Vicki McKenna Show - The 193 Trillion for the National Debt

Good morning and welcome to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna show. That would be me. And we're going to just dive right in on the show. I want to revisit something that I had brought up from last week, late last week, because I was off yesterday. And thank you to Jason for pinch hitting for me. And that was on the Dane County Board's refusal to comply with state law. on human service expenditures oversight. So we don't have any idea about the payments that are being made to human services, organizations, programs, et cetera, because we're just not doing oversight. And why are we not doing oversight? Because nobody's forcing Dane County to do oversight. And why is nobody forcing Dane County to do oversight? Well, I don't know. Josh Cole could do it. But he's too busy trying to put my friend Jim Troopus in prison for representing President Trump in the recount. Still, he could do it, but he won't. Tony Evers could mandate that Dane County comply with state law, but Dane County's left wing, Tony Evers is left wing, so he won't. The federal government, since a lot of this has to do with dollars that are attached to federal grants, I suppose they could do it. The legislature could do it. Anybody could do it. but nobody is. And that is the story of fraud and improper payments writ large. Maybe some of you saw Scott Bessent, our Treasury Secretary, on the talk shows this weekend, talking about whistleblowers and how the Treasury Department is now going to take the reins, the steering wheel, whatever, and begin to get... its arms around fraud and improper payments. I mean, you know, I'm not going to hold my breath on any of this. Improper payments, just the federal, I can't, I don't have numbers for the state and I certainly don't have numbers locally because nobody's bothering to actually take a look at this. The federal numbers for fraud and improper payment will blow your mind. And this is an estimate and it is considered a conservative estimate by the government accountability office, the GAO. Ready for this? $520 billion per year. That does not include COVID ripoffs, which were estimated at somewhere around $300 billion, but since a lot of the COVID grants have now wound down, that's not yearly. I'm talking about yearly. $520 billion per year. It wasn't that long ago when we had ongoing budget deficits of under $150 billion and we were lighting our hair on fire in shock at that. We are now in excess of $2 trillion in ongoing budget deficits and $520 of it, $520 billion of that is fraud and improper payments. It doesn't include what's been exposed in California. It doesn't include what has been exposed in Minnesota. That's new stuff. That wasn't part of the GAO estimate. The GAO estimate assumed.

For the most part, that Medicaid payments or autism payments or whatever hospice payments were going out and we're generally speaking on the up and up, they were using suspicious activity reports from banks to generate their estimate on how much fraud there is in the United States. $521 billion. And nobody's going to prison for that. Well, I shouldn't say nobody. Maybe under 20 people. have ever been prosecuted for it. I'm not sure how many have gone to prison. So we'll talk about that because we're going to talk about the Dane County situation here. Your property taxes went up. For what? You have no idea. Nobody does because nobody cares. But when you take a look at the reason why Medicare, Social Security. are not, I mean, just flat out telling anybody who's probably under the age of 50 are not going to be there for you, understand how we got to this place. And it is 100% due to the fact that our government does not care who rips us off. So we'll take a break on the program. We'll come back and talk about the Dane County situation that I referenced late last week. And then a little bit later on in the program, how about this one, $193 trillion? That's how deep we're in the hole. The cumulative effect of all of the lack of oversight by this government over decades puts us in the whole $193 trillion to pay out senior citizens, existing senior citizen benefits. If there were no cutoff, or if there were a cutoff today, and nobody else could take in Social Security or Medicare, or I should say cash out on Social Security or Medicare. If everything got cut off today and no new people could get into the program, we're on the hook for $193 trillion. It's an it's an undoable thing, isn't it? Anyway, we're going to come back and talk about some things maybe that are doable and that would be paying attention to how. Printed money is spent here in Dane County so that you don't have to keep going back to the well for referendum spending, continued tax increases, shenanigans by state government to try to rig it so that local governments never have to pay the Piper. We will be right back. All right. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. So as I had mentioned, I believe I was talking about this on Friday. Forgive me, my, you know, my timeline's all goofed up here. But I, you know, I think I was referencing this on Friday. It was a piece that was posted at David Blaska's blog at David Blasca.com, which you can still find a link to his front page. So please go read this. And it was referencing work that was done by Sean Burke. Sean Burke is a candidate for Dane County Board. Amen. And I get and I've got Sean standing by. So kudos to David for the article, but kudos to Sean for doing the hard work to expose what is going on at the Dane County Board with regard to human services. So thanks for joining me, Sean. It's good to have you.

Thank you, Vicki, for having me on. I'd also like to add a thank you to the constituent that actually turned me on to this situation. All right. Awesome. So, hey, how about that, a candidate who talked to a constituent who actually was paying attention because it wasn't the press by and large that got this out, although I call Blasca the press, but not in a way. that he covers county board meetings, you know, the way the television stations or the newspapers ought to be doing. So what did you find out? Here's what I'm looking at, according to the Blasca report here, that Dane County has not complied with state law in oversight of health and human needs spending. And we're talking about $2 billion that has moved through the various committees at Dane County. And nobody knows what that money is being used for, whether that money is being used appropriately, or any other type of oversight being done. How did you find this out? What, in fact, is the reality here? Well, I found out through an email from a constituent a couple of weeks ago on Sunday evening about 1130. And I immediately read it and was like, hmm, this is interesting. So I started researching it, got to my laptop and went through. And sure enough, this board has not met since 2020. And this is a state mandated board that's supposed to meet. And the function of it is to have the budget. originate from this board made up of supervisors and citizens anywhere from a minimum of seven and a maximum of 15 and The board, well, pseudo-exist in 2024, then county executive Patrick Miles appointed three supervisors to the board, but they never met. One of those supervisors has resigned, but yet this board has never met. And I'm questioning what's going on because this seems to be a pattern of scandals plaguing Dane County Human Services that just don't get dealt with. So, which, by the way, includes money for supposed housing assistance through a left-wing NGO. And consistently, the contracts are written so that oversight is not required by the general county board. And of course, we're talking about the urban triage stuff. So three supervisors were appointed five years ago. One resigned. Two left. They never met. That's... Five less than mandatory and zero citizens. And this is the body through which the health and human needs budget is supposed to flow.

Correct. And I'm trying to figure out why my opponent, Tommy Rylander, has been AWOL on this issue. He likes to tell people that, I believe he told the state generally he's got his finger on the pulse of human services. Well, he doesn't even know about this, apparently, as vice chair of HHN. So I just think that he's gone AWOL. And to be very frank, I think that the county is in open defiance of the law. And I'm questioning why. And by the way, Vicky, this is the second time in about six months that the county has been found to be violating state law. Channel 3 reported about six months ago during budget season that they were openly advancing money to nonprofits through human services in violation of state law. Yep, they were. openly through so through the health and human needs committee which is supposed to be overseen by an oversight board and the budget itself is supposed to is supposed to be developed at the oversight level so we don't so what is going on are people just like making phone calls and saying yo i need some money can you shoot me some money and dan county board is like you got it man Well, Vicki, a lot of people don't know that Dane County, half of the budget, and in last year's budget, it was over $400 million, went to Human Services. And that money flows to HHS. And a lot of that seems to be going to nonprofits. And I mean, I have proposed consolidating certain services like with housing services with the City of Madison so we can run more efficiently, cost less money, and actually hire. in-house employees, but they just they want to just continue to funnel this money to people without any oversight. If I may, Vicki, there's a couple opportunities that the board actually had. In 2024, they had an opportunity to do an audit, and my opponent and a majority of the board voted against it. And then just last year, after Channel 3 came out with a story regarding the advancing of the money, they actually made it easier. They offered an ordinance amendment to make it easier. for the Human Services Director to give out large sums of money without any oversight or any approval from the County Board. Yes, that is true. And again, that was the urban triage report. It was really good reporting that was done a rare piece of really good reporting done by television investigative journalists. I didn't even think they existed any longer. But the response from the county board was, okay, we'll just, you know, pass an ordinance that says we don't have to do oversight on this. But state law says you have to do oversight on this, Sean. State law says so. Where's the attorney general?

opening up an investigation, especially after that report. But now that it is abundantly clear that Dane County is in violation of state law, you would think the Attorney General would want to know because how are the NGO selected? How are the dollars determined, you know, the needs determined for various different services? Does anybody know? To be honest with you, no. I've actually witnessed, I've witnessed, Vicki, like, no big contracts being awarded without anybody blinking an eye for hundreds of thousands of dollars in housing funds. One of the, that went to Occupy Madison. What? Housing dollars went to Occupy Madison. That is a political organization. that they went to run one of the new tiny homes on the east side. I would also point out that my opponent, who's a member of Progressive Dane, gets endorsements from somebody that is on the endorsement committee for that group. So it's very much interconnected. That is why this board being in existence is so important. And my question I have is this. And by the way, Vicki, before I forget, they're already trying to point the fingers at everybody. I know for a fact that multiple media outlets have called, including Channel 3, to check who they call a corporation counsel who refers to the human services director. Human Services Director has transferred it over to the board. I spoke with David Blasca yesterday. Patrick Miles, although he was the one that made these appointments, is now laying this at the feet of the county executive. I will tell you for a fact that the county executive staff has known for well over a year that there were issues. I actually had a meeting in January of last year with the chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, and nothing came of it. They did nothing. So Patrick Miles knows about this. He's passing the buck. Corp Council knows about it. The Corporation Council, this is supposed to be the people who are covering the butts of county government, right? They're telling you what you're supposed to do to legally comply with the law, and they're passing the buck. That's the committee's responsibility. That's the chair's responsibility. Chair is saying, no, that's the county executive's responsibility. County executives, like, don't look at me. I don't know what's going on. And in the meantime, You know, no bid contracts are going out to political organizations for services that are never audited. Do we know if proper requests for proposal are being put out? To be honest with you, I don't know. I can tell you personally, though, Vicki, I have seen in the case of one nonprofit that there are invoices for streaming services for $3,000 training classes in California that had nothing to do with housing. I've seen dinners that were meant for other...

programs for this group being billed to the county. And to be honest with you, I was shocked not too long ago when I found out that when Dane County does expense reports from their nonprofits in human services, they don't ask for invoices or receipts. They just take a form and that's it. And that is all they do. And now I worked in corporate finance, Vicki, and that is not in best accounting practices. Yeah, no. Everybody who actually works in any private sector company knows that you don't just get to submit your costs without receipts, without, you know, telling people exactly what it was for and making sure that it is legally compliant. It is legally compliant. So they just submit expenses and they get paid. And then... You know, nobody knows. It might be streaming services. Who knows what they're doing with streaming services? Why would you go to California? Why do we need so many housing NGOs? That's another one. Can I tell you? We haven't solved the problem. Exactly. But it's not only that it's about who's actually helping the people that we're paying. I will also tell you something else that has not become public that I'm making public with you right now for the first time. is earlier this year, you're familiar with the harm reduction clinic that was supposed to go over here in District 12? Right. Well, one of the agencies that was bidding for that contract actually had a convicted heroin dealer working for them.

not laughing. I'm laughing, but I'm not laughing. And this person was in charge. That's drugs, by the way, people, has a heroin dealer working for them. And I will point out that this individual was, in fact, working on a county-funded housing program. So the vetting process, and I know you know very well, Vicki, that the county executive has said that she's working on the contract vetting process. That's something she doesn't need to do because the board for Human Services Board, that would be responsible for that as well. That would be setting policy for the contract and vetting and everything as well. What they're trying to do is they're trying to reinvent the wheel that's already there. They just don't want to put people there. State statute, we have the number. Hang on. I think David had posted the number here. It's 46.23. 46.23. That's the state statute that requires an oversight body. for all of this. So no, you could not just simply submit your expenses and get covered. You could not just simply get a no-bid contract and then not have to justify any kind of result. And then you would be able to look at, for instance, non-profit CEOs that pay themselves $300,000 as Brandy Grayson did. You would have to look at those kinds of things and then see whether or not there were any results. from the actual dollars. These are grant dollars. These are tax dollars. Well, they're all tax dollars. Sometimes they're in the form of grants. Sometimes they have state money in them. Sometimes they have federal money in them. And you would actually, you know, be required to follow an official vetting process so that you don't put smack dealers in charge of county services. Can I just tell your listeners some of the things that I think are just common sense of ways we can fix this? Absolutely. You've got a couple of minutes left here. You bet. Yep. One of the things that we can do is I think that at this point in time, it's become very clear. Human services needs a top-to-bottom audit, going back five years. We're talking a forensic audit. We need to find out why everything's been broken and make sure every dollar's been accounted for. That's the first thing. Second thing, we need to start requiring contractors to provide invoices. for their contracts. If you buy something, you need to have a receipt and you need to be able to justify it, just like any corporation would. Another one, which doesn't cost any money, Vicki, is just simply putting online all these programs and where the expenses are going so that people can go online and view for themselves where their money is actually going.

I recently was at an MMSD meeting with the Madison Police Department, their coffee with the cops, and asked that question, and they're actually going to be doing that. So this is just common sense stuff we should be doing. You're talking too much logic here. Okay, so where can people learn more about you? Because you're running for District 12. This election is April 7th. Early voting is going on right now. So tell people where they can learn more about you and quickly tell people where District 12 is so that they remember that they're living in what could be your district. District 12 is the area over by East Town Mall, also part of the Aberg, Sherman Neighborhood, Sandberg Neighborhood, Portage Road. And if you'd like, you can find me on Facebook is the best place. It is work for Dane County on Facebook. Feel free to check me out. Drop me an email. I'm not afraid to respond to questions. If there's any concerns, and if your viewers would like this evening at Door Creek Church on the corner of Aberg and Sherman, my opponent and I are actually going to be having a public forum. Awesome. So people can come and ask questions of both of us. What time is a forum? 630 to 730. 630 to 730 at Door Creek Church. This is District 12. Sean Burke with an E for Dane County on Facebook. Sean, thank you very much for joining me on the program. Thank you, Vicki. Have a good day. And thank you for doing the work that journalists across Wisconsin should be doing already. Kudos to Blaska for being, as far as I can tell, the only person who's reported on this. And then I'm relying on him. We'll take a quick break. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. There's a new survey out of unmarried men, young men, so under the age of 30. And they found, I mean, actually some pretty good data that is coming out on young men. Young men list in their top three, marriage and kids as goals. You know, stable job, marriage and kids. Young women, by the way, by contrast, have it in their bottom three. There is a new piece of data that came out very recently, though, that said young men are having a hard time finding people with whom to share those goals. 52% said they find it difficult to find someone to date. 58% report reluctance to even ask someone out for you to do of just plain old rejection. It's clear that these apps are not induceive to forming relationships. And I mean, what to do about this and how do we reconcile women and men who have totally opposite goals?

with women having an opposite goal of nature itself. I don't know. Edward Bartlett is the founder of the SAVE organization, Stop Abusive and Violent Environments. He joins me on the program to talk about this. This is, I mean, I don't know what you do about this, Edward, but it's great to have you, by the way. So let's shoot it around a little bit. How do we get women and men back on the same page? Hey, Vicki, great to chat with you again. Well, you're asking the... The key question and the most difficult question. I think we need to look at the bigger picture, and people are using the phrase war on men. You know, you look at, you look at advertisements, you look at social media. Over and over again, you see, men are being painted as abusers or, you know, that men don't care. I mean, the stereotypes keep piling up. And it doesn't happen by accident. People are pushing, intentionally pushing these stereotypes. So I think we need to look at the, you know, why are there people pushing these negative stereotypes? If I can give an example, I will. So you probably know men are dying five years earlier than women. It's not due to biology. is due to a variety of factors. But in the Department of Health and Human Services, get ready for this. There are six offices of women's health. Any guesses? How many offices of men's health? Zero. Exactly. Yeah, I know the answer to this because I'm mad about it. Yeah, me too. So that, you know, I could give many other examples, but the point is, how is it pop, and these are not evil people. I used to actually work at HHS. I know these people. But how is this societal narrative come into existence so that basically we don't care about men dying early, but we have six offices for women's self. That doesn't make sense. Well, and I think you're right. This is a holistic problem. So it's the problem. We could talk about marketing alone. The marketing world or PR world, and this started maybe 50 years ago. So this is going to be one that. I actually think might be easier to unwind because you simply make a shift, started to take feminist theory and use it as a marketing trope. And so not only did they market this sort of anti-male culture, but they were also promoting this division among women and men, telling women they didn't need men, telling women that they can just be, you know, have everything they want without motherhood, without a husband, etc. This is 50 to 60 years in the making. But I think the big, and I think you could actually shift the marketing message pretty quickly. Which you can't shift is everything else, which is everything from daycare to K-12 to the demand for a dual earner income to support a family. That's harder. When you've got K-12 messaging that moves into high school, that moves into college, that says women need to have careers, middle management careers, and not children.

When you've got nonstop promotion of critical feminist theory and at the same time, you have got government agencies in Congress following suit, forcing a dual earner demand, I'm not sure how we're ever going to solve it even with good marketing. Well, you've definitely, I agree with every point you've made. I mean, this goes back to 50 years ago, remember Betty Friedan, the feminine mystique, you know, and the narrative that women are victims of a patriarchy. By the way, there is no such thing as patriarchy in the United States. You know, you can look at... at any indicator you want to, it's men who are lagging behind women, not the other way around. So, yeah, this is, I mean, this narrative has driven laws, is driven, the media is in so many ways. So. Just by having this conversation now, you and me, we are challenging this narrative. And we're saying, look how many miserable women who are in their 40s, 50s, you know, doing done very well in their career. But they're miserable because all they have to keep them company is a cat. Right. No, no, and everyone, we're not bashing on cats, just so everybody understands. I always get the cat, the cat lover emails, all right? We're not bashing on cats. Cats are perfectly fine. I'm a dog person or dogs. They don't have anything to show for themselves except, you know, a career, you know, maybe a 401K that they didn't put enough money into a social security check that may or may not materialize and a pet. And. And I, so that's women that are a little bit younger than me or maybe my age. But you're looking at these young people, these young, you know, 18 to 29 year olds. And women have career, success, money, happiness, all of this. And then at the bottom of their list. marriage, family, stability, that kind of thing. Men, so men, you know, when given an opportunity to ask honestly, they're still the old school guys. Maybe they've taken their cues and they've behaved like a bunch of wimps for the last 50 years. No offense. I'm not, I'm not, I'm broad, taking a broad brush here. In general, the culture, the overarching culture of men has not handled the assault at all. But they're still, you know, rooted in exactly where they need to be. They have not altered their nature. Women, the marketing of this, the institutional push of this has made women alter their nature. Yeah. There's actually a whole series of social science surveys.

that have found that actually men are more interested in getting married than women. Yeah. Men are more in having a larger family. I mean, on a whole, you know, men are more opposed to abortion than women. I mean, on a whole series of indicators, men are more family-oriented to women. But I think this male bashing that really is prevalent has sort of drowned out the fact that, hey, men are really trying to keep things, you know, keep families alive and keep the, you know, the two family, the two-parent model alive and well. So, yeah. So, but again, I'm really happy. I'm going to throw this out there as the initial attempts to divide men and women. You know, the old battle to sexes was funny. But the initial attempts to divide men and women to, you know, to create this idea that men are horrible. Most of the attacks now that I see are attacks on the actual nature of women. The feminists are in 100% dominant control of both government, media, and education. Thank goodness Pete Hegseth has made a change at the Department of Defense or we weren't going to be winning any wars in the near future or distant future. But. Now it's an attack on the nature of women where they're telling women, you know, children are parasites. You know, this is, this is, you know, you're a slave if you have children. And so, you know, I think they've realized that they've maxed out the male bashing abuse. And so now they've turned their attention. If you have seen some of the awful stuff I have seen in the sort of eco-sphere of female messaging. It's evil. It's positively evil. And that is when you've changed an entire generation of young women, the way it appears these messaging tropes have. I don't know if we're going to get this generation of men and this generation of women together. I think this generation of men might have to wait for the next generation of women. I think we can get the next generation of women. But this is, we have so messed with nature. We've convinced, we've gaslighted people into rejecting nature. I think men have come out of the other end of that tunnel. But boy, I don't see, I don't see much hope for the young ladies of the world. Well, yeah, we have to start somewhere, and we're starting right now today. I'm sure you've heard this term, the great feminization, which refers to what happens, the basic dynamic in an organization changes when the majority of the employees are female.

And so, and I've actually experienced this myself personally when I was the only male in an office with about, about 10 females, that the whole dynamic changes. And, you know, the focus is not on... you know, objective standards of competency. There's a lot more backbiting. There's a lot more negativity going on. And anyway, so this is sort of another piece about this. You've probably heard about the Trad Wives. Trad Wife trend. Personally, I'm not sure I agree with everything of the Trad Wives, but it does reflect the growing female disenchantment with this very harsh stereotyping of men as patriarchal oppressors. Agreed. It's nascent. I'm not sure it's beyond a trend. I hope it is beyond a trend because if it does stick, that is, it's targeted directly to that 18 to 29 year old group of women. You know, I'm just going to throw this out there because I think we could solve a lot of problems. Get rid of HR departments. You could have a 90% male employee base, but if you had an HR department that's calling the shots on that, that male employee base is going to be irrelevant. So let's just get rid of HR departments, replace them with a couple of lawyers and be done with it. You'd save a lot of money, a lot of headache. There'd be way less drama. I'm telling you, you know I'm right, Edward. You know I'm right. Get rid of HR departments. I mean, you want to talk about where. You know, the astro-Nazis collect. That's where they collect, my friend. Anyway, where can people find out more about your organization? Because it's time for people to start taking this seriously, get involved. Otherwise, you know, our government's going to be managed by a bunch of, you know, narcissistic people in SSRI. So where can people learn more? Yeah. Our website for Save is wwwsaviservices.org. saveservices.org and Vicki, I've really enjoyed this conversation with you. Thanks, Edward. I appreciate the time on the program. You're very generous with it. Thanks so much. Take care. Bye-bye. And we will take a break on the Vicki McKenna Show. I'll be right back. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. This was just announced yesterday. I mean, you can't make this make sense. The Democrats are preparing emergency litigation. Well, that's not shocking to sue President Trump also not shocking for paying TSA workers. Democrats are preparing emergency litigation to sue President Trump for paying TSA workers. Go crazy. Do it.

Do it. Make sure you're no king's R words. Still can't say it yet on the radio. So I'm going with R word. You're no king's R words who apparently are completely comfortable with the idea of a top-down dictatorship in government. But you know that. Can put it on their signs. The Democrats are going to sue. President Trump for paying TSA workers. How is President Trump paying TSA workers under an emergency declaration saying that it's a national security issue? And it is. The whole reason TSA was put in place in the first place was transportation security following 9-11. Now you can say, you can argue that we can just get rid of TSA workers and maybe there's a good case to be made to privatize transportation security. That's what we were using before 9-11. I don't think things have much improved in terms of security since 95% of weapons when tested, make it through TSA. But whatever. The argument for the creation of TSA in the first place was transportation, security based on the national security concerns after 9-11. Sue the president for that. First, they'll lose. Second, it's really bad optics. But they're going to do it. The lawsuit is being prepared as we speak. Second, the reason I think this is just so beyond entertaining is that the Democrats are also attacking President Trump for waiting to issue an executive emergency order to pay TSA agents. You can't make this up. Here's Congresswoman Delia Ramirez attacking Trump. Multiple members of the Democratic House are Democrat House attacking Trump on this. Trump could have signed the executive order to pay TSA on day one. Same Democrats going on face the nation, bragging about how they are preparing the lawsuit to stop President Trump. from paying the TSA workers with an executive order declaring a national security emergency. This is not serious. These people are not serious, which is, again, it's why it's very frustrating. I'm using that word because I just, all the other words are just, you know, too harsh and profane. It's very frustrating that the Republicans would cave to these people and then send the Senate home for a recess. This is not serious stuff. The press is not serious. Face the nation, let him get away with this. This is not serious stuff. Congress is not a serious body any longer. Chris Bray, who wrote a great piece on his substack, Chris Bray, B-R-A-Y. It says that Congress is now no more, no less than a social media influencer at this point. They're influencers because they don't do anything. Influencers don't do anything. They go on social media and they get clicks and they get money and they don't do anything except affect public opinion. That's all Congress is at this point because it doesn't do anything. If 80% of people say we want the Save Act, do you think that matters? No.

It does not matter. They don't do anything. They're not actually acting on behalf of America. So who is President Trump? And the same people who grouse and complain all the time about he's acting like a king. He's acting like a dictator. Refused to do anything. Delia Ramirez. She both says we want no kings, but at the same time says why didn't President Trump sign the executive order on day one of the TSA shut down? Figure it out, lady. Make yourself make sense. But in the meantime, you know, I guess I can, you know, say, I can complain again that the Republicans could easily just simply take the reins and start doing things about this. But if we go with Chris Bray's theory, they're nothing more than social media influencers. They don't do anything, especially not in the Senate. So on this deal that the Senate passed late and then went on their recess, handed it over to the House and the House flipped the bird to the Senate and said, no, we're not going to take your crappy deal. What was the argument for that crappy deal? The Democrats wouldn't move. This is the best we could get out of them. The best we could get out of them was defunding ICE and DHS in order to pay transportation security. Well, President Trump is already paying transportation security. So, bad deal. Go back to work. It's the best deal we could get. No. It's not. The best deal you can get is if you blow up the filibuster and just pass a piece of legislation that the entire planet wants. I shouldn't say the entire planet. The people who want to cheat don't want this legislation. It's called the Save Act. Pass it and get DHS and ICE fully funded because that's a 75% issue. Save Act is an 80% issue. Just get it done. But. Congress is not, there's no pressure for Congress to get it done. And the Republicans could stay home on election day and say, I'm so mad. And then Democrats take control of Congress and then they blow up the filibuster and they shove everything under the sun down our throats. Or the Republicans go to the polls and vote those Republicans back in, which sends the Republicans a message. We can just keep doing the same thing. So I don't have an answer to this problem, this conundrum, except. The executive, that's the answer. I'm sorry to say, that's where we are in America, where the executive does everything, because Congress doesn't do anything, unless the Republicans make a bad deal with Democrats, in which case the Democrats get what they want and Republicans get nothing, which is always the case, always the case. If we do a deal in order to get past the 60 vote, close your rule in the Senate, we lose. Always. We always lose. Always, always, always. So we rely on our executive to do good things. Now, when the Democrats were in control, they got what they wanted, but then they also had an executive.

that was willing to do these expansive things. They thought they were good things. We thought they were horrible things. But that's America. That's our government now. That's where we are. As it stands right now, it's the executive. And so all of the Democrats' actions at this point, if they're not trying to con a bunch of dumb Republicans into voting for bad pieces of legislation. are suing the executive because our executive is actually being pretty effective in his executive capacity. Is he overreaching? Is he exceeding executive authority? Probably. Probably. But is Congress willing to step in and do anything about it? No. Sorry. Joe Biden exceeded his executive authority. We filed lawsuits. If President Trump is exceeding his executive authority, and they don't even care if he's exceeding it or not, they're filing lawsuits. That's America. We are governed by the executives and lawyers. And the Democrats, again, are going to sue to get those transportation security agency workers, defunded again at the same time complaining that the executive, who they just protested for two days over the weekend, hasn't acted aggressively and fast enough. I mean, just make it make sense. Again, R-word people. We're dealing with the R-words. Those are the people who run this government. They have zero interest in doing anything except getting clicks and likes on X or TikTok or Instagram or blue sky. We'll take a quick break. All right. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. So let's get back to this enormously popular piece of legislation that we will see, given all of the ire and irritation that everybody has at the Senate for bailing and taking a vacation when they should still be in Washington trying to figure out ways to pass the Save America Act and to get DHS and ICE fully funded, instead of giving away the farm to the Democrats. to do something President Trump has already done with an executive order. Save America Act. The Democrats over the weekend, in their astro-turfed protests with all of their blue-haired astro-nazis with their fake signs, we're claiming somehow that voter ID is meant to disenfranchise people, as if our elections at this point, you know, are not completely enfranchising the entire third world population of illegal migrants. But.

John Lott has got a piece out there to take a look at all of the different countries. How do they handle citizenship verification? How do they handle election security? John, welcome to the program. Great piece of the New York Post. Tell me what you found out when you decided to do the job that American reporters refused to do. Right. Yeah, thanks for, I mean, look, when Democrats have been talking about requiring government issued photo IDs to be able to go and vote and proof of citizenship, and that it was primarily disenfranchised Hispanics and blacks, I thought, well, what's happening in those countries that these people are coming from? And so if you look at for Hispanics, for example, whether it's Mexico or any of the South American countries, all of them or Spain, all those countries require government issued photo IDs to be able to go and vote. All those countries require evidence of citizenship. Mexico and all the South American countries have rules. for providing proof of citizenship that are essentially identical to what's in the SAVE Act. In Mexico, you can provide a birth certificate or a passport or there are other types of ID, but they're all the same as what's listed in the same SAVE Act. With regard to Africa, there are 54 countries in Africa. All the countries there require government issued photo IDs to be able to go and vote. 51 of the 54 countries require proof of citizenship in order for people to go and vote. So, you know, the question is, how come Hispanics or blacks in all these other countries around the world, you know, countries that have much lower per capita incomes and less education? than what we have here in the United States seem to be able to go and get the necessary documents to go and vote. But somehow those same types of people in the United States, we don't trust to be able to do that. You look at Europe. There are 47 countries in Europe. All 47 countries in Europe require government-issued photo IDs to be able to go and vote. 43 of the countries have computerized databases of lists of who's a citizen that they go and they check against the registration there to make sure that, in fact, the people who are registered are citizens of those countries. France has a registration system where you have to provide proof of citizenship when you register to vote. And again, that's the same as Mexico or what's in the same act or these other South American countries. There are three countries in Europe, though, the UK, Crete, and one other that don't require that you have to have proof of citizenship necessarily when you register to vote. But they may call on you at some point, kind of almost a random process.

that if you're called on to provide proof of citizenship, then you have to do so. So, you know, and if you look at surveys in the United States, I mean, about 76% of blacks, about 84% of Hispanics support government-issued photo IDs to be able to go and vote. Two-thirds of Democrats say they support government-issued photo IDs to be able to go and vote. One of the votes that they had when they were considering the same act was to say, okay, look, we won't do the citizenship discussion, just the voter IDs. And all... 47 Democratic senators, including John Fetterman, voted against requiring government-issued photo IDs to be able to go and vote in federal elections. So 66% of Democrats, 76% of black people, 84% of Hispanic people, like 95% of white people, whatever, Republicans, probably 99% of Republicans. We want photo ID to vote and prove of citizenship. I was looking this up as well. There has been so many studies done on whether or not requiring photo ID and proof of citizenship has resulted in voter suppression. Zero studies have shown photo ID and proof of citizenship. There's a lot of studies out there have shown any evidence whatsoever of voter suppression. If anything, all of the evidence, and not all of them looked at this, all of the evidence concluded. that it actually enhanced voter turnout because people had a higher trust in the elections. Right. No, yeah, in fact, there are studies looking at, because there are states in the United States that require a government-issued photo IDs. There are seven states that require proof of citizenship for people to be able to go and vote. And you're right. You actually saw increased voter turnout rates. You know, and it's not just in the United States. You look at Mexico. They had their reforms in 1991. And they were very strict. You know, not only do they require government-issued photo IDs and a copy of your thumbprint that's there, but on top of that, they banned absentee ballots because absentee ballots have been a source of major fraud in Mexico. And you have to go in person to register to vote and again to go and pick up your ID. And the thing people don't understand is that...

Mexican states, and most of them, there's only one place to go and register to vote, one registrar's office. And in some Mexican states, you may be talking about having to travel up to 100 miles each way to go and register to vote. And then again, to go and pick up the ID. So you think, boy, there should be a huge drop off in the rate that people vote, because those are much more difficult circumstances than you're talking about. You know, the SAVE Act or anybody talking about in the United States to go and vote and register. And yet, if you look at the three presidential elections prior to 1991, they had a 59% turnout. And some of those may have been fraudulent voters, so the actual turnout may have been lower. In the three presidential elections after it, it was 68% where you're more certain that the people who were actually voting were really... true citizens of the country there. So there was a substantial increase in turnout. I don't know why people want to, well, I don't know why the Republicans want to sort of cave on some of these issues on absentee balloting. I mean, we could debate that all day long. I think, I think they've just surrendered on issues that they could fight on just because they're tired of dealing with the media. And they, and, and I guess we're trying to appease a lazy electorate as well. But to all of the point of your entire piece, and then I looked up some more on the data, on the, you know, information and whether or not any of these have improved or, you know, caused problems with voter turnout, again, as you just pointed out very well, they don't. It's abundantly clear that we need. proof of citizenship. And it's also abundantly clear, John, that it's easy. It actually is easy for people to have proof of citizenship, at least in these other countries, because they have their citizens in a database, and their IDs are generated based on those database, those databases. So if they have a, by the way, we have a database as well. We just don't allow whatever to be used. I mean, this is like flipping a switch. This is like getting computers to talk to each other. Voter ID. Make it easy to generate an ID based on a citizenship database so that it is clear on the ID itself. We could easily do that with real ID. And be done with it. It wouldn't even cost that much money. That's the thing that makes it so aggravating. Besides the polling on it, it wouldn't even cost that much money. But we're beholden to a bunch of people who want the third world already used to being very clear about, about, you know, their citizenship and their own elections to have no responsibility whatsoever in ours. Yeah, that's an excellent way of phrasing it. You know, we have people from South America or from Mexico or from other countries where in their own home countries, they're required to have government issued photo IDs to be able to go and vote. You know, one of the ironies is you probably remember this, but there was a lot of news stories during the Biden administration where illegals right before they would come into the country would throw.

their IDs away right before they crossed into the United States to make it harder to identify who they were or whether they even had criminal records back in their home countries. They all had IDs though, didn't they? Every one of them had IDs saying, no, I'm not a citizen of the United States of America. So it isn't like they couldn't figure out how to get an ID, even if it costs 100 miles in travel. But now we're just supposed to take everybody on the honor system. Let's just start doing that with guns. That's what I want to do. Let's just start doing it with guns. You know, no, no, no. I just take my word for it. I am in the other thing is you need to have a government issued photo ID in order to check into a hotel. To be able to fly in a plane? Yes, Western. Let's take my word for it. Get on a plane. Oh, TSA, just take my word for it. Just take, no, take my word for it. John Locke, great piece in the New York Post. I hope it has an impact. And having such wide distribution, New York Post is very well read. And our people in Washington supposedly love it a lot. Hopefully when they come back from their, you know, when Lindsey Graham comes back from his vacation at Disneyland, weird, that we can actually get back to work. Thank you so much for coming on the program today. Well, thank you. Good to have you. John Lott, go check it out of the New York Post. Still there. I think you can still link off the front page, but if not, I've got it up on social media. I've shared it on my ex. It is weird that Lindsey Graham went to Disneyland, I think. But we'll take a quick break.

Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. I wanted to get to this last week and everything fell apart. So I'm bringing this up. I hope because I don't want to see this story disappear. I have Benjamin Netanyahu Bull who's the General Counsel of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation on the program to talk about what is nothing short of a landmark ruling on social media addiction, meta, YouTube, you know, they just got smashed. upside the head with regard to the way they manage their digital platforms, their algorithms to suck kids in. And so Benjamin Netanyahu, welcome to the program. How expansive is this? The way I'm reading it, it's pretty darn expansive, and it's not just metadata YouTube. No, that's right. You use the word landmark, and it's exactly that. It's a watershed case. And the great thing is that there are about over 200 lawsuits just like it coming behind it. Of course, there'll be a real knife fight in the courts of appeal. You know, meta doesn't go, it's not going to go down easily. And it thinks it's done nothing wrong by getting kids and causing all kinds of problems. And so they will surely appeal. But in the meantime, and assuming the judgment stands on appeal, it's a watershed moment. It's very much like a big tobacco moment when the culture turned or the courts turned. Big tobacco began being held accountable for all of the, you know, the damage he was doing to people. So they were, the argument was by design. These platforms got kids essentially, and I shouldn't even say essentially, literally addicted. They could not put them down. You took your kid and TikTok, all of them are the same way. You take your kid's social media away and they act like every drug addict who's in withdrawal. So when you get kids this dialed in and hooked in, what those algorithms can do is then put wildly inappropriate content in front of them and have them consume it. on mass. So how did the algorithms, what was the argument and how the algorithms got these kids, and it's not, by the way, it's not just kids, but got these kids to scroll and click and scroll and click, leading to depression, leading to, you know, potential risk of sexual exploitation? Well, people have to understand that there are experts out there on hooking kids. And, you know, the evidence was, and we knew this, we've known this for years, that Meta intentionally designed its platform to use personal algorithms. That's, you know, they find out exactly what appeals to you to, especially a young person. And they constantly feed that person things that, you know, social media that it finds particularly, you know, hypnotizing. Then it has endless scrolling. And so, I mean, there's no bottom to the scrolling. It just goes on and on forever. And we know that it triggers the brain's reward system generating dopamine. As you said, it's just like gambling addicts. It's exactly the same part of the brain that causes gamblers addicted to gambling did not be able to stop. Or drug addicts not be able to say no. Yep.

So that's what it is. It's the dopamine reward. And by the way, we could talk about this, this model of addiction of dopamine reward is it's not just alcohol. It's not just gambling. It's not just drugs. It's everything from, you know, social media scrolling to pornography. It's the dopamine hit. Then you need that same level or ever increasing levels. So when it comes to social media and it's anybody, they're trying to, and it's not just, again, meta, it's X. Every single, every single social media platform uses this by design, feed you content, fast moving content that keeps you there. Scroll to the next one, scroll to the next one, scroll to the next one, and on and on. And I know people who can do this for hours. I know adults who can do this for hours. Well, if you look at a group of kids waiting for a bus going to school, what are they doing? Right. Every single one of them has their phone and their noses in the phone, scrolling, TikTok, Instagram. You know, you know all the platforms. You just mentioned them. And one thing that people don't understand is you can actually do MRIs to people's brains who are hooked. on this. And they don't even know they're hooked, but it actually shows, the MRI will show changes in the brain, similar to people who are addicted to pornography or gambling or alcoholics, for example, similar brain changes. And, you know, there's now a science supporting this. It's not just a whole bunch of conservatives or religious people, you know, raising a storm about it. It's, I mean, there's science. There are people on the left, people on the right. Everybody's waking up to it. And now for the first time in history. Meta's being held accountable. Meta and YouTube are being held accountable. Yeah, YouTube was famous for sort of first kind of maximizing the scroll that quick dopamine hit. TikTok, I think, has made it worse because it's much shorter. And it feeds you a constant stream of multiple multimedia. It's all multimedia content. So that's actually the bigger problem with Meta's Instagram. YouTube and TikTok as it's multimedia. It's not just words. Maybe you could get by it if it were just words and pictures, but it's video or it's ASMR. It's anything that will just kind of keep you hypnotized there. So this is obvious from observation. There is now data showing that as people are doing this, their dopamine reward system goes bonkers. And there's data and science showing that when you take it away, they act like people who have just had their, you know, had their cigarettes or their booze or whatever taken away from them. So, but observationally, we know that this is real. Why does it seem to be rolling a boulder up a mountain? to get this, to get bands, at least for kids. I personally think that, you know, if an EMT blew up the service of meta and X and all of them, we'd be better off. But why is it rolling a boulder to get bands on social media for kids? Not just cell phone bans in school, but actually saying you have to be 18 years old to use this.

That's a very good question. I think that law follows culture, and culture is finally catching on to the harms of it. And the law is coming along and validating that and recognizing that. You know, which I think, you know. certainly the laws on the books and case law or court decisions like this. It's about a generation too late. I mean, it should have come along 20 years ago, but finally, it's coming along, which is not unusual. I mean, there are a lot of phenomena that flourish for a while, and then people see the harms of it, and then the law changes, and then the people are held accountable. And I think we're at that point now. And the other case that happened a couple of weeks ago was the New Mexico decision. And that was also against Mehta, which called them out for fraud and deceptive business practices because they knew about child predators on their platforms, strangers, strange men, older men propositioning children for sex and didn't do anything to stop it. No, and for a long time, X was doing nothing and Facebook was doing nothing. So meta in general, you know, TikTok will make a tweak here and there. I just looked this up while you were talking. 95% of people age 13 to 17 use social media. Can you believe? I mean, I guess I'm shocked at that. 95% most of them on TikTok and Instagram. Snapchat is third, but it's TikTok, Instagram, that's meta. And then Snapchat. And so 95% of young people. We already know that sexual predators in Wisconsin use Snapchat. In the schools, in the schools, use Snapchat to communicate with kids and put them at risk of predation. We, you know, so you know meta's already doing it. X is not here. That tends to be a more adult platform. But how do we get to? We let 95% of kids use this. Yeah. And, you know, it's not like they just drop in once a day and use it. They're on it for hours. Exactly. In fact, you say that 61% scroll for, they just said multiple hours. So I'm sorry, I have a definition, 4.8 hours a day. 60% say they scroll for at least 4.8 hours a day. Yeah. And we have a lawsuit against X that's on its way to the Supreme Court right now. We showed that they knew that there are hundreds of thousands of child porn images on its platform and did nothing to take them down. We represent two children who were sex trafficked on X. Meta knew about it, acknowledged it, said they were not going to pull the images down until law enforcement got involved. So that's, and that's X, if Elon Musk's X. Now I know he didn't own it forever, but, but so now the liability risk of these platforms, even if they get transferred in ownership, they're saying, oh my gosh, if we actually pull this down, then we're maybe putting ourselves at risk of additional lawsuit. So we're going to dig in. We're going to dig in. Otherwise we may lose our Section 230 protections. It's so cynical. Just do the right thing.

and get rid of this information. As far as these platforms go, though, generally, the right thing would be to not create algorithms that induce dopamine hits by constant scrolling. But then that's the entire business model of these platforms. Right. And 230 doesn't immunize them for intentional, you know, platform design. Like, you know, 230 immunizes these platforms, allegedly immunizes them for third-party content that's uploaded to the platform. Not the design features of the platform, but they decide to use algorithms that keep kids hooked. That's a whole different deal. And that's what was involved in California in that decision. So again, it's going to hit the appeals, but there are multiple lawsuits in the wake of this one. So if it goes sideways at one appeals court, maybe it doesn't go sideways at another appeals court. So this isn't over by any shot. I'm impressed at the amount of sheer activism that I think it had to have taken to get all of these lawsuits in the pipeline. But it hopefully changes. Congress could change it overnight, couldn't they? They could pass a law tomorrow. In fact, there's legislation trying to make its way through Congress, but, you know, meta and TikTok and all of the platforms you just mentioned, they have billions of dollars at play. And they have countless lobbyists. And suddenly you'll have a congressman who's on our side and then overnight will change. Right. Because the national center for, yeah, your organization, you know, National Center for Exploited Kids. You don't have money. You can't pay a lobbyist a million dollars a year to go and camp out outside, you know, the halls of Congress or people's offices. Because, you know, you don't have billions, people with billions of dollars giving you money to do that. So we the people, in terms of our representation or lobbyists, are, you know, by comparison, probably underfunded by the tune of 100 to 1. Oh, at least. At least. No, these lobbyists are, I mean, they come in by the dozen. And what happens is they, you know, they hire very reputable former congressman and public officials to be their public face. And you think, well, this person would never be bought, but they are. You know, there was legislation about to be introduced two years ago. And then suddenly META decided to build a $10 billion AI facility in Mike Johnson's district, who's the Speaker of the House. And that legislation never went to the floor. I was going to think about this. An AI facility nobody wanted except the people of the town that were going to rake in the dollars. But the people in the town didn't want it. But that was enough to get. the legislation killed for that particular Congress. You know what? So I said this before on the program. I said we are at this point governed by executive order and lawyers. And sometimes the lawyers are bad. But every now and again, they're not. Every now and again, we get the good ones. And every now and again, we get the good lawsuits. So I'm hoping this one ultimately achieved success. But it's going to be a little while. Thanks for fighting because it's hard. This is thankless what you do.

Well, thank you for covering it. It's voices like yours that let people know what's out there and what's at stake. And people need to reach out to their representatives in Congress. I want to. And in the state legislatures, too. So I also want to point out the website for you guys, the National Center for Miss, I'm sorry, I want to make sure I get this right. National Center on Sexual Exploitation. You've just put out your dirty dozen list. So I want to send people out to endsexual exploitation.org so that they can, you know, participate, maybe make some donations and things like that. Thank you very much. That would be awesome. Thank you for covering it, Vicki. Benjamin Netanyahu Bull, who's the General Counsel for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, we'll be right back. All right, still ahead. I had mentioned at the top of the show $193 trillion. That's a huge amount of money. It's an unknowable amount of money. It's an unattainable amount of money. And that's what the United States is on the hook on, a hook for. And we will talk about that coming up on the program, especially with an eye to Scott Bessent, announcing his intention to ferret out the fraud. Good luck, buddy. And we'll also check in on what has become a... reliable spring and summer trend of, quote, teen takeovers. They're happening all across Wisconsin. They're happening all across the country. And everybody seems to just not have a way to figure out what to do about it. That's coming up as well. Have a good one. We'll see you back here at two. Good afternoon. Welcome to the Vicki McKenna show. I'm going to cram in a lot of stuff if I can. Thank you. I don't know who filled in for me yesterday. So whoever did thank you. I don't know. Nobody told me who it was. But I took a day off for a family emergency. And I'm back. So what's the big news? Well, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to get to some of the lesser news today. Like $193 trillion that the United States government owes. Who does the government owe it to? That would be you and me. You and me. They owe it to us. $193 trillion. But we'll get into that. I will also talk about those street takeovers. I know that's of lesser importance than what I am about to share. So the looming debt crisis, the collapse of the U.S. economy, and the miserable seizure of the streets by near-dewells and thugs. This, though, I don't know why it's not getting the attention that I think it deserves. This would be Benny Johnson. The podcast guy that everyone, you know, has anointed as some kind of mega podcast god, just concluded an interview with Matt Bill Gates, who, if I may, thank goodness, was not made FBI director. It is only usually after these things go south that these folks are revealed to be somewhat less than qualified.

Here is what Matt Bill Gates told Benny Johnson MAGA podcast God in podcastistan. He said he was, quote, briefed by, quote, a man in a military uniform that there was an alien breeding program with human beings that is in secret currently going on right now to create a hybrid race. Quote, what he explained is that the military ran a very secret program where aliens that were living in forced breeding programs with humans that had been abducted from war zones and from caravans of migrants. He was telling me that there was between six and 12 locations around the United States where the alien human hybrid breeding program is taking place. Ladies and gentlemen, you knew it was only a matter of time before the headlines from the old weekly world news were presented as real life in podcastistan. Does anybody remember the weekly world news? You see, I remember the weekly world news because it was such fun, especially when I was back in college, especially when I was on, and I apologize for this, and I will again, the campaign team for Bill Clinton, because the alien. From the weekly world news named Pilad endorsed Bill Clinton. Do you remember this? Space visitor tells Democrats how to rebuild the U.S. economy alien backs Bill Clinton. Quote, I'm happy he saw through Bush and Ross Perot, says Bill Clinton. This was a goofy tabloid back in the day. Remember, Bat Boy and the Ed Anger column and the alien stories. Alien confirms Elvis is alive. Alien confirms John Lennon is alive. Alien confirms Paul McCartney is dead. So now we're seeing this in the pot. So here's my strong advice. Stay away from podcast to Stan. Just. Don't, this is obviously Matt Bill Gates is either on a very special kind of bath salt or he's trying to see what wild things he can get people to believe and get them distracted from, you know, the less important things, like $193 trillion in debt. I don't even under, look. There were a lot of conspiracy theories that were proven true because of COVID, but not these. Okay, just because some of them were proven true because of COVID doesn't mean the PILAD alien stories from the weekly world news were proven true because of COVID. What do you think the likelihood is there's an alien human breeding program in the United States? Zero. Zero. Okay, there's your likelihood. Let's try not to become morons because we don't trust anything the established institutional government tells us. We can do both things, not become morons and not trust the establishment government. We can do both things. And I swear we can. You can walk and chew gum at the same time. You cannot trust the government.

And you cannot fall into a hole where a whole bunch of people are laughing at the psychological experiment they are conducting right now to see how dumb the suckers of the United States can show themselves to be. Let's not do that. You feel free to send me hate mail defending the inanity. of a former U.S. congressman saying a guy in a military uniform confirmed a human alien breeding program. I'll take your hate mail. I'll take your hate mail and raise science and common sense as a response. We'll take a quick break. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. And I originally wanted David on, David Clark on the program to talk about this case out of Madison. And if we have time, we'll get to it. But after I saw the news over the weekend and then into yesterday, what you see across the country. I don't care where it is. It's in California. It's in Massachusetts. It's in Illinois, New York, Wisconsin. You can set your calendar by this. Once the weather gets warmer, we get this phenomenon, this brand new phenomenon known as teen takeovers. And we pretend like this is just a gag by a bunch of near-do-well teenagers, but it's not. It's crime. And unless something puts the hammer down on it, it continues until the end of the summer. David, welcome to the program. We've got two recent examples in Milwaukee, one at Bayshore. Didn't think you guys were ever going to get touched out there in Bayshore and Moody Park. And it will not stop unless the hammer falls. We saw it in Chicago and New York and Boston, Baltimore, cities in California as well over the weekend. Well, too many people see that. When I say people, I'm talking about government officials, they see this as adolescent behavior, and it's hood-like, it's hoodlum-like behavior. And that's exactly what it is, and it needs to be dealt with accordingly. But I don't see much of that happening. These goofs need their rear ends kicked. I don't know that a simple citation is really going to discourage them. you know, we're connected now through the internet and through social media. They could spread the word. I saw that there were some fires going around. Where was law enforcement? Why weren't they prepared? Aren't they monitoring some of these sites? to gather the information and create intelligence on them to head it off. You know, we're always hearing about things like predictive analysis and all that sort of thing that law enforcement is in on. Well, these things are probably predictable too, but I think once again, they're steep at the wheel. And the other thing you have to keep in mind, it's very important is law enforcement resources are overwhelmed when a group of 50, 60, whatever.

even 25 of these idiots show up and you know all you have is maybe you know three or four squad cars because many of these agencies are working short-handed and you can't neglect the rest of the city or the town or the village for one incident at Mayford, you've got to police the rest of the community as well. So you've got, you've got Southridge Mall had this problem. This has been ongoing, by the way, Bayshore had a problem. Bayshore has had this problem in the past, just had a park in Milwaukee. And a disorderly conduct citation, a ticket that says disorderly conduct to a 12-year-old who isn't going to pay it or a 12-year-old's parent who isn't going to pay it. Give me a break. And this is typical. You actually had this David Sinclair guy who claims he is a professional disruptor. He's a professional. He goes in and he talks to the community members and to the young people. He's a professional. He says, we want to make sure the kids can have fun, get together and be in gigantic groups and take over spaces and have fun. And the only reason he responded was because there was a shooting at Moody Park. So but for the bullets, this is just kids having fun, but it isn't. It is a declaration of lawlessness and it is an assertion of power over communities that are right now completely incapable of solving this problem because no one will drop the hammer on youth violence. Well, like I just said, it's not fun for the business owner. This impact negatively on the business and they're operating on the margins anyway, but it. It really inhibits their ability to make a profit because it scares away customers, for heaven's sake. So it's a quality of life issue. It's not fun. And it's also a drain on government resources, mainly police, and maybe one of the other things that should be done here. because it's going to take more than one remedy, going to take several, but you start charging the parents when a kid gets arrested, okay, you want to give them their little citation, fine, but you put together the total of law enforcement resources that were spent on this, and you bill the parents for the cost of the... police enforcement to respond. So I'm just saying you throw, you keep throwing stuff at the parents and you keep hammering them away at this. And eventually, I say eventually, because it won't happen overnight, maybe they'll take responsibility for their kids. Hey, look, I just got a bill for $750 from the city of Glendale for your. ticket that you got, your little ticket here and start to engage actively as a responsible parent. So I could come up with some creative ideas. I don't know why the government officials and the business owners won't seem together and come up with some more ways to...

hammer these people. They could also have automatic garnishment of wages and or benefits. If the parent is claiming, well, I'm too poor. I'm on public assistance. Well, guess what? Then we're going to reduce the amount of public assistance to cover the cost of the police involvement. The state of Wisconsin could also have a law on riots. Now, I'm sure there is a, you know, illegal public gathering law. No one's blown the dust off that thing probably in years. An explicit law that says if you are gathering. solely to intimidate, to, you know, to wild, to do damage, whatever, you can assess specific mandatory penalties for that as well. You can have mandatory community service. By the way, only 14 kids got tacked at Bayshore. 14 kids. They got disorderly conduct tickets. None of them are going to pay them. None of their parents are going to pay them. 14 out of what? 400? So that isn't a deterrent either. You actually are going to have to start dropping the hammer on the people who organize this as well. And you can start by actually taking it seriously in the law, by creating a special carve-out in the law to address this particular problem. By the way, you could also do that for other types of wilding street takeovers like you see all the time in Milwaukee. Well, you know, there's another idea. You know, you can look at this federally for the people who are organizing these things and encouraging it. You know, there's racketeering laws. There are other federal statutes that I think can apply here because they're encouraging rioting behavior. And until the government officials get more creative, they're going to continue in the reactive mode of responding to the stuff. You make a few arrests. That ties the officers up away from the street as well to write up the arrest. So they've got to look at this. differently. You know, Mayfair dealt with this a number of years ago, and it might be coming their way, so I hope they're ready, but they had to deal with this. for a long period of time. And then they finally threw the hammer down. They enacted laws, not laws, policies that, you know, after a certain time, 4 o'clock or whatever, anybody under 18 had to be accompanied with a parent or guardian in order to be in the mall. And they couldn't walk around in more than groups of, you know, three to four. They enacted those policies. And then, of course, a racism card was played. to try to get them to back off. Well, you just don't want black kids coming into the mall. They stood their ground. I remember advising the then manager of the Mayfair Mall how to navigate this thing, this race baiting, this race playing card. And they stuck to their guns. And you know what? They finally got it out of control. But it doesn't mean it won't return because if you turn your head for one second, those idiots will be back. 100%. This is, this is, quote, youth culture. You just say, I reject youth culture. We do not have to embrace youth culture. Youth culture is broken. However you want to describe it, they say, well, you're being racist because most of them are black kids and shrug your shoulders and say, not my problem. It's youth culture.

We're not going to tolerate this crap. And by the way, a disorder- It is rot. But, you know, a disorderly conduct citation is a couple of hundred bucks, and it's a ticket. It's not a criminal charge. It's not going to follow you into your adulthood. It's not going to have any impact whatsoever. It's not going to stop you from stealing cars, stealing stuff. It's not going to, you're not going to lose your driver's license. You're not, nothing happens to somebody who gets a disorderly conduct ticket. Nothing. They don't pay the ticket. Nothing happens to them. So unless you want to get ahead of it, as Mayfair did, note to Bayshore, then this is going to continue to be a problem until people like me say, I won't go there anymore. Yeah, that's the other thing you have to think about is it dissuades people, discourages people from going out there because they don't want to get caught up in the middle of this. But handling this with a city ordinance violation of the ticket. Those are for minor infractions, minor violations. They have to look at this. in a more serious way and start charging it with a state statute violation that's all meant to the criminal justice system. Yeah. Again, you were also talking about policies. Policies that could say no large groups of children are allowed to gather. None without, you know, no way. So in the other mall, it was groups of more than, say, four or five. I'm not sure what their ultimate policy became. But you just say no more large groups. You're not allowed. Oh, but the professional interpreter. whatever Sinclair says, we just want kids to have fun. You know, kids can have fun without breaking things and shooting each other. Kids can have fun without terrorizing shoppers at them all. Kids can have fun without taking over streets. There's all kinds of ways for kids to have fun. So I don't know where this clown is coming from, but maybe people should stop taking him seriously as an advisor on policy. Yeah, and again, you know, if you look at the Mayfer situation, I think these other malls could use that as a model. It's going to take some time because they let it out of hand. But one of the things they did in Mayfair, too, is they let the Walatosa police open up the substation inside the mall. So you had actual police officers in the mall all day, you know, at all time so that they could. immediately disrupt this stuff when I see these goofs, just, you know, maybe they're not going wild yet, but they're gathering and they're walking through in large groups. You see a uniform or two, you know, immediately is going to at least get their attention. So that's another thing that they can do to reduce the strain on police resources because you only have so many cops. And like I said before, and this is important. One of the reasons I got out of Milwaukee, when the cops are responding to this and these large numbers, they're not patrolling my neighborhood. And they're not in a visible presence mode to dissuade burglaries and street robberies and shootings and all these other things because they're at the mall, for instance, or at some park, for instance. So this eventually affects everybody in that community. That's how people have to look at this on a larger scale.

I agree. By the way, when you let it go unaddressed and unmanaged, when you let the chaos and the crime go unaddressed and unmanaged and people walk away, people leave, that's why you have all those grocery stores and drug stores abandoning neighborhoods in Milwaukee. That's why it is happening. Because at some point, after enough time has gone by with zero attention to the problems that are affecting business, those customers. and refusal to enforce the law, you know what? Places, shops in the mall, people who own these properties say enough, and they leave. And then you complain that another desert has opened up. It's a shopping and retail desert. It's a grocery desert. It's a drugstore desert. It is the after effect of the design of refusal to take the law seriously. Well, that's what you're talking about is a broken windows theory. You take care of the problems when they're small so they don't spiral into larger and more serious situations. And, you know, many agencies now, they don't engage in broken windows policing. One of the reasons is they don't have the cops, the number of cops they used to have for heaven's sake. One of the things that Bill Bratton did, who was one of the architects, him and Jack Maple, of broken windows policing, was they hired. 5,000 new cops because Bratton understood. And they only had 35,000. New York's a big city, you know, with, what, 8, 10 million people. So these smaller agencies don't need 5,000 cops, but you can't continue to reduce police positions and think that they're going to have time for things like preventive patrols. visible presence type policing. Those are the things that discourage this stuff from really getting off the ground. In Milwaukee, they keep reducing. the amount of police officers they have. And then now it's, you know, and it fills into the suburban surrounding suburban community. So now it's your problem. Yep, now it's your problem. So, you know, Glendale, get on it. Glendale City Council, Bayshore, get on it. Anybody who's dealing with this, don't wait around from Milwaukee. State legislature, get on this stuff. It isn't like it isn't solvable. David, I do appreciate the time on the program. Thank you very much. Be well, Vicki. You as well, and we'll take a quick break. Welcome back to the program. It's the Vicki McKenna Show. And I have standing by the CEO of Open the Books, as I love to say about OpenThe Books. OpenTheBooks. It was Doge before Doge was Doge. With an absolutely shocking number. I'm going to say the number and then I'll introduce John. $193 trillion. I don't even know how to understand what that means. And it's a fiscal time bomb ticking in the U.S. economy. John, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me. I have to be on again. All right. So $193 trillion. What does that mean? Tell me what that means. I don't even know how to understand that number. But that's what we have promised to beneficiaries of various programs, right?

That's right, Vicki. And look, and this number, it's important to know that this number comes from the Treasury Department, Scott Bessent. So this is not something we conjured up. This is not hyperbole. It's not hype. These are the official numbers reported from our own government, our own Treasury Department, essentially declaring that the United States is insolvent. But the context is really important. Because, again, these numbers are so mind-numbingly large. Let me put this in context. And I'm going to give a shout out to my friend David Walker, who's the former Comptroller General. We've written about this together before. But he did a brilliant job explaining what these numbers mean. So one way to think about a trillion dollars. is divide that number by $100 million, okay, and drop eight zeros. And this is where you can relate to your family budget. So imagine you're someone listening to your show in Wisconsin or wherever around the country. And your household earns about $52,000, okay? Make $52,000 a year, but then you spend $73,000 a year. Okay, so that's your $21,000 in the whole. That's not a good path to be on. Now, then imagine that your liabilities and what you owe is $1.3 million, and you have only $60,000 in assets to your name. So what that means is you're that regular worker in the United States. You owe your $1.3 million in the whole. And that's how we get to these huge numbers. And the reason this study was so well done and so important. is that any time you can help the average person grasp how serious the problem is, it creates the circumstances for change. So I was just on, Stuart Varney, I love Stuart Barney's show, was on Fox Business yesterday talking about that, and explaining the same numbers we're talking about now. And he was skeptical that politicians would ever do the reforms necessary to change this. And when you look at politics as they are today, he's right to be skeptical. However, we have so many examples of history when the American people change the politics. And that is the only way out of this, is if we the people, I think the average person does understand this. They do know, they know intuitively that we're not on a sustainable course. And when they know specifically what that can do is animate change and force politicians. to enact of reforms that are necessary for this country to survive. I'll say this. This could be a way to get this. Look, without the filibuster reform, nothing, I don't think anything is going to change, but something like...

the radical risk of the inversion of the United States. It's already insolvent. But what happens if we can't function anymore? So what happens if the interest rate on our debt, just in our immediate debt, which is expected to be around $62 trillion. I think that was open the books, by the way, who produced that number about a month and a half ago. It's expected to be around $62 trillion 10 years from now. What if the interest on that reset? We don't have money for defense. We don't have money for Social Security. For any, so that's where this is driven by Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare. We don't have money. You know, I mean, I don't even know what that looks like. It looks like, you know, it looks like Molotov cocktails in the streets and people eating each other. That's what it looks like. Right, right. And again, just to put this in context, too, is I think our federal government right now is quite literally, and I'm going to quote my friend Adam Milstap who coined this phrase, we are a nursing home with an army. In other words, our money is all going to health care entitlements for the most part. Social Security and then defense. Everything else is relatively small compared to that. And all of these programs are structured in a way that they're unsustainable. And what is such a scandal, too, is that the quality of benefits has been going down for decades. And so the big lie in Washington is that, hey, we're going to save Social Security Medicare by not touching it. That's what every politician says. I'm not going to touch Social Security of Medicare. Well, by not, quote, touching it, you're condemning future generations to a much lower standard of living, if not a total catastrophe. And, for example, we've seen, yeah, Social Security, purchasing power of Social Security has gone down 95% since 1925. Right. So every year we don't act, we expose ourselves to risk. And, you know, as I wrote, you know, 13 years ago with Coburn in the debt bomb, you know, eventually there's a principle in economics is that everything continues until it stops. And so no one can predict when that moment of the heart attack is, but that's really what we're talking about. We're a patient with advanced coronary disease, and at any second we could have a catastrophic coronary event because of the load of our debt. And that's what we're trying to prevent. And I don't know what the age cutoff is. 100% of people below a certain age are going to get zero. And that's regardless, period. They're just going to get zero. It will get to the point where you can't keep funding the system. But if we keep kicking the can, then it's not just going to be a lower standard of living for younger generations. It's going to be a complete economic catastrophe. And you and I are young enough will be living through it. That's my worry, what a debt crisis in the United States looks like. It is economic inversion. Think of those stories you hear about the lakes and then they got all the muck and stuff at the bottom of the lake and it flips over and all the carbon monoxide is released and everybody within a certain amount of distance dies. That's how I look at the debt crisis if it hits us. And historic norms are 5%. That's 5% interest rate.

is the historic norm. That's $600 billion more in interest instantly and nobody will loan us money anymore. And we can't print it if that happens. So, you know, I mean, maybe the $193 trillion is just a fantastical number and we shouldn't even talk about it. We should maybe talk about what it looks like, you know, for all of us living when it happens. Because. And I don't know. I don't know if there's going to be enough pressure or if the politicians will have to wait until the disaster strikes. Yeah. Right. And that's the big worry. By the time there's enough pressures, will it matter? Will the damage be so severe that it doesn't matter? So that's why we have to do everything. And that's why we're so focused on this and open the books is to avoid the catastrophe. And another way of thinking about the danger is we're currently spending more on interest payments on the debt alone than we are on defense. So just paying the interest off your credit card, that's more than what we spend on national defense. Now, the only sort of positive thing I can offer in terms of the opportunity for change. I mean, there's a couple things. But when you compare our situation to other countries, we're the least wilted rows in the base. So we're relatively, we're still stronger than all the other economies. And if you look at China, China has worse demographic problems that we do in the United States. Now, that will only help us for so long because, again, there will be a point where if we don't get ahead of this, then we have runaway inflation. There's simply no way of getting out of this. short of an economic catastrophe. And that, sadly, is what most great powers go through. You know, there's a wonderful book written, you know, 13 years ago called This Time is Different, eight centuries of physical folly, where these two economists, Reinhart and Rogoff, looked at eight centuries of debt crises. And it's rare that countries get ahead of it. And so our hope is that we can, we can again draw off the lessons of history. And our political system is far better than most other political systems. In spite of all of our dysfunction, we still have the capacity to get this right. And if enough people decide that this is absurd, then they can create the right conditions for change. So I want to just. That's why we just will never stop trying to educate the public about what that way. The Democrats are just, they're in fantasy land at this point. We used to have Democrats who cared about this stuff. The Democrats are full on fantasy, buy my stuff, socialism at this point. They are, seize all wealth. By the way, and this is about a 10-year-old analysis now, and so the budget was different at the time. I think we could fund the government for like 11 days if you seized 100% of all wealth in the United States. We would be able to fund the government for about 11 days. So it's worse now because...

We're almost, you know, we're cresting up towards $3 trillion in an ongoing budget deficit. So it's way worse now. But that's what they think. We'll seize the companies. We'll seize the wealth. We'll seize the assets. That's what Elizabeth Warren's got this idea out there. Unrealized capital gains. That's going to be our ticket. And everybody gets free stuff. That is not how it works. I mean, it's not, it's literally not possible. I mean, so they're not even serious. You can't even take them seriously. Unfortunately, I just don't think there's been enough education. I mean, if you ask Ron Johnson or maybe Rick Scott, who are the two guys talking about, by the way, your book that you mentioned, Ron Johnson summarized it and presented it to the caucus. And he told me he got kind of glassed over eyes, you know? So it's like, what do you do? There's not enough prepping in the world. You can't prep enough food and water and wood. to, you know, to make it through this if this debt crisis hits us because we're just doing nothing about promised entitlements. In fact, I hear ad saying, you're not getting enough out of your Social Security. And I'm thinking there's nothing to get out of Social Security. It's fake money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And here's a great factor in our recent report on this about the billionaire myth. So, you know, so the number, again, it's $192 trillion of what we owe. And what we've spent in our history since 1787 is 132 trillion. Wow. So we owe more than we've ever spent in our history. But here's the kickers that the net worth of every billionaire on the planet, and not just the United States on the planet, is 20 trillion. So if we seized, if Elizabeth Warren could seize money from every billionaire in Bernie Sanders and capture them and put them in a camp and take all their money, that would only pay one-tenth of the cost. And of course, that's never good. Because by the time you start seizing wealth to that point, you destroy the capacity for economic growth. So it's a completely absurd fantasy land vision that they have that we're somehow going to tax. billionaires out of, you know, and we're going to escape this by doing that. That's never going to happen. There aren't enough out there. The number you just said was so my, I want you to repeat it. You said it was 130, how much trillion that we've spent in the entire history of the United States? One more time on that? 132 trillion. Wow. We've spent 132 trillion since the founding of the country. We right now have unfunded obligations of $193 trillion. That's right. That's right. And all the worth, the net worth of all the billionaires on the planet is 20 trillion. So that's not nearly enough. On the planet. So we got to go capture people in like. We got to, right. We got to send the special forces out the cap. Round up all the billionaires. This is why Elon Musk, by the way, after he tried really hard with Doge says, I think I'm just going to focus on putting a colony on Mars. He really literally did say that because he just couldn't get people to take this seriously. Everybody's got to read this because it's so sobering and it's really easy to find and you've written it in such a way that it's easy to understand. So I always am grateful that you guys do that on some of this complicated stuff. OpenThebooks.com. John Hart, as always, thank you. And thanks for the work that you guys do. Thank you, Vicki.

Good to have you. And we will take a quick break on the Vicki McKenna show. And that's it for me. Coming up on tomorrow's program, we'll talk about conservatives and free speech under assault at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When I mean under assault, directly under assault, we will talk about that tomorrow.