Valuetainment - January 07, 2026


＂Prices Will NEVER Go Down＂ - Trump’s Affordability Promise COLLIDES With Cost-of-Living NIGHTMARE


Episode Stats

Length

19 minutes

Words per Minute

205.8522

Word Count

4,017

Sentence Count

346

Misogynist Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 White House laser-focused on affordability as Trump softens tariff strategy.
00:00:06.440 Okay, so there's two stories like, well, you know, affordability is just a Democrat hoax.
00:00:11.760 It's not a real thing. No one's really dealing with that. It's just a bunch of BS.
00:00:15.340 But behind closed doors, apparently, guys, we got to get this affordability thing scored away
00:00:20.260 as we're going through this next phase.
00:00:22.220 So the Trump administration is ramping down tariffs for even more goods
00:00:25.980 as the White House zeroes in on its messaging around affordability.
00:00:29.940 The White House announces Wednesday that tariffs slated to kick in Thursday
00:00:33.260 as furniture, kitchen cabinets, and vanities would be postponed for another year.
00:00:39.560 This indicates that on some level, the White House understands that President Trump's tariffs
00:00:43.180 are driving up consumer prices and that Trump and the Republican Party
00:00:46.780 are incurring substantial political damage from higher prices.
00:00:49.920 As Michael Strain said, the White House slapped a 25% tariff on furniture, kitchen cabinets,
00:00:55.400 and vanities in October. Tariffs on furniture were slated to increase to 30% in January,
00:01:00.000 and tariffs on the cabinets and vanities were set to increase to 50%.
00:01:03.700 But they're trying to figure out something going on here with affordability.
00:01:06.920 Tom, your thoughts on the story?
00:01:08.120 Well, first of all, we were correct.
00:01:10.420 We talked about this, and we said that the tariffs, and we said at the beginning of the year,
00:01:15.660 they would be tactics, not taxes. And guess what? All the economists come out and so surprised.
00:01:23.260 Oh, wow. Well, you know, it really hasn't gone up. It hasn't been as inflationary as we thought.
00:01:27.300 Even the Fed, Jerome Powell, you know, the short timer who's about to lose his job, has said that.
00:01:33.380 And what's happening this week is the president is talking more about affordability to kind of take
00:01:38.700 the messaging back from the Democrats who keep saying, oh, it's inflationary, inflationary.
00:01:43.260 If you look at one of the things that was happening this week, it was a bunch of pre-made
00:01:46.980 construction stuff. These are things that, you know, average Americans buy every week, not.
00:01:52.940 Vanities, kitchen cabinets, you know, higher-end furniture, come on. Those aren't the things that
00:01:59.120 people are buying every week, and that's not what tariffs are going to cause inflationary.
00:02:02.600 As a matter of fact, he moved on some agricultural tariffs that were in Italy, and it took the
00:02:11.720 tariffs down to 1.2 percent on certain Italian pastas. So the pastas that are coming in, it was
00:02:17.580 less than one-seventh of our sales tax. So what's happening right now, point one, the president
00:02:23.700 hears these messages Democrats are trying to push on affordability. So now he's fighting back saying,
00:02:29.820 hey, it wasn't inflationary in the first place, and I'll tell you what, let me suspend this tariff
00:02:34.420 over here, this tariff here that was on kitchen vanities, cabinets, and things that you would
00:02:38.940 use for remodels. And Americans aren't really doing that right now, right? There's not a lot of
00:02:42.720 remodeling going on. You see the quarterly reports from Home Depot and Lowe's. But energy is down,
00:02:49.340 heating oil is down for the winter. And also, he just did like what he did on the imported Italian
00:02:55.160 pasta. Make it like a one percent tariff coming over there. So he's getting the joke that he can't
00:03:00.720 just say to the microphone, oh, affordability is a headline issue that's being spun by the Democrats.
00:03:06.020 No, there's some reality to it because the prices haven't come back down from Biden inflation. And so
00:03:11.880 now the White House and the president are out there speaking to it to counter the message of the
00:03:16.700 Democrats. And yes, certain things like Italian pastas came down a little bit.
00:03:20.360 Jeff, your thoughts on this? Yeah, this is not a messaging thing. And the fact that they try to
00:03:26.100 treat it as a messaging problem shows that they're still kind of out to lunch. You're saying it's a
00:03:30.220 real thing. It is absolutely a real thing. And, you know, the original problem here that Republicans
00:03:37.040 had specifically is they came in, you know, last year or the year before. Sorry, it's 2025 or 2026.
00:03:42.380 Now they came in the year before and said, we're going to bring prices down. Well, in economics,
00:03:46.260 prices don't go down. That was a mistake to begin with. When prices went up back in 21 and 22,
00:03:51.580 that was a permanent change. You can't go backwards. Every supply shock in history,
00:03:56.880 prices go up in a step fashion and then they level off where they are at a new step fashion or the new
00:04:01.240 equilibrium and they stay there. So Republicans should have said is, you want to blame Biden for
00:04:07.000 that? Fine. Biden made you poorer. Now we're going to try to fix it. Not by getting prices to go down
00:04:11.780 because they will not go down. They should have been clear on that. Prices will never go down again.
00:04:15.560 We are never going to see 2019 prices again. So what we're going to try to do is our absolute best
00:04:22.080 to make sure the jobs market is as strong and as resilient as matching the rhetoric coming from all
00:04:27.140 these different economists in the Federal Reserve. So that what happens is what should have happened
00:04:31.520 if we had a strong economy, that you have prices that went up in 21 and 22 or 21 back then, five years
00:04:38.140 ago, and then incomes rise to, first of all, meet prices and then exceed them. What happens first?
00:04:45.000 What happens first? Cost of goods goes up first, then income rises? What is the typical pattern?
00:04:53.300 Well, in this case, because prices were forced higher by government action, it was a non-economic...
00:04:58.120 Income has to be forced to increase.
00:04:59.640 Income should naturally go... If there was an actual recovery from the pandemic and the lockdowns,
00:05:04.520 incomes would naturally rise over enough time that it would equalize with the prices from 21 and 22
00:05:10.140 and then exceed them. So even though the cost of a car is now 50,000 instead of 30,000, you have more
00:05:16.440 than enough income to pay for it. And so we all get used to the new higher prices and it doesn't
00:05:20.820 become a major problem.
00:05:21.940 But is that happening?
00:05:22.800 No, that's the problem. What really happened was prices went up massively in 21 and 22 and incomes never
00:05:29.660 caught up. This is what people are talking about when they talk about inflation and affordability.
00:05:33.420 It's not about the price of a dryer or something that's gone up in the last year. It's the price
00:05:38.560 of everything that went up five years ago and incomes never went up enough for people to
00:05:44.640 claw back to...
00:05:44.940 So one, whose fault is that, too? How do you address it?
00:05:47.500 First, whose fault is that? It's the government's fault. They created the pandemic and the lockdowns
00:05:51.640 and then because of the pandemic...
00:05:53.400 Under Biden, when they did the pandemic and the lockdown...
00:05:55.160 You can't forget, it was also Trump.
00:05:56.740 It was... The spending was on both sides.
00:05:58.740 Spending was on both sides.
00:05:59.500 But the lockdown was on both sides.
00:06:00.640 Yeah, it was both sides. I mean, you got to blame both sides for this part.
00:06:03.520 On lockdown?
00:06:04.120 Sure.
00:06:04.720 And spending and in the printing.
00:06:06.480 Who locked down on Trump's side?
00:06:07.400 2020? Two weeks to flatten the curve? That was in Trump's watch.
00:06:12.420 Right. The lockdown. But it wasn't a... You're not talking about the lockdown that happened
00:06:16.520 under Biden?
00:06:17.440 No, the repeated emergency pandemic measures, that was absolutely devastating. That's where
00:06:24.140 really the price changes came from.
00:06:25.520 Right.
00:06:26.000 Because what happened is you had the economy starting to come back from the lockdowns,
00:06:29.300 so there's more demand that was rising. But at the same time, supply, the supply side
00:06:33.840 of the economy was hindered by all those emergency measures and logistics.
00:06:37.020 So the government printed more money?
00:06:37.860 Not money printing. Not money printing. What happened was it's called a supply shock,
00:06:42.480 which is an imbalance between demand and supply. So you have demand and supply that completely
00:06:46.860 plummeted during the lockdowns. When they came back, demand started to come back, but supply
00:06:51.720 couldn't. It was restrained. People were home. They couldn't work. We couldn't get stuff shipped
00:06:55.600 from overseas. So demand came back faster than supply, and this is basic economics.
00:07:00.140 What happens when demand is growing faster than supply is? The only way to reconcile those
00:07:04.820 is prices have to rise. Think about it as an auction process. If you have an auction where
00:07:09.040 a ton of people show up and there's only a couple of sellers, the sellers are going to
00:07:11.800 get huge prices for it.
00:07:12.920 So because supply was restricted, that's why it's called supply shock, prices had to rise
00:07:18.140 to meet for the rising demand. Now, what should have happened, what the government said was
00:07:23.500 going to happen, was that we are going to do all these stimulus plans. We're going to
00:07:28.380 give money to people. And what that's going to do is that's going to temporarily stimulate
00:07:33.200 the economy so that the process I talked about, where incomes would start to rise and then
00:07:37.280 slowly over time, they would offset and exceed price changes. But that never happened.
00:07:42.920 Because stimulus never really actually stimulated.
00:07:45.540 How do you address it now?
00:07:46.480 How do you address it now is we got to get the labor market back working again, which
00:07:50.280 means the economy needs to hit some kind of equilibrium coming off of that three years
00:07:54.760 ago, four years ago, where it was artificially stimulated in all the worst ways. Now it has
00:08:00.140 to clear out all the bad stuff, including the stuff we're going to talk about here with
00:08:03.440 fraud. I mean, fraud and government waste was a huge part of stimulating the economy, which
00:08:08.700 is the worst way to try to create a sustainable economic growth pattern. You don't
00:08:12.640 you don't create growth from waste and fraud and inefficiency and unproductivity. So we
00:08:17.140 got to clean all that stuff out and let the economy start growing. It's like the same reason
00:08:20.700 why you cut back all your weeds in your garden, you know, all the bad growth. You got to get
00:08:24.380 rid of that.
00:08:24.800 That's what recession is for.
00:08:25.660 Tom, what do you think we're going to be saying?
00:08:26.340 So there's a couple of things here. First of all, I agree that there is this cataclysmic
00:08:30.440 jump in prices that happened under Biden. And you can argue whether it started as Trump,
00:08:36.720 but you can certainly look at the charts and it went nuts under Biden. And there's a lot
00:08:42.040 of core products that probably aren't going to be able to come down. Energy is one where
00:08:47.200 the president can help it get down. I mean, look what Biden did. Biden depleted the SPR,
00:08:53.480 Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to artificially drop gasoline prices in the face.
00:08:57.420 That's never happened. They used the SPR and it didn't actually get oil prices to go down.
00:09:02.640 Correct. But that's what he said he was doing. Instead, it just depleted it.
00:09:06.500 But again, that's all just messaging. We need to do something to appear to be doing something.
00:09:10.900 Correct. Well, he didn't do anything. What Trump is doing something, and you can look at the price
00:09:15.080 of gas outside of the blue states where it have the artificial cap taxes. California's got $1.90
00:09:20.740 cap tax on the true price of gas. So you take a look at what you'd pay, say, in Texas,
00:09:25.720 Alabama, even New Jersey, and then put $1.90 on it, the California cap tax. And that's why it's
00:09:31.200 $5 in California and $2.99 in other states. So the president can push down on energy. But this
00:09:37.840 president needs to talk about affordability to blunt what's happening with the Democrats.
00:09:45.160 That's the messaging thing. What you're saying, solution. I agree the solution isn't messaging.
00:09:49.660 But one year, you're not going to have a 30% increase in American income. That is, by the way,
00:09:55.240 we do see that around the world. It's hyperinflation, right? If everybody's income goes up,
00:09:59.800 then all the companies that pay those people... That's why it happens over time. What I'm
00:10:02.640 arguing for is that from the president and political perspective is that what they should
00:10:05.860 do is be honest. They should just be honest and say, look, we're not going to get prices to go
00:10:09.820 back. That's not how economics works. So that's... We're not even going to try. That's not our goal
00:10:15.540 here. What do you think any president would say, you know, the other guy did it, and I can't fix it.
00:10:21.500 I'm not even going to try. No, that's what I'm saying. No, I'm saying is... He's not saying that.
00:10:24.320 What he's saying is... We need to go in another direction. What's not saying is we're officially
00:10:28.280 in a new reality. The new reality is... And this new reality is... $50,000 a year cars instead of
00:10:34.940 $30,000. So then, but what do you do with that? How do you address that, Brandon? You're not going to
00:10:38.820 get the cars to go... I understand that. That's what I'm saying to you. So when you're saying...
00:10:42.840 So is the solution to... The messaging, if you want to go to the messaging, the messaging needs to be... Not messaging.
00:10:47.320 And I'm not talking messaging. I could care less about messaging. What I care about is
00:10:51.100 results. I want to find out what do you do. So... Strongest job market that we can possibly
00:10:55.920 have. How do you do that? That's the only way to get out of this is to make sure that incomes
00:10:59.520 grow in a fashion that pays for all of those price changes from five years ago. Yeah.
00:11:04.340 How do we get jobs growing again? We need a lot of things to take place, but among them
00:11:08.440 is we need the banking sector to be more efficient and actually start making loans again instead
00:11:12.640 of just lending to BlackRock and the most liquid borrowers out there. We need a more efficient
00:11:19.500 banking sector. We need a more efficient monetary system. We also need... Like I said, we got to get the
00:11:25.100 government out of the economy. The government is the biggest impediment because the government is all
00:11:29.220 fraud, waste, and inefficiency. I agree with that, but you've just... Can you hear me? Yeah.
00:11:35.060 Yeah. I agree with that, but you can't fix every layer of the lasagna all at once.
00:11:40.680 I'm not arguing that we should. What I'm saying is the government should come clean and say,
00:11:45.440 look, we're not going to focus on prices because that's a lost cause. They should be honest about
00:11:50.080 that. That's a lost... Prices are never going to go backward. Prices of what? Prices of...
00:11:53.340 Everything. Just general prices. General prices. Houses, yeah. Because gas, you saw the article that
00:11:57.560 came out saying with gas prices being where it's at right now, saving Americans a half a billion
00:12:01.400 dollars. I don't know if you saw that number or not. Yeah. I mean, the wholesale price of gasoline
00:12:04.560 at the CME is $1.70 a gallon. That's where it is right now, which is the lowest it's been in five
00:12:08.660 years. That's actually not a good thing. What about the deflationary innovation though?
00:12:11.940 Like the way that a flat screen TV started off at $10,000 and now I'd say it's $200. So there's
00:12:16.500 examples of things going down in price. Yeah. There's always individual items that go down
00:12:19.900 in price and tradable commodities can go up and down in price. Sure. But we're talking about
00:12:24.400 goods that usually... The economists use the term sticky. This is what sticky really applies
00:12:28.100 to, which means that when prices go up, they tend to stay there.
00:12:31.280 But the things that are killer though is like electricity, food, housing. I think those are the core
00:12:36.300 things that people really get upset about if those are unaffordable. And I mean, I think the
00:12:40.320 problem too is like, I think deficit spending in general is a bigger example of what happened
00:12:44.920 during COVID. Like that M2 money supply chart I sent you, Rob. So this is the amount of money
00:12:49.960 in the economy and like obviously went up a ton in 2020. But just the fact that we're spending
00:12:55.600 like an extra trillion dollars per year than what we actually have, like that's the creation
00:12:59.420 of new money. I know it's not money printing. It's like the treasury issuing new debt, but that's
00:13:04.560 adding new money into the economy. That's artificially increasing demand. So, you know,
00:13:09.100 of course things are going to be more expensive and we're like putting more money in the economy
00:13:12.740 every year. And that's such a waste of capital too, by the way. Like the Fed created like an
00:13:16.960 extra $9 trillion of money on its balance sheet. So that went to banks. So why aren't banks using
00:13:21.980 those loans efficiently? Like where are they just sitting on that money?
00:13:25.540 Yeah. What they've been doing is buying U.S. treasuries because they're risk averse.
00:13:29.340 Yeah.
00:13:29.600 So we need risk taking in the economy, which can't happen because of all this other stuff.
00:13:32.780 I think the one part that you talked about, which I agree with, Rob, can you pull up the
00:13:35.900 number of banks in the history of America over the years? How many we had and how many
00:13:41.040 we are now?
00:13:41.760 Small banks.
00:13:42.340 That's exactly that. Small banks, just banks, total banks in America. If you go to, yeah,
00:13:47.140 while you're doing that, I'll look up the reports. But the question becomes of prices,
00:13:52.820 like you said, you know, flat screen TVs went from $10,000. You can buy a TV right now for
00:13:56.420 four or five hundred bucks. I can't believe how cheap it is right now to buy a, yeah.
00:14:00.240 So what does it say? It says 4,000 commercial banks in the U.S. 2023. Okay. So let's just
00:14:07.100 say around 3917, according to FDIC, the number of banks peaked in the 20th century would
00:14:13.360 estimate is typically around 29,400, 30,400. That's before the Great Depression. But even
00:14:20.620 at 1980s, we had 14,000 banks. To go from 14,000 banks to 3917, no longer lending money
00:14:30.580 to small business owners to start because the underwriting becomes tighter. They want the
00:14:34.640 bigger deals. They want the bigger business. I can see this happening. I can see this happening.
00:14:38.760 But, you know, the other part is as well where the incentive comes about, let's develop cheaper
00:14:44.620 cars. Okay. More cost-effective cars. Let's develop housing that's going to be more cost-effective.
00:14:50.980 How do you do that? Innovation. This is a time where innovation can really lead. But go to that
00:14:58.080 chart right there, Rob. Go to that chart right there. Look at that. I mean, that tells a whole
00:15:01.440 story right there. Consolidation. Look at that. That's not good. Yeah, it wasn't a contraction. It
00:15:06.300 was a roll-up. Yeah, it was a roll-up. That's exactly what it was. That's all mergers.
00:15:09.460 Mergers. It's all mergers. And the consumer wins there. Look how sudden it is from 1980. So
00:15:15.460 why, by the way, Jeff. That's the Eurodollar system. Why is that sudden from 1980, though? If
00:15:20.600 you look at the number, it's increasing 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and then it drops. Yeah, the
00:15:25.600 reason why is because of international consolidation. You have international competition. So we
00:15:31.080 internationalized the monetary system starting in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. And by the 1980s, it
00:15:35.660 became hyper-international, which meant that you don't have a small regional
00:15:39.300 bank in a local U.S. location competing with other small regional banks in that same
00:15:44.080 location. Now you have large-scale banks in Switzerland and Japan and Asia competing with
00:15:52.160 the large banks on Wall Street. And those are the only banks that suck up all the money
00:15:56.080 and oxygen. And as a big bank, what do you do? You buy all the smaller ones. It's the
00:16:01.120 cheapest way to continue to grow in scale. The average person watching this, what can
00:16:04.840 they do? What can they do? What can the average person do? As far as, you're talking
00:16:10.060 about prices, the economy? To fight against this. Last time I was here, you talked about
00:16:14.960 is invest in yourself. Make sure that you are individually doing everything you can to
00:16:20.240 maximize your own talent. So whatever prices are due and whatever the, you know. You're
00:16:23.400 not affected by it. You are affected by it, but you can better, you're better able to
00:16:27.540 handle it. If you're investing in yourself and raising your own income potential, then you
00:16:30.740 can handle higher prices. I agree. I agree. I mean, this is terrible. This is horrible
00:16:35.260 stuff. But I mean, it's the reality. The reality is we can't change it. We can't go
00:16:39.080 backwards. So let's be honest about it and deal with it moving forward.
00:16:42.900 To your point about wages, you've got a couple of things that are going to happen this year
00:16:49.220 and that you're going to hear headlines that are more and more talking about like job
00:16:52.940 retraining and displacement. And you're going to hear going to the election. No, the labor
00:16:57.980 market's actually better than people think. But we have some people in the wrong places
00:17:01.660 and robots are taking over the warehouse jobs. So those people need different training
00:17:05.780 and need to be other places. You're going to hear about displacement, geographic labor
00:17:10.240 shortage and job retraining, which is all messages that's true. But they're going to
00:17:17.320 be trying to say, hey, better paying jobs are available here, here and here. Because
00:17:20.560 remember, it's election year. Having said that, folks, since September 9th or 10th, even
00:17:26.580 when we went to Aspen, I keep telling you this, I have been wearing the same exact shoes.
00:17:31.360 I'm not kidding with you. This sounds crazy, doesn't it? It has to be. It's the only thing
00:17:35.760 that I wear every single day and I show you every single time. This is on, right? Future
00:17:39.500 Looks Bright Shoes. We are now seeing this in 20, I think we just hit 25 or 26 countries
00:17:45.800 that it's been ordered in. If you're somewhere in the world watching this, you haven't placed
00:17:49.380 an order yet, go ahead. But here's a Future Looks Bright Shoes. Rob, go ahead and play
00:17:52.580 the clip. When we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function and luxury, we
00:17:59.960 had the choice to make it fast. We had the choice to make it cheap. We chose neither.
00:18:05.580 Instead, we chose Tuscaneiro. We chose true Italian craftsmanship, each pair touched by 50 skilled
00:18:12.580 hands. We chose patience, spending two years perfecting every detail, and we chose the finest quality
00:18:18.580 at every step. Introducing the Future Looks Bright collection. Not rushed, not disposable,
00:18:27.300 not ordinary. Rather intentional, luxurious, timeless.
00:18:32.960 All right, so guys, it's officially on the fourth order. This is how quickly this thing's going
00:18:41.540 right now. We were not expecting for a shoe, but it has become such a big hit. And the biggest
00:18:46.940 thing is people come to this page and they compare it to the Berluti, the Ferragamo, the
00:18:50.060 Zenia, the Gucci. And you look at the FLB and what it offers with the super foam technology
00:18:53.980 at the bottom of it and the craftsmanship made in Tuscan, Italy at five factories. If you
00:18:58.840 haven't placed an order for yourself or your husband or your son or somebody, go place an
00:19:04.380 order. They will fall in love with the shoes. Go read the reviews on the website for yourself
00:19:08.840 only from people who purchased the shoes and enjoy it. They'll come back to you saying,
00:19:13.400 this is the most comfortable thing I've ever worn. Go to vtmerch.com, place your order.
00:19:18.260 And having said that, let's get right into it.
00:19:20.900 If you enjoyed this video, you want to watch more videos like this, click here. And if you
00:19:23.760 want to watch the entire podcast, click here.
00:19:28.840 See you next time.