Biden to Announce Student Loan Forgiveness

Today on Secular, more money, more problems. As Biden's IRS, it's $80 billion more for their budget. We've also got Mike Pompeo and Rick Rinnell. And now your host, Jordan Sekulow.

All right, welcome to Secular. We're taking phone calls to first half hour especially 1-800-684-3110. That's 1-800-684-3110. The Wall Street Journal in their editorial board is looking into, of course, this increase in IRS funding that we've talked about, but they got a little deeper because remember the Tax Inspector General, the TIGTA, you might remember that from the Tea Party targeting days by the IRS, just a reminder of that. Well, they issued a new report and so they go through there, the Inspector General, they point out the problems of the IRS. The problems of the IRS are gigantic to a point that you almost think that the $80 billion, but they say they're going to go hire new people instead of like computers and set up a computer database to make this take the human prejudices out.

The politics, the personalities, and just say here type in your information, put it in this way, and this is how much you owe in taxes, and you go from there. But instead they are backlogged 17 million tax returns. Those are 17 million Americans who follow the rules, file their taxes, pay their taxes, and are likely owed a return.

When you get backlogged to 17 million, think about that number, and it keeps adding up and adding up and adding up. On top of that, only when the IRS is called, only 10 percent of the calls are answered. I mean this is an agent, they work for you, you're paying their budget, and I think this is what is so upsetting when you say let's just throw $80 billion at it over 10 years. But they are not hiring more customer service folks.

They only have $3 billion to spend on that over 10 years. That's nothing for an agency that large, and so no one's going to answer your phone call. Even that point, the fact that you've got to call, the fact you have to fax, that you can't just go, you can't just do it online, I think we could be outraged about this. You don't have to accept this talking point from the left, and again I go back to they love this authoritarian style IRS system where it's a ghost, and so if you're pushing back you don't even know who to push back to.

It's like you just pick up the phone to call the IRS, and so unless an individual agent, and you have someone to work with directly, and then they're not even working from an office anymore, and it's the whole issue. I just think that we have to take that step back because there's a lot of pushback going on right now. Logan received from the left, they say oh this is great, this is wonderful, it's going to make things better, we're going to find money, we're going to find tax cheats, and you realize they're not even taking care of the people who are paying their taxes. No, and that happens when you see those kind of things where you see thousands of people who've done the right thing, who are now going to be punished.

It's sort of honestly the situation like the what's going to happen later today, when you have the student loan situation, student loan forgiveness. There's a lot of people who, yes, do I think there is corruption involved in maybe the student loan business? Absolutely, but do I think a lot of people were probably fraud at a very young age? Yeah, likely, but there's a lot of people who did the right thing, who did pay their bills, who did keep it up. A lot of parents that did that for their kids, a lot of situations like that, but they're not the ones who are punished, or they're the ones who get punished for this. Not the ones who did the wrong or similar situation here when you have this kind of backlog and the IRS is just going to be funneled with more money and it becomes this cataclysmic issue where we're all dealing with, like you said, a government where you just were supposed to pick up the phone and say hey IRS, can you fix this for us?

It's just not going to happen. Yeah, I mean I love to hear from people. Maybe you're one of those 17 million people with an unprocessed tax return who's calling the IRS, but nine out of ten times they don't answer. And then when they do, you know, you're on hold for days. People call back, they call again, they call back again. And your fax is your personal info and you know it's not going to an office, so it's going to somebody working from home.

And we know that there's the human part of anything, that the politics at play, the power trips at play, and who gets targeted. It is not the people who have teams of lawyers and accountants. Because you think a single IRS agent or a couple of them want to deal with that? No, they want us to, they're going after small business owners, restaurant owners, people who deal with cash, people deal with tips. 1-800-684-3110. We want to hear from you, 1-800-684-3110.

All right, welcome back to Stack Hill 1-800-684-3110. We're talking IRS. This idea again, constantly giving them money when you have another inspector general report out saying they don't answer your phone calls. 17 million people filed their tax returns, unanswered, unprocessed.

Because they're hand processing. And they didn't work for three years, two years, they didn't go into an office, they stopped going into an office. And guess what, there's a lot of Americans, a lot of taxpayers, it starts piling up. And it starts piling up to a number, you'll actually see in their testimony when the IRS officials testify, they say it's not fixable. You know, we can't even ever get to the point of fixing this, we never get to the problem of actually getting this through. So we're talking about that, and at the same time while we're bailing out a federal agency, and I say we because we're all taxpayers paying for that bailout of the IRS, we see the student loan forgiveness.

Which I think again, Democrats are not, you're dealing with smart politicians, okay, they're smart, they are dealing with headlines. And the headline is they're forgiving student loans. What they're not telling people is that it's $10,000 and what this is the kind of, this is more inflationary spending.

Because the government starts canceling these debts, and then one, you have to wonder, taking out a loan, do you ever have to pay it back? And next year will they cancel $30,000? What would be the incentive? Let's say you get this $10,000 off, and let's say you got $30,000 left. What's the incentive to pay that $30,000?

Oh, by the way, they're also putting a halt to that. Now you, if you're a small business owner dealing with a bank, you're not getting these kind of, you know, these kind of protections, ever. So this idea that we give $150,000 to 18-year-olds or 24-year-old grad students, and it sounds great to them at first, and then they have a job that isn't even that much a year.

Or you hit economic troubles like COVID, or you have an economic downturn. I came out of law school in 2009, people couldn't get jobs at a law school. And it didn't matter if you went to Harvard or a law school that was ever heard of. It just wasn't happening, because people were taking jobs from those top schools that they usually wouldn't have, and then the people usually would have taken the lower paying jobs, maybe it was the government, local government, things like that.

They weren't available. So you had this whole, go to this school, you'll learn this way, it's worth putting in the time, worth putting in the effort, worth taking out the giant loans. And, you know, I hit 40 years old this year. A lot of people I know from law, they are just paying off those loans. I mean, that is a loan, they got kids, they got loans on top of debt, on top of debt. And the $10,000 to the people have serious student loan debt.

That's a drop in the bucket. To people who are closer to paying it, what's the incentive to ever pay it back? I mean, I would say just, you know, keep waiting. They keep delaying that you even have to make a payment. So we'll take your calls to this, 1-800-684-3110. In this first half hour, we're getting into more of what's happening domestically. We've got Rick Riddell and Mike Pompeo in the second half hour talking about what's happening overseas, especially with Iran.

So you don't want to miss that. And we're gonna be talking to the next segment, broadcast what we're doing at the UN as well. Yeah, we do have some calls coming in about the IRS situation. We'll take some of those, because then we'll move specifically to a bit more about the student loan forgiveness plan that's coming through and our thoughts on that. I think both of us, as you know, people who are 40 and under, you have a lot to say about it, whether the positives and the negatives that are coming out of this, I think there's a lot of interesting things, but let's go ahead and take some phone calls and then we'll move on. So let's go to John who's calling on line one.

John, you're on the air. Yeah. Hey guys, thank you for advocating for the taxpayer, namely like me.

So thank you. I haven't, we haven't gotten taxes resolved for the last four years. Uh, our last, uh, tax year ended up being, uh, pretty clear at 2017. So since 2017, we've been, uh, trying to bug the IRS. We have a great, great tax prepare. He's super, uh, he's, uh, started his own tax business 50 years.

I can't retire probably because of this, all, all this chaos and stuff. And he's trying to gradually cut down his clients, 2017. That's it may feel like four years.

That's, that's almost six. You know, I mean, that's because we had these couple of years that kind of disappeared. Right. Um, and we're seeing this in the comments. It's not like this was a unique situation. There was a comment that came in pretty early on the show that said that they've been having this same kind of problems since 2019.

So they've held multiple years behind. Look, we got our tax return check. It came, this time there was an issue came physical check deposit. Uh, and then I got a letter before we could deposit it saying, do not deposit that check.

Uh, we made an error. So you're going to getting a new check. So we see this, I haven't gotten the new check yet. So then, you know, cause they had better check your mail carefully, right?

Because they're not, you know, and that's not supposed to happen that way. It's supposed to, it's supposed to be, they had a direct deposit that you could set up kind of processing issue this year, uh, as it, what happens. And this is what happens and it keeps spinning out of control. And you have a situation where you get a check, that check may be for four figures and you may be like, all right, we'll go deposit this. Now it's my tax return. And then, um, before you have the opportunity and some people probably after they already did it, got a message saying, Hey, uh, you can't do this.

And please don't, please don't deposit that check. So those are the kind of situations that we're seeing. We're also obviously seeing people who are years and years behind or people that are just even the ones who are just a year behind who are just getting their 20, 20, 20, 21, uh, in anticipation for 21 and 22. Uh, it's spiraling out and look, I think it all connects to even things happening right now, uh, with the, the essentially handout that's going to be occurring for people with student debt.

Yeah. And so let's go through that. So we have the more specifics, the executive order is, is, we haven't seen the speech yet from President Biden, but we now have the specifics. So here's what's happening with the student loan. So it's the $10,000. It's if you're making under $125,000 a year as a single person or less than $250,000 as, uh, uh, as couples file jointly.

So if you receive the federal Pell grants and make less than that 125 a year, uh, you'd be, uh, you could be actually eligible for to $20,000 in, uh, forgiveness. They also, you don't have to make payments again through, uh, December 31. This we're right before an election. I just don't write this stuff off.

I think that's important because a lot of people read headlines. They see how it affects them short term, which these are all short term things, right? I mean, 10,000 of your $100,000 plus loans or, um, not having to pay this year, but the loan is not going away. You're going to have to assume assuming at some point, either you're paying under the government is, is, uh, dismissing the idea of this debt.

I get why people don't like the system, but they did sign up for it. Um, and whether I think you could talk about education costs, you could talk about, again, a lot of these issues about what degrees are worthwhile, what's not worthwhile. And we had this kind of push for 20, 30 years, but I think people are rethinking it. Now people are rethinking higher education.

Yeah. I think that you're going to see a massive change with kids who are currently coming out of high school. I see it with my friends who have kids that are about to graduate or graduating this year. There is a boom for trade school and there is a boom for just going out and doing the job you want to do. You saw Elon Musk saying those kinds of things. People are going out there a lot of different ways.

I can tell you right now trade by the company. Yeah. And surely, uh, our legal team obviously is very well educated, uh, in terms of that. But if you look at people who work in our production, you look at people who work in all over this office. Uh, there are people who have very high level degrees and there are people who have just high school diplomas, but are, but are at the same level position.

Not because, uh, at the time it certainly wasn't a moment where, uh, in time a degree meant something meant a lot more than it does now. Now you are looking for that experience and that talent to do it. So there's, there's a lot of new business and a lot of new work that's happening that doesn't have to do with necessarily getting a traditional education. And we're seeing that unfold. I think COVID actually showed that kind of exposed a lot of that, you know, whether it's working from home or any of the other options that could exist.

Yeah. You had the economic issues plus COVID, which had a lot of economic issues. You add them all together and people are rethinking an idea that was, it's, it's a, it was a fairly new idea in the United States too, that everyone needs to go to get a four year degree and then figure out what you're going to do somewhere along that four years. You know, the first couple of years you didn't have to decide on major and then the price levels. And it does make sense if you're going to a specific, like the law school part of law school makes sense.

You're going to be representing people. If you're going to be a surgeon, it makes sense. You got to spend a lot of time before you can do this, but other countries cut off half the time. Like for law school, you go to law school, you go to law school, you don't have to go to four years of undergrad.

There may be like a mix where it's a little crossover. Maybe it takes five years total instead of seven, seven years if you go full time that it's a long time to give up now and just be going into debt. Unique situations for the bar in places like California, where you can have alternative ways that don't necessarily involve traditional law school. You got to obviously know your stuff and you have to prep.

It's very hard. But that's what I think we're going to see that more and more. And we're going to see that as a generation grows up, especially our kids who are now not necessarily being discouraged from going to college. Certainly if our children want to go to college and would like to, but it's not the only, it's not the goal. I feel like the goal for maybe the baby boomer boomer generation was they were the first, a lot of the times the first generation to go to college. And you ever see, and that was a big deal and it is a big deal, but they wanted that for their children, regardless of what it was, they just wanted to see that piece of paper. Now, a lot of them got taken advantage of, have hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Sure. Do I think we need to be the people who now have to pick up that bill?

No, I do not. But I also think if that same person had walked into a car dealership and asked for a hundred thousand dollar car, they would have been, they would not get it now. They would not have gotten it then. They would not get a hundred thousand dollar loan to start a business or to buy a house.

It certainly would not happen. So the fact that the, our system was set up to where a college kid could get this amount of debt so quickly, so young, I think there's something we need to talk about there, a big discussion, but it is what it is. We're gonna take some calls on it.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. 1-800-684-3110. All right, welcome back to Sekulow. Second half hour coming up, Mike Pompeo and Rick Rinnell. We'll talk about some of the, what's going on with the Iran and these nuclear deal. A lot of domestic news right now, of course, with what the President's going to announce in the executive order on this student loan debt forgiveness. It's going to be a huge debate. It already is a huge debate, but we also are working at the UN. I want to tell you a little about what we're doing with ACLJ as well. It's Cece House joining us because Cece, we filed five different reports with the UN. Let's walk people through exactly what we're doing here. Sure. So the 51st session of the Human Rights Council is just about to start.

It starts September 12th and goes through October 7th. And as an NGO with special consultative status, we're able to file five written reports highlighting just human right atrocities that are happening currently. So we filed those. We just filed those five reports. We did one on India, one on Afghanistan, one on Pakistan, one on Nigeria, and then we did one with the working group on arbitrary detention, reminding them of the good opinion we got on Pastor Saw, who is still, unfortunately, in prison in China.

So we were able to do those five written reports, and then in a couple weeks we'll be able to do oral submissions and oral interventions on those as well. And specifically, you know, I think Afghanistan, probably a lot of people highlighted because it's been such a significant, not like things were perfect there during when the U.S. had troops on the ground, but things were certainly different. Women were going to school, girls were going to school, people were starting to get a sense of more religious liberty. At least things were moving in a more positive direction than they had been, and we saw this just revert back to chaos and horrendous for people that are minorities. Absolutely. So we highlight the fact that with the Taliban takeover, basically, and ISIS-K, both persecuting Christians in Afghanistan, and their goal is to literally eliminate the Christian population in Afghanistan, and they are being very successful targeting and the persecution that's going on. Right. And again, at aclj.org, people can see them there, if they want to see the reports, see what we're doing.

Yep, that's aclj.org, and you can check that out. And again, we're doing all this work. I wanted to spend some time on it. I know there's a lot of breaking news and a lot going on. We can take the, go back to your phone calls now, talk about IRS, talking about the President's going to announce, and I just always want to be straight up with everybody here. He's going to use this as a political win, even though the hard left doesn't love it. I think that actually, it helps him some though, when they're saying this isn't big enough, this isn't great enough, because if you don't have the AOC endorsement, some of the more left-wing groups, suddenly he looks like he's playing more in the middle.

Right, absolutely. And a lot of people are calling in about that. A lot of people are calling about the IRS. Let's go ahead, let's go to Bob, he's calling in New Jersey. Line 2, Bob, you're on the air.

Thank you for taking my call. My question is in regards, like you said, to the IRS. You have them wanting to hire 87,000 new agents, which is ridiculous, but what's the process? Let's just say, whether it be a Republican House, Senate, or even a presidency, is there a process to remove those jobs or reduce those jobs? Yeah, you could cut the, the IRS budget was cut after the wrongdoing that was uncovered with the targeting of the Tea Party groups and conservative groups.

And then, again, Senator Graham was on, right when this happened, I go back to, because you have to get into kind of a little bit of the weeds, but just at 10,000 feet, Congress approves, then they have to appropriate. So they have to then appropriate, those funds have to make its way of the power of the purse. They have to make its way out of Congress. So if you have enough political change, and like you said, it can't, it wouldn't just be the House, it wouldn't just be the Senate. You need a bigger change of that, but certainly, if you took the House and the Senate, you could stall some of the funding. So they wouldn't be able to just hire 87.

It's going to take, first, I don't even know how the IRS hiring 87, how are they competent enough to do that? It seems like, so because of that, you do have time to then go through the appropriations process and, and stop those funds from being released. So you think about it, it's approved, but then you have to go through each funding because it's over 10 years.

So you have an opportunity. That's when taking back the Senate becomes extremely critical. But even if you take back the House, you can start having the interplay that goes on in Congress, it doesn't even make it to the President's desk. So it'll all be the appropriations game, certainly until there was a Republican President. Then you can start talking about repealing and removing through legislation, not just relying on Congress not releasing the funds.

But that is something that, again, there will be a lot of work to do if Republicans stay on track to take back the House and the Senate. Yeah, let's continue on. You want to take another call? Yeah, let's go to Melissa in South Carolina on Line 6. Hey, Melissa.

Hey, Jordan, thanks for taking my call. I'm over 50, went back and got my master's degree and graduated in 2019. I couldn't afford to do that. So my loan is a direct graduate loan, not necessarily the Pell Grant. And I was just curious if this loan elimination is going to affect that. The moratorium has affected me, but I've been planning to pay back. So I was just wondering how this really works for someone who's over 50 and on the graduate level student loan, not the Pell Grant type thing.

So the details of the age, I don't think the age is an issue. And it's not only the Pell Grants, is that right? That's why it's the up to 10,000, up to 20,000.

So everybody individually is going to have to see when this comes out how this affects me. It really depends to how much you're making a year. That's the kind of top line.

So whether you file jointly or whether you file independently, you don't have to go through that publicly on the area. Yeah, it seems like it's mainly just that income. That's the big line. So if you make over $125,000 a year, this is not affecting you.

Not affecting you by giving you forgiveness. How this becomes a problem for everyone is we're in the middle of time where there's inflation and this increases inflation because you're taking people's debt away. And they always try to figure out then, okay, wait, so that means less revenue for the federal government who just said they're going to spend $87 million for the IRS. They got to then find that money. And when they try to find that money is when inflation starts going because they start printing more money and things get more expensive. It's like the car companies say, oh, you're going to make electric cars cost this much more. You're going to give this kind of tax credit. We're going to take that exact amount and add it to the cost, total cost of the car.

So you never got any feeling of that saving. Even before literally the legislation gets passed, before you'd ever have time for that to trickle down to you, it's done. They raise their prices. So I do want to talk about the podcast too, because we haven't gotten to that yet. We talked about it last week, but September 12th, we're launching a new podcast, secular brothers podcast. Again, on this show, as you can see, we are taking every time possible, every minute possible to get you up to speed. So we don't always have time to get into the longer discussions. And on some issues too, there aren't just politics as well. Yeah, we're going to talk politics, we're also going to talk news, culture, our lives, some pop culture, and really just dive a little deeper, have a much more interesting, maybe a little more casual conversation out.

These aren't interesting. Like you said, these are your hard hitting shows. We have an hour on terrestrial radio to get a lot of information out, but this, we can settle in, have a bit more of an interesting vibe. And it is, like you said, secular brothers podcast. Just from your reaction before, we were able to garner over a hundred ratings and reviews on Apple podcasts.

Just one day we talked about it. I actually already peaked and went to number, I think we were like in the top 40 of all news podcasts in the United States on Apple podcasts and we haven't launched yet. So first I want to say thank you to everyone who went and put in a review or wrote it, but then if you didn't, I'm going to ask you to do that right now. You just go to secularbrothers.com, click subscribe on Apple podcasts.

If you go to Spotify, that's fine too, but you'll see the direct link to subscribe on Apple podcasts. And when you do that, I want you to write a review and give us a five star rating. Cause what that's going to do is when it launches September 12th, one, you'll be the first people to hear it. It's going to come straight in the afternoon. You're going to get after this show, we're going to have lunch and we'll come back. We're going to do the show and then you're going to get it immediately that night.

And that's going to happen three days a week on Mondays, on Tuesdays and on Thursdays. And that is secularbrothers.com to subscribe to this brand new podcast. Do it now. And look, send me, if you write a review, once it gets posted, send me a screenshot, tag us, I'll retweet it. I will post it on our Instagram.

We'll do whatever it is. Just tag at Logan Sekulow at Jordan Sekulow. Again, go to Sekulowbrothers.com.

It's a really simple options to click on where you can subscribe. And we look forward to talking to you on September 12th. We got a second half hour coming up on Sekulow right now. At the American center for law and justice, we're engaged in critical issues at home and abroad for a limited time. You can participate in the ACLJ matching challenge for every dollar you donate, it will be matched. A $10 gift becomes $20. A $50 gift becomes 100. You can make a difference in the work we do protecting the constitutional and religious freedoms that are most important to you and your family.

Give a gift today online at ACLJ.org. Keeping you informed and engaged. Now, more than ever, this is Sekulow. And now your host, Jordan Sekulow.

All right, welcome back to Sekulow. And we're going to take your calls right now at 1-800-684-3110. That's because we've got former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo next live, then Rick Rinnell live joining us. We'll talk about the student loan issue with Secretary Pompeo as well as Iran and get into more of the Iran details too with Rick because I think that's something else. This is election time and the President has executive authority.

They will go to their reaches, even if you can file a lawsuit that prevents this stuff, which on the foreign policy side is not possible. But they start trying to make it look like they've accomplished things. For a year and a half, there was not any accomplishments. His poll numbers have not risen as much, but it's not really about Joe Biden right now. And Joe Biden has been in politics long enough to know he is not technically on the ballot. And if his party looks like they're trending in the right direction, then you kind of take him out of it. That's a good thing.

And they can point to their accomplishments. And then he can spike later on. And it's already starting to occur where you're seeing a little bit, the spin has changed. I can even say the spin for the media has changed from we need to replace Joe Biden.

He doesn't need to be our President. He needs to leave. He's in decline.

These things need to go. He's failing to all of a sudden like, hey, he's wearing those sunglasses again. He's looking good.

I mean, that's legit like an article I read. They're like, look how much more lively he is now. And look at all the accomplishments that are happening. That is the spin that's happened the last couple of weeks. And sure, it has nothing to do with the fact that we are now really getting closer and closer to the midterms. And look, that's why we're launching our new podcast on September 12th, because we're going to be able to lead you up right into the midterms.

And then obviously we got a heck of a couple of years ahead of us. So we want you to join us there. Should we take some phone calls? Yeah, let's go ahead.

We'll take Nancy, New Hampshire line three. You're on the air. I just want to thank you guys for everything that you do for us. God bless you.

Thank you. Um, I, I filed my taxes in 2019, 2020, 2021. I have not asked them the letters and telling me to call them.

And of course, as you know, we can't get through on the call. And I've also heard that, um, they have destroyed a lot of people's IRS warrants because they said that, you know, they weren't pertinent. So does that mean that I'm now on their list to have, um, IRS agents show up at my house? I don't know if it's for the art IRS agents show up at your house, but at some point, this is the question that people ask. You've complied, right? You've done the right thing. Try to file.

They say, okay, give us a call. You get three years behind. They are three years behind on you. And there's 17 million ish people like that. But that number probably doesn't tell us the true story, which is how many of those 17 million people individually are three years. They're three years behind.

It's not because of what you did. It's because of what they haven't done. And so one of the issues is, is the, the agents that they're putting out there though, are not the same that would be handling your tax return that you're following. These are to go out and find new sources of revenue for the IRS.

That's how they always say, right? We have to, oh, we've got this money sitting out there. We just can't get because we can't figure out how to do it. So just give us more money and hire people. And hopefully over this 10 years, we'll be able to get the money that is supposed to be paid to the IRS, but they can't even deal with the people who are paying in to their taxes. It's, it is a backward system. It would only, this does not work anywhere except for federal government.

And this idea of just transparency and putting in new, using technology, using the advancements we made to make things better for people, easier for people. It is, that is not the IRS's plan. That's not where they're saying, we're not, they don't say where you give us $80 billion and we're going to make everything much easier, much more simple.

They still look at the American taxpayer as a negative. Like your, their starting point is you're bad. Instead of the starting point is you pay their salary. You're the reason they exist.

You're the reason they have a job. So this backwards kind of approach, when we come back, we'll be joined by secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. And again, we're talking, we're talking about the student loan issue, talking to Ron as well. Then Rick Renell will be joining us. We want you to be part of the show as well. And our new podcast at secular brothers.com. And you can sign up either there through iTunes, through Spotify, and we really encourage you to leave a rating. You can rate it before and say, Hey, I'm excited to see the first, to hear the first podcast or watch the first podcast. And that's out September 12th.

So you go to secular brothers.com and we really encourage you hope you'll rate it five stars and leave a comment there through iTunes or through Spotify. All right, welcome back to secular folks that we're talking the issues internationally domestically. One of the big domestic issues right off the bat, of course, that this student loan announcement we knew was likely coming. Now we have some of the more details.

We're joined now by our senior council for global affairs, former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo and secretary Pompeo. I want to start off with that because this is again, classic election year politics, headline student loan debt forgiveness, but how this actually impacts Americans. What the, what are the number that the $10,000 number of forgiveness, but also who ends up paying for you tweeted out, you know, it ends up it's American workers. A lot of people who didn't even go to college, never took these loans out. Wouldn't get these loans for their small business venture. Wouldn't get this loan.

And we were talking about if an 18 year old walked up to a car dealership, I want $150,000 car. You're not getting that loan. But this was, these were the agreements that were made. And now people are going to be stuck with them who didn't even take these loans out.

Jordan, this is insane. This is pure politics. This is, this is your point. This is about buying election votes for the Elizabeth Warren AOC wing of their party. They think they'll go run on this and they'll have more power. And so in the end, this becomes about power.

Your point's well taken. Everybody who took that student loan did so voluntarily. They knew exactly what they were going to have. They knew what their payment requirements were going to be. And in America, that's what we do, right?

If you make a commitment, you live up to it. Now the Biden administration is saying, nope, you're a child. You're an infant. You're not smart enough to make your own decisions and to repay the loans that you decided to take out. They treat them like they treat them like they somehow, somebody foisted this loan for them to take it. And then I think about Jordan, I think about the machine shop that I ran in Wichita, Kansas. I ran it for a bunch of years before I lost my mind and ran for Congress. Those folks were working hard. Why should they be paying for some graduate student who's studying gender theory at an elite school and say, nope, if you decided you didn't want to work, you're making less than $125,000.

We're going to give you 10,000 bucks. It is fundamentally indecent. It is wrong.

And I regret that the Biden administration thought this was in the best interest of America. Yeah, I mean, it even gets complicated with the payment idea because then they also put these freezes on payments through December. They're supposed to restart in January.

But if you look, will they actually restart? I mean, the whole idea that even the incentive to stay up to speed is not really there and it's not real reality. You're not preparing anybody for the real world through this. And again, a lot of this is you're talking about, they may have been young when they took the loan out.

They're not young now today. I mean, and so I just think the numbers are interesting. And it does, I want everybody to be cautious though, because election year politics, like we said, the headline making issues, and this takes me to the next issue, the Iran nuclear deal. I mean, we know about your situation and the Iranians putting out bounties at the same time they're sitting there negotiating on nuclear weapons.

It seems just absurd, but it's also, it's another political election year. Can we check the box and add something else to the list? This deal that the United States is about to sign with the Ayatollah and the President, Raisi and Iran, will put American lives at risk. We will end up with an Iranian nuclear weapon. Other nations inside of the Middle East and the Arab States will feel compelled to have nuclear weapons as well. We will start a nuclear arms race in that region. And we'll put our friend and ally, our partner, Israel, in terrible peril.

And it'll create enormous risk here. They didn't ask the Iranians to stop any of their terror activities all across the world. There is no reason to think that if you give them 750 billion or a trillion dollars over a few years, that they won't increase that terror effort, whether that's attacking U.S. former government officials here in the United States or conducting terror on our friends in Israel. This only leads to a nuclear armed Middle East and more terror in the world.

They've got a new piece up at ACLJ.org about it. The Biden administration must cease negotiations with the Iranian regime. But it does seem that Secretary Pompeo, from all the reports, that they're right on the edge. That this, any day or hour, they're going to announce that they've rejoined this deal.

That's the sense that everybody's getting right now. So the pressure of what we can do about it, but also so that people understand, they're walking back into this. Look, the ACLJ was an important player back in 2014-2015, convincing this administration that they had to negotiate tougher. Frankly, the deal negotiated in 2015 is going to be tougher than the one that they're going to sign here in a few days, it appears.

So this is shorter, weaker, and softer, not longer, stronger, and harder. So it's an even worse deal. I hope everybody who's listening today will contact their political elected leaders and make the case for why this isn't in America's best interest. It's not in our security interest. It's not in our own economic best interest. And if you care about the relationship of the United States and Israel and our Judeo-Christian tradition here, the United States, and the way that the ACLJ has fought for for so long, we'll do everything we can to try and convince this administration not to go back into this crappy deal.

Yeah. And also our allies too in the Middle East, not just Israel, but some of our allies who haven't gone the nuclear route, who I think, again, this is the Iran has exported their terror to their countries as well. And they've got rockets coming in. It doesn't always get as much attention as rockets from Gaza, but it's a similar kind of approach. And they've got the resources financially. They haven't really put the pressure on the USA. We have to have these weapons and we've kind of put our own troops there. But I would imagine there'd be tremendous pressure on future administrations too from those countries to say, we've got to protect ourselves. It may be a little unstable and you might not agree with all of our politics, but if we're going to work together, we've got to have these weapons too. And then you've got another massive arms race in a pretty volatile region of the world.

Jordan, you have this exactly right. The Emiratis, the Saudis, the Omanis, the Kuwaitis, the list of Arab States that will say, I have to protect myself from Iran is long and they will be demanding a capability to enrich uranium or process plutonium as well. And then second, I would tell this, the Iranian leadership needs to know this deal is going to last exactly 27 months. This deal will be over as soon as the next President of the United States is in office and the sanctions regime is coming back full throttle. And we will put enormous pressure on the regime to try our best to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon. The American people will demand it.

It will be the right thing to do. And I'm convinced that the next President will actually deliver that. We will break back out of this deal and we will begin to deny Iran the money they used to terrorize the world today. All right, folks, I want you to check out the new piece up by a former secretary of state, our senior council for global affairs, Mike Pompeo. It's on aclj.org.

You'll see it right on the homepage. The Biden administration must cease negotiations with the Iranian regime. Secretary Pompeo is always great to have your insight on both those issues and those domestic issues too, folks.

I don't want you to under count. And that's why I like getting into details about how it actually impacts you. That's important. Why policy wise, we disagree with whether it's the Iran deal, whether it's the student loan issue. I will tell you, it's easier to say I'm against the Iran nuclear deal because it's Iran. Look what they're trying to do, ABC. You get to those student loan issues, top line, people think, oh, this sounds nice.

They don't think about the bigger impact right off the bat. For the left, this isn't enough. And so for the right, they disagree with the policy behind this. But you see for the politics of the middle, and you're talking about, again, can you get an extra couple thousand votes in Pennsylvania? Can you get a couple extra thousand votes in Wisconsin? Can you find those votes in Florida? Where people who, they are going to vote in the midterm, but they're not necessarily voting for or against this bigger issue of Joe Biden.

And so they're looking at just really, they start paying attention. It's back to school time. It's right around now. So you get, summer's over, people kind of tune back in more to the news and they start saying, okay, what's been going on? What's been going on? We had inflation, oh, look, but gas is a little bit cheaper right now. So because it went a dollar down, now it's up three. It's up three, but it's not up four anymore. And then the big spending, the Build Back Better and the Inflation Reduction Act, which isn't really about inflation reduction. It's not about that at all. This announcement later on this afternoon about the student loan issue. I get, if you just think individually, you may say, they're wonderful. I don't have to make these payments again, starting till maybe January and I get this 10,000 forgiveness. If I hit these specific thresholds, you might be listening as a parent right now saying, this is great.

This sounds good. That's exactly how they want to hook you in. But remember, anytime they are taking out $300 billion of what this cost from the federal government and they're putting back in $87 billion too for the IRS, where do you think they're getting that $87 billion from? I mean, they're running this big deficit of spending.

It's you. And when you start canceling this money, it's just like saying, where are you giving the tax credit for the electric truck? And the electric truck went up exactly the amount of the tax credit. So you never got the impact of that.

It never reached you. And that's how you have to have these conversations starting today with people in your community, armed with the facts, armed with the truth, armed with the statistics to get past the headline. Because if you get stuck at the headline, we lose. I know to some of you that you may go, you're crazy, but look at how the polls have changed. Now, we have time to push them in a different direction. It's not like the election is tomorrow. But the Democrats are doing what they're good at doing. And you have to give your political opponents credit when credit's due. And you can also learn from it. You start racking up.

It just looks like you're accomplishing things. And the first year and a half, we said, hey, see, government doesn't work. And suddenly Joe Manchin is voting like AOC. And suddenly, he's backing a great new deal.

1-800-684-3110. We'll be right back with Rick Grenell on Secular. Welcome back to Secular. We talked about, we just started getting into the politics of these decisions kind of sacrificing the policy and how it actually affects the American people. And we talked about the student loan issue, these headline issues that kind of say, oh, that sounds very nice.

It sounds wonderful. And there are a lot of people that vote on headlines. So you have to take this info, and we have to go the extra mile to educate people past these, what inflation reduction act, that sounds wonderful, but it's really the great new deal.

It's really build back better, which no one supported. Couldn't get any traction at all. But the politics of this are real.

I want to go to Rick Grenell right off the bat because, Rick, the politics here, you've been out with states, the primary season kind of coming to a close than the general election process starting. And we see the polls tighten up. And whether it's the announcement of a student loan debt or what sounds like for this administration, they're ready to cut the Iran nuclear deal.

And it just reeks of, hey, we're just trying to get something on paper before an election. But I want our people to know they have to be aware of this because it's a real political issue that can move the needle if you don't educate voters. I think that there's this idea that the media have decided to work very close to the Biden administration to push every possible piece of good news and pretend it's changing the way people are living their lives. We know the economy and gas prices are still wildly a problem. And what people have to focus on is the idea that their lives have been turned upside down in the Biden administration.

We're not energy independent. Crime is on the rise. We've got gas prices that are soaring. The woke left is taking over. We can't get immune to stay focused no matter what the media says, no matter what pieces of good news they're going to try to claim victory that gas prices are coming down. It's still way high. And so this little piece of good news that they're coming down is not good news.

Yeah. I mean, it's a dollar down, but it's $3 up. But suddenly the news, it's baby formulas. There's still a shortage, but the news moves on. And then you can get a headline of the student loan forgiveness.

And then they talk about that for a couple of days. They may talk about how this affects taxpayers, but I want to talk about Ron Moore. It just seems like this one deal, this is what I think the American people do understand is that it's only got two years left on the deal. And we're just handing them money. These bad actors going after our allies, going after our partners in the region, going after us, putting the agents out and trying to recruit people to kill US officials.

We saw what happened to Salman Rushdie on stage. There was some contact there with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. And we're about to make a deal with him over nuclear weapons, eight years into a 10 year deal.

Back again and put them back on the world stage as well. Well, I don't view this much differently than the Biden administration's policies towards the Russian pipeline. They believed, because the Europeans told them, that a sanctions regime on the Russian pipeline would be bad. They dropped the sanctions, and then we saw the Ukraine war.

And so we've got a team at the White House over calculating how you make deals with the other side and what's good. To make a deal with the Iranians means you trust the Iranians. This isn't a regime you cannot trust. So I don't care what they say, the Iranian regime lies. I don't care what they say they will commit to, the Iranians demonstrated they don't keep commitments.

So we have to be much harder. A deal, just to be able to say a deal is not good if you don't trust the other side to implement the deal. The Iranian the Iranian regime cannot be trusted no matter what they say. It's what on paper on earth. You know this team, you've been in the same positions they are, same jobs that they're in, same access to information.

Publicly what we see is everyone knows they're not good actors. The Ayatollah, their whole philosophy going in. And that you can't really, you can't buy off a fundamental, so long you can only buy off a fundamentalist who is dedicated to this ideology.

And they're not backing away from their ideology. It's just to me, it's Rick is saying to me that they've got literally people here trying to recruit, to kill US officials and we would even think about making a deal on nuclear weapons again. A deal again on nuclear weapons.

All right, I think we lost right here. This is what I want you to understand because that's why this interplay with Rick, who's I know he's traveled a lot with the political, but he's on the ground in these places. He's also been the highest level of security.

Mike Pompeo, highest levels of information and dealing with it. So if there was something positive to gain, anything positive to gain from making these deals with the devil, I feel like they could lay that out for us. But when you have Israel sitting there and their leadership unified in rejecting these deals, the Iranians literally tell you what they're going to do because they're putting agents on to kill Americans here in the United States. Not just our troops overseas, here in the United States. And again, this is all, be careful though because the politics at play.

I just want to say it out there, we like to say the truth, talk to you and direct on this broadcast. When you take the politics of all of this and you put it all together, that's where you have to be the most careful because the headlines, and Rick was talking about too, the headlines, if you get the media buy-in and they write it the right way about the student loan debt forgiveness or Iranian nuclear deals or the securities and they forget, they take your attention off Ukraine, they take your attention off Russia, maybe you're not paying as much attention to China and the supply chain issues. You're just not focused there, like the baby formula, like the gas prices.

Remember, everybody's talking about the gas prices, but they went down 75 cents and suddenly, oh, everything is good. But you still have these massive supply chain issues. Everyone knows this, I'm talking to the choir here on this, if you're trying to get supplies, materials, vehicles, and while we'll see it inch up a little here and there, it's not the America that we knew pre-COVID where, I mean, you could buy the truck you wanted at any time. If you had the resources, you could go do it.

You didn't have to put in a request six months ahead, put down a deposit on something that may or may not get there. Whether you're buying a computer or a car or trying to get a refrigerator for a home, or baby formula, it just makes this feeling, the homelessness crisis. I will say that is seeping into every community as well. It's like the drug crisis. We've seen that seep into every community and on top of that, you add the drug crisis, the homelessness crisis, and then that leads to crime and that feeling like when you drive down the street that just things aren't right. We've always had issues, big country, you have issues, you're gonna have criminals, you're gonna have bad actors, you have addiction, you need to deal with it. But when you start feeling overwhelmed, there's just too many people and it's every facet. There's a lot of focus on California and San Francisco and Portland and New York, but it's happening everywhere. That's where you got these kind of hubs of media based, but you open your door, you will see it more and more. And these are all that feeling like, do I need the government to come save me? Maybe I should just trust them to do everything.

And that's exactly what the left wants. We encourage you to go to aclj.org, stay updated on all of these issues, aclj.org. And let me encourage you to secularbrothers.com. New podcast launches September 12th. What we're asking you today is if you go to secularbrothers.com, you can choose between the iTunes or Spotify. Leave a five-star rating and a short review that you're excited about it coming. We really would appreciate that secularbrothers.com.