January 2, 2025 • 31 mins
Wayne Resnick fills in for Bill Handel all this week. New Orleans latest… what we know. What happens when nobody grows up? Trump immigration challenges. Battle over drinking.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
It's the Bill Handle Show. And Bill is coming back
from his holiday vacation on Monday. I did talk to
him two days ago. He's very excited to come back
and speak with you all. Wayne Resnick sitting in until
nine and we're going to I'm going to try to
(00:29):
synthesize a tremendous amount of information that I've been taking
in about new things that have been learned visa VI
the terrorist attack in New Orleans, and also what looks
now like a car bombing or I guess technically a
cyber truck bombing in Las Vegas. The death toll in
(00:53):
New Orleans is now at least fifteen, and in Vegas
there was only one fatality, and it was the person
in the truck who is apparently the perpetrator of the incident.
Although several people were injured, luckily those people, it was
minor injuries for some bystanders that were in the area.
(01:14):
And the first thing is that the authorities are now
looking at whether or not there could be a connection
between these two events. Now There is one connection in
that both of them involved a vehicle, and in New Orleans,
as you know, the perpetrator drove the vehicle into the
(01:36):
crowd of people and then got out and started shooting
and was killed in a gunfight with the cops. Both
of those vehicles were rented, and they were both rented
not from Avis or Hertz or Enterprise. They were rented
through an app called Turo, which I had not heard of,
(01:57):
probably because this is not something I would ever do.
Turo is an app where you can It's kind of
like an AIRB and B for cars. You can rent
a car through Touro from some guy who rents out
his car. The appeal of it, and if somebody were
(02:21):
to try to sell you on why Touro is cool,
it would be because you would be able to rent
interesting cars. That hurts inn Avis and those places won't
have maybe old cars, maybe custom cars, but a lot
of the cars are just basic cars. So you're renting
somebody's car. I imagine some people doing that like Airbnb.
(02:45):
Some people rent out their own home or part of
their own home. Other people have properties that are only
for the purpose of renting them out. And I assume
they're people who have cars that are only for the
purpose of renting them out, and other people may be
rent out the car that they drive when you're not
renting it. So both of these people finger quotes people
(03:09):
given what they did, in my opinion, rented through Turo
and Turo says they are cooperating with the FEDS in
the investigation.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Now there's another link. Both of them served in the military.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
We've had some information for a day or so about
the New Orleans suspect, shamsu Den Jabbar.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Now it's believed that the man.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Who rented the cyber truck and is the perpetrator of
the explosion, there is somebody named or who was named
Matthew Littlelsberger, and assuming that is the person that we
should be talking about, he has a history of serving
in the military as well. Now they haven't identified the
(03:54):
person who is behind the wheel of the truck in
Vegas because, as you might imagine, it's not in very
good condition. So they're working to do that through forensics.
But they were able to get the information about who
rented it, and they were also able to track not
in real time, but after the fact, the drive of
(04:15):
the car from Colorado where it was rented through to
Vegas by because as whoever drove it drove it from
Colorado to Las Vegas, it passed through many license plate readers,
and so they're able to get that data and look
at the path that was taken. The FBI is conducting
(04:39):
searches and investigations in Colorado Springs. We know that there
were search warrants served at the place where the New
Orleans perpetrator was staying in New Orleans, and so both
of these Both of these events have a lot in common,
both in terms of how the investigations are being being handled.
(05:01):
They're both in kind of the same stages of investigation,
and they both involve people who served in the military,
both of them for many many years. Beyond that, we
don't know if there are any other similarities, and by
the way, similarities obviously are not the same as connections.
(05:22):
The idea that possibly these two people knew each other
in some way and agreed to do different types of
terror attacks in different parts of the country seems to
me right now, seems far fetched, But I do think this.
They're throwing everything they can at it, and they usually
are pretty successful at coming up with additional information at
(05:44):
this stage of an investigation, So obviously KFI is keeping
an eye on this. Anything that comes out that's relevant,
we will bring it to you as soon as it happens.
And I think Michelle a little bit later in the show,
we can revisit this again through the prism of where
did the authorities go wrong in trying to prevent what
(06:06):
happened in New Orleans? And was there anything they did wrong?
And was there anything they could have done? But for now,
let's move on to some other things that are going
on in the world. And what are we going to
do with this entire generation of people who are not
growing up? Who am I talking about? I'm talking about
(06:31):
the people in their thirties man. Today, let me start
it differently. If you look at film and photographs of
people who were in their thirties back in say the
forties and the fifties and even the sixties, they all
(06:56):
look old as dirt.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
They look old.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
There they are in their house with their wife or husband, kids,
the car. And if I showed you photos of people
from the forties and the fifties and I said how
old are these people? I guarantee you because this is
what I used to do till I learned better. I
(07:24):
would say, I don't know that guy's forty five, No,
he's like thirty two. I really do believe that physically
we have changed in terms of how aged we look.
But so today now, if you're in your thirties, you
(07:46):
really maybe have never looked less like a grown up.
There's a physical manifestation of the phenomenon that.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
I'm about to tell you about.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
I think I honestly believe people are looking younger, and
I don't know if it's because of the fact that
they're living younger, but maybe there's a connection. Americans in
their thirties are not hitting the three big milestones of
(08:20):
being a grown up adult, owning a home, getting married,
pounded out the babies, and some of them are doing
that on purpose. There is a big swing away from
in particular marriage and having children. The percentage of Americans
(08:44):
in their thirties now who are not married is significantly
higher than it was even twenty years ago. One third
of today's young adults will never ever get married. I mean,
at least that's what the Institute for Family Studies says.
(09:05):
They're a conservative thing tank, and if you go back,
say twenty years, maybe fifteen percent say I'll never be married.
The projection was fifteen percent of people will never get married.
Let's talk to some adults who don't have kids. Will
(09:28):
you have kids? Well, it used to be back in
twenty eighteen, thirty seven percent of childless adults who are
under fifty, You can't. It's not fair to ask people
who are over fifty who don't have kids, do you
think you're gonna have kids? Because there's no way. But
(09:49):
like thirty five year old, you don't have kids yet?
Are you gonna have kids? And in twenty eighteen it
was already sizable, it was about a third of them,
and now it's almost fifty percent, and that's according to
the Pew Research Center. And a lot of it is
by choice, is people don't value marriage anymore, they don't
want to have kids. But even the choice there, particularly
(10:13):
the choice not to want to have kids, is not
one hundred percent a free choice. Because the other thing
that's going on is some of these aspects of the
American dream of being an adult is not possible. They
don't have a choice. That's the home ownership part of it.
(10:39):
Right it's a crazy housing market right now, it has
been for a while, is probably going to continue to
be for a long time. And today home ownership is
out of reach for a much bigger percentage of people
in their thirties than ever.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Ever.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
There was a time in this country where everybody their
mid thirties, almost everybody who wanted to buy a house
bought a house. It really wasn't I don't want to
say it this way, but it wasn't that.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Big of a deal.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
It was reasonably affordable to buy a house anywhere.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
And now it's the opposite.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
It's like, please show me the zip codes in this
country where it's reasonably affordable to buy a house.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
And it's not.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Because although some people think the economy sucks, and some
people think that like people in their thirties now simply
don't have the same income or don't have the same
financial wherewithal as people in the thirties and previous generations.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
That's not true.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
The fact is, median wages for full time workers are
up sixteen percent since two thousand, and the wealth the
wealth of people in their thirties has gone up sixty
six percent between nineteen eighty nine and twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
I think is the most recent numbers on that.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
So in fact, the current thirty year olds are in
a better financial condition on average. Now, now the aside,
these are statistics, and we're talking about averages and medians.
So obviously there are a lot of people in their
thirties who fall below that and are struggling even by
(12:34):
objective economic standards. But it also means that they're thirty
year olds who are doing even better than that. But
the thing is, the attitude is different. This has been
an ongoing thing. It was really highlighted during the election
that so many people have a dimmer view of the
(12:55):
economy than the actual economy would warrant, and that's true
amongst the people in their thirties. Only twenty one percent
of adults in their thirties said the overall economy was
good or excellent last year, but by objective measures it
was pretty good.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
When you ask them a more.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Grandiose question, like you know what you think you're going
to quote achieve the American dream, which is very vague
and subjective, but they do ask people that, and people
in their thirties are far less likely than people in
their fifties or sixties to say that it's still a possibility.
(13:46):
That was a Wall Street Journal poll just in July.
So there's a pessimism. A lot of people think they're
worse off than they objectively are are, and their view
of the future is more pessimistic than objective facts might support.
(14:13):
And I think it's the housing thing. I really do
believe this, because the housing thing objectively is bad. That
cannot be sugarcoated. There's no statistics I could give you
to try to then say, see, the housing situation's not
as bad as you think it is.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
The housing situation really is.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
And I know some people who are younger than me,
and it is a big source of frustration and malaise
that they cannot afford a home. And I think there
are a lot of people in their thirties that are
preoccupied and I'm not saying wrongly, so they're preoccupied with
(14:56):
the true objective reality that they simply cannot afford a home.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
And it's not their fault. It's the housing market.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
And when you can't do that, and it's really important
to you, I mean a home. Owning a home is
kind of the core of stability as an adult, isn't it.
Most people used to you would buy a house first
and then you'd start a family. So the idea that
that's the initial lynch pin of being an adult is
(15:26):
being able to get a house, and you can't. And
what's happening is so many younger people they're saying, I
can't be an adult because I can't get a house.
They don't realize that that's the equation that they're making
in their head. But that's what's going on, and that's why.
And the pandemic didn't help. By the way, Hey cameo
(15:48):
appearance by the pandemic in this topic because a lot
of young people move back home, kind of regressing in
terms of what their lives look like heired to their
age and now when at least in terms of the pandemic,
there's no reason you shouldn't be able to buy a house.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
The economics are making it impossible. And so.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
I don't know if this is going to continue where
it's going to be people in their forties and their
fifties who've never done any of these things.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
But that's what's happening right now. Let's get into this.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
President elect Donald Trump has promised he's going to crack
down on illegal immigration and he wants to spearhead significant
changes to various immigration laws.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
I am so not interested in.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Arguing about whether he should or whether he shouldn't, or
is he a jerk, or is he this you know,
the smartest man in America for finally dealing with this problem.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Should he.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Is irrelevant if he can't. So let's look practically some
of the hurdles that are in place to see what
he's up against. Let's go here we go. Number one,
(17:10):
there's a massive backlog in the immigration courts.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
The way the law works now, with few exceptions.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Immigrants here illegally cannot be deported without a hearing an
immigration court. This gives them a chance to ask for
asylum or maybe another way to stay in the country,
and it's required by law. There are some exceptions, but
they're not relevant to the big discussion here. The courts
(17:39):
are so backlogged that today somebody who gets a hearing
scheduled will be expected to come to their hearing in
twenty twenty eight or twenty twenty nine. Yeah, that's how
far backed up the courts are. Now, you get a
(18:03):
hearing date, and you are given a work permit, and
you can find employment in the US legally and President
elect Trump and the people close to him say, Hey,
first of all, that's not a good idea, because this
is why, this is why so many people are coming
(18:25):
to the border, because they know that even if at
the end of the process they don't get to stay
that for years, they can be here and work. So
what do we have to do to solve this problem. Well,
(18:46):
right now, there's about five hundred immigration judges. And immigration
judges are not like Article three federal judges. They are
they really are employees and they do have to follow directives.
(19:07):
And there's about five hundred of them. So they're various
experts that have done projections and calculations, and they say
Congress will have to hire five thousand more immigration judges.
So it's not like we have five hundred and we
need six fifty. That's not what's going on here. Massive
(19:32):
amounts of money will have to be spent to hire
ten times as many immigration judges as we have. Now,
this raises a question in my mind, particularly as to
the cost of doing this.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Then you got to have.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Places for them to sit and conduct hearings, so you're
gonna have to have a build out of some kind
of facilities. It's a ton of money at a time
when we continue to run deficits, when the debt ceiling
continues to be a political football, and when an administration
(20:08):
is coming in that's all Republican in the White House
and the Senate and the Congress, and we don't typically
think of that kind of a government as being a
let's spend like crazy kind of a government. Is there
something else that can be done about the backlog? If
we aren't gonna spend all this money to hire ten
(20:29):
times as many judges, Well, you could. Here's one thing
they could do. You could shuffle around whose hearings happen first.
It's mostly a first come, first serve thing right now.
But what you could do is you could say, Okay,
somebody who shows up here from let's just say El Salvador,
(20:50):
they're gonna get priority. They're gonna get the earliest hearings,
and somebody who comes in from somewhere else they're gonna
wait even longer.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Or you could do this. I would say, this is
a good idea. Here.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
People who show up and they have criminal records, they
get a hearing absolutely as soon as possible. They move
to the front of the line. Because those are people
that probably were not gonna let stay. Also, another thing
you could do is tweak the laws and procedures so
that when you get to the final hearing stage, you
(21:23):
can't delay it anymore. What will happen sometimes is people
wait years for a hearing and then they show up
and they go blah blah blah a hearing, and then
they go, all right, we need one more hearing, and
then they keep delaying it, and judges allow the person
to delay their final hearing. Usually it's because they say, well,
(21:44):
I need a lawyer for my final hearing. I need
more time to find it. If you made it a
little tougher to do that, that would shorten the timeline
and that would clear the backlog sooner.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Here's the thing, though.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Unless there's a rapid infusion of money to increase the
immigration judge situation by a factor of ten, or the
laws are changed, most of the people who came here
illegally while Biden was president will not be legally able
(22:20):
to be deported until after Donald Trump's second term. There's
also not enough ice agents. There's another problem. There's about
six thousand of them right now. They have money to
keep in custody about forty thousand immigrants at a time.
(22:42):
They do not have the planes, the airplanes that they
would need to deport millions of people back to their
home countries. Now, you know, the Republicans can figure out
some ways to free up some money for.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
All of this.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
And Trump says he'll declare a national emergency that will
unlock some money almost right away from Pentagon's budget that
could be used for certain things. But the problem is
things have changed now. One of the things that Donald
Trump likes to talk about is in the fifties, when
(23:16):
Eisenhower was president, there was a mass deportation program, and
by the standards of trying to mass deport a bunch
of people, it was a success.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
But here's the problem.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
When Eisenhower was president, pretty much every single person that
they were deporting was from Mexico, so they were sending
everybody to the same place right over the border. That's
not the case anymore. Yes, sure a lot of people
are from Mexico, but they're from China, and they're from Uzbekistan,
(23:57):
and they're from India, and they're from I don't know, Mauritania.
So you can't just push them back across the border,
and you can't load up planes for short flights.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Boom, now you're back.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
You've got to coordinate hundreds of flights to different countries,
and you're fighting with the governments of those countries about
when or will they receive those flights. It's way more
complicated the logistics of it, and that can only be
solved with more money. Money for planes, money for logistics, people, money, money, money.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Those are the big hurdles.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
There's some other issues, like trying to end birthrights citizenship,
which will have to amend the Constitution. But the fact
of the matter is the amount of money that is
necessary to do this within the current legal framework is
beyond the reach of the United States government right now.
(25:00):
It's not I don't think it's going to be so much.
How much money can they come up with for this effort.
I think it's gonna be how much of the laws
can they get changed?
Speaker 1 (25:10):
And we'll see what happens.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Every five years, the government revises the US dietary guidelines
and they're in the process of doing it again. And
there's a huge controversy about what to say about drinking.
You know, for a long time, the studies would come out,
(25:37):
we'd talk about them, and they all said essentially the
same thing.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Excessive drinking is bad.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
By the way, that's the one thing about drinking for
which there is no legitimate counter argument. Excessive drinking, heavy
drinking is bad, period, full stop. There's no way to
rehabild take that. But the studies would keep saying that,
but drinking moderately is actually better than not drinking at all.
(26:11):
The number of people who started drinking red wine, for example,
because of the studies that said it's good for your
heart health. But then more recently, agencies like the World
Health Organization and Great Britain and some other groups are
(26:34):
saying no, our evidence shows that no amount of drinking
is good, that even literally one drop of alcohol hurts you,
and that alcohol in any amount is highly correlated with
various cancers, and that there is no safe amount of alcohol. Well,
(27:01):
you have these two schools. Now, there's one school that
believes that moderate drinking is actually beneficial and another group
that says there's no such thing as beneficial drinking of.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Alcohol, period.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
And they're at war over what's going to go into
these guidelines. So, in an unprecedented move, the government has
commissioned two different studies to help it decide what they're
going to say about drinking and these guidelines.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
That's not usually what happens.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Usually they just review the existing research and then they
decide what to do. But there's such controversy now that
they want two different groups of people to weigh in,
and one of these groups. There was about one point
three million dollars I believe. I don't have the number
written from a face, but I think it was about
one point three million dollars that Congress gave to the
(27:54):
National Academies to put together a panel to look at
this issue and come up with the report. And so
the National Academies got the money and they said, hey,
there's these two people at Harvard. We should have them
be on the panel. But the problem is those two
(28:14):
people their research kept saying moderate alcohol consumption is good.
So there was a big outcry and they said, all right,
we won't use them, they're too controversial. So instead they
put on two other people from Harvard who don't.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Say moderate drinking is awesome.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
However, some of their research says there is a link
between some moderate drinking and a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease.
I can't believe that word came out of my mouth
that way, So not as bad as the first two,
but not great. And of these four people, at least
three of them, at some point in their research got
(28:55):
funding from the alcohol industry, which is really what's on
underneath all of this. Do you think the alcohol industry
wants the United States government to tell everybody that even.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
One drink is harmful?
Speaker 2 (29:10):
No, they do not, And so do they fund studies
that they hope wink wink will be favorable in some way? Well,
I'm sure that they do. Do they want a report
to go to the people who will come up with
the new guidelines that it says something nice about drinking alcohol?
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Yes, they do.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Now there's going to be another study by a different
group of people who don't seem to have any connections
to the alcohol industry.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
It's a government committee.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Remember this other thing is funded by the government, but
it's made up of people who aren't part of the government.
This second report is a government committee, and it's called
the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking.
How complicated has our government become? I could probably spend
(30:04):
four straight hours on KFI reading you the names of
government agencies and committees that you've never heard of before.
I'm not going to do it. Don't worry. I'm just
saying that's how complicated and bloated government has become. So
in any event, it's the first time that two separate
reports have been commissioned, and you're probably going to get
(30:27):
to competing conclusions in these reports, and then they'll decide
what to do with the guidelines.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
And then in a.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Way it won't matter because in five years they'll redo
it again, and five years after that again. Look in
twenty years, who knows what we might learn. The guidelines
might be you should rub alcohol into your eyeballs ten
times a day because we found out it increases is
(31:00):
your IQ by twenty points. But that's not happening yet.
This is KFI Am six forty Live everywhere on the
iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Catch My Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am,
and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM
six forty.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app.
It's the Bill Handle Show. And Bill is coming back
from his holiday vacation on Monday. I did talk to
him two days ago. He's very excited to come back
and speak with you all. Wayne Resnick sitting in until
nine and we're going to I'm going to try to
(00:29):
synthesize a tremendous amount of information that I've been taking
in about new things that have been learned visa VI
the terrorist attack in New Orleans, and also what looks
now like a car bombing or I guess technically a
cyber truck bombing in Las Vegas. The death toll in
(00:53):
New Orleans is now at least fifteen, and in Vegas
there was only one fatality, and it was the person
in the truck who is apparently the perpetrator of the incident.
Although several people were injured, luckily those people, it was
minor injuries for some bystanders that were in the area.
(01:14):
And the first thing is that the authorities are now
looking at whether or not there could be a connection
between these two events. Now There is one connection in
that both of them involved a vehicle, and in New Orleans,
as you know, the perpetrator drove the vehicle into the
(01:36):
crowd of people and then got out and started shooting
and was killed in a gunfight with the cops. Both
of those vehicles were rented, and they were both rented
not from Avis or Hertz or Enterprise. They were rented
through an app called Turo, which I had not heard of,
(01:57):
probably because this is not something I would ever do.
Turo is an app where you can It's kind of
like an AIRB and B for cars. You can rent
a car through Touro from some guy who rents out
his car. The appeal of it, and if somebody were
(02:21):
to try to sell you on why Touro is cool,
it would be because you would be able to rent
interesting cars. That hurts inn Avis and those places won't
have maybe old cars, maybe custom cars, but a lot
of the cars are just basic cars. So you're renting
somebody's car. I imagine some people doing that like Airbnb.
(02:45):
Some people rent out their own home or part of
their own home. Other people have properties that are only
for the purpose of renting them out. And I assume
they're people who have cars that are only for the
purpose of renting them out, and other people may be
rent out the car that they drive when you're not
renting it. So both of these people finger quotes people
(03:09):
given what they did, in my opinion, rented through Turo
and Turo says they are cooperating with the FEDS in
the investigation.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Now there's another link. Both of them served in the military.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
We've had some information for a day or so about
the New Orleans suspect, shamsu Den Jabbar.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Now it's believed that the man.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Who rented the cyber truck and is the perpetrator of
the explosion, there is somebody named or who was named
Matthew Littlelsberger, and assuming that is the person that we
should be talking about, he has a history of serving
in the military as well. Now they haven't identified the
(03:54):
person who is behind the wheel of the truck in
Vegas because, as you might imagine, it's not in very
good condition. So they're working to do that through forensics.
But they were able to get the information about who
rented it, and they were also able to track not
in real time, but after the fact, the drive of
(04:15):
the car from Colorado where it was rented through to
Vegas by because as whoever drove it drove it from
Colorado to Las Vegas, it passed through many license plate readers,
and so they're able to get that data and look
at the path that was taken. The FBI is conducting
(04:39):
searches and investigations in Colorado Springs. We know that there
were search warrants served at the place where the New
Orleans perpetrator was staying in New Orleans, and so both
of these Both of these events have a lot in common,
both in terms of how the investigations are being being handled.
(05:01):
They're both in kind of the same stages of investigation,
and they both involve people who served in the military,
both of them for many many years. Beyond that, we
don't know if there are any other similarities, and by
the way, similarities obviously are not the same as connections.
(05:22):
The idea that possibly these two people knew each other
in some way and agreed to do different types of
terror attacks in different parts of the country seems to
me right now, seems far fetched, But I do think this.
They're throwing everything they can at it, and they usually
are pretty successful at coming up with additional information at
(05:44):
this stage of an investigation, So obviously KFI is keeping
an eye on this. Anything that comes out that's relevant,
we will bring it to you as soon as it happens.
And I think Michelle a little bit later in the show,
we can revisit this again through the prism of where
did the authorities go wrong in trying to prevent what
(06:06):
happened in New Orleans? And was there anything they did wrong?
And was there anything they could have done? But for now,
let's move on to some other things that are going
on in the world. And what are we going to
do with this entire generation of people who are not
growing up? Who am I talking about? I'm talking about
(06:31):
the people in their thirties man. Today, let me start
it differently. If you look at film and photographs of
people who were in their thirties back in say the
forties and the fifties and even the sixties, they all
(06:56):
look old as dirt.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
They look old.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
There they are in their house with their wife or husband, kids,
the car. And if I showed you photos of people
from the forties and the fifties and I said how
old are these people? I guarantee you because this is
what I used to do till I learned better. I
(07:24):
would say, I don't know that guy's forty five, No,
he's like thirty two. I really do believe that physically
we have changed in terms of how aged we look.
But so today now, if you're in your thirties, you
(07:46):
really maybe have never looked less like a grown up.
There's a physical manifestation of the phenomenon that.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
I'm about to tell you about.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
I think I honestly believe people are looking younger, and
I don't know if it's because of the fact that
they're living younger, but maybe there's a connection. Americans in
their thirties are not hitting the three big milestones of
(08:20):
being a grown up adult, owning a home, getting married,
pounded out the babies, and some of them are doing
that on purpose. There is a big swing away from
in particular marriage and having children. The percentage of Americans
(08:44):
in their thirties now who are not married is significantly
higher than it was even twenty years ago. One third
of today's young adults will never ever get married. I mean,
at least that's what the Institute for Family Studies says.
(09:05):
They're a conservative thing tank, and if you go back,
say twenty years, maybe fifteen percent say I'll never be married.
The projection was fifteen percent of people will never get married.
Let's talk to some adults who don't have kids. Will
(09:28):
you have kids? Well, it used to be back in
twenty eighteen, thirty seven percent of childless adults who are
under fifty, You can't. It's not fair to ask people
who are over fifty who don't have kids, do you
think you're gonna have kids? Because there's no way. But
(09:49):
like thirty five year old, you don't have kids yet?
Are you gonna have kids? And in twenty eighteen it
was already sizable, it was about a third of them,
and now it's almost fifty percent, and that's according to
the Pew Research Center. And a lot of it is
by choice, is people don't value marriage anymore, they don't
want to have kids. But even the choice there, particularly
(10:13):
the choice not to want to have kids, is not
one hundred percent a free choice. Because the other thing
that's going on is some of these aspects of the
American dream of being an adult is not possible. They
don't have a choice. That's the home ownership part of it.
(10:39):
Right it's a crazy housing market right now, it has
been for a while, is probably going to continue to
be for a long time. And today home ownership is
out of reach for a much bigger percentage of people
in their thirties than ever.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Ever.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
There was a time in this country where everybody their
mid thirties, almost everybody who wanted to buy a house
bought a house. It really wasn't I don't want to
say it this way, but it wasn't that.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Big of a deal.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
It was reasonably affordable to buy a house anywhere.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
And now it's the opposite.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
It's like, please show me the zip codes in this
country where it's reasonably affordable to buy a house.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
And it's not.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Because although some people think the economy sucks, and some
people think that like people in their thirties now simply
don't have the same income or don't have the same
financial wherewithal as people in the thirties and previous generations.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
That's not true.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
The fact is, median wages for full time workers are
up sixteen percent since two thousand, and the wealth the
wealth of people in their thirties has gone up sixty
six percent between nineteen eighty nine and twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
I think is the most recent numbers on that.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
So in fact, the current thirty year olds are in
a better financial condition on average. Now, now the aside,
these are statistics, and we're talking about averages and medians.
So obviously there are a lot of people in their
thirties who fall below that and are struggling even by
(12:34):
objective economic standards. But it also means that they're thirty
year olds who are doing even better than that. But
the thing is, the attitude is different. This has been
an ongoing thing. It was really highlighted during the election
that so many people have a dimmer view of the
(12:55):
economy than the actual economy would warrant, and that's true
amongst the people in their thirties. Only twenty one percent
of adults in their thirties said the overall economy was
good or excellent last year, but by objective measures it
was pretty good.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
When you ask them a more.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Grandiose question, like you know what you think you're going
to quote achieve the American dream, which is very vague
and subjective, but they do ask people that, and people
in their thirties are far less likely than people in
their fifties or sixties to say that it's still a possibility.
(13:46):
That was a Wall Street Journal poll just in July.
So there's a pessimism. A lot of people think they're
worse off than they objectively are are, and their view
of the future is more pessimistic than objective facts might support.
(14:13):
And I think it's the housing thing. I really do
believe this, because the housing thing objectively is bad. That
cannot be sugarcoated. There's no statistics I could give you
to try to then say, see, the housing situation's not
as bad as you think it is.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
The housing situation really is.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
And I know some people who are younger than me,
and it is a big source of frustration and malaise
that they cannot afford a home. And I think there
are a lot of people in their thirties that are
preoccupied and I'm not saying wrongly, so they're preoccupied with
(14:56):
the true objective reality that they simply cannot afford a home.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
And it's not their fault. It's the housing market.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
And when you can't do that, and it's really important
to you, I mean a home. Owning a home is
kind of the core of stability as an adult, isn't it.
Most people used to you would buy a house first
and then you'd start a family. So the idea that
that's the initial lynch pin of being an adult is
(15:26):
being able to get a house, and you can't. And
what's happening is so many younger people they're saying, I
can't be an adult because I can't get a house.
They don't realize that that's the equation that they're making
in their head. But that's what's going on, and that's why.
And the pandemic didn't help. By the way, Hey cameo
(15:48):
appearance by the pandemic in this topic because a lot
of young people move back home, kind of regressing in
terms of what their lives look like heired to their
age and now when at least in terms of the pandemic,
there's no reason you shouldn't be able to buy a house.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
The economics are making it impossible. And so.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
I don't know if this is going to continue where
it's going to be people in their forties and their
fifties who've never done any of these things.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
But that's what's happening right now. Let's get into this.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
President elect Donald Trump has promised he's going to crack
down on illegal immigration and he wants to spearhead significant
changes to various immigration laws.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
I am so not interested in.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Arguing about whether he should or whether he shouldn't, or
is he a jerk, or is he this you know,
the smartest man in America for finally dealing with this problem.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Should he.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Is irrelevant if he can't. So let's look practically some
of the hurdles that are in place to see what
he's up against. Let's go here we go. Number one,
(17:10):
there's a massive backlog in the immigration courts.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
The way the law works now, with few exceptions.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Immigrants here illegally cannot be deported without a hearing an
immigration court. This gives them a chance to ask for
asylum or maybe another way to stay in the country,
and it's required by law. There are some exceptions, but
they're not relevant to the big discussion here. The courts
(17:39):
are so backlogged that today somebody who gets a hearing
scheduled will be expected to come to their hearing in
twenty twenty eight or twenty twenty nine. Yeah, that's how
far backed up the courts are. Now, you get a
(18:03):
hearing date, and you are given a work permit, and
you can find employment in the US legally and President
elect Trump and the people close to him say, Hey,
first of all, that's not a good idea, because this
is why, this is why so many people are coming
(18:25):
to the border, because they know that even if at
the end of the process they don't get to stay
that for years, they can be here and work. So
what do we have to do to solve this problem. Well,
(18:46):
right now, there's about five hundred immigration judges. And immigration
judges are not like Article three federal judges. They are
they really are employees and they do have to follow directives.
(19:07):
And there's about five hundred of them. So they're various
experts that have done projections and calculations, and they say
Congress will have to hire five thousand more immigration judges.
So it's not like we have five hundred and we
need six fifty. That's not what's going on here. Massive
(19:32):
amounts of money will have to be spent to hire
ten times as many immigration judges as we have. Now,
this raises a question in my mind, particularly as to
the cost of doing this.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
Then you got to have.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Places for them to sit and conduct hearings, so you're
gonna have to have a build out of some kind
of facilities. It's a ton of money at a time
when we continue to run deficits, when the debt ceiling
continues to be a political football, and when an administration
(20:08):
is coming in that's all Republican in the White House
and the Senate and the Congress, and we don't typically
think of that kind of a government as being a
let's spend like crazy kind of a government. Is there
something else that can be done about the backlog? If
we aren't gonna spend all this money to hire ten
(20:29):
times as many judges, Well, you could. Here's one thing
they could do. You could shuffle around whose hearings happen first.
It's mostly a first come, first serve thing right now.
But what you could do is you could say, Okay,
somebody who shows up here from let's just say El Salvador,
(20:50):
they're gonna get priority. They're gonna get the earliest hearings,
and somebody who comes in from somewhere else they're gonna
wait even longer.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Or you could do this. I would say, this is
a good idea. Here.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
People who show up and they have criminal records, they
get a hearing absolutely as soon as possible. They move
to the front of the line. Because those are people
that probably were not gonna let stay. Also, another thing
you could do is tweak the laws and procedures so
that when you get to the final hearing stage, you
(21:23):
can't delay it anymore. What will happen sometimes is people
wait years for a hearing and then they show up
and they go blah blah blah a hearing, and then
they go, all right, we need one more hearing, and
then they keep delaying it, and judges allow the person
to delay their final hearing. Usually it's because they say, well,
(21:44):
I need a lawyer for my final hearing. I need
more time to find it. If you made it a
little tougher to do that, that would shorten the timeline
and that would clear the backlog sooner.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Here's the thing, though.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Unless there's a rapid infusion of money to increase the
immigration judge situation by a factor of ten, or the
laws are changed, most of the people who came here
illegally while Biden was president will not be legally able
(22:20):
to be deported until after Donald Trump's second term. There's
also not enough ice agents. There's another problem. There's about
six thousand of them right now. They have money to
keep in custody about forty thousand immigrants at a time.
(22:42):
They do not have the planes, the airplanes that they
would need to deport millions of people back to their
home countries. Now, you know, the Republicans can figure out
some ways to free up some money for.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
All of this.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
And Trump says he'll declare a national emergency that will
unlock some money almost right away from Pentagon's budget that
could be used for certain things. But the problem is
things have changed now. One of the things that Donald
Trump likes to talk about is in the fifties, when
(23:16):
Eisenhower was president, there was a mass deportation program, and
by the standards of trying to mass deport a bunch
of people, it was a success.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
But here's the problem.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
When Eisenhower was president, pretty much every single person that
they were deporting was from Mexico, so they were sending
everybody to the same place right over the border. That's
not the case anymore. Yes, sure a lot of people
are from Mexico, but they're from China, and they're from Uzbekistan,
(23:57):
and they're from India, and they're from I don't know, Mauritania.
So you can't just push them back across the border,
and you can't load up planes for short flights.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Boom, now you're back.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
You've got to coordinate hundreds of flights to different countries,
and you're fighting with the governments of those countries about
when or will they receive those flights. It's way more
complicated the logistics of it, and that can only be
solved with more money. Money for planes, money for logistics, people, money, money, money.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Those are the big hurdles.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
There's some other issues, like trying to end birthrights citizenship,
which will have to amend the Constitution. But the fact
of the matter is the amount of money that is
necessary to do this within the current legal framework is
beyond the reach of the United States government right now.
(25:00):
It's not I don't think it's going to be so much.
How much money can they come up with for this effort.
I think it's gonna be how much of the laws
can they get changed?
Speaker 1 (25:10):
And we'll see what happens.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Every five years, the government revises the US dietary guidelines
and they're in the process of doing it again. And
there's a huge controversy about what to say about drinking.
You know, for a long time, the studies would come out,
(25:37):
we'd talk about them, and they all said essentially the
same thing.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Excessive drinking is bad.
Speaker 2 (25:45):
By the way, that's the one thing about drinking for
which there is no legitimate counter argument. Excessive drinking, heavy
drinking is bad, period, full stop. There's no way to
rehabild take that. But the studies would keep saying that,
but drinking moderately is actually better than not drinking at all.
(26:11):
The number of people who started drinking red wine, for example,
because of the studies that said it's good for your
heart health. But then more recently, agencies like the World
Health Organization and Great Britain and some other groups are
(26:34):
saying no, our evidence shows that no amount of drinking
is good, that even literally one drop of alcohol hurts you,
and that alcohol in any amount is highly correlated with
various cancers, and that there is no safe amount of alcohol. Well,
(27:01):
you have these two schools. Now, there's one school that
believes that moderate drinking is actually beneficial and another group
that says there's no such thing as beneficial drinking of.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Alcohol, period.
Speaker 2 (27:13):
And they're at war over what's going to go into
these guidelines. So, in an unprecedented move, the government has
commissioned two different studies to help it decide what they're
going to say about drinking and these guidelines.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
That's not usually what happens.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
Usually they just review the existing research and then they
decide what to do. But there's such controversy now that
they want two different groups of people to weigh in,
and one of these groups. There was about one point
three million dollars I believe. I don't have the number
written from a face, but I think it was about
one point three million dollars that Congress gave to the
(27:54):
National Academies to put together a panel to look at
this issue and come up with the report. And so
the National Academies got the money and they said, hey,
there's these two people at Harvard. We should have them
be on the panel. But the problem is those two
(28:14):
people their research kept saying moderate alcohol consumption is good.
So there was a big outcry and they said, all right,
we won't use them, they're too controversial. So instead they
put on two other people from Harvard who don't.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Say moderate drinking is awesome.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
However, some of their research says there is a link
between some moderate drinking and a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease.
I can't believe that word came out of my mouth
that way, So not as bad as the first two,
but not great. And of these four people, at least
three of them, at some point in their research got
(28:55):
funding from the alcohol industry, which is really what's on
underneath all of this. Do you think the alcohol industry
wants the United States government to tell everybody that even.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
One drink is harmful?
Speaker 2 (29:10):
No, they do not, And so do they fund studies
that they hope wink wink will be favorable in some way? Well,
I'm sure that they do. Do they want a report
to go to the people who will come up with
the new guidelines that it says something nice about drinking alcohol?
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Yes, they do.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Now there's going to be another study by a different
group of people who don't seem to have any connections
to the alcohol industry.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
It's a government committee.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Remember this other thing is funded by the government, but
it's made up of people who aren't part of the government.
This second report is a government committee, and it's called
the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking.
How complicated has our government become? I could probably spend
(30:04):
four straight hours on KFI reading you the names of
government agencies and committees that you've never heard of before.
I'm not going to do it. Don't worry. I'm just
saying that's how complicated and bloated government has become. So
in any event, it's the first time that two separate
reports have been commissioned, and you're probably going to get
(30:27):
to competing conclusions in these reports, and then they'll decide
what to do with the guidelines.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
And then in a.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Way it won't matter because in five years they'll redo
it again, and five years after that again. Look in
twenty years, who knows what we might learn. The guidelines
might be you should rub alcohol into your eyeballs ten
times a day because we found out it increases is
(31:00):
your IQ by twenty points. But that's not happening yet.
This is KFI Am six forty Live everywhere on the
iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Catch My Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am,
and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
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