Is Washington Starting To Realize The Debt Is A Problem? | Arcadia Economics

The federal government of the United States needs a fundamental course correction. If it doesn’t get that course correction and the jury is out, right? I don’t know whether it can correct course or not. I believe that it can. I don’t know that it will. The land of Arcania well, hello there, my friends. Chris Marcus here with you for Arcadia Economics and quite excited today because we’re going to be doing something a little bit different. We will touch on gold and silver and the role that it could conceivably play, which growing in importance as we progress through the current events.

Although we have someone who has some potential solutions that could be implemented because Mike Turmott is running for the libertarian party. He is the vice presidential candidate along with Chase Oliver. And obviously we have a lot of libertarian leading thinkers in our audience and really excited heard from Mike and his team recently. And I think especially in light of the debate we had a couple weeks ago, in addition to all the other issues building in the country, really a nice time to catch up with you, Mike. I appreciate what you’re doing, what you stand for, and what you’re speaking up about.

And thanks for being here. And how are you today? Thank you. I’m doing good. It’s a great pleasure to be with you, Chris, and good to be with your audience. And everything you just said is true. It’s a strange and interesting time and probably not a bad time to be a metals bug, right? Yeah, certainly it’s been a nice year after a lot of years of patience and waiting. And although with all the things that are happening again, that really makes it an interesting time to have you here today. And perhaps just to start, you could give folks a little bit about your background, what you’re doing with Chase, and some of the things that are happening with libertarian party, and then we can dig in from there.

Sure a lot to unpack there. I was a professional economist for a couple of decades in banking, commercial finance. I worked for the White House as an economist, mostly in budget issues for a couple of years. Worked in Washington for almost another decade after that, mostly as an advocate in the financial services industry. Had my own business for almost another decade in the education and event space, mostly for financial services and a lot of strategic consulting. Taught economics at three different universities, did a lot of substitute teaching in the public schools, which is quite an experience that I would advocate for anybody who cares about their community.

It’ll open your eyes. As a second career, I was a police officer from age 49 to 60. I was on the road as a patrol officer in Broward County, Florida, for eleven and a half years. I am the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential nominee. Chase Oliver is our presidential nominee. Chase is a good guy. He’s a very young man. He is a peace activist. He is the guy who disrupted the race for Senate in Georgia when, because he got two or 3% of the vote, neither Raphael Warnock nor Herschel Walker were able to get 50% causing a runoff.

So that’s a little bit of Chase Oliver’s background. So we’re excited about forming a ticket. We’re excited about representing the libertarian party and just as importantly, representing libertarianism. And I think it’s a good time to do it. I think people are frustrated with the republican party and the Democratic Party and for cause, not just because their nominees are problematic, I’ll use trying to be diplomatic, but because each of those parties has left behind what used to be their political agenda, which were, you know, for the most part the reasons why people join those parties. Right? Yeah.

And certainly we’ve got a display of that. I guess it was two weeks ago now where we had the debate, which was an eye opening experience. I heard candidates talk about beating inflation. Theyre going to balance spending a lot of stuff, which on the face of it, I know you mentioned youre an economist, and even the idea that were going to balance the budget, cut spending with so much of the economy based on government spending seems like a lot of things that sounded nice conceptually. I dont know how effective they would be at implementing them. But especially with your background as an economist and what you’re doing now, can you give people an overview of where you see things economically and whether we are headed off a cliff, as many say, and perhaps what you’d advocate.

Well, thanks for all of that. The federal government of the United States needs a fundamental course correction. If it doesn’t get that course correction and the jury is out, right, I don’t know whether it can correct course or not. I believe that it can. I don’t know that it will. We need a libertarian minded administration, whether that’s the libertarian party or someone else. There isn’t anyone else in the race this time except for our ticket. But soon. We need a fundamental course correction. And if we don’t get it, I do believe it is true that the federal government will face of financial implosion before the middle of the century.

I don’t think there’s, I don’t think a lot of people would build a strong argument on the other side of that. I think that we’re absolutely headed for a cliff. Yeah, it sure seems like that to anyone who’s watching the debt. And obviously we’re past the point where it’s just folks like you and I talking about it. Here’s Bill Dudley, former New York Fed president. It’s possible to know when investors will decide the risks are too much to bear. When it happens, it tends to be sudden and brutal. Here’s JB Morgan, Jay Barry, co head of interest rate strategy, talking about how more of the borrowing is going to be done in the short term and opens up the question of who’s going to buy the treasuries.

This could absolutely strain funding markets. Meanwhile, on the other hand, we have Janet Yellen, who says that debt load is in a reasonable place if it remains at current levels relative to GDP. Fantastic. Only problem, there’s about a 0% chance of that happening. And we’ve heard statements from Janet Yellen as well as Jake Sullivan, who made some comments at the Brookings Institute that essentially they realized this idea of just exporting treasuries is on borrowed time. So whether Janet thinks the current thing is sustainable or nothing, it seems like now even in some parts of Washington, they’re realizing that something’s coming up.

So it’s not just speculation by you or me on this. I would agree with everything you just said with the following caveat. I don’t think that what Janet said is true. She said it was. I think the word was used was reasonable. There’s a difference between reasonable and sustainable. Just because you could imagine sustaining the level that we’re at. And you’re right, it’s irrelevant because we are not sustaining it. We are growing it. But even if you believe that it could be sustainable at the level of debt if interest rates were not to change, which is also an incorrect assumption, but presume that all those assumptions are correct, that doesn’t make it reasonable.

Right. Just because you can hang on by your fingernails for the rest of this century, that doesn’t make it a good idea. Right? No. There is no reasonability behind the amount of money that our government has borrowed. Look, every dollar that the government spends is a dollar that you and I can’t spend or that at least someone can’t spend. You know, the amount of resources available to be spent in the world is not increased by the federal government’s participation. That’s not a thing. Right. That’s hocus pocus. And so we need to realize, you know, inside the libertarian party, we have this expression, Chris, you’ve probably heard it.

We say taxation is theft. Right. The reason we say that is because taxation is theft. But I would like to broaden that, to say that all government spending is theft in some sense. All government spending is, whether it’s financed by tax, by inflation. Right. Or by debt that you’re eventually going to pay off. That someone is, you know, maybe your grandchildren, my great grandchildren will eventually have to pay off. It’s still resources that other humans are not able to spend. And so we need to keep in mind that just because Janet says it’s reasonable doesn’t mean that it is.

And just because someone makes a case that it’s sustainable doesn’t make it reasonable. I think that that’s an important distinction. But in addition to all that, no, we are piling debt on top of debt. And as the old Hemingway expression goes, it happens slowly. And then all of a sudden, I like the quote that you brought up that says, you know, these corrections are swift and brutal. That’s right. And unfortunately, most people don’t see them coming. Yeah, that certainly does seem to be the case, although we even have Jamie Dimon warning about it, Jerome Powell warning about it.

And it’s not rocket science. And especially at a time where you see foreign countries not talking about how they feel about the dollar, but acting on it. And we’ll come back to that in a moment and perhaps how all this plays out, although I am going to pull up website that you and Mike have put up the gold new deal and would be great to hear. We’ve talked about some of the problems. We talk about that quite a bit on the show. But some of the solutions that you have here, two of which in particular, I think will catch people’s eye, eliminate the IR’s, which to many people seems like, wait a second, how could we do this? Although, keep in mind we had the industrial revolution, perhaps the greatest period of prosperity of the country before the IR’s came along, and obviously one near and dear to our heart, ending the fed.

So wanted to give you a chance to talk about those two or any of these others on here. Sure, eliminating the IR’s and cutting out the income tax are two different things. I think that those are both good ideas, but those are two different things. What we’re recognizing here is the relationship between us and the federal government. This direct relationship, this direction, financial relationship based on tax, that’s an inappropriate relationship. And as anyone in your audience who’s been audited knows, that is not a fair fight. That’s a weird relationship. I have been audited. I’m looking at you, Chris.

I’m guessing you have been. If I were in charge of the IR’s, I would definitely audit you. You know, you are presumed guilty. I think it’s part of the reason why the IR’s is able to raise so much money is because the power that it has and that is, you know, really the reason why the federal government is able to spend so much money, because they don’t get the pushback that they should. Yeah, I realize. And then Mister Smith goes to Washington version of this story. Our congresspersons represent our interests and hold spending in check. But as a practical matter, that doesn’t happen.

And so what I’m suggesting is that we rebalance that relationship to the extent to which the federal government needs money. They should be going to state legislatures for it. They should not be coming to us directly. And it should be up to states to stand up for our rights, to stand up for our interests, and to give the federal government some pushback in a way that you and I are just not able to do so. And the next point you see there is to limit federal expenditure. I think that that’s so critical. By the way, the way to do that is an overall cap and then to ratchet that cap down, especially in a real basis.

But I would suggest doing it in a nominal basis as well. And the reason for that is that it’s not realistic to expect our legislature at the federal level, or frankly at any other level to vote against any particular program. We know that mandatory spending is the vast majority of our problem, right, entitlement programs, and you can’t expect the legislature to stand up against that. And so what I’m suggesting is we need an overall cap and to ratchet it down. We used to have budget control law when I was a White House budget economist, right after the earth cooled and it worked for a little while.

It wasn’t perfect, it’s not a silver bullet, but that’s the direction in which we need to go. And of course, I do believe that we need to end the federal reserve system. That doesn’t mean ending the dollar. That means we need a different type of monetary policy. I don’t think most Americans, your audience gets it, but I don’t think most Americans have any idea how monetary policy is set. I think if you were to stop someone in the street and say, do you know how the most important price in the world is set right, short term interest rates on the us dollar, they’d say, I have no idea, nor should they, you shouldn’t have to walk around every day worrying about this.

Okay? This is how it works. This is not a metaphor. We gather a dozen people every six weeks in a room and basically ask them what mood they’re in regarding the economy. That’s literally how it’s done. That is not metaphorical. That is not an exaggeration. If you said that’s how we set the price of, you know, pork shanks, you would say that seems pretty stupid. Yeah. The fact that it’s the world’s most important price. Wow. And we happen to know as a matter of research, it doesn’t work for those of you out there who are defenders of the Fed.

And good for you. I’ve worked with literally hundreds of fed economists, patriotic, smart, sophisticated, hardworking, earnest people. But after 100 years, you have to admit at some point this is a system that doesn’t work very well. It doesn’t mitigate the boom bust cycle. It doesn’t eradicate inflation. And we have created a politically motivated and politically powerful behemoth that is able to throw its weight around for a variety of reasons, and most of what it does is no longer in our interest. Trey. Yeah, and I suppose to that, Mike, you could add that if people were shocked of how the short term interest rates were set, how would they feel if they realized that the people setting it were the same ones who said subprime was contained before it really imploded, that inflation was transitory? So it’s not like we have Stanley Druckenmiller or Warren Buffett out there or someone who’s getting all these things right.

Although like to shift into perhaps where this goes from here, because in the midst of all this, I’m sure you’ve seen that and heard plenty. We have Judy Shelton, who was an economic advisor to Trump on Twitter. She’s talking about gold. She’s doing interviews, talking about gold. Bonds has a book coming out, good as gold. So at least we’re seeing people within the establishment now say the four letter g word. I don’t know if you caught this, Mike. This was a stunner. Back in January, you actually had the Philadelphia branch of the Federal Reserve publish a paper on whether a gold standard works.

They came to the conclusion that it does. While the gold standard exposes the home country to short term fluctuations in money, prices and output caused by external shocks, it ensures long term price stability as the quantity of money and prices only temporarily deviate. Yeah, im not sure I buy all that. I am not a gold bug. But the idea behind having gold in your portfolio, I personally find a damn good idea. Maybe that does make me a gold bug. But I would suggest that we need to harden our currency. Yes. By having a rules based system.

Yes. Do we need to stop the fed or anyone else from having the authority to create money stock willy nilly? Yes. So we’re all on the same page with all of that. Does it need to be tied to a particular commodity? I don’t buy that. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be a better idea than what we have now. Right. I think that we can beat the deflationary pressure and even the volatility that might come with a gold standard. I think we can beat that with a better system of controlling the monetary base, controlling how much money that.

That we create, whether it’s by the Treasury Department or the Federal Reserve or by anybody else. I think the fed as an entity has to go for political reasons. But whoever is in charge of monitoring the monetary base needs to be hemmed in by a rules based system. I think we’re all on the same page there. I just don’t think that you need to go all the way to a gold standard to accomplish that. Okay. And, well, two follow up questions. Do you think that whether we need to or not, especially with what we’re seeing happen with the BRICS, where now reportedly they’re discussing a settlement currency that could involve a gold backing.

So slightly different question. Do you think that we are going to have more gold involvement in the system? And then also, what would you advocate if you are. If you and Chase are elected? I would advocate for other currencies to be allowed to compete in as robust a fashion as possible. One of the things I don’t like about federal government policy of the United States is that we typically disadvantage other currencies, whether that’s in transactions or clearance vehicles, or whether that’s in participation and policy setting organs. We disadvantage other currencies. I don’t like that. I believe that we need open competition among currencies, whether those currencies are inside the United States or outside the United States, whether those are blockchain based or whether they’re based on clamshells.

I don’t like disadvantaging other currencies. I think it’s a problem for long term american interests. The idea that we only have one currency that is the reserve currency of the world, and now we’re attacking it by our government overspending. In the long run, that’s not a good idea. That’s a bad idea. What would we argue, by the way, is in second place to the US dollar? And by that I don’t mean who’s got the most transactional volume or greatest asset base volume today. What I mean is who would be the likely replacement if the dollar were to fail? You would have to.

As smart as your audience is, we would all have to scratch our head for a moment to figure that out. That’s a bad thing. That’s a bad thing. You should have robust competition at the top of the scale, not at the bottom of the scale trying to figure out whoever is in second place. So yes, I do believe that we need to allow Brics to compete. I’m not, frankly, I’m not optimistic about brics. I think anytime you put the letter c in something it’s going to be problematic. Having said that, is it likely that there’ll be more gold involvement in these schemes, in these attempts in these competitive currencies? I think so.

I, you know, I would suggest that. I wouldn’t advocate it. It’s none of my business. It’s their currency. But would I suggest it? Yeah, I think it adds an indicator to the market that you are conservative, that you are careful, that you’re willing to hold yourself accountable. That’s an important signal, especially in light of the fact that, you know, the b, the r, the I, the c and the s are not necessarily the governments you would choose. As you know, these are the most prudent, they’ve done a good job of demonstrating over the course of the past century that they all are adherent to good free market principles.

I think that would be a lift to base, you know, your narrative on that. And so if you can mix in there, and we’re going to have a certain level of involvement, whatever you decide that it is, we’re going to have a certain level of involvement for metals. I think that adds some credibility. Well, that makes sense. And certainly I like what you said there about the idea of competition. So it’s not something that’s mandated. And be nice to see gold and silver stand in their own rightful place in competition. And I guess that’s one of the things I’ve wondered about the Brics of.

Again, we don’t know their exact plans or how successful they’ll be implementing yet. I do wonder if they year or five years from now they are using a system based on that. If someone’s selling oil and they have a currency that has some gold backing versus the dollar, it seems like some natural economics could have their impact. On that over time. So love the way you phrased it there, Mike. Perhaps the last one before we wrap up, obviously, you’re very tied in with the politics, maybe not participating in some of the mainstream establishment, but have insight into a lot of the things that us folks are reading about.

Curious what you see in terms of the geopolitics, where it feels like we’ll leave whether Putin is right or not aside. But almost any red line that he puts down, it seems like Europe and the US are poking at it pretty hard, which leaves a lot of people concerned. Are we headed towards a bigger war escalation? Curious what you see there. And anything you would pass along. And certainly if you want to add your thoughts on what you would advocate, but anything along those lines would be great to hear. Well, I appreciate that. In general, let me say as an overall, we can spend as many minutes talking about this, we could spend the next three weeks talking about this.

Right? But overall, let me start out by saying I’m terrified. Just as an overall conversation starter, personally, I’m terrified. And the basic reason for that is that I don’t believe that american foreign policy makes us safer. I think arguably it makes the world more dangerous. And let me throw out a couple of thoughts for you and your audience to chew on. We’ve been in many, many military interventions since, let’s say since World War two, right? A lot, some of them pretty large, right? I mean, you’re a lot younger than you. Got a little premature gray hair going on there.

Mine is well earned. I mean, you and I remember some fairly large scale interventions, right? Going back to Vietnam and maybe a little bit before our time in Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq a couple of times. Some of these are really big. Here’s my point. There have been so many, and we have gotten ourselves out sloppy. Not without damage, not without damage to our reputation, not without damage to the world. Sloppy, costly, painfully. But we have gotten ourselves out, right? At no point have we triggered what people are calling world War three since World War two. In my view, that’s whistling past the graveyard.

You cannot spin the wheel as many times as our federal government does without that wheel eventually coming up with what I will just call blanket, a bad result. At some point, I fear that our government is going to get us into something that it just has a hard time getting us out of. I cannot predict which one it is. We are at war in Ukraine, full stop. We’re at war. We have a very small number of troops there, but it ain’t zero. We have american weapons. We have hundreds of billions of american dollars. We have american intelligence.

We have american assistance from our intelligence community. I don’t know how you characterize that as anything but being at war. There are strikes inside russian territory proper. We need to get out of that. We need to get out of that fast. We need to put pressure on both sides to get out of that in a hurry. We never should have been in it the first place. To your point, the red line that we kept pushing, don’t mishear me. Putin is a bad actor on any number of levels. Whether you want to view that in terms of safety for the world or whether he’s representing his people’s interests, just at a basic level of character level, he’s a bad actor.

Okay? So if I say anything that makes you think I’m excusing him, I have misspoken. But having said that, we cannot escape having contributed to the stupid situation that we’re in over the past 35 years, we have not played our hand a strong hand. We have misplayed since 1989. I would argue that we’re misplaying our hand in Israel. I speak as someone who loves Israel. I have traveled Israel north, south, east, west. I’ve sent my daughter to events in Israel. I’ve sent my son to train the Middle east. I’ve traveled the Middle east with my kids.

I’ve taken my son through palestinian territory. I’ve been all around. And a lot of us have spiritual connections right to the holy land. But having said that, foreign aid does not buy the american people what our government tells us it does. We have no influence over the government of Israel. Maybe you think that’s a bad thing. Maybe you think it’s a good thing. But the truth is that we’ve been sold this idea that we’ve been able to influence the world by spreading money around. And it’s not empirically speaking, objectively speaking, it’s just not true. We give billions of dollars every year to the israeli government, and we have given billions, many billions of dollars collectively to every one of the other actors in the area.

Consider the list of people to whom we’ve given money. Our federal government, the government of Egypt, the government of Lebanon, the government of Jordan, none of which do we have any influence with. We have given money to the Palestinian Authority, to Hezbollah and to Hamas in the past, not recently. I get that. But has that bought us influence? No, it doesn’t. As a practical matter, it doesn’t work. And now we are, in some sense, politically speaking, on the hook for decisions that the israeli government makes. Does Israel have a right to defend itself? Of course. Of course.

Are american citizens upset about the way that that war is being prosecuted? Absolutely. Americans are upset about it. Do we have any influence over it? Absolutely not. Are we being held liable for it, politically speaking? Absolutely. The rest of the world views us as being in bed with the israeli government. And now polling data suggests even the israeli government is no longer popular with the israeli people. Let that sink in. We’re financing a government operation which should be none of our business. Right. We should be telling the israeli government, you do you. We’re financing the government of Israel that is no longer popular with the american people, no longer popular with the israeli population, and does not follow the basic american principle of us not getting involved, a principle that we have left behind the past 60 years.

I would suggest, in my view, we need to get out of these ideas. We need to correct our silly position of strategic ambiguity with China. We should not be sending the signal that we’re going to go to war with China over microchips. We should be telling the chinese government that they’ve got to wait. They got to wait some period. The chinese government is happy to wait. The PRC, if the Communist Party is told they can have their cake and eat it, too, but they’re going to have to wait an extra five year cycle. Of course they would wait an extra five year cycle.

They play along. Their game is measured in hundreds of years. Ours is measured in hundreds of weeks. Right. If you told them that they have to wait while we develop microchip development capability elsewhere, of course they would. Of course they would wait. They don’t want to go to war with the United States. They want to repatriate Taiwan. Those are two different things. It’s only our White House that thinks that’s the same thing. The Chinese don’t think that’s the same thing. We just don’t seem to understand as a government what it is that’s in our interest. And I’ll tell you something else, as long as I’m prattling on, if you were to ask the typical american citizen, go ahead and name me a military intervention by the federal government, United States, over the last three generations that you would say, yeah, you know, it cost us millions of dollars.

It cost us a, you know, thousands of lives, but it was a good idea anyway. Go ahead, name it. Right. And this is the heartbreaker. And I’ll leave this topic on this. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re not talking about billions of dollars or millions of dollars. We’re talking about trillions of dollars. And this is the heartbreaker. We’re not talking about thousands of lives. We’re talking about the loss of over a million lives that does not align with America’s values and it does not align with our strategic interests. And that’s why I believe we need a different foreign policy fundamentally.

Well, I think a lot of the people watching today are certainly in agreement with that, startling when I hear speculation about even draft proposals coming up. And hopefully we don’t get that far. But very important time in the country right now. And Mike, I appreciate that you and Chase are doing what you’re doing and providing a much different option. And perhaps you could just let folks know if they’d like to get more information, stay in touch with what you’re doing. I have your websites pulled up back here and you can let them know where they can find you.

Yeah, go to miketramont.com. tricky to spell because termat’s got two a’s in itheme. You can go to votechaseoliver.com. that’s a mouthful. You can go to goldnewdeal.org and read about our platform, my personal platform. Here’s a fun website for you, libertarian intelligence.org, where Lisa, the libertarian political bot, lives. That’s a fun toye. Ask Lisa any, any question about public policy. See if lisa gives you a decent answer. So that’s kind of fun. And you know, if anyone wants to get involved in our campaign, go to miketramont.com. there’s a form you can fill it out. If you got to get rid of some money, that’s a good place to do it too, Chris.

And your listeners want to get rid of some hundreds of dollars or even more. This is a campaign worth supporting. Well, I appreciate that, Mike. And it’s good to know that we still have some people who have these values out there and are getting involved in what’s going on. So I will have all the links to those sites in the description field below. So please go check them out for everyone watching at home. And Mike, I just appreciate you making some time. I’m sure it’s busy season of the year for you, although admire and appreciate what you’re doing and, and we’ll look forward to seeing your success in these next couple months.

It’s great to be with you, Chris. It is a busy time, but I gotta be honest with you, there’s nothing more important than a show like yours. And that just happens to be the truth. Thank you. Well, thanks to Mike for today’s show was a lot of fun talking with him. Certainly a pleasure to meet him and interesting to hear what he’s doing and what he’s a part of, certainly at a time where that it’s perhaps more importantly than ever and just really respect and admire what he has been doing. So hope you enjoyed that one at home.

And before we wrap up today, we’d like to once again thank Silver Viper Minerals for bringing us this show. And of course, Silver Viper Minerals has their La Virginia project in Sonora, Mexico, where they already have made and resource with over 49 millionoz of silver equivalent, which they have added ounces since then. And I, amongst other things, including getting out drilling this year, they’re also in position to update that resource estimate after the drilling is completed. I know it’s been a long wait for them to get out drilling in some difficult market conditions, although last week, when Steve Kope was on the show, he recorded an update to give you an idea of exactly where they are at now and the options they’re pursuing, and that one is coming your way now.
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