Lunch Money with Paul Krugman and Heather Cox Richardson

[00:00:00]All right.

[00:00:04]Hey everybody from Oh, we have uh France and Maryland and Pennsylvania and Michigan. Two from France or maybe No, you just misspelled it before. The Birkshars, which I bet are beautiful uh right now. And uh while we wait for Facebook, Dr. Krugman, hello. And you know the the Birkshars yourself, don't you?

[00:00:26]>> Indeed. Um, not to give too much away, but we spend um Robin and I spend a fair part of each summer there when we can and uh uh yeah, lots of stuff. My parents retired there. Anyway, great area. So, so if I recall correctly, and it's entirely likely I don't, the Birkshars became a summer resort for people from Boston in like the late 19th century when you could buy up old farm houses for like nothing because the people who had lived out there went out west. Is that right? Uh yeah, it was land was very cheap. uh the you know that basically most people left either for city jobs or places where the soil wasn't full of rocks and uh the uh and then they built there's a fair number I mean uh Edith Wharton's house is is there you can you know there are the great mansions uh which mostly now are museums but um it's look it's lovely and and of course it's shifted now there at this point it's there if you ask what what does it what does the area do for a living. It basically provides services to rich New Yorkers with second homes.

[00:01:35]But all right, that's that's not a bad thing either.

[00:01:39]>> And and part of the old New England tradition actually is I'm sitting here on the coast of Maine, we do a lot of that as well and did a lot of that all along. Those rocks do make it difficult to pull a living out of the soil.

[00:01:50]>> But but that's a nice segue to what we were going to talk about today. Um, you know, you've been writing so much interesting stuff about AI and about crypto and and wondering about the rise of this financial elite like what do you want to talk about today?

[00:02:08]>> No, I wanted to talk to a genuine historian as opposed to a econ nerd who who reads a bit of history on the side.

[00:02:15]Um, that's me obviously. Um the so I've been partly inspired by the you know Elon Musk the first trillionaire but just generally this incredible rise of extreme wealth and extreme political influence. Um and a lot of hearkening back to the guilded age. You know people I still find people saying are we going to have a second guilded age? And you know my god we actually passed guilded age levels of of wealth concentration about 25 years ago but now we are way beyond that. But still, my question is actually a funny one. I think I don't know who else I could ask better than yourself. Um, how is it that American, we weren't exactly a democracy, but something democratic and constitutional?

[00:03:01]How is it that America survived the the era of the Robert Barons when it seems to be in so much trouble now? And I think that's kind of a starting point for a whole discussion about what what has changed, what what at at some level what's wrong with us now.

[00:03:17]>> You know, I think there there are a lot of things that are different now than were then, but there are some similarities. One of the things that happens is that if you remember the Republican party which forms in the 1860s really I'm sorry the 18 the late 1850s early 1860s and really starts to put its policies in place during the Civil War during the 1860s that becomes really tightly uh associated with the United States of America with the government. So what you do is you get a number of the the original founders of the Republican party who end up many of them becoming industrialists or supporting the policies of the robber barons. But then you have the next generation and it's coming to age in the 1880s. And the next generation comes of age and this is going to be people like Bob Lafallet in Wisconsin and Theodore Roosevelt in New York and um Henry Kat Lodge in Massachusetts and Albert Albert Beverage in Indiana. And those are all people who can't be a Democrat because they see that as the party of the South.

[00:04:17]They see that as the party of rebellion.

[00:04:19]They're going to stay in the Republican party. Even when a lot of people in 1884 jump ship and become um uh mugwumps and Republicans vote for Democrats, they stay in the Republican party. But they are staunchly committed to the principles for which the Republicans fought during the Civil War, which the North fought during the Civil War. So as they watch the country becoming more and more corrupt, they start to rise and to take power based on the idea that they're going to return the country to that earlier system. And they manage to make common cause with the populists, the alliance members, and the Democrats who have been standing against the robber barons all along and to take over the system in the late 1890s. And of course, they're dramatically helped by uh the I I I hate to talk about assassinations for many reasons, but by the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, which puts Teddy Roosevelt into the White House, a a a source of power for that reformist coalition that might not otherwise have happened. But you saw that ground swell beginning in 1884 and really the the the change in the Republican party toward reform the same way the Democrats were. And one of the things that really jumps out to me in this moment is that the Republican party has just rolled over and played dead.

[00:05:39]It's just gone for Trumpism. And that was a surprise to me all along.

[00:05:45]>> Yeah. I mean, so there I hadn't really understood that there was a significant reformist wing within the guilded age Republican party, which um obviously nothing like that now. And I guess it probably is important that our if if you want maybe there's some kind of meta equivalence between the civil rights movement and the civil war and but our civil rights movement did not involve uh the Republican party. it was all coming from uh the other side and and so at some sense we had a kind of uh I don't know a legacy of the 19th century greatest generation that that helped to temper uh the the oligarchic influence.

[00:06:31]Is that is that my the right way to read it?

[00:06:33]>> Well, yes, except except the the modern day civil rights movement pulled heavily from Republicans. This is true. Remember that's it was largely bipartisan. That whole coalition, the bipartisan coalition really shatters in ' 65 and then going into 1965 and into 1968 and forward with Nixon and the embrace by the Republicans of those Dixierats, those people who wanted segregation. But but I actually think there's something more interesting in the difference between the past and the present. And this is something that speaks, I think, to your work and what's going on in finance and in the economy right now.

[00:07:08]Because of course we saw extremes of wealth in the 1850s and the 1890s, again in the 1920s, and certainly in the present. But one of the things that is different now than was then is that after World War II, you get a much more powerful international financial and economic system. And one of the things that does, I think, is it takes American uh very wealthy uh capitalists in America. Well, I hate the word capitalist, but but people have a lot of money in America.

[00:07:38]>> It takes them and it embeds them in an international system. So, in the late 19th century, there's a real panic over how big the trusts are and how powerful the trusts are. Like, literally, senators would introduce themselves by saying, "I'm the senator for the sugar trust, for example, which was the biggest trust in the 19 in the 19th century." But what happens is there's a panic over that and by the early 20th century you have a move to try and pull big money out of politics and it starts really being articulated by the populace with anti-semitism. But by the early in 1908, 1909, you start to get a much more general, hey, wait a minute here. We're noticing that not only do we have these big corporations, we also have big money in them because when people like JP Morgan start to put up the money to consolidate these trusts, they're like, "Hey, we want to say in that." And so so by 1911 1912 you get one of my favorite uh congressional committees ever and that's the Pujo committee. And the Pujo committee is run by a guy from Louisiana whose last name is Pujo. He actually doesn't finish the committee because his wife gets sick and he has to go home. But it looks into the relationship between the people's money and how it's being consolidated by bankers and being used then against those people to rig the economic system.

[00:08:59]And from that we get the Pujo report and from that we get which says basically JP Morgan sits on every major uh industrial combination in the country. And then we get Louis Brandise Lewis Brandeise writing other people's money which be and how the bankers use it which I'm sure you know talks about how the people are being basically taken to the cleaners by the banks that are rigging the system against them. And from that we get the direct election of senators.

[00:09:25]So you no longer represent a trust and we get the embrace of an income tax amendment and so you get reform coming out of that. Now in this moment and that was a very long segue to say one of the things that worries me is when you look at the really big money that is operating against the American people because there is big money operating for the American people too. um usually where people don't pay attention to it.

[00:09:50]But you know, I look at cryptocurrency, I look at um AI, and I look at the fact that with the internationalization of our political and econom or our economic system, these guys don't need to be approved in the United States anymore.

[00:10:07]They can do whatever they want. At least it looks that way to me. Is that an overstatement?

[00:10:12]>> Uh it's a bit of an overstatement, but let let's get there. I just want to say one thing that when I read again amateur history reading, but what strikes me about the uh early 20th century is how quite sort of mainstream political figures were willing to talk about the political danger of immense wealth in a way that until it's it's finally come back, but really just really just in the past couple of years. You have Woodro Wilson, you know, and I'm I'm pro probably not all that sincere, but Woodro Wilson saying if there are men big enough to own the government, they will own the government. Basically advocating estate taxation, progressive taxation, not simply for the money, but because the political economy of a republic requires that they're not the immense fortunes on that scale.

[00:11:02]And that would have been, you know, that would have until just the other day that would have people would have screamed socialism, communism, um if if any major political figure said that. I think we're starting to get there. So there there's a definite openness to that now terms of your question. Okay. Um there are uh it's a little the the situation right now is it's I wish it were a pure thing that there was just the bankers taking your my money and your money and using it to prop up these uh you know to to make these corrupt businessmen uh super rich. Um which is just it's a piece of it and but less than I wish it were the whole story. It would be a lot simpler.

[00:11:47]um we seem to have the okay I this is going to be very nonlinear so let me try to do a um things to say the the the concern I think with uh with crypto and all of these new fangle you know this stuff is that aside from the question of why are we doing this what is the point of it but that it is attracting a fair amount of unsophisticated money that lots of enthusiasts are buying in. And so, you know, the the big story of this week is um that Elon Musk is a trillionaire based upon the valuing a company that a money losing company with a fairly small business um as being worth about the same as Microsoft. So, and that is primarily um uh enthusiastic retail investors, although there's a he heavy element of institutional misuse of other people's money as well.

[00:12:44]Um the but what that does the uh banks proper you know old-fashioned banks with with checking accounts and so on with FDIC in the window FDIC insured in the window they are still in spite of everything um relatively regulated and what they can do but we have a proliferation of banklike stuff shadow banking we call it that for most of us looks the same But in fact, it doesn't have those guarantees and doesn't have the regulation. And now if the crypto enthusiasts get their way, uh what is what is a stable coins, right? All of these things that we don't want to know about, but a stable coin is a a cryptocurrency that supposedly will always be worth a dollar. Um, and when a company issues a stable coin, so people pay real dollars to acquire the stable coins and then that money gets used for something that is a bank. That is in practical terms a bank, but it's a bank without any of the regulations, any of the safeguards that proper banks face.

[00:13:55]And that's a huge risk to the system.

[00:13:58]The question about, you know, there's a whole lot of things here to unpack, but it it is this wild free-for-all. It is in some ways um uh in many ways we are returning to the free-for-all of 19th century banking but with additional >> what wild well yeah actually did you know they origin the phrase wildcat banking >> no >> okay >> the west where the wild cats are >> yeah ba well basically but it's not just it was in the west it was uh you know originally before actually before the civil war before the greenbacks uh notes were bank notes were issued by by private banks and uh somebody you would a bank would say here are our notes we promise to pay you in gold if you arrive at our bank with the notes but uh sharp operators would open banks where to get the notes reclaimed you'd have to go to the bank branch the bank branch was located in the middle of nowhere where the wildats roamed and that was wildcat banking uh oh the other trivia sorry now I'm playing amateur history >> let me let me add more to that because yeah >> I actually know that period really well and I've written on banking in that period. This is one of the things that encouraged family because you had big families in those days, but that encouraged families to send their sons out west is you would have businessmen, bankers back in Boston and New York, but you needed to be sure that you had secure money out wherever it was you were trying to do business. So, you sent out one of your one of the brothers Wow.

[00:15:28]>> to open so you could always trust that money. And that's why you end up with a number of families spread out across the the north in America after about 1835.

[00:15:38]>> Okay. Maybe you can tell me whether the one more 19th century banking story is true. Supposedly in one of the biggest the biggest bank in the south in the era of free banking was the Citizens Bank of Louisiana based in New Orleans which issued banknotes uh that were English on one side and French on the other. and their $10 notes were very widely disseminated and they said on the front 10 on the back dies and supposedly people would refer to the whole south where these notes were so um widespread as the land of Dicks >> Dixie land and that's supposedly the origin of the whole phrase. Now I I think it's true uh enough people believe it's true that I once said maybe I would buy I'll buy one of those notes. They cost of course tens of thousands of dollars because they're collector's items but anyway anyway. So, >> I've never heard that. I've always heard it came from the um the work of the early work of the Steven Foster who wrote a lot of the minstrel songs, but I'm going to look into that because the whole history of banknotes, especially in the South, and how you create a well, you know, here here's a segue back to where we are. The way you create a nation is in part by what you put on your banknotes because people then say, "Oh yes, I associate with George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or in the case of southern banknotes, enslaved Americans looking happy and jolly in the cotton fields." But we are talking in this era, I believe you have said within the last few days that the only use there really is for cryptocurrency is money laundering. Yeah, there's essentially no uh it's speculation, but in terms of actual use cases, sorry, sound like a business school guy. Um the there's no way you would not want to do a transaction. Uh it's it's incredibly cumbersome to use Bitcoin. It's a little bit easier to use a a stable coin like Tether, but it's still what's the point?

[00:17:30]banks do a perfectly good job of transferring funds and so on. But if you want your transaction to be invisible, um, you know, how how has Iran been been paying for imports during this war? The answer is well, they've been using cryptocurrency. So that's the that's really the only use for it is is for moneyaundering crime. uh when you get a ransom note because somebody has put malware that is destroying your business, it they will demand payment in Bitcoin. So, and it's really nothing beyond that. It's it's the most amazing thing. And this, you know, Bitcoin is not new. Bitcoin was introduced, I think, in 2009. This is a this is a technology that's older than the iPad and yet nobody has found a use for it except crime. So, so let me ask you on that and then we can get back to what this looks like in the present era and and the power that you know because I because I'm watching the the American people are really unhappy with where things are but there's a lot of power on the other side that makes that very hard I think to crack the its power over the American government. But just a couple of days ago or maybe it was yesterday I've lost track of time. World Liberty Financial, which is the Trump Organization's um cryptocurrency venture. They own about 60% of it and it's they've also got friends in there with them, have said that they will become be becoming actually and and you explain what this is. They will be able to operate as a bank, not just simply as a cryptocurrency venture. and the marriage of our governmental system and the the president to something with his name on it that basically has no use except crypto except moneyaundering or putting a lot of money in the Trump family's pockets. I think they've made about $2.3 billion dollars in Bitcoin since they or I'm sorry in cryptocurrency not Bitcoin in cryptocurrency which is bit for those of you who don't know the stuff Bitcoin is the name of a kind of cryptocurrency.

[00:19:30]Yeah, it's the original cryptocurrency and >> kind of like a Kleenex is a a tissue is a Kleenex. Anyway, um that seems to me to be deeply problematic.

[00:19:40]>> Oh yeah. I mean at at multiple levels.

[00:19:43]First of all, cryptocurrency itself um the coins the basically the tokens issued by World Liberty Financial are have no real use except as well now that's a new use instead of just being able to make transactions that are hidden from the law. uh it's also it's a way of putting money directly into the president's pockets. So people will acquire that not because there's any really good use for it but because of that and then to the extent it can operate as a bank um it's like a bank that is without any limits without you know banks are uh the reason the um uh the the final scene of it's a wonderful life right they the the bank run um that was a bit of an anacronism although the movie is supposed to be set in the early 1930s by the time they but When the movie was released, it was post World War II. That couldn't happen because you had the FDIC and along with the FDI, you have um limits on risk-taking by banks. Uh banks are required to have capital. They're required to have reserves. They're not allowed to make certain kinds of investments. um this whatever this turns out being, World Liberty Financial, aside from it being a sort of a more or less open bribery channel, will also be free to take all kinds of risks that banks for financial stability reasons are not allowed to take. So this is altogether it's a corruption of the whole system. Um and um yeah, you worry a lot about how much we already saw right in in 2008. Uh the it turned out that the growth of exotic not that exotic for people in the business, but you know, money market funds, but also repo, which was a way for to do banking without banks and so on. Um it turned out had exposed us to a sort of high-tech version of the bank runs of 1931.

[00:21:42]uh this would be that but an order of magnitude worse. So it is very very frightening and of course it's all very much tied into the corruption um which is well but I want to ask you about corruption also but the uh well maybe I should raise that I mean one thing that I you know as I've been doing I've been doing some uh sort of statistical stuff trying to understand where we are and I have been harkening back to the guilded age and um and what I find myself wondering is not why are why is America now so corrupt but why wasn't it even more corrupt in the guilded age than it was? I mean we yes we had bribery scandal all kinds of corruption in those days but uh teapot dome uh even adjusted for inflation was something like $10 million in bribes to the secretary of the interior. Um, as you just said, I mean, Trump has personally has is about $4 billion richer than he was on January 20th. So, uh, of of last year. So, um, roughly speaking, Trump has been personally has been bribed by a teapot dome-sized payout every day since taking office.

[00:23:02]Why didn't it happen then? And why do people stand for it now?

[00:23:06]Well, you know, I don't think there's a single answer and I think about this a lot because I would like to stop the corruption and therefore I spent a lot of time thinking about where the levers of power are to stop it and the guilded age is a great place to work to to look at that. So I think part of it is there really was still a focus on uh on on principles on morals and on being a good American and that involved many different things including working hard to prosper and you know trying to live a moral life and not cheating people and sort of those old small our republican values and certainly a lot of people talk about that and they put it on either side of the coin. you know, Andrew Carnegie talks a lot about that as well as the people who were standing against him at Homestead, for example.

[00:23:50]So, there is that. But, you know, one of the things that that c that always comes back to me, and of course, I'm a political historian, is that what makes the Republican party, which is what controls the 19th century, sit up and take, I'm sorry, the federal government in the 19th century, sit up and take notice is when the American people are like, "We're not going to vote for you anymore." And even though they are in a somewhat limited way trying to manipulate the vote in the north now they've really clearly manipulated the vote in the south by the end of the 19th century they are doing the same thing in northern cities especially to get rid of immigrants especially immigrant workers from being able to express their will at the polls >> there is still the need to get into office like you can't impose your will unless your people are in office and I look at today where it is so possible to manipulate the election results. And I don't mean by stealing them or whatever, but by you know these floods of money into the system that you know portray the the the mega Republicans as the saviors of the world and their opponents as you know domestic engaging in domestic terrorism for example. And that worries me a lot. It also worries me that at the at the international level you know Andrew Carnegie needed the American system to work. you know, he he wanted to be in control of it, but he needed that system to work. I look now at cryptocurrency or at somebody like Elon Musk at the, you know, the breakdown of a national um boundaries in a way that, you know, the radical right looks at it and says, "Okay, you know, people like Curtis Jarvin look at it and say, well, this is just ducky. We're going to create a post national world that we're going to run." I look at that and I think, you know, I don't want that postnational world that you're going to run. I'm really concerned about maintaining a good system for people in each country. um and or you know instead of going to this idea of these sort of um boundaryless um internetbased nationalities which is what somebody like Yarvin talks about and it worries me because I don't see as much of a connection between the popular anger and the popular outpouring of a desire to recover American democracy and the late 19th century when you know Carnegie had to to bow to that to some degree. And that that lack of connection strikes me as being partly cultural, like I say, but a lot the rich guys just have so much and they don't really need the nation any longer, it seems to me.

[00:26:28]What do you think?

[00:26:29]>> Um, I have mixed feelings about it. Uh, partly because the the late 19th century world was a lot more globalized than we tend to realize. I mean, uh um uh random stuff. um Helmar Shockt who was um you know Hitler's economic architect um was actually named Helmar Harris really shocked because his father spent a lot of time in Chicago so there was a much there was much more uh global interchange >> right and then with the name of Horus Gley he goes on to be a Nazi >> yeah it's not clear exactly how much of a Nazi he was as opposed to an amoral technocrat who worked for the Nazi he probably was a Nazi as well but he But yeah, but point was there was a lot of interchange of of of people of money. Uh global capital markets were pretty integrated. I mean that you couldn't move money, you know, at a click of a mouse, but you could move it with a te with a telegram. So I think that we may be exaggerating uh the extent to which globalization is new. Uh but um it is true. I mean, you know, Peter Teal has just uh I don't know if he's actually moved to Argentina, but apparently has switched to Argentine citizenship, which is not a great way to beat the accusations of him being a neo-Nazi. Um the uh but it's a um uh there is I think that there I I don't know. I mean I funny I I am actually I should be the one who says well it's all fundamental forces and globalization but I actually think that the values thing is a really big that the is role of values um that in uh that the oligarchs of 110 years ago had a felt at least the need to appear to be respectable and upstanding and u you know I on my substack the other day I put up you know first a photo of John D.

[00:28:30]Rockefeller and his family which is a kind of Victorian ideal probably who knows what the reality was but that was what is meant to look like and then Elon Musk and his baby mamas and his many many many children um and it just there's somehow a collapse it's it this kind of broadness even the hypocrisy is gone now and yeah it does help that people can zip off to I mean uh a few months ago I would have said well you know they're all going to decamp to Dubai I although that doesn't look like such a great idea these days but you know that but there was a fair bit of that there are a fair number of um malifactors or great wealth who have basically become a national now >> well that's really interesting that idea because I would argue that the American people never lost their decency that in communities and and by that I mean everywhere in the United States that's you know if you go to New York you know it's all just a bunch of communities that live really close together and so on that those same values still obtain in all of those places but they seem especially under Trump to be divorced from the government and that idea that somehow the people in the government don't have anything to say to each other is um is I think a major hallmark of our era and one of the things that has really interested me since the 1980s is the degree to which when people look at the um the American government they don't see it as us, they see it as something else. And and one of the big things about Trump these days, uh, that really has jumped out to me is those stupid trousers he's put on the Kennedy Center, which is, um, you know, him once again finding a way to cheat the system.

[00:30:18]Okay, I took my name down, but I also am covering up Kennedy's and, you know, and and you can't make me do anything. And that idea that somehow you're clever if you fight the system, if you fight the government, if you manage to find a workaround so that you can have cryptocurrency that you can launder money with. That idea that people want that in the government and they won't have it in their personal lives strikes me as being one of the lever points that um that may make a difference in terms of reclaiming democracy because you look at the extraordinary behavior of certain people in power and you say, you know, you wouldn't put up with this from your kid or your uncle or your grandmother.

[00:31:01]Why are you putting it up putting up with it with the most powerful person in the world? What do you think?

[00:31:07]>> Yeah, I actually think that and this is something that where I I really do believe that the political consultants have been a a blight uh because they're always saying, "Oh, never mind that.

[00:31:18]Let's talk about kitchen table issues."

[00:31:20]Which, you know, fine, let's talk about kitchen table issues. But I do think that there's a real visceral sense that corruption, abuse of power is bad and that people really hate it. Uh, another random different thing about I had a conversation a few months ago with my uh uh my old friend Kim Lame Shepley who's a uh expert on Hungary and um and dur issue in the overthrow of the Orban regime was in fact corruption uh that the symbol of the resistance movement uh uh property next to Orban's country estate owned by relatives but it had apparently had zebras on it. uh as a kind of you know lab and so zebras became the symbol of the resistance there was it was above all about the corruption of fides and the uh uh and let's reclaim the country from these these crooks and I think that the power the potential power of that to reclaim America is huge that if if if we do get through this it will be because there's a mass reaction against this people treating the government as their private uh piggy bank their their private uh tool.

[00:32:33]>> Um I I hope so. And and I know we're running short of time, but on that I I have to ask you a question that has really been bothering me a lot. And that is I am watching this administration just pour through money. I mean taxpayer money, lots of it. And of course cut taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

[00:32:55]And I am extraordinarily concerned about what it looks like on the other side of that in terms of if we get to the other side of the Trump administration and the reckoning comes due financially aside from anything else. Like in any previous period in American history before 1981, Congress ages ago would have raised taxes. That's just what they went to.

[00:33:19]That was always what they went to. And I look at this now and I think, you know, we seem anyway to have people in power who say under no circumstances will we raise taxes. So I look at that and I think what is the what is the reckoning going to look like?

[00:33:35]>> Yeah. And the answer is I don't know.

[00:33:37]It's it's a um the um the United States has had enormous running room. our history of of always paying our debts. Uh you know 200 200 plus years of financial stability uh to a certain extent though that's exaggerated the role of the dollar as the global currency and all of that has meant that the United States can can put off uh a reckoning for a long time but at some point you have to say when does that how far does that go? If the idea is that America is a reliable, sensible country that will in the end always do the right thing, is that the way you would think about America now? You know, a country that that elected Donald Trump twice and all of that. Um, and uh, and how it plays out, there comes a point at which the people are not willing to lend money to the United States. We're only at a premium that they're um, something has to happen. But how does that work? I mean, if for a med even a medium-sized country, you call in the International Monetary Fund and the which is in large part of something to hide behind, you're going to do unpopular things. You're going to have to raise taxes. You say, "Well, we had to do it. The IMF told us to do it." But the IMF is America's too, you know, we we talk about too big to fail. America is too big to save. And it's hard to know. we can't probably even in pretend to be invoking an external authority to do what's necessary. So I mean we did raise we did raise taxes the uh the New Deal raised taxes a lot uh probably too much given the the the Great Depression. Um the last time we had serious No, that that's not true. Clinton raised taxes but only only at the top end. George HW Bush had raised taxes significantly on a uh on a on a wider basis. So we've done it but it has been decades since we've been able to do anything serious and of course uh but if you ask about you well why don't we cut spending instead and then the answer question is well you know the US government what do we spend money on and it's basically Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. How much are we going to >> Yeah. So um hard to imagine what what does the uh what what does the political con I mean it's not hard right the United States is still an enormous economy the and we're one of the lowest tax economies in the advanced world so the the money is there how does it work out politically I have no idea >> well that and that's where my my sticking point is too because again if you even got rid of the George W Bush tax cuts and the Donald Trump tax cuts you don't have to go all the way back to Reagan even. You make a huge dent in in our problems, but I'm just watching what's really jumping out to me is I'm just watching the administration, you know, pouring money into one thing or another that Congress has had no say in as if as if it's all coming out of a gumball machine somewhere. And this, you know, I look at the other side of that and I think if you look at the people, for example, who supported the Ultimate Fighting Championship arena on the White House lawn on Sunday, those are all corporations or most of them are corporations that paid no taxes, >> right, >> last year. And I can't see them going, "Oh, you're right. I'm really concerned about the fact that some state is in bankruptcy, therefore I'm suddenly going to start paying money." and that I I don't see I don't see what that looks like unless you know Massachusetts for example has this new millionaires tax that has gone incredibly well for the state. I I don't I don't know where the answer is at the national level. Well, yeah. It's uh I mean, in some level, we really do need um uh hopefully not not literally, but we kind of need the the the mobs with torches and pitchforks where you people start where where even the oligarchs say, "Oh, we have to change because um this will we we have to restore some peace." Actually, one of the things that I I think the reason that we were able to be as responsible as we were for a number of decades was actually I believe the Soviet Union. A lot of things were done in the United States even even accepted by the super rich because well there was this threat and I don't know maybe uh I don't know may may maybe uh can we invent I mean I don't really want to go to war with China so maybe we can maybe we should it's time to open up Area 51 and explain that we need to do all of this to deal with the threat from aliens. I don't know.

[00:38:20]>> Well on that cheery note we should probably pack it in. We've we've gone over and I know people want to keep this short, but I could talk to you forever because that opens up all kinds of new ways to think about the economy and and for me the politics of it. Um >> I I would you know as I I'm always nervous when I do history. So thank you with and let's let's let's do this again.

[00:38:43]>> So it's so much fun. I mean again I I could just do the stories that we both know um you know that about old banking and and stuff because we come at it so differently. Maybe maybe next time we can do something about the stock market and how you know there were literally fist fights in the financial markets during the Civil War.

[00:39:02]>> Okay.

[00:39:03]>> All right. Well, have a a good uh I guess it's a month and uh and we'll talk soon and everybody thank you for being here.