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  [Music] [Music] I'm Charlotte McLoud with investing news.com and here today with me is JP Cortez executive director of The Sound money defense leag thank you so much for being here thank you for having me back on Charlotte it's so good to see you really good to run into you here I'm so glad we could get you on and actually meet in person so maybe just for people who might not be familiar with you who didn't catch the first interview could you share a little bit about your background you'd mentioned it's it's the

10 year anniversary of the sound money Defense League yeah yeah absolutely so like you said it is the 10-y year anniversary of the San money Defense League I'm the executive director my name is JP Cortez and the San money Defense League is a nonpartisan public policy group uh we're funded by money Metals exchange a national purchas Metals dealer and we go to the state to in the United States and to Washington DC introducing legislation to remone gold and silver there are currently a lot of uh uh disincentives a lot of

regulations a lot of friction around being able to even buy gold and silver as a as an investment of course when you sell it you're going to be charged a capital gains tax by the state and the federal level in many cases so in some cases tax on the purchase on the sale by the state and on the sale by the federal level it's triple taxation on precious metals so we go state toate say removing all of this friction that keeps people from being able to actually use gold and silver as an investment of course but as

money as well if they'd like which of course I think this is a message and a mission that I think a lot of people at this conference would definitely identify with and so we're coming up on the end of the year and I know that you've had seven victories this year so let's let's look at the most impactful changes across the US and and how they impact Everyday People the biggest thing that we've seen this year this year there were seven states out of 50 that passed legislation here in the United

States passing an array of different policies policies that remove taxes on precious metals policies that reaffirm gold and silver as legal tender as money in the state um and then in Utah's case that was a special Bill where the state of Utah announced and legislatively allowed for I believe it is a $180 million investment of physical gold to be stored for the state so on the state's balance sheets so the state itself is now looking to gold and silver as an actual Reserve asset you know we

talk a lot about bricks right now and dollarization and there's so much talk about countries with an adversarial relationship to the United States who are looking for Alternatives but if we look more closely we'll see it's more than that states themselves are also looking to dollarize they're looking for an alternative to Dollar denominated Investments and well we're finding we're seeing that of course individuals but states countries and international coalitions seem to be coalescing around

go yeah that's very interesting and of course we we talk all the time on this channel about the bricks but it's interesting to see it at that that smaller level as well very interesting and so the latest edition of the sound money index has just been released I believe there's a copy here maybe we want to hold it up so maybe for those who don't know if you could explain what it is and and talk about the evolution over time insights from this year any other takeaways that you would add of

course the we are so excited to announce like you mentioned two days ago we announced the uh the latest 2025 sound money Index this is an index we've been putting out uh every year for the last several years that rates all 50 states based on their Pro or anti- sound money environment is this a state that has removed sales tax from precious metals capital gain taxes does your state reaffirm gold and silver as legal tender does your state have an instake precious metals bullion depository is your state

investing in physical gold in its state reserves issuing gold bonds things like that and so there are a number of different criteria that we find that really separate states from one another an interesting thing that we found is that it's not along political lines you'll find that if you look at the index towards the bottom of the list you'll find is Kentucky a notably deep South what is normally a red state but with a Democratic governor we found that earlier this year they vetoed one of our

bills the bill to end sales tax on purchases of precious metals in Kentucky was vetoed and the governor sneered as he said if you can afford to invest in gold and silver then you can afford to pay taxes on those Metals so this is a slap in the face to Precious Metals dealers who or precious metals investors and dealers who you know probably looked to Kentucky as a conservative State a state that would defend the con tion a the state that would promote gold and silver and we're finding that it's the

exact opposite because politicians see Industries as a whole as cash Revenue they see dollar signs when they're when they think about potentially taxing an asset like gold and silver they're talk they're thinking about the revenues to the state but they fail to realize that this is not an effective means of collecting tax revenue and you're harming the people in the state themselves precious metals dealers aren't going to uh open a brick and mortar store in your state conventions

like this one and coin conventions that happen all over the world regularly are actively avoiding these states so it has been a great pleasure to publish this year after year and have people reach out to me and tell me I moved because of your index I opened a business because of your index Wyoming for example there's um uh a a mint that was opened out there recently uh who often cites the sound money index you know Wyoming being number one in the country at defending the the rights of precious

metals investors and dealers is a huge deal for people wanting to invest in this industry okay that's very powerful and and maybe if you could talk a little bit more about some of the challenges you face when you're doing your advocacy work and how you address skepticism from people well the truth is that there is a lot of skepticism unfortunately and the reason for that is largely because a lack of Education uh here in the United States across state legislatures there are more 7,000 elected officials many of

those have never heard the term sound money they've never considered questions about what makes good money where it deres its value what it maybe should be backed by or maybe shouldn't be backed by and these are questions that simply have escaped the the social Zeitgeist of course in the United States culturally there's very little uh attention to gold and silver as an investment or as a reserve asset um which is jux opposed to if you if you spent any time uh in in the eastern part of the world where

across Thailand across Japan across China Gold is revered brick and mortar stores on every corner religious symbols are coded in Gold it's an important part of their culture because they understand its reverence of course for its industrial use but for its religious symbolic meaning the the education here in the United States is lacking because for more than five decades now gold has been completely severed from the dollar which leaves us where we are today which is sort of what free market thinkers and

economists have been predicting an explosion in deficit spending an an explosion in Wars across the world and the bloat in bureaucracy and of course the Perpetual devaluation of the purchasing power of our money none of us voted for this none of us chose this but this was foed upon us and States now are saying while this is a federal problem while this is a problem that you know it it the finds its roots at the federal level and in the Federal Reserve there are steps that states can take to mitigate some of this damage and I think

that that feeds into the education work you're doing so you've got the sound money scholarship and the new sound money Fellowship so let's talk about the impact that you'll hope those PR programs will have and you know why I think we can start to tell why this is so important yeah absolutely the scholarship is a program that we started I believe this is our eth year doing um the sound money scholarship where um in coordin with money medals exchange we've set aside 100 ounces of physical gold to

fund scholarship in these topics so for the sound money scholarship we have uh given out I I believe over $100,000 now to high school seniors to undergraduate students and graduate students who enter our essay contest and the essays are graded by a judge of free market economists of professors of commentators of notable people in this space who are reading the work of these students and then awarding them uh monetary awards for their great essays um that has been excellent this year we had over 200

applications from students all over the world not in the United States but India Russia countries in Africa there's been so much uh interest in this program and the Sone Fellowship is a program we started this year uh which is uh intended to promote even further scholarships so we're not talking about necessarily high school students here or even undergraduate students but we're talking about people with an intense passion independent researchers people in their postgraduate careers that are

still interested in paid opportunities to contribute to sound money scholarship so we hope to have very academic type very deep research done in sound money and providing opportunities for these researchers to get paid while doing it okay that's very exciting I like that there's there's a couple of levels there to what you're doing okay so we've taken a look at kind of what's happened this year let's let's look into the future at ongoing projects upcoming legislation

that you're excited about you'd let me know that between 2023 and 2024 there were over a dozen states that passed PRO Sound money legislation so let's talk about what could happen next year what is on uh yeah of course the for me Our intention from the beginning was we were sort of our policy initiatives were born in the idea that right now there's too much fr in the form of taxes for gold and silver to be used as actual money to remove those friction to remove that friction is more important than legal

tender status it's more important than building an instate depository it's actually giving individuals the power to reopt their own gold standard without being penalized from the state or from the federal level by doing so so to us the greatest progress that we've seen since we've started has been on taxes today there are 45 states in the country that have either partially or fully eliminated sales tax on purchases of precious metals that leaves five states that still do of those five states we

have we expecting legislation introduced in at least four of them to end that tax that that tax so we're looking you know to make sales tax on purchases of precious metals across the country extinct and we're very close to ending that the capital gain side is something that has picked up steam as more states have eliminated the sales tax now states are starting to say okay what else can we do the capital gains becomes a very obvious next logical step so now 13 states have removed the capital gains on

sales of precious metals if you enjoy a gain and so we have still much work to do uh but more and more we're finding that states now are reaching out to us it's incredible to imagine back in 2017 when I was we I was writing draft legislation and I was going state to state begging legislators please introduce this language there was a bill in 2017 I remember that we uh wrote to allow the state to invest in physical gold as a reserve asset and in 2017 the bill was not even considered in fact it was mocked in some states gold

was $1,200 an ounce at the time today I think today Golds fought back up to $2,700 an ounce the politicians the people who are making these fiduciary decisions that affect all of our lives were derc in their duties to protect the St the state's reserves so we're very hopeful that as the taxes continue to be where we devote most of our bandwidth but there is more to do and the next steps States investing in physical gold states building precious metals depositories in their own state to protect their reserves I keep it outside

of New York or other uh other depositories that might be further away from home we're finding that there is a ton a ton of energy and steam Behind these projects and I think we're seeing sound money gold and Silvers is having a Renaissance right now yeah and okay so this is kind of near-term things that are going on take a look maybe say a decade into the future where do you see the sound money movement going and we talked a little bit about this last time but how how can people start to get

involved what would you like to see them do 10 years from now I certainly hope that the sales tax issue will be completely resolved convincing states that exchanging Federal Reserve notes exchanging one form of money for another is a taxable event is something that we've had great success doing because not many states do it anymore right you notice if you walked into a gas station and you exchanged and you gave the the cashier $1 a dollar bill and asked them to exchange it for four quarters and

they told you okay there will be a tax on this transaction you would say this is ludicrous it makes no sense I'm simply exchanging one form of money for another and that's exactly what you're doing when you're exchanging Federal Reserve notes for gold and silver uh so making that more clear to politicians to legislators to Regulators is something that uh in the next 10 years I hope to completely have eliminated the tax structures among or uh pertaining to precious metals and I think what we hope to see then is an

increase in entrepreneurship in this space I think that uh there is a a famous fa hyek quote The Economist Nobel prizewinning Economist fa Hayek who said that money when money was discovered it was captured by the government and Frozen in its most primitive form what if there was more to money than we have today what if your money actually retained its value what if you weren't charged for exchanging it or transferring it what if you know there were for example we're seeing fractional precious metals like we've never seen

before we're seeing crypto backed uh precious metals asset backed digital currencies of course Bitcoin is approaching $100,000 as we we speak so the space where smart people are innovating and and devoting time and resources and money to reimagining what money could be I am very bullish about this process and I think that sound money is going to win out it has to right the the US debt now is I think has broached 36 uh trillion dollars that's on paper that doesn't consider uh unfunded liabilities or any anything

else that's on top of that which probably breaches 100 if I had to guess So eventually the government is going to have to start looking at this more seriously short uh as a collapse of some sort and so the hope is as sound money continues to become more accessible to become more ubiquitous we might find that the stewards of America's money say hey wait they have Alternatives now we should get our act together okay okay this has all been very educational and interesting do you have any final words

that you would leave investors with as we close I think that the base case for precious metals for me anyway has always kind of been the same if you believe that the government will continue to grow you know we have a trump presidency who was recently elected and there are talks about uh you know government agencies that will address the bloat and the bureaucracy and the massive amount of waste that happens here in the United States government there are some people that are very hopeful about that I

personally am not necessarily hopeful that that Donald Trump or that any politician is the answer to these to these questions um but what I will say is that like we mentioned States all over the country are thinking about gold countries all over the world allies I'm not even talking about countries with an adversarial relationship in some cases these are allies to the United States that are thinking about Alternatives and of course the the people with adversarial relationships of course are

thinking about gold and silver as more people as more institutions as more governments revert back to gold and silver as a reserve asset I'm bullish about the price of gold in that case of course uh so have the have the state of Utah invest $180 million have the government invest millions or billions of dollars Russia India before you know it the price of gold has s far surpassed $2,700 so as an investment case I'm very hopeful for the price of gold and silver in general uh gold silver has been

lagging of course but I'm hopeful that it will bring up the rear and catch up with the gains that we saw in Gold earlier this year and in general as long as the government continues debasing its currency as long as deficit spending continues as long as the dollar continues to be debased gold and silver are going to be good Investments okay I think very good note for us to wrap up on but thank you for taking the time today too to give us an update this is really good thank you so much Charlotte okay and once again

I'm Charlotte McLoud with investing new.com and this is JP C with the sound money defense Lake [Music]