Friday Wrap-Up with Bob: April 4, 2025 (Transcript)

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Good Friday. It’s Friday wrap-up time again on The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, and this is Bob Barney. And we have a lot to talk about today, but I’m going to start out by saying this is the second day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

It’s something, if you were following along on these podcasts and on our website, you see that we talked about the Passover, which happened Wednesday night, and then yesterday, Thursday, was the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and we had a couple of programs on why you should be paying attention and doing those, and we won’t get into that today. It’s Friday wrap-up time, but I just wanted to mention this is the second day of the seven days of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. You’ll hear more about it next week on a few podcasts as well, but I wanted to get into what’s going on this week in the real world of politics and economy and whatnot, and just general news.And before I start, I want to say one thing, because we all saw what happened yesterday on Wall Street in the stock markets, in the futures, you name it. It was bad. It was the worst Wall Street day, I think, since 2022.

Some reports said since 2020 COVID, and $3.7 trillion were lost yesterday by investors, and a lot of these investors that lost money, by the way, are people like you and I that are middle-class people that have 401ks and IRAs, and I’ll tell you right now, I’ve seen basically a 21% deduction for my IRA since the election. And that’s going to bother people, I’m telling you, especially if you’re older and you’re more towards retirement age and you realize you have very little time to build up those IRAs and 401ks before you’re going to have to start taking money from that. And so we’ll have to see. But the Trump tariffs were much nastier than people thought they were going to be. And there is so much misinformation coming out of this White House that it’s going to continue. I’m doing this program in the morning and I don’t know what the stock market is going to do today. And I’ll tell you now, in my opinion, it’s just an opinion, you’ll know by the end of the day how good my opinion is, I think there’s going to be a great sell-off again today. And I’ll tell you why. Usually when there is a sell-out like yesterday and the stock market went down, you know, 1500 points, usually the following day, there are going to be enough profit takers, you know, people get in and say, I can get this Apple stock really cheap now or this Tesla stock really cheap now.

And they’re going to go in and they’re going to buy when they think it’s the market low. And that probably would happen after yesterday if today wasn’t Friday, because this is the thing that even gets me and some of the investments I do. When Friday comes, I often sell off stuff that I think is going to crash over the weekend. The problem is because investors, unless you’re, you know, a multi-billionaire that has assets around the world, investors are stuck with the nine to four market times, Monday through Friday, not including holidays. So what happens is you decide to buy stocks on a Friday morning and then by Saturday and Sunday, you realize your stock is tanking all over the world, but you can’t sell it when you want it to. So a lot of people are going to say, I’m not going to do anything today. I’m not going to buy anything today. And even more people are going to say, I think it’s going to go down bad today and I’m going to sell. So my opinion is that I think it’s going to have another, I don’t know about a record day, but another bad day on wall street.

And I know a lot of people out there, especially those people who want to support President Trump and I’m one of them, by the way, I know the way I’m talking lately, people don’t think so. But the thing is it does matter because wall street is a reflection of main street in a few months’ time. And I always hear these people say, especially the Trump apologists lately, that what happens on wall street, doesn’t matter what happens on main street. And you know, we don’t care about the rich people losing money on wall street. All we care about is the, the American mega person working hard at their jobs and their ability to make money and to buy groceries cheaper. Well, what they don’t understand is most of wall street is really a reflection of middle-class investments in their 401s and IRAs. So yes, when wall street goes down, number one, it hurts the middle guy. It hurts the guy who voted for Trump as well as the people who voted for Harris for that matter. But the other thing that’s just as important is wall street is usually a reflection. People that are playing the game on wall street are much more attuned to the economy and what’s going on than you and I are when we’re working a job every day. And we don’t have time to sit there and study the markets and study different things that are going on. And so when wall street starts going the wrong way, usually that means main street’s going to go the wrong way later on. And that’s something that you just can’t ignore that. I know a lot of people are trying to ignore now because they were making excuses for President Trump’s first 90 days, whatever it is in office. And these same people, by the way, would be trashing Camilla Harris. If she was president with this kind of economy and wall street crash, they would be trashing Biden and things like that. I’d like to give you another personal example because I am afraid that there are unintended consequences to people who do not know what they’re doing when it comes to business.

Now, I know the statement that Trump is a businessman. He signs the front of checks. He’s been a successful businessman for many years. But what kind of businessman was he? Well, first of all, there’s a difference in being in the real estate investment game and building things like that and running a company that depends on people, regular people, buying what you sell. There is a huge difference. And the people who run companies like me, and I’m going to give you a personal example. I’m a small guy. I’m not big like the big paint companies like the PPGs or other big companies like Apple or IBM or you name it. But I employ about 20, 21 people.21 people make their living because of my and my wife’s paint company. They make good money. We don’t pay minimum wages. The minimum we pay is $20 an hour for people. And many people make much more than that. Plus we play bonuses. Working for us is a pretty good deal. And I’ll tell you right now, we have some major world famous or at least national famous paint artists and people who restore automobiles that use our products. And many of our customers call in and they start talking to one of our people on the phone and they find out many times they’re going to talk to my wife who owns the company and that thrills our customer. But a lot of things that thrill our employees is the idea is they see some car win a prize at a major car show and it’s done in Tamco. And it makes my employees feel great about themselves and about the company they work for and about the product that they’re making and we’re selling. And especially when it’s big names. The last Fast and Furious movie, for example, all the paint on that movie was a Tamco products. And that probably doesn’t mean a lot to people outside of how many people watch Fast and Furious number 12 or 13, whatever it was. But for the employees that work for you, that’s pride.

They really take interest in that. And so do I for that matter. Some little paint company who’s scratching out a good existence against the big giants of this world has customers who are world known or movie studios, big time names that everybody recognizes using our products. And that gives our employees something to be proud of. And one of the things I learned a long time ago from what my mentor in the paint business is that you have to treat your employees like you would treat your family. And I know big companies can’t do that. They treat you like a number. And but they give you a lot of bennies that little companies like myself can’t afford, you know, 401ks that they match and insurance policies, medical insurance policies. But for that saying, you are treated like a number. And the minute there is a downturn, you lay that person off because he’s a number. When you work for a small family company and there’s a downturn, the family stops paying themselves first, not their employees first. You don’t go to lay people off. We have a particular employee right now that had a serious stroke, and he was a younger person and very important to our company and our company’s existence and reputation. And he has been basically incapacitated for now almost a year. It’ll be a year in May, but we still try to pay him. We still pay him. And its what little companies do to make their employees feel like they’re a part of the family, that they’re integral and they’re important. And our employees are important. And the one thing you cannot be when you are running a business that you’re manufacturing things and then you’re selling it yourself to the end user, you can’t show arrogance. You can’t show disdain, and you can’t run a business like Trump could run his businesses. And that’s the plain truth.

I don’t care if people don’t want to hear this and they don’t think it’s true. But running a small family business is probably as hard in many ways as running a big corporate business where you have all kinds of people that can help you. You have all kinds of employees. You have all kinds of bean counters. But when you run a little company and you have, you know, 20, 21 employees that depend on you to pay them every week and your sales are down 20, 30 percent because the economy has taken a bad turn, it’s tough. You have to make hard decisions. And basically the first decision most people in my shoes do, and this is not me. I’m not great because I believe in God, though I think it helps because I follow God’s principles. But most small businesses like myself, family businesses, the first people who take a pay cut are the owners. The next are the managers that are part of the family. That’s the way it goes. The last people you want to cut as employees because the employees are what makes your company and your customers also get to know your employees. They call on the phone and they talk to somebody and that’s all they want to talk to because they’re familiar with them. So you keep going through employees every other week, then your customer base thinks, well, you’re not a company I really want to deal with. So there’s all kinds of things.

The other problem is in many businesses, not just my business, in many businesses, you’re not going to get the raw materials that you need or the finished goods that you need from American manufacturing. It’s just not going to happen. We don’t have the skill to do many of these things and the big companies would rather pay the tariff and just charge us more money than to come to this country and realize in four years you may have a Democrat president who makes you wish you never came here in the first place and chases you back to China or Indonesia or wherever you’re from. And you’re going to spend seven, eight billion dollars to build a plant in America. It’s going to take you three years to build it. And then the fourth year your guy that you supported loses the election and the next guy comes in and puts all kinds of barriers on your business. And that’s not going to happen. What’s going to happen is this. Let’s say a particular product you’re buying is ten dollars a unit. And now it’s going to go up to twelve or thirteen or maybe fifteen dollars a unit. And it’s just the cost of doing business. You as a small mom and pop type business is going to have to pay for it. So eventually you’re going to cut your pay. You’re going to cut expenses. You’re going to try to cut everything you can possibly cut. Then you’re going to raise prices to the end consumer. And so the end consumer is going to see price increases. I’ll give you an example of this.

In my company business, I’ll give you an example. There are very few American resin manufacturers. But there is a resin manufacturer in America, 100 percent based in America, that makes a very good resin that I like to use for some of our industrial and automotive and fleet paints. And it was a dollar ninety a pound just last Friday. I go to order four drums. It’s not a big mover. So I usually order container loads of one particular resin. But it’s a slow mover. But anyway, I go to order four drums at the one ninety a pound price, dollar ninety a pound price. And I find out it’s now two dollars and thirty four cents since last Friday. And this was Wednesday. And I said, how did it go up so much money? Oh, I don’t know. They won’t tell me. But they said it’s two thirty four. And probably because of tariffs, it might be up to two sixty-four to seventy five by the end of March. I’m sorry, the end of April. And I’m thinking to myself, you make everything in America. But what’s happening is they’re going to gouge. They’re going to realize the only other people that make that product happens to be in Taiwan. And Taiwan’s got themselves, I think, a forty four or forty five percent tariff. So Taiwan was selling the same product for a dollar sixty-four a pound. I was willing to pay a dollar ninety a pound for this product made in America because I want to buy American products. But now the dollar sixty four pound product is going to go up to about two thirty, two forty, two fifty a pound. The company I’m buying from realizes that and they say we got an opportunity to hose our customers because they got to buy from us because we’re now going to be cheaper and we’re going to be cheaper only by five or six cents because we know they’re going to end up buying from us because they’re not going to want to buy from a supply chain that might even get a bigger tariff down the road.

And in my company business, I’ll give you an example. There are very few American resin manufacturers. But there is a resin manufacturer in America, 100 percent based in America, that makes a very good resin that I like to use for some of our industrial and automotive and fleet paints. And it was a dollar ninety a pound just last Friday. I go to order four drums. It’s not a big mover. So I usually order container loads of one particular resin. But it’s a slow mover. But anyway, I go to order four drums at the one ninety a pound price, dollar ninety a pound price. And I find out it’s now two dollars and thirty four cents since last Friday. And this was Wednesday. And I said, how did it go up so much money? Oh, I don’t know. They won’t tell me. But they said it’s two thirty four. And probably because of tariffs, it might be up to two sixty four to seventy five by the end of April. And I’m thinking to myself, you make everything in America. But what’s happening is they’re going to gouge. They’re going to realize the only other people that make that product happens to be in Taiwan. And Taiwan’s got themselves, I think, a forty four or forty five percent tariff. So Taiwan was selling the same product for a dollar sixty four a pound. I was willing to pay a dollar ninety a pound for this product made in America because I want to buy American products. But now the dollar sixty four pound product is going to go up to about two thirty, two forty, two fifty a pound. The company I’m buying from realizes that and they say we got an opportunity to hose our customers because they got to buy from us because we’re now going to be cheaper and we’re going to be cheaper only by five or six cents because we know they’re going to end up buying from us because they’re not going to want to buy from a supply chain that might even get a bigger tariff down the road.

So you’re going to see price gouging with the raw material manufacturers to small businesses like myself. 

And so eventually the end user is going to see drastic and I mean drastic price increases. It’s just part of the being in this business for forty five years. I know this business as good as anybody in my type of business. Well, my type of business is the average business model for most small paint manufacturers or any kind of manufacturer. I don’t care if you’re manufacturing sheds or you’re manufacturing shoes in America, you’re trying to anyway, or pillows like my pillow. Eventually everything that you buy, whether made in America or not, is going to have an inflated raw material price. I’d like to be a buzz or a bug, I guess the word is. I’d like to be a bug on the wall around Mike Lindell, you know, my pillow guy, who’s a big Trump supporter, realizing that his company is in trouble as it is. It’s near bankruptcy and he admits that every day on Rav when he’s trying to sell his pillows and all the other things he sells. But I’d like to be a bug on the wall and what he says that’s not on camera about these tariffs, because he realizes it probably could put him out of business in six to nine months. Totally go out of business. Think about that. That is the problem that I don’t think President Trump really understands. He’s been in one business that’s not a manufacturing or it’s not even a retail business.

It’s a big business, yes, but it’s a big business unlike most other businesses that he’s managing right now as president. He does not understand the unintended consequences of one thing that you do has a consequence that you never even anticipated. And I just gave you one about price gouging amongst American manufacturers because I can get away with it. That was already pointed out, by the way, I’m not coming up with this on my own, excuse me, it was already pointed out with washer machines. In 2018, Trump put a huge tariff on Chinese made washer machines and Westinghouse and GE, who made at the time their washing machines in America, guess what? It was a 12% tariff and their prices went up by 12%. Think about that. It’s something I didn’t even know at the time. I found this out because of watching all the TV in the last few days about what’s going on Wall Street. So I would not be surprised if we see another $800 to $1,000 decline on Wall Street today, and NASDAQ probably even worse percentage wise because the tech industry is being decimated. So that’s the story on the tax cuts, or I’m sorry, the tax cuts is the next thing I’m going to talk about. That’s the big story about the tariffs and inflation and what’s happening to little old Joe and Jill out there in America, farmland in cities across America that are going to pay an awful price for unintended consequences that these policies coming out of the White House is going to bring. The other unintended consequence in my opinion, if this continues and it does not change, you’re going to see the Democrats finally get a message as inept and stupid as they are, they’re going to finally get a message and they’re going to win the House and maybe even the Senate in two years. And then you got Trump impeachment 2.0, and it’s going to be a nasty, nasty game. And guess who pays for this? You and I, that’s who pays for it. John PQ citizen out there who always seems to foot the bill of everything that goes on between the Republicans and the Democrats in politics. And it’s a crying shame. Now getting to this idea of the tax cut, which one of the reasons for the tariffs in my understanding, and I believe it’s true, is Trump actually, his tax cut that he’s proposing, and he’s given away taxes to waitresses and taxes to seniors. And a lot of things make sense, but a lot of it does not.

For example, why should a waitress not pay taxes on her tips when my employees have to pay taxes and they’re just as poor? And in many cases, waiters and waitresses make a lot more money if they’re any good and working for a good place than most people working for a small family business. And why should my people have to pay a hundred percent of their money that they make taxes on, but a waitress, because the government decides to pick winners and losers, does not have to pay taxes on their tips. And that’s a lot of money. So when you add up all these tax cuts that he wants to do, well, the experts claim, and I’m not saying the experts are right, but I kind of think they may be. And I’ll tell you why in a second. The experts claim that Trump is going to raise the deficit with his tax cut plan from 37 trillion in debt today to 41 trillion in debt by 2028.

And usually, those experts are really wrong in the wrong way. I think the deficit will be 44 trillion in this tax bill by 2028. So President Trump knows this. He knows there’s going to be resistance in the Senate, especially, and even in the House, of passing something. He got the debt ceiling lifted. And I said at the time when he did this, his first thing in office, that he got them to lift the debt ceiling. I said, why, if you’re going to lower the debt, are you raising the ceiling and doing away with the ceiling? Because you honestly are lying to the American public. You intend that the deficit is going to go up, and you don’t want to have that noose around your neck when it does. So you’re promising all these tariffs is going to pay for the tax cut. So they’re going to say, no, we’re not going to be 41 trillion in debt in four years. We’re only going to be 35 trillion in debt because we’re going to get seven to $8 trillion from tariffs over that time. It’s not going to happen. It’s absolutely not going to happen. You’re going to destroy the economy. You’re going to destroy little businesses, and you’re going to put us into a recession. So that $37 debt, that becomes a $41 trillion debt in four years, will probably, if the economy goes south, will end up being a $48, $49, maybe a $50 trillion debt. So I had a person the other day tell me that all President Trump is really doing, he’s on the Titanic, because everybody has any brains realize we are on the Titanic, and it’s sinking, and all he’s telling people to do is move this chair over here, move that chair over there, move this chair over here, and a lifeboat, by the way, don’t worry about the people on board, just throw it overboard, and maybe they’ll survive. It’s got to get tough, but we got to do, we got to get these lifeboats out no matter what happens.

Well, that’s the unintended consequences of not knowing what you’re doing, and that’s what happened on the Titanic, by the way. The staff did not know what they were doing, and it was total ineptness by the Titanic sailor staff, and so many people, 1,500 people died, a lot of the reason because they didn’t have enough lifeboats, that wasn’t their fault. But many of the lifeboats that were launched were launched nearly empty. Some were even lost without any one person in it. So hundreds of more people probably could have been saved if the people didn’t know what they, or did know what they were doing. Unintended consequences to not training your sailors properly. It just goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on. So to wrap up the economy part of this show, I want to tell you right now that we have four or five bad months coming. Will President Trump wake up and listen to other people other than the yes people around him? I hope so. If not, you have a failed presidency, you probably have a House and maybe a Senate going back to the Democrats, and you just saved the party that needed to be totally decimated after putting up Kamala Harris and Joe Biden first. And I’m sorry, but that is, that’s the fate if we don’t do something about it now. Lastly, I want to go over this weekend. I don’t have the Sunday show planned yet, but I think I have the one I want, but I won’t mention it just in case I change my mind. But unlike two weeks ago, I will definitely have the Sunday show up and ready by probably tonight for the weekend. But tomorrow night for the, you know, every Saturday, Sabbath, it’s the Sabbath, every Sabbath evening at 7.11 p.m., we either have a short story, a famous short story.

We’ve had some by Leo Tolstoy and some others. And we sometimes show some half hour at the most 45 minute videos from back in the day, some of them back in the 80s, some of them back in the 60s. We’ve shown some Twilight Zone shows that we think have a very good educational content, symbolic content, but at the same time is enjoyable for everyone to sit down and listen to or watch. You can cast, you know, the YouTube, it’s always a YouTube that we’re playing. It’s always, even if it’s a short story, it’s on YouTube. So you can cast it to your TV if you’re, you know, able enough to do so. I am so, and I’m not the smartest, you know, rock in the quarry. Then you can listen to it or watch it if it is a video on your big TV and with great sound, and you can enjoy a half hour, 45 minutes worth of a short story or even a short video. But tonight, once in a while, we change that. And tomorrow night at the 7.11 p.m., we’re going to play the complete movie, Jesus, the film, it’s called. And there’s been a few adaptations of that movie. The original, I believe, was 76. We’re playing the 1979 one. It’s the same one as the 1976 one, but it has a trailer that goes into it that is really great. It starts with Adam and Eve. The original movie did not do this. It’s a movie that almost every word is taken from the book of Luke. I do not like Jesus movies, and I do not like religious movies for the most part. There are some good ones. This one is really good because it’s pretty hard. There are some mistakes maybe in it. Jesus has longer hair than he should. But for the most part, if you’re just quoting the book of Luke in order, you’re not going to have the wrong gospel being played on TV like a lot of these movies that they have out that have, you know, about Jesus that are just so anti-Bible, anti-truth. It’s just unbelievable.

But it’s called Jesus, the film. It’s the 79 version where they spice it up with about an eight-minute intro to give us the picture of Adam and Eve and how they fell and how God instituted sacrifice and how Abraham, I’m sorry, sacrificed his son that God would finally allow him to do and set up the symbolic picture of Christ going to be sacrificed in place of Isaac in a place of all of us for all of our sins to bring us back into a familiar relationship with both God the Father and Jesus Christ, who’s the Lord of the Old Testament and the New Testament. And it’s a very well done movie. The quality, even though it’s a YouTube movie, the quality is very good. We watched it on the Passover night after we had our meal. We went into the bedroom and we put it on and before I put it up for tomorrow night. And it was really good to see on a 75-inch TV in the bedroom. We were like a movie experience and we don’t go to the movies anymore. We stay mainly home. We work all day long, sleep all night long with very little entertainment in between, working harder at 69 and three quarters than I did when I was 39 years old. But that’s another story. But anyway, you’ll like the movie if you take the time to watch it. Like I said, it’s the most accurate of all the Jesus films, word for word from the book of Luke, modern translation of the Bible, but it’s still from the book of Luke and I think you’ll like it. And it’s going to be a two-hour movie. It’s not going to be a 35-minute, 45-minute like we usually do.

We only done that one other time that I can think of in our history of showing something on the Sabbath evening, 7-11 p.m. And that is we showed the Corrie ten Boom story in Hiding Place, which was another two- or two-and-a-half-hour movie, which is a movie I just think everybody needs to watch about the woman, her sister and her father and brothers who spared many Jews their life during the Holocaust. Well, they were in the Netherlands and they ended up all but Corrie dying to save the Jewish people that they were hiding in their home. Great story. We had that up. I believe maybe it was last Feast of Tabernacles time, but it was really good. And this movie, Jesus to Film is going to be great. So 7-11 tomorrow morning, we’re going to have our normal Sabbath type show that’s informative, what you need to know.

Sunday night is the movie Jesus. And then Sunday, I pretty much know what I’m going to put up, but you’ll find out Sunday morning when you go to your computer, turn it on, go to the plaintruth.com and then go to the Plain Truth podcast, which is the plaintruthtoday.com. And you’ll see what we have up. And I think you’ll find it enjoyable.

We’ll be back here again Monday with another show, and hopefully we’ll be back, God willing, and maybe be able to digest what’s going on with the economy and the tariffs. So until then, this is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today, signing off, saying thank you for listening, friends.

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