Everybody Got What They Wanted. You Got the Bill. | Wacky Wednesday

Everybody Got What They Wanted. You Got the Bill. | Wacky Wednesday

What if some of the affordability crisis is actually the accumulated cost of government trying to engineer preferred outcomes?

A bizarre California story involving utility contractor certifications sent Chad down a rabbit hole involving:

• Stadium subsidies
• Hollywood tax credits
• AI data center welfare
• Supplier diversity programs
• The hidden cost of incentives

Every story raised the same question:

Did it improve quality?

Did it lower costs?

Did it save time?

New episodes weekly.

CHAPTERS

00:00 California Wants to Know If Your Electrician Is Gay
04:45 Quality, Cost, Time
10:00 The Certification Economy
18:30 You Paid for the Stadium
28:00 Hollywood's Favorite Producer Is You
34:30 Data Center Welfare
42:00 Exceptions or Examples?
45:00 Closing Thoughts

#ChadLaw
#CommonSense
#WackyWednesday
#Economics
#Politics

Transcript

Chadq: Good evening America. California's got a program now, a real one, and I checked it twice because the first time through I figured somebody invented the headline just to ruin my morning. A program to certify whether the business bidding on your utility contract is gay. Gay owned, certified. There's actually a form. And look, I'm supposed to be the guy this one's for. I'm the gay one. This, in theory, is my parade. And I read it and I didn't feel represented. I felt confused, like somebody threw me a party and I can't figure out what we're celebrating. But here's where my head went, no detour. It's late, the power's out, it's 106 outside or it's 12. Pick the one that wrecks your week. And somebody's coming to fix the line that feeds my house. And I promise you, hand to God, standing in the dark, the one thing I am not wondering about is who that man goes home to. I don't care if it's my electrician is gay, I care if he's available. That's the list. Show up, fix it, don't die. We can talk about your weekend once the lights are back on. And this isn't me mad at anyone for being on a list. Nobody in this story did anything wrong. That's almost the part that gets me. Everybody involved had a perfectly nice intention. But somewhere between the nice intention and my electric bill, there's a question that just never got asked. And it's so small it sounds rude out loud. How does any of this? The form, the certificate, the office that processes the form and the certificate. How does one cent of it help keep my lights on? So I pulled the thread and should have left it alone. I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, America's binary brother, the common sense extremist living in radical reality, the walking contradiction your professors warned you about, broadcasting truth on the only rainbow that matters, the red, white, and blue rainbow, working to restore common sense in the American household one conversation at a time. And America, this is common sense. The show where we read the fine print so you don't have to. Where we bring receipts so you don't have to ruin another Thanksgiving dinner. The show for the other 80 % of Americans. The people busy raising families, building businesses, taxes, coaching League, serving their communities, and wondering common sense became controversial. You see, while cable news, political consultants, professional activists, and social media outraged merchants spend all day arguing about the loudest 20%, we focus on the people who actually keep America running. This is the big tent. Common sense conservatives. The shelter for the politically homeless, the politically exhausted, the politically independent, and everybody else tired of being told they have to choose between two bad ideas. In here, reality gets a vote, results matter, truth matters, and most importantly, common sense matters. Welcome home. Let's start the show. All right, so we're getting back to my electrician. are. That thread goes a lot further than you'd think. And by the end of the tonight, I was a little sorry I started. But anyways, ⁓ the only scoreboard I keep, three questions, fits on a napkin. Somebody builds something, funds something, runs a program. I want to know three things. Did it make the thing better? Did it cost less? Did it get done faster? Quality, cost, time. That's not an ideology, that's just what's in your head when you're the one writing the check. Nobody coaching Little League ever stood in line at the store going, you know what I'm really hoping for here? A robust set of preferred outcomes. No, you want it good, you want it cheap, you want it now. Hold those three, we're keeping score all night. And here's the thing I keep chewing on folks, the thing I don't even like because of where it goes. Everything costs more, you feel it. everything. And we've got all the explanations on the shelf ready to grab. Inflation, greed, some guy in a boardroom. And sure, sometimes. But what if a chunk of it, not all of it, a chunk, isn't any of that? What if part of your life got so expensive as just the bill? The accumulated, itemized, decades-long bill for every single time somebody somewhere with a perfectly nice intention decided what the answer was supposed to be? before anyone asked what it cost. I'm not gonna answer that for you tonight, that's no fun because I wanna show you. Now, as always, I've pulled a few stories, they look like they've got nothing to do with each other. That's always the trap, that's exactly the trap. So let me start where the whole thing started for me, with that electrician and the thread I told you I probably should have left alone. So earlier I sort of waved at it and walked off and that's no way to treat you. So let me show you the thread that I actually followed. The story comes from a writer named Chris Rufo from City Journal, broke it this week. Not some dusty thing I dug out of a drawer, this is fresh off the press. And the headline straight no spin. The state of California has an official process to certify whether the company fixing your power lines is gay owned. There's a category. There's an application, there's a man at a desk somewhere going, hmm, verified gay. I assumed it was a bit, so I checked. It's real. It runs through something called the supplier diversity program. That's the public utilities commission, the people who regulate your power company. And here's how it works. They set goals, targets. They tell the utility a slice of your contracting should go to these kind of owners. Women owned, minority owned, disabled veteran owned. And about a decade back, they bolted on gay owned. Then a few years later, they expanded it because nothing in government ever gets bolted and then left in place, duh. Now here's the number that sat me up in the chair. California utilities spends around $43 billion a year on contracts, 43 billion. That's the engineers, the suppliers, the people keeping gas and power, water moving for 39 million humans. and the state looked at that mountain of money and one of the boxes that decided was worth checking was the personal life of the owner. You know what gets me? Not the money, the priority of all the things to care about with $43 billion on the table. And I gotta be careful here because the second a gay guy asks a plain question about anything with a rainbow on it, somebody decides he's got a problem. know, me, self-hating conservative gay, they call me. I don't have a problem, I'm not offended, I don't need a hug. I'm just really confused. Different thing. Because I don't need special treatment. I need the best electrician. Also a different thing. Best contractor in the states, a gay guy? Fantastic. Send him. Straight guy? Send him. A Martian who can rewire a substation in pitch dark? I'll carry his toolbox to the truck. See, the orientation of the man is not load bearing. The man is load bearing. So how do you get certified? This is the part that kept me up. You have to prove it. To the state, there's paperwork to establish a thing about yourself that, last I checked, did not previously require a notary. The reporting walks through it. Affidavits, documents, and in one case, I'm not inventing this, a letter from a therapist. A therapist's note so you can bid on a transformer. Imagine explaining that to your grandfather. Hey, Pop, I gotta get a note from my therapist. ⁓ for what? You okay, man? No, I'm great. It's so I can bid on the substation job, Grandpa. And I keep coming back to the transformer because the transformer doesn't know. You could read it the whole certification packet, cover to cover, and it'll just hum at you with total indifference. There's no part of high-voltage electrical component that works better because of the documentation is in a gay electrician's Biedermeier cabinet. The wire wants to be connected right by somebody who's awake. That's its whole personality. And here's the part that got me personally, because I used to be licensed. Before any of this, the show, the agency, all of it, I did hair for a living, licensed cosmetologist. And you know what that license proved? That I could cut hair. wild concept. A piece of paper that certified the thing I was hired to do. Nobody ever sat in my chair and asked to see paperwork about who I was. They asked if I could do hair. And if I couldn't, the paper didn't save me. The bad haircut walked around town telling everybody. So watch what happens to the money when you certify the owner instead of the work. Run the scoreboard with me live. Quality. Did the grid get more reliable because we started tracking who owns the contractor? Come on, nothing connects the owner's identity to whether the lights stay on, whether the guy's any good. That's a different question. And this isn't it. So quality didn't move, we stapled a label to the front of the work that has nothing to do with the work. Cost, cost moved. ⁓ did it ever. Just the wrong direction. Now you need a clearing house to verify everybody. Contractors spending money getting certified instead of, you know, contracting. And 30 plus utilities each running their own supplier diversity operation with staff filing annual reports. There are always annual reports. And every dime of the verifying and the tracking and the office that reports on the reporting, it lands on the cost of doing business. And for a utility, that cost of doing business lands in one place. Your bill, your bill. Congratulations, you're funding the paperwork that confirms your electrician is gay. You're a stakeholder, and it gets better. One San Diego utility, one year, $8.6 million on gay-owned vendors. Fraction of a percent of what they buy. And you want to know one of the things they bought with it? A training video on how to find diverse businesses. So the diverse business they found sold them a video on how to find diverse businesses. That's not a supply chain, that's a snake eating its own tail and mailing you the check. and the vendors themselves, you want the list certified on the books, eligible for your utility money. A kombucha maker, a sign language interpreter, a coaching firm that runs a series to help people manage their feelings about the latest election cycle. I don't know what feelings about the election cycle had to do with the power grid, but it's certified, it's eligible, it's in the pool. Time, last one. any of this make a single thing faster? You've added an application, a verification, a reporting requirement, and a goal somebody chases and documents. You don't bolt four steps onto a process and come out the other end quicker. That's not how steps work. So, quality flat, cost up, time up. Zero for three. Here's what actually bugs me. It's not that somebody failed the test, it's that somebody was taking it. Quality, cost, and time weren't even in the room. The thing being optimized was the mix, a photograph of who got the contracts. And that photograph costs real money, and the money's yours. ⁓ and one more. This one's almost too perfect. Years ago, California voters passed a law. Government can't hand out preferences like this in public contracting. The voters said no. So it didn't come in the front door. It came in the side door through the private utilities the state regulates the voters "no" quite reach. ⁓ The of the people got a polite nod ⁓ and workaround. Now here's my mistake. I figured weird story, very California. Screenshot it, send it to the group chat, move on. It's a one-off. It's not a one-off. Because once I had the shape of it, Somebody decides what the answer's supposed to look like and quietly sends you the bill for the difference. The electrician was just the loose end I grabbed first. So I went looking. Is the gay thing the weird outlier? Nope. Turns out it's the rookie. It got bolted onto a system that already had woman-owned, minority-owned, veteran-owned, disabled-owned, a whole alphabet. And these are not little clubs. The big woman-owned outfit? Around 17,000 certified businesses. 17,000! And that's only one certifier. The big minority-owned one's got 15,000 plus. Hundreds of corporations paying to play. Then the states pile their own goals on top. New York wants 30 % of its contracting in these three categories. California's utilities aim north of 20. Everybody's got a number. Everybody. And here's the part that's genuinely funny sad. If you're a business owner trying to chase this work, You don't get certified once. have a federal version, state version, city version, corporate version, and the utility version. Because none of them take each other's word for it. Same guy, same fact about himself. Five times, five clipboards, each one independently confirming what the last clipboard already confirmed. It's getting carted at the same bar by five bouncers standing in a row. And look, I ran a company, built a marketing agency from nothing, sold it before I was 35. I hired contractors, I was a contractor, sat on both sides of that table. Three questions every time. Are you good? What's it cost? When's it gonna be done? I never once needed a notarized letter about who somebody was before I let them do the job because the client doesn't care, the deadline doesn't care, the work doesn't care, but somebody built an entire economy that does. Think about that for a second. An entire economy of people whose whole job is proving who you are. The certifiers, the re-certifiers, the consultants, yeah, there are consultants now, firms whose entire business is filling out your eligibility paperwork for you, for a fee, because it got complicated enough to need a professional. There's software, diversity management software. There are conferences, thousands of people, badges, lanyards, breakout sessions on supplier diversity. And I'll be straight with you, because that's our deal. I went looking for the grand total. and I wanted to stand here and tell you, Americans spend this many billions a year just proving who they are instead of doing the work? I couldn't find it. Nobody adds it up responsibly, which seems to be its own punchline, isn't it? We built a giant machine to measure eligibility and the one number it never measures is what that machine costs. But you don't need the total. Read the certifier's own paperwork. It tells you in writing that getting certified doesn't guarantee you a single contract. That's not me editorializing, that's their language from the website. The certification proves you're eligible. Doesn't prove you can do the job, doesn't get you the job. It's a permission slip. We built an enormous, humming, professionalized industry for the manufacture and inspection of permission slips. And that's when it flipped for me. I'd been telling the story wrong in my own head. I thought the story was the electrician. It's not. The electrician wasn't the story. The incentives were the story. Somebody built a system that rewards a characteristic instead of an outcome. And the second you do that, the whole thing tilts and the money follows the reward. And the reward isn't fix it well, cheap and fast. The reward is be the right thing on the form. And once I could see that, I started catching it everywhere. Places with nothing to do with electricians, nothing to do with California, nothing to do with any rainbow or any flag. I caught it on a Sunday afternoon in a football stadium you paid for and now can't afford a seat in. I caught it at the movies in a blockbuster you helped fund and didn't get a nickel of. And I caught it next to a building the size of a small town owned by the richest company that's ever existed that somehow needed your help. and nudged your power bill while it was at it. Same shape every time. Let me show you the first one. you somewhere that feels like the opposite of a gay certified utility build. Somewhere fun. Red, white and blue. Let's go to a football game. You love your team. I love that you love your team. And I love my teams. And a few years back, your city decided your team needed a new stadium. Old ones tired. Gotta keep up, right? And the pitch. You've heard the pitch. Jobs, tourism, civic pride, economic development, a rising tide. And Who's against their hometown? Nobody. So the public chips in. Chips in, I love that. Let me show you the chip. Buffalo Bills, new stadium. Public share, state and county, $850 million. Now the owner, Terry Pagula, worth about $9 billion. Nine billion, and he needed help from the taxpayers. Read that back to yourself. A man with $9 billion filled out the equivalent of a hardship application and we approved it. And to cover part of the public share, the county sold bonds. They literally called them bills bonds, 125 million in debt. So a billionaire wouldn't have to reach into the billions he already has. And this isn't me vilifying billionaires, this is just bad economics. Then Nashville watched Buffalo do it and said, hold my beer, Tennessee Titans. Public share, 1.26 billion. Largest taxpayer handout for a stadium in American history. And that's before the interest on the bonds, which drags the real public number towards two and a third billion with a B. For a building, a private company uses eight home games a year. Eight. Do the division on that sometime, it'll keep you up. Now run the scoreboard. Quality. Did your life get better? Here's quality from your seat. You helped buy the building so going to a game gets easier, right? It gets harder. Now there's a thing, I'm not making this up, called a PSL, a personal seat license, a fee you pay for the right to buy a ticket. You pay to be allowed to pay. Then the ticket, then parking, its own little mortgage. You finance the building and still get carted at the gate like a stranger. And here's the part that gets me, and I'm not anti-stadium, I'm build a dome with my bare hands if you'd let me. But if taxpayers put up the money, taxpayers are investors, right? You put money in a thing, you're an investor. At least the city is. So where's your stake? When the team's value goes up, and it always goes up, maybe not the Titans, they suck, but who pockets it? Let me show you the climb. The average NFL team in 2020 was worth about 3.5 billion. By 2024, 5.1 billion. 2025, 7.1 billion. And the Titans jumped from 4.9 billion to 6.3 in a single year. And which year was that? ⁓ the year you helped pay for their new stadium, duh. I mean, folks, imagine pitching that to a banker. So I'd like you to take... So I'd like you to fund my building. You take all the risk. I keep the building and everything it earns and all the value it gains. The banker laughs you out of the room, but a city council? They're ready for the ribbon cutting. You're not a partner, you're a cosigner who never gets his name on the title. And this isn't fringe. 86 % of economists say kill these subsidies. 86! You can't get 86 % of economists to agree on what's for lunch! Because the promised boom mostly never shows up. The money you spend at the stadium is money you'd have to spend across town anyways. Folks, you didn't build a new economy. You moved your wallet across the street and paid a billionaire a toll to do it. And here's the scale of the habit. Over $10.5 billion of public money is sitting in current NFL stadiums right now. Out of 30 stadiums. You wanna guess how many got built without taxpayer cash? Six. Six. The other 24 came to you with their handout. Now I'll be fair because we keep it honest here. There's one version that kind of works. funded most, Vegas funded theirs mostly off a hotel tax. So tourists pay, not residents and by some accounts it pencils out credit where credits do. But that's the exception people point to because it's the exception. Buffalo and Nashville reached into the general fund. The one that does schools and roads and fire and police and the kicker. Nashville spent $1.26 billion and got awarded a Super Bowl. So you know what every other city just learned? The subsidy buys the prize. Pay enough, the league throws you a parade, which means the next city has to pay more. It's an auction. You're not the bidder, you're the money. Okay, that's sports. Now watch the exact same move at the movies. You've seen the Marvel movies, the big ones. Billion dollar box office, two billion. Here's a thing you might not know. When they shoot one in a state like Georgia, the taxpayers of Georgia help pay for it. You, you're a Hollywood producer. You just don't get a credit, a check or a seat at the premiere. It's the film tax credit. The pitch, say it with me. Job, sound stages, be the next Hollywood. Georgia went all in. 30 % credit, no cap, runs them 1.3 billion a year. And here's the number next to it. Total production in Georgia last year, 2.6 billion. So the state covered more than half of the entire industry's tab. That's not a tax break, that's a co-sign on Hollywood's whole operation. And here's the cleanest receipt in the whole show. Georgia's own auditors, the state's people, not mine, sat down and figured it out. For every dollar Georgia spends on this, how much comes back? 19 cents. $19 in, two dimes back. That's not an investment strategy, that's a wood chipper. And I know this one feels far away. You don't make movies, you don't even watch half of them. So who cares, right? Well, here's who cares. I sold a company. I pitched investors for a living. And I'm telling you, there is not one investor on earth who hands you a dollar and gets back 19 cents and goes, love it, let's run it back. They'd block my number and warn their friends. But a state will with your money. And that billion three didn't come out of some magic movie fund. It came out of the same pot. As your kids' school, your roads, the bridge that's been getting fixed since you drove a different car. So no, you don't have to see a single frame of the movie. You've already bought a ticket, you paid for it, you just don't get to sit down. One single year, the net loss was 600 million cost per job, about 160 grand of your money. And a lot of those jobs pack up the second the shoot wraps. And here's the punchline you'd swear I wrote. The industry didn't love that 19 cent number. So they commissioned their own study. Theirs found a return of $6.30 on the dollar. 19 cents from auditors, 6.30 from the people cashing the check. Sit on that gap for a second. That gap is the whole game. Folks, you're not stupid. When the guy getting the money writes the report on whether the money's working, that's not a study. That's a thank you note with footnotes. ⁓ and you want to know what a production had to do to unlock the extra 10 % of the credit? There was a hurdle, a real bar to clear. They had to put a little Georgia peach in the end credits. That's it, a peach. Stamp a peach on the credits. Here's another pile of taxpayer money. Avengers Endgame. Two billion at the box office, qualified for welfare. And here's the part that should end the whole debate. After years of Georgia paying Hollywood to stay, Marvel started pulling productions out of Georgia anyway. You can't even buy loyalty with the bribe. The bribe doesn't even work. And it's a bidding war. 19 plus states are doing this, all underbidding each other to pay the same studios, everybody racing to lose money faster than the state next door. Where's your dividend? You financed the picture, where's your cut? There isn't one. There was never going to be one. You weren't an investor. You were the mark. Stadium, movies. ⁓ You'd think I the bottom. I have not found the bottom. Because now I will take you to the biggest one. Where we don't help a billionaire and we don't help a studio, we help the richest companies that have ever existed in human history. Data centers. ⁓ The giant warehouses full of computers running the internet, the cloud, the AI everyone's losing their minds over. And I want to be crystal clear, I'm not against data centers, I'm not against AI. I drive a Hummer EV. I've got a place in Oregon that runs off the grid. I plug in a truck the size of a studio apartment. I think about power more than most people. I'm not the guy yelling at the cloud. I'm against the welfare. Here's what happens. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Metta, companies worth a trillion, two trillion dollars show up and say, we'd like to build here. And the state, scared to death the company picks the state next door, rolls out the red carpet. Tax exemptions for decades, sometimes forever. Discounts on the equipment, discounts on the power. Texas alone, one year, gave away about a billion dollars of this. A billion! To companies that could buy Texas 10 times over. Virginia. Biggest data center market on earth abates close to a billion too. We are putting the most valuable corporations in the history of money on public assistance and nobody's blinking. Hey, and listen folks, this isn't a yellowed clipping I pulled out of a drawer. This is right now. I mean, the watchdogs went back and ran the numbers again just this year in 26. And these giveaways aren't shrinking, they're ballooning. Because of the AI gold rush, the deals are getting bigger and states are tripping over each other on who can give more of your money away to these people. Somewhere today, while we're sitting here, a governor is standing on a stage with a giant pair of scissors cutting a ribbon on the next one. And the pitch, same as always, is JOBS! So let's check the jobs, because this is where it gets ridiculous. A data center up and running employs about 157 people. 157 for a building the size of a small town. Meta's putting one in Louisiana the size of Manhattan. Manhattan-sized building, skeleton crew, you could fit the entire staff in one section of the parking lot. And look, I've made payroll. I've signed the front of a check, not just the back. So let me translate that number for you. 157 jobs is not an economic miracle. That's a medium Costco. We're handing a company the GDP of a small country to land a building that staffs like a Costco. And the Costco would at least sell you a hot dog on the way out. So let's do the math nobody wants to do. You ready? One deal in New York, 1.4 billion in subsidy. 125 jobs. That's $11 million per job. Think about that. 11 million. You could hand each one of those 125 people $10 million, tell them to go home and never work again, and the state still comes out ahead. And it's not a one-off. Apple, North Carolina, 321 million for 50 jobs. 6.4 million each. Google, North Carolina. over a million per job. And I want to be clear, I'm not cherry picking the worst ones to make a point. This is just what these deals look like. I keep reading these going, somebody approved this? Someone sat in a meeting, saw $11 million a job and went, yeah, that pencil's out. And the jobs that do show up in Nevada, the one state that'll actually tell you, the workers averaged about 31 bucks an hour, 65 grand a year. solid living, also a lot less than the company waved around at the ribbon cutting. Funny how that part's always said quieter. And here's the one that should really get you. Amazon goes into Indiana, announces over a thousand jobs. You read the actual agreement? It stipulates 400. And the other 600? Those are subcontractors. And the 400 only show up at full development. which means after all, 16 data centers get built someday maybe. Over a thousand jobs quietly became 400 eventually if you don't read the footnote. And those construction jobs everyone brags about at the podium? One building in Ohio, the average worker was on site about six and a half weeks. Six and a half weeks! Then the crew packs up and drives to the next state. The jobs leave with the cement trucks. Oh. And half these states, 16 out of 36, don't even require the company to create any permanent jobs at all. Yeah, you heard that. No jobs required. Just take the building, take the tax break, discount the power, and we're happy you're here. And here's the thing that flat out got me. Not one single state reports both the jobs promised and the jobs actually delivered. Not one. They announced the big number at the ribbon cutting. Scissors, grins, local paper, and nobody ever checks the box that says, well that didn't happen. Because if you don't measure it, you can't be embarrassed by it, right? ⁓ and the chef's kiss. Half the time, you don't even know who you're handing the money to. The companies hide behind shell companies with fake little names. Google showed up in Indiana as a company called Hatchworks. Hatchworks sounds like a place that makes artisanal birdhouses. It's Google. The trillion dollar company wore a fake mustache to the subsidy office. Now run the scoreboard. Quality. Your town gets noise, water draw, strain on the grid, cost, billions in giveaways, time, the exceptions outlive your mortgage. And here's the one that lands at your house and this is the one I wanna take with you. These companies negotiate cheaper electricity for themselves. And when the giant new customer gets the discount, somebody's gotta make up for the difference on the grid. That somebody is you. Your power bill ticks up so a two trillion dollar company can pay less for electricity than you do. Same bill, the exact same bill we started this whole show on, round and round it goes. Folks, you know who used to do this differently is Henry Ford. Ford built factories that built the middle class without mailing the taxpayers an invoice. He needed a plant. He built a plant. Never crossed his mind to ask the county to chip in and then bill the workers for parking. The richest companies in history used to build things. Now they apply for welfare. So I started with an electrician and now I've got a billionaire's stadium, a Marvel movie, and a building the size of Manhattan. All running the exact same play. Somebody decided what the answer should look like. The right vendor, the right team in town, the right industry, the right logo on the skyline, and quietly sent you the bill for the gap between what they wanted and what it cost. And somewhere in there, I'll be honest, it stopped being funny and got a little spooky. Because I stopped seeing isolated stories. I stopped seeing exceptions. That's what I thought these were when I started. Exceptions, weird ones, outliers. Boy, they're not exceptions. These are examples. And the second I understood the difference between an exception and an example, that's when I finally figured out what I'd actually been looking at the whole time I researched this episode. So stay with me. Exceptions or examples. That's the whole thing right there. So let me just sit in it with you for a second because this is the part where it clicked. I've got four stories, a gay certified electrician, a billionaire stadium, a Marvel movie, a warehouse full of computers, different states, different industries, different, I was gonna say villains. Hang on, hold that word. We're gonna come back to it because the villain part is the part that actually stopped me cold. And I'm sitting there, it's one in the morning, which is fantastic time to realize your country might have a pattern, and I keep trying to find the thing these four don't have in common, and I can't. I keep only finding the one thing they share. So I start asking myself a dumb little question, and I want you in this with me because it's the question that cracked it open. What happens to anything when the people in charge quit caring whether it's good, whether it's cheap, whether it's fast? and start caring about something else instead. Anything else. Doesn't even matter what. So I run them back. But this time I don't watch the story. I watch what they were aiming at. The target. The electrician they were aiming at. The mix. The photo of who got the contracts. The stadium. The prestige. Keep the team, get the parade. Governor at the ribbon. The movie. The glamour. The headline that just says, we're next to Hollywood. The data center, the announcement, the big number on the day with the scissors. And I'm going down the list and it hit me. Not one of them was aiming at the thing you and I care about. Is it good? Can I afford it? Will it get done? It wasn't losing the argument. It wasn't even in the argument. Nobody benched quality, cost, and time. They just never put them on the roster. And that's the whole... Moment the whole thing turned over for me because I realized I've been reading every single one of these wrong I thought the electrician was the story the stadium the movie the data center. They're not the story. They're just the costume thing wore a different costume every single time, so I wouldn't recognize it was the same thing. Somebody gets rewarded for hitting a target that's got nothing to do with whether the thing actually works, and the money just follows the reward. See, money's not sentimental. Money goes where the points are. And that's the whole machine right there. It's not even complicated. The second you reward what something is instead of what it does, everybody quietly starts chasing the is. Not because they're crooked, because that's where the money moved. You stop getting what you hoped for, you start getting what you rewarded. And now the villain part, because I went hunting for the bad guy all night, some guy in a back room twirling a mustache, jacking up your bills on purpose. I never found him. The person who added the gay certification thought they were including somebody. The mayor thought he was saving the team. The legislator thought he was bringing jobs. The governor thought he was landing the future. Every one of them, on a Tuesday in a sentence, sounds completely reasonable. And that's when I realized why nobody catches this. It's not a conspiracy, a conspiracy you could catch. A conspiracy has a meeting. This has no meeting. It's a thousand reasonable people in a thousand different rooms, each one adding one reasonable little layer. And this is the part. Nobody's in the room where they all add up. There's no whiteboard anywhere with somebody standing in front of it going, okay, what's all this together doing to a normal family's bills? Because any single layer by itself is defensible, always. You try to argue against the one layer, you sound like a jerk. ⁓ so you're against fairness? You're against your own team? You're against jobs? No, I'm against the invoice. I just can't see the invoice because it never shows up as one bill. It shows up as a little more on the power bill, a little more on the ticket, a little more on the parking, a little more in your taxes, a thousand little mores. And here's the thing, once you can see the shape, you can't turn it off. I'm not even counting the ones I skipped tonight. I didn't touch the EV battery plants, $22 billion in projects canceled in six months. Ford and a partner walked away from $11 billion battery deal. 850 workers in Ohio sent home. And the part that'll scramble whatever team you root for, a lot of those promised jobs were headed to Republican districts. This isn't a left thing. It isn't a right thing. The pattern doesn't care who you vote for. It sends everybody the same bill. I didn't touch the chip plants. Billions in subsidies for a flagship semiconductor plant in Ohio supposed to open this year. Now it's 2030, maybe 2031. The ribbon cutting was real. The factories still... A hayfield. I didn't touch carbon credits, which is just permission slips, but for the sky, a whole market built on companies buying the right to say they're green, and a study found fewer than one in 10 of those credits do anything at all. Same machine, same product. Eligibility, a permission slip with nobody home behind it. And I'll tell you where I feel all of this. I grew up in California. I watched the most beautiful, richest, most blessed piece of ground God ever made talk itself into a cautionary tale, one reasonable layer at a time. Nobody set out to wreck it. Everybody set out to help. That's the whole horror of it all. And this is the part I genuinely did not see coming when I clicked on a dumb story about a gay electrician. We've all got our explanations for why everything's so expensive. Inflation, greed, some guy in a boardroom. And sure, sometimes those are real. But what if a huge piece of it isn't any of the loud dramatic stuff? What if a piece of it is why your life got so expensive is just the accumulation? A thousand layers, each one reasonable, each one well-meant, each one defended by somebody decent, and every last one them quietly ending up on your bill. Maybe there's no monster, maybe I was looking for the wrong thing the whole time. Maybe it's a thousand small things, a thousand preferences, a thousand certifications, a thousand requirements, a thousand good intentions. And every one of them mailed the bill to the same house. Yours! Man, and once I could see that, I couldn't stop seeing it. It's the name of the game of this show! So come back to where this started with- Gay electrician. The guy from the top of the show, the therapist's note, the certificate, standing in the dark while my lights are off and I've got a flashlight in my teeth. When I started tonight, I thought he was a punchline, a funny little California thing. And he turned out to be the most honest guy in the whole episode. Because he never asked for any of it. Nobody asked him if he wanted a certificate. He just wanted to fix the line and get home to dinner. He's not the problem. He's the guy in the dark holding the tools while everyone else argues about what category he goes in. He was never the story. I told you that an hour ago and honestly, I didn't fully believe it myself yet. I do now. The electrician wasn't the story, the incentives were. And the bill? The bill was the story the entire time. We just never recognized it because it doesn't show up with the return address. And... You want to know the thing I keep turning over? It's so simple it almost sounds stupid. When you're the one writing the check at the store, at the shop, at the kitchen table with the bills fanned out, you ask three things. Is it good? Can I afford it? Will it get done? That's not a philosophy, folks. That's not left. That's not right. That's just what it feels like to be a grown adult in a budget. And every story tonight was what happens when somebody decided those three could wait. Not that they were wrong, just back of the line, behind the certificate, behind the prestige, behind the press release, behind the ribbon. And you know what happens the day, is it good? Can I afford it? Will it get done? Stops being the first question? It turns into the bill. Every time. The thing you quit caring about is the thing you start paying for. Which brings me to tonight's Reagan reminder. Reagan had a line, you know it. The nine most terrifying words in the English language. I'm from the government and I'm here to help. And everybody quotes it like a little joke about lazy bureaucrats. It's not. That's not what scared him. It wasn't that they don't help. It's what they mean to. Every single layer we looked at tonight was somebody from the government who showed up to help for real. Help a business owner, help a city, help an industry, help the future. And the help had a price. And the price went to a house that never asked for the help. And that's exactly why this isn't a fight for the loud 20%. This is a culture war thing. I'm the gay guy and I'm telling you it was never about the rainbow. This is for the 80%, the people coaching Little League and paying the light bill and quietly wondering why a dollar doesn't go as far as it used to. People who never got a seat in any of those thousand rooms but somehow ended up on the invoice for all of them. That's our tent. That's who we're for. Reality gets a vote. And tonight reality voted. It came in the mail and it was higher than last month. I don't think there's a monster. I went looking all night and I never found him. No villain, no meeting, no conspiracy. Just a thousand reasonable people in a thousand rooms, each adding one perfectly reasonable little thing. And not one of them ever had to stand in your kitchen and watch the total. And that's the trick of the whole thing. That's the part I can't shake. A monster you see coming. A thousand good intentions show up one at a time, each one holding a little receipt. and they all add up to the same number at the bottom of your page. So the next time somebody from the government tells you they're here to help, ask them, who's getting the bill? I'm Chad Law. If you see us, share us. Welcome home. And America, this was Common Sense. If you're on Rumble, stick around for the after hours Q &A, where I answer all the questions you've been texting in during the show. Allow us under 10 seconds to reset the studio and I'll be back to answer your questions then.