Inequality and hating a good economy | Hour 2

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all of the links, become a patron, go to thepeteclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. So have you heard of the claim that global inequality is getting worse? Right, the richer getting richer, the poor getting poor, cats and dogs living together like real wrath of God, D of the world type of stuff. Right, What have I told you that's not actually true? I mean, except for the cats and dogs living together part. But what if I told you that's not true, that long term data actually shows declines, nay significant declines in inequality, so in other words, more equality in income, health, education, as well as other metrics. Would you say that's not true? Would you do not? Or or let me take the well hand on a second, I'm gonna break it in half and just take half of the black pill. Okay, So that's. Because we're getting poorer and going down to everybody else's standards. That's actually not true either. No, what's happening is that we're seeing rising prosperity in poorer countries across the globe. As a free market capitalist, you're welcome. The world is now more equal across a range of factors, from lifespan and childhood's survival to internet access and schooling. And the more broadly that you examine inequality, the more encouraging the data appear. This is from a piece that was originally published in The Washington Examiner, also available at human progress dot org, which is a very fantastic website, human progress dot org. If you want to see like trend lines and like you want to counteract the black pilling, check out human progress dot org. Okay, people who keep saying everything is terrible need to go look at actual data human progress. Dot org outlines. So, a recent analysis that was published in the Economist finds that global inequality in consumption spending is falling. Okay, so the gap between consumption spending is getting smaller between the richest country and the poorest countries. It's not because the rich ones are losing purchasing power. It's because the poor ones are gaining it. That's why that gap is closing. Here's one of the statistical points. If you go back twenty five years, twenty six you go to the year two thousand, Okay, the richest ten percent of humanity, the top ten percent in the world, spent forty times more than the poorest fifty percent. Right, So you got the top ten percent the bottom fifty percent, and that's a forty x multiple of what they were what they were spending. Fast forward twenty five years. Instead of a forty x it's now eighteen x. So more than half the poorer countries have closed the gap by more than half. Using data from World Data Lab, they find that the poorest fifty percent now out consume the richest one percent. That has never happened before. Okay, the poorest half out consume the richest one percent. That is good news. This is dare I say, the rising tide that lifts all the boats. The record on foreign aid is less encouraging than its advocates suggest. Decades of evidence show that aid frequently fails to deliver sustained development and bears no reliable relationship to long term economic growth. Worse, the fixation on even larger aid flows often crowds out the harder work of domestic reform. In some cases, foreign aid has been showed to or has been shown to, weaken political institutions and French bid governance and slow the process of democratization, which makes sense. This is the conservative position, and it has been for decades, right that if you just give the man the fish, he's going to ask you for a fish tomorrow. They're not changing anything. The starving guy does not know how to fish, and so he's just relying on you to give him the fish. He doesn't know how to change. He doesn't know how to learn how to fish. You're not actually helping. You may be giving a safety net, but that safety net quickly turns into a hammock. Right, And when you have at a government scale, at a national scale, if you've got a corrupt government that is taking all of the aid, then they spread it out to their preferred recipients and it just entrenches them in power, and then they're not making any of the reform that they should be making in order to actually lift their population out of poverty. Wealth taxes have their own problems from high administrative costs and enforcement challenges to low revenue production, and invasion of financial privacy. These problems help explain why so many of the countries that have implemented wealth taxes in the past, like France and Germany and Sweden, have abolished the tax altogether. Perhaps the worst of all, by discouraging risk taking, wealth taxes suppress investment and growth effects that would be felt in both rich and poor countries, and would likely prove especially damaging to development in the world's poorest economies. This is the thing that made America exceptional was the risk taking. That's what the free market unleashed, right, people taking chances, people having ideas, trying to implement the ideas. I have a product, I have a service. I got this next great thing, and I want to make available to my fellow citizens voluntarily. And if they don't want it, if it's not a good product or service, then it will go away. If it is, I will be successful. This is why free market capitalism is, in fact the moral system. It is a more moral system than socialism, than command control economies, than Marxism. It is the more moral. That's not to say it is moral because you can use capitalism in evil ways if you want to, just like you can do that with money, right. I can use money for good stuff, I could use it for bad stuff. That's freedom. This is why underneath this sort of the substructure of the American project is individual virtue. You want people to act in virtuous ways, and that's on every individual to do themselves. It's on the families to teach that to the next generation. It's on dare I say, teachers, all kinds of teachers right to instill these types of virtues in the next generation, to reinforce what the churches, what the civic organizations, what the family units right, what they are instilling in their kids. Recent work on multi dimensional inequalities suggests the world has not been drifting towards ever greater gaps, but that the rich and the poor have been converging when it comes to material comfort. Calls for global wealth taxes are massive. New aid programs often rest on the assumption that international trade and economic freedom have failed to deliver broadly shared gains, but the long term evidence suggests the opposite. It actually has all right. For over a year now, you've heard me talking about create a video, great local company, in mint Hill that has helped more than two million families preserve their memories by turning old photos, VHS tapes, film reels and slides into lasting keepsakes no creative videos, helping families and groups create brand new memories while they're traveling. Introducing group travel videos perfect for family reunions, church mission trips, group vacations, destination weddings, student trips, senior adult groups, sports teams. I mean, really any gathering of people that you care about that's traveling together. Group travel Videos gives your traveling pack a private app where everyone can share photos during the trip, send messages, share schedules and important documents, even a traveler safety locator feature that works only during the trip, and family members and friends back home can follow along and enjoy the experience in real time. No social media, no ads, It's totally private. No emails, phone numbers, account setups, or hassles. With group travel videos, you'll capture today's moments on your special trip while they're happening. Then after the trip we're gathering, they'll professionally turn your shared moments into a beautiful storytelling video that your whole group can stream and download and treasure for years. Check out Group travel Videos dot com. That's group travel Videos dot com. Or call seven O four eight four six seventy eight seventy extension two O six And when you do that, ask for Katie. But Pete, can I just email? Well, yes you can. You can email Katie Katie at group travel videos dot com. Group travel videos from old memories to new adventures, preserving life's moments for a lifetime. So here's another question for you. What if I told you that the US economy is actually doing. Okay, No, no, we can't have that. No, all is laws. It's terrible, everything's terrible. Actually, the big picture indicators of the US economy, the GDP, the unemployment rate, so on, they're actually doing pretty good. They're doing fine, while public opinion rock bottom. Why why is that? This is a piece at axios dot com by Neil Irwin. The juxtaposition is the result of not just the elevated prices reflected in macroeconomic data, but higher and more volatile prices for these specific items that dominate americans day to day living expenses. Right, that's the early conclusion of top democratic economic policy minds. So this is coming from democrats who have embarked on a new effort to quantify and develop policy responses to the economic forces that ail American households. So don't worry, Democrats are going to do something about this. Okay, Democrats, I don't know if they're putting together some sort of a blue ribbon or what, but they have top economic policy minds that have embarked on this new effort to quantify all the economic forces. I'm sure they will not be including the deficit spending right, the debt, the printing of the money, right, the massive entitlement programs, the waste, fraud and abuse. I'm sure none of that's actually going to be in the Kitchen Table project as it's being dubbed, Yes, the Kitchen Table Project. It's being led by Biden White House Economic Advisor Lale Brainard, so you know it's going to be smart. With a person with the last name of Brainard leading it up along with Consumer Financial Protection Bureau chief or former chief row hit Chopra. It could help inform the policy agenda if Democrats were to win control of Congress in November or the White House in twenty twenty eight. So I bring this story to you because note axios hardly a right wing publication, okay, and they are highlighting the Democrats attempt to shape this messaging right around economic data points, because you've got strong GDP, you've got growth, you've got unemployment low. Right. We had the consumer Price Index and core CPI as well that were flat or decline, right. So there are these positive signs economic metrics, but there are some that like, for example, gas prices. We keep hearing about the gas prices, right, and grocery prices. We had the big the Great Burrito debit of twenty twenty six a couple of weeks ago, right, the price of food. And it doesn't matter what we say when we bring forth economic data to show the various prices and the changes historical trends and why the inflation jumped during the Biden administration, and the nature of inflation, it doesn't go away. If there's deflation, there's going to be some economic crisis tied to that. Right. So, even as overall inflation has slowed in the last few years, many of the most salient goods and services people buy are more unaffordable than ever, and that rising wages and tax cuts haven't been enough to offset it. Well, wages lag behind inflation. Inflation makes its way into the system first, wages increase later, and that's why people have been feeling that pinch since all of the spending during the Biden administration, as well as Trump won right the first Trumpet term, but also tariffs. I have been opposed to the tariff. Regime. When Trump announced it was my view on it was like, this looks like a tax. This is going to raise the prices on everything. This is what economists have believed for a very long time. This has been the sort. Of the conventional wisdom. But maybe I am a fish that doesn't know it's wet, and so we'll see what happens. So far, it hasn't really worked out to the benefit of Americans in my view. Now that's just my view. I don't think tariffs are helping. I think if the president were to actually undo a lot of the tariff increases, I suspect we would have we would have prices dropped somewhat because now the tariffs aren't increasing those costs. But again, what do I know. I'm just a little old radio host. I'm talking here about the disconnect between the economic indicators that are positive and people's belief that the economy is terrible, and even Democrats recognize that there is this gap between the two. We don't want to hear anymore about how good things are, Pete, we want to we want to wallow. Just let me wallow. Look if things were bad, if everything was as terrible, and look, there are bad things. I don't deny that there are things. I wish we're cheaper. Absolutely, I wish GOVCO would get out of a whole bunch of different sectors to help reduce those prices. Absolutely, I've got a whole bunch of ideas on what could be done to bring prices down. However, as a resident of realvill As, Rush would say, although he was the mayor like i am, I'm not going to deny things as they are. And by the way, as an ad like this is always one of the issues when you talk about economics stories. Whenever you know, a new report comes out and people want to frame it as you know. Good news or bad news or whatever. The economy is so much bigger than one data point, and every single data point has all sorts of nuance, and everybody has different lived experiences with those data points. For example, I'm seeing this. Eighty seven percent of pickup drivers are men, eighty five percent white, seventy four percent married, most non college sixty percent identify as Republicans. What does that. Matter, Well, these are the people that voted for Trump by and large. Right, Well, they're going to feel the pressure of gas prices more so than any other demographic, any other voting demographic, because they drive pickup trucks, right, Which makes sense. So this isn't to not to deny that there are pain points in people's personal budgets. However, when you are looking at the total picture of the economy, things are better than they were, and people think they are worse because of these individual pain points or because they're being fed a constant narrative that denies the reality of the total picture. All right, let me go over here and chat with Stacy. Hello, Stacy, welcome to the show. Hey, how are you good? How are you every single day? Thank you doing a great job. Thank you. I just want to say that the Democrats are fire starters. They're now going to quote unquote fix the problem they started. If you stay with me, this goes all the way back to the Clintons in nineteen ninety three, I mean, I'm sorry, I don't know if you knew any doctors. When Hillary started the PPOs and HMOs, we basically gave everything up to the insurance companies. I mean, when you go to the doctor, they don't say, well, this is what doctor so and so want, They say, this is what your insurance company will pay for. So again, you know, talking, and everybody was so excited, Oh, I can go to the doctor for twenty five dollars. Basically, you know, that's we're having a big problem. Yeah, the healthcare, the healthcare model that we operate under now is completely broken for yeah, that reason and through Obamacare. Right, And then I was about to say, and then you had Obama who basically said, if you don't take a plan, I'm going to charge you more taxes. So what problem are they going to solve? And the other thing I want to bring up about Clinton and Obama is that these are the two people. You know, all the. Trolls can call in and say, I'm homophobic, I'm anti trans, I'm not. I'm from New York. And back in the nineties there were companies that covered homosexuals, they covered partners. But if you notice there are two people and that basically became their platform. Does anybody know why has anyone looked at their lifestyle? You're saying Bill Clinton was gay? No? Trans is? Wait? Oh you say Hillary is? Hillary Clinton is trans? No? No, I think somebody is married to somebody who's trans. Oh my goodness, Really are you? Do you think Michelle Obama's a dude? Yeah? No, Stacy, stay, don't don't I mean don't, I mean, don't be sorry. Just don't adopt silly ideas like that. That's a joke. That's a that's an internet trolling joke. It's not real. Why did that become so important? Is that something George W. Bush cared about? What trans? Yeah? No, right, right? But why you know I can okay, so I can tell you why. Oh, Bergia felt the Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage. Once that, yeah, once that happened, think about it. You had this entire political industry, all of these nonprofits, activist groups that really energized and donated money to the Democrat Party. And then after the Supreme Court ruling, what do you if you're one of these organizations that's been fighting for gay marriage and now you're sort of the dog that caught the car. Now what do you do? Right? And so they have to they have to adopt a new mission because you've succeeded in the mission that you had outlined, right, which was gay marriage. So now gay marriage is allowed. And so you have this, you know, uh, this. Multimillion dollar infrastructure built up inside the Democrat Party, and you don't want to lose that funding. And you have people who are in these positions leading these nonprofit groups and they don't want to lose their jobs, so they have to find some other mission. And so well, you've got the LGB and what's the last letter T And so that's when this shift occurred to start focusing on transgender issues. Right. Then you also have at the same time popping up social media, right, and now you've got this perfect environment to spread rapid onset gender dysphoria. Right, You've got the TikTok videos and you've got the affirmation and then you've got an entire medical industry that realizes all of the funding. We're going to get into this actually at two o'clock with ap Dillon, the Wolves and White Coats, okay, yeah, where they realize like this is a money making thing for a lot of hospitals, you're creating lifelong patients. Yeah, so so No, it's not because of quote unquote Big Mike, as the internet meme is. I appreciate the Colt Stacey. You are right though about the model is broken. It does go back to the Clinton era. Obamacare made it even worse. And it's not just in the health industry. Right. Anytime government gets between you and the service provider, efficiency is a casualty, right, and the price goes up. The prices are masked, so the consumer doesn't know what the price is a lot of times the doctors don't either. I've told the story before. I had an HSA years ago and I went in and the doctor recommended I get a teennis shot and I said, well, I haven't done anything that warns it. He's like, oh no, but we'll just give you the tennis shot. I was like, well, what's the cost? He had no idea. So he goes and he checks the price and it's like almost one hundred dollars and he's like, yeah, just come back if you step on a nail, because is the price worth that as just a preventative? No, it wasn't. So yeah, the whole, the whole industry is broken. And you could thank John McCain for not repealing Obamacare when he was the deciding vote, and he'd give the thumbs down because he hated Trump. Yeah, Statesman got a message from Melissa on Twitter. As a female pickup truck driver, I understand the gasoline price issue. I would like to point out this weekend, I paid one hundred and twenty dollars for twenty five gallons of gas in eastern Upstate, New York. On the return trip, same exact starting points to and from, same volume twenty five gallons, I paid ninety dollars in midwestern Virginia, same gas stations used to and fro. It will cost me even less when I fill up later this week in South Carolina. The difference between state and local taxes, Yeah, that has a massive impact on the price of gas per gallons state and local taxes. Jeff says. It's kind of funny that you don't hear the Democrats complaining about the price of eggs anymore. I just paid a dollar forty nine for a dozen large Oh that's right. They don't talk about the good news, right, Well, it's not in their interest to that, like we all saw the narrative crafting occurring as it was occurring. Right, All of a sudden, egg prices became this huge story, right because it was to hurt Trump, to hurt Republicans. The economy is terrible. Trump's killing the eggs, right, when in fact, there were various other factors involved. Right, you had the slaughtering of flocks or herds, flocks, I guess, right, because of the Avian flu. They had to wipe out a lot of the chicken population. Same thing as going on with beef prices, right, the beef price. I went over this a couple of days ago, maybe about a week and a half ago. The price of beef is impacted by droughts, and we have had a sustained drought out West, which has prompted the ranchers to have to slaughter the herds where like a seventy year low, Like we have the smallest herd for beef production in America. And we also had the we had some bands on the imports of beef which are now being lifted. But that was also due to some problems with the beef. There was some sort of was it the screw worm or something like that, and so they cut off imports of foreign beef from Mexico. All of that has an impact on the prices. These are all volatile commodities. Here from the Axios story, more than half of the survey respondents cited beef costs as the highest driver of grocery prices. Beef prices have been higher and more volatile thanks to droughts that contributed to a smaller US cattle herd concentration in the meat packing industry that has squeezed ranchers. I've talked about this as well. We need more Abatois slaughterhouses. So these slaughterhouses can then cater to smaller farmers, right because the big producers they've got their slaughter facilities in house. I think North Carolina has only got a couple of these types of facilities. And so if you're a small farm and you want to take you know, your cows to market. That's what that means. When you know, this little piggy went to market. Yeah, that little piggy got slaughtered just for I live in Reoville, people, I'm just telling you. So, like if you had more of these slaughterhouses, then you'd be able to shop around to find who's going to give you the best price for the slaughtering, and who's going to do it the way you want it done, because a lot of times, if you want to do like a particular type of slaughter process, you may not have that option because the slaughterhouses don't make it available to you. I know of a story from a personal friend of mine who farmed and they wanted to sell their was it the pigs heads, I believe the right so the brains, And there were restaurants in Charlotte that wanted this because apparently people eat that. I am not I am not one of those people, but apparently they wanted this, but the slaughter house wouldn't do it. For so like if you had more habitois, you'd have more options, as it were, And then you've got tariffs that made the imported beef more expensive, and then you had the parasite that threatened the cattle herds. Right, all of that leads to the price problems. Seven oh four number, says Pete. We are talking about basic supply and demand. Because our public school teachers have not right economic illiteracy. People do not understand how this stuff works, almost as if it's intentional. Democratic elected officials have made affordability a potent focus of their political messaging. Their rhetoric, however, is often vague and it isn't always obvious what specific policy actions might help. See. I am super interested in this. What do they call it, the Kitchen Table project? Yeah, the Kitchen Table Project. They're going to come up with some specific policies to bring down the price of stuff. Okay, I'm very curious because they haven't told us how they're going to bring down the price of stuff, and so now they're going to be giving us specific policy responses. I can't wait to hear what Democrats come up with on this. I'm guessing probably more government, That's what I'm thinking. Probably more government. All Right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecalnarshow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.