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Dr. Kasie Whitener Returns to Discuss Her Senatorial Run in South Carolina · Conversations With the Hoff

• 1:14
  SPEAKER_04: Pull up a chair.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_04: Lean in close.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_04: Got a question.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_03: It's a beautiful day on the South Strand.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to Conversations with the Hoff.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_03: I'm Steve Hoffman, your host, and with me in the studio today is the executive producer of Liberty Crack Media, Trip Detmering.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_03: Hey folks.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_03: We also have a special in-studio guest who was on Conversations with the Hoff just a couple of months ago.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_03: She is Dr.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_03: Casey Weitner.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_03: And she is the Carolina, South Carolina Libertarian Party candidate seeking election to the U.S.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_03: Senate.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_03: During this episode, we're going to talk about one of Casey's favorite topics, and that's the national debt.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_03: So welcome to the show, Dr.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_03: Whitener.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad to be here.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, my family's vacationing on the Grand Strand this week and next week, and uh getting to do some cool campaigning and hang out in some really cool places.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And uh immediately thought of coming to see you face to face, Hoff.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: I had to be here.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I'm glad you're here.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_03: Just be sure to spend a lot of money because here and in Ory County, we depend on the generosity of others.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_03: We don't have any manufacturing, all that good stuff.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Glad to, glad to.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_03: So let's begin our conversation today about uh your your favorite topic.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_03: Why should the average American be concerned about the national debt?
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Every issue is a debt issue.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: And what I mean by that is we keep talking about affordability, things being so much more expensive.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: They're more expensive because we owe so much money.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: The national debt is the thing that is driving all of that extra expense.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I think everyday Americans should care about the national debt because that is our national credit card.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's where we as a nation are in some serious trouble.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: The debt has eclipsed our GDP.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: So what that basically means is we owe more money than we than we are bringing in every year, right?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: So we our our gross domestic product, what we produce every year, what our value is, we owe more money than that.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not great.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: That would be as if you were, you know, making$60,000 a year and you owe$120,000.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Then you owe twice as much as you're earning.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: We don't want that.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: We don't want to be owing that much money.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_03: I heard that for the first time since World War II, our debt to GDP ratio has exceeded 100%.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_03: Mm-hmm.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, 100%.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: And and the worst part about it is that there's just no appetite in Washington to slow down the spending.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they continue to pass these massive spending bills.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And they're using reconciliation, which is instead of creating a budget and, you know, doing your budget like you would as a family every or as a company every year and then sticking to your budget, throughout the year, they're using reconciliation to add more money in there and to then cut product programs that they had already funded the year before.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: So they're just sort of playing fast and loose with America's money.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's awful.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_03: When you go around on your campaign talking to people on the street, are they aware of the national debt?
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_03: Is that an issue for them or not?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_03: Or are they blindfolded?
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, not only are they aware, they're also very concerned about it.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: I back about a year ago, when I first launched my campaign in 2025, I did what most entrepreneurs do, which is customer discovery.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: So you go out there and you start listening to what people have to say.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: What are they interested in?
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason I'm running for U.S.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Senate is because of the national debt.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like it is the primary reason I'm running for U.S.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Senate.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so I wanted to find out like, do other people care about this as much as I do?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I was told by different political consultants that that's too big, people don't understand it, it doesn't really matter, nobody cares about it.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: This is, you know, and they gave me this whole list of other things that people care about.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: But whenever I would mention it to people, everybody, their eyes get big and they go, Yes, thank you for taking on the debt.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: I feel it.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: We all feel it like a monkey on our back.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: And especially if you've got kids or grandkids, you know that this is their bill to pay.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really sad for people.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: They feel frustrated by it.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: They feel like they can't trust their government to do the right thing.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's it it it sort of bleeds into everything.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, people care about it.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: And and not everybody necessarily knows all the ins and outs of it, but they're reading the financial news enough to know that it's in we're in bad shape.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I'm sure that if you were a candidate and approached your constituents and said, I promise to raise taxes, you'd lose a bunch of votes.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_03: But the increasing national debt is gonna result in just that.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_03: Somebody's got to pay for it.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_03: And eventually it's gonna be a lot of pressure on raising taxes.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: So the worst part about it is that we politicians get elected by cutting taxes.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the more taxes that they cut, the less revenue is coming into the government, right?
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you're spending more, but you're bringing in less, you're inevitably going to be running this debt.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what they've been doing.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: I have zero problem with cutting taxes.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like I'm a libertarian, taxationist theft, all that.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like, let's cut the taxes down to nothing.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're gonna do that, you have to also cut the spending down to nothing.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And they just don't.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: They keep spending and then they give away these tax cuts as if it's they're buying votes with the tax cuts.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And especially because they're buy they're putting those tax cuts in places where, for, for example, elderly Americans who vote in on mass, you know, our older older voters are typically more likely to show up than the younger voters.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: So they're not cutting taxes for those 18 to 25-year-olds.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: They're cutting taxes for the 75 and higher.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: And and that's intentional to get those people to vote for them.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it's a scam and it's awful.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_03: So the politicians basically basically don't see that link between cutting spending and lowering taxes.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_03: No.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_03: If you're gonna lower taxes, you're gonna have to cut spending.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_03: It should be an obvious thing.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: It is obvious.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: They're just ignoring it.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's that's the thing.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because people also want their government programs, right?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: They still want their government to work.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: They want their government to do the things they expect it to do.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: My challenge is helping people understand that government should do significantly less than what it's already doing, right?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: We have these ideas that government should solve all the problems.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's not what it's supposed to do.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's just basically there to arbitrate between individuals and to protect our individual rights.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: It ought not to be solving all these problems through government programs and then needing taxation to be able to pay for those programs.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's how we sort of spun everything out of control.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_03: So you probably see the link also between uh increasing national debt and an increase in the size and scope of government.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's how they're they're getting their money.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_03: They uh pass more bills, they uh establish more agencies, but somebody's got to pay for it.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_03: And if you don't have the money, well, you just borrow it.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_06: Well, Casey, what are some of the thoughts on the programs, excuse me, the programs and the areas that you would like to start seeing significant cuts if you got into office?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the two biggest programs that are driving the national debt faster than anything else are Social Security and Medicare.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's very difficult to have a conversation with that key voter block of 70 plus about those programs.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody wants to use the word cuts, but we it that's not what we're after here.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: What we're after is reform.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: So let's look at these programs.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: The first one being Social Security.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's not, it was never really meant to be a default retirement program.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was always meant to be a poverty prevention program.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: So not everybody should be receiving Social Security.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Even though everybody's paying into it, it was meant to be a social a safety net for the least among us, for folks that just did not have the income to be able to cover themselves in retirement.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_06: Well, uh to go back in history, wasn't it just for widows and orphans specifically, not for uh an arbitrary block of needy people?
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: And and even with the World War II generation, like my grandparents, who, you know, my grandfather lived to 90, he passed in twenty twenty eighteen, right?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: So even with that generation, most of them did not build their retirement on social security.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: They built their retirement on their pension plans, from their companies, and they on and investments that they had made over their lifetime.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, even they knew that it wasn't meant for them.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: But sometime around the early 80s, we switched out of pension plans and into 401ks, and financial planners started saying, well, let's look at what you can expect to get from Social Security as well.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so when they were building for the baby boomers their investment, their retirement portfolio, they built that social security as part of the portfolio.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_06: Let me tweak that narrative a little bit.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_06: Just like you were saying it was built for the needy, and it really wasn't.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_06: It was specifically made for widows and orphans.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_06: All of a sudden, some somebody started using needy in there.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_06: And so then they said, Well, these people that had uh didn't have uh jobs that provided pensions and so on, we have to take care of them in their older age because now they're part of the needy group.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_06: And then they start adding all these other people into the needy group, and then they were like, Well, okay, all these people, we're gonna start using this as a retirement program so that we haven't we have a legal excuse to be able to extract it from every person who is employed that they're going to be getting some of this money back when they Well, that's the thing is because you hear that even now, right?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I paid into it, so I should get back out of it.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And and that that refrain is where the financial advisors came in in the 80s and 90s and saying, hey, when you go to retirement, you're gonna have this social security that you've been paying into that you deserve to get it back.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, I even hear people in Generation X that are like, well, I've been paying it my whole career.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: I deserve to get it back.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: That it was never meant to be that way.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: And again, I'm a libertarian, so taxation is theft.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: And taking that money out of your account was always theft.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_06: Well, that's why we don't want to go and say it's for the needy.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_06: We want to abolish it.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_06: And then have it for people who have uh their own retirement programs and so on.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: But let's be clear, you can't just tomorrow be like we're done here and kick it out.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's there are people who have built their retirement portfolio around this, and you have to scale it back in a way that is a responsible reduction.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_03: You can always grant grandfather it.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_03: There are countries out there that have different retirement models, like Singapore, uh, Chile, Australia, or it's partial government government, but it's mostly private.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_03: And uh like if we did scale it back and say that you know you can't have uh Social Security, you could say, up until age 45.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we're gonna we're gonna grandfather it.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody over 45 is gonna run be on the current system.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_03: But the reform system is gonna be for those under the age of 45.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and at some point, you I mean, I think when I was coming up in the 90s, we all knew we were not getting Social Security.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: So for us, there was this sense that it was it was eventually gonna run out.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't gonna be available to us.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: But like I said, now the financial advisors have told everybody that this is part of your retirement portfolio.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: So we need to the people in their 20s right now are the ones that are paying for the people that are getting it's a Ponzi scheme.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: The ones that are currently working are paying for it.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: And right now we're borrowing 75 cents on the dollar.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: So, like, or sorry, 25 cents on the dollar.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: So 75 cents is being paid for by the Social Security Trust Fund.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I put that like in air quotes because it's not really, but it's it's being funded in real time with real cash.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: But the other 25 cents we're having to borrow, and that's because there's being more extracted from it than it is actually bringing in.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: And that deficit is what's causing the national debt to to grow.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: So we've got to find a way to get even there and then ultimately to get where the government is not building that for us.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_06: I would think probably it's the the folks in Generation Jones put the uh put that alarm out first.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_06: Because they were the first ones to say we're not going to get anything or we're gonna have a reduction in our social security.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_06: And that's I mean, that's the folks that are collecting it, starting to collect now.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_06: And they're and they they made a plan, you know.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_06: But but you're right, this is something that has to be done.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_06: It has to uh be, you know, like we said, we have to do it intelligently and scale it down.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_06: But I think the first thing we have to do is uh to again, you know, figure out who the quote needy are.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: And well, there's a really good book by Romina Baccia.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: She were uh works at the Cato Institute, she wrote a book about social security, and her book lays out this is how we can scale it back, scale it down, until we get to the place where individuals are are responsible for their own retirement.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: And if we have a social safety net, it's one that we all understand is meant for the very needs.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_06: Very similar to what Randolph had in fee and individual responsibility.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_03: That's a unique idea.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_03: Amen.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but you know, it doesn't get you elected, though.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's the challenge.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's really hard to tell people like you have to do this work.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody is coming to save you, least of all the government.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: No, you have to do this for yourself, and that is not a message that voters.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_06: The one the one thing I was looking at was the military spending.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_06: And I'm, you know, I'm a Marine, and I think this is the military spending is just ridonkulous.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_06: Absolutely.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_06: Um uh you you probably are uh again for us getting out of uh these foreign bases because I mean we're not getting support from these people anyway.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: So um well, there's there's an economic uh impact there in areas where we do have a military base, and but I'm definitely for pulling that back.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like we from a readiness perspective, our that we have readiness models that fit our current global experience, and we need to be listening to the military on those readiness models.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: We don't need to be listening to the people who supply the military whose drive it is to sell more weapons and sell more product, right?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: We have this huge military-industrial complex where these companies are making a lot of money because they sell a specific product into a specific space.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Those companies have got to diversify.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: If they're going to see a cut in that military spending, and they should, they've got to find another product that's going to generate income for them that's not going to be h heavily dependent on the military.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_06: Right.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_06: And and we've got to start weaning foreign governments because we have been supporting their defense and uh and supporting their c their economies.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_06: So yeah.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_03: Deloitte Eisenhower back in the 1950s warned the American public about the military.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: He he absolutely did in his outgoing message as president.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_03: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I'd like to comment on something you said a little while back about uh the Social Security Trust Fund.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I stopped believing in the tooth fairy just a couple of years ago.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_03: And I really don't believe that there is such a thing as a Social Security Trust Fund.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's I think it's all gone under the general fund, hasn't it?
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so that's the that's the thing, is that the the way people describe Social Security is they think that the government has taken my money out of my paycheck and it's invested that money for me, and now it's growing.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like they think of it as if it's a future scholar account, and it's not.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is not a 520.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's not a 401k, it's not a 529.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like this is just a tax that you're paying every month.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that tax is going directly into somebody else's pocket who's collecting social security, right?
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_03: And that's why you hear the politicians say, I'm going to invest in your future.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right, right, right, right.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I would say, because I I do I I'm glad to talk about the military spending, but the second biggest driver of the national debt is Medicare.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is one that, man, I have been at forums where these people, the the looks on their faces are like, you have lost your mind.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Medicare is health insurance for retired people.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it's because we have health insurance tied to employment.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: We have got to decouple that.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to be able to get your health insurance without having a job.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: You have to be able to pay for it on the free market.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: You should be able to buy it from Costco.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: You should be able to buy it from State Farm.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: You should bundle it with your home and auto with progressive.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like you've got, we've got to make insurance accessible in that way.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then we have to decouple health care from health insurance so that you can go see a doctor without health insurance.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: You should be able to go to a nurse practitioner and have a basic exam or have a basic physical.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: You should be able to get a basic prescription without needing health insurance to pay for those things.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: And until we do that, until we fix all of that, we're stuck with this Medicare situation, which is again health insurance for retired people because we screwed up decades ago and tied health insurance to employment, and that needs to stop.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_03: Well, definitely screwed up.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_03: When I turned 65, I went to the local Social Security office to apply for Social Security and Medicare.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_03: I walk into the office, I'm 65 years old.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_03: Half the people in that office were in their 30s.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm going, something's wrong here.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_03: They're getting these benefits.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_03: And I had to wait till I was age 65 before I applied.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_03: But now they're going to apply for them, and they're going to probably get those benefits.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: Government ought not to be in the health insurance market.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: And they and it has distorted the health insurance market by negotiating prices and things like that and leading in a space it has no it should not be there.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_06: I agree.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_06: And I don't I don't think corporations and businesses should have a tie to it either.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_06: So you can I I would like it that corporations cannot supply um benefits to their under a small group for a policy.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_06: I want all those insurers to have to go into the open free market.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_06: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: I agree.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: And and what they've done is they've made it illegal.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you're an insur an uh employer of a certain size, you have to offer health insurance.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_06: See, that's ridiculous.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's it's a law that absolutely should be repealed.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_06: And and again, you know, you hear all these people yelling fascism, fascism.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_06: This that is exactly what fascism is.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's forcing corporations to do what we want them to do.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and I say we what the government wants them to do, as opposed to getting the corporation to do what's best for the company.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, my husband worked for a discount tire company for 16 years.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: We had very good insurance.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: They were a privately held company, they had plenty of money.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: They only expanded in cash, meaning like if they had the cash to build a new store, they would build the new store.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: But they didn't have any debt at all.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: There are companies out there that are operating very good businesses that are doing the right thing for their employees because it's the right way to retain your employees.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's fine, that's wonderful, but let the company make that choice.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: It shouldn't be about the federal government putting their thumb on the scale and forcing people to buy insurance.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because that, of course, is how those insurance companies lobbied was like, hey, force everybody to buy it, and then we're gonna make plenty of money.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: So in talking about the national debt, a lot of Americans today are really worried about inflation.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_03: Things are costing more and more and more every day.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_03: And uh we're basically uh kind of strapped, you know.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_03: Some people are just living day-to-day, their paycheck doesn't cover all their expenses.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_03: So is there a relationship between the national debt and inflation?
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so part of the uh inflation challenge is the rates being set by the Federal Reserve and the Federal Reserve's role in trying to balance between employment and inflation, and and they use the interest rates as this kind of lever to try to manipulate that.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it is monetary manipulation, it's monetary policy manipulation at the Federal Reserve level.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of libertarians that are on the in the Fed train, and I get that, I understand that.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm working really hard to try to figure out where do I land on this on the one side or the other.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: I have some friends that are really good economists that talk a lot about um, and and my conversation with them is like, what do you think of this?
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: What do you how do we do this?
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: How will we do that?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to learn and listen on that.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but when we think about where the that inflation's coming from, it's the monetary supply, right?
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: The more money that's in the market, the less valuable that money is.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so when the Federal Reserve is controlling that monetary supply, that's where that inflation is coming from.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I think the biggest challenge when people, and it gets really like, I mean, it gets really like, ugh, mass.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but when you start thinking how yesterday the the eggs I bought were$4.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Today they're$6, right?
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: When it gets to that, like that very personal level, and then you go, well, what can I do about it?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: You can elect politicians that'll stop spending and that will really try to look at this monetary policy and try to pull back on some of these things that are causing that inflation and causing that.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: The other part of it is that the US credit rating is very low right now.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we've gotten a couple of dings to our credit report because there's no intention to stop spending.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that credit rating is, you know, that that's putting us in danger as well.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: And all of that uncertainty, that financial uncertainty at like these high market level stuff becomes the thing that the rest of us are seeing.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: The eggs go from$4 to$6.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_03: Don't we rely on other countries to buy our bonds to help finance the government?
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_06: First, I want to get back to the the Fed.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_06: Um I and I can understand your position on it, and it's it is with a lot of people, but um, it's almost like a Schrdinger's cat situation because you don't know what the situation is.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_06: So my feeling, my my feeling is we need to audit the Fed.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_06: Agreed.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_06: And yeah, and I think that's where everybody can can land on.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_06: That's a good first step.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: A lot more transparency.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, I feel like we've had, and this is what my economist friends say, that that the Federal Reserve, they're as neutral as they can be, but they still have corporate interest in mind.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: They're still trying to help the banks, they're still trying to invest in things, like there's still just so much the actions, the activity there, things that we don't really know they're doing, but they're manipulating.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_06: And they're they're guessing too, because they're assuming they're as neutral as they can be, unless we can actually see the numbers and audit them.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_06: Using economic models.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_03: Since 1913, after the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, our national debt has slowly crept higher and higher and higher.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_03: Before 1913, the national debt like the debt to GDP was like a straight line.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_03: After the establishment of the Federal Reserve, it went up dramatically.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_03: So there's probably a link between the Federal Reserve and the national debt.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_03: Gee, what could that link be?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and any time government gets into a market, it distorts it.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, anytime.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: You you don't have true visibility of what does the market actually want?
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: How are people going?
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: What do they actually need?
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: And before the Federal Reserve, we had these wild swings back and forth, right?
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: Where there was and there was so much market uncertainty.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea was that the Federal Reserve should stabilize things.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it's done an okay job at that.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that to your point, it has also overreached in so many places that it's really driven steadily, it's driven that national debt higher and higher.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_03: But you mentioned that as a family, you're not going to spend more than you earn.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_03: You don't want to go in debt.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_03: But there's nothing to stop the government, the federal government, from spending because they can spend more than what they get in the tax dollars because they get money, they can just go to the Federal Reserve.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_03: Just print more.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_03: Print more money.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, it's not technically printed, right?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like we say that, that's the phrase, but it's putting, it's infusing capital into those markets.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like, hey, I'm going to put some, I'm going to put millions of dollars, you know, digital currency into these spaces.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: And when I do that, I'm basically creating money out of thin air.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what drives that inflation.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like I said, once you have more money available, the value of that money goes down.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, that's it's that's exactly what it is.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_06: It's a fancy way of just saying we devaluate the currency.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_03: And that's interest payments on the national debt are also a major concern.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_03: Just within the last week or two, the 30-year bond went over five percent.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_03: Now, for those of us that follow this sort of thing, that is bad news.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_03: It really is.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's gonna make us harder in the future to pay off the national debt.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And you mentioned before the foreign governments that are buying those bonds that are basically lending us money in that way, right?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the more they do that, the more beholden we are to them.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's where our uh national security advisor, the uh chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at one point said that the na the biggest threat to national security is our national debt.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it's because our adversaries are the ones buying up that debt, and they're the ones that then get to put pressure on us for what we're gonna they want us to do and how they want us to behave.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_03: And uh one of the biggest issues also that I I went to my my Japanese buddy, Mr.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_03: Ai, and he pointed out that uh AI, hello.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_03: And uh he he mentioned about economic distortions from the from the national debt.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_03: Here you now you have capital that's being spent to pay off the national debt rather than capital being put back in industry to create jobs, to to improve the economy.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_03: It it's it's a it's a destruction.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_03: What about my roads?
• 26:19
  unknown: Yeah.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_03: Who's gonna build the roads, right?
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: And when when we again, once government gets involved in a market, it distorts that market.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: You don't really know what the demand is if government is creating a false demand for this.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we've talked about this a little bit with um uh education, right?
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: So when those education loans all got backed, then it was, well, now the the universities can raise the prices because there's this like endless supply of money with these education loans.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: The same thing happened in the housing market when they create uh Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack and they start backing these housing loans, FHA loans.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: They create they made money available, cheap money available, so that people could buy houses, housing prices go up.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: That combined with this shortage as people are anyway, but that we'll do a whole other episode on housing, but like that's again the government, you know, getting in there and distorting that market.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: They did the same thing with Medicare.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: Government gets in there, Medicare starts setting all these prices and setting all these what we will pay for and what we won't pay for, and it's distorted the health care market.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: Every time government goes into a market, it distorts that market.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the Federal Reserve is just a uh an example of them distorting the capital markets.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, one of our uh greatest economic uh collapses that we had was the one Fannie Mae the bonds, remember the Fannie Mae bonds and Freddie Mac bonds?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_03: That caused a very big uh economic crisis and uh a lot of people lost their homes because the government, again, subsidized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_03: And whenever the government interferes in the marketplace, bad things happen.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, education, you mentioned education.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_03: Why in the world where in the Constitution does it say that the federal government is responsible for educating our children?
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_03: I I can't find it.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's a it's a commodity, it's a service, and it should be just run by the by the market, by the market, free market.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_03: And we have a without government interference.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: We have a respect, I think, for generations now that an educated populace is what we want.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: We want people to have basic understanding, basic skills.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like I think as a value in our country, we all value that.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: But that doesn't necessarily mean that we should be supporting an infrastructure that is underperforming, right?
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_03: So we send our kids to government schools where basically they they're indoctrinated rather than educated.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_03: There's a big difference between indoctrination and education.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_03: And yes, we do need skilled Americans in especially in today's economy, highly technical economy.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_03: You need highly highly skilled people.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think you're gonna get them out of your traditional government schools.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_06: Well, not just technical, but also we need welders.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_06: We need people who can, you know, do the skilled labor, skilled labor.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the so for me on the education side, the national level, and this goes it's like everything else.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's this pattern here where there are companies that want to sell more product, so they get to they get together with the congressman and they and they start creating these regulations or these agencies, they start selling their product into these agencies, and and the Department of Education at the national level is an example of that, where you have this trying to nationalize education, trying to standardize education, and you have these vendors like the College Board that are selling their services in through the Department of Education.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the College Board runs like the SAT test, they run the AP programs, like, but they're a vendor.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: They're a company that is making money off the federal government, and they have so distorted our education market that like now you're seeing students graduating with like a 5.2 GPA and these kinds of things because they're getting all these extra points.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: Once they've said, like, oh, my daughter just graduated high school.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: She has so many classmates that have graduated with these massive number of AP credits.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I asked one of them who was taking in, she's showing up to college as a sophomore.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I asked her, like, well, that's great.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how long will it take you to graduate?
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's still gonna take four years because the universities have gotten wise to this, right?
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so they up the degree requirements, they add more credits you have to have.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like they they know they want you here for four years, they want you to pay your tuition for four years.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: So the whole system got totally rigged from that national level where the Department of Education decided they were gonna standardize education.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: And and to your exact point, Hof, we've got a this this sense of indoctrination, not even just at like the idea level, but like at the systemic level.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: There is a system here, and you have to follow the system.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't work for everybody, which is why we don't have as many welders as we need or as many electricians as we need.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_06: And I the Babylon Bee had this hilarious meme.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_06: It was uh proud parents with the graduate helping him sound out his diploma.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I saw that.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: I saw that.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: That was really funny.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_03: I'm on a six-month waiting list just to get my house pressure washed.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_03: That's how bad it is for skilled people.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, and we need entrepreneurs, we need people building businesses, and we need people who are seeing a need in the world around them and filling that need.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't even create that kind of education where people understand how do I find what people need and how do I create value in that space.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: We're not teaching kids that basic, that, that basic language.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_03: Well, thank you very much for being a guest on Conversations with the Hoff, Dr.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_03: Whitner.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and uh your uh your your focus on the national debt is very apropos, and uh more and more Americans need to hear hear you talk.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_03: I appreciate that.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know, politicians have always warned us about existential threats to our American life: global warming, rise of socialism, nuclear proliferation, reliance on fossil fuels, ad nausea, ad nausea.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_03: Hopefully, our listening audience can agree that a more immediate threat to our American way of life is the rapidly increasing national debt.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_03: Most of us limited government types would summarize the issue this way: the national debt is not just a financial problem, it is a mechanism that allows government to spend beyond what citizens would voluntarily fund while shifting costs to future taxpayers and increasing the risks of higher taxes, inflation, and economic stagnation.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_03: So I have a a motto that most people that listen to Conversations with the Hoff know that I'm for less government, more freedom.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_03: But it could also be less government, more financial accountability.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_03: Amen, brother.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_03: So thank you, Dr.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_03: Whitner, for being a guest on today's show, and thank our valued listeners for tuning into this episode of Conversations with the Hoff.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_03: And now a word from our glorious leader, the executive producer of Liberty Crack Media, Tripp Detmering.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_06: And if you want to find out more about this fantastic candidate, go to the show notes.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_06: We'll have links to her campaign page.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_06: And hey, you might even want to uh donate, talk about finances.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_06: And uh speaking of donating, uh, this month we at Liberty Crack Media have a tin cup in hand and are trying to get money ourselves because liberty comes at a cost, and so does uh, I guess, uh platforms, microphones, and recording equipment, along with Haas Gummies.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_06: Yeah, my gummies.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_06: Don't forget my gummies.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_06: I will not forget your gummies.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_06: Uh so this entire month of June, if you go to libertycrackmedia.com and go to Project 2027 and hit that uh page, you'll see a donate link, and we would really appreciate if you did.
• 33:56
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• 33:58
  SPEAKER_06: We'll probably give you a little free gift if uh if you decide to give us some some um a little bit of yours.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_06: And um also we want to let people know that on the Sunday, the 14th, Flag Day.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_06: Now, I know everybody's got their flag day uh trees up and the flag day gifts under the the tree, but if you have time, tune in to our our little mini uh YouTube marathon, yeah, from 10 to 6.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_06: And um we are going to be having a lot of mayhem with the microphone monkeys.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_06: We're gonna have a lot of huffing and puffing and gummy chewing from the Hoff.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_06: And uh, we might even have uh some special guests and special call-ins, special call-outs, and I wouldn't even be surprised if we don't hear from the candidate herself.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_06: So uh anyway, join us with the fun and tune in next week for another adventurous conversations with the hoff.
• 34:55
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