Congressional Dysfunction and Special Interest Influence

Welcome back. I'm Peter Stayonos. This is a weekly roundup of my daily videos on the economy and Freedom, where I cut through the BS and lay out with the gaslighting clouds pulled out of their hats this week and what is coming next American oil saved the world from an energy catastrophe With Iran closing hormz tighter than a burglary suspect in a cavity search W a big assist from China who made lemonade from lemons from a slowing economy that slash oil imports. Together these canceled nearly three quarters of the Ormu disruption in the Iran war It also knocked oil prices down thirty percent from highs even as the war keeps going. And so with that war going into month three, the biggest surprise so far is the world did not run out of oil Europeans are not in fact heating their apartments with IkeA catalogs, and the reason is simple American oil went goblin mode, pumping an additional four million barrels of oil in just ten weeks that nearly doubled America's oil exports to over eight million Extra barrels would have been the world's number four exporter free war All that pump cancellled nearly a third of the thirteen million barrel Hormz squeeze. That's twenty million minus seven. They're still getting out with backup pipelines and trucks toss in a million and a half of new pump rom Canada, Norway, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela nearly forty percent of the Hormz blockage is already replaced That has also taken American oil revenue from one hundred billion a year pre war to nearly three hundred billionars making American oil exports bigger than agriculture for the first time in history. It's even taken some of the edge off oil prices for American consumers with American oil, West Texas intermediate almost ten bucks cheaper than Europe's breint. This is why you drill Incidentally, green energy was as useful as a hooker to blood drive as you would imagine Now beyond the pump, the other half of Armu's replacement was Asia slashing demand Some was emergency measures, so rolling factory shutdowns every other day driving, shutting universities so the darlings don't ri. Much bigger was prices lowering demand, as in people drive less, whenind gas hits five bucks a gallon called demand destruction Put it together and pump and dump replaced three quarters of the Hormuz, shock on raw numbers, we' lost an aggregate billion barrels of oil since the war started. That's thirteen million a day times eightydd days global oil reserves fell only a quarter of that, about three million. So' When the war kicked off, markets went straight to the nineteen seventies oil shock, Morgan Staleian City predicted one hundred and fifty oil IMF's former chief economist predicted two hundred, they were going to be eating the pets. they were going be out of oil in a couple months Here we are with lower prices than when the Ukraine War started while stock markets are up. Since the war, this is not your grandfather's oil crisis Still, even at three million a day, maybe it is not a gaping chest wound, but reserves are running out, meaning if the war is still going in six months, We will be back to the Dom board. Is it time for the kids to unlearn to code? Thteen years into the AI jobs panic, we are finally putting some numbers on the board With Facebook and Morgan Stanley announcing mass layoffs, L week Mark Zuckerberg announced he's cutting eight thousand jobs, almost ten percent Most of these are cancellled rolls, just two thousand actual pink slips Now the move was framed as AI since Meta simultaneously announced it's plowing over a hundred billion To turn its hilariously bad llama AI, which you've probably never heard of into something less embarrassing. And so Meta joins a parade of tech luminary shedding jobs, seven thousand at Microsoft, a thousand to epic games, a rumored thirty thousand at Oracle The big one, Amazon, which trimmed future hiring by six hundred thousand jobs granted over a decade. Tallied up but according to teech Layoff tracker trruep, we're running just shy of thirty thousand tech layoffs a month It's not much better on Wall Street where Morgan Sanley just announced twenty thousand five hundred job cuts, three percent of their workforce The city is laying off a more impressive ten percent capital one through a thousand in the pot. Now there's no aggregate tracker for Wall Street layoffs since nobody likes them, but it's ballpark two thirds of tech so maybe twenty thousandars a month So what is growing? health carere by a mile, along with skilled trades, energy logistics the AI buildout For those who don't have any particular skills, personal services, restaurants, childcare, elder care, fitness, trainers, Uber eats Now some of these actually pay great, nursing the trades, but most pay a lot less than tech and finance In the long run, automation lifts all boats. a house painter today makes twenty times what he did before the Industrial Revolution Meaning when the smoke clears, Starbucks and pet sitting pay six figures, the problem is that takes a while. Take decades. before that smoke do clear Hey longer if government keeps making it hard to start a business or create a job Meaning we could be looking at an entire lost generation of overducated genen Zs flipping burgers dreaming of burning it all down to a sex We are now thirteen years into the AI job panic. K off in twenty thirteen with an Oxford paper predicting half of all jobs would be gone In fact, since then, jobs grew by sixteen millionars Plenty of work, but expect AI to keep replacing the high payid jobs like tech and finance Really across Cubicical world from corporate America to universities to the mother shhip of useless workers government Junior analysts will eventually become nurses, Coders will become electricians marketing coordinators, shall run warehouses or even bartenders, but near term there's going to be a lot of young grads who feel they got, bait and switched with that hundred thousand College degree that AI gobbled for lunch Wds from our sponsor. 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They're run by passionate Bitcoiners who've been at this since twenty twelve B when Bickcoinners were trining in person at Sap meets You can pick up hardware wallets and plenty of other goodies at coinkite. com slash prof Saintange That CO n k Ie d. com slash profet Oge. Okay, back to our show A new study finds most immigrant households in America are on welfare, including legal migrants whichich is weird because a rich country can cherry pick the top zero point one percent of immigrants, the Elon Musks, Peter Thals, Alexander Graham Bells rading the brains, talents and capital of the world, instead we mostly import welfare cases. The numbers come from the Center for Imigration Statistics who pally by country of origin. Finding a low of nineteen percent for Canadian immigrants, which is still too high. It should be zero escalates fast, hitting one in three Chinese immigrants, half of Colombians two thirds of Mexicans and over eighty percent of Afghans and of course Somalis Altogether, forty seven percent of immigrant households use one or more of cash welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, section aid housing. is nearly double the rate of natives, not very cherry picked It gets worse because millions more take child tax credit, which is twenty two hundred per year and earned income tax credit, the ITC, which gives migrants up to eight thousand dollars per year Of course, for legals is much worse. CIS estimates almost two thirds access traditional welfare And once they have the anchor baby or open a leering setters, it is off to the races. Summing it up, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, illegals alone are draining one hundred fifty billion dollars a year taking six times in welfare that they pay in taxes So how did it get so bad? Before the nineteen sixties, immigration to the US was lean and the quality was high. banned migrants likely to allw welfare, along with communists and national quotas favored Northwest Europe This all changed in the nineteen sixty five Heart Celler Act, which abolished national origins replaced with family reunification instead of skills So instead of high quality migrants, the system shifted to poor countries that have massive families get one in the whole villages in. this combined with the nineteen sixties welfare state, Lyndon B. Johnson's so called G Society I created a trillion dollar magnet that drew in tens of millions of third worlders So Heart seeller opened the barn door's weelfare called the entire World to Feast Annual legal migration went from two hundred thousand to over a million That's not counting illegals America's foreign borne population went from five percent in nineteen sixty nine to one in five today One in four, if you count, illegals Wh now make up a third of welfare cases that were meant for poor Americans? So with sex Trump has focused on illegals as he should. But we also need to fix an immigration system that imports five hundred and forty welfare cases for every cherry pick Restricting immigration to Europe and maybe Japan, Korea and Taiwan is not going to happen anytime soon. can do what Japan Korean Taiwan do, which is an immigrant point system so you do take only the best All three use a mixture of education, salary, concrete skills, IT finance, investment capital and a history of starting successful businesses This eliminates the welfare cases, it dramatically reduces the criminals, and it turns immigrants into an asset create more jobs and pay more taxes than they take Las cherry picking also reduces the number of migrants. There's only so many cherries in the world. Meaning Democrats will fight it tooth and nail America cannot be the world's welfare Oice and still remain a middle class country In case you still have hope for the next generation, according to Fortune magazine, the stay at home boyfriend is now a thing, in fact it's spreading like cancer, as in men who do not work, they do not go to school, they don't do much of anything sponging off their woman to play halo Bait Mango Eyes lecture her on Marvel Universe Canon and pretend to do dishes while she puts on the Big boy piz. According to the magazine, there are now seven point two million of these losers. In fact, sociologists have a name for it Net as a not in education, employment or training They're up over a million of the past decade and now make up one in eight young men getting worse fast accccording to the Fed in the past twelve months, women gained three hundred thousand jobs, but men Phil by one hundred forty two thousand past two years Two thirds of all jobs went to women So what do these men do? accccording to a study in the prestigious journal of Political Economy, they spend seventy percent of their time shockingly playing video games Two thirds supplement their suugar mama with welfare, food stamps, unemployment, disability, Medicaid So it's driving it easy government and the broad culture punishes providers, especially mail providers Parasites get rewarded, especially since COVID when welfare skyrocketed by fifty percent since they rubber stamped everybody, not just the Somalis This trove welfare fraud, of course which is now estimated over five hundred billion, which is enough to eliminate income tax for everybody up to eighty thousand It was crack cocaine for young men who got better things to do than paying bills These since COVID men have dropped out of the labor force at three and a half times the rate of women Zooming out, in nineteen forty eight, eighty seven percent of men in just one in three women work Now there are fewer men with a payroll job than women Meanwhile, when men do work, they are gutted for blue collars, it was illegals taking your job for twelve bucks an hour corporate America, massks discriminated against men using DEI, especially white men One study found white men who are a third of the workforce got just three percent of corporate jobs in the wake of BLM Meanwhile, wages for men are flat since nineteen hundred and seventy three, while blue collar earnings are down twenty percent thanks to illegals So work doesn't pay, they won't hire you anyway. Government's paying you to sell on the couch And with another seven million men living on the couch, women have so few options they will take what they can get Now this is rough for the women. It's exhausting. There's zero chance of building wealth. They don't have kids because they can't afford them if the guy is playing halo all day There's zero margin for error if she runs into work trouble with the kids But it's catastrophic for men. stududies say once they fall off the treadmill, they stay off plunging into depression with no purpose, no goals Men now make up seventy percent of homeless and eighty percent of suicides, men are four times more likely. commit. to aide So a six Progressives demolished the load bearing walls of the American family, culturally and economically Men were treated as seed corn to be eated instead of planted Now Gen Z is already struggling with house prices and AI replacing jobs With male providers dropping like flies expect fewer families you were kids and more men who check out figuratively and literally I order it from our sponsor Stocks and even gold are all over the place. 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Now back to our show Why is Congress so useless and can it be fixed With voter ID crashing and burning under the useless stewardship of the Rhinao establishments,'s worth asking why is Congress so useless By margins of almost two to one, cross party voters want secure borders, foreign aids slash to basically zero By three to one, they want less federal spending. four to one wants less federal debt, lower taxes, lower immigration, tougher crackdown on violent crime Voter ID is five to one, including a strong majority Democrat, smaller, deficits are nine to one, yet none of this happens. Instead voters are the tax donkey inflation sponge and designated villain who gets hit in the head with a brick by a homeless crack head while both parties fight over who gets to apologize Now the filibuster gets blamed. The Senate ruuled that laws need six percent of votes, meaning only uniarty approved laws get through We're talking stuff with three to one, five to one, nine to one support cross party. These should sail through Congress like ninety seven to three and yet they do not The answer, alas, is simple, the voters don't matter. they get outbid by special interests in both parties A widely cited paper by a pair of left wing political scientists at Princeton and Northwestern analyzed seventeen hundred policy issues Over a twenty year period and found popularity among voters has zero influence whether something becomes a law. meaneaning a policy with eighty percent support, everybody loves it Theres no better chance of becoming law than a policy with thirty percent support. everyverybody hates it So what does matter? prereferences of donors, special interests like unions and NGO's, and the richest voters In other words, this is not a democracy, it is an oligarchy So how to fix it? Term limits are popular. although the data is very mixed, newbies in Congress become more dependent on lobbyists and the permanent staffers eyeing future lobbyist job offers Campaign finance reform is also popular, but the trick is the left is very good at playing the system So the lost influence of oil companies and manufacturers is captured by inc kind left wing donors like NGOs and unions So what would fix it? sixixty years ago, economist Manker Olson summed up the problem of concentrated benefits, diffuse costs In other words, a given policy is a small deal for the typical voter, pay three bucks a year for the sugar cartel It's a very big deal for the suugar cartel Multiply that across every industry, every NGO issue, every teacachher's union, and it becomes a straitjacket. You've got to change at ratio The easiest is move stuff from federal to state or local where voter benefits are fifty to five hundred times more concentrated Normies can defeat special interests on a homeless encampment down the street or getting prn out of their local school Even better isate government out altogether in the honey pot so there is nothing for special interests to bid on And the Fed and the administrative state let Wall Street fund its own bailouts and let the leering centers raise donations or shut down So with sex The special interest oligarchy, you get a Democrat party that does not lock its most faithful voters into Detroit hellcaes. You get a Republican party that does fewer bailouts for Wall Street, fewer wars for lockockheed And you get voters who no longer see government as a predator Congress alas will fight tooth and nail to give nothing to states or God forbid taxpayers. If voters break through one time that resets the game. Thanks for tuning in. Remember to subscribe so you don't miss an episode and go to Petersanans. com for daily videos and in depth articles. with with charts and all the gory details. Okay We'll be watching See you next time .