Real Clear
Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst addresses relevant political and social issues of our times in a straightforward and honest manner. Taking on anti-logic factions that are growing in society. News and opinions that you can rely on for integrity and depth!
Real Clear
Public Version: The State of Things
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The podcast explores the overwhelming economic challenges faced by families today, rising costs, and the disconnect between elite political leaders and the realities of citizens. The discussion highlights personal struggles, the need for political accountability, and the urgency for policies that prioritize the well-being of everyday Americans.
• Community struggles with rising costs of living
• Disconnect between political discourse and economic realities
• Analysis of Kamala Harris's pathetic and offensive interaction with labor unions
• Economic indicators suggesting a recession is underway
• Government's role and proposals regarding economic issues
• The importance of public safety in urban areas
• Discussion of California's ongoing state-caused failures with wildfires
Hello everybody. Thanks for tuning in, let's talk. I'd like to discuss the state of things as I see them right now. I'm going to start off by reading something from a local community forum in my neighborhood. Just need someone to say it will be okay.
Speaker 1:My family of five have had hard times last three months recovering after my husband was laid off. He is working again with overtime and I work full-time as well, but it's not enough. Today my son asked when can you make breakfast again? I had to tell him soon. Groceries are expensive. We can only afford to eat one meal a day and maybe something else small. All our bills are getting paid late right now. We make too much for help through the county. I try to go to food banks, but I cannot miss too much work to go. Our rent is going up another 200 in March, which I am dreading. I know this will not be forever and I'm not asking for anything. I know a lot of people are going through the same thing. I just have no one to talk to and just need someone to relate to and assure me that it will be okay.
Speaker 1:That statement represents to me a number of things. It represents, of course, that we are in a recession. I think it's going to be at least through the year 2025, and I think the country will land on its feet in 2026. I think we will see some prices go down as a consequence of freeing up fossil fuel production. I'm not sure how much that's going to accomplish, because we slingshotted light years in price increases as a consequence of COVID and the inflationary policies that took over in its wake, and I think we find ourselves, frankly, in a different universe from the actions we took during the pandemic. But fossil fuel increase will that will make some dent in things and it will improve the economy broadly. I'm not sure it will be the silver bullet that we hope it will be.
Speaker 1:This woman's statements also represent a kind of macular degeneration that I think has taken form on the left, and that is to view cultural matters that they consider to be important as somehow superordinate to the economic realities of the average person. I really don't think that the woman who wrote the statement that I just read to you is all that concerned about whether men should be able to run in women's sports and doesn't consider such a thing to be top on her list of priorities. I think she's much more concerned with what she stated, putting food on the table, surviving and the Democrats are having a very difficult time. They tend to consider people who voted for Trump as reacting out of some kind of cultural malice, which is childish. It's not even adolescent. It's childish the idea that if you don't think the way I do, that you're bad and you're mean. That's psychic equivalence and then it's splitting.
Speaker 1:People think differently for all kinds of different reasons. Perhaps ask them. If you were to ask this woman what's important to her, I don't think you'd have to listen very long to understand that it is. It's the economy. Stupid Things are difficult for a lot of people right now. We're in weird times, not just through circumstantial economics and phase economics, but also because of things that are upon us that we've never seen before. Ai is going to absorb more energy production than we could have imagined. It looks like perhaps 30% of our energy in the future is going to go towards the generation of AI, which itself is going to usurp historical jobs. It's going to own trucking. There's not going to be any more room for the Teamsters. So the Teamsters.
Speaker 1:As I discussed in my upcoming episode with Jamie Miller, there was an amazing spectacle of Kamala Harris's political incompetence in the way that she engaged with the Teamsters. She insulted them, she scorned them, she refused to talk with them for the full interview that they put every candidate through. She warned them that she would win with or without them. She put her finger in the face of their vice president and said y'all better get on board. She threatened the largest labor union that is typically a Democrat stronghold and walked out of their interview with her 20 minutes early after an aide only let her answer four out of 16 questions.
Speaker 1:I don't think people like the woman whose quote I just read to you felt very assured that Kamala Harris had any interest other than her own political ambition, which is it's really representative of the track record of her life. I think Americans, given the state of their economic realities, were terrified of her. This is something that I really hope the Democrats take heed of, because, as I'd mentioned before and I'll probably mention a number of times in the future, a strong two-party system is much better than one-party domination, and the Democrats need a reinvention, and the Democrats need a reinvention. If they had run a Joe Manchin, I dare say he might have won. I also think the Republicans need to keep in mind that if someone other than Donald Trump had run, he probably would have won by an even bigger margin. This is the opposite of what a lot of people tend to think. With Donald Trump, I think he ran an unbelievably deft campaign. In hindsight, there were some huge mistakes throughout it. He made some unforced errors, but he ran an unbelievably skilled campaign in some ways and we can talk more about that in future political analysis.
Speaker 1:The point right now is the state of the economy is profoundly disrupted. We've been in a recession since July. You can look at the ROMS predictor, though he has since walked that back. Who cares? Look at the inversion yield curve. It's identical to previous recessions and you don't have to rely on these macro indicators because you have your own realities to contend with.
Speaker 1:My wife and I just went to Costco today. He did pick up a few things and I deliberately said, walking in on the way no, we're not getting a cart, just we're going to carry out with our hands the few items that we're going to get. We got a jug of olive oil, some avocado oil, spray toothpaste and some vanilla extract $65. Yeah, I would say, let that sink in, but I don't have to Every time you go to the grocery store, you're walking out with a couple hundred dollars and maybe two bags.
Speaker 1:The country can't keep going like this. There needs to be a way that economic realities are dealt with, that life on the ground for most people as they live it is dealt with in a way that is different than the government's going to give you stuff. As you recall, one of the most disastrous positions that Kamala took in her campaign was she was going to set price ceilings on groceries, federal price ceilings on groceries. That's the way the Democrats have taken virtually every economic problem that has come their way in recent years. Don't worry, we're going to be a caped crusader for you. We're going to make businesses do something for you. This never works. All that will happen is that grocery stores will stop production, the investment companies that back them will go into other industries, prices will shoot up and there'll be a less effective system of delivery. I'm not an economist by training. I'm just a thinking man. Look at what happened in Chicago in 2022.
Speaker 1:Mayor Brendan Johnson, who is a travesty of a mayor, decided at least floated I'm not sure if he's enacted this, but floated the idea of government-run grocery stores, because grocery stores don't want to operate in high-crime, high-violence areas Government-run grocery stores. Welcome to North Korea. Instead of improving crime and improving safety in those neighborhoods, such to where those stores would operate, what else did he do recently? He tried to strike down one of the city's most effective crime reduction strategies, which is this technology system that spots crime by way of sonic evaluation of gunfire, so you don't have to have police monitoring the situation right there. These systems will actually spot gunfire and then communicate with dispatch very precisely so that units can be sent right where the fire was heard. It's almost like a GPS targeting system. It's been very effective and he wanted to get rid of it.
Speaker 1:Why Racial profiling? How many times can you hit your head against the wall as a voter and keep going for the same people? What do you mean? Racial profiling? The most dangerous places in Chicago and in most cities are going to be urban areas. There happens to be a higher amount of non-white people living there, specifically black people. It's not racist to then police crime to a greater extent in order to improve those communities At some point. Are we going to pull our heads out of the sand or out of other places and take a look at what these voting trends actually do to communities.
Speaker 1:California is on fire yet again. Gavin Newsom had a chance after the Paradise fires a few years ago, where Paradise burnt to the ground. 85 people died. And it's happening again. And what is the result of the liberal policies that have dictated this state? Karen Bass is the Democrat mayor of Los Angeles.
Speaker 1:If you don't recall who this woman is, she was a VP contender for Joe Biden in 2020. And what did she say when Fidel Castro passed away? She said the passing of Comandante Enjefe is a great loss for the people of Cuba. She's a renowned Marxist, reported by some, and she was on her way to Ghana. She was actually directing government agencies through remote communications in Ghana while the fires were raging through her own city and county. Do you think that she's going to be attending the American inauguration as she did the inauguration of the Ghana president? I doubt it. In order to continue listening to this full episode, go to realclearpodcastcom or click the link in the show notes below. Help me get the middleman out of the way and listen directly through my website, real clear podcastcom. Thank you.
