Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds and Donald Trump is pulling worse on
Speaker 1: the economy than any reason.
Speaker 2: President.
Speaker 1: We have such a great show for you today, Think
Speaker 1: like an economist. Podcast host Justin Wolfers steps by to
Speaker 1: talk about the fuzzy math of DOGE savings for the
Speaker 1: American people. Then we'll talk to the Eurasia groups Ian
Speaker 1: Bremer about the new global alignment in Trump two point zero.
Speaker 1: But first the.
Speaker 3: News Smiley, It's beginning to look a lot like Germany
Speaker 3: in some people's hand gestures these days. There's quite a
Speaker 3: lot of Boback. After Steve Bennon, who seems to hate
Speaker 3: Elon Musk, did a similar gesture to him.
Speaker 1: Personally, I don't want to make any hand gesture that
Speaker 1: can be interpreted anyway that starts with an end and
Speaker 1: ends with an eye. I just think stay away from
Speaker 1: all of these hand gestures. French far right leader Jordan
Speaker 1: Bardella canceled planned remarks at Seapack after ex Trump advisor
Speaker 1: Steve Bannon made a gesture referring to Nazi ideology. That's
Speaker 1: a direct quote, according to a statement. This is the
Speaker 1: far right leader from France who's saying that it is
Speaker 1: too close to Nazi ideology for him. Let's take a
Speaker 1: moment to think about that for a second. The far
Speaker 1: right leader from France, not the left wing leader, but
Speaker 1: the far right leader from France is saying that that's
Speaker 1: worth thinking about for a minute. It is probably the
Speaker 1: strongest rebuke yet of Bannon, but it's worth pointing out
Speaker 1: how far afield we have gotten in the United States
Speaker 1: of America that this kind of rebuke must come from
Speaker 1: someone on the far right from France. You're welcome. I
Speaker 1: can't take it.
Speaker 2: It's so bad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really a shape if the reports that we're
Speaker 3: there's not going to be any more seapas anymore come true,
Speaker 3: because then they'll just never have an up or you
Speaker 3: to go there and do all these interesting hand motions.
Speaker 1: It's also worth just pausing for a moment and remembering
Speaker 1: that we have this seapack and yet we don't have
Speaker 1: a democratic version of it. We don't even have a
Speaker 1: centrist version of it. We just have this one thing.
Speaker 1: You know, if you are a listener this podcast, perhaps
Speaker 1: you would like to have something that is like seapack,
Speaker 1: but not as zealatus.
Speaker 4: Not as awful.
Speaker 3: So this is the interesting new development is the staff
Speaker 3: at multiple government agencies have been instructed not to speak
Speaker 3: to Congress.
Speaker 1: Yes, Congress, which is supposed to be running this whole thing,
Speaker 1: is getting less and less and less power, and we're
Speaker 1: seeing it happen in real time. Here's a Democratic congress person.
Speaker 1: She sent several letters to different federal agencies and the
Speaker 1: employees were said that they were not able to speak
Speaker 1: to her. The Committee on approbates as a long standing
Speaker 1: relationship with agency career staff, Well not anymore. Are This
Speaker 1: is the transparency that is doge.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's almost like, you know, there's supposed to be
Speaker 3: these checks and balances in the government and we're deciding
Speaker 3: that feels real irrelevant. The founding fathers didn't want that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I mean, this is a takeover of the
Speaker 1: United States government at the highest level, and that's what
Speaker 1: we're watching in real time. And you know, Congress has
Speaker 1: given up what little power they had and they gave
Speaker 1: it up to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and now
Speaker 1: Elon Musk is cutting away at the government despite the
Speaker 1: fact that that is not how any of this is
Speaker 1: supposed to work.
Speaker 3: With those drastic overreaches and sledgehambers to oversight trump claims
Speaker 3: power to fire administrative law judges.
Speaker 1: That will Yeah, so again, Look, there are a couple
Speaker 1: things that Trump wor is doing with the courts.
Speaker 2: That are bad.
Speaker 1: One is that they are really like either they haven't
Speaker 1: quite yet done it, but they are priming themselves to
Speaker 1: a judicial rulings, which, by the way, will tip us
Speaker 1: into a constitutional crisis. I don't know that it's quite
Speaker 1: happened yet, but there's a lot of kind of voodoo
Speaker 1: math going on when it comes to unfreezing these funds.
Speaker 1: A lot of them are being unfrozen or a lot
Speaker 1: of them aren't being unfrozen as the way the federal
Speaker 1: judiciary is instructed.
Speaker 2: So we're going to see more of this.
Speaker 1: We're going to eventually, hopefully not, but I think there's
Speaker 1: a very likely scenario where the courts are ignored, where
Speaker 1: these members of the federal government in Trump world, under
Speaker 1: the instruction a Musk and Trump barrel through the guardrails
Speaker 1: and continue to have their way with the federal government. Now,
Speaker 1: the one piece I think of good news here is
Speaker 1: that we're starting to see real pushback, and we're starting
Speaker 1: to see it from both the right and the left,
Speaker 1: because you're seeing these town halls of these people who
Speaker 1: are suddenly understanding just what's stake in these town halls.
Speaker 1: And I think we're going to see more and more
Speaker 1: of that, And I think that we are absolutely one
Speaker 1: hundred percent at the beginning of a real ground level
Speaker 1: pushback that I think is going to be really important
Speaker 1: and good.
Speaker 2: So I would say.
Speaker 3: That, I mean, I think there's a very interesting theory
Speaker 3: of the case that a lot of people live their
Speaker 3: life not being really affected by Trump's first term and
Speaker 3: didn't see tangible changes to their life. They just didn't
Speaker 3: like what was happening. But here we're seeing it all
Speaker 3: the time, and there's even more evidence of it where
Speaker 3: that could happen right here, Which is our next subject,
Speaker 3: which is Trump fires federal workers who help fight forest
Speaker 3: fires weeks after historic LA blazes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, and the FDA and the cuts. You
Speaker 1: know today they were talking about how they're going to
Speaker 1: cut the FAI. I mean, these are things that if
Speaker 1: they are cut, we're going to see real tangible results
Speaker 1: right away. And TSA, for example, they're going to cut
Speaker 1: the DSA that's going to mean longer lines and airs.
Speaker 1: I mean, these things are going to affect.
Speaker 2: Every part of our lives.
Speaker 1: And I think it's really important to remind people that
Speaker 1: this is not happening because the federal government is in
Speaker 1: trouble now. I mean, certainly we run a big deficit.
Speaker 1: This is happening because Republicans do not want to let
Speaker 1: these tax cuts for corporations and millionaires expire.
Speaker 2: That is what's happening here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And they have a theory of the case that
Speaker 3: none of these people's work is necessary, that the private
Speaker 3: sector will just pick it up and then they won't
Speaker 3: have to pay for it anymore, and that theory of
Speaker 3: the case is very dumb.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Justin Wolfers is the host of the Think Like an
Speaker 1: Economist podcast and a professor at the University of Michigan.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Fast Politics. Justin wolf You, Molly Sancy
Speaker 1: academic here to explain to us all the money that
Speaker 1: don't or some members of the United States Senate call
Speaker 1: it doggie, is saving the American people lots of money.
Speaker 2: So explain.
Speaker 4: Could you just stop by telling me who calls it doggie?
Speaker 2: We had a senator call it doggy. The other day.
Speaker 1: And actually there are some members of Congress who are
Speaker 1: calling it doggie, and you know what, for power to them,
Speaker 1: they are not wrong. Oh actually, Jesse said, everyone calls
Speaker 1: it doggie.
Speaker 4: I love seeing Christian Conservatives becoming comfortable with themselves, their sexuality,
Speaker 4: their bodies, and what we can do with them.
Speaker 2: All right, so let's focus on the money they're saving.
Speaker 2: It strikes me that they're not saving that much money. Discuss.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I'm going to start with the math, and
Speaker 4: I'm not going to apologize to your listeners because actually
Speaker 4: the math is the whole story. So there's a website
Speaker 4: Elon says he's super transparent in which he lists every
Speaker 4: one of his savings. So I went on that website
Speaker 4: last night and I mapped it up. I imported all
Speaker 4: the dater into a spreadsheet, and I added up all
Speaker 4: the savings and it adds up to seven point three
Speaker 4: billion dollars. Sounds like a low, right, Like you and
Speaker 4: I could have a terrific night hour.
Speaker 2: It feels like a lot. I good, Yeah, summer house everything.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 4: So here's the thing. There are three hundred and forty
Speaker 4: million Americans. So we're going to do long division seven
Speaker 4: point three billion divided by three hundred and forty million.
Speaker 4: What's that? That's about twenty dollars, isn't it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that doesn't seem like that much.
Speaker 4: It's twenty one dollars and forty seven cents per American.
Speaker 4: Now the President is so excited by how much money
Speaker 4: that Doze is saving us that he's recommended that perhaps
Speaker 4: we should have a Doge dividend that he sends out
Speaker 4: dividend checks where one fifth of the Doze savings goes
Speaker 4: out to us as Doge dividends or stimulus checks, and
Speaker 4: the other four fifths, of course girded tax cuts for
Speaker 4: the rich. That one fifth then adds up to four
Speaker 4: dollars and twenty nine cents per american. Now, it turns
Speaker 4: out a cart and of eggs costs more than that,
Speaker 4: So so far Doze will yield savings.
Speaker 2: Of nine e nine eggs.
Speaker 4: Nine eggs. You can have many way you want them.
Speaker 4: You have to cook them yourself.
Speaker 2: Do they sell them in nine tacks? I thought they
Speaker 2: didn't sell them a nine facs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Well, what you can do is buy a six
Speaker 4: pack and then split another six pack with the neighbor. Okay,
Speaker 4: and that's your dividend check. Don't spend it all at once?
Speaker 4: Can I teach the listeners some economics?
Speaker 2: Please? And teach me too.
Speaker 4: Okay, so the amazing thing, right, the bottom line is
Speaker 4: the dose savings are trivial. They're tiny. You're getting four
Speaker 4: dollars and twenty nine cents, and in return, it's going
Speaker 4: to be hard to get into the national parks. The
Speaker 4: analysts who determine whether the Department of Transport invests in
Speaker 4: good stuff or bad stuff got laid off, so we
Speaker 4: might spend hundreds of billions of dollars on bad stuff.
Speaker 4: That all sorts of services are getting cut across the
Speaker 4: federal government. So you got your four dollars twenty nine
Speaker 4: cents on the one side, and you've got a less
Speaker 4: effective government on the outher. Okay, here's the most important
Speaker 4: thing and the most difficult thing to understand about physcal policy,
Speaker 4: and it's simply this. Our minds, our human minds, are
Speaker 4: not very good at thinking about big numbers. So millions
Speaker 4: sounds like a lot of money, billions sounds like heapes,
Speaker 4: and trillions sounds magnificent, And that's roughly right. But the
Speaker 4: thing to realize is these words sound the same, but
Speaker 4: they mean very very very very different things. And so
Speaker 4: when someone says I have generated savings of say seven
Speaker 4: billion dollars, don't get impressed. The first thing you have
Speaker 4: to do is take any number and reduce it to
Speaker 4: a human scale, a scale that your mind understands. And
Speaker 4: in this case, what I did is i'd made it
Speaker 4: per person. Now I realize Elon is saving twenty one
Speaker 4: dollars and forty seven cents per person, and that's a
Speaker 4: scale I can understanding. All of a sudden, these impressive numbers.
Speaker 4: We realize that Elon's looking in the wrong place, is
Speaker 4: doing the wrong things.
Speaker 1: Isn't there an eight billion dollars savings that's actually eight
Speaker 1: million dollars?
Speaker 4: Yes? Okay, So first of all, everything I just said
Speaker 4: is taking Eilon at his word, saying I went to
Speaker 4: the website, I counted his savings as he counts them,
Speaker 4: and so on. Now it turns out there's a bunch
Speaker 4: of Salutes who've gone into the Doze data where they
Speaker 4: list Doze as savings, and they've said, hey, is this
Speaker 4: really a saving? Now? The most prominent of these was
Speaker 4: a case where those claim to have saved eight billion
Speaker 4: dollars on a very small project that couldn't possibly be
Speaker 4: worth eight billion, right, And this again is the problem.
Speaker 4: So some idiot wrote down eight billion without realizing that
Speaker 4: was completely out of scale for the sort of project
Speaker 4: that I think about. Since that the project was eight million,
Speaker 4: so Doze had to go back and say, well, actually
Speaker 4: we are exaggerated by seven point ninety nine to two billion,
Speaker 4: but don't worry, we staved you eight million.
Speaker 2: I'm not an economist.
Speaker 4: You're not an economist, mind, but it's less. That's what
Speaker 4: you're going to tell me.
Speaker 1: Right, I'm not an economist, but I feel like there's
Speaker 1: a lot of difference between a billion and a million.
Speaker 4: That's really, really really important to be literal. A billion
Speaker 4: is a thousand million, and a trillion is one thousand billion.
Speaker 4: So let's try and create our own scale here. May
Speaker 4: Musk wants to save two trillion, and if he does,
Speaker 4: that will balance the budget, which is the deficits around
Speaker 4: about one point eight trillion. Right now, Okay, so he's
Speaker 4: after two trillion, So if he saves two billion, that's
Speaker 4: zero point one percent of the way there. Another way
Speaker 4: of saying this is if he saves twenty billion, think
Speaker 4: about how far he's got to run as being one
Speaker 4: football field. A football field is one hundred yards. If
Speaker 4: he gets to twenty billion, then he's moved the ball
Speaker 4: forward one yard. Okay, he's moved it forward seven point
Speaker 4: three billion, so he's moved the ball from his goal
Speaker 4: line one foot. And I really want listeners to think
Speaker 4: about that. Realize that on this fiscal football field, each
Speaker 4: yard is twenty billion. So whenever you hear a word
Speaker 4: that begins with M million, realize it's doing no work whatsoever. Right,
Speaker 4: it's moving you forward like a quarter of an inch.
Speaker 4: It's tiny, it's infinitesimal, like it matters for people in
Speaker 4: their lives, but it's not. If what you think you're
Speaker 4: going to do is fundamentally transform our government's finances, you
Speaker 4: can't even stuff that begins with a letter M from million.
Speaker 4: You've got to start with billion. And in fact, if
Speaker 4: you want a yard, you want twenty billion. And he's
Speaker 4: not even at one yard yet.
Speaker 1: Right, I want you to sort of top line because
Speaker 1: what Republicans have done have said like we are cutting
Speaker 1: waste and fraud, which again fraud seems to me, and
Speaker 1: according to elon things he doesn't agree with, discuss wonderful.
Speaker 4: So here's another economic principle for the listeners, and it's
Speaker 4: one I tell my students. You're never allowed to use
Speaker 4: the word cost without the word benefit. Right. You could
Speaker 4: say I saved two thousand dollars worth of costs. Why
Speaker 4: is that? Well, I stopped paying my mortgage. Right, that's
Speaker 4: not a benefit to stop paying your mortgage. It's going
Speaker 4: to come back and by you on the bum. So
Speaker 4: the one exception to that rule that you can use
Speaker 4: the word cost without benefits because if there's a cost cut,
Speaker 4: there's a benefit cut is if you're eliminating waste for
Speaker 4: auDA abuse. Because waste fordam abuse is all cost, no benefit.
Speaker 4: And so that's sort of the idea behind Doze or
Speaker 4: the animating politics or the animating narrative. The thing there's
Speaker 4: not that much waste fraud and abuse. More than that,
Speaker 4: Doge isn't finding it. Here's how you know something's waste,
Speaker 4: fraud and abuse. When they discover it, people are arrested,
Speaker 4: right that onto it. So far Doze is at zero arrests.
Speaker 4: What they've done instead is they've discovered some things Elon
Speaker 4: doesn't like. Elon doesn't like it when usaid, which is
Speaker 4: basically how the US government helps other countries foreign aid.
Speaker 4: It's less than one percent of our federal budget. It
Speaker 4: gives us soft power, and it makes the world a
Speaker 4: safer place. Elon doesn't like that, so he eliminates it.
Speaker 4: But it's not waste fraud and abuse. That's a value judgment.
Speaker 4: We had a whole circus last week where Elon discovered
Speaker 4: that there were lots of Social Security numbers for people
Speaker 4: who were not recorded as having been dead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as please talk about that.
Speaker 4: He literally goes on to claim, as the White House did.
Speaker 4: Trump doubled down, as did his press secretary, that tens
Speaker 4: of millions of people are receiving Social Security who shouldn't
Speaker 4: be receiving it. That would be waste, fraud and abuse.
Speaker 4: So you can see this is like a really important
Speaker 4: thing from a retire perspective, because this is how doze
Speaker 4: becomes a technocratic apparatus rather than a political one. Now,
Speaker 4: the reality is that there were not tens of millions
Speaker 4: of people receiving Social Security. He shouldn't. What happens is
Speaker 4: there's one data based table. God, I'm so boring right now.
Speaker 4: I'm going to bore everyone.
Speaker 2: No, it's not boring. It's a coding error.
Speaker 4: Right, it's actually even more boring. There's one database table
Speaker 4: at Social Security where they list all the social Security
Speaker 4: numbers that have ever been issued, and then you want
Speaker 4: to have another column in that table. Think of like
Speaker 4: a big Excel spreadsheet, which says, is this person dead?
Speaker 4: And it turns out if you just take all the
Speaker 4: people who are not recorded as being dead, there's tens
Speaker 4: of millions of people or social security numbers that were
Speaker 4: issued to people born over one hundred years ago. Now
Speaker 4: that doesn't mean those people are receiving social Security. In fact,
Speaker 4: almost all of those records were people who died more
Speaker 4: than fifty years ago before we had electronic death records,
Speaker 4: and as a result, there was no easy way to
Speaker 4: update this table to show that they were dead. But
Speaker 4: if you go through those social scurity numbers, no one's
Speaker 4: drawing a check from them, because social Security is a
Speaker 4: remarkably more sophisticated operation than Musk and his coders. And
Speaker 4: so it turns out that in reality, there are about
Speaker 4: eighty thousand Americans age ninety nine or older who are
Speaker 4: receiving Social Security, not sixty million. And actually eighty thousand
Speaker 4: is about the right number because we actually do have
Speaker 4: some old people in America who are receiving Social Security,
Speaker 4: and a reasonable estimate is not that there were sixty
Speaker 4: million people receiving social Security who shouldn't be, but rather
Speaker 4: perhaps it's sixty and so the millions of people he found,
Speaker 4: and therefore the billions of dollars he saved, was literally
Speaker 4: a misinterpretation from a guy who was too busy to
Speaker 4: be bothered to go to Google to say, why are
Speaker 4: there so many Social Security numbers that are not yet
Speaker 4: marked as dead? If he'd done that, he would have
Speaker 4: discovered there was a twenty twenty three Inspector General report
Speaker 4: that explains literally every line of this inexcruciatingly boring detail.
Speaker 4: There's no problem with the Social Security database. The only
Speaker 4: problem is when a naive person misinterprets it.
Speaker 1: Part of the thinking behind this, I think, on the
Speaker 1: part of a lot of conservatives, was that dought sort
Speaker 1: of technology that the rest of us didn't know existed, right,
Speaker 1: that they were going to be able to look at
Speaker 1: things in ways that the rest of us couldn't, and
Speaker 1: that they were going to be able. And I think
Speaker 1: of it as like sort of the revenge of the buzzword.
Speaker 1: Like there have been you know, for example, like two
Speaker 1: years ago, everyone was going to put everything on the blockchain, right,
Speaker 1: and then you know, the blockchain is.
Speaker 2: Good, but the world is not running on blockchain.
Speaker 1: And this is a sort of similar thing, right, everything's AI,
Speaker 1: the AI, this the AI that, And I do think
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, a lot of these bureaucrats thought
Speaker 1: that AI was going to be able to rip through
Speaker 1: the federal government and figure out everything, and we're seeing
Speaker 1: in fact that they're just sort of haphazardly cutting things
Speaker 1: Elon doesn't like.
Speaker 4: Yes, So that's I think extraordinarily insightful. So if the
Speaker 4: argument is that the government should run on modern technology,
Speaker 4: I'm completely in favor. In which case I'm really very
Speaker 4: disappointed that the first thing the Republicans want to do
Speaker 4: is strip the technology modernization money out of the irs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that doesn't seem to square with the theory.
Speaker 4: Right. Look, I can give listeners two answers. One, it's
Speaker 4: not going to work. You can walk away and just
Speaker 4: believe me because my first name is professor. But that's
Speaker 4: a shitty way of thinking. What I want to do
Speaker 4: is give you a really deep understanding of why it's
Speaker 4: not going to work. So many of us have in
Speaker 4: our minds the sense that government is bloated and inefficient.
Speaker 4: I know that last time I went to get my
Speaker 4: driver's license renewed, it was the most infuriating and frustrating
Speaker 4: thing in the world. I know I've waited in the
Speaker 4: long line at the post office. I know that sometimes
Speaker 4: my kids that this local schools are not well run,
Speaker 4: and so on. The first thing to understand is that
Speaker 4: most government services a state and local government. They're not federal.
Speaker 4: The best business analogy for the federal government it's a
Speaker 4: company called ADP. ADP is a private sector company that
Speaker 4: does payroll processing. Basically, a lot of companies send ADP
Speaker 4: their bank account detail and it's probably true for you money.
Speaker 4: It's how you get paid. They send your bank account
Speaker 4: details and an amount of money and ADP will send
Speaker 4: out the check. Many of your listeners will receive their
Speaker 4: checks yo ad So basically, what is ADP. It's a
Speaker 4: bunch of nerds with computers and basically a really big
Speaker 4: check printer. Why do I bring them up? What is
Speaker 4: the federal government? So it's not the DMV, and it's
Speaker 4: not the local hospital, and it's not the local schools.
Speaker 4: That's the state government. Most of what the federal government
Speaker 4: does is takes in money through taxes and sends it
Speaker 4: back out. It's basically there to take money in when
Speaker 4: you're doing well and then give it back to you
Speaker 4: when you need it. That's what social security is, that's
Speaker 4: what unemployment insurance is, and so on. So it turns
Speaker 4: out that yes, the federal government spends lots of money,
Speaker 4: but it spends a lot of money in the same
Speaker 4: way adp quote spends a lot of money. It's just
Speaker 4: writing a lot of checks. It's writing a lot of
Speaker 4: checks folks who also send them in money. So if
Speaker 4: you want to save money, it's not really going to
Speaker 4: be there's too many people manning the check printer, right,
Speaker 4: it's really are we getting enough checks in and we're
Speaker 4: sending enough checks out. So there's this old saying the
Speaker 4: federal government's an insurance company with an army, and it's
Speaker 4: basically right. So again, remember the first lesson we said,
Speaker 4: which was I want you to think about twenty billion
Speaker 4: dollars in savings as being one yard on a football field.
Speaker 4: Total federal spending on payroll on people who work for
Speaker 4: the federal government is two hundred billion dollars, which is
Speaker 4: to say it's ten yards. You could fire everyone who
Speaker 4: worked for the federal government and you'd move the ball
Speaker 4: ten yards. Now, no one wants to do that. Elon
Speaker 4: might end up reducing the federal workforce by ten percent,
Speaker 4: and that's going to involve a lot of very very
Speaker 4: painful cuts and a lot of very very painful services.
Speaker 4: Ten percent of ton of billion is twenty billion. So
Speaker 4: if he cuts the federal workforce by ten percent, a
Speaker 4: massive amount, he moves the football forward one yard and
Speaker 4: he's got ninety nine to go. The point here is
Speaker 4: it's not about workforce reduction. That's not where the money is.
Speaker 4: The money is in two places. It's a rich guy
Speaker 4: is not paying enough taxes. That's the money that's not
Speaker 4: coming in.
Speaker 2: I don't think Elon's so interested in that.
Speaker 4: And then there's the money that's going out, which is
Speaker 4: predominantly Social Security, Medicare, and medicaid. If you're against those programs,
Speaker 4: you want to send fear of those checks before you
Speaker 4: better go to Congress first. And if you think that
Speaker 4: those programs are actually a really fair and useful thing
Speaker 4: that the federal government does, then you realize that actually,
Speaker 4: like most of what the federal government does, because that's
Speaker 4: most of where the federal dollars are going.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then there's also one other saying which you
Speaker 1: don't mention, which is servicing the national dat.
Speaker 4: So that still basically makes the federal government like ADP.
Speaker 4: It's printing a lot of checks. And you're right that
Speaker 4: some amount of our revenue now is just going to
Speaker 4: pay in interest bills a large and increasingly large amount.
Speaker 4: And then this brings us all the way back full circle,
Speaker 4: which is where is our fiscal position, which is the
Speaker 4: economy is very good. May disappoint some lirls to hear that,
Speaker 4: but I believe that's true. When the economy is very good,
Speaker 4: the government should be stocking away money to either repay
Speaker 4: past debts or for a rainy day in the future. Instead,
Speaker 4: we have a very very large budget deficit and very
Speaker 4: large interest payments, and Trump is promising about four trillion
Speaker 4: dollars worth of tax cuts back to the football field.
Speaker 4: Four trillion now is two football fields, right, So Elon's
Speaker 4: going to move the ball one yard and then Trump
Speaker 4: is going to run it back two hundred yards. So
Speaker 4: that's how this math isn't mathing. And so there really
Speaker 4: is a quite serious fiscal situation that Republicans need to decide.
Speaker 4: Do they want to blow out the dead. Maybe that's
Speaker 4: what they want to do, which is leave it for
Speaker 4: Democrats to clean up again and they get their priorities through.
Speaker 4: That could be what's going on. At some point. You've
Speaker 4: got to wonder how long this can go on?
Speaker 2: Right, But that's a real question.
Speaker 1: I watched c SPAN because I have no life, and
Speaker 1: I was listening to Rand Paul, who I think of
Speaker 1: as almost always wrong about everything.
Speaker 2: Because remember these tax cuts.
Speaker 1: The panic here is because Republicans don't want these tax
Speaker 1: cuts to expire. If these tax cuts are allowed to expire,
Speaker 1: talk goes through where the American government is financially.
Speaker 4: I haven't done the matter too much on this, so
Speaker 4: I'm just going to speak in broad terms. If the
Speaker 4: Trump tax cuts expired, then we will still have an
Speaker 4: ongoing budget defice at a time where it would be
Speaker 4: a good time to have a budget surplus. There will
Speaker 4: be a donor class who are furious. What's funny is there's,
Speaker 4: you know, three classes of Republicans on this. There's the
Speaker 4: old school, balanced the budget guys who haven't won an
Speaker 4: argument since they lost to Reagan in nineteen eighty. Mike
Speaker 4: Johnson claims to be one of those guys. I don't
Speaker 4: believe him. There's the tax cuts for the rich because
Speaker 4: it'll all trickle down, and then there's the put your
Speaker 4: fingers in your ears and do whatever the dear leader says,
Speaker 4: which is currently in the ascendency, and it not only
Speaker 4: wants to extend that Trump tax cuts. Trump is still
Speaker 4: talking about tax cuts on Social Security, no taxes on tips,
Speaker 4: no taxes on overtime.
Speaker 1: He's really into no taxes on tips, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: is completely unsustainable, right, because then everything can become a tip.
Speaker 4: You know exactly what I'm going to be doing, which is,
Speaker 4: I'm going to tell the University of Michigan that I
Speaker 4: am going to be willing to work for seventeen dollars
Speaker 4: plus tips, but if the tips aren't good enough, I'm leaving,
Speaker 4: and so as a result, all of my income becomes untaxable.
Speaker 2: Fantastic, it is, literally, right, Yeah, go on.
Speaker 4: I'm loving it. Yeah, it's give me terrific.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think that's a really good point here.
Speaker 1: So fundamentally, this is a problem created by Republicans. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you were to say tomorrow, and again, I know
Speaker 1: you haven't run the numbers on this, but I just
Speaker 1: want to like reiterate as a socialist. I'm not really
Speaker 1: a socialist, but compared to a lot of these people,
Speaker 1: I am. If you just let these tax cuts expired,
Speaker 1: you raise the corporate tax rate a little smidge, and
Speaker 1: you said, you know, if you make more than one
Speaker 1: hundred million dollars a year you need to pay slightly,
Speaker 1: you know, an extra two percent in taxes that you
Speaker 1: could cut the deficit quite helcily quickly.
Speaker 4: Yes, No, his, I think the essential point I want
Speaker 4: to leave. You'll listen this with Imagine that you've been
Speaker 4: given a KPE and you're told that you're the super
Speaker 4: deficit hole. You get to solve our physical problems. The
Speaker 4: question is, would you spend your days and nights trolling
Speaker 4: through the newspaper subscriptions at the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission,
Speaker 4: which we're cut and looking for fake Social Security payments
Speaker 4: and finding none, or would you go and spend all
Speaker 4: your time up the road at the irs, looking at
Speaker 4: the millionaires and billionaires who we know are paying very
Speaker 4: very low tax rates and using various sophisticated schemes and
Speaker 4: have excessively low audit rates. Where do you think the
Speaker 4: real money's lying? And I think when you think about
Speaker 4: that question, the intuition, I think is obvious. If you're
Speaker 4: after the real money, it's the taxes that aren't getting paid,
Speaker 4: and that's the only place they're not looking. And instead,
Speaker 4: what they're doing is they're looking at what seems to
Speaker 4: be technocratic and it meets everyone's sense that government is inefficient,
Speaker 4: but there's no money there at all.
Speaker 1: It serves a political cira, but it doesn't necessarily it's
Speaker 1: approved exactly.
Speaker 4: So what you're seeing out of DOGE is pure political theater.
Speaker 4: It's either cutting things but calling it waste when it's not,
Speaker 4: or it's not really making important cuts at all, and
Speaker 4: it's providing political cover then to ignore the rest of
Speaker 4: the deficit issues so that they can generate text cuts
Speaker 4: for the rage.
Speaker 1: Oh Man, so interesting and also OI, thank you, thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you, thank.
Speaker 4: You, great joy.
Speaker 1: Ian Bremer is the president of the Erasure Group. Welcome
Speaker 1: back to Fast Politics.
Speaker 4: Ian, Thank you, Mollie goe to be with you.
Speaker 1: So I felt like we had to have you on
Speaker 1: because of the incredible stuff coming out of Trump World,
Speaker 1: and it's bizarre for foreign policy debacle from the Munich
Speaker 1: Security Conference on we've just seen such a high level
Speaker 1: of unprecedented. I know you're not supposed to say unprecedented,
Speaker 1: We'll just say without precedent when it comes to Trump
Speaker 1: World and formulations. So talk us through where you are are,
Speaker 1: what you see, and sort of your take on that.
Speaker 5: What we see is a reversion of the United States
Speaker 5: to support the law of the jungle. In other words,
Speaker 5: on the global stage, might mix right. If you're powerful,
Speaker 5: you get to set the outcomes. It's an important shift because,
Speaker 5: of course, for a long time, the United States was
Speaker 5: actively involved in promoting a very different kind of world order,
Speaker 5: still the most powerful country, but one where the US
Speaker 5: supported collective security, where the US supported the promotion of
Speaker 5: rule of law and free trade and even the promotion
Speaker 5: of democracy, not always consistently, certainly a lot of hypocrisy,
Speaker 5: but nonetheless that was the idea.
Speaker 4: That's clearly not the idea anymore.
Speaker 5: Ask the Ukrainians, or the Canadians, or the Germans, or
Speaker 5: the Panamanians, or the Mexicans or any of a number
Speaker 5: of other American allies right now who feel that the
Speaker 5: United States is acting in a predatory manner because the
Speaker 5: US is so much more powerful because they can't. And
Speaker 5: I mean clearly, since I've just spent time. I spent
Speaker 5: a week and a half in Europe and most of
Speaker 5: that time talking with erstwhile American allies who increasingly feel
Speaker 5: like the United States is led by an adversary to them.
Speaker 5: And that's a really big change. So that's what's fundamental here.
Speaker 5: And how much of that is true? Is that universal?
Speaker 5: I'd answer no. There are a lot of countries that
Speaker 5: don't feel like the rug has been pulled out from
Speaker 5: under them the way the Europeans, for example, presently do.
Speaker 4: But certainly big changes are afoot.
Speaker 5: There are open questions about the survivability of the Transatlantic Alliance,
Speaker 5: and certainly very big questions about what happens with Ukraine,
Speaker 5: what happens with Russia.
Speaker 2: That's NATO. You're talking about the surviv villains of NATO, right.
Speaker 5: Yes, and more and more broadly, I mean the alignment
Speaker 5: of the US with Europe.
Speaker 4: But sure, I mean both of those things are true.
Speaker 1: It's interesting if you were awake at all during Trump
Speaker 1: one point zero, none of this is a huge surprise
Speaker 1: that said, the fact that this stuff still comes out
Speaker 1: as a surprise, I think is actually kind of its
Speaker 1: own surprise. Will you talk to us about for example,
Speaker 1: it definitly seems like Trump two point zero is ten
Speaker 1: times more supercharged, which they were promising. But I'm hoping
Speaker 1: you could talk to us about the predatory idea here,
Speaker 1: for example, the idea that somehow he's going to secure
Speaker 1: some amount of mineral rights from Ukraine. That does seem
Speaker 1: like something I have never seen in my adult life.
Speaker 2: So will you talk about that?
Speaker 4: So a lot of things here.
Speaker 5: First of all, on Ukraine, I have no problem at
Speaker 5: all with the idea that the United States could cut
Speaker 5: a deal exploiting Ukraine's natural resources in return for in
Speaker 5: during national security going forward and providing arms. And I
Speaker 5: have no problem with that where I think, I mean,
Speaker 5: there's a question of how the deal should be structured,
Speaker 5: what the right level of compensation is. You know, Ukraine
Speaker 5: is not a country that has great infrastructure right now,
Speaker 5: would take a long time to invest and take a
Speaker 5: long time to get it out. I mean, you know,
Speaker 5: the US should be paid for taking that risk if
Speaker 5: they're going to make that investment. All those things Where
Speaker 5: I would have a very serious problem, and I see
Speaker 5: it as unprecedented. Is the idea that the Americans should
Speaker 5: be paid back for aid eight that the American government
Speaker 5: has already granted. That would certainly be unprecedented in modern
Speaker 5: times for.
Speaker 4: The United States.
Speaker 5: And it's something that I mean, the Ukrainians may end
Speaker 5: up accepting because they have no choice.
Speaker 4: That's predatory behavior.
Speaker 5: That's what you do as a corporate raider when you
Speaker 5: know you're facing a company that is in bankruptcy and
Speaker 5: has no choice, and you rip their faces off. And
Speaker 5: I mean, to be fair, at Trump's background is in that.
Speaker 5: In that field, he knows how to rip people's faces
Speaker 5: off when they're weak, and he's now doing it geopolitically.
Speaker 4: Now is that new?
Speaker 5: I think it is new, And I think it's new
Speaker 5: because Trump's in such a more powerful position now in
Speaker 5: so many ways than he was in twenty seventeen. I think,
Speaker 5: you know, some of it is that America's adversaries are weaker.
Speaker 5: China has the worst economy since the nineties, maybe the seventies.
Speaker 5: Russia is actually in decline given the war and other problems.
Speaker 5: Iran has just lost their proxy empire across the Middle
Speaker 5: East America's.
Speaker 4: Allies are weaker.
Speaker 5: The US economy is performing so much better coming out
Speaker 5: of the pandemic than all of the other G seven economies.
Speaker 5: US technology outstrips American allies by you know, wildly. Think
Speaker 5: about America's energy production compared to Europe's desperate need, Japan's
Speaker 5: desperate need. And then of course you have the political
Speaker 5: consolidation around Trump. He is in a strong position. He
Speaker 5: has the House and seidate, he has the GOP reporting
Speaker 5: to him in a way that so many allies are
Speaker 5: facing very big problems against their own incumbents. And you know,
Speaker 5: you saw Canada's government just fall apart, South Korea's government
Speaker 5: fall apart, Japan just had a big loss.
Speaker 4: And now they're in coalition.
Speaker 5: Even India had to face coalition, France, Germany.
Speaker 4: You know, it goes on and on.
Speaker 5: So we're in a particular time where this Trump administration
Speaker 5: is really strong. And then Molly one more point, since
Speaker 5: we're really leaning in on this, which is that Trump personally, really,
Speaker 5: I think does feel not just vindicated, because it's the
Speaker 5: greatest political comeback story in American history. If you think
Speaker 5: about where he was on January sixth, then with the
Speaker 5: second impeachment where he is today having won not an
Speaker 5: election without the popular vote the first time around, but
Speaker 5: with the popular vote, but also having survived an assassination
Speaker 5: attempt where he was shot in the hit, right. I mean,
Speaker 5: this man now, and he's said this in conversations with friends,
Speaker 5: he believes that, you know, he was saved by God
Speaker 5: and that you know, it's like divine intervention and is
Speaker 5: why he's president now. So his level of confidence is
Speaker 5: just extraordinary. That wasn't true at all in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 5: He needed the Republicans to give him legitimacy. He didn't
Speaker 5: have it himself, you know. I mean, he was pretty
Speaker 5: insecure privately in terms of being the president.
Speaker 4: He isn't now.
Speaker 5: And so I think when you put all of those
Speaker 5: things together, you have to recognize that this is a
Speaker 5: This is a wildly different administration than twenty seventeen. That's
Speaker 5: even before we talk about the fact that they have
Speaker 5: Elon to activate them, who is so much more powerful
Speaker 5: and capable than anyone they had in the first administration.
Speaker 1: I understand when you say powerful, I'm not entirely going
Speaker 1: to go along with capable, because what we're seeing now
Speaker 1: in week five of whatever this is is that actually
Speaker 1: Elon has had to rehire a bunch of people. The
Speaker 1: ethos has moved fast and break things. They're breaking a
Speaker 1: lot of them.
Speaker 5: I'm talking about capacity, capacity to get things done. Does
Speaker 5: that mean capacity to do things that people are going
Speaker 5: to like or are going to work the way that
Speaker 5: he intends them to work.
Speaker 4: That's a different story.
Speaker 5: But there's no question that if what Trump is interested
Speaker 5: in doing is bringing about a revolution domestically and frankly
Speaker 5: in some ways internationally, Elon is uniquely positioned in his
Speaker 5: administration to help him do that. I disagree with many
Speaker 5: things that the Elon is doing in the government, of course,
Speaker 5: but I think he's incredibly capable. I think that you
Speaker 5: look at who that he is appointed in cabinet can
Speaker 5: get things done. You look at someone like Pete Hegseth
Speaker 5: and he can talk about wanting to do a thirty
Speaker 5: four percent cut down in defense budget. I'm very skeptical,
Speaker 5: and I think the generals and admirals.
Speaker 4: Are going to run circles around this guy. Elon.
Speaker 5: On the other hand, I think Tulsey Gabbert got appointed
Speaker 5: because of Elon. I think he made some calls to
Speaker 5: Republican senators, and he changed those votes because they're scared
Speaker 5: of them. I think his ability to get things done
Speaker 5: is beyond that of anyone outside an individual president I
Speaker 5: have seen in my life in the United States.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm not going to argue with you on this
Speaker 1: because you clearly know something about Elon and I don't.
Speaker 1: But I would say, certainly having unlimited funds is a
Speaker 1: huge advantage. The question is again, and I wonder about
Speaker 1: this is as someone who was a longtime fan of
Speaker 1: the incredible things that came out of Silicon Valley, it
Speaker 1: does feel to me like the what Elon is banking
Speaker 1: on is a technology that almost exists, and so I
Speaker 1: think there's a thinking here that AI can do things
Speaker 1: that it can't quite do yet. And so and maybe
Speaker 1: I'm wrong, but it certainly seems like why they would
Speaker 1: fire like the nuclear scientists for ten hours, or why
Speaker 1: they would fire today. A friend of mine who works
Speaker 1: in that world sent me a text message to say
Speaker 1: that they had fired the and again like this is
Speaker 1: just you know, this has not been reported yet, but
Speaker 1: from Los Alamos, you have things like a plutonium facility.
Speaker 1: I mean, he said, you know, they fire the radiation
Speaker 1: protection manager, Emergency response manager and security manager from Los Alamos.
Speaker 1: Then they tried to get them back, and that's what
Speaker 1: we're seeing at the FDA. We're seeing that at different
Speaker 1: parts of the government where and even like and they're
Speaker 1: still going. So Again, the larger problem it being unconstitutional.
Speaker 1: If you don't believe that the law applies to you,
Speaker 1: you can do whatever you want, which is the fundamental
Speaker 1: underlying problem of Elon. But I would add that if
Speaker 1: he were such a genius, wouldn't he be able to
Speaker 1: fire people who weren't needed to be rehired right away.
Speaker 5: I don't know as much about how effective AI is
Speaker 5: going to be for Elon using DOGE inside the US
Speaker 5: regulatory environment and the government system. I know a lot
Speaker 5: of people that I respect, with greater technological capacity than
Speaker 5: you and I that believe that this is going to
Speaker 5: be a game changer for the US over the medium term,
Speaker 5: and that the Europeans.
Speaker 4: Are going to be left way behind and all the
Speaker 4: rest that.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, But what I'm saying is not arguing
Speaker 1: with any of those points.
Speaker 5: I want to make your point in an area that
Speaker 5: I know much better, which is usaid. Because here the
Speaker 5: United States provides about forty percent of all the global
Speaker 5: humanitarian aid period and the United States is now basically
Speaker 5: shutting down the principle mechanism to deliver that aid. And
Speaker 5: they are not doing this in a way to say,
Speaker 5: let's first go through all the programs. Let's see which
Speaker 5: ones are complete crap that no US taxpayers would support
Speaker 5: if they actually knew what was happening. And there's a
Speaker 5: lot of that, and let's keep the things that really matter,
Speaker 5: like you know, preventing AIDS and stopping ebola when there's
Speaker 5: an active outbreak, and you know, dealing with like children's
Speaker 5: hunger and all that, and they are not doing that.
Speaker 5: And the fact that they have chosen to shut everything
Speaker 5: down fully aware that there are lots of really important
Speaker 5: programs that are going to be caught up in that
Speaker 5: that is the intention. They know that the cruelty is
Speaker 5: in part the point. The thing that worries me the most,
Speaker 5: I mean, aside from the fact that I just feel
Speaker 5: bad for all of these innocent people that are being
Speaker 5: caught up in it, is the fact that the Chinese
Speaker 5: are going to make bank here. I mean, they're the
Speaker 5: ones that are already the leading trade partners with almost
Speaker 5: every country in the global South, and those ministers and
Speaker 5: presidents and prime ministers who have just had their programs
Speaker 5: cut by the US are.
Speaker 4: All turning to China.
Speaker 5: And what worries me most about the Trump elon approach
Speaker 5: is that it is penny wise and pound foolish, that
Speaker 5: it will get all sorts of wins today and will
Speaker 5: deeply undermine America's power position in the world in five
Speaker 5: and ten years time. And to be fair, I don't
Speaker 5: think Trump cares that much about five and ten years
Speaker 5: time out, but I do, and you do, and a
Speaker 5: lot of sites in the United States do. And they're
Speaker 5: being sold a bill of goods here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, And I think that is certainly an
Speaker 1: important point. So my larger question here is think about
Speaker 1: with that Munich security speech, the j de Man's speech
Speaker 1: where he said good night and good luck, what have
Speaker 1: been you know, now we're a couple weeks out from that,
Speaker 1: what have the sort of ripples been from that?
Speaker 4: I wish we were a couple of weeks. We're not
Speaker 4: even one week out from that.
Speaker 1: We're not even one week out from that. Okay, we're
Speaker 1: almost one week out from that.
Speaker 4: It feels like a year. That's the funny thing, right,
Speaker 4: But we'll literally I was there. I was in the room.
Speaker 5: I was maybe twenty feet from him. How to go
Speaker 5: over to say badly would be an understatement, but it
Speaker 5: was a shock.
Speaker 4: Some people were in tears.
Speaker 5: People were angry when he said specifically, I mean, look,
Speaker 5: it's a security conference, and yet he didn't talk about security.
Speaker 4: I mean like he didn't talk about.
Speaker 5: Ukraine or China or Gaza in the speech he made
Speaker 5: passing reference to I know, we got all these other things,
Speaker 5: but what the most important threat is the threat you
Speaker 5: know to inside the room. It's the woke virus, it's
Speaker 5: the it's lack of free speech, and it's democracy falling apart, which,
Speaker 5: of course I mean from my perspective, there are many
Speaker 5: things that the Americans can and should lecture the Europeans on,
Speaker 5: like innovation and competitiveness and entrepreneurship and lack of red
Speaker 5: tape and all these things. JD chose the one thing
Speaker 5: to lecture the Europeans on the Americans don't actually have
Speaker 5: good standing on, right. But leaving that aside, he specifically
Speaker 5: this is the part that really mattered. He talked about
Speaker 5: the firewall, and most Americans don't know what the firewall is.
Speaker 5: This is the Germans refusal to work with join government
Speaker 5: with make policy with the Alternatives for deutsch Land party,
Speaker 5: which right now polls it just over twenty percent and
Speaker 5: this weekend's upcoming elections in Germany and is considered by
Speaker 5: the entire German political spectrum outside of the AfD as
Speaker 5: a neo Nazi party. They are, they are under surveillance
Speaker 5: from German intelligence. It is about as raw and central
Speaker 5: to German governance and what their state means as anything
Speaker 5: you can imagine. And this is coming from a United
Speaker 5: States which led the world in de nazifying Germany after
Speaker 5: World War Two, coming from a vice president who went
Speaker 5: to Dacow and saw the concentration camps the day before
Speaker 5: he gave that speech, and then he says, you need
Speaker 5: to end the firewall because you are not democratic if
Speaker 5: you refuse to engage with the twenty percent of your
Speaker 5: population that supports this in Germans views neo Nazi party.
Speaker 5: And then later that day he refuses to meet with
Speaker 5: the German chancellor. He does meet with the head of
Speaker 5: the AfD, the sitting vice president. First of all, I
Speaker 5: saw all of a sudden when he made that statement
Speaker 5: I saw a man and yell out, this is unacceptable.
Speaker 5: And most people in the room had no idea who
Speaker 5: it was because it was a packed room and he
Speaker 5: was sitting in the front and they would have been
Speaker 5: looking at his back, but I could see him from
Speaker 5: the side.
Speaker 4: It was the German defense minister.
Speaker 5: Oh wow, and Molly, in fifteen years of going to Munich,
Speaker 5: I have never in my life seen anything remotely like that.
Speaker 5: And so you know, you have to understand that even
Speaker 5: leaving a side Ukraine, leaving aside everything else that we're
Speaker 5: talking about on national security, that statement, that reality, backed
Speaker 5: by the American President, backed by Elon who's been actively
Speaker 5: promoting and supporting AfD personally and through his Twitter and
Speaker 5: the rest, would make the United States look like an
Speaker 5: enemy of Germany. And that is the way the Germans
Speaker 5: took it, and it's the way an awful lot of
Speaker 5: Europeans took it. This is now a serious crisis from
Speaker 5: the Europeans who understand that the leadership in the United
Speaker 5: States does not actually share a fundamental and core view
Speaker 5: of democracy.
Speaker 4: And rule of law with the Europeans. So really it
Speaker 4: really shook them.
Speaker 2: Correct. Thank you, thank you, Ian.
Speaker 4: Bremer Lay.
Speaker 3: No moment, Jesse Cannon, Molly Junk Fast Elon has no bounds.
Speaker 3: He's now making his way from Pennsylvania, where he did
Speaker 3: a bunch of fuckery over to Wisconsin to mess with
Speaker 3: their Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a Wisconsin Supreme Court election. It is
Speaker 1: coming up very soon. It will decide the control of
Speaker 1: the state court. It will decide things like jerrymandering, abortion, etc.
Speaker 1: Elon Musk has put is the single largest donor to
Speaker 1: it on the Republican side.
Speaker 2: He has put a million dollars in there.
Speaker 1: You'll remember, a million dollars is a rounding error for
Speaker 1: Elon Musk. Great and he may put in more because
Speaker 1: of overturning of Citizens United, because of the fact that
Speaker 1: basically now our elections are just billionaire repositories. He can
Speaker 1: put as much money as he wants to in it,
Speaker 1: and it becomes this sort of proxy fight. The people
Speaker 1: who suffer will end up being the people of Wisconsin
Speaker 1: who want to get abortions or who have miscarriages and
Speaker 1: need to have mythipristone. Those are the people who are
Speaker 1: going to suffer. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
Speaker 1: Tune in every Monday Wednesday Thursday and Saturday to hear
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