Josh Barro and Paige Cognetti: The World Is Going to Blame Trump

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This is a music for your oron, video is also released on Windows with Shopify, which can be made for a real hit, starting to test today for one of your promonts on Shopify.de/record. Hello, welcome to the board podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller, a few live programming notes tonight. After Donald Trump's address to the nation, some combination of your public phase will be live on YouTube in Substack. Maybe me. We'll see. Check it out. I will definitely be live tomorrow night at about eight o'clock in the east, where I'm continuing my streaming experiments.

It's just me alone. I'm vibe it out. I'm having an orange wine. I'm answering your questions. So come join us on YouTube or Substack for that as well. That is Thursday, night about eight o'clock in the east. All right. We got a double header today and segment two. It's the mayor of Scranton Page, Cognetti.

“But I think I had my favorite launch out of the cycle. So I'm excited to talk to her. She's running against a Republican who's a pretty big leave.”

So it should be a good conversation. But up first, welcoming back, host of the podcast, serious trouble with Ken White.

And now I was on this couple weeks ago, Central Air with Megan Macarton, Ben Dryfest. He also writes on Substack at very serious. It's very serious. Josh Beryl. How are you doing, sir? I'm doing well, Tim. Thanks for having me. It's April Fool's. I'm not a big April Fool's day guy. I don't sense that you are either. No, I find tricks unpleasant.

Yeah, that sounds right. We're also tomorrow. I guess if you're listening to this on Thursday morning, it's the one year anniversary of Liberation Day. And so that's a good thing also to mark. And we're going to get into the economics of the war.

But first we just have a couple of news items. We got a touch and what's happening with Iran.

“Or maybe they're news items. I guess that's probably what we should talk about.”

Trump has a speech tonight at nine o'clock at the time of this taping. We don't exactly know whether that is him cutting and running, him escalating. You know, him both debuting, you know, a new wing to the White House. Maybe it's not even about the war. Maybe he just is going to do a PowerPoint presentation about the different types of marble. We'll have to see he has a bleet this morning that says this on radio.

Iran's new regime president much less radicalized it far more intelligent than his predecessors has just asked the United States of America for a ceasefire. Sounds good.

We will consider when or moves straight is open free and clear until then we're blasting Iran into oblivion.

Whereas they say back to the Stone Age as I should note that Iran's president, Masood Pezaskin. They got that right. Has been president since 2024. So they don't actually have a new regime president. I don't know what he's talking about there. So it's unclear if this is like intelligence he's gotten from the actual negotiators on the ground.

Or if he saw a news report where the Iran regime president was sounding a little bit. I opened to a ceasefire and he's just kind of weighing in on that like a radio talk show call in person on his social media. Or he made it up like. Or he made it up. Yeah.

Much like, you know, he was saying that he spoke with some former president who told him that they wish they had done what he did in Iran. You don't think that was built Clinton. You don't think built Clinton. Well, kind of wishes he had been bound to Iran. I feel like that's possible. I'm lying all the time. So I'm not saying it's definitely the case, but I'm raising one eyebrow.

I built Clinton as this will pass. I forget whether it was New York Times or Washington Post, but one of the papers reached out to there aren't that many living former presidents and all of the. All of their spokespeople denied that it was them. I would note that Trump statement did not actually specify that it was a former president of the United States who had made this comment to him. So maybe there's a much larger universe of.

You know, presidents of homeowners associations and such former presidents who could have made that statement, but he just he just makes these things up. And it's also possible that there's something in his head that he made up about some person. Some official in Iran who he is then misidentifying as the president. So it might he might have a real person in mind, even if the story is fake and the person might be someone else, or he might just, you know.

“But I, the more important thing in this statement is him now saying that we're not going to stop until the straight is open.”

And his administration for the last couple of days has been saying, well, actually, we have several key objectives here and reopening the straight isn't one of them. And if England wants the straight open, they should go open it themselves. So this is this is a different position than what they've been publicly taking for the last couple of days, but the explanation of what the war is for and what will constitute success and when we can stop just keeps changing.

I should say that the Iran parliament, that's when I statement out of the Ira...

And we've not held any negotiations and we will not hold them.

“So kind of a Sherman ass statement there.”

Hard to know who to trust in this back and forth. I mean, it's just unreliable narrators all around. And so I guess we'll just sort of wait and see for the president. One of the reasons I wanted to have you on today was this is true for the economy, which is honest. But it's just also true generally about Trump.

You've been a consistent Trump opponent, but maybe, you know, not with the hysterics that I have. You know, Josh, you're a rational person, you're kind of even handed, you know, trying to make you look at the facts. You know, I'm I'm an emotional roller coaster. I'm an emotional wreck and like I've looked at the last few weeks. And I'm like, this is a disaster of unimaginable proportions.

It's the stupidest thing I've ever seen.

Oh, it's very bad. And so I'm just kind of wondering as you assess kind of the state of the war as it is right now.

I do you see it as completely absurd and ridiculous as I do. It's outrageous. And it's outrageous on several levels. I mean, no one authorized him to do this. There wasn't even an effort to try to sell people either domestically or abroad on the idea that this was a good idea. In addition to fact that a lot of people are dying, it does not appear to be producing a better regime outcome for the people in Iran.

And it's causing all sorts of trouble all around the world. And we're already seeing in Asia the really significant fuel shortages because they're closer to the Persian Gulf. We're going to start feeling these effects in a few weeks. Now it's not going to be quite as bad here because we are a net oil exporter.

“But I think some people have this misconception that because we are an oil exporter that we're actually better off when the price of oil goes up.”

There are oil producers and Texas who are going to have a windfall and there are local economies and parts of the US that will benefit from investment and oil and gas. But most US consumers interact with oil by paying for gasoline and for by paying for other products in which the petroleum products are cost component. And those people are going to see prices go up. And then also the fact that we may be setting off a global recession here because you have other countries that are net importers that are just going to be in much more pain.

They're not going to be able to buy as much of our goods. And so you have negative knock-on effects from the fact that this causes so much economic damage globally. And then it's also outrageous because they don't seem to have planned for any of this. They're making it up as they go along. They have no idea what they're doing.

And there are certain obvious things that like if you were Donald Trump and you were coming back into office and you were dead set on invading Iran. You at least would have done certain things to prepare. For example, they didn't refill the strategic petroleum reserve. It runs out in April. It runs out in two weeks.

Yeah, but the thing is that the whole strategic petroleum reserve runs out in two weeks. But like the last, you know, amount that they released like that. Well, runs out April 15. You know, we drew down a lot of this and when Russia invaded Ukraine. That was the previous driver of a significant global disruption in oil supplies.

And we were able to somewhat moderate the price effects of that by gradually releasing the strategic petroleum reserve. Then the situation stabilized. I mean, frankly, Biden should have started refilling it in 2024. Yes. But you know, it was gas was still cheap even a little bit cheaper in 2025.

And so Trump, you know, A should have just generally been taking advantage of the low price to refill it. And B, if he thought that he might want to war in the mid-East, then he especially should have refilled it. Because he should have known that there was risk that there would be another one of these global supply disruptions. And they didn't do it. I guess because, you know, when you're refilling it, it has a marginal upward effect on oil prices.

Because the government is out there being a big buyer of oil. And that's, you know, a little bit of short-term opinion. But it was a good time to do it because gasoline prices were low. And we'd be in a better position right now to ride this out if he had done that. And it's just clear that this wasn't some grand strategy that he came in in January.

Last year knowing that he was going to do this. What happened is they did this thing in Venezuela, which was on its own narrow terms of really tactical success. And you know, it worked. We went in. We got maduro.

We took him out. The new government is, you know, at least somewhat more friendly to us than the old government was. Even if we haven't brought freedom to Venezuela. And so it's clear he looked at that. And it was like, oh, that's, that worked.

Let's do that again. You can't do the same thing in Iran for a number of reasons. One of which is that's a much more ideological regime that has objectives other than, you know, cleptocratically enriching the leaders who you could then theoretically cut a deal with. So it's, he's improvising.

And one of the few redeeming traits that Trump had was that he was sort of gun shy about this stuff. He did appear genuinely reluctant to get himself into significant military commitments that would be difficult to back out of.

“But I think that he was just feeling arrogant after the Venezuelo thing and took the temptation.”

There's always people around you in the Republican Party.

You want to invade Iran. And he, he made this decision that he can't really just talk. It's not clear that you can do that here. It's not clear that you can actually cause the straight to be reopened simply by backing off and get, you know,

Get gasoline prices to fall by the dollar a gallon that they've risen in the ...

Yeah, I think it's understated like the arrogance of the coming off of the Venezuelo success combined with,

when people talk about the way that Israel got us into the war. It's like part of it is Israel and NBS and others were praying on Trump's both arrogance, and just make itlamania and how he's high on his own supply. And also the fact that, hey, remember these guys tried to kill you. You should get them back.

“There's a little bit of the vengeance effort, but there was also the, I think that Trump was, like, really impressed by the Israeli military of the recent other actions, you know,”

whether it be the pages or other be, you know, going after that nuclear last year and the 12 day war. And it's like, oh, look at this, you know, I can be a winner by kind of writing shotgun with these guys who are really good. We're going to take out the eye to a low we know where he is now. You know, we can do the Venezuelo thing part two. And, you know, I think that like he was a willing partner and large part because like he liked that part of it.

Like it felt like it was going to go really well because he thought that Israel was really skilled at this, which they are, but they're limits. Yeah, I mean, and Israel is really skilled at a number of things. They also seem convinced that Iran just wasn't going to close the straight. In part because Iran had taken fairly conservative responses to some of the prior escalations over the last couple of years,

because Iran did not want to get into a full-scale war, but the problem is now they, they were in one whether they liked it or not.

And they have, you know, clearly made the determination that, you know, for their, you know, for their existence and survival, they need to do this. And while these rallies have many impressive capabilities reopening the straight it looks to me as it looks like it's going to have to involve a substantial ground troop presence that will be under extreme threat. And it's not clear that that's viable, which I think is part of why the president leaves open the possibility that we just won't fight to get the straight reopen.

The global destabilization that is going to happen because of this oil shock. I don't think people have even really thought through yet. Yeah. Well, I want to talk about the negotiations and just one more thing on the geopolitics, then we'll get to economic stuff. It's just the other thing is the matter guys like to look at this stuff in a kind of base dominance versus weakness, you know,

confidence versus like that that is the prism, which with which they look through a lot of the stuff very primitive prison prison and like through that prison. It's like who has been bullied by this like who is more confident like Iran has had a lot more damage done sure. But like right now in this moment, I think Iran looks this and goes shit, we can't close the straight like we have more power than we realize we have, you know, the remaining leaders who are alive. And it's Trump and Vance were looking at this and going, how do I get out of this, how do I get out of this fight, how do I back out of this fight while saving face right just like as if from a school yard bully, you know, school yard fight like who's the most likely to back out and go home to mom standpoint like.

Iran is in a more powerful position right now even though obviously they're weaker than materially. I'm not sure how much that matters. Obviously aesthetically, this administration cares about looking strong and, you know, the nonsense focus on social media, DHS and, you know, the whole ethos that Pete hexap has, I get that.

But they always seems to understand on a basic level that voters are fundamentally driven by ordinary cost of living issues.

“And that's why the president has been so focused on he wants, he wants the 10 year yield below 4% he wants lower mortgage rates, that's why he's harassing the Fed.”

And, you know, up until he launched this war, he was having modest success getting those longer term interest rates down, they then sort once he started this war. He's focused on the stock market because he knows that people care about how their portfolios are doing. And that's also, I think, why over the last month he keeps doing these interventions that appear more aimed at the financial markets than it Iran. Trying to say, hey, you know, this is going to end soon, this is going to end soon because he wants to keep the oil price down and stock prices up.

But the problem is that voters aren't looking at the barrel price of oil. Voters care about the price of gasoline. And you can project an image of strength and you can do things that move financial markets around. But if you're not actually getting the pump price down, then that's not going to serve you politically. I think that he had up until the last few weeks seemed to have shown an understanding that,

Iraq, even though he was for it at the time and lies about having been against it all along, he understands what a misadventure that ended up being for the Republican party that was not popular to go do these foreign adventures that people really do care.

“Very much about just what's happening at home, that's why America first worked as a slogan.”

And that's just all completely gone out the window and it doesn't matter how cool you look on social media, people are going to be really angry. I mean, gasoline is already really expensive and we haven't even yet hit the effects of, you know, to the extent that we do import oil from the Gulf, that's still in transit. It's going to be a few weeks from now that finally the oil starts to be missing, but then it's going to be missing and things are going to get even more expensive and they're going to be shortages of things.

People are going to be absolutely furious.

Let's talk about the success of that because you're you're speaking my language about the global crisis. I think that it's hard for people to out their heads around right now, like the immensity of the crisis and all the different ways in which the energy crisis is going to manifest in their lives.

It's more than just the gas pump, it's absolutely cataclysmic and even if tonight he announces that he's out.

They're still going to be, you know, reverberations of that for months to come. I should just say one other idea about tonight we'll see how to start out. There's a prediction is that the market is closed tomorrow. The market is closed on Friday. It's Friday. Right. The market is closed Friday. So you do have a three day weekend. Thank you for going to escalate for trying to escalate an end for four days. It's not it's not not maybe the worst decision if you're letting it go from the market on a three day weekend.

But anyway, well, but the reverberations like I think just as you've been mentioning are immense and around the world like we're already starting to see this might come to us a little bit later, but it's happening.

“The key thing people need to understand, this sounds very basic is that like you have to bring the amount of petroleum products that get consumed down to match the volume that is available.”

And so prices go up, you know, in the financial markets it moved based on people's expectations of, you know, well, what's what's the situation going to be two months from now, et cetera.

But ultimately, you know, if you have less crude oil flowing into Japan, there needs to be less jet fuel made, there needs to be, you know, less gasoline, all of the products in the stack.

And that means you have to actually get people to not do things that they were going to do, and the price needs to go up to bring the supply and the demand into balance. And a lot of consumption of petroleum products is very inelastic in the short term. Like your office is 30 miles from where you live, you still have to drive there every day. If gasoline goes up by $2 a gallon, you're just eating that cost. It's not actually causing you to consume that much less gasoline.

And as a result, sometimes the price really needs to move a lot in order to change behavior enough to bring demand in line with supplies. So that's why you can see these really wild swings and why they talk about the possibility of $200 barrel oil as a result of this. Because really the price, the price needs to go up a lot to get to the pain point where people decide, okay, I'm actually not going to make that trip. I'm not actually, I'm actually not going to produce this plastic product, et cetera.

And so you're starting to see that pull back on a very small scale.

I mean, United Airlines announced, for example, they're going to pull down about 5% of their schedule in the second and third quarters of this year.

They've already canceled their flying to Tel Aviv and Dubai, that's 1% of the schedule. They're going to pull down some Tuesday Wednesday flights, some red eyes, that's sort of thing. That's a 5% reduction give or take in the amount of jet fuel that United is going to use.

“But if you need to start pushing airlines to a point where they need to do 20% less flying and some market, that sort of thing.”

You're going to see huge changes at the airports and you also, you're also going to see big increases in fares because you have, you know, a substantial reduction in supply and that flows through into price. And so you just imagine that process happening over and over again in every industry in the economy that relies on petroleum products. There will be direct consumer effects. You know, some people can work from home more. Some people will cancel road trips that they were planning to take, et cetera.

The EU is already telling people to do that. Right. The EU is like, and some of your countries are starting to say, like, work from home, you know, don't put them as much. And so, you know, at least in the US, you will have some offset from the fact that, you know, you will have,

“you have oil-driven economies in parts of the country where there is more work and more profit.”

And those people will have more money to spend and they'll go out and spend it on some things and that will offset part of the economic cost here. But the way most people are going to experience this is that if the straight remains closed or the amount of petroleum flow through the straight remains greatly reduced for an extended period. It's going to have to mean not just higher prices. It has to mean actual lifestyle changes where people use a lot less fuel brought about by those price changes so that we don't run out of it.

So the effects are enormous and global. And then, of course, and we can talk about you get downstream political effects from that people get there. This is part of why I found it funny that the president is trying to lay this groundwork to convince people that someone else is fault that, that oil is getting more expensive, that it's, it's your ups fault for not reopening the straight. I mean, people blame the president for high gas prices even when they're not as fault. And so the idea that he's.

The time at this fault. Right. This time it is his fault. But even if it wasn't like the idea that he's going to escape, you know, political hell by spending some story about why it's someone, someone else's fault, the gasoline got more expensive. Like, I can't believe that he actually think that thinks that's going to work. But I don't think that's going to really hit the president how much political damage this is doing to him until several weeks from now when you have all,

significantly more energy supply disruption than we're already experiencing. In some ways, you know, like the geopolitical impact also, it's hard to predict how bad it's going to get. If you live in the UK right now, and like they're coming up, like very, very simple on having like petroleum shortages there, like if you, that gas is already higher in Europe and Canada in Asia than it is here, and it's going up even more.

They only have one person to blame, like America, and you have Donald Trump o...

It's like he is like pushing the accelerator on all the stuff that Mark Carney was talking about, you know, back and, you know, whatever that was.

“And Davos a couple of months ago about how these people need to feel like they need to reorient the world.”

I mean, like the rage globally against him is going to be significant because like there's real pain that's coming. And also, I mean, again, as I know, like people tend to punish their local politicians when the price of gasoline goes up. And so what you will see politicians all around the world try to do is tell a story about how this is Donald Trump's fault. And that might work better than Trump's blamed deflections strategy because it's true, but usually that still doesn't work. Mark Carney is one of the few examples of a politician who in recent years seems to have had success, pointing at a domestic economic problem, saying it's Donald Trump's fault.

And actually riding that to an electoral victory.

You know, he took over as the leader of the Liberal Party in Canada and the rise in, you know, anti-American.

The board audience is familiar with Carney. Okay. Carney is the most bull work leader of the world wide. Right. Rose McCron's position there was, he was pushed aside by Mark Carney with his, with his Trump's arrangements in real.

Yeah, and, you know, that worked in part because it was so obvious and so proximate and people were so personally offended by the way that Donald Trump has treated a candidate and rightly so. Yeah.

“Mark Carney, of course, also moved the party to the center on some other important issues, most notably a carbon tax.”

So, you know, the, I encourage Democrats to look at that. The fact that you can abandon unpopular parts of your agenda and be rewarded electorally for Mark Carney, you know, shows us that that is true. But so he's sort of the exception that usually doesn't work. And so, you know, the administration has been very happy to see left-wing regimes down in, in Latin America, becoming unpopular and losing elections. You know, it's happening in Chile, it's probably going to happen in Colombia soon.

But like, what goes around comes around there. If he causes a global recession, you know, that's not going to be good for the popularity of what's his name in Argentina, Malay. The right-wing leaders that come in, they're similarly going to be negatively impacted by this and you're going to see disruption in ways that could actually be, you know, negative for US geopolitical interests. Other disruptions here also are happening on top of that. The cut-last we applies and thought about the fertilizer issue and how it's going to affect food, helium, and how that affects, you know, various industries.

One thing you mentioned earlier when you're talking about all the negative outcomes on this was interest rates. Yeah. Like one thing Trump had going for him economically was that he was putting in this new Fed share Kevin Warsh.

Basically, corruptly, and we could debate the scale of the corruption of him pushing through Warsh.

But he was pushing through somebody that he wanted to lower interest rates. And one thing that was working out for Trump was that the slow down of the economy even before this war happened was going to, you know, kind of make it not very controversial for the Fed to continue to lower interest rates over but more as the year went on. That's pretty hard to do now. I mean, you look at the bond yield going up significantly, you know, mortgage rates are going up borrowing rates are going up across the board right now.

I'm spiking really since the war started. Warsh is going to be in a pickle. Well, I mean, first of all, he still has the issue of the investigation into Jay Powell and Senator Tillis from North Carolina saying that he's not going to allow any nominee to move forward. So long as that so long as that investigation remains on going and to date the administration has been stubborn about that. Janine Piero appealing and unfavorable ruling that she got there. So I don't think it's clear that Warsh is going to be on the Fed anytime soon.

The Fed was already in a difficult position in that the labor market appeared to be worse, weakening, but inflation still appeared to be sitting above target.

“And so those those are forces that push an opposite directions in terms of what you should do with interest rates. And so you could you could make a plausible argument for rates up a little rates down a little.”

You couldn't make a plausible argument for rates down a lot, which is what the president really wants. You now have the Fed in a different difficult position where this pushes upward on interest rates in part because the, you know, you have the government out here spending additional hundreds of billions of dollars on this war. That's going to have to borrow the government was already in, you know, to already borrowing too much money, which sends to push up interest rates. So you have that force and then you have oil prices in the short term if they spike that's inflationary right that's, you know, one key component of spending that it's gone up a lot.

On the other hand, if you're causing a recession, that might be deflationary. People are going to be poorer. They're going to have less money to go out and spend, as they spend more their money on gasoline. They can't afford to spend as much on everything else. That can actually be a deflationary force. And also because of that, that might further weaken the labor market, which also calls for loose or monetary policy. So the Fed is still in a position where it's not really obvious which direction they should go on interest rates.

Part of why the rates have gone up in the market, some of it has to do with, you know, even wider expectations for deficits. And some of it has to do with the fact that it's likely that this, the effect of this oil shock is going to be a significant, you know, upward pressure on CPI over the next year or so.

That's going to put the Fed in a position where it's not going to be able to ...

But that's going to be really painful economically for the U.S. if the Fed is having to raise rates to fight inflation at a time when the labor market is already soft because of the oil shock, that could cause a lot of unemployment.

“Will he staring down the barrel standing, inflation?”

Our last experience with Stagflation was similarly to do with an oil supply shock.

I don't think, well, we'll see if they get washed in there. It's kind of unimaginable that he would get in there and then increase interest rates, right? I mean, so isn't well, isn't like the bigger. He doesn't set interest rates. That's true. The Federal Open Market Committee sets interest rates, which consists of all seven members of the Federal Reserve Board and five presidents of regional Federal Reserve banks on a rotating basis.

Most of those people are not people who are directly in the pocket of Donald Trump.

“People do this head count with the Fed board where they talk about how many of the members Trump appointed, which I think is the wrong way to think about it.”

I mean, first of all, Powell is a Trump appointee.

I don't think anybody thinks that Powell is someone in his pocket. Ray was a Trump appointee. So you have, you have Steve Miron, who's sitting on the Federal Reserve Board, who had been the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors and continues to be out there saying that we should have substantial interest rate cuts him as being very hacky. If Worsh is confirmed, that just puts him in Miron's seat. So you have, you know, that Trump doesn't even gain an additional warm body on the board through the confirmation of Kevin Worsh, because that, because Worsh just ends up displacing Miron in his seat on the board.

Jay Powell can remain on the board, at least until 2028, and again, if no one gets confirmed into Powell's seat, you get to stay until some new person is confirmed into your seat on the board and stay until you die in theory.

If no one else is confirmed. And so I don't know if it's going to be possible to confirm any one to the Fed this year.

I don't think the Senate's going to be more hospitable to yours from now, because even if there isn't a democratic majority, they're going to have an even narrower Republican majority there in the US Senate. And then you have the other two Trump appointees, Christopher Waller and Mickey Bowman, have been a little more favorable toward Rick cuts over the last year or plus, but I mean it when I say a little more favorable.

“There's a reasonable debate to be had about, you know, should we have cut another quarter point? Should we have cut a quarter point less?”

That's sort of the realm that they're in. They're not here to cut rates to 1% because the president says so. And then you have the Fed Bank president who aren't appointed by the president at that all. So even if Kevin Worsh came in really hot to do deep rape cuts. And again, once Worsh is in, he's no longer dependent on the the president's good will because he already has the job. Worsh has a long career history in which he's generally been pretty hawkish and appeared to have real, you know, real ideological grounding.

Sometimes that I disagree with significantly more hawkish than me. So I also, I don't necessarily think that Kevin Worsh is going to the Fed to do whatever it is that Donald Trump tells him to do. But even if he wanted to, he doesn't control the Fed himself, so he can't. And also it doesn't control the bond markets and, you know, all of the, what else is happening with the rest of the economy and the way that. Yeah, that's the other thing. If you cut interest rates in a, in a really inappropriate way, the Fed only contract directly controls short term interest rates.

There's more good. Right. If, if what the market thinks is you've cut rates too much, it's going to cause inflation to spike. You're going to have to raise rates later in order to address that. Long term interest rates might not even fall now. Like the, the 10 year rate, which drives mortgage rates, the 30 year rate, those could go up on rate cuts. If the expectation is that the Fed is going to have to do a return. Hopefully on the, I think we've agreement on this would run the economy before Trump created this morotic disruption. There's a little internet fight between or in cast Trump's protectionist policy management and others.

Okay. Well, I assume he has on the side of him or in cast said this, since the tariffs were at the one year, as we mentioned, since liberation day since the tariffs growth ticked up an inflation down manufacturing demand and productivity rose and consumer sentiment improved. The dollar didn't appreciate retaliation didn't occur. The administration successfully leveraged tariffs into favorable deals and commitments. So that's the spin from the pro chair of crowd on how the economy is going before the war.

We continue to lose manufacturing jobs. The one thing I will say is I think the idea of there are many things wrong with the tariffs. The expectation that they were specifically going to be inflationary, I think, was sometimes a little bit oversold. And for a similar reason to what I was talking about with oil a moment ago, which is that, you know, if you tariff a particular item, it raises the price of that item, but it also makes US consumers poor. They have less money to spend on other stuff. And so that the tariffs will tend to like push the price of imported goods up and the price of everything else down a teeny tiny bit because everyone is poor.

And it's easy to think about this if you think about other tax increases. Generally, the expectation is if you went out and raised the income tax, that would be disinflationary. If you raise the income tax and don't have new government spending to offset it, you're taking money out of the economy, you're taking money out of people's pockets, they go out, there's less money chasing all the goods that are out there inflation should come down.

A tariff is just a tax that happens to be on a very specific set of goods and...

So I think it's true that, you know, of the many problems that we should have expected from tariffs, it was not necessarily that they were going to goose the inflation rate, although again,

“the mechanism by which the inflation is offset is that they make everyone poor, so they don't really like to talk about why they wouldn't be so inflationary.”

But the tariffs have not produced the economic objectives that the president laid out here, it doesn't appear to be causing the reshoring, we continue to lose manufacturing jobs. And it's also because of the extremely chaotic nature in which the president has done this, it has not fostered business investment. Businesses don't know what to do, they don't know what rates they're going to be taxed out on what activities. And so you have this weird economic situation over the last year where there's been this sort of freeze where companies don't want to make changes, they don't want to invest, they don't want to hire or fire.

They're a little bit scarred from their experience in COVID where they laid a lot of people off and then they had shortages and they couldn't hire enough people, so there haven't been mass layoffs, but they also, but it's also been a really tight time for labor market hiring. And if anything that log jam on that is about to be broken by this Iran war, I mean, you know, that inflation data where things had, you know, we started from an elevated rate of inflation and we had, you know, some federal reserve tightening that that happened to try to try to fight that.

And inflation continued to moderate modestly, although it's still even before the Iran war was still above the 2% target. And now we're going to see the short term effects of the oil shock are definitely going to push that upward. So I don't know what success there is for them to brag about here on the on the tariffs, although I'm sure what Oran is up to here is the idea is to say, see, look how good the last year was and then everything going forward, you can say that it was about Iran.

Yeah, yeah, blue collar jobs are about a half million below trend in addition to manufacturing jobs down and it's just happening across the board.

A couple of the things that we've news this morning. Donald Trump showed up at the Supreme Court today. They're discussing the birthright citizenship case and the challenge to as executive order, banning birthright citizenship. I guess this is like the type of thing where like a mob boss, like goes to sit inside the courtroom to try to try to bully a witness. So I don't know if there's a different theory there, I don't like why else he would do it, maybe he's bored.

He doesn't want to talk about Iran, he's tired of getting people calling him, getting bad news. He wants to go in there where his phone, he doesn't have his phone and he can kind of do his off a little bit. I don't know what you're taking. I don't know what he's up to. It's definitely not going to impress the justices and I'm not sure he's dumb enough to not realize it's not going to impress the justices.

“I mean, these are nine very statistical people. They don't like being pushed around. The conservatives on the court, I think, are a little bit sensitive about the perception that they are a political arm of the president.”

And, you know, this is somewhat like the tariffs, this is another one of those cases where they can, they can show their independence from him without really having to break from any of their key judicial philosophies. I think the black letter text the constitution is pretty clear here about what is required in terms of who's a citizen. So I don't think he's going to get his way and I don't think that he, I don't think he's even dumb enough to think this is going to help him get his way. I think it's he thinks somehow that he is benefits politically from these high profile fights with the court because it fires up the base, but I don't he doesn't have to win another presidential primary.

I mean, he's going to blame. He's good at the blame game. It's kind of hard right now. Like he doesn't have a lot of people to blame. So to move, even before he was a politician, you know, going back to bankruptcy time, it's like, oh, so in so's false, you know, they're out to get you he's good at that he's good at identifying someone else, you know, to point a finger at. It's hard to do when you're the president, you control both chambers of Congress, you know, you're dumb. There's also no chambers in the court. So, you know, the, it's the extent you're going there for a photo op and I guess they'll get him entering the building.

But it's not it's not even a photo op. Also, people don't know what's happening. So he feels like maybe he can go out of there and rant and rave about it and talk about how, you know, these guys don't want to stuff a country anymore.

They want to spring in the cannellops, calves, you know, third world people from shithole countries. I don't know. I guess that's maybe the thinking.

Yeah, we'll see. I don't, I also don't think it's going to work and we'll do one more serious topic because you're subject is very serious. I'm very serious. And then we'll do a little bit of selling it. I had someone the other day, I was talking with and they were like, oh, and so your newsletter not serious. And I was like, no, it's very serious. That's the opposite of what the title is. Yeah. It's important to understand. Josh is a very serious person. If you have any questions about it, you can look at the swag that he sells, you know, it's on the hat.

It's on the shirt. I guess you do have hats. We don't have hats. Maybe we should have hats.

“You should get hats. Yeah, it's important to point and have branding. You know, I saw a couple hats out of the no kings.”

I like a couple of workouts. Appreciate it. That last serious topic. You wrote about sloppyism and how the out of lessons of taking over policy making. And you kind of grapple with this age old question that you and I are dealing with the same time as elder millennials, which is our things getting worse or am I getting old, you know, and you grappled with that through the context of policy.

I mean, I'm definitely getting old.

There you go. That's, thank you for for more more precisely.

“You're getting old too serious. Yeah, for more precisely. We're seriously initiating the conundrum that we're processing.”

And you looked at the context of policy making and how can stupid lot of proposals are down Trump and is in his, you know, tax bill, you know, had all these gimmicks, no tax on tips, etc. And now, you know, we've got a Democrats who are copying this with tax, DMX, Kishalans bottoms in Georgia saying teachers shouldn't pay tax, Katie Porter, nobody under a hundred K should pay tax. We have Holland and Cory Booker. They're proposing a bunch of tax carve outs for lower mental class mental class people. What's your problem with those policies? Why do you call it adolescent?

There's an element of it that's like I should just be able to have ice cream for dinner. I don't have responsibilities. Other people should take care of things. And just this arbitrary choice of, you know, which people are favored and should be excused from the shared responsibilities that we have in society to finance our government. And it's different groups of people depending on which politicians you have Steve Hilton running for government, California saying veterans shouldn't have to pay income tax there.

“But it's, it's treating taxes as though they are a penalty or something that, you know, reflect a moral judgment that you're just favored and therefore you should pay rather than them being the price of a civilized society.”

And it's, it's childish when anyone does it, but it's especially like an airline boarding mindset towards taxes, you know, it's if you're an elderly, you get to board first, if you're a baby, you get to board first, if you're a veteran, you get to board first, if you have a limp, you get to board first, you know, if you pay your way out of it, you get to board first. It's like, you know, sounds like you have a whole airline take care. I mean, it's insane. The airline boarding process is insane. I watched a family of nine pre-bored me because one member of the family was, I don't know, maybe ten years younger than President Donald Trump.

I guess one person who is, you know, looking like they had a little bit of a limp and they boarded their entire family first, that's just not a way to have a society.

Yeah, I don't know. You know, we all should board it at, you know, just based on based on merit from each according to our ability to each according to our needs. If you fly delta, they promise you they'll have the bag to the bag claim within 20 minutes if you're playing a rival at the gate. And so I like to check my bag and then I just have a backpack. I don't need to worry about over had been space and then I can just board last. And I don't need to, I get completely out of that rat race, but anyway, to your point about this, you know, the ranking and the need to figure out who's worthy.

“I understand why the airlines do this, but ultimately, you know, if you're a Democrat, you're supposed to be able to say to people that the government provides valuable services to you that you should be willing to pay for.”

And I think some of that broke down during COVID, you know, the, the period where in a lot of blue states you had public officials explaining why actually it wasn't important for the government to open schools that your children could be sent to all day. A little bit undermined their ability to say, "Hey, you know, you really should pay for your share of this because the government is doing something important and valuable here." Like they, not only were they not opening the schools, they were saying, "Well, actually it's not as important that the children be in school."

Like the teachers unions would have gone insane if you had said that in 2018 that it wasn't, you know, that it didn't matter that much, whether it gets in school or not. Suddenly, the, the positioning on that flipped and the way they could message that flipped. And at the federal level, what you see from Senator Van Hollen and Senator Booker basically trying to create extremely high thresholds, you know, again, in the ballpark of a hundred thousand dollars around which, you know, people should pay no federal income tax at all.

It's both disclaiming the idea that what the federal government is doing is worth paying for. And it's also at a time when we have a yawning budget deficit, where we already can't afford tax cuts in the first place. And they're saying, "Well, this is paid for because we have plans to raise taxes on the rich and corporations to offset these middle and lower income tax cuts." But the problem with that is you need the tax increase anyway to close the budget gap, and Democrats have a whole laundry list of new things they want the government to spend money on.

They claim they want child care benefits and paid leave benefits and big new subsidies for green energy that the Republicans have got it.

These things all cost money. And it's like they come up with one tax, you know, it's all we're going to have this tax on people who make over a million dollars.

And then they come up with seven different things that the amount of that tax collection theoretically finances. You can only use it once. And if you decide to use it on this middle and lower income tax cut that both, you know, it completely stands in the way of what Democrats punitive policy agenda is for a more active, you know, larger government with more services. And it comes at a time where the Fed is having to raise interest rates to that push mortgage rates to a place that people are dissatisfied with.

In order to counteract those government budget deficits. Yeah, I hear you. I hear everything you're saying you're correct on the merits. We cannot just raise taxes on people over a million dollars and also give people paid leave and do a green new deal and cut taxes for everybody under 100.

It does the math doesn't work on that.

You're the mayor of New York. That seems to be working for him. You're in New York City. He did some gimmicky proposals. People liked it. People got on board for that. Now he's in there now he's in charge. I used to make some hard decisions. He's cutting some, you know, he's doing some budget cuts.

You know, he's doing some budget cuts and he receded criticize before libraries and elsewhere. Maybe that's the thing to do.

Promise them candy and then govern with broccoli. Well, I mean, for one thing, I think people notice if you promise things and then don't do them. And so that might feel good during the campaign once, but the people will then punish you for breaking your promise.

“But then they forget you couldn't run again. So that's how it worked for Trump. You know, they promised them and they're mad at them and then he left for four years tomorrow.”

I'll go and then he came back and they're like, remember? Well, he was defeated for real. And then, you know, and then we had a democratic administration that presided over exploding inflation and a border that they failed to police and they brought him back in. You know, we discussed this when you were on Central Air a few weeks ago. The, like the skeleton key to how to Donald Trump get elected again was that Joe Biden drove the reputation of the democratic party into a ditch. And so voters decided that the Democrats had been even worse and even more.

But also down Trump promised not a popular stuff. If Biden had, you know, done a better job getting inflation under control and had not, you know, allowed millions of people to enter the country without without authorization and had no strategy for dealing with that.

Kamala Harris will one that election, regardless of Trump coming out with no tax on tips.

Snap reaction. If they're two candidates running for president in 2028 and one candidate does very well with people who understand how budgets work and one candidate does very well with people who don't. Who do you think's more likely to win? I, I think this is a gosh of question. I don't like it. But I, you know, I, I look back to wave politics.

“I look back to the way the politics worked 30 years ago because again, I try to remember that like it's not going to be getting old.”

And we have answered the question to the conundrum. It's not that you're getting old. People are newly idiots. That's the problem. But it's like in in 1992, you had three leading presidential candidates all running on deficit reduction and it wasn't this sort of eat your vegetables moralistic like we have to live within our means.

That's why I've introduced the budget deficit.

No, they were out there saying, I want to cut the deficit. So mortgage rates will come down. And you would, you know, in the 1980s, you had this understanding that fighting inflation and bringing down interest rates were like the key. The key job for the president in the morning in America ad that Ronald Reagan ran in 1984 was about how interest rates inflation were lower. So it's not that people are excited about the idea that you will do an austerity budget deal that raises taxes and lower spending.

It's that people will reward you if you come into office and implement policies that cause inflation to fall and interest rates to fall. I agree with you.

“I think that people should go and then do the policies to do that and also throw on top of that little cherry on top, little candy.”

Okay, you know, we'll give you a little tax break, too, if you. If you can't, I mean, if you can't do these intersectional things that are very popular that are that we need in order to win the election. It is true that Bill Clinton ran on a middle class tax cut in 1992, which he did not deliver. And he got reelected although 1994 was rough along the way. Yeah, I don't know.

We just need something for working class people to get excited about, you know, if it's, and if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's more inflation and lower interest rate. It's better than free money. That's like lower interest rates are like, especially important for people with lower incomes. Final topic, also very serious.

Yes. You offered on social media a contrary view regarding Brian's bimbabowification and weather constitutes constituted a double life. You wrote this. I don't understand why people take Brian's interest in women who seek to cartoonishly enhance their feminine sexual characteristics as a sign of incompatibility with his wife. And I agree with that.

Yeah, I agree with that. Christy Knome, like Brett Bear severely saying on Fox that Christy Knome is shocked by this. And she wants privacy for family. It's like, no, this was not a double life. This is a standard South Dakota life.

I mean, maybe the saline breasts are a little different. But having a husband to is doing some weird stuff on the internet that is like a slightly exaggerated version of what he does with his wife once a month. Isn't that just heterosexual marriage in South Dakota? I think so. I saw someone on Twitter making a good observation that, you know, because Brian, which by the way, why can none of these people spell their names correctly?

Brian, you know, have this interest in women who were in this, you know, bimbabowification, which is not a fetish that I'd heard of before a few days ago. We're like, you know, they put saline in to get enormous breasts and that sort of thing.

Then, you know, obviously, we've seen the photos of him positioning himself a...

It's kind of like a Sam Rockwell white lotus situation. We're like Sam Rockwell, like for some boys so much he decided he had to be one. So whatever this Brian situation is I want to first note that it is fundamentally heterosexual for clarity that we're looking at here. This is about Brian and his relationship to women. But be that as it may, I mean, the whole Mara Logo face aesthetic.

And it was always amazing to be the Christy Nome who 10 years ago kind of look normal.

“To be the governor of South Dakota, this, what I think of as a wholesome Midwestern state with like fairly modest aesthetic approaches.”

To get this like, this thing that makes you look like a female to female transsexual. This like the Mara Logo like, you know, blow up your lips as big as possible. And then the like the really obvious weird like face work that is, it's not just her, this aesthetic. Is popular in these Republican circles right now. And it is like it's super unnatural looking.

It's it's actually kind of funny in the context of them, you know, being concerned about, you know, like the rise of trans identity and people like doing, you know, making unnatural changes to their body. It's not ironic. It's just another version of that. And also Maha, it's a, it's a little bit of a, it goes contrary both to the attack on drag queens and to the attack on unnatural additives in our foods.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. No, it's, it's, you're putting me out of this right into your face. I don't know why you can't, now either lucky charm.

Yeah. But so anyway, it's, you know, it looks to me like there's two people into that marriage who have a natural ideas about what a human body should do. Yeah, I don't, I definitely don't think it's a double life at all. I think that's I think that it is, it's very congruous. I would say.

Yeah. What Brian was up to and what Christy was up to. And you know, we honor the Straits getting into some kinky stuff in the Midwest. Okay. All right.

“The more I think the more Straits that are, I want to change it from Bimbabweification to elonification.”

The more straight men that are elonification their bodies. I think, you know, maybe the more they'll start to not give a weight. But what is it to elonification your body? I'm going to have you seen Elon shirtless. I mean, talk about that.

I saw those times unfortunate. I saw those unfortunate yachting photos. Yeah, the yachting photos like his whole body. And he's very top heavy. Yes.

He's got kind of like, what was George Castanza's dad's name? Frank Castanza. Frank Castanza. Yeah. He kind of needs a man's ear or a bro kind of like Frank Castanza.

And they work quite as comically just Karabit and there's Brian's breasts. But they're getting there. They're on the right way. Okay, that's Jasper. We won't lay too long.

And more Page Cognetti. She's going to have to transition from that. So Josh, I'll see you soon. Keep on looks Maxing.

“And just up back to the mayor of Sprint.”

[MUSIC] All right. We are back. She's the mayor of Sprint. And she's running in Pennsylvania's eighth congressional district against the Trump

and Doris first term congressman, Rob Brezhnehann.

It's Page Cognetti. How you doing, girl? Great. Thanks for having me, too. I'm excited to have you.

It was maybe, I don't know, times of flat circle. A couple of months ago now. When you launch the campaign. And I loved your opening launch. It was one of my favorites of the whole cycle.

And so I just want it for people rather than having you redo it live on the show. I'm just going to play a little bit of it. I'm going to play a little bit of it. I'm going to play a little bit of it. For if I am sure you got your stick down.

I'm going to play a little bit of it. So it's watch. When our mayor went to prison for corruption. The Democratic machine thought they could put in another crowning.

So I took on the powerful and corrupt Democrats.

The brand for mayor is independent. It's a simple idea. The government should work as hard as the people of service. They called it Page Against the Machine. As mayor, we did things differently.

We lowered costs. Cleaned out the corruption. Managed the finances. Hoth utility companies built cool parks. We slashed the cost of doing business.

Built nearly 1,000 more homes. And welcome new businesses. So everyone here has a shot. The American Dream. We listened.

Fraud is a brave enough to hold a single real-time haul. I've held dozens in Trump country. We built a government for everyone. Fraud so the screen is gone. What do you want?

Well, Rob. I say a day trading away. The public trust is not who we are. So yeah. I'm running for Congress.

I love it. I love it. So we got the most with the gist of it there. But give us your story. Yeah.

What's fun about that is a lot of those lines. We actually wrote in 2019 at a coffee shop when I was first running for mayor. In 2019, the mayor of Scranton went to federal prison for extortion. There was not supposed to be a mayoral election that year. And I was very pregnant with our first daughter.

And I was not going to raise our daughter in a place where corruption was okay.

The backdrop of that would be before that.

I was on campaigns.

“I was in the Obama administration at the Treasury Department.”

I went to business school.

I was in finance for a bit. I moved to Trenton in 2016 to be with my husband who I met 20 years ago when I was on the campaign trail. And I started reading the paper trying to figure out what I was going to do for my next career step. Started looking and realizing that there was real corruption happening at the Trent school district. We didn't know at the time.

It was also happening at the city. Unfortunately, this is a region that is kicked in public corruption. We have had mayor's panic missionaries, judges, state senators, go to prison for public corruption. I started fighting in 2018, fighting that corruption in school court. I worked for the auditor general at the state level in 2019.

We were calling out fraud and waste and abuse on school districts across the Commonwealth. We were calling out waste in nursing homes. And the inability of the state to do what they need to do for our seniors. We are not able to do that. We are not able to do that.