Key Takeaways

In this episode of TFTC we discuss the discrepancy between government-reported inflation, like the CPI, and real costs, which Butowsky argues are much higher, as highlighted by his Chapwood Index. He explains that in the 1980s, the government altered CPI calculations to downplay inflation, cutting reported rates from 133% to 3% to alleviate the financial strain of social programs. This manipulation, he claims, widens the economic gap, impacting especially retirees and lower-income groups, and contributing to social issues like crime. Similarly, metrics like the “GDP deflator” skew growth figures, masking economic vulnerabilities. The discussion also covers the Federal Reserve’s inflationary tactics, noting that cycles of metric manipulation, debt growth, and economic stimulation only deepen systemic fragility without significant intervention.

Best Quotes

1. "The government could not handle giving out 133% increases in their programs like Social Security and Medicare, so they started to manipulate it. The CPI went from 133% down to 3% in a year."
2. "If you went back and used the old rules of how they calculated it, you would find that inflation was growing around eight or nine percent a year."
3. "People rely on the government's CPI number to keep pace with their real cost of living, but when it’s inaccurate, they fall behind."
4. "In California, it won't surprise you that their cost of living increase is far greater than Taos, New Mexico, and New York is going to be a lot greater than Denver."
5. "I wish I could do a 60-minute segment on this because what I would focus on is that this is one of the reasons why we have so much crime in the inner cities."
6. "When you look at the GDP numbers, you have to look at how GDP is calculated, and there's something called the GDP deflator... If they were to assign the real inflation number, then GDP would be negative."
7. "Anybody who thinks that their cost of living increase is only 2.5%... they’re absolutely misguided."
8. "The only way to get out of this economic misery that we’re in, some people are probably thinking, is to go to war."
9. "The more money that we print, the less value our dollars are worth."
10. "Anybody who really has any kind of intelligence at all that really sits down and studies this will walk away with a very uncomfortable feeling about the future of our economic base."

Sponsors

Conclusion

Ed Butowsky’s insights on the Chapwood Index expose troubling gaps between reported CPI and real-world inflation, highlighting the risks posed by manipulated economic metrics, including GDP figures and the Fed’s inflationary policies. He questions how long this financial illusion can endure, as rising inflation and debt create systemic pressures that may require substantial reform in traditional financial systems. By advocating for alternative metrics like the Chapwood Index, Butowsky offers a valuable perspective, suggesting that a clearer understanding of true inflation could better equip individuals and policymakers to tackle future economic challenges.

Timestamps

0:00 - Intro
0:59 - Cost-of-Living Adjustment
6:45 - Mischaracterization of CPI
9:19 - Fed policy and GDP
15:06 - Bitkey & Coinkite
17:04 - Effect of band-aid policy and gaslighting
19:39 - Sovereign debt crisis and monetary base
23:11 - Realistic risk estimates for clients
24:59 - SOTE
25:31 - Bitcoin
30:27 - Defaults and dollar weaponization
33:23 - Trump & conservative policy
39:05 - State autonomy and energy renaissance
41:34 - Wrap up

Transcript

(00:00) that's when the government started manipulating the way that they calculated the CPI Ed Butowsky is an American financial adviser and author in 2005 he founded chapwood Investments a private wealth management firm that was among the first to assist professional athletes he also created the chapwood index it reports the unadjusted actual cost and price fluctuation of the top 500 items on which Americans spend their after tax dollars in the 50 largest cities in the United States many find this to be a more accurate version of
(00:30) the CPI today we will break down what the chapwood index has been signaling and why the Federal Reserves version of the CPI is flawed and incorrect the government could not handle giving out 133% increases in their programs like Social Security and Medicare and so on so they started to manipulate it so the CPI went from 133% down to three in a year thank you for uh for joining us and sorry for the technical difficulties we're using our our backup streaming service right now well that's fine I'm I'm not the most computer literate
(01:09) person but uh but this works well I think uh whether or not you're computer literary I think the the work that you're doing at chapwood Investments particularly with the chapwood index is something that I admire greatly particularly somebody's been writing about the economy for seven years now looking for um better inflation inflation metrics than what uh the BLS puts out with the CPI I found that your work and the the work from Shadow stats more directly uh imbus what I'm feeling throughout the economy when I'm going
(01:46) and shopping at the grocery store going to fill up my gas tank paying Insurance bills on a month-to-month basis and uh extremely excited to have you on just to get a background of the chapwood index why you decide to put it together how you put it together um because it's something that I've been following and have only ever heard a few interviews from you before and just want to dive into this because I think it's a very important topic that many Americans uh have at the top of their mind right now
(02:13) particularly as we head into election season absolutely so so the way that I started this was I initially had this idea and it it all goes back to my mother uh when she got divorced from my father and my mother got a job when she had cancer and I said why' you get a job at Macy's she said because your effn father didn't adjust my alimony for Cola and I thought Cola you drink tab I didn't even know what cola was at that time and then I started looking into it and I realized there was a a gentleman named Albert uh
(02:49) singer in swathmore Pennsylvania who was doing an analysis on the old ways that the government used to calculate inflation versus how they were doing doing it now and this was in 1994 that I had this conversation with my mother and uh Albert singer was referencing back to 1983 because that's when the government started manipulating the way that they calculated the CPI because the CPI was at 133% and the government could not handle giving out 133% increases in their uh programs like Social Security and Medicare and so on so they started to
(03:31) manipulate it so the CPI went from 13% down to three in a year well the go the prices didn't go you know stop going up that much in one year the government started manipulating the way they did it so if you went back and used the old rules um of how they calculated it you would find that inflation was growing around eight or % a year so I had a conversation with John Williams who runs Shadow stats and I said well why don't to do this for every city because every city has a different cost of living increase it's not the cost of living
(04:07) that's important it's the cost of living increase that's important and he said he didn't have time to do it and I thought okay well I'll ask all of my clients to fill out what they're spending their money on today and then have them track their own cost of living increase I sent out a request to all of them not one of them did it so I thought okay well then I need to do this somehow so I got people on Facebook to go out to their grocery stores and other places and start doing it for me so these are my
(04:38) friends and they started doing it quarterly and it got to be too much so we do it twice a year and these are the real adap pocket costs that people spend money on to keep a constant standard of living so in California it won't surprise you that their cost of living increase is far greater than tal New Mexico is and and uh New York is going to be a lot greater than Denver is although it's interesting to note that a lot of democrat cities where there's a heavy spending in the cities their cost of living increase is far greater than
(05:14) red cities and that's not a political statement it's just factual and so that in the 90s is that when they introduced hedonic adjustments mid 90s is that what that that change in the CPI was it was the 8384 83 384 right but I started um understanding it really looking into it when my mother was sick um and that's when I became really just amazed by the manipulation because her costs were going up so much quicker even though my father didn't adjust her alimony for Cola um I started looking into it and
(05:53) realized what a what a bogus thing this was because you have so many people who are relying on their cost of living increase to to keep them in Pace or keep them up with what their real cost of living increase is so they're looking to the CPI to be adjusted realistically but like just now you had a 2 and a half% growth for for Jan for January 2025 well anybody who thinks that their cost of living increase is only 2.
(06:26) 5% you know they're they're absolutely misguided so they're going to be they're face they're going to spit in their face by about 5 to 7% their lives are going to get harder that's why grandmothers and grandfathers presence get worse as years go on because they're living off of uh Co they're living off of this money and they can't keep Pace with the cost of living increase well that I mean and that's the the other nefarious um tactic that the government uses particularly this Administration not trying to get political just being
(06:55) objective of how things are positioned in the market and Biden Administration has been championing the fact that uh CPI inflation has been falling um since the beginning of this year uh end of last year and they neglect to acknowledge the fact that even though it's a smaller rate of inflation according to CPI I think we would both argue that CPI is uh underscoring inflation dramatically but even if you're running with the assumption that CPI is somewhat accurate they're misar izing uh the fall in inflation it's
(07:32) really the fall in inflation rate which is building on a higher base which is still squeezing people post 2020 yeah and and I'll tell you I wish I could do a 60 Minute segment on this because what I would focus on is that this is one of the reasons why we have so much crime in the inner cities because people in the inner cities again just being very general here they are middle inome people to lower income people and these people rely on on somebody giving them a thumbs up or a thumbs down based on what
(08:04) their performance was they don't get a chance to make extra money based on their performance so they get an increase based on the government's CPI number and if that CPI number is low or lower than what their expenses are it only takes about five years of being you know smooshed in the face by being you know 5% behind what their cost of living increas is then all of a sudden they're 25% behind and then they're going to start to commit crimes because everyone has a threshold of pain and when you
(08:34) reach it you know they're paying their taxes they're doing everything right but they just keep falling further and further behind and this is one of the main reasons I think we have Inner City crime is because of the misguided number from the CPI and shifting back to the index um and the data collection there's 500 items correct it's down to 150 now down to 15 50 and in terms of data collection like are you essentially indexing people buying the same good from the same place or are the good substitutable between um
(09:12) different different stores or different um gas stations if you will well I try to get people to buy the same thing over and over again at the same store so my data collectors are going to the same stores looking at the same items yeah and I mean if you go on chapwood index and you you you look at the numbers I mean particularly the major cities since 20120 and even before then uh double digits to Mid double digits to mid- teens in many of these cities on an annual um and semiannual basis like what what do you think like with the FED
(09:53) lowering rates by 50 bips and all the rhetoric and policy changes that have been made in in your mind um have they been effective at all are we are we setting ourselves up for 1970 St Echo inflation with the FED cutting rates at this particular point in time well that's a little bit of a different discussion than the index that's my interpretation of the cost of living uh and is it going higher or lower and will it go higher or lower I I believe that the fed's going to have to continue to cut interest rates mainly because of the
(10:28) GDP number not because of inflation I think the GDP number is woeful and we're going to have to lower interest rates to stimulate the economy and if if the CPI or if inflation isn't under control then we're going to see it exacerbated um so you're going to see Rising prices again uh when they lower interest rates let's get that I was mentioning before we we recorded that I um I watched an interview that you did with kcko news a couple of weeks ago maybe last week in which you you mentioned
(11:02) just this they're going to be focused on GDP which is um which is not surprising to me but it was um it did stick out to me because if you hear the FED talk they're always targeting the inflation rate and talking about getting to the level they want to before feeling comfortable lowering rates but you seem to think that GDP is is much more top of mind for the fed and so in terms of GDP like diving deeper into what the actual or what the reported numbers look like and then your thoughts on whether those reported
(11:36) numbers are actually uh indicative of what's actually happening in terms of productivity throughout the economy yeah so so again not to sound like a conspiratory you know everything is a conspiracy but when you look at the GDP numbers you're you have to look at how GDP is calculated and there's something called the GDP deflator and that is the inflation number that they're able to assign to the GDP and if that number is low that means growth would be higher and they're able to assign a very low
(12:10) number to the GDP deflator therefore the number you know the the GDP growth could be higher so they assign a very low number to it and they still are getting a pretty woeful and I keep say wful I don't know why but they keep getting a woeful uh number on the GDP but if they were to assign the real GD real inflation number uh then GDP would be you know negative but they're able to manipulate it by having a higher or a lower uh GDP deflator number so think of GDP deflator as a placeholder for inflation and they're able to assign
(12:49) a lower inflation number to the GDP number therefore making the growth in GDP seem higher is it even lower than the CPI the deflator I believe so what what is our justification for using a lower number to make the GDP number look higher it's just the game the numbers that's it yeah and it's um so there's really no growth in the economy right now at all no I I think the jobs numbers will point to this too if you look at jobs growth particularly over the last 3 years A lot of it has been um either immigrants taking uh
(13:29) taking a lot of the jobs or government jobs basically taking up a bunch of um the the positive jobs growth in the US and then on top of that you have the backwards revisions that have been pretty woeful themselves over the last two years yes so you stole my word woful um I did so you know I don't understand how illegal immigrants can get jobs if they're not legal how are they taking jobs like how is that happening I I don't get that is everybody just breaking the law I mean in the postco world it seems
(14:09) like the um the appetite to actually enforce the law has has decreased a bit particularly in some you're talking about inner city problems uh and looting um looting stores if you if you steal less than $1,000 doll you're not even going to get a slap on the wrist they're going to say just walk away uh yeah no that's a great question um and you had your own palus explicitly admit that um illegal immigrants taking jobs is quote unquote good for the economy because it helps um helps uh employers pay lower wages to
(14:46) keep producing goods and services yeah you just wake up one day and you think what kind of world do we live in like what do we accept as the truth you can't accept the CPI numbers as the truth you can't accept the GDP numbers as the truth you can't accept the number of migrants that are coming into this country um you know you you can't really accept anything anymore is the truth so FS this rip of tftc was brought to you by our good friends at bit key bit key makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to
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(17:00) use the code tftc we have a code now tftc for 5% off at checkout living in uh a dained age where we are completely detached from the truth like how how much systemic risk do you think that introduces for the American economy uh what what what situation uh just just gassing the numbers lying to people about inflation lying to people about jobs lying to people about GDP sort of band-aiding over what seems to be a systemically fragile economy um obviously we're expanding the debt astronomically just added 450 billion I
(17:41) believe in the last three weeks leading up to this election approaching 36 trillion obviously we have an interest expense on the debt approaching 1.22 trillion annually it seems to me that the emperor is naked uh and they're trying to project to the country that everything is well we're going to get through this but um it seems like they're kicking the can down the road and trying to make everybody believe that things are going to be okay but it it's almost like somebody putting their head in the sand um exuberant amount of
(18:14) cognitive dissonance that could lead to um pretty terrible economic outcomes due to the inability to actually confront the actual problems well I think most of this is wonky to most people out there so they don't really understand what we're talking about but when you talk about the amount of money that we bring in and how much money we pay out in terms of government programs and we add $2 trillion doll a year to our national debt and that that is about a you know a quarter of what we bring in in tax
(18:48) revenue when people start to really understand it they they're then going to understand that there's no way around this because we continue to want to spend more money and there's always going to be programs out there regardless if Trump's elected or if Harris is elected we're still going to see massive spending way over and above what our tax revenue is so we're at a point of no return and the only way we can get around this is to drill underneath us and bring in more tax revenue that way but but most people
(19:21) don't understand how the world works and how the economy works so so you know there's not going to be you know riots in the streets over this except when we go to war and we have to you know have a war to get out of this economic uh misery that we're in that's the sad thing that the only way to get out of this and some people's not saying this to you but the the government's probably thinking we got to go to war we got to fix the economy and I mean when you think about it going back to drone Pals and the fed's rate
(19:54) cuts um last month it if you look at the long end of of the yield curve like it it's still going higher despite the fact that that rates went lower which is not a good signal and and I mean that gets to the bigger question I think um many people um predominant macroeconomic uh analysts and many people in trafi think that the US due to its ability to issue this debt and have international players and um Sovereign actors buy the debt whenever it's auctioned um people think that is something that's going to continue to
(20:31) happen but it seems like the demand for this treasury debt is is waning as the world wakes up to the fact that we do not have our spending under control and it doesn't look like we even have the ability to get it under control and I don't think many people in the US want to admit it but I'll just throw this out to you to get your thoughts on it but like are we approaching sovereign debt crisis levels where things really get out of control yeah I don't think we are because too many people view our debt in
(21:02) relationship to our GDP our our gross domestic product and that they say that we're about 120% of our debt to our GDP so they don't think that that's a tragic level but but something I wanted to also mention is that the more money that we print the less value our dollars are worth so when we have to print more money the value of what we currently have in our Pockets buy less and that's also very inflationary um you can look at M2 statistics and you can look at when M2 goes up money supply you can see
(21:39) inflation numbers go up and those are the government's numbers go up um so that's another important point that might be a breaking point where there where inflation just gets rapidly out of control and people then start to understand that it's because of our spending and our spending is coming because of new Bridges and Roads and you know chips programs and all these other Green New Deals and all of this stuff is costing you money today it's making the dollars you have today worth less every
(22:10) single minute yeah we have um I have a good friend his name is Matthew mazus out of Ria lvia American citizen who moved to laia and we've been doing a quarterly update episode he monitors the world the global monetary base broken up by every currency and that I think has become my favorite metric of of real inflation over time and I think going back to the 70s he's run the numbers for the compound annual growth rate of the monetary base the global monetary base is something like 13.7% um year onye for the last five
(22:51) decades well you know under Tim gner when the world had a liquidity crisis he went out and told everybody to print more currency so he said print more Euros print more dollars print more Yen and that has just inflated the monetary base tremendously and that's become inflationary across the board and as I mean as a wealth adviser how how do you approach this inflation Pro problem in terms of positioning your clients well I tell them the truth I I don't use one of these bogus statistics that inflation is
(23:25) 2 or 3% I tell them the inflation is 6 to 7 % and that they have to do something to make sure that you know I can put a plan together for them that is just filled with fraud meaning 2 or 3% inflation but that's just not an accurate number I use 67% and and then show them how much money they need to make in order to not lose purchasing power how do you manage risk with that is that does that push you out further on the risk curve to necessarily when you use modern portfolio the you can have a you know a lower risk
(24:02) portfolio by having assets that are non-correlated to each other um so you don't have to have a lot more risk to get really good non-correlated returns you just have to have non-correlated assets you have to have alternative investments in a portfolio and most investment firms limit your alternative portfolio or your alternative allocation to about 15% and 15% does not do it for you you have to have more than that in an in a overall portfolio yeah out of uh out of college I worked for a managed Futures fund and
(24:35) we were one of those alt funds and we were fighting for 5% of the portfolio at the time this was 10 10 years ago now at this point well manage Futures is one of my favorite alts because it's non-correlated you want to get technical analysis um done and that's how you manage it you you really get the non-correlated asset through something like managing Futures this rip was also brought to you by our good friends at salt of the earth you got to be hydrating Freaks and while you're hydrating you got to be getting your
(25:06) electrolytes this the best electrolytes mix that I've ever come into contact with uh Pink Himalayan salt with calcium magnesium potassium sodium no sugar it tastes incredible my favorite is the orange and the pink lemonade go to drink so.com at drinks.com use the code tftc when you make your purchase and you'll get 15% off I'm telling you get on it freaks you're going to love this stuff what are your thoughts on uh this is a Bitcoin show this is uh something I've been passionate about while I was working at
(25:38) the managed Futures fund that's when I I found Bitcoin I was uh on the portfolio management team as an analyst and I was uh had to write the commentary commentaries for the fund and this was during operation twist QE2 when Yellen was at the helm and I just found it completely idiotic the way the the global monetary system was managed particularly one instance where Janet Yellen had a press conference and she was wearing a purple pants suit and and Traders uh took that as a signal that she's feeling Regal she's feeling uh
(26:15) like she was in a position of strength so some markets traded based off of what she was wearing that seemed completely insane to me and then you couple that with what we discussed earlier is the fact that a lot of these governments um are in a position where they continually needed to debase the money to basically have everything sustain itself this this Ponzi sustain itself and so uh intuitively I got Bitcoin about a decade 11 years ago and have been passionate about it ever since because I do think it's a solution to
(26:47) this money printing problem if we can um leverage a an asset that's not controlled by any Central Authority cannot be controlled by any company or government or Central Bank um um and is an emergent Market good uh it that seems like a good solution to this money printing problem to me I'm curious to get your thoughts on on bitcoin well you're not going to like my opinion on bitcoin but it's okay I I'm old school in that I want there to be something backing the asset that I'm involved with
(27:23) and the dollar what's backing it is the ability to print more dollars and you have the US economy behind it Bitcoin there's nothing behind it other than people's desire to own Bitcoin so I'm not into crypto although I will tell you I have a client of mine who's very wealthy and he bought gbtc and I went ahead and bought a th000 shares of it and I'm up $3,000 on it um so I'm not you know completely out of the idea of doing it um but it's very difficult for me to support something
(27:57) that doesn't have any backing it other than the idea that everybody else wants to own it and the idea now that as you stated that you're going to have to go and have everybody repurpose their currency into Bitcoin to make that worthwhile away from the dollar away from all the other currencies I think that's a heavy lift in our lifetime it's definitely going to take a while gradually then suddenly is uh is what a lot of people say here but I would I would I would push back and say that I don't think Bitcoin is not backed by
(28:30) anything it's backed by um a network of consensus rules of people making active decisions to abide by by those rules and on top of that there is a connection to energy that is that sort of I don't want to say it backs Bitcoin but it makes it very hard to game in the sense that you need an immense amount of energy to overwrite the um transactions on the network but we don't have to get into a debate about the merits of Bitcoin um yeah cuz I I would lose I don't know enough about it and you could talk
(29:02) circles around me but I just basically want there to be something tangible backing every investment like if there's a stock like let's say it's a Hershey's chocolate I know that they sell Hershey's chocolate bars and they sell things and there's something backing the share of stock and if there's a bond I know that there's something backing that Bond when it comes to the dollar I know that the US economy and the ability to print more dollars backs it when it comes to bitcoin yeah there's a network of people who
(29:33) can't change it and there's rules that cannot it's backed by uh I've got a book I'll send you I've wrote the forward to it uh it's called gradually and suddenly my good friend Parker Lewis wrote it and that's one of the uh the chapters in the book is Bitcoin is not backed by nothing and gets into the merits of the network cuz it is this weird thing to to try to grasp this digital good it seems ephemeral um but there are there are sort of um consensus rules codifying the the backing of the legitimacy of the
(30:11) network that they give you certainty that things operate the way you expect them to cannot be corrupted easily very very hard to corrupt but um I would love yeah the uh the I mean because to a broader Point discussing because like it seems as a millennial two young children wife looking to build to the Future and looking out at this runaway inflation this runaway debt crisis it is it why I'm so passionate about Bitcoin because it seems like there are no mechanisms from within the system to actually fix this problem it seems like you you have
(30:53) two roads you can go down it's your US Government overt default on the debt which is never going to happen cuz geopolitically unpalatable or um default via debasement which seems inevitable at this point yeah um look anybody who really is you know has any kind of intelligence at all that really sits down and studies this will walk away with a very uncomfortable feeling about the future of of our economic base I mean it's it's really really that sad and difficult to comprehend uh just how bad things are
(31:32) and we're not any better than any other country out there in fact we're just we're we're we're probably you know worse than most because we're so much bigger yeah and I mean the that's what worries me the most is that there's this perceived um there perceive protection due to the size of the government and the economy and how long we've been in Pole Position globally as a as an economic power and you look out at the world with the wars popping off in the Middle East Russia Ukraine and
(32:07) then you see uh the brics countries meeting as we speak right now talking about how they want to um diversify away from Dollar exposure because the US government has weaponized um the financial system freezing assets freezing the ability for people to move money Between Borders um and do you think the government has made missteps in the last four years with how they've weaponized the dollar system and do you think they understand the ramifications of that weaponization yes but at the same time 60% of trade is done I think these numbers are
(32:47) right in US dollars or 60% of the currencies out there are US Dollars uh I don't believe that we're going to get away from the US dollar being the current currency of the world um The Reserve currency cuz the only one that could come up is China and that's a communist country um and the other countries are too small um I think that the us is going to remain uh the leader uh in the reserve currency for world trade but the US has definitely made mistakes along the way yeah yeah that's do you think this
(33:25) election's critical for the the ction of of the country and the economy oh without question I don't think you've ever had a time where you had two candidates were so opposite in how they want to address the economy and the world um you know it's no no secret that I'm a trump supporter um but I'm a republican more than a trump supporter and I believe that we need conservative economic policies and we need to have lower taxes to stimulate growth versus raising taxes on people uh and you know
(34:00) there's so many things that I'm against the Democrat uh platform that you know now Will trump get in there and cut spending I don't believe so um but I think he's going to increase Revenue into the tax base you know every single time that we've ever cut taxes we've increased Revenue now the question is how did they spend that money under Bush the money was spent so that therefore you had a higher uh debt and deficit under Bush um but by cutting taxes you increase the revenue same thing with
(34:38) Trump but he continued to spend money but he had to because of Co yeah but the only way that we're going to get out of this is to cut taxes and that's the only way that I mean I hope he can cut spending I mean he's talking a big game um trotting Elon out and a lot of campaign stump speeches and saying that he's going to get him in and slash all these U useless bureaucratic agencies within the federal government and it can I mean I don't know if it can be done here in the United States but
(35:11) just broadly speaking look at Argentina the last year and they've done a good job of completely decimating that bureaucratic layer within their their government um obviously their economy is still going through some turbulence but should be expected when you have um when you have such a a drastic shift in in policy from one Administration to the other and why don't you think he'll be able to cut spending is I maybe I'm naive optimistic but I would like to think that what he's going out there and
(35:41) pitching could actually be implemented if he gets in office well I I don't know you know he's talking about you know money going out to you know different programs and anytime you get you know when spending bills come up there's always always a need to you know take care of somebody uh like in Kentucky you have Mitch McConnell who's a huge who gets tremendous amount of money from the US government for the state of Kentucky and they're always trying to increase those programs so cutting some of the
(36:15) programs out of the government like the educ Department of Education out that's a Band-Aid that's a minor minor thing and we're hemorrhaging right now so he's going to need to cut tremendous amount of programs and we're going to see this country get smaller in terms of our expansion like here in Dallas we have roads that are being you know worked on because of the programs the infrastructure program that was passed and they're getting so much money they're just digging up roads uh you
(36:43) know roads that my wife says doesn't even need to be fixed and she knows believe me um and you know I I think that there's just a tremendous amount of nonsensical spending that goes on with the government and I just believe that Trump by himself is going to be able to cut that back yeah but we'll see now it reminds me my days of the man of fut fun I lived in Chicago and I lived in Chicago for 5 years and around the fourth year I became aware of the jobs program they had in the city which is they would pay the roads with mid-grade
(37:17) gravel Every Spring and Summer um so that when you're driving through the Salted and snowy roads in the winter they would inevitably get torn up and you'd have uh essentially an annual jobs program Every Spring and Summer of people going and repairing those roads it's insane just use the high-grade gravel so you don't have to fix the roads every year yeah yeah my my wife is so frustrated over how many roads are being torn up in Plano and the roads look perfect but they have so much money that they need topend it down here in
(37:49) Austin too we're seeing it we've had um South Lamar has been completely blocked off for two months they haven't even started working on it they've just blocked it off and uh prevented traffic from flowing flowing normally and making it harder for me to get into work and uh it seems like they're preparing for something but aren't actually getting anything done well the the point the point about Trump is that Trump has never been a conservative he's always been a big spender and he proved that during his
(38:19) first Administration um and you know Camala Harris if the Democrats win you know they they already have all of these programs that they want to spend money on or forgive loans uh there's there's just so many handouts that they want to give or they want to forgive things which also becomes a negative for the debt and the deficit so we're going to have to get spending under control uh at the same time that we get our Revenue up and I just don't have a lot of hope that the Republicans are going to be able to
(38:51) pull this off yeah on the Democratic side are you saying that uh giving people $25,000 to to buy their first home is bad idea yeah I know where where was my 25,000 yeah the uh well like on this line like maybe it's the not the federal government that can solve this and I think that was one of the Silver Linings of the post lockdown era or during the lockdowns was this assertion of autonomy by individual states and this uh walking back towards the direction of federalism the way the Republic was originally set
(39:28) up do you do you have hope of that Trend continuing States basically looking do the states have to come in and say the federal government you're insane we're sending too much money to you don't worry like we don't need your money we're going to we're going to take care of it here and become a bit more insular vers the the federal government well if you look I was looking the other day at the state budgets I know that'll tell you how exciting I am um but I was looking at the debt clock and I looked
(39:52) at the state budgets and almost every state is underwater so they need government and money uh to subsidize their spending so I I can't imagine that any state is going to be able to uh pull things off without the federal government's money yeah yeah do you think we need an energy Renaissance to really Kickstart things do you think uh Trump's idea to drill baby drill to drive down Energy prices is an effective way to fix these problems if you're not going to cut spending yeah but what surprises me is that we are producing
(40:26) more fossil fuel um in each month than has ever happened in this country so there's a lot of discussion about how this Administration has slowed down the amount of drilling but we're drilling more uh we're producing more than we ever have in the history of our country which is shocking to most Republicans yeah I think it's not well the l& is what we're shipping abroad right so and the oil we're exporters of oil now too um yeah we're producing so much on a monthly basis more than we ever have but
(41:05) there's all this rhetoric that that the Democrats have cut the amount of amount of drilling that we're doing so I I don't understand the the contradiction there yeah maybe we're getting more efficient drilling I don't know it's uh I gotta have Dr Nas alaji on do you hang out with him at all up in uh that area of Texas no I would love to know he says about that yeah he's uh he's our go-to oil and gas expert here at tftc um but Ed uh I know we started a bit late I want to be respectful of your
(41:39) time this has been a great conversation I just want to thank you for the chapwood index it's it's something that I follow um and write about quite often and I think it's a an incredible service to um US citizens because they should have better information about what is happening to their lives and their and what is eating at their at their pocketbooks and their wallets it is a shame that the government um feels compelled to to manipulate the data and and paper over what I deem to be systemic problems um and essentially
(42:14) lying to the American public and so I want to thank you for for surfacing the truth and giving people better information well absolutely the new numbers should be out in about two weeks all right and we can find chapwood index correct correct and I have to ask you the numbers to your right shoulder what are those so this one right here this is uh SATs per dollar so there's 100 million Satoshi in one Bitcoin so right now $1 will get you 1,486 Satoshi okay yeah so bitcoin's divisible it's portable it's extremely scarce it's
(42:52) backed by a massive network of energy making sure the network runs and individuals who are making sure that the rules are followed that's what it's backed by send me that book and this is the block height we're at block height 866 878 so since January 3rd 2009 866876 blocks of transactions been produced on the network I'm happy I asked this is the block clock by Quin kite great great product all right take care Ed have a great day peace love freaks