Will Trump Be a Meme President? (Uncut) 01-22-2025
Will Trump Be a Meme President? – Ep 1004
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The Peter Schiff Show. Well, the 45th president of the United States is now the 47th president of the United States. Donald Trump took the oath of office yesterday and is now back in the Oval Office.
President of the United States. Certainly better than the alternative, but hardly the ideal. I have a lot to say on today’s podcast regarding what’s happened thus far with the Trump presidency.
But before I get into what’s happened since Donald Trump was sworn in, I want to talk about a few things that happened in the days just prior to the presidential inauguration on the Martin Luther King Day holiday. First, we had the preemptive pardons issued by former President Joe Biden to, I don’t know, his entire family, a bunch of other members of Congress, all the people that were on the January 6th committee. Fauci, I forget who else.
And, you know, the problematic aspect of these pardons is people are not being pardoned of a crime that they’ve been convicted of or even a crime that they’ve been charged with. People are being pardoned who have never been charged with anything. Basically, what Biden is saying is if any of these individuals did anything wrong at any point over the last 11 years, I pardon them for whatever they might have done that I don’t even know that they did, that somebody might discover that they did, which I think is a real abuse of the whole system of a pardon.
To just preemptively pardon people. But that’s what he’s done en masse. And in fact, Joe Biden himself, I saw footage, you know, or tapes from years ago where he came out and said that that would be wrong to do something like that.
And, of course, that’s exactly what he has done. But, of course, hypocrisy and Joe Biden have gone hand in hand for a long time. So it doesn’t surprise me that he would do exactly what he said he would never do and that he shouldn’t do, which, you know, happened the same way with his son Hunter.
Oh, I would never pardon my son Hunter. I’m going to accept, you know, whatever justice does. I mean, nobody is above the law.
And then, of course, you know, he pardons he pardons Hunter. But, you know, Hunter’s not alone now. Everybody’s got these pardons.
The only, you know, silver lining of this, and I hope this happens, is that now that everybody has been given a pardon, Congress can fully investigate everything that went down, I think, with January 6th. And, you know, and, you know, all of the you know, the instigating of it, they can find out what happened by subpoenaing all these people who were pardoned. Because if Congress subpoenas you, you got to show up.
You can’t not show up or you’re in contempt of Congress. And, you know, you could go to jail for that. But normally, if Congress, you know, subpoenas you and they ask you a lot of questions, you could just take the fifth.
Well, I don’t want to answer that, you know, because what if I say something that incriminates me? So you could you could plead the fifth. But now, because these guys have all been pardoned, they can’t plead the fifth. So they have to talk.
So, A, they have to show up if they get subpoenaed. And now they have to talk and they have to tell the truth, because if they lie, that’s perjury. And that’s not protected by the pardon.
See, pardons are for crimes that you committed in the past. They don’t cover crimes that you commit in the future after the pardons are granted. I mean, that would be ridiculous.
I mean, like giving somebody carte blanche to go out and commit crimes if they know they’ve been pardoned. So the pardons are for the crimes of the past, not the crimes of the future. So this is a great opportunity to force a lot of people on the witness stand, force them to speak truthfully.
And if anybody is caught in a lie, well, now you’ve got a perjury charge that you can now pursue. So hopefully this happens and some of these bad actors, at a minimum, if they don’t go to jail, they at least have to tell the truth so that the public has a better idea of the lies that they were told and what happened. And not just with January 6th, but a lot of other things.
And it’d be great to get Fauci up there and find out all about the vaccines and COVID and all that. But the fact that Biden would even do this, it’s really inappropriate. No other president has done this.
And I think it’s interesting to me. It’s like, oh, it’s because Trump may go after them. You mean the way the Biden administration went after Trump? Right.
He’s afraid of Donald Trump doing exactly what he did. Right. But they established this bad precedent and now they’ve established another one.
But, you know, it’s not just former President Biden, I think, that was acting inappropriately in the days leading up to the inauguration. President Trump also, I think, was very inappropriate in the launching of his meme coin, the Trump coin, which came out on Friday evening. And just as inappropriate, the Melania coin, which I think came out the following day, was it Saturday or Sunday? I forget.
But over the weekend, both these coins came out. And I really think it is shameless. I think it diminishes the office of the president for Donald Trump to be profiting in this way off of his presidential win.
I mean, you know, in the first term, people were upset. Hey, you know, Donald Trump, you know, you have the emoluments provision of the Constitution. The president’s not supposed to receive compensation.
And there was problems about, well, he’s got a hotel and people might stay in his hotel as some kind of quid pro quo. And it’s not, you know, he shouldn’t collect, you know, the hotel revenue while he’s president. I mean, this dwarfs that.
If you look at the value of this Trump meme coin, as of now, I’m recording this, it’s at $47, which gives it a market cap of about $45 billion. That’s the fully diluted, assuming that all the tokens are issued. And they’re all, you know, they all released over a three year time period.
So over three years, they’re all going to be out there. But even the ones that are already in the float, they’ve got a market cap of $9 billion. But $45 billion for what? For nothing.
I mean, the company’s worth more than Newmont Mining, which is the world’s biggest gold mining company. And in fact, I think Sunday evening, when it peaked out at about $75, it was worth more than 150 percent of the market cap of the world’s largest gold mining company. I mean, it was worth a lot more than DJT, which is the Donald Trump stock, you know, which at least is a business and it doesn’t make any money, barely has any revenue.
But the meme coin has no revenue, doesn’t even have the possibility of having a revenue. But I don’t like the fact that that the Trump family is cashing in like this. And in fact, this opens up the opportunity when Donald Trump and his family members own all these coins.
I mean, it really opens up a way for people to curry favor or bribe Trump. All you have to do is buy his coins from him. You know, when Biden was president or vice president and people wanted to bribe him, it was a lot more complicated.
I mean, they had to run all the bribes through all these shell companies. And each shell company was owned by another Biden family member. It was a very complicated process to bribe, you know, Biden.
But, you know, bribing Donald Trump, you know, I’m joking, but I mean, Donald Trump promised to make government more efficient. Well, it’s certainly a lot more efficient to bribe him. All you have to do is buy the token or buy the Melania token.
You know, if you look at the description, you go to the page and he, you know, Donald Trump’s Twitter page or X page was constantly promoting this. Right. And he was promoting it, of course, on Truth Social and all over the place, getting people to want to buy this coin, which is, you know, just purely promoting gambling.
A lot of people are going to lose money in these coins. Some people have already made a tremendous amount of money. The people that got in really early that were like prepared for it and knew about it, bought them and flipped them and made millions and millions of dollars.
But whatever money is made, certain people equals the money that’s lost by a lot of other people. The people that voted for Trump, the people that Donald Trump supposedly cares about, a lot of them are going to lose money. But here, look at what it says on.
This is the get Trump memes dot com. Right. Trump memes are intended to function as an expression of support for and engagement with the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol dollar sign Trump and the associated artwork and are not intended to be or to be the subject of an investment opportunity, investment contract or security of any type.
Yes, that’s exactly what they are. I mean, why else would anybody buy these things? I mean, it’s not like, you know, a Trump hat or a T-shirt or some kind of, you know, memorabilia. I mean, what do you got when you buy one of these? You get nothing.
Right. I mean, on his ex post. This is what he put out on January 17th.
My new official meme is here. Exclamation point. It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for winning.
Join my special Trump community. Special. What’s special about that? Anybody could buy it.
What’s so special about a meme coin that any idiot can buy? Right. But join my special community. Get your Trump now.
Go to get Trump means that this is shameless promotion. He ends it by saying have fun. Exclamation point.
We mean to have fun. I mean, the only way you have fun buying a Trump meme coin is if you make money. I mean, I can’t imagine it’s fun.
I mean, I didn’t buy any. So I don’t know, like how enjoyable the whole process is of going to your wallet. Now, I remember I clicked on it.
You could buy it with a credit card. You could buy it with crypto. I mean, it doesn’t look like, you know.
You know that fun to go through this process. What’s fun is making money. Right.
But what people think is fun is buying it and then selling it at a higher price. That’s what’s fun. Right.
What’s not fun is losing money in the coin. But it’s all about gambling. This is massive mania.
Right. On steroids now. And Donald Trump is contributing.
Yeah. As the president, the United States exploiting his name and the fact that he just won this election, taking the opportunity to basically sell this crap to the public. You know, with the presidential seal of approval.
And now he gets his wife in on it. I don’t know if the baron Trump’s going to launch one. And Trump Jr. and Eric and, you know, Ivanka and Tiffany and everybody.
Are they all going to come out with their own, you know, tokens that people are supposed to gamble with? You know, so I was embarrassed, you know, for the country that this is going on. But, you know, what’s also funny about it is, you know, watching people try to talk about I was watching Anthony Papiano. I like Anthony, you know, he’s a nice guy.
Unfortunately, you know, he’s he’s, you know, gone down the wrong, wrong path with Bitcoin and stuff. But he’s on I’m watching him on CNBC and and they’re asking him to just to explain these these meme coins. Like, what’s a meme coin? Like, what the hell is it? And, you know, he has a hard time really coming up with a simple definition.
And the reason is because we define it. You define Bitcoin. There’s really no no difference.
I mean, these these coins, they have a limited supply. The Trump coin has a billion. That’s the hard cap.
Right. They’ll never be more than one billion. Right.
So they’re scarce. So why aren’t they digital gold? What you know, why aren’t they the same as Bitcoin? Why aren’t they better than Bitcoin? You know, they’re on the Solano network, not the Ethereum network, which caused Solano to pop because they chose Solano. But they chose Solano because it’s a lot cheaper and faster than any theory.
Well, it’s the same thing with Bitcoin. Right. The Solano is better than the Bitcoin block chain from that respect.
So why is Bitcoin any more valuable than Trump coin or Melania coin? They’re not. I mean, Bitcoin’s a meme coin to say, what’s the meme? What’s the Bitcoin meme? Well, it’s digital gold. Yeah, that’s the meme.
It’s not actually digital gold. It’s got nothing in common with gold. It’s not a precious metal.
It’s nothing. It’s all about perception. But we’re fueling this now.
We’re fueling this bubble. You know, it was fart coin and hock to a girl coin or all this nonsense. How can anybody look at this and not understand what it is? You know, meanwhile, you know, the one promise that I think Trump hopefully won’t keep, which he never actually officially made, is this Bitcoin strategic reserve.
And I don’t know if the fact that he’s launched these these tokens, if that, you know, you know, they’re saying, hey, this is this. This brings him closer to the crypto community. I mean, to me, he’s making fun of it.
I mean, it’s just like, you know, the Dogecoin. And, you know, and why is that? Although I understand Doge isn’t necessarily a capped like like like some of the coins. But there’s other joke coins that are out there that have that have hard caps.
But, you know, it’s embarrassing that Trump did this, that this is I mean, in fact, I don’t even know like how much he has to do with it. I mean, who posted that stuff? Does Trump post his own stuff on X? Or does he just have, you know, his family members or other people within the organization that they go out and post that stuff? Because I would think that Trump had more important things on his mind. You know, he’s about to be inaugurated president, that he’s spending his time, you know, shilling is his shit coin.
Right. Or whatever they, you know, his meme coin. But anyway, let me let me let me move past that topic and talk about some more serious stuff.
But again, the serious nature of what was going on was really cheapened by this by by this promotion. And I would assume even that people in the crypto community should be embarrassed by by this. Anyway, we got a quick commercial break.
We’ll be right back. So stick around. So it’s a new year, 2025, and you’re probably thinking this year is going to be different.
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What I love about Shopify is that no matter how ambitious your growth targets are, it equips you with the necessary tools to seize control and elevate your business to new heights. All right. Now, before I get into some of the Trump executive orders and what’s been accomplished, I want to also comment on the fact that you’ve got all these CEOs, these heavy hitters in the tech industry.
And in fact, earlier this evening, before I did the podcast, I know Trump had a press conference. He was there to announce the formation of this new joint venture between a bunch of tech companies, Stargate, I think he called it. SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, investing like a half a trillion dollars, 500 billion, I think over a few years, I think 100 billion in the first year to build out data centers and some other AI infrastructure, building it here in the United States.
So that’s what is exciting Trump, that these investments are going to be taking place in the United States rather than in Europe or someplace else. But, you know, you’ve got all these CEOs that are cozying up to Donald Trump. And at first glance, you would think, oh, this is great, right? This is a pro-business president.
And so it’s good that all these businessmen want to be so tight with the president. Well, I don’t necessarily look at it that way. I mean, you’ve got to see the other side of the coin.
One of the reasons that a lot of businessmen want to get into the president’s good favor is because they’re afraid of him. They’re afraid that he’s going to do something, you know, that might harm them. On the other hand, he could do something that will help them, because I think Donald Trump intends to try to micromanage parts of the economy from the Oval Office to try to pick winners and losers.
His own version of central planning, because, you know, he’s got a big ego. He thinks he’s a great businessman. And in some sense, he was.
He’s a good promoter. But, you know, he’s also had his share of flops, companies that have gone bankrupt. Right.
But it’s one thing when you’re investing your own money and you succeed and fail. It’s something totally different when you invest taxpayer money. Governments should not be in the business of picking winners and losers.
Even people who have had a good track record of picking winners with their own money should not be trying to do it with taxpayer money. This should be left to a free market. But that’s not what Trump is about.
In some ways, he’s pro capitalism, but in other ways, he’s not. And I look at these businessmen and, you know, they want Trump to use the power of the White House to their advantage and to the disadvantage of their competitors. And that’s not what you want.
You don’t want the government tipping the scale in any direction. You want the government staying out and allowing capitalism to flourish, not getting involved. And if you remember when Trump was president the first time, I mean, he would come out and criticize his company and the stock would go down and he’d say something good about a company.
But I remember when he did the tariffs the first time you had all these companies that were applying for waivers because they they didn’t want to have to pay the tariffs on the stuff they imported. And so Trump would be selective. Yes, you get a waiver.
You don’t get a waiver. Right. So people are trying to get into his good graces.
I don’t like any of that. It’s not a free market. You know, would Harris have been even more anti free market? Sure, probably.
But Trump, again, he’s not a libertarian. He’s not even a conservative. Right.
We didn’t elect Ron Paul by any stretch of the imagination. And I know the libertarians are happy that, you know, he’s pardoned Ross Albright. That was a promise that Trump made and he fulfilled it, I guess, a couple hours ago.
But most of Trump’s agenda is very anti libertarian. And he’s certainly not a Javier Millet. Right.
So, you know, it could have been worse. But, you know, we could have we could have had a much better president if we had the opportunity. But we didn’t.
Right. So we got Trump anyway. But let me go in to some of the things.
So, first of all, Trump talked about now we are in a golden age of America, a new golden age. It begins right now. Why? I mean, how is it a golden age? Because Trump is president.
He was president, you know, from 2016 to 2020. Was that the golden age? I mean, it’s the same guy. Right.
But, you know, when you talk about the golden age, I guess it hearkens, you know, the, you know, memories, not memories, but, you know, back to the Gilded Age, which I think Mark Twain came up with that term Gilded Age. And it was you know, it was kind of he was you know, he wasn’t calling it a golden age because he looked at it as more of superficial. The prosperity, because, you know, guilt, you know, when you have gilded gold, it’s gold on the top.
Right. But it’s like wood beneath it. Right.
You know, you look at all the you know, the you know, the the the palaces in France, you know, when they’re all gold, you know, Versailles is gilded wood. Right. It’s not it’s not solid gold.
They put gold on the outside. And so the idea is like, hey, we have, you know, these robber barons, the Carnegie’s, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilt’s. Right.
These guys are really rich. But then you have all these poor people. So it’s really not a golden age.
It’s a gilded age because, you know, it’s not solid like like gold, which I think, you know, that’s not really a good characterization of the period, because, yes, there were some very rich people in the gilded age of capitalism. I would call it the golden age. And there were people who were poor.
And so what I think Mark Twain was looking at and other people is they looked at the difference. Here’s some really, really rich people and here’s some poor people. Now, apart from the fact that wealth inequality is greater now, the divide between the wealth of the top one percent and everybody else is much greater now than it was during the gilded age.
So forget about that. But what people often overlooked at the time was the poor people in 1880, 1890, 1900, who were working in factories, even though they were poor relative to the owners of those factories, they were less poor than they were when they still worked on farms. See, the people who went from the farms to the factories, they did it because the factory jobs were better.
Yes, the working conditions might have been bad, but they were worse back on the farm and they worked harder on the farm. Nobody was forced to leave a farm to go get a job at a factory. They did it because it was better.
And all the people that came to America from Europe to work in those factories, they didn’t come here from Europe because working in factories was worse than where they were in Europe. Their lot in lives improved so much so that they invited their friends and family to come join them. So if it was so bad, why didn’t they leave? Why did they invite more people to come? So when you’re just looking at the difference between the rich and the poor and you’re saying, hey, this is not shared prosperity, you have to appreciate that the so-called poor are much richer than they were before the capitalism.
And of course, it took more time to really build up a wealthier middle class. But all of that was the result of American capitalism and the real golden age, which was before the income tax, before the Federal Reserve. We are not embarking on another golden age.
You know, we’re not going to get rid of the income tax. We’re not going to get rid of Social Security and Medicare and Obamacare and all these rules and regulations that have been layered on the economy for the hundred years since we got out of that period. So, no, I mean, this is all marketing.
This is like, you know, Trump stakes is what’s going on. Trying to say this is a new golden age of America. It’s just just just a bunch of nonsense.
I mean, we’re still heading for a economic crisis. And so far, nothing that’s been proposed is going to change that. But among the executive orders that that Trump gave, I mean, one, he talked about inflation and he said that we’ve had all this inflation and it’s been caused by an increase in spending and rising energy costs, he said.
And he’s going to attack inflation by drill, baby drill and getting more energy. Well, we didn’t have inflation because of rising energy. In fact, energy has been a relative bargain.
Other prices have gone up a lot more than energy, but it’s inflation that caused energy prices and other prices to rise. It’s not the other way around. And it’s not just the government spending.
It’s all the Fed money printing. And that went on during Trump’s term and it continued under Biden’s term. And it’s going to resume in in Trump’s second term.
So even though he’s talking about this, this war on on inflation, inflation is going to win. He did lift the ban on LNG exports, which Biden signed. Apparently, people said that he didn’t even understand it when he signed it.
He didn’t even know what he was signing, which even questions the legality of an incompetent president signing executive orders that he doesn’t even read. But it’s a good thing that they reversed it. But it does mean higher natural gas prices, because one of the reasons that I think the Biden administration wanted to prevent us from exporting our natural gas is to keep more of it here.
And that would reduce the price because we’d have greater supply. But if we’re allowed to export that supply to Europe, then that’s less domestic supply. And that means means higher prices.
Not that I’m against it. I’m for free markets. But that was part of maybe Biden’s attempt to artificially suppress energy prices here by preventing us from exporting what we could have exported, which would have somewhat reduced our trade deficits.
Now, Donald Trump also announced a hiring freeze and a regulation freeze. Now, this is not new. Donald Trump did the same thing when he was elected the first time, right? I think it was an executive order day one, day two.
He announced a freeze on federal hiring. And then at some point, you know, I forget how many weeks went by, but he basically removed the freeze and they continued to hire. And in fact, I checked it out.
And under Donald Trump’s watch during his term, the federal workforce grew by two percent. Now, you might think, all right, well, that’s not that much. Well, that’s a lot of people because it’s a big workforce.
But under Obama in his second term, it only grew by one percent. And in fact, I took a look at George W. Bush and in his first term, the first four years, the federal workforce grew by one point five percent. And in his second term, it grew by one percent.
So Donald Trump grew the government more than Bush in terms of the number of employees. So, you know, why is it going to be any different this time? You know, I don’t believe it. I mean, yes, he might have talked about it, but he talked about it the first time, too.
And he didn’t do it. And I looked at, you know, Biden, the growth of federal employees under Biden seems about the same as it was under Trump. It looks like it’s going to be maybe one and a half, two percent.
I mean, I don’t think all the numbers are in. Now, I know a lot of government jobs were created under Biden, but most of them were at the state and local level. That’s where the real hiring bid came.
It wasn’t the federal government. I mean, Biden continued to hire, I think, around, again, the same pace as Trump. But it was the state local governments that hired all these all these workers that, you know, are on now the state payrolls.
And again, these are not productive jobs. These are unproductive jobs that drive up the trade deficits because, you know, they spend their their their paychecks on imports. Anyway, we got one more commercial break.
Got a lot more to discuss. So stick around. We’re coming right back.
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All right. So I’m discussing some of the executive orders. I think 42, something like that, that Trump signed into law.
And then he was tossing the pens into the crowd for souvenirs. See, those are real souvenirs. You can actually hold on to that pen.
Unlike the the meme coins. But a couple of things that he did. Let’s see.
He withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords. I’m in favor of that. So that that was positive.
He did have an initiative or an executive order on ending birthright citizenship. That’s going to be a tough one to stick. You know, the 14th Amendment says that if you’re born in the United States, you’re a citizen.
And it’s going to be tough to argue that that that doesn’t apply. I know that when the amendment was originally passed, you know, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments all had to do with the emancipation of the slaves, the ending of slavery. And the goal of the 14th Amendment was to make sure that the slaves and their children were all United States citizens.
But it doesn’t read like that. And the courts have not held in the past that the 14th Amendment is limited to the slaves and their and their children that were alive, you know, back in 1860s, 1870s. I mean, they could have limited it.
They could have said those people who were slaves and their children born here are citizens. No. The way the amendment reads, it just says that if you’re born in America and subject to a jurisdiction, which anybody born here would be, then then then you’re a citizen.
Now, I think that would exempt maybe a diplomat if you’re a diplomat and you have a kid and you’re immune from U.S. laws. You know, you got diplomatic immunity that I don’t think your children are citizens because of the diplomatic immunity that that they hold. But, you know, if you’re an illegal crosses the border, they don’t have any immunity.
So I think it’s going to be difficult for that to hold up in court. You know, one of the things that that he announced was he declared all the drug cartels to be terrorist organizations. And it seems like Donald Trump really wants to escalate the war on drugs, which, again, is a very un libertarian position and something that I disagree with.
I don’t want to escalate the war on drugs. I’d like to end the war on drugs by decriminalizing the drugs. That’s what I want.
I mean, I’m not in favor of people doing, you know, heroin or cocaine or any of those drugs. Just like I’m not in favor of people smoking cigarettes. I mean, people can smoke if they want to.
I advise not to. Right. But but, you know, I think it should be the same with with these drugs.
Right. Yes, they’re bad for you. There’s a lot of things that are bad for you.
I mean, junk food is bad for you. We don’t ban it. And so I think that if drugs were legal, a cocaine was legal, right, it was in Coca-Cola.
That’s where the name came from. You know, I don’t I don’t encourage people to do drugs, but I recognize that the problem isn’t the drug so much as the fact that they’re illegal. That’s where all the crime comes from.
The crime is here because the profits and the profits are here because they’re illegal. Look, there are no cartels that are smuggling cigarettes across the Mexican border or liquor. Why? Because those are legal products and we can buy them from reputable companies.
And we don’t have to worry that, you know, you know, there’s some kind of impurities in our liquor that we’re going to end up dying with. Right. We you know, that’s the problem, you know, with with a lot of the drugs.
It’s because the drugs are expensive. The the criminals who make them lace them with cheaper ingredients that are actually more harmful like fentanyl. Right.
A lot of times people when they die of cocaine, it’s because there’s fentanyl in them. And, you know, if that happens, you can’t sue your your drug dealer. Hey, you gave me bad heroin or bad cocaine.
No, I mean, there’s no court that you could sue it. I mean, that’s it. But, you know, if you have a reputable company that’s selling you a product and and now you have somebody that you can sue, you can have somebody that can be responsible.
So, you know, if you have legal drugs where they’re available, even if they’re by prescription, I mean, then you can deal with drugs as a as a health issue instead of a crime issue. You know, a lot of the crimes in America are committed by drug addicts who are stealing money so they can buy drugs because the drugs are expensive. If they were legal, they’d be a lot cheaper.
So at least they wouldn’t have to steal from people to support their habit. Right. So because that’s that that’s what makes the drug problem a problem for everybody.
You may not do drugs at all, but your house gets robbed by somebody who does. Right. That’s a big problem.
I’d rather have somebody doing drugs and not stealing from me. But, you know, everybody always says, you know, if we legalize drugs, we’re going to have a lot more drug use. Maybe we will.
Maybe we won’t. But that’s not the point. But we already had an experiment prohibition.
We made alcohol illegal in the United States, which was illegal. I think the whole constitutional amendment to prohibit alcohol was unconstitutional. But be that as it may, we had it and then we repealed it.
But they’ve looked back on the records and they can tell, you know, from the ingredients that are used to make alcohol and everything, that alcohol consumption went up during prohibition. So the government made it illegal to drink and then more people drank as a result. See, almost everything the government does backfires.
The government said, hey, too many people are drinking. Let’s outlaw drinking. And the minute they did that, more people drank because it became, you know, more fun.
It was you know, you were doing something you weren’t supposed to do. You know, in Manhattan. There were 15,000 bars in Manhattan before prohibition.
At the peak, there were 30,000 speakeasies in Manhattan. So there were twice as many bars during prohibition as there were before. It was even more fun to go to a bar when it was illegal.
So how do you know? Maybe it’s possible that we make drugs legal and then fewer people will do it. How many kids do it? Because they want to rebel. They want to do exactly what they’re told not to do, like reverse psychology, take a psychology, tell some kid not to do something.
And the first thing they want to do is that they want to do it. Right. You make it more popular, you know.
So I don’t even know that that would happen. But again, if you’re if you believe in freedom, people should be free to do what they want. Right.
You know, you talk you have these women that sell people, you know, abortion. They say it’s your own body. Well, it’s a better argument.
You know, if you want to do cocaine, it’s your own body. Right. You should be able to put whatever you want in your own body.
It’s not the government’s business. What is the government’s business is when you steal from me to buy the cocaine. But, you know, if cocaine is cheaper and if cocaine is pure so that if you take it, you have a lot less chance of dying.
Right. And, you know, I think, too, if it was legal. If you had to go to a doctor to maybe get a prescription for cocaine, the doctor could try to talk you out of it like, hey, why do you want to do this? This is going to, you know, here’s all the bad things that are going to happen to you if you start this habit.
Whereas, you know, your drug dealer doesn’t try to talk you out of buying it. He tries to hook you into it. Hey, here’s some free here’s some free cocaine to get you to get you to use it and then get more.
But all this all is created. So if you want to get rid of all the gangs, you know, and all the crime associated with it, then just decriminalize it. Legalize the gangs are gone immediately.
That’s the only way to win the war on drugs is to surrender. And it’s not, you know, a surrender because you’re you’re letting freedom win. You know, here here’s like, you know, what should basically convince anybody that this is a futile war, that Donald Trump should not be escalated.
Right. If you want to know where drug use is the most pervasive in America, it’s in prison, in jails. The on a per person basis, you have a greater use of illegal drugs like heroin, like cocaine.
Right. In prisons than you have in the general population. So think about a prison.
Right. You know, I mean, it’s surrounded by walls, you know, barbed wire. I don’t know.
Dogs, you know, snipers, whatever. It’s a jail. The people in the jail basically have no freedom, right, because they’re under complete government control and surveillance.
Yet in that environment of complete government control of basically like enslaved people with no rights, the government can’t keep drugs out of prisons. The government can’t stop people from using drugs in a prison. So if they can’t do that, how the hell are they going to keep drugs out of the United States? We’ve got huge borders north and south.
We got oceans east and west. People are free. We have our own homes.
There isn’t a chance that the government is going to stop people from doing drugs. And the more they try, the harder they clamp down on it, the bigger the incentive to smuggle it in. Because it just increases the price and therefore the profit for the people that successfully bring the drugs in.
And so you can’t win the war. And all that happens is we have more and more casualties. Collateral damage goes up and up and up.
So I wish Trump understood this. But, you know, it is popular to just say drugs are bad. Let’s go after the bad guys.
Let’s stop drugs from coming in. Yeah, yeah. You know, because I remember they tried to use that against me when I was going to run for Senate in Connecticut.
I never really talked about this because it wasn’t an issue. I didn’t want to make legalizing drugs an issue of my campaign. But Linda McMahon made it an issue at the nominating convention.
She had her minions running around the floor, you know, talking about, hey, you know, Peter Schiff wants to legalize cocaine, you know, because they, you know, I spoke about it on like a radio show or something. And even though I never made an issue of it, they tried to turn people against because they know in the Republican Party, you know, they’re you know, they don’t want you to be soft on drugs. Right.
They’re not necessarily libertarian. A lot of Republicans say, you know, they want to clamp down on drugs because they don’t like drugs. Yeah, I don’t like them either.
I don’t do them. But, you know, again, there’s a lot of things that I don’t do that other people do. And I don’t want to prevent them from doing it just because I disagree with it or just because I think it’s bad.
Look, people buy Bitcoin, they buy Trump coin, they buy Melania coin. I think I think it’s foolish, but I don’t want to make it illegal. People want to do that.
They can do it. I don’t I don’t want to ban it. But again, this is just another, you know, very unlibertarian thing that Trump is doing.
And of course, it’s going to cost more money. We’re going to spend more money on this. We’re going to waste money and it’s going to crime is going to go up.
Right. It’s not going to go. Don’t go down.
Just like the government lost the war on poverty. The government always loses the war on drugs. Can’t be won.
Anyway, he did declare a national emergency on the southern border. This is separate from the drugs just to keep the immigrants from coming in. I guess they’re going to try to step up the efforts on the border.
He talked about renaming Mount McKinley, which I didn’t even realize that Mount McKinley wasn’t called Mount McKinley. That just shows you, you know, how much attention I paid. It’s apparently it’s Mount Denali, which is it’s a Native American, Alaskan name from, I don’t know, way back when.
I never even heard of that. But apparently that’s been the name. And I think Obama made it official or something.
And so it was it wasn’t called Mount McKinley when President Trump was there the first time. But, you know, this time it’s he decided to rename it. He also declared that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America.
I know that’s kind of a slight to Texas or Louisiana or some of these other states that he could have picked. But I know the Gulf of America could just could mean South America, too. It doesn’t necessarily mean the United States could have called it the Gulf of the United States.
I don’t know, like, you know, the significance of that stuff. But again, this is form over substance. I mean, we have real serious problems in this country and they’re not going to be solved by by renaming the Gulf, the Gulf of Mexico.
You know, one of the things he didn’t talk about specifically were tariffs, although he did talk about forming the external revenue department, which is a fraud because there is no way to collect external revenue. It’s all internal. Right.
This is just packaging. And, you know, one of the reasons that Trump likes President McKinley is because he had tariffs. And Trump thinks that’s great.
Right. He wants to go back to the tariffs. Trump thinks that, you know, tariffs made us rich.
They didn’t. I mean, yes, during the time where we had unprecedented economic prosperity, we also ran the government on tariffs. But the tariffs were not the source of our prosperity.
That is bad logic. The reason we were rich as a country when we ran on tariffs was because we had a tiny government that you could support with tariffs. That’s why we were rich, because government was small.
Government was so small we could pay for the entire cost with tariffs and some taxes on liquor and tobacco and firearms. The government ran on excise taxes, of which tariffs are one. Right.
And so we were rich because we could run government on tariffs. The reason we’re not rich now, the way we were, we don’t have the type of economic growth that we had then, is because we have a massive government and we can’t pay for it with tariffs. So we pay for it with an income tax, which is inherently a much worse tax than a tariff.
You know, when people hear me criticizing Trump’s tariffs, they think, well, don’t you think they’re better than income taxes? Yes, I do. We’re not talking about getting rid of the income tax and having a tariff. We’re talking about adding tariffs on top of the income tax.
Now, yes, they are talking about reducing income tax rates and then imposing tariffs to make up the difference. So that would be OK from a tax perspective. But what I am arguing against is Trump’s position that the tariffs aren’t going to cost us anything, that the tariffs are taxed on Canada, Mexico, that they’re taxed on China.
They are not. And in fact, when America ran on tariffs and people were much more familiar with tariffs, you would have to think that Americans who were around in the 19th century knew a lot more about tariffs than Americans today. In fact, they knew a lot more about everything than they do today.
I mean, we had much better schools, even when people only went to school to the sixth grade. You know, they were typically more knowledgeable than a lot of our college grads are today. But people had an understanding of tariffs.
They knew what they were and they knew who paid them. Because the reason that America, the government, was able to sell the public on the income tax, and I’ve spoken about this on my podcast before, but I will speak about it again. The agitation for the income tax was to get rid of tariffs.
Now, why did people want to get rid of tariffs? I mean, if foreigners paid them, it’s a freebie. The reason that Americans wanted to get rid of tariffs is because they knew that the average American paid them. They were taxed on consumers.
And so it was a middle class tax. It was a lower class tax. And what the politicians said is, let’s get rid of these tariffs and replace them with an income tax that only taxes the really rich.
And so all you regular people who have normal jobs and earn the equivalent of maybe $40,000 to $100,000, $200,000 a year, who are paying tariffs, we’re going to eliminate all those tariffs and we’re just going to tax Rockefeller. We’re going to tax the equivalent of billionaires. They weren’t necessarily billionaires back then.
They were millionaires when millions still meant something. But they said, we’re going to tax these really rich people and let you off the hook. And that’s why the public wanted the income tax, because they didn’t want to have to pay the tariffs.
They knew back then and nobody lied to them back then to try to claim that the Europeans were paying the tariffs. Everybody knew that every tariff imposed by McKinley or anybody else, that every tariff was paid by American citizens, by people who buy the products subject to tariff or products that compete with the products that are subject to tariff. And so now Donald Trump is trying to say that tariffs are not a tax hike.
Yes, they are. And they’re going to be paid by Americans. Now, there’s another thing, again, that I disagree with.
One of the criticisms of tariffs are misplaced. People are still saying, the Democrats anyway, a lot of them, a lot of the Republicans are afraid to criticize tariffs. But the Democrats say, oh, well, the tariffs are going to cause inflation because prices are going to go up.
They’re not going to cause inflation. We’re going to have inflation, but it’s not going to be the tariffs that causes it. See, all things being equal, let’s say there was no expansion of the money supply.
We had balanced budget. So the government’s not creating inflation. And now the government imposes tariffs on whatever, across the board or certain goods.
Government slaps on tariffs. Let’s say they’re 20 percent tariffs and some goods go up by 20 percent in price. That’s not inflation.
That’s just certain goods that have gone up in price. But if money supply remains the same, if my paycheck is the same and I have to spend more money to buy certain goods that have been tariffed, I have less money left over to buy other goods. So what happens? The price of those other goods goes down because demand goes down.
And so now in order to sell those goods that are not subject to tariff, you cut your prices. And so there is no net increase in prices. So what would happen in America if we get tariffs on all these goods, then all those goods, all the things that you buy, you know, on Amazon or Walmart, all that stuff would get more expensive.
But other things might get cheaper. Maybe your barber will have to cut the cost of a haircut because, you know, you don’t have as much money left over, so you don’t have as much to pay for a haircut. Right.
So I think a lot of the services will end up being cheaper, which, of course, is bad for the barber who now can’t charge as much for a haircut because his customers have spent too much money paying tariffs. Right. But that’s what’s going to happen.
Some prices are going to go down. Now, of course, I don’t expect the price of anything to go down because they’re going to keep on creating inflation. You know, with or without the tariffs.
But on a relative basis, the tariffs will make the cost of the goods that have been subject to the tariffs more expensive relative to the stuff that’s not subject to the tariffs, which are, you know, a lot of the services which which are not are not going to be tariffs. So they don’t cause inflation, but they are a tax and they are going to be paid by Americans. Now, will American businesses benefit from the tariffs? Some will, but some will be hurt by the tariffs.
You know, I got an email from a customer. I’m not a customer of his, a customer, but he’s a listener. He may be a customer, too, but he emailed me and he said, well, isn’t it unfair that like Europe exempts the exporters from the VAT taxes? So isn’t that a subsidy? And no, it’s not the way the VAT tax works in Europe.
Right. That’s how the Europeans are paying for government. I mean, they’re also paying with an income tax.
Right. It’s not like that. They’re only paying the VAT.
But the VAT tax is meant to cover the cost of the services that you are receiving from government. Well, if something is being exported out of the European Union and it’s being bought by an American, the American is not getting the benefit of any government services in Europe is in America. So why should a product that’s exported to a non-European be subject to a VAT tax that is to pay for services provided to Europeans? So it makes perfect sense that the VAT is subtracted out from exports.
And otherwise, European countries would be at a competitive disadvantage if they had to stick a VAT tax on an exported product where the person who’s buying the product doesn’t get any of the government services that the VAT is being paid for. So that is not a government subsidy. Right.
That just makes it easier for the government to have the VAT tax on people that are that are there. But just like, look, if somebody in Europe buys a product in the United States and we ship it out, you know, if it’s manufactured, not that we manufacture, but let’s say we made something in New York and we ship it to Europe. It’s not subject to the New York state sales tax.
That’s sales tax. In fact, even states, if you buy something in one state, they ship it out. The state doesn’t charge the sales tax unless, you know, now they do more often, you know, because they have a location.
But in theory, right, if the goods are being bought out of state, the state that you bought it from, they don’t charge you the sales tax. Now, the state that you live in may try to charge you a use tax because they say, hey, you’re avoiding our sales taxes by buying stuff out of state. So we’re going to charge you a use tax.
But that’s the same concept as the European countries rebate the VAT. In fact, when you go to Europe as a tourist and you go and buy something, you know, you get a coupon and at the airport you get the VAT tax back. Why? Because you’re not there to benefit from the services.
So why should you pay for it? So that’s not a unfair competition or a subsidy. But look, even if some countries are dumb enough to try to protect their businesses, I mean, there’s one thing. If the goal of a tariff is to raise revenue to support government, fine.
I mean, you’ve got to support government somehow. So tariffs are one way to do it. In fact, tariffs are better than an income tax.
But if the goal of a tariff is to protect a local business from competition, I think that’s misguided. I think the more competition, the better. And I don’t care if it’s global competition.
You know, American cars are a lot better because they compete with European cars and Japanese cars, you know, and, you know, in Korean cars, the more competition, the better. And so if a government tries to limit competition through tariffs, it’s not a good thing. It’s not good for the economy.
It’s certainly not good for their consumers. Right. If you’re a consumer, you want as much competition as possible.
Right. Just, you know, if you live in one state, do you just want to have businesses in your state? No, you want to be able to buy products that are made in other states. Well, you want to be able to buy products made in other countries.
And it actually makes American industries more competitive because let’s say there’s a there’s a component that I need for something on manufacturing. If I can source that component cheaper from Korea than, let’s say, the United States, that’s where I want to get that component. Because it makes my end product more competitive because those components are less expensive.
But if you force me to buy the component from an American company, that’s more expensive. Now, my product is more expensive on global markets. And now maybe I can’t compete.
So a lot of times the tariffs, maybe they make one company protect it, protect one company, but at the expense of others. So it’s not a good thing. And two wrongs don’t make a right.
And so just because let’s say you say, hey, here’s some bad policies in China or Japan or Canada where they’re protecting a particular industry with these high tariffs. All right. If they want to shoot themselves in the foot, if they want to do something that hurts their citizens, we don’t retaliate by hurting our own citizens.
You know, the best policy is just free trade. And if somebody else doesn’t want to have free trade, that’s their loss. Anyway, that’s it for today’s podcast.
I think I’m going to do one more before the end of the week. Should be a very interesting week in the markets as people kind of digest what’s going on in the early Trump administration. Could be a bit of a buy the rumor, sell the fact.
We’ll see. I mean, they’ve been buying up the markets on anticipation of the Trump presidency. Well, now that he’s president, we’ll see what happens.
And so I probably want to talk about it towards the end of the week. Maybe on Friday. As far as today’s podcast member, hopefully we didn’t have any technical glitches.
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Bye for now.