Thomas soul on Donald Trump quote what is remarkable is that after six years of repeated disasters under a glib egomaniac in the white house so many potential voters are turning to another glib egomaniac to be his successor close quote yes glib ego man how bad has he been who where does Barack Obama rank in your mind you who know so much history among the worst American Presidents he has displaced Jimmy Carter from that position the worst the worst worse than James Buchanan yes worse than Richard Nixon yes all right Richard Nixon did not after all
put us in danger of of nuclear attacks probably win the lifetime of people living today the Iran deal will do that yes we we're we're committed to stopping the Israelis from stopping the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon that's part of the deal when I interviewed George Gilder about 6 or seven months ago George Gilder known to both of us he contended that with the right policies the economy come back to the international scene in a moment but the economy would actually turn around quite quickly the American economy can be revived quite quickly cut taxes
peel back regulation and you'd see another version of the early 1980s you agree yes all we have to do is get out of the way in a certain sense yes I mean uh uh there was there was a when when Warren Harding took office in 1921 the uh unemployment rate was around 12% Warren Harding did absolutely nothing as the as the government's Revenue fell because of the of the downturn he cut government spending now now both those things are things that the drive the keynesians crazy the following year unemployment had fallen to about half that
level within a year yes and then a year after that it fell yet again uh PE you know there is a history the first time the federal government intervened in the economy to get us out of of a downturn was in 1930 now which means that for more than 50 years the federal government just stood by and twidle their thumbs while the economy recovered on its own and all that time there was never a depression as bad as the 1930s depression where there was all kinds of of intervention beginning with who Herbert Hoover help and
help us uh and then Amplified by Franklin D Roosevelt so in terms of you're looking at what happened as a matter of fact uh again there was no there was no Federal Reserve prior to 1914 uh the Federal Reserve was created in order to one cut back cut back on bank failures uh reduce uh inflation and prevent deflation all of those things reach historic highs never seen before under the Federal Reserve so the the the the the idea was wonderful Thomas so on Obamacare quote Obamacare imposes huge costs on some institutions while the president's waivers
exempt other institutions from having to pay those same costs the law says you got to do this and over here we have the Secretary of Health and Human Services granting a waiver to this person or that entity or this waiver is taking place over here well it's legal nobody seems to Su them for that one of the great problems is that people do not react I mean when all is said and done the Constitution of the United States uh is a set of words on pieces of paper the only way that the constitution can protect
us is if we protect the Constitution if if we rise up in Revolt if we vote out of office people who violate the constitution then of course it will mean something if people can do this say a few pretty words and we say oh well uh then the Constitution will over time erode to the point well it will mean absolutely nothing there'll be nice words on paper but people with power will just do what they feel like what about those nine people in Black robes who sit in on on the bench across the street from
the United States capital isn't it the job of the Supreme Court of the United States to defend the Constitution it is but they alone can't do it and more importantly if Obama gets reelected he's probably going to have one or maybe two more members to appoint and from that point on it will just be a rubber stamp for whatever he chooses to do Tom Soul this past summer quote the America that has flourished for more than two centuries is being quietly but steadily dismantled by the Obama Administration close quote now you note the way the
Obama Administration has used executive orders to wave Provisions in the No Child Left Behind Act and to repeal your word the legal requirement that welfare recipients must work he's the president Tom doesn't he get to make adjustments in this law or that law well he he didn't the uh oath that he took of office was that he would Faithfully execute the laws now I don't they think they meant execute in the same way that the mafia means it to the economy Tom Sol quote we are not yet Greece but we are not exempt from the
rules of arithmetic that caught up with Greece we have just a little more time close quote uh so what's going to go wrong let's assume Barack Obama for for the for the moment let's assume Barack Obama wins reelection what bad things happen for one thing we start running out of money that's the problem of Greece see the secret of the welfare state is you can do almost anything in the short run juggling money from here to there and so on but in the long run the arithmetic can't be ignored and in the long run you're
going to run out of money which is what's happened in Greece which is starting to happen in Spain uh and which can happen uh in the United States so so you're an optimist that is to say the welfare state against which you have devoted enormous professional energies over low these several decades now is about to come to an end one way or the other that's right but but it makes a difference how how it comes to an end okay so that's that's what I'm trying what what what feels to I mean look we have 8
point 8 point something or other perc unemployment as a matter of fact if the same number of people were still in the workforce as were when President Obama took office the unemployment rate would be 11% the econom is really bad but by historical standards it's still a wealthy country people can get by journalists are already defining the State of Affairs as The New Normal so really four more years of Barack Obama does what to us we can we can we can skate by Tom the question is how long can you skate uh discovered that there
there does come a point where where where there is no more money in Spain people are already leaving Spain in drove and taking their money out of the out of the Spanish banks with them uh one of one of the things that you could you can do in the long run it'll be forced to do is simply print more money and as they as they print more money that is simply a a hidden form of Taxation I mean when the Federal Reserve creates money to buy government bonds and keeps the interest rate low in order
to make the price of The Debt Service low uh what that means is that if you have your money put aside in the bank and and and and you're getting 1% and the inflation rate is 3% that means they're taking 2% of your uh savings uh every single year and you know how compound interest is right uh and and even under the current conditions and a $100 bill in 1998 would not buy as much as a $20 bill would have bought in 1960 so the the thievery that goes on through inflation is huge the Republicans
I think have a notion that because so many people are unemployed and on food stamps that that is a is a negative for Obama Franklin D Roosevelt was elected in a landslide after H having an unemployment rate higher than Obama's the there was not a single month in the first term of Franklin D Roosevelt when unemployment was not in double digits and in a number of months the unemployment was over 20% and he he won the biggest landslide in American history so the the people who think that the economy is the key that you can't
win if your unemployment is 8% forget it all right let me push back a little bit Tom when President Obama took office the financial system appeared close to collapse serious economists including our colleague at the Hoover institution Robert Barrow wrote that there was a significant chance of of not just recession but depression and today we've got a financial system that's functioning housing prices are settling rather than crashing and there seems to be a general consensus that we'll see a recovery within a year to 18 months so why not take President Obama at his word and
simply impute to him the motives that he claims he came into office passed a stimulus Bill and a raft of other measures because of the financial crisis demanded that he do so and it seems to have worked well I I I'm not as optimistic and in uh in predicting how how things are going to be wonderful in a couple of years but we'll know more in a couple of years um if you look at the stimulus package the one thing it has not done is stimulate uh prior to the um bailout money for the banks
the banks were lending a certain amount after the bailout money the banks were lending less uh supposed I mean the stimulus means that he's not depending just on the government's own money being spent producing the result that this will stimulate others in the economy it is not money uh money the circulation of money the speed with which money circulates in the economy fell to the lowest level in 50 years it fell during after the stimulus yes uh business reduced its investment by oh something like 25 or more percent so that if you're looking in terms
of what actually happens rather than the words that are used what actually has happened shows no such stimulation as as they're talking about you mentioned the uh I think you would call it a naive view of world affairs that he he places a great deal of faith in a kind in rhetoric the ability of rhetoric to solve Global problems this reminds you of the 1930s it reminds you of Neville Chamberlain uh I read you a quotation of the notion of spreading the wealth around and again you said that's perfectly pure socialist Doctrine from the 1930s
is it would you argue that this man is the most left-wing or the uh the purest Embrace of the unconstrained Vision that we've seen in American politics since since when since the New Deal since been American politics really yes yes I mean even FDR uh you know pull back on some things but uh Obama really he he he does have the unconstraint Vision which is really an elitist Vision it says I know what is the best to be done and I will do it uh when he says I will change the world you realize this
is a man who's actually accomplished nothing other than advancing his career through rhetoric and he it reminds me of of a sophomore uh in college you know who thinks that he can run the world because he's never had to run anything and you can believe that only until you have uh personal responsibility for consequences and that's when it gives you a little bit of uh of humility why don't the American people see through that isn't that the fundamental bet that the founders made that the cons on that that voters would see through ultimately they'd see
through nonsense yes but that that was before nonsense became a a large part of the curriculum of our educational institutions President Obama keeps talking about the jobs his administration is creating but there are more people people unemployed now than before he took office How can there be more unemployment after so many jobs have been created let's go back to square one what does it take to create a job it takes wealth to pay someone who is hired not to mention additional wealth to buy the material that person will use but government creates no wealth ignoring
that plain and simple fact enables politicians to claim to be able to do all sorts of miraculous things that they cannot do in fact without creating wealth how can they create jobs by taking wealth from others whether by taxation selling bonds or imposing mandates however it is done transferring wealth is not creating wealth When government uses transferred wealth to hire people it is essentially transferring jobs from the private sector not adding to the net number of jobs in the economy if that was all that was involved it would be a simple verbal fraud with no
gain of jobs and no net loss in reality many other things that politicians do reduce the number of jobs politicians who mandate various benefits that employers must provide for workers gain politically by seeming to give people something for nothing but making workers more expensive means that fewer are likely to be hired during an economic recovery employers can respond to an increased demand for their company's products by hiring more workers creating more jobs or they can work their existing employees overtime since workers have to be paid time and a half for overtime it might seem as
if it would always be cheaper to hire more workers when you get more hours of work from the existing employees you don't need to pay for additional mandates as you would have to when you get more hours of work by hiring new people for many employers that makes it cheaper to pay for overtime the data show that overtime hours have been increasing in the economy while more people have been laid off there is another way of reducing the cost of government imposed mandates that is by hiring temporary workers to whom the mandates do not apply
the number of temporary workers hired has increased for the fourth consecutive month even though there are millions of unemployed people who could be hired for regular jobs if it were not for the mandates that politicians have imposed osed economists have long been saying that there is no free lunch but politicians get elected by seeming to give free lunches in one form or another yet there are no magic wands in Washington to make costs disappear whether with workers or with medical care we just pay in a different way often a more costly way nor can these
costs all be simply dumped on the rich because there are just not enough of them often people who are far from Rich pay the biggest price in Lost opportunities a classic example is the minimum wage law minimum wage laws appear to give low-income workers something for nothing and appearances are what count in politics realities can be left to others so long as appearances get votes people with low skills or little experience usually get paid low wages passing a minimum wage law does not make them any more valuable at a higher wage it can just make
them Expendable raising the minimum wage in the midst of a recession was guaranteed to increase unemployment among the young and it has none of this is peculiar to the current Administration the Roosevelt administration created huge numbers of government jobs during the 1930s and yet unemployment remained in double digits throughout FDR's first two terms constant government experiments with new New Bright Ideas is another common feature of Obama's change and FDR's New Deal the uncertainty that this unpredictable experimentation generates makes employers reluctant to hire destroying some jobs while creating other jobs does not get you very far
except politically but politically is what matters to politicians even if their policies needlessly prolong a recession or depression
