The Auron MacIntyre Show - August 06, 2026


It's the Economy Stupid ｜ 8⧸6⧸26


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

154.82

Word count

1,549

Sentence count

85

Harmful content

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.440 It's the family and friends event at Shoppers Drug Mart. Get 20% off almost all regular priced merchandise. Two days only. Monday, August 10th and Tuesday, August 11th. Open your PC Optimum app to get your coupon.
00:00:13.500 The conservative political class is committing one of the most disastrous acts of political
00:00:22.600 malpractice in recent memory. When Biden press secretary Corrine Jean-Pierre chided Americans
00:00:29.460 for complaining about the price of staples like milk and eggs, she did serious damage to the
00:00:35.140 Democratic Party. Many voters backed Donald Trump because they trusted him to address inflation and
00:00:40.860 the broader affordability crisis. Now conservative pundits and influencers are repeating the exact
00:00:46.520 same mistake, telling consumers that everything's fine and only economic illiterates would think
00:00:51.760 grocery, gas, and housing costs are too much. Elections aren't won by lecturing voters that
00:00:58.620 their problems are imaginary. This is politics 101. Professional political actors adopting this
00:01:04.580 strategy months before midterms is both bizarre and dangerous affordability is not a democrat
00:01:11.140 talking point or a socialist catchphrase it's real and it'll dominate every foreseeable election
00:01:17.560 republicans understood this when biden occupied the white house the problem doesn't just disappear
00:01:22.960 when trump returns people can feel that the economy isn't working for them they can see
00:01:28.320 the american dream drifting farther out of reach conservative pundits may produce charts cite
00:01:34.020 aggregate statistics and explain that certain indicators look healthy, but none of that will
00:01:39.200 save the GOP any more than it saved the Democrats who insisted that Bidenomics was working. The
00:01:45.220 party can't dismiss this anger as a failure of messaging. Voters don't experience the economy
00:01:51.100 as an abstraction. They experience it at the checkout counter, at the gas pump, when the
00:01:55.740 insurance bill arrives, when yet another year of savings still leaves that starter home beyond
00:02:00.760 reach. Their judgment is concrete and entirely rational. The price of some discretionary goods,
00:02:07.300 like flat-screen TVs, has fallen. The essentials of ordinary life have not followed the same path.
00:02:14.260 Food, healthcare, childcare, education, insurance, housing, electricity, and gasoline remain
00:02:21.200 punishingly expensive. Gross domestic product and surging stock markets might come for those
00:02:27.320 who are already winning in the economy,
00:02:29.600 but they're poor measures of the daily experience
00:02:32.000 of a family struggling to stay afloat.
00:02:34.980 Many of the underlying problems
00:02:36.740 are nearly untouchable in a democratic system.
00:02:40.080 The hard truth is that buying votes
00:02:42.240 is often the optimal electoral strategy.
00:02:45.620 No candidate wins by promising voters
00:02:47.900 that their benefits will shrink,
00:02:49.600 their home values will fall,
00:02:51.880 and their taxes will rise.
00:02:53.940 Trump understands this better than anyone.
00:02:55.960 He promised not to touch major entitlements, pledged to protect home values, proposed eliminating taxes on tips.
00:03:03.220 America may be on a slow collision course with fiscal disaster.
00:03:07.240 But no politician wants to lose an election, lose power because they told people the truth and implemented austerity.
00:03:14.460 The brutal fact is that we're probably just going to sit around ignoring this problem, hoping that the other guy is holding the bomb when it ultimately explodes.
00:03:23.700 The American version of this problem has modern features, but the core dilemma is ancient.
00:03:29.400 Large civilizations require immense resources.
00:03:32.500 When rulers can no longer obtain enough through ordinary taxation, they manipulate the currency.
00:03:38.260 Roman emperors knew little of modern monetary theory,
00:03:41.840 but they understood that reducing the precious metal content of coins allowed the state to mint more of them.
00:03:48.500 The apparent solution eventually helped destroy confidence in the currency
00:03:52.860 and contributed to the collapse of hard money across much of Europe.
00:03:57.080 There's only so much Trump can do about the structural inflation and accumulating debt.
00:04:02.500 He can, however, avoid taking actions that make the problem worse.
00:04:07.340 Gasoline is literally fuel for the economy.
00:04:10.460 Higher prices punish voters at the pump
00:04:12.880 and then reappear in the cost of every product that must be transported.
00:04:17.600 Energy bills, food prices, and fuel costs hit households immediately and simultaneously.
00:04:24.680 Voters will remember that squeeze more clearly than any lecture about macroeconomic fundamentals.
00:04:32.060 It's the Family and Friends event at Shoppers Drug Mart.
00:04:35.400 Get 20% off almost all regular-priced merchandise.
00:04:38.860 Two days only, Monday, August 10th, and Tuesday, August 11th.
00:04:42.860 Open your PC Optimum app to get your coupon.
00:04:48.600 The war with Iran has taken a disturbingly familiar shape.
00:04:53.900 Its champions mocked anyone who warned that the conflict might last more than a few weeks.
00:04:59.340 Now the country approaches a critical midterm election with no end in sight.
00:05:04.040 This was predictable.
00:05:05.620 Once a war begins, the ability to control its scope and duration rapidly diminishes.
00:05:11.220 Machiavelli put it plainly,
00:05:12.940 Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please. 1.00
00:05:17.600 The very same pundits who demanded war now tell voters that they're stupid or selfish for noticing 1.00
00:05:25.320 its economic consequences. They will inevitably blame any disastrous midterm results on the 1.00
00:05:31.860 people who oppose the conflict, but the political reality is obvious. The central issue is not that
00:05:38.720 voters have developed a sophisticated position on Iran. Many of them probably care very little
00:05:44.280 about the strategic details. What they do care about is that everything costs more. Telling them
00:05:50.160 that they lack economic literacy has roughly the same electoral appeal as shooting a puppy on live
00:05:56.280 television. America has already spent tens of billions of dollars on the Iran war and depleted
00:06:03.900 munition stockpiles that will require years and billions of dollars more to rebuild. The Republican
00:06:11.240 House has approved another $8 billion in loans for Ukraine, despite Trump's promise to end that war
00:06:18.560 immediately. The United States doesn't have this money sitting in a vault somewhere. It's not like
00:06:24.640 we actually have reserves of cash. It's got to be taxed, borrowed, or credited. Each method imposes
00:06:31.200 a cost on Americans who receive little material benefit from their foreign conflicts. Oh, and by
00:06:37.500 the way, do not let neoconservatives gaslight you into believing that they don't understand
00:06:42.560 inflation magically when it comes to war. These people are constantly, and to be fair,
00:06:47.760 correctly complaining that social security and other entitlements will eventually bankrupt the
00:06:52.540 United States and that it creates inflation that destroys our currency. They perfectly understand
00:06:57.660 the phenomenon, but they only care about it when it's paying your bills. They don't care about it
00:07:03.000 when it's paying for a war in the middle east it's like looking at a guy who is buying cocaine
00:07:09.180 and a yacht on his credit card but he turns around and criticizes you for splurging on a burrito
00:07:15.500 these people know exactly what they are doing they know how the economic theory works they get how 0.98
00:07:21.020 inflation works they just don't care as long as they get to blow up one more middle eastern country
00:07:25.940 as long as they get to pay off one more defense contractor as long as they can enrich themselves
00:07:30.660 that's all that matters they will destroy this country just for the thrill of getting to launch
00:07:37.460 one more set of missiles that's all that matters to them and ultimately the fact that you can't
00:07:43.600 afford something that's nothing and they will mock you they will mock you and spit on you and
00:07:49.180 just have a seething disdain for the common person and their inability to afford something
00:07:55.000 important because at the end of the day they got invited to the nice cocktail parties and they got
00:07:59.620 to have a nice steak dinner on the back of some lobbyist, and that's all they care about. That's
00:08:06.380 all they care about. Look, I am pretty sympathetic to the fact that the realities of the political
00:08:11.480 system limit what Republicans can do on inflation. Like, really, I do get that. But ending vast
00:08:17.220 expenditures on wars that don't improve the lives of voters, I mean, that's a pretty obvious place
00:08:22.620 to begin. The road ahead is difficult, but many of the wounds are self-inflicted. The first step
00:08:27.380 towards recovery is to stop repeating the behavior that caused them. End funding for the war in
00:08:31.900 Ukraine. Bring American forces back from the Persian Gulf. Stop telling voters that concerns 0.98
00:08:37.040 over rising prices is foolish, greedy, or manufactured by Democrats. The GOP still has 0.97
00:08:42.840 one really important advantage. Democrats remain deeply unpopular. Redistricting has improved the
00:08:50.020 Republican electoral map, and the left continues to repel many ordinary voters. There may still
00:08:55.340 be time to limit the damage or maybe even regain some momentum. But first, Warhawks must admit that
00:09:00.940 they were wrong, again, and change course. Democrats lost because they cut themselves
00:09:06.620 off from reality. Republicans have no reason to copy that strategy.
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00:09:56.460 The Blaze. Thanks for watching. And as always, I'll talk to you next time.