TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #551: Why Inflation Is Higher Than You Think with Ed Butowsky

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

Today, Marty sat down with Ed Butowsky to discuss the real inflation numbers the Fed is hiding from Americans. They cover the cost-of-living increases that the CPI falsely shows by analyzing the Chapwood index. This ranges from higher food prices to higher energy costs. True Inflation data is much higher than most think, affecting all economic data, including real GDP growth. Ed on Twitter: https://x.com/EdButowsky Chapwood Index: https://chapwoodindex.com/ 0:00 - Intro 1:31 - Cost-of-Living Adjustment 7:17 - Mischaracterization of CPI 10:01 - Fed policy and GDP 15:38 - Unchained & Coinkite 17:31 - Effect of band aid policy and gaslighting 20:07 - Sovereign debt crisis and monetary base 23:39 - Realistic risk estimates for clients 25:26 - Zaprite & SOTE 26:59 - Bitcoin 31:55 - Defaults and dollar weaponization 34:50 - Trump & conservative policy 40:32 - State autonomy and energy renaissance 43:02 - Wrap up Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained https://unchained.com/concierge/ Zaprite https://zaprite.com/tftc Salt of the Earth https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

that's when the government started manipulating the way that they calculated the cpi ed butowski is an american financial advisor and author in 2005 he founded chapwood investments a private wealth management firm that was among the first to assist professional athletes he also created the chapwood index it reports the unadjusted actual cost and price fluctuation of the top 500 items on which americans spend their after-tax dollars in the 50 largest cities in the united States. Many find this to be a more accurate version of the CPI. Today, we will break down what the Chapwood Index has been signaling and why the Federal Reserve's version of the CPI is flawed and incorrect. The government could not handle giving out 13% increases in their

programs like Social Security and Medicare and so on. So they started to manipulate it. So the CPI went from 13% down to three in a year. 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. Ed Butowski, thank you for joining us.

And sorry for the technical difficulties. We're using our backup streaming service right now. Well, that's fine. I'm not the most computer literate person, but this works. Well, I think whether or not you're computer illiterate, I think the work that you're doing at Chapwood Investments, particularly with the chapwood index is something that i admire greatly particularly somebody who's been writing about the economy for seven years now looking for um better inflation inflation

metrics than what uh the bls puts out the cpi i found that your work and the the work from shadow stats more directly uh imbues what i'm feeling throughout the economy when i'm going and shopping at the grocery store, going to fill up my gas tank, paying insurance bills on a month to month basis. And extremely excited to have you on just to get a background of the Chapwood index, why I decided to put it together, how you put it together. Because it's something that I've been following and have only ever heard a few interviews from you before. And just want to dive into this, because I think this is a very important topic that many Americans have at the top of their mind right now particularly as we head into election season absolutely so so the way that

i started this was i initially had this idea and it all goes back to my mother uh when she got divorced from my father and my mother got a job when she had cancer and i said why'd you get a job at macy's she said because your effing father didn't adjust my alimony for cola and i thought cola? You drink tab. I didn't even know what cola was at that time. And then I started looking into it and I realized there was a gentleman named Albert Singlinger in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, who was doing an analysis on the old ways that the government used to calculate inflation versus how they were doing it now. And this was in 1994 that I had this conversation with my mother. And Albert Singlinger was referencing back to 1983 because that's when

the government started manipulating the way that they calculated the CPI because the CPI was at 13 percent and the government could not handle giving out 13 percent increases in their programs like Social Security and Medicare and so on. So they started to manipulate it. So the CPI went from 13 percent down to three in a year. Well the prices didn't go you know stop going up that much in one year. The government started manipulating the way they did it. So if you went back and used the old rules of how they calculated it you would find that inflation was growing around eight or nine percent a year. So I had a conversation with John Williams who runs Shadow Stats and I said well why don't you do this for every city because every city has a different cost of living increase

it's not the cost of living that's important it's the cost of living increase that's important and he said he didn't have time to do it and i thought okay well i'll ask all of my clients to fill out what they're spending their money on today and then have them track their own cost of living increase i sent out a request to all of them not one of them did it so i thought OK, well, then I need to do this somehow. So I got people on Facebook to go out to their grocery stores and other places and start doing it for me. So these are my friends and they started doing it quarterly and it got to be too much. So we do it twice a year. And these are the real out of pocket costs that people spend money on to keep a constant standard of living. So in California, it won't surprise you that their cost of living increase is far greater than Taos, New Mexico is.

And New York is going to be a lot greater than Denver is. Although it's interesting to note that a lot of Democrat cities where there's a heavy spending in the cities, their cost of living increase is far greater than red cities. And that's not a political statement. It's just factual. and so that in the 90s is that when they introduced hedonic adjustments mid-90s is that what that that change in the cpi was it was the 8384 8384 right but i started understanding it really looking into it when my mother was sick and that's when i became really just amazed by the manipulation because her costs were going up so much quicker even though my father didn't adjust her alimony for cola i started looking into it and realized what a what

a bogus thing this was because you have so many people who are relying on their cost of living increase to to keep them in pace or keep them up with what their real cost of living increase is So they're looking to the CPI to be adjusted realistically, but just now you had a 2.5% growth for January 2025. Well, anybody who thinks that their cost of living increase is only 2.5%, they're absolutely misguided. So they're going to be spit in their face by about 5% to 7%. Their lives are going to get harder. That's why grandmothers and grandfathers presence get worse as the years go on, because they're living off of they're living off of this money and they can't keep pace with the cost of living increase. Well, I mean, and that's the the other nefarious tactic that the government uses, particularly this administration, not trying to get political, just being objective of how things are positioned in the market.

in the Biden administration has been championing the fact that CPI inflation has been falling since the beginning of this year, end of last year. And they neglect to acknowledge the fact that even though it's a smaller rate of inflation, according to CPI, I think we would both argue that CPI is underscoring inflation dramatically. But even if you're running with the assumption that CPI is somewhat accurate. They're mischaracterizing the fall in inflation. It's really the fall in inflation rate, which is building on a higher base, which is still squeezing people post 2020. Yeah. And I'll tell you, I wish I could do a 60 minute segment on this because what I would focus on is that this is one of the reasons why we have so much crime in the inner cities, because people

in the inner cities again just being very general here they are middle income people to lower income people and these people rely on somebody giving them a thumbs up or a thumbs down based on what their performance was they don't get a chance to make extra money based on their performance so they get an increase based on the government's cpi number and that cpi number is low or lower than what their expenses are it only takes about five years of being you know smushed in the face by being you know five percent behind what their cost of living increases then all of a sudden they're 25 behind and then they're going to start to commit crimes because everyone has a threshold of pain and when you reach it you know they're paying their taxes they're doing everything right

but they just keep falling further and further behind and this is one of the main reasons i I think we have inner city crime is because of the misguided number from the CPI. And shifting back to the index in the data collection, there's 500 items, correct? It's down to 150 now. Down to 150. And in terms of data collection, like are you essentially indexing people buying the same good from the same

place or are the goods substitutable between different, different different stores or different gas stations if you will well i try to get people to buy the same thing over and over again at the same store so my data collectors are going to the same stores looking at the same items yeah and i mean if you go on chapwood index and you you look at the numbers i mean particularly the major cities since 2020 and even before then uh double digits to mid double digits to mid teens in many of these cities on an annual um and semi-annual basis like what what do you think like with the fed lowering rates by 50 bps and all the rhetoric and policy changes that have been made in in your mind um have they been effective at all are we are

we setting ourselves up for a 1970 style echo inflation with the Fed cutting rates at this particular point in time? Well, that's a little bit of a different discussion than the index. That's my interpretation of the cost of living. Is it going higher or lower? And will it go higher or lower? I believe that the Fed's going to have to continue to cut interest rates, mainly because of the GDP number, not because of inflation. I think the GDP number is woeful, and we're going to have to lower interest rates to stimulate the economy. And if the CPI or if inflation isn't under control, then we're going to see it exacerbated. So you're going to see rising prices again when they lower interest rates. Let's do that. I was mentioning before we

recorded that i um i watched an interview that you did with kitco news a couple of weeks ago maybe last week in which you you mentioned just this they're going to be focused on gdp which is um which was not surprising to me but it was um it did stick out to me because if you hear the fed talk they're always targeting the inflation rate and talking about getting to the level they want to before feeling comfortable lowering rates but you seem to think that gdp is is much more top of mind for the Fed? And so in terms of GDP, like diving deeper into what the actual or what the reported numbers look like, and then your thoughts on whether those reported numbers are actually indicative of what's actually happening in terms of productivity throughout

the economy? Yeah, so again, not to sound like a conspiratory, you know, everything is a conspiracy. But when you look at the GDP numbers, you have to look at how GDP is calculated. And there's something called the GDP deflator. And that is the inflation number that they're able to assign to the GDP. And if that number is low, that means growth would be higher. And they're able to assign a very low number to the GDP deflator. therefore the number you know the the GDP growth could be higher so they assign a very low number to it and they still are getting a pretty woeful and I

keep saying wolf I don't know why but they keep getting a woeful number on the GDP but if they were to assign the real GD real inflation number then GDP would be you know negative but they're able to manipulate it by having a higher or a lower uh gdp deflator number so think of gdp deflator as a placeholder for inflation and they're able to assign a lower inflation number to the gdp number therefore making the growth in gdp seem higher is it even lower than the cpi the deflator i believe so what is their justification for using a lower number to make the gdp number look higher it's just to game the numbers that's That's it.

Yeah. And it's... So there's really no growth in the economy right now at all? No, I think the jobs numbers would point to this too. If you look at jobs growth, particularly over the last three years, a lot of it has been either immigrants taking a lot of the jobs or government jobs, basically taking up a bunch of the positive jobs growth in the U.S.

then on top of that you have the backwards revisions that have been pretty woeful themselves over the last two years yeah so you stole my word woeful so you know i don't understand how illegal immigrants can get jobs if they're not legal how are they taking jobs like how is that happening i i don't get that is everybody just breaking the law i mean in the post-covid world it seems like the um the appetite to actually enforce the law has has decreased a bit particularly in some cities you're talking about inner city problems uh and looting um looting stores if you if you steal less than a thousand dollars you're not even going to get a slap on the wrist they're going to say just walk away

uh yeah no that's a great question um and you had your own pal almost explicitly admit that um illegal immigrants taking jobs is quote-unquote good for the economy because it helps um helps uh employers pay lower wages to keep producing goods and services yeah you just wake up one day and you think what kind of world do we live in like what do we accept as the truth you can't accept the cpi numbers as the truth you can't accept the gdp numbers as the truth You can't accept the number of migrants that are coming into this country. You know, you can't really accept anything anymore, is the truth. So for this episode of TFTC is brought to you by our good friends at Unchained.

Do you have an old IRA or 401k that isn't keeping up with Bitcoin? Rolled over into an Unchained Bitcoin IRA and take advantage of Bitcoin's long-term potential while enjoying tax-deferred growth. With Unchained, you hold real Bitcoin and keep control of your keys, reducing counterparty risk through their collaborative custody model, while Unchained handles the tax forms. It's very important they handle the tax forms. Get started now with no setup fees

and no account fee for the first year. Not only is this the only standard Bitcoin IRA where you can control keys unlike other Bitcoin IRAs, you can take distributions directly in Bitcoin avoiding exchange fees. Set up a Roth or traditional Bitcoin IRA for no charge today at unchained.com slash TFTC and experience true ownership of your retirement savings.

Go to unchained.com slash TFTC. This rip is also brought to you by good friends at Coinkite. Coinkite builds the best Bitcoin hardware in the world. There is no second best when it comes to Bitcoin hardware. If you're looking to secure and self-custody your Bitcoin, you can get the MK4 or the Coldcard Q. Coldcard Q has a full keyboard, a QR scanner, NFC enabled, has a battery pack with some AA batteries in there.

Create private public keys off pair in an air gap fashion. Private keys never have to touch an online device. they have their sats card which is the best way to give bitcoin if you're looking to gift bitcoin for a wedding a birthday party a communion a bar mitzvah whatever it may be tap the card on the back of your phone you get a address to send to you send it to that address it lives on the sats card again there is no second best when it comes to bitcoin hardware the bitcoin price seems to be going up you want to take care of your security before bitcoin goes to six figures make sure you get your bitcoin off exchanges using coin kite hardware mk4 cold card q go to coin kite.com

use the code tftc we have a code now tftc for five percent off at checkout living in a day and age where we are completely detached from the truth like how how much systemic risk do you think that introduces for the american economy uh what what what situation uh just just gassing the numbers lying to people about inflation lying to people about jobs lying to people about gdp sort of band-aiding over what seems to be a systemically fragile economy obviously we're expanding the debt astronomically just added 450 billion i believe in the last three weeks leading up to this election approaching 36 trillion obviously we have an interest expense on debt approaching 1.2 trillion annually it seems to me that the emperor is naked and they're trying

to project to the country that everything is well we're going to get through this but um it seems like they're kicking the can down the road and trying to make everybody believe that things are going to be okay but it's almost like somebody putting their head in the sand an exuberant amount of cognitive dissonance that could lead to pretty terrible economic outcomes due to the inability to actually confront the actual problems. I think most of this is wonky to most people out there. So they don't really understand what we're talking about. But when you talk about the amount of money that we bring in and how much money we pay out in terms of government programs, and we add two trillion dollars a year to our national debt and that that is about a quarter of what we

bring in in tax revenue. When people start to really understand it, they're then going to understand that there's no way around this because we continue to want to spend more money. And there's always going to be programs out there, regardless if Trump's elected or if Harris is elected, we're still going to see massive spending way over and above what our tax revenue is. So we're at a point of no return. And the only way we can get around this is to drill underneath us and bring in more tax revenue that way. But most people don't understand how the world works and how the economy works. So there's not going to be riots in the streets over this, except when we go to war and we have to have a war to get out of this economic

misery that we're in that's the sad thing that the only way to get out of this and some people's not saying this to you but the government's probably thinking we got to go to war we're going to fix the economy and i mean when you think about it going back to jerome powell's and the fed's rate cuts um last month it if you look at the long end of of the yield curve like it it's still going higher despite the fact that that rates went lower which is not a good signal And I mean, that gets to the bigger question. I think many people, predominant macroeconomic analysts and many people in TradFi think that the U.S., due to its ability to issue this debt and have international players and sovereign actors buy the debt whenever it's auctioned, people think that is something that's going to continue to happen. But it seems like the demand for this treasury debt is waning as the world wakes up to the fact that we do not have our spending under control. And it doesn't look like we even have the ability to get it under control.

And I don't think many people in the U.S. want to admit it, but I'll just throw this out to you to get your thoughts on it. But are we approaching sovereign debt crisis levels where things really get out of control? Yeah, I don't think we are because too many people view our debt in relationship to our GDP, our gross domestic product, and that they say that we're about 120% of our debt to our GDP. So they don't think that that's a tragic level. But something I wanted to also mention is that the more money that we print, the less value our dollars are worth. So when we have to print more money, the value of what we currently have in our pockets buys less, and that's also very inflationary. You can look at M2 statistics, and you can look at when M2 goes up, money supply, you can see inflation numbers go up, and those are the

government's numbers go up. So that's another important point that might be a breaking point where inflation just gets rapidly out of control, and people then start to understand that it's because of our spending and our spending is coming because of new bridges and roads and you know chips programs and all these other green new deals and all of this stuff is costing you money today it's making the dollars you have today worth less every single minute yeah we have um i have a good friend his name is matthew mazingtious out of rega latvia american citizen who moved to latvia and we've been doing a quarterly update episode he monitors the world the global monetary base broken up by every currency and that i think has become my favorite metric of real inflation

over time and i think going back to the 70s he's run the numbers for the compound annual gross rate of the monetary base of global monetary basis something like 13.7 percent um year on year for the last five decades well you know under tim geithner when the world had a liquidity crisis he went out and told everybody to print more currency so he said print more euros print more dollars print more yen and that has just inflated the monetary base tremendously and that's become inflationary across the board and as i mean as a wealth advisor how how do you approach this inflation problem in terms of positioning your clients well i tell them the truth i i don't use one of these bogus statistics that inflation is two or three percent i tell them inflation is six

to seven percent and that they have to do something to make sure that you know i can put a plan together for them that is just filled with fraud meaning two or three percent inflation but that's just not an accurate number i use six seven percent and and then show them how much money they need to make in order to not lose purchasing power how do you manage risk with that is that does that push you out further on the risk curve to try to be thoroughly when you use modern portfolio theory you can have a you know a lower risk portfolio by having assets that are non correlated to each other. So you don't have to have a lot more risk to get really good non-correlated returns. You just have to have non-correlated assets. You have to have alternative

investments in a portfolio. And most investment firms limit your alternative portfolio or your alternative allocation to about 15%. And 15% does not do it for you. You have to have more than that in an all in an overall portfolio yeah i out of uh out of college i worked for a managed futures fund and we were one of those alt funds and we were fighting for five percent of the portfolio at the time this was 10 10 years ago now at this point well managed futures is one of my favorite alts because it's non-correlated you want to get technical analysis um done and that's how you manage it. You really get the non-correlated asset through something like managed futures. This rip was also brought to you by good friends at Zaprite. If you're a Bitcoiner and run a

business or an independent contractor, you should be accepting Bitcoin as payment. If not you, then who? If we believe that fiat is systemically fragile and is a risk, the rails that that currency runs on are risk as well. You need to begin accepting Bitcoin as soon as possible. invest in the future of your business, create a redundant rail by accepting Bitcoin as payment using ZapRite and reduce risk for your business. I've done this for my business here at TFTC. We use ZapRite. It allows you to easily create invoices, payment links, or connect e-commerce stores, connect your wallets or custodial accounts and be set up in minutes. 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 zap right go to zap right.com slash tftc to get 40 off their annual subscription zap right.com slash tftc 40 off this rip was also brought to you by our good friends at salt of the earth you got to be hydrating freaks and while you're hydrating got to be getting your electrolytes this is the best electrolytes mix that i've ever come into contact with. Pink Himalayan salt with calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, no sugar. It tastes incredible. My favorite is the orange and the pink lemonade. Go to drinksote.com. That's drinksote.com. Use the code TFTC when you make your purchase and you'll get 15% off. I'm telling

you, get on it, freaks. You're going to love this stuff. What are your thoughts on, this is a Bitcoin show. This is something I've been passionate about while I was working at the Managed Futures fund that's when i i found bitcoin i was uh on the portfolio management team as an analyst and i was had to write the commentary commentaries for the fund and this was during operation twist qe2 so when yellen was at the helm and i just found it completely idiotic the way the the global monetary system was managed particularly one instance where janet yellen had a press conference she was wearing a purple pantsuit and and traders uh took that as a signal that she's feeling regal she's feeling uh like she was in a position of strength so some markets traded based off of

what she was wearing that seemed completely insane to me and then you couple that with what we discussed earlier is the fact that a lot of these governments um are in a position where they continually need to debase the money to basically have everything sustain itself this this ponzi sustain itself and so intuitively i got bitcoin about a decade 11 years ago and i've been passionate about it ever since i do think it's a solution to this money printing problem if we can leverage a an asset that's not controlled by any central authority cannot be controlled by any company or government or central bank and is an emergent market good uh it that seems like a good solution to this money printing problem to me i'm curious to get

your thoughts on on bitcoin well you're not gonna like my opinion on bitcoin but it's okay i i'm old school in that i want there to be something backing the asset that i'm involved with and the dollar what's backing it is the ability to print more dollars and you have the u.s economy behind it bitcoin there's nothing behind it other than people's desire to own bitcoin so i'm not into crypto although i will tell you i have a client of mine who's very wealthy and he bought gbtc and i went ahead and bought a thousand shares of it and i'm up three thousand dollars on it um so i'm not you know completely out of the idea of doing it um but it's very difficult for me to support something that doesn't have anything backing it other than the idea that everybody

else wants to own it and the idea now that as you stated that you're going to have to go and have everybody repurpose their currency into bitcoin to make that worthwhile away from the dollar away from all the other currencies i think that's a heavy lift in our lifetime it's definitely going take a while gradually than suddenly is uh is what a lot of people say here but i would i would push back and say that i don't think bitcoin is not backed by anything it's backed by um a network of consensus rules of people making active decisions to abide by those rules and on top of that there is a connection to energy that is that sort of i don't want to say it backs bitcoin but it makes it very hard to game in the sense that you need an immense amount of energy to

overwrite the transactions on the network but we don't have to get into a debate about the merits of bitcoin um yeah because i would i would lose i don't know enough about it you could talk circles around me but i just basically want there to be something tangible backing every investment like if there's a stock like let's say it's a hershey's chocolate i know that they sell hershey's chocolate bars and they sell things and there's something backing the share of stock and if there's a bond i know that there's something backing that bond when it comes to the dollar i know that the u.s economy and the ability to print more dollars backs it when it comes to bitcoin yeah there's a network of people who can't change it and there's rules that cannot that's it's back

by uh i've got a book i'll send you i've wrote the forward to it uh it's called gradually and And suddenly my good friend Parker Lewis wrote it. And that's one of the chapters in the book is Bitcoin is not backed by nothing and gets into the merits of the network. Because it is this weird thing to try to grasp. It's this digital good. It seems ephemeral.

But there are sort of consensus rules codifying the backing of the legitimacy of the network. so you like they give you certainty that things operate the way you expect them to cannot be corrupted easily very very hard to corrupt but um yeah the uh the i mean because to a broader point discussing because like it seems as a millennial two young children wife looking to build to the future and looking out at this runaway inflation this runaway debt crisis it is it is why i'm so passionate about bitcoin because it seems like there are no mechanisms from within the system to actually fix this problem it seems like you

you have two roads you can go down into your u.s government overt default on the debt which is never going to happen because geopolitically unpalatable or default via debasement which seems inevitable at this point. Yeah. Look, anybody who really is, you know, has any kind of intelligence at all that really sits down and studies this will walk away with a very uncomfortable feeling about the future of our economic base. I mean, it's really, really that sad and difficult to comprehend just how bad things are. And we're not any better than any other country out there in fact we're just we're we're probably you know worse than most because we're so much bigger yeah and i mean the that's what worries me the most is that there's

this perceived um there's the perceived protection due to the size of the government and the economy and how long we've been in pole position globally as a as an economic power and you look out at the world with the wars popping off in the middle east russia ukraine and then you see the bricks countries meeting as we speak right now talking about how they want to diversify away from dollar exposure because the u.s government has weaponized the financial system freezing assets freezing the for people to move money between borders um and do you think the government has made missteps in the last four years with how they've weaponized the dollar system and do you think they understand the ramifications of that weaponization yes but at the same time 60 percent of trade is done i

think these numbers are right in u.s dollars or 60 percent of the currencies out there are u.s dollars. I don't believe that we're going to get away from the U.S. dollar being the currency of the world, the reserve currency, because the only one that could come up is China, and that's a communist country. And the other countries are too small. I think that the U.S. is going to remain the leader in the reserve currency for world trade. But the U.S. has definitely made mistakes along the way yeah yeah that's do you think this election is critical for the the direction of of the country and the economy oh without question i don't think you've ever had a time where you had two candidates who are so opposite in how they want to address the economy and the world

um you know it's no no secret that i'm a trump supporter um but i'm a republican more than a Trump supporter. And I believe that we need conservative economic policies and we need to have lower taxes to stimulate growth versus raising taxes on people. And, you know, there's so many things that I'm against the Democrat platform that, you know, now will Trump get in there and cut spending? I don't believe so. But I think he's going to increase revenue into the tax base you know every single time that we've ever cut taxes we've increased revenue now the question is how did they spend that money under bush the money was spent so that therefore you had a higher uh debt and deficit under bush um but by cutting taxes you increase the revenue

same thing with trump but he continued to spend money but he had to because of covet it yeah but the only way that we're going to get out of this is to cut taxes and that's the only way that i mean i hope he can cut spending i mean he's talking a big game trotting elon out and a lot of campaign stump speeches and saying that he's going to get him in and slash all these useless bureaucratic agencies within the federal government and it can i mean i don't know if it can be done here in the united states but just broadly speaking look at argentina the last year and they've done a good job of completely decimating that bureaucratic layer within their their government um obviously their economy is still going through some turbulence but

should be expected when you have um when you have such a drastic shift in in policy from one administration to the other and why don't you think he'll be able to cut spending because i Maybe I'm naive, optimistic, but I would like to think that what he's going out there and pitching could actually be implemented if he gets into office. Well, I don't know. You know, he's talking about, you know, money going out to, you know, different programs. And anytime you get, you know, when the spending bills come up, there's always a need to, you know, take care of somebody. Like in Kentucky, you have Mitch McConnell, who gets a tremendous amount of money from the U.S. government for the state of Kentucky, and they're always trying to increase those programs. So cutting some of the programs out of the government, like the Department of Education out, that's a Band-Aid. That's a minor, minor thing, and we're hemorrhaging right now.

so he's going to need to cut tremendous amount of programs and we're going to see this country get smaller in terms of our expansion like here in dallas we have roads that are being you know worked on because of the programs the infrastructure program that was passed and they're getting so much money they're just digging up roads uh you know roads that my wife says doesn't even need to be fixed and she knows believe me um and you know i i think that there's just a tremendous amount of nonsensical spending that goes on with the government and i just don't believe that trump by himself is going to be able to cut that back yeah but we'll see that reminds me of my days at the man of his future son i lived in chicago and i lived in chicago for five years and around the

fourth year i became aware of the jobs program they had in the city which is they would pay the roads with mid-grade gravel every spring and summer um so that when you're driving through the salted and snowy roads in the winter they would inevitably get torn up and you'd have essentially an annual jobs program every spring and summer of people going and repairing those roads it's insane just use the high grade gravel so you don't have to fix the roads every year yeah yeah my wife is so frustrated over how many roads are being torn up in plano and the roads look perfect but they have so much money that they need to spend it down here in austin too we're seeing it we've had um south lamar has been completely blocked off for two months and they

haven't even started working on it they just blocked it off and prevented traffic from flowing flowing normally and making it harder for me to get into work and uh it seems like they're preparing for something but aren't actually getting anything done well the point the point about trump is that trump has never been a conservative he's always been a big spender and he proved that during his first administration um and you know kamala harris if the democrats win you know they they already have all of these programs that they want to spend money on or forgive loans uh there's there's just so many handouts that they want to give or where they want to forgive things, which also becomes a negative for the debt and the deficit. So we're going to

have to get spending under control at the same time that we get our revenue up. And I just don't have a lot of hope that the Republicans are going to be able to pull this off. Yeah. On the Democratic side, are you saying that giving people twenty five thousand dollars to buy their first home is a bad idea yeah i know where was my 25 000 yeah the uh well and like on this line like maybe it's the not the federal government that can solve this and i think that was one of the silver linings of the post lockdown era or during the lockdowns was this assertion of autonomy by individual states and this uh walking back towards the direction of federalism the way the republic was originally set up do you do you have hope of that trend continuing states basically looking

do the states have to come in say the federal government you're insane we're sending too much money to you don't worry like we don't need your money we're gonna we're gonna take care of it here and become a bit more insular versus the the federal government well if you look i was looking the other day at the state budgets i know that'll tell you how exciting i am but i was looking at the debt clock and i looked at the state budgets and almost every state is underwater so they need government money uh to subsidize their spending so i i can't imagine that any state is going to be able to uh pull things off without the federal government's money yeah yeah do you think we need an energy renaissance to really kickstart things so you think trump's idea to drill baby drill

to drive down energy prices is an effective way to fix these problems if you're not going to cut spending yeah but what surprises me is that we are producing more fossil fuel um in each month than has ever happened in this country so there's a lot of discussion about how this administration has slowed down the amount of drilling but we're drilling more uh we're producing more than we ever have in the history of our country which is shocking to most republicans yeah i think it's not well the lng is what we're shipping abroad right so or any oil we're not exporters of oil now too um we're producing so much on a monthly basis more than we ever have but there's all this rhetoric that that the democrats have cut the amount of amount of drilling that we're doing

so i i don't understand the the contradiction there yeah maybe we're getting more efficient drilling i don't know it's uh i gotta have dr nasahaji on do you hang out with him at all up in the area of texas no i would love to know what he says about that yeah he's uh he's our go-to oil and gas expert here at tftc um but ed uh i know we started a bit late i want to be respectful of your time. This has been a great conversation. I just want to thank you for the Chapwood Index. It's something that I follow and write about quite often. And I think it's an incredible service to U.S. citizens because they should have better information about what is happening to their lives and what is eating at their pocketbooks and their wallets. It is a shame that the government

feels compelled to manipulate the data and paper over what I deem to be systemic problems and essentially lying to the American public. And so I want to thank you for surfacing the truth and giving people better information. Well, absolutely. And the new numbers should be out in about two weeks. All right. And we can find that at chapwoodindex.com, correct? Correct.

And I have to ask you, the numbers to your right shoulder, what are those? so this one right here this is sats per dollar so there's 100 million satoshis of one bitcoin so right now one dollar will get you

1,486 satoshis okay yeah so bitcoin's divisible it's portable it's extremely scarce it's backed by a massive network of energy making sure the network runs

and individuals who are making sure that the rules are followed that's what it's backed by send me that book And this is the BlockHite. We're at BlockHite 866,878. So since January 3rd, 2009, 866,876 blocks of transactions have been produced on the network. I'm happy I asked. This is the BlockLock by CoinKite. Great, great product.

All right. Take care. Ed, have a great day. Peace and love, freaks. Thank you.