David Pakman (68:10)
Okay, so that's the third time, $100,000 a year. So Caroline Levitt had to come out and say, no, no, no, no, it's a one time fee of $100,000. Now, the initial assumption was they're confused about their own plan. They don't understand their own plan. Some of them believe it's $100,000 a year. Some believe it's $100,000 one time fee. They just don't know it's the Trump administration. So confusion is often enough of an explanation. But that may not be the explanation here. It may be that they wanted it to be $100,000 a year. But they then, after announcing it, got feedback that that's completely bonkers, insane, that would never possibly work. And so they said, okay, okay, okay, we'll back off and make it a $100,000 one time fee. We don't know because this is an administration that's constantly in shambles. Now, let's talk about the policy a little bit. The H1B visa is a US work visa. And what it allows American companies to do is if there is a specialized, high skilled job, often in tech, engineering or medicine, and they want to bring someone in from another country specifically for that job, it's called an H1B visa. That's, that's the process that exists now, even as a one time fee. $100,000 would make the United States by far the most expensive country in the world to apply for this high skilled foreign labor. Now I understand the idea here. The idea is convince companies to hire American by making it more expensive to hire from other countries. The problem is because in part due to our education system, which Republicans have damaged, there are arguably not enough of the high skilled people that these companies want and need to hire from the United States. In other words, if Republicans really wanted to fix this problem and make it so that American companies look inward rather than to other countries for a lot of these roles, why are you worsening our education systems? And by the way, the people that are hired for these roles domestically disproportionately are coming up in these dangerous liberal blue state education systems and liberal universities. So to the extent that this is a problem, it's a problem of their own making. Now Trump says we're going to make corporations pay, but in practice, this is just anti immigration through economics. If you can't ban H1B visas, you make them really expensive. And even as a one time fee, if you do this small and mid size, first of all, small and mid sized businesses, forget about it, the ones that rely on international talent, they can't afford this. So that's it. You're hurting small and medium businesses. You will push skilled workers who might come to the United States, work productively, innovate, have kids here who then work here, pay into the system, they're going to go to other countries. So you're also hurting the United States in that way. And I should also mention that all of the people concerned about the birth rate, it's widely accepted that legal immigration to the United States needs to go up. If you believe in the paradigm of in order to grow economically, we need more people here and it's hard to convince people to have more kids. So one way to increase your population, increase your tax base, etc. Is to bring in legal immigrants, especially highly skilled, highly qualified ones, to do relatively high end jobs. You should be in favor of this. Like what Elon Musk has been talking about is we got to get more people here, qualified, smart people. And so this is nuts in every sense of the word. If you really want to deal with this issue, you can't fix it in one presidential term. You've got to deal with education. Trump doesn't want to do that behind closed doors. Some of the top CEOs of the United States are admitting something they will never say on tv. They will never say it in a shareholder letter. They will never say it in front of Donald Trump, which is that Trump's economic policies are destroying the economy. These are not progressives. These are not democratic strategies. These are strategists. These are CEOs. Many of them are Republicans. These are executives who benefit from Trump's tax cuts, who love deregulation. They don't want to be called anti business. But they are admitting what they see, which is tariffs raise prices, chaotic trade wars that freeze investment are bad for business, and politically bullying the Federal Reserve, as Donald Trump has tried to do, is not a good idea. Now, the tariffs CEOs told a Yale Leadership Forum that two thirds of their companies are being hammered by Donald Trump's trade policies. They estimate that 80% of the costs land squarely on the American firm and the consumer. You hear these rumors, oh, the companies will eat some of the tariffs or other countries will eat. It is not happening. It is. 80% of it is floating down to consumers. Consumers are not going to pay $50 for a hammer. They're not going to pay triple for clothes just to make Trump feel like he did a big boy. Second is uncertainty. This is another word that kept coming up. Trump changes the rules on a whim. The tariffs are on. The tariffs are off. The supply chain shifts overnight. CEOs say we're holding back investments, we're shelving projects, we're freezing hiring. And it's not because they don't want to grow. It's because they don't want to look like fools. When Trump hopefully wakes up and realizes this was a bad idea. I'm going to do a 180 on that. I'm changing the next thing. They don't want to be left holding the bag. And that's not a position of strength. That's paralysis. Third is the Federal Reserve. Trump has spent months just hammering on Jerome Powell. Slash interest rates. Do it, do it, do it. Now, the Fed has finally done the 25 basis point cut, but this is, this is all an attack on the independence of the fed. That business CEOs see and they go, that's not good. Historically, that's not a good thing. That's. There's a lot at stake there. If the world stops believing in the independence of the Fed, it could be bad for the dollar. And then you've got the part that fewer people are talking about, which is this obsession Trump has with trying to Control private markets. The America first president acting like a central planner, the likes of which you would expect, you know, in Beijing or in Moscow or in other places. So Trump is also, I'm not praising or criticizing. I'm just saying CEOs are worried because Trump's moving away from what we know of as free market capitalism, is moving towards state run capital capitalism. So why don't the CEOs go public and call Trump out? I think they know what happens when you cross Donald Trump. They've seen what happens when a company or a CEO becomes a target. You get the boycotts, the social media tirades, and it's not good. Threats to your contracts all of a sudden. Start now. The irony is that in public, Trump is still getting the dear leader Praise from CEOs, you know, Zuckerberg and Bezos and Sam Altman. They show up. It's so incredible what you're doing, sir. We're so glad that we finally got competent leadership and, you know, whatever. And privately they're going, this is very much not good. This is bad for our customers, this is bad for our employees, this is bad for our business. And when they see the layoff starting and they realize the dollar is not going as far for our workers, they're going to be in a very difficult situation. So this is not even left versus right. This is really about results. And one of the things about CEOs, many CEOs are political. There's no question. Sometimes they're publicly political. Most of them vote and have private politics that they may or may not espouse publicly. But at the end of the day, there's a lot of downsides to shareholder value being the number one priority. But one of the things about it is that it can transcend politics. And for a lot of these CEOs, they like Trump's tax cuts for the rich. They may like what Trump is doing on vaccines or whatever. It goes beyond that. And it's, this guy is wrecking the business environment for us. And this is going to be a building problem for Donald Trump, a very, very serious building problem. Now on the bonus show today, we will talk about the return of Jimmy Kimmel to his show. But is anybody going to air the show? That's the question. Trump is also putting pressure on Pam Bondi to charge his political foes. This could be a real legal problem. And finally, the annual hunger report has, has been canceled by the Trump administration. You don't want pregnancy, don't test, you don't want autism, don't evaluate people for autism. You don't want to acknowledge that there's hunger in the country, in part due to your policies. Cancel the report about hunger. All of those stories and more on today's bonus show. Sign up@join pacman.com I'll see you then.
