Lee Elci: I want to thank Rich, who gave us some cool pictures of a couple of foxes. I mean the animal foxes. Not, women foxes.
Red is joining us right now, as he does each and every Wednesday at the same time, you can go to his website, The-Red-Line.com. His name is Red Jahncke. Red, good morning. How are you?
Red Jahncke: Hey good morning Lee. Why do you start out disappointing us? Foxes. And you say they’re the animals. You could wake us up with the alternative version.
Lee Elci: Well, I had to make sure people understood what I was talking about.
Red Jahncke: Your women audience. Yeah.
Lee Elci: Exactly. Good morning. How are you today?
Red Jahncke: I’m good.
Lee Elci: I would assume it’s late nights watching hockey. Someone emailed me early this morning. Christopher emailed me saying that you probably are flying high because Edmonton just keeps winning. Is that true?
Red Jahncke: Yeah. Edmonton won six in a row. They’re the comeback kids. If any team, it’s Edmonton. So they’re down I think three one going into the third. Corey Perry scores. It’s three-two. And then with a couple of minutes to go you know the star of the team and the league, Connor McDavid, scores to bring it even. And then everybody is getting up from their TV to go get popcorn for the OT. But, point four seconds. This playoff run has to be breaking records for buzzer beaters.
Lee Elci: Right. Well I mean how many how many teams are left.
Red Jahncke: It is eight teams.
Lee Elci: Well, it’s a lot of action, I gotta say. Like, I don’t watch a lot of hockey, but the hockey playoffs are really insane. So, somewhere along the line, I’ll jump into the deep end of the pool, onto the ice, analogy you want to use, but it’s good stuff.
All right, so let me ask you a couple of Trump related questions. He’s basically, touring the Mideast, as you had said, the Trump of Arabia tour. What are your thoughts on some of this stuff?
Red Jahncke: Yeah, modern day Lawrence of Arabia. He’s in Riyadh with MBS, and, celebrating to beat the band. He has defacto recognized the new regime in Syria, and he’s threatening Iran. I just read that they’ve had a fourth round of talks that have gone nowhere. Right. So, I have no extra insight on what that means. He’s got the deal with the Houthis: If you don’t target our ships, we won’t blast you to kingdom come. And of course, Israel is upset because there’s no mention of the Houthis having to withhold fire on on Israel. He’s gone all in, in Arabia.
Lee Elci: Right. Well, you mentioned Syria. What’s your thoughts? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Have they paid enough of a penance for the things that they’ve done in the past?
Red Jahncke: Well, we have to remember that this is an entirely new regime. So before we get to the character of this regime. You know, Assad, father and son, it’s been a family dynasty for like 50 years of ruthless dictators, right? So, finally that family dictatorial dynasty has been overthrown. That is cause for celebration. That is cause for saying, hey, let’s see what they can do. Right? And that’s basically what Trump has said. Now, it’s controversial because the new regime was allied with ISIS for a while. He’s a jihadist. But, you know, it’s kind of like, fight fire with fire. If he’s going to topple the Assad regime, he’s going to have to be a pretty tough dude. So I don’t know whether we should be so upset that that he’s got that background. He got the job done.
Lee Elci: Let me ask you a couple other things about the Middle East, and then we’ll talk about that big, beautiful bill. But, let me ask you apparently there was a rumor that there’s a bit of a rift developing between Trump and Netanyahu.
Red Jahncke: Well, I think this all gets down to personal considerations. I’ll make a prediction here: you will never see Netanyahu come and address the US Congress under Donald Trump. Trump is not going to let Netanyahu upstage him. I mean, when Netanyahu came last year and gave that speech, it was a stirring Churchillian speech. You didn’t you didn’t have to agree with what he said to acknowledge that he is a formidable speaker. So he’s not going to get a platform here.
Netanyahu feeds off different variations of opposition. Trump is employing a strategy to handle Netanyahu. He’s, without saying it, saying, go out do what you want. We’ll see how it turns out. He’s letting him have his reign. And, you know, if if Netanyahu has enough rope to hang himself, Trump’s gonna let him do that. And if he needs enough rope to, quote, get the job done, he’s gonna let him do that. Trump is just letting Netanyahu fly this plane. We’ll see how, how far and how well you land it.
Lee Elci: But you don’t think there’s a rift necessarily between the two, because that is a rumor right now that’s out there. It’s floating around.
Red Jahncke: I think that’s over interpreting the fact that Trump is just not going to get involved. You can read Donald Trump as having a strong pacifist streak, right? I mean, he talks about Ukraine as being this tragic bloodbath. Right. And he talks about Gaza the same way as a horrible situation. He jumped right in between, India and Pakistan with some diplomacy that had those two back off before that got terribly serious. In his first administration, he took care of Iran by taking out Soleimani. Right. Figured out that I don’t need to go to war with these people. All I need to do is take out a couple of key, key actors, and that’ll keep them on their back foot. Right.
Lee Elci: Again. Red Jahncke. One more. You for or against us getting a plane from, Qatar.
Red Jahncke: I completely uninterested. If they want to give us a plane. Fine. Qatar, this tiny little nation on the Gulf in a position to bribe us? I don’t think so. So, they give us a plane.
Lee Elci: Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about the big, beautiful bill. Real quick before we run out of time. Anything we need to know?
Red Jahncke: Well, it’s a big, beautiful blowout. I don’t think any of the various agencies that score these things have said that it’s going to do anything other than balloon our debt even more.
Under Bill Clinton, we had our last budget surplus. We’ve run a quarter century without even coming close to a budget surplus. The whole concept of economics is: when you’re in recession or weaker economic times, the government increases spending. So you run a deficit. Government spending gooses the economy, the economy comes back. Then when the economy is roaring, you’re supposed to pay down the debt and run some surpluses.
We’re a far cry from that. What’s staring us in the face both nationally and in this state, is we’re getting very close to the point of no return, that we just become so deeply in debt that, we have to borrow money to pay the interest on the outstanding debt, and the amount we have to borrow becomes ginormous.
You know, we’re going to run $1 trillion of interest on the national debt in the budget this fiscal year. Yeah. So we have to borrow $1 trillion. That’s not spending on anything. That’s just servicing the debt. So we’re we’re running at a clip of a $2 trillion deficit, half of which is just plain interest.
Lee Elci: We may have already reached at that point of no return. I don’t know if we can sustain this for sure, but, anyway. It’s always good talking to you. The-Red-Line.com. Our hockey go-to guy. He’ll give us more details next week. But Red, always a pleasure. I thank you, my friend.
Red Jahncke: Hey. Thank you, Lee.
Red Jahncke is a nationally recognized columnist, who writes about politics and policy. His columns appear in numerous national publications, such as The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, USA Today, The Hill, Issues & Insights and National Review as well as many Connecticut newspapers.