BUCK: You know, my little sister’s got a young one. You know, this is something that people… You don’t want to add this stress to the situation of new parents, and it’s a problem all across the country. And I think, unfortunately — and this is where, you know, there’s good news/bad news to bring you in general here on the show on this day and a lot of days I think. The good news is that Clay and I are confident that the Democrats are heading for a smackdown, a elbow-off-the-top-belt buckle, if you will, in this midterms that, a suplex. I used to watch the WWF back in the day, before the wild life people got mad —

CLAY: Sued ’em.

BUCK: — and made it the WWE. I used to watch back in the day. So the Democrats are gonna get crushed, I think, in the midterms. We’re obviously gonna stay eye on the prize, focus, mobilize, get everybody as engaged and involved all across the country as you can. One of, honestly, the real responsibilities we have on the show is there are and we are blessed and thankful and humbled there are so many listeners to this show that this audience can make a real difference in national politics, not even just…

Obviously any state or local race but even national politics which is why we’ve got, you know, would-be Senators and congressmen and dogcatchers, you name it. They’re reaching out they want to come on the show all the time. So on the good news of things is I think we’re politically now reaching a point of clarity. On the bad side of things, it’s gonna get, as you are aware of out there, the economy. I think that’s almost a certainty at this stage.

And, now, that ties into the first proposition, but I actually want the country to be prosperous, happy, stable, and free. This isn’t just my scoreboard, their scoreboard thing, where wherever gets our side to win is all that matters — and the economy is gonna get rough. We’ve got the new inflation numbers expected to come out soon, the stock market tanking today. Biden is going to give a speech tomorrow — this just announced.

A speech tomorrow where he’s gonna try to blame inflation on other people. Let’s remember that inflation went from — according to this White House — not a problem to transitory to short-term or it’s gonna fade out soon, to, “Okay, we’ve got an inflation problem but it’s the Putin price hike.” That didn’t work. That talking point’s gonna fade away. CNN released a poll that said that “eight in 10 U.S. adults said the federal government wasn’t doing enough to curb inflation.”

Clay, this is what’s gonna… This is a problem. Curbing inflation means rates go up. That’s really the way… Yeah, you can reduce spending but in the short term if you really want to curb inflation you have to raise interest rates. We have gone through a period here of really unprecedented and artificially low interest rates. Folks, this is gonna mean buying a house, getting that mortgage, more expensive, credit card debt, more expensive, just investment out there in the community in general, more expensive, harder to come by. This is the only way. Basically, we gotta eat our peas now, Clay. It’s time to put the caster oil on the spoon for this economy. It’s not gonna be fun.

CLAY: Yeah, and what Biden’s gonna do is confuse people and argue that the policies that he’s tried to pass that have not passed — in other words, Republicans have helped to cause inflation. Now, they’re blaming everybody, right, ’cause initially as you said, Buck, the argument was this is very transitory. And instead, it’s now somewhat stable. Now, the expectations are that inflation is going to come back a little bit on Wednesday.

And again that number, I believe, comes out at 8:30 a.m. eastern on Wednesday; so I’m sure Wednesday’s show we’ll be talking about whatever those numbers might have shown for April. The challenge is, to your point, the only real way to dial back inflation is to start to raise interest rates. And there’s still a tremendous gap between where interest rates are and where the inflation rate is, and it doesn’t feel to me like this is going to be a rapid retrenchment in any way.

But Biden knows that he’s way underwater on the inflation-related issues. So he’s going to try and muddy those waters and try to assert blame on Republicans rather than owning it himself for the policies that he put in place. And honestly, thank goodness, on a small scale, that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema stood up against the massive Build Back Better plan that Biden wanted to spend.

Because if that had passed, that was gonna be trillions of more dollars rolling into our economy being spent by the federal government at the worst possible time. Now, unfortunately, unfortunately, they were able to ram through all of the spending that they were in the early days of the Biden administration. What did we end up spending on covid? Over $5 trillion, right? Buck?

BUCK: Yes, sir.

CLAY: Over $5 trillion that we borrowed for covid. And basically all of that money had virtually, I believe, no impact, meaning it would have been better off for us if we had never shut down, if we had just powered right through. Virtually everyone has gotten covid by this point or gotten the covid shot. Many have gotten both the covid shot and covid, of course, including your own governor, Kathy Hochul, who continues to trot out the insanely ridiculous:

“I have covid, it’s relatively minor, thanks to the fact that my two shots and my two boosters.” I mean, it’s such a cliche at this point. But that’s where we are. We’re captured now at 40-year high inflation rates which make, I believe… I really think there’s no argument at this point. Joe Biden’s far worse than Jimmy Carter ever was. When you look at everything that Joe Biden has touched has turned to crap, everything in this country…

The border, the crime rate, the inflation rate, the inability — Buck, we still haven’t gotten — and I think this is important ’cause the other thing Biden’s gonna argue is, “Oh, look at the millions of his jobs I’ve created since I’ve came into office,” that’s a lie. We still aren’t back to the same employment that we had in February of 2020 and early March of 2020 when we shut down this country, and I think a lot of people don’t realize that. I believe we’re still 1.5 million jobs behind where we were when we decided to have the lockdowns and the unemployment rate skyrocketed to 20%. We still haven’t gotten back the jobs that we lost when we shut down this country in February and March of 2020.

BUCK: It’s not confidence inspiring, Clay, when you think that it took a couple of senators getting the ire of their party, ‘cause people were furious with Sinema and Manchin. And not only did they probably save the Democrat Party from even further electoral annihilation, they might have done more than anybody else to save the economy from getting destroyed. Now, Republicans obviously didn’t want to go along with that either but they weren’t in that position, right.

They weren’t members of the Democrat Party in a position say, “We’re actually gonna break with party ranks here and not spend that additional $5 trillion.” This is all very straightforward. And let’s remember that under the Trump years you started to hear more and more… When I say straightforward, I mean the cause and effect. Under the Trump years you started to hear more and more from the left, from Bernie Sanders supporters and voters and advisers and AOC about MMT, Modern Monetary Theory. You’re not hearing a lot about that these days. Modern Monetary Theory —

CLAY: We should explain that to people because it was such a lie.

BUCK: And we were hearing it as though it was smart. And basically, MMT is the government, in our position, it’s a macroeconomic theory saying that rising debt and fear of inflation should not restrain your spending. Essentially, determine what the public good requires in terms of spending and spend it. Open checkbook, go for it, go wild. Now, if anybody — and then people say, “Well, what about inflation?”

They say, “Oh, don’t worry. We’ll handle it.” That’s effectively, the MMT theorists will all freak out. “I have a PhD in microeconomics!” That’s reality. They’ll say, “We’ll handle it.” They don’t have a real way to do it. And this was talked about more and more ’cause Trump, there was so much property, the markets were doing so well, and everyone felt like, wow, the economy’s kicking butt.

Now all of a sudden you’re not hearing that anymore because under the covid period we kind of tried a short-term test. It was like a trial period of MMT: Stay home and we’ll spend additional dollars to try to deal with this completely unnecessary spending, you know, over 90% of it, right, when you look at it, ’cause people shouldn’t have had to stay home. We should have gone to our jobs.

We should not have done any of the things that we did in that regard ’cause, remember, senior citizens overwhelmingly are not the ones who were staying home from work and they’re the ones who are at risk. So we tried this idea out of, “Hey, there’s a public crisis. Let’s just spend whatever money we think we need to spend,” and it’s disastrous. And now the bill is coming due, and we’re gonna have to deal with the pain. This is cause and effect. And the Democrats, until about five minutes ago, were saying… I want to find the audio. Joe Biden was saying, “Spending $5 trillion will reduce inflation,” like a true moron.

CLAY: Yes. That was the argument for Build Back Better. And there were, by the way, a lot of economists who carry water for Democrats that were saying the same thing. And I hope that come Wednesday at 8:30 a.m., we don’t have another high in inflation because how many months in a row have we had to deal with economists saying, “Boy this surprises me. I didn’t expect for this number to be up like it was!”

That’s been the reaction for, what, eight or nine months in a row, it feels like? And the idea that you can borrow as much money as you want and there are no consequences ever is one of the linchpins of Modern Monetary Theory, and it’s been proven to be a hundred percent wrong. And only because of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema did Democrats not spend an additional…

And Buck, even the $5 trillion dollar doesn’t do justice on how much more money they wanted to spend ’cause it was $5 trillion over 10 years but then they cut it off as if it wasn’t gonna exist any longer, meaning the reality is we’re talking about 10, 20, $30 trillion over the next 30 or 40 years that Democrats wanted to commit the federal government to spending.

BUCK: We know there are regime media outlets effectively that will do anything to support Biden. Most of the political national journalists out there, whatever they can do to help the Biden administration narrative they will do and they think that they have a duty to set aside whatever ethics their profession demands or supposedly demands in order to serve the interests of Biden. They’re regime economists too, because every time Biden would say, “Economists all agree…”

And of course economists don’t all agree, that’s an untrue statement but that’s part of the propaganda. And then they’d point to some institute, you know, some nonprofit that has a bunch of economists working for it. Well, if you want to be the economist who gets invited on CNBC and gets $50,000 or $20,000, whatever it is speaking gig at some conference of investors, you always come up with the, “Oh, Biden’s doing a good job.

“Biden knows! We’re moving in the right direction.” You essentially become a cheerleader for the idiotic policies. That’s been going on for the last year and a half, give or take. I think we’re about to see less and less of that because it’s just indefensible at this point. There’s no defense can be made of the Biden economy.

CLAY: I will predict what Biden is going to say tomorrow, that he has the solution to inflation and Republicans are stopping him from implementing it. If you want to story-in-a-sentence what is Joe Biden going to say tomorrow, it is, “I have the solution to high inflation, and Republicans are keeping me from implementing it. They are the reason for this problem.” I think that’s what he’s gonna pivot to now, ’cause initially it was transitory, then it was Putin, then it was… Nothing is ever the Democrat policy’s fault, even though the reality is here they are to blame.