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June 7, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:59
America First Economy Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 849
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Hey everyone, I'm Danielle D'Souza Gill and I've been hosting Dinesh's podcast this week while he's been away and we've been having so much fun.
Today is my last day hosting so he'll be back with you next week.
If you are a regular Dinesh D'Souza listener then I'm so glad you're here and make sure to find me on social media.
I'm at Danielle D'Souza Gill on all the platforms on Facebook, Instagram, True Social, X so make sure to find me on there for all of my comments and thoughts and I'm an author of two books, one called The Choice, The Abortion Divide in America, and the other one is called Why God?
An Intelligent Discussion on the Relevance of Faith.
I also am a mom to my daughter Marigold and support my husband's congressional campaign in North Texas.
Well, today we have a lot of topics to get to.
We are actually going to be talking about what it means to be America first.
We're going to talk about Marxism and the harms of that.
We are also going to speak with Jim Nels, who is a columnist and an economist, and we're going to talk to him about the economy in America.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
With the country in another presidential election year, American voters are once again being asked to choose between two divergent political philosophies.
On the one hand, you have political establishmentarianism, the ideology of the status quo whose adherents maintain an overwhelming presence on both sides of the aisle in D.C. Its ideological counterpart is what's become known as the America First contingent.
Normally, American elections involve choosing between so-called liberals or so-called conservatives, but the America First philosophy butts up against the established tenets of both liberalism and conservatism, aka the Uniparty.
America First is what's known in market research as a disruptor, which explains why establishment politicians from Liz Cheney to Nancy Pelosi have abandoned their traditional party enmity to work together in an effort to destroy it.
But this disruptive force is still relatively new, and thanks to the mainstream media misinformation operations, there's genuine confusion as to what it entails.
A brief definition would be helpful.
America First is a political philosophy based on the well-founded assumption that Americans love their country and what it represents.
The idea then follows that politicians and government officials should prioritize the protection of and service to Americans.
That's it. Not rocket science.
It's therefore little more than applied common sense.
America First sees American elected officials as beholden to Americans, and not, for example, Iranians, Ukrainians, or the Chinese.
No matter how much money and influence these government servants receive, their first concern should always be, how is this going to affect my country or the lives of my fellow citizens?
Because, you know, they live here too.
That's why America First politicians have adopted skeptical attitudes towards foreign intervention, but are more open to protectionist measures in international trade.
The idea is that both American blood and American livelihood should not be bartered away cheaply, as our politicians have done in the past.
It's a sad state of affairs that such basic common sense ideas, such as putting America first and protecting your own country, serving your own voters, have become controversial.
This is especially alarming because we reputedly live in a free democratic republic.
Nowhere today is the necessity for America First values more apparent than in the debate over immigration.
The country is at last waking up to the drawbacks of leaving our southern border wide open.
We are defenseless and the Biden administration is using airplanes and buses to transport faceless strangers straight into our heartland by the millions.
Drugs, crime, violence, chaos, and poverty are now rampant throughout the country as a result of this reckless act.
It's clear now no one is happy about this.
In a properly functioning system, any effort to control illegal immigration would have broad, bipartisan support.
And yet, nobody does anything about this dangerous situation except talk.
And our enemies have taken note.
A March article in the Epoch Times reveals that China is using our border to erode American democracy from without and within.
In an effort to build a more effective global transportation system, China is now constructing a highway in Panama that, when completed, will run 18,000 miles from Alaska to Argentina.
And if you haven't noticed, that means the very center of our country will sport a Chinese toll road.
Right now, the project is working to bridge what's known as the Darien Gap, which was already a major thoroughfare for illegals crossing over into America on foot.
Just by completing this one segment, China will have successfully supercharged an already dire illegal immigration situation.
The article quotes Mike Howell of the Heritage Foundation Oversight Project, saying that a completed highway will devastate American regional relevance.
This, along with the many other Chinese-run infrastructure projects being built around our country, will squeeze out American influence in our own backyard.
Howell states, It's like a boa constrictor that's tightening and tightening around the United States.
Article goes on to quote the work of a Panamanian professor who praises the Chinese project as a means to the utopian ideal of a borderless world.
In other words, a world where there is no Mexico, no Canada, and no United States.
Did you vote for that?
Did any of us vote to disenfranchise the entire population of America by summarily subjecting us to rule by a super-national elite?
Who said China has carte blanche to just start divvying up American territory to suit its own ends?
And this is just China.
In the world of international economics, the corporate feudalists, known as the globalists, are hard at work bleeding our country dry by outsourcing everything from manufacturing to food production, all while ruthlessly imposing the ritualized observance of illogical beliefs like transgenderism or DEI on the general population.
These beliefs undercut American meritocracy to the point of crippling our businesses and our military.
And if the place we now know as America one day soon ceases to be, what happens to her founding spirit of freedom and equality?
Well, theologians have a word for the separation of the body from the spirit.
It's called death.
In this respect, America First philosophy is a kind of national medicine, a necessary corrective for a culture that has inexplicably embraced suicidal policies.
As rational as that sounds, the oddest thing about the America First platform has to be the unhinged reaction it elicits from our political class.
The same politicians who droned on endlessly about the existential threat posed by a small network of terrorists in the aftermath of 9-11 are suddenly mum in the face of the incursion of powerful state and corporate forces who openly plot our destruction.
The idea of a border wall to protect citizens from violent outsiders is a project that even libertarians would agree falls within the purview of the government.
At the same time, establishment politicians of every stripe, the same people who never met a government project they didn't like, couldn't manage the building of the border wall.
Wow. Is that not weird?
If these politicians actually supported the views they profess, they'd welcome these ideas with open arms.
Yet, they don't.
And herein lies the real problem with America First.
It reveals our political class to be rife with liars who are so self-serving they are dissolving America for personal prestige and a few denarii.
They don't appreciate the critique implied when people embrace America First.
They're embarrassed at being outed as incompetent frauds.
They don't like their secret funding lines being threatened, so they stand against an American revival.
They stand against America first.
They oppose a more vibrant middle class.
They don't want the U.S. to be energy independent and industrially strong.
They don't want the economic and tech booms such as American Renaissance would produce.
That's too disruptive.
They stand against families and rational gender concepts, shockingly.
Again, they are against stability, prosperity, freedom, and against what Abraham Lincoln termed in the Gettysburg Address, the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our national union.
America First policies, simply put, seek to ensure that again, in the words of Lincoln, the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
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During the 20th century, the ostensible goal of Marxism was the eradication of any semblance of class structure in order to free mankind from historical oppression.
In hindsight, it was a solution in search of a problem as its reduction of all conflict and oppression to mere class struggle oversimplified dynamic and complex contemporary and historical situations.
Much in the same way an ignorant bigot heaps all his personal problems onto his scapegoat of choice, Marxists blame class structure for all of the world's ills.
Marxism would never work because it was based on a sloppy analysis and motivated by the base personal hangups of one man.
So when it became the governing ideology in places like Cuba, the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia, it worked less like a socioeconomic theory and more like a personal grudge.
An attack set loose upon a planet of otherwise innocent and unsuspecting people.
Marxism fails because everywhere it has been tried, it has ended up leading to destruction and accomplishing the opposite of what it claims to be set out to do.
Instead of creating equality, it establishes a two-class system consisting of the rulers and the ruled.
Under communist regimes, these two classes remain as distant as any classes have ever been.
The rulers enjoy a life of ease and luxury while everyone else waits for hours in the hope of receiving a single loaf of bread.
What's more, Marxist states have been historically unprecedented in the brutality of their police state tactics.
You aren't allowed to worship God.
Work or pay?
Or write?
Or even think about such inoffensive topics?
Alas, Marxism also fails to achieve real freedom because the ideology is so fragile that even an isolated incident of providing goods or services for money threatens to collapse the whole project.
Communism is less about helping the downtrodden and more about consolidating power.
Marxist societies are places where innovation and success are punished on principle.
You aren't allowed to improve anything.
You can't improve quality of life, least of all your own situation.
If Marxists were sincerely committed to helping people, they would be focused on improving metrics, such as class mobility.
It's not in puritanical Marxist societies where people enjoy the benefits of such socioeconomic upward mobility, but rather in the freedom-loving capitalist West.
How can this be?
Karl Marx said capitalism was all about oppression, yet here in the United States, we're confronted daily with examples of capitalism empowering impoverished citizens who, through hard work, grit, and determination, launched themselves into the company of their erstwhile capitalist oppressors.
They may have an iPhone or live life in a way that has an improved life because of these inventions.
If we accept Marx's notion that class differences are at the root of all of society's evils, then class mobility is the closest thing we have to a working solution to the problem of poverty.
Class mobility, therefore, is a metric we should all be interested in because it serves as an indicator for the freedom we have to improve our life.
And for all the praise we give rates of upward mobility in the West, a disturbing trend has shown that mobility is shrinking.
This is happening in particular in the middle class, according to a 2022 analysis of government data by the Pew Research Center.
The report states that the middle class, once the economic stratum of a clear majority of American adults, has steadily contracted in the past five decades.
The share of adults who live in middle-class households fell from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2021.
This comes from how the American middle class has changed in the past five decades.
The middle class is the best indicator of where society is headed because its trajectory is not fixed in the same way it tends to be for the extremely rich or the extremely poor.
For example, when you define upward mobility as the ability of a given birth year cohort to economically outpace their parents, both the upper and lower classes display predictable consistencies.
It's hard for those born rich to out-earn their parents who already kind of exceeded expectations.
It's comparatively easy for those who are extremely poor to demonstrate very moderate gains in income over their parents where a They may be still poor, but just a little bit less.
So upward mobility is typically stagnant for the extremely rich or extremely poor.
But if we look at a 2017 study published by Chetty et al.
in Science under the depressing title The Fading American Dream, Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940, the greatest decline in upward mobility since the 50s has been in the middle class.
What could be the cause?
Where is the downward pressure on economic freedom coming from?
We've previously talked about how the Fed's monetary policies of flooding the market with dollars eviscerated the middle class salaries.
Another cause may, in fact, be the Marxist remnant in our government.
Take Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, for example.
She recently added 40 more appliances to the Department of Energy's unified agenda.
The list seeks to impose various regulations on the populace.
It puts regulations on the manufacture of appliances, from gas stoves to ceiling fans.
The stated goal is to save consumers money by making appliances more efficient, but that doesn't really make sense.
Manufacturers who are capable of implementing product changes that would save consumers money don't need an incentive in a free market to save a consumer money.
And that's how you know Granholm is a Marxist.
She says she wants to improve lives, but her actions are guaranteed to impoverish the masses while consolidating power for her party and her role.
It's uncanny how that's always the way things work out under leftists.
Biden creates an energy shortage and then here come the regulators who cash in on the privatization for their own benefit, imposing rules and controls that ultimately give them more control over every aspect of our lives, from how long we shower to how we toast our bread.
When compared with capitalism, Marxism ceases to have plausible excuses for its poor performance.
Because of the freedom generated by capitalism, Marxism can never hope to measure up, and can't really compete.
A side-by-side comparison reveals Marxism's many inherent flaws, the most obvious one being that Marxism always winds up wounding the people it purports to help.
Despite its failures, Marxists continue to insist that their ideology is capable of saving the world, which would perform better for class mobility and personal liberty, Marxist communism, or American capitalism.
That's a race the whole world needs to see.
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Jim, thanks so much for joining us.
Hi, Daniel. It's great to be with you today.
Yeah, well, we have so much to get to today, but before we got started off-air, you were telling me about your passion for the Second Amendment.
So how did you develop this passion about this?
I mean, do you kind of shoot guns yourself, or do you feel like it's kind of looking at the federal government's encroaching power?
Because I know that, gosh, what's going on with them is crazy, but tell me a little bit about that.
Well, it basically started when I was in the military.
I didn't grow up hunting or shooting guns or anything like that.
But once I got into the military and was trained on how to properly use them, I saw them as something that could be useful both for sport, for fun, and for protection.
So currently, you know, I go to the range once a week or so and train there.
I've trained both my children how to safely use guns and so that they're comfortable around guns.
Sadly, my daughter is a better shot than I am, but that's okay.
I'm really proud of her for being that way.
That's good. And then, you know, it really came to play, I think, along with a lot of other Americans during the 2020 BLM riots where we saw gun sales just skyrocket because people were afraid.
Interestingly enough, the largest increase in gun purchases during that time were among African Americans and women.
Wow. It wasn't just the white, you know, us white hillbillies, men who were buying up the guns.
It was everybody. And since then, you've really started to see the government really want to wage war in the Second Amendment, and they're doing it in a number of different ways.
Number one, you're starting to see states put forward legislation to...
Confiscate so-called assault weapons.
Now, I'm sorry, isn't any weapon that you use to hurt someone technically an assault weapon, so therefore a broom can be an assault weapon, right?
Basically, what assault weapons means is a very scary-looking rifle.
Okay, fine. But the thing is, when they confiscate assault weapons, they're not doing anything.
Approximately 400 people a year are killed with what are called assault weapons.
More than 450 people are killed each year Falling out of bed.
So why aren't we banning these death traps that are beds, especially the bunk bed and the water bed, which are the two super assault weapons of beds.
So we're focusing on the wrong things.
New laws only impact law-abiding citizens.
And that's the thing that the politicians either don't realize or they do realize that they don't care.
Criminals, by definition, do not follow the law.
In fact, there was a study done by Loyola University going all the way back to 2016 where people who were in state and federal prisons who committed a crime with a gun, of those people, only 6% purchased the gun legally under their own name.
So all of these laws that they're passing won't stop 94% of the criminals from doing what they do.
The majority of guns that criminals use in Committing a crime are handguns that they either bought illegally or that they found at another crime scene and took with them.
The other thing we see is these guns pass from person to person to person as either they're killed by one of their competitors, if you will, or someone commits a crime with a gun and the first thing he wants to do is sell it to someone else for cash so he no longer has that gun.
So the government's focusing on all the wrong things.
If the government really wanted to stop Gun crime, especially mass shootings, because all of these things happen pretty much after a mass shooting.
They say, oh, we need to do something.
We need some common sense gun laws.
There are two common sense gun laws that I would love to see Congress pass, but they don't have the fortitude to do it.
Number one, ban gun-free zones.
If you're a criminal and you want to go shoot up a whole bunch of people, where's the best place to go?
A place where you know that no legal gun carrier will be there because they're not allowed to bring their guns into that area.
Number two, universal concealed carry.
There's no reason why I go through 16 hours of training in the state of Illinois in order to get a concealed carry license, and yet that doesn't transfer across to, say, New Mexico or to California or to New York.
You don't have to get a driver's license for every state that you drive in.
Why can't we have universal concealed carry, eliminate the gun-free zones, and then the criminals will think twice because they don't know if the person next to them is a good guy with a gun.
Right. Absolutely.
It's crazy how much...
Our Second Amendment is being chipped away at.
And it seems like every time you mention a mass shooting, especially a school shooting happens, the left says, let's capitalize on this opportunity to try to push our, you know, liberal agenda to take away guns and so on.
So, I mean, at the end of the day, I feel like with situations like that, it's a mental health crisis because the person who's in this situation is...
They, you know, they clearly are a disturbed person.
And so there's a lot that needs to be done there.
And taking away the gun, as you mentioned, isn't going to solve the issue.
Absolutely not. And, you know, the other thing that we're seeing is it is a mental health issue, like you said.
And a lot of these recent school shootings, the ones that have taken place over the last 12 months, the people that did the shootings were on some sort of antidepressant medication.
And so you don't know if they went off the medication and that's what caused them to do this, or if the medication in and of itself caused them to do this.
So that's something that I think we really need to explore.
The other thing that the government is doing Danielle, and this is what they did in my home state of Illinois, is they said, oh, if you want to keep your evil assault weapons, you have to go register that weapon with the state police so we can create a database of people who have guns.
Now, you can look back in history, countries that did that, it didn't turn out well for the citizens.
It didn't turn out well for Jews and Nazi Germany when they had to go tell the government who had guns and who didn't.
It didn't work well for the Venezuelans, the Cubans, or the Chinese citizens when their governments made them do something like that.
There is a history of governments forcing people to register their guns, saying, I have this many guns in my home, and here are the type of guns I have, and then the government showing up at that person's door and taking them away.
Right. My goodness.
Well, Jim, let's transition to talking a little bit about economy because we're an economist and people are living in really difficult times.
I mean, it's amazing how much Biden has ruined our country in these last few years.
But maybe you can take a minute and compare the Trump economy with the current Biden economy that we're in right now.
Let's look back to maybe pre-COVID. Right.
Yeah, so if you look at what happened pre-COVID, Trump came in and all of a sudden things took off.
And for a couple of reasons, he was a very pro-business and anti-regulation and he was pro-America.
And those three things together signaled to the companies in the United States that I'm going to invest in infrastructure in America.
I'm going to invest in research and development.
I'm going to do the things that need to be done in order to ensure that my company can grow and I can hire more people.
The Trump tax cuts were very good because it lowered the corporate tax rate.
And then what we saw is corporations repatriating money back into the United States that they had kept in other countries because they didn't want to pay the 28-30% corporate income tax that they were paying under Obama.
So Trump did very, very well with that.
We saw the stock market doing well.
We saw unemployment, especially unemployment for minorities, women, and high school graduates be at record high levels.
COVID hit, okay, you know, once in a lifetime pandemic, hopefully it never happens again.
The stock market crashed, but then it was coming back strong.
All Joe Biden had to do was nothing.
If he had just sat in the Oval Office and counted his toes, the economy would be in a much better position than it is today.
But what did he do?
He pumped trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars into the economy without doing anything to get the economy rolling.
So you had more money chasing the same number of goods and services, which means we got inflation.
And what we saw when Biden took office, inflation was about 1.3, 1.4% in January of 2021.
We had 19 consecutive months of increase in inflation, peaking just under 10%.
Now, the rate of growth of inflation is coming down, but the thing that people forget is inflation is additive.
So, if inflation was 10%, just for the sake of argument, in June of 2023, And it's 4% in June of 2024.
We're still 14% higher than we were two years ago.
And for them to say that inflation has been cut is wrong, the rate of growth.
The analogy I like to make is that if you gain 10 pounds over Christmas because you eat a whole bunch of food, And then over Easter, you only gain five pounds.
You're not getting thinner.
You're getting fatter, slower.
And that's what the economy is doing.
We're seeing prices go up continuously, but it's going up more slowly than it was before.
The other thing that's happening with our economy is that, again, Biden is not pro-business.
He wants to raise taxes.
He wants to do a whole bunch of things.
He also has said he wants to kill the fossil fuel industry.
So if you're Shell or you're British Petroleum or one of these other companies who are in the petroleum industry, are you going to invest a lot of money in R&D? Are you going to invest money in updating your refineries so that they can be more productive?
No, you're not. You're going to do a whole bunch of other things to try to maximize your profits in the time that's left.
The last thing that we're seeing right now, Danielle, is that we really have almost a schizophrenic economy.
At the macro level, things look really good.
The stock market's doing very well.
Unemployment is at a very, very low rate, although workforce participation is not where it should be.
But if you look at what's happening to the average American, especially working class Americans, they are getting killed.
Their wage increases are not keeping up with the rate of inflation.
Their credit cards are maxed out, and they're not using that to go on vacation and buy flat screen TVs.
They're using their credit cards to pay for their utility bill, to pay their rent, to pay for food and gas.
Food prices are out of control.
There was a recent study that showed that one-third of Americans are skipping meals in order to pay their bills.
Think about that. In the United States of America, nearly one-third of Americans are skipping meals in order to pay their bills.
We're starting to see record foreclosure rates on homes.
We're seeing record numbers of people back out of the sale of homes because they realize they can no longer afford that home.
And we're seeing a record number of automobile repossessions.
But the one thing that I saw that gives me a lot of pause and makes me really worried is consumer spending is starting to fall off a cliff.
That means that people don't have any more room on their credit cards, they've drained all their savings, and they're finally saying, we can't build any more debt.
We've got to start cutting.
And that's going to cause what economists will call shrinkflation or stagnation, excuse me, where basically with stagnation, we have low to no growth and we have inflation.
And I think that's what we're going to start seeing.
Now, the government's going to tell, hey, our gross domestic product numbers are looking pretty good, but they don't because gross domestic product also includes government spending, which is at record high numbers now.
If you backed government spending out of GDP, our economy is shrinking.
Yeah. If you look at, though, the fact that I think in the last couple Christmases it was, I would see these numbers saying, oh, look, you know, Christmas sales and these things are through the roof.
And I remember thinking to myself, it doesn't make any sense because Americans are hurting.
But like you said, eventually I think it kind of leads to a point where people say, whoa, I actually can't, I can't keep living like this. I can't keep up this lifestyle that I had before under President Trump, like you mentioned. And eventually the Biden economy that was being propped up, it looks like it's good, but it's not. And even with the, with the government putting out more money, I mean, that, that, that, that only works for so long because the inflation eventually gets
it's so bad, where, like you said, the wages don't align.
So how do you think, moving forward, how do you think Americans are going to approach this in the election?
I mean, I know that we say, okay, the common sense is going to tell them, hey, the Biden economy, horrible.
But do you think that some people will look at it and say, you know what, I'm just getting by and this is the new normal.
I mean, liberals say things all the time, like, new normal!
Let's hope not. If you look at surveys of voters that they do with exit polls during the primary season, the number one and the number two issue for Americans were the border and the economy.
And so Americans are worried because when you, again, when you're skipping meals to pay your bill, when your credit card is maxed out and you're paying 25% interest and you're making minimum payments and you can't afford to fill your car up with gas because filling your car up takes a third of your paycheck every month, Then you really start to vote your pocketbook and you say, hey, you know what? I'll take $1.50 gas and mean tweets from that orange man all day long.
I don't need that old doddering fool trying to pump more trillions of dollars in the economy for this green agenda that doesn't work.
So I think Americans are going to say, we've had enough and we need to return to the policies that we saw under Donald Trump.
We're pro-business, anti-regulation, let the economy do its thing.
The thing with government intervention in the economy is they get it wrong.
They're not very smart people.
So the smartest thing governments can do is nothing.
Stay out of the way and let the economy do what it will.
Yeah. I want to zero and two on something you said about the workforce participation.
So if the economy seems to be doing well, why are more people not participating?
Are these Gen Zers? Are these people who say, you know what, I'm not interested in doing this kind of job that pays X number of dollars at Walmart or so on?
What is causing this?
You're primarily seeing it from a couple of different areas.
Number one, there are the moms.
The moms who saw what schools were doing to their children during COVID because they were able to participate in the classroom via Zoom.
And they're like, you're teaching my kid what?
And so moms decided to leave the workforce to stay home with their kids so they could be more active in their children's life.
Now, it wasn't that long ago, right?
In the 1950s, you could have one person in the family work, the mother 99% of the time stay home and raise the 2.3 kids.
You had two cars and you had a house.
Now you can't have that with a one-income family.
So it takes both families to do that.
But I think families are scaling back sometimes.
The other thing that you're seeing is a bunch of Gen Zers who...
When they got all this Biden COVID money, they're like, well, gosh, this is a lot better than working, so I'm just going to not work.
And so, you know, they're living in their mom's basement.
You're still seeing a huge number of Gen Zers who are living in their parents' basement.
Right now, it's not necessarily because they're not working, but it's because they can't afford an apartment or they can't afford to buy a house.
But a lot of people just decided, I don't want to go back to work.
I'll live off the government dole because my life isn't that different anyway when I'm doing that.
And that's why you're seeing participation down.
We're not at record low numbers as we were right after COVID, but it's not where it should be.
We should be about a point higher in labor participation.
And when you look at the population of the United States, that's a lot of people.
Yeah. Yeah.
And those people, like you were mentioning, who just didn't really want to go back post-COVID... It's like, how do you reset that?
Eventually, the people say, well, I'm used to my life this way.
I think you need to see a couple of things.
One, we need the moms to kick their kids out of the basement, right?
If you're going to live here, you're not going to play video games all day.
You're going to go get a job. Number two, I think you'll see more people go back to work when they realize that their money is actually going to buy something.
So we need to see prices come down.
That's not going to happen under this administration.
It's going to happen under a Trump administration.
Because remember, even though inflation is shrinking, no prices have come down.
On average, prices are up 19.7% since Biden took office.
So think about that. One-fifth of your earning capacity is gone right now because of inflation.
Yeah. I know you're an expert on supply chain.
Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that because I know there was a period where it was like buying a used car was crazy.
Buying a new car, they weren't available.
Supply chain affected everything.
What is kind of the status currently with supply chains, maybe just with something like that?
Well, we're seeing some interesting things with supply chain right now.
So if you go back to 2021, when COVID was raging, and we weren't able to get computer chips, and the price of used cars was skyrocketing, and you couldn't get a new car, things were bad because the ports were super congested.
So even if they were able to make the chips and get them onto a ship, the ship sat at anchor.
For a month, six weeks waiting to unload because the ports in the United States are so inefficient, and they still are.
A recent study just came out ranking the most efficient ports in the world.
The United States is not in the top 10, not in the top 20, not in the top 30.
So that shows you how bad our ports are.
There are ports in Africa, undeveloped African nations that are better, more efficient than the United States ports are.
What we're seeing today is extremely interesting because we're starting to see a spike in the cost of shipping via ocean.
And that's happening for a number of reasons.
One, we had an issue in the Suez Canal, the Suez Canal with the Houthis firing the missiles in the Red Sea, and that caused ships to have to go around the Horn of Africa, which added two weeks to the supply chain.
And when you're not ready for that, that really starts to cause hiccups.
And it actually caused the container shortages because the containers that they thought were going to be available two weeks weren't there and there weren't enough to go around.
We saw the same thing happening with the Panama Canal, which was at record low water levels over this past winter because of a drought in Panama, so ships were having to go around the southern tip of South America to come up.
Now that's starting to resend.
The water laws are coming up.
But now what we're seeing is ocean freight companies taking ships offline in order to drive up shipping prices.
So about six months ago, the price of shipping a container full of goods from, say, Shanghai to Los Angeles was about $2,200.
We're starting to kiss $10,000 right now.
So not quite as bad as the $22,000 levels we received in COVID, but it's becoming much more expensive to do so.
The other thing that we've seen that impacts the United States is the shipping companies have changed the footprint of their ships.
They're sending their larger container ships from Asia into Europe.
And they're sending smaller ships from Asia to the United States.
And so it's taking more ships to bring the same amount of goods now than it did say six, eight months ago.
And I think the reason that they're doing this is if they were going to be using the big ships, they weren't Going to be fully loaded.
And the shipping companies won't sail if they're not fully loaded.
And so that to me also shows that the U.S. economy is weaker than we thought it was because there's not the demand.
So they're shifting their most efficient, largest ships to where the demand is.
And right now that looks like it's Europe.
Wow. Okay. So in a sense, it seems like things are going to be getting worse.
We're going to be getting less goods.
We're going to be getting the supply chain is going to keep with this kind of Because there's still a lot of conflict going on in the Middle East.
We aren't buying as much things in the U.S. Is that kind of the trend that you're seeing?
I think things are going to stay pretty much how they are now up until the election.
And depending on who wins the election, we'll see it change overnight because a lot of this is done off of forward momentum, not actual results, right?
It's forward-looking. So if Trump wins, everyone's mentality is going to be, okay, we're going to go back to how things were before COVID. And so companies will start adjusting, basically, if you will, to support the pre-COVID economy.
If they see Biden win, they're going to stay where they are.
Now, the one thing I think, going back to the intersection of the economy and the supply chain, the one thing that we really need to watch is what the Federal Reserve is going to do with interest rates.
Right now, there's no reason for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates if you look at what's going on in the economy.
The economy is still growing at the top line.
Interest rates are staying pretty, pretty high, and unemployment is still very, very low.
So, if they reduce interest rates, it's going to be because they're political, which they're not supposed to be.
The thing that I'm a little worried about is that they're going to lower rates during their September meeting as kind of a nod, if you will, to Joe Biden.
And that's going to cause the economy to start taking off a little bit.
Then we're going to see inflation again.
And inflation is going to go from 3.4%, which is where it is today, to You know, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10% in a very short amount of time.
We'll see how that impacts things.
But if they lower rates in September, you're going to get a good enough blip that it could change the election.
Wow. But if the inflation is getting bad, wouldn't that also be bad?
Well, think about it. If they lower the rates in September, and then October people start buying things like crazy, that number won't be...
By the time they realize it, it's too late.
Yeah. That number will not be reported until after the election.
The only thing they'll have is the headline of, Biden gets interest rates lowered.
And that could motivate enough people who are on the fence to switch from, say, Trump to Biden.
Now, you also have a lot of people who are switching to Trump because of him being convicted of all these 34 felonies, which no one can still tell me what the crime was.
That's a whole different story.
But, you know, if you look at the polls, a lot of people are switching over to Trump and he's getting a lot of street cred from minorities to say, man, he's got the same kind of problems that I have and he's more real than Joe Biden.
So we'll see. It's going to be an interesting next few months.
Yeah, let's discuss a little bit of the interest rate issue and housing market.
Because today it's crazy.
It's nothing like it was during previous generations when you could buy a house that was more in line with your income.
Today it seems like it's basically impossible, especially for younger people, to buy a home.
So where do you see that going?
Do you kind of think it's on the side of the people who say, You know, invest in real estate or are you on the side of people who say, you know, focus on the stock market?
What do you feel like is your advice as someone who's an expert on that?
I'm not a financial advisor, so please don't take financial advice from me.
Or maybe do the George Costanza and do the opposite of what I say and you'll make a ton of money.
But the housing market is interesting right now because...
You know, interest rates are pretty high.
We're around 7% or so.
And people can't afford to move.
So if you're living, I'll make up the numbers, if you're living in a $500,000 house today, and you have a mortgage locked in at 2.5%, your mortgage rate would double if you went and bought the same house.
So you can't afford to just move to the same house.
That's actually hurting companies who are trying to recruit executives and getting them to move because no one wants to move.
The only reason that we're seeing the housing market be stable and prices stay relatively stable is because people actually learned from the housing crisis of 2008-2009 where they had variable rate mortgages.
Okay. Right now, the number of variable rate mortgages out there in the economy is negligible.
And so people are locked in on their rates, but then that has the effect of people not putting their house on the market.
Therefore, there's no inventory, which means prices stay high.
So right now, if you can afford to buy a house, I would buy a house and I would get a five-year variable rate mortgage because rates should be coming down over the next five years.
But if you don't need to buy a house or if you have a house right now, I'd stay put for a little bit.
Yeah, no, that definitely makes sense.
If Trump is reelected, if he's back in office, what would kind of the plan be or what would the strategy look like that you would suggest to rebuild the economy?
Because I feel like, yes, we want to go back to Trump's policies, but we also have to clean up this mess that Biden's created.
So what would be involved in doing that?
Let me do a couple of things.
First and foremost, Trump needs to rescind all of the new regulations that Biden has put in that are anti-business.
He needs to then work with Congress to make the tax cuts permanent so that they don't go and start raising the corporate income tax.
Most importantly, don't raise the corporate income tax any higher than it is.
Biden wants to nearly double the capital gains tax.
Now, capital gains is something, if I buy $1,000 worth of stock, And that stock doubles in price to $2,000.
And then I sell the stock and I make a profit of $1,000.
They want to charge me 48%.
So they want to take away $480 of that $1,000 that I made in profit from the sale of the stock.
But what people forget is I bought that stock with money that had already been taxed at 37%.
Yeah. So I had $100.
It's now down to $63.
I take that $63.
I invest some of it into the stock market.
The stock goes up and then they want to take 48% of my profit away from me doing that.
That's completely insane.
They got to make sure that they don't do that.
The next thing that I would do is I would take all of the unspent COVID money and any money that had not been spent on all these silly green New Deal projects and I would use it for infrastructure.
Not green infrastructure, not windmills.
I would fix roads and I would fix bridges.
And I would fix airports.
That's the number one thing that we need to do from an infrastructure perspective.
And quite frankly, and no one's going to like me saying this, we need to find a way to break the unions in our ports so that we automate our ports and our ports become world-class instead of being a laughingstock, which is what they are today.
Hmm. Wow. Do you feel like, sorry, just what you said about the airports.
Do you feel like the airport issue, though, is, like, that takes kind of a while to fix, right?
Because I guess they have to kind of, it takes some time.
It may even be, I guess, post-Trump by the time you see some of the results of, like, the infrastructure projects.
Yeah. But, again, a lot of what drives the economy is not actual results, but the forward-looking anticipation of those results.
So, for example, and I don't know what the numbers are, but let's just say, for example, there are $5 trillion available in unused funds from COVID, green infrastructure, whatever, and Trump announces, over the next four years, we're going to invest...
Four trillion dollars in upgrading our roads and bridges, right?
One, construction crews start hiring more and more people, right?
And then number two, people get excited about the way that the infrastructure is going to look, and it just creates its own momentum.
So much of the economy is driven by the way people feel.
And again, that's why it's forward looking.
If I feel good about what's going on, I might be willing to incur a little bit of debt in order to buy that 65-inch television or to take the family on a really nice vacation to Hawaii.
If I'm not feeling good about the future and I'm worried about getting laid off from my job or I'm worried that the price of gas is going to be $7 a gallon, I'm not going to go spend that money.
And that's what causes the economy to shrink and that's what puts us into a recession.
Okay. Wow.
Well, Jim, thank you so much for your thoughts today.
I appreciate it. And all I have to say is, Trump needs to win this fall, and hopefully next year is better than this year.
Danielle, thanks so much for having me.
It was a wonderful time. Well, that wraps up today's show.
If you've enjoyed the show, make sure to find me.
I'm at Danielle D'Souza Gill on True Social.
I'm on X. I'm on Instagram, Facebook, all the places.
I'm at Danielle D'Souza Gill.
So make sure to stay in touch with me there.
I've had so much fun this week subbing for Dinesh.
So be ready for him to come back next week.
And I hope to see you guys again soon.
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