Are You Better Off Than You Were on Trump’s Final Day?

CLAY: We begin with the biggest issue that continues to dominate the American political sphere, and it is inflation. Tomorrow we will get a reading on the month of April to see whether or not inflation has accelerated or decelerated a bit from a 40-year high of 8.5%. What will not change, however, is Joe Biden is going to continue to come up with a shifting rationale under which he bears no responsibility for the policies that he has implemented —

That have helped to ensure that the United States has one of the highest inflation rates among Western democracies. And it’s worth noting as Biden speaks and we begin this show that it wasn’t very long ago that Joe Biden claimed his infrastructure bill would help to stop surging inflation. In fact, this was just November of 2021. Basically, every single policy idea, including Build Back Better, Joe Biden has tried to argue that by spending trillions of dollars, inflation will get better.

Here is Biden in November of 2021.

BIDEN: The House of Representatives passed by bipartisan infrastructure bill, along with other plans that I am advancing, this bill is gonna reduce the cost of goods to consumers, businesses, and get people back to work — helping us build an the economy from the bottom up and the middle out where everybody is better off. (sputters) You know, I’m tired of this trickle-down economy stuff.

CLAY: If only we had trickle-down economy stuff because the only thing trickling down from Biden is incompetence.

BUCK: It’s amazing to watch this in real time, Clay. I can see on the screen you’ve got, “Lowering Costs, Tackling Inflation.” The Democrats really do seem to believe — and maybe it’s just because their own ideology boxes them into this and they can’t find a way out from it, that the way to lower costs and tackle inflation is to have the federal government spend more money. Oh, and, of course, to raise a taxes a whole lot, which is something that they’re not talking about very much now.

But they will be, by all means. If they can find themselves in a position to actually pass legislation and do that, they will. And I think that that’s probably gonna happen. But they keep saying now — Biden’s big talking point is — well, there’s the Putin price hike, which he said during the speech which he’s giving right now as we’re talking to you. They’ve got the actual talking points behind him: “Lowering Costs, Tackling Inflation,” and then I listen to him, and I go, “None of the things that he’s saying will do either of those things.

“They will actually make inflation worse and they will make costs higher.” This is a little bit like the paradigm of Defund the Police. Defund the Police is only going to make crime worse and make everybody less safe but they kept saying, “Oh, no, no, no! Just give this defund thing more time, treat it more seriously.” Spending more money when you’re in an inflationary period — as you pointed out, the worst inflation we’ve seen in 40 years — is only going to make the problem worse.

But they refuse to accept that they’re wrong. That’s really what it comes down to. It’s like the mask issue, they will not turn around and say, “Hold on a second, government additional spending will simply make things that are already getting bad far worse than they would otherwise be.” So, that’s why I think we’re just seeing the beginning of this. I think that you’re gonna see a really rough summer going into the fall with the markets, with inflation, with the price of food and the price of gas. It’s all gonna be a nightmare for the Democrats.

CLAY: Look, we hit yesterday a low in the S&P 500 going back to March of 2021, and we are becoming perilously close to going negative for the entire Joe Biden administration. And we have continued to talk about this, Buck. But the incompetence of Biden on every single front… This is what I would ask everybody out there. It’s a simple question, but it goes to the essence of very many political elections: How many people out there are better off now than they were when Donald Trump was president?

How many of our listeners are better off today than they were the last day Donald Trump was president on January 19, 2021? I don’t think there’s very many. And it’s not just Republicans. It’s independents; it’s Democrats. If you took away — to your point, Buck — the preexisting party alliances that are out there whereby a certain percentage of people are just going to refuse to acknowledge that things could be worse because they’re so dyed-in-the-wool in supporting the Democrat Party.

Nobody really supports Joe Biden. They support the fact that a Democrat is in office. If you take away those people, and even those people if you gave them truth serum and you asked them, “Hey, really, let’s be honest, were you better off when Trump was president or are you better off when Biden’s in office?” I think 100% of Americans would have to acknowledge that Joe Biden has failed on every single front.

He’s failed on the border. He’s failed on international relations. He’s failed on inflation. He’s failed on crime. I just think we have to keep beating this. He’s failed on covid. Certainly, he’s failed on kids being better off because of covid. I just think we have to keep beating this drum because there isn’t a story that Republicans can lose on when it comes to Joe Biden’s performance in office, and I think they’re recognizing it.

It’s very Big Brother-esque, Buck, to your point. I’m looking at the screen, and they have all these messages that they’re trying to get across behind Biden through just repetition, as if he has an answer in any way for what’s going on with inflation. His answer for inflation is spend more money, which is truly the worst thing that could happen for the government right now.

BUCK: There’s no way Democrats can hold on to a majority in the House or the Senate with the… I mean, we know they’re gonna almost certainly lose the House, but I don’t think they could even hold a Senate majority if this current trend economically continues. I mean, when you look at the data… Just so everyone knows, this is not like Clay and Buck. You look at Biden right now. I said this to Clay before and I say to all of you, ‘cause we’re all part of the Clay and Buck family here, okay?

This guy as president is absurd. I’m just gonna say it. He’s not up for this. He was never a very bright guy. He is way too old for the job. He looks decrepit — I’m sorry, it’s true — and I mean that in terms of not cognitively, physically capable of doing this in a meaningful way. Democrats act like everything’s fine. I’m sorry. The emperor has no clothes, and people are realizing this. There was a CNN poll, not RightWingCrazies.com.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: CNN poll last week, eight in 10 adults said the federal government wasn’t doing enough to curb inflation. Seven in 10 in the Democrat Party, seven in 10 Democrats approve of Biden on the economy; 68% of Democrats overall approve of his performance. The people that voted for Biden don’t seem to understand the cause and effect of what they voted for. They keep saying the federal government “isn’t doing enough to solve this.”

Understand the federal government is causing the problem. And Joe Biden’s management of the federal government is causing the problem, so Democrats are in denial and delusion about this. The numbers with independents, though, and Republicans? In the tank. You look at overall approval of the economy nationwide, everyone recognizes these guys don’t what they’re doing. They simply don’t have the skillset.

They don’t have the vision, and their ideas are crappy. I just looked at the Build Back Better framework Clay. It’s really straightforward: Spending a whole lot more money. Giving you “universal pre-K,” think of the size of that. You’re basically gonna expand out the federal school system, right, the Department of Education into universal pre-K. That’s just gonna be a whole new entitlement. More money, more spending. It’s just gonna get worse and worse.

CLAY: Yeah, I don’t think there’s any doubt, and I’m not sure where they’re going to be able to make arguments going forward. The best thing we can do — and I mean this for the country — is run out the clock on Joe Biden in 2022. Essentially don’t go away allow him to pass any more truly substantive bills. Now, we can get into a big debate as to what exactly counts as substantive. I’m not happy that we’re spending $40 billion plus to give Ukraine aid when our moms can’t find any —

BUCK: Baby formula?

CLAY: — baby formula out there on the shelves right now. I’m not happy that we’re sending Ukraine $40 billion to help protect their borders when we won’t protect our own southern border. I think there are many reasons why you can be angry about the way money is being spent and what the significance of the dollars that we are spending is, but what we really have to keep is any sort of transformative, long-lasting legislation from being passed. Whether it’s a tax increase, whether it’s some form of Build Back Better that creates government expenditures that ride off into the sunset of trillions of dollars.

We have to run out the clock because once we get to the summer, everything pivots towards the campaign, and if Democrats haven’t passed anything, Buck, they’re not gonna be able to pass much in 2023 and in 2024 because I think you’re correct, that there will be an overwhelming red wave in November, so long as Republicans continue to bring home the failures of the Biden administration so far.

#BREAKING: Average national gas prices hit new all-time high https://t.co/18HUlGVJ1C pic.twitter.com/6wA5V51OHj

— The Hill (@thehill) May 10, 2022

BUCK: I want to also bring this up. This is another CNN poll just to give everyone a sense: The public’s view of the economy overall is the worst it has been in 10 years, okay? The worst that has been in 10 years. That was actually the top line of the poll. So overall everyone realizes this is a bad economy right now. It’s not good. And inflation, I know, is primary driver of that. But, yeah, how expensive everything is: Gas, food, rent, new cars, used cars, everything. How expensive this is…? You know, I’ve got a family member who’s a small business owner. All of his costs are just going up all the time.

CLAY: Oh, yeah, of course.

BUCK: And if you’re trying to get to that point where your profitability, it can eat away at your margin and it can kill your business, right? This is why so much of this… Here you go. Biden says, “Deficits exploded under my predecessor.” It’s always somebody else’s fault. It’s Putin’s fault, it’s Trump’s fault. Joe Biden didn’t come into office saying, “I’m going to complain a lot about what other people are doing and not fix anything.” He said, Clay, “Steady hand on the economy, middle class folks would do great,” and that was just all absurd.

CLAY: Also, deficits exploded because of covid, right? If you look at the economy and you freeze frame it in February and March right before covid hit, we were trending towards the greatest economy that has ever existed in the United States. In fact, you can argue we were there, and I think we have to continue to hammer home that the people who were employed in February of 2020 when wages were rising for all races — white, black, Asian, Hispanic — when unemployment rate was lower for all races than we’ve ever seen before, we still haven’t regained the jobs that we had from the Trump economy in February of 2020. There’s still over a million people who are not in the workforce that were working then.