Will Main Street Get a Tax-Free Holiday Next Year?

February 07, 2017

Staff

WRITER

Chris Martenson from PeakProsperity.com joined The Glenn Beck Program on Monday talk about what Glenn calls a "weird switching of musical chairs."

"The right is now convinced that everything is fine, and the left is now convinced we're on the precipice," Glenn said.

Martenson predicted another change given that the Federal Reserve is terrified of even the slightest market correction.

"We're still accumulating debt at more than twice the rate that the economy is growing," Martenson warned. "So to get around that math problem, they're going to have to give money to Main Street. And I'm talking like complete tax holiday next year. A check from the Federal Reserve. Something like that."

If that's the case, get your shopping lists ready to buy because hyperinflation will be just around the corner.

Listen to this segment from The Glenn Beck Program:

GLENN: All right. So Chris Martenson is here from peakprosperity.com. And we're talking a little bit about the economy and what is to come. And there is this weird switching of musical chairs, where the right is now convinced that everything is fine.

CHRIS: Uh-huh.

GLENN: And the left is now convinced we're on the precipice. And I'm happy to say that I haven't changed my position in two presidents.

CHRIS: Yeah.

GLENN: What was coming in 2006, that we felt coming, is still coming.

We propped it up. It's still coming, and it's going to be worse.

You said that there's two parts to this. There's the downside.

CHRIS: Uh-huh.

GLENN: Right? And, part two?

CHRIS: Well, economically, there's first the downside and then the Federal Reserve has to print more and more and more. They're going to keep trying the same thing over and over again. And it's not really going to work. I haven't changed my position over a couple of presidents either because there's deeper structural things that we need to attend to. And that's part two. That's the part of the story I'm actually excited about, is can we finally have the conversation to say, "Who do we want to be?" You know, where do we want to go as a country? And have that vision and really bring that forward.

GLENN: Okay. Before we get there, tell me -- they've printed all this money, and it went all to the Wall Street fat cats.

CHRIS: Right.

GLENN: I was just told by Wall Streeters, that this is not true, Glenn. They're not buying back their own stock. The fundamentals are sound. And I said, "You're starting to see the beginnings of inflation. There's no inflation on chicken. There is inflation in the stock market. That's inflation. That is inflated money. Funny money had by all the fat cats. They're dumping it in there. That's making the stock market go up, and everybody feels good."

CHRIS: Right.

GLENN: But the average person didn't get that money. Banks never lent that money. Go try to get a business loan.

Now you're saying that they're going to print again. Where are they going to give the money this time?

CHRIS: This time it's got to go to Main Street. They've tried giving all this money to Wall Street. They'll keep doing that. The Federal Reserve and the other central banks are scared to death of even the most minor market correction. When the markets start to go down, even a little bit, they come out, and they use words. And I think they might even be using other means to drive the markets back up again. They're scared of that. But it hasn't really worked. When you look at overall economic growth, worldwide United States, it's not there.

GLENN: Right.

CHRIS: We're still accumulating debt at more than twice the rate that the economy is growing. Try doing that -- you know, your credit card is growing at twice as fast as your income. It doesn't work. It's a math problem.

So to get around that math problem, they're going to have to give money to Main Street. And I'm talking like complete tax holiday next year. A check from the Federal Reserve. Something like that.

GLENN: For everybody?

CHRIS: Everybody. They'll have to do something like that.

PAT: Yay!

GLENN: I mean, it would be hard to -- to be disappointed on a tax holiday.

PAT: Yeah, it would. A complete tax holiday. That would be really hard to say no to.

PAT: Yes, it would.

GLENN: And they expect us to just dump it into the system.

CHRIS: And I not only would expect people to do that, I would encourage them to do that. As soon as that tax holiday comes, run, don't walk. And make sure you know what your buy list is going to look like because that's when we're starting down to act two of the story, which is hyperinflation. All of that.

GLENN: Inflation. Hyperinflation.

Okay. Because when they start dumping -- you know, this is one of the guys who said, "Glenn, these corporations, you're going to get tax breaks. And these corporations are going to repatriot their money." I said, "That's $15 trillion repatrioted to the United States. Where is all that money going to go?" It's either going to go to the stock market, or they're going to start building factories and everything else. Then that's $15 trillion that is going to be seeping through the system. How do you not have inflation?

CHRIS: Uh-huh.

GLENN: And they said that wasn't a concern.

And I didn't understand the math on that one. But that's what the experts told me.

CHRIS: Now, look, everybody fights their last battle. So when we say inflation, people think about back to the '70s, where you had a wage-price spiral, right?

GLENN: No, I'm thinking '30s.

CHRIS: Or '30s. Right? But we're not having that world. So you're absolutely right in identifying, look, if you dump money into a market, you get inflation.

GLENN: But we are getting inflation.

CHRIS: We are.

GLENN: To the people who got the money. It's the stock market, right?

CHRIS: Look at the trophy properties in Manhattan and San Francisco and London.

Look at the price for rare gems. Fine art. Gulfstream Vs. All very hard to come by. Trophy Islands, right?

They dumped the money in to the fat cats, and they bid up everything they care about. Right?

All of those things I just mentioned, through the roof inflation. But people aren't recognizing that because we don't measure that when we look at the inflation measures. We measure chicken.

This next part of this story is they start pushing the money into the people, and that's where we get the other inflationary parts.

Now, the real question is, does the rest of the world say, "Yeah, I'll continue to hold US dollars under that circumstance?" So you have corporations rushing their money back.

Hey, but maybe the Bank of Iraq says we don't want dollars anymore. We don't like what you're doing. They start selling. China starts selling.

That's when you start getting the external inflation that comes back into this country. Because we've been great exporters. Fantastic. Of dollars. We've done a lot of that. And we're just kind of hoping that that won't stop. Like everybody will just continue to want to hold our dollars, forever and ever, no matter what. And that's an assumption that really needs to be tested.

GLENN: Well, preferably not in my lifetime. But it's going to be tested. It's going to be tested.

CHRIS: Uh-huh.

GLENN: You just said that coming to this realization has been the best thing in your life.

CHRIS: Uh-huh.

GLENN: Really? Because it always makes me really miserable.

CHRIS: Uh-huh.

GLENN: I mean, I look at it and I think, "Holy cow, I don't want to go through that."

JEFFY: Who cares? And what's the use?

GLENN: Yeah, what's the use? What am I going to do about it?

CHRIS: So, listen, there's a lot of things I can't control in this story. I can't control what the Federal Reserve is going to do about money printing. I have some ideas. I think I know what they're going to do. What can I do about that? Nothing.

I can, however, control my exposure to the dollar. So I have a lot of my assets out of the dollar. I have a lot of gold, a lot of silver, I own real estate. Tangible things. Because we've seen this story before, right?

In -- from 1918 to 1923, in Austria, they went through the Weimar hyperinflation. They write books about it. And they talk about it as if the great wealth destruction, the middle class was wiped out. And they still talk about it, oh, it's a wealth destruction. But not if you understand what wealth really is. Wealth is productive farmland, factories, hotels, the productive enterprises of the nation. Those didn't go away because they went through hyperinflation. But who owned them, that changed a lot.

So, yes, in this story, it's already happening. You know who the largest landlord in America is right now? The Federal Reserve.

JEFFY: The government. Yeah.

CHRIS: They own $1.75 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, which makes them the largest landlord in America.

Where did they get that 1.75 trillion to own more real estate than anybody else in this country? Well, they printed it out of thin air. We should be talking about that.

So this ownership is going to change a lot. So this is my advice to everybody is watch the trends, understand this is coming, and then own real assets.

GLENN: But doesn't that -- doesn't the ownership of more property in America, by the Federal Reserve, isn't that just now once again the rich getting richer?

I mean, this income -- what was it? Somebody last night was doing income redistribution for the Super Bowl. That's not the answer. But there is a problem here. And I don't know -- I don't know how to solve that. You do have the uber, uber fat cats. Not the guy who are living in the fancy houses in most -- in most towns. But the uber, uber billionaires that are up at the top of this banking problem and Wall Street problem. There's where they're sucking up all of the money.

CHRIS: Right.

GLENN: So how do we solve that without riots in the street?

CHRIS: But we're getting there already because they have -- that sucking sound is them sucking the economic oxygen out.

Let's look at, like -- rental prices in all the major cities have been going up at 8, 9, and 10 percent for the past five or six years.

And the reason for that is you have big, giant private equity companies. They get to borrow at 1 percent. So their rate of mortgage is a 1 percent mortgage. And they're competing against you or I, who might want to try and buy those apartments, who are not renting it, but our cost of capital is four, 4.5 percent on a mortgage. So they borrow at 1, unlimited. And then buy up all these things because they can make that number work at 1 percent. And for you, it's harder to make it work at 4 percent, right?

So they just have access to capital, and this is what Janet Yellen and the central bank of the United States, this is what they're defending.

This is what they're saying has had no economic harm, that they haven't been driving this wealth gap that exists in America. But it's happening structurally because we haven't been able to face it -- it doesn't exist.

GLENN: Right. We can't borrow the money that they can borrow.

CHRIS: Right. It's totally unfair playing field. It's shaped like this.

GLENN: So how do we fix that? How does that fix it, when they hold all the cards?

CHRIS: Well, this is a very big topic.

But in my mind, we have to first confront the problem, understand it for what it is, and I think this is almost a cultural piece. I think it's time to actually not say, "Oh, it's this big private equity company," but let's call out the CEO of that company. And let's make them understand that we have -- we're watching them. I mean, maybe public shame used to be a feature, right?

CEOs used to be ashamed to take more money than their workers back in the '50s and '60s. It was a thing that you wouldn't do that. Today, we've become shameless.

GLENN: See, I don't necessarily have a problem. You know, if you are the -- if you're the wealth creator -- like I'm the wealth creator here. Everybody is working for me. We all know key man insurance, I die, the company dies. So why should I -- why should I not make more than the people who work?

CHRIS: Well, let's separate people who actually are generating, creating value and people who are skimming. All right?

What I'm talking about, these people are just running skimming operations. They don't create anything. They're just running a skimming operation. I might pick on, for instance, in the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, they went after everything. I'm getting killed by this, by the way.

GLENN: We all are.

CHRIS: Sixty-one and half percent increase this year, 25 percent last year.

PAT: Wow.

GLENN: Jeez. Holy cow.

CHRIS: Right? And that's dialing my way down through the bronze plans and all kinds of, like, deductible increases. All that.

GLENN: Right.

CHRIS: Where my anger, if not rage comes up, is when I open it up and discover that the CEO of Humana Health Care took home $66 million last year. 66 million. And that's just him. You look at the rest of the C-suite, they might have skimmed a billion dollars out of this. They weren't asked to contribute anything to this story, right? You would have to have over 4,500 families at my level paying into that system, just to pay that one person's salary. What did he actually do? He skimmed.

This is -- so there's a level, beyond which -- there's a tougher story we have to get to here, but that's just gone off the rails. It's -- you ever see that old game show where they put somebody in a plexiglass thing and dollars around them and trying to grab them as fast as they can?

I feel like that's the part of the story we're in. That's what it feels like. Everybody is just grabbing money as fast as they can because we all know that you can't print your way to prosperity. The money machine turns off at some point so you might as well grab as much as you can, while the fans are still growing and the money is swirling.

PAT: Isn't that -- that's market value though, right? I mean, if his company is willing to pay him $66 million, then pay him $66 million.

GLENN: Because who else is going to do it?

PAT: Right?

GLENN: They can make $65 million someplace else.

PAT: Isn't that the free market system? I'm not sure how you get around that.

GLENN: How do you solve that?

PAT: You can't make it equitable for everybody. It's never going to be. That's not capitalism. That's not communism. We can make it equitable if it's bad for everybody. But we can't make it equitably good for everybody.

GLENN: Yeah.

PAT: So the CEO of a major corporation is going to make a heck of a lot more than a worker with less education, with less skill.

GLENN: And I'm concerned because there are some --

PAT: Less work ethic.

GLENN: There are things -- some of these CEOs. You know, the banks really bother me. Because they know exactly what they're doing. They know exactly what's happening. They know the game that's being played. They know it's not going to work. And they're not warning anybody. They're out there, while they're taking tons of cash.

However, I hate to say CEOs. Because how do we know -- I mean, that just gets into the mob mentality of, get 'em.

CHRIS: Well, in this particular case, I'm talking about a highly regulated industry. So in my state -- and I live in Massachusetts.

PAT: There's your problem right there: Highly regulated. That's the problem.

CHRIS: I know. Well, it's regulated to the point that in my state, there's no competition allowed. Right? I can't buy certain levels of insurance because they've been lobbied out of my state.

PAT: Right. That's the problem.

GLENN: Correct.

PAT: But that's not the CEOs fault. That's the government's fault.

CHRIS: Well, no, the CEOs create this --

PAT: We need them out of it.

GLENN: I will tell you, I'm with both of you here. It is the government, Pat, but it is the CEOs.

What did Bill Gates just say his biggest problem was? His biggest problem was that he didn't feel -- at the time he created Microsoft, that they needed government. His deal was, I'm going to create what I create. You do your job. Leave me alone.

PAT: Uh-huh.

GLENN: Where Apple went and they partnered with the government.

CHRIS: Hmm.

GLENN: He said, "Microsoft is paying the price right now because they didn't feel they needed somebody to go in."

So you're kind of like the free market. If you have a fiduciary responsibility. I'm the CEO. I'm going to go -- if my business competitor is going the other direction and they're going to the government, my fiduciary responsibility, isn't it to go to the government as well? I mean, we just -- this whole system is broken.

PAT: But, again, that's government intervention. And it shouldn't be there. It shouldn't be there.

GLENN: Right. But how many people have the principles to be able to hold fast, especially when you have shareholders beating you down the door? I mean, I don't have the answer.

Elon Musk challenges sexual misconduct accuser to describe certain 'one thing' about his private parts

Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

Elon Musk responded to allegations that he exposed himself to a corporate jet flight attendant by daring his accuser to "describe just one thing, anything at all (scars, tattoos, …) that isn’t known by the public."

"I have a challenge to this liar who claims their friend saw me “exposed” – describe just one thing, anything at all (scars, tattoos, …) that isn’t known by the public. She won’t be able to do so, because it never happened," Musk posted on twitter.

A Business Insider report on Thursday, alleged that a flight attendant for SpaceX's private jet fleet was paid $250,000 in 2018 to settle a sexual misconduct claim against the company's founder and CEO. A friend of the flight attendant signed a declaration accusing the tech billionaire of exposing himself to the attendant, who is also a licensed massage therapist, during an in-flight massage.

According to the declaration, the flight attendant told her friend that Musk asked her to come to his private cabin "for a full body massage" during a flight in late 2016. When she arrived, Musk "was completely naked except for a sheet covering the lower half of his body." The friend also told Insider that Musk propositioned the flight attendant, then "touched her thigh and told her he would buy her a horse."

One day before the Insider story was published, Musk predicted an escalation in political attacks against him after revealing on a podcast that he plans to vote Republican in the next election cycle.

Political attacks on me will escalate dramatically in coming months
— Elon Musk (@Elon Musk) 1652890958

Musk called the sexual misconduct allegations "wild accusations [that] are utterly untrue" and challenged his accuser to verify her claims by describing a certain something “not known by the public" about his private parts.

The attacks against me should be viewed through a political lens \u2013 this is their standard (despicable) playbook \u2013 but nothing will deter me from fighting for a good future and your right to free speech
— Elon Musk (@Elon Musk) 1653017312

But I have a challenge to this liar who claims their friend saw me \u201cexposed\u201d \u2013 describe just one thing, anything at all (scars, tattoos, \u2026) that isn\u2019t known by the public. She won\u2019t be able to do so, because it never happened.
— Elon Musk (@Elon Musk) 1653020653

On the radio program Friday, Glenn Beck and Pat Gray reacted to the incredible "coincidence" of such allegations cropping up just days after the SpaceX CEO announced his intention to vote Republican in the next election cycle — not to mention joining Glenn's longrunning anti-ESG crusade by calling the corporate score system a "scam."

pic.twitter.com/0vWlu6IAJl
— Glenn Beck (@Glenn Beck) 1652894352

Watch the video clip below to hear more from Glenn:

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Leaked contemporaneous notes reveal Anita Dunn's 6-month crafting of ultra-MAGA 'slam' on Trump

Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Anyone paying attention can see that President Biden is in dire straights come 2024, regardless of who his opponent may be. His administration has been workshopping several ideas to try and craft just the right message. One that will cut through all the noise (failures) and put him on a more solid footing should he go head-to-head in a rematch with the former President.

Biden called in the big guns and he wasn't afraid to call in a few favors either. He drew on his stint as VP and called Anita Dunn out of the bullpen and tapped the Center for American Progress Action Fund to try and help pull this one out. After an exhaustive six-month-long study into how President Trump was able to summon the magic of MAGA — they finally feel they have the winning message.

Dunn has gotten sloppy, however, since her days in the Obama administration. We obtained her contemporaneous notes and emails showing how they coined the term "ultra-MAGA," trying to get a little "extra pop" to his rhetoric. The leaked emails also show the evolution of the messaging over that same six-month period.

[The preceding Memo was a parody written by MRA writers Josh Jennings and Jon Boldt – not the Biden administration.]

Biden crime family: Why Hunter’s secrets are REALLY about Joe

Almost every week, new incriminating evidence is mined from Hunter’s wild laptop. And the proof is mounting that President Joe Biden is lying about his knowledge of his family’s crooked deal-making. Everyone knows Hunter Biden is a seriously degenerate guy. Anyone who has handled his infamous laptop needs a tetanus shot.

The salacious stuff on the laptop is sad and pathetic for sure, but that stuff is NOT what is most relevant to the United States. Glenn Beck exposes how the laptop is REALLY about Joe Biden, his abuse of power as vice president, and his ongoing denials now as president.

Now that the 2020 election has passed and their man is in office, the mainstream media have suddenly decided to admit Hunter’s laptop is not Russian disinformation after all. No one has done more research into the Biden family corruption than journalist and best-selling author Peter Schweizer. He has researched the depths of Hunter’s laptop and found more than racy photos. “These aren’t HUNTER’S business deals,” Peter says, “they benefit the WHOLE family.” And he has the emails to prove it.

But the mainstream media still insist President Biden is as pure as his thinning white hair in all of this. As Glenn reveals tonight, he is not. But will anyone in the Biden family see jail time? Americans are fed up with two sets of rules – one for regular citizens and one for the ruling elites.

Watch the full episode of "Glenn TV" below:

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Top 5 times corporate WOKENESS crossed the line

Intelligent people know that wokerness plagues society and must be ridiculed and eradicated from conversations. But what happens when people lose their jobs for calling out the absurdity of woke ideology? What happens when corporations and media sources weaponize wokeness?

Here are five videos that will help us better understand a few of the many issues that wokeness inflicts on society and how we can stand against it.

Bye bye, Target. You crossed the line!

In this clip, BlazeTV host Allie Stuckey of "Relatable" explains how Target recently announced the sale of chest binders and "packing underwear" for women. She expresses how children can be negatively impacted by the sale of confusing clothing items for people suffering from gender dysphoria and the importance of loving the body God gave us.

Today, Allie notices that Target's stock experienced a 35-year record drop. Apparel was named as one of the two underperforming departments. Was pushback from critics of gender-affirming apparel the cause? It is hard to tell, but Allie encourages her audience to continue speaking out when corporations cross the line by making harmful products available for sale to the public.

Listen to the podcast here.

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Wokeness can get you fired

In this clip, Stu Burguiere covers a story about a man who challenged Black Lives Matter using nothing but data and was fired.

Here's the story: "I had been at Thomson Reuters for over six years—most recently, leading a team of data scientists applying new machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to our legal, tax and news data. We advised any number of divisions inside the company, including Westlaw, an online legal research service used by most every law firm in the country, and the newsroom, which reaches an audience of one billion every day around the globe. I briefed the Chief Technology Officer regularly. My total annual compensation package exceeded $350,000." Read more

"We live in the era of woke religion," says Stu.

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Coca-Cola circumvents Constitution with TERRIFYING mandates on diversity

Glenn Beck loves Coca-Cola. So much so, in fact, that he refuses to drink Pepsi if Coke isn't available. But ... he says the time has come for him to give up his favorite soda. Why? Because Coca-Cola just announced some terrifying new company policies on diversity and equity. It sent out notices to all partnered law firms, demanding a required percentage of diverse attorneys on any legal team working for the corporation. The notice says all legal teams also must report these numbers quarterly and they will lose Coca-Cola's business if they do not comply.

"Equity is not the same thing as equality," Glenn said, adding that equality means we all have an equal chance, while equality means we all have the same outcome.

Glenn explains how mandates like this could affect everybody — even the guy working on the factory line or the truck driver delivering the drinks. Glenn also explains how Coke's new move is nothing less than a circumvention of the Constitution, and he predicts more companies (especially those in support of the Great Reset) will follow with similar policies, too.

Listen to the podcast here.

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Coca-Cola takes a 'pause' on woke initiatives after after pressure from the Right

Glenn followed up on a story about Coca-Cola becoming the poster child for how a corporation could shove leftist ideologies onto its consumers. The company suspended advertising on Facebook in a push to censor former President Donald Trump, published a manifesto about racial equity, and demanded all legal teams working for Coke meet certain diversity quotas.

But, after Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and many other conservative voices called for a boycott of the company's products, Coca-Cola appeared to shift directions.

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Calvin Klein's gender blender ruins sex and Mothers' Day

Chad Prather reflected back to the Great Depression era of enticing photographic entertainment, otherwise known as the callow and deprived years of his youth, when a Calvin Klein pictorial of old would have represented something exciting, something to, say, think about at the end of the day. Had he run across this present weird concept at that age, he would have either been disgusted on sight … or possibly really disgusted when his dumb a** put two and two together the next day. Anyway, his point is: Has the whole world gone crazy? Do we really need this? At this inclusive embracing point in our recent history, what in the world makes Calvin Klein feel the need to be the standard-bearer for a lifestyle screamed largely into existence by a very vocal minority?

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Former Disney artist SPEAKS OUT: ‘It’s time to do something’

A former Disney artist, who wishes to remain anonymous, joins Glenn to describe WHY he recently took action against his former employer: ‘I'm tired of watching my country go down the drain. And it's time to do something.’ Today’s woke Disney is not what Walt once imagined, he says, and his recent video release — "It’s A Woke World After All" — exposes Disney’s large stray from its roots ...

Listen to the podcast here.