TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #517: Why Eliminating The Income Tax Would Supercharge The US with Peter St. Onge

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

Marty sits down with Peter St. Onge to discuss Trump's rumored plan to replace income tax with tariffs. Peter on Twitter: https://twitter.com/profstonge 0:00 - Intro 0:50 - El Salvador 4:23 - Vibe shift 12:26 - River & Unchained 13:42 - Mass immigration and nationalism 17:51 - Trump’s rumored tariff plan 24:49 - Media and education 29:18 - Gradually, Then Suddenly & Zaprite 30:56 - Countering lies 38:10 - Headwinds for next election 45:40 - Dedollarization 50:42 - Has the melt up already started 1:00:27 - Feeling the inflation 1:06:42 - Bitcoin and Trump 1:14:02 - We’re gonna win 1:16:44 - Presidential debate 1:21:35 - Back to tariffs and taxes Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Zaprite⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Gradually, Then Suddenly⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

this rip of tftc was brought to you by river it's the best place to buy bitcoin go to river.com tftc and enjoy this episode you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be jesus i've seen what you've done for others and i want that for myself

is that how you felt felt coming back from el salvador oh sour is fantastic yeah i mean first off he had a bunch of bitcoiners down there so that was a lot of fun he had a lot of bitcoiners living down there permanently now so you got like lena from low hodlers you got max and stacy of course there's a whole community kind of cropping up in san salvador and down by the beach and just the vibe in in el salvador is fantastic you know people are i mean first off they're they're very nice very welcoming they're thrilled to see tourists that's something they haven't seen in a long time and people are really just proud of what's happening in the country you know talking to uh waitresses or taxi drivers kind of regular salvadorians they're just so proud of of uh of

what's become of their country of course all that is bukele i mean it was a crap hole until uh he started changing things so but it's exciting i mean if you get a chance to go down without a doubt you know it's a good tourist destination you got surfing you got volcanoes you got like the costa rica experience but it's actually safer and i think you get a different vibe like you get a much more optimistic vibe in el salvador than you might even in costa rica which is not that bad to begin with uh but both of them certainly be what's happening in america now where you know people are kind of convinced that it's all downhill from here uh so it's it's kind of a relaxing change of pace to actually be in a country where people are optimistic about the future

we may get that here we'll see what happens in november but we did have that not so long ago so it'd be exciting to get that again it would be and it's it's hard to think that you can get higher vibes than puerto vito vibes in costa rica but because i mean he described it with Tucker as literally a miracle but I think yeah the El Salvador story over the last four years particularly going from the most dangerous country in the world to one of the safest countries in the world is really a needle in the eye of the incumbent power structure which has led people to believe that these problems cannot be fixed and El Salvador is proving the exact opposite it just takes political will and action that's the thing you know salvador is a very poor country

uh they're working with you know they're talk about being outgunned by the bad guys uh poverty-stricken country the government has no money and if they could manage this then that suggests that the crap that's going on in american cities you know there's a lot of money in san francisco or new york or detroit for that matter right you take the amount the city budget in Detroit. And you compare that to something like El Salvador. We're swimming in money. And what the heck do we have to show for it? And so voters should walk away with the understanding that all the crap that's going on, right, if you list through all the problems in America right now, the broken families, the education system, the crime, the delinquency, the inflation,

the flat wages, people, well, you got suicide rates, people feel like there's no purpose in life everything's getting every last one of those is a choice right these are not things that are falling out of heaven these are not things that were fated to suffer these are all a policy choice the united states is one of the richest countries on earth if a country like salvador can fix that there's absolutely no excuse no and like you said it's a it's a reason for optimism and i i can feel the optimism growing here in the united states despite the economic conditions that people are living through the stagflation that one could argue we are going through right now it does feel like there is a vibe shift as many people are calling it and people waking up to hey the

government seems to be in the way and in the lead up to the election later this year it seems that many people are throwing their arms up and saying hey we're going back to trump because it seems like his administration will enact policies that that actually enable us to flourish which is good to see yeah you're seeing a lot of people flip over and i think what happened you know when we had a lot of discussions about election cheating um i had this conversation a lot but a funny thing happens when a government starts to cheat which is that you know the reason you cheat is so you you can ignore the voters on the other side, but once you start cheating, it turns out you can actually ignore your own voters too. You can ignore all the voters, right? And every political

party is like this permanent civil war between the activists and the donors who run the party and the voters who they need to go to, you know, to actually win the election. And so once a party starts cheating, it doesn't just win elections. Okay. Maybe like the first, you know, six months, it's all pure profit, right? They can win the election. This is awesome, guys. And then very quickly, the party loses their mind because the party's own voters drop out of the equation, right? They no longer have a seat at the table. Now it's just the activists and donors. And I think if you look at what the Democratic Party used to be, like when I was growing up, right, it was the party, the little guy, the working man, working class unions. It

was conservative, socially conservative. Bill Clinton, one of his big issues was he was beefing up the border wall in case we're going to deport all these illegals, right? If you look at what the Democratic Party was and you look at what it is now, I think very clearly what's happened is that the Democrat voters dropped out. They're no longer, they don't have a seat at the table. Now, a lot of them are still voting almost on autopilot. I think you see this in the black community, for example, where a lot of people, they identify as Democrats, third generation democrats yeah of course i'm gonna vote democrat but then you're getting like a lot of young blacks now who are starting to question these things are actually you know watching they're watching

content from the other side okay a lot of them are saying wait a second what in the heck is going on because they recognize that the party is no longer even appealing to its voters uh you've got cities that are just in absolute chaos defunding the police right if you live in a dangerous inner city that you have got to be out of your mind to think that that's a good idea you know when you've got uh you know murders and gun play going on every day in your neighborhood yeah swell idea let's defund the police that could only come out of university faculty and the reason that those policies are becoming reality is exactly that i think that one party whether it's cheating at the ballot box, or whether it's this sort of soft cheating, where you've got the

media and Google search and all these kind of, you know, putting their finger on the scale, one way or the other, the sort of ruling party of America has been the Democrats for my entire life. They started cheating, they no longer need the voters. And so now they're pumping out this stuff that is just absolute pure insanity. And so what happens at that point is that, you know, regular people, even people who incline left, you know, like Elon Musk was he was generally a left leaning guy. He was, you know, whether it's climate or I mean, really across the board, he was a left winger and he he, you know, red pilled on one topic. And then at that point, just the floodgates open. So I'm starting to see that now. A lot of people in my life, I grew up as a liberal, as a

progressive. And so a lot of my family members and people I grew up with, they're Democrats, they're old school Democrats. And I see a lot of those people waking up to realize that this monstrosity is no longer the party they knew and loved. It's not necessarily a party that's even paying attention to voters anymore. If I were rooting for the Democrat party at this point, I would be tearing my hair out. I'd be like, what on earth are you guys doing? The 34 genders, the, you know, men getting their balls waxed with kids. I mean, just what the heck are you people even thinking you're never going to win an election like that? And that's what's happening. So I don't know if it's durable. I don't know if it's necessarily American Renaissance.

You know, it could just be that one party lost their freaking mind. They sort of got raised in this orchid, like greenhouse environment where, you know, they they're no longer really in touch with reality. And so maybe they're they're going to go through a correction, at which point, You know, if we look through history, say, in the past 50 years, we've had a couple episodes there where one party, the other went off the reservation. They lost an election really badly, like they won like one state or three states or something. And then they, you know, sort of went back to the smoke filled room and they said, OK, we kind of need to reinvent our brand. Maybe we get that. I would welcome that. It would be nice to have it, you know, to not have one insane party. Not that I'm a fan of either party. But anyway, I think that's going to be the big question.

you know, it's possible that they do cheat again, again, whether it's hard or soft cheating, and they, you know, sweep the election in 2024. If that's the case, then I assume that we just get a continuation of that process where they even more continue peddling policies that are completely insane. I imagine they'll, I don't know. I mean, really, what's next? Like bestiality? I don't know. You know, you kind of have to use your imagination. Like how insane can you get? So, you know, we can have a rough patch there. But, you know, I mean, fundamentally, we are a largely Democratic polity still, meaning that, you know, voters still do have a say. It's just a question of how many are waking up.

I think a lot are. We're watching them in real time. But the question is, you know, are we actually going to get a policy change out of that? There's a study that I wanted to mention. I think it comes out of Stanford and Princeton. But anyway, there were a couple of political science professors. And what they did was they correlated the popularity of a particular policy or law. They correlated that with its likelihood of actually becoming law.

And it's a fascinating paper because what they concluded, and they looked at hundreds and hundreds of laws, they concluded that there's almost no impact. So like what the voters want has almost no bearing on what government actually does. I think that is a fundamental flaw in our system right now. And what kind of gives me hope is that the experience of one party going insane, you could argue both parties have gone insane, but at any rate, that that sort of wakes people up to the point where we get much more informed electorate that actually starts to fix that so that we can get to a world where, you know, people actually do believe in their leaders. One thing we saw in the recent G7, A lot of people were commenting on what everybody's approval rating was. So the G7 is the seven biggest economies in the world. And all these guys were sporting like 30% approval ratings. So is that still a democracy? If people are being ruled by somebody they despise, whether it's cheating or however they manage it, they do win the election. But then the rest of the time, everybody despises their rulers.

I think that there's a lot of room for improvement. And in a sense, you don't necessarily like drama, you know, because bad things can happen, civil war, whatever. But I do sort of welcome some sort of fundamental change in our political systems, the way they function today. to give people Bitcoin via River links. You'll be able to send and receive Bitcoin over the Lightning Network, and you'll be able to set limit orders. If you want to buy Bitcoin at a particular price below or above where it is now, you can set orders to buy Bitcoin when it hits that price. Go to river.com slash TFTC and set up your account today. This rep was also brought to you by our good friends at Unchained. Unchained is building a financial services platform for a Bitcoin standard. They have over 7,000 clients that are securing over 90,000 Bitcoin with 12,000 keys on their platform. Their platform leverages Bitcoin's native multi-sig properties. Their cornerstone

product is their Volt product, a two or three multi-sig Volt, which allows you to hold two of three keys in a multi-sig quorum. That gives you full control over your Bitcoin. They also have an IRA product, a lending desk, and they're rolling out a bunch of other products, including inheritance protocol and sound advisory so go to unchained.com set up a call with our concierge onboarding team today tell them that tftc sent you and use the promo code tftc at checkout unchained.com there's a great shake-up happening i think the two things really driving this particularly for incumbent voters of liberal leaning parties is obviously inflation people feel it and have felt it for years despite the fact that every administration is telling you

that they've tamed inflation it's overtly false you see it at the grocery store at the gas station every day that and then immigration whether it's here in the united states i mean you mentioned the inner cities i think new york chicago are great examples of cities that have had immigrants flow in uh in new york they're giving them debit cards with ten thousand dollars on them and the people who have voted for democrats for for decades now are like wait a second you're supposed to help me and you're inviting all these people into my city and just giving the money i've never gotten that and that's happening globally now i mean big uh i don't know if i necessarily want to consider it nationalist uprising but people who are fed up with immigration in germany ireland

i saw some videos out of france sweden uh it's popping off this this mass immigration policy is definitely backfiring. Yeah. I mean, I've been an immigrant most of my life. We lived a long time in Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, Germany. Immigrants are fantastic. They create jobs. They create businesses. The trick, of course, is that you want good quality immigrants. And I should mention immigrants do generally vote crap. Almost everywhere in the world, immigrants tend to vote left-wing. There's probably deep psychological reasons for that. There's a book called Darwinian Politics, if you're interested. But at any rate, setting aside that immigrants tend to be crap voters, they're left-wing voters. Economically, they tend to be wonderful,

right? In fact, poor countries get upset. They call it the brain drain, right? They're upset that every doctor in Mexico ends up in the US. And they're like, well, maybe we could keep some our doctors every so often um so immigration is fantastic mass immigration where you have zero standards we don't even know who these people are right like if i commit a crime in mexico yeah i would go to the us i'd be an idiot not to nobody knows who i am i don't have a criminal record uh so i mean a lot of these people are just uh nobody wants them mexico doesn't want them nobody wants them that i think is what's bringing it to a head unfortunately i think that that's probably going to end up backlashing on high quality immigrants as well, you know, who like Silicon

Valley, for example. I mean, if you look at who founds the big companies there, they're probably most of them are immigrants, but they're high quality immigrants. So unfortunately, I think that they are breaking that up. But, you know, fundamentally, I am a huge fan of nationalism. I'm a fan of nationalism for everybody. You know, I was a professor in Taiwan for five years and I taught my students they should be nationalistic for Taiwan. You should love your country for the same reason you should love your city. You should love your neighborhood. You should love your family. And, you know, the reason is that if people feel nationalistic, if they feel a sense of pride towards their country, they're invested in it.

Right. They're willing to make things better. They pick up trash on the side of the road all the way up to they vote. they advocate, they get involved in public policy, they make things better. So I think that there's a confusion that to be nationalistic doesn't mean that you hate a specific type of people. I think everybody should be nationalistic. Kenyans should be very nationalistic about their country. Everybody should be nationalistic. And I do think that we are seeing a resurgence of that pretty much for the same reason, that the ruling class went completely insane and now we're getting this massive backlash to it. I hope it doesn't go too far. Historically, sometimes it does. But

I mean, what I've seen for now, you know, people like Malay or Bukele in Latin America, people like Donald Trump, I've been really encouraged in, you know, them sort of bringing nationalism out of the shadows and rehabilitating it as a positive social force. Well, that is a good natural segue into the topic that I reached out to you to discuss, which is the economic policy that Thomas Massey sort of leaked after a GOP meeting a few weeks ago. and you made a video about it I believe last week which is a rumor that Trump would like to eliminate income taxes replace them with tariffs and the idea behind this is it would help re-industrialize the United States put money back in American citizens pockets and really get the federal government out of the way and let Americans do their thing there's been a lot of back and

forth in economic circles about whether or not this would be a good policy people like Larry summers coming out and saying that would be truly idiotic because it would create stagflation but again bringing up malay specifically what he's done in argentina with his la fuera vendetta of ripping out the government is there a way to implement a an economic policy that would eliminate income tax increase tariffs and not lead to a stagflationary period in the united states yeah so my metaphor for what i think we've done on trade over the past couple of decades is that essentially we shot ourselves in the foot with regulation and taxes and actually government spending things like the apollo project which brain drained our electronics industry and put

them into this stupid moon adventure um you know we we lost the american electronics industry almost on the point of when we started with the apollo project anyway we had all these government own goals and we essentially shot ourselves in the foot and at that point now we're you know forced to like rent crutches from china uh so you know one idea might be stop shooting ourselves in the foot um you know in general i'm i'm rel i don't blame china so much as i blame washington i mean if it weren't china it would have been mexico or who knows it would have been somebody Uh, what I think the real problem is, is that government is making it impossible to run a business in America, especially manufacturing business. You've got to be a masochist or you've

got to have some niche product where you've got, you know, 10 X markups, like, uh, you know, some, uh, skateboard, you know, with art printed on it or something. Right. I mean, if you've got like normal products, like a broom, you've got to be absolutely insane. if you're going to manufacture that in the u.s and so you know broadly speaking anything that removes those domestic handicaps i am a huge huge fan of now if we talk about the tariffs versus income tax trade-off you know the first thing is that it's not science fiction that's how the country worked in the late 19th century which is really the golden age of american growth i mean actually it was the golden age of all of human history if you look at the period from about 1870

to about 1910 when the progressives destroyed it everything was getting better just so fast it was incredible um you know when you look at science fiction of the era and they predicted flying cars and all this then people say haha they were so naive no we're they weren't naive they were precisely on track we destroyed it our ancestors our grandparents destroyed it so if you look back at that era like the 1880s uh our federal government was in was almost entirely funded by import tariffs. And, you know, if we sort of translate what those import tariffs would do in a modern age, back then they were about 30%. Apparently things did not fall apart. We did not have stagflation. On the contrary, we had Singapore levels of economic growth, along with falling

prices, which was actually great, right? So everybody got rich really fast. So apparently we can sustain that level, call it 30% tariffs across the board. If we were to do that today, we import about $4 trillion in goods and services. If you put a 30% tax on that, it would go down. So maybe it would go down to $3.2 something, in which case you'd be raising about a trillion in revenue. The current income tax takes about $2.8 trillion. So you would have a reduction in government revenue by about $1.8 trillion. If they were prudent, which is a big if, then of course they would reduce spending in line with that. And so we would get a much smaller federal government.

We had a much smaller federal government. Then you have fewer bureaucrats creating these these new regulations and harassing businesses. And of course, you know, the main benefit is that if you don't have an income tax, then it becomes much more attractive to run a small business here. So if we imagine America where you've got, say, one tenth as many, you know, EPA and OSHA and whatnot regulators. OK, so if you cut those by 90 percent, you do a Javier Malay afuera type, throw those guys out. And on top of that, if you add zero income tax,

well, at that point, you know, it would be crazy to make a broom in China. You'd make it here in America. Right. So I think absolutely. I mean, it's a fantastic idea. It's never, ever going to pass because it's too good. You know, it's like ending the Fed. It's got it's just an amazing idea across the board, but it's too good for Washington. And unfortunately, those kinds of obviously good ideas, they probably won't come in unless we have some sort of crisis in Washington where, you know, you get like a great reset. If they keep cheating, right, then we'll probably get there sooner than later, actually, ironically, because, you know, each time that people sort of get more and more extreme. If you shut them up, then they just, you know, they actually start to

get more and more extreme. And then when finally sort of the spring pops up, then, you know, it can be a lot more dramatic and we get a bigger change. I was at a talk just a couple of years ago in Canada and the former, who was the Canadian prime minister before Trudeau? Harper. And Harper is kind of a, you know, he's like a middle of the road conservative. He would be a rhino in the U.S. without a doubt. And Harper was giving a talk where he was talking about Trump. And, you know, I assumed, oh, OK, he's just going to trash the guy. But actually, he said, you can't silence somebody like Trump because he's speaking for a large percent of the population. He's very frustrated. And if you shut him up, then you're not going to like what comes next. Right. So I

think we're at that stage where you a contrarian or an accelerationist would almost root for them to cheat at this point because that gets us closer to a state break where you can get ideas like ending the fed or bitcoin legal tender uh or you know trading out the income tax for tariffs where those things do actually become a possibility i wish i didn't have to come to that i wish for sure trump could come in like off where i just cut everything um yeah we lost that battle yeah between public education uh the progressives uh dewey and them and again about you know 1910s uh public education which you know of course was state indoctrination uh and then mass media where um you know for the first time you had this very very concentrated uh ownership of really sort of

opinion molding of of society and mass media obviously the first thing they did was made friends with government uh and cut deals uh licensing you know censoring um the competition and so between those two uh mass media and education and then out of that fell different things you know they captured institution after institution like universities and we discovered during covet apparently they had captured freaking everything like the national you know um book binders association of america had opinions about blm and you're like what like when when did you guys get captured by marxists but there we were um but yeah so unfortunately it'd be really nice if we were back in like 1870 where you could talk to regular

voters and they had a brain um but we've fallen quite a bit i actually did a study a couple years ago study is a grand word i went through and correlated i looked at every state of the no i'm sorry the inauguration address so every inauguration address of every president since 1900 and if you go back right that was before public education so in theory everybody was illiterate right and so you go back to 1900 1904 and remember if you're in an inaugural address those are written by professional speech writers who are aiming at the 50th percentile of voters right they're not aiming at phds they're trying to speak to voters because what they're trying to do is you know to gain enough popularity that they can muscle congress to get stuff passed

so anyway you've got these inaugural addresses and back in 1900 1904 the inaugural addresses were running at um you know if you run them through flesh kincaid grade level scores okay to to sort of estimate the grade level that these things are written at they're written at like 14th 13th 14th grade in other words college all right so the median american in 1900 was college educated equivalent all right now you can then tarry that forward and it is a stunning straight line decline by the time you get to trump it was something like eighth grade uh no i'm sorry obama was eighth grade trump was like sixth grade and then biden was like fourth grade all right so and you can try this at home you can run the inaugural speeches through

flesh kincaid it is stunning so the the you know there's uh this theory in um in sociology that we've all gotten smarter i guess because of the internet or tv or whatever it is false certainly when it comes to policy matters uh i mean the voters have just been absolutely gutted um intellectually gutted if you look at what happened in covid that seems to have accelerated so i i fear for the next generation of voters but yes it would be wonderful if we could have these adult conversations like we used to in the 1890s you know you read like monetary debates in the 1890s and most phd economists would not be able to follow them and these were public right these were in newspapers these were aimed at average median voters so um but unfortunately

it's fallen so far that i think that it's probably going to take a pretty big crisis to break the crisis doesn't necessarily have to be existential right so 1970s was a big enough crisis that it led to uh ronald reagan ronald reagan i think dramatically underestimated the scale and powers of the swamp so he more or less bounced off without a without leaving a mark uh trump did a little bit better but not a whole lot better because i think even trump didn't um he talked about the swamp but i don't think he fully appreciated how deep that swamp was and how difficult it is to fight it on anything so unfortunately you know the good news is it doesn't take that much of a crisis to turn voters around uh but maybe the bad news is that if we

look at people like reagan or trump when we did have voter revolts not much changed and so if we really want fundamental change that unfortunately may take a much bigger crisis than the 1970s quick break here freaks this rip is brought to you by gradually then suddenly a framework for understanding Bitcoin as money by Parker Lewis. I wrote the foreword to the book. I'm honored to have done so because it's the best zero to one primer if you're looking for a logical explanation

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We can also connect our bank accounts, our Stripe accounts, our Square accounts to accept fiat as well. The time is now, freaks. The fiat system is fragile. Invest in the infrastructure that de-risks the future. Invest in yourself. Bitcoin payments with ZapRite. Go to zaprite.com slash tftc to get 40 off their annual subscription zapwrite.com slash tftc 40 off i'm curious because media and education obviously plays a big role in having the voting base think the way they do and vote the way they do ultimately like for you personally i mean i think you are officially or unofficially the economics professor of twitter and you've been doing this probably two years now how long you've been doing your yeah a year and a half yeah yeah thank you for saying that but yeah

yeah i've been doing it for a year and a half have have you had people reach out to you and let you know that your videos are changing their minds i'm just trying to get out here it's like do we live in a media landscape where individuals like yourself can actually affect the way people think and then go out and act in the world we can i think massively the trick is you know it's the um it's like the matrix right you've got to unplug first and until you do like people have to be ready to hear an alternative they have to be dissatisfied with what they're hearing in mainstream um it's almost like you're born with a religion and a certain percent of people start to question that religion and then they go out and they're like

okay maybe i'm a buddhist maybe i'm a muslim maybe i'm a zoroastrian and people have to get to that point where they start to doubt now that's part of what you know motivates me is that i know that you don't actually have to counter every single lie you just have to counter one line you have to do it so effectively that somebody in the audience says yeah wait a minute that doesn't make sense and then it's like a threat on the sweater and the whole thing unravels so i mean i've been in not only impressed but humbled that you know i've got listeners who who are like truck drivers, nuns, completely working class, like carpenters.

And they understand the history of the Fed. They've like read through like the French Revolution. They understand like all the stages of, I mean, it's really fricking impressive what people understand when they feel like something's wrong with the world and they get motivated to go out there and actually figure out what's happening.

So it's exciting. But unfortunately, I think that whether it's 30 or 50 or 60 percent of the population, they don't really care. They have no idea what's happening in terms of policy. They just want to ignore it. There's the line, you may not care about war, but war cares about you. Policy cares about these people. It's destroying their lives, but they don't understand it.

And of course, they're surrounded by mainstream media that is gaslighting everything. So the prices are high at the supermarket. obviously this is mr putin uh and it's greedy grocery stores grocery stores have a 1.2 cent margin okay grocery stores are the least greedy business on earth they make like 1.2 pennies per dollar sold greedy grocery stores are not what's making the prices go up it's obviously money printing but if you don't have access like if you haven't uh sort of decided to open your mind enough to hear alternative points of view then you're just going to more or less assume that whatever you hear on TV is true.

I mean, after all, you've got PhD economists who are saying it on CNN. You know, these are the experts. You know, and most people figure, who am I? I work at Burger King. You know, what am I going to second guess Paul Krugman? Because they don't necessarily understand

that a lot of these expert infrastructures are thoroughly corrupt, right? The people are saying the things because they're essentially paid to, directly or indirectly. Yeah, they're all charlatans, people, for listening. And today was a perfect example this juxtaposition that you're describing where you had your video talking about the new

regulations that are going to go live under the biden administration that will increase the cost for appliances and other things due to environmental regulations and in the same day i'm not sure if you caught this but wired released an article saying that climate change is the economic crisis of our time is climate change is driving all these prices higher which is it's got got the causality completely backwards oh for sure and i mean fundamentally it's the socialist revolution it's been going on since i mean really since the progressives uh gained power in the late 19th century and the excuse changes every time uh you know maybe it's uh inner city poverty maybe it's uh i mean it's just you know it's like a constantly rotating cast of what the excuses are

but they all come out to the same punch line which is that we have to hand over more control more resources to the government so that they will take care of us. And the mainstream media tends to be dominated by people who went to the Ivy League. They tend to call the shots. And those are, they're almost religious schools at this point. They're like madrasas for the socialist revolution. So I don't even think those people are lying. I think that they genuinely believe this, just in their worldview, the people are dangerous, right? The people are somewhere between wild animals and like sociopathic children. And you need, you know, whether it's the zookeeper or the teacher, you know, with a thick ruler, somebody has to keep these people

in order or they're all going to kill each other. I think that's actually how they view the world. And if you think that's the case, right? If you think that the people are like dangerous monsters, then all of it makes sense right yes absolutely uh you need government control you need the experts you know to be telling us what to eat and what to put in our bodies and so on all of that naturally follows from it but then you sort of back up for a second you say well okay number one uh are the people actually dangerous monsters um you know keep in mind i mean we do live in a democracy and you know if the people are dangerous monsters then i would assume we have bigger problems because that would mean that our societies are being run by dangerous monsters.

But, you know, and I mean, I think that that's a big reason why they do go after democracy. I mean, of course, they claim to defend democracy, but they don't. They try to take as much power away from the people as possible is because they are afraid of that. Right. If you look at, you know, for example, in Europe where they're fighting against populists and a lot of the speeches are pretty close to saying that people are dangerous and we can't let the people think for themselves. right? We have to, we have to filter this, right? We have to have experts who can decide what the people can handle. And the sort of, sort of background assumption on this is that the people are wild animals. They're, they're, they're psychopaths, they're murderers. You,

you cannot let them actually control things. So I think it's funny that we live in a world where, you know, really for the first time in history, almost the entire world does have elections. it's not run by you know monarchs or dictators it i mean you know we do actually have semi-functioning democracies and yet the entire elite power structure is absolutely convinced that the most dangerous thing possible is for the people to actually control their governments yeah feels like it's really i don't want to say dehumanize it's just like again all this going back to

the literacy rate of the uh the state of the union address or the inaugural speech right to all this zookeeping uh policing and managing it's like it's so belittling which is oh for sure yeah it's just like winter and i think people are waking up and Again, going back to climate change, I think I saw a stat earlier today that Gen Z, the number of Gen Z individuals who believe climate change is an existential crisis fell by something like 20% between 2017 and 2022. Wow. So I think people are getting it.

And again, they can feel it in their everyday lives. And I guess that begs the question. There's a lot of hope as we head into this next election. people are believing that Trump's going to get in who knows whether they've rigged the election again or not and what will come of that but you do have this backdrop where we have passed many Rubicons in terms of the interest interest expense on the debt surpassing uh what we spend on defense on an annual basis you have you mentioned earlier delinquency rates on credit cards are going up You have this commercial real estate bubble that looks like it's imploding.

You have large buildings in New York City and D.C. selling at 80 percent discounts. How big are these headwinds for either administration coming in to the 2024 election? Yeah. So since I mean, really, since the 1970s, well, arguably for a lot longer than that. anyway sharpening since 2008 the playbook out of washington is that um they make policy according to what they want to spend like they have their own goals and then if anything breaks in the economy then you just shoot it with a trillion dollars and you do that over and over until it goes away and you know i think that's i mean we saw that in full effect during covid where where they just did things that were absolutely insane. I mean, closing down the entire economy,

like what? But the reason they could do that is because of the, of course, fiat money. And specifically, I think the lesson that they thought they learned from 2008, which is that in 2008, they shot several trillion dollars at the banking system to fix it. They didn't reform anything. They didn't actually make any policy changes. They just shot a lot of money at rich people. And indeed, it made the problem go away. Right. The banks got back on their feet. We did not actually see much inflation. A lot of people predicted at the time. But what happened was those two trillion were, you know, the banks used them to plug their balance sheets. They essentially held on to the money. It didn't go circulating. And so our power structure, the lesson that they

took from that was, hey, wait a minute, this is awesome. We can do whatever the heck we want. right we could even something as sci-fi nuts as shutting down the entire economy and we'll just shoot a bunch of money in so they did that with covid and they ended up shooting what i think was about six trillion uh seven trillion i'm sorry that the money supply grew in about a year and a half it was just utterly unprecedented uh certainly in modern times it was about twice the pace of the 1970s which was you know our last inflationary crisis and why would they do something so reckless i think because the lesson they took away from 2008 was no problem it breaks we just shoot money at it the money whatever you know it it gets salted away in the basement of

this and that bank and no problem at all and so they tried that and what we saw is you know sort of the traditional wisdom research like the reason why you can't just shoot a trillion dollars everything that moves is because it's going to turn into inflation and then once you get that inflation, people are going to get angry, and it's going to cause a bunch of ancillary problems, right? So, you know, the Fed had to hike rates in order to strangle the economy and took off the inflation that then sent the banks tanking. We had all those bank crashes last year. So, there are just all these problems that dribble out of it once you start getting double-digit inflation. And so, now I think they're kind of in a tight spot where for the past couple of

decades, and certainly during COVID, they've really just stomped on the accelerator to build out this mega state where it spends whatever it wants. At this point, the federal government is running $2 trillion deficits, for example. We're not in a major war. I mean, we're always at war because we have been for 200 years now, but we're not abnormally at war compared to say five or 10 years ago. So we're in what passes for peacetime for America. We're not in the middle of a major recession. And yet we've got two trillion dollar deficits, which suggests that when one of those two things changes, which we've got a lot of stagflationary numbers coming in, the Biden administration seems very, very interested in escalating the wars, particularly in Ukraine

and Taiwan. When one of those changes, then at that point, we go back to that sort of direct conversion of deficits into inflation. And I think that it's possible that the system could break on that. What I mean by break is that we could start to get inflation galloping up 10, maybe even more percent. I think 20 is one standard of hyperinflation. A lot of left-wing economists like a number where it's like got to be a billion percent before it qualifies. There's an accounting, there's a major accounting outfit that uses 20% a year. The reason they use 20% is that 20% is when people start doing things differently that make inflation accelerate, right? People start trying not to hold money in their bank account, not to hold money in their

wallet and then it tends to tends to be off to the races so I think at this point Washington I mean it's not just Washington but also Europe is just very very reckless they've kind of grown into being able to spend whatever they want to create any kind of financial crisis and just sort of assume that you know they'll shoot money at it and at this point the debts are getting so big that it looks like they might not that might not be possible for many more years and there's a name for this, right? It's called fiscal dominance. When you get to the point where the government debt is so massive that governments lose freedom of action, right? They can no longer bail out Wall Street. They can no longer patch up the next recession. They can no longer fund the next war.

And at that point, I think it gets pretty interesting. That's kind of where the rubber meets the road and we start to get, it'll be interesting to see what happens then. But we've seen this in many, many countries, right? I mean, dozens of poor countries have gone into fiscal crises and, you know, they, worst case scenario, they shrink down to the point where they can only pay the praetorian guard. There is sort of a silver lining there, which is that, you know, if the government completely collapses, then the people have to take over. So, you know, neighborhood watches instead of police, you don't have any more regulators.

you've you've essentially abolished the entire regulatory state in one fell swoop because the government's not paying the epa regulators so they're not coming out to hassle you uh i mean there is a silver lining to it but it does feel like we're getting a lot closer to that and we've accelerated since especially since covet yeah and then you factor in the external variables which is other countries seeing what we're doing with the fiscal dominance and saying hey whether it's fiscal dominance or the weaponization of the treasury market they're saying i don't want to buy treasuries anymore so you have demand for auctions going down which we discussed the last time you were on you have the bricks countries beginning to buddy up in saudi arabia most

importantly joining bricks and saying that they're open to settling trades and in different currencies outside the dollar you have what's going on in japan right now a major bank there came out and announced that they're going to be dumping i believe 60 billion in treasuries over the next year to defend their balance sheet and then you have the bank of japan being the largest u.s treasury holder in the world trying to defend its currency peg which i didn't check today but was hovering right below 160 yesterday at least and like what happens if any of those things break Yeah. So that's fascinating. Pretty much every traditional customer of federal debt is for one reason or another not buying, right? So China is preparing just in case the U.S. goes to war with

it. A lot of countries are peeling off just because of what we did to Russia, right? We seized the dollars owned by the Russian central bank. A lot of those were in treasuries, right? And so that made the U.S. dollar a risky thing for central banks to own. And so countries all over the world are watching this. The Indonesian president gave a speech at an ASEAN conference from Southeast Asian countries, and he said, hey, guys, you got to, you know, look what happened to Russia. It could be our turn next, right? The U.S. could come and seize our, the dollars that are backing our currency, and then that would collapse our financial system. So, you know, a lot of countries are pulling out for that. As you say, Japan has just a raft of problems. The, you know,

Japanese central bank just pissed away. I think it was about 60 billion as well that it came out to the price tag. They pissed that away trying to defend the yen. And then about three weeks later, just popped right back to where it had been. So it was completely wasted money. You've got Nodin Shuking Bank was the one that announced, I think it was 63 billion in treasuries. But there's a lot of banks in Japan that have a lot of issues, right? I mean, they got 20 years of extremely low interest rates that have given them the zombie economy. And so there's probably going to be a lot more after that. As you said, right, Saudi Arabia, some of the Gulf states that have traditionally been buyers of U.S. treasuries, they're now, you know, either they're being

courted by BRICS, China's trying to tempt them off the dollar, or, you know, there's been a question about whether the so-called petrodollar arrangement is still in effect, where, you know, those countries would buy U.S. assets in exchange for unpaid mercenary services. And so really every single buyer in the world is dropping out and yeah i had a video on this recently where the one who's picking up the slack is individual americans they're doing that right now because treasury bills are paying like five percent all right so traditionally treasury bills you know if they pay one percent then you can park your money there they pay five that starts to look pretty good considering all that's happening in the world and you know that could cause trouble in

stocks or risk uh so americans for the moment are picking up the slack or individual investors around the world but when we get the recession uh you know in the next whatever 18 months uh at that point the fed will always slash rates that is then going to you know those individuals are going to dump out of bonds because they're no longer going to pay five percent they're going to pay like one percent uh so at that point warren buffett has this great expression he says when the tide goes out we sue swimming without a suit so when the tide goes out on these high interest rates and those individuals dump at that point what we're left with all those institutions which really don't i mean they just they don't have the appetite uh for u.s debt that they used to have

now you pile on top of that the fact that we are running two trillion dollar structural deficits every year as to the us government this year is going to be flogging 11 trillion in treasuries between refinancing and fresh debt so if the institutions are dropping out the individuals they popped in they're having a couple drinks but they're going to go home soon and then meanwhile you've got just this wall of debt coming in it's hard to see how that doesn't hit a crisis if that does hit a crisis then the fiscal uh power of the us government shrinks dramatically right if it effectively can't sell debt without you know paying so much for it that it sort of becomes this vicious cycle uh if the us can't pay debt at that point the trillion dollar bazooka that it's

been relying on you know where it can just create wars and create crises without ever thinking about it because you just shoot a trillion another at that point that all goes away uh and it gets pretty interesting for what happens to the economy at that point yeah it makes one wonder like are we at the beginning stages of that like are we already in this late stage fiat melt up when you consider again interest expense surpassing defense spending and the three expenses above it are structural ponzi schemes and social security medicare medicaid um you just look at stocks like nvidia who knows maybe it is a markup that's commensurate with the increased revenues they've seen over the last couple years but just looking at the chart looks a little crazy to me and what's

even more wearing is the fact that it is holding up um the nasdaq potentially the whole u.s equities market and some people would say the global financial system um you'll get delinquency rates at 2010 levels it's like it seems like things are um melting up if you will in all the the wrong ways yeah and you know that's always the question is timing um and you know we can see the markers on the road there. So FDR clearly, FDR seizing gold, at which point the U.S. dollar was no longer a gold-backed currency. Nixon finishing it off. So before Nixon, countries could still cash their dollars in for gold, but Nixon ended that. And then you sort of see this acceleration at each one of these stages. You can see an inflation really cleanly. So the first

150 years of the republic, we had zero aggregate inflation. You had some years that went up, years it went down if you take prices in 1789 and you look at prices in 1912 they were almost identical like for eggs or you know things that you can compare apples to apples bread things like that uh and then of course once the fed came in now inflation ramped up because that's what central banks do they create uh inflation for living uh and then nixon ramped that up and so the question is did we hit whether it was 2008 or whether it was covid did we hit this point where it's inflecting again. And now, you know, we're going to get much higher rates of inflation going forward. And, you know, I think you could make a case for both of those. Really, in a sense,

it was a one-two punch between 2008 and COVID, where the government fundamentally changed its relationship with the economy, where we shifted, you know, from a mostly market-driven with like an assist or a corrupt assist from the government. We shifted from that kind of a world into a world where it's really being led by the government at this point. I mean, COVID was, all the disasters that came out of COVID, the inflation, the stagflation now, all the bank collapses, all of that was caused by government, right? It, like the disease itself was a respiratory illnesses. Those have occurred many times through history. We should be used to them by now. But so we're now this economy now where it's completely government driven they're almost incentivized to create these

new crises in fact they they pretend there's crises and there doesn't appear to be one right that goes back to that wired argument how or that uh wired magazine how you know the climate crisis is the like they're they're sort of trying to spawn crises out of nothing like um and you know traditionally we'd assume that governments actually tried to fight crises and tried to to protect us but it seems like they're actually going for them if that changed in the relationship right where government has gone from a benign parasite to an active predator if that has changed us onto another trajectory then yes i think that is quite likely that we're looking at you know maybe only another 10 years left in the current system before it implodes

yeah and then you factor in the escalation particularly ukraine what happened at crimea exactly over the weekend oh god it's astounding yeah and just right it really is and then the other factor that we haven't touched on is that they're still underreporting all these things whether it's inflation look at the jobs numbers and the revisions um whether it's at the federal government at state level it's all yeah all fake um and then the job growth that we have had is either taken up by immigrants or people taking second and third jobs which force them to get in a car and drive people in ubers or drive food via doordash which was going to be inflationary itself because you have to fill your gas tank to do those jobs in the first place

yeah yeah it's funny like looking at the statistics these days it is it's like dealing with a thief where like you don't know he he tells you something you know it's not true and so the trick is just figuring out exactly in what way he's lying like what is he lying about right and you know if you look at for example in the economic statistics right so just a couple days ago california revised their jobs numbers and it turns out that they had essentially zero job growth they had 9 000 uh jobs created last year out of an economy of like 4 45 million people or something I mean, that that is effectively zero. OK, in other words, like it's not conspiracy theory anymore. All right. This is not just crazy guys, you know, saying the moon landing was fake and the unemployment numbers aren't real.

No, this is literally the official reporters are coming out and saying, oh, man, hey, no, it turns out we did the sums rule. We saw that also at the federal level. Right. So I think it was the Federal Reserve that put out a paper where they estimated that 800000 jobs last year were actually not there. We've seen a divergence in the job numbers between, you know, the number of jobs that companies say or that government surveys claim that companies report, as opposed to what households actually report. I mean, just across the board, the numbers are fake. They are being constantly revised, not just revised like a tiny bit, but revised just massive amounts. Inflation is the other big question, right? So official inflation since the pandemic has been something like 25%. But if you look at, for example, fast food menus, those are more like 35% or 50%.

In foreign exchange, they don't look at government reported numbers. They look at something called the Big Mac Index, right? This is a holy grail in foreign exchange analyses. Like if a bank is trying to figure out if the Japanese yen is undervalued, they ask, okay, what does the Big Mac cost in Japan? And what does it cost in the U.S.? And the reason they do that is that a Big Mac is a bundle of different services. So you have labor, you have gasoline for the truck, you have real estate, you have electricity, whatnot, food. And so if you look at that, kind of the gold standard of inflation, it hasn't been 25%.

It's been like 35%, maybe 50%. People who post stuff online, they post their grocery bills. They talk about things they bought, vacations. These things all seem to be 50% or more. The reason that matters is not only does it suggest that perhaps they're lying about inflation, right? It also means that the way that we count GDP, like whether we're getting richer or not, is we use real GDP. So you take the numbers and then you take off inflation. If inflation hasn't been 25 percent, but it's actually been 35 percent, it implies that we've actually been in a recession for four years now.

I don't know if that's the case, right? There are so many inflation numbers. I honestly don't know which one is correct, but it is entirely possible. Now, how could that be? You might say that's ridiculous. We would know if we're in recession. But in fact, you know, if you go back, like in our minds, a real depression looks like the 1930s where, you know, prices were collapsing, wages were collapsing, people were being laid off. But actually, you can look at another recession, which is the Weimar events in Germany during the 1920s. And when Weimar first hit, obviously, the economy was completely collapsing, right? That's what gave rise to the social disorders that followed. But early in Weimar, what people were talking about was the stock market going up, okay?

Because inflation, as it circulates in the economy, it makes eggs and shoes go up, but it also makes stocks go up because stocks are things people buy, right? And so early in Weimar, people were not worried about the hyperinflation. They were super excited about the hyperinflation of their stock portfolios, right? So this starts to look a lot like today, right? If we've actually got like a four-year depression, and I should give credit to Jeff Tucker. I had a great conversation with him. We were sort of teasing this out, and he's got an upcoming article over at Brownstown.

But at any rate, it seems to me that it's possible that we've actually been in a four-year recession here where asset, pumping asset prices have been covering over it, right? People feel rich. They are rich because their assets went up. Not all people, of course, only the upper class and the upper middle class. They're doing just fine and everybody else is not. Now, if that were the case, right, if we had an economy where the numbers were fake and it was all being propped up by assets, that would look a lot like what we have today. Right. Media would sit around. They would say, look at these amazing numbers. What's wrong with you idiots? You know, you Americans can't see how amazing Bidenomics is.

You would have rich people who are, you know, this ridiculous, conspicuous consumption. you know they've got gold flakes in their chardonnay and whatnot maybe not chardonnay in their champagne uh while you know the working class is like struggling to make ends meet so if we had that type of economy it would fit the facts uh so to me that's that's kind of as an economist that's one of the more interesting things going on at the moment yeah i would have hard to believe at all that we've been in a recession for for four years i mean the tiktok videos you mentioned earlier people sitting in their cars complaining crying pleading for help right yeah you go out here in austin you look at what's going on down the street here on sixth

street there's gaggle of homeless people that are in a desperate state and i mean i feel i mean i'm fortunate to be somewhat comfortable financially and i can still feel them like damn i'm having a question are we gonna buy uh we're gonna go out to dinner are we gonna go buy these clothes right doesn't make sense we're going to buy a new car because does any of this make sense right now you're like forced to question when constantly i think a lot of us look at it you know like you go to mcdonald's and it's like 78 bucks to buy food for the family uh we got our dog neutered it was 900 dollars like how i don't i'm like that is not 24 inflation man like and i mean beyond that you're like how on earth are regular people surviving i haven't i have i mean i know

from the numbers they're doing it with debt but this is this does not strike me as terribly sustainable no and well and the debts they're getting tapped out too we could blink with c it's going up they can't banks or they're looking at the interest rates like i can't pay 25 interest even though i may need to to survive it's just a little too much for my liking and then bank credit offerings are becoming constricted because they understand the risk profile of what it would be to lend money out to people making this much income at these interest rates. It's a shit show. And then to make matters all the more worse, even if you were to take the government's

statistics at face value, they're still lying to the public, particularly the Biden administration. Oh, we've solved inflation's lower. You solve the rate of inflation, which is still building on a higher base that built up. from 2020, and so the index is still up quite high if we are to take your numbers at face value, which we're not because they're not true at all. But even if you were to appease the government and what they're trying to tell you,

it's still not as good as you're making it out to be. Yeah, well, if there's a junkie who shows up and siphons off a gallon of gas every night out of your fuel tank, okay, then you know you're like hey what are you doing he's like okay tell you what i'll just take a half gallon you're like you know what yeah that'll work things are a lot better i mean that's where we are like you know it it's not like prices are ever going to go down they will never want to go down again of course as long as the fed exists because the reason you know that's like the fed's uh go-to

excuse for why it uh counterfeits money is that you know it claims that deflation is always bad so right those prices are never ever coming back the best you could say about biden is that it's not getting as bad as it was a couple years ago but of course you know if you look at the inflation rate even now it's uh what about three and a half three seven even if we take the official numbers uh i had a video the other day that inflation expectations okay so what americans think inflation is going to do in the next 10 years are currently at 5.3 percent that is 10 years uh and it's an article of faith that consumer expectations are one of the most accurate reads of future inflation extremely accurate the fed watches them like a hawk because they know they're

accurate and in fact if we go back to the worst of bidenflation right the absolute worst when actual official inflation was it was actually over 10 because they they do this funny thing with housing, with delays. Anyway, official inflation was over 10% and it was 9.9. And expectations at that time, okay, Americans thought that inflation was gonna be about 4%. Now they're saying 5.3. So in other words, if you actually talk to Americans

who are the gold standard for predicting inflation, why? Because they raise prices, I mean, they are the inflation. They're the ones who process the inflation, it runs through them. inflation actually looks like it's saved up to take another jump. And just going by the expectation numbers, that could be bigger than the last bout that we just had with Joe Biden. And that would, by the way, be the exact pattern of the 1970s, right? So the 1970s, we had two, looked like a camel's back, right? So you had one inflation that got into double digits,

then it came back down for a little bit, the Fed declared victory, just like they are now. And then it jumped again. We're almost month to month on track for that. It was pretty astounding. What's concerning for me is that in the 1970s, it ended because we had a Fed chair, Paul Volcker, who cranked rates up so hard. We had the biggest recession since the Great Depression. Finally, it broke the back of inflation. But the problem is he was appointed by Jimmy Carter, who's obviously a very inflationist guy. I don't think Jimmy Carter knew what he was getting in Paul Volcker. I think he was surprised. Moreover, by crashing the economy so hard, of course, Jimmy Carter lost the election, right, because people blamed him for not only the inflation but the recession, meaning that Washington is not going to be that dumb again, right?

they're not going to put somebody in there who is hard money, who's going to lose the president who appointed him the election again. So that's my concern is that if we get into that kind of 1970s scenario where inflation takes off again, I don't see Jerome Powell having it in him to hike rates the way that Volcker did. I mean, you know, current rates are like five, five and a quarter. Volcker got them up to like 16, 18, 19%. We had like 20% on mortgages. I mean, it was much, much more than Jerome Powell has ever thought about doing. So that's my concern is that if we get into that place again, we may not be able to come out of it. Rather, Washington may just ride it off the cliff because the alternative is that they fix it and lose their jobs.

And no politician is going to take that deal. No, they're not coming to save you. So you have to save yourself this is something that it seems like many more people are waking up to whether that's individual countries fading treasuries uh in favor of gold or companies we've seen a big trend over the last six months particularly of individual companies that are publicly traded and even private privately held companies following the likes of micro strategy and putting bitcoin on their balance sheets as a treasury asset. And I think that is something that if you're listening, I'm sure you already know this

because it's a Bitcoin podcast, but with the fact in mind that they're not coming to save you due to these circumstances and the history that you just explained, you got to save yourself. Like if you're running a company, if you're an individual,

you have to get some money on your balance sheet, whether it's your corporate balance sheet or your personal balance sheet. That is the only way we're going to manufacture a soft landing, in my opinion. is by winning hearts and minds and convincing them that Bitcoin is the way out. Well, and it's a moral imperative. I mean, if you run a company, you have a responsibility for your people.

I run a business, you run a business. You come to look at your employees like family. And, you know, if you want your business to survive, you have to hold some of your assets, some of the treasury assets in something that's actually hard. And, you know, obviously, I mean, Bitcoin compared to gold, you know, I would put the odds. If we have a collapse, the odds that we flip the gold versus the odds that we flip the Bitcoin. I think obviously, you know, the the end game is Bitcoin. Gold has managed to do that many times in the past, but it's also failed over and over because it's got the fundamental physical flaw.

it's vulnerable to government seizure uh so yeah i would argue that you know anybody who runs a company actually has a responsibility to put some of those assets in uh in bitcoin yeah yeah we're seeing it too here at 1031 it's in our portfolio companies are starting to bring credit products to market that blend traditional credit with bitcoin dual collateralizing with assets like commercial real estate and bitcoin to enable people that are involved in these businesses to actually ensure that they can have their assets or their assets at value at the end of the day that's what i think that's what excites me most about bitcoin and hopefully a trump victory with very little regulation is that i do think the free market

can figure this out and bitcoin is viral in nature and it seems to be a trend that's picking up like i would not be surprised if we wake up in 2026 and there's over 100 publicly traded companies with sizable bitcoin treasuries um at that point it comes a self-fulfilling prophecy where if inflation isn't tamed and people are seeing the success of michael saylor and others that have followed his wake um and they say hey this looks like a better strategy than depending the government to to fix this inflation yeah and there's a tipping point right companies um ceos are conservative they're financially conservative by nature uh you don't get fired for doing what everybody else is doing okay on the other hand it's very risky to do what nobody else is doing

and so there's this tipping point where you go from you know currently for a lot of companies it's very risky to put bitcoin on your balance sheet but there is some level where it's actually risky to do the opposite and then you get this mass lemming pile on when people talk about million dollar bitcoin that's probably one of the usual suspects on that uh when you get to the point where ceos see it as risky to not hold bitcoin i i mean you'll you'll get you know potentially trillions of dollars uh pouring over you know because banks will also do that across the financial system and you know i think what's been fascinating this this trump coming over to bitcoin so he had of course been skeptical for a long time uh i don't think trump understood

bitcoin i don't think he had really had a strong opinion either way he just likes the dollar okay and you know generally when he would criticize bitcoin like back in 2021 he would say things like yeah i'm not really sold on bitcoin i like the dollar i want the dollar to be strong and i think what happened you know a couple weeks ago when he was talking to libertarians and and he came out um full-on for bitcoin and you know protecting self-custody uh wanting bitcoin to be made here in america which i'll take it you know there are economists who you know ankle bite but yeah okay i'll take that um i think what's happening there is that you know trump to me is an interesting politician where there's a lot of issues where i don't think he has a strong opinion

either way he doesn't really care uh but what he does have is he loves his people okay in his mind he has a picture of the people who love him and he has been astoundingly loyal to them in his first term anything that he imagined his people okay and his people might be like a farmer in indiana or something right whatever he imagined that person wants in life he was for it he is i think exceptionally loyal that means that you know for him to endorse bitcoin like that with most politicians you would say you know whatever it's a politician trying to win an election i think in his case he is extraordinarily loyal i think if he says that he's going to be pro-bitcoin i actually believe him i don't think it's coming from conviction i don't think he's read

you know say fadeen uh but i think that he's incredibly loyal to his people and that somebody in his orbit uh maybe don jr convinced him that bitcoiners are his people yeah i think steve minutian steve munchin butts had a perverse influence on him during his first time yeah and it's good to see that he's been working closely with vivek who is pro bitcoin and i do And we should mine all the Bitcoin here, because that incites the incentives. If Trump signals to the rest of the world, hey, we're going to mine all the Bitcoin here. They say, no, you're not. We're going to mine all the Bitcoin here.

And then you naturally geographically distribute hash rate as people vie to mine all the Bitcoin within their borders. It's good for Bitcoin at the end of the day. And, you know, people who worry about mining concentration. I mean, there is a worldwide trend to build useless green energy projects in the middle of nowhere. All of those are eventually going to be Bitcoin mining, because what else are you going to do with a dam that's a thousand miles away from the nearest city? So, look, there's going to be plenty of geographic distribution simply from bailing out all the green projects. So if we have policymakers in the U.S. who are, you know, hardcore pro Bitcoin mining, bring it. Absolutely.

Yeah. we're gonna win it's dark times i yeah i think i think we're absolutely gonna win i think we're gonna win on bitcoin i think we're gonna win politically i mean it's part of the reason you know people ask me like you know because sometimes you know i'll be kind of happy in the videos and people will be like why are you happy man everything's going you know to hell and no we're absolutely gonna win if you look back through history you know the the um you know the hard times make uh weak man and you know that whole which is like a 2 000 year old thing Libyus, right? That's, that's ancient wisdom at this point. It is true. Uh, the worst things get

the stronger we get. Okay. So I, I mean, in a way, I don't know, it's, you don't like the suffering that comes when a country collapses, you do have starvation, you have all kinds of terrible things. Um, but there's a silver lining that the faster things collapse, the faster we fix it. And, you know, I have no doubt if you look at the caliber of our elite right now, like the goofball who biden just uh uh hired with the i mean just the these are not high we're gonna find out he's stealing luggage in like four months another luggage stealer i mean these are pathetic people like these you know we have and the emperor has no clothes literally where like it's like this potemkin village of elite that i mean they're just

absolute pathetic uh people i i have no doubt they're doing everything they can to hold it down censorship is pretty much all they got left that's the only thing that's keeping them in power uh censorship control over um thought fundamentally right whether it's uh schooling universities media that's all they got going for them is control over thought they lose that and holy cow they're gonna be out of here so fast and even so even with all the control over thought right you're talking about the zoomers who aren't buying the global warming stuff i mean these guys zoomers are they're like in the religious schools man they're in there every day with this stuff crammed down their throats they probably get flunked out if they you know question any of it

all the media they're getting they're on tick tock i i think you know as well we get censored all the time on tick tock for global warming stuff and nonetheless they're not buying it so i am incredibly optimistic they have to get lucky every single time right they have to suppress the truth every single time if one time it bleeds out that's going to be the sweater the little thread in this way that pulls the whole thing apart i am massively optimistic it's not going to be fun between here and there it does take a while right we got to win minds over one by one but we are absolutely going gonna win yeah i think we may have a catalyst for the acceleration of acceleration in two nights with this debate unless they can jack him up with enough amphetamines to make it a somewhat cogent

debate i think that's it's gonna be massive mud on the face that's the question i'm i'm debating this with my wife all the time like are they gonna try to yank him you know are they gonna take the debate and say, well, you guys were right. He's not fit. Let's yank him. And they'll stuff in Nurse Ratched over in Michigan, Whitmer, or who's the other one? Newsom, jailboy. And I mean, that strikes me as a possibility. You know, any other candidate the Democrats have has kind of damaged goods. But on the other hand, I mean, never underestimate the media distortion. You like you remember fine people on both sides and how the media just pulled that out of there i mean they they can they have a limitless ability to lie so you know like if they stuff gavin newsom in

there three weeks later he's gonna be the second coming at jfk uh so that for me is gonna be the big question is does biden do so badly that they try to yank him of course the biden people the biden handlers want to protect him right i mean biden is you know whatever he's useless but his his handler right because he's president he's attracted a lot of powerful people in dc and those people are going to want to keep him even if it's you know cousin at bernie's propping him up they're going to want to keep him around they sure as hell don't want kamala that was probably the most brilliant thing the biden campaign did was put kamala in as vice president as insurance but for me that's that's really going to be the interesting question is does he so

do so badly that they yank him and try to stuff in somebody else yeah well that's what apparently the trump i think he said on true social or somewhere some interview like he's pretty convinced that they try to make it so he would turn down the debate due to how biased it was with jake tapper and other anchors at cnn who have talked very negatively of him in the past obviously have a biased tilt um he was like no i'll take the debate and just a yeah i think it was a bluff that trump called now it's like all right we gotta roll joe out here and have him talk for an hour let's see let's see how that goes i'm waiting anxiously i have to be at a dinner thursday night while it's going on i'm thinking about not going oh man watch it no yeah

it'll definitely be a popcorn moment how long are they going to be debating do you know uh i can't imagine i mean the biden handlers had their way it'd probably be a half hour debate yeah maybe 15 minutes because you know it it's a question of the half-life on the drugs right you know there's some point where they start wearing off and we saw it at the state of the union this year he started slurring towards the end and yeah yeah and like he actually started out strong he he sounded legit in the beginning uh i don't know what drugs they're using but i'm sure they're expensive i'm sure it's the good stuff uh but yeah you gotta you gotta get him out of there before he started slurring so well the state of the union is a different animal you don't have to

you don't have to respond you don't have to be on your toes you're sort of reading a speech a debate where he's forced to cognitively cognitively compute uh parts of a discussion and respond cogently it's something i'm very excited about and then how crazy like we're well the fact that we're even having this discussion like the president is not gonna be able to speak at the debate is like a sign of the times well the the the fact that they decided not to prosecute him because he was like mentally incompetent and i'm like what what clown world are we living in where but you know to be fair talking about the debate the the fetterman debate i mean he was in bad shape right he was in really bad shape and i will say it's pretty astounding what ended up happening

after that the great transformation of john fetterman uh where he you know regained his his, uh, sanity better than ever. Um, but you know, I mean, we've got recent, um, precedent for pretty bad debate performances that don't end up affecting much. So, you know, maybe he comes out, he slurs, uh, the media selectively edits the 60% of Americans who get their news on the evening news, you know, the NBC evening news, they don't know any better. Uh, Jimmy Kimmel, you know, uh, gives us the highlights and, and maybe he comes out of it. Yeah. Jimmy Kimmel has Hunter Biden back on to uh to discuss the debate and how well his dad did um yeah exactly maybe i'm too much of a of an optimist here but i i think the uh there will be good clips floating around twitter on

thursday night oh without a doubt yeah yeah yeah well peter thank you for doing this i uh yeah always it's always a joy marty the uh income tax demolition of income tax and increasing tariffs is something i was like oh i haven't thought about that in a while and you did a video if it happened when it's funny because you know most mainstream economists are in my mind just obsessed with tariffs like they don't care about anything else they're like 99 income tax reparations do whatever you got to do but my god don't touch the tariffs they're just obsessed with them and i uh my colleagues at heritage as well um we yeah i mean if you actually look at the impact of tariffs it's not that big the impact of taxes is big income tax the impact of regulations is also very big

just it's like a neutron bomb you know like why does detroit suck so bad regulations you can't start a business there uh you're gonna get harassed out you're gonna get hounded out So, yeah, I love the idea. You know, I think for me, one of Trump's specialties is taking things that are great ideas, but are nowhere close to the Overton window. They're nowhere close to actually being discussed by people. And he puts those out there. And, you know, one of those was NATO, you know, the idea of the U.S. getting ripped off by NATO. And why the heck do we join all these wars anyway?

What the heck's in it for regular Americans? And this to me is another one, right? this kind of an idea that when most people first hear it they're like that's crazy and actually no it's not as crazy as it sounds we we did it for a long time and it turned out pretty special yeah and the income tax is unconstitutional unconstitutional um and it was supposed to be one to two percent and now it's fifty percent yeah state and federal in some areas so well and that's an open question so if they jack something in even if it's an amendment and then they end up you know changing it materially so that you know in other words

when the income tax came in it hit less than one percent of the population the top rate was three percent okay now it hits 80 of the population top rate is what 39.5 or something that's a materially different thing okay and so you know to me it's kind of an open question like if they pass a law under false pretenses, I kind of feel like the law should be reverted. I think that's the same on the Federal Reserve, right? The Federal Reserve was passed to protect the dollar. It had one goal in life. It was to protect the dollar. As soon as they start with the second mandate, full employment, the third mandate, bailout banks, all right, at that point, I don't feel that it was passed under, you know, under good faith. I think we should repeal it and go

ahead and ask the voters again if they want it. So that's kind of a meta question, I suppose. But yeah i would agree the in my mind the income tax and the federal reserve act the twin disasters of 1913 because of what they've become in my mind those were never passed democratically they were smoke and mirrors they've you know it was a bait and switch they've delivered something that the american people never thought that they were voting for afuera afuera afuera exactly we will we will get it all out keep crushing it i enjoy your videos every day thank you marty love sharing them no you do fantastic and yeah keep up the battle you too peace a lot freaks