DOGE - Satan or Savior??? (Ep 105)
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the national debt are front and center. But is efficiency even possible with $36.5 trillion on the books? With debt service now consuming a growing share of GDP, what does this mean for retirement planning and long-term financial security? In this episode, we break down the economic reality facing today's savers, why blind trust in government spending won’t cut it, and how smart investors can adapt to the shifting landscape. Plus, a look at AI’s growing role in financial planning and whether ETFs can replace high-yield checking.
Transcript - The following transcript was generated by a robot, so please excuse any typos or inaccuracies.
Brian Doe 0:02
Brian, today on Make the DOE rise, we will take a look at DOE. Is this going to solve all of our problems, or will this be the end of this? Stay tuned.
Speaker 1 0:18
It's time to make the DOE rise, the financial podcast with Brian Doe. Hey.
Walter Storholt, co-host 0:27
It's another episode of Make the DOE rise Walter Strohl here alongside Brian Doe he, of course, is the certified financial planner at living worth, wealth advisor, serving the lake country and beyond, based in Greensboro, Georgia, more than two decades of experience in the financial planning world, and we've got a great episode today, Brian, we're all dealing with you've got a little bit of sneezing going on. I'm getting over a cold. Even producer Andre has got her cup of tea and a little sore throat this morning. But we're going to push through because we've got this important topic to talk about today.
Brian Doe 0:56
Yeah, clearly, it is the depths of winter and but the good news is spring will be right around the corner and we get our sunshine and vitamin D back up soon. There
Walter Storholt, co-host 1:04
you go. Absolutely we can always keep our fingers crossed for that, even though the groundhog saw a shadow or whatever, and it was going to mean lots more winter. You know, we got, actually a little fall spring in Colorado, so where, even though I got the cold, we had, like, a really nice weekend of temps in the 60s. So yeah, we had the same here for a little bit. It's pretty nice. After a little bit of snow comes through, then you get the clearing. But hopefully the same thing will happen with being under the weather. Nonetheless, I'm excited for today's topic, because obviously this has been dominating the news all the talk about doe, and you have some people that are really excited about it, others that certainly see it as you kind of depicted here, the devil or the Savior. It is two very different takes on its impact, on its importance to the country right now. And a lot of people have very strong opinions about this, and I know that you're one to typically step back a little bit and say, Okay, well, let's just strip all of the emotions out of it and look from a more practical standpoint. And I hope we get to do that a little bit on today's show. Today's
Brian Doe 2:03
show. We will take a look at all of it and get a few topics. We'll, we'll breathe through, and then we'll, we'll dive into the big ones for
Walter Storholt, co-host 2:10
sure. Yeah, should be pretty good. Other than doe on our topic today, everything else going well in your world, my friend,
Brian Doe 2:16
yeah, yeah. We're getting ready to go skiing out in Utah for a little bit. I'm taking one of my daughters out there with some some friends, and then they we had, but we've had just stuff going on with the kids all different directions. One got involved with mock trial, and they've won their district and are headed to state competition. That's been pretty cool, spring musical and thescon, and then we've got, you know, just all the first year college stuff with Hannah. So nice. You think they're gonna grow up and quit dominating your calendar, and you find out they're just as busy and bigger productions than ever. So yeah,
Walter Storholt, co-host 2:53
maybe after the wedding days, eventually, perhaps they'll stop dominating the calendar Exactly. Hopefully, then you'll be a grandpa before too long, Brian, and then all of a sudden, that'll dominate your calendar, the circle of life. That's right, that's right. Well, Brian, I know DOE is such a large topic, and we're here at the beginning of a new year, perhaps we need a little reset, or at least, what's catching your eye, or what do we need to cover to give us a basis for this conversation today?
Brian Doe 3:19
Well, a couple of little things, just sort of housekeeping notes. Vanguard has some new ETFs out that give access to short term treasuries and provides a very nice dividend. So if anybody out there is worried about savings accounts or banks, bank savings accounts and the like even CDs. There are some good new ETFs that are not tied to any corporate bonds or anything like that. It's pure treasuries, and they can give a comparable yield to what you're getting from some of the higher yielding savings accounts and money markets now. So I thought that was a nice thing that they they had coming along that nothing, nothing major, but just know that that's out there. And the other advantages, if you've got a state with high income tax, you would not be subject to state tax on those dividends. So just an extra little boost to those and we're also seeing a lot of talk about AI and the rise of AI, and everybody's exploring applications of what they're doing with it, and we're beginning to see it actually get incorporated into the software suites that we're using for financial planning. So it's going to be fun to see what what actually comes of all this. A lot of a lot of people have played with chat GPT, or they've heard of chat GPT. And I have one client who's early 80s, and a couple weeks ago he called and he says, Have you heard about this chat GPT? I said, Oh yeah, I've heard about it. He said, Well, I just found out about it last week. And I said, what you been doing with it? Oh, he he had planned a trip. They're taking a trip out. And he wanted to drive X number of hours a day and stop in certain places and see the sites. And he says, chat, GPT. Just put the whole thing together for me. And I said, Well, very good. I'm impressed. That is, what else? What else have you done with it? No, he was analyzing some artwork with it and getting some feedback on on his wife's paintings and things like that. And I said that, that's cool. I never, never thought about that. And then I said, Well, what else will he do it? Have you done with it? He said, Well, I put my portfolio in there, and it tells me I've got enough cash. And I was like, Oh no, I'm gonna be on a job here pretty soon. It's true. It's coming for us all. The Terminator
Walter Storholt, co-host 5:38
advisor is here. That's right. Oh, that's funny. It's amazing. You know, there's the, what I kind of break it down as the times I intentionally use AI, and then the unintentional, like, I don't even know that I'm using AI. And it sounds like you're having that slip into your financial planning world a little bit more, where you're not having to go to the third party to seek out the use of it, AI, it's just it's already working its way into the software. It's working its way into, you know, just your normal day to day life. I see that in in emails now, with it trying to, like, make you write the email for you, and all those kinds of things. It's interesting how it just slowly sort of creeps into your everyday life without you even having to go seek
Brian Doe 6:19
it. It is really nice because it puts together some very nice reports and summaries and analysis, you know, stuff that would take hours to put together. It just it kind of does for you, and it doesn't do it perfectly. So let's be fair, the limitation of AI is, at the end of the day, you still really need to understand your field and what feedback it's providing may or not be correct. It may or not be applicable to your specific situation, but man, it's a great way to get maybe 80% of the way there. Yeah, and then you can go back and fix those little things that aren't perfect about the AI, I'll
Walter Storholt, co-host 6:53
tell you one of my uses for it. Over the last six months, I've been using it for this specific thing a little bit more. I tend to be a bit verbose in emails, and so especially if it's like a coaching email or an equipment list that I've got to send somebody, or a how to or even a sales email that recaps something, I tend to be a bit too verbose. And I know people just don't have time to read these long emails that I tend to send. So I do my long Email, type it all out, I drop it into chat GPT, and tell it to make me more concise, and then it spits out a you know, half length version of what I wrote, but still has all the essential information in it. I make a tweak or two, and then I'm able to send that out. And I've noticed over the last six months or so, I my response rate has certainly increased, so I use it kind of in like an assistant role in that way, and it's helped me out a lot in those specific tasks.
Brian Doe 7:48
I think the most unique use that I have seen just occurred this past week. My daughter, turning 16, had a few of her friends over, and they were talking about boyfriends, and one of them had a particularly bad boyfriend, or he's done something when the consensus was he needs to go. And so I they went downstairs, I didn't hear from him from a little bit, and they came back upstairs, and I said, Well, we did it. She broke up with her boyfriend. She put into chat GPT, how to break up with a boyfriend. It generated a script she called the boyfriend. Basically read the script and it was done and over. I thought, well, that was so cool, like I always struggled for what to say or get into these awkward situations, and if it'll script it out for you and get you through it, I thought, That's very clever. I didn't know you could do that. That's
Walter Storholt, co-host 8:34
a brave new world, isn't it? I'm sure chat GPT, if we wanted to, we could go the reverse, and rather than the breakup, we could probably have chat GPT come up with all sorts of pickup lines, you know, yeah, customize it to our personalities. And if
Brian Doe 8:49
you don't have the currency to even say it, you can just text, take copy from jet GPT, paste it and see how it
Walter Storholt, co-host 8:55
works. That's right, that is a pretty cool use of it. I'll share one last one with you, and this is just a very humorous one. I have a client that sends me posts for, you know, blogging and notes and things like that. And he's still a double spacer. And so I guess he's been like that his whole life, you know, double space after every after every period. And it drives me crazy. And I used to have to go through before posting and take out manually all the double spaces in the post. And I was like, boy, this has to be like the lowest level task I do as a human being, just hitting Delete 1000 times between all these spots. Now I can drop the whole thing into chat, G, P, T, and say, change. Nothing about this script, other than getting rid of all the double spaces. It goes, spits it out. Copy, paste it back in. Done. That's awesome. I was like, now that's AI, that's, that's, that's your greatest use, right there, you just saved me. Like, the the time ratio that you just saved me is incredible.
Brian Doe 9:47
It's huge. Yeah, yeah. There's gonna be all kinds of efficiencies that are gonna come from it. But the doomsday errors do think you're just millions and millions of jobs are gonna be eliminated. But if you have young children that are, you. College age, coming up into the workforce, definitely, they still need the critical thinking skills, learning how to communicate. The mock trial that we were at really gave them an opportunity to verbally express themselves, put an argument together, respond to real life situations, and they need that skill, but they are also going to need to know how to apply chat GPT to it, and it's the combo that I think will be the the people who are most lethal in tomorrow's job market. Yeah,
Walter Storholt, co-host 10:30
yeah, absolutely. I agree with you on that front. All right, so ETFs, you mentioned those the rise of AI. Anything else catching your eye before we head to DOE? The one
Brian Doe 10:38
that's kind of connected or tangent to DOE is what's going to happen with taxation. We're hearing a ton of talk, you know, out of Trump about eliminating the income tax and the IRS and switching entirely to tariffs. And, you know, that was a 1800s era taxation system, and we did not have the social programs of social security and medicare and whatnot. It was very different time, but it was very prosperous for us. So I would, just before I got too excited or too alarmed about any of those, I would just take a step back and just, let's wait and see what actually transpires, because the payroll taxes that fund social security and medicare and those Pay As You Go systems. I don't know how you ever convert that to a totally tariff based system. It bring it up with some kind of hybrid, but I did see Steve Forbes coming back out and saying, Hey, flat tax, you know, he's been talking about it for decades, and that that would be nice to see a great simplification, or something, you know, built into prices that more accurately tipped. I think the key thing that Trump is looking at is making a fair system for the US. For so many years, we've allowed other countries to subsidize industries, China or have tariffs against us that we don't have against them, Europe, in the auto space, Canada. So there are some imbalances there that need to be rectified and either make it free trade on both sides or make it fair trade. So again, just give it time. Let's, let's see where this all settles out. I'm, I'm not making any conclusions about it just
Walter Storholt, co-host 12:29
yet. Yeah, little hard to judge it, you know for what it's going to be, because it's constantly morphing Right? Like they're going to take place tomorrow. Okay? We've put it off for a month. Okay? Now this has happened, okay? This is a marketing chip that's been used. Okay? Now this has been moved over here. Still going to happen, but now we're delaying it over here, so it's like, All right, we don't know how this is all going to come out, just quite and
Brian Doe 12:47
again, the Trump is all big, bombastic, crazy idea, behavioral finance. It's called, like anchoring. You throw this ridiculous price out there, or this crazy number out there, either high or low, and somehow that anchors people at that spot, and then as you move off of that, then your original or normal price seems, you know, like a deal in comparison. It's a tactic. It's a strategy. People aren't used to politicians doing it, so that's a little bit of what's rattling everybody. So again, just stay calm. Let's just see what actually happens. Give it time. There's there's other variables in place besides just what Donald Trump does.
Walter Storholt, co-host 13:27
All right, I think you've teed us up nicely for for doe and the Elon impact, and however else you want to kind of couch this, this new development in 2025 here. All
Brian Doe 13:39
right, I need to tread very carefully on this one, because I did not realize how sensitive this subject was on either side of the coin. This does, call it the DOE coin, and is there's heads and tails on it. And I will admit the majority of my clients are conservative leaning. They are optimistic about what's happening. They would like to see cuts and reductions to government, and I didn't think there was anything of particular panic about what was happening. I was rather enjoying seeing the idea of somebody come in and begin to look at and scrutinize all the the government spending. And I'm, I've been following what Malay has done down in Javier Malay, in Argentina, he's calling it, and he was the guy with the chainsaw, and, you know, flat out, cut this, cut that, get it out. And he's really turning Argentina around. And that place has been notoriously a financial Basket Case for better part of a century, and he's got inflation down. And I look at what's happening here as you being like a very necessary step in reorganization, like any corporation or business would do that. It's coming off the rails financially. But apparently some people are so hyper fixated on the personality or the emotion or the idea of Elon Musk, and he's the he's the billionaire, He's the richest guy in the world. And of course, Trump is highly, highly polarizing. And so the first thing that tipped me off was I got an email, and he said, Oh. I said, Hi, guys, hope you can help me out with some advice. My clients are sending articles and are worried about their money in banks being hacked by musk, and there's a link here to some article about it, and then another client sent me this email, concerned that Schwab is in cahoots with Maga. There's Maga money at Charles Schwab. And I just I clicked on these articles. I thought, my God, this, this stuff is not making it into my feed. I'm not hearing any of this stuff. And said, you know, finally, I don't know about you, but I've never had to invest in the midst of heavy terrorists while taking over the Gaza Strip, Canada, Mexico, Greenland and deporting people to all corners of the globe. I thought, Wow, this, this is like a totally different world view and perspective than what I was seeing it from. So I called and talked through it, and I looked, looked at a couple of these articles, and I said, this kind of this looks sort of sensational and redirected. Or my advice to her was, you know, go back over a historical time period that the client had lived through. Remind them of all of the crazy things that have happened at a time that they remember but didn't have a lot of money invested. And then you look and you see that there are the savings and loan crisis, and you had presidential assassination attempts and big political upheavals and major legislative changes, and y 2k and September 11, and all the things that we've lived through. And put it in perspective, so that they can realize that what's happening today really is just like a different day, another flavor of sensationalism or concerned and really what they should do is just turn off the news. Take this look back, or, even better to tune into the other side. Everybody seems to be very dialed into one channel, one flavor of news, one take. And it really concerns me, because it's just polar extremes that a this is either the salvation and the new golden age, or Musk is hacking our accounts, and they're taking the government down, and we're headed to oblivion. I was like, the truth is somewhere in between. It's not either of those, but it's, it's going to be somewhere in between. But I don't know. Are you seeing this anywhere? It kind of kind of snuck up on me, but now that I see it, it's seems to be everywhere.
Walter Storholt, co-host 18:00
Yeah, exact same kind of, kind of takes, I guess I would say I've got a family member who could be caught up, you know, kind of an extended family member who could be caught up in the layoffs of the federal government, a federal employee. So I'm, you know, I'm getting information and kind of hearing, certainly, that anxiety and perspective and the whys and a lot of those, you know, that side of the coin. So that's interesting to see that perspective. There's definitely room for improvement, I would say, in the in the how things are done, this is sort of like, even if you like what's being done, it's the how it's being done. And then for someone who doesn't like what's being done in the first place, the how just makes it that much worse, I suppose. And you know, Trump likes to be a comedian. Elon loves to be a troll. And you know, his own comedic way of being, I don't know, satirical or ironic or sarcastic, maybe a combination of all of those. And then you throw in memes and just online quips and one liners, and that's what can sometimes make this stuff really hard to keep up with, is it's like, it would be nice if somebody would just say, Hey, I'm the adult in the room. We're making these cuts. Well, here's another change that we've made. We've done this just without all the trolling, right? Like, because that would help take some of this emotion out of it and just put the facts on the table. So I think I feel like that just Stokes people even more. I mean, I was talking with someone who I respect quite a bit, and they were concerned, kind of, and they're in that category of people that are more just concerned over everything that's happening and what they're reading in the news. And something that I thought was interesting was we were actually talking about cryptocurrency, and I was just telling them about what cryptocurrency is, trying to explain it, just at a very basic level. And they were asking about doe, and they were like, so they started doe after, like, they launched this coin to scam people after they did this government thing. And I'm like, No, it's the other way around. The coin was was first, and has been out for a long time, and it just happens to have. The same initials as you know, just made for an easy carry over into this government agency. But that rubbed him really the wrong way. Like, even though his concern was it was launched as a scam on the American people today, it was like it then became more concerning that this whole government agency was built off of a meme and off of a joke. The
Brian Doe 20:19
DOE meme existed first, right? Then doe coin came along, sort of as a joke, I guess, or right? It's a copy of Bitcoin, but it was not meant to be really serious. Elon Musk took a shine to it, and now and DOE didn't it just start as a typo, like somebody was trying to write dog, and they got a E. It was like, doggy or something. Oh, I don't even know, yeah, maybe. I think it was one of those typo things that turned into a meme that now has turned into a government agency, right, right?
Walter Storholt, co-host 20:49
So, but that was part of their like, that's something that simple, right? It was part of the concern of like, oh my gosh, we're dealing with people's lives, and we're laying people off and firing them left and right and causing chaos, right? And everyone, that's a word commonly used lately, is causing all this chaos, and it's just done with this joking attitude. So I do think that rubs people the wrong way, no matter kind of what side you're on, that can, that can maybe affect you a little bit.
Brian Doe 21:14
I understandable, yeah. And again, I just, I take people back to the reality of what's happening and and so let's, let's do take that more sober, serious, factual, look at it. And we've talked about this with for years on on this podcast. And the the government debt, I think when we started talking Walter was at 23 or 25 trillion or so. It
Walter Storholt, co-host 21:39
would be kind of fun to go back to a first episode or two and see when we when we first talked about the debt, what it was, but you're probably right, yeah,
Brian Doe 21:46
and now it's at 36 and a half trillion dollars that that is $107,000 of debt per citizen, or 323,000 of debt per taxpayer. So if you're a taxpayer, you're in the minority, because there's a lot of children and non working age people. There's a non employed or non working so per taxpayer, that's a pretty big low. That's a starter house in today's market that people are burdened with, if you had to put it on your
Walter Storholt, co-host 22:19
balance sheet, even with DOE is impact right? Now that number is still heading in the wrong direction,
Brian Doe 22:23
right? And the the interest on that debt has now surpassed $1 trillion per year. Okay, we spend, what eight, 900 billion on defense, and that's a massive line item in our budget, and now just the interest on our debt is larger than our defense budget, and it's not going away. I mean, it's not going to just, it's not like we've got this thing on a five year balloon note. We're going to pay it off or amortized anything like that. It this is just ongoing, continuing to add to it. Interest rates have gone up, and that, that that number will just continue to rise in this current environment, as the debt that was issued during the low interest rate era matures. And we do we issue new treasuries? Well, if you're a saver, you know going back to how we opened, if you want to go buy the US Treasury 30 day treasury note, you can get a nice yield on it, but the government is having to pay that interest, so trillion dollars a year, plus four and a half to 5% of GDP just to tread water.
Walter Storholt, co-host 23:30
By the way, you were in the right neighborhood when we started podcasts in 2019 it was kind of the 22 23 trillion range. So yeah, we've gone up over 10 trillion plus since that
Brian Doe 23:42
4040, 45% increase.
Unknown Speaker 23:45
Yeah, yeah, pretty incredible.
Brian Doe 23:47
So and you look at that, and you also have to look at Social Security obligations, Medicare, Medicaid, VA, payments, pensions, those are all obligations of the the government and to make those payments as well. I did not look at the numbers on those but if you calculated the unfunded liabilities of the federal government, the the number just gets even more massive than that, $323,000 so a lot of that gets paid with current payroll taxes and things like that, with direct funds coming in. But the payments are about to outstrip the inflows, and we're gonna have a crisis mid, early to mid, 2030s, on funding for Social Security and Medicare, if we don't do stuff between now and then, such a
Walter Storholt, co-host 24:41
huge issue and deal. And so doe came onto the scene to try and correct this, and they're eliminating programs, and definitely, you know, fires, the firings have started in certain sectors now, left and right. I mean, can this realistically put much of a dent into what we're doing
Brian Doe 24:57
that? That's the million dollar question. Yeah. In or the trillion dollar question, I guess? Yeah, multi trillion dollar question, right? So I thought about it. I was listening to another podcast, and they were talking about it this way, if you had debt service on on our debt is a trillion plus. Well, that's larger than many other countries around the world. So if you were a average citizen on an average Street in America, and you had been burning up the credit cards and racked up a ton of credit card debt, such that just the interest payments on your credit cards were larger than all of your neighbors average annual incomes for just the debt payments on your credit card, never mind your your own mortgage and your own cost of living. And someone came in and said, Hey, I think this, this little debt thing and these credit card uses is getting a little out of hand. Why don't we take a look and let's just just pull out all the statements, pull out all the past spending, and let's just review it to see what things we might be able to cut and start stripping out everything unnecessary and get this under control. And then, as you made that probe, maybe there was one line item or two that you pointed out that said, hey, maybe you don't need this XYZ item. And all of a sudden, the massive protest becomes about whether or not that line item is necessary or to be cut or you're having a very strong reaction to it. No, the crisis is not that we're going to cut this one line item, or we're even talking about cutting one line it's worth $36 trillion in debt. Your interest payments are larger than the average neighbor's annual total income. We have to get aggressive. We have to get serious about it. And protesting one line item on the ledger and objecting to a particular department or job being eliminated is what people are reacting to. So the problem is way bigger than what people are even seeing and having the reaction to. So I'm not, not sure how to convey that or get people to to look at it that way, but the reality is, a lot of government jobs are not productivity. They don't increase GDP. For example, if I was the earner in my family, and I say made $100,000 a year, and I wanted to increase my family income, I would need to send wife and kids out to get jobs. Well, if, on the other hand, I said, Well, don't go out and get jobs. Let me just, I'll hire you, and I'll, I'll pay each of you $20,000 a year. And so now we're all making, I'm making $100,000 a year, and they're all making 80 because I'm paying them 20 each. So our income has not gone up $280,000 a year, it's still the amount that I've got coming in. So hiring my own family does nothing to increase the net resources of our household and government jobs are a lot like that. I mean, there is a certain amount of regulation and administration and law enforcement and things that need to be done, for sure, but you know, if, like any good big corporation, I deal on the other side of this with corporate employees who have been subject to layoffs, downsizing, mergers and acquisitions, and you Want to talk about a merciless process that is not a touchy feely kumbaya session. They a lot of people that were in their peak earning years. They were a few years away from retirement. They were looking forward to really bolting down and securing their finances. You know, coming into the final years of the approach boom, they're out a job, and, you know, they don't have benefits now, and it's a harsh reality. So to think that all government jobs should be immune from that process is, you know, it's a unfortunate but but necessary process. Sometimes I think
Walter Storholt, co-host 29:39
it's something we all need to just kind of try to strip some of the emotion out and look at it practically, look at it rationally. I know that doesn't make it more palatable for some, but I think if the more of us who can try and at least reach some sort of common ground and understanding this, finding truth, realizing that there's a problem that needs to be fixed and we've got to at. Least work on some solutions to get there, rather than sticking our heads in the sand or just making the problem worse, we've got to try and at least make some inroads into this. And you know, I don't think you can fix any I think if you can ask any person Brian, who's ever made them made it out of debt themselves, even a small amount of debt, or someone who's made it out of a large amount of debt, it doesn't happen easily and without pain. It takes sacrifice. It takes painful days, concerted efforts, concerted efforts, frustrations, cuts. But talk to anybody that's made it out of that situation, and they feel like their life has changed forever, rated, yep, and liberated, and all the good things that have happened to them, they could probably tie back to that, getting out of debt. So it's, to me, it's a very worthwhile mission to at least explore and figure out how we're going to get there.
Brian Doe 30:53
And if you, if you can get to the other side of it too. I mean, if you, if you have a million dollar, sorry, a trillion dollars to pay in interest payments. How much better would that be if we were spending a trillion dollars a year on actual infrastructure? Yeah, or better health care for seniors or people in need? There's a lot of things that that amount of money could go to that would be productive, enhance our society, our economics. And I just hate to be see it being spent on on debt service, because that is a kind of a dead loop or spiral that you get, you can easily get caught in. Let me just wrap this up here. Sure I go on all day about it, but obviously the big idea is that if we can reduce tax burden, move non productive workers to productive positions, and again, I'm going to pull back in AI, if you I think there's a lot of opportunity and potential in the technology space to create trillions of dollars worth of wealth in the coming years. And if you can get enough economic growth, we can actually outgrow the the debt. Put it down as a percentage of GDP, we're at like 130% which is a higher level of debt than we had right at the end of World War Two as get as a percentage of GDP. So it's either pay down the debt or grow GDP like crazy. Well, that's kind of a Reagan esque era idea, and Reagan ended up with with larger deficits and debt, and he was very heavily criticized at the time because of it, and to be fair, we were waging a Cold War arms race at the same time. That was where a lot of the extra spending went. But eventually, deregulation and the reduced taxes did lead to a great boom in the 90s, and we had the last balanced budgets of the last 50 years happened in the 90s under Clinton. So it can be done, but it takes many years. It's going to be a long cycle. And we didn't get here overnight, and we're not going to get out of it overnight, but I certainly think if we focus on the right things and have the right attitude about it. We can definitely get there, because we really don't have any other choice.
Walter Storholt, co-host 33:27
Yeah, keep that optimistic attitude. Hopefully more of us can adopt that here in the future as well. If you are kind of listening to today's show and you're just, I don't know how all this is going to impact me, or I'm concerned, or, Hey, maybe the crux of it is just, well, you know, this is great to look at things globally, but I'm still worried more about my portfolio, my retirement, my future. How is this all going to impact it? If you don't know how increased taxes or decreased taxes, or, you know, cuts and things like that, or even a job loss if you're maybe in, you know, possibly going to be caught up in some of these layoffs, or the threat of AI, maybe you feel like you're really, you know, at risk of losing your job in your final working years because of this, you know, perhaps coming down the pike, and you don't know how all that's going to impact your retirement and what you can sustain and withstand. Those are all great questions that lead to a solid planning process. And that's what Brian takes clients through pretty much on a daily basis, helping them put together a solid plan for their financial future, for retirement, and help navigating you through those ups and downs and building a plan that can withstand many of these things. That's what he's been doing for 20 years. That's how long he's been helping people plan for financial planning and retirement. He is also a Certified Financial Planner professional, which means he meets the highest standards of training and ethics always putting your best interests first when building these plans. So you can take advantage of a complimentary 15 minute call with Brian to see if you're a good fit to get clarity on your financial goals and prepare for that more secure tomorrow. All you have to do if you want to take advantage of that 15 minute review. Is to book a call by going to living worth com. The button there says, book a call. So that's very easy to follow. And it's at living worth.com or again, you can call 706451 9800 that's 706451 9800 that contact information is also in the description of today's show, so you can find it easily. Well, Brian, I hope your your sneezing doesn't turn into a broader sickness and that our warmer and brighter days are ahead, my friend. And thanks for breaking down this difficult topic on today's show, but appreciate your insight. Hopefully
Brian Doe 35:32
gave some insights to it. And yeah, we'll shake this winter crud off and be on to better things here. Soon you got it. We'll
Walter Storholt, co-host 35:40
have another great episode next month. Folks to come back. Come back and join us for that. Until then, we'll see you next time on make the DOE rise.
Speaker 2 35:56
Make the DOE rise is brought to you by living worth Wealth Advisors with a central office in Greensboro, Georgia, but serving the lake country and beyond. The podcast is available on Apple podcasts Spotify and all your favorite podcasting apps. Subscribe today and never miss an episode. Just search for make the DOE rise. With Brian Doe, you can also visit make the DOE rise.com to listen to recent episodes if you'd like to contact the show or schedule a complimentary financial review, as Brian and the team just go to make the DOE rise.com and get in touch through the website or call 706-451-9800, thanks for listening to make the DOE rise investment
Announcer 3 36:34
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