Guest
Senior economist at The Heritage Foundation · Economics commentator
Peter St. Onge is a senior economist at The Heritage Foundation and a former MBA professor who publishes daily commentary on economics and freedom. He holds a PhD in economics from George Mason University. His five TFTC interviews since 2023 examine government spending, the banking system and Bitcoin, with AI's effects on work joining the discussion in 2026.
St. Onge brings Austrian economics to current policy arguments. He focuses on who creates money, who gets it first and what happens when governments can spend beyond what voters will accept in direct taxes. Before his policy work he taught international trade and marketing at Feng Chia University in Taiwan and worked in corporate marketing and strategy. His daily videos turn that background into short explanations of prices, jobs and the institutions shaping them.
The TFTC series begins with the banking crisis in May 2023 and a discussion of public debt later that year. In 2024 the question was whether removing income tax could help rebuild the productive economy; in 2025 it was the political organizations sustained by government funding. By June 2026 he was arguing that AI could reverse part of the advantage white-collar workers had enjoyed for decades. All five conversations have written episode pages below, separate from his authored articles and other shows' interviews.
Latest
Peter St. Onge on why the AI bubble still has a year or more to run, why blue-collar workers are the surprise winners of the AI era, and why Kevin Warsh's let-companies-fail Fed stance is exactly what the economy needs.
Economist Peter St. Onge exposes how government-funded activism and fiat-fueled corruption distort society.
In this episode of TFTC, Peter St. Onge discusses El Salvador's transformation and potential economic reforms in the US.
The road to hyperinflation is paved with government spending bills passed by feckless politicians who refused to take the hard medicine.
Peter St Onge joins the show to breakdown the problems in the banking sector, fed policy, and the debt ceiling crisis from a first principles perspective.
Positions drawn from Peter’s TFTC appearances, grouped by theme. Quotes are from TFTC’s own recordings and are dated.
In November 2023 St. Onge used a weak Treasury auction to explain how much routine refinancing the government requires. The important distinction was between borrowing for new spending and replacing debt that was already coming due. He treated a poor auction as a warning, while acknowledging that subsequent auctions had cleared. That context matters: his concern was the vulnerability created by repeated refinancing, rather than a claim that one bad sale had already ended the government's ability to borrow.
“Most of that is refinancing old debt and then about 2 trillion in fresh debt.”
“Now, subsequent auctions have been fine.”
St. Onge argues that focusing only on the Fed's balance sheet leaves out an important source of monetary expansion. Commercial banks create deposit money through lending, while government borrowing gives the financial system a large and continuing demand for credit. In April 2025 he paired that monetary explanation with a political one: state spending is backed by coercive power. His criticism is aimed at the incentives of the system, not simply the personality of the current central-bank chair.
“Most inflation doesn’t come from the Fed”
“The government is just Walmart with a gun.”
Asked in June 2024 about replacing income taxes with tariffs, St. Onge located the underlying problem in domestic policy. He argued that American businesses had been made less competitive by taxes and regulation before foreign competition arrived. His support for a smaller tax burden follows from that diagnosis. The conversation's title emphasizes eliminating income tax, but his answer ranges more broadly over the choices that determine whether people can produce and build in the United States.
“I don't blame China so much as I blame Washington.”
“Every last one of [America's problems] is a choice.”
The April 2025 interview applies his economic method to activism and education. St. Onge argued that public funding can sustain organizations whose apparent political independence deserves scrutiny. He used the same reasoning for universities, which he sees as supplying intellectual support for government expansion. These are his claims about institutional incentives. The episode's useful question is who funds an activity and what that funding rewards, rather than assuming an organization is independent because it describes itself that way.
“What looks like a revolution on the left is really just an intimidation racket with a payroll.”
“Universities are the state religion. They’re the intellectual bodyguards of the government.”
In the 2026 conversation St. Onge expected a disruptive change in which skills command a premium. He argued that generalized white-collar work was directly exposed to AI, while the physical work required to build its infrastructure would remain in demand. This is the basis of the episode's blue-collar framing. He did not describe the transition as painless: the occupations that benefited most from an earlier economic order could face a difficult adjustment while other workers gained bargaining power.
“So I think what we're looking at is the next 10 years or so, generalist white collars are gonna get gutted.”
“And what I think is fun is that effectively the blue collars are taking the jobs from the white collars, right?”
St. Onge's housing discussion follows the same argument as his trade discussion: high costs are partly the result of rules that restrict production. In 2026 he criticized the Fed's large swings in interest rates and pointed to construction regulation as another constraint that policy could change. His proposal is to let more housing be built and lower the cost of adding it. The focus is the physical supply of homes, rather than treating a lower mortgage rate as the only possible route to affordability.
“And, you know, of course, the problem in housing is that the Fed yo-yoed rates, right?”
“Like there's regulation you could do that could that could probably drop the price of new construction by fifty, even a hundred thousand.”
In June 2026 he argued that Bitcoin's weak price action did not invalidate the case for an alternative money. He compared its volatility with gold's behavior when gold is held as an asset alongside a dominant fiat currency. A relatively thin market and shifting speculative demand can produce large moves. His view was that another major step in adoption could change the scale of the market, while the underlying argument should be assessed separately from a recent trading range.
“I think the underlying argument for Bitcoin is unchanged.”
“I think it has nothing to do with the sort of fundamental thesis of Bitcoin.”
His bleak descriptions of public finance are paired with a persistent claim that the results are reversible. In June 2024 he pointed to El Salvador as a challenge to the idea that political dysfunction is inevitable. In April 2025 his closing emphasis was on retaining the willingness to act. The recommendation is political and practical: identify the choices producing a bad outcome, then change those choices, rather than treating a country's decline as a natural law.
“The United States is one of the richest countries on earth. If a country like El Salvador can fix that, there's absolutely no excuse.”
“This is the golden age. The only way we lose is if we lose hope.”
Broken economic indicators and underreported inflation suggest the U.S. may have been in a hidden recession for nearly five years.
Prices are sky high but nobody's buying
For the first time in American history, interest on the national debt has crossed $1 trillion, with projections indicating it could reach $3 trillion in just five years.
American consumers are facing a financial wall as incomes stagnate, savings deplete, and debt levels hit record highs.
Hedge funds, corporations, and President Trump endorse Bitcoin, signaling a significant shift towards mainstream adoption.
A Federal Reserve study exposes how its policies fuel a widening wealth gap, favoring homeowners and leaving renters in the dust.
Notable appearances on other shows, newest first.
Adam Taggart | Thoughtful Money® · Nov 2025The Investor's Dilemma: Ride The Bubble Or Seek Safety? | Peter St OngeThe investment dilemma between participating in a rising market and protecting against its eventual reversal.
Stephan Livera · Apr 2024US Government Fiscal Collapse Accelerates with Peter St Onge SLP561The government-debt argument with Stephan Livera, which TFTC also summarized at the time.
The Bitcoin Layer · Nov 2022Bitcoin & The Austrian School of Economics with Peter St. Onge | The Bitcoin LayerAn introduction to the Austrian-economics framework behind his Bitcoin and policy commentary.His daily economics articles and videos.
His policy research and commentary at the Institute for Economic Policy Studies.
His own biography and public work.