The State of the Economy is not looking Good by Bob Barney (Transcript)

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Is the economy getting better?

Hi, Bob Barney with The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, and contrary to some of the news you watch, the economy is really not getting that much better. A lot of the things that we all hoped that voted for Donald Trump, I know a lot of people did that did not, don’t care, and they want to see him fail, but a lot of the people who wanted to see him succeed, like myself, 10:25 based that on what we saw the last time around. And I’ll give you a little personal antidote here about just what I’m talking about. Tamco Paint, which is my wife and I’s business, is named after her. She’s Tammy, so it’s Tamco Paint. I always laugh and say it’s not called is named after her. She’s Tammy, so it’s Tamco Paint.

10:45I always laugh and say it’s not called Bobco, it’s called Tamco. She’s the boss. But we started in 1989 and it took me a long time before I could go full time doing Tamco. I had to work for other paint companies for many years in order to have insurance and to make a living, and a good living we did make. And finally in 2002, we went full time with Tamco, and it went quite well right away,

11:12and we were quite excited. They were the second King George Bush years, and the economy was pretty good, and we had a very good 2003, 2004, 2005, and we kept doing better and better and better and we really thought we were on the road to something. 2006, however, we did notice a very significant downturn on what I would say was the smaller

11:41businesses and at the time we were selling through distributors, something we don’t do today, and we were seeing all of these mom-and-pop distributors going away. This was under Bush. Now he had just lost the House to the Democrats again, so a lot of the Democrats had a lot more power and that probably hurt the economy somewhat. But we really started struggling from 2006, 2007, and into 2008, and believe you me, the last person I wanted to see president was Barack Obama, because I had a feeling and pretty

12:13much knew exactly what his policies were. He’s not that much different, contrary to what you’re being told today on the news, the fake news at that, than that guy that’s running for mayor up in New York City. They’re both communists. Barack Obama was a communist. He wasn’t just a social democrat.

12:31He was a communist. And most of the, in my opinion, most of the bad policies you saw under the Biden administration that really put us in the problems we’re in today, this is not all Donald Trump’s fault. He just can’t unbury himself what Biden dug a hole. But what Barack Obama did with his influence over the Biden administration,

12:54by his people running the entire inner workings of the Biden administration, Biden’s first term was Obama’s third term. And what we saw here in his third term was the true Barack Obama with all these communist type policies and anti-American and anti-American ally policies that Joe Biden did. But when we get to Donald Trump, we had a record of Donald Trump in 2017, 18, 19, and

13:2320. And the record was pretty good. I know we had COVID and I think Trump mishandled COVID quite terribly, and especially keeping Fossey in the position that he was in, and really pushing a vaccine that has harmed millions of people worldwide. But anyway, we have a record of Donald Trump’s business and his foreign affairs leadership in the first administration and it was very good and I got news for

13:49you. Tamco doubled sales every year under the first Donald Trump administration. We really absolutely came to life. Now some of that I have to give tribute to and credit to my daughter Tammy, also named after her mother, my oldest daughter. She decided in 2017 to really get involved in our company and she really did a great job promoting TAMCO on Facebook and Instagram and all the other social media

14:20where her face was known by about everybody and still is by the way, in the custom paint business. Now I wanted to do more than custom paint because that’s only, you know, you know, 3% of the total automotive paint business. I wanted to do more fleet, marine and things like that. But we kept growing and it stopped growing

14:41by the second year of the Biden administration. We did very well under COVID because frankly, most paint stores were shut down and we were an online store. And so people were kind of forced to buy from us because they could buy things from us

14:57and we would ship them and it had been two or three days. And they could stay at home and receive them there. And they didn’t have to worry about, you know, boycotts or quarantines or whatever that each state did. And so we did quite well, but we had a hard time the last two years of the

15:14Biden administration staying afloat, but we did stay afloat and the big difference between what we inherited with Biden and what we had with Barack Obama, because I’ll tell you the truth, Barack Obama darn near destroyed our business. And he destroyed many businesses of people I know. Many paint companies went out of business, many body shops sold to big conglomerates because of it. And many people in other businesses that I know from just acquaintance with racing and other things,

15:44a lot of people lost out under the Obama years and it’s something that the mainstream media just will not really tell you about anymore. They kind of look at the Obama years with nostalgia. Well, why do you think there was a Tea Party movement? There was a Tea Party movement because of what Obama was doing to middle-class businesses on Main Street.

16:09The Tea Party was not attended by people who were working for other people, for the most part. When we went to Washington, D.C. and we went with the Plain Truth signs and everything back in, I think 2010, when we went to Washington DC, when we talked to thousands and thousands of people that were at that event back then, they were all business owners, every single one of them.

16:36I didn’t talk to one guy that was an employee or lady that was an employee. And that is because that’s who Obama was destroying. Obama was destroying all of the middle of the road, middle-class businesses that keep America prosperous because without a strong middle-class, you cannot be prosperous. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say this again right now.

16:58You can study history, and I am an historian. One of my degrees are in history. I have three, but all bachelor’s. I’m not a doctor or a master’s or anything, but you can study history by the battle between the upper crust, the elite, the nobility, you could say, and the rising middle class in every culture, starting with ancient Egypt all the way through the times of the Bible and the times of the

17:28Romans and the times of the Middle Ages, because there was always a middle class that kept poverty at bay amongst most of the people. But whenever the rich had their way, they did away with the middle class. They wanted to, they didn’t want a baker making his own money. They wanted to own that bakery shop and make some baker work for them.

17:51They didn’t want a farmer farming for a profit and making a good living for he and his family. No, they wanted to own that farm and make that farmer either a slave, an indentured servant, or some kind of working slob, and that’s what the Middle Ages was all about. You had lords and you had serfs, you had

18:12nobody in between. There was not a very vibrant middle class. One of the reasons it’s called the Dark Ages is because 99% of Eastern and Western Europe lived in poverty and in disease, the great plague of the 1666 of all years, and all of the deaths and pestilences and wars that made more deaths and diseases that absolutely wiped out most of the families of Europe of the time. Every family during those middle-aged times knew people within their own family

18:50that died in war or disease or some unnatural thing, along with starvation in many cases. And this is what happens when the middle class is done away with. The middle class makes a living by providing things for the rich

19:06people as well as the poorer people at better prices than what a monopoly will allow the poor people to buy. The middle class is anti-monopoly, where the rich people, or the billionaires today, they want monopolies. They want to have no competition so they can charge whatever price they want to charge. And that has been a battle from time immemorial through the Bible and before the Bible was even written and in the times of Noah even, there was this push to force their middle class into the lower class

19:41and turn them into slaves or servants or peasants, as they’re called in the Middle Ages. And so what happened under the Biden administration was bad for us, but it did not do us almost in like the Obama administration for a very personal reason. We started Tamco on a shoestring. We didn’t have a lot of money to start it. So we were constantly running in debt. And when you run in debt and the interest rates go to 10, 12, 13% and 29% on credit cards,

10:13and we use a lot of credit cards then to buy things, and you find yourself in debt very quickly. And worse than that, you find yourself having these big interest payments you really after a, can’t afford. And it almost drove us to a bankruptcy.

10:27I can remember now the prayers that I did, and I did it on a personal private Message Board thing, that it’s private, nobody can read it. My wife hasn’t even read those prayers from 2009, 10, 11, 12 and all the prayers were very, very, just horrible in nature because I was so depressed and I saw everything

110:51going away. I was happy. I had daughters having children of their own. I became a grandparent during these times. Tammy became a grandmother. We were still doing well at first, but I got news for you. I would get up every single night, day after day, every single night,

11:11one, two o’clock in the morning with panic. How am I gonna pay this bill tomorrow? How am I gonna pay that bill? And that was my life under Barack Obama for seven years, seven to the eight years, that was my life. And I never forget, we

111:25were doing on average of online sales about three thousand, four thousand dollars a day, that was it. And the day after Donald Trump was elected, we did twenty seven thousand dollars. Think about that. And we had never done that in a day in our entire life. And so I realized then that there was going to be a change in everybody I talked to in the paint business. From other paint companies, to suppliers, to salespeople, and to the body shops

111:55themselves, and to people doing their own work but had another job. Many times we sell people who are painting their own vehicle, but they may be a plumber or a carpenter, or they may even be a doctor. We have, we’ve had a few doctors in our time and a dentist that I can think of that actually bought paint from us and in their spare time restored cars. And so you would talk to these people and everyone felt upbeat. Everybody said, I think things are going to change. And things did change and they changed to the good.

12:25Tamco doubled sales every year. 2017 was double 2016, 2018 was double 2017, double 2019 was double 2018, 2020 was double 2019 and even 2021, the first year and COVID under Biden, we still two and a half times our 2020 sales in 2021. And in 2022 was the first year that we were just even to the year before. We didn’t lose anything but we were just even with the year before. And 2023 and 2024 was a struggle to maintain sales. The reason that we weren’t in the trouble that we were under the Obama years was we had a lot of money saved up under the Trump years. I always said Donald Trump made us worth millions of dollars under his years.

13:20Unfortunately now, Donald Trump’s policies are going to make sure that he leaves us as broke as we got into it, if it continues the way it goes. And I got news for you. I talked to many people. Now I don’t talk to the people that I used to in owning body shops. My wife does more customer relations than I do.

113:39The poor lady, she gets up quite early in the morning and then she starts manning the phones by nine o’clock, 10 o’clock in the morning. And after the phone shut off at four o’clock in the afternoon, she’s home on our porch because we live in the middle of nowhere and we have very poor cell service

13:57and we have no phone service connectable to the house. So she’s got to sit on the porch, basically 360 days a year, and talk on the phone because you can’t do it inside the house. And so if it’s 110 degrees outside,

14:12you’re 110 degrees under that porch. If it’s 20 degrees, you’re sitting on a porch, bundled up 20 degrees with the little fireplace on the porch on. That is what she does.

14:24So she talks a lot more people than I do, but she’ll tell you the same thing I’m telling you right now. Everybody is worried that is owning a business or employing people that are not showing up to work. We talked to one guy, I told you this story before,

14:39he’s in Colorado, and he has all Hispanic workers. Even though every one of them have a green card and several are American citizens, none of them were showing up to work. Why? I said, well, if they got green cards, because they’ve heard stories or they know people who’ve been caught up in these ICE raids and deported without a trial, without being able to defend themselves, even though they had a green card. In several instances they know people who were born American citizens of Hispanic descent that were arrested and on the verge of being deported until people got involved

115:17and stopped it. So this has got even people who were American citizens not going to work at body shops. And I’m going to give you a

15:31primer about the money that a body man makes or a painter makes at a good body shop.315:35It’s one of the little known secrets in the

15:41in the world today of business and that is somebody without a not even necessarily a high school education

15:53if they have any skill as a body man or a painter can make anywhere from $75,000 to $125,000 a year working in a body shop. And some painters and body men make more than that. And I’ll tell you how that happens, just so a little side note here, is when you’re paid, let’s say the insurance company says to paint this fender, to fix it and paint this fender, we’re going to give you three hours. And so three hours to them is worth $100. Maybe that’s what $33 an hour.

16:15And but if they can do it in 45 minutes, they still make that $100. Do you see what I’m saying? So a good painter or a good body man can turn a hundred and forty to a hundred and fifty hours a week in a 40-hour week and that is a little-known secret. If more people got into this industry and I got news for you there are openings all over the United States. You can go to any town in the United States with a population above a 2,000 and you can get a job in a body shop

16:45if you have the skill to do body work or be a painter. If you are one, you can go to anywhere, name your price basically. I know painters and body men who get sign-up bonuses like a darn baseball or football player. Getting five, 10, $15,000 if they promise to stay

17:02for just two years. That’s how critical it is trying to find body men that pay that kind of money and we can’t fill those jobs. Why? As I tell my brother, he’s been out of the workforce now 15 years,

17:15but as I tell my brother, people in America just do not wanna work anymore. It’s not even like when you worked at the Nestle company. People that are American white people and most American blacks as well, simply wanna stay home and they wanna get a check

17:31from the government or from their parents or from somewhere, but they themselves do not wanna work. And if they wanna work, if they have this drive to go make a living, they wanna work in an air conditioned office behind a computer,

17:44not in an un-air-conditioned body shop or mechanic shop, even though they could make three times the money they’re gonna make coming out of college and being a computer operator and for basically a minimum wage today. That’s not the case if you’re a mechanic or a plumber, electrician or a body man. It’s just not the case. These people make very good money but if you look at most of them they’re over 40 years old. Most of them are over 50 years

18:14old because of the people who learned how to work with their hands and they understood they could live a great lifestyle that they would never been able to live going to college and they still are willing to work. I see this all the time. You go into a place and you see the people over 50 doing all the work and the younger people are sitting around talking. You see this all the time. America is in decline. America’s people are in decline, and I had a show about

18:43that a few months ago and it’s very sobering. We are following the prophecies that you find in the Bible concerning modern-day America and yes you can go in the Bible and you can find prophecies about modern-day America. I’ll give you a short one you can read in probably 45 minutes or less. Just go to your Bible and do an easy-to-read Bible like the Plain Truth Bible if you have it but if you don, just go to your Bible and do an easy to read Bible like the plain truth Bible if you have it, but if you don’t, just go to a living translation or new good  the new King James Version translation for a little better translation, but if you really just want to understand, the living Bible is very good. I think they call it the new living Bible today. And anyway, go to Amos, the Book of Amos. Last week we put on a show, like our Saturday night show, about the Book of Amos. It was like a short story explaining what Amos had to say. What most people don’t understand is

19:41Amos was a prophet for Israel and we are Israel and that prophecy was not for his day it was really for our day today and when you read that especially in the New Living Testament or the Living Bible and you listen to the words and every time you hear the word Israel just think of America and listen to what the warnings were what the people were like, and how closely we match what Amos was saying about a people who thought they knew their God and they they worshiped their

20:13God. They said God was never gonna let this their nation fall because they were God’s people, yet their hearts were not even in the same room with God’s, and God was disgusted with their holidays and God was disgusted with their holidays. He was disgusted with their Sunday worship and with their churches and their false pretenses of being a Christian or being godly, as it’s mentioned in Amos. And when you read it, you see what America has become. America

20:41has become self-centered, egotistical, greedy, yes the word is greedy, there’s a difference between making a rightful profit in what you do, like what capitalism is all about, and being a corporate greedy billionaire. I remember a story one time was told to me, I think it was Jay Paul Getty at the time, the richest man in the world, and some reporter said to him, I think it was J. Paul Getty, if I’m wrong, I apologize, but it’s one of them, but I’m positive, I’m pretty positive it was J.

21:13Paul Getty, and a reporter said, Mr. Getty, you’re the richest man with a smile, not much more, just a little bit more, just an inch more. And that’s how all these greedy people are. They never have enough and they don’t have a problem taking it from you even if you’re not getting by and your child is not even eating well or getting proper medical attention because that person is stealing your money. That is greed. That is not the capitalism that you can find in your Bible. You know Jesus was a capitalist. You get to the story

21:52when he gives the story about the three persons. One was given, you know, I’m gonna make this in dollars so you understand. One was given ten thousand, one was given five thousand, one was given $5,000, one was given $1,000, and he went away for a long trip. And when he came back, the guy he gave $10,000 to gave him $10,000 plus another $10,000 because he invested the money and made that. And Jesus said, you’re a great servant, and you’re gonna be in charge of more of my money than ever before. And the guy that did 5,000 came back with the five

22:25plus another five and said the same thing and Christ was happy with him. And he’s a capitalist, you can see that in the Bible. The Bible you read, you can see Jesus Christ talks about capitalism. And he said, great faithful servant you are.

22:37And then the guy that he gave $1,000 comes and he gives him that thousand dollars back. And he says, I know you’re a hard man and I was afraid of investing it and losing it. So I put it and I hid it in my basement. And here’s your thousand dollars back. And Jesus says to the man, you are a fool and a lazy person.

122:59Take the money from him and give it to the guy who’s got the most. And you notice he didn’t give it to the guy who had the 5,000, he gave it to the guy who made the 10,000, and threw him in the parable into the hellfire. And what is the message there? The message he says, you could have put at least in a bank and got me interest, and

123:20so you can understand that if you understand true capitalism, Christ and God is a capitalist, but they are not a greedy corporatist that will kill people to make a vaccine, for example, that they have test results that proves that it causes all kinds of deaths, maiming of people, loss of their eyesight, you name it. That’s what COVID-19 vaccines have done. And there has been all kinds of cases,

123:50but the greed factor is just they don’t care. You know, it’s what happened to the medical profession in general. You had doctors, when I was a kid, I got very sick when I was three years old and I darn near died. As a matter of fact, my mom had told me they thought I was a kid I got very sick when I was three years old and I down there died. As a matter of fact my mom and tells me they thought I

124:08was going to die. I had dehydration. It turns out that was 1958 and it was the flu epidemic nobody talks about. There was a rock and roll song about it and and people don’t even know that rock and roll song was about a flu that nobody even paid attention to. Many people died, many people got sick, but back then we didn’t have COVID-19 responses to every flu epidemic.

24:32We lived through them and tried to do what was best. Well, my doctor, Dr. Barish, stood by my side. I was three years old, by my crib, I guess you could say, in the hospital, day and night trying to keep me alive. And believe it or not, my father, who had by then working for the Nestle company and

24:52they made Maggie bouillon, and Dr. Bear said to him, I just can’t keep fluid down. He’s dehydrating and I can’t keep stuff in him. He needs more salt. And my father said, well, bullion, bullion cubes are nothing but salt. That’s what they are, salt and chicken flavoring.

25:10It’s the worst crap you could put in your body, but it saved yours truly’s life. They fed me, Dr. Barish, I’m willing to try anything, and they started feeding me lukewarm bullion cubes, you know, soaked in hot water, turned into a soup, you know, a broth,

25:28and they spoon fed it to me with all that sugar, salt, I should say, and lo and behold, in three days, I was not only gaining my weight back, I was getting better, and I survived the flu. I probably should have died, or maybe God was overlooking me. I I think in my life God has overlooked my life and that of my

25:50brothers. The doctor that I had, Dr. Barish, was a Jewish doctor who insisted I be circumcised and back then most kids were circumcised but he wanted to make sure of it and today so many Christians think you don’t have to be circumcised. Well, you don’t have to be circumcised to be a Christian to be converted, but any baby that is born should follow the laws of Moses and be circumcised because it’s also for your health and for the health of the

26:20little boy. People don’t want to hear that today but that’s the plain truth. But going on to this business stuff right now, I have quite a few things on the on the message board. U.S. dollar suffers worst start of the year since 1973. Home Depot founder warns of scary indicators in the U.S. markets. One of America’s most important companies slashes 20,000 jobs. That’s UPS, by the way. That is a marker.

126:47That is telling you something. Nux headline, Trump’s erratic policy shifts heightened European fears for gold stored in the United States. Do you know Europe wants their gold back out of Fort Knox? First time in 80 years, they’re talking about

127:02they want their gold back. We may not even have it, who knows? Retail sales fell almost 1% in May, worse than anyone expected. US job market shows a slowdown coming. You know, you hear good news,

27:17the stock markets keep going up for the time being, and that’s only because everybody’s just came to the conclusion that Trump’s just, you know, taco and he’s not gonna do anything. But people do not really see the underlying news where inflation went up, not core inflation, but gasoline and all these things, all the stuff Trump promised that he was able to correct in 2018. He cannot do now. And that is because of his talk of tariffs. That is because of his nonsense approach to business, how he’s

27:48beating up Chairman Powell of the Fed. I’m no believer in fan of the Fed, but I’ll tell you right now in a world economy, if, if the world sees that Donald Trump is controlling our Fed and our currency, I got news for you. The world’s not going be buying our debt. And one third of our debt is owned by foreigners.

28:08And a lot of that is owned by Japan, China, and Europe. People were going to war with tariffs. It’s stupid policy, it’s stupid economics, and it’s gonna catch up with us. But anyway, that’s the economic show for the week, I think. I’m not gonna get into that anymore, but I thought I should give you an update.

28:26The economy is not getting better. Things are not getting better, and they may be getting worse real soon if these ice raids keep sending our farm workers back to Mexico and wherever they came from, and no one picks the crops. I saw a report, I reported on it last week, that some $10 billion worth of crops were starting to rot in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. That’s going to just

28:49keep going and going and going. Because I got news for you, friends. Americans do not want to go out in 90, 100, and 110 degree heat and start picking cucumbers. And if you think there are Americans going to do that job, you better think again. You’re not in the real world.

This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth saying thank you for listening.

I appreciate you. Bye-bye.