Why America’s Fling With Dems Could Get Very Expensive

We found out this week that Americans wanted to punish the Trump administration. 

Instead, Americans punished themselves. 

Welcome to the era of Democratic dominance.

Americans didn’t like the corruption, the chaos, or the unaffordability. All understandable. 

But in response, Americans elevated a bunch of Democrats and then passed a bunch of measures that work toward destroying the country’s economic growth. 

Do we all feel much better now?

Right after the election, Dow Jones Industrial Average futures surged. MS NOW’s Stephanie Ruhle celebrated, saying, “The Dow recorded its second best day since President Trump was reelected. For months, Donald Trump has tried to equate the market with the economy, warning that stocks would tank without him. He’s Mr. Market. But yesterday, investors proved him wrong.”

And then the Nasdaq Composite plunged. The S&P 500 plunged. The Dow Jones average plunged. All three major averages posted their worst day since April 2025.

A lot of people ask why this matters. Why talk about the stock market? After all, the stock market is just for the elites. The stock market is what white-collar people talk about. It’s just hitting those annoying tech bros. So really, who cares? The stock market has nothing to do with affordability for real, everyday Americans. 

This is wrong.

Let’s start with the obvious. Fifty-eight percent of all American adults are invested in the stock market. Seventy million Americans have 401ks.

Losses in the stock market are what they call “paper losses,” meaning that you don’t technically lose money unless you cash out. But here is the problem. The whole complaint in this election cycle is that things are unaffordable, which means you need access to cash, which means lots of people — thanks to wages not keeping up with inflation — will now need to cash out their 401ks. If you do that lower, it means you lost money. 

But of course that’s not the only thing the stock market drop signifies. Stock markets are net betting markets. They’re pools of liquidity. They are giant floating oceans of money waiting to gobble up new offerings or new issuances of stock from currently publicly traded companies.

If Burger King wants to raise money, it issues stock, and you buy it. When the stock market drops, companies can’t issue more shares at competitive prices because nobody will buy them. Companies issue new shares in order to raise capital. They want money so they can hire and expand and innovate and research and build.

So when the stock market is in the dumps, companies can’t really do that. They can’t leverage an IPO; they can’t issue new stock. And guess what? Banks don’t want to lend to those companies either because people have less money to actually pay for new and good things. So companies start to go under; they start to contract. 

Let’s use my own company as an example. We’re a private company, but let’s say that we weren’t. Let’s say we were in the public markets and wanted to raise money to make another Matt Walsh documentary, but the stock market as a whole is dropping. We can’t just sell some shares and raise more money to do that documentary. Instead, we just don’t sell the shares, which means fewer people subscribe because we don’t have a Matt Walsh documentary that people want to see. And that means we start to contract; we have to fire people, and we can’t get a private loan because we’re now in decline, which means now we lay more people off. That’s how companies work.

You might say to yourself, “Wait. I don’t work for a publicly traded company.” But there’s this: One-third of all employees in America work directly for a company that’s publicly traded. 

You might say, “That’s only one-third. What about the other two-thirds? What about my private company?”

Let’s take The Daily Wire as a real example. We’re a private company. We’re not publicly traded. We grow based on our subscriber base and advertisers. If a bunch of people lose their jobs across the economy, or products get more expensive and worse because companies can’t invest in them, then people have less money to spend; they have to spend more on other stuff, which means presumably fewer subscribers. Same deal with advertisers. 

This is why recessions hurt pretty much everybody at the same time. So a stock market dump means less money for you and fewer jobs. It means things get more expensive relative to your earnings. 

It gets worse. When financial markets become frightened, banks and lenders don’t lend money. They would rather hold their cash than lend money to businesses they’re afraid will fail. Why would you lend money to a business that is going under?

That matters for your mortgage. You need to show the bank that you can pay it, and they want their money back faster. So that means for you on a personal level, if you want to buy a house, bigger down payments will be required. More borrowers will be rejected. Higher interest rates will be required. 

The same holds true for businesses. They will want collateral. They will want you to pay a higher interest rate. 

Even more importantly, innovation stops. A functioning economy is all about actual innovation and making things better and newer and cheaper. That requires heavy investment of capital. If you don’t have investment money, then there are no better, newer, cheaper things. 

I hope you enjoy your current iPhone, microwave, or TV, because that’s about as good as it’s going to get.

Why is all this happening? You have to start with the premise that many people do not understand economics. An Echelon Insights poll showed Democrats, especially those under 50, view the free-market economy positively by 22 points, but they view socialism positively by 35 points.

In other words, people don’t know what in the hell they are talking about. 

If you can’t tell the difference between free market economies and socialism — as young Democrats cannot — this means that you don’t know things, and knowing things is generally a prerequisite for being a good and effective citizen.

Here’s the central point: We’re very lucky. Americans are the luckiest people on planet Earth. 

You can have two great privileges in life. Privilege number one is being born into an excellent two-parent household with a mom and dad. That is privilege number one, and there’s no substitute for it. 

And then there’s privilege number two. And that is being born in America.

Being born in America is the greatest privilege that you can have when it comes to geopolitics, because this place kicks ass.  It’s awesome. 

Many people think that prosperity is a central fact of American life, that it’s the status quo; it’s normal. 

It isn’t. People think they can vote for whatever anti-wealth-creation socialist they want and it won’t matter.

 This is wrong. 

Why are companies pulling back? Why are investors getting scared? Why does everything seem like it’s gone financially haywire since Tuesday? 

Let’s see if we can spot any clues, because elections have consequences.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) basically compared corporations to Marie Antoinette, who was beheaded. He compared the current government, which is quite corporate- and business-friendly, with the 18th-century French government, which was famously not particularly friendly toward private property.

Raskin also said, “We will not hesitate to go after the private corporations that are collaborating in all of the lawlessness with Donald Trump. And we’ve done it before, and we will absolutely do it again.”

By lawlessness, they mean people who are working with the Trump administration to deregulate parts of the economy. A lot of those are the biggest earners on Wall Street, not because they’re corrupt, but because they’re producing things.

Nvidia isn’t the biggest earner on Wall Street because it is corrupt. It’s because it’s extremely advanced and well-run. 

You wonder why investors are getting skittish. 

This would be the reason. 

On average, Americans come up with the right answers over time. But there’s a difference between a voting machine, which is what elections are, and a weighing machine, which is about weighing what is true and what is not true. 

Democrats plan to enjoy our equality — and poverty.