If he wins, in effect, he's going to be a lame duck. He doesn't have to run for re-election, and so he can do a lot of things. He'll have a freer hand, in fact, than he would otherwise. It'll leave JD Vance with a harder job, but there's a big opportunity to fix a lot of these things, maybe once in a lifetime. If we don't fix this whole debt, debt... Good envelope. ...onster is going to suck us down. You're listening to Carrie Lutz's financial survival network, where you get valuable information you just can't find anywhere else. To thrive in today's trying times, you need the financial survival network, now more than ever. Go to financialsurvivalnetwork.com and get your free newsletter and gift, Financial Survival Network, now more than ever. And welcome. You are listening to and watching the Financial Survival Network. I'm your host, Carrie Lutz. I got a really interesting guest. His name is Bill Walton. Bill, you have a podcast, but you've done so much more. You find him at thebillwaltonshow.com. It's seasoned entrepreneur, Bill, the CEO of Allied Capital Corporation for many years, and basically, part of the Trump transition team, you've done a lot, and really great to have you on here, because it looks like there's an inevitability about to take place in the election, although elections are like horse races. You never know when one of those horses is going to get drugged or taken out before it crosses the finish line, as they've already tried to do here. But we got to talk about what you foresee happening, and is the economy hopeless at this point? Is the country hopeless? Is there anything that can be done to turn to write this sinking ship? Well, I think there is, and I'm quite hopeful about Trump's prospects next week. Lots of people who are close to it. I'm based here in the DC area, and the feeling is he's going to win. But I have insider information. I have a dentist, who is a dentist to all the Democrat operatives who work for Obama and then Biden, and they're in northwest, and they are terrified. They're quite concerned that this thing is going south on them, and they've been living in a honeypot now for 15 years, 20 years here, and they're worried about the game over scenario. The other thing that makes me optimistic is if Trump wins, when he wins, there are a lot of people that he, you know, he made a lot of people mistakes in 2016 and took a long time to get over it and get started, and then, of course, they attacked him with the Russia, Russia, Russia thing. I think he's all ready for that now, and he's got, I don't know, I can think of 15, 20 people who probably come into the administration who get what needs to be done. They've been there. I think the odds of making some changes are good. All right, well, we certainly need it. You know, I don't want to talk about personalities and cults of personality, all that, but it's good to hear that your dentist is getting us some golden inside information as he takes the gold out of their pockets, and they should be scared, because what's happened in this country is, you know, the policies that have been pursued have got us at the brink of bankruptcy. But, I mean, like Trump has said, he didn't need to do this, and I'm sure he's doubted himself for doing it many, many times since, but he's kind of, it's a calling for him. It's kind of a mission, and, you know, it's going to be interesting. But like I said, we're not into like election politics and all that, we're into policy. That's something that you have firsthand information and insight into. You know, one of the things people complain about, Bill, it's so hard to get the government to do anything to change the government. One policy that Trump is promoting now is elimination of the income tax. Are you and I ever going to live to see that? Oh, my gosh, I hope so. You know, when we put the income tax in place, there's obviously the money part of it. But the income tax is just an unbelievable intrusion into our personal privacy. All of a sudden, the federal government has the right to take apart your sources of income and they know everything about you. And there are lots of other things afoot if Kamala ends up winning, where they, you know, the Treasury's got something called the Corporate Transparency Act, which they-- I know, which Biden signed into law and, you know, that would require most of the small businesses in America, some 30, 40 million, to disclose the beneficial ownership of them and a lot of other things that would be intrusive. And so, yeah, I do know that's the kind of thing that when Trump wins, you know, they're going to make a target. Now, getting rid of the IRS or the income tax, I don't think we get enough revenue if we go to tariffs to substitute for the income tax, given the unbelievably big, you know, size of the government, but I like the way they're thinking about it. You know, but the tariff idea is really-- it's about revenue, but I think it's mainly about making sure that we rehabilitate American business here and, you know, we've transported most of the business, a lot of the businesses and the jobs offshore and we've got to bring that back. And I think that'll be a big step in the right direction. Certainly. So probably a combination of tariffs and a that national sales tax, if you will, probably what it's going to have to be. But we get Elon Musk in charge of a different efficiency. I mean, look, the most productive auto manufacturing plants in the world, the most productive one happens to be the Tesla plant in Shanghai. But it's not that far ahead of Austin and it's not that far ahead of Fremont, California. Quality is a little higher there because it was built later than Fremont, but Austin quality just is good. So can you imagine Elon Musk being in charge of cutting government programs? Hang on. Go ahead. Yeah. There's one other thing. There was a case that took place during Nixon's tenure. And I know that President Trump is aware of it. That's the impoundment authority. Yeah. Case. I don't remember the name of it, so forgive me for that. But basically said, if Congress authorizes the spending, you got to spend it. And the case was never properly tested. And look, to just say, all right, Congress, you allocated $6 billion, but we're only going to spend four of it. Stumi, can we look forward to that? You think in a second Trump administration? I think it's on the radar screen, definitely, but you got to love Elon Musk answer. They say, well, how much money can you cut out of a $7 trillion budget? I think that's the number. It could be 20 million, 20 trillion. He said $2 trillion, which is a big number, but it's not just waste fraud and abuse. He also, in another conversation throughout the notion that there's some 275 or 300 federal agencies. And if you want to look at a definition of immortality, it's a federal agency. Once these things get created, they never go away. And I would bet they're probably 75 to 100 agencies, which may have had a good reason to come into existence, but they don't have any reason to be right now. And there's a big opportunity to not only cut employment, but also restructure the regulatory framework to make it more compatible for growing a business. Yeah, I put this question to chat GPT. I said, list 100 federal agencies, agencies that are useless and could easily be cut. And I'm going to give you like just a few of these agencies. You're going to get a real kick out of it. Do you think we could live without the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Denali Commission, Exembank, Exembank's just corporate welfare? About the Postal Service. Yeah, well, we need somebody to deliver the mail, but I think Jeff Bezos could do it better than the government, right? It still already is. OPEC, US Institute for Peace. It's not doing a real good job now. Office of Navajo and Hopi, Hopi Indian relocation. That seems like an urgent national concern, doesn't it? I mean, it just goes on and on and on and on and on here, like 100 of them. They're talking like things like the FHFA because it's duplicated by other things in private could do it. Office of fossil energy. I mean, it must be manned by fossils, right? Or how about the Office of Legacy Management? What the heck? Do you even know what that does, Bill? But it's managing somebody's legacy in government. I don't know. Maybe it's managing oversight, protecting all the agencies. The job is to stand guard to make sure nobody shuts them down. I don't know. We'll have to get rid of that one first. The one I want to get rid of is the Department of Redundancy Department because it's definitely redundant. This is Chad GPT. That's amazing. I think of that as not really I realize it was a libertarian. This is good stuff. All right. So we could further refine this and say, pretend you are Rand Paul or, you know, just pretend you're Rand Paul. That's the way to cut out. Yeah. Or if I were Ludwig von Mises, what would I, what would be left to the federal government? You know? Do that because then it has to put on its other hat and get away from its leftist programming. But how about the export control and related border security assistance program? You know, list, it would be comical, Bill, if it wasn't true, well, it wasn't, it wasn't obscene. I mean, that's the issue. I mean, that's, you know, it's comical if you sort of doing what we're doing. But if you run a business and a small business, medium-sized business and you fall under the predations of one of those agencies, you got a problem because they can tell you to do all sorts of things that don't make any sense. And that's the hidden tax on America now is all these agencies put out, you know, one of them puts out a bad rule or a rule that may be even, you know, with a good intent. But then all of a sudden you're supposed to comply with it. If you get a hundred agencies doing that, all of a sudden, all you're doing is filling out paperwork about, how about like one of Trump's most successful policies last administration was putting in the executive order that for every new rule you want to impose or implement, you got to get rid of two. And it actually was so effective that most agencies were getting rid of 20 new rules. For every rule they implemented, how about for every new rule you implement, you got to get rid of a hundred employees and a hundred existing regulations. Well, think of what Delon must did at Twitter. What did he do? Reduced the head count by 80%, 90%, and nobody did it. And nobody did it. The 8,000 employees and it's taken it down to about a thousand. And it's doing just fine with that streamline structure. I know if Delon wouldn't talk about this, if he weren't serious, and if you get him thinking this way about these agencies, I think, you know, this could be, you know, think about our budget deficit, think about all the bad things that people think you can't fix. Well, if you do all this, you could. Yeah. And he's managed if he saw the last Tesla earnings call and I've caught it. The average price of a Tesla to produce is $35,000. Now, granted, they don't have unions. They don't have legacy costs like medical and pensions and all that good stuff, but nonetheless, the price has come down while inflation has been going up, Bill, two things, deficit inflation. All right, like, I know Trump saying, let's just drill and we can, you know, bring down inflation because energy costs and all that, but you and I both know, it's got to take a massive cut in government expenditures, unnecessary, wasteful. And some that even maybe aren't wasteful, but just aren't useful. And that's where the blowback is going to come from. Because like you said, you know, the, your dentist is worried because all of his, well, most of his patients are probably going to be out of a job here if Trump is elected. Well, and they should be out of a job because, well, I came to Washington, I guess, in 1996. I've been here several times, but in Potomac, Maryland, which is this big, big, expensive suburb in north of the city, had these huge mansions and I was just really stunning and I asked, you know, I was new to the T.C. area and I said, what's, what's paying for all that? It's a pastry money and what we've seen now in the last three or four years is those big mansions have been considered tear downs and they're, they're putting up even bigger ones up in Potomac and a lot of that's coming from things like the Totally Miss Named Inflation Reduction Act, which is basically the Green New Deal on steroids, which is added at trillions of dollars and, you know, John Podesta's got a $400 billion fund to, for the, for the projects of the Democrat, Democrat donors have that they're purportedly, you know, green energy. So all that sort of stuff could go away. I mean, the whole, the whole green energy piece is a massive reallocation of capital of private capital and government capital and if we just shutting that down would, I think, do a lot to the deputy deficit. Yeah. We got like hundreds of billions in corporate welfare every year taking place, right? These companies, it's one thing you give to the least needy, you could at least justify that. But how do you justify these massive subsidies and everything else? Oh, because they can afford, they can afford the lobbying firms and afford the contribution to the, to the senators and the congressmen and, and they're the only ones talking to them. And so they end up getting, getting these handouts and the rest of the country can't afford to be here and do that. And so they, they've been the losers. We, you know, let's turn that around. Yeah. So yeah, like, like the bowings of the world and you see what our subsidies have done. They, and the banking industry, everybody, they get these subsidies and then they up their executive compensation and their stock options, everything else. I mean, I do believe that you run a successful company, you deserve to be extremely well rewarded because it's very difficult, especially in these times, but, you know, the taxpayer shouldn't be paying for it. Well, that's, that'll be a new paradigm. Now, the thing we do, you know, Donald Trump was not exactly a cost cutter last time and was on no and one of the, and I don't want to cost him any votes because we have to win, but he's not talking about entitlement reform. He's not talking about any, any budget, but he can't. I mean, that, that, that's going to, that's political suicide. But on the other hand, if he, if he wins and effect, he's going to be a lame duck. He doesn't have to run for reelection. And so he can do a lot of things. He'll have a freer hand, in fact, than he would otherwise, it, it'll leave JD Vance with it with a harder job, but there's a big opportunity to fix a lot of these things, maybe once in a lifetime. If we don't fix them, that whole, this whole debt, debt, debt, could implode, onster is going to suck us down. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the federal government bill still owns 45% of the state of California. First of Nevada, all these states that it wasn't supposed to wind up owning, it owns. So why don't we just sell off for 10% of California? Would that be such a bad thing? Well, I can give you a great thing. And there's this, there's this totally mistaken notion that if you put land in federal hands, it's preserving it and they're going to nurture the environment with, with this federal ownership. It's just the opposite. But if you put land in private hands, private owners do an awful lot to, to, to make it more productive and make it more environmentally, whatever the word is, a better, a greener. And so, you know, yeah, I mean, it would be a win, win, you, you get, you know, I was back in, I was used to be in the merger and acquisition business and, you know, wasn't the question of just buying and selling companies. The way you think about it, really, is you're trying to take one business that may be struggling or something like that. And you try to put that business into stronger hands, people who know what to do with it. And hopefully they'll take that and build it up into something better, more profitable, better for shareholders and, and so on and so forth. And I think the same thing, I think it's a great idea of federal lands. Let's, let's, let's raise some capital and put it in hands of people who could do something good with it. And it's all the Western states, Idaho, the Dakotas, maybe people don't live in those places necessarily, but increasing the supply of land, which eventually would increase the supply of housing, all these things. And you know, that to me, the biggest issues campaign or, you know, immigration, obviously the economy inflation, inflation is a cycle, I don't know that the government really can bring it down. It just kind of lasts for 20 or 30 years, as in the past, but the crime, all these things. We just seem like deviant behavior, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say, we're defining deviancy down and shoplifting is decriminalized in a lot of states. And you've got these DAs who don't believe it's their job. Only if you steal more than a thought, only if you steal more than a thousand dollars worth of stuff. I mean, if you keep it under a thousand, I guess it's decriminalized, but come on. And this is, this is insane. Yeah. And I can see people in the stores with their, with their iPhone calculator working. Okay. Well, I'm getting up to 995 and we better. Okay. We've stolen enough time to get out of here. They'll knock the charges down anyway, sorry as DAs, but I was in a CVS in Woodland Hills, California. And I tell you, everything in that store was locked up and I was there a little later at night at the wait 15 minutes for a guy to unlock the case to get some eyedrops that were 20 bucks. In Florida here, there are some things that are locked up, like that are high shoplift items like razor blades, all right, and like certain eyedrops, eye care products. But it's a small section of the store, everything else that's like open. And you know, the self check out to cash here is we can have them here in Florida, but in California or New York, you can't risk them because they increase shoplifting by 50%. Well, yeah, and there's stores, you know, here in the DC area, they're just just shutting the stores down. They can't afford to keep them open. So all these things are supposed to protect criminals or whatever have ended up really hurting most of the inner city communities here and here in DC. And everyone, the waste of time of having to wait for them to open something up and get it. And you just say the heck with it, I'll buy it on Amazon. But you think about the trouble the country is in what we're describing, it's their target rich opportunities to make it better. I mean, it doesn't take a lot to sort of say, well, let's change the, let's change some of the rules about crime. And you know, we did, they did it a couple of times in New York, I mean, Giuliani turned it around and Bloomberg did a pretty good job with it. You can fix a city if you get the right people in charge. So true, what you're saying, like, I remember the city before Giuliani, I remember after, and the left vilifies him and gives him no credit for saving their haven. And after a couple of terms of comrade Bill de Blasio, and now this new guy, the place is completely unlivable, becoming more unlivable by the day. Well, yeah. And you know, there are a lot of, yes, it is and I don't, the problem is we talk about governance. We're talking about Trump and the Fed, you know, what the feds can do. And I think the state legislatures and some of the larger, some of the smaller cities can make these changes. I don't see changing big city government much. I mean, Democrats have got a lock hand on it and they don't, they're not showing any signs of paying a price for all the damage they've done. Well, the price is migration from, from these blue states to the red states, and of course, here in Florida, Texas, various other states, Tennessee, you see mass migration where people are just throwing up their hands. And I know a number of people left California. And that's it. Well, Bill, it's really been a pleasure having you on the show. And we will definitely have you on again. We definitely got some interesting times ahead. You find Bill at the bill Walton show dot com. The link is in the show. That's this interview on financial survival network.com. Please sign up for free newsletter. And if you got any questions for Bill, myself, the email address is kl@carryluts.com bill. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for coming on. Great. Love to be here. Thanks for listening to Carrie Lutz's financial survival network, your solution to today's trying times. For the latest, go to financialsurvivalnetwork.com financial survival network now more than ever. [MUSIC]
