you
I know what that is.
I want to know the Smoky Robinson and the Miracles.
Welcome back to the Erlingham Show.
As always, you can join us at 855-752-4842.
Sandy, great music, by the way.
It's Friday.
That means Friday's my co-host, Sandy.
We have Sandy to music.
You know, Sandy, before we go to the phone lines and the phones have been jammed since the beginning, so thank you guys for hanging on.
Sandy, I was looking at this, products impacted by tariffs, leather products, wearing apparel, electric equipment, textiles, mineral products, metal, wood, plastics.
sanded it's everything that's everything
yeah and you know if you looked at the wearing apparel you know you can't buy shoes that are fabricated in the United States you can't buy
Textiles mostly that are fabricated in the United States and most of them are fabricated in places where there would it would be impossible to have a balance of payments Trade with them that was equal for instance Bangladesh Lots of textiles are made in Bangladesh people of Bangladesh don't have money to buy the things that America makes and it would be crazy to to assume that Bangladesh and the United States ought to have a balanced trade
balance between them.
The other thing about what's going on is Donald Trump is stoking another misconception.
He talks about deficits in the trade balance as if it translates into a debt that somehow the United States is building up debts because they have trade deficits.
The concepts are totally unrelated.
The deficit in trade that the United States has has nothing to do with the federal debt.
The deficit in trade we have is a function of
millions and millions of decisions made by individuals about what they buy and where that thing is made.
And it's that individual that is expending the money that needs to be spent to accomplish the purchase.
The only thing that could happen from an imbalance of trade would be potentially a depreciation in the value of the dollar if we had big deficits.
But of course, our dollar is very, very strong because it is the world reserve currency.
So Sandy, before we go to the phone lines and guys, I promise you I'm coming.
And so it's Peter Navarro looked at in the arena of intellectuals on economics.
It's Peter Navarro at the top of the list.
a moron.
Well,
He's a maverick.
He represents a theory that is not held in high regard or high repute.
You know, it's good that the...
that the economists of the world do not all have a unified position.
And of course, Peter Navarro's position is far from the consistent view of economists.
He's a maverick, okay?
All right, Charles, thank you very much for hanging on, man.
You won't talk about the tariffs, go ahead.
Hey, good morning, guys.
Great, great show.
Two points if I can make them.
The first one is on tariffs.
And Sandy, you're kind of here like arsonists.
You know, he intentionally set the fire to the building.
Then he comes in with this water hose, and he puts out the front of the house.
He leaves the back of the house burning, which would represent China.
Then he comes out and raises his hands and say, hey, I'm the hero.
And then the sad part is you got these non-news people on Fox News on Fox.
saying, oh, he's brilliant.
He's the dealmaker.
Look what he did.
I heard Horado on MSNBC.
I had to turn it off.
Like Donald Trump, this is exactly what he was planning to do.
He's not a dealmaker.
He's bankrupted all his businesses.
And the second point is, I believe that judges that are about the law, teachers that are being affected,
businesses that I've been affected with all this, DEI talk crap, and regular citizens, law firms need to be out in the streets, marching and protesting because this man is definitely out to destroy the company.
Hey, Charles.
I mean, to destroy the
country.
To
destroy
this
country,
yes.
Hey, Charles, thank you very much for the call.
Let's go to Cam from Appleton.
Good morning to Cam.
You say what?
Hey guys, real quick two things one is I don't think people quite understand that if ships are impacted at all Those are already pretty high demand Country like China are gonna Pull all of them in and make advancements faster than USA is able to at all period to I don't bring great pleasure in mentioning this but
the CECOT, the prison in El Salvador.
Last night I saw some people looking into it a bit and they're finding that using satellite imagery, if you look at the prison, you can see a section of the prison that is not present whenever any of our US new stations go over there.
It's just
gone, like the sheds are removed, the buildings are removed from that plot of land, but then they're present again and they leave.
And you can see blood stains painted all over the ground and north of the prison by a mile or a mile and a half, you can see what looks to be an area for them to dump bodies.
Well, Cam, thank you very much for the call.
Sandy, we know that it's an inhumane place, right?
Well, in fact, I think I think Donald Trump champions it as such essentially I mean there's very thinly veiled discussion about the nature of that prison and now he's talking about how much comfort he would take if he could deport us citizens who are arrested and he could deport them to such a place, you know
The reason people are being sent to a prison like that there is much the same reason that we had a dark place like Guantanamo where we could send prisoners and treat them in a manner that wasn't permitted on a U.S.
soil.
All right, Jim, you're up next from Brookfield.
Good morning, Sandy and Earl.
First of all, Earl, I just want to wish you well tonight with the Prime.
I hope that everything goes great.
Oh, hey, man, it will.
It's commendable.
Well, thank you.
Yeah.
And I just want to just voice my frustration of what apparently, I mean, it's become very obvious.
There's two types of standards for presidents, you know, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, even W. Bush.
And then there's Donald Trump.
I mean, why is it, I mean, just imagine if Barack Obama, you know, had eliminated or not eliminated, but kicked out Fox News out of the press room like Trump did with AP.
Okay, just imagine if Barack Obama was targeting law firms and extorting money from them simply because they, you know, took positions or defended cases that he didn't agree with.
You know, Joe Biden lends money to his brother who pays it back.
And yet the Republican congressional hearings last two years to see if there's any wrong doing on this and call him the Biden crime family.
Why is it that there's, like, two standards for presidents?
You mentioned earlier, Earl, what happens when Trump leaves the office.
I'm hoping there's some type of, you know, the pendulum swings back to some sort of accountability for these presidents.
But I just am floored by the fact there's two different types of standards for all the other presidents and then Donald Trump.
He gets away with everything.
And it's not just the Republicans.
It's just the American public, I think.
the media, whatever, they're just accustomed to Trump being so outrageous.
It's like the norm and that's wrong and that's got to stop.
Hey, Jim, thank you very much, Sandy.
You want to respond to it?
Well, I think what's astounding is that people apparently are willing to concede to Donald Trump, the ability to be an authoritarian and to exercise his will because they think he's such a great deal maker.
When the facts are that his private business ventures have been
ultimate failures, every one of them, and the only deal making he did that seemed to be interesting and dynamic was when he was a TV figure and it was fictitional.
The apprentice
was not
reality, and the apprentice is what in fact built him up to have the reputation of being a great businessman.
The guy who was the showrunner
for the apprentice has since apologized to the American people saying he is so sorry that they selected Donald Trump to be the the head of the apprentice because they built for him a reputation which he did not deserve as a great businessman.
All right.
Up next CJ.
CJ, you're up next.
Well, thanks for taking my call.
I know I won't get long to get one shot.
You know,
You misrepresent so much of what's happening, Sandy.
The tax law, if the Trump tax cuts are not extended, this is from the Congressional Budget Office.
22% the average taxpayer will see a tax hike.
40 million families will have their household's child tax credit cut in half.
91% of all taxpayers will see a guaranteed deduction
flashed in half.
26 million small businesses will be hit with a 43% top rate tax increase.
Most small businesses file as individuals.
Two million family owned farms will see the death tax exemption flashed in half.
I feel like Paul Harvey, because you only tell part of the story.
Well, no, let's just say that if what we wanted to do was preserve all of those things, they could go ahead and preserve all those things, and the cost would be nowhere near $4.5 trillion.
The problem is they want to preserve the tax reduction for the wealthy, and that's where the expenses are experienced with respect to the cost to the federal budget.
The cost of tax revenue lost only comes from people who pay large taxes, okay?
And it is true that the wealthy in America pay more of the percentage of the federal tax than the poor do, but of course you can't get blood from a stone.
So, yeah, you should go back and analyze that data and say, if we continued all those things that are being broadcast as being lost by Tom, Dick and Mary and did not preserve the rest of the tax cut, how much would that cost?
And that would cost a mere
fraction.
You know, great music, Sandy.
8-5-5-7-5-2-4-8-4-2-Texas at that same number.
Sandy, the music?
The music's about circuses and clowns, and that's apropos to what we're talking about, I guess, today.
It's interesting how much music there is that relates to circuses, and most people find joy in it.
People are frightened of clowns, however, and...
And I'm afraid we have a clown that we are all getting to be very concerned about.
All
right, let's go up next is Mike from Kenosha.
Mike, you're up next.
Morning, guys.
Happy Friday.
Yes, sir.
You know, I have to say this.
I got two points very quickly.
Number one is looking at the budget that the house passed yesterday, the GLP budget that adds $5 trillion.
to our nation's debt.
You remember, and we're talking about theater, when Barack Obama was attempting to get healthcare under the Affordable Care Act, you remember the drama that the Jim Jordans and all these Republicans, they're foaming at the mouth saying, there's no way we're gonna do this, adding more debt to American people, I think that.
The debt was somewhere around $20 trillion, a third less than it is now, roughly.
And there are formerly the mothers, no way, to the point where they put all these poison pills in Obamacare in order to make it budget-neutral.
So here is a perfect example of the Carnival Act, the Circus Act of the GOP that we've all witnessed.
Again, the Tea Party and all these foaming of the mouth and sanely passionate, no more budget, you know, the Rand Paul drawing the line in the sand, all this stuff.
And they passed a bill that added five trillion yesterday.
So to me, and I was thinking all people who are paying attention, this clearly reveals how intellectually dishonest the Tea Party
theater, the GOP campaign has been.
Believe these things, we believe in social security.
Go ahead.
One, one, one other point and Sandy, this is really for your benefit.
If you recall back in the late thirties, we had roughly our economy.
I think the debt was 120% of our economy.
And what did we end up doing?
We fought a war we create the GI Bill and then we created the interstate system But we did that even though we had a hundred and twenty percent of national debt We did that because we understood that you know the progressive type of sales tax and revenue that is shared by most of the world where the elite the
the super wealthy are going to have to pay a little bit more.
That's been the norm.
So again, all is not lost, but we must come to the realization that this whole Republican, for the last two or three generations of Americans, it's all been theater.
It's all been a circus in yesterday's budget that they passed.
The Republicans passed, I think is clear evidence.
Hey, Mike, thank you very much for the call, Sandy.
Well, you know, this whole doge thing has been circus, you know, the claim that we've got billions and billions and billions of dollars of fraud.
We've got people who are 120 years old, many, many of them experiencing and getting Social Security or getting unemployment benefits and.
All of that is designed to be a smokescreen at the time that they're adopting a budget that's going to involve a great deal of larger deficit, because the American people, I think, are trying to be led to believe that there'll be savings, enormous savings that will offset the kind of deficit that they're talking about adopting in the budget through reduced expenditures, which aren't going to materialize.
Yeah, I mean the only thing that I take comfort from is that the gilded age that Donald Trump wants to refer to from 1873 to 1913 was followed by a period of progressive government and and so was the depression, you know, so that
You know the 20s in a period of conservative conservatism was then followed again by progressivism and people believing in government and the things that government ought to be doing and should be doing well and and maybe people are gonna wake up when they when they see what happens in a in the current environment with respect to the need for adequate government,
you know Sandy speaker Johnson and the Republicans in the Congress who passed his budget
Speaker Johnson made a promise to them that the cuts are going to come.
We didn't do it right now, but I guarantee you, we're going to make major cuts down the road.
So people need to be aware, they need to understand that he's traded this off-sending.
I think that's what that expression was all about.
If they want to have tax reductions, they ought to come forward with the cuts first.
That's the hard part, right?
And let's see whether they actually materialize and what it is they're talking about cutting.
Yes.
That's like giving the dog the treat before the trick, okay?
You know, the dog doesn't do the trick once they've had the tree.
All right.
8-5-5-7-5-2-4-8-4-2.
Phone lines are open.
It's Friday.
That means Friday's my co-host Sandy Williams and you, and I promise you we're coming right back to the phone
lines.
Of course we believe these things.
We believe in social security.
everyone's a winner bargains glory that's right you two can be the proud owner of the quality goes in before that name goes on one-tenth of a dollar one-tenth of a dollar we got services after the sale how about perfume we got perfume how about an engagement ring some for the little ladies some for the little ladies some for the little ladies three four dollars
We got a year-end clearance, we
got our white sale, smoke
damage, furniture, you can drive it away today.
Act now, act now, and receive as our gift.
Our gift to you, they come in all colors, one size fits all.
All right, Sandy.
Great
stuff, man.
Welcome back to The Erlingham Show.
As always, you can join us at 855-752-4842.
Text us at that same number, Sandy.
Go ahead, man.
The music.
Yes, it's great, great music.
Let's go to Tom from LA.
Tom, you're up.
Well, I'm not a, first off, you know what?
Actions speak louder than words, and you always show the actions every day.
I hope there's a way that somebody can videotape that wonderful prompt.
I'm going to do it.
We can all see it.
We're going to do it.
I'm absolutely going to do it and make sure it's
available
on the civic media link.
Thank you for that.
Second, I'm going to be talking a little longer today.
But if you want, I'm not a genius by any means.
But if I want to cut waste out of the government, give people
who make $3 million or less a tax break, and increased taxes back to the Republicans' Eisenhower rates, Republican Eisenhower rates, on people who made over $3 million or adjusted to today's wealth.
It was 90%.
Republicans are robbing Peter, cutting the essential programs,
that FDR put into place, like Social Security and Unemployment, to pay Paul the billionaires in tax breaks.
And it's amazing that it would be Paul, the one that was the tax collector that they'd be giving it to.
I am glad that Sandy has finally, and Sandy, this is not a snipe at you, so I don't want you to think that, even though it may sound like it.
snipes snipes
but go ahead i know i know but i am so happy if sandy has finally woken up and looked at the things like people like brendan and cam and charles and eric and pj and ann and susan and mike and of course genie my favorite olly bill and mark because we have been saying this for over a year
I haven't heard from Gary lately, so I'm thinking that his HVAC money or supplies must be going skyrocket and maybe he's starting to see the light.
We need to start pushing back when people say that Joe Biden's economy was not good.
Donald Trump takes things that are working.
He breaks them and then he says that he fixes them.
And then he goes on like the Roy Cohn that he is, or the protégé of Roy Cohn, and says, oh, am I not wonderful?
The one air Democrats make is they don't know how to communicate their bragging of what it is that they've done to actually care about the American people.
And I have one last question for you, Sandy.
Why is it that the people who benefited
from we the people government paying into the system through paying taxes like Derek Van Odd one and Paul Ryan Etc want to destroy the programs that they actually benefited from as children because they were on snap and Social Security because of Paul's dad dying Why do they want to cut these essential programs?
that Franklin Delano Roosevelt put into place and the New Deal, when they benefited from it, maybe they just need to pay back everything themselves and let the rest of us continue to run the programs.
Like you said, Sandy, in the past 50 years, government has not increased in terms of the number of employees.
And what their goal is, is to say, we're not gonna cut Social Security, trust us, we're not gonna cut Medicare, trust us.
We're just going to cut the workers that work for those places.
So therefore the programs go belly up.
OK, Tom.
That's what they're saying.
So when they say that, thank
you.
We got you, Tom.
Thank you very much for the call.
Sandy, you want to respond to any of that?
But you know, I keep to try and explain.
why it is that people of wealth are wanting to cut taxes and to cut out programs that are designed to be safety nets for the poor.
is what I've described as the process of the wealthy trying to kill the golden goose that has made them wealthy.
They've grown up in a system with a government the size that it is and a government with the programs of the sort that it has and it has afforded them the opportunity to develop great wealth and now when they have this great wealth they somehow have decided that they don't want to share any of it into the federal revenue pot and they've demonized the programs that exist as a rationale
for trying to retain much more wealth than they can ever consume themselves and wealth that when it's left to their children will only spoil them.
The world has known for a long time that third generation wealth loses all of it based on their incapacity to be motivated in the manner that they could otherwise be if they weren't born with a huge pile of money sitting beneath them.
Jack from Merimet, good morning to you Jack.
Good morning.
Yeah, I've got a few things to say about this insanity.
But just as one comment about the obscene wealth, I have quite a number of conservative friends as well as a lot of progressive ones.
And I always ask my conservative friends when something like this comes up, how much is enough?
And the answer
they really never come up with a real answer.
They closest to that, like I hear from them is, well, they earned it all.
Well, we know they didn't earn it all.
I mean, between not paying taxes and accumulating and then turning that over untaxed income to their next generation and continuing that, that's the way this kind of huge wealth
usually is built.
But I have a few things to say about the insanity in Washington right now.
First, if you wanted to bolster the strength of American enemies like Putin and Xi Jinping and degrade American strength and standing as a democracy
in
the world, I don't know what more you could do than what they're doing.
Trump's been allowed by Congress and the Supreme Court to become literally a dictator, and I don't expect he'll allow anything like a real election in 2026.
There's no way the majority of Americans will vote for anything like a continuation of this chaos.
And our financial system continues to be degraded to the point where our currency soon is going to stop being the world benchmark, probably replaced by the one.
Also, the constant pushing of xenophobia is an intentional distraction.
It's just designed to continue inciting hate and anger so people either ignore the real issues like the billionaire giveaways and tax welfare plan that's in the new budget and blame other countries for the financial degradation of most Americans.
The pain, whether it's financial,
lack of government services, lack of fulfillment of contracts, apparently random and in some cases illegal deportations.
This is intentional.
They're saying, look at the harm we can cause with impunity.
And we can do it to anybody.
So you better not stop our theft of your government and the trillions that it has, because we'll do it to you.
This is authoritarianism 101.
You know, Jack,
Thank you very much, Sandy.
We've just had just great callers, great insightful thoughts, your thoughts on all of this.
The last point that was made is absolutely one of the most important points, which is this theater of demonstrating, for instance, how they're taking immigrants away in the dark of night and sending them to El Salvador to a horrible prison.
This notion of
Calling law firms forward to destroy their business if they act in the manner of simply dissenting from the views of Donald Trump is all designed to be chilling theater to repress dissension Wherever it might exist and to make everyone afraid I guarantee you that if I still worked in the law firm that my law firm would be calling me up right now and telling me I should not be on the air talking like this about Donald Trump because it threatens their entire business environment he has
demonstrated his capacity to stamp on and play whack-a-mole with anyone who has the temerity to speak up against him.
It's the most contrary, it's the singular most contrary policy to the First Amendment that I have ever seen in action.
All right, let's go to Lori.
Good morning to you, Lori.
You say what?
Yeah, when Sandy made that comment about Trump being a clown and that some people are
scared of cons.
It just reminded me of Stephen King's it.
Maybe we should call him president it.
But so CJ, that question that he made or that comment he made about we have to extend these this tax breaks.
So from what I understand with Trump's first term, he made permanent tax breaks for the wealthy, but these ones for us
are temporary and rat out this year.
So why isn't CJ commenting on that?
Why weren't ours permanent?
Why was it just for the wealthy?
And how can they possibly give the wealthy another $4 trillion tax break when they can't even give us anything?
And then the other comment I want to make was, I think it's Charles that calls in.
He is so articulate.
He's so confident and
very intelligent.
He should almost have his own show.
Well, uh, Lori, thank you very much.
Uh, and I think you're a first time caller, but thank you very much.
Uh, Sandy, uh, you know, she's asking the question about why does, why do these billionaires need additional tax breaks?
Well, why do they need more money?
Well, it's it's unbelievable to me that that the people who have assembled this kind of wealth Don't feel an obligation to support the government which creates the social and economic Ecosystem in which they make all this money and what they what they're looking at doing is taking away money that they describe as as entitlements which are aimed at people who have who don't have wealth Okay, and so Social Security is designed for the people who don't have a big cushion when they retire
so that they can actually exist in retirement.
Medicare is aimed at people who are older and couldn't possibly afford the insurance price that an elderly person would have to pay to have insurance coverage for medical care.
Medicare is aimed at the people who can't afford medical care at all.
And so these are entitlements that the wealthy want to extract from the programs because
To the extent that they want to reduce the budget by any substantial amount whatsoever, they have to attack those parts of the budget as well as the Defense Department budget.
And they've already, the president has already announced and it tends to increase the expenditures for defense by a number like $165 billion.
You know, Sandy, it is not only nauseating, it should be criminal.
because the suffering that is going to take place because of these decisions that they made Sandy, we know that there's going to be massive suffering of the American people, right?
I mean
particularly in a recession when these safety net issues become much more pertinent to a far greater number of people and so you know are they going to attack the safety net that's an uncertainty that they're continuing to say they aren't but it's pretty clear that either they are or they are going to increase the deficit by such an enormous amount that they're going to leave a legacy for our children and grandchildren which is an exceedingly exceedingly burdensome and and
sustainable kind of a problem.
So if you had a magic wand or a crystal ball, which one of those two do you think they're going to pursue?
On the other side, Sandy.
8-5-5-7-5-2-4-8-4-2.
Very good, especially so Sandy, great.
Great show this morning, 8-5-5-7-5-2-4-8-4-2.
I call Sandy Williams
and you.
show Sandy just great music this great great music it's Friday means Friday's my co-host Sandy we're sending the music choice
all right Brendan you're
But you can't get a pair of sneakers for under $100.
It's ridiculous.
But the point I want to make is April 15 is coming, folks.
And this clown up there in DC wants to, the American people need to be shot.
They need to be woken up.
So let them put on martial law.
Let the American people wake up and see on their televisions, reserve troops going against peaceful protesters.
This is how the Vietnam War was ended.
college students stood up and took batons to the skull, and it was all on national television.
So let's stand up.
We gotta stand up if we do not.
This is just gonna get worse.
And to the kind young lady who called earlier asking why CJ said something, because he'll never say anything negative about a guy he's in a bromance with.
You guys have a great
weekend.
Hey Brendan, thank you very much for the call.
Mark from Racine.
Yeah, the term defense spending, that's a euphemism, it's military spending, it's almost really more like offense spending given US history, but I would say at least call it military spending because saying this defense spending makes people, oh, we do want to defend ourselves, and then we're spending at least half of the federal budget is going to the so-called defense.
Military spending is my suggestion.
Anyway,
thank you.
Hey, Mark, you're right about that, man.
Thank you very much for the call.
Nobody's coming after America.
Don, you're up next.
Yeah, great show, guys.
Boy, I'm really learning something here.
Your callers are hitting all the needles right on the heads.
Anyhow, I learned something again today.
That lady said that tax
Trump tax, uh, permanent for them.
For
the
wealth, for the rich.
Yeah.
For the wealthy, but the Trump, Dick and Mary, uh, we're getting ripped off.
I mean, uh, shouldn't we,
uh, get, uh, sure that we know what's good for the goose should be good for the gander.
You know, that, that doesn't sound good to me, but anyhow, that's Mike.
All
right.
Done.
Uh, thank you very much, man.
So, so Sandy, I have to say to you.
We've done a lot of different shows Something you're very electric and special About this morning show.
I mean music was unbelievable and it fit just perfectly but Sandy the content of the conversation of what is really happening and What is transpiring as we speak?
You know, I said before earlier I was
One of my classmates was on Facebook.
I don't do Facebook.
I just tell people I don't, but I got this, this thing that came in and I happened to look and she was on saying how great Donald Trump was.
She'd vote for him again.
And there was thousands and thousands of people who were saying, yeah, he's the greatest thing ever.
And we're going to support him the next time.
And these were people of my generation.
And Sandy, all I could do is, man, what don't they see?
Well, to be honest, you said that in the past, I've always been much more cautious about talking about the economy, the future, being pessimistic.
To me, alarm bills have already rung.
And I wake up in the morning and I'm both angry and frightened by the turn that the country has taken.
And it's not about the policy.
It's not about whether we ought to make government more efficient or that something like a DOGE committee could investigate efficiency and try to improve the efficiency of government.
No, that's not the problem.
The problem is the process.
And the process has obliterated the separation
of powers in our government.
We have now a person in the presidency who is operating in the most authoritarian ways possible, using all of the powers of the presidency and those that don't even exist but are contrary to the Constitution, to point the guns of government at individuals who dissent, at businesses who dissent, to destroy and repress dissension and free speech.
is the most frightening thing I've seen.
And that is the process that the American public needs to stand up and be very frightened about.
We've unleashed a monster.
We've opened the bottle.
The genie has emerged and we've got to get it back into the bottle.
You know, I just want to say thank you, Sandy, as always.
Thank all of you who made this show go.
I'll be able to escape this in Sandy Will as well for a little while as we spend some time with some very special people this afternoon at the 22nd annual Citywide Special Ed Prom.
Thank everybody who made the show go.
Thank you, Cardi.
I'll be back on Monday.
You've been tuned in to The Early News Show.
Have a great weekend.
is what they want.
Viruses and riots.
People dying.
We won't stay home.
Black lives matter.
All lives matter.
What's all this division for?
It's modern.
