Today we'll get into all the vicissitudes of the American economy. Are things going up? Are things going down? What the hell is going on? Plus, we'll get a new poll showing where Americans agree and disagree and a peace proposal on the table from the Trump administration with Russia and Ukraine. First. Our Black Friday deal is here right now. Daily Wire plus annual memberships are 50% off right now. Be one of the very first to watch the Pendragon cycle. Rise of the Merlin Join today. Pay half price@dailywire.com subscribe well, the fate of the Trump administration, and perhaps Republicans in Congress as well, is tied to American sentiment about the economy. And right now, nobody knows what the hell is going on or which way is up. Yesterday, according to the Wall Street Journal, stocks surrendered gains and closed sharply lower after a whirlwind day of trading that began after Nvidia posted strong results. The Nasdaq composite led indices lower after being up on the day more than 2%, and then it ended up closing 2.2% lower. Nvidia itself actually finished the day down 3.2%. So they reported an actual profit of something like $62 billion, and they ended up down on the day. Why? Because people are expecting that there is in fact an AI bubble. And that expectation is not unreal. Again, whenever there's a transformative technology, people seem to think that just because there is a bubble, that means that the underlying technology is not transformative. If you look back at the history of investment, there is always a speculative bubble around brand new technologies. And then failing companies tend to get cleaned out. And you remember the successful companies, so you remember Henry Ford, because Ford ended up being a wildly successful company. But there were dozens of other automobile companies that were startups at the time that ended up crapping out. In fact, Ford had several of them before he actually started the Ford Motor Company. The same thing was true of the Internet. When the Internet bubble burst in 2000, everybody remembers pets.com as sort of the thing that represented the era. But what we should remember is that actually the Internet has completely transformed everybody's life. We all work on the Internet, we all do commerce on the Internet. We, we all interact on the Internet. The, the stock market bubble of 2000 did not mean the Internet wasn't important. There were idiots like Paul Krugman who tried to suggest that it wasn't important. It was very important. But that is not mutually exclusive to a bubble. And that's also true with regard to AI. So people are looking at the current AI boom and they're thinking that at some point here it has to crap out. Some of these companies are just not going to be able to develop the kind of margins or gross income that justifies the investment they are currently making. OpenAI being the most obvious example of a company that is not publicly traded, but has so many contracts with publicly traded companies ranging from Oracle to Nvidia, that if it craps out, then that could take down a bunch of companies with it or at least severely damage their market capitalization. According to the New York Times, it would not be a stretch to describe this period of hyperactive growth in the tech industry as a historic moment. Nvidia said on Wednesday its quarterly profit had jumped to nearly $32 billion, up 65% from a year earlier and 245% from the year before that. Just three weeks ago, Nvidia became the first publicly traded company to be worth $5 trillion, meaning Nvidia is now worth more, according to the stock market, than the entire economy of Germany. But some industry insiders say there is something ominous lurking behind all the bubbly news. They are looking at the eye popping growth and the same stunning wealth creation as Jensen Huang and they see a house of cards. Even Nvidia's growth can be explained away because again, demand for the company's chips. It doesn't mean that people want to use AI. It means that companies are building giant AI systems in the hope that somebody will pay to use them eventually. And this is going to be the question. At some point the productivity generation from AI is going to have to start matching up to the investments that are being made. Evan Conrad, a chief executive of San Francisco Compute, a startup specializing in AI, says Stargate alone, if it does actually reach $500 billion, would be the largest infrastructure project in the world, several times over. Stargate is of course, a $500 billion data center project in the United States, enough to fund the Manhattan Project 15 times over. It could pay for the entire Apollo Moon program twice. So the amount of investment at some point is going to have to be channeled into actual gains. Goldman Sachs estimates Nvidia, for example, will make 15% of all of its sales next year from what critics call circular deals. And so people are betting on whether there is going to be an AI boom that justifies all this or an AI bust. And we don't know which way it's going, which is why people are freaking out. They're also freaking out because if AI does succeed, there will be some temporary job dislocation. There are a lot of jobs that will become obsolete. If you want to hear me discuss this with Bat Walsh, Andrew Clave and Michael Moles, go listen to our episode of Friendly Fire. Came out a couple of days ago. Discussed this at some length. The history of job creation is that the economy becomes more productive, you get nicer things for cheaper prices, you work fewer hours, your grandparents were working many more hours than you work. But it also means that there is, with technological chain change, significant job dislocation, people losing the kind of jobs they've historically held, and then they have to find new jobs, retrain. One of the points that I made to Matt Walsh, who's very critical of AI is that if you named the jobs that many people hold in today's economy to people living in 1997, when the Internet was first really getting started, if people in 1997 said, hey, this is going to destroy a huge number of jobs. For example, if you're, if you're able to buy everything from Amazon, a bunch of small mom and pop shops might go out of business, which is true. So what's going to happen to those jobs? Well, you know, they and their kids are going to end up doing online marketing, social media management. They are going to end up having small micro businesses that use shipping via Amazon. Right. All these things would have been unthinkable in 1997. Amazon was a used bookstore company. I mean, that's what it was. It sold used books to start. And yet we've generated millions and millions of jobs off of areas that we didn't even know exist. And this is just the way the economy tends to work. That doesn't mean that, that the angst and the heartburn about job dislocation are somehow false. And so two things can be true at once. We can be in a transformative, amazing time for the economy, and the uncertainty can be real and the concern can be real, and it can't all be alleviated by the government. And so right now you have a lot of uncertainty and dyspepsia. Now, it is also true. It is also true that some of what is being sold in the news is just not really true. So, for example, there's been a lot of talk about housing, housing unaffordability. And it is true that housing is way less affordable than it was in, say, 2020 in just pure dollar terms. Why? Well, because we inflated the currency massively between 2020 and 2024. The inflationary policy that was pursued in bipartisan fashion, by the way, in 2020 during COVID when we had a massive artificial shutdown and the government paid everybody to stay home, was then followed on in 2021 and 2022 by even more massively inflationary policy under President Biden. What that led to is an increase in the price of pretty much everything, but particularly housing. Because when people didn't know what to do with their money, they figured, I'm going to plow that into the housing market. Because historically the housing market has been an excellent repository of wealth. The way that you got wealthy is you bought a house and then if you got richer, maybe sold that house and bought another house that was bigger and kept upgrading your wealth level as what my parents did, think what many Americans parents did. It's what I've done myself. However, there's some myth making right now about the price of housing in the United States. So Zoram Hamdani wins in New York and he shouts about housing unaffordability. And of course he's right. New York is really, really unaffordable. We talked yesterday on the program about many of the reasons, I.e. regulations, rent freezes. All of that makes it really unpalatable to build new units in New York. And many of the units that already exist, it costs more to rent them out to somebody than it would be to keep them empty. Like the maintenance costs on it, the taxes on it actually cost more to rent than to just keep it empty. So you have 50,000 so called ghost apartments in New York City. Okay? But this is also obscuring a simple truth. In many parts of the country, the prices in housing have been on the decline, not the incline. Already coming up, we'll get to some things people think about the economy that just are not quite true. First, it's the one time of year that Birch Gold Group gives away free gold with every single qualifying purchase. That's right for Black Friday. 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Balance of Nature delivers the natural goodness of fruits, veggies, spices and fibers just as nature intended. Which means Even when I'm 2,000 miles from home, I'm still taking care of myself the way my family needs me to. Balance of Nature makes me healthier. It's easy to use. Go check them out right now. After years of research and development, they've created something that makes getting proper nutrition convenient for any lifestyle. Head on over balance of nature.com get a free fiber and spice supplement plus 35% off your first set as a new preferred customer by using discount code. Shapiro so I asked our sponsors and friends over at Comet, which is a project of perplexity, have housing prices gone down in populous areas leaving aside New York, Chicago, Louisiana and Seattle over the last year? And according to Comet, housing prices have declined over the last year in several populous metropolitan areas outside of New York, Chicago, Louisiana and Seattle, with the largest decreases seen mostly in Florida, Texas and some southern and western cities. Now what you'll notice about that is those are all red areas where, by the way, population is increasing. So when you have areas like LA or Chicago or Seattle or New York where population is leaving and the housing prices are increasing, you're reducing demand and yet somehow you are still having the prices go up. That is regulation. That is regulatory overreach. That is the rationale according to Perplexity. According to our sponsors over a Comet, Austin saw median listing prices fall by nearly 15% over the last three years and about 6% year over year. Miami's prices have dropped 19% over the last three years and roughly 4 to 4.6% in the past 12 months. Why did this happen by the way? Because when there was a gigantic rush during COVID to Florida and to Texas, then one of the things that happened is the housing prices went up, right? Same supply, higher demand, higher prices. But then what happened? Every developer in Florida decided to build. The building went nuts in Florida. The building went nuts in Dallas and Austin and Houston. And so now there's more inventory. And then the demand slacked a little bit. Now the prices are down. Tampa has experienced a 6.2% year over year decline. Dallas and Houston saw home values decreased by 3.9% and 1.9%, respectively. Atlanta recorded a roughly 3.1% decrease in home values. There are a bunch of areas actually that have experienced year over year declines between 0.9% and 4.3%. Many of the areas in the Rust Belt in the Midwest saw home prices increase. But some of that is because a lot of those home prices were already fairly cheap. If you're looking at a house in Cincinnati, it's not going to cost you what a house in, say, New York would cost. Nationally, US Home values have actually remained mostly flat over the last year. So it's important to look at the contrasting areas. The United States is not homogeneous. Saying that it's unaffordable to live in New York City does not mean it is just as unaffordable to live in Austin. Now that doesn't mean there aren't affordability problems in Austin. Groceries particularly have been a major issue. And again, that's because the value of your dollar just is not worth what it once was because there are more dollars chasing the same number of goods. As Milton Friedman famously said over and over and over, inflation is anywhere and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. What he meant is you really get inflation as a factor of how much money the government is pumping into the economy. With that said, having to explain this, like explaining this in real ways, is the job of the Trump administration. And one of the things that they are falling into is this routine where they either say that people's feelings are fake, which, you know, I can say, because again, that's my show, and I can say that facts don't care about your feelings, but politicians feelings very often don't care about their facts. Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, he's been saying that the economic dyspepsia is fake news. Well, you know, it may be true that much of what is being distributed about the economy is fake news. The dyspepsia is not fake news by the polling data, it's just fake news.
A (16:07)
So again, you know, it's not true that the tariffs are bringing manufacturing home. That is not true by the statistics. However, some of the, you know, angst about the economy is in fact overstated. The idea that you absolutely cannot get a job anywhere. We have a 4.4% unemployment rate by historic rates that is actually close to full employment. And in many of the high tech industries, we actually still have more job openings than we have job applicants in some of these areas. Meanwhile, the Vice President is begging Americans for patience, which, you know, the problem with begging people for patience is that they are not patient. And even though we've made incredible progress, we understand that there's a lot more work to do. And the thing that I'd ask for the American people is a little bit of patience. This economy was not harmed in 10 months. It took a deliberate four year administration that, that was making life harder for everyday Americans. That was importing foreign workers instead of giving jobs to American workers. That was overregulating, overtaxing, overspending. They were doing everything wrong. And as much progress as we've made, it's going to take a little bit of time for every American to feel that economic boom. Okay? So we will see if that is true or if that is not true. Okay? But one of the things you actually do have to explain to the American people comes with some strings, right? If you explain, as I just did, that the economy is heterogeneous, that living in Florida and Texas is not the same thing as living in New York, and that blanket solutions are not going to work the same way, that that is a politically difficult thing to do, but it is a politically necessary thing to do because otherwise people are going to look at the solutions that you are proposing. And when they don't work the way they think they should, when the housing affordability crisis in New York does not alleviate, they blame you for that. Right? You see some of this in the marketing from the administration. So the Department of Homeland Security, they put out a tweet yesterday in which they basically suggested that every single problem in the United States can be attributed to illegal immigration. Now, there are a lot of problems in the United States that can be attributed to illegal immigration. But to sort of use the hammer available to treat every single thing as a nail is a mistake and no one's going to buy it. They put out a tweet yesterday that said rent is too high. There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country. Okay, so first of all, there is some truth that there is upward housing pressure based on the population. That is true. It is also true that illegal immigrants are likely to be living many, many people to some of the cheapest housing in America. They're not the ones who are taking up suburban houses for the most part. Groceries cost too much. There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country. Again, higher demand is true, but there aren't enough jobs. There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country. Women don't feel safe walking down the street. There are tens of millions of criminal illegals in our country. Okay, again, I, I don't. I'm not even arguing that criminal illegal immigration does not actually drive up prices or create traffic or put pressures on the health care system. All of that is true. But the conclusion here, which is many problems. A simple answer. No, actually, many problems may have one factor that is a simple answer, but that is not the only factor. And pretending that it is is likely to result in, again, fruitless promises. Because first of all, this administration will not. They're not going to deport 20 million illegal immigrants. It's not going to happen. The administration is deporting some people for sure. We have seen one of the tremendous achievements of the administration is that the job growth that has occurred under the Trump administration is going to American born workers. It is not going to foreign born workers, illegal immigrants and the rest. And that's a good thing. But promising a panacea is a mistake because then people expect more than they are likely to receive. Now, with that said, Democrats do the exact same thing. Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority leader, yesterday, he suggested. So if JD Vance is suggesting that homeownership is unaffordable due to illegal immigration, which again, maybe on the margins, true, but that's really not why housing is unaffordable as a general rule. Hakeem Jeffries is saying that homeownership is unaffordable because of climate change, which is just insane, homeownership has become unaffordable in far too many places, ripping away the possibility of home ownership for millions of Americans.
A (40:20)
By the way, it is also true that Zorn Mandani continues his unbroken record of virtue signaling to the worst people in America. So one of the big controversy that is broken out in New York is that just the other night a bunch of anti Semites, and I use that word advisedly because of what they were yelling, gathered outside of an Orthodox congregation in Manhattan's Upper east side chanting from New York to Gaza. Globalize the intifada again. Globalize the Intifada. That is a violent call. Okay? Intifada is a violent uprising calling to globalize. The Intifada in New York means go kill people in New York. That's what that means. So why were they outside of synagogue yelling? I mean, by the way, they're also chanting, resistance, you make us proud. Take another settler out. They consider every Jew in Israel to be a settler. I don't know how else to describe that other than Jew hatred. I mean, that's what that is. They were literally outside a synagogue in New York. What were they protesting? There's a group called Nefesh B. Nefesh in Israel that facilitates for people who want to move to Israel. If you're in England, America, wherever, they help facilitate your move to Israel. So how did Zoram Hamdani respond to the anti Semitism? Well, he blamed everybody. His spokesperson said, quote, the mayor elect has discouraged the language used at last night's protest and will continue to do so. He believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation and that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law. That is an insane statement. Nothing that was happening in the synagogue violates international law. First of all, there are a few problems. One, international law can go screw because it's the most useless pile of crap that ever was conceived by man or. Or anyone else. It's ridiculous. There is no such thing as international law. There are just international interests. The notion that there is a governing party that decides what is right and wrong, that includes Russia and China and Iran is. It's absurd. It's ridiculous. American domestic law protects First Amendment religious activity. International law typically protects some of the worst people on earth while attacking places like America. Which is why the United States is not a party to, for example, the International Criminal Court. The Zoran Mamdani likes to cite the International Criminal Court used by human rights violating regimes like South Africa as a. As a sword against any place they don't like. Ridiculous. Okay, but beyond that, again, from a purely American perspective, New York is not an international city. It's an American city. If you're an American living in American city and your mayor is saying that you can't go to your synagogue or church because you might be, quote, unquote, violating international law. I mean, listen, there are international standards that pertain to, for example, the quote unquote, abuse of religious materials that, that largely are focused on not violating the scruples of radical Muslims. There. There are in fact, bodies that prosecute acts like that under hate speech. Is that something that we're going to do in the United States because Zoram Hamdani says it violates international law? What? What a joke. He is truly a joke. And more than that, a dangerous joke. All right, it's time for some fast fact. Hey, let's begin with some fascinating polling data. This is from Gallup. Americans are actually showing some consensus on issues. I know it's shocking. Those issues are, for example, democratic values. So asked whether political leaders should compromise with the other party to get some things done, even if they don't like some parts of the compromise, or whether political leaders should stick to their beliefs and avoid compromise even if nothing gets done, 80% of Americans believe that political leaders should compromise with the other party to get things done. Now, of course, when you dig beneath the hood, the question is, what's the nature of the compromise? But Americans are not actually, in fact, begging for kind of the wild partisanship that was demonstrated by the Democrats during the latest government shutdown on political violence. 83% of Americans say it is never okay for people to use violence to achieve a political goal. And by the way, that does include a broad majority of Democrats. This one is kind of fascinating. On the question of whether the US Is stronger as a nation because it has people from different races, religions, and cultures, or the US Is weaker as a nation because it has people from different races, religions, and cultures, 84% of Americans believe the United States is stronger as a nation because it has people from different races, religions, and cultures. That America is not, in fact, homogenous. Now, we will get into another under the hood question in a minute here from this poll about how fast American culture has been transitioning, which is the real objection that many people have. And that's being misread. That objection, which is a very real and legitimate objection, is being misread into a critique of America as a creedal nation entirely by large parts of the right. At this point, where people say things are changing too fast, we don't want this many people coming in. Mass migration is changing the fabric of the country incredibly fast and in the wrong ways. Those are all legitimate perspectives, and they are all perspectives that I think most Americans probably agree with. However, to read that into, okay, what we need is a homogenous nation, racially, religiously, totally homogeneous. That, of course, is not traditionally American, and it is a massive electoral loser. On facts versus opinions. 88% of Americans say they are facts, and then there are opinions. Only 10% of Americans say facts are just Opinions and points of view. Okay, so again, some of the breakdown here is really, really interesting. So that under the hood question that I think is the big one that is that is dividing the country basically right down the middle is the nature of change in America. The right is not anti people of all races or people of a wide variety of religions. While acknowledging of course the biblical heritage of the United States, the question is the pace of change. So according to this gallup poll for this statement, please indicate which comes closer to your view, even if neither is exactly right. Over the past 25 years, cultural changes in U. S. Society have happened too fast or cultural changes in the United States have happened at a reasonable pace over the course of the past 25 years. So that answer is 49. 49. 49, 49, right. Literally half and half, half Americans think things are moving too fast. Half Americans think that things are moving kind of reasonably. The age breakdown is that as you get older, people think things are happening too fast. Democrats overwhelmingly think that things are happening at a reasonable pace 2 to 1. Republicans 2 to 1 think that things are happening too fast. Independents are split exactly 50, 50. This is the nature of the division in the country. This is the nature of the division in the country. But here's the thing. There is no one complaining that the change is happening too slowly, okay? That is the real key to this poll. No one is saying that the change is happening too slowly, that we need to accelerate the pace of change in the United States. No one is saying that. Again, that's fascinating because what that means is that the sort of radical left which wants to accelerate change is not going to be popular. And a radical right that also wishes to radically decelerate like change in the opposite direction or to a place that America never historically has been. That is not what Americans want. Virtually all Americans believe either that the pace of change is about right or that's moving too fast. Americans are an incremental people. We are not a radical change people. That is not what we are. Another basic split among Americans is whether people are responsible for their own needs on a basic individual level or the government is responsible for making sure the basic needs are met directly. 50, 50 directly. 50, 50 again. Democrats 70, 30 believe that the government should be responsible for making individuals basic needs are met. Republicans 72 to 27 believe the opposite. So despite these sort of populist movement believe that they can just side with the democrats. Most Republicans do not believe this. Republicans are still pro free market and individual responsibility. This is in fact a hallmark of Conservatism and the bizarre attempt to sort of retcon conservatism into a left wing Social Democratic populism from Wisconsin in 1918 is bizarre for sure. By the way, independents are split right down the middle. Slightly more independents believe that people should be responsible for maintaining their own basic needs than that the government should be okay. Meanwhile, again, the bottom line is that there is discord here, but this is the Overton window, okay? The Overton window in America, meaning the place of kind of rational discourse is in the middle of all of this. There are a lot of open questions to be left there, but there are a few things that Americans are pretty clearly rejecting overall. One, political violence to the idea you should never talk to or work with anybody on the other side of the political aisle. And three, radical, fast change, radical change. Americans don't love it. They are not in favor of it. They certainly don't want things accelerating from here. So any accelerationism from either side is likely to be rejected by the American people, okay? Meanwhile, our media are very much focused on accelerationism and partisanship and exacerbating it. Again, this is not to avoid blame for partisan politicians who also do it, but I have to say that things are increasingly stupid here in the United States. Like truly stupid. So yesterday, the big story of the day was a rather stupid story was let off by a bunch of Democrats. We put up their video yesterday. This is a bunch of Democrats ranging from Senator Alyssa Slotkin of Michigan to Representative Crow, Jason Crow of Colorado, calling on members of the military to disobey illegal orders. Now, we should note what this is and what it isn't. There's what it says and then there's what it implies. And now we're playing in the dumb space between them. So what it actually says is not illegal telling people they don't and and cannot obey illegal orders. That, of course, is true. Duh, right? If somebody gives you an order to go mow down a bunch of school children for no reason, and there would be no reason if they, if someone tells you to go do that, then you have to disobey that order. If you're in the US Military, obviously, okay? So the question becomes why they filmed that video. And the answer is because the implication is that the Trump administration is routinely giving illegal orders and thus you should just disobey the Trump administration. So once again, we are living in stupid land where Democrats will interpret this video as saying nothing new and Republicans will interpret this video as saying that members of the military should disobey legal Orders, not illegal orders. Here is the video. Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren't just coming from abroad, but from right here at home. Our laws are clear.
