 stuck in the notes as well. Let's go on to Trump, what would our show be if we didn't spend some time criticizing Trump? We have to, it is an imperative. And today actually Trump gave me the opportunity to recycle this meme that I had so much fun with, I spent way too much time on, but people, it's one of these where I have to explain it and people don't get it, so whatever. But I call it my zombie economy meme. Trump was bragging yesterday about what a great job he's doing. The forgotten voters of the 2016 election are now doing great. The steel industry is rebuilding and expanding at a pace that it hasn't seen in decades. Our country has one of the best economies in many years perhaps ever. Unemployment numbers best in 51 years, wow. And for me, I think of this as the zombie economy, that he is using government in a way to revive sectors of the economy that should have been dead, essentially. So it's the zombie economy, right? So we've got on my little meme, if you're looking at it, don't let it go.com or Twitter, wherever you guys follow me. You've got the US Steel zombie writing Harley-Davidson basically out of the country. Because Harley-Davidson is one of the companies that has suffered thanks to Trump's. I mean, he is in a position to brag about the economy because the economy is doing well, relatively speaking. It's, you know, he's got the numbers on his side. They're nowhere near as good as he would like them to be. And that's, I guess, your next thing about him complaining about the Fed. But they're nowhere near as good as he promised them to be. And we're not seeing the bad stuff. When a recession comes, that's when you see the bad stuff. You know, Joe, Bill Clinton had an economy that only grew throughout his entire administration, arguably at faster rates than under Trump. The labor participation rate is improving, but nowhere near as fast. And it hasn't got to the levels that it was before the year 2000. There's a bunch of numbers that suggest that it's not as good as Trump would like to say it is. On the other hand, it's good. You know, it certainly be his alternative and it's better than under Obama. And if he only ran, if he only ran on look, look at the wonderful things I'm doing for the economy, then I think he would be tolerable. But these kind of issues get minor reference by him. He's much more interested in running on scaring people on telling us how awful things are in spite of the great economy. So if he just said, look, I deregulated, I cut taxes, the economy's doing well, and he left all the other stuff, then fine. But that's, he spends very little time on this stuff and everything on the other stuff. Well, and the Fed stuff is interesting. Well, and that's, first of all, he's complaining because he wanted, and he wouldn't say exactly, he tells you the opposite of what he wanted, right? He says quantitative tightening was a killer should have done the exact opposite, which is of course quantitative easing. And if you look up quantitative easing, you know, the standard just Wikipedia explanation is the Fed directly injecting money into the economy by buying. Buying bonds, so it's printing money, it's increasing the money directly available to banks, although, I mean, it's complicated, but there wasn't real easing because the money then flowed into bank reserves at the Fed. So it came out of one pocket and went into another pocket and nothing much changed. But the interesting thing is he's complaining because he says, economic growth could have been 4%, but it's only 3% because of the Fed. And this is my second, I guess, I told you so moment. Because I've said again for a year at least, maybe two years, that when things go bad, Trump will use the Fed as a scapegoat. He will blame the Fed for what happened. He has set this up for months and months and months. He's been saying all along. Of course, he nominated this chairman, Powell. I was against Powell. I suggested that he nominate professor, oh my God, Taylor, Taylor, Taylor from Stanford. But he didn't want to nominate Taylor because Taylor was an independent guy who wouldn't have done what Trump demanded of. And Powell is a nobody, stands for nothing, reminds me a little, Trump, complete pragmatist, has no ideology, has no economic point of view. And Trump thought he could bully him. And it turns out that Trump indeed can bully him. But he's gonna complain about him anyway because whatever Powell does, Trump will complain. If he lowers interest rates and we get inflation, it'll be, or we get something else, it'll be Powell's fault if it's bad. If he doesn't lower interest rates, or if he increases interest rates and the economy slows down, he'll blame Powell, he'll blame the Fed. So he's got this wonderful out of blaming anything bad on the Fed and he's already doing it. So he keeps setting it up. So if we do have a recession, when we do have a recession, he'll have a fallback. Yeah, and here he's just saying, oh, well, it would be even better than it is if. And I mean, what would, is it actually that the GDP would be that or just the numbers would reflect? I mean, does GDP mean anything if you can manipulate it just by quantitative easing, right? Oh, it means economic growth and it's adjusted for inflation. So yeah, I mean, you can manipulate GDP. You can manipulate a lot of economic numbers. But I mean, does it mean real productivity then? Yeah, in the short run, the question is what happens in the long run? It's like cutting taxes. You cut taxes and yes, the economy grows in the short run. That's completely understandable. But if you don't cut spending and you amass huge deficit, you're sacrificing the future for the present. Now, you're also distorting the present because there's a lot of malinvestment going on because of all the government spending, but you're also sacrificing the future for the present. So you're giving up on a future growth in order to attain present growth, which is what Trump has done, particularly with the tax cuts and the government spending out of control. And yes, people are feeling good. I mean, people, you know, the jobs, the economy is chugging along. All of that, you know, is true and Trump should and is going to take credit for it. Some of us should point out the cost of all these things and the long-term cost that we're gonna pay for all of this short-term economic growth. I don't think anybody's listening. I don't think anybody will listen to us because everybody is enamored with what's happening right now, but you can't run a trillion dollar annual deficit and think unless you're, you know, one of these MMT, unless you're OEC, which I think Trump is very similar to in many respects, you can run trillion dollar deficits without there being a consequence. And Trump and Republicans have done nothing to try to reduce those deficits. We're already at 22 trillion, I think, of total debt. It's only gonna increase dramatically under Trump. And then now it could take a long time before that manifests itself. You could say, tell with it in the long run, you're all dead, which is what Cain said. And so who cares about the long run? But the fact is that you, yes, feel good now, enjoy it because it ain't gonna last forever. And at some point you're gonna pay for it. Now it could be that you won't even know that you paid for it. That's the other thing about economics. Often we don't know that we're paying for it because the economy might grow for decades at 2% and we could have grown for decades at 4%. And the difference between 2% to 4% is unbelievable when you compound. It's the difference between the wealth we have today in the United States and what Mexico has. Imagine if we'd grown to 2% less every year for the last 50 years, we'd be as rich as Mexico. So the difference is that compounding. And that's, it's massive. So that's the problem with economics that the problem with life, right? The path you didn't take, you can't visualize. It's not real to you. I can hypothetically tell you what I think would have happened but I can't show you, I can't point to it. And that makes people, particularly if they're concrete bound it makes it impossible for them to actually observe the damage being done. There's enormous unbelievable damage being done to the US economy right now by this administration by past administration, by everybody since the Bush administration and everybody for the last 100 years. But it's definitely significant over the last two administrations. But much of that damage is not being seen. The economy since Obama has grown nicely there were no recessions of the Obama, the economy grew and that economic growth has accelerated a little bit under Trump but the distortions, the perversions, the bad investments, the bad stuff that underpins that is in the background we can't observe. And when the recession comes it'll be blamed on capitalism it won't be blamed on any of these things and certainly won't be blamed on Trump or Obama or anybody. Yeah, and that's why, you know if I get the opportunity when I do these tweets and actually I think this tweet the one about the Trump sounding like a capitalist oh wait, no it's not that one it's the next one that Shapiro actually retweeted for me. But I will when he is not sounding like a capitalist at all call it out because so many people say oh he's a capitalist and he is no such thing. He is calling for quantitative easing he's calling for the Fed to inject money, print money that is, you know. As long as we have a Fed there are circumstances in which the Fed has to inject money. If we have a Fed you have to and much of what they did at the financial crisis given that we had to have a Fed was they actually didn't inject enough money. So one of the problems both in 2008 and in the Great Depression was that the Fed did not inject enough money in the Great Depression they actually sucked money out of the economy just when it needed. So they created this credit deflationary cycle in the Great Depression. And arguably in 2008 they were not fast enough and not aggressive enough in injecting money. Given that you have a Fed it has to act it has to do something that the pretense of it can just stay out of it and do nothing is a misnomer because they're doing something every day. That's what they are, they're the Fed they're the central bank and not doing anything is doing something. It's actually so this is why you need somebody like John Taylor to be at the as long as there's a Fed and it's gonna act semi-rationally you need it to act based on some kind of rule that determines when you inject money and when you don't inject money and how much money and what are the criteria? Right now, and this is true under Ben Anki and it's certainly true under Powell it's completely arbitrary and random it is whatever the Fed chairman and the committee decide and their models, their statistics are very, very, very bad and arbitrary. So it's not economics. Is it based on pressure group stuff? So it's sort of like a crony decision? Not so much pressure group stuff the Fed is somewhat immune from pressure groups although the banks are pressure groups with the Fed but it's relatively not that but it's much more the it's an arbitrary function it's a non-market function it's a central planning function you can do it really, really badly or a little less bad but it's always going to be bad and the little less bad would have been appointing John Taylor who would have imposed a Taylor rule and that would have been a little less bad still would have been bad it still would have created problems So is the idea that you add more money as necessary to permit an increase in production in goods and services to flow properly through the economy because there is a real increase or some is that So what happens during things like a financial crisis is there is a true because credit is being destroyed the credit being destroyed means people are not paying back their debt banks are not lending money there is a massive contraction in the amount of money that exists out there and people because people can't borrow money and because banks suddenly see all these they shut everything out and what you get is the spiral where it gets worse and worse and worse and worse which was what happened during the Great Depression and what usually happens is in a free banking system that would the whole thing would have never happened the dynamic that whole dynamic would have never happened but and a lot of that dynamic is that there was a lot of money being freed up by the central bank leading up to this collapse so central bank needs during periods in which that collapse is happening to in a sense, you know, back up the banking system with liquidity, back it up with financial resources with money to facilitate the continuation of economic and financial transactions and that would now again, there's no way to do that without some kind of long-term bad consequences but it's all you have so you have to do something because the short-term economic consequences can be so negative as to justify the action There's so many things like this so, you know, what do you do about North Korea now that we're in this horrible, you know, position where anything that we do we're maybe putting South Korea at risk or ourselves at risk or huh? You don't wave a communist flag with the leader of one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world. Right, right, but there's so many things like this in which our government has been pursuing a wrong immoral destructive policy for decades, century or more, whatever and in order to survive the short-term at all you have to continue in some way that policy but then of course the question is you have to do it with an eye to getting out and doing something better which Trump has no idea and you're saying if he had appointed Taylor there would have been some idea of working towards something better or is it just at least mitigating the damage now? Or would it have mitigated some of the damage? I mean, again, I'm not saying that John Taylor would have been perfect because I don't think you can be a perfect chairman of the Fed, but there's a difference between appointing somebody who is a nobody and then nothing and therefore swayed by the wind and appointing somebody who at least has a rule the market know what the rule is it creates some stability and predictability and it helps the market know what's going on. You know, whenever you have an institution like the Fed or bad foreign policy like with North Korea or the Middle East, what you need to do is start unwinding the bad foreign policy you need to start unwinding and the first thing to do with the Fed is put it on a rule-based system and then ultimately dissolve it but nobody's talking about dissolving it so at least make it as predictable as possible at least make it so that people understand what it's doing, why it's doing, when it's doing it and then markets can adjust fairly well to predictable changes in interest rates and predictable changes in the money supply what they don't like is finger in the wind pragmatic, unprincipled type behavior which is what Powell is exhibiting and what Trump is exhibiting. So, you know, the one thing the reason I think the economy is doing well is that the one thing that Trump has been semi-predictable on is that he's generally loosening up the regulatory burden on companies not in a kind of a massive systematic legislative scale that is needed but at least the regulatory agencies are somewhat hands-off and are giving space to businessmen to invest and to grow and to build and to create stuff because he's not fighting the legislative battle it's easily reversible when the next president comes in or with the court challenges, right because he's been trying to do some of that with Obamacare and then the courts undo what he's doing, right? Yeah, the only way to do it is to pass legislation that's the system we live in is the system of laws and that's what Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan did actually President Ford and then Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan did when they deregulated many American businesses in the 1970s and 80s was it was through legislation through massive bipartisan massive pieces of legislation that actually deregulated American business and it would be one thing if you said you can't do it because Congress won't do it but nobody's tried and there's been no effort by the administration to do it there's been no using the bully pulpit to do it there's been no massive legislation proposed that was then rejected by Democrats or Republicans or whatever there just hasn't been that it's just been behind the scenes at the regulatory agencies deregulation which is better than nothing but very, very reversible. Also, I mean, it's true that the tax cuts and other things are making businesses they have more money, you know because they primarily the corporate tax rate is being cut, which is a good thing but, you know, not everybody has more money because a lot of people's personal taxes have actually gone up but in terms of corporate taxes they've gone down but again, that's a short-term one-time effect and because of the government deficits taxes will have to go up in the future and they will go up in the future so yes, feel good now, invest now but long run, you know, what all of this has done is created massive instability in terms of the long run and nobody- Zombie economy, it's the zombie economy Nobody is fighting for the long-term health of the US economy nobody's being in that up nobody's arguing for it that, you know, if the Republicans used to be so-called physical conservatives and used to fight for some kind of physical responsibility which they did under Obama quite successfully in government spending shrunk significantly under Obama they're not under Trump they're quite the opposite under Trump they're spending like there's no tomorrow if Republicans used to talk about reforming entitlements which is the largest spend on the which both the stores markets primarily the healthcare market and is bankrupting us Republicans have stopped talking about reforming entitlements so the agenda of slowing down spending and the agenda of entitlement reform have been taken off the table by Trump maybe one of the most damaging things that he's done and by doing that, yes, you're feeling good now the economy is doing well now you're investing money you think you've got more freedom in the short run but you've also sacrificing your long run viability as a business because at some point you're gonna have to pay for all these things at some point, A is A, reality is what it is it doesn't move based on your whim or based on Trump's whim