rk. So is Trump trying to get rid of the president, a color revolution, that's what you'd call that, or is he trying to nurse the situation forward and find any kind of advantage that might move us forward? I don't know exactly what we're trying to do or even what's possible down there. Anyway, we'll see.

Down where I live, California, the one county over, Santa Clara, they just had a special election and they raised their own taxes to 9.75 percent. That's only sales tax, right? Yeah, that's sales tax. How would you like a sales tax of 9.75 on top of state tax? What is the California state tax right now? The highest? Is it 12, 11, 12? What's the highest California state tax? Put it in the comments. And then the federal would be something like 37, 47, 57. Two-thirds of what I earn goes directly to Gavin Newsom for his hair gel. So how happy am I about that? Well, right after we're done here, I'm going to have to get a second job to try to pay for all that hair gel.

Do you remember when Trump first talked about tariffs? That even smart people couldn't decide if they were a good idea or a bad idea. Do you remember that? And I think I alone, I only remember me, probably other people did the same thing, but I remember saying we're not going to ever know if this worked. That's just not how anything works. The way economics works is you usually don't even know if the thing worked. You just you might know the outcome, but you don't know is it because of that or was it going to happen anyway.

So here's the most surprising study. John Carney in Breitbart News is writing about this. Someone did a big analysis. They call a sweeping new analysis to find out if in the history of tariffs, you know, the 150 year history of tariffs in the United States, if they have created inflation or decreased it. What would you say? Before I tell you the answer historically, have tariffs increased inflation or decreased it? Now, that's an easy question, right? Simple question. If you raise the cost of something, which is what a tariff does. It raises the cost of something. How does it not create inflation? Right? There's only one way it can go. If you do a thing that absolutely by its design increases the cost of everybody involved, which is what a tariff does. Not everybody, just depends who decides to absorb it. But how could it be anything except inflationary? I thought the question was how badly it would be inflationary. Didn't you? Maybe you didn't think of it that way. I never thought in terms of is it inflationary or not? I always thought, well, it might not be that inflationary and if we get other benefits, the benefits might outweigh the inflationary part. But it turns out according to John Carney in Breitbart News that this there was a big study that showed actually it reduces inflation if you look at the whole 150 years. So he's not looking at just what Trump did. They're looking at the history of that. Do you believe that? And that the entire time allegedly even the smartest economists and smartest analysts were getting this wrong and that there's actually a reason. So it's not random. There's actually a reason why it reduces inflation. I'm not sure I understood the reason honestly. But I'll tell you what the article says. So this is on John Carney. If he doesn't explain it well enough for you to understand, then that's on you and John, not on me at all. But John is writing that the researchers' approach was ingenious. Rather than trying to parse recent decades of limited tariff variation, they exploited massive swings in tariff policy across centuries using these shifts as a natural experiment to understand cause and effect. Are you sold? Did that sell you? Well, I'm going to say it didn't really sell me on that, but I kind of sort of almost a little bit understand the point of it that if you look at the big picture, you get a different answer than if you look at any micro part of the picture. That part makes sense, but no. Yeah, I'm seeing in the comments, you're not buying it at all, are you? I'm not buying this at all. All right, I think I'm with you. I'm not buying the expert opinion here. I do still think that the open question is how much it changes anything. If the how much it changes anything isn't that much, then that's all you need.

Anyway, you know, I keep telling you Ukraine is becom