Post from Truth Social

Lots of talk about affordability, or is there? I don't even hear a lot of talk about it anymore, but still, there's a lot of grumbling about it on the internet, there's a lot of people talking about it. And one of the things they're saying is, if you understood the mindset of young people, you would understand what the problem is. They're leaving Trump by the zillions, and they expect us to do something to help them. And so you have some people proposing sort of socialism-like. These are from so-called conservatives who become pseudo-conservers. The populists, of course, are all over this, because in many ways, they're the socialists. And so more government and more spending, despite the $40 trillion debt going to $50 trillion, and despite, at some point, the need to do something about Social Security and Medicare, Social Security in six years, say the trustees, is going to lose money and go broke, and in seven years, followed by Medicare. So Washington proposes what Washington's best at, spending more debt, redistribution of wealth, stealing from you and the private sector. So let's get into this. I want the Democrats, specifically, to answer a few questions, and the media hosts, particularly on these Sunday network magazine shows or news shows, maybe they'll try asking some actual questions when they have Democrat Party guests. Please specifically spell out your affordability agenda. You raised gasoline prices when Biden was president. How will you lower them when you raised them last time? You raised food prices when Biden was president. How will you lower them when you raised them last time? You raised inflation when Biden was president. How will you lower it when you raised it last time? You raised the cost of living for average Americans. How will you lower it when you raised it last time? You raised healthcare costs when Obama was president by passing Obamacare, not a single Republican voted for that. How will you lower it when you raised it under Obama by expanding it and calling it Medicare for all? Well, they don't have any answers, you know, they'll just say tax billionaires or something like that. But I want to take a little bit of a deeper dive here and talk some turkey with you. People talk about in the 1950s and '60s, people could afford a home, they could afford a car, they had modest incomes, not anymore, not anymore. We need to get back to that. So I looked, in the 1950s and '60s, young adults in their early 20s and 30s, well, they had lower average incomes, more family-based households and less access to credit. This meant that while they might have spent a larger share of income on certain categories, like cars or housing, the absolute dollar amounts that they spent were generally lower than today's young adults in their 30s and 40s. Young adults in the 1950s and '60s by today's age had lower total spending than today's young adults in their 30s and 40s due to lower incomes in different economic conditions. Core spending takes up the greatest share of income for the youngest and oldest generations. Core spending, that trend can be explained in part due to changes in income. Peak earning occurs in middle age, obviously not when you're just starting out and obviously not when you're retired or retiring. Even in the dollar value of household spending, that goes up as someone approaches middle age. The increase in household income on average outpaces the increase in spending. So when you're really kicking into your career or your business or whatever it is you're doing. Medical expenses are the smallest percentage of budgets for the youngest adult generation. So they're paying lower than any other generation when it comes to medical expenses. Young adults today are much more likely than their counterparts 30 years ago to be college graduates. But that comes with a cost. College tuition is expensive. Most students wanna live away from home and go to schools away from home. So in addition to tuition, you have room and board on top of tuition. That said, those with college degrees over the course of their lifetime, they earn significantly more than those without. Although for many at the start of their career, they have college loan debt and perhaps other debt they've acquired, such as cars and credit cards for eating out or vacations that put great pressure on their incomes. Again, when they're starting out, their incomes are those of junior employees. Young women have made greater gains at attending college than young men. From 1993 to 2023, the share of young women, ages 25 to 34, with at least a four-year college degree rose from 23 to 47%. And among young men, the increase was smaller, 24 to 38%. Therefore, the debt spending income scenario can be even more widespread among young women and especially among single women. So in other words, much of this has nothing to do with government, nothing to even do with government policies. These are lifestyle decisions. In other words, the benefit for many young people in going to college doesn't actually come until several years or even a decade or more after they graduate. They pay down both student debt and other expenses they've incurred. So in the long run, the degree is typically beneficial. In the short run, depending on lifestyle decisions and spending habits, it can create more financial difficulty. The 1950s and '60s, fewer Americans went to college. Young people started work early. They didn't make big purchases requiring lots of debt, no student loans, not new cars. They lived more modestly in the types of homes and vehicles they might buy. They ate home at home more often than going out to restaurants. They didn't travel as much, so they didn't use airlines. They didn't go to hotels and that sort of thing. Maybe they drive for a three-day vacation or something like that. Family expectations were different. In limited consumer goods were available. Goods like sugar and meat were still rationed in the early 1950s, and refrigerators were a luxury for some households. Colored TV didn't even exist for most households until starting in the early '60s and beyond. Leisure was often local and low cost. Kids played outside, not a whole bunch of computers and video games. Clothing was practical and modest. While the 1950s and '60s saw economic growth, many young people's lives were marked by modest living. And so some young people had brought these circumstances onto themselves. It's not the system, it's not capitalism. It's not even government. We have gotten so good at producing so many consumer products, leisure products, and so forth and so on, that people wanna partake of them. They wanna acquire them. But sometimes they outpace their income, particularly when they're young people, particularly if they go to college, particularly if they take out student loans, and they live away from home with tuition and board. And all those expenses pile up. It's a bigger percentage of young people than 30, 40, 50 years ago. And I wanna talk about gas prices. We're told that a gallon of gasoline, if we can get the price of gasoline down, we Republicans will win the midterm elections. Gas prices may feel like a record in 2026, but adjusted for inflation, they are not, writes Dr. Randall Olson. We're told gas is the most expensive it has been in years. The war headlines are everywhere. And he says the record gas prices, it's back in everyone's feed. The pump number stings, but adjust for inflation and the record evaporates. US gas costs more in 1981 than it does today. More in 2008 than it does today. Again, inflation adjusted. More in 2022 under Biden than it does today. The number on the pump is near an all-time high. What a gallon actually costs you in real money is nowhere near an all-time high. 2008 is still the one to beat, he writes. The real all-time high was June 2008 at $6.20 a gallon in today's money. 1981 was worse too. 1981 held the record before 2008, took it. March 1981, regular gas hit, again, inflation adjusted. Regular gas, $5.32 a gallon in today's dollars. Oh yes. Even in 2022, a few years back, the most recent peak is the one people remember. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the national average set an all-time record just above $5 a gallon in June 2022. That was the highest price ever at the pump in plain dollars adjusted for inflation. It works out to about $5.50 for a gallon of regular gasoline still above spring 2026 and still short of 2008. And if you live in California, my son, our son took a picture of the prices at the pump. They are unbelievable. You got 72 cents a gallon sales tax in California, the highest in the nation by far. Other expenses that they add on to gasoline and oil out there, it is nuts. And they want you to blame Trump and they want you to blame the Iran war and on and on and on. No, I've said it before and let me underscore it again. The prices for gasoline, the prices for everything when it comes to energy is higher due to what we call Democrats. What about housing prices? As of June 2026, the last information that is comparative, the inflation adjusted US home price index is 170.2 up from 169 in May of this year. But that's 3.8% below the highest May 2022. That was the record 176.9. This is the number they use to compare income to housing prices. So the highest it's been was in May 2022, 3.8% higher than it is today. That means that when stripped of inflation housing prices, they're still near an all time high. And by the way, for investors, they like that. For first time buyers, they obviously don't, but it's not at the peak that it was under Biden in 2022. I just told you that gasoline at its peak was higher in the 1980s and highest under Joe Biden. I just told you that housing prices were highest, highest under Joe Biden. But you don't hear this. You don't hear it anywhere really. The two highest points were 2006, the housing bubble and 2022, the post pandemic surge. Now there's no accounting for what Democrats do in these blue states and these blue metropolitan areas. Take Mondami, the Marxist Islamist. Oh yes, socialism he supports. Well, let's take rent control. What does rent control do? Let's think for a second. They lock in rent prices back to a given year or time. Now people who are renting and are older, they love it. They love it because they're gonna have a fixed rental price whether the landlord likes it or not, whether his or her expenses go up or not, whether utility prices and taxes go up or not, they don't care. It's just wonderland. We love socialism, rent control. But what does that do? It limits the number of units. You have to be nuts to be a developer and go in and say, you know what, I'm gonna build a whole bunch of new rental properties just so I can have rent control at some point. No, because if a government can put in rent control today it can put it in tomorrow. That's not Trump's fault. That's not Israel's fault. That's Mondami's fault. That's the fault of the socialists who drive up the cost of everything. And not only is affordability an issue, but availability is an issue. Okay, I wanna address another topic before we go to our guests and that is Iran. I wanna be very blunt about this. This is not a war between the United States and Iran or the United States and Israel versus Iran. This is a civilizational war. You see, we don't quite understand the enemy. We can't seem to get our heads around it. I'm afraid some of our generals can't, some of our advisors can't. This is a civilizational war, certainly from the perspective of the enemy. Khomeini in 1979, he was not interested merely in taking over a nation state, a country. He is spreading an ideology. He is spreading Islam. He seeks to conquer the West. He seeks to conquer obviously an entire Middle East. He and his followers. Israel is a big problem to that agenda because the Jews don't intend to go easily. In fact, they don't intend to go at all. They have a serious military, one of the most powerful on the face of the earth and certainly one of the most experienced on the face of the earth because they're facing enemies, they're surrounded day in and day out. We are war hardened too, but not in the same way. Not in the same way. My concern is this. We've heard from generals talking about off-ramps. We've heard generals say that we have limited munitions, whether they've said it anonymously or however, same with advisors who said the same thing. They're leaking to the media. We had an MOU that was never going to work. The enemy, you know, they have an agreement and two minutes later they violate it. So we're constantly looking for ways to negotiate our way out of this. You wanna end this war? I will give you my best thought on this. I want us to win. I want the administration to succeed. I want my friend, President Trump, to be the greatest president, including wartime president in American history. And what he's done so far is unparalleled. Seven prior presidents, you know, chose to do next to nothing. Some of them even subsidized the enemy. Some of them subsidized their nuclear program. The fact is that this president had to act, did act. He couldn't wait. The enemy told his envoy that we could make 11 nuclear bombs in 10 days. Our intelligence said we needed to act and it was imminent. But it is a civilizational war. You can't contain the enemy no matter what's negotiated if it's ever negotiated. The enemy will not comply. The enemy will not agree to anything. The enemy views us as a bump in the road. Whether it's the first tier, the second tier, the third tier, or the 10th tier of this regime. If we want to defeat this enemy, we've got to use all that's available to us to destroy it. That includes arming the Iranian people, as I've said for half a year, as was the Reagan doctrine. Now there may be generals and advisors telling the commander in chief, "No, the risk averse and so forth and so on." There is no effective off-ramp. Arming those people with the help of the Israelis, who we've sidelined, with the help of Mossad, working with the CIA, will make a huge, huge difference as it has in the recent past in other countries, among other things. There is no reason Karg Island is off the table in some of these other infrastructure facilities. I don't care what the Arabs say, ignore them. I don't care what Erdogan says, ignore him. This is a civilizational war that we must win. It is a righteous war. We have a courageous president. I don't think we'll see another one like him. It's now or never.

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