Air Date: 05-06-2026

Full Show Notes

Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we examine how the U.S. war on Iran is producing an economic crisis with echoes of the 1970s stagflation era which explains why Trump is now less popular on inflation than Jimmy Carter. We'll also be exploring various element of the structure of our economy, including how GDP became a deeply misleading measure of welfare, why consumer spending increasingly goes toward things people don't want to buy, and how gambling and junk fees are literally counted as economic growth.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 55 minutes today include

All In with Chris Hayes

Economic Update 

The NPR Politics Podcast

The Brian Lehrer Show

THE DAILY BLAST 

and Pitchfork Economics 

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 4 sections;

Section A, The Pump and the War

Section B, Lies, Spin, and the Roaring Economy

Section C, The Boomcession

Section D, What This Costs Real People

And now, on to the show.

BRIAN: Let's start with Friday's inflation report for the month of March.

Do you agree with that Washington Post headline, Trump faces surging inflation report fueled by Iran Conflict. 

GUEST: I do, the numbers were very clear. We had a full percentage point increase in the headline inflation. And that's really unusual to get such a jump in one month. Moreover, if you look forward, we will get another jump in the headline inflation.

The other interesting thing is there's a second measure, as you know, called core inflation that tries to. Exclude the, the very volatile energy and food prices and that did not move very much. I don't think that's gonna last. So I think what you're gonna see going forward is not just headline inflation being driven by energy prices, but we're gonna start seeing a broader inflationary process take hold.[00:02:00] 

BRIAN: Why? 

GUEST: Because first it's way beyond energy, what the prices that are being disrupted, the supply. Lines that are being disrupted, speak to a number of other things. Fertilizers, which will, will speak to food prices, aluminum. So there's a set of other products that are being disrupted in terms of supply.

And second energy has a way. Of encouraging what economists call co cost push inflation, but simply your costs go up as, as a producer, as a restaurant, and you decide, i'm gonna pass that on to my consumers. I'm not gonna take the hit on my own. And if oil prices and gas prices stay high for a while.

More and more companies will pass on that, hit two households in different ways. 

BRIAN: How much do you think this is inevitable, what you were just [00:03:00] describing or already baked in? Even if, let's say they were to come to a peace agreement tomorrow, 

GUEST: Brian, there's an economic logic that is very, very clear.

When you get the sorts of supply disruptions associated with the war, the first thing that moves are energy prices and interest rates. So the average person pays more at the pump, and if you try to get a mortgage, the cost of your mortgage has gone up. That's phase one. That's done phase two, which we are in the midst of, and it is a done deal.

Is that you start seeing the increase in very selective things, energy and mortgages starting to spread through the economy, so you have a broader hit that takes longer to overcome Stage three, which thankfully the US is not in. [00:04:00] But Asia and Europe are looking, are staring at the face of it. 

BRIAN: Ah. Hold that.

Hold that for just a second because this is, this relates to the clip that I mentioned in the intro of your appearance on Marketplace that we aired last week, citing four stages of economic harm from the war. And you've just touched on the first two as they pertain to the United States. I wanna replay numbers three and four now, which sound more global and much more scary.

And then I'll invite you to expound on them. This is you from last week. 

GUEST: Parts of Asia unfortunately, have moved to phase three, which is not only do you get phase one and phase two, but you also get demand destruction. So you start worrying about economic growth. And of course, phase four, which I hope we never get to, would be financial instability, undermining the economy.

BRIAN: That's part of what made me think, okay, I gotta talk to this guy in more depth, in a longer segment on the show. So take us further into that. [00:05:00] What's happening in Asia or elsewhere that you're referring to there? 

GUEST: So in Asia, ships practically have come out of the Strait for about six weeks. And what they are looking at is not just high energy prices.

But a potential disruption in actual availability of fuel. And think a little bit of how you would react, Brian if suddenly someone tells you, you, it's not that you're gonna pay more at the pump, but it's not clear that the gas station will be open. That would, that changes behavior. We found that when you go from, from a price shock to a quantity shock, the risk of tipping points.

Increases meaning that you start seeing damage to economic growth to economic activity. And that is a much bigger hit to the economy. And the minute that happens, then you start weighing about default phase, which is financial [00:06:00] instability. There is a, an economic logic that. I suspect 99.9% of economists would tell you yes, that's absolutely the case.

The question is how quickly do you go through it? What are the tipping points and what are the circuit breakers? And that goes back to your question, what if the war ends to end tomorrow? Well, it will take us some time to restore production of energy in the Middle East. It would take us some time to get the ships in the right place.

It's not like a light switch. You don't switch it back on and everything comes on, it takes some time. Mm-hmm. But we would be stuck with the phase one and phase two, but we would avoid phase three and phase four. 

BRIAN: On this phase three that you said some countries in Asia have already moved into, I've heard a theory that that's why Pakistan was eager to broker these peace talks because their economy is being hit so hard by the war.

Does that sound right to you? 

GUEST: That may be a reason. It certainly also [00:07:00] explains the, the reporting why China pushed Iran to agree to the two week cease fire, fearing that there are worse things ahead. The rest of the world is really concerned. I think here in the US we are lucky beca because we have energy independence.

We are an exporter of energy. The rest of the world is mostly an import of energy, and I can tell you the, the extent of economic concern is a magnitude higher than it is here. 

BRIAN: What are the impacts on China that would've led them to pressure Iran to get involved in the talks? 

GUEST: So they are worried that they're gonna lose their second supplier of cheap oil.

The first one was Venezuela, because both Venezuela and. Iran are subject to sanctions. China has been able to buy oil from them at a significant discount estimated to about 30% of [00:08:00] the international price. India also has taken advantage of that, so they risk losing their second supplier, not just of oil, but of cheap oil relative to their alternative.

Now. As you know, the Chinese tend to plan, so they have one of the highest storage levels in the world. They've been accelerating not only the transition to green tech, but they've also restarted coal mines. So they, they have taken some steps to protect themselves, but they are looking at disrupted supply of oil and higher prices.

Of oil and it's sign significantly higher. And that's where the economic concern comes in over what's been going on between the us, Israel, and Iran 

It's like a mess of jigsaw puzzle, isn't it? What are the key interventions that need to change to create a circular shift in that market, in that city? How do we [00:09:00] finance that and how do we make the most of that opportunity and then become the challenges that we're seeing? What do you really need to get right?

What are banks doing? What are investors doing? What kind of innovation is being financed? What are the opportunities like? What's really growing? What is this concept? How do we grab the opportunity of it? Why are we not seeing a broader shift across the economy? As a whole, welcome to the Circular Economy Show.

Today I'm thrilled to be joined by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Strategic Finance and Investment Team, Emily Healy and Joe Rogers. In this episode, we're asking why is it that despite the success of individuals circular business models, we aren't seeing a wider shift across the entire economy? We'll explore how systemic investing and capital orchestration could be the tools we need to take this transition forward.

And we'll be looking at where we are currently seeing this sinking brought into on the ground real life demonstration projects.[00:10:00] 

Well, thank you so much, em and Joe for joining me today and, for looking like you've just rocked up from the catwalks of Milan. For those of you who are just listening to the Circular Economy Show today, em and Joe present both the beauty and the Brainiac package for the foundation and we're thrilled to have them here now.

You guys have been working together. On finance and the circular economy for roughly four years. Em, you've been here eight, Joe, you joined the foundation about four years ago. Mm-hmm. You must have navigated some huge changes in that time. What are you sensing now as we move on? Well, thank you for embarrassing us.

I No worries. To start off, the colleague you can rely on, maybe, maybe helpful to start about how things have shifted over over the last few years. 'cause when we really started, when we set [00:11:00] up, our program on finance, it was in 2019 and the world was in a very different place. It was pre COVID. Mm-hmm.

It was pre a lot of the geopolitical things that we've seen and there was a real groundswell in the finance. Sector, circular economy was starting to, to, to become a more known concept. And it was a really interesting and exciting time to be thinking about it. And I think it was the reason we did start the program was because there was an, there, there was this interest from the financial sector and we kind of started by highlighting where is finance already flowing?

What are banks doing, what are investors doing? What kind of innovation is being financed? What are the opportunities? What's really growing? And, and then we sort of have seen it at that peak, that kind of excitement. And growth in, in financing peak at about 2021.

And then sort of go down slightly as it's become a more challenging economic environment. And it's obviously not true. It's not true just a circular economy. But, but sustainable investing in general is, [00:12:00] when, when people are, when it's harder economic times. The people shift to things that are more familiar and there's less willingness to take risks.

So I guess that's, we're seeing some of that. Yeah. You've literally ridden that financial rollercoaster. Well, and I think so much of the shift as well has been, has reflected in the, in the shift that the foundation's been through as well. It started about what is the circular economy, and a lot of the questions that were coming from, from the finance sector then was what is this concept?

How do we, how do we take, grab the opportunity of it? And over the last four years we've really seen that shift to going to, how do we finance that and how do we make the most of that opportunity and overcome the challenges that we're seeing? And I think in that past, we've seen a lot of those exciting opportunities come, be realized.

and that is reflected in the, in the business world and, and some of, some of the amazing, . Growth that's been seen around certain economy and specific certain economy businesses as well. Yeah, I mean, to date, I, correct me if I'm wrong guys, but we have highlighted successful [00:13:00] circular business models, fashion resale, the refurbishment of electronics.

So if these guys are manage managing to gain successful traction and finance. Why are we not seeing a broader shift across the economy as a whole? Yeah, I mean, I think, and as you said, we've seen those great individual success stories, and that's been realized from everything that we've always, always talked about with the CER economy.

consumers gaining access to assets and products at low value, those products existing in the C economy for longer, and then the benefits, um, from nature and climate as well. And, and that's a lot of the reasons why. Finance is attracted to certain economy. It's kind of got that economic value and then also the environmental impact as well.

and it's even to say those success stories come from, hard, difficult to finance opportunities. It's not like it's really easy. So, it's an, as you said, Emily, it's a difficult funding environment now, and a lot of those. [00:14:00] Circular business mo models and circular businesses require high, upfront investment.

often it's starting at a very small scale and needing to bridge to larger scales to really build that demand and that supply. Yeah. and so the, and then needing a lot of technical knowledge to, to make those successful. So while they've, Being, there's been those bright spots of success and they, and those individual stories, they still face an uphill struggle against the, a broader system.

Yeah. May maybe jump in and say, and no, we would've ex and I think something we would've liked to see over the last six years I've been focusing on it is just more of those examples and no, we've. Got some really strong case examples that we love talking about, but I think something that's become more apparent and, and, and we've heard that reflected through financial institutions that we've talked to, is that.

If individual success stories themselves are not, are not enough. If you invest in just, if you are looking at just one solution and trying to fund that, you're [00:15:00] missing the whole systemic perspective of circular economy that, that, you have. Circular businesses that are still trying to operate in a linear economy.

And that's always gonna be an uphill struggle. They're always gonna fa face potentially higher costs, lack of demand or, uncertain demand. Maybe an uncertain policy environment about whether those policies are going to create incentives for their no, create incentives for their business model or not In future.

There's a, a hope that that will happen, but it's not always the case. inter. policies that help internalize, carbon emissions would, would, would again, increase the, would, would enhance the business case for certain chronic business models, but it's. have to think about it in a system.

For example, if think about a recycling plant that's, it's downstream. It's not an example that we really like to give, but it is something that gets funded typically, um, as a yeah, absolutely. A second project that it does get funded, whether it's by, development finance, whether it's by public sector government funding, or it might be bank funding.

but that plant will never [00:16:00] be. If you're just thinking about, investing in that in, in, in one single facility, it will never be optimized. It will run at, at a lower margin than it possibly could. or, or, or potentially it would have to be subsidized 'cause the economics won't stack up if you aren't also thinking about where's the feedstock for that plant?

Like what now? Where, where's the materials? What quality? Do you have enough quantity? Where's it coming from? How complicated is the legit logistics? What cost does that add? Does that add, how well is it sorted? how well do, if you think about the whole chain, people in their houses, are they, is their education campaigns are they aware of, of what they need to do to, to help that?

That whatever their packaging or whatever it is, that they have actually be recycled at the end of the day. And then at the other end, on the demand side, you also think about someone's gotta use this material. who are the companies that are going to use it? Have they, have they is there commitments?

Is there certainties that, that someone is going to buy that recycled material? and no further down the chain for someone to. Buy it. [00:17:00] They also have to, to figure out how they integrate it into their products. Think about how their products are designed, think about their factories and their manufacturing processes.

Can they just substitute one for the other? Do they need to rethink how they do that? So it's, it's a, it's a really complex system and I think, that's why we're not seeing the broader shift is because there's too much focus on individual solutions rather than Yeah. Yeah. The whole, this whole system.

So if we were to think of it. I mean, it's like a massive jigsaw puzzle, isn't it really? If the system isn't currently designed to bring all those pieces together, which it's not at the moment, is there an alternative? Yeah. I dunno if you wanted to Jo jump. Sorry, Joe. No. Is there an alternative? I, we were looking at each other then I, I mean.

In many cases, the right financing does exist. to, as Emily mentioned in that example, we do see infrastructure being funded, but that the complexity which Emily [00:18:00] spoke about in that system is just down to one material stream, to one investment. And that is absolutely the mandate of finance.

finding those single point, solutions, and matching their return and risk expectations. but the sort of. Way to knit those things together. we're seeing, some really interesting emergent ideas in systemic investing. so this is the sort of concept that you can bring together different stakeholders from across the system, not just finance business as well, and, and, and policy.

and then actually starts to create, Interventions at all points. So upstream, downstream, and, and, and in the middle, to maximize that opportunity and get that multiplier effect. So to come back to the recycling plant example, if you have a really, well resourced collection and sorting system, then that is no longer a cost that has to be absorbed by that recycling plant.

and then you, then you on the, on the other side, you have a demand for the, for the product that's come, [00:19:00] that's coming out. So. It's something which is, that we, we see, this, this concept of systemic investing as a really good fit for circular economy. and, and an emerging idea that we are starting to, explore and understand more.

and we think there's a really great, great opportunity to bring those financial, stakeholders together and. Move beyond that single point of financing and start to really build, longer lasting systemic shifts. Yeah, I was, oh, sorry. Maybe, maybe if I jump in, I think it's, It feels like a really natural fit.

And in terms of the shift that we've gone through, initially it was f it was really trying to meet finance where they are and we're still trying to do that, un understanding what are their risk return expectations? what are the types of capital that they have available to allocate to circular economy, how does that align with.

The sector, geography, et cetera. And then highlighting the relevant opportunities, for, that's where circular economy was growing and that fit within our vision of a circular economy. 'cause I think that's a, a crucial piece of helping [00:20:00] the fi that we've done to date is help financial players understand what counts for circular economy and what's not.

What's actually gonna get us towards the, the system we're trying to build. But we've hit up against this wall of, of, that just ends up highlighting single point solutions and misses the systemic perspective. So this, no, so, so trying to bring the, the ideas of systemic investing, which is no. Lots of players have, have been really building on this.

we've been inspired by the Trans Cap Initiative in particular, over the last couple of years. and trying to think about how you bring a systemic perspective, not just to ha the changes we're making, the real economy, but also bringing the financial perspective. can I just take you back, what is the TransCap Initiative?

for those who don't know. So they are a not-for-profit and they are, I guess, a similar type of organization to us, but they are, developing and, communicating about the concept of, of systemic investing. Right. Okay. Sorry, just I'm, and building the field and, and knowledge base. Thanks. And highlighting case examples.

And I [00:21:00] think there, there are, there are some emerging examples that that, that they've highlighted of how systemic investing is being. Is being employed to help place-based systemic transitions in particular. I think that lines up really nicely with where our work is going, where we're really trying to demonstrate implementation on the ground.

Yeah. and, and when you actually talk about financing, if you want, if you're gonna get practical, it's, it actually has to be in a place what are you financing? Is it, is it. Is it infrastructure or is it a company or is it, Yeah. What is it? Yeah. So how is this showing up in our work at the moment?

I think for us it's really about trying to put the ideas into practice in the real life projects. Mm-hmm. And, and maybe something to say is that. We talk a lot about the financing of the real stuff in circular economy, like infrastructure, business models, and innovation. I guess being the three, the three design and innovation that we talk about a lot, but it's also thinking about a much broader [00:22:00] spectrum of capital.

Also thinking about how we bring in philanthropic capital and the typical, players that would fund. policy engagement and shifts or consumer behavior check campaigns or, or, or, shifts to understanding how you shift governance models to, to better suit a, a, a circular economy. So it's, it, it, it's, it's bringing the whole picture together, not just, not just the, the real things that, that, that money can go to.

Yeah. And I think to build on that, When we talk about bringing different types of capital together, and, and I think this is a, a lot of the conversation, blended finance is brought up a lot. And I think what the, the, the key thing to note here is that systemic investing in capital orchestration goes beyond just, bringing together public and private money in, in, in one, in one facility.

But it's also about how do you then engage, corporates to sign offtake agreements or as you said, philanthropy to provide grants for, so social programs that would also support these shifts in these systems. and I think that's like one of the early examples that we're [00:23:00] looking at is, working in Brazil on, on, on waste management infrastructure.

there was, again, as, as Emily said, building a place-based project around a city. Yeah. and bringing together all of those different three main players of business, finance and policy. but also still talking to philanthropy about how do we, Fundamentally change, the way that that waste streams are managed in one particular place and.

That also echoes that broader shift that we're seeing from like, what to how and we can actually start to get real in places and, and, and put numbers to, to these projects, which, allow, allow us to see this in, in a practical, sense. I think at the moment the, a lot of this work is, is, is just in the idea phase.

So we're really excited to be taking it from the end idea phase into actual real projects. Yeah. Maybe Yeah, I can I also jump in on that? 'cause I think it's, in terms of how the, the process like works in on those projects is we've typically brought no defined a vision for circular economy in [00:24:00] our key sectors.

SAR plastic packaging. Yeah. And brought business and policy around that. And that's still the, that's still the, the foundation. And that hasn't gone away. And the way we see it is that now when we're moving into specific places, you first need to understand. What are the key interventions that need to change to create a circular shift in that market, in that city?

And which ones are likely to have the biggest outsize impact? Mm-hmm. what do you really need to get right? Yeah. For all the other pieces of the puzzle to flow and follow, because it's really complex. You're not gonna be able to do it all. And then once you've identified those really key.

Intervention points. Mm-hmm. And how they connect to each other. playing that convening role, which we've always done at the foundation and with point business, with policy, with finance around the, this is the shift that we need to see. These are the interventions, but then the additional layer that we need to figure out, and this is a.

No, this is all, this is all new work for us, so it's exciting. But yeah, it will be very emergent. We're not pretending that we have all the [00:25:00] answers by any means. but, but I think But you are working towards them, right? Hope. Yeah. Hopefully. And I think there's, know that there's, there's a, now I think there's a growing community of practice Yeah.

Who hopefully we can learn from. Mm-hmm. And, and hopefully we can also. Share learnings from the, from our projects as we're coming out and as we figure out, what are the different types of capital that we think are needed and, and from, for that system shift in, for the, for the project in Brazil.

And, and, and the, where we're thinking about is, is, is ca can we, can we mobilize? Business and philanthropic, contributions to funds, to fund, that system to create the, make the business case stack up that then you can crowd in public and private financing like development, finance, also private finance, to, to.

Demonstrate. Yeah. well, working circular systems that whilst we also work on the, the, the policy engagement side. and no, it's, it's, it's, it's exciting but it's very new and I think we, over time we hope that we'll be able to. Replicate, develop our thinking and replicate that across other program [00:26:00] areas in crystal minerals and fashion.

Yeah. And other plastic programs set up a blueprint type of thing. Yeah. And share that pub and, and hopefully share that, more broadly. Hopefully we'll be back here in a year and have some real, some real, real things to share. Although this is obviously really long term work, we're talking about for this project is five to seven years.

Yeah. Just in, one place and, and, and hoping to replicate that in other major reasons in the global south. Joe, what's key to success? I think as a, as a, as Emily just said, it's really co it's really complex work and I, and I think it's, already key to highlight that. It's not there's a load of time and money sitting around waiting to do this.

This is, this is an extra layer of coordination, and of convening that needs to, come together around those specific systems and problems, and, and work together to, to maximize those and, and to, to find those out. So I, I feel like for us at EMF as a, as a, as a, as a foundation. Do [00:27:00] playing, playing that role of bringing those, key stakeholders and actors together, is a, is a really.

Key factor to, to, to providing that, that time and resource enable in being able to do that and building the trust and the confidence in this idea. Yeah. to, to showing that it's something that can work in, in the real world. I think also like-minded. no financial players. It's always, and I even know exactly the right wording because we're talking about such a, some, a spectrum from funders to financial institutions to no calls, different types of players, which means complicated, but I think we'll probably find a natural.

Fit, with financial players and stakeholders who already have, a, a systemic mindset, an ability to, to, ha have impact really embedded into their mandate. So philanthropic, no foundations and philanthropy who we already work very closely with, but also development, finance, and public sector finance who again, have a mandate to, to, to.[00:28:00] 

Yeah. To build that. Yeah. Create, create, yeah. Create impact and yeah. not, no, there's obviously, we've always engaged very closely with a private finance audience, but I think they will follow, no, they will things need, all the pieces need to line up for them to be able to engage. So I think there, in terms of working this through, we'll probably find a bit of a coalition of the willing with the, with the, with the stakeholders who are, who are already more aligned to our, to this thinking.

Absolutely. As we. Start on this journey. It's about learning together and understanding how this, these ideas and this theory land in the real world and, and the real challenges that need to be worked through. whether that's, the right governance, the right, d different types of finance and different types of projects.

but identifying those stakeholders and players that want to go a lot on, on that, journey with us and, and be that coalition of the willing. Thank you guys so much for joining me today, and if anyone can take on the challenge, I know it's you too. and I want you back in a year to report with your progress, please.

Sounds like we'd love to. [00:29:00] Good. See you later. Thanks so much to Emily and Joe for taking us through how in many cases, the right financing is definitely out there, but more thoughtful allocation and coordination could result in better and more resilient outcomes. As we discussed, concerted action within a system builds true economic resilience and through capital orchestration.

Finance doesn't just enable change. It can drive it. Thanks so much for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a like or a comment and share with your colleagues and friends. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we'll see you next time.

One thing that strikes me listening to these clips, these, these voters seem pretty read in on what's going on right now.

I guess, can you talk a little bit, as you watch these focus groups, uh, does it feel [00:30:00] like these are people who are reading and watching the news every single day? Or I guess how, talk a little bit more about the sort of information environment that these voters live in. Well, Iran has certainly broken through.

Mm-hmm. I mean, I, I wouldn't say that these voters listen to news 24 hours a day. There are a lot of things they don't know. You know, you show 'em pictures of their representatives in Georgia, they don't know who they are. Oh, that's interesting. But the war has broken through and that's also because the war is affecting their daily lives.

It's causing prices to go up. They understand that there's a connection between what's happening overseas and gas prices being high at the pump. There's an economic cost that people are being asked to pay for the war, and Donald Trump says it. He says, you know, it's a small price to pay. For, for making sure Iran doesn't have a bomb.

That's not something these voters agree with. Yeah, and in general they believe it's just not worth it. They don't think all the money and all the resources and the focus that Trump is putting into this war is worth the time. Uh, one woman, she's a Republican, she said this clearly, she's like, I don't think this is worth it.

Her name was Jia. It just doesn't seem like it's, [00:31:00] it has resulted in anything positive. I just haven't seen, I don't, I guess I don't have anything that's saying it's going poorly, but I have nothing that's saying it's going positive. And I don't think the cost is worth what they're doing. Yeah. So she's one of those voters who isn't, I can't, you know, like unlike Nick, she can't like tell you, I've been reading this in the New York Times and I see what's going on.

She's like, in general, I'm just reading the room and I get a sense that this isn't good for me. This isn't gonna help me in the future, and it's definitely not helping me. Now as I'm seeing oil prices rise, I mean, is that the economic connection completely? Is it just gas prices rising or is there something broader about this economic connection?

No, I think there's something broader. Joe talked about. How he feels about the economy and specifically talking about what Trump promised to do. He said day one, he was gonna bring the prices down on eggs and other things. Um, he's cut subsidies to health insurance, so that's gone up. Um, you know, I don't, I see my pocket, but.

Pocket book being hit and he's building a new ballroom for some reason that we don't need, you [00:32:00] know, how about you put some money toward us? How about you put some money toward us? I think that's the biggest takeaway. I mean, these are voters who were asked what are Trump's priorities and do they align with your priorities?

And that was his answer to that. In other words, no they don't. And um, you know, the problem is that Donald Trump promised to do a lot of things about. High prices and he's done the opposite. This war is so inextricably linked with the major issue that voters think is important right now, which is the cost of living.

I mean, just to say this again, because I think it was the theme of this conversation that these voters were having, which is it is distracting Trump, like Iran is distracting Trump from solving economic issues. It is not just that. We're spending all these resources, it's that if he's focused on this, he's not focused on these other issues that are only getting worse.

No one thinks any part of their budget is getting better in recent months and they don't think it's getting better in the future either. Well, that's what I was gonna ask. Is it trump's, it seems like [00:33:00] part of Trump's argument is this is short term pain. A lot of the, A lot of the what? I mean this is the same argument about the tariffs short-term pain for some sort of long-term gain.

Do voters buy into that idea that things are going to get better at some point? No, and actually there are a couple things that came up, especially related to AI that seems to be like a pressure point for them or, or at least a looming anxiety about the economy. One, they're seeing job losses. This has come up in every focus group now for at least the, the past three that we've seen in the past three states.

We've, we've heard from voters, they think that AI is gonna lead to more job losses than they have already. And uh, there were a couple questions in these focus groups about data centers. A lot of voters said that they're worried that the companies who run these data centers won't be taking on their fair share of energy costs.

So it's like a mix of like anxieties here, it's present and then future. And Trump, in their view, uh, seems pretty distracted. Every single one of these voters. Said that they feel more anxious now about the economy than they did when Trump came into office. And [00:34:00] again, the job of any president is to make voters, citizens feel safe and secure, not scared and anxious.

So now it's the war. It's Trump's behavior. It's the extreme posts. All of those things are making voters more anxious, not less.

And Maura, all the people we're hearing from are people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024. How do they feel or how are they engaging with the promises he made on the campaign trail? Now? Well, on some promises like closing the border, they feel pretty good about it, but on a lot of other promises, not only do they not feel that he's delivering, they feel he's doing the opposite.

Here's Corey, so his his priority with the war. Uh, in Iran, that, that is not anything that I approve of. Uh, I prefer to take care of home first. And Dawn said almost the same thing. I just feel like he made a lot of promises about our economy and, you know, make America first and be, you know, strong American drill, baby drill, all those kinds of things, just [00:35:00] domestic.

We've heard this now in multiple focus groups where folks who were. Explicitly voting for Trump because he did not sound like a warhawk. They feel particularly betrayed by that right now. It's come up at least two or three times now, which I think is interesting. But it's also interesting, you know, president Trump did also run.

Heavily on this immigration promise. Unauthorized crossings at the border are way down during no doubt about that presidency. No doubt about that. How much credit is he getting for that, or how much does that matter to these voters in terms of as they're weighing everything else? Well, this is the big question that we're gonna be pursuing as we get closer to November every month with, with these different focus groups, because they do give him credit.

They like what he did on the border. They're not crazy about what he did in Minneapolis. They like what he did on the border. The question is, is that gratitude going to. Outweigh their anxiety about the war and the economy. We don't know that. We don't know yet how their feelings about Trump will affect their votes for governor, Congressman, Senator.

Um, and that's something we're gonna be [00:36:00] drilling down on with the future focus groups. I think what we're seeing is their frustration with everything else overshadowing how. Maybe happy they are about what's going on in the border. You know, in other fo focus groups we heard, we heard voters say, you know, I'm really happy with the way that Trump is handling the border.

But I feel like the further we've gotten into this year, the closer we get to the midterms, I'm hearing more and more people say, I on the whole disapprove of the job that Trump is doing, even though I am happy with what's happening on the border, and you know, tell me if we're still gonna be at war. At the end of October.

Mm-hmm. Tell me what gas prices are gonna be at the pump. I mean, those are gonna be the important data points that people are gonna make their decisions on. I mean, it is clear also in public polling about that the Iran war is not popular with America. That is not, there's nothing in these focus groups that contradicts public opinion.

Polling it, illustrates it. It doesn't contradict it. But what. If, if, if they're unhappy with that. But what do they want Trump to focus on? I mean, I hear these kind of vague America [00:37:00] first, that domestic things. Are they more, no. They want him to bring prices down. That's what they say over and over again.

You said you'd bring, bring prices down on day one, but instead as. Our voters said, you're cutting, healthcare prices are up. You don't seem to be paying to attention to us 'cause you're building a ballroom for some reason. I actually think that could be a big difference is just even if Trump was attempting, making the show of caring about the economy.

'cause right now every conversation is about his political enemies as usual, but then also his now foreign enemies abroad. It is. A big frustration among voters that he's just not even talking about it. This is what they're talking about. This is what they care about. And they feel like the president, it's not even at the top of his list anymore.

And I did hear at least one or two voters say that at one point. 'cause part of the conversation that the voters had with Rich Thau, who was the moderator from Engagious who, who was, um, talking to these folks during the focus groups. The question was, what do you think his priorities have been throughout his administration?

And a lot of folks said, you know, I thought the economy and immigration was at some point, but now it sounds like [00:38:00] none of that is, is at the top of his list and that is where the rub is. That is what they're most frustrated with, is like they, they have these priorities and the president has seemingly different ones.

I mean, looking ahead to the midterms, is it fair to say like, it's so interesting hearing from these voters in Georgia. Is it fair to say in a state like Georgia that these voters, uh, you know, matter more than many other places? Well, the reason we pick these states is because they're battleground states.

They have important senate races or an important, uh, bunch of house races. Yeah, we've been to Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan This month we went to Georgia. Um, yeah, these, these are important states. This is where the house majority. Might be won or lost. This is where the Senate majority might be won or lost.

So these are important states to follow. Yeah, and they're also important in presidential elections. And these are states where elections are close and when you have close elections and all it takes is a couple thousand votes here and there for, for not just house races, but Senate races to swing it is important what even small subsets of voters have to say.

Yeah. And Georgia, just as a reminder for folks, has [00:39:00] a lot of statewide races on the ballot this year. Governor, Senator, secretary of State, attorney General,

WOLFF: For years, the Iranians said to anyone who would listen, if we get attacked again, we will close the Strait of Hormuz. That is a narrow passageway linking the Arabian Sea to the Persian Gulf. Here's something to know. 20% of the world's, excuse me, oil passes through those strait that strait, a higher percentage of the world's liquified natural gas goes through there.

70 to 80% of the food eaten by the people who live in the Gulf monarchies, the seven or eight countries that ring that part of the world. [00:40:00] Through the, in other words, fuel, oil, gas, and food depend on that passageway and Iran dominates that passageway. In every way, economically, politically, militarily, geographically, you name it, they're in a position to close the gulf.

Uh, Strait of Hormuz. And when the United States and Israel attacked them this time, they did what they said they would do. They shut it immediately. Huge amounts of oil and gas. Sitting on ships heading towards the Strait of Hormuz, couldn't get through. It was too dangerous. Insurance companies wouldn't write policies to cover the boats in case they [00:41:00] got hit by Iranians who said, if you go through there and we don't allow it, we will shoot you down.

By the way, is there oil that they do allow going through the, the, the straight Yes. For example, Iranian oil being sold to China, which is where most of it goes, has been passing through the Strait of Hormuz without a problem. China has paid for it with money that Iran can and does use. To fight against the United States and Israel.

By the way, when the Gulf, when the Strait was closed and oil sat on tankers and couldn't be delivered, the world suddenly experienced an oil shortage. And the price of oil, as I'm sure you all know, shot up 10, 20, 30%. [00:42:00] The longer the war lasts, the more the price of oil will go up. It makes countries that export oil like the United States richer.

It also makes the country of Iran the other side richer. And above all the largest exporter of oil in the world, Russia is making a fortune, which enables it to fight the war in Ukraine That much better. Was that taken into account? Who knows. It's just the economics that I'm telling you about. Also, when you bomb a country and you bomb its oil facilities, which Israel or the United States have done, you create spectacular pollution, huge quantities of burning oil.

You all know what that means, and it's blowing across [00:43:00] Asia. It will eventually get everywhere on earth. This is already an ecological disaster, which will have all kinds of economic costs. Here's another thing. It costs billions and billions of dollars to fight a war. Mr. Trump just finished spending billions to, to.

Take away the leader of Venezuela, and that's a crisis waiting to happen. He's threatening Cuba. That's an expensive armada, half of which frightened Venezuela and Cuba, and then was sent to frighten Iran. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. Kind of hard to tell, but does it cost a ton of money? Oh, yeah. And so they gone to Congress and remember.

Congress has not declared a war, which the US Constitution says is the responsibility of Congress, but Mr. Trump is going to [00:44:00] Congress to get the money to fight the war that the Congress didn't authorize. It's not clear what's gonna happen, but he's asking $200 billion. And how does this work? Let's see. A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court said the tariffs which raised the $150 billion were unconstitutional, and there are lots of lawsuits demanding refunds.

So the 150 he thought might come in to deal with what? The fact that the United States is the largest debtor country in the world is not there, will not deal with him. Meanwhile, he's got an extra 200 for this war. And then he said for holding on to the empire, doing all those other things. He said, take Greenland.

Make Canada a 51st state. Take back the Panama Canal. I could go on. He wants to raise the defense, or excuse me, [00:45:00] war budget from 900 billion, roughly what it is now, to 1.5 trillion. That's an extra 600 billion, and then there's the 200 billion for the war in Iraq and the money not coming in from the tariffs.

We're gonna be not just the biggest debtor country in the world. We're gonna have one of the biggest deficits we've ever had this year, and who's gonna pay for all of that? What we're gonna borrow, it says the president, but the rest of the world doesn't wanna lend to the United States anymore. Let me quote to you, the Defense Minister in Germany, arguably our most important economic ally.

We didn't start this war. We weren't consulted about this war. We're not gonna pay for this war, and we are not gonna invest in this war. Whoa. That's a NATO [00:46:00] alliance fraying, and not just at the edges. The cost of this war is spectacular.

GOLDY: You talked about providing public options in a number of areas. One of the things you bring up, which seems to be a recurring theme on the podcast these days is sectoral bargaining. Uh, explain why that's important and how it would work. 

GUEST: Yeah, so one thing I argue for in my report is this idea from, of shifting from this liberal obsession with like delivering programs really well to taking a more sectoral approach.

And I mean that in two ways. So one is we should shift towards sectoral bargaining in our labor policy. Sectoral bargaining is the idea that instead of a union having to. Negotiate individually with employers that they should be able to negotiate at the sector wide level. And I think this makes pretty basic sense.

Like why would [00:47:00] nurses at one hospital, uh, have worse pay and benefits than nurses at another hospital a few miles away? We should be able to bargain at the level of healthcare workers. So I think sectoral bargaining is a really important way to rebalance power for workers. But I think a sort of additional idea is the idea of taking a sectoral approach to anti-poverty policy.

We know which sectors of our economy create conditions of poverty. It's like healthcare, childcare, utilities, groceries. These are the areas of of life that sort of dominate the affordability debate right now. Mm-hmm. But, you know, affordability I think is like this. It is sort of a sanitized way of saying that conditions of poverty are creeping up the income ladder.

And so I think instead of just delivering grocery assistance, we need a much more comprehensive approach to rebalancing power in the grocery sector. And so that sectoral approach would mean organizing the way the state engages in a [00:48:00] fundamentally different way than what we do right now. And as I mentioned before, there's this basic disconnect where the people who subsidize.

Markets often are like not in the same room as the people who regulate those markets, and that allows corporations to capture a pretty big share of public investments that are intended to counteract poverty. 

GOLDY: Yeah. If you think about it, if you think about, you know, obviously our I approach to market economies is that it's this complex adaptive system with various feedback loops.

You make one small change here, it creates another change elsewhere. It totally, it doesn't make any sense that we wouldn't bring these, uh, interventions together, that the regulators wouldn't be working with the people who are delivering the safety net programs, that we wouldn't be thinking of the tax system as part of, uh, this entire system.

Yeah, it's, um, it's a different way of approaching [00:49:00] it, but again, it is a lot more complicated and. Um, I think there's one benefit to our very complicated system of, or at least it has been our complicated system of delivering, uh, uh, safety net programs and uh, aid and so forth. And that is the more complicated it is, the harder.

It is to dismantle. Uh, it's one of my critiques of universal basic income when people tell me how much more efficient it would be just to give people money than to provide all of these services. And that's, well, once you've eliminated the social safety net and you've replaced it with a universal basic income, as efficient as that might be on paper now, all you need to do is erode the universal basic income and you've eliminated everything.

GUEST: You know, I have my own reasons for why I think universal basic income is not a silver bullet, but I don't think I agree with you that complexity [00:50:00] makes us safer. I think part of why Trump has been able to take a sledgehammer to the safety net is that it's so complicated that people don't really understand how it works.

It's so complicated that some of these programs. Just don't feel that good to receive, and so they are easier to attack politically. Notice how much harder it is to attack social security than it is to attack more complicated, fragmented programs. Social Security works because it's really straightforward.

You turn 65, you get your benefits and I think that we need, 

GOLDY: well, 67 now. 

GUEST: 67, yeah. Well, and fair enough. And, and actually we should, I think, be having a debate about lowering the retirement age, um, in this country, but we need more parts of our safety net to operate in that straightforward, accessible, guaranteed way.

GOLDY: Right. I can tell you. I'm 63 and so I've, [00:51:00] I started to investigate Medicare recently, and I gotta tell you, I was shocked. I just assumed that I would turn 65 and European style, socialized medicine. I'd suddenly, you know, no more premiums, no more deductibles, no more messing around with anything. Just one simple system.

Oh my God. Is it complex and it seems to be designed to drive people into Medicare Advantage where they can then take advantage of you. I think that's where the advantage comes from in the branding a 

GUEST: hundred percent. And just wait until you start getting calls from all of the insurance brokers who are gonna try to sell you a plan you don't actually need, because it turns out that they're taking kickbacks from Medicare Advantage providers to do so.

GOLDY: Yeah, 

GUEST: you touched on this briefly and I, I just wanted to sort of get it on the record because for a long time, giving people money was seen as the solution in, in various parts of the Democratic sphere. I know Vox was big into it, and I mean, we did [00:52:00] see some success, I think during the, the pandemic, during the lockdowns when we did send people money and it did, it did strengthen the economy.

But I was wondering if you could talk about why giving people money isn't the end all solution. Well, I think it's a big part of the solution, so I wanna be clear about that. I mean, cash is the most dignified, efficient way to help people who are struggling in our economy, and I think we would be in much better shape today if more of the safety net operated as cash-based programs.

But I think the challenging reality is that. If rents keep rising because we haven't fixed that marketplace. If healthcare costs keep rising because we haven't fixed that marketplace, then pumping more cash into people's pocketbooks is gonna get absorbed by broken markets. So I think cash. Is a floor that we should provide to more people, but it needs to be part of a much broader intervention into the economy.

I'm very skeptical that cash on [00:53:00] its own can do all of the heavy lifting for rebuilding an economy that is fair. 

GOLDY: So we're gonna put you in charge. No political constraints. You can fix the system however you want. What might it look like? The, uh, the next new deal that comes out of your report? 

GUEST: If I could sort of make one change today to the safety net, I would think about expanding social security for families with children.

We are such an outlier globally in our failure to provide a child allowance. Having a kid in this country is so expensive. Actually having a baby in this country precipitates a period of poverty for something like 40% of moms. That's ridiculous. We're the wealthiest nation on earth. Social Security has been one of the most effective anti-poverty programs in the country, and I think that a bold idea is that families with little kids need that [00:54:00] same kind of help.

Child tax credit showed us what is possible when we expanded it, uh, during the pandemic. We cut child poverty in this country in half in one year. That's remarkable. I think that there's no reason to believe that we shouldn't expand the promise of social security when people start a family. 

Donald Trump is in the midst of learning a political lesson that you would think he above anyone else would know, right? The lesson is that people really care about gas prices. Have you heard that one? Oil, natural gas, gasoline are the most important commodities in the world.

They are what modern civilization runs on. I think that's about to change because of how cheap and incredibly clean energy has gotten. But right now, you quite simply cannot run your society without fossil fuels. There's no other option. When the prices go up, people get pretty upset about it, and right now, prices are, as you may have noticed, way, way up because Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu started a pointless war in Iran.

A war that [00:55:00] killed 6,000 people, injured countless others. Displaced a million more has caused untold human misery and upended the lives of many, many people. It is also, as you might have heard. Happened to disrupt the global supply chain for the world's most important commodity. The thing, modern civilization runs on a disruption that continues day after day after day, to this very day, even with a seemingly indefinite seaside because.

As soon as the US started bombing, Iran started to control Strait of Hormuz. Something that was not the case before this war. Something that was long in this country, and they're pretty mad at Donald Trump for starting this war. Take a look at this chart. We, we, we were sort of marveling over this one today.

A lot of charts don't read on tv, but I think this one gives you the point. So that's from pollster G. Elliott Morris, who tracks Trump's approval on a bunch of different issues. And you can see there's a bunch of issues. They all go in the same direction. They all go down. But the one that's the lowest, the one all the way at the bottom [00:56:00] of your TV screen, the green line that is Donald Trump's approval on inflation and the cost of living.

Of course, that includes gas prices because not only is gas a major expenditure for nearly every American rising diesel costs in particular also make everything else more expensive. That doesn't even include the sort of inputs you get when you start getting into fertilizer and chemical products. And as you can see, Trump is just almost incomprehensibly unpopular when it comes to prices.

Literally off the chart. He is so underwater in fact, that he is off the chart. In fact, that chart doesn't go low enough to show his massive minus 40 approval on the issue. According to one analysis. This is an amazing historical tidbit. To give you a sort of sense of comparison, Donald Trump is currently less popular on inflation than that man on your screen.

Jimmy Carter. [00:57:00] Carter, the guy who oversaw stagflation, the guy who was in president during the 79 energy crisis, the guy with the sweaters and the Malaise speech. I mean, just ask any voter at the gas pump. It is bad, you know? Um, people gotta live, people got to eat, you know what I'm saying? And believe it or not, um, transportation is very, very important.

And you know, you have to choose whether you, uh, drive or eat, you know? So I mean, gas prices or are crazy. I mean, that was the whole thing that Trump promised everyone, that people voted for as they lower gas prices. And here we are. So. Yeah. Crazy low, lower prices on everything is what he said. Groceries, gas, everything.

I feel like everything is just more expensive. So now Trump is stuck. His shifting posture with Iran, I mean, we, we can hardly keep track of it. We're, we're, that's our job is to keep track of it and you almost can't and, and that sort of merry-go-round. He's [00:58:00] been doing negotiations obliteration, that's made any kind of deal to reopen the Strait exceedingly difficult.

We're, we're not currently negotiating as far as anyone knows. And none of this is winning over the American public, as you saw from the chart. So basically what they're left with is a strategy to just lie. The fact of the matter is that all of the cylinders are kicking. It is good news. You can even feel in our environment how good things are getting gas prices continue to come down, which means that your groceries will come down a little bit as well.

Okay, two things. First of all, I love the fact that they're showing the, the crypto stocks while he's talking like, yes. Wow, a crypto rally. Second of all, did you catch what he said? Gas prices continue to come down. Senator Tim Scott. That is simply not true and you don't need to go do a bunch of research to come to that conclusion.

It's plainly a lie in the most obvious [00:59:00] sort of inexplicably, condescending way. Nationally, the average price of gas, that's something we tabulate closely. It's four 30 at a gallon. Honestly, it might be even higher as of tonight, according to the live tracking data, because it's been going up by the hour, even the conservative number is up 30 cents from a week ago, up by, well over a dollar since the war started.

Again, that's just the average. Believe me, out west, they would be happy to pay $4 and 30 cents instead of over six bucks a gallon like now. Even if we just look at Senator Scott's state of South Carolina, the state he proudly represents the average price of gas. There is about $3 90 cents a gallon. It was $3 and 65 cents a month ago.

Meanwhile, a year ago, it was 2 83, more than a dollar cheaper now to bend over backwards, to be fair to the senator, we did find this one little nugget in the data. It does appear that the price of diesel in South Carolina is down slightly from the highest ever recorded average, which it hit. Three weeks [01:00:00] ago, thanks to Donald Trump, but come on, Senator as Petroleum Analyst, Patrick De Haan points out today, the price of gas is up in every single state compared to a week ago.

In fact, he says prices are going up so rapidly that the algorithms he uses to track them are having trouble keeping up. In fact, I'm gonna talk to him about that in just a moment. So while there might be some small fluctuations day-to-day, it is simply wrong to say that gas prices are down. That's not even spin.

Right. It's just a lie. Even the, the very Trump friendly CNBC host, Joe Kernan wouldn't let the Republican majority leader get away with lying about gas prices. People that will remember you go back two years ago, we were paying almost $6 a gallon for gasoline. Right now it's in the threes. Obviously we've seen a, a jump with the Iran conflict, but when were we, we paying six, it's still 50.

What is that? Well, two, two and a half years ago, I don't think we were, but if you look [01:01:00] at it, that wasn't the average price. Look at where we're now. We're, we're over 30% below where we were just two years ago. Today we are 30% below where we were two years ago. We must have been on vacation in California, I think, I think two years ago in, in April of 2024, we were at about 365.

So we're actually above. Uh, where we were then. Yes. Thank you. Now, there are ways one could spin the Trump economy of positive light. You know, there there is a difference about spinning and lying, right? Uh, and, and spinning is part of politics. I mean, you, you could, there's good faith spinning. You could talk about the stock market, which has been going up.

You could talk about massive and spiking business investment, which we saw in some of the numbers that came out today. That's real. That's happening. But if your message going into the midterms is to just plainly lie to people's faces on camera, right in front of them about gas prices, the price that they see every day driving around, I think voters are gonna laugh you outta office.

I mean, even Trump is simply trying to sort of [01:02:00] kick the can down the road. The gas will go down as soon as the war's over. It'll drop like a rock. There's so much of it. It's all over the place, sitting all over the oceans of the world, and it'll be, it'll go down. It's also not really true. Gas prices rise quickly, but they often take a long time to go down.

Plus, again, as we've covered now for two months, Trump has absolutely no plan to end the war. He can't even articulate what the strategic end he's trying to meet as it changes every day. Right, and just last week, remember he said he is no rush at all. His new big thing is he's gonna blockade the blockade.

Then today they're trying to get a coalition of willing to un blockade it.

If you are a Republican running for Office of November, and I suspect a few of you do watch this program, I would just say I would not hope for an assist from Donald Trump, especially because, and I think this is important, I would estimate he spends right now conservatively about.

[01:03:00] 90% of his waking moments thinking about his ballroom. In light of today's Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act, do you want Republican states in the south to look at re uh, drawing congressional districts before the midterm? You have to tell me when did the ruling come out? I've been with the astronauts.

I've been. Contractors because we're trying to get the ballroom built. Yeah. Ahead of schedule. It's, it's right on schedule. It's ahead of schedule now. I want to keep it that day way. There's been some talks about changes to your security after what took place. Changing my security. Changing your security after what took place.

Well, they did a pretty good job actually. You know, they stopped. They NFL running back. I mean, he was like a running back. In fact, if you ever got out, they're probably gonna sign him. It's a pretty tough. Situation now, right outside, we have something that's on time, on budget, actually ahead of time and ahead of budget, depending on finishes.

You know, finishes is a big difference between marble and Onyx in price, [01:04:00] but it's right on budget, right on time. Do you see how like he go and then he comes back to the ballroom? And a question pulls him this way, but he comes back to the ballroom. Oh, the, there was a a huge, there was an attempt on your life.

Very scary. True. There was, let's talk about the ballroom finishes. For what it's worth, the ballroom, the thing they're pivoting to the things he's obsessed with. The thing that every Republican now wants to talk about is the central priority for America in the year of our Lord. 2026. That ballroom is also very unpopular.

Who to thunk it? Voters are actually against it two to one in the latest polling. Donald Trump doesn't care. He is literally measuring the golden drapes for his ballroom. I'm sure he's actually talked to the contractor about finishes for those instead of, for instance, trying to lower gas prices. And I don't think voters were gonna let Republicans off the hook for it.

It wasn't this high before he became president, man. Gas was was three something [01:05:00] B, barely $3. Now it's four. You know, it is. He don't need to be talking about ballroom man. You need to be trying to fix the economy. Better yet, you just need to retire and let JD Vance let somebody else run the country. Well, that's one vote for JD Vance.

GREG: this economy is largely the creation of one person, Donald Trump, and I want to get into that in a bit. Political reports on this new Republican memo that shows striking findings. It's from Americans for Prosperity, the Koch backed group, and that's its own story, which we'll get to. But for now, I wanna read this line from.

Our internal polling in several battleground states and one-on-one conversations with voters show that for the first time, Democrats are more trusted on the economy and inflation. Monica, that's striking. Other polls have shown this as well. Trump's 2024 victory was all about the economy and inflation and Democrats were in just terrible shape on both.

Due to what you talked about, the post COVID [01:06:00] inflation shock, how do you account for this turnaround? 

MONICA: Well, I think that, uh, Trump was riding a long term advantage that Republicans had on the economy for at least since Reagan, people have, American voters have tended to think that Republicans are better for the economy, largely because of their rhetoric on small businesses, on cutting taxes, and people tend to think that that's good.

So I think that he had, he came into office with a huge advantage on the economy that he really blew, um, that in the first few things that he did as president were to kind of squander that trust that people had, people saw right away that the things he was doing wasn't what. You know, they, the things he was doing weren't what they wanted from him.

And so I think that that has given an opening for people to think about the democratic rhetoric on the economy more and to maybe start trusting the Democratic Party more on what they say the economy needs. 

GREG: It's just kind of amazing because not only did [01:07:00] Republicans have this deep built-in advantage on the economy that you talked about, which is largely unearned, but goes back many decades.

Trump also had this big unearned advantage on the economy, and I was doing some reporting up in Reading, Pennsylvania about what happened with the Latino vote there in 2024, move towards Trump. And what I was struck by was how deeply this cultural picture of Trump as this. Crack businessman who builds big things and makes things happen and is an entrepreneurial spirit, how deeply that had taken hold with a lot of low information voters.

That that's just something that I think Democrats were un, were really unable to do anything about. And yet that's been pissed away too. 

MONICA: Yeah, that's right. And I think people forget that the vast majority of voters aren't reading the really long investigative pieces that show that Trump actually wasn't a very good businessman.

I mean, you can find all of the evidence. [01:08:00] You want to show that Trump inherited most of his wealth. He squandered it. His early successes as a builder or as a real estate person, really based on his father's work and, uh, he was never really the businessman he portrayed on tv, but people still had this idea, this really long held idea of him as a businessman.

That was his. Know public persona. That was really ingrained and I think that it was always gonna take a lot of work to try to chip away at that. I'm not even sure the Democratic party even really tried, and I don't know if it would've worked if they had, so, you know. People, just, a lot of people had an idea that he was a businessman.

They have an idea that the country needs a businessman or at least, uh, someone who thinks like a businessman to run it, which is really not how the country want runs. But that's a whole other story. And so, you know, he, it's kind of amazing that he really has squandered that in, um, just a little over a year.

But he ha But he has, people don't believe that about him [01:09:00] anymore. They think he's making the wrong decisions. 

GREG: And also the other cultural picture of him is as the guy who fires people, who just makes things happen really quickly, you know? And so, well, here's another line I want to read from the memo quote As it stands today, our view is that the Republican Senate majority is at risk.

Monica, I think the Senate map is still awfully hard. Democrats have to net four seats in some really tough states for them. But if there's anything that can get Democrats there, it's this kind of widespread economic distress. Can you talk about that? 

MONICA: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we had talked about it a minute ago, but the truth is that there was a pretty substantial number of voters who thought, uh, at the end of the Biden administration, the economy is not where I want it to be.

Trump's a businessman and he can get us back. And so that was his huge advantage with a lot of voters in the middle, a lot of independents, a lot of, uh, swing voters to the extent that they exist. Um, and a lot [01:10:00] of people who were upset about Biden's economy and so who just. Didn't turn out to vote for Kamala Harris, Vice President Kamala Harris.

And so, you know, I think that, um, the fact that Republicans are in this position is completely attributable to Trump squandering that trust with voters. And I think it's really kind of amazing because Democrats always probably had an advantage in the house. The party that isn't in the White House has an advantage in the house, in the midterms.

Kind of one of the things you can take to the bank. For the most part, the Senate map is really difficult, but if the candidates are right, if the wins are right, if we are still stuck in Iran, if we're still stuck in a lot of conflicts globally, if tariffs are still bad, if the price of oil stays high, if people, if inflation is up, if people don't have faith that the economy is gonna get better, you really start to see where Democrats have an opening, I think.

GREG: So let's just talk a little more about that point you're making, which is that Trump created this [01:11:00] economy and Trump is the reason that Republicans are still in such bad shape on it. It really is a a, an odd situation because for the most. Presidents don't have that much control over economies, and yet Donald Trump managed to figure out a way to really damage it in just about every conceivable way.

Right. You, you mentioned the tariffs, which really had an inflationary effect for a lot of people. And then there's a immigration, which I don't think people usually connect to the economy, but that. Also had a negative economic effect. It had a negative effect on jobs by just reducing the number of immigrants in the country and so forth.

And then of course, there's the war as well, which you know, has really spiked prices and we're really stuck. He doesn't seem to be at all aware of the. That he doesn't really have a lot of leverage in this situation. He's just tweeting that he's got all the leverage and he's happy to wait for, I don't know, as long as it takes [01:12:00] until Iran finally realizes that he's the boss and concedes.

But I would, if I'm a Republican office holder, like a, a vulnerable and incumbent Republican in the house, I'm like, dude, you've got to stop this war already. We're just gonna get wiped out. It's just, can you talk a little bit about how Trump. Did this. 

MONICA: Yeah. It is one of the ironies of our time that people blamed Biden for the economy that wasn't, it was largely out of his control.

A normal president who is doing what the job of a president is, is trying to con create the conditions for a good American economy for people to share in economic growth. And is kind of hoping that private industry takes us the rest of the way because we're, you know, America's very, very much believes in its free market economy ideals, and.

What Trump has done is a number of things. He, uh, enacted tariffs unilaterally, which have had a really big impact both on, um, the price of goods global or [01:13:00] the price of goods in America, and also the impact. Of, uh, on our trading partners globally has had a, has had an effect as well, because people don't really know what's gonna happen next with Trump.

Um, some writers, uh, have called it the, uh, the tariffs, the Trump Chaos Tax, um, and you could call it the chaos economy because you know, businesses, consumers. Anyone who interacts with the economy wants to have some idea of where we're going. They wanna know if it's a good idea for them to buy a car this month, or if they're, if they should refinance their mortgage because rates are going down and they're gonna stay down.

And so, uh, you know, when you're making big decisions or even small decisions, you kind of wanna have a sense of where we are in the economy. And because Trump is so erratic, he announces policies on his. Social media platform. He keeps changing his mind about tariffs constantly. He just, uh, started wars in Venezuela and Iran kind of overnight without [01:14:00] taking his justifications to the American people.

All of those things have both real and kind of perceived effects that become real because it changes the way people interact with the economy. 

Speaker: We've just heard clips starting with

All In with Chris Hayes documenting how Republican senators are flatly lying about falling gas prices when the national average is $4.30 a gallon and rising.

Economic Update traced how closing the Strait of Hormouz turned an oil price shock into a potential quantity shock, a transition that economists say sharply increases the risk of deep economic damage worldwide.

The NPR Politics Podcast revealed that every single voter in Georgia focus groups said they feel more economically anxious now than when Trump took office, with no sense that things will improve.

The Brian Lehrer Show walked through the four stages of economic harm from the Iran war, warning that the U.S. is already in phase two as rising energy costs spread through the broader economy.

THE DAILY BLAST analyzed why the Republican Senate majority is now at risk, [01:15:00] with the Americans for Prosperity internal polling showing Trump's economic betrayal of swing voters has opened real opportunities for Democrats

Pitchfork Economics made the case for sectoral bargaining as a way to rebalance power for workers, arguing that cash assistance alone can't fix poverty when broken markets just absorb the money.

All In with Chris Hayes in part two of the discussion showed that Trump's White House ballroom project is itself polling two-to-one against, with voters on the street saying he should be fixing gas prices instead of talking to contractors.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

But first, speaking of economic anxiety, some sad news about out new show, SOLVED! A confluence of events, mostly the recent, dramatic cut in ad revenue we’ve been dealing with, has forced us to put SOLVED! on indefinite hiatus. We love doing it and if we can see a viable path to bringing it back, we would love to. Right now, with the financial squeeze we’re feeling, we have to get back to [01:16:00] basics and focus on building Best of the Left to be the best it can be with the greatest reach it can. So, that’s where my focus is going to be and I’ll be keeping you posted on our progress as it develops. 

Regarding members supporting the show, you really are more and more of what’s getting us through right now so thanks to everyone who is a member or has made one-time donations. 

If you haven’t signed up yet, it’s important to remind you that each episode of Best of the Left takes about 25 hours of human labor to produce.

So, if you get value out of the show and want to support all of the work that goes into it and get it delivered ad-free to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support - there's a link in the show notes - through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.

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You can message us on Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01,

or you can simply email me to [email protected]

As for today's [01:17:00] topic,

Around the start of this year, the ad revenue that helps keep this show running started drying up quite suddenly. I’ve mentioned it on the show, and we’ve been asking listeners to become members to help fill the gap. As far as we can tell, what’s happening to us isn’t really about us. Marketing budgets are the first thing companies cut when they think the broader economy is about to turn. Companies will cut ad spend before they touch other expenditures, think about layoffs, or pretty much anything else. So when ad revenue starts disappearing across the small media ecosystem, a small show like ours might be the first to feel it but what we’re actually looking at is the leading edge of a serious potential for economic contraction that hasn’t fully arrived yet.

And someone with a lot of credibility has been telling us, in plain English, exactly what comes next.

We just played a clip from Brian Lehrer’s show featuring an economist named Mohamed El-Erian who walked through the sequence of shocks the Iran war is putting us through. [01:18:00] 

We’ve already moved through the first two phases he laid out: an energy shock, when oil prices spiked after the Strait of Hormuz closed, and an inflation shock, when those costs rolled through into everything else. 

The third is demand destruction, which is the moment when prices get high enough that people stop buying, businesses stop investing, and the economy stalls out.

The fourth is financial instability of the kind we last saw in 2008. 

This isn’t a force of nature. The war was started by Trump and Netanyahu, the Strait of Hormuz closed in retaliation, and the war keeps going because Trump keeps choosing to keep it going while all of the predictable consequences are playing themselves out.

Republicans in Congress have, with a few exceptions, been choosing not to stop him. When phase three lands, we’re going to know exactly who’s responsible. 

There’s an active legislative fight happening over all this. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia has forced six War Powers Resolution votes in the Senate trying to [01:19:00] require congressional approval for further military action. The April 30th vote failed 47 to 50, but for the first time, Susan Collins of Maine voted with the Democrats. Rand Paul of Kentucky has been voting with them all along. 

In the House, Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie have a bipartisan version that lost 219 to 212 in early March. Meanwhile Trump keeps asking for more funding to keep the war going, refusing that supplemental is the cleanest way to starve the war.

If you want to channel pressure into those votes, many organizations are doing great work right now. Just to mention three coalitions comprised of dozens of organizations; The Friends Committee on National Legislation at fcnl.org organized a sixty-plus organization faith coalition against the earlier funding request and has been doing antiwar lobbying for decades. 

Win Without War at winwithoutwar.org is a progressive foreign policy coalition with active take-action tools on the War Powers Resolutions and [01:20:00] the supplemental funding fight. And the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee at adc.org has a single streamlined form that will contact your senators and your representative on both the Kaine and Massie-Khanna resolutions in about thirty seconds.

If you want to support direct action, About Face: Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace held a 62-arrest action inside the Capitol Rotunda on April 22nd, one of the largest veteran-led civil disobedience actions in years so check out what they’re cooking next. 

And the National Iranian American Council is the place to amplify Iranian voices in this fight rather than letting Iranians get spoken for by people who’ve never set foot there.

And while we’re pressuring people in Washington, we should also be getting our communities ready for what’s coming. Phase three doesn’t hit everyone equally. The people who’ll get hit hardest are the people already squeezed on housing and groceries and medicine, with the least margin to absorb a shock. 

Mutual aid [01:21:00] networks have been quietly building infrastructure for years that’s about to become a lot more relevant. If your city has a community fridge, a free pantry, a tool library, or a debt clinic, that infrastructure is going to matter when a recession hits.

Tenant organizing matters here too, because phase three usually comes with a wave of evictions, and tenants who are already organized weather that wave a lot better than tenants who aren’t. 

The Tenant Union Federation at tenantfederation.org can connect you with a tenant union in your city, or help you start one if there isn’t one yet. The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee at workerorganizing.org will help you organize your workplace for free, which becomes a lot more important when companies start using a recession as cover for layoffs they were already planning on. 

And The Debt Collective is organizing student debtors, which becomes a lot more relevant when interest costs start eating what’s left of household budgets.

When economic crisis hits, we usually figure out what hit [01:22:00] us afterward. This time, we see it coming and so we have a brief window to get ready and to make the people who chose this war and all the fallout from it bear the political cost.

And as another quick reminder, we here at the show are acutely feeling the impacts of this economic turmoil and, by far, the best way for us to gain some stability is to be able to depend more on members chipping in a few buck each month or annually so that we’re less dependent on the fickle nature of ad revenue. For all the ways to support us, go to bestoftheleft.com/support, link in the show notes. 

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;

Section A, The Pump and the War

Followed by Section B, Lies, Spin, and the Roaring Economy

Section C, The Boomcession

And Section D, What This Costs Real People

Yesterday, white House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said this, rest assured to the American people their a recent increase in oil and gas [01:23:00] prices is temporary and this operation will result in lower gas prices in the long term. Once the national national security objectives of Operation Epic Fury are fully achieved, Americans will see oil and gas prices drop rapidly, potentially even lower than they were prior to the start of the operation.

A lot there, including some promises from the press Secretary Domenico, what do you make about this messaging strategy on the gas prices or on the oil prices? Well, I think they're trying to keep their base, in line and, keep the poll numbers as we've seen them where, eight in 10 Republicans continue to back this president continue to back the war in Iran.

Right now, they're giving Trump a long leash and they've been giving him a very long leash for a very long time. But, if you've got. Oil and gas prices that continue to stay high, that is gonna be something that's gonna test a lot of people's patients, with this president, with this administration.

And I think what you're hearing there is a lot of pleading for trust and patience. It almost it. [01:24:00] Gets rid of any plausible deniability also from President Trump. He says right there that this was part of the expectation. He is basically telling the American people that, yes, I knew gas prices were going up, and basically this is a sacrifice you have to make.

Whether he really knew that or not, or if he's just saying that now because it's what's happening and he wants to make it sound like that was the expectation. He never sold that to people. Never told the American people, never readied them for that. Potential thing, especially considering a few days before he was touting how much lower oil and gas prices had been, since he'd come into office at the State of the Union.

I, it's not a big stretch to assume that an attack on Iran would result in higher oil prices. That, that it's, that's a pretty obvious, night follows day sequence. When Karoline Leavitt talks about. Prices coming back down. As soon as the national security objectives are met. We still don't really know what the national security objectives of this war are and how long, really would it take for gas prices to come down?

Because it feels like [01:25:00] they go up fast, but they don't necessarily come down quickly. That's usually the pattern up, up like a rocket, down, like a feather. And it's not just gas prices we we're. That's obviously the most, we see it when you're driving down the street on the signs, but there are a lot of other impacts of high oil prices, right, Scott?

Absolutely. For one thing, not only does a lot of oil and natural gas pass through the Strait of Hormuz, but a lot of the sources of the fertilizer comes from the Middle East and the, the Farm Bureau Federation was out just yesterday with a warning that this is coming at a very bad time for American farmers who are just getting ready to.

Enter their planning season and they're seeing their input costs go up again, as they already were because of tariffs. At the same time, their crop prices are down. So that's very tough on farmers. And then the other thing is not only has gasoline prices gone up, but diesel fuel prices have risen even more sharply, and that affects the cost of transporting everything that moves by truck or train, which is basically everything.

So if these high diesel prices are sustained. That is going to, again, put more upward pressure [01:26:00] on the price of goods and more upward pressure on inflation overall. How does this interact with the tariffs? It's kind of been hard to keep track a little bit. I know the Supreme Court paused some tariffs, but, president Trump end up promising more of them.

How, I guess, are these inflationary pressures we're talking about now interacting, or could they interact with where we've landed on tariffs? Well, it was important that the Supreme Court a couple of weeks ago struck down about half of the tariffs that President Trump had ordered, but he did move quickly, as you say, to replace them with other import taxes using different statutes where the President's authority is a little bit more clear and and spelled out by Congress.

So the overall tariff rate. Today is a little bit lower than it was before the Supreme Court ruling, but it's still a lot higher than it was before President Trump went back to the White House. All of that has had a meaningful effect on inflation and prices. It's not been outrageous because it, it only affects imported goods.

It doesn't affect. Homegrown goods, and it doesn't affect services, but it's been meaningful. You [01:27:00] can see the price of imported goods is higher than it would otherwise be. The other thing that's happened is last week the Court of International Trade said that the government has to give back the money that it collected illegally from those tariffs that were in place for the better part of a year.

And that's a pretty big refund. It's gonna be $166 billion that's gonna go back to the US businesses that paid those tariffs. Another key component of the economy, Domenico, is the labor market, which you mentioned a second ago. This was something that Trump was aiming to bolster with his tariff policy by getting, American companies to be motivated to build factories in the US and and hire people.

What have we seen on the labor market front during his second term? Well, I think it's been pretty stunning. When you just look at the. Numbers for the jobs reports that have come out. There's been a softening really in the labor market, which has not gotten as much attention. And remember, if you wanna buy things, that are going up in price, then you need a job to be able to do that.

And there are real warning signs there. Just in the past year during the Trump [01:28:00] presidency, we've seen five months where we've seen negative jobs, reports where the country's reported losing jobs. Before that there were four straight years. Of, positive jobs reports except for January of 2025, which was partially Biden and partially Trump.

And, we've talked about cost of living and high prices being the things that, make it difficult for people to feel like the economy's going in a good direction. Well, if the labor market softening. You need a job to pay for those things. Yeah. And this really creates a headache for the Federal Reserve because, when, when the job market is weak, the Fed would like to lower interest rates and kind of go the economy.

But when inflation is high, the Fed wants to keep interest rates relatively high to, to bring prices under control. And right now they're really caught in this, this tug of war between, on the one hand, a very weak job market. We saw a net loss of 92,000 jobs in February and. Inflation that's moving in the wrong direction and it's moving in the wrong direction [01:29:00] faster as a result of tariffs and now this war with Iran.

Yeah, it's interesting to see this impact people differently, but when the cost of debt goes up, you see credit card debt increases and that really impacts low income consumers. But Scott. We're also seeing a pretty substantial drop in the stock market, which we know impacts high income people. The people who own the majority of stocks in the us.

We've seen the S&P 500 drop something like two and a half percent in the last month. Do you have any sense from investors on why that is or how that's connected to all, everything we've been talking about? Well, a lot of that is also connected to the war. We've, we've seen a bit of a sell off since the war began.

Businesses are worried that, if people are having to spend more money at the gas pump, they're gonna have less money to spend on everything else in their lives. Corporations are, are feeling the effects of this, both the, the. Cost increase and the, the weakening demand for, for other products?

I will say that the, the stock market remains volatile. We saw a big jump, earlier this week when the president seemed to suggest that the war was almost over. Investors, lept at that opportunity and, [01:30:00] and, and bought stocks. But then there were hopes were dashed when the president elaborated more and it wasn't really clear how much longer the war might go on.

But investors are, are watching all this with some nervousness for sure. I do want to get into how this is all gonna play out politically too, because this does seem to put Republican candidates in a little bit of a bind. President Trump ran on the idea of lowering prices in 2024. He has not really sold this war to the American people.

Domenico, how do you think Republican candidates are going to talk about cost of living issues? Because it seems unavoidable, ahead of this year's midterms. Yeah, I think that those, those Republican candidates in those house races, in swing districts, they're in a real. Bind because, Trump has proved toxic with independence in the past year.

They are a key group in trying to win those districts. He kind of has been trying to sell to them to talk about culture issues, whether it's, being against trans rights or talking [01:31:00] about immigration and how to change talking about immigration because his deportation tactics are also unpopular.

There's only 40% approval. On immigration in our poll for Trump. And we've seen majorities say that federal immigration agents have been going too far and been too harsh. So overall, I think Trump again believes that the core of why he was elected was things like immigration and culture, and he wants Republican candidates to continue to stress those things.

The problem is those things don't play in. Swing districts as well as the economy does because that is the top concern and that's where you see this persuasion as, something that's, that's possible where we've seen fewer and fewer persuadable voters, and we know two of those groups, Latinos and independents, have heavily moved away from the president in this past year.

We've been talking on the podcast for the last couple years about how Americans are struggling with rising prices all over the economy.

I'm thinking about housing [01:32:00] and energy costs, medical bills, everything. How do we have any sense on how people are receiving now yet another price increase? Well, they're not happy about it. I don't know who would be happy about going to the pump and, paying more. And it's certainly, something that affects people who make less money more, right?

Because everyone pays the same at the pump. And look, the economy and prices, like you said, have been the top concern for people for years at this point. And people say Trump is not focused enough on it. In polling, majorities are saying that in our latest N-P-R-P-B-S news, Marist Poll, 35%.

Only give Trump a positive job approval rating when it comes to his handling of the economy. That's the worst we've ever seen, and that was something that was always seen as a, as a strength of Trump's in his first administration. And you've got a majority of people, 56%, saying that they're against this war in the first place That.

The administration didn't make a huge case for getting into this war. And now people are paying the price at the pump. The longer this goes on, and Scott can tell you better, [01:33:00] the more prices are likely to go up and the angrier people are gonna be, the clock is only ticking closer to the midterm elections.

Yeah, president Trump campaigned on a promise that he was gonna lower prices. For the most part, the cost of living has continued to creep up on his watch. Gasoline had been one of the few things he could point to and say, look, gasoline prices are lower than they were. Before I came into office, and that was true for, for most of the last year.

So for most of the last year, relatively cheap gasoline has been a counterweight to the overall inflationary trend. But now gasoline prices are higher today than they were this time last year. So gasoline is actually pushing inflation up. And if these high prices that we're seeing at the pump right now are sustained, they're gonna push inflation back above 3% by the end of next month.

I also feel like, the president doesn't have complete control over every aspect of the US economy, but Domenico, because he has been so personally involved, in the decision to go to war in Iran, do you feel like [01:34:00] Americans are really going to pin, the gas prices issue on him more than maybe, other things like the stock market?

Well, I think that. He's already been suffering the consequences for, higher prices, and people not having a good outlook on the economy. Just overall people's feelings about the economy have been very negative. The labor market has been softening, and people's views on how they feel they're paying more at, grocery stores and all that hasn't really.

Abated since the COVID Pandemic. And they blamed Biden pretty heavily when he was in office. They're blaming Trump while he's in office and they're saying that his policies Trump's policies, a majority are saying are making things worse. And that's in particular because of those tariffs. Scott, is there anything the Trump administration can do to bring down the price of oil?

You know, it's a, it's a global energy market. It's, it's, it's very difficult for the president to do anything in the United States that's gonna have a meaningful effect on the global energy market, when there's been a disruption of the scale that [01:35:00] we've seen as a result of this war. And yeah, you can talk about how inflation went up on Biden's watch and whether.

You know, additional spending by Congress was played a role in that. Whether some of the policy choices that, president Biden made contributed to higher inflation, there's no question about who's responsible for the rise in, in oil prices and rising in gasoline prices. This was absolutely a. The president's decision to go to war with Iran that has, has caused this spike at the pump.

And presidents often get more blame and credit than they deserve when it comes to the economy. But on tariffs and on oil prices, these are two things that people can clearly point to Trump as the reason for seeing those things, be more problematic. And it has to be really destabilizing for Trump because.

It during his first term when he left office, he had a 50%, approval rating when it came to his handling of the economy, and it was never below 47% in our N-P-R-P-B-S News Marist Poll. So this is a totally new position for him to have to try to figure out how to deal with, and his party are gonna be the ones [01:36:00] who are gonna deal with the.

With the political consequences 'cause he's not on the ballot. Those frontline republicans in swing districts are. That's so interesting because basically what you're saying is his numbers on the economy were outpacing his overall approval rating always in in, always. Whereas now they're actually lower than his overall approval rating.

Is that right? That's right. And when he came into office, by April was the first time we started, polling on his economic handling because he was starting to implement those tariffs, it was already at 39%. So he has been below 40% on his handling of the economy, all the way back to April of last year.

Well, Scott, the president and the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, everyone in the administration has insisted this is not going to be a forever war, that this is all gonna be over, at least. From the United States' involvement in the next few weeks, will the price of oil just come down after that?

You know, if hostility in the Middle East ends, it's certainly possible that oil prices could go back down to where they were. That won't [01:37:00] happen overnight. It, it will take some time. Oil prices tend to go down more slowly than they go up. Same thing with gasoline prices, but look. Right now you have countries like Kuwait and Iraq that don't have a lot of, onshore oil storage capacity.

And because the tankers that they would usually rely on to carry that oil away to, to markets around the world are not making their usual passage, some of those countries are having to actually shut in oil production. And once they take that step, then we're talking about at least a, a matter of weeks, if not longer, to restart that production.

So. Even if hostilities were to cease tomorrow, you wouldn't see oil go back down to the $60 a barrel range overnight. It would eventually come down. But, but the damage is gonna be done. And you're gonna see American people asking, what did we gain from all this? If, if at the end of the day you say, okay, we have a more stable and more peaceful Middle East, maybe that's worth a month or two of higher gasoline prices.

But if you wind up with [01:38:00] an Iranian regime that is. More or less the the same regime, just a generation younger. If you wind up with the Iranian revolutionary guard that's still in place and calling the shots, then I think people are gonna say, what? What did we spend all that extra money for? We saw Republican Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, for example, on CNN yesterday, saying that, people might have to make sacrifices.

Well. I think that a lot of people feel like they've been making sacrifices for years when it comes to the economy, and they're certainly not looking to make sacrifices, on having to pay more at the pump without knowing what the goals are long term or what they're gonna get out of, in Iran where the administration, again, never made a case to the American people for getting into this war in the first place.

WOLFF: When the price of oil goes up, all kinds of adjustments are made, and people should understand that those adjustments are not all reversible. In other words, what that means is after you adjust [01:39:00] to something suddenly becoming much more expensive.

You can't or don't want to go back to how things were, even when the prices, if they do come down. Let me give you some examples. China is helping Cuba. Cuba has been suffering from an embargo impose imposed by the United States for the last 70 years, but. But more recently, no oil could get in to Cuba, and they've suffered blackouts because they can't generate energy since they used to rely on oil.

Well, what did the Chinese ship them? Solar panels. To remind you, China is the world's foremost producer [01:40:00] of solar energy. They've invested huge amounts of money, huge amounts of scientific research and personnel to developing solar panels to harness the energy of the sun. Cuba, as you know, is an island in the middle of the ocean.

And he is therefore blessed with sunlight, an enormous amount of the time. They need, they should have had solar energy all along, but now between the embargo of the United States, Mr. Trump wants a victory in Cuba and the rising price. Even if they could get oil. Cuba solves a longstanding problem at the same time that it solves an [01:41:00] immediate problem.

It becomes energy independent in relationship to oil and gas. It will use the sun, and China is in a position to do that and China.

And the United States cannot at least not yet intervene and block the Chinese because if you're having trouble winning a war against Iran, please think long and hard about a war against China. Right. You understand that just as much as any general or admiral or anyone else in the military. [01:42:00] So you, Cuba will never go back to buying oil the way it once had to.

That's the irreversible change. Let me give you another example. Petroleum is the major source of fertilizer. It's a long, complicated story, but if the price of oil goes up, so does the price of fertilizer and as the price of fertilizer goes up, the economics of farming collapse. Much of farming around the world is a low margin enterprise.

You don't make high rates of profit. You barely make it. Well if you're barely making it on a farm somewhere in the world, and suddenly the price of the fertilizer zooms up because it depends on [01:43:00] petroleum. You're done. You throw in the towel, you don't plant the corn or the wheat or the soybeans or the vegetables, and you take a job in a town nearby, as for as your forefathers in the farming business have been doing for decades.

Anyway, that's not reversible. When the price of oil and maybe even fertilizer comes back down, will they quit the city job and resume farming? Some will, but many won't. It's not reversible. And you know what it means? Rising food prices. But we knew that anyway, didn't we? Because since food has to go by truck.

From the farm to the wholesaler to the retailer, so you can buy it in the store. [01:44:00] That truck depends on diesel fuel. Before the war in Iran began, it averaged three 50 a gallon. It now averages five and a quarter a gallon. You understand the price of food was gonna go up just to help. Pay for the transport, but now it'll have to pay for the rising price of food because food is going to become scarcer, 'cause of the cost of the fertilizer You understand? We live in a world now where everything is intertwined in this way, and the therefore the cost of the war in Iran is, excuse me, far beyond just the cost. Of the ships and the planes and the bombs and the missiles of all the people directly involved.

Speaker: Next, Section B, Lies, [01:45:00] Spin, and the Roaring Economy

BRIAN: And before we get more into the blockade, professor Ian, let's just stay on the Friday inflation report a little bit more. You wrote that consumer confidence has dropped to a record low, further illustrating the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street. How would you describe that gap 

GUEST: if you start with Wall Street?

Stock prices are. Basically unchanged for the year, and they are back very near where their level at the beginning of the war. So if you, if you had just gone to sleep at the beginning of the year and woken up, you wouldn't have thought that there's a major war going on that's disrupting oil energy, that is pushing energy prices higher, that is risking, what's called stagflation, higher inflation, lower growth.

You don't see it in the stock market, but go to Main Street [01:46:00] and you see a few things. You see, of course, people worried about higher gas prices, which hits the most vulnerable households particularly hard. You see young people now staying at higher mortgage rates than they had before. And you see a significant loss in confidence.

The University of Michigan issues every month, surveys of households, and they ask them two questions. The first has to do, how confident are you about the current economic situation and the outlook? And second, what are your expectations for inflation? And what we saw in the report issued last week is the fall to a wicked low.

In terms of people's confidence driven, both by how they feel about the current situation and how they feel about the future. And on the inflation side, we've seen a [01:47:00] big jump as as to what people expect inflation will be in the next year. Now I have to add two qualifiers. One, there's nothing automatic about the link between the surveys and how people act.

Yeah, normally you would expect if you are that worried about the future, you would stop spending. But that link is pretty weak. And the second link, the second qualification you will hear is any other survey is impacted by the politics. And the polarized politics that we're in right now. So when you break down between Republicans and Democrats, you get very different results.

BRIAN: Presumably Republicans are more optimistic about the economy than Democrats. 

GUEST: I would put it slightly differently, Brian. They're less pessimistic about the economy than Democrats. Ah, the worry about the economy is clearly there is the extent of the worry. 

BRIAN: Are you [01:48:00] saying though, that when we hear these reports in the news about consumer confidence level levels and we get them every month, that they're really just a measure of people's feelings and they are economically meaningless?

GUEST: Meaningless is a strong word, I would say. They provide you some insight, but no one should act on them alone. They have to be combined by actual indicators. Not of what I say, but what I do. Because the translation between what I say and what I do is not perfect. And we've seen this historically over and over again.

BRIAN: You mentioned stagflation. Which is slow growth coupled with high inflation. Usually inflation is, something that's produced by rapid growth. A bad side effect of rapid growth, though growth is good generally, when the economy isn't growing and inflation is. Ballooning. Anyway, that's stagflation.

And our first caller has a stagflation question, [01:49:00] George and Riverdale. On line one on Stagflation, George on WNYC with economist Mohamed El-Erian. Hi, 

CALLER 2: good morning. Gentlemen, Mr. El-Erian, I've been following your career ever since you ran one of the world's great bond funds, before you went on a present career and always been storied, and I've always enjoyed listening to you.

My concern is, of course, the possibility that the Fed will face its worst horror, which we know is stagflation. Last time we had it was in the late seventies. Where you had a stagnant economy, then a high inflation, and the feds supposed cures, worked against one another. What is the chance of our running into the same kind of stagflation again, obviously we don't know what ultimate decisions are going to happen or what's going to happen with the current war in Iran, but what would you assess are the chances that such things could happen to create stagflation?

BRIAN: Thank you, George. 

GUEST: Thank. Thank you, George. Thank you for your kind words and, and [01:50:00] you're absolutely right. You called it the worst horror, and it is the worst horror for central banks. So, as, as George, hinted, the Federal Reserve has what's called a dual mandate. It is designed to deliver price stability, so low inflation and maximum employment.

When you get stagflation, both your mandates are threatened, and yet the solution is very different depending on which mandate you wanna respond to. As George, pointed out, if you wanna respond to high inflation, you raise interest rates. If you wanna respond to a threat to employment, you lower interest rates so you can get stuck.

In these competing claims on your policy tools and end up either paralyzed or making one or [01:51:00] other mistake. So, so right now if we continue, if the war continues and its economic effects, start multiplying. George is absolutely right. It will be the worst horror for the Fed. We get indications of what the Fed is thinking because they.

Publish the minutes of the deliberation and right now, while they worried, they're worried about the uncertainty. While they would completely agree with George that that both mandates are threatened, they are more inclined right now and this may change, but they are more inclined if they have to respond to respond to the employment side, then to respond to the inflation side.

And because of that, the market is pricing. One weight cut this year. Not a weight hike, but a weight cut. But as George says, if we continue down this road of disruptions to energy prices, broader inflation [01:52:00] growth, starting to get threatened. Then it, it is gonna be a really tough situation for the Federal Reserve.

All this in the midst of a major leadership change to make life even more complicated 

BRIAN: You, you said earlier, you mentioned the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street. Why do you think Wall Street has been so resilient? If people on Main Street are beginning to take these hits that we feel in our lives, wall Street hanging near its record highs, is that unrealistic optimism or a calculation that even if consumers' pockets get hit, corporate profits won't or something else?

GUEST: Yeah, and, and Ryan, there's a number of things in play here. One is yes, the stock market is inherently optimistic. Compare the stock market to the bond market. You'd think that their biases would be similar. They're not, the bond market is not back to where it was at the beginning of the war, but the, the equity market.

Is virtually there. [01:53:00] So, so there is some inherent optimism, some inherent biases. And it's of course helped by the fact that if you're optimistic and you sound optimistic, you attract more investment dollars, that you get paid a fee on this. So, so, so there's a whole structure that supports, that optimism 

BRIAN: until a bubble bursts, right?

GUEST: Correct. And, and you have the classic, classic quote by the, who was a then the CEO of Citigroup, in August of 2008, just before the global financial crisis. And he, he, he gave the following image. He said at some point the music will stop and it will be problematic, but as long as the music is playing, we are dancing.

Okay. And that, and, and of course he lost his job a month later when, when the music stopped. Ah, the second argument is that what normally mitigates risks in a [01:54:00] portfolio, the bond prices gold, the risk mitigators have not worked. So the typical manager says, well, if the risk mitigator isn't working, I might as well stay in equities because I get the upside.

And then the third argument. That, that we see is this notion that investors are paid to take risk. And if you had done that, every single dip in the last 10 years has been a buying opportunity. So what we've seen is we've seen this conditioning become so deep that the dips are less frequent. And smaller in magnitude because people see it not as it's signaling a yellow light.

Be careful. They see it as signaling a buying opportunity, and that's why you get this incredible decoupling of the financial markets, the equity markets in particular from the rest of the economy. 

GOLDY: And as you point out in the [01:55:00] report, it's part of an integrated system, or at least was initially intended to be part of an integrated system. And that we've lost those other parts and we treat them all separately.

It's not just that it's market failures that create the conditions of poverty, it's actually the market working how markets work. 

GUEST: That's exactly right. I think the argument I'm making in this report that I think is likely to ruffle the most feathers is an argument that the safety net is sometimes inadvertently subsidizing the same corporations that are creating economic precarity in the first place.

And I know that this can feel uncomfortable because millions of people rely on these programs every day, and their lives are made better by these programs every day. Mm-hmm. But I think when we take a big step back. The safety net functions as an inadvertent form of corporate welfare, and I'd like to point to a couple ways that that happens.

One is that the safety net lets some companies offload their costs onto the public, so when wages are insufficient and jobs are insecure. People still [01:56:00] need to eat. They still need healthcare. They need a roof over their head, and it's public programs that are filling that gap. And effectively what that means is that employers get to offload part of the cost of sustaining their workforce onto the public.

It's this hidden subsidy for low wage and high precarity business models. And I look at a place like Walmart. One in four SNAP dollars are now spent at Walmart. They are an enormous corporate beneficiary of the program. And at the same time, Walmart itself is one of the most prevalent employers of individuals who use food stamps to make ends meet.

And at the same time, Walmart has a long history of preventing union organizing among its workers. So SNAP is doing a lot of really helpful things for Walmart, and I don't think that that's the way we want our anti-poverty programs to operate. 

GOLDY: Right. And it's not just Snap, of course, the earned income tax credit, that is a direct subsidy to employers.

You only get it if you have a poverty wage job. You have to be working at a job that doesn't create an income sufficient to support you to get it. So it's [01:57:00] people that that work at low wage employers like Walmart, who. Qualify for the EITC? 

GUEST: Well, there's a long and spicy history of debating whether the EITC subsidizes low road employers.

I think the argument I wanna make is it's not just in the context of the labor market, that the safety net is providing these subsidies to corporate actors who are really creating economic precarity. Let's look at Medicare Advantage for a moment. 

GOLDY: Mm-hmm. 

GUEST: Medicare Advantage was created under the argument that the private sector could deliver healthcare more efficiently than the government could.

And, we were approaching a, a place where a majority of Medicare recipients, are actually receiving benefits through Medicare Advantage rather than through direct Medicare. But in 2024, Medicare paid over 80 billion more to Medicare Advantage Insurance for the cost of coverage than if those same seniors had just been enrolled in traditional Medicare and at the same time.

Medicare Advantage Marketplace has become completely [01:58:00] concentrated. There are just two insurers, UnitedHealth and Humana, that now carry 40% of all Medicare Advantage plans. And these same Medicare Advantage companies are being investigated by the DOJ for engaging in really egregious anti-competitive practices.

So I think we have to ask ourselves funding that is supposed to. Meet the needs of low income people or economically precarious people is really being siphoned up by corporate actors in our economy who have found ways to make their interactions with the safety net very profitable. Part of your critique is that there's been a divorce between, social policy and market policy in terms of the safety net, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that means and why it's important that they not be divided.

I think one of the things neoliberalism has taught us to think is that markets are natural and they're inevitable, and then social policy should come behind those markets and do a little bit of cleanup for anyone who's fallen through the cracks, but that's a political construction. Markets are shaped by rules.

And I think [01:59:00] what's happened over the last several decades is that we really systematically deregulated and restructured markets to favor capital while relegating social policy to this compensatory model. And this shows up in really basic ways in the way we organize policymaking. So. Federal and state systems that provide subsidies into a marketplace through safety Net programs generally don't coordinate or share strategies with the regulators of those same marketplaces.

So for example, an employer who has been found to have engaged in wage theft against their own employees can still receive federal workforce training investments. That disconnect between social policy and market policy, I think is making the safety net really much less effective than it could be if we had shared market strategies and social policy strategies that we were bringing to bear in the sectors of our economy that create conditions of poverty as opposed to focusing on regulations and programs as these separate functions of the state.

So the title of the report, it's very catchy from from Safety [02:00:00] Net to Power Base. Could you talk a little bit about, about what the difference between a safety net and a power base is? Part of my argument is that if we look back historically to the origins of our safety net, we find many of these programs are built in the New Deal era.

And the New Deal is really, it's not just a set of new programs, it's a power rebalancing project. FDR uses market regulations. Public options where markets had failed and social insurance programs. He uses these tools together to create counterweights to concentrated economic power. As that framework eroded as New deal liberalism gets replaced with neoliberalism, we really lost the idea that governments could actively shape markets in the public interest.

And so I think part of our task is to really restore the power balancing promise of the New Deal, but for the conditions we face in the 21st century. And I think there are a couple ways that we could start thinking about how to make this shift. The first is. In so many [02:01:00] contexts, private subsidies into unregulated markets is not working, and we should be building strong public options.

So some of the most impoverishing parts of our economy are the care sector, childcare, healthcare, elder care. These are just crushing families budgets, and I think we've learned time and time again that the markets are not really capable of serving the interests of low income people. In care sectors, so we need public option childcare.

We need public option healthcare, we need public option elder care. I think one of the biggest sectors where we need a public option is actually in financial services. James Baldwin famously observed how extremely expensive it is to be poor, and that's true. Poor people get hosed by credit card fees and overdraft fees, and we need public options, public option banking to give people a better option for financial services.

I think another way that we might shift from a safety net to a power base is to really build towards a system that is capable of planning and making investments. So instead of a [02:02:00] reactive safety net that catches people if they fall, we need a safety net that is actively monitoring the economy for disruption and planning ahead.

And I just think about the magnitude of disruption that may be on the horizon as ai. Raises the potential for job displacement. Our safety net has almost no tools to proactively mm-hmm. Manage and transition this potential disruption in our economy. That's a real problem and it makes people very vulnerable.

GOLDY: Right. Well, one of the things we, we've known for a long time is coming, for example, is long haul trucking. Is going to be eventually, it's not yet, but it's going to be displaced by autonomous vehicles and there are millions of truck drivers in this nation. It's one of the largest job categories in many states, and we know it's coming and we are doing nothing about it.

From the perspective of the workers who are going to lose their jobs. 

GUEST: It's exactly right 

GOLDY: and that's what you mean when you talk about our system being too passive, 

GUEST: right? The way our system would work today is, [02:03:00] let's say tens of thousands of long haul truckers start losing their job because of the adoption of autonomous vehicles.

What we have available for them is unemployment insurance, which is time limited. It's a system that is already struggling to keep pace. Just a huge number of unemployed people cannot actually access unemployment insurance. That's especially true for gig workers, and we have very few tools to help people transition or upskill or participate in another part of the economy.

And this idea that. We should just wait for people to get hosed by economic transition and then offer them piecemeal support. The rate of change in our economy, I think demands something that's much more active. You actually make the case that when you strip people of economic power, it creates the conditions for an authoritarian state, purely hypothetically.

Of course. And I was wondering if you could, if you could talk a little bit more about that link, how that, how the one feeds into the other. I think this relationship is just so basic. If people's primary interaction with the government. [02:04:00] Is trying to get safety net assistance and the safety nets treats them with disrespect and it's hard to get the help you need and you feel like your social status and your economic status is diminishing and the government is not there to help you.

Why would you continue to have faith in that system? So, I argue that feelings of economic powerlessness really are a breeding ground for right-wing populism. And there's actually really compelling evidence that when people feel like they're experiencing regional decline or a loss of economic standing, they're more likely to support anti-democratic movements because those movements promise to tear the system down and to restore people's sense of pride and prosperity.

But I think the other connection here between wealth inequality and threats to our democracy is just that we've wrongly treated. Money, like speech in this country. And so, wealthy people just have more power in our democracy than poor people do. And that's a pretty frontal threat, I think, to longstanding democratic legitimacy.

[02:05:00] I think that it seems to me that this economy is amazing for rich people, people who have a lot of capital. And in fact, we can see in 2025, billionaire wealth grew three times faster than the average rate of the previous five years. And wealthy households hold a massive portion of the nation's wealth and.

This, I think is the tipping point that our economy actually faces right now. And I can tell you that in Minnesota, a lot of people are telling me that it is harder and harder for them to afford the basics. They aren't rich, they don't have enough money to pay their bills, to pay their doctor's bills. So I wanna look at this with you for a few minutes and I wanna, I wanna start with inflation.

So. Last week, president Trump said that gas prices are, quote, not very high, and quote, we're having some fake inflation because of the fuel. So understanding what you've been saying about data and measurement and all of that, let me just ask you, do you think that gas prices going up [02:06:00] 20% is fake inflation?

Senator the gas prices, beef prices, eggs, milk, and the rest they move. And when they move in the wrong direction, American people are hurting by, it's, there's no question about it's, that's right. American people feel it. It doesn't, it's not fake to them, it's money that they don't have in their pocket because gas is up.

20%. I think my, my constituents would say that that inflation is real and not fake. Okay, so let's look at unemployment. At the state of the Union, the president said, quote, the economy is the roaring economy. Excuse me, this is the quote. The roaring economy is roaring like never before. So do you agree with that statement?

Is that how you see the economy that is roaring, like never roaring before? So, so Senator, if I can clarify two things. One, there's a difference between the change in prices and inflation. The change in prices happen in a market economy when inflation moves up. That's 'cause the Fed had something to do with it.

Now on, on the state of the economy, [02:07:00] I would say that the broad contours of the economy are improving the potential of the economy. The real results of the economy are improving, but I think it can improve more. And I think, in the years ahead, I think the economy's potential is strengthening. So, the reality is that the economic data, understanding what you're saying about economic data being not imperfect, that there was almost zero job growth in 2025.

And so that looks to me like not a roaring economy. It looks like a weak economy, which is what my constituents are telling me back in Minnesota.

GREG: Well related to all this, one of the things that's interesting in this memo is it calls on Republicans to focus much more on the economy. But everyone knows at this point that Trump isn't mentally capable of focusing on anything really, except for maybe the ballroom, but he certainly doesn't have much of an interest in the economy.

You can just visibly see that at these events that they try to set up where Trump's supposed to, refocus everyone on the economy and you just can't do it. But even if he were [02:08:00] able to, he. Couldn't do it effectively. 'cause of what we're talking about here and what's just so amazing to me about this is that Republicans all know that Trump is no longer a credible voice in the economy, but they just have to pretend not to know that.

They have to say, we really want the president to talk more about the economy, even though they know it wouldn't do them any good. 

MONICA: Yeah, I, I don't know, why they, I feel like they still are relying on Trump to be kind of this magic, interlocutor with the American people, that he has some ability to kind of sway them.

But, and, and some of this too, is the inability of the Republican party to come to terms with the ways that their other. Policy priorities do clash with the economy. I, you mentioned before, and I, I didn't comment on it before, but I, should, is that a, a lot of the immigration policy is hurting the economy.

There was just an American tax fairness report that came out today that a lot of the industries that rely on Latino labor, that employ a lot of Latinos are suffering because [02:09:00] immigration enforcement and immigration policy is so draconian and up in the air, and so. All of the things that Republicans have concentrated on that they wanted Trump to concentrate on are also hurting the economy.

And so at some point they have to say, we are actually doing this. Our president is doing this, and we are doing this with our policies. It's not just a. A side effect, or it's not just circumstances, it's, it's our policies. 

GREG: Right. And I think the, the, the report you just talked about on immigration is really important because it highlights how Trumpism as an ideology is getting us here as well.

Because for Trump and for Stephen Miller and for the anti-immigrant nativists around him and so forth, they think that having fewer immigrants in the country is an inherently good thing. It's intrinsically good, even if. The negative effects on the economy persist right to them. It's worth it. It's so important to have fewer immigrants in the country that they're willing to have lower job growth as a result.

They [02:10:00] actually kind of almost say that openly. And so there you have the ideology of Trumpism having a directly negative impact on everybody's material fortunes basically, right? 

MONICA: Yeah. And I think the fact that they say it openly that the effects of their policies are having such an obvious impact on impact on people's lives.

People are seeing it in their local economies. Local business owners are having trouble because their, employees are disappearing. Or, people aren't buying because they're, worried about what's gonna happen down the road. That makes it clear to voters in a way that nothing else.

Possibly could have, and I think that that's, gonna be hard for Republicans too, because they were trying to do doublespeak for a long time before just to say, oh, we need, immigrants are taking your jobs, which was part of the rhetoric from the Trump campaign at least since 2015.

It's been core of his identity. I think people have to see now that that's not true. 

GREG: Yeah, that [02:11:00] has certainly been disproven. So just to go big picture and talk about your reporting, there's this nugget in the memo that I wanna bring up. It hails Trump's tax cut as a landmark piece of legislation, and then in the next sentence, admits that people's economic concerns are really profound.

Of course, that tax cut represented a massive upward transfer of wealth, which is exactly what Americans for Prosperity the, the authors of this memo. Wants, right. And so what that tells us is that people are struggling under the economy that the plutocrats want. It seems like there's a big opening for a more populist economic program from Democrats now.

Right. You, you did some reporting on this. Is there a way that Democrats could talk about a new direction entirely? 

MONICA: Yeah. I did reporting on earlier this week on a report from Way to Win. It's a, a left-leaning strategic group that does polling and strategy for Democrats. And, one of the things that they [02:12:00] found was that messages that concentrated on, a populist economic message saying, we need to.

Tax corporations, we need to make, the economy fairer for the working class. Messages that really did sway people and people are open to that messaging because they can see now I think they can feel and see that there's an economy. Right now where the wealthy are looking out for each other, the tax cuts are helping the wealthy that some of Trump's billionaire friends are benefiting from the most from this economy.

And in the meantime, people are drowning in debt just tr trying to pay their energy bills and trying to pay their grocery bills. And so I think that. There's an opening to say that we need to tax corporations. More corporations are treating working people unfairly. Those, there's a lot of polling even in swing states, even in states that are more approving of Donald Trump's presidency than the nation as a whole.

Those states. Voters in those states, voters that are getable [02:13:00] voters that need to be persuaded to vote for Democrats, they're swayed by messages that that say, we need to re-sort our economy and refocus our economy. 

GREG: It seems like there's really a a, an opening in another way too, which is that everything is really in, in flux to an unusual degree, I think.

Right? Because if you think about the trajectory from Reagan to now, all of a sudden everything's up for grabs and up in the air. The debates are in a way, we had the COVID shock and the inflationary shock of that, and that was a really profound. Experience for a lot of people. I think it was really disorienting and dispiriting and shook people up a lot.

It allowed Trump to swoop in and do this amazing comeback or whatever, but then you have a, a right-wing populace to put it in polite terms, right? Coming in and actually doing the stuff, doing the agenda of right-wing populism, tariffs, in immigration restriction is [02:14:00] America first pissing on our alliances and so forth, and that's a disaster.

So is there a different opening now to take charge of people's understanding of these big questions that maybe wasn't there before? 

MONICA: Oh yeah, I think so. I think, there's a new hunger from voters and especially younger voters who don't remember Reagan, to focus on workers to think about worker power, to focus on, government provision of expensive services like childcare.

A lot of millennials now are the youngest millennials I think are. In their thirties almost, or in there already. So, these are people who are ready to buy homes and start a family, and they're seeing, the long-term effects of the Reagan era policies that, concentrated, power among a lot of bus big businesses, that diminished worker power, that diminished wages over time.

And I think that there's a new. Opportunity then to tell us a [02:15:00] different story about the American economy, which is, one that allows for thinking about building the economy from the worker up to think about the kinds of institutions that can be countervailing forces against big corporations.

To think about refocusing political power on the working in middle classes. I think there's a lot of people, but especially young voters who are very hungry for that. Yeah. And, 

GREG: and the younger voters are among the constituencies that move to Trump, just like the non-white working class and. So to those voters, maybe the right wing popula stuff sounded somewhat credible, right?

It's anti elite, it's about workers, it's about power, it's about worker power in some way, even though we know that it's a sham. And so has it been sufficiently discredited? Has, has Trumpism, has right-wing populism? Have those things been discredited enough to create an opening [02:16:00] to do something new?

MONICA: I think so. At least right now, a lot depends on what happens in the next year or the next, two years. And a lot probably depends on what happens on how the Democratic candidates and the Democratic party as a whole take up the story. Because there was a lot of the things that Trump said that did sound good to people and he's.

Putting his money where his mouth was. He's not, he's not fulfilling that. And so I think, and the people around Trump are traditional Republicans doing traditional Republican things. And so, tax cuts to the wealthy, concentrating power, taking away rights from women, taking away, away rights from minorities, immigration enforcement, that's draconian and not in accordance with American ideals.

And I think that that. Just really does give an opening for the Democratic Party to potentially solidify those young voters as their voters for life. Because they're getable I think in a lot of ways now still. 

Speaker: Now, Section C, [02:17:00] The Boomcession

Well, Matt, mostly, today we wanted to talk to you about this really fantastic piece you wrote called The Boomcession, right? why Americans Hate What looks like an Economic Boom. I thought was incredibly well written and really interesting and pointed to some things which are non-obvious, but probably should be.

Right. Those things that, that become obvious after they're pointed out. Yeah. Yeah. So just, just briefly take us through your argument and the evidence that you marshaled to substantiate it. So there's this dilemma that I think a lot of people have today in, in elite circles where the economy looks like it's doing fine.

Okay? Or at least it, it was, let's put the Ira Iran thing aside for a second. Since the COVID crisis. The economy GDP growth, which is the way that that policymakers measure how the economy is doing. It's an aggregate of all transactions in the economy. You know, when that goes up, typically [02:18:00] people are happy.

It means there's more economic activity going on. People are richer, they have more stuff, houses, cars, whatever. This weird thing happened in really in 2021, where the economic growth GDP growth. And consumer sentiment diverged. So people were less and less happy even though the economy was doing well.

Typically, people are unhappy when there's a recession, which is the economy is the amount of stuff that we're creating, is going down, but they're happy when we're in a, a growth period. And, and the weird thing is we've been in a growth period. But people are unhappy, and so this was a dilemma for Biden because Biden was trying to figure out what do I do?

All of the buttons I'm pushing to improve the economy are working, yes. Inflation was high in 2022, according to this other index called the Consumer Price Index, but it's coming down right, 20 23, 20 24. It's returning to normal and GDP growth is up and [02:19:00] wage growth is up. Why are people so mad?

And the political consultants were saying, well, you gotta tell people that they're actually getting a bad impression from the media, or, so you have to tell them that things are good or you have to sympathize with them, or all of these pieces of advice that we're resting on this. Fundamental thing we haven't seen since, before we started measuring economic statistics, which is, is that the economic statistics and the public sentiment are just have diverged.

And that did not change when Trump came into office. So in the first term, in Trump's first term, people were happy with the economy. They didn't necessarily like him. They thought he told dirty jokes, but they're like, whatever, everything's funny when I'm making money. Right? That was the, the general vibe.

But they, they reelected him because they thought. At least I was richer when this guy was in office. But in his second term, not only did he not quote unquote improve the economy of consumer sentiment is actually lower than it is under Biden. It is actually at a, I think probably, let's see here. I have a chart.

Public Satisfaction with the Economy by President [02:20:00] was on since we started measuring it. It was the lowest ever under Biden. And Trump in his first term, was the third highest ever. You can go back to JFK. He was the third highest ever in his second term. He's actually lower than Biden, right? So this is this phenomenon I call the I call a boom session, which is traditional stats look like they're doing well, but people are really unhappy.

They feel like it's a recession. There we go. That's the argument. It's interesting. So decom, but decompose it a little bit more. you said a couple of really interesting things in that. Piece, they're related, but separate. One of them. In 1934 when we cooked up the idea of GDP, right? It was, it's just worth noting parenthetically that the people who did cook it up Kuznets and others insisted that we not use this as a measure of welfare at the time.

Right, right. Just to be clear, they said, this is not a measure of welfare. Never use it as a measure of welfare. We ignored their pleas and now we use it as a measure of [02:21:00] welfare. But in 1934, it was almost certainly true that when the economy produced more. The majority of that was useful to people, ordinary people, right?

That that there was a connection between GDP going up and your lives getting better, and that connection has become more and more tenuous for a variety of reasons. And the second point you made, which I think is really important, is that consumer spending may be going up for middle and working class people.

But all of it is devoted to shit they don't wanna buy in the first place. Right. Paying more interest, paying higher healthcare to you, whatever it is. Right. So they, they may be spending more, but their, their lives are getting crappier at the same time. Yeah. So, to me those were two things that you said in that essay.

I thought that were pretty, pretty cool. There's a number of reasons that. Explain the [02:22:00] sentiment that people don't like what's going on. And the first one that you pointed out is the idea that just the production of more transactions, the more stuck goods and services that are sold in the us, is that necessarily something that people like?

Right. It more, more of, yeah. The GDP in 2025 is that. Translating into what makes people happy? Well, to give you a sense of the kinds of things we were making in the 1930s and forties and fifties was things like toilets. A lot of people didn't have toilets and then they got toilets. That's pretty awesome.

Yeah. That's a big change. So, it's a big deal, and, and electricity, that's pretty solid. You don't have electricity. Yeah. And then you have electricity. A, okay. Right. I was struck by this stat, which I can't totally remember now, but it was in Mississippi, in the, the 1930s, very few people had toilets and by in 1960, most of them did.

And it's just like a huge change for people's welfare. Things like washing machines and refrigerators and stuff [02:23:00] that, that's, that's a really big deal. And a dollar spent on that is a really high return in, in terms just in terms of people's welfare, but. Not, it wasn't just that there was more basic stuff that people didn't have that we could create.

It was also that, we banned things like gambling. Yes. Right. So, so we, and we regulated markets in a much more aggressive way. So we just the financial sector was not a significant part of the economy. It's only like 2% of the economy today. It's 9% of the economy. I don't think that having more options for credit cards makes people happier, but it might increase the amount of GDP.

Yeah, that's a reg. Like what we've, what we've done is we've essentially said we're gonna. Stop trying to regulate for a moral economy, a moral economy being the, that kinds of things that people want more of or, or even a useful economy. A useful economy might be, might be a a, yeah. One way to put it, moral economy, however you wanna characterize it, but the second largest segment, the second fastest growing segment in the economy from [02:24:00] 2019 to 2024 was, is, is actually gambling.

Right. So GDP growth in gambling is going up and you par some part of that, 2.3% or whatever the GDP growth last year in the US economy as a result of more people clicking on DraftKings and Kalshi, right? Yes. Which doesn't, which makes their lives worse. It's not like, yes, introducing a toilet, it's introducing a guy that steals their time and money and attention, right?

Yeah. So on a, on a broad macro level, and this doesn't explain the, the, the post COVID thing, but on a broad macro level. We do have this problem where. In the 1930s, even though Simon, 'cause it didn't, he said, don't use this as a measure of welfare. You could use it as a measure of welfare. Yeah. And it was not unreasonable to do that.

It wasn't terrible. No. No. Yeah, 'cause, 'cause we regulated on a micro level, to make sure that products got better and were more useful. Overtime, right? Yeah. First it was cars, then it was better cars, then it was cars with seat belts, and so on and so forth. So now, it's just whatever, man, it it, [02:25:00] if you can make money doing it, if you could make it, it, it, it's by definition good and righteous.

Right. So, so Kalshi and Polymarket being canonical examples. Yeah. Right. And that's right. And so. Like Live Nation, Ticketmaster sells a ticket for more. It's like a higher GDP. Is that really like making your life? Is that better? Is that better?

So we've, again, we've, we talk a lot about how GDP is a terrible metric, and now you're telling me that consumer spending is a terrible metric because it's not actually making a distinction between discretionary spending and things which essentially behave like a tax.

So something you have to pay whether you want to or not. What should we be measuring? I think we should start with, consumer sentiment. I, I actually really like, there's this whole weird thing where for years people have said, well, the, the public is unhappy. But, but we need real hard data, not soft data, and soft data being consumer sentiment numbers.

And I think we should start with the soft data. So if people are unhappy, we [02:26:00] should try to figure out why they're unhappy. Instead of starting with harder data, which is just pricing and, and stuff like that, right? Where, 'cause the pricing can be all, can be gamed, right? But if you just ask people how are you feeling?

You can, obviously it's it's feelings and that's all soft. But if they're mad, they're mad. Right? So I, I, that's where I think we should start. And, and I don't think that consumer spending is a, is a terrible metric or GDP is a terrible metric. I just think it's limited. The interpretation that we're using doesn't work anymore.

So, I wouldn't necessarily stop collecting that data, but I might. I might start trying to understand how do we measure consumer spending that for things that people want to get? How do we start to measure things that don't increase people's happiness like. I, I don't know exactly how you would do that, but you could presumably find, take things like gambling and, figure out what people value and what they don't value, [02:27:00] and create different metrics based on what they value, what they don't value.

I think just studying, changing the way we collect pricing information could be really useful. I know that the BLS sends Bureau of Labor Statistics sends people out to just go and look at price tags. And it's a lot of companies now, they will show you one price in the, in the aisle. They'll say, oh, this drink is a dollar.

And then you go to check out and it turns out it's a dollar 20. And a lot of people don't notice. Well, if the BLS person is, and that, that's fraud. But a lot of companies do it shockingly. But the BLS looks at it and says, oh, it's a dollar. And then they, they say it's a dollar, but then the actual thing that people pay is a dollar 20.

There's also all, all sorts of reward programs. Pricing games and rebates and all this other stuff that it's hard to put in there. So I would, I think I would just try to understand, try to collect pricing data differently and then try to divide up consumer pricing into things that people, that make people happy and things that, that are at are non-discretionary, that [02:28:00] are tax, like we don't include taxes in CPI.

Yeah. Like healthcare and, right. Yeah. Right. So do, do you know in. I would also just ban in other countries, I would, I would ban price discrimination. I would just say, yeah, it was better in the thirties when people pay the same thing for the same item. Right. I'm curious, Matt, do you know in other countries where, a lot of the things that we talk about that are essentially like taxes.

Like healthcare, right? College education. Yeah. Childcare, daycare. You have to pay it whether you wanna, you want it or not. In a lot of other countries, those are provided by the state. So in those countries, those things are not counted as part of consumer spending. I don't know the answer to that.

If you look at the OECD's, AIC index, which is actual income. Consumption or something like that, which nets out public goods. How, how the US ranks [02:29:00] changes for, for example, changes radically because, well, USA is, I dunno, top three or four in GDP per capita. If you, if you normalize for all the things that other societies provide for free that don't go, that, that therefore don't go into GDP, the picture changes dramatically.

Dramatically. And I think that's a big part of the problem in the United States is that, there, yeah, people earn higher wages and stuff like that, but it all goes to pay for this stuff that is escalating in price faster than the wages are going up. Because those are private markets where the objective is to make the prices go up, right.

Where the whole point is to charge people more money every year. Right. I just, I told, Nick, I just had surgery. Two hours, less than two hours in the operating room. One night in the hospital, they billed my insurance company $82,000. There is no way that if I was in Germany [02:30:00] or France or any European country without insurance, and I went and and did the same thing, that my bill would be $82,000.

No, it would be a fraction of that just as somebody who was uninsured. Yeah. Yeah. So it would've been $3,000 or something like that. Yeah. And, and I, just to be clear, the US does have a lot of public goods. Like we high school, we have public schools. Which we didn't use to have public schools.

People, we pay taxes. And you can, there's a lot of, there's roads and there's lots of stuff that we, that we do that, where we, we don't think about election infrastructure. We talk about, oh my gosh, there's so much money and, and politics that's terrible, right? Which, yes, it is terrible, but we don't expect donors to pay for like voting machines, right?

So there, there's all sorts of infrastructure that we just don't think about that is public and paid for with taxes. That is not the case in in a bunch of other countries. It's just a matter of how we choose to characterize these things as taxes or not. And it has significant political impacts [02:31:00] because there in a lot of Democrats and Republicans who just absolutely would never raise taxes, but they don't think it's a tax when your healthcare premium goes up by 7% or 8% or 9%, they just think that's sad.

And yeah, it's, it's crazy to think about the world that way, but it does feel like our, our economic statistics. Point us to that framework when when that price goes up, 7% GDP goes up, which is good, right? And yeah, by definition versus, versus when your taxes go up. Like there's all sorts of dead weight loss.

But that's bad. Bad by definition. Yeah, no, it's bad. Oh, see, the other thing that I think I wanted to I'll put in in here about the consumer price index. This is the one time Larry Summers has quoted me. Which is funny. Not sure if it's good or bad, but go on. Well, it's only once since it's, since it's virtuous to me.

I'll, I'll say that he, at the, at the, at that, that five minute period when he decided to quote me, he was brilliant. Other than that monster, right? No. The, the Consumer price Index, right? Reagan made a [02:32:00] couple of changes to the consumer price index. They effectively said that the price of money, the interest rate does not.

Does is has nothing to do, is not included in the, the inflation rate, right? So what that means is if you is, if you buy a car, I remember seeing 2023, I was like, why is this, why are people so mad about inflation when, when the CPI is low? And then I saw people striking the UAW had a strike about, the auto industry went on strike.

You remember that? And, and. There were people saying, I can't buy the cars that I make. Right? And I was like, huh, that's interesting. And I looked at the price of cars. And the price of cars was flat from 2022 to 2023. They had increased dramatically in 2022, but it was flat. And I thought, that's interesting.

It didn't actually get more expensive. But then I realized, oh, people don't buy a car, a sticker price. They buy. They lease it or they, or they, pay with, with a, with auto financing and financing costs increased dramatically. The [02:33:00] Fed raised rates from whatever it was to. 0% to 4% that year or 3%.

And that drama that increased. Yeah, the cash amount that people pay massively. So people, the CPI looks at it and says, oh, cars did not increase in price. But actual normal people, the amount they have to shell out Yeah. For cars is much higher from 23 2 to 2023. And that's true for in somewhat similar for housing.

And so if you look at it and you're like, wait, the cost of credit cards due, debt, housing and cars are not included in. The CPI. That's weird. They always do CPI and they call it core inflation, which is the inflation without food and energy. So if you don't buy a, have a car or a home or eat anything or use energy, then the CPI is perfect, right?

But other than that, it doesn't actually reflect the lived experience of normal people. And I think there's a moment for. Congress and the Bureau of Labor Statistics to go in and start to say, okay, how are we gonna [02:34:00] actually. Create, an inflation metric that reflects the lived experience of normal people.

You could do it in a lot of different ways. You could just get rid of price discrimination and then measure. You could also just measure what it's like to be, for different baskets of people. They, they do have urban consumers. They do have a CPI for elderly people. You could look at a CPI for poor CPI for rural, if you wanted that.

That gets complicated. But there are ways to go in and look at this basic things though, like the price of money that should be in there. Food and energy that should be these, these things. We need to stop at these games. It's, it's absurd.

JANINE: Well, media talk about companies as not just successful, but as evidence that profit driven capitalism and the deregulation that enables it really is the best thing for everyone because look, they're providing a product or a service.

They're creating jobs. So really any criticism is. Wrong. And, and, and maybe just jealousy, your, your [02:35:00] new report is not about a small ancillary thing that companies could improve on. It really drives a stake through the heart of this mythology. So, so tell us, what did you look at and what did you find?

GUEST: Yeah, well, just continuing with the Walmart example, you mentioned that the CEO made $27.4 million in 2024. So yeah, if we criticize that, then sometimes people will say, oh, oh, you, you're just envious. You wanna make that amount of money, and it doesn't have anything to do with you. So why? Why should you complain?

Well, it does have to do with all of the rest of us because for one thing. Walmart and many other large US corporations are really based on a business model that extracts wealth from low wage workers and funnels it up to guys like Doug McMillon and they are paying their low level workers so little.

Many [02:36:00] of them have no choice but to rely on public assistance. And so that's what our report looks at, is we looked at the 20 largest US corporations, with the lowest median worker pay, and we found that the vast majority of them have median pay that's so low that a worker at that level. Would qualify for Medicaid for a family of three.

Most of them would qualify for snap food, aid benefits. And what that means is that not only are workers getting the shaft from this business model that it's all about. Keeping wages at poverty levels at the base to overpay their CEOs. But the rest of us are affected because it's our taxpayer money that is going into those public assistance programs that these companies are using to make this model workable.

And I think that this is a big part of the current affordability crisis that so many [02:37:00] people are talking about as they struggle with the rising cost for things like housing and. Groceries and there's a lot of focus on how can we bring these costs down. But we've also gotta look at why do people have so little money in their pockets in the first place?

And that's because of wage suppression by companies like Walmart. 

JANINE: Well, I just wanna say, if we can say poverty wage business model like 10 times, I just, I want that to enter the lexicon, but I feel like. Some media feel like they found a hack. The Washington Post had a thing a few months back, why you may not want lower prices as much as you think you do.

And I get it. They're saying prices are one factor and we have to look at other factors. But if you just report it that way, oh, you're so dim. You want prices to go down. You don't understand how the economy works. Mm-hmm. It's like, it's like giving the ball score [02:38:00] Yankees four. There are other elements of course, at work here, and, and this is in a context as the report lays out, it's in a context of cuts to benefits, union participation, stock buybacks.

There's a lot going on here that is part of the affordability crisis. Yeah, absolutely. 

GUEST: And, and the companies are saying, oh, it's rising. Cost for so many things. We have to pass those costs on to customers or we have to cut jobs. There's no other way to find money to, 

JANINE: mm-hmm. 

GUEST: To, cover these things when, if you look at what they really are spending money on these 20, companies altogether have been on a massive stock buyback spending spree.

All together. Let's see, I think it was, over $200 billion over the past 20 years. Some companies are just completely outrageous examples, like Home Depot spent 38 billion on [02:39:00] stock buybacks over the past six years. And every dollar that's spent on stock buybacks, first of all, I should explain what they are.

This is when companies go out and repurchase their own stock on the open market. And when they do that, it artificially inflates the value of their shares because they're reducing the available supply. And what that. Also does is it inflates the value of their CEO paychecks because CEOs get most of their compensation in some form of stock-based pay, and every dollar that's spent on those buybacks is a dollar that's not spent on worker wages.

And so at Home Depot, if they've taken all the money that they spent on buybacks over the past six years and instead gave it to their workers, they could have given every one of their 419,000 US employees. A $15,000 bonus every year for those six years at Lowe's Home Depot's competitor and the home improvement field, the the figures [02:40:00] are even more insane.

I think that they could have doubled the level of median pay at that company if they had spent money on worker wages instead of stock buybacks. So it's not that these companies don't have the resources. To be paying, something other than poverty wages. It's that they're choosing to use their resources to enrich those at the top.

JANINE: It's so important to indicate that these are choices, when you read mm-hmm. Economic reporting, it's often like they had to pass the cost on to customers like they had to, like, no, these are choices. Priorities that are being made. Yeah, we could talk about them that way. 

GUEST: Absolutely. They also say, well, of course pay is low at these companies because, the workers are mostly part-time.

Well, again, that is a choice to have a business model that's based on an overwhelmingly part-time workforce, which comes with all kinds of costs. It [02:41:00] tends to. Contribute to higher levels of turnover and people not feeling as in invested in their workplace. And so there's all kinds of business arguments as to why it might make more sense for them to have more full-time employees with benefits.

But, it's a choice. They want more. Part-time workers so they don't have to pay benefits so they can keep their labor costs down. So it is a choice. It's not just, something like the weather that just happens out of our control. 

JANINE: Right, right. And it's a storyline. It's such an old storyline.

We don't need to pay fast food workers, livable wage because. It's, they're teenagers and they're just getting to pick up money to go to the movies, and it's so outdated. It's so outdated and, and unrealistic, and I just, I have such frustration with the. The unending power of these narratives.

GUEST: Exactly. There's such a large, the, these low wage workers are [02:42:00] parents, many of them single parents who are really struggling to make ends meet. We've talked about our country's largest private sector employer, Walmart, but if you look at Amazon too, we were able to get. Data from a, a handful of state governments that report how many employees big companies have on public assistance programs.

And so with Amazon, the, the state of Nevada actually is the only one that reveals this information from Medicaid and Amazon had 8,900. Employees in Nevada on Medicaid, and that was 48% of their whole workforce. So imagine that they're the second largest private sector employer with, a, a gazillionaire founder and Jeff Bezos.

They're, generating enormous wealth for people at the top, and yet 48% of their employees in this one state are on Medicaid. 

JANINE: Okay. I'm gonna need to talk to you more about this, I suspect, but for [02:43:00] now, I just would ask you what could happen today, tomorrow, policy-wise? Legislatively, what? What could happen that could start to address this situation?

GUEST: Yeah, there's a lot that could be done. First of all, raising the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at 7 25 an hour for 16 years now, we could strengthen our labor laws so that workers like the ones that Amazon and Starbucks that have voted to unionize of four years ago now, but still don't have a first contract because our protections for union rights are so weak and these companies have just used.

Every trick in the book to undermine the desires of their employees, to be members of unions, to bargain collectively for for better pay. And then I'm very excited about efforts to also use the tax code to address this issue of, overpaying CS and [02:44:00] underpaying workers. And this year there are ballot initiatives moving ahead in both.

Los Angeles and San Francisco that would raise local taxes on businesses based on the size of the gap between their CEO and their worker pay as an incentive for them to either, narrow those gaps by lifting up worker pay or bringing down CEO pay. Or if companies refuse to do that and wanna.

Stick with the status quo of having really large pay gaps, then they would pay more taxes into public services and infrastructure that is so needed by so many states and cities because of the federal cutbacks in funding. 

Tech companies are rushing to trade their people, meaning workers, including the highest skilled workers. For more chips, some of those companies might come to regret the exchange. That's the Wall Street Journal, and then they go through Microsoft and [02:45:00] Meta and the other companies that are laying off tens of thousands of workers, significantly reducing their workforce.

And again, there's none of the AI investment, whether it's in data centers or anywhere else. That's showing its quote profitability, which of course is the only real metric that matters for capitalism or in the capitalist economic model. And so the Wall Street Journal's warning, you're getting rid of all of these high skilled workers, massive cuts massive layoffs, all to replace them with ai, and the AI thing has yet to prove itself.

Anyway, as an economist and as a Marxist, I want to get your take on this. Well, there are a number of issues, and I'm sure they're all in your mind, Brian, which is why you bring this topic up as well. You should. Let's start with this. The question about whether AI is or is not a successful capitalist [02:46:00] investment.

You're quite right. The way we handle technological inventions in capitalism means that the technology is immediately interesting if and only if it is subordinated to the profit, calculus of capitalists, they will buy the equipment, the software, the hardware, whatever it is. If and only if it will save them on labor costs.

That's what this is about. And AI is a perfect example, but computers were an example. Electricity was an example. the jet engine was an example and, and many others. But let's stick with ai. The promise of AI is that for a capitalist, he can do or she can do the following, fire, the worker. Who costs a wage or a salary, whatever that might be, and replace him or her [02:47:00] with a machine or with a piece of software or however you understand ai.

Alright. The question is, is that true? The problem for the capitalist is it costs money to have ai. It costs money to get the AI and it costs money to run the ai, very heavy cost of electricity, for example, to operate the data centers, that they're creating, and they're worried because the investment is made now.

To build the AI's, the data center, to build and to buy the machinery to set up the electric supply to worry. For example, these days, will there be oil or natural gas fuel for producing the electricity that ai. Because of course they're worried not just can we get the [02:48:00] electricity, but what will we have to pay for it?

Because that goes into the cost of the AI and there goes the comparison with the worker you just fired. So here's what the Wall Street Journal and many other financial documents these days are worrying about. The money is being invested now, but we don't really know yet. How many workers of what kind earning, what salary will actually be dismissed by the capitalist if it isn't that many?

And if it isn't the ones that you're saving money on because they're high paid, you may be very sorry that you made this investment. And that's not just bad for the capitalist to invest, but much of the money being used to build out artificial intelligence is money [02:49:00] borrowed from the biggest banks in the United States.

We, you and I, when we put money in the bank may not understand it, but the bank lends that money to the AI companies. And if the AI companies have made a mistake, they won't be able to pay that money back and the banks will then be in trouble and then they will shift the burden onto you and me. So we are at risk.

Without knowing it, we are at risk. Without controlling it. And we are in the hands of people who think only in terms of the profitability. If this isn't profitable, they won't pursue it beyond a certain point. And the truth of it is, if you are honest, we don't know yet. And by the way, this is very typical.

If you remember back in the early year 2000, we [02:50:00] had something called the.dot-com collapse or the.dot-com crisis. Why? Because enormous money was being spent on computers because they were gonna replace all of these workers who used to sit there with their pre-computer technology, and that turned out to be a hype.

And the banks went down and all kinds of other companies collapsed. That's the real risk here, and I wanna make clear the capitalists are making the decisions, but we are all at risk. If they're miscalculating, if they're overshooting, whatever the benefits of AI are, we will all suffer. Probably more than they will, and they're at least in charge, and they will know before we do that.

This is a bust and they will get out of the business. [02:51:00] They will sell, they will declare bankruptcy. They'll use all the normal tools of capitalism that protect them when they screw up and leave us out there with the risk. But before, even on that one more thing, which is an older Marxist understanding. If it is true, let's, let's be real simple.

Let's assume AI can make some or all workers twice as productive as they used to be. So what does the capitalist do? He fires half his workers and buys ai. Now the remaining half working with AI can produce just as much as the full compliment of workers used to do, and our capitalist is very happy because with half the workers, he saves on half his payroll.

He doesn't have to pay the [02:52:00] workers he fired. And that money, which he still gets, 'cause he's producing as much as he did before selling it, as he did before. Let's make it simple at the same price as he did before. So the money's coming in, but half of his payroll, he doesn't have to pay out to workers anymore.

He gets to keep it. That's the profit incentive to buy ai. But now let, let me give you an idea. What would a socialist collective of workers do if they were running the company? Would they not be interested in ai? No, no, no. They'd be very interested in ai. And if AI could make each worker doubly productive, here's what they do.

Would they fire anybody? Absolutely not. Everybody stays working. Everybody gets the same wage. But everybody works four hours a day instead of a why. Because in four hours with [02:53:00] AI, you can do it twi. In other words, the technology, instead of en enhancing the profit, transforms the lives. Of the vast majority, the employees who now get four hours a day to pursue their political interests, their passions, their hobbies, their family life, their, their physical and mental health, and all the rest of it.

That's what technology is often undertaken for. That's what, if you ask the inventor who comes through with something, that's what he or she is hoping for to really improve life. Capitalism doesn't do that because it subordinates the technology to the profit game, and that is good for those who already have a business.

That's already our richest people and not good for the average person, and that's why capitalism isn't so good. 

Speaker: And Finally, Section [02:54:00] D, What This Costs Real People

YouGov poll finds inflation is the number one issue, and that between his war and his tariffs, Trump is 35 percentage points. Underwater on inflation. That is his approval to disapproval gap is that high. When asked about the inflation on Fox business last week, he could only muster this much optimism about the effects of his own policies.

The question came from Fox Businesses Maria Bartiromo. Do you believe the price of oil and gas will be lower before the midterm elections? I hope so. I think so. It could be, it could be, or the same or maybe a little bit higher. I think this won't be that much longer. Maybe even a little bit higher.

Trump on Fox Business and on the Alliance with Israel in this war. A headline on Vox says, Israel's critics are winning the battle for the Democratic party, democratic voters. Turned against [02:55:00] Israel. Now their politicians are following that from Vox, and that follows a Pew poll last week that the times of Israel broke down this way.

60% of US adults now hold an unfavorable view of Israel. Only 37% view it favorably. It continues about. Percent of Democrats and democratic leaning independents express unfavorable views of Israel 80%, while 58% of Republicans and Republican leaning adults view Israel favorably overall. So a big partisan split there.

However. The Times of Israel summary of the PU poll continues, however, majorities under age 50 in both parties now rate Israel and Netanyahu negatively again, that on the Pew poll from the Times of Israel now. This all has major implications for the midterm elections here in the United States where the primaries are already well [02:56:00] underway.

And of course the midterms have major implications for how much Trump can keep up the pace of right-wing and culture war change that he's been on, and whether Democrats can reverse the government's course and enact any kind of agenda of their own if they do take the Congressional majorities. Our focus for this conversation.

Will be what some of this means politically in this country with Dave Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst for the Cook Political report with Amy Walter among his recent articles, five Ways 2026 looks like 2018. That was Trump's other midterm elections and Five Ways it Doesn't. Dave, thanks for joining us.

Welcome back to WNYC. Good to be with you, Brian. Thanks. I threw a lot of numbers out there. So in words, how would you begin to describe how the public ranks inflation as an issue now and how the president is doing on that issue? Well, inflation is still voter's top issue, but it's really a series of issues.

It's [02:57:00] healthcare, it's the cost of groceries, it's the cost of gas, and up until. The launch of the coordinated attacks on Iran, it appeared that Democrats messaging in the midterms would be centered around the reconciliation bill and Republican cuts to the social safety net, particularly Medicaid, the premium spikes associated with the Obamacare cliff, and the expiration of enhanced subsidies.

These were unpopular measures under. Unified Republican control of government that, Democrats were going to exploit and they still will. But now there's this, additional aspect of an unpopular war and the supply chain disruption and higher oil and gas prices that come with it. And it has compounded Republicans problems politically because, president Trump.

Won over independent voters in [02:58:00] 2024 by promising an economic golden age, extracting America from for foreign conflicts and not really making broad changes to entitlements, Democrats can now capitalize on all three of those. You heard the Trump clip from Fox Business. I heard a TV analyst say, this is the same playbook that President Biden failed with when he was running for reelection.

Don't worry, this inflation is only transitory. It'll calm down on its own. Trust me on this. Do you see a parallel? Well, the stimulus spending under, the Biden administration didn't do much to improve his standing with voters who were facing higher prices. And, I think one difference between, where we are today politically and where we were eight years ago.

Back then, voters still had generally positive views of life under the Obama years. Today, voters are cross pressured [02:59:00] because they don't view the Biden years favorably. They view them as, the, the, start of in this inflationary environment. And so they are having a hard time trusting either political party to make their lives better.

Question from a listener who writes the Times, had a front page story last week, questioning Trump's mental stability. Has that issue made an impact on the public? I. Every time Democrats have sought to, run ads that focus on, the president's mental state or on fitness for office, they are typical.

They're reaching, they're preaching to the, their own choir. And it kind of makes Democrats feel good to, to diagnose the president with, a mental disorder and, and try and rally their own troops that way. But what we've seen in focus groups and in polls is that [03:00:00] that argument doesn't really change, the, the preexisting ways in which voters see the president doesn't change many minds.

Instead, what, what has hurt Republicans is the. The argument that the president's policies have negatively impacted their pocketbook and their outlook in terms of their healthcare coverage, their ability to, to, to pay for their housing or their car, and. Some of the, the changes that we've seen, under the, the one big beautiful bill won't take effect until 2027 or later, but the threat of hospital closures or Americans losing insurance.

Is a rallying cry that, that has moved votes in the past. In [03:01:00] 2017 and 18 when Republicans embarked on repeal and replace, it didn't even, it didn't even pass. They didn't succeed in gutting Obamacare, and yet Democrats barrage of ads when it came to preexisting conditions helped them win the midterms by a wide margin.

So first of all, if I may call you Steven, thank you very much for your time, for joining us to talk about your book. So let me, it's a, let me begin. Would you say that sickness is an individual problem or a social problem when you look at the United States? Whether you look at the United States or other countries, it's always a social or political problem.

Rudolf Virchow the father of Modern Cellular Pathology, said in 1848, all diseases have two causes. One. Biological and the other political, so trying to understand that politics is the, [03:02:00] the most important factor in producing health in a society is quite challenging, especially for Americans. All right, let me, let me draw you out.

Tell me why that's true. Why is it, especially for Americans, are we. A, a, sick people, and B, is our politics playing a role in creating that situation. So as an emergency physician, the easiest diagnosis I could make in the ER was that somebody's dead hard to fake. So I filled out a death certificate, that was then linked with the birth certificate, and we could calculate.

Mortality rates, who died at what age? Add them up all together. And you get a number called life expectancy. And that's the average length of life. If, mortality rates stayed the same from year to year. So I like to use this as a measure of health for a country. Basically, you can't [03:03:00] be healthy if you're dead.

So it's a measure of how long people live. So. If we, if, if we look at life expectancy, we have to ask what's a normal life expectancy? Because, if you go to the doctor, they'll take, take your blood pressure and decide whether it's normal or not. For a country, you can take the life expectancy measure and ask, is this normal?

Well, normal should be, what the best achieve the best countries achieve. And we're about seven life expectancy years behind the longest lived country, which has been Japan since 1978. Well, if we, so how important is that seven year difference? You might think of it as a few more years drooling in a nursing home, but in fact, our leading disease killers are number one, heart disease, number two, cancer.

And number three, unintentional injuries. [03:04:00] Those three will kill roughly half of our, population, about 3 million deaths a year. And if we eradicated our three leading killers as a cause of death, we would be right up there with Japan in terms of length of life. So taking my measure for length of life, some 50 countries have higher life expectancy than we do.

Now to, then why, the question you asked. Well, medical care, we spend about half of the world's medical care bill in the United States. It's about, $7 trillion. It's, a sixth of our total economy, and we are less healthy than. 50 other countries. So just by simple logic, medical care cannot have a big effect.

So what else matters? Well, studies show medical care can avert about 10% of mortality in the United States. [03:05:00] So that leaves 90% attributed to other factors. And, but Americans. When you poll Americans on what's most important for health, they put medical care first. And guess what? They put politics last.

So we have to, we have to, dissect what's going on here. Medical care isn't that important. I have to say that, I worked clinic clinically as a doctor and I taught doctors and I have to reflect and say, gee, what I did and taught wasn't really that important. So what really matters, studies show that the amount of inequality in a society is very strongly associated with its health.

Say, measured by life expectancy. And you were talking earlier about the vast increase in economic inequality in this country. And we are, certainly among the [03:06:00] rich countries, the most unequal country among them, and we have the worst health among them. And the two are actually linked causally. So mostly we say, well, an association between inequality and health does not imply causation.

But if you ask, how do you decide that something causes something else? The relationship I've just mentioned between inequality and health can be proven to be causal. And I use the criteria, that the Surgeon General's report in 1964, linking smoking in bad health. They laid out the criteria for saying smoking caused worst health, and that's what I use to make this link right.

I, I make the link and there are many other researchers that verify that. So inequality kills. How does it do that? Well, [03:07:00] inequality produces a lot of stress in society and the, and we in the United States are, one of the most stressed countries in the world. So how do we cope with this stress?

Well, not in very, healthy ways. I mentioned unintentional injuries, being, our third leading cause of death, and so we kill ourselves with opioid overdoses. The, the fentanyl, issues that, are, are, big time in this country in many other ways and. So that's one way consuming opioids.

Another way is, well, there are a lot of dysfunctional ways of, of trying to cope. Some, some perhaps better than others. Walking the dog gets you out on the street and maybe talking to other people, but so highly stressed society caused by the inequality. That we willingly choose. In other words, and this is a tough thing to, to, to recognize.

[03:08:00] We have a so-called democracy and, and so we choose policies and what you were describing in the previous part of, today's, session was the inequality. And we seem to have. Chosen through our political process to have less so the rich can have more. So that makes us responsible for the poor health that we're having.

So suppose we decreased inequality, what would we do with the proceeds? Well, besides inequality being so important, the other factor is attention to early life. As we go from the erection to the resurrection, roughly half of our health as an adult has been programmed between conception and your second birthday.

That's called the first thousand days. And. Studies, many studies show that that period is critical for [03:09:00] how healthy you become as an adult. So who's responsible for that period, that first thousand days? Well, we, we think family values should make the parents responsible for creating healthy conditions for that period, but.

Fam, a poor, a a, a poor family, a family struggling to make ends meet, to pay the electricity bill that you described. They're just trying to survive. And if, if you want them to stay home and raise the child. To be healthy. They can't do that. There's only two countries in the world that don't give a working woman who's pregnant, paid time off after she has her baby.

One is of course, the United States. We say we can't afford that. The other country is Papua New Guinea, half of a big island, north of Australia. So we don't. Have a national [03:10:00] policy of providing time. Pay for a woman to, for a mother to, spend time with her child. And so our, our young people, our infants and toddlers are raised in very dysfunctional situations.

Take a healthier country. Sweden, there it is mandatory to take 480 days of paid. Parental leave. The father's gotta take some too. And that's at your full pay. So, then in your, when your child is, is put in a, when your child is two or three, you can put 'em in a daycare center and in Sweden it costs $160 a month for Swedish daycare that's run by the government.

We have nothing like that. So we have chosen because, we've decided that. It's too expensive for the United States [03:11:00] to have, to support early life. And, so we are in a sense making the political choices so we have poor health and die young. I don't think if most Americans really realized that the political choices they make.

Lead to an early death and before dying, much more disease than we should be having, considering we're the richest and most powerful country in world history, although that is fast declining.

RALPH NADER: You do say in your book that industry will be anxious to advance a popular narrative that holds individuals responsible for the systemic problems.

It creates itself industry. So you talk about the retirement pension industry, you talk about the health insurance industry, you talk about the credit industry, you talk about the cigarette industry, and as you mentioned, the renewable energy versus fossil [03:12:00] fuels. Can you run us by several of these to make your points more specific?

GUEST: Yes, absolutely. So I think the framing here is that I think the, the key bit of psychology is that it's very hard for us to see a problem from more than one point of view at a time. And so many social problems. We could potentially think of them from both from an individual perspective. So I need to change my behavior to reduce my carbon, to save for my future, to, to smoke less or not at all, or to reduce my intake of fatty foods and so on.

So I can think of it as a problem for me, the individual and everybody else's individuals, or I can think of it as a problem of the system. The political system is working. There's incentives. We have regulations, lack of regulations, international agreements. So the, the trouble is that given the way we're, we're wired, if we think about things from an individualistic perspective, we tend not to think about the system.

For example, if you take obesity, say we, we know it's clear that obesity has been increasing rapidly in the US and UK across [03:13:00] many parts of the both Western world and developing world. You might think, well, from a political campaigning point of view, it's clearly obvious that one of the forces that's driving that.

Is the massive growth in high energy, dense foods and the gigantic marketing campaigns which are, pushing those foods at large numbers of people. But that's the, the systemic frame, the system frame. But the individual frame is focusing on individual, weight loss, individual control of our diets and, and the amount we exercise and so on.

And the crucial bit of psychology, as I say here, is that these frames tend to mutually block each other. So this means that if I'm thinking about my own obesity as an issue of self-control and an issue of my own responsibility, then I tend to defocus on the systemic forces that are causing obesity at at large.

So this means that it's really attractive for industry in, in any domain where these sorts of issues arise to push what the sociologists have termed an agenda of responsible. So it is very helpful for industries who want not to be regulated very heavily [03:14:00] to tell people it's an individual problem. You have to worry about your own weight, you have to worry about your own carbon emissions.

It will help you do it, but it's really your problem. Similarly with you have savings, it's up to you to put the right amount of money aside and so and so on and so on. And you see that all over the place. So. Many of your listeners will be very well aware in, again, in context of climate, the idea of an individual carbon calculator, so we can each monitor our own carbon footprint that was both created and propagated by bp, which is one of the world's largest oil companies.

And it was not done, of course, with the intention of particularly helping reduce the consumption of fossil fuels. What it's doing is individualizing the problem, saying, it's not our problem, it's your problem. Each of you systems needs to take up that problem and solve it yourselves. And if you are, if we're all worried about that.

Then we're worried about both ourselves, but about other people. We can start blaming each other. We can start vilifying climate scientists for flying to conferences, and we can just generally get into a tangle in which we're wondering which individuals are to blame. And that [03:15:00] distracts us away from the big question, which is these big systemic forces.

Similarly, with litter, the big campaigns, the Crying Indian campaign and, and, and onwards in the US are funded as, again, many of your listeners will know. They're funded by the packaging and drinks industry. So that, again, the ostensible story is, we're very, very worried about littering and plastic waste, and we're gonna help with this helpful campaign.

But of course, what it's really doing is individualizing the problem. It's saying, this problem of all this plastic leaking into the world's ecosystems is a problem for individuals lit more carefully in the trashcan rather than, well, hang on. Why is it possible to create such vast amounts of, of non-recyclable or non recycled in practice plastic?

Same. I think another great example that you mentioned was every retirement's savings. It's not so long ago, of course. That the start of retirement savings was a fixed, a defined benefit scheme, which allowed people to be sure of what they would, get when they retired, and that would be allow them to live reasonably well that has [03:16:00] been deemed to be unaffordable by businesses in the pensions industry, where unaffordable means it would be cheaper to do something different.

And what the cheaper thing we've got is the shift to defined contribution schemes, which are essentially, as you understand, we very familiar with, you have your own, you have your own pile of money and you just try to invest it as best you can. So that, of course, is it doesn't share risk across people. It doesn't give you any way of, of dealing with the risk, about uncertainty, about your own lifespan and so on.

And indeed, usually the performance of these schemes is, is not particularly good. But the respons trick, as we think of it as Leigh of hand, is to say, well, if you are having trouble with your financial position in it retirement, it's really, it is your own problem. You've gotta put more money aside or should have invested it more wisely.

And the fact that we've shifted from a scheme, which was actually pretty advantageous for most workers who had those schemes, clearly one could always have had them on a larger, broader scale. And we've shifted to a totally different scheme, which is essentially makes the problem well now impossible for most of us.

RALPH NADER: One of the subtext [03:17:00] is Nick, is you're attacking the whole concept of consumer education in our schools, for example, and all the self-help books that come out, all the articles in the New York Times and Post, and how you can maneuver to minimize your exploitation by banks and insurance companies and credit card companies, consumer advice columns.

Now, you've heard this probably many times, it isn't an either or is it? In other words, if people start trying to control their own garden, so to speak, what they can control because they can control what they eat and what they expose themselves to. Bad food, for example, or drugs that aren't working and so on that they hear about over the counter drugs.

That if they focus on their own deficiencies and try to self-correct and self-improve, they become more aware of how they're being exploited systemically and therefore move from simply consumer [03:18:00] self-improvement, say, or worker self-improvement into the arena of advocacy for systemic change, which of course you talk about in your book, you indicate in some parts of your book you're sensitive to that, that it isn't really an either or.

It's a attempt to get rid of the zero sum relationship that basically it doesn't matter what you do individually on climate change, it's what the government does to replace fossil fuels with solar and wind power and conservation of energy. Can you elaborate the plea by a person who says, look, I'm way overweight.

I know why I am overweight. I don't exercise, I eat fatty food, I can reduce my obesity, and now he's telling me it's really the fast food and ultra processed foods fault. 

GUEST: Yeah, I think the key here is exactly the problem that psychologically we do find it very hard to hold these two frames in our mind.

And they do tend to compete, but they [03:19:00] absolutely needn't do. So I think you're absolutely right that it's a perfectly rational and probably the most rational perspective, to think well clearly that there's more obesity across the world and the reason there's more obesity in some countries than in in other countries.

These are driven by systemic forces. The reason that I myself are more obese than I used to be, say that's something that is about my own recent behavior. So there are certain things I can control, but what what's dangerous I think, is that if we get sunk into thinking about the individual perspective, if we do that, we can get sucked away from we, we can start to think that, oh, it's my problem and everybody else's obesity is their problem.

In fact, we've all just gotta take responsibility for our obesity problem. And that means that the industry doesn't really have to take responsibility at all. So I think that the synergy that we do want is, and that can happen as as you integrated, and I think in cigarette smoking, actually it's probably a good example.

We can get a situation where people who are themselves, for example, trying to give up smoking, are often become quite keen advocates for anti-smoking measures just [03:20:00] across the board. 'cause one sees oneself as. As a vixen or at least pushed around by powerful forces which are not working in one's interest and one wants to stop that happening to other people and and to oneself.

And I think that is in principle possible. I think what's actually happened, at least looking at what's happened. This is to go back to the mea culpa point. What's happened with academic research, or at least mine, is that given the amount of attention and budget you have to devote to it, if one starts to focus on these individual questions, your mind just gets captured by how can we solve the obesity crisis by helping individuals pull themselves together, as it were, and does a dangerous direction.

I think to be going in, 

RALPH NADER: you would add grief, wouldn't you? Mothers Against Drunk Driving that led to much tougher enforcement against drunk drivers pressure on the alcohol industry to stop promoting in their ads, ways to get people, young people especially to drink. You'd include that, the grief. 

GUEST: Oh no, completely.

No, absolutely. And I think one of the interesting reactions when terrible tragedies do happen is that it does galvanize many people into [03:21:00] campaigning mode and those campaigns are very, very powerful. So I think, and this is hardly, hardly news in the context of your career in this show, but I think seeing one of the most powerful things that each of us has is the ability to propagate our own perspective and to to campaign and to.

Argue for change. And this is really, really crucial. And I think the, it's very different from a inward looking perspective, which is saying, well, I'm gonna look after my own garden, but not worry about anybody else's garden. But they've got to look after their gardens. I'm just gonna look into my, and look, stay in my parochial patch.

I think the getting people pulling together and pushing for change can be of course, and you've, you've been more of a part of this, almost anyone can be incredibly powerful. So seeing ourselves as, as citizens who are actively able to have our voice, make our voices heard, I think that's where the real power lies.

And I think that that, campaigners have, say political activists and so on have always known this. And of course also big businesses also known this too. And they certainly don't want us to be doing too much of that. They want us to be [03:22:00] focusing quite, quite the opposite. They want us to be focusing on our own gardens and not worrying about the, the big picture.

They don't want organized opposition. 

RALPH NADER: Before we get into the systemic change in civic advocacy and lobbyists and role of congress in parliament, there's one area that didn't seem right to me, and it is, you have this distinction of the I-frame trap, and you say to believe that the issue also includes the matter of evil business executives is to fall into the iframe trap.

The iframe, meaning it's blaming the individual, blaming the victim. But there are evil corporate executives. Let's face it, some of 'em are evil by conventional standards. They're actually corporate criminals, killing, injuring, stealing, lying in all directions. So how can you ignore the issue of evil personalities, fraudulent personalities, running entire corporate [03:23:00] enterprises?

GUEST: I think the I-frame trap, I think doesn't in, in any way cut across that point. 'cause I think it's absolutely true that the variety of people in charge of powerful organizations, including governments from a moral perspective, is extremely broad and it makes a huge difference. I think the thing we're trying to caution against is the line that if people seem like decent folk and they love their families and they seem, they, they don't seem inherently monstrous.

There may be cases where this isn't true, but there are clearly quite a lot of regular business people who are, they're not unusually virtuous or venal lab. There's regular people, but the logic of their organization just demands. The logic of the demands that they maximum for bit shareholder returns and so on, just forces a particular kind of direction of travel for, for the decisions they're going to make.

So of course it's absolutely true that beyond that there can be all kinds of violations of the law and immoral behavior by any standard, and many clearly happens. But even if you don't have that, [03:24:00] then you can still have organizations which are, inherently going to be pushing against, essentially trying to push, pushing against consumer interest and citizen interests.

I suppose I'm slightly, I'm just wanting to defend against the thought that what's wrong with the world is it's just, it's the wrong people. I think it was probably David Hume had this line that we should be designing our political systems to defend against knaves. Not, not assuming that everybody is a knave, but we have to have a system which is knave proof.

And we certainly don't have that at the moment. So, so I think it's absolutely true. There are, knavess, but it's also true, I think that even morally relatively neutral people inside an organization, which, where the incentives are all wrong and the the regulations are all wrong, they'll just be doing things which are building, well here I am, I'm, I'm marketing chocolate, I should be trying to sell as much chocolate as possible.

That's what I'm here to do. And if I don't do that, those dereliction of duty, and then I'm gonna be you telling people that they reason to eat so much chocolate is due to a lack of restraints and I need to, need to improve their efforts to restrain themselves. And so that, that all these, these, these patterns can, can arise even without [03:25:00] the additional layer.

And then that expeditional layer may be very, very important in some cases, additional layer of, of active, of advice at the, at the top. 

Speaker: That's going to be it for today.

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The additional sections of the show included clips from;

The NPR Politics Podcast

Economic Update 

The Brian Lehrer Show

Pitchfork Economics

PBS NewsHour

THE DAILY BLAST 

CounterSpin

The Socialist Program 

and the Ralph Nader Radio Hour

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