Liberal Vs Conservative On Tax Policy and Economy

 Just as we get role in Destiny, this is Tom Wheelwright. He's the author of TaxiRewelf, sold over 400,000 copies of that book, is probably known for one of the top CPAs and known for being one of those gurus. He's worked directly with Robert Kiyosaki and has a franchise business and you know you've been doing this for only 45 years Tom, just in this world. And obviously Destiny you don't need much of an intro but you're a streamer, political commentator, you're a very good debater and it's an honor that you would take time to be on here. And the purpose of this whole conversation is really to set the stage of like okay, there's a lot of talking points, Trump versus Harris and pros and cons. We can talk about whatever we want tonight but the main focus is going to be from an economic and tax side of the coin. What are the thought process? If that Destiny, if you just want to start us off, you can give a brief intro if you want. I'm assuming most people know who you are but kind of set the stage on the framework if you had to like framework why Kamala Harris when it comes to the economy and when it comes to taxes. Yeah, so I think on a really macro perspective, I appreciate the Democrat view at the moment of the economy more than the Republican view of the economy. I feel like the Democrats have a bit more of a realistic understanding of how money works in an economy and I feel like the Republicans have like a fine and I have a word for a delusional view of how money works. We can get as I guess as wide or as into the weeds as we want on that on a wide view. It seems like Democrats understand that stimulating the demand side of things is incredibly important that people need money, people need jobs and that that's as important as having suppliers that can produce goods and services for the economy. On the Republican side, I feel like we're still stuck in this weird like supply side econ world where we feel like just giving infinite tax cuts and spending infinitely with no concern for the budget while also saying we need to have zero debt seems to be the mo on a finer resolution. So a lot of the tax proposals that Trump has made are just kind of bizarre to me and I don't think they would even save that much money for people. Like when we talk about what was one, he said that you'd be able to like itemize your car loan interest and it's like I think at this point it's like after the increase of the standard deduction from the Trump from the initial term Trump tax cuts is like 90% of Americans take the standard deduction. Even if you itemize like realistically how much interest per year are you paying on a car and now that's like a tax that like it's just like this we're not really we're saving like pennies or dollars like nobody that is qualifying for this deduction even cares about it. So yeah, I just I feel like on a very fine level I feel like the proposals from Trump are very kind of bizarre and weird and nonsensical and then on a macro level I just don't know what the vision for the economy is of the conservative party at the moment. Yeah. And then what would you say to Harris like like what what about her or what she's proposed or what Joe Biden's done for the last three and a half years have you like liked from a standpoint of what they're proposing. It's a little bit hard to compare unfortunately sorry this I'm going to come up as very politically biased but it's hard to compare right now because I feel like there's only one party that really talks much about policy right now so it's hard to like compare you know what could a world look like otherwise if policy debate was more. What we did when it came to the economy as far as like I mean as far as saying good things I think that we did do a good amount of stimulus for the economy I know that people complained about inflation but we were potentially facing you know economic ruin and I know that we. I know that we are outperforming you know the g seven I think the entire OECD when it comes to inflation on our economy so despite how much of a problem people think inflation is we're doing better than every other country. So I think the spending there was good I think that allocating money for things like infrastructure I'm glad that that got passed that's like a political and economic thing as far as trying to take care of like citizens that might have children so things like the child tax credit I'm expanding that I think that those types of distribution income redistribution programs are good. Yeah I feel like in general I'm not a big fan of like the answer to everything is just plug in more money like so I'm a little critical of like the $15,000 first time a home biotax credit obviously that's going to be a big upward pressure on prices I'm not a big fan of just money for everything but I think things like the child tax credit and the expansion of that I think these are worthwhile things I think investment and infrastructure and the American economy I think is good too so yeah. We're definitely going to talk about the $25,000 proposed or tax credit for new home. So all right Tom the same question to you when it comes to and you you can give a little bit of your philosophy I'm assuming destiny you're not familiar with Tom's book tax tree wealth and any of his background so Tom feel free to give a little bit of paint that picture but then also when it comes to economy when it comes to you're working with value creators and business owners and all day long and so just what's your perspective as relates to that. Well first of all the the first thing to realize is the tax law has become since John of Kennedy primarily a series of incentives right and so the tax law acts as incentives for certain activities and I think destiny you hit it right on the head is that the Democrats have decided that the incentives need to fall heavily on the consumption side and the consumer side whereas the Republicans have decided that the incentives need to fall heavily in the market. And that is a fact in fact that's the primary difference between the two tax proposals is if you look at the Democratic side they actually want to take down investment and take the money from investors through higher capital gains taxes through higher corporate tax rates through higher state taxes through eliminating 1031 exchange they want to take those. Dollars and give them to people who would consume those dollars which I don't have an argument like child tax rate is that are there some good parts of the absolutely on the other hand. I believe that Harris's plan will push put a lot of upward pressure on inflation and I think inflation is the worst tax we have it is the most regressive tax we have it hits poor middle class the most and if you take 4 to 8 trillion dollars from the investments and you put it into consumption it's a little like feeding the economy sugar and while yes it will stimulate in the short run what will it do in the long run and in the long run what we saw from the 2020 and 2021 the big stimulus packages the general public stimulus packages as we saw this upward pressure too much money chasing too few goods and so you have to have this combination of you've got to have the money in there but you have to have the goods and the just this week there was a report on the economy you were right you're right we are outperforming other economies in the world but what also is in that report is that only 20% of the GDP came from production 80% came from consumption and the question is how long can you consume and not and not run out of supply not put upward pressure on on the price of goods. So generally speaking the Republicans are very heavily on the investment side the Democrats are very heavy on the consumption side that's not that's not said that there aren't some consumption sides of Trump's proposals not taxing tips not taxing overtime which I don't like either of those proposals personally and here has proposed increased in the low income housing tax credit which I think is a terrific proposal and actually adding a neighborhood development tax credit low income housing tax credit and those are investment type initiatives but Harris's most of Harris's initiatives land in the consumer and the consumption area. So this is pretty much the question I have as it relates to like okay the liberal talking point versus maybe the conservative talking point comes down to all right should we give incentives to the consumer slash worker or to the big the corporations to the people the small business owners and destiny how would you how do you go about framing that question and thought process because obviously that's really like it's like tax rich tax rich and again sometimes I come I look at that is like why are we taxing and trying to go after the people that are creating the jobs in the first place. So I would say that if we look at like George W. Bush's economic policy if we go to like the like kind of neoconservatism and we look at the very positions on like corporatism or immigration we could have that conversation but I don't agree right now that Republicans are trying to defend the supply side of the economy. One of the big concerns I think that people should have from a finance and economics point of view of the country right now is it used to be that you would have conservatives fighting on the supply side and you would have Democrats fighting on the demand side and then hopefully we would settle out somewhere in the middle but now we have just the conservative party from a financial point of view is is wholly separated from reality. So I don't take very seriously the idea that the conservative party is concerned with the supply side when Donald Trump is talking about like a 20% across the point there of which would just be an unmitigated disaster when it comes to supply or when we look at supplies like for instance like supply of labor right labor is one of your most important productive inputs for your economy and Trump is talking about deporting anywhere from 12 to 20 million people. When we talk about things like consumption versus supplying these are these are complicated affairs as well so for instance a lot of people are under the incorrect assumption the intuitive one that having a very strong currency is good for instance right I want the dollar to be strong having a strong currency is very good when it comes to importing because I can buy a lot of stuff having strong currency is really rough when you're exporting because now our stuff is more expensive and the USD has been gaining a lot of strength. We have like a 25 year high or something against the euro so there are a lot of other things other markets that are playing into our consumption versus our production like imports versus our exports I mean like that's kind of an international trade I guess is kind of another leg of this but I guess to come back and center it I just I don't feel like conservatives are very much the party of supply side help right now they're stuck in this weird populist world where it feels like they're attacking everybody when Donald Trump's only policy is like this sledgehammer of mass of tariffs for everything and then irrelevant tax deductions for like overtime and wages and and car interest payments I guess. I have a question for you this needs so so you don't see the 2017 tax act as a supply side that tax proposal with with all of the incentives reducing the corporate tax rate from 3521 which Kamala wants to increase to 28 reducing the tax on entrepreneurs by by 20% so you know I guess I kind of curious because I don't know how this I guess I haven't like done research on this or whatever but what wouldn't a supply if you cut the corporate tax rate wouldn't that lead to a decrease in supply side production should know it always results in increase because you have corporations aren't people right corporations now have more money to reinvest into into supply basically into into into equipment reinvest into innovation that's what I'm saying. So if you're a corporation that's where they have more money if they if they don't have such a high tax rate. Isn't that isn't that not really true though like if I'm an invent let's say that I own a business right and I'm looking for projects with the high NPV plus right I'm like a very net present value plus project to invest in let's say that let's say that we live in a world hypothetically where the corporate tax rate is 99% okay that means that if I have a thousand dollars in profit for my business if I can invest in any project that just doesn't lose me 99% of my money I'm basically like making money right because the profit tax is so much more than that. So I'm not that the profit tax is so high that I'm encouraged to basically invest my money into reinvest into my business no matter what whereas if the corporate tax rate comes down to 1% well that NPV plus project has to be pretty lucrative now because I can have absolutely no corporate taxes I just would pay my personal income tax on whatever gets withdrawn from my company. I feel like I don't know if I feel if I agree unless there's like some plug in there that I'm missing that like a high corporate tax rate because it would only apply to profits not revenues right so why would that necessarily discourage reinvestment if anything I feel like it would encourage reinvestment because you be trying to avoid the tax rate there. Why would you reinvest why would you even undertake a business if there's no if there's no possibility of profits because the government takes everything. Why would you do something why would why would an entrepreneur put so entrepreneurs take all the risk they put all the money they put in all of their sweat blood and tears why would they do that if the government were going to take all the money I mean would you do it I wouldn't do it well not take all the money but I mean 99% is all the money well sure there's nothing left over I'm I'm obviously 99% would be an extreme hyperbolic example but I'm saying like if the corporate tax rate were 20%. I would still be incentivized to make money from a business because it's better than just being employed right but if the if the corporate tax rate is 20% when I'm going to invest in future projects I'm accounting for that corporate tax rate right I'm probably trying to avoid stuff in the profit margin as much as possible and I'm probably trying to reinvest or expense out most of that money so wouldn't like a slightly higher tax rate to some extent encourage reinvestment versus having a 0% tax rate because tax by definition is a drag that's the way I'm going to invest in the market. That's that in the dictionary is it just tax something is to put a drag or a weight on it. Yeah, what are we taxing? Well you're taxing corporate profits so by doing that by doing that you're putting a drag on the amount of money that they have to reinvest. Remember there's what if you and again there's one thing. There's a question. How do you define corporate profits? Okay, so that's actually a very big question. Okay, so for example the Republicans want to bring back full expense in equipment. Okay, that means that if you spend a dollar in equipment you don't have to pay tax on that dollar you spent. But if you if you didn't have that if you had a long term depreciation rate say 10 years then you'd actually spend $100 and you don't get to debt 10. Okay, and you get the debt 10 a year. But what that does is it actually reduces the incentive. Now the Democrats on have Kennedy don't have Kennedy actually is the first one to incentivize investment in equipment. He enacted the 10% investment tax credit for that same reason. Wait, depreciation schedules can be important. I might not want to take a full deduction up front for a particular thing. I might want to depreciate that on a schedule over some number of years. Why would you want to do that? Why would you want your money later instead of today? Because I'm not asked does that work? I mean, I guess it depends on the I guess it depends on the time of the business we're talking about right? If we say for instance if we're talking. What? No, because because here's the thing. So the more money I have, the more money I can invest. Okay, investment and in fact all production is a matter of mass. Okay, how much mass do I have to invest? It's why the rich get richer because they have more mass. Okay, and that is actually the argument against not taxing the rich more frankly. Okay, but if you have more money, you can you can you can invest more. The faster you have the money, the faster you have the money, the more money you have to invest. And ever you you have more money to invest. If you wait for it, if you wait for it, then then then then you don't have the money. So. Okay, let's so let's say theoretically let's say that I have a If I say that I've got like a pass through or flow through entity, right? You understand that? The entity itself is in tax, but it flows through to my taxes, right? So if I'm if I am working with with an LLC and I've got a some kind of pass through entity, let's say that I purchased something and let's say that I purchased an asset for a million dollars, right? My goal in depreciating that on a schedule would be I don't want to take a massive depreciation for this year. And pay no tax and then not carry that forward to the future years because on a progressive tax system, if I can knock dollars out of that top tax bracket every single year, that's more valuable than just doing in in some cases than just doing an upfront full depreciation like like instantaneously, right? I love it when I hear other people talk about tax planning. That's awesome because that's what I do for a living. But in principle, okay, you're right. Are there times when you want you're going to manage your tax deductions? Absolutely. But the general rule is I want my money now because I can invest that money because not only can I invest that money now, I can actually leverage that money with the banks money and or investors money. And I can actually get even higher rate of return. And so what it does is it increases the velocity of my money and I get a higher and higher rate of return. So I understand what you're saying in a, I understand what you're saying in a in kind of a simple sense in that like I want my money now so that I can leverage it. But if we're talking about like corporate business stuff or if we're getting into higher dollar amounts, you don't need money to leverage it. You just need an asset or you need future cash flows, right? So if I can do certain types of tax strategizing where I am optimizing for future cash flows and one of the ways to do that will be to minimize my overall tax footprint over a large period of time rather than just taking a whole huge upfront deduction, right? Why would I ever want to tax deduct stuff that's in like the bottom income bracket? But there's ways for me to gain access to other people's capital and investments that just revolve around like the valuation of my company, future potential cash flows, other assets that I might have that don't need need to just have a bunch of cash right now, right? That's like the lowest level of like investment or leveraging, right? I have cash and like let me leverage it, right? Well, so let's go back to the corporate tax rate. Corporate tax rates are flat tax rate. That's not a graduated rate. There's no graduated rate in the corporate tax rate. And so when you propose increasing that rate or decreasing the amount of deductions, you are putting a drag on the investments that are possible in corporations. Now remember, yes, you're talking about pass-throughs and that's an individual graduated tax rate. And there are points where in fact it's the 20% point typically where if you get below 20%, you probably are good, right? 20% is a good tax rate to be paying. If I pay less than that, then I may be giving up future future tax benefit. Maybe, okay? However, however, in the corporate world, that's not the case. And remember, all small businesses, they have the right to use the corporate rate. They don't have to use the pass-through rate. Everybody can use the corporate rate, not just the big businesses. So my point is that look, if you have a flat rate, then absolutely you want your money now. You absolutely do not want to wait. Okay? If you have a graduated rate, there are rare circumstances. And I can tell you, I've been doing this for 45 years. It's rare that I see somebody who doesn't want to take the deduction now and wants to postpone it. Because you're also assuming that I'm going to put all my money back into investment. When the reality is I'm going to take some of that money out because I need to live on it if I'm an entrepreneur. And that money's going to be taxed. And I'm going to get my 20% tax rate just on the money that I need to take out to live on. I don't want to have to pay taxes. That's what I can't. I don't have a C-Corp for my corporations. That's for sure like a C-Corp. When you say you have to take out money now in order to live off of it, if the money that you would take from a C-Corp wouldn't you W-2 yourself and just pay that out as an expense of the business? Or the corporate tax rate be applied to money that you pay yourself in W-2? So in a C-Corp, you're right. You would take it out probably if you could. You take it out as salary because if you take it out as a dividend, our current tax system doesn't allow a deduction for dividends. Which is by the way a horrible idea. We should be allowing a deduction for dividends. Sure. But you should be living off of your business profits. Ideally, you pay yourself a wage. But an entrepreneur who has a flow through tax is living off their business profits. They're not taking everything out in salary. They are living off their business profits. Sure. But if you're not corporate taxes don't apply anyway. L-O-C is a great way to do that. Let me get back to the individual tax rate. So if you're assuming so we go upwards to a 40% tax rate, right? Well, the 20% tax rate applies to the amount of money that you would take out to live on. It doesn't apply to the money you would leave in. The money you're leaving in is at the higher tax rate. So what I'm suggesting is that's a drag. And I'd rather see the expense. I'll give you a perfect example. In 2017, the Trump tax bill did something that very few people actually even know to this day exists. And it allows small businesses to detect their inventory currently. In other words, they don't have to wait until they sell it. Well, why is that a big deal? Because small businesses that are growing were actually going out of business because of taxes. Because they put their money back in inventory. It's not deductible. They don't have the cash, but they have to pay the tax. So they're reinvesting in inventory to grow their business, but that inventory wasn't deductible. Now it's deductible. Now they can actually have the money to reinvest in the inventory. But if they have to use the money to pay taxes, they don't have the money to reinvest. What can you just help me because I'm just trying to understand if I'm growing inventory for my business, am I paying taxes on the money that I'm spending to increase the size of my inventory? Yes, you are. Unless you're unless you meet this exception to unless you meet this exception that Trump put into account into effect in 2017. Yes, you are. Okay. So so take a big corporation, take Apple, for example, is Apple paying tax on the money they put back in inventory. Absolutely. And so let me say inventory here. We're talking about like purchases from like other manufacturers and stuff. I'm guessing. We're talking about everything that you have in stock. So that couldn't anywhere from parts to to finish goods. Anything that you have in stock, that's inventory. I think here's a question. Destiny, are you familiar with how the QBI tax credit works for pastoral entities? Can you explain to me? What does it stand for? How long? Why don't you explain it? And then the question is, so what as part of the 2017 act in order to basically compensate small businesses who don't have a corporate tax rate, just like you're talking about destiny, they put into place a 20% deduction off the top. Okay. So in other words, a business only pays 80% on its income where an individual pays 100 pays tax on 100% of their income. But a business only only pays tax on 80% of their income. It effectively lowered the top rate from 37% to 29.6%. That's what it did. Okay. For business income. That's the point of that. And so the idea of that is, let's get to a lower rate right off the bat, closer to a corporate rate, but still, it's still basically a 9% difference. Are you destiny? Are you in favor? Because if nothing happens, it's going to sunset and pretty much it's in. If Kamala Harris gets in, it's probably not going to be renewed. If Trump gets in, he's already said that he wants her new everything that he, you know, with the tax and jobs cuts act. So what is your thoughts around that? Because as a almost every small business owner that we serve takes advantage of that. And whether it's true or not, they're out of the belief that they're better off. Like they have more money. It's a big deal for a small business. It's a big deal. And the reason it was put in is so that the little guy, the past through businesses like all of ours, got the same sort of benefit that corporations got. I guess I would have to be more informed in terms of how this QBI works or like what it actually applies to. I guess here's maybe a different question. It's less specific. Are you in favor of lower taxes for past through businesses? Even that make more than 400,000 in that profit? Or like, what do you believe? What tax rates should that be? Because I guess that I would just love to hear your thoughts around taxation when it comes to people in business. Business income. Sure. Good question. On the most macro level, I think that the tax rate for a society should be such that you can ideally afford the majority of your budget every year. So we've got some level of programs that we've been a fund and we fund that through taxation. Whether that taxation comes more from businesses versus individuals. To be 100% honest, I don't think I've ever been sold on the concept of a corporate tax. I don't know if it's something that is more productive than just taxing income. Just period. I'm not entirely sure on that. But I don't know enough, like I don't know what the laffer curve theoretical appointment should be for the corporate tax rate to optimize your cash flows from tax receipts from corporations. I'm just not sure. And then you've got huge corporations that are very investment heavy and growing a ton. They just end up paying no corporate tax anyways because all of their money goes back into reinvestment. So there are no profits to tax. So yeah, I don't know. I don't have like strong opinions one way or the other about corporate taxes. I would have to see like paperwork to really believe that like a lot of these tax breaks are helping small businesses. I just usually I just don't believe it that much. I feel like people just want to take on more money because at the end of the day, like I've never hired or fired or thought about any part of my business because of the tax rates. If anything, higher taxes seem to spur on that investment a little bit more because I know that if I reinvest it, it's just revenue and then I can expense it out instead of paying taxes on it. But there might be some types of businesses like I don't hold inventory, I don't sell products like that. There might be like paperwork that I could see where it's like, oh, I can see how this like tax break would help significantly here. But at the end of the day, it comes down to what programs do you want to fund and then what's the best way to raise money for it? Yeah. And well, what's your opinion because is it a bad thing that people get wealthy in America? Is it a bat? No, I don't think so at all, no. I think America is amazing for that. So can I ask you a question, Destiny? So I have two questions. First of all, are you familiar with the global minimum tax that they proposed and the OECG? Yeah, I think GMD, the idea, I'm familiar conceptually at a very high level with it, but I couldn't get into the weeds about it. I think that you know that is that I'm global tax rate around the world. So there's not like these tax havens, like incentives, like an average. It's actually, it actually would actually operate to make sure that American companies don't get all of those tax benefits and pay a minimum 15% tax rate. Okay, so they would pay tax and it actually go into, I honestly can't even tell you where it goes because it goes to other countries. It doesn't go to the US. Okay, they would pay this minimum tax rate so they would not effectively get all of those tax benefits, including all of the right of their equipment. So I was just curious if you had any thoughts on that. I think I don't like the idea of countries making a lot of money off of tax rates. So I'm not necessarily opposed to like some kind of global minimum tax. If it means that there aren't countries that are just making a ton of money because they happen to have favorable rates, I think it's a little silly to you know have an office in Delaware and to say that this is like where your business is somehow earning money through or the Irish tax stuff. I think that's kind of silly. So I'm not opposed to global corporate or global like minimums or whatever or some way to prevent financial exits from countries for that. But maybe that could be done in other ways too that you penalize people that do business out of the country and try to bring the money back or something. I don't know. Maybe a GMT is a good thing. Well, there are incentivized people to bring money in the country like they did in the 2017 act. They brought two trillion dollars back into the country. Sure. I think there are good ways to incentivize ways to bring things. But you agree right there are bad ways to incentivize money coming back to a country right? For sure. Yeah. For sure. And we're never going to get rid of tax savings. It's not possible to get rid of tax savings. As long as we have high taxes. One thing that's been interesting is since 2017, the global tax rate has come down across the board. And so it's been a bit of a race to the bottom which is not necessarily a bad thing because that helps the entire world's economy, not just the US economy. So that was one thing. But I wanted to go back to Caleb's question, which is Harrison Biden have a significant tax increases on investors. Okay. Start with the capital gains tax, an increase to 33% 28% rate plus a 5% net investment income tax, which is just basically a 33% tax rate. Okay. Which is a 60% tax increase from the capital gains rate, which and then also proposed other tax increases on capital assets like the unrealized capital gains tax, like well, the corporate, the corporate income tax actually is an investment tax that way because it means that your stock portfolio probably loses value if the corporations paying more many taxes as opposed to having more money available for the investment or doing or paying out. That's it. I get your shrug there. And then the only reason I shrug, I agree with you like in the in the in the micro, but obviously in the macro, right? The argument would be that they might be losing a little bit of value at their portfolio because of the taxes that are being directly paid. But then they might be gaining value in their portfolio because more consumers have money to buy products on the company, right? It's like a back and forth, I do. Right? Okay. All right. I get where you're going there. So I am curious about your thoughts on particularly increasing taxes on investment income like capital gains taxes, like taxing gifts as capital gains taxing states for capital gains and the state tax eliminating 1031 exchanges, which are the like kind of changes on real state. So you don't have pay tax when you sell real estate, as long as you buy more real estate. I would like I would love to hear your thoughts on appreciation. Appreciation goes away all together. 100% depreciation. The bonus depreciation does we go back to what we've had for basically 40 years. So I think I think yeah, that question is my most, but I'm most interested in the increase in the rates the capital gains rates. I mean, for example, let me give you an example. So let's say that you're a business owner and you put all your money in your business that this is your retirement. You don't have a foreign K because you're putting your money back in your business. This is your, this is your, this is basically your retirement. And when you retire, you sell that and now you have a 33% tax rate because you're going to recognize all that in one year. You don't get to take it over a number of years. Like if you, if an employee puts their money into a 401k, they're going to pull that out and be taxed on it in those lower margin rates that you talked about earlier. They're going to be taxed on that as they pull it out. Whereas the business owner, because now, okay, so let's say it's a million dollars, which is what Harris's proposed, but you sell your business for three million dollars, that two million dollars is going to be subject to that 33% tax, which is quite a bit higher than if they'd been able to take it over their retirement years like an employee does. So I'm, I am curious as to how you, you know, what you think about those increases in capital gains rates. I guess at the end of the day, like I said, it all comes down to like managing government spending with with government income. And if, if this is the one of the ways that they can make more money by, by taxing capital gains a bit more, then I mean, like I, I mean, like we said earlier, right, but in terms of the laffer curve, right, there's going to be some level of taxation that discourages heavily any future investment. There's going to be some level of taxation that too low discourages future cash flows to the government, right? Like if we had a 5% capital gains tax, you could probably raise it to 6% and people would invest just as much, right? You could probably raise it to 7%, if people would invest a lot. What a 28% would a 5 point gain, a 5 point increase on the capital gains tax discourage investment. I guess the question is 10 point gain, not a 5 point gain. 10 point? Okay. What would be the, I guess like what else would the money go into? I'm not sure. Well, so here, here's so statistically historically, as I've looked at these numbers, 28% is the maximum capital gains rate you can have before your significantly, your significantly discouraging investment. But if you think right now, right now, most people have a 28% capital gains rate because they have a 23.8% federal rate and they have a 4 to 5% state rate. So they're already at that peak. So hit, so the the if you look at, for example, tax foundation runs lots of numbers on this. And what they show is that you get over that level just like you're suggesting you get over that level, you actually actually bring less money into the government. So one of my points is it seems like, and maybe I'm misreading this, but it seems like there is this need for the Democrats to raise taxes on the rich for the sake of looking like they're raising taxes on the rich, whether or not it actually increases the revenue to the government. Yeah, I guess, so the, I guess the question could be if taxes are going up on the capital gains rate, like if they do, if they are bombed 10 5 or 10 points, what is the alternative? Was that money being spent on anyway? Like what would people invest in instead? You mean what would they do with that? Well, they're going to give that money the government. What do you mean? So they will be spending that money. What? It's the same, it's the same concept of giving deductions. A higher capital gains tax is going to discourage investment. But if the money is not being invested, what would they do with the money otherwise? Well, so it's, they're not going to have them. So so what you're saying is, well, here's what's going to happen. You're not going to sell the asset. So what you do is you you take liquidity out of the marketplace because if I'm going to be tax when I sell it, and of course, this is why Harris wants this unrealized capital gains tax, right? This is actually the reason she wants that capital gains tax is because by increasing the capital gains tax rate from an effective 24% to a 33% rate, okay? Which is the proposal. Then what you're doing is you're saying, well, look, I'm maybe I should just hold it hold onto it. And I won't sell it. And I won't have transactions, which takes liquidity out of the marketplace, which actually depresses the marketplace because you don't have buyers and sellers. Sure, so I definitely agree with you there. And I think that's a huge problem. But I don't agree that that's a problem with with increasing a theoretical tax rate. I think that's just a lock-in problem from taxing at the point of sale. And I feel like in an odd way, taxing unrealized gains would probably increase liquidity in markets because there's no longer as much of a lock-in function. If you're being forced to step up the tax basis year after year, because well, now fuck it. Like I've already paid taxes on this investment, even though I haven't sold it. I might as well. If it like right now, if we're looking for investment opportunities, let's say that I have a million dollar sitting in some taxable asset and my tax basis in that is 50 grand, right? Well, when I go to invest in any other opportunity, I have to imagine that I'm about to suck $950,000 of appreciation out. And I'm going to have to pay, I don't care if it's 28%, 38%, whatever, I'm about to lose a quarter of my money. So I'm locked in like crazy. But if I have to pay a step up in basis every year or whatever however you would do that to increase that, then the lock-in effect disappears. But I don't know if like 33 or 35% is significantly more lock-in than 25%. I don't know if I'm fully convinced on that. I think the lock-in is a problem, but I think that has more to do with how we treat the tax basis of investment. When they run the numbers, it actually is. When they run all the models, it is significant. But you do, of course, now open the door to the unrealized capital gains tax, which, Caleb, I know you wanted to talk about. Yeah, this is a point I wanted to get to. So I'm glad Destiny brought it up. Yeah. And I think he just opened it up, like unrealized capital gains. Destiny kind of made a point. So let's talk about this. First of all, it's very, I'm going to say this is one of the worst proposals out there. It is, it's really, you know, I know you hate the tariffs. I hate the unrealized capital gains tax. And I hate it for a number of reasons. One is that you are taking the enormous amount. Remember, when you take money out of the investment class and you put it into the consumption, then what you're doing is that you are reducing the amount that's being invested long term and you're putting it into short-term consumption, which yes, it's like a sugar high. Okay. So that goes on. The worst part of the unrealized capital gains tax, though, is it is completely unmanageable and it's such a disincentive to do anything. It's a, it's a complete disincentive. Hold on. We need to, when we talk about incentives, we have to compare these things to other things, right? Let's say that I live in an environment where, let's say that I live in an environment where I am taxed at 5% if I invest in a particular thing. Okay. That that appreciates at 100% per year. And let's say that all of the other investment opportunities around me appreciate at 2% per year. It doesn't matter if you triple or quadruple my tax. My overall gains, my index is going to be way higher investing in that ultra profitable opportunity rather than investing in less taxed other things. So like when we talk about how the tax will increase and it'll disincentivize one thing, what we should be talking about, you have to, what else is the money going towards? This is what I was saying earlier when I'm saying like, let's say that I have a a million dollars invested and the capital gains tax goes up or let's say I have a million dollars to invest and the capital gains tax goes up. It's not like I'm just not investing my money. It's not like all of a sudden it's a good idea to keep my money in the bank. Yeah, my tax rate might go up on my appreciated asset, but I'm still making money, right? As opposed to just sitting there losing money to inflation or whatever or I guess like hoarding treasury bonds. So there I have, there has to be some other place where the money is going for disincentivizing things because at the end of the day tax rates and profits and all of these things, all of these things are just competing for what is your like what is your good investment opportunity and all of these things are factors in that I think. Yeah, but you're presuming that there's just as much money to invest when in fact when you're taxing it there isn't as much money to invest. And so now what I have to do is I have to spend a higher proportion of my money on consumption than I do in investment and there's not that investment going back into the economy. There's not that investment going back into production. I mean if you look at the top, look at the top four or five incentives in the US tax code right now. There's four or five of them. Okay, the first one's business. You mentioned it several times. If I put my money back into my business, I don't have to pay tax on that money. Okay, the second would be technology which Trump wants to bring back the research development deduction, which is a huge need by the way in our country. The fact that it went away is a really horrible disadvantage us versus the rest of the world that has much better tax incentives for research development. But then go to real estate. Okay, look at how much housing has been built in the last since 2017 in large part because of the additional incentives to invest in real estate through the bonus depreciation. And then you look at energy. What did Biden do in 2022? The big bill was the so-called inflation reduction act, which was the main part of that. Well, that was in energy, renewable energy in incentives. Those are tax incentives, credits and deductions. And then you've got fossil fuel tax incentives. And you have and then you have agricultural incentives which are probably the biggest incentives that there are in the tax law or agricultural tax incentives because here's what the government wants. They want to produce housing. They want to produce food. They want to produce energy. They want to produce jobs. And so that's where those incentives go. Okay, but if you take out, if you take the money out of those incentives, you have less money going in. And again, it's this mass problem. It's like compound interest works really well. The fifth, sixth, seventh time you compound it, but it works terrible. The first time you compound. You keep saying we're taking money out. Can you explain what you're putting it? You're putting it, you're taking money from the investors and you're putting it into consumers. Now you're- Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, because we keep, do the consumers set it on fire? Where does the money go next? So you're assuming it's going right back to the rich people? Yeah, to the, if a poor person gets money from the government via taxation and then they spend money, they're probably spending it in places that are like heavily capitalized by capital owners, right? Well, yes, but there's, but that is, that is, as I'm saying, okay, a sugar calorie is just as valuable as a, as a, as a protein calorie or a vegetable calorie. They have different values. Okay, and this is your argument. I presume is that you can't all, you can't just rely on its plyside, which I agree. You've got to have consumption, but what's that proportion? That's my question. What's the proportion of investment versus consumption? If it's all consumption, here's what happens. The biggest problem is inflation, because what happens is is that remember the people who are investing, they have extra money. Okay, so, and that's the argument for taxing them because they have extra money, so they can afford to do it. They can. Okay, that's a fact. They can afford to do it. The challenge is is that you're taking that money. It's like selling your, your gold supplies. Okay, you're, you're taking that money. And now what you're doing is, is you're consuming it, which means that you're pushing up heavy on the demand side, but you're not increasing the supply side because you're taking money out of the supply side. So at the same time, you're taking money out of the supply side, you're adding to the demand side, which is natural inflationary pressure. Yeah, but I mean like, like, that's a, it's a balance, right? We have to talk about both ends, right? Because we can also like, right, it is a balance. Hold on, wait, we remember, we all remember the, the graph, right? Our quantities produced, quantity, supply, right? Not all of those pressures are necessarily bad, right? Having people that are willing to pay more for certain goods or services can increase on the supply side. The, the willingness to produce a given goods service, right? At a, a quantity demanded more will be produced at a higher price paid. So the idea, I, I feel like it's just when you talk about like, when you remove money from one area and give it into another, you're talking about all the potential negatives, which are true, right? Removing money from investment can be bad. We want to capitalize our businesses, giving an infinite amount of money to create upward pressure on demand could be bad. You're increasing inflation, making things less affordable. But, every single economic transaction has another side to it, right? If you've got some guy who has a billion dollars invested in his, in his company, and his tax basis for this is like a million dollars, one, whatever the tax rate is, we haven't realized any of it from the government, right? And two, who's to say that the money is better off not even being taxed versus you tax the money from him, you pour it into people that are going to consume. When people go to Walmart and they buy goods and services, I mean, where does the money ultimately end back up in, right? And the suppliers that are now going to be expanding stores, hiring more workers, not to mention the social goods from giving people money so they can consume things and increase their standards of living and everything else. And, and yeah, so like I understand what you're saying, obviously, again, I said Laffer curve like 50 times, right? There's going to be an ideal level of taxation that we have to talk about, but we can't just pretend that all of these transactions are just bad on one side. I, I, I, I, I try to agree. My question, my, my question few then is what I'm hearing from you. I mean, come in wrong. But what I'm hearing from you is you think it's imbalanced right now. And that you, that we need to rebalance it by actually increasing the, the demand side and decreasing the supply side. That's what I'm hearing. I mean, I don't know. So I mean, I'm not going to, I can't seriously debate like macroeco, I just going to be difficult for me, right? But I mean, my understanding is as long as the inflation is around 2%, we can stimulate the demand side a bit more. As long as unemployment is below 5.5%, right? I mean, like the Federal Reserve has its two targets and in it, that's kind of how it conducts monetary policy. And as long as our stuff is staying there, then pumping the supply side and the demand side is good. But we look at our government budget next to see, okay, well, what's going on? If we're overspending like crazy, which everybody seems to do Trump included, well, then maybe we need to tax a little bit more, right? Or spend a little less. Yeah, because again, like even something you said, even something you said earlier, you mentioned something about how when tax rates are lower, like the growth is higher. Well, that's a bit of a, that's a sneaky statement. Not, I'm not saying you're intentionally saying something like that. But like, when people said, for instance, that the Trump tax cuts spurred on the economy, that's true, of course, it's deficit spending. You would expect it to. Trump cut a whole bunch of tax receipts from the government, but continued to spend. But it's not fair that Trump gets to take credit for what's essentially deficit spending and say, well, the reason why is because we gave suppliers more money. You did, but you did it by not only allowing them to keep more money, but in a roundabout way, you're stimulating the demand side as well by continuing to spend at an exorbitant rate for the government as well, right? There's always like two sides to all of these transactions that everybody seems to ignore. Trump was just as much a demand side stimulator as any supply side alleviator because he's deficit spent at record levels even before COVID. Well, before COVID, his deficits were not nearly as big as they are right now under Biden. That's true. Coming out of it, but Biden has an excuse, right? Biden has an excuse. What's the excuse is, excuse is, here's the problem. And I want to get just to this. And I really appreciate you bringing this up. His excuse is we have inflation. Okay. So, so because we have inflation, we have higher interest rates. And it's the higher interest rates that are causing that deficit, that deficit to be so high. And the higher interest rates do in fact have a huge impact on the deficit. Okay. But where are the higher deficits come from? They come from the higher spending of the of the 2021, the March 2021 American Rescue Plan and the Trump 2020. Okay. Both of those, neither one of those, my opinion, just in my opinion, were necessary to stimulate the economy. Both of them pushed, pushed demand side up without taking to account that we had this huge supply side disruption caused by COVID. Okay. Well, here's two, just two quick facts on that. So one, you can say that they weren't necessary. I don't know what we're competing against as a legendary hypothetical mystical or mythical version of America. We are outperforming every other country when it comes to inflation. So if we say that we could have done even better, that's fine. But you're talking about going from rank one to rank like, like super one. Like, the reality is is whatever financial stimulus we did, which was higher than every other country in the world except I think Japan. It obviously, it clearly helped us to some extent because we are booing off, like inflation better than every other country. Number one, number two, Donald Trump's pre-COVID deficits were still larger than Biden's current deficits, even with COVID. Trump had no excuse to run deficits at that level prior to COVID. His economy was booming. Everybody involved in the markets and watching the GDP knew this. Why if Trump was going to spend that crazy with no crisis, who's to say he wouldn't spend even more insane now, still after COVID with inflation being high or the year over year, at least, the cumulative being high. So prior to COVID, his deficits were lower than Biden's. His spending is deficit is deficit's were lower. He wasn't he's spending at that point was the highest it had been in in US history for deficits, right? Before COVID, right? It was higher, but Biden is far surpassed him. We're at two trading dollars this year. Do what? We're at two trading dollars for the first time this year in an annual deficit. Sure, but again, it's in a post-COVID environment, right? So there's... Right, but we're we're we're two years post-COVID. We're not we're not six months post-COVID. We're two years post-COVID. And my point is, so here's what I want to get back to if I can, Destiny, I appreciate your thoughts. Is that if you have this, you're putting all this money in and you're going to get inflation, because what I heard was this that some inflation may be fine, maybe fine if you get inflation. The the the Federal Reserve, they have been very clear that their job is not to deal with spending. It's not the demand side. From a spending standpoint. In other words, that's the government's job. Sure. Their job is to their job is two things only. One is interest rates, the interest rates and employment. So sure, all inflation and employment. That's what everybody knows. When you say spending, you're talking about the government spending, right? Yeah, government spending. Yeah, right. So inflation and inflation, they want to bring inflation down, and they want to balance that with employment, right? That is that's their two mandates according to them. Okay, so what happens if you get this upward pressure on inflation that we're talking about now? What happens is that now you get higher interest rates. What happens with higher interest rates? Now, you're going to get some you get severe disruption in the economy. I think we're lucky, frankly, I think we're lucky that we have not had a bigger downturn in the economy than we have. I don't I don't think this was the Fed being smart as much as it was. I think we got a little lucky. Again, isn't this a this a two sided thing? No, like like higher interest rates can also cool off the economy and cool off inflation as well. No. Well, that's that is what they did. Okay, it does. That's what they did. That's why we've had we've had we've had higher interest rates than we've had in 40 years. Yeah. Okay. So we've got these high interest rates. What they do is yes, they cool down, but remember, they also cool down investment. So they've had a huge impact on the supply of housing, huge impact that the housing is not being built. Why is that? Well, because interest rates are so high and why are the interest rates so high? It's not that 5% is a bad interest rate. I mean, I grew up when I bought my first house, it was 16%. That was bad. Okay. So historically, 5% an average rate. What's bad is when you go from 2% to 7% in a year and a half. That's what's bad because you you put such a jolt to the economy that you have an enormous risk. I think we got lucky. I think we got lucky, but you put that enormous risk to the economy. And so inflation pressure and the other thing is yes, inflation has come down, but prices haven't come down from where they work two years ago. They're going up as fast. The average person is really doing the inflation. Yeah, there's two inflation will be cumulative. It's never going to be. Right. Right. Not going to deflate. Sure. And then also just to revisit. Okay. So according to the for the committee for responsible federal budget for the debt that these two presidents accumulated, Donald Trump's non-COVID spending was $4.8 trillion. The CARES Act and then COVID relief that he provided was 3.6 trillion. Biden's the American Rescue Plan was 2.1 trillion. His non-COVID debt was 2.2 trillion. Trump spent like crazy. No, that 2.2 trillion. The deficit this year is 2 trillion. One year. Okay. This is something released by the Trump Biden on the national debt. This came out June 24th. US Budget Watch 2024, I guess. But I can't speak to it because if you look at what the deficit is through September for the fiscal year, any September is right around $2 trillion. So I'm not sure how they come up with 2.2 over four years non-COVID. Which we'll appreciate this style. What is your guys thoughts on the national debt? Because it seems like both parties aren't talking about it or they're kind of talking about it. But no one's really taking it seriously. Well, this is one point where I think that's an error. I are going to agree. Well, I'm just I honestly think it I am scared for my grandchildren because of the national debt. So there's only two ways. What's the solution? Because it's either it's raise more money. It's probably a combination. Honestly, it's a combination of raising more money and spending less. It's both. You have to do both. You can't do just one. You can't just reduce spending. You can't just increase taxes. It won't work. You've got to do some combination of them. I and I'm not you'll you'll be shocked at this cable. I'm not opposed to let's say a surtax on somebody making over five million dollars. They're not they're not going to miss it. It's not I don't think that fiber so you want to explain what that is. How are we Clinton? So Hillary Clinton proposed a surtax on people making over 10 million dollars. I think it was a four five percent surtax. I have no issue with that. I think that's I actually think that's fine. There's a revenue razor right there. Okay. It's just another tax rate. It's a surtax. Okay. It's not a tax on investment. It's just tax on income. So it doesn't it doesn't single out investment which is the which is which is the important thing and it didn't apply to capital gains. It only applied to ordinary income. So I don't have an issue. There are we do need that I have no question. We need to raise some revenue but we also need to reduce expenses. One of our challenges of course and this is a question I have for you, Destiny is are you concerned because you seem to be concerned about the national debt like I am. Do I have that right? First of all are you concerned about the national debt? I'm not concerned about the conversation about the national debt because I feel like the conversations around it are just really bad. Like the issue is that like if you ask somebody like what is the or I guess I could ask you what do you how much debt should the United States have? I have no idea. Okay. That's a better answer. That's good. Okay. Because a lot of people will say zero which is not true right. You know that's not true and if you look at Japan they're at 200% of GDP. They're not failing. Sure. Yeah. So I don't know what the ideal debt should be. And I don't need to have a manager GDP. I do think we are spending a lot and we've added a lot recently. The thing that's confusing to me that I don't understand about conservatives is if we talk about the debt and they talk about their concerns for the debt like you said you either have to raise more money or spend less money and you know people can sit here and talk about the budget but like a lot of people when they talk about the budget they're only talking about the discretionary spending which is what like 30% of the very small percentage. Yeah we're not even talking about not discretionary. What are you going to have Republicans cutting like social security? Yeah. That's not happening. So I guess the confusing thing is for being so concerned about the debt it feels like Donald Trump has a platform that would apply an unfathomable amount of upward pressure on things related to inflation. So global tariffs these are massively inflationary destructive to consumption and supply chains. You've got a nasty portation of labor here right that's you're going to drive up prices right you're going to drive up the cost of labor to untanable amounts potentially right which is going to be inflationary. He's talking about pressuring the Fed he admitted to trying to pressure Powell right into keeping interest rates low in his own term and he says he wants to keep interest rates low when he comes back. He wants to eliminate all these random income taxes reducing tax receipts. He wants to maintain his prior tax cuts right reducing tax receipts. I don't know where these spending cuts are supposed to come from. He doesn't talk about them ever and he talks about all these income reducing cuts and we have to serve his interest on the debt. So I just don't know how anybody could ever look at Donald Trump a guy who spent like crazy when the economy was good and think that this is the guy that I'm going to choose for fighting the debt and fighting the deficit. Yeah. So let's going back to the deficit. I agree. I mean we don't have a you know I don't know what the magic number is. Frankly I don't think anybody knows what the magic number is. I don't think the smartest economist in the world knows what the magic number is because we've never been here before. This is new territory because it's a worldwide economy. It's not a U.S. economy only. It's a worldwide economy. So you can't say well it's like you know you know the Byzantine area or whatever because that was a that was a country not a global. My question for you does need though is let's go back to something you brought up at the very beginning which was the child tax credits which socially we go okay we're all empathetic for that okay especially the child care credit. I'm actually more empathetic for the child care credit than child tax credit. Tom what's the difference? The difference is is that one's a credit because you have for it's helping you to pay to take a drop a child off at a daycare center while you go to work while you be productive okay whereas the other is a credit for the fact of having a child okay and that's nothing to do with whether you work or not okay so that's the difference. My question is are you concerned destiny and because this is one of my concerns I'm concerned that you get the child tax credits or earned income credits or these other Harris proposals become entitlements because once you give them it's really hard to take them away now you can give them during COVID and take away and say oh that was COVID that's different but you give them now now how do you take those away because what you're doing is if you do take them away you're actually giving that family a decrease in their standard of living are you really going to do that and that just puts more pressure on the deficit so what do you think about do you think they they'll become entitlements? I don't know I mean maybe but regardless of if that's true or not and we could go into the benefits and the pros and cons I guess with those credits all of this would pale in comparison to any hypothetical destruction you would rot on the economy compared to the global tariffs that Donald Trump is suggesting which is just that's like a doomsday scenario. Yeah so let's talk about that for a second if we can let's talk about tariffs because it's weird. Let's talk about tariffs. So so right now today the US has a severe tax disadvantage to the rest of the world because the US has no value out of tax so if we export to France that export gets a value out of tax of 20% tacked on it if we import from France there's no value out of tax tacked on so what that means is is that a the the the French production has an advantage on their exports over a US export now a tariff is one way. Wait can I ask a quick question on that yeah I genuinely don't understand what I thought that a value added tax I thought that you pay tax when you add value at a at a part in the in the production if I were to export a good to France and they would just sell it as is can they VAT that? Oh absolutely yeah you VAT imports you don't VAT exports exports are excluded imports are taxed 100% okay I'll take your word for it for sure yeah 100% so so we have that disadvantage and while I'm not a fan of a tariff being the solution to that what is the difference in your mind from a 20% tariff on a good coming in from France and a 20% VAT on a good going into France what's the difference it's the same number it's 20% I mean I would I would have to read more of the comparison for the tariff stuff because I feel like um the like let me think let me let me think about that for a second yeah let this is this is my whole thoughts on tariffs is we're just increasing the costs we're we're indirectly passing down the cost to consumers it increases the cost of goods absolutely it can wait there's no question in my in in all of the literature there's no question that the consumer pays that tariff most of the time well I think I think it ends up being split kind of 50 50 right ultimately I think it's higher than that I think the consumer pays more of that than you mean than the than the producer yeah because it because you have to you have to eat some of the costs because the consumers are going to eat all right right right presumably there's there is a one different one different be for a tariff that of VAT is going to be applied evenly to everything in your economy like things that are produced domestically as well whereas for a tariff and and that is the argument for for the VAT over a tariff you're you hit it right on and that's why the tax foundation prefers doesn't have a problem with VAT but they do have a problem with tariff but in the when you're looking at comparative purposes and you're going still we're giving a we're making it cheaper to buy a French good a good from France then the French buy the same good perfect example is Boeing versus Airbus Airbus no VAT when they send it to the US Boeing VAT when you send it to France that's a perfect example of a competitive disadvantage that we have and absent us doing a VAT which is wildly unpopular in the US they actually tried that during Trump's first term something similar a border you know something like a a VAT it's not popular frankly the only way it would ever be popular is if you eliminated the income tax entirely by repeating the 16th amendment and then I think people might be okay with that but until then the the challenges you still do have a competitiveness issue when it comes to goods made in America shipped to France versus good made in France shipped to America is so okay let's so let's let's walk let's walk down this path per minute sure if that is the case are we not just gaining an advantage by their government spending money to make a good or service cheaper for US citizen for who an advantage to whom so like let's know where the producer like you are you are you are you are making it cheat you are saying it is an advantage it is an absolute advantage to the American consumer yeah absolutely they are going to be a disadvantage to the American producer well I so the issue that I have with saying it's a disadvantage to the American producer I would agree with that if our production was hurting but if we're deploying our capital in more productive ways then isn't that just a net win for us like in the United States let's say that we make let's say that we make like macro widgets right but we don't make any micro widgets but the micro widgets are what are used to make macro widgets right let's say that we import something from from like a like China standard whatever right and let's say that China is like oh we're going to we're going to we're going to subsidize the fuck out of and you know the AT and whatever to make it so we can export you a ton of micro widgets would your economy wouldn't you go okay well if you guys want to waste your government spending and tax your citizens all that to subsidize your shit then we'll just buy that at reduced cost and we'll just make macro widgets which is more a more productive deployment of capital anyway aren't we just like winning from that exchange isn't that good like the other hand it feels like what we're saying is like hold on we're not going to let you do that you're not allowed to fuck your citizens over and give us an advantage we're going to destroy citizens over two so that nobody wins and now we're going to bring all this base manufacturing back here we don't want to make testless anymore we want to make gear boxes and we want to make wheels and we want to make fenders instead like I don't know why that would be the answer I guess I don't understand that the connection area if you are if you're saying well China's going to give Chinese they're going to make up for it to the Chinese producer okay in order for them those two to offset you might have a point but the US doesn't do that we don't we don't say look Boeing we're going we're we're going to somehow reduce your cost by 20% because you're going to have to increase your price by 20% when you send to France we don't do that so maybe a if we did some kind of a mechanism like that maybe you're right maybe that would work well why why do we why do we even need to do some kind of well you're just talking you were just talking about China you're going they're incentivizing that but but they're penalizing the producers if they're incentivizing us right I'm going to free us up to do more like productive stuff though like like do I like it would I be more proud and this gets into very loaded like normatively loaded territory because people feel a certain type of way about base level manufacturing you know like oh I want to make cars again and then destroy it in the whatever jobs right and I understand this some extent like there are emotional ties to that but like people aren't scrambling to buy China's airplanes or Russia's airplanes they're scrambling to buy F-35s in the United States right Elon Musk didn't go to make SpaceX or Tesla right there's a reason that they're not scrambling to buy Chinese electric cars and it's only because of tariffs do you really think that you don't oh absolutely because we're actually we actually prohibit it we don't just add tariffs we don't let them sell their Chinese cars when was the last time you saw a Chinese electric car in the US I'm just do you do you think that all of the higher level goods that the United States produces you don't think they're that much better than any other part in the world no no absolutely not no do you think do you think do you think you think US cars are better made than Japanese cars do you think I don't know I don't know I don't think as shavvy is a better made car than BMW in Germany I don't think I don't think automobiles would would be the thing I would would buy I'm just I'm just looking at at at at an example that is I think a pretty relevant obvious example because cars are one of those things that we make and other countries make sure but like you have to say about like I will tell you my wife my wife loves the Hondas and she loves the BMWs I've never seen her never seen her even consider buying a Chevy sure but when we think about like what like one of the largest export markets I think we have is related like information technology and services around like like services around that this is something that America does better than the rest of the world right great and I just I don't see right now what you're seeing right now so let's go to that one so that's where we come back to this global minimum tax what you're seeing is their Europe is after those global technologies to tax them heavier because yes we're better I mean we're first we're better we're I mean we own that we literally own that market worldwide now we're not better in things like semiconductors Taiwan owns that market we're trying to get that over here my backyard in Phoenix where we got two big plants going on one you know we're trying to bring those those Taiwanese semiconductors over here which I think is actually I like I like the semiconductor bill because of that but the question and so what other countries are doing is that they're actually I think what's missing in the tariff discussion and I'm not a huge tariff and per se what's missing the tariff discussion is what other countries are doing and and so I think where you have to be able to say well wait a minute you can't do this with impunity we are not going to allow you to ship your cheap goods to the US with impunity and then tax our goods with impunity so that we can't export those goods which is exactly what you're up in particular is trying to do with the technology why wouldn't those if we think that taxes are bad if we think that taxes are bad in the United States if you're telling me that they distance incentivize investment and they disincentivize all these other things why is it that taxes are good when other countries use them against us I don't I don't think taxes are I actually don't think our current tax rates I actually think our current tax rates are pretty appropriate I don't want to see them increased significantly which is I think I do for everything right which I think because there's again the one what we were talking about there's just but the other countries you're asking me what is the explanation for because it feels like it feels like when we talk about taxes in the US it's like taxes are bad we don't want to you know like taxes stuff because it discourages all these horrible things and we don't want the government using the money but then when it comes to other countries and it's like they put huge VATs on our stuff and they put massive you know taxations on all of our imports why is it that like taxes are good for those countries and it helps them but it doesn't help them you said earlier our inflation rate is lower and our production is higher than every other country in the world that's part of the reason you look at Germany Germany has a 70% tax rate 70% isn't that the point that tariff like tariffs might not be a good thing across the world well you'll look there there I think there are strong arguments because I've I spent a lot of time with my friends at the tax foundation and they really hate tariffs okay they really do my challenge is I don't like this idea that a the that we pay taxes to other countries and don't expect them to pay taxes to us yeah how do we pay taxes to other countries that there's a VAT and we said that most of the classes passed on to the consumer are they just making their own citizens pay the taxes? well yeah but their citizens their their citizens are paying those taxes but some of it as you said some of it is passed on to us the producer is going to pay some of the it makes us less competitive and it makes us the the the tougher part is it makes us less competitive because I mean would you disagree that which that's why Trump wants to direct in general across the production the US the reason we import so much is cost production in the US as a general rule is higher than the cost of production in a lot of other countries that's why we buy clothing from Vietnam it's cheaper to buy clothing from Vietnam than it is to to buy clothing from made in the US yeah but it also frees up it also frees up our citizens to one have a higher standard of living in two by other things right like if I want to buy a new instrument for my kid at a local shop that produces you know high quality trumpets if I can go to Walmart and buy cheap clothes I can buy like a custom made US instrument at home if all of a sudden we bring all our manufacturing back and now I have to buy you know fifty dollars for you know a pair of like children's like t-shirts or whatever because they're all made at home I feel like there's an opportunity cost as Mrs. Asaline's like a bright windows fallacy I actually agree with that I think that that you have a that I would not want to bring manufacturing back to the US at any cost which is what the comparison is I do right I like to see every set of the way what I'd like to see is I'd like to see the investment the investment incentive so that for example I mean take take musk and Teslas okay not a lot of people to make a Tesla that it's all robotics right and so it's innovation it's technology that's the so what you want to see is rather than having it cheap because it's cheap labor and they're in sweatshops in Vietnam and Indonesia you want it cheap because the technology's good that's what I would like to see I would like to see that's why it becomes cheap not because of cheap labor sure I but I mean at the end of the day these are all market forces competing with each other right like at some point machines are going to outperform humans it just depends on how low the wages can be but I mean like like there's weird moral values we say like we don't want like there'd be sweatshops in other countries well what if you take away the sweatshops and then they go to like subsistence farming right like sweatshops aren't great in the US of course and a lot of countries share but it might be like a a countries path towards industrialization in middle class wages eventually like there are roads and steps and the country is free to negotiate as well right it's just one thing that I know it's about a lot of like tax and an econ policy is that for some reason other countries are doing things that somehow are so good for them and they're screwing us over but then if we were to do those things if they become bad for us and it makes me wonder like I think that deportation and tariffs these are both great examples of people will say you know in one breath they'll say they'll say Mexico has this unfair advantage because they have so much cheap labor they're killing us in manufacturing we can't allow this to happen and then in the next breath they'll say we need to deport all these guys back to Mexico and it's like well hold on if they're killing us in manufacturing because of all their workers why don't we just let them fucking come up here and then make it in the US like wouldn't that be better like if we really think that that's like killing us why not just like eat all their workers and have them come up here and yeah so yeah so it makes here right would that be bad I mean that's actually a supply side argument yeah so I guess when I look at like the people that support like the Trump tariffs are just they're just so bad and like if you want to subsidize your economy and you want to make things cheap as hell and and you know you want to do that to the detriment of your own economy because I think in a lot of ways subsidies can be good and subsidies can be really bad I think I think they're good subsidies bad subsidies if you want to subsidize the craziest stuff out of your economy and then we get to you know import that I mean we're just like gaining off of your crazy tax planning and again there's pros and cons everything but man a 20% tariff across the board that would just like you agree that would be like devastating to the US economy right like that would be more devastating than any $6,000 child tax credit right well certainly more devastating $6,000 child tax credit baby tax credit um credit um you know what what what's interesting is Biden the one thing that he kept he only kept one thing of Trump's and that was tariffs the only thing he kept I I just find that interesting well I'm not I'm not going to make coming up but he did he kept the difficulty I think when it comes to terraces it's very easy for me to tear somebody I can look at somebody go 20% tariff screw you but obviously they're going to retaliate right okay well fine 20% tariff screw you to put up to levitate of his easy but to bring it down well now I have to negotiate some kind of deal because I can't just remove my tariff on you while you've tariffed me because now well now I'm going to screw it right so I think it's the one of the reasons why the tariff state around is because we're already engaged in kind of an awkward trade war thing going on with China you know geopolitically with Taiwan economically um and trade wise with with chip manufacturing everything um so like the it's easy to to levitate it's hard to take it down so I'm not going to give Biden the same penalty for maintaining a tariff that Donald Trump laid on somebody right and I think that like the chip sack was better for bringing manufacturing here for for semi-conducting manufacturing than even just the tariffs you know from from I totally agree with that um I have another question for you so Harris has proposed um price controls yeah I was literally uh price controls on groceries price controls on rent price price lots of different price controls historically that has not played well in other countries what makes you think or what makes even the democrats think that that's going to work here when it hasn't worked other places um this is my favorite thing about the democrats um I I don't care what Kamala Harris says about price controls because price controls are one of the most devastating ways that you can annihilate an economy so I don't think that'll ever go through I mean that if Kamala said we're going to do price controls there would be 50 million people around here that would go absolutely not this is insane go out there and apologize and say you're not doing that shit if Donald Trump says he's going to do 20% tariffs you have to fall in line or he's going to annihilate your career right I think that's the difference so there are some things um you know we not to revisit it but like like like the concept of unrealized capital gains taxes and wealth taxes for a large number of reasons these are almost inconceivably difficult to levy it's how do you evaluate sort of it's it's very very difficult I'm not even really concerned about it there's I just don't think that an unrealized capital gains taxes ever coming because of how difficult it'll be to levy and how much push back she would get because the the Democratic Party such a wide-temperty look at what happened to Biden when he had a disastrous debate performance the leftist media bullied him he got bullied internally and then people internally bullied him externally they make him leave well I mean we could say the same thing about Trump's proposal to not tax Social Security that that's it's it's frankly because that money actually goes back into the Social Security Fund the income tax on Social Security goes into the Social Security Fund and that would be untenable to to pull that so that example and congress has to pass that so I would say a lot of these Trump has made I think some of Trump's tax proposals are non-logical quite frankly some of Trump's stuff is that he can do a lot of it by executive action which is the story he can he can taxes tariffs yes taxes no taxes probably not for the tariffs yes and the tariffs no tariffs are one of the scariest things that he's talking about though right tariffs tariffs tariffs you think though do you think that an executive action like tariffs is I suspect you do is particularly worse than just unconstitutionally just wiping out student loan debt no I think unconstitutionally wiping out student loan debt would be atrocious which is what Biden attempted several times no I don't think so I just agree he was he was shot armed by the courts sure so well so what you just said defeated the argument that you made right so the constitution is what powers the legislature the courts and the executive Biden his statutory interpretation of the of the education bill that said that in times a president can forgive certain types of debt or whatever he attempted his the executive their interpretation was well I can forgive this debt and he tried it and the Supreme Court said we disagree with that interpretation you can't and then he said oh okay oh I can see what else I can do I don't think that's violating the constitution the executive tried something that they thought that they had the statutory construction to do and the court said no you don't have it actually he actually said I know the I know they're going to shut us down because I know this is is not legal I'm going to do it anyway because maybe I'll get away with it I don't know if that's exactly what he said not exactly but but it's basically anyway I'm just you're right you're right you and I agree on one thing and that is that anytime we can have balancing powers is a good thing okay if I was worried about stuff like that not to not be a one-trick-croning but I'd be way more worried about like Donald Trump trying to remain an office after he lost the election because that was the thing they were trying to do unconstitutionally they were advocating for breaking a law the ECA underpants and Eastman himself said that not only can we break this law we won't we there will be no checks and balances because the Supreme Court won't touch this because they'll invoke the political questions doctrine and they won't get involved so we can just do this that's arguably above the constant or above the court and eliminating checks and balances so arguably so so you have it on both sides which doesn't make either one right well hold on that's not a bloody side it's absolutely what they tried to do on the Trump side unequivocally and they said as much I don't believe Biden said I'm gonna go above the constitution and I'm gonna defy the Supreme Court and do all these things Trump side did say that and he destiny I don't want to put words in your mouth but you're essentially saying price controls bad idea even unrealized capital gains probably not gonna happen but you're saying that probably won't happen whereas you're you're saying that Trump to get selected he can almost be a mob boss do tariffs without any checks and balances and he's way more likely to do that yeah I don't want to like that I don't want to come up with like overly political but like Trump I'm gonna solve there Trump operates like like an authoritarian in so far is he wants to centralize a lot of power in the executive now not really the executive the presidency so Donald Trump will outfit himself with a lot of people that are willing to go really far with the things that he wants to do in terms of executive control and he's got a court that's very favorable to him right now so I'm worried about the types of things that Trump could do because if you go against Trump Trump will try to destroy your career that's what he does right he attacks everybody that opposes him in the party whereas in the Democratic party you kind of have to play ball more with everybody in the party because it's a wider tent and you got a wider constituency and the parties just a little bit more live where like if today Kamala Harris said screw the Democrat party I'm walking away you know the Pelosi and everybody else we're like okay I guess we're gonna throw somebody else up in here if Donald Trump said screw the Republican Party I'm running as an independent the Republican party loses 75% of their constituents it's like it's it's so that's a lot scarier to me I feel like the potential for executive power overreach and abuse is a lot higher with with Trump that's my feeling go ahead Kettle well I mean this is this is comes down to the big big debate around Trump but like I guess you didn't you said you didn't want to get super political but I feel like it's bleeding into what why is the reason you hate Trump so much and can you boil that thesis down because we're talking about I feel like a lot we're talking and agree a lot on the same policies but like you obviously hate Donald Trump a lot of the people that are agree with you around the tax side would our voting Republican so I've just wondered what the disconnect is and then obviously January 6 is like a huge huge talking point but then if you take a step back like he was he was president for four four years and I don't understand why people think like it's just gonna be game over if he becomes president again and that's and and again I know that this is not the first time you've heard that question but that's just the it's like it seems like the the liberals they're only talking point it seems like Kamala's only talking point is is Trump Trump Trump Trump horrible horrible horrible horrible and it seems very it's just like that's like they're only they're only talking point and and it and it almost seems exhausting so I guess that's that's just a just feedback on like that and it might be working I mean I actually do believe that Trump lost the election because of Trump not because of Biden and so I like it's one of those things where it's like I can see both sides he's an exhausting person but but but I also I'm not as afraid as that he's gonna like take over and like stay in off like those are the kind of things that maybe it's like they didn't move the needle for me but it clearly moves in need over it's an extent point because I I get why they can move the needle somebody they certainly move the needle for my my wife who who can't stand Donald Trump okay but for me I'm more afraid of the Democrats because the Democrats want to eliminate the filibuster they want to they want to put term limits on Supreme Court basically reverse the the the the majority in the Supreme Court on day one by doing by doing their term limits that retroactive effect those types of things actually eliminate checks and balances I like the filibuster because I like the idea that you've got that check and balance you have to negotiate if you have a 50 plus one vote on everything you know and you're you're going down a slippery slope when you go okay you did it once for the budget now you're gonna then you did it for federal judges now you're gonna do it for abortion then you're gonna do it for you know for voting laws where does where does that stop pretty much it goes away completely meaning that you only have that 50 plus one a question on the if you if you don't like the elimination of the filibuster what do you think was the most egregious elimination of the filibuster in US history it was when McConnell denied Barack Obama checks and balances right the presidential right granted in the constitution to appoint and have his nomination card yeah so yeah so yeah he's not done that I agree she's not done that well so but it's not just that he shouldn't done it is that is the most egregious if if the Republicans right now could pass something with favor from Donald Trump but in order to do so they'd have to eliminate the filibuster do you really think that the filibuster would survive yes I do I absolutely do there there are there are Republicans and the earth that absolutely would not vote so so remember the only reason we still have the filibuster is because it cares since cinema and jill mansion without those two we wouldn't have the filibuster because the democrats tried to get rid of it this term so I don't think that I don't think that the filibuster pressure from Donald Trump I think there's ample evidence to show that the Republican party will go along with with basically anything Donald Trump says and like right now there's no guarantee there's no guarantee that a Democrat president will ever get another Supreme Court justice if there is a majority in the Senate that are Republicans like you have no reason to think that if you're a Democrat and the Republicans have the Senate and a Supreme Court Justice dies there's no reason why you should think you're ever getting another Supreme Court justice as long as the Republicans are are 50 plus one in the Senate and I think if if we're worried about things like checks and balances and the filibuster in the Supreme Court that's a big issue so let's bring so who who got rid of the filibuster on federal judges the democrats did that the Republicans didn't do it the Democrats voted that not the Republicans the Republicans just took it to the logical next step and said well we're going to do it for the Supreme Court justice too because they're federal judges so what I agree which should we have a 60 vote requirement for federal judges yeah I think that'd be great sure I mean like we can talk about the original the original attack on the filibuster but again it was because it was because Republicans didn't want to nominate or they didn't want to nominate any of the judges that were being put forth right like the the issue is when Republicans try to bog down government and destroy it and try to make it McConnell literally said my goal is to make Obama a one-term president people like Lindsey Graham literally said well listen if they're in there last year you know we're not we're not going to give them another Supreme Court pick that's fair and then he reversed it on Trump right they have no values they have no principles the the issue that I have with Donald Trump is I feel like he is fundamentally an un-American person the way that he runs the president has seen the executive and the way the undermines every part of the U.S. when you look at his his leadership as president it was a warrant in every single way right what what is Trump trying to take credit for now it's funny enough you know we talked earlier about how disastrous price controls are what is one of the things that Donald Trump wants to take credit for is the price control in insulin you know we talk about how bad government spending is what is Donald Trump saying he wants to take credit for now the ACA in pre-existing conditions the thing that he tried to kill day one when he came into office so I think that Donald Trump is just he conducts himself in a way where he wants to centralize power in the executive he wants to deny the outcome of the last like he doesn't even agree that the last election results for real he doesn't even agree in the 2016 election results he says that three million illegal is voted with no evidence a guy like this who who fights against all the institutions you know tries to defy the peaceful transfer of power you know constantly spreads lies and misinformation attacks his opponents is an ineffective leader he can't get any major legislation passed he can't get his own party to support him on stuff sometimes and then commits crimes and goes before his supreme court that he's gotten three appointments on and says I want criminal immunity because I'm not president I can't commit crimes that's just a person that I don't want anywhere near the presidency that's insane to me I think that that's a deeply un-American figure that I just don't want wielding the executive power I certainly understand that point of view going back to major legislation though 2017 act tax act was the biggest tax piece of tax legislation the most major change in tax law since 1986 it was just deficit spending though right no it wasn't just deficit spending it wasn't it was what what was there some yes no no it all what what what what what it wasn't no it wasn't so you raised a trillion dollars by eliminating the state and local tax deduction by the way the state local tax deduction has no business being in the law there is no reason to give a state and local tax deduction there is no there's no theoretical premise for giving a state and local tax deduction that raised a trillion dollars so you can't say that it was all giveaways because it wasn't there was a lot of revenue raised two trillion dollars you look this up two trillion dollars came back to the US because of the 2017 act that's two trillion dollars we didn't have okay sure but like no so yes was that was there a deficit as a result of the 2017 law yes however the 2017 changes in the law some of them were massively positive including by the way the only part of that law that is permanent which is the corporate tax rate sure but there's two things one the ten year impact um and then beyond of like those trim tax cuts i'm pretty sure far outweighs um anyone who gained from salt and two doesn't tell him Trump say he wants to bring back state and local tax deductions that's a dumb idea but he says he wants to bring it back even the part here we can't even i get that's not gonna happen it's not gonna happen why not well the same reason why i get an unrealized capital gains tax because that's not gonna happen there's too many people that don't want the difference is is that when the democrats say comola don't do this comola says okay fuck i want to do this but when when somebody says Donald Trump don't do this Donald Trump is on the next day saying you know camp that guy's a schmuck i should have never supported him we got some good guys in congress to do good work for us but not these guys not these never trump or these evil horrible republicans so this is where because i have friends in congress i have friends that are republican congress republicans in congress i know them personally they they do have they they do have a backbone i disagree though the republicans there's nobody with a backbone to be fair i would shout you can i would talk to any of these people there is there are there are no invertebrates that are more spineless than the republicans in the house i'm sorry no offense if anyone want to argue with it that's we i would love to argue with any of them but absolutely not there is no backbone in the republican party in the law making body unless you're ready to retire you're never standing up to Donald Trump because it's the end of your career he'll he'll primary you literally he does it you primary what's your stuff on time i'm gonna consider it but carthy a rhino now McCarthy a rhino they couldn't even hold on to their speaker seat a historic event in the united states with the majority party loses their speaker seat and they're begging the democrats can you guys help us maintain our our majority seat here like it's that's unbelievable that's ungovernable that's crazy destiny what what's your thoughts on Thomas massie he seems like he is a backbone and doesn't just get in line on i don't know enough about him unless i yeah you can give me information about about i don't know about him but what's he done to resist any other options he doesn't support he doesn't support is like israel when it comes to the the wars and he's very big on cutting spending and he's he he he doesn't even get in line with a lot of the republican agendas and so that that's just a an example of someone who's doesn't necessarily make friends on either side but i would agree with you that one of the challenges i have with the democrats is that we had two democrats one and it's sort of an independent my my own kishan cinema um our zone is kishan cinema we had two democrats who would stand up i don't know do we have democrats who will stand up to and i and i'm not saying Harris i say whoever is running things because i don't for a second believe Harris is in charge there um but it do we have do we have democrats who will stand up to the democratic establishment i mean the president is literally not running for re-election as an incumbent that's a great right so so right he was there there was a coup there that's that's right so he was kicked out that that's right that's the democratic establishment that did that was your let's say let's say that i grant you that you just asked me do the democrats ever stand up to their leadership and then you said there was a coup i mean that what was what i said i'm pretty sure you're suggesting Biden was their leader and i don't believe that well then it wasn't a coup then right it was just a second per second so what i'm asking is what i'm asking is because this is important when it comes to things like the filibuster and things like these these big changes that the democrats want to make um our we had to we had to we had cinema and mansion are there others do you think that will stand up to the democratic establishment to to give us some checks and balances i think there are in the republicans that that i realize i'm you know you probably don't agree with me let me ask you as my question is do you do who would you point to in the in the democratic party that is going to stand up to the democratic establishment i mean literally anybody one of the most popular democrats you know made a name for themselves fighting other establishment democrats we watched aoc and polocy you know wage war against each other for years um we saw Biden you know being forced to step down we've seen liberal media attacking you know they're not on the democratic establishment what but but what are your thoughts on that gates and the crazy craziness that when i mean that's never happened what he's a completely i know but i'm saying is like they're had it's not like all the republicans get in line and you know what i'm saying the republicans are not exactly i think we are agree the republicans are a mess i think the republicans are a mess i don't know what my next question is this go along with Donald Trump in trying to coup the the government on January 6th right he would find people to sponsor the j6 objections to the certification of the vote right that's this is insane there are people that did they didn't vote for his impeachment for partisan reasons and the senate they didn't convict for it just i don't know that's just wild to me i guess and you believe that the uh the supreme court needs to be either packed or termed out and what's your thoughts on the filibuster i have never i people don't like me for this i think the filibuster is okay i think that having 60 vote majorities on passing major legislation i think that's fine i think it's good to have some bipartisanship um now you need another party to govern with and right now we don't have one in the united states unfortunately um but when it comes to the supreme court i've never heard a good argument against term limits the supreme court as we have it right now which is like the wacky democracy casino where every four years you get a president who might nominate anywhere from zero to four supreme court justices is absolutely fucking wild i have never my life heard a good argument against terming it so that like every president is guaranteed one pick or something like that i think that would be a much better system a more democratic system a more checks and balances system a more fair system um and the only reason i can see somebody opposing it is because they like the composition of the court right now basically i i i i i would be curious what you think about term limits for congress because my my thought is to to congress who says we want term limits on supreme court you first congress is voted in every two years or every six years right then no yeah but they but they have to win reelection i understand huh supreme court justice can get away away away away away i i understand that however because they don't have term limits are you kidding why would you ever vote out uh uh uh somebody with seniority in your party that's ridiculous you you would lose the seniority unless everybody has to be voted out for seniority i don't understand what you're saying people get voted out of parties and if you had no no no no no why would you ever vote i mean you you're you're complaining about Mitch McConnell i i get you're complained okay now why would anybody vote out Mitch McConnell who has that much power because of his seniority if instead you're going to give it to Chuck Schumer who has who has all of that because he gets to stay in longer why would you why would you why would you put in a a rookie senator when you've got an established power broker that's exactly where aOC came from a OC primary one of the most powerful like the person who was supposed to be the runner-up leader to Pelosi a OC primary that person as like a 15 year old and she kicked him out of congress right i would tell you that's the exception that proves the rule i would say it's just an exception that's not that that's not the norm i'm just asking what you think why not have term limits for congressman and for congress i'm just saying it's it's okay to have like powerful people in congress congress is a it's a what interesting it's it well congress is a big body like three or four or five congress people right what is it four hundred thirty eight house members right and then hundred in the senate right hundred and seven yeah the uh the uh the if you've got a few people in congress or a few people in the senate that's one thing but if you've got three supreme court justices oh four thirty five sorry if you've got if you've got a three supreme court justices we're willing to go in a certain way and they have you can't vote them out there's no ethics guidelines there's no checks and balance there's not i guess you can pass a constitutional amendment but that's a much scarier situation i think and it's something that's worth because what are the checks and balances on the supreme court i i'm gonna i think this is a really interesting conversation i i do want to take this back to the the tax and economy and let's talk about what kamaulah and trump seem to agree on which is no tax on tips i personally think that's the terrible idea well i i would love to hear why you think that and then destiny what is your thoughts why why why are why are you why are you what's the benefit to the economy what's the benefit to the u.s. do not tax tips what's the benefit i take a different approach i worked in McDonald's and i hate tip workers screw you pay taxes on your tips because you guys both agree the thing is here's the thing if we've decided that an income tax is part of the way that we tax income it's part of the way that we gain you know money for the federal government and the state governments then you tax income you don't take like imagine somebody puts it i agree like we think that lumberjacks are the most important people so we're not going to tax anybody that cuts down trees like why stupid like why would you not take the income next question the twenty five thousand dollar first time home buyers that kamaul is talking about um you you even referenced that this early on destiny that you're not necessarily in favor of that i i see problems with it i see it kind of could screw up demand supply and all what is what are your guys's takes on the twenty five thousand dollar and i also want to just point out that both trump and kamaul are just trying to buy votes they're trying to say all kinds of things and will any of this stuff actually happen i don't know but the twenty five thousand dollar has a quick thing there's nothing wrong with buying votes your politician that's what you're supposed to do on my vote right if it's going to be through tax cuts or through stimulus far i don't care as long as i get money i don't care um that the personally um as a quick thing some people view certain things that people should have and they think that it's unethical to have a free market do these things because they're essential goods or services right you the you know everybody should be guaranteed a house or food or whatever i don't think that i don't think that matters what matters is what can market solve for and what can market's not solve for we don't have to give people free food and clothes because markets solve for food and clothing pretty well houses are solved for really well by the free market when they have the ability to create supply the issue that you're running into right now it is a physics problem which is you're you're trying to take every single person in the country and have them live in seven cities and you're assuming that if we just give these people enough money it'll be possible you can it's not going to happen you have to free up the ability for people to make houses and how that happens is a whole other thing but giving money to people is just going to make everything more expensive when it comes to housing i think tom do you agree with that well i i do think that um so one thing i would definitely agree with in uh uh connois um approach is i do like the idea of improving the low income housing tax credit that has proven over the years to work it's i know it's confusing it's confusing credit it's a very big credit and what it does is it's almost as much as 70% of the of the cost to build is is a credit over the lifetime of the building okay so basically the entrepreneur who's building the the housing actually basically pays 30% of the government pays 70% over time okay it's not a one-time credit it's it's it's complicated but it has proven to work and the the private private public partnerships are very interesting and that's what a low income housing tax credit is that's what frankly the solar energy credits are that's what the intangible drilling cost deduction for oil and gas is that's what um that's what business deductions are these are all basically a partnership between the government and the entrepreneur and so um i i like that kind of a partnership if we're going to have an income tax now i'm not a huge fan of an income tax because that's a tax on production i i would i i think they're better taxes but we have an income tax we're stuck with it it's not going to change tom if you could change it the income and note income tax do you see a world where that would make sense well i i mean you mean i can wave a magic wand and a limit like if you were yeah i i put in a value out of tax instead what is your thoughts on that destiny i that's a whole it's like asking me if like humans could be based on silicon instead of uh it is just right right actually it's it's just not it's not politically possible okay i don't know if we said it i'll just say Churchill said it because everybody gives every quote to him uh it's like uh what americans consider imagine like the end of the world and the end of capitalism or something i can't even i like i've heard people argue for um vat i've heard people argue for land value tax uh i don't know i've heard a consumption tax well that's a value out of taxes it consumption tax well yeah i don't like consumption taxes as a much because i'm a big believer in marginal utility um it's a lot easier for me to give up 10 percent of my income than for a poor person give up 10 percent of their income and i don't think that your consumption scales percentage wise with the money that you make so i feel like consumption taxes hurt i like i think progressive income taxes are good or some kind of progressive progressive taxation is good because it hurts poor people more to pay taxes than wealthier people trump just said that you know no taxing over time is that you guys have the same belief as no taxing yeah what you get is manipulation now think about this thing about this came up everyone of your employees wants to be non-exempt because they want over time and they're gonna they're gonna they they're gonna be less efficient there's there's there's nothing good in this you can't not tax over time it's it's it's it's it's just a bad idea it's like not taxing okay so and just now to assume you would agree yeah i okay we have here you're gonna have these we need to have the taxes we need to not have like if like if trump comes out tomorrow and he's like i'm not gonna tax white cars and commas like i'm not gonna tax cars that are the colors of the rainbow i was like what yeah are we gonna tax them or not like figure yeah all right so here's and this is really and we talked a little bit early on but i think this is like this is the real question is one party is literally we will pay less in taxes across the board i i know that maybe some people say that in commas world you'll keep the you could talk about that tom but at the end of the day trump under trump's economy we are gonna pay less in taxes and versus pay more taxes under Kamala Harris's like number one do you agree with that statement that i just made and number two why is one better than the other i think that really comes down there's we we agree on lots of things and like i just fundamentally lean towards i can do better with my money than the government but maybe that's a libertarian conservative talking point and i'm very open to hearing thoughts on this especially from you destiny because i would imagine you would disagree with that that statement do you have any answer for us sir yeah i'm real interested so this is what i would say the what you pay in taxes is is is only half of the question and the other half is how much money did you make like not exaggerating i probably pay about a hundred times like two orders of magnitude in taxes more now than i paid when i was a carpet cleaner i much prefer my life now than when i clean carbass not even close okay i think when i live in california my effective tax rate was climbing north of like 40 percent my life was way better than when my effective tax rate was almost zero when when i was working before i streamed so taxes are one part of the equation and income is another part and that same equation blows up to the entirety of the economy right if there's an economy that has higher levels of taxation that produces an overall better welfare for a citizenry that economy might be better than another economy that taxes people less but is overall smaller right if you tell me you're a top one percent earner in your country i'm like damn that's awesome and you're like yeah i'm from samalia it's like not not knocking samalia but like okay well i mean like could job i guess whereas like if you're in the united states do we pay more taxes yeah i do but i wish the people would just kind of like keep in mind like when you pay taxes like for me to work in the united states okay i'm sitting in front of a camera and i am speaking to a lot of people and i make a lot of money doing it i can only do that because people are willing to be janitors at electric power plants with materials that are you know brought into this country by guys working at harbors who are you know willing to to to drive trucks across the country and do all this miserable labor for one tenth one twenty-th one-fifty-th of what somebody like me gets paid the only way that i can do what i do at the top of this income chain is because of all the other people down the stairs from me so and and the difference is is that like if i break my leg i can do a donation drive on my stream go to the hospital pay cash and be fine if a truck driver's daughter gets sick and he has to stay whole from work he might be facing financial ruin so if you're gonna come to somebody like me and say destiny you got to pay an extra twenty thousand a tax man to keep this shit working i don't even have to think about it i'm like yeah sure obviously i'm in one of the best countries in the world that lets me be the best version of myself and the only reason i can do that is because of all the other people that are working to keep it going so when you pay taxes like that's the system that you're building towards and i wish people to keep that in mind a little bit when it comes to thinking of taxation rather than just the government stealing my money because they hate me and so i'm going to ask a question a different way if it wasn't trump if it was like kamaula versus kamaula but kamaula on one side was saying hey we're gonna raise taxes versus no like would you like this is this is the way that i like it very simply i don't care about i don't attach normative value to taxes if you're a billionaire then fucking a your billionaire that's great if you want to tax somebody a lot or a little okay whatever at the end of the day here's what i care about this is what you want to spend this is your spending and this is how much you need to earn to spend it so when it comes to figuring out what our tax rate should be it's just like if you give somebody you if you guys do financial consulting you know if study comes to you and they say fuck man i'm running out of money every month the first thing that you tell them you don't tell them you need to earn more money or you need to spend less what you tell them is make a budget what are you trying to spend money on figure out what our programs are that we need and then once we figure that out figure out the appropriate level of taxation and the best way to raise the money so when you ask me right now like do i want more or less taxes i don't know i don't i think about like right now it seems like we need more taxes because we've got a lot of spending if there are spending programs that we can get rid of or if they're spending we can decrease they won't have a massive negative outlay on our country or our citizenry then we cut those programs if there's not then we need to tax more because i like living in the United States and i like the things that we offer here and i think there's a reason why people like Elon Musk come to the US to build things and i want to maintain that but yeah that's that's what i would look at i don't have like a normative value i'm like tax are good or bad or or spending is good or bad just like find out what we want to fund and then fund it yeah for some reason i thought you were more progressive when it comes to like higher tax but you the answer the way you answer that is something i respect appreciate and probably would give a very similar answer because i am not in favor of of out of control spending and it's it's a problem no one wants to talk about it and the problem with our financial system is no one's incentivized to talk about it sure yeah so we just be careful when you talk about that out of control spending like people will say things like because earlier we were talking about how much we love the low income credit for like housing and everything right i'm pretty sure this comes through HUD like housing and urban development and you're talking about Trump wants to put people like Elon Musk in charge we're probably going to look to slash those programs first so i mean what do you know what are you going to do yeah so i think it's i think it's a little more complicated than raising taxes or not we by the way historically we have one of the lowest tax rates in the world and we have one the lowest tax rates we've ever had if you look at everything combined so the tax rates really are not exorbitant right now okay could they become exorbitant yes they could and is that a slippery slope yes it is i'm more concerned about what's taxed and how we're taxed because like i said if you put a want to put a 5% surtax on every of you making over $10 million a year i have no issue with that go for it that nobody's nobody's going to care they're not going to care the people may more than 10 million dollars they're not in care they pay an extra 5% no problem i think they'd be just like destiny on the other hand you put a you raised the tax on investment on capital gains by 60 60 percent that's challenging for me because any drag i'd like to see less drag i'm a huge art laver fan as it turns out i actually that destiny i know art laver and i'm a big fan of his work i think you you do you can put a very big drag on investment okay and it can drag down an economy and reducing certain taxes can spur an economy now can you reduce them to nothing no but for example trumps proposal to reduce the menu the income tax the corporate income tax on manufacturers from 21 percent 15 percent i think that's a good i like that proposal i like that one that that's actually reducing very specific tax for manufacturers it is encouraging manufacturers i thought the corporate tax rate being reduced from 35 percent to 21 percent was excellent because what i didn't like was the democrats the day after it was the day after the the democrats took power in 2023 they said we're going to get rid of the we're going to raise the tax rate back up on corporations because what it does is it creates instability when it comes to the rest of the world the rest of the world would like to see some stability which i know is like an oxymoron in the us stability in the us right we just have none okay part of it's our election system part of it is you know just who we have and and what's going on in the world but my point is is i think you do have to look at that there are both candidates have good policies and bad policies okay i'm hopeful that you know there's enough negotiation in it that some of the good policies went out the bad policies don't just like your suggestion destiny we don't have a unrealized capital gains tax we don't have a tax on gifts we don't have it 33 percent tax i actually think that one probably would happen if the democrats swept next week i think we get that 33 percent tax rate on capital gains and i think that would that is i think that's that would hurt i think that would hurt would it be devastating not like Biden's proposal to raise it to 45 percent i didn't propose raising it to 45 percent Harris said no we're going to raise it to 33 percent much more reasonable proposal i still think i i like capital gains rates low i think tax is uninvesting are a bad idea in general because i think that the more capital that people have for investing the better they the better off we are because i like to see money go back into investment not just into consumption destiny any any final thoughts i have one or two more questions but i appreciate both your time any thoughts on on where we've gotten so far tonight i mean i when i think about stability i mean i agree but like i've made this complain of your time i wish that i wish in my lifetime one democrat got to come in without everything being completely destroyed and got to govern and it was um and it was bill Clinton and we had budget surpluses we i think that's the last time we did and then we had George w bush who gave us iraq i'm not going to blame him for 9-11 i won't do that um i'll blame the jews no i'm just kidding um so we had 9-11 and then we had the whole middle east fiasco under bush which was a disaster um then we had the 2007 2008 housing collapse that was a worldwide financial catastrophe and then after that a democrat has to come in Obama to come off the back of that horrendous thing which was destroying the entire world economy and you have you you've got an ungovernable uh republican senate on on top of that right who's for six years again McConnell was a disaster for Obama then after that we get trump for four years okay Obama we turn around the entire economy we do tarp the government makes money on getting the loans back we do all this stuff right Obama turns things around since 2013 onward we're posting all time highs in the markets again the economy is growing trump comes in does even more deficit spending adds more to the debt um and then we get we have the blm riots which i we don't have to blame trump for but if it happened to a democrat president we blame the democrat president and then we have this horrible in my opinion mishandling of covid and it was mishandled so poorly for two reason i mean like two things we only have one trump denied it even existed until there were like tens of thousands of cases here and then two even when trump the only thing i could give him credit for like warp speed most of his audience doesn't even like it because of how much you undermine our institutions while he was there and then after covid now we bring in another democrat president Biden who again what what you know what do they say oh in and not to mention jenny rysix and all that they always say what's going to happen eight years of obama's going to be communism it didn't happen we got the aca that the republicans hated trump comes in he tries to destroy it now he wants to take credit for pre-existing conditions obama passes this in the midst of the the 2017 yesterday crisis right Biden comes in for four years american uh reinvestment plan american recovery plan we've got uh the chip sack we're bringing manufacturing back um they're saying well look they're the the the republican or i'm sorry the the democrats under biden who had to come in after trump's disaster or causing inflation we're beating the rest of the world on inflation and we have to come in after the disaster of covid and trump's denial of it even happening and now trump wants to take the reins again and it's like jesus i wish we could get a democrat to come in and get to govern for four to eight years without having to clean up the disaster of the last republican president just to like clean the car and then hand the keys over to them again and say please like bring this back in one piece again for our next turn in office is just my feelings on it yeah but if you look back the democrats have been in power more than the republicans last 20 years um it's that so it's like it's like you're talking points it's like really i know trump makes a splash but it was obama obama trump biden wait hold on i can't wait i could be wrong i'm sorry i suck my brain is fried uh bush bush bush junior was two terms right and clinton was two terms yeah so it was so we it was eight year i mean it gets a depends on what we started it was eight years of clinton it was eight years of bush and then it was eight years of obama then it was four years of um trump and then it was four years of biden since we've been pretty equal right and i mean the latin if you look at the last six years no there's eight more years of democrats in well i depends on what you want to start right like yeah but if you start a clinton yes that there would be eight more years of democrats but of course before clinton we had four years of of bush senior and we had eight years of Reagan yeah so in total it's it comes out about even Caleb i mean my lifetime it's about even steven tom i got a question that she's from we do we agree at least that like it seems like crazy disasters happen under republicans and then democrats are brought into govern next i don't i don't know about that i mean what we had no wars under trump and we have big wars under biden wait so did it clear we had tons of wars under trump no no i mean this is a good no new war started all the way i don't know why new wars matters okay so under trump we um under trump we had but drone strikes and bombing and Yemen that increased um we assassinated solely a money in iraq um we had Iran shooting rockets into Saudi Arabia um we had the whole border rights going on in israel um we had conflict in syria right we had the whole Kurdish abandonment in Syria that we dealt with um we had a raging war going on in the donbass in southeast ukraine where russia was still fighting people to defy down there they still own kramia um north kramia no no no no no that was obama wait no no the kramia kramia kramia was 2014 i i don't be fort trump i'm aware but kramia was still occupied and russia was still fighting and funding fighters in the southeast of ukraine all through trump's term that was still happening get what destiny saying is trump didn't get out even though the biden actually got out of that gana santa and trump ended one conflict arguably and that was by surrendering to the Taliban what do you think do you think the russia ukraine thing would be going on in the israel like deal would be going on if trump was in office i mean this is one of his talking points so i think it would be yeah of course so you don't you don't believe trump's telling the truth if he gets elected it will it'll be done before he gets in office i mean i mean i mean trump has literally said that he would just tell the ukrainians to give up to russia and what's trump gonna do in in palestine uh like what would he even do yeah i i i'm i'm a tax guy so not not my i have nothing i have a right to be literally i just don't don't know i know someone asked someone asked in the in the chat they said are you less concerned about trump getting in essentially because the senate's most likely going to go gop like that's a check in balance so you could make the argument that even if heirs because is wins the presidency i thought that 2020 and i made mistake okay i didn't think that i don't i didn't know nobody thought the democrats could sweep in 2020 and they did yeah so do i think the democrats can't sweep in twenty-twenty four no i don't think that for a second um if destiny if you had to give kamaul a heros a tips or not maybe tip is a bad word because no attack recommendation like a recommendations is there anything like what do you like about what she's talking about what would you like should she be going on to rogan should she should be making more personal attacks on Donald Trump the republicans have divorced themselves from reality they don't talk policy anymore Donald Trump is incredibly fragile um she should just say he has small hands and and go from there tell her this stormy Daniels you know center picture was dick it was small like on ironically she it should just be brutal personal attacks really uh yes there are publicants and the republicans think of policy it's a it's a joke now like there's we don't talk policy in the US anymore because the republicans have decided that they don't want to talk policy like it especially for you guys doing like finance and econ i don't know how you could stomach listening to Donald trump um talk uh at that bloomberg meeting like my god i've no i didn't know that that like the question would be like your child comes home and they get an f on their math test what's your goal and it's like well i'm gonna increase tariffs on sought-hier radio like wait what i think it was an unbelievable conversation and then people will say like kamaul the stutterers or doesn't speak well and like meanwhile Donald trumpers are saying insane stuff constantly and he does non-responsive everything i don't know it's a crazy debate i think and i think you believe that trump is gonna get in and be the boss man no one would be able to stand up to him i i'm look at i don't necessarily see it that same way and so it's not like i don't love Donald trump's personality period um i don't think you could look to him and say this is an amazing leader this is what you want your kids to be like like i think you can be critical there but then you can also be you can also say like hey the people behind him and the policies behind him and obviously there's we can agree to disagree on those things but like i just want to be real that there are some people that love Donald trump's personality i don't think anyone on this call would get in line and be like wow we we love that but um but i i mean i feel like this conversation has been really great uh uh tom i mean that's right i agree the personality thing but like you just the problem is is that if you like i i don't know if i believe that i think people do like his personality because let's say that you cared like if i would have put myself i grew up as a republican my mom is cuban okay i grew up very republican all right i cried when they sent when they sent Ellie and back to cuba all right um okay if i was a republican and i hated deficits i'm looking at this guy Donald trump this guy came in as a businessman okay he should be able to run a tight ship uh the markets you if you guys are investors right what would when trump here was here what was it like 24 25 percent year over year for the first three it was insane why is he pressuring interest rates for remains so low why is he spending so much money if things like balancing the budget and everything are important like this is just not the guy for for budgets it's not the guy for fiscal responsibility and the fact that he says he wants to bring in somebody now to to to try to like cut government spending like why didn't you do it when you were the leader when the economy was going amazingly right when everybody was happy when people were posting huge marks huge huge returns for the markets i just don't see him coming in now when you've got like all this cumulative inflation everything right the price aren't going down we're not deflating it's never happening so and then you know we say like we don't like price controls but you know they want to keep the thirty five dollar insulin so i i don't like even if i was a fiscal conservative trump would not be the guy to get any of this done i just don't see it ever happening like yeah that's yeah well i i would agree we do not have a fiscal conservative running for president right now period we don't we do not have a fiscal conservative running for president we have two fiscal liberals running for president i think that's absolutely true what i prefer fiscal conservative absolutely 100% that said that said i prefer if you're if you're going to you're going to have a tax system you're going to have an income tax system and you're going to have incentives that is that is part of the fabric of our of our country frankly not just ours every developed country has tax incentives that is no politicians ever going to give up that power which is the power to tax right they're not going to do that that's why we're never going to get a flat tax for example we would never get that because that would give up the power to tax that's why we don't get a value out of tax they you lose all the all the power you have if you're going to have the income tax i still like if you're going to incentivize there does need to be a balance you've got to me the tax incentives taxes should be if they're going to incentivize should incentivize things that are that improve the economy improve the welfare long term not short term and don't put a drag on the economy and um the tax like is fundamentally i mean six to seven thousand pages it's mostly they're mostly incentives okay that's what the tax law really is and so then you'd basically choose your incentives and all presidents use incentives and the question is what kind of incentives are we going to get out of Harris versus what kind of incentives are we going to get out of Trump interestingly enough Harris likes the 2017 tax act if you make less than four hundred thousand dollars she wants to maintain it and and Tom you've been you've shared a couple times tonight on some things that you've liked about Kamala Harris's you know credits and you know new building uh Destiny is there anything that Trump did uh in his time with the economy and tax wise that you would give him his flowers or said that he did a good job on um the problem is is it like even if there are things that I might have liked they just happen incidentally because I don't think that Trump has a uh a a view of the economy you know that's greater than like how a six year old would envision things um I just I don't think Trump I don't think like if you would have hold a gun to Trump's head and you would have asked him to explain the difference between like the budget deficit and the national debt and like a trade deficit he wouldn't be able to explain those three things to be fair that Kamala would be in that same boat like I absolutely disagree Kamala is is a million times more qualified she's already one and several I just don't know if I would use that argument at all of like I think both of them I think to be clear it's not even questionable Kamala is smarter than Donald Trump in almost every conceivable way related to government she's been disd a of San Francisco she was a attorney general for um California for two terms and she was a vice president for four terms and an administration that actually did stuff um Donald Trump was it was in office he was a historic failure when it came to legislation he ran on repeal and replaced the ACA he couldn't get it done he got the tax cuts done he did first step which was okay he was a miserable failure at the border he ruled through executive action he left the country in a horrible state uh wrestling with covid uh there were BLM riots that raged on for a year he couldn't get a handle on any of the civil situations the lockdowns were historically unpopular he couldn't organize any of the states are the government is behind anything he threatened to withhold FEMA aid from California because it would like Trump was just an he was a horrible leader in in every conceivable way so like it's hard to give him credit for everything like the only people that he even likes he gives credit to he's like oh well Victor Orb n said nice things about me I want to put people like Kim Jong-Un um you know Putin is really nice to be like damn like come on man like what what about Trudon? You know what about the people that are right next to us what about yeah I don't know yeah so should uh come all gone on Joe Rogan could she like because a lot of people are saying that she couldn't last and like why is she avoiding like you wish she was out like you stream every day it seems like for like you're you're out there why do you think they're like not putting her out in front of a lot of media then come didn't Donald Trump hold on just two questions one Donald Trump dodged a second debate with Kamala right? We cracked and then two Kamala did an interview on Fox News right? Correct so I it doesn't compute to me that Donald Trump gets the standard of he's a brave guy because he goes on Joe Rogan I'm the Joe Rogan interview with such a glaze that he did that interview when I was in Texas and I couldn't even do I couldn't even watch it online because Texas is band pornography okay from mobile phones I couldn't even watch the interview that's so much of a glaze fest the Joe Rogan Donald Trump interview so the idea that like because she didn't do Joe Rogan that like she's not being you know serious about I don't I don't buy that I just don't buy it okay okay well um there's so many good things what who's gonna win on Tuesday let predictions and then we can wrap this thing up destiny do you do you feel like Kamala's gonna win? I feel like I'm almost gonna win but I it's like 55 45 like it's almost a coin flip I I mean who knows you think you're gonna be coming on to Pennsylvania? It could be like a blowout either way like it could be like a not Reagan tier but it could be like a huge landslide for either side who knows you know Tom Tomini any predictions? I actually would predict that one of the parties is gonna sweep I don't think we're gonna have a mixed Senate and Congress okay destiny thank you I really appreciate you taking time yeah yeah it's yeah I just agree with you so much but I enjoyed getting to talk it's fun to talk to I don't know how much you debate taxes or whatever but you know talking to me and I was like a 1031 exchange or talking to me who knows what like a marginal tax fight it is it's nice to be able to actually go through some of this stuff sometimes because Jesus most tax stuff is is absurdly stupid when talking to me and I appreciate that thank you and ironically destiny if you need a good person to help you with your tax strategy you're you're talking to one of the best in the world so Tom thank you for thank you for being here I know that you don't necessarily do conversations like this all the time but I love it so I you know I lived in France for a couple of years when I was younger yeah people are saying that you are obsessed with France and the comments what I what I love about the French is they love a good argument because that's how you learn and that's why I like a debate like this with destiny because I learned new things today tonight and I want I want to learn I think you raised the consciousness of the world when you have people debating legitimately legitimately debating different views I think it's awesome so thank you Caleb for hosting yeah absolutely hey thank thank you guys both have been amazing night and I'm sure this won't be the last time our past cross so take care guys thanks very much thanks lot bye yeah