E9: The National Debt: A Basepoint Perspective

We tackle a great listener question for this episode, "What impact does the National Debt have on retirement and savings and does this possibly mean higher taxes and more inflation in the future? Good question.

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Transcript

The Point Podcast Ep 9 The National Debt

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

inflation concerns, national debt, deficit spending, fiscal policy, monetary policy, reserve currency, economic impact, inflation protection, portfolio strategy, government spending, interest rates, asset prices, purchasing power, intergenerational tax, reserve currency status

00:05

Welcome to The Point Podcast. We have informed, intelligent conversations about today's financial topics submitted by viewers like you. Let's go ahead and get started. Here are your hosts, Landis Wiley and Allen Wallace. 

00:23

Hello and welcome to The Point sponsored by Basepoint Wealth. I'm your host. Landis Wiley, sitting here, as always, with Chief Investment Officer Allen Wallace, we're happy to welcome you into another conversation about the world of finance. For those of you who may be tuning in for the first time, the way that this works is really pretty simple. Our goal is to let you in on conversations that Allen and I have everyday. It seems like about stuff that's going on involving the economy, markets, or just the world. It's stuff that you're probably reading about, maybe in the newspaper, your favorite online news source, maybe you see it on Good Morning America, or whatever your favorite morning talk show is, but we like to just break those things down and have an easy, common sense conversation. So, before we get into today's topic, though, we're going to kick this off with a usual segment called the most important thing. And that is just what it sounds like. It's something that's impacting the world of markets, the economy, and probably you and I'm going to flip it over to Allen and Allen, what's our most important thing?

01:28

The most important thing right now is inflation. There was a recent uptick in the otherwise consistent drop in inflation data over the past few years. CPI is currently 2.41% above where it was at this time last year. And most of the inflation is focused on food and shelter, which make up a large percentage of the spending for lower income households. It is important to remember that the Federal Reserve has a dual mandate of controlling inflation and attaining full employment. The recent employment data has been a little soft, especially when you compare government jobs to private jobs, and when you compare natural born workers to foreign born workers. If employment data begins to deteriorate, the Fed will need to make a decision about which of their dual mandates they focus their attention on. In past episodes of inflation, most notably in the mid-1970s, there was an initial decline in the rate of inflation, only to be followed by a second spike that lasted for multiple years. Of course, there is no way to know if this pattern will be repeated, but it would be naive to not know that it is a possibility for inflation to heat back up. Almost every economist who writes a column expects the complete and total victory over inflation here followed by a soft landing, or even no landing. It is not that I take pleasure in being a contrarian, just to swim upstream, but the most volatile market reactions occur when everyone agrees on something and they end up being wrong. Keep your eyes on inflation for signs of reheating.

02:40

Imagine the perfect swing, the satisfying sound of a golf ball landing on the green. Your retirement could be filled with moments like these. At Basepoint Wealth, we design retirement plans tailored to your passions, whether it's perfecting your game or simply enjoying the tranquility of the course. We've got you covered to tee up your retirement with one of our fee-only advisors. Visit basepointwealth.com to schedule your initial consultation today, because from here you can go anywhere. Basepoint Wealth is a registered investment advisor. Visit basepointwealth.com for important disclosures. 

03:12

All right. Well, thanks, Allen, always an interesting topic of inflation. It's something top of mind for a lot of people out there. So, with that again. Welcome back to The Point. For those that are tuning in for the first time, the way this works is Allen and I just like to chit-chat about markets, economy, financial news, all sorts of things. But unlike a lot of podcasts that you may listen to or tune into, we don't always have a set topic that we've prepared for. In fact, our list of topics come out of this hat over here, which they end up in there because of folks out there watching and listening, who send us in questions, and they come from our advisors here at Basepoint. So, we never know exactly what we're going to draw to the hat. And we kind of wing it as we go through some things we know a lot about, and some things we may not know quite so much about, but we'll work through it just the same way that you out there listening to us probably are as well. So without further ado, let's see what the lucky hat today tells us we get to talk about. So today's topic, what impact will national debt have on retirement and savings, and does this possibly mean higher taxes and more inflation in the future? So kind of timely, yeah, given the most important thing. So, obviously, national debt, where we sit today, 30, 35.68 Trillion. Okay, that's a big number. It seems to get bigger all the time. So certainly, this is something I think you know, folks listening to us banter here probably are hearing a lot about. Is deficit spending, government spending, money printing, however we want to talk about it. But you know, anytime you start throwing around numbers like 35 Trillion, I guess I, you know, I honestly just kind of have a hard time even fathoming  what that number means. d

05:10

I mean, I think it'd be good to just start with some definitions, right? Because I think people conflate the words deficit and debt, right? I mean, here people use them interchangeably in conversations. So the debt is the balance sheet number. That's the total debt that we owe. The deficit is the income statement number. That's the difference between how much we brought in and how much went out in a single year. 

05:32

So for the average person sitting out there, that would be akin to the debt, is the mortgage, right? They own the house, and the deficit is, when you're making $5,000 a month, but your credit card says you're spending $7,000.

05:44

Exactly. Yeah, right, so, but, but it's important, because, you know, some people are like, hey, what's the deficit? It's 1.9 trillion. That's our current deficit for 2024 so far, the debt itself is, like I said, 35.68 Trillion. That's $105,000 for every person in the United States of America. So it's a gigantic number. And right now, I think it takes about 17% of annual income just to pay the interest on the debt. Okay, that's,

06:10

I mean, those numbers are shocking. Yeah, they are. And I think, you know, one of the things that's maybe difficult, you know, when you hear about this stuff in the news is, you know, trying to, just trying to understand the weight of those numbers. I mean, the one that you threw around, that I think most people can probably relate to, is the fact that that that debt number is $105,000 for every person, every single person, and that just adults. Here is that, including the kids, that's everyone, that's everybody. I mean, that is a, that is an unbelievable number. So, you know, obviously, you know, for people out there, you know, when, when we're trying to manage our own personal debt, I mean, we all understand the implications when we get credit card debt that's too high and we can't pay that off, and the interest accrues on us, and it affects our credit rating. And you know, which affects our ability to go get loans, or reasonably priced loans for mortgages or cars that we need or that we want. You know, when we start talking about numbers like this for the government, what are the practical implications of a $35 Trillion

07:15

national debt? You know, so it depends on whether you have a reserve currency or not, right? And I think that's one of the things that's allowed us to sort of slip through this. The way that we have is that other countries like to settle their transactions in US dollars. So that gives you a little bit more leeway when you're the reserve currency. But I mean, typically, if you're at two or 300% of GDP, that's not a good thing, right? So, I mean, you're usually trying to be less than one times your annual income, in total debt, right? When it when it comes to a country, and you know we're above that now, so typically, this type of debt in relation to GDP, is reserved for times of war, right? So World War Two is the last big one. If you look at a chart of the US debt going back to the very beginning, it sort of peaks during wars and depressions and sort of troughs when things are going well. The problem here is that we just sort of never took our foot off the gas pedal, you know, we just continued spending more than we're earning in the form of deficit spending. And typically, even the Keynesian say you're only supposed to doing that, do that during periods of economic calamity, right? Not just when things are sort of a little bit stagnant. So we've sort of called off, you know, pulled out all the stops here and now, we have to sort of ask ourselves, well, what does that mean for the future? Well, I

08:48

know one of the topics that's come up in recent years, as you mentioned, you know, times of war, times of economic struggle. I mean, obviously we had the disruption of COVID and certainly there was a lot of stimulus money, which effectively was spending well beyond what the government was bringing in in terms of tax revenue. But this deficit problem isn't new, right? I mean, we've basically been growing the deficit for the better part of 20 plus years. I

09:16

remember Schoolhouse Rock when I was a kid, did an episode on, you know, reigning in deficit spending. So, you know, that would have been over 40 years ago. So that would have been in, you know, in the Reagan administration, when they first started talking about it becoming a big problem, right?

09:32

And so, if you, if you think back, you know, the last major, aside from the COVID disruptions, you know, the last major economic troubles that most people would think about would think about would be 2008 2009 right? When we had to step in, and whether it's TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) or other programs that were designed to shore up the banking sector, but that was really kind of the last major financial strife period, if you will. But yet, you know that that deficit spending, that spending in excess. Of what the government is bringing in, in terms of revenue, is continuing to expand over the, I guess, now, 15, 16, years, you know, since that financial period. So is that kind of what you're talking about of, you know, it's sort of what's unique maybe this time, is that we're continuing to expand that deficit spending, even though there isn't, there isn't really a direct cause that we can point to.

10:23

No I mean, we're at, we're at near record unemployment. So what is, you know, what exactly is the purpose of the fiscal stimulus, right? So keep in mind, there's two different types of government spending. There's monetary policy, and then there's fiscal policy, right? Monetary is what the Fed does. Fiscal is what your congress person does when they you know, when they approve a budget, we've had great, a great amount of monetary stimulus since going back to 2008 right? And it just never really seemed to do much. It didn't pick up inflation. It caused the price of assets to go up significantly, right? But it wasn't until we started getting large amounts of fiscal stimulus that we started to see that sort of trickle down into inflation. And you know, that's because when the Fed buys assets and puts them on their balance sheet, all they're doing is pushing people further on the risk curve. So it causes the price of assets to go up, but it doesn't necessarily translate down into what people spend their money on every day, like food and shelter, right? But when you hand out cash, then that goes into the hands of people who are going to spend that money. And that causes, you know, if you're not increasing the supply of things and you're just increasing the amount of money, it causes the price of those things to go up. And I think that's what we've seen since 2021

11:31

here, right? And when you say monetary policy, I think you know something people there may be, maybe remember, is the good old quantitative easing days, the days, that's really what you're talking about. We're finally

11:41

starting to let some of those out. Some of those assets roll off the

11:43

balance sheet, right? And the most maybe practical impact to that, as you said, is it pushed asset prices up. Maybe not the ones that we spend money on every day, but certainly stock market, you know, kind of reap the benefit, if you will, right of that time frame, you know, you touched on something there, when it gets into the fiscal spending, which is the legislative items, whether it's the infrastructure bill that was passed, the green New Deal bill that was passed, the COVID stimulus bill that were passed, those are actual fiscal spending bills that pumps more

12:16

money directly out into the economy, into the hands of people who are going to spend it. And that's sort of what causes inflation to start to tick up. The Fed can do a lot of things with its balance sheet, and it doesn't seem to translate directly into price inflation or goods inflation. It does seem to translate into asset inflation, right? And goods inflation and asset inflation are sometimes they counteract each other, right, right? If you're, if you're liquidating assets in order to buy goods that are going up in price, that can cause the price of assets to go down. So they they're not always necessarily concurrent with each other. Sometimes they can, they can switch directions, right?

12:52

And so maybe one of the most, maybe one of the most practical impacts of the debt deficit conversation is whether it's being sourced from monetary decisions or fiscal decisions. And certainly, if I'm if I'm understanding correctly, the fiscal decision making that is contributing to deficit spending, ie, if we pass a two or $3 trillion spending bill when we're not raising two or 3 trillion additional revenue, that's certainly adding to our deficit, which is adding to that 35 trillion,

13:24

right? Yeah, so that's almost the debt and the deficit are almost always going to be fiscal in nature, right? Right? You may use monetary policy to fund them, but you're not usually going to count the Fed's balance sheet towards the

13:36

and so the practical impact of that, as it may relate to your most important thing conversation, maybe one of the most immediate or noticeable impacts of higher deficits higher debt is inflation. Is that? Well,

13:49

so fair statement, there's a little bit of a generational battle going on here. So you've got the baby boomers who are into their retirement, and when you're retired, inflation is the enemy, because you have a fixed amount of income, and when prices go up, that means you necessarily have to consume less. And then you've got the millennials on the other end, and they have a lot of debt. They have student debt, they're maybe just starting to get mortgages. They've got credit card debt. And inflation is actually your friend when you have an when you have negative assets, right? Because you think about it like, you know, you're trying to shovel money over to pay that debt off, well, inflation causes your shovel to become bigger, right, right? So you have this push and this pull between two massive generations where the older generation sort of would like to see inflation go away, and the younger generation, you know, especially if it's translating into wage growth, would be much better off if, if there were more inflation. So I'd be interested in, you know, I'm sort of stuck in the middle in the Gen X generation, but, yeah, I mean, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out,

14:57

right? Well, it's interesting because, you know. When you think about the people that are making the legislative decisions, you know, to spend all this money,

15:07

most of them aren't exactly young, right? They're starting the millennials are starting to play some candidates, though, and you can definitely see the difference where some where the younger candidates are sort of clashing with the older candidates. And I mean, I do think that that's a really big difference here between, you know, even going back to John Major Keynes, inflation was always sort of posited as a tax, right? It's an intergenerational tax that causes the money to become less valuable over time, and it allows the government to spend a lot more money, and it sort of prevents that intergenerational wealth from continuing without having to be productive, right? You can't just, you couldn't go back to 1900 and stick all your money into a savings account and have it keep up with inflation. You would have had to have it be productive in the economy and things like stocks or, you know, higher risk bonds or those type of things. So inflation is a methodology of making the government debt more sustainable or more payable over time, and of also forcing assets to be more productive in the economy, so that, you know, if you bury the money, it basically becomes worthless over 100 years, right? Right?

16:12

Well, and I guess that's an interesting take on this, right? So 35 Trillion in in debt today is certainly a big number. You know if, if we were to inflate, if inflation were to devalue our currency by, say, 50% and that debt didn't really change, theoretically, that debt costs half as much to pay off, absolutely. So is there maybe a little bit of a, is there maybe a little bit of a financial game that happens as it relates to inflation relative to our debt, that the government gets overextended in its debt, we'll just make the dollar worth less, and therefore we have more of them, and so that number becomes easier to pay off. I mean, I do think that

16:55

that's happened over time, right? So the first time I can, I've found a analog to this would be 18th century France, right? So, in the early 1700s a guy named John Law comes to France. He was a gambler and philanderer from Scotland, and after killing someone, he left and moved to France and becomes the Treasury Secretary, or whatever the analog was of that position at the time. And he decides, you know, why don't we just print money instead of having it backed by anything? Right? So, this is 1716, 1717, and then he started the Mississippi bubble. And then, you know, the currency became less and less valuable. And we all know how that story ends, right in the beheading of the king and Napoleon terrorizing Europe. So, so the last time. But the problem is, it took 100 years, right? So if you go all the way back to 1913 when we sort of chartered the second Federal Reserve. At the time, people said this is going to destroy our currency. Well, if you look at how much purchasing power is declined over that period of time, maybe that's correct. But also,wit's been 110 years, and if you would have done something crazy in order to try to counteract that, you know, you look kind of dumb, right? You put it all in gold or something like that, right? But history showed us that sometimes these things don't end well, one major difference between 18th century France and us is they didn't have a Federal Reserve Bank. Actually, that's one of the first things Napoleon did when he took power in 1802 or 1803 was to charter the first French Federal Reserve Bank. So, you know, maybe, maybe the Fed is the magic equation here. We'll see, right, but it definitely didn't end well in France when they tried that experiment with just being able to print money, right? And was that just

18:49

because the overall degradation of quality of life from loss of purchasing power that that the average citizen experienced? Yeah,

18:57

it's the old let them eat cake, sort of you know, mentality where, you know, the wealthy were getting wealthier, the gap between the poor and the wealthy was continuing to expand, because the price of assets was going up, even though the price of goods was going up even more. And yeah, I mean, when people are starving and miserable, then they have a tendency to revolt, and that's what happened, so

19:24

specific to kind of the debt deficit question, then it sounds like it's a little bit of a double-edged sword, in the sense that the deficit side of the spending equation has a tendency to push asset prices higher, which for people who own assets, could be a benefit, right? So could be it could be a positive thing to folks and their portfolios, being in a period of deficit spending, but at the same time, it's being counter weighted by the erosion of the currency underlying it when we're printing money to fund that. Yeah, and it's maybe a little bit of a race, right? Is your portfolio appreciating faster than your purchasing power is declining? 

20:07

It’s also an equation, right? So you've got exports minus imports, plus investment plus consumption plus government spending equals GDP, right? And so when that government spending portion goes up as much as it does it, or in a deficit manner, that sort of has to be funded from somewhere else, right? And what you're, what I think you're finding, is it's being funded by profit margins, right? So if you, if you look at what the all this talk in the news about how, you know, there's price gouging going on in corporate finance, because profit margins have risen from, you know, like 8% to 17% or something like that, over the past few years. The problem is that if you don't have more goods and you've got $2 trillion of excess government spending, it sort of has to be funded from somewhere, right? That equation has to be balanced. And what's happening is it's pushing because savings isn't going up at all, right? It's forcing the seed component, in the form of profit margins, to go up, right? Because that whole equation has to balance them out,

21:07

right? Which that would be a positive for stock. Exactly.

21:11

for investors, it's positive. But for consumers, that means they're getting less of that consumption pie, right, right? It's, it's crowding them out. And that's one of the biggest problems with government deficits is that it crowds out legitimate private business, because there is only so much money to go around. Well, there's only so many, so much in goods, and when you print excess money, then you know, in order for that equation to balance, the only option is for prices to go up. Right, right?

21:38

So what would you tell a person, I guess, what's the what's the portfolio strategy for a period of high deficit, high debt, increasing debt?

21:48

Well, you're going to want to have inflation protection. And so which we do, you're going to want to so we have inflation protection in the form of gold and silver. We also have inflation protection in the form of inflation adjusted bonds. The inflation adjusted bonds are going to want to make sure that you're getting a decent real interest rate at the point where you purchase them, which I think we are right now. And you're going to want to limit fixed interest bonds to a great extent, right? So you're not going to want to have 60% of your money. And now that doesn't mean you shouldn't have any right? Because remember, when you when you build a portfolio, it's a little bit like composing a symphony. I mean, you have a lot of different instruments, and the biggest problems we have are when someone's like, I don't like oboes, so don't put me oboes in my portfolio, right? It doesn't, it just doesn't sound right. Okay? So it's never do all of this thing and none of this other thing, but it's, how do we weight the portfolio to make sure that we have a balance here? And if we feel like the danger is on the side of inflation, then we tilt things a little bit so that if inflation does pick up, then we have assets that will counterbalance that. That'll be your inflation adjusted bonds, that'll be your equities, real estate can fall into that category, and then also gold and silver. 

23:08

How much of a direct line or a direct connection do you see between deficit spending and the general trajectory of the national debt and inflation?

23:18

I think that they're very clearly correlated. I mean the deficit directly increases the debt, right? So if you're spending 1.9 Trillion more this year then you brought in, then your debts going to go up by 1.9 Trillion plus whatever interest didn't get paid in cash, right? So that's a direct correlation. Milton Friedman said that inflation is always a monetary phenomenon. And I mean, I think if you are printing more money than the amount of goods that we have, you're clearly going to create inflation, right? So now, every economist that I read says that inflation is over, and, you know, we've got the soft landing, and we stuck it. It remains to be seen whether that's true or not. Right? I'm not in the business of predicting things. I just I'm trying to balance a portfolio so that if things happen that we don't expect, we don't get caught off guard, right, right? And so I still think we're positioned for either outcome, either inflation heats back up, we've got assets that'll do well in that scenario, if inflation is tamed, then we do have some longer duration, high credit quality bonds that'll do fine. If we get down the road a little ways, and oops, we missed it. And, you know, we can clearly tell that something's not right, then we can make changes, and that's sort of how we're going to balance this. And we continue to hold quite a bit of cash that's earning four three quarters percent, which is higher than the rate of inflation at 2.4% so, you know, I think that we just continue to be patient. Remember that this is a long term, perpetual, continuous game that we're in, and we need to be able to make tactical decisions when circumstances change. Right?

24:59

Well. Would you tell a person that looks at the current trajectory of deficit spending, looks at the national debt and worries that it's all going to fall apart? You know is, is there? Is there a tipping point where overspending, if you will, could actually cause something more than just the inflation effects that we've been experiencing, to where it could become something. 

25:29

I’ve read 10 different papers that try to tell you where that number is, and none of them have ever really agreed on it. And again, if you go back to 1913 when, when the Fed was first formed, those people were wrong, you know, they were

25:45

earlier, right? But they were wrong. They were early

25:47

enough that they were wrong, right? So I don't think putting all your money into shotgun shells and bottled water for the Mad Max scenario is going to be a winning strategy. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be prepared, right? But at the same time, we're dealing with intergenerational things here that take hundreds of years to play out. And finding yourself in the midst of one of those things, the most dangerous thing you can do is overreact, right? Given the fact that they take hundreds years of play to play out, they also don't change overnight, either you can sort of see deterioration coming. What I would be looking for is other countries to stop using the dollar as a reserve currency, or further downgrades in our credit, right? We did. We had a downgrade a few years ago from AAA to double A or whatever it was. And so those are the kind of things I would continue to monitor to see if maybe the debt is getting ahead of our ability to pay our liabilities, and

26:48

as long as we maintain our reserve currency status, like you said earlier, we've certainly got some benefits that other countries probably don't have when it comes to their level absolutely ability to withstand deficit spending, right? Absolutely, yeah, do you think, you know, kind of playing off that a little bit because it has been in the news. Conversations seem to be bigger a year or so ago around the BRICS nations, you know, trying to create an alternative to the dollar. Is that part of this debt conversation, in a way? Yeah.

27:18

I mean, I think that a lot of nations would like to not have to settle their transactions in dollars, especially Russia, you know, I mean, irregardless of where you stand on foreign policy, when we froze their foreign reserve assets, that sent a signal to everyone that if we're upset with you, we're going to take your money. And so that's what has sort of necessitated these other countries from saying, hey, maybe we don't want to have all of our future value tied to this single currency, right? So yeah, I mean, I do think that's part of the conversation. The issue is that when you're in a developing economy, and you can't issue debt in your own local currency. You have to issue it in some currency that has been the dollar. And so that strengthening dollar has sort of been a headwind when you're you know when you need to buy dollars in order to pay your debt off. That strengthening of the dollar can actually be kind of detrimental to those developing economies. And I think we have seen some of that because the dollar continues to

28:26

strengthen. Right? Interesting, fun topic. Yeah, it's always, I don't know. It's always interesting. You know when you and obviously going through an election cycle like we are currently, right? You know, certainly the idea of who's going to spend what amount on various projects,

28:47

Total spoiler alert for you, neither of them are looking at reducing deficits at all,

28:52

right, right, right. I have enjoyed the argument back and forth, you know, here, over the last month or so that you know one plan is going to increase deficits by 2 trillion over 10 years, and the other one's only going to increase deficits by 1.9 trillion over

29:06

10 years. And they're big ranges. To 2 trillion to 8 trillion is one of the ranges. Or the problem with a topic like this is that we can prognosticate all day long, and we're not going to be able to come to a conclusion. All we can do is be prepared for contingencies and continue to monitor the world around us, right? I mean, having a Chicken Little reaction to this, and you know, sitting in cash would be detrimental, right, because inflation is going to eat you up, right? Having it All in gold not great, because gold is hot, is very volatile, and maybe even a little bit overvalued right now, so you could lose half your money there. All Stocks, not good, all bonds not good, right? So being that's this is why we diversify, and it's why we have to continue to monitor the world and make decisions accordingly. I mean, that's just, that's what it means to invest, right? Risk means more things can happen than will. Happen, right? And in this case, we're dealing with hundreds of years of history playing out. And the fact, you know, the idea that we're going to catch that at one moment in time is pretty preposterous, right?

30:13

So, as always, kind of, the name of the game is patience. Don't overreact, don't try to outsmart a very complex machine. Yeah,

30:21

well, and did we ever answer the question? I think,

30:25

I think we got there. Okay, all right, we got there, you know, because I think really, what, really, what the focal point is, is, we see the government spending, we know there's a big debt. Is it going to impact our portfolio? And I think fundamentally, the answer there is, is potentially Right, right? But you don't try to place bets on thinking it's going to end up one way or the other, right, you know? And I think the good example you gave were those that 112, 113 years ago, when the Federal Reserve was established, argued that it that the establishment of the central bank would destroy our currency. And that argument was correct in the sense of, we've lost 99% of our purchasing power in the dollar since that period of time, right, right? But, but for people that would have tried to place a trade expecting that outcome, you know, they've lost Right, right? And so, you know, I, I think you know when, when we talk to clients and we sit in meetings and we get asked about the debt. That's usually where it is well, how do we bet on this? Right? How do we, how do we position to try to outsmart it? And I think I think your message is, is you don't

31:32

right? Okay, well, that's a good summary. So perfect. Well,

31:36

with that, I think we'll kind of draw us to a conclusion. So we thank you, as always, for joining us today and taking time out of your day to listen or watch if you're curious about a topic that you've been hearing about or reading about or talking about, we'd love to have the opportunity to just sit and discuss it. So feel free to hit up our website, basepointwealth.com or call in and shoot us your ideas, and who knows, maybe we'll draw your topic out of the hat on an upcoming episode of the point until next time, take care.

32:09

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