This Matters to YOU! A Democracy in Decline – with Dick Morris [Ep. 62]

Linda: Due to time, this interview was completed over the phone. There are a few sound-quality issues, but I hope you will still enjoy the interview with our guest, Dick Morris.

Thank you for joining us today. My guest today is a repeat guest and a very dear friend, Dick Morris. 

Many of you know Dick Morris as a political consultant and news commentator. What you may not know, is that he now has his own show every Saturday afternoon on Newsmax TV. You may want to tune in to Dick Morris Democracy on Newsmax every week. If you miss it, you can also catch it online.  I do want to welcome my good friend, mentor, and advisor, Dick Morris. Thank you for being with us today Dick.

Dick: Hi Linda, great to be here. The show is on at 4:30 EST every Saturday.   It’s so exciting and I really love it. It’s so much fun to do. 

Linda: It’s great and it’s been a long time coming in my mind. I’ve always felt that you should have your own show. You are like the encyclopedia of political knowledge. It just pours out of you from history to random facts. It’s just amazing to me, what you do and how you write.  You’ve been a great asset to the American Republic. So, thank you. 

Dick: Thank you.

Linda: It’s been great to work with you on so many things over the years.  I really wanted Dick to be my guest today because there’s just so many things happening. I know recently on your show you had some guests discussing the current crisis at the border. We are actually recording this in March 2021.  I’m not sure when people will listen but right now it’s March 2021. We have seen an incredible change on our southern border with the new administration. Biden has opened up the border and as you’ve often said, the schools are closed but the borders are open.  I would really like to have you dive in a little bit on what this open border policy means to American citizens. Also, how it can affect our American businesses and therefore the workers they seek to employ. I mean this really has an impact on the ability to provide jobs for American citizens because our costs are going up. We’re paying for more illegals and all of these policies but also for the job pool as these lower entry level workers are coming into our work force. Can you please address some of that for our listeners?

Dick: Sure. One of the single hallmark achievements of the Trump administration, which was incredible, is that he really for the first time, changed the income distribution in the United States. He really stimulated growth in income for middle and lower middle-income Americans. He was able to kindle a wage growth among people who were high school graduates and had not been to college, which was the first time that it’s happened in about 70 years. 

 In fact, wage growth, income growth, for the lower middle class was greater than for the upper class which was the first time that’s happened in forever. There are two things that made that possible. The first, was his trade policies, where he really promoted American products, American manufacturing and limited Chinese imports.  The other one, I think the major one, is that he controlled the southern border so that you would not have the continuous influx of people who are willing to work for very little. Let’s go back in history a little bit to Abraham Lincoln. He did not like Thomas Jefferson. He said that the reason he didn’t like him was that Jefferson’s fundamental view was that we should have a country of yeoman’s farmers, who served subsistence farmers who didn’t really work for money.  They just ate what they grew and that permitted no upward mobility. He said that the real problem was that if you kept a slave population you could never have income growth among the working people. That was 5 million people at the time in the U.S. that could be forced to work for free. The rest of the labor force would have no bargaining power to be able to raise their wages. We don’t have slavery anymore, but we do have massive illegal immigration where people are just pouring over the border. This was a problem that was solved under Trump and Biden’s policies rekindled them. It’s unique. It’s not only a failure to solve the problem, it’s the willingness to cause a problem and those people slugging over the border are driving down wages for all Americans. They make it possible for people to hire people who end up as landscape people, personal assistants, messengers, all kinds of jobs and pay them very little. The democratic solution, of course, is to try to raise the minimum wage and to use police powers to try to force them to pay people more. That won’t work because all of the nation will just eliminate those jobs. The Republican’s solution, which is the Trump solution, was to limit the border and stop people from coming in here illegally.  Ted Cruz once said, if those people coming in over the border were doctors, lawyers, professors and professionals there would be limits on them, but because it’s ordinary laborers, there’s not that competition that holds down wages terribly in the U.S.  I think the other thing to realize is that the border isn’t open. It’s open only one way-in. The Biden administration has basically stopped deporting anybody. Even if you committed murder or rape while you were here illegally in the U.S., you can go to jail, serve your time, get out and you’re welcome to stay for the rest of your lives. They’re never for supporting anybody who is here legally even after they’ve committed a crime. The center for immigration studies did an analysis of the 95,000 people that were deported in 2018 and they found that 91,000 would not be deported under Biden’s new rules. For example, nothing anybody did 10yrs or more ago is the basis for deportation now. So, even if you killed somebody 11yrs ago, you can stay here. You’re welcome. We would love to have you in the country. Since half of all people that commit crimes and felonies are recidivists, they basically come back and commit another felony within a year. This is an invitation to create not just a labor force but a criminal element in the U.S. that will stay here and continue to prey upon us. Already, we’ve seen that the policies of the Biden administration, in the efforts to defund the police and to scare police into not doing their job, results in huge increases in crime. The murder rate year on year in Chicago is up 50%, New York it’s up 40%, and in L.A. it’s up 30%. This is all because of the policies of weakening the police and failing to deport people that are here illegally who are criminals. That really is, I think the way, that the illegal immigration affects the average employer in the United States. 

Linda: It’s mind boggling to think of the amount of people coming through our border that are undocumented illegals. Resources are needed from our country, paid for by our tax payors, to accommodate these illegals. We all support immigration. I think there’s a misperception or possibly a misrepresentation of the conservative viewpoint regarding immigration. We all welcome immigrants of every background. However, we want them to come through basically, the front door. We want them to come through legally, through an organized process.

Dick: That’s not just because we’re legalistic. The fact is, the crime rate for crimes committed by people that are legal immigrants is lower than the population as a whole by a significant amount. They want to be good citizens and we welcome them because of that. 

Linda: Exactly.

Dick: They do not commit crimes. Whereas, those who are here illegally, have a much higher rate of violent felonies and aggravated felonies than the population as a whole because they came here breaking the law. Obviously, they’re not law abiding which stays in their character and that ends up really hurting us. While we’re talking now, the stimulus package is hurtling on its way to being signed. I think that it’s worth understanding what that is going to do to employers throughout the country and employees. It is going to make it increasingly unprofitable to work. In fact, I believe the Democrats goal, which they say is that they want to create jobs, but I think jobs is their second choice.  I think welfare is their first choice and you can do the math. The stimulus package raises unemployment benefits to $400 per week counting the existing benefits. So, if you have a family of four, with both adults unemployed, they’re going to get right away $40,000. That’s $20,000 for each of them in unemployment benefits with no time limits and no expiration. They’ll also get a child tax credit that Biden is raising from $2,000 to $3,600 for a child under 6 years old. If they have two children under six, that’s $7,200 on top of the $40,000 and they’ll all get food stamps that have been increased to over $2,000 per year. So, that is $4,000 and all kinds of other benefits, day care, and of course, Medicaid. When you put that all together you really have the equivalent of an income of 80-100K per year. So, if you go out and work and you make less than 80K per year you’re a sucker. You should just stay home with your wife and go on welfare. The work doesn’t pay and that’s the problem employers are going to have. You know, we have it all set up to help disadvantaged people and minorities that have traditionally been discriminated against. We require employers to hire large numbers of them in their workforce which is great but where are they coming from? Where are they getting these workers from? The schools are terrible.  The lack of school choice has condemned those folks to poor educations and low skills. They can’t recruit people because of the welfare programs that are effectively competing with American jobs. We’ve always said that Japan was taking way our jobs or China is taking away our jobs.  Those were all true, and with China it may be again, but what’s really beginning to take away our jobs is the welfare system. People rationally weigh the alternatives of doing no work to getting their unemployment benefits and their stimulus checks. I forgot to say everybody gets $1,400 of a stimulus check, so add another $2,800 to that computation. Then add food stamps, Medicaid and unemployment benefits. When you put that together you’re talking about an income that is far more than most people can earn in the marketplace.

Linda: That’s amazing. The problem, I too see with that, is that you have a nation dependent on the government.  As I’ve often said in my books and resources, that if you have more people depending on income than those who are working to provide the income, then the economy will topple. So, we need these people to be working. They provide tax dollars for all these different programs. However, the balance of the scale does not weigh out evenly anymore so we’re running in more deficit and more deficit. This is not the way to have a strong economy or a strong country. As we’re looking at this this, this is truly a crisis.  I believe it’s a crisis of national security. It’s a crisis of a secure economy. A crisis in education. It truly is a crisis for job providers and manufacturers.

Dick: It’s also going to kindle incredible, unbelievable inflation. Think about the economy right now. We’ve had all kinds of stimulus checks. The average American in January saved 20% of their income in the month and not because they’re so frugal but because where in the hell do you spend it?  Everything’s closed. There are no restaurants or even movies and where do you spend your money? So, all of this money is sitting around. There is now 1.6 trillion dollars of cash sloshing around people’s checking accounts, savings, short-term savings accounts and under the mattress that people are not using. When the quarantine ends and the virus recedes, which it’s beginning to, all of that money is going to come out of hiding at once. It’s like WWI and WWII. While the war was in effect there was rationing.  No one could really spend any money.  Once the war ended, the rationing ended and all of a sudden everybody bought everything. There was a huge increase in inflation. In 1919 and 1920, then again in 1946 and 1947, after the two wars ended, there was 20% inflation in each of those years.  In metaphor, it’s kind of like your gas tank is full but you can’t drive anywhere. It sits in the parking garage in wait for stuff to open and then when it opens everybody drives out at once and it creates tremendous traffic jam of inflation. The democrats, the liberals, they basically don’t really care about deficits anymore. That’s for accountants and fuddy-duddies because you can always borrow the money. The way and the only reason we can borrow the money, it’s not that we have people willing to lend it to us but that the federal reserve just prints more money. The more money you print the more inflation you’re going to have.  I think we’re looking very seriously at the idea of the same kind of major inflation of 15% to 20% to 25% a year that we had in the late 70’s, and early 80’s, that basically got Reagan elected. The reason for that was that there were huge budget deficits that Johnson tried to do the “Great Society” in the Vietnam war and not raise taxes at the same time. Those deficits caused tremendous inflation and the only way to cure that level of inflation was to damn near kill the economy. Volcker came in as head of the Fed and raised interest rates to 20%, literally 20%. No more zero interest rate. As a result, unemployment rose over 10% and the patient didn’t die, he recovered but we had to almost kill him to get rid of the inflation.  I think that may well be the future that we’re facing as the Democrats continue to spend money without any thought of what the deficit is. 

Linda: Well, that brings up a really good point with all of the things that we’ve talked about. We touched on the border, the Covid-19 Stimulus package, the lack of school choice under this administration which was getting expanded under the last…

Dick: Actually Linda, let me stop you there. School choice has expanded not because the administration wants it but despite their best efforts because the public schools are closed. 

Linda: Well, exactly.

Dick: I think that parents who voted with their feet and decided to send their children to charter schools, private schools, church schools and even have home schooling, may well continue a lot of that. 

Linda: I see that as the silver lining. In the cloud of all the lockdowns, parents are waking up to other options in education. For so long, we’ve seen parents totally dependent on public education. It was the only way and anything else was kind of “out there”, right?  However, we’re seeing such a resurgence of parents choosing private schools, charter schools, home schools and they’re finding some of the benefits. I know home schooling.  I always pay attention to that as a former homeschooling mom. That is way up all across the country and really across the world.  Parents are seeing the flexibility and the resources that are available to home schooling families. In one of my podcast episodes, I interviewed a woman who is starting a Hillsdale College charter school in my area because she was so frustrated with things. There’s a new charter school starting because the public education system wasn’t meeting the needs.

Dick: Charter schools are public. They’re free. 

Linda: Correct. Yes, traditional public schools weren’t meeting the needs.

Dick: They’re tax funded but they’re not subjected to ridiculous union rules.

Linda: Like unions in the schools, we think about unions organizing in other industries. One of the other things we need to pay attention to as it travels thru the halls of Congress, is the PRO Act. Would you like to touch on that?

Dick: Yes. The PRO Act fundamentally changes the whole rules surrounding unionization. It creates a totally unequal playing field that strongly buys in the favor of the union and basically forces unionization. First of all, it makes it illegal for any state to pass the right to work law. It repeals all the existing right to work laws. You literally are forced to join the union as a price of getting a job. If you don’t join the union, you have to pay the dues anyway. It’s like a tax on people that want to go in and work. It also changes the election rules for determining if you’re going to have a union or not. Everything is tailored to the advantage of the union. The employers do not have an opportunity to present to the workers the reason why they should not form a union. This is really a goal to make the private sector just like the public sector. The public sector is so handicapped in its ability to deliver services, particularly in education, that it totally subverts the system. Years ago, the majority of union members were in the private sector. The public sector was sort of an add-on. Now about two-thirds of the union members work for the government in one level or another. This is designed to reverse that and give the power to union organizers. It basically forces unions into existence and forces people to join them.

Linda: You talked about the union members not being allowed to not join the union or having the choice of what they’d like to do. That brought to mind something that recently passed the House and is in the Senate right now, the H.R.1 Bill (For the People Act).  I always tell people when you hear a title like that, that sounds so wonderful, look under the hood of that fancy car because it might not be all it’s cracked up to be. So, would you like to touch a bit on the For the People Act?  It will definitely impact the voting rights of all citizens in our nation and really change the structure of our elections and how they’re run in every state. 

Dick: The Democrats basically do not believe in the concept of voter registration or voter eligibility. Their fundamental world view is, if you’re here, you can vote. There’s no such thing as screening for citizens, or people who should be eligible, or that people actually live in the area they’re voting in, or even in many cases age. Part of H.R.1 is to pre-register 16 and 17-year-olds, so that on turning 18 years old they become voters. That’s their second choice. They really want to lower the voting age to 16 years old. It eliminates the concept entirely of screening anybody. If you’re here and you want, you can vote, you don’t even have to show up. You can do it by absentee or you can do it by mail. In fact, you don’t even have to exist. The Democrats have eliminated and severely restricted the ability to purge voter lists of people who have died or people who have long since moved away. When they move away, it’s not like they get a plane ticket and come back to their old residence and vote. It’s that their names remain on the rolls. The Democratic workers bring somebody who’s not that person, who claims to be that person who votes in their name. There’s no photo ID and it isn’t even in-person voting, it’s by mail, and the Democrats can do that really at will. In effect, we have a phantom electorate of people who are not showing up, people who are not eligible to vote, people who in many cases are dead and someone else is voting in their name.  That is, to lose and destroy the ability of the rest of us to really have a democracy. It’s the controversy about the 2020 election.  I have no idea really whether the voting machines were at issue because I’m not a computer guy. The paper ballots sure were and as a result, the turnout of voters or phantom voters rose by 20% between 2016 and 2020. Literally 26 million more people voted in 2020 than in 2016 and Biden carried those. Trump got a lot of votes. Biden got 15 million and Trump got 11 million. Trumps people were real voters who showed up and voted. Biden’s people were phantom people who voted by mail who may have existed or may not have. There were no verification requirements of signatures and the rights of the For the People Act (H.R.1) essentially codifies and legalizes all of the practices that permitted the Democrats to commit shenanigans in the election of 2020. It makes them permanent and makes them mandatory for the states.

Linda: It should be something that we absolutely take seriously for the future so that we can have free and fair elections, where every legal vote gets counted and every illegal vote does not. 

Dick: Let’s be clear about why the courts have not ruled that this needed to happen in the election was illegitimate. It is not that any court actually reviewed what happened. No court did that anywhere, in any level, federal, state, or local. Instead, they said we don’t have jurisdiction over it. It’s up to the states, or state courts which were controlled in most cases by Democrats that claimed, we don’t see enough evidence of fraud to require a complete recount and a complete audit. In the states where they did recounts, it was under the old rules and under the rules where fraudulent ballots, mail in ballots that were postmarked illegally after the election day, ballots that were not subject to signature verification and ballots that came in from people who were not registered. All of that stuff was counted, twice. Once in the election and once in the recount, but no court ever did what needed to happen; to say, we want a forensic audit for these results. We want every vote scrutinized and checked out to see if the person who cast it is alive, is a registered voter and in fact cast the vote themselves. That was the only way you could deal with assuring an honest election and no court was willing to do that. That, of course, begs the question as to why the Supreme Court did not order that. The answer to that, I believe, is that the Supreme Court was intimidated by Biden. The Democrats threatened to pack the court. Basically, after Barret was confirmed, they said that we’re going to expand the number of judges from the current nine to probably fourteen. They’d add six new judges all of whom would be Democratic Liberals.  Before, the justices now on the court were liberals or conservatives, they’re justices. They believed their interest has to be to protect the power and integrity of the Supreme Court. The checks and balances system of Congress could destroy that. Congress could make the Court as large as they wanted and put in all kinds of new rules; for example, the judges rotate, or there would be mandatory retirement age, and the result would be that the supreme court would not exist as part of our system in the way that it does now. Remember, that the Supreme Court’s power does not come from the Constitution. It comes from the ruling by Justice Marshall in the Dartmouth College case and in McCulloch v. Maryland where essentially the Supreme Court pre-empted the right to review state and federal laws and determine their constitutionality. That could be changed by a Court. That could be changed by Congress. The Court basically voted to protect itself by not getting in the middle of this fight. The Court felt that they were damaged in reputation when they ruled in Bush v. Gore in 2001. They were determined not to go down that road again, so they absolutely opted out. 

Linda: That’s amazing. So, we have covered a lot of ground in this interview and I know our time is coming to a close. I so appreciate your insight and I know the listeners do as well. We have covered the border. We touched a bit on schools, school choice and school re-openings. We touched on the stimulus, the voting rights and the For the People Act. What would you tell employers and the employees who are regular citizens and maybe not the business owners?  What would you tell them in terms of their best actions moving forward here to protect America as we know it? Where we can protect our rights under the constitution, our rights economically, what would you tell them?

Dick: Well, that is so simple. Vote for the Republican candidates except for a few RINOs. Basically, retake the Congress in 2022 and retake the Presidency in 2024. We used to always say this was the most important election in our history because there were all these potential threats looming. If we had voted for Hillary or if Biden was going to win these threats would become real. They are now real. They’re not threats anymore. They’re time bombs. They’re ticking and they’re going to explode and destroy our country. These are all policies that are now in effect. The voter fraud has become a built-in part of the system. Illegal immigration-they’re pouring over the border. Workplaces are being fraudulently and wrongly unionized throughout the country. People are getting entitlements that make it unnecessary and unprofitable for them to work. The welfare state is expanding by leaps and bounds. This is all going on right now. If we let it continue to go on beyond the next four years, we’ll never be able to get it back. So, 2022 is not an election to try to stop things from happening; it’s to try to stop them from getting worse and stop them from becoming permanent. The year 2024 has to be seen as our last chance to roll stuff back and have a country like we’ve always had. 

Linda: That’s so true. For listeners who maybe don’t like the whole partisan concept of party. I would just like to say I’ve always promoted policy over party but there really is a dividing line.  When Dick talks about the Republican Party, we’re talking about the policies that are promoted there. We’re talking about a sovereign nation. We’re talking about a nation that has a strong economy. We’re talking about a nation where we want people to have equal ability and opportunity all across the board no matter what your background, race, creed, color, or whatever, as long as you’re a legal citizen of our country. We’re talking about free and fair elections. We’re talking about economic revival, opportunity and the freedom to raise your family. The basic freedoms that are allowed to us in our founding documents, the Bill of Rights and in our Constitution. These documents are what we’re talking about supporting here. So, it’s really not about just supporting a party because it’s a party. We are saying that these policies are absolutely critical to support as we go into this next election. Even as you think about your local elections, whether it’s school board, mayor, city council, county board, or your state elections, it’s very important to think about running yourself on these policies or making sure to support people who support America first policies. You bring up a very good point about voting. It is so far beyond anything partisan. Although we live in a two-party system, we will need to do that, but the way to make these policies become reality is to make sure we hold those Republican elected officials accountable to support the policies that will make this nation strong. Do you agree with that statement?

Dick: Yes, yes. We have a two-party system and we have primaries to make sure that the parties reflect our view. I think that’s the practice we have to go through to elect pro American candidates both in the primaries and in the election. 

Linda: Right, and this is all hands on-deck. As we close, I just want to encourage listeners that this is all hands-on deck. When you think about the founding of our country or the greatest generation of WWII, everybody got involved in that war effort to bring freedom to millions. This is what we need now. It’s a different type of battle. We all need to be informed, involved and impactful, as I say with Prosperity 101®. Make sure you understand the foundations of prosperity and freedom and how to protect it by becoming informed, involved and impactful.  Dick, I thank you for your work in helping people do that. I want to make sure they can find you again. People can go to dickmorris.com and they can also watch you every Saturday on Newsmax TV. Would you like to remind them of the time?

Dick: Yes, at 4:30 EST every Saturday. I look forward to seeing you all. Thank you.

Linda: Yes, It’s wonderful. Dick Morris’s Democracy on Newsmax. Thank you, Dick. Thank you.