It’s been another busy week for the Inspired Idiots. Here are a few of the most absurd stories from the last several days in case you missed them.

New York’s top socialist has a fake union card and a townhouse from Dad

Gustavo Gordillo tells a great story.

He’s the son of Peruvian immigrants who “had nothing”. He worked fast food and cleaned houses. He rose up to become a unionized electrician, renting a modest apartment and fighting for every New Yorker squeezed by landlords and capitalist pigs.

And today he’s co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Then the New York Post started pulling records.

It turns out his grandfather came to America in 1958 to practice medicine and became president of the Ohio Psychiatric Association. That’s pretty accomplished for a family that “had nothing”.

It’s true that Gordillo joined the electricians’ union as an apprentice in April 2024. But he quickly stopped showing up for work and was thrown of the union for “prolonged absence.”

A union source told the Post that Gordillo took the slot “just for show.”

And it turns out his ‘modest apartment’ that he rents to burnish his working class street cred is also for show; Gordillo doesn’t actually live there, he actually lives in a posh townhome that his parents spent millions renovating with nonunion labor.

Last week, Gordillo’s fellow comrades on the New York City DSA’s leadership committee voted him into one of their top jobs— coordinating their socialist agenda with Mayor Mamdani’s office.

It’s such a joke… everything these people do is a con.

It’s the same con when the Chicago’s teachers union boss said school choice was for “racists,” then put her son in a private Catholic high school.

Or people like Barack Obama who spent years warning that rising seas would make homes uninhabitable, then bought a waterfront estate on Martha’s Vineyard.

They’re all frauds.

The EU has found €10 trillion of “idle” money. Guess where?

Ursula von der Leyen is the unelected President of the European Commission, i.e. the de facto head of the European Union. Last week she gave a speech to French business leaders in Paris and announced an amazing discovery: Europe has €10 trillion just lying around!

So where is it? It’s in regular people’s bank accounts. It’s their savings.

“Unfortunately, these savings are lazy,” she said. The EU’s official translation quickly changed it to “sitting idle.” She talks about other people’s money as if it were hers to spend and says she and her unelected members need to “put these savings to work.”

Her plan, called the Savings and Investments Union, would rewrite the rules for banks and insurers, essentially forcing banks to make certain investments that the European Commission wants… and doing it all with funds that regular, everyday Europeans are trying to save.

Hooray Democracy!

Some of these investments would go towards bankrupt governments. Others would go towards European companies that are deemed ‘too risky’ to private capital. Great. So when investors aren’t willing to back a company, the answer is to force banks to do it with their customers’ savings?

What could possibly go wrong??

Well, Germany serves as the perfect answer. It shut down its nuclear reactors, which had supplied a third of its electricity, and bet the grid on solar panels in a country where the sun barely shines.

German electricity now costs about 2.5 times what it does in the US, and the factories are leaving.

Von der Leyen herself admitted in March that abandoning nuclear was “a strategic mistake”— one she personally voted for, and one she has done nothing to reverse.

But this is how these people think: your savings are Europe’s resource, more dairy cows to be milked through the banking system.

Birmingham is going to the High Court to get the Union Jack off its lampposts

Birmingham is England’s second-largest city, and its local council has spent the past year pulling the country’s own flags— the British Union Jack and England’s St George’s Cross— off lampposts.

People kept putting them back up. So on Aug 26 the council, now run by a Liberal Democrat and Green coalition, asked the High Court for an injunction against “unauthorised attachments on the highway, including flags,” naming seven of the flag-hangers and “persons unknown.”

Breaching a High Court injunction is contempt of court— up to two years in prison or an unlimited fine, and the council’s draft order adds, in capital letters, that “YOUR ASSETS MAY BE SEIZED.”

Bear in mind, hanging something on a lamppost is otherwise a £2,500 fine. The council went to the High Court to turn that into a prison sentence, and its stated reasons are “public safety” and “community cohesion.”

Meanwhile, Palestinian flags have hung from Birmingham lampposts since the Gaza war started in 2023, and as far as we can tell nobody went to court over them.

And twelve days before it went to court, the council lit up the Library of Birmingham in green and white for Pakistan’s independence day.

My guess is that the council won’t sue anyone putting up a Pride flag. And judging by what gets waved at the city’s protests, you could probably get away with an Islamic State flag.

But the British flag in Britain, and the English flag in England, are now a safety hazard and grounds for contempt of court.

So what “community” is the council so keen to keep cohesive?

Britain let in nearly a million net migrants a year at the peak and housed a great many of them at taxpayer expense. Taxes are now at their highest since the 1940s, and the wealthiest and most mobile taxpayers have been leaving in droves.

What stays behind are all those “doctors and lawyers” arriving by dinghy from Africa and the Middle East… like the Afghan who crossed the Channel from Calais in 2022, won asylum by saying Afghanistan was too dangerous to go back to. He then spent eight weeks on vacation there in 2024, posting videos from a national park.

It really is pathetic. And governments like these are exactly why we keep telling readers to have a Plan B.

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In 1845, the French economist Frédéric Bastiat petitioned parliament on behalf of the nation’s candlestick makers. They were being ruined, he wrote, by an unscrupulous rival that was flooding the market with light at a price no honest candlestick maker could match.

This light-producing rival, of course, was the sun.

And Bastiat satirically demanded “a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains… in short, all openings, holes, chinks and fissures” to ensure that no sunlight could enter French homes.

Think of the jobs this would create. “If more tallow [curtains] be consumed, there will arise a necessity for an increase of cattle and sheep,” the petition argued. “Thousands of vessels would soon be employed in the whale fisheries [for oil].”

Bastiat, one of history’s most famous proponents of free markets, was obviously joking. He wrote the petition to mock the tariff wall that sheltered France’s industries from cheap foreign goods— block the cheaper competitor, protect the domestic producer, count the jobs saved.

No one counted the cost of protectionism: everyone else paying more for everything, and the whole country became poorer.

Yet decade after decade since, every new innovation has been met with exactly this kind of uproar. And nobody is joking.

It wasn’t so long ago that taxi drivers were up in arms over Uber undercutting their prices. In June 2015, nearly 3,000 of them shut down parts of Paris, burning tires and blocking airport roads, because Uber’s cheap service didn’t require the professional taxi license that could cost $270,000.

The French government caved within a day, ordering police to seize the unlicensed Uber drivers’ cars.

Now the wheel has turned. Waymo’s robotaxis launched in Atlanta in June 2025, bookable through the Uber app of all places. And Uber drivers say the competition is cutting their pay.

Naturally the Atlanta Rideshare Drivers Union wants the city to slap a $0.50 to $1.00 fee on every robotaxi ride, paid into a “driver transition fund,” plus a ban on robo pickups at the Atlanta airport.

If only they could tax the sun for the candlestick makers.

The federal government runs the same play, just bigger.

In January 2025, the Commerce Department finalized its ‘Connected Vehicle Rule’, which bans cars with Chinese-linked software from the US market, starting with the 2027 model year.

The stated reason is national security: keeping foreign adversaries out of the cameras, microphones, and GPS units on American streets.

That’s a real concern, to be fair. But then came the carve-outs.

Volvo, majority-owned by China’s Geely, got authorization in May to keep selling. Ford, after talks with the department, decided its China-built Lincoln Nautilus doesn’t need an exemption at all.

But Polestar— owned by the same Chinese parent as Volvo— was shut out and is leaving the US market.

The Commerce Department doesn’t publish these decisions or its reasoning, so nobody outside the building knows why one Geely brand got a green light and the other got kicked out of America.

Let’s be honest: if these Chinese cars were really a security threat, there would be no carve-outs to negotiate. There would be a flat ban. No exceptions.

The real threat of cheap Chinese cars is to the profits of American automakers; Chinese cars are very inexpensive— like a decent quality mid-size SUV for around $20k. So many US buyers would start driving Chinese that the American automakers would either have to adapt and compete… or suffer catastrophic losses.

The end result of these bans is less competition, meaning Americans end up paying more for their vehicles.

Just add this to the long list of things which governments, from city councils to federal regulators, make more expensive.

Yesterday we wrote about how federal influence over local building codes adds $132,000 to the average new home.

Today it’s how they’re making buying a car and taking a quick trip more expensive.

Ask California how it’s doing on that nonexistent high-speed rail… $15 billion and 18 years in, without a mile of track. Or ask Europeans, where climate fuel mandates are already tacking surcharges onto every plane ticket.

The receipts are everywhere: everything the government touches becomes more expensive.

College tuition is up about 1,200% since 1980— the surge began as soon as the federal government made itself the nation’s student lender.

Since Obamacare passed, the average family health insurance premium has nearly doubled.

Even junk food became more expensive due to government  food subsidies; in fact the moment 18 states pulled soda and snacks off the food stamp list, PepsiCo cut prices on Doritos and Lay’s by up to 15%.

Housing, transportation, food, healthcare, education— all swamped by government interference, all quickly became less affordable.

And underneath all of it, bringing the whole pot to a boil, is the inflation that politicians and regulators caused with their own spending.

Yet who do they blame? Greedy corporations.

Inflation has nothing to do with greed. It has everything to do with incompetence and irresponsibility.

Bastiat’s joke was that nobody would ever actually file the candlestick makers’ petition. Yet 181 years later, what started as satire is taking place every single day.

A political class that treats cheaper goods and services as a threat is deliberately choosing to make the country poorer.

P.S. A government that treats cheaper as a threat isn’t going to start choosing growth anytime soon. That’s exactly why we publish Plan B Confidential— our flagship research on legal, practical ways to diversify your savings, your income, and even your residency beyond any single government’s bad decisions. Click here to learn more.

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Somewhere in America there’s a local ordinance that tells you which way your garage has to face.

Another one dictates what your fence can be made of, and a third sets how many square feet of window your house needs. A few spell out the dimensions of particular features down to a quarter of an inch.

The National Association of Home Builders, the trade group for the companies that build American homes, has been adding up what rules like these cost since 2011.

Its reasoning is simple: the country is short about 1.2 million homes, and rising regulatory costs are one of the things keeping builders from closing that gap. So anyone writing new rules ought to know what the existing ones already cost.

Government regulation now adds about $132,000 to the price of a new home.

That’s just over a quarter of the roughly $500,000 the average new house sold for in January.

Builders said that ten years of changes to the building code added about $40,000 to the cost of a house. That’s the cost to buy the extra materials and labor each new edition of the code demands… whether or not the buyer wanted them.

Some of those rules are reasonable— hurricane-rated windows on a house within a mile of the shore, or shock-proof breakers on the circuits that run the stove and the dryer.

But those same code changes also decided that a hot-water pipe can’t run more than 100 feet, that the outlet on a kitchen island has to pop up out of the countertop, and that an ordinary draft-vented furnace needs its own sealed, insulated room with an outside air vent.

None of those is a matter of life or death; even the furnace is an energy-efficiency rule, and the homeowner doesn’t get to decide whether the upfront cost is worth the long term savings.

Codes get adopted locally, but the model codes that cities and counties copy are drafted with help from the Energy Department, FEMA, and the EPA.

The study notes, almost in passing, that “DOE also has a budget to persuade state and local governments to adopt more stringent codes.”

In other words, a federal agency spends tax money persuading your county to make your house more expensive.

Just the energy part of the code adds between $9,600 and $21,400 to a home built to the 2021 version, and NAHB estimates it can take the buyer up to 90 years to recoup that money in lower utility bills. So maybe your grandkids will thank you, assuming the house is still standing.

This cost was made a federal requirement— a condition of every FHA and USDA loan on a new house— until a judge ruled in March that it violated the government’s own affordable-housing law. But it still stands as the building code in roughly a dozen states.

Then come the fees. Permits, inspections, impact charges, and utility hookups add about $20,000 per house after the builder buys the lot.

Like any medieval lord, the local government also takes its tribute in land. More than 85% of developers have to hand part of their parcel to the town for a park or keep it as open space, at a cost of about $13,600 per home. Of course that cost is passed on to the buyer.

Regulation also costs time, and the study only quantifies about half that cost. More than 90% of developers report delays averaging about seven months, and more than a year passes between the zoning application and the first day of work on the site.

The study puts the delay itself at about $4,000 a house. It doesn’t count the opportunity cost, or how delaying new housing supply raises the costs of everything else on the market.

And it’s quickly getting worse. Five years ago the same study put the total regulatory cost per home at about $94,000. It’s up more than 40% since then— and it has doubled since 2011.

Disposable income in the US rose 18% over the same five years. So the cost of obeying the rules is growing twice as fast as anyone’s ability to pay it.

Notice that these costs have nothing to do with greedy builders or Wall Street landlords.

Many builders have been cutting prices every month for well over a year, and new homes still aren’t selling. They’re sitting unsold— in a country that’s short 1.2 million homes— because a builder can only cut so far before he’s selling at a loss.

Ironically, on top of the federal government pushing a rule that violated its own affordable-housing law, NAHB suspects some of the rules have less to do with safety or efficiency and more to do with “aesthetics, or possibly even, in some cases, a desire to price less affluent residents out of particular neighborhoods.”

Yet the same city councils that pass them will tell you affordable housing is their top priority.

And homebuilding is just the one industry that bothered to add up the cost of insane government regulation.

The same thing happens anywhere the government writes the rule book.

Want to build a power line, a pipeline, or a mine? The White House’s own environmental council found that the average federal environmental review takes four and a half years before anyone breaks ground.

The National Association of Manufacturers puts the cost of complying with federal rules at about $3 trillion a year, roughly 11% of GDP.

All of this strangling regulation is a big part of why the economy can’t grow faster, and right now the US needs growth badly.

The national debt just crossed $40 trillion, and Congress refuses to cut a cent, even when the spending is obvious fraud.

That leaves two ways out. Either the economy grows faster than the debt, which means the country builds more, makes more, and starts more businesses than it does now… or the government prints the difference.

Without a regulation-destroying bonanza, it’s obvious which one happens. If the government can’t rein in the rules, it can’t rein in the debt. And if it can’t rein in the debt, it can’t rein in inflation, because printing the money is the only option left.

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Hardly a week goes by without another data center announcement, and the projects have gotten so big that they’re now measured in gigawatts.

A gigawatt is a billion watts of electricity. Running around the clock, one gigawatt is enough to supply about 800,000 average American homes— and a single large data center is now built at that scale.

The data center that Meta is building near El Paso is designed for a full gigawatt and comes online in 2028.

Plus Meta just announced plans to grow its campus in Louisiana to 5GW. And OpenAI’s Stargate program, spread across sites in several states, is planned for 10GW.

These projects are also spectacularly expensive, and even the richest companies on earth have stopped paying for them out of pocket.

Earlier this month Google borrowed $25 billion from the bond market. It was the company’s third major bond sale this year, which brings its 2026 borrowing to more than $70 billion.

Google needs the money because its capital expenditures budget this year is about $200 billion, and in Q2 they spent more cash than they brought in for the first time in more than two decades.

Meta is doing the same thing. In late July, a BlackRock-led group raised $12.5 billion of debt for that El Paso site, where Meta will be the sole tenant for twenty years.

The group had to pay about 7.5% to get the deal done, one of the highest yields on any blue-chip data center bond to date. That comes on top of the $25 billion in bonds that Meta sold in May, and another $30 billion borrowed for the Louisiana campus.

And that’s just two borrowers. The total borrowings right now related to AI and data centers is truly staggering.

But it’s not just tech spending that’s driving the bond market. Let’s not forget about the US federal government, which is on track for a $2.1 trillion deficit this fiscal year.

That’s just the NEW amount of debt they have to borrow this year just to keep the lights on and pay all the Somalis.

The White House is asking Congress for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget next year, more than 40% above this year’s and the largest defense request (as a percentage of GDP) since World War II.

So between tech spending and the federal deficit, that’s already several trillion dollars in capital that needs to be borrowed from the bond market… THIS YEAR.

Here’s the problem: America’s “net private savings”, i.e. the sum of ALL undistributed corporate profits, plus total household net income, is only about $2.2 trillion.

In short, the federal government already requires nearly ALL of the net private savings from literally every household and every company across America… just to make ends meet.

Meanwhile the biggest foreign lenders are backing away.

Japan, the UK, and China— the three largest foreign lenders to the US government— all cut their Treasury holdings in June. China now has their lowest Treasury holdings since 2008, down more than 13% from last year.

In short, foreigners are not coming to the rescue. So there is very little capital left over to lend for data centers and AI expansion.

And that says nothing about the tens of millions of other borrowers— small businesses, home buyers, etc. who need to borrow money.

This is why interest rates are rising— it’s simple supply and demand: demand for capital is at an all-time high. Yet supply of capital (at the moment) is fixed. And when the supply/demand fundamentals of capital get out of whack, interest rates rise.

Families who need to buy a home now are standing in the same line as Google, Meta, and the Treasury Department, competing for the same money.

That’s why the average 30-year mortgage rate is 6.7%, and will likely go MUCH higher from here…

… unless the Fed starts printing money again.

Technically the Fed doesn’t physically ‘print’ anything, it’s all electronic. And they don’t call it ‘money printing’, because that would be too embarrassing. They refer to it as ‘quantitative easing’. But it has the same effect— increasing the supply of capital to meet the demand, thus causing interest rates to fall.

Mortgage rates fall. Treasury yields fall. Everyone is able to borrow for less.

Which sounds great… except that conjuring money out of thin air invariably triggers more inflation. So if you can borrow more cheaply but have to pay more for everything, are you really any better off?

It’s obvious the White House wants the Fed to cut rates… which means firing up a fresh round of Quantitative Easing. And Congress certainly won’t mind being able to borrow more.

Pretty much all politicians, regardless of party affiliation, want lower interest rates. Given the choice between high mortgage rates and higher inflation, politicians will pick higher inflation every time.

And that’s exactly why it makes sense to have a Plan B.

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In November 2008, California voters approved a ballot measure to build a bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

It was supposed to be fast enough to make the journey in under three hours. And passengers could hop on by 2020, for a total cost of $33 billion.

Eighteen years later, there is nothing to ride.

Emblematic of the progress so far is a field outside Fresno, where lonely viaducts poke into the sky with no rail connecting them. The locals call it their own Stonehenge.

And the state’s 2026 revised business plan now says it will cost $126 billion to complete… by 2040. Eighteen years into a 12-year project, they’re now saying they need another $93 billion and 14 more years.

Why is the price nearly four times higher than the original estimate?

Well, let’s try to answer that by tracking where the $15 billion already spent has gone.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority’s own business plan shows that about $9.1 billion went to three construction contracts covering 119 miles of the project. Those contracts are for the civil work only, meaning dirt, pipes, power lines, and concrete.

For that, California got about 80 miles of finished roadbed, i.e. the raised, graded earth that the track will eventually sit on, plus various bridges and overpasses.

In case you’re not keeping score, that works out to $77 million per mile… but that doesn’t include the actual train tracks.

No, California plans on building the rail, the electric wire, and the signals with an additional $3.5 billion contract— which was just awarded in June (i.e. 18 years in to a 14-year project).

And $3.5 billion of rail only encompasses a very small portion of the total distance they need to build.

For a rough comparison, Brightline— a private company in Florida— finished a Miami to Orlando line in 2023, with 235 miles of track, stations, and trains, for about $6 billion, or $25 million a mile.

So California’s is three times what Florida’s cost WITHOUT including the cost of the rail, the trains, and the stations.

Extraordinary. Where did all this money go?

They claim that $1.57 billion went to buying property— the narrow strip of land under the 119 miles (i.e. less than a third of the project).

But if you look at real estate prices in the area (Central Valley farmland went for about $12,000 an acre when the buying started), the actual land value was worth maybe $35 million at the time.

In other words, the state OVERPAID what the land was worth by 30x. I’m sure absolutely zero politicians or their families profited from that overpayment.

The next $3.6 billion went to studies, i.e. environmental reviews, and something the state calls “program-wide support”. That’s the second-biggest item on the bill.

The Authority started in 2008 with ten employees and hired a consulting firm to run the project. By 2018 the state had grown its own staff to about 190, with the consulting firm employing 485 people on the job.

This outside firm is generating hundreds of millions of dollars per year to do nothing.

When the state auditor went looking for what all those people had produced, 145 of the 184 deliverables were missing.

Not deliverables like rails and bridges. We’re talking about reports. The consultants couldn’t even manage that.

Governor Gavin Newsom’s reaction was to promise a purge. Yet the same firm still runs the project. And every slip in the schedule means the firm gets paid more. In fact this year’s plan added another $145 million for consultants.

In July the project’s own Inspector General wrote that the Authority “has obscured basic facts about the project” and made oversight harder for the legislature.

For example, in January, the Authority agreed to pay one of its contractors $537 million to settle nearly 600 claims for extra costs.

What claims? Were the claims real? Nobody knows, because nobody has audited it. The Inspector General, whose job that is, says his office is half-staffed. Maybe he should hire an outside consulting firm.

How could anyone look at all this and not see the same kind of fraud the Somalis are running in Minneapolis?

You take tax dollars and funnel them through layers of government employees, consultants, contractors, and unions, all of them tied to the political establishment. In return, those people spend a slice of their ill-gotten gains keeping the politicians who make it possible in office.

California’s version may be ‘legal’ graft. But that hardly makes it different. It might be worse, since at least in Minneapolis the people on the take can be prosecuted.

Who’s to say the contractor didn’t earn an extra $537 million? Who’s to say the consultants’ reports weren’t worth every dollar of the $3.6 billion?

And when someone tries to get to the bottom of it, they make asking questions illegal.

Nick Shirley, the YouTuber whose video of empty tax-funded Minneapolis day cares went viral last Christmas, walked into a Los Angeles immigrant-services nonprofit this summer and asked where the $80 million in government money it has taken over the last four years went.

But they were ready to silence him, because two months after the Minneapolis video, that same nonprofit had co-sponsored a bill letting its staff sue anyone who posts videos of them online. Newsom signed it into law on Saturday.

Starting in October 2027, anyone who works at, volunteers at, or gets help from an immigration nonprofit can sue whoever posts their picture online, for at least $4,000 plus attorney’s fees.

And these are the same people who mock anyone who suggests an election might not be secure.

Why wouldn’t you trust them to count the mail-in ballots at 3 a.m.?

Nobody should bet a family’s future on these people getting better. The tax-funded gravy train isn’t slowing down if they have anything to do with it.

And that’s exactly why it makes sense to have a Plan B.

PS- Schiff Sovereign Premium is our guide to building that Plan B: legally cutting your tax bill, gold and precious metals strategies, research on undervalued real asset businesses, and diversification moves that keep your money and your freedom of movement out of any one government’s reach.

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