Things To Fall Apart After The Mid-Terms? | Stephanie Pomboy

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Stephanie Pomboy** (0:30)
I definitely don't think, having not been a problem yet, that anything material is gonna happen between now and the midterms. The question is, if I'm right, and oil prices begin to move back up after November, and then you've got consumers who both are struggling to pay their bills and are facing, again, higher costs of everything they can't live without, that it becomes a stress.
And at that point, maybe we begin to see more cracks in the system. So that would be my best guess, would be anytime after November.

**Adam Taggart** (1:15)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart. Very excited to welcome you here for another monthly Wednesday session with the MacroMaven herself, Stephanie Pomboy. Hey, Steph, how are you?

**Stephanie Pomboy** (1:26)
I'm good. How are you doing? Feels like it's been forever.

**Adam Taggart** (1:29)
Yeah, well, it's been a while, and you've actually been bopping all over the world. And now you are, if it's, what? If it's late June, then you gotta be somewhere in the American West?

**Stephanie Pomboy** (1:40)
Yes, you know it. I'm up here with my, my Irsine cousins, so.

**Adam Taggart** (1:47)
All right, good. I hope they're keeping their distance when you're out there on your hikes.

**Stephanie Pomboy** (1:50)
They are. They are, thankfully.

**Adam Taggart** (1:52)
So, all right. Well, thank you for taking a break from all your globetrotting to talk with this crowd and give us your monthly update. So I got a bunch of questions here for your staff. And of course, if there's anything burning brightly on your radar, just bring it up and we'll go there.
We are hopping on here just kind of minutes after the Supreme Court issued a couple of rulings. And I just want to get your reaction, if you don't mind, to one of them, which is birthright citizenship. And this is one that I've been following closely. And I know folks have strong opinions on both sides of it, and I'm not necessarily here to give kind of the moral or ethical ruling on it. But as you know, Stephanie, I just kind of look at the world through an economic lens first. And I think about birthright citizenship as it's currently implemented in this country. And it basically says that anybody who's here, for whatever reason, if they have a child, that child is a full-blown US citizen with all the protections and benefits and freedoms. And there was a cost associated with that, right? And the bean counter in me just says, okay, well, you know, if the world starts flooding people with, who come in and have children, you know, that's a future obligation for us. And it's not even just the individual, because as I understand it, once a US citizen gets to a certain age, it's probably 18, but they can start to serve as a sponsor for direct family members who live outside the US. And that's why they've been called anchor babies, right? You plant an anchor here and then they can bring other people in. So it kind of multiplies the obligation.
And so I'm just curious.
I get people saying, well, look, it's the law of the land. Sorry, you don't like it. It's in the Constitution. You don't like it, change the Constitution. And maybe that's what we should do. But it's so interesting to me that we've gotten to a point where there's something in the Constitution, or at least in our law, where I think a lot of people can look at it and say, I don't think that serves our interests. So why are we continuing to do it? And the answer is just, well, it's in the law, right? So curious to hear your results on it, your reaction to this.

**Stephanie Pomboy** (4:11)
Well, thank you for starting this off with a non-controversial question. Maybe you'll ask me my opinion on crypto and we would have stopped.

**Adam Taggart** (4:20)
Well, we can get to strategies, new whole digital.

**Stephanie Pomboy** (4:23)
Okay, yes, I'm sure we will have time to talk about that. But no, I mean, this is a touchy subject, obviously, because there are arguments, there are examples that you can use on both sides that are, if you take the extremes on the one side, you have now China, for example, has this whole birth tourism business where, what I thought the stats were in the hundreds of thousands of women, Chinese women have come to the US specifically to give birth on the US.