Trump Sends So-Called ‘Experts’ Reeling After Historic First 6 Months
All the signs are there - we are on the verge of an economic boom, and a boom that no generation before us has ever experienced...
Transcript
This transcript has been modified in structure for easier reference…
In this first 6 months of the Trump administration,
we've entered unknown territory
there are a lot of known unknowns
We're doing things we've never done before
experts think they can predict it, but they've been wrong
TARIFFS
Usually tariffs are not a source of revenue because traditional economic orthodoxy says that whatever revenue they generate, they decrease GDP by inflicting a tax on goods.
But yet, we don't know what the profit margin is in these countries
perhaps the tariffs are not resulting in rising prices
At least they haven't in May and June, which suggests again that the Germans or the South Koreans or the Chinese were making so much money by exporting to the United States, while protecting their own industry and piling up surpluses that they could pay tariffs and still remain in our market at a cost competitive profit.
The result is that we're getting up to 26 billion dollars a month and higher
No one anticipated that.
Scott Basant, Treasury Secretary, said in theory the year could end with a third of a trillion dollars, $330 billion
That's almost 5% of our revenue is coming from tariffs, which was thought would be impossible.
DEBT
Another impossibility is usually we're running a $2 trillion debt
That's what we were usually told by people.
But in the month of May, there were more federal revenues than there were
debits.
And that was a result of the Doge cuts and the tariffs and the seasonal increase in federal revenues that come through taxation and other charges against the private sector.
Everybody said, "Well, May is always a good month. It's the one good month of the year."
But we haven't had a surplus since 2017 in any month, which is kind of strange.
If we're going to run this huge $2 trillion budget deficit, and while we're
discussing it, more money is coming in than going out, and we have this known
unknown about tariffs, then something's up.
And that something's up is amplified.
img: U.S. Department of Treasury
FOREIGN INVESTMENT
When we look at the foreign investment, we were told 4 trillion, 6 trillion, 8 trillion.
That's a phenomenal number.
Nobody has ever had $8 trillion of foreign investment in the United States in 1 year.
The Secretary of Energy Doug Bergam says to us now that the actual revenue, or I shouldn't say revenue, but the actual income or amount or capital investment from foreign sources of various statuses could be 15 trillion.
Economists have ratios for each billion dollars in foreign investment, depending on the nature of the foreign investment and the jobs created.
If this were true, it's a phenomenal number.
ASSETS
He also said something that was quite striking that the value of US assets that have been on tap, natural gas, coal, oil, timber, rare earth minerals is somewhere between 100 trillion and 200 trillion.
Now, we don't want to exploit and plunder our countryside, but it's something to think about that if we were not buying rare earth minerals from China, and we probably may not be, or we had a mechanism to tap our coal and use it cleanly to help generate the electricity for AI.
This is unusual.
This is crazy.
$15 trillion of foreign investment, $200 trillion of unrealized assets.
And remember that the $15 trillion
is coming from people who were not willing to do that
prior to Donald Trump
They're doing it in fear of tariffs.
MILITARY RECRUITMENT
There's a couple of other things, and that is the military was short anywhere, depending on who you talk to, 45 to 65,000 recruits.
They were they could only get 50% of their benchmarks. a year ago at this time about 50% about only about half of the people were enlisting.
But when they changed the ad campaigns and they said they were no longer going to prejudice recruits for tenure, promotion, enlistment, advancement, etc. by their race or gender, and they were going to stress battle efficacy.
All of a sudden, recruitment soared.
Nobody thought you could do it in 6 months.
But in less than 6 months, the military went from we're short 50%, we don't know what to do.
Maybe it's gangs, maybe it's tattoos, maybe it's drug use, maybe it's obesity, maybe we're competing to, I don't know what happened, but all of these people have enlisted, and we all know what happened.
They stress what the military is for in their ads and communications, and they got what they wanted.
And there's one other final thing that's inexplicable.
img credt: NYPost
IMMIGRATION
We were letting in up to 10,000 illegal immigrants a day for over a 4-year period.
It's controversial how much, how many came in total, but it could be from 8 to 12 million.
So when Donald Trump said he was going to offer a self deportation, you get $1,000.
You get your way paid for, and you can apply for legal immigration at some future date.
If you don't do this, you're disqualified for 10 years.
And then he was the big beautiful bill will continue the wall.
He put pressure on Mexico to enforce its own borders to stop this trek northward.
We could go through all the things he's done, but we all thought that maybe he could reduce it from 10,000 to 2,000, maybe to 1,000.
I thought maybe, wow, if he does all this and he actually forces people and he creates a new deterrence, he might get only 500.
Some months, there's nobody.
126 people.
I think it was in May.
This is phenomenal.
There is no illegal immigration right now as we speak.
That frees the border patrol and the new agents that will come online and the new big beautiful bill to round up the 10 million starting with the 500,000 criminals that Joe Biden let in.
img credt: Note: Data are for fiscal years and only include encounters along the southern land border. Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection
ADDING IT ALL UP
Add it all up, and the orthodoxy, the conventional wisdom, wisdom about
tariffs
foreign investment
our assets that are unrealized
military recruitment
illegal immigration.
They've all gone with the win.
(Meaning,) we're in new territory.
All the perceived wisdom is ignorance, and nobody knows what is what.
Except we're in a very exciting period.
If $9 trillion represents the market capitalization of all of Silicon Valley, you can imagine what 10 to 15 million would do to this country; it's like bringing a new Silicon Valley in total, one and a half of them, and plopping them down.
And when you add in robotics and AI and the efficiency in government regulation due to these cuts and fast-tracking permits, we don't know where we are, but we might be on the verge of an economic boom.
Our Note
Peace through strength comes in oh-so-many forms…