88– Social Engineering at the Cost of American Business

In this episode, Peter and Sonny explore how regulatory policies shape today’s business environment and impact the American business. They share insights from Citadel’s CEO, Ken Griffin, on post-election shifts after Donald Trump’s 2024 victory and discuss ABC’s role in advocating against regulations such as PLAs.

The full audiovisual version of this episode is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/GoBQYJgCkHQ 

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Transcript

Sonny Maken 0:09

Hey, welcome to the Obvious Podcast. My name is Sonny Maken.

Peter Dyga 0:13

And I'm Peter Dyga, president and CEO at ABC Florida East Coast chapter.

Sonny Maken 0:18

You are listening or watching to the Obvious Podcast, where all opinions expressed are our own unless we say otherwise.

Peter Dyga 0:24

Love the show, subscribe on any major podcast platform, or watch us in action on YouTube. Follow the Obvious Podcast on TikTok, Instagram, X, and Truth Social. All the links you need are in the show notes. And you can reach out to us anytime at theobvious@abceastflorida.com. If you're enjoying the ride, help others find us by leaving a review wherever you listen. Happy Friday.

Sonny Maken 0:49

Happy Friday, Peter. Here we are, another episode. So you probably don't know this, but I've had a love-hate relationship with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland since high school. Okay. I found out what it was in high school. I thought it was so cool. I really wanted to go there. And then in the last few years, all I hear are like these woke liberals talking about how people need to be eating insects and stop eating steak.

Peter Dyga 1:12

It was out of there that that came from.

Sonny Maken 1:13

But all that all that nonsense came out of Davos, right?

Peter Dyga 1:15

And it's just like this isn't part of the um what what's the the cabal, the underground shadow, you know, that people talk about? Is that part of that?

Sonny Maken 1:25

No, it could be. You could argue that it's part of the pentemerate. We should uh we should play that clip from that movie that I love. But so I saw a clip. So you've heard of the company, uh Citadel, which is those huge financial services firms. Most stock transactions, somehow Citadel is involved, whether in processing it or behind the scenes uh buying or selling of shares. Uh multi, multi, multi-billion dollar company. It's run by a guy named Ken Griffin who who founded the company. Uh Citadel used to be headquartered in Chicago and left, moved their entire headquarters to uh Miami.

Peter Dyga 2:01

We could do a whole show on that. We could do a whole show on that. Actually, I've seen some like YouTube or some some things on Charlie Seen too. That whole movement or effort. Yep. And really the online trading has kind of made all that possible. It's not like on the floor and written pieces of paper like that. Oh, yeah, from those old days, yeah. So but anyway, that world is changing. Oh, dramatically.

Sonny Maken 2:23

But it's all moving here, and there's the whole thing they started this a few years ago in terms of rebranding West Palm Beach as Wall Street South. Are they moving here because they like the weather, Sonny? No? No. They're moving here because they like the taxes. They like the uh lack of regulation. They lack the so they can get away with murder. Yeah, exactly. That's what they they'll tell you, right? And it's just it's insane. A friend of mine, I I'm gonna just share this quick story with you. A friend of mine was just offered a job in Manhattan, making I think the base salary that he was offered was 1.2 million plus bonuses and he didn't take it because just off the top, he said 600,000, no, 700,000 on that was gonna go into just state, county, and local taxes, income taxes. Wow. 700,000 on a 1.2 salary or 650, I think it was. Something over 50 percent.

Peter Dyga 3:20

I want to make a side comment. I got a statement this morning about the hotel that uh I'll be staying at, we'll be staying at when we go to ABC Nationals convention. In um Salt Lake City. In Salt Lake City, okay. And I don't think I've ever seen this before, but God bless them, because uh I don't know if I've ever told you. One of my first acts as uh king would be um making gas stations because I've always wondered why do gas stations uh the only place exempt from you go to any other service, a restaurant, or yeah, they tell you where the taxes are you see the tax on your mill. Why is it at the gas station you don't see the tax? It's just it's right. Here's here's what you're paying. Great question. Why don't they separate it out? And one of my first acts as King would be requiring tax gas receipts to show you how much is for the gas and how much is going to the government. So I get this statement from the from the hotel, and I don't think I've ever seen this. Eight over eight percent tax for the city, over seven percent tax for the state, three percent fee here, two percent fee there, you know, uh all these local, you know. I mean, it was almost twenty north of twenty bed tax, right? It was north of twenty percent that was being paid anyway. It just your your comment kind of you know made me think of that. And these things have impacts, right? Like in your in your friend's case, he decided not to move there.

Sonny Maken 4:37

Yep. He's like, what's the point of working because he's gonna have to work his tail off to make that money. And what's the point of working if I'm gonna give away 52% of my income just in income taxes? Forget the cost of living.

Peter Dyga 4:47

I think California enacted some billionaires tax or going to or something. The billionaires, even um, yeah. The guys from Google the lefties, yeah.

Sonny Maken 4:56

The guys from Google left, uh Zuckerberg left Meta. He just bought a house in Miami. Yeah. Um that tax is insane because that tax is one, it's retroactive to January 1st, so you would have had to move by January 1st of this year. And number two. That would be challenged. Right? Because it hasn't even passed yet, and they're making it retroactive. Right. And number two, they're trying to tax. So if your company hasn't gone public and you're a founder, you have all the stock, but it's only paper money, right? Because you haven't gone public, you haven't sold it yet. They're trying to tax that valuation. Unbelievable. So I'm like, who the hell is that?

Peter Dyga 5:30

New York, I think, is talking about something similar to Dami.

Sonny Maken 5:33

He wants to go to like nine, nine and a half percent property tax.

Peter Dyga 5:36

Anyway, you want to play a clip, which is a phenomenal clip. I want to play a clip of the background.

Sonny Maken 5:40

This is the head of um, this is Ken Griffin, the head of Citadel, the founder of Citadel, talking at the World Economic Forum. So I'm gonna play this for our audience.

Speaker 5:49

How painful it was each and every day under the Biden administration to look at what new crazy proposal was being put into place to solve a problem that didn't even exist. I mean, our our constant friction at Citadel with the government across umteen different aspects of our business was exhausting. And to have that literally end on one day, election day, just gives you so much energy as an entrepreneur to go back and build your damn business. So the biggest sea change I've seen across American executives has been just like the giant sigh of relief. I can now go and focus on building my business. And that prior administration, you know, I we happen to be a creditor of uh Spirit. Their merger with Jet Blue was stopped. Spirits in bankruptcy today. There were so many decisions that were so so poorly thought out in terms of economic consequences, it cost the U.S. economy dearly. I cannot emphasize that enough. And so the Trump administration is making slow progress on deregulation thus far, but the end of the regulatory onslaught has been just an extraordinary boom for American business. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Peter Dyga 7:19

I remember seeing that on the nightly news. You saw that on the nightly news? No, that was a joke. That's a joke. Did not see that on the nightly news. Oh my gosh. It was nightly newsworthy. Right. A little clip of that, you know. I mean, get ready for your bell. So, oh, I could have done the bell like minutes ago. Right. Let's do it. But yeah.

Sonny Maken 7:36

I mean look, we can get into why we could talk about why there was such a, as Ken Griffin calls it, an onslaught of bad regulations that came through the Trump administration. But are you talking about this, by the way, back when it was happening?

Peter Dyga 7:51

That would have been nice. That's a great question. Not just after. That's a great question. You know, leaders gotta talk when, not just when it's safe. That's a great question. But any of that. Still lessons to be learned, even if it is in retrospect.

Sonny Maken 8:04

Yeah, because you know what? At some point, this this president will leave and there'll be another uh it'll be a different Democrat again there. No doubt about it. And they're gonna bring on the same people that were running Biden's administration, and this thing will re- restart. Right. And we'll go through this pendulum again.

Peter Dyga 8:19

They might be out of college by then.

Sonny Maken 8:21

. Singing their yoga chance. Um I just I wanted to talk about this topic because as ABC, this is one of the things that we do so well, right? And and I certainly mean this at our level, I certainly mean this at the state level, and I certainly mean this at the national level. Because there is an onslaught of regulation that comes from politicians who have never had a real job, who have never worked in the private sector. You know. Right. A lot of these guys are on the national on the national scene. Right.

Peter Dyga 8:54

There's two ways you can reply to you can respond to that.

Sonny Maken 8:56

Yep.

Peter Dyga 8:56

You know, one is to to hell with the experts, or to hell with we're just gonna do it because philosophically or politically, you know, we're we're getting at some social engineering objective that we have. Or, which is where we're constantly trying to position ABC as, you might actually say, okay, before we actually do this, let's reach out to the experts and ask what we're doing.

Sonny Maken 9:19

Okay, uh go back to your first point because I want to make the I want to make this clear for our audience. What you're really saying is what you're really answering is why would the previous administration do what it did in terms of regulation? Because it clearly made no sense to uh Ken Griffin, who's an unbelievably bright guy, right? You know, super successful. Well, so it's clear why. So I mean your point about social engineering, I think that was a brilliant point. I want to just I want you to make that, and I want you to make it slowly so the audience understands.

Peter Dyga 9:49

You know, it's clear, you know, because A the rich don't pay their fair share. I mean, you know. Um B, the world was ending by economic or uh environmental collapse. I mean, we just you know, we had to we had to do away with oil and force electric cars on everybody. And um C China's awesome. Right. And whatever we can do to support them and their uh advancement. Their development, yeah. Their development. I mean, you know, this is why. I mean, they're still considered China for we had to do these things under Biden. So you know, and C, they know better. They're the experts, quote unquote. The bureaucrats, the expert, not the guy running the business. Right. Right. Not to my point, you know, which is to actually stop, slow down. Uh let's actually call in and let's see if it's uh construction related, you know, uh, you know, the leaders in that field, if it's investment related, the leaders in that field, and ask them you know, how is all this regulation impacting you? So but you gotta yeah, you gotta actually care about that first, Sonny. That's a great point.

Sonny Maken 10:51

You actually gotta care about that. You gotta care about that. I mean, not that we want you to like lead by caring, but like leadership needs to be based on facts. But if facts are irrelevant and facts be damned, you know, his point about Jeb Blue and Spirit and Spirit going into bankruptcy and the impact that that has on the American consumer, there's a real price to be paid for bad regulation and overregulation. Yeah. Right? And it's paid by us. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Peter Dyga 11:13

I think you've made the point before, for example, when it comes to gas or oil. I don't think for four years we heard anything about you know all these things impacting gas going up, and it went as high as I think I had mentioned before, I'd done some research. 492 was the height in uh somewhere around the year 2022 in Biden's administration. That's the average. California was at eight, nine dollars a gallon. You know, no no talk ever about that. But you know, now all of a sudden we got uh some speculation going on because of uh uh uh you know the Iran issue. Yeah, yeah. And it's uh you know, it's the front of every news news.

Sonny Maken 11:46

Yeah, yeah, gas is going up. And I was like, where were you when it was going down?

Peter Dyga 11:49

Right. Right? Right. Or to my this is the point I'm trying to make, where were you in the previous four years when it was going up? When it was going up. You didn't really care about it then, you know, and that's because they got political agendas, quite frankly.

Sonny Maken 12:00

So it's social so social engineering at the cost of American business and the American economy.

Peter Dyga 12:06

Correct.

Sonny Maken 12:06

Right? Correct to me, that's probably the most dangerous.

Peter Dyga 12:12

You built an economy that's not as strong, it's not as competitive, yeah. Uh you're not getting having as much creativity and ingenuity being, you know, uh succeeding, you know, and and encouraging that. Um it who's who suffers? The rich don't suffer. The the government bureaucrats don't suffer because they've got all these Kush programs, right? Flying around on their on their government jets. So they're kind of in the same class. Anyway, a very powerful statement by this guy at the World Economic Forum.

Sonny Maken 12:41

Very powerful. And the for him to say that it stopped on day one, right?

Peter Dyga 12:48

That's phenomenal. Day one. That tells you to your point, leadership matters. Leadership matters, always has.

Sonny Maken 12:56

And so I really wanted to kind of communicate this that this is really what we do better than anybody out there in this marketplace, right? The idea that we this is what we fight, the amount of lawsuits we had under the previous administration trying to stop the bad policies and the bad regulations was nuts. And we talked about this all the time. And I mean, I know the guys in DC who for ABC National, they talk about it all the time.

Peter Dyga 13:22

I'm gonna make a case for one of those uh regulations that quite frankly is the most troubling and uh remaining impactful one in a negative sense to our industry. Oh which we don't quite understand why this administration has not acted on it. But reversing the project labor agreement executive order uh that the previous administration had. And for then this for some reason this administration hasn't done that. And you know, you could argue uh a lot of different reasons why, you know, but uh we certainly would like to see that. So, Mr.

Sonny Maken 13:53

President, if you're listening, can you explain the impact? Can you explain the impact of the PLA and what that actually does to our audience?

Peter Dyga 14:02

I mean, sure, it's been uh like a volley back and forth over the years, going all the way back to maybe Bush, I don't know, maybe yeah, I mean, senior, right? Um uh hell, it might go back before that. But anyway, um you know a project labor agreement um is is something that basically says, and and by the way, the unions will dispute this, but I'll explain why it's uh basically true, that says you have to be a union contractor in order to bid on a project. So we tend to see them in Florida and other parts of the country, although they're they're more common in more uh uh union strong or states where unions are a larger percentage of the workforce. In Florida, they're less than three percent of the workforce. People don't realize that. They might think it's 50, they might think it's 60, it's 3%. You know, so we that's important, by the way. And we're not just saying that because you know we'd like to talk about how awesome um right to work uh is, and and when you give workers that right, how they choose freely, you know, not to affiliate with the union. Um they still have the right to organize if they're not happy or not treated fairly, but they choose not to where they actually have that choice.

Sonny Maken 15:03

So by the way, the number of Florida legislatures, legislators that I've had this conversation with and have told them about the three percent stunning. They have no idea.

Peter Dyga 15:12

No idea. They are stunned.

Sonny Maken 15:13

They're absolutely stunned.

Peter Dyga 15:14

Yeah, so um, I mean, obviously in states like ours, uh PLAs are not as prevalent, but we still see them on large government projects for some reason. You know, the the unions are successful in some way in arguing that somehow it's fair to require bidders to be three what are in essence only represented by three percent of the workforce.

Sonny Maken 15:33

Yeah.

Peter Dyga 15:33

I mean, it's one of the biggest friggin' rip-offs and um quota programs, if you will, in existence. You know, so and I've often said in my uh we've talked a little bit about my background, you know, I've been in government government affairs in this chapter for a long time. We would use the argument that if we came to you and said that only non-union contractors can bid, you would laugh us out of your office. Yep. You know, so I don't know why the opposite somehow is an okay um, you know, public policy to kind of pursue. So in essence, presidents have always issued an executive order requiring project labor agreements on on federal projects, you know, and and again, unions will dispute the fact that you don't really have to be a union contractor to bid, and that's technically true. Yeah. You just have to agree to sign a collective bargaining agreement after you win. Which is insane. Which is in which is in essence the same thing, right? Because you're not gonna bid on a project hoping to win, the reason you bid, if you're a non-union contractor and you're gonna be required to become a union contractor once you win the job. So, in essence, it's not inaccurate for us to say PLAs kind of require you to be a union contractor. Those are the ones, you know, that's the Trevor Burrus. But the end result of PLAs is just they are the end result is fewer less competition, which is to our point, we're pro-competition, fro pro-meritocracy. It's gonna cost it it it does, in fact, according to studies and also results from bids, ends up um bumping up significantly the cost of these projects. So anyway, the volley over the years has been back and forth. Of course, because these are federal projects. Uh, you know, or it's either paid by the taxpayer or you get less of whatever it is you're building. Yeah. You know, that's another opposite way or a flip side of the coin to look at something. If you've got X number of dollars to spend to build, let's use, because it's kind of a pertinent topic right now, uh, X number of uh missiles or X number of ships. Yeah. And you've got that budget amount. And if you can only get 80% or 70% of that, you're gonna get less missiles or less ships, as opposed to if you didn't have the PLA. So but it's a volley back and forth. Uh, Democrat presidents would come in and issue an executive order requiring it. Republicans would come in rescinding that executive order, issuing a executive order freeing federal pride. And for the first time in that volley, uh, this Republican president has not rescinded the previous PLA. So we're all kind of like wondering why. Well, yeah. And the only real, and I'm hoping this is the only reason why, is because it is subject of a lawsuit. So ABC is suing the federal government. Because we'd like once and for all to end the executive order back and forth and get a court to say it's ill it's illegal and then end the whole volley back and forth. And it it could be, you could make an argument that the administration is just not going to do it because it's it's a pending court case. That's the most charitable, I think, uh Interpretation. Interpretation, if you will, of that. So how did we get on PLAs? We were talking about happy to talk anytime about the these things that impact ABC members, anybody who uh like the regulations that one of the regulations that we're still dealing with, even though we have a new administration, is that one.

Sonny Maken 18:33

That's it.

Peter Dyga 18:34

We want to be fair, right? We give credit an awful lot to this administration because we think um their policies. They've dropped the ball on this one. They have dropped the ball on this one, in our opinion. So anyway, pray for a uh if anybody from the administration is listening. Yes, if anybody's in listening, uh but but pray for a uh favorable outcome in the course. Or yoga chan for a prison. So it's gonna become one of our favorite. I know. So anyway.

Sonny Maken 19:00

Well, uh we are out of the way. That was amazing. Absolutely. And again, leadership matters, right? And again, it's not just about the president. You just can't think about who's president. You can you gotta think about the administrations they're bringing in and the administrations they build. You know, everybody's kind of raving about what a great job um Marco Rubio has done as state of Secretary of State. I was listening to his predecessor under the last administration, Anthony Hopkins Perkins. I can't even think of his last name, but it's Anthony something. He's on CNBC trying to take credit for the Iran deal, you know, and how great they were in kind of laying the groundwork for the Iran deal. This is before the bombing had started. And uh, you know, we contained it. Like, and I'm just like, what? You were one of the worst secretaries of state there was. Um and the guy, you know, in on CNBC, it didn't challenge him at all. Just let him let him talk, right? And then of course, if it was a right winger, they would have been like all over that. And uh I just wanted to share that with you because it's not just our opinion. This is American businesses are telling you uh this administration is good for business. Welcome to Miami. Welcome to Miami, Citadel. We're happy to have you here. So all right. So um all right, go ahead, Peter.

Peter Dyga 20:12

All right. Well, we thank you for listening and honoring us with your time as always. We look forward to sharing another episode with you next Friday.

Sonny Maken 20:20

Or comments, send us an email at theobvious @ abceastflorida.com.

Peter Dyga 20:25

Until then, ciao. Take care.