It's a Numbers Game: The Numbers Behind America’s Economy with Breitbart's John Carney

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show — "It's a Numbers Game: The Numbers Behind America’s Economy"
Guest: John Carney (Breitbart)
Host: Ryan Graduski (filling in)
Date: November 17, 2025
Episode Focus: Unpacking the reality behind America’s economy—what’s driving affordability anxieties, which numbers actually matter, and how political and economic narratives intertwine.

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the core anxieties surrounding America's affordability crisis, dissecting recent economic data with guest John Carney from Breitbart News. The discussion explores inflation, wage growth (or lack thereof), tariff impacts, youth unemployment, sector-specific price changes, and how both voters and businesses are responding to the "new normal" in the U.S. economy. Insights are grounded in data, mixed with personal experience and a dose of political commentary.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. State of Affordability & the “New Normal”

• Widespread Anxiety: Americans across income brackets feel they’re barely getting by or just getting by; there’s little optimism about a return to pre-2020 prices.
• Inflation vs. Deflation: Yearly inflation is down from its peak, but prices haven’t fallen. Stagnation at a higher cost is the new baseline.
• Political Expectations: Many voters hoped a Trump return would “magically” reset prices to pre-COVID levels—a view Graduski calls unrealistic.
• Quote:
  • “Inflation is down year to year from the height of when Biden was presidency. But prices overall have not fallen... We are in a new normal, whether we like it or not.” — Ryan Graduski (12:00)

2. Quirks and Contradictions in Price Increases

• Some Prices Are Down or Stagnant: Items like home appliances, smartphones, gasoline, computer software, and furniture are flat or cheaper than in previous years (24:00).
• Sharp Increases in Essentials:
  • Car insurance up 55% (since 2022)
  • Home insurance up 13%, medical equipment up 13%, dental services up 18%
  • Pet food up 20%, tools/hardware up 12%, airline fees up 22%, overall food up 18%
• Root Causes:
  • Tariffs get overblamed; “[Tariffs] are not responsible for your home insurance or your car insurance. It’s an easy out, especially from media that looks to blame Donald Trump for everything.” — Graduski (16:50)
  • Deficit spending impacts overall inflation: “42% of all inflation is related to deficit spending... every time the government is posting a trillion-dollar deficit, you are losing purchasing power.” — Graduski (17:30 to 18:00)
• Car Insurance Specifics: Repairs are pricier due to technology; hybrids and EVs are harder to fix, making older methods obsolete. (25:32, Carney)

3. Corporate Profits vs. Consumer Experience

• Stocks Up, People Down: Although 85% of S&P 500 companies beat Q3 profit estimates and the market is steady, consumer sentiment is negative due to living costs.
• “The sky isn’t falling... But anyone telling you to hide your money in a shoebox is probably overstating the situation.” — Graduski (16:00)

4. Credit, Wages, and Class Difficulties

• Delinquency Rates:
  • Student loans: up to 14% (historic norms ~8.5%)
  • Credit cards: 7.1% (slight uptick)
  • Mortgages and home equity loans remain below historical averages.
• Paycheck-to-Paycheck Reality: 25% of families still rely on paycheck-to-paycheck existence (down from 29% in 2023).
• Wage Growth Gaps:
  • Under Trump 1.0, lower-income workers saw fastest wage increases. That momentum is gone, hitting middle- and lower-class workers hardest.
  • “That lower class quadrant is who’s feeling inflation the worst… those workers, not seeing any strong wage growth, are turning politically.” — Graduski (29:59)

5. Youth Unemployment & College Graduates

• Youth Under Pressure: Recent college grad unemployment is 9.3%—higher than at the Great Recession’s peak. For ages 16–24, it’s 10.5% (32:43).
• Surprising STEM Difficulties: Even STEM grads, historically considered safe, now face unemployment.
• Ripple Effects: This “anxiety” trickles upstream—parents and even grandparents co-signing loans get nervous.
• Quotes:
  • “It’s not just the people having trouble getting jobs—it’s their parents, and even the parents of kids still in high school who are anxious about their children’s prospects.” — Carney (37:43)

6. Tariffs, Energy, and Structural Inflation

• Tariffs:
  • Most items predicted to spike due to tariffs (cars, furniture, appliances) did not.
  • Apparel is up, but not dramatically; shoes are down.
• Energy, Electricity & Food:
  • Higher electricity costs drive up food prices (especially refrigerated or frozen goods).
  • “We did a really bad job preparing to use more electricity… and some activists oppose all expanded energy, thinking higher prices mean less usage, which is a flawed logic.” — Carney (28:46)
• Fed & Monetary Policy:
  • The Fed is unlikely to cut rates unless job losses spike significantly; Fed policies remain tight partly out of political and (Carney argues) mistaken inflation reasoning (32:43).
  • “They have a theory that is wrong, which is that tariffs are going to cause inflation. They look and say, ‘tariffs didn’t cause it YET... so it’s coming.’” — Carney (35:25)

7. Media Narratives, Political Uncertainty, and Business Response

• Media Coverage: Economic reporting drives—and sometimes amplifies—anxiety independently of actual data (43:51).
• Business Hiring:
  • Many companies overhired after the pandemic, are cautious on new hires until clarity emerges on economic trends—true especially amid tariff and AI anxieties.
  • “Companies don’t like to change their mind every day; they make year-ahead projections and are still digesting pandemic-era hiring.” — Carney (44:52)
• AI & Future of Work:
  • Artificial intelligence is a wild card for employment, but history suggests new tech eventually creates new job categories.
  • “Technological innovation doesn’t lead to long-term unemployment; outsourcing does. But maybe it’ll be different this time.” — Carney (41:15)
• “Bubble” Talk:
  • AI industry may be in a hype bubble, but, as Carney says:
  • “Bubbles can last a long time. Just because it’s a bubble doesn’t mean it’s not real.” (39:27)

8. Recession “Where?”: The State-by-State Mystery

• Confusion over ‘State Recessions’:
  • Moody’s claims 22 states are in recession, but many have growing GDP and no job losses.
  • Carney clarifies “recession” is a fluid term; it may refer to a modest rise in unemployment, but generally “true” recession is when all sectors/regions stagnate simultaneously.
  • “When people say a sector or a state is in a recession...what a recession really is, is almost everything all at once doing badly.” — Carney (48:18)

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Notable Quotes

• “No, the economy is not in dire straits. It's doing okay right now... a lot of unhappiness is Biden-flation hangover unhappiness.”
  — John Carney (23:03)

• “If you're not training the next level of senior people, because all their junior jobs are being done with AI, you're going to run into a business problem in the future.”
  — John Carney (43:03)

• “I don't see that inflation explains home insurance increases… it just doesn't explain a lot of other things.”
  — Ryan Graduski (36:28)

• “Bubbles can last a long time… just because something’s a bubble doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
  — John Carney (39:27)

• “Technological innovation actually doesn’t lead to long-term unemployment, which is very different from when you outsource jobs to another country...”
  — John Carney (41:15)

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Key Timestamps

• 03:13 — Correction on Jewish voting swings and donor data
• 12:00–18:00 — Affordability crisis: numbers, deficits, and what’s driving inflation
• 22:40–24:39 — Kicking off with John Carney: “True state of the economy?”
• 25:32–29:59 — Dissecting price hikes: insurance, appliances, tariffs, energy
• 29:59–32:43 — Wage growth, class impact, and political shifts
• 32:43–33:45 — Youth/college grad unemployment and ripple effects
• 35:21–36:28 — The Fed: Will they cut rates and why/why not?
• 37:43–43:51 — AI’s impact, hiring freezes, and business adaptation
• 44:52–48:16 — Recession definitions: National, sectoral, and state-by-state
• 50:59–52:47 — Where to find John Carney’s work and how economic journalism should operate

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Memorable Moments

• Carney’s analogy about going out to dinner and being shocked by normal menu prices, underscoring how the psychological hangover of price increases lingers even as inflation softens. (23:40)
• Discussion of AI mattresses and the tendency of new tech bubbles to last longer than skeptics expect. (39:09)
• The segment on youth unemployment’s emotional effect on parents, highlighting the psychological, not just financial, reach of economic malaise. (37:43)
• “Recession” confusion—calling out how economic labels can be misleading or driven as much by narrative as by numbers. (47:27–48:18)

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Conclusion & Takeaways

This episode challenges prevailing narratives about the economy driven by both partisan media and surface-level statistics. Listeners heard that while the U.S. economy isn’t in free fall, significant segments of the working and middle class are struggling to adjust to a new baseline for prices, wages, and expectations. Young people and their families, in particular, are feeling squeezed. The panelists urge listeners to look beyond political blame games, consider deeper structural issues—like deficit spending and technological transitions—and recognize that, for many, belief in a “return to normal” is likely misplaced.

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For further reading and daily economic analysis:

• Breitbart Business Digest
• John Carney (@carney) on X

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Transcript

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[Ryan Graduski]

Welcome back to A Numbers Game with Ryan Graduski. Thank you all for being here again. I need to start off the show with a correction from Thursday's All Ask Me Anything show. I had a listener named Brock who asked me about the Jewish vote since October 7th and I had some kind of brain fog. I don't know what was going on. I promise you I don't use drugs, so I can't even blame it on that. But I had a brain freeze and I forgot what year October 7th happened. And I some for some reason assumed it was last year and it was this year. It was like maybe. Sorry, I thought it was like maybe this year. It was like two years ago. So we have had, I said the only election we've had since then is the New York City mayor, Virginia governor and New Jersey governor election. And we had a presidential election that I completely forgot about. So Brock, I want to correct myself for you and for any listeners who care about this topic. So the organization that I mentioned, there's an organization that looks at the Jewish vote every single year and they say that they are a nonpartisan organization, but they are liberal hacks. And I remembered it after the podcast was over, over last week. It's called the Jewish Electoral Institute, the Jewish Electoral Institute, whose numbers I never trust. But I but the media post them because they're the first ones who come out with numbers of the Jewish vote. They said that Har won the Jewish vote 71 to 26. That's what you'll see that number in the media a lot. If you look it up, it comes from them. They are partisan hacks. They should be ignored. The Pew Research center, which did a very deep dive investigation into the election of different demographics, multiple demographics, looked at the Jewish vote and said it was more like 63 to 35 in favor of Harris So Harris did win the Jewish vote, but that is actually a swing to towards Republicans. Now, Pew did not look at the election from 2020. I looked at other data analysis which said that Trump won around 25. 26%. So we might have seen about a 20 point swing between what the Democrats lost and what Republicans gained overall with the Jewish vote in 2024. Steve Saylor, who is very controversial, so the media will not cover him fairly or accurately, he actually looked at Jewish donors and this is really fascinating. In 2020, Jews gave Democrats more money in their presidential and congressional runs than Republic. For Republicans, 517 million for Democrats, 411 million for Republicans. In 2024, Jewish donors for Democrats dropped their donations by 33% while increasing their giving to Republican presidential candidates. Obviously, Trump and Republicans running for Congress by 29%. So in 2024, Republicans actually received more money from Jewish donors than Democrats did by a $529 million margin for Republicans and 344 million for Democrats. That's very insightful. It really does speak to where the, the voters or especially the donors really feel like the party is representing the best interest of Jewish Americans. I, I think that that's very fascinating. So the Jewish vote swung towards Republicans by a good, by a good measure, but Jewish donors really swung towards Republicans. And obviously, if you look at the mayor's election, Cuomo won the Jewish vote, certainly. And in New Jersey, the Jewish vote swung heavily towards the Republican candidate for the governor of New Jersey. All right, enough of the Jewish vote. We're going to talk about affordability this episode. It is the topic, the word, the buzzword that the media is grabbing on to, that the White House is grabbing on to, that Congress is talking about ever since Mandani won in New York City, speaking about issue of rents and the cost of transportation, all the rest of the things that are plaguing New Yorkers. And obviously New York is one of the most expensive places in the country to live in. There is a real feeling in the country, and I've talked to people of many different income brackets, many different. They work in different sectors of the economy, they are in different age groups where they have genuine anxiety over the state of the economy. The issue that they feel like they are barely getting by or not getting by or just getting by. Inflation, I think, you know, inflation is down year to year from the height of when Biden was presidency. But prices overall have not fallen because we're not in a deflationary period. Right. So just inflation has slowed. But we are in a New normal, whether we like it or not, our everyday prices, we're not going back to 2020. And I think that's what angers a lot of voters who felt like, let's get Trump in office, he'll have a magic wand somehow and we'll return to a pre Covid world that I just don't see that we're ever gonna come down to. Now, we all know certain things in our everyday life, lives have gone up, right? Food prices, electric bills, home prices have not budged. Some of it is related to Trump's tariffs, right? Like clothes. Clothes are much more expensive. But some of it, some of, and, and some of it, by the way, like electricity has nothing to, right, because it's the data centers and other things are going on. But according to CBS News, it's very unusual which, which items are seeing the biggest spikes and which ones are decreasing, right? So according to CBS News, home appliances, smartphones, gasoline, computer software, televisions, they're all cheaper than they were in 2022. Furniture is actually stagnant. There's not been an explosion in the increasing cost of furniture since 2022. Interestingly. Interestingly enough, gasoline when adjusted, is actually cheaper in 2025 than it was in 1973. Nothing to do with the conversation, but I saw that and I was like, I got, I got to say to somebody. Otherwise I'm just up at Wikipedia middle of the night looking up random gas prices throughout the years. So items have increased for other things though, things in our daily lives that we feel we have to kind of have. Car Insurance is up 55% since 2022. Home insurance is up 13%. Medical equipment is up 13%. Dental services are up 18%. Pet food is up 20%. Tools and hardware are up 12%. Airline fees are up 22%. I fly all the time. I trust my feeling this. And overall food is up 18%. Now that's not every item, but that is, you know, the Overall number since 2022. Why is this. Yes, some of it is tariff related, which is what the media has been talking about non stop. If you read nothing besides the mainstream media, it is, tariffs are responsible for everything. But it doesn't, it doesn't make sense, right? Tariffs are not responsible for your home insurance or your car insurance. It's an easy out. It's an easy explanation, especially from a media that looks to blame Donald Trump for absolutely everything. Part of it and part of it is Trump's fault and Republicans fault because of a new study I read from MIT which said 42% of all inflation is related to deficit spending. Every time the government is posting a trillion dollar deficit, you are losing purchasing power of your, of your dollar. Right. It is the tax that they are. They're, you know, Democrats say let's do a middle class tax cut. Republicans say let's do a tax cut everybody. Every time they pass an inflation, it is a tax increase without them telling you about it. And that is really a big chunk of why your dollar is not going as far and hasn't for quite some time now. This doesn't mean that all companies are, you know, that because our daily lives are the cost of our daily lives are increasing, that all these companies are about to fail or are failing. There was new consumer sentiment is down. But, but price. But, but 85% of firms in the S&P 500 actually beat their Q3 quarterly profit estimates. Right. Companies are doing fairly well. Like the. The sky isn't falling. I'm not saying things are great. I'm not trying to overstate it. I'm not doing, I'm not Baghdad Bob saying no, everything is cheap and easy. It's not. But anyone telling you that you should, you know, consider hiding your money in a shoebox and then burying it is probably overstating the situation. Earnings are strong for companies, which explains the resiliency of the stock market. So inflation is down from where it was during the Biden presidency. It's ticked up slightly. Overall, the 3% companies are showing strong profits, the stock market is strong, but the cost increase that really is ratchet up since the recession hasn't come down. Right. The new normal is hurting working class people the most. In 2025, 25% of families are living paycheck to paycheck and increasingly living on their credit cards. That's actually down. Believe it or not, the amount of people living paycheck to paycheck according to polling from 20, from 2023 where it was 29%. You may have heard a lot about delinquencies, Right. People are delinquent on their mortgages, delinquent on their credit cards or on their cars. Right. I want to talk about a broader context to really understand when they say delinquencies, where they're at. When you look at the last 22 years, student loan delinquencies were usually at 8.5%, credit cards 6.5, mortgages for auto and auto cars 2.5, autos 2.5 and HELOCs 2%. Currently, student loans are way up there at 14%, way, way higher. Than normal. Credit cards are slightly up there at 7.1% and auto is up to 3%. It's up about maybe it's actually, it's up a little bit, but it's not up terribly by half a point. Mortgages and HELOCs are actually below the national average for the last 22 years. And that's because inflation is growing faster than median incomes for lower and middle class people. People who are more dependent on the credit card who, you know, maybe can't afford their monthly car payment, but either they don't own a house, they're living in an apartment, or you know, they have a house that is a more reasonable cost and it's what they prioritize. This went really into overdrive around February, but it's been, it's been happening for some time and it probably explains why you saw shifts among white working class voters in the presidential election and the last governorship elections a few weeks ago. Working class voters, white working class voters and Latinos because they're both at the same or very similar economic standing, right? And one didn't just flip, they both moved, they both went in the same direction. They're both feeling this economic pressure that the average middle and lower income person is feeling. A big part of this discussion is especially focused on young people. Unemployment for recent college graduate stands at 9.3% higher than it was during the Great Recession. This is especially true for STEM graduates. STEM was we were told get a STEM degree, you'll, you'll have a job for life. That's not true for a lot of STEM graduates, recent STEM graduates, which makes the conversation over H1BS even more infuriating. Unemployment for 16 to 2424 year old stands at 10.5% this and many of them are in school. But still that's very, very, very high. And I want to want to make listeners understand the political gravity of this when they talk about youth unemployment. It is not just the young people who are focused feeling this anxiety towards, you know, not having a job or being underemployed or having to settle for a job where you didn't get your degree in. It also affects their boomer parents and their Gen X parents, right? People who have co signed their student loans who are saying hey, my kid got a good degree from a good school. Why are they not making what they should. They're feeling the nerves too. They're feeling that anxiety too. So although they may be fine in their jobs, they're invested. Their biggest investment is not their house. It's their child. And this is go. This is the trend that's been going on for some time. It didn't just start when Trump became president. It's been happening. Part of the reason that young people are feeling especially this terrible economy right now a little bit could be exposure to AI But I've read a few papers and studies that say that they doubt it. Part of it could be uncertainty. I mean, Trump is a wild man to a lot of people, right? So if you're a company and you don't know which way, especially with tariffs are going, maybe you slow down hiring. Part of it could be that they hired a lot of people during the recession and now they don't need workers. I mean, that's also a big, big part of it. And this entire context that we're having about rising costs and tariffs and AI and H1BS and all of this, this nervousness, especially towards younger people and where they stand, the economy happens. At the time that Moody's response has stated and rated that 22 states are currently in a recession. Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Virginia, Washington, Washington D.C. west Virginia and Wyoming. I, I don't know exactly if what the state of their recession is because only two of those states have reported GDP declines in the first two quarters of this year being Arkansas and Mississippi. Arkansas is not even on that list. Mississippi is the only one on that list. And non posted job losses. My overall assumption throwing all that data at you is this. The economy is not great, especially if you're a workingclass middle class employee, especially if you're a young person. It is a slog and it is not a great time to be unemployed. If there was ever a good time to really be unemployed. But this is not it. I think that what we are dealing with as a society is we're adjusting to a new normal that we will not feel normal in for a very, very long time. I don't think there's a magic wand that can go back to 2019. I wish there was. It'd be much easier for me who works a million jobs seven days a week could even feel because even I am sitting there and saying wow, these prices are getting really expensive. Not that I'm a billionaire, but I'm noticing these on my, on my general life and I make a good income. I work really, really hard. I have employees to sit there and pay for. We're all noticing it and what it will mean if we can't get some kind of restitution by Election Day is that these swing voters, especially the ones who said let's trust Trump because he can sit there and wave a magic wand, they're going to sit there and say, you know what, I'm going to either stay home or I'm going to give Democrats a chance. That puts Republicans in a very precarious situation and they don't have a lot of time to address Trump this. And that's why it's more important than ever. They focus on getting Americans back at work and increasing stability in the economy overall. With me today for this episode is the brilliant John Carney from Breitbart News. He's going to go over all these data, all these numbers, and really make it understandable for people, for fellow college dropouts like me, and for everyone else who's not an economist. That's coming up next.

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[Ryan Graduski]

A national conversation around affordability, right? Especially since Mandani 1. You've heard the white House talk about it more. Congress is talking about it more you write about. And it's an interesting moment because stocks are up and companies are posting really strong profits, but people are not feeling it. What do you have a sense as the true state of the economy right now? Is it as bad and dire as people say it is?

[John Carney]

No, the economy is not in dire straits. It's doing okay right now. I think there are risks. I do think a lot of the unhappiness that we're hearing from people is really what I'll call like Biden flation hangover unhappiness. The main complaint is that prices are very high. Inflation is still above where it was for most. Everybody is going to watch this lives. It went up to the highest level under Biden in 40 years, but still at around 2 and a half to 3%. That's too high. And remember, that's 2 and a half and 3% on top of the giant increases we saw under Biden. So I think people, even if we had almost no inflation right now, I think people would still be worried about affordability. We don't have almost no inflation. We have inflation that's still a little bit too high. It needs to be brought down further. But I think it's, frankly, I think it's going to take years for people to feel like, to get used to the new price level. I feel it myself. I go out to dinner and I think like, what I said, I didn't say it. I thought it to my friend. I was like, did you bring us to like the fanciest restaurant in your town? Because these prices are out of control and it's just the normal restaurant price. Right. You know, but, and I, it makes me feel really old. Like I, I'm like, you know, oh, when I was a boy, my hamburgers only cost $15 and now they're 22.

[Ryan Graduski]

Yeah, I, I feel it completely. And it's not even across the board. So I, I was looking. CBS posted a whole group of things of what? Where prices up and where are they down? Certain things they are down, right? Computer software is down, gasoline is down, smartphones is down, home appliances is down, furniture is stagnant. It's even gasoline is actually lower by inflation measures than it was in 1973. But then you look at home insurance, pet food, food hardware, some of it would make sense that the tariffs have had a, had, you know, on clothes, for example. Tariffs clearly have had an impact. But home insurance, they. Tariffs have nothing to do with home insurance. So why are we seeing certain things that affect our daily lives? Car insurance is up like 20% from 2022. Why are certain things just spiking and exploding? That affects people's daily lives. Yeah.

[John Carney]

So there's a few reasons for this. The car insurance thing really actually does have to do with the fact that we've made our cars into computers and so that repairs to cars are much more expensive. And I talked to a friend of mine who works in the business of car repair. He said actually like the. It's easier to total a car, meaning, you know, make it unusable than it used to be. Because it used to be you got in an accident and you could take some parts out and put parts back in. If you're driving like an electric vehicle, you can't take anything out. It's all basically one big part. And just even hybrids and internal combustion engine cars are much harder to repair these days, so they're much more expensive. That drives up inflation prices. In general, though, I do think that what we're seeing is, like I said, a, it's. I don't think there's much of a tariff effect.

[Ryan Graduski]

Right.

[John Carney]

But you named all those things that aren't up much at all or aren't or are actually down in price that people thought would be more expensive from tariffs. Cars, furniture, appliances was a big thing, right? Appliances were going to like, we're going to see a big increase in appliance costs. We haven't. Apparel is up. Apparel's up a little bit, though. I mean, it's actually not up as much as, you know, you might have thought if you were a tariff fear monger. Shoe, shoes are down, which is weird. And one of the things about that is we're not seeing the. Everything goes up a lot kind of inflation we saw in Biden. We are. Some food prices are up, beef is up, egg prices are down a lot. So what we're.

[Ryan Graduski]

Well, they were so high. I mean, they were. At one point they had to come in and go higher. I mean, how many chickens are dead?

[John Carney]

I mean, like. Well, yeah, I mean. And also, I mean, it's one of the reasons beef prices, like food, particularly proteins, are substitutable. So if egg prices go up, you eat more bacon in the morning or you eat. Or you make pancakes or whatever, you know, meaning you shift away from the super expensive stuff. The. And same thing happens with beef, frankly, people, okay, you know, I'll buy some chicken instead of buying the, you know, the steak. And so people shift their proteins, prices come down. I don't. I know the Trump administration is like Lowering tariffs on some foods, that may help a little, but I actually don't think it's going to have a big effect.

[Ryan Graduski]

Well, when it comes to coffee, the biggest cost from food is transportation, right? Transporting food and energy is the biggest cost of food. And something that I have never seen someone write, I've kind of thought about is as electricity prices have increased, the cost of refrigerating food must be going up because it has to affect everything. Walmart's, you know, the Walmart grocery store or Kroger's or wherever you're buying groceries from, their costs are going like your houses. So they're passing those costs on to consumers. Am I crazy for thinking that?

[John Carney]

No, no, that's, that's actually a really good insight is that when you do have these, this problem of higher electricity costs, and we actually did a really bad job in this country of preparing ourselves to use more electricity, we really, we haven't built enough electricity plants. There's all sorts of reasons for that. You know, a huge part of it is like climate change fears. People were demanding that if you build new electricity plants that they, you know, that they only be powered by wind or solar somehow. And you can't, you can't actually do that. And some climate activists actually oppose all expanded energy because they feel like it's actually a bonus to have energy cost more. The more expensive it is, the less we'll use it. And therefore, somehow, if, you know, if it becomes too expensive for you and I to, you know, turn on our lights at night, then that'll save the earth from climate change. Obviously that's, that's wrong, but that really is the part of the idea they discourage the building of new energy generation. I think we're past that now. I think we're going to build more electricity, but it's going to take some time.

[Ryan Graduski]

So when you look at the wage growth, right, something that we saw in the first Trump administration was very high wage growth among the lower quadrant of workers. Right? Lower quadrant percentile of workers. That has not changed. Now we're lower, we're lower class workers are actually making their, their wages are growing at the slowest amount, unlike they used to grow at the highest amount during the first Trump administration. What do you, because that, that middle tier and lower tier income bracket is, who's here feeling inflation the worst. And when you saw the New Jersey and, and Virginia elections, especially the New Jersey elections, it wasn't just a lot, you know, had moved against Trump. And they are in that quadrant of the lower middle Class, but also white working classes moved against Republicans in big numbers. Those are, they have the same economic levels. So why are those workers not seeing wage growth at a strong level like they used to?

[John Carney]

So I think actually we're going to see it. I just think it's too early. A few things are going to drive it one there and this will set a little trickle down economics. But we, there is going to be this investment surge coming from the tax bill that will actually result in more demand for workers that will push up wages and then the deportations and the closing off of the border will also help push up wages. It's actually funny hearing people complain about this because at the same time you keep hearing people complain that we're going to experience some sort of horrible labor shortage from Trump's border policies. So I expect that what we've seen in sort of the lower deciles of, of income not performing maybe as well as people had hoped, that that's actually, again, I hate to keep saying this like, oh, it's a hangover from Biden, but look like electing Donald Trump can't, you know, like it's not going to change the economy immediately. Right. We are still dealing with Biden policies for a while. And so what I'd say is like, look, give it some time. I think it will come back politically. You know, the Trump administration has to hope that it comes back in the next six months. Right. Because sometime around you're the political guy, not me. But you know, sometime around next May, people's mindsets will, you know, like they get fixed. That's what the economy will be in their mind till November. So I'm saying it's going to get better. The, the political question is, does it get better in time and do people notice it in time?

[Ryan Graduski]

Well, is the Fed going to cut rates, you think?

[John Carney]

I. Well, so here's the question. No, unless we get, unless the answer, unless we get a terror. So, so we're getting a jobs report this week on Thursday day. If the jobs report is awful, and by that I mean probably would have to be negative. So it would have to show that we lost jobs. If it comes in at like 30, 40, 50,000, that's actually a pretty good jobs report. It will mean that unemployment is not rising. We're creating enough jobs to fill the growth of the economy. That number is a lot lower than it used to be because we're not admitting a million illegal aliens every year.

[Ryan Graduski]

Now, that Right?

[John Carney]

Yeah. I mean, yeah, the millions that were coming in meant that you had to be generating, you know, 125, 150, 200,000 jobs a month just to keep up with the new entrants. That's a lot lower now. So like 50,000 is actually a pretty good number.

[Ryan Graduski]

Well, ADP estimates is about 50,000. Goldman Sachs says we've lost a hundred thousand.

[John Carney]

So if we get a number like that, then the Fed will probably cut. If we get a shock, no, if we get a positive number and it's not like three jobs but tens of thousands, then I think the Fed stays on hold. I think that there's greater risk to the economy right now. I think the economy is doing okay, but there are signs that of risks to the economy. I think the Fed should cut in December just to hold off the risks. But there's two reasons why they don't want one, I think that they want Trump to fail. I think, you know, that they are political. I don't think that they look at this and say like, oh, you know, we better, you know, I don't think they, they want a recession, but they wouldn't mind if things go pretty badly over the next six months so that people vote for the Democrats. And I also think that they have a theory that is wrong, which is that tariffs are going to cause inflation. And they look and they say tariffs didn't cause a lot of inflation yet. But rather than correcting themselves and being like, oh well, maybe we were wrong about that whole tariff inflation thing, they just keep saying, well, that just means it's going to get worse in the future. Right. So every time we get a price report that shows not a lot of, of inflation, they're like, oh yeah, man.

[Ryan Graduski]

But that means, you know, it's coming.

[John Carney]

And they're going to keep saying this at least until May when Jerome Powell is leaves the chairmanship. We don't even know if he's going to leave the Fed. By the way, he may be there for, he could, he has a couple more years in his term as governor so he could do something that almost no Fed governor has Fed chairman has ever done, which is like stubbornly stay on the Fed when your chairmanship is done. And he shouldn't do that. That would be irresponsible. It undermines the next chairman. Every other Fed president except one leaves or Fed chairman leaves when their term is done. So but I think we may get a change from the Fed in May. But before that, I don't think they'll cut unless something starts to go really bad in the economy. Meaning like they're not, they're not willing to do like a preemptive like or precaution cut. They need to see like, you know, people would like you know, tin pans in the streets like and barrels over their, you know, cells because they don't have any clothes.

[Ryan Graduski]

Yeah, the, I was looking at different trends on costs and, and there's not much that you see a dramatic change from Biden like the trajectory of lower income people to or having, having their wages decrease started during Biden and it has been increasing and it just still has continued. So I don't see that inflation doesn't explain home insurance increases. Like it just doesn't explain a lot of other things. Dental services are up like so it's, it's very, very strange. The now they wanted to ask you about was what is going on with college graduates having such high unemployment rates? Because that is leading to, I think a big part of it is when young people have high levels of unemployment it doesn't just affect them, it affects their parents. Oh yeah, grandparents will co sign student loans. So the Gen X and baby boomers who have Gen Z children are like why is my, my kid graduated from a computer science major from a good college, why is he unemployed? Or why is he working at Starbucks? He should have a really good job right now. And their anger and you know, anxiety about the economy is because of that their kid isn't doing well. So why are college graduates having such high unemployment rates?

[John Carney]

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right and I love that insight into the fact that it's not just the people who are having the trouble getting the jobs, it's their parents and actually it's the parents of even younger kids. If you've got a kid in high school and you see that college graduates aren't getting jobs, you become anxious. You say oh, you know, this is, I have this huge expense. You know, if you're helping your kid out with college that I'm going to be paying and if they can't get a job that'll be bad. So I think you're right. It is a, it's bigger than you know, just, it creates anxiety much broader than just the people who can't get jobs. I think there's a few things going on. One is that we are coming through a period in which employers hired a lot and they probably overstaffed and so we got down to unemployment rates that we hadn't seen for two generations. And I think that some employers are still sort of digesting those workers. They're worried about that there is probably some AI effect. Not so much that AI is doing people's jobs. Yet I, you know, do you have exhibit AI?

[Ryan Graduski]

Can I ask you?

[John Carney]

Am I excited about it?

[Ryan Graduski]

No. Anxiety. Do you have anxiety?

[John Carney]

No, I think, I mean, I. I worry a little about, like, stock market valuations based on AI. They're very.

[Ryan Graduski]

Oh, that's. There's definitely a bubble. When I saw a commercial for the AI, the AI mattress, I go, oh, man, this is pet stock. I was like, this is not going well at all. Like, the AI mattress. I was like, guys, it's a wrap. Like, there's no way that this is real. But anyway, go ahead.

[John Carney]

Yeah, no, it does start to get worrying. But one problem I'll just say about bubbles is that bubbles can last a long time. You know, like, people were calling, like, tech a bubble in 97 and 98, and it had a few years to go. So when you say, oh, so it looks like a bubble to me, I try not to even think necessarily whether something's in a bubble because that makes people think it's about to collapse. But it actually may have years to go and we may have years to run on this. And also, just because something's a bubble doesn't mean it's not real. There was an Internet bubble, but guess what? You and I are here on the Internet, right? It can become something very real. And there's a bunch of companies that exist on the Internet that are the world's most valuable companies. And so there's a bubble. Doesn't mean that you're not actually creating value in technology over time. So to get to your real question, like, you were like, what? So I think that some employers are probably holding back on hiring young people, in part because they want to see. Maybe I don't need as many people, right? Maybe I can hold back, see what AI can do, what it can't. So there may be a friction there, but I actually don't expect that to last very long. Historically, I'm not one of the. Like, I'm not an employment doomer from AI, and I have friends who are, by the way, I have friends who are like, no. Like, you have no idea. We're all going to be unemployed.

[Ryan Graduski]

I go back and forth. I'm like, oh, it won't be so bad. I'm like, it's the worst. So, yeah, I'm having Rokhan actually on my podcast next week to talk about this.

[John Carney]

Yeah, so I'm not a doomer when it comes to employment, typically, what happens. And again, this is some like really like overly optimistic. But typically what happens when we have a new technology that displaces workers. We find new work for the people because the people then become a underutilized resource and you can use them. History bears that out, by the way, including some recent economic studies. They just gave the Nobel Prize for this. That showed that technological innovation actually doesn't lead to long term unemployment, which is very different, by the way, from when you outsource jobs to another country that actually does lead to a permanent lower level of employment that doesn't get fixed. So technology tends to free up resources and outsourcing jobs actually tends. They're often conflated in people's minds. They were like, oh, technology also takes away people's jobs. It's different than outsourcing jobs. Technology doesn't tend to lead to permanently lower employment. Maybe it'll be different this time. You know, it could be, yeah.

[Ryan Graduski]

I mean generative AI is different. I think that's why I think there was a real clear thing when Sam Altman said we're going to have to have a bailout for AI companies and then immediately. Who's the head of AI for the White House? The billionaire. I can't remember his name. Top my head now. He, he said there'll be no bailouts for AI companies like the same day. And he's very bullish on AI. So I think that's, I think it's interesting. I don't think we're at a place yet where everyone's going to get replaced. But I do worry if there is enough unemployment, what people's politics, when you get to that level switch dramatically and it's going to elect mandanis across the country. If 20% of our youth cannot get jobs.

[John Carney]

Yeah, we need to worry about that if it gets to that level. The other thing, by the way, is it becomes a problem for the businesses themselves because you can't only be run by senior people because those senior people get old, they retire, they die. And if you're not training the next level of senior people, like let's say you need 100 senior people to run your organization. You don't just need 100 junior people because you don't know which of those hundred are going to be good. You need a thousand junior people so that you can winnow them out and get the senior. And if you are not training them because all their younger, the junior jobs are being done with AI, you are going to run into a business problem in the future. I don't know how that's exactly going to work out. But it is, it is a business problem that businesses are going to have to face.

[Ryan Graduski]

What do you. My last. Well, yeah. How much. One last question with my last, last question. What how much do you think of this could also be anxiety. The way that the. I've noticed the way that the media covers the economy and the economy are two very different things and always really have been. Right. I've been waiting for recessions sometimes month when the Democrats in White House it's going to be a recession any day. When the Republicans the White House it's gonna be a recession any day depending on what media outlet you look at. How much do you think maybe the slowing down of hiring, especially if young people could be of. Let's see where these tariffs go. Let's see what the, what the orange man does. Let's see how things shake out before we sit there and start making these. Because they're having profits, they're having growth. It's not like our companies are failing left and right. But is it just that the economy is growing, The GDP is growing too. So is it that? Is it part of it could be. Hey, I have anxiety over Trump's, the way that Trump behaves and who knows if this is a possible like, you know, we could make a wrong turn.

[John Carney]

Yeah. And look, just a few months ago there were like widespread recession predictions that the tariffs were going to push us into a recession. And I do think that probably caused company Remember companies don't like change their mind. Like you know, every single day they, they make year ahead projections, they have plans, they can revise them as time goes on. But if you think about like where we were a year ago, Donald Trump's coming into office, he's promised to put a 20% tariff on everything, which we don't have a 20% tariff on everything by the way. We have a lower tariff. The average tariff rate is probably around 18%. It might be a little lower right now. So companies were worried, a lot of economists were saying that it was going to destroy the economy. When he announced the tariffs in April, people were like, people don't jump out of windows anymore because you can't open them. But they were more or less like that's it, it's over and it didn't happen. And so I think we may see more hiring actually as companies. The other, the final piece of this I'll say is I think the Fed's monetary policy has been too tight for most of the year that it became clear that inflation was not going up, that tariffs aren't pushing up inflation. There's a new paper out of the San Francisco Federal Reserve that people are talking about a lot that shows that actually tariffs tend to push down inflation, not up. And so I read that one.

[Ryan Graduski]

But it was also because they have job losses, they have less money, so there's less inflation. That was their.

[John Carney]

Yeah. All I can say is everybody should read Breitbart Business Digest because I am going to spend the next several days explaining exactly what I looked for your take on it.

[Ryan Graduski]

I didn't see it and I was like, okay, I'll get to it. Like, I'm sure he'll publish about it pretty soon.

[John Carney]

I mean, you know, follow me on X. I'm, you know, I have one.

[Ryan Graduski]

Last question before we get to the promotion of John Carney, which everyone should read John Carney. But my last question. So there was a, a paper out, a survey by Moody's and it said that 22 states are already in a recession. I looked at their hiring and their gdp. All of the states listed had GDP growth. Only two states have had GDP losses in the last two quarters, which was Arkansas and Mississippi, neither of which are on that list. And they all had, none of them had job loss losses. So how are these states in a recession?

[John Carney]

Yeah, so I mean that's part of the thing is like, look, what you define as a recession is, you know, is in a way very subjective. The, it's, it's actually defined by a committee up in Cambridge officially. And so, so, but what, so, but that's on a national level. So what do they mean? Like is there a recession? It could just be something as simple as has the unemployment rate moved up by 50 basis points. That Claudia Sahm is an economist, said that that is one of the best recession indicators. And although she has said more recently, like it's not a lock that you're in a recession, if that happens, she actually uses that it's like an alarm bell that the government should start to think about what it, the government, the.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Fed.

[John Carney]

Should start and the fiscal authorities should start to figure out what they might need to do to aid the economy. If you get a half point increase within six months of like, so you have a high level, you have, you know, one level of unemployment and over the course of six months you go up a half a point. That's a like quite steep increase. That can, that she, that has historically been a recession indicator. So maybe that's what they mean. What I would say is it's a little weird to have. Like, it's like when people say a sector is in a recession, right? Like, oh, I mean, you can say I say it. Housing is in a recession, right? The problem is a recession. Like, parts of the economy are always doing better and worse. And same with parts of the country. Parts of the country there tend to be some places that are doing really well and some places that aren't. So it's weird to pick out a place that'd be like housing recession or Oklahoma recession. Because what a recession really is is almost everything all at once and almost everywhere all at once doing badly. Because that means you can't move to another sector to get a better job and you can't move to a better part of the country to get a better job. So I don't like the word recession when used that. That said, like I said, I think some parts of the economy, housing in particular, have been pretty weak because interest rates have been too high. And so I wouldn't be surprised if that starts to show up in various places. I mean, although we just got one of the first economic reports in quite a while because the government reopened and it actually showed that construction was better than expected. It was expected to decline like a tenth of a basis point and went up 210 of a basis point. I know it's like, doesn't seem like a lot, but. But like, that's a big deal. A lot of us were expecting, including me, that, like, we're gonna have to start to see layoffs in the construction sector, which has been doing pretty well because construction spending was probably going to sink. But. And this is, this is an old number. It's an August number, but. But it. Or September number, I guess. But it shows that construction spending is going up, which is, you know, and that's pretty impressive. So maybe, maybe I was too fearful.

[Ryan Graduski]

Well, John, where can we go to read all your brilliant insights? And you are brilliant. I do love reading your stuff. And it's easy for people who are not economists, for college dropouts like myself to understand. So where people read you all the time.

[John Carney]

I'm glad you say that. I try to. You know, I definitely don't write for economists. I try to write for everybody. And so Breitbart Business Digest comes out every day.

[Ryan Graduski]

It's free.

[John Carney]

You can subscribe to it comes to your mailbox. You don't even have to, like, go to the web. You could just read it on your phone. Breitbart.com economy my X speed at Carney C A R N E. Yeah. Has a lot of it. We talked about that San Francisco Fed paper. I'm going to explain why the negative interpretation of it, like, oh, no, it means the economy has to do badly once you put tariffs in for prices to go down is wrong. One of my favorite things to do, actually is a lot of journalists, I'm sorry to say, seem not to read the economic papers they talk about. You know, they just go on X and they're like this says we have to have a recession or whatever.

[Ryan Graduski]

That is true of journalists in any sector. They do not actually read the papers that they talk about. That is very, very, very common. Yes.

[John Carney]

Or they're afraid to admit they don't understand them. You know, when I don't understand something, I start making calls to get somebody to explain it to me. That's one of my rules.

[Ryan Graduski]

I call you.

[John Carney]

John.

[Ryan Graduski]

I don't understand anything that's going on.

[John Carney]

I. And I have a rule that if I don't understand something, I don't write about it until I do. Right. Like that's the, that's. And, and I'm not embarrassed to say, like, I don't get that one yet. And that's actually proven a very safe thing for me because it saves you from a lot of mistakes. But anyway, you know, Breitbart Business Digest, everybody should subscribe to it. It is, it's where, it's where I explain not just like what happened, but why and how and what it probably means for the future.

[Ryan Graduski]

Future. All right, John Carney, thank you for coming on my podcast. I always appreciate you.

[John Carney]

Yeah, it's great to see you, Ryan.

[Ryan Graduski]

You're listening to It's a Numbers Game with Ryan Gusky. We'll be right back.

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[Ryan Graduski]

Now it's time for the ask me anything segment of this podcast. If you want to be part of the ask me anything segment, email me Ryanumbers game podcast.com that's Ryan@NumberNumbers PL numbers game podcast.com I love getting these letters. I love getting these emails. I like to know that there's someone listening and I'm not just getting a chart of what my numbers are like day to day. This email comes from Joey. He says, hi, my name is Joseph Hagler. I just finished listening to one of your podcasts with Nikki Haley's son. It was good. I did think it was interesting how so many younger generations look at the boomers and the life they were able to have and resent them for it. I know, you know, and that's what I try to tell Nail in when I was having the conversation. Was things easier for baby boomers? Yes, in some respects, but it wasn't easier in many others. They grew up in a very turbulent time and there, I think a lot of things that happened that the silent generation voted for and did is blamed on baby boomers. And there was also, they were, some of them were drafted, some of them had a real hardships. They grew up in a much more dangerous society than we do now. It wasn't all sunshine and roses. It wasn't like they all were able to buy, you know, a home that's like, that's now worth $10 million for, you know, five bucks. That didn't really happen. There are some things that definitely boomers could be blamed for as a generation, but it's not. It's not. I mean, younger people really have a lot of pent up resentment towards baby boomers for sure. Okay, my question is this. Why does nobody talk about the national debt being 30 trillion is leading cause for inflation? Exactly what I said about this podcast, which is basically attacks on everybody. That's what he said. I completely agree with you. That's why I did this podcast episode. Joseph, why? We need multiple people in a home to be working, which means they're not even raising their own kids. So they put the kid in childcare services, which is very expensive. Why the cost of living does not match livable wage. Joseph, you're 100%. Right. And it's, we're not talking about it because it's uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable to sit there and say the only real way we are going to sit there and get to a balanced budget and a budget surplus is either we have to grow the economy to unimaginable numbers, which may be with AI. That's what they're saying AI is going to do. I don't know. I really don't know. We're going to have a conversation I next week. I'm looking forward to that. It could also be. Or we have to increase taxes, which not just on the wealthy. It's going to be a tax increase very much across the board, which nobody wants. It's very unpopular. Or we're going to have to touch our entitlements and our military spending. It's going to have to be everything. And the cost of servicing the debt is going to be the largest part of our budget pretty soon. I, I mean, you know, they've talked about printing a trillion dollar coin and just paying off the debt or whatever. I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's possible. I don't know what else they're going to sit there and do. But they have to get into realistic terms because we're paying for it. We are paying for the debt every day. I 100 agree with you. They're not talking about it because one, it's not sexy for the media. It's much more sexy to talk about other things like, you know, Epstein. But yeah, it's very, very, very important and it's very uncomfortable, which is why people don't want to do it. It. Okay, next and last question. This comes from Christopher. Christopher writes, hey, big fan of your podcast. Listen to every episode. Thank you, Christopher. I, I beyond appreciate you. I have no idea. Thanks for what you do. I have two serious questions. One serious and one not so much. First, I've been speculated that Trump and Beset have been working deliberately to derail the economy this year to force the Fed to reduce rates and make it easier to require refinancing of trillions of dollars of debt that rolling over. Do you buy this argument or have any evidence for or against it? Do I have any evidence? No, I don't have any evidence for that. They're for or against it. I don't think that that's the case though. My general suspicion is that Trump loves the headlines to sit there and say everything's going great. I do think that he likes tariffs. I Just think that he fundamentally thinks tariffs work for his end. And I don't think, I don't believe that tariffs are responsible for all our costs to increase. As I've said in this whole podcast episode, I think, and I think Bessette is a very smart man. I don't think he wants to see the economy fail. I, I think some things are bigger than the president, and I think that that's part of the, part of the problem. And I think compared to Trump term one, I mean, honestly, he's been much more toned down and much more even keel where it's not like crazy and you don't know what's going to happen day to day. So I don't, I don't buy that argument, Chris. So I, I don't know. I heard it, but I don't buy it. Second, what's the story with a theme music? It sounds like video killed the radio star. Is that correct? That is exactly correct, Chris. I am a big fan of new wave. I big fan of 80s music. I used to go to 80s clubs in New York City back when they were still open. Love it. Did Pyramid Club. And I went. I mean, I did all those clubs. I love, love, love 80s music. I picked that song as my theme song because, you know, video did kill the radio star, and podcasting and new media is killing traditional media. So I thought it was appropriate and very meta and I'm sure that nobody got it whatsoever. A different listener asked me if it was the Golden Girls theme song and I was like, no, what are you talking about? So, yeah, that's why I picked it. I love 80s music. I love new wave, and I love. And I thought it was very, you know, highbrow thought process of like, oh, this is what this is gonna mean. I'm sure no one got it besides me, but what can I tell you? I. I think too much sometimes. Chris, thank you for listening this podcast and thank you all for listening to this podcast episode. If you like this podcast, please like and subscribe on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast yout get these videos now. I'm so appreciative of my YouTube channel growth. It's been really, really impressive and I'm very excited to continue to see it grow. And wherever you get your podcast, I will talk to you guys on Thursday.

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