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Unknown A
Apparently, Trump's approval has already been going down. I mean, that's to be expected because that happens with basically every new president. You know, what's the aggregate right now in 538? 538. Remember, we're looking at approval, not favorability. Favorability, we're still hovering at like + 1.6 unfavorable. But for approval, even for 538. Even for 538. Look at this, look at this. Since the inauguration or right after it, January 24th, plus 8.2, we are already down 6 points to right now to plus 2.5. And I do question the reliability of 538's numbers and the way they aggregate their data and which polls they consider valid sometimes. That's Yesterday. Today shows 1.6. Well, I don't see the aggregate for it. I'm real bullish on that disapproval line. I mean, if you take a look at the first term. See, there it is. Oh, there it is. Okay. Yeah.
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Unknown A
Plus 1. Plus 1.3. Wow. No kidding. That's quite a drop in one day aggregate. A one day change of plus 2.5 to plus 1.3. A 1.2 point drop in a single day. Get. It really depends on. I mean, you know, data is devilish, polling is devilish. You know, you know, you understand. But at the same time, we'll see what we're working with here, right? For comparison, Joe Biden, by the same metrics, started with a plus 20.3 approval. If you go back to 23.4 in that ballpark, and then if you move forward to where we are now down like five points, though a lot of that is from disapproval rapidly rising right down here. And I think the reason for that is because after January 6th, a lot of Republicans were genuinely like soul searching. Because after January6, it did kind of seem like Trump was done.
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Unknown A
But as soon as Biden came into office and Fox News, like revved back up again and everything Biden did was evil and so on and so forth, the disapproval kicked up. But after that normalization period, things held relatively stable. Relatively stable. Man, they actually could have buried Trump. Yerp. Until Afghanistan. Yes, until Afghanistan, yes. And then the. Of course, you know, we all know how that played out. Still pretty massive downturn. Like, like, again, this. We're looking at one month right here. One month change from January 20th to February 20th. Oh, happy one month anniversary, by the way, on this administration. I know it feels like our fingernails are getting pulled out with pliers. I wouldn't say no one cares A lot of conservatives soyout over JD yet neo Nazis on Twitter. I promise you the average Republican is at most like on J.D. vance, he's not the average Republican, only likes Trump.
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Unknown A
I really do believe that. I really, I genuinely do believe that. Yeah. Can you show us a certain Bernard Sanders? Why would there be a Bernie Sanders approval rating in this chart? He hasn't been the president, unfortunately. Doesn't approval not matter for a second termer? Well, we don't have a democracy anymore, so it's not really about like winning the next election. It's more about public backlash and outcry. The main thing that I'm bullish over right now is the fact that congressional Democrats have like a -21 point approval average or something like that. You know, this just shows general congressional approval or disapproval. God willing. I hope those stupid motherfuckers get primaried soon. I'm bullish on stairs versus McConnell. Well, he is retiring soon, so you don't have much time. Yesterday, the NLAB's Buffalo office, Region 3, received word from its landlord that GSA, acting on Behal a doge, had unilaterally cancelled the region's five year lease without any prior notice to the agency.
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Unknown A
The region's been given 90 days to vacate the building. Cool. The NLRB's Buffalo office covers millions of workers in upstate New York. Does this lower the egg prices? This might increase the egg prices, I'm afraid. I mean, if you want to talk about like immediate harm that is being felt across the country as a result of these illegal cuts. Again, they are illegal. Remember, these cuts are being done out of line with the budget bill that was passed back in 2024. This is the doge taking on the responsibility of the of the purse, which they do not have the constitutional authority to do. But there have been some severe cuts in the Parks and National Forest Service. Where is that? I'm trying to find it, but apparently there are like really long lines at. I think it was Yosemite because they've had to lay off a bunch of people in a trail near Seattle.
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Unknown A
They've had to close it down because they no longer have the staff necessary to upkeep it. At California's Yosemite national park, the Trump administration fired the only locksmith on staff on Friday. He was the sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms. The wait to enter Arizona's Grand Canyon national park this past weekend was twice as long as usual after the administration let go four employees who worked at the south entrance, where roughly 90% of the park's nearly 5 million annual visitors passed through. They, I, I am so serious when I say this, okay? I am so serious. They need to put up signs saying wait times increased due to Doge budget cuts. Like that is literally true. So it's not a lie. It's just a factual explanation of why the wait times have increased. And at Gettysburg National Military park in Pennsylvania, last week's widespread layoffs gutted the team that managed reservations for renting historic farmhouses.
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Unknown A
Visitors received notifications that the reservations had been canceled indefinitely. Yeesh, that's pretty bad. Canceling reservations. Like, not even tapering or buffering them out. Like they were really running on a thin margin. It's not like the National Park Service was receiving the lion's share of the federal budget. You know, I, I stuff like this gives me a little bit of hope about the incompetence of the administration. I know I've been saying this a lot lately because we're talking about saving, like, microscopic amounts of money. Microscopic. Four employees let go at the Grand Canyon national park and thereby doubling the wait time. You know what I mean? Like, you make more money from people buying from the gift shop than you lose from the salaries of the employees there. Like, it's, it's nonsensical. It's not saving money. That incompetence, you know, it, it speaks to me. Like they don't, obviously don't know what they're doing, but it's not like a stable system.
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Unknown A
They're scraping the bottom of the barrel. I mean, at the end of the day, there's just no getting around the fact that the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of the money the government spends is either necessary to upkeep a certain standard of life and, like, national cohesion, or inflated due to private public partnerships contracting. Literally. Look at where the money goes. Where does the Pentagon money go? Sure, some of it goes to salaries. A lot of it goes to paying fucking Lockheed Martin. You know. Where, where does all this, the Medicare, Medicaid money go? Well, some of it's to employees. A lot of it's just like paying private pharmaceutical and medical companies to do work. The government should just nationalize, you know, and they're not going to meaningfully go after that system of wealth reallocation. So we're just going to see this, you know, pulling copper wiring out of the damn damn walls.
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Unknown A
A lot goes to developing things like SWORD missiles. Yeah, but that's done privately. Also. I could have developed the Sword missiles. Just ask 12 year old me. You know, what should, what should the government work on? That would be like, sick as hell. Did you. Well, they didn't ask me. You just put a sword in the missile. Isn't hard. That's what I'm saying. Gonna get worse. I think we, we might see more of this immediately in places like the National Park Service, because it, they were already running on such thin margins. You know, they were already. We're already scraping the bottom of the barrel there. But when shit like this starts, like, you know, Medicaid, Medicare, or, or even beyond that, like basic infrastructural stuff, you know, what, what, what happens when the federal government stops subsidizing road construction in, at the state level, you know, or, or like highway construction?
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Unknown A
All these projects slow down. You get less disbursement from the federal government, which means you have less money to like upkeep and maintain. A lot of this is done at a state or local level, but a lot of it isn't. A lot of it is, like, subsidized by the federal government. You can only bend so much. Then they'll privatize the roads and do tolls. Yeah, but like, realistically, that can't really happen. There's so much. If you thought the public turn against Biden after the Afghanistan pullout was bad, when roads all across America start getting privatized and having toll roads, even necessary roads, it would be like riots. Like, like full on January 600. You wouldn't be ready for it. Okay. Even if they could pull that off, which they couldn't, this is scary. So if you criticize Elon Musk, Trump's DOJ will send you this letter.
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Unknown A
Members of Congress must have the right to forcefully oppose the Trump administration. I will not be silenced. As attorney general, as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, I received requests for information clarification. Take this request seriously. I respectfully request you clarify your comments. From February 12, 2025. During a live interview with CNN, when asked how Democrats can stop Elon Musk, you spoke clearly. What the American public wants is for us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight. This is an actual fight for democracy. This sounds like a threat to Mr. Musk, an appointed representative of President Trump who you called a dick, and government staff who work for him. Their concerns have led to this inquiry. Damn, that's crazy. Is this, is this where we're at now? Actual 1984 shit, dude. Legendary levels of petty. Yeah, but like, this is kind of how they arrest political opposition.
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Unknown A
I Mean, Kash Patel just got appointed, you know, he just got confirmed. It's not just petty, you know, we take threats against public officials very seriously. I look forward to your cooperation with my letter of inquiry after request. There's no, like, legal weight to this on its own, but it's not like the law matters anymore. Right? These are slap suits. Yeah. Also, Russia does it to any influencer that speaks out against them. If they receive 5 cents of ad money, they consider that as a foreign agent. Yeah, well, I don't really want to, like, hold ourselves up to Russia's standard for journalistic freedom, you know, that to me is a bit of a red flag. Just a little bit. There is no federal anti slap. That's true. Trump backs idea to send some of Doge savings to American citizens. Well, despite what Doge has claimed, so far they've saved what, like 2 billion of verifiable, like, verifiably, they've saved like, 2 billion or something like that.
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Unknown A
Elon Musk said every American should get 5,000, which. Sorry, I can't do. I can't. I'm just a. I'm just a boy. I'm just a stupid boy. I suck dick. I don't do math. 5000 times 300 million. 1, 5 e12. That's probably a big number. Sure, why not, man? But the administration is considering the concept in which 20% of the savings produced by Doge's cost cutting efforts go to American citizens and another 20% goes to paying down the national debt. Wait, where the fuck would the other 60% go? The. The government doesn't have, like, a pro. The government doesn't have, like a bank account in that way. It's not like, oh, we finally saved money or whatever. You put the money towards the principal to roll into the next year's budget. It's all bullshit anyway, because Doge is lying about how much money they saved again.
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Unknown A
What happens when the government starts putting out official documents misrepresenting how much debt it owes and how much money it has? If it's misrepresenting how much money it has, that can only be covered by additional borrowing. Like all of this money, it might be abstract in concept, but these are payments being dispersed by the Department of the Treasury. You can, you know, Musk can dip his balls in the treasury payment dispersal stream all he wants. There's still money running through it. Trillions of dollars running through it every year. All of this gets accounted for at some point or another. It's not funny money. Like, at least it can't be for long. Like, I'll put it this way, okay? There are governments out there that are a lot more corrupt than the United States. For now, at least. Why don't they just do the funny money bit?
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Unknown A
Why doesn't Russia just go, oh, of course we have more money than you think. We're not bankrupting the country by spending a huge portion of our GDP on the war. Actually, we have more money than you think. And the reason for that is because Russia is just, like, writing fake checks and misrepresenting their debt and their money. The reason is because it always comes to account eventually. Like, these discrepancies always emerge under close scrutiny. China does. You did a segment on it. They lie about their GDP pretty severely, for one. I say that we don't know. But there's a difference between lying about your gdp, which is a metric that you use to determine economic activity within a country, and lying about how much money you have. Those are two. Like, the GDP is like an assessment of economic trajectory. I'm not saying it's, like, completely made up, but there's a lot of subjectivity and a lot of ways you can game the numbers in ways that are not necessarily representative of the kind of economic activity we're talking about.
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Unknown A
But at the end of the day, the accounting books, those are on the money, not on the gdp. The GDP is just an abstract assessment. It's an outside thing. You know, if they gave a $5,000 bribe, wouldn't that explode inflation, for one. Yes, but also, they can't, because they're saying they would give 20% of the savings produced by Doge's cost cutting, which is nothing. 20% of 2 billion is $0. Just did that in my head. You're welcome. But, like, it's. It's nonsensical. They could try to win the public's trust with a giant $5,000 check for everyone. But where would that come from? Would. Would. Would that be accounted for in the ledgers? Would we be borrowing that money? Like, would. Would the government admit, okay, we don't have that money from the cost cutting. In reality, we have to, like, add massively to the debt in order to do it, because that would be pretty bad for the economy.
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Unknown A
But it would also indicate they haven't saved any money. What would happen if they just printed 5k for everyone? Well, if they printed it, the Federal Reserve would. I'm sorry, I'm not a modern monetary theorist. Okay, the Federal Reserve would make that printing known, but it's not the Federal Reserve would have to give that money. Like the Fed would have to give that money and everyone would know about it and everyone would know the dollar was being devalued. That would be pretty bad if you're just borrowing. If you're just like racking up America's debt, that's arguably not as bad for inflation. Well, not arguably. It's objectively not as bad for inflation because you're not devaluing the dollar in the same way. All you're really doing is putting a balance on America's tab and giving it to the citizenry. Now that money's being exchanged around the citizenry, the total amount of money hasn't gone up.
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Unknown A
Like the total amount of USD in the world hasn't gone up. You're just kind of like buying back time on your debt clock, you know? Whereas if you print $1.5 trillion and then the Fed just gives that to the government, that devalues the worth of the American dollar. Because that kind of implies that America could just pay down all of its debts by just printing an ung. Godly amount of money, which wouldn't really be solving the debt issue at all because then the perceived value of the dollar would go down, basically. It would be bad. I'm not, I'm not like, not if we lie. Okay, not if we lie. But there's no way for the Fed to print money and give that kind of money to the government without it being public information. There's, there's, there's no, there's simply no way to. The way bills are tracked, the way money's tracked.
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Unknown A
So burn more money. Well, that's against the law, but it would be deflationary if they did and it would increase the value of America's debt, which would be bad for America, even with the new admin. Well, yeah, guys, the way economics works, the way inflation works, this is a fact of reality. I'm not saying that like supply side economics or whatever is like engraved in the, you know, the fucking coda hammer rabbit or what. I'm not saying any of that. I'm just saying like this shit's been happening for a long time. Did you know that the Spanish more or less crashed the European gold economy because they brought back so much gold from the New World that it devalued it broadly. Like even back in those days when you could literally like all the wealth you could have, like in a big treasure chest in a castle, like they brought back so much gold that it became a problem.
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Unknown A
Silver. But yeah, silver Gold, silver, same thing, different colors, whatever. It's fucking. Which is funny because there was a shortage before that. Alexander the Great did the same thing. That's crazy. Also, they can't just introduce the money. The government sells the Fed US Bonds, so the Fed pays the money. So the government. Yeah, exactly. Like, there's no, it's just, it's, it's not workable, you know. Now, now I think this is a solvable problem economically because the real absence of wealth is the trillions that get siphoned out of the economy into offshore illegal tax havens and the trillions that get held in the stock portfolios and bank accounts of the ultra wealthy that don't circulate in the economy because they're being hoarded, which could literally be completely solved with a major upper, like, percentile tax hike to like 99%, which is what we had in the 50s.
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Unknown A
And very aggressive tax investigation or tax fraud investigation abroad. We could spend the Pentagon budget level of money on investigating tax fraud abroad and make a profit off of it. Like, we could literally build a new Pentagon, give it $800 billion in a year and say, your job is now to go after those Cayman island accounts, liquidate those assets and reintroduce them to the economy. And it would make money, it would be profitable if it did that. Which is why Republicans go after the IRS and want to lower taxes. I mentioned that. And someone said if you did it, it would cause huge amounts of inflation. It would. Well, it might cause a bit of inflation, but you would be introducing so much money into the economy that I think you could reasonably control it. Look, it would be like an unprecedented seizure of wealth, but it would be deserving.
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Unknown A
So, you know, do you think they know this or is this stupidity? The wealthy, of course they know it. That's why they do everything they can to keep us from doing it. Yeah, absolutely. That's why the Panama Papers lady got her fucking car bombed, you know, that's why no one looks into those offshore accounts. Do you have any idea how much wealth is held in them? The wealth that's held there, by the way, it's not just like five billionaires, it's everyone. All your favorite celebrities, your comedy show folks, your politicians, they all have money over there because they give their money to very, very talented accountants who hide it over there. You know, it's not easy hiding your money overseas like that. But smart accountants can do it. The right people can do it. It's not just like five people with their evil schemes. It's what you do when you're very wealthy.
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Unknown A
Bill Burr, maybe not Bill Burr. Trillions have been taken out of the tax base this way. Yep. Trillions that could have otherwise been taxed and used to fuel the government, used to f. You know, infrastructural spending, used to fuel, etc. Etc. You know, you understand everyone, including warlords and drug cartels. Yep. Are oligarchs, Russian oligarchs, Brazilian oligarchs, South African oligarchs, Chinese oligarchs. Yeah. Emma Watson had offshore accounts. Lol. Yeah. And here's the thing to understand. Emma Watson probably doesn't know that or didn't know that. Emma Watson, like many wealthy people, doesn't manage her own wealth. God, can you imagine? No, you have. You hire someone to manage your wealth, and those people who you hire are talented and they're paid well, and they make you way more money than they earn in their paycheck because they do shit like that. What's even the point of that?
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Unknown A
You can't do anything with it. Yeah, that's. That's what wealthy people do with their money. They hoard it. Like dragons. Yeah. What do you think they do? You make the money so they want to not get taxed on it. Then you get loans of the money and pay no taxes. Yes. There are ways to leverage that wealth for financing that sort of thing. It's all very complicated and, you know, it's not like I'm an expert on it. That was all financial advice. Yeah. Find yourself an accountant who can help you commit tax fraud in a video game. Don't actually do that. Not that this administration would have an issue with that. Still think you read over the wiki page of hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic, so chat can really understand. I think what I want is like a really good econ textbook that finds ways to cleanly delineate between the real economy and the fake economy.
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Unknown A
The real economy being actual monetary transactions that take place on the ground level. Wages, you know, taxes, exchanges at, like, a local business, you know, like beans. Exactly. Beans and rice. All that stuff that's really happening, that's actually engaged with, you know, the lives of people that can be tracked and organized. It's not speculative, it's not abstract, it's not leveraged. It's just money. Like, you could theoretically replace all of these financial transactions with, like, gold coins and it would all work exactly the same. It'd be clumsy, but it would work. You know, and then on top of that, of course, you have the enormous bubble of speculation. And I like the distinction between these two and the way we calculate our, you know, whatever. I'm a political economy theorist in grad school. I'll email you some. Don't send me a long email. People keep making the mistake of thinking that because they have special knowledge of a subject they that I want their knowledge.
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Unknown A
When they don't realize from my perspective, it's like I get an email that's 18 paragraphs long and I'm just supposed to like take it at face value, you know what I mean? Like somebody is like, hey, just so you know, this is how this works. And I'm like, okay, like I how I'm going to have to fact check everything you're saying because I can't say this just because you've said it. If anything, emailing me is like a early warning sign against somebody's credibility because I know they watch me.