Newt Gingrich on Fox News Channel's Watters' World | May 15, 2021

NEWT:

No, if you ask it that way. I think that Biden has very limited capacity to understand and decide and articulate. I mean if you just watch him. But he's also trapped because the left on almost every one of these issues sees the world in a way that doesn't work. It's as though somebody came rushing in and said I have got a great new idea for making hot coffee. We'll put it in the freezer. You can figure out pretty soon it won't work. Take crime,:we know the liberals failed and we know Giuliani succeeded. So, what’s the answer? The answer was when New York has a 200% increase in one year is drop everything Giuliani did that worked and keep everything that the liberals did that failed. What did they think was going to happen? I think the pipeline problem is a much deeper problem in that we just paid $5 million to a criminal organization to recruit more people to rob more places and the hacking is really a threat to our entire civilization because of the degree to which we all rely now on things that are more effective.

ATM machines are great, but what happens if the Chinese close them down. It’s traffic to be able to go and pump gas. What if a Russian hacking group closes off the gas pumps? You can go through all of these things. There is no evidence that anybody in the federal government has any real appreciation. We have done little fixes and bandages. This is a much deeper crisis. Great hackers don't work for bureaucracies. We have to rethink our entire approach to the hacking question. As to the economy, I have to say this feels more like Jimmy Carter than I would have thought possible. I think maybe it was the gas lines that was the final breakthrough. You are getting stagflation which is what you called it when Carter was president. That's when you have stagnant jobs and inflation at the same time. Reagan put that together into a misery index.

He added the unemployment number and the inflation number. And the underlying inflation numbers are stunning. At a minimum, the highest rate of inflation since 1982. And at a maximum maybe even higher than that. You said something important that I want to build on and that is Inflation is a hidden tax. The real Biden tax is this inflation. It's making every American poorer. You are 4% poorer than you were a year ago because the dollar doesn't buy as much. When Biden says he's not going to tax people over $400,000 income, no as long as you don’t buy gas, you don’t buy electricity, you don’t buy food, you don’t pay for a house. Go down the list of everything you’re paying for because it's all being inflated, and I think that’s a key part of this.

One last thing. The idiots who think that electric vehicles are a solution to the cost of fuel, forget that at the other end of the line you have to make the electricity. So, you are either going to use coal which China is doubling down on and building more coal plants, you will use nuclear, you are going to use solar, wind, you are going to use something. But it's not like Tesla emerges from heaven and angels drive it around for you. You have to pay the founder of Tesla and you have to pay for the electricity every single day. I think you have to wonder; for these people, did the brains all kind of just drip out over the last 20 years? What are we dealing with?