BUCK: They had the January 6th prime time whatever hearing last night. There’s supposed to be six nights of this, I think, or six sessions of this. Something like that. They will do multiple ones. Clay, we talked yesterday about how much of it — and we’re not diving into that, folks. There’s something more important going on, but I just want to know, how much did you watch? How much did you stomach?
CLAY: Twenty minutes. I basically said, “Hey, I’m going to watch this, as if I am a totally normal person,” not us. By which I mean you’re usually paying attention to a great degree to every single detail going on, and I said, “If the first 20 minutes,” which are more than most people who are casually interested in politics are going to watch. “If the first twenty minutes gives me any new information provides any sort of gripping content, where I would say, ‘Okay. This feels compelling to me; I’ll stay on,’” and twenty minutes in, we made the switch from I think Benny Thomas — or whatever that guy’s name is, Thompson — to Liz Cheney.
And I thought, both of them were pretty boring. And they were reciting essentially facts that already had been written about, some of them months ago in the newspapers. And obviously, you and I say attuned to every little detail there. So, I wasn’t learning anything new. I turned it off. And I went and started reading the book that you suggested, to me. The Endurance book, the Shackleton Antarctica expedition. Which, by the way, read the first 100 pages or so of that. Riveting. And I turned off the television. So that was my evening of activity in the Travis household.
CLAY: Before you came in, you watched the whole thing?
BUCK: Yep. Just being lectured by Liz Cheney, and there was nothing new. The biggest omission from… You know what, actually, let’s get to this. Because here’s what actually happened. While they’re putting on this extravaganza last night — and some of this, we do have to push back on. Right? We can’t just let allow them to set the narrative without fighting back. But while that’s going on, the inflation numbers came in. And the Nostradamus of Nashville over here, was correct in that last night, it’s all, “Oh, let’s talk about the insurrection!”
But do the rest of America — who don’t just leave MSNBC on in the background while they’re drinking their soy milk. To the rest of America, the much bigger issue — by the way, that soy milk is getting a lot more expensive — is inflation. Which I thought, how much worse could it get for Biden, right? At some point, you feel like, “They must have hit something approximating political bottom.” Nope! Gave them too much credit. The inflation numbers announced today, and we are at a 41-year high of 8.6%. Groceries up 12%. Gasoline up 49%. Airline travel, by the way, also up 40%. So many things that really hurt. The one that people, I think, more than anything, Clay, are going to recognize is a 12% jump in the overall price of groceries, 8.6% overall inflation —
CLAY: Yep.
BUCK: — and gas basically $5 a gallon, national average right now, give or take. This is just economically, politically, untenable for this regime.
CLAY: Yeah. And look, putting it in context. You just turned 40 this past year, right? This past year. In your entire life, inflation has never been this high before. I mean, just to kind of put in context, for everybody out there listening right now: December of 1981, I was a year old, or so, year and a half old. Maybe I was two. I guess I was two. I obviously don’t remember it. Now, there’s a lot of people out there, like, “Oh, my goodness.” If you’re in your 70s, you’re listening to us, and you think we’re whippersnappers. Right? But there’s also people in their 20s and 30s listening.
For a large majority of Americans, right, the average American today has not been alive for inflation at this level, which is pretty wild to think about, Buck. And what I said, yesterday — I put out tweets yesterday. You can follow @BuckSexton. @ClayTravis. We’re fighting the battle on his social media fronts, that we fight on radio as well. I said, this feels so tone-deaf to me. Whoever struggled this prime-time hearing, I said, “What’s going to happen is, everybody is going to react.
“Everybody is going to be talking about it. Early morning articles are going to be reacting to January 6,” and then early on this morning, we’re going to get an inflation update, and it’s going to be a 40-year high. And it’s going to completely take over all discussion and drown out any discussion about January 6th. Now, we’ll still talk about January 6th, but I pulled this, Buck, because I wanted to mention it and I think it’s significant. Everybody out there listening right now, you just mentioned, groceries up almost 12%.
`Here’s other ones for day-to-day living out there. Chicken. Chicken, up almost 18%. Chicken! Restaurants, largest ever increase, up 9%. Fuel, we all know this, up 107%, the largest ever. Electricity — a lot of people going to be using a lot of electricity, because it’s getting hot — up 12%. The largest in nearly 20 years. Rent up. Airfare up. Services all up. Massively. Right? So it isn’t just that, “Hey, well, this price is up, you can kind of avoid it.” Whatever you are buying right now, you are paying potentially 40-year highs, and potentially all-time highs.
Like you just mentioned, Buck, at $5 basically a gallon of gas, which has never occurred before. Inflation adjusted, it’s nearly an all-time high, associated with what gas costs. And how many people do you think are waking up this morning going, “Boy, I’m really glad the Democrats decided to have a special prime time hearing about 18 months ago, the riot at the Capitol,” or do you think they’re looking five months into the future and saying, “What are you going to do to help my family with this massive default tax increase?”
And let me just say this, Buck: There are a lot of Republicans, lots of Republican staff, also a lot of Democrats who listen to what’s on this show. We’ve got to draw a line on in the sand and say, “All spending is done. We cannot allow the Biden administration to pass any new tax increase, any new revenue expenditure. We have to hold the ground now, and we got to hold the ground for the next two years of the Biden administration.”
Every Republican — I really mean this — as we roll into the midterms, should be holding up their right hand and swearing to the American public, that they will not increase expenditures, which is going to make inflation worse, and that their number one priority is going to be ensuring Joe Biden doesn’t continue to destroy everybody’s ability to make purchases and live with these continued increases overall.
BUCK: They did the thing they always do in advance of this inflation announcement too, which is the “worse than expected.”
CLAY: Yeah. How are the experts are wrong every time!
BUCK: We keep seeing that somehow, what is expected is always wrong. But what was the predicted, what is expected by, quote, “the economists,” around Biden as well — what was predicted by Donald Trump himself, by the way, people like you and me, saying, “Hey, we’re spending too much money. They can’t do this stay-at-home, print trillions, print trillions more thing. It’s going to have real consequences. You can’t reduce productivity and increase the amount of money in circulation, without there being these negative effects.”
All of this was predicted. It’s all coming true. And the only people that seem surprised by this are the Democrats calling the shots like Joe Biden and maybe the advisers around him and these so-called economists that are making these predictions too. Even Janet Yellen had to admit that “transitory” was a bad word for her to use, and was obviously not correct. So there’s it don’t way that they turn this around. No one thinks they’ll turn this around. But actually — and this is where I hate to be that guy, but I’m going to be that guy.
It’s going to get worse. Because now everyone realizes where we are, what’s hang. The reality of what we’re facing, I think, has become too obvious. So a recession is going to be a word that you start to hear, and, for example, here’s Larry Kudlow over at Fox Business saying the feds should raise interest rates a full point now, and that means recession is going to come along with it too. Play clip three.
BUCK: We’ve been saying recession. I’m not an economist, Clay, neither are you. We know a lot of stuff about a lot of things, but we’ve been saying recession since January, basically, and Kudlow is a very smart guy, as we all know. He understands this all very well. This is what we’re heading toward. And the funny thing — not funny, haha, but it would be odd — is to watch and listen to the Biden administration trying to explain. “Recession is just a natural part of life, folks. You know, this is the responsible thing for us to be handling right now. The Biden recession is actually evidence of how smart the people in charge really are.”
CLAY: So for people out there who are like, “Hey, what is the technical definition of a recession?” It’s two straight quarters of declining GDP growth. We already have posted minus 1.9% growth in the first quarter. And it feels to come, Buck, that we are already squarely into the second quarter now, and those numbers are likely to be down again. That is April, May, and June. When these numbers exactly will come out, we don’t know. But, Buck, it feels to me, that we’re already in a recession, right? And the challenge that we’re going to have is, let’s use housing prices, for example, as a rough approximation right now.
When you decide that you’re going to drastically increase the overall interest rates, you’re taking a lot of air out of a lot. And if you see right now, what’s going on in the housing market. We basically pop the bubble. Nobody is going out and getting mortgages. The amount of transitions going on in terms of the housing market, I think, are going to drastically decline in terms of the numbers of people that are buying. A lot of people — we’ll talk about this in a sec — are maybe not going to move. Because they have a two or 3% interest rate. Fifteen or 30-year. And they say, “Man, I don’t want to move, because now I will have to 5.5% or 6% on that interest.” It’s a big issue, and everything is falling apart. Let’s be honest.
BUCK: This matters to people.
CLAY: Yes
BUCK: What Mark Meadows texted Trump 18 months ago —
CLAY: Eighteen months ago.
BUCK: — about, “Hey, sir…” That just doesn’t matter to people, despite Democrats trying so desperately to make it so.
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