The Cost of Living Crisis — In the Tank Podcast #537
Download MP3Alright. We are now live. Welcome to the show, everyone. Well, president Trump has dropped his lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for the creation of what Democrats are calling a slush fund for his allies and what supporters call justice for the wrongly targeted and what the Department of Justice simply calls an anti weaponization fund. But for our main topic today, we are going to dig into the cost of living crisis, especially as it impacts young Americans.
Linnea Lueken:Gen z young adults say that they are totally cooked and are not very convinced by the old advice that what they need is to cultivate a crisp handshake and better budgeting skills. How right are they? I don't know. We are going to find out, and we are also going to talk about what is actually going on with our economy. And for Unhinged, we have press members at it again.
Linnea Lueken:This time, credentialed New York City media are blatantly out in support of the murderer of Brian Thompson. All of this on episode 537 of the In the Tank podcast. Welcome to the In the Tank podcast. I'm Lanea Luken, your host. And as always, we also have Jim Lakeley, vice president and director of communications at the Heartland Institute, Sam Karnick, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, and special welcome everyone to Heartland's state government relations manager, Samantha Fillmore.
Linnea Lueken:Thank you so much for being on, Samantha. We called you, like, super last minute for this,
Samantha Fillmore:so I'm really glad you
Linnea Lueken:were able to make it. And as always, guys, we also have producer Andy Singer in the background, keeping us moving along and also cutting me off with funny drops. So but as as is his duty. Alright. So before we get started, if you want to support the show, you can go to heartland.org/inthetank and donate there.
Linnea Lueken:Please also click the thumbs up to like the video, and remember that sharing it helps us to break through YouTube suppression. They really do not like us. Even just leaving a comment helps too. If you're an audio listener, you can help us out by leaving a nice review. Alright.
Linnea Lueken:I'm gonna get us moving along here because Samantha cannot stay for the whole show today. But if if you guys have any big news that you want to mention to the chat here at the top of the show. Anybody? I'm singled out. Nope.
Linnea Lueken:Nobody has a alright. Then we will move it along. Alright. So we're gonna start with unhinged and I have not watched the clips for this yet. As usual, I I try not to watch them unless I already accidentally, like, came across them.
Linnea Lueken:But oftentimes, Jim is the one who finds these for us. And apparently, he really found a doozy. So I will be leaning on Jim for this. We can just play the clip now. We have credentialed press corps members outside of the murder hearing of Luigi Mangione, and we are going to see what they have to say.
Samantha Fillmore:That's all
Speaker 3:I wanna say. Brian's mom. That lady said something on Inside Edition. I said I said what I said.
Jim Lakely:I don't give a fuck
Speaker 5:His children are better off without him. They need to learn to not be like their dad and enjoy the blood money, kids.
Speaker 3:I'm standing on this as Brian Thompson. I don't give a fuck he died. Millions of Americans
Speaker 5:liked it. Brian Thompson was a terrorist, and more people should acknowledge this and be appropriate. You should be canceling all the graves and people who profit off killing me. That's completely called for as president and and normal. This has gone on for too long.
Speaker 5:This should have happened decades decades ago. Okay? This is long overdue. I had been waiting for someone like this mysterious hero to appear. He answered
Samantha Fillmore:my prayers.
Speaker 3:If you guys are okay with someone like Brian Thompson being around and not being a part of our society, that says more about you as a person because you look absolutely monstrous defending someone like that who participates in social murder. That's
Speaker 5:mass social murder. To He's responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden. And I remember Americans celebrating when Osama bin Laden was killed. It's not like we don't understand heroic violence or, like, when violence is good. There's, like that's, like, as American as American gets.
Speaker 5:I mean, why do we protect the second amendment so much? Is it to allow people to shoot
Samantha Fillmore:up schools or is it for us
Speaker 5:to protect our democracy? I think it's to kill the second congress. I'm not saying, you know, we should all take up arms, but when your democracy is eroded and there's no other option, like, what are we meant to do? What are we left with? We're backed up into a corner.
Speaker 5:I mean, if we can't change the world's eyes, we don't wanna be here. So we don't have a choice. I heard that. That's why, you know, desperate times come desperate measures.
Speaker 6:I liked it, says the goth girl. I wanted you to see the mannerisms. I want you to see the cutesy curtsy. I want you to see the hand signals as they talk about Brian Thompson being somehow similar to Osama Bin Laden. So Stacy, the reason that I want you to see all that is not to give those young ladies fame.
Speaker 6:I want you to see all that to understand that those are the people that will smile and giggle and curtsy and hand gesture you on your way to the gallows. What I'm providing you today is not fame, I'm providing you knowledge and perhaps for them, infamy.
Jim Lakely:Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. I'm gonna I I have a feeling, Jim, that you probably have a lot to say about this. So I'm gonna just hand it off to you right away.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. I got something to say about it. First of all, these are not some redneck cranks living in a cabin, you know, in the Upper Peninsula play acting revolution as part of the Michigan militia, which was treated by our justice department by the Biden justice department as the most dangerous threat to the peace of America. These are urbane influencers with college educations. One of them was a Fulbright scholar.
Jim Lakely:So these are highly educated, urbane influencers, and the New York City of Zoran Mamdani, the communist mayor, gave these people press passes to cover the Mangione trial. And here they are coming outside the courtroom and saying to reporters, I'm very glad they did this actually, that everybody who's not down with the revolution, should be slain publicly and and for their families to suffer if they're not also, worthy of being slain as well, I I suppose. And mom Dani mom Dani again and his staff had to know who these women were. I read a story today in the free press that talked about how difficult it actually is to get credentialed as a member of the media by the city of New York, it is not easy. Somebody from City Journal, a conservative publication from the Manhattan Institute, tried to get a press pass for this and was rejected.
Jim Lakely:So they know who they are giving these passes to. And with these press passes, they have been given the stamp of approval by the city of New York. And this is if we needed more of them and we need more of them, but we see this on this program all the time. This is a big mask off moment. Communism is and always will be a political philosophy of mass murder, and they will kill you with these smug and satisfied looks on their faces, with being very stylish, with the hair just so, with a little pompadour over her forehead and everything just just perfect, or the goth hipster look over there.
Jim Lakely:And the the goth chick said, if we can't change the world, I don't wanna be here. Well, you know, that's fine and dandy for yourself, but the point of the revolution is not the the the point what she expressed there was that we want to change the world, and if you're not down with that, I don't want you to be here. I'm just gonna stop there before we get this entire channel taken down.
S.T. Karnick:Well, I'll pick it up. These three women remind me of, characters in fiction, and they're very good characters. I I really, find them quite revealing of, certain tendencies and a mentality. They remind me very much of a particular fictional character, Madame Defarge, in Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, which is set during the French Revolution. And Madame Defarge is, in fact, part of the, low level in the bourgeoisie.
S.T. Karnick:She and her husband owned a own a tavern, I think it was. And they, she sits beside the guillotine while people are being executed, she's knitting and and is a a very fascinating and well known character. And I would suggest that anyone who wants to understand where we are today, certainly, the the communist revolution is a, a touch point and one that can give us some insights. But it seems to me that this sort of mentality is embedded deeply in modernity from the enlightenment, the very the very beginnings of the enlightenment in the seventeen hundreds, and read A Tale of Two Cities, is set during the French Revolution, and get a really good perspective on where this mentality comes from and where it leads. The fact that that such insignificant people as these three young ladies clearly are, they have their credentials from the city of New York.
S.T. Karnick:That's that makes sense to me. Insignificant people who are, can be used by the authorities to make the case that they want, is a very common thing. But I do think that this is embedded in modernity, and it's something that's going to play out over time here, as it has elsewhere. And we don't know quite where this is leading, but I have some pretty good ideas.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Doug in the chat says it's okay. Say what it is, insanity. And I would I would disagree with that. I think that these women probably are at least somewhat sane.
Linnea Lueken:I think they're just evil.
S.T. Karnick:Yes. Yes. I I agree with you completely. You know, T. K.
S.T. Karnick:Chesterton get in a Chesterton quote. Here we go. Said that the the person who, is is mad is not the one who has lost his reason. It's the one who's lost everything but his reason. And what do you what what Chesterton was saying there is if your premises are false, you're going to reason.
S.T. Karnick:You're going to reason correctly no matter what. You may twist things and create fallacies because you're trying too hard to reason and reason away things. But if you are reasoning from bad premises, you are going to reach abominations. And that's what's happening here. They're reasoning from bad premises.
S.T. Karnick:That the fact that you do a and b happens down the road, that doesn't mean b was caused by a, it doesn't mean that you were responsible for it. The notion that that, this man killed more people than Osama bin Laden is just terrifyingly wrong, but it's logical. It's logical when you take their premises. And I I request respectfully, all our listeners, do not take these premises, and do not allow people around you do not allow people around you to take these premises and and to and to run with them and to pretend that that this is the truth. It's not.
S.T. Karnick:When something is obviously untrue, it probably is untrue.
Linnea Lueken:Samantha, I don't know if you have much that you wanna comment on this. It's I've It's just like our our our fellow ladies are not doing okay there in New York.
Samantha Fillmore:No. I mean, well, first of all, obviously, that's morally repugnant, but I'm not surprised. I mean, these are likely the same people that we saw on social media celebrating when Charlie Kirk was killed. As we move into modernity, as we move more into, extreme liberalism and socialism, there's almost like a, I hate to say it, and there's no other word, but like a bloodlust. They are totally fine when anyone who does not fit their narrative is killed, whether it's a capitalist in the case of of, I believe it's Brian Thompson.
Samantha Fillmore:I'm I'm not sure if I'm actually remembering that. Or if it's someone who was not, like, a person of color. How many white people have been killed in New York City, and then they continue to let all of these violent criminals back out onto the street without parole, and then you can continue to have repeat of repeat offenders and so much violence in New York City. I think in general, it's just the push to the ultra left into socialism and ultimately without getting too religious. It's a it's a departure from Christ.
Samantha Fillmore:We're no longer a Christian nation. We're supposed to or most religions, most Abrahamic religions can they condition you, and you are taught to love everyone and treat everyone with respect and not bring harm upon anyone. And these people are so out of touch with those basic principles, those principles that guided our founders, those principles that guided the foundation of our of the creation of our laws. And, yeah, they're they're happy some children are fatherless. It's disgusting.
Samantha Fillmore:But, yes, that's that's my take.
Linnea Lueken:It reminds me I saw I it had never crossed my mind that there existed people who unironically thought that it was just to kill the children of the Romanovs. But I recently started coming across people online, especially, like, on Blue Sky and those, you know, cesspits of of leftist thought who who would say things like, well, it actually is good to kill the children of the czar because even if they were disenfranchised and disinherited, they still would have that, like, memory of their parents and the lifestyle that they were used to growing up in. And it was likely that they would be able to climb to some kind of prominence on their own afterwards. And we can't have that so it's good that the children were killed. And I thought just like what Sam was just saying about like terrible logic.
Linnea Lueken:You're like, yeah. You're probably right. If the if the children of the Romanovs were allowed to survive, they almost certainly would have become wealthy in their own in their on their own right. It it's evil. Like, it's it's catastrophically, unspeakably evil to support that position.
Linnea Lueken:And yet, it's logical.
Samantha Fillmore:Right. And that just kind of goes into what I was saying. Anyone that does not fit their narrative of convenience or is, like, in in the way of their ultimate worldview or the goal of the world that they wanna live in, they would happily celebrate the violence and the death of it. I mean, it that they have that actually Machiavelli writes about that in the prints about discontinuing bloodlines and wiping out entire civilizations if you are to continue to move on. And I only say that to kind of sound smart like Sam.
Samantha Fillmore:I'm gonna reference some old political philosophy just once in the show so I could have my name on the check mark on the on the tick board next to Sam. It is a it is a school of thought that has been promulgated throughout centuries, but it's an inherently amoral one. And, like I said, anti Christian and anti anyone who believes in any god.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Well, and and Darren and Lokey in our comments here just said, I thought it was interesting that they praised the second amendment. I know that they were claiming it is there to murder, but it's the first time I've heard any far left person support the second amendment. Well, fortunately for you, you are shielded, I guess, from the, like, very far left in this country because the very far left in this country has been pro not pro two a necessarily, but certainly pro them getting to have firearms. There's entire, like, communist and socialist gun clubs in this country and there have been for many decades.
Linnea Lueken:They just haven't been so prominent until recently. And I and I only laugh because it's kind of it it flies so in the face of the kind of caricature that we have built of what the left is over the last couple of decades because of the way that they tend to behave. You know, you get, like, an Obama or Biden or something who you know, they're not gonna go out and say this kind of stuff that that these women are saying with regards to Brian Thompson, but their allies are and have been. These people have always existed. They're just able to be front and center now because we've become so polarized.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. I mean, we we usually talk a lot on this podcast about how ignorant communists are about economics. I mean, Mamdani is that with almost every policy he's he's proposed, you know, most prominently his publicly owned grocery store thing, which is laughable, and it's gonna take three years to build. It's gonna cost probably 20 times what it would cost to open a private one, and it will actually make food more scarce. But with with that with those economic arguments, we kinda give them the benefit of the doubt.
Jim Lakely:Right? You know, we think they are ignorant rather than, you know, stupid or even evil. They just don't understand how the world works. But then when they celebrate the murder of people who disagree with them, it shows that they are not ignorant. They are tyrants.
Jim Lakely:They are evil, and they are endorsing and trying to bring upon this world an evil ideology. They have all of the characteristics of every commie national leader ever, which is an irresistible instinct to handle opposition to their unworkable ideas with murder. One at a time is fine. Mass murder is even better, but it doesn't matter because the only way to get to Utopia is to get rid of the people who are standing in your way. And it is dangerous, obviously, and it is quite I'm trying not to be angry.
Jim Lakely:I'm trying to be I'm trying to think about sadness, but I can't be sad about this. This is the face of evil that they anybody who thinks any murder is justified because, like like Sam said earlier, don't accept any of the premises that these women have put forward because they are not, grounded in fact. But and I might I'm actually even reluctant to even address the issue that they are supposedly talking about where murder is justified, and that's the cost of health care and our insurance system in this country. I would remind and I'm gonna bring this up in the other topics in a much less angry way. But I would remind these three ladies that, well, for one thing, the heartless two published a book by the recently departed Peter Ferrara called the Obamacare disaster.
Jim Lakely:We are a free market think tank, and that book was aptly titled because the argument that more government involvement, government control over the health care system is going to bring down prices and bring and make it more affordable and more accessible for people was always never going to work because it never works that way. And the Harlan's two you know, the closer you get from the dollar in your hand to the doctor who's giving you care, the the the less distance there is between those two things, the more efficient it is and the cheaper the care becomes. But Obamacare set up a system in which the insurance companies everybody's insurance rates have gone through through the roof. You know, The Heartland Institute, we're a nonprofit organization, but we provide, obviously, health benefits to our our full time employees. And those costs have been going through the roof over the last ten years or so, even more.
Jim Lakely:And that is a result of the policies that these three ladies would certainly have voted for if they were old enough to do it back then, but it is the left that created the problem that, in their evil minds, think murder is justification to somehow right that wrong. It is the leftist policies that have caused what she thinks is a disaster in the health insurance industry in this country.
Linnea Lueken:Yep. And they'll only make it worse. I'm sorry. I'm gonna cut you off for a second here.
Speaker 3:Boy. That escalated quickly. I mean, that really got out of hand fast.
Samantha Fillmore:This is
Jim Lakely:no time for joking, Andy.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. We're we're good. We are we are moving along. Whoops.
Samantha Fillmore:Sorry. The same people who would absolutely celebrate if Donald Trump, like, was killed or any other conservative member of of our government. I've I know so many people that, like, have said, oh my gosh. I gotta, like, hope he has a heart attack. You know, it's just crazy things.
Samantha Fillmore:It's just absolute it's a blood loss. They anyone that stands in their way, they have no human empathy for.
S.T. Karnick:May I quickly may I quickly add that, demonization of your opponents is this this is exactly where that leads. And that's what's been going on for decades now. And demonization of your opponents, your opponents are normal people who are just trying to live and just trying to, make their way in the world. This the this man who was killed I I'm sorry. I can't even remember his name.
Jim Lakely:Brian Thompson.
S.T. Karnick:Yes. Thompson. And he he was a a CPA, a certified public accountant, and he worked hard. And he just made it to an important position in the world. Who knows?
S.T. Karnick:Maybe he would have done very good things. We won't have that chance to find out.
Samantha Fillmore:I think I'm sorry. One more one more. I think one very important thing, on top of what Sam says is that if we continue to demonize our opponents, there will never be common ground met. There is you you completely throw out any propensity for resolution if the other side is evil and if you view them as such. And I think that's where we've gotten in our mainstream political ideology, which leads us to a lot of problems that we deal But it's it's deeply problematic and troubling.
Linnea Lueken:Absolutely. Right. Well, Jim had alluded to, you know, how health insurance or health care in general has gotten so expensive. So that's why the main topic today is about the cost of living crisis. We're not gonna get into the health care stuff too much this time around because there are some other angles to hit this from.
Linnea Lueken:And I really wanted to talk about this. And and part of the reason why is because, Sam, you just had a new housing affordability policy study come out. And, also, at the same time, there's a, like, viral discussion going on or just the discourse on the gen z part of x, where everybody is arguing over whether it's reasonable to suggest that young people might have a spending problem. And I want so before I get into this topic, I'm gonna offer a trigger warning here. In this segment, we are going to be generalizing about different generations of Americans.
Linnea Lueken:If you are of the generation being discussed and what we say does not apply to you, then you are not who we are talking about. I am a millennial, I think, technically. I might be a zillion, like, just right on the on the edge there in '95. I do not strongly identify with the stereotypes of my generation. And yet, I do not get mad when people make generalizations about millennials and, you know, they call it the me generation.
Linnea Lueken:We have to be able to generalize about generational habits and statistics in order to help explain why those habits are changing over time amid different generations. Population averages are not indictments of your individual character. So that is my warning. Every time we have to talk about different generations, we get comments from people upset or feeling offended that we said mean things about boomers or we said mean things about gen x or or millennials or whoever. I'm not talking about you.
Linnea Lueken:I'm talking about statistical averages. So Gen z, two things can be true about Gen z. One, the economy is really rough. You just entered the workforce during COVID or afterwards or just before, and inflation has been absolutely insane due to the government. We will talk about that in a minute.
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Linnea Lueken:With that out of the way, I really don't about them. Affordability right now is more difficult for millennials and Zoomers and then older generations right now. 84% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 believe that the economic conditions in The United States are either bad or terrible. 81%. That's 84% of eighteen to twenty four year olds.
Linnea Lueken:81% of twenty five to twenty nine year olds believe that economic conditions are bad or terrible. So the vast majority of people 30 years old believe that things are awful. Housing is the biggest issue that has a large difference in that generally generational impact, I think. High high home prices benefit people who have houses already, but it makes it harder to get that first home. So, Sam, you recently wrote a study on this and discussed it in a life liberty property article.
Linnea Lueken:So in your report, you say that monetary inflation in the early twenty twenties aggravated long term housing affordability crunches and turned it into a housing crisis. Reducing inflation will alleviate the short term crisis. The nation must then turn to the long term problem, a stagnant supply of housing. So if you can expand on that a little better, tell us.
S.T. Karnick:Yeah. Thank you, Lynne. The the the premise of the paper is well, the idea of the paper, in fact, is to correct the record and make it clear why we have an affordability crisis. And the the the short story of it is, I encourage people to read the paper, it's very it's it's done in terms that regular people can understand. It's not too technical, I don't I don't think.
S.T. Karnick:But the key thing is that we have had a housing affordability problem now for, really, a few decades. And the the big reason behind that is that the amount of housing that we're building has been decreasing for a variety of reasons, but all those reasons are caused by government. And it's the federal government and the, state and local governments have put so many restrictions on housing. And the federal government and the central bank, which is a product of the federal government let's remember that the Federal Reserve, although it's supposed to be independent and so on and so forth, was created by government in the first place. So this is all, these are all products of of government, actions, and these government actions restrict what people can do in terms of in terms of building, selling, buying, and occupying housing.
S.T. Karnick:And and and maintenance and things like that are all also affected too. So interest rates, for example, affect the housing market very much. Well, what has happened here is that over the decades, it's become more and more difficult to, buy a house and to afford a house because we have had an incredible amount of immigration. We we our our population is one third bigger than it was in in the nineteen eighties when when when we got a deal that in for immigration would be slowed. And remember president Reagan signed off on that, and some cynics at the time suggested that, well, you're going to get your amnesty, but you're not going to get your cuts in immigration.
S.T. Karnick:And that was exactly what happened. So because we've added so many people to the to the, market, so many buyers, and on top of that, we have added many more in the twenty first century because the millennial generation and the the, generation z, the Zoomers, have hit the marketplace in the last well, start about the last decade or so. And so you've had an incredible intensification of people wanting to buy homes and want and in particular, wanting to get those starter homes. And on top of that, the building of homes decreased radically starting in 2008 because of the great recession and the intensifying restrictions on finance, which were brought about by the the the Barney Frank bill, which is in the the late Barney Frank who who just died a day or so ago. The the that put so many great, heavy restrictions on how you finance things that it is it it really just shot the the market of, from creating sufficient supply.
S.T. Karnick:So the number of house new houses being built has been very low since, Dodd Frank. So what you those those are all things caused by government. And then on the local level, which is local governments are made by the state. So the states are responsible for this. But the low on the local level where this is occurring, obviously, you have zoning.
S.T. Karnick:But on top of that, you have an incredible amount and a very elaborate code, building code items and restrictions. And those are based, yes, on safety, but they're also based on the, convenience of the and the profits of the big players in in in that world. So if you make things very complicated, what happens? People have to hire somebody to do things that ordinarily they might be able to do themselves. So all of this adds to the expense.
S.T. Karnick:So the government has made housing much, much, much more expensive. And so you you put all that together, housing now for a lot of young people costs more than 50% of their their wages. Now this is very interesting because when you make that comparison between the millennials and the boomers, you find that the the wages and incomes for millennials are higher than boomers at the same age. What what boomers were making when you correct for inflation was was less than what millennials are getting now. So that's an interesting statistic.
S.T. Karnick:And then housing, in fact, is less expensive for millennials and zoomers than it was for boomers. Now wages have been rising much more rapidly than inflation since the beginning of last year. So we had this huge burst of inflation, and that played out through the economy and made people feel much less, much less wealthy than they were. And that has to and and it came it came up so fast that it takes a long time for wages to catch up. Now we're never going to have the prices go back down.
S.T. Karnick:That's not how things work. But what you do is the wages rise more rapidly so that your real income catches up and kills off the effects of the the original inflation. But that takes time. It's gonna take easily two or three years to five years to get it all wrung out. But the reports are continually and consistently about what young people feel about the economy.
S.T. Karnick:And as I mentioned and I mentioned all this in the life, liberty, property item, that there's a reason they feel that way. It's not irrational, and that is the enormous cost of higher education. The cost of a college degree is more than doubled in inflation adjusted terms, not just nominal terms, but in real terms since the boomers went to college, and the quality of the product has absolutely plummeted. This was all caused by, guess who, the government. Massive increase in federal spending on higher education, and it was absolutely, metastasized during the Obama administration.
S.T. Karnick:The the amount of spending on federal spending on higher education has been incredibly high. Now this money poured in. Alright? And because it was borrowed and the expected payoff of a college degree was was very high. It was terrific.
S.T. Karnick:So the customers didn't pay as much attention to the fundamental quality of the product. The students and the parents were just, okay. This is what it takes to get a college degree. So today's younger workers, they who especially those who have those college degrees, they had every reason to expect that they would be getting twice the real wages that the boomers got. Now that was impossible.
S.T. Karnick:It was never going to happen. And so that disappointment has led to anger, to blame, to scapegoats, and the scapegoats are capitalism and capitalist, which is exactly what they were taught in college. And those three young ladies that we saw at the beginning of this episode are absolutely perfectly characteristic of that. So this is the real problem that the generation, that the the the two generations that have been coming into the workforce and the housing market in the last few years, the millennials and the Zoomers, were given a a story about themselves and about their situation that was simply false. It was terribly false, it was wrong for people to do that.
S.T. Karnick:And we at the Heartland Institute have been saying for years the truth about what was really going on. So as a result of all this, the higher education sector is going into a much needed reorientation, and it's going to bring lower prices and better product, but it's gonna take a while. Harvard just announced Harvard University just announced this ending grade inflation. We'll see if that turns out to be true. But the point is that this is playing out now, to repair what government did.
S.T. Karnick:It's going to be up to the young people who are who are affected by this whole situation, who are feeling this disappointment, to recognize the reality behind it, who actually caused this? I'm not saying who is to blame. I'm just saying who caused it and what caused it. It wasn't capitalism. It wasn't the, greedy landlords.
S.T. Karnick:It wasn't, greedy investors. Having money having private investing money coming into any field is a good thing. You get more of whatever it is you're investing in. So it wasn't those people. It was government that did this.
S.T. Karnick:And the government that did this was elected by the boomers, the lost generation before them, generation Jones, generation x, and, yes, the millennials. So we're we're all we're all we're all part of this. But what could we do? What could those of us who oppose this do? We at the Heartland Institute have told the truth over the years and what we what we very strongly understand to be the truth.
S.T. Karnick:So we need to get that out there, and that's what the purpose of this paper is, and that's what the purpose of shows like this are. And the all the follow-up work we're doing in, articles and op eds and the like is to show people that this is that capitalism is not the problem. Markets are not the problem. We don't have free markets. Free markets are the solution.
S.T. Karnick:So we need to spread that word, and I encourage everyone who, watches the show and listens to it to to spread that word and to get this information out to their friends and associates and family.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. And also and I this is something that I try to hammer in as much as I can, but it doesn't really seem to stick with, you know, certain I don't know. Certain groups just have a really hard time with this. Telling, like, Gen Zers that their concerns are not anything to be concerned about and that they're just, like, you know, egotistical, stupid, greedy, whatever, is not going to stop them from voting for a mom Donnie who says, actually, no. Your expectations are fine for life.
Linnea Lueken:It's the capitalists that are stealing from you and all these people who are calling you lazy and entitled and blah blah blah. They're the ones who have put these conditions on you, and they're gonna take that route. So there needs to be, like, some kind of empathy for young people from the older generations. However, two things can be true at once. One, cost of living for young people is difficult.
Linnea Lueken:They have a lot of unique challenges that they're facing whether it's, you know, you you are convinced or you it's hammered into you from the from, like, eighth grade until senior year of high school that you have to go to college in order to get a good job. And that, you know, and they're, like, taking away our technical schools and stuff in high schools. They're, you know, at my high school, at least, it was like a given that you were going to get into college. I believe that certain schools in certain states, certain public schools in certain states receive, like, rankings based on how many of their students go on to college. And so there's a huge incentive from high schools to push everybody onto the college track whether or not it's reasonable.
Linnea Lueken:You can't blame a 18 year old or a 17 year old for having that message being shoved down their throat, you know, from every angle, from, you know, most of the time, many of their parents, from the media, from their teachers, school administrators, everyone is trying to get you on that college track. And then you do it. And then you graduate four years later or five years later with a degree that cost you $50 a year. Just you were just doomed from the start. And and so and then so I think that there needs to be, you know, kind of like a reasonable balanced discussion about this, not just saying that Gen z are stupid and entitled.
Linnea Lueken:And then so now that everybody has these degrees, they are not the the competition for jobs that require degrees is immense. And the value of a bachelor's degree is much lower than it was at the same time as the monetary cost to get one is much higher. So that's an incredible difficulty there. And, also, our culture is just like rotting from the inside out. So they're so they're dealing with that as well.
Linnea Lueken:So I I really I wanna emphasize to any Gen Zers who are watching this that we're not you know, we are about to talk about a a spending problem that Gen Zers do have, but we're not blaming you for the economic conditions that you live in except on this one point. Alright? So that's my transition here. And I'm gonna see if well, I think we have a clip for this. Hang on just a second.
Linnea Lueken:The fact so we have a clip of Kevin O'Leary talking about oh, yeah. Actually, we can go to this first now that Andy has brought this up on screen. Okay. This is a credit card company study from a credit card company out of Canada, I believe. I do think that these numbers are probably about right for Americans as well, especially metropolitan area living Americans.
Linnea Lueken:As you can see, it's not just Gen z. Every single generation has increased the relative percentage of their spending on food on restaurant and delivery compared to the generation before them. Every single generation spends more eating out, not just not in terms of percentage of the amount of money that they spend on food than the previous. On the one hand, I would say this is evidence that we are actually like relatively richer than we were in the past And also that there's a lot more availability of different, like, eating out options. Of course, you know, since COVID, especially, the delivery services absolutely exploded.
Linnea Lueken:There's, like, I don't know, like, 20 different companies that you can choose from to have your food delivered to you. You can even have even more than in the past, your groceries delivered to you. And each subsequent generation has taken more and more advantage of these services. However, the so the fact of the matter is that Gen z does eat out a lot more than previous generations. But if you're already struggling or you feel like you can't afford a home or you can't afford whatever, spending a large percentage of your food budget on eating out is is not the way to go.
Linnea Lueken:We are all part of this trend, but it's it's not so it's not such a good strategy here. We have a clip from Kevin O'Leary that I wanna pull up.
Speaker 8:Can't stand it when I see kids that are making $70 a year spending $28 for lunch. I mean, that's just stupid. It's just think about that in the context of that being put into an index and making eight percent eight to 10% a year for the next fifty years. Stop buying coffee for $5.50. I can walk around with anybody for a day and show you that they're wasting 15% of their money, sometimes 20.
Speaker 8:Stupid stuff. You you go to work, you spend $15 on a sandwich. What? Are you an idiot? It costs you 99¢ to make a sandwich at home and bring it with you.
Speaker 8:So what if you bring it with you? Bring your own water if you have to, or your own drink, or bring your own coffee mug. You start to add that up every day, it's a ton of money. Most people, particularly working in metropolitan cities that are just starting out on their job making their first 60,000 piss away about 15,000 a year on stupid stuff. And that's what they should stop doing.
S.T. Karnick:May I say quickly, okay boomer, but Oh, don't start. But he's right. He is right that if you if you care about these things and if you you care about your future, you will make sandwiches and bring them in or hard boiled eggs, whatever it is you you like. And, yes, bringing in your own water and even maybe spritzing in some flavor into it or whatever. But the problem is that the millennial generation and the the Gen z have been brought up in a time of incredible inflation.
S.T. Karnick:And what inflation does is it flattens the time her the the the time preference. Meaning, you would rather spend money now
Jim Lakely:Yeah.
S.T. Karnick:Than later because money spent now buys more than it will a few weeks from now, let alone a year or a month from now. So it's hard to convince people that they're they're getting a good deal if they save their money and invest it instead of just buying things. And the the reason it is hard to convince them is because it's false. It's not true that that that they're that they're going to get a better deal by by, putting the money aside. They were getting we were getting nothing from our bank account.
S.T. Karnick:If you put money in a in a bank and just put it in a savings account, you were getting literally nothing. But it was at point 0025% or something. And so you your disc and and all of this was caused by government regulations. So you are making peep making it foolish to save, and you're making it foolish to invest in in small ways, that to invest in small ways. And then you say, ah, you fool.
S.T. Karnick:You're not investing in saving. Well, maybe they're the ones who who are thinking straight, and you're the ones who are causing all the problems. It's no maybe in my view, they are the ones causing all the problems. None of this none of this is caused by market failure. What is all caused by is government stupidity.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Jim
S.T. Karnick:I that's my my rant.
Linnea Lueken:Thank you, Sam. That was a very good rant. But, Jim, I do think I mean, Kevin is right insofar as he's saying, you know, if you're worried about cash for rent and stuff, then you shouldn't be spending money on, you know, eating out so much or whatever. In a metropolitan area, it's actually very difficult just from social pressure not to do that. Right?
Linnea Lueken:It's the same with we all spent a lot, probably ate a lot a lot more in college than I do now just because, like, the social pressure not and then I don't mean pressure in, like, a negative way. I just mean it in, like, you know, you're living with a bunch of young people, and they're like, hey. We're gonna go out and get pizza or whatever. And you're like, okay. I'll come with.
Linnea Lueken:And then you end up spending, like, all of your money on food all and your and sometimes adult beverages. So but I do understand that this clip of Kevin O'Leary went viral, and young people are furious at it. I can understand even if he's right in some ways. I can understand why the optics of a extraordinarily wealthy person telling people to pack a lunch is not great. The you know, they it would get you kind of angry.
Linnea Lueken:You know? It it's so I I I feel I I have a lot of empathy for the the or sympathy rather for the frustration when this guy is talking like this. But what how do we how do we fix it? Because it's kind of between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, you have people online right now who are saying, like, having hot meals delivered to their house from Chick fil A or whatever is a human right.
Linnea Lueken:And on the other hand, you have people saying, the economy is terrific. You have nothing to worry about.
Jim Lakely:Well, I mean, none neither of those things are true. I mean, there's somebody from the Heartland Institute who has been on this podcast quite a bit. I see him in the office, you know, every week, and we have lunch together. About half the time, I bring leftovers from home. Half the time, I'll run downstairs.
Jim Lakely:There's a little cafeteria in our building, and I'll grab a sandwich and, you know, come upstairs. And, yeah, it's about as expensive as Kevin O'Leary says. It should be paid $15 for for a sandwich, but that's just the price of things today. Thank you, Biden economy and the skyrocketing inflation, which is very unfortunate. It hits everybody, but it does hit younger people just getting their career started harder than anybody else, and that's absolutely true.
Jim Lakely:But this person I'm talking about never gets lunch outside. He has a young family that he has started, and I've even offered to buy him a sandwich. And he says, no. It's fine. And he because he brought his own every day he does this.
Jim Lakely:So, you know, Kevin O'Leary's brand is to be you know, he is jokingly think he calls himself mister wonderful, which is the inverse of what he is because on Shark Tank, he is probably one of the meanest ones, if not the meanest person on that show. It's his it's his shtick. I get it. And nobody wants to hear that the way they're living their life is the main source of their financial problems. But the fact remains that, you know, no matter who you are, there is some truth to that, to to that statement, and nobody really likes to hear it, especially younger people.
Jim Lakely:You pointed out very very correctly, Lynne, earlier when you talked about student debt student debt. It's much, much, much worse now than it was when I went to college between 1988 and 1992. And why is that? It was because of the free government loans for everybody. So it right as Gen z was starting to begin their adult lives, the difference between the cost of something or the price of something and its actual value was being completely separated because you could just apply for a government student loan.
Jim Lakely:It doesn't you know, so there was no real cost to you in the beginning, so you didn't really grasp it. And I was actually talking with my wife about this today, you know, we knew we're gonna talk about this today. You know, when I was a young man, you know, I was not wealthy by any means. I worked two jobs and, you know, it's hard to save money when you have to pay use all of your money to pay for bills, and I had to do that too. You know, it's it's tough for every generation when they start out, believe it or not.
Jim Lakely:I know that, you know, with all there's all sorts of reasons why there are unique challenges to the rising generation right now, but that does not mean that the generations before you did not have their own challenges that were just slightly different, but financially, we're not that much different than we are today. But one thing I remember, it it I saw this commented on on Twitter this week, and I think it's pretty apt. Money used to be money. Right? It was cash.
Jim Lakely:It was in your hands, and it's harder to save, I think, when you don't ever really see your own money. I mean, again, I'm Gen X, and, course, we had credit cards. I had a credit card. But we used to go to ATMs. Remember ATMs?
Jim Lakely:I think they're pretty much a dead technology today. I can't remember the last time I went to an ATM. In fact, I've been carrying around the same, like I've accumulated $20 bills. I think I'm carrying about $212 in my pocket for, like, three years because I never use cash. Nobody goes to the ATM.
Jim Lakely:But when I was a young man, I'd go to the ATM. I'd sit there and think,
Speaker 8:oh gosh.
Jim Lakely:Can I get $60 out? I should probably just get $40 out. I should just get $40 out. That's all I need to go out with my friends. And then guess what?
Jim Lakely:Guess what's on that little receipt that would come out? What's left in your checking account? Which was, you know, $212, and my next paycheck is not coming for another four days. And so I was always acutely aware of how poor I was every single day when I needed to have money. But today, I like I said, I don't use cash anymore.
Jim Lakely:I get annoyed if anybody even asked for cash. I use Venmo and PayPal and all sorts of stuff, but certainly Gen z I'd be I'd actually love to see if somebody could look this up. What percentage of of Gen z even has a traditional bank account? Is all their money just put into a Venmo account or to PayPal and everything is digital? So I think when you when you're separated from have from real physical money, from having to balance a checkbook, from having to write out checks and put them in an envelope and mail it off to the cable company, I think it it it doesn't certainly doesn't help your financial literacy when you don't really actually ever see physical money.
Linnea Lueken:Samantha, how about you? I know you have a young family, and you guys are you know, you've you've run into all the same struggles that all the rest of us have. So I'd love to hear what you think.
Samantha Fillmore:Yeah. Well, I guess I would consider myself one of the also anomalies. I remember coming out of college and taking my first job, and my salary was so low that I would, like, literally go through the grocery store once every once a week and, like, be doing math in my head as I was, like, pulling things off the shelf. Be like, okay. This plus this will feed me for, like, four days, and then, like, that'll that means I have, like, 50 more dollars to spend at this trip to the grocery store and absolutely lived off of, like, soup and popcorn and ramen noodles and cereal and all the other fun caricature type foods that absolutely you can live off of if you are on a budget.
Samantha Fillmore:And I was I would occasionally DoorDash, but it was a very special treat for me. But, no, I think it's to build off of what Jim has said, I have so many I am the very I think I'm the last millennial. I am nineteen ninety six. So I'll be 30 this year. So this is, like, I think, yeah, technically, the very last of them.
Samantha Fillmore:But I have so many friends who have said verbatim, like, well, we're not going to be able to buy a house anytime soon. Like, might as well just have fun now or, like, might as well just go get back to Starbucks or
Linnea Lueken:Yeah.
Samantha Fillmore:Order in. It's a really unhealthy set of logic, but it's it's true. And the, like, the supply and demand is so hard. There are so many boomers that are homeowners and have homes, and I live in a metropolitan city. And just have to inherently be bidding $6,080,000 dollars over the asking price to even consider winning a bid for a home, much less being able to afford the down payment or the mortgage.
Samantha Fillmore:But we are in a culture that has promulgated just reckless spending. How quickly can you go on to Amazon and just order things you need? Same with DoorDash. And exactly to Jim's point, you're not using cash. Everything is pulled digitally.
Samantha Fillmore:All of your bills are pulled digitally. If you select the paperless option for your gas company or your electric company, you're not even physically seeing how much money you spend on on utilities that month unless you are hawking your bank account every day, which everyone should be to know what's going in and out. That's my, like, unsolicited financial advice, guys. But, yeah, I mean, I have a young son. I have two young sons, but the one who can speak will be like, oh, mommy, like, just order it off of Amazon.
Samantha Fillmore:So nonchalantly like that because I'll tell him, oh, you know, we need this, and I'll order it. But in his mind, you just, you know, click a few buttons on a phone, and it'll show up at your house. And I think as much as he's he's three, so he's a toddler, but there are, I feel like, adults who feel that way too. Like, oh, we just ordered off of Amazon. I need it.
Samantha Fillmore:I'll get it now. We're almost living in an age of ultra comfortability. Everyone needs to be 100% comfortable all of the time, And I think that that's our problem. No one is, like, really well, now people are really struggling. But, like, if you are like me and you grew up in the nineties and I had one parent who worked and we lived a comfortable life, I have enjoyed growing up in an in an in in an America that was prosperous and that where we could have little lux not excessive luxuries, but my family could go out to dinner, and we could go to Disneyland, and we could go and take a family vacation once a year.
Samantha Fillmore:And now those are things that are becoming further and further out of touch for young Americans, and it is a culmination of the student loan debt, the, like, housing housing affordability crisis, what food costs, insurance. And I think and this is I'm kind of going on it right now. But in my mind and in so many others, I'll speak for so many others, the American dream, the American way was that you will work hard, and you'll be able to provide a life for your family that you did not have. So my parents never went to college, but I was able to go to college, and I paid for it with loans. And now and my husband wants the same way.
Samantha Fillmore:And now we are working very hard to save for our kids so that they and who knows if college will even be relevant or whatever in twenty years, but we're trying to save for them so that they can go to college and not take out loans so that when they enter into the workforce, they can focus on saving for a house instead of spending anywhere from 10 to 20% of their income on student loan debt. And that's that's the dream, and that's what where I think we're getting so lost is so many people are working so hard to keep themselves above water, but they're asking themselves tough questions like, should I have a family? Should I start a family? Will I have one kid, or will I have two? Like and it's really stunting a lot of the decisions that these people make.
Samantha Fillmore:So, again, then you say, wow. That's really stressful. I'm kinda sad. I'm gonna order some Chick fil A to feel a little bit better. And, like, maybe that milkshake, the cookies and cream milkshake will, like, make me feel a little sad about my dystopian future of a life.
Samantha Fillmore:And don't even talk about AI maybe taking your job in a few years. So not to give a lot of excuses for these younger generations because I've done it. I've been strict on a budget. I still am on a budget with my family. But it's it's hard.
Samantha Fillmore:Psychologically, it's hard, and it's not fun having wealthy older people tell you that you shouldn't get Chipotle, which you shouldn't. But, anyway, anyways, that's my wrap.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Yeah. No. I've heard I've heard the same thing from friends of mine and but especially people from, like, my sister's generation. She's a couple years younger than me.
Linnea Lueken:And and what I'm hearing it called is financial nihilism where they're thinking, like, look, I'm not gonna be able to save for a house by skipping DoorDash. Like
Jim Lakely:Right.
Linnea Lueken:So I might as I may as well, like, enjoy a meal that I like right now because I'm not gonna be able to afford a family and a house and vacations and whatever. So why would I, like, you know, live small when it's not gonna pay off in the long term? And so and I and I really do understand that perspective. I I I don't think that it's the right perspective to have, but it's I think again, not an irrational one.
Samantha Fillmore:I was gonna say, think frontal lobe development helps. Like, I I know for a fact that when I turned 25, I was like, oh, wow. Like, things make so much more sense now. Like, I could and I joke about that all the time. I love, like, brain science and the way that it affects decision making.
Samantha Fillmore:And something that I don't think is talked about nearly enough is that all of these young people, most of them from college to entering the workforce, scientifically do not have the fully developed frontal lobe, which is the part of your brain that tells you like, helps you make long term decision domino effect thinking, especially with finances. So I and another just random Samantha anecdote is that's why I think people should not be able to vote until they're 25 or at least about paying for their own health insurance. That's my we've we've always joke around the Heartland Institute with various voting reforms. I'm like, you have to be paying for your own health insurance if you want a cast to vote in this country, completely derailing the topic. But a lot of a lot of younger people feel that way, and then I I hear those things.
Samantha Fillmore:And I'm like, well, yeah, like, that's not good logic. But I'm it makes sense, and you're young. And it's it's so hard. I actually have to jump off now, you guys. Thank you so much for having me.
Samantha Fillmore:So I'm gonna use this to say goodbye. This was such a joy, and I hope to see you guys soon. We'll see you guys. Freddie, we'll have you on again Bye. Bye.
Samantha Fillmore:Bye.
S.T. Karnick:So long, Sam.
Jim Lakely:It just here. Want to say, call it economic black billing. It's like, why even bother saving like you said, Lynnea? They've just taken the black pill. They've given up.
Jim Lakely:It's completely understandable, I think, in today's economy.
S.T. Karnick:The the attitude that, Linea and, Sam that you both articulated a few moments ago is we we have to understand where it's coming from, though. It it is caused by policy. There there's the the high expense of houses is caused by high regulation. That's that's really what is coming from, this the suppression of supply. And the the high inflation is caused by government, high federal spending.
S.T. Karnick:I I demonstrate this in the paper. High federal spending brought on the inflation because the Federal Reserve, the central bank, had to monetize it is what it's called. It's it's a process, and and you can you can get it from the paper. But the the fact is that excessive government spending causes inflation. There's simply no way around it.
S.T. Karnick:And so this attitude that, well, I'm not going to be able to afford a house is not irrational. And the notion that you would say, look. If I can't afford a house, why do I care whether I buy from DoorDash or I I I make a sandwich myself? It's there's no difference. It's not an irrational thought.
S.T. Karnick:It's it's it's got some foundation to it. And so what we need to understand is why the the the fundamentals of our economy have got so off track. And I think we can get into some pretty good theories about who benefits from this and and why governments would do these things. And it seems pretty clear to me that that we're creating we've created a crony capitalist system that is nothing like free markets. And the solution to this is not more government, more of the things that created the problem in the first place.
S.T. Karnick:The solution is the thing that was destroyed by government and that will will solve the problem by freeing people to build houses and to buy houses as they wish, which will make prices make sense. The prices of things make sense when people are free to buy and sell. When they're not free to buy and sell, prices don't make sense. And when the currency is debauched, the prices don't make sense. So fix those two things.
S.T. Karnick:Fix regulation. Fix the currency through lowering spending, and young people will start to save for houses. Right now, it doesn't make any sense for a lot of people.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Let let me just add to that a little bit. Like you said, Sam, government policy is what's made the economy not as strong as it could be because and especially and and frankly, it's leftist Democrat policies. Not that Republicans are perfect on this on this topic. That is certainly not the case.
Jim Lakely:But a lot of the troubling economic conditions that we are in right now are the result, especially over the last four years before Trump's second term, of the policies of the Biden administration. And before that, you know, q e one and q e two and q e three, all this money printing. Government spending absolutely exploded at the end of Trump because of COVID, but then it just kept going up and up and up under Biden. The more the government spends and is involved in the economy, the less power that the dollar in the private sector has. It's it's competition works in the economy too when it comes to money.
Jim Lakely:But what is the number one put it this way. Democrats, if you were to take it by age group, have one age group that votes more for the Democrats than any other age group if you take it from young people to middle aged and to older people. And that's young people. I looked it up last night. It's it's around 60% of Gen z votes Democrats.
Jim Lakely:In fact, well, we've talked about it a lot on this podcast. Those three disgusting evil women are Gen z, and they're socialists. Right? But you're voting for the policies that are creating the bad economic conditions that you're in. As you tend to get older and understand better how the economy works and how life works, you tend to be more conservative over time.
Jim Lakely:But, you know, Gen Z is, in a way not not to blame them, but they're voting for these policies that are making life more difficult for them and making the economy harder to recover because, you know, Sam, you say it on this podcast probably at least three times per podcast that we do not have a free market in The United States, that we do not we've never actually experienced free market capitalism. We have something very, different from that, but it's still better than than full on socialism. And then just one last thing, you know, we had that that graphic up on where each generation gets their food, and I think the number was 64%. Where is it? There it is.
Jim Lakely:No. 68% of the food generation z eats is either at a restaurant that they that they go to or have it delivered right to their door through DoorDash or something else. There is no justification for having that percentage of the food that you eat for your entire life coming from restaurants or having it delivered to you. So there is quite a bit of truth to what Kevin O'Leary said in in the in the clip that's gone viral and has had generations bashing their their digital heads against each other on Twitter for the last thirty six hours or so.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah.
Jim Lakely:But, you know, that that's a that's a that's an abs that's that's not sustainable. You can't you can't live like that. No. You shouldn't live like that. Learn how to cook.
Jim Lakely:Cooking at home is actually a pleasure. I do it. I love to cook.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Well, so so the arguments that I've seen to that end are well, I've seen some really stupid arguments from left wing journalist Taylor Lorenz said that, you know, people who are struggling financially or poor people don't have the time or the capacity was the word she used to cook a home cooked meal, which is incredibly insulting, I would think. The time thing is one thing. There are a lot of people though who work, you know, multiple shifts, multiple jobs, and they still somehow manage to have time to cook for themselves. It's a it's a issue of priorities.
Linnea Lueken:But I also think that there is probably a very significant amount of cultural influence. I think that because, in general, previous generations have been, like, have have succeeded in building wealth. A lot of these kids are probably raised more than in the past. I know I'm gonna get comments from Gen Zers who are like, we were poor when I was growing up. I'm not talking about you.
Linnea Lueken:I'm talking about in general. I there were more there was more affluence in their, like, childhoods and now they're downwardly mobile
Jim Lakely:Mhmm.
Linnea Lueken:Which is something that's somewhat unique in American history. I do think it's true that Gen Z and also part of millennials, especially after they come out of college in massive debt and they got a degree in something that they thought they were gonna be able to find a job and it turns out that job doesn't actually exist anymore. They are downwardly mobile. And so they grew up being able to go out to eat every week or their parents would order, you know, Netflix when they used to order it and and a pizza or whatever every week. And they have all the different cable channels.
Linnea Lueken:They have HBO. They have all that stuff. And so that's their, like, baseline expectation for how the middle class or even the lower middle class lives. And now they're struggling. And now they're paying they're living in when I lived in South Louisiana, not a wealthy area of the country, I was looking at apartments.
Linnea Lueken:This is part of the reason why I I ended up moving to South Carolina, not because it's less expensive to live in South Carolina, but just because I could find better conditions for for owning my own home. I could not find an apartment that was not like actually in a terrifying neighborhood that I wasn't willing willing to put up with for less than $2,000 a month. That was crazy. That that that's in South Louisiana. That's a that's a terrible, terrible price.
Linnea Lueken:And I was a little bit spoiled because I lived in a sketchy, sketchy, sketchy apartment in college. That was, like, a tiny studio apartment that's probably a 10 foot by 20 foot cell, basically, that that did not have a kitchen, and it was, like, $450 a month or whatever. That was sketchy enough. But the the cost of rent is so phenomenal that these kids are are coming out into after they leave college or even when they're in college. They have all the student debt and their expectations are that they're going to live at least as well as they did when they went into college with their families.
Linnea Lueken:And it's just not the case. I think that's shocking and it's very it's very depressing and radicalizing, frankly, for a lot of these kids.
S.T. Karnick:Well, you know, suppressing investment is certainly not the way to fix this, which is what the senate bill, the homeownership bill would do. It's it's it's absurd and stupid and wrong. And and we we have this tendency, to to say, well, there's a problem here, and so let's have the government restrict people more so that it'll fix the problem. How are people ever gonna figure out what's wrong and how to fix it unless they have the freedom to make the choices to experiment? You know, they they the people say that, states are the laboratories of democracy, but common sense and wisdom come from learning from other people's mistakes.
S.T. Karnick:You know, they always say the smart person learns from his mistakes or her mistakes. I think the smart the smarter person, the smartest person learns from other people's mistakes, and that's what we need. I think we need more freedom to make mistakes. We need more freedom to be wrong and to be stupid and to goof up, and then we can all learn from that and and learn exactly what works best. But this system of saving everybody from their own choices is the essence of the problem.
S.T. Karnick:And until we until we get out of that, mentality, this is just going to get worse and worse.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Absolutely. We had another, gosh, I I pulled a article that just came up, a jobs report that was reported over at Fox News, and it surprised me in some places. It did not surprise me in others. Sam, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Linnea Lueken:So the jobs report published over at Fox News here says private payrolls added a 123,000 jobs in April, well above the prediction of 75,000. March's gain of a 186,000 jobs was also revised up to a 190,000. So government payrolls contracted, I wonder why, by 8,000 jobs in April. The federal government's workforce shed 9,000 jobs for the month, while that decline was partially offset by a gain of a thousand state government jobs. Local government employment was not changed very much.
Linnea Lueken:And then the manufacturing sector shed 2,000 jobs in April as economists polled, had expected a gain of 5,000.
S.T. Karnick:I wrote about those, those elements earlier this week, in a in a piece that is about to appear. This is this is exactly what's happening, is that, the Trump administration and the Republicans in congress, with a little help from, senator Fetterman, bless his soul, bless his heart, they're they're try what's going on here is they're trying to normalize things. They're trying to get things back to normal where the economy actually reflects the choices of human beings, rechoices of human beings. When that happens, again, that you you get what I mentioned earlier, that that process of experimentation where people try things, they work or they don't work, And if they work, they do it more. If it doesn't work, they do it less.
S.T. Karnick:With government, if something doesn't work, they do more of it. When you say, oh, we're going to we're going to solve, poverty by spending more money on it, And then poverty increases, you say, see, we have to spend more money on this. It's the opposite. Politics works the opposite way of free markets and free people, and we need to get more of the latter and less of the former. And as we do that, you will see these things happening where the the jobs that we're getting now are real jobs.
S.T. Karnick:The jobs that we were getting in 2022, 2023, 2024 were government jobs, and they were not productive. Things get produced in the private economy. You can make the you can say that government, adds to the the value of private economy of the private economy, that that's the Keynesian position, but it doesn't. It's a net negative. And everything other than other than enforcing contracts, valid contracts that are not products of force or fraud, and stopping force and fraud.
S.T. Karnick:That's all government can really do or really should do. And so when you have free choices by free people, you you find the truth of what people really want, what really appeals to people, and you can you can have more of that. When you try to say, this is what people should want, and this is what people are going to get, then you can be wrong all the time. And the more wrong you are, the more sure you are that you were right in the first place. And that is why you have Mundamy as president of New York City.
Jim Lakely:The idea that there's a 115,000 jobs added in April, I'm actually pretty surprised by that. The job numbers haven't haven't looked good for a while, and they probably won't overall for a while because people forget how many tech jobs have been just zeroed out. I asked Brock, and Brock should know. It's from X. It's from Elon Musk, mister tech himself.
Jim Lakely:But how many just give me an estimate of how many since the beginning of 2025, so the beginning of Trump's term. How many tech jobs and then how many media jobs have been eliminated in that time? And the number is about anywhere between three hundred and fifty and four hundred and fifty thousand tech jobs. According to Grok, have been are are no longer necessary because mainly because of AI. And how many media jobs?
Jim Lakely:Happily, about 5,000 media jobs. I think that's a pretty good start. We could probably do better than that. But so the idea that jobs numbers are even going up at all considering the way AI is starting to displace people. It starts in tech.
Jim Lakely:It's coming everywhere. Yeah. As you said, Sam, there's there's a lot of there's a lot of correcting that needs to go on, and AI is only accelerating that.
S.T. Karnick:Reorientation that's going on in higher education that I mentioned is going on in the economy. We're getting jobs out of government. That's a very good thing. We're also getting jobs out of, places that were overvalued, and were getting a lot of money, especially in capital infusions, and weren't actually making any money. They weren't making products.
S.T. Karnick:They weren't making any of the services that anybody wanted.
Linnea Lueken:You know who a lot of the people are that are probably losing their jobs? And I know that there are good, like, there are probably coders and stuff who are losing their jobs, but I'll tell you who's definitely losing their jobs. And that's those, like, girls who are going on TikTok and annoying the heck out of everybody being like, here's a day in the life of my tech job because she has an email job at a tech company at Google or something. And then she's going in and spending a ton of money on, like, the corporate food in the corporate food lounge or or the the cafeteria they have downstairs in the in the corporate campus and stuff and and doing their little, like, TikTok dance girl boss things. Though their AI is coming for them for sure.
Linnea Lueken:They're they're probably the first ones that are getting slashed.
Jim Lakely:Well, what I was looking for This
S.T. Karnick:is a really good point. Job destruction is good as long as job construction is happening, and that's what's happening now.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. And talking about government finance jobs, I mean, I read a story the other day about higher education that I think a 100 universities and colleges have already closed over the last, I think, either twelve or twenty four months. And that pace is going to accelerate because of a demographic bomb that has already gone off that people don't realize. The university staff, mostly administration, has exploded over the last twenty years. But the number just fit that physically exists, the number of of well, especially, certainly for American born children, the number of people who could go to college because they are now 18 and graduate from high school has been shrinking a lot in The United States over the last couple of decades.
Jim Lakely:And so there is less need for university systems the way they are today than there was when I went to school thirty years ago. So you're gonna start seeing layoffs unless the federal government's gonna bail out all of these colleges. Sure hope not. But you're gonna start to see some layoffs at universities, and you're gonna see a lot of colleges and universities close.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. So, you know, what I I basically, I don't I don't think for one, I'm I'm skeptical that AI is going to be as much of a obliterator of jobs in The US as people are presenting, especially if and we don't we don't touch on the immigration issue all that often on in the tank. But I think that, you know, the people are starting to look around and say, you know, hey. It's kind of crazy that we're that we're hiring, like, millions of people who are not resident, you know, permanent residency in The United States. We're hiring all these people from abroad to come and do these, like, not not necessarily low skill, but definitely low input, low background jobs that historically, like, people right out of college could do.
Linnea Lueken:They could work for a phone bank or something and, you know, it's mind numbing terrible work, but they could do that. So so they could put some money on the table and and finish off their degree and go and find the real job that they wanna work for. But all of that has been taken up in large part by a lot of both illegal and, you know, h one b type immigration. And the same is true of our, like, fast food places and stuff. All of that stuff.
Linnea Lueken:All those jobs that would traditionally go to younger people that don't have a whole lot of experience in a workforce yet have been going to a lot of people from abroad. I think that's probably gonna get killed off by AI in part. And from there, I think the people will be so upset about AI taking these types of jobs that there's gonna be very little stomach for imported labor from the public anyway. And so I think I think you might see some returns. That's my optimistic take on what's going to happen.
Linnea Lueken:I think you'll see some returns to having people be able to have actual, like, first foot in the door, no experience necessary jobs. I think I think a lot fewer of those will will go to h one b's in the future because of AI.
S.T. Karnick:Quite true. And the the point is that the bigger point is that whatever it is, whatever is best, whatever is the best use of resources, whatever is the best, places for human beings to put their effort will happen if you stop trying to force it. If we if we stop having the the, backed by if we stop having policies backed by machine guns and and jet planes and and so forth, telling us exactly how what the future should look like, we'll be a lot better off, and we'll have a much better future. If the government is deciding everything, then it's going to be much, much, much below what is optimal simply because, as Hayek Friedrich Hayek, the great economist, pointed out, they can't know. They just cannot know all the things that you need to know in order to make those decisions.
S.T. Karnick:But what what can know is the people en masse, and that is who we should rely on.
Linnea Lueken:Right. So in conclusion, you guys, it is hard for Gen Z out there. It is genuinely difficult. They are struggling. Also, you can probably be a little bit smarter with your with your budgeting.
Linnea Lueken:And all of this is ultimately pretty much just the government's fault. That's kind of the in conclusion of our of our program here today. We did not get to our third topic, but I think that this was so important that I'm glad that we spent the whole time talking about it anyway. Our third topic was just gonna be or our second topic was just gonna be on the anti what was it? What did they call it?
Linnea Lueken:The anti weaponization fund. We can talk about that another time or not at all. I don't know. Anyway, so thank you guys so much for being on the show. Thank you all of our audience members for joining us in the chat and also in our silly little polls.
Linnea Lueken:But that is all the time we have today, unfortunately. Thank you everyone for your attention to these matters, and we are live every single week on Thursdays at noon central, on Rumble, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, all over the place. Jim, what do you have for our audience today?
Jim Lakely:We have at the same time on these same channels, the climate realism show. It's gonna be another banger, so I hope to see you tomorrow. Absolutely. Sam?
S.T. Karnick:The affordability paper is available at heartland.org right on the front page there. I have an article at the Blaze today, and there's also the substack, stkarnick.substack.com.
Linnea Lueken:Yes. Absolutely. For audio listeners, please rate us well on whatever service you're using and leave a review. Thank you so much to all of our usual panelists. And also Samantha who had to duck out a little bit early, but I very much appreciate her coming on.
Linnea Lueken:And also, of course, to all of our viewers. We will see you again next week.
