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Sept. 13, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
43:03
Is The Blue Tide a Mirage? | Ep. 1573
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New polling suggests that blue tide may be a mirage.
The New York Times issues a long scathing attack on Hasidic Jewish schools in New York.
And Russia is on the run.
But what if Vladimir Putin uses a nuke?
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Bench Bureau Show.
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Well, the brand new inflation data is out and it's really, really bad.
The inflation data from Joe Biden's administration continues to just buck all expectations that the Fed was going to bring this thing Under control.
You're talking about 8.3% inflation out today.
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Well, for a while here, the polls have been suggesting that this congressional election is going to be a lot closer than originally thought.
The suggestion was that Republicans, six months ago, were going to run away with this thing.
Now, it looks as though it's a lot more even.
The latest polls show, the last five polls show NPR Has the Democrats up in the generic congressional poll 4 points.
Insider Advantage has the Democrats up 1.
Economist YouGov has the Democrats up 6.
Rasmussen has Republicans up 4.
And Trafalgar has Republicans up 6.
And that sort of gap suggests that there may be a polling sample problem here.
This is a point that is made by Nate Cohen over at the New York Times.
He's pointing out that the polling data seems to be skewed toward Democrats in a very similar way to how it was skewed toward Democrats in 2020.
Now, here's the reality.
Even The Economist, which is polling at Democrats plus four.
Even The Economist is suggesting that Republicans have about a 75% shot at taking the House.
They're suggesting about a 75% shot that Democrats take the Senate.
I'm going to suggest that it's like a 50-50 shot that Republicans take the Senate and about a 98% shot that Republicans take the House.
Now again, those numbers are just coming directly from nowhere, but if I were to just put money on it, I would say that the Republicans have a decent shot of taking the Senate and I would say they have an overwhelming shot.
of taking the House at this point.
Nate Cohen points out that there seems to be a trend of polling errors over the course of the last several years.
He says, ahead of the last presidential election, we created a website tracking the latest polls.
Internally, we called it a polling diary.
Despite a tough polling cycle, one feature proved to be particularly helpful, a table showing what would happen if the 2020 polls were as wrong as they were in 2016, when pollsters systematically underestimated Donald Trump's strength against Hillary Clinton.
The table proves eerily prescient.
Here's what it looked like on Election Day in 2020, plus a new column with the final result.
As you can see, the final results were a lot like the poll estimates, with 2016-like poll error.
We created this poll error table for a reason.
Early in the 2020 cycle, we noticed Joe Biden seemed to be outperforming Mrs. Clinton in the same places where the polls overestimated her four years earlier.
That pattern didn't necessarily mean that the polls would be wrong.
It could have just reflected Biden's promised strength among white working-class voters, for instance, but it was a warning sign.
That warning sign is flashing again.
Democratic Senate candidates are outrunning expectations in the same places where the polls overestimated Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016.
Wisconsin is a good example, says Nate Cohn.
On paper, the Republican Senator Ron Johnson ought to be favored to win re-election.
The 538 Fundamentals Index, for instance, makes him a two-point favorite.
Instead, the polls have exceeded the wildest expectations of Democrats.
The state's gold standard Marquette Law School survey even showed Democrat Mandela Barnes leading Johnson.
By 7 percentage points.
But in this case, good for Wisconsin Democrats might be too good to be true.
The state was ground zero for survey error in 2020, when pre-election polls proved too good to be true for Mr. Biden.
In the end, the polls overestimated Biden by about 8 percentage points.
Nearly enough, Barnes is faring better than expected by a similar margin.
The Wisconsin data is just one example of a broader pattern across the battlegrounds.
The more the polls overestimated Biden last time, the better Democrats seem to be doing relative to expectations.
So in other words, where the polls were wrong about Biden, it seems like the polls are doing the same thing with Democrats in the 2022 cycle.
Conversely, Democrats are posting less impressive numbers in some of the states where the polls were fairly accurate two years ago, like in Georgia.
If you put this relationship on a chart, you see a consistent link between Democratic strength today and polling error two years ago, which raises the possibility that the apparent Democratic strength in Wisconsin and elsewhere is a mirage, an artifact of persistent and unaddressed biases in survey research.
If the polls are wrong yet again, it won't be hard to explain.
Most pollsters haven't made significant methodological changes since the last election, says Nate Cohn.
The major polling community post-mortem declared it was impossible to definitively ascertain what went wrong in the 2020 election.
The pattern of Democratic strength isn't the only sign the polls might still be off in similar ways.
Since the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision on abortion Some pollsters have said they're seeing the familiar signs of non-response bias when people who don't respond to a poll are meaningfully different from those who participate creeping back into their surveys.
In other words, people who are very motivated about abortion are the ones who stay online for the polling surveys.
And people who just don't like Joe Biden very much are the ones who are saying, no, I don't feel like talking to you.
I have a job.
Brian Stryker, a partner at Impact Research, Biden is a client, told me his polling firm was getting a ton of Democratic responses in recent surveys, especially in the familiar places where the polls have aired in recent cycles.
So it's possible that what we are watching here is a bit of a mirage.
So if this were the case, right, if what we are looking at is Senate polling with the 2020 poll, like poll error, what you would see is Democrats probably winning in Colorado, probably winning in Pennsylvania, although by less, winning in Arizona.
Basically, Nevada would be dead even.
Georgia would be dead even.
Wisconsin would be plus four Republican.
North Carolina would be Republican.
Ohio and Florida would be Republican by large margins.
So that means that the race for Senate control would be extremely competitive, right?
So what I'm saying, it's like a 50-50 shot.
It sounds a lot more like that.
And by the way, I think that some of those races are going to get a lot closer.
I've been saying for a while, the race between Mehmet Oz and John Fetterman is going to get a lot closer because Fetterman is a horror show of a candidate.
The race in Arizona seems like that one is growing out of reach for Republicans.
That one could get closer as well.
Pennsylvania, I think, is almost certain to get closer.
I'd be shocked, actually, if Adam Laxalt doesn't win in his race against Catherine Cortez Masto, the Democratic Party senator from Nevada, who is up in a very tight election race right now.
So what we could have been talking about here, you know, this giant Democratic surge, it could be that there's been a surge.
It could be that the polling is moving in Democrats' favor.
It could also be That there is a significant polling error that has yet to be taken account of.
And there's some data to back this, especially if Republicans do what they've been doing the last couple of weeks, and they stop focusing in on, for example, Donald Trump and the FBI.
I've been suggesting for a couple of weeks now, as the Democrats were drawing closer in the generic ballot, as they're drawing ahead by many polls, that the Republicans were making a large-scale mistake by focusing in on the FBI and Donald Trump.
That is not a referendum on whether the FBI did the right thing in raiding Donald Trump's house.
That's not a referendum on whether the DOJ is correct to be pursuing an indictment of Donald Trump.
All I'm saying is that as a political matter, it is a major mistake for Republicans to focus in on an issue where Republicans are largely motivated and so are Democrats, but Democrats way more than Republicans.
Like if Trump is on the ballot in 2022, that does not bode well for Republicans.
There's some new polling out today, actually, from an organization called WPA Intelligence.
And what this poll shows is exactly what I'm talking about.
Overall, they have Democrats plus two in the generic ballot, Democrats plus three with likely voters.
But what we are seeing is that on the issues Republicans win.
When it comes to Trump and the FBI, Republicans get themselves in trouble.
So Trump's favorables among independents, for example, he's at minus 32 among independent voters.
Biden's favorable among independents.
You know, a lot of people say, well, yeah, but Biden's the president.
Yeah, Biden's favorable among independents.
Minus 22.
So what that shows is, again, Biden is actually more favorable among independents than Trump is among moderates, so-called moderates in the voting base.
Trump's favorables are minus 42.
Biden is at underwater by just five points.
So if Trump is made the point of comparison in 2022 for Republicans, they're going to be in serious trouble in the Senate and it's going to hurt them pretty badly in the House.
Same thing is true by the FBI, by the way.
Overall, the FBI still has a plus 22 favorability rating.
So making that the top of your issue pile is a big mistake.
For Republicans.
Now, on the fundamentals of the election, the Republicans are still way ahead.
By a 61 and 39 margin, voters say they would rather live in Florida than California if they were given a choice, for example.
Even almost 50% of pro-choice voters in this poll say that they would limit abortions to 15 weeks or earlier.
So on a lot of the issues, Republicans actually have the advantage.
By the way, a lot of Democrats are just misinformed.
This poll shows that 52% of Democrats believe that the Supreme Court outlawed abortions, which, of course, is incredibly silly.
So a majority of Democrats, according to that poll, actually believe something that is overtly false, that the Supreme Court outlawed abortions.
Nearly half of Democrats, by the way, believe that Russia stole the 2016 election, which demonstrates that election denial is a bipartisan phenomenon.
74% in this poll of college-educated Democratic women believe that Florida banned the word gay in all schools, which, of course, is not true.
So, you know, what this polling data shows is, again, that what we could be seeing here, especially if Republicans reorient, which is something that it seems like they've been doing for the past couple of weeks, if Republicans reorient, Democrats could still have a world of hurt on their hands come the election cycle.
And some of these races, I mentioned the Fetterman race because again, that one seems to me like a really low hanging fruit for Republicans.
All Mehmet Oz has to do is just put the focus squarely back on John Fetterman.
The simple fact that John Fetterman is an extraordinarily radical candidate who also happens to resemble Uncle Fester and happens to have had a stroke that seems to have prevented his ability to speak publicly.
Plus, he's just a bad candidate overall.
I mean, these are all factors militating against making a man who's been a career useless person but does wear Carhartt sweatshirts.
a senator. This guy is, he's unbelievably bad at this. And the fact that he's been treated by the media as somehow good at this is astonishing to me. I mean, yesterday, for example, John Fetterman, actually it was over the weekend, on September 11th, he did an abortion rally basically on September 11th, which is what you do on September 11th, apparently, if you're a Democrat in Pennsylvania. And he was wearing his fabled Carhartt hoodie, because he's one of you.
He's one of the people, a person whose parents have basically supported him through his mid-40s, and who is the mayor of a town of 1,800 people with a salary of under $2,000 per year, living in an apartment that he bought for $1 from his sister. And John Fetterman declared himself John Fetterwoman on the campaign trail over the weekend, which, ladies, you can have him.
My name is John Fetterwoman.
That's part of that clip.
If you can't see it, John Fetterman looks down, he's holding a pink shirt that says John Fetterwoman, like an adult.
And he looks down at the shirt to remind himself that it says Fetterwoman.
Now, this is not a hard joke to remember.
His literal name is Fetterman.
All he has to do is add a woe in front of the man to get John Fetter Woman.
But he has to literally look down physically at the shirt.
He's not in great shape here.
He has to look physically down at the shirt to remind himself that he is supposed to say, Fetter Woman.
This is the person you want in the United States Senate if you are the people of Pennsylvania?
Really?
This person?
And again, listen, health problems are sad and difficult.
Also, they can absolutely be disqualifying for higher office, obviously.
You didn't have a doctor in your life making fun of it, making light of it, or telling you that you're not fit to be served.
Can you describe a stroke and what's happened?
So it's such the most important race for the Senate here for 22.
We have to replace Pat Toomey.
Senator Toomey was not very nice to me.
Pat Toomey is a miracle.
He had a chance.
He had a chance.
To match me up again, abortion is the ballot now in November.
What?
My goodness.
That is hard to watch.
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Even the Washington Post is like, this guy might not be able to be a senator.
The Washington Post editorial board put out a full-scale piece today talking about how John Fetterman needs to debate more than once for the Senate to demonstrate that he's actually fit for the office.
Quote, The race might well determine which party controls the Senate.
Voters would benefit from seeing the two candidates exchange ideas and test each other.
Mr. Fetterman has seemingly been reluctant to commit to firm debate dates.
That troubling stance has raised questions about whether he's still recovering from a serious stroke, is fit to serve in the Senate.
After suffering a stroke in May, Fetterman was off the campaign trail for three months and has campaigned little since then.
He held a rally on Sunday.
Oz has pressed for five debates.
Fetterman, Dodge, and Duck before tentatively agreeing last week to one, but not until sometime until the middle to end of October.
That is well after September 19th, when voters can start casting mail-in ballots.
It's short of the two debates that have been the standard during recent competitive Senate contests in Pennsylvania.
So what he's trying to do is run out the clock.
He's saying, I'll do a debate like the day before the polls open permanently.
You know, the actual live polls open.
We'll do the debate then.
But not when the early ballots are coming in, which is what Democrats are counting on.
This is the Washington Post editorial board, okay?
Not Daily Wire editorial board.
Since returning to the campaign trail, Mr. Fetterman has been halting in his performances.
He stammers, appears confused, keeps his remarks short.
He's held no news conferences.
Fetterman acknowledges his difficulties with auditory processing, which make it hard for him to respond quickly to what he's hearing.
He receives speech therapy, and we wish him a speedy, full recovery, but the lingering unanswered questions about his health, underscored by his hesitation to debate, are unsettling.
Well, yeah.
Apparently, he had been diagnosed in 2017 with cardiomyopathy.
He had a pacemaker with a defibrillator implanted after the stroke.
The campaign's response to questions about Fetterman's health is to point to a doctor's note released more than 14 weeks ago which said he should be able to campaign and serve in the United States Senate without a problem if he takes his medications and exercises.
But that's not good enough because, again, he is on the campaign trail and we can see that he is not functioning the way that you need a senator to function.
The fact that he is avoiding a debate is pretty obvious.
By the way, he's not the only one avoiding a debate.
In terms of gubernatorial races, right now, Katie Hobbs, who is the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Arizona trying to replace Doug Ducey, she's running against Carrie Lake.
Carrie Lake is running dead even with her.
And Katie Hobbs, who has no excuse at all, is now denying debates with Carrie Lake, specifically because Carrie Lake is really good on TV.
She's a newscaster.
According to TheCentralSquare.com, Katie Hobbs will be the first candidate for Arizona governor in decades to refuse an invitation to debate her opponent in a state commission organized event.
Hobbs, the current Democratic Secretary of State, announced on Sunday she would respectfully decline the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission invitation to reach terms on debating her Republican opponent, former Fox 10 anchor Carrie Lake.
No other candidate running for office in November had declined an invitation, nor has any candidate for governor done so since the commission began holding debates in 2002.
She's obviously avoiding a debate because Carrie Lake is going to clock her.
Carrie Lake, again, is very good on TV and Katie Hobbs is going to get shown up.
Meanwhile, in some of the races that Democrats are considering competitive, these are not competitive races.
So for example, in the gubernatorial race in Florida, Ron DeSantis is running away with that race.
Anybody who tells you differently is lying to you.
Ron DeSantis is way ahead.
Any polls that suggest that Charlie Crist is running within three, two, one points of Ron DeSantis has never visited the state of Florida.
This is not a reality.
And one of the reasons for that is because, aside from the fact that Charlie Crist has literally run on the ballot of every party in the United States, there are parties that have yet to be invented where Charlie Crist is preparing to run.
But Charlie Crist is a terrible candidate.
And Ron DeSantis is a very popular governor.
I mean, how bad is Charlie Crist as a candidate?
He's out there saying things like this on the campaign trail.
We got a divider on the other side and a uniter over here.
You know, some people call him DeSatan.
Have you heard that?
That's one of the nicer ones.
Indeed it is.
I'm trying to be nice.
DeSatan versus that.
Oh, think about it.
Boom!
the Satan versus Christ.
That's the joke that he's making because he's like a he's like a Jesus like figure.
Charlie Christ.
Mm hmm.
And Rhonda sense is Rhonda Satan.
He's so bad at this.
Anybody who tells the AARP is suggesting that this race is within three points.
This race is not within three points.
I'm sorry.
Not even.
No, the answer is no.
That you want to talk polling error.
That is a massive polling error.
Meanwhile, as I mentioned over in Nevada, people are sleeping on the Republican threat to take Cortez Masto's seat in Nevada.
Even NBC News is catching on to this.
Say, in a volatile midterm election where Democrats have unexpectedly taken the lead in crucial battleground states, Republicans have found a glimmer of hope in their quest to seize control of the Senate.
Eight weeks before election day, they're within striking distance of capturing the seat long held by late Democratic titan Harry Reid before Senator Catherine Cortez Masto won it in 2016.
Cortez Masto may be the most endangered Democratic incumbent in this cycle, even though her party hasn't lost a Senate race here in a decade.
While Democrats are still projecting confidence, polls show a dead heat despite massive spending by Cortez Masto and an early assault of negative ads designed to tarnish rival Adam Laxalt.
This is definitely our best opportunity at any point in the last 14 years, said Jeremy Hughes, Republican consultant who's worked on many Nevada races.
Hughes cited GOP gains in voter registration, a trend of Hispanic voters drifting away from Democrats, rising gas prices and food as the key forces propelling Republicans.
In an interview, Cortez Masto, who eked out her first Senate victory here by 2.4 points in 2016, acknowledged she had her work cut out for her if she wants to keep her seat.
She said Nevada's races are always competitive.
I'm not going to take anything for granted, and you can't either.
Okay, well, again, she should not take that seat for granted, considering the fact that Adam Laxalt is a very good candidate.
He is running a strong race against her.
There are some other races, by the way, that seem a lot more competitive than people are sleeping on.
I mean, the Colorado Senate race right now.
That is a possible win for the Republicans, despite the fact that Colorado has turned pretty significantly blue.
Republican Joe O'Day is running very competitively against Michael Bennett right now.
According to the latest polls, Bennett has the lead.
But again, these polls are within the margin of error.
I mean, there's one poll showing Bennett at 48 and O'Day at 47 with 5% undecided, according to the Washington Examiner.
There are a lot of close races out there, so this is why I'm saying.
And I think that a lot of the pessimism is starting to wane as, again, the focus moves off of Trump and back onto the key issues.
Which, by the way, is one of the reasons why you're seeing so many leaks from the DOJ.
Anybody who believes the DOJ and the FBI are apolitical, why are all the leaks always in one direction?
Why?
So apparently the Justice Department is subpoenaing Trump administration officials.
Well, how are you going to know if somebody arrives at your door to deliver a subpoena to you?
I mean, I don't know how you voted, but there's a decent shot that might happen under Merrick Garland's DOJ.
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Speaking of which, another leak again today.
This one about the DOJ going after officials surrounding Donald Trump.
According to DNYU's Justice Department officials have seized the phones of two top advisors to former President Trump and blanketed his aides with about 40 subpoenas in a substantial escalation of the investigation into his efforts to subvert the 2020 election, people familiar with the inquiry said on Monday.
And how many anonymous sources can leak information about this investigation before you start to doubt the political non-partisanship of these agencies?
The leaks are the story in many of these cases.
The content of the leaks doesn't actually forward this.
Like, okay, so you subpoenaed people.
Does that mean that they're guilty?
Or does that mean you're gathering information?
We've had leak after leak after leak in the Donald Trump documents.
We had the pictures of the documents on the floor.
We had the accusations that were nuclear documents.
We had leaks of the back and forth between Trump and the DOJ and all the rest of this.
The leaks themselves demonstrate how partisan these law enforcement agencies really are.
And now you have this leak as well.
The kind of slow drip leading up to the election, I have very little doubt that's an attempt by members of the DOJ and the FBI to shift the midterm elections away from the Republicans.
The seizure of the phones coupled with a widening effort to obtain information from those around Mr. Trump after the 2020 election represents some of the most aggressive steps the department has thus far taken in its criminal investigation into the actions that led to the January 6th, 2021 assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
The extent of the investigation, according to DNYU's has come into focus in recent days, even though it has often been overshadowed by the government's legal clash with Trump and his lawyers over a separate inquiry into the handling of presidential records.
Federal agents with court-authorized search warrants took phones last week from at least two people, Boris Epstein, an in-house counsel who helps coordinate Trump's legal efforts, and Mike Roman, a campaign strategist who was the director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign in 2020.
The names of those receiving the latest rounds of subpoenas in the investigation have dribbled out gradually.
Oh, have they?
I mean, almost as though it is a public relations campaign.
The New York Times, by the way, first reported this.
So, yeah, I mean, it seems as though pretty obviously there is an attempt being made to redirect the conversation back toward Donald Trump.
There's a reason for that, and that's because if the conversation is not about Donald Trump, Democrats are in real trouble.
And Joe Biden out on the campaign trail is not a boon for Democrats.
Joe Biden is out there on the campaign trail, for example, talking about how inflation eased.
You feeling that easing in inflation?
Are you?
You feel like you're spending less at the grocery store?
It turns out that gas prices have eased, but food prices are still up.
When gas prices go down fairly dramatically, as they have over the past couple of months, some of that is due to lack of demand.
Some of that is due to the Interest rate increases that have taken money out of people's pockets.
And there are a lot of reasons for the decline in gas prices.
Very little of it has to do with, for example, Joe Biden releasing from the Strategic Petroleum Reserves, which are now at an all-time low.
When Joe Biden is out there bragging about inflation decreases, you're certainly not feeling that at the supermarket.
When the gas prices go down but inflation remains high, that's because the other items in that basket of goods that define inflation have gone up in price.
Here is Joe Biden trying to brag about his inflation record.
Good luck with this one.
We're seeing hopeful signs of progress on inflation as well.
The price of gas, when we said what I was doing wouldn't make any difference, guess what?
It's down $1.30 since the start of the summer and continues to go down.
Inflation eased in July.
That is not, that is, it is not his policies.
I mean, I'm going to need to see a relationship between the stuff Joe Biden has done and the easing of gas prices, because those are not related.
He did not get additional gas out of OPEC.
He did not increase the amount of supply in the United States.
He has not relieved regulations.
He released some from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Some of that actually went to China.
Again, lack of demand is largely what explains the decline in oil prices.
So, the Federal Reserve is responsible for that.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is still out there pretending that he can cure cancer.
I mean, the guy can't even talk and he's saying he can cure cancer.
It's amazing.
Cancer does not discriminate.
Red and blue.
It doesn't care if you're a Republican or a Democrat.
Beating cancer is something we can do together.
And that's why I'm here today.
He's been talking about this cancer moonshot thing.
It's one of the great bugaboos of my political life is when politicians get up there and they say, this problem that no one is able to solve because it is one of the deepest and most difficult problems in science.
We could all solve it if we only had the sufficient will and poured enough money into it.
It's like, dude, that's not how science works.
At all, at all, at all.
But again, this is the person the Democrats have chosen to make the face of their party.
And they're going to have to deal with that.
And then secondarily, the other face of their party is Kamala Harris, who's also terrible at this.
She's been spending the last week out there talking about how people who oppose her are extremists who trumpet quote-unquote so-called freedom.
When people use the phrase so-called freedom to describe actual freedom, you should start to get a little bit frightened.
The stakes could not be higher.
You know, right now, extremist so-called leaders are trumpeting the rhetoric of freedom while they restrict and systematically attempt to take away freedoms.
This is what you're going to run on?
Okay, good luck.
The people who didn't want to mask up the children and wanted all the kids to go back to school, those are the people who are the true threat to your freedom.
Meanwhile, again, his economic policy is going to be the one that is going to be front and center in the 2022 elections.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Stocks are riding a tentative recovery with the S&P 500 up 1.1% on Monday, but whether they can keep their momentum hinges in part on how earnings season plays out next month.
Analysts have now cut their estimates for third quarter earnings growth by 5.5 percentage points since June 30th.
According to John Butters, senior earnings analyst at FactSet, that is more than usual.
It marks the biggest cut since the second quarter of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns brought economic activity to a standstill.
So they're saying that basically all of these companies are going to stop making money.
Companies have also been looking increasingly pessimistic lately.
A total of 240 companies in the S&P 500 mentioned recession on their post-earnings conference calls for the last quarter.
That is the most ever.
In fact, that's data going all the way back to 2010.
The markets have been resilient, hoping that this is going to be kind of a short and shallow recession.
But the simple fact is that if the earnings go down more than people expect, that could turn really quickly.
Investors say markets have been able to hold their ground lately, in part because companies are still expected to report modest earnings growth through the rest of the year.
Other data points, such as employment and consumer spending, have continued to show strength in the economy.
But many caution stocks' recent gains look vulnerable, should data take a turn for the worse in the coming months.
David Greshak, Managing Director and Investment Strategy and Research at Aspirant.
He says, you've got this really unpleasant combination of very high inflation, an economy that's already slowing down, and a central bank that's tightening policy rapidly.
Stock valuations also remain elevated, said Mr. Greshak.
This is one of the problems.
And the simple fact is that if the stock market has already taken a pretty significant hit over the first half of the year, based on inflationary policy, based on the fact that the earnings are not high enough, as the earnings reports start to lower, the stocks are going to readjust.
Remember, if the P.E.
ratios on these stocks remain stable, but the earnings go down, right?
The price earnings ratios, if the earnings go down and the price earnings ratio remains stable, the price of the stock is also going to go down.
So you will see a stock decline.
The S&P 500 trades at 17 times its next 12 months of expected earnings.
According to FATSAT, that is below its five-year average, but above where it was at the end of the second quarter due to the fact that stock prices have risen while earnings estimates have fallen.
Mr. Greshek said, all things considered, it doesn't really feel like a great time to be adding risk here.
The S&P 500 is already down 14% for the year.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs is cutting hundreds of jobs, which is a sign, obviously, that the markets are ready to boom.
I'm being sarcastic.
Goldman Sachs is preparing to lay off hundreds of staffers as soon as next week, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The job cuts are part of the bank's annual performance reviews that have been suspended during the pandemic, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Goldman reinstated those reviews earlier this year following a slump in Wall Street dealmaking activity.
Goldman had 47,000 employees on staff at the end of June, up from 41,000 a year earlier.
After a record-setting 2021, the industry-wide slump in mergers and new IPOs has hit Goldman's bottom line this year.
Second quarter investment banking revenue fell 41% from a year ago.
Goldman's profit fell by nearly half in that same period.
Well, yeah, as the inflation gets taken out of the economy, a lot of that speculation goes away as well.
And that means that Goldman gets hit.
So again, when Goldman Sachs is cutting jobs, that is not a wonderful sign for the economy.
Meanwhile, a U.S.
rail strike is looming.
So the Biden administration's preferred policy of boosting unions is actually going to turn around and clock it right in the face.
It turns out that when you give unions disproportionate power, they can hold up the United States economy.
It's one of the least covered stories.
In the media, the Washington Post has a good piece on it today for, I think, the biggest and best piece on this.
President Biden apparently made calls to union leaders and rail companies on Monday, pressing for a deal to avert a national railroad strike that is days away from shutting down much of the country's transportation infrastructure.
You like supply chain bottlenecks?
Get ready for the freight trains to stop running.
Biden administration officials have also started preparing for a potential shutdown, warning a strike could seriously damage the United States economy, as well as hurt Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Oh, you mean that, um, the alligator that you were riding on turned around and started to eat you?
Biden administration?
Those unions who were your friends, it turns out that they want a chunk of you?
Shocker.
Biden's calls follow unsuccessful emergency meetings at the White House last week, which have been led by the White House National Economic Council and included Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, The most indispensable person in the administration, who just went absent for several months and no one noticed, is also involved in trying to broker the impasse, said the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about internal deliberations.
The stalemate pits two of Biden's top priorities against each other.
The president has been an adamant defender of union workers, but does not want a breakdown in the nation's transportation infrastructure that would disrupt commuter and passenger services.
The administration has basically no time to act.
The nationwide rail shutdown is set to go into effect after midnight on Friday.
Labor and management have been at an impasse over difficult issues like sick time and penalties for missing work.
It would be the first such strike in about three decades.
Amtrak is already warning passengers interruptions will begin Tuesday on its national network.
The passenger railroad said it's pulling trains on three long-distance routes to avoid possible passenger disruptions while on the routes.
The freight industry warns the strike would shut down 30% of the country's freight and halt most passenger and commuter rail services.
A freight railroad shutdown could devastate Amtrak operations, according to the Association of American Railroads.
Oh, I'm shocked.
You mean that when you empowered all of these unions and they decided that they wanted more from you, that that's bad?
No.
No!
It's just shocking.
By the way, biggest news of the day, biggest expectations of the news for the day, is a worse-than-expected inflation report less than two months away from the midterms.
The consumer price index was expected to rise 8.1% Instead, CPI rose 8.3% year-over-year for August.
So, all that talk that Joe Biden was saying about how he had stabilized inflation, what that means is that the Federal Reserve has been attempting to raise those interest rates and cut down on inflation, and they were trying to get to this sort of lukewarm state where they could gradually increase the inflation rates and prevent the economy from falling into recession.
They're gonna have to slam on the brakes.
Grocery prices keep going up, according to Neil Irwin.
It was the chief economic correspondent at Axios.
Another 0.7% rise in food at home, up 13.5% over the last year.
13.5% increase in the price of food over the course of one year.
These are bad, bad numbers for the Democrats.
And what you're going to see right now is the stock market take a serious dive.
Because the stock market basically priced in the idea that the inflation was going to be brought under control.
All items right now, 8.3%.
Food, 11.4%.
8.3% food 11.4% 11.4% year over year inflation.
Why it's almost as though when you fire hose money into the economy the way the divide administration has and you regulate and you are on the verge of a railroad strike and maybe all this bad policy has consequences.
Who would have thought?
So who's who, by the way, is going to be?
All Republicans have to do is point.
OK, as I've been saying for a very long time, the entire Republican campaign, this is true in 2016.
It's true in 2020.
It's true forever.
All Republicans have to do when Democrats are in charge and govern this badly is point.
Like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
That's all they have to do.
That's all they have to do.
Just point at the Democrats.
Because my goodness, there's only one party that's in control right here.
There's one party that's in control.
Again, the inflation rate was supposed to... It quote-unquote slightly slowed because last month it was like 8.5%.
But the expectation is that it was going to seriously slow to 8.1%.
8.3% is a bad number.
Let's not make any bones about this.
That's why everyone was awaiting the CPI coming out today.
And that CPI, it ain't good for the Democrats.
Democrats are going to have a lot to contend with going into the election.
Well, when you look at these economic statistics from the Biden administration, you think, man, people who say they're experts aren't always experts.
You know where else that's true?
At the auto parts store.
Every time you go to that auto parts store, you get up to the front of the line and the person at the front is like, I can tell you what you're missing.
And then he looks it up online and then he orders it and then upcharges you.
Or you could just skip all of that, go directly to the experts over at Rock Auto.
You know, some states now have laws that say that as early as the 2030 model year, new vehicles will have to be electric in order to be registered, which means your internal combustion engine car is going to be more expensive over time because the supply is going to decrease.
You need to preserve that car.
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Get brakes, shocks, carpet, wipers, headlights, mirrors, mufflers, lug nuts, or any other part you need.
That's rockauto.com.
Be sure to write Shapiro in there.
How did you hear about us, Fox?
So they know that I sent you.
Also, many of you know Candace Owens was out on maternity leave.
Her eight-week-old already has a successful lemonade stand and is planning a successful run for a class president as well.
Well, now, we here at The Daily Wire, we are unleashing the power of Candace Owens five days a week in her new Daily Wire Plus show.
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Okay, so as I've been saying, the fundamentals of this election are very, very bad for the Democrats.
And so you've seen a narrowing because Republicans got distracted by the shiny Trump object over here.
But as the fundamentals return to center stage, things like inflation, things like immigration, Democrats are in real trouble.
The border continues to be a massive issue.
How big is the border issue?
The border issue is so big that the Washington Post is now having to issue editorials telling Democratic mayors that if you're going to be a sanctuary city fanatic, then you got to own it.
Because there is a crisis on the border, according to the Washington Post.
The Washington Post says, and I quote, the White House has scarcely taken notice of the hundreds of eastbound buses that have arrived in the district since April, and twice the Pentagon brushed off the mayor of DC's request for National Guard troops to help handle logistics arising from the arrival of what is rapidly approaching 10,000 migrants. The caper by Republican governors on the border to send illegal immigrants to Washington, DC.
has been politically effective to the extent that it has posed a growing dilemma for Democratic officials provoking their peak.
Muriel Bowser, the mayor of D.C., said mayors do a lot of things, but we're not responsible for a broken immigration system.
Says the Washington Post, that's not really right.
In fact, state and local officials nationwide must accommodate a flow of migrants in schools, shelters, streets, impelled to seek refuge in the United States by terrible conditions in their countries and the relative scarcity and availability of jobs in this one.
Ms.
Bowser's emergency declaration enabling her to tap $10 million in city funds will help fund an Office of Migrant Services to oversee meals, medical care and temporary housing for the new arrivals.
Now she needs to formulate a long-term plan that reflects the reality of migrants' increasing numbers, whether or not the federal government reimburses the city as she hopes and as it should do.
Ms.
Bowser didn't directly ask for this problem.
Nonetheless, it is hers to solve.
Well, good luck to the Democrats.
Seriously.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is just, I love this, because the people who are now paying the price for this are Democratic mayors who are receiving incoming illegal immigrants.
Kamala Harris, the Vice President of the United States, spent her Sunday explaining that the border is secure in many, many words.
Lots of words are spoken here.
I will say that when it comes to lots of words spoken to provide very little of substance, Kamala Harris is just, she is the master, the mistress of it.
She's just unbelievable at this.
Here we go.
Two million people crossed this border for the first time ever.
You're confident this border is secure?
We have a secure border and that that is a priority for any nation including ours in our administration.
But there are still a lot of problems that we are trying to fix given the deterioration that happened over the last four years.
We also have to put in place a law and a plan for a pathway for citizenship.
For the millions of people who are here and are prepared to do what is legally required to gain citizenship.
Slay queen?
What?
My favorite part of this, whoever suggested that Kamala Harris is the human incarnation of a predictive text mechanism, that's exactly right.
She's a bad algorithm.
She types in three words, and then she waits for the next three words to pop up in the Google search bar.
And then she says those three words, and then she waits like several seconds.
She even speaks like that.
She stops, and then she adds a few words.
And then she waits to see what happens next.
And she doesn't know which way she's going.
It's really suspenseful to watch her.
It's very different than watching Joe Biden.
The suspense in watching Joe Biden speak is whether he's going to emerge alive at the end of his speeches.
That's the suspense.
It's really high stakes.
Kamala Harris, the suspense is, does she know what's going to come out of her mouth next?
I really enjoy the parts of that particular statement where she says, the border is secure and that is a priority for any nation to have a secure border.
That doesn't mean anything.
What does that mean?
That's like saying the nation is prosperous in the sense that it is in the interest of any nation to be prosperous.
No, no, no.
We're not asking you whether the border is a priority for you.
We're asking you whether the border is secure.
You're saying yes, but then you provide no evidence that it is because it isn't.
And then you say it's about a pathway to citizenship, which, of course, encourages more illegal immigration.
Because if you get across the border, then you are subject to the pathway to citizenship.
So excellent job here, guys.
I mean, I can't see why you are going to get just clocked in the house.
The Republicans have an incredible ability.
to somehow steal defeat from the draws of victory, but even they are going to have a tough time blowing this one.
Because again, the economic data is going to continue to be bad.
My faith in Joe Biden's ability to blow this thing is pure and unalloyed.
It's like my faith in God.
My faith in Joe Biden's ability to ruin things is as strong as it is possible for it to be.
I came in a doubter.
I came in doubting the faith.
When Joe Biden entered, I was like, how could anyone blow this?
He's got a working vaccine.
The economy's been in an artificial coma.
So that means expectations are low.
All he has to do is just stand there and be dead.
And that's the thing he is best at.
There's no way he can blow this.
I'll say this.
Joe Biden made a religious man out of me.
I'm now a religious believer that this administration is capable of screwing up literally anything.
And what that means for the election is that as much faith as I have in Republicans sucking at their jobs, I have even more faith that Democrats are going to suck at their jobs.
So the continuing bleep show will, I think, spiral into Democratic defeat in 2022 in the election cycle.
I think Democrats know this, by the way.
I think panic is going to break out any second here.
I keep coming back to the CPI report today.
It is very, very bad.
They are going to have to slam on.
They're going to have to slam on the brakes, the Federal Reserve.
They're going to raise another 75 basis points.
It is going to crater the economy.
Again, it's not something you should be rooting for as an American.
It just happens to be a reality.
When bad economic policy meets the road, this is what happens.
All right, you guys.
The rest of the show is continuing now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We're going to be getting into the New York Times, pretty obviously targeting anybody who sends their kids to a school that doesn't promote left-wing values.
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