JULY 27, 2025
 hour 1:  "Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family's Hope and the Untold, History of the Disappearing American Farmer"        
 with Brian Reisinger 
 
hour 2: "The Outlook for American Economic Growth"
with Phil Kerpen
information for Phil Kerpen's show
 
FULL TWO HOURS   WE THE PEOPLE RADIO   HOUR 1  WE THE PEOPLE RADIO     HOUR 2  WE THE PEOPLE RADIO
 
hour 1: Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family's Hope and the Untold, History of the Disappearing American Farmer
About our guest Brian Reisinger
Brian Reisinger, author of Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family's Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer, grew up on a family farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin and lives to tell the hidden stories of rural America. A columnist and consultant, Reisinger worked with his father from the time he could walk, before entering the worlds of business journalism and public policy.
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He has been published by USA Today, Newsweek, Yahoo News, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/USA Today Network, PBS/Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Wisconsin Life,” The Daily Yonder, RealClearPolitics, The Hill, The Wisconsin State Journal, The Cap Times, Saving Country Music, and many other news, policy, outdoor, and cultural publications. Reisinger’s writing has won awards from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, first place in the Seven Hills Literary Contest, a Solas Award, and more.

He lives with his wife and daughter and serves as President & Chief Content Officer of Midwestern-based Platform Communications, splitting time between a small town in northern California and the family farm in southern Wisconsin. Land Rich, Cash Poor is his first book.
 

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 Taking on this working-class story of heart and hardship, award-winning writer Brian Reisinger weaves forgotten eras of American history with his own family’s four-generation fight for survival in Midwestern farm country. Readers learn the truth about America’s most detrimental and unexplained socioeconomic crisis: How the family farms that feed us went from cutting a middle-class path through the Great Depression to barely making ends meet in modern America. Along the way, they’ll see what it truly takes to feed our country: accidents that can kill or maim; weather that blesses or threatens; resilience in the face of crushing economic crises, from depressions and recessions to COVID-19; and the tradition that presses down on each generation when you're not just fighting for your job, you're fighting for your heritage.
  
 With newly analyzed data, sharp historical analysis, conversations with some of modern farming’s most notable champions and critics alike, honest debate, and personal storytelling, Reisinger reveals how the hollowing out of rural America is affecting every single American dinner table. Food prices soaring far beyond the rate of inflation, a vulnerable food supply chain, environmental and ecological dilemmas, the security of our farmland from foreign adversaries, a mental health crisis that includes farmer suicides and addictions, a deepening urban-rural divide, and more worries than ever about what’s for dinner. These are all becoming the hallmarks of a food system that has long stood as a modern miracle. Land Rich, Cash Poor offers the honest truth about these issues, and a candid look at what we can do about them—before it’s too late.

"An anthem to the family farm in America." —The Associated Press 
 
“A Big Difference”: Trump Administration’s Tomato Tariffs Already a Game Changer for American Farmers

 Trump says he will set tariffs for 150 small countries in one swoop
  
 PUBLIUS SPECIAL GUEST: Brian Reisinger, author of Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family's Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer. The hidden history of an economic and cultural crisis that is threatening our very food supply—the disappearance of the American farmer.
  
 In a decisive move to protect American agriculture and restore fairness, the Trump Administration’s tariffs on fresh Mexican tomato imports are already boosting American farmers, growers, and business owners.
 Here’s what they’re saying:
TO BOOK INTERVIEWS EMAIL: Kimberlyt.publius@gmail.com 
 
 

  The Outlook for American Economic Growth

with Phil Kerpen    WE THE PEOPLE RADIO

hour 2:  CFPB is just one more regulatory burden

 
Good Riddance to the CFPB
By Phil Kerpen
 https://www.americancommitment.org/good-riddance-to-the-cfpb/
  
 The housing crisis and subsequent financial crisis in 2008 was caused in large part by politicizing loan eligibility criteria, advancing social justice objectives over sound economics.  Unfortunately, the Dodd-Frank law added even more politicization by creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has raised costs and pushed many financial services beyond the reach of the consumers it purports to protect.
  
 The CFPB was the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren and the top demand of the liberal advocacy groups funded, ironically, by the billionaire inventor of toxic subprime negative-amortization mortgages, Herb Sandler.  It was designed to be the most powerful and unaccountable bureaucracy in the federal government.  All power was concentrated in one director with a fixed five-year term and not subject to removal by the president.  There was no budgetary oversight from Congress, with the agency funded by Federal Reserve profits, and no meaningful limits on what it could regulate.
  
 Fifteen years later we can judge CFPB by its results.  The number of banks in America, according to the FDIC, has plummeted from 7,500 to 4,500, with regulatory compliance costs falling disproportionately on smaller banks that have been forced to merge into the big guys or go out of business.  The St Louis Fed calculated that small banks have triple the regulatory compliance burden of big banks.
  
 So much for punishing Wall Street.
  
 CFPB's mortgage disclosure rules haven't made buying a house any easier or less financially risky – but they have added to the pile of paperwork and substantially increased closing costs.  The $25 billion "robo-signing" settlement, for instance, sent at most 6 percent of the total proceeds to victims.  Probably less.  And the settlement resulted in many mortgages being sold to non-banks with little expertise and lots of incompetence.
  
 A lot of the money CFPB collects in fines and fees ends up in a slush fund called the Civil Penalty Fund to be funneled to left-wing social justice groups.
  
 The agency even tried to do the one thing Congress expressly prohibited it from doing – regulate auto-lending.  This bizarre and extremely expensive regulation was overturned by a Congressional Review Act resolution in Trump's first term, but it was an early example of weaponized wokeness, using a computer model to guess the race of borrowers based on their last names and zip codes and then punishing auto dealers for computer-simulated racial discrimination.
  
 Under Biden, the CFPB kicked its regulatory activities into hyperdrive.  They banned arbitration clauses to open up vast new opportunities for trial lawyer class-action lawsuits.  They banned short-term lenders from setting up automated repayments – with a substantial negative effect on the availability of short-term loans that forced people who could no longer qualify for loans to instead overdraw their checking accounts or incur credit card late fees.  Then they tried to regulate overdraft fees and credit card late fees.
  
 This chain of regulating everything might sound good, until you realize that this is precisely why small banks are disappearing, and big banks are increasingly putting fees on everything.  Good luck finding a free checking account anymore if you don't carry a hefty balance.  The result is a two-tier banking system, and those struggling financially are getting denied access to more and more critical financial services.
  
 Fortunately, the CFPB's unaccountable structure is also its Achilles heel.  The Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that the provision that said the president can't fire the CFPB director is unconstitutional, and Trump has swiftly fired Biden's director, Rohit Chopra and installed Russ Vought as the interim director.
  
 The lack of any funding from Congress allowed Vought to inform the Federal Reserve that the agency's funding draw for next quarter is zero dollars.  Economist EJ Antoni points out that since the CFPB is supposed to be funded by Fed profits, and the Fed has been operating at a huge loss, the agency legally must be zero-funded.  So, Vought is on firm ground.
  
 Congress should also do its part, ideally by formally repealing the agency, but Democrats are likely to filibuster.  What they can't filibuster are Congressional Review Act resolutions, which are privileged and can permanently repeal the agency's most expensive and destructive midnight regulations from last year.  Whatever rules Congress doesn't repeal, Vought should formally rescind.  And then close up shop.
  
 Mr. Kerpen is president of American Commitment and Unleash Prosperity.