Friday’s Wrap-Up with Bob: August 29, 2025 (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S MIDDAY BROADCAST: Friday’s Wrap-Up with Bob: August 29, 2025

Hello, Bob Barney for the Plain Truth Today, Friday wrap-up, Friday again. Seems in my life I have too many Fridays, but actually Friday’s a good time because you wind down for the week. But I want to get into what was going on this week, this past week, and some of the ideas and what we’re going to have tomorrow on the Sabbath day. We always have a Sabbath day show in the morning and a story of some sort at 7 11 p.m. And then the Sunday show I do not have done yet. Just a little disclaimer about this show. I did this show actually Thursday, not Friday.

I have, you know, a real job that I have to do for the Tamco Paint Company, which my wife and I own. And tomorrow, which is Friday, when you’re going to listen to this. So today I’m busy preparing for a large sale that my company is going to have for Labor Day weekend. It’s always a big sale for us, and right now we need all the sales we can get, and so does everybody in the business. The economy, going into this now, the economy, contrary to what you’re listening to on TV, contrary to what all these business shows want to tell you, the economy is not doing as well as people are being told it is. And so when you’re a supplier, you’re a businessman, or you’re just a consumer, and you think that you’re the only one having problems with this economy, that everybody else must be doing good, because that’s what you hear from this administration.

That’s what you hear from the Republicans. Of course, no one believes what the Democrats say or MSNBC says. Of course, they’re always going to down the economy when a Republican is in charge, especially when Donald Trump’s in charge. But the plain truth is the economy is not coming along. It’s a lie that the Republicans are trying to say everything is going great, there’s no unemployment, there’s no inflation. Of course there’s inflation. First of all, I’m always amazed when people, after they have had about a 25-35% inflation, and then they say, well, it’s only 3% inflation now. No, because since 2020, or you could say 2021 when Joe Biden took effect, we had about a 25-30% inflation. Now we’re at a 33% total inflation since 2021.What we should have been seeing with this administration and doing the things that it did in the last time they were in power in 2017, 18, 19, and 20, what we should have seen was a deflation, a structured deflation, not something bad for the economy, but prices should have went down. Eggs should have went back down to 99 cents a dozen. You’re not finding eggs for 99 cents a dozen. That’s what they were in 2021. And so the idea that this economy is doing good when everything is already still artificially inflated simply does not understand the consumer, the middle class, the lower middle class, and the lower-class people, financially I’m talking about, because they are struggling. I have employees, I have people that I know, we have customers, and they’re telling us the same thing, that everybody is struggling.

You can’t make it on the salaries that are being paid today with the prices that are stuck at these high ends. Gas is still about $3 a gallon. Gas should be no more than $2.50, $2.40 right now. If we had a booming economy, we were drilling like we should be drilling, and we were producing the amount of oil we should be producing, and we had our friends and allies like the people in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and the North Sea, our Gulf states offshore, Alaska. Alaska could supply oil in big supply for 400 years is what I’ve been told, what I’ve read. And the thing is, is I think people forget, I’ve watched the price of oil all the time because my business depends on the price of oil. When the price of oil is under $60, $50, then my business can keep prices low for the consumer. I remember a day, and I think many people are going to hear this and they’re going to say, that never happened. But there was a day in 2020, when Donald Trump was still president, that a barrel of oil sold for, do you remember what it sold for? Negative $38 a barrel, which means if you had a barrel of oil and you wanted somebody to buy that barrel, you had to pay them $38 to take it off your hands. That’s how much oil we had. Now I know people are going to say, well, that was during COVID and the economy was really stalled. Maybe so.

But I remember in 2017, the average price of a barrel of oil was about $38 to $40. By 2018, and we were booming in 2018, the price of oil was down to $29, $30 a barrel. I was buying solvents and paint ingredients, resins and things like that for record low prices that I could not remember. For example, the price of xylene, toluene, MAK solvents that we use in the paint industry. I could not remember a time in 25 years at the time, in 25 years of manufacturing, I could not recall a time that xylene, toluene, these solvents were as low as they were. We were paying 40 cents a pound for xylene. I remember in the late 1980s, xylene was 50, 60 cents a pound when the dollar was stronger. That’s how cheap things became under Donald Trump’s first administration. And what people don’t realize, and I don’t think they remember because I think too many of us have too short of a memory, prices was actually declining. I actually lowered paint prices to my consumers every single year from 2017 to 2019. I did not have to have a price increase until 2021, and that was a modest price increase. And then in 2022, 2023, 2024, and not yet in 2025, but probably by the end of 2025, we’ll have yearly price increases. My competition has had two to three price increases since 2021 every single year to the tune of about 45 percent. So, if you have an accident with your car and you go to a body shop and you look at the price on your estimate that the paint is going to be part of that job, it’s going to be up 40, 50 percent that your insurance has to pay or your deductible has to pay. And if you have a high deductible, you’re going to pay a lot more money out of your pocket because for just a small fender bender, because the price of paint materials has gone sky high.

And a lot of this pricing is going to even go higher. And I’ve been saying about this is because of the tariffs, because when a paint company, which maybe makes six to 10 percent net profit off sales, when a paint company has to face 25, 35, 50 or 150 percent tariffs on all the raw materials we have to buy, then what you have to do is you got to raise it to the end user. So you, the consumer, are going to pay these tariffs. China is not paying these tariffs, like Donald Trump tries to say. No country pays the tariff. The American public, who pays for everything in this world, is paying for the tariff. And it’s not fair for people who expected Donald Trump and the Republican Party to be the party for the little guy, not for the tech billionaires, which they have become. And so we see this inflation stickiness not going away. That is one of the reasons. And I’m not going to say the Fed, and we’re getting into that in the next segment here. I’m not going to say the Fed isn’t political because they are. When they had the interest rate reduction right, what, three weeks before last year’s election, that was definitely a political move that Powell and people who do not like Donald Trump wanted to make sure he couldn’t become president. That’s what that was. And if anybody says it wasn’t, they’re full of it. But at the same time, the Fed is still basically independent from the presidency.

I know Ronald Reagan talked against the Fed, and he had Volcker, his chair, who had very harsh, strong interest rate increases to get that inflation under control. And many times Ronald Reagan did not agree with it, but he accepted whatever Volcker did. And at the end, I think most historians looking back will say that Volcker was more right than any other Fed chairman for getting us out of such a bad recession that we had back in 1979, 80, 81, all the way up to 83.The first two years under Ronald Reagan, he really struggled to get out of the Jimmy Carter malaise. But remember one thing about Ronald Reagan. He did not have a Republican Congress. Hè did not have a Republican Senate. He did not have Fox News. He did not have Rush Limbaugh. Hè did not have talk radio on his side. Ronald Reagan faced the Russians alone, faced Europe and Japan’s high tariffs alone, and he faced the Jimmy Carter destruction of our economy, stagflation alone. He had to do it by his own faculties. He had to convince the Americans by going on TV many times in a very precise way, explaining what had to be done. And because he did so, not bombastically like Donald Trump’s doing, people felt comfortable listening to him, and they were willing to give him a chance. Now we go forward. We go to Donald Trump’s second administration. All he wants to do is attack people’s character. He wants to try to fire people that he has no right to fire.

He is trying to destroy small businesses in America with not only high tariffs, but loss of employees because many employees, you might not like this mega people, but many employees that are doing work that you’re buying their goods, you go to the market, you buy produce, you buy lettuce, you buy cucumbers, you buy apples, you buy grapefruit like everybody else, and you may say, I don’t want any illegal over here picking my crops. I’ll do it myself. Well, you’re not going to do it yourself. Right now, I know for a fact from talking to people in my industry that thousands of acres of produce is rotting in the field in California and in Arizona, Texas, and Florida because they cannot get people to show up to pick these crops, even those people who are here legally because they are hearing horror stories. If they’re Hispanic, they’re hearing horror stories of citizens of Hispanic descent being arrested, taken away to these concentration camps before if they’re lucky, and we don’t know how many people have not been lucky, could get a lawyer to prove that they were an American citizen in the first place. They were arrested and being an American citizen did not help them to stay out of these concentration camps. This is something that I am afraid that too many Americans just are not aware of because they’re not listening to the real news, and I am not some flaming liberal Democrat here. I am not. I’m as conservative.

I am more conservative than Donald Trump will ever be. I am more conservative than Genghis Khan for pity’s sakes. I believe that the government’s role is to not get involved in businesses, not get involved in trying to buy businesses as Donald Trump is doing with intel, and especially be very careful and only have targeted tariffs to fight unfair enemy action by states like Japan did under Ronald Reagan or what Europe did in certain cases to go after these countries, targeting them with specific tariffs to get them to change their policies, but to tariff the entire world and think that the American people are not going to foot that bill is either one of two things. Either it’s plain stupidity of the economy knowing that we’re in a global market, or worse yet, it’s absolutely just lying, and I have found, in my opinion, this administration has done nothing since they have taken over but lie. They fudge; they lie. We’re going into this, what’s her name, Lisa Cook, this Fed person that Donald Trump fired, and of course she’s still there because it’s going to be challenged in the courts, and I’m not sure of the situation here. I know some people are saying she wasn’t really aware that these contracts, and I bought a house twice in my life, and I will admit there’s a lot of paperwork, but I do believe that she lied and knowingly lied on this contract to say that she lived in that house. Now whether or not her husband or significant other could say he was living there and she was living in the other, and both are on the title, I’m not aware or any knowledge of if it’s legal or not. My point here is Donald Trump would not go searching for a crime, remember Stalin, show me the man and I’ll find the crime, and this is what he did.

He’s mad at the Fed for not lowering interest rates, and so he is going to use any means possible to remove the people that are in his way. Is he investigating the four or five Republicans on the board that maybe did the same thing with their taxes or their homeowners agreement contract? Is he investigating the people that agree with him? No, they get a pass, absolutely get a pass, and that is finding winners and losers and picking winners and losers, and that is not the job of this administration or any administration or any government. People are going to say to me, well, Bob, Biden did it to him. Yes, Biden did it to him, but didn’t we want to see an end to it? Didn’t Donald Trump say there would be an end to lawfare? There’s not been an end to lawfare. This John Bolton thing is a made-up story. John Bolton’s many things, and I am no John Bolton fan. He’s a war hawk. He’s actually a chicken hawk because he himself never went to fight a battle, but he wants to send every American soldier into every battle that you can find. I don’t like people like that, and Donald Trump shouldn’t have picked him for national security advisor back in the in the first administration, but he did. So now we’re going to investigate Bolton, and Donald Trump called him a scumbag, which is just a word no president should ever use, by the way. This is just not presidential, but he’s the one that picked the man. He’s the one that picked all the people that he now, he picked Jerome Powell. He picked Jerome Powell for the Fed. All the people he sits and trashes is the people he chose. So who’s the problem here? The man who he’s not happy with and he trashes, or the man who put him there in the first place? If I was a boss at a big company, and I kept picking people to run my companies and my divisions, and every one of them turned out to be as bad as Donald Trump claims his picks were being, then all it shows me is that Donald Trump shouldn’t be allowed to pick anybody because he can’t pick anything.

And we can find that in his own businesses. Many of his businesses were so mismanaged by the people he put there that they went bankrupt, and that’s the plain truth. When people don’t want to hear that today, mega people don’t want to hear that today, but it’s true. I have a very good friend. He’s in the same business I am. He’s in the same town that I am at, and we’re good friends. He makes paint. He’s done it for 60 some years. He’s 82 years old, but he talks about his brother who was a great big real estate investor and developer. He built a lot of part of West Richmond, Virginia, and at one time during the 1980s, he was much richer than Donald Trump, his brother, who has since died of cancer. But he remembers warning Wilmer when Wilmer was going to buy some stock in the Trump casino, in New Jersey. He remembers warning him. He says, oh, never invest anything Donald Trump does. He’s the biggest crook on the face of the earth. Everybody in the industry knows he’s a crook and don’t believe in him. That’s 40-year-old information, and that was the case back then for people that were in his business. Just a point of that. Now, does that bother me? Did that stop me from voting for him for three times when I had that information? No, because he had a track record with the first administration of doing good for small businesses.

Small businesses did great under the first Donald Trump administration, and I’m going to tell you right now, I don’t believe that the majority of small businesses today, when I say a small business, I’m talking about people that have under 50 employees. Probably most of them have under 15 or 10 employees, and I tell you right now, I don’t think that most of these small businesses are doing well at all. I don’t think so. I think most of them are hurting for business, and even if they are maintaining their sales volume, they’re doing so by massive sales to get people to buy. How many times do you buy from things online that every day now you’re getting some kind of sale from that company? Do you think they want to put things on sale every single day to get you to buy? Do you think that’s the right way to run a business? No, they’re doing this because their sales absolutely plummet when they don’t have a sale, and so they’re forced to keep doing sales. Now, some of these bigger companies, they’ve figured away how to do this. They raise their prices before the sale and then have a sale, so really, there is no sale because the American consumer has become quite ignorant when it comes to the word sale. There is a term a friend of mine told me a long time ago back in the 1980s that I think it’s funny. He said, my wife suffers from a really serious condition. It’s called biitis. When something’s on sale, she buys 10 of them, but we don’t use 10 of those in 5 years. Yeah, but they were on sale, and he termed that medical condition as biitis, and I thought it was really funny at the time, and at the time, that was a rare person. Many women suffered for it, I will admit, housewives, but today, everybody suffers from biitis. They see something on sale, they buy 5, 6, 7 of them because they think they’re getting a deal, and maybe in some cases, they are getting a deal, but at the same time, at what cost? If every business in America is making less and less profits, then who’s going to pay the taxes? I said this to a friend of mine who was in favor of the tariffs, by the way, because he was under the impression the Chinese were paying for them, and I said, well, in my condition, the Chinese ain’t paying for them. I’m paying these tariffs.

I’m the one paying them, and at one time, in one or two orders that I got in of raw materials, I paid 150% duty, and I ate it. I did not pass it off to the customer, and many of my products were sold below my cost. I lost a lot of money, so what happens when I did my income taxes for my four corporations? They all lost a lot of money because of the tariffs. Well, in one particular case, one of my taxes, and I won’t give the dollar amount, but one of my taxes from last year to this year, what I paid the government was down 84%. So if Donald Trump is making $300 million a month on tariffs, and he’s boasting that’s going to be all new money, that $300 million in tariffs is coming out of the profits of U.S. companies that are taking it off their taxes, and I can guarantee you that there is more than $300 million a month in less revenue coming from businesses that are losing money or barely breaking even. That is the plain truth. That is what’s happening, and nobody wants to talk about it, and everybody wants to believe we’re living in a good economy. I think we’re ready for a fall. I think the stock market is going to plummet when you have Nvidia, for meaning that you have, just to simplify things, you’ve got a company worth a million dollars, but you’re going to sell it for $40 million because your stock value is $40 million on a company that’s only worth a million dollars. Put that into the billions and the trillions, and then you’ve got Nvidia. So does that make sense? Does that make sense that that stock’s not going to fall and plummet to earth someday, and everybody with it is going to find themselves in trouble? Do you want to know if there’s inflation? Keep looking at the price of gold. This morning, which was Thursday, it’s a day early, this morning, gold was at $3,460.

I had predicted on this program in late winter, I think around March, that I believed gold was to hit $3,500 by December. At the time, gold was $2,800. And today, it’s only $40 away, in August still, from $3,500. That is inflation. That’s what it’s telling you. The inflation, gold has never gone up a dime. What you’re finding out when you see gold go up like that, your dollar is becoming weaker and weaker and weaker. And you just look at the reports. The dollar is getting weak. One of the results that’s happening there, if you don’t know this, is American money is leaving American stocks and going into Chinese stocks, which are having record years selling stocks to Americans and other investors in the American economy. They’re pulling their money out of the stock market. They’re pulling their money out of the American bonds. And they’re putting that money into Asian stocks, which are going up 15%, 20%, 25% right now a year. Are they going to crash and burn? Probably. But people are always losing money on the stocks in the short run. In the long run, people, if they keep the money there, usually make money. But if you don’t time it right, if you’re going to retire in the next year, and all of a sudden, your stock market crashes this October, and it goes down some 35%, and you had, let’s say, to make it easier, you had a million dollars. Now you’ve got $600,000 in your 401k.That’s going to affect your retirement, is it not? And so, yes, in the long run, you might still be in good shape with your 401k, if you look at the long run. But in the short run, you ain’t going to be able to retire. It’s that simple.

Well, this week, that’s mainly the thing. The Ukraine wars, it’s just a joke. Trump is just winging along, changing the story. The Jeffrey Epstein story with Donald Trump is another story that’s just being under the carpet. Nobody was even mentioning it for the most part, other than the plain truth, because there’s a scandal there, and nobody wants to talk about it. And many of the other real reports that we should be talking about, of wars and rumors and wars, the things that Jesus told us to watch in the news, are just being bypassed this week, and I’m not going to talk about them, because basically, nobody’s talking about them at all to get any information, other than I can tell you, there are going to be wars over the trade wars. The trade wars are going to lead to a world war, eventually, if they don’t end. Donald Trump’s economy is going to collapse, because what he’s doing is not economically sound. So, the four horsemen are riding really well right now. False religion, masquerading as Christianity, it’s all over the Trump administration. The people are so-called Christians that support Israel, no matter what Israel does. Israel’s people, God’s people, yeah, it’s the people of Judah. They’re not even the people of Israel, by the way, but they are killing civilians in Gaza. Do they have to? I don’t know. I’m not there, but I’m just pointing out that Christians who support Israel, no matter what Israel does, because they’re God’s chosen people, they don’t even realize that Christians are God’s chosen people. But anyway, we won’t even get there, but I’m going to get into what’s going on this weekend and on the plain truth, and tomorrow, we’re going to have a rebroadcast of mine about how I came to believe what I do. I had a few people talk to me about some issues, and I’m going to talk about one thing of that in a second, but I’m going to replay what I did in my birthday, which is how I came to believe in what I do, and I started out as a teenager, became an atheist, and really thought I had disproved the existence of God and all religions, and I thought I did, and I found out I was wrong. I think it’s an interesting story, and that’ll be tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow night’s story, short story, we’re back to short stories again, and we’re off to Westerns. Every Wednesday, remember, every Wednesday is going to be Western night. We had a really good Western show this last Wednesday, and it’s a really good one from Zane Gray Theater, but the story tomorrow night is by Shirley Jackson, I believe her name is, The Lottery, and it’s a suspenseful, futuristic type, 1984-ish type short story. I believe it’s only 17, 18 minutes long. It’s going to be one of the shorter ones that we have in that time slot, but it’s a very interesting story from a long time ago. I read it when I was in high school, and it was, I think, pretty old even then, but it is a picture of where we’re coming to, and I don’t even, I’ll even say even under the Trump world, I think we’re coming to this world of big government that’s going to be our big enemy. All these things, buying into Intel and buying other companies that he says he’s going to do, all of this is going to lead to an economic disaster in the years to come, and it’s, I go back, it’s like the Patriot Act. Who gave us the Patriot Act? Was it Barack Obama? Was it Joe Biden? No, it was George Bush, King George Bush II, who brought us the Patriot Act, along with all the Republicans in the Congress and all the Republicans in the Senate. That’s who gave us the Patriot Act. That has been used against American citizens, not against foreign terrorists. It’s been used against American citizens for the last 20 years, unconstitutionally, by the way. Who’s going to give us this new communism, Bernie Sanders communism? It’s not Bernie Sanders. It’s not even AOC. It’s Donald Trump, the new communist of America, who’s going to have American socialism replace American fascism. Doesn’t even make sense.

But anyway, that’s where we’re at. Sunday show, I haven’t picked yet. It’ll probably be something to do with this economy or the stocks or something like that, unless I find something about the Ukraine war. But right now, Russia is really attacking and kicking the bejesus out of Ukraine right now. But I believe that’s just going to make Europe stand up to the plate against Donald Trump and even support Ukraine more. I think Vladimir Putin is an idiot, and I think he is destroying himself and probably will eventually be assassinated or die pretty quickly in the whole scene. The problem we have today is too many of our leaders around the world are ignorant. They’re absolutely stupid people, including Donald Trump right now, that are getting us closer and closer to that world war that we do not want to see happening. But it’s going to happen, and I think it’s going to happen sooner or later.And it’s not going to be fun. It’s not going to be nice. So that’s the end of this week’s Friday wrap-up.I do appreciate everyone who is listening. I hope everyone has a very safe and blessed Sabbath day. And if you don’t know about the Sabbath day, check out ThePlainTruth.com. We have a lot of articles why you should be observing a Sabbath day and not Sunday worship, which is the Devil’s day. And it’s that simple. And you can go to your Bible and you can find every single verse about the Sabbath, and you can find out it’s never been done away with, and it’s never been changed to Sunday. But I hope everyone has a safe and blessed weekend.

Until Monday when I’ll be back, Bob Barney, thank you for listening. Bye-bye.