The economy is doing well. The stock market is up. Unemployment is the lowest since the 60s. Under 4%.
People are working. And yet people are still worried about the table. What's on the table? Inflation. Talk about that for a second. What can Joe do about inflation? Well, it's what Joe is doing.
So you're right, inflation is down. But recently he's been meeting with CEOs of the major companies like Target and Walmart and grocery stores to say, you have to bring down these prices. And they've responded. They've responded.
Yes, it was just in the New York Times last week. So he's going to continue doing this. So he's going up to people and saying, assuming that they're gouging. So that's one of the things he says. The reason why prices aren't coming down is because these people are gouging or they're rich and they don't want to pay taxes.
It's always an enemy, never him. And it's true, some of these places have brought down prices. Just keep in mind, part of it is the supply chain. Part of it is the gas prices, the shipping, all the costs that go into that before the product gets on the shelf. And the costs, the cost of all these goods that come to fruition. It's a capitalist society. If you had competitive costs, if Walmart was bringing their prices much lower than Target, Target would have to respond. Those are market forces. Instead, he says the economy's going good, lower your prices, or you're gonna get Donald Trump. Is that the way the economy works?
The way you are told it works, rather than how you know it works for you and your family. Matt Taibbi talked about that in his new column in Racket News. It's not me, it's you blaming the public's perception of the economy. He's using the words and the perception of the administration. Matt, welcome back.
Thanks for having me, Brian. It's kind of weird. I mean, once in a while you might say, are military strong and then find out things that make you feel differently. You might say the economy is good and then realize, okay, this is not resonating.
You spent $20 million last year telling everyone binomics is great, it didn't work. Why does this administration still cling to the numbers and try to convince people they're right instead of you being right? Yeah, it's a very strange thing. It kind of reminds me there was an old Joseph Heller play where a general said, well, we're gonna bomb Constantinople off the map. And somebody says, yes, well, why don't we just bomb the map? And that's what they're doing.
They're just trying to bomb the map. They're trying to tell people that, look, the statistics say you have a good economy and what you feel or what you perceive when you go to the store is not rational. So when you buy a $4.50 chocolate chip cookie and you have a reaction to that, that seems a little high, you're being irrational, they tell you. And it's gone beyond saying people are being irrational or partisan in their political choices. They're saying that their own perceptions of the economy are incorrect, which is kind of an amazing thing for the press to do.
It is, it's really bizarre. And some of the people that have counseled him to knock it off is James Carville and David Axelrod, two people that got Bill Clinton elected twice and David Axelrod, everything to do with Obama winning twice. He's trying to send a message.
But instead, when this message gets to Joe Biden, the one time people have reported, he used an expletive to talk about Joe David Axelrod. So for Matt, what do you think is going on? Do you think his staff is telling him one thing and he's doing something else?
Or do you think they're all on the same page? We'll keep telling the American people things are better than they are, and they'll eventually believe it. Well, one thing I know from talking to people who've worked in White Houses or in staffs for senators is that most politicians don't understand even basic economics very well. So it's entirely possible that Joe Biden may not realize that when the Fed adds $5.5 trillion to its balance sheet that this will inevitably have an inflationary effect on the economy. And that when his aides tell him that by telling retailers to lower prices, he's fixed the problem. And that he doesn't understand that the public is looking at 20 years of policies that are clearly inflationary and they're dealing with trying to pay the bills and it's different for them. I just think that most politicians they're not really in touch with what ordinary people are going through. Right, you would just think that there might be consultants that want to earn their money. It could tell people you got to change this message, you got to give people an idea what's going on.
I also thought it was pretty learned too that Pete Buttigieg went on with Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation. And basically they said, look, you got all this money from the inflation reduction act, what have you done for certain terminals? We've done a lot. Well, I hear you got seven electric car terminals in the country with something like $30 billion. He goes, right, we're gonna have so many by the end, but you're not doing anything now. So even the money they put into this infrastructure bill, the same thing that Barack Obama found out, there was no such thing as a shovel running project.
That's what he's finding out now too. So we spent the money, it goes into the debt, but we're not even getting the infrastructure yet. Well, right, and this is the whole premise of, for instance, like modern monetary theory is that it's okay to endlessly print money if there's enough personnel and expertise and resources in the economy to absorb all that slack. But the problem is, if you do quantitative easing, three rounds of that, and you do the Obama stimulus and then you do the CARES Act, which adds another $6 trillion to the economy, if you don't actually do all those shovel ready projects, it's going to come out in inflation, which is just an indirect tax on ordinary people. And I think they may not realize that that's actually what's happening because these folks live in little archipelagos of wealth in Georgetown and the Hamptons, and they don't know what ordinary people are dealing with.
They're not like you guys in New Jersey who do know where they're ordinary people, exactly. So if you wanted proof that what Matt wrote about and what we're speaking about is actually what's coming out of the White House, here it is, various comments from White House officials on various networks about the economy, cut 33. It's real, but the fact is that if you take a look at what the people have, they have the money to spend.
We are helping dig families out of debt. I believe continued progress on inflation will benefit both the American people and the global economy. This is a president who has been very clear about making sure that he's building an economy that leaves no one behind. So you could say all you want, but people are not adhering to that message.
I also thought it was pretty good in that political story this week. One of the comments, Matt Taibbi, was that every time people compare the Trump economy to the Biden economy, the word was we lose, meaning the Joe Biden people lose. So we have to overcome that. That's what made them pessimistic. And that's why the headline said it's basically panic time in the White House. Yeah, and I think that comes out in a variety of ways, the increasing frustration with the questions about inflation, the bizarre stunt with sending Robert De Niro to the trial the other day. How do you view that, by the way? Look, I thought that was a crazy move because after denying for so long that the trial was political, you send a campaign person to basically create a commercial outside of a courthouse. So it doesn't make it sound depoliticized. But this economic question, I first ran into this in 2009 when I heard that people in Treasury had to hear from retailers that people didn't have money to spend after the crash heading into the holiday season because they just didn't know anybody who had real economic problems. And this is something that, in addition to the basic lack of knowledge about economics, has been a persistent problem with politics in this country for a while now.
And I think this administration is particularly bad on that front. See why CarShield is voted America's most trusted vehicle protection company and see why our commitment to our customers has landed us an A rating with the Better Business Bureau. We have live reps here to answer all your questions. Drivers who are covered will not have to pay for covered repairs again. This protection plan is at an all-time low. Additionally, drivers who activate this vehicle protection today will also receive free roadside assistance, free towing, and car rental options at no additional cost. Visit us for your free quick quote today at carshield.com slash audio. That's carshield.com slash audio.
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All right, so pick it up. This is another reason to get racket news with Matt Taibbi. Matt, I want to bring it to another area in which you were leading the charge, and that was the Twitter files. You know, before he bought Twitter, Elon Musk was kind of on the outs with Donald Trump, but after he bought it, it turns out he's on the outs with this administration, who seemed to have a sudden interest in investigating everything he's doing, which has brought him and Trump together. Now they're talking, Trump was asked yesterday, what do you think of Musk?
He goes, I'd like to have him on as a consultant somehow. Could you give me an idea of what changed for Elon Musk with this administration once he bought Twitter, brought you guys in to expose what was happening? Yeah, you know, Elon, it's tough to say because he's such a difficult character to read, but clearly I think the experience of buying Twitter and seeing the sort of avalanche of negative publicity that came with that, I mean, he was identified as a foreign threat actor in the front pages of the New York Times after he bought the company. I think that had, you know, probably a big impact on his thinking and probably was one of the reasons he decided to release the material that ended up in hands of reporters like me. And there's no question that that's gonna be difficult to repair between the government and him because they will not forgive him, I don't think, for releasing all that stuff that embarrassed the FBI and all those other agencies. For putting you guys in there, Barry Weiss in there, to find out what they were up to.
Not making it up, not giving opinion, but you were digging it up. Right, I mean, he didn't even know what we were looking at. I mean, this stuff was just coming out and it just happened to be extremely embarrassing to the government. I mean, I think he was expecting that there would be stuff that would be embarrassing to Twitter in there. And the stuff about the government was something that was unexpected to all of us, so yeah. And he's a person who has a lot of federal contracts with SpaceX, so this was a very sticky situation for him when we started putting out damaging information about the military-industrial conflicts, or the intelligence community, or whatever it was. I mean, those were not harmless stories for him, I don't think. But yeah, it clearly complicated his situation with the government.
And we know about Starlink and they value it as. And Matt, the other thing is, he's a leading electric car company in the country, maybe the world, and they don't have any dialogue with him. But yet, that's their agenda. Get America to buy electric cars, but they don't wanna talk to the guy that did it all himself.
Yeah, he got some subsidies, but for the most part, he put all that infrastructure in those charging stations himself. The other area I'd like to bring you to is what's happening with COVID. Now, last week, Dr. David Morins was on Capitol Hill. He was a senior scientific advisor to a guy to the Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Of course, he was writing side by side with Anthony Fauci.
Turns out, he made a huge effort to avoid the virus. He made a huge effort to avoid the Freedom of Information Act, Matt. And he was bragging about it on different communications, how he's gonna do everything on Gmail, how he's got experts coaching him so no one can see the interaction with Fauci and others.
Here's a little of the exchanges on Capitol Hill when he got found out, cut 39. I think there's some misunderstanding here. The secret back channel joking terminology, to my knowledge, was never about FOIAs. So you're gonna joke about back channels to spellings on queries. That's a joke.
Not very funny to me. I would have to see this communication. It's confusing to me because I had no back channel.
I could walk into Tony's office and talk to him anytime I wanted. There's no need to have a back channel. And I had face-to-face meetings with him all the time. So the back channel thing- So you deny these statements is what you're saying? I think there's a mix-up somewhere. So you deny it?
Yes. The problem with him denying it, it was in black and white, Matt. I know you're laughing.
By the way, Matt's on Skype now, so if you're able to watch on the app, you'll see Matt and his Adidas cap. But Matt, you're laughing. He's denying his own words, so you can't do that. Yeah, and as somebody who probably last year sent out 500 FOIA letters, I've invested a huge amount of money in that over the years. It's incredibly frustrating when politicians skirt the law on FOIA. We know they do it. We know they routinely deny legitimate FOIA requests, basically daring reporters and citizens to try to take them to court because they know it will cost us money. But when they're out in the open saying that we're going to misspell things to evade search engines or put them on signal or in private servers so that the people are not allowed to see these communications, they've created this whole legend that the government and researchers and scientists are under assault by people who are filing congressional subpoenas or FOIA requests as if they're entitled to secrecy. They're not. They work for us. Their communications are not private. They belong to the public. And when they hide that stuff, it's an incredibly serious violation.
It completely undermines how the press works. And this is an area where I'm in favor of very stiff punishments because they're just not allowed to do this. And Matt, I'm never going to forget those two years and how they made up things on the fly. They condemn people for using ivermectin, told everybody to wear masks, told people to stay home, then found out we can go outside, then told us we have to stay six feet apart, stopping kids from going to class because they couldn't spread the desk out. Then it turns out they made it up to six feet apart, stopping kids from now they had to learn on Zoom, the kids who had the money to get Zoom. Everybody got hurt and no one was ever held accountable. And they mocked people, they questioned their expertise. I just want you to hear one more exchange between Nicole Maliatakis and Dr. David Marenz.
This guy's caught red handed and he's trying to talk us away out of it, cut 41. Why did you choose to use personal email? That's because that was not government business.
What happens to a private citizen in a death threat situation in my mind is not government business. Well, it is government business if you are advising him, you're advocating on his behalf, you're editing things, letters that he wanted to send to NIH. You did all that on personal email, correct? I don't remember, but if I did, I shouldn't have done that, that's wrong. It is wrong and that's why we're asking the question because you were using it for official business. He did it, he went around it, he mocked it, he was exposed. He apologized for the tone, but not for the content.
Final thought? Yeah, it's unbelievable. I mean, I worked with Michael Shellenberger on the story about the letters with the scientists who wrote the proximal origins of COVID paper for Nature Magazine, where we had all these incredible exchanges where they're basically saying, yeah, it sounds like a lab league or that's totally plausible, but it's hidden, right? It shouldn't be, that stuff should all be public. We could have spared ourselves years of misconceptions and deceptions if we had known this upfront, and that's why you cannot hide this stuff.
The public needs to be informed to make good political decisions, and they're preventing that from happening. And Matt, remember, if you said lab league, you were shadow banned or banned in particular, you were vilified, you were mocked on other channels, you're acting irresponsibly instead of acting like a journalist or having legitimate questions, whether it's a podcast or a newspaper, or in your case, racket news. Matt Taibbi, thanks so much, always great. How do we get racket news? It's just www.racket.news, so thanks very much, Brian, I really appreciate it. I love his last column, it's not me, it's you, blaming the public's perception of the economy.
