Excerpts from the Remarks of Charles Payne
Host of Making Money with Charles Payne, Fox Business
From the PRI 2026 Spring Retreat, Reagan Library
Economic Outlook
I’m a rose-colored glasses guy; a glass half full guy. I became that way in part because I’ve been able to live the American dream. And I can tell you right now, I am as excited as ever, but I’m also as concerned as ever.
Overall, on the economy, I feel really good about it. All of the things that were done last year, particularly the One Big Beautiful Bill, you could just see the results almost on day one. Of course, we have the Iran conflict, which has interrupted it. But the underpinnings, the tailwinds, are still here. Reindustrialization is happening in this country, and I think a lot of folks are getting it, particularly conservatives, who may not like the Trump brand of economics. But we really fell into a trap as a nation with such a rigid system where China was subsidizing everything and consequently they were sucking out our industrial base and taking away jobs. Take rare earth minerals. They’re not rare, we just stopped mining them. In fact, in California, we were able to get as much rare earths as we needed. We’ve got to reload, and what do we reload with if we don’t control these supplies?
The Fourth Industrial Revolution
I think what’s happening now is that we’re in the fourth industrial revolution. Every industrial revolution brought with it new products, innovations, but also a tweaking of the financial system. We went first from a mercantilist system followed by laissez faire, the second industrial revolution. It allowed America, which was a tiny speck economically compared to the UK and other European nations, within 50 years to supersede them all.
Now we have this form of a capitalism, the third industrial revolution, which ushered in financial engineering — Wall Street and Main Street. That continues to this day. If you look at corporate profits — profit margins from 1980 to 2000, if a corporation made 6 to 8%, that was pretty good. Now we’re averaging about 16%. The problem is that that comes at the expense of something else — income inequality. Main Street’s share of wealth has diminished to the point that it’s going to be a major political issue. It won’t just be Mayor Mamdani of New York City. If we’re not careful, it could be President Mamdani of the United States. So that’s the part I’m worried about.
But the other part of this fourth industrial revolution which I love is that it’s spearheaded out of America. Once again, the underpinnings of it comes from this country and companies. And even tonight your guest is Palmer Luckey. That’s a story that can only happen in the United States.
AI has a huge role in this fourth industrial revolution. At the top of the list is SpaceX, an amazing idea that germinated from an individual who went against the grain. Let’s face it, no one really had a lot of interest in it. NASA wasn’t doing much to make us excited. Now it’s so compelling. I remember in Trump’s first year when he said that we need a space force. Everyone laughed. Now it’s good thing we have it because there’s no such thing as the cloud — it’s satellites in space. Elon Musk talks about how much power he wants to generate from data centers out in space and on the moon, and he ties his compensation to it. If he pulls it off, he’ll generate eight times the amount of electricity we generate in this country right now. So if he makes a few trillion from it, we won’t be upset. I don’t think I will be. So we’ve got this virtual cycle going: SpaceX, Anthropic, Open AI, all of them underscore American exceptionalism.
Payne’s Big Concern
We have to make people understand that the reindustrialization of America is so critical. But I’m really worried, because you’ve got this massive opposition to data centers, for instance. And I see these towns in opposition and I just scratch my head. If you live near one of these, at a certain point, your electric bill will go down, not up. So the good news is that the red states are taking them — bring them on. But I want all Americans to benefit.
Obviously there’s an intimidation factor from AI, for example, what kind of jobs it might take? But we have to embrace this. We have to keep it going….I’m excited about where we are, what this world is going to look like, and the fact that we’re leading the charge for now. But I will warn: we cannot drop the baton.
The biggest political risk to the stock market is the success of the stock market. And what I mean by that is it is creating authentic resentment. The top 20% of Americans buy 50% of the goods out there. They’re doing extraordinarily well….Goldman Sachs put out a survey — 40% of people making more than $501,000 a year say they live paycheck to paycheck. So people feel like they’re under this crazy duress and this crazy stress, and they’re angry about it, and they want someone to do something about it.
That’s what these college grads in New York City did. They voice that same kind of anger. But these are the college grads that drove New York City rents higher and they’re the ones who are making these huge paychecks coming out of school, but they still want more. So, I think this envy can be exploited pretty easily in politics, and it’s drawing in more and more people, particularly young folks, who come out of school, that job where they learned how to code, all of a sudden AI is doing all the coding. So there’s this tremendous amount of resentment that could be stoked.
On Young People Getting Ahead
What can you control? You can control your spending. DoorDash and Uber — these are discretionary items. And yet the people who use them really cannot afford them. So, can you convince a young person or a young family? It’s difficult because the societal pressures are so immense.
You do have entrepreneurs who are out there who are really trying to get it done. Now the only problem is that it’s being sold to them as easy. In some of these posts, all you have to do is open up an LLC and watch the money pour in. That’s not going to happen. You have to suffer through these environments and sacrifice through them to get the money that you need. And it’s going to be hard too.
If we trip up this AI race, it’s all over.
On AI
If we trip up this AI race, it’s all over. It is a wake up call. Obviously China is trying to compete. Japan is trying to compete, particularly because of their aging population. We’re walking this tightrope over just how much we should slow it down, understanding that others won’t slow down. If we slow down too much for our principles, do we lose our edge? So it’s really tough, but I think it’s a race that we must stay in front of, and we must win.
Sometimes when you talk about productivity miracles, you’re saying doing more with fewer people, or one worker can produce more output. That means you need fewer workers. So the productivity miracle sometimes masks the idea that you need less workers, or employees, which is great for corporate America in terms of the bottom line. Robots are going to be taking jobs. And there are some who believe they’ll take enough jobs that you have a large swath of people with nowhere to go. And we have to make sure that they eat and that they’re part of society — hence, universal basic income. But you know, wherever it’s been tried it’s been a disaster. I think it’s innate in all of us is that we don’t all just work for money. We want purpose. We want to achieve things. We want to make sure we go to bed at night knowing we achieved something, not just made money.
And so I don’t necessarily think it’s going to come to that. I do think there’s going to be a gulf, though, between people who lose their jobs today from AI and those new jobs that don’t exist now. It could be a political hot potato…. So I’m a natural born Luddite, but I also admit that after every industrial revolution, human beings were better off. We ended up with better jobs, better health conditions, more prosperity. But the gulf between there and now is going to be prime territory for ideas like universal basic income, which I hope we reject as a nation.