Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast live from Music Row on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – Leahy was joined on the newsmakers line by the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael.
During the second hour, Carmichael explained how he saw the people who ran the government and the party unions as incredibly political, abusive and crooked. Towards the end of the segment, he stated that in order for the government to survive the private sector would have to do extremely well because it is what funds the government.
Leahy: We are joined now by our great friend. Our original star panelist Crom Carmichael. Crom good morning. Are you safe at home?
Carmichael: Michael, I am still at home. How are you?
Leahy: So yesterday the governor required everybody to stay-at-home. Now it’s not just Davidson County and Shelby County. It’s all 95 counties in the state that are required to stay at home. What’s the impact of this going to be for the economy of Tennessee Crom?
Carmichael: Well, my guess is not much of the rest of the state was in a semi-stay at home mode anyway. But now the rest of it is and so it’s going to be very very difficult. And let us all hope and pray that come the end of April that there are enough masks that are being mass-produced so that people can go back to work. Even if we can go back to work at the beginning of May, it’s going to be many many months before we get the kind of economy back in February. It might actually be a couple of years.
Leahy: So, Crom, I’m going to do a little bit of experimenting here like I did with Clint earlier. I came to work and now wearing a mask when I go outside the house. I think you can’t lose. And you probably are helping a little bit. Although the federal government has been very confused about whether or not you should or should not wear a mask. This is a mask we bought at Kroger. But I’m going to put it on right now. The mask is on. Can you still hear me, Crom?
Carmichael: Yeah. Oh yeah.
Leahy: So here’s the thing, Crom. I guess we can rest easy now because yesterday Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she’s putting Adam “Schifty” Schiff, you know the guy who lied about the president in a committee hearing and made stuff up.
Drove through this sham impeachment while the coronavirus was driving through China. She’s putting that guy in charge of a select committee to investigate, guess what? Coronavirus? No, the president and his response. I think it’s beneath contempt. What do you think Crom?
Carmichael: It’s unsurprising. And what it shows you is that it is usually crooks who are most concerned about other people being crooked.
Leahy: (Laughs) That’s a good one.
Carmichael: And Nancy Pelosi, unfortunately, it’s so fascinating how part of what she has said in that is how corrupting money is. I think that was part of what she said in her statement. And what I have been saying since I started coming back on your show is that the Democrat Party is owned by the public sector unions.
Now I’m not talking about government employees. There are many many fine government employees. But the people who run the government and party unions are incredibly political. And they are abusive. And they are crooked. The people who run the unions are just crooked people.
And the Democrat Party is then the party that seized the private sector as the servants of government, not the other way around. And the Democrat Party gets one and a half billion dollars every two years from the government unions.
And so she is right. Money is corrupting. And money has corrupted Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party. I hope his story is right about that. We have a very good one here in Nashville that I hope we’ll write about someday.
Leahy: (Chuckles) You talking about our good friend who we’ve yet to meet John Meacham. Have we heard anything from him as of late?
Carmichael: I have not. I have not heard anything from him. I’m sure he is sheltering in place. It’s going to be very interesting to what happens when we do emerge and we must emerge from the current circumstances.
Leahy: Yeah absolutely.
Carmichael: And you hear Gavin Newsom and you hear Andrew Cuomo who are saying that change is afoot in the progressive party. This proves that progressive politics works. And I’m trying to understand how is it that a pandemic proves that progressive politics work. I don’t see the connection at all.
Leahy: What is their argument? I saw Newsom say that and of course, Andrew Cuomo has gotten good marks for his command and control of this. But he’s gotten to be very repetitive it seems to me in terms of his presentation. Back to Gavin Newsom, he did say this will open up a brand new progressive era. I don’t get that.
Carmichael: I don’t either. What this is going to do is it’s going to add a tremendous amount of debt at the federal level. And I’m not saying that its a bad thing. But I’m not saying the response under the circumstances was a bad response. But the results are that we’re going to end up with 25-26 trillion in debt.
I’m sure that a lot of states and local governments are going to be worse off than they were from the standpoint of unfunded liabilities. And we’re going to need to have a very strong private sector to generate the kind of wealth and income and prosperity to not only the people in the private sector.
You know government lives off of taxes and the taxes come from the private sector. If you have a weak weak private sector you are going to have even worse government. I don’t get the connection. But we have to ask progressives how they connect these dots. Because I don’t see it.
Leahy: I was watching Mark Levin on Sean Hannity last night and he was echoing what he said earlier on his radio program. And he said look, we’ve got to turn the economy back on. Specifically, he pointed out something very interesting. He said, “Ok people working at grocery stores, they are able to go and work. They are open. They are doing things.”
Amazon is delivering stuff. Fed-Ex is delivering stuff. They are all working. Why are these policies he argued, limiting the ability of many others to go to work? I thought that was a very good question. By the way, you’re talking about businesses doing well and poorly. Right now I would not want to own any stock in a hotel company but I would like to own stock in a grocery company because Kroger their unit sales were up 30% last month.
Carmichael: Well, the reason sales are up is because restaurant sales are virtually zero. And so all of the food that people are consuming is being shifted to grocery stores and away from restaurants. And that will change. But it’s going to be a slow process coming back to where we were because people are not going to just race out and engage in crowded venues.
Leahy: Yeah, there’s no question about that.
Carmichael: No.
Leahy: We’ve heard some people say particularly in restaurants, well this is going to be a steep V down and then a steep V back up. I don’t think so.
Carmichael: I agree. And airline travel is going to be very slow to recover. Hotels are going to be slow to recover. Restaurants are going to be slow. And many restaurants that were open in February were just simply not reopen.
Leahy: Never reopen.
Carmichael: And you see Macy’s laid off 100,000 people. There will be a lot of retail stores that don’t open also.
Leahy: Absolutely. Let’s say a retailer has been struggling and their ability to conduct business on an ongoing basis was beginning to be in doubt anyways. You take something like this and you just can’t overcome it. And I think you’re going to see a lot of that happening here in the United States.
Carmichael: Yeah.
Leahy: Let me just go over the numbers Crom for you because there is a little bit of encouragement there. of coronavirus in the country. As of midnight this morning 244,000 cases of coronavirus in the country. That’s an increase of 29,000 in one day. That’s only slightly up from the previous 24 hour period an increase of 28,000.
There are 6,070 deaths. That’s an increase of 900. That’s actually a lower increase in one day than the previous day of 1,350. A possible indication that or it may be an anomaly. We’ll know better on Monday. A possible indication that we may be reaching the peak of this a little bit earlier.
Carmichael: You are right. We’ll see next week. And if the news is good then I would say that by the end of April and I think we’re on a nationwide stay at home, I’m not going to say order.
Leahy: Recommendation.
Carmichael: Through the end of April.
Leahy: Exactly.
Listen to the full second hour here:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Nancy Pelosi” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
