Live from Music Row, Wednesday 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 for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
You know, Michael, I read an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal on June 13th, and the title of it is called “The Incredible Sinking Yen.” And they’re talking about the Japanese economy, and the yen in particular.
And there’s something in this article that caught my eye, and that is the total debt for Japan, which is 2.5 times their GMP. We’re now approaching one and a quarter times ours. And so we’re not at their level now.
They don’t have the same kind of unfunded liabilities that we have in this country. And they’re still holding their interest rates at near zero. They are beginning to have some inflation.
Their inflation over there is 2.5 percent, but they’re holding their interest rates at near zero. And here’s the problem that they have. If they raise their interest rates and the interest goes up on their national debt, then the deficit for Japan jumps an inordinately large amount because of that one line item.
Well, we’re in the same position in this country. You have, in fact, somebody … Biden is a lot like Jimmy Carter. And I think that is being very unfair to Jimmy Carter because Carter at least knew there was a problem and admitted there was a problem.
Now, the difficulty with Carter was he didn’t know how to solve the problem. So he gave what became known as the name “malaise speech,” where he identified the problem, and then he had no real solution. Biden, on the other hand, says inflation is the bane of our existence, but he doesn’t take any responsibility for it.
And so he blames it on Putin, which is almost kind of humorous. I want to mention that Russia’s economy is smaller than the economy of Italy. So could you imagine for a moment that Biden was saying that the reason we have so much inflation is because of the government of Italy?
That would be an absolute joke, but yet he’s still trying to blame somebody else, and he’s also still calling for additional massive spending increases and additional massive taxes. And so he’s learned nothing from the past.
I believe he actually sincerely believes that his policies are good. And I say that because he’s been a grifter his entire life, and a grifter always tries to figure out how to rationalize in their own mind that what they are for is actually good for others, when it’s actually bad.
And so we’re at a period here where you’ve got the Federal Reserve, which is going to start, I think, raising interest rates at a faster rate than they previously said they were going to. But here’s the question.
And it’s just like in Japan; if the Federal Reserve raises interest rates the way they did in the late 70s and 1980s and ’81, if they were to do that, they would run the federal deficit through the roof because we now have, instead of less than a trillion dollars of federal debt, we have more than $30 trillion.
And so there’s a real Catch-22 here at the federal level. The only real solution is a dramatic cut in spending and regulations. That’s the only real solution. And that is obviously not going to be in the cards under Biden.
Listen to the Crommentary:
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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.
