2401 FBF: John R Lott, Jr- Debacle, Obama's War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future, American Enterprise Institute & FOX News

Welcome to this week's edition of Flashback Friday, your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past that Jason has handpicked to help you today in the present and propel you into the future. Enjoy.

This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts, visit HartmanMedia.com.

Welcome to the Creating Wealth Show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on Investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self-made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer, and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your financial independence day. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman, with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome listeners from around the world.

This is your host, Jason Hartman, with episode number 693.

693.

Thank you so much for joining me today. And as I am Standing in the middle of a field in Fiji. Yes, Fiji. I'm very far away from my usual location. In fact, the time difference is a whopping 19 hours. 19-hour time difference.

Wow.

And this is my 80th country. I've now been to 80 countries. So it's always interesting to travel and become familiar with other cultures and other economic systems and real estate investments around the world. Of course, you regular listeners know I've talked about real estate deals in many of the places in which I've looked, and we've just never found anything better than America. The United States is a pretty special market when it comes to real estate investing for many reasons I've outlined on prior shows.

But the big news—

well, there's two big pieces of news. One I think is actually good news, and that is congratulations to the United Kingdom on their independence from the EU. Some may disagree. I think this will be painful at first in the transition, but I think overall it's a move against the establishment. It's a move against the bureaucracy. It's a move against unaccountable one-world government ideologies that I am very, very much against. I think it'll be good for Britain in the long run, although there may be some short-term pain, no doubt. But also, it gives the Federal Reserve a really good excuse to keep interest rates low. And what does that What does that mean? That means a likely continued upward spiral, and I will call it a spiral because it's been pretty significant, in prices. We should see the prices of real estate continue to rise when we have these low rates, and the Fed is really just frankly looking for an excuse to keep rates low. That's my read on it. Janet Yellen, of course, doesn't want to be the spoiler. Doesn't want to slow things down, wants to keep the party going. You know, Alan Greenspan didn't want to take away the punch bowl. Ben Bernanke didn't want to take away the punch bowl.

None of them do.

Of course they don't. They don't want to do it on their watch. They want to have everything going well. And inflation fears are very, very moderate, very tame, except for asset price inflation. And of course there's healthcare and college tuition. That's the thing you have, you know. If you want to get into the investor class If someone wants to become an investor, which is a really different class in the socioeconomic ladder, it's a lot more expensive to get into that class than it used to be. In fact, to become an investor, that has outpaced inflation actually quite dramatically in many ways. And of course, you have to dice that equation and that statement up a zillion different ways. Do you look at the price of real estate? Do you look at the the price of the Dow, the S&P, the Russell Index? Do you look at the down payment on real estate? You know, it's a complex issue, but just suffice it to say it's more expensive to rise up into the next level in the socioeconomic ladder of investor, the investor class. And that's the class you're in, hopefully, because you're listening to the show, or it's the class you plan to be in very soon because you're listening to the show.

So we will help you do that.

We will help you expand your involvement in the investor class or help you get into the investor class. And I think the Brexit, as they're calling it, of course, is really good for Britain, and I think it's good for overall freedom of humanity, because if we see another country leave the EU it'll just show the world that this bureaucratic, unaccountable stuff is just not acceptable to people. Again, I'm not some Pollyanna thinking this will be without some short-term pain. I think it will be. One of our listeners, Ross— hi, Ross, if you're listening from Ireland— he was on the show before when I was out in Ireland last year. He was against it, and he's very well informed, more so, you know, much better informed than I am about this subject. Of course, you know, being so intertwined with England, being right next door basically. There are many different opinions and perspectives. This was not a landslide victory for the Brexit, OK? But I would encourage any of you who are interested in this topic, and it is pretty interesting and it affects the entire world economy. Obviously England has a huge economy and they are a huge part of the world. In fact, remember the old saying, "The sun never sets on the British Empire," back in the old days. Probably not true anymore, I'd have to think about that one a little bit to actually be sure. But it's certainly Britain civilised the world, many would say, and some would say they were imperialist jerks, you know. So that's history. The history of the world is really the history of war. It's ugly, it's terrible, but it's reality. That leads me to the next topic before we get to our guest today, which is another terrorist tragedy in Istanbul. And I've been hanging out here at this Tony Robbins event in Fiji with a new friend of mine, Nesli. She is Turkish, she lives in Istanbul, and you know, then you get news like this and you see that it really affects people directly. It's just awful. What happened to Obama uniting the world? What happened to how he's going to bring peace, the great uniter, right? Is this terrorism threat and problem bigger than it's ever been? I mean, with what just happened in Orlando, what happened in Boston— mind you, Turkey and Boston, there were no guns involved, and that is one of the topics our guest is an expert in, actually. But we're not talking about that today. We're talking about the economy. That's John R. Lott, who will be coming up. But he wrote a fantastic book, a very academic study on gun ownership and gun control and both sides, you know, academic, footnoted statistics, data-driven, and it's called "More Guns, Less Crime." And it's just proven over and over again, you know, you can hear that episode on my Holistic Survival Show that I recorded several years ago. He's the author of that book, and it's a really interesting look into the gun control debate.

Welcome to this week's edition of Flashback Friday. Your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past that Jason has handpicked to help you today in the present and propel you into the future. Enjoy.

Without saying much more about that, I mean, it's just tragic. And you know that the world has to go through this kind of stuff. And, and we don't pay attention to it much as Americans, as a lot of our audience is American. I guess that a good 60-65% are US-based, or at least Canadian and US-based. This goes on around the world constantly. It goes on in Africa, it goes on in Southeast Asia, it goes on all over the place. And, you know, we obviously notice it a lot more when it's at home, like the Orlando massacre. But these tragic events— what's going to stop it? Is it going to be negotiation? Is it going to be the great uniter, Obama? Is it going to be getting tough? That's up for the world leaders to figure out, but it's just, it's just awful, awful tragedy once again. So I just got that news and just saw it. So as far as investments, let's get back on track here. We'll talk a little bit about the economy today, and we'll do that with John Arlott, who's written a couple of books on that topic after he wrote the More Guns, Less Crime book. And as far as investments, there are situations where we certainly still struggle to get good inventory for you, but we're making it work. But inventory is in short supply, investors, and if the prediction, which really that was a prediction I just made about the Federal Reserve having an excuse to keep rates low with the Brexit, then inventory will remain tight and may even get tighter. So if you are looking for properties Get active, pay attention, don't have the bad, sad story that says, "I lost this deal, I lost that deal." We have many investors that try to find properties and get their hearts set on one and think about it too long and then it's gone. And that's the way it is, you know, real estate just has a built-in limiter. It's scarce by its nature so the supply is always very limited and fickle. Of course, in this market it's much more limited than usual because it seems as though the whole world is discovering what I've said for many, many years, that income property is the most historically proven asset class in the entire world, and it most definitely is. So go to JasonHartman.com, check out some of the properties there in the properties section. We are again struggling to bring you good inventory of properties This job would be so easy if we weren't picky, but we are going to stay picky because, you know, in life you only get one chance at a reputation. That's, that's a really scarce thing is a reputation. So we're going to be picky so that you get the best properties out there. There are many promoters out there who are not picky at all, I hate to say, and they're not picky in terms of the properties or the provider of those properties. Clients just have bad experiences. So we don't want to have that happen to you. So check out the properties at JasonHartman.com. Also check out the educational products at HartmanEducation.com. That's HartmanEducation.com. And without further ado, we will get to our guest, John Arlott. And the next time I talk to you, I will probably be just leaving Fiji, just heading out, and tell you more about the trip. I'm about to enter the Tony Robbins Wealth Mastery program here next. It was Life Mastery for the first part of it, 10 days altogether this trip, and Wealth Mastery is part 2, which starts this afternoon. So I'll let you know more about that. Let's go to our guest, John R. Lott.

It's my pleasure to welcome John R. Lott Jr. back to the show. He is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, a columnist for Fox News, author of At the Brink: Will Obama Push Us Over the Edge? Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't, Debacle: Obama's War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do to Regain Our Future, and of course, More Guns, Less Crime. We've interviewed him on that book before, and we're going to touch on some of the economic issues today. John, welcome back. How are you?

Thanks, doing well. Good to talk to you again.

Yep, good to have you back. So give us, if you would, kind of just an overview of, you know, where we are in the economy nowadays. And what some of our biggest concerns should be.

Well, I mean, I think most people know the economy has been growing at basically record slow rate for recovery. We've actually had worse performance in terms of median family income during the recovery than we had during the recession. And, you know, unemployment rate's gone down, but that's been for a very unusual reason for a recession, and that is because about 80— you can either reduce the unemployment rate by getting people to get jobs or by having them give up looking for jobs. And unfortunately, this is the first recovery where we've had about 80% of the drop in the unemployment rate simply because people have given up looking for work after they've been unemployed for a year or two or three. And, you know, even the broadest measure of unemployment, the so-called U6 measure, which has it just below 10%, even that only includes people for a year after they've gotten discouraged. So, you know, even that underestimates kind of what you could argue the true unemployment rate is. You basically have a lot of people who are males in particular who are in their 50s or later who lost jobs and have essentially just retired.

It's amazing, John, that the government is allowed to get away with manipulating the statistics the way they do. Of course, we had John Williams, founder of ShadowStats, on the show before, and we've examined that quite a bit. And the left would portray it as though we're in this glorious recovery, that everything is great, new jobs are being created, unemployment is low, the economy is growing.

How are they able to get away with that?

Well, I think statistics that have normally made sense in most past recoveries just aren't very well suited to the condition we're at right now. Usually when you have a recovery, people who had previously given up looking for work start looking for work, and so you can actually see an increase in unemployment right after the recovery starts. In this case, people didn't do that. They just— you had more and more people giving up looking for work, the exact opposite. And so while what would normally happen is that the unemployment rate falling would signal that people are getting jobs and that's the reason why it's falling, in this case, it's picking up something quite different. It's picking up the vast majority of the drop has been people simply getting discouraged and giving up looking for work. And so, I don't think there's a conspiracy there. I think it's just that people designed the measure at one period of time when there were kind of certain rules, the way recoveries and recessions always have worked in the past. And that those assumptions just simply aren't true in this case. But there's still lots of measures that I think by any indication, whether it's income or poverty or people on food stamps or whatever, show that things are not that rosy. And anybody who kind of looks at the political situation this year, kind of the anger that seems to be there in the electorate, realize that there's a lot of people who feel kind of left behind, even looking at things like the average or median. Well-being of people misses out a lot what's happening in the tails. You have a lot of people who had a certain skilled job, they lost their job, and that there's no similar job that's anywhere remotely similar in terms of pay. And so you have people who may have gotten a job that are making 40% or 35% or 30% of what they were making previously.

Oh, it's truly, you know, John, it is truly amazing to me in this sort of gig economy in which we live, this freelancer economy, that the high-quality corporate, I mean, formerly corporate people that you can hire on websites all over the place, that if you post a job on Craigslist, it's amazing the number of applicants you'll get. People that formerly had significant corporate jobs, even the quality of the barista at Starbucks has skyrocketed because these people used to have real jobs. They just don't have those jobs anymore, right?

Right. No, I mean, look, you know, often we hear people getting all excited about the fact that there's 160,000 jobs that are created in a month and they'll say, well, look how many months we've had of consecutive job growth. Of course, this last time, I guess it was like 38,000. What people don't realize is that the working-age population in the United States is growing. And just to kind of keep in place in terms of the job force participation rate, you have to have something between about 135,000 and 140,000 jobs being created each month just to break even, just to keep the same percentage of the working-age population working as we had before. Of course, people know we've had a huge drop in the share of the working-age population that's been working. The irony is, for the working-age population, the participation rate's fallen, but for people over 65, it's actually gone up. Because you have some people who normally would have retired, but, you know, they lost a lot of money during the recession, they're not as well off financially, or they had to go and use some of their life savings in order to get by for a couple or a few years there. You know, so they don't have the money to retire. Their labor force participation rate's actually gone up. Of course, overall, It's gone down and gone down very dramatically.

I mean, is this just a smoke and mirrors recovery then? I mean, are we at least better off than we were in, say, 2008, or is another shoe about to drop?

Well, you know, we literally just recently, just I guess within the last year, gotten back to the number of people employed that we had for when the recession started. And, you know, the thing is, not only do we have, you know, this problem with the employment, but there's been a change in the types of jobs. You mentioned baristas. The big growth in jobs has been in terms of service sector jobs, but primarily part-time service sector jobs. And so You may remember in the past, Democrats would get all upset about saying, well, you know, it's been a growth in service sector, and service sector is not all bad, but— or low-skilled. But, you know, this time it's worse. Not only is it service sector, but it's part-time service sector jobs. So, you know, that's a real change from what we've seen in past recoveries. Usually, the worse the recession, the stronger and faster the economic growth and job growth is afterwards. Instead, this time we've had the slowest economic growth. We've been averaging about 2%. The first quarter of this year, I think we had something like annual growth rate of half of 1% growth. You know, that's just unbelievably slow. I mean, you look since 1967 or so, Prior to this, the average annual growth in the economy during every year was like 3.1%. So we're at less than two-thirds of the average annual growth, and we're way below what it would be during a recovery. Usually by about 2 to 3 years after recovery, has started, you're back up to the kind of the previous GDP growth path that you would have been on. We're falling further and further behind. You know, you can just think the old path would have been growing at 3.1% annually. We're growing, you know, like half of 1% annually this first quarter and 2% average. That gap between where we normally would have been, and where we are keeps on getting bigger and bigger each quarter as you go by.

The second chapter in the At the Brink book is about more stimulus, fewer jobs, and lower wages, and we identified some of that. But can you make the connection for the listeners, John, as to why, why doesn't the stimulus work? Why doesn't the Keynesian idea work? Uh, or, or is it actually counterproductive? Is it actually— not that it not only doesn't work, but it actually hurts the ultimate goal of more jobs and higher wages?

Right. No, unfortunately, I think it hurts. And the reason is pretty simple. I mean, people somehow think, well, if the government spends the money, that's new spending, that's money that wouldn't have been spent, those are jobs that are created there. The question is, the money has to come from someplace. Whether it's borrowing or taxes or even printing up money, which lowers the value of other money that's out there. They're taking money from one place and giving it to be spent by the government. You know, this old Keynesian notion is that somehow saving is the equivalent to going and digging a hole in your backyard and hiding your money in it. That's not what saving is. If I go and get a check, I put it in the bank. Even if I leave it in the bank, the bank doesn't just hoard the money. The bank goes and lends it out. And so, you know, it's— and then that person will spend it, and then that money will get put in the bank, and you just— the process goes on like that. And so the thing you have to say is when the government takes money, it's taking it from someplace. It's not increasing net expenditures. It's just changing where the money would have been spent. The reason why this creates a worse problem is that people have been spending, you know, you would be spending on certain industries or certain services, the government spends it someplace else. And the problem is resources don't instantly move from one industry to another. You know, workers You know, maybe the type of places you would have spent your money on, you maybe would have bought a new computer or done something else with it. Now the government decides it has its own preferences. Well, it may take a year or two or whatever for people to realize, well, I can't work for this industry anymore. I have to go and find a job in the place where the government wants the money spent. Not everybody's going to find their job over there, but there surely whoever does find it isn't going to find it instantly. And it's that process of moving resources, moving people from industries which are losing expenditures to the ones that the government favors. That churning process increases temporarily unemployment and reduces income.

It's just amazing to me that the American electorate tolerates this.

Well, there's so many things that kind of really discourage me. Look, I mean, I agree. Politicians just could say, well, stimulus investments and what have you. They ignore that the money has to come from someplace. It's not magical. They really should be making a justification why the government spending makes so much more sense or is spending on something that people in their own wisdom aren't smart enough to spend the money on. It goes beyond just the stimulus. I mean, look at the corporate income tax rate in the United States. You add state rates onto the federal rate of about 35%. You're talking about a corporate income tax rate that's about 40%. We're the highest in the world by far. You know, the next country is like 5 percentage points below us. You have countries like Europe, it's 21% average corporate tax rate. Canada is about 20%. And so, you know, if you are a company and you're trying to decide, do I go and invest in Canada or do I go and invest in the United States? If you invest in Canada, you get to keep almost 20 cents more on each dollar that you earn.

So your tax rate is half if you're in Canada thinking, oh, well, should I Should I invest in the US?

Well, if you're any place in the world and you're trying to decide, you know, international capital flows are very important. So you're saying, could I invest in Europe? Can I invest in Canada? Can I invest in the United States? You know, I'm just making it simple. If you're trying to compare just Canada to the United States, you get to keep 20 cents more on every dollar that you earn by investing in Canada. A lot of people are gonna make that decision.

If you are in Canada, for example, and you wanna come to the US, You would basically have your taxes increased by 100%, essentially. And you know, John, you hear a lot from the left— well, a little bit, maybe not a lot— about these companies keeping all this money offshore and how they should repatriate those dollars and bring them back to America and create jobs here. Well, it's counterintuitive. Why don't you give them a tax amnesty and just watch a couple trillion dollars come onshore, or maybe not an amnesty, but a lower tax rate, and you'll, you'll see a massive increase in economic activity. This is how it works.

Yeah, well, the thing is, our, our tax system is completely nuts. We're like the one country that goes and, uh, taxes companies for money that they've already paid taxes on in other countries. So let's say you're Apple and you're located in Ireland. The corporate tax rate in Ireland's 11%. Apple pays the 11% there. But now if it wants to go and bring the money back to the United States, it has to pay the crazy US tax rates on that money. It's nuts. And so it keeps it there. And instead what it does is it borrows against the money in Ireland to be able to go and pay the dividends that it has, 'cause it can't bring the money back so it can pay the stockholders directly a dividend with that. It has to go into the bond market and borrow against the Ireland money, essentially putting the Ireland money up as collateral so that they can go and go into the bond market to pay the dividends.

John, what is a fair tax rate?

On corporate, I'd say it's zero, I mean, mainly because economists refer to this as kind of double taxation that you—

If it's a C corp, it's a double dip.

If it's an S corp, it passes through to your personal return for smaller companies.

Right, but for Apple or other companies, there's this double taxation issue that's going to be there. And so what happens is you work, you earn your money, you pay your income tax, and then if you go in and buy a stock, then any money that you make on that, you have to go and pay an income tax on that. And so, you know, the money that you invest, you're essentially paying taxes on twice, whereas if you consume it, you know, you buy a yacht or something like that, you're not paying that additional tax. And so we're discouraging people from going and doing it. You should only tax income that people make once. And, you know, so for me, you know, if you want to go and have higher income tax rates, whatever, you know, at least be explicit, argue about that. I think we already have one of the higher income tax rates in the world. But, you know, talk about that way, but this double taxation makes little sense.

Yep, no question about it. What's the Buffett rule?

Well, the Buffett rule is this claim that Buffett is paying a higher tax rate than his secretary. Than his secretary.

Yeah, yeah, what a bunch of crap.

And the problem with that is, see, here's the deal. For a lot of people, you know, let's say you invest in a company and it doesn't pay a dividend. Well, if the company just keeps the money there, then each dollar that the company keeps, the value of the stock goes up by that dollar, and you pay a capital gains tax on that. And so capital gains tax was 20%. I guess it may be up to 25% or so now. That, you know, and so the claim is, well, that capital gains tax is less than the tax rate that the secretary was paying. Well, I assume His executive secretary is getting like over $100,000 or something a year.

I'd hope so, otherwise he is really cheap. Here you got the world's richest man on and off, not always, and if he's not paying his secretary at least $100,000, I would be amazed.

So in order to get her to have a higher marginal tax rate than he's going to be paying for capital gains, he has to pay her fairly well. But the thing is, it's this double taxation thing. The reason why they had a lower tax rate on capital gains and for a while on dividends is that you worked, you earned your money and salary, you paid your taxes there, and in order to make it so that the double taxation rate wasn't too exorbitant, they allowed you to pay a lower tax rate on dividends or on capital gains. You know, it was 20% for a while, and now But, you know, there's an economic reason for it being lower, and that is Buffett, for whatever money he invested in his own personal account, he had already earned his income and already paid income taxes on it. And so, you know, it's not a right comparison to look at the taxes on the investment and not also include the taxes that he paid on the original income that he earned.

Well, and what's even more interesting about the Buffett hypocrisy that just is mind-boggling to me is maybe people don't know this, maybe good old Warren doesn't know this, but the IRS will happily accept more money. If you want to pay them extra, they will take the money. So Buffett could simply do that, but instead of that, he has been embroiled in a big lawsuit with the IRS over taxation. And fighting to pay less. So it's just such a ridiculous irony.

His answer, I assume, is that, well, it doesn't make much sense for him to do it by himself, but if all the wealthy people are going to pay more, then he's happy to do it. Look, here's the problem, I think, and that is somebody like Buffett gets so many benefits from government that more than offset the taxes that he pays, he's happy to go and argue that he should pay higher tax rates. I'll just give you a simple example. Buffett lobbied against the Keystone Pipeline. And so when the president denied it and didn't allow it to go through, Buffett made a lot of money. And the reason why he makes a lot of money on that is he owns the Burlington Northern Railroad. Burlington Northern Railroad goes through North Dakota, where they have all these oil fields. The point of the Keystone Pipeline was to use the pipeline to transport that oil. Instead, by being good buddies with Obama—and I'm sure there are lots of environmentalists who are on the same side as Buffett on this—he gets the oil shipped along his railroad. That's a lot of money for him. How convenient.

And guess what? What do you think is better for the environment? A pipeline that's there forever that basically doesn't, you know, you don't need to load trains and trucks and all of this stuff and the oil just flows through it, or trains that have to come by multiple times a day?

I would imagine the pipeline is better for the environment, but yeah, no, I mean, it's clear. I mean, in multiple ways. One is it takes a lot more energy to go and transport oil via a railroad than it does with a pipeline. And two, if you're talking about oil spills, trains derail, and the likelihood of derailment is much higher than the types of problems that you have with pipelines. So, you know, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to do that. I mean, except you have the government under the Obama administration has done a lot to go and help out its friends in industry.

Well, this will continue forever, but it's good that there are people like you talking about this stuff and raising attention for it, John. Give out your website if you would and tell people where they can find out more about you.

Sure. Well, the Crime Prevention Research Center— I mean, I've been an academic most of my life doing regular economics, broad issues, but I'm president of the Crime Prevention Research Center right now. Our website is crimeresearch.org, crimeresearch.org, and we're basically a group of academics who look at issues from gun control to policing, and I think people will find a lot of interesting stuff at our website at crimeresearch.org. Yeah, no question about it.

Good stuff.

John Arlott, thank you for joining us again.

Great talking to you again.

Thanks. I've never really thought of Jason as subversive, but I just found out that's what Wall Street considers him to be.

Really? Now how is that possible at all?

Simple. Wall Street believes that real estate investors are dangerous to their schemes because the dirty truth about income property is that it actually works in real life.

I know. I mean, how many people do you know, not including insiders, who created wealth with stocks, bonds, and mutual funds? Those options are for people who only want to pretend they're getting ahead.

Stocks and other non-direct traded assets are a losing game for most people. The typical scenario is you make a little, you lose a little, and spin your wheels for decades.

That's because the corporate crooks running the stock and bond investing game will always see to it that they win. This means unless you're one of them, you will not win.

And unluckily for Wall Street, Jason has a unique ability to make the everyday person understand investing the way it should be. He shows them a world where anything less than a 26% annual return is disappointing.

Yep, and that's why Jason offers a 1-book set on creating wealth that comes with 20 digital download audios. He shows us how we can be excited about these scary times and exploit the incredible opportunities this present economy has afforded us.

We can pick local markets untouched by the economic downturn, exploit packaged commodities investing, and achieve exceptional returns safely and securely.

I like how he teaches you how to protect the equity in your home before it disappears and how to outsource your debt obligations to the government.

And this set of advanced strategies for wealth creation is being offered for only $197.

To get your Creating Wealth Encyclopedia Book 1, complete with over 20 hours of audio, go to JasonHartman.com/store.

If you want to be able to sit back and collect checks every month just like a banker, Jason's Creating Wealth Encyclopedia series is for you. This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. All rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.hartmanmedia.com or email media@hartmanmedia.com. Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own, and the host is acting on behalf of hartmanmedia.com exclusively.