--:-- [Upbeat music fades out]
--:-- Host: John Bickley: The end of the shutdown sets the stage for a new battle on Capitol Hill, the fate of Obamacare.
--:-- Host: John Bickley: As pandemic-era subsidies head toward expiration, why are Democrats so insistent on saving them?
--:-- Host: John Bickley: The people that are watching, it's like, they're Democrats. We, we, we designed these to expire. This wasn't something the Republicans are taking. That's how we designed this.
--:-- Host: John Bickley: I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Friday, November 14th. This is Morning Wild.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: $49.8 million for the entire Halloween weekend domestically. You have to go back to the 90s again to find a box office that low for Halloween.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Hollywood suffers a monstrous slump in October, as big-name directors sound the alarm over what they say has become a broken system.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: And a federal contracting program meant to lift up minority-owned businesses finds itself in a swamp of fraud accusations.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.
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--:-- Host: John Bickley: Last year, Chevron increased U.S. production nearly 20 percent, powering communities and businesses from the heartlands to the coast.
--:-- Host: John Bickley: We're helping to fuel America's energy advantage, building a brighter future right here at home. Visit chevron.com slash America to discover more.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: With the shutdown finally ended, the fight between Democrats and Republicans over health care subsidies and the fate of Obamacare is only ramping up.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Here are the latest on the health care battle raging in D.C. is Daily Wire reporter Amanda Presta-Giacomo.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Hey, Amanda. So Democrats largely blame their unwillingness to reopen the government on health care. Republicans won that first round, but were nowhere near done.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: So first, walk us through these Obamacare subsidies, which are really at the heart of this issue.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Yeah, so these Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare subsidies, were expanded during COVID in 2021.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: The subsidies, which are technically tax credits, they were only supposed to last two years, but Democrats extended them once again, and now they're expiring at the end of this year.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Currently, there are about 24 million Americans who are on ACA plans. That's up from 11 million at the start of the pandemic, so a huge increase due in large part to these subsidies.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: It's estimated that about 42 percent of 2025 ACA enrollees pay less than $10 a month, with a vast majority paying nothing at all.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Notably, Democrats remove the income cap for subsidy eligibility. So people who are earning over 400 percent of the federal poverty level, they qualify for these subsidies as well.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Now, as for the cost of all of this, the Congressional Budget Office says that extending the subsidies through 2035, that would increase the federal deficit by about $358 billion.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Why are Democrats so insistent that these subsidies are the answer?
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Yeah, well, Democrats have been reports that they really want to make the midterms all about health care.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: And their message is that inaction from Republicans here will drive up health care costs for millions of Americans.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: I spoke to Ryan Long, a senior research fellow at Paragon Health Institute, to explain all of this.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: And he said that if these subsidies expire as scheduled, people on ACA plans will once again return to paying something, even if it's just a very small amount, instead of having access to these zero dollar plans.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: He said that those $0 plans actually have led to a lot of widespread fraud and abuse.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: At Paragon, we believe that there's upwards of 6 million people that aren't actually within that income category that are claiming credits as if they were in that income category.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: In certain states, there are three to four times as many people enrolled in 100 to 150 percent of poverty, these $0 plans, than there are people actually in those income brackets.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: So these COVID credits have just produced massive amounts of fraud.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: And Republicans they generally don't want to extend these subsidies
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: What are their arguments?
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Yeah, they want them to expire when the Democrats scheduled them to expire
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: They argue that Obamacare is a failure
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: It's in need of serious reforms or a whole new system
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Premiums, for example, they rose 143 percent in the first six years after the ACA took effect.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: And next year, premiums are set to rise another 26 percent.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: CMS administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, for example, he just recently went off on the many problems with Obamacare and how he sees American taxpayers effectively being cheated.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Today, it's over 11 million people who have Obamacare never used their policies, which means they often don't know they have it.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: And yet we're still stuck with the bill.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: When Obamacare was created, they take a step back because this is the original vision.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: 50 percent of the people on Obamacare were supposed to be paid for by the government.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: 50 percent were supposed to be spending their own money.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Now it's 95 percent government funded because we drove out all the private sector people by overpaying.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: As for the fate of Obamacare, President Trump has really amped up his calls to move on from the, quote, Obamacare madness.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Here's Trump on Wednesday.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: I'm calling today for insurance companies not to be paid, but for the money, this massive amount of money to be paid directly to the people of our country so that they can buy their own health care.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: Trump already seems to be getting a lot of support from congressional Republicans.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: In fact, Florida Senator Rick Scott says that he's writing up legislation to put this HSA-style account idea into action.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: All right, so maybe witnessing the beginning of the end of Obamacare here. We'll see.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Amanda, thanks so much for reporting.
--:-- Host: Amanda Presta-Giacomo: You're welcome.
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--:-- Host: John Bickley: Hollywood is in a major slump with October marking the worst box office revenues in nearly 30 years.
--:-- Host: John Bickley: Even Halloween weekend, usually a horror cash machine, failed to draw audiences.
--:-- Host: John Bickley: Here to explain what's ailing Tinseltown is Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: So Megan, not great news on the horizon for Hollywood right now.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: What's going on?
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: Yeah, Georgia. So as John said, this has been the worst October on record since 1997, with the exception, of course, of that COVID pandemic year when the theaters were all closed.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: But perhaps even more alarming is the fact that this was the worst Halloween weekend in 31 years.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: So really, nobody came out to theaters. Nobody got any of that box office revenue up.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: And I think a big culprit here is the fact that there were simply no must-see movies.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: Even those movies that had big stars and where Hollywood tried to generate a lot of buzz, well, audiences weren't really interested and the reviews were pretty mediocre.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: So just to go through some of them, Disney's Tron Aries opened to only $38 million.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: That was the franchise's worst debut.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: A24's The Smashing Machine with big A-lister Dwayne Johnson. You would expect that to go big. It didn't. It made only $11 million.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: And then there was the Bruce Springsteen biopic. A lot of people were excited for that, we thought, but it only made $9 million.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: So the total October take here was only $425 million.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: By comparison, The Joker made more than double that for the month of October alone just six years ago
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: That how bad things are
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: Now the first couple of releases that we're seeing in November aren't faring much better
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: A lot of people thought that Christie starring It Girl, Sydney Sweeney would blow up the box office, but turned out to be a major flop.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: You do have some people blaming politics on that, but I think that's probably a stretch.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: I would say more likely the explanation here is that Sydney Sweeney's core fan base of young men who liked to see her looking young and gorgeous were not so interested in seeing her play an unattractive tomboy type boxer.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: Veteran ComScore analyst Paul Daguerrebedian told finance outlet Cheddar News that without a couple of Japanese anime movies that actually outperformed expectations, the story here would be even worse.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: There was just nothing commercially exciting enough to mainstream audiences to drive them in huge numbers.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: And, you know, last year there was a Venom movie that opened at $50 million in October. We didn't have that this year.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: And so I think that definitely hurt the box office.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: Also, August was down about 25% over August of last year.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: September down only about 2%.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: You had The Conjuring in the mix there.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: Again, if not for those anime movies, we'd be looking at an even worse situation.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: So is this just the ongoing disruption we've talked about from streaming and or social media, or is there something more fundamental going on?
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: I mean, yes, obviously that kind of creative destruction is always playing a role, but not necessarily in the way that we think.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: So you're hearing from a lot of veteran filmmakers that are complaining that the way Hollywood does business is no longer the same.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: And it is much harder to get creative ideas greenlit than it was in the past.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: So because of that, what we're seeing is audiences getting kind of tired of seeing the same old safe scripts.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: So you have these well-known, well-established filmmakers, people like Michael Bay and James Cameron, complaining that creative ideas just aren't able to get across the finish line anymore.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: And they say that something bigger may be broken in Hollywood.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: In an interview just a few months ago, Bay voiced frustration over what he called a system afraid of risk.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: Now, we're talking about somebody who is the king of big blockbusters, and even he now says that he's turning to independent filmmaking so that he can be more creative.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: He said that Cameron told him that no individual executives are empowered to greenlight those creative ideas anymore.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: And so the result is too many sequels, too few original ideas, and a growing reliance on the algorithm to decide what gets made.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: Well, and if you look at social media comments, it's all about the lack of creativity.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Megan, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Host: Megan Basham: Yeah, my pleasure.
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--:-- Host: John Bickley: The Trump administration is turning its eye on a long-running DEI program that may be one of Washington's most corrupt.
--:-- Host: John Bickley: The federal government awards a percentage of contracts based on the company's owners being, quote, socially disadvantaged.
--:-- Host: John Bickley: But they may not even be the ones doing the work.
--:-- Host: John Bickley: Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Rosiak joins us to discuss.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: Hey, John.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: So you've been digging into this. What exactly is going on here?
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: Hey, John. So this is a program called 8A Contracting or Set-Aside Contracting, where certain contracts, which could be tens of millions of dollars, are either given to one company with no competition outright or limited so that only, quote, disadvantaged companies are eligible to bid on them.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: And so basically racial minorities and also women-owned companies.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: So right off the bat, when you're not competing for contracts, you're not getting the best price or the most qualified company.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: So this lessens competition and potentially quality of the work that produced
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: Exactly
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: In fact I argue that a lot of the poor performance we see in the federal government like websites that seem like they out of the 1990s is because of this
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: This has been the way that things worked in Washington for decades.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: Everybody kind of gets their piece.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: Disabled veterans, which veterans like.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: Alaska Native corporations, which shores up support from Republican lawmakers from that state.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: And then the big non-minority-owned companies who wind up actually doing a lot of the work as subcontractors or like 49% owners.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: So James O'Keefe had a great expose last month, you might have seen, where an official from one such company called ATI Government Solutions seemed to admit to just that.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: So the new contract is basically close to 100 million.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: What's the percentage that ATI will retain from that 100 million?
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: 65 for us being the prime.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: And you pay these like a centrist to do the job.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: And so it's really minimal work.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: Yes.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: Honestly, that's really, in reality, that's what's happened.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: So this is a company that gets contracts because it's owned by Native Americans in part.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: But of course, the guy we just heard speaking, well, he's the wrong kind of Indian.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: If you look at ATI's website, all the executives actually seem to be white.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: The website is almost entirely focused on selling the idea that it's easier for government officials to just skip the annoying parts of their job, running a competition to find the best company to do something.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: And also it's good for big companies because they can have a shortcut to getting these big contracts by working with or partnering with this Indian company, which basically has an automatic in because of its part ownership.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: All right, so the Varane is sort of a perfect little loop here where everyone seems to benefit.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: So what are officials saying about this?
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: So Kelly Loeffler, the head of the Small Business Administration, said there's a full review of the 8A program underway and that it's already found institutionalized abuse to the tune of billions of dollars.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: She said that ATI's CEO, a guy named Firmage Crutchfield, has a network of seven different companies, all of which has been suspended from receiving new contracts, and she says their names have been provided to law enforcement.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: Senator Joni Ernst, who's chair of the Senate Small Business Committee, said the Biden administration tripled the goal for minority set-asides from 5 to 15 percent and did little to make sure those companies were actually doing the work instead of serving as what they call pass-throughs.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: Ernst said, quote, small businesses contracting programs were never intended to function as welfare systems for favored classes or give no-bid contracts to do-nothing companies.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: Over the decades, penalties against rule breakers have not been swiftly and resolutely imposed.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: I will say I've been documenting these pass-through schemes and these problems with minority contractors for more than a decade, and they continue to go on even in the first Trump administration.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: In my opinion, there wasn't much deterrence.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: Now, the Trump administration is also rewriting the federal acquisition regulations, which is a big deal, even though it's kind of wonky inside Washington stuff.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: But so far, I haven't seen anything in those rewrites that would abolish this category outright.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: Well, 5% to 15% of all federal contracting dollars is a big number.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: So I'm glad they're at least taking a look at fraud.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Luke, thanks so much for digging into this and coming on.
--:-- Host: Luke Rosiak: Anytime.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Thanks for waking up with us.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: And if you're listening to the show, now you can watch us for free on Daily Wire+.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: We'll be back later this evening with more news you need to know.
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--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: You could buy one while they're still available.
--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Or you could win ours.
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--:-- Host: Georgia Howe: Good luck.
