 Axios, you think this is a coincidence this morning? I warned you yesterday that the Department of Homeland Security under Biden and Mayorkas, two absolutely corrupt individuals, are now putting out a warning. Oh man, election day could be trouble. Could be some interference with hackers and stuff like that. Unbelievably, I'm putting this show together this morning, remnants of it. I put the core of it together last night. And I sent this over to Jim. Jim, did you not get it this morning?  Yes, he did. Hackers to back Kamala Harris at Vegas fundraiser. Axios, Sam Sabin. They note that this guy, who's a co-founder of DEFCON Voting Village, says he was motivated to host this event after Kamala Harris supported the election security community in 2018. Wait, it gets better. At the time, lobbyists for voting machine vendors were attacking the village for its plans to test voting machines for security flaws.  I, you know, I would never dare compare myself to patriots like Paul Revere, like and others. Right. That would be disgraceful and disgusting. But I feel like I'm kind of like the guy, you know, like when you ever go see a TV show live and noise is a guy who holds up a cue card. I feel like I'm the guy now, like with the cue card up, like they're telling you what's going to happen. Applaud now. Like they're telling you.  What other signal could you possibly need that they are planning some electronic attack on Election Day? There is not a single substantial, substantive, excuse me, reason for you to wait and not bank your vote early. When I say bank your vote, I mean vote early. There's not one. More on this coming up.  Over 20 big-screen TVs, over 80 bourbons, pizza, steaks, sliders, all in a family-friendly restaurant with a superb bourbon bar. Bourbon & Barley's, locally owned and operated, and the perfect place for families to enjoy delicious food and drinks together.  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Folks, these are some of the most important segments we do because they directly impact  Your wallet that Kamala Harris wants to unburden with money. She wants to unburden it by lightening your wallet, removing some of that money, and then placing it into government coffers so they can flush it down the toilet bowl. Here to talk about the current state of the economy is one of the best economic minds out there, a guy I follow on social media, and you should too, E.J. Antoni. E.J., welcome back to the show. Dan, thank you for having me again.  Well, again, I follow you on social media because you're always ahead of the curve on these things. First, let me just ask you a very simple question. I get it. You know, one can predict the future. A thousand different variables could happen. Wars. I get it. But say we're on the current trajectory we're on now, the unemployment numbers, productivity numbers. Do you sense a recession might be close or even before the November election? Because that would change everything.  I really do, Dan. I would not be surprised, actually, if they eventually backdate a recession to beginning this month in August.  And unfortunately, we're never going to know before the election whether one has actually begun or not, because we're not going to get that that official pronouncement handed down to us, if you will. But I think the American people at this point can look around and see their own personal finances, see what's going on around them and get a pretty good sense that the economy is not doing well. Yeah, we're talking to E.J. and Tony E.J.  You know what I don't like is the Democrats trying to distance themselves from policies that have been directly implicated in this economic malaise being caused right now. And I use that word intentionally.  I am not naive. I understand that swampy Republicans for years have played into the debt crisis. And some of them are now playing into the current tax crisis as well with a lot of these manipulations of the tax code. I get it. And I just think the Democrats are far worse. And that's why I'm forced to vote Republican most of the time. I wish I could vote conservative.  But there is absolutely zero doubt that team Biden, Harris, now Tim Walz are all on the side of borderline socialist, if not outright socialist type redistribution. They want a massive increase in the corporate tax rate. They want massive government spending to not only continue to be, but be enhanced. I mean, these are the types of things that are directly causing the economic crisis we're in now through things like crowd out and productivity problems as companies have to forfeit more money over to the government.  Oh, absolutely, Dan. That's all 100 percent right. I think you're spot on. And I would add to that that that Kamala's VP pick even wants to put a surcharge tax on capital gains and dividends. Can you imagine what that's going to do to people's retirement accounts? I mean, it's just absolutely going to wipe them out because those taxes apply not just to real increases in value, but just nominal increases. In other words, as stocks go up because of inflation, which, by the way,  accounts for three quarters of all the stock gains we have seen under the biden harris administration you don't just owe tax on the real increase you even owe tax on the nominal increase from inflation in other words you you add in these additional surcharges on top of that and you end up with a negative real rate of return you would have been better stuffing your money under a mattress  Yeah, this isn't hard math to figure out, even if you're a leftist. If inflation is, say, well, just, you know, pick fingers, 5%, five fingers, whatever. Inflation is 5%, and you make a 5% nominal gain in the stock market, you have not made any real money. So if you're then taxed on this fake gain, you have effectively lost money.  In other words, what you could have bought before your fake 5% gain, you can actually buy less now because you've had to give that fake gain over to the government, which they then really take.  Exactly, Dan. And, you know, this is the exact same thing that we see when this administration talks about how families are making more today than they ever have before. I mean, sure, that's true in a technical sense, but it's not really true in any meaningful sense, because although the typical American family's weekly paycheck has gotten much bigger over the last couple of years, on average, it buys much less. How much less? About four thousand dollars less.  I mean, can you imagine what that does to families right now? You have countless Americans who can't even afford groceries. They're having to use credit cards. You know, Dan, I just saw a statistic. Half of American families right now can't afford back-to-school supplies for their kids. They can't even afford crayons and notebooks. This is insane. They're literally having to put this stuff on a credit card that they can't pay off. Yeah. We're talking to E.J. Antoni, economist at Heritage. You're still at Heritage, right? Sorry, I should have...  I am for now. We'll see. I don't know. Okay, good. But I hope they do it. Well, we love you. And I follow you on social because you're always ahead of this stuff. You just said something. Oh, I wanted to kind of reiterate to my audience as to why I believe politically that  The economic ramifications of the Biden years have been far worse politically than they were in Obama. Obama managed to get reelected despite an economy, EJ, that you and I followed that candidly was probably just as bad. Obama in eight years never reached 3% GDP growth, the first president in modern history not to be able to do it. Productivity was in the tank. It was really a terrible economy.  But Obama managed to get reelected because it was a couple of layers removed. He managed to distance himself from it, excuse me, by blaming greedy corporations and others. The problem Biden has is inflation is a very unique economic crisis because everybody understands it just by...  It's by the cash register. I mean, you can't hide it. You can't just go, oh, my gosh, look, you know, we hiked to corporate tax and those greedy corporations instead of reinvesting the money, blah, blah, blah, and talk people into a ditch. They experience it every day. They may get a raise at work, but they realize, wow, I can't afford my insurance bill anymore. I can't afford my car payment.  Inflation is a unique crisis that Biden created through this milieu of really horrible decision making. And that's why people get it. And I think that's why they're going to have a real problem pulling the lever for him if they're not diehard Democrats in this election.  Well, Dan, and I think it's important to emphasize that this is not simply a Biden problem. This is a Biden-Harris problem. She owns this agenda. Not only was she the biggest cheerleader for all the runaway spending over the last several years as the vice president of this administration, but also as the president of the Senate, she cast doubt.  Two tie-breaking votes for two of the three biggest spending bills we have seen over the last three and a half years. So she bears a tremendous amount of responsibility here. She has to own the inflation crisis because she helped cause it. And one other thing that we really need to point out, that these inflation numbers don't really capture the true cost of living crisis that families are facing today because they ignore regulatory costs.  The Trump administration, I don't think, gets enough credit here for what they did with regulatory reform. They reduced regulatory costs on the average family by $2,000 per year every year through their efforts. Conversely, what has happened under the Biden-Harris administration, we've seen the opposite. We've seen regulatory burdens increase by $5,000 per family per year every year. That's a tremendous additional burden that isn't even counted in these inflation metrics.  I think that's important that we all understand that, folks, what E.J. just said. Government regulations are effectively attacked. I'll just give you a quick example. I have this Secret Service coin on my desk or whatever. It looks like an old badge. Let's say you work for one of these coin makers and Biden puts out a regulation saying if you make a coin with this type of metal, you're going to have to pay for an environmental analysis.  the environmental analysis could cost $10,000, $15,000. Candidly, EJ, I'd rather pay a tax that costs me $2,000 than a regulation that costs me $10,000. So when you talk about things like Trump's deregulation and his destruction of government red tape, which is a matter of record, you can go look at the Federal Register, compared to Biden growing the Federal Register and just dramatically expanding red tape, these aren't  secondary tertiary costs. This is real money coming out of your business's wallet and bank account that is then not going to workers to create cheaper products.  Exactly, Dan. You're spot on here. And again, we got to emphasize that when you hear in the news, oh, inflation is down, everything's fine. Really? Then why do I keep paying more when I fill up my tank or when I put groceries in the backseat? Why is it I'm driving around on bald tires because I can't afford new ones? Why are these costs still going up when they tell me inflation is down? A lot of that has to do with the fact that they're not counting many of these costs, regulatory burdens.  chief among them. Yeah, they're real. EJ, one more Biden-era initiative, which, again, no sane person can question unless you're a hyper-partisan gaslighting lunatic, is the Biden team has not been friendly to a pro-energy agenda. They just haven't. Between LNG export restrictions, refinery restrictions, pipeline permitting issues, you know, even Joe Manchin, who's a Democrat, you know, phony, whatever, but even Manchin tried to push for a permitting restriction relief.  Because if you're not going to have pipelines, you're not going to have gases. What are you going to do? Transport it by rail? It's dangerous. It's laborious. It doesn't work. They've done this. Energy is fed into every price of everything. There's nothing out there made besides maybe you, John J. Rambo style, whittling away at a piece of wood to make a spike out of it. Everything's going to require some form of energy, petrochemicals, everything. Not to mention the plastics that come out of it and everything else.  There has not been a more anti-energy agenda team than Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. And that's another imposed tax on America as their heating bills go up, their gas bills go up. This is a de facto tax, if not a de jure one, right out of the chute that's costing people real money.  Dan, you are spot on again here, 100%. Look, not only does energy affect the price of everything we do and everything we buy, but in America, because we can get natural gas out of the ground so much cheaper than most of the rest of the world, we actually use that and not oil for a lot of our chemical blend stocks. In other words...  We use natural gas to make everything from the polyester fibers in your clothing to the plastic in your cell phone to even components in your car engine and everything in between. And so what happens is when you raise an input cost that is as ubiquitous as natural gas,  You are going to cause costs to go up throughout the economy. And sure enough, that's what we've seen under this administration. These are the people that killed the Keystone XL pipeline literally on day one from the beginning until all the way till today. They have been anti-energy.  E.J., I know I said it was the last question. One more. I got two minutes left. There's a thing in economics you and I both know called the substitution effect. You know, price of chicken goes up, people buy more beef. Price of beef goes up, they buy pork. You can substitute. You may not like it, but there's a way out of it. That's not the case with energy prices. What you just said is accurate. There's no way to avoid energy prices if you're going to restrict energy like the Biden administration with Harris are committed to. There's just no way. It's built into every single thing.  That's right, Dan. And that substitution effect, by the way, that happens not only at the local level, right? It happens not only when the individual consumer is choosing, like you mentioned, what kind of meat do I want to buy? It happens at the international level as well. In other words...  When we're not producing enough energy exports, countries have to turn to sometimes hostile nations like Iran and buy energy from them. And so now, instead of money going to put Americans to work, you're putting money into the coffers of the warlords in Iran, and you're funding terrorism.  Right. And it's just amazing how we're funding this war in Ukraine. Whatever your position is, I'm not even going to talk about that now. That's for another day. But we're funding a war in Ukraine while simultaneously restricting our own natural gas supply to allow others to buy natural gas to Russia. We're like effectively funding both sides of this war, which is an obscenity.  EJ, you're awesome. They need to follow you. EJ Antone, he is on social media, on X and elsewhere. Give him a follow if you want to stay way ahead of the curve on the economics news of the day. EJ, we'll have you back as always. You're our resident economist on the show. We love you. Thanks for coming on today. Appreciate it. No, my pleasure, Dan. Thank you for having me.  You got it. That guy's one of the best, folks. Please give him a follow on social media. EJ and Tony, it's worth your time. Look at all the numbers he has up there on consumer debt. The economy's worse than you think. You know I haven't been dramatic. It's not the worst we've ever seen. I'm never going to engage in hyperbole to spin your wheels. Okay? I'm not going to do that. It's bad enough that we should vote the right way.  I'm just telling you, it's not as bad as some people will tell you, but it's a lot worse than Biden and Harris are telling you and the media. You look at the numbers and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. Real wages, consumer debt. We are in a lot of trouble. More coming up next. 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You know, they call it the dismal science. I get that. I'm never going to spin your wheels on the show. Economics is not, if framed the wrong way, it could be one of the most boring subjects you'll ever take. If framed the right way, it explains everything.  And the thing I love about economics and why we do those segments about twice a month, that interview with E.J. and Tony was fantastic. We're going to put it on the weekend interview show. A couple people already requested it. Explains everything as to why the economy is in the malaise it's in right now. The reason I do that is I promise you, I give you my word as your friend. Once you understand even basic economics, I'm not talking about advanced level Keynesian permaculture.