Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 05-30-25_FRIDAY_7AM

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

Greg Roberts from Rogue Weather dot com and the outdoor report, David Bahnsen is on from the Dividend Cafe dot com site, how is it looking for the big beuatiful bill, winners, losers.

The Bill Meyer Show podcast is sponsored by Clouser Drilling. They've been leading the way in southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at ClouserDrilling.com. Here's Bill Meyer. Outdoor Report time. Greg Roberts at RogueWeather.com on the case here. 97? Do you think we could hit 100?

I'm out talking to this thing. Do you think it's going to hit 100 this week? I don't know. What does Mr. Outdoors think here Greg welcome I'm probably more on that 97 98 realm rather than 100 I just man I just don't think we're gonna get there okay at least not yet right. And this is certainly the warmest we will be for, you know, this to this point for this year. But you know, we all know warmer days lie ahead. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, you have to have

the, you have to have the appropriate sound effect when that happens though. Warmer days lie ahead. There you go. That's perfect. Okay, so the record for today, 103 set in 1986. So we are at the point now where pretty much every daily record we're going to see now till the later part of September Is going to be over a hundred degrees and you know in some cases well over 100 but Yeah, I just you know look at it how this looks and

You know you bring the question up and now obviously I'm kind of looking at everything. Yeah, max guidance today, meaning it has a 10% or less chance of reaching this temperature for Medford, 99. So what that tells me is we're probably that 97 looks far more likely. No, but you have to understand though, you have not put in the probability of the Doppler radar system up on Mount Ashland than changing the weather patterns and bringing in hot weather. You know that. Yeah, you know, it's going to do what it's going to do, but you start looking into all the different things. Hold on, Brad. Hold on, Greg, rather. I just want to say, people, don't call me about this. I'm having fun with Greg. Okay? Yeah. He is. All right. You know, what's interesting, I'm hearing a lot of talk about 97

and yet now I just pulled up the point specific forecast for Medford, they're showing 98. Okay, well a degree or two here and there. What yesterday did in terms of our high temperature, hang on one second, because well, great. Now I just lost the screen I was looking for here. Oh the joys of the computer sometimes whoops one wrong click and things go askew. I got to get back to the one I was looking for here because Yesterday we wound up with a high of 85 and projected high for yesterday, if I recall,

was going to be 89. So we wound up four degrees off where data expected us to be. But what that did, and this is going to be kind of an introduction to something coming up later, last night, the Rogues game, I've been doing, you know, the announcing at Rogues games, this is my fifth season now, last night may have been probably one of the top three nights since I've been doing Rogues games in terms of the weather, the temperature, the lack of wind. It just, it was a truly beautiful night at the ballpark. I mean, you couldn't ask to get better weather than what we had last night.

And we're going to encourage people to go to the games tonight. And we're going to give away some tickets at the end of this. So we'll get back to you on that in just a moment. Yeah, exactly. Now, we have something coming later, you know, so obviously, you know, when we look at what happened yesterday and we were four degrees lower than what wound up being the forecast, you know, we'll see how that works today, but I suspect that if the maximum, meaning 10% or less chance to see it, temperature is 99 per the guidance today for Medford. At a set expected high at 97, 98, I think we're probably more now, based off what happened yesterday,

looking likely to see 95-96. Okay we'll take that to the bank here right now and I guess we'll find out when we find out Greg. Hey if you are not into baseball tonight and maybe this particular weekend and you wanted to go do something else and what would be your outdoor pick here in southern Oregon and what's the coast going to look like too? Linda and I are heading out there for a day or two of R&R and of course you know the way we always look at going out to the coast is hey the coast is what the coast is right and if you go about expecting a certain thing you're bound to be disappointed most

of the time so I don't care about the weather. Well yeah most of the time but what we're looking at for the coast is a lot of beautiful weather there's definitely going to be some breezy to windy conditions over there. Small craft advisories are up for the near shore waters out 60 miles on the Oregon coast, but down in Northern California on their coast, they actually have a storm watch from 10 nautical miles out to 60 nautical miles out and they have a gale watch from basically the beaches to 10 nautical miles out. So really windy conditions coming up down there. It's not storm in the sense of

you know rain and thunder and things like that. It's more due to the winds that they expect to see. But the weather is going to be beautiful over there. However, this does create some challenging conditions for people going out and going fishing and obviously for the coastal waters off of Northern California, but still looks like we're going to be seeing some rough, bumpy conditions in the coastal waters on the southern Oregon coast. So if you get out in the mornings, meaning from first light through probably about 10 a.m., probably some pretty good fishing conditions

for the near shore waters in Oregon and then going out 16 nautical miles. But you get to the afternoon, those winds are gonna come up, seas are gonna get steep and choppy for the Oregon waters and then down in Northern California. Well, if we're getting up into gale and storm conditions, yeah you don't want to be out there on little small boat at all. Okay very good. Greg Roberts at rogueweather.com with me this morning

on the outdoor report. Greg, as far as outdoor activity here that's maybe not fishing, does anything come to mind? And I don't know, I've asked you how the the forest roads were looking in the higher elevations if most of those are still closed with snow that hasn't melted down yet in the spring warm-up here has that changed at all or we still I don't remember I know we discussed it I just don't remember when it was but the snowpack melted off very rapidly. And what that did was it opened up

the Forest Service roads, roads I thought might be impassable even until after the Memorial Day weekend. Now most roads were in pretty good shape and passable for the Memorial Day weekend. So right now, I don't think there's really any serious issues that I'm aware of with roads for people being able to get through. Now, you start hiking off out into the landscape, getting out in the backcountry, some of our wilderness areas. Yeah, there could

be some trails out there, especially on north-facing slopes with heavy timber, might still have snow that would create issues for hiking. But by and large, if you stay on south-facing, west-facing slopes, you should not have any kind of snow impact out there right now at all. I know that there were times that I would camp up at Wrangel. I've told you about Wrangel, you know your Wrangel Gap, and there is a mountain by that campsite that I would hike up to the very top of it called Red Mountain. I don't know if you're familiar with that or not, but it's the... and the Pacific Crest Trail goes all the way around that. And there are times, even in August,

I would go over the side of the hill on the on the north-facing slope of that and even in August I would sometimes find remnants of winter snow still up there even in August in Early August by the time it's late August usually gone. It's fascinating how long some of that stuff hangs on up there Yeah, if we don't get particularly hot summers, you know Red Mountain that north slope It definitely will do that. You've got those areas up there closer to Crater Lake outside of Union Creek and Prospect. You will have those patchy areas in that deep heavy timber on North Slopes will hold snow well into August. So yeah, a lot of it will depend

on exactly how hot a summer gets. And no, just because we're gonna be somewhere in the 90s today is not an immediate indicator that we're gonna have a long, hot summer. It's kind of interesting, couple of years ago, we had that incredibly hot June. We wound up tying our all-time record high in Medford on June 21st, and the exact year is escaping me, and everybody's like, oh no, this is going to be a brutally hot summer.

No, that wound up being the hottest part of the summer. We wound up progressively cooling down through July and August. Summer in terms of heat, and again, this has been since I've been the announcer for the Rogues, and now I'm going into season five. But it started hot, and then it progressively cooled. So you just never really know for sure how these, you know, things are going to work. Historically speaking though, when you average it all out, August is our hottest month of the year on average. So we got a ways to go here. Hey, before we take off here and give away the rogues tickets here, given your firefighting

experience here, I was really saddened when I'm reading about Dennis Dreyer, the man over in Merlin, we ended up dying. Did you read about that earlier this week? I got snippets of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there was an escaped open burn that he was by, and apparently he died while fighting that fire. Yes.

Now, we are done with open burning period right now, correct? No, actually not yet. That happens at 12.01 a.m. Sunday morning when fire season begins. Alright, Sunday it's all over. Okay. Yeah, so we still have a couple of days. There's basically the only section of the state right now where they have moved full-on into fire season and burning is banned is over in central Oregon in portions of Crook and Jefferson counties, and that's it. But when we hit 1201 a.m. on Sunday then Jackson and Josephine counties will automatically go to fire season, Klamath Lake go to fire season. So that shuts down, you know, burn barrels, debris, burns

in backyards. But you know I want to get back to the sad part about the guy he's out there he's monitoring his burns. Yeah, he's doing the right thing though, John. And I felt badly about, you know, what happened to him. It was horrible. You know, and for what happened, in case people were wondering, I'm just, you know, I'm gonna come right out and say it, he suffered a fatal heart attack because of the stress and fear and realizing his fire was getting away from him. Sadly, that does happen. I had two incidents when I was with Redmond Fire Department. Same kind of thing. Luckily, we did not lose the landowners

in either case, but they suffered heart attacks from the stress of the situation. You get the same thing in the winter, though, back in the Midwest. Yeah, digging out snow. In these winter storms, they'll say, well, the storm was responsible for, let's say, 10 deaths. Everybody just immediately assumes traffic accidents. Well well then you do a deep dive into the numbers and the statistics, and you find out in the ten deaths, four were traffic-related caused by the snow and ice, but six of them were people trying to clear snow out of their driveway and the sidewalk and their entry to their house, and they suffered heart attacks.

Well, that goes down as a weather-caused death Now let's think back to you know, poor Dennis Like I said Dennis he did suffer that heart attack like you mentioned and just just horrible about that You know something will always get us at some point in our life. You know, he was 76 not a young man You know, I'm 63. You're a little bit younger than than I am You know those sort of things. If you ever find yourself, God forbid, in that kind of a situation, are you better off just to call 911 and have the pros come out on it in many cases?

It's like, all right, got to fall on your sword and an open burn got away. What do you think? Yeah, absolutely you are. And you know, it kind of also goes without saying that you owe it to yourself to try and keep yourself in the best health possible. And if you know, and I do not know the gentleman's background, so you can't always speak to this because there are times that even very fit people will have these cardiac events and literally drop dead on the ground. And those can happen in any number of ways. You know, I'll never forget, I was doing medical standby at the end of the pole, pedal, paddle, the run portion, the event that happens in bend every year, and there was a fairly well-known runner that was doing that 10-mile run as his leg of the thing, and he hit the finish line in Drake Park, 52-year-old guy that anybody would

look at and go, my goodness, he's the picture of perfect health. And he hit that finish line and had a cardiac event and died literally right there at the finish line because they were never able to successfully bring his heartbeat back, you know, worked him in the ambulance all the way to St. Charles Hospital and Bend, which really isn't that far, and they were never able to bring him back around. So you don't always know what's happening with people internally, and sometimes yes, it's obvious. Sometimes people know they're taking statins, they've got nitro. Yeah, and you can't go too much over that.

From all accounts, just a great... Then you go out with a triggering event and then they have cardiac arrest. This is not all that uncommon, so it's just something to keep in mind. I know also the way men tend to approach this. This is different between... There are differences psychologically between men and women. That's the way it is. You know, we men, it's almost like a sense of pride. I don't need to call anybody. I don't need to call anybody, right? You know, I don't have to, I do this. I can handle this. I

can do this, right? And sometimes we would do better just to say, you know, this is, well, I have to go back to what Clint Eastwood was talking about. Man's got to know his limitations in that one Western movie, right? Without any question. Yeah. Back in the day, especially as modern EMS first started coming on the scene, heart attacks, official medical name, myocardial infarction, was definitely a very male thing. It happened far more

frequently with men than it did with women. Now we've moved on and well now the numbers have really kind of balanced out. We see a lot of women having heart attacks far more so now today than we used to see back in the 70s and into the 80s. All right. So on that note, we're going to wrap the outdoor report sponsored by Oregon Truck and Auto Authority on airway drive in Medford. And let's have the good stuff here because we've got some great baseball weather here

for the next few days. And you're going to be the announcer there so people will hear a familiar voice, right? So big home stretch here this weekend? Yeah, we literally, we're on a home stand right now through the 13th of July. Oh, good. We're gonna have some off days in between, but the Rogues do not have an official road trip

until the 14th of July. So a good long stretch for people to have the opportunity to get out, take in a ballgame. Of course tonight, fireworks night, we're going to be doing fireworks every Friday night now through the 4th of July. These shows time out at about 17 minutes long. And unless you're on the fireworks launch crew, you will not get closer to the fireworks going off anywhere here in southern Oregon. And on the 4th of July, if you really want an up close experience with fireworks, get tickets for the Rogues game.

You get a great baseball game and then you're going to get as close as you can get to fireworks without, like I said, being on the launch crew. Well that starts tonight, and we do those every Friday night through 4th of July, and we always get huge crowds for fireworks night. So if you're going to win the tickets we're about to give away, Friday nights could be very tough, but there are plenty of other opportunities to be able to use these tickets and definitely hope people get out and come take in a game because it's going to be a great time that a thing you do with your family you're going to remember the rest of your life. All right, what we're going to do then is call our 9, 10, and 11. We're going to give away a pair of tickets. Now these are general

admission tickets. Are they good for Friday nights or any other time? Yeah, no, they're good. Well, honestly, the only time they wouldn't be good is on Sundays because on a Sunday and we do have a Sunday game this weekend starting at 1.05, general admission is free. Okay, even better. Greg, have a great weekend. It's going to be a great time to be playing baseball and good luck to the Rogues. Okay, we'll have you back next Friday.

Alright, see you then. Greg Roberts at Road Weather. 770-5633. Call her 9, 10, and 11. You get a pair of admission tickets and go out and watch some baseball. Decompress a little bit this weekend. Good to do that. William is one of millions of Americans who uses good RX to save on the cost of their prescriptions. My oldest daughter, Camilla, two days old, she had the hat of a... You know, we got your truck, your SUV, your certified pre-owned, your EV, and of course your savings. 60-month of payments to 1792 for 1,000 Finance and approved credit with four vote of Finance. Good morning. This is News Talk 1063 KMED, and you're waking up with the Bill Meyers show. Well, I'll tell you those baseball tickets went fast for the Medford Rogues. Darren Marr, Joanne Eldridge, Kevin Keating all winning a pair. We'll give away some more probably when I get back from vacation on Wednesday because

then you'll be wanting to do some more fun. Okay. But thank you so much for listening. I'll tell you. They're looking outside, they're knowing it's going to be great baseball weekend. That's for sure. David Bonson joins me right now. And David Bonson is the founder and managing partner and chief investment officer of the

Bonson Group. And we're going to talk about the big, beautiful bill and what I really like about the Bonson Group and also his Dividend Cafe newsletter. And by the way, David, welcome to the show. You put out the Dividend Cafe every day, every weekday, I think is when you do that. Is that the case? Yeah, so we do a big commentary every Friday,

but there's a daily commentary as well, Monday through Thursday. And what you really try to do is strip the political rhetoric out of what's happening with money and investment. And I appreciate that because is it hard to do anything, any kind of reporting or commentary without getting into the hot and bothersome political, whether from the right, left or elsewhere? What are you thinking? Well, it is hard and also because I myself have plenty of political opinions and political

worldview but when it comes to managing money, you have to deal with what is and not what various people believe ought to be. And a lot of times the politics, we mix the two things up. We confuse what we want to be with what we think is, and it leads to people that are so politicized and so emotional, just sort of assuming, I hate Trump so much, it means that the economy will be bad because of Trump. Or I love Obama so much, it means the economy will be good because of all these different things.

It's not good economic analysis. And so we try to parse the things out the best we can. So how would you analyze the way things are at the moment? I know reports come out. And of course'm always looking at scants at government numbers and reports but yet they're the only ones we get a lot of times and they're saying that in that price inflation 2.1 percent that report came out this morning. No doubt you'll talk about it on Dividend Cafe a little bit later but if you were you know do you believe that? I guess now energy costs are certainly a little less on the gasoline things.

I'm not actually seeing prices going down though. Is that a fair assessment or just we're talking about the rate of increase? Here's the problem. I think it's lower than that. You do? And you're probably thinking it might be higher, but the issue is that what we're talking about to begin with is a nearly impossible thing to do. Inflation is trying to measure something

called the aggregate price level. Right. Okay, imagine trying to measure the weather for 50 states and thousands of counties all at once. Impossible task for you to give an overall view, right? Yes, and so when people say, oh look, I just went to the restaurants and it was more expensive. You could say

okay that doesn't feel like prices are coming down. But then when you look to other components and measure it all together and then they have to weigh what these things represent. So if insurance went down two percent and then eggs

went up 1% who's to say what percentage of one's wallet. Eggs and insurance are so there's just a lot of variability around it. The reason why I think inflation right now meaning you're over a year. Is lower is that rent is

a big part of people's expenditures. And the average cost of shelter had been going up so dramatically. 2020, 2021, 2022, it has very much slowed. And right now there has been actual deflation in some of that, and that's not getting measured in the numbers yet. Okay. So that's sort of a lagging indicator of sorts that comes in later on? Exactly. yes. Should we only be paying attention to revisions?

Sometimes I wonder about this because you'll see often that a number comes out of the federal government, and they're talking about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, and by the way, we revised the numbers from the last quarter, that sort of thing. Maybe the revisions are what we should be paying attention to instead of the headlines, What do you think? Well I think it's both. I mean I don't think that there is a big conspiracy behind the

revisions. I think that there's reasons for them at times. And by the way, it's totally bipartisan. Oh I know. There are massive revisions that might take place in the way jobs are measured. But people say, okay, well the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts in the way jobs are measured- but like people fail cable the the bureau labor statistics without the monthly jobs numbers and then they'll be

revisions in later months. Every revision for good reason. But you know it doesn't have that is the weekly jobless claims. That doesn't come from the federal government. It comes from the state. Individual states that are just

simply reporting on who is filing for unemployment. Those numbers don't lie. And so I view it as an economist, I have to do all the above and then not rely on one data point to inform me, use the body of evidence together to form a narrative. Now looking of unemployment, Oregon as an example, we're seeing a tick-up in the unemployment issues out here. I'm wondering if that is more of a west coast phenomenon than perhaps over around the rest of the country. No, I think it is not just west coast, I think it's specific to certain sectors and where

tariff impact has been more severe. So for example, certain places reliant on construction are doing worse. Others that have been more reliant on capital coming in have done a little better. There's been a little increase in some of the venture capital activity in, say, San Francisco. But I think that where you're likely to see a little impact in the months ahead are things related to construction, steel, aluminum, lumber.

There's been a little downward tick on job hiring there. Speaking of steel, it does appear that Nippon Steel is going to be now getting involved with the US Steel, not actually a purchase. What was the difference? It's a full purchase. Oh, it is a full purchase. Nothing changed whatsoever. The deal that was originally rejected is the deal they're accepting.

The only difference is they're now calling it an investment instead of a purchase, but it is a purchase. Is that just political rhetoric, just a name change? Really? I think it's dishonest but yes. Oh okay. Well you know that's just the way this works here. Now I didn't actually have a problem. I didn't have a problem with Nippon Steel doing this in the first place because I have a feeling that Nippon Steel is actually going to be good for U.S. Steel. Nippon Steel is actually more of a leader in this, and they're talking about investing a lot in American plants,

and that can only be good. And I never understood why there was such resistance to it in the first place, David, do you? It was an utter and complete travesty, a joke that people made a big deal of this, that the Biden administration blocked it, that the Trump administration initially blocked it was an outrage.

And that they would pretend it was done for national security reasons is one of the most dishonest things I've ever seen. You have a company from an ally nation, Japan is an ally of the United States. We sell them billions of dollars of missiles, and then we're supposed to pretend that them. Owning a plant that is in Pennsylvania.

And that they already have a plant in West Virginia and Kentucky. And we're supposed to pretend it's the national security risk. And they could not find American company to impute it to impute in new capital we have comfort

countries want to put capital in our country, hiring US workers, and we were going to deny it. It was outrageous. Yeah. And I know that the workers were just like all for this. It's like, come on in. You know, they were... Of course.

It's not 1982 again. I remember in the Reagan administration when there was the whole thing, China is going to, or not China, Japan is going to take us all over. I don't know if you're old enough to remember those conversations back then, David. Oh, I remember it all well. And I also remember what happened after those predictions. Japan went 30 years not growing at all, and we went 30 years doubling our economy. So I guess it worked out pretty well for us.

Economist David Bonson with me of the Bonson Group here. David, let's talk about the big beautiful bill here and you know there's like 1,100 pages in there and I've read some of it. One of the things that I'm not real happy about this is absolutely no regulation of AI, artificial intelligence at all for the next 10 years. I think there could be an issue there. Maybe you'll disagree with me on that, but who do you think are the winners and losers out of this overall? Well look, I don't disagree with you about having an AI bill. I don't know why that would need to be in this though. This is a budget reconciliation bill. This should be cutting spending and

further putting reform on our tax code. That's what the purpose of it's supposed to be. Now I understand the way sausage is made in Washington DC is when you get an open season for a bill and you have your votes, everybody wants their pound of flesh to go put various pork in it or pet interest in it. But there can be really good things that should happen legislatively that I still don't think should be in this bill. Because if it's a good thing that should happen legislatively that I still don't think should be in this bill, because if it's a good thing that should happen, then go pass a gosh darn law.

That's your job as a congressman or woman. And so the fact that Congress refuses to act like Congress is not our problem. This bill should be cutting spending and it should be reforming the tax code. And there's things in it I like and there's things in it I don't like. Why is it so difficult to cut spending? I'm still trying to figure out why there's such a push to make the military. I didn't think that the military was necessarily underspent upon before this big, beautiful bill, and I'm kind of questioning why we're wanting to do this now.

Do you have a financiers look at this? I do. Look, to be honest with you, of all the things government spends money on, the one thing that animates me the least, the one thing that bothers me the least, is the military. At least that's the one thing I believe is a legitimate function of the government. And I think that they lack some modernization that will be necessary in cyber military and in keeping up with fleets necessary around the world to become protected against China. That part I don't have a lot to say on the weeds of it, but I can see why there, if you're going to have a knob turn up I'd rather spend an extra 100 billion on the military than 100 billion on giving people clean energy tax credits. Agreed. Total agreement on that one. The clean energy tax credits. Now is that mostly dead now? Is most of that been stripped

out according to your reading of what's going on? Or are we still going to be living with continuing writing hot checks so that more virtue signaling wealthier people are able to get an electric car cheaper? Yeah, no, there's still some of it in there. Some of it phases out. A lot of the clean energy tax credit is not for people to go get their $7,500 credit to go buy a Tesla. It's more the Biden administration's bill

that was hundreds of billions of incentives to go build clean energy plants and basically just give corporate welfare to people like the next cylindras of the world. And so a lot of those things have been addressed. They didn't address it as aggressively as they wanted, but that's one of the areas that some of the fiscal hawks in the House, like Chip Roy, were able to get a little bit extra out of in the end.

We'll see what the Senate does. All right. As far as the tax bill itself, how would you evaluate what it is? We don't know what's going to come out of the Senate at this point, but who wins? Who wins maybe not so much And maybe who's on the downside of this? Well, you're right. We do need to see what happens in the Senate. But my own view is that they are basically just extending the tax rates as they were before. So those aren't

tax cuts. They're just the same we've already had. And then if you have an LLC or escort like a family business, a small business, a service business, they had a loophole called the P-TET that allowed you to deduct your state income tax through your business and they're getting rid of that. So some small business owners are going to see a tax increase. And then other than that, the tax side is really not the biggest part of this bill. Extending the Trump tax cuts was always going to happen. There was no appetite to see those tax rates go up. But they were acting as if somehow- Like partisan support.

But they were acting as if somehow there was a cost to this because I guess they were projecting that it was just going to be temporary. You know, is that the way- Well, it was temporary. It was past as temporary, but every single time we've done it, two Democrats have done it, two Republicans have done it, they've always extended it. And so it's just gamesmanship. It's total complete dishonesty.

Now, a lot of people write me because they were concerned about the social security tax cuts, not taxing that. And I would try to explain, and I probably do it inelegantly, there was a reason they couldn't do it and they had to put a deduction in. Could you help us understand that? I think you're referring to the senior Social Security. The reason they couldn't do it is it would cost trillions of dollars. There was no way they were ever going to do it. And the bottom line is that what he did is add a four thousand dollars

standard deduction for anyone over the age of sixty five. So just round math is basically just giving a thousand bucks to fifteen hundred bucks to every person over sixty five okay I think it's just outrageous now David what about the state and

local tax deductions here Oregon is a relatively high income tax state here. And I think it's just outrageous. Now, David, what about the state and local tax deductions here? Oregon is a relatively high income tax state here. And what is your opinion as a money guy and an economist here? I always hear people talk about, well, having state and local tax deductions that benefits these liberal states like Oregon is, that have these higher tax rates here. And the way I'm looking at this is that I never got this idea of taxing a tax, taxing money that you didn't have

that was vacuumed out of you immediately and the federal government would tax you on that and call it income. And I argue back and forth on this kind of stuff, but what do you think? Yeah, so that I understand what you're saying, but that's not what they do. All they do is tax on income and so the federal government taxes on income and the states tax on income and some states have a zero tax and then my states California and New York have a 13% tax, your state Oregon has a 10% tax. Right. So the question is if two people make the same amount of money, one in South Dakota, one in New York, should they be paying massively different federal taxes?

And my answer is no. So even though my taxes went up huge after the Trump tax cut, I still, on a matter of principle, vehemently oppose the state and local tax deduction based on equal protection under the law. Okay. So that's your point of view. And you see, I'm looking at that though, is that to tax my income tax never made sense to me though, because I've already...

But you're not taxing income tax. You're only taxing what you actually made. There's no difference. People make X and then they're getting taxed what you actually made. There's no difference. People make X and then they're getting taxed on what they made. You don't get taxed on the tax. Well, no, you're not getting taxed on the tax, brother. On the other hand, that tax is not income. It was taken away from income. See what I'm getting at? That's what I'm getting at. Well, I do, but then there's a circularity. Why wouldn't the state say the same thing? So what we're dealing with is two different taxes, and they're two unrelated

taxes. So we're asking one constituent to suffer from the benefit of another constituent god. So you're basically a subsidy, and that's why I'm against it. All right. Well, quickly shift to the tariff situation. President Trump has had trouble in the courts here with the tariff issue. And he lost in the International Trade Court the other day. But apparently he's going to be allowed to keep those tariffs going right now. Good thing, bad thing, we don't know. What do you think? Well, a lot of them a lot of them aren't going anyways because he had already waived them And and some of them are still there. And so, you know, I mean obviously the court made the right ruling Nobody could possibly believe that these things represent an economic emergency that warrants this kind of intervention But you know the challenge is it took away some of the president's leverage

as he's trying to negotiate some of these different deals. And what had they'll end up doing for some of them is switching to a different rationale. It doesn't affect steel, aluminum or auto tariffs because those are done under a different disingenuous rationale which is section 232 the national security claim. So like we talked about before with nip and steal, I'm always very, very upset when people claim something is done for national security reasons because it becomes a boy who cried wolf. If everything is a national security rationale, then nothing is a national security rationale.

Nobody really believes that t-shirts in Vietnam are a national security rationale. Nobody really believes that t-shirts in Vietnam are a national security rationale, so to pretend otherwise just undermines our national security legitimacy. But the Trump administration's not that worried about this because they got a state to keep the tariffs on while they try to negotiate through this. There's some other court losses they're probably going to face going forward. And that part doesn't bother me a lot because it's not exactly ambiguous in the Constitution. The power to tax lies with Congress. And so if the power the power to set tariffs is largely with Congress, if Congress wants President

Trump to be doing it, ultimately they're going to have to pass some legislation to do that? That's the way our constitution is written, yes. Okay, very good. Absolutely. And David, how can people get your Dividend Cafe and find out more about you? I always appreciate the talk. Yeah. Oh, I appreciate you saying that.

It's DividendCafe.com. It's all completely free. They can sign up at DividendCafe.com, weekly investment writing, economic commentary. Some of it they'll agree with, some of it they won't, but I promise they'll always be honest. Well, I appreciate your honest take on it and trying to keep the political lens out of it because it's hard to find it, all right? And it's once again, dividendcafe.com. Thanks David, be well, take care. Thanks so much, appreciate it.

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