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Hey, everybody, welcome to the Buck Brief. On this episode, Inez Stepman is with us. She is a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women's Forum, does some great writing and it's been a friend of mine in this business for like a decade. Now, isn't that what we're getting old?
He is? You know, they realize That's what I was gonna say.
That's a reminder of how old we are.
May be able to measure our friendship and how many decades we have been hanging out. So let's start with with this I wanted to get into and just to give folks a sense of where we're gonna go. Uh some DC school numbers about how many people are you know, absent truant, but really are they even going to school at all? That's really interesting to me. Mark Cuban thinking that he should just keep on. It's like a kid burning his hand on the stove. But Mark Cuban with
DEI is like burn it again, burn it again. Like he just seems to love doing this online, like he loves the pain. But we'll we'll get into that. But I just think this is fascinating. You are a New Yorker. You live there.
Now, it's funny I used to be in New Yorker.
I mean, I think that's very generous of you, given I know that you're you're an original New Yorkers. I don't know, after three years, can I call myself a New.
Yorkers who were born and raised there.
It's a little bit like the way that Japanese feel about citizenship, Like we're very slow to call somebody else a New Yorker, Like we don't really give it out. But no, you because you love the city and you are staying, and you are conservative, but you are staying, and so is Jared, your husband. He You guys are in it right, You're in it to win it.
Okay.
You live across from a migrant encampment in New York City. Tell me all about this because I actually haven't been there to see this phase of the city. I was there through the COVID madness. Now live in Florida. What are we seeing with the migrant situation?
Yeah, I mean it's bad, and it's visibly so and getting worse, which I mean we can talk about. I think the single most uh and successful political gambit probably the last thirty years has been dysantis an abbot sending bus loads of migrants to Blue Havens because it has
truly made it a national problem. And of course there's the obvious hypocrisy in a bunch of New Yorkers waking up to the fact that this is actually a problem, you know, after they've been calling Hidalgo, Texas who's dealing which is dealing with a much worse problem over decades, and they've been basically called racists for their trouble for complaining about it, right, But nevertheless, I think it's been really effective. I do see a lot of people complaining
about it. I see people, you know, it's one of those things you just can't ignore. It's also impossible to ignore the makeup of who's coming here. These are young men from eighteen to their mid twenties, and they're just hanging out in packs. It's definitely like I get very interesting notifications. I have a app that tracks like neighborhood crime and get I get really interesting notifications like three hundred men in a brawl. Oh, that doesn't happen without.
I mean, unless it's unless it's happening at Thermopoli a long time ago. That's concerning.
Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's it's a different dynamic than the domestic problems with crime, which are also an issue. But now there's a lot of uh, there's a lot of chatter around. Some of these guys are forming gangs, and they're just forming like kind of snatching gangs, so walking around the street, grab a bag, grab a phone.
They're speeding away on on mopeds. But it's organized. It's not a sort of random, it's it's organized, and they're repeated offenders over and over again, and and a lot of people are now it's it's self perpetuating because the sanctuary city policies and the generous benefits in New York are an attraction. So now Abbott and DeSantis don't have to do bus loads. They can. The people are saying at the border, you now the it's about hotel Manhattan.
So that's that's uh, that's that's what's going on, and it is really putting us straight on the city. It's it's anyway, it really it's a different experience actually living next door to it. I lived in San Diego for quite some time, and that's the closest I've come to seeing this. But it was much less out of control
when I was living in San Diego. Even though there were a lot of illegal crossings, the number and again the demographic profile of people coming here is like the only thing I have to compare it to is, as I was telling you off air, as East Jerusalem. It feels very very foreign. You feel nervous as a woman alone walking by. It's just packs of young men hanging out all day doing drugs, drinking, like getting into fights.
And what is the city plan for this? You know, it seems like this is combustible. It's clearly a quality of life issue. It's a safety issue, it's a law issue. I mean, I can good on the whole list. What is Eric Adam saying about this or anyway.
He's been kind of vocal about it. I've been kind of surprised. I mean, obviously my standards are very very low, given that he is a Democrat, but he's been kind of a burn the Biden administration side. I mean, unfortunately, the democratic resolution for all this right, the thing that everyone will agree to at the end of the day within that party is we just need to throw more
money at this right. So Eric Adams is complaining about the strain on resources, which again is something that border states have been dealing with for decades, but is a
very real problem. I mean, we had the headline go viral from the New York Post just I think a few weeks ago where they once again shut down schools went to virtual schooling in a school in New York, this time not because of a virus and not because of teacher strikes which has happened in which have happened in other states, but because they needed the space to put migrants in. So they send everybody's kits to virtual learning. Those kinds of really direct trade offs are I think
what is shifting. That's why I say it's very successful gambit in a way. I do think that changes people's minds and people forget that there was a seventeen point swing in New York I think largely over the crime issue, and now I would add migration into that general crime and quality of life. People are not happy with it. They actually are changing how they vote. Obviously, it's a super blue state and so it didn't go over the top.
For the governor. But seventeen points is a big swing of people basically switching their votes from Ray.
It's encouraging, but I just I any person who tells me they think given what New York City when I was living there, right, so I was experiencing it too. I have disdain for people who voted for Kathy Hockel. I mean true, truly, I think their judgment is impaired and they're not very bright, Like I don't really even care what their issues are. If you see what was going on in New York. I know she's the governor.
It's not New York City per se, but New York City is the political center of gravity for the entire state. It's obviously a huge part of the overall budget. There are enormous implications for New York City based upon what goes on in Albany and from the governor's office. And to put that, and you know, she was so involved with the COVID situation in the worst possible ways to put that, imbecile Kathy hocal in power for a full term.
To me, it's just inexcusable. It's just malpractice.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, she's the worst for sure, she's the worst.
No, I mean I think I did you feel safe on the subway? Can I ask you that?
Because you know they did that whole National Guard thing recently. As a whole I was going to bring.
Up is that, you know, the left basically because they refuse to put career criminals in prison and want to put the rest of us in prison, like we can all live in prison, so they can try to accommodate for the consequences of not putting people in prison. Yeah. No, I mean I definitely feel more and safe than I did a few years ago, and for sure more than pre pandemic like twenty nineteen. On the subway, I mean it still is okay, it just depends, right, you have
to be a lot more alert. I definitely switched cars. That is the biggest problem is the enclosed space of the subway, and that actually is less of a crime problem and more of a problem of the people being unwilling to uh put away people who are insane, like drug addicted and insane.
Yeah, the gang very commitment, right, it's not about a gang banger with you know, an uzy on the subway. I know they're doing this whole gun it's about a lunatic who's going to throw an old lady in front of a train for no reason, who's been arrested fifty times. Right, That's what the dynamic that I can just read about. But I remember it happening when I was there. I
saw stuff on the New York City Subway. I was born and raised there, and I was there in the nineties, and I remember it as a kid when it was actually at its most dangerous by the numbers. But I've seen stuff on the New York City Subway in the in most recent years that I had never seen before. I mean, gross stuff that I won't talk about on this show right now. But I saw guys doing things
that I was like, things are not going well. All right, let's talk speaking of cities, DC and the school situation there. We'll get to that a second. But if you look around, the world is obviously a volatile place, and markets can change very quickly, and currencies can be in a whole lot of hurt depending on what the government's doing with inflation and what national spending looks like.
So what can you do.
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gold and silver simple and easy to understand. Call right now, you may be able to qualify for a ten thousand dollars in free per medals A three three nine nine five gold eight three three nine nine five gold A three three nine nine to five gold. All right, and as you're an education policy expert and follow this stuff all very closely. This this was, uh, this was pretty stunning stuff that the DC schools. This has gotten some attention recently. DC public school system have a sixty percent
chronic absenteeism problem. What is going on here.
Well, first of all, we lost track of hundreds of thousands of students. And by lost track, I mean we have no idea what happened to them. They were in school before the pandemic. They ought to have been in school after the pandemic, and we have no idea what happened to them. That it was bad before this truncy problem in DC. I mean, DC is a city with a lot of problems that precede the education system, and then the education system despite being these single most well
funded system in the United States. A lot of the estimates now per pupil are over thirty five thousand dollars per student. So please do not let anyone ever tell you that the Washington DC schools are underfunded. I mean they are paying higher tuition than many private schools. We
are all paying for that actually because it's federal. So I mean, this is a school system that was turning out bottom of the barrel results for decades, got a little bit of an improvement because of a relatively free charter law in the district, but nevertheless, I mean, this is a system that has had problems for a long long time, and the pandemic just estimated it because a lot of kids stop going to school functionally. It turns
out that a laptop is not a acceptable substitute. And if you put kids on laptops for two and a half years, a lot of them don't come back to school. And we're finally seeing, I mean, it is enraging to see like the New York Times and elsewhere finally start to acknowledge the absolute devastation to so many millions of children's educations that happened. I mean, this was there is no excuse. There was no excuse even in like May
June of twenty twenty for shutting the schools. And that's even if you were on the more cautious side of the spectrum when it comes to like the virus itself, it became clear pretty early on that children are not getting seriously affected by this. And then just as a matter of prioritizing, you know, societal functions, right, if you have casinos open and schools closed, that that's a matter
of priorities. And unfortunately the fact that schools stayed closed for so long had so much more to do with teachers union's political power than it did with any analysis of any kind of risk analysis with the terms of the virus, any kind of you know, seriousness with in terms of prioritizing what activities for society are actually important.
And we were told that, oh, it'll be fine, like it'll be fine, that we just shoved all these kids into like unmonitored virtual learning for years at a time, and now, finally, when it almost doesn't matter, we're getting those kinds of admissions from the New York Times, which always likes to print all the news that's fit to print three years ago.
Yeah, absolutely, where does just forever?
I always think this is such an interesting point about how much money is being spent, because I know the reflexive response you're supposed to have to any problem the school system is well, they need more money. And if you listen to Randy Winegarden, who I think is an I think is an evil person. I mean, I actually think that what she does is really destructive and dishonest, and that she hides behind the needs of children in order to.
Help lazy socialist adults is pretty grotesque. That's just my view.
What she did during COVID is unforgivable. She's almost as bad as Fauci. Where does all the money go right. They always say we need more money. Thirty five thousand dollars a person in DC, a pupil in DC. Where does the money go.
It's a really good question, and the answer is largely to things that have nothing to do with the classroom. In some states, the it's so bad that, for example, in Illinois, for every additional dollar that's spent on education, generally only eleven cents is making it to anything having to do with the classroom. That's the salary of the teacher, paying for the building supplies, blah blah blah. So, like you know, almost ninety percent of the money is going
outside of that system. So what's it being spent on. Well, it's being spent on a massive administrative hiring spree. We now have the smallest proportion of teaching staff to non teaching staff that we've had since the nineteen fifties. That's the number that's been going down over time, or rather going up. That we have more administrators every year visa the teaching positions, and this makes it really hard to talk about how much money we actually spend in the
United States on education. We are a top two or three country per pupil, depending how you count all these funds. Our problem is not money. We are very very generous. The American people have been generous for decades, pulling out more and more money and in taxes going to the education system in America. The problem is the structure of the education system and what that money is spent on.
But it's really really difficult to convince people of that because on the ground they see shortages, right because this money is so misspent. They'll go to their first grader's classroom and there isn't enough money for supplies, and the teacher is paying out of her own salary for you know whatever, like for equipment for the classroom, and they see that and they're like, well, obviously we're not spending
enough money. But that's not the problem. The problem is that people like Randy Winegarden are setting the priorities of where the district spends money and what they spend money on. Are adding more administrative staff, like massive pensions for all those administrative staff, and then all kinds of like tech buy in. I mean, there's a lot of just incredible waste in the system. And that's before you get to what they're actually teaching and whether or not it's worthwhile.
And whether they're teaching kids how to read, or whether they're teaching them to be little anti racist, you know, cultural revolutionaries. But all of that is not a matter of not being enough money. And in fact, you know, I think it's long past time that we take that money and give it to parents. I mean, I know you're a big proponent of school choice. I am as well. It's only a matter of fairness. Imagine what parents could do with thirty five thousand dollars per child per year
in terms of their children's education. I guarantee you they'll do a better job than Randy Winegarten.
Yeah, it seems very straightforward, but obviously the Democrat Party and the teachers' unions are a symbiotic organism. We'll come back and talk about Mark Cuban and Dei here in just a second. But you know, on this podcast, we try to cut through the noise and the nonsense, the ulterior motives out there. And that's also what my colleague Mark Chaykin does for the stock market. Mark worked on
the stock market for fifty years. Across those decades, he invented three new indices for the NASDAK and has predicted some of the biggest market shifts of the past decade, including the recent mania and AI stocks. Mark says the majority of Americans are about to miss out on a critical turning point in this AI frenzy. He's calling this a new dawn for US stocks, and Mark predicts dozens of specific companies will be impacted in just the next
ninety days. That's why Mark has agreed to share one of his favorite AI stocks to buy now with you. He put everything you need to know in a new presentation, Go to twenty twenty four aistock dot com. That's twenty twenty four aistock dot com twenty twenty four aistock dot com paid for by Shakin Analytics. So Mark Cuban is a rich guy who owns the Dallas Mavericks. He's worth
billions of dollars. He's on shark Tank. He made a lot of money really selling a company that was effectively well, not worthless after he sold it, but worth a whole hell of a lot less than what he sold it for was at Broadcast dot Com. Right, But he's weighing into the DEI debate a lot and not looking very smart when he does it. What is Mark Cuban doing.
Yeah. I mean, he doesn't seem to be able to get out from under certain premises of what he thinks DEI means, these kind of nice sounding platitudes about wanting to treat people equally, in valuing diversity and so on, and he just keeps looping back into those platitudes when people like Chris Ruffo show him that, in fact, that's not what it means, and shows a bunch of you know, examples and documents by actually, this is about declaring any
disparities inherently illegitimate and trying to equalize outcomes between different different racial groups, between the sexes, because when you say it like that, it sounds insane, right, especially, I mean, I think sex is one of the easiest grounds on which you say. I mean, it is a sort of it's an insane premise for anybody who's actually lived in the world and met women and met men who assume that outcomes between them in all ways would be fifty to fifty. That is the kind of premise that if
you go in you can only achieve through tyranny. It's just not going to happen any other way, because men and women have radically different interests, they live radically different lives, they have different responsibilities. All of these things I guess are are now crime think. But it's an obvious sort of You don't you don't even to know much about the DEI apparatus, You don't need to know all the
theory to say this is an absurd goal. It's an absurd goal to say that men and women's outcomes should be identical. Right.
I'm fond of pointing out for everyone he knows that if you really believe in disparate impact, someone has to explain what do we do about the fact that ninety percent of homicide inmates are men. I'm pretty sure it's because the member one it's killing.
People impact, right, which I've actually had people online try to explain to me that actually women are just as violent as men. Wow, it's funny from like the red pill side of the internet. They're like, actually, there's this mass underreporting of abuse, like physical abuse by women. I mean, it might be underreported because men are ashamed, but like, the reason that there's a disparity is because one is
stronger and more violent than the other. One is unable to, like women effectuate violence and sneak your ways.
Anyways, I've never been on a date with a women with a woman who could beat me up in my entire life.
Not well, so you know this is pretty straightforward stuff.
Yeah, well, I really do think like generations of sort of feminist action movies with female heroes has genuinely made a lot of people, because we don't live very physical lives, a lot of us anymore, made people delusional about the strength difference between men and women. It's not like, for example, height, where like, yeah, men are generally taller than women, but there's a lot of overlap. You you know, go out of the house any given day, you'll see a woman
who's taller than you know, a man walking around. Right, that's not how strength is. It's not that much of an overlap, a very very tiny overlap between the strongest women and the weakest men. I mean, there there is just an enormous physical difference in terms of upper body strength, in terms of speed, even something like reaction time. Right,
It's just enormous enormous differences. But but Mark cuban is is kind of doesn't want to accept that the premise of all of these structures is that radical premise of perfect, perfect parody between different groups, because when you say it outright,
people immediately know that that's absurd. Whereas when you couched in the layers about equity and that dumb little graphic that's always going around with the people watching the baseball game, right, it's just about giving, you know, giving somebody a boost who hasn't had, you know, the same opportunities. But no, no two people will ever have the exact same opportunities. No two people will have the same family background, the same genetic endowment, the same you know, just just sheer chance.
I mean, I'm sure that Mark Cuban, in his business endeavors, had access to opportunities that other people did not just by virtue of not being Mark Cuban. That kind of radical egalitarian premise is more absurd the more plain plainly it's laid out. But Mark Cuban doesn't want to accept that. In many ways, could.
Mark Cuban spell a galitarian? I'm just kidding. You don't have to answer that the question out there.
He's a billionaire and I'm not so he knows something. He knows, you know, right place, right time in his stepman Everybody Independent Women's Forum you're on Twitter, right, You're on all the good things.
People can follow you there.
Yep, yep, you can follow me. It's at Inez Felcher there.
And her husband has a great book, by the way, which I think you can if you're watching on the YouTube The War on History by Jared Stepman. Jared's a great guy, buddy of said, buddy of ours. He's your husband, so I think it's safe to assume that he's your buddy. But he's not in mind too. Yeah, but yes, you can check out Jared's book and enes. Thanks for hanging out.
Good to see you.
It's great to see you. Thanks for having me.