DC Fantasyland --- No Recession & Inflation Was 0%
With each passing day, the Biden Administration drifts further and further from reality. Politicians are notorious for practicing deception, but when lying becomes constant, even it starts to lose its "effectiveness." The truth, and those who speak it, start to look like a breath of fresh air. Real life can't be powered by lies.
With each passing day, the Biden Administration drifts further and further from reality. Politicians are notorious for practicing deception, but when lying becomes constant, even it starts to lose its "effectiveness." The truth, and those who speak it, start to look like a breath of fresh air. Real life can't be powered by lies.
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Chris Rossini, our co-host.
Chris, good to see you today.
It's great to see you too, Dr. Paul.
Good.
You know, we'll be talking about so many things economic in the administration and the fact that the achievements have been just astounding.
We have no inflation whatsoever and things are going on.
No recession.
That was quick.
I always tell people one recession depression that we should look at and study was the shorter recession depression in 1921 because the government kept hands-on.
So I figure, well, maybe these people are smarter than we think because one day we had a pretty serious inflation number.
Prices admittedly were going up about 10%, really going up about 15%.
And all of a sudden, there was a lot of people complaining about a recession.
But it's all been corrected.
So we're going to discuss that and find out what the secrets are.
So because we pride ourselves in searching for the truth.
And if they can do that, boy, we're going to have to reassess our values.
Who knows what's coming up here.
But, you know, the other thing that's been in the news a lot, and Daniel and I have talked about it a bit, and that is the, you know, the raid, the raid on Trump's house.
And it seems like that is stirring up a lot of interest, you know, especially the Republican base.
They're more solid than ever.
And even some Democrats are coming forward and talking, and even some moderates in the middle because it has stepped over the line.
So that's one thing that stays with us now.
But guess what?
Sometimes surprises happen.
And essentially, this might be true of almost all of Biden's programs because they've been backfiring on them.
You know, it took a while, but it looks like COVID has backfired on all of those lockdowns and things.
But also this raid may well backfire and get more support.
And some of the statistics and fundraising, the fundraising for the Republicans went way up.
So there's still a lot of activity there that we'll talk about.
Inflation And Precious Metals00:02:22
But before we do, I want to mention the fact that the whole issue of the inflation and listening to the government and which statistics to believe in.
What should we do today versus tomorrow?
What investment should we do?
And of course, most of our viewers are very interested in gold and silver and precious metals.
And they know that the company I associate with and partner with, it's Birch Gold.
And they do have information.
And it's important.
And most people admit, including myself, that it doesn't hurt to have as much information and advice.
Because, you know, I actually started saving coins, gold coins and all, and you had to search for them before gold was re-legalized.
So you had to look at numismatic coins.
And as a kid, I would go through the pennies, you know, and the silver and save the currency, not the gold.
So it's something I've looked at for a long time, so I have to individualize it.
Back then, I remember precisely when gold was, you know, gold was made illegal, and also when The day that it was made illegally that the foreigners couldn't deposit $35 and get an ounce of gold.
But I also remember very clearly when silver, the price of silver got so high that it was worth melting, so the government couldn't print it, couldn't mint it, because it just disappeared because that's the law of economics.
And I can remember LBJ saying, I'm going to make so many silver Kennedy half dollars that there'll be so many that they will not confiscate them and hide them.
But the law of economics ruled, and that is important.
But also, in the early 80s, I remember going around and buying a few rolls of pennies for the kids to have because they were the last, it was the last year that the pennies would lose their copper.
So we couldn't even maintain a copper standard.
So someday they'll realize they can't maintain a paper standard, too.
Rising Taxes and Deficits00:12:07
So, but anyway, if people are interested in getting more information from Birch, they can take a look at that text number on the bottom of his page.
Contact them, and you'll receive more information if you think you could benefit from it.
I also want to ask Chris a little bit about this too, because he has been studying this, and he's getting all these compliments from our viewers, how astute he is.
And now we're going to talk today a lot about the Biden program.
He's going to explain that first question I ask is, you know, how did we get rid of the inflation?
And how did we get rid of the recession?
Chris, how did that happen?
Well, thank you first for the kind words, Dr. Paul.
And yeah, today we're covering the fantasy land called Washington, D.C.
And, you know, a few days ago, Daniel on the show put up the video of Biden claiming that the inflation was 0% in July.
It was 8.5%.
But he said zero.
And I thought to myself, as I'm watching, it's just another one of Biden's mistakes.
But then I see the vice president says the same thing.
And then the press secretary says the same thing.
And then I went on social media and all the people who just repeat what they're told are all saying it was zero.
I mean, how fascinating.
Recession is gone.
There is no recession.
You can't even define it anymore.
And inflation is zero.
So my first question is: I wonder what's next.
Is the national debt not $30 trillion, but zero dollars?
Is that what we're going to hear next?
I mean, it's a total joke.
And it makes you wonder if inflation was really zero percent.
Why create the so-called Inflation Reduction Act in the first place?
You don't need it.
You know, why spend another $700 billion?
Spend another $700 plus billion that you do not have that will cause prices to rise even further.
So, you know, we're chasing them around with logic and truth, and they are not interested at all in logic or truth.
And this is very bad for the American people as a whole.
You know, it's bad for the people that go along with it and just repeat what they're told to repeat.
Your cost of living is going to go up too, along with everyone else.
The price of food, the price of gas, the price of all of your other bills, too.
So the consequences of these very real policies are going to create very real economic pain.
And this is just very bad for all of us.
Very good.
You know, the House today will be voting, I believe, on the Inflation Reduction Act.
So they don't even believe their own rhetoric about zero inflation.
They wouldn't have to pass this bill, which is, of course, they have to call it zero because they always want a little inflation.
That's why they worked 10 years to try to get the prices going up at a 2% rate.
So they're still in there.
But what it does, it adds to the confusion.
It adds to the distrust in government.
More people every year end up not believing what the government says.
And that's a good step because you've got to look for what's really happening and who's telling the truth if you think you can come up with the good answers.
But you know, in this bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, one of the big items in there has been the IRS.
They don't admit they're really short of cash because they say deficits don't matter and we print it up.
But they have to sort of appeal to the people that think that deficits do matter.
So they say, well, yes, we don't think we should raise taxes, which they do anyway.
They're raising a lot of taxes in order to get their credibility.
And then they also say that there's a lot of people not paying their taxes.
And I think that issue of the tax collectors has been around a long time.
I think that it was even mentioned in the Bible once or twice.
The taxpayer, that the tax collectors weren't held in high esteem.
But now they were putting an ad out.
They want to put in, if it passes, there'll be $80 billion to the IRS because they need to be more efficient.
They're not collecting enough money.
And they claim, we'll just get it from the super rich.
Of course, that isn't true.
What the plan is, if this goes through, they're going to get it from the middle class, just like the inflation tax hits the middle class.
And now they're even putting the IRS agents onto the middle class.
And yet they were going to get $80 billion for that and 87,000 people.
But the real clincher is, and I've complained about this already many times, about how many bureaucrats we have in government, hundreds of thousands, 200,000, closer to 200,000 that technically and legally they can carry guns.
Well, the ad out to get these agents hired into the government said that you have to be willing to use lethal force.
You know, every once in a while have a racial type killing in this country by the police, and that stirs up a lot of trouble.
But what they're doing is legalizing, you know, in a way, the IRS admits that if they need legal force, you know, if you don't, if the IRS agent doesn't knock on the door and doesn't have a warrant or something like that and you resist, you can be shot and nobody would be responsible.
That's why ultimately it's reform that we need, reform where they don't need the money and reform.
Where, you know, another simple solution for this is when we repealed 1913, just get rid of the IRS, get rid of the personal income tax.
And that would go a long way.
But they have been posting and getting it, but it was in the papers and all that you had to endorse lethal force.
Now, they haven't changed their mind, but the ad has changed.
I think they took down the ad or removed the part that they were advertising that.
I guess they got a lot of grief.
Thank goodness somebody sees something like that.
But they'll go through with this.
They're going to put more pressure on it.
I believe absolutely the pressure is going to be on the middle class, just like the inflation tax.
And there's going to be very little done because the momentum is so strong.
And there's a collusion between the welfare state and the warfare state.
And I hear so many Republicans in leadership position, and their biggest issue is we've got to have more money in the military.
We have to win that war in Ukraine.
And besides, we really haven't settled scores with Afghanistan and Syria, and we have to keep up with it.
So this is going to be around for a while because I think the improvement that we get after the elections will be welcome and there will be some improvement.
But ultimately, the support by leadership in both parties doesn't bode well for the country.
Chris.
Right, Dr. Paul, and these crazy programs and the inflation, you know, those who have followed your career and who watch our show regularly, especially on Fridays, we try to always hammer home, always blame the Fed for this, especially inflation.
However, we live in a world where every ability for us to come to that conclusion is barred off.
They're going to blame everybody else except the Fed.
You know, what was the first thing we heard from Biden?
Oh, it's Putin's inflation.
He went across the world and blamed that guy.
And then you have Republicans here who say, no, it's Biden's inflation.
They're both wrong.
It's always, always, always the Fed's inflation.
They are the ones that create the money, not Putin and not even Biden.
So when we see tens of billions go to Ukraine, $700 billion for Inflation Reduction Act, 87,000 IRS agents, where are they getting this money?
They are 30 trillion in debt.
They're not taxing us directly.
We don't go out to our mailbox and open a thing and say, oh, here's my share to pay for the 87,000 IRS agents.
No, they don't tax us directly.
Do they borrow the money?
They borrow some of it.
Some foreign countries, for reasons I don't understand, are willing to loan our government money, but they don't borrow all of it.
So it's the Fed that prints the money that gives these people the ability to live out their fantasies in the real world.
Otherwise, you could stick all these politicians in a room and they'd be like, well, let's spend $700 billion and $60 billion.
And every day we see the numbers and the headlines.
They wouldn't be able to do it without the Fed.
It's just not possible.
So the Fed is the root problem of all of this.
And the more people that understand it, the better.
And, you know, they daydream and they use terms like there's no inflation and we don't have a recession.
And everybody knows that's nonsense.
They don't believe that.
But the worst part is what they're doing isn't neutral.
It isn't like they didn't do any good.
They've done all this harm.
Everything you've mentioned, Chris, will do harm.
They are going to raise the taxes and they are going to raise the spending.
And thank goodness that there will be a lot of inefficiency there.
A lot of people are going to suffer by the threats from the IRS.
And there's going to be a lot of that and a lot of fear created.
But they're not going to be very efficient.
And the spending will continue because they're spending money on something that doesn't work.
And most things that government does doesn't work.
And this will continue.
But there are two points that I want to make about this.
When they use, right now the student loan is estimated that they're going to lose about $200 billion.
Well, you know, Henry Hazlitt wrote a pamphlet once, and it was entitled Instead of What.
And that is when you send the money to the government, and we won't even question how and what it's going to do, but if you send it to the government and it doesn't create wealth, then what could it have done?
Nobody asked that question.
Well, $200 billion that we've just lost in student loan, can we say that we created $200 billion worth of good education?
And look at our schools.
You know, it's all part of the tragedy of COVID and the lockdown and the destruction of civil liberties.
So people ought to always ask when they see $10 or $10 million or $10 billion going, how could that have spent if the people would have been able to keep that and not to have to pay any tax on it.
And the other thing to remember is when the government creates the new money, prints the money, to accommodate this runaway government spending, that there's no increase in wealth.
Just because, you know, they send out $50 billion or more, they send out trillions of dollars this time.
But the growth in the economic growth did not occur.
Matter of fact, there is no translation and correlation.
If they send out $5 trillion, if they get $1 trillion worth of growth, they might do it.
So it's very, very expensive.
It's just a failed policy, and that's what we're facing, a crisis that has confronted us.
And we hear a lot of talks, and the best they can sue is, why don't you just go ahead and daydream and daydream about the day that recessions didn't need to happen and we could get rid of them by just taking our hands off it.
Power's Peril00:07:21
Let the people go back to work and cut their taxes and cut the regulation.
No, that's not it.
We're in the midst of something that the momentum is so great that we have to have really a revolution in thinking about the benefits of liberty versus the tragedy of the authoritarian state.
Chris.
Excellent, Dr. Paul.
I'll finish up with my final word here.
When you're in our business, we have to know the competition.
So our competition is a very, very old one that goes all the way back to the beginning of man, and that's the lust for power.
And the people that have this affliction, I'll call it, they always have the same defining characteristics.
They want no restraints on their power.
And if you go back and read about the Bolsheviks and the Maoists and even before them, you know, anybody, any of the bad guys through history, it's all the same.
They want no restraints.
They don't want any religious or God, any restraint on their decision.
So they just, you know, that's superstition.
Write that off.
They don't want traditions or accumulated knowledge, you know, to guide them.
You know, just like capital is accumulated and we benefit from it, so is knowledge.
It's accumulated century after century.
They want to abolish anything from the past.
They don't want laws to restrict them.
They break the Constitution every single day.
As we speak, they're breaking the U.S. Constitution, which is supposedly the law of the land.
They don't want that to restrict them.
They don't want biology to restrict them.
That's how crazy it's gotten.
We all see those crazy headlines.
Basically, they don't want the truth.
It's too much of a restriction for the truth on them.
So they want to do whatever they feel in the moment.
They want to say it, and that is the law, and they have people to enforce it, and everybody's going to obey.
Obviously, this cannot work, but this is what they do over and over, and they chip away at this through the decades.
If you go back to the early 1900s, they wouldn't put up with what we put up with.
But it's been so washed down the American mindset of liberty that you don't know any different.
So the good part is this falls apart.
The bad part, it's not pretty when it falls apart, but when it does, it will be a prime opportunity for people to speak the truth.
And if you're going to form a government, it must be heavily restrained.
That's what our founders worked on.
They wanted to restrain it.
They know what happens when people get too much power.
Their experiment failed.
Who knows what the future holds, but we have to know at least which direction we want to go.
Very, very good, Chris.
You know, the difficulty we have is people have latched on to authoritarianism.
And Chris, you pointed it out perfectly, talking about power.
There are people who have been throughout all of history who have seeked power, and they seek to be the authority, and they want to hide from and reject and ridicule a higher law.
That's silly stuff.
But it's not that complicated because there will always be problems that will be facing us.
But what are you going to have if you don't have authoritarianism?
When you have chaos, when there be chaos in the streets, and people would be suffering, and they wouldn't have homes to live in, all this nonsense.
But the thing of it is, what substitutes for the authoritarianism of a few people telling the masses how they have to live and how they should be taxed to take care of those who have the power, it's the principle of voluntarism.
And that means really voluntarism.
You know, two individuals getting together, and as long as it's voluntary, there's no place for government to say who should get together and what their activity should be if there's no physical violence.
And it's no more complicated than that.
I mean, if an individual can be diverse on their own territory and do what they want, not hurt people, and if two people can do it, why can't everybody do it?
You know, have voluntarism because we have to confront the people that Chris talks about, the people who want the power.
And it's something that's been discussed for centuries and centuries and throughout history, and we're not going to see it disappear quickly, but it's also, there's a big difference.
Chris mentioned the condition, you know, in this country, you know, 120 years ago before the progressive era started, and things were a lot better because they were closer to accepting a moral principle of a higher law rather than saying whoever has the power because you have to, their argument is you have to fill it in the power because nobody knows what the truth is.
Who said that not killing people is the final truth?
You shouldn't murder and steal and that there should be something like property rights.
So if they don't want to reject it, they have to fill it up and they fill it up with authoritarianism.
And that's where our problem is.
And it's not a lack of government problem.
It's a problem of too much government with a lack of emphasizing the fact that if people are left alone, you solve the problem.
Many excuses given by those who want more government is we need diversity.
We need to control the schools.
We need to dictate everything that they teach, all the subjects and everything else.
And because we don't want anybody to be left out.
So look at what's happened to our schools and look at what's happened to this absolute coercion through they will devise the diversity.
That's how they will bring people together and benefit from their great wisdom.
Well, the great wisdom, I think, ought to come in a form of get the government out of our lives and let people assume responsibility because people are much more responsible for themselves than a lot of people believe.
I think there's a lot of good out there.
It's just that it gets locked down and there's a little too much too much lack of interest and determination by the people who know better to go along with it and allow the people to get ahead.
But that's shifting.
That's what I think we're seeing, you know, in this atmosphere and this election coming up.
People can finally get pushed too hard.
We're tired of the wars and they'll get us out of the wars.
But I want people to be tired of thinking about the wars and not get into the wars.
That's why you don't set the stage by a coup, participating in a coup in a place like Ukraine, and then financing it to the hilt by the tune of billions and billions of dollars, contributing to the bankruptcy.
Now, the answers are there.
They're not complex.
And the biggest job we have is the people, since we have the majority of people, waking up and acting out and speaking and resisting the authoritarians that think they know what's best for us.