So You Think You Know Who I’m Voting For?

My admission today might surprise you

Ric Edelman: It's Wednesday, September 18th, and, like everybody, I've been spending a lot of time -- I guess inordinate amounts of time -- paying attention to the upcoming elections. Not just the House and Senate, and the state elections, but, of course, preoccupied with the presidential campaign, and I am just frankly flummoxed. I have on occasion over the past month or so, given you some of my commentary on various policies, proposals, activities by Donald Trump and/or Kamala Harris. And I've been getting quite a number of emails from you. Thank you. I always love to receive them.  

And the criticism has been split 50-50. Accusations from my listeners that "you clearly support Donald Trump", and they say that as a derisive term because they favor Kamala. Or telling me that "I obviously am a liberal, and I support Kamala",  and that comes from the people who support Donald Trump. 

In other words, people who love one candidate accuse me of loving the other, and that means I'm getting it about right. Because, if the mail I'm getting is pretty much 50-50, that means I am down the middle. That I am being honest and objective and fair in my commentary on what I'm seeing. 

But let me just tell you the truth. Let me tell you exactly where I am. I'm going to pull the curtain back and I'm going to tell you quite bluntly where I stand on this election. I am undecided. Yeah, that might surprise folks. But I am flummoxed. I'll give you just two examples here today. 

Donald Trump? Why on earth is he hanging around with Laura Loomer? This woman, 31 years old, has expressed bigoted views. She says 9/11 was an inside job. She's called Islam a cancer. She says she's proud to be an Islamophobe. She recently said on X that Kamala Harris, if she wins the election, The White House will smell like curry, which is a racist remark against the VP and, a whole bunch of people around the world. 

You know you've got a problem when even Marjorie Taylor Greene says that Laura Loomer is appalling and extremely racist, and doesn't represent Republicans. Hell, even the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial asking why Donald Trump is hanging around with her, putting her on his jet, letting her backstage with him at the debate. 

What the hell is he doing? Does he agree with what she stands for? Will he put her in the White House if he's elected? It's this kind of thing that makes me really wonder, how on earth could I possibly support Donald Trump? How could I vote for him?  

So, then I look at Kamala Harris, and here's what I see from her. An astonishing level of absurdity in her proposed economic policies. I'll just give you one example. Her idea to impose a new tax on unrealized capital gains on the ultra-rich. She calls it the “billionaire minimum tax.” She would apply a minimum 25% percent tax every year on the unrealized capital gains of Americans who are worth more than $100 million. 

Now, a lot of folks are saying: “Oh, so what. It's only on the uber rich people worth $100 million or more, and I'm not that and therefore she's gonna tax them...she's not gonna tax me.  Let them pay their fair share and the rich don't pay enough in taxes”. She creates this “us vs. them" environment while claiming to be the candidate for everybody. 

And regardless of that rhetoric, the fact is that if she were to try to apply 25% tax on unrealized capital gains on this very tiny group of people, it would actually destroy the capital markets. It would crush your 401k. Yeah. This isn't something that only would impact the super rich. It would impact everybody.  

There's a study just released from a professor at Harvard Law School. He's also a director of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation. And their study shows that billionaires collectively own $5 trillion worth of stock in this country. That's 7% of the entire stock market. This represents 2/3 of their wealth, which means if they had to suddenly pay a 25% tax on all the profits they've earned on the average stocks they currently own.  They haven't sold them, so they haven't paid taxes on them yet. They would have to sell hundreds of billions of dollars worth of stock in order to come up the cash to pay the tax. And if they sold hundreds of billions of dollars worth of stocks, those sales would drive down stock prices not just for them, but for everybody who owns stocks. 

And that means your 401(k). It means your company's pension plan. Your union's pension plan, which is fully invested in stocks. And this would happen every single year. It would also crush private companies as well, because the people who have $100 million or more in assets, they've also got $4 trillion in unrealized capital gains in the shares of private companies, according to the study. But you can't sell the shares of private companies because they're private. Those shares are not tradable. So those rich people would have to go to their public shares. The stocks on the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. They'd have to sell more of those to raise the cash to pay the tax on their private shares. Now, if the law that Kamala is proposing won't apply to the private assets, then guess what the rich will do? They will sell all their public stocks and put all of their money into private stocks. The stock market would crash if $5 trillion dollars suddenly left. 

She doesn't seem to understand this. And that astonishes me that a career civil servant might not understand the fundamentals of how the stock market works. Her plan, she says, is to exempt those who have 80 percent of their wealth in non-tradable illiquid assets. And all that does is give all these rich people a major incentive to shift their money to exactly those kinds of assets. 

She just doesn't seem to get it. So how could I possibly endorse her when she is talking about creating policies as crazy as that. And don't tell me that Harris's proposal to tax the unrealized capital gains has no chance of passing Congress. I know that it has no chance of passing Congress. That's not the point. Or maybe that is the point. Because if it has no chance of passing Congress because Congress has no support for it, because the American people don't want it, why would Harris put forth a proposal that is so left wing, so liberal, so progressive, so extreme, that it is so out of touch with the American public?  

And oh, by the way, this isn't pie in the sky. This was already put before the Congress because it was in Joe Biden's budget. Harris is simply echoing the policies of Joe Biden, which were failed policies. It shows that she's not inventing anything new on her own. She's just parroting what Joe Biden has been doing. So don't tell me that,  "oh, it's not a big deal, Ric.  It doesn't matter because it will never pass." The fact that she would even propose this indicates how out of touch she completely is.

And on an economic side, it's reflective in her choice of VP. Her vice president selection doesn't own a car, doesn't own a house. According to his 2022 tax return, he has earned no interest income, no dividend income, no capital gains. The guy owns no savings or investments. How can he know anything about how the financial markets operate if he doesn't have a bank account, doesn't have a brokerage account, doesn't own stocks or bonds or mutual funds? 

What he does have are three pensions. He's got a military pension, he's got a schoolteacher pension, and now he's got a government pension from his service in Congress and as governor. So his attitude is, all I gotta do is show up for work, do it long enough, and they'll give me a monthly check for as long as I live. That's what a pension is. Well, good for you. You're absolutely right. You provide service for a career in the military, you get a pension. You provide a career in the school teaching system, and you get a schoolteacher's pension. And you go into government service in Congress or in the Governor's Mansion, you get a pension there, too. Good for you.

But what he doesn't understand is where that pension money comes from. Sure, he has some of his paycheck applied to the pension fund, but it's also fully supported by the state legislature or the federal government in the case of a military pension. And now on top of this, what do the pension fund managers do? They take the pension money they're allocated, and they invest it in the stock market. The reason that pensions are able to provide benefits to the pensioners is because of the profits they've earned in stocks. In other words, your pension check is fully dependent on the performance of the stock market. 

And if Harris's proposal to tax unrealized capital gains comes along, which crushes the stock market, it will therefore crush the pension funds, destroying the pensions that so many Americans, including Tim Walz, are counting on. The fact they don't get this, shows how out of touch they are with how the American economy and the capital markets operate. 

And that scares me to death. Oh, and don't now go say, "oh, well, Ric, you're just proving you're for Trump." Look, Donald Trump is the guy who came out with this notion of we're gonna make Social Security benefits tax-free. We're gonna make tips tax-free. We're gonna now make overtime pay tax-free! Is he crazy? 

In the middle of federal deficits and a massive federal debt, we need to pay our bills. He's just exempting left and right as many people as he possibly can from taxes. All in an effort to pander to the electorate, in a desperate effort: “Elect me, and I won't make you pay taxes.” This is insane!  

Trump's economic policies, in so many ways, aren't any better than Kamala Harris's. Both of them are wrong. And it's not just on the economy, either. You just saw what the Pope had to say. The Pope just declared that both of them are immoral. He said Kamala Harris basically wants to kill babies, and Donald Trump basically wants to kill immigrants. The Pope said they're both immoral. Choose from the lesser of the evils. 

In fact, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have offered plenty of economic policies. So much so that economists say they're able to calculate the impact of all of these proposals on the federal deficit. 

And with the result of that analysis done by the economists, which of the candidates would make the federal deficit worse?   

Well, the Penn Wharton budget model is produced by a non-partisan research group out of the University of Pennsylvania in the Wharton School of Business. And they say the plans from both Trump and Harris are bad. That both of them would increase the federal deficit. 

So yeah, I'm between a rock and a hard place. I'm therefore undecided. Trump, so often, says and does, terrible things. Hangs around with terrible people. Harris has terrible economic policies, encouraged by terrible advisors.  

So, you tell me who I should vote for. No, seriously, you tell me. Send me your thoughts. Help me answer this question. Send it to AskRic@TheTruthAYF.com. The link is in the show notes.  

I need your input. Help me resolve this. In fact, starting in October, as we get within a month of the election, I'm going to start talking more and more on this podcast about what I'm thinking and how I'm feeling. Because right now, I'm totally flummoxed, just like another 15% of the entire country who, like me, are undecided. And that means we're the ones who are going to decide who gets elected. You can start by trying to persuade me 

Hey, I’ve got two webinars coming up for you. On Friday, September 20th, 1:00pm EDT, it’s The Q4 Crypto Outlook: What you need to know. Matt Hougan's going to join me with 20 charts. They're going to blow your mind on what's going on now and the next couple of months through the end of the year and into 2025. You'll get past the headlines and really see what's happening in the world of crypto.  You're really going to enjoy this. That's Friday, September 20th, 1:00pm EDT.  

And then the week after that on Wednesday, September 25th, we're going to take you beyond the crypto ETFs, and we're going to unlock alpha in crypto for you. Chris Rhine, Portfolio Manager, Head of Liquid Active Strategies at Galaxy is going to join me and we're going to show you how to gain risk-managed exposure to the crypto-linked equities, crypto miners, semiconductors, financial services, and more innovative strategies and active management. If you are interested in learning more about two of the biggest topics in active management, this webinar is a must-see.  

You get one CE credit for each one of these webinars. You can register for both of them for free at the links in your show notes. Thanks very much. Hope to see you at these two events.  

If you like what you're hearing here on The Truth About Your Future, be sure to follow and subscribe to the show, wherever you get your podcasts, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and remember to leave a review on Apple podcasts. I read them all. Never miss an episode of The Truth About Your Future. Follow and subscribe on your favorite podcast app.  

I'll see you tomorrow.  

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Links from today’s show:   

Kamala Harris Official Campaign Website Policy Page:  https://www.kamalaharris.com/issues/

Donald Trump Official Campaign Website Policy Page:  https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform

 9/20 Webinar - Q4 Crypto Outlook: What You Need to Know Now: https://dacfp.com/events/q4-crypto-outlook-what-you-need-to-know-now 

9/25 Webinar - Unlocking Alpha in Crypto-Equities and Beyond: https://dacfp.com/events/unlocking-alpha-in-crypto-equities-and-beyond 

9/11 Webinar Replay – Rates are Poised to Drop, Now What?: https://www.thetayf.com/pages/rates-poised-to-drop-now-what 

9/10 Webinar Replay – Bitcod-fund-quickly-rakes-in-245m-right-behind-franklin-templetons-older-offering/ 

Become Certified in Blockchain and Digital Assets: https://dacfp.com/certification/    

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