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Episode 209: “The Money Confusion: Why Inflation Now?” with John Tamny

The Bill Walton Show

Release Date: 11/30/2022

Episode 218: “The Ugly Truth About the White House, the FBI and the Social Media Companies” with Jenin Younes and Todd Zywicki show art Episode 218: “The Ugly Truth About the White House, the FBI and the Social Media Companies” with Jenin Younes and Todd Zywicki

The Bill Walton Show

Newly released documents show that the White House has played a major role in censoring Americans on social media.    Email exchanges between Rob Flaherty, the White House’s director of digital media, and social-media executives prove the companies put Covid censorship policies in place in response to relentless, coercive pressure from the White House—not voluntarily as the government has claimed.    The emails emerged last month in the discovery phase of Missouri v. Biden, a free-speech case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and four private...

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The Biden Administration - and a majority of Republicans in Congress - persist in their bellicose rhetoric about an “existential war to defend Ukraine” telling the Russians that “we're going to destroy your regime and dissolve the Russian Federation.” Really? After sending more than $100 billion to Ukraine to fight a proxy war against Russia, have they thought through whether the US is capable of doing this?  They are calling for actions that only a global hegemon might possess. But a hegemon that no longer controls its own borders, has crumbling critical infrastructure, hollowed...

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The Bill Walton Show

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Episode 215: “To Shrink Government, Cut Taxes: How the States are Doing It” with Grover Norquist show art Episode 215: “To Shrink Government, Cut Taxes: How the States are Doing It” with Grover Norquist

The Bill Walton Show

For an excellent primer about how the politics of our over-complicated state and local tax systems operate, this conversation with Grover Norquist is absolutely the place to start.  It's comprehensive, easy to understand and often humorous, as only Grover knows how to make it. (When Grover is not doing taxes, he’s doing stand-up comedy. For real, and he’s good at it.)  As founder of Americans for Tax Reform, which opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle, no one in modern times has fought harder than Grover Norquist to shrink the state by keeping the issue of high taxes...

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Episode 214: “Ukraine, The Balloon and the Loss of US Hegemony” with Brandon Weichert. show art Episode 214: “Ukraine, The Balloon and the Loss of US Hegemony” with Brandon Weichert.

The Bill Walton Show

Events are picking up pace rapidly on the world stage and I’ve asked my frequent guest Brandon Weichert to join me to help explain what’s happening. Brandon, geopolitical analyst and publisher of The Weichert Report, is among the best at connecting the dots globally with his bold and unnerving forecasts. Among the many issues brewing that we get into: Russia is amassing up to 400 thousand troops on Ukraine's borders for a winter offensive, objectives unknown. Nuclear escalation looms.  The Chinese sent a satellite balloon hovering ominously across the entire United States as it...

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Episode 213: “It’s High Time for a Ceasefire in Ukraine” with Stephen Bryen and David P. Goldman show art Episode 213: “It’s High Time for a Ceasefire in Ukraine” with Stephen Bryen and David P. Goldman

The Bill Walton Show

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinds on, it’s nearly impossible for the ordinary observer to figure out what's really happening.  One of the problems is that war news is generated primarily by Ukrainian propaganda, which is endlessly parroted in the Western media. Anytime there is contradictory information – for example, mention of Ukraine’s high casualties – Kiev pushes back so hard that Western leaders go silent. But what is clear is that looming on the horizon is the very real possibility of a nuclear war, as more and more European countries are drawn in to the...

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Episode 212: “The Truth about Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change” with Dr Jerome Corsi, PhD show art Episode 212: “The Truth about Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change” with Dr Jerome Corsi, PhD

The Bill Walton Show

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Episode 211: “It’s Happening According to Plan” with Kevin Freeman show art Episode 211: “It’s Happening According to Plan” with Kevin Freeman

The Bill Walton Show

If someone wanted to weaken, then destroy a sovereign and free United States, what would they do? Well they might start with surrendering its energy independence. Make war on reliable fossil fuels oil and gas, coal and nuclear power.  Induce it to rely on wind and solar energy sources that are certain to lead to rolling blackouts and the ultimate failure of America’s electrical grid. And while they’re at it, persuade America to rely on China for most all of its wind and solar energy production technologies. Inflate its currency. Have the Federal Reserve print trillions of dollars of...

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Episode 210: “Office Buildings: Will We Ever Go Back?” with John Scheurer show art Episode 210: “Office Buildings: Will We Ever Go Back?” with John Scheurer

The Bill Walton Show

"Commuting to office work is obsolete. It is now infinitely easier, cheaper, and faster to do what the 19th century could not do, move information, and with it office work to where the people are, the tools to do so are already here. The telephone two-way video, electronic mail, the fax machine, the personal computer, and so on."  Peter Drucker (1989) In 2020, over 30 years later, futurist and management guru Peter Drucker’s prediction came true with a bang. With the mandated COVID lockdowns, suddenly everybody had to learn to work from home. Office occupancy plummeted from 90% to 10%...

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Episode 209: “The Money Confusion: Why Inflation Now?” with John Tamny show art Episode 209: “The Money Confusion: Why Inflation Now?” with John Tamny

The Bill Walton Show

In 1974, with annual inflation raging over 12%, President Gerald Ford introduced WIN (“whip inflation now”) buttons telling Americans: “To help increase food and lower prices, grow more and waste less. To help save scarce fuel in the energy crisis, drive less, heat less.” In other words, the responsibility to fix inflation fell to ordinary Americans. It didn’t work - because they didn’t cause it in the first place - and it would be another eight years before Fed Chairman Paul Volcker tamed the inflation beast. With draconian measures, like draining bank reserves, the Fed funds rate...

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In 1974, with annual inflation raging over 12%, President Gerald Ford introduced WIN (“whip inflation now”) buttons telling Americans: “To help increase food and lower prices, grow more and waste less. To help save scarce fuel in the energy crisis, drive less, heat less.” In other words, the responsibility to fix inflation fell to ordinary Americans. It didn’t work - because they didn’t cause it in the first place - and it would be another eight years before Fed Chairman Paul Volcker tamed the inflation beast. With draconian measures, like draining bank reserves, the Fed funds rate rose to 19.1% and mortgage rates reached over 18%. Volcker’s “remedy” engineered not one severe recession but two of them, back to back.  Today, a “WIN” button might stand for “Why Inflation Now?” The many explanations include: the explosion of Federal spending and the money supply, Vladimir Putin and the Ukraine war, the economic disruptions caused by Covid policy lockdown, the war on fossil fuels and (my favorite) claims from MSNBC commentators that Republicans have invented the term inflation for political purposes. In this episode my frequent guest John Tamny and I debate whether today’s out-of-control inflation has been caused by a massive increase in federal spending and paid for by the Federal Reserve’s printing money.   Or By the destruction of critical elements of our real productive economy caused by governments’ coercive lockdowns and other measures taken in 2020 and 2021 to stop a covid virus, which in the end, came anyway. Notice that both explanations lay the blame at the doorstep of government policymakers. Both explanations probably play a part, although John, reliable contrarian that he is, believes only the second is the real reason. John Tamny, Vice President of FreedomWorks, editor of RealClearMarkets and a senior fellow at the Market Institute is the author of the recently published The Money Confusion: How Illiteracy About Currencies and Inflation Sets the Stage for a Crypto Revolution Vastly oversimplified, there are essentially two types of inflation. “Non-monetary” inflation where price increases are driven by rising demand for products and services that occurs naturally in markets. The other type is “monetary” inflation, resulting from central bank money printing or other events that cause currencies to lose value. The Money Explanation: At $30 trillion, our Federal debt now exceeds the size of the entire US economy with much of this massive obligation being financed by the Federal Reserve buying Treasury bonds that it pays for with money it creates out of thin air. This has unleashed an ocean of dollars into the economy. From 2020 to mid 2021, the money supply exploded by more than 35 percent, exceeding an astonishing $ 20 trillion. The result: inflation with the average American losing $8,500 in purchasing power in the last year. The Shutdown of the Economy Explanation: Higher prices in the aftermath of crushing lockdowns weren’t caused by government spending or “money supply” but instead were the logical consequence of impairing the interconnectedness of the market that makes ever-falling prices a possibility in the first place. “To be clear” John explains, “higher prices did reveal themselves in 2021 and 2022 but there’s a big difference between rising prices born of currency devaluation versus the imposition of command-and-control. The latter is not inflation.” Listen to our brief back and forth and you decide.