Legendary investor and former OMB Director David Stockman joins today's Liberty Report to take a hard look at the shutdown that has brought the US economy to its knees. Was it really necessary...and how can we ever recover? Don't miss today's Liberty Report...
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Numbers Crunching Truth
00:08:34
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| Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report. | |
| With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host. | |
| Daniel, good to see you. | |
| How are you this morning, Dr. Paul? | |
| I'm doing very well. | |
| Thank you. | |
| It's going to be a good program. | |
| We have a very special guest, somebody our audience knows well, somebody I've known for a long time. | |
| I've known him when he was a mere congressman, way back then. | |
| It's David Stockman of David Stockman Contra Corner. | |
| He's had a lot of experience. | |
| I'm not going to name all those, but he had a lot of experience with a president by the name of Ronald Reagan. | |
| He was the budget director. | |
| And that's, I don't know, David always knew how to crunch the numbers up. | |
| I think that's where he really did the crunching. | |
| David, welcome to our program today. | |
| Glad to be with you. | |
| There's a lot to talk about here. | |
| And frankly, some numbers crunching that gets to the truth of this whole hysteria about COVID-19. | |
| It couldn't be more timely. | |
| We have a campaign being run by the mainstream media, I call it the Cuomo Brothers CNN Inquisition, that is really scaring the daylights out of both politicians and the broad public in a way that's leading us to commit damn near economic suicide. | |
| Shut down the nation is a government-imposed calamity that is getting more vicious by the day. | |
| We saw last week the unemployment claims again, 5 million. | |
| In four weeks, we're up to 22 million new unemployment claims, which equals the total number of jobs allegedly created over the last 10 years of recovery, at least according to the BBS. | |
| That number for four weeks, you just can't emphasize it enough. | |
| 22 million people out on the street losing their paycheck is 10 times larger than the first worst, I should say, the worst four-week period during the Great Recession in that dark winter of 208 and 209. | |
| That's how far off the deep end we are. | |
| And it's predicated on a description or characterization of the COVID-19 that I think is asked backwards, if you'll excuse my French. | |
| This is not the black plague ripping through the entire population, taking people down, whether they're old, young, in between, healthy or not. | |
| This is just the opposite. | |
| This is a very bad, contagious flu variant that strikes in a pinpointed way at the elderly and especially the elderly that have pre-existing life-threatening conditions like heart disease or various other comorbidities, as they call them, diabetes, even cancer, respiratory illnesses, and so forth. | |
| And I think it's important before this continues much longer, and they're running this campaign on the media. | |
| You can't open it up. | |
| You've got to wait. | |
| We're going to be sheltered in till 2022 and all the other nonsense. | |
| Well, the economy will be entirely destroyed by then. | |
| So we need to face the facts. | |
| And I focus in my numbers crunching, Ron, as you call it, on the data from New York State, which they report every day, separate from Governor Cuomo's audition for his presidential candidate to see or whatever he's doing. | |
| And if you look at those numbers, it's crystal clear that one size fits all is the wrong remedy. | |
| The shutdown or lockdown solution is wrong. | |
| And just listen to this. | |
| There have been, as of today, 11,500 deaths, unfortunately, with COVID-19. | |
| And I say with because they're characterizing almost any death in a hospital as COVID-related, whether it was caused or not, but accept that number. | |
| But if you take the population under 30 in New York, there have been just 56 deaths out of that almost 12,000 number. | |
| And the thing that we need to look at to understand our risk and what we should be doing is the rate per 100,000 population, because what that does is standardize it, makes it sensible, understandable. | |
| The death rate per 100,000 for people in New York State, now this is the epicenter of the whole damn thing, is less than one. | |
| It's less than one per 100,000. | |
| And on the other hand, if you look at the population over 80 years of age, 80 or over, there have been 3,000 or 3,100 deaths, and the rate is 630 per 100,000. | |
| Now, just think about that. | |
| Your risk of death if you're over 80 from exposure or being infected by the corona is 850 times larger than if you're under 30. | |
| And in fact, if you take everybody under 50, which is 13 million of the 19 million people in the state of New York, the rate per 100 is only about six, six per 100,000. | |
| And that's just a tiny fraction of the normal death rate just from normal accidents and diseases and so forth. | |
| So when you look at those numbers, the obvious thing is we have to identify, isolate, treat, help that small subpopulation, maybe 10% of the population or even less, that's vulnerable to this thing. | |
| And on the other hand, open up society and economy and let the rest of the population get back to work and back to life. | |
| Daniel has a question for you. | |
| Yeah, you do make the good point, David, in your piece that there are virtually no New York deaths among the disease-free population under the age of 50. | |
| And these are predominantly the people that are out there or would be out there working. | |
| And that's so important. | |
| And you point out one size does not fit all. | |
| There should be special care taken for those that are vulnerable. | |
| But when you shut the people who have virtually no chance of dying from this away with those that do, it makes no sense. | |
| You know, we talked about this recently. | |
| Thomas Massey, Republican of Kentucky, said, we are facing severe disruptions in our food chains. | |
| We hear that Smithfield is cutting, it's closing plants. | |
| Farmers are dumping milk. | |
| Vegetables are rotting. | |
| And we're facing a massive catastrophe because of this monumental powder grab by politicians. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You know, unfortunately, as in so many other cases, Donald Trump has gotten some very bad advice from career government bureaucrats who have tunnel vision. | |
| Now, I'm not a Dr. Fauci lover. | |
| In fact, I think he ought to be, you know, I think Trump ought to do his thing and fire him forthwith. | |
| But let's just understand who he is. | |
| He graduated from Cornell Medical School in 1966. | |
| Ron, he's almost, I think, up with you. | |
| But in any event, two years later, he became a researcher at the NIH, National Health Institute of Health for allergy and infectious disease. | |
| He's been there for 52 years in the same tunnel. | |
| And he's been director of the joint since 1984. | |
| Now, he may know a lot about infectious diseases, but he knows very little about the rest of the world. | |
| And he was asked the wrong question. | |
| He should have been asked: who are the most vulnerable populations? | |
| It's not one-size-fits-all. | |
| This isn't the grim reaper of 1335, you know, Black Death in England or in Europe. | |
| And how do we identify them? | |
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Governors' Syndrome Protection
00:07:15
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| How do we protect them? | |
| But instead, these knuckleheads in the Trump White House gave them a platform to say, shut it down. | |
| And they gave the CDC a platform to say we can stop this virus if we stop social and economic life. | |
| That was the wrong question. | |
| There have been a lot of these viruses studied: SARS, MERS, H1 and N1. | |
| There's a whole body of literature that tells you very clearly you can't stop the virus. | |
| What you need to do is mitigate the harm to the most vulnerable populations that can happen. | |
| Well, they weren't given that. | |
| They were given full authority to scare the hell of the American public. | |
| They've done that. | |
| Trump stands there every day like a deer in a headlight while they're talking, and then he goes into another, you know, pissing contest, literally, with the rest of the press. | |
| And what it's done, unfortunately, is opened up a window for all of the partisan Democratic governors and mayors of the country to go whole hog with lockdown, shut their economies down, demand Washington, bail out everybody as a consequence of the shutdown, and blame the whole damn thing on Republicans and Donald Trump. | |
| You know, if you would have tried to do something as stupid as this whole scenario that I've just described, it would be hard to come up with it. | |
| I have a question. | |
| Who's motivated to do this? | |
| You come down on the side, well, they're just a bunch of jerks. | |
| They're dumb. | |
| They don't know what they're doing. | |
| Or is there a sinister desire to do this? | |
| You say the media is lying to us, which I think most of the world now realizes that. | |
| But is it the bureaucrats that lied to the media? | |
| Is that part of it? | |
| And in your experience with government, did you ever see anybody purposely misinform the public on economic stats? | |
| Or is that a new modern phenomenon? | |
| It may be more modern, and I think it's a great question, Ron. | |
| But, you know, there's different motivations of this syndrome that's underway. | |
| The CNN and the other mainstream media are desperate for advertising revenue. | |
| Their ratings are terrible. | |
| The public doesn't believe them anymore. | |
| And Trump is right about that. | |
| They're losing their audience. | |
| So now, if you can run a 24-7 death watch, which is essentially what CNN is, they got that little crawler on the bottom of the screen there that is updated by the hour. | |
| I think it's a morbid kind of thing. | |
| But apparently, that's how they're selling advertising. | |
| And that's what I think their motivation is. | |
| Now, the government bureaucrats from CDC or the Institute for Infectious Diseases, I think it's just the old syndrome that where you stand depends on where you sit. | |
| And these people have a chance to run the world for a moment, be front and center in the spotlight. | |
| And that's fine, but they were asked the wrong question. | |
| They shouldn't be making policy. | |
| They should be asked, how can we help? | |
| How can we protect, isolate, identify the vulnerable. | |
| Now, let me just add one thing to this, John, which, you know, you and I are great critics of the welfare state. | |
| But here's a case where the overwhelming, I showed this the other day, and I think people would find it startling. | |
| 20% of all the people who have unfortunately died from the coronavirus and the numbers shown on that screen on CNN and the rest of them have been citizens of New York over the age of 80 that had two, three, and four medical conditions that made them vulnerable. | |
| Okay, that's what the real truth of the matter is. | |
| And yet we allow the experts to run the whole country when they could easily be focusing their knowledge and expertise on helping that very vulnerable population. | |
| Stated differently, that share of the population is a fraction of 1%. | |
| And they account for 30% of all the deaths in America. | |
| So I don't know how we're going to shake loose of this because there's a war now going on between the Democrat mayors and governors and the Trump White House. | |
| Frankly, I'm a Federalist. | |
| I don't think Washington and the White House should be telling governors what to do. | |
| On the other hand, the governors are committing economic suicide in their own state. | |
| And I just hope that somehow people like yourself, Ron, and others can alert the public that we've got to stand up to them. | |
| There's a saying, the truth will make us free, but I would think that make us free and then maybe we'll hear the truth. | |
| So, Daniel? | |
| You know, you bring up the issue of political motives, and you can't ignore these. | |
| And you say, well, that's a little conspiratorial. | |
| They wouldn't do something like this or try to take advantage of something like this for their own political gain. | |
| But these are the same people that brought us to the brink of nuclear war with Russia to try to get Donald Trump out of office. | |
| So it's kind of easy to believe they do anything at this point. | |
| So there must be a component of that. | |
| But in your most recent piece, you put a very interesting graphic. | |
| You had a picture of Cuomo doing his daily thing. | |
| Then next to you had a graph. | |
| And that graph was hospitalizations for New York. | |
| And it went up like this. | |
| And then it went down and way down and way down to the bottom. | |
| Well, the whole point of the shutdown was to flatten the curve so the hospitals didn't get overwhelmed. | |
| Guess what? | |
| They're not overwhelmed. | |
| So why aren't we back on the streets and in our restaurants? | |
| Yes. | |
| You know, you're so right about that. | |
| And you hate to put on a tinfoil hat, so to speak, and accuse these Democratic politicians of nefarious purposes, okay? | |
| But frankly, the Trump derangement syndrome among Democrat politicians and frankly, half of the Republican establishment in Washington has become so severe that even if their lips are talking about public health protection and safety and So forth, in the back of their mind, it's get Trump, get Trump, get Trump. | |
| You shut down the thing he had to about. | |
| Okay. | |
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Where We Stand This Year
00:04:51
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| Are we there? | |
| In the back of their mind, you know, that's clearly a factor. | |
| David, I'm going to ask you a question. | |
| I was asked just minutes ago because I was doing an interview, and I don't know how well I did with the answer, but they wanted me to describe where we would be on this emergency at the end of this year. | |
| You want to deal with that one? | |
| Well, it's unless something changes dramatically mindset, unless the public gets aroused and comes out of its stupor, I'm afraid that the mainstream media and the establishment commentariat and the Democratic politicians are going to keep the country more or less in quasi-shutdown mode for months and months and months. | |
| And if that happens, we're going to have a collapse of GDP in an economy that was already ultra-fragile as a result of all this debt we talk about-74 trillion public and private on the U.S. economy and all the malinvestment and distortion and speculation that has occurred as a result of these bad monetary policies for several decades. | |
| So, what I'm saying is it's bad enough if this would have happened, let's say, in 1970 or 1990, it would have sent the economy into a tailspin. | |
| But this economy is totally, you know, it's as if, if I can use a medical term, the immune system of this economy has been totally destroyed by the Fed. | |
| It's a hand-to-mouth economy. | |
| It's a debt speculation-ridden economy. | |
| And when you have this kind of disruption to paychecks and to cash flow, and then we can even get into the government, it's crazy what they're doing. | |
| And since we're talking about it, Ron, I've got to get this thing, I've got to throw this number out. | |
| You know, the current estimate now for the deficit this year, fiscal 2020, is 3.8 trillion. | |
| That's 19% of GDP. | |
| It's off the charts. | |
| No one ever even imagined something that crazy. | |
| It's nearly where the deficit was during the dark days of World War II, when the economy was totally mobilized for military production and people didn't have anything to spend their money on anyway, except buy government bonds. | |
| Okay, that's where we are. | |
| This is really scary stuff. | |
| And that means by the end of the year, we're going to have multiple economic, financial, fiscal crises like we've never imagined before. | |
| Okay, I'm looking for a tidbit of positiveness going on. | |
| Today, we talked a little bit on a program earlier on about some of the resistance that has built. | |
| You know, people are finally waking up. | |
| Can you give us, do you think that's a little bit of a sign of things opening up and the people are getting sick and tired of it? | |
| I think that even if that is the case, I do understand exactly what you said. | |
| Nothing changes overnight, and there's a lot of debt and malinvestment to deal with. | |
| We're hoping that the people are waking up to some degree from our viewpoint. | |
| Yes, that's a good point. | |
| And I certainly, you see signs of it. | |
| Yesterday in Michigan, there were protesters outside the state capitol. | |
| And of course, last night, CNN had the governor on saying that these people are bioterrorists. | |
| You know, I mean, you know, that's about as crazy. | |
| They're exercising their constitutional rights. | |
| And suddenly they become bioterrorists. | |
| But I don't think that's the end of it. | |
| I think it's just the beginning when people realize, you know, because all this information that we've been sharing here today, it's not secret. | |
| You know, it's not something that I've got, you know, in a safe here where I am in Connecticut. | |
| This stuff is going to get out and people are going to realize that we've shut down the entire society, locked down the economy for no good reason. | |
| And once this information starts to filter out and we all have to work on getting it out to the public, I think there's going to be a real uprising. | |
| Okay, David, we're going to finish up here, but Daniel has a short question or statement. | |
| No, I just wanted to offer a little bit of optimism. | |
| I was talking to Lou Rockwell on the phone yesterday, and he said he was reading that the LA Times ad revenue has gone down to zero. | |
| So there might be a silver lining. | |
| Hopefully the other papers having the same experience. | |
| Okay, very good. | |
| David, I want to thank you again for being with us today. | |
| It's been great. | |
| And we're going to do our job in spreading the message. | |
| And I think you do a great job in doing the same thing. | |
| So thank you very much for being with us. | |
| Great to be with you. | |
| Well, very good. | |
| And I want to thank our viewers today for tuning in. | |