Transcript
David Pakman (0:07)
I have to apologize up front. I'm starting with something very negative today. I've been getting dozens of questions from some of you. David, why haven't you been breathlessly covering the lead up to the potential government shutdown? The meeting that was supposed to happen at the White House with Jefferies and Schumer and then it didn't, and then it did. And we might close down the government or we might not. Let me explain to you, especially for folks who are kind of new here, I don't typically cover the day to day political theater of each government shutdown. Who walked out of which meeting and who's holding the bill this time and which party is spinning it better. It is noise in the sense that I believe treating every shutdown like a sports rivalry misses the bigger picture. And it is the bigger picture, which is where the average person gets crushed. The truth is that this entire shutdown ritual is an atrocity, and I refuse to cover it like some normal part of governing, even though it happens again and again and again for no reason. This is a contrived crisis. It's unique to how our system was set up, and it was later twisted into a weapon. Now, for most of American history, shutdowns didn't exist. If Congress was late passing a budget, the government just kept running. Agencies didn't grind to a halt, workers didn't get furloughed. The country didn't get pushed back to the brink every single year. And the political posturing just wasn't a part of it. Now, that changed in the 1980s. What happened was that Ronald Reagan's Justice Department reinterpreted the Anti Deficiency Act. This is a law from the late 1800s that was never designed for this purpose. And what they decided was that if Congress hadn't explicitly passed new spending, the government literally has no authority to operate unless you sign off. We've got spending, we've got money for the money for the government to operate. The government shuts down. And that launched the shutdown era. Once this door was opened, politicians who don't give a damn about prioritizing what's best for you realize they could use this shutdown thing as leverage. And instead of being embarrassed by missing the deadline, which they should be, if you are elected and you're paid a much higher than average salary and you've got this cushy job and you've got all these days off and vacation, you should be embarrassed that you can't even get a budget passed. But if you miss the deadline, you can now use the threat of a shutdown as a bargaining chip. It's effectively a hostage situation. And like any hostage situation, it's the innocent bystanders who suffer the most. Every time this happens, the legacy in corporate media starts obsessing over who's at fault. Now, I'll be the first to tell you who's at fault does matter. It's mostly Republicans who are at fault when governments shut down. But the story becomes our Democrats refusing to give in are Republicans demanding unfair ransom. But this misses the larger point, which is that no matter who's to blame in a given year, and it's usually Republicans. I'm not hiding that it's usually Republicans. But no matter who's to blame in a given year, they this entire shutdown mechanism is a disaster for ordinary Americans. Federal workers go weeks without pay. Veterans waiting on benefits are left hanging. Government contractors often don't get back pay, they're just out money. Small businesses that rely on those government contracts can go under. Families waiting on loans or Social Security checks are told to wait. And travelers face delays as TSA agents and air traffic controllers work without paying. And through all of it, the politicians who created this stupid mess keep cashing their own checks. And the kicker is that when the shutdown ends, nothing gets solved. Agencies are backlogged, projects are stalled. Confidence in the government sinks even lower. The shutdown never solves a problem. It creates problems and it delays working on actual problems. And every time the government shuts down, the country is weaker. This is why I refuse to participate in the normal coverage. And every year, every other year when this comes up, Pat and I talk about it on the bonus show. We're getting emails. Why haven't I been following the latest meeting? The meeting's on. The meeting's off. How would we be in any way more broadly informed or better positioned if I had been covering that up until now? This is not a story about who wins or loses the standoff. The way legacy and corporate media make it out to be the story is that the shutdowns themselves are an atrocity. They are this built in form of sabotage that just punishes everyday Americans. While politicians treat it as a game. They love getting attention. Whoever is in the out party loves getting invited to the White House to sit with the President to negotiate. And the legacy and corporate media love hosting the who's to blame thing. I saw it on cnn, I saw it on msnbc, saw it on Fox News. It is all just a disaster. Other democracies have problems, but they mostly argue about policy. They debate what should be in the budget. They don't hold their citizens hostage every couple of years. Sometimes it's every year to get attention and to score political points. This is an American dysfunction. And so part of me not covering it is part of what they want is the attention. Part of what they want is the attention. On my phone. If I showed you my, my text messages and signal chats and email, you would see that the communication is just pouring in. Here's the, you know, these newsletters I'm on here is this elected officials five Top Bullets about the impending shutdown fight and then this. And we've done this every year, every other year for how long that I've been doing the show. We must demand an end to this manufactured crisis. Now, I don't know exactly how to do it, but we are reliving the same farce over and over again. Nobody signed up for this crap. My little piece of resistance is that I am not going to pay lip service to the entire thing by going breathlessly over the machinations and the pros and cons of this and that. Today we are going to interview Senator Chris Murphy, who I think has actually been striking the right note on this. But I'm not going to go to him about the negotiations. I'm going to go right in on why do we even have this and why is it that we seem to have to deal with this when other countries don't. So we'll hear from Chris Murphy a little bit later. If you've been wondering, though, this is why I haven't been doing the same type of coverage on the shutdown that many other shows have been doing. All right. We are now in the nightmare scenario on grocery prices for Donald Trump. Grocery prices are at record highs. David, didn't you tell us last month that they were at record highs? Yes, and they have gone even higher over the last 30 days. When people struggle to afford beef tofu, if that's your preference, instead of beef, coffee, fruit, vegetables, as some elected officials call them, they do not want excuses. They want results. Trump promised results. Trump promised on day one, groceries are going to go down. All costs are going to go down, but groceries specifically are going to go down. And In August of 2025 alone, we get the numbers like on a delay. Prices jumped even more. It was the steepest monthly gain in nearly three years compared to a year ago. Food is about 3% more expensive. Since 2019, prices are up more than 32%. And as you can see here, if you look at different elements, cheese Alcohol, grocery, dairy, produce, meat, it's all up. And some is up precipitously. Okay? Ground beef at a record 632A pound. Coffee's up 20% year over year. Steaks are up 17%. Beef and veal overall, 14%. Apples. My beloved Granny Smith's actually went apple picking the other day. I found a new green apple, the Rhode Island Greening, and then also a crimson crisp. These are top notch apples. Anyway, it was 25 bucks for a bag of apples. Apples are up 10%. Bananas are up 7%. Eggs, which spiked earlier because of avian flu, have dropped from their peak, but are still significantly higher than last year. Every one of Trump's promises has not come to fruition. Now, why is this happening? The tariffs are part of it. That's totally self inflicted by Donald Trump. Rising labor and fuel costs are part of it. Supply chain disruption, weather has been a factor, corporate profiteering, but the tariffs are a really big deal. The 50% tariff on Brazilian coffee is not making America great again. Okay? It's making my cappuccino more expensive. Now, for Trump, this is not just about economics because it's about politics at its core. High grocery bills hit households every single week. Families leave the store either paying more or with less. And no matter how Trump tries to spin this thing, voters, I hope, are going to blame the guy in charge. Trump said that he would fix it, but he is now panicking as prices keep going up. Now, remember some of the promises Trump made about this.