Ben Shapiro

They could take a loss.

They could cram that down on their own citizens, just make their own citizens poorer.

They don't really care about their citizens.

Obviously, they live in an authoritarian communist state.

So what they could do is flood the market with cheap American bonds, making it difficult for us to raise more debt in order to pay our bills.

Well, this again goes to the fact that if you wish to be a world power, you cannot be a bloated welfare state.

Being a bloated welfare state is a choice.

I know that there's a third rail of American politics and that third rail of American politics is all of the entitlement programs.

I understand that President Trump has taken the position and many Republicans, J.D.

Vance, have taken the position, Marco Rubio, they've all taken the position that the entitlement programs in the United States require no systemic changes

The problem with that perspective is when you bloat your own economy, when you create enormous anchors on the American ship of state, it is very difficult to move in the ways you need to move.

Us being dependent on the Chinese to float us our debt is a huge problem.

What we should be doing is we should be getting lean and mean in terms of how we actually run our ship of state.

We should be making our economy not only more innovative, but lower on taxes.

We should be cutting down the bloated welfare state, not building it up.

Because the better shape we are in, the less we have to sell our debt to our geopolitical enemies who could use that as leverage against us.

And finally, we really, really need to cut off China's avenues for stealing our IP and destroying our institutions.

One easy way to do that, zero Chinese foreign exchange students, zero.

I understand that there's a lot of incentive for our university systems to bring in Chinese foreign exchange students because foreign students pay full freight while American students pay a discounted freight.

We should not be importing students from places that hate the United States in order to study at our universities, period, end of story.