 All right, welcome back. Right before the commercial break, we played a clip of Vice President Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes touting the success of Bidenomics. They want us to forget all about the sticker shock you experienced at the grocery store this past weekend because wages are up. Are you feeling it? They also told us that on Friday the U.S. economy grew at a pace of 4.9 percent in the third quarter. So third quarter GDP almost at 5 percent. But the budget gap also grew. The deficit is now at $1.7 trillion in interest costs on our federal debt, which is around $33 trillion, is now at $879 billion as of last fiscal year that beats all U.S. military spending by $103 billion. Nearly a trillion dollars flushed down the toilet on interest payments. And if the Treasury Department keeps rolling out new debt and rolling over old debt at higher and higher interest rates, the annual interest rate, what we all have to pay just to maintain the debt we already have will more than double by 2030. So a financial reckoning and economic reckoning is coming. A lot of experts say let's welcome back in. Data analyst and research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, E.J. Antoni, he's sticking around with us. We also have the CEO and founder of the Stock Swoosh, Melissa Armo, here. And just a reminder to everyone, if you hear something you think might be useful, make sure you take it to a professional and get their insight on it. You should never take advice and act on it from a television show. We do want to provide you with some information that you can hopefully start a conversation with with a financial professional to make sure you feel protected in times like these. Melissa, it's great to have you with us. E.J., thanks for sticking around. Thanks for having me. All right, Melissa, tell us what your thoughts are. Every financial analyst I talked to seems to think we are headed for a market crash. How are you preparing? Well, I think the market is definitely lower. And when you look at where we could be 12 months from now, there's a possibility that we could go into recession in 2024, which will make it very interesting considering it's also a presidential election year. So I think the market's definitely lower. We're nowhere near the highs. Right now, we're in the thick of earnings season. Apple is the next big earnings, which is Thursday night. The Fed speaks on Wednesday. So the market just is teetering right now, waiting to hear and see if the Fed is going to increase interest rates between now and the end of the year one more time, which I do think that they will probably won't be until December. But I think overall, people need to be careful with their investments. If you're already retired, you probably should have met with someone way, way earlier in the year to discuss what to do with your investments, because the market has fallen in the last several months. Now, when you look at the overall year, we haven't made new highs since the beginning of 2021 it was, 2022. So I mean, when you go back and look whatever industry you're looking at, whether it's the Dow or the S&P or the Nasdaq, we have been falling with rallies here and there, but then the market gets scared and falls again, whether it's because of the possibility of World War III, whether it's because of interest rates going up, whether it's because of inflation, the market is just getting scared at anything right now. Yeah, there's plenty to be concerned about out there. And again, you need a professional to talk to about this if you feel like you need to make some changes. But EJ, what did you think? I mean, I was sitting here in the office on Friday and I saw the GDP numbers. What was your reaction to that 4.9 percent? Unfortunately, it's a classic case of unsustainable growth. As one of my colleagues likes to call it a tissue fire, something that burns very hot and bright, but very quickly. And then there's not even embers left at the end to keep you warm. Breaking down what actually caused that growth, for example, you had a splurge in consumer spending, which was fueled entirely by increasing debt and a reduction of savings, something that obviously isn't sustainable. On the government side, we saw about a fifth of GDP growth coming from government expenditure growth, which again is not sustainable because you need a growing private economy to sustain those government expenditures, which we just don't have enough of right now. On the investment side as well, it wasn't businesses buying factories and machines, things that will increase productivity and long run growth. No, it was simply stocking up of inventories because they're afraid of future price increases. So they're buying things today. But that only means that in the coming quarters, businesses will draw down those inventories, which is going to subtract from future GDP. So all you did was essentially transfer GDP from a future date to today. You didn't actually increase long run growth. It's all concerning. I know for a lot of people it makes your head spin, but it's certainly good information to, again, take to a financial planner, someone who you trust and get their insight on this. We want to have E.J. and Melissa stick around. We're going to have a little bit of a political conversation. We're going to talk about the Iowa caucuses and some new polling there when we come right back. Former Vice President Mike Pence also officially dropping out. I came here to say it's become clear to me this is not my time. That was Mike Pence, former Vice President, officially dropping out of the 2024 race. The announcement came as a surprise to some, but Pence had struggled to raise funding or gain serious traction in a very crowded primary field. Now, a Republican with the Pence campaign said that they would be surprised if the former Vice President endorsed one of the other candidates before the primaries were over, but former President Trump, well, he thinks Mike Pence should endorse him. Here's why. I chose him, made him Vice President, but people in politics can be very disloyal. I've never seen a thing like it. You know, they asked me a question. You heard the trader chant there from the crowd. The question is, what will Mike Pence do? And if he does endorse anyone, will it make a difference in Iowa or anywhere else? Let's bring back E.J. Antoni and Melissa Armo. Thank you both for being here with us. And I know this isn't normally in your bailiwick kind of handicap in these presidential races, but a lot of people do it. Let's go ahead and dive into it. E.J., you think Mike Pence will endorse President Trump? And if he did, do you think it would matter? It's a really good question. Now, I'm not a political scientist to be clear. You know, I'm an analyst. I'm a numbers guy. So let's just look at it strictly from a numbers perspective. Mike Pence has been just incapable of raising money and garnering support in this primary, so much so that I don't think he would have much of an impact at all no matter who he endorses. In fact, if you look at his favorability versus unfavorability polling, it might actually do more harm than good if he endorses a candidate other than Trump. That is, you know, that's one of the things that just makes this political landscape so interesting. And speaking of numbers, Melissa, I want to take a look at the latest Des Moines Register poll. This is conducted with NBC News, kind of a small sample size, but I do think it's illustrative because 41 percent of likely caucus goers say their minds are already made up. So just 41 percent say their minds are made up. But when you look at the voters who have made up their minds, 63 percent of Trump supporters say they are 100 percent on board with Donald Trump no matter what they are with him. Look at this, though. Just 30 percent of DeSantis supporters say they are locked in on him. The rest are open to somebody else still. And 26 percent of Niki Haley supporters say they are ride or die on Team Niki Haley. Again, this is according to the Des Moines Register poll. What do you see when you look at these numbers, Melissa? Well, I'm a numbers person, too, John. But any time you ask me to talk about politics, I'm happy to do so. I mean, we're going into an election year. This will affect markets. And overall, I think it's Trump's race to lose. I mean, this is one of the reasons why they're trying to put gag orders on him. One of the reasons why they're going after him so much in the courts because they literally don't want him to be going out and campaigning. I think that Pence was always going to drop out. He just didn't have the support of the funding. I think Niki Haley might end up dropping out of the race. I don't think DeSantis is going to drop out in Biblical as well because somebody is going to try to want to be Trump's VP pick, whether or not he chooses one of the other nominees. I don't know or one of the other people that is running. I don't know. But I mean, I think overall, when you look at where the economy was at with Trump, COVID is the reason in my mind or the major reason that Trump lost the 2020 election. If we wouldn't have had COVID, I think that Trump might have won. And COVID was really Biden's gift to winning. I mean, Biden didn't even hardly go out and campaign. He's really not even campaigning now. And so to think about the fact that we could go into another election with the two same candidates from 2020. Again, if you're a numbers person, if you would have bet on this, nobody probably would have bet on this. Yeah. But there are a lot of people who do bet on this stuff. And sometimes their predictions are more accurate, those betting sites than the pollsters. But that's what I love about this, you know, getting people who aren't political analysts per se to just look at the numbers sometimes because you can learn a lot from this. I want to take a listen for not so much a numbers approach on this, but just, you know, see what his strategy is. Here's Ron DeSantis. He spoke over the weekend. A lot of the candidates were at the Republican Jewish Coalition event in Las Vegas. Here is Ron DeSantis. There is a sickness on these college campuses. I don't know why American taxpayers are funding these universities. If that's the type of garbage they're going to produce. And the response by a lot of these university administrators have been absolutely pathetic. I mean, I think he's absolutely right about that. But we mentioned Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. We also could talk about the Vekrama Swami. His numbers in this Des Moines Register poll don't look great either. As the field narrows, we're going to learn pretty quick how viable some of these other candidates are. And if it's Ron DeSantis doesn't gain anything by other people leaving the campaign, E.J., I think that's a big wake-up call for him. Well, it's interesting because what we saw in 2020 was essentially Trump versus everyone. And a lot of analysts, a lot of political pundits expected that as those different non-Trump candidates dropped out that their support would continue going to the other non-Trump candidates. In other words, at the end you would be left with Trump and all of the non-Trump support behind a single person like a Ted Cruz, for example. But that is not what happened. Trump was most people's second choice in that primary. And as much as there is a large block of DeSantis voters who are never Trumpers, you also have a lot of Ron DeSantis supporters who still have Trump as their second choice. And so just because other people continue to drop out of the race, whether that's Mike Pence or maybe Nikki Haley, as was mentioned earlier, whatever the case may be, it is not a foregone conclusion that their support is going to go to Ron DeSantis or someone other than Trump. And so it is very likely that we get to a convention like we did last time where you have a tremendous amount of support that originated with other candidates but ends up with Trump and not DeSantis. That's right. We can't forget that Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses in 2016. It obviously didn't factor into the final result. Melissa, do you think the Iowa caucuses mean more this time around? No, not necessarily. I think that there's so many things right now. There's so many issues at hand. We were talking about the economy earlier. That's one of the issues. And again, what's happening over in Israel is one of the issues. And so many of these candidates have not been clear really about where they stand on this issue. So I think the next debate is something really that more people were going to be watching. And to see really where do people stand on these issues. And then that's something that Trump is going to have to come out and really verbally talk about. He's been talking so much about his cases. We need to hear more from him about these issues. And he needs to get out more in the public eye. Yeah. Well, he's going to have that competing event in Hialeah the same night as the Republican debate next week in Miami. We'll see what happens there. EJ and Melissa, we got more to talk about when they come back. We're going to talk about Gavin Newsom's embarrassing trip to China. Also, the GOP shifting his attention to border security.