Andrew Gause

Show highlights:

Andrew breaks down the dilemma of The FED Board:  Continue raising Interest rates in 2019 to blunt inflating the money supply and risk stock market crash….and not raising rates…or lowering…and also doing QE, also known as money printing to keep GDP up and about.

We explain clearly the magic the FED Bank of NY is doing with their balance sheet as a way to blunt inflation, by literally extinguishing assets, literally just deleting Billions from their balance sheet.

When your main way of making money is making money, one can for the most part do what they want

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin  called on the Plunge Protection Team, The six biggest primary banks, to cause the big up and down swings in the market the past month.

We ask Andrew that if his Uncle Charlie called and said he had all his dollars in stock equities, what should he do now?

With 25% tariffs  as Andrew lobbied for last year, USG could lower taxes considerably

We discuss in full frontal detail the current inflow and out flow of the Social Security System, sparked by this excellent email from listener  Tony:

On the expense side, just Social Security ($980 Billion), Medicaid ($608 Billion), and Medicare ($753 Billion) alone accounted for $2.3 Trillion spending in Q3 2018; all trending up as well. Will the government be forced to cut benefits in the future? It just doesn’t seem sustainable.

Tony also wrote:

In a show last year on Jan 17, 2018,  Andrew commented that “nearly 77 cents of every tax dollar we collect is necessary to service our existing debt at current rates”.   Could he clarify this for me? Is this comparing debt held by the public to the GDP of the US?

From that statement and the government shutdown, I started digging through St. Louis FRED data.  My biggest surprise was seeing how much personal income taxes and payroll taxes contribute to the total revenue for the US government, compared to everything else.  In Q3 2018, revenue from personal income taxes was $1.94 trillion and payroll taxes were $1.62 trillion.  In comparison, corporate taxes was $162 billion.  In Q3 2017, these numbers were $2.08 trillion, $1.62 trillion, and $296 billion respectively.  So, while the new tax laws reduced corporate taxes by $134 billion, that still represents a change of a couple of percent to the total bucket.

I think I can see now where tariffs and unemployment % can add more money to the government than corporate taxes.  With more jobs and low unemployment, people will earn more income but also contribute to more payroll taxes.  Rising wages would only increase those numbers as well.  Tariffs would also boost the other income streams of taxes from other countries and taxes from production and imports. Am I thinking about this correctly?

Andrew dreams of what the process would be if President Trump took over the 12 Federal Reserve Banks in this Country and started to issue United States Notes from the Treasury

A 15 Dollar Minimum wage does not keep a worker up to speed with inflation, yet Andrew is not a supporter of any mandated minimum wage