t's a big deal or a small deal? So I had to do my own research to find out what the budget of LA is to find out if a billion dollars even matters. It's around 8%. It's about 8% of the budget.

So if you tell me that they have to cut the budget by 8%, the rest of the budget by 8%, that seems painful but doable. If you tell me it's just a billion dollars, they go, I don't know, is it a $2 billion budget? Because it wouldn't be possible to cut 50%. But 8%, I feel like an 8% cut is something that a big budgeted anything should do once in a while. If you're a big company, big state, big country, big organization, shouldn't you every now and then look to cut 8 to 10% of your expenses? That's the most normal thing in the world. So it's doable, but maybe not with the competence of the people who work in LA.

By the way, State Farm has a lot to answer for. I'm hearing more stories of people who thought they had insurance for the Pacific Palisades and State Farm was part of that and are learning that the quality of their insurance was not what they hoped it would be. So I think the local news is going to be on that story, and I don't know what State Farm does about that. I mean it could be that they just don't have any money, so even if they wanted to treat people better they can't. We'll find out.

Another cost cutting. Pete Hegseth said on Thursday yesterday that they're going to cancel more than $580 million in grants and contracts that they deemed quote wasteful spending. What do you think about the fact that all these big government entities seem to be able to look at the budget and in five minutes they can identify millions of dollars that don't seem to be justified? And they're just crazy grants for crazy things. The fact that this is as easy as it is is really weird.

There was, I think it was one of the DOGE leaders was on the news, I think he was on Laura Ingraham's show on Fox News, and one of them, Sam Corcos is his name, and he was asked what was one of the big surprising things about the DOGE and the cost cutting. And Sam said you can cancel a $50 million contract and nothing happens. No one even knows why it existed. Just think about that. Just think about the fact that you can cancel a $50 million contract, probably in multiple places in the government this exists, and there won't be much pushback because there's nobody who can defend why it existed in the first place. That's the quality of our government money management. We really have the right to ask for a lot more responsibility and auditability and just fiduciary responsibility with our money. We're owed a lot more anyway.

But even when I read that Hegseth said the Pentagon found $580 million to cancel, my first thought was wow, that's a lot, $580 million. And then I realized that the number we're looking for would be closer to $580 billion in order to get to a sustainable debt level. The defense is probably where a lot of the cuts will happen. $580 million doesn't get you anywhere close. I mean it's better than not getting $580 million, obviously, but $580 billion might close the debt.

I see people still dumping on DOGE in the comments. Well, here's some good news, bad news. You want to hear the good news, bad news? The good news is Germany is going to increase its military spending by a trillion dollars. The bad news is Germany's going to increase its military spending by a trillion dollars.

Have any of you seen the Norm Macdonald, the late Norm Macdonald's act when he talked about Germany? And I don't remember the exact wording, but if you can think of it in Norm Macdonald's voice, it's like, I don't know if any of you study history, but in Germany. And then everybody starts laughing because yeah, Germany does have a history. So when was the last time it was good for Germany to massively increase its military capabilities? I'm not worried at all anyway. So that's happening.

So but that might be part of what gets the United States out of Europe's business, because it didn't really make a lot of sense that we're all up in their military business in Europe in the first place.

But let's talk about some other countries. As you know, Israel is going hard at Gaza and the Hamas militants who are still there because the hostage deals seemed to fall apart. And it looked like Hamas was just going to stretch it out and they were hoping for some kind of a ceasefire, maybe involving the hostages or not, and then they thought they could reconstitute and take back control. And indeed during this latest ceasefire, Hamas tried to reconstitute its leadership of the area and reconstitute like a government and a military and stuff. And I guess Israel said no, we're not going to have any of that. So now they're just going hard at them.

And here's my question. It seems to me that anytime one of the grown-ups from another country, be it Saudi Arabia or some other country that's allied with the U.S. or maybe a European country, anything in the European Union, don't they always say but what we really need is a two-state solution? And here's my question. How do they not know that's not an option? If you just look at a map of all the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and then you look at Gaza, where exactly would this second country be? That option has been completely taken off the table.

And it makes me wonder that the people who say it are generally smart, which makes me think that they know it's not real, but they know that's the thing you have to say in public. Because if you don't say it, if you don't say I want a two-state solution, then you become a target for anybody who thinks that being too pro-Israel is a bad thing. And we live in a world where there's a lot of people who think that. So do you believe that that's just acting? My current opinion is that's acting. That 100% of the people who actually know how the world works and are paying attention, not casual people, I think if you just stop somebody in the street and say do you prefer the two-state solution, you'd find lots of citizens who are not deeply informed about what's going on. I think the citizens would quite honestly say yes, two-state solution, good idea. But not the experts.

So don't we still have people who are allegedly experts who they have to know that there's no real possibility of a two-state solution, don't they? So and that's a real question. Do they actually not know that that option closed? I don't know when, but it's certainly closed.

So I would also say that the way Hamas handled or didn't handle the hostage situation kind of gave Israel the free pass that they needed to do whatever they need to do. So I think that Israel has decided Hamas will be destroyed completely. And I think Hamas never thought that was serious. I think their strategic problem was they thought well if we just do this and that, they're going to do a ceasefire, we'll reconstitute, we'll claim victory, and we'll do it again. But that's not at all where Israel's head is at. Not at all. Israel has quite clearly decided that they'd like to get the hostages back but they're not going to let it control them, meaning that they're going to destroy every part of Hamas, no doubt about it, no matter how long it takes.

So for those of you who are new to me, I don't support Israel. It's not my country. I support the United States. But it's hard for me to criticize a country that's doing something that looks like it's in their best interest, even if it's horrible to other people, because I see it through the filter of power. And Israel has power and they're using it to what looks like their own opinion of what's the betterment of Israel. If the power were reversed and the Palestinians had all the power, the Israelis would not be happy. In other words, whoever has the power is going to be doing things that the people who don't have power are really, really going to hate. And they might even have a good point, but it doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter if they have a good point because the ones with the power are going to get what they want. And that's just what that part of the world is about.

Now I don't think our part of the world is better. I think that when the U.S. has power it uses it, and when somebody else has power they use it. So to imagine that if I had a moral or ethical qualm that somehow that would matter, that wouldn't matter. It wouldn't matter to anybody. So I just shut up about any moral or ethical qualms because I don't live in a moral and ethical world. I live in a world where countries quite understandably pursue their own best interest as hard as they can. So what are you going to do about that?

Now you might say but we don't want to be funding it. And that's a good conversation to have because that's just economics. But I'm not even entirely sure if we understand the whole funding situation because a lot of that money that looks like it's for Israel is really just does a U-turn and comes back to the United States and fun