Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio to discuss the experience of inflation and the dishonesty of the Biden administration.
Leahy: We welcome to our studios, the original all-star panelist, Crom Carmichael. Good morning, Crom.
Carmichael: Michael. Good morning, sir.
Leahy: How was your weekend?
Carmichael: Fairly mundane.
Leahy: I like a mundane week. Not a lot happened this weekend, except in Knoxville.
Carmichael: Oh, my goodness. Well, now the College football scene was interesting when Georgia clearly made the statement that they’re the best team in the country. And then the controversy in Knoxville, of course. And then Vanderbilt lost to South Carolina.
Leahy: At the last minute.
Carmichael: We’ve got the big Titans game tonight.
Leahy: Titans and Bills. Bills coming back to the Music City for revenge after the Music City miracle 27 years.
Carmichael: There are no players on their team that remember it.
Leahy: But still the fans remember it.
Carmichael: Yes, a lot of them do.
Leahy: Well, Crom, as is our want at 6:30 when you come in, it’s time for Crom’s commentary.
Carmichael: Michael, one of the things I did over the weekend was I read an interesting article in The Free Beacon about a fellow named Michael Zandel. In 1640, in The Elements of Law: Natural and Politics, Thomas Hobbes mischievously observed that democracy, in effect, is no more than an aristocracy of orators.
And then, from the silver tongue statesman to clever sophists and crude demagogues, the best talkers Hobbes suggests subverting Democratic equality by stirring the people’s passions, shaping public agenda, and commandeering the majority’s will.
That then led me to kind of thinking about what’s going on in Washington right now. Inflation is terrible. You have food prices, many different categories of food going up at more than 10 percent.
You have energy prices going up at more than 30 percent. Some are double. You have clothing, you have furniture, it’s just across the board.
And you have an economist from Harvard who’s actually claiming that it’s not happening or that if it is happening, it’s a blip and it’s a blip because of demand and the strengthening economy. Now those things are false.
The reason that we have inflation is that we have way too much money chasing a static amount of goods. And that always happens when you expand the money supply at a ridiculous pace.
And I believe we’ve now out-punted the coverage of the Federal Reserve and its ability to tamp down inflation without dramatically raising interest rates. And so that’s where we are. And the Democrats are determined to throw more gasoline on the fire.
You have Manchin and you have Sinema who are standing in the way. But it is the dishonesty that is absolutely spectacular. You have Jen Psaki, who claimed first that Afghanistan was a success. (Chuckles)
And then you have Jen Psaki explaining that the supply chain problems are a problem of demand. And the clutter at the ports and the hundreds or thousands of ships all around the United States that can’t unload their products because of a labor shortage that is due directly to the COVID mandates.
And then you have a shortage of truckers who is also a function of the mandate. You have a shortage of pilots that’s also a function of the mandates. And the people in Washington to a person are all saying these things are not true.
And it reminds me of the wife who comes back from a business trip early and walks into the bedroom and her husband is having sex with a woman.
And the husband looks up and says, honey, are you going to believe what I’m about to tell you? Or are you going to believe those lying eyes of yours? And that’s what we have right now. Here’s what’s interesting.
There are three ways that people can learn. One is people can study history. One is people can observe what’s happening to other people. And the third is people have their own personal experiences.
By far, the one that has the greatest impact is personal experiences. And that’s what’s happening with inflation and the COVID mandates. And that’s what’s happening with the supply chain and the lack of goods on the shelves.
Those are personal experiences, and they are real. And there’s no way that somebody can lie and effectively change somebody’s opinion. Observation is what happened when the people observed the debacle in Afghanistan.
We didn’t personally experience it, but we observed it, and we see just how terrible it was. And then the last is we learned from history. That’s the most difficult. And this article is talking about a speaker can put people in a trance and get elected.
I believe that is true when you don’t have the terrible observations and the terrible personal experiences. I think that the Biden administration, it looks to me like if it doesn’t acknowledge that the COVID vaccine mandates are really harming the economy and creating giant spikes in crime in major cities as police don’t go to work and city officials are getting fired that the implosion will be like one we’ve never seen.
Leahy: I think it’s intentional frankly.
Carmichael: Tell me the benefit.
Leahy: They want to destroy our capitalist system.
Carmichael: But how do you do that and destroy your own party?
Leahy: Well, they think that they’re not going to destroy their own party. I agree with you, and it is a little bit of the emperor has no clothes here, right? And we have just mass dishonesty.
Carmichael: Not only is it that the Emperor has no clothes, but the other is and as I observe, the Emperor has no clothes I’m freezing my butt off. In other words, I’m experiencing terrible things personally.
If you’re a renter, you’re seeing your rents go up at ten or 15 percent a year. And you’ve seen that now for three years. If you’re a homeowner, then the inflation is benefiting you and you probably know it.
But everything else in your life is hurting you from an inflationary standpoint. And now you’re seeing shortages where even school lunches are now being affected.
Leahy: Send your thank you notes to Joe Biden and the Biden maladministration. And Mark Zuckerberg who helped make it happen.
Carmichael: Did you see Buttigieg’ss comments over the weekend? He’s making a complete fool of himself.
Leahy: Just for the context.
Carmichael: But he is the epitome, by the way of what they’re talking about here. The silver tongue guy who can stare you right in the eye and tell you the biggest lie. And if it weren’t for the fact that you’re experiencing it yourself, you might believe him.
Leahy:Â Well, he’s very clever.
Carmichael: He is.
Leahy: But he’s also very dishonest.
Carmichael: Of course. But the question is, is he going to be caught and hoisted on his own batard?
Leahy: Well, he should be.
Carmichael: And I think he will be because he’s sitting there saying that the supply chain is not a problem. It’s the demand.
Leahy: It’s insane.
Carmichael: And then you have people saying, well, it’s the low unemployment that’s causing inflation. As if people can’t remember that when Trump was President just two years ago, inflation was less than two percent, and there were five million more people working at that time than there are now. And the unemployment rate was half of what it is.
Leahy: I want to take that concept and kind of shift gears a little bit. It’s not exactly comparable. But I’m going to play a little bit of Devil’s advocate here on this particular issue here in Tennessee.
The governor has called for a special session of the Tennessee General Assembly. And they’re convening today and are going to consider that Ford Motor Companies announced that, thanks to, in part, some incentives that the state of Tennessee is providing.
They are going to invest $5.6 billion in the Memphis Regional mega-site in Hayward County. They promised to invest $5.6 billion. They promised 5,800 jobs. They’re going to make electric cars there.
They also promised that the electric battery manufacturers here will be part of this. Now, the price tag was supposed to be $500 million. The fine print has arrived. It’s now $884 million.
Let me just say in general, and I think this is probably going to push it through. And I’ll just set this up. I am not a big fan of these kinds of corporate giveaways in general. Your view on them is what we’ll get back to the details about after the break.
Carmichael: Well, they depend. And so in this case, you and I can have a back and forth. Â On that particular one.
Leahy: I think that’s probably it.
Carmichael: But there’s some information that I do not yet have and maybe you can supply it.
Leahy: Well, I think we’ll do that in general. I think our difference would be I think you would say in certain conditions it makes sense.
Carmichael: Yes.
Leahy: And I would say it never makes sense. I’m in the minority view there. But we’ll talk about that when we get back. This is The Tennessee Star Report.
Listen to the second hour here:
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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.
