Mitch McConnell wants more spending, not less. I got a message for Mitch. Also, Carol Roth is here to talk about the economy. And what do you want to hear from President Trump in tonight s speech in front of Congress? Oh, we have some opinions on that.
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00:01:40.820I have to start here because this is the thing that is our biggest problem, and it is—I was going to say this, but I want to be very careful.
00:02:04.680It's old people, but it's old people that will not leave Congress or the Senate.
00:02:31.540Mitch McConnell wrote in the Washington Post, every time Congress faces a government funding deadline, Washington reminds itself that shutdowns are worth avoiding.
00:02:41.500This is familiar in an all-too-frequent conversation.
00:02:45.160He goes on to say, today we're closer than ever on making ignoble history on the front of budgets, tomorrow's challenges,
00:02:55.360and we owe it to our men in uniform and our taxpayers to be honest about the consequences.
00:03:00.600Consumer goods aren't the only things that have grown more expensive in recent years.
00:03:04.260In times of high inflation, governance without updated appropriation means diminished Pentagon buying power,
00:03:10.040forcing the U.S. military to equip itself for the next year's threat at this year's prices.
00:03:14.400Even as fresh eyes comb the Pentagon for new efficiencies and cost savings, effective military acquisitions continue to require multi-year runways.
00:03:24.380A truly clean full-year continuing resolution would, at the level set for 2024, would mean no new starts on critical programs that the military needs.
00:04:29.100Why are you so worried about China if they don't have all this money?
00:04:34.940And yet, here you are, clamoring for more, as if throwing cash at an outdated war machine is somehow or another going to secure our future.
00:04:45.520And your priorities are stuck in your time, country time era.
00:04:50.620Aircraft carriers, those floating behemoths that you and the Pentagon so dearly love, are relics of the past.
00:05:01.540In the next real conflict, they'll be as useless as horses were in World War I.
00:05:08.020Speaking of which, let me just give you the stats on the horses, because it's going to be applicable to the aircraft carriers the next time we really go to war.
00:05:16.160When Europe entered World War I, they had 25 million horses.
00:05:22.460By 1918, 15 million of them were dead.
00:10:55.340I mean, I might have buried the lead here, Senator.
00:10:58.780But, well, let's see if anyone else listens to the following stats and they think maybe this op-ed was being written not for the American people.
00:11:13.740And probably not by you, but probably by somebody who hasn't lost their mind to dementia yet who works in your office.
00:13:39.480So there's been so much going on that I'm just trying to process it out.
00:13:42.780When someone said, oh, it's only been a month and a half, I went, yeah, my mind was blown.
00:13:46.640Yeah, we're 40 days into, around 40 days into this administration, and you're looking at this, and I'm, it's breathtaking at what has been done.
00:13:57.340Last month, we had, I think, 1,800 encounters at the borders.
00:14:03.020A year ago, last February, it was 109,000 encounters.
00:14:09.420That's how much of an impact he's made on that.
00:14:12.120We have all these things that he's done, but when it comes to the economy, Congress has to move on some of his things.
00:14:19.660He hasn't really done anything with the economy except, perhaps, for Doge, which you've been warning about on this program for a while now.
00:14:33.460Yes, so, you know, we've talked about before that the economic situation is not really what it was presented to be.
00:14:43.800You know, we heard under Biden and certainly during election season, what a wonderful economy we had.
00:14:51.340All of these really great statistics on employment and growth.
00:14:55.140And it's become very clear, well, it was very clear to all of us before we've talked about it, something that Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Besant, talked about in a speech a couple weeks ago, is that really the economic foundation is incredibly fragile.
00:15:10.600And what we've had the Biden administration do, which was exceptionally nefarious, is that they decided that they were going to spend to paper over the weakness of the economy.
00:15:22.220So if you remember, I think it was back in 2022, we had those two down quarters of GDP, which is a technical recession, which for some reason, by the way, they said was not a recession.
00:15:32.540I'm sure if Trump had two down quarters, they would say it was.
00:16:17.240We were taking in almost five trillion dollars.
00:16:19.700We were spending the U.S. government and they're spending even more.
00:16:22.340They're spending almost seven trillion dollars.
00:16:24.320So that was done to mask the weakness and the economy now that we don't have the ability to continue to kick up even more and more to show growth.
00:16:35.480Both the consumer continues to be tapped out from all the Biden era policies and the fact that we have Doge, which is trying to cut down government spending.
00:16:46.580We're at a situation where things could get uglier before they get better or they could get uglier and they could take away the political will to make them better.
00:16:57.440And that's, you know, this delicate dance that we've been talking about, why we need this careful choreography.
00:17:02.640The craziest thing that's happened over the past several days is that the Atlanta Fed, you know, one of the branches of the Federal Reserve that has a tool that predicts GDP for each quarter.
00:17:15.620They went in the last four weeks, OK, four weeks time from predicting that we were going to have almost four percent GDP growth in the first quarter to now negative three percent in the first quarter.
00:17:32.940That is a seven percentage point difference in four weeks, which, A, just goes to show what a joke, you know, any of this reporting and these tools and this data are.
00:17:44.700But I think also shows, hey, we've got somebody else at the helm here.
00:17:50.680So now we don't need to doctor these numbers in a way that seem a bit more friendly.
00:17:56.240And so where we potentially could be seeing something ugly, which is something that we've talked about many, many times.
00:18:03.920And this has been a setup that they knew was coming.
00:18:07.900If you if you go back to the middle of last year, you had a bunch of, quote, unquote, Nobel economists that put out a piece that said that, you know, Trump was going to create inflation.
00:18:17.640He was going to do all these bad things to the economy.
00:18:19.420And I called it out right then and there and said, this is a setup.
00:18:22.580They know this is coming no matter what.
00:18:24.820And so they are setting the groundwork to blame this on Trump.
00:18:28.820And so, you know, get ready for the talking points.
00:18:31.700You know, Trump's been, as we said, only in there for six weeks.
00:18:34.680He hasn't even really had a chance to do anything about the economy.
00:18:39.760And yet we're already getting the rhetoric that, oh, you know, look what he did to our really great economy.
00:18:45.820Correct me if I'm wrong here, Carol, but the Biden administration, while they spent a lot of money, they did it in ways to cover things up, et cetera, et cetera.
00:18:58.640But that big 2021, you know, $1.2 trillion bill and then the $836 billion for roads and bridges and broadband and then the $144 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act, it's well over a trillion dollars.
00:19:17.140And it's my understanding that only 17% of that money has been spent.
00:19:21.840So what happens if we don't stop the spending of just the stuff that is already on the books from Biden?
00:19:33.400Wouldn't that cause our inflation to go through the roof?
00:19:37.000Yeah, it absolutely would cause our inflation to go through the roof because, you know, even with the cash in and cash out that we have, as we said, we're running these wartime level deficits.
00:19:46.500And by the way, we're financing those at high interest rates, not necessarily in the historical context, but in the context of the last 15 years.
00:19:55.140And in a way that we have now made the interest expense on our debt, you know, what we're paying for stuff we've already bought, exceed the financing charges, exceed what we're spending on defense.
00:20:07.060Niall Ferguson has a great sort of maxim, if you will, that basically I'm paraphrasing here, but, you know, nations that spend more on interest versus debt don't, you know, remain great nations for very long.
00:20:21.860That seems to be pretty obvious, something that everybody can wrap their heads around, that we don't want to be spending all of our money, you know, paying for stuff that we've quote unquote already bought.
00:20:33.420And we certainly, at these levels, cannot afford to do that.
00:20:38.420If we continue to do that, and, you know, this kind of goes into another conversation that we've had before, Glenn, too, is that, you know, central banks around the world, who used to be our friends in support of the U.S. being the world's reserve currency, used to just buy treasuries, you know, as kind of part of the deal here on an ongoing basis.
00:20:57.400Over the past, you know, 11 or so years, they have been net sellers of treasuries.
00:21:03.440They've actually replaced that with gold on their balance sheet.
00:21:06.020So if we don't have central banks that will just buy treasuries whenever, because that's part of the geopolitical deal, that means you have to find people who are, you know, are looking at the price.
00:21:17.100They're looking at the price of the treasuries.
00:21:19.460And basically, you know, at this at these levels, even though they've come off a little bit and we can talk about that, too, but they're saying they're overall saying, yeah, we're not going to do that.
00:21:30.800You know, we we need, you know, to have a reprice here.
00:21:34.020And, you know, when you don't have enough demand, you end up seeing our yields go higher.
00:21:39.900And to the extent they add up too high, which we were dangerously close to a few weeks ago, that has come off now.
00:21:46.140You know, but if you hit that, that could end up causing a debt spiral.
00:21:51.580It could end up causing a mismanagement or excuse me, not a mismanagement, but basically a throwing up, if you will, of the treasury market and have global implications.
00:22:00.760So let me just explain this so the average person can understand what you just said.
00:22:04.940You are you're wanting to buy a new house and the interest rates are up at eight percent.
00:22:14.320You say, honey, I don't think we should buy a new house.
00:23:39.080I'd love him to say it must have a trillion dollars, bare minimum of cuts to show the rest of the world that we're serious.
00:23:50.220I don't know why Javier Malay can do these things, but we can't.
00:23:56.340However, however, Glenn, if we cut, as we talked about, we cut a trillion dollars and we just cut it off very carefully and we don't choreograph it like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
00:24:08.300And then we don't have that in our GDP.
00:30:14.340I'd love to hear Donald Trump say something that no president or congressman has ever said, and that is that the people, with a capital P, highest office in the land, beautiful remnant, has the responsibility and the duty that's mentioned in the Constitution to enforce our Constitution.
00:30:32.140And that will accomplish at least as much as Donald Trump and any other politicians have accomplished.
00:31:28.840And it it made I mean, it made the hair stand up on my my neck because I I'd never heard a president say it that way before where, you know, it's up to you.
00:31:39.860I've heard that a million times when he's talking about the people.
00:32:09.720Two things I'd like to see Mr. President say tonight is as far as Doge uncovering this fraud and misuse of funds, I would love for him to say that they're going to prosecute to the fullest extent possible anybody who is caught funneling money.
00:32:26.220And I'm talking like Elliot Ness, where we use some some obscure laws and just punish them because this is the taxpayers money in it.
00:32:35.860We have to discourage this terrible behavior of the nonprofits and what have you.
00:35:09.040I would love to hear Donald Trump say,
00:35:12.360Russia and the United States are going to engage in another round of nuclear disarmament.
00:35:18.000We're going to use some of that savings from the deep state to rebuild our highways, our bridges, our electric grid system, and do what Eisenhower did.
00:35:29.160So, I think you're going to actually get some of that.
00:35:33.760I think Donald Trump does want to have that conversation with China and Russia and the rest of the world about reduction of our nukes.
00:35:56.160I don't know, but I think that will begin under Donald Trump.
00:36:01.420One more thing on the last call when he says, you know, the last call said, I really want to hear the president say, I'm going after these people.
00:36:09.440The problem with that is there's been two, I think, missteps, and they've happened in the last week.
00:36:16.400There's been two missteps, and only two by this presidency.
00:36:21.100The first one was last week, and I don't believe it was Zelensky.
00:36:24.920The first one was with the DOJ, with Pam Bondi, and the release or the non-release of Epstein.
00:36:32.660That was the first time I thought, oh, wow, maybe they're not serious.
00:36:35.820Then they came out last night and said, there's a truckload of files that were on its way by that deadline Friday.
00:36:47.520Okay, well, is that a truckload like you ever see, you know, you watch some, you know, law show, and they're like, yeah, they just filled the conference room with boxes of papers just to stall and keep you busy looking in a needle in a haystack.