Obviously, our president is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and a
lot of US conservatives have theorized about like who is actually running things? Is,
like, how much is President Biden actually in the day to day actually
running the show? Here the transcript of his interview with Special Counsel her was
a real indication. Really, if you want to get a sense of just
how kind of not with it Biden is, you should read that transcript,
and it's publicly available. I mean, he's he's not there. I mean
he's being like, he gets asked a question, he starts going off on
tangents. He can't kind of expand and contract his answers in a way that's
actually responsive to what he's being asked. He's all over the place. He
starts talking about his like corvette at one point during the transcript in a way
that has nothing to do with anything and makes room room sounds like that that's
actually in the transcript that he says vroom vroom. So a lot of us
have theorized how much is he actually running things? I think this might be
a proposal that he himself is in on, because it's the same kind of
bad ideas he seems to really cling to, Like it's some of the things
that, like his Inflation Reduction Act, he was able to sort of grasp
and have some kind of understanding or we're playing for stuff, we're helping helping
out with inflation. So there's a couple of pieces I read in National Review
that we're going over this Biden's latest housing proposal. How can President Biden help
out the American prospective home buyer? How can President Biden help increase the housing
supply? Obviously big problem here in California. We got a lot of new
Man we don't have enough supply. Now, Liberals in our state government kind
of refuse to look at engage with like all of the range of options for
how to actually fix the housing problem, Like get rid of a bunch of
California environmental regulation, get rid of Sequel, blah blah blah blah blah.
So that's fine over there in California. But this is President Biden. President
Biden trying to solve a problem for a Biden's latest housing proposal is so stupid,
It's so obviously inflationary that it bears the hallmarks of that razor sharp intellect
that currently resides at sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue. So here's the piece from National
View. This is there editorial about it. During the pandemic, rock bottom
interest rates and a desire for more space drove a rapid and stunning rise in
housing prices. Thank god the Girardi's bought their house in twenty nineteen, not
twenty twenty. While prices have moderated from their peak, they have not done
so nearly enough to make up for the more than doubling of borrowing costs.
President Biden says he has a solution, but like most forms of government interference,
it would only make the problem worse. Yeah, Nation, classic National
Review. I'll government interference is bad, all right. During the State of
the Union address, Biden unveiled a plan to this is just so great,
Like people can't afford things, Just have the government print and give them more
money. That definitely won't have an inflationary impact on the economy. During the
State of the Union address, Biden unveiled a plan to give home buyers four
hundred dollars per month for mortgage payments over the next two years. Quote as
mortgage rates come down end quote it didn't take long for most people with a
basic understanding of economics or an ounce of common sense to recognize that government subsidies,
especially during a time of falling interest rates, would lead to more demand
and thus even higher housing prices. So yeah, like anyone with a brain
in their head could see what's gonna happen here If you're just giving people four
hundred dollars extra a month, it's not like no other market forces recognize that
this is happening. If that happens, guess what Housing prices will just go
up. The average cost of a mortgage in count let's say, California,
will probably increase by about, uh, I don't know, four hundred dollars
dedli and it continues, it continues. Not only are we going to do
that? Basically, they've discovered the issue, the Girardi family issue that people
who did buy at good interest rates are clinging onto their houses like grim death
because they don't want to sell, They don't want to be they don't want
to exchange their you know, three and a half percent interest rate mortgage for
a new, shiny eight and a half percent interest rate mortgage. So how
do we get these greedy sons of guns who bought their houses at those low
interest rates, How do we get them to sell to free up to loosen
up, loosen up supply in the market. Well, here's President Biden with
a brilliant way of solving this. Biden wants to offer up to ten thousand
dollars up to ten thousand dollars per year in tax credits to those who sell
their starter homes and purchase new homes with higher rate mortgages. This, the
theory goes, would help unlock inventory again, though all you'd be doing is
so if the idea is for me, Okay, I've got a house that
I bought for around in twenty nineteen. It was around three hundred and fifteen
thousand dollars. Okay, I got a mortgage at three and a half percent.
If I were to buy another house, presumably it would be a nicer
house. So one the market has increased substantially, So my current three hundred
and fifteen thousand dollars house, I don't know what it's worth now. I
think it's probably worth around four hundred and fifty at this point. So my
current house is worth like four to fifty, Meaning any house that's nicer than
this, i'd estimate I don't know. Probably i'd been now in the six
hundred range at least, I don't know if it. I mean, I'm
not going to just move. I'm not just gonna move to another house that's
equally nice just to get myself a higher interest rate for no reason. No,
presumably, if you're gonna encourage first time home buyers to get out of
their starter homes, then you're gonna you're expecting them to buy something more expensive.
So giving them ten thousand dollars extra per month, what's that gonna do.
That's just gonna be inflationary again for houses in that second tier up,
like the next tier, nicer than starter homes, that's just gonna make their
costs more inflationary because people selling it will know, oh, well, they're
gonna be doing that government program where Biden is gonna give them, you know,
ten thousand dollars per year extra. So that'll just jack up the price
of those houses even more. So, this is the stud but his idea
possible. So why is you really doing it now? You look at the
makeup of Congress right now. Obviously it's a Republican control, barely Republican controlled.
House representatives right now which I'd love to talk about that later. Marjorie
Taylor Green immediately trying to have a motion to kick Mike Johnson out of the
speakership almost makes me wonder if people like me were right all along that kicking
out Kevin McCarthy in the first place was not a very smart idea. It's
all the same problems that we're there with McCarthy, They're all still going to
be there. It's not like every single person we make speaker is just a
liberal in Republican clothing. Like anyway, we have a Republican House, the
Senate, Republicans can block stuff with the filibuster. This crazy idea has no
chance of passing, certainly not in an election year. What's this about?
I mean, I think this is President Biden trying to throw, you know,
throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. He's losing. Like
if if the polls that exist right now are accurate, which they're not,
but let's assume for the sake of argument, they were accurate. If the
polling is all accurate and we voted today, Donald Trump would win. So
I think what Biden is trying to do is to either genuinely give away the
store in anything that he has control over with giving people free money or throw
out proposals that sound to idiots like he is giving to idiots and economic illiterates
that sound like he is giving away free money, and thereby to claim the
votes of the gullible bread and circuses. That's what we're doing here. And
I got to say, this is the This is kind of the outcome that
certain people, some more intelligent observers, were afraid of. I sort of
mentioned sort of some fear of this, like during COVID, when all of
a sudden, we had the idea of straight up cash payments to people,
and there was some sort of theoretical idea that like, hey, like a
lot of people were put out of work by these restrictions that the government imposed.
You know, maybe there's some way of compensating helping helping people out.
Okay, But straight up cash payments from the government to people. Obviously,
that's both economically dangerous and inflationary. So Trump did it, and then Iden
did it again, and California did it, and then all of a sudden,
wow, we have inflation. What a shock. So it's obviously there's
this inflationary effect. But I think there's also this threat when it comes to
elections that basically the election contest can turn into this insane just I'm offering people
this much money. Oh, I'm going to offer people this much money.
And that's always I think that's always a problem for Republicans is that no Republican
will ever beat a Democrat ever in a game of how much can I give
away to the voters. No Republican has ever beat a Democrat in how much
money he can give away. No Republican ever will beat a Democrat in that
game. I don't know, maybe Trump can, but pretty much, no
Republican, no other Republican in all of human history, has ever won that
game against a Democrat. So I don't know that. Obviously this is a
ludicrously stupid proposal on Biden's part, But I don't know that it was necessarily
intended to be serious. But you know, I don't know. Maybe Biden
is such an ill I mean, Biden was not exactly you know, the
bulb was not exactly burning brightly when Biden was at his peak, you know,
let alone today when that bulb is dimming quite a bit. So maybe
this is a kind of policy that he actually thinks is a sort of solid
thing. I mean, God knows, there have been Democrats who have seriously
proposed stuff like this before, So I don't know. I don't know how
serious he is. I do think though, that the main thing that's motivating
this is not so much concern for home buyers, Like if you were actually
concerned for home buyers, there are things you could do. Maybe it has
to be more at the level of individual state governments, you know. You
know, we'll talk in the next segment about problems in California and then how
you know, the problems there have to do with all these kinds of liberal
environmental regulation that liberals don't want to touch. So I think what's happening here
for the most part, though, is President Biden wants to give away the
store, give away as much money as possible to buy as many votes as
he can. Will it work? I don't know. I mean, this
is not actually going to get very serious debate in Congress. Whatever the merits
of this proposal, you know, I can't see the Senate passing it.
Maybe they think they could get some Republicans to vote no on it in the
Senate and then use that to run against the Oh, he voted against lowering
the cost of housing. I guess I could see some ads like that.
Anyway, when we return, we'll talk about this a little bit more in
the California context. We'll talk about we Hey, why is it so exped
so so difficult for builders to build? That's next on the John Girardi Show.
President Biden has his insane proposal for how to fix the housing problem nationwide.
Oh, it's easy. We'll just give people four hundred bucks permontent facts
try to help them pay their mortgage payments. Yeah, that definitely won't result
in an inflation to the market and just making the average cost of a mortgage
that someone gets about four hundred dollars more expensive. But I think a lot
of the problems with housing, as they exist in different parts of the country,
it's at the level of the state. And certainly that's the problem here
in California. What's our fundamental problem supply and demand. We have way more
demand for housing then we have supply. Builders can't build enough supply to meet
the demand. And as much as the liberals who control the state legislat and
they do control it, like absolutely control, they don't have to listen to
Republicans for anything. They just if Democrats make a decision, the decision is
made. They have three quarters of all the seats in both houses of the
legislature, So you know, Republicans can't block anything. There are certain things
Republicans could block if they had one third of the votes. There's certain things
that the majority can only pass with a two thirds majority. Republicans don't even
have a fourth. For those of you from Rial Linda, one fourth is
smaller than one third. Now, one of those things is SEQUA, the
California Environmental Quality Act. And this is just kind of a great example of
the ways in which California just makes it difficult to build anything. So SEQUA,
let's look up all handy Wikipedia. SEQUA is a California statute passed in
nineteen seventy, signed into law by then Governor Reagan, ah shortly after the
United States federal government passed the National Environmental Policy Act. Ronald Reagan not a
very conservative governor, gotta say the institute's statewide policy of environmental protection. SEQUA
does not directly regulate land uses, but instead require state and local agencies within
California to follow a protocol of analysis and public disclosure of environmental impacts of proposed
projects, and in a departure from the federal legislation like this, the National
Environmental Policy Act adopt all feasible measures to mitigate those impacts. SEQUA makes environmental
protection a mandatory part of every California state and local agencies decision making process.
Now, the main thing that it does is basically it the main way in
which it harms new housing developments is that it allows basically anyone with a grievance
against a quote public project, And the California Supreme Court broadened the definition of
what's a public project for a development that needs government approval, so basically it
includes housing projects. So basically, anyone who's got a grievance against some big
housing development can file a lawsuit and the and they're based in the alleged environmental
harm that this housing development, this bunch of condos, whatever it is,
is going to cause. And this is one of the main this is just
a factor. There are a lot of factors. Now you have to put
solar panels on every new house you constructing California, or of a new housing
unit you construct in California. Now you got to do this. There's a
lot of things that make the couse of housing new housing more expensive in California,
but Sequa's a big one because of the threat of lawsuits. And these
lawsuits can either massively slow down a project or just outright kill them. And
as a result, builders are understandably leary, like, Okay, I've got
this big plot of land here, do I want to build? Do I
want to build housing for lower income persons? Well, basically, SEQUA all
these other regulations make it such that it's just not profitable to do It's just
not profitable to do. So the only way you can do it is with
massive California state subsidized subsidization. And here's here's what tends to happen. And
I've seen this more and more and more so living out in Clovis. I've
been noticing a couple of different construction projects around for like condos, condos,
like multi multi unit, multi unit dwelling entities. So this this plot's being
developed for with you know, one hundred and fifty condos, and they're like
very expensive looking. They're they're they're super nice looking. These are expensive condos.
This is not lower income housing by any stretch, like it seems like
the kind of thing that like, I don't know, a single like nurse
making one hundred and ten thousand dollars per year, Like maybe that's something she
would get for herself. Or you know a young guy who's I don't know,
maybe a junior, a younger associate at an accounting firm who's making you
know, eighty or ninety thousand dollars, that's that's where he would live.
Or I don't know, a divorced lawyer, a divorced lawyer with a lot
of money. Okay, he's gonna live here. But it's it's higher end.
This is not like it's not like oh, this person someone who works
at a convenience store. No, this is not lower income housing. It's
very high yet it's not even necessarily middle class housing, like a middle class
family could not live here. And why is it so the only things that
seem to be getting Well, here's why builders aren't gonna build, because of
all the risk involved, because of all the cost involved. Builders aren't gonna
build unless they can be assured there's some return on investment that they're likely to
get. So, if you're gonna build a big condo, a big you
know, multi resident dwelling thing, not houses, but like condo's apartments whatever.
You really only have two options for how this thing is going to be
viable or profitable for you. You either make it super high end where all
the units are going for you know, primo, primo, big bucks,
or you make it a California lower income housing registered trademark development where the state
will subsidize you. But there's not really anything for middle class housing. And
that's the problem that this is another thing that contributes to inflation. Basically,
if the only new housing that can be built is designed for either high end
buyers or low end buyers, it just keeps bumping up the costs for middle
classs. It makes it just more and more difficult and shrinks and shrinks and
shrinks the supply of affordable housing for middle income buyers. And then the people
who have those houses that are in the sort of right range, who sort
of look over towards North Fresno, look over towards bougier northern parts of Clovis
and say, boy, I could never afford a house over there. You
know, I'm not selling my nice, you know, mid sized middle class
home here in Fresno. I'm not selling this thing for all the tea in
China. I'm holding onto this like grim death. I had that nice.
You know, my mortgage is mostly paid off. I'm not moving. So
this is the problem that a lot of so much of this environmental break Like
liberals are just so confounded. How come there's no how come people aren't built?
They're just not building. If only there was one party that like could
control the legislature and change the laws to change the conditions for this. But
they're so beholden to the environ mental lobby that they're not going to change it.
When we return, I delve into the question of Valley Children's and the
alleged the allegations of excessive executive pay. That's next on the John Girardi Show.
There's been a big brew haha over the last four or five days about
Valley Children's Hospital, and the focus of attention is on the compensation received by
some of its executive team, but most particularly the CEO of Valley Children's,
Todd Centrapak. Now, someone may accuse John Girardi of all people of being
a little biased here. I love Valley Children's Hospital. My dad was a
surgeon there for thirty one years. You know, I'm probably leery of criticizing
it too much, but I find that two things are sort of motivating me
here. One is I have this kind of instinct from a little bit of
time as a lawyer anyway, that I have this instinct of being leary when
only one side of the argument has presented the facts and laid out the facts.
I remember this in law school. I remember this in law school where
we would do these like mock trial things, and they would have like a
fake set of facts and then a fake you know, it's a pretend trial
obviously, so they put together fix set effects and then a presentation effects by
the one party and presentation of the facts by the other party. And I
read by the one party, I'm like, boy, this is just seems
like this side has it completely slam dunk totally. Obviously this side should win.
Then I read the other side and I'm like, oh, it seems
completely like this side should win. Now, obviously that was a well written,
you know, fake trial. But I found that to be true.
Also in my legal practice, very often i'd read one side's presentations of the
facts and I'd think there is no way this other side has any merit to
what they're saying whatsoever. And then I'd read the other side, I'm like,
oh, okay, well this is pretty good. I remember this even
during the Kavanaugh hearings, and there was some conservative commentator I think it might've
been Ben Shapiro or somebody who made a clown of himself, because it was
like for the I think I remember it was the exact same day that Christine
Blasi Ford testified, and then just like I think it was like an hour
or so later, Brett Kavanaugh testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and
Ford testified, and we hadn't heard Kavanaugh yet, we hadn't heard his side
of it yet. All we had was Ford her side of it, and
a bunch of conservative commentators, including Shapiro, said, the Kavanaugh nomination is
over. They need to give up. There's no way he could recover from
this. Well, and then Kavanaugh came up to testifying, he was actually
pretty compelling. It was like, oh, okay, well, maybe what
we should have done was here both sides of it first before rushing to judgment.
After hearing the first side, there's that, and then there's also this.
I hate the easy pious answer. I hate the easy pious answer.
A story comes out about Todd Sunchripack's CEO of Children's making more money on average
than the CEOs of other children's hospitals. And who's there riding in on his
white horse but Merrick Worzowski from the Fresno Bee, always willing to take whatever's
either the liberal position or the sort of self offended position. And I also
noticed some of the you know, I love Gary Brettefeld. I've supported Gary
Brettefeld. I think he's the best person on the president of city Council.
I think he gets a bad rap often for you know, these people act
like he's just totally just a pure conservative fire brand lunatic, and I don't
think that. I think he's actually a very smart man. I think he
actually is very responsible city councilman, and I really value his work. But
I think some of his critiques here were wrong. I think, for one
thing, he's sort of in his press conference talking about this, he wound
up turning it into a criticism of Lisa smit Camp the DA because smit Camp
is on one of the boards of Valley Children's But smit Camp is not on
a board that does anything to oversee executive compensation, so she has nothing to
do with that. And I think part of that from Brettefeld was Brettefeld's running
for county supervisor Da Smith. Camp is opposing him. She's supporting Steve Brandau,
So I'm sort of wondering if that had something to do with it.
Again, I love Gary Brettefeld. I respect his work a lot. I
disagree with him somewhat here. I think the easy thing to come on and
be pious about and rant about is well, they're playing these fact cats way
too much and children are starving and dying in the streets. First of all,
I haven't heard in any of the critiques any ways in which Valley Children's
provision of care for children. None of the critiques that have been given that
I've seen so far has indicated that care for children is suffering at Children's.
If anything, if you look at the landscape of Fresno Area hospitals, Valley
Children's is about the gold standard, all right. It's doing better than Saint
Agnes, it is better. It is held in better regard than community in
certain respects. Again, I'm not a medical person. I'm a little bit
from the outside looking in. But I know enough people in the community that
you know, Valley Children's has a pretty great reputation, So the idea that
this is deeply harming children is I think questionable at best. Now, Center
Pack has also massively increased revenue to the hospital, and his salary has gone
up in ways that are kind of commensurate with that. Now, I admit
that the home loan thing, I don't think. I kind of I don't
fully understand that. I would want to kind of hear their side of it
a little more. It's sort of my guess, though, just I guess
this is my thing knowing the persons involved. These are all pretty reasonable people,
reasonable people who genuinely do care about the provision of care to children.
And my guess is that a more granular, detailed assessment of what's going on
would result in, oh, okay, well that's maybe a little less insane,
especially when it comes to like for example, one of the criticisms was
made was that other executives were making more and more and more and more.
Well, a lot of you know, I've come to know some of these
people. A lot of executives at Children's have been there. I mean,
my dad knew some of these people for twenty twenty five thirty years. A
lot of them they got hired, they did a great job, they stayed
on continuing to do a good job. You don't pay them less over time,
you pay them more. You know. It's not like you reset the
pay scale so that oh, I know, you made you know, five
hundred thousand dollars this year, we're gonna bump you down to four hundred thousand.
No, people who do a really good job at a high level,
their salaries don't get reset backwards. So and again, I just find if
there's I just find it. What indication has there been of corruption or corrupt
dealing here? You've got Arius and Miguel Arius and Gary Bredfeld have asked the
Attorney General to investigate how the hospital is spending state dollars. I don't think
there's ever been any indication that Valley Children's has done anything inappropriate with its state
funding at any point. The and plus, look, why is Valley children
able to sustain itself? It gets more donor support than any other hospital.
What's the difference between Valley Children's versus Madeira community. They're both serving a huge
population of medical patients. Well, Valley Children's has way more charitable support,
all right, if they have charitable supporters who are backing what the hospital does
and want to pay the executives more compensation. I don't know that that's necessarily
some horrible problem. You know, it looks bad. It maybe maybe in
a certain light it looks bad. But I'll also say this. Look,
there's some people who put forward the argument we need to cut members of Congresses
pay those members of Congress, these fat cat members of Congress. They're getting
all this money, we should cut their all right, you want to reduce
the pay for members of congressmen to zero, members of Congress to zero dollars?
Great. The only people who are going to run for Congress then are
people who are already extremely wealthy. Is that the only class of people we
want to run for Congress? To run for city council? I remember there
was this debate like this about the city council where the city council members were
making like basically a part time salary when the job of being a president of
city council member had increased to obviously being a full time job. And you
know, just in case mister Brettefeld thinks I've been too harsh on him this
segment. I'll be harsh on mister Brandow this segment. So uh, there
was a proposal to increase the pay for members of the president of city council,
and people on the County Board of Supervisors were like, oh, that's
what a Oh these fat council on the city Council trying to feather their nests.
Meanwhile, the county supervisors were making well into six figures every year with
no term limits, Like like, what a hippoc critical perch to criticize people,
Basically, like, I think we should actually incentivize competent professional people to
want to work in government in that same vein. Yeah, running a whole
flip in children's hospital and all the charitable things associated, blah blah, that's
a really hard job. Yeah, you should pay people a lot of money
to run it. Now, maybe there's a debate to be had about excess.
I think one of the things was that he had like bonuses for two
consecutive years paid to him in one year, which made that one years salary
look way larger. Okay, that's fine. I just don't think that there's
any real indication that the provision of care to children was in any way so
grievously harmed. I think this is an easy criticism to make, and I
hate those kinds of like easy safe arguments. When we return, I look
back to Saint Patrick's Day and one extra thing about the White House Saint Patrick's
Day shindig that made me want to puke. Next on The John Girardi Show,
to close out the show, I I do this with my Twitter account.
I tweet and retweet things that basically the way at Fresno Johnny, by
the way Twitter dot com slash Fresno Johnny. Basically, my Twitter account is
basically like show prep. I see something interesting or funny on Twitter, I
make a tweet or retweet it, and then the idea is to use that
for the show later. And then I forget to look at my own account
when I'm prepping for the show, and then I forget about this. So
this is a little old back the Sunday, I guess the Sunday before last
was Saint Patrick's Day and President Biden had some like kind of catholic y shindig
at the White House where it was just a who's who of barf inducing Catholic
lefties. So a lot of you won't know who these people are, but
the editor of America magazine, father James Martin, who's a huge lefty Thomas
Reese, who I think used to be the editor of America until Pope Benedict
like disciplined him for all of his various heterodoxies. All these Catholic lefties were
there and for all their like, oh, Christian nationalism on the right is
bad. Groveling for power to Donald Trump is bad. They were all like,
oh, look, you can see me in the picture here with in
the background with Joe Biden. Oh, Joe Biden's there in the foreh Like,
okay, yeah, So groveling for power towards right wing politicians terrible,
horrible and agreed, shouldn't probably do it. But when you do it for
left wing politicians who support unrestricted abortion, you know, a boarding a million
kids per year. Oh that's fine, no, biggie nbd. And as
if I didn't have enough barworthy from this Saint Patrick's day, I finally found
something even more barworthy. At one point, President Biden, not exactly a
cultured man, started tearing up because someone played on the violin, a rendition
of the worst popularized him in the whole Catholic him genre of the last seventy
years on Eagles Wings. Now for the you non Catholics, you may not
have been subjected to this, but pretty much every Catholic funeral other than my
dad's funeral has played on Eagles Wings. It's kind of a ripoff of Psalm
ninety one. It's very sappy, and it's a sure sign that you don't
have a deep knowledge of Catholic music. Like President Biden's always President Biden's favorite
hymn. It's probably like the only him Biden can actually remember, and it's
a video of someone playing it on the violin, really sappy while Biden tears
up just the most barfin' do, like I just wanted to crawl into a
hole on behalf of the entire Catholic community and die. That'll do it for
the John Girardi Show, See next time on Power Talk