Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
Speaker 1: ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Speaker 2: it just means the absolute world to have your support.
Speaker 2: But enough with that, let's get to the show.
Speaker 3: We're excited to be joined now by Lindsay Burke. She
Speaker 3: is the director at the Center for Education Policy at
Speaker 3: the Heritage Foundation and also wrote the chapter in Heritage's
Speaker 3: Mandate for Leadership, also known now as Project twenty twenty
Speaker 3: five on education policy. This is a very timely conversation
Speaker 3: given recent developments of the last twenty four hours about
Speaker 3: how DOGE is starting to turn its attention to the
Speaker 3: Department of Education. So, Lindsay, first of all, thank you
Speaker 3: so much for being here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks for having me Emily.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, we appreciate it. I think you and I
Speaker 3: come from a very different place than Ryan does on
Speaker 3: this and the question about the question about just like
Speaker 3: what's going to happen to the Department of education is
Speaker 3: obviously a sensitive one for parents around the country who
Speaker 3: are worried about a shutdown affecting them. So lindsay, I
Speaker 3: think maybe a good place to start is, actually if
Speaker 3: you could walk us through your take on why people
Speaker 3: why parents with kids, and you know, schools that are
Speaker 3: almost entirely unless they're at Hillsdale funded by the federal
Speaker 3: government in some park, should not be afraid from your
Speaker 3: perspective of Doge kind of tackling the Department of Education.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Well, first we should make a distinction between K
Speaker 4: twelve and higher ED. So in the K twelve space,
Speaker 4: federal funding is less than ten percent of all school
Speaker 4: funding across the country, and it's worth noting. And so
Speaker 4: this is different than high red right where you get
Speaker 4: student loans, it's holly federally funded. Ninety three percent of
Speaker 4: all loans are originated in serviced by the federal government.
Speaker 4: So two separate things. But in K twelve education, it's
Speaker 4: a very important Remember the Department of Education does not
Speaker 4: run a single school, it does not pay a single
Speaker 4: teacher salary, it does not educate a single child in America.
Speaker 4: And so I would swage parents' concerns and I would
Speaker 4: make the case to most parents, you will be better
Speaker 4: off when your local teacher, your local school principal is
Speaker 4: not having to worry about federal mandates handed down from
Speaker 4: the Department of Ed. And for taxpayers too, who I
Speaker 4: think are so often left out of the conversation. For them,
Speaker 4: it has meant their money is taken sent to Washington,
Speaker 4: filtered through this ineffective bureaucracy, and then sixty five cents
Speaker 4: on every dollar is sent back to local classrooms, and
Speaker 4: somehow that's supposed to improve educational outcomes or lead to
Speaker 4: academic excellence, and it clearly hasn't. So that's where I
Speaker 4: would start, just to swage any concerns parents might have.
Speaker 4: And the other quick thing I would say is just
Speaker 4: because the Department of Education is eliminated and we'll see
Speaker 4: what ultimately happens, doesn't mean that programs in spending go away.
Speaker 4: Most of the proposals that are out there, including ours,
Speaker 4: would move many of the programs that are actually effective
Speaker 4: or appropriate to other federal agencies. So you look at
Speaker 4: something like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act funding under
Speaker 4: idea that would move over to HHS. Data collection, things
Speaker 4: like the National Assessment for educational progress. Send it over
Speaker 4: the Commerce Department, let the Census Bureau handle that student loans,
Speaker 4: move them to Treasury. So this idea that eliminating the
Speaker 4: physical structure of the Department of Education will somehow have
Speaker 4: negative benefits on education, I think it's quite the opposite.
Speaker 5: So the twenty twenty five proposal seem pretty heavy on
Speaker 5: block grants, like we'll take right now to take the
Speaker 5: disabilities provision that you talked about, so you would move
Speaker 5: the you would move that over TOS. But the key
Speaker 5: thing there to me seems to be that you would
Speaker 5: also just block rerant it. And for people who don't know,
Speaker 5: blockrant just means all right, we used to fund you know,
Speaker 5: under these requirements. The states had to you know, submit
Speaker 5: this kind of paperwork and meet these requirements to get
Speaker 5: this money. Now we're just going to add up the
Speaker 5: amount of money, send it all out, and you know
Speaker 5: that means they'll get more money because you know it's
Speaker 5: not going to get filtered through that bureaucracy that you
Speaker 5: talk about. But imagine you're a parent who has a
Speaker 5: child in school here who benefits from one of these
Speaker 5: IEPs or something. It's already as you know, a war
Speaker 5: that parents have to go through with their schools to
Speaker 5: get these IEPs. Because you get an IEP, it's going
Speaker 5: to cost a little bit extra money. So the school
Speaker 5: districts are generally doing everything they can to say, well,
Speaker 5: your kid actually doesn't qualify for this, and just to
Speaker 5: make it so difficult for parents that they just eventually
Speaker 5: give up and only the most dedicate ones get through.
Speaker 5: So if you no longer and that so it's a war,
Speaker 5: despite the fact that you have the federal government kind
Speaker 5: of looking over their shoulder and saying, you know, you
Speaker 5: need to do this if you're going to get this money.
Speaker 5: If you if the federal government just walks away and
Speaker 5: just hands the money to the schools, given the school's
Speaker 5: impulse already, why wouldn't the school just reject everybody's IEP,
Speaker 5: keep the money, cut property taxes, and then use the
Speaker 5: money to just fund their general operations. And there are
Speaker 5: a couple other block grants remind you can remind me
Speaker 5: you know this better way titles. Why wouldn't they just
Speaker 5: do the same thing, And just now the federal government
Speaker 5: is just that money isn't supporting these projects, it's just
Speaker 5: supporting the school. And then the school cuts, taxes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the city, so a couple of things. So your
Speaker 4: example with IDA is a really important one because I
Speaker 4: think those are the parents absolutely right, who have had
Speaker 4: the most contentious, unfortunately relationship getting the services that they
Speaker 4: are entitled to under federal and.
Speaker 5: Something like fifteen million parents have gotten through the thicket
Speaker 5: for fifty million kids.
Speaker 4: Right right, right, And so what we want to do
Speaker 4: is provide them with the tools to actually fight that
Speaker 4: war effectively and not be reliant on a process where
Speaker 4: too often they end up in litigation trying to get
Speaker 4: the services they are entitled to under federal law. And
Speaker 4: so what do those tools look like? Once we block
Speaker 4: rent that funding to the states, so it doesn't go
Speaker 4: directly to schools, right, So a state could receive the
Speaker 4: block rent. At that point, a state could decide that
Speaker 4: parents can have access to their dollars, so states could
Speaker 4: make those IDA dollars portable and if a family wanted,
Speaker 4: they could take their kid's share of IDA dollars. And honestly,
Speaker 4: at the per pupil level, it's not that much. And
Speaker 4: the overall scheme of what we spend per pupil, we're
Speaker 4: talking about maybe two thousand dollars a year. But if
Speaker 4: a parent doesn't feel that their school is providing services
Speaker 4: appropriately to them, they could tap into that money and
Speaker 4: they could pay for private services and providers, schools, service providers,
Speaker 4: whatever it might be that they feel better meets the
Speaker 4: needs of their children. The other thing I would.
Speaker 5: Add, would that pay for private school or are you
Speaker 5: talking about two thousand a year or something?
Speaker 4: Right? So services, so probably additional services. Right, It's not
Speaker 4: going to pay for tuition at a private school. However,
Speaker 4: if you're in a state that has a school choice
Speaker 4: program already, and we're now to the point where over
Speaker 4: half of them do, and most of them are education
Speaker 4: savings accounts, and most of them started off for kids
Speaker 4: with special needs. In fact, if you're in one of
Speaker 4: those states, you could easily envision a family getting an
Speaker 4: ESA and rolling in private school and then under this proposal,
Speaker 4: also being able to tap in to their funding under
Speaker 4: IDA and topping off that amount to get additional services.
Speaker 4: So you could certainly envision that situation. And we're to
Speaker 4: the point, by the way, quick non secutor, if Texas
Speaker 4: gets school choice this year, which finally it looks like
Speaker 4: they're going to do, we're going to be at the
Speaker 4: point where over half of all kids across they have
Speaker 4: access to private school choice. So this is happening, but
Speaker 4: on IDA specifically at the federal level, I would add
Speaker 4: that the law that is supposed to protect these children,
Speaker 4: that doesn't go away, right, And that law, the Individuals
Speaker 4: with Disabilities Education Acts predated by the Education for All
Speaker 4: Handicapped Children Acts in seventy five, that predated the creation
Speaker 4: of the Federal Department of Education, as did so many
Speaker 4: of these laws. Right. So this idea that access or
Speaker 4: protections for kids with special needs or low income children
Speaker 4: go away, all of those protections came well before Carter
Speaker 4: acquiesced to the Teachers' union in order to get their
Speaker 4: support to be elected president and created a federal Department
Speaker 4: of ED. So none of that goes away.
Speaker 5: Just from a news perspective, what can you tell us?
Speaker 5: What do you know about what the Trump officials were
Speaker 5: doing at ED yesterday and the sixth floor that gen
Speaker 5: Vender we had a gen bender between from hot post
Speaker 5: up there. Other people are saying that, you know, eighty
Speaker 5: nine contracts were cut totaling something like nine hundred million dollars.
Speaker 5: What do you know about what's been cut so far,
Speaker 5: and what insight do you have into what further cuts
Speaker 5: or are coming.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I don't have insight into what the administration
Speaker 4: is doing or thinking yet. I think we're all just
Speaker 4: waiting to see what a potential executive order might include.
Speaker 4: And look, I mean.
Speaker 5: Is they're not working with you. I mean you wrote
Speaker 5: the blueprint, right.
Speaker 4: Look, we put out for years, in fact, for almost
Speaker 4: I've been a Heritage seventeen years now, so for almost
Speaker 4: two decades we've been writing about the need to wind
Speaker 4: down the department. And our writing on that predated the
Speaker 4: chapter that you all reference there. And so you know,
Speaker 4: we have a map for exactly what you would do
Speaker 4: with every single program. We have a three part test
Speaker 4: which programs you would keep? Are they ineffective or they
Speaker 4: do plicative or are they inappropriate at the federal level.
Speaker 4: If they check any of those boxes, they're gone. The
Speaker 4: handful of programs that remain map out more appropriate receiving
Speaker 4: agencies to manage those programs, and so all of that's
Speaker 4: out there. I'm very excited to see an administration finally
Speaker 4: willing to try to correct Carter's mistake and wind down
Speaker 4: this bureaucracy. I mean look at the recent NATE outcomes, right,
Speaker 4: they were awful. Kids have lost just if you look
Speaker 4: at fourth grade reading, kids have lost almost a year's
Speaker 4: worth of learning, almost a grade level worth of learning,
Speaker 4: just over the past decade. And I mean the recent
Speaker 4: outcomes were really just heartbreaking for so many families. And
Speaker 4: this has been a trend that has continued since nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty five. Right, And we talk about the Department, but
Speaker 4: really it was the War on Poverty, right, it was
Speaker 4: Lyndon Johnson. It was nineteen sixty five when we first
Speaker 4: see the federal government get involved in pre K and K,
Speaker 4: twelve D and higher education. There have been no improvements
Speaker 4: as a result of that involvement. You look at the
Speaker 4: gap between low income children and more affluent kids, it's
Speaker 4: four grade levels worth of learning for It's exactly the
Speaker 4: same today as it was in nineteen sixty five. We
Speaker 4: have just not moved the needle and improved academic outcomes
Speaker 4: to speak of. And so, yeah, we're all very excited
Speaker 4: to see the administration make some of these important cuts.
Speaker 4: And as far as you know what contracts and programs
Speaker 4: we will see, we know that there is a lot
Speaker 4: of uh, you know, DEI adjacent stuff that has infused
Speaker 4: the department over the past few years. So hopefully that's
Speaker 4: first on the chopping.
Speaker 5: Block before we move to higher ed. Here, I wanted
Speaker 5: to just get your take on this. Here's the here
Speaker 5: are the collapsing scores. I think that you were just
Speaker 5: referring to which you know also show an increase you
Speaker 5: know from you know, and you have other ones that
Speaker 5: go show an increase before it. I feel like, you know,
Speaker 5: correlation is not causation. I look at the the timing
Speaker 5: of some of these these collapses, and I see the
Speaker 5: rise of kind of cell phones and social medias, screens.
Speaker 5: But let me go a little bit further, so long
Speaker 5: like when you look at these long term trensis. So
Speaker 5: this is from your your project twenty twenty five document here,
Speaker 5: you know, pretty flat, you know, flat and rising for
Speaker 5: thirteen year old reading, rising for nine year old reading,
Speaker 5: you know, going back to nineteen seventy one, you know,
Speaker 5: rising for math, uh for thirteen year olds and nine
Speaker 5: year olds though you know, falling a bit, you know
Speaker 5: around the pandemic. Pandemic and screens. I think a combination
Speaker 5: of those two you know, two things. So why like,
Speaker 5: what do you what do you think accounts for the
Speaker 5: the increase, like if you look if you look at
Speaker 5: those numbers, like well, like I said, correlation is not causation.
Speaker 5: But you know, Department of Education came around and scores
Speaker 5: went up for decades. Screens came in and scores went down.
Speaker 5: So and then the pandemic, you know, absolute catastrophe for
Speaker 5: for schooling. So is you know, as is on one winding,
Speaker 5: this going to like reverse that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So what we didn't include and we should have
Speaker 4: are the twelfth grade results. If you look at the
Speaker 4: twelfth grade results, they are flat flat and reading flat
Speaker 4: and math. And so even though we see if some
Speaker 4: increase in reading a math for thirteen year olds and
Speaker 4: nine year olds, that doesn't persist throughout high school. And
Speaker 4: so we're just not seeing those gains throughout the years.
Speaker 4: The longer kids spends in school, the less the gains are,
Speaker 4: the less the gains are there over time, And so
Speaker 4: I should have included that too. Look in terms of
Speaker 4: the department, again, I would certainly not peg the department
Speaker 4: to any of those increases. And if you look at
Speaker 4: the charts where you see those slight increases, that again
Speaker 4: don't persist over time have they do correlate more with
Speaker 4: One could argue some of the accountability measures that and
Speaker 4: I'm no fan of No Child Left Behind, but that
Speaker 4: were included in NCLB, And I mentioned that because there
Speaker 4: was a concerted effort at that point to care about
Speaker 4: reading outcomes the way that the federal government wrote NCLB,
Speaker 4: the sanctions that were put into place did not work
Speaker 4: well at all for states. But we did see a
Speaker 4: focus at that time on reading by third grade. You
Speaker 4: look at Florida at that time period, right, you had
Speaker 4: Jeb Bush there who would continue to beat the drum
Speaker 4: about you know, if a kid from kindergarten to third
Speaker 4: grade is learning to read from third grade on, they're
Speaker 4: reading to learn right, and if they don't get that right,
Speaker 4: they're going to have a very hard time throughout the
Speaker 4: rest of their academic experience. And so there was a
Speaker 4: real focus and so I think that that focus on
Speaker 4: reading may account for some of those early gains, but
Speaker 4: again they didn't persist. And I am also heartened to
Speaker 4: see that we have a renewed focus on phonics based instruction.
Speaker 4: Now that's something that is long overdue. We had the
Speaker 4: shift toward whole language, which we know, really failed honestly
Speaker 4: generations of children in learning to read, and so that's
Speaker 4: been great to see a renewed focus on phonics based instruction.
Speaker 4: So hopefully that will the benefit of reading in the
Speaker 4: next few years. But yeah, I mean the pandemic declines,
Speaker 4: and I say pandemic declines, these were teacher union into
Speaker 4: school closures that kept kids locked out of schools right
Speaker 4: far after, far after we knew it was safe for
Speaker 4: schools to reopen. And so those significant declines lay squarely
Speaker 4: at the feet of the teachers union's heads, and you know,
Speaker 4: that's kind of stick with these kids for decades to come. Unfortunately.
Speaker 3: Well, I wanted to ask one question, Lindsay, sort of
Speaker 3: from a conservative perspective, it's kind of different for me
Speaker 3: to imagine if this was a Rond De Santis administration
Speaker 3: versus Trump administration with Elon Musk coming in. People like
Speaker 3: you really have spent years carefully crafting detailed plans, like
Speaker 3: granular level plans as to how to, you know, put
Speaker 3: the Department of Education on an off ramp essentially, with
Speaker 3: all kinds of ideas as to how gaps that would
Speaker 3: happen if the centralized federal department is shut down, will
Speaker 3: be filled. And I'm curious if it worries you at
Speaker 3: all the way that dog has approached other departments, you know,
Speaker 3: without debating what should have happened to usaid even just
Speaker 3: the way that it was, it was sort of like
Speaker 3: an ad hoc. Oh, we're finding something here gone like
Speaker 3: the melea afuera approach to government. Right, So does any
Speaker 3: of that concern you that you have this carefully crafted,
Speaker 3: ideologically sound plan from a conservative perspective and you kind
Speaker 3: of have the wrecking ball coming for different departments?
Speaker 4: Now, No, it doesn't. Honestly, we need a wrecking ball ed.
Speaker 4: And we're in the i would say enviable position that
Speaker 4: families across the country understand through experience and just intuitively
Speaker 4: that the Department of Ed has failed them over the years.
Speaker 4: We don't have to make the case like I go
Speaker 4: and give talks all the time and the biggest applause
Speaker 4: line is always closed down the Department of ED. I
Speaker 4: mean it is, So we're you're in a good position there.
Speaker 4: I think there's a fairly high level of understanding among
Speaker 4: the public at large about how little the investment is
Speaker 4: at the federal level. In K twelve, a relative to
Speaker 4: the red tape and regulations that the agency hands down.
Speaker 4: So you know, I think with us AID there was
Speaker 4: just less I think understanding about what the agency does
Speaker 4: among the general population. And so I think we're we're
Speaker 4: on pretty solid ground there.
Speaker 5: So what would funding levels look like in your ideal world?
Speaker 5: You know, as we look at the world now, it's
Speaker 5: it's so hard for teachers to live near their schools,
Speaker 5: for instance, or to just live a live a dignified life,
Speaker 5: which makes it then harder to attract kind of the
Speaker 5: best people into the field. So what does it look
Speaker 5: like in your world where you've gotten rid of the
Speaker 5: Department of Education?
Speaker 4: Yeah, look, I agree, right, I mean for teachers. So
Speaker 4: over the decades, the union's made a decision that they
Speaker 4: wanted more teachers rather than and I say teachers, they
Speaker 4: wanted more education employees. Right, So that I should add
Speaker 4: the teacher to non teacher ratio right now is one
Speaker 4: to one. If you look at your typical school district,
Speaker 4: for every teacher in a classroom, there's an administrative counterpart.
Speaker 4: So the unions made a decision over the years to
Speaker 4: prioritize increasing staff. Because of course that accrued to the
Speaker 4: benefit of their bottom line. Right, more dues pay members
Speaker 4: rather than taking ever increasing state, local, and federal spending
Speaker 4: and putting that into higher teacher salaries. So that was
Speaker 4: a conscious decision that was made on the part of
Speaker 4: special interest groups. We should pay teachers more, those who
Speaker 4: deserve to be paid more. Right, we should reward teachers
Speaker 4: based on merit, right, not just on the amount of
Speaker 4: time that they've spent in the classroom. But that will
Speaker 4: require some changes. Right, it's going to require us to
Speaker 4: no longer have this staff surge that we have had
Speaker 4: over really since the nineteen sixties. To put a damper
Speaker 4: on that, we've had one hundred percent increase in the
Speaker 4: number of students in schools since the nineteen seventies, but
Speaker 4: a seven hundred percent increase in the number of administrators,
Speaker 4: just to put a finer point on it. So we
Speaker 4: need to stop that staffing surge. But we also need
Speaker 4: to be willing to say modestly increase class size a
Speaker 4: little bit. Right. We know that at some point there's
Speaker 4: a diminishing return on reducing class size, and it is
Speaker 4: low nationally, it's fifteen to one, Right, So you could
Speaker 4: modestly increase class size and then you could pretty significantly
Speaker 4: increase teacher pay for those teachers who increase student learning. Right,
Speaker 4: if you get more than a year or a year's
Speaker 4: worth of learning over time, you deserve to be rewarded
Speaker 4: for that.
Speaker 5: How do we get to that fifteen to one number?
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 4: So that's a National Center for Education.
Speaker 5: I'm not doubting that that's a stat But like what
Speaker 5: happened such that most I bet most people watching this
Speaker 5: are gonna be like, huh, there's twenty kids in my
Speaker 5: kids class.
Speaker 4: And I should say that's high school high school numbers.
Speaker 4: So if you look your elementary and second or your
Speaker 4: elementary numbers are they are slightly higher, but for your
Speaker 4: typical high school fifteen to one. So interesting to your question,
Speaker 4: which I don't think I answered, about what is the
Speaker 4: appropriate spending level? And are you thinking for pupil are
Speaker 4: you thinking at the federal level what was either spend
Speaker 4: either what.
Speaker 5: I mean, what matters most really is what gets down
Speaker 5: to the school.
Speaker 4: Exactly, Yeah, one hundred percent agree. So at the federal level,
Speaker 4: if you look at the plan that we've worked on
Speaker 4: for two decades now, what we have recommended is that
Speaker 4: you eliminate all of the competitive grant funding that the
Speaker 4: Feds manage. It is completely ineffective. It has not moved
Speaker 4: the needle at all in terms of student learning outcomes.
Speaker 4: That's a lot of programs. It's not a lot of spending,
Speaker 4: to be honest, It's maybe not a lot, maybe three
Speaker 4: billion dollars of the department's budget. So that would go
Speaker 4: away immediately, and there are certainly other areas where you
Speaker 4: could cut as well. But those large formula grant programs,
Speaker 4: which is where most of the funding is, those are
Speaker 4: the programs that would just go to other receiving agencies.
Speaker 4: So again, you actually probably wouldn't see that large over
Speaker 4: reduction in existing federal spending, but you would see some,
Speaker 4: and you should see some. As far as what the
Speaker 4: ideal per pupil spending level is, just to give the
Speaker 4: listeners an idea, we spend about eighteen thousand dollars per
Speaker 4: pupil per year now nationally. So that's combined local, state,
Speaker 4: and federal revenue, and of course the federal piece is
Speaker 4: a small share of that. It's about forty five percent
Speaker 4: federal I'm sorry, forty five percent state, forty five percent local,
Speaker 4: ten percent federal funding. I would say, we don't know
Speaker 4: the ideal number because we don't have a market based system, right.
Speaker 4: We have a system that runs and functions much more
Speaker 4: like a monopoly than a market. But we can look
Speaker 4: at the school choice programs that are expanding in the
Speaker 4: state and get some sense of what it does cost
Speaker 4: to educate a child. If you look at education savings
Speaker 4: account options in the states, states like Arizona, they're getting
Speaker 4: about seven thousand dollars per kid. That's a base per
Speaker 4: pupil allocation. If you have a kid with special needs,
Speaker 4: you get a little more money. It's weighted based on disability,
Speaker 4: and that is working great for families. Families are choosing
Speaker 4: to enter that program to take that amount of funding
Speaker 4: and then go find services that work for them rather
Speaker 4: than staying in the district system where they're spending twice
Speaker 4: that much and they're not getting a quality education. So
Speaker 4: it's hard to say exactly what it should be, but
Speaker 4: the evidence strongly suggests we don't need to spend eighteen
Speaker 4: thousand dollars per child per year.
Speaker 5: Is this a vicious cycle? Like are the public schools
Speaker 5: that are seeing all of these kids leave and go
Speaker 5: to these private schools funded by the school choice are
Speaker 5: they quickly collapsing And.
Speaker 4: We haven't seen any clothes yet, honestly, and we should, right,
Speaker 4: I mean schools that are trapping kids cycles and like
Speaker 4: you know, generations of kids in these ineffective institutions should
Speaker 4: be around, right, No kids should be trapped in a
Speaker 4: school that is failing them. We're not seeing schools closed yet,
Speaker 4: but we do see the kids who are leased well
Speaker 4: served by these schools having an escape patch out of them.
Speaker 4: And that tends to be the case with even if
Speaker 4: you look at states with universal choice programs or really
Speaker 4: large choice options. You know, you look at Florida, you
Speaker 4: look at Arizona. It is still an escape valve for
Speaker 4: these kids. So we haven't seen schools shutting down, you know. Well,
Speaker 4: I think two things are going to put more pressure
Speaker 4: on public schools than any school choice option. One is
Speaker 4: just the demographic collapse that's coming, right, I mean that
Speaker 4: that will put a lot of pressure on public schools
Speaker 4: in the future to either consolidate or downsize. They're just
Speaker 4: not going to have kids in seats because of the
Speaker 4: fertility crisis, not because of school choice. And then the
Speaker 4: other thing is if if the argument of those on
Speaker 4: the left against choice was well, it's going to harm
Speaker 4: public schools, right, we should be are focused on funding
Speaker 4: children and not institutions. But if that were the case,
Speaker 4: why allow public school choice at all? Why allow families
Speaker 4: to even buy a house in another neighborhood? Right, Like,
Speaker 4: anytime you exercise public school choice, that money leaves an
Speaker 4: assigned school and goes to another school, same with charters.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: So this idea that private school choice is either going
Speaker 4: to lead to the end of public education as we
Speaker 4: know it or that it already has isn't found in
Speaker 4: And I always come back to the Freedman argument, right
Speaker 4: that we, yes, we will publicly finance K twelve education,
Speaker 4: but the public financing does not require government delivery of services.
Speaker 4: So fund the kid, separate that out, allow the family
Speaker 4: to choose what works for them.
Speaker 5: We're running out of time to talk about high ED.
Speaker 5: I was going to say it was sure a lot
Speaker 5: of our viewers are deeply concerned about, Like, so what's yeah,
Speaker 5: what kind of wrecking ball are you guys bringing to
Speaker 5: the university system.
Speaker 4: Hopefully the biggest one of all, Right, Like, I mean
Speaker 4: it needs higher ED. Wow, I mean it's more than
Speaker 4: a pr problem at this point, right, I mean Higher
Speaker 4: ED has entrenched systemic issues that will only be solved
Speaker 4: when we cut off the open spigot, a federal aid
Speaker 4: that has been dumped on these universities from federal helicopters.
Speaker 4: To quote Richard Vetter, he's an economist at the University
Speaker 4: of Ohio for decades. Now, if you look at the
Speaker 4: outcome of federal spending on Higher ED, and again it
Speaker 4: all goes back to Lennon Johnson, Right, it all goes
Speaker 4: back to nineteen sixty five. Prior to that, we did
Speaker 4: not have widely available student loans and grants originated by
Speaker 4: the feds. Right, we had the GI Bill, but that
Speaker 4: was targeted, it was an earned benefit. Right. But once
Speaker 4: we got the Feds involved in sixty five, then we
Speaker 4: just see this inflation intuition prices over the decades, and
Speaker 4: it had gotten so bad by the eighties. And I
Speaker 4: think everybody knows this at this point. But in nineteen
Speaker 4: eighty seven, Bill Bennett, who was Ronald Reagan's ed secretary,
Speaker 4: he wrote a famous op ed and it was the
Speaker 4: New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but it
Speaker 4: was called R Greedy Colleges and he said continued spending
Speaker 4: at the federal level will lead colleges to increase prices,
Speaker 4: sure enough, and that was called the Bennett hypothesis. It
Speaker 4: became true, right, I mean, we know that that's the case.
Speaker 4: And even if you look at the Federal Reserve Bank
Speaker 4: of New York, they did a study a few years
Speaker 4: ago or they found that for every additional dollar and
Speaker 4: subsidized student loans, universities increased tuition sixty cents. So they're
Speaker 4: capturing much of that federal largest that's going there. But
Speaker 4: it has really enabled universities to not Mind's shop the
Speaker 4: way that they should, right, I mean, it is it
Speaker 4: has allowed this proliferation of dei Commissariat to just i think,
Speaker 4: really drain resources from Higher ED and not create a
Speaker 4: better learning environment for students. It's enabled this facility's arms
Speaker 4: race where you get the climbing walls and the lazy rivers, right,
Speaker 4: I mean, it has really just been detrimental to Higher
Speaker 4: ED the prices increasing for students. And then you know,
Speaker 4: we've had this policy over the decades of just trying
Speaker 4: to subsidize increases in cost which haven't worked at all.
Speaker 4: And so hopefully the wrecking ball includes eliminating the PLUS
Speaker 4: loan program. Right, So this is all of the federal
Speaker 4: lending for grad students and for parents of undergrads. Right.
Speaker 4: So you've got the main direct loan program that goes
Speaker 4: to undergrad students and grad students. But then once you
Speaker 4: exhaust that, you can plus up right, you can get
Speaker 4: additional funding from the federal taxpayer subsidized by the federal
Speaker 4: taxpayer for grad school, or parents can borrow even more
Speaker 4: for their undergrads. And so if you ever hear these
Speaker 4: horror stories of people entering retirement with student loan debt
Speaker 4: that largely falls at the feet of the parent plus
Speaker 4: program where they borrowed for their kids undergrad experience, the
Speaker 4: parents did. And so we need to cut off that
Speaker 4: open spigot of federal aid and restore to the private
Speaker 4: lending market responsibility for offering student loans and grants.
Speaker 5: And is the goal then that fewer kids go to college?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 4: I mean the goal is people for whom college is
Speaker 4: the right decision have access to that and can go,
Speaker 4: and that those students who take out a loan repay
Speaker 4: that loan. And this is the problem, right, we have.
Speaker 5: They get access if they don't like, let's say so
Speaker 5: just lay it out like, yes, you want to go,
Speaker 5: you don't, can't afford it. Schools are now ungodly expensive.
Speaker 4: How do you go? Yeah? Well, so back to what
Speaker 4: I said a second ago, our proposal doesn't eliminate the
Speaker 4: direct loan program, which is the basic loan program's fifty
Speaker 4: five thousand aggregate right now. I believe it's on.
Speaker 5: That order, which is which is good for about like
Speaker 5: one year in college.
Speaker 4: Well, I don't know whether that's the case, right, I
Speaker 4: mean you look at some of your state schools. That's
Speaker 4: not the case. And everybody forgets, by the way, Ryan,
Speaker 4: that you can also work while you're in school, right,
Speaker 4: I mean this is.
Speaker 5: I did work study, I made right hour, there was
Speaker 5: a management minimum wage went up, I got attention while
Speaker 5: I was there.
Speaker 4: Exactly.
Speaker 5: That was beer money. Though, like college, it is not
Speaker 5: the nineteen sixties anymore.
Speaker 4: But look, you you can also do that. But so
Speaker 4: the the direct loan program stays in place. So we're
Speaker 4: talking about loans for grad students. We're talking about that
Speaker 4: additional parent plus one. But if you eliminate some of
Speaker 4: the federal large ss, you're going to see them. There
Speaker 4: is still a private lending market right, So it's not
Speaker 4: just the federal granted it's seven percent of the market,
Speaker 4: but you can still get a loan through the private
Speaker 4: sector as well. And look, we need to have a
Speaker 4: lending program in place that actually does take into account
Speaker 4: your ability to repay in the future, because what we
Speaker 4: have now is just open access to federal tax payer dollars.
Speaker 4: I call them federal tax pay dollars because they're subsidized
Speaker 4: and because we're forgiving them on the back end in
Speaker 4: large part. And so you know, we have not encouraged
Speaker 4: students to really take a hard look at the school
Speaker 4: they're attending, the education they're getting, what the ROI will
Speaker 4: be on the back end. I mean, forty four percent
Speaker 4: of mass degrees have a negative ROI, right, And so
Speaker 4: we have enabled this profligacy on the part of higher
Speaker 4: ed institutions, but also have created a situation in which
Speaker 4: students aren't well served at all. And yeah, we might
Speaker 4: have too many people going to college right now. There
Speaker 4: are people who would probably be better served not going
Speaker 4: that route, doing apprenticeship programs, doing career and technical LD options.
Speaker 4: But the federal government has put the thumb on the
Speaker 4: scale in favor of traditional higher ed and has said
Speaker 4: this is your only path to climbing the ladder of
Speaker 4: upward economic mobility in America, and that is an unfortunate
Speaker 4: falsehood that has not served students well at all.
Speaker 3: So if you keep those loan programs in place, or
Speaker 3: the one that we were just discussing, how quickly reasonably
Speaker 3: would tuition prices be expected to go down and there
Speaker 3: would be a market correction because it seems to me
Speaker 3: there might be a gap period where college is still
Speaker 3: ungodly expensive.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and definitely, yeah, there is there will probably be
Speaker 4: a gap. But there are other things can do concurrent
Speaker 4: with the loan program to help prices decrease. One of
Speaker 4: those which has gotten some attention over the past few
Speaker 4: days is indirect cost, which is sort of like arcane
Speaker 4: little policy idea, but basically capping the overhead cost that
Speaker 4: universities can charge federal taxpayers for research grants. INIH, this
Speaker 4: was floating around a few days ago where INNIH said
Speaker 4: we're now going to cap at fifteen percent your amount
Speaker 4: of indirect costs. I mean, there are universities out there
Speaker 4: right now that are charging the taxpayer sixty cents on
Speaker 4: the dollar for their research grant overhead. I mean, it's unbelievable.
Speaker 4: And so again, this is a part of the federal
Speaker 4: large s that has been handed down for decades now
Speaker 4: that has enabled universities to continually increase prices. Knowing that
Speaker 4: there's more federal money coming on the back end. They
Speaker 4: need some spending restraint imposed upon them. And this is
Speaker 4: the only way we're ultimately going to see prices brought
Speaker 4: down is to reform to the loan programs, reforms to
Speaker 4: some of these other grant options that are out there.
Speaker 5: I mean, isn't research though, one of the most overhead
Speaker 5: intensive things you could possibly have, and aren't there, but
Speaker 5: they're what they required to say, like here, here are
Speaker 5: the actual specific overhead costs that are connected to there's
Speaker 5: very research.
Speaker 4: What a university does. They'll say, here's the indirect rate
Speaker 4: that we charge. They might say, we'll accept a grant
Speaker 4: from I don't know, fill in the blank, Google, and
Speaker 4: you know, we'll accept a five percent overhead rate from Google,
Speaker 4: but we're going to charge the federal taxpayer sixty cents
Speaker 4: for research grants. So we know that what they're charging
Speaker 4: the federal taxpayer is higher than what they necessarily need
Speaker 4: and So one of the most interesting proposals, and this
Speaker 4: is my colleague Jay Green at Heritage has put this
Speaker 4: proposal out but basically putting some market discipline in the
Speaker 4: indirect rate, where you say, to a university at the
Speaker 4: federal level, you cannot charge the federal government an indirect
Speaker 4: rate that exceeds what you're willing to accept from a
Speaker 4: private funder, and so it just sort of resets and yeah, look,
Speaker 4: of course universities have some fixed costs. Of course, research
Speaker 4: has some fixed costs, but they will argue all of
Speaker 4: their costs are fixed, right, and that's certainly not the case.
Speaker 4: They'll use this to fund infrastructure where they have names
Speaker 4: on buildings, right of donors who have privately provided significant funding. Right,
Speaker 4: you have all of the title for programs, all of
Speaker 4: the student loan and grant options that are out there,
Speaker 4: other direct grants from the federal government. You've got private foundations, philanthropy.
Speaker 4: Universities are swimming in money. This idea that putting a
Speaker 4: little discipline on their overhead rate that they're charging the
Speaker 4: taxpayers somehow going to have this detrimental effect on research
Speaker 4: totally unfounded.
Speaker 5: I just worry that, So why not invest in technical schools,
Speaker 5: trade schools in addition to colleges and universities. I worry
Speaker 5: that in the seventies and eighties and nineties we decided
Speaker 5: to as a policy destroy our manufacturing base. And the
Speaker 5: thing that is keeping us afloat is our college and
Speaker 5: university system in the United States. Like that, it's a
Speaker 5: thing that makes us globally competitive, and it makes people
Speaker 5: want to live here for like the you know, the
Speaker 5: most talented people in the world want to come here. Like,
Speaker 5: we're going to gut that too, and then it's just
Speaker 5: going to be, you know, a wasteland, Like like what
Speaker 5: do we have at that point?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I hear you on that, But I think we
Speaker 4: are a little naive and believing that the quality of
Speaker 4: high ed is equally distributed among institutions. It is not.
Speaker 4: We have a lot a lot of underperforming colleges and
Speaker 4: universities in this country. There are great like the schools
Speaker 4: that we're probably thinking of the great schools, right. You've
Speaker 4: got some great state schools that are out there, the
Speaker 4: flagship universities. You have some great smaller private Great Books
Speaker 4: schools and other faith based schools that are doing really well.
Speaker 4: But you've got a lot of middling schools across the country. Right,
Speaker 4: there are four thousand or so colleges across the country.
Speaker 4: You know, a non trivial number of those schools are
Speaker 4: having students leave, right And by the way, they're spending
Speaker 4: six years on average to get a four year degree.
Speaker 4: They're leaving with debt. Some of them leave and don't
Speaker 4: even get the paper credential that they were promised. And
Speaker 4: that's the worst situation that they can be in. And
Speaker 4: we know it's ineffective because employers report that constantly that
Speaker 4: students who leave college are not prepared to enter the workforce.
Speaker 4: And so is there a better way to serve the
Speaker 4: needs of those students. Can we do war to give
Speaker 4: them flexibility with those existing federal funds to pursue career
Speaker 4: and technical ed Right, So, at the end of the day,
Speaker 4: our position is simply, you want to give students flexibility
Speaker 4: if we're going to fund this at the federal level
Speaker 4: with the type of post secondary education they pursue. Right,
Speaker 4: maybe they do go into a trade where they are
Speaker 4: leaving with no debt and making a good living right
Speaker 4: out of the gate. But right now we're saying to everybody,
Speaker 4: you've got to go to a four year brick and mortar,
Speaker 4: and by the way, majority of them are not going
Speaker 4: to serve you very well in the long run.
Speaker 3: Lindsay, we could keep going on this, but we really
Speaker 3: appreciate your time and you willing us to talk through
Speaker 3: some of these difficult questions that will definitely be on
Speaker 3: people's minds in the days and weeks ahead. Thank you,
Speaker 3: We appreciate it.
Speaker 4: Likewise, thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: We're joined now by sorob Amari's actually my colleague at
Speaker 3: Unheard and wrote a very very interesting piece this week
Speaker 3: that crystal Flag for us we wanted to talk about.
Speaker 3: The headline is Elon Musk is a danger to trump
Speaker 3: Ism and we should mention before we dive in that.
Speaker 3: SOB and I also have a new newsletter that you
Speaker 3: can sign up for over at onheard dot com. It's
Speaker 3: called Area forty seven. It's kind of inside scoop from
Speaker 3: Trump World with a very unheardy lens. We're having fun
Speaker 3: over there, So go ahead and sign up, and Sarab,
Speaker 3: thank you for being here.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me, guys, it's so good to join
Speaker 1: you on yet another platform.
Speaker 3: Heavily great to have you. Can you walk through the
Speaker 3: argument that you lay out in this article, especially through
Speaker 3: the lens of somebody who is on the right and
Speaker 3: is looking at what's just happened over the course of
Speaker 3: the first three weeks of the Trump presidency, and there's
Speaker 3: a lot, you know, probably to be critical of that
Speaker 3: people are dancing around or glossing over that you actually
Speaker 3: lay out here openly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I start with the case of the Consumer Financial
Speaker 1: Protection Bureau or a CFPB, not a friendly acronym, and
Speaker 1: I tell the story of Rohi Chopra, who was President
Speaker 1: Biden's now housted or outgoing director of the CFPB. He
Speaker 1: did some numerous reforms that I think were pro main street,
Speaker 1: helping ordinary Americans who have very little bargaining power against
Speaker 1: banks and now big tech companies that increasingly act like
Speaker 1: financial institutions. One of the things that he proposed just
Speaker 1: in his final days in office was a rule against
Speaker 1: d banking. This is basically that your financial institution can
Speaker 1: drop you as a customer based on your views or
Speaker 1: what you know, what you use your account to fundraise for,
Speaker 1: or what you've said online. And this was remarkable because
Speaker 1: it was kind of politically conciliatory. It's not just good policy.
Speaker 1: But in a way you have here someone from the
Speaker 1: progressive wing of the Democratic Party taking on a practice
Speaker 1: that mostly has been used against right wing activists like
Speaker 1: PayPal d banked and evangelical fundraising site that was raising
Speaker 1: money for January sixth defendants Canadian truckers who protested the
Speaker 1: COVID mandates, where d banked at the beheads of the
Speaker 1: Canadian government. In Britain, Nigel Faraj faced d banking for
Speaker 1: a while from his financial institution, which is called Coots. Anyway,
Speaker 1: it was something that the right was exercised about, and
Speaker 1: he just very with a very swift rule that says,
Speaker 1: you know, customers cannot be dropped based on their exercise
Speaker 1: of free speech. Would have put a stop to it. Now,
Speaker 1: that's not the only thing the cfpv did. It did
Speaker 1: lots of good things. But you know, Musk had said
Speaker 1: that the CFPP must die, and sure enough he did it.
Speaker 1: Not just Musk, by the way. Mark Zuckerberg also went
Speaker 1: on Joe Rogan's show complaining about why he's getting oversight
Speaker 1: from the CFPB. Well, it's because they track their Facebook
Speaker 1: users financial transactions and that they surveiled people, and so
Speaker 1: they're acting more and more like a financial institution. As
Speaker 1: Chopra himself told me, it's not that we are encroaching
Speaker 1: into big tech. It's a big big tech is encroaching
Speaker 1: into the financial system.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And Mark Andresen too went on rogan to complain about CFPB,
Speaker 5: talk about how it was de banking people and the
Speaker 5: d banking. I think a point is a great entry
Speaker 5: into this, into your piece and to the whole conversation
Speaker 5: because privately, Andresen and the others, I don't think actually
Speaker 5: would be satisfied by what Chopra did at CPB with
Speaker 5: the with with his de banking role, because it said
Speaker 5: you cannot debank people for ideological reasons. But of course
Speaker 5: you can still dbank people for being drug traffickers or
Speaker 5: for you know working you know, working with cartels, working
Speaker 5: with sanctioned organizations. Like there's a you know, it's called
Speaker 5: know your customer, and it's one of the things that
Speaker 5: Silicon Valley, some elements of Silicon Valley have been so
Speaker 5: hostile to this idea that you have as a financial
Speaker 5: institution some responsibility to know who your customer is and
Speaker 5: and whether or not they are just you know, you know,
Speaker 5: you're whether you're dealing with al Chapo. They hate that.
Speaker 5: They think that that's an encroachment on their freedom to
Speaker 5: you know, to do bitcoin commerce or whatever. And so
Speaker 5: when Andresen talks about that them having so many founders
Speaker 5: who were debanked, he's doing doing this kind of two
Speaker 5: step where he's trying to make Rogan's audience think that
Speaker 5: these Silicon Valley tech founders were debanked because they supported
Speaker 5: Trump or because they said something critical of like George
Speaker 5: Floyd or Black Lives Matter or something, when in fact,
Speaker 5: if you look at each case, it's like, oh, like
Speaker 5: they were you know, they were moving crypto for a
Speaker 5: cartel and so the bank was like, we're freezing this.
Speaker 5: And so for Choper to come in and deal with
Speaker 5: the actual problem that people had is interesting because it
Speaker 5: shows that he's a he's kind of responsive to the
Speaker 5: genuine public concern, but the public concern is not the
Speaker 5: actual oligarch concern. They're just kind of using that. So
Speaker 5: I guess, so answer the answer the charge that you've
Speaker 5: gotten online of and I get this too on the
Speaker 5: left or on the right of naivete that what did
Speaker 5: you expect? It's a bunch of oligarchs who got Trump
Speaker 5: into office, you actually believe they were going to do this.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So I get very irritated by that because I
Speaker 1: wrote a number of pieces in the lead up to
Speaker 1: the election as saying, as someone on the populist wing
Speaker 1: of the right or the pro worker conservative, we have
Speaker 1: different names for people like me, conservative, social democrat. I'm
Speaker 1: very concerned about Elon's influence. I wrote a piece for
Speaker 1: The New Statesman whether before the election where the headline
Speaker 1: was Trump will have to choose populism or Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: So it's not I always saw that, and I know
Speaker 1: the administration is torn between these competing impulses. But what
Speaker 1: I will say is, like the degree to which Elon
Speaker 1: has has been empowered Elon and that kind of coterie
Speaker 1: of the so called techno libertarian right, it is a
Speaker 1: little bit disturbing, especially what I see as self dealing.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So Elon wants to create an app out of X
Speaker 1: that is not just the social media company, but a
Speaker 1: kind of everything app like they have in China with
Speaker 1: we Chat. So it's just it's your payment system. It
Speaker 1: can do all sorts of things. And CFPD would have
Speaker 1: brought scrutiny to bear on what he was doing on
Speaker 1: the financial side of it, and he says kill it,
Speaker 1: and it is done. That's very disturbing. Another one which
Speaker 1: I mentioned in the piece is what's happening in the
Speaker 1: National Labor Relations Board. So President Trump came in and
Speaker 1: he dismissed the general counsel of the CF of the NLRB.
Speaker 1: That's quite expected because President Biden did the same thing
Speaker 1: to trump One's general counsel. But then he also dismissed
Speaker 1: without cause or notice, is required by both statutory law
Speaker 1: and Supreme Court. President one of the members, gwyn Wilcox,
Speaker 1: who can only be dismissed for malfeasance or neglect causes
Speaker 1: like that, and there's no indication that she's done anything
Speaker 1: like that, and also with notice, and she didn't receive notice.
Speaker 1: Now what that does is basically the nl RB needs
Speaker 1: under Supreme Court, president needs a quorum in order to
Speaker 1: actually uphold labor law, to enforce the Wagner Act or
Speaker 1: the National Labor Relations Act. Now this happens against the
Speaker 1: backdrop in which Elon Musk and one other of the
Speaker 1: oligarchs who stood on the stage at the swearing in,
Speaker 1: namely Jeff Bisos of Amazon, have launched a lawsuit to
Speaker 1: declare the National Labor Relations Act unconstitutional altogether. Now that's
Speaker 1: a drastic legal argument, and it's questionable whether even with
Speaker 1: a super conservative Supreme Court, they're going to be able
Speaker 1: to kill the National Labor Relations Act, which is the
Speaker 1: fundamental labor law in this country. But you know, is
Speaker 1: there a better alternative, Yes, basically to cripple the agency,
Speaker 1: which is what happens when you remove its quorum. You know,
Speaker 1: local and LRB offices can still investigate and so on,
Speaker 1: but when it comes to an actual labor dispute where
Speaker 1: the Board as a whole has to apol collective bargaining,
Speaker 1: it can't do that. And what I've heard is that
Speaker 1: they intend to keep things that way, essentially crippling the agency.
Speaker 3: So one thing that I've heard from people in Trump world,
Speaker 3: or this argument from people who are sympathetic to Musk
Speaker 3: and Doge, is that this is basically a generational opportunity
Speaker 3: to deal with the problem of waste, fraud and abuse
Speaker 3: in the government, which I think probably all of us
Speaker 3: agree is significant. You know, there's kind of it's sort
Speaker 3: of an inevitability, of course, and whether they're able to
Speaker 3: make a big dent in it without touching things like
Speaker 3: Medicare and Social Security, you basically can't. You can take
Speaker 3: you could eliminate the pentagon and still probably not put
Speaker 3: not probably you couldn't put a dent really in the
Speaker 3: debt and the deficit. So on the one hand, there's
Speaker 3: this genuinely important question of streamlining the federal government, making
Speaker 3: it more efficient and helping people in ways that are
Speaker 3: kind of populist in some cases, not all cases, but
Speaker 3: in some cases kind of populist. On the other hand,
Speaker 3: there's you know, the idea that this is all being
Speaker 3: done by a literal oligarchic is close as you can
Speaker 3: get in the American system to an actual oligarch So
Speaker 3: how do you think about the balance between this worthy goal,
Speaker 3: noble goal of cutting down on large s and actually,
Speaker 3: you know, making the spending of tax para money more efficient,
Speaker 3: and on the other hand, having it sort of done
Speaker 3: by someone who at least has the potential to be
Speaker 3: a corporate raid for his own cause.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's a great question. We have to separate
Speaker 1: mentally separate different things here. The first is that if
Speaker 1: you want social reform that empowers working, working people and consumers,
Speaker 1: that's not necessarily tantamount to supporting everything that's associated with
Speaker 1: big government, you know, like just a bloated administrative apparatus
Speaker 1: can actually be as conservatives though as well, but it
Speaker 1: can be pretty oppressive to ordinary people, and it can
Speaker 1: be gained by incumbents to their own advantage. So it's telling,
Speaker 1: for example that in Mexico President am Loo, as he's
Speaker 1: popularly known, very left wing president, he actually slashed the
Speaker 1: size of government and he cut off all sorts of
Speaker 1: like magazines and NGOs and stuff that survived at the
Speaker 1: only because the Mexican taxpayer was subsidizing them. And the
Speaker 1: Mexican kind of progressives, think about the Mexican equivalent of
Speaker 1: the Brooklyn Left, were really really angry with Amlo the
Speaker 1: whole time he was in power. They hated him in
Speaker 1: part because he had cut them off from the public dole.
Speaker 1: And yet at the same time he did things that
Speaker 1: empowers ordinary people relative to employers, relative to capital, so
Speaker 1: like raising the minimum wage, making it easier to organize
Speaker 1: workplaces and so on. So it's not just like if
Speaker 1: you're in favor, if you're consider yourself pro worker or
Speaker 1: pro labor or pro consumer, you should just want bigness
Speaker 1: in government for its own sake in every direction. But
Speaker 1: two things have to happen for this kind of reform.
Speaker 1: One is it can't be so self dealing. It can't
Speaker 1: the guy who has an obvious, you know, imminent material
Speaker 1: interest in deleting quote unquote some agency should not be
Speaker 1: the one wielding that kind of scalpel. It's not even
Speaker 1: a scalpel, unfortunately, it's like an axe. It's a different thing.
Speaker 1: And the second thing I'd say is there are two
Speaker 1: different kinds of administrative agency. One is one that like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's just you know, directly overseeing society, and
Speaker 1: I think those can be quite oppressive. However, agencies that
Speaker 1: came out of the New Deal, there's more, many more
Speaker 1: of them, you know, all the various like trade commissions,
Speaker 1: you know, et cetera, the New Deal era, I mean
Speaker 1: a new Deal, uh, the the U, and then I
Speaker 1: think I think of the CFB. The same way is
Speaker 1: more they're playing umpire. They're playing umpire between different social forces.
Speaker 1: So the state is mediating between labor, capital, consumers, you know,
Speaker 1: state back electricity co ops, et cetera, et cetera. Those
Speaker 1: are not big government. What they're doing is just straining
Speaker 1: the power of a few market giants and allowing, you know,
Speaker 1: encouraging the other side of the market to count exert
Speaker 1: what used to be called countervailing power by the new dealers.
Speaker 1: That's the difference, you know, like and I think of
Speaker 1: Social Security, by the way, and in the same vein
Speaker 1: social Security is not a big government program. It's not
Speaker 1: coming from the taxpayer, and FDR deliberately set it up
Speaker 1: that way. In the going back to the nineteenth century
Speaker 1: and even the early eighteenth century, workers had set up
Speaker 1: these basically mutual organizations of mutual aid where if one
Speaker 1: of them fell ill, the rest of them had contributed
Speaker 1: and they could take care of that person's family or
Speaker 1: if he died the widow. What the Social Security program
Speaker 1: did was take and just codify that and formalize it
Speaker 1: into a system. But because it's not funded by the taxpayer,
Speaker 1: it's impossible to quote unquote reform or very difficult. We'll
Speaker 1: see if Elon tries to go there. So I agree
Speaker 1: that like big government for its own in every direction,
Speaker 1: sure challenge that it's it can be, it can be oppressive.
Speaker 1: But when the state plays umpire and tries to level
Speaker 1: the economic playing field between different social forces. I think
Speaker 1: that shouldn't be touched.
Speaker 5: But I'm just kind of curious, by the way, just
Speaker 5: in general, what makes people like you conservative social democrat
Speaker 5: not just a social democrat, like what's the.
Speaker 1: Well that becomes a more philosophical question. So I think
Speaker 1: social democracy, and we should say social and Christian democracy.
Speaker 1: They're kind of like twin traditions in the US. The
Speaker 1: closest equipment we have is the New Deal tradition is
Speaker 1: conservative right it. In other words, I'm not safety. I'm
Speaker 1: not like a right wing guy who then occasionally says
Speaker 1: stuff to get like a pad in the ahead out
Speaker 1: of the head from like the New York Times or whatever.
Speaker 1: It's because as a as a person who wants to
Speaker 1: see a social order that is not completely disruptive to workers' lives,
Speaker 1: that conduces to family formation, things like that. Well, capitalism
Speaker 1: is a profoundly revolutionary force. It's very good at doing
Speaker 1: things efficiently and so on. We all know it's benefit.
Speaker 1: But it can also be pretty disruptive. So as a conservative,
Speaker 1: I want to restrain that to try to bring it under.
Speaker 1: If we're going to have disruption, let's have it. Subject
Speaker 1: to political contestation rather than just having you know, the few,
Speaker 1: the very very powerful direct the nature of.
Speaker 5: So it's like a it's like a twist on the
Speaker 5: Buckley line where you know you're you're standing the tide
Speaker 5: of capitalism and yelling, yelling stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess so. So one one let's very quick
Speaker 1: point is also that like the New Dealers the social
Speaker 1: democrats of old, they were trying to prevent revolution, right
Speaker 1: like the The idea was to stabilize the system in
Speaker 1: order to not have you know, authoritarian leftism or authoritarian
Speaker 1: rightism come up. It was a conservative impulse and I
Speaker 1: think the peopleeople who call themselves democratic socialists would be
Speaker 1: offended to hear that, but they're the fundamental impulse here.
Speaker 1: Is not that we don't want totally classless society. Very
Speaker 1: few people do, only like really hardcore tankies. It's about restraining,
Speaker 1: keeping it under some political control, keeping it, you know,
Speaker 1: making the market safe for society is a good way
Speaker 1: to put it.
Speaker 3: So such a I think important piece. So thank you
Speaker 3: for coming here to discuss some of this as it happens,
Speaker 3: changes by the hour seemingly, and we appreciate your time.
Speaker 1: Thank you both and it's good to join my colleague
Speaker 1: on a different show.
Speaker 5: All right, Emily, very nice to have your colleague on
Speaker 5: interesting show. Today. We didn't we didn't get a chance
Speaker 5: to talk about the new inflation numbers that just came
Speaker 5: out showing a rise in inflation three percent. It's a
Speaker 5: real blow to Trump, also a blow to your four
Speaker 5: oh one k. The stock market is diving on this news.
Speaker 5: It's probably going to push Trump to calm down a
Speaker 5: little bit on the on the the trade trade war,
Speaker 5: you know, uh, And it's going to be interesting to see.
Speaker 5: I think he's just going to go into the Bureau
Speaker 5: of Labor Statistics and into the bowels of the Commerce
Speaker 5: Department and tell him to stop giving him ugly numbers
Speaker 5: that like, I think that's going to be Musk's task,
Speaker 5: give me better numbers. But in the me in the meantime,
Speaker 5: I think it'll put a little bit of the brakes
Speaker 5: on the on the trade war.
Speaker 3: And you know, that is one of those things where
Speaker 3: it's tough because like there actually are some tweaks that
Speaker 3: probably need to be made over at BOLS. But then
Speaker 3: you so like maybe there's a good end, there's a
Speaker 3: good outcome, but you just can't trust the process, so
Speaker 3: somebody to keep an eye on, for sure. Trump notoriously
Speaker 3: cares very much about the markets on his watch, but
Speaker 3: also notoriously as a hardened ideologue on the question of tariffs.
Speaker 3: So an interesting clash here for sure. Thank you so
Speaker 3: much everybody for tuning in to today's edition of Counterpoints.
Speaker 3: We will be back here next Wednesday with more. We
Speaker 3: know this is a longer show, so we appreciate it
Speaker 3: one sticking with us.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and we'll do a little Friday thing for you
Speaker 5: just to keep you updated. And we'll see that