HARWOOD: The real game is the Federal Reserve. They started to raise interest rates, and the question about whether or not we have a recession, that’s really gonna turn on how skillful the Federal Reserve is trying to cool down this economy, raise interest rates enough without tipping the economy into recession. But the things, the rhetoric the president uses or the steps the president takes — releasing oil from the strategic reserve or denouncing greedy corporations or all that sort of political talk — isn’t gonna do very much. It’s… Inflation control principally rests with the Federal Reserve and so Jerome Powell is the person who we really should be looking to. Unfortunately, the Fed does not have daily press briefings; the White House does. That’s why the attention is focused on the president.

BUCK: Welcome back to Clay and Buck. That was some CNN guy, John Harwood over at CNN, talking about how it’s really all about what the Fed does. But you see there’s a part of that that’s missing. Yeah, the Fed is supposed to fight inflation, and you can argue it doesn’t really do a very good job. It does a good job until it doesn’t and then all of a sudden it’s, “Hey, rates are rates! The bond market determines where this is all gonna go in the long run anyway.”

But how did we get to this place? It was political decisions. It was decisions to spend money. It was decisions to lock down, to send people checks at home. Now, some of this was done — and we always tell you the truth here, because if you bring this up to your neighbor… You know the lib who lives next door who drives a Prius and has four masks hanging from the rearview mirror and has a Biden-Harris bumper sticker on the car.

If you bring this up, they’ll say, “Well, Trump spent a lot of money too.” Well, in the absolute moment of greatest panic and emergency, there was a bipartisan decision — and I think you could argue, the wrong decision, but it was a good-faith decision — to do shutdowns for a period of time. And then the Democrats fought in the summer of 2020 every step of the way for the reopen, wanted more and more benefits, more and more spending, essentially running a universal basic income test run, which is what they turned it into.

And then Biden comes in office, Clay, $1.9 trillion, not a single Republican vote, because the six trillion or whatever it was that was spent before that during the covid crisis wasn’t enough for their liking. And now we’re being told, “Oh, well, it’s the Fed is trying to fight the fire,” but overspending by government in general and specifically the $2 trillion spent by Biden the beginning of 2021, that lit the fire. They didn’t start the fire. You know what I mean. I was gonna go Billy Joel and you couldn’t really stick the landing.

CLAY: Here’s a question that I would love to be able to see. You know, we live in this Marvel universe, Buck, where there’s all this multiverse going on and I know people out there with grandkids and kids have seen this. The multiverse concept is there’s all different sorts of universes and they spin a little bit differently based on certain choices that have been made. You know, sort of the Sliding Doors example if you remember that movie years and years ago where you come home… Do you remember that movie? I think it was Gwyneth Paltrow was in it.

BUCK: You’re asking me about Gwyneth Paltrow on radio, Clay? Look at you.

CLAY: I bet Producer Ali knows exactly what I’m talking about.

BUCK: You’re a married man so you’ve been dragged to some Gwyneth Paltrow movies.

CLAY: No, this is pre-marriage. I think this is a 25-year-old movie. Gwyneth Paltrow might be the wrong one, but basically the idea is this woman misses a subway and the doors close right in front of her, and she doesn’t get home in time to see that her husband is having an affair. One world she does, the other one she doesn’t, and it’s all about how the world spirals differently as a result — and Gwyneth Paltrow may not have been the star. Somebody, some girl didn’t make the subway in New York.

BUCK: I think there was some random British actor that was in it with her. I’m kind of remembering it now. Does that sound right?

CLAY: Yeah, I think that’s right.

BUCK: Not a big name guy. Anyway.

CLAY: By the way, this is probably more than Sliding Doors has been mentioned in, like, a decade right, like, anywhere.

BUCK: I think it might be a single digit Rotten Tomato experience. I’m just gonna throw that out there.

CLAY: (laughs) The point is if we had not embraced lockdowns, if we had said basically, “Hey, guys, this is gonna be tough, but we’re just gonna have to ride through it. If you get sick, stay home,” we never overloaded hospitals — I really don’t think we ever would have. I don’t think any of the lockdown choices that we made, made any difference at all in the overall trajectory of the virus. I really believe this. And in the process we spent trillions of dollars to basically, I think, wreck our economy.

Really, I think we’ve done that. What if we had just said, Buck, “You know what? This is gonna suck, and we wish that this pandemic hadn’t arrived, but the only thing you can really do is if you’re super unhealthy, we would encourage you to limit your exposure to others. If you otherwise are basically under 60 and healthy, you’re probably gonna get this, but you’re probably gonna be fine,” what would the country look like?

BUCK: I made that argument publicly in April of 2020, and libs accused me of being Thanos.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Wanting everyone to die with the snap of my fingers.

CLAY: Actually, a funny liberal attack upon you, ’cause that also ties in with Marvel, as these things can go. Yes, it was funny. But I made the same kind of arguments, and I always said the same thing. And I did it from a sports perspective ’cause my argument was we have to find a way to get the sports book. And a lot of people said, “If we play sports all the athletes are gonna die!”

How many athletes have even had anything other than a sniffle, Buck, since we came back with sports? There’s been zero impact there, right? So I wish we can go back and actually see, because to your point, people will say, “Oh, it would have been worse if we hadn’t spent $5 trillion.” That’s what they’ll argue. I think they’re totally wrong. I think we basically picked the worst possible option.

BUCK: If you look at also at the excess mortality data now that we really have it — and there’s still a lot that has to go into finding out who died from versus with covid.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That’s a whole… That’s gonna be eye opening, folks, when that analysis is actually done. But remember they told us, “Oh, Trump, Trump is the reason all this bad stuff happening!” The U.K. basically had the same thing. Is that Trump’s fault? Italy, I think, was like a 13% increase. We are a 15% increase. The U.K. was a 15% increase, major European countries had very similar outcomes to the U.S. But remember the whole argument in 2020 was, “It’s ’cause Trump is so awful!” These people are lunatics.

CLAY: And if they didn’t have similar outcomes, it’s because their age range and health status is different. In other words, we got a lot of old, fat people who aren’t making good health decisions and overwhelmingly obesity was the number one controllable factor in terms of severity of covid.