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Here is a summary of the key points made by Seth Grossman, WPG Radio, Nov 15, 2025.
🏛️ On New Jersey Politics and Affordability
Trump and the Election: Grossman argues that even though Donald Trump was not on the ballot, he effectively was because he dominated the news for the three weeks leading up to the election.
Critique of Jack Ciattarelli: He criticizes the Republican candidate for NJ Governor for not being specific about how he would make New Jersey affordable. For example, his TV and radio ads addressed to Democrats and undecided voters never blamed Gov. Murphy shutting down six power plants. Never called Sherrill a liar for saying he would raise sales tax. Never said Sherrill made commitments that would raise taxes.
Blame for Leaders: Yes, we talked about all the right issues on talk radio and at Liberty and Prosperity meetings. But Trump had access to the media and Jack Ciattarelli had millions for TV ads. We need leaders to use those assets to lead on the issues. We can’t blame voters for making decisions based on information that candidates fail to give them.
🏡 On Housing and School Costs
Causes of High Housing Costs: Grossman identifies several root causes for why housing is so expensive:
Zoning and Permits: Builders must spend almost as much money on paperwork and permits as they do on the land and building materials.
High Real Estate Taxes: Taxes are high primarily to pay for schools.
Bloated School Budgets: He claims schools are expensive because, unlike in the past (when a school had a teacher, principal, janitor, and nurse), budgets are now filled with “counselors, child study teams, [and] individual education” plans.
“Affordable Housing” as a “Shell Game”: He calls the policy of “affordable housing” a “joke”. He argues that when the government forces developers to sell 20% of new units at a discount (e.g., $50,000 less), the builders simply charge more for the other 80% of the units to make up the profit. He calls this a “shell game” that benefits a few, often politically connected, people while making housing more expensive for everyone else.
🚌 On “Socialism” vs. “Capitalism”
The NJ Transit Example: Grossman uses the $6 New Jersey Transit bus from Vineland to Atlantic City as a key example of “socialism”.
Critique of Government Monopoly: He argues that in a free market (“real capitalism”), an entrepreneur would simply buy a van to meet the demand. However, New Jersey law makes it a “crime to compete with New Jersey Transit,” which he identifies as a “socialist” model that is taxpayer-funded, runs at a loss, and is inefficient. He contrasts this with countries like Guatemala, where clean, safe, and cheap private buses operate without government subsidies.
Economic Argument: He claims that 60-80% of the U.S. economy (including healthcare, housing, and college) is already “socialism,” and this is the true cause of high prices.
📰 Other Topics Discussed
Thwarted Michigan Terror Plot: Grossman brings up a “close call” in Michigan where six “radical Muslims” were arrested for planning a “mass murder” at Halloween parties and an LGBTQ nightclub area in Ferndale, a suburb of Detroit.
New Jersey Connection: He highlights that one of the ringleaders was from Montclair, New Jersey, and was a full-time student at Rowan University in Glassboro. He notes he only learned this by reading the Rowan campus newspaper (“The Whit”) while on campus for a scholarship dinner.
The “Battle for Young People”: He discusses the “hatred of Jews and hatred of Israel” on social media. He argues that it is impossible to have a “debate” on the issue because two or three generations of young Americans “grew up without learning any of the basic facts” about communism, socialism, Islam, or Israel. He concludes that without an agreement on basic facts, the “biggest liar” will win any debate.
TRANSCRIPT:
TRUMP PUT HIMSELF ON THE NJ BALLOT. EVERYBODY WAS TALKING ABOUT TRUMP.
SETH GROSSMAN: You said that Trump was not on the ballot. But in a way, Trump put himself on the ballot. Trump made a point of putting himself in the headlines of almost every day for three weeks before the election. It was Trump, building his new ballroom. It was Trump talking about, well, maybe I’ll run for a third term. It was Trump saying, well, maybe, I ought to get $200 million back from the government for legal fees. All that stuff put him on the front page.
And for the entire summer Jack did not say any of the things that you were just saying about what had to be done to make life affordable in New Jersey. Jack said, I will make things affordable. Jack never said exactly what he would do to make it affordable. Jack never used his TV ads to say “Electric rates are high is because Murphy shut down six power plants. Vote for me and I will rebuild, replace or re-open them to bring rates down”. He never called Sherrill a liar for her lies that Jack would raise the sales tax to ten percent.
DON’T EXPECT VOTERS TO AGREE WITH SOMETHING IF THE CANDIDATE WON’T SAY IT!
So that was Jack’s campaign. Unfortunately, when it comes to to Jack Ciattarelli or Donald Trump, we can’t expect voters to agree with something that Trump isn’t saying or something that Jack Ciattarelli isn’t saying. We can’t expect low-interest voters to form opinions based on what you and I say on talk radio or at a Liberty and Prosperity meeting.
We need our leaders to lead, and that means speaking clearly and forcefully on these key issues. And it just didn’t happen.
JOHN DEMASI: Yes. you’re right. I was lamenting a lot of the things we talked about last week here on the show. I’m really I’m really disturbed by this whole thing, to tell you the truth.
DON’T BLAME VOTERS, DON’T BLAME KIDS IF OUR LEADERS DON’T EXPLAIN WHY HOUSING IS SO EXPENSIVE.
SETH GROSSMAN: We can’t blame the voters, and we can’t blame the kids for listening to our leaders instead of listening to us. Our leaders have a much bigger microphone. They have millions of dollars for the TV ads. You and I don’t. So we have to hold our leaders accountable to do this.
Meanwhile, when you talk about affordability, we need to explain why! There are three big reasons why houses are so expensive. First we have these zoning and building codes that force the builders and developers to spend almost as much money on the paperwork to get the permits to build a house, as they do for the land and for the building. I have not heard a single politician, Republican or Democrat, talk about fixing that.
Housing is also too expensive because real estate taxes are way too high and real estate taxes mostly pay for schools. Public schools are way too expensive. Why? Well, you used to have, my elementary school at Richmond Avenue School in Atlantic City. You had your teachers for each grade, a principal, a secretary, a nurse, a janitor and a special education teacher. You probably had less than a dozen employees for a couple of hundred kids.
Now you also have all sorts of counselors, you have child study teams, you have individual education. Anyone who wants can say my kid has special needs so you need to hire a special tutor for my kid and spend an extra 80,000 a year instead of having him in a regular class. All that is very expensive.
We talked also talked about our state income tax. Every dollar of that state income tax is supposed to be for property tax relief. But it’s not. 80% of that, that income tax property tax relief money goes into, maybe 30 or 35 Democrat controlled school districts. But we are never going to fix any of this if we don’t have leaders to even talk about this!
JOHN DEMASI: That’s right. They’re not. That’s a shame.
“AFFORDABLE HOUSING” SHELL GAME: GIVE DISCOUNTS TO A FEW BY RAISING PRICES FOR EVERYONE ELSE!
SETH GROSSMAN: And by the way, that whole affordable housing thing is a joke. The Democrats always talk about “affordable housing” . Now what does “affordable housing” mean? It means that you do nothing about the real estate taxes. You do nothing about the ridiculous cost of getting permits and approvals. You do nothing about using almost all of the property tax relief fund from the state income tax to benefit maybe 35 Democrat run school districts.
So what do the Democrats do? They say we are going to force the developers to sell 20% of what they build as so-called “affordable housing. The means they’ll give a discount of maybe $40,000 or $50,000 for those units. So if the builders still have to spend all this money for the permits and all this money for the land with the right zoning, and they still have to spend all this money for the taxes how can builders sell 20% of their houses for $50,000 less to a handful of lucky people. They still have to make a profit. So they charge a lot more for the other 80% of the units! It’s a shell game. And a lot of time, the so-called lucky people who get those so-called “affordable housing units” at maybe 20% less while the other 80% have to pay 20% more just happen to have political connections. That’s what so-called “affordable housing” means. It’s a joke. It’s a term of art.
REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES KEEP HIRING THE SAME CONSULTANTS WITH LOTS OF EXPERIENCE IN LOSING.
But God forbid a Republican candidate talk about real issues like this when they’re running for election. Because what the Republican candidates do, and I’ve seen this happen time after time again. Instead of listening to the John DeMasi show, instead of listening to what real people are talking about, they hire these consultants! And these consultants say, “Oh, you gotta do this and you need to say that”. And Those are the experts, and the candidates go along.
I found this out when I ran for Congress in 2018. And I went to hire campaign consultants and I’m talking to these people and I’m asking for their qualifications. And they tell me, “I have lots and lots of experience. I worked on this campaign and we lost. And I worked on that campaign, and we lost. And I worked on this campaign, and we lost. They lose election after election. But they keep getting hired because they have experience and their supposed to be experts. This is what we have to deal with.
JOHN DEMASI: Jeez. That’s that’s that’s like the football and baseball coaches. They all they just recycle them. That’s how it looks to me.
ISLAMIC TERROR PLOTTER IS FULL-TIME STUDENT AT ROWAN FROM MONTCLAIR, NJ.
SETH GROSSMAN: Meanwhile, I don’t know if you follow this thing on on the national news, but for Halloween, there was a very close call in Michigan where you had six radical Wahhabi, Salafi, whatever you call them, radical Muslims. They were all set to do mass murder at Halloween parties in a suburb outside of Detroit, Michigan. And by pure luck, they were caught and they were arrested. They had automatic weapons and they were going to kill a lot of people at strip of LGBTQ nightclubs and bars in Ferndale, a suburb outside Detroit.
First of all, I think very few people know about that. And second, if you looked at the Press of Atlantic City article, the headline did not mention that these were radical Muslims.
But what really shocked me was this. Did you know that one of the ringleaders was from Montclair, New Jersey and, was a full-time student at Rowan University in Glassboro?
JOHN DEMASI:. No. I didn’t know that. No. I didn’t know that. No.
SETH GROSSMAN: Well, I had no idea either until, last Thursday night. My late mother had had given a scholarship donation to the college. So I was there for a reception to recognize the people who gave money for scholarships. So I was there on campus in Glassboro for the reception. And I was looking at the college newspaper, theto scholarship. So I was there, you know to meet one of the students benefiting from the scholarship so I was on they call it “The Whit”.
And the front-page headline was “Rowan student arrested by FBI”. It says “Tomas-Kaan Jimenez-Gazel, a 19 year old computer science major at Rowan University from Montclair, New Jersey” was arrested “while boarding a flight to Istanbul, Turkey last week” . So, I mean, I think that’s a major event that people in the area ought to know about. But unless you happen to go to Rowan University in Glassboro and happen to read the student newspaper, you’d probably never know anything about it. I’m wondering why that didn’t make the local news here.
JOHN DEMASI: I wonder why too.
NEW BUS FROM VINELAND TO ATLANTIC CITY: TEACHABLE MOMENT ABOUT NEW JERSEY TRANSIT SOCIALISM.
SETH GROSSMAN: At our Liberty and Prosperity breakfasts, we talk a lot about “affordability”. Why things are so expensive? Last week I was talking about the difference between socialism and what the left calls “capitalism”. In my view is just a fake propaganda word that the communist invented. Because what they call “capitalism” is a system where people are free to make the most important choices about how they want to run their own lives. Choices like “I want to start this business” or “I want to work at that job or “I want to charge this much for my work”. They call this “capitalism”, but it has nothing to do with “capital”. Capital is money you use to start a business. But many people succeeded in starting businesses with nothing. With working, saving, borrowing from friends and family and getting people to invest in your project.
“Capitalism” is really a system of freedom. It is the freedom charge this price for my stuff. What the left calls capitalism is actually a system of freedom. It is a system where people are free to decide the most important things that affect their lives.
And that system of freedom works much better than a system where government officials make these decisions. There are two reasons for that. When people make decisions about their own lives, they know more about what is going on in their own lives than some government officials. And even more important, if you make a good decision about your own life, you benefit. And if you make a bad decision, you get hurt. It dosn’t work that way with government officials.
If a government official makes a bad decision that messes up someone else’s life, that government officials still get his pay, promotions, and benefits.
I say this over and over and I see people falling asleep. But every now and then there’s a teachable moment, that explains this. And that’s the bus, the $6 bus from Vineland to Atlantic City. I think your station and many radio stations are advertising that New Jersey transit is now running a bus frotm Vineland to Atlantic City. That is so people who live in Vineland can get to jobs in Atlantic City. This is good for the casinos. It’s good for the hotels. It’s good for the people in Vineland.
So how do we get that bus and how much does it cost? Well, if we had a free market system, if we had real capitalism, people in Vineland would say, gee, I know a lot of people who would like to work in Atlantic City, but they can’t get there. So I could buy a van and I could start my own bus service. I could take people back and forth and I can make money.
That would make everybody happy. The casino hotels in Atlantic City will be happy they get people to work for them. The people in Vineland are happy. They can get to work at better jobs. And what would the government have to do to make that happen. Absolutely nothing. How much would the bus cost? The guy running the bus would decide how much he needed to pay his expenses and make a profit. What hours would the bus run? That would be when it was most convenient to his customers. How much would it cost the government? Nothing. The government would charge a fee to inspect the bus or van and make sure it is safe and make sure the driver is licensed and qualified. The government would also require insurance. But that’s it.
But we don’t have this in New Jersey. We instead have socialist public transportation. If somebody comes along and says, “I know 20 people in Vineland who need a ride to work in Atlantic City”. And that person rents a bus, hires a driver and takes those people there, and charges them 5 or six dollars, that person is going to get arrested as a criminal. They will fine him and take away his bus.
That is because New Jersey law says there is only one legal bus company in the state, and that is New Jersey Transit. It is owned by the state and all competition is illegal.
We pay roughly a billion dollars to New Jersey Transit each year. The fares don’t cover the costs. Most of its buses and trains run at a loss. You see how most of them are empty and people can’t get buses to where they want to go when they need them.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had private people who could run buses, jitneys or vans to take people where they want to gogo when they want to go? You find that in almost any country in South America. In Puerto Rico they have these things called Guagua. I was in Guatemala last year, you you have these clean beautiful safe buses that cost a fraction of whate we have here and the government doesn’t spend a nickel on them. The people do it themselves. And those people make a profit and pay taxes.
We never have a discussion as to why we can’t do that kind of thing here. You can’t do it in New Jersey because it’s against the law. It’s a crime to compete with New Jersey Transit. Yes. You run into this all the time.
If you want to take a bus from Margate to Ocean City, you just find a bus to take you down to Longport and then over the bridge. That would be about four miles. No. You have to take a bus that runs through Ventnor and then all the way to Atlantic City. Then you need to go to Pleasantville, and then to Northfield, Linwood and Somers Point, and then you get to Ocean City. That’s more than 20 miles. Why?
When my kids were were in high school, I wanted them to have the experience of having a real job. So I had to be a $150 an hour lawyer would have to, you know, pick up, my kids in Linwood, driving back and forth to Ocean City so they could make like $8 or $9 an hour, for the experience of a real summer job. If we didn’t have that New Jersey Transit monopoly law, my kids would have had all sorts of affordable choices. But they didn’t. And it wasn’t because of capitalism. It is because we have so much socialism in New Jersey
And this explains why things are so expensive for young people today. Our schools teach them to blame capitalism, But capitalism is not making everything so expensive. The problem is that we already have socialism in maybe 60 to 80% of our economy. We already have socialism in health care we have in housing, we have in in college. But instead of saying, “Let’s get rid of the socialism that’s screwing up our economy to make things affordable again, the leftists who run our schools and colleges teach our kids to demand more socialism.
JOHN DEMASI: I don’t know the answer to this, but it’s just not not right. You’re depressing me even more.
YOUNG PEOPLE BLAMING JEWS AND ISRAEL AS WELL AS CAPITALISM.
SETH GROSSMAN: Well, well, it’s a good thing. I didn’t get to what I really wanted to talk about, because that would depress you more.
Another big battle going on with our young people is antisemitism, blame the Jews. If you’ve been following the debate on TikTok, on X, on Gab, on all the social media, you see this real ignorance and hatred towards Jews and of Israel.
And last week, one of your listers said, “Why can’t we have a debate about this and hear both sides?”
But the problem is we have an entire generation, actually two or three generations of young people in America who grew up without learning any of the basic facts about communism, about socialism, about Islam, about Israel, about the cold war and because of that, you can’t have a debate. Because when you have a debate people have to agree on what the basic facts are. And if people don’t know the facts or can’t agree on the facts and you have a debate, that means that the biggest liar will win every debate. That is because anyone can make up any lies they want and nobody will know they are lies.
So the first step, before we have any debates, is to start teaching these basic facts. We have a lot of them posted at our libertyandprosperity.com website. I hope maybe next Saturday I could go through some of these points. In fact, I haven’t prepared certain things for the website because I’ve been working on this history book of South Jersey. And while working on that book, I learned a lot of new fcts that everybody should know. Things like How did America get started? Why did America become successful? Why do so many people hate Americans? Well, they hate us because we’re successful. So, we have to teach ourselves and our children these basic facts, and I think that’s goanna be one of the bay main missions of liberty and prosperity, during the next few months.
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Seth Grossman is executive director of Liberty And Prosperity, which he co-founded in 2003. It promotes American liberty and limited constitutional government through weekly radio and in-person discussions, its website, email newsletters and various events. Seth Grossman is also a general practice lawyer.
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