What's the REAL Inflation Rate?

Hey everybody, what is the everyman's CPI?

When is AI going to change the economy? We talk about that. And then Josh Hawley, Senator Josh Hawley joins us to unpack the Senate betrayal. Email us directly, freedom at charliekirk.com. That is freedom at charliekirk.com. Get involved with Turning Point USA at tpusa.com. That is tpusa.com. Start a high school or college chapter today at tpusa.com. If you want to become a member, go to members.charliekirk.com. That's members.charliekirk.com. Listen to all of our episodes advertiser free.

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Go to noblegoldinvestments.com. Things just keep on getting more expensive, but no, there's no inflation. That's what the government tells you, and obviously the government would never lie to you. Joining us now is Jason Trennert, CEO of Strategis. I think I said that right. Did I? Jason, you can correct me. Well, close enough. Strategis. Okay, great.

Okay. Jason, what is the Everyman's CPI or the Common Man's CPI? Yeah, the Common Man's CPI is something that we constructed based on the CPI that comes out of the government, and the government has a headline number of inflation, and then it has what it's called a core number, and core excludes food and energy, you know, which for most people is pretty core. So what we did is we said, what are the things that people pay for that they have to pay for, and that's things like food, energy, shelter, clothing, utilities, insurance, and that's our Common Man's CPI. The Common Man is a reference to Aaron Copeland, the fanfare for the Common Man, but the point is that that is growing much more quickly than wages, and has been growing much more quickly than wages for the last four or five years.

So it's one thing maybe if you can get, you know, a flat panel television cheaper, but it's very different when your utility prices are going up, or food, or shelter, or all the other things that you have to pay for are going up. So then how much has the Every Day Man's CPI gone up in the last year? Well, it's up about 4.2%, so it's just higher than the 3.1% that was reported this morning for the headline number, and it's also grown about 7% more than wages in the past four years. So that's part of the reason why you'll hear people talk about real wages starting to improve, which is wages after inflation, but the problem is that, you know, the level of prices generally doesn't go down.

So if you're behind, you're still behind, even if you're starting to catch up. And that's one of the reasons why the administration is not getting the credit for the economy it believes it deserves, despite the fact that you're close to full employment, and stock prices are near all-time highs, that average person is still very far behind where they were before the pandemic. Yeah, so the other question I have that I think is important, can you just reiterate, how does the government currently calculate CPI, and how did we get such a bizarre calculation that the media always touts?

Yeah, it's, Charlie, I'm going to tell you, it's pretty complicated. You know, the BLS, there's about eight or nine hundred people that work there that work on this thing, which is, you know, probably gives you an idea of part of the problem with government debt. You have that many people working on a price, but it's quite literally thousands of prices that go into this calculation, and it looks at prices on a month-to-month basis, and then I tend to look at it on a year-over-year basis, and it gives various weightings to those factors that are in the CPI. So I can't give you a quick example, because it literally would be spreadsheets upon spreadsheets that would come up with it. We isolated 67 major categories within the thousands that we think are quite big, and that's how we came up with our common man CPI.

We made a decision as to what's discretionary and what is something you have to pay for. What, I mean, the obvious answer is fiscal policy coupled with monetary policy, but what specifically is driving this inflation from a policy perspective? If you had to explain that to somebody who is not as initiated in economic or finance parlance.

Yeah, there's two, you know, too easy, because I think inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. So we've increased the money supply by 40 percent since 2000, so it would stand to reason that prices would be up 40 percent over some period of time, and then we've also increased the size of our budget deficit dramatically over that period of time. So we're up to 34 trillion dollars in debt, and so while the Fed is trying to tighten monetary policy, to a certain extent it's being offset by massive fiscal stimulus, by massive government spending. Last year the deficit was seven percent of GDP, which is unheard of at a period of time in which the unemployment rate is this low, and we've only done that three other times in the post-war period, but each time the unemployment rate was above seven, and the deficit only goes higher when we eventually do go into recession. The deficit will go meaningfully higher because there are things called automatic stabilizers, like unemployment insurance or food stamps or welfare, that automatically kick in.

They don't have to be voted upon by Congress, they're automatic into the system. So this is very reckless, in my opinion, to be running deficits of this magnitude when there's no obvious immediate need that we have to. Yeah, I mean, are we at war against imperial Japan and Nazi Germany?

I mean, what is the, this is such an important and smart point. Typically, deficits are saved for emergencies. That was all argument for COVID. It's just a short-term thing, but we are now posting massive structural deficits, and there will be a reckoning, everybody. We are a debtor nation. We owe more than we are worth. We're going to encounter hyperinflation, and there's no urgency. Our leaders just authorized another couple hundred billion dollars to go to a foreign country. Your response?

Yeah, no, this is Charlie. I mean, and again, this can get a little complicated. One of the things that has happened since the global financial crisis in 2008-2009 is that the Fed has largely monetized most of the debt, which is just a fancy way for saying it's bought most of the debt from the federal government. So what would normally give you an indication to stop spending would be higher interest rates has largely been obscured by the fact that you have a captive buyer in the Fed.

And so this has also been highly regressive, which is to say that your average guy has gotten zero on his savings from 2009 through 2021, while a wealthy person that has a private equity portfolio or something that's highly leveraged has done great. So, this is a very, you know, I think it was started with good intentions, but it's gotten out of hand. And right now, the fiscal monetary policy, they're actually right now, they're working at odds with one another.

But this massive, what they call quantitative easing has allowed policymakers to live in a fantasy world that their spending doesn't have any consequences. And sooner or later, it will have consequences. Yeah. Privately, they think A.I. is going to solve this, that there are going to be such efficiencies, such growth, that can you talk about that in a lot of these private intelligentsia circles, they whisper, just the video will solve it.

You know, A.I. is going to just basically make labor irrelevant and we'll have a brave Yeah, that and Ozempic, you know, and it would be the two things that, you know, and certainly, you know, the U.S. is extraordinarily special. You have to say that because it does have the most innovative companies in the world. In my opinion, that's largely in spite of the government as opposed to because of it. But that is, it's not an excuse to run massive structural deficits. And I would also say when it comes to A.I., no one really quite knows how how consequential it will be. I don't doubt that it will be consequential. I do very much doubt that anyone knows when and or that or that it will be all good. I mean, you have 30 million jobs displaced.

That's going to expand the social safety net. So. Right. You know, and again, this is so early. You're in such the nation stages of this technology that you can't, you know, I think Churchill once said, you know, you don't want to confuse deliverance with victory.

He's talking about Dunkirk. And so, you know, this is what we're attempting to do. We're conflating the idea that we, you know, we might get lucky with the idea that we're winning. And again, we are the reserve currency. There are good reasons for that. But there's no divine right to have a reserve currency. There are many societies that have lost it and they've lost it largely in the same way we appear to be trying to lose it, which is by foreign excursions and bread and circuses and all sorts of other things to try to keep doing our work.

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That is Patriot Mobile dot com slash Charlie and free activation using offer code Charlie. So, Jason, challenge me if I'm incorrect here, but if the laws of economics, which don't change, are not going to be uprooted in the next couple of months and years, it's either they can tax their way out of these massive deficits, they can cut spending or they could decide to inflate their way out of it. Certainly seems that they're signaling and sending smokescreen. Hey, we're just going to inflate our way out of it.

There's no spending cuts on the horizon. This is why I think we're going to be entering a new normal of five, seven double digit inflation annualized. Am I looking at that correctly? I think you're right. And but as you mentioned in the last segment, I would say there's four ways. One is you can just you can try to grow your way out.

I do think that is possible. And that's through pro gross policies, right? Like in the last administration, but otherwise, you either have to take pain by raising taxes or cutting spending, or you have to just accept higher levels of inflation.

So that's, that's basically it. And politically, it's always easier to accept higher rates of inflation, as it's a for most politicians, that is the almost perfect answer. Because it's, it's hard to pin on one person precisely, it doesn't move necessarily quickly, if you're particularly if you have debt in your own currency, like the US does. And so it becomes a very, very attractive alternative to people that don't want to make hard decisions. And I think that would describe a good portion of our political elites, I would, I would say, yeah, and so there is this hope that maybe there'll be this 20 to 30% growth, because we have a bunch of robots and AI solving everything. But of course, no conversation about the cost or the displacement. Or, I mean, how do you even integrate it?

Right? I mean, how do you integrate AI into? I mean, it's a nice little widget and tool, I guess. And by the way, the people who are going to be immediately displaced are actually the college educated mid-level management, first and foremost. It's not the plumber or the electrician or the welder hilariously, which is why they're like, oh, we have to get robots too, so that we could displace jobs everywhere. So this is gonna be a lot messier than people think. It's okay, you have this really powerful technology.

How does it apply? I mean, yeah, it's, it's like a fun parlor trick. I mean, it can help you prepare for homework. Right. Your thoughts. Right.

Yeah, I can help you write, you know, dirty limericks and all sorts of, you know, right now. I'm not saying it won't have an impact. But I also think that, like many other significant technological changes, it takes a long time to get into business processes that really change the way people do business. And the internet, as an example, really took about 14 years before it was something that was truly integrated into business processes and had a meaningful change in the way people were able to earn profits.

The Lord only knows how long this will take. But it's not, I'm relatively certain it's not going to be in the next year or two years, this is going to be an evolutionary process. And as you point out, there will be unintended consequences.

Generally speaking, I'm a very free market person. So I don't want to create artificial barriers around technology, because I think there's always new technology and there's new innovations that come about. But I think the other point that you made, I think was a very good one, if you don't mind my saying, is that everyone's been telling kids, I have a college-aged son and I have a daughter who's 15, and everyone for the last 10 years has been telling them to learn how to code. And I would say artificial intelligence, in my opinion, the most immediate casualty of artificial intelligence is coding. You're still going to be people that really know how to do it, but there's going to be a need for a lot fewer of them. And as you pointed out, the trades, the things where you need a human being to come into your house in the middle of the night to stop a flood, that's not going to be something that's easily displaced by technology.

That's exactly right. And if you look at, it's also they're replacing journalists too. It turns out it doesn't take that much brainpower to write an article for The New York Times. There's all these unionization campaigns and walkouts because they're afraid A.I.

is going to start to replace them. Turns out it's not that creative. But also understand with A.I., and we'll disclose it here, is that A.I. can only do what has already ever been done.

There is not yet, unless the leaks from Bard are correct, new, something new that it can't do math, it can't create ex nihilo, yet it can only process that which has already been and organize it very, very quickly. So we shall see. Jason, thank you so much. Thank you. They suggest gold and silver, all these but goodies in the finance world. Plus, they've got a sweet deal, a free one fourth of an ounce gold standard gold coin this month. If you qualify, it's pretty cool, right? If you're curious, just give them a call at 877-646-5347.

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That is noblegoldinvestments.com. Joining us now is Senator Josh Hawley, who unsurprisingly voted perfectly yesterday and throughout the weekend. Senator, thank you for joining the program. It's a disappointment to see this legislation advance, Senator, but I guess the buried nugget of positivity is more of your colleagues voted no than yes. Your reaction, Senator? Yeah, thanks for having me.

It's always great to be with you, Charlie. And yes, you know, I mean, here's the deal is that Republicans, Republican leadership couldn't even get a majority of the Senate Republicans to vote for this thing. And thank goodness. I mean, why would you vote for another 60 billion dollars for the Ukraine war machine? No oversight, no plan, no nothing. I mean, it's just writing checks to Joe Biden and his cronies in Ukraine. It's unbelievable.

And I was just, you know, the war machine always gets paid. That's what I've learned in D.C.. Meanwhile, if you're an American, you know, somebody actually lives in this country.

I mean, good luck to you. The border is wide open. Our infrastructure is falling apart. You can't afford to buy gas.

But, hey, unlimited money for Ukraine. It's a travesty. Yeah. And so the numbers were winnowing. And I also say this with a little bit of a grain of cynicism. Senator, can you explain vote swapping? Because some of these people who voted no, I know they're your colleagues. I think that if it was a 90 plus vote, they would have voted yes. It seems as if some of the old bulls and the people who are just immune to any sort of primary challenges, they voted in favor. Can you I mean, is was this an ideological shift?

Was there some vote swapping or was that some people were afraid because the base is so on fire with this topic? Well, I do think that voters are making themselves very clear about this, which is they want investment in the United States of America. They actually want to secure our border, not Ukraine. They actually want to get crime down in our cities, not Ukraine.

So rather than spending another 60 billion on Ukraine, think what that could do in our communities in this country. Our voters are saying that loud and clear. And I just I don't understand, Charlie, why it's a virtue for some politicians, many politicians in Washington to give the middle finger to voters and say, oh, look at me, I'm so brave. I'm ignoring our voters. Our voters are idiots.

I mean, you've got some senators out there openly calling voters idiots. No, that's right. I mean, that's an approach.

Yeah, that's an approach. I mean, to me, what is courageous is actually to follow your oath of office and to do the right thing and to do what's right for this country. And what's right for this country is to invest in this country, to secure this country. What's not right is to spend billions on a foreign war that we have no plan to win, that we have a commander in chief whose senile should even be in office. Why are you supporting that guy and his failed policies?

I don't get it. So, Senator, I'm going to read one of your colleagues quotes. Our base cannot possibly know what's at stake at the level that any well-briefed U.S. senator should know about what's at stake of Putin wins. Number one, I want your reaction to just the snobbery and the contempt that Senator Tillis espouses here. But you're a senator.

What do you know that we don't know, Senator? You know, my view is, is that the American people are pretty smart folks. They're not idiots.

They're not stupid. They know what's going on in Ukraine. They look over there and they say, huh, looks like we've spent one hundred fifteen billion dollars. Looks like we've spent more than all the Europeans put together. Looks like we've been doing this for two years and there's no sign of a victory.

Joe Biden couldn't find his way to the paper bag. Why would we spend more money when our own borders overrun, our own roads are crumbling? That's what voters are saying. And you know what? They're right. They're not dumb. They're right. So I've yet to hear an answer substantively to any of that. And I just think, listen, I'll let my colleagues speak for themselves. But I think calling voters idiots, man, I mean, that's something.

But I wouldn't recommend it. Yeah, it's breathtaking and remarkable. I don't think Tom Tillis is going to come on this show any time soon. So so, Senator, I am curious, just do they ever specify what does success look like or what would the end of a conflict be? Senator McConnell comes out and he says that, you know, we must defeat the Russians. Well, that's that's quite a statement. Does that involve Crimea? Does that involve all of eastern Ukraine? Senator Mitt Romney said that this is the most important vote that we take as senators.

Do they ever specify what does success look like? Number one. And number two, I'm struggling to understand how this is in our national security interest. Yeah, I haven't heard answers to any of those questions.

And here's here's the irony. We're being told by the Biden administration that there's not going to be a military victory in Ukraine. That's what they've told us.

You want to talk about what senators gets briefed on. That's what we've been briefed on repeatedly is that there's not going to be a military victory. There's going to have to be a negotiated peace. That's what Biden's people are saying. OK, well, then what's that going to look like and what's their plan for it?

We have no idea. But yet in the absence of that, we're just going to write a check for another 60 billion dollars. And by the way, like a million people crossed the border yesterday. I mean, that's that's really where our priorities are. I don't get it. And frankly, Charlie, I'm I'm fed up with it.

I mean, I've heard this song and dance for years now. I have not voted for this Ukraine spending. What I've tried to do over and over is actually get an accounting of how our money is being spent. I'd like to know where the money's going. We have no earthly idea. We do know that our own government thinks that the Ukrainian government is corrupt, that they've got major kleptomania problems, which, of course, is a surprise to nobody. And yet we just keep writing them checks.

I just I think it is, as I said yesterday, it is the middle finger to middle America. So there is a story that is gaining steam here. And last evening, David Sachs with Elon Musk were in a Twitter space with Senator Mike Lee, Senator Ron Johnson. And this has been reported for quite a while, but it's really starting to gain momentum. I'm going to play this piece of tape here, because, Senator, I want your reaction, because this has been around for like the last year. We're finally getting somewhere.

Play cut 55. Could we get a real investigation, some congressional oversight, a congressional investigation of what exactly happened in that sort of March, April period at the beginning of the war, where, again, they had a draft agreement in Istanbul and then Boris Johnson came in and the Ukrainians walked away? I mean, I would love for the Congress to ask real questions of the administration in its oversight capacity, asking what was your involvement in sabotaging that deal? So, Senator, what is your reaction? It seems as if that we dispatched Tony Blinken and also Boris Johnson to obliterate a peace deal that could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Your reaction, Senator? Well, I think that we do need to answer that question. I mean, that is absolutely a perfect question. And we should know the American people should know. We should know how every tax dollar, every dime has been spent in Ukraine. Charlie, we have no idea. We have no idea where this money is going.

How about Nord Stream 2? I mean, we've now had widespread news reports that our own intelligence agencies were involved, at least at a bare minimum, involved in training the teams that blew up Nord Stream 2. I mean, that's news.

Is that accurate? What was our level of involvement? Did we know about it beforehand?

There have been news reports, and I'm talking like the New York Times, suggesting we did know about it beforehand. I mean, this is crazy, crazy stuff. And to just willfully ignore it, you know, put your fingers in your ears, say, la, la, la, la, la, write more checks to Ukraine.

That's essentially what the Senate just did last night. And I tell you what's going to happen. This is going to end up just like Afghanistan, just like Vietnam. In about 10 years here, all of these same people are going to look back and say, oh, gosh, I just we had no idea. We could never have known the money would be stolen like this. We could never have known that this would end so badly. We could never have known. Yes, they could have. They don't want to know.

They just want to spend your money and they want to give you moral lectures about how superior they are. That's the issue here. That's what we're seeing. So, Senator, what are we hearing about any backdoor negotiations with the House to potentially block Speaker Johnson's ability to block this bill? What are you hearing in that regard? Well, I think the speaker's got the cards here and I hope he will stand firm.

I mean, he has said, he's issued several statements. If I'm reading correctly, I'd take them to be that they're not going to move on this Ukraine package. They're not going to take it up.

And that's exactly right. They need to, if they want to do something, first of all, they shouldn't spend any more money in Ukraine. I mean, they ought to send a clear message to our allies.

It's time for our allies to step up here and defend their own backyard. We shouldn't spend any more money, number one. Number two, they ought to move an Israel aid package separately. But really, Speaker Johnson is in control here and I hope that he will maintain control and stay true to what I think he has said. Sometimes it's hard to say, hard to decipher, but what I think he has said, which is that he is not going to take up this bill as passed by the Senate. I sure hope he doesn't because it's a bad bill. It does nothing to secure our national interests, our borders, zero zilch. And the House, you know, the House ought to keep their pledges. So, final kind of thought here, Senator, can you walk us through from your perspective how the what went wrong with the border deal negotiation and how foreign funding all of a sudden superseded the priority of the invasion on our southern border?

Sure. The the negotiation on the border was always about Ukraine. I've said this from the first from from last fall when Mitch McConnell said, OK, we're going to do border in Ukraine together. It was always about just peeling off enough Republican votes to get Ukraine. It was always about Ukraine. So it was always going to be a bad deal for Republicans, always 100 percent. And that's why McConnell shut every Republican senator except for one or two out of the deal.

None of us had any any visibility into what was being negotiated. And that was by design. The whole idea was to to spring it on us and say, OK, here we go. Best we can get now.

Shut up. Take this and vote for Ukraine. That was always the plan. And that then blew up in their faces because the deal was so bad because, of course, Democrats weren't going to give Republicans a good deal.

Why would they? They knew that Republicans were desperate to vote for Ukraine. Why would they compromise? So it was a horrible deal, as you thank you for covering it in depth. Horrible deal.

It fell apart. But, Charlie, it was designed to be a bad deal. It was always about Ukraine. And the proof of that is there was never any serious attempt to involve Republican senators in negotiation. McConnell ran the negotiations.

It was done behind closed doors. It was always about getting to this last night's vote, this morning's vote to send more money to Ukraine. Very good. Senator, keep fighting. We have your back. You're one of the most important voices in the Senate.

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Who can you trust? Government leaders repeatedly fail us. Self-appointed experts have led us astray. Distrust and so-called authorities is spreading like a bad cold and we can't quite shake it. But you're not as powerless as they'd like you to believe when there's no one to depend on. It's time to rely on yourself.

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My patriot supply dot com. I want to, I want to conclude, it's kind of ties in the Tucker Carlson story as well, which they're still losing their mind over Tucker Carlson. Visiting and interviewing Putin. Now, interestingly, that was not a softball interview. Tucker did great.

I encourage all of you to watch it. How many views is that interview at now? Tens of millions? Over 100 million?

I'm not sure. I'd be curious how someone could find that interview objectionable. OK, yeah, Putin was allowed to talk uninterrupted. And what I found to just be hilarious about the whole thing is, you know, they're there to talk with the Ukraine war. And Putin says, yeah, I'll get to your question. Let me let me give you the history of how Russia was formed.

Going back to 900. Oh, OK. So 199.8 million people, 200 million people have viewed the Putin Tucker interview. In other words, more people viewed the Tucker Putin interview than the Super Bowl. Our prediction was right. Our prediction was right. We predicted that the Tucker Putin interview would get better ratings than the Super Bowl. The media is really upset that we were even allowed to see this.

I watched it multiple times. I wanted to make sure I listened very carefully to what Putin was saying. Again, I'm not a Putin fan. He doesn't want a free society.

I want a free society. It also was just kind of meandering through Russian history at times, which found to be rather unpersuasive, not exactly that interesting to me. Other parts, I thought he was making some really good points. I thought that Putin was making some points where he was basically saying, some points where he was basically saying, why is the West continually lied about who gets NATO membership and NATO expansion? You guys said that NATO wasn't going to expand. And yet then you have Lady Graham coming and saying, we're gonna play offense against Moscow.

We're gonna play offense against Moscow. The Russian hawks are losing because they are not on the side of truth, obsessively hating Vladimir Putin and Russia. And you can hate them.

Let me say it differently. Believing that that is the greatest threat to American national security, where obviously the Chinese Communist Party or the Mexican drug cartels are far more important, lethal towards the future of America. And Putin has said he wouldn't invade Poland.

You can disagree with that. You can distrust him. But why would he invade Poland? He explained that Ukraine has historic ties to Russia. And if he invaded Poland, then that would invoke Article five of NATO and we'd be involved. OK, but we're involved right now.

We're spending hundreds of billions of dollars and we're involved right now. What I analyzed from the the Tucker Putin interview is Putin just kind of and Tucker isolated on this and Putin brushed it away is he did feel a little bitter. And I thought that was really smart when Tucker said that Putin is someone who thought he could get along with the West, who was lied to by Bill Clinton, lied to by George W. Bush. Putin seems very obsessed with old grievances, literally 300 year old ones. But does anybody who saw the Putin Tucker interview walk away thinking that that's the biggest threat to the American homeland?

Anybody? He's like a lying gangster, basically where we're at. He's a guy that's like obsessed with controlling Ukraine as part of Russia. He believes that the fall of the USSR was one of the greatest failures in Russian history.

Part of the interview was Putin saying like, hey, the fall of the USSR could have and should have been the beginning of a new normal and foreign alignments. But the war machine of Langley, Virginia, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Raytheon, they don't want peace. They don't want peace. The American government does not want peace. The American government wants war and strife.

They get powerful and wealthy from war. NATO was allegedly established to fight the USSR. So when the USSR fell, why didn't we let Russia participate with NATO or just get rid of NATO altogether?

Donald Trump said some stuff recently about NATO that are making people go nuts. So what is the purpose of NATO now? Why did we keep the cold war going cold war going when the whole reason for it went away? It's the same reason why government programs never disappear, because entrenched bureaucrats and the oligarchs of the national defense industry, they need you to hate Russia. They need more money against Russia. They need the relentless saber rattling so they can stay rich and powerful.

And while the homeland falls apart. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always. Freedom at Charlie Kirk dot com. Thanks so much for listening and God bless. For more on many of these stories and news you can