3.28.25 Brian Fitzherbert WOND Radio

Brian Fitzherbert joins Anne Baker on WOND radio for 'Fitzherbert Friday'. They talk about DOGE, tariff's, Trump resetting 'international' trade table. They take a call from listener Rich of Egg Harbor Township.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Talking with Anne on Newstalk fourteen hundred and
ninety two point three w o n d.
Here's your host, Anne Baker.
Good morning, everyone. This is Anne Baker on
Talking with Anne, and, of course, this is
also Fitzherbert Friday.
We've got my buddy Brian Fitzherbert on. And,
Brian, welcome. And how the heck are you,
my friend?

(00:20):
I'm doing well, Anne. Thanks for having me.
No. No. Thank you for giving us your
time.
Do we have Luke with us as well
listening and and giving you ideas?
Yeah. He is, sitting at my feet with
my golden retriever, and he is playing very
well with a nice set of toys.
Love it. Just love it.
Well, you know, we are continuing to hear,

(00:44):
the left wing go crazy over,
what Elon Musk is doing, finding out with
Doge.
And,
I don't know where it's going.
I know that if I look at
the,
the funding in our country,

(01:05):
if I look at the stock market, if
I look at, you know, which seems to
be a crapshoot. You don't know whether it's
gonna go up or whether it's gonna go
down from day to day, or what in
fact impacts it. Do you think DOGE is
having an impact on what is happening with
the markets today?
It's possible. So what I'll say is that

(01:25):
there's a lot of things affecting the market.
It's Trump,
again,
trying to equalize the economic playing field. Everyone
is assuming the story starts with Donald Trump,
and he's creating a tariff for. No. He's
now
showing us in the middle of the story
and he's reacting
to the previous ripoffs that we've had. Obviously,
the reaction and the example with the automotives.

(01:48):
No one even knows how much
the European Union charges as tariff on US
imports.
It's 10%, and we've only charged two and
a half percent for those coming from the
European Union. In Trump's view, that's not fair.
So what is he doing? He's doing a
maximalist position, an apex position of 25% tariffs,

(02:09):
and that is obviously so the market
is reacting
on one way or the other. And what
the left is trying to do and our
friends in the Democratic Party, they're trying to
say that tariffs
are inflation. And anyone with a fundamental
understanding
of economics knows that's not the case. And
I'll get to that in a minute. But
circling back to Doge, what is Doge doing?

(02:30):
And this is what people also don't understand.
They're assuming that none of these cuts can
be done without congress. Not so.
Doge and his team, and I encourage your
listeners, if they haven't seen the interview with
Brett Baer,
with Elon and the six colleagues
on, basically, the the high level Doge team
on these fundamental things that they're discovering,

(02:51):
I strongly encourage you to watch it. It
it's it's eye opening. And as I've said
with you in previous,
appearances,
I almost look at the doge.gov
website
on
a almost a daily basis because it speaks
my language. I understand this from a government
contracting standpoint.
What Doge is doing is they are reviewing
for fraud, waste, and abuse, and they're able

(03:13):
to do you've heard me say this numerous
times week in and week out, a t
for c as a contract clause action
on existing contracts. What's t for c? A
termination for convenience,
meaning the contract owner, I e, the government
can terminate a contract for any reason. Joe
Biden did this with the border wall when
he took office in January of twenty twenty
one.
He he foresee it. He has every power

(03:35):
to do that just like Doge and Elon
Musk has every power to do that. Now
each of these contracts
has a ceiling.
Within that ceiling is what has been funded.
And if funding has already been
basically utilized, then that funding is gone. But
you can cut the remaining value of the
contract that we're not gonna disperse anymore additional

(03:56):
funding to those contracts. So what's happening?
This is how it potentially impacts the market.
All these
and Elon is joking about this,
and I have to chuckle every time he
says it. He said, how can a non
government
organization
do nothing but receive government funds? Mhmm. Then
it's not a good it it just makes
no sense. So all these NGOs, all these
nonprofits,

(04:16):
all these organizations that file for grants
that would disperse the money into the economy
in some form or fashion,
it wasn't real.
Meaning, there wasn't real demand for it, just
like the left and,
Democrats tried to prop up solar energy during
the Obama administration. Now we've seen this with,
wind turbines
here in in

(04:37):
in recent years, especially here in South Jersey.
So there's not real demand. It's artificial demand
that has artificially
impacted the economy. So the economy is correcting
itself,
and it's reacting to what is true demand
and what is true supply, your basic fundamentals
of economics.
So as a result of let's say I
have a nonprofit. I've used this example with

(04:57):
you before. I have a nonprofit. I have
two people. I'm gonna process,
let's say, a server. That was an example
that the Doge team utilized with BretBear, and
I need a hundred billion dollars to process
a a survey that you could otherwise go
to survey and get it due for, you
know, a few thousand bucks. But I need
a hundred billion dollars to not only process,
but also to pay my salary and and
my team that I hire within the nonprofit.

(05:19):
Because it's a nonprofit,
you can't make profit. So what do you
do? You disperse and you utilize all those
funds for the cost of producing the survey
and everything between. And then whatever's left over,
that's what you pay in the salary. And
you could pay someone way above market value
and say, you know what? I'm I'm worth
$50,000,000,000. That's what I should be paid for
this. And that's what was happening.
It was complete fraud.

(05:40):
And now you're seeing this correction
because all these NGOs, all these nonprofits, all
these other organizations that were getting grants and
funds and other contracts that there wasn't pure
demand. There wasn't
a productivity
in return, and that's Musk's whole point is
why do you need this many employees to
do x, y, and z? Same thing internally

(06:01):
with the IRS or any other government employees.
Why do you need he used the example
the other night. Why do you need 1,400
IRS employees to give out laptops and and
cell phones?
That's absurd. Mhmm. And any company
that has an IT department usually has a
handful of people to do that for thousands,
if not tens of thousands of employees at

(06:23):
a particular location. So, again, there's not a
real demand.
It was all artificial, and there wasn't any
attempt to cut
or adjust or even audit anything with regard
to this. So all these things that Doge
is doing, yes, there's likely to have a
supply side effect and a demand side effect
in the economy as it works to correct

(06:45):
itself.
And that's one piece that's impacting the economy.
The other is Trump trying
to get us to a position where we
are on,
more or less the same page
with regard to,
tariffs and dealing with countries. And everyone's like,
well, why are we going after Canada and

(07:05):
Mexico? They're our friends. We have, you know,
the renegotiated
NAFTA, which is now USMCA.
But even then, that wasn't enough to equal
the playing field. Why does Canada have a
300%
tariff
on dairy and lumber
on The US with because they're protecting
Canada's dairy and lumber. So you have all

(07:26):
these situations where Trump is saying, yep. We're
gonna have reciprocal,
we're gonna have a reciprocal tax,
rate, and he's using it for multiple reasons.
One, take the maximalist position,
maximize leverage
to get
Canada, in this case, to do something he
wants. And if they don't do what he
wants, okay. Fine. Then that's a revenue stream

(07:48):
to help pay down debt,
and finance the government on top of everything
that DOGE is doing. Because, again,
in order to get the sinking ship that
is The United States economy and the country
under control because we're going bankrupt and everything
you know, I've said it a million times.
We have $36,000,000,000,000
in debt. We have a $36,000,000,000,000
economy.
That's a % debt to GDP ratio. It's

(08:10):
not sustainable at Soviet levels. You have to
do something. And when you have a $7,000,000,000,000
spending and you only have between 4 and
$6,000,000,000,000
in revenue. And, again, go back to the
2017 tax and jobs,
cuts act that was put in place. What
did that do? The Democrats and the left
said, oh, we're gonna lose revenue. We're gonna
lose tax revenue.

(08:31):
All every single year those tax cuts have
been in place,
you've seen an increase in revenues for the
federal government.
So clearly, the tax cuts work, and that's
ultimately what Trump and Elon are trying to
do. Elon's trying to do the equation
cutting
by shrinking it, and then Trump's trying to
grow the economy
by getting us into an even playing field.

(08:52):
Oh, that even playing field. You know, I
had no idea about the 300%
tariffs at lumber and dairy on Canada. I
mean,
you just don't even think about trading partners,
and and you think that it's fair because
else why why else would you trade with
them? And yet, when we find out about
it,
why did we allow this to go on

(09:15):
for so long?
Yeah. So so, again, this
is the position
from Canada's perspective, putting 300% tariff rate on
The United States
is they're protecting their own supply base. Right?
They're protecting their lumber. They're protecting their dairy.
And we never did anything about it because
okay. Fine. If that's what it is, then

(09:36):
we react and it maybe it's cheaper,
to get dairy
and lumber from Canada. And maybe that was
what was was done,
with regard to that. And on top of
it, more,
elected officials that just like the way things
were or didn't wanna rock the boat. Oh,
there's always the the fear of the the
terror war and, you know, we can't do

(09:56):
this. We can't do that. And Trump is
the only one with the boulders between the
legs to actually say, no. We're gonna stop
getting ripped off, and we're gonna even the
playing field. And he's been saying this for
forty or fifty years. This is nothing new.
You go back to videos
of of Trump in the eighties, and he
said the same thing that we were getting
ripped off. And what he's doing is even
in the playing field, and the market has
to react. And now you're seeing all these

(10:17):
car companies that are like, holy smokes. There's
a 25% tax
on all these foreign car companies. If you
import them into The United States, it's gonna
cost more money. So what are they doing?
They're looking at their their LRPs, their long
range planning, which is your five to ten
year look at. And these CEOs and these
executives are like, okay. What's the cost to
produce

(10:38):
and develop a new manufacturing facility in, say,
Indiana or a red state that is a
right to work state so you don't have
to deal with the labor challenge? And what's
that cost? And minimize
what the supply chain is going to be.
Because right now, this is how bad the
economy has been. I've used this example before,
so forgive me. But it is cheaper
for us as United States companies or executives

(11:00):
to go and find
another country,
build a factory,
hire labor,
put in processes, put in machines, put in
all this stuff, get all the the goods,
the raw materials, manufacture
that good,
have it through go through quality inspection, put
it on a barge,
and ship it to The United States

(11:23):
is cheaper than building and doing all of
what I just said in The United States
and manage and the cost of managing that
supply chain from the time of raw materials
and purchase order to actual manufacturing and delivery.
That's where we are today in 2025.
That it is that much cheaper to manage,
which has generated the whole idea and the

(11:44):
whole business and the whole industry
of supply chain management because it's cheaper to
do it that way than to literally just
build a factory, let's say, here in South
Jersey and put the processes in place and
build it, hire the workers, and produce a
profit. That's where we are.
Okay. Is this
it sounds to me
like a a great part of the the

(12:06):
cost to us as consumers
comes because of wages,
and
perhaps specific job,
needs,
of of higher level
people who are
better trained perhaps than we do in The
United States Of America?
How do we get beyond it? And how

(12:27):
is it that Donald Trump is going to
be bringing back
all of this industry that he believes is
going to lower the price, lower the cost
when you just talked about you can send
it out to a country where labor is
cheap. You can build a whole plant. You
can produce whatever it is that we need,
and it's a lower cost for them to
put it on a barge and bring it

(12:47):
to our country. How do we change that
dynamic?
So there's there's multiple there's multiple avenues you
can go, and this is where, again, our
elected officials,
outside of Trump and his team seem to
have had no balls between the legs. And
the first thing is we have things like
OSHA. We have things like child labor laws.
Right? We're we have environmental,

(13:09):
safety. We have all these things that are
added goods, regulatory, added added cost, tax, whatever
you wanna call them, as part of doing
business that are other countries
like China, let's let's pick on China, does
not do. They don't have child labor laws,
obviously. They do not have safety situations. They
do not have, things that impact the environment.

(13:31):
So all those are non cost that they
have to compete. Same thing with Korea, Japan,
etcetera, but not to the same extent. So
on top of it, we have labor costs
here, not just because of the cost of
living or just the demand here, but we
also have all the extra things that are
negotiated,
along the way that are added costs. So
how do you even that plaintiff? The first

(13:52):
thing to do is, guess what? Trump takes
the position that I'm not gonna do any
business with any countries
that do not share our safety and our
environmental and our,
child labor laws. So then what happens? It's
a direct impact to demand. It's a direct
impact to supply.
So then either we go into that kind
of

(14:12):
challenge and war until the other country bends
because they need The United States. They need
The United States consumer to buy their stuff.
And as a result of that, that demand
and that supply gets impacted,
And, ultimately,
it will eventually drive the cost down because
it will also do a self reflection on
The United States on all those regulatory is

(14:32):
it overdone or whatnot, and find some equilibrium
to get to a point
where the efficiency
factor goes down and you get more competitive.
What do you really need in terms of
the cost? And this is why car companies,
Korean, Japanese, etcetera,
do so much better than US manufacturer companies.
Because what do only

(14:54):
US manufacturing car companies, auto automotive in Detroit,
etcetera, have that the rest of the the
rest of the world doesn't? They have all
these collective
bargaining units that drive up the cost of
labor
that instead of putting that money back into
the business into a better product that you
could bring down the price, it goes into
employees that,
unfortunately, they've been able to retire,

(15:16):
I don't know, mid fifties, and then they're
living for another three decades. So the cost
of labor is usually two or three
versus one. So you have to get to
a point where you're competing on the same
playing field, and then the byproduct of efficiency
gets created to become competitive
to drive it down.
If you were to look at all the
regulatory agencies and the taxes, which is what

(15:39):
these regulatory
agencies put on businesses,
how do we get rid of these regulatory
agencies that are unnecessary,
that are there
because they're part of the bureaucracy that the
Democrats built up because they wanted to hire
more people, so the employment rate would look
good while they were in office. How to

(15:59):
get rid of these
many agencies
that, in fact, are able to regulate
certain businesses,
placing taxes on the businesses, which is then
handed over to the public who wants to
purchase the goods.
Yeah. So Doge actually has a tab on,
the doge.gov
website where they're tackling this. Because regulations are

(16:21):
just another form of tax. Right? It's another
thing they are forced to do to spend
money and time to either
oblige or learn, etcetera.
So, again, what Trump and his team are
doing is
what the people voted to put him in.
You do what Trump tells you to do.
And if you're gonna cut regulation, if you're
gonna add a new regulation,

(16:43):
I think it's 10 for everyone. If you're
gonna add a new regulation, you have to
find 10 to cut.
And that mentality,
again, you try to find ways to in
in the private sector or public companies that
have requirements that to pass audits,
otherwise their entire
stock creators, which the government doesn't have. Right?

(17:03):
There there's no way the United States government
on any level could pass a freaking audit,
in in a multitude of avenues. So how
do you do this? How do you find
the regulations to cut? It's it's no different
than reviewing line by line
the cost and contracts that Doge is doing.
If you have a regulation that you have
to do x, y, and z.

(17:25):
Alright. Well, who created the regulation?
Well, it's it's in the FAR, federal accusation
regulation.
Okay. Well, great. Well, who wrote it? Who's
the individual? Do they still work here? Let's
justify that. And this is very time intensive.
But the best way and a benchmark
of how far to cut is to get
to a point where, oh my gosh, I've
cut too much, and I need to put

(17:46):
back in. That's what happens in the private
sector. That's what happens with public companies. That
when you're trying to find ways to be
more efficient, you cut processes, you cut regulations,
you cut things to the point where, like,
okay. I need to put these back in
place because
something else happened, a new challenge or an
error. And, yes, we do need that in
there. And that is your that's how you
do this in a business world that's clearly

(18:08):
never been applied to the federal government prior
to Donald Trump getting elected as a '47
president.
I can't wait. I can't wait to see
what Elon Musk actually
actually does over the next year or so.
Honestly,
Brian, I I am
gobs struck by all of the good things
that the man is doing. And the louder

(18:29):
the politicians
from the left or right,
are yelling, the more I hope
Elon Musk looks at the Trump is more
or less, he's flipping the game board and
saying, I'm sick and tired of getting screwed
and you cheating, and we're gonna start over.
He's brilliant. Reactions to that are impacting the
stock market. He really is brilliant.

(18:50):
It it it it's mind boggling
how smart that man is, and he he
knew what he wanted to do fifty years
ago. It's incredible.
We have Rich Barely on the phone. Good
morning, Rich. How are you? Welcome.
Good. Anne, how are you? And Brian, how
are you? Good. Good. Good. The
I'm enjoying the show and

(19:10):
Brian's brilliancy about the observations
of, those in the economy and so forth.
My question is,
I called in last week, I think, when
on your show, and,
I just said that I would hope that
the tariffs,
were applied the revenue from the tariffs
were applied to reducing the debt.

(19:31):
The same thing, with,
with regard to the savings that DOS is,
which I'm a favor of, DOS is achieving.
Where is that savings going? And I hope
that it doesn't get reshuffled somewhere else. I
hope that that gets,
applied towards reducing the debt.

(19:52):
Great question. Yeah. Great question. And I recall
that from last week. And here let me
try to be more comprehensive. So the basic
understanding is what is Elon and Trump trying
to do? I said this earlier. Trump is
trying to
find ways to grow the economy by a
trillion, and Elon is trying to find a
way to cut a trillion dollars so that
you have this $2,000,000,000,000 deficit

(20:13):
or more
gets evened out, and you have a balanced
budget in terms of how much revenue you
take in from taxes and what you spend.
Now to your question, where does the money
go from tariffs? Where does the money go
from savings? Again, this goes back into the
treasury in terms of the overarching supply of
money to be dispersed. Because if you cut
to my point with the contracts, you have

(20:35):
a ceiling of a hundred million dollars on
a contract. You've actually been funded so far
40,000,000,
and you have 60,000,000 remaining, which means when
you cut that contract through a t through
c clause, that $60,000,000
doesn't get spent, and it goes back into
the treasury.
Right? Because it's no longer funded on that
contract. The same thing with the lease cancellations

(20:56):
that DOGE is doing. The labor cost. Right?
It's just like any business. I have a
labor cost. You have your payroll. You have
all this stuff. The
the reduction in force, the rift that they're
talking about, those are your actual terminations
prior to or
after these voluntary separation plans that are going
to reduce the labor force. Again, it goes
back into the treasury into the pot. To

(21:17):
your point of trying to earmark this specifically
for the debt, that's where treasury secretary Bessette
comes in. That, okay. Here's my expenses. Here's
my balance sheet, and this is what I
have to do. And, ultimately, it's all going
in the same place. And Trump, at the
delegation
or
the treasury secretary, can say, this is how
much extra revenue we have

(21:38):
as he's the chief executive. Right? Congress has
to appropriate,
meaning give the
ceiling of the amount of money. It doesn't
mean you have to spend it. And that's
where the tax revenues
from you, me, and everyone listening,
on top of corporate taxes, on top of
tariffs, all that gets accumulated in terms of
the revenue.
And that's where the point of

(22:00):
Trump trying to grow the economy by equalizing
the playing field
and Elon trying to find cuts. You have
a net net of almost 2,000,000,000,000, maybe even
more at the rate they're going because of
the fraud, waste, and abuse, and all that
gets into the pot in terms of the
money that's spent. And the whole point is
then you have to get congress to actually
do the budget, which we haven't seen in
in fifteen years. But, ultimately, it's the larger

(22:21):
pot of the money in terms of the
revenue of where this goes. And that's why
Trump, even if people don't do what he
says by doing these tariffs, he's like, who
cares? I'm getting revenue as a result of
it. And if the economy gets to a
point where
we it's it's really bad, Trump will pull
back, but he knows he's got all the
leverage. He's got the maximalist position to get
other countries and economies to do what he

(22:43):
wants, or at a minimum, he gets to
take some revenue in the meantime. So, ultimately,
that's how it's gonna be done. You have
to do both sides of the equation. You
have to reduce
the spending,
the cost, and you have to expand the
economy generating more revenue and everything in between.
Because 7,000,000,000,000,
30 six trillion dollars, seven trillion dollar,
spending every year. And if you're only taking

(23:04):
5,000,000,000,000 and you have $36,000,000,000,000
of debt every year, then that's 2,000,000,000,000 plus
the.
Okay. So what is the the blowback going
to be if Donald Trump and and Elon
Musk continues the good work that they're doing
and,
the left wing,
or all the politicians
and the departments
that are going to be eliminated,

(23:25):
with the blowback.
What do you think is going to happen
and how long do you think it's going
to be before everyone sort of settles into
understanding what Donald Trump is doing and accepting
it for what it is?
Well, I think based on the performance thus
far, the fact that now there are multiple
polls, not just one,
which was mind boggling for me to see

(23:46):
this week is that the direction of the
economy the direction of the country
is in the forties in terms of the
positive direction. It hasn't been that way since
I was in high school. We're talking early
two thousands,
maybe even middle school, when
we had a approval of the direction of
the country. So that alone is showing that

(24:06):
Trump and Elon and the Doge team and
Trump's cabinet are doing
what is needed. And the American people seem
to have an appetite for it because it's
not one. It's not two. It's three separate
polls by three very left leaning organizations
that have now
identified that the we're in a positive direction
for the for for the country, which, again,

(24:28):
this hasn't happened. We haven't seen these numbers
in twenty five years, a quarter of a
century. Oh, man. That's crazy.
Brian, I can't thank you enough. You really
did elucidate
some of the some of the major obstacles
that most of us have who don't understand
what the economy is all about, what tariffs
mean,
and how it's going to be better for
our country,

(24:48):
all the things that Donald Trump and Doge,
is doing for us.
Thank you, as always. I can't wait to
see you. I'll see you soon. And, in
the meantime,
God bless you, Brian Fitzherbert.
You are the best. I love you. Take
care. Thanks. Be a proud man. God bless.
Bye.
Anyway,

(25:08):
yeah.
The man is brilliant. I think he belongs
on Donald Trump's team. If Donald Trump was
wise, he would,
hear some of what, our buddy,
Brian,
talks about when it comes to,
all of the things having to do with
the economy, and he would be hired on
the spot.
Yes. He would be.