Shuffling Biden Shakes Hands with Man Who Isn’t There As Economy Crumbles

BUCK: Biden is shuffling around. What, he had to get led to his seat in the video and clapped for no reason?

CLAY: Yeah, Buck, there’s a viral video. He’s in Israel right now, and he’s done this thing where he finishes speaking a couple of times now and he turns and he, like, pantomimes as if he’s supposed to be shaking hands with someone and there’s no one else there. In this clip, which I tweeted out — you can go watch it @ClayTravis on Twitter — he not only turns and appears to think that he’s shaking hands with someone who isn’t there.

The Israeli official that is with him has to come over and sort of take him by the elbow and lead him to where he needs to be seated, and it looks like something that you would see… He’s also walking uncomfortably, very gingerly on the stage. It looks like something that you would see happen in a nursing home, and I’m sure Biden right now, Buck, is worse because he probably hasn’t slept very much for that travel to Israel. But I watch it and I think, “How can we do 30 more months of this?”

BUCK: And he had his schedule truncated. They limited the amount of time he was gonna spend doing this because they know that he’s… Folks, he’s running out of gas, okay? He’s running out of energy day in and day out, and on the one hand I think the press is happy because all foreign reporting in particular, people read it and they go, “Okay, we’re not there.” Whatever Reuters, whatever the AP and the New York Times are writing tensd to be the perception of what’s going on overseas.

I think we’re at a point right now where, because the price of gas is so high, because inflation is so high, because everyone’s… You know, worker wages are down and you look at all these economic factors that are really concerning, the media’s happy to have Biden on the world stage, right? Biden astride the globe — kind of shuffling though, taking tiny little steps and hoping that he doesn’t fall down — because at least that’s not the domestic front where he’s losing so much ground politically.

But I also think this is reminding people, we got some big problems on the world stage, and we’ve got Mr. Magoo, Biden here, wandering around as the commander-in-chief who has a long history of failure. On the one hand, you have Iran trying to get nuclear weapons. I mean, I know they say, “Oh, is that really what’s going on?” They just enriched to 20% with new centrifuges at the Fordow nuclear plant. That was reported just a few days ago.

So Iran’s enrichment’s going up. Iran getting nukes could very well happen on Biden’s watch, Clay. It’s very, very possible, very likely situation, I think, now. The war in Ukraine is going badly, and he is begging the Saudis to pump more oil. All of the three major issues… Middle East, peace instability, Iran nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabian oil, and Russia-Ukraine, these are not issues you want Joe Biden handling.

CLAY: No. And, Buck, we’re simultaneously now talking in the wake of that 9.1% inflation report yesterday that we talked so much about on the show. They’re now talking about a one-point basis point rise. A three quarter-point basis point rise at the Fed meeting, which is gonna happen in a couple weeks — a three quarter-point raise — was the highest since 1994. And the numbers were so bad in that 9.1% report that they’re talking about a full one-point interest raise the likes of which, frankly, most of us haven’t seen in our lives. And that is going to further torpedo the economy and lead us even more into a recession.

BUCK: It’s guaranteed recession.

CLAY: I feel like you’re right.

BUCK: That 1% is… I think we’re already probably close to a recession already.

CLAY: I think we’re in one now.

BUCK: Yeah. But you raise the interest rate one point, you are — and look, at some level there are people who are trying to be honest about this, I think, who understand these mechanisms. They’re saying, “We gotta take the medicine now. We gotta take the pain now.” Some of us were warning about this situation that we are heading into that we’re just seeing the beginnings of when it came to covid lockdown, when it came to the stimulus payment on the PPP and all these things. All of the madness. We spent, what was it, $6 trillion additionally in the federal budget — roughly $6 trillion — in about a two-year period.

CLAY: Yep.

BUCK: That’s completely insane, folks. And some of us were saying it was insane the whole time. I have never been piled on as much in my life as when I said publicly that we should have reopened for business and gone about our lives in April of 2020.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: In time for Easter. Remember they were thinking about that?

CLAY: Yeah, I remember.

BUCK: Some of us were telling people it turns out if you’re going to truly run an experiment where you’re just gonna print money, and see the outer limits of what that will do to your currency, you find out long and hard. And we’re about to find out long and hard. That’s the problem.

CLAY: Biden likes to brag about the economic recovery, “the Biden Boom” they tried to call it before everything fell apart. We still, Buck, don’t have the same number of people working today as we did in February of 2020. For all of the talk about “recovery,” we still have fewer people out there working than we had in February of 2020, after over two years, because these lockdowns were the most disastrous decision that we could have possibly made at all. And there still hasn’t really been anyone who’s had to pay the consequences for these awful decisions.

BUCK: I’m also curious about the unemployment rate. There are a lot of things that are going on that don’t really seem to make a whole lot sense, Clay, that are troubling indicators of the economy, I think. One is everyone is gonna start feeling this in their communities — in a lot of communities, I should say — there’s a housing shortage. And not just in places that are used to housing shortages, which are New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, a number of other major cities.

But it’s spreading to places that are usually thought of as having much better housing supply. Phoenix, Arizona, for example, lots of different places. In Florida, but I think that’s as a result of the boom and people moving there. But nationwide you’re seeing more and more communities that aren’t used to this. Why are there not…? There’s not enough housing being built to keep up with population and with demand. That’s one thing that’s interesting. The unemployment rate, what is it, since that came out… What is it?

CLAY: It’s 3.6%, I think.

BUCK: Its 3.6%, right? We have an unemployment rate of 3.6%, and yet we have a lot of businesses still saying that they can’t find workers willing to do the jobs that they have and we have people saying the economy isn’t working for them, isn’t going well. And yet we’re told that the unemployment rate is so very low, right? So you have millions and millions of open jobs —

CLAY: 11 million open jobs.

BUCK: — and a 3.6% unemployment rate. Why aren’t wages rising? What should happen is, “Okay. You need someone to do the job? Wages have to rise.” Why aren’t wages rising? So there’s some dysfunction in the economy that I haven’t heard good explanations for.

CLAY: I think everybody who wants to work is working. The problem is the share of working-age population is actually down pretty substantial compared to February of 2020. A lot of people just are choosing not to even be seeking jobs. They don’t want to work.

BUCK: Yeah, ’cause usually an unemployment figure that’s really low is cause for celebration. Everybody knows this unemployment figure isn’t telling us that we’ve got some great economy that we should be all so thankful for. Everyone feels the economy is not what it should be right now.