Friday Wrap-Up with Bob: February 21, 2025 (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: FRIDAY WRAP-UP WITH BOB BARNEY FEBRUARY 21, 2025

Hi, this is Bob Barney…happy Friday. 

Yes, it’s Friday wrap-up time again at noontime and I want to welcome everybody that may be new and listening to the Plain Truth Today broadcast. We invite you to go to The Plain Truth dot com every day to see the latest news so you can understand what it may mean for you and your family. Some of the news can help us predict what is going to happen in the future. I think there are some things I may be able to personally predict about what is going to happen, so I really want to get things right here. 

2:58 Last week I mentioned that Donald Trump for the first time probably ever was in a positive position with approval rating, unlike his first time around. He had a 53% approval rating and he had a really big approval rating when it came to the border being shut down, but in reality, he had a negative approval rating. He had 66% of the people thinking that his administration was not doing enough for inflation, and I’m one of those people. I think they need to pivot away from Ukraine and owning Gaza and worry about the price of gas. I have some ideas on how to change that as well, and the effects of the price of food and this egg scandal, because I believe this egg situation is a scandal.

I mentioned earlier in the week that there are a handful of food companies worldwide that control all of the food basically that we eat. Maybe eight to ten companies worldwide control the food supply in the Western world, and there are the big companies like Nestle’s and General Foods and Archer Daniel Midland and Purdue Chicken and Tyson, just all kinds of big conglomerates that are price-fixing, just like the paint companies do.

4:05 I’m in the paint business and I gave a speech to the Ruatan Club in Wakefield, Virginia Monday night. I mentioned a little-known fact about automotive paint to everyone. I shared that the closest business to automotive paint in America today is the pharmaceutical drug business. Although unlike house paint that you may go to your Lowe’s or Home Depot or Sherwin-Williams store for or wherever you are going to buy it, the product is marked up maybe five, six, even seven times from cost to the end user. Automotive paint is such a monopoly-controlled business by the big five that they make 40, 50, 60 times their raw material cost when they sell you a gallon of paint.

A gallon of house paint might cost ten dollars a gallon to make however it sells for maybe 50. A gallon of automotive paint, like clear coat for example, probably costs them ten to twelve dollars a gallon but it ends up selling for 400 to 500 dollars a gallon to the body shop. It’s not even the retail price, and that kind of big markup is very reasonable to understand, and that is the monopoly that the big five paint companies have over the market; it should be broken up worldwide.

5:55 Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. I got into the automotive paint business in January of 1980, and at the time there were something like 116 American paint manufacturers producing automotive paint. Paint companies that you have never heard of today.  Zach Lack and American Lacquers that I worked for, and the big five that are still in existence had a 25% market share. Now we’re in, I guess the last figure I saw was in 2020. There are 16 total paint companies in the United States that truly make paint. A lot of people claim they’re the manufacturer, but they really have somebody tolling it for them, and they’re not the manufacturer that’s really making the product.

There is so much money to be made that you can have two or three different middlemen, and everybody will make money along the way! AND, it will still be cheaper than the big guys! Of the 16 paint companies, the big five have a 99% market share of about a 50 billion dollar a year business. 99% market share! The 11 other paint companies out there in America are all fighting for that 1%. Now 1% of 50 billion is still a lot of money, and so everybody can do well. We might sell a gallon of paint, a clear coat for example, without the hardener, for say $200, with the hardener being $278 for something that’s every bit as good as what you’re going to buy from one of the big five. The big five by the way that sells it with the hardener for $750.

That’s the kind of market I’m in, and they actually want the EPA and OSHA to have all these regulations, believe it or not, to keep their prices up, and to make sure, because they can afford to comply to all these OSHA regulations and EPA regulation. I’m sure they also bribe many of these people. The corruption in the United States government is so big it’s unbelievable, and they know little guys like us have a hard time complying, and that was the whole purpose, is to get us out of business. 

7:25 I could sell my business tomorrow. I have kids and grandkids that I want to have the business. It’s named after my wife Tammy. That’s why it’s called Tamco. I always joke to people that it’s not called Bobco. I want that brand to say Tamco as long as I’m alive, and hopefully long after I’m dead, and if I sold out to one of the big five tomorrow, I’d make a lot of money. Of course, they would shut me down the day after tomorrow. They would shut down the brand. They don’t even want my business. They just want me out of business, so they can raise their price another 10-15 percent for nothing, and that’s called a monopoly. Something that Teddy Roosevelt broke up, and we’re all paying the price for that.

A lot of the car insurance that we are paying these high rates for is because when you have an accident, they’re going to pay a lot of money, and a lot of that money is going to the paint companies that are overcharging for their paint. That’s the plain truth, and so we have to tackle inflation, and before I get into the next subject here on the Elon Musk looking for fraud in government, and I’m going to give a warning here, there are certain ways I believe instantly we can help with inflation.

8:32 I’ll give you an example. Gasoline. Do you realize that California has its own special blend? North Carolina has its own special blend. New York, Connecticut, and other liberal states, they mandate a special blend. The President of the United States, along with the Congress, because Congress now after the Chevron decision from the Supreme Court, which basically outlawed EPA and OSHA making regulations that the Congress did not approve, which is great news for American consumers, by the way, that it is important to realize that Congress could pass a law mandating that all 50 states burn the same gasoline, that we don’t make a special gas for New York, or for California, or for North Carolina, which adds anywhere from what I’ve read from 35 to 50 cents a gallon on a on a price of gas in these states because of the blend. If the gas refineries could have the same formula and didn’t have to make special blends, everybody would see a probably a 40, 50, maybe even more cent reduction than the price of gas. But that’s only one step lowering the price of gas.

The other way you lower the price of gas is you get ethanol out of gas. Many people do not know this, but ethanol actually reduces gas mileage. It’s an inefficient fuel. Let’s keep corn feeding poor people around the world, and let’s keep it out of our gasoline supply. If you use a non-ethanol gas blend, you will get about 10% better gas mileage. So there’s another 10% you would save on how much money you spend a month on gas. But there’s even something beyond that. As a paint person and a chemical person, I know that if you take a product that we use in paint called Solve-It 100, and I had a problem one time with Solve-It 100, and only two companies that I know of make it, and that’s Shell and Exxon. They’re great big refineries for solvents for the paint company.

9:21 When I had a problem with Solve-It 100 in Isocyanate Hardener, I asked the people, you know, you gave me bad Solve-It 100. It had color to it, and it was bad, and they were trying to say, oh no, you aren’t supposed to put Solve-It 100 in hardener. It’s only really made by us for a gas octane boost. Hmm. Well, they were wrong about that. You can buy Isocyanate Hardener with Solve-It 100. They were just trying to get out of a $25,000 claim, and that’s all that was about. So, your big companies, especially your Solve-It companies, lie like a dog. When I heard that, I started putting a gallon of S-100 into my tank. At the time, I was driving a CRV that had an 18-gallon tank, I believe it did, and I filled it up with regular gasoline after that. At the time, Sunoco had no ethanol in their gasoline, and my gas mileage went from around the city, everywhere I went with that little CRV, from about 24 miles to the gallon to over 30. 31, actually. About a 25% increase in gas. 

I had a friend of mine who had a Dodge Ram that only got 12 miles to the gallon. And I told him, put a couple gallons in. You have a 30-gallon tank, put a couple gallons in, see what you get. He goes back and forth to Florida all the time. He came back and said, well, I really didn’t get 25%, you know. I only got average 16 miles to the gallon instead of 12. I said, that’s a 25% increase. And so you can blend gas that does not hurt your motor, actually helps your motor, and it keeps it cleaner, and you can blend gas to get a greater gas mileage.You also, which I did a program many months ago, you can also make sure all stoplights are synchronized, that people don’t spend all of their gas money sitting at a parked position at a stoplight, waiting for it to turn green. 

11:34 There was a study back in 2000, and I believe one or two during the first second, second, the first part of the second Gulf War, I should say, that 30% to 35% of all gas consumed in the United States are consumed at a red light. Just by synchronizing red lights to where you go a certain mile an hour, 30, 35, whatever the sign would say, you would never stop. This was the case in Torrington, Connecticut, back in 1962, when I was seven years old, there was a sign, go 35 miles an hour, and you will never stop at a stoplight. We never did, and we would, my father would drive through Torrington at 35 miles an hour. There were no computers back then, and they could do it then. Now we have all these computers, and we have these stoplights designed to keep stopping you. Have you ever noticed you go through a city, and every light will always get you, no matter what you do? 

Sometimes you have to speed in order to beat the lights, and they have that plan so they can write your tickets and make money that way. The whole system is corrupt.

I just showed you three ways that gasoline consumption and cost could go down, probably by 50%. Then if we get oil back to where it belongs, at 25 to 30 dollars a barrel, which I do think Donald Trump is going to be able to do, then you’re going to have, in my opinion, gas so low that the American economy would burst asunder because of the fact people would have so much discretionary spending that they’re not spending with gas, and of course when all the fuel prices go down, so do your food prices, so does everything you buy. Why? Because everything you buy travels 2,000 miles, and it has to go by rail or truck. And it costs money to put the fuel in there. If you could increase fuel consumption, decrease fuel costs, you could set an economy in America going like you can’t believe. So that’s my whole take on the gasoline situation. That’s just one part of it. That is the biggest part of inflation, by the way. Get gas back down to a buck fifty a gallon, and your inflation is gone. Gone.

President Trump needs to worry about that and not worry about Gaza. 

13:21 Here’s another problem that I have with what’s going on with the Trump administration right now, and they’re going to have to get their message right, because there’s a lot of lying going on. I don’t want to sound like a freaking Democrat here, because I’m not, but I want to give you, I want to play something for you and see if this does not bother you. If this does not bother you, I don’t know what’s going to. But this was on News Nation, and now maybe these facts are going to turn out to be wrong, but I don’t think they’re going to be. You know, it’s funny, before, this just played Thursday night which was way after I talked to my wife Tammy about this. Monday morning, I was talking to Tammy at breakfast, and I get up really early in the morning. I was drinking my breakfast shake. She makes me a fruit shake. She uses the Ninja, and she blends a lot of frozen fruit, and that’s all I have for breakfast with my coffee.  I was mentioning to her, I had a problem with this idea, there was a 369-year-old person collecting Social Security, because I actually do not believe that story. I don’t believe there are millions collecting Social Security that died over 150 years ago. I just didn’t believe that, and I kind of thought there’s maybe some BS going on with some of the numbers that’s coming out of Elon Musk’s mouth…and I don’t think that’s very healthy if it turns out to be all a lie, and then therefore the Democrats will use this to really promote big spending again.

Let me play this from NewsNation and think about what is being said here. Now on whether there are really a bunch of dead people receiving Social Security benefits, something you probably heard about, right, from Elon Musk and the president. So, 100 years old. Elon says Doge uncovered millions of people over the age of 100 in the Social Security database, saying that there are a ton of vampires collecting benefits, right? Now, it is true that the agency struggles with incomplete death records in its system.It’s also true, there’s only a small number of people in the US who are actually over 100 years old. That number is about 90,000 at the moment, as far as we know. At the same time, all this does not mean necessarily that there’s like millions and millions of people collecting checks.In fact, they did an audit on this. There was an audit done by the inspector general, and they found that almost none, okay, of the 18 million people over the age of 100 actually got benefits. Almost none.That’s what the audit found. Instead, what they found is that there were 44,000 people collecting checks. So, that’s where almost none comes from, because it’s percentage-wise.It’s a problem, yes, but a much smaller one that has been indicated here. Again, according to that audit. There was another audit. There was another audit done back in 2021, found Social Security gave out $298 million worth of payments to 24,000 people who had died, and the agency only recovered, they say, $84 million at that point. Just last month, they said they regained another $31 million that they’d given out to dead people, okay, and they expect total to be $215 million in expected recovery by the year 2026. Bottom line, yeah, it happens sometimes, but not even close to as often as has been suggested, according to the audit. Developing story now. 

16:32 Developing story now. So, you have to sit there and say, what am I being told, and am I being told the truth, and why am I not being told the truth, because those statistics that that man just read match what was in my head. I was talking to my wife about that Monday morning, sitting back, and I’m a numbers guy. I know the cost of every pound of every product I buy, and there’s probably over 150 ingredients I buy, and I can, if 70, damn near 70 years old, I know my facts and figures, and I know my numbers, and the numbers in my head just did not add up. They just did not add up at all. And I know how hard it is for certain people to collect their Social Security as it is. So, we then have to start asking ourselves what is being told that is true.

Like yesterday, we ran a story on our Thursday edition, on the main page, about $4.7 trillion, according to Elon Musk, in IRS Treasury Department spending, was not even itemized. An example of this is like, you have $10 million in a business worth of expenses, and you itemize raw material as $1 million, cost of the rents and labor $2 million, miscellaneous $11 million. That wouldn’t fly very far, that you would be audited so damn fast. My accountant gets mad if my miscellaneous is more than $300 a year. I mean, we have a pretty damn big company. And so, that’s what the $4.7 trillion would mean. Now, this could be true, and I’ll tell you why. Back in 2008 or 2009, with the end of the Bush administration, the second Bush administration, they did an audit of the military. Who could not account for $7 trillion over 20 years of spending? And at the time, the debt was $14 trillion, and I was writing an article in the Plain Truth saying, how in the world can we not account for $7 trillion in military spending and call it a rounding error for half the national debt? So, yeah, I’m sure there is so much fraud and corruption, and I can even give you that with military buying.

We were making paint for the military, for the Navy, for the Coast Guard, with the Tamco label. We’re a woman-owned business. It is Tamco, Tammy’s company. We were at times underbidding the big guys, sometimes on contracts. There was one contract that was, we bid $135,000 for a contract that was won by a major company, and I won’t mention the name, they cover the earth in their logo, and it was won by a 200, their lowest bid was $210,000. They were $80,000 or $85,000 more than a minority women-owned business who were supposed to be even given special consideration by the military and can even be more money than the lowest bid. We were $80,000, $85,000 cheaper, and yet the person in charge of the purchasing agent, the purchasing agent for the Navy, said he didn’t think we could do the job. That is against the law. That is against the policies of the Navy exchange for buying, but that’s what happened.

18:21 You don’t think that man, you know, took trips maybe all over the world, paid for by this big cover-the-earth paint company. You don’t think there’s fraud going on? These big five paint companies, I didn’t mention this earlier, but the big five paint companies in 2003 pleaded guilty, or no contest, to a federal government charge of price fixing automotive paint, and they were told that they overcharged people by, oh, I think it was $500 million that they price-fixed in a five-year period. $500 million. You know what the total fine was? $53 million. Now, would you steal $500 million if you only had to pay $53 million of it back? I think most people would. Most honest people probably would. This is the corruption that I do hope Elon Musk can uncover, and I hope we’re not going to BS people about how much we’re finding when it is not true. We have to stick with the facts. We have to make sure the facts are real, because the Democrats and the liberals will tear this apart. This is not Nazi Germany. We don’t control the press. We don’t control the free speech of Americans and of the press.

We have to make sure that everything that comes out of the mouth of this DOGE Committee is provable and not rumors that turn out to be false, because it will destroy this presidency. We cannot, as small businesspeople and American citizens trying to make this country great again, we cannot afford to have a failed presidency based on hubris, based on arrogance, and based on and based on lies. 

20:44 That’s all I’m going to say, and I do hope that President Trump realizes we need to forget about Gaza. We need to forget about Ukraine. We need to forget about foreign aid. There, we save a lot of money alone, and we need to take care of American people first. That’s it. Lower the cost of gas, and everything else will fall. Simple economics. 

I’ll be right back after this message about theplaintruth.com. This is Bob Barney talking about theplaintruth.com and theplaintruthtoday.com, two different websites that you can go to, all from theplaintruth.com, by the way, and see what today’s news is, what everyone’s talking about, and what it may mean in God’s prophecies, and for your future, and what it means for your family. So, every day, go to theplaintruth.com, and you can go to our message board, our Your Health Today, or these podcasts. We appreciate all your support. Again, this is Bob Barney saying thank you for listening.

22:22 Well, tomorrow is, again, another Sabbath day. We always mention that at the end of the Friday wrap-up. Tomorrow’s show is going to be a video on the Sabbath day itself, and about how it was changed by none other than the Catholic Church some 400 years or more after Christ walked this earth. You’re going to find out why it changed, and you’re going to see what Catholic leaders and theologians in the past admitted to changing the Sabbath day to Sunday. They had absolutely no biblical right to do so. They claimed authority because they claimed who the Pope is, their Christ on earth, that had the authority to do so.

So, it’s going to be a very informative video for those people still wondering about Saturday, Sunday, Sabbath day, Sunday worship, and it is not put on by the plain truth at all. It is not one of our videos, and so we cannot say that every content on the website that you’re going to be led to from the plain truth today Sabbath morning broadcast is going to be all accurate, but they are what I saw of that broadcast about the changing of Saturday or the Sabbath day into Sunday by the Catholic Church and by the Pope and by Constantine, the Emperor of Rome, who supposedly became a Christian when he saw a flaming cross before a battle. I doubt it. And you will see the real plain truth about the Sabbath day and how it is still enforced today, and if you really want to please God, you have to follow what God tells you to do, and one of the top ten things that God tells you to do is observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy. It’s not for the Jews. It’s not even for the people of Israel. Adam and Eve were the forerunners of all human beings alive today, and it was made for them. So therefore, it is made for all of their offspring, including you and me.

So that’s tomorrow morning at 711 a.m. on The Plain Truth Today.

25:21 You can get it from the plain truth.com, and I think you’ll enjoy the video. It’s very informative and tomorrow night, we always have some kind of a radio show, usually. Sometimes we put up a movie. Sometimes we put up a video. Sometimes I put up even like a Twilight Zone from the 1960s, but tomorrow again, it’s going to be another Radio Classic Mystery, and I like to listen to those. I listen to these almost every day now when I go to work. Of course, my work from my home is only about 15 minutes, so sometimes I have to take the slow route in order to listen to a 20-minute show, 22-minute show. They’re very, very fun to listen to. What people used to listen to 60, 70 years ago, when they didn’t have television to inculcate their mind with all kinds of video and audio and sensations. When you listen to a book or a story being read, your mind can imagine much more than what your eyes will see that some director wants you to see on a video. 

So, when you’re listening to a book and you’re listening to a short story, your mind has much more imagination than maybe the video that you’re watching when you watch a TV show or a movie, many times. And on Sunday, I have not yet decided what show I’m going to put on Sunday. Last week, I thought I did a Bill O’Reilly show. I try to do a more political show for Sunday, you know, like in the meet-the-press kind of spirit. Sometimes I change that up. .

I might do something about the FAA and all these air crash investigations. And if you’ve been following that string, it’s mainly been on the message board. We did put up a couple stories on the main page as well.

27:34 You’re going to see that many of these crashes all along have to do with pilot error, and especially in these commuter airlines, lack of experience of the pilots being challenged. And as Buddy Baker, the racer, used to say when he used to announce racing for NASCAR, the guy ran out of talent on the fourth corner. Sometimes you see some of these younger pilots making difficult landings, like what happened in Toronto, just run out of experience trying to land that plane. That plane came down at a very high rate of speed, turns out it came down twice the speed that it should have, and we had a Megyn Kelly show on that the other night on the Plain Truth Today broadcast. I think it was the 7-11 show Wednesday, I believe. A pilot explained that they were supposed to come down much slower.

Then it turned out we had a story yesterday by my brother-in-law, Joe Kovacs, about, it was an all-female crew, and not trying to disparage female crews, but I am a little sick and tired of all this DEI BS and people’s safety being compromised just because the government wants to feel good about itself. It does this by promoting people into jobs they simply cannot do because they’re a transgender, or they’re a woman, or they’re black, or they’re Chicano, you name it. It’s just not what we should have when it comes to public safety. Merit-based performance is all we should be worried about. Our government is supposed to be colorblind, and until we realize that we are not to judge people based on their lack of skill, but only on their skill, then we’re going to have these kinds of accidents, and we’re going to have tragic deaths because of it.

29:01 Well, like I said, the weekend’s approaching. I hope everyone has a safe and happy weekend. It’s going to be very cold where I’m at, and it’s going to be cold a lot of places in the country. We had a lot of snow in Virginia the other which we barely ever get any big snowstorms, and I hope everyone stays safe. I hope everyone does follow the Sabbath tomorrow, or at least watch that program on the Sabbath, and maybe make an informed decision for you and your family of what day you should think about God.

Until Monday, when we come back with a new broadcast by me or by other people as well, this is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today, saying thank you for listening. I do appreciate you, and again, have a good weekend. Bye-bye.