Economist Stephen Moore warns that higher taxes, regulation, and spending could push the U.S. toward another Great Depression. He argues COVID lockdowns left young people idle and fueled unrest, and that red states with lower taxes outperform blue states economically.
Stephen Moore is a fighter. He's on the president's economic team. He was at the— was it the last night or all the nights?
I went only the last night. That was the big night when Trump gave his speech.
So you were there, and when you left, you were harassed. I mean, really harassed. Spit in the face, cursed at. They recognized who you were. And we were talking about your sense that they were deranged. They were in their late 20s, early 30s, is that correct?
Yes. Mostly white?
Mostly white. And male and female or mostly male?
At this particular, you know, melee, it was males.
Right. Right. So this is my theory, as I told you. You walked into a cliché, as it were. Do you have a theory as to what in America has produced such derangement?
Well, obviously the anti-Trump derangement is a huge part of it, but I think it goes beyond that. I think we miss a larger point here, Dennis, and I've been saying this for many months before the, before the rioting started, I had predicted there would be rioting in the streets if we continued to lock people down and keep them isolated and keeping them locked in their homes. And you just can't do this. You can't keep 18 to 30-year-old males locked up with nothing to do, no jobs, no income, no purpose in their life, and you're creating a bonfire. And what happened in Minneapolis was just the match, right? And it was— if it hadn't been that, it would have been something else. And I do believe that part of this is that these youngsters don't have anything to do. And as my wise old mom used to say, that idleness is the devil's workshop. And there is a lot of truth to that. When people have a job, when they have a purpose in their life, they don't mug and they don't set things on fire. And so I think we are partly responsible for this, for the, I think one of the worst decisions in the history of America. You've made this point yourself, Dennis, which is the locking down of our economy, which in my opinion, the costs of that, both from health and economics, were multiple times greater than any benefit. And the reason I bring that up, Dennis, is because when I heard, you know, Joe Biden say the other day that if, how did he say it? If the scientists told me that I should do it, I would shut down the economy. There's so many problems with that. One is that, You know, it's one thing to have been in favor of locking down the economy 4 or 5 months ago, but to see the carnage, the tens of millions of people unemployed, the millions of businesses destroyed, the increases in suicide and depression and all the health costs of that, and then to call for that again, I think is a bit crazy. But also this idea of the left, and I hear you talk a lot about this, Dennis, and you're so right about this. Science is— what the left does now is they find some scientist who believes in what they believe in, and then they call that the science.
That's exactly what they do.
And they have politicized science in a way that it has no meaning anymore.
So you're an economist, so let me, let me focus on that for a moment. Are we in a depression? Are we moving towards a depression?
We will have a great— I, you know, my, my 20-year-old son, he's kind of— he was a pretty wise kid. He just got a job. That made him a lot wiser. Getting a job and earning a paycheck changes your perspective.
And when he gets married, he'll even get wiser.
And he was smart. He decided not to go to college this year. By the way, why do— why are people— Why are parents sending their kids to college if they're not having classes?
Well, no, drop if they're not having classes. Why are parents sending their kids to college is the question I ask.
Good question, but he came to me, Dennis, and he's a smart kid. And by the way, I don't impose my political views on my kids. I really think if you're smart, you can figure this out yourself. And so I let them figure it out themselves. I mean, they know what I do and they listen to sometimes what I say. But he said, Dad, I don't know what to do. He said, I'm in a quandary. He said, "If I vote for Donald Trump, we're gonna have 4 more years of this chaos and crisis." And then he said, "But if I work for Joe Biden, we're gonna have a second Great Depression." And I thought, smart kid. You know, 'cause I think to some extent those are our choices. I mean, if Trump wins, the violence may very seriously escalate.
[Speaker:DENNIS PRAGER] I believe there will be bloodshed.
[Speaker:JOHN CUSACK] I believe you're right about that. But I also believe that if Joe Biden wins, given how fragile the economy is right now, and it is fragile, I mean, I'm not quite as optimistic as my friend Larry Kudlow and others. I mean, you know, we've done severe damage to our economy. Severe damage. If you then bring in Joe Biden, he raised taxes, destroys the American energy industry, increases regulation, massively increases government debt and spending. We will have a second Great Depression, just as we did, by the way, under Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt's policies in the '30s actually extended the Depression by 10 years. Nobody learns that in school.
Nobody. We have a video at PragerU on that. A few, yeah.
Well, Amity Shlaes wrote a great book about that.
Well, we have Amity doing it. Yeah, we get good people like you to do videos.
But, you know, I'm here with you today because I'm doing a PragerU video and we are doing it on red state versus blue state. And it's a very simple story. Red states are doing very well. Blue states are a catastrophe. Red states have, you know, people are moving to red states. Red states have lower taxes. Texas. The red states have lower crime. Red states have, you know, better health outcomes. Red states, you know, on and on and on. And people are moving into red states. They're not moving out of red states. Meanwhile, you know, Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, California are disaster areas economically and socially. And in terms of their, you know, these are the places where the crime is the worst, where the economies are in a disastrous situation. So we— the question is, do we want to make America more like Texas, or we want to make more like Illinois and New York.
Well, thank you. You are, you're a joy to have. I could talk to you every day.
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