It was a bizarre display: President Trump read the terms of surrender to EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen. One of those terms was for the Europeans to purchase a quarter of a trillion dollars worth of very expensive US LNG each year. The other terms are equally impossible. Are we in a post-reality society?
Get tickets to the Ron Paul Institute's August 16th DC Conference!
More info here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/blueprint-for-peace-tickets-1397170888739
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams as our co-host.
Daniel, welcome to the program.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Good.
I want to talk today shortly, I think, because we have a busy schedule, and the government has a busy schedule counting their nickels and dimes and proving to the world that we are still king of the hill.
Top of the hill.
All we have to do is collect a lot of money from tariffs and we'll be okay.
Everything will be smooth.
There's some euphoria out there, and the news reports the euphoria, but we're at times skeptical because we're looking at what the government's really doing.
But there was this announcement, daily announcement, how we have just gained access to the control of the spending and the tariffs and all that's going on around the world.
And we're going to make a lot of money.
And everybody that capitulates and does what our administration tells them to do are happy with it.
And we suspect it's not quite that good.
And I think when we look at this, we find that some of these agreements, you know, are euphoric when you read them.
But we're not as optimistic that they're going to work things out.
The most recent episode of an exciting ad, and people are still, even as we speak, are still talking about how positive it is.
And that is the headline that came out on Politico.
And I think on Wall Street Journal, you can find another opinion.
Politico said, the EU's fantasy, the quotes, like $750 billion energy promise to Trump.
Well, that means Trump won again.
He's going to be more popular than ever.
And he is popular because he could spend this in a way.
And he's probably very sincere in his efforts.
He's very sincere in his belief we ought to have interest rates lower because interest rates are lower.
You know, when we have a recession, and he knows darn well we're going to get a recession.
He's trying to, you know, diminish the punishment that he'll get from that.
But this, this, people are pointing out in details that these agreements aren't really what they seem to be.
But what I worry about is the distortion of what tariffs and sanctions have turned into because sanctions to some degree are constitutional.
But I don't think for a minute the founders intended the tariffs and sanctions being used to dictate to the world monetary policy for everybody.
Matter of fact, we all know they never even dreamed that the Federal Reserve would become what it is today.
So Daniel, I think it's a mess.
I think we're going to continue to hear these optimistic promises.
And if it's not a fancy one today, if it's not challenged, there might be another good one coming from Japan.
Who knows?
And we'll be in charge and we're going to benefit.
And there's promises that it will all help pay down, you know, our national debt.
And quite frankly, they're dreaming.
And we have to try to hope we can wake them up, Daniel, and tell them, yes, we dream too, but what we dreamed for is sound money and limited government.
And then we're on the road to peace and prosperity.
Daniel.
Yeah, it was quite the scene, Dr. Paul, when President Trump was sitting down next to European Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen.
And he just basically sat there with a printed out paper with notes in it, with talking points in it, which is unusual for Trump.
But the scene was really the kind of the final humiliation of Europe on the part of the Trump administration.
He essentially dictated the terms.
This is what you're going to get.
You're going to get a certain amount of sanctions, 15% sanctions.
You're going to do these other things, and that's just how it is.
And a reporter asked him, 15% tariffs.
I'm sorry.
And a reporter asked him, Is there any way he could go a little bit lower with those tariffs?
You know, it was a European reporter, and he said no.
So, dictating the terms.
But the article that we're talking about is from Political, as you say.
And it says fancy.
This is one part of the deal that they made where the Europeans have committed to spending $750 billion importing U.S. LNG to power the continent.
Well, as the Politico article points out, they spent $375 billion on all energy imports last year, and that is $76 billion from the U.S.
So they would have to triple their imports of American energy to live up to this commitment that they've made.
And there's a question of whether this is even physically possible.
And also, it would mean that they wouldn't be able to buy energy from anywhere else, including Norway, which they currently get cheaper energy from through a pipeline.
So they've basically given up after the Nord Stream was blown up by who knows who, they've given up all the idea of having inexpensive energy, oil and gas.
And they've said, no, we'd rather pay double for American.
And that's essentially what happened.
So the thing that struck me when we were reading it is the whole deal seems completely fake to me.
The idea that they can triple their purchases, that we can even supply that much.
And to top it off, Dr. Paul, they don't even have the facilities to receive or to enrich this LNG.
I don't know the exact term of what you do, but something they have to do to make it usable.
So the whole thing is completely fake, it seems to me.
Daniel, you point out something.
It's simplistic.
You're like you're doing arithmetic, like you're going to subtract.
You know, it's like they were all taught in government schools.
They're propagandized.
You know, when it comes to places like the Fed, just look at all their economists.
They're all saying the wrong thing.
It's preposterous.
It's amazing.
And people are hopeful.
And I'm hopeful.
And sometimes I speak more optimistically than others would say that I should.
But it is sort of a deception that goes on and on and on.
But the one thing that history shows is this stuff can't last.
You can't have all this intervention and pretend that there's peace and prosperity forever by doing all the wrong things and building things on an authoritarian approach.
I think this is more authoritarian.
You know, do it our way or you're in big trouble.
We still have a lot of bombs.
But the truth is, we don't give away a lot of our bombs.
So we're limited to that in a foreign policy.
And we're going to be limited as our deficit explodes even higher.
And then they're going to have to do something about it.
So it is nice.
I think if you read the papers superficially, even though we complain the far left controls the newspapers, it's really Trump is on a roll.
You can't deny it.
Even some leftists coming over, boy, we were mistaken.
This Trump guy is really good and his tariffs are really working.
Well, I think that, you know, sometimes people who manipulate things on the surface, they do real well.
But you and I, Daniel, if we went out today and borrowed the million dollars we need to run our outfit, it won't make us wealthier.
If we did it personally, you know, what would happen?
You have to have a scheme, but then their scheme is intervention, planning, manipulation, threats, and it's going to aggravate people.
And I think it's going to aggravate, you know, the division in this country.
It's not so much that I expect the Democrats are all of a sudden they're going to be powerful, but the anti-system is going to grow just like people turned against the government when they woke up about COVID.
And this is much bigger than COVID.
And the American people are going to turn against it.
And I think they're struggling to prepare for it.
And that's one of the reasons why Trump is saying we got to get the interest rates low because he's going to save a lot of money paying the interest on the national debt.
But that is not enough.
We have to look at it philosophically about the role of government.
You know, Dr. Paul, you've often said we live in kind of a post-truth society where there is no truth.
I think we also live in a post-reality society.
And I think that's certainly you mentioned COVID earlier.
That was definitely part of it.
And then they moved on to the Ukraine war.
And you have a situation where the Western partners are promising weapons they don't have.
We're going to send you endless patriots.
They don't exist.
We're going to send you endless tanks.
They don't exist and they're not being built.
And in exchange, Ukraine says, well, we're going to make a deal to give you a trillion dollars worth of rare earth minerals, which they do not have.
They don't exist.
And I think this is just another example of this post-reality society because the entirety of the deal made between Trump/slash U.S. and the EU is basically a fantasy.
Now, Arnaud Bertrand is, I think, one of the more astute observers of our current scene.
And he summarizes the deal this way, Dr. Paul.
Here's the deal between the US and EU: the EU now gets charged 15% tariffs on its imports to the U.S. when they commit to charging zero tariffs on U.S. imports to the EU.
The EU agrees to invest $600 billion in the U.S. for no other obvious reason than pleasing daddy, as Trump's preferred.
The EU will purchase hundreds of billions of dollars of American military equipment, and the EU commits to buying $750 billion worth of very expensive U.S. LNG, specifically $250 billion for each of the next three years.
And Bertrand continues: In exchange for all these concessions and extraction of their wealth, they get nothing.
I'm not even exaggerating.
That is the deal.
The EU gets nothing.
It's a crazy, crazy deal.
And just on the military spending, really quickly, Dr. Paul, the German Chancellor Meritz, had just announced that he was going to remilitarize Germany and rebuild the German military industrial base.
Well, this will be undermined if they have to spend $600 billion buying U.S. military equipment.
It's going to essentially enrich our military-industrial complex at the expense of Europe.
New Voluntarism Program00:02:04
But Daniel, we're not being ignored.
Obviously, they listen to our program and they respond immediately with sensible new programs.
And here is one example, but it's not all that sensible.
Everybody knows there's a bad debt and the problem, even Democrats, well, it might be getting a little high, and the people don't like this and they don't like what's going on.
So they come up with the answer to all this.
They need money, but they don't know what they need.
It's real money, and it would be a goal that we could achieve if we talked about real money versus the fictitious money.
But here, here's a new program they've come up with just recently.
I just read about this, I think, yesterday.
And they have a new program, and this is how they're going to help reduce the debt.
The U.S. Treasury Department offers a program called voluntarism.
We're for that.
It gives to reduce the public debt.
For that, allowing individuals to donate to reduce the national debt.
You can make these donations through paypal and, and uh, and the Treasury now accepts donations via Vermo and paypal and, and some of this stuff is automatic.
You know, you get in there and it's automatic deduction and I kept thinking, if they collect any money from that, I don't think they're going to collect enough.
I think that I think that I think that's just a demonstration of where they are in.
Paying down the debt is having people.
Why don't you people cough up some more money and they're all struggling to pay their grocery bill.
So uh, I guess uh, I guess they'll keep trying it, but my prediction here is the program will not be successful and the debt will remain high and keep growing.
Exactly well, I wish taxes themselves were voluntary, Terry.
That would make it easier for those who want more people who can pay for them.
So that's all from me, Dr. Paul.
I'll turn it over to you to sign out.
Very good.
And I want to thank all our viewers for tuning in today.