The Daily Signal - For Bureaucrats, It's 'Christmas in September'

Episode Date: September 24, 2019

For the federal government, September is the real holiday: with the federal fiscal year ending, it's spending mayhem. Adam Andrzejewski of Open the Books joins us to explain just how much spending occurs at the end, and what can be done. We also cover these stories: President Trump gives a speech on religious liberty at the UN. "There is no international right to an abortion," says HHS secretary Alex Azar at the UN. Climate change protesters block traffic in Washington, D.C. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, September 24th. I'm Kate Trinko. And I'm Daniel Davis. It's officially fall, and in Washington, that means big spending is around the corner. Our colleague, Rachel Del Judas, recently spoke with a group called Open the Books to take a look at out-of-control spending at the end of the year. We'll bring you that interview. Plus, climate activists are going nutso this week in D.C. and at the UN.

And if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on iTunes and encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. Well, as the United Nations General Assembly gets underway this week, President Trump kicked things off by delivering a speech on religious liberty and persecution. around the globe. He noted that 80% of the world's countries lack sufficient protection for religious liberty and called on world leaders to bring about change. Here's a piece of that speech. As we speak Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Yazidis, and many other people

of faith are being jail, sanctioned, tortured, and even murdered, often at the hands of their own government, simply for expressing their deeply held religious, beliefs. So hard to believe. Today with one clear voice, the United States of America calls upon the nations of the world to end religious persecution. The UN's role in pushing a pro-abortion agenda is no secret. On Monday, Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services, made remarks at the UN about changing how the organization discusses abortion. Azar read a statement he said was supported not just by the U.S. but by 19 countries around the world, including Brazil, Egypt, Russia, Nigeria, and Poland. Azar said, quote, we do not support references to ambiguous

terms and expressions, such as sexual and reproductive health and rights and UN documents, because they can undermine the critical role of the family and promote practices like abortion and circumstances that do not enjoy international consensus and which can be misinterpreted by UN agencies. He also said, such terms do not adequately take into account the key role of the family in health and education, nor the sovereign right of nations to implement health policies according to their national context. There is no international right to an abortion, and these terms should not be used to promote pro-abortion policies and measures. Well, President Trump is defending the idea of raising corruption as a topic of discussion

with foreign leaders amid accusations that he had improper conversations in July with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. Speaking to reporters at the UN Monday, Trump said he has a responsibility to raise the issue of corruption, saying, we're supporting a country. We want to make sure that country's honest. It's very important to talk about corruption. If you don't talk about corruption, why would you give money to a country you think is corrupt? One of the reasons the new president got elected is he was going to stop corruption.

So it's very important that on occasion you speak to somebody about corruption. Well, that comes as multiple outlets have recently reported that the president pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden. Rather than explicitly deny that, President Trump maintains that his conversation was ethically above board. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Monday asking him to investigate this alleged whistleblower claim that Daniel just referenced. Schumer wrote, quote, this is a whistleblower complaint that has been labeled urgent and credible, not by Democrats, but by a senior-level Trump appointee. And it is the Senate's duty to take this national security matter seriously and to take action now. The FBI has arrested a potential domestic terrorist, an army soldier who allegedly discussed plans to bomb a major news network and even considered targeting former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke. ABC News reports that the man spoke to an FBI informant in an online chat group and discussed his plan for the attack, his search for more radicals, and the possibility of killing members of the far-left group Antifa.

Per the report, the man also planned to travel to Ukraine to fight with the far-right group, Azov Battalion, and allegedly distributed information online about how to build bombs. On Monday, climate change protesters decided that the way to bring attention to their issue was to make everyone's life awful in D.C. So the protesters essentially flooded Washington, D.C. and shut down a bunch of intersections. Here's a soundbite via Twitter account Extinction Rebellion, Washington, D.C., of one moment from the protest. So, the protest succeeded. DC traffic was a disaster on Monday.

The police said they were taking action and there were reportedly 26 arrests. But frankly, it's hard to imagine that if pro-lifers did this stunt, there wouldn't be more arrests and there wouldn't have been more folks hauled off the streets right away. Up next, Rachel's exclusive interview about. about upcoming federal spending. Tired of high taxes, fewer health care choices, and bigger government, become a part of the Heritage Foundation. We're fighting the rising tide of homegrown socialism while developing conservative solutions that make families more free and more prosperous. Find out more at heritage.org. On the Daily Signal podcast today by Adam Anjievsky. He's the founder and CEO of OpenTheBooks.com,

an organization that tracks spending at each level, local, state, and federal. Adam, thank you so much for being with us today. Rachel, great to be on the program. I'm very happy to shine a white-hot spotlight on what's going on this week in Washington, D.C. Well, can you start off by telling us a little bit more about what Open the Books does in its mission to track all the spending that happens in the government? Well, our mission, Rachel, is very simple. It could be summarized in a very straightforward phrase,

And that phrases every dime online in real time. And to that end, our organization at OpenTheBooks.com has built the nation's largest private sector database of public sector expenditures. And that's comprised of nearly all federal spending since the year 2001, 49 out of 50 state checkbooks. And we're getting ready to sue the state of California to open the books for the first time ever in the Golden State. There are loan holdout on state checkbooks. And across the country, last year, I'm really proud to say that we compiled, for the first time in the history of the country, virtually every single public employee's salary and pension record from virtually every single level of government across the whole country. It was 22 million public employees salaries. And everybody listening to the podcast, you can see all of this on our website at openthebooks.com.

Wow, you guys are busy. So I got to ask, September 30th marks the end of the fiscal year, and many government agencies tend to go on spending sprees at the close of the fiscal year. Why is that? Well, there's a reason why the last week of the fiscal year is called Christmas in September for federal contractors. It's the largest extravaganza of taxpayer abuse going on right now in the history of our country. This is a period where the agencies are spending down their business. budgets this year, so they'll get an appropriation from Congress that's the same or larger next year. It's called use it or lose it spending. It's a spending binge. And some agencies,

Rachel, are going to spend $1 out of every $5 in contracting on the year, and they'll spend it this week in the final week of the year. Wow. Can anything be done about these spending sprees? Are there any, is there any legislation you're looking at or any other avenues where you're seeing as helpful ways to curtail this? So, and the answer to that is yes, and there's about three or four things that could be done immediately, and some of these things quite possibly could be done by executive action. Last year, our organization, our auditors launched an oversight report on the final month, September of 2018, last year.

And what we found was nearly $100 billion of federal contracting went out the door in the last month, and incredibly in the last week of the year, there was $53 billion. Now, this led to U.S. Senator from Iowa, Joni Ernst, she has championed the cause of stopping this outrageous abuse of taxpayers. So she wrote a bill. It's called the Year End Fiscal Responsibility Act, and it's Senate Bill 1238. This week, today, as a matter of fact, on Tuesday, she's taking the floor of the United States Senate to talk about our oversight report, to talk about the executive agency spending binge and her legislation designed to stop the practice on a go-forward basis. Well, we'll definitely be monitoring that.

What are some types of last-minute spending sprees that your organization has uncovered as this fiscal year comes to a close? Well, for instance, last year the federal agency spent a half billion dollars in the month of September buying vehicles. It's an incredible amount of money. And Rachel, this is happening right now as we speak. We just pulled the numbers from the first two weeks of September of this year. And already, $60 million was spent by the federal agencies on passenger motor vehicles. So it's going on again. Actually, the Department of State, and we've got an inquiry into them asking for the reason why in the first two weeks of this year, they've already spent $33 million buying cars. Whoa, that's crazy.

I was speaking with Senator Ernst the other day, and she was saying, I believe what she was highlighting the Department of Defense, and mentioning how they'll use last-minute funds to buy things like lobster and video games and candy, things that aren't necessarily needed for the work that they do. Well, in our oversight report last year, we found that the Pentagon spent $4.6 million,

dollars buying lobster tail and snow crab. This made national news. It was big news. It ran on all the platforms. It was a nonpartisan story. It ran on Fox News. It ran on CNN. It ran in the New York Post. And it ran in the Arkansas and the Arizona Republic. You know, we can find no evidence. And we've looked here in September already that the DOD is purchasing again lobster tail and snow crab. Now, we still have two weeks left. They could definitely they come in with a big order. Wow. Well, in July, right before the August recess, things were busy in Congress. Congress passed a spending deal that combined a temporary suspension of the debt limit through July 31st, 2021. And Congress raised the spending caps in the Budget Control Act for fiscal

years 2020 and 2021, which essentially means that the federal government would have no limit on how much it can borrow. How does this hurt the complicated situation that we already find ourselves in? Well, I think you raised all the right questions here, and that is Congress has thrown even more money at the federal agencies this year for the end of your spending binge. What we have found is that the procurement departments at these major agencies, they've staffed up in anticipation of having to blow these contracts out the door before the fiscal year closes. We find evidence that the agencies are now even open on the weekends this year. They've scheduled work days of 12 and 13-hour days. Last year, the fiscal year actually ended on the weekend. This year, September 30th is actually during the week.

So they're not going to be closed. They're going to be open. They're going to be working longer hours with more staffers and more money to spend. And actually, they've even eliminated the limits. They've raised the limits on the credit card. So they can use their credit cards now for up to $10,000 per day. transaction rather than 3,500. So the limits have come off, the money is flowing. It is definitely Christmas in September for federal contractors. I believe Senator Joni Ernst from Iowa, you mentioned

all the work she's championed on this. And actually, we have some articles on our website, DailySignal.com, where people can follow some of the legislation that she's pushing. But I believe she's called this a war on waste. And why would you say that this is something that should be a nonpartisan issue, something that not just, you know, Republicans should be pushing because they tend to be the party of fiscal responsibility. But why should this be an issue that both Democrats and Republicans can get behind? So when we launched this report back in March this year, we launched it on C-SPAN's program, Washington Journal. And I was on there for the half hour, and I took 23 calls. And they were divided between, and they were marked between Republicans and Democrats and

independence and all 23 callers were with us. You know, an honest Democrat wants to cut waste fraud, corruption, and abuse because that harms the efficiency of public money going to solve problems. Republicans want to cut the waste and save taxpayer dollars. So for different reasons, both parties should be on board. This is one of the most egregious abuses every single year of the United state's taxpayer, and it needs to stop. In your own research tracking this federal spending, where would you say is the most waste? I think the most waste is going to be in the largest agencies, which just stands to reason. So I think the most waste is over at the Pentagon.

You know, the Pentagon buried an oversight report a couple of years ago in 2015, and they found that there was $125 billion a year in bureaucratic waste. And there's probably even more than that. Look, the Grace Report back in the 1980s under President Reagan said one out of every three federal dollars spent is wasted. It's either taxpayer abuse or spent on duplicative services. And Rachel, I don't think anyone believes that the budget is more honed today than what it was 30 years ago. I think we've had a couple of decades of spending on steroids. Are there any particular reforms looking at the Pentagon and how there is.

so much waste there that you would suggest that would be particularly helpful for that particular situation? So we've advocated in USA Today and the Wall Street Journal three times. Double-facing pages, we went in with an open letter to President Donald Trump, urging him to embrace the transparency revolution, urging him to declare as commander-in-chief war on federal waste. And the accompanying page detailed out 100 out. examples of waste. One of the easiest ones, and again, it's nonpartisan, we advocate putting

in basic in-house financial accounting controls. Incredibly, since 2004, the 20 largest federal agencies admit to $1.4 trillion worth of improper payments. We've done oversight on that, Rachel, and what we found was even last year, there was $1 billion, dollars of federal payments paid to dead people. These were improper payments paid to people that had already filed a federal death certificate, but payments continued to flow, like social security payments and pension payments and Medicaid and Medicare payments. So there's just a lot of work to do just on the basics. I mean, think about this. The Department of Education, they admit last year to $6 billion of improperly paid Pell grants and student loans. It's 8% of all Pell Grants that are improperly paid

and 4% of all student loans. Even the Small Business Administration lent $1 billion last year that they say they should not have lent. I mean, just basic in-house financial accounting controls are missing. And they're even missing at the IRS. The IRS is one of the most egregious offenders of improper payments. Yes, the Internal Revenue Service. They administer the earned income tax credit, and every year they admit to $18 billion, one out of every $4 in that program is improperly paid out. We have our work cut out for us. You're definitely right on that.

In your own research, especially looking at state spending, what are the states that are some of the worst offenders for use it or lose it spending? So we haven't done use it or lose it analysis in the states only at the federal level, but I can tell you the state where we're headquartered. We're open thebooks.com as headquartered is in Illinois. And Illinois is the Super Bowl of corruption. In Illinois, we're very, very familiar with. And we got our start here honing our oversight models. And we've got a phrase for the waste in Illinois. It's all legal in Illinois. These are legalized money laundering schemes. And in Illinois, one of the biggest schemes that we face as a state, and it's actually bankrupting our state, is the level of public employees' salary and pensions. In Illinois, incredibly, there's nearly 100,000 public employees on salaries or pension payouts in retirement that exceed six figures a year, that exceed $100,000 a year.

And it's no wonder that our 600, yes, we've got 600 pension. plans, and Moody's estimates the long-term unfunded liability of those plans is a quarter trillion dollars. And there's only 13 million people in the state. That means for every man, woman, and child in the state of Illinois, there's $20,000 of unfunded liability. A family of four, your share of the Illinois pension crisis is 80 grand. Rachel, that's never being paid back. And those programs, those pension plans, they're going to go bust. Well, going back to what you all are doing on the federal level researching the use it or lose it spending, how would you say this spending, I don't know, this interaction they have to it, the spending sprees that they go on. How does use it or lose it impact taxpayers in particular? So, look, we've got $1 trillion of where the spending exceeds the revenue.

revenue, $1 trillion of budget deficit and a $22 trillion national debt. So when we look at use it or lose it spending from last year, we found a half million dollars to redecorate into federal agencies. You know, the Department of Defense spent $10,000 on a club leather chair. We found $300 grand spent on booze at the Department of Defense and the State Department purchasing deer wine and whiskey. We found a billion dollars to load the gun lockers. Now, everybody could can probably support the Pentagon purchasing guns and bombs. But where it gets a little dicey is when you have your non-military, non-law enforcement agencies, like the Office of Personnel Management, the Small Business Administration, the EPA, health and human services, the IRS and Veterans Affairs, purchasing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of guns and ammunition. And we see that again in this year's numbers, $17,000. went to purchase bullets for the equivalent over at the VA for their police force of AR-15s.

We found last year $10 million was spent on workout equipment and recreation equipment, including $12,000 on a foosball table. We found a half-million dollars spent on self-promotion, PR, public opinion, research, and communication and advertising in the final month of the fiscalization. year. And of course, we had that $300 million spent on vehicles. That's incredible. It's like you wouldn't believe it unless you actually saw the research to back it up. And that's why what you're doing is definitely so important. Final question, looking ahead, especially at the younger generation, people around my age who are maybe in their

first job getting started and are real mesmerized by issues like climate change and others. Why is this issue, the issue of federal debt and spending so very important, it's something that we should be tracking and caring about? Well, Rachel, it's unfair to your generation that my generation gets to spend and borrow and bond your generation for all of our bills. It's grossly unfair, and I think that's just another reason. Look, this is a moral issue at the end of the day. You know, the waste and excessive spending of hard-earned taxpayer money, you know, to our auditors that open the books.com and the nearly 300 people that subscribe to our messages. This is issue number one.

We believe, as our honorary chairman, Dr. Tom Coburn, the legendary former U.S. senator from Oklahoma, also believes, as does the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Barack Obama, Admiral Mullen, that the number one security issue facing the country is our national debt. We've got to stop spending and stop wasting taxpayer money. Well, Adam, we appreciate you so much being on the podcast today. Where can listeners follow your work? Just come to openthebooks.com and sign up for and become a subscriber, or download our free app for Apple and Android.

It's very innovative. It's called Open the Books, free in the Apple Store and the Google Play Store. And what you have on that is you have the 22 million public employee salaries at every level across the entire country, right in your own zip code, in your own neighborhood, finally you can look up and you can see who, by name, works for which government agency, school district municipality, and how much they make. Well, we've been speaking with Adam Anjewski. He's the founder and CEO of OpenTheBooks.com.

Adam, thank you so much for being with us. Great to be on the program, Rachel. Thank you very much for your interest in our work. Americans have almost entirely forgotten their history. That's right. And if we want to keep our republic, this needs to change. I'm Jared Stepman. And I'm Fred Lucas.

We host the Right Side of History, a podcast dedicated to restoring informed patriotism and busting the negative narratives about America's past. Hollywood, the media, and academia have failed a generation. We're here to set the record straight on the ideals and people who've made this country great. Subscribe to the right side of history on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Stitcher Today. Greta Toonberg is a 16-year-old Swedish climate change activist.

Last year, she started protesting in front of the Swedish parliament, which I actually learned about earlier this summer when I was in Stockholm. I was on one of those free walking tours, and the guide was very excited. to tell us that we were in the same spot as a celebrity. I had never heard of her at the time, but the guide was very excited about her, and apparently a lot of other people have heard of her. So Greta Toonberg has gained international attention, and she addressed the UN on Monday.

So here's what she had to say about climate change when she was speaking. This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school. on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams, in my childhood with your empty words,

and yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass, extinction and all you can talk about is money and fair tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you? So Daily Signal, Heritage Foundation, it's not really a secret that we have a lot of skepticism here about the amount of human-caused climate change

and a lot of pushback to the idea that this is an emergency that policymakers need to address right now. So I don't want to focus on that. But what I do want to talk about is the effect that this is having. on young adults. I think it's pretty clear. You just heard the clip that Tunberg is personally devastated by climate change fears. She's shown a lot of real willingness to do things. She took a boat instead of a plane across the Atlantic, which is basically my worst nightmare. She got her parents to give up meat reportedly, and she's really started a movement internationally among kids who are worried about climate change. And Tunberg is not alone. There's even a term for it I found out

on Google today, it's called Eco Anxiety. So Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore wrote about this recently. She said, like my daughter, I find the climate crisis scarier than Brexit, because it is already happening, the flooding, the hurricanes, the desertification, the fires. There are already poor, desperate people who can't get clean water. Will that one day be us? It will all come down to water in the end. My daughter and I are suffering from what is now called eco-anxiety. Therapists and mental health experts are reporting that many children are now terrified of climate catastrophe. While this should be recognized as a psychological phenomenon, it is not a mental illness because it is rational, end quote. And the college fix, great outlet, recommend you check it out if you're not familiar with it. It's

written by college students about the craziness going on college campuses. So they recently went out to a climate change protest at St. Olaf College in Minnesota and asked people about Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's claim that we essentially have 12 years to fix things on the climate front. Here's part of the video produced by College Fix. And we're like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change. What are your thoughts on this and what's your plan? for we know it could be sooner than that we're not entirely sure um uh i don't really know you never know

with science um i haven't seen that figure but i'm sure it's believable and it's it's concerning you know the lack of time that i think we have left i think it's a super serious statistic and that people should recognize that that can be truthful that we need to enact change as soon as possible to prevent that from happening yeah i i'm baffled the fact that we're talking about so many other issues when This is the most pressing effects. Everyone equally, we're not going to have a life if we don't do something about it right now. So we need to start acting immediately. So Daniel, what level of eco-anxiety would you describe yourself as having?

The only anxiety I've had was sitting in my car this morning for 45 minutes as I was stuck on my way into work because protesters shut down the streets. Climate change protests, of course. Yeah. I mean, I really wonder how many extra gallons of gas were burned this morning because of their protest. just. Anyway, you know, I think the thing is, if these projections were reliable, then, then yeah. I mean, obviously, you freak out based on what you expect the future is going to be. So that's, that's rational insofar as, as far as it's logical. Problem is these predictions have been going on for decades and decades, and many, many,

many of them have fallen through and proved to be not real. So the Competitive Enterprise Institute actually put together a whole list of like failed predictions, environmental predictions over the last 50 years. And I'm just going to read from one of them. This is in the Salt Lake City Tribune from 1969. Quote, it is already too late for the world to avoid a long period of famine. A Stanford University biologist said Thursday. Paul Erlich said, quote,

the time of famines is upon us and will be at its worst and most disastrous by 1975. He said the population of the United States is already too big that birth control may have to be accomplished by making it involuntary and by putting sterilizing agents into staple foods and drinking water and that the Roman Catholic Church should be pressured into going along with routine measures of population control. Okay, end quote. This is from the 60s.

Paul Ehrlich had a lot of these, actually. And he's still on faculty. at Stanford University 50 years later. Amazing. Yeah, crazy. He's like head of his department. So clearly he did not retreat in shame. There were lots of other predictions like an ice age by the year 2000.

In the Boston Globe in 1970, an article was titled, Scientists predicts a new ice age by the 21st century. Quote, air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century if population continues to grow. Later it says, Quote, the demands for cooling water will boil dry the entire flow of the rivers and streams of continental United States. I could go on and on. There's like a billion of these at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. So a little bit of historical context is really helpful before we all lose our heads and panic.

Also, another reason why kids should not run anything. Sorry kids, but the whole point of school is so that you're competent after you graduate, not before. but I will say kudos to this young middle schooler. Is she high school? Yeah, 16. Okay, well, she's kind of... Unless Swedish school is dramatically different than American school, which actually probably is.

So, anyway, 16-year-old. I don't know. I mean, the one kudos to her, though, is that she is adjusting her lifestyle in accordance with this, as opposed to a lot of the wealthy elite who go to, you know, fly to these climate change conferences in their private jets and contribute to the problem that they claim to decry. Yeah, I think that's true. I think I, you know, the one line that really stuck with me, her, I mean, her speech was, it did seem heartfelt. I also read that her mom was an opera singer. So I was like, well, I wonder she learned something about dramatic delivery from her,

but that's probably too cynical to take. But, no, when she said, like, it's unfair to look for children for hope, I thought that was very true. And even aside from like the stupidity of putting, a teenager up as like a leader of a movement or you know in the case of Representative Ocasio-Cortez like a very young Congresswoman. I do think there's something to be said like you shouldn't be looking for kids to solve this. And it does seem that there's this increasing strain in American political things where like kids are expected to get gun control past. Kids are expected to get climate change.

Well, it kind of comes from this worldview that sees kids as pure. and adults as totally compromised by the structures of evil that just dominate the world. And so kids right out of the womb are the purest, most perfect beings imaginable. And we should all look to them. And that's actually a lot of communists believe, too. So it's look at history. Which is interesting because, of course, Western civilization was founded on Christian thought, which sort of said, hey, they have the effects of original sin.

That's right. And you need to overcome that. It's not like your little angels. It's the opposite sort of inclination. Yeah, it is terrifying to be led. But also, just reading this stuff about the eco-anxiety just made me so sad and just think, you know, what are these liberal parents doing? Like, Greta will never be a child again. And here she has this massive anxiety, sadness.

It just seems to me that parents, I don't think you should shield your kids. I mean, like, I don't think pro-lifers should shield their kids from abortion, certainly not when they're teenagers. But it does seem that like from a parenting perspective and from a societal perspective, you know, we should be encouraging hope and resilience and not catastrophic thinking, you know, believe that change can happen. I just, I don't know. I just, the amount of despair just really upset me. Yeah, it kind of reminded me of not that I was there, but I heard about the 1950s and kids having to sit through the duck and cover videos. You remember duck and cover? I don't remember, but I've heard about it for the parents.

Yeah, and in like, you know, in case of a nuclear war, if there was a nuclear bomb going to go off telling the kids, yeah, but if you get under your desk and you, you know, cover yourself in the right way or jump, you know, next to the curb on the street, you can protect yourself. And on the one hand, like, I guess there is a kind of hope. It's totally false hope. You're not going to survive a nuclear blast. Sorry, guys. But I feel like telling kids about the disastrous effects of a new. Duke is just not good for them anyway. Like, why do they need to know that?

Especially if it happens near them, they're going to be gone. Yeah, that's an interesting point because I don't actually know. I would generally say you should tell them, but now I'm wondering if I'm a hypocrite. Well, on that note. We'll leave it there for today. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud.

And please leave us a review or a rating, but not your politically interested kid on iTunes to give us any feedback. We'll see you again tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis. Sound design by Lauren Evans and Thelia Ramprasad. For more information, visitdailySignal.com.