Speaker 1: Friend of the show, Crystal Ball, was on Bill Maher's real time show over the weekend,
and she absolutely schooled him on a number of topics, including whether Biden is too far left
and whether Democrats are to blame for inflation and turmoil going on in the stock market right
now. Now, Bill Maher, he's for sure a liberal, but he's no progressive. I think we can say, like in
the 2020 Democratic primaries when there were all these different candidates to choose from,
the person that he settled on was Amy Klobuchar, of all people. So that's the kind of Democrat
that he is. And Bill Maher will often criticize the left for being too woke and too extreme and
say that. The left is too thin skinned and all of these different things. Crystal Ball is a
co-host on Breaking Points with Saga and Jedi, and she also has a podcast with Kyle Koplinski
called Crystal Kyle and Friends. She is a true progressive by all accounts. We can definitely
say that for sure. And she absolutely took Bill to task when he tried to do the. I'm on the left,
but I criticized the far left routine. So here are the two debating whether Biden's approval numbers
tanked because he went too far to the left. Speaker 5: Here's my question about Joe
Biden for you, too. Has he pandered to the far left? A too much be too little?
Not at all. Because AOC would say not at all. Speaker 6: Well, if you.
Speaker 5: Other people would say he panders way too much to the vote.
Speaker 6: You look at the trajectory of his presidency at the beginning of his presidency,
he did some of the things that myself, as a person on the left would like him to see
pass as the COVID relief bill. And lo and behold, he had very high approval rating. You're not.
Speaker 5: Always on the left. Speaker 6: Then? I am on the
left. I was the I know Bernie Sanders left. Speaker 5: As the populist economic left. And then
there's the low left. These are two separate. Speaker 6:
In any case, let's talk about what he's actually done. So in the beginning of the administration,
he passes that very high approval rating, doing extraordinarily well.
When he puts out the left agenda in the build back better and then it fails and he stops delivering
for the American people. That's when he. Speaker 5: Came in by the left agenda in the bill.
Speaker 6: Like, well, there's universal pre-K. Speaker 5: Going on that.
Speaker 6: It's not everything that I would want, right? No. Medicare for all. There's no
Green New Deal. You had universal pre-K. You had affordable child care. You had elder care. You an
expansion of Medicare. You had things that would have delivered for the American people.
That falls apart partly because of mansions, cinema, parliament, all of that that falls apart.
And since now, the American people are feeling incredible pain with inflation and gas prices and
unable to put food on the table and put gas in the car. And he's basically ceded the ground and said,
oh, there's not much I can do. I just hope the Fed gets this under control.
Yeah, the approval ratings have fallen off a cliff. That's nothing to do with the left. I
wish the left had more power. In fact, I think the left is the only part of the political spectrum
that has offered anything to deal with inflation. Gas prices in the current economic situation,
that doesn't just involve, hey, let's trigger a recession and kill people's wages.
Speaker 1: This is the correct assessment from crystal ball here. Joe Biden was super popular
at the beginning of his presidency because he was able to get things done and he had an approval
rating of something like 55 to 60%. As time has gone on, he hasn't been able to get things passed.
And so he's starting to look feckless and unable to respond to some of the challenges that we as a
country are facing. And so his approval numbers have gone down accordingly. And notice how Bill
steps in there and tries to reset by saying, Crystal, you have to slow down. You have to
be more clear and concise as if what you were saying wasn't already super clear and concise.
And he does this later on. That's just like a rhetorical crutch that he's using here because
he realizes that he's outmatched when it comes to the facts. Next, they're discussing inflation
and the reasons for it. And Bill just has a difficult time recounting the historical events
of the past couple of years. Let's roll that. Speaker 5: Part of this inflationary problem is
because we put too much money into the economy. There's way too much government spending,
and that's why we have inflation. So that's a large part of that. It's stupid economics.
Speaker 6: And that second basic economics thing called a pandemic.
We had a supply chain crisis and oh, by. Speaker 5: The way, the world played a role
is played a role. Speaker 6: Like the
only reason we knew because people got a little bit of money in there is just not on.
Speaker 5: A new a little bit of money. They got more than we spent in World War Two. So
you don't act like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. Don't act like you said. Don't act. Don't act
like we had to react to the pandemic exactly the way we did. We hacked. We had to spend six.
Speaker 6: How about. Speaker 5: On the level of flow.
Speaker 6: That the Federal Reserve shot at Wall Street for some reason,
people don't get upset about that. Unidentified: How much would you say the
trillions of dollars the Federal Reserve shot at Wall Street to.
Speaker 6: Stop the stock market and the bond market? No one gets upset about that,
even though that was a massive inflation. Speaker 5: What do you mean,
shot at Wall Street? When we talking. Speaker 6: About that, we're talking about buying
assets, buying stocks, buying bonds, buying Treasury building so that they expand their
balance sheet. This is during the crisis, the coronavirus crisis, when the stock market crashed.
That is what the Fed did. They went into action. Speaker 5: They shot the stock market, didn't
crash during the crash, and it's crashing now. Speaker 6: It crashed and the Fed came in
and backstopped it. That's what happened. Speaker 5: It crashed. We never heard of.
Speaker 6: No, it crashed. Go back and look at it. I think we fell off a cliff when Treasury
bond markets stopped functioning and the Fed took extraordinary action. It's never taken in history.
I don't remember. We get. Speaker 5: The first week.
Speaker 6: Of someone somehow. Nobody gets upset about the rich people who got tons of money
and tons of support. Oh, way more than working class people did. Sure they did. My God. People
are able to feed their kids and they had a little bit of money in their bank accounts.
It was the worst thing in the world. That is one small part of the inflation story. And it is,
by the way, not the only thing that we can deal with to get out of this mess.
Speaker 1: So once again, there's that rhetorical crutch that Bill uses by saying shot at. I don't
understand what you mean shot at. You have to explain what you mean by this term. As if we don't
all understand what Krystal is saying when she says shot at, she means pumped up, infused, added
to. But Bill has to get super pedantic and focus on this one term because he's losing the exchange
and he recognizes that. And then he doesn't remember somehow how the stock market crashed
at the very beginning of the COVID pandemic. It certainly did. The major indices plunged
about 30 to 40% at the start of the pandemic before quickly bouncing back because of, yes,
the Federal Reserve announcing their commitment to bailing out companies and buying up debts. Now,
even though Bill should know about this, because he follows news and politics and he does a show
about news and politics, and you'd think he would be up on world events. I kind of give him credit
in a weird way for not remembering that the stock market crash at the beginning of the pandemic,
because Bill's obviously a very well-off person and so he most likely has a bunch of money in the
stock market. So he must have lost a ton of money at the very beginning of the pandemic before.
Yes, quickly gaining it all back. So you'd think that like many other rich people,
he would have been freaking out at the very beginning of the pandemic for losing all that
money, but apparently it didn't faze him. So to some degree, I think that makes him look good,
in my opinion. But the broader point is the one that Kristol made, which is that when
the government bails out the stock in the bond markets, that's just solid economics,
right? You know, that's just what we're supposed to do as a country. But then when money is given
to the middle class and the working class in the form of unemployment checks and stimulus checks
and child tax credits, that's blamed for tanking the economy, and we sure as hell can never do that
again. So excellent job there by Krystal and I kind of get the sense that maybe she won't
be invited back on Bill Maher's show anytime soon because she really made him look bad.