All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 30, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
47:23
WarRoom Battleground EP 364: GDP Falls As Elites Extract Wealth From America
Participants
Main voices
e
ej antoni
15:46
s
steve bannon
24:17
| Copy link to current segment

Speaker Time Text
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
This is what you're fighting for.
I mean, every day you're out there.
What they're doing is blowing people off.
If you continue to look the other way and shut up, then the oppressors, the authoritarians, get total control and total power.
Because this is just like in Arizona.
This is just like in Georgia.
It's another element that backs them into a corner and shows their lies and misrepresentations.
This is why this audience is going to have to get engaged.
As we've told you, this is the fight.
Okay.
unidentified
Senator, you're up for election in three short years.
What are your thoughts on that?
I'm sorry, I had a hard time hearing you.
That's okay.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
What are your thoughts on running for re-election in 2026?
unidentified
What are my thoughts about what?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Running for re-election in 2026.
unidentified
2026.
Did you hear the question, Senator?
Running for re-election in 2026?
Alright, I'm sorry, you all.
We're going to need a minute.
Thank you.
Okay.
So, I'm going to go ahead and close the meeting.
I'm going to close the meeting.
Somebody else have a question?
Please speak up.
What efforts is Daniel Cameron going to have to make on the campaign trail to win Kentuckians over in November?
Senator Daniel Cameron, do you have a comment on Daniel Cameron?
Well, I think the government race is going to be very close.
Far and away the best candidate we could have nominated.
I'd say that we don't increasingly need a Republican.
In fact, we don't need the only Democrat left in Congress.
So I'm optimistic the diner will be packed up.
Michael, good morning.
$177,000.
$177,000 ADP, the private payroll company, estimating that private payrolls in the U.S.
in the month of August rose by $177,000.
It's an estimate of $200,000, and actually a bit weaker than the estimate, because as you remember, ADP is only doing the private sector.
There's an estimate that government jobs on Friday will show a stronger number here.
So this is the lowest number since March 2023, with goods doing $23,000, services $154,000.
There's that nonfarm payroll estimate of $170,000, which is government and private sector.
As for the size of the business, small business coming down a bit.
It had been quite strong at $18,000, medium business at $79,000, and large businesses reversing a decline over the past several months, now up $83,000.
So the job growth was spread across business size.
And then several sectors chiming in here.
Education, health services, a tricky time for measuring this with back to school and not back to school.
And coming back in August, 52,000 trade transportation utilities up 45,000.
Leisure and hospitality, which had been doing in the triple digits essentially there, over a hundred very often now just up 30,000.
Let me in here, baby.
Okay.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Welcome to the, uh, welcome to the afternoon show.
Or the early evening show.
I want to thank Natalie for 5 o'clock.
It's Wednesday, August 30, Year of the Lord 2023.
I know she covered it, but I want to do two things.
I want to break out.
That was the freeze moment.
Another freeze by Mitch McConnell.
And I think actually, if you see the whole tape, it's actually worse than that.
And then I had to get into kind of the way the corporate media presents all these job numbers.
So we got a lot going on.
I got EJ and Tony here.
I've needed some time because we had to get down into the Kind of the substance of what's happening in Georgia.
We got a big special on Saturday.
We're working on Texas, on this impeachment.
It's kind of the same fight, whether it's at the federal level, at the Georgia level, at the Texas level, of the Trump populist movement, the nationalist movement, versus the globalist rhino establishment.
This is all coming under a framework of a massive shift in not just geopolitics, but geoeconomics.
And how that's playing into the United States and what we're doing to exacerbate the Biden regime.
I'm gonna bring in E.J.
Antoni, one of the smartest guys I know, a numbers guy, works with Steve Moore and his Prosperity Group, works over at the Heritage Group, doing such great work.
E.J., first off, I gotta ask you, I wanna bifurcate this, and I know you don't get into politics, but just so much of when people come back The week after Labor Day, or really coming back to Washington the week of the 12th.
There's going to be a firestorm and everything's about...
Everything's about the potential government shutdown, the budget, the spending.
The House is driving this, we understand.
But the Senate is going to be a critical part of this.
I mean, the Senate, at the end of the day, has to make a deal with the House.
And now we're talking about government shutdown, and quite frankly, the Senate's involvement Particularly these 19 what I call the collaborationists that have worked with Schumer and have worked with Biden to pass this stuff.
Just give me your thoughts of how do we go into this when Mitch McConnell, and this is whether you're a Mitch McConnell supporter or Mitch McConnell you don't like, it's clearly something, and look he's I don't know 80 something years old, it's He can't help this.
This is obviously a physical situation that's overtaking him.
But what are your thoughts, just the practicality of how you're going to herd cats in the Senate and actually try to take a hard line here on this spending when you have a minority leader that is in this type of shape, sir?
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
Well, thank you, Steve, for having me.
And first, I just want to say, you know, our thoughts and prayers go out to Mitch McConnell and his family because it's very clear he's not well.
And my fear is that in these episodes, he might be having minor strokes, in fact.
And you're absolutely right that that does not put you in a very strong negotiating position.
And the people on the right have been saying the exact same thing about the left when it comes to Joe Biden.
He clearly is infirm and has been for quite some time.
And so by the same token, his negotiating skills cannot by any means be up to snuff at all.
And so we very likely are going to have to rely on conservatives in the House and not the Senate in order to actually get any kind of fiscal reforms through, at least this time around, with the appropriations bills.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Okay, we're going to get into all that in a second, because I know our audience, they understand that they're the head of the creditors committee here.
And they're a central player in this drama.
But I want to go and I really want to thank my team for watching the CNBC this morning on the jobs and to have that clip on.
We could have played for another couple of minutes, but here's the substance I want to get to with you.
These numbers come out, and you, I think, have done the best analytics on this.
These numbers come out, and they always look a lot worse.
They don't feel right.
And then they go back, and they have all types of adjustments.
If you go to zero hedge, they basically eviscerate it all the time.
Has the U.S.
government gotten to be like the CCP?
Which I say with the Chinese Communist Party, data is propaganda, right?
This is one of the reasons the financial meltdown they're having right now, you can't even get your head around what actually the numbers are.
Is the U.S.
government and the labor department, because we saw these numbers today, I'd like you to comment on that, but they always go back and they have massive readjustments later that you see now they're getting it on GDP, they're pulling GDP down, but they're also changing the labor numbers.
What are we to take from these numbers that come out today about the labor market?
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
Well, Steve, you're absolutely right.
These revisions are becoming a serious cause of concern here.
And it's not the fact that the numbers are being revised.
That's a normal part of the statistical process.
And even if you occasionally have large upward or downward revisions, again, that's perfectly normal.
It happens.
But when things are constantly being revised downward, and by very large margins, much more than normal, when this becomes a pattern, all of a sudden you get to a point where statistically it becomes impossible to have these kinds of statistical abnormalities one after another after another.
And so it definitely seems like there's something going on here behind the scenes.
There is something wrong with the models being used, whether it's the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Or the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census Bureau, you name it.
You can throw another three letters together and probably get another government agency that's clearly having problems with their estimates.
And unfortunately, the initial estimate is what gets all of the headlines.
But no one wants to talk about the fact, at least no one in the administration or the mainstream media wants to talk about the fact that every single month of jobs data has been revised downward, several by abnormally large measures.
And then we also had a very large downward benchmark revision just a week or two ago.
And what that did, between that and the previous revisions, essentially took away a quarter of the job gains that we thought we had this year.
Now on to the GDP that you mentioned that came out this morning.
It turns out that most of the private economy actually grew much less than we thought.
The one thing that grew more was government, of course.
So looking at something like business inventories, for example, business inventories didn't even grow at all last quarter.
They actually shrunk.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
I want to go back to these revisions because something's not right here.
The books are being cooked somehow.
This just came because You know, what you've written is that it's not every now and again, and you can even have a big swing.
And that's just the way statistics works.
This is literally going back for every month.
There's a consistent and mainly the revisions are on a downward side.
So clearly, you know, after a while, you just got to realize it's not a bug.
It's a feature.
And the feature is somehow, either what should be these independent agencies or independent parts of the labor department, somehow they're trying to put forward a narrative that they understand.
The initial number come out, that's what everybody's focused on.
They get the media attention.
When you do the revisions, everybody, the caravans kind of moved on.
Do you believe That the government is cooking the books here on a consistent basis to mislead not just the American people, but the financial markets on actually the strength of the American economy and its labor market, sir?
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
You know, Steve, at first I really dismissed that theory because there were a lot of very logical explanations for why these different figures were being overshot.
And a lot of that had to do with baseline effects.
In other words, coming out of the pandemic, so many of our statistical models, frankly, weren't very useful anymore, but all of those things should at least now be taken into account.
And the fact that we are still continuing to have these blockbuster numbers that again are consistently revised down, that is now making me call into question the independence of many of these agencies and many of these so-called statisticians.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
If we were a company and we were reporting, but take the government as a reporting company with all the strictures and requirements of a public reporting, am I incorrect in saying that they would be subject to potential shareholder suits for consistent misleading financial information, sir?
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
you Well, again, Steve, under normal times, you would have revisions like we've seen, but they would be going both up and down.
So it wouldn't be consistently overshooting.
But you're absolutely right.
If you were a private business and you consistently misled investors with earning estimates, which you were never able to meet, And you always had misses quarter after quarter and year after year.
Absolutely, people would begin raising concerns.
And not just your investors, but the regulators would begin raising concerns too.
The problem is now it's the regulators that are at issue.
So who's regulating them?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Yahoo Watch is the watchman.
You've actually nailed it.
If the government, according to these around these statistics, this was a reporting company.
The SEC and he went back month after month and revised it down always in one direction.
And quite frankly, the numbers originally were pretty dramatic.
So people are all elated and obviously buying stock and making decisions off that.
But you had revisions later that were all the same direction consistently down.
You would open to massive shareholder.
First off, you'd have a visit the following day from the SEC.
They would be all over you, being a public traded security, right?
Your auditors would be on notice.
There would be huge actions.
And I just want to make sure the audience understands this.
There's something not right here.
This is not the normal course of business.
EJ gave you the very even handed, the reason he's been doing the analysis every month and publishing these articles, but he hasn't been screaming, you know, firing the theater because naturally sometimes you have swings both ways, but that's not what this is.
This is a pattern.
Of misreporting.
And it's misreporting to build a narrative that the economy's okay.
The other part, to get back to the GDP realignment we had today, or the reassessment we had today, that GDP happens to be lower.
And I don't need to tell anybody in this audience that, because your lived experience shows you this economy is not robust.
This economy is not functioning.
The only thing that's coming in better, and look what Steve Leesman said for CNBC, we've got to wait for the government number.
The government number's been pretty strong.
What did EJ just tell you about the GDP?
It's the government part.
What does that get back to?
That gets back to the McCarthy-approved spending orgy of the Biden regime.
This is all inextricably linked back together.
I'm going to get to your article in a second about the inflation.
But is that what we have?
The only thing they got going for them is the ability to keep spending money to try to keep the carcass of this economy at least fogging a mirror, sir.
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
Steve, I think so.
I think the government handouts are the only thing keeping not only the government expenditures alive, but also the government transfers.
And what that's doing is it's goosing the consumption expenditure numbers, which is basically just how much you and I are spending every quarter.
So because the government is still handing out so much money to people, and money that they already did hand out is still being spent, That's helping to keep some of these numbers elevated, but it can't last forever.
And one of the key drivers of economic growth going forward is private investment, which has literally just flatlined since Biden took office.
In other words, we're not going to be able to sustain current economic output with these investment levels.
And so unless something changes, there's no way you can avoid a recession here.
That's just what the numbers tell us.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Walk me through that.
Slow down and walk me through that again.
That, that, that, about the recession.
As you see the numbers right now.
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
So right now, if you look at how much private investment is actually going into this economy, that can cover a whole lot of different things, such as machines in a factory, for example.
It's things that are going to help us produce more in the future so that we can consume more.
Well, those numbers have essentially flatlined since Biden took office.
They've been up slightly, they've been down slightly, but today they're right where they were when he became president.
And so the economy is not capable in the long run of supporting the current amount of output and the current amount of consumption.
In other words, we're literally just not going to be able to buy as much today, excuse me, in the future as we do today.
Consumption is going to have to come down because we simply just aren't making enough to sustain what we have today.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
So one of the Issues.
Let me lay this out for the audience, for the posse.
One of the things you're going to hear, they're going to try to put a shiny toy in front of you to say, oh, we can't, you know, you can't force Biden's hand to shut down the government because then we're not going to be able to do the investigations.
That's obviously a lie.
OK, and we can pretty easily see through that, the tissues of that lie.
The other thing that's going on behind the scenes, a lot of the Wall Street guys, E.J., are saying, no, no, no, no, no, no.
This economy is on the verge of imploding.
And if the Republicans try to force the hands of Biden, then we'll get blamed because they'll sit there, oh, the government shut down, brought it down.
The government shut down, brought it down.
First off, do you believe the underlying thesis?
Do you believe in your math that you look at?
Did you see a major contraction in the American economy, in the US economy in the next couple of months?
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
We are looking at a contraction, absolutely, in the future.
It's just a question of when.
Now, initially, when I started this year running the numbers, it looked like it was going to begin by the fall.
But what we've seen with a lot of these economic indicators is that they are still pointing to a recession just slightly further into the future.
So, right now, the latest numbers indicate that a recession would probably begin Around December, the yield curve is a very good example of this.
While the yield curve does invert, which means it switches from the position it's normally in, it does that before a recession.
However, it usually returns back to normal, or at least begins returning to normal, before the recession actually begins.
That process hasn't begun yet, which indicates a recession is going to be at least several months away.
But, Steve, you simply cannot spend, borrow, and print trillions upon trillions of dollars and not expect negative consequences.
And we are staring down the barrel of those negative consequences right now.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Okay, even at 2%, which is adjusted, I think, from 2.4 to 2.022.
Although technically that may not be a recession.
That is not a robust economy.
Economy is not growing at least 3% or above.
4% is not a robust growing economy.
That's just kind of traipsing along and we are risking right now having the lost decades.
What do you believe, I mean, do we even have the capacity, given what BRICS did and given this de-dollarization movement, do we even have the flexibility to continue to just deal with, we have now structurally a $1.5 to $2 trillion annual deficit.
And what I mean by that for the audience is total revenues of all taxes, capital gains taxes, personal income taxes, corporate taxes, all fees, all revenues, tariffs, all cash coming into the federal government versus all cash outlays to the federal government.
The difference is between roughly $5 trillion coming in, $7 trillion going out.
So we have roughly $1.5 to $2 trillion in perpetuity right now, unless there's some dramatic changes made.
Is that given what the BRICS said last week, that, hey, we're going to start the de-dollarization program, given what Modi did with Mohammed bin Zayed in the UAV to cross this massive 1 million barrels of oil for rupees, given the inclination of the global South that controls the resources, do you believe we have the capacity to continue on an annual basis in perpetuity at a trillion and a half to $2 trillion of annual deficits, sir?
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
No, no, not at all, Steve.
This is going to end very, very poorly if we do not reverse course very soon.
And, you know, unfortunately, I wish I could give you whatever the magical date was or the magical number was, but that has proven to be different for different countries at different periods of time around the world.
So I can't say once we hit, for example, a certain percent of GDP that that's our point of no return.
We simply just don't know where that is.
But that's all the more reason why we need to move so urgently to address what you rightly pointed out are structural problems in the federal budget, because we don't know where that point of no return is, and we don't know how close we are to falling off that fiscal cliff. What we do know is that we're headed in the wrong direction.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Is now, um, so when we come back from the holidays, we have a, um, an ill, um, minority leader.
Mitch McConnell.
Obviously, he's not the same guy he used to be.
No fault of his own.
It's his medical condition right now.
And this town is a town of hard-nosed vipers, right?
So you have someone that's in a very serious medical condition.
You have Kevin McCarthy that is talking about happy talk that I just need a, a two month CR.
We just need to keep going.
And I need to keep the impeachment going.
If you shut down this, if you, you know, if you force the government to shut down, I can't do the impeachment.
Well, behind the scenes, he's saying, I need a CR to March.
I see a continued resolution to March.
And what would be, if we had a continued resolution to March at the same spending levels, they got baked in.
Cause that's what he wants.
How catastrophic do you think that would be EJ?
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
It's definitely going to take us closer to the brink.
I don't think people realize that the United States doesn't actually pay off any of its debt.
It simply rolls it over.
It'd be like if you max out a credit card, and then instead of paying that card off, you just get a new credit card and transfer the balance from the old card to the new one.
But when you do that, the debt is no longer subject Subjected to the old interest rate, it's now at the new interest rate on that new card.
And that's what's happening with our debt right now.
So we are rolling over debt that's at 1%, 2%, 3%, and we're rolling it over at twice those rates.
So it's causing the deficit to literally go up exponentially.
And as a consequence of that, we are seeing the deficit, we are seeing the debt just absolutely explode.
The federal budget truly is collapsing in real time.
If you look at the monthly report from the Fiscal Service, there are only two line items that are larger than interest on the debt.
If I remember correctly, it's the Social Security Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services.
That's it.
So that gives you some perspective as to just how much we are paying out on interest alone, and it's only getting worse.
And every single month that goes by, every single month that McCarthy gives us just another CR, makes the problem that much worse.
Because going back to that credit card example, imagine if every month when those financing charges come in, you simply just roll that over, too, onto another card.
So you're not even paying for the interest.
You're simply letting the balance grow and grow.
For a family, that's the path to insolvency.
Why do we think it's any different for the nation at large?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Okay, we're going to take a break.
EJ's going to stay with us.
He's got an amazing piece in The Washington Times about Biden economics and Biden inflation.
This all gets back to how it is impacting American citizens.
But I also want you to understand that the entire apparatus is on your shoulders.
The entire apparatus is on your shoulders, and the pressure you're going to come on in the days and weeks ahead, because you can see right now, if you back the government spending part out of the math, this thing's horrific.
And that's why the political class is afraid the media will blame them if they force Biden's hand to shut down his own regime.
This is why we have to be force-multiplied to get to reality.
We are hurtling over a cliff into a financial abyss.
And it doesn't need to be that way.
One reason I want everybody here, we've got the Peter Navarro macro course.
I think it's $10.
If you want to take that.
We've also go to birchgold.com slash Bannon.
I want everybody to get the End of the Dollar Empire.
It's broken out in three sections.
We've got the debt trap, the politics of money.
We've got a pricey on the road to Durbin, everything about the bricks, why that's important.
I'm about to come out with quite frankly, working with Philip Patrick and the Birch team in about mid-September, the fourth installment that will blow your head up.
It'll go back over time and actually trace productivity, trace value creation for the American people.
You'll start to be able to see the answers of why the elites in this country are extracting all the wealth for themselves.
And you're left holding the debt bag and having to pay off all these obligations, or at least now the interest on the obligation came and get to the face amount.
And make sure you ask Philip Patrick's team.
This is a question you've got to ask them.
Why is the Federal Reserve spending all their time on a central bank digital currency when all the other central banks in the global south, which have all the resources and are kind of tired of their purchasing power going down 17% every year?
Why they're buying gold at record rates?
Just ask that question.
When you get the answer, I think you'll be able to sit through and think through your current financial situation in an entirely different light.
Birchgold.com slash Bannon.
unidentified
Okay, we're going to take a short break.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
EJ and Tony, the numbers man, going to talk to you about your lived experience in the age of Bidenomics and its inflation.
unidentified
Back in the warm in just a moment.
Okay.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
One of the reasons we do this, remember there's never been a working class or middle-class audience has been kind of weaponized in this area of understanding capital markets and economy.
That's why I think about none of the shows play it.
None of the shows do it.
The reason they don't do it, one, it may be beyond their comprehension, but number two, the real reasons from the channels and networks, they don't want you to understand this.
They want you chasing shiny toys.
Think about it.
The Hill newspaper this morning, the lead story, was like you were reading the script from War Room a week ago.
Talked about the House coming back.
Talked about who the House Freedom Caucus, these other patrons, are going to stand up.
And they said they've heard enough of it.
And they echoed E.J.
and Tony.
Ralph Norman and others just sitting there going, hey, I've looked at the math.
And unless somebody can explain a different set of mathematics to me, then this has to stop.
And we have to be adults.
That's what governing is about, is making tough calls.
We're going to have to make some tough calls.
In order to have the American people on your side, you're going to have to treat them with some respect.
What we do in the show, we treat you with respect because we give a lot of tough information.
This is not easy entertainment.
We know it's not.
We give you a lot of hard information and force you to grapple with it and work through it yourself.
That's the only way you become, the only way you understand anything is you've got to work through it yourself.
In any sport, remember any sports about reps, you've got to do it over and over and over again.
Same thing here.
There's a lot of foreign concepts.
That's where we try to explain nomenclature first.
So you understand, okay, what are the words?
What are these concepts?
What do the words mean?
Then we talk about the statics and dynamics of process.
How do things proceed?
What is the process?
And what are the things that are static in that?
What are the things that are dynamic in that?
And so that then you can get a mental map.
Only when you have a mental map do you become awakened to that topic.
It's like when you're a little kid riding a bike.
That's what we do here.
That's the reason Birch Gold has been such a great partner.
I really appreciate that and we really want you to read these installments we put out and grapple with it.
And eventually we're going to figure out how to do some Q&A here so we can go back and forth.
I was so proud last night on the Q&A on transhumanism.
I said, I felt like I didn't need to be there.
The things were so great.
I was going to ask him the questions, and then we just had Grace read the questions.
And the reason is, I said last night, I felt like I was in a student commons in MIT.
That's how good the questions are.
I saw the questions, some of the questions popped up that Grace gave me beforehand.
I go, man, these are amazing.
Let's just answer these.
That's this audience.
Whatever topic it is, and we give you big topics, tough topics.
But that's what birchgold.com, check it out.
And ask those questions.
Why are central banks and countries with huge resources, why are they going back and want as much gold as possible right now?
With the United States Federal Reserve is focused on a central bank digital currency.
And you heard, and you heard, basically Powell the other day said, essentially said the game's up.
My interpretation, the game's up.
EJ, walk me through this article in the Washington Times that you've put up, this analysis.
If Memphis can put it up by EJ Talks.
I want to make sure people get it.
And the Washington Times is such a great...Epic Times, Washington Times are very blessed with these really great papers.
Washington Examiner, so it's a conservative movement and the MAGA movement.
And maybe not all of these things are total MAGA.
Epoch Times is, but the Washington Times puts up a lot of great stuff.
EJ, walk me through this because this is going to hit people in their own lived experience.
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
Certainly, Steve.
One of the things we've seen over the last year has been that for most of that year, inflation rates have actually been coming down.
That's not to say prices are coming down.
It just means that prices are going up at a slower pace than they were before when they were at 40-year highs.
And of course, the Biden administration has been incredibly quick to take credit for that.
But what we're finding is that Inflation was never trending back down towards 2%.
It has been trending towards 3%.
We've reached that, and we're not going any lower.
In fact, now inflation is re-accelerating and going higher.
And a key reason for that is the fact that the government simply will not stop Spending, borrowing, and also now printing more money.
And this is one of the terrible consequences of the deal that McCarthy struck, where they not only raised but just flat-out suspended the debt ceiling and gave the Treasury a green light to go on a $1 trillion borrowing spree over the time period of just a few months, frankly.
And so now what we are seeing is prices going up again at a faster pace.
The rate of inflation increased in July.
It's going to increase again for the month of August.
And I will be more than happy to come on and apologize that I was wrong if that doesn't happen.
But I'm very, very confident that we're going to see inflation go up again for the month of August.
And so if you start looking at how much is this really affecting me personally, how much is this affecting the average American, it's very easy to see that inflation is actually taking more wealth from you than income taxes are.
For the average American worker, he paid less than $4 an hour, as an example.
He paid less than $4 an hour in federal income taxes.
But he paid more than $4 an hour, about $4.60 an hour, in the inflation tax.
In other words, that's how much his earnings were robbed Well, but do the math.
purchasing power on an hourly basis.
So when you look at how much is inflation impacting the average American today, it has literally doubled the effective impact of federal income taxes.
That's how much Biden's hidden tax here has taken from people.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Well, but do the math.
If the average, if you work 2000 hours a year, right?
And the inflation actually, so it's $8.60 if you combine them both, because the taxes aren't going anywhere.
They're not going to get lower.
They can't lower taxes.
Anybody that sits on the stage and says, I'm going to lower taxes.
Uh, hello, we have a $1.5 to $2 trillion deficit right now.
So show me, show me how we're going to cut taxes.
Until you dramatically cut spending.
But right there, it's $8.60 per hour for the American people.
That's what, almost $16,000.
If you take a 2,000 hour, that's $16,000 a year, both in taxes and inflation out of your pocket.
How can the average American handle that?
This is my point.
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
Well, Steve, they can't.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
They simply can't.
Hang on, but the spending is not a benefit to you.
The spending is not a benefit to you.
There's certain things that are, certain aspects that are, but not at this level.
Not the $7 trillion.
Remember, what McCarthy approved was $6.8 trillion for two years.
With a baked in $4 trillion deficit on that, we have to finance, which is going to be much higher.
EJ, your thoughts and observations.
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
Steve, you're spot on.
The average American simply cannot afford this.
This is crushing American families right now.
If you look at it, the actual amount that people have lost from inflation, that exceeds what many households take home for an entire month.
It's as if you lost an entire month's pay.
Right now, as compared to January of 2021.
And that's just an average.
If you're one of the poor people who are trying to buy a home right now, I mean, my goodness!
Go back to January of 2021 when Biden took office.
The monthly payment for a median priced home was about $980 a month.
monthly payment for a median priced home was about $980 a month. Today it's over $2,000.
It's going to cost you an extra $13,000 a year for the same house.
The middle class cannot afford that.
It is no wonder that things like consumer sentiment, consumer expectations, consumer confidence, these numbers are all near historic lows.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Before I leave you, in great analysis, Richard Stern's in charge of the budget.
He's the head of the budget project over at Heritage.
We had Richard on last week.
And Richard says, hey, when you cut out all the content and the back and forth, he thinks the cuts they're talking about are really $12 billion.
That's from Richard Stern.
Now, I would actually give him the benefit of the doubt and say, maybe it is the $100 billion they're talking about.
But EJ, both of those are irrelevant numbers.
Is your theory of the case similar to mine?
Unless there's major structural changes to the spending, we're going to have to have some hard fights on that.
This thing is now officially out of control because now you've got a systemic problem where structurally you've got a crowding out of other capital because you're just raising, you're having to raise so much money.
You're having to raise a trillion and a half to two trillion every year at higher interest rates.
The point that E.J.
made earlier in the last segment, Let's say you're rolling over, particularly start rolling over some of this federal debt.
A lot of that was back this coming up was back in the days of zero interest rates or 1% interest rates.
Everything now is going to be much, much higher.
And you're going to have the interest expense is going to be even greater than the out of control Department of Defense budget.
So if you have to make a start here, Would you recommend that this has to happen on this fiscal year before midnight on 30 September, that we have to have that confrontation now?
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
Steve, I think so.
You really hit the nail on the head there.
This is a completely unsustainable path.
And the more we put off this fight, the more we kick this can down the road, the worse the ultimate confrontation is going to be.
We are already seeing the Federal Reserve take completely just extraordinary measures to try to transfer the cost of capital away from the government and on to the private sector.
And that can only last so long as the private sector can shoulder that much of a burden.
But what we are seeing as economic growth slows down is that the private sector is increasingly unable to shoulder that transfer of the cost of capital.
And so eventually, the Federal Reserve is effectively going to have to take so much wealth from the private economy to finance these deficits.
That the whole thing is just going to implode.
And again, that is why it is so imperative that we start today to fix this mess.
It is only going to get worse.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
By the way, the reset of the GDP we talked about earlier from 2.4 down to 2 was because of quote-unquote higher interest rates.
Is that your point about the Fed shifting that to the private sector?
Is it due to their interest rates?
Are there other mechanisms that they're using?
Or is it just they're using the blunt force instrument of interest rates right now?
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
Well, what they're doing, Steve, you're absolutely right.
They're using that blunt force instrument of interest rates, but only on the private sector.
They are meanwhile subsidizing the interest rate paid by the public sector, paid by the government.
So effectively what they're doing is artificially increasing interest rates when you or I have to borrow, when a business has to borrow, but they are artificially depressing the rates for the government to try to keep down those borrowing costs at the treasury.
And even with those monetary manipulations, the interest on the debt has still exploded.
You can only imagine what it would be if the free market were allowed to dictate those interest rates.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Walk through some of the manipulations they're doing on the government side, because I want people to fully understand the big picture here of how it's a rigged game.
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
Certainly.
You know, one of the chief things that they're doing right now is they are effectively paying banks, hedge funds, even insurance companies, lots of different large financial institutions that have very big cash balances.
They are paying them money that is just being created out of thin air to keep those cash balances liquid and to not do anything with them.
Don't lend these out to people.
Don't lend them out to businesses.
And what that effectively does is keep that money sterilized.
Where did all of that money come from in the first place?
It was originally created for the Treasury to spend.
And after it was spent by the Treasury, it now needs to be essentially kept in a lockbox so that it can't get into the banking system and can't multiply.
And that does effectively keep down inflation.
It is a very effective tool.
The problem is that it, at the same time, starves the private market for capital because you now have some $5 trillion That the private market does not have access to.
And so you are again keeping all of that hands out of individuals, out of businesses who might use it for productive outputs, and instead you have given it to the government to spend where it has largely been wasted.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
Real quickly, we got about a minute before I gotta let you bounce.
E.J., last week in Durban, they added Iran, they added UAE, they added Saudi Arabia.
They ended it by having UAE cross a trade of a million barrels of oil in rupees.
They said their number one focus out there is de-dollarization first, new basket of currencies backed by gold second.
How concerned are you now, given our financial situation, of the dollars of prime reserve currency with even the beginning baby steps of the BRICS?
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
Well, I'm extremely concerned because these things never happen suddenly at first.
They always begin with, as you just said, baby steps.
But it's that old line, how did you go bankrupt?
Slowly at first and then suddenly.
So we need to be concerned.
We need to be getting our financial house in order.
And if we look at some of our biggest enemies around the globe, what has China been doing, for example?
They've been dumping U.S.
debt, not buying it.
They are getting ready for the eventual default of the United States, and they're also getting ready, probably for military conquest, and they don't want the United States to be able to forfeit, or excuse me, to default on any debt that is specifically owned by the CCP.
And so by selling that debt now, they have essentially immunized themselves from both of those problems.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
EJ, how do people get you?
Social media, website, do you get all your writings, all your analysis, all your thoughts?
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
Best place to find me is on Twitter or X or whatever we're calling it these days.
It's at Real EJ Antoni.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
E.J., thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
ej antoni ▲ ● ▼
Thank you for having me.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼
E.J.
says something very perceptive at the end there.
You know, the Chinese right now are on a precipice given this trillion dollar bailout they need immediately on their commercial real estate market.
They're the driving force in back of the bricks, right, to try to get off the U.S.
dollar.
They do not want to be beholden to us.
And everything right now looks like to drive nationalist fervor, they're going to look to do a military strike.
In Taiwan, if they don't win the presidency there with Terry Guo.
We'll talk more about that in the next couple of days.
We're geopolitically in the most sensitive place I think this country's ever been in its history against an existential threat that is the Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany combined and doubled.
Combined and doubled.
One of the things is they will use every strategic opportunity they have.
Rosemary Gibson warned us about this in the early days of the pandemic.
That would be their grip on generic drugs and 100% control of pharmaceutical ingredients, active pharmaceutical ingredients, API, including like vitamin C, all of it.
To get around that, go to Jace Medical Today, Dr. Roland and the team, and check out what they've got.
They've taken Rosemary Gibson's idea and they've turned it into actually a business and a service for you.
It's a telemedicine operation, so there's a lot of rules you kind of got to check out, but you need to go to their site, talk to their consultants, look at it all, but do it today.
Don't let yourself get rolled up in the strategic envelopment of the United States of America by the Chinese Communist Party.
Okay, we got a lot to go.
By the way, I think it's a great day.
We had it today.
We did a reprise of Billy Joe Shaver.
And, um, get the behind me Satan, which is just an incredible song.
We're going to play this entirety tomorrow morning.
We'll be back at 10 o'clock.
We're going to be firing off the football.
We've got four hours of the, uh, war room tomorrow and Friday.
Then we got some specials, got an amazing special on the trial of Ken Paxson.
What's happening in Texas.
is just as important to the entire nation, the impeachment of an Attorney General, as what's happening to President Trump in Georgia with Kemp.
And we're going to show you the connective tissue of how to think about them both.
Also make sure that you're not in the grips of cyber criminals.
HomeTidalLock.com.
Go check out HomeTidalLock.com.
Make sure you're not exposed Some of the worst elements in the world.
People that want to rip you off.
Billy Joe Shaver!
Get thee behind me!
Satan!
To take us out.
unidentified
I'll see you back here tomorrow morning.
you The demons that were in me, had turned me wrongside out.
I knew inside my soul, I was headed straight for hell.
But I couldn't for my life, figure how to help myself.
And I said, get me behind this thing.
of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
Here, deep behind me sitting, for I commanded Him in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The moon and stars were hidden by the shroud that clouded round.
I could see my loved ones weeping as they lowered me in the ground.
No words were spoken over me.
I almost thought I died.
Then I knew I wasn't dead.
I had been buried alive.
I said, get deep behind me sitting, for I commanded Him in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
Get thee behind me, sin, for I command thee in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ I couldn't see my hand in front of my face.
I knew that I was buried in the deepest, darkest place.
The deeds I had done put me in this awful place.
Then I felt a stir inside me and a smile came across my face.
And I said, get deep and I'm listening.
of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
Yeah.
And keep behind me Satan, for I command it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
I say it's the evil behind me Satan, for I command it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
Get thee behind me, Satan, for I command it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
▲
Export Selection