In this episode of the No Pill podcast, we dive into the political and economic landscape with a focus on the recent controversy involving Donald Trump and Thomas Massie. We explore the online uproar following Trump's criticism of Massie and the broader implications of this political spat. We discuss the House's recent passage of a spending bill to avert a government shutdown and the ensuing debate in the Senate, highlighting the complex dynamics between Republicans and Democrats.
Thomas Massie provides his perspective on the so-called "fake fight" in Congress, where he argues that the spending bill is a pre-arranged deal between Republicans and Democrats, with no real conservative agenda at play. We delve into Massie's critique of the fiscal responsibility act and the ongoing budgetary maneuvers in Congress.
We also explore the economic strategies under the Trump administration, including the controversial use of tariffs and interest rate manipulation, as well as the potential impact on the housing market. The episode examines the FHA mortgage program and the looming threat of a subprime bubble, questioning the sustainability of current housing policies.
Finally, we touch on the broader political landscape, including the actions of the Trump administration and the ongoing challenges in holding political figures accountable. We discuss the need for more decisive action against political corruption and the limitations of current political strategies.
[00:00:47]
Andrew Hoffman:
Hello, and welcome to the No Pill podcast, episode six. We're gonna do something a little bit different today. It'll be a little more timely with what's going on in the news and more focused on the political and economic stuff. So if you're if you're tired of vaccine bashing, this is probably a good episode. If you could care less about politics, you you might have you might find something in what we're gonna talk about. So, in particular, what motivated me to start recording was this whole Donald Trump bashing of Thomas Massie, saying he's gonna primary him and and, you know, kick him out of Congress, and he's not a real congressman. I don't know. I don't know. It's a ridiculous post. So I'm sure people have seen that.
I should throw that in in the show notes, though. But, anyway, this spawned a whole giant online war of people taking sides, either bashing Thomas Massie, even though the people bashing Thomas Massie, in general, probably didn't know who he was a week ago, or people supporting Massie and and, you know, standing up for him against Trump. I kinda think even Thomas Massie and Donald Trump both know that this is not real, for different reasons and and have their own their own agenda at play here. So we're we've got a few clips. Hopefully, it we're gonna play quite a few clips, and hopefully it all makes sense by the end of it. But we'll start out with with, you know, the official story here. This is the propaganda for dumb people, the Yahoo News version, which actually doesn't mention Thomas Massie at all. Kinda interesting in and of itself. But but remember, you know, this is Yahoo. It is the it's not for the thinkers, to put it more nicely.
After House votes to avert government shutdown, Senate Democrats face stark choice. In dramatic fashion, House Republicans passed a bill to fund the government through the September 2025, a major victory for speaker Mike Johnson, who has previously relied on Democrats for bipartisan support to avert a shutdown. The House voted two seventeen to two thirteen to pass the spending bill known as a continuing resolution days before funding runs out. Following the house vote, which saw just a single Republican defection, doesn't mention who it is, Johnson thanked president Donald Trump who helped convince GOP holdouts to support the bill.
We are united in our mission to deliver the American first agenda, Johnson said in a post on x. The The spending bill now heads to the senate where it requires 60 votes to pass, and its fate is uncertain. Or is it? The house's approval has left senate Democrats divided on the stark decision ahead. What will senate Democrats do? There are really only two options. One is to vote for a pretty bad CR, or the other is to vote for a potentially even worse shutdown, said senator Angus King, following the house vote. So it's a very tough choice. Democrats met for two hours Tuesday with no consensus on how they plan to handle the vote on the bill. Oh, yeah. I'm sure there's I'm sure they don't have a plan at all, and the fisher is palpable.
Some Democrats are clearly leaning towards casting a painful vote to oppose the House package and effectively shut down the government. Senator Elizabeth Warren branded the house passed CR a shutdown bill that Republicans will bear responsibility for in a speech Tuesday night. Yada yada yada. Nobody listens to Elizabeth Warren, but she's playing her role. So, anyway, so that that's the official story on it. And now let's hear, Thomas Massey's opinion on it because it is quite quite different than that. Hi. Congressman Massey here. I thought you'd like to know about the fake fight that's going on in the House of Representatives right now over this CR. They're trying to pitch it as a conservative CR versus, liberal Democrats, and even the Democrats are going along in the house. But let me tell you why that's a fake fight. They're they plan to pass it with all Republicans here in the house, but after we leave town, the Democrats are gonna vote for it in the senate. That's right. They're gonna need about eight democrat senators to vote for this thing over in the senate.
That means that this deal has already been cut, that Mike Johnson has cut a deal with the senate senate democrat senate leadership, and even Hakeem Jeffries. He's in on this so that they can pitch their fake fight here in the house. Now how do I why am I so certain this is gonna pass in the senate when it gets over there with eight Democrats or however many Democrats they need? Well, Mike Johnson is sending us home a day early. We're gonna vote on this thing at skip town. If you thought there was really a threat of them not passing it in the senate, why would you leave town?
The other thing that's going on is the Democrats have a retreat, an off-site retreat, where they're gonna get together and party and have, you know, guest speakers and stuff. And that starts tomorrow and runs through Thursday and Friday. Now you think they're not gonna let this thing pass. What would happen if, let's say, the Freedom Caucus decided to take the conservative stance on this CR and oppose it? Well, they would be about 30 or 40 votes short here in the house. The Republicans would. But Hakeem Jeffries wouldn't be able to pretend along with Mike Johnson in this fake fight that this is conservative versus liberal battle in the house, and he would just hand over at least 40 Democrats. And once you get the 40 Democrats, it'd probably be a whole lot more Democrats. So that's what's going on. It's all a fake fight. You're gonna find this out when it goes over to the senate, and you have Democrats in the senate voting for it. Now here's the other thing a lot of people aren't telling you about this bill.
In the FRA, stands for fiscal responsibility act, I'm not saying it was that responsible. But in the FRA that passed a couple years ago under Kevin McCarthy, the deal that was cut between myself and others on the rules committee was that if you will guarantee a 1% cut in spending on any CR that goes past April 30 and put that into law, use the sequester language, and put that into law, then we would raise the debt limit or suspend the debt limit for a period of time. I voted for this because a 1% cut seemed like a wonderful thing if they would go and do a CR for a full year, at which seemed like almost a certainty at some point in the next two years. Well, here we are under Mike Johnson, and we've got the the one year CR that they're gonna do. It's actually a six month CR because we're already six months into this, and it's gonna go past April 30. It should trigger the sequester.
But guess what? Mike Johnson's folks and lawyers have said, we're just gonna ignore that. We're gonna treat this continuing resolution as 12 appropriations bills or an omnibus for the purposes of this sequester because it goes all the way to September 30. In other words, they're saying this really isn't a CR for the purposes of that deal we cut two years ago. We're gonna call this basically an omnibus in CR clothing so we don't have to follow the law, the agreement that we did before. Now that's pretty disingenuous if you ask me. It's even more disingenuous to try to say that, oh, two years ago, Massey was fiscally irresponsible because he voted to raise the debt limit. No. We got a deal there, and then Mike Johnson has broken the deal because he's not being conservative. I mean, this was this was obvious, as obvious as that Capitol Dome back there behind me and the blue sky.
So what would I do? What's a CR I could vote for? Because people have said, oh, Massey voted for CRs before in the past. Well, actually, I've never voted for a CR that became law because they were too conservative. I voted for a CR under McCarthy that cut everything in discretionary spending 8 percent. That's an 8% cut. I mean, I'm a fan of the penny plan, but 8% is huge. I think that CR also had some border security package on it as well, but I'm not a big fan of sticking things together. The reason I voted for that CR is it had an 8% cut. It never went into law. So but if you wanted me to vote for a CR, that's the kind of CR I could vote for if you're gonna cut everything 8%, if you're gonna be serious about it, but they're not gonna be serious about it. Really, what we should be doing is what I've said all along. I've been here twelve years. We should be doing 12 separate bills. That's kinda plain as day if you ask me. And that way, there's no threat of a shutdown.
The reality is that the Democrats and Republicans love to have the threat of a shutdown. They can get conservatives vote for liberal things if there's a shutdown looming, especially when you have a president who says, oh, we don't wanna shut down under my watch. By the way, this is not Trump's agenda. This is Biden's spending agenda. This is the CR extends Biden spending levels until the end of the year, the Biden spending levels that he enjoyed for the last fifteen months of his presidency will now be locked in until September 30. Remember in September, you can go back and find a video, September 2024, of me in the rules committee saying that what's gonna happen if we do a CR in September is it's gonna go to December and then because what they said then was, oh, we gotta go after the election. We don't wanna lose the majority, so we'll have this fight after November, after the election. Well, we got to after the election. This and we were in December.
It was time to do the spending bills again. They said, nope. We don't wanna fight right now. We got we actually won the senate, and we won the White House. So we'll have the high ground. And they thought about doing the CR until January, and they said, no. Let's give Trump and the new congress time to get their legs underneath of them, and let's go all the way to March, March fourteenth. That'll be this Friday. They said that'll give us time to implement the Trump agenda. But here we are on March 14. Remember, the first excuse was wait till after the election. The second excuse was wait until everybody sworn in. And now the excuse now for doing a CR is, oh, we don't have time. We don't have time to do the right thing. We don't want the fight now. We'll do a fight in September of twenty twenty five. Well, guess what, folks? The closer you get to the next election, the less spine these people have. And if you think they have little spine now, the spine will be nonexistent.
I don't see the fight coming. I hope there is a fight to cut spending. I just don't see it. And we're our own worst enemy here in the Republican party. So what should you do? Do a cross the board cut. You should honor the 1% cut that that's in law that Mike Johnson is going around. He's violating at least the spirit of the law and maybe even the letter of the law by ignoring the 1% cut. And we should also lock in the Doge cuts. Why are we gonna fund all of the waste, fraud, and abuse that Doge found? Why are we gonna cut, copy, paste that budget? I thought we were gonna get rid of that stuff. Well, it seems like we're not. So the vote's gonna happen here pretty soon. I thought I would record this video for posterity from my new office here. Finally got a view of the capital, and I'll be going over to vote no. Remember, today, Trump is attacking Canada and me.
And the difference between the two is Canada will eventually cave. Just a little more to the story there from Thomas Massie than what we got from Yahoo or on X today or any of the well, certainly mainstream, but even alternative sources that that made it all, you know, either a fight between Republicans and Democrats or between Trump and Massey. And what he points out is this is the same exact spending that was going on under Joe Biden. They're moving deck chairs around on the Titanic, but they're not changing anything. And the idea that it would it's going to get changed at some future date, in this case September, is totally ridiculous.
You will have less leverage if if the Republicans actually want to change things. Now is when they would change it. With every new administration, you get basically six months to get as much of your agenda through as possible, and that's it. You kinda move deck chairs around on the Titanic and point point fingers at each other and, you know, Republicans are are great when they're not in power. They say all the right things. We're, you know, we're spending too much. This is oh, it's terrible. But when they're in power, they turn into to Democrats. It's there's no difference whatsoever. So other than, okay, we'll we'll waste money on less woke stuff. Yay.
And it's all the woke stuff's still in there too. And as Massey points out, you know, all these doge supposed doge cuts, they're not in law. Congress is not passing any of this stuff. This is all the same they're doing the same exact stuff they were doing last year when Democrats were in control, and Democrats were voting for it, and Republicans were voting against it. And it all marches on, and I think his point about the fake fight is a great one. And that's one thing Thomas Massie, does probably even better than Ron Paul because Ron Paul would kind of try to give people the benefit of the doubt and, oh, both parties are wrong.
But Massey's kind of had enough at this point and is saying, no, it's fake. And you'll see how fake it is when just enough Democrats cross over or maybe a lot of Democrats, but enough Democrats will vote for this. And it shows that it's not a conservative bill. It's nothing nothing is changing. It's just that Congress was a we could fight over it because, all the Republicans will vote for it, and it'll still get through. And the reason that I think Trump is genuinely mad at at Massey at some level. But the the primary threat, it's still it's two years away. This is not it's not a serious threat.
So I think Trump might be doing that for for other reasons, and we'll get into those later. Thomas Massie certainly did not sound very worried, and he shouldn't be. Right? But, as far as politic, he would probably not not terribly mind getting kicked out of Congress. It's it's not a fun life there. So if you're not getting tons of money under the table from special interests, it's there's not a lot of enjoyable experiences there in in DC. So this next clip comes from just to be honest, I hadn't seen seen it much before, but I like this take on the Trump versus Massey thing. It's from, Ivan Raikland.
And I guess he's a guest on Alex Jones or anyway, something, but he kinda mentions that in here. But this, I thought this was an interesting take, and there there should I think there's some truth to it. Hey. I'm gonna do a quick video in response to the little spat between president Trump and representative Thomas Massie. So here's the deal, folks. You gotta look at it from a little bit different perspective. It's not about taking sides of, oh, president Trump's right or Thomas Massie is right. What is that issue here and I'm gonna talk about this on Infowars later today at 5PM Eastern Standard Time with Owen Shroyer. Bottom line here is that the deep state tar members of the deep state target list, I'm gonna name who they are, are behind putting a wedge and removing Thomas Massey.
Well, guess what? Why are they doing that? It's because he's the only one that's in the position to expose the remember when he was on Tucker Carlson talking about how everyone has a handler, APAC Handler? Match that up with any relationships with folks that are on the Epstein client list. Maybe Thomas Massey in a in a position to expose that. Additionally, wasn't it Thomas Massey that exposed and was very zealous about going after the January 6 pipe bomber? Would that then expose Nancy Pelosi, her involvement in January 6 Fed's direction? Paul Ryan, former speaker of the house, and his involvement in the Fed's direction and subsequent cover up, and then maybe other top prominent Republicans.
So it's interesting to know that a lot of these things, you know, are interrelated. And I suspect that the reason why they're trying to take out Tom Massey is because he was the only one that was right on COVID. He called for the vote on the pandemic, the $2,000,000,000,000 electoral heist or excuse me, the $2,000,000,000,000 that was used by Nancy Pelosi to pay off everybody that was going to and did steal the twenty twenty election. Additionally, Thomas Massie was the only critical thinker that called out the unsafe and ineffective products. So in essence, on many levels, he was the only one right on COVID, the pandemic, the COVID con. And so now he's gonna be punished for it on another issue. And the reason why they're picking some other issue on it is because they wanna cover up their own involvement in the pandemic.
The Fauci funded lab incident, the cover up, the stolen election in 2020, the January 6 Fed's direction, the Fed's direction cover up. My assessment is that the unit party is duping president Trump into going after Thomas Massie to be able to then remove him from office so that he cannot expose all those things that I just mentioned. COVID con, plandemic, illegal election, January sixth, Fed's erection. There's my hot take. So I agree with a lot of that. There's some stuff I don't agree with. I don't think President Trump was duped into anything.
He is easily triggered at some level, especially in his, like, social media posts. He'll he'll come out a lot more fired up come across a lot more fired up than than, you know, to talk about it. I think the truth is he might have even told Massey, hey. You know, if if you vote against us, I'm gonna come out and say we're gonna primary you. And that's probably what he told all of them, all the freedom so called freedom caucus holdouts that were against this thing initially is, hey. I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna let you have it if you vote against it. And, like Thomas Massie said, he could have thrown in the Freedom Caucus, you know.
Trump was, was angry at the the Freedom Caucus, including Thomas Massie and, Canada, and Thomas Massie is the only one who's who's not going to cave there. So the I I think there's a little bit of showmanship going on, and I think in some ways, Trump wants to talk about anything except the economy, because the economy is really, really not going well. I'm sure everyone had noticed that. And there are different theories on on why that's happening. You know, it's the tariffs. You know, it's the the debt. It's a whole I mean, there's a whole lot of bad stuff going on. And the whole time we did Revelations Radio News, I mean, the the next crash was coming. Right?
So you can only reinflate and keep inflating these bubbles over and over and over again for for so long. Eventually, stuff does does pop. We've had higher interest rates supposedly to deal with inflation, and Trump is vociferously against that. We'll hear him talk about that. But so this was an interesting take floating around the idea that Trump is intentionally, he's Anthony Pompliano says crash the economy. That's kind of overstating it, but is intentionally kind of driving the stock market down and with the with certain goals in mind. So let's hear his his theory and see if it matches up and if we can tie it back to the whole Trump versus Thomas Massie thing.
The big, big question in financial markets over the last two weeks has been, is Donald Trump the president of The United States? Is he intentionally trying to tank The US stock market? That'd be insane. That would have been an absurd question back before the inauguration. Now the general thought process is that president Trump, he's a businessman. He's also an investor. He measures the health of The US economy through the stock market performance, and so you should expect that the stock market will go up into the right if Donald Trump becomes president. Now I know this was the consensus because I believed it too. I told you guys that that's what I thought would happen. And there was no obvious reason why Donald Trump would allow The US stock market to drop, let alone personally take actions to crash the market himself. That's exactly what's happening right now. And to be honest, this got people's brains in a blender. Now here's president Trump talking over the weekend. It's all about his plan to get interest rates and energy down. Take a listen. We've been I I've been saying, let's get interest rates down. You know, nobody ever gets rich when the interest rates are high because people can't borrow money. Interest rates are going down. You know what else is going down?
What have I been trying to get down? Energy. Energy's going down. I'd love to see energy go down. It's kinda crazy to hear them talk about that. Now Chris Patel and Amit is investing. They explain how this plan works. We got $7,000,000,000,000 of debt. We need to pay it back in the next six months. That's a big bill, baby. If we don't pay it back, we'll have to refinance. And the Trump administration, they do not want to refinance that debt if rates are at 4% or higher. So what do we gotta do? The ten year yield, we gotta get that thing down. At one point, it was at 4.8% this year, but we gotta get it lower. And so how do you get it to come down? Well, markets, they need to be scared. They need to show a little weakness in growth. People gotta believe that DOGE is actually working and interest rates will slowly start to come down. And the way to do that is you create that fear and that uncertainty.
You do it through things like tariffs. And so as you put on tariffs, you could see the slowdown in growth in the short term. You can get the bond market to start buying bonds as soon as possible because they're scared to touch stocks. And then, of course, that gives the Fed, the big bad Fed, the authority to bring lower rates down, which continues to bring the yield down as well. So although every single talking head on television, every mainstream economist will tell you conventional wisdom says tariffs are inflationary and the ten year should be spiking on more tariffs, it's actually going down because it's bringing so much uncertainty to equity markets. And people, they're fearful. They're selling stocks, and they're buying bonds. That's exactly what Trump wants to happen here. And in the short term, we are going to see the refinancing costs come down. Now this isn't the easy way. It's actually the hard way to get interest rates down. The easy way we already tried that one. The easy way would have been to have the Federal Reserve cut interest rates at the start of the year, but that didn't happen. In fact, many people already forgotten.
But go back to last year. Donald Trump was telling Jerome Powell, you gotta cut interest rates, cut interest rates, cut interest rates. But Powell was public in his defiance of Trump's request. So now Donald Trump and Scott Bessen, they're taking matters into their own hands. They are crashing asset prices in an attempt to force Jerome Powell to cut interest rates. Now here's the thing. We're gonna see who blinks first. It's a big game of chicken, baby. So don't believe me, though. Here's Donald Trump explicitly saying that you can't watch the stock market right now. Take a listen. You said, look. We're gonna have a disruption, but we're okay with that. Is that what you meant? The stock market going down was the disruption. What other disruption were you alluding to? Look. What I have to do is build a strong country. You can't really watch the stock market. If you look at China, they have a hundred year perspective. We have a quarter.
We go by quarters. That's true. And you can't go by that. You have to do what's right. What we're doing is we're building a tremendous foundation for the future. Tremendous foundation. So there you go. The entire administration in the White House, they have their eyes on the ten year treasury yield. But even without Jerome Powell stepping up to the plate with his big bat and slashing interest rates, we've already seen the ten year drop from 4.8% in January all the way down to 4.25% this weekend. That means we're heading in the right direction, and that is a good start. But we're gonna need much more movement on interest rates if we want to have a profound impact on our refinancing cost. And refinancing costs coming down isn't just good for the US government. Lower interest rates also affect the consumer.
The drop in interest rates since the start of the year, they've helped drop something like mortgage rates as well. Chris Patel points out that as interest rates decline, more buyers come out of the shadows. The sellers, they're willing to go ahead and sell because buyers are willing to pay more, and that is what it's gonna take to get the housing market to thaw. If you want housing transaction volume, you gotta get interest rates down. So from from Trump's perspective, he's he's never really been a big promiser of cutting the excess spending or or balancing the budget or or any of that. He emphasizes, we're gonna grow the economy, cut taxes.
We're gonna have a the best economy ever. So this idea that he's, in part, doing the the tariffs and the other just kind of creating uncertainty to potentially drive down interest rates because people are chased from stocks into bonds, It's an interesting interesting theory for sure. And obviously, that can easily be be reversed and and turn back around. You know, the the stock market can always go back up. They can always manipulate it and pump more more money into it. So that, that last part about how's it the housing market and trying to get, you know, in with interest rates coming down, it kinda gets the housing market unstuck because people are more willing to buy. They're able to afford more house with the same amount of money with the lower interest rate mortgage, and then people are more willing to sell it because they can get a higher price for it. So that is it is kind of an interesting scenario with with the housing market. You can definitely see more houses available, certainly than when I moved here to Oklahoma three years ago.
It was crazy trying to trying to get a house. So there's definitely more availability. There's a lot of houses being built, and they seem to sit empty a little bit longer. And this next clip has been floating around, and I grabbed a couple parts of it and put them together. And this guy, I don't even know who he is or if everything's accurate. I kind of doubt everything is accurate. But it is an interesting perspective on the FHA program and what the Biden administration was doing. And also, you could talk about similar things with the, student loan. That's a a whole separate bubble.
But, let's talk about the FHA program. The subprime bubble two point o is about to burst. It turns out that the US government has been making the mortgage payments for hundreds of thousands of defaulted mortgage borrowers using taxpayer dollars, and this was just exposed by by the Wall Street Journal. And if it's reversed, it has the potential to cause a massive cataclysmic housing downturn in many cities and neighborhoods across America. And the big issue is the FHA mortgage program. The first time home buyer mortgage program where you could put 3% down to buy a house. This mortgage program now has a 14% default rate. The default rate's 13 and a half percent.
Over 1,000,000 mortgage borrowers on the FHA program are currently in default, and the Biden administration basically was blocking these defaulted mortgages from going to foreclosure. And what the Biden administration was doing was that when a mortgage borrower went into fault and claimed financial hardship, they stepped in and made the mortgage payments for them, or they tacked the mortgage payments onto the back of the loan so the borrower has more debt. And this has been something that's been artificially inflating the housing bubble and preventing the foreclosures and the listings from hitting the market. And some of the things that I'm gonna show you in this video are gonna absolutely shock you.
I was shocked and appalled at some of the things I read about what the US government has been doing. This is one of the biggest scams that the US government has been involved with in decades, in my opinion. Because essentially what the government was doing was they were giving this loan program for first time buyers where your credit score could be as low as 580. You could have a 580 credit score and put three and a half down, and they would give, these borrowers these subprime loans. I mean, these are subprime loans. A subprime loans. A bank would never offer these loans, without the government backing. And then when that borrower would inevitably default, sometimes within only a year, the government would prevent it from going to foreclosure using taxpayer money. Money. Now that this has been exposed by the Wall Street Journal op ed, which highlighted that Biden's mortgage relief program caused this subprime crisis and that there's an FHA subprime bubble, what's gonna happen now? What's the Trump administration and Elon Musk going to do in response? I think particularly an area that could see lower prices if these foreclosures are allowed to happen. There's around 400,000 backlogged foreclosures right now that are being stopped by the US government. I think if they're allowed to happen, we could see prices in a city like Fort Worth, Texas where I am right now. We could see them drop by a lot. Because there's a lot of FHA mortgage borrowers here in Fort Worth. A lot of people have actually bought in home building communities from builders like Doctor Horton with FHA low down payment mortgages, and a lot of them are now going into default.
And so I think we could see lower prices here in Fort Worth. We could see lower prices in a city like Las Vegas. We could see lower prices in Orlando. Those are some of the top markets for FHA mortgages in America and would be some of the ones that are most exposed if these foreclosures are set loose and if the Trump administration does the right thing and turns off this subprime mortgage support offered by the US government. And I think some people in the real estate industry watching this might take issue with me calling these subprime loans. They're gonna say, no, Nick. These loans have income documented. They're nothing like the mortgages from the mid two thousands. But the crazy thing, everyone, is that when you look at the credit quality of these mortgages, they're horrible. They're worse than they were in the mid two thousands. Thousands. The Wall Street Journal has a graph showing the percentage of FHA borrowers who have a debt to income ratio above 43%.
It's over two thirds. Over two thirds of FHA borrowers when they get the mortgage have to pay over 43% of their income to debt costs. I want you to think about that. That means pretty much anyone borrowing from the FHA program right now is doing so, in a situation where they can't really afford the payments. Back actually in the nineties and February, it was only a quarter of all FHA mortgages had a debt to income above 43%. And some of the stuff that was happening here, folks, was absolutely wild. If you go further into this Wall Street Journal article, they mentioned how in 2024, mortgage servicers made 552,000 incentive payments to mortgage borrowers to prevent them from getting foreclosed on.
Translation, mortgage servicers took money from the US government FHA mortgage program and put it in the pockets of defaulted homeowners under the FHA mortgage program who could not make their payments. That is absolutely absurd. What's even more absurd is that in some cases, the government is automatically lowering the mortgage payments for these defaulted borrowers by 25%. If you go to the FHA mortgage website, it says very plainly, if you're in default and claim financial hardship, you could have your payments reduced by 25% with no contact. They could just do it automatically.
And I sincerely hope that Scott Turner, the new head of the FHA sworn in under the Trump administration a couple weeks ago, takes a serious look at what's going on in his department. And so folks, get this. There's 7,800,000 FHA mortgages outstanding. That's approximately 17% of all mortgages. His basic premise is that the Trump administration will not continue doing what the Biden administration was doing by paying, you know, paying for these mortgages and and kind of propping everything up and keeping the foreclosures from happening. I don't really see any evidence of that. I mean, if Trump was trying to reform the FHA program or any of that, he'd be he'd be talking about it.
I kinda think they're just gonna keep on doing similar things. And, you know, what happens if if you buy a house, if you got lousy credit, you're able to buy a house, and, you know, you you didn't really budget well, you and you miss a mortgage payment. And then instead of you missed three mortgage payments. And instead of going into foreclosure, the government says, oh, were were you having a hard financial hardship? Oh, well, we'll just we'll just pay those for you, or we'll just add some debt to the the end of the loan.
And you're not in it for a huge down payment. You're in it for the FHA three point five percent. So you basically have a a put option on your house. If the value goes goes down, you just walk away. Value goes up, maybe pay a few mortgages, then you can sell it and and make a profit. So this and there was criticism of this program, being expanded because it's been around for a long time, but it was expanded so that people with lesser, you know, lower credit scores, could could be eligible for it. That was a change I forget if I did I think it was before Biden, but I I could be wrong. I think it was even before, the first Trump administration.
So there's I mean, that's been going on in building and kinda reinflating some sort of bubble, but I just don't think Trump necessarily wants to deflate that bubble. We'll have to see. But something to keep an eye on, you know, if there's four if the 14% of FHA loans that are are delinquent all go into foreclosure at the same time. Yeah, that will definitely impact the housing market. I just don't think that is going to happen. So we've got we've got to wrapping things up for the week. I wanted to play this Harrison Smith clip, just just it's a little different topic, but I think he expresses well some of what I I feel I would probably even state it a little more strongly.
But, just kind of his feeling on what is happening with the Trump administration and what is not happening with the Trump administration. This is from DNI, Tulsi Gabbards. I have revoked security clearances and barred access to classified information for Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Lisa Monaco, Mark Zaid, Norm Eisen, Leticia James, Alvin Bragg, and Andrew Weisman along with the 51 signers of the Hunter Biden disinformation letter. This is good. Now arrest them. This is good. Now send them to jail forever. And I think that's how a lot of us are feeling. I think a lot of us are feeling like losing their job isn't good enough. Losing their security clearance is nothing.
So arrest them. I'm telling you, there's something about this Trump administration that it's all like a tease. This is all we just we just keep being teased with stuff. They're like, we are gonna go after these guys. These guys fraudulently claimed Hunter Biden laptop was fake. They covered it up. They rigged the election. They launched lawsuits against their political opponents. They violated the very basics of our constitutional order and our fundamental principles. They wield enormous inordinate power using your taxpayer dollars to destroy your way of life, in some cases lead to the death of millions by starting wars. And we're all like, these guys suck. They're like, yeah. So we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna take their security clearance away.
So there you go. That'll make them think next time. Next time, they'll think twice about launching a coup against the sitting president of The United States because they're gonna lose their security clearance. So problem solved. Go harder. You have to go much, much, much harder against these people. We're in a fight for our lives here. So where are the trials? Where are the imprisonments? Where are the executions for treason? Considering the fact that they did in fact commit treason, maybe now would be the time to, arrest them for that. Or tell you what, maybe you should find out if one of the entries in any one of their bank accounts is mislabeled and then you can charge them with 34 felonies. You do what they did to you. Maybe we could do it to them, but we don't need to. But we don't have to fabricate totally fraudulent and nonsensical charges to go after them. We can just charge them for what we know they've done. Be it the theft of millions of dollars through fraud or subversion of the election or any of the other various wars they've started and assassinations they've allowed to go on. Or it's like treat these criminals with the same intensity that the Democrats treat innocent people. Can we do that? Is that a good way to put it? I don't think it's too much to ask. If we could treat these acknowledged open tyrannical treasonous scum with the same vitriol and aggression that the Democrats treat a plumber from Nebraska that took an unpermitted stroll through the Capitol, like, we'd be good. If we could just get that bare minimum basic justice, we could solve all these problems.
I think Trump is a master of doing slightly more than you expect, but not what you want him to do. Right? Like the like, we're not going Ron Paul here. We're not going any real changes. We are just kinda shifting things around, but, hey, we're gonna go really hard on the peripheral issues with executive orders. And we're not gonna pass any meaningful long term congressional legislation that actually changes the direction of the country, but we're gonna do some kind of short term stuff. And which he, interestingly enough, said, you know, in America we look at quarters. China's looking at a hundred year plan.
But I don't I you can't tell me he's looking any further than his term. Right? There's I mean, you look at his first term, it's not like he's like, hey, we gotta do something about this debt. So I think he is he's in it for him to a large degree. I don't think Donald Trump hates us the way that other politicians have hated us. I don't think Donald Trump hates us the way Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, etcetera. And hopefully, he's not compromised to the same extent either. But, boy, you know, it let's just say I'm not surprised that there's not trials, and I'm not gonna be surprised that there's, you know I was not surprised they didn't throw Hillary in in jail.
Not at all surprised that that they're not locking up. Even the people that went directly against him, you know, they're pulling security clearance, and that's the end of the world. And and the it being the end of the world from the mainstream media is how the system operates. Right? Like you have to have the Democrats in Congress freaking freaking out about this continuing resolution that's exactly everything they want because if if they were agreeing with it, people would it would raise some red flags. Like, wait a second. There's these people are trying to destroy the country and they like this? Well, maybe we shouldn't like it. So that it's the way the system operates, the whole Elon Musk thing. I mean, what a great distraction. He's doing absolutely nothing. I mean, absolutely nothing. I mean, very, very little as far as long term changes.
Most of the short term changes that they've made are gonna get overturned, you know, changed by by courts or what have you. And it's definitely a scam. I like Thomas Massie. I think he he sees a lot of what's going on. So if he if he make me choose, I'm definitely team Thomas Massie versus Trump. But, unfortunately, it's not just Trump versus Massie. It's new world order versus us. I hope everyone has a great week. Thank you so much for listening, And thanks especially to those of you that that supported via Substack subscriptions and what have you.
You know who you are, and I appreciate you greatly.
Hello, and welcome to the No Pill podcast, episode six. We're gonna do something a little bit different today. It'll be a little more timely with what's going on in the news and more focused on the political and economic stuff. So if you're if you're tired of vaccine bashing, this is probably a good episode. If you could care less about politics, you you might have you might find something in what we're gonna talk about. So, in particular, what motivated me to start recording was this whole Donald Trump bashing of Thomas Massie, saying he's gonna primary him and and, you know, kick him out of Congress, and he's not a real congressman. I don't know. I don't know. It's a ridiculous post. So I'm sure people have seen that.
I should throw that in in the show notes, though. But, anyway, this spawned a whole giant online war of people taking sides, either bashing Thomas Massie, even though the people bashing Thomas Massie, in general, probably didn't know who he was a week ago, or people supporting Massie and and, you know, standing up for him against Trump. I kinda think even Thomas Massie and Donald Trump both know that this is not real, for different reasons and and have their own their own agenda at play here. So we're we've got a few clips. Hopefully, it we're gonna play quite a few clips, and hopefully it all makes sense by the end of it. But we'll start out with with, you know, the official story here. This is the propaganda for dumb people, the Yahoo News version, which actually doesn't mention Thomas Massie at all. Kinda interesting in and of itself. But but remember, you know, this is Yahoo. It is the it's not for the thinkers, to put it more nicely.
After House votes to avert government shutdown, Senate Democrats face stark choice. In dramatic fashion, House Republicans passed a bill to fund the government through the September 2025, a major victory for speaker Mike Johnson, who has previously relied on Democrats for bipartisan support to avert a shutdown. The House voted two seventeen to two thirteen to pass the spending bill known as a continuing resolution days before funding runs out. Following the house vote, which saw just a single Republican defection, doesn't mention who it is, Johnson thanked president Donald Trump who helped convince GOP holdouts to support the bill.
We are united in our mission to deliver the American first agenda, Johnson said in a post on x. The The spending bill now heads to the senate where it requires 60 votes to pass, and its fate is uncertain. Or is it? The house's approval has left senate Democrats divided on the stark decision ahead. What will senate Democrats do? There are really only two options. One is to vote for a pretty bad CR, or the other is to vote for a potentially even worse shutdown, said senator Angus King, following the house vote. So it's a very tough choice. Democrats met for two hours Tuesday with no consensus on how they plan to handle the vote on the bill. Oh, yeah. I'm sure there's I'm sure they don't have a plan at all, and the fisher is palpable.
Some Democrats are clearly leaning towards casting a painful vote to oppose the House package and effectively shut down the government. Senator Elizabeth Warren branded the house passed CR a shutdown bill that Republicans will bear responsibility for in a speech Tuesday night. Yada yada yada. Nobody listens to Elizabeth Warren, but she's playing her role. So, anyway, so that that's the official story on it. And now let's hear, Thomas Massey's opinion on it because it is quite quite different than that. Hi. Congressman Massey here. I thought you'd like to know about the fake fight that's going on in the House of Representatives right now over this CR. They're trying to pitch it as a conservative CR versus, liberal Democrats, and even the Democrats are going along in the house. But let me tell you why that's a fake fight. They're they plan to pass it with all Republicans here in the house, but after we leave town, the Democrats are gonna vote for it in the senate. That's right. They're gonna need about eight democrat senators to vote for this thing over in the senate.
That means that this deal has already been cut, that Mike Johnson has cut a deal with the senate senate democrat senate leadership, and even Hakeem Jeffries. He's in on this so that they can pitch their fake fight here in the house. Now how do I why am I so certain this is gonna pass in the senate when it gets over there with eight Democrats or however many Democrats they need? Well, Mike Johnson is sending us home a day early. We're gonna vote on this thing at skip town. If you thought there was really a threat of them not passing it in the senate, why would you leave town?
The other thing that's going on is the Democrats have a retreat, an off-site retreat, where they're gonna get together and party and have, you know, guest speakers and stuff. And that starts tomorrow and runs through Thursday and Friday. Now you think they're not gonna let this thing pass. What would happen if, let's say, the Freedom Caucus decided to take the conservative stance on this CR and oppose it? Well, they would be about 30 or 40 votes short here in the house. The Republicans would. But Hakeem Jeffries wouldn't be able to pretend along with Mike Johnson in this fake fight that this is conservative versus liberal battle in the house, and he would just hand over at least 40 Democrats. And once you get the 40 Democrats, it'd probably be a whole lot more Democrats. So that's what's going on. It's all a fake fight. You're gonna find this out when it goes over to the senate, and you have Democrats in the senate voting for it. Now here's the other thing a lot of people aren't telling you about this bill.
In the FRA, stands for fiscal responsibility act, I'm not saying it was that responsible. But in the FRA that passed a couple years ago under Kevin McCarthy, the deal that was cut between myself and others on the rules committee was that if you will guarantee a 1% cut in spending on any CR that goes past April 30 and put that into law, use the sequester language, and put that into law, then we would raise the debt limit or suspend the debt limit for a period of time. I voted for this because a 1% cut seemed like a wonderful thing if they would go and do a CR for a full year, at which seemed like almost a certainty at some point in the next two years. Well, here we are under Mike Johnson, and we've got the the one year CR that they're gonna do. It's actually a six month CR because we're already six months into this, and it's gonna go past April 30. It should trigger the sequester.
But guess what? Mike Johnson's folks and lawyers have said, we're just gonna ignore that. We're gonna treat this continuing resolution as 12 appropriations bills or an omnibus for the purposes of this sequester because it goes all the way to September 30. In other words, they're saying this really isn't a CR for the purposes of that deal we cut two years ago. We're gonna call this basically an omnibus in CR clothing so we don't have to follow the law, the agreement that we did before. Now that's pretty disingenuous if you ask me. It's even more disingenuous to try to say that, oh, two years ago, Massey was fiscally irresponsible because he voted to raise the debt limit. No. We got a deal there, and then Mike Johnson has broken the deal because he's not being conservative. I mean, this was this was obvious, as obvious as that Capitol Dome back there behind me and the blue sky.
So what would I do? What's a CR I could vote for? Because people have said, oh, Massey voted for CRs before in the past. Well, actually, I've never voted for a CR that became law because they were too conservative. I voted for a CR under McCarthy that cut everything in discretionary spending 8 percent. That's an 8% cut. I mean, I'm a fan of the penny plan, but 8% is huge. I think that CR also had some border security package on it as well, but I'm not a big fan of sticking things together. The reason I voted for that CR is it had an 8% cut. It never went into law. So but if you wanted me to vote for a CR, that's the kind of CR I could vote for if you're gonna cut everything 8%, if you're gonna be serious about it, but they're not gonna be serious about it. Really, what we should be doing is what I've said all along. I've been here twelve years. We should be doing 12 separate bills. That's kinda plain as day if you ask me. And that way, there's no threat of a shutdown.
The reality is that the Democrats and Republicans love to have the threat of a shutdown. They can get conservatives vote for liberal things if there's a shutdown looming, especially when you have a president who says, oh, we don't wanna shut down under my watch. By the way, this is not Trump's agenda. This is Biden's spending agenda. This is the CR extends Biden spending levels until the end of the year, the Biden spending levels that he enjoyed for the last fifteen months of his presidency will now be locked in until September 30. Remember in September, you can go back and find a video, September 2024, of me in the rules committee saying that what's gonna happen if we do a CR in September is it's gonna go to December and then because what they said then was, oh, we gotta go after the election. We don't wanna lose the majority, so we'll have this fight after November, after the election. Well, we got to after the election. This and we were in December.
It was time to do the spending bills again. They said, nope. We don't wanna fight right now. We got we actually won the senate, and we won the White House. So we'll have the high ground. And they thought about doing the CR until January, and they said, no. Let's give Trump and the new congress time to get their legs underneath of them, and let's go all the way to March, March fourteenth. That'll be this Friday. They said that'll give us time to implement the Trump agenda. But here we are on March 14. Remember, the first excuse was wait till after the election. The second excuse was wait until everybody sworn in. And now the excuse now for doing a CR is, oh, we don't have time. We don't have time to do the right thing. We don't want the fight now. We'll do a fight in September of twenty twenty five. Well, guess what, folks? The closer you get to the next election, the less spine these people have. And if you think they have little spine now, the spine will be nonexistent.
I don't see the fight coming. I hope there is a fight to cut spending. I just don't see it. And we're our own worst enemy here in the Republican party. So what should you do? Do a cross the board cut. You should honor the 1% cut that that's in law that Mike Johnson is going around. He's violating at least the spirit of the law and maybe even the letter of the law by ignoring the 1% cut. And we should also lock in the Doge cuts. Why are we gonna fund all of the waste, fraud, and abuse that Doge found? Why are we gonna cut, copy, paste that budget? I thought we were gonna get rid of that stuff. Well, it seems like we're not. So the vote's gonna happen here pretty soon. I thought I would record this video for posterity from my new office here. Finally got a view of the capital, and I'll be going over to vote no. Remember, today, Trump is attacking Canada and me.
And the difference between the two is Canada will eventually cave. Just a little more to the story there from Thomas Massie than what we got from Yahoo or on X today or any of the well, certainly mainstream, but even alternative sources that that made it all, you know, either a fight between Republicans and Democrats or between Trump and Massey. And what he points out is this is the same exact spending that was going on under Joe Biden. They're moving deck chairs around on the Titanic, but they're not changing anything. And the idea that it would it's going to get changed at some future date, in this case September, is totally ridiculous.
You will have less leverage if if the Republicans actually want to change things. Now is when they would change it. With every new administration, you get basically six months to get as much of your agenda through as possible, and that's it. You kinda move deck chairs around on the Titanic and point point fingers at each other and, you know, Republicans are are great when they're not in power. They say all the right things. We're, you know, we're spending too much. This is oh, it's terrible. But when they're in power, they turn into to Democrats. It's there's no difference whatsoever. So other than, okay, we'll we'll waste money on less woke stuff. Yay.
And it's all the woke stuff's still in there too. And as Massey points out, you know, all these doge supposed doge cuts, they're not in law. Congress is not passing any of this stuff. This is all the same they're doing the same exact stuff they were doing last year when Democrats were in control, and Democrats were voting for it, and Republicans were voting against it. And it all marches on, and I think his point about the fake fight is a great one. And that's one thing Thomas Massie, does probably even better than Ron Paul because Ron Paul would kind of try to give people the benefit of the doubt and, oh, both parties are wrong.
But Massey's kind of had enough at this point and is saying, no, it's fake. And you'll see how fake it is when just enough Democrats cross over or maybe a lot of Democrats, but enough Democrats will vote for this. And it shows that it's not a conservative bill. It's nothing nothing is changing. It's just that Congress was a we could fight over it because, all the Republicans will vote for it, and it'll still get through. And the reason that I think Trump is genuinely mad at at Massey at some level. But the the primary threat, it's still it's two years away. This is not it's not a serious threat.
So I think Trump might be doing that for for other reasons, and we'll get into those later. Thomas Massie certainly did not sound very worried, and he shouldn't be. Right? But, as far as politic, he would probably not not terribly mind getting kicked out of Congress. It's it's not a fun life there. So if you're not getting tons of money under the table from special interests, it's there's not a lot of enjoyable experiences there in in DC. So this next clip comes from just to be honest, I hadn't seen seen it much before, but I like this take on the Trump versus Massey thing. It's from, Ivan Raikland.
And I guess he's a guest on Alex Jones or anyway, something, but he kinda mentions that in here. But this, I thought this was an interesting take, and there there should I think there's some truth to it. Hey. I'm gonna do a quick video in response to the little spat between president Trump and representative Thomas Massie. So here's the deal, folks. You gotta look at it from a little bit different perspective. It's not about taking sides of, oh, president Trump's right or Thomas Massie is right. What is that issue here and I'm gonna talk about this on Infowars later today at 5PM Eastern Standard Time with Owen Shroyer. Bottom line here is that the deep state tar members of the deep state target list, I'm gonna name who they are, are behind putting a wedge and removing Thomas Massey.
Well, guess what? Why are they doing that? It's because he's the only one that's in the position to expose the remember when he was on Tucker Carlson talking about how everyone has a handler, APAC Handler? Match that up with any relationships with folks that are on the Epstein client list. Maybe Thomas Massey in a in a position to expose that. Additionally, wasn't it Thomas Massey that exposed and was very zealous about going after the January 6 pipe bomber? Would that then expose Nancy Pelosi, her involvement in January 6 Fed's direction? Paul Ryan, former speaker of the house, and his involvement in the Fed's direction and subsequent cover up, and then maybe other top prominent Republicans.
So it's interesting to know that a lot of these things, you know, are interrelated. And I suspect that the reason why they're trying to take out Tom Massey is because he was the only one that was right on COVID. He called for the vote on the pandemic, the $2,000,000,000,000 electoral heist or excuse me, the $2,000,000,000,000 that was used by Nancy Pelosi to pay off everybody that was going to and did steal the twenty twenty election. Additionally, Thomas Massie was the only critical thinker that called out the unsafe and ineffective products. So in essence, on many levels, he was the only one right on COVID, the pandemic, the COVID con. And so now he's gonna be punished for it on another issue. And the reason why they're picking some other issue on it is because they wanna cover up their own involvement in the pandemic.
The Fauci funded lab incident, the cover up, the stolen election in 2020, the January 6 Fed's direction, the Fed's direction cover up. My assessment is that the unit party is duping president Trump into going after Thomas Massie to be able to then remove him from office so that he cannot expose all those things that I just mentioned. COVID con, plandemic, illegal election, January sixth, Fed's erection. There's my hot take. So I agree with a lot of that. There's some stuff I don't agree with. I don't think President Trump was duped into anything.
He is easily triggered at some level, especially in his, like, social media posts. He'll he'll come out a lot more fired up come across a lot more fired up than than, you know, to talk about it. I think the truth is he might have even told Massey, hey. You know, if if you vote against us, I'm gonna come out and say we're gonna primary you. And that's probably what he told all of them, all the freedom so called freedom caucus holdouts that were against this thing initially is, hey. I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna let you have it if you vote against it. And, like Thomas Massie said, he could have thrown in the Freedom Caucus, you know.
Trump was, was angry at the the Freedom Caucus, including Thomas Massie and, Canada, and Thomas Massie is the only one who's who's not going to cave there. So the I I think there's a little bit of showmanship going on, and I think in some ways, Trump wants to talk about anything except the economy, because the economy is really, really not going well. I'm sure everyone had noticed that. And there are different theories on on why that's happening. You know, it's the tariffs. You know, it's the the debt. It's a whole I mean, there's a whole lot of bad stuff going on. And the whole time we did Revelations Radio News, I mean, the the next crash was coming. Right?
So you can only reinflate and keep inflating these bubbles over and over and over again for for so long. Eventually, stuff does does pop. We've had higher interest rates supposedly to deal with inflation, and Trump is vociferously against that. We'll hear him talk about that. But so this was an interesting take floating around the idea that Trump is intentionally, he's Anthony Pompliano says crash the economy. That's kind of overstating it, but is intentionally kind of driving the stock market down and with the with certain goals in mind. So let's hear his his theory and see if it matches up and if we can tie it back to the whole Trump versus Thomas Massie thing.
The big, big question in financial markets over the last two weeks has been, is Donald Trump the president of The United States? Is he intentionally trying to tank The US stock market? That'd be insane. That would have been an absurd question back before the inauguration. Now the general thought process is that president Trump, he's a businessman. He's also an investor. He measures the health of The US economy through the stock market performance, and so you should expect that the stock market will go up into the right if Donald Trump becomes president. Now I know this was the consensus because I believed it too. I told you guys that that's what I thought would happen. And there was no obvious reason why Donald Trump would allow The US stock market to drop, let alone personally take actions to crash the market himself. That's exactly what's happening right now. And to be honest, this got people's brains in a blender. Now here's president Trump talking over the weekend. It's all about his plan to get interest rates and energy down. Take a listen. We've been I I've been saying, let's get interest rates down. You know, nobody ever gets rich when the interest rates are high because people can't borrow money. Interest rates are going down. You know what else is going down?
What have I been trying to get down? Energy. Energy's going down. I'd love to see energy go down. It's kinda crazy to hear them talk about that. Now Chris Patel and Amit is investing. They explain how this plan works. We got $7,000,000,000,000 of debt. We need to pay it back in the next six months. That's a big bill, baby. If we don't pay it back, we'll have to refinance. And the Trump administration, they do not want to refinance that debt if rates are at 4% or higher. So what do we gotta do? The ten year yield, we gotta get that thing down. At one point, it was at 4.8% this year, but we gotta get it lower. And so how do you get it to come down? Well, markets, they need to be scared. They need to show a little weakness in growth. People gotta believe that DOGE is actually working and interest rates will slowly start to come down. And the way to do that is you create that fear and that uncertainty.
You do it through things like tariffs. And so as you put on tariffs, you could see the slowdown in growth in the short term. You can get the bond market to start buying bonds as soon as possible because they're scared to touch stocks. And then, of course, that gives the Fed, the big bad Fed, the authority to bring lower rates down, which continues to bring the yield down as well. So although every single talking head on television, every mainstream economist will tell you conventional wisdom says tariffs are inflationary and the ten year should be spiking on more tariffs, it's actually going down because it's bringing so much uncertainty to equity markets. And people, they're fearful. They're selling stocks, and they're buying bonds. That's exactly what Trump wants to happen here. And in the short term, we are going to see the refinancing costs come down. Now this isn't the easy way. It's actually the hard way to get interest rates down. The easy way we already tried that one. The easy way would have been to have the Federal Reserve cut interest rates at the start of the year, but that didn't happen. In fact, many people already forgotten.
But go back to last year. Donald Trump was telling Jerome Powell, you gotta cut interest rates, cut interest rates, cut interest rates. But Powell was public in his defiance of Trump's request. So now Donald Trump and Scott Bessen, they're taking matters into their own hands. They are crashing asset prices in an attempt to force Jerome Powell to cut interest rates. Now here's the thing. We're gonna see who blinks first. It's a big game of chicken, baby. So don't believe me, though. Here's Donald Trump explicitly saying that you can't watch the stock market right now. Take a listen. You said, look. We're gonna have a disruption, but we're okay with that. Is that what you meant? The stock market going down was the disruption. What other disruption were you alluding to? Look. What I have to do is build a strong country. You can't really watch the stock market. If you look at China, they have a hundred year perspective. We have a quarter.
We go by quarters. That's true. And you can't go by that. You have to do what's right. What we're doing is we're building a tremendous foundation for the future. Tremendous foundation. So there you go. The entire administration in the White House, they have their eyes on the ten year treasury yield. But even without Jerome Powell stepping up to the plate with his big bat and slashing interest rates, we've already seen the ten year drop from 4.8% in January all the way down to 4.25% this weekend. That means we're heading in the right direction, and that is a good start. But we're gonna need much more movement on interest rates if we want to have a profound impact on our refinancing cost. And refinancing costs coming down isn't just good for the US government. Lower interest rates also affect the consumer.
The drop in interest rates since the start of the year, they've helped drop something like mortgage rates as well. Chris Patel points out that as interest rates decline, more buyers come out of the shadows. The sellers, they're willing to go ahead and sell because buyers are willing to pay more, and that is what it's gonna take to get the housing market to thaw. If you want housing transaction volume, you gotta get interest rates down. So from from Trump's perspective, he's he's never really been a big promiser of cutting the excess spending or or balancing the budget or or any of that. He emphasizes, we're gonna grow the economy, cut taxes.
We're gonna have a the best economy ever. So this idea that he's, in part, doing the the tariffs and the other just kind of creating uncertainty to potentially drive down interest rates because people are chased from stocks into bonds, It's an interesting interesting theory for sure. And obviously, that can easily be be reversed and and turn back around. You know, the the stock market can always go back up. They can always manipulate it and pump more more money into it. So that, that last part about how's it the housing market and trying to get, you know, in with interest rates coming down, it kinda gets the housing market unstuck because people are more willing to buy. They're able to afford more house with the same amount of money with the lower interest rate mortgage, and then people are more willing to sell it because they can get a higher price for it. So that is it is kind of an interesting scenario with with the housing market. You can definitely see more houses available, certainly than when I moved here to Oklahoma three years ago.
It was crazy trying to trying to get a house. So there's definitely more availability. There's a lot of houses being built, and they seem to sit empty a little bit longer. And this next clip has been floating around, and I grabbed a couple parts of it and put them together. And this guy, I don't even know who he is or if everything's accurate. I kind of doubt everything is accurate. But it is an interesting perspective on the FHA program and what the Biden administration was doing. And also, you could talk about similar things with the, student loan. That's a a whole separate bubble.
But, let's talk about the FHA program. The subprime bubble two point o is about to burst. It turns out that the US government has been making the mortgage payments for hundreds of thousands of defaulted mortgage borrowers using taxpayer dollars, and this was just exposed by by the Wall Street Journal. And if it's reversed, it has the potential to cause a massive cataclysmic housing downturn in many cities and neighborhoods across America. And the big issue is the FHA mortgage program. The first time home buyer mortgage program where you could put 3% down to buy a house. This mortgage program now has a 14% default rate. The default rate's 13 and a half percent.
Over 1,000,000 mortgage borrowers on the FHA program are currently in default, and the Biden administration basically was blocking these defaulted mortgages from going to foreclosure. And what the Biden administration was doing was that when a mortgage borrower went into fault and claimed financial hardship, they stepped in and made the mortgage payments for them, or they tacked the mortgage payments onto the back of the loan so the borrower has more debt. And this has been something that's been artificially inflating the housing bubble and preventing the foreclosures and the listings from hitting the market. And some of the things that I'm gonna show you in this video are gonna absolutely shock you.
I was shocked and appalled at some of the things I read about what the US government has been doing. This is one of the biggest scams that the US government has been involved with in decades, in my opinion. Because essentially what the government was doing was they were giving this loan program for first time buyers where your credit score could be as low as 580. You could have a 580 credit score and put three and a half down, and they would give, these borrowers these subprime loans. I mean, these are subprime loans. A subprime loans. A bank would never offer these loans, without the government backing. And then when that borrower would inevitably default, sometimes within only a year, the government would prevent it from going to foreclosure using taxpayer money. Money. Now that this has been exposed by the Wall Street Journal op ed, which highlighted that Biden's mortgage relief program caused this subprime crisis and that there's an FHA subprime bubble, what's gonna happen now? What's the Trump administration and Elon Musk going to do in response? I think particularly an area that could see lower prices if these foreclosures are allowed to happen. There's around 400,000 backlogged foreclosures right now that are being stopped by the US government. I think if they're allowed to happen, we could see prices in a city like Fort Worth, Texas where I am right now. We could see them drop by a lot. Because there's a lot of FHA mortgage borrowers here in Fort Worth. A lot of people have actually bought in home building communities from builders like Doctor Horton with FHA low down payment mortgages, and a lot of them are now going into default.
And so I think we could see lower prices here in Fort Worth. We could see lower prices in a city like Las Vegas. We could see lower prices in Orlando. Those are some of the top markets for FHA mortgages in America and would be some of the ones that are most exposed if these foreclosures are set loose and if the Trump administration does the right thing and turns off this subprime mortgage support offered by the US government. And I think some people in the real estate industry watching this might take issue with me calling these subprime loans. They're gonna say, no, Nick. These loans have income documented. They're nothing like the mortgages from the mid two thousands. But the crazy thing, everyone, is that when you look at the credit quality of these mortgages, they're horrible. They're worse than they were in the mid two thousands. Thousands. The Wall Street Journal has a graph showing the percentage of FHA borrowers who have a debt to income ratio above 43%.
It's over two thirds. Over two thirds of FHA borrowers when they get the mortgage have to pay over 43% of their income to debt costs. I want you to think about that. That means pretty much anyone borrowing from the FHA program right now is doing so, in a situation where they can't really afford the payments. Back actually in the nineties and February, it was only a quarter of all FHA mortgages had a debt to income above 43%. And some of the stuff that was happening here, folks, was absolutely wild. If you go further into this Wall Street Journal article, they mentioned how in 2024, mortgage servicers made 552,000 incentive payments to mortgage borrowers to prevent them from getting foreclosed on.
Translation, mortgage servicers took money from the US government FHA mortgage program and put it in the pockets of defaulted homeowners under the FHA mortgage program who could not make their payments. That is absolutely absurd. What's even more absurd is that in some cases, the government is automatically lowering the mortgage payments for these defaulted borrowers by 25%. If you go to the FHA mortgage website, it says very plainly, if you're in default and claim financial hardship, you could have your payments reduced by 25% with no contact. They could just do it automatically.
And I sincerely hope that Scott Turner, the new head of the FHA sworn in under the Trump administration a couple weeks ago, takes a serious look at what's going on in his department. And so folks, get this. There's 7,800,000 FHA mortgages outstanding. That's approximately 17% of all mortgages. His basic premise is that the Trump administration will not continue doing what the Biden administration was doing by paying, you know, paying for these mortgages and and kind of propping everything up and keeping the foreclosures from happening. I don't really see any evidence of that. I mean, if Trump was trying to reform the FHA program or any of that, he'd be he'd be talking about it.
I kinda think they're just gonna keep on doing similar things. And, you know, what happens if if you buy a house, if you got lousy credit, you're able to buy a house, and, you know, you you didn't really budget well, you and you miss a mortgage payment. And then instead of you missed three mortgage payments. And instead of going into foreclosure, the government says, oh, were were you having a hard financial hardship? Oh, well, we'll just we'll just pay those for you, or we'll just add some debt to the the end of the loan.
And you're not in it for a huge down payment. You're in it for the FHA three point five percent. So you basically have a a put option on your house. If the value goes goes down, you just walk away. Value goes up, maybe pay a few mortgages, then you can sell it and and make a profit. So this and there was criticism of this program, being expanded because it's been around for a long time, but it was expanded so that people with lesser, you know, lower credit scores, could could be eligible for it. That was a change I forget if I did I think it was before Biden, but I I could be wrong. I think it was even before, the first Trump administration.
So there's I mean, that's been going on in building and kinda reinflating some sort of bubble, but I just don't think Trump necessarily wants to deflate that bubble. We'll have to see. But something to keep an eye on, you know, if there's four if the 14% of FHA loans that are are delinquent all go into foreclosure at the same time. Yeah, that will definitely impact the housing market. I just don't think that is going to happen. So we've got we've got to wrapping things up for the week. I wanted to play this Harrison Smith clip, just just it's a little different topic, but I think he expresses well some of what I I feel I would probably even state it a little more strongly.
But, just kind of his feeling on what is happening with the Trump administration and what is not happening with the Trump administration. This is from DNI, Tulsi Gabbards. I have revoked security clearances and barred access to classified information for Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Lisa Monaco, Mark Zaid, Norm Eisen, Leticia James, Alvin Bragg, and Andrew Weisman along with the 51 signers of the Hunter Biden disinformation letter. This is good. Now arrest them. This is good. Now send them to jail forever. And I think that's how a lot of us are feeling. I think a lot of us are feeling like losing their job isn't good enough. Losing their security clearance is nothing.
So arrest them. I'm telling you, there's something about this Trump administration that it's all like a tease. This is all we just we just keep being teased with stuff. They're like, we are gonna go after these guys. These guys fraudulently claimed Hunter Biden laptop was fake. They covered it up. They rigged the election. They launched lawsuits against their political opponents. They violated the very basics of our constitutional order and our fundamental principles. They wield enormous inordinate power using your taxpayer dollars to destroy your way of life, in some cases lead to the death of millions by starting wars. And we're all like, these guys suck. They're like, yeah. So we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna take their security clearance away.
So there you go. That'll make them think next time. Next time, they'll think twice about launching a coup against the sitting president of The United States because they're gonna lose their security clearance. So problem solved. Go harder. You have to go much, much, much harder against these people. We're in a fight for our lives here. So where are the trials? Where are the imprisonments? Where are the executions for treason? Considering the fact that they did in fact commit treason, maybe now would be the time to, arrest them for that. Or tell you what, maybe you should find out if one of the entries in any one of their bank accounts is mislabeled and then you can charge them with 34 felonies. You do what they did to you. Maybe we could do it to them, but we don't need to. But we don't have to fabricate totally fraudulent and nonsensical charges to go after them. We can just charge them for what we know they've done. Be it the theft of millions of dollars through fraud or subversion of the election or any of the other various wars they've started and assassinations they've allowed to go on. Or it's like treat these criminals with the same intensity that the Democrats treat innocent people. Can we do that? Is that a good way to put it? I don't think it's too much to ask. If we could treat these acknowledged open tyrannical treasonous scum with the same vitriol and aggression that the Democrats treat a plumber from Nebraska that took an unpermitted stroll through the Capitol, like, we'd be good. If we could just get that bare minimum basic justice, we could solve all these problems.
I think Trump is a master of doing slightly more than you expect, but not what you want him to do. Right? Like the like, we're not going Ron Paul here. We're not going any real changes. We are just kinda shifting things around, but, hey, we're gonna go really hard on the peripheral issues with executive orders. And we're not gonna pass any meaningful long term congressional legislation that actually changes the direction of the country, but we're gonna do some kind of short term stuff. And which he, interestingly enough, said, you know, in America we look at quarters. China's looking at a hundred year plan.
But I don't I you can't tell me he's looking any further than his term. Right? There's I mean, you look at his first term, it's not like he's like, hey, we gotta do something about this debt. So I think he is he's in it for him to a large degree. I don't think Donald Trump hates us the way that other politicians have hated us. I don't think Donald Trump hates us the way Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, etcetera. And hopefully, he's not compromised to the same extent either. But, boy, you know, it let's just say I'm not surprised that there's not trials, and I'm not gonna be surprised that there's, you know I was not surprised they didn't throw Hillary in in jail.
Not at all surprised that that they're not locking up. Even the people that went directly against him, you know, they're pulling security clearance, and that's the end of the world. And and the it being the end of the world from the mainstream media is how the system operates. Right? Like you have to have the Democrats in Congress freaking freaking out about this continuing resolution that's exactly everything they want because if if they were agreeing with it, people would it would raise some red flags. Like, wait a second. There's these people are trying to destroy the country and they like this? Well, maybe we shouldn't like it. So that it's the way the system operates, the whole Elon Musk thing. I mean, what a great distraction. He's doing absolutely nothing. I mean, absolutely nothing. I mean, very, very little as far as long term changes.
Most of the short term changes that they've made are gonna get overturned, you know, changed by by courts or what have you. And it's definitely a scam. I like Thomas Massie. I think he he sees a lot of what's going on. So if he if he make me choose, I'm definitely team Thomas Massie versus Trump. But, unfortunately, it's not just Trump versus Massie. It's new world order versus us. I hope everyone has a great week. Thank you so much for listening, And thanks especially to those of you that that supported via Substack subscriptions and what have you.
You know who you are, and I appreciate you greatly.
Introduction and Episode Overview
Trump vs. Massie: The Political Clash
House Votes and Senate Dilemmas
Thomas Massie's Perspective on the CR
Ivan Raiklen's Take on Trump vs. Massie
Economic Theories: Trump and the Stock Market
The FHA Program and Housing Market Concerns
Harrison Smith on Trump Administration's Actions
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
