Congressman Brendan Boyle Calls out Trump for Economic Disaster

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3:26Ben Meiselas:Despite Donald Trump saying he's completely eliminated inflation, that couldn't be further from the truth. But that's not a shocker. He lies about everything. Inflation came in hot earlier in the day. We got the August numbers. Core inflation was 3.1 % year over year. And then inflation in general was up 2.9 % up significantly from the prior readings. When you start to look as well into some of the other kind of indicators, like the inflation of like coffee up 21 % since last August, audio equipment up 12 % since last August, living in dining room furniture, 10 % tools up 6 % jewelry and watches up 6 % women's dresses and men's pants up 6 % and 4 % toilet paper up 5%.

4:17Ben Meiselas:And then you go into all of your other groceries and it's up significantly. And this doesn't shouldn't come as a shock to most Americans. I mean, you go to a supermarket, you go out and about, and you know, things are significantly more expensive than they were last year, despite Donald Trump making posts like he did yesterday saying no inflation, exclamation point, exclamation point. Too late, must lower the rate big right now. Powell is a total disaster who doesn't have a clue. President DJT, and he's attacking the chairman of the Federal Reserve there, Jerome Powell, who Donald Trump himself appointed.

4:54Ben Meiselas:and those attacks further erode confidence in our markets where your independent central banker is under attack by your executive branch. That's what we see in what Trump would call third world countries. But who could have predicted this? Who could have said that we would be in this situation? I don't know, 16 Nobel laureates and or pretty much all the Nobel laureates in economics and former Vice President Kamala Harris during her debate with Trump, like literally predicted exactly where we would be right now, huh? Well, when you follow the data, wow. Here, play this clip.

5:26Brendan Boyle:What Goldman Sachs has said is that Donald Trump's plan would make the economy worse. Mine would strengthen the economy. What the Wharton School has said is Donald Trump's plan would actually explode the deficit. 16 Nobel laureates have described his economic plan as something that would increase inflation and by the middle of next year would invite a recession. You just have to look at where we are and where we stand on the issues. And I'd invite you to know that Donald Trump actually has no plan for you because he is more interested in defending himself than he is in looking out for you.

6:06Ben Meiselas:And now Donald Trump says, we're not going to use the real numbers. This is what he said the other day. The real numbers, they're coming 2027. So that's when he says things will start looking really good. 2027. Then you had Howard Lutnick moving the goalpost. He was on CNBC earlier in the morning and he said, it's going to happen in 2026, 2026. We're going to see an explosion of growth here. Play this clip. So now everybody knows their tariff, right? So now you're going to see factories can build in America at a scale that you have never seen before. Okay.

6:43Brendan Boyle:10, more than$10 trillion of factory builds coming. All right. And so there's huge amount of construction jobs. So I would say the first quarter of next year will be the best quarter of construction jobs this country's ever seen. And that's going to roll all the way through 26. So I think you're going to see GDP growth next year over 4%. You do 4%. 10 trillion over what period of time, Secretary?

7:08Ben Meiselas:Mr. Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States during his term. There's making stuff up. Donald Trump says he brought in$17 trillion. If you brought in$17 trillion, why'd you need to increase the debt ceiling by$5 trillion? Why are we right now confronting another government shutdown? If you brought in 17 trillion, everything should be great. Let's bring in the ranking member of the budget committee, Democratic Congress member, Brendan Boyle. Congress member Boyle, obviously bad economic data seems to be coming out every single day now. What seems to be even worse, though, is that the regime isn't acknowledging what's happening and they're just lying about the numbers and saying we're in a golden age and this is great when that's not a way to address the problem by pretending it doesn't exist.

7:58Ben Meiselas:What do you make of it?

7:59Brendan Boyle:Yeah, well, first, let me commend you. That was a great imitation of Howard Nudnick. Boy, the moment that guy opens his mouth, you know not to trust anything he says. So in many ways, he's the perfect spokesperson for Donald Trump. You know, former Vice President Kamala Harris, in that clip you showed of the debate last year, she was exactly right. She said recession by the middle of next year, which is now. Sure enough, what we're seeing, it's incredible how many job losses we're seeing, far more than we thought. And at the same time, costs are going up, not down. That is stagflation. That's what happened in the late 1970s when inflation was going up at the same time, joblessness was also going up.

8:50Brendan Boyle:And once that starts, it's actually very difficult to reverse the trend. So all of the data is pointing in the same direction. President Trump's response will probably be to fire yet another person at the Department of Labor, fire the folks who are keeping the accurate stats in order to cook the books. But the reality is, most people when they go to grocery stores, when they do their shopping, when they're on Amazon, or in Target, or any of the more commonly shopped at stores, they see with their own eyes that costs are going up, and it is specifically because of the policies of Donald Trump. Let's not forget, we were close to the target 2 % low inflation in the early part of this year.

9:40Brendan Boyle:Since then, though, we have seen inflation spike because of Donald Trump's economic policies. This is his economy, and he is driving us into a ditch.

9:50Ben Meiselas:You know, in the House Budget Committee, you see the budget, you see the money coming in, you know, the money going out. It's literally the job of the Budget Committee. And the power of the purse is the power of Congress. It's Article one, despite the fact that your Republican colleagues seem to not want to be a co-equal branch of government. So when Donald Trump is out there, though, and saying that he's brought in currently$17 trillion, that's what he says right now, and that he's ready to invest the$17 trillion right now and pour it into the economy. Yet your colleagues have to increase the debt ceiling by$5 trillion.

10:40Ben Meiselas:Why would you need to increase the debt ceiling by$5 trillion if someone's brought in more than 3.2x that amount? You do serious work, very serious work, and your colleagues on the Republican side are supposed to be doing serious work. So why is this behavior like some, and I wouldn't even want to offend middle school students involved in like mock government debates. But like, why are they cosplaying fake numbers of$17 trillion when it's not even$1 trillion? It's nothing, none of that's happened. It's just, it's all a lie.

11:20Brendan Boyle:Look, Donald Trump lies as easily as you and I breathe. It's such a spectacular lie, though,$17 trillion, just to give people an idea, because I know sometimes, you know, numbers float around and they're so mind-bogglingly large, it's sometimes hard for people who don't do this day in and day out to keep track. So$17 trillion is approximately the size of the entire U.S. GDP. So it would be roughly three times the size of the entire federal budget, everything we spend on per year. So the idea that suddenly there was this surge of$17 trillion is not just a lie or an exaggeration. It is so laughably false.

12:08Brendan Boyle:But the reality is Donald Trump knows he won't be called on it by Republican members of Congress because they're so afraid of him, because they are petrified of one tweet from Donald Trump causing them to lose a primary. That's why he's able to get away with it. That's why under Republican control, the House of Representatives has ceased to be a co-equal branch of government. It is absolutely remarkable, with maybe only one or two exceptions, the way every single House Republican and most Senate Republicans fall in line like robots. They care more about pleasing the toddler in the Oval Office than they care about actually bringing costs down for the American people?

12:55Ben Meiselas:We're once again on the precipice of a government shutdown. Republicans have not put forward cogent numbers. They've not put forward, they've not gone through the normal process in a diligent manner. I think they're more focused on their January 6th subcommittee or covering up the Epstein files for Donald Trump. And here we are again, just based on their sheer incompetence and their refusal to even negotiate or have conversations with Democrats on the edge of a budget shutdown. So where are we right now? What's the game plan? And how are we here after a disastrous budget bill passed? Like, how do we even get what?

13:42Ben Meiselas:Why would them, does it always seem like we get here every six months and it's like, oh, here we go again. We're on the verge of Armageddon. And it seems like every six months you and I have this, Jeff. It seems like it because we do.

13:54Brendan Boyle:It is every six months under Republican control that we're facing a government shutdown. And let's just be clear. Republicans control the House. Republicans control the Senate. Republicans control the White House. If there is a government shutdown, it is because Republicans want a government shutdown. And all the evidence so far is that they want a government shutdown. We are just, as you pointed out, only two to three weeks before government funding runs out and before we would be in a shutdown situation. And Republicans have yet to even sit down and negotiate with Democrats. So I judge people by their behavior.

14:32Brendan Boyle:I think it's pretty obvious they want a government shutdown. and I'm fully telling my staff and anyone who will listen to be prepared for this because actually there's a lot of work, ironically, you have to do to prepare for a government shutdown. It's pretty costly for the American people, huge inconveniences. So we're already just internally prepping to do the work we'll need to do over the next couple of weeks in order to properly prepare our own constituents back home. When's the day again?

15:04Ben Meiselas:Remind our viewers.

15:05Brendan Boyle:Yeah. So midnight, September 30th is when government funding runs out. The fiscal year, I don't know why in the world this ended up being the case because no other business or country I know has the kind of fiscal year we do. But for whatever reason, going way back, our fiscal year begins on October 1st and goes through the following September 30th. So we're under a continuing resolution right now. It expires at midnight on September 30th going into October 1st.

15:36Ben Meiselas:I mean, do you think that this is their just incompetence that rears its head? Someone like Maggie Mike Johnson and his crew spending all the time at what they call Club Rose Garden now and partying with Trump and doing all of that, that their eye is not on the ball? Or you think it's actually they are pushing for chaos? us. They think that they could be blaming Democrats. They know where the economy is headed right now under Trump. So they're looking for a scapegoat and they actually want to tank. They know the economy is tanking. So now they want the scapegoat and Trump saying, look, just shut it down.

16:17Ben Meiselas:Then I'm going to say, look, I was going to say, we were in a golden age. I reduced inflation, but then the Democrats shut it down and now they screwed me. It's their fault. Is it you think it's a setup?

16:31Brendan Boyle:You know, it's so first, I don't know. This is speculation. It's not like they've let me in on what their strategy is. If they have one, that's the other thing, because right now they have some fissures on their side where their members, you know, the two dozen or so who are the most vulnerable next year are pushing to try to claw back the devastating health care cuts. They just literally voted for. Yet at the same time, they have some hardline conservatives who were saying no. So it might be that they recognized there's going to be no way internally to deal with that. And so they Mike Johnson just wants to sit on his hands and punt.

17:12Brendan Boyle:That could be the situation or it could just be as simple as you described that Donald Trump knows that this economy is heavily moving in the wrong direction. He also knows by his own admission and has undertaken a rebrand of what he used to call the Big Beautiful Bill. It is so deeply unpopular with the American people by about a two to one margin that he's actually doing a rebrand that's going about as well as Cracker Barrel's rebrand went and trying to come up with a different name. And here I am, an elected official, do this for a living. I can't even remember the name of the new name they came up with with their bill.

17:55Brendan Boyle:That's how poorly it's catching on. So it would make sense if they want to distract people from the fact that the economy is declining and that they just passed the most unpopular major piece of legislation of our lifetime. One that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will cause 15 million people to lose their health care and health care costs for tens of millions more to go up. Before we go, you have access to more information than any of us have here.

18:31Ben Meiselas:Is there any other things that you're seeing that you think deserves more attention than it's getting right now that you want to bring to the attention of our viewers, whether it's regarding the budget or otherwise?

18:43Brendan Boyle:I have to say, I mean, the inflation spike is deeply worrying, especially because this may not be the peak of it. It actually could just be the very beginning of inflation going up dramatically. When again, we were so close toward the end of last year and beginning of this year to finally taming it. Obviously, the initial cause of this was the post-pandemic era when inflation spiked all around the world. We had finally gotten that back all the way, almost all the way to normal, only for Donald Trump to take over and actually ruin the situation. Another thing I would point out to people, which I think is getting lost a little bit when we talk about the 15 million people who are going to lose their health care, the Obama subsidies they go away effective October 1st so while everyone's focusing on the Medicaid cuts which it's important to focus on them they take effect next December so we have a year and a couple months meanwhile right now in a few weeks staring us in the face is the biggest cut to Obamacare in American history and that will be followed three months later come January 1 by devastating cuts to Medicare.

20:04Brendan Boyle:So there was a lot of conversation about Medicaid, again, appropriately so, but actually we have these huge cuts to Obamacare and huge cuts to Medicare coming first, one of them in a few weeks, the other in a few months. So I'm trying to remind people, even in the middle of all of this talk about whether or not the government will stay open, we are facing a major healthcare crisis in the United States. We need to address that. Republicans who caused it are absolutely adamantly opposed to it.

20:37Ben Meiselas:Congressman Brendan Boyle, thanks for joining us as always. All right. Thank you. And everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million subscribers. Want to stay plugged in? Become a subscriber to our sub stack at MidasPlus.com. You'll get daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski, ad-free episodes of our podcast, and more exclusive content only available at MidasPlus.com.

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21:39Brendan Boyle:With Superhuman, your team doesn't need to build new habits or spend hours on training. Superhuman is already there with the right context and ready before they even have to ask. When every person on your team works at their best, that's when your AI investments start to compound. See what Superhuman can do at superhuman.com. That's superhuman.com.