EDITOR’S NOTE: Morry Taylor, the chairman of Titan International, spoke at Lessiter Media’s two national conferences in January 2025 in Louisville. Known as “the Grizz” for his ‘bear-like’ presence – replete with candor and a “call it like he sees it” approach — Taylor has a storied career that began in tool and die manufacturing before becoming a manufacturer’s rep in the heavy-duty wheel business. Following his rise and the eventual acquisition of Titan Wheel International from Firestone, he gained national attention as a GOP presidential candidate in 1996, an experience he chronicled in his bold book Kill All the Lawyers — And Other Ways to Fix the Government. In its last completed fiscal year in 2023, Titan International had done $1.8 billion in sales.
Following his presentation, I got my signed copy of Trump: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, which he and co-author Dale Buss published in 2024 prior to the 2024 presidential elections. Since past histories were so popular with our readership, we sought, and received, Taylor’s permission to excerpt from the book. What follows here is unedited and in Morry’s own words, as it appears in the book, which is available for purchase on Amazon here. – Mike Lessiter, Farm Equipment editor/publisher
READ Part I: Where I Come From
READ Part II: If I Had a Bridge, I’d Sell It to You
READ Part III: What I Learned from Building an Empire
By Morry Taylor, excerpted from 2024 book Trump: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly
Against the backdrop of the election nonsense, "threats to democracy" and all that, don't forget that our only hope for our future, a future that only a second-term President Trump can bring about, is to address the economic monster that surely will take our country down if we don't tackle it: the national debt.
You can forget about all your other worries for this country, because they don't make any difference compared with America's $36 trillion in debt. And over the next ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, we’re on pace to add $20 trillion more onto the pile of future obligations, which will suffocate the next generations. By 2034 the deficit is predicted to be $56 trillion. That total includes a $2 trillion budget deficit for 2024, which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just projected in June some $400 billion more than it forecasted in February despite an economy that is not in recession.
So while Donald Trump may have other priorities after he takes the presidential oath of office again on January 20, 2025, he needs to listen to me on this one: Attack the budget deficit and national debt over every other priority. History, and our grandkids, will be grateful for it and call you blessed and it will do our country a hell of a lot of good in the meantime.
A select number of Precision Farming Dealer Summit attendees received Morry Taylor's book, "Trump: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly" in exchange for questions posted to the businessman/author in Louisville.
You see, the national debt is not just some kind of abstract financial beach ball that you keep bouncing around to someone else and that never actually lights on anyone. It's more like a medicine ball, a ponderous object that lands with a painful and decisive thud on whomever ends up catching it.
Take the national crises caused by illegal immigration, natural disasters, fentanyl and any other problem you want to name, roll them all together — and they still don't pose the kind of threat to this country's existence that the national debt does. It's a menace that has gotten absolutely out of control since Joe Biden took office.
Here are a few data points from a snapshot of the national debt in early 2024:
- Last year, we spent more on net interest costs than on Medicaid and all other income-security programs. Paying interest alone on the national debt over the next decade will cost more than $10 trillion, according to the CBO, an amount that, according to Bloomberg Economics estimates, would be the global toll for a war over Taiwan, or about 10 percent of the global GDP. But instead of potentially using that amount to save Taiwan and the rest of the world from the menace that is Communist China, the United States and our citizens get absolutely zilch for the $10 trillion we’ll pay just to service the national debt from now through 2033.
- The ratio of our national debt to our Gross National Product has reached more than 120 percent, after biting 100 percent for the first time, also under Joe Biden. By contrast the debt-to-GDP ratio was only about 52 percent under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and he saved the U.S. economy, rebuilt the U.S. military and won the Cold War with it. Think of an economy where debt outstrips economic activity as a cataclysm waiting to happen.
- The level of national debt incurred by our current president has brought the United States into shameful company with the biggest fiscal deadbeats in the world. Japan still has the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the world at more than 250 percent, but they’re an outlier. I'm not sure how they manage it, but with typical Japanese discipline, they do. But now, with the second-highest debt-to-GDP ratio of any country, the United States exceeds number three, Greece, which nearly went bankrupt several years ago, and number four, Italy, which has never figured out how to govern itself.
"Take the national crises caused by illegal immigration, natural disasters, fentanyl and any other problem you want to name, roll them all together — and they still don't pose the kind of threat to this country's existence that the national debt does."
What is the national debt? The budget deficit? And why do we care that they keep growing?
The budget deficit is the annual difference between the flow of government spending and the flow of government revenues, mainly taxes.
The deficit has gotten out of control over the last few years, since Biden authorized trillions of dollars of what amounted to welfare payments to Americans to get them through the pandemic. Since the pandemic basically ended three years ago, Biden has taken advantage of the opening to continue to spend trillions of dollars that we don't have on everything from continued "Covid relief" to helping fund a national transition to electric vehicles that we don't need and that nobody wants.
The national debt has gotten to the point where it's starting to squeeze out important investments that only the federal government can make, in everything from rebuilding our transportation infrastructure to funding basic research and development that helps keep the American economy the most innovative in the world, to re-equipping and re-expanding our military. Even with all the growing threats we face from abroad, the Biden administration isn't planning on boosting defense spending much at all, partly in a bow to the budget deficit and, ultimately, to having to pay interest costs on the debt.
Much of the national debt is held by the trust fund for Social Security and Medicare. Because of the rising federal debt, those are two programs whose very existence-and the financial lifeline for tens of millions of Americans-is in danger. When Trump even hints that maybe the country needs to figure out ways to curtail these entitlement payments for seniors just a little bit, or change the way Social Security is financed, Biden calls him on it and won't play.
The question is if taking on more federal debt helps keep our economy going, our military operating, and our SNAP vouchers liquid, isn't all of that more important than some abstract number on the national balance sheet no matter how much it balloons?
Well, yes... and no. Taking on debt certainly has helped our country at times, starting when overseas financiers helped fund the American Revolution. But there's a reason the constitution of every state but Vermont demands their governments balance their budgets every year, and there's a reason that we have no precedent for what is happening now.
In fact, there are at least two major dangers in having such a high national debt. First, on our current path, the United States is at greater risk of a fiscal crisis, and the high debt could leave us with much less flexibility to respond to black-swan events such as another major recession like the one in 2008 and 2009; a war with China, Russia, or in the Middle East; or another pandemic like Covid.
Even stating these two dangers is putting it way too mildly. Think of it this way: If we don't drastically cut our national debt, and soon, it’s over. The government collapses under the weight of its obligation to its own people and to foreign debtors, just like the Soviet Union did. That means no pensions or even wages for millions of government workers, and no Medicare or Social Security for tens of millions. The economy quickly slides into a vast depression so hard and deep that’ll make the 1930s look like a picnic.
That's why, with every year that goes by with no action on reforming Social Security and the national debt rising, the seemingly ridiculous thesis of a great book looks more and more plausible. In 2011, the brilliant comic Albert Brooks wrote a novel called 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America. When the book opens, the millennial generation is now in power and has forced their parents onto "euthanasia cruises" out to sea because they can no longer afford to keep the elderly alive.
"The real solution is simple but unavoidable: We've just got to start reducing expenses. There's no way around it. But it is possible."
Want to take down a great nation? Keep proceeding on this path.
It'll be more effective in ending the United States of America than any foreign threat. Until a few campaigns ago, national politicians would seriously debate the size of the federal deficit and national debt, and it was an issue that could influence votes. Back when I was running for president in 1996, the national debt was already a monstrosity, and it was "only" $4 trillion. It was the biggest issue that I ran on. It engaged voters who'd become greatly concerned and got the attention of other candidates, who at least nominally talked about it as a campaign issue.
Those days are disastrously gone. Neither Trump nor anyone else really talks about the national debt or budget deficit anymore because they know the American people don't want to hear about it. And we certainly don't want to sacrifice anything to do something about it. We can't keep kicking this particular can down the road, but how do we fix it?
What won't work is what the Biden administration proposed early this year in its budget for fiscal 2025: reduce the budget deficit simply by raising taxes. Even if Republicans in Congress rubber-stamped Biden's mess of a plan, the country still would continue to run a deficit this year and keep adding to the national debt.
Biden said his new budget would cut the annual deficit by $3 trillion over 10 years "by making the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share, closing tax loopholes (and by) cutting wasteful spending on Big Pharma, Big Oil and other special interests."
What it would really do, according to a Tax Foundation analysis, is reduce the deficit by increasing taxes by $4.4 trillion over the next decade by substantially increasing marginal tax rates on investment, savings, and work. That would reduce economic output by 2.2 percent in the long run, cut wages by 1.6 percent, and reduce employment by nearly 800,000 full-time jobs, according to this analysis. Thus the way to cut the national debt isn't to boost taxes to new onerous levels, which retards economic activity in the process, nor to expect revenue increases to keep outpacing more government spending.
The real solution is simple but unavoidable: We've just got to start reducing expenses. There's no way around it. But it is possible. Once you start doing it, a flywheel effect will take place that will encourage even more debt trimming and make further cuts more and more feasible.
Titan International Chairman Morry Taylor with Lessiter Media's Mike Lessiter prior to the first of Taylor's two presentations to dealers and farmers in Louisville in January 2025.
Likely, President Trump's success in beginning to reduce the federal deficit will encourage responsible leaders of states, cities, and counties to see that it can be done and to attack their own huge debt-related problems.
There's more than $4 trillion coming into the U.S. Treasury every year. Following my prescription for cutting the size of the federal bureaucracy alone will save $1 trillion a year, which will go a long way toward cutting this debt before it crushes succeeding generations.
I’ll lay out my prescription in more detail later, but let's just say that much of the savings we require will come from eliminating entire departments of the federal government that are spending whores and doing way more harm than good.
Sources
Albert Brooks, 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2011).
"FACT SHEET: The President's Budget Cuts Taxes for Working Families and Makes Big Corporations and the Wealthy Pay Their Fair Share," The White House, March 11, 2024
