Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 09-26-25_FRIDAY_7AM

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

Outdoor report is on with Greg Roberts from Rogue Weather Dot Com, talking the economy and tariffs and what is going on with Ken Rapoza from Coalition for a Prosperous America

The Bill Myers Show podcast is sponsored by Klausur drilling. They've been leading the way in Southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at Klausor drilling.com. Beautiful feel to the day. Hope it's going to be a great weekend for you. Well, it'll be a better weekend for us than it is for James Comey, right? Given the indictment. The indictment finally happened.

I guess there were only a couple of days before he could actually do his, before the statute of limitations ended up running out, and then they couldn't have filed this. I'll be curious to see where this goes. Then what about James Ray, too? Hmm. Oh, well, we'll have conversation certainly about that on Find Your Phone Friday. Mr. Outdoors will be joining me here in a couple of minutes after the Hannity update,

and that's always a great talk. We'll talk about all the great places you should be headed to this weekend as we start heading into a cooler and rainier time. And I guess we're going to have some hunting seasons that'll start hitting pretty soon, too. gold and silver still just going outstandingly higher went a little parabolic the other day I haven't checked the price of it this morning but it's still performing its job which is especially gold protecting the value of your wealth during times of increasing dollar devaluation dollars down 10 12 percent gold up 23 24 25 percent sort of her response

there's also other reasons for it to industrial and central bank buying and and and Basically, people looking for a hedge against the collapse of paper promises, just saying, yep, I know that the stocks are at it. It's interesting to be in a time when stocks are at an all-time high, and gold is rallying at that same point, too. But there are a lot of different reasons for it. It's not just the dollar and everything else, okay? So when you're ready to buy and or sell, either way, talk to the recognized experts about this. It's Jay Austin and Company, gold and silver buyers in Ashland. It's 1632, Ashland Street in Ashland, 6th and G in downtown Grants Pass.

By the way, they've gone to those gold and silver shows, those road shows, and they've been doing the price shopping. Don't fall for the siren song of, hey, we're going to have a gold show. We're going to be in this place over the weekend here. Bring your stuff. Jay Austin pays more, okay? Deal whether you recognize local experts. Jay Austenbrokers.com, fortune reserve.com.

The recognized experts, Jay Austin. Braistorming continues at the... Here's Bill Meyer. Great having you here. 12 minutes after 7, yet someone else who is having a better day than James Comey, and then is Mr. Outdoors. Greg Roberts over at rogueweather.com. The Outdoor Report, sponsored by Oregon Truck and Auto Authority on airway driving metric.

Greg, welcome back. And I guess really at this point, we're just talking about to enjoy this weekend, get set for real fall, for real rain, and then deer season, right? pretty much what we're talking about. Yeah, that pretty much was it in a nutshell, because that's exactly what the next week looks like. We've got a very pleasant, sunny weekend coming up. Temperatures tomorrow right now look like we might be upper 80s,

pushing towards 90 here in Medford and Grants Pass, so warmer than average for sure, but nothing I would necessarily call hot. and then Sunday night, right on cue, the clouds move in, and so does the chance of rain, and then that's going to linger through at least Thursday of next week. And then this time, next week, we're going to be talking about the start of the Oregon deer rifle seasons, which are a week from tomorrow. Okay.

What could you say, do we know, is the population looking pretty good of deer right here in Southern Oregon and Northern California. I know that when it comes to lawnmower thing, you know, Captain Bill's always talking about lack of, that we've never really restored our populations. Do you know? It's curious. Well, okay, it's kind of a two-part thing.

Okay. It is west of the Cascades and talking about the blacktail deer populations, which look pretty good. They are definitely different in terms of where you find them than what, you know, people historically became used to, you know, and obviously the arrival of wolves here changed where you find the deer at, especially, you know, if you want to be a hunter, things definitely have changed. There is no two ways around that. We've got more deer in our cities than we've ever seen before, and a big part of that is predator escapement, not just

wolves obviously but cougar you know bear bobcat all the rest well pretty much everything except the wolves to this point we'll definitely move into our cities just fine to go where the deer have gone to and then they find other things readily available so we have cougar we have bobcat and yes we even have bears in every single city um in jackson and josephine counties and down in in Northern California. When you go east of the Cascades and you look at the mule deer situation, that, however, is definitely not a good picture. And mule deer herds overall continue to decline. And it is not just due to wolves. It is due to a lot of things. But what really triggered that was that horrific winter die-off that we had in the winter of 92 and 93.

that they never recovered from. And then east of the Cascades, especially in central Oregon, you had a ton of habitat loss, both types, summer and winter. People kept harassing them on the winter ranges. And then you had the predator situation, starting first with the cats and then adding the wolves coming in. and it just has decimated our mule deer herds east of the cascades. The alarming part about that, I haven't seen or talked to anybody that has any idea on how they're truly going to correct that.

Yeah, that's what I was wondering, Greg, if it could be something where, you know, a relaxation of hunting on the predators, the apex predators, maybe something like that. but Oregon doesn't seem to want to want to do that, does it? Dog hunting for the cougars. Right. And you allow some kind of a hunting season on wolves, which even then hunting for wolves is not nearly as successful as everybody think it's going to be because all the people who think it's going to be, I will guarantee you 99.9% of them have never attempted to hunt for a wolf. but if somebody who has spent a lot of time in the pursuit of hunting coyotes, once you flip it and you start hunting them and they're very well aware you're hunting them, it's not nearly as easy a process as it sounds. And when you don't allow hunting of cougars with dogs, you essentially have eliminated hunting with cougars.

It's like Oregon wants to do away with firearms, but they're smart enough. in Salem to realize, well, we can't just come right out and say that why the peasants would revolt. What they do is they pass a lot of laws, and now you get good guys' guns closing their doors. Although I have heard rumors that they are, it's a hope that they will reopen shortly, but there is a lot of political risk, I would imagine, in that business right now. There is a lot of political risk, and honestly, I don't blame Dan for doing what he did. I would probably be fed up with the situation too and go, well, I can go enjoy my life in much better ways than having the constant pressure of the state of Oregon wanting to put me out

of business. Yeah, it does seem that way. Yeah. Well, it's almost like there's this, when it comes to wildlife, this ethos in the state of Oregoners or this general feeling of like it's like a Disney cartoon, you know? Right. And you nailed that. You couldn't have said that any better because from the people on the outside, when you read the kind of statements and you read the things they're sending to Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, and I have seen it both from the agency and from state representatives, it's like, are you kidding me? It looks like everything they know about the natural world either came from Disney or came from Looney Tune cartoons.

I'm not kidding you. Oh, boy. Yeah, and they vote, and they vote for dog bans on hunting. Not only do they vote, the majority of those people get themselves very well organized. They're very well funded, and they can go for the best attorneys, and whatever they don't automatically get Salem to do because of shared ideological belief, then they get lawsuits, and they push it in that way. Okay, fair enough. Well, I'm talking with Mr. Outdoors right now, and kind of getting off onto the 100. I think Neil, given that we have the deer season, which is going to be starting a week from now. Let me grab a call here. Did you want to talk with Mr. Outdoors?

Hi. Go ahead. You're on Greg Roberts. Who's this? Hey, this is Scott from EP, professional driver. How are you doing, Greg? I'm good, Scott. How are you?

Not bad. Hey, I wanted to talk about it if you haven't already talked about it, the relic hominoids that are out in the woods, too. Yeah, they're definitely out there. There is no question about that. Yeah, we're probably not going to be doing a focus on the relic hominids today, though, if that's okay. All right, Scott? Okay, black bear identification in those areas.

Be super careful, right, Greg? Yeah, without any question, you know, where I go to have my relic commentant encounters is absolutely loaded with bears. seeing bears is not any great surprise when I'm out there actually seeking out the Relic Commit and I should add that my location that wound up being my single best this year for encounters with Relic Commitids will probably be seeing snow and very likely accumulating snow arriving next week because snow levels are going to be getting down in that 6,000 to 7,000 foot range

For normal people, also will include Crater Lake National Park and the Rim Village area. All right, let me grab another one here. Mr. Outdoors, we're happy to take your calls. Good morning. Who's this? Welcome. Good morning, Bill. Jim, up in Grands Pass.

Hey, Jim. You're on with Greg Roberts. Yes, I wanted to mention to Greg that there's a sequence to, I fully agree. I was a housman for several decades, and you've got to take that. the wolves out first before you can start seriously running dogs on lions, because the wolves will come to a tree and kill the dogs. In fact, they'll kill dogs. Yeah, that definitely, that's a big scene.

Yep. Yeah. And a lot of houndsmen have just thrown in the towel because the wolves are just so, especially on this west side. It's terrible. And so that has to be dealt with as far as I'm concerned. Well, if you want to look at just a $1,000 area. Okay, hey, Jim, hey, guys, hold on, hold on.

Eastern Oregon. All right. Hey, Greg, can you hear me? Sometimes I'm trying to. No, I can. Okay, all right, yeah. Just try to break in there and interject, keep things moving. Thanks for the call, Jim.

The point is, though, you're on the Wolf Committee. Are you still on the Wolf Committee? No. I signed that because of the head of Jackson County Health, which the Wolf Committee is a committee of Jackson County Health. Really? Don't ask me why. But, yeah, I totally resigned because of her and also ODF&W just would not release any information to the Wolf Committee beyond what they thought. They felt we should know.

Oh. And we had questions. There are people who are still on that committee for various reasons that the biggest complaint I am still hearing is the main complaint I had about ODF and W just flat withholding information. They just will not provide any. When you say withholding information, is it withholding information that would help with, you know, learning to live with the wolves or trying to find a way to control the ones that are the... came down to the fact of being able to know exactly how many we had at any given time

that they were aware of and where they might be, because they said, no, no, you're just there to cut checks basically to people who lost livestock. And because of the nature of your committee, then we'll come to you with money requests that we can't get out of Salem for things we want. and then you're going to fund it because it's, quote, unquote, non-lethal deterrence. Oh, okay. So beyond that, they don't want you knowing or being aware of anything else. You're just supposed to show up at the meetings and go, oh, well, Jim Smith lost five cows to wolves up at prospect.

So, yeah, let's just make sure his application to get his reimbursement is done correctly and send it in. So in reality, you only need one Wolf Committee meeting a year to do that, and they're putting on multiples, and it really becomes the same old dog and pony show, and it's all about the various agencies showing up and trying to justify why they should be getting money out of the Jackson County Wolf Committee that they can't get directly from Salem or D.C. Okay, well, I'm starting to understand the lay of that political landscape at this point. In other words, Jackson County Wolf Committee was almost like, gee, sort of like your typical

school board, which is now being denuded to the point where it's just rubber-stamping the Oregon Department of Education. Got it. Pretty much. All right. All right. Hey, I'm glad to understand a little bit of that. Okay, let's get off the wolf here.

I didn't mean to detour too much in this one. So anyway, but that's the reality what we're talking about when it comes to a deer season coming up next week. Now then, what about fishing for this weekend as we're going into. a wetter, cooler time. Is that going to be helping to increase the bite? What's you? Where would you go? Yeah, no, the fishing definitely this weekend is going to be great because we're going to have these nice sunny skies. It'll be great for us because, well, the sunny skies, it also will be great because believe me, the fish probably know even better than us what's coming,

and they're really on a feeding binge right now to get loaded up for winter. And You know, you watch these social media posts from the various resorts. You see the post from Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Online talking about fishing success. And no surprise to me, every bit of that information is indicating that trout fishing is really good right now without any question. With the storms coming in, do we expect that the ocean conditions are definitely going to be, switching into more of a winter mode situation. So rougher waters, but for right now, today, tomorrow, for sure, you will be able to get out. Bottom fishing is great.

Crabbing is great right now, especially in the estuaries and the bays, because for the moment, we don't have a lot of flow down the river. That's right. That's going to change next week, and crabbing success is definitely going to decrease in the bays and estuaries through the course of next week over at the ocean as all that fresh water comes rushing down the rivers and causes salinity decrease and the crabs will go marching back out to the ocean to get to conditions they will find more favorable to them. All right, great. Another question I have here is the rain that is coming going to be dumping

onto the moon complex down there by Paradise Lodge? Without any question. Good. Total extinguishment? I don't know. We're going to wind up and see how that goes, but absolutely there's going to be rain hitting the moon complex. That will greatly assist, but we will be expecting to see a break in the rain, and then when the break in the rain develops, we're probably going to have a better idea on what's going to happen with those fires. With that rain coming in and looking at the

projected amounts right now, we may get into a situation where, fire season will be declared over in Douglas, in Coos, in Curry counties, but it will still be going on, probably at a reduced level, moderate or low in Jackson and Josephine counties. I don't have a lot of certainty yet in this being a season-ending event for, you know, fire. anywhere in Jackson and Josephine counties, but you get out of Jackson and Josephine counties in areas west of the Cascades, it likely and very probably will be,

especially the further north you get. All right. Hey, great. We will talk with you again next week, and I hope you have a great weekend, decompressed a little bit. News is still continued to be weird and woolly and all the rest of it here.

Get out in Mother Nature, right? Let's do that. And here's the funny thing. The biggest source of news that we did have in this house was because of our Hulu's subscription, which we canceled the second ABC slash Disney put Kimmel back on the air because Hulu and some other streaming services are owned by Disney, and we went, that's it, we're done, and disconnected from it. Oh, no, but he cried.

He apologized. No, he did not apologize. He never apologized for the. a lie. He said he made light of it, and he absolutely did not. I know. I know. I'm just having fun with you, Greg. You know that. Yeah. I just kind of like, you know, throw you a softball, right? Here we go. Greg, I'll talk to you next week. You'd be well over at Rogue Weather. Of course, you'll keep people up on the changing conditions as that occurs, okay? Thanks so much. Yeah, we're going to, we're going to be doing lives for sure coming up. I'll be doing one later

today. We'll definitely be doing them as we go through the event next week and get a better feel for exactly how much rain we're getting and where and what the fire season situation will be as a result here in Jackson and Josephine County. And I'm looking forward to the rain. It'll be good. Okay, thanks, Greg. See you next time. All right.

And the outdoor report sponsored by Oregon Truck and Auto Authority on Airway Drive in Medford, 729, taking your calls to at 7705-633. Make phone clean up a breeze. Okay, a hurricane with echo blowers from Zolzlanag. Good morning. This is News Talk 1063, KMED, and you're waking up with the Bill Myers Show. 731, and Tom's here. Hey, Tom, you wanted to talk about my conversation I had earlier with the CEO of John Birch Society.

I haven't been in touch with them for ages. And do you remember, I'm just going to ask you, Tom, do you remember the writer who used to work for Lou Rockwell from Idaho? He used to write for them, and then he passed away a number of years ago. He was a big freedom fighter out there, and I just can't pull his name out. Do you remember him? Do you remember him? No, because I haven't been in contact in recent years, so I never came across him. I'm going to go through their writers because, you know, he's been gone for a good 15 years. I want to say at least it was when I was doing the early talk radio here on the KM.D.

I was just curious if he remembered his name. But anyway, I'll find it at some points. Now it's going to drive me nuts, going to drive me nuts all day. I try to figure that out, you know? And anyway, what were you thinking about the birchers, huh? Well, you know, in the late 60s, being pretty young and so forth, I and a subject of government education, I wasn't very clear about anything. Everything was kind of hazy.

I couldn't tell you the difference between a Democrat and a Republican and so forth. But I remember in 68, after Robert Kennedy was murdered, along with Martin Luther King, and I'd tell him my mom at the time, I said, you know, from what I'm seeing here, it's real obvious to me that there's an assassination squad operating here in America, and they're taking out all the real movers and shakers. And I mean to find out who's behind it. And I could see that real clearly. from all the blotched news reports of the so-called investigations and so forth.

I could see there was obviously more cover-up than disinformation than information. So I started looking everywhere. I went down to the library, read all the major magazines at the time, U.S. News World Report at the time, all kinds of things. I couldn't find anything there. I thought, well, I drifted over to a communist. there was some kind of, not a real communist party, but kind of a very left wing. Couldn't find any information there.

And what I knew about the John Burtz's time was that they were bad. Oh, I know. Oh, they were so set on fire by the so-called respectable right-wing even, right? Right. And so I thought at the time, you know, if there's truly this secret assassination squad that's being run obviously by, in part by the government, then they would put down anybody who was telling the truth. So maybe I'd better go take a look at them, even though they're, quote, bad. And so I walked into the American Opinion bookstore, and I was really flabbergasted

because I thought I'd see nothing but, you know, sort of right-wing propaganda. And instead, I found most of the literature wasn't written by the John Burt Society. They're written by diplomats, researchers who were not connected with the John Burt Society and so forth. There was a lot of deep information going on. I walked out with about four or five boxes of books that they had. I mean books, too. I was carrying them out in cardboard boxes. And I read for the next couple of years and so forth.

And about that time, too, they had none dare call a conspiracy written by Gary Allen, who pretty much outlined the deep state and the international globalist. Yeah. So is this, you know, can we put a fine point on this one? I don't need to rush you along but here, but I'm Bernard Daylight, and I do have to move along. Was it somewhere where you kind of got your, a big part of your... education from the birchers there originally yeah at the time they were uh yeah they were instrumental and kind of really shifting um my clarity of vision what was going on it really was able to see

um that it was coming from a very high level i you know uh people like dan smoot at the time used to call it the invisible government nowadays we call it the deep state yeah and i i appreciate you share sharing your journey on this one. We'll have to talk a little bit more about that a bit later. By the way, I wanted to let you know. I just found out, I finally found out the name of that author that I was talking about from the Birchers. It was, who wrote for Lou Rockwell, William Norman Grigg. Do you remember him? He was a amazing author, I thought. Oh, interesting. No, I'm unfamiliar with him. Yeah, look up his archives over on Rockwell. A big, big freedom fighter. He ended up passing away

from an illness about eight, nine years ago. Last time I talked to it. Well, I hope to encourage other people look behind the curtain. Yep, thanks again. I appreciate that, Tom. We're going to be breaking things down on tariffs and more with Ken Raposa joins me

from a Coalition for a Prosperous America. Right, they get to that one. It's more than just coffee. Considering local news and weather are important. You can watch Fox 26 First News at 10, the encore playback at midnight, or online 24-7. at Fox26medford.com.

When you want the news first, tune in to Fox 26, first news at 10. Because local news and weather matters. Hi, this is Lisa, the Hughes Lumbergirl, and I'm on 106.7, KMED. Ken Raposa, long career in the press, staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal in Brazil for a number of years. Moved to the U.S. to cover Brazil, Russia, India, China for Forbes, and he is currently an analyst at the Coalition for a Prosperous America. He's a trade association focused on industrial strategy and preserving investments in domestic manufacturing. So that's a good thing. Hey, Ken, good

to have you back on. Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks have me back. Yeah, you know, I was just talking about all in Brazil this morning because we had a bunch of Starbucks that are getting closed here. I guess you may have saw the news. Oh, no. Yeah, Starbucks is closing down a lot of stores that are underperforming and I was wondering a part of it might have been with a tariffing going on and I had a very expensive purchase of the coffee that I like a lot it just just exploded in price almost doubled the last a few weeks it I just was told by a friend that it just dived back down a little bit here about eight nine ten dollars for a bag it went down but it's been about Brazil because of the 50% tariff on on coffee in Brazil and it's just been

roiling the markets, apparently, and it's not affecting the other ones, but it's one-third of the coffee market, and when you have one-third of the coffee market, that goes up in price 50 percent, people start scrambling. I guess that's what's been going on, part of it. Oh, sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, of course, remember now, here's the thing that I think is really important to remember, because let's just make things really simple math. So 50% tariff on $100 coffee bag. Okay? that's now $150, right? And then the market sells it for $300, right?

So you're being tariffed on the wholesale price, right? Not the price that you get for Starbucks. Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. Yeah, we're talking about wholesale prices because it's green coffee coming over usually, and then it gets roasted here, usually. Exactly. So the tariff is really not on.

So if you think, oh, my $10 coffee with a 50% tariff is now 50% tariff is now $15. No, it's not really how it works. No. But of course, I think Trump said that they're going to consider removing tariffs on coffee in Brazil or just in general on the commodity that we really don't produce except in Hawaii, but that's more of a specialty coffee. It doesn't really come in a mix. If you get a Hawaiian coffee, you go to Starbucks and say, and I want that Hawaiian one, and it's going to be a pure Hawaii. It's not mixed, like the Brazilian ones are mixed.

But these things are also driven on the commodity side, by the market, by the commodities market, by hedge funds, and so on. So they hear the news about this, right, what's happening in Brazil, and they say, boom, I'm going to drive up the coffee future price. I'm going to buy more coffee. Oh, so they're buying futures. It's almost like a lot of speculators come in, right? Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

Now, the speculators, you know, they do that, though. There's a reason for it that is actually very helpful that usually, you know, keeping a supply going, right? But yet there's a lot of bank to be made sometimes. on this, right? Right, and that's why when all of a sudden they've made their bank, then they sell the bank, and then that's when the prices come down. That's pretty much how that works. Okay, all right.

Very interesting here. I want to talk about how tariffs are starting to, because now you, from Coalition for a Prosperous America, you're generally in favor, I would say, of the Trump administration's focus on the tariffing or not. Where are you overall, if you were to? Right. So we are more in favor of two types of tariffs, which would be a lower 10% revenue tariff, right? Because the United States government needs to bring in revenue somewhere.

Otherwise, you and I are going to pay it in taxes, right? And corporations are going to pay in taxes. And you know what happens when big corporations have to pay more in taxes. They go to Mexico. They go to Canada. They go to China, right? That's what happens. Yeah, they go to wherever they're treated a little more nicely.

That's just the way it goes. So we – and of course, we all know, and your listeners know that. that the government doesn't like to cut spending. So we have to raise money somehow to lower the fiscal deficit because we spend more that we take in. And so we are very much in favor of a revenue tariff in that respect to bring in $300 billion a year in revenue to Treasury to maintain or lower taxes for us plebs and corporations as well.

But we're also in favor of what's known as the Section 232 tariffs. These are for economic security, and Trump has made economic security a matter of national security. These tariffs are protective for industries like steel or the auto industry that employ a lot of people at high-wage jobs and are sectors that are global. And with the rise of China, it's very hard for American companies to compete. And so these tariffs are put in place to protect that investment. because that's not only where you have a solid middle and blue collar class working there in large numbers, but where you also have, with the example of automotive, this is where a lot of the innovation happens on the factory floor. And when you're losing those things, when you're losing those things, then you lose the innovation and then you lose the ability to manufacture those things that you innovate.

You might be able to come up with an idea how to build a better mouset, but you don't have the factory floor to build it. So now you're going to end up, you know, selling your idea the Chinese or the Asians because they do have the ability to build it. To build it, yeah, they're much ahead on factory. You have to have some sort of protection, and that's what we're in favor of. Okay, got it. Well, to your point, just today I was reading that President Trump is imposing a 25% tariff on heavy trucks that are not built in the United States of America. And this is obviously designed to probably protect. I think Freightliner is about 40% of the heavy truck market in the United States.

And even then, I think Freightliner may be getting assembled a lot of times in Mexico. I don't know. Are you aware of where that's happening? Absolutely. A lot of them are going to Mexico. You know, the USMCA, NAFTA was created basically for the auto industry. That's where most of the free trade become across the border of the U.S. and Mexico is auto. And at some point, you would say, if you're an automaker, and this includes the big commercial trucks, if your Mexican labor can do what your American labor can do.

And not only that, if you have the platform, so you have the factory floor that can make this particular model. Because, over the years, the United States has the factory floor that makes a particular model. Let's just say, I don't know, a big rig. I'm just going to make a big rig number one. We have the platform that can make big rig number one. It's been around since the 80s. But now we're moving up to big rig number two. It's a whole new style.

Why am I going to invest in the platform to make the big rig two? Well, it's a lot cheaper for me to do in Mexico, and I can sell it to Americans duty-free. Right. So this is the future. This is what's happening. So if you want to have an industry that has, you want to have a commercial truck industry. And again, I talked about before, the auto industry is a big innovator. We always talk about autonomous vehicles now.

Do you want autonomous vehicles all being designed and made, or at least made in Asia or in Mexico? Or do you want to at least sell them to be made in the United States? So in thinking of the future, there has to be some level of protection to entice multinationals to at least invest in new capacity in the United States or increase the capacity that they already have on their factory floor. So you want to convince them to build a big rig two platform here instead of Mexico. You want to at least convince them to do that, right? But at the very least, the big rig one platform where they're turning out 100 cars a month, when they could be turning out 200. And the reason they're not is because big rig platform number one also exists in Mexico,

and they're doing it there. So you want to be able to entice to them to invest in the United States. And the way to do that, the only way really to do that, that is either through low taxes, right? And, of course, companies could get even lower taxes somewhere else, especially when you have labor arbitrage, a stronger dollar. Yeah, because essentially, you know, the arbitrage, you know, we are competing. We, American workers, are competing with Mexican and Chinese workers, essentially, right?

Isn't that really what we're talking about? And you're never going to win that competition. Not. Hmm. Let me ask you, Ken, speaking to another point that you were making, in fact, I was reading an article of yours that you did a few days ago, and it had to do with the price of drugs and pharmaceuticals, because the Trump administration is an order out there that if you have, I think it's, the distinction is that if you have a name brand drug, something which is not

a generic drug, and you don't make it in the United States, and I guess a lot of times it's getting made in China right now, or India is another place where a lot of this gets made, then it's going to be tariffed, but not for generics? Is that correct what you're talking about here? Yes, correct. The new order that came out yesterday is 100% tariffed on branded drugs that are not made in the United States. So obviously they're imported in the United States. And drugs are one of the biggest sources of our deficit, trade deficit,

you know, probably up there with cars and computers. It's a top three every month. three. Now, what that would mean is, you mentioned China, India. India is more of a generics play. Okay. China is all across soup to nuts, so they do a lot of generics, but what they also do is they innovate, again, innovate, and make drugs, new drugs, okay? And what they do is they license those new drugs to the American brands, Abbe, Pfizer, okay? Now, you'd be buying this drug, it'll have a Pfizer or a Pfizer subsidiary logo on it. But if you read the fine print, it'll probably say licensed by, you know, Shanghai Pharmaceutical is the

ones who, they're the brainpower behind this drug. They made it. They invented it. They mixed it. We just put our sticker on it. We just put our logo on it. That drug will be subject to a higher tariff. I'm pretty sure, unless for some reason is a car about for licensed drugs. I don't know. Yeah, but still 100%. Yeah, that's real. Like Ozempic, things like that. Yeah, so the Trump administration really working hard, though, to get as much drug manufacturing transferred back to the United States because this is an issue of a national security bent. Fair enough?

I mean, this is realistic. But especially with generic drugs. It's much worse with generic drugs because no one's going to say, OZEPIC, right, is a national security. Well, I don't know. The Hollywood star is trying to lose weight. They would look at a bad as a national security thing. You might worry about it.

Yeah. But there are a lot of drugs like basic chemotherapy drugs, you know, even something is like amoxicillin, a type of penicillin, these drugs aren't made in the United States. And after going through COVID, I could tell you when I had COVID, I had pneumonia, and I was put on amoxicillin. That amoxicillin that cleared me up in two days, a miracle drug. But amoxicillin isn't made in the United States.

It's probably made it India with the ingredients that also come from China. So those two countries are very enmeshed in the generic pharmaceutical supply chain. So that is really where the essential medication, if you look at the, if you go to Google or FDA's essential medication list, you'll see a whole list of medicines, it's all generics. It's all very low-cost generic drugs. Those are the ones that are the real problem where you have shortages and you're a cancer patient and you don't have this particular drug and you're going to go to another drug. And it's not always easy to switch from one drug to another. There's a reason drugs are different, you know. And so if you're a shortage of it, because you can't get it in the United States, you don't make it, and, you know, now you have a problem.

But you've made it clear here, Ken, but Ken, you've made it clear that, and you've talked about it in your other articles, that the challenge with the United States is that we can't really compete on price, right? It's what you're saying when it comes to the labor. We can't compete on price. So what can we compete on, in your opinion? Well, for the United States, it's always been, the argument has always been, we're the innovator again, right? We're the guys who are going to compete on innovation. No one is smarter than us. We make the, we invent the wheel.

We invent the Internet. Okay. And that's fine. But that was really fine when you didn't have, when China was just a happy meal toy-making economy. That's not the case anymore. China is also going to innovate. And if you are just going to innovate and make things elsewhere, the innovation has to, on the factory floor. The innovation happens in the lab. So if you don't have the labs because

all the R&D is being done in China, which is largely the case today with the big drug makers, they're all doing R&D in China. They're all doing preclinical trials in China. Then you lose a lot of that. And then maybe within our lifetime, instead of brands like Pfizer ruling Big Pharma, it's a brand that you never heard of like maybe just Shanghai Pharmaceuticals is the leader. And maybe they're not the leader in the United States, but they're the leader in all of Asia. And if you tell a multinational corporation that, you know, like Apple, for example, that your market share went from 30% in China down to five because now you're competing with Chinese smartphones, they're going to lose a lot of money, billions of dollars.

So we have to also protect the U.S. market and have more of a soup-to-nut supply chain because it's not forget, this is the biggest consumer market in the world. The nationals like to think that China is, and of course China is huge, but we're still the biggest. And if we can cater to our own consumers and make things for those consumers, instead of outsourcing it to be made mostly in Asia for our consumers, or in the case of trucks, Mexico, you know, it's better for the United States, it's better for the U.S. worker, it's better for prosperity. and in time when you have cost of living rising, we want to be able to have our wages rising. And our wages are not going to rise if, you know, working at Macy's or driving Ubers, right?

Yeah, our wages going to, are the wages, in your opinion, Ken, going to be rising in a world in which people are having labor replaced with artificial intelligence? There's not a week that goes by that. I don't see that going on. Right. Right, right. Yeah. You know, look, I will say this, there's always an expert that's going to tell you, well, I think this or I think that. And whenever you're, I like to say, whenever you're analyzing human systems, like an economy, there's too many moving parts. So the AI is going to replace thousands of jobs. Everyone says that. I use AI every day on my job, and I feel like I have two brains and forearms, something I've always wished I had. And now I have it. It hasn't replaced me yet. It might, and it might in the future. replace a job like mine, but right now it is helpful to me. But, of course, those jobs in AI will replace a lot of people in mid-to-low-level tech.

Somebody's got to come up with those AI programs. I don't know. That's not a topic for CPA, Coalition for a Process. Yeah, no, I get that. But it's not easy to know. It's not easy to know the outcome of that. Okay, there's always a part of me that wonders, you know, where that United States economy looks in the future, if it really is.

a point where the introductory jobs and the mid-level tech, as you say, are no longer done by people. And so, you know, not everybody is cognitively equipped to be the upper echelon, as you know what I mean. I'm wondering what society looks like over time, but that might be beyond your pay grade at the moment, huh? Well, I'll say this. Let's pretend we're going to build a Star Wars economy in the future, right? And C-3PO is going to be the one who's piloting the Millennium Falcon. Well, let's not forget that C3PO, he might have been a good sidekick to Han Solo and the Ballinian Falcon, but Han Solo still overruled C3PO a number of times, right? And someone has to make C3PO and someone has to fix C3PO, and that'll always be the case.

Hopefully in our lifetime won't be robots doing all of that. If it is, well, we'll have this discussion again and then, you know, I don't know, Maybe I'll be talking to an AI version of yourself. Gosh, I hope not, but maybe it's a – I'm just wondering if we're in the middle of fashioning that – what was that Walt Disney movie, the Disney con – Wallie, in which, you know, the robots are doing everything, and then the humans are just kind of, you know, fat and lazy on a starship cruise, right? Yeah, fat and lazy and just, you know, sucking up a universal basic income. I hope we can avoid that. I really do. So do I. I think you and I are in the majority on that one. Great talk. I appreciate this. And final question I have for you is I talk to business owners behind the scenes, even one here in Southern Oregon I was talking to. And tariffs are hurting their particular margins, and they are involved in import, export, you know, to a certain extent.

Are we going to find some, how long do you think it's going to take before we shake out and we kind of get predictability? I think that's a lot of what this one person was talking to me about. We seem to be lurching back and forth on tariff policy. Any thoughts on that? Right. It's an excellent question. Let's not forget that probably let's say some of the tariffs that he's paying might be part of the so-called Liberation Day tariffs that were imposed in April.

And the courts have recently ruled that those are illegal. The Supreme Court will weigh on that in December. And supposedly those tariffs are supposed to go away in mid-October. I don't know if that will be, if that will be held because Supreme Court is going to rule on this in December, so it may still be in effect. I think what might happen is you're going to see a 10% tariff, which I think the market can handle. They never complained about it, actually. No. But the higher tariffs that someone like your colleague is talking about, those, you could actually see them come down, but if he's importing something that's under the Section 232 umbrella, you know, then he might.

He might have to rethink his supply chains. He would turn to Mexico and Canada, whether the U.S.MCA is still going strong, so long as the products are made fully in those countries, or for the most part, depending on content requirements in that law, or source domestically, if possible. All right, very good. I'll have to ask him more specifically on where he's getting that stuff, but I've had more than one business person who has behind the scenes say,

hey, I'm supportive of Trump, but, man, it's killing me. You know, and I get that. And I get that I'm sympathetic. I understand the long-term goal. On the other hand, I don't want to destroy everybody on the process of that long-term goal either. I'm hoping we can. Agreed. Agree.

All right. It's tricky. All right. I appreciate it. Ken Raposa once again, Coalition for Prosperous America, prosperusamerica.org, all sorts of articles that we've been talking from, and you can go up there and read it right now. Thanks so much, Ken. Good talk.