[00:00:04] Broadcasting live from atop the Rocky Mountains, the crossroads of the West, you are listening to the Liberty Roundtable Radio Talk Show.
[00:00:27] Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here. This is the Liberty Roundtable, well, radio TV talk show. Sam is experiencing some lovely technical difficulties at this moment. I am Kurt Crosby. Sam and I have worked together for 30 plus years in the broadcast world and we appreciate you being alongside.
[00:00:56] We're thankful for your accompaniment, your participation in whatever way you choose. Also, we want to thank those behind the scenes, you know, that are working on the tech, whether it's Zach or Jay or Michael, you know, wherever they are. Thank you for being there while we exercise our vocal cords.
[00:01:23] We've, I noticed a little earlier, a truth social from President Trump. He said, CNBC incorrectly reported that the great Jensen Huang of Nvidia was not invited to the incredible gathering of the world's greatest businessmen slash women proudly going to China. In actuality, Jensen is currently on Air Force One.
[00:01:53] And unless I ask him to leave, he says, which is highly unlikely, CNBC's reporting is incorrect or as they say in politics, fake news. It is an honor to have Jensen, Elon, Tim Apple, Larry Fink, Stephen Schwartzman, Kelly Ortberg. It says Boeing in parentheses after him. So many of these guys never heard of.
[00:02:21] Then you've got David Solomon, Larry Culp, Jane Fraser, Sanjay Mehrotra from Micron, Cristiano Amon from Qualcomm, and many others journeying to the great country of China,
[00:02:40] where I will be asking President Xi, a leader of extraordinary distinction, to open up China so that these brilliant people can work their magic and help bring the people's republic to an even higher level. In fact, I promise, says President Trump and his true social, that when we are together, which will be in a matter of hours, I will make that my very first request.
[00:03:08] I have never seen or heard of any idea that would be more beneficial to our incredible countries. President D. Donald J. Trump. Well, ladies and gentlemen, there are many things going on. Some of the other things, of course, that have hit the news, you've got your big, you know, producer price index, and some of the reports about inflation are hitting some higher notes.
[00:03:38] Of course, most of that has to do with your Iran situation with the Strait of Hormuz. I think a lot of that is being taken care of, or I guess you'd say worked out, as so many of these other opportunities,
[00:03:57] whether it's Venezuela or the American energy, what would you say, giant being released or opened up to the world. There's so many options, and as the God in heaven says, the earth has enough in despair.
[00:04:22] If we will only, I guess you would say, keep his commandments. And of course, that has to do with some basic things to be followed. Some of the other instances Sam mentioned to me or sent me, I'll read them to you, some of these other options while they're working on getting Sam back and available for you.
[00:04:51] I know you don't really want to listen to just me today. But he sent over several of these other ideas about some of the other headlines. There's so many different things happening, and of course, the world of gerrymandering,
[00:05:12] and I know that's a lovely term you really enjoy, but Sam said to bring up the fact that inflation is climbing to the highest level since 2023. Of course, that's only three years ago, I guess. You've got the honest money report that normally goes on within this hour.
[00:05:36] You've got gold at $4,700 an ounce, silver right at $86. U.S. inflation reportedly hit 3.8% in April, driven largely, Sam's notes say, largely by rising energy costs tied to the global conflict and supply instability. Producer inflation jumps to highest levels since 2022.
[00:06:07] That's the April producer price index rose 1.4% monthly and 6% annually as fuel transportation and food costs increase nationwide. Looks like small businesses are beginning to seek refunds from the struck-down tariffs.
[00:06:31] U.S. Customs and Border Protection started processing refund requests tied to the tariffs, which are the tariffs, which are the tariffs, which are the tariffs, which are the tariffs, which are the tariffs, and the tariffs, and the tariffs. That's the Supreme Court. You've got Kevin Warsh was confirmed by the Senate in a 54-45 vote to replace Jerome Powell
[00:06:57] as Federal Reserve Chair amid ongoing inflation and market volatility. I say just replace the Federal Reserve with nothing, but anyway. A federal court blocks Trump's global tariffs as illegal. A federal trade court ruled that President Trump exceeded his authority
[00:07:22] by imposing new 10% global tariffs under emergency powers law. Isn't it amazing how many of these federal judges just make themselves president? President Trump arrived in Beijing, as we mentioned before, for talks with the Chinese President Xi Jinping. They're going to talk about trade and, of course, a number of other issues,
[00:07:52] Taiwan, arms sales, artificial intelligence, and the Iran conflict. Xi has told Trump that mishandling of Taiwan could spark a conflict, according to KSL.com. Florida is expected to shut down the beloved alligator Alcatraz. That's the detention center that they put together there.
[00:08:22] They're supposed to shut it down by June. Federal and state officials are reportedly preparing to close the Florida Everglades' immigration detention facility after rising operation costs, vendor payment problems, and ongoing legal and environmental challenges, with the detainees expected to be moved to other centers in coming weeks.
[00:08:52] Kind of wonder if they'll move them to Guantanamo, or as they say, Gitmo. Senate fails to pass resolutions limiting U.S. military action against Iran. I'd hope the Senate would just get to work on that Save America plan, but anyway, we'll see if that ever happens. A Senate War Powers resolution aimed at restricting U.S. involvement.
[00:09:19] That's what this resolution was, and it failed by a 49 to 50 vote after, they say, bipartisan debate over the expanding conflict. The Supreme Court is weighing a case that could restrict nationwide telehealth and mail access to the,
[00:09:44] now that's not mail like A-L-E-S-M-A-I-L, access to the abortion drug Mifacristone. Mifacristone. You know, isn't it wonderful to have those kind of things available? Then you've got another piece in the headlines, White House expands Medicaid fraud enforcement efforts.
[00:10:09] Now, I'll tell you what, if you want to find an industry that's wide open for a lot more workers, that would be one. A lot of Medicaid fraud, et cetera, out there available, I'm sure. But anyway, the Trump administration announced new Medicaid fraud audits while delaying $1.3 billion in the California Medicaid reimbursement pending review.
[00:10:39] Yeah, that's a good thing to review right out of existence. Medicare freezes enrollment of new home health care providers. Federal officials will be right back, ladies and gentlemen. And thank you for being right here alongside the team. Why don't we say to the government writ large that they have to spend a little bit less? Anybody ever had less money this year than you had last?
[00:11:08] Anybody ever having a 1% pay cut? You deal with it. That's what government needs, a 1% pay cut. If you take a 1% pay cut across the board, you have more than enough money to actually pay for the disaster relief. But nobody's going to do that because they're fiscally irresponsible. Who are they? Republicans. Who are they? Democrats. Who are they? Virtually the whole body is careless and reckless with your money. So the money will not be offset by cuts anywhere.
[00:11:37] The money will be added to the debt, and there will be a day of reckoning. What's the day of reckoning? The day of reckoning may well be the collapse of the stock market. The day of reckoning may be the collapse of the dollar. When it comes, I can't tell you exactly, but I can tell you it has happened repeatedly in history when countries ruin their currency. Are you watching what's happening in our country and asking, what can I do? Join the John Birch Society in Salt Lake Citigroup June 6th for a powerful one-day conference.
[00:12:07] The day includes a host of respected speakers, two meals, and meaningful connections. You'll gain clarity on the issues and walk away with practical steps you can take to your community. Reserve your seat today at JBS.org forward slash SLC26. That's JBS.org forward slash SLC26.
[00:12:27] Back with you live, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Sam Bushman. I've got Kurt Crosby with me. Thank heavens for Kurt taking over the broadcast. I don't know what on earth is happening that did some upgrades to one of our systems, and it's caused us all kinds of grief. I'll try to get that fixed, and I don't know what on earth is going on.
[00:12:55] Sorry, no video today for me, but at least you got Kurt's beautiful face. And that's what's important anyway. Thank you so much for holding down the fort, Kurt, on this inflation discussion. I want to kind of talk about this because I really believe the inflation is caused not by the tariffs, but by the fact that we have an internal IRS and an external IRS. When you put those two together, it's dangerous. I support the tariffs.
[00:13:19] I support President Trump 100% in his focus on the tariffs because I think it's the proper role of government and the way our founders intended to pay for the proper role of government. I wish we would do two things. Number one, I wish Congress would have the guts to follow and back and support President Trump. Then we wouldn't have all these whacked out court cases attacking Trump and shutting down his ability to do tariffs. They are constitutional, but it is true that Congress needs to be involved. And in my view, their derelict and their duty is the big problem.
[00:13:48] So we need Congress to back the president. And then we need to get rid of the internal revenue service. That would be one of the biggest benefits if we could do so. It would be a huge win before the midterms. It would back President Trump. Congress would get a board. We would set a standard. And we wouldn't have these crazy inflationary situations. Now, I agree that we need to get rid of the Federal Reserve, too. That's a whole other topic. But at the end of the day, these things would make a big difference. If Congress would back President Trump, the courts wouldn't be able to stop President Trump.
[00:14:15] If we got rid of the internal IRS, we wouldn't have double jeopardy, if you will, or two taxes on the American people. Kurt, your thoughts? Well, I couldn't agree more, Sam. I mean, as they say, the Federal Reserve is, well, not federal. It needs to just go away. It got started in 1913, ladies and gentlemen. The reason the number 13 is what you'd call an unlucky number. Boy, that year was a rough one.
[00:14:44] We had that in the Federal Reserve. We had the 16th Amendment, which they say allows for the income tax, which, you know, those two big volumes of books that I sell called The Law That Never Was, and the law that never was outlined in detail, how the states didn't ratify that properly.
[00:15:06] And then at the same time, in that same year, we got the 17th Amendment that moved the senators from being chosen by the state legislators to literally them being elected by the local citizenry. Boy, that was a rough year, huh, Sam? And not only would that have helped the states have a seat at the table, a lot of the states could have really helped with the economy there
[00:15:34] because the senators would be listening to the states, and the states would be saying, hey, you know what? We need these tariff abilities. I think tariffs are one of the proper roles of government. Look, think about tariffs for a minute, ladies and gentlemen. They can be small by nature. They can be across the board. They're invisible to the public if they're not very big.
[00:15:55] They don't require any personal, you know, Sam doesn't have to give his Social Security number or track all of his assets or track all of his sales or do anything goofy, you know, track miles on my car and just harass me to death. None of that has to happen. Tariffs just simply put a little blip on there and boom, and it makes sure that we can, one, pay for the proper role of limited government without violating any of my privacy.
[00:16:20] And then secondly, the benefit of it at Curt is it helps us then regulate the foreign affair commerce, which I think is the president's responsibility if Congress backed him in this, where he can basically say, listen, so-and-so is a bad actor. We're going to have an increased tariff on them because they're dumping products on the market. Their governments are subsidizing. They're not playing fair in a fair free market playing field. And we want supply and demand. We don't want governments dumping or causing these problems.
[00:16:47] And so it's a way to level the playing field for the American people, and it's a way that we don't have to spy on each of us as Americans. I mean, the tariffs are brilliant when done right. President Trump is right on this one. But Congress simply is, I don't know what on earth they're doing, except for going on vacation. They need to support the president and keep the courts out of it. I think that's really – if I were to point to a single economic problem right now of all the different things we face, I mean the IRS is a problem, the Federal Reserve is a problem, I get all that.
[00:17:16] But if there's one thing I think this is it, Congress needs to back the president and stable the marketplace, stabilize the marketplace and bring in tariff dollars. And then, hey, let's start cutting taxes on the other side of the equation. I think if they were to take action and do that before the midterms, it would be a landslide in Trump's party's defense. And I'm not really a party guy, but I'm just saying it would change the game, Kurt. Well, I couldn't agree more, Sam.
[00:17:41] And I know that behind the scenes you were working frantically to get things connected, so I'm not sure if you heard it. But President Trump did send a truth earlier kind of talking about his flight over to China. And he mentioned that he said CNBC incorrectly reported that the great Jensen Huang of NVIDIA
[00:18:09] was not invited to the incredible gathering of the world's greatest businessmen, slash women, proudly going to China. In actuality, Jensen is currently on Air Force One. And unless I ask him to leave, which is highly unlikely, CNBC's reporting is incorrect, or as they say in politics, fake news.
[00:18:35] It is an honor to have Jensen, Elon, it says Tim Cook, I guess that means Tim Cook from Apple, Larry Fink, Stephen Schwartzman, Kelly Ortberg, it says in parentheses Boeing, Brian Sykes in parentheses Cargill, Jane Fraser in parentheses Citigroup, I guess that's Citigroup Corp,
[00:19:00] Larry Culp, GE Aerospace, David Solomon, Goldman Sachs, Sanjay Mehrotra from Micron, Cristiano Amon from Qualcomm, and many others journeying to the great country of China, where I will be asking President Xi, a leader of extraordinary distinction, to open up China so that these brilliant people can work their magic
[00:19:29] and help bring the People's Republic to an even higher level. In fact, I promise that when we are together, which will be in a matter of hours, I will make that my very first request. I have never seen or heard of any idea that would be more beneficial to our incredible countries, President Donald J. Trump. Now, the interesting thing about that meeting, Kurt, is this is a super high-tech of all high-techs.
[00:19:58] I mean, AI is at the center of this meeting. You've got Elon Musk and Trump who, you know, they tried to make a big deal about how they just were enemies and fighting, and I think there might have been a slight falling out, but it wasn't near like the media told us, and the fact is now Elon's with Trump once again, so are these other big tech titans and stuff like that, and, you know, you can look at it negatively or positively. You can say, hey, it's a bad deal. The big tech is going to take over. It's a meltdown. You know, I see those as possibilities for sure,
[00:20:27] and I see that wicked people certainly want to control tech, but, you know, tech is neither good nor bad, and I believe that the good people can stand up and use tech in very productive, very valuable ways. AI has some real, you know, everybody is afraid of it, just like there were the Industrial Revolution or just like some of these other things, and I get the concern. You know, I get the fear, but I think everybody just needs to calm down and realize that rarely does technology displace something overnight. Okay? Most of the time it changes.
[00:20:56] Most of the time the hype exceeds reality. Think of the dot-com bust of the 2000s. You know, hey, they thought that dot-com was just going to change the world, and then they had to take a big step back. The same thing is going to happen with AI. Look, AI has tremendous capabilities. Will it change the world? Absolutely. Will it do it overnight, though? One day you'll just wake up and there's no job for anybody and no one can work, and robots are everywhere, and humans don't really have anything to do with the superior robots.
[00:21:25] Okay, all this is a lie. It's going to take 20, 30, 40, 50 years for some of this stuff to come to fruition, and we don't know how it will unfold. But just like the Industrial Revolution, a lot of jobs will be lost. There will be a massive shift. There's no doubt about it. However, there will be a lot of new jobs and a lot of new capabilities. I mean, I've turned my IT business, for the most part, into now I'm an AI consultant primarily because of this very reason.
[00:21:50] And Claude and JetUBT and Gemini and Grok and some of these other systems, they're real, okay? But they're not going to take over the world tomorrow. Just think about your iPhone to make the point. Just one simple example. The iPhone back in what? 2027, or I'm sorry, 2007 is when it came out, I think. It's been almost 20 years. 20 years. That's a long time, right? And in those 20 years, think about it. The iPhone's evolved.
[00:22:19] It's way better than the first one for sure, right? But the fact is the iPhone's falling behind now. Right now everybody goes, Siri's no good. It doesn't have any AI capabilities. Apple got sued, $250 million lawsuit right now because they promised AI that never got delivered. They promised all these capabilities that never happened. So 20 years later, the iPhone was, you know, 20 years ago, the iPhone was supposed to take over the world. 20 years later, it's falling behind. Okay, think about this.
[00:22:47] When I was a kid in 1971 or two kind of range, we were talking about, yeah, we're going to have these cool video phones. And the joke was, hey, don't answer the phone naked because you'll, you know. And now, look, we have video phones, right? I mean, everybody's got FaceTime or an equivalent on their phone. We have video phones everywhere. But how often do people use them?
[00:23:11] I mean, you use them intentionally when you want to have a meeting face-to-face, when you want to, you know, see the grandkids, when you want to. I'm not saying they're never used, but I would say one out of ten calls is a video call at best. So the idea is, oh, once we get video calls, regular phone calls are dead. Or once we get this, that. Okay, we don't know the future. None of this stuff is true. We can't panic. We need to look at the new jobs.
[00:23:35] Think about us in the media and what we've been able to do on a thin dime because of AI, because of the lower cost of tech. So anyway, my whole point with this is that Trump going to China and trying to work with those people and trying to bring tech to the whole world in a productive, meaningful way, if we do it right, has tremendous, tremendous opportunity and value. And I pray for their success. And we'll see what happens there, ladies and gentlemen, I'll tell you. But right now, don't think it's the end of the world because of tech.
[00:24:04] Tech is neither good nor bad. It's up to us on how we use it. Hopefully, we'll use it to promote God, family, and country. For Kurt Crosby, I'm Sam Bushman. God save the republic of the United States of America.