Thin plans on making things cost less | Hour 1

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 the links, become a patron, go to the peak calendar show.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. And as we always do on Tuesdays at noon, we chat with Andrew Dunn. He is the publisher of Longleaf Politics. Longleafpol.com is that website. You can subscribe to his newsletter there, also the podcast. He's also a contributing columnist over at the Charlotte Observer and the author of the book, The Change Agent, Pat McCrory's Rise, Reckoning and Legacy. Andrew, how are you, sir? I am doing fantastic. How about yourself? I am well as well. How was your book event last week? It went really well. And I'm going to have to send you a marketing fee. There was a number of folks there who said they heard about the event on the. Pete Callender show. So I'm very grateful for you promoting it. 25 cents a head. That's my conversion cost for you. Okay. Well, let me go look in the couch cushions. There you go. Right, right, right. All right. So let's talk about affordable housing and the bonds that we are being asked to support on the Charlotte local ballot this November, $ 125 million. And you thought you asked a question that I thought was, I don't know, like pretty basic in this piece at the Charlotte Observer. Like, have we gotten any bang for the buck on this? Are we actually, are we, are we addressing the affordable housing shortfall? No. I mean, the short answer is no. The longer, the slightly longer answer is we don't know. You know, I was, as any good responsible voter or taxpaying citizen would do, I just was looking at my sample ballot and saw that, yet again, the city of Charlotte voters are being asked to approve another multi-hundred million dollar affordable housing bond. And so I wanted to say, well, you know, what have we gotten so far from this? Because the numbers just keep increasing. We went from $ 15 million to $ 50. Million to $ 100 million. And now another record-breaking $ 125 million. And they tend to pass overwhelmingly. If this housing bond gets approved this November, We're going to be at more than $ 500 million. That's half a billion dollars in the last 10 years in total. Obligations related to affordable housing. And the scary part is that the city of Charlotte does not really have any idea what impact this is making, if any. To their credit, some of the members of city council and housing committee meetings earlier this year. Asked that question. What impact has this had? And they said, well, we're studying it. They've got a couple UNC Charlotte studies, and I guess they've got an external consultant doing a study too. I wouldn't hold my breath to. See those results before election day this year. But to me, it's extremely troubling that we're spending ungodly sums of money on this and have no idea whether it's actually working. Yeah, it seems like you would want some sort of, I don't know, proof of concept, right? Like, does this program work? You have some numbers in your piece, 8,850 income-restricted apartments funded for construction or preservation since 2016. So that's like over the last decade, just under 9,000 income-restricted apartments. And this is part of the deal, right? You you build the affordable. Housing and exchange and you get like some, uh, some perks as the builder. And then the city gets to basically cap the, the rents, uh, based on the, uh, income of the families. Right. So when most of those apartments serve the higher end of the eligible income range, but you pointed out developers routinely propose apartments with rents that are in that range, that service, that, uh, that economic demographics. So, uh, You asked the question, and I guess we don't know the answer, maybe just because of politics, but why pay for what the market is already providing? It doesn't make any sense. Right, exactly. And, yeah, when I got that top line number, you know, just under $ 9, 000. quite sure, well, is this an impressive number or is this not an impressive number? I'm not really sure, especially when we're talking about close. To $ 500 million. But the reality is that those 9,000, it doesn't necessarily mean 9,000 additional homes that we wouldn't. Have had otherwise. And it doesn't mean. that these 9,000 homes are being rented for cheaper than they otherwise would have. The main bucket of money that. The city of Charlotte uses these housing bonds for is, well, they call it gap financing, but basically what it means is that developers will come to them with a proposal. We want to build this apartment complex. We don't have enough money. Will you chip in some percentage of it, 10% of the overall construction price. And in exchange, we will agree to rent a certain percentage of them at an affordable price. Quote unquote. But the reality is that when you do the financial calculations, that affordable price is essentially what the market rate is to begin with. It all has to do with area median income. And, you know, there's all sorts of crazy calculations that you can do. But the long and short of it is that there's no real evidence at this point that we are creating new homes at a price cheaper than they would normally be. And we won't know that until somebody takes a look at the actual details here. Right. This is what former County Commissioner Jim Puckett always used to refer to as the but-for situation. Like, would these units not have been built but for this subsidy? And it sounds like the answer is, well, they would have been built. They probably would have been built. And when we talk about, you know, the housing affordability crisis and all of this, the answer is, and now it's been borne out in multiple studies, when you build more luxury apartments even, even if you're just building luxury apartments, those are like class A, then the people who are in class B move to the class A's. They move up to get to the nicer apartments. People in the C range, they move up to B. And then the C range, well, there isn't a D. There's nobody below. So then they just start lowering their rents. That's how that works. And they've seen this in multiple markets over many years. But for some reason, I guess it's a lot of nimbyism as well, where not in my backyard and people like to complain about new apartments getting built everywhere. Yeah, it's really just simple economics. If you want prices to go down, you have to increase the supply. And that's the only way to do it. And you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars, but you're not going to counteract the forces of the market. I mean, it's a fooled errand. And my concern here is it really seems that the city of Charlotte is continuing to pour money on this because it feels good, right? It feels like, well, at least we're doing something. But I don't think it's unreasonable. And there's some bipartisan consensus on this, too, that if we're going to spend all this money, we should make sure that it's actually helping the people that we say that we're trying to help. I think the incentives, though, are aligned for this program to just get bigger and bigger because the incentives for the politicians are going to be, obviously, they get to tout the affordable housing initiatives and the funding. We're all about affordable housing. Look at us. We voted for these affordable housing projects. The builders, their incentives are aligned because they get some money. It makes it cheaper for them to build it. And then the voters, their incentive is because they're not paying for it because they're in the lower median income range. So they're paying very little when it comes to these kinds of taxes. And so They just think, okay, well, I'll keep voting for those people. It seems like it's all just a line to keep going in this one direction. So I don't have a lot of confidence that it's going to change. No, I don't either. And I am looking forward to what reports the city of Charlotte ends up putting out. I guarantee you it'll be after the election. But I would also love to see, and if State Auditor Dave Bollick is listening to this, I would love to have his team come in and take a look at this as well. So I think I'm going to trust his report a little bit more than whatever the city's paid for. Yeah, we'll see. All right, speaking of affordability, let's take a look at it. We mentioned this, I think, last week. Roy Cooper's Make Stuff Cost Less agenda. He's running around the state with this agenda and this slogan. And when you go to his website, which you did, you took a look at it, and I believe we spoke briefly about it last week. There isn't really anything in that agenda, in that plan. So when you did your deep dive, quote-unquote, into the bullet points here, what did you find? What's in it? Yeah. Well, funny enough, after the column published, I went back. To the website this morning and it seems like the Cooper team is trying to beef up their affordability bona fides there, but it's still not any, not anything that's impressive. I mean, when you go to the site previously and still today, you get a whole lot of attitudes like, we're going to put doctors in charge of healthcare and not insurance companies. We're going to rein in the corporate mergers or things like that, or we're going to cut red tape on housing. And there's really not a whole. Lot of meat to the bone there. I think what it seems like is that the Cooper campaign has engineered this to sound smart, sound like there's a detailed plan, but when you really dig into it, there's not a whole lot of there there. Yeah, you say much of it is the familiar democratic program of subsidies, tax credits, and government intervention. It seems more like a list of good intentions and new obligations for taxpayers, which this is what kills me, is that the people who have done more to raise the price of all of these things through government regulations and government intervention in these individual markets, they're now claiming that they have the answer, but it's not deregulation or government non-intervention. It's just taking money from somebody else to give to you or to subsidize something else or whatever, just moving government taxpayer money around. That's what it seems like. Yeah, you're exactly right. I mean, if you look at any sort. Of data on how prices have changed over the past three, four decades and look at what industries prices continue to go up in which they go down, the ones where prices are skyrocketing are the industries that government subsidizes most heavily. You know, you look at the price of TVs. TV prices have gone down tremendously over the decade. You can get an awesome TV today for a lot cheaper than you could get a crappy TV 30 years ago. But you look at health care, you look at housing, you look at child care. These are all the industries where government spends and spends and spends. And that inevitably drives prices up. It's just a matter of who's doing the paying for it. Yeah. You could read both of these columns are at the Charlotte Observer. Andrew Dunn, thanks so much for your time, buddy. Appreciate it. Thank you, sir. All right. Take care. That's Andrew Dunn. And you can read his work at Longleaf Politics, longleafpol.com and catch his podcast as well. 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 and VHS tapes, film reels, and slides into lasting keepsakes. Now, Creative Video is helping families and groups create brand new memories while they're traveling. 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Check out GroupTravelVideos.com. That's GroupTravelVideos.com. Or call 704-846-7870, extension 206. And when you do that, ask for Katie. But Pete, can I just email? Well, yes, you can. You can email Katie, katie at grouptravelvideos.com. Group Travel Videos, from old memories to new adventures, preserving life's moments for a lifetime. We finally got somebody in a journalism-ing role that got to ask Roy Cooper, my good friend Ray, cut him loose, Cooper, got to ask him some questions. I mean, they weren't terribly hard. It was not a combative or adversarial interview to be sure. I mean, it is a journalism and it is a Democrat. So you're not going to get the kinds of, you know, kind of pre-laden assumption of motive type of leading question to try to like trap the, the candidate. It was all very amicable, but again, tip of the hat to Manu Raju at CNN, who came to North Carolina and did a story about the state of the race. He got a one-on-one with Roy Cooper, and he also went to a press conference held by Michael Wadley, where he asked about non-crime related things. So we will get to that. I've got the audio from the interview, but regarding Andrew Dunn's piece, at the Charlotte observer, there were a couple other points here to be made about Roy Cooper's make stuff cost less agenda, which is thin at best. Okay. It's just as he called them platitudes. It's a series of bullet points with bumper sticker bromides and slogans. Okay. Andrew said these are reassuring goals before anyone has to argue over the rules or the bill, right? This is, I called it sort of the blank slate candidate, right? You can just say, I'm for this good stuff. And Ooh, he's, he's for the good stuff. I like good stuff. I must be for him then. And you don't know how he's actually going to do things. Like for example, Cooper's newfound enthusiasm for cutting housing red tape. And it would be easier to take this seriously if, if he had not vetoed building code deregulation bills in 2023 and in 2024, right? So when the legislature tried to actually cut red tape, try to reduce the regulatory burden on housing construction in North Carolina, he vetoed it after eight years as governor with far more direct influence over those rules. He should be able to tell us what type of rules he now wants gone. Yes. I want specifics. But see, when you define, you divide. And that's why if you can run for office without ever having to define any of your policy pitches, then you won't divide people. And that's obviously what the Cooper campaign is doing. Now is the moment we have been waiting for. New treatments emerging in the fight against this disease and other dementias. And so it's a lot of hope in the movement to end Alzheimer's. And as I do every year, I participate in the Walk to End Alzheimer's. If you want to join the team, it's called Pete's Pack. And that's going to be a team. That team walks in Charlotte. But before that, I'm going to be emceeing the walk in Gastonia. That's October 10th, Saturday morning, October 10th at Rotary Centennial Pavilion in Gastonia. So if you want to. Join that walk or you want to join my team, simply go to alz.org slash walk, alz.org slash walk. You can do a search for Pete's pack. And if you want to, so if you want to join the team, that's how you do that. Or if you can't join the team to walk yourself and you just want to help us raise the money, we're trying to raise $ 5, 000 before the walk itself. And I think we're about halfway there. And so any donation, any amount, to help end this awful, awful disease. And I walk for my grandfather who died from it, as well as Holly and her father-in-law down in South Carolina who recently passed away from it too. So go to ALZ.org. And thank you very much for your support. I do appreciate it. All right, let me get to some of this audio. This is from CNN. Manu Raju hit the campaign trail in North Carolina where Democrat Roy Cooper... A former governor is hoping to flip a Senate seat. This was the seat held and currently held by Tom Tillis. He's running against Michael Watley, the Republican, who is hammering Cooper with attacks focused on crime. Here is the beginning of Manu Raju's report. Roy Cooper, the former two-term governor, is key to Democrats' quest to take the Senate, a mission that would almost certainly be derailed if he fails to defeat Michael Watley. the former RNC chairman and close ally of Trump's. He will do and say whatever the president tells him to do and say. A lot of Democrats have written off North Carolina. They think they have it in the bag. By the way, would you say that you did whatever Fauci told you to do or say? Do you feel like that? Like we have your email or we have the note rather from Fauci's diary. Seems like that. Also, Mandy Cullen, who's got it going on, your former Health and Human Services secretary during COVID. And she talked about how she would call up her or other health director compadres in other states and be like, are you. Going to allow NFL games? Are you going to let people go to funerals? Okay. I'm not either. Ha ha ha. So like that kind of taking orders or, or, or Joe Biden is doing fine. You fully endorse him. Oh no, Joe Biden. He dropped out. Now it's Kamala Harris. No, no, no. It's Kamala Harris. We have to back her all the way. She's fantastic. Like that kind of taking orders. I'm there with Manu. Didn't ask that as a followup. But why would they think that? I mean, Donald Trump has won here three times. And there's been no Senate Democrat who's won statewide in a Senate race since 2008. There have been polls that have shown Cooper well ahead in this race. All right, so this is the horse race coverage, right? I talk about this, the way that, you know, reporters cover a race and it's just horse race coverage. So you're like, oh, this is... guy's ahead. This guy's ahead. Now he's in the lead and down the stretch. I can't say that. I think that's trademark. But at least one poll from High Point University actually showed this race to be much tighter. A five-point race, that's within the margin of error, meaning there's no clear leader in this race. There's this view in Washington that you kind of have this race in the bag. But the polls actually show that this is actually. A tightening race. It really is. So what has changed here on the ground? Well, nothing's really changed that we didn't anticipate. North Carolina hasn't elected a Democrat in almost two decades, and only two in almost the last. 40 years. So it's tough for a Democrat to win a U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina. Why? This is going to be anywhere from a 1% to 3% race. Someone asked me what my biggest concern was, and I said that people take this race for granted. Complacency. Complacency. They've been pounding us with false negative ads since July. And the race is tightening just as we knew it would. Republicans clearly have not given up, reserving more money for TV ads in the final eight weeks of the campaign, with more than $ 50 million. With Trump's approval sagging, Cooper is barnstorming the state, attacking Whatley. over high cost caused partly by the president's war with Iran and sweeping tariffs. Okay, to be fair, he's not really barnstorming the state. He's just going to, like, the Democrat strongholds because they got to drive up their turnout. I know costs are way up, and it's a senator's job to do something about it. As Cooper was seizing on cost-of-living concerns in a suburban Charlotte county that Trump carried three times. About 120 miles southeast from there, Watley was attacking Cooper's record in a Democratic stronghold. And I caught up with Watley to ask whether he was aligned with Trump on Iran and tariffs. Watley's careful not to break from the president. Since the president came into office, inflation is still higher than when he first came in in January 2025. I'm wondering specifically when it comes to the issues of Iran. Okay, hang on. The inflation isn't higher. Inflation is an annual number. It constantly goes up. If you're having deflation, you probably have some very large economic problems going on. So the price of things went up because of inflation during Biden, 9% in one year, 9% inflation in one year. That doesn't come back down. The prices don't. All drop again because that's now baked into the cake, into the economic pie, okay? So all you can do is try to keep the rate of inflation around 3%. That's generally where you want to be. You want to keep it down so you're having growth, but the inflation isn't outstripping salaries. Which are a lagging indicator and all that. The salary increases lag behind the inflation, which, by the way, salaries have gone up like 13% or something over the last five years. And tariffs. Should he change course at all given. how much more people are paying here in North Carolina? Well, what I would say is inflation is a whole lot less than it was under Joe Biden, right? So they are significantly lower than they were, and they need to get them even lower still, right? When we talk about the war on Iran, obviously we need to ensure that Iran does not have nuclear weapons, that they do not have a capacity to build or to deploy nuclear weapons. And so I think the president took decisive action And we're moving forward with that. So are you 100 percent behind him when it comes to Iran and tariffs specifically? Well, what I would say is that we cannot allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon that they can develop and deploy. And tariffs, too. You're 100 percent behind him on his tariffs policy as well. What I would say is we need trade policies that are going to help North Carolina farmers, manufacturers and small businesses. We need to have a conversation about where those tariffs are going to be. All right. So. Obviously, Manu Raju doing the Democrat frame of Michael Watley is a puppet of Donald Trump. He's going to do whatever Donald Trump says. Right now, of course, when you have your party mate in the presidency, you don't run against the leader of your own party. So that's kind of obvious. Also, he was the head of the RNC. So. Like he's going to keep saying the things that the Republicans have been doing and he's going to align with the things Republicans have been doing. And he's a Republican nominee for Senate. Now what does Roy Cooper think about all this? Is he aligned with all of his leadership? That's tougher to suss out. All right. Yes. So 704 number on the text line says is in Cooper's ads. He's saying affordability is a senator's job. He was governor for eight years. Wasn't it a governor's job, too? Yes, it was. Yes, it was. But he's going to bank on you not. Paying any attention to his 40 years in politics. OK, next up. The focus on crime that the Whatley campaign is taking in their campaign against Roy Cooper. That's the next part of this report. Whatley has centered his attacks on Cooper's record on crime, criticizing his rival over a court-ordered settlement. Okay, hang on a second. A court-ordered settlement. This has now become the boilerplate language used by media. The court-ordered settlement was a collusive agreement entered into by the plaintiffs and the governor, okay? And the judge in the case, one judge, a Democrat, signed off on it. The judge did not order Cooper to release all the people. That is not what happened. There was not a court-ordered release of all of these prisoners. This was ACLU and NAACP saying, we're going to sue you, release all of the prisoners during COVID. And the governor said, I'm not so sure. And we're suing. And they go to court, and the Democrat activist judge up there in, I believe, Greensboro, I think his name is Rozier, he said, I think that the NAACP and the ACLU, I think they're totally going to win here. And then Roy Cooper and his administration said, okay, well, then I guess we have to do it. They did not fight. They did not appeal. They did not... Do anything except create a list. We still don't know how that list got created, but create a list and release a bunch of people. That's what happened. The court signed off on the agreement. The court did not order the release of these people. It was an agreement that the parties entered into, a collusive agreement. Cooper reaches governor with civil rights groups. to reduce the prison population during the COVID era. Behind the numbers are real victims and families who will never be whole. We paid the price when Roy Cooper put criminals before the innocent. 40 years is enough. The centerpiece of the Republican campaign against you is this settlement deal that you reached about the prisoner release, roughly 3,500 prisoners released early. When you look back at the way that that was handled by you and your administration, do you have any regrets about the way you handled that? This is something that the state had to do because the court ordered it. And I think a lot of people believed, if you ask the plaintiffs, they were very frustrated that more weren't released And this was something that we wanted to do to make sure we work to protect the public. Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What? That you work to protect the public? 18 North Carolinians were murdered by the people you released after they were released. Protect the public? You, you, you did not even, you did not even sign into legislation the, um, The 287G cooperation requirements for the sheriffs who were cutting people loose, criminals that were being arrested, criminal illegal aliens being arrested. And rather than tell the sheriffs to hand them off to ICE, you said, oh, no, no, we could be sued, which hasn't happened, has never happened. No sheriff has. Been litigated into oblivion for cooperating with ICE. It has not happened. Yet, Cooper and the Democrats keep saying that this is their concern. This is what our sheriff in Mecklenburg County, Gary, not my fault, McFadden, this is the same thing that he kept saying. And it wasn't true. It hasn't been true. I'm just, I'm afraid of the litigation. But there hasn't been any. There's been no ramification, no consequences to any sheriffs that have participated and cooperated with ICE in the 287G program. None. But they keep saying this. They keep saying it, just like this thing, oh, the court ordered me to do this. No, the court did not order you to do it. You agreed to do it, and then the court signed off on it. That was your agreement, governor. 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 podcast. 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 ThePeteCalenderShow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.