Live from Music Row Friday 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 by Fox Business contributor and Wall Street expert Liz Peek on the newsmaker line to discuss the current economic climate, inflation, and what the future brings in the Biden administration.
Leahy: I am delighted to welcome back to our newsmaker line our very good friend Liz Peek with Fox News, the expert on the economy. Liz, thanks so much for joining us this morning.
Peek: Oh, good morning. I’m happy to join you. Thanks for having me.
Leahy: What is going on with the economy? Could the Biden maladministration be doing anything worse than it is currently doing?
Peek: (Laughs) It’s hard to figure. I mean, we really are looking at sort of a replay of the 1970s. I wrote about this, six months ago, but honestly, I didn’t really expect it to happen quite so dramatically.
In the last quarter, now we know grew at only know, and the price index was 5.7 percent. What that means, translated, is that inflation was almost 6 percent. So what’s happening to average workers?
Their pay is going down in real terms. That is to say, their salaries, et cetera, are worthless at the grocery store, worthless in terms of what kind of rent they can afford. It’s a pretty shocking development because when Biden took office, we were growing at better than 6 percent.
Everything was teed up for a really rapid, remarkable recovery. You had a big fiscal boost. You had a big monetary infusion from the Fed. All that was a very strong tailwind for Biden. And somehow here we are with the economy drastically slowing.
And certainly, some things are beyond his control. The fact that you’ve had port shutdowns in China and disruptions in various other places, that’s something outside of Biden’s responsibility zone.
But what is in his responsibility zone is the fact that our supply chain issues, ports, truckers, and so forth are totally bollocked up and not getting any better. So here’s just a little insight into how the mindset of the Biden administration works.
They actually did look at this situation on the west coast where there are hundreds of ships waiting offshore to be unloaded and they decided the solution was to fine. To fine the shippers’ hundreds of thousands of dollars a day for delaying offloading their cargo.
Understand, there is no way to offload the cargo. There are not enough places for the containers to be stored. There are not enough longshoremen willing to do that now in the middle of the night, which is a new thing.
Somehow magically they think putting pressure on these guys is going to make it better. Guess what? It won’t. Honestly, it’s just an incredible mess.
Leahy: Biden bollocks things up. I love that word. I think that describes the administration. Crom Carmichael is in studio. He has a question for you, Liz.
Peek: Sure.
Carmichael: I was born in South Bend, Indiana. I go up there a good bit. And our Transportation Secretary is the former Mayor of South Bend. (Peek chuckles) Just to give you some background. While he was Mayor in eight years, he did rearrange the traffic on twelve city blocks and put in two roundabouts.
(Peek laughs) So anybody who wants to say that he is not qualified to be Secretary of Transportation needs to go to South Bend and ride around those roundabouts. They are beautifully done. (Leahy laughs)Â
Peek: I saw someone take that on that whole topic not long ago on Twitter, and they mentioned that I think there were 39 municipal buses in South Bend. (Leahy laughs) He’s familiar with mass transit. Oh, good. Really?
I think at the end of the day, the thing that’s most shocking as I’m sitting here in my house thinking about all the things going on with this administration, they’re so politically stupid. Biden has been a politician all his life and here he is, begging Congress to pass something, anything so he can go off to the G7 looking like a successful president.
It’s all so tacky and sort of inept and stupid. And to have Buttigieg take this long protracted, more than a month family leave at a time when his department theoretically should be stepping in and helping manage things.
And anyway, he’s not a manager. He’s never done anything of this sort. Honestly, it does make you scratch your head, right? I just can’t understand it.
Leahy: Liz, is this going to get worse before it gets better, or are we just going to slide into this? Jimmy Carteresque stagflation with a Biden bollocks twist to it?
Peek: Well, I don’t know. You’ve got a number of things happening. One is the labor shortage. And everything Biden has done and literally every single policy has made it worse. How is that so?
First of all, obviously, we’ve all talked for months about all the entitlements, keeping people on the sidelines. Whether it’s a child tax credit, the extended unemployment benefits, rent moratoriums, or even forgiving hundreds of thousands of student loans.
All those things mean it’s less imperative that people go back to work. That’s number one as Joe Biden would say. Number two is the vaccine mandate. Now we have public employees that are balking. Firemen and police in New York City are refusing to get this shot.
And also, by the way, in private enterprise, a lot of people who are older who are sort of considering retirement are thinking, okay, I’m out of here. I don’t want to deal with this. I don’t want to take this vaccine for whatever reason.
And some younger people, too. You have just a real critical problem in terms of not enough workers. Eventually, if you crush the economy enough, we won’t need all those workers. So I guess the problem will be resolved.
But you don’t really want it resolved that way. And I think the third thing is that Biden is pushing unionization very hard. It’s like he’s stuck in the 1950s and he thinks this is the big solution to America’s problems, is to get everybody into a union.
So you have McDonald’s workers going on strike. The UAW representing John Deere workers has now gone on strike. And, of course, they’re already unionized. But having a big public strike like this kind of inspires similar activities maybe at other companies where they’re going to try and do this Amazon thing down in Alabama again.
All of this pro-union activity is going to raise wages. And I think we’re already in a wage-price spiral. I’ve seen this before. This does not turn out well.
Now what’s happening is that companies and you could hear it in the third-quarter earnings reports from companies, everyone’s having to raise wages because prices are up. Then they raise prices.
Leahy: Liz Peek with Fox News, honest and accurate but not exactly encouraging.
Carmichael: I was going to say. A little depressing.
Leahy: Thanks, Liz. Come back next week next month with maybe better news. Thanks for joining us today.
Peek: (Laughs) I’ll try and do that.
Leahy: All right. Thanks so much. Liz Peek, she’s always great.
Carmichael: That was terrific.
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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.
Photo “Liz Peek” by Liz Peek.
