Transcript
Economic Turbulence and the AI Revolution
What's Going On with Earl Ingram · Wed Oct 7, 2026
All right, welcome back to what's going on with Earl Ingram.
As always, it is always great to have an opportunity to come before you, the listening audience, and always even better when I can share this platform with my good friend, Sandy Williams.
Sandy Williams really needs no introduction for those of you who've been around a while.
But I'll just say he's a great economist.
He's a guy that if I start talking about all his accomplishments, it would feel the entirety of this hour.
And we've got too many things that's critically important to talk about.
It's been a while.
But good morning to you, my friend.
How you doing?
I'm doing all
Well, well, it's kind of been the same way for me, but it's good to be back in the saddle with you again.
And, you know, we know for sure it's not going to be so long the next time I've been assured of that.
So got a lot to talk about Sandy.
Things are going on that I think the average person is struggling to understand, you know, you, you, you are a man who.
is very well informed about the economy, how it works, more so than the average person.
But here we are, Sandy, and the average American is just wondering what happened.
Things are just so difficult, and they don't seem to be getting better.
They just, and so it's like we're swimming upstream.
And there's an economy that's booming.
And so, help us understand how that contradiction can be taking place, Sandy.
An economy that's booming the way it is, and yet the American people are struggling to put food on the table.
And if you, those segments of the economy are booming to such an extent that when you average them into the rest, the numbers all seem very good.
But when you,
unbundle it, and you look at the compartments of the economy and what's doing well and what isn't and how various segments are going, it's kind of troublesome.
And it's particularly troublesome for Tom Dick and Mary for a long time now.
We've had a stock market that's soaring, but the percentage of the US population that actually shares in the prosperity created by the stock market is very, very small.
And so we've got this seeming bellwether of economic strength, the stock market, which has been booming for quite a long time.
And yet the people who are sharing in that wealth experience.
is relatively small, and it doesn't affect Tom Dick and Mary's daily cash flow, for instance.
And so we're finding that families now even rising all the way up to the level of $300,000 a year, a significant percentage of families at that level of income report that they're living paycheck to paycheck, meaning they aren't really saving money.
they're spending all the money they have, they're feeling financial constraints.
Well, if that's happening at the $300,000 level, which is way above the median income in this country, just think what's happening to the median income families.
In Wisconsin last year, the median income was about $75,000 a year.
What is median income?
That's the level of income that half of the people
up to half of the people are at or under, okay?
So in Wisconsin, if the $75,000 number is the median income, that means that half of the income earners in Wisconsin earn less than $75,000 and half earn more.
And so that's the same kind of ratio that's occurring in the country.
Maybe the national median income might be a little higher than Wisconsin's.
It might be 80,000, but it's well off of that 300,000 bogey where people are living paycheck to paycheck.
So if you ask people whether they're booming or not, and if they're living paycheck to paycheck, their answer will be no, we're
not.
Sandy, $75,000 in 2026
is it seems, it appears to be almost a negative number you
Very hard to make things, get things patched together.
And if you have a household income that's in the $80,000 range, you're living a very tight existence.
And then we've got things that are happening in the economy that some of it's related to the strength of the economy, and actually some of it's related to the weakness in the economy.
But for instance, recently there's been a fair amount of publicity about how the federal treasury instruments with maturities of 10 years, the so-called 10-year treasury bond yield, has gone up to 5.6%, which is at a high for over a decade.
That's the highest level we've had.
And so why is that happening?
Well, there's a whole bunch of reasons for why it's happening, and it sort of ties together a whole bunch of economic factors going on in the economy.
First of all, just to be simple about it, if you're going to lend somebody some money and you're going to charge them interest for it, well, how will you figure out how much interest you should charge on the money?
Well, one of the things you need to do if you lend someone money and they're going to pay it back to you in, let's say, five years, is you need to make sure that the money they pay back to you in five years is worth as much as the money you lent them today.
And that's a function of inflation.
Inflation is essentially the rate at which a dollar loses its value.
So if a dollar inflates by 2% a year, that really means that
Next year it takes a dollar and two cents to buy what a dollar could buy today and so If you're going to lend someone money for over a period of time the first thing you want to know is how much inflation is there going to be because I need to charge an interest rate that is at least as high as the inflation rate so that the money I get back from this person is as is as valuable as the money I lent to them a second factor is
how risky is this investment?
If I lend this person a dollar, what are the odds that I'm going to get paid back any of the money at all?
Or am I going to get paid back a hundred cents on the dollar by the borrower?
So that's the risk component.
And then a third component of it is how else can I put this money to work?
And what can I earn on this money if I do something with it other than lending it to this person?
And that's sort of the opportunity cost of lending the money.
And there are other factors as well.
For instance, how much demand is there for my money?
If lots of people are coming to me and saying, I want to borrow money from you, I'm in a position to charge more money for it, or more interest for it.
And all of that is going on right now.
So the level of inflation seems to be going up.
And the predicted levels of inflation seem to be that it's going to be sticky, that it's going to continue to be at a higher level.
That means you need to charge more interest to the borrower, meaning in this case, the federal government, if the federal government wants to borrow money on a 10-year basis, you're going to want to get more money back from them because of the interest rate, the inflation rate that you're projecting.
A second issue is how much
money is being borrowed today?
Well, in today's world, there's a great deal of corporate debt that's where corporations are borrowing money.
Why are they borrowing it?
Well, the biggest borrowing segment is the artificial intelligence segment, which is building out things at such a rapid rate.
And so there's more borrowers competing to borrow money with the federal government.
That's causing the rate of interest to go up for the federal government.
And then, of course,
There's an added level of risk with the federal government because it seems to have an unbridled appetite for spending money that it doesn't have.
The deficit projected for this year, the federal deficit in the budget is projected to be $2.1 trillion, which is record breaking for a time period in which there is no recession.
There's no reason, no, there's no policy reason to be running a deficit.
It's just that the United States currently, and it's with its political processes, seems to have a voracious appetite for spending money that it isn't taxing.
And in particular, the government in question today's administration reduces taxes, but continues to spend money at the same rapid clip.
So we have a $2.1 trillion deficit.
We have a $40 trillion plus national debt, which is growing now at a rate of $2 trillion a year.
And so this kind of projection causes those who are lending money to the United States to become more uncertain about the credit worthiness of the United States and its capacity to pay back dollars that will be worth as much as the dollars that were lent to it.
And so
this higher maturity, this higher interest rate on 10-year maturity treasuries spills over into our economy immediately.
For instance, the interest rate on mortgages has gone up.
It's gone up almost a percentage point in the last month and a half.
And that is slowing down the rate at which people can buy housing.
It's reducing the value of housing.
It's reducing the value of commercial real estate.
So there's broad implications.
all of which affect not just the sectors, not just the federal government and its cost of borrowing money, which incidentally, the interest rate bill for this year because of the size of our debt and the increasing rate on which we're paying interest is a trillion dollars.
So we're paying trillion dollars of interest this year in the federal budget to just carry the debt
And it's going up.
You know, Sandy, I was reading this article in Money Watch yesterday in prior to our conversation this morning, and I was trying to understand as an average American citizen.
Where where we fit in this and the article a couple paragraphs and and let you explain this I want you to explain this to us American workers share of the economic pie has fallen to its lowest level since at least 1947 when the federal government began tracking the data according to analysis by the Federal Reserve Economist the measure known as labor share of income
tracks how much of the nation's economic output flows to workers in the form of wages and salaries, as opposed to the share that goes to investors and corporations through profits, dividends, and other capital income.
A shrinking labor share of income indicates the more economic gains of flowing to shareholders and business owners rather than to workers.
As of early
2026 American workers received 54.1% of the national income according to research from Federal Reserve Bank of New York by comparison that figure top 65% almost 80 years ago when the government began tracking the data following World War II in the in early 2020 it stood at 57.7 indicating that workers have continued to lose ground since the pandemic.
So if I'm if I'm reading you right and listening to what you are saying and I have no reason not to Believe what it is you are saying and I'm reading this information That this just almost appears that this debt that continues to grow From our nation There's not going to be any room for the people themselves.
We're not the ones who are borrowing the money Sandy
The amount of money being borrowed on credit cards continues to go up.
People are pinched.
That's because we're pinched, Sandy.
We're pinched, exactly, yes.
And so, like I was saying, the architecture of our economy has changed a great deal.
We have fewer manufacturing jobs.
We have many more companies whose business models are built on using hourly employees.
the fast food industry, much of the hospitality industry.
We've turned into a service industry economy, which is much different than a manufacturing economy, which we were in the 1960s and 50s and early 70s.
So the architecture of the economy has changed.
We have fewer people who are working in manufacturing or otherwise working in blue collar jobs that permit them to be
in the middle class.
And the definition of the middle class has probably become a little bit underestimated in terms of what it takes to be in a comfortable middle class.
When we look at what it takes to live in some manner that isn't just paycheck to paycheck, we realize that it takes more than the median income to
get
It used to be that the median income was a middle class income and it permitted people to live
Comfortably and not paycheck to paycheck but in the in the new world The median income ends up being an inadequate income and it probably is Only in the in the lowest end of the middle class in terms of if you measure the middle class by financial security and financial comfort We've also shifted the way in which we put the burden of Benefits that used to be borne by the employer so that health care the benefit of health care used to be
given with almost no deductible, no contribution from the employee.
Now, healthcare, even when it's provided by the employer, comes with a significant cost burden to the employee to bear the cost of healthcare.
Some of that has to do with how broken our healthcare system is and how expensive it is on a relative basis in the world.
And then also retirement benefits.
which are now also borne by employees materially with 401ks, rather than having an employment pension plan in which the pension is basically caused by the contribution from the employer.
So, you know, we've changed the way things are designed for the worker, and all of those changes in design have put an added tension on the worker.
And now we've got a shoe that might be falling in the future, this artificial intelligence process, which promises to substantially increase the productivity of certain kinds of workers.
And of course, increasing productivity sounds great, particularly from the employer standpoint.
But when you increase the productivity of workers in a significant fashion, and you don't increase the amount of work that needs to get done by those workers, you end up reducing the number of workers that are required to accomplish the work.
So, Sam, this has happened without the worker not being aware that these things have changed.
Well, you know, that's the way things are.
I mean, things tend to change.
in a manner that is kind of creeping change, creeping change.
It's a bit like being, I've never been this, but I think it's, to hear it, the story told, it's a bit like being the frog in the cold pot
of
the heat
hot
And I think that,
That's sort of what happens to all of us.
We end up in a situation of creeping change.
We live day to day, month to month, week to week.
And in those time periods, the changes are harder to perceive.
But when we look backwards in time and we look backwards over four or five years, we can perceive that there has been a material change in the five or 10 year perspective.
We can get looking backwards.
It's much harder.
to prognosticate what that change is going to look like five and ten years in the future.
But the current trends and then the current unveiling of this AI process leads many people to believe, particularly young people, to believe that the future, the changes that are going to occur in the next five to ten years, could be much more significant than the ones they've realized in the past, particularly as it relates to them.
And we can talk about it later in the show, but I think the impact of AI is going to be materially affected in the service economy.
It's going to be materially affected.
The effect of it is going to be materially felt by our college graduates, the people who have gone to school.
paid the money to go to school in order to obtain white collar jobs.
And unlike productivity increases in the past where robotic manufacturing promised to decrease the number of manufacturing jobs, the impact of AI is pretty much prognosticated to have its biggest impact on white collar jobs.
So Sandy,
before we get there, I want to go back to where the average every day
Tom, Mary, and Dick, and see themselves, when you pointed out the amount of money that is being borrowed and amount of money that's owed, and this is not going to disappear.
This is a serious problem that has to be
taken on by our government, and reeled in at some ways, shape or form, isn't it?
I mean, we can't just keep letting it go the way it's going.
And, you know, it's a tightrope dance because obviously what becomes a matter of concern is the size of our
annual national budget deficit and the size of our national debt, which is the compilation of all of our deficits that are currently remain unpaid.
How that relates to the size of our gross domestic product, which is essentially the size of our economy.
And when the percentage
relationship between our national deficit, annual national deficit.
And when the percentage relationship between our national debt becomes too high as it relates to our gross domestic product, i.e.
the size of our economy, it becomes untenable.
It becomes unsustainable.
It's just like a family having too much debt, having a mortgage that is too big for them to bear.
They can't afford the house they live in.
because the debt burden is too great as compared to their annual income.
It's the same kind of analysis, but looking rather at the gross domestic product, which is like the gross income nationally of everything combined.
And when that relationship, percentage relationship gets too high, it's a problem.
Well, you can solve that in two ways.
You can reduce the debt.
which of course can only be accomplished by increasing taxes if you don't have another process for reducing the debt.
Or you can reduce expenditures, which reduces the debt.
You can do both.
Or you can change the percentage by having the economy grow at a more rapid clip.
And in the past, what we've always done is have our economy grow at a rapid enough clip to absorb the level of additional debt.
that we have been compiling every year, because we've really only had about four years of budget surplus since World War II, and we've always had a deficit of some size since then.
But the deficit has always been, or has usually been, a relatively small percentage of our national GDP, and it's also been less than the growth rate of our GDP.
Recently,
We have been increasing our national debt at a rate that exceeds the rate of growth of our GDP, to the point where our national debt now as a percentage of our GDP is about 120%, which is higher than it's really ever been.
And we're experiencing national annual deficit levels of $2 trillion a year, which is 6%, 7% of our GDP.
which is much greater than we've ever had except when there's been a sorry reason for us to do it.
For instance, World War II, the recession of 2007, the fright of the COVID pandemic.
But otherwise, we've not tended until recently to have this increasing rate of annual deficit in spite of the fact that we have a booming economy and no reason, no policy reason to have that deficit.
But you know,
Sandy, when it wasn't so long ago that I was hearing economists and other people say that our debt, we could carry the debt, okay?
And that it wasn't, the amount of the debt wasn't so detrimental to everything.
I'm not hearing, and it wasn't that long ago that I was hearing people say that.
What
So
our debt was growing, but the interest bill on that debt wasn't growing at a very rapid clip at all.
In fact, the interest rate, the average interest rate on our outstanding debt was a falling number up until about 2018, from 2007 to 2018.
We had a period of an annual decrease in the cost annually of servicing our debt.
But subsequent to that was interest rates rise.
Now we have a trillion dollar interest bill.
No one can ignore that.
It's as large as our defense budget.
So that clearly is an issue.
We also have a rate of increase in our national debt, which is exceeding our rate of growth in our national economy.
And so these things obviously aren't sustainable.
Okay, it doesn't take a rocket scientist or a PhD in economics to say that you can't continue to have a long-term trend where you take on additional national debt at a rate that exceeds the growth rate in our economy because you're continually adding to the burden on the national economy of the government processes and in particularly the debt service of the government processes.
And so, you know, we need to make sure we have a rapidly growing economy.
We need to make sure as well that we don't add to our national debt and have an annual deficit that exceeds the growth rate in our economy.
And for that, we need some discipline.
We might need to tax ourselves at an adequate level, and we might need to do a triage on our various
expenditures, including defense, to figure out whether we can tighten the belt a little bit to avoid this increase.
You know, Sandy, the reason I enjoy having these conversations with you so much is that you can explain it to those of us who are living our lives and the complexities of how all this works and comes together.
We don't ever get to hear.
And yet you can at least explain it to where
we can understand to a degree what we're faced with, because all the things you are talking about right now, right now our nation's not headed in those directions, which will turn this around.
And that's where the fear is.
How can we force our nation to see
that this has to be changed.
The average person, how can we get them to see that?
Yeah, I think the problem is that the government, as far as the political processes are concerned, has just lost fiscal discipline completely.
And I think the American public is aware of it.
We haven't figured out a way to hold their feet to the fire.
electing and re-electing the same people.
And these same people keep behaving in the same manner, which is basically to be unwilling to increase taxes in a manner that would offset the costs of government that they are creating in the various policies.
You know, we wage war.
It's been since the Vietnamese War, we have waged wars of immense expense without increasing taxes.
In fact, George Bush II
who inherited a budget surplus from Bill Clinton, when we got into the Iraq war after 2001 at September 11th, and we got into the wars there, we ended up spending several trillion dollars in the wars that started in that time period.
And not only did we not increase taxes, but we decreased taxes in the face of those increased expenditures.
And what did we get?
What did we expect to get from that?
Well, we obviously got
vastly increased annual deficits to the point where we're now experiencing deficits just 25 years or 26 years after a budget surplus, we're experiencing a deficit of $2 trillion.
You know, Sandy, what you're saying is there's a correlation between tax cuts and our deficits.
That clearly is you can
You don't have to be Sandy Williams to know that there is a correlation between
I think you can use first grade arithmetic to figure out that there is a relationship between them and that the so-called trickle-down effect, which has always been the promise.
that has supported the public policy notion of tax decreases, the trickle down just has not worked.
Now, the people who espoused trickle down, I would say, yeah, but it would have worked except we had that 2007 recession.
But there's always apparently an excuse for why it doesn't work.
But the main point is that it has never worked and that it has always resulted in substantial deficits.
The Reagan tax cuts resulted in substantial deficits.
So let me ask you, Sandy, with all these things that you were saying, the dollar has been it.
Everybody has wanted the dollars and invested in that dollar and across the world.
It was a safe currency.
We're looking right now.
Are we in danger of that changing?
We're looking around.
And in China and other place, we're not, we got to stop acting as though we're the way we were 50 years ago.
We're not that anymore, Sandy.
And
never be that again.
The rest of the world has decided and that the dollar is the
its reserve currency and why is it settled on that?
Well, it has because the dollar has been the most stable currency as compared to its in its relationship to other currencies and in its relationship to its value from day to day.
Also,
because we are the biggest economy and we have the biggest trade relationships, most trading countries have a very big international trading relationship with the United States and all of those transactions with the United States are carried out in dollars.
Furthermore, since 1973, all international petroleum transactions were carried out in dollars based on an agreement by the
OPEC nations to to transact all of their oil transactions and dollars, which meant that an immense amount of world international trade is carried out in dollars.
And because of that, people who sell something and receive dollars for it know that they'll be spending dollars in the not too distant future.
And rather than transferring that dollar back into their into their euro currency or back into their
ruble currency or back into whatever currency they might be operating in, they keep it in dollars.
And by keeping it in dollars, they create a need for them to find an investment in dollars that they can make to store that money and get some return for that money during the process of its storage.
And where does that money go?
That money goes into the U.S.
Treasuries.
It goes into the U.S.
financial markets.
And so
Over 30% of the treasury debt is held by foreigners.
A substantial portion of the US stock market is owned by foreigners.
And so the dollar and our financial markets in the United States are all buoyed up by the fact that it is the currency of choice for world transactions.
And now what we've got is a situation in which, for a variety of reasons,
a number of countries are becoming disillusioned with the notion of number one, doing so much trade with the United States.
Look at Canada, look at Europe, look at all the countries that we've created this tariff for with, who are now valiantly and vigilantly trying to find other trading partners to replace us with, which will reduce the reliance on the dollar in that way.
We've got the mid-east, which is becoming
destabilized and probably in many respects estranged from the dollar based on the Iran war and the problems that have been created by it and the shortcomings of their relationship with the United States which has been revealed by it.
And so I would say yes, any thoughtful person will tell you that
that the notion that the U.S.
will forever be the reserve currency in the world and will hold the advantages that that creates for our economy probably needs to think again.
You know, Sandy, you're painting a futuristic picture that we need to take a good long look at because, again, we have been forced into
You know, not decisions we as American citizens have made, but our government has made to bring these issues to bear on nations that have supported us in the past and that we're going to pay a price for that.
Is it safe to say that?
Well, we are definitely going to pay a price for isolating ourselves and that the ultimate price would be the loss of the US dollar as the reserve currency with all of the advantages that creates for our financial markets and for the dollar itself and for the ability of our government to maintain the kind of deficit expenditure patterns they have because if if
30% of our national debt instruments are held by foreigners.
If they decide they don't want to hold it, then suddenly it's going to be much harder for the federal government to sell its debt, meaning they'll have to pay a higher interest rate to attract the capital needed.
And that higher interest rate comes at a high cost, not only for the federal government, but for our economy as mortgage rates go up, as the cost of borrowing goes up.
So it could have a very stifling effect on the growth rate in our economy.
Stifling the growth rate in our economy, which is the main path towards the cure for our national debt, means that that doesn't portend well for the future either.
So what we need is a much wiser set of government policies.
We need a government policy that is looking at the big picture.
We need one that's looking at the big picture internationally in the near term and is looking at the big picture both financially and internationally in the long term.
And if we don't get that, I'm afraid that all the jingoism of America first is going to put America last.
And if that's not bad enough, Sandy, you and I spoke a little bit yesterday and you spoke a little earlier about the impact of AI and what it's going to do.
long term, you add that on, you talked about the fact that white college jobs are going to be impacted the most through AI.
And so those are some of the highest paying jobs.
And so where are we at with this, Sandy?
I mean, we're hearing about the things that AI are going to do that are going to certainly, there's good and bad with all of it.
But we can't just talk about the good side of it.
There's also a detrimental side of it that we're not seeing.
Is it safe to
Well, there's certainly an extreme uncertainty side of it.
We know that it's going to create substantial increases in productivity.
We know that the productivity increases are likely to be most extremely felt in the white collar industry and in the service industry.
Like I said before, if you have a huge increase in productivity and you're still doing the same amount of work, well, then you need many fewer workers to accomplish the amount of work.
So the question, the open question is, will there be additional work created that requires the attention of these highly productive workers to the point where we will be continuing to create jobs, more jobs, as the result of the increase in total work?
And that's where the uncertainty lies, because we can't tell what kind of work that would be that will be created by this new world of artificial intelligence.
And there are some, particularly those who are in the world of manufacturing or essentially creating artificial intelligence, who want to say that, yes, there'll be a substantial amount of new kinds of work, things we can't imagine now that will be
that will be created by this and will therefore support continual employment.
And there are others who think, well, it's not hard, it's not very easy to see what kind of work that will be, in which case...
there will be a shrinkage in the amount of demand for white-collar workers which is a further change in the architecture of the U.S.
economy and will require substantial kinds of adjustments for the American workers to figure out what it is we do.
I mean there's a very safe sector of our economy and it's essentially the low-tech side.
It's
it's carpenters, it's plumbers, it's electricians, it's HVAC workers, it's a blue collar space that is actually experiencing a great deal of success right now and rising incomes because of the demand for them and the safety of those jobs and we're seeing an increased focus on that sector with average incomes in that sector well exceeding $100,000 in many cases.
You know, Sandy, when you're looking at all of this and the impact that these things are going to have, if you're talking about eliminating some jobs, which is inevitable, as you were saying, and nobody's arguing that is not going to happen, our nation is cutting back on immigrants coming in.
At the same time, my birth rate is shrinking.
Don't they, for heaven's sakes, you're an economist.
Who's looking at all of this, Sandy?
I mean, and don't they know that, look, I'm just an average guy.
Don't they realize these things gonna have an impact on our future?
All of these things combined?
the wishful thinking of tariffs was that we would be reshoring jobs like mad and that the tariffs would be the solution because we'll now create a whole big manufacturing sector in the United States that will house a lot of new people and create a bunch of high-paying jobs.
Well, the near-term jury on that is well out and is, for instance,
the number of job creations hasn't gone up, it's gone down.
This last month we had 29,000 jobs created, which was a sorry small number.
Yes, the balance of payments has maybe gotten better by 20% over the last running 12 month period.
But we haven't, that isn't because we have replaced the stuff we were importing with new jobs and new manufacturing.
It could well be that the shrinkage
in our growth rate is the result of the shrinkage in our economy caused by the reduction in the imports of materials that we used to be getting.
And so it's not at all clear that the wishful thinking of tariffs will come true from the standpoint of affecting the future.
And the future is obviously going to be fraught with change.
Now
Our futures have always been fraught with change.
Now we can see, for instance, that college is becoming a different kind of a commodity for people to think about.
Fewer people say that they want to go into debt to go to college.
The number of people enrolling in colleges has gone down in the private space for the first time.
And it's projected that
25% of the private colleges in this country will be out of business by 1936.
Much of that projection was simply based on the demographics of the country with the reduced number of people being college age and the number of applicants to colleges going down.
The view was that that was going to be the reason for this.
rapid demise of a bunch of private schools.
But the fact is that we now have more more more factors in play, including the fact that a white collar job might be becoming something that's something that's less attractive and less valuable.
And many people go to college in pursuit of white collar jobs.
And so there's going to be a social upheaval associated with what's going to happen to colleges and the college experience probably over the next decade.
You know, Sandy, as I listen to you, all I can think about is if ever there was a time that we needed all hands on deck, meaning Democrats and Republicans working together to solve.
what is going to be something that's impossible to be solved if we're separated the way we are and Democrats see it one way, Republicans see it another way.
I mean, for the sake of the future, it's going to take a coming together of everybody.
wrong?
I mean, if you look at our country,
And you can kind of see three pots of issues that need to be resolved.
Our healthcare system needs to be examined.
It needs to be re-evaluated and probably redesigned because the rate at which our healthcare across is growing is unsustainable.
Our education system needs to be evaluated because it clearly has issues, particularly in metropolitan areas across the country.
And the question is, are we going to be producing
young people with the kinds of training and talents that they need in order to succeed in the world that's going to be created.
And then we have this third area, which is the uncertainty about the
future.
really need is
both the aisle, wise people involved with public policy to be focusing all of their wisdom on first of all identifying these problems and then working on solutions to these problems instead of what we have today I think which is bombast and
and kicking the can down the road in so many ways and very little attention being paid to actually addressing any one of those three pots of problems.
You know Sandy, we're at a turning point in our nation's history and we are faced with, we can't look at China and dismiss them anymore.
because China is up and, you know, and, you know, they're educated now and they are moving forward.
And it's at a time, Sandy, where again, we seem to not understand that the world is changing.
We're not controlling the entire world anymore.
And at some point in time, don't we have to accept that?
And then you said it, this America first America isolationism, this is the wrong thing to be doing at this point in history.
Well, absolutely.
And the fact is that we don't have to dominate the world to be the most successful country in the world.
And we could definitely set up a path in which we are.
Objective is to be the most successful country in the world and then we'd have to set up measuring rods to figure out What does that mean to be a successful country?
I presume it means prosperity for the residents of the country happiness for the residents of the country And we would start addressing the issues that are necessary to achieve that instead of squandering our attention on Trying to dominate a world while we ignore the problems at home and ignore the issues at home and and claim to be
the greatest country in the world without having any sort of index that we can point at, any sort of measuring rod that we can point at that would actually demonstrate that we are the greatest country in the world.
If we wanted to measure education rates or birth rates or mortality rates or criminal incarceration rates or any of the things that you can measure that might relate to the success of a country, not
the size of its military, not the size of its air force, not who it can bring to its knees with those kind of forces, but just measuring the success of a country and much as you would measure the success of a corporation, we would start focusing on measuring rods that would allow us to figure out public policies that we could adopt and pursue that would enhance those outcomes.
And we aren't doing that.
And it's clearly because we have been distracted so mightily.
by the notion of being dominant.
We have been distracted so mightily by the process of money and politics, which seems to blind us from our own self-interest as citizens.
You know, Sandy,
elections.
And I almost feel like the elections themselves.
aren't gonna be able to, you know, change the dynamic of where we're headed.
We know we're headed towards a collision course, right?
Those of us who've been around a while, we see it.
And I, man, for heaven's sake, your grandchildren, great grandchildren.
And all of this is a fight for them.
I keep telling people, we have to fix this.
because we're leaving them in a situation that's untenable and their future, Sandy, right now we're predicting that for them.
Is it safe to say
Well, we're definitely putting them in place.
situation which will make their lives more difficult than our lives and And we're doing it by kicking a can and we're not kicking the can down the road just a year or two We seem to be kicking the can that kind of a can down the road decades into the future But but it's not that it's maybe going to happen The can that we're kicking down the road is loaded and and and will happen if we don't write things because
the things we're creating are making it more difficult for us to have a robust economy.
And a robust economy is what we need to ultimately grow out of the situation we currently have associated with high deficits and high national debt.
And furthermore, we're kicking the can down the road with something like healthcare, which on its current trajectory becomes untenable in about 10 years, the rate of growth and the rate at which
Our health care is consuming a percentage of our GDP and the greater growth in that is unsustainable.
We're at over 20% now.
And if we keep this up, we're going to be at 30%.
You can't have an economy that's 30% devoted to health care.
And similarly, with respect to the defense establishment, which is becoming an untenably large part of our economy, much the way Dwight Eisenhower projected it in 1959.
Sandy, you said.
we are now a service economy.
And there's nothing to point out that we're not.
Being a service economy is not good for growth and development of wealth for the average American citizen.
How do we get out of that?
Well, we need to find, you know, that's the problem with the architecture of our economy is we don't have enough people participating in
the robust nature of, if you look at the economy on a macro basis, it seems quite robust.
But if you look at the economy and break it down as to who's earning income, well, we have the highest 1%, the highest 5% of income earners are earning an increasingly high percentage of the income being earned by the general population.
So that means that
Money is essentially being drawn into a much rarer number of people in this economy and leaving the rest of the economy in a situation where, like I said before, based on the way costs are growing, the way housing costs are growing, the way insurance costs are growing, people earning $300,000 a year report that they basically live paycheck to paycheck in many metropolitan areas in the country.
Sandy, this is unsustainable from the perspective of the majority of the American people who aren't going to be, can remain silent as they watch this.
The people aren't just totally numb to what they see happening.
And even it's not even just.
Donald Trump always go back to when you uh a year or so ago when you spent a couple weeks going through project 2025 you went through all of that remember you went through you explained it all and guess what I keep telling people you just you're just looking at Donald Trump and you and you just see him but what brought this about
It's supporting just the one guy and the people who have brought this about Sandy, they're not going away.
And the main thing is that he's been the person that could get elected through which he has become the instrumentality of this movement, this sort of anti-government pro low tax.
movement, which is reflected in 2025, that the notion of sort of Christian nationalism, the notion of re-bulkenizing the world.
But I think you're wrong about elections not being able to affect it.
I think elections are the only path that could affect it.
I have a feeling that this midterm election is going to tell us a lot about the ability of the American people to try and redirect the ship.
aircraft carrier it doesn't turn rapidly but I think you put enough people on one side of it and it begins to tip and turns a little more quickly and so you know I think that there needs to be a wake-up and maybe we're getting that wake-up.
So you talk about the money in politics and the control that it has but you're saying that even that if when the people get to the point
where they're not going to take it anymore, that money and politics will be usurped by the people and their individual votes.
Yeah.
You know, Sandy, it is always so good having these conversations and dialogue with you because it's triage in a way.
But even with you having insane these things, my lion eyes are seeing stuff that's going on that make me just want to scream, hey, guys, don't you see what is taking place here?
I mean, to the
Well, I think the manifest corruption in government has become something that we've all become, I think we've dulled, I think this process over the last 10 years of what's going on in politics in this country has dulled our senses, has dulled our reactivity.
We've become anewer to what goes on and whatever goes on and however outlandish it might have seemed in the past, no longer seems outlandish, it's the norm.
We go on with our day-to-day lives.
Our day-to-day lives are more important than the outrage that we could otherwise focus on what we're seeing happen.
And so I think that the people doing it actually had a subtle understanding that that's the way it would be if we are barraged day in and day out with constant kinds of activity, constant kinds of potential outrage pretty soon.
fatigue sets in and I'm afraid that for a while at least we've experienced in America a form of political fatigue that has allowed much to happen.
Now the question is I think in this next election cycle, is there some caffeine?
Will the fatigue be lifted and are we going to see some response?
All right, we'll leave it there for now.
It is so good to be back, Sandy, with having these conversations with you.
They really do open their eyes of those of us who really know that there's something that's just not right, you know, but that there are people at least who understand this thing on a macro level, a micro level who, you know,
can
help us.
my friend.
Yeah, always.
We'll see you in a week.
Yep.
Absolutely.
All right.
That's one and only Sandy Williams.
That's a wrap.
But what's going on with Earl Ingram?
See you all later.