A Lesson from Ronald Reagan for Today (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE PLAIN TRUTH TODAY MIDDAY BROADCAST: A lesson from Ronald Reagan for Today

   A lesson from Ronald Reagan for today

Hi, Bob Barney for the Plain Truth today, and I want to talk about another Ronald Reagan momentabout government spending and the reality, or I’d like to say the plain truth, about what happenswhen government spends too much and who pays for it and who really pays for it. And his wisdom, Ronald Reagan’s wisdom, we sorely miss. We miss Ronald Reagan and the wisdom that he had about who pays for what and the fallacy of liberalism and government that is rhino in nature, Republican in name only.

That’s what we’re going under right now. And listen to this brief commentary by Ronald Reagan, and I’ll come back and talk more about it. You know, sometimes the big spenders in Congress talk as if all that money they spend just kind of magically appears on their doorstep, a gift from the Internal Revenue Service.

They talk as if spending were all giving and no taking. Well, there is no magic money machine.Every dollar the government spend comes out of your pockets.

Every dollar the government gives to someone has to first be taken away from someone else. So it’s our moral duty to make sure that we can justify every one of your tax dollars, that we spend them wisely and carefully and just as important, fairly. Unfortunately, hardly anyone could honestly call federal budgets wise, careful or fair.

Is it fair to ask one small business to help subsidize its competitors? Is it fair to ask workers in the private economy to pay for civil service pensions that are much more generous than the retirement benefits they receive? Is it fair to ask low income families to help pay for the college education of children from families with incomes as high as $100,000 a year? Is it fair to ask taxpayers to help pay billions for export subsidies to a handful of America’s biggest corporations? Well, it isn’t fair and you know it. But that’s the law of the land right now, just part of the legacy of 50 years of trying to do good things for all by treating your earnings like government property. The time has come to decide what benefits we can properly expect from the federal government for ourselves, our neighbors and those in need.

And what government can take from us in taxes without making everyone worse off, including those who need our help. The one thing we cannot do is stay on the immoral dead end course of deficit spending. And that’s where we’re on right now.

We’re on the course of deficit spending and we really have people in Congress, the Republican Party that used to be in agreement with Ronald Reagan’s conservative ideas about taxation and how to spend money, now they are acting like Democrats. I call them rhinos because they’re Republican in name only. And that is even including the Trump administration who wants to keep spending money.

But what Ronald Reagan said is a point we need to get into talking about. And that is when you tax somebody and give tax breaks to other people, you are picking winners and losers. And he gave some really good examples.

When you pass regulations or you give one small business a tax break and other small businesseshave to pay for that tax break, then you have given that other small business an advantage that they can then put their competition that other people paying their way out of business. But it becomes worse than that because small businesses are not usually the benefit of any tax breaks. The real benefit and the real enemy of small American owned businesses, especially small American family businesses are the large corporations who lobby Congress, lobby the president, lobby everybody they can and spend the money that small businesses cannot afford to do.

And so they get tax breaks and they get benefits that are paid for by their small businesscompetition. And big businesses like your Walmarts or your Amazons, they don’t like mom and pop businesses and they really want to put you out of business. And they use big government andregulations and taxation to help them put the little guy out of business.

I’ll give you an example. And I’ve given this example time and time again about the tariffs. The tariffs, when they were imposed by Trump back in April, which he called liberation day, it was really enslavement day for most smaller American businesses, especially small American manufacturing businesses who he said he was helping.

But what happened is he gave these large tariffs, unreasonable tariffs to manufacturers and small businesses, and he exempted his friends. He exempted people that gave to his inauguration. It’s a plain track.

We put it on the plain truth a few months back that the hundred largest donors to the Trump inauguration, billionaires all, who spent about a million to 2 million each, reaped over a hundred million dollars each in government spending contracts. And this doesn’t even count the tariffs they were exempted from. For example, and a lot of people do not realize this, many of your biggest companies like Amazon, Walmart, the chip companies like AMD, which the government took a stake in, which again, the government pick in winners and losers.

And by the way, on a side note, AMD, since the United States put in all those billions of dollars, their stock has plummeted. It’s been a bad deal for America. Not too many people are talking about that, but it’s been a very bad deal for the American taxpayer who invested in a company that every expert would tell you was going out of business in the first place.

And there was no way, no how we should have bought into that company as a nation. There are other tech chip manufacturers, maybe we should have helped and we should try to help all American manufacturers, but it’s just simply was not what really happened. So the big guys got the tariffs and the little guys did not get the tariffs.

And also what came out of these tariffs was if you were a manufacturer, like in my business, I tell you all the time, I’m in the paint manufacturing business. My wife and I run Tamco paint, which pays for this program and everything we do, which is mainly an automotive fleet marine paint company. We make solvent-based paints.

We don’t make house paint. And when you have factories in China, which we do today nowbecause of the tariffs, we decided to invest in a factory in China. This is the advantage when youhave a 50% tariff or at the time, a 100% tariff.

PPG, Exalta, which was the former DuPont, BASF, Sickens, which is a part of the Axel company that bought out Exalta, talk about monopolies in a minute. They all had plants in China. So when they send raw materials that their plants make in to their American manufacturer counterpower, the 50% tariff is based on what they say they’re selling it to.

I can’t buy from a Chinese company and they sell to me below their cost. So I get a very small tariff. So when a big manufacturer, like a big paint company, manufactures resins and pigments in China, and let’s say it costs them $100 to make a unit of something, right? But they say on their manifest, because it’s their Chinese company, that they’re selling it to their American manufacturing facility in Ohio, for example, and they’re saying it only costs $10.

So if you have a 100% tariff, it’s $20. So they only pay a $10 tariff. Now, if I was to buy the same ingredient that they could do for $100, I would pay $150 because the manufacturing plant is going to make a profit for me in China.

And they’re going to then manufacture at their cost is $100. That’s what the big guy’s own manufacturing costs would be. And they’re going to mark it up at least 50% or more.

So I’m going to pay $150. Then I’m going to pay another $150 at 100% or $75 at 50%, which it is right now, tariff. So I’m going to pay $225 for something that the big guys pay $110 with tariff for.

How am I going to compete? And they know I can’t compete. And this is how your big companies have gotten around the tariffs. And it’s what happens when governments pick winners and losers and because of the corruption in our government.

And the average congressman, I think makes $176,000 a year, but the average congressman shows earnings of $1.2 million a year. That’s a statistic. What job do you get that you could have that you can make $170,000 a year, but also on the side, make another million? Huh? Does that talk about corruption in politics? Well, if you’re a corrupt politician, if you’re a corrupt president, if you’re a corrupt senator or congressman, and you can use the tax code to enrich yourself and your companies that support you with donations, then what happens to little guy manufacturers in America? They’re going away and they’re going away in droves.

Since the tariffs, I know of four small, they weren’t in the automotive, but I know of four small paint manufacturers that simply closed their doors because almost 100% of the products needed to make paint, automotive fleet, marine type paint, floor type paint, solvent-based paint, comes from China. It’s that simple. You can’t get around it.

The American manufacturers moved to China to get around the regulations from the EPA, OSHA,and other government agencies, again, that pick winners and losers. So they moved away and they’re not going to come back. And so little guys that do not get a break on the tariffs, the tariffsactually put them out of business.

Before they were somewhat in competition with the big guys because there was no extra fee from the suppliers they were buying from that they had to pay for. And just to make this point really clear right now, China is not paying these tariffs. This whole idea that China and the rest of the world is paying this tariff and we’re going to give money back to the American people is a lie.

It’s an absolute bone-faced lie. We put on the plain truth and anybody can do any research they want to know. The American public and American corporations, mainly small corporations, have paid 130, and I’m trying to figure out where that 30 came from, percent of the $240 million of the tariffs.

There were $240 million collected in tariffs since April 1st, but Americans have spent over $300 million. And I’m thinking, well, where is that all that other money that came from? And again, it’s probably the corruption. I’ll be right back with some more Ronald Reagan after this word from the plain truth.

Bob Barney for theplaintruth.com and The Plain Truth Today, the place to go to find out what’stoday in a true, plain truth manner. We tell you the real truth here, the plain truth, and it will always be that way. We don’t have sponsors.

We’re not beholden to people like your congressman is or your president or your senator. We do not take any advertisements except from our own company that pays for it all. And that’s why what you get from us is the plain truth.

Please come to us every day, listen to these broadcasts, read what we have, write on our message board and learn. Thank you very much for listening. And we’re back with the plain truth today.

And I want to get in another statement from Ronald Reagan about taxes and who pays for the taxes and who it helps and who it doesn’t help. And if you’re a middle-class American, it never helps you. Government has only two ways of getting money other than raising taxes.

It can go into the money market and borrow, competing with its own citizens and driving up interest rates, which it has done, or it can print money. And it’s done that. Both methods are inflationary.

And during the debates with Jimmy Carter, he says this phenomenal statement. And I think anybody listening with a pure heart, listening to these words, you’ll see why he was elected president in 1980 when polls said he wasn’t going to be elected even a week before the election.Because people listen to these debates and they realize this man was talking for them.

He has then accused the people of living too well. Meaning Jimmy Carter. We must share in scarcity.

We must sacrifice and get used to doing with less. We don’t have inflation because the people are living too well. We have inflation because the government is living too well.

We’d like to ask the president, why is it inflationary to let the people keep more of their money and spend it the way they’d like? And it isn’t inflationary to let him take that money and spend it the way he wants. And that was Ronald Reagan in 1980. But then again, in 1984, he was running for reelection and the first two years of his administration, it was still pretty bad economy because it took a lot.

And remember Donald Trump has a Republican Congress and a Republican Senate. Ronald Reagan had Ronald Reagan and his ability to go to TV and talk to you and I direct in our living room and do it well. But he didn’t have a Congress wanting to work with him.

He didn’t have a Senate wanting to work with him. But he did do a lot in the two years, 83 and 84 up to the election, which gave him a landslide because the people saw what he was doing was good for them. But more importantly, what he was doing was the real deal.

It was really what was going to help America. Listen to what he says in 1984 about his record and about government spending in general. I’m running on the record of what we have asked for.

We’ll continue to try and get things that we didn’t get in the program that has already brought the rate of spending of government down from 17% to 6.1%. A program a program of returning authority and autonomy to the local and state governments that has been unjustly seized by the federal government. And you might find those words in a democratic platform of some years ago. I know because I was a Democrat at that time and I left the party eventually because I could no longer follow the turn in the democratic leadership that took us down an entirely different path.

A path of centralizing authority in the federal government, lacking trust in the people. And honestly, if you really want to be honest with yourself, that is what’s going on today within the Republican Party. They no longer really trust the American people.

They are doing things that are forcing us to make decisions in order to survive that they claim is good for us. But they’re acting like the Democratic Party that Ronald Reagan left because of the same thing. I have to say, when you watch Republicans add $2 trillion to the federal deficit in one year and then have nothing good to say about it, not even explain it, except saying, well, it was Biden’s budget.

Well, it was Biden’s budget passed by a Republican House and a Republican Senate that went along with it. And they’re still going along with this spending. We are spending and Ronald Reagan has a funny thing.

We’re not spending like a drunken sailor because drunken sailors spend their own money, but drunken Congress people and drunken senators spend your money and not their own money. If they spent their own money, I think there would be a different take in Washington. But unfortunately, there is just absolutely no stopping this government from spending money.

And the Republicans have proven they’re going to be the same thing as a Democrat once they’re in party. Why is that? Well, the answer, in my opinion, is quite simple. The answer is lobbyist.

The answer is big money, big business, big media, and big government. They have more in common with themselves than they have with you and I. Do you think that the reporters at the Washington Times or the Washington Post or the New York Times or CNN or even Fox News has anything in common with you? Oh, I know you watch these TV shows on Fox or CNN and they actlike homespun folksy people. They’re making 20, 30, 40 million dollars a year.

They have no concept of how bad this economy is because they’re living in the right areas and they’re spending all the money they want to spend. That is what we talked about last week in the Friday wrap-up, that there is just a very few really rich people spending all the money in America. That’s what’s keeping this economy going and eventually they will stop spending money too.

Why will they stop spending money? Well, they’re going to stop spending money because all of them make money on investments mainly. Now, there are manufacturers that are big making money too, but it all depends on the middle class being able to buy things to keep this economy going because we are not a manufacturing economy. We are a consuming economy and when the middle class stops consuming, the rich people’s investments go down the drain and then they are finding themselves in monetarily bad places and they themselves will stop spending and then you see the downward spiral of the economy going down into the drain.

My brother Bill had a very good comment many years ago when NAFTA first came and the world trade around the world, the Southern Pacific and China was allowed into the WTO. He said, if we’re going to export all of our jobs, manufacturing jobs for example, over to China or at the time Japan or Korea, who’s going to buy the Cadillacs? Who’s going to buy the BMWs? Who’s going to have the money to afford anything? If Walmart, remember under Sam Walton, Walmart boughtfrom American companies, all of their products were basically American made. Sam Walton was proud of the fact that many of the small towns in America boomed because of a Walmart and when they opened up in that town, they were welcome because they were the people buying from the textile mills in South Boston or buying from the steel mills, the smaller family owned steel mills making steel type products, cabinets and file cabinets and things like that.

That’s what Sam Walton did but then when he died and he was replaced by his family members who appointed professional CEOs who only looked at the dollar and they started moving overseas. Some of the reasons they moved overseas, I will frankly admit, is because of government regulations and taxes but they moved overseas and what they didn’t realize, my brother realized it, I don’t know how $40 million a year CEOs didn’t realize this, but if you keep taking jobs away from the American people, who are they going to sell to? They themselves are finding problems selling to people that have no money and that’s the problem we have right now. Most Americans do not have available money to spend and it’s showing in our economy.

We did a show last week, 72,000 restaurants closed last year, 72,000. Now a lot of them are chain restaurants like Olive Gardens and things like that and but who owns those Hooters, Olive Gardens and those chain restaurants? It’s not the corporation, it’s franchisees, franchisers who are usually people from within the town who is really a small family business who investedupward. I think a McDonald’s franchise now is something like $3 million, a Burger King I believe is a million dollars.

They invest hard-earned money, then they find out the government makes them pay a minimum wage to teenagers who don’t want to work and they got to pay them some $16, $17 an hour because some of these states have ridiculous minimum wages. All minimum wage does is replace teenagers with AI robots. You go to a McDonald’s today, I haven’t been to a McDonald’s in a while, but I’ve been told that the one up in Wakefield, there’s two people working in it.

Everything is done, you can’t even order. You got to go to a board and push what you want and you got to take what it gets and then they bring it to you or in the line, I’ve been told, I think this is true, that a lot of times you’re not even talking to the person at the place, you’re talking to some order center in India for pity sakes and this is what’s happening in America and so we have corporations going out of business that are mainly family-owned, local business corporations that are going out of business. So of those 72,000 restaurants that are going out of business, the majority of them were owned by some small guy who put his life savings into a franchise only to watch it go down the toilet and it’s going down the toilet because of this inflation that’s still running away.

As I said in earlier programs, we should be in deflation right now after Biden’s awful four years. Biden was the worst president we’ve ever had. Donald Trump couldn’t even get near how bad Joe Biden was as president and the Democrats then protected the heck out of his administration.

Now they find fault with everything Donald Trump does. I can’t stand listening to a Republican on TV and I certainly can’t stand listening to a Democrat because I know what the Democrats are going to bring us. Unfortunately, I don’t think too many people out there do realize what the Democrats are going to bring us and that if Donald Trump brings us Democrat rule, which looks like it’s going to happen, this nation is going to go down the toilet and it’s going to go down the toilet faster than anybody ever thought it could because these people are not middle-class people.

These people are not your friends. These people are not even pro-American. These people hate your guts.

In many cases, they want to see you die. They want to see you off the Medicare rolls, off the Social Security rolls because they got to make room for illegal aliens to get on there and not go bankrupt. Then again, going bankrupt, they’re going to bet against this country anyway.

The ironic thing here is when a totalitarian country like a Putin or a Xi Jinping or a Japan when they were military or the Adolf Hitler years or Stalin years, when they took over another country, who are the first people they slaughtered and killed? It wasn’t the workers. It wasn’t you and I. It wasn’t the middle class that the Democrats hate. It was the Democrats type.

It was the leaders of that country who led it into ruin. They’re the first people that the conquering nation kills, and yet these people in Washington, they are so stupid, they really think they can continue to spend our money, drive us all into poverty, and somehow end up saving their lives. It’s not going to happen in the long run.

Oh, yeah, in the short run until this country actually goes down the tubes, it’s going to work for them, but it’s not going to work forever. You read in the Bible, for example, what happened to the kings of Israel and the kings of Judah? They were all slaughtered by Nebuchadnezzar or Darius or Cyrus the Great. They were all killed.

The people weren’t killed. The leaders were killed, and that’s what’s going to happen here too when we’re taken over. We are going to go into captivity because the Bible says that we are going to go into captivity, but I did not think it was going to happen maybe in my lifetime, and I hope it still doesn’t.

I have grandchildren. Many people out there probably listening to me have great grandchildren, and I’m sure you don’t want to see what’s going to happen, but it’s going to happen, but I didn’t think we should try to force it to happen so quickly. If we return to God maybe and ask God to do something about our leaders and do something about what’s happening and national prayer and fasting, maybe things would change.

I don’t know. I’m not talking to God. He hasn’t told me what he has planned for us right away.

I know in the long run what’s planned for us because I know who we are in the Bible. I know our identity, and we’ve had many shows about it, but we have a problem, and we have a problem of corruption in our Republican Congress. We already know the Democrats are all corrupt.

You know, people who tell you they’re for democracy, well, do you know that democracy is needed in order to bring totalitarian rule? Yes, you heard that right. You have to go from a republic form of government like we are, like ancient Rome was originally, a republic form of government that our forefathers gave us. Then you have to morph that into a so-called democracy in order to get totalitarian rule because all democracies end up being totalitarian in the end because a democracy is three people and two people saying we’re voting to kill the third, and the third person has no way to stop it.

A Republican form of government does not allow that to happen, a republic. That’s the safeguards our forefathers gave us, but when you hear Democrats talk about democracy, what they’re talking about is totalitarian rule once they get total power, and I’m afraid by 2028, we’re going to see an America that no one is going to believe before it’s over and done with. Well, I know it’s a sad story I’m giving today, but it needs to be said.

We need to have someone wake up in the Republican party and realize they are destroying themselves, and if they think they’re going to win friends on the Democratic aisle, they’re wrong there too because they’re going to be the first to go with their eyes poked out like the kings of Judah had happened to them. It’s just amazing just how stupid, I have to use this word, stupid our leaders have become, and we are paying the fiddler. I’ve said a long time ago, and I’ll leave this show with this thought.

The history of the world can be summed up with the upper class, the really rich fighting, not the poor, they want everybody to be poor, no, fighting the middle class. The middle class is the enemy of the wealthy. Why? Because the middle class people make their money doing something with their hands.

They’re the carpenters, they’re the butchers, they’re the bakers, they’re the people who make things, they’re the people who own the little stores, the hardware stores, or the convenience stores, or the gas stations, or the bakeries, or the restaurants, and they make good money and live good, and the really rich want to go back to the middle ages. They want to go back to feudalism where there’s only rich and serfs, lords and serfs, and they want to destroy the middle class and take away those businesses so everyone has to work for them. That’s the key.

That is what is going on right in front of our noses, and we’re not seeing it. God help us if we don’t wake up. Well, this is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com,saying goodbye.

We’ll see you tomorrow. Bye-bye.