On today's show, we have two first-time guests: Former Chief of Investigations for the Department of Education and former Senior Counsel at the Justice Department, Paul Moore, and CEO of MBS Highway, Barry Habib, to give you an inside look at the economy and what to expect next. We also reveal more explosive revelations about how our universities are selling out to adversaries like China.
00:06:26.000Things are moving as fast as ever, myself included.
00:06:29.000Every day the news is happening so rapidly it can be hard to even keep up.
00:06:34.000But that's why we're here, to tell you all you need to know and break down all of the biggest stories.
00:06:40.000And today we actually have two first-time guests.
00:06:43.000First, we'll get into all things DOJ, DOJ, Department of Education, with former chief of investigations for the Education Department and former senior counsel at the Justice Department, Paul Moore.
00:06:57.000We'll also reveal even more explosive revelations about how our universities are selling out to adversaries like China.
00:07:08.000Then we'll get into all things DOJ, DOJ, Department of Education, We'll have CEO of MBS Highway, entrepreneur and housing expert Barry Habib, to give you an inside look at the economy and what to expect next.
00:07:20.000So make sure you guys are liking, sharing, subscribing, so you never miss one of these major episodes.
00:07:25.000Remember, you can get Triggered on Spotify, you can get it on Apple Podcasts.
00:07:29.000If you missed the show here on Rumble, check it out there.
00:07:32.000If your friends get their podcasts that way.
00:07:35.000And for all of the top headlines that we'll spotlight here on the show, go over to my news app, MXM News, where you can get the mainstream news without the mainstream bias.
00:07:44.000And of course, support our sponsors for supporting programming like this.
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00:08:39.000And now let's take a look at the top headlines.
00:08:42.000Yesterday, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that DOJ is filing a lawsuit against the state of New York, Governor Kathy Hochul and the state attorney general Letitia James for harboring illegal aliens, protecting violent criminals and defying federal protecting violent criminals and defying federal immigration law.
00:09:06.000But finally, someone's doing something about it.
00:09:08.000Here's a clip from the announcement yesterday where Attorney General Bondi made it clear that if you violate the laws, it ain't going to work out so well for you.
00:09:17.000And that's why President Trump has directed this to stop.
00:09:21.000And if you don't comply with federal law, we will hold you accountable.
00:09:43.000They put their lives on the line every single day to protect us.
00:09:49.000And what New York has, they have green light laws.
00:09:53.000Meaning they're giving a green light to any illegal alien in New York where law enforcement officers cannot check their identity if they pull them over.
00:10:04.000Law enforcement officers do not have access to their background.
00:10:30.000You will be held accountable if you do not follow federal law.
00:10:35.000It's over, it ends, and we're coming after you.
00:10:38.000And those remarks came around the same time that we learned that, yes, we were right all along.
00:10:44.000As usual, every conspiracy theory ends up being fact.
00:10:49.000It's just a matter of how long it takes to get there.
00:10:52.000FEMA was, in fact, dishing out funds to house illegal aliens, even as residents in North Carolina were being left behind after the hurricane back in October.
00:11:08.000According to DHS, $59 million was sent under Biden to New York City to put illegals in luxury hotels while Americans were suffering.
00:11:22.000$59 million for illegals if you lost your home, a loved one, your business.
00:11:28.000In North Carolina, you got like a $700 check.
00:11:31.000Okay, just so we're clear where you stand relative to the Democrat mentality and their prior administration.
00:11:39.000Here's my father reacting to the findings yesterday.
00:11:43.000This is a massive fraud that's taken place.
00:11:46.000And then you have judges that are activists, and they sit there and they say, oh, as an example, $59 million going to a little small group in New York City.
00:11:57.000You get nothing going to North Carolina to help.
00:12:50.000Now, under the Trump DHS, that 59 million has been clawed back.
00:12:57.000But we need a full investigation into just what possible criminal conduct occurred and who all benefited from it.
00:13:06.000It's, of course, yet another reason why we need Doge to root out all of this corruption, all of the waste, all of the fraud, and all of the abuse.
00:13:18.000It's why the Democrats are losing their mind.
00:13:20.000Who wouldn't want to know what's going on?
00:13:23.000Unless, of course, you're indirectly benefiting it when you're not supposed to.
00:13:27.000But rogue judges, shockingly all Democrat appointees, in liberal places, are doing everything they can to try to stand in the way.
00:13:38.000The judge who issued an injunction to block the spending freeze, Judge John McConnell Jr., is basically a far-left activist.
00:13:47.000He's on tape claiming that a middle-class, white-privileged male person needs to understand criminals who are women, black, or transgender.
00:13:57.000Again, I gotta put it all in quotes so that it doesn't get mixed up.
00:14:00.000And claims that the trans community needs special sentencing treatment.
00:14:05.000Again, like all things trans, they don't want to be equal.
00:14:15.000Government actions, when you're sentencing someone, when we talk about sentencing, that you have to take a moment and realize that this, you know, middle-class, white, male, privileged person needs to understand the human being that comes before us, that may be a woman, it may be Black, it may be transgender, it may be poor, it may be rich, it may be whatever, may have experiences that aren't yours, and you have to...
00:14:43.000You have to walk in their shoes and understand that the law applies to them where they are, and then you have to apply the law accordingly.
00:14:53.000Now, when issuing the injunction, the judge did admit that the administration has the right to limit access to federal funds on the basis of the applicable authorizing statutes, regulation, and terms.
00:15:06.000I'm shocked he believes any of the law, which, you know, again, they've been known to totally ignore.
00:15:12.000But that sets the stage for further litigation, maybe at the appellate level and maybe even at the Supreme Court.
00:15:19.000The good news is, on the issue of the deferred resignation program for federal workers, a different federal judge yesterday did rule in favor of the Trump administration, clearing the way to clean out the rot in the federal bureaucracy, at least for now.
00:15:37.000And if you're wondering just how bad the waste...
00:15:45.000Federal employee retirements are processed using paper files by hand in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania.
00:15:57.000Literally 700 mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process 10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes.
00:16:10.000The retirement process takes multiple months.
00:16:17.000I mean, they don't want us mining anything else, but, you know, if we can use it to store retirement papers in possibly the most inefficient way imaginable, that's obviously OK, folks.
00:16:27.000But like I've been saying, this is yet another reason why we need Congress to actually pass legislation to codify some of these executive actions into law.
00:17:33.000But we're ranked number one in one department, cost per pupil.
00:17:37.000So we spend more per pupil than any other country in the world, but we're ranked number 40. We've been between 38 and 40. The last time I looked, it was 38, and then I looked two days ago, it came out the new list.
00:17:49.000It came out at number 40, so we're ranked 40. Norway, Denmark, Sweden, I hate to say it, China, as big as it is, it's ranked in the top five, and that's a primary competitor.
00:18:03.000We're ranked number 40. So if we're ranked number 40, that means something's really wrong, right?
00:18:08.000And I say send it back to Iowa, to Idaho, to Colorado.
00:18:13.000Send it back to places that, and there are a lot of Indiana.
00:19:29.000Tulsi Gabbard was confirmed as the next director of national intelligence, getting us one more confirmation closer to getting the cabinet that you all voted for confirmed.
00:21:16.000But they are appointees of the duly elected president.
00:21:19.000So your view, you're here as our legal expert, but your view is because you don't personally believe they know enough that the duly elected president who appointed a treasury secretary and will appoint special appointees like Elon Musk shouldn't be able to act as the president because...
00:21:33.000You don't personally believe they know enough?
00:25:41.000Remember when Biden, for Brittany Griner, he had to trade the merchant of death, literally a terrorist arms dealer who's apparently back in action, probably using it against either our allies or Americans abroad, whatever it may be.
00:25:54.000We just got people back with strength and resolve.
00:28:14.000we've got this department that's out of control that's been on the front line of of uh of uh using the nbi and doj to terrorize parents actually classify them as domestic terrorists if they dare to speak up in an unfortunate way at a pta meeting things like that oh yeah we talk about that one all it's disgusting.
00:28:34.000You know, they've given away $400 billion in taxpayer money from hardworking people to graduates who promise to pay off their student loans.
00:28:42.000You know, they've quit investigating China's money at our universities, at our research universities.
00:28:49.000I mean, there's so many things that they've done.
00:28:52.000And in my opinion, they've disqualified themselves from continuing.
00:28:55.000I mean, if you have a doctor that abuses their patients, you say you can't practice medicine anymore.
00:29:01.000We found out where Cardona and Biden were going to go in the first year of the administration, December 2021. They had this thing called the Civil Rights Data Collection.
00:29:12.000And so they actually ordered that elementary schools and secondary schools had to ask, one of the questions was, are you male, female, or non-binary?
00:29:21.000You know, so you're asking kindergarteners, first graders, etc.
00:29:24.000You know, if they're non-binary, you're introducing the whole thing, you know, it's the gender madness, we can't start too early.
00:29:39.000Also, you've got all these teachers who, you know, really aren't trained or equipped to be addressing that matter.
00:29:44.000Some people might be old-fashioned and say, hey, that's the parent's job, and, you know, let's just keep the, you know, education industry out of it, but not this department.
00:29:52.000And they actually, they required, I mean, you know, if you're a tiny town in Missouri, you've got to, where I'm from, you've got to ask these questions.
00:30:04.000There's been such an abuse of the authority that was granted to the department, and then the excessive use of that authority, which is just unconstitutional, illegal.
00:31:31.000Well, I know you've also testified on Capitol Hill about how much our universities have gotten away with in terms of shady foreign donations from China.
00:31:39.000They've even funded Chinese research that ends up being used against us.
00:31:43.000How much, you know, is it beyond elementary education?
00:31:46.000How much are colleges a part of the whole story here?
00:31:49.000Well, you have to think about higher ed colleges and universities as big business.
00:32:56.000And of course, she was rewarded with becoming ambassador to Germany.
00:33:00.000And, you know, but I mean, you just, and there were, I think, 12 senior members of the Biden administration that were working at the Penn Biden Center.
00:33:09.000And so they were essentially on the payroll of the CCP. You just can't make it up.
00:33:14.000And I mean, you look at other universities, I mean, Stanford, Yale, Harvard.
00:33:18.000Hundreds of millions of dollars from these universities.
00:33:21.000TAMU, something like $493 million in contracts.
00:33:25.000They finally decided they're going to get out of some of their Chinese operations.
00:33:29.000But what we're doing is handing over our research product to the Chinese, who aren't stupid.
00:33:34.000As your father often says, you know, we're the dumb ones.
00:33:59.000Our Department of Defense funded more than 2,000 scientific research collaborations with Chinese scientists who are working on emerging technologies, hypersonic and fourth-grade generation nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, advanced lasers, high-performance explosives, and rocket fuels.
00:34:16.000I mean, this is our Department of Defense.
00:34:24.000Same thing's happening with NASA. NASA's prohibited from using any of its funds in scientific collaborations with China, Chinese universities, Chinese scientists.
00:34:33.000And yet there's evidence that's happening at many of our top universities around the country, research universities.
00:34:39.000So, you know, with all these problems in the schools, given all of what we're talking about now, and, you know, obviously there's so much more, just how far has this set back our students at both the kind of K-12 level and as well as the college level?
00:34:54.000Elite universities, they're graduating all these people with gender studies degrees.
00:34:58.000They're happy to rack up $300,000 worth of debt, but no possible way of paying it back because there's no market for that skill, if it's even a skill.
00:35:09.000And, you know, how much worse was it made during the Biden administration with all this stuff?
00:35:13.000You started talking about sort of paying off the student debt, having a plumber pay off, again, some Ph.D., because the plumber is actually far better off than the Ph.D., but the Ph.D. racked up probably half a million dollars in debt.
00:35:26.000It seems like a huge transfer of wealth from the alleged elite from the working class of America who made better decisions and didn't make irresponsible ones.
00:35:39.000And I mean, I think the problem goes really deep because we're not just looking at reversing four years of Biden.
00:35:44.000We're looking at the eight years of Obama.
00:35:46.000That's when all this really started and was serious.
00:35:49.000So during Trump 45, we put the brakes on it.
00:35:51.000And it took a long time to put the brakes on things.
00:35:54.000We did it right, but there wasn't any kind of radical.
00:35:57.000We didn't have a colonoscopy, which is what we need now.
00:35:59.000And by the way, your father, you probably remember this, he actually proposed eliminating the Department of Education in 2018. We have a bunch of its responsibilities to other federal agencies.
00:36:09.000But I mean, these students who are graduating in their 20s and later with worthless degrees, advanced degrees from these paper mills that produce diplomas, no wonder they're resentful.
00:36:42.000We need, you know, the other thing, too, is there are program participation agreements with all these universities.
00:36:48.000And so, in other words, for them to be able to access federal student loan money and grants for their students, even private universities, they've got to enter into these program participation agreements.
00:36:57.000And that's the tool that the Department of Education has, even if it's in its limited lifetime expectancy, to yank that string and say, You're doing things that are wrong, so I'm doing this stuff, teaching that stuff, you know, indoctrinating and all the gender madness.
00:37:12.000So, I mean, you know, there's a great opportunity using those program participation agreements to immediately reach deep down, you know, because the tentacles of the Department of Education doing it's kind of evil over the last few years.
00:37:24.000And one other thing I should point out, there are only 4,400 employees.
00:37:28.000It's still a lot at the Department of Education.
00:37:29.000But the Department of Education actually funds about 48,000 employees at state agencies around the country.
00:37:35.000So technically state employees, they're being funded by money from the Department of Education.
00:37:40.000Even if you eliminate every Department of Education employee tomorrow, you've still got all these people that are, you know, they're kind of shock troops out there, in a lot of cases carrying out the same programs.
00:37:50.000You need to go deep into those folks, figure out who they are, what they're doing, you know, really cut off that money or open it up so it's examined by their states.
00:37:59.000So, you know, it seems like, obviously, you're of the opinion that the Department of Education should be abolished.
00:38:05.000My father's obviously been talking about that as recently as, like, yesterday.
00:38:09.000But, you know, what would that look like?
00:38:11.000What would the sequence of events to make it happen be?
00:38:14.000You know, how does that work, you know, in practice?
00:38:17.000Because you're right, I'd rather go to the states and have their responsibilities.
00:38:19.000But if 4,000 people are funding 48,000 people throughout the states, that's, you know, plus a little less than 1,000 people a state.
00:38:28.000How do you get that rot out of there as well?
00:38:31.000Because if you just transfer it to the States, but it's the same people just with different funding mechanisms, how do you make that happen to effectuate actual change?
00:38:40.000Well, I think the way it's happening right now is executive orders is a great start.
00:39:14.000Move it to Treasury or somewhere or private sector.
00:39:17.000I mean, at least have that portfolio overseen by people that are trained to handle money and know how to track money and know how to look at qualifications.
00:39:25.000I mean, the rollout of the FFSA, which happened a year and a half or so ago by the department, is a perfect example of departments in competency when it comes to handling financial.
00:39:38.000That's the application that was supposed to be simplified from 100 questions to 18 questions.
00:39:44.000For people who want to go to college to apply to the department to see if they qualify for student aid, financial aid.
00:40:11.000There's some important things that do happen.
00:40:14.000I think DOGE needs to have the council of people who say, look, this is actually something important the department does.
00:40:20.000Let's get it to somewhere where it can be done effectively and competently.
00:40:23.000And if there are good people working around that, move them with it so that the institutional knowledge isn't lost.
00:40:28.000But, I mean, that's a very small handful of people.
00:40:31.000So, you know, move things out, get them to the right places, and then have Congress pass a law that says we're done with the Department of Education.
00:41:10.000Yeah, well, that's, I think, you know, from everything I understand, that's one thing that they did competently.
00:41:14.000They give away other people's money very well.
00:41:16.000And they, you know, even though, frankly, they mangled that a few times, but they, because they were rushing it for it to be done right before elections.
00:41:23.000And by the way, they had contracts to have calling people, like, right before the election, weeks before the election, they had automated calls going out saying, President Biden has canceled your student loan.
00:42:49.000I'm not saying it's an easy job or, you know, there's not great teachers out there, but the teachers' union itself has weaponized all of these things so badly to the detriment of our students.
00:42:58.000And again, it's not like we're overperforming.
00:43:00.000So, I mean, I do feel like something has to be done about that one.
00:43:04.000The other thing, too, is there was $190 billion thrown at elementary and secondary schools, you know, under the guise of COVID. And so, you know, in that crazy year 2020...
00:43:15.000That was passed by Congress, but most of it was then, you know, doled out during the Biden administration.
00:43:20.000So one of the first things the Biden administration did is said states and localities, if you did the school districts, if you want any of this money, you have to submit an equity plan to the prior education.
00:43:40.000So, I mean, it was, you know, this is how abusive and disgusting they've been.
00:43:45.000The DEI was a way to channel money to their friends and to hold it back from people that they didn't like, probably mainly in red states.
00:43:53.000But they basically, you know, they got four years of everyone, you know, local school districts on up through state agencies marching between their drummer.
00:44:02.000And so it's like the executive orders that are coming out now have been wonderful.
00:44:06.000And keep going down, down, down to remove, you know, the last, you know, vestiges of cancer.
00:44:11.000I mean, you've got to keep treating this patient until it's all gone, every state, every local school district.
00:44:17.000So you've also worked at the DOJ. You know, talk about what you think Pam Bondi's top priority should be.
00:44:25.000You know, as she sort of, you know, really gets rolling.
00:44:28.000Is it to stop the lawfare and restore credibility?
00:44:53.000And I was at DOJ for most of your father's previous administration.
00:44:56.000And, you know, the open sabotage by high-ranking department officials, by the deputy attorney general, others there, was just extraordinary.
00:45:07.000And it's, you know, completely beyond their mission.
00:45:14.000It's an agency, too, that has grown tremendously.
00:45:19.000If you pare it back, all of a sudden they'll have to focus on the things that actually matter.
00:45:23.000To me, what I've seen the new Attorney General doing, really good stuff, focusing, going after these cities and saying, you're not going to get any more funding if you're going to be a sanctuary city, if you're going to be a sanctuary state.
00:45:35.000We're going to come after you because you're actively passing these laws.
00:45:39.000And enforcing them to prevent the federal government from doing its job on immigration and other things.
00:45:44.000So, I mean, I think she's off to a great start.
00:45:47.000And, you know, that's what the American people expect.
00:45:50.000So, you know, it's finally being delivered.
00:45:52.000I think there's a lot of shock right now because, you know, a lot of Republican presidents and presidential candidates have talked about it.
00:46:04.000But I think it's great how they're going at things.
00:46:08.000And get the FBI back in the business of investigating and not counterintelligence, not missing its tools to go after its political opponents or to go after school parents that express a different viewpoint.
00:46:21.000So again, the tentacles of what's been done, this has been a disease really from the left.
00:46:26.000There's got to be a lot of active work to pull out.
00:46:28.000To have Elon Musk You know, I mean, the Twitter files with Matt Taibbi, I think one of the best things that's happened in this country, to have that man leading the effort now to expose what's been happening at different agencies, I think it's terrific.
00:48:37.000The way that an economist looks at it, they look at the rate of change.
00:48:40.000The way that a customer or consumer or just everyday person looks at it is, how much does this cost him at the grocery store, which is a cumulative effect.
00:48:47.000So even saying the rate of change came down, which it did to some extent over the last year, it still is adding to the inflation that the consumer is feeling.
00:48:57.000So it's just a little bit of a different way to gauge the inflation numbers.
00:49:01.000So look, I think that inflation, while...
00:49:04.000And I know that President Trump would like.
00:49:47.000So they tried to say it's coming down when it's actually going up.
00:49:50.000And for someone who's not an economist and isn't dealing with it every day, they're telling me it's going down.
00:49:55.000But if you look at the groceries, That ain't the case.
00:49:59.000What can you talk about in terms of what drives up this cost that is essentially entirely self-flicted, specifically in housing?
00:50:09.000You have illegal immigrants overwhelming the country.
00:50:12.000Then there's also a mass influx of foreign ownership, especially in high-end markets.
00:50:17.000I mean, just how hard is it to buy a house for, let's call them, common-sense, middle-class Americans these days relative to what you would have seen five or six years ago?
00:50:35.000They've gained equity in their home because the value has gone up.
00:50:37.000But the other is that mortgage costs have gone up rather significantly.
00:50:40.000Again, that goes back to the inflation issue because in order to get a real rate of return, an investor is going to lend money and say, well, I'm going to...
00:50:47.000Blend it out at this rate, but inflation is going to erode this amount, so I've got to preserve this real rate of return.
00:50:53.000So as inflation goes up, it drives interest rates higher.
00:50:56.000So what we need is we need to see inflation come down.
00:50:59.000Now, fortunately, the way that this is computed is it's interesting, Don, in that what we have to look at is the biggest component in, let's say, the consumer price index that we got yesterday.
00:51:37.000In dividing the country up into panels because they're understaffed, meaning that they look at one-sixth of the country every month.
00:51:43.000So that means if you look at an area of the country in January, the next time you're going to revisit it is in July.
00:51:48.000As things change, you could see big influxes.
00:51:52.000The problem with that is that you are not going to capture what's actually happening, and the result is this.
00:51:57.000Right now, the government's telling us that rents are going up on an annualized basis at 4.5% a year.
00:52:02.000That's 46% of CPI. If you take a peek at what they're really going up, it's only 1.5% by all the real-time data we have, whether it's Zillow, CoreLogic, Realtor.com, ApartmentList, Redbit.
00:52:14.000The metrics that you have available that were not available 50 years ago when they came up with these could be used.
00:52:20.000It's like adding instant replay to football.
00:52:22.000So if you were to simply make this change, inflation would be at the Fed's target of 2%.
00:52:28.000Again, still adding to inflation, but we could actually see 2% inflation.
00:52:33.000You'd see mortgage rates come down and you'd see housing become a lot more affordable because rates should really be at 6%, not 7% right now.
00:52:41.000That would help those people buying a home because currently they're under a lot of pain in trying to make that move out of a rental where they get no equity and into a home where they could really make a lot of wealth for themselves for the future.
00:55:46.000So essentially, 100,000 jobs a month was a BS number.
00:55:50.000And look, it's a Herculean effort to do this.
00:55:53.000But you have to be curious, especially around the liberties that they took with something called a seasonal adjustment.
00:55:59.000Now, seasonal adjustment, Don, is meant to say, look, during the...
00:56:02.000Holiday shopping season, you get all of these hires.
00:56:04.000It doesn't mean the economy is going gangbusters.
00:56:06.000And when they're let go in January, it doesn't mean the economy is falling off a cliff.
00:56:10.000The same with teachers in June and September.
00:56:12.000So they use a seasonal adjustment to smooth it.
00:56:15.000But the last time they did this before the election, they did something they hadn't done in 49 years and gave the most generous seasonal adjustment to make the numbers look as pretty as possible right before the election.
00:56:27.000Now, again, I have to say it's at least...
00:57:13.000Will some of the savings on Doge, if we're not racking up the extra debt that we don't need to be doing, if Elon's able to cut a trillion dollars out of the budget?
00:57:22.000You know, you're still running a deficit, but it's not racking up as much.
00:57:25.000You know, what does all of that look like to you?
00:57:27.000Because I mean, I feel like if we can get to a place where interest rates go down, you know, that's going to be when people start investing.
00:57:33.000That's when people are going to start trying to buy homes.
00:57:34.000That's when it's going to be affordable for other people who aren't already in a home to buy a home.
00:57:40.000Well, again, as we mentioned, the accurate information on where the rate of change on inflation is will be critical.
00:57:47.000But in addition to that, I do believe that the labor market is not as strong.
00:58:05.000On job postings years ago, if I wanted to hire somebody, I had to post it locally.
00:58:10.000But with work from anywhere, I can post it in every state, and each one of those states counts the same job opening as it gets aggregated.
00:58:17.000So these are grossly overstated, making the job market look better than it is.
00:58:26.000So there's a lot of moving parts here that lead me to believe that the job market is not as strong.
00:58:32.000If the job market slows, which I think it will, if inflation comes down, which I do think it will as well, that means rates will come down.
00:58:42.000Who can quickly change their mind, maybe talking very tough now about less rate hikes or even less rate cuts or even potentially would they do a rate hike?
00:58:50.000They can quickly change their mind if they see the data change.
00:58:54.000They give us their summary of economic projections.
00:58:56.000And I think if we get the unemployment rate to 4.4%, 14 of the 19 Fed members are going to say, oh my gosh, we got this wrong.
00:59:03.000We got to get aggressive with rate cuts.
00:59:04.000So that's kind of the magic number for everybody to look at.
00:59:10.000And watch the inflation rate of change come down closer to 2.3% from its current level of 2.8%.
00:59:17.000Those are the magic numbers that will help interest rates come down.
00:59:20.000And by the way, Don, housing is at a point right now where people think, well, it's overvalued.
00:59:25.000Housing has continued to be very resilient.
00:59:28.000And I think that when you just look at the sheer numbers of the laws of economic supply and demand, You get interest rates a little bit lower, and real estate may be one of the best investments out there because I do see a lot more price appreciation.
00:59:54.000How do you get that right so that the Fed is actually looking at objective numbers or actual numbers?
01:00:00.000Or, again, I saw in the original job numbers a lot of people, well, if you took on a second part-time job because you needed it to make ends meet, that was two jobs in the job market, but it's one person just struggling to get by.
01:00:41.000You need to be taking the data that is readily available and accessible and using and implementing the data that's there instead of going back to these things.
01:00:50.000As far as the Fed goes, you've got to remember, Don, that you've got Fed members, people like Michelle Bowman, even our Fed chair, Jerome Powell.
01:01:01.000There's a big difference between understanding economic conditions and being an attorney.
01:01:06.000I believe that these are things that need to be looked at as far as who is voting on the most important price in the world, the price of money.
01:01:15.000The U.S. dollar is the world's reserve currency, and you've got 19 people determining the value of that.
01:01:21.000Are these 19 people really qualified in order to make those decisions?
01:01:26.000When it comes to what the Fed will do going forward, as I mentioned, I think that the Fed definitely should be looking at these numbers much more objectively and looking a little deeper.
01:01:37.000They aren't looking at the numbers other than, for the most part, just on the surface what the headline is, but you have to look under the hood.
01:01:44.000For example, the same thing we talked about with the delay, that lag in the shelter numbers, it made the Fed complicit.
01:01:50.000In adding to the inflation problem, you had the Biden budget buster of $1.9 trillion that we did not need, and that definitely added a lot of issues.
01:02:00.000Plus, you had a lot of the fraud that occurred with the spending that went on, which of course Doge is uncovering.
01:02:08.000This is something that created a lot of the inflation.
01:02:11.000But remember, the Fed continued with QE. They continued with zero interest rate policy.
01:02:16.000Because they were looking at inflation numbers that were lagging because of the same shelter component.
01:02:21.000And while rents in real time were going up and the inflation numbers were going up because of the lag, they said, oh, we're okay to keep QE. Oh, we're okay to keep interest rates at zero because what we're looking at in the data, remember they keep saying data dependent, shows that inflation is under control.
01:02:36.000When in real time, how they had looked at that, they could have responded more quickly and at least to some degree contained that level of inflation.
01:02:43.000They're making the same mistakes today in the opposite direction.
01:02:46.000So, I mean, would you abolish the Fed?
01:02:52.000Obviously, that's a big thing for a lot of people on my side of the political spectrum, but I'm sure there is some purpose.
01:03:01.000What would your ideal scenario be, whether it's abolished, whether it's sort of...
01:03:06.000Extreme modification to make sure that there aren't just lawyers making economic decisions just because they get appointed to a prestigious position that probably they have no business being in.
01:03:51.000This particular Fed has bungled things.
01:03:55.000Again, I believe it's because the way that they've looked at the data.
01:03:57.000Look, when you have points where things are relatively stable, Lagging data doesn't really matter.
01:04:03.000But in points of inflection, and we certainly have seen that after the COVID disturbances and what it caused in the economy, looking at lagging data can be very, very painful and the wrong thing to do.
01:04:13.000And having people who aren't vetted, who aren't sharp, who are bureaucrats instead of sharp economists, that will cause the pain.
01:05:14.000As we discover more stuff, I'll definitely have to get you back on and let you do the full thing with the charts and the graphs because it's fascinating.
01:05:21.000And there's just a lot of nuance there that I think a lot of people miss that they should be informed about because we're all about getting that information out there.