Victor Davis Hanson

speaker

2,022 appearances 16 recordings 5 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 23 Mar

Victor Davis Hanson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Victor Davis Hanson Show · History of Income Tax Amendment 16 and News of the Week · 1 Mar 2025 podcast

Well, we do have that program already. It's kind of difficult. And according to Mr. Luknik and the Commerce Secretary, there may be as many as 200,000 people queuing up that we have not been able to accommodate.

It's not such an easy thing because the people who had that means of $5 million, some of them may have got their money through illegal or illicit means, so they have to have a very careful background check. But the simple thing is, as he said, if you do the math and you're paying $5 million And you've got $200,000 lined up, right? $200,000 million. And you've got a trillion dollars you could get.

And you could apply that right to the debt. So, it's enticing. And then the criticism of it, well, we're an egalitarian society. Yes. But... We are bringing in 12 million people the last four years who have made enormous claims on the state in health care, on education, on housing, on nutrition, on food, everything.

And some people have argued that it could be as high as $30,000 or $40,000 per year per illegal immigrant. And that's aside from the law enforcement problem. So what Donald Trump is saying, we're going to stop that and it will be expensive in the short term to deport people. But once we get the border control, we'll have legal only immigration.

And people will go back to a system where they will apply for immigration for a green card, which allows them to work. And then once they're here, if they have not broken the law and they're self-sustaining, then they can apply for citizenship. At the same time, he wants to expand the special entry.

We have all sorts of independent agents in the United States, and they make a pretty lucrative living by having a rich foreigner say, Mr. Smith, You're a citizenship broker. I want you to fast track my citizenship applications. So he's trying to expand that and he uses the word gold card. Green card is for everybody. Gold card is the person.

And as he explained it, these people then would have a lot of money. It's not that they have five million. If you're going to spend five million, you have a lot more. So you would come in and you would buy things and hire people and pay taxes and it would be good for us.

But most importantly, we would get around the special dispensation for techies and skilled people that's causing so much trouble because we're letting in people under certain visas to work. And we're told that they're PhDs and they're special and they're not always. And so they're taking jobs away from coders. But this time we're telling the employer, the Apples, the Googles, the Facebooks,

So you need 1,000 highly skilled engineers from Taiwan, from South Korea, from India, anywhere. You're going to pay the $5 million to bring them in. And I don't know. There's wrinkles. And he didn't spell it. Would the $5 million be a one-time fee so then they could renew it under a regular green card process? Or would they have to keep paying? A lot of things that are up in the air.

But here's what I want to make the point. Donald Trump really does believe that he can balance the budget if he does four things that no one's ever thought of before. Number one. massive cuts. I'm not talking about here and there, but a trillion dollars. We're spending a trillion point seven that we don't have this year. And that's down from Joe Biden's record.

He had the record of the most debt piled up in four years, more even than the COVID Trump problem. So that's number one. He thinks he can get a trillion dollars. Then they believe that for all the braggadocio about the 25% tariffs, they were willing to negotiate reciprocity. Canada, you have 5% on average, we will have 5%. Germany, you have five or six, we will have that.

And they feel that that is saleable. People will agree with that. Because it's just... Germany says, I don't want to have any... You can bring all the Dodge Ram trucks you want. Nobody wants them in Germany, but we won't have any tariff. And then we'll say, okay, we won't have no tariff at all on Audis or something. So that's... But he thinks he's going to get money from tariffs.

I don't know how much he will be. I will say that as we get to the income tax, the income tax is connected to tariffs because the only source really of revenue were fines and tariffs. And the income tax was introduced... to eliminate or reduce tariffs, which were about 40% to give a break on pricing for the lower middle classes. But nevertheless, he thinks he's going to get money on tariffs.

He's going to cut a billion. And then he's going to have this program, the gold card. And he thinks he's going to get a trillion dollars maybe once or twice in spurts. Or maybe every year there's going to be, I don't know, there might be 10,000 a year. And then he's also going to go maximum development of natural resources, but especially oil and gas. We are almost self-sufficient.

By that, I mean not that we don't import, but we export about the amount in dollars that we import for oil and natural gas. Somebody's going to say, well, why do we import any natural gas or oil when we have it? It's because of the quality and the refinery and the transportation costs. Sometimes it's cheaper to sell natural gas and then import it or to sell oil, etc.

But we're getting to the point of self-sufficiency. So the point then is that Donald Trump wants to build pipelines. He wants to open ANWR and he wants to get an additional, I don't know what that would be, 23, 24 million barrels, three or four million barrels of And I don't know if that would crash the world price to put that on the market.

And I don't know whether people in the oil companies or the independent oil producers would want to do that because basically they'd have to invest more money produce more product at a cheaper price. And it's a finite commodity. So you're an oil company, you have a big oil field in Anwar, they open it up, you think, yeah, wait a minute, price of oil is 60, 70 bucks a barrel, $50.

The more I produce, the less I'm going to have in the long run and the lower the price I'm going to get. So it's going to be tricky to I think one thing, people don't think this about Trump, but the more oil you can take off the world market, so you put maximum pressure on the two or three million barrels from Iran, and Russia has been restricted to China and India and Turkey, basically.

So then you keep the price high, then we make money. That's my point. So cut a trillion dollars, maybe get half a trillion in tariffs, maybe... quarter, a trillion, 250 billion in oil or natural gas cell, and then maybe 200 million in the gold card, and you've got the ingredients for a balanced budget.

That would be a Herculean... I'll make a statement that I'd never make predictions, but I will make a prediction. If Donald Trump, in the next two years, balances the U.S. budget, which we have not seen since the Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton compromise of 98, 99, 2000. And remember, they did that by raising taxes. Gingrich allowed some taxes to be raised. Clinton allowed cuts to be made.

Showing 1001–1020 of 2,022 · page 51 of 102