Speaker 1: And hello, welcome to the Big Ready, The Big Ready,
The Big Podcast, Old Habits, Die Hard, The Big Podcast
on this Thursday. Today's the fourteenth day of August, Year
of Our Lord, twenty twenty five. My name is Tom Sullivan.
And yeah, we've got well, well, let's start with what
we have been talking about of late, and that is
the DC crime problem. And it's still a top story.
And I mean, to me, this is I've heard some
Democrats already saying, oh, oh oh, this is a trap.
It's a trap, and you go, well, what's the trap? Well,
Donald Trump, they get it. Donald Trump was elected for
lots of reasons. One of them was the border, another
one which he has pretty well fixed and done it
in record time. I mean, he changed that overnight. But
the other big issue was about crime and cracking down
on crime, being tough on crime. This has worked in
the past, or our cycles to it in American politics.
The last time there was a big tough out crime
candidate was Richard Nixon back in nineteen sixty eight, and
it worked for him. Well it's working again for Donald Trump.
A lot of people voted for him to crack down
on crime. So it's painfully obvious to me that he's
looking around and going, well, I got elected because I'm
going to be tough on crime. I'm sitting here in Washington,
d C. Where there's always been crime problem in DC
there always has been. And then somebody on his staff
for himself, whoever, I mean, he has keen political instincts. Well,
wait a minute, I don't have to ask anybody's permission.
I can take control of DC because it's federal property
and under the Home Rule of nineteen seventy three, I
can go in and take over the city and I'll
crack down on crime. And look, it will be another
way for me to fulfill a promise. And so it is.
It's pretty slick. But whether he's already talking about maybe
going to other cities to do this, but it's not
going to be as easy because this is where the
law gives the president total control over federal property. Harry Enton,
the statistician over at CNN. Listen to what he has
found out about what people think about Donald Trump in crime.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that Democrats have to get it around
their heads that Americans are far more hawkish on crime
than they think that they are. What are we talking
about Trump's not approval handling crime. Where was he last year?
He was way underwater at minus thirteen points views of
term number one.
Speaker 1: But look at where he is now.
Speaker 2: He's on the positive side of ellection. He's on the
positive side at plus one points. Americans view Trump far
more favorably now on crime than they did a year ago.
And while this polling doesn't take into account what's exactly
happening in DC right now, it does take an account
what happened in Los Angeles, what's happened earlier this year,
and Americans for the most part, actually view Trump favorably.
Crime is one of Trump's best issues. It's one of
the reasons why he wants to talk about crime, because
it favors him. Yeah, okay, I think this sort of
gives the game away here because Donald Trump is like
Air Jordan, towering over Joe Biden when it comes to
their handling a crime. Look in twenty twenty four, look
at where Biden's net approval was on crime, way on
the water there at minus twenty six points. It was
one of Biden's where's issues. Granted, pretty much every issue
is one of Biden's wears issues. And again, look at
where Donald Trump is way, way, way above Joe Biden.
Speaker 1: What is that?
Speaker 2: That's twenty seven points. So Americans vastly prefer Donald Trump's
approach to crime than they ditch you Joe Biden's. And again,
I think it gets back to the point that Americans
are far more hawkish on crime than a lot of
Democrats want to it.
Speaker 1: Mat.
Speaker 2: You know, we're talking about Donald Trump here, right, So
I think it's very important to note that this isn't
just about Donald Trump. It's about Republicans versus Democrats, right,
And that, of course is a key question going into
next year's midterm election. I think the party closest to
your views on crime. Look in twenty twenty three, Republicans
were favored by thirteen points. Look at where they were
in May of this year. Republicans were actually favored by
sixty months. They actually gained ground on crime, They were
maintaining their edge and actually added a little bit to it.
So Republicans in the House, Republicans in the Senate, they
absolutely want to be talking about crime. The more they
feel that we're talking about crime, the better they feel
that the electoral landscape is for them.
Speaker 1: So not only is that's it a morally good thing
to do is to try to crack down on crime.
But people are loving it. And the more you talk
about crime, the more you talk about being a crime fighter,
the more people are going to like it. Remember Tim Paulenti,
he was the governor of Minnesota, ran for president years ago,
didn't get very far, and he's been a moderate, middle
of the road Republican all of his political life, and
he thinks Donald Trump's doing a great job on it.
Speaker 3: What I say to that is that this is an
important issue, both substantively and politically, and for all the
reasons Harry just outlined. This is a powerful issue for
a reason. People are fed up with cities, particularly our
major urban centers, being filled with homeless encampments, crime, graffiti,
and other liveability issues.
Speaker 1: And they've had it.
Speaker 3: And President Trump has tapped into that. And by the way,
it's not like he just came up with this problem.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: DC has been dysfunctional for big parts of its modern history,
and no mayor, no city council has really made substantial progress.
It's a mess, and I'm glad that he's actually taking
bold treatment towards DC. They need a shock and they're
getting it.
Speaker 1: So that's the fascinating part to me, is that the
people that live in that city, you would think that
they would be tired of the crime and the homelessness
and all of the problems that Washington, DC has, or
LA or San Francisco or name your city, Chicago. Why
do they keep voting for the people that don't know
how to run the city. Why do they keep voting
for them? That is the part that bothers me. Maybe
it's because of the fact that they give them crumbs,
they hand out money or programs for them just to
keep them pacified. But the people of Washington, d C.
It's like Tim Plenty said, it's been dysfunctional for as
long as I can remember, and he can remember. So
why do people keep voting for the same losers that
are running the city? I don't have the answer, but
it is quizzical. People are so fed up with these issues.
I think they're willing.
Speaker 3: To tolerate, at least for a while, a little bit
of perhaps overreach or aggressive behavior. And by the way,
I lived in DC for six years. I'm a frequent
visitor there, and they got problems. And as to your question, though,
does it look overly dramatic maybe initially, but when more
business as usual more of the same isn't working, and
so something different has to be tried. There's been no administration,
either federally or in the DC district where they fundamentally
have solved these problems for any length of time. So
just saying a little more money for a little longer
time isn't going to work. We have to try something different.
I applaud the President for trying.
Speaker 1: Well, so do I. Whether it's a political stunt, or
it's over aggressive, or whatever complaint you want to have
about what's going on in DC, it's going to be
if nothing else associate cologist out there are going to
be studying is to see, hey, maybe you try something new,
maybe you try something different. So the President says he's
going to try to get an extension on the thirty day.
He's aware of the thirty day requirement that this is
only good. The president can only take over control of
the district for thirty days without getting Congress to pass
an extension. He thinks Congress will pass it because he
thinks all the Republicans will give him the okay to continue,
and that the Democrats are in this pickle where they
can't vote against him because otherwise they'll look like they're
for crime. And nobody's for crime, not even the Democrats.
So the problem is it's just incompetent leadership. And I
think that's the true of so many of our big cities.
Speaking of which the mayor's race in New York is.
I try not to spend much time on it because
it's local, but it's not. It's getting a lot of
national attention. Today. It turned out where Zoron ma'am Danny
said yeap Obama called him after he won the primary.
And so a lot of Democrats are afraid to come
out and say, including Obama, saying that they're endorsing him.
Not only are they afraid to say if they're endorsing
him or not. Hakim Jeffries, who is not only the
minority leader in the House of Representatives, but he's also
a Congressman from Brooklyn, and he was asked a number
of questions this morning by Andrew Ross Sorkin, who is
a liberal guy, all kinds of questions and hawk King
Jeffries just would not answer any of the questions. Here's
an example. Listen to this.
Speaker 4: Andrew Cuomo has made the point that Zoron Madami lives
in a rank control department even though he is not
considered quote unquote poor, and that Andrew Quan would actually
try to create a law in the state that would
prevent people like Mandomie from being from living in a
rank control department. Do you think that he should live
in a rank control department?
Speaker 5: Well, listen, that's an issue for the state legislators and
the state government to work out.
Speaker 4: No, but it's a fascinating issue about affordability in this
city and whether there are folks who are living in
rent control departments all across this city that effectively should
be going towards poor people who need that affordability.
Speaker 5: It's a legitimate issue that has been raised, and the
Mondamine campaign is going to have to address it.
Speaker 1: Hakim Jefferies is just one of the many Democrats that
are afraid to go anywhere near this guy. He's leading,
but they're afraid to buddy up with him because he's
totally I mean, Donald Trump calls him a communist. He is.
He's not a socialist. He wants the city to control
the private sector. Here's some of his by the way,
his campaign is he's going from Burrow to Burrow one
a day this week, and the message is I'm running
against Donald Trump. Donald Trump is terrible. Now, if I
remember right, Hillary Clinton tried to do that, saying vote
for me because I'm not him. It didn't work. They
also tried it with Kamala Harris. People try to vote
run against Donald Trump. Sure, there's a lot of people
that don't like Donald Trump. But if you're trying to
put yourself up against Donald Trump, it doesn't seem to
work politically. Here's mom Damie, and this is his message,
trying to win well Burrow.
Speaker 6: That will be free from Trump's cruelty. I describe my
administration as being his worst nightmare. I describe it as
such because we will actually fight for the people that
he claimed to be running to represent.
Speaker 1: So go to a political pro Carl Rove knows all
about running campaigns, and here's his opinion of Donnie's campaign
so far about running against Donald Trump.
Speaker 7: Well, look, it works for him because he's the front
runner and this allows him to eat up time. Think
about this. We have about eleven weeks left in the
election and he's out there saying I am Donald Trump's
worst nightmare, which appeals to the more left wing Democrats,
and it leaves his opponents trying to catch up with him.
I thought Andrew CMO's response, well, I'm actually his worst
nightmare because I actually stood up to him in Ancient
History Times twenty twenty and so this is good for Domi.
What gets me is it's to the benefit of both
Mom Dommi and Trump that he take this line, because
Trump is looking at it in a national picture and saying,
if New York has a Democratic socialist mayor, and if
you add one in Minneapolis, for example, we can run
against them in the twenty twenty six midterms and say, look,
here's what the New Democratic Party is all about. It's
about free everything, democratic socialists, blah blah blah blah blah.
So you know, both both Trump and Mom Dommy benefit
from this, and the Democrat other Democrats I think are
making a mistake. They ought to be out there finding
a way to change the dialogue back to something on
which they can win. Can I give you one example,
what happened? What would happen? Mom Dommy said at the
end of this, he said, you know what, I'm going
to be spending city money to defend people in the
city against deportation. What if a Democrat said, well, you
know what, I just want to agree, I will use
city money to defend people who are here in our city,
contributing to our society, have kept their nose clean, whom
Trump is trying to deport out of the country. I'm
going to use your taxpayer dollars to defend him, but
only if they've kept their nose clean. If they're criminals,
that's their problem. We want them out of our community.
What that would say is I'm a Democrat and I'm
willing to spend your money to defend undocumented people, but
I draw the line at criminals. So if you you're
a normal Democrat, you don't have to go for the
socialist in order to get what you want as a Democrat.
It's a little dangerous, but they may need to do
that with tetrology. Oh, Carl's right, that's you know, taking
a big risk. But in New York, Democrats probably going
to be the one that wins. So why not try
to schmooze up to the majority of Democrats. And Andrew Cuomo,
I don't know if he has the energy to do
all of this to run another campaign. Well, he didn't
have it to first go round, and he had all
the advantages. He was better known, he had the political endorsements,
he had lots and lots of money, and he ran
way behind Mountdammie. He's got to find a way to
shake this thing up. And look, the way to shake
it up is to find a way to say I'm
the normal Democrat who can actually run this place, and
that guy over there is extreme and it's going to
serve It's not going to serve the city of New
York or our Democratic Party if he's the face of
both our city and our party nationwide.
Speaker 1: So that brings us to social Security today. I know
you've got this marked on your calendar. Today is the
ninetieth anniversary of Social Security. Yep FDR was the president.
It was August fourteenth, nineteen thirty five, and at the
time they said we'll make it so that when people
turn sixty five they can start collecting social Security. They've
changed it to sixty six and now to sixty seven,
and who knows what they're going to do to it
in the future as far as your eligibility age, but
as or withdrawal age. But they never really talk about this.
But what they did this was I think borderline criminal.
But what the government did in nineteen thirty five was
they knew the the actuarials knew that most people don't
live much past or at all past sixty five. Back
in the nineteen thirties, that was it. So they were
hoping that you would pour a bunch of money into
Social Security, and Social Security would never ever have to
pay it out, or if they paid out any it
would be very few people who were able to live
longer than their actuarial expected date of death. So it's
still a big question because there's something like seventy thousand
baby boomers that are mostly in retirement age eligibility age
for Social Security, and they are collecting something like one
hundred and thirty billion dollars a month. So the guy
who took over Donald Trump appointed as the new head
of Social Security is a guy by the name of
Frank Bisigan Bisignano. Frank Bisignano, he used to be the
chief operating officer over at JP Morgan Chase. He's run
a couple of other countries. He's a turnaround guy. He's
taken some companies that were doing terrible and turned them around.
So they asked him today about where social Security is
going to go and can you fix it?
Speaker 8: Well, I think first of all, you have to think
about the foundation, and what we've been doing is working
out on the foundation. Second of all, we've always talked
about social Security as seventy two million beneficiarias, we're talking
about three hundred million active more than three hundred million
active Social Security numbers, and so the ability to serve
that whole base was really job one. Job two to
digitize the business, and we have a bold goal to
have two hundred million digital users. While doing that, we've
been working on fraud, waste and abuse.
Speaker 9: Earlier today I talked.
Speaker 8: About eight billion dollars of changes we've made. These inputs
have not gone into in solvacy formula yet, and the
amount that we're still going to work on is still
not even uncovered. It was an organization that had a
one percent araray. I've often said, we need to move
that five digits to the right. That may not solve
the whole problem, but up till now, we've never accounted
for a well run organization. It's not the expenses of
the organization, it's the expenses of the Trust Funds. So
I'm optimistic that each year we'll chip away at it.
At some point in time, the Trust Funds trustees, which
I'm one of us, one of them along with you know, Congress,
we'll see what's needed. But I think it's verymature because
we're doing so much to fix the operations of the organization. Well,
as I said before, first of all, I like us
to think about it. You know that one hundred and
thirty that we looked at goes to seventy two million Americans,
but there's three hundred million Americans that we actually serve
with the Social Security number and having the pure accuracy
of that. If you think about the cost of the
inaccuracies of a one percent errate on that, that's very
very large. So I think the first thing, and you know,
there's my one hundred day in the job. You heard
the stats from the President on what we've done in
terms of servicing, getting the systems up one hundred percent
of the time. We had a website down twenty nine
percent of the time. If those things don't work right,
that's not causing out payments to work right.
Speaker 9: So the next job is payment accuracy.
Speaker 8: And as we whittle away at that, we'll come back
with ideas and thoughts on how to make this a
better performer and ultimately protect and preserve it for the
next ninety years. I'd say, in that same interview, your
good senator talked about us having half the staffing that
we have. You know, so are a lot of things
that that interview that I would throw out because the
inaccuracy is field office is closing.
Speaker 9: We haven't closed one field office.
Speaker 8: We're going to serve the American public where they should
be served. There's been a drumbeat of inaccuracies consistently while
we're performing better than any other agency. And if you
had a business, I took a company First Data. It
was ten x levered, with twenty four and a half
billion a debt and losing money, and we ultimately turned
it into a great company. It's started by fixing the operations.
Nobody wants to talk about that, but that's where all
the money goes through. So I'm going to come back
to my platform. It's have a vision for a digital
first agency, have two hundred million digital users by the
end of next year, have it run as a great
payment company, which would be five digits to the right
of one percent, and then we'll actually know what the
nut might be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I don't know. He sounds a little wonky
to me, but he's got a track record of turning
around organizations that need financial turnarounds. So yeah, his name's
Frank Bisignano, and he wants to get the operations fixed first.
But he doesn't. He's not talking about Social Security going broke.
He has a plan to fix it. And that's probably
a good point of Benny. Even the President today introducing
the new head of Social Security, I was talking about
the fact that, hey, how about that, no more tax
on Social Security, and it's just not true. The big
beautiful bill, that's what President wanted, but that's not what
came out of Congress. Social Security is still taxable, federal tax.
I don't know about what your state says. Nine states
imposed some income tax on Social Security, but what they
did was not make Social Security untaxable. Still taxed, but
if you are sixty five or older, you can claim
six thousand dollars deduction. That's six thousand dollars for each
of you if you're filing married, filing jointly, so it's
a six thousand dollars deduction for tax years twenty twenty
five through twenty twenty eight and basically until Donald Trump
is out of office. So that's what he's doing, is
giving you a deduction. The senior deduction is reduced by
six percent if you have an income of above seventy
adjusted gross income seventy five thousand dollars for singles, one
hundred and fifty thousand dollars for joint filers, so you
don't it's still taxable. You get a deduction six thousand
dollars per nose for you, and if you're married, finally
jointly for your spouse, and your income has to be
below seventy five thousand single or one hundred and fifty
thousand for a joint return. So according to the White
House Council of Economic Advisors, apparently about twelve percent of
seniors will still be paying taxes on Social Security. So
I just want to correct it because it's talked about.
Even the President's mentioned a couple of times about how
there's no taxes on Social Security, and that's just not true.
There is, but you've got to go through a deduction
in order to get it. So I should have started
with the top story of the day, which I'm being
facetious about YouTube. Is a couple of stories about YouTube today.
One of them is is that YouTube is going to
start using AI to guess your age. They want to
make some content, especially porn, not available to you if
you're under eighteen. And what they're going to do to
guess your age is they have your history of what
you like to watch on YouTube. They also will look
to see how old your account is and if it's
been around a long time, and if it's If they
guess that you're not an adult, and they prohibit you
from watching certain YouTube channels you're going to have, you
can get around it, but you've got to provide them,
send them upload your driver's license, and I don't know
what else to prove that you are an adult. The
big story though about YouTube that I've been burying is
Taylor Swift. Last night, she and Travis Kelsey, her boyfriend,
went on The Kelsey Brothers have a YouTube channel. It's
about football, and she went on the first time she's
ever done a podcast, and she went on with her
boyfriend and his brother and disclosed her new album which
is coming out. I don't know soon. Anyway, it crashed YouTube.
YouTube has some pretty strong backbones, and the whole thing
went down last night after I think an hour and
they had to repost another twenty minutes of it later
something like that. But Taylor Swift Swift crashed YouTube last
night with Travis Kelsey. Economy, Well, this is let me
just give you the facts here. It is a producer
price index, the wholesale inflation rate, if you will. Producer
price index was expected to go up two tenths of
one percent. Instead it went up nine tenths of one percent.
The core rate when you thaw out food and energy
was also up nine tenths So year over year, inflation
at the core rate at the producer level wholesale level
now up to three point three percent. That is much
higher than had been expected. And the FED is going
to be meeting mid September, and they got to be
looking at this and going, oh boy, this is more
inflation than we thought it would be. So will the Fed,
which the Federal Fund's Future Market is estimating ninety three
percent chance that they're going to be cutting interest rates
by a quarter of a percent in September. But with
this kind of news, you know, there's going to be
some of the members of the Open Market Committee that
are going to say, I don't know, inflation looks like
it's starting to show its ugly head. So this is
not good news for the Fed. They're going to have
to still. The market's betting they're still going to drop
interest rates. But this is a question of are we
starting to see little dribs and drabs of inflation coming
from tariffs. It's too soon to tell. Tariffs take a
long time to work their way through the economy. President
was also talking about that again today, about the trillions
he says that we have collected. I think it's in
the tens of billions. It's a lot of money that
we've collected because of tariffs. And I have to ask
you to ask the question who is paying the trillions
of dollars to the US Treasury. Mostly it's from consumers. Now,
there are some companies that are eating that charge and
not passing it on, but a lot of them are,
and a lot of them are saying that they're eating
the charge for now, but they can't keep that up forever.
So if when every time he brags about the huge
amount of money that's coming in from tariffs. Just remember,
somebody's paying that. And despite what he says, he has
it wrong. He's always had it wrong. He says foreign
countries pay it. No, they do not. It's that simple,
So let's talk. A job report also came out first
time jobs claims two hundred and twenty four thousand. That's
down from we were estimating two hundred and twenty nine thousand.
Continuing claims long term claims a million, nine hundred and
fifty three thousand, that's down fifteen thousand. So one of
the economists that is a professor at the Stanford Graduate
School of Business. His name is Josh Ruaw. He is
not seen tariff inflation yet yet. Is the operative word here?
Speaker 10: He is, Well, it's a toasting number. But I think
this PPI index, it's pretty volatile. I don't think you
can read too much into this. One thing I noticed
that we haven't mentioned yet is that the services component
is actually up more strongly the than the goods component.
And if you're you're thinking it could be about terrorifts,
well you expect to see more in goods. So I
think it generally reflects possibly somewhat hotter demand than we
had thought. It may slightly temper what the FED would
be thinking for the September meeting, but not by too much.
And I also would want to underscore what you were
discussing before, which is that the Fed should not be
responding to price changes that would be driven by tariffs.
I'm not seeing I mean, for the CPI, you had
to squint real hard to see evidence of tariffs in there.
On the this PPI as well. You know, I think
we got we got to digest the numbers. I'm not
seeing it. So in any case, it's I think it's
a volatile index. I think we're we're gonna have to
wait and see what comes out with the PCE and
the jobs numbers in early September.
Speaker 1: Of course, so those are the numbers inflation at the
wholesale level hotter than expected. The big question then becomes
do you believe the numbers? This is where we are now.
We had the person that ran the Bureau of Labor
Statistics who was fired for incompetence. President Trump is just
appointed AJ and Tony to be the new head of
this And the question about AJ is is he political
and is this a number that is going to be
driven by politics or is it really driven by good
economic stats. Back to Josh Ruaw, what I.
Speaker 10: Do think about AJ Anthony is that some of his
statistical analyzes are not of the highest quality. I'd like
to see somebody really high quality that job, like maybe
somebody from Silicon Valley, where I'm from here.
Speaker 1: I don't know what that was about. He's a professor
at Stanford, so he's really into Silicon Valley where Stanford
is located. Another economic stat out of California was Port
of Los Angeles said that they said an all time
record last month, they had more than one million containers
that were unloaded at the Port of LA. That is
a record. They said. The reason was people were simply
trying to beat the tariffs that are coming, so they've
ordered as much as they can before the tariffs went
into effect. So Port of LA had a great July.
Let's see how they do this month or next. And
late word coming out of California this afternoon is Governor
Newsom held a news conference and basically said that they
are going to put on the ballot in November a
plea to the voters of California to temper rare give
them the power The politicians in California the power to
draw congressional lines trying to fight what Texas is doing.
They want to read district because they think they can
get five more Democrats out of the state of California.
I don't know, it's maybe maybe one or two, but
it is. The people took the power away from the
politicians a number of years ago of saying we don't
want you drawing the congressional districts anymore because you've messed
it all up. So they have an independent commission that
I believe they put it in the state constitution. Independent
commission has to draw the lines, not the politicians. And
new some today said they're going to put a ballot
measure up for the people to vote in California in
November that will allow the give it back temporarily to
the politicians to redraw the lines in twenty six, twenty seven, eight,
and twenty nine, and then go back to the normal
commission drawing of the lines in twenty thirty. So we'll
wait till November to see what the people of California
go for that or not. Right now, latest poll taken today,
sixty four percent of the people in California want to
keep the Independent Commission, thirty six percent want to give
it back to the politician. So Governor Newsom has some
work to do if he wants at the past on
the market today, stock market, well, they got the news
this morning before the market opened that inflation at the
wholesale level was much hotter than had been expected. So
when the market opened, the dow took a dive, went
down about two hundred points, stayed there for most of
the session, but worked its way back to finish down eleven.
The Dow at forty four and nine eleven. SMP went
up two points, NASDAK went down two points. Price of
gold it filled twenty six dollars to thirty three point
eighty two, and oil popped up a little bit today
a buck and a half up to sixty four dollars
now for one barrel of oil. All right, Tomorrow Friday,
we've got the big meeting between President Putin and President Trump.
We'll see how that affects the news of the day.
In the meantime, have yourself a wonderful rest of your
day to day. We'll see you tomorrow.