Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Should You Keep Renting or Buy a House Right Now? | Ron Simmons

Episode Date: August 22, 2026

Ron responds to Monte Mader’s “bodily autonomy” defense of abortion and breaks down why it’s a flimsy excuse to kill a baby. Trump is still grappling with the housing affordability crisis and economic fallout he inherited from the Biden administration, much like how Ronald Reagan faced severe inflation and high mortgage rates left over from the Carter years. In the early 2020s, rapid home-price growth and soaring inflation pushed 30-year mortgage rates far higher after they had been in the mid-to-high 2% range when Biden took office, echoing the double-digit inflation and 18%+ mortgage rates of the late 1970s and early 1980s. While rates have begun easing and home-price growth has slowed significantly under Trump, resolving a crisis of this scale — just as it took years in the 1980s — requires more time than many critics allow. Also, Ron answers questions on budgeting, housing, Tucker Carlson, and parenting. Watch Allie’s Debate on Jubilee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxnfmddjcFs&t=865s Share the Arrows 2026 is on October 10 in Dallas, Texas! Tickets are on sale now at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://sharethearrows.com⁠⁠⁠ Share the Arrows is sponsored by: A'del Natural Cosmetics: AdelNaturalCosmetics.com Range Leather: RangeLeather.com/ALLIE We Heart Nutrition: WeHeartNutrition.com Buy Allie's book "Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion": ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.toxicempathy.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ – Time Codes 0:00 Introduction 3:13 Monte Mader’s Justification for Abortion 8:51 Is the Economy Trump’s Fault 18:00 Viewer Q & A – Episodes You May Like: Ep 1386 | Did Patrick Clancy Do It? Fact-Checking Lindsay Clancy’s Defenders https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-1386-did-patrick-clancy-do-it-fact-checking-lindsay/id1359249098?i=1000784406133 Leaked DNC Report, NFL QB Attacked for Trump Support & When to Buy a House | Ron Simmons https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leaked-dnc-report-nfl-qb-attacked-for-trump-support/id1359249098?i=1000770322269 --- ► Buy Allie's book, "You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love": https://alliebethstuckey.com/book ► Subscribe to the podcast: iTunes: https://apple.co/2UVssnP Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2FwkXxj ► Connect with Allie on Social Media: https://twitter.com/conservmillen https://www.instagram.com/alliebstuckey/ https://facebook.com/allieBlazeTV/ ► Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Well, hello, everyone. I hope everybody's having a great day. I know that for most of you, school has started again with kids, and that's kind of gets people back into a routine, which can be good, but it's always sad to see the summer coming to an end. But the heat wave across the south certainly has not. I don't know where you are, of course, but it has been hot in the south. I will tell you, we will look forward to fall coming. If football season's right around the corner, which is hard to believe. But thank you very much for joining. joining me today. Again, my name is Ron Simmons. I'm Allie's dad. In fact, we have some questions occasionally from new people that are new to Allie's show. Say, well, who is your dad? Okay. Well, again, Allie's dad, Ron Simmons. I grew up in my mom and dad were public school teachers in the South. We grew up in pretty small towns, a couple of different places. and I went to college, but mostly to night school. My wife and I got married when I was 19. She was 20.

She was robbing the cradle, so to speak. And then I went into business for myself a few years later after working as an employee for a couple of companies. And then I started a business that was in the wealth management area. And we had that company for 30 years, myself and some other partners and some great teammates. It was a great benefit for us. We ended up managing about $3 billion when we sold it at the end of 2019.

And part of the time, even while I was working, I served in the Texas legislature. So I've been very much involved in public service and politics for since, I guess, probably for the last 10, 15 years have been a part of our lives. I'm not in the legislature anymore. I still serve on a couple of boards where I've been appointed by the governor. of Texas and still engaged. I've got several friends that are still elected officials. So I'm very much engaged in that. It's, you know, it's like Allie said that politics matter because policy matters because people matter, right? I mean, that's true. So that's us. We do have, yeah, Allie has two brothers and we have some grandchildren. And so I really enjoyed doing this

twice a month that Allie allows me to do. And I try to, in this, we're changing our format just a little bit for my episode. It's going to shorten it up. Because people have a lot of stuff going on. You don't always have an hour to listen to something. So we're going to try to shorten it up and focus on the questions that you ask. You send in a lot of great questions. And also bring you up to date on a couple of stories, whether they're new stories related to politics or finance.

And just kind of some of my experience over the last, you know, 65 years of life, you know, I've gone through a lot, just probably like your parents have seen a lot, and try to give you my perspective, as a husband and a dad and a follower of Christ as well as my experience in politics as well as business. So looking forward to that. Let's get started if we can today. And one of the things I want to talk about first is Allibeth has done a couple of these debates

through an organization called Jubilee, which will probably put the link in the show notes. And she did one a year or two ago that was very, she debated 20. different people, which was interesting. But this one was a one-on-one debate that she just recently did. And it's got a lot of airplay as well. And she was debating what I guess the lady would call herself a progressive Christian, although she's gone through basically deconstruction, which deconstruction is essentially where people are, they have been believers in the past, and then they've deconstructed their faith where there may not even be believers anymore. I guess we'd have to ask them individually.

But this lady was Monty Mater. And one of the subjects they got into, which you can imagine with Allie, is they got into a debate on pro-life and abortion. And the way the format works is that you could not interrupt. Allie could not interrupt the lady when she was talking. There was a timer. And then the lady could not interrupt Allie. But this lady's thoughts on abortion, and they go beyond deconstruction,

they go all the way to just, in my opinion, Satan controlled. And here's what she had to say about a baby. Again, it comes back to autonomy, using someone's organs to keep someone else alive and not having the right to make that decision. The reality is that everyone should be able to make that choice. Christian should be able to affirm abortion,

especially in cases of an incest, how could a just God force that on a child? They could also say, no, I want doctors making that decision because it's going to save more women's lives because the reality is abortion bans increased maternal and infant mortality rates. I mean, I just couldn't stand it. I mean, it just, I wanted to scream. And I'm sure Ali did too. I could tell a little bit by her facial expression about that. But let's just dive into it a little bit.

You know, she tries to say that we're using the woman's organs for the baby to be there, which is true. And her argument is, well, if you're using my organs and I should be able to decide, well, yeah, you could have decided not to get pregnant. And there are ways not to get pregnant for sure. But then she brings up incest, which is a sad scenario, no question about it. All right. but it's also a very, very small percentage of pregnancies. But remember that the rape or the incest,

that's what takes away the autonomy. It's not the baby, not the pregnancy. That's due to, you know, the sex. But it doesn't mean that because someone has encountered this horrible scenario, that a child should die who has. had no choice in the matter, right? There was no choice. The child was formed. We believe that all children are formed in God's image. And so the child should not be taken away his right to live. Now, whether or not the mom wants to keep the child or put it up for adoption, that's a whole

different subject. But the fact of the matter is that a child is a human, as Allie talks about, if you listen to the thing, she talks about that that baby was born immediately of upon conception. And, you know, talks about the, she talks about how could adjust God, you know, allow this to happen. But it's, there's always evil in our world. And when, you know, when something happens, rape or incest or whatever, that's evil. And that's awful.

And nobody likes that. All right. But that's not God's, God didn't cause that to happen. All right. The fallen world is what caused that to happen. And then talking about. letting doctors decide. Well, what are the doctors going to decide? Yeah, if the mother's life is in danger, which is a very rare case. And we're talking about the mom's going to die if she has the

baby. You've got to make a choice, all right, like Solomon's choice. He talks about between the mom and the two moms and the baby. But that's very rare. That's not going to happen very often. So there's been a lot of negative comments. The liberals have trolled Allie on this video a lot. I would encourage you to listen to the video and put some positive comments on social media. Don't let the liberals and the abortionists, you know, take all the air out of the room. Go in there and support what Allie's talking about in the areas. And it's not just about abortion.

There are other subjects as well. But go in there and post on social media and get your friends. listen to it and post on social media. Because, you know, these are important issues. It's a fight for the soul, not of America, just but of the world as well. So I would encourage you to listen to that. Allie does a great job. I'm so proud of her for the work that she does on that.

It's pretty cool. And it is very hard for me to not lash out myself when I see people treating Allie as hateful as they do sometimes. So she needs all our support, and I'd encourage you to join me in doing that. Now let's move on a little bit about the economy. You know, being in the investment business, one of the things that I followed and have always followed, I guess, since I got to be an adult, was economic issues. As a dad and a father and the leader of my house, I had to be concerned in a micro scenario

about our own finances and then how, in a macro standpoint, how, the country of the state, the city, the country that I lived in, how that affected what was going on in my household. And a lot of people are really concerned about affordability. And that's a legitimate concern. I'm not here to tell you that's not a legitimate concern because it is a legitimate concern. In fact, one of the questions that we have is, what about interest rates and housing prices being unaffordable? Let's break this down for just a few minutes, okay? And it is true that is less affordable that it has been in the past. But it's,

what's happened is not something that was caused by the Trump administration. It would, all of this occurred during, because when Trump left office the last time, interest rates were just under 3%, okay, for mortgages. But what happened when President Biden came in, and yes,

we did, we were, we were still going through COVID, and the stimulus packages, I mean, Biden put in, I mean, Trump put in a stimulus package when COVID was kind of getting going good. And by the time Biden got in, it was waning off, but he still put another stimulus package in there. And that always causes prices to increase.

When there's more money available, people are willing to pay more for things. And that's one of the reasons that inflation occurs. But the number one failure, in my opinion, of the Biden administration that has caused, especially the housing issue, was the allowing of millions and millions of illegal aliens to enter our country. That is the number one. Because when they come in to the country, they have got to eat. Okay, so there's more people demanding, making demand for food and other services. And they've got to have somewhere to live.

and so therefore there's a greater demand for housing and the supply did not meet the demand. In fact, it's still struggling to meet the demand, even though I think the numbers now is close to 3 million people that were here illegally are no longer here. They've been sent back to their own country, either through self-deportation or the government deporting them because they had a criminal record. or had committed crimes here. So that's the number one issue, in my opinion. But the issue that's going on is very similar to what it was when President Reagan

went into office in the early 80s. In fact, he entered office in January of 81. It's just so interesting because Lisa and I were about where a lot of you are then. We were just kind of getting going in our adult life. We had only been married a very short period of time. And so we were looking at the same things that you were looking at. And it had come out of a, on the backs of Reagan was elected right after Jimmy Carter had been president for four years. And again, a single term president like Biden was a single term president.

And the mid-70s was pretty much a disaster economically. We had gas prices that we had gas shortages actually. We had to be in gas lines. In fact, the energy shortage was such that the president Carter would come. on in his cardigan sweater and tell everybody to turn their thermosats down during the winter and just put on extra clothing and, you know, turn them up in the summertime, which it's okay if you want to do that, but to be kind of fatalist mentality for that rather than saying, hey, let's go see if we can find, you know, more energy. How do we produce more energy? I remember

in the early 70s that people were predicting that we would be out. of oil around the world in like 19 years from then. Of course, it's been much longer than that, and we have more oil and those types of supplies than we've ever had. Plus, we have figured out how to harness some solar energy. In some cases, I'm not a huge fan of it, although I find if that's what you want to do. Certainly not a fan of wind energy. I think that's not, has not proven to be, at least where we are, very successful, and it actually hurt. our overall capacity to provide electricity to all of our neighbors. In 1980 and 81, the 79, 80 and 81, think about this, all right, is that inflation rose 10% annually. 10%

annually is how much things went up overall. And the index rose from 6.5% in 77 to 13.5% in 1980. But then by 1982, it had dropped, similar to what it's happening now, to 6.2%. The median family home value rose 43% during the 70s versus 8.2% in the 80s. This is from the U.S. Census Bureau. So look at that. So all of this, again, rather than increasing production, it was all about constricting. And that caused what we had in the housing market to go up. Same thing that's happening right now. The 30-year fixed mortgage rate was 18.6% in October of 1981. Can you imagine that? I remember when Lisa and I bought our first house, it was 13 or 14%. Crazy. And then for most of the 80s, though, it went down to 10% which we all thought was pretty good. But of course, we know that it really got a lot better after that. In January of 21, as I mentioned earlier, the mortgage rates were 3%. And then inflation hit 9% in year over year, June 2022. The highest reading in 40 years inflation was. You have to

remember what happened during that period of time, all right? And what happened is that the home price growth was 17.5% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2021. And that is in a large part for two things. One, as I said, it was all the illegal aliens coming in. And two, when COVID happened, a lot of people were looking to buy second homes because they wanted to have an alternative to get to. And that raised prices as well. So all that slowed down with the, Home prices since in 2025 only went up 1.8% versus the 17%. And as of May 2026, only 2.2%. So things are still as not as affordable as we want them to be.

In fact, the mortgage rates now is still about 6.6%. But I will tell you that President Trump and his people and the Republican Congress have done the stuff that they can do. Now, we still have to fight inflation. And unfortunately, the best way to fight inflation is to keep interest rates higher because that slows down the economy and it reduces demand is what generally happens. And the balancing of that is where the devil is in the details. And that's what Treasury Secretary Bissett and them are trying to do.

But as you can see here, what's happened to mortgage rates over the year. where we are right now is kind of much more average of what we've seen over the last 30 years. It doesn't mean that it's any easier to buy a home. I get the issue, but it's much more average. You can see some of the peaks and valleys in this. But I do think that interest rates will eventually come down. I thought they would already be down by now, but I think they'll be coming down hopefully over the next year or so. more than the 5% range, and that would be very, very good.

But it does change on what type of house you can afford. It changes on where you can live, and I get that. I really do. And maybe now it's not the time to buy house. Maybe you just need to continue to rent for a while until the supply catches up with demand and interest rates settle down. So talk about a couple of other financial things. A young man asked the question, how do you generate wealth for the average young man?

Well, just remember, there's only two ways you can generate wealth, and I'm not talking about inheritance, okay, that you generate them. And one is that you, you are able to have income, like through your job or whatever it is that you're doing to create income. And you live off of the income less than what you live less than what you make and you invest the rest. All right. And there are plenty of good occupations that you can do that in. I've got a really good friend that's, an insurance agent and he really can't sell his agency when he gets ready to retire because all the value is based in him and his relationships. But what he's been able to do, he and his wife have lived off less than what they've made. And so with the extra portion, they've invested

that over their career and he has done very, very well. And they'll be able to have that huge Asset number when he's ready to retire or slow down or maybe participate in something else, that he'll be able to use that. The second way, first way is income, live off less than what you make, invest the rest. The second way is, which we should always live off less than what we make. But the second way is to have a business that you're either the owner of or a part owner of that can be sold down the road. That's the avenue that Lisa and I took.

I own this wealth management company with a few other partners. And over time, because that wealth management company could continue after I was gone, I made sure that that's why I never put my name on the company. Never want to have your own name on the company. That is a mistake because then it's all dependent on you and you're tied to that. But when we sold our company, we had sold a business that was generating 20 to 30 million dollars worth of revenue. and there are other firms that would pay for that, right, rather than having to go start it and build it themselves,

they would pay for that. So they paid us a handsome sum, and that's how we created our so-called nest egg. Now, we invested our extra money during our lifetime as well, during my career as well, but our big nest egg came from the asset that we had built. So it's either income or asset, all right? All right.

Now, last thing for today, we'll talk a little bit about parenting. Always get questions on that. One of them was, which I touched on earlier, is how do you handle and walk through seeing the vitriol and hate of your daughter? It's very, very difficult. And we just have to pray about it. I have to make sure that I'm always encouraging her.

Because even though she doesn't, you know, follow the trolls, it does have an effect on. You gets discouraging. The second question was parenting advice and the age of perfect parents on social media. You have to make sure that you have your children around other normal people and normal families. And you have to just again, remind yourself and remind them that life is not perfect.

And that every family has its own issues and that we have to work through those of the family. Nothing that we see out there on social media about how everything perfect is is true. And so we just have to, I think having, first of all, limiting social media for all of us, but then also making sure that you have your family

around other families that are what we would call normal. Anyway, thank you for your time today. It's been a good one. We'll look forward to see you in a couple of weeks. Don't forget if you're interested in my book, Life Lessons from the Little Red Wagon or Allie's bestseller, Toxic Empathy, you can buy those anywhere you buy books. Have a good day.