Can Herb Kay’s 1964 Plan Make America Great Again?

[0:00] We talked to Herb Kay, the founder and public face of ‘The 1964 Plan’. He claims his plan transcends party lines and addresses societal problems like the breakup of the nuclear family, the war on drugs, and the welfare state. He also believes it will solve our violent crime problem. Is it a new, fresh idea? Or just a rehash of old conservative tropes? I’m Doug Berger, and this is Secular Left.

[0:34] Music.

[0:45] Our guest today is Herbert Kay. He’s been a sailor, linguist, NSA analyst, retailer, insurance agent, stockbroker, registered principal, venture capitalist, business turnaround expert, best-selling author, paid corporate speaker, direct marketing executive, TV talking head seen on CNBC, Fox, CBS, ABC, real estate developer in Mexico, and when it collapsed in 2008, he spent time in the Arizona prison system. He’s the creator and public face of the 1964 plan that he claims will restore the traditional nuclear family and reestablish safety, decency, and community by building a movement to educate people, to understand cause versus correlation, and present a reality-based plan to make America the safest country on earth. Herbie, thank you for joining us today. It is a pleasure to be here, Doug.

[1:45] I’m gonna enjoy this immensely. I’m ready to rock and roll. By the way, thank you for the great introduction. One quick addition. I’m not gonna discuss my crime. I was guilty, I got what I deserved. It’s as simple as that. And I consider it really the most transformative experience of my life. I wouldn’t be here without having had that experience. Okay, let’s… And by the way, I pay restitution, I’ll pay it probably the rest of my life and I’m glad to do it. Okay. Right, but it does play into your plan that you experienced that, so… If I didn’t experience… See, I’ve been at the very, very top. That’s when you were right, I was a capitalist and I was stupid enough to go all the way to the very, very bottom and evil enough, really. It was my fault. It’s just simply my fault. And it gave me a rare perspective, let’s just say. Okay, all right, let’s get started then. Could you tell us a little bit more about yourself and why you conceived of this project, the 1964 plan? I conceived it actually while I was in prison. It became almost immediately apparent to me.

[2:53] That the underclass that’s represented in the prison population, it’s mostly the underclass, there were very few guys like me there. There were a few, but not too many, thank God. Compared to me, everyone else in that yard was a minor criminal. The havoc I wreaked was much bigger than a guy robbing a, you know, a 7-Eleven. So I don’t consider myself any better. But you know, when you spend that much time isolated, which is what prison is, that’s the punishment. You’re completely cut off from everything. I got to know everybody and I didn’t judge. I got to know everybody from what we called the shot out, which are the guys that really have lost a lot of brain cells, usually don’t have any teeth and gum their food. They won’t even take the free dentures that are offered to them by the prison system that are actually quite good, because it’ll get in their way when they go back to the street, which they literally live upon by choice. That’s the shot out. I have a very good perspective on the homeless. That is a synonym for homelessness. When I first went to prison, when they used to say, what do you do on the street? I thought it was a euphemism. They mean it absolutely, literally. Then there’s everyone else is essentially a drug-related crime. Even if it’s.

[4:07] Robbery or theft of any kind, it’s always because they’re paying for their habit. So about a third of the prisoners were possession or sale and the rest were guys that did bad things to afford possession or sale. And also in there were a lot of cartel guys and I got to know them extremely well. So I know more about drug importation than you’re ever going to want to know. So armed with this perspective, I… I came to realize that the two solutions of the right and left, generally on the left, it’s going to be a discussion on gun control. We talk about violent crime. Generally speaking, I’m making a broad generalization.

[4:49] But from my point of view, there’s 400 million guns in circulation. The only difference between an assault weapon and another weapon is cosmetic. There’s absolutely no difference between them. There’s never going to be a weapons confiscation or ban. It would cause a civil war. On the right, all they talk about is lock them up, lock them up, lock them up. Well, we have 25% of the world’s prison population and we have 4% of the world’s general population, which tells you we imprison more of our population than Russia, China, and North Korea combined. I know that no one ever talks about it, but fact check me, it’s correct. And that falls most heavily upon the Black and Latino communities, particularly. So I began to understand where resentment comes from, let me just say that. And I began to think, what can we do to restore? Because people in my position usually, when they hear about all this, basically, look down upon, you know what I mean? But when you’ve been in the gutter.

[5:48] There’s no one to look down to. So I conceived of the plan and I decided it would be apolitical. It’s neither Republican nor Democrat. There’s something in here for you to love. There’s something in here for you to hate. I know you’re ready to go on that. That’s fine. We’ll attack that first. I’ll say that I’ve written a series of white papers. They’re for free on the 1964plan.org. I hope you popped it up for me, Doug, when you do the editing. And- Yeah, I will. I’ll add it in to the information. Thank you very much. So, you know, in this brief time, I’m not gonna go through them all at length. Let’s start with the parts you hate, and I’m ready to rock and roll. I kind of think I know where it’s coming from, but you go ahead and tell me. All right, what do you think that I would hate? Which part? The end of the federal welfare state. Yeah, I didn’t. I didn’t care for that one. I knew that. Well, your first, you had a couple of primary causes, you say, you identify the primary causes. The primary causes are the breakup of the nuclear family. Right.

[6:56] The drug war. Right. And the welfare state. So to holistically treat all of this, you have to address each one. So I I did, and because I’m not running for office, I was very specific. And I know that today, there’s not gonna be broad acceptance of what I’m saying, but the rational, the radical, sorry, it’s a radical plan. The radical becomes reasonable when the shit hits the fan. And it’s about to hit the fan at a historic level. The world is on the precipice of the largest economic collapse in history. As you know, I have a strong financial background, And this is gonna sound really glib, but you can go back and fact check me on this too. There’s a long record on me. I’ve never been wrong about making a prediction of what’s coming next. And over my entire career from the 80s, when I say never been wrong, not to the day, but I get, I knew the crash of 87 was coming. That was my first call. I knew the recovery afterwards was coming. It’s, and by the way, usually I’m very optimistic. I’m almost a Pollyanna, people blame me, but I’m telling you that the party’s over in a very, very big way. It’ll come all at once. You’ll literally wake up one morning and the world will be a different place than you live in. And when that happens, people are gonna start looking for alternative solutions and that’s what the 1964 plan is about. Okay, well, when you point out about the destruction of the nuclear family, what exactly do you mean by that?

[8:23] Fatherlessness. For people who might not be familiar with the term. Well, generally fatherlessness. For example, because the bad side falls predominantly on people of color, let me start there. In 1960, before we instituted the welfare state, 86 percent of black children were born into two-parent families. Black poverty had reduced between 1940 and 1960 by 47 percent. Now, 31 percent of the black population still lived in in poverty, but that was an enormous improvement that they did without the welfare state. And the pace in which they were improving was very, very fast. And then we destroyed their community by trying to help them by building the welfare state. And what the welfare state did is it changed the nature of the government became the support as opposed to the family. It began to replace the family in almost every possible way from AFDC, Aid to Family with Dependent Children to what’s now called snap and food stamps, to rent support. It’s all the things that your family used to do for you when you got into a terrible position, which made poverty temporary. But this became a lifestyle.

[9:32] And for whatever reason, it’s evident, because today, 82% of black children are born into single-parent families. And the poverty rate hasn’t moved since then. Their progress literally stopped in place. And it’s not fair, but it’s not fair for the reasons other people don’t understand. We killed it with kindness. Now, the reason I picked 1964 though, because the welfare state essentially began at 65 under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, the FDR programs were by this time long gone, the CCC, the WPA, all that stuff. So Lyndon Johnson was the most transformative president if you look at it from a point of view of how many bills were passed. He was the most productive president in history. And he put in what he called the war on poverty. I’m sure he was well-intentioned. The road to hell is always paved with good intention. And he instituted all of these programs to help the poor and instead institutionalized poverty so that people are born in, live in, and die in poverty. And what makes it especially dangerous to the population at whole, and we’re seeing this in the homeless problems and what’s going on in our urban areas in particular.

[10:41] Is that they have a lot of children, a lot of children. So where middle-class people and upper-class people, now the birth rate is too low for population replacement, it’s 1.2 per family. So really, but the underclass population has four, five, six, seven, usually by different last names. It’s a rite of passage. The young men have no intention of supporting those children in any way, shape, or form, because they know the welfare state’s gonna pay for it. And they don’t really have any relationship most of the time. But but Herbie, but Herbie why why does it matter?

[11:18] Tell tell me why Because fathers teach boundaries. That’s that’s the father’s role in a fam in a traditional family, Moms god bless them and I know we don’t live in a time where you’re supposed to know that there’s a difference between men and women but women are nurturers men are.

[11:34] Discipliners generally speaking and now when I say discipline, I have four children I’ve never laid a hand on any of them, but but they were absolutely terrified of me, Just because of the tone of my voice and I had very strict boundaries My rule was simple. I’ll give you one morning and then it’s punishment time. And all fathers to one degree or another form that role within the family. So without that, and they also teach things that are very important, like most importantly, deferred gratification. That is a very male lesson. Women wanna give their kids anything they ask for. Fathers say, you’re gonna have to work for it. You’re gonna have to wait for it. And that’s an incredibly important life lesson. So absent, and by the way, there are literally thousands of studies that back up what I’m saying. Absence of father, it is not in dispute, is why a single-parent family is a disaster. There’s really no debate on that subject. But do you have any evidence that forcing men to be fathers would actually improve a child’s life? Sure, because prior to the welfare state, Men were forced regularly to marry and to have, before the welfare state. But did that make the child’s life any better? If you’re forcing people to stay married, to get married and stay married, because you’re also against no fault divorce. Yes, I am. Does that actually improve the family life and the child’s life?

[13:03] And I would say it does not. I understand. So now, and by the way, that’s fine. But here’s why I believe it does. Number one, I don’t know if you read the white papers, but I footnoted in the white papers a study from Yale University, so not a right-wing institution at all, that…

[13:21] Clearly demonstrates that women are the unhappiest they’ve ever been since they started collecting the data, and increasingly so. The suicide rate among women is the highest it’s ever been, and increasingly so. Not so men so much. Men are promiscuous things. Our biological imperative is spread your seed, but women are not happy. My argument would be within the traditional nuclear family, when you get married and you have children, and by the way, I only am against no-fault divorce in the case of a couple having children. If they’re just the two of them and they don’t have children, they can do it this way. It doesn’t make any difference because they’re not harming anybody else. Again, I disagree with forcing people to stay married, for any reason. I’m not forcing them. I’m not forcing them. Because that’s where you come up with the domestic violence. That’s where you come up with the alcoholism and the drug abuse.

[14:13] Because you’re creating an unhappy family by not giving them any options and that’s what you’re doing. That’s propaganda not fact. So let me explain why that’s propaganda not fact. First of all Nobody’s forcing anyone to stay in a marriage. We’re simply saying that if I’m simply saying to go back to the way it was when my mother divorced my natural father, she had to go to court and she had to prove why, and she had to state a reason, and a judge had to say good because.

[14:42] Now, if you don’t agree with this supposition, then you’re never going to understand and that’s okay. But here it is, when you get married and have a child, it’s not about you anymore, period, end of story. Your happiness becomes unimportant once the child is born. your imperative, both biologically and culturally, and has served the human race for the entire span of history. I read the other day that they found in Zambia the remains of a wooden building from 400,000 years ago. The oldest institution in all of that time is the traditional nuclear family. I would simply say, we tried something that no one’s ever done before and we screwed it up in in a royal way. Were women happier then? Yeah, they were. Because the movie picture, the propaganda picture of the woman in the apron and the husband. By the way, when it comes to domestic violence, fact check me on this, 80% of domestic violence is women on men. Now, I know that that is never publicized, but 80% of domestic violence arrests are women, not men. And the reason for that is men instinctively know that if they hit a woman, they’re gonna kill her. We are much too strong. Unlike the Marvel comics, women are not as strong as men. Even at my age, if I struck a woman, I could kill her. I would certainly hurt her.

[16:02] So men don’t hit women. I do want to though, give you an actual real world example, of what it was like before 1964. Okay. My mom divorced her first husband in 1963. They had two children, my two sisters. He was a truck driver, he was an alcoholic, and he beat her often, all right? So she was granted a divorce.

[16:34] He got custody of the children. Why? Because he had a job. And she did not because she worked in the home. You had a terrible job. That was 1963. My mom divorced my father in 1959. So I’m very familiar with this. First of all, as you know, in the white papers, I make an exception for those two things. Violence and out of control alcoholism are both grounds for divorce. So, now- No, I’m not disputing that. I’m disputing the fact that the women- I just want people to know that I’m not that hard at it. The reason why women get seen, as you exclaimed in your white paper, that women seem to get the best of the divorces is because women actually had to lobby the government to change the laws because they did not get the better end of the deal, just like my mom did not get the better end of the deal. Yes, in the 70s, it happened in the 70s. Prior to the 1960s, look it up, fact-check me. Ninety percent of the time, women came out better in divorce. The reason for that was the court’s assumption was that the man was the primary wage earner.

[17:43] Since the man was the primary wage earner in those days, and inflation had not yet taken place, and we hadn’t debased the dollar, so it only took one income to have a house and two cars and a television set. The husband went to work and the wife stayed home. Plus the technological advances that we’ve had since didn’t exist. So traditionally, women stayed home. The reason that there was a traditional nuclear family is until about 1908, when finally petroleum became widespread as energy, the world basically didn’t advance as far as the status of how people lived for the span of the entire history. The last century was the most productive century in history because of oil. Now having said that, the men were in the traditional role of wage earner because there was no middle class. The middle class is the 20th century creation. There was the very rich and there was everybody else. And unless you were born into the class where that was going to be.

[18:42] There was no capitalism prior to 1859. That was mercantilism. It’s a very different system that people just don’t understand. It’s where an elite, and we’re, by the way, a mercantilist power now. It’s where you get an oligarchy at the top that sets the rules for themselves and screw everybody else, which is why we’re losing our middle class, because we have replaced capitalism with mercantilism in a big way and it’s a disaster. But I don’t want to get into finances so much. But the reason it was is that men, it was very dangerous to be out in the fields being pulled along by an ox. Eighty percent of people worked in agriculture for the entire span of history, because there was no productivity in agriculture, because there was no oil to power anything, everything was animal power. Virtually for the span of history, men went out and worked in the fields and it was dangerous.

[19:32] Then even in the early 20th century, when you see these guys up on high rises, that’s a very dangerous job. Women always talk about equal access to jobs, but that’s a very particular, do they really wanna be plumbers? Do they really wanna be bricklayers? Some do, and by the way, when I make a generalization, I know there are exceptions. And there is no such thing as a perfect solution. In fact, there is no solution. There’s only trade-offs. I’m saying we get rid of the trade-off of destroying our culture and take the trade-off of sometimes someone’s gonna lose. They are, no one’s gonna have the, that’s why we never get anything done. We get it stuck in minutiae and exceptional cases. I’ll say that single parenthood is a disaster and someone will come forward and say, my son graduated from Harvard and I’m a single parent, blah, blah, blah. And if I had time, I’d go in and find out 100% of the time, a grandfather or an uncle stepped up and filled the role. Okay, and by the way, great, congratulations. But when you’re born into a welfare state and there is no grandfather, that you don’t even know who the grandfather is and there are no uncles, it’s a disaster, okay? And we have to. We can only set the situation up for success and I’m not talking about putting women back into the kitchen Well, let me just just I want to I want to get another I want to get to another point about that Okay in your white papers you oppose abortion and the use of birth control.

[20:57] No, I don’t why don’t I don’t know where you got it? Yes You said that was that destroyed the nuclear family was birth control. I I did say. The pill. The pill. You’re quoting me out of context. Let me be very clear on this. I also said we’re not going to get rid of the pill. All I said about the pill was that it caused the most radical transformation in culture in history, and it did because the pill changed women’s- in the old days, for better or for worse, whether you think it’s good or bad, the burden of parenthood in the event the girl got knocked up and the boy ran away was on the girl, period, end of story. It was a disgrace. The reason that the word bastard used to be a terrible thing that a child was a bastard, there was a good reason for it, was to prevent it from happening in the first place. In other words, yes, someone would suffer because of it, but the broader culture was much better off. Because of that, birth control pill changed everything. I was there, I lived the sexual revolution. It was a party, we screwed ourselves silly because no longer did girls have to marry as virgins. And also boys got laid a hell of a lot more. And this is still going on today, but look at the discussion of body count. Now here’s the issue with that.

[22:18] Number one, when you have a lot of sex, why does, I mean, I hate to get off into a little tangent, but why do so many men take Viagra? Why are there ads on TV for for hymns and they’re selling Viagra generically over TV? And the answer to that is sexual comparison. So women have enough partners that men going in fear that they’re being compared with God knows who. And it’s led to enormous sexual dissatisfaction because the popular cultural message is, you should find your soulmate, which is a bullshit term. There’s no such thing as a soulmate. There are millions of people out there that could be the right one. It’s just when you, if it’s the right time and you’re kind of mesh, you work on the relationship, but we’ve completely lost that because there’s no commitment. But you do know that men and women both do not need partners for sexual gratification.

[23:11] Well, I understand that, but that doesn’t change the fact that men are wildly promiscuous and women are wildly promiscuous today. That’s a fact. I mean, go on TikTok and have a good time. And, you know, it’s really, I mean, body count is not something when I, when I used to say body count, I’m a Vietnam era veteran, by the way, I was never in Vietnam. I was a Russian linguist. I was nowhere near Vietnam. I was just in the service at the time of Vietnam, but I knew tons of Vietnam veterans, body count men, how many people got killed. But today it’s how many people you’ve stooped. So the bottom line here is men and women used to marry as virgins. And in that case, most of the time, most men were virgins, most women were virgins. And if the man wasn’t a virgin, it’s because he was drafted. And when he was overseas, he had sex with a prostitute, but he wasn’t going to ever fall in love with that woman or bring her home to mama. Okay, he was going to marry a good girl. And a good girl was a virgin. And that meant there was no sexual experience virtually on either one of their parts. So when they have sex in a committed monogamous relationship, it’s kind of like pizza. There’s no such thing as bad pizza. Sex is great, but if you start comparing it to the best lover you ever had, it’s not.

[24:20] But if this is the pizza you’ve got and it’s great, marriages were far happier when people weren’t fucking everybody in sight. That’s not to say that people weren’t hypocrites, but there was even a reason for cultural hypocrisy, because to keep the fabric of of the culture intact, as it had been for the last 400,000 years of humanity, it was necessary to have some cultural control.

[24:47] One of the problems of progressivism, and I know you’re a progressive, and God bless you, and that’s fine. But one of the problems of it is it’s like a progressive will walk across a field, and he’ll come to a fence. And it’s in his way because he’s going somewhere else, so he’ll just pick it over. But there are three questions he never asks. Who put the fence up? Why did they put the fence up and who owns it? And if you don’t know the answer to all three of those, we have no business kicking over that fence because fences protect as much as they keep in. So we’ve knocked down fence after fence, after fence, after fence, without a moment’s thought to the impact. And the world we’re living in today where school and shooting are in the same sentence. Prior to 1964, the word school and shooting were never, literally never in the same sentence. The first school shooting was Columbine, okay? So we have let, and now it’s positively routine. I lived around the corner from the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I used to walk by it every day. That’s the one where the Nazi went in and killed all those Jews, okay? Never happened in the past, never, okay? It was, we have let the cultural.

[25:57] Torrent out of the bag and now because what really frightens me is the speed of technology and we have absolutely no defense against it. So now we’re going to go into an AI generation without a foundation on the houses that we live in. We have no moral background, we have no moral structure. Most people are secular, I’m secular. It’s a growing amount but actually that’s a mistake. Religion, traditional values are a defense that you can at least understand what’s going around you in context by universal lessons that are taught by religion. Listen, I’m a Jew. I know what happens. We’re the most persecuted people in history. Compared to us, Black people aren’t even close. They’re not even in the same ballpark. So I understand persecution as well as anybody, but I’m just going to tell you, we made an enormous mistake by moving secular. We just did. Now, again, we’re not going to put that horse back in the barn. That’s why I based the entire 1964 plan is based on stoicism and objectivism. And there are four pillars to stoicism, justice.

[27:02] Courage, moderation, and wisdom. We need a foundational philosophy. And by the way, most Western civilization has been patterned on stoicism. It’s the most important philosophy in history. The Stoics were among the first philosophers and it underpins almost every other philosophical discussion. Well, yeah, I don’t want to go that direction today. Okay, I get way too off. Go ahead.

[27:30] For more information about any of the topics covered in this episode, check out our show notes at secularleft.org.

[27:37] Music.

[27:43] But what I wanted to do though was to move on to where you talk about prison reform, And your plan includes isolating the worst offenders, Enforcing the rest into like a boot camp like environment like a military Environment and you claim that prisons are criminal universities.

[28:02] Why didn’t you get that degree Because I knew that when I got out I know how the game is played I knew perfectly well that I was going to recover I had no doubt in my mind that I was going to be able. I had a knowledge base of 40 plus years of experience growing up in a Jewish family where business is discussed the same way people discuss the flavor of popsicles. I mean, I grew up reading stock pages with my grandfather on his lap. So I have knowledge and skills that none of those boys had, none of them. And I had plenty of people that took the place of my mother’s divorced husband. I had numerous uncles and I had grandparents who stepped right up to the plate and cousins, first cousins. My mother was the youngest in the family by far. She was kind of a whoops baby. And so her nearest sister was like 20 years older than she was. And it was interesting because my first cousins were like big brothers and sisters to me. So I had a lot of advantages that these poor children don’t have. And it’s just not a comparison. I’m going to win no matter what, and I know that when I go into it. But that’s not, how can you have that expectation if you have no knowledge base whatsoever? Are you familiar with the Netherlands and the problem that they have with their prisons? No. They don’t have enough prisoners to fill the prisons.

[29:27] They’ve reduced their prison populations by addressing the root causes of the crime, Mental illness being a major factor and drugs being another. Wouldn’t your plan work just as well by diverting as many people as possible out of the jails and addressing their personal issues like mental health and the socio-economic issues? Like you had a safety net when you got out? The Netherlands population is less than the population of New York City, the entire country. Country. It’s racially homogeneous, largely. Yes, they have a Muslim population. And by the way, there is an enormous and growing right wing in Amsterdam because they’re getting tired of the Muslims aren’t assimilating into their culture. So there’s a movement in the Netherlands today to throw them out. Whether or not it will be successful, we’ll wait and see. This is not an area that I opine on, but that’s a fact.

[30:23] It’s the same reason why the welfare state works very well in Norway and it works very well in Sweden, They’re not socialist countries. They have they all abandoned socialism in 1981 because it doesn’t work, But they became a welfare state and it works because the largest Scandinavian country is sweden has nine million people that and they’re the biggest country and they’re racially homogeneous and everybody thinks the same way So when you impose a plan On that population you have a better chance of it working plus the government is much closer to the people so it’s much more answerable. The Netherlands, for example, doesn’t really have a strong president, they have a council and it’s almost a direct democracy because it’s so small. There’s just no parallel to the United States. Now, how I structured the plan after boot camp and for reward, I patterned on the Norwegian prison system.

[31:12] I absolutely reached out to where things could work, because you can’t punish people when they’re not bad, which is what routinely goes on today. Having said that, in this country, we have 340 million people, we are multiracial, we’re multicultural, and we’re tribalizing as we speak. There’s so much racial and tribal identity going on in the United States, the melting pot has been destroyed. Again, that’s because of the breakdown of culture. That should have never been allowed to happen, but it’s happened. Again, that horse is out of the barn. That’s the reason that I advocate, I don’t advocate the end of the welfare state, I advocate devolving it to the states. I advocate the end of the federal welfare state because Wyoming, their welfare program is not gonna resemble Florida, nor is New York State’s gonna resemble Arizona. It’s a completely different demographic, group of people, racial makeup, religious makeup. And the further government gets away from its own people, the worse it gets, because it has to use a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. And it becomes incredibly inefficient.

[32:19] The $32 trillion deficit has mostly been created since the year 2000. Yeah, could you explain that? Could you explain why you think that the welfare program should be catered to specific states? I mean, I don’t understand that. Yeah, I just said it. Because of the demographics of the individual states. So I’ll give you a very good example. Wyoming has less than a million people. I’ll use, they’re the least populous state. There are more cattle in Wyoming than there are people. They have virtually no need of a welfare state. Why are they even paying taxes for it? Now, if the people of Wyoming want to have a welfare state, go right ahead, but it will be a very small one. And it’ll be probably mostly private because it’s such a small state and it’s got the fewest percentage of black people in the country. It’s less than 5%. So they have a racially homogeneous population and they have a tiny population. It’s a very different. California, which would be the seventh largest country in the world, if it were a country, cannot have the same welfare system as Wyoming.

[33:20] Further, and the other danger here is, and you can’t ignore this, we are printing money out of thin air and it’s going to have to come to an end. Every state constitution requires a balanced budget at the end of the year. I also believe, and I didn’t include this in the plan, but I’ll just share this with you, I don’t think there should be a federal income tax. I think the states should have the burden of the income tax and tax their people for as much as the people want. For example, the people of Norway and Sweden and all the Scandinavian countries, the middle class tax rate is 56%. The middle class pays a higher tax rate than the wealthy or the poor because that’s where the money is. I know that it’s easy to say, look at that billionaire, but all of them together would pay six months. If we took all their money, it would pay six months of the interest on our national debt. It’s a ridiculous argument. It’s propaganda. The money is in the middle class. Those countries tax the middle class. The base tax rate is 56% for the lowest income earners, and it goes up as high as 95%. Now, why do they accept that? That’s not socialism. That’s a welfare state because it’s a good welfare state. They get great medical care. They get great childcare. It’s a good system. They’re happy with it. God bless them. I wouldn’t change it. All I’m saying is put the tax burden to the people that want the plan, and if they want to pay for it, God bless them. They’ll have a much better plan designing it for their state than trying to figure out how to make Mississippi happy in Fresno.

[34:46] Right. I just looked it up for Wyoming, and they have 1,172 adults and children receiving TANF, which is welfare. They have 13,000 children receiving food stamps. They have 34,000 earned income credit tax recipients. They have 1,800 families receiving childcare subsidies and households receiving federal rental assistance, 6,000. Yeah, because that’s how the federal government buys votes for the military industrial complex. Look, it’s bread and roses for the masses, okay? All I’m saying is most of it, we don’t- Herbie, Herbie, Herbie, Herbie, Herbie. Doug, I don’t know anything about Wyoming’s population individually, but I do know this, the system is played. No, see, what I see when people start talking, we need to devolve this to the states, is they just want to have a state where they don’t have to pay any taxes and people don’t get help. Just like we saw with what they did with abortion, because you have a few states that allow it and a few states that ban it.

[35:56] I personally approve of the 14th Amendment, where everybody gets treated the same, regardless of where they live. You’re taking that out of context, but that’s okay. Look. That’s what I mean. That’s why I think… By the way, I’m pro-choice, Doug. I know you said that I was anti-abortion. I’m pro-choice. I’ve always been pro-choice. No, you said in your white paper you were not in favor of abortion. No. No, I said that life began at conception, which is a fact. Okay, that’s all I said. No, that’s… Okay. All right. That’s… Okay. Okay. You can go read it again. That’s all I said. I said, I’m not going to- I know you said that. I literally said, I literally said, I’m not going to opine on abortion, but I do believe that life begins at conception. And that’s a factual statement, period. That’s a statement that you made, yes. Yeah, and that’s the only statement I made. So I want to be very clear. Well, I want to move, I know, got a lot to get in here. And I just want to kind of start to wind things down a little bit. Okay. I have a couple more questions. you have this plan and you have a nonprofit supporting it, what is your ultimate goal? What is your objective?

[37:01] Okay, if I’m wrong and the country goes along pretty much as it is now, and modern monetary theory is correct, and the national debt means nothing, and we go along, okay, it could be, I could be wrong. I’m not the furthest thing from perfect, God knows. If I’m wrong, what I’m doing now will be a complete and total waste of time, okay? Because it’s never gonna be broadly accepted. The people, when I go on shows on the right, boy, do they hate the legalization of drugs, which is a big part of the program. They hate it like they hate poison. But the reason it’s a great plan is there’s something for everybody to hate. And that’s why it’s not propaganda, it’s real. And it’s based on objective reality and it will only come true. And this is why, this is to answer your question, I believe the collapse is imminent. Imminent. I don’t think we’ll get to the next election without global economic collapse.

[37:58] Where it will come from, it could come from China, it could come from here. Right now, we’re in a terrible situation because, well, I won’t even get into it. That’s not the discussion here. But if that happens, then the radical becomes reasonable and people will instinctively be looking for something to grab onto. And demagogues will come forward and people that are dangerous, people like Trump, Trump will come forward with a whole bunch of simple solutions and he’ll try to make everything sound like it’s gonna be okay. People, by the way, I don’t know what he’s gonna say or even if he’ll be alive, you know, who only knows but people like him will come out of the woodwork and there has to be an alternative to that and that’s what I’m working on here. God knows I’m not simple. And then finally, is there anything that we have or haven’t discussed that you want listeners to know about you or your project.

[38:51] I do want to discuss that I’m in favor of total drug legalization. I wanted to make that very clear. Not decriminalization, not decriminalizing like alcohol, not replacing the cartels with the bureaucracy, legal like alcohol, an age that you have to be and all that good stuff. I do that because I know a lot about the drug business. I mean, more than I ever wanted to know and I’m telling you we’ll put the cartels out of business. The last people on Earth who want drugs legal are cartels because the government is literally protecting them from competition because it’s so expensive to avoid interdiction that the little guy can’t compete. There’s no free market in drugs. I’m just advocating open up the market and then take the enormous prison savings. When you say empty the prisons, that will lead to an 80% emptying of American prisons. I also believe there should be universal amnesty to everyone who’s in prison now on possession or sale, not violent crime. If you killed or beat somebody up, you got to serve it out. But all those people those millions of people that are in there for possession and sale We’ve turned a health problem into a criminal problem and that’s insane. There is no.

[39:59] Drugs do not cause crime drug laws cause crime And we have to I want to make that very clear and that’s a big part of it, too And baby, that’s the part that come after me on the right every single time, but you know what I can defend it, So I don’t care. All right, Okay Herbie, thank you very much for joining us today You gave us a lot to think about and like I said, I’ll have the information up in the show notes, so that people can check out the white papers and and read it themselves and and, See your intro video and all that stuff and I really appreciate there. Okay, Doug, You are a fair man and you listen and you ask good questions and I appreciate that and you know Like I said, I’m I’m not political. I don’t care vote for who you want in the next election They’re all morons as far as I’m concerned. So party on, you know, I like Trump just as little as I like Biden. Take your pick. So enjoy yourself and have a beautiful day. I, God bless America.

[40:57] Music.

Epilogue

[41:12] I hope you enjoyed my interview with Herbert Kay from the 1964 plan. We did kind of argue quite a bit, and there was a little bit of fireworks, and what I wanted to do is I wanted to give my last thoughts on the 1964 plan. He’s an objectivist. I don’t care for objectivists. Talks about stoicism and things like that. I really did have a problem with the claims that he’s making about single parents and that the root cause of crime is a lack of dads. I don’t believe that couples should be forced to remain married. I don’t believe that men should be forced to be fathers.

[42:01] Yeah, they should be responsible for children that they father, sure, but they shouldn’t be forced to marry the mother. They shouldn’t be forced to remain in a marriage. If either party, if the woman or the man, or if it’s a same-sex couple, if somebody wants to leave the relationship, they should be allowed to leave it without cause, really. I mean, that’s something That’s something that we as people, we should have the freedom to make those choices ourselves. He talks about it being, Herbie talks about it being all propaganda, the points that I made about it. And I’m just saying though, that when, like I told the story about my mom in 1963, and.

[42:55] That’s, women got the short end of it until the 70s, until they stood up and they said enough of this, you know. And you could tell he had old-fashioned ideas about men and women’s roles in relationships. You know, men are the discipline and women are the nurturers. That’s poppycock. That’s just old-fashioned. And he talks about and he makes a point several times, you know, I don’t want to go back to that time with for, you know, women, Suzy Homemaker and all that stuff. But what’s the logical conclusion, really? If you fantasize about how it was in 1964, when women couldn’t even have a credit card, they couldn’t even have a bank account. And that women that were getting divorced had to have a good reason to get divorced. And the man in the relationship could refuse, and the woman wouldn’t get a divorce.

[43:54] You know, it’s like if you, sometimes a woman would have a child out of wedlock, and you couldn’t force the man to acknowledge the baby. That was in the 60s. You know, men are held a lot more accountable today than they were in the 60s that he pines about.

[44:15] And I think, and the other thing too that I totally disagree is about the welfare lifestyle. There is no welfare lifestyle anymore. That was done away with in the 90s under President Bill Clinton when he had an agreement with the Republicans to do away with welfare as we know it. Now I did agree with Herbie about legalizing drugs, because that is a major reason why a lot of people are in jail today is for drugs. You know, unless you’re a drug kingpin who’s murdered people because of it, you really shouldn’t be years in prison. I mean, that’s just a simple fact. And I think the Netherlands, for prison reform, I think the Netherlands has a very good point. Now Herbie says, well, they’re small and they’re social, or used to be so, that has nothing to do with it. What it has to do with it, and what I fully believe is, that you have to address the root causes of the desperation that causes the crime.

[45:30] And until you do that, you’re going to fill up your prisons. You know, most of the people that are in prison today are in there because either they have a mental illness, an undiagnosed mental illness, or it’s for drugs.

[45:47] And he’s talking about, he made some pretty strong statements regarding demographics and too many children born from low-income people. And that really set me off because…

[46:06] We have a history of trying to make a pure society. If you want, I’m going to have a link up to eugenics. Really bad, really bad scientific thought called eugenics. In fact, it was borrowed by Adolf Hitler in order for him to justify the Holocaust. It came from the United States because we wanted to make a more perfect society. So that’s why I always question people like Herbie. You know, these people that want to make a perfect society. Women were happier when they weren’t able to get a divorce, and weren’t able to have sex whenever they felt like it. And, you know, it’s just wild thinking. Just wild thinking that just doesn’t fit in today’s mode. So again, I appreciate that he came on, and we talked, and judge for yourself, read his materials. I don’t recommend it. I don’t recommend the plan. I think it’s a bad plan, and it’s just a rehash of old stuff that we’ve heard and seen before.

[47:18] Thank you for listening to this episode. You can check out more information, including links to sources used in our show notes on our website at secularleft.us. Secular Left is hosted, written, and produced by Doug Berger and he is solely, responsible for the content. Send us your comments either using the contact form on the website or by sending us a note at comments at secularleft.us Our theme music is dank and nasty, composed using Amplify Studio.

[48:04] Music.