a good idea. None. Zero. You can't find any. Now I might be wrong about that but if you see an economist come on and say you know what in a capitalist system if you want to have a good supply of things you cap the price, nobody will say that. So watch how fake the news becomes because you might see an economist come on Fox News to say well that's a terrible idea everybody knows it but CNN and MSNBC almost have to have no economist on the news for the next few months. None. You watch. Yeah even the economists whose names you've heard of and are often on the news they will be so shut out they will have nothing to do with this.

And if you were just a Democrat voter and you were not an economist and you didn't know whether price caps were good or bad which would be reasonable, I mean I think you'd have to have some pretty deep experience to know it's always a bad idea. Some people would think well maybe this case it is a good idea. No it's not. It's always a bad idea 100% of the time. That's one of the few things you can depend on in economics is if you put artificial controls on things you'll get less of it guaranteed.

So meat processing conglomerates, I don't know what the story is there. I guess there were a bunch of mergers and so the government is claiming that the mergers allowed them to make obscene profits. Do you think that's true? Do you think that the reason meat prices are high is because the meat processing conglomerates consolidated and then there's less competition? I'll bet that's not what's going on. I'm no expert but here's what I would guess. My guess is that the consolidations are because they couldn't make money. In other words there was too much competition and the prices were too low to handle their overhead. So my guess is if you looked at the return on investment of whatever meat processing conglomerates exist I'll bet you'd find the ROI would be right in the middle of business in general meaning that there would be no indication of price gouging because it's not price gouging if the company is making just an ordinary profit. Price gouging would mean they're 100% more profit than they've ever made before and they could easily lower the cost and still make lots of money. Where's that evidence?

Do you think Kamala Harris will say here's the meat processing conglomerates we're talking about. Before they consolidated their ROI was a quite reasonable 10% a year. After consolidation and several of them consolidated now this one big company has an ROI of 53%. Yeah way more than the average company so that's abusive. Do you think she'll make that argument? I guarantee you she will not. You will never hear about the profit ROI. You know forget about profit number. If she just gives you a number like and they made a billion dollars this year whatever the number is that's fake. You've got to know the return on the assets that they employed. That would tell you if they're making more money than you would expect the company to make. So look for no good information on economics coming out of any of this.

Meanwhile Trump, his economic proposals include extending his 2017 tax cuts. Now somebody explained to me the other day because I went to the website where you can put in your personal income and age and state and we'll tell you how much you'll save in taxes or lose in taxes depending if this tax law expires. So I said to myself oh my God if these Trump tax cuts expire how much more am I going to spend? So I go to the site, I put in my information and it tells me that if the tax cuts expire I will save money, quite a bit. And I looked at it and I think I told you oh the website doesn't work because it says if the taxes go down, no it says if the taxes go up that somehow I'm going to spend less on taxes and I thought it must be broken. And that's why I said, and then somebody said no Scott because part of the tax law was that it took away state deductions and I'm in California so we have wildly crazy taxes for California so I used to be able to write them off. So that used to be a deduction but I lost my state deduction in return for a lower tax rate but it didn't compensate. So it turns out that the Trump proposed taxes will raise my taxes so I'm not in favor of that. I'm in favor of raising your taxes not mine like everybody else. I just say it out loud. Yeah I would love to raise your taxes and lower mine. Is that wrong? No it's not wrong because you want the same thing. You want my taxes to go up and yours to go down. Let's be honest we all want everybody else's taxes to go up except maybe poor people. We don't want their taxes to go up but among the people who are able to pay their bills already we kind of want the other people's taxes to go up. So I can't support Trump's economic plan because it raises my expenses. There may be other parts of it I might support. I mean obviously I think how you treat the border has to be part of your economic plan because the border stuff is really an expense it's just a different kind of one. So I'm not going to go all in on Trump's economic proposals. You can make your own decisions. If you do your calculations and it looks like it will lower your taxes then I would say you have a complete moral cover to say you like that better. It raises my taxes. I think I'm not positive but it looks like it might. If it raises my taxes I'm against it and I think you would understand that right? Somebody's going to win somebody's going to lose but nobody wants their own taxes to go higher.

All right and Trump wants to do more increased drilling even though I think we're at record levels but you could do a lot more. I think lowering energy costs, I think that's the magic lever and I think Trump has a much better story that he would increase production and lower energy costs so I think he's got the better story.

Then there's this whole question of tariffs. So I guess the Biden administration which was always anti-tariff decided not to remove most of or all of Trump's tariffs that he had on China. Is that true? I need a fact check on that but I think that the Democrats were all anti-tariff until they inherited the government and then they said we better keep these tariffs because that's a lot of money coming in. Now some people say but Scott you fool don't you know that tariffs don't help at all because all they do is pass along the expense to consumers in this country. To which I say I'm not sure you understand how this works.

So here's my big question. If we're getting raw materials from China and we don't have those raw materials here I would not expect to see a tariff because why would you just increase the cost? Basically it would just be a tax on Americans because we would need the raw materials for building whatever we need to build. It would be just like a tax so why would you do that? Well probably don't. Here's a case where it would make sense to put a tariff on. Let's say China decides it wants to take over one of our industries and I'll just make one up. Let's say China wants to take over the refrigerator manufacturing industry. Now I'm making that up because they already took it over I think or South Korea did or somebody did. I don't know. Do we make any refrigerators? Does the United States even make a refrigerator? Probably not. But imagine the situation where America said our refrigeration manufacturing is vitally important. We can't have some other country making all our refrigerators. So in that case a tariff would make sense because the tariff is to discourage people from buying the Chinese refrigerator when they could buy an American one and everybody is a little bit better off that way.

Now if China had artificially lowered the price of the refrigerators so that a Chinese refrigerator cost half as much and was just as good well it would put American refrigerator makers out of business but not because of competition. It would be because the Chinese government had subsidized their refrigerators to make them so cheap that it would put us out of business. So a tariff makes sense when you're protecting an industry from being attacked not by another competitor. This is the important part. The tariff is not to protect you from a good competitor. The tariff is to protect you from a government that is backing a competitor so much so that they can wipe out your entire industry. So in those cases you want a tariff. Now would it raise the prices in some cases of Americans paying for things? Yes it would but it would also drive the right behavior which should compensate enough to make that a good tradeoff. The right behavior is that we keep our refrigerator industry. Now when I talk about refrigerators it's ridiculous because I think we've already lost that industry but imagine if it's electric cars. Do you think we cannot be the electric car maker? We need that industry. What if it's solar panels and batteries for your house? No we need that. We really really need that. So there's some things that have such basic domestic value that you have to do whatever it takes to keep the competitors out and a tariff is a good way to do that.

So just remember this simple rule about tariffs. If it's something we need and we can't get it somewhere else that's a bad tariff. That's just a tax. If it's another government targeting an industry for destruction you need to do whatever it takes to stop it and if it's a tariff even with a little pain that is the correct answer. So tariffs are not so easy. It's not tariffs are good or tariffs are bad.

Argentina elected an economist. The Argentinians had a problem with housing supply. How do you think it went? All right let's predict this. So Argentina elects an economist and I told you economists don't believe in price caps. None of them. None of them. So they elect an economist. Did he put price caps on? Nope he did the opposite. He removed price caps, rent control. And what happened? He's an economist. He removed government caps on prices for housing. Immediately it caused a building boom and a resupply of rental housing. Do you know why? Because it always does. It works every time. This is not one of those things guessing about. If you elect an economist you get this. I'd love to see if there's any economist in something like a capitalist country that ever got a worse result. I'll bet not. I'll bet they all get a reasonably good economic result. And I would argue that Trump is far closer to being an economist as in being compatible with an economist in terms of all of his views than Kamala Harris. So if you can't get an economist you want somebody whose views are completely compatible with economists and I think Trump is 100% compatible with general economic belief and Kamala Harris is I think 100% incompatible with every economist. Now I'm making the largest claim so there may be some weird exceptions but I think that's true. I think there's no such thing as any economist who believes in price caps for example or keeping the border open the way we have it.

Also the Democrats are looking at attacks on unrealized gains. Now without getting too wonky about that let me tell you that 100% of economists think that's a terrible idea. So what it would do to me is it would be really bad for me. Most of my current money is from my investments. Almost all the money that I made just sort of daily, you know my daily royalties for my career, either spent, gave away or invested in some kind of business that usually didn't go well. So my entire wealth for the rest of my life is from investment gains because early in my career I made a nice little pocket of money and I just put it all in an index fund and then I just sat on it for 30 years. So that's my money. But the small amount that I put in, relatively small amount that I put into the stock market is now a nice healthy amount. If they tax me on the difference between what I put in and what it's worth now even though I haven't sold any of it I'm going to get killed. I mean it would actually change my entire lifestyle depending on the percentage I guess. So it's pretty draconian. And although I'd be fine, I mean I'm not going to starve, but you could imagine somebody who is in a similar situation where most of their net wealth is an unrealized gain and it's what they're relying on for their entire retirement. It is just so wrong and unfair and I don't think any economist is in favor of it. Now I might be wrong on this one. I'm definitely not wrong on the price caps not being supported by any economist on the left or the right. I don't know about this one but I can't believe there'd be anybody in favor of it. It'd be hard to imagine.

But of course you watch the news right? So the news has fully vetted this? What? No no. This most important question you haven't seen the news tell you whether it's a good or bad idea to tax unrealized gains. How about the one on tariffs? Do you remember the tariffs? Who explained to you what I just explained that there are some cases where a tariff is really a national defense necessity? Do you remember the news covering that in detail for you? Probably not. Now I do believe the news has covered all of these things but they just sort of do a light touch and move on. Yeah they don't treat it like it's the most important thing and I don't know what's much more important than the economy.

All right here's an assassination attempt update. The rabbit hole of the Trump attempted assassination just keeps getting bigger. I'm not going to give you details but I would recommend to you a podcast in which Benny Johnson was talking to Mike Benz and Mike Benz does this incredible job of collecting, connecting dots and explaining the architecture of our government and all of its parts and how everything fits together and what looks like a coincidence and what doesn't. And it's really a master class. Every time I see him on a podcast I think wow I just learned something I never knew before. So if you're not