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Oct. 27, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
32:10
No Vacation For You!

In a new survey some 30 percent of Americans said they could not afford a vacation. That is the highest number among all countries surveyed. Meanwhile the US national debt just surpassed $38 trillion. Is there a connection?

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Time Text
Government Spending on Holidays 00:15:01
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you this morning.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
Doing good.
You also have to work hard this week and cure the problems of the country.
I will do my best, sir.
Well, the best we can do and offer, we're not allowed to treat because we just can't take the checkbook away from them.
That's right.
All we can do is suggest to them what we believe is the correct answer to the dilemma a lot of people are facing.
But we want to talk about some of the things, particular things that happen when things get out of hand and spending becomes epidemic, and it's supported by printing more money.
And that's what the Fed is there for.
They say, well, why are you complaining about the Fed?
That's why they're there.
They're there to print the money.
And the politicians love it.
And under tough conditions, even those who tended to think, well, this is not a good idea, but when push comes to shove, they're then there voting for it.
But this week, there were a couple of items that caught our attention.
And one was out that I clicked was, this came on Zero Hedge.
30% of Americans say they can't afford a holiday.
Well, big deal.
You know, does that mean anything?
Well, they're the worst in the world.
The best in the world, which is rather ironic, is China.
They get more vacations than we do.
But that's probably a mixed bag.
But I'll tell you what, being the worst of all the pseudo-free market countries and what's going on, that doesn't mean that there's a good thing.
Well, we did have the information that codifies and makes a point.
They can measure debt.
And they do it even when they fudge.
You know, these last month or two, they said it wasn't good to report it.
So it wasn't the right political time, so held back.
So they just had to add all the debt that was really there.
And it quickly shot up and went up to $38 trillion.
That's the debt.
And there's still people arguing.
Well, that's not too bad.
And some of the liberal states, the governors are saying who want to not accept the fact that maybe there's a problem out there with too much spending.
They're arguing the case.
Well, we did a poll, and the people in my state, oh, they're not worried about inflation.
But I tell you what, I believe the people who say they are worried about inflation.
And that's a lot of people that are involved.
So the answer is easy.
The problem is understandable, but why do they keep doing it?
Well, it's sort of like a drug addict.
It's hard for them to quit.
And it sounds like a free lunch.
And then you have the theoreticians, the fancy economists from the university saying, that's old-fashioned, worrying about deficits.
That's not necessary anymore.
And it works out.
They've warned because we who are trying to wake people up, they claim that we're just there to scare people in order to continue the process.
But I think it's serious.
And I think a few things that we're going to talk about today would verify that people ought to pay more attention.
But I have to admit, more people are paying attention because one factor, why the people finally rise up, and that is this type of a system rewards the rich, it punishes the poor, wipes out the middle class, and leads to political violence.
And if an honest person looks at our news from that viewpoint, all of a sudden, yeah, that's exactly what's happening today.
Yeah, one of the challenges that we have is how to convey sort of a relatively abstract idea like the debt, like how much we spend.
How do we communicate that in a way that people understand?
And you just mentioned off camera, I think it was, I could be getting this wrong, but in California, they did a survey and nobody's worried about a debt or anything like this.
So it's an abstract.
So I think some of the challenges that we've had over the years is to try to explain it in a way that Americans can understand.
You know, we know we've seen inflation.
We know what inflation feels like when you go to the store and eggs are, you know, $10 a dozen, what have you.
But there are other ways too.
And these are the ways of reflecting the recklessness in both our foreign and our domestic policy of spending too much money.
And I think here is a good way of measuring it.
If you put that first one up, this is what you were talking about, Dr. Paul.
It's a new survey of a group of 20 countries.
And it shows that 30% of Americans say they can't afford a holiday.
Data from the most recent Consumer Insights survey from Statista shows that almost three out of 10 say they won't be able to go on vacation this year due to lack of funds.
Now, this is the highest proportion of respondents of the 20 countries in the survey.
Here is the chart if you go to the next one, and you'll see that we are number one, but not in a good way.
Three in 10 Americans say they can't afford a holiday.
The share of respondents selected in countries who say they can't afford it.
U.S. is number one at 29.
Now, Canada's got 28.
Japan, Germany, UK, France, India, Brazil.
All the way down at the bottom, interestingly enough, as you mentioned, is China with only 8%.
Now, that means the vast majority of Chinese do feel that they have the ability to go on holiday.
And this is somewhat of a comparison to apples and oranges, although I don't know all the details, but because of the nature of the government in China, there probably are subsidized holidays for people in China.
That was certainly the case when I lived in barely post-communist Hungary.
There were special places that workers could go.
And I think it's because governments like that understand that it is good for people's mental health to go have a vacation, even if the government has to subsidize it.
Well, in the U.S., we can't do that.
And Americans that are frustrated that they can't do that should stop for a moment and think why.
Why can't I?
It's not because I'm not working hard enough.
A lot of Americans are working two or three jobs.
It's because the money that you're making doesn't go anywhere.
That's it.
And you know what I thought of as you were reporting that, and people couldn't take vacation.
You know what else they've had to postpone or cancel is retirement.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, there was a time, you know, in the 50s and the 60s, there was never a perfect system, but a lot more people were capable of retiring.
Even five, 10 years ago, there were a lot more people able to retire.
So this is probably a newer phenomenon where people can't retire.
And so if they don't have a holiday and they can't retire, it really adds fuel to the fires of the people who are discontented.
And there's plenty of those.
But the big question is, will they wake up and do it?
It looks like they've had a couple votes in Congress because the source is big spending.
Anybody that argues against that, they should be discredited because you can't just spend money and make the country richer.
And that's why there was a pause and they were holding back on announcing the deficit.
And they said that this $38 trillion in debt, after the fastest accumulation of $1 trillion outside of the since the pandemic.
And that was all fake, too.
And that was just an excuse because it made things worse.
It was forcing bad medicine on the people, and people died from it.
And yet, that was even worse accumulation, but now they're just putting it into the debt, you know, to calculate it into the 38 trillion.
So, and that's uncontrollable.
That is not going to stop.
It's rather frustrating for the few people, a few, maybe two, in Congress who will not vote for it.
And the people who have given token support for this now won't touch it.
And they're intimidated because there's a political powerhouse that you'll get punished if you vote for fiscal sanity.
But see, they're going for the short run and not thinking about the future.
And that's what people should think about.
You know, I think I look at the founders as thinking about the future.
They probably didn't expect in the midst of a revolution, you know, to have all the magic benefits of liberty.
And they were trying to set the standards.
And it worked to a good deal.
And it still does work to a degree.
But it doesn't work like it should.
And it could be much better if we had a system of government that we actually believed in, like not going to war on executive orders and spending billions of dollars.
No, no, I think it's into the trillions now that have been spent on wars that made no sense.
And you send $170 billion to this ridiculous Ukraine war.
You give Israel $30 billion to attack its neighbors.
You spend recklessly at home.
People wonder: well, where does this huge debt come from?
Well, it comes from all this and more.
These are real numbers and they really affect your lives.
So the answer to the question, well, why can't I go on vacation?
Go to the next one.
Now, this is an article we both saw.
This is on PBS.
And as you mentioned, Dr. Paul, it says, go to the next.
I'm going to skip this one.
Yeah, 30.
Thanks.
This was on PBS, but it's an AP article.
U.S. hits $38 trillion in debt, as you mentioned, Dr. Paul.
The fastest accumulation of a trillion dollars outside the pandemic.
If you go to the next one, we hit $37 trillion just in August, Dr. Paul, just in August.
We hit 37.
Now we're at 38.
Go to the next one.
Now, this is the Peter Peterson Foundation, which is somewhat of a mixed bag.
Nevertheless, the chairman said reaching $38 trillion in debt during government shutdown is the latest troubling sign that lawmakers are not meeting their basic fiscal duties.
You think so?
He continues and he says, along with increasing debt, you get higher interest costs, which are now the fastest growing part of the budget.
And this is important, Dr. Paul.
He says we spent $4 trillion on interest over the last decade, but we will spend $14 trillion in the next 10 years.
Interest costs crowd out important public and private investments in our future, harming the economy for every American.
It goes on to say the U.S. debt hit $34 trillion in January 24, 35 in July 24, 36 in November of 24, and now boom, boom, boom.
We're adding it up.
Well, They have to have a trick to do this to convince so many people not to revolt against the system and use the freedom that they have, like voting these people out.
Instead, they legalize.
This blows my mind because they're fussing over trying to decide what's the right thing to do.
We all know that some states and some areas of the country, they legalize foreigners.
And somebody that wants to have the people voting be an American citizen.
You know, there was a time when they said they had to have owned property.
Well, we're not saying that.
We're just saying that they ought to at least be an American citizen.
And that's what's doing that.
But the tax trick is, well, we're going to tax the rich, and that's going to take care of it.
So you're going to hurt the rich.
And you think, oh, well, we need the products.
They're going to make the products less.
And they're resentful because some of the good companies are making money for legitimate reasons.
They're going to go ahead and raise the taxes.
The products are not going to be produced.
And then if you raise them enough, then you have to fire the people.
Then it affects the unemployment.
But the big trick in this whole thing is that we have a Federal Reserve.
This was designed right before 1913, how you can take a republic and turn it into a mob activity.
And so they go in and they pass up the bill.
And the Fed is allowed to buy debt unlimited, which Jefferson argued against, but it didn't get passed because they do have a legal authority to borrow, but they shouldn't have a legal authority to destroy the country without looking at basic economics.
But the trick is you print the money, and that's the tax.
It destroys the value of the money they're holding.
So if you have prices go up 50%, they've devalued your money by 50%.
It's been over the years a lot more than that.
So they're taking the money and they don't even have to use a gun.
Oh, yeah, the gun is indirect because if you don't participate or argue the case or just preach the gospel on taxes, you can go to jail for that.
And we know of episodes where people got to go to jail because they merely said this is unconstitutional, how they collect it.
But the real evil is the fraud.
And that is they spend the money and then the money loses the value and the people then can turn their effort toward unions.
They caused it off because they always want the higher wages.
Well, of course, they do it and they should prefer that.
But they shouldn't have to tell them that you can't do this anymore at all because when the money goes down in value, the prices go up and that's where the people don't want to believe that.
And matter of fact, it's a nice ride for a while because everybody gets some benefit.
That's why even conservatives eventually can't vote against it because everybody has a constituency.
Trust in the Dollar 00:07:01
And the best example of that is F-35.
Just build it in every state.
Every state's participate.
So they never cut back.
And every year they add billions of more dollars on a plane they never intend nor could they ever use it if a real war occur.
And they're building something that's probably more appropriate for World War II with all the technology available today.
But anyway, that's the way the system works.
And it's unfair, illegal, immoral.
Other than that is a great deal for some people.
Yeah, you know, we were sitting around with my kids.
I was talking about when I was in high school and I worked as a cook in an Italian restaurant.
And we were all kind of having a laugh at it.
I made $4 an hour.
And then my son kind of took out the calculator and adjusted for inflation.
And that actually would be a very, very good wage now for relatively unskilled labor, actually, more than my kids were making working at the college and relatively skilled labor.
So it was sort of funny that that $4 an hour was minuscule back then, but it's way more now.
So that really brings it home.
It's a trick.
And a lot of people think in those terms, if they would, they'd have more people supporting our efforts to look into this Federal Reserve.
There's something suspicious going on.
Who does benefit if they can steal the value of the currency?
Is there somebody capitalizing on this?
They certainly do.
There's a lot of people.
It just happens that small minority, bankers and investors that don't follow the rules of real true free markets, they benefit.
And the statement that the far left uses: the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
But isn't it funny that those liberals who are saying it, they're part of that group that's getting richer.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Well, I pulled up a couple of charts to help us visualize some of what we're talking about.
And I'll put that next one up.
This is visualizing the national debt.
In global markets, is the X account.
The U.S. debt is escalating.
The federal government just crossed $38 trillion, rising $1 trillion in only two and a half months.
This marks a $1.8 trillion jump since the key: since the debt ceiling was lifted in July.
This is $514 billion per month or $17 billion per day added to the debt.
This is mind-blowing global markets rights, and that is true.
Just look at that.
And he accurately but somewhat humorously calls it debt out the wazoo, which is exactly what happened.
Look at that steep curve on the far right, Dr. Paul.
That is a massive increase in debt, and that is dangerous.
And Thomas Massey, of course, addressed this, and he put it in terms that Americans really should be able to understand.
If you go to the next one, he points out that debt per person in America is $113,000.
So every single American has that hanging over their $113,000 bill hanging over them, hanging over their head.
And they wonder, well, why can't I go on vacation?
Well, your credit cards are maxed out.
And I have one more chart that this was.
Lauren Chen, who's a conservative commentator, she puts in a chart of U.S. debt as a ball and chain.
And of course, the U.S. ball is the largest.
She says the U.S. is the most indebted country in the world, but the government still borrows hundreds of billions of dollars to give to other countries in foreign aid.
If those other countries are so desperate for money, perhaps they should borrow it themselves.
That's a pretty good observation.
Yeah, but the process continues because there still is trust in the dollar.
And one thing is, the rest of the world is doing the same thing, and they don't have the same resources and the same mystique about what our military can do.
But what finally ends this will be the loss of trust.
And I think that's very vulnerable right now for whether it's economic policy or whether it's our foreign policy and policing the world.
So I think that's diminishing the trust in those institutions.
And when it just dissipates or somebody raises their hand and says, no more, stay away.
Right now, that's not the case because the people still trust the dollar.
I mean, This administration is controlling the world with a promise and the technique of threats, sanctions, tariffs, and all these things that are really mystical when you want to talk about sound economic policy.
But they're doing it, and the people, people just go along with it.
But they better be wise because we have history on our side.
As people say, that's history.
We can do a better job.
We have better managers.
Yes, the history has shown that this, no matter what kind of monetary system they had or political system, no matter how much power, they eventually always abused money.
And it was a lot easier because it doesn't create, doesn't continue to create endless wealth.
And that's why it's just a statistic we just talked about.
You know, people can't take vacations and they can't retire at a certain age.
So that's a sign of this thing coming to an end.
And of course, my biggest worry is that it produces violence under these cases because people won't understand it and they want to blame somebody.
And then there will be a lot of positioning and politicking going, a lot of deceptions, just like that one statistic.
They're coming out if they want more money and show their states pretty well.
They can do a poll and say, the people in my state aren't even worried about inflation.
So it has to be nothing more than a theoretical way of convincing the people that there are no problems.
Trust us.
We'll take care of you.
And sometimes that's the only hope some of them have.
But I think that's a hope based on the fact that people have been trained to be ignorant about basic economics.
And that's why one of the first things that the progressives did is they took over control of education and they still have it.
But I give the current administration making an effort to try to curtail some of that in, but we still have a ways to go.
Well, Georgia's threw 20 in the super chat and urged me to show the full Massey tweet.
And the reason I edited it that way is very simple.
It was not necessarily relevant to the point, but I will, for the sake of transparency, it was a tweet where Thomas Massey was talking about debt per person in the U.S. versus debt per person in Israel.
Gaza's Dilemma 00:06:12
And in Israel, it is much, much lower, yet we still give them money.
And that was the point Massey was making.
It's a very important point, and I commented on X, and I think I reposted it.
But the point that I was simply trying to make was that narrow point, which is that we've got $130,000 over each one of our heads.
So you could do the full thing and say, yeah, well, we shouldn't give it elsewhere.
That's true, but I just wanted to capture the reality.
Anyway, so foreign policy is something else we're going to talk about today briefly.
And that is a plan.
This came out over the weekend.
Here's a good write-up from Dave DeCamp.
U.S. is considering a plan to split Gaza in two, with one zone controlled by Israel and the other by Hamas.
I mean, there's not much left to split over there, but nevertheless, here's what Dave writes up.
Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the U.S. and Israel are considering a plan for Gaza that would divide the Palestinian territory into two, with one area controlled by Hamas and the other controlled by the Israeli military.
Under the plan, reconstruction could only take place in the Israel-occupied area until Hamas disarms.
So that seems like the Kushner said no reconstruction funds will be going into areas that Hamas still controls.
That's the way it seems that they're going to exert pressure.
But there's an opening for that group that's not getting any promise of repairs because all they have to do is volunteer, sign up, and become a permanent slave.
Yeah.
You know, and live under the conditions that a lot of them have already experienced.
So, yes, you do what they tell.
So, there's no intention to help them.
There was no real concern for the people perpetuating the famine, the starvation.
And how many people have been starved to death over there?
Yes.
It's quite a few.
And that in itself should outrage people about it.
But, Daniel, we have to admit that the attitude has shifted a bit.
People, I mean, I'm all for treating Israel like everybody else.
And since our position is very clear, everybody else, nobody else gets free money by us stealing from poor people in this country.
It doesn't make any sense.
And people do it.
And then they think that's the litmus test.
And just think of the punishment people get because they will signal Israel over the others.
Why don't we treat them equally?
You know, why don't we just treat them as friends and trade with everybody and forget about this?
Who's running the empire?
Because the empire will end anyway.
And I think we're seeing the empire being in a very fragile condition.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'd rather not talk about Israel at all, but for the fact that we're giving $30 billion to fight wars in our name.
But this whole plan strikes also of sort of unspeakable cruelty.
And I'm talking about civilians.
You don't have to like Hamas, but the average woman, the average child, even the average male civilian in Gaza has no control over Hamas running their government.
That's like blaming some guy on the street for the fact that the U.S. is about to invade Venezuela.
They have no control.
They're just civilians in a bad situation.
So why should they have to suffer yet again until you get rid of, this is just like U.S. sanctions, until you get rid of that government, not only will we not get reconstruction, you won't get any food.
We're going to starve you to death.
It seems unspeakably cruel to do something like this and also just to shove it in their faces.
You know, they're going to look over the border fence and see all the reconstruction over there as they slowly starve to death.
It seems awful.
And remain docile.
Yeah.
You know.
Yeah, exactly.
And here's the other, here, now there's one more to it.
I just want to point out another point about this.
If you put that next one on from the same article, long-term permanent military occupation of parts of Gaza could also lead to the reestablishment of Jewish settlements in the Strip, something settler leaders and some officials in the U.S., in the Israeli government have made clear they want.
Now, this is the other part of it, Dr. Paul.
There's the cruelty of not helping these civilians who have been treated so badly, those that have lived.
But the other is this part that will be occupied by Israel, they're going to start building settlements.
And they're not shy about it.
Smotrich, who's one of the most extreme people that have ever been in political power, and I say that with a lot of memory of people who've been in power, he says, quote, there will be Jewish settlements in Gaza.
So they're very clear about this and very open about the fact that they want to do that.
And the Israeli paper Heretz, which is a liberal paper, often very good, said in an analysis of Kushner's visit for vision for Gaza that the plan, quote, would amount to something like the West Bankification of Gaza, a scenario that has become dangerously more likely since the ceasefire went into effect.
And what that is, Dr. Paul, is that they slowly, they slowly colonize these little villages.
They kick Palestinians out more and more.
It's a de facto, it's a de facto genocide just by moving in.
That's what they've done in the West Bank.
So that's the plan for Gaza.
So there are two horrible things about this: removing them from their homes and also starving them to death in the meantime while they're doing it.
You know, there's a religious issue on this as well, because if you do any challenging, you're considered anti-Semitic because you haven't followed the rules.
But some of the rules have been written in recent history.
It hasn't.
But the pretense of certain factions is that this was the original intent of Judaism and Christianity.
That the special treatment wasn't for Jews per se.
Truth Is Treason 00:03:53
It was now been translated into whoever is the dictator of Israel, whoever, you know, if it's the UN that we have to deal with.
Oh, well, you know, there's this religious belief, and that is firmly held by people.
If you get to know them, they seem very decent and honest and want to do the right thing.
But I tell you what, that is done on purpose to make sure that people don't actually try to tell the truth.
Because under these conditions, I think that statement that truth is treason when everything is based on lies.
So if you tell the truth, you're the one that's committing treason.
And just to look at that situation where starvation is no big deal for a lot of people.
So sad.
Very sad.
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Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And one of the obstacles that individuals like ourselves and many others who think along these lines of non-intervention, it beats a great deal of resistance because they call the people who do this and believe this that we're isolationists.
We don't want to deal with the world.
It's exactly the opposite.
I mean, and a libertarian constitutional republic believes there's more integration of the people.
There's more trade that goes on.
There's more prosperity.
There are good examples of this.
And it's a shame that there was an understanding of this for a long time, even before the founders wrote the Constitution, because they look towards some of these ancient arguments about why it is better to let people make their own decision, and you shouldn't have dictators running their lives.
But this whole principle of being called isolationism, I mean, there's no evidence to show there's more isolation.
The world has been isolated.
Just think of the big ones, World War I and what followed there, World War II.
How many of our little, so-called little wars?
It's more isolation at all.
We're over there doing bad things to people, stealing from one group and giving it to another.
You know, Bastiat was very clear.
Anytime you take money from one person and with force and give it to somebody else, he called it plunder.
I vote against plunder.
Let's see what we can do to get people to understand that the government should be put out of business once they come and acknowledge what they are doing by plundering the people.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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