Democrat Presidential Candidates for 2028

The J Weber podcast is presented by Creative Planning, helping clients simplify their journey to financial wellness, one personalized plan at a time. The J Weber podcast is a production of Iran radio podcasts. Good day and welcome to the J Weber Show, the J Weber podcast, I should say, the J Weber Show was technically the radio thing . Just ahead. I want to talk about how these unhinged attacks on anything Trump like the reflecting pool are only adding to Donald Trump's legend at this point. No other president or presidency of the modern era has been this interesting, and the historians are going to want to write about it. We'll also talk about how bare the Democrat cupboard is for twenty twenty eight and how I don't think they realize it yet. And a segment on the car industry because there are two things going on that are pretty interesting. First of all, the high prices and the high interest rates are slowing car sales significantly, but also a car bubble has all sorts of people having to add to what they owe on their own car to the loan that they're taking out to buy the new car. Gregory John imagine buying a new car for fifty grand, but walking out of the showroom owing seventy. Is that because of the interest or yeah, it's because of what you owe in the old car. If you owe forty grand of the new car but they're giving twenty grand as a trade in, someone's got to pay that other twenty grand so it's going on to the shaper work for the new car. Oh my God, that's what's going on. Dorothy and I were thinking about getting a new car because of the equidox twenty eighteen. It's got a little rush bot on it. It's all paid off. Oh man, I'm going to wait for the zero percent interest . At least don't have a whole bunch of debt. Your equinox is all paid off. Yeah, fine and then you're just paying the cost of the regular car. But it's something like one third to forty percent of Americans who are turning in cars now are walking out with the additional debt lumped on to their new loan, which is crazy. But first, let's talk about the biggest story in Milwaukee and Wisconsin and probably the entire sports world today. Gotta take a shot . T secondwos step back jumper the buzzer . The bucks traded Yanis . Well, we all knew it was gonna happen. And what he was he's been here for thirteen seasons. Maybe he spent too many years here, actually the last four or five years. But yeah, you here's a great story but here's an eighteen year old kid from Greece came over, remember how skinny he railed. We all like, what is this kid It was just potentially. He didn't have I mean, he had some basketball skills, but he has really worked to build his skills to the point where he is a superstar. It's an incredible story. And like you say, he's been around for a while. You can't expect that any NBA player is just going to spend his entire career in one with one team, but what a gut punch to Wisconsin sports fans nonetheless. When did this news actually break? It really was over night. When I got up this morning about four thirty, I saw it. Oh, so it must have been running after nine nine, ten o'clock at night. So what a great story. Like you said, you know, when he first came over, when he was eighteen years old, he was drafted with twenty camera with twenty thirteen. I think it was. Yeah, twenty thirteen and Herb Cole at the time was the owner of the box had him here and then like twenty fourteen Yana said I want my family over here but they, because of summon some restrictions, they couldn't come, but Herb made sure the whole family came . He was a senator. He did have some poll. Yes, a poll, so he got he got his entire family here and then the rest is history. Look at what happened. Given that Yannis not only revived the team after decades of mediocrity and led them to a championship, losing his talent and his superstar status is bad enough. I mean, that's just a terrible development for Milwaukee. But then there's the second gut punch, which is more important to me is only a casual sports fan. He was such a great person and such a great fit for Milwaukee and for Wisconsin. Gottas loves Milwaukee and Milwaukee loves him. He has a work ethic, I think, that might be Greek, but it matches perfectly with the Wisconsin sort of work ethic. He has a humble sort of Wisconsin mentality that we have. He's just a superior individual. And you hate to see the franchise losing someone like that. My favorite memory was that during the championship year in twenty twenty one when after he got the championship, he went to Chick Fil A to get some numbers . Remember he had the trophy in his car and he had a video of it and he's going just to just riding around the neighborhood. That is a prototypically Wisconsin move, apparently a Greek move too, but yes, that was great. But he's you know, he's I think you have to give him credit for genuinely sticking by Milwaukee in the franchise. He's never bad mouthed it. He's a superstar who could have quickly turned into a Lebron or some other arrogant jackass who was going to demand a trade to a larger market or demand that he gets to pick the players that he wants around him and the franchise just has to go out and get them. He didn't do any of that, at least not publicly. And I think that speaks to his character as well to go to Miami, a division rival for the bucks to agree to that. That's interesting. Yeah. I saw the journalist. I want to ask you about this though too. I saw the Journal Sentel's coverage. They labeled him as one of the top seventy five players in the in NBA history. I know the league's been around a long time and it's had a lot of superstars, but it hasn't had many true superstars like Giannis. Well, I'm going to say I'm going to say I'm not going to say he's a Michael Jordan . I mean, I saw Michael Jordan three, four times. So I can say that. I saw Yanis at least five times in his career here . He's at that level. Yep, but in terms of our lifetime of watching watching NBA basketball. Say the last fifty years. I think he's top ten. Oh yeah, I totally agree. Okay, Michael Lebron, you know, who else are you going to put in there? Yonest has his name has to pop up. Larry Bird again. Yeah , he literally grew up here after coming from Greece and as this promising prospect who might be a big deal. Turn himself into a superstar brought Milwaukee National Championship as well. Man, he's going to be missed. But listen to this transition , at least he's not retiring . Speaking of retirement, have you heard of Creative Planning, the stellar sponsor of this podcast? They're one of the nation's largest independent wealth management firms offering fully integrated financial and retirement planning , investment management, estate planning, tax strategies, business services and international wealth management all in house and coordinated through your wealth manager. Their fiduciary wealth managers are here to help you navigate every piece of your financial life, visit creative planning. com to schedule your introductory meeting. That's creative planning. com. Your team awaits. Paid for by creative planning an SEC registered investment advisor. The speaker's statements are not an endorsement of the firm. So the left hates Donald Trump and America, apparently, so much that they're now trying to destroy the renovations that Trump made to the reflecting pool in order to, I don't know, prove that Trump didn't fix it, I guess, or maybe it's just a lash out in an attempt to not allow Trump to rack up another win. But for whatever the reason, it really just boils down to more hatred and jealousy and left wing mental illness. It genuinely does. And you've probably heard the backstory on this, but on social media , the left wing haters and activists have spread so much misinformation related to the renovation project, I doubt most people know the truth or anything close to it. This was a straightforward renovation and repair project on a reflecting pool that was leaking thousands of gallons of water per day and had never ending algae blooms. After this was even after the Obama administration spent thirty four million dollars in repairs and fixes in Obama's day . It's actually a perfect example of the sort of federal public works project that never even got attention during the Obama administration. Consider that the Obama team and Congress had approved thirty million four dollars on a project to restore this reflecting pool. The American public didn't even hear about it or know about it. Okay, it's leaking. It's got algae and it smells, it looks terrible. Let's fix it. Obama's era organizers and contractors tried and failed and blew thirty four million dollars worth of taxpayer money in the process . Okay , so it's a fetid cesspool through the first Trump term and the only Biden term. And now the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the country is coming up and Washington DC is going to have a huge, wonderful spotlight put on it. So as President Trump personally takes on an effort to rebe y Washington DC, this is one of the major projects on the list , probably the biggest project . So over the last fourteen months or so, the statues have been sandblasted at graffiti, they're gleaming again. Something like thirty fountains have been restored and the water's flowing again. Most of DC looks beautiful and it, comes around to the reflecting pool project. You've seen it. They drain it, they fix the leaks, they put a few coats of rubberized sealer or whatever in it. It's refilled. Looks beautiful. And for some reason, the Trump haters and the leftists just lose their minds over it . I think he did something that Obama botched and did it more beautifully for far less money, only fourteen million this time. I mean, for whatever reason, this beautiful new reflecting pool with its new lighting and its clean water just set off the rabid left . But you know, a week or two goes by and suddenly oop, there's new algae blooms in the water, Trump didn't fix anything. And then oop, the rubberized coating is flaking off Trump, didn't fix anything . And from the onset, this was suspicious because boy, that algae sure seemed to come back fast, and boy, that sealant sure seemed to peel up fast. And if you weren't paying attention and only a few people were . But if you really weren't paying attention, you didn't see the social media posts or hear the little rumors that it were circulating about how people are sneaking in at night. They're putting fertilizer in the water, they're going to regrow the algae. And hey, the activists are sneaking in and putting chemicals in the water to try to ruin the pool, et cetera. Those rumors have been circulating. The problem was, of course, the mainstream news media and the rabid haters of Donald Trump, which includes virtually everyone in Washington, DC , but most especially the news reporters and the media outlets , they weren't going to report on this or report the rumors or set up cameras to try to catch the actions. Of course they weren't. All they were going to do was report on how Trump's fixes are already failing. Big loser . When the algae regrew and when the pool's coating was damaged by whatever chemicals or vandalism was occurring, they went right to see his fixes didn't work . So we had at least a week's worth of Trump eff up again. He didn't fix anything. He only made it worse stories and posts on social media. And yes, this is how diabolical today's left is. They will even go this far to try to create some sort of negative story on Trump. They'd literally vandalize a much needed renovation project and vandalize another national monument. This is Trump derangement Ebola. This is genuinely mental illness and the most extreme sorts of activism. Over the last few days then you've seen the headlines. Multiple people have now been arrested for vandalizing the reflecting pool. It sounds like it's at about twenty people at this point. The news came from Donald Trump himself first, and this meant that the Trump haters rushed to play this off as Oh he's making excuses. Trump sucks so much he's just gonna make excuses now. But this is real. The Department of Justice is charging several activists with acts of vandalism against a federal monument , and the Department of Administration has called in National Guardsmen to now guard the reflecting pool because there's a sliver of America hating Trump hating A holes who want to ruin absolutely everything for the rest of us. As one news report put it, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has become the latest target in the left's war on anything Donald Trump touches, and the radical Left isn't even trying to hide it anymore. I think that's a very good summary of what's going on here. The mental illness is so strong within so many of these Trump haters but they can't help themselves and they brag about their crimes against Trump and their crimes against the country. Trump has had his workers rushing against the clock to rebey Washington, DC before the fourth of July celebrations, right? Now we have these American haters and Trump haters on the left who are trying to undo it all because you know F the American people and F Trump . Just for the record, this is the sort of stuff that's going to make Donald Trump a legendary president. Honest to God, the left's extreme and violent reactions to the presidencies of this man are what's going to turn him into a historical figure for the ages. If they keep this up for another three years, as Trump and Republicans keep restoring the country after four awful years under Biden and eight pathetic years under Obama, I'm telling you Trump's going to come out of the other end of this looking like a legend . He will go down in history as a man who preserved and protected the greatness of America against a global horde of socialists and communists who sought to destroy it. To the point that, and I hate to even say this , God forbid it ever happens, but they've already built Trump up into such an unforgettable historical figure that the only additional thing they could do to him to ensure he's forever revered as one of America's greatest presidents would be to assassinate him. Again, God forbid, they've already tried twice, but we're already to the point at which most Americans understand that Trump's motivations are clearly to restore and protect the country and its citizenry. Even if you don't particularly like the guy personally, you know that in his heart his interests are what's best for the American people. And I'm serious. Take the rabid Democrats and haters and set them aside. We're already to the point that I think most Americans understand just as they did with Reagan as his, polit ical enemies trashed him as the worst and most evil president ever and made him a legend, Trump is trying to look out for us. The left is being so hateful and irrational on that side of the aisle and within the Democrat Party that they're virtually assuring Donald Trump goes down in history as a genuinely great president to the point that if they do manage to kill him , that'll just be the frosting on the cake in terms of any Trump legacy or Trump history. He'd go down in history as the self made billionaire who stepped out of the private sector late in life to save the country from a creeping sort of socialism and social decay that was destroying it and had to basically fight all of the country's elites and insiders in order to get that done , he'll be remembered as a guy who simply refused to give up until his political enemies felt like they had to kill him in order to stop him and hurt the country. I mean genuinely at this point, only that rare and historical and terrible act could make Donald Trump an even more legendary president . And stuff like this reflecting pool nastiness , it just adds to the Trump legend . Really? Trump has his opponents so worked up they hate him so much . They're so ugly and spiteful. They're actually vandalizing restoration projects in the name of fighting Trump. Good grief. Now that is an elite level of derangement and hate. President Trump confirmed on Friday that vandals have damaged the reflecting pool, but hopefully the damage is limited to one smaller area, and so Trump said workers will have to at least partially redrain that pool to make repairs. And this was the first public confirmation that I saw that confirmed the quick new blooms of LJ and the damage to the coating was caused by vandals , again, because the legacy newsrooms have no interest in investigating or telling the truth. Trump first pointed out that his administration has cleaned reno,vated and beautified more than forty five monuments and memorials, twenty eight statues, twenty two fountains. And he said Washington DC has gone from a crime ridden disaster to one of the safest cities in the country on his watch. Then he said, we've had some real problems with vandalism at the beautiful reflecting pool. Just three days ago they destroyed the grass outside of the pool. They've also done everything possible to hurt the inside surface that was just installed. Trump said the vandals used chemicals that are being deployed elsewhere on the National Mall to try to destroy his newly completed work. And he said the algae plaguing that pool is now seventy five percent gone and the damage section's going to be repaired this week. Law enforcement, he said, is actively investigating the situation. As one pundit put it, they don't care about the country, these lefties. They don't care about the symbols that belong to all Americans, regardless of party. They hate Trump so much they'll destroy anything out of spite. This is who the left has become, not protesters with grievances, vandals with grudges. Yep. And people who listened to my radio show for years saw all of this coming. Some of us have been properly c ategorizing what today's Democrat Party is and who today's Democrat leftists are for years. Scummy, scummy people . And I haven't seen a specific number when it comes to how many vandals have been arrested so far, but the Trump White House and the DOJ were saying, quote, multiple people there was an initial batch of like twelve arrests and then a few more, so it's probably around twenty. They're being described as having poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the pool , both to regrow the algae and then ruin the surface. In fact, some of you might have caught this. Since last week, there has been a small group of lunatic protesters claiming to be pro algae and out there protesting every day, being loud mouths every day on the mall, just making trouble. And some of them are extremely well known to most people who live and work in Washington, DC and to DC law enforcement because the true lunatic protester community is rather small and they're seeing these faces all the time. Just pick a protest, any protest, and you're going to start to see the same faces at virtually all of them, and there are going to be a handful in particular. There will be a handful in particular who are genuinely ment ally ill troublemakers. We had a little core of them here in Wisconsin during the years long capital protests during the Scott Walker era. And these friends of algae people out in DC include a number of people who fall into this prof essional protester category , but also fall into the genuinely mentally ill troublemakers category. So it's further validation that Trump isn't making any of this up. Law enforcement's been tracking them the destructive accidents against the reflecting pool have been verified, etc . This isn't just Trump making excuses because his repair failed. I saw even some conservatives suggesting that he was just trying to make excuses. There's no evidence of project failures yet that can't be trac ed back to vandalism the way it sounds. But as I've been following all this nonsense, all of the blowback against the president's wonderful and laudable move to rebe y Washington DC, I've also been thinking about how completely a certain sliver of Americans have lost their patriotism or patriotic sense of attachment to this country, and that's terrible. Now I should also say that many of the most rabid anti Trump and anti America protesters that we've seen around us are foreigners or foreign born, including a sliver who are illegal aliens. And so I guess we shouldn't be surprised that they feel no sense of pride or patriotism for this country, but then please leave. I'm talking about a sliver of American citizens though whose brains have been polluted to the point that they genuinely hate this country and want to lash out at it. It's more than just hating Trump. In fact, his presidencies are just the convenient flashs forpo themint as they go about hating and trying to harm America . How did their minds get this polluted? Who indoctrinated them into this hatred for the greatest country on the planet? The activists left, and today's group of vapid and useless Democrats did, of course . It's why I want to end the segment with a chunk from Bill Mar's HBO show. As you know, Mar is a Democrat. He's a long time liberal who grew up in the sixties and seventies when liberalism meant something very different than it does today. Bill Maher does not at all seem to appreciate the socialism and wokeism of this age or most of the people who have taken the reins of today's Democrat Party. And on this weekend's show, he made the point that Democ therats of this era only ever pretend to be patriotic . And this to me has more power when it's coming from a lifelong member of that party and a lifelong liberal. Every election year, Democrats seem to remember patriotism for about an hour at their convention when they're trying to win back swing voters . The whole message of Kamala's speech in twenty twenty four was take back the flag. That's why she talked about America like a pageant contestant The greatest privilege on earth . The privilege and pride of being an American. Hard to believe she lost, huh? Well, you can't take back the flag in an hour if the rest of the time you treat patriotism as something vaguely embarrassing. It shouldn't be. Even though we are far from perfect . Sadly, the loudest voices in today's Democrat Party clearly do not like this country and don't seem to like its people all that much either. Why would today's Democrats ever speak in patriotic terms if they never feel patriotic? In fact, boy, the dedication ceremony for Barack Obama's presidential library was revealing, wasn't it? Barack and Michelle basically insulted the country from its founders right on forward in their speeches they just insulted the country and, several sharp eyed people who were in attendance and who were watching it on TV noticed that there were no American flags to be seen, not on the stage, not in the crowd . Now, is that an intentional oversight or is that just an honest mistake by people who never feel patriotic? Even if it was just an honest mistake , understand what it says about those people. It's a glaring mistake, isn't it? No one thought about the flag . Four living presidents and Firstadies L , along with hundreds and hundreds of people who worked for them and are longtime DC insiders get together to dedicate a presidential library and no one notices there isn't a single American flag to be seen, not even his decoration on the stage . You need to understand how automatic this is in Washington, DC and when it comes to federal events . It is automatic to decorate the Daises and the stages with American flags . In order to fully appreciate how embarrassing and appalling this oversight was, you have to think about that. No one in this crowd asks who forgot the flags? Why are there no flags here? This is supposed to be a celebration of Americ a, after all, in addition to a celebration of Barack Obama. Americans should be asking, why wasn't there a hint? Why were there zero visible examples of patriotism shown at that event? Because today's Democrats aren't patriots, that's why they're America haters. The answer is probably half of the people in that crowd would have wanted to burn that American flag if it was put on the stage. Today's Democrats are not patriots interested in what's best for this country anymore, as virtually all Democrats have been since the creation of the country . And that fact has been on display pretty much every day since the Socialists swooped in to take control of the Democrat Party. This was after Hillary lost and it was, clear traditional liberalism was a failed concept. The Obamas retired to Oprah's yacht, Hillary went off wandering in the woods wearing her depression mumu, and the Bernie Bros swooped in to take control of the Democrat tent and ensure socialism was going to replace liberalism as the party's future. So now, years later, we shouldn't be surprised that your average Democrat never displays a hint of patriotism. You're listening to the J Weber podcast, a presentation of NewsTalk eleven thirty WISN and IHART Radio podcasts. J Weber draws from his thirty five year career in radio news and commentary , with an irreverent wit that simply can't be matched. Right minded alternative to media outlets that substitute self serving narratives for candor and truth. Listen to the J Weber podcast published every Tuesday and Friday . Be sure to subscribe . There's a basic and pretty interesting story to be told about the U. S. car industry, and yet no one's really telling it other than maybe the reporters at the Wall Street Journal. The story can be summed up this way. American cars are now so expensive that they're keeping car owners in debt and causing a crisis of both sales and conscience in the auto industry. It has also created a so called car bubble that's similar to the housing bubble that we saw in the late Bush and early Obama administrations. But some insiders and politicians want to blame COVID and sort of the Biden years and Biden inflation that caused this. Others simply want to attribute it to the industry that's added too many features and made cars too expensive for the average person. But it's interesting stuff. Whatever you want to attribute it to, it's very real, and it mirrors the crisis we've been seeing in the housing market. There's been a very real shift on how long Americans are keeping their cars now because they can't afford to buy a new one. Both the price of the car and the interest rate on the car loan are keeping people from buying. In fact, in twenty twenty six, this is expected to be the first year, perhaps in history that the US car companies are going to sell fewer cars than they did the year before. The estimate I saw is that the shortfall could turn out to be nearly a million cars . in As U, a.ut Som. akers sold seventeen million vehicles in twenty twenty five, but they will only sell sixteen million this year. A recent story in the Wall Street Journal said that some drivers are squeezing more miles out of their vehicles and avoiding new rides because of sticker sh ock, higher interest rates and economic jitters. They say others are hanging on to aging wheels simply because they can. Thanks to advancements in engineering, materials and safety technology, today's cars last longer than vehicles of gener ations past. That's true, isn't it? They say the average vehicle on US roads is about thirteen years old , a historic high and a ten percent jump from a decade ago. While cars have steadily grown older over the last fifteen years, they say the tre,nd picked up over the COVID pandemic when shuttered factories and supply chain snarls drove up prices. The shift has accelerated in recent years as more car companies bulk at new vehicle prices and many automakers grapple with fallout from America's cooling on electric vehicles , which has cost companies tens of billions of dollars in lost investments and forced them to rethink their U. S. lineups. Yeah, I mean, someone needs to pay for those losses. It's new car buyers. They continue automakers long laser focused on this new car market are now pouring resources into propping up used car sales, aftermarket parts, and maintenance work. Dealers are investing in their repair shops more and adding service base to make more profit that way. Moreover, the industry experts tell the Wall Street Journal, flagging U. S. new car sales show no imminent sign of rebounding. Even used car sales are relatively flat simply because there aren't enough of them to meet demand. This is in a country where a lot of people cannot afford new cars because they are so blasted, pricey. Sure, a new car comes with onboard computers and numerous cameras and a host of wonderful new features, but all a car really needs to do is get you from point A to point B. Our car makers in America seem to have lost sight of that most basic fact . And if you question that, consider that the executives at these U. S. car companies see as their biggest threat a Ch,inese car company that cranks out cheapy electric vehicles that are starting to become so popular around the globe they could ultimately destroy the US business model. These Chinese companies seem to understand the mission of any car is to first get me from point A to point B . So they don't have to include all sorts of luxuries and bells and whistles. And a lot of the Asian markets in particular, a lot of the foreign markets , they don't expect every bell or whistle. They need to get from point A to point B. In the US, cars just keep getting more expensive even if they do keep getting more luxurious. In April, the price of a car was up about two percent from the same time last year. The price of even an average car now is about forty five thousand dollars, and even the car companies are starting to admit that there aren't a lot of options for anyone who wants a thirty to forty thousand dollars car. Not if it's new . As a consultant for Cox Automotive , told the Wall Street Journal, Consumers are really handcuffed to their current vehicles and they have no choice sometimes but to repair their vehicle. So the latest marketing effort that Ford is undertaking for example, is to try to convince people to get their fords fixed at the company dealerships. This expert says there's an old saying in the car business. You sell them once in the sales department and then you sell them ten times over in the service department. So at dealers around the country, perks the are on rise for customers who will actually keep their older vehicles running and keep bringing them back to the dealership. It's a shift for an industry that's been notoriously focused on new car sales. The industry insiders also talk in this article about how long time perception is that getting a car service at a dealership is going to cost more or they're not as honest, right ? That perception is going to have to change too. And many dealers along with the US car companies are working hard to change it , because if you aren't selling as many new cars, you have to make more profit somewhere. In fact, according to Cox Automotive, the service end of these dealerships accounts for about half of the overall profit now. And I don't think this next thing is surprising to anyone who has wanted to buy a new car over the last several years and looked at the prices. If the sticker shock doesn't get you, the higher interest rates will . Then there's this, which is also increasingly true , just like the housing crisis of the Bush and Obama eras, there are now a large number of people who owe so much on this car they want to turn in, they can't really afford the next car they're buying. We called that the housing bubble? Well, this is a car bub ble. A dealer in Ohio is seeing customers still owning as much as forty or fifty grand on their current pickup truck and they're looking to buy a new one. Well, the traded on that truck isn't going to be forty thousand dollars. The dealer wouldn't break even trying to turn around and sell it as a used vehicle. I think you get it. One example the Ohio dealer gave in an article that I ran across says a prospective buyer recently sought to trade in a Ford F one hundred fifty lightning, but that customer owed about eighty seven thousand dollars on the pickup truck. Well, the Ford pickup truck was worth about forty seven, leaving the buyer well underwater. He said, This is the battle we're fighting every day . These dealers say more Americans are turning in their cars to buy new ones and are encountering this difficult reality. Their vehicles aren't worth what they owe on it. In fact, according to Edmunds, about thirty percent of borrowers in the first quarter who traded in a car to buy a new one had negative equity , which obviously means they owe more on their loan than their car is worth. Those borrowers owed about seven thousand two hundred dollars on average before getting a new loan. Wow. Edmond says about a third of Americans trading in an older car have negative equity, which has been typical in the industry for years, but the average amount of Americans are underwater has skyrocketed. Buyers are trying to unload cars bought during the pandemic at high prices, and this is creating the problem. To offset those costs, they say more car buyers are taking on longer loans to keep monthly payments digestible. In the first quarter of this year, the average loan was seventy months on new cars, according to Edmunds data. My God , that's a six year car loan. I'll do the math for you. That is a six year car loan. Some of us remember when a three year car loan was considered risky or considered a big deal. You weren't sure if you wanted to extend yourself out that far. The COVID era played a role here in a few different ways. First, there was a superconductor shortage. I think you remember that. That meant that fewer new cars were being made or available for purchase, which meant those vehicles that were being made and available were selling for high er prices. Remember this? An analyst quoted in the Wall Street Journal says this was the era in which dealers were overcharging customers. And so dealers are now seeing a bunch of cars that were bought during the COVID era coming back to them and the own scerre iswed because he or she owes way more on the car than it's worth. Why? Well, because they agreed to buy that vehicle for a price that was never realistic or reasonable, but in the moment they didn't care. Or they just felt like they needed a new vehicle. Either way, they're stuck now. So consider that they now want to buy a new car but will have to keep carrying the debt from the car they're trading in. That's getting us to this figure . Right now in twenty twenty six bu.yers Car with negative equity as in they still owe something on the last one, that group of car buyers is now working out the car loan paperwork and walking out having borrowed an average of fifty six thousand dollars to drive away with the new vehicle that's worth less . That's the loan for the new car and the old debt piled on top of it. I'll make up an example. They leave fifty six grand in debt for a new car that was supposed to cost them about forty eight thousand Whatever, this is the average American consumer, I guess, just pile on the debt . So you won't find this surprising. That consumer who rolled over the old debt is more than twice as likely to default and have the car repossessed within two years . Gee, no kidding. Meanwhile, the financial gurus and the industry insiders don't really see a situation either in which the cost of the vehicle or the interest rate will go down anytime soon. The Wall Street Journal reporter obviously asked, well when will the situation correct itself? When do you expect car prices and or loan rates to drop? The answer was, maybe never. We don't see a time on the near horizon that that happens. Great. My take would be conditions seem primed for a quality car company to sweep in and offer a far less expensive car and destroy the U. S. auto industry's business model entirely. The time seem s right to offer a class of thirty to forty thousand dollars cars that young Americans in particular could get jazzed about and could actually afford as Ford GM, etc . Keep insisting that it's reasonable to expect people to pay seventy five to one hundred to one hundred fifty thousand dollars for a vehicle . Which brings us to the next but related topic the automaker's electric pickup truck fiasco and how they're desperately trying to do a reset on this. I'm not sure they are, but the story contends they are. When GM and Ford started to trot out their electric pickup trucks, we, on my radio show were pondering whether the average U. S. pickup truck owner would want an electric vehicle, and the conclusion was no . Certainly the working class of farmers, laborers, contractors, etc . who need a reliable and no nonsense pickup truck has no interest in that baloney. But if most pickup owners are rural and suburban drivers who put a lot of miles on, they probably don't want it either. So round one, the first attempt to create EV pickups and get them to sell has been a catastrophe. These companies went billions of dollars in debt, taking losses every step of the way to design , manufacture and sell electric vehicles. They were selling these clunkers and losing tens of thousands of dollars on every sale. It was just a foolish mess, and it has ended with a public and political retreat from electric vehicles all together . And so Ford, GM, and these other car companies have just embarrassed themselves with the EV pickup truck effort. I'm going to again reference a Wall Street Journal story this Sunday about how these automakers want the buying public to give them a second chance. And the rather amusing headline is You were right to hate EV pickups. I love that. It's an admission by the automakers We tried to trick you with gimmicks or junk and you caught us. At least that's the way I take it. But the story says quote, The first generation of mass market electric pickups ended in financial disaster. As automakers try again with smaller designs, consumers are right to ask what will be different this time. The answer most? Al everything . They report that in December of twenty twenty five, Ford Motor Company announced a record nineteen point five billion dollars in EV related losses. That's not just the trucks that's across all EV cars they make , but this was mostly owing to the failure of the F one hundred fifteen lightning pickup. Meanwhile, GM took a write down of its own of six billion dollars . At this point, consumers could have easily concluded electric pickups were never going to happen, the Wall Street Journal says. Well, those EV pickups were supposed to go about three hundred miles on a charge , but building and moving a pickup takes a lot of weight and energy. And so the end result of the first generation of EV trucks was they were very heavy, and if you put any weight in the back of them or wanted to tow any trailer to add more weight, the battery life dwindled quickly. In other words, they weren't really useful as a pickup truck, even if they looked cool. And so as Ford and GM go back to the drawing board, they're apparently going to try to offer the public something that is far removed from a traditional pickup truck, at least according to this story. They're bound to be smaller with less capacity and not really geared toward a working vehicle. In other words, a toy pickup truck for city dwellers and suburbanites might be coming from these companies. That's electric. But having read the story, I don't see Ford, GM, or Stalantis rushing to actually design and build these things. I think this is a way to more gracefully duck the embarrassment of the first try because none of the execs quoted by the Wall Street Journal could say in any real way when we might see or be able to buy this new version of their EV pickup truck. Meanwhile, the reporter does talk about one or two other small or startup EV companies that are going to be offering EV pickups, but they sound like long shots. For example, a company called Slate Truck is a startup company in Indianapolis that claims by twenty twenty seven , it will be offering a very stripped down, very basic EV pickup that buyers then will add their own extras to for under thirty thousand dollars . And folks, this to me could be the future of the auto industry, not necessarily the slate company, but this newer way of selling them, start with a strip down version and have people build their own add ons. I see that as a more popular way for cash strapp ed young people who want to buy everything over the internet anyway to buy cars in the future. Instead of going to a dealer to look at cars that are pre made and have all sorts of unnecessary but expensive features and that's what makes this a seventy thousand dollars truck. I think today's kids are already so used to I ordered on a website and you send it to me that this is going to become the routine way of buying cars . I know Carvana and other versions of this already exist, but they don't exist as a build your own car first , which is what I'm talking about here. Slate claims their base EV pickup will be about twenty grand, and then you decide if you need a radio or a speaker system. I mean it,'s that basic. Do you want power windows they're going to be asking you or alloy wheels? This is all la carte ordering and it will greatly reduce the price of the average new car if it's done right. That, I think will, appeal to all sorts of middle aged buyers as well, and it might be the future of the car industry. I think it's going to be fun to see where the auto industry is headed, and where it is in just five short years, and then ten, etc You're listening to the J Weber podcast, a presentation of NewsTalk eleven thirty WISN and iHart Radio podcasts. Jay Weber draws from his thirty five year career in radio news and commentary with an irreverent wit that simply can't be matched. Right minded alternative to media outlets that substitute self serving narratives for candor and truth. Listen to the J Weber podcast , published every Tuesday and Friday. Be sure to subscribe . My friends, I still don't think the Democrats fully understand what type of trouble they're in for twenty twenty eight. I'm not saying the next Democratic nominee for president cannot win the presidency. I mean, history would suggest that the position is handed back to the Democrats by voters in twenty eight, but it's not written in stone. And from where I'm sitting, the Democrats and their party are getting further and further away from having an appealing group of candidates. I think it was two podcasts ago that I talked about the most dangerous dark horse candidate that they have. This is Congressman Rokana from California. He's of Indian descent. He's a slick, convincing talk er. He could sell Bernie and AOC's socialism to the country far more effectively than they are. And so I'm not discounting a rowcona candidacy in twenty eight, but the thing is, traditionally, Congressmen and senators don't win presidential elections. In fact, I don't believe a single member of the lower chamber. I don't think a single member of the House of Representatives has ever won the presidency running from that position. And what I mean is, yes, Joe Biden was a senator, but he won the presidency as VEP, etcetera. Yeah , Barack Obama was a senator, but he was uniquely black and clean and articulate, as old Joe put it, and he was running in a year in which no one wanted Hillary. But if you look back into presidential history, very few senators have even won presidential races. The voters heavily favor governors and vice presidents because they have this belief that you should have some executive experience for this office, Bush, Reagan, Carter, all governors, et cetera. And so if we put Rokana aside as a long shot in a Congressman, my point today would be if you look at the pool of Veeeps and governors who might naturally appeal to voters in this country as proven leaders or those who have executive experience, wow is the Democrat kitchicen bear. Again, this weekend, Kamala Harris was doing some cushy interview with Don Lemon and couldn't manage to put sentences together. Several highlights from that interview went viral as more of Kamala's drunken word salads. And I don't know if she'd been drinking or not, but she certainly generated content free word salads in that interview. And I continue to maintain that she will not be the Democrats' twenty twenty eight nominee. Way too many of them are sitting in way too many important positions within the party and within elected positions to know the real Kamala behind the scenes. They know she is a lazy, pretender, idiot. And so there goes the party's potential VEP candidate, right? Take her off the board. And as for governors, yes, there are a few that I would consider more credible and appealing candidates , but they aren't the ones that the Democrats themselves or their accomplices in the news media are going to highlight or promote, and they're not the ones that the most rabid grassroots activists on that side of the aisle are going to like. Josh Shapiro is well liked, but he's famously Jewish in a party whose leaders and grassroots bullies are increasingly anti Jew. There's Andy Bashir of Kentucky. He's proven to be a more moderate and reasonable Democrat, but Democrat voters don't want moderate or reasonable in this climate . There's Wesmore of Maryland, whom I find impressive in a number of ways. He speaks with some common sense. He's also African American. But again, common sense isn't selling right now in this party. It won't be Kathy Hochal or Janet Mills from out east, they're too politically damaged and unappealing. A shiny face scretchin Whitmer over in Michigan, she's already ruled herself out. This leaves, as people who are both governors and talking about running in twenty twenty eight , this really only leaves JB Pritzker, Tim Waltz, and Gavin Newsom on the Democrat side. Well, if you haven't heard Tim Waltz, the governor of Minnesota and Kamala's failed jazz hands Veep is so staggeringly unpop ular in his own state that he's not even running for reelection. A poll last week put Wals' approval rating at thirty nine percent and his disapproval rating at fifty three . Moreover, forty five percent of Minnesotans say they trust Republicans to fix the rampant fraud that has been discovered in Minnesota under Waltz's watch, and only thirty eight percent trust the Democrats to fix it. Think about this. This is a deep blue state, my friends. And voters are saying Tim Wallace is an ass hat and we need Republicans to come in and fix things. Well , then there's this little fact, while federal investigators haven't charged Tim Wallace with any crimes related to this fraud that he obviously knew about, yet, it doesn't mean they won't at some point. That puts another cloud over any Tim Wall's presidential candidacy. And given the farcical glimpse that the American people got of him in the fall of twenty twenty four, I highly doubt he'll make any sort of splash in twenty twenty eight, even if he runs. He may try to use running for president as a face saving excuse as to why he's not running for governor again . But the next president of the United States will not be the elderly and unserious theater kid from Minnesota. That leaves JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom. Well, I can dismiss a Pritzker candidacy with just a few sentences here. He's a tubby billionaire who simply oozes white privilege of the sort that members of the Democrat grassro ots insist they hate, and he's been a controversial and crappy governor that the people of Illinois don't even particularly like. In fact, the latest news on Pritzgeridge is that he just signed a new budget into law that will add nearly a billion dollars in new taxes onto the people of that state. Oof . Pritzker and the Democrats down there even invented a new tax, a tax on advertising that is so ludicrous, experts say it's bound to lead to all sorts of high priced and high profile lawsuits that are going to leave the taxpayers down there paying not just the tax, but millions of dollars more fighting the lawsuits in court . The Illinois Policy Institute says this is another Pritzker two step budget , increase spending, then raise taxes and sweep dedicated revenues from other funds to fill in other big budget gaps. This is why Illinois residents pay the highest combined state and local rate in the country, they say. A senior fellow at the Tax Foundation , the new tax opens the state up to costly litigation. It has a very good chance of losing, and the whole thing looks like something dashed off with very little thought. He says Illinois plans to impose a complicated, legally fraud new tax based on a few pages of confused, contradictory, and almost laughably incomplete legislative text embedded in a new budget . Fantastic. And so that, in addition to his really weird and foolish fights with Ice Make JB Pritzker look like a long shot when it comes to any presidential bid too, but I don't doubt that he'll launch one. Which means we arrive at Gavin Newsom. And folks, this is fun because like everything else related to Gavin Newsom, it comes with a lot of Newsom's lying and very few people believing any of it. You might have heard that Newsom and his wife are now under federal investigations , and the public knows this because Gavin Newsom is the one who went public with that information. Newsom did this as a way to try to get ahead of a serious scandal. Gavin Newsom and his team went with the strategy of let's get out the bad news ourselves so that the public hears it from us and then we, can inv ent excuses and manage the fallout better. So it was Gavin Newsom who told the California media, I'm now under federal investigation, but then the next breath of that was because Donald Trump finds me such a threat . Now, come on. Donald Trump doesn't find Gavin Newsom anything other than maybe an elite debag. I doubt that Donald Trump has given any real thought to Gavin Newsom, if you ask him. After all, Trump's not even running in twenty eight , JD Vance is. And yes, JD Vance has some thoughts on Newsom, but Trump probably isn't wasting much brain power on Newsom at the moment. Moreover, Mark Halprin, the veteran DC reporter and longtime insider, he's got great sources. He made it known to his podcast viewers this week. This is spin. Helperin said, Democrats he knows in both California and Washington, DC say that, oh no, this investigation is serious. There is something to it. This isn't about Trump, and the Newsoms need to be genuinely worried here. In other words, this isn't a bogus investigation drummed up by Trump's team to try to smear the reputation of Gavin Newsom. This isn't going after John Bolton just to try to bloody his nose and prove that he's slipperier than he comes off , or some sort of obvious political payback move. After all, what would Trump have to pay Gavin back for? That's what I wonder. Gavin Newsom has never been a major player as much as he'd like to be. Newsom has been a rather impotent and pathetic little pretender in the larger scheme of national politics. Any attacks he's made on Trump have had so little impact, I wouldn't label him Trump a enemy . No, Helperin is known for having great sources and he is saying even my Democrat contacts are saying, No, no, this isn't Trump venom. This is a legitimate federal investigation that would be occurring regardless of who's in the White H ouse. And as a way to validate that, I would mention that back when Joe Biden was president and Mara Garland was atop the Biden Department of Justice, even during the Biden years , the Department of Justice was looking into possible corruption in the Newsom Governor's Office and charged his chief of staff with bank and wire fraud. These are charges that this gal, her name is Dana Williamson, she just pled guilty to these charges in court last month. And so Gavin Newsom knows that the related investigations go back into the Biden administration and he's still leaping to blame Trump so that whatever's coming legally he can deny and insist he's a victim of some Trump jihad or some Trump bullying. But it's already pretty amazing the number of people on the left who are saying it's not going to work and Gavin Newsom might be cooked politically . And no, neither Newsom nor investigators are really giving any specifics on what's being investigated, but we know it's related to the Newsom family finances, and it's very likely related to the fact that his wife and he had been involved in several controversial non profits that were being funded with state and federal tax dollars, and somehow, geez, the Newsoms just got really rich in a really short period of time. Gavin himself raised hundreds of millions of dollars from his supporters and his donors for alleged charities and non profits that he wanted them to donate to. Many of the recipients have business interests with the state of California and Newsom's office though. So there are all sorts of conflicts of interests here that look bad. And frankly, those are only a few of the personal scandals and whispers of corruption that have floated around Gavin, Newsom and his wife for years now . And so if Newsom is going to try to flip this around and try to use a hugely negative federal investigation into a positive, turn into a positive for his twenty twenty eight campaign, it's incredibly cynical and it's not likely to work. Not when the Department of Justice at some point details the charges and evidence against him and his wife if it comes to that. Some credible reports say investigators are looking at his wife's taxes and finances, and everyone involved with her in this nonprofit world out there is scrambling to call their lawyers. Also, you have to consider how any federal charges or lingering accusations would affect the Gavin Newsom presidential run. This has already has some insiders saying that he should just pass on twenty twenty eight and focus on his family scandals . But then there's also this other thing that could harm him in twenty eight becauseeen everything is politics. There is currently a large tax the billionaires and F the rich movement that's going on in California , and it comes with a ballot initiative that voters out there will vote on in November. That ballot initiative is to have the state of California slap a five percent wealth tax on the residents of that state, after all, no one deserves to be that rich. And the fun here is that this ballot initiative is another thing that's giving Newsom and his team heartburn right now because he doesn't want to run for president as the first governor to slap a wealth tax onto his own citizenry and that wealth tax by the way would really piss off the Silicon Valley billionaires who he expects to fund his presidential race . That move might thrill the socialists in his party's base, tax the billionaires, but it's not going to impress the sorts of swing voters that he would need in order to win the Democrat primaryic or the presidency itself , and it would harm his campaign literally make it harder to get it off the ground without that billionaire California Silicon Valley money . But hey, nearly a million Californians were needed to sign the petition to get this question onto the fall ballot, and so it's not like taxing the rich isn't popular out there. Taxing the rich is something that Newsom knows is popular with California's voters. So how is he going to play this? So far he's begging the SEIU and the other powerful Californian Unions to come out against it, but geez, that's a pretty impossible climb when they're the ones pushing it. Union leaders, especially the SEIU , have always been socialists who like to attack the rich, and the SEIU leaders in particular have pushed this ballot initiative. According to one report, quote, The Billionaire Tax Now Coalition, which includes the SEIU and other proponents, wrote to Newsom back on june eighteenth, offering a compromise, agree to a two percent tax on billionaires, and they'll drop the ballot initiative. So now he's saying if you can do something legislatively and only tax the rate of two percent, we'll drop the five percent b allot initiative. Newsom, of course, rejected that deal, and he called the tax a poorly designed measure that's going to harm the state. And it will, by the way , it will drive away even more successful people in their successful job creating businesses , and Newsom knows this, but he's been pandering to the activist left for so long that he's in a really tough spot here . If he wants to have any shot at the twenty twenty eight nomination, he's in a tough spot because either he's the socialist who drove jobs and entrepreneurs out of California or he's the A hole who invented an unfair and unawan new tax on his own people . So why should we want him to be president for the nation? And this is why Newsom is trying to negotiate a legislative compromise so that the SEIU and other supporters will agree to gank this question from the fault ballot . And if he can't get it pulled, he's going to have all sorts of Silicon Valley billionaires really , really angry