Restoring the American Dream Through Affordability

0:00 Speaker 1 Sunday morning, Easter Sunday. What is today is Secretary brook Bollins, and she is the Secretary of Agriculture, and it’s Easter Sunday. Do we have eggs at the right price?

0:13 Speaker 2 Madam Secretary, Well so, don you’re kind of talking my love language here. You’ve combined Easter with the cost of eggs and supporting our farmers, which is kind of the top of my list. Listen, what a joy to be on with you this morning, especially such an important day, the most important day for our Christians, but also those

0:34 who love faith, supporting our President who’s put faith back at the center of the White House, but also understanding the importance of our farmers. And tomorrow is Monday. We’re going to have the Easter egg roll at the White House.

0:47 Forty thousand great Americans are going to descend. I mean we about thirty thousand eggs arrive from North Carolina later in the week of last week. I was able to launch them from North Carolina and then on the back end except then when they got to DC. It’s just a beautiful day, a beautiful time for our country.

1:06 Speaker 1 So how many eggs are going to be at the ys Forty thousand.

1:10 Speaker 2 We had forty thousand eggs donated from the Braswell Egg Farm in North Carolina.

1:17 Speaker 1 Wow, are they hard boiled?

1:20 Speaker 2 They’re hard boiled. The kiddos are going to be decorating and rolling them down the lawn. And you know, to your point, this is such a great Donald Trump’s story. I think that maybe has gotten lost last year. At this time, the cost of a dozen eggs was a lot of people couldn’t afford. It was astronomical. It was,

1:37 you know, after four years of really bad policy under President Biden, and they went anywhere from ten dollars a dozen. In California it was twenty dollars for a dozen eggs, and so people went to the president. He said, Brick, you got to get the prices down, and we’ve done that.

1:50 The prices are now about eighty percent lower than they were a year ago. But we also said, sir, do you want to consider having plastic eggs this year of the cost of eggs, and he said, absolutely not. These are Easter eggs. We’re not going to have plastic eggs.

2:05 And so at that point the cost of eggs was already coming down much more affordable. We found a great egg farmer last year won again this year. Who donated all of those eggs, And we were able to celebrate a lot of different things that day, just as we will tomorrow on Monday for the Easter egg role.

2:22 Speaker 1 And I spoke to Hilton. It’s running for governor in California, and gasoline yesterday was seven and a half eight dollars a gallon.

2:33 Speaker 2 Oh, it’s really you know well, first of all, the president and this administration has been so focused on energy and being energy independence. In the cost of gas, and you know this, it really had come down significantly, even in crazy California. I think it was down to four or five dollars a gallon. In my state of Texas

2:52 it was down to lower two dollars a gallon. Of course, with the ron and the conflict, it’s up a little bit. It’ll all come back down, I’ll tell you. Steve Hillton is doing a remarkable job out in California framing the question for the people of California is this what you want?

3:09 Do you want a state where the governing and maybe in your two in your beautiful state of New York, John, is this really the American dream? Where gas costs six seven, eight dollars a gallon where to go to the grocery store is forty percent more than in other parts of the country where all of your job creators are leaving

3:27 in droves for states like Florida and Texas and North Carolina, where the tax burden is so much lower. That’s the existential question of our time. And I’m glad you got to talk to Steve. I think he’s doing a good job framing that question for our citizens.

3:40 Speaker 1 And I’ll tell you something else. I just kind of tweak that in Now I live in New York City, and we got a mess in New York City, and I just kind of tweak that from this J. P.

3:51 Mluggen guy. He says, when I came to work for JP Mluggen, they had thirty three thousand employees, and now they have in New York and now they have twenty six. Does I guess the rest want to us state Texas.

4:05 Speaker 2 Yeah, that’s exactly right. And that’s the story all over the country. And it’s interesting. I don’t know if you were tracking, but the state of Washington just passed their first income tax and they’re already a deep blue state. Actually, I think it’s more fifty to fifty. John Donald Trump only lost the state of Washington in one of his

4:21 races by five or six points, but the governance there is far left. And so they just passed their income tax. They were already struggling, and immediately a lot of their big job creators are like, we’re up here. We’re going to Texas, We’re going to Florida. We’re done. So at some point these states are going to have to wake up.

4:39 The voters are going to have to wake up and realize what they’re voting for is a decimation of the American dream.

4:45 Speaker 1 Check. Terry rollins, we want the price of food to come down. You know, I am in the food business. And the joke I tell is the less stores I have, the less money I lose. And right, I mean, it’s horrible what’s going on.

5:00 Speaker 2 It is so.

5:02 Speaker 1 And what’s happening is, you know, we’re waiting for energy course to go down. They were down to fifty five dollars a barrel and now they’re back up because of the war. Now the other thing is, I guess Washington Chairman Powell is keeping interest rates artificially up. So what happens is whether you’re in the food business, or whether

5:23 in the agriculture business, interest rates and the cost of energy is the two most primary things.

5:33 Speaker 2 Well, that’s exactly right, and that’s really what the President is focused on. You know, we had, really, we’ve really begun to see the price of food begin to decrease. You’re probably not seeing it in New York as much.

5:44 Other than the eggs, which we’ve talked about. Milk is down seventeen percent across the country, butter is down eleven percent across the country. A lot of the proteins like chicken and pull chicken, and a lot of our seafood is down. Of course, you know, it’s some that are that are an outlier, like beef, that are still up.

6:03 But we’re working really hard. We’ve got to get fuel, keep getting fueled down, keep getting labor down, keep getting interest rates down. And agriculture feed fertilizer equipment has skyrocketed at a time that our farmers haven’t made any money in years. And also we had no new trade deals under the Biden administration, so we inherited a fifty billion

6:22 dollar agricultural trade deficit in one year. We’ve cut that in half because the President has inked eighteen new trade deals. So we’re putting that, John, The infrastructure is being put in place. It isn’t going to happen overnight, although we have got a lot of things done overnight, seemingly and in the first year. But we’ve got to you know,

6:40 we’ve got two years and about ten months left to get the rest of it done, and we’ll get there. The affordability of everyday Americans having the American dream within reach continues to be our highest priority, and agriculture is a major component of that. And as hard as this job is, it’s also such a blessing. And here on

6:58 you know, Easter Sunday, I’ll say that that fighting for farmers, fighting for the American dream, fighting for rural America, fighting for the pioneering spirit, fighting for freedom and liberty just continues to be the greatest honor of my life. And getty to talk about it with you is right up there too, So I really appreciate the time.

7:15 Speaker 1 Well, thank you so much for coming on. I have a happy Easter with your family, and I hope that egg roll goes well. And God bless you, God bless America.

7:25 Speaker 2 God bless you too. John, Thank you so much. Talk to you soon.