CLAY: It’s amazing how often the, quote-unquote, “experts” continue to be wrong about inflation, which is the overwhelming number one story that is out there in America today. At 8:30 a.m. Eastern — right before many of you probably got in to work or right as many of you were getting to work — inflation comes out. It is now at a 9.1% level, up from 8.6% last month. It is — drumbeat, please — “above expectations” yet again.
The economic disaster that is Joe Biden’s administration continues, and here are some numbers from the CPI report. Over last year, 98.5% cost increase in fuel oil; gas up just shy of 60%; electricity up nearly 14%; food at home up over 12%; new cars up 11%; transportation, 9%. You know it; you experience it. you knew it was going to happen because — unlike the Biden administration — you actually live in the real world.
Road map for where we’re headed: Senator Josh Hawley, he went viral yesterday for saying men can’t get pregnant. I’m not even making that up. That is why he went viral from Missouri, the senator there, one of them, will join us, Ryan Girdusky on the latest data on the midterms. All of that coming your way. Study out from the New York Times: Republicans adding minority voters overwhelmingly as the Democrats have become the party of woke, white college graduates.
There is a new video from the Uvalde shooting that is going to make you all sick. Joe Biden is now in the Middle East, and Joe Manchin, senator from West Virginia, has said basically Congress needs to stop spending money. He is a sane Democrat. But, Buck, I wanted to play this for everybody out there. The Biden administration experts have been telling you that inflation is not a big deal for a long time now.
This is a montage of Joe Biden, of our good friend — former Little Red Lying Hood, our former White House press secretary and speaker before we got to Karine Jean-Pierre — also, Treasury secretary Janet Yellen. All of this… That, of course, is Jen Psaki, who is the former White House press secretary. All of them telling you no big deal, everything’s gonna be fine, inflation is transitory. Listen.
CLAY: All of this is embarrassing and, unfortunately, the people who are bearing this massive tax increase… You heard at the end there, Biden trying to blame Vladimir Putin. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Buck, inflation was already 7.9%. What’s your reaction to 9.1% inflation?
BUCK: Oh, it’s just a question now of are we in the Biden recession and how much worse is the Biden recession going to get? Now, what I mean by, “Are we in it?” is if it hasn’t started, it’s about to start, now that we see this trend with inflation. And you get into some difficulties here because politically they’re obviously gonna want to do whatever they can to make it seem better before the midterms, and so they may forestall the recession at some level.
They may try to do whatever they can. For example, the Fed raising interest rates. People are talking about huge interest rate hikes now to try to rein this in. Well, you can either do that now, take the pain now, or you can try to do it more slowly and do a little bit of monetary magic here and there to make it seem less bad in the in the future. But that will probably make it worse over the long term, meaning you’re gonna get…
Do you want to take your medicine now, or do you want to have to take more medicine financially down the line? That’s probably what America is facing right now. And with the feckless and reckless Democrats in charge like Joe Biden, I think you can expect that And this is… All you have to do is you look at economies around the world that have had a terrible time over the last, let’s say, 20 or 30 years. Inflation is ruinous.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: Inflation has so many components. We think of it in terms of what it does to people paying for gas and groceries, ’cause that’s what you’re feeling every day and that’s why the American people, the American voter are looking at this and saying, “Oh, my gosh. What is going on here? I’m getting poorer. I’m doing the same work, I’m living on the same budget, but I’m getting poorer every month.”
But when you look at it from the business and longtime investment sense as well, a lot of businesses, if inflation keeps up like this, will start to say, “I can’t make longtime investments ’cause I don’t know what the future is gonna look like.” The lack of stability that this creates — the economic distortion in an inflationary period — have all kinds of secondary effects that slow growth, slow investment, make people poorer. That’s gonna start bringing up the unemployment rate. By the way, the way we gauge unemployment in this country is a whole other conversation. It doesn’t really reflect what the job market’s truly doing right now. So, Clay, this is a disaster for the country.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: A disaster for the Biden administration. “Worst in 40 years.” We keep saying that. It’s gonna be the worse in even longer than that, I think, when all is said and done. And does anyone think that the people in charge…? You just played that montage, which is so excellent. They have been so wrong about everything. When Biden says, “We’re on the problem of inflation; we’re doing everything we can to bring prices down,” this is like Dr. Fauci telling you right now, “We just need a few more shots. You just need to mask up a little more.” It’s not gonna work, folks. The people who were wrong about everything aren’t suddenly gonna be right.
Joe Biden would have had a more successful presidency so far if he had come into office and done the exact opposite of everything that he’s done. And we should mention that the craziest thing about how bad Biden has been is he would have been far worse off if he had actually gotten Build Back Better passed because he would have spent another $5 trillion plus, and we’d be sitting at 15% or 20% inflation right now, which leads us, Buck… People say, “Okay, where we going from now?” Biden’s still trying to spend money.
They’re trying to pass a tax increase and spend billions and billions of dollars more before July runs out and we officially move into the midterm election cycle. And Joe Manchin put out a statement that said, basically, “No matter what spending aspirations some in Congress may have,” I’m reading directly from his statement, “it is clear to anyone who visits a grocery store or a gas station that we cannot add any more fuel to this inflation fire.”
Now, I’m hopeful that means that Joe Manchin is basically waving the white flag and saying, “No more. We are done negotiating.” The best thing that Republicans — ’cause we got a lot of senators, congressmen and their staffs who listen. The best thing that anybody on Capitol Hill could do is basically run out the clock on Joe Biden and the remainder of this congressional cycle, not pass anything more, don’t make anything worse. We’ll see what happens with the inflation data on July a month from now when we’re in mid-August. But it’s not gonna get much better before the midterms. I don’t think anybody’s arguing that.
BUCK: And they’re not going to take the rational response to this that you were just laying out. Remember, Democrats said very well by Rahm Emanuel. It’s one of the oldest aphorisms out there, but a crisis is an opportunity. Democrats, as much as they understand they have to emote and pretend they care about all the peasants out there that don’t have their electric vehicles, that are struggling to put their gross, icky gas in their cars, the unwashed masses with their gasoline!
Democrats have to do that so that they can get the votes plus whatever other votes they can get through shady means, they can get the votes together to stay in power. But ultimately, they see all of these things that you and I talk about as crises — whether on the economic front, the environmental front, the border, crime — as opportunities to push more of what they want from a policy perspective.
“Put us in charge more and we’ll fix it.” This reminds me of the big line for the Obama administration when they had the stimulus, which was a trillion dollars. To remind everybody, that was a trillion dollars, and you got the Tea Party. Joe Biden spent $2 trillion like he found an extra 20 in the back pocket of his pants, and everyone was like, “Oh, okay. I guess so.” No. That was Crazy Town, and what they were saying was, “Oh, he didn’t spend enough.”
You’re going to see with the Biden administration says on a range of issues, including the economy, “The problem is the Republicans! The problem is we can’t do enough of what we want.” They’re gonna try the Build Back Better thing just ’cause it second downs good as a slogan or it sounds good as words. The second anyone dives into it, to work point, Clay, it would have made everything markedly worse to anyone who operates in reality.
CLAY: And that’s why we need a landslide in less than four months and also why we need another landslide in 2024 because until they get their ass kicked, I don’t think Democrats are going to recognize how out of touch their policies are and, frankly, how disastrous they are for the overwhelming amount of Americans out there — white, black, Asian, and Hispanic — because 9.1% inflation is a default tax on the pastor among us. It hurts everybody, but you’re living paycheck to paycheck, you feel it so much worse. Joe Biden is the worst president in a hundred years or more, and I don’t see things getting any better at all.
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