Over these first few days of the Trump administration, we’ve seen these bold measures. And it’s starting to incur a big backlash, or anger, or counter response from the Left.
And it runs something like this: well, yes, maybe this needed correcting, but it’s going to be so expensive, do you understand what you’re doing? You’re supposed to be cost-cutters and now you’re going to spend all this money to rectify something. It’s almost as if, well, the person who’s going a hundred miles drunk and when you pull him over the cost to arrest him, to bring him into the police station to arraign him, to indict him, to impound his car, is so much more than the damage he did by going a hundred miles and endangering people.
So, you don’t arrest him, in other words. So, here’s what I mean, we’re told, oh, Donald Trump is spending billions of dollars to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, does he have any idea—well, who emptied it? When he left office, there was about 650 million barrels. It got down to 340. It’s only 40—I mean, he took almost half of it.
And why did Joe Biden do that? He timed it right before the midterms and the general election. So he could lower the price of gas. There was no national emergency. There was no global tension, which the reserve was designed to preempt. So yes, it’s going to be expensive to fill it back up because Joe Biden drained it for his own political selfishness.
Another thing is about the wall. They’re saying, well, Donald Trump wants to build the wall. Does he have any idea what it’s going to cost?
Well, a couple of things. What was the cost of letting 12 million people in here? Twelve million people. We have no idea. What was the cost of allowing 80,000 to 100,000 people to die every year from cartel-imported fentanyl?
What was the cost of telling legal applicants, wait in line for six, seven years—with real talent, some of them—you can’t come in because we have to handle all of this? What was the cost to tell people, our own citizens who are in social service dependencies, I’m sorry, the doctor’s office is too crowded?
So, there was a cost. And it’s not—that cost was much greater than building the wall. We have 700 miles that are walled pretty well now. There’s gaps. The governor of Texas is helping. We have a 2,000-mile border. We need another 1,300 miles. Some of it is in rough terrain, some of it is on the banks of rivers, and we don’t know exactly, what can be walled and not.
But the wall is a reaction to the waste and expenditure of the Left, and it will save money in the long term. Now, finally, there’s also this question of DEI. Everybody’s saying, Donald Trump just ended DEI, and he’s giving them paid leave. So, Mr. Costcutter is telling people to go home and not do anything.
Well, no, he’s telling them, I’m not going to be sued right now. You’re going to get out right away because you’re doing damage every second. And the second—anytime you’re not on the job, even if we have to pay you for a while, we’re saving money because your sin is not just commission—in other words, you’re a, what, a Russian Soviet commissar who is overlooking every type of productive activity and say, no, you don’t. That person needs to not be in the pool.
I’m disturbed about that talented person because they’re the wrong race, or the wrong religion, or the wrong sex, or the wrong sexual orientation. But they also commit this sin of omission. While we spend all this money in these programs, we’re taking money away from other things. It’s been estimated—just to take one final example—in the National Institute of Health, $50 billion, maybe a fifth of that money is not on scientific research or medical studies to cure cancer or to cure viruses, but things like what is the race, sexual orientation, gender of this particular group, and were they treated fairly by this particular program?
So, maybe we’re going to look at—spend $5 million to look at how many people got chemotherapy and see if we can just find, just we hope, we can find there is some discrimination. That’s not going to get you a better chemotherapy.
And so there was a sin of omission: what we didn’t do because we were spending on DEI and commission. We were discriminating against people and robbing ourselves of talent. Bottom line is the corrective.
The remedy for this malady is going to be expensive, and that’s what the Left is glomming onto, but they’re forgetting that the malady itself that they cause was far more expensive than the cure.
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