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What does real advocacy look like when it's led by those who've lived it? In this episode of American Potential, host David From talks with Alexa Rice and Jimmie Smith—two dedicated leaders at Concerned Veterans for America—about their trip to Capitol Hill for Vets on the Hill, one of the most powerful veteran-driven advocacy events in the country. Alexa, attending for the first time, and Jimmie, a seasoned CVA leader and U.S. Army veteran, share why this mission matters. Their focus: fighting for greater health care choice through the Veterans Access Act, ensuring veterans can seek timely care in their communities if the VA falls short. They also advocate for keeping the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which supports the high rate of veteran entrepreneurship, and call for a smarter, right-sized foreign policy that puts American interests first and avoids endless wars. This episode dives deep into the personal motivations that fuel their work, the unique power of the veteran voice in policy discussions, and how real change starts with individuals sharing their stories directly with lawmakers. Whether you're a veteran, policymaker, or someone who simply cares about protecting freedom and opportunity—you'll leave inspired by what these two are doing to make a difference.
Making Billions: The Private Equity Podcast for Startup Founders and Venture Capital Investors
Send us a text"RAISE CAPITAL LIKE A LEGEND: https://offer.fundraisecapital.co/free-ebook/"Hey, welcome to another episode of Making Billions, I'm your host, Ryan Miller and today I have my dear friend Woodie Neiss. Woodie is the managing general partner at his venture capital fund, D3VC.ai, he's also the co-architect of the Jobs Act. So what does this mean? Well, it means that Woodie understands government, private markets, and how raising capital for startups can be hard, but no longer as hard as it used to be.Subscribe on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOe79EXLDsROQ0z3YLnu1QQConnect with Ryan Miller:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rcmiller1/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/makingbillionspodcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/_MakingBillonsWebsite: https://making-billions.com/[THE GUEST]: Woodie Neiss is the managing general partner at his venture capital fund, D3VC.ai.THE HOST]: Ryan Miller is an Angel investor, former VP of Finance, CFO of an insurance company, and the founder of Fund Raise Capital, https://www.fundraisecapital.co where his strategies heEveryday AI: Your daily guide to grown with Generative AICan't keep up with AI? We've got you. Everyday AI helps you keep up and get ahead.Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the showDISCLAIMER: The information in every podcast episode “episode” is provided for general informational purposes only and may not reflect the current law in your jurisdiction. By listening or viewing our episodes, you understand that no information contained in the episodes should be construed as legal or financial advice from the individual author, hosts, or guests, nor is it intended to be a substitute for legal, financial, or tax counsel on any subject matter. No listener of the episodes should act or refrain from acting on the basis of any information included in, or accessible through, the episodes without seeking the appropriate legal or other professional advice on the particular facts and circumstances at issue from a lawyer, finance, tax, or other licensed person in the recipient's state, country, or other appropriate licensing jurisdiction. No part of the show, its guests, host, content, or otherwise should be considered a solicitation for investment in any way. All views expressed in any way by guests are their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the show or its host(s). The host and/or its guests may own some of the assets discussed in this or other episodes, including compensation for advertisements, sponsorships, and/or endorsements. This show is for entertainment purposes only and should not be used as financial, tax, legal, or any advice whatsoever.
In this episode of The Electorette, host Jen Taylor-Skinner speaks with Jessica Fulton, senior fellow with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, about the 2025 budget bill—rebranded by conservatives as the "Big Beautiful Bill"—and the devastating consequences it could have for Black households. Rooted in the Joint Center's policy brief, Centering Black Households in the 2025 Tax Debate, the conversation exposes how proposals like extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would continue to funnel wealth to high-income, disproportionately white households—while offering temporary, shallow benefits to working-class families. Jessica explains how policies that sound equitable on the surface—like tax deductions for tipped workers, child tax credits, and overtime exemptions—actually reinforce economic exclusion. Together, they explore how tax policy has long been used as a tool of racialized wealth-building and why understanding these “wonky” details is essential to building a more equitable economy. They also touch on the dangers of cutting Pell Grants, dismantling agencies that support Black-owned businesses, and using budget reconciliation to pass policies that will have generational consequences. This episode is a powerful call for greater transparency, stronger advocacy, and inclusive policymaking that truly supports all families—not just the wealthiest. Episode Chapters: (00:00) Tax Code, Wealth, and Racial Inequality The Federal Tax Code perpetuates racial inequality, with implications for Black households, through policies like the 2025 Budget Bill. (12:23) Tax Policy and Racial Disparities Changes to child tax credit privilege higher-income households, exclude poorest families, and perpetuate systemic inequities. (23:56) Tax Policy and Worker Income Nature's financial burdens on low-income workers, tax treatment of tips and overtime pay, and erosion of worker protections. (27:28) Tax Policies and Working Class Disadvantages Tax policies can privilege certain workers, have political motivations, and create disparities between demographic groups. (39:47) Tax Code and Racial Disparities Examining how race affects taxation and economic disparities, and the importance of understanding and challenging these systems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to the Know Your Numbers REI Podcast! In this episode, host Chris McCormack dives deep into the latest developments surrounding the proposed "one big beautiful bill" currently making its way through the Senate.Join us as we explore the implications of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, focusing on key provisions like Bonus Depreciation and Opportunity Zones that could significantly impact real estate investors and taxpayers alike.Whether you're a seasoned investor or just starting out, this episode is packed with valuable information to help you navigate the ever-changing tax landscape. Don't forget to like, follow, and leave us a review if you find this content helpful!Thank you for tuning in, and let's keep moving forward together!••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••➤➤➤ To become a client, schedule a call with our team➤➤ https://www.betterbooksaccounting.co/contact••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••Connect with Chris McCormack on Social MediaFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/chrismccormackcpaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismccormackcpaInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/chrismccormackcpaJoin our Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/6384369318328034→ → → SUBSCRIBE TO BETTER BOOKS' YOUTUBE CHANNEL NOW ← ← ← https://www.youtube.com/@chrismccormackcpaThe Know Your Numbers REI podcast is for general information purposes only and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Information on the podcast may not constitute the most up-to-date legal or other information. No reader, user, or listener of this podcast should act or refrain from acting on the basis of information on this podcast without first seeking legal and tax advice from counsel in the relevant jurisdiction. Only your individual attorney and tax advisor can provide assurances that the information contained herein – and your interpretation of it – is applicable or appropriate to your particular situation. Use of, and access to, this podcast or any of the links or resources contained or mentioned within the podcast show and show notes do not create a relationship between the reader, user, or listener and podcast hosts, contributors, or guests.
Founder of the Raising Capitalists Foundation and previous co-host of The Real Estate Guys Radio show, Russell Gray, joins Keith to discuss the historical and current devaluation of the U.S. dollar, its impact on investors, and the broader economic implications. Gray highlights how the significant increase in interest rates has trapped equity in properties and affected development. He explains the shift from gold-backed currency to paper money, the role of the Federal Reserve, and the impact of the Bretton Woods Agreement. Gray emphasizes the importance of understanding macroeconomic trends and advocates for Main Street capitalism to decentralize power and promote productivity. He also criticizes the idea of housing as a human right, arguing it leads to inflation and shortages. Resources: Connect with Russell Gray to learn more about his "Raising Capitalists" project and his plans for a new show. Follow up with Russell Gray to get a copy of the Beardsley Rummel speech transcript from 1946. follow@russellgray.com Show Notes: GetRichEducation.com/558 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text FAMILY to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”. For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript: Automatically Transcribed With Otter.ai Keith Weinhold 0:01 Welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, what's the real backstory on why we have this thing called the dollar? Why it keeps getting debased? What you can do about it and when the dollar will die? It's a lesson in monetary history. And our distinguished guest is a familiar voice that you haven't heard in a while. Today on get rich education. Mid south home buyers, I mean, they're total pros, with over two decades as the nation's highest rated turnkey provider, their empathetic property managers use your ROI as their North Star. So it's no wonder that smart investors just keep lining up to get their completely renovated income properties like it's the newest iPhone. They're headquartered in Memphis and have globally attractive cash flows and A plus rating with a better business bureau and now over 5000 houses renovated. There's zero markup on maintenance. Let that sink in, and they average a 98.9% occupancy rate, while their average renter stays more than three and a half years. Every home they offer has brand new components, a bumper to bumper, one year warranty, new 30 year roofs. And wait for it, a high quality renter. Remember that part and in an astounding price range, 100 to 180k I've personally toured their office and their properties in person in Memphis, get to know Mid South. Enjoy cash flow from day one. Start yourself right now at mid southhomebuyers.com that's mid south homebuyers.com Russell Gray 1:54 You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education. Keith Weinhold 2:10 Welcome to GRE from St John's Newfoundland to St Augustine, Florida and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith weinholden. You are inside get rich education. It's 2025. The real estate market is changing. We'll get into that in future. Weeks today. Over the past 100 years plus, we've gone from sound money to Monopoly money, and we're talking about America's currency collapse. What comes next and how it affects you as both an investor and a citizen. I'd like to welcome in longtime friend of the show and someone that I've personally learned from over the years, because he's a brilliant teacher, real estate investors probably haven't heard his voice as much lately, because until last year, he had been the co host of the terrific real estate guys radio show for nearly 20 years. Before we're done today, you'll learn more about what he's doing now, as he runs the Main Street capitalist platform and is also founder of the raising capitalists foundation. Hey, it's been a few years. Welcome back to GRE Russell Gray. Russell Gray 3:19 yeah, it's fun. I actually think it's been maybe 10 years when I think about it, I remember I was at a little resort in Mexico recording with you, I think in the gym. It was just audio back then, no video. Keith Weinhold 3:24 Yeah, I remember we're trying to get the audio right. Then I think you've been here more recently than 10 years ago. But yeah, now there's this video component. I actually have to sit up straight and comb my hair. It's ridiculous. Well, Russ, you're also a buff of monetary history. And before we discuss that, talk about the state of the real estate market today, just briefly, from your vantage point. Russell Gray 1 3:55 I think the big story, and I'm probably not telling anybody anything they don't know, but the interest rate hike cycle that we went through this last round was quite a bit more substantial, I think, than a lot of people really appreciated, you know. And I started talking about that many years ago, because when you hit the zero bound and you have 6,7,8, years of interest rates below half a point, the change when they started that interest rate cycle from point two, 525 basis points all the way up to five and a quarter? That's a 20x move. And people might say, well, oh, you know, I go back to what Paul Volcker did way back in the day, when he took interest rates from eight or nine to 18. That was only a little bit more than double. Double is a far cry from 20x so we've never seen anything like that. Part of the fallout of that, as you know, is a lot of people wisely, and I was on the front end of cheerleading This is go get those loans refinanced and lock in that cheap money for as long as possible, because a loan will actually become an asset. The problem is, when you do that, you're kind of married to that property. Now it's not quite as bad. As being upside down in a property and you can't get out of it, but it's really hard to walk away from a two or 3% loan in a Six 7% market, because you really can't take your same payment and end up getting more house. And so that equity is kind of a little bit trapped, and that creates some opportunities, but I think that's been the big story, and then kind of the byproduct of the story. Second tier of the story was the impact it had on development, because it made it a lot harder for developers to develop, because their cost of funds and everything in that supply chain, food chain, you marry that to the 2020, COVID Supply Chain lockdown and that disruption, which, you know, you don't shut an economy down and just flick a switch and have it come back on. And so there's all of that. And then the third thing is just this tremendous uncertainty everybody has, because we just went from one extreme to another. And I think people, you know, they don't want to, like, rock the boat, they're going to kind of stay status quo for a little bit, whether they're businesses, whether they're homeowners, whether they're anybody out there that's thinking about moving them, unless life forces you to do it, you're going to try to stay status quo until things calm down. And I don't know how close we are to things calming down. Keith Weinhold 6:13 One word I use is normalized. Both the 30 year fixed rate mortgage and the Fed funds rate are pretty close to their long term historic average. It just doesn't feel that way, because it was that rate of increase in 2022 that caught a lot of people off guard, like you touched on Well, Russ, now that we've talked about the present day, let's go back in time, and then we'll slowly bring things up to the present day. The dollar is troubled. It's worth perhaps 3% of what it was 100 years ago, but it's still around since it was established in the Coinage Act of 1792 and it's still the world reserve currency. In fact, only three currencies have survived longer than the dollar, the British pound, the Japanese yen and the Swiss franc. So talk to us about this really relentless debasement of the dollar over time, including the creation of the Fed and the Bretton Woods Agreement and all that. Russell Gray 7:09 That's a big story, as you know, and I always like to try to break it down a little bit. One of my specialties I'd like to believe, is I speak macro and I speak Main Street. And so when I try to break macroeconomics down, I start out with, why do I even care? I mean, if I'm a main street investor, why do I even care? In 2008 as you know, is a wipeout for me. Why? Because I didn't think anything had happened in the macro I didn't think Wall Street bond market. I didn't think that affected me. One thing I really cared about was interest rates. And I had a cursory interest in the bond market. We just try to figure out where interest rates were going. But for the most part, I thought, as a main street real estate investor, I was 100% insulated. I couldn't have been more wrong, because it really does matter, because the value of the dollar, in other words, the purchasing power of the dollar, and usually you refer to that as inflation, right? If inflation is there, the dollar is losing its purchasing power, and so the higher the inflation rate, the faster you're losing that purchasing power. And you might say, well, maybe that matters to me. Maybe it does. But the people who make the money available to the mortgage community, right to the real estate community to borrow that comes out of the bond market. And so when people go to buy a bond, which is an IOU, they're going to get paid back in the currency that they lent in, in this case, dollars. And if they know, if they're making a long term investment in a long term bond, and they're going to get paid back in dollars, they're going to be worth a whole lot less when they get them back. One of the things they're going to want is compensation for that time risk, and that's called higher interest rates. Okay, so now, if you're a main street investor, and higher interest rates impact you, now you understand why you want to pay attention. Okay, so let's just start with that. And so once you understand that the currency is a derivative of money, and money used to be you mentioned the Coinage Act Keith money, which is gold, used to be synonymous with the dollar. The dollar was only a unit of measure of gold, 1/20 of an ounce. It was a unit of measure. So it's like, the way I teach people is, like, if you had a gallon of milk and you traded, I'm a farmer, and I had a lot of milk, and so everybody decided they were going to use gallons of milk as their currency. Hey, where there's a lot of gallons of milk. He's got a big refrigerator. We'll just trade gallons of milk. Hey, Keith, I really like your beef. I you know, will you sell me some, a side of beef, and I'll give you, you know, 100 gallons of milk, you know, like, Oh, that's great. Well, I can't drink all this milk, so I'm going to leave the milk on deposit at the dairy, and then later on, when I decide I want a suit of clothes, I'll say, well, that's 10 gallons of milk. So I'll give the guy 10 gallons of milk. So I just give him a coupon, a claim, a piece of paper for that gallon of milk, or 20 gallons of milk, and he can go to the dairy and pick it up, right? And so that's kind of the way the monetary system evolved, except it wasn't milk, it was gold. So now you got the dollar. Well, after a while, nobody's going to get the milk. They don't care about the milk. And so now. Now, instead of just saying, I'll give you a gallon of milk, you just say, well, I'll give you a gallon. And somebody says, Okay, that's great. I'll take a gallon. They never opened the jug up. They never realized the jug is empty. They're just trading these empty jugs that used to have milk in them. Well, that's what the paper dollar is today. It went from being a gold certificate payable to bearer on demand, a certain amount of gold, a $20 gold certificate, what looks exactly like a $20 FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE. Today they look exactly the same, except one says FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE, which is an IOU backed by nothing, and the other one said gold certificate, which was payable to bearer on demand, real money. So my point is, is he got money which is a derivative of the productivity, the beef, the soot, the milk, whatever, right? That's the real capital. The real capital is the goods and services we all want. Money is where we store the value of whatever it is we created until we want to trade it for something somebody else created later. And it used to be money and currency were one in the same, but now we've separated that. So now all we do is trade empty gallons, which are empty pieces of paper, and that's currency. So those are derivatives, and the last derivative of that chain is credit. And you had Richard Duncan on your show more than once, and he is famous for kind of having this term. We don't normally have capitalism. We have creditism, right? Everything is credit. Everything is claims on wealth, but it's not real wealth, and it's just when we look at what's going on with our current administration and the drive to become a productive rather than a financialized society, again, as part of this uncertainty that everybody has. Because this is not just a subtle little adjustment on the same course. This is like, No, we're we're going down a completely different path. But fundamentally, your system operates on this currency that is flowing through it, like the blood flowing through your body. And if the blood is bad, your body's sick. And right now, our currency is bad, and so it creates problems, not just for us, but all around the world. And now we're exacerbating that. And I'm not saying it's bad. In fact, I think it's actually it's actually good, but change is what it is, right? I mean, it can be really good to go to the gym and work out before we started recording, you talked about your commitment to fitness, and that if you stop working out, you get unfit, and it's hard to start up again. Well, we've allowed our economy to get very unfit. Now we're trying to get fit again, and it's going to be painful. We're going to be sore, but if we stick with it, I think we can actually kind of save this thing. So I don't know what that's going to mean for the dollar ultimately, or if we end up going to something else, but right now, to your point, the dollar is definitely the big dog still, but I think it's probably even more under attack today than it's ever been, and so it's just something I think every Main Street investor needs to pay attention to. Keith Weinhold 12:46 And it was really that 1913 creation of the Fed, where the Fed's mandates really didn't begin to take effect until 1914 that accelerated this slide in the dollar. Prior to that, it was really just periods of war, like, for example, the Civil War, where we had inflation rise, but then after wars abated, the dollar's strength returned, but that ceased to happen last century. Russell Gray 13:11 I think there's a much bigger story there. So when we founded the country, we established legal money in the Coinage Act of 1792 we got gold and silver and a specific unit of measure of gold, a specific unit, measure of silver was $1 and that's what money was constitutionally. Alexander Hamilton advocated for the first central bank and got it, but it was issued by Charter, which meant that it was operated by the permission of the Congress. It wasn't institutionalized. It wasn't embedded in the Constitution. It was just something that was granted, like a license. You have a charter to be able to run a bank. When that initial charter came up for renewal, Congress goes, now we're not going to renew it. Well, of course, that made the bankers really upset, because bankers have a pretty good gig, right? They get to just loan people money. They don't have to do any real work, and then they make money on just kind of arbitraging, you know, other people's money. Savers put their money in, and they borrowed the money out, and then they with fractional reserve, they're able to magnify that. So it's, it's kind of a cool gig. And so what happened? Then he had the first central bank, so then they got the second central bank, and the second central bank was also issued by charter this time when it came up for renewal, Congress goes, Yeah, let's renew it, right? Because the bankers knew we got to go buy a few congressmen if we want to keep this thing going. But President Andrew Jackson said, No, not going to happen. And it was a big battle. Is a famous quote of him just calling these bankers a brood of vipers. And I'm going to put you down. And God help me, I will, right? I mean, it was like intense fact, I do believe he got shot at one point. I think he died from lead poisoning, because he never got the bullet out. So, you know, when you go to up against the bankers, it's not pretty, but he succeeded. He was the last president that paid off all the debt, balanced budget, paid off all the debt, and we got kind of back on sound money. Well, then a little while later, said, Okay, we're going to need, like, something major, and this would. I should put on. I got my, this is my hat, right now, I'll kind of put it on. This is my, my tin foil hat. Okay? And so I put this on when I kind of go down the rabbit trail a little bit. No, I'm not saying this is what happened, but it wouldn't surprise me, right? Because I know that war is profitable, and so sometimes, you know, your comment was, hey, there's the bank, and then there was, you know, the war, or there's the war, then there's a bank, which comes first the chicken or the egg. I think there's an article where Henry Ford and Thomas Edison went to Congress. I think it was December. The article was published New York Tribune, December 4. I think 1921 you can look it up, New York Tribune, front page article Keith Weinhold 15:38 fo those of you in the audio only. Russ started donning a tin foil looking hat here about one minute ago. Russell Gray 15:45 I did, yeah, so I put it on. Just so fair warning. You know, I may go a little conspiratorial, but the reason I do that is I just, I think we've seen enough, just in current, modern history and politics, in the age of AI and software and freedom of speech and new media, there's a lot of weird stuff going on out there, but a lot of stuff that we thought was really weird a little while ago has turned out to be more true than we thought. When you look back in history, and you kind of read the official narrative and you wonder, you kind of read between the lines. You go, oh, maybe some stuff went on here. So anyway, the allegation that Ford made, smart guy, Thomas Edison, smart guy. And they go to Congress, and they go, Hey, we need to get the gold out of the banker's hands, because gold is money, and we need money not to revolve around gold, because the bankers control gold. They control the money, and they make profits, his words, not mine, by starting wars, because he was very upset about World War One, which happened. We got involved right after Fed gets formed in 1913 World War One starts in 1914 the United States sits off in the background and sells everybody, everything. It collects a bunch of gold, and then enters at the end and ends it all. And that big influx created the roaring 20s, as we all know, which ended big boom to big bust. And that cycle, which then a crisis that created, potentially a argument for why the government should have more control, right? So you kind of go down this path. So we ended up in 1865 with President Lincoln suppressing states rights and eventually creating an unconstitutional income tax and then creating an unconstitutional currency. That's what Abraham Lincoln did. And then on the back end of that, you know, it didn't end well for him, and I don't know why, but all I know is that we had a financial crisis in 1907 and the solution to that was the Aldrich plan, which was basically a monopoly on money. It's called a money trust. And Charles Lindbergh, SR was railing against it, as were many people at the time, going, No, this is terrible. So they renamed the Aldrich plan the Federal Reserve Act. And instead of going for a bank charter, they went for a constitutional amendment, and they got it in the 16th Amendment, and that's where we got the IRS. That's where we got the income tax, which was only supposed to be 7% only affect like the top one or 2% of earners, right? And that's where we got, you know, the Federal Reserve. That's where all that was born. Since that happened, to your point, the dollar has been on with a slight little rise up in the 20s, which, you know, there's a whole thing about whether that caused the crash or not. But at the end of the day, if you go look at St Louis Fed, which you go look at all the time, and you just look at the long term trend of the dollar, it's terrible. And the barometer, that's gold, right? $20 of gold in 1913 and 1933 and then 42 in 1971 or two, whatever it was, three, and then eventually as high as 850 but at the turn of the century, this century, it was $250 so at $2,500 it would have lost 90% in the 21st Century. The dollars lost 90% in the 21st Century, just to 2500 that's profound to go. That's right, it already lost more than 90% from $20 to 250 so it lost 90% and then 90% of the 10% that was left. And that's where we're at. We're worse than that. Today, no currency, as far as I understand, I've been told this. Haven't done the homework, but it's my understanding, no currency in the history of the world has ever survived that kind of debasement. So I think a lot of people who are watching are like, okay, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. And then the big question is, is when that when comes? What does the transition look like? What rises in its place? And then you look at things like a central bank digital currency, which is not like Bitcoin, it's not a crypto, it's a centrally controlled currency run by the central bank. If we get that, I would argue that's not good for privacy and security. Could be Bitcoin would be better. I would argue, could go back to gold backing, which I would say is better than what we have, or we could get something nobody's even thought of. I don't know. We don't know, but I do think we're at the end of the life cycle. Historically, all things being equal. And I think all the indication with a big run up of gold, gold is screaming something's broken. It's just screaming it right now, not just because the price is up, but who's buying it. It's just central banks. Keith Weinhold 20:12 Central banks are doing most of the buying, right? It's not individual investors going to a coin shop. So that's really screaming, telling you that people are concerned. People are losing their faith in giving loans to the United States for sure. And Russ, as we talk about gold, and it's important link to the dollar over time, you mentioned how they wanted it, to get it out of the bank's hands for a while. Of course, there was also a period of time where it was illegal for Americans to own gold. And then we had this Bretton Woods Agreement, which was really important as well, where we ended up violating promises that had to do with gold again. So can you speak to us some more about that? Because a lot of people just don't understand what happened at Bretton Woods. Russell Gray 20:56 What happened is we had the big crash in 1929 and the net result of that was, in 1933 we got executive order 6102 In fact, I have a picture of it framed, and that was in the wake of that in 1933 and so what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in signing that document, which was empowered by a previous act of Congress, basically let him confiscate all The money. It'd be like right now if, right now, you know, President Trump signed an executive order and said, You have to take all your cash, every all the cash that you have out of your wallet. You have to send it all, take it into the bank, and they're going to give you a Chuck E Cheese token, right? And if you don't do it, if you do it, it's a $500,000 fine in 10 years in prison. Right? Back then it was a $10,000 fine, which was twice the price of the average Home huge fine, plus jail time. That's how severe it was, okay? So they confiscated all the money. That happened in 33 okay? Now we go off to war, and we enter the war late again. And so we have the big manufacturing operation. We're selling munitions and all kinds of supplies to everybody, all over the world, right? And we're just raking the gold and 20,000 tons of gold. We got all the gold. We got the biggest army now, we got the biggest bomb, we got the biggest economy. We got the strongest balance sheet. Well, I mean, you know, we went into debt for the war, but, I mean, we had a lot of gold. So now everybody else is decimated. We're the big dog. Everybody knows we're the big dog. Nine states shows up in New Hampshire Bretton Woods, and they have this big meeting with the world, and they say, Hey guys, new sheriff in town. Britain used to be the world's reserve currency, but today we're going to be the world's reserve currency. And so this was the new setup. But it's okay. It's okay because our dollar is as good as gold. It's backed by gold, and so anytime you want foreign nations, you can just bring your dollars to us and we'll give you the gold, no problem. And everyone's like, okay, great. What are you going to say? Right? You got the big bomb, you got the big army. Everybody needs you for everything to live like you're not going to say no. So they said, Yes, of course, the United States immediately. I've got a speech that a guy named Beardsley Rummel did. Have you ever heard me talk about this before? Keith, No, I've never heard about this. So Beardsley Rummel was the New York Fed chair when all this was happening. And so he gave a speech to the American Bar Association in 1945 and I got a transcript of it, a PDF transcript of it from 1946 and basically he goes, Look, income taxes are obsolete. We don't need income tax anymore because we can print money, because we're off the gold standard and we have no accountability. We just admitted it, just totally admitted it, and said the only reason we have income tax is to manipulate behavior, is to redistribute wealth, is to force people to do what we want them to do, punish things and reward others, right? Just set it plain language. I have a transcript of the speech. You can get a copy of you send an email to Rummel R U, M, L@mainstreetcapitalist.com I'll get it to you. So it's really, really interesting. So he admitted it. So we went along in the 40s and the 50s, and, you know, we had the only big manufacturing you know, because everybody else is still recovering from the war. Everything been bombed to smithereens, and we're spending money and doing all kinds of stuff. And having the 50s, it was great, right, right up until the mid 60s. So the mid 60s, it's like, Okay, we got a problem. And Charles de Gaulle, who was the president of France at the time, went to a meeting. And there's a YouTube video, but you can see it, he basically told the world, hey, I don't think the United States is doing a good job managing this world's reserve currency. I don't think they've got the gold. I think they printed too much money. I think that we should start to go redeem our dollars and get the gold. That was pretty forward thinking. And he created a run on the bank. And at the same time, we passed the Coinage Act in 1965 and took all the silver out of the people's money. So we took the gold in 33 and then we took the silver in 65 right? Because we got Vietnam and the Great Society, welfare, all these things were going on in the 60s. We're just going broke. Meanwhile, our gold supply went from 20,000 tons down to eight and Richard. Nixon is like, whoa, time out. Like, this is bad. And so we had inflation in 1970 August 15, 1971 year before August 15, 1971 1970 Nixon writes an executive order and freezes all prices and all wages. It became illegal by presidential edict for a private business to give their employee a raise or to raise their prices to the customers. Keith Weinhold 25:30 It's almost if that could happen price in theUnited States of America, right? Russell Gray 25:36 And inflation was 4.4% and it was a national emergency like today. I mean, you know, a few years ago, like three or four years ago, we if we could get it down 4.4% it'd be Holly. I'd be like a celebration. That was bad. And so that's what happened. So a year later, that didn't work. It was a 90 day thing. It was a disaster. And so in a year later, August 15, 1971 Nixon came on live TV after Gunsmoke. I think it was, and I was old enough I'm watching TV on a Sunday night I watched it. Wow. So I live, that's how old I am. So it's a lot of this history, not the Bretton Woods stuff, but from like 1960 2,3,4, forward. I remember I was there. Keith Weinhold 26:13 Yeah, that you remember the whole Nixon address on television. We should say it for the listener that doesn't know. Basically the announcement Nixon made, he said, was a temporary measure, is that foreign nations can no longer redeem their dollars for gold. He broke the promise that was made at Bretton Woods in about 1945 Russell Gray 26:32 Yeah. And then gold went from $42 up to 850 and a whole series of events that have led to where we're at today were put in place to cover up the fact that the dollar was failing. We had climate emergency. We were headed towards the next global Ice Age. We had an existential threat in two different diseases that hit one right after the other. First one was the h1 n1 flu, swine flu, and then the next thing was AIDS. And so we had existential pandemic, two of them. We also had a oil shortage crisis. We were going to run out of fossil fuel by the year 2000 we had to do all kinds of very public, visible, visceral things that we would all see. You could only buy gas odd even days, like, if your license plate ended in an odd number, you could go on these days, and if it ended on an even number, you could go on the other days. And so we had that. We lowered our national speed limit down to 55 miles an hour. We created the EPA and all these different agencies under Jimmy Carter to try to regulate and manage all of this crisis. Prior to that, Nixon sent Kissinger over to China, and we opened up trade relations. And we'd been in Vietnam to protect the world from communism because it was so horrible. And then in the wake of that, we go over to Communist China, Chairman Mao and open up trade relations. Why we needed access to their cheap labor to suck up all the inflation. And we went over to the Saudis, and we cut the petro dollar deal. Why? Because we needed the float. We needed some place for all these excess dollars that we had created to get sucked up. And so they got sucked up in trading the largest commodity in the world, energy. And the deal was, hey, Saudis, here's the deal. You like your kingdom? Well, we got the big bomb. We got the big army. You're going to rule the roost in the in the Middle East, and we'll protect you. All you got to do is make sure you sell all your oil in dollars and dollars only. And they're like, Well, what if we're selling oil to China, or what if we're selling oil to Japan? Can they pay in yen? Nope, they got to sell yen. Buy dollars. Well, what do we do with all these dollars? Buy our treasuries. Okay, so what if I got this? Yeah, and so that was the petrodollar system. And the world looked at everything went on, and the world is like, Hmm, the United States coming back to Europe, and Charles de Gaulle, they're like, the United States is not handling this whole dollar thing real well. We need an alternative. What if all of us independent nations in Europe got together and created a common currency? We don't want to be like one country, like the United States, but we want to be like an economic union. So let's create a current let's call it the euro. And they started that process in the 70s, but they didn't get it done till 99 and so they get it done in 99 as soon as they get it done, this guy named Saddam Hussein goes, Hey, I'm now the big dog here. I got the fourth largest army in the world. I'm here in, you know, big oil producing nation. Let's trade in the euro. Let's get off the dollar. Let's do oil in the euro. And he's gone. I'm not sure I should put my hat back on. I'm not sure, but somehow we went into Afghanistan and took a hard left and took this guy out. Keith Weinhold 29:44 Some credence to this. Yes, yeah, so. But with that said, Russell Gray 29:47 you know, we ended up with the Euro taking about 20% of the global trade market from the United States, which is about where it sits today. And the United States used to be up over 80% and now we're down below 60% still. The Big Dog by triple and the euro is not in a position to supplant the US, but I think China, whose claim to fame is looking at other people's technology and models and copying it, looked at what the United States did to become the dominant economic force, and I think they've systematically been copying it. I wrote a report on this way back in 2013 when I started really paying attention to it and began to chronicle all the things that they were doing, this big D dollarization movement that I think still has legs. It's the BRICS movement. It's all the central banks buying gold. It's the bilateral trade agreements where people are doing business outside the dollar. There's been not just that, but also putting together the infrastructure, right? The Asian Infrastructure Bank is an alternative to the IMF looking, if you have you read Confessions of an economic hitman. No. Okay, so this is a guy that used to work in the government, I think, CIA or something, and he would go down and he'd cut deals with leaders of countries to get them to borrow from the United States to put in key infrastructure so they could trade with the US. And then, of course, if they defaulted, then the US owned that in the infrastructure. You can look it up. His name is Perkins, right. Look it up confessions of economic hit now, but you see China doing the same thing. China's got their Belt and Road Initiative. And you go through, and if you want to trade with China on that route, you have traded, you're gonna have to have infrastructure. You can eat ports. You're gonna need terminals for distribution. But you, Oh, you don't have the money. We'll loan it to you, and we'll loan it to you and you want. Now we're creating demand for you want, and we also are enslaving borrower servant to the lender. We're beginning to enslave these other nations under the guise of helping them by financing their growth so they can do business with us. It's the same thing the United States did and Shanghai Gold Exchange, as opposed to the London Bullion exchange. So all of the key pieces of infrastructure that were put in place to facilitate Western hegemony in the financial markets the Chinese have been systematically putting in place with bricks, and so there's a reason we're in this big trade war right now. We recognize that they had started to get in a position where they were actually a real threat, and we got to cut their legs out from underneath them before they get any stronger. Again, I should put my hat back on. Nobody's calling me up and telling me, I'm just reading between the lines. Sure, Keith Weinhold 32:23 there certainly are more competitors to the dollar now. And can you imagine what rate of inflation that we would have had if we had not outsourced our labor and productivity over to a low wage place like China in the east? Russ and I have been talking about the long term debasement of the dollar and why. More on that when we come back, including what Russ is up to today. You're listening to get rich education. Our guest is Russell Gray. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold, the same place where I get my own mortgage loans is where you can get yours. Ridge lending group and MLS, 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than anyone because they specialize in income properties. They help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your pre qual and even chat with President Chaley Ridge personally while it's on your mind, start at Ridge lendinggroup.com that's Ridge lendinggroup.com. You know what's crazy? Your bank is getting rich off of you. 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Get rich education with Keith Weinhold, don't quit your Daydream. Keith Weinhold 34:52 Welcome back to get rich education. We're talking with the main street capitalists Russell gray about this long term debasement of the dollar. It's an. Inevitable. It's one of the things we actually can forecast with pretty good predictability that the dollar will continue to debase. It's one of the few almost guarantees that we have in investing. So we can think about how we want to play that Russ one thing I wonder about is, did we have to completely de peg the dollar from gold? Couldn't we have just diluted it where we could instead say, Well, hey, now, instead of just completely depegging the dollar from gold, we could say, well, now it takes 10 times as many dollars as it used to to redeem it for an ounce of gold. Did it make it more powerful that we just completely de pegged it 100% Russell Gray 35:36 it would disempower the monopoly. Right? In other words, I think that the thing from the very beginning, was scripted to disconnect from the accountability of gold, which is what sound money advocates want. They want some form of independent Accountability. Gold is like an audit to a financial system. If you're the bankers and you're running the program, the last thing in the world you want is a gold standard, because it limits your ability to print money out of thin air and profit from that. So I don't think the people who are behind all of this are, in no way, shape or form, interested in doing anything that's going to limit their power or hold them accountable. They want just the opposite. I think if they could wave a magic wand and pick their solution to the problem, it would be central bank digital currency, which would give them ultimate control. Yeah. And it wouldn't surprise me if we maybe, perhaps, were on a path where some crises were going to converge, whether it's opportunistic, meaning that the crisis happened on its own, and quote Rahm Emanuel and whoever he was quoting, you know, never let a good crisis go to waste, and you're just opportunistic, or, you know, put the conspiracy theory hat on, and maybe these crises get created in order to facilitate the power grab. I don't know. It really doesn't matter what the motives are or how it happens at the end of the day, it's what happens. It happened in 33 it happened in 60. In 71 it's what happens. And so it's been a systematic de pegging of any form of accountability. I mean, we used to have a budget ceiling. We used to talk about now it's just like, it's routine. You blow right through it, right, right. There's you balance. I mean, when's the last time you even had a budget? Less, less, you know, much less anything that looked like a valid balanced budget amendment. So I think there's just no accountability other than the voting booth. And, you know, I think maybe you could make the argument that whether you like Trump or not, the public's apparent embrace of him, show you that the main street and have a lot of faith in Main Street. I think Main Street is like, you know what? This is broken. I don't know what's how to fix it, but somebody just needs to go in and just tear this thing down and figure out a new plant. Because I think if you anybody paying attention, knows that this perpetual debasement, which is kind of the theme of the show is it creates haves and have nots. Guys like you who understand how to use real estate to short the dollar, especially when you marry it to gold, which is one of my favorite strategies to double short the dollar, can really magnify the power of inflation to pull more wealth onto your balance sheet. Problem is the people who aren't on that side of the coin are on the other side of the coin, and so the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. Well, the first order of business in a system we can't control is help as many people be on the rich get richer. That's why we had the get rich show, right? Let's help other people get rich. Because if I'm the only rich guy in the room, all the guns are pointed at me, right? I wanted everybody as rich as possible. I think Trump and Kiyosaki wrote about that in their book. Why we want you to be rich, right? When everybody's prospering, it's it's better, it's safer, you have people to trade with and whatnot, but we have eviscerated the middle class because industry has had to go access cheap labor markets in order to compensate for this inflation. And you know, you talk about the Fed mandate, which is 2% inflation, price inflation, 2% so if you say something that costs $1 today, a year from now, is going to cost $1 too, you think, well, maybe that's not that bad. But here's the problem, the natural progression of Business and Technology is to lower the cost, right? So you have something cost $1 today, and because somebody's using AI and internet and automation and robots and all this technology, right? And the cost, they could really sell it for 80 cents. And so the Fed looks at and goes, Let's inflate to $1.02 that's not two cents of inflation. That's 22 cents of inflation. And so there's hidden inflation. The benefits of the gains in productivity don't show up in the CPI, but it's like deferred maintenance on an apartment building. You can make your cash flow look great if you're not setting anything aside for the inevitable day when that roof is going to go out and that parking lot is going to need to be repaved, right? And you don't know how far out you are until you get there and you're like, wow, I'm really short, and I think that we have been experiencing for decades. The theft of the benefit of our productivity gains, and we're not just a little bit out of position. We're way out of position. That's Keith Weinhold 40:07 a great point. Like I had said earlier, imagine what the rate of inflation would be if we hadn't outsourced so much of our labor and productivity to low cost China. And then imagine what the rate of inflation would be as well, if you would factor in all of this increased productivity and efficiency, the natural tendencies of which are to make prices go lower as society gets more productive, but instead they've gone higher. So when you adjust for some of these factors, you just can't imagine what the true debased purchasing power of the dollar is. It's been happening for a long time. It's inevitable that it's going to continue to happen in the future. So this has been a great chat about the history and us understanding what the powers that be have done to debase our dollar. It's only at what rate we don't know. Russ, tell us more about what you're doing today. You're really out there more as a champion for Main Street in capitalism. Russell Gray 41:04 I mean, 20 years with Robert and the real estate guys, and it was fantastic. I loved it. I went through a lot, obviously, in 2008 and that changed me a little bit. Took me from kind of being a blocking and tackling, here's how you do real estate, and to really understanding macro and going, you know, it doesn't matter. You can do like I did, and you build this big collection. Big collection of properties and you lose it all in a moment because you don't understand macro. So I said, Okay, I want to champion that cause. And so we did that. And then we saw in the 2012 JOBS Act, the opportunity for capital raisers to go mainstream and advertise for credit investors. And I wrote a report then called the new law breaks Wall Street monopoly. And I felt like that was going to be a huge opportunity, and we pioneered that. But then after my late wife died, and I had a chance to spend some time alone during COVID, and I thought, life is short. What do I really want to accomplish before I go? And then I began looking at what was going on in the world. I see now a couple of things that are both opportunities and challenges or causes to be championed. And one is the mega trend that I believe the world is going you know, some people call it a fourth turning whatever. I don't consider that kind of we have to fall off a cliff as Destiny type of thing to be like cast in stone. But what I do see is that people are sick and tired of monopolies. We're sick and tired of big tech, we're sick and tired of big media, we're sick and tired of big government. We're sick and tired of big corporations, we don't want it, and big banks, right? So you got the rise of Bitcoin, you got people trying to get out from underneath the Western hegemony, as we've been talking about decentralization of everything. Our country was founded on the concept of decentralization, and so people don't understand that, right? It used to be everything was centralized. All powers in the king. Real Estate meant royal property. That's what real estate it's not like real asset, like tangible it's royal estate. It's royal property. Everything belonged to the king, and you just got to work it like a serf. And then you got to keep 75% in your produce, and you sent 25% you sent 25% through all the landlords, the land barons, and all the people in the hierarchy that fed on running things for the king, but you didn't own anything. Our founder set that on, turn that upside down, and said, No, no, no, no, no, it's not the king that's sovereign. It's the individual. The individual is sovereign. It isn't the monarchy, it's the individual states. And so we're going to bring the government, small. The central government small has only got a couple of obligations, like protect the borders, facilitate interstate commerce, and let's just have one common currency so that we can do business together. Other than that, like, the state's just going to run the show. Of course, Lincoln kind of blew that up, and it's gotten a lot worse after FDR, so I feel like we're under this big decentralization movement, and I think Main Street capitalism is the manifestation of that. If you want to decentralize capitalism, the gig economy, if you want to be a guy like you, and you can run your whole business off your laptop with a microphone and a camera, you know, in today's day and age with technology, people have tasted the freedom of decentralization. So I think the rise of the entrepreneur, I think the ability to go build a real asset portfolio and get out of the casinos of Wall Street. I think right now, if we are successful in bringing back these huge amounts of investment, Trump's already announced like two and a half or $3 trillion of investment, people are complaining, oh, the world is selling us. Well, they're selling stocks and they're selling but they're putting the money actually into creating businesses here in the United States that's going to create that primary driver, as you well know, in real estate, that's going to create the secondary and tertiary businesses, and the properties they're going to use all kinds of Main Street opportunity are going to grow around that. I lived in Silicon Valley, when a company would get funded, it wasn't just a company that prospered, it was everything around that company, right? All these companies. I remember when Apple started. I remember when Hewlett Packard, it was big, but it got a lot bigger, right there. I watched all that happen in Silicon Valley. I think that's going to happen again. I think we're at the front end of that. And so that's super exciting. Wave. The second thing that is super important is this raising capitalist project. And the reason I'm doing it is because if we don't train our next generation in the principles of capitalism and the freedom that it how it decentralizes Their personal economy, and they get excited about Bitcoin, but that's not productive. I'm not putting it down. I'm just saying it's not productive. You have to be productive. You want to have a decentralized currency. Yes, you want to decentralize productivity. That's Main Street capitalism. If kids who never get a chance to be in the productive economy get to vote at 1819, 2021, 22 before they've ever earned a paycheck, before they have any idea, never run a business. Somebody tells them, hey, those guys that have all that money and property, they cheated. It's not fair. We need to take from them. We need to limit them, not thinking, Oh, well, if I do that, when I get to be there, that what I'm voting for is going to get on me. Right now, Keith, there are kids in ninth grade who are going to vote for your next president, right? Keith Weinhold 45:56 And they think capitalism is evil. This is part of what you're doing with the raising capitalists project, helping younger people think differently. Russ, I have one last thing to ask you. This has to do with the capitalism that you're championing on your platforms now. And real estate, I continue to see sometimes I get comments on my YouTube channel, especially maybe it's more and more people increasingly saying, Hey, I think housing should be a human right. So talk to us about that. And maybe it's interesting, Russ, if I take the other side of it and play devil's advocate, people who think housing is a human right, they say something like, the idea is that housing, you know, it's a fundamental need, just like food and clean water and health care are without stable housing. It's incredibly hard for a person to access opportunities like work and education or health care or participate meaningfully in society at all. So government ought to provide housing for everybody. What are your thoughts there? Russell Gray 46:54 Well, it's inherently inflationary, which is the root cause of the entire problem. So anytime you create consumption without production, you're going to have more consumers than producers, and so you're going to have more competition for those goods. The net, net truth of what happens in that scenario are shortages everywhere. Every civilization that's ever tried any form of system where people just get things for free because they need them, end up with shortages in poverty. It doesn't lift everybody. It ruins everything. I mean, that's not conjecture. That's history, and so that's just the way it works. And if you just were to land somebody on a desert island and you had an economy of one, they're going to learn really quick the basic principles of capitalism, which is production always precedes consumption, always 100% of the time, right? If you're there on that desert island and you don't hunt fish or gather, you don't eat, right? You don't get it because, oh, it's a human right to have food. Nope, it's a human right to have the right to go get food. Otherwise, you're incarcerated, you have to have the freedom of movement to go do something to provide for yourself, but you cannot allow people to consume without production. So everybody has to produce. And you know, if you go back to the Plymouth Rock experiment, if you're familiar with that at all, yeah, yeah. So you know, just for anybody who doesn't know, when the Pilgrims came over here in the 1600s William Bradford was governor, and they tried it. They said, Hey, we're here. Let's Stick Together All for one and one for all. Here's the land. Everybody get up every day and work. Everybody works, and everybody eats. They starved. And so he goes, Okay, guys, new plan. All right, you wine holds. See this little plot of land, that's yours. You work it. You can eat whatever you produce. Over there, you grace. You're going to do yours and Johnson's, you're going to do yours, right? Well, what happened is now everybody got up and worked, and they created more than enough for their own family, and they had an abundance. And the abundance was created out of their hunger. When they went to serve their own needs, they created abundance forever others. That's the premise of capitalism. It's not the perfect system. There is no perfect system. We live in a world where human beings have to work before they get to eat. When I say eat, it could be having a roof over their head. It could be having clothes. It could be going on vacation. It could be having a nice car. It could be getting health care. It doesn't matter what it is, whatever it is you need. You have the right, or should have, the right, in a free system to go earn that by being productive, but the minute somebody comes and says, Oh, you worked, and I'm going to take what you produced and give it to somebody else who didn't, that's patently unfair, but economically, it's disastrous, because it incentivizes people not to work, which creates less production, more consumption. I have another analogy with sandwich makers, but you can imagine that if you got a group if you got a group of people making sandwiches, one guy starts creating coupons for sandwiches. Well then if somebody says, Okay, well now we got 19 people providing for 20. That's okay, but then all the guys making sandwiches. Why making sandwiches? I'm gonna get the coupon business pretty soon. You got 18 guys doing coupons, only two making sandwiches. Not. Have sandwiches to go around all the sandwiches cost tons of coupons because we got way more financialization than productivity, right? That's the American economy. We have to fix that. We can't have people making money by just trading on other people's productivity. We have to have people actually being productive. This is what I believe the administration is trying to do, rebuild the middle class, rebuild that manufacturing base, make us a truly productive economy, and then you don't have to worry about these things, right? We're going to create abundance. And if you don't have the inflation is which is coming from printing money out of thin air and giving to people who don't produce, then housing, all sudden, becomes affordable. It's not a problem. Health care becomes affordable. Everything becomes affordable because you create abundance, because everybody's producing the system is fundamentally broken. Now we have to learn how to profit in it in its current state, which is what you teach people how to do. We also have to realize that it's not sustainable. We're on an unsustainable path, and we're probably nearing that event horizon, the path of no return, where the system is going to break. And the question is, is, how are you going to be prepared for it when it happens? Number two, are you going to be wise enough to advocate when you get a chance to cast a vote or make your voice heard for something that's actually going to create prosperity and freedom versus something that's going to create scarcity and oppression? And that's the fundamental thing that we have to master as a society. We got to get to our youth, because they're the biggest demographic that can blow the thing up, and they're the ones that have been being indoctrinated the worst. Keith Weinhold 51:29 Yes, Fed Chair Jerome Powell himself said that we live in a economic system today that is unsustainable. Yes, the collectivism we touched on quickly descends into the tyranny of the majority. And in my experience, historically, the success of public housing projects has been or to mixed at best, residents often don't respect the property when they don't have an equity stake in it or even a security deposit tied up in it, and blight and high crime rates have often followed with these public housing projects. When you go down that path of making housing as a human right, like you said earlier, you have a right to go procure housing for yourself, just not to ask others to pay for it for you. Well, Russ, this has been great. It's good to have your voice back on the show. Here again, here on a real estate show. If people want to connect with you, continue to see what you've been up to and the good projects that you're working on, promoting the virtues of capitalism. What's the best way for them to do that? Russell Gray 52:31 I think just send an email to follow at Russell Gray, R, U, S, S, E, L, L, G, R, A, y.com, let you know where I am on social media. I'll let you know when I put out new content. I'll let you know when I'm a guest on somebody somebody's show and I'm on the cusp of getting my own show finally launched. I've been doing a lot of planning to get that out, but I'm excited about it because I do think, like I said, The time is now, and I think the marketplace is ripe, and I do speak Main Street and macro, and I hope I can add a nuance to the conversation that will add value to people. Keith Weinhold 53:00 Russ, it's been valuable as always. Thanks so much for coming back onto the show. Thanks, Keith. Yeah, terrific, historic outline from Russ about the long term decline of the dollar. It's really a fresh reminder and motivator to keep being that savvy borrower. Of course, real estate investors have access to borrow giant sums of dollars and short the currency that lay people do not. In fact, lay people don't even understand that it's a viable strategy at all. Like he touched on, Russ has really been bringing an awareness about how decentralization is such a powerful force that reshapes society. In fact, he was talking about that the last time that I saw him in person a few months ago. Notably, he touched on Nixon era wage and price controls. Don't you find it interesting? Fascinating, really, how a few weeks ago, Trump told Walmart not to pass tariff induced price increases onto their customers. Well, that's a form of price control that we're seeing today to our point, when we had the father of Reaganomics, David Stockman here on the show, five weeks ago, tariffs are already government intervention into the free market, and then a president telling private companies how to set their prices, that is really strong government overreach. I mean, I can't believe that more people aren't talking about this. Maybe that's just because this cycle started with Walmart, and that's just doesn't happen to be a company that people feel sorry for. Hey, well, I look forward to meeting you in person in Miami in just four days, as I'll be a faculty member for when we kick off the terrific real estate guys Investor Summit and see and really getting to know you, because we're going to spend nine days together. Teaching, learning and having a great time on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. Until then, I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, don't quit your Daydream. Speaker 3 55:13 Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively. Keith Weinhold 55:36 You know whatever you want, the best written real estate and finance info. Oh, geez, today's experience limits your free articles access and it's got pay walls and pop ups and push notifications and cookies disclaimers. It's not so great. So then it's vital to place nice, clean, free content into your hands that adds no hype value to your life. That's why this is the golden age of quality newsletters, and I write every word of ours myself. It's got a dash of humor, and it's to the point because even the word abbreviation is too long, my letter usually takes less than three minutes to read. And when you start the letter, you also get my one hour fast real estate video. Course, it's all completely free. It's called the Don't quit your Daydream letter. It wires your mind for wealth, and it couldn't be easier for you to get it right now. Just text. GRE to 66866, while it's on your mind, take a moment to do it right now. Text, GRE to 66866 The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth, building, getricheducation.com.
Tune in here to this Monday's edition of the Brett Winterble Show! Brett kicks off the program by talking about the recent military celebration honoring the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary and the media's contrasting focus on social and political controversies. He praises the parade as a proud tribute to American strength, faith, and unity, emphasizing its importance over progressive narratives. Brett criticizes those who downplay or mock military service, suggesting a cultural divide between patriotic Americans and those who “cheer failure,” referencing the Afghanistan withdrawal. Later, Brett turns his focus to major national and global events, including growing unrest in the Middle East, ongoing protests, and a tragic political assassination in Minnesota. While acknowledging these serious developments, he emphasizes the need for Americans to stay grounded in their local realities—raising families, building businesses, and making communities stronger. Brett contrasts chaos and radicalism with what he describes as a return to stability through economic policies like the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and renewed support for law enforcement, federalism, and border security. He critiques progressive narratives and protest movements like the "No Kings" march, calling them out of touch and ineffective. Listen here for all of this and more on The Brett Winterble Show! For more from Brett Winterble check out his YouTube channel. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this next installment of American Potential, host David From shares a timely conversation featuring House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Fox News contributor and Americans for Prosperity Advisory Council member Guy Benson, recorded at the AFP Freedom Embassy in Washington, D.C. Scalise breaks down the House-passed reconciliation bill designed to lock in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA)—a move aimed at preventing a $4.5 trillion tax hike scheduled for 2025. The legislation would secure tax relief for families, protect small businesses, eliminate taxes on tips and overtime, restore bonus depreciation, and make the 199A small business deduction permanent. The bill also features aggressive mandatory spending reforms, work requirements in Medicaid and SNAP, border security investments, and energy production measures, echoing the agenda backed by voters in the last election. This episode offers an inside look at the high-stakes legislative battle to keep more money in Americans' pockets—and keep the economy growing.
In this eye-opening episode of American Potential, host David From sits down with David McNeilly, a financial advisor from Michigan, who shares how the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) has had a measurable, personal impact—not just on his clients, but on his own family's financial freedom. With a background in ministry and a passion for helping others, McNeilly now helps middle-class families navigate retirement planning, tax strategy, and long-term financial goals. But when he crunched the numbers comparing his 2023 tax bill under current rates versus pre-TCJA levels, the result shocked him: a $4,700 difference in annual tax savings—enough to take his family on a Disney cruise. McNeilly walks listeners through how policies from Washington shape real lives, sharing stories of clients who have retired early, sent their kids to private school, or bought long-dreamed-of lake houses—opportunities made possible by smart planning and a more favorable tax environment. He also explains how he's preparing clients for the potential expiration of TCJA, and why higher taxes could force middle-class families to rethink their futures. If you want a clear, data-driven perspective on how federal tax policy affects everyday Americans—not the wealthy, but the working families—this episode delivers it straight from the source.
Taxes don't have to be the financial death sentence most people accept them to be. In this episode, we welcome back Neil McSpadden from Tax Sherpa for his second appearance on the show. Neil shares his journey from owing the IRS $1.3 million to becoming a tax strategist who's helped save hundreds of millions in taxes across 50,000+ returns.The conversation covers everything from the latest Trump tax legislation to practical strategies for business owners, plus why being a W-2 employee puts you at the biggest tax disadvantage possible. We dive deep into the "Big Beautiful Bill," estate tax changes that could impact infinite banking practitioners, and the fundamental difference between how employees and business owners are taxed.Whether you're a pure W-2 earner looking for ways to optimize your situation or a business owner wanting to maximize deductions, this episode reveals why having a tax strategy isn't optional—it's essential for keeping more of your hard-earned money out of government hands.The Tax Order of Operations: The fundamental difference between W-2 employees and business owners isn't just about deductions—it's about when you pay taxes. Employees earn money, get taxed on nearly everything, then spend what's left. Business owners earn money, spend on allowable business expenses, then only pay taxes on what remains.Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill": Neil breaks down the key provisions of the new tax package, including making the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent, the "no tax on tips" policy, vehicle interest deductions for American-made cars, and changes to the SALT cap. Understanding these changes is crucial for planning your 2025 tax strategy.Estate Tax Alert for IBC Practitioners: The estate tax exemption could drop from $13.5 million per person to roughly half that amount. For infinite banking practitioners with whole life policies and convertible term coverage, this could mean your policy values might subject your estate to a 40% tax.Why Everyone Needs Business Income: Even if you're primarily a W-2 employee, having some form of business income opens up tax strategies unavailable to pure employees. This doesn't mean quitting your job—just finding ways to generate legitimate business income that shifts expenses from after-tax to before-tax.➡️ Chapters00:00 - Opening thoughts on taxation philosophy01:00 - Neil's backstory: From $1.3M IRS debt to tax expert04:00 - How Tax Sherpa was born during the pandemic08:00 - Why the IRS doesn't actually know what you owe09:00 - Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" breakdown12:00 - No tax on tips: The details matter17:00 - Child tax credits and vehicle deductions22:00 - SALT cap negotiations and high-tax states28:00 - Estate tax sunset: A ticking time bomb33:00 - Generation skipping transfer tax explained37:00 - W-2 vs. business owner tax treatment42:00 - The guiding principle of business deductions47:00 - Case study: Converting 1099 income properly52:00 - Tax Sherpa's client process overview57:00 - Why Neil understands infinite bankingWant to learn smarter ways to reduce your tax burden and keep more of what you earn?Follow Neal on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/neal-mcspadden or book a call at https://taxsherpa.com/book-an-appointment to see how you can optimize your tax strategy!Visit https://remnantfinance.com for more information FOLLOW REMNANT FINANCEYoutube: @RemnantFinance (https://www.youtube.com/@RemnantFinance)Facebook: @remnantfinance (https://www.facebook.com/profile?id=61560694316588)Twitter: @remnantfinance (https://x.com/remnantfinance)TikTok: @RemnantFinance Don't forget to hit LIKE and SUBSCRIBE
Fields questions about Social Security, military parade Rep. Mike Lawler, whose district includes Philipstown, held a town hall on June 8 at Mahopac High School, the third in a series of four he has promised constituents. After being introduced by Kevin Byrne, the Putnam County executive, Lawler spent two hours fielding questions about the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed the U.S. House, 215-214, with Lawler's support and is being amended by the Senate. In addition to tax cuts and an increase to the cap on deductions for state and local taxes, the legislation contains changes to programs like Medicaid and food stamps that are expected to lead to a loss of benefits for some enrollees. Lawler also fielded questions about Social Security, cuts to foreign aid and the estimated $45 million price tag for a military parade being held in Washington, D.C., on Saturday (June 14), which is President Donald Trump's birthday. Below are some of Lawler's statements and a review of statistics he cited. "We [New York] spend 83 percent more on Medicaid than the average of the other 49 states." According to data from KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation), Medicaid spending in New York totaled just under $98 billion in 2023, second only to California. The spending was 83.77 percent more than the average for the other 49 states. However, the average does not account for each state's population. Wyoming, for example, has 588,000 residents, compared to 20 million in New York. It also means using costs in states that, unlike New York, opted out of a provision in the Affordable Care Act to expand Medicaid so that more people qualify; the federal government pays 90 percent of the additional cost. Alternative methods to measure Medicaid spending among the states include per-capita or per-enrollee. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, New York ranked fourth in per-capita Medicaid spending in 2022 ($11,203), behind North Dakota, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. The national average was $8,919. New York placed third among states in Medicaid spending per enrollee in 2021 ($9,688), according to KFF. Virginia and Minnesota had the highest per-enrollee spending. "If [the Tax Cut and Jobs Act] expired, it would have been about a $4,000 increase in taxes on the average family in our district." The Tax Cut and Jobs Act, passed in 2017 during the first Trump administration, expires this year. If it is not extended by Congress, taxes will increase in the 17th Congressional District, on average, by $3,530, according to the Tax Foundation, a think tank founded in 1937 that analyzes tax policy. Drilling down to specific income levels with a calculator created by the Tax Foundation (dub.sh/tax-calculator), annual taxes would increase by $933 for a single person without dependents who earns $50,000 annually, and by $2,622 for an individual earning $100,000. Taxes would increase by $5,091 annually for a married couple with two children and a household income of $150,000; the same couple earning $250,000 would owe $9,320 more. Those scenarios omit 401(k) contributions and other deductions, but the calculator can adjust for those, as well as other household sizes. "There are over 3 million people in this country who are able-bodied adults, without dependents, who refuse to work." Lawler is referring to Medicaid coverage. A provision in the House's version of the One Big Beautiful Bill requires that able-bodied recipients between ages 19 and 64 who don't have dependents work at least 80 hours monthly or be participating in a "qualifying activity," such as job training. The work requirement would increase the ranks of the uninsured by 4.8 million people by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Although the CBO did not specify why people would lose coverage, Republicans have equated the figure with people who chose not to work. According to the KFF, 64 percent of the 26.1 million adults between ages 19 and 64 receiving Medic...
On this episode of the Passive Income Playbook, Pascal Wagner interviews Jimmy Atkinson, founder of OpportunityZones.com and host of the Opportunity Zones Podcast. Jimmy breaks down how Opportunity Zones work—from their 2017 creation in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to the powerful tax incentives they offer investors. He shares how these zones have catalyzed billions in investment across the country, not just in multifamily but also in startups, industrial real estate, and community-focused developments. They also explore the future of the program, including what Opportunity Zones 2.0 might look like, and Jimmy offers tips for LPs considering OZ investments for the first time. Jimmy Atkinson Current role: Founder of OpportunityZones.com and host of the Opportunity Zones Podcast Based in: Dallas, Texas Say hi to them at: https://opportunityzones.com Get 60% off the Magic Mind offer with our link and code https://magicmind.com/bestevermf & BESTEVER60 #magicmind #mentalwealth #mentalperformance Get a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale at https://www.stamps.com/cre. Thanks to Stamps.com for sponsoring the show! Post your job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/BRE. Terms and conditions apply. Join the Best Ever Community The Best Ever Community is live and growing - and we want serious commercial real estate investors like you inside. It's free to join, but you must apply and meet the criteria. Connect with top operators, LPs, GPs, and more, get real insights, and be part of a curated network built to help you grow. Apply now at www.bestevercommunity.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), enacted in 2017, introduced sweeping changes to both individual and business tax provisions—many of which have significantly benefited Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNAs). But with key components set to expire at the end of 2025, now is the time to understand what's at stake and how it might affect your financial picture. Here's some of what you'll hear in this episode:
The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act represented one of the largest ever investments in broadband infrastructure. Many in the digital equity space believed the bill would go a long way to solve the digital divide. Provisions like the Digital Equity Act promised to be powerful tools in ensuring fast and reliable Internet access for […]
Check out the full episode with bonus insights: https://masterthemargin.substack.com/p/one-big-beautiful-bill-what-the-new Schedule an Rx Assessment: https://www.sykes-cpa.com/rx-assessment-service/ More resources about this topic: Podcast - Master The Margin: 2025 Tax Outlook: https://www.sykes-cpa.com/tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-2025-outlook/ Webinar - Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017: Pharmacy Impact and §199A: https://www.sykes-cpa.com/tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-of-2017-pharmacy-impact-and-%c2%a7199a/ Blog – Tax-smart Depreciation on Pharmacy Buildings and Equipment: https://www.sykes-cpa.com/tax-smart-depreciation-on-pharmacy-buildings-and-equipment/ Blog – Maximize Pharmacy State and Local Tax Deductions (SALT): https://www.sykes-cpa.com/maximize-pharmacy-state-and-local-tax-deductions-salt/
If you'd like a free copy of the book, just email us at team@thewealthelevator.com and tell us how you found us.In this episode, we dive deep into various tax strategies tailored specifically for business owners. We cover essential topics such as home office deductions, the Augusta Rule, paying your kids on payroll, Solo 401(k)s, and advanced strategies like captive insurance. The first half of the podcast is dedicated to potential tax changes currently under review by the Senate. We discuss extensions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, increases in qualified business income deductions, and more. In the second half, we bring on guest Patrick Lonergan to discuss specific strategies for business owners and how to optimize personal taxes linked with business operations.00:00 Introduction to Today's Podcast00:18 Overview of Potential Tax Changes00:41 Extension of Tax Cuts and Jobs Act01:26 Bonus Depreciation and Section 17903:13 Qualified Opportunity Zone Program03:57 State and Local Tax Cap Increase04:33 Lifetime Estate and Gift Tax Exemption06:19 Additional Tax Changes and Implications08:03 Infomercial: Family Office Ohana Mastermind08:35 FOOM and Real Estate Professional Status11:33 Tax Strategies for Business Owners14:00 Home Office Deduction17:09 The Augusta Rule21:28 Family on Payroll24:37 Qualified Business Income Deduction29:18 Level Two Tax Strategies37:27 Setting Up Retirement Plans for Solopreneurs38:46 Navigating IRS Audits and Employee Classifications39:17 Overview of Level Two Tax Strategies39:37 Understanding ROBS and Roth Conversions41:08 Introduction to Level Three Tax Planning41:22 Captive Insurance: Benefits and Risks46:38 Investing Through Captive Insurance55:31 Level Four: Tax Fraud and Evasion57:30 Common Pitfalls and CPA Involvement01:05:39 Final Thoughts and Contact Information Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode of State of the Arc, I cover four high-impact stories shaping the future of welding and manufacturing in America. First, we break down the trends transforming global manufacturing through 2028—from smart factories to sustainability pressures. Next, we explore new welding challenges and solutions in the heavy equipment sector. Then, we turn to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and what it means for welding jobs across the country. Finally, we take a close look at how federal tax policies—and proposed changes like eliminating taxes on overtime—could reshape the financial future for welders and other skilled tradespeople. This week's Welding History Fact celebrates the unsung welders behind the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge—an iconic American structure that wouldn't exist without pioneering welding techniques in the 1930s.
Episode 60: In this episode, Timalyn explains your right to appeal unfair IRS decisions and why you shouldn't give up. We are celebrating three years and 60 episodes of the Tax Relief with Timalyn Bowens podcast! Provisions from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are set to expire in December, and many taxpayers are worried about IRS mistakes - especially after recent budget cuts and workforce reductions. Does this mean you have to accept wrongful IRS decisions? Timalyn says absolutely not. She explains that the IRS has an Independent Office of Appeals that provides fair, impartial review of disputes without going to court. These appeals officers are separate from regular IRS agents and focus only on the facts of your case. Timalyn emphasizes that this appeal process is your right as a taxpayer. She warns that with IRS staffing shortages, it's more important than ever to stand up for yourself when they make mistakes. Automated systems and overworked employees can lead to errors in levies, liens, or tax adjustments. Timalyn urges listeners to act quickly if disputing an IRS decision. The appeals process has strict deadlines, and professional help from an Enrolled Agent like Timalyn can make all the difference in getting a fair outcome. What do you think? Have you ever needed to appeal an IRS decision? Do you feel confident navigating the process if necessary? Need Tax Help Now? If you need answers to your tax debt questions, book a consultation with Timalyn via her Bowens Tax Solutions website. Please consider sharing this episode with your friends and family. There are many people dealing with tax issues silently. This information might be exactly what someone you care about needs. After all, back taxes shouldn't ruin their life either. As we conclude Episode 60, we encourage you to connect with Timalyn on social media. You can subscribe to this podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and many other platforms. Remember, Timalyn Bowens is America's Favorite EA, and she's here to fill the tax literacy gap, one taxpayer at a time. Thanks for listening to today's episode! For more information about tax relief options, visit: https://www.Bowenstaxsolutions.com. Got feedback or an episode suggestion? If you have any feedback or suggestions for an upcoming episode topic, please submit them here: https://www.americasfavoriteea.com/. Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It provides a framework and possible solutions for solving your tax problems, but it is not legally binding. Please consult your tax professional regarding your specific tax situation.
Welcome to a new twist on the typical EESI Congressional briefing: EESI Rapid Readouts! Things are happening faster than ever, and you need information quickly. These 30-minute interactive Readouts bring you what you need to know, when you need to know it. This Readout will answer your questions on the mechanics of reconciliation, how the process could unfold in the coming months, and how the package moving through Congress could affect clean energy tax incentives and other funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and more. To learn about the basics of budget reconciliation, as well as the annual appropriations process, watch or read the highlight notes from EESI's February 2025 briefing, Understanding the Budget, Reconciliation, and Appropriations. We are here to help you answer questions from your boss and constituents. Let us know what climate, energy, and environmental topics you want to see us cover in future Rapid Readouts by emailing us here.
L'8 e il 9 giugno i cittadini sono chiamati alle urne per votare cinque i referendum abrogativi su lavoro e cittadinanza promossi da sindacati e associazioni. Per la Corte Costituzionale sono risultati ammissibili quattro quesiti referendari sul lavoro, per i quali sono state raccolte più 4 milioni di firme, e il referendum sulla cittadinanza, per il quale sono state raccolte 637 mila firme. Giorgio Pogliotti, Il Sole 24 Ore, spiega i quesiti referendari. Nuovo taglio della Bce al costo del denaro di 25 punti base, forse l'ultimoAncora un taglio. La Banca centrale europea ha ridotto il costo ufficiale del credito per l ottava volta dalla scorsa estate, abbassandolo di 0,25 punti percentuali. Il tasso sui depositi scende così al 2%, quello sui rifinanziamenti principali al 2,15%, quello sui prestiti marginali al 2,40%. Soprattutto, la Bce ha pubblicato nuove proiezioni macroeconomiche trimestrali che segnalano come la fase di contrasto all elevata inflazione potrebbe essere giunta alla fine.«La maggior parte delle misure dell inflazione di fondo indica che l inflazione si assesterà, in modo duraturo, intorno all obiettivo del 2% a medio termine», spiega il comunicato pubblicato subito dopo la decisione: quanto l istituto di Francoforte si era imposto. La decisione è stata presa con un solo dissenso.Il commento di Donato Masciandaro, docente politiche monetarie università Bocconi, editorialista Sole 24 OreVino italiano guarda a est, export in Asia orientale 430 milioniIl vino italiano è protagonista al Padiglione Italia di Expo 2025 Osaka con i lavori del primo Market trends and opportunities for Italian wine in Asia, dedicato all'export nel settore vitivinicolo, organizzato dal ministero dell'Agricoltura, Sovranità alimentare e Foreste in collaborazione con l'Agenzia Ice. All'evento, che si è tenuto questa mattina ed è organizzato da Italian Trade Agency (ITA) in collaborazione con il Gruppo 24 ORE, hanno partecipato e sono intervenuti il ministro Francesco Lollobrigida, e l'ambasciatore Mario Vattani, commissario generale per l'Italia a Expo 2025 Osaka. In particolare, nel 2024, ha rilevato il direttore dell'Ice Matteo Zoppas il settore del vino "ha raggiunto gli 8,1 miliardi di euro (+5,5% sul 2023) e nel primo bimestre del 2025 l'export vinicolo ha toccato 1,2 miliardi di euro, in crescita del 3,6% rispetto allo stesso periodo del 2024". E in questo scenario, secondo il direttore dell'Ice, l'Asia orientale che rappresenta un mercato strategico: "Qui l'export vinicolo italiano nel 2024 ha toccato 434 milioni di euro" e "nel 2024 abbiamo esportato in Asia 5,6 miliardi di euro di prodotti agroalimentari", ha concluso il direttore dell'Ice. In collegamento da Osaka, interviene Matteo Zoppas - presidente ICE - Agenzia per la promozione all'estero e l'internazionalizzazione delle imprese italiane
Trump's new tax bill is here — and it's being called the most sweeping tax reform since the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In this episode, we break down exactly what's in the bill, how it affects your taxes, and what it could mean for your future.Whether you're a middle-class family, small business owner, senior, or service industry worker, this episode gives you a clear and engaging walkthrough of the tax changes — from permanent tax cuts to MAGA accounts for kids, a bigger child tax credit, and tax-free overtime and tips. We'll also cover the controversial cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and EV tax credits, plus what might change in the Senate.This episode is designed to help you understand the real-world impact of the bill — the good, the bad, and the unknown. If you want to stay informed, avoid the spin, and make sense of how this legislation could affect your wallet, this is the episode you don't want to miss.Topics include:o Extension of TCJA tax cutso No federal tax on tips and overtime payo MAGA accounts for children under 8o Increased standard and senior deductiono Child Tax Credit raised to $2,500o SALT deduction cap increasedo EV tax credit repealo Cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and Planned Parenthoodo Estate and small business tax changeso What the Senate might changeMake sure to like, comment, and subscribe for more in-depth analysis of how policy changes affect you and your money.Articles Referenced: https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/whats-in-the-2025-house-republican-tax-bill/**Support the Stream By Shopping at Our Store** Buy Your Financial Mirror Gear: https://www.thefinancialmirror.org/shop YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thefinancialmirrorRumble: https://rumble.com/TheFinancialMirrorFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/thefinancialmirr0rX: https://twitter.com/financialmirr0rInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefinancialmirror/Podcast: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/thefinancialmirrorIf you are in need of a Financial Coach, don't waste another day of being in debt, not planning for retirement, or simply wondering where your money went each month. Today is the day to take control of your finances and I can help, no issue is too big or too small. Contact me at https://www.thefinancialmirror.org/#TrumpTaxBill2025 #TaxReform #MAGAAccounts #OneBigBeautifulBill #NoTaxOnTips #ChildTaxCredit #StandardDeduction #EstateTax #SmallBusinessRelief #EVTaxCredit #MedicaidCuts #SNAPReform #TaxPolicy #ConservativeFinance #USPolitics
From generous tax breaks to costly trade-offs, the House GOP's One, Big, Beautiful Bill has a little of everything. It's a sweeping attempt to extend key provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act before they expire in 2026—but what's actually in it?Kyle Hulehan and Erica York are joined by Garett Watson, Director of Policy Analysis at the Tax Foundation, to break down the good, the bad, and the ugly: who benefits, what it could mean for the economy, and how it might reshape your tax bill.Learn more: Budget Reconciliation Tracker: https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tax-cuts-2025-budget-reconciliation/“Big Beautiful Bill” House GOP Tax Plan: Preliminary Details and Analysis: https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/big-beautiful-bill-house-gop-tax-plan/The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in the One, Big, Beautiful Bill: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/one-big-beautiful-bill-pros-cons/House Tax Package Could Double Economic Growth Impact by Prioritizing Permanence for TCJA Business Provisions: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/house-tax-plan-economic-growth-impact-business-tax-permanent/A More Generous SALT Deduction Cap in the Big, Beautiful Bill Would Cost Revenue and Primarily Benefit High Earners: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/salt-deduction-cap-increase-proposal-analysis/House “One Big Beautiful Bill” Riddled with Temporary Tax Policy: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/house-one-big-beautiful-bill-temporary-tax-policy/Current Trump Tariffs Threaten to Offset Benefits of Promised Tax Cuts: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/trump-tariffs-tax-cuts/House GOP's Approach to the IRA Clean Energy Tax Credits: Five Things to Know: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/ira-clean-energy-tax-credits-house-gop-ways-means-bill/Support the showFollow us!https://twitter.com/TaxFoundationhttps://twitter.com/deductionpodSupport the show
From generous tax breaks to costly trade-offs, the House GOP's One, Big, Beautiful Bill has a little of everything. It's a sweeping attempt to extend key provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act before they expire in 2026—but what's actually in it?Kyle Hulehan and Erica York are joined by Garett Watson, Director of Policy Analysis at the Tax Foundation, to break down the good, the bad, and the ugly: who benefits, what it could mean for the economy, and how it might reshape your tax bill.Learn more: Budget Reconciliation Tracker: https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tax-cuts-2025-budget-reconciliation/“Big Beautiful Bill” House GOP Tax Plan: Preliminary Details and Analysis: https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/big-beautiful-bill-house-gop-tax-plan/The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in the One, Big, Beautiful Bill: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/one-big-beautiful-bill-pros-cons/House Tax Package Could Double Economic Growth Impact by Prioritizing Permanence for TCJA Business Provisions: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/house-tax-plan-economic-growth-impact-business-tax-permanent/A More Generous SALT Deduction Cap in the Big, Beautiful Bill Would Cost Revenue and Primarily Benefit High Earners: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/salt-deduction-cap-increase-proposal-analysis/House “One Big Beautiful Bill” Riddled with Temporary Tax Policy: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/house-one-big-beautiful-bill-temporary-tax-policy/Current Trump Tariffs Threaten to Offset Benefits of Promised Tax Cuts: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/trump-tariffs-tax-cuts/House GOP's Approach to the IRA Clean Energy Tax Credits: Five Things to Know: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/ira-clean-energy-tax-credits-house-gop-ways-means-bill/Support the showFollow us!https://twitter.com/TaxFoundationhttps://twitter.com/deductionpodSupport the show
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Jeffrey Cleveland and Arthur Laffer Jr. give their takeaways from the April PCE report. “If we didn't have this whole tariff threat, I think the Fed would be very happy with the progress we've seen this year on core inflation,” Jeffrey says, but expects some short-lived inflation this summer. Arthur says we have to see the 2017 Jobs Act made permanent, or “it'll take the bloom off the economy.”======== Schwab Network ========Empowering every investor and trader, every market day.Subscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribeDownload the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watchWatch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-exploreWatch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetworkFollow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about
Aaron Kowal discusses what investors should and should not do in the face of increasing prices, shares estate planning updates related to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Jeff Kowal examines common mistakes made amid a divorce, and Aaron touches on charitable giving strategies for Retirees.
Gene has been in the commercial and investment real estate business continuously since 1972 and in the legal profession since 1996.Awarded the CCIM designation in 1977, Gene continues to serve as a member of the CCIM faculty and achieved Senior Emeritus Instructor status, upon 40 years of teaching. In 2002, he was selected as the Robert L. Ward Instructor of the Year in the Institute. In 2005, Gene was awarded the Victor L. Lyon Distinguished Service Award for his many years of outstanding contribution to the Institute's education program.He is a member of the California Bar. The founding partner of Trowbridge Nieh LLP, Gene's law practice concentrates on the syndication of commercial and investment real estate, through both debt and equity. As a former syndicator, who for ten years raised investor capital; he served as the sponsor of sixteen investment groups, by raising equity from investors, through registered representatives in the broker dealer community, once sending out 1,676 K1s in a single year.He was responsible for the organization of those investment groups; the acquisition, management, and disposition of the real estate; and communications with the investors.Because of his hands-on syndication experience, Gene can communicate with his clients on both the technical and practical aspects of state and federal securities laws. Between Gene's individual syndication background and the firm's legal practice, the partners in the firm have written offerings of more than $5 Billion in monies raised. The median offering size is $2. 5 million. His practice writes offerings under Rule 506(b) and 506(c) of Regulation D, Regulation CF, and Regulation A+.He has trained and mentored three different law partners, in syndication and crowdfunding, since 2008. He has delivered more than 250 live seminars on group ownership, exchanges, and taxation audiences across the country; his articles have been published in various real estate media outlets and he is a highly sought-after speaker on the topic of real estate group ownership.He authored his first book It's A Whole New Business in 2005. The Fourth Edition was released in 2021 and is available now at tnllp.com and Amazon.He and Kay have been married for 50 years and have two daughters, Amy, and Emily. He enjoys music, travel and has run 37 half marathons since turning 60!Chapters00:00 Introduction to Gene Trowbridge01:05 Current Market Insights for Passive Investors03:51 Diverse Investment Opportunities Beyond Real Estate05:53 Understanding Private Placements and Regulation D09:09 The Evolution of Securities Regulation14:56 Impact of Economic Crises on Investment Regulations19:52 Future of Accredited Investor Definitions21:44 Guidance for New Syndicators22:22 Understanding Syndication and Securities24:48 Control and Decision-Making in Partnerships27:20 Investment Contracts and SEC Regulations30:04 Key Questions for Passive Investors33:27 The Importance of Relationships in Real Estate37:17 Investing Strategies and Debt Funds39:04 outroRANDY SMITHConnect with our host, Randy Smith, for more educational content or to discuss investment opportunities in the real estate syndication space at www.impactequity.net, https://www.linkedin.com/in/randallsmith or on Instagram at @randysmithinvestorKeywordssyndication, private equity, accredited investors, real estate, securities regulation, Jobs Act, passive investing, market trends, due diligence, investment strategiesSummaryIn this conversation, Randy Smith and Gene Trowbridge discuss the current state of the syndication market, the evolution of securities regulation, and the importance of due diligence for passive investors. Gene shares insights on the role of accredited investors, the impact of the Jobs Act, and key considerations for new syndicators. The discussion emphasizes the significance of relationships in the investment space and provides practical advice for both syndicators and passive investors.
Associates on Fire: A Financial Podcast for the Associate Dentist
In this episode of the Dental Boardroom Podcast, Wes Read, CPA and CFP, breaks down the key elements of the newly passed House tax bill—H.R.1, also called the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act.” While it still faces an uncertain path in the Senate, this bill aims to permanently extend many provisions of the 2017 Trump Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Wes walks dentists through what matters most, including the preservation of lower income tax rates, an increased standard deduction, and the continuation of the SALT deduction cap and mortgage interest limits—provisions that have significant implications, especially for practice owners in high-tax states.He also explains temporary tax exemptions for overtime and tip income, a proposed auto loan interest deduction, and how these changes could affect employee expectations and HR management. Whether you're a practice owner, associate, or independent contractor, Wes shares insights to help you prepare for what's coming and highlights why staying proactive on tax strategy is more critical than ever.Key Takeaways:Overview of the "One Big, Beautiful Bill Act (H.R.1)", passed narrowly by the House on May 22, 2025.Focus on the tax policy provisions most relevant to dentists, associates, and independent contractors.Breakdown of the permanent extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, including lower tax rates, standard deduction changes, and SALT deduction caps.mWes explains how blue-state dentists may continue to feel the pinch from SALT and mortgage interest deduction limits.Commentary on temporary tax exemptions for tips and overtime pay — and how it may lead to HR challenges and enforcement complexity.Discussion on a proposed auto loan interest deduction and increased standard deduction amounts.Practical insights for dental professionals on how these tax changes could impact your bottom line.Caution on the uncertainty of final Senate approval — changes are likely.#DentalBoardroomPodcast #DentalCPA #TaxBill2025 #TrumpTaxPlan #DentalFinance #PracticeCFO #HRTaxTips #WesReadCPA #DentalPracticeOwners #DentistMoneyMatters #SALTdeduction #TaxStrategy
Welcome to the Know Your Numbers REI Podcast! In this episode, host Chris McCormack, CPA, Certified Tax Planner, and founder of Better Books Accounting, dives deep into the implications of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act for real estate investors.As we approach the expiration of key provisions in this tax act, Chris discusses the potential changes in tax brackets, bonus depreciation, and capital gains tax rates that could significantly impact your bottom line. He emphasizes the importance of proactive tax planning and staying informed about current tax laws to make confident decisions regarding your investments.Whether you're considering selling a property, refinancing your rental portfolio, or simply looking to optimize your tax strategy, this episode is packed with valuable insights and actionable advice.Don't miss out on this essential information that could shape your financial future!Follow to the Know Your Numbers REI Podcast for more insights on real estate investing and tax planning!••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••➤➤➤ To become a client, schedule a call with our team➤➤ https://www.betterbooksaccounting.co/contact••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••Connect with Chris McCormack on Social MediaFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/chrismccormackcpaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismccormackcpaInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/chrismccormackcpaJoin our Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/6384369318328034→ → → SUBSCRIBE TO BETTER BOOKS' YOUTUBE CHANNEL NOW ← ← ← https://www.youtube.com/@chrismccormackcpaThe Know Your Numbers REI podcast is for general information purposes only and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Information on the podcast may not constitute the most up-to-date legal or other information. No reader, user, or listener of this podcast should act or refrain from acting on the basis of information on this podcast without first seeking legal and tax advice from counsel in the relevant jurisdiction. Only your individual attorney and tax advisor can provide assurances that the information contained herein – and your interpretation of it – is applicable or appropriate to your particular situation. Use of, and access to, this podcast or any of the links or resources contained or mentioned within the podcast show and show notes do not create a relationship between the reader, user, or listener and podcast hosts, contributors, or guests.
Send us a textReady to slash your tax bill? Schedule your free consultation and let's strategize your tax savings together! Book now at: https://www.prosperlcpa.com/apply Or, if you still need more time, here are some other ways to begin winning the tax game... Take our free Tax Planning Checklist & learn about what tax savings may be available for you in our minicourse at https://taxplanningchecklist.com Bonus depreciation offers enticing tax benefits but comes with significant hidden risks for business owners and investors who don't plan beyond the initial tax savings. We examine the dangers of relying too heavily on bonus depreciation strategies and provide alternative approaches that don't create future tax problems.• Bonus depreciation allows writing off a percentage of qualifying assets immediately rather than over their useful life• The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provided 100% bonus depreciation from 2017-2022, now phasing down to 40% in 2025• Financing assets for tax write-offs still requires paying the full purchase price over time• After claiming depreciation, loan payments become essentially non-deductible, creating "paper income"• Selling assets before their useful life creates depreciation recapture taxed at ordinary income rates• More balanced tax strategies include income shifting, entity structuring, and hiring family members• The Augusta Rule and employing children can provide up to $100,000 in deductions without creating future liabilities• Prioritize assets that generate sufficient returns to justify their purchase beyond just tax benefits• Smart tax planning considers both immediate savings and long-term financial implicationsTo learn how these concepts apply to your specific situation, visit prosperlcpa.com/apply and schedule a consultation.
Companies scored wins after the House passed a multi-trillion-dollar tax bill that largely preserved the current tax rates on foreign-earned income. Republicans' 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act created a new international tax regime including a minimum tax on global intangible low-taxed income, or GILTI, a reduced tax rate on foreign-derived intangible income, or FDII, and a base erosion and anti-abuse tax, or BEAT. Each of these tax rates will go up in 2026 without congressional action, but House lawmakers made slight changes that will result in minimal tax increases. But the debate isn't over. The bill now heads to the Senate, where tax practitioners and companies expect impactful changes to the mammoth legislation, including the international provisions. On this week's episode of Talking Tax, reporter Lauren Vella talks about the House provisions, what companies want to see in the Senate version of the tax bill, and how the legislation might impact US relations with other countries. Do you have feedback on this episode of Talking Tax? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.
In this episode of the EMS One-Stop podcast, host Rob Lawrence sits down with returning guest Chief Robbie MacCue of Colonie EMS (New York) to explore the transformative potential of the Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) federal grant program. Funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, SS4A aims to prevent roadway fatalities and enhance post-crash care. With $5 billion available nationwide and $900 million still on the table for FY25, this conversation is a call to action for EMS agencies across the country. Chief MacCue shares the story of how his department, in collaboration with neighboring EMS and police agencies, secured $2.4 million in SS4A funding for a project focused on innovative vehicle alert systems, prehospital health information exchange and groundwork for whole blood deployment. From demystifying the grant application to defining success metrics and compliance reporting, this episode breaks it all down — turning policy into practice, and complexity into impact. Memorable quotes “I was pretty taken back by the statistic that 40% of these patients were alive when EMS arrived and later died. Those are patients that are talking to us that are no longer living after a crash.” — Robbie MacCue “This isn't free money. It comes with reporting requirements, match funding and responsibility — but there's help out there, and it's absolutely worth it.” — Robbie MacCue “Our goal is to go upstream to the source of the problem. How do we stop the bleeding? How do we stop some of these accidents from actually happening?” — Robbie MacCue “We put a two-page narrative together that generated a $3,000,000 regional application … based on simple principles about statistics.” — Robbie MacCue “Post-crash care is definitely a missing element in the Safe System Approach … and EMS needs to be part of the solution, not just the response.” — Robbie MacCue “You don't have to have all the solutions right away. You just have to have the initiative to get with other like-minded people.” — Robbie MacCue “This project isn't just for crashes. It will also help us with high-utilizer patients and improve reimbursement accuracy by connecting data silos.” — Robbie MacCue “Somebody emailed me in the week to say that the EMS One-Stop podcast is the podcast that's able to turn a very complex EMS topic into a car bumper sticker. So there you go. If we're doing that and we can achieve that, then we're getting somewhere.” — Rob Lawrence Episode timeline 00:00-02:00 – Intro to SS4A and the scale of available funding ($5B) 02:00-04:00 – Why post-crash care matters: 42% of patients alive at EMS arrival die later 04:00-07:00 – How Colonie EMS discovered and approached the SS4A opportunity 07:00-10:00 – Building a regional grant application and tripling the funding 10:00-13:30 – Overview of the proposed project – transponder tech, health information exchange and whole blood 13:30-17:00 – Specific technology being explored and integration challenges 17:00-20:00 – Working with MPOs, consultants and navigating acronyms 20:00-25:00 – Finding the 20% match, leveraging in-kind contributions and funding timelines 25:00-30:00 – Federal reporting requirements and budgeting with SF-424A 30:00-35:00 – The big goal: Closing the outcome data loop and EMS-hospital data sharing 35:00-40:00 – Measuring success, from whole blood to vehicle alerts 40:00-42:30 – Robbie's final advice: “Don't be intimidated — reach out and apply.” ADDITIONAL RESOURCES SS4A Application Portal & Resources: Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) Grant Program | US Department of Transportation NHTSA's Office of Emergency Medical Services | EMS.gov Lexipol Grants Support Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) database
Last week, House Republicans advanced a multitrillion-dollar tax and spending bill that could affect millions of American households. With the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act set to expire at the end of the year, this bill aims to make several key provisions permanent.Join Chris Galeski and Beau Wirick as they unpack what's in the bill, who it benefits, and what it means for the broader economy. Note: This episode was filmed on May 22nd, 2025.Tune in if you're interested in the following:• How the bill could affect your income and estate taxes in 2025 and beyond• What the proposed $3.8 trillion in tax cuts and $1 trillion in spending cuts mean for the national debt• Why this legislation matters for estate planners, retirees, and middle-income households• What's next as the bill heads to the Senate—and how fast things could move
In this episode of Budget Watchdog All Federal, host Steve Ellis and Director of Research Josh Sewell break down President Trump's massive reconciliation package that passed the House by the razor-thin margin of 215-214. The "one big beautiful bill" extends the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, exempts tips and overtime from taxes, raises the debt ceiling by $4 trillion, and makes significant cuts to safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP. While the Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill adds $3.3 trillion to the deficit, the real cost could reach $5.2 trillion when accounting for budget gimmicks.
Note: This episode was recorded on Wednesday, May 21, 2025, prior to the House of Representatives vote early Thursday morning May 22, 2025 — 215 in favor, 214 opposed, 1 voting present. See this Journal of Accountancy (JofA) article for updates on the bill that occurred overnight prior to the vote. In this joint episode with the JofA podcast, host Neil Amato discusses with Melanie Lauridsen, Vice President of Tax Policy & Advocacy for the AICPA, the AICPA's perspective on several aspects of the budget bill that was voted and approve by the House of Representatives in the early morning hours of May 22, 2025. What you'll learn from this episode: · An explanation of the pass-through entity tax (PTET) state and local tax (SALT) deduction · Some of the AICPA “wins” in the legislation · The top concern from a survey of members just after tax filing season · The definition of “fractures” AICPA resources 2025 Tax Reform Advocacy — AICPA tax advocacy efforts on current developments on the tax changes that Congress is considering in 2025, including the expiring provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA). Planning for tax changes and tax reform — CPAs need to not only brace for tax law changes such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and expiring provisions but also be proactive in planning for them. FAQs on Tax Reform via Budget Reconciliation — Tax reform FAQs that explain the budget reconciliation process, legislative timing, key issues and practical tips for CPAs. Tax Section news and member FAQ — Get the latest tax news, a digest of key tax topics and commonly asked questions about resources and benefits.
Tax Legislation for "One, Big, Beautiful Bill" Brush and Poison Ivy Control Cattle Health Metrics 00:01:05 – Tax Legislation for "One, Big, Beautiful Bill": Roger McEowen, K-State and Washburn law professor, starts the show explaining a recent piece of legislation. He talks about the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” and what it means for taxpayers, farmers and ranchers. The "One, Big, Beautiful Bill" Tax Legislation - What Now? Roger on AgManager.info 00:12:05 – Brush and Poison Ivy Control: Keeping the show rolling is K-State weed specialist Sarah Lancaster as she discusses how to control buckbrush, roughleaf dogwood, smooth sumac and poison ivy. Control Options for Buckbrush, Roughleaf Dogwood, and Smooth Sumac 00:23:05 – Cattle Health Metrics: The Beef Cattle Institute's Cattle Chat podcast with Brad White, Brian Lubbers, Bob Larson, Phillip Lancaster and guest Logan Thompson end the show as they say what health metric they would like to see measured. BCI Cattle Chat Podcast Bovine Science with BCI Podcast Email BCI at bci@ksu.edu Send comments, questions or requests for copies of past programs to ksrenews@ksu.edu. Agriculture Today is a daily program featuring Kansas State University agricultural specialists and other experts examining ag issues facing Kansas and the nation. It is hosted by Shelby Varner and distributed to radio stations throughout Kansas and as a daily podcast. K‑State Research and Extension is a short name for the Kansas State University Agricultural Experiment Station and Cooperative Extension Service, a program designed to generate and distribute useful knowledge for the well‑being of Kansans. Supported by county, state, federal and private funds, the program has county Extension offices, experiment fields, area Extension offices and regional research centers statewide. Its headquarters is on the K‑State campus in Manhattan
In this episode of Engineering Influence, we delve into the latest findings from the American Council of Engineering Companies Research Institute's Q2 2025 Business Sentiment Survey with Joe Bates. Recorded during the 2025 Convention and Legislative Summit, we explore the current and future economic sentiment within the engineering industry. The survey reveals a softening in economic sentiment, with the lowest industry sentiment reading on record, though still positive. We discuss the crucial themes of uncertainty in political, economic, and legislative landscapes, and highlight actionable steps Congress can take, like extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, to provide stability. Join us as we analyze the pulse of market sectors including data centers and energy utilities, and address challenges such as tariffs and interest rates affecting real estate and infrastructure investment. Learn about the upcoming introduction of mid-quarter updates to track the rapidly evolving business environment.
In this compelling episode of American Potential, host David From welcomes Congressman Jeff Hurd, a freshman lawmaker representing Colorado's vast and beautiful Third Congressional District. Congressman Hurd shares his journey from humble beginnings bagging groceries in Grand Junction to earning law degrees, practicing energy law, and now serving in Congress. Drawing on his experience as a small business owner and father of five, Congressman Hurd discusses how bad energy policy acts as a hidden tax on rural Americans—and why reversing those policies is essential to economic opportunity. He outlines his legislative efforts to return the Bureau of Land Management headquarters to Colorado, promote responsible energy development, and fight for rural families who want to stay, work, and raise their children in the communities they love. The conversation also dives into the importance of making the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent. Congressman Hurd explains how those tax cuts have directly impacted working families and small businesses in his district and why allowing them to expire would be a devastating tax hike on the middle class. From energy independence to economic freedom, Congressman Hurd brings a clear-eyed focus and a personal commitment to building a better future for rural America. Don't miss this inspiring and informative episode.
In this episode of Good Morning Liberty, Nate and Charles dive deep into the controversial 'One Big Beautiful Bill.' They critique the bill's components, including the potential effects of making the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent, Medicaid cuts, and increased spending on Border Patrol and Defense. They also address Moody's downgrade of the US credit rating and discuss the long-term impact of the bill relative to current and future government spending and taxation. Beyond these specifics, the hosts emphasize the need for fiscal responsibility and the challenges politicians face in implementing spending cuts. (00:00) Introduction (01:50) Discussion on the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' (02:43) Moody's Credit Rating Downgrade (04:35) Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Debate (07:03) Projections and Realities of the Bill (18:37) Work Requirements and Social Programs (20:04) Immigration and Border Security Funding (21:24) Defense Spending and Military Quality of Life (22:12) Student Loans and University Endowments (24:18) Fiscal Responsibility and Tax Cuts (25:21) The True Cost of Government Spending (26:08) Interest on Debt and Deficit Projections (29:29) Historical Spending and Taxation Trends (33:13) Political Promises and Fiscal Reality (34:13) Debunking Misconceptions About Tax Increases (35:08) The Need for Spending Cuts and Fiscal Reform (44:12) Proposals for Limiting Government Spending (46:43) The Role of Public Awareness and Action (48:41) Conclusion and Call to Action Links: https://gml.bio.link/ YOUTUBE: https://bit.ly/3UwsRiv RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/GML Check out Martens Minute! https://martensminute.podbean.com/ Follow Josh Martens on X: https://twitter.com/joshmartens13 Join the private discord & chat during the show! joingml.com Bank on Yourself bankonyourself.com/gml Get FACTOR Today! FACTORMEALS.com/factorpodcast Good Morning Liberty is sponsored by BetterHelp! Rediscover your curiosity today by visiting Betterhelp.com/GML (Get 10% off your first month) Protect your privacy and unlock the full potential of your streaming services with ExpressVPN. Get 3 more months absolutely FREE by using our link EXPRESSVPN.com/GML
We break down the House GOP's One, Big, Beautiful Bill—a sweeping tax package designed to extend key parts of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act before they expire in 2026.Kyle Hulehan is joined by Garett Watson, Director of Policy Analysis at the Tax Foundation, to unpack what's actually in the bill, who benefits the most, and how it could impact the economy, federal revenue, and your taxes.Links: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/house-one-big-beautiful-bill-temporary-tax-policy/https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/big-beautiful-bill-house-gop-tax-plan/https://taxfoundation.org/blog/house-tax-plan-economic-growth-impact-business-tax-permanent/Support the showFollow us!https://twitter.com/TaxFoundationhttps://twitter.com/deductionpodSupport the show
(AURN News) — President Donald Trump's fiscal policies are under renewed scrutiny after Moody's downgraded the U.S. credit rating from Aaa to Aa1, citing the nation's rising debt, widening deficits and mounting interest costs. While Moody's did not name Trump in its downgrade announcement, the agency pointed to long-term trends that have intensified under his administration. Federal spending has increased sharply, and Trump has called for extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — moves that analysts say are worsening the country's fiscal outlook. “Over more than a decade, US federal debt has risen sharply due to continuous fiscal deficits. During that time, federal spending has increased while tax cuts have reduced government revenues,” Moody's said in a statement. The agency projected that without changes to taxation or spending, the government's budget flexibility will remain limited. It expects mandatory spending — including interest payments — to rise from 73% of total federal outlays in 2024 to 78% by 2035. Moody's also warned that extending the 2017 tax law would add about $4 trillion to the federal primary deficit over the next decade. Deficits are projected to reach nearly 9% of GDP by 2035 — up from 6.4% this year — with debt rising to 134% of GDP, up from 98% in 2024. According to CBS News, federal spending under Trump is now higher on a day-to-day basis than in nine of the past 10 years. In the first 100 days of his presidency, spending was $200 billion higher than during the same period the year before. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan watchdog group, called the downgrade a warning sign that policymakers are heading in the wrong direction. “Can you hear that? It's the sound of not one, not two, but all three major credit rating agencies now saying the same thing: the US fiscal situation is unsustainable,” said Maya MacGuineas, the group's president. “At the very least, we should not be considering adding more than $3 trillion to the debt — or $5.2 trillion if temporary provisions are made permanent — after we were just told our credit worthiness is inferior to what it was,” she added.Trump has touted cost-cutting efforts through the Department of Government Efficiency, but so far, overall federal expenditures have continued to grow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Today’s show features highlights from Friday’s House Budget Committee hearing over the “Big Beautiful Bill” that will extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, while also slashing spending from other … Read More
In this episode of American Potential, host David From sits down with Congressman August Pfluger—Chairman of the Republican Study Committee, decorated Air Force veteran, and proud seventh-generation Texan—for an in-depth conversation on the path forward for America's economy, energy independence, and national security. Congressman Pfluger discusses why predictability in the tax code is essential for families, entrepreneurs, and innovators alike. As the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act faces expiration, Pfluger makes the case for why extending—and ideally making permanent—those provisions is not just a matter of policy, but a critical step to preserve America's competitive edge and avoid economic backsliding. He also shares how the Republican Study Committee, now the largest conservative caucus in Congress with 189 members, is working to restore fiscal discipline, protect family-owned farms from devastating inheritance taxes, and ensure American businesses have the confidence to invest and grow. The conversation dives into the real-world impact of smart tax policy, using examples like a small business in rural Ohio that was able to give employees a 40% raise thanks to the Trump tax cuts. Congressman Pfluger also breaks down the growing demand for domestic energy production—driven in part by rising electricity needs from data centers and AI—and why energy security is inseparable from national security. Representing one of the largest and most quintessentially Texan districts in the country, Congressman Pfluger shares what makes his constituents special, why the Permian Basin is a story of American innovation, and what it means to fight for the freedom and opportunity they hold dear. This episode is a must-listen for anyone who wants to understand how principled leadership, clear policy direction, and bold vision can help secure a stronger future for all Americans.
In this episode of Main Street Matters, Jordan Bruneau speaks with Mattias Gugel from the National Taxpayers Union about the current state of tax policy in the U.S. They discuss the implications of the federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the importance of state-level tax developments, and the impact of payroll taxes on small businesses. The conversation also touches on the role of fees in business costs, the need for competition in the credit card industry, and the effects of local taxes and bonds on taxpayers. Throughout the discussion, the importance of taxpayer engagement and advocacy is emphasized. Main Street Matters is part of the Salem Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Wednesday & Friday. For more on the National Taxpayers Union CLICK HERE Chapters 00:00 Introduction to Tax Policy and Its Impact 02:55 The Federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act 06:09 State-Level Tax Developments 09:10 Understanding Payroll Taxes 12:01 The Role of Fees in Business Costs 15:08 Competition in the Credit Card Industry 17:58 Local and Municipal Taxes 21:03 Bonds and Their Impact on Taxpayers #taxpolicy #TaxCutsandJobsAct #statetax #developments #payrolltaxes #smallbusiness #fees #creditcard #industry #municipaltaxes #bonds #taxpayer #engagementSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Michigan Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga on Tuesday confirmed that he is interested in potentially running for the U.S. Senate in 2026. "I am," Huizenga answered when asked if he was considering running for the Senate on the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show. "You know, this was not necessarily on my radar screen when I started this." Huizenga represents Michigan's Fourth Congressional District and has been serving in office since 2011. He said that he is considering a Senate run because President Donald Trump needs allies in the upper chamber. Huizenga said he believes that in the midterm elections, Republicans could keep the House and the Senate if they do the work of getting the budget reconciliation process in place and get the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reinstated. Later, Claire Lopez, a former CIA operations officer and founder of Lopez Liberty LLC, discusses President Trump's upcoming trip to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. Claire shares insights into the implications of this trip on international relations, particularly regarding the Abraham Accords and the potential for new peace deals in the Middle East. Finally, it's AMAC Wednesday, and AMAC spokesman and Maine Gubernatorial candidate Bobby Charles provides his unique insights on the issues of the day. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Our strategists Michael Zezas and Ariana Salvatore provide context around U.S. House Republicans' proposed tax bill and how investors should view its potential market impact.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Michael Zezas: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michael Zezas, Global Head of Fixed Income Research and Public Policy Strategy.Ariana Salvatore: And I'm Ariana Salvatore, Public Policy Strategist.Michael Zezas: Today, we'll dig into Congress's deliberations on taxes and fiscal spending.It's Wednesday, May 14th at 10am in New York.Michael Zezas: So, Ariana, there's been a lot of news around the tax and spending plans that Congress is pursuing; this fiscal package – and clients are really, really focused on it. You're having a lot of those conversations right now. Why are clients so focused on all of this?Ariana Salvatore: So, clients have reasons to focus on this tax policy bill across equities, fixed income, and for macroeconomic impacts.Starting with equities, there's a lot of the 2017 tax cut bill that's coming up for expiration towards the end of this year. So, this bill is Congress's chance to extend the expiring TCJA. And add on some incremental tax cuts that President Trump floated on the campaign trail. So, there's some really important sector impacts on the specific legislation side. And then as far as the deficit goes, that matters a lot for the economic ramifications next year and for bond yields.But Mike, to pivot this back to you, where do you think investor expectations are for the outcome of this package?Michael Zezas: So there's a lot of moving pieces in this fiscal policy package, and I think what's happening here is that investors can project a lot onto this. They can project a lot of positivity and constructive outcomes for markets; and a lot of negativity and negative outcomes for markets.So, for example, if you are really focused on the deficit impact of cutting taxes and whether or not there's enough spending cuts to offset those tax extensions, then you could look at the array of possible outcomes here and expect a major deficit expansion. And that might make you less constructive on bonds because you would expect yields to go higher as there was greater supply of Treasuries needed to borrow that much to finance the tax cuts. Again, not necessarily fully offset by spending cuts.So, you could look at this and say, well, this will ultimately be something where economic growth helps tax revenues. And you might be looking at the benefits for companies and the feed through to the equity markets and think really positively about it.And we think the truth is probably somewhere in between. You're not going to get policy that really justifies either your highest hopes or your greatest fears here.Ariana Salvatore: So, it's really like a Rorschach test for investors. When we think about our base case, how do you think that's going to materialize? What on the policy front are we watching for?Michael Zezas: Yeah, so we have to consider the starting point here, which is Congress is trying to address a series of tax cuts that are set to expire at the end of the year. And if they extend all of those tax cuts, then on a year-over-year basis, you didn't really change any policy. So that just on its own might not mean a meaningful deficit increase.Now, if Congress is able to extend greater tax cuts on top of that; but it's going to offset those greater tax cuts with spending cuts in revenue raises elsewhere, then again you might end up with a net effect close to zero on a deficit basis.And the way our economists look at this mix is that you might end up with an effect from a stimulus perspective on the economy that's something close to neutral as well. So, there's a lot of policy changes happening beneath the surface. But in the aggregate, it might not mean a heck of a lot for the economic outlook for next year.Now, that doesn't mean that there would be zero deficit increase in the aggregate next year because this is just one policy that is part of a larger set of government policies that make up the total spending posture of the government. There's already something in the range of $200-250 billion of deficit increase that was already going to happen next year. Because of weaker revenue growth on slower economic growth this year, and some spending that would automatically have happened because of inflation cost adjustments and higher interest on the debt. So, long story short, the policy that's happening right now that we think is going to be the endpoint for congressional deliberations isn't something our economists see as meaningfully uplifting growth for next year, and it probably increases the deficit – at least somewhat next year.Now we're thinking very short term here about what happens in 2026. But I think investors need to think around that timeline because if you're thinking about what this means for getting deficits smaller, multiple years ahead, or creating the type of tax environment that might induce greater corporate investment and greater economic growth years ahead – all those things are possible. But they're very hypothetical and they're subject to policy changes that could happen after the next Congress comes in or the next president comes in.So, Ariana, that's the overall look at our base case. But I think it's important to understand here that there are multiple different paths this legislation could follow. Can you explain what are some of the sticking points? And, depending on how they're resolved, how that might change the trajectory of what's ultimately passed here?Ariana Salvatore: There are a number of disagreements that need to be resolved. In particular, one of the biggest that we're focused on is on the SALT cap; so that's the cap on State And Local Tax deductions that individuals can take. That raised about a trillion dollars of revenue in the first iteration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017.Republicans generally are okay with making a modification to that cap, maybe taking it a bit higher, or imposing some income thresholds. But the SALT caucus, this small group of Republicans in Congress, they're pushing for a full repeal or something bigger than just a small dollar amount increase.There's also a group of moderate Republicans pushing against any sort of spending cuts to programs like Medicaid and SNAP; that's the food stamps program. And then there's another cohort of House Republicans that are seeking to preserve the Inflation Reduction Act. Ultimately, these are all going to be continuous tension points. They're going to have to settle on some pay fors, some savings, and we think where that lands is effectively at a $90 billion or so deficit increase from just the tax policy changes next year.Now with tariff revenue excluded, that's probably closer to [$]130 billion. But Mike, to your point, there are these scheduled increases in outlays that also are going to have to be considered for next year's deficit. So, you're looking at an overall increase of about $310 billion.Michael Zezas: Yeah, I think that's right and the different ways those different dynamics could play out, I think puts us in a range of a $200 billion expansion maybe on the low end, and a $400 billion expansion on the high end. And these are meaningful numbers. But I think important context for investors is that these numbers might seem a lot smaller than some of what's been reported in the press, and that's because the press reports on the congressional budget office scoring, and these are typically 10-year numbers.So, you would multiply that one-year number by 10 at least conceptually. And these are numbers relative to a reality in which the tax cuts were allowed to expire. So, it's basically counting up revenue that is being missed by not allowing the tax cuts to expire. So, the context matters a lot here. And so we have been encouraging investors to really kind of look through the headlines, really kind of break down the context and really kind of focus on the short term impacts because those are the most reliable impacts and the ones to really anchor to; because policy uncertainty beyond a year is substantially higher than even the very high policy uncertainty we're experiencing right now.So, sticking with the theme of uncertainty, let's talk timing here. Like we came into the year thinking this tax bill would be resolved late in the year. Is that still the case or are you thinking it might be a bit sooner?Ariana Salvatore: I think that timing still holds up. Right now, the reconciliation bill is supposed to address the expiring debt ceiling. So, the real deadline for getting the bill done is the X date or the date by which the extraordinary measures are projected to be exhausted. That's the date that we would potentially hit an actual default.Of course, that date is somewhat of a moving target. It's highly dependent on tax receipts from Treasury. But our estimate is that it's somewhere around August or September. In the meantime, there's a number of key catalysts that we're watching; namely, I would say, other projections of the X date coming from Treasury, as well as some of these markups when we start to get more bill text and hear about how some of the disputes are being resolved.As I mentioned, we had text earlier this week, but there's still no quote fix for the SALT cap, and the house is still tentatively pushing for its Memorial Day deadline. That's just six legislative days away.Michael Zezas: Got it. So, I think then that means that we're starting to learn a lot more about how this bill comes together. We will be learning even a lot more over the next few months and while we set out our expectations that you're going to have some fiscal policy expansion. But largely a broadly unchanged posture for U.S. fiscal policy. We're going to have to keep checking those regularly as we get new bits of information coming out of Congress on probably a daily basis at this point.Ariana Salvatore: That's right.Michael Zezas: Great. Well, Ariana, thanks for taking the time to talk.Ariana Salvatore: Great speaking with you, Michael.Michael Zezas: Thank you for your time. If you find Thoughts on the Market and the topics we cover of interest, leave us a review wherever you listen. And if you like what you hear, tell a friend or colleague about us today.
Work With Erica Erica explains the potential savings on self-employment taxes and the trade-offs with the Qualified Business Income Deduction (QBID). Erica advises listeners to hold off on making the S-Corp election until there's more clarity on tax laws, which are expected to change with the expiration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2025. 00:00 Intro 00:45 The Importance of Timing for S Corp Election 01:49 Understanding S Corp and QBID 02:50 The Impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act 04:11 Why Waiting is the Smart Move 05:52 Practical Steps for 2025 07:13 Concierge Bookkeeping ____________________ Connect with Erica | LinkedIn | Website | Newsletter
Watch The X22 Report On Video No videos found Click On Picture To See Larger PictureLayoffs are left over from the Biden administration, Trump is now countering the layoffs with incoming jobs. Trump just used information to see what China's next move is. Trump is now preparing for the next phase, he needs to see who will fight against removing taxes. The [DS] is being weakened, they are doing everything they can to fight back but it is making it worse. Trump and the patriots know they need a clean house and Gabbard confirms they are doing exactly that. Operation Hunt and Terminate is now happening in the agencies. Trump has now exposed the RINOs and the [DS] players, they are now boxed in and he is now setting up the team to expose the crimes they have committed. (function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:13499335648425062,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-7164-1323"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="//cdn2.customads.co/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs"); Economy https://twitter.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1920539645273575910 Job cuts have been particularly high in the government sector, followed by retail and technology. DOGE actions, market/economic conditions, and restructuring have been major drivers of layoffs. US layoffs are at recession levels. Since Donald Trump became president on January 20, 2025, approximately 345,000 jobs have been created, based on available data up to April 2025. This figure comes from a White House memo citing job creation through March 2025, with 228,000 jobs added in March alone. Additionally, February 2025 saw 151,000 jobs added, according to a jobs report. These numbers align with claims from the Trump administration, though they emphasize private-sector growth (54% in non-government sectors) and manufacturing gains (9,000 jobs in February). https://twitter.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1920847873270264005 https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/1920838414590488902 Trump Says GOP Should ‘Probably Not' Raise Taxes After Reportedly Backing Millionaire Tax “The problem with even a “TINY” tax increase for the RICH, which I and all others would graciously accept in order to “[Raising taxes on the top level] would be a tax on every small business, every job creator,” Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said Thursday on CNBC. “That's what Kamala Harris campaigned on. That's what she promised.” “Right now, I'm not excited about the proposal,” Senate Finance Committee chairman Mike Crapo told conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt on Thursday. “But I have to say, there are a number of people in both the House and the Senate who are, and if the president weighs in in favor of it, then that's going to be a big factor that we have to take into consideration as well.” Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who frequently breaks with his party on economic issues, told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday afternoon that he would be “fine” with the president's millionaire tax proposal. He cautioned that at most two of his Senate GOP colleagues would join him in signing off on the tax hike. Source: dailycaller.com Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017, which reduced taxes for many, including the wealthy. The law lowered the top individual income tax rate from 39.6% to 37%, doubled the estate tax exemption, and cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, disproportionately benefiting high earners and corporations. Data from the Tax Policy Center shows the top 1% of households received an average tax cut of about $50,000 in 2018, while middle-income households got around $900. supporters claim it spurred economic growth. https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/1920553634775118283 https://twitter.com/BitcoinMagazine/status/1920841070281175489
Behind every great moment of American prosperity, there's been a bold move to let people keep more of what they earn. In this episode of American Potential, host David From is joined by Chris Stio, Deputy Director of Staff Training at Americans for Prosperity, to trace the powerful history of tax reform in America—from the Civil War to JFK, from Reagan to the modern-day Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It's more than a policy discussion—it's a story of what happens when government gets out of the way and trusts people to build, create, and thrive. Drawing on decades of economic history, Chris explains how lowering taxes has consistently empowered individuals, sparked growth, and lifted millions. He also reveals how the language we use—words like “tax relief”—can inspire action and shape the national conversation. As Tax Day approaches and Congress debates whether to let tax hikes kick in, this conversation is a rallying cry for action. Because when we cut through the noise and stand up for real reform, we're not just defending numbers on a page—we're defending opportunity, dignity, and the very promise of the American Dream.
Tax season is here, and so is the debate about what you owe and why. Cato Institute's Adam Michel joins us to break down the policies behind your tax return—from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to what's at stake if key provisions expire in 2025. We cover how the law affected everyday Americans, why claims about corporations and the rich not paying their “fair share” fall apart, and what an ideal tax system could actually look like. Adam Michel is the Director of Tax Policy Studies at Cato Institute. Read his updates on tax and fiscal policies at https://adamnmichel.substack.com/ and follow him on X at @adamnmichel.