[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, this was a quiet week overall in the U.S. stock market, despite some rather bearish news that should have caused a bigger decline in the stock market, but thanks to the AI bubble powering tech stocks, the markets were actually generally higher, although the Dow Jones did snap a four week winning streak by falling about three quarters of one percent this week.
[SPEAKER_00]: As did the Russell 2000 was down a little bit more, 1% not a lot of text stocks there.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the S&P 500 up 75 basis points and the NASDAQ up about 82 basis points thanks to the upward move in stocks, particularly text stocks.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the news that happened that I mentioned this on my Wednesday podcast was the collapse of the peace deal.
[SPEAKER_00]: The memorandum of understanding, fellow part, the wars back on, the markets rallied on the news that there was a peace deal.
[SPEAKER_00]: oil came down based on the fact that there was a peace deal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bion yields even lower to kick you a bit based on the idea of peace.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet now the rug was pulled out from under that and the markets really didn't react.
[SPEAKER_00]: The only markets that reacted were precious metals.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gold and silver were down based on the renewed tension in the Gulf.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gold was down about 1%.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, not that big a drop.
[SPEAKER_00]: Close the week at 41940.
[SPEAKER_00]: Silver, though, down 3.5%.
[SPEAKER_00]: Below $60.
[SPEAKER_00]: $59.76.
[SPEAKER_00]: but it was the gold and silver mining stocks that really took it on the chin.
[SPEAKER_00]: The GDX was down 5% and the smaller ones GDXJ were down 6%.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the news was actually bullish for gold, bullish for silver.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fact that the war is going to continue is bearish for stocks, but not for gold and silver.
[SPEAKER_00]: gold and silver benefit not only from the uncertainty that surrounds war, but from the inflation that always finances it and because this war is not ending and it may never end.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean this is again is a huge quagmire that Trump has gotten us into.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just as bad as Afghanistan or Iraq, another huge mistake only this time you can chalk it up to
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's gonna cost us a lot of money.
[SPEAKER_00]: The war is gonna cost us a lot of money.
[SPEAKER_00]: The peace if we ever get it is probably gonna cost us even more money
[SPEAKER_00]: Where's that money get a cup from?
[SPEAKER_00]: They're they're going to borrow it and they're going to print it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's going to drive people out of the dollar and into gold and silver.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the metals should be rising on this news.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the stock market that should be going down based on the prospects of bigger budget deficits and higher inflation.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, it should be obvious by now that I ran now controls the straight of her moves.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had no control over it before the war, nor did they have any pretense to take control.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, had we done nothing, had we not started a war against Iran, and Iran had just taken over the straight, the whole world would have united around us to repel that, to put it stop to that, because they would have been the bad guys.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we gave Iran an excuse to do what they probably always wanted to do, but could never find an excuse to do it until we dropped it in their lab.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we basically fell into their trap by attacking them and created a pretext for them to take over the straight.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now they're going to be charging a toll, probably forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: for the ships that are going through there.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is going to substantially increase the cost of everything that transports through that straight, which is gonna be food and energy in particular, because fertilizer and oil and gas, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So those prices are gonna be permanently higher.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is bad news.
[SPEAKER_00]: So maybe it's good news for the oil stocks, but it's not good news for the overall stock market.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not good news for the economy.
[SPEAKER_00]: and that's good news for golden silver because bad news for the economy means more government stimulus, more inflation, more money printing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The irony of this is that everything that's happening is bearers for stocks, yet stocks are going up, is bullish for golden silver, yet golden silver are going down.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, bonds also went down, which is bearish for the stock
[SPEAKER_00]: closed above four and a half percent on a weekly basis.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now 4.56 is the 10 year.
[SPEAKER_00]: And on the 30 year we're now back above 5.506.
[SPEAKER_00]: and more significant than where the yields are now is where the yields are headed because if you look at a chart of the bond market it looks to me like there's going to be a major breakdown in in that market.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to see a sharp fall.
[SPEAKER_00]: in the price of bonds.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that means a big rise in the yields.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is a big negative for the stock market.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a negative for the economy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a negative for the housing market.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the 30 year mortgage, I think went out at about six and a half percent.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm going to talk about housing,
[SPEAKER_00]: After this break that's coming up, I got a lot to say about housing in this podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to table that for a minute.
[SPEAKER_00]: But rising buying yields are obviously a negative for the real estate market.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, and a negative for the real estate market is bullish for gold and silver.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because what happens if we have a big drop in the real estate market?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the Fed has to come in and bail everybody out.
[SPEAKER_00]: We get more money printing.
[SPEAKER_00]: We get more inflation.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I do believe that the precious metals market is setting up for a major move up, and the stock market is setting up for a major move down.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you can see some cheeks to the armor look at what happened to SpaceX.
[SPEAKER_00]: So SpaceX was a highly touted IPO, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The biggest IPO, a lot of people just piled in the SpaceX.
[SPEAKER_00]: SpaceX was down 12.6% on the week.
[SPEAKER_00]: it closed at $145.36.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the lowest close since the IPO and the lowest trade.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it actually traded, I think, the lower the day was $145.07.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it closed just off the low.
[SPEAKER_00]: This stock closed 36% below it's high from about three days after the IPO.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there are people who have bought SpaceX and in less than two weeks, if they're still down 36%.
[SPEAKER_00]: This stock is still above the IPO price, which was 135.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's below the opening print on the IPO day, which was 150.
[SPEAKER_00]: and who still holds it is down.
[SPEAKER_00]: The only people who are up are the people who bought the IPO.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, a lot of people who bought the IPO also went and bought in the market.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so their average price is probably higher than today's close.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you've got a lot of people that are down.
[SPEAKER_00]: But remember, I pointed out the big deal about SpaceX is how thin the float is right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's going to be happening between now and the end of the year is the float is going to explode as all the lockups expire for all the insiders that have been waiting years to sell their SpaceX stock.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I've met some of these guys.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them I know.
[SPEAKER_00]: friend of mine has moved to Puerto Rico, he's retired now and he's waiting to sell some SpaceX stock.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he worked for SpaceX for a long time and he moved to Puerto Rico, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because he knows he's going to be rich when he cashes out his SpaceX stock.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there are a lot of people that are waiting to sell that haven't been able to.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that is a sign of some weakness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Although there was a high...
[SPEAKER_00]: profile IPO today of S.K.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hinex, which is a memory chip company in South Korea, and this stock was up, I've like 16-17 percent on its first day.
[SPEAKER_00]: This stock is already up 7.3x in
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not really an IPO in the sense that the stock wasn't public.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been public.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's now trading on the NASDAQ with an ADR.
[SPEAKER_00]: And America is just when crazy over that ADR and bid it up, the market cap of the company
[SPEAKER_00]: based on the ordinary shares is just over a trillion, but it's 20% higher.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's over 1.2 trillion if you base it off where the ADRs are.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we'll see what happens on Sunday night when the ordinary starts to trade and they get a chance to react to what happened in the US.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you know, by the way, there are already several companies that have filed to do leverage plays on this stock.
[SPEAKER_00]: You create new securities where you can go to X or 3X leverage on a stock that's already up 7 full.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the stock is trading at better than 20 times earnings.
[SPEAKER_00]: You might think, well, 20 times earnings, that's not that high, multiple.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but the earnings are not sustainable.
[SPEAKER_00]: These chip companies, memory prices have gone through the roof, the AI build out, the
[SPEAKER_00]: is driving this demand.
[SPEAKER_00]: So these companies are making a fortune now.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not going to make a fortune forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't count on these earnings being there year after year after year.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is actually a very cyclical business.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the PE is very high given the fact that there's
[SPEAKER_00]: to these earnings.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is all part of the bubble.
[SPEAKER_00]: People are chasing into this stock.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're buying it because it's going up.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is gonna end in disaster.
[SPEAKER_00]: They always do.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of these bubbles always pop.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, they always get bigger than you think.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then when they pop, in many cases, they go down more than even most of the bear's thought.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this was what was holding up the market.
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite the bad news.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, one of the few things too that was up was Bitcoin Bitcoin actually managed to rise about 4% on the week.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, as I'm recording the podcast, Bitcoin has just above 64,000.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what's interesting, and this goes in line with what I've been saying, strategy common stock was down on the week, another 1.7% despite the fact that Bitcoin went up.
[SPEAKER_00]: strategy went down.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that widened the discount that the common trades relative to Bitcoin.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's now near 40%.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what that means is that it's impossible for strategy to sell any more common stock to buy Bitcoin.
[SPEAKER_00]: They can't do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That chip is sailed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also stretch was down down on the week not up down down eight tenths of a percent close at 8748 the Yoban stretch is 13.7 he can't sell any more stretch either stretch has to be at a hundred for him to sell it and you know interesting thing
[SPEAKER_00]: is the fact that stretch is trading at 87.48.
[SPEAKER_00]: What that tells you is that investors do not believe that Bitcoin can go up by 12% a year, because if they believe that, then the 12% dividend would be safe.
[SPEAKER_00]: the fact that investors are commanding at 13.7% yield to hold it means they're prepared for the dividends to be cut because they don't believe that Bitcoin could go up enough to enable strategy to make the 12% payment.
[SPEAKER_00]: the coupon.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they expected to be cut.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, of course, if you look at a lot of the Wall Street firms that that cover Bitcoin, by the way, nobody that covers Bitcoin is bearish.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every single investment bank or brokerage firm that has an opinion on Bitcoin.
[SPEAKER_00]: And some of them don't have an opinion at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: But every company that has an opinion has a positive opinion.
[SPEAKER_00]: So on Wall Street,
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's no way that you can say that you're a contrarian, if you own Bitcoin, when all the Wall Street firms are bullish.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the least bullish by Fowl was Sidney Bank, they have an $82,000 price target, I think by year end.
[SPEAKER_00]: Standard Charter was 100,000, Burn's Feet is 150,000, JP Morgan has a price target of 170,000.
[SPEAKER_00]: I forget if that's by year-end or over 52 weeks, but these are relatively short-term targets.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fun strad, of course, I mean, forget them, and they're 200 to 250,000.
[SPEAKER_00]: Probably, I don't know if it's by the end of this year or the end of next year, but you can't trust anything they say.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I mean, everybody is bullish on Bitcoin.
[SPEAKER_00]: But nobody is willing to put their money where their mouth is, because if these firms really believed that Bitcoin was going to go up this much, they would be all over stretch.
[SPEAKER_00]: They wouldn't be buying the hell out of it at 8748.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fact that they're saying their bullish on Bitcoin, but they're not buying stretch shows you that they're not really bullish.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't believe their own bullshit.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're just talking their books.
[SPEAKER_00]: They have some vested interests in Bitcoin because they're making money off of Bitcoin and so they have to be bullish.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't be bearish because then you piss off all your potential customers.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's sac religious.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if you say anything negative about Bitcoin, that could kill your crypto business.
[SPEAKER_00]: So all these banks have bullish forecasts for window dressing.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't actually believe it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They know it's BS because if they believe that they would be buying stretch.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, we've got a quick commercial break coming back.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to get into the housing market.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's going to be a great discussion.
[SPEAKER_00]: So don't miss it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, before I get into housing, just a couple more markets I wanted to mention.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dollar was flat on the week, which I thought was significant, and that the dollar didn't get a bump out of the renewed war, and so I think that's a bearer sign for the dollar, which again is a bullish sign for gold and silver.
[SPEAKER_00]: And oil prices up about 5%, I think oil prices are going a lot higher.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, I'm surprised oil didn't move up even more this week.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I expect oil prices to continue to build on these gains, which are ultimately going to be bearers for the bond market, which should be bearers for the stock market and bullish for gold and silver.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's irrelevant to Bitcoin.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, Bitcoin is already proven that it's not correlated to gold.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not correlated to tech stocks anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: Although I believe
[SPEAKER_00]: It just doesn't go up when text stocks go up, but when text stocks go down, it's going to go down a lot more.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I want to pivot and talk about housing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's because this new bill, the 21st century road to housing bill.
[SPEAKER_00]: will become law on Saturday.
[SPEAKER_00]: Without the president's John Hancock, Donald Trump refused to sign this bill and he shouldn't sign it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a bad bill.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I thought he should have vetoed it, but it passed with such overwhelming support.
[SPEAKER_00]: that even if Trump vetoed the bill, Congress could have overwrote it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe Trump didn't want to have that fight.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't want to risk the embarrassment of having his veto overwritten.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if I was Trump, I would have vetoed it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would have been proud of veto it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would have tried to convince some other Republicans to stand with me and reverse their votes.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think he realized he didn't have the numbers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he just didn't sign the bill.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, he, his excuse for not signing it was not like how it's a bad bill.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to sign it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He basically said, look, unless I get to save America outside, I ain't signing this bill.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he was kind of holding his signature hostage to this other bill.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm going to talk about the Save America Act a bit in the next segment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right now, I want to talk about the housing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he's not signing the bill.
[SPEAKER_00]: but it's going to become law.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, anything that has overwhelming bipartisan support is probably a bad bill.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, pretty much you could tell when you have a consensus where the Democrats and the Republicans, they both like it, you've got to know it's bad because it's full goodies.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the whole idea behind this bill is that it's going to make housing more affordable that they're addressing this housing affordability crisis, which we have.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, that was confirmed yesterday.
[SPEAKER_00]: We got some housing numbers.
[SPEAKER_00]: We got existing home sales.
[SPEAKER_00]: which unexpectedly fell.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I don't know why people didn't expect this, but they didn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: They expected housing sales to rise, existing home sales instead they fell by 2.4% on the month.
[SPEAKER_00]: Year over year now, home sales are up, but only 2.8% as of the prior month, they were up 3.2%.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what's also significant and not unrelated is that home prices rose to the highest ever.
[SPEAKER_00]: So people aren't buying houses, but housing prices are going up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, which maybe doesn't even make sense because you would think that people would have to be buying houses to push the price up.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not buying them and the price is going up anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: But one of the reasons they're not buying is because the prices are going up.
[SPEAKER_00]: If prices were coming down, then maybe more people could afford to buy.
[SPEAKER_00]: But because prices keep going up, they can't buy and so sales are falling.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there isn't affordability crisis.
[SPEAKER_00]: Homes have never been less affordable than they are right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: in all of American history, housing has never been less affordable, and that flies in the face of over 50 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, more than 50 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it started in 1930s, so 90 years, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But ever since the 1930s,
[SPEAKER_00]: The government has decided to make home ownership I pray already, to make it easier for people to buy homes, to make housing more affordable, yet it's more affordable than ever.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know what?
[SPEAKER_00]: That is not a coincidence, that's not irony.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is actually the predictable consequence of America's policy.
[SPEAKER_00]: So here you have Congress passing this 21st century road to housing bill.
[SPEAKER_00]: pretending that this is going to solve the affordability problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is going to do nothing to solve that problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the problem itself was created by Congress.
[SPEAKER_00]: The U.S. government is the reason that housing is so unaffordable.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this bill will do nothing about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: What the bill does do is destroy private property rights because it restricts ownership of single family homes.
[SPEAKER_00]: It says that companies that own, I think it's like a 350 homes or whatever it is, there's a certain cutoff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And once you own that many homes, you can't buy anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: and they're thinking that this is the reason that housing is so expensive is because you have these big corporations buying houses.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're a small part of the market, maybe in a couple of cities it could be significant, but overall this is not going to make much of a difference, but what everybody is overlooking is not the fact that you're diminishing the right of a corporation to buy.
[SPEAKER_00]: property, but you're diminishing the rights of the owner of that property to sell it to whoever he wants.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if I own a piece of property, I should be able to sell my property to anybody I want.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the government is saying no, you can't sell it to a company that already owns a bunch of houses.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even if that company is willing to pay you a higher price than everybody else.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're diminishing my property values, you're diminishing my rights as an owner of property to sell it to the highest bidder.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think it's a slippery slope of taking away property rights.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's unconstitutional that they're doing this, but so many things the government does is unconstitutional anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't expect that many congressmen to vote against it based on constitutionality, but it is bad policy to do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is also going to result in fewer homes being built because the investor pool to buy them is diminished.
[SPEAKER_00]: homes for rent, which means higher rents for single-family homes, which will impact people who want to rent them.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I want to get into the bigger issue, and that is what the government has done to the housing market, all the government policies that are designed to make home ownership more affordable actually made homes more expensive.
[SPEAKER_00]: The main policy as the government has is you got the FHA federal housing authority.
[SPEAKER_00]: of their house agency, which guarantees mortgages directly, low-down payment mortgages, and then you got fanoned Freddy, which were created, which have implicit now explicit government guarantees where they can buy up mortgages, repackage them, and issue them with government guarantees.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of this is designed to make it easier for people to borrow more money to go out and buy houses.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, the tax code incentivizes a home purchase by giving you a deduction for your mortgage interest.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when people are looking at the cost of a home, versus the cost of renting, they take into account the tax deductibility of the interest to the extent that they itemize and most homeowners would itemize.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would take advantage of that deduction.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the tax deductibility of mortgage interest
[SPEAKER_00]: as well as property taxes, and things like that, reduces the money that you spend.
[SPEAKER_00]: But all of this increases demand.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you make it so people can borrow more money to buy houses, they have more money to spend on houses.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you allow people to deduct their mortgage, they can borrow more money to pay higher prices.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if the government gave one person.
[SPEAKER_00]: those benefits.
[SPEAKER_00]: If one guy could deduct a mortgage interest,
[SPEAKER_00]: or got a guaranteed loan?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: That would help that one guy because now he can go and buy a house and save money.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if everybody has the same benefit, if everybody can go out and deduct their mortgage, if everybody can get a government guaranteed mortgage, then everybody is just bidding against one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody has more money to buy houses.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what happens?
[SPEAKER_00]: The price of houses goes up.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not rocket science.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you increase demand,
[SPEAKER_00]: then price goes up.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the government's policy is a backfired.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead of making home ownership more affordable, they've made it more expensive.
[SPEAKER_00]: Housing is over price, but also because of all these government subsidies that stimulated demand, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And none of this is the free market.
[SPEAKER_00]: The free market would have produced an opposite result.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we had a free market in housing, there would be no affordability crisis.
[SPEAKER_00]: Housing would be very affordable and very plentiful, just like everything that the free market provides.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not an accident that the where the government is most involved, education, healthcare, housing.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's where prices keep going up.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's because the government doesn't allow the market to work.
[SPEAKER_00]: What did all of these subsidies do?
[SPEAKER_00]: The result of giving people money to buy homes meant they bought more expensive homes.
[SPEAKER_00]: That meant more expensive homes were built.
[SPEAKER_00]: So builders,
[SPEAKER_00]: Because people could deduct their home mortgage and because they got a guaranteed mortgage by the government so they got a lower rate, they could afford bigger more expensive homes.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what they built.
[SPEAKER_00]: And because people who might otherwise have rented and we're renting would have been more economical in a free market because the government stepped on the scale and made
[SPEAKER_00]: Approaches more economical only because of the government subsidies and the tax breaks People who might otherwise have rented became buyers and so there wasn't as much rental housing Produced because more people were led by the government to become buyers and there wasn't
[SPEAKER_00]: you know as many lower cost homes built because there was demand for more expensive homes people who couldn't deduct the mortgage or who couldn't get a guaranteed mortgage so they needed a bigger down payment because you know people didn't want to lend money to somebody without a government guarantee the government guarantee took the risk out of the lending so they were willing to extend more credit but without the government guarantee people couldn't
[SPEAKER_00]: And so developers would have built more, more, smaller homes.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this whole crisis, this whole affordability crisis, was manufactured by the government.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this ridiculous bill is not going to solve it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if home buyers didn't benefit from all these subsidies, who benefited?
[SPEAKER_00]: the sellers of homes.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you wanted to sell a home, yes, you benefit it because you got more money because the government subsidized home buyers, the home sellers got more money for their homes.
[SPEAKER_00]: The home builders, companies that built homes, they benefited because their customers had more money to buy their products.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that is the irony.
[SPEAKER_00]: The government says, hey, we want to make housing more affordable, but they end up making it more expensive.
[SPEAKER_00]: The beneficiaries of all the government housing programs are not home buyers, but home sellers, home builders, the housing industry.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's not how it's sold to the public.
[SPEAKER_00]: The government says, we're gonna help you by a home.
[SPEAKER_00]: But all they help you do is buy a more expensive home.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, Donald Trump reiterated his position.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just last week, I saw him say the same thing again.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said it a couple months ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wants home prices to go up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite the fact that we have an affordability crisis, he doesn't want homes to become more affordable with prices going down.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what does Donald Trump want?
[SPEAKER_00]: He just wants interest rates to come down.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what he said.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wants real estate prices to keep going up because he wants the people who own homes.
[SPEAKER_00]: to continue to be rich.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't want them to lose their housing wealth because they're so excited.
[SPEAKER_00]: They feel so good about how much money they have in home equity.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't want to take that away from people who for the first time in their lives are rich now and he doesn't want to take away their riches.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not really rich.
[SPEAKER_00]: They just think they're rich.
[SPEAKER_00]: They own an overpriced house that nobody could buy.
[SPEAKER_00]: But maybe they're able to borrow against it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Trump's policy is to keep air in the housing bubble, to keep housing prices going up.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his solution for younger people who are struggling is just take on more debt.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we'll just make it easier for you to borrow more money by getting a low interest rate.
[SPEAKER_00]: But all this stuff backfires.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we are in a huge problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: The real solution.
[SPEAKER_00]: to the housing affordability problem is to get the government out of housing.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what we got to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: We should end the mortgage deductibility.
[SPEAKER_00]: We should shut down Fanny and Freddie, shut down the FHA and allow the free market to distribute housing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't, you know, people shouldn't buy houses.
[SPEAKER_00]: They can't afford.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you can't convince somebody to loan you money to buy a house, it's probably because you're not a good credit risk.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because banks want to make loans.
[SPEAKER_00]: The key is they want to get paid back.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're not going to make you alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: If they don't think you could pay back.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if the government guarantees the loan, they don't give a damn whether you could pay it back or not.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the government's going to pay him back.
[SPEAKER_00]: but that's not what we want.
[SPEAKER_00]: We want a free market and we want houses to be built that Americans can actually afford.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's not going to happen because if the government actually did the right thing and real estate prices went down, we'd have another financial prices because all this collateral for all these loans,
[SPEAKER_00]: would go bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is the problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: The government inflated this bubble.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, why did they do it to win the votes of potential home buyers by pretending that they were doing them a favor?
[SPEAKER_00]: Just like with students and student loans, hey, we're going to get you loans.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to guarantee your student loans.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to loan you might go to college.
[SPEAKER_00]: See, isn't that great?
[SPEAKER_00]: yet the loans are the reason that college is so expensive.
[SPEAKER_00]: So all the problems that the government solves, the government creates them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's solutions create the problems that it's trying to solve, and then they get worse as a result of the continuation of those programs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, we got one more commercial, so stick around, come and write back.
[SPEAKER_00]: So to continue what I was saying before the break, the government created.
[SPEAKER_00]: the housing affordability problem by stimulating demand.
[SPEAKER_00]: What we need is more supply, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That would help bring down home prices and a reduction of demand.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if there's a housing shortage, which there is, that's part of the problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: And part of it has to do with local governments, zoning and all kinds of restrictions on building,
[SPEAKER_00]: make it more expensive.
[SPEAKER_00]: What Trump is doing with immigration is driving up construction costs because, you know, the workers are leaving because a lot of the workers were illegal.
[SPEAKER_00]: The tariffs are driving up the price of lumber.
[SPEAKER_00]: The price of copper, the price of steel.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So homes are not being built so we can get rid of those tariffs.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we can we can liberalize the labor laws.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can allow more people to legally enter the country
[SPEAKER_00]: We need more homes and we need less government subsidies.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the government's solution is let's try to stimulate demand.
[SPEAKER_00]: People can't afford houses.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's stimulate demand.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well then the price are just going to go up.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're not going to create anything by stimulating demand when you have a bubble.
[SPEAKER_00]: When prices are already too high.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they don't want to do the right thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And part of the reason is so many people now own homes.
[SPEAKER_00]: that they just don't want the price to go down.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a lot of Trump's voters are in their 60s and 70s.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've paid off their mortgage, they're retired.
[SPEAKER_00]: The last thing they want is their home, which for many people may be their biggest asset, they don't want that going down.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the government is more concerned about preserving what the have's have, then making it easier for the have nots to get it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you know, I would rather see younger people that want to raise families by homes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Older people whose children have already left the nest, they don't need to stay in these homes anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: They should sell them.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you know what, they're not selling them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or maybe they have a 3% mortgage that they can't live, they can't leave.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the government created this problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the public doesn't know I mean the public gets fooled in the believing that oh the government is helping me the government's gonna make homes cheaper The government's gonna make college cheaper the government's gonna make health care cheaper.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it's not Those are empty promises everything the government promises to make cheaper.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's gonna make more expensive.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how government works
[SPEAKER_00]: But the public doesn't know that, they don't understand economics, which brings me to the last topic I wanted to discuss.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is this Save America Act.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is, you know, again, the reason that Donald Trump says that he doesn't want to sign this housing bill is because Congresswoman passed the Save America Act.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I haven't really talked about the Save America Act on the podcast yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have mixed feelings about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I suppose I would support it because there's always good and bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, in everything, I guess if I was a senator and I had I got an elected, I probably would support this bill because on average, I think it's better than not.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not the ideal bill that I would write.
[SPEAKER_00]: And part of me doesn't like the federal government getting to involved in elections.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that the state should be doing it, but the states are obviously, you know, drop in the ball here when it comes to allowing illegal to vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it's pretty clear that if you're not an American, you're not here legally.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're not a citizen.
[SPEAKER_00]: You should not be voting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's pretty clear.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, I've never been a big fan of everybody voting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, personally, I think the fewer people who vote, the better.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, yeah, I'd like to see, illegal's not vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: And obviously, Donald Trump wants the same thing, but, you know, the Democrats,
[SPEAKER_00]: obviously don't want it because I think the feeling is that most of the illegal Siu vote vote democratic and so that's why the Democrats are opposed to it and you know it's very a patronizing too because a lot of what they say is that they claim that the law requiring you to show ID proof of citizenship to vote is somehow discriminatory because minorities will have a problem getting ID
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, what's so hard about that?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I mean, how hard is it to have an ID?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we have IDs.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, don't think have driver's licenses.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, should we make it so, you know, people don't need driver's licenses because minorities aren't smart enough to figure out how to get a driver's license.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we shouldn't have driver's licenses because they discriminate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or what about passports, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, parties are they too incompetent to figure out how to get a passport.
[SPEAKER_00]: Should we just not have passports?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it discriminates.
[SPEAKER_00]: that your constituency is too incompetent to figure out how to prove that they're actually here legally.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in my mind, if you cannot figure out how to prove that you're in a legal citizen, and if you're not willing to take the time,
[SPEAKER_00]: to get some kind of ID to prove that you're legal.
[SPEAKER_00]: That don't want you voting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, think about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Democrats are saying, our constituents are not competent enough to figure out how to get an ID, but we want to make sure they vote to see who's going to be the president or who's going to be in the Senate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why would we want people who are so incompetent?
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, personally, you could have incompetent people on both sides, but that's how little the Democrats think of their own constituency.
[SPEAKER_00]: which in a way, look, you have to be less intelligent in general probably to vote for these guys, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if you have some brains, you're going to vote conservative, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You make, you know, as you grow up, and you get more experience, you realize that all this stuff is a bunch of nonsense.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you start out,
[SPEAKER_00]: left wing, more socialist, Democrat, when you're young and idealistic and before you actually have any real experience, but as you grow and you gain knowledge and wisdom, you gradually shift and then you become conservative libertarian.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a natural progression.
[SPEAKER_00]: But here they're claiming that, oh no, we can't have this law.
[SPEAKER_00]: But to me,
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just illegals that I'm concerned about, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm concerned about a lot of legal citizens who are voting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't like that either.
[SPEAKER_00]: Voting, and we talked a little bit about the Declaration of Independence and about the birth of America, America is 250 years old now.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when we fought a revolution,
[SPEAKER_00]: And when the framers went, they wrote the declaration of independence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we ended up with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
[SPEAKER_00]: Voting was not there.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Declaration of Independence, we weren't protesting that we could vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, voting is not in the Bill of Rights.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the first ten amendments, you have freedom of speech, freedom of press, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Right to bear arms.
[SPEAKER_00]: We added voting rights later on in the amendment process.
[SPEAKER_00]: As we were making it illegal and constitutional for states to have various criteria for voting.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we kind of manufactured a right that never existed.
[SPEAKER_00]: The framers always looked at voting as a privilege.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not a right.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was never intended that everybody would just vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, if you look at
[SPEAKER_00]: the way the federal government was established.
[SPEAKER_00]: Only the House of Representatives was elected by the people.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the Constitution doesn't set up a framework for how the people were going to elect the representatives.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just left it up to the states.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were no criteria.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just said that the people shall elect
[SPEAKER_00]: the House of Representatives every two years.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this stage determined which people there was nothing in the Constitution or the original Tenements that mentioned anybody's right to vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was strictly up to the States to set the criteria on which people would do the voting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the senators, they weren't even elected by people.
[SPEAKER_00]: The senators were appointed by the state legislatures.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's no election at all there.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one had a right or even a privilege to vote for senators because they were appointed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the same thing with the president, the vice president.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were elected by the electoral college, by electors.
[SPEAKER_00]: And back, it wasn't,
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea back then was that the electors would just be a rubber stamp of some popular vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: The framers of the Constitution thought the electoral college would actually deliberate that they would decide who the president would be.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not not the public.
[SPEAKER_00]: The only body that was going to be directly accountable to the public
[SPEAKER_00]: was the house and that's why they ran every two years.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why revenue bills had to originate in the house because they wanted to make sure that the people in posing the taxes had to face the people who were paying the taxes every two years to justify their taxes.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the states then had all kinds of criteria.
[SPEAKER_00]: So here we are arguing that, oh, we don't want to have any requirements on voting.
[SPEAKER_00]: We want to make sure that every idiot votes, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: No matter how dumb they are, no matter how incompetent they are, we want to make sure that we get them to the polls so they can vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: Think about how ridiculous that is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because first of all, just in any situation, the majority is usually going to be wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the inherent problem with the democracy, and that's why we're supposed to be a republic, not a democracy, is because if you are deciding on laws based on the majority, then you're going to have a lot of bad laws.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're in a lot of trouble if you're going to put everything to a vote and you're going to do what the majority wants.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you're going to have elections, the key is to limit the electorate to get a better outcome, to lessen the chance of really bad legislation being passed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was the original thinking of all of the states.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the states had all kinds of criteria, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You had to be 21 years old, generally.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the age to vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, 250 years ago, if you were 21, you had a lot of life experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've probably been living on your own for maybe eight years, you had a wife.
[SPEAKER_00]: You had a couple of kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you're responsible.
[SPEAKER_00]: You probably, you know, you worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: Today they're voting at 18, 18, most 18-year-olds have never even had a job.
[SPEAKER_00]: They still live with their parents.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why are we letting 18-year-olds vote?
[SPEAKER_00]: We shouldn't be letting 18-year-olds vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the only reason they're voting was because we started drafting them in Vietnam.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they said, well, all good enough to fight, all good enough to vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm against the draft number one, so that's that's that's all other argument.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it just because you're old enough to fight doesn't mean you're old enough to vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: If that's the case, if you're too old to fight, then you're too old to vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fighting and voting are completely different skill sets.
[SPEAKER_00]: And 18 year-old can fight.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're in good shape, you know, they could be on a battlefield.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't think they have enough life experience to vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, based on the 21 year-old voting age we had,
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, you know, 200 years ago, 250 years ago, the voting age should be in the 30s.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe 35 before you could vote because you have to be that age to have the same life experience as somebody at 21 back then.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, though, you didn't live as long.
[SPEAKER_00]: The life expectancy people died in their 50s and they're 60s.
[SPEAKER_00]: They weren't as many people 80, 90, 100 years old like we have now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, so.
[SPEAKER_00]: there were these criteria.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then they had poll taxes.
[SPEAKER_00]: You want to vote pay a tax.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you don't want to pay the tax, you don't vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a literacy test.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, you've got to pass this test.
[SPEAKER_00]: We want to make sure you're at least competent to understand the issues.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're not competent, then you're not going to vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, you know, they didn't let women vote, which, you know, wouldn't make sense today given the roles that women play in society, but back then, uh, women had very different roles than men, uh, by and large.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it didn't make sense that they would vote, um, be, uh, of course now, you know, there's no reason to discriminate based on sex.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is based on age for sure, but we could have property qualifications, literacy test,
[SPEAKER_00]: who votes, the key is the outcome of the election, not the participation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if you just want these guys, oh, we just want everybody to vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: What if everybody is a socialist?
[SPEAKER_00]: What if everybody votes for socialism?
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you supposed to be in favor of that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because, oh, well, it's the democracy.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, you're not supposed to be in favor of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: What was that, the old joke, that a democracy is two foxes and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
[SPEAKER_00]: a republic is a well-armed sheep who challenges the vote right i don't want people voting in social i don't even care if
[SPEAKER_00]: the criteria for voting excluded me, I would be fine with it, as long as I believed that the electorate was better off.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like for example, when I was 18 years old, I was still in favor of a higher voting age, when I was 18.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I was a responsible voter at 18, but I knew that most of my friends were not.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would have been fine not being able to vote, knowing that neither could my friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: because my friends were canceling out my vote, what good is it?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I would have been happy not to have had the right to vote, knowing that so many other 18-year-olds couldn't vote either, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, you know, when I would have moved to Puerto Rico,
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things people said is, well, Peter, you're gonna lose your right to vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, my right to vote was meaningless.
[SPEAKER_00]: All I ever did was vote for the loser.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was living in Connecticut.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody I voted for, one.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what difference did my vote make?
[SPEAKER_00]: My vote was meaningless.
[SPEAKER_00]: When everybody could vote, voting means nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The key is fewer people voting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then it means something.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and then you won't have these stupid laws.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why do we have all these dumb laws about housing that drive up the price, about education, about healthcare?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the electorate is too dumb to understand the implication, they don't get any of this stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, how or most elections even determined?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the crazy part about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's our elections are determined by TV commercials.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because, you know, most people already know who they're going to vote for, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't even need a commercial.
[SPEAKER_00]: The more responsible people know who they're going to support without any of this money.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to spend all the money that we spend.
[SPEAKER_00]: All that money on the margin is meant to get the guy who makes his decision or gal based on TV commercials.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, who is going to make their decision based on that, based on a commercial, an idiot, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, so basically we've decided that we're going to choose our leaders based on who the idiots vote for, not based on who the responsible people vote for, because it was just them, nobody would spend any money, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: All of this, all the big money.
[SPEAKER_00]: that goes into politics is to get the votes of the idiots.
[SPEAKER_00]: And whichever way the idiot breaks, that's who wins.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why is that how we want to run the country, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Leaving it up to the dumbest among us, the most impressionable.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, could you imagine making a decision on which candidate that you're going to support based on a commercial, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And what is in the commercial?
[SPEAKER_00]: Mostly just negative ads about your opponent that's kind of irrelevant, attacking his character, or whatever, so it's not just this, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: save America act where we have to save America from the illegal's voting we have to save America from the legal's voting that is the problem too it's a bigger problem than the illegal's voting is all the legal's voting who should be voting now I know people again I'm gonna say oh Peter and I says terrible you know everybody should vote why
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I'm concerned about everybody having liberty.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody having freedom.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if everybody voting is a threat to our freedom is a threat to our liberty, then why do I want that?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want good government.
[SPEAKER_00]: Government is the ends.
[SPEAKER_00]: If the means of getting there is restricting the suffrage, then that's what we do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if we have good government, everybody wins.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we have bad government, everybody loses.
[SPEAKER_00]: And democracy guarantees bad government.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, when you look at how our leaders are in office kind of forever, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Look at all these people that make a career at a politics.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why isn't that they're able to stay in office for so long?
[SPEAKER_00]: because they do what's in their political self-interest.
[SPEAKER_00]: And generally, what's in the economic interest of the country and what's in the political interest of our leaders are at odds with each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: Doing the right thing is usually bad politics.
[SPEAKER_00]: but doing the wrong thing is good politics.
[SPEAKER_00]: So who are the people who are the most successful politicians that people who consistently do the wrong thing?
[SPEAKER_00]: The people who consistently put their own career over their principle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are the ones that are successful in politics because that's what you need to do to be successful.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you are in office and you're doing the right thing and ignoring the polls, you're not gonna have a career.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, what happens to a lot of people, maybe there are some good intention people who go to Washington and they go there and they're going to do good.
[SPEAKER_00]: They end up basically surrendering all their principles and the justification as look, I know this is a bad thing to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if I don't do this bad thing, I'm not going to get reelected, and so a worse person than me is going to come in office.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so in order to keep my job, I've got to do this bad stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if I don't do this bad stuff, somebody else is going to do even worse stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, of course, a lot of it, too, is self-interest.
[SPEAKER_00]: People go to Washington, oh, yeah, I'm going to make a difference.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to make everything better.
[SPEAKER_00]: But once they get there, their main objective is staying there, because they like the lifestyle.
[SPEAKER_00]: They like the perks, and so they want to stay there, so they have to play ball.
[SPEAKER_00]: They have to get money.
[SPEAKER_00]: They have to get donations.
[SPEAKER_00]: They have to get the special interest, supporting them.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, a lot of these problems could get solved if people didn't have to raise so much money to stay in office.
[SPEAKER_00]: If they didn't have such a big electorate to pander to, because if people, if we had all these voting restrictions, then there would be far fewer people voting, they'd be much more informed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we wouldn't have to spend so much money.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, today,
[SPEAKER_00]: All you should have to do is put a website up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, I'm running for office.
[SPEAKER_00]: Check out my website.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's all my positions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why do we have to spend all this money on these ads?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that's how you get the idiots to vote for you with the ads.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's only a few swing states now.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the idiots concentrated in a half a dozen states that determine who wins the White House now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what is all boils down to.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this whole system needs reform.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just stopping the illegals.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's taking back our country, taking back our Republic, and it sounds terrible, and I know that if I ever ran for office, these are the kind of things that get used against me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Peter Schiff wants to take away your right to vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I want to restore your right to freedom and liberty and prosperity that is being robbed by having too many people exercising a privilege to vote that they should not have.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because again, it's not the means, it's the ends.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want good government.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of times, Republicans always want low turnout, because high turnout tends to favor Democrats.
[SPEAKER_00]: So are you a bad person if you're hoping for a rainy day so that fewer people turn out?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if people are only willing to vote, if it's a sunny day, don't vote, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: If it's not that important, if you only vote, if it's good weather, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, well then, you know, but
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you're a if you're okay rooting for low turnout, you know, everybody's like, oh, this is great.
[SPEAKER_00]: We want to make sure everybody votes.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know where everybody voted like in the Soviet Union.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody voted there.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you mean, I think you were required to vote.
[SPEAKER_00]: You had to go vote, but you had the choice of communist A or communist B.
[SPEAKER_00]: So who cares, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it a real election?
[SPEAKER_00]: If you don't have an actual choice and in fact today in America.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where's our choice?
[SPEAKER_00]: Socialist, A or Socialist B.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can vote for the Republican.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or the Democrat.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's not that much difference between the Republicans and the Democrats anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: They all want big government.
[SPEAKER_00]: They all want inflation.
[SPEAKER_00]: They only disagree on the margins.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why it's so polarizing because they really have
[SPEAKER_00]: So much in common, that they have to create this fake controversy to pretend that there's a difference when it's really a distinction without a difference because they have far more in common than they are apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they have to really play up the differences to maintain the pretense that you actually have a real choice when you don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no choice because no matter who you vote for, a Republican or a Democrat is going to win.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know third parties, the libertarians never have a shot at any election.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know there are other people now talking about, oh, let's have a third party.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tucker Carlson is talking about third party.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's not going to work.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're trapped in this duopoly and part of the problem is the voting process and the fact that we have degenerated into the very thing that the framers tried their best to prevent from happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: When they asked,
[SPEAKER_00]: Benjamin Franklin, what kind of government have you given us, Mr. Franklin, his response was a republic if you can keep it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And unfortunately, we couldn't keep it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, that's the end of today's podcast.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I finally broke through the 600,000 mark on YouTube.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm now about 625 or something sort of 30,000.
[SPEAKER_00]: So at least I'm getting an increase in my subscribers there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's keep that momentum going and everybody enjoy the rest of your weekend.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll be back again next week with more podcasts.
[SPEAKER_00]: So bye for now.