Debt Doomsday is Coming + The Truth on Social Security

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That is noblegoldinvestments.com right now. Hey everybody to the Charlie Kirk show. This is a very fun episode.

We tell the truth about the federal debt and deficit and we talk about how social security is something that is really tough to talk about. I think you'll enjoy this. Text it to your friends, listen to the whole episode before you email me because there's some very important data in it. Email us freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast. Open up your podcast application and type in charliekirkshow.

Get involved with turningpointusatpusa.com. Buckle up everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here.

Brought to you by the loan experts I trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandtodd.com. What is the greatest failure of the last 11 years? Boy, it's been hard to pinpoint. The border is definitely up there. How both parties have allowed the border to remain completely and totally wide open and tens of millions of foreigners have come into our country. How many people have come into our country illegally in the last decade?

It's got to be at least 15 million. When I first started Turning Point USA, we were warning that we are going to become a debtor nation. We were warning that we were borrowing money we did not have. Remember one of the first speeches I gave as Turning Point USA started, we were $12.7 trillion in debt. I said, we, this is unsustainable. We are heading towards a fiscal and financial apocalypse.

And people said, oh yeah, you know, that's good thinking. Well now, 11 years later, as Turning Point USA has grown and strengthened into the most powerful organization, one of the most, if not the most powerful organization in the country, definitely with young people, but potentially over overall, the national debt is over $33 trillion. So we went from $12.7 trillion to $33 trillion, a near three times a tripling of the national debt in a decade.

So where did this all start? Well, it's important to remember the founding fathers wanted sound money. They wanted something backing our currency. Woodrow Wilson started the end of that with the Federal Reserve. We got rid of a metallic-based currency, and it was multiple decades of work. It involved FDR confiscating the gold in the 1930s and 1940s.

It all culminated with Richard Nixon officially getting us off the gold standard, putting us on a fiat currency. Big government needs cheap money. If you were to summarize many of our comments here today, big government needs cheap money. It needs the ability to turn on the printing press, allow it to go, because if you target the money, if you target the money, and to the libertarian's credit, I disagree with them on basically everything else, this is something that I agree 100% on, if you are able to have the money be sound, it's a lot harder to finance the foreign wars, a lot harder to pay for the warfare state and the welfare state. We have a warfare state and a welfare state that work in harmony right now, that finance Zelensky's regime, that financed the war of Iraq and Afghanistan, that finance all these domestic programs, that bleed the American taxpayers dry.

Cheap money allows big government to grow bigger and bigger and bigger. Now we tried to warn people, and we were just a bunch of high school and early college kids in 2012 and 2013, that we have to stop the spending, balance the budget, but that means you would have to live within your means, you would have to buckle your belt, and quite honestly, many people do not want to see any cuts at all to government programs. Now if I were to say this, and I'm not even, I don't believe it, I believe every person is obligated to receive Medicare and Social Security, but if I were even to say that we need a slight cut in Medicare and Social Security, something I don't believe, I would receive 5,000 emails of very angry listeners.

And I get it, you earned it. You believe that you paid into it, and you did earn it, and the government has recklessly spent money it doesn't have, and I mean, that's untouchable, you cannot touch it. If I were to say that we need to close some of our military bases, I would get tons of emails, thousands of emails.

Charlie, how dare you say that? But if I were to say we don't want to close some of these domestic welfare programs, a different portion of the population would send me a bunch of emails. So we have grown addicted to the party, the carnival of getting drunk with cheap money. In 2012, a 12.7 trillion dollar debt felt manageable compared to where we are now. We thought we were drowning in debt, that our generation was not going to be able to survive. Well now we're at 33 trillion dollars. Admiral Mike Mullen famously said in 2010 that the national debt was the greatest threat to American national security. And basically very few people in either party cared.

This has been a bi-partisan spectacle. According to Admiral Mike Mullen, the inability to control the national debt is greater than the threat of China, Russia, or Iran. When Mullen delivered that warning, the US national debt was only 13.5 trillion dollars.

And now it's 33 trillion dollars. Part of part of the social contract embedded in the constitution is to pass down a better country to the next generation. That is not happening. Instead of passing down a damaged country, a country where the next generation has to go further into debt, the schools are not better, the culture is not better, and the fiscal health is far sicker than it was 10 years ago.

And look, I'm not trying to overly depress you with things, but this should be the appropriate backdrop. This is the context as we enter this contentious continuing resolution fight. We have so many problems.

Schools that are worse than worthless, rampant crime, we're funding this war in Ukraine, obviously our border is wide open, but the debt should be one that transcends all political lines. But there's a cohort of Republicans and Democrats that believe the lie of Keynesian economics. An economist by the name of John Maynard Keynes, if you do not know that name, you should educate yourself on it. He believed that deficits don't matter.

He said quote, we are all dead in the long run. He believed in the national debt actually being in some ways an asset to a country. John Maynard Keynes contrasted with the Austrian economists, the economists and Milton Friedman believed that the state can fix all economic problems, that you have boom and bust cycles and you just need to turn on the quantitative easing. And we have become a quantitative easing dependent society. Now part of this all started at 9-11.

We talked about how our country reacted so poorly post 9-11. After 9-11, remember the green span put, turned on the guzzle, can't have the stock market collapse, can't have the stock market collapse. Then after the 2008 financial crisis, when we saw Lehman go under, we saw so many of these other banks in a fragile state, we turned on the guzzle and we made a decision post 2008. Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner, who was running the treasury department in 2007 and 2008, well 2008-2009 under Barack Hussein Obama, they made a decision.

The Goldman Sachs gang of Geithner and Paulson, they said we are going to love cheap money. They said look, we need to spend money we don't have because if we borrow against ourselves, then only we have to pay for it. And that's what most people don't understand about our national debt.

If you were to go on the street and say hey, who do we owe this money to? You know we owe a fair amount to China, about a trillion dollars. We owe a little bit to Japan. We owe the most to ourselves. We're borrowing against ourselves. We're mortgaging our own future.

What this does though, it's an IOU that if interest rates were ever to go up, which they are, just the interest payments and the debt alone to service the debt, the price of previous borrowing could cripple the federal budget. And this is not a Democrat blame session. Republicans have been just as much, if not more guilty of fiscal irresponsibility over the last decade, of allowing budgets to grow. And then COVID was the big one and we're going to walk through that. We locked down the country.

We were, you could actually go back and find those tweets, Andrew or Ryan. We were one of the few people in public life that said zero stimulus, zero spending, open up the economy. I think the Senate voted 97 to nothing for all of this deficit spending.

97 to nothing. Because DC saw it as a once in a generation opportunity to grow the leviathan, to strengthen the machine, and to make the beast untouchable. From 11 trillion to 33 trillion in just a decade. We'll talk about it as this continuing resolution fight looms and we have become a debtor nation. That is what his life is all about. Make sure you guys are sleeping well. It's a major part of life.

Check it out right now, relieffactor.com, relieffactor.com. For current beneficiaries, none of your, none of your obligations should be touched. If you're receiving social security, if you're receiving Medicare, if you look at the composition of the federal proposed budget, a lot of it though, and I don't like this word entitlement. I don't like that.

I'll be honest. If you pay into social security, that's not an entitlement. You earned that. Now, I do think you should be able to opt out of social security payments.

I really do. You should be able to say, no, I don't want it in the future. I don't want it now. I can invest it far more dutifully than with the federal government. And just so you know, the federal government's not putting your social security payments in some sort of a lockbox. They take your social security payments via FICA for 20, 25, 30, 35 year olds. And then they just bring it through and they say, okay, we'll, we'll pay you later. We'll pay you later. We'll pay you later. And so the proportion of retirees to people paying used to be something like 20 to one, 30 to one.

Now it's like two and a half to one. So in the future, and I'm talking about my generation, I'm 29 years old. I'm willing to say, you know what? I'm willing to strike a deal so that people in their twenties are going to get next to nothing for future social security. If it means we can balance the budget.

Now, I totally understand. If I were to say that about people in their fifties right now, there would be a revolt at our studio of all the issues that if I were to even touch, even allude to saying that a 1% adjustment of social security or Medicare, it would be a riot. I get it because a lot of people depend on it and a lot of people, you know, live on it and they expect it. And look, you have to understand you work many decades to pay into it and you're made a promise and the government says, oh, you know, not so fast. I will say there's a lot of lying around the social security or Medicare issue. A lot of lying where it is used as a political football. Now I will say that for future retirees, people under the age of 45, we should absolutely raise the retirement age.

I'm going to say something very provocative. I'm not a fan of retirement. I don't think retirement is biblical. I think that if you retire, you should always be doing something. Not to say that you have to, you can't slow down, but you should be helping people, part-time work. You should be helping with the grandkids, volunteering. I do not like the overemphasis on a retirement-based society. I don't.

I think there is so much talent that is not being used. In fact, I talked to senior citizens. They say, Charlie, after I officially retired, I went back and I was a part-time substitute teacher, counselor at the local church. And so I challenge this idea of retirement altogether. People are living longer. Are they doing more with their 70s or 80s?

Some yes, some not so much. But you say, Charlie, I'm just going to retire and I'm just going to go golf. I think what a waste of the gifts that God has given you. What a waste of the wisdom that you have been given just to kind of just watch TV and to golf. No, there are young people that need you as a mentor.

You know, any Turning Point USA chapters would be blessed by people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s to mentor them, to pour into them, to give them advice. So we take money from people who need it the most, young families in their 20s and 30s, and give it to those who need it the least. Now, we could easily just go back to pre-COVID spending easily, but Congress doesn't want to do that. We have massively expanded the bureaucracies, massively. This is an all-of-the-above approach.

We expand the federal budget through defense. We need to cut back on some of the bases. This needs to be an all-of-the-above approach. Department of Education, EPA, all these bureaucracies need to be just grinded down. In fact, we need to abolish them. It's not going to happen realistically, but it's not an easy thing.

It's easier said than done. Composition of the proposed fiscal year 2024 budget, $6.9 trillion. Email me, freedom at charliekirk.com, anytime throughout the hour. Where would you cut?

I know where I would cut. You'd make a lot of people uncomfortable, but just the interest payments alone are $789 billion. Just the interest alone to service our debt. So that is paying the price for previous generation spending, soon to be $1 trillion. If you have a grandkid out there, they're going to be spending the rest of their life as a debt slave to pay for the stuff that we paid for five years ago.

It makes the country less free and it allows totalitarianism and tyranny to dominate. Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here. Do you get the feeling that the unthinkable is going to happen soon? Well, I do.

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If you want a balanced budget, you have to you have to sacrifice and you have to make tough choices. That's what your leaders gave you. Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just showing you the numbers.

Okay, we're receiving a ton of emails. Let me just say this. You have been gamed and lied to by the government. There's a $6.9 trillion federal budget.

Let me say that again. $6.9 trillion federal budget. So let me tell you what we can't change in this budget.

Unfortunately, you can't change the interest payments. So that's $789 billion. To give an idea, when I first started Turning Point USA, the whole federal budget was like $2.4, $2.5 trillion. Now our interest payments alone are $789 billion. We cannot touch that.

How large is that? That's how big Obama's stimulus package was. Obama's shovel-ready stimulus package was around $800 billion, okay?

So we can't touch that. Then next is defense discretionary, $885 billion. Now, almost none of the insiders in Washington DC want to touch the defense budget. If we were serious about how we contract things, serious about reining in the globalist American empire and stopping endless wars, we could probably prudently get that down to $600 billion. Probably even less. $500 billion. I'm just estimating. So we're doing this. That's $200 billion in savings. Again, to get Congress to agree to this is nearly impossible. So then next is non-defense discretionary.

I don't really even know what that means. I think that this is the agencies, okay? I think that this is the EPA, education department. A very simple way is you say you go back to your pre-COVID number, okay? That would save like $400 billion. Now, you could eliminate entire departments, but you'd have to get Congress to agree to it very hard. Then next is social security, $1.4 trillion. So understand that's not going to get touched, but that money is not there. So that was a promise made 30 or 40 years ago with those of you who paid via FICA and your employer matched it.

And so then you get an IOU. Now, some of you say, but Charlie, why don't we just cut foreign aid? Foreign aid is only about $35 to $40 billion of our budget. It's a $6.9 trillion budget. So I'm all for cutting all the foreign aid, but that's only $40 billion of a $6.9 trillion budget. Then next is Medicare.

We're not going to cut any of that. So that's another $842 billion. And then next is Medicaid, which is health insurance for the poor. There's a lot of corruption there. So you might be able to clean it up maybe $100 billion. And then you have other mandatory spending.

I don't know what this is, Blake. This is just, I think, a lot of COVID garbage. Of all the buckets, this is where I think we could probably make the most traction, like the COVID relief stuff, like business reimbursement stuff.

I don't really understand what this category is. Other mandatory spending, the way that they label this is so deceiving, so deceiving. And so let's say it's $1.1 trillion.

It feels as if it's almost designed to be murky. And let's say we could cut $500 billion of that, okay? So what is that? Even that, with these kind of various, these would be considered severe cuts to the Uniparty and the regime. That would get us $1.2 trillion in cuts, which means we would still run a trillion dollar deficit.

That means if I take out my fiscal hawk sword and I start slaying and slaying and slaying, they might say, well, Charlie, then what is your solution? All those cuts are helpful, but we need to change the methodology of how we budget. We need to get rid of baseline budgeting.

Do you know the way that Washington DC works is they never do zero-based budgeting? In any functioning business, in any functioning family, they start at zero and you have to justify every expenditure from zero to five to ten to twenty-five, et cetera. The federal budget starts at the previous number. It starts at $150.

It starts at $250. It starts at whatever, and the increases are on autopilot built into the rate of inflation. So why is it that these budgets are so out of control? It's because the inflation rate, 6%, 7%, is automatically exploding the federal budget without any sort of debate or discourse on the issue. And these buckets of spending, I'm curious, what in the fresh heck is other mandatory spending for $1.3 trillion? And I think everybody needs to give up a little bit of their sacred cow. The federal budget, the debt and the deficit is such an existential threat to our republic that we need to figure this out. For future retirees, not current retirees, there needs to be other options or raise in the retirement age. Needs to be.

As you know, in the Bible, all of Israel suffered because the leaders are wicked. Sadly, that's America very soon from the federal debt and deficit. But, you know, we're receiving a lot of emails, well, Charlie, why don't we just cut the foreign aid to Kenya or these African nations?

I'm all for that. It's just so, it's so nonsense. Those are not the major drivers. The major drivers are the following. The interest, you can't touch that. The social security and Medicare, we shouldn't touch that for future, for current retirees.

And the third one, which is really important, is the automatic growth of the bureaucracies. To give you an idea of how much money we are spending that we do not have, we could delete the entire military and our deficit only cuts in half. Somebody says here, Charlie, you're sounding like a rhino when it comes to social security. First of all, who are you to decide what everyone else should do in retirement? I'm getting some of the nastiest emails just because I have even teased the idea of future retirees getting some sort of adjustments. And that proves my point. We're never going to solve this problem.

And that's just the way it is. We will never solve the problem. We will be a permanent debtor nation. Everybody needs to say, not current retirees or current beneficiaries.

I mean, yeah, the nastiness of the emails, I knew what I was getting into when I said this. And I'm not even making that strong of arguments on it. I'm not even saying we should touch social security or Medicare for any of these people.

I would lie to you if I would tell you that you could solve this problem. Everybody wants a balanced budget, but no one wants cuts that affect them. We have spent 20 trillion dollars more debt than when I started Turning Point USA. Is America better off? Has it helped make America become greater?

Does it help the young five, six and seven year olds of America enter a freer society? Of course not. And I'm not even recommending those cuts. I'm simply just teasing this and boom, you get slammed. That just proves the point. And I get it. You should be angry.

The government did lie to you, but don't be angry at the guy that tells you the government lied to you. I totally get it. I accept it in stride.

Matt Gaetz on Washington being given a blank check, play cut 46. Mr. Speaker, I'm not voting for a continuing resolution. I'm not voting to continue the failure and the waste and the corruption and the election interference.

And in some cases, the efforts that could lead this country into World War Three. I oppose the C.R. authored by my friend and colleague from Florida, Byron Donalds.

The Donald C.R. continues the Ukraine policy negotiated by Speaker Pelosi and Mitch McConnell in the omnibus that conservatives were against. My friends, we are approaching the days where we're facing climate change, we are approaching the days where we're facing two trillion dollar annual deficits atop a 33 trillion dollar debt. This is unsustainable.

And just to continue things with some facial eight percent cut over 30 days that will lead to no programmatic reform is an insult to the principles we fought for in January. I yield back and understand that the Social Security Trust Fund was raided. This is an important point that some of you have been paying in and you have earned some retirement from that. Obviously, the money's not there. The government stole it from you.

It's a Ponzi scheme. Are do you are you obligated? Of course you you are owed that. And more importantly, you psychologically believed throughout your life that I will always be able to draw from Social Security.

And for that, I would be totally angry, but be angry at the DC insiders, not the guy who walks through math. And there is no trust fund. Social Security has always been money taken from young people given to old people.

Always. Charlie, I listen to you on a regular basis, but your opinion about cutting Social Security and Medicare really pissed me off. I didn't even say I wanted to cut it. It's amazing how you even remotely touch the issue.

It is probably one of the most tribal issues I've ever seen. And understand that if you want to cut Ukraine money, they get just as angry. So what are we going to cut?

I'm open to any ideas. I'm not even recommending cutting Social Security. Where in the $6 trillion budget should we cut?

Because I've isolated some cuts here. It's $1.2 trillion. So you cut the new FBI building, that's only $20 billion.

You cut the trans stuff. Even if you cut all the COVID spending, that's only $600 billion. Email us freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast.

I love the spirited emails that we are receiving. The government stole your money under false pretenses. They've bankrupted the country. They took the Social Security trust fund to pay for the intercept highway system and many other ways.

And it's a tragedy. Those are robber barons, the insiders that run the fiscal decisions of America. So someone says, Charlie, young people are not paying my Social Security. I paid it throughout my career to stop being a liar.

No, you didn't. You paid into something that no longer exists. That's what I'm trying to tell you. The money's not there. So now the government took an IOU slip and they said, yeah, sure, we'll give it to you later. But now it is dependent on young workers. I know that is a uncomfortable truth, but it's a fact. You paid for the Social Security of retires when you were working, but it's a myth that the government has some sort of lockbox.

The government doesn't save any money. It's a lie. In 1960, there were 5.1 workers per beneficiary. That ratio has dropped to 2.8 today. The declining ratio of workers to beneficiaries creates financial difficulties for Social Security. In 1935, when the Social Security pension system was implemented, significant differences in the expectancy existed. Life expectancy at birth was 61 for white males and 65 for white females.

For blacks and other minorities, life expectancy at birth for males was 51.3 and 55.2 for females. Another option, of course, is to grow the economy. Obviously, cut taxes. Well, to cut taxes means you're going to borrow more money.

Deregulate the economy, energy independence. Trump, I think, had a pretty good balance here, but he should have cut more spending. Someone says here, Charlie, why don't we cut foreign aid? That will balance the budget. It's only about 40 or 50 billion. We're talking about a couple trillion. But understand that it's the insiders that have benefited the most.

And with this, we should have complete and total agreement. And just to make this perfectly clear, I have not even said that current retirees should have any sort of cuts whatsoever. I, as a 29-year-old, am willing to say I will never get Social Security. I think most people under 35 would take that deal.

I think most people would say, forget it, I'm done. I do not trust the government at all. I think the government is going to rob, steal.

Remember, it's the same government that you guys are trusting that lied about the vaccine and lied about Ukraine and lie about the border and lie about masks. So don't put your, there is no money there, everybody. There's no money.

So that distrust of government is systemic and it should be systemic. There is no money. It's theft. It's generational theft.

But understand as we have cheap money and debts and deficits and we are going further and further into this direction, it is the rich that benefit the most. You've been lied to you've been lied to is the message I'm trying to tell you. If you are a carpenter, a welder, if you're in the muscular class and you sweat for a living and you shower before work and after work, the insiders have been taking your FICA. They've been taking your Social Security payments and they've been spending it on other stuff. There's no lockbox. There's no designate money.

And some of you are emailing you say, Charlie, you're wrong. I've been told by my accountant, the money is being saved. No, it's not. In fact, actually, if there was no Social Security and you put it in a moderately managed money market account, you would actually have a far bigger retirement parachute than what the government does. What Social Security basically is understandably is state centrally managed retirement accounts is what it is. Now again, all that's in theory and it scares people.

There are no accounts at all. That's actually, it's state managed future retirement promises. It's just a promise.

And by the way, I get a lot of emails of people that say, Charlie, how dare you? I'm retired. Look, I'm saying this, if you're an able-bodied person, you still have your faculties enough to email me angrily, then go do something. Young people need you. You realize it's the most suicidal, alcohol addicted, drug addicted generation history.

They need people in their 70s and 80s to counsel them, mentor them, pour into them, pray for them, volunteer at a church, volunteer at a synagogue, substitute, teach, help out a local charity. We are in a massive debt crisis. And I would say, by the way, I'm not going to back down by this. I'm going to be very clear about my position, but don't shoot the 29 year old messenger that's telling you the country's about to collapse because we're spending money we do not have and the currency's about to fall apart. Remember, debts and deficits deteriorate the currency because the only way you then can get out of a $2 trillion debt, you can cut spending, we're not going to do that, raise taxes, we're not going to do that, or you can inflate your way out, which is what we are doing right now.

And if you inflate your way out of it, then there's no purchasing power whatsoever. I care about America so much. I care about you. To tell you the truth, your leaders have lied to you. They have stolen your money and called it social security, made a promise they can't fulfill.

And now we are in a debt crisis because of it. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always freedom at charliekirk.com.

Thank you so much for listening and God bless. For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com. When I grow up, I want to work for a woke company like super woke. When I grow up, when I grow up, I want to be hired based on what I look like rather than my skills.

I want to be judged by my political beliefs. I want to get promoted based on my chromosomes. When I grow up, I want to be offended by my co-workers and walk around the office on eggshells and have my words policed by HR.

Words like grandfather, peanut gallery, long time no see, no can do. When I grow up, I want to be obsessed with emotional safety and do workplace sensitivity training all day long. When I grow up, I want to climb the corporate ladder just by following the crowd. I want to be a conformist. I want to weaponize my pronouns.

What are pronouns? It's time to grow up and get back to work. Introducing the number one woke free job board in America, red balloon dot work.