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Aug. 22, 2022 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:27
America...Why Are You So Unhappy?

According to a new NBC News survey, the vast majority of Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the direction of the country, holding the belief that America's best days are behind her. Why the massive negativity? Will politics solve it? Also today, neocons trash Biden's attempt to return to Iran deal. Get your tickets to the RPI Sept. 2nd conference: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/anatomy-of-a-police-state-tickets-366089773367

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Time Text
Why We Need a Deliberate Recession 00:15:09
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Happy Monday, Dr. Paul.
How are you today?
Doing well.
Doing well.
Have a nice weekend.
I noticed some people were writing on Twitter giving you some congratulations.
Yeah, I wonder why they keep reminding me about that stuff.
I know.
I don't like it either for me.
It was nice to see there was a lot of really heartfelt nice greetings, you know, out there.
I did get to see those.
We got winning mainly family.
It was a more quiet birthday because over the years we took license on that or some people in the campaigns took license on it.
He said, you're going to have a big party.
I said, well, I'm not into this stuff.
The parties I've had in later years sort of made up for the early years, even though in the early years I didn't know it.
But we never had a party because it was, I was born in the middle of the 30s, and then there was World War II and family in the military.
And it wasn't our tradition except the immediate family.
But now ours is immediate, but a little bit more.
A little bit more.
We usually have big parties on birthdays.
But anyway, we had a good time.
Smaller group, but we had a good time.
And I wish the country would do better.
And, you know, there are days when we can find the positive things, and you see people expressing themselves, and you see, you know, the Trump people are going to push some of those weirdos out.
And there'll be a shift in attitude.
Then the next thing they say, you know, it might not work.
You know, nobody seems to be ready for that.
So there's a lot of argument.
But we like polls to try to help figure us out.
Well, is there going to be a real change?
All I know is if they say that the Republicans narrowly hold the House and they don't change the Senate, I think that would be bad news, not only for the country, but bad news for, you know, if you can't beat the Democrats now, who are you going to beat?
But of course, long term, we're never convinced that even if there is a major changeover and Republicans and Democrats, when they have a lot, I was there for, I don't know whether it was two or four years, where the Republicans had the House and the Senate and the President when Bush was in.
But believe me, there was a lot of spending and a lot of wars going on there.
So it was not the best of times when those Republicans had total control.
So a mixed control sometimes doesn't hurt us.
A little bit slow them up.
But it doesn't seem to slow them up.
What's happened now, you don't need the Congress.
The Congress either acts on their own, courts write laws, there's a bureaucracy out there, and it must be the most important position.
The other day we talked about how much money Fauci made.
So that must be a really important part of the government.
And he must be a very important person.
The person that makes the most money in the halls of government.
Anyway, let's see what poll.
We find the poll.
It's reported by Daily Mail, but it was also an NBC poll.
Yeah.
So that caught our attention.
And the title, 75% of Americans think the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction.
Well, we're not surprised.
I don't think you have to have spent too much money on a poll to come to that conclusion.
But some people think there's not been any positive change and the negatives are bad.
I don't know how the Democrats could get any cheer out of this, but I don't think Republicans should lay back and say, you know, the Democrats are so bad.
American people are going to wake up, you know.
But if they really wake up, what they'll say is we can't trust both parties to do what they say because that's generally been the case for decades, if not ever since government existed.
Yeah, let's put up that first.
This is from the Daily Mail, as you mentioned, Dr. Paul.
Nearly 75% of Americans think the U.S. is heading in the wrong direction under Biden.
More than half worry that the country's best years are in the past.
It reminds me of the Jimmy Carter era, you know, the Malays speech and that whole thing.
It's a NBC News poll and they used Heart Associates.
I think you mentioned that you're familiar with them.
So it's a reputable firm.
Let's look at that next one.
Here's some of the more details about it.
58% feel more worried that America's best years may already be behind us.
Only 35% thinking the best years are yet to come.
68% of the respondents believe the U.S. is already in recession, despite Biden's attestations that the economy is rebounding after the country's inflation rate hit a 40-year high.
In total, the poll found 55% of Americans now disapprove of the job he's doing.
And you're right, they seem to be attacking this, just attacking the language.
Don't pay any attention to what it looks like in your bank account.
We're not in a recession because we changed the definition of recessions.
You know, we must be in 1984 because they can change the definition of words.
You know, they had to do a poll to find out that 68% of the people believe we're in a recession, and our government tells us there is no recession.
So don't you believe the government?
No, they don't believe the government.
That's good because maybe they will look for the truth and seek the truth and work in that direction.
But no, they just changed the definition.
That has been going on for years.
I mean, we've reported so often on when you measure inflation of the money supply and what it does, like raise prices of goods and services, they measure things like CPI and PPI.
And they never report things accurately.
It's always a fudge to make the administration not look quite as bad as they really are.
So they fudge the figures and then they come up with, well, why don't we just take out food and energy and see, oh yeah, things don't look quite so bad.
Food and energy.
Do you think there's some people that food and energy, what if they're in a job, they have to drive their car and they have kids and they're not going to be able to do it.
They like to eat.
I mean, I would say their inflation rate might be the biggest in the world.
And everybody else, government says, oh, 8%, 9% maybe.
But now our job, it's always been for years and years.
They wanted 2% inflation.
They finally got that, but it went by so fast nobody recorded it.
And now, guess what the goal is?
2% inflation.
We have to create a bad economy.
We have to have a deliberate recession.
And they believe that it's the way you get rid of inflation, like inflation fell out of the sky, what you need is a depression or a recession, and that'll push prices down.
It's totally nuts because they won't deal with a real subject of where does all this distortion come from?
High prices and tense cities and all the arguments going on and the hatred of the world.
And it comes from too much government spending and an outfit there that says, well, Monopoly was a great game.
They still play it.
They use monopoly money and they pass it out.
And some people haven't recognized yet that it's monopoly money.
When they decide this is monopoly money, things are going to really change.
That's when you're going to see some fireworks.
Well, you make a great point that it really is the Republicans to lose, judging from the mood of the country based on these numbers.
But I think you probably would also say they're probably going to do a pretty good job of trying to lose it because you could ask, what do they stand for?
Well, you know, fiscal restraint?
No, we don't see much of that.
We haven't seen much of that.
Well, surely they're going to maybe oppose Biden's warmongering.
No, no, no.
They're actually attacking.
We'll talk about this in the second segment.
They're attacking him in the very few areas where he actually makes some sense in foreign policy because he's not warmongering enough.
And, you know, McConnell, the minority leader in the Senate, he's sort of already bracing people for not a great result in the Senate.
He said he was just grumbling, well, the quality of the candidates is not very high.
We may not make it, you know, which he means to Trump supporters that are now rising.
That's just driving him nuts.
But they had a test run on that on Trump.
And I think that candidate's name was Cheney or something like that.
And she didn't do so well.
So that's probably what is driving the Democrats nuts right now.
But even that is not, that's sort of an exception of what's going on.
But the vote in the fall, we'll see how many people agreed with her.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, here's, let's look at the article from the Daily Mail had some great graphs, so we're going to go ahead and use them.
And let's put up a couple of these because it's always good to just get a visual of it.
Is the United States headed in the right direction?
That's that little tiny green one.
Headed in the wrong direction?
That's that massive red, 74%.
Next one, do you approve of Joe Biden's job in office?
That smaller green one of 42% approve.
That larger red of 55% disapprove of his job in office.
The next one is the economy, probably the most important.
40% approve and 56% disapprove of how he's handling the economy.
And now the next one, as we move down, is the U.S. in recession, as we talked about.
They try to change the name of it.
They did everything they could.
It didn't convince the American people.
68% believe we're in a recession, while 27% don't believe so.
Those are the people, I don't know who they are.
Here's the next one: CPI from 81 to 2022.
And you can see that massive, massive jump.
June 2022, 10-year high of not a 40-year high of 9.1%.
So with those numbers in, with that inflation numbers in, the last question that we'll put up here is how will Inflation Reduction Act affect your life?
People are not super enthusiastic.
36% said it's not going to make a difference.
35% is going to make it worse.
Only 26% said it'll make things better.
So people don't have any faith in the Inflation Reduction Act.
They don't have any faith in the economy.
They're pretty disillusioned, I think.
Well, yeah, and then the number 35, a third of the people say it's going to make it worse.
So you have two-thirds have no idea what's going to go on.
So nobody really, well, a few people are saying that, yes, it's going to help, but that has to be a daydream to think that doing more of the same thing over and over again, that printing money and spending money and running the world and having an empire to deal with and a welfare state to deal with, and no hesitation whatsoever.
So they come up with these stories.
Well, under modern monetary theory, it's not necessary to do that.
And under Keynesian economics, they say deficits aren't that bad.
Matter of fact, the weaker the economy, the bigger the deficit should be.
You know, and on and on with this nonsense.
But you know, because people want to believe, because they say, well, I did pretty well.
Even people, if they cut off the last two years before COVID invaded, people would say, well, you know, the last 10 years, I've been doing pretty well.
And there have been periods they do when people aren't getting the payment.
The payment comes due.
But when they're just printing the money and passing it on, people do pretty well, but it's all fake.
It's like, I tell people, it's like, oh, let's start a new business here.
And I know a banker down here.
He can loan us a million dollars a month for six months if we get it.
And oh, oh, then we spend it, but we also spend it on ourselves.
We feel very well.
But then the bank calls an end to it.
And the bank in this case is the marketplace because the system has to reassure them that the money will always come.
So when this extra little thing came about called COVID on top of what the Fed was doing, what was the first thing they do?
They started this thing where they ended up passing out $6 trillion and they wonder why we're in trouble.
And we haven't even touched the transition from that money sitting there and assimilating and getting into the economy and having prices discounted.
That is just starting.
It's sort of like a brush fire.
No other brush fires started on the edges.
All of a sudden, the fire is going to, the fire has been lit.
Pretty soon it's going to be huge.
Yeah.
And when you dig down to how the American family feels, here's something from the article in the Daily Mail.
Moody's analytics economist Mark Zandi, studying the latest U.S. government price data, he has determined that households are now spending nearly $493 more each month to buy the same items they were buying a year ago.
And I'm sorry, that really does add up an extra 500 bucks a month just to get what you were getting a year ago.
It's no surprise at all then that people are feeling like the best days are behind them.
Yeah, and this whole thing about jobs and the job numbers, there's a lot of misconception there.
Some people, you know, have one job and they're suffering from the things you just described, and they still can't live with it.
So they're taking two jobs.
And that goes in, instead of that looking like a negative, they look as if, oh, we just created a million new jobs because people were suffering so badly they have to work from nine to five and then six to twelve in order to feed their family.
So the government statistics aren't very helpful.
The people who are honest, they work and they pay their bills and they have to go to the store and they understand what's going on.
Why Trade Matters 00:09:18
And they don't represent what's happening in Washington.
Yeah.
Well, let's move to our next topic if you're ready, Dr. Paul.
And let's skip those next two clips and just move on to the gatestone.
This is via zero hedge, so we give them the credit for putting this up.
But so, this, I think, is an example.
This came out today.
Biden drops more crucial demands to get Iran deal.
Now, Gatestone is basically a neocon outfit.
But I think we wanted to talk about this a little bit because here's a preview of the neocon pushback.
If Biden is actually successful in doing one of the things that we think is a pretty good thing, which is going back to the Iran deal.
I remember you praised the Obama era for two good things: easing up on Cuba and making a deal with Iran, even though you didn't think we needed a deal because we should never have sanctions in the first place.
At the very least, moving toward peace in a way from confrontation was good.
And then, of course, Trump came in and surrounded himself with neocons and got us out of it.
So, Biden is trying to get us back in.
And I think he's sincere for the most part, but he's got a lot of pressure.
And here's the kind of pushback that he's going to be getting as we get very close to the New Deal.
You know, I've often said that many people in the Middle East never forget, and Americans never remember.
And I don't think many Americans remember 1953.
I remember Bill O'Reilly never heard of a problem in 1953 when I brought the subject up.
And, well, of course, what I was talking about was the coup.
You know, we're against coups.
You know, that's nasty stuff.
And Donald Trump was on the verge of an insurrection and a total takeover of the government and have this huge coup.
Now, there was a real coup that the British and Americans got together in 1950, which started all this stuff.
You know, that's why if we would have followed the principle of a non-interventionist foreign policy, you know, we wouldn't have been in there and stealing the oil is what happened.
But it didn't work.
You know, they ended up responding by becoming more estranged from the world and more protective.
And it didn't help America and it didn't help the people there.
And now we've been fighting ever since.
So, yes, moving in the directions with it, just an agreement on that, because I think the evidence, I think the Iranians would, you know, under certain conditions, would like and have probably done their research on if they ever got hit by a nuclear weapon, can they retaliate?
But I really do believe that the inspections had some reality there and that they were more interested in denuclearizing that area.
But right now, this thing is not going to be smooth, even with even with the concessions of Biden.
It is going to be used by the hawks.
And one thing I, when figuring this stuff out, I realized that there are hawks on both sides.
You know, you might have somebody, even in the Soviet system, now the Russian system, that you might have a leader that might be more sympathetic than it appears, but it might be that there's a military complex in Russia, and to maintain public support, they go along with that.
But that is a big problem, and that's why the case for a peaceful society should be made a little bit stronger or more influential, that we can get people to agree that we don't need wars.
Wars don't cause prosperity.
I think there was a Republican president in recent years that said, you know, all great presidents have to take care of a war.
And we had a war.
Fortunately, there were no rewards for that for him.
Well, reportedly, the U.S. has signed off on this new agreement, which basically is a return to the old agreement.
And the neocons are mad because they wanted a bunch of new conditions to be brought to the table, you know, reduction in their ballistic missiles.
Well, this wasn't part of the original deal, and there's no way that Iran, once it got a deal, would make more concessions.
There's no advantage to it.
And this is according to an anti-war.com article.
He points out that Matt Lee, who's the AP diplomatic reporter, he's reporting that members of Congress are capitalizing on the alleged plot to assassinate John Bolton and the attack on Salman Rushdie to prevent a return to the agreement.
To that, I would say it's rather suspicious that these two things come out right at a time when you're just about to return to this.
And I don't have any information about it, but A, Bolton was involved in assassinations in Iran, the Soleimani assassination and others.
The Rushdie thing, I don't know anything about it.
Supposedly, the guy's pro-Iran, but we know for sure that the neocons are blaming Iran.
It's a convenient excuse to say this.
And of course, Ted Cruz, who always loves to be the armschair general, he said the Ayatollahs have been trying to murder Salman Rushdie for decades.
The Biden administration must finally cease appeasing the Iranian regime.
So that's the mindset of the neocon.
If we want to return to trade, if we want to move away from conflict and war, they call that appeasement.
You know, they always use that term.
Yes, and this is something that is used politically, and it's very powerful because if you take a position that is working for peace, they will put this in terms of, you know, the way they attacked me was, oh, unpatriot, unpatriotic, and you don't support the troops, and you're weak.
And here it turns out that maybe the opposite is true.
Maybe people who are insecure do not have confidence in what liberty is all about, do not understand economic policy, but they are influenced by profiteering, by weapons manufacturers.
And that's been around for more than the last 10 or 15 years.
That's been around for a long time.
Well, the one thing that the Hawks here in the U.S., they're not even Hawks, they're just neocons.
What they don't understand is this is a different world than it was when the U.S. originally entered into the agreement with Iran.
The world has changed significantly, particularly in the last six months with the U.S. sanctions driving Iran and Russia closer together, Iran and China closer together.
Iran is no longer as dependent on trade with Europe and the U.S. In fact, Europe is poor.
They can't buy anything anyway, right?
So, and here's just a couple of examples I dug up to describe how the world has changed.
And it's not as, I would argue it's not as urgent for Iran to come back to this U.S. and EU deal.
Let's look up the next one.
This is significant, I think.
The United Arab Emirates has sent an ambassador to Iran the first time in six years.
They broke relations six years ago.
Now they're sending back an ambassador.
Iran is slowly making peace with the Arab states in the Gulf, and that is a significant thing.
The second one, if we can go to this, Iran says U.S. dollar officially ditched in trade with ally Russia.
So the U.S. did the nuclear option, kicked Russia out of SWIFT, said, you can't use our dollars to trade anymore.
And Russia and Iran said, okay, we'll use something else, you know.
So this is an own goal.
This is a shot in the head.
And here's the next one.
Iran oil exports could rise further after June-July increase, trackers say.
They had a huge increase in their exports.
They're sending it to China.
They're sending it to India.
They're sending it elsewhere.
They no longer have to rely on these markets.
Unintentional consequences of the sanctions against Russia have changed the world, I think.
And so I would just argue, Dr. Paul, that the world is different now.
We no longer have the clout to sit down and bang on the table.
That's true.
And nobody really predicted it.
But I think the general statement that if you trade with people, things go better and both sides benefit.
But you know, one thing that has always annoyed me, and I don't know where we stand on frozen assets, but that's always been a thorn in the side of the Iranians because we froze billions of dollars.
And then I think Obama actually sent some back, and that was interpreted as the taxpayers paying money to the Iranians.
And all it was is money we stole from them.
And, you know, and that goes on right now.
I wonder if we would, you know, ever pay rent for the oil that we're getting out of Syria right now.
Just think of how we work that deal.
I mean, that's probably not settled forever in Syria.
But we're getting a lot of oil because we maintain the oil up there.
So that's a cost.
Less Motivation for Peace 00:05:41
And also a reason because we're involved in that, there's less likely, there's not as much motivation for a more peaceful agreement where right now it's up for grabs.
And boy, I think that's a hot spot over there.
It's not any better since we've been involved, but we're not really involved.
I mean, our troops aren't over there.
We just send advisors and weapons and monies and bribes and the whole works.
Well, we're just flat out stealing Syria's oil.
I mean, we basically, you can see the trucks coming.
But I think there are some changes there.
Maybe we'll talk about those later this week.
There are some changes there, I think, with Erdogan turning around a little bit and the increasing ties between the Turkish and Syrian governments.
I think, you know, there's going to be a switch there.
But let's, I'm going to close out if we're ready.
I just want to remind less than two weeks, people, less than two weeks.
Put up the next clip, Anatomy of a Police State, September 3rd, 2022, Weston, Washington Dulles Airport.
Go to ronpaulinstitute.org to get your tickets.
Now's the time to get those tickets before they sell out.
It's going to be a great get-together, a lot of great speakers, a lot of great people, and a good time.
This will be our sixth conference, as we mentioned in D.C. I'm looking forward to it.
I'm a little nervous because there's a lot to do, but I'll tell you what, I'm really looking forward to it, Dr. Paul.
You know, all police states start by announcing to the people who want the police state and saying, you know, this is something that's very good.
We're going to give you a police state.
But what they do is they start by telling them, we're going to take care of you.
We're going to protect you.
And there's an enemy out there and you have to sacrifice your liberties.
And that came up certainly after 9-11.
And you were, I think, in the office by that time where people would call in and say, yes, that's right.
And Dr. Paul may be right on this thing.
But you have to do one thing.
When you need to be safe and secure, you have to sacrifice a certain amount of your freedoms.
And, you know, that certain amount, whether it's 1% or 10%, is the amount that sells you out.
And that's like the people who argued the case correctly way back in 1913, that assuming that you can tax the income of every person means you own that person, you own their income.
And they then say that it'll get worse.
And it does get worse.
Even now, well, yeah, but once it was up to 90%, now it's much down.
But the taxation is a little more sophisticated now.
So the principle of taxation is still very bad because they tax by stealing the money from your account, by diluting the value of your account, and that's theft too.
But it's so rarely seen as a moral issue.
And it's always seen as a, well, we have to take care of the poor, the sick, the people who are hungry.
Yes, we'll build them tent cities.
They like to live in tents.
We'll put them up, we'll give them a couple more tents to put up.
So it is tragic that that is the case.
But we're going to keep plugging away at pointing out what happens when you concede a little bit.
You end up with a big police state, and that's what we have.
And when you think of the FBI right now, I think they might qualify as an arm of the police state.
And there's a lot of policemen up there, you know.
And I've been talking about that for years.
I think when I first talked about it, I said bureaucrats shouldn't exist.
We shouldn't have a national police force.
But we're going to almost have 100,000 of them, and they're allowed to carry guns.
But now I understand it's 200,000, and they're out recruiting 87,000.
And one of the advertising temptations is we want you to be able to shoot a gun.
So it is a police state.
And it's not a police state for you if you do exactly what they tell you.
But you are being policed and you are a prisoner and you don't live in a free society if the only way you can survive is being obedient to the police state.
And that is a tough question to answer because sometimes it's either suicide to resist.
But we do not have to ignore the fact of what they're doing.
They need to be named.
And people need to know what the alternative is.
They need to understand.
Take a thing like protectionism.
That is so tempting to endorse protectionism.
But people need to know about it.
And 20 years ago, you couldn't find an economist in this country.
They say, oh, I'm a protectionist.
But now, Democrats and Republicans alike, if you don't keep the tariffs on and the punishment, then you need to be out of office.
They believe in all this protectionism and all this authoritarianism.
It is the principle of authoritarianism versus voluntarism.
That is the principle we have to deal with.
Because a voluntary society is one where people change things by peacefully negotiating and setting examples for other countries should do it, individuals should do it.
And we have less and less of that every time.
I hope we can contribute to the solution of that argument in our conference next week.
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