Bob Barney: It’s Time for Republicans to Give Trump the Room to Save America (Transcript)

Bob Barney- It’s Time for Republicans to Give Trump the Room to Save America

 The big question is this…

Is Donald Trump going to get the Republican Congress to pass his budget as well as his debt ceiling increase, and is he going to be able to get his Trump-onomics off the ground?

 This is Bob Barney with The Plain Truth Today, and I want to talk about what I think could stall the recovery that the United States economy so desperately needs. This potential stall would most likely be because of a few Republican congressmen who simply always want to just say no. I’m going to give an explanation about what Trump is planning from a business standpoint, and it is one that I hope people can easily follow because it’s going to be kind of complicated.

I think because I am a businessperson, and I run a fairly large business at that I think I can help the listener understand what his plans are. There are things that businesspeople can see that politicians cannot, especially a politician who has never signed the front of a check! They just don’t understand when it comes about debt, and when it comes to getting a business to move along and flourish.

A long time ago, when I was really hurting for business and we were in bad shape under the Obama years with our paint business, a good friend of mine who’s also in the paint business said, remember one thing, Bob, sales solve all problems, and there really is no truer statement than that.

3:01 Growth in sales solve all your problems. 

When Donald Trump became president, talk about our business flourishing. Our 2017 was four times bigger than our 2016, and our 2018 was twice that of 2017, and our 2019 was almost twice that of 2018, and our 2020 was five times what our original one was and still double the 2018 business and our 2019 business. In 2021, even though Donald Trump wasn’t president any longer at the height of COVID because we were an online paint business and many of the paint stores across the country were shut down by regulations or whatnot in each state, our business boomed. It even almost doubled over 2020 which was the last year of Donald Trump, and then, of course, like every other business that did well in the last years under Trump, we’ve stagnated and everybody’s stagnated or lost sales.

 We’ve been lucky that we’ve been able to maintain where we were the whole time, although I saw the writing on the wall that if Kamala Harris was elected president, we would all be in a lot of trouble. I think most businesspeople would agree with me on that and they’re very happy with the results having Trump at the helm.

What we’re going to talk about today are the mistakes that I think many people have about how they understand debt and sales, or in the case of America, growth equals sales. The Trump plan requires people to understand sound business practices.

I’ll be right back after a moment’s brief timeout.

Hello, this is Bob Barney for theplaintruth.com, the one place that you can go to, to understand today’s news and what it means for you and your family and for the future of you and your family. It takes into account what God has to say about our country, about countries around the world, the history of all the nations of the world, and the future of the nations of the world. Believe it or not, God has predicted exactly what is going to happen in the end days, and it is news. Many people do not understand that it is news, but it is. God is the biggest news maker as well as the biggest newscaster when he walked this earth some 2,000 years ago, proclaiming what would happen in the end days. Now, I’m not saying we’re at the end time of the millennium right now or of the age of man and going into the great tribulation, but the truth is the apostles made it clear in their epistles 2,000 years ago that we had entered into the end times even then. So we are in the end times.

Will the return of Christ happen in our lifetime or not? That I cannot predict, but there are signals that he gave to let you know if we’re in the end time. ThePlainTruth.com, along with this broadcast, ThePlainTruthToday.com, goes into what God says and predicts will happen. I hope you listen to this show every day, and I also hope you go to ThePlainTruth.com every day. This is Bob Barney saying thank you for listening.

7:56 Hi, Bob Barney here again, and I do want to say after that commercial we just played that ThePlainTruth.com is the place to go to figure out what’s going on, and we have a perspective that I think is different than everybody else’s. Just to say that, because we use the Bible, and we use what God says is going to happen in the end times, and we believe it, and we also know God is news, and God controls the news, and when he walked this earth, Jesus Christ was the greatest news predictor and caster on the face of the earth, and there ever will be, and ever has been.

Getting back to this budget battle that we’re going to be facing, and I think there are many battles, as I had a broadcast last week, I think there are many, many Democrats secretly hoping Trump succeeds. Why? Because they see even the hope of their party is to nail back the people who want to be communists, the AOCs, the Bernie Sanders, the Kamala Harris’s of this world, and they want to see the Democratic Party move back to a pro-American, pro-worker, pro-union, pro-worker, pro-little-guy party again that it used to stand for some 50 years ago. It is unfortunate that it no longer does and hasn’t for many, many years. The Democratic Party has become the party of the very, very wealthy and the elite, and don’t ever mistake it as a people’s party any longer. So there are, I believe, many Democrats in Congress that will start supporting the Trump administration and his agenda if the Republicans can keep their act together. After all, they are the opposition party. They’re basically sworn to oppose anything Republicans want to do, but if the Republicans are united, they want to go along with it so they are not continually out of power. They want to get their power back, and they’re going to have to change their party back to what it used to be when it could win.

9:05 So what I wanted to get into here is that the problem that I think Trump’s going to have, and this is not new, I’ve been saying this now for six months, the problem that the Republicans are going to have or Donald Trump’s going to have with the Republicans is that Republican diet I keep talking about. Republicans like to cannibalize their own selves, their own people.

They don’t go after the Democrats.

They basically go after themselves.

Just this morning, I was listening to a congressman. I didn’t even know his name. He was on TV, and he was saying that he has a problem. When he was asked, are we going to be able to put the immigration and the new budget in the same bill because President Trump wants one big bill passed as soon as possible, and the guy said, I don’t think so. And right there, I knew what was coming next. He said, I think we have to have two bills because I think we need to get the immigration thing done first. That way, every Republican in the caucus will agree with going on with that bill without any problems. And I think many Democrats will the second all the Republicans band together. He said, but I think we’re going to have a trouble when it comes to the budget because I think, and he said, me included, we are not going to raise the debt limit. We’re not going to raise the debt ceiling one inch. We’re not going to do it in a year’s time or a five-year time or a four-year time that President Trump wants. Right there, I realized there is not going to be an easy solution to the budget battle because of these 20, 30 Republicans who are going to hold out when they really don’t understand the economy.

11:56 Let me explain something from a business perspective. I’m going to use in the example what would be considered a small business, not a big business, but a small business today that is still a major business that’s still small. We’re not talking about a mom and pops thing here. Let’s say it’s a $10 million a year business, and they are carrying no debt and they make a 4% net. So that is, and after paying themselves and paying all their people and paying all their rents and paying their taxes, it still shows a three to a 4% net. They understand in order to continue to be viable in the business world, they have to grow considerably. Under the Trump administration, they are thinking, well, this is a great opportunity to really grow. We might be able to double our business in the four years that we want to really take in what Donald Trump’s going to do in his four years and be a part of it and really grow. So, we want to make this $10 million business a $20 million business. Well, now you start looking into your business and you say, well, right now I buy raw materials through a supplier, and I buy what I need in 30 days. It costs me about 25 to 45% more for raw materials than if I could buy great big container loads of raw material from the source, which in the paint business and in most businesses, most raw materials are coming from Asia, especially China.

You think to yourself, now, should we go ahead and buy more material than we can use in a 30 to 60- or 90-day time?

13:21 Well, if it’s 40 or 45% cheaper than what you’re buying today, then you say, well, I have to buy, let’s say $8 million worth of raw material in order to get that great price. Well, I don’t have $8 million. I might have a cashflow of about $2 million that I have saved ruthlessly over the years for bad times I really don’t want to take away all my cash just in case some tragedy comes along with the company, and we need cash….so what does a big company, what does a company of that size and even billion-dollar companies do? They go to a bank or to a lender and they borrow money. Like the United States government’s national debt is borrowed money.

So you go and you try to arrange a good deal.

You say, I need $7 million, and I need to pay it off in five years and they give you an interest rate. Then let’s say the interest rate, let’s say you’re in a four, let’s say you’re in a 3% inflation. So all your products are going to go up three to 5% a year. Your costs would have gone up that. You’re really saving about 50% on product. That’s how you have to look at it. Then you say, well, what kind of interest rate can I get? Let’s say a private lender, there’s many private lenders out there looking to make as much money as they can. They say, well, we can let you have it for 5% which is much greater than the American government is paying for its debt percentagewise. Then you put the numbers to the paper, and you figure out, well, over four years’ time, that 5% is going to cost me about $750,000. However, I’m going to be selling an extra $10 million and I’m going to be able to pay off that debt and still double my income and make anywhere from $4 to $5 million a year with that debt. Every company that I know runs their business, just the way I explained it and that’s what Donald Trump is trying to do with this government. He understands we’re upside down and we’re near national bankruptcy. When you take a company over that’s in bankruptcy, the first thing you do is you try to leverage your debt and you try to leverage it out as far as possible, if you can, without paying interest. There are many great people who have taken over businesses and turned them around and was able to do exactly what I said and be able to pay out the debt in 5, 10, 15 years and end up with a company that’s very viable, very profitable and saved from bankruptcy and a lot of jobs as well.

15:03 When I was in my teens, I was working for a contractor that did all the maintenance, lawn and maintenance and snow plowing at Kimberly Clark Corporation in Connecticut. I remember talking to the plant manager one day and he was talking about their debts, and this was back in the 70s, he said, we never pay off our debt. Our debt is, we figure, 100 years for our debt. We borrow money and we just pay the interest. We don’t even pay the principal on the money we borrow. We just pay the interest, and we factor the interest into the cost of doing business. This way, we’re using other people’s money to buy all the materials we need at the prices we need to buy them, and all we have to worry about is not the principal that we’re borrowing, but the interest rate.

Well, at the time, I was quite astonished to hear that as I had never even heard of that before. When I went to work for the Esposito family, and that’s when I got into the paint business as a manufacturer way back in the 1980s, I never forget when he interviewed me and he pointed out I had come from a company that had deep pockets. Additionally, they sold paint and they had you load your store up with all kinds of goods and services, and the idea is if the people don’t see it, they won’t buy it. Well, Frank Esposito knew about that, and he said, well, that’s not how I do my business. He said, I do business through opium. I’m thinking, what is he, a drug dealer? No, opium refers to other people’s money. My idea of running a business is you go out, and you sell product A, then you go to the supplier, and you order it and get 60-day terms to pay it. The customer has 30-day terms. You deliver it to the customer, and 30 days the customer pays you, and you have 15, 20 more days to pay the person in the first place you bought it from, and you make your profit, never touching your own money.

The man became very wealthy with that principle, and this is Donald Trump’s whole strategy. If you study Donald Trump’s business practices, he always bought everything he built on borrowed money from banks. There was a time when the economy turned sour on Donald Trump, and this is the danger of living a lifestyle like this when the economy is really running strong, it really works well, but in the great recession in the 1990s, Donald Trump found himself way overhead in debt, but then he had another principle. I am not sure if he wrote about this in his book, but I can tell you what this principle is, and this was also explained to me back when I was working for Mr. Esposito. When you borrow $1,000 from somebody, you are a borrower. When you borrow $5 million from somebody, you are a partner. When Donald Trump owed banks hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in the early 90s, when the big economic bust happened, he actually was able to go back to those banks and renegotiate all the debts because of the fact they didn’t want him going bankrupt. Why? Because if he did go bankrupt, they would be out everything. That in itself is a business strategy. Now, a lot of people who are not in business do not understand how businesspeople have to work to make money, but I’m just telling you this is what is going on in business.

17:23 Now, you know why so many of them have ulcers and they all retire when they’re 55 if they can because they’re going to die because of all the things they have to do. That’s somewhat of a joke. I’m 70 years old, and I’m still going strong, but I’ll tell you right now, it is tough. It is tough to live a life that you’re always living off borrowed money, but that is what drives American and worldwide consumer business types because no company has the money to invest themselves in what they have to buy in order to grow. They might have enough money to invest in what they need to buy to stay the same and have no increase in sales, but if you’re planning on doubling or tripling your sales, then you are going to have to borrow the money to do that, and you have to do so at an interest rate which is going to be less costly than the profit you make in the increase in sales. Now, let’s get to our government and what I think Donald Trump’s plan is. His idea, which we did see, by the way, people forget this. COVID threw a shot at Donald Trump, even though I believe COVID was a man-made virus in many ways, and Donald Trump fell victim to some of the shenanigans of the COVID restrictions, but people forget in 2017 and 2018 and early 2019, the American GDP was growing at an astounding rate. So was the deficit, but the deficit was not growing in relationship to the GDP growth.

It was far below the GDP growth, which means the debt that Donald Trump added to the national deficit was actually working debt that could easily be paid off if the economy kept booming. Where it backfired on Trump, and it was planned, in my opinion, by the deep state, by Democrats in general, by the opposition party, was COVID-19 came along and it really cost us trillions and trillions of dollars, and that went to the debt under Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s debt addition or his portion of the debt addition was all in his last year of office, and that was all related with COVID. What he plans to do, and I do think, by the way, we have to worry about that the deep state’s going to try to plan another COVID incident under Trump, especially if they lose the Congress in two years. I do believe that they’re going to try to come up with a new COVID-type problem, and that problem is going to be called, in my opinion, which we’re already being kind of pre-warned about, is the bird flu. Some kind of a bird flu is going to come, and it has supposedly a 50% death rate instead of a 0.00001% death rate, and that was only to obese old people.

20:02 That was something we had to consider. But Donald Trump’s plan for the next four years of his administration is to have this huge GDP increase, which is the goods and services that the American companies produce, bring all these companies back to America, put all these people to work, all these people working are going to be paying income taxes. Income taxes are going to swell. The national debt is actually going to go up in the first two years. That’s why he needs a debt ceiling increase, because you’re buying all this stuff up front, and you’re going to be paying for it in the next two years. So the debt’s going to go up, people are going to panic, the Democrats are going to make hay over it, and unfortunately, I think 20 or 30 Republicans are going to book out, and that’s going to kind of end the Trump recovery.

If the United States economy can grow like it did under Reagan, but especially grow like it did under Dwight David Eisenhower, where we had 8 and 9% GDPs, we could easily, in a 20-year time, reduce the debt by probably 75%. And if after one or two years of the cost cutting that Elon Musk and Trump claim they’re going to be able to save the Americans, they’re saying $2 trillion a year out of a $7 trillion total budget, and that would break even right away, but I don’t believe we’re going to save $2 trillion right away. But let’s say we can save $1 trillion a year, and even though the debt may go up $2 or $3 trillion in the first two years, then when all of this income tax starts rolling in from all of these new people working and all these companies making a fortune and these companies coming back to America are all going to be adding money to the coffers of our federal government, even though there are lower rates of tax rates, you know, 15% he’s talking about for corporations, the actual dollar amount is going to go in.

22:23 How many times do you see a company, when they want to raise money quickly for a project or anything, they have a major sale. They have a 25% off or a 35% sale off, and even though they are lowering their prices by 35%, they’re actually making dollars of profit because that’s the quickest way to get the money in…by discounts. So, on paper you lose money because you say, well, I lost 35% off what I could have been, but you would have never sold it without the sale in the first place so you’re not down anything. You’re actually up cash flow, and cash flow is king in any business, and it is amongst countries. That’s what’s called the trade imbalance. It’s really a cash flow situation.

If Trump can get his way, I believe his plan is to grow our economy, get a five, six, seven percent GDP, and a two or three percent negative GDP when it comes to the national debt. The net is still going to be a two or three percent increase in money going to pay down the national debt, which could add up. Then if you can save a trillion dollars a year of, you know, the boondoggle spending we’re all talking about, that’s just, you know, icing on the cake, and that is, I think, a good plan. It’s the only plan and the only hope we have. If we tighten our belts, if any company out there decides they’re going to pay off all their debt, and they’re not going to have any debt at all, and they’re going to pay everything and all the profit that they get coming in selling goods and services, they’re going to just do to pay off their debt and have no more debt, they’re going to go out of business.

I had a friend of mine a long time ago tell me something which is so true that, again, if you’re not in business, you will not understand this principle, but trust me, this principle every businessperson knows is true. Unlike what a bean counter will tell a company, because bean counters basically don’t know how to run a business, that’s the accountant part of the business, you cannot cut yourself to a profit. When you start cutting a company’s sales force, production, cutting the debt, cutting the production, what you end up doing is cutting yourself out of business. You end up stopping the flow of money, and within a year or two, what looked great on paper will come back and bite you in the rear, because you can’t cut yourself into a profit. You have to grow.

Getting back to my original statement I made in the beginning of this show, sales, or I should say when it comes to governments, growth solves all problems.

25:23 If we could have an eight or nine percent GDP for the next 50 years, and America had that back in the 1870s through the 1920s, if we could have a 10% GDP for the next 50 years, we would by itself pay off the entire debt without even saving any boondoggle spending, just from growth alone. Well, we’re probably not going to have 50 years of growth, and we’re probably not going to have an eight or 10% GDP, but it just shows you that if Trump’s growth plans work, and this is why he’s working day and night trying to get all these companies on board and coming back to America, and why he’s trying to bully Canada, Mexico, and Europe. He’s trying to bully them with tariff restrictions and stuff like that in order to make America have the most stable, and fast-growing economy on the face of the earth. It will actually force China into bankruptcy if he can succeed, because China has a national debt that they don’t disclose. They do, but it’s a lie. They subsidize all of their businesses. They subsidize the tariff. They’re giving money all over the world, and they keep devaluing their currency, so their debt structure is probably by tenfold worse than the United States’, but they don’t have governments that change every four years, and so they have one government. This is why businesspeople like to deal with the fascist-type governments of the world. They have one government that has one purpose, and they can last until they go broke. They might be able to last 20, 25 years.

Look at the Soviet Union, how they matched us missile for missiles throughout the 50s and the 60s and the 70s, until Ronald Reagan came along with the Star Wars in the 80s, and we actually drove Russia broke and destroyed the Soviet Union. That is what smart presidents and leaders do who understand business and growth of the economy and outspending your enemy in a way that is growth oriented. Star Wars added jobs to America.

Welfare doesn’t add jobs. Military spending does add jobs to American workers at high rates, and therefore Russia, trying to keep up with Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars, couldn’t do it, got broke, and they ended up losing everything in just a matter of months, even though they were able to maintain it for years. Well, China is playing the same game. They’re maintaining a parity with America right now, but their debt, I can guarantee you, even though it’s like a national security issue, their debt is going to stifle them in the long run. I know from my sources that I have in business, because I buy a lot of raw materials from China and from Asia in general, that the Chinese economy is hurting big time because 65, 70 percent of what China produces comes to America, and America’s been in a recession. Oh, I know the news hasn’t told you we’re in a recession, but anybody with a brain knows we’re in a recession. You’re listening to me.

28:21 You’re not spending money like you did in 2018. You’re not going to the restaurants and buying the things you bought in 2018 and 2019, are you? Why not? Well, it is because money is tight and that is why Donald Trump won in a landslide back in November over the Democrat, Kamala Harris. That administration could try to say all day long that the government is in good shape and everybody has all the money in the world and there’s no recession. In fact, it’s a miracle economy. Biden tried to say it’s the best economy in 75 years. Do you remember that? Well, nobody believed it because everybody was out of money. We saw that with our customer base in our business. Money became impossible to get.

Sales solve all problems. 

Lack of sales create a multitude of problems, and this is why I hope Donald Trump can get these Republicans listening to reason and go along with his budget plan, even if they disagree with it.

What do they have to lose? We’re already the Titanic that hit the iceberg. We’re going to sink unless by some miracle, God and Donald Trump’s policies pull us out of what is inevitably, one day, going to be a sinking ship. These Republicans really have nothing to complain about. We’re in the problem scenario that we are. We have to try something that is out of the box. Politicians never think out of the box, by the way. They always think the same, but they expect different results, which is insanity. It’s time that we try to grow ourselves out of this national debt and our national problems with this country.

That’s my take on everything, and that’s my take on this budget battle coming up. Pay attention to it. It’s the most important thing for you to pay attention to.

There’s going to be all kinds of stories to try to get your attention somewhere else because the deep state doesn’t want you to understand what’s going on here. We need to grow out of our debt.

We need to grow, period.

We need to have a GDP like we had in the 1950s, and we need it for another 10, 15, 20 years, if possible. This is the end of the show.

30:00 I’m out of time. This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today saying thank you for listening, and we’ll be back again.