Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
America’s Housing Crisis: Why You Can’t Afford a Home, Supreme Court Blocks Trump Tariffs, Democrats Hand Trump a Midterms Ad | Weekly Recap
01 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: Why are young people leaning towards socialism in America?
A lot of people are saying that the reason why the young people are swinging to socialism is they think that it's othering of economy. I don't care that you're taxing billionaires. I'm not a billionaire. It's not going to impact me. I don't care that you're increasing property taxes. I rent. That's not going to affect me at all. So there's this othering of the economy.
And Kalashi just announced that the U.S. housing market has reached its most unaffordable level in history ever.
yeah so on the othering of the economy people really have to watch how things are playing out in new york right now watch how they've played out historically it doesn't work because the people are mobile or you just disincentivize them and i don't think people are being honest about what it takes to get the smartest and best among us to build things to innovate to create things to actually drive gdp forward if you want just like the most shocking history lesson look at china
finally, after decades and decades of murdering his own people, starving them to death, Mao finally died. And then Deng Xiaoping takes over. And what was his solution? Let people get rich. And I quote, Deng Xiaoping, the successor to Mao, said to get rich is glorious. So the way out of this stuff is to understand that humans have a drive to get better.
Chapter 2: What alarming statistics highlight the housing affordability crisis?
They have a drive to get ahead. They have a And for a lot of the brightest minds in the world, the competition is in the realm of business. And the way that you make the most money in business is to create something that people want. So you innovate, you build something that's better, cheaper, faster.
And it works out well when you have light touch regulation to avoid things like monopolies and a regulatory capture is very important to avoid. But when you do that well, like China did, you pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. I mean, and rapidly. So it's absolutely extraordinary.
However, once you stop understanding that mechanism that you're allowing those people to get rich precisely so they will pull everybody up with them, but you want those workhorses, the people that are excited, they're smart, they're driven, they just want to win. And you get to harness that as a society, but you have to let them run. You have to let them get as far ahead as they're able to get.
You have to do it. And as soon as you start disincentivizing them, you get less rich. Now you have to protect the middle class. Hopefully you guys know that is like the core of my focus is making sure that the middle class can thrive.
But you're never gonna have a middle class if you don't have that top whatever 0.01% that is just psychotic about giving up their entire life to build something extraordinary. So let us all be thankful that they exist, but you have to let them run. And so when you're just like those kids and you wanna tax them into oblivion, they just stop being incentivized.
As I've said many times, you start clamping down on them, putting restrictions, and then they can't even if they want to. Now, speaking on home prices and what's going on there, to Drew's point, home prices are completely out of control and it is damaging this country massively. In the 1990s, the median American home cost about three times the median household income. Today,
Today it costs five times. That is the highest ratio in recorded American history. It's higher than the peak of the 2006 housing bubble, which I hope we can all agree was a catastrophe. Unlike 2006, nobody's calling this a bubble. They're calling it normal. They're not thinking about it. They're, ah, everything's okay. It's not normal. Home prices are going up like 60% just since 2019.
The median home now costs $417,000. To qualify for a mortgage on that, you need to earn roughly $127,000 a year. And the bad news is the median household only makes 83,000, which means the average American family is now mathematically locked out of the average American home. It's so simple. You can see it in the math. When you can see it in a spreadsheet, make more homes.
A study tracking 95 major housing markets, which they did across eight countries for 21 years, just published its latest findings. For the first time in the study's history, not a single market was rated as affordable.
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Chapter 3: How does the Supreme Court's ruling affect Trump's tariffs?
Not one. We are now short just under 5 million homes in the US alone, which is an all time high according to Zillow. 8.1 million families are doubling up and sharing homes with people they're not related to, not because they want roommates, but because they can't afford a place of their own. Now, I hope you guys are all asking, how on earth did we get here?
And the honest answer is that our policies are designed to make housing go up, not come down. In a world where deficit spending is eroding, the value of every dollar you save, people have piled into real estate as a hedge. You have to, you have to go into some asset. and real estate is the one that people actually understand intuitively.
Homeowners right now sit on $35.8 trillion in aggregate equity. They are a massive political constituency, and no politician wants to tell their whole group the biggest asset that they own is gonna lose value. Trump has said out loud that that's the case. In December, he admitted the two goals are in conflict. In fact, we have a clip.
Are you still considering a national emergency over housing? The President I'm looking at it. Yeah, I'm looking at it. The Press What would that mobilize? The President You know, I have two — there's two thoughts on housing. You have a lot of people have housing that because we have Such a strong time and such a strong market there. Houses are very valuable.
It's a big part of their net worth, their house. I don't want to knock those numbers down because I want them to continue to have a big value for their house. At the same time, I want to make it possible for young people out there and other people to buy housing. In a way, they're at conflict.
In a way.
You create a lot of housing all of a sudden, and it drives the housing prices down.
Praise Jesus.
So I want to take care of the people that have houses that have a value to the house that they never thought possible, that have sort of made them
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Chapter 4: What was the impact of the recent State of the Union address?
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This tariff thing is breaking. This is a report CNN confirmed it, NBC News. The justices divided 6-3 held that Trump's aggressive approach to tariffs on products entering the United States from across the world was not permitted under a 1977 law called the International Emergency Economics Power Act, IEEPA.
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Chapter 5: How do economic dynamics influence innovation and wealth?
But the president and the Trump administration points to no stature in which Congress has previously said that the language in the IEPA could apply to tariffs, he added. As such, we hold that IEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. It is a rare setback for the administration at the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority since Trump began his second term in January.
They gave him the blessing on deporting people, even to other people's countries. And then this is, I think, the first L he actually publicly took.
This is more than just an L. This is a very big deal. What they have just said is that what he did was unconstitutional, and now companies are going to go after him hard. and they're going to sue the life out of this administration for the damages that they perceive will have been done. And so the unwinding of all of the money that's been collected via the tariffs, whoa.
So this is one where there's no doubt that the administration will have some other trick up their sleeve, like, oh, okay, we're not doing it because of the IEP, A, whatever it is. We're doing it because of, and then insert thing. I cannot fathom that they're going to back off of tariffs given the catastrophe that would be unwinding them just from a pure economic standpoint.
And then also it's given him so much leverage in negotiations internationally, the odds that he stops doing it again are vanishingly small. But now you're like in constitutional crisis territory where it's like, okay, if he skirts around that, and go somewhere else. And then that has to work its way through the system again.
First of all, you exacerbate the problem of him collecting more and more tariff revenue, which then open, if then whatever other thing he tries gets shut down again, now you've got both periods of time of collecting these tariffs that you're just gonna get sued to death over. So man, this one is a really big deal. This is a meteorite strike.
And so we have to find out whether they've got a legitimate thing that they're gonna try to go down. But or if it just seems blatantly obvious to everybody that this is him just saying, I don't care about the Supreme Court. And if you've got a president saying, I don't care about the Supreme Court, you have a constitutional crisis, man. Hey, let's wait and see what happens.
But this is this is big. I want to jump back into the article. The decision does not affect all of Trump's tariffs, leaving in place ones he imposed on steel and aluminum using different laws. But it upends the tariffs in two categories. One in country by country or reciprocal tariffs, which range from 34 percent for China to 10 percent baseline for the rest of the world.
that was a tariff bingo day um the other is a 25 tariff imposed on some goods from canada china and mexico for what the administration said was to fail their curve the flow of fentanyl so the canada china and mexico under the fentanyl clause are able to be upheld these other ones um the reciprocal ones would be struck down and to your point companies that had to pay tariffs may be able to seek a refund from the treasury department and hundreds have already sued
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of the current housing market trends?
I'm not a constitutional scholar. I'm not in these rooms. I have no idea what they're going to do, but he's going to find something. I will be utterly shocked. The only way that you're really going to be able to defang Trump if you don't like the way that he's going about things is to flip the Senate and or the House. Like if he loses at the midterms, they impeach him, then it's game over.
Failing that like if he wins at the midterms, he's gonna find another path to this It really comes down to a question Do the American people want the executive branch and then specifically Trump as the wielder of the executive branch? But they they do well to think of this as policy not as just Trump do they want the executive branch to be able to use tax effectively as a weapon against
other governments? And it's an interesting question because traditionally the executive can do a lot more internationally than they can do domestically. You more or less go, okay, the executive branch, like we can't babysit everything. So Senate, Congress, we're going to deal with things that affect us domestically.
And then you do, it's not like whatever you want, but you do with much lighter restrictions, what you want internationally. Yeah. So I could see something that ended up settling out where it's like, first of all, we're never going to call it a tax because that gets money from a constitutional perspective. But you've got like broader authority to act outside of the country.
But things that are domestic, you can't touch that. So then it will become a debate about whether we're going to consider tariffs domestic or domestic. international, because as people will be right to point out, when you tariff somebody, it's the importer within your own borders that ends up paying that. So now it becomes how do we define tariff?
Is it a domestic tax or is it best understood as an international tax? He'll probably lose that given what they've just said. So then it becomes, OK, what is the thing that you can do? Like, is there a new thing that isn't a traditional tariff where you are directly imposing the fee on the outgoing shipment. I don't know. I don't know if that's possible.
There's a reason that it doesn't exist currently. There's a reason that everybody does it. I imagine just for reasons of collection. But you could certainly stop things at the border and then say this this payment has to come from them. You could do that. But yeah, this is going to get weird.
So that is my bet is that Trump is going to find a way to keep doing this because he can't give up that leverage.
And it's interesting to your point. He probably has a team of lawyers spinning something up to get out of its finesse.
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Chapter 7: How do political narratives shape public perception and policy?
I didn't think it was particularly good. I didn't think it was as bad as it could have been, but. It wasn't inspiring. It's not going to be remembered. This is not something that becomes part of our national identity once we get over the fever dream that is populism. It's a missed opportunity. So Trump's approval rating as we come into this is 36%.
So it is the lowest point during either of his terms in office. And 61% of people say that the economy is not working well for them personally. But last night, as he's giving the State of the Union, he stood before a joint session of Congress and called this moment a golden age for America.
Now, as always, the night just ended up feeling like a tug of war between two warring factions that are far more interested in controlling the national narrative than they are actually helping the American people. And before Trump even got his first full sentence out, Congressman Al Green of Texas was standing in the chamber holding a sign that
read, Black People Aren't Apes, which is a reference to a video Trump's own account shared on True Social earlier this month depicting Biden and the Obamas as apes. Republican senators physically tried to grab the sign away from Greene, and then he was quickly escorted out within minutes.
The biggest beat of the night though came when Trump asked members of Congress to stand if they agreed that the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens. Republicans obviously stood, but Democrats stayed seated. This was exactly what Trump was holding for. They handed Trump a midterms campaign video. I won't say I don't know what they're thinking.
I know what they're thinking. They want to make it clear that they stand in opposition to him and everything that he stands for full stop. But especially as it plays out in immigration, at the moment in the whole event, Trump, as they're seated, looks at them and says, isn't that a shame? You guys should be ashamed of yourself for not standing up.
Now, that exchange set up representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashid Tlaib to shout at the president when he called members of Minnesota's Somali community, Somali pirates, and he claimed that they'd stolen $19 billion from taxpayers. To be abundantly clear, nobody's proven anywhere near that.
then yelled, you've killed Americans and you're a liar, referencing the fatal shootings of Rene Good and Alex Preddy by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis. Omar also fired back with her own, you should be ashamed, to President Trump. For me, the unhinged shouting, which has been going on for a while now, is just, it really is disgraceful. It's horrible.
None of us should be excited about that. I don't care who's doing it. It's just a terrible, Terrible, terrible look. Meanwhile, dozens of the Democrats just outright boycotted the entire night. Now, getting into the substance of what Trump's speech was all about, he opened with the economy making some big claims that I imagine felt a little hollow to everyday working people.
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Chapter 8: What strategies can be implemented to improve housing affordability?
This is how we walk through. Some of the things that he will say are so like easy to fact check and just be like, that just isn't true, but that doesn't really matter. Like he's trying to get people to feel that it's true. If you're just trying to drive home, this feels true, then it's a totally different game. And so if we're judging him from the outside as like, no, hold on, wait a second.
That isn't actively true. That isn't empirically true. He's just like, what game are you playing? Like he's never going to acknowledge it. He's just going to keep repeating the thing. Was this enough to get him over the hump for the midterms? Right now he is on a one-way course to calamity in the midterms. It will flip for sure the House. Will the Senate? I don't know.
I don't know how many people are coming up for re-election because they're on different schedules. But yeah, if the elections were held right now today, he loses for sure. He's already made the structural bets that he's going to make. And now they either pay off or they don't.
If he can make things settle down in Mexico and there's a perception that this whole strength through sorry, peace through strengthening is working. It worked in Venezuela. It worked in Iran. It worked in Mexico.
Like if he gets that trifecta running and people are seduced enough by big wins from the tax refunds, he could be in a much stronger position or he would be unequivocally be in a much stronger position going into the midterms. Will it be enough? I don't know. It all comes down to how the average person feels about the economy.
I think we're mad at the wrong 1%. I think the right is convinced that there's a bunch of furries and blue haired people that want to blow up the country. And I think the left is convinced that there's just a bunch of Nazis that are walking around that are trying to burn down all the Jews. And I think that we want the poor people to be mad at the rich people.
We want the rich people to be mad at the poor people, but the 1% that's really been and us this whole time is politicians. I think that is 1% that we need to do. I think that same energy that we have for cops and ICE agents and all that stuff needs to be had for everybody that was in that Congress building yesterday.
All of them got more money, look better, increased their net worth, are living in beach houses. They have three, four houses. They're on private jets because they're traveling so much. And meanwhile, you're trying to scrape up, like scrap up change to feed your kids.
Like it's crazy. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break.
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