BUCK: Clay, it doesn’t seem like things are… It seems like the Democrats, with each passing month right now, they’re piling all these problems together. Mark Penn — he’s a Democrat pollster and strategist — was saying (summarized), “You’ve got nuclear war fears. You’ve got inflation fears. You got the worst border situation a long time. You got crime fears way up.”

I think that you start to believe, “Well, there must be some light at the end of the tunnel for the Democrats,” and unfortunately — and this would be bad for America too — could get worse in terms of the economy. Here’s CNBC saying we might be heading toward a recession.

BUCK: “Things are gonna get harder.”

CLAY: Stock market as we speak, Buck, down over 600 points. So this Biden… One thing that you could point to — if you wanted to — with Joe Biden so far in his tenure is that the stock market is up a small amount now during his tenure so far. That could well be negative — yet another negative — for the Biden administration that probably the stock market is one of the few things they can point to that hasn’t tanked relative to larger economic issues, and it feels like that may well change by the time we get to November.

BUCK: Doesn’t it all seem like we’re finally seeing some of the bills come due here? Doesn’t it seem like of course we’re heading into roughly financial waters when the consensus of the medical community… You notice how Fauci says (impression), “Why is the judge weighing in on medicine?” She’s actually weighing in on the law but that’s neither here nor there.

Did anyone ever sit around and say that Fauci at the time and Birks later on and Walensky — some of these big voices for the covid lockdown — don’t know a damn thing about the economy? They don’t know what the second order effects of lockdowns and shutdowns and trillions of dollars of additional spending and paying people to stay home and the supply chain issues and shutting down industries are.

I’m wondering when we’re gonna see more on this, but an economic the downturn in America means people deal with additional stress and you gotta worry about the mortgage payment. It’s very real. But the global economic the downturn from lockdowns which we still haven’t had a full accounting of how we even got into that process, in some countries it’s people go hungry, right?

In some countries when you have a recession or you have real economic dislocation, people suffer, people die — and lockdowns globally were a disaster. But, Clay, I feel like right now we’re starting to see what we were doing for a long time and what blue states in particular were often — let’s be honest — big engines of economic activity, big population states. What they did was crazy. It was crazy.

CLAY: Well, they didn’t consider any sort of multifaceted analysis. It was very childlike in the way that they contemplated it. Covid was all that mattered, and so they shut down, and then recovery from covid was all that mattered; so we spent money like drunken sailors. And, yes, I think you’re right. The bill is coming due now. And, unfortunately, we’re all going to have to pay for it. And I just saw…

I was trying to catch up on what’s going on on Capitol Hill as the House and the Senate are back in session. And Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema still, Buck, seem to hold the cards for anything that the Biden administration might try to do. Now, Joe Manchin to his credit has been right about inflation, and you and I are not economic stalwarts. We’re not geniuses.

We don’t have PhDs in economics like a lot of the so-called experts do, but I do know that our overall of interest rates have to get higher than inflation in order to somehow cure what ails our economy right now. We’ve got 8.5% inflation, and you can still borrow money at a 3% rate. Well, that’s not gonna work.

So we have to somehow bring down inflation while simultaneously raising rates so that we end up out of this crazy posture that we’re in right now where money is still cheap but it also is skyrocketing in terms of cost which is broken, which is why I think we’re likely going to end up back in a recession.

And if that occurs, how do we get back out of it? Do you trust the Biden administration in the next 2-1/2 years to come up with sound economic policy to pull us out of an economic tailspin? ‘Cause I really don’t. And the consequences for that are going to be, I think, unfortunately, severe.

BUCK: I don’t think we’re really dealing with rational actors when it comes to the economy and the Biden administration. I don’t think that they see what everyone is feeling and what’s actually affecting people right now and come away with, “You know what? We need to change course.” Where are they changing course? At best, you may think that they are gonna moderate some of their positions.

But to actually change course, which is what would be necessary — less regulation, allow more energy production, less taxation, allow for people to actually run their businesses and grow them — all the things that the left hates, all these things that they say they despise. Unless they’re willing to go back on some of their ideological sacred cows, we’re just gonna keep heading in this direction.

There’s no reason to believe this is going to dramatically improve anytime soon because why would it? And we’re not dealing with people who are gonna say, “You know what? We messed up on this one. We gotta go in the other direction.” This Democrat Party is incapable of self-correction on the economy, on the border, on crime. Yeah, maybe they’ll be a little less crazy, but to turn the ship around and take it in the other direction? Utterly unwilling to do that even when it’s been proven that what they were doing was wrong.

CLAY: Buck, think about how everything they’ve touched has turned to crap, and yet they would have been even worse if they hadn’t been protected by Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and the courts. Because Biden would have passed Build Back Better which would have added trillions more dollars out there. Our inflation rate would be well over 10%, if that had passed because the government would have just continued to print money and throw it out haphazardly into the economy.

If the judge down in Florida doesn’t overrule him on that, if the Supreme Court doesn’t — on masks. If the Supreme Court doesn’t overrule him on the vaccine mandate, if Supreme Court doesn’t shut down the moratorium that he was trying to put in place on rent payments… Think about all of the things that he has done that are wrong. It’s almost impossible to point to something and say, “Hey, you know what? Biden got this right.”

In fact, Buck, I’m genuinely unable right now. Can you even think of…? Can you point to something and say, “Hey, given a decision to make, Joe Biden a hundred percent got X right?” Can you even fill in an X? Like, given the choice to make, if you were in the Biden White House right now, Joe Biden got X right, I’m not sure that I can even come up with a single thing — I’m racking my brain right now.

BUCK: His pick for vice president was really inspired. Let’s be honest. That was phenomenal.

CLAY: (laughing) I don’t even know. I’m genuinely racking my brain right now. “Joe Biden had to make a choice and, X he did correctly.” We’re coming up on two years in office, and I can’t even tell you one — and I’m legitimately thinking about it right now. It’s crazy.