BUCK: So we’re telling you what we’re seeing across the country in the news cycle and, of course, around the world when need be. Fascinating. Before we get into the supply chain snarl, the big holiday-timed crisis it seems here it’s gonna be hitting stores… Well, it’s already sitting some. We’ll get into that in a second. It’s just amazing to watch as we have here in the NYC EIB headquarters, Fox News up alongside CNN on the screens.

Clay and I could watch these in our respective studios, and on the left you got Fox talking about supply chain issues, you’ve got inflation, you’ve got the border. On the right, guess what CNN’s talking about today? The January 6 insurrection and the subpoenas they’re sending out and all this nonsense. This is a preview of what we’re all going to be seeing in the next year —  which is every time things look so bad for Biden that his chief propagandists and the people around him whose job it is is to try to convince as many Americans as possible that what they’re seeing and feeling isn’t real. That the inflation that’s eroding their savings and making everything they buy (their gas, their food, their rent) more expensive.

That the sense they have the country is not only has Biden failed to unite it, but he has just exacerbated whatever divisions we had in part by lying about being a unity candidate, which is what Joe Biden has done. But you don’t ever — you don’t ever — get to make these distinctions, these claims on your own without the media, without the corporate apparatus of the Democrats’ corporate media and just in general the corporations telling you what you’re supposed to think and believe.

And right now, what they want to tell you is, “Don’t worry about all the economic turbulence. Don’t worry about the bad decision making and the economic inflation and all the goods that are not being delivered to ports in a timely fashion and how it’s gonna affect you over Halloween and everything else. No, no! It’s the insurrection.”

I prefer to actually dig into what matters and not go down the CNN rabbit hole of left-wing absurdity. Here is Joe Biden having to speak about — just yesterday, right after we finished here — what’s going on at the Port of Los Angeles, among other places, with all the supply chain backup.

BIDEN: Today, we have an important announcement that will get things you buy to you, to the shelves faster. After weeks of negotiation and working with my team — and with the major union retailers and freight movers — (slurring) the Port of Los Angeles announced today that it’s gonna be — begin operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This follows the Port of Long Beach’s commitment of 24/7 th-th-that it announced just weeks ago. A 24/7 system — what most of the leading countries of the world already operate on now, except us, until now. This is the first key step toward moving our entire freight, transportation, and logistical supply chain nationwide to a 24/7 system.

BUCK: Clay, the good news is we can count on Pete Buttigieg’s deep experience as secretary of transportation to weigh in on this kind of stuff. It’s absurd. The Biden administration has no idea what they’re doing.

CLAY: No — and, Buck, things just keep getting worse. I wanted to share some of these supply chain numbers. I was reading about this this morning, and it’s pretty staggering to see what’s going on. Now, here’s some data for you that’s partly impacted in a big way by what’s occurring with inflation and the supply chain. Food prices are up 4.6% this year.

But that obscures a little bit because some of these prices are up staggering amounts. Meats, poultry, fish, and eggs, prices are up 10.5% this year. Beef prices are up 17.6% this year. Fruits and veggies, 3%. And the prices, Buck, are higher. Houses, rent, food, gas. We know gas is at a seven-year high.

Electricity, furniture, new cars, TVs, restaurant meals. Buck, I noticed this. I was out buying shoes for my kids, my two youngest, recently. Children’s shoe prices are up 12%. That hasn’t happened ever for kids’ shoes going back to the 1950s. Why is that? Because shoes are brought in and imported, and the price to bring those shoes in has so skyrocketed that they are caught in supply bottlenecks.

Something simple, right? A lot of people are out there right now going out to buy their kids new shoes for school. As you move into the holiday season, you may be buying shoes for your kids as presents. I was walking around. I didn’t want to feel like an old man, but I was like, “Man, I don’t remember kids’ shoes usually costing this much!”

They’re up 12% ’cause they can’t get it shipped in. And all of this is a result of our response to covid, right? Everybody out there wants to say, “Covid caused this.” No. Our response to covid caused this. It is the biggest failure in America since the Vietnam War, and the Biden administration — since they have taken over — has made everything worse. Buck, remember when you couldn’t find toilet paper? This Christmas season, you might not be able to find anything.

BUCK: Because people were hoarding it because they were terrified about, “There’s going to be hoarding!” Well, that’s why some of the advice that you see out there is, “Go get it now! If you want a toy for Christmas, go get it now.” Yeah, that just means the stores are gonna empty out even faster. But it is a function of the long…

Look, there’s a lot of what you could call the covid response hangover that we are still going through as a nation while we’re not yet out of the covid response to begin with. But a lot of the downside of the effects of what we did last year are being felt now, right? A lot of the economic effects. First of all, inflation, obviously.

The trillions that have been pumped into the economy with trillions more probably on the way from Democrats, that causes inflation. We all know. Anybody who has Econ 101 in their background will tell you this is going to spur inflation. We know this is the reality of it, and then on the lockdowns helping cause these issues. Here’s GOP representative Greg Steube who’s saying exactly that.

STEUBE: You pay more people to not work than to work you’re gonna have those people in the supply chain not working. That coupled with the fact that you’re locking down all these big cities, these big backups of all these shipping containers are in cities and ports like L.A. that were locked down for months. And now because for so long people could make more money not working than working, they have a hard time funding the labor for these different individuals to work in the different supply chains.

And now you want to put a vaccine mandate on private companies on top of that, so people are gonna not work because the companies — through the Biden administration — are forcing them to have vaccine mandates on their employees. It’s gonna just completely exacerbate the problem. This is 100% the result of bad policies that Democrats have put in place since Joe Biden has taken office.

BUCK: Yup. All right. I cosign.

CLAY: And, Buck, this is going to get worse and worse. I already feel bad for kids out there for Christmas ’cause Dad and Mom — and, trust me, Dad and Mom, I’ve been in this situation. You’re trying to find that right present, usually it’s something that is really sought after, right? Every kid suddenly wants the same toy.

BUCK: Tickle Me Elmo. Remember Tickle Me Elmo? That was a big one.

CLAY: Yeah. Everybody has to have the same exact thing. Could be a new video game system, new video game, whatever it is, right? So many kids want the same thing. But with the supply chain shortages, what you’re hitting at is — and again, I don’t think enough people are recognizing this. If you’re not buying your kids’ presents in October, as we get into November, and, God forbid, what it’s gonna look like…

I know it’s always crazy on the day after Thanksgiving anyway with Black Friday starting. I can’t even imagine what some of these shelves are gonna look like when it comes to toys, because so many of these toys are being brought in. It’s not like they can just ship in more in time for the holidays.

BUCK: And it will be fascinating to hear the ultimate fallback with all this. Especially as we get into November, you’re looking at getting close to the end of the first year of the Biden term, and I think we all know that if things get economically really disjointed… If things really start to feel like they’re out of control. You got big shortages. Inflation keeps going up. We have all these unfilled jobs. They keep saying the unemployment trate is 5.4%, something like that. You have millions and millions of people that aren’t looking for jobs, aren’t going to work.

CLAY: Almost 11 million open jobs.

BUCK: Yeah, other people are staying home because they’re angry about the vaccine mandates, not just pilots we’ve been talking to but other people as well. They’re going to do the usual, which is: Blame Trump. Guaranteed. I think they’re gonna turn around and say (sniveling), “The shortages we’re experiencing are because of a lack of Trump planning.”

This is what they did with the Afghanistan debacle. That’s what they’ll do then. But, Clay, I bring it up because I think they’re running out of room on some of this stuff. I think the independents… Forget about lunatic leftists that triple mask and wear goggles when they’re alone in the car because Fauci says so. Forget about them. People who can look at things and make rational decisions are saying, “We got some real voters remorse from this whole Biden situation.”

CLAY: Well, it’s one thing to have problems, right? Every president from time immemorial is gonna have problems. Harry Truman said being president is like trying to ride a tiger. So we know that there are inevitably going to be problems. What becomes an issue is when you don’t have any solutions for any of the problems.

And what becomes an even bigger issue, Buck, is when your “solutions” make the problems worse, which is basically everything Joe Biden is doing. We are talking about incompetence on every level, a basic lack of understanding of the most essential economic rules. Everywhere, everything he touched gets worse. It’s the opposite of the Midas touch.

BUCK: A quick question for you: Is there a person in this administration at a senior level that you would want to hand the keys to OutKick over to and say, “Run it”? Honestly, I think the answer is probably no, right?

CLAY: It’s a really good test, Buck. I’ve got OutKick, right, which is a media company that we built up to a decent degree and I make a lot of decisions every single day. If Joe Biden tried to run my company, it would go bankrupt I think within a year. I don’t trust his judgment or ability to make any decision.

BUCK: Not even Biden. The people around him who are his top advisers, would you want them? Would you want Kamala Harris in charge? No. Would you want…? Go through the cabinet. Would you want Tony Blinken? No.

CLAY: It’s a great point. And, by the way, not just my business. If you have a Subway franchise, would you want the Biden administration in charge of your Subway franchise? I wouldn’t.

BUCK: This is deja vu with the same feeling people had about the Obama administration, which was that the people making the big decisions for the most part were just disconnected from reality, either so rich for whatever reason so that it didn’t matter what was happening in the economy around them, or so much from the faculty lounge that they just didn’t know how it really is for people trying to pay bills and deal with life. That’s like the Ron Klain tweet. It’s a “high class problem” to have all these supply chains down. He liked this tweet about how it’s a high-class problem. People are like, “Ah, we could maybe come in…”

CLAY: It’s not a high class problem. We can talk about this when we come back. If you’re driving down the road and you’re looking at gas prices and you’re trying to do the math in your head and you’re saying, “It’s gonna cost me how much to fill up my car now?” that ain’t high class thinking.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: We’re talking about supply chain issues and the impact of inflation on so many of our listeners out there. I got a text from a friend who said, “My dad’s in management for a big nationwide shoe company. I was talking about going out shopping for new shoes and thinking, ‘Man, these are a lot more expensive.'” Reports are that kids’ shoes, the prices are up 12%. If you got kids, their feet seem like they grow so fast. Crazy how often you have to buy a new pair of shoes for them. Sometimes you can pass down the older brother’s shoes, at least in my experience.

BUCK: I had a lot of older brother shoes. I had a lot of worn-in Jordons in my day.

CLAY: Yeah, well, we’ve done that a lot with cleats and other different shoes because the kids can grow so fast. Big brother shoes can get passed down to little brothers, everything else. So that happens in the Travis household too. We were out shopping, and everything was out of stock. We went to four different stores to buy new shoes for my kid.

The Foot Lockers, the Dick’s Sporting Goods, you name it, the normal places you would go to buy kids’ shoes. None of them had my kids’ shoes in stock, and I thought that was strange. Then I saw that report about this 12% and I got this text message, inventories down over 30% according to my friend here.

And it’s gonna get worse, he says, over the next 90 days. Now, that is a small overrule issue. One particular product. But I think if you’re out there listening to us, this is going to become a major, major issue. And to your point, Buck, it’s gonna get exacerbated — it’s gonna get made worse — because what the Biden administration is saying is, “Go buy now.”

Well, that’s gonna send a rush. People are gonna go buy now and there might not even be some of these supply shortages. But as you remember for those of us last year who were trying to buy things in grocery store, the mere perception that there might be a shortage creates the shortage. So when we combine the actual supply all of his with rising inflation with a rush to go buy so many different products, Buck, I think we’re talking about a really chaotic situation for many products that are going to need to be purchased in the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday window for sure.

BUCK: I hope that people don’t start panic buying toilet paper again —

CLAY: Again.

BUCK: — because I can’t go back to that time, friends —

CLAY: And bottled water.

BUCK: — when I would go to places and there was no toilet paper. I’m like, “You don’t need six months of toilet paper. No one needs to buy six months of toilet paper.” We’re talking about how the Biden administration’s trying to spin all this stuff; so you have Ron Klain, who’s the White House chief of staff, some say among the most important advisors in the administration.

CLAY: Maybe the actual president.

BUCK: Yeah, when I say, “among the,” people say that Ron Klain has probably has more influence on Joe Biden than anybody else in this White House. That’s what I hear from Democrats. I speak to Democrats who are in the administration, and he liked a tweet by a Harvard econ professor named Jason Furman who wrote:

“Most of the economic problems we’re facing (inflation, supply chains, etc.) are high class problems. We wouldn’t have had them if the unemployment rate was still 10 percent. We would instead have had a much worse problem.” Okay. But an unemployment rate of 10% is really bad; so we didn’t have that before. Why is this now the benchmark, Clay? It’s almost like, “Well, it could be worse; so what we got’s not that bad.” That’s not how it works.

CLAY: Yeah, I’ll tell you this. The people that I talk to who are worried about the highest prices in seven years, they’re not thinking, “Oh, it’s a high class problem that I have to pay way more for every product that I’ve ever bought.”

BUCK: It’s actually a working class problem to be worried about the inflation, the inflation rise and things like gas and other commodities you need.

CLAY: You have to spend all of your money to live, and that becomes a monster issue. It’s actually insulting what they were saying out there.