Latest / Words & Numbers / Episode 454: Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!

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Episode 454: Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! · Words & Numbers

• 0:00
  This week on words and numbers, capitalism and socialism.
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  Cocaine to coffee? Finding vacant businesses.
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  And jobs numbers again. All this and more coming up on
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  Words and Numbers, a civil original production.
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  Hi, I'm James. And I'm Anthony.
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  And this is words and numbers. Catch us every week twice
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  Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7:00 AM Eastern.
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  What's new and exciting in your world this weekend?
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  I've got in a fascinating story and I've got notes all over the
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  place, so I'm going to have to kind of give this to you in
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  stream of consciousness. This concerns Howard Buffett,
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  who is of course Warren Buffett's son.
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  The the Warren Buffett being the billionaire.
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  Is this the the one about cocaine and coffee?
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  It is about cocaine and coffee. And were you on one of those two
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  things when you took all those crazy notes?
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  No, they involve Howard Buffett. But before I get to that, I want
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  to remind our listeners of a story they probably heard from
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  Aesop's Fables. The story concerns a competition
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  between the wind and the sun. So the wind and the sun are
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  arguing about which is stronger and they come up with a
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  challenge. And the challenge was to make a
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  passing traveller remove his cloak and the wind goes 1st and
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  he blows. He blows as hard as he can.
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  And the more he blows, the more the traveler grabs on to the
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  cloak, holding it ever tighter. So the wind finally just gives
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  up because he can't remove the cloak from the traveler.
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  Then comes the sun's turn. What's the sun do?
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  It just shines and it gets warm. The traveler takes his cloak
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  off. And one of the morals to the
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  story is that incentives matter. The wind gave the traveller an
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  incentive to grab on to the cloak ever tighter.
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  The sun gave the traveller an incentive to take off the cloak.
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  And what's operational here is that it's in the end the
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  traveller who decided what to do, not the sun or the wind.
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  They simply handed over the incentives.
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  All of this leads us to this story of Howard Buffett.
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  And in this in this story, I'll cast Howard Buffett as the son
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  and I will cast the US government, specifically our war
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  on drugs, as the wind. Colombia produces 3000 tons of
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  cocaine a year. That's a lot.
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  Yeah, I was going to do the multiplication for the street
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  value of that, but then quickly realized I was awash in zeros.
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  The 3000 tons of cocaine per year, the US has spent since
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  2010 billion dollars just on that business in Colombia.
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  So fighting the cocaine trafficking and the growing of
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  the cocaine and all of that, just Colomb in just Colombia
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  itself. So 1 drug in one small country.
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  One drug in one small country course.
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  It's a big market, but the US has spent $10 billion.
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  And what have we got for our $10 billion five years ago?
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  There were 100,000 families in Colombia growing cocaine five
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  years ago. Today there's 230,000, despite
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  this $10 billion. Yet the number has doubled in
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  just the past five years. But but I'm I'm guessing, aunt,
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  that when a foreign power goes after supply, supply becomes
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  difficult. And when supply becomes
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  difficult, prices go up. And when prices go up, more
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  people are encouraged to start farming.
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  Exactly. It just makes it more profitable
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  to farm. And it's it's very much like the
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  wind blowing on the traveller. The harder he blows, the more
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  incentive the traveller has to grab onto the cloak.
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  So too, the more money we spend fighting the drug business in
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  Colombia, the more we restrict the amount of of drugs coming
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  in, the higher the price goes and more incentive of the
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  Colombian farmers have to grow the thing.
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  So that's that's the wind side of the story.
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  Now let's along comes Howard Buffett on the sun side of the
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  story. And what is he doing?
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  He spent this past year $170 million.
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  He handed it over to cocaine farmers in exchange for them
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  tearing up their cocaine crop and planting coffee.
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  Instead, he gave them a profit incentive to switch crops from
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  the one thing to the other thing.
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  And the conditions are such that conditions that are good for
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  growing cocaine are also good for growing coffee.
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  And you can imagine that the machinery translates.
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  So this is an easy switch. All you need is to give the
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  incentive, it gives the incentive.
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  And he has convinced 32,000 farmers to switch from cocaine
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  to coffee now just using his $170 billion reaping the reward
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  of 32,000 farmers. What would it take to get all
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  230,000 farmers? At that rate?
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  It would cost $12 billion, or roughly what our government has
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  spent trying to fight the cocaine farmers in Colombia ever
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  since 1999. I take your point completely,
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  but it's a bit of a red herring too, right?
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  You're never going to get the number down to 0 because the
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  closer, the closer it gets to 0, the more incentive somebody has
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  to say now I'm going to be the only cocaine grow the coca leaf
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  grower and I will be the only cocaine producer.
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  Yeah, you're not going to get it to 0.
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  In fact, I mean, this is the thing and with with any kind of
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  public policy, whether it's cocaine or highway deaths or
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  COVID or whatever it is, you're never going to get the number to
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  0. The issue is, can you get it to
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  a reasonable, tolerable level at reasonable cost?
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  And what Howard has shown us is that, you know, there's a way to
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  do this. And, and I would point out here
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  to those among us who who see a problem and immediately turn to
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  the government and say, well, you need the government to solve
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  this. And those of us in on the free
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  market side say, wait a minute, take a deep breath, There could
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  be market solutions to this. And they say, oh, no, no, the
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  market isn't going to solve this because people are just selfish.
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  And particularly the billionaires here.
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  We've got a billionaire using his own money to convince the
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  cocaine farmers to switch to coffee.
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  And, and look, he might be selfish.
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  He might be looking to make a massive profit here, I don't
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  know. He's probably not doing it out
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  of the goodness of his heart exclusively, but, well, you.
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  Know, James, I would take solace in that because.
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  I'm fine with it. I'm fine with it.
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  If he were doing it out of the goodness of his heart, that's
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  wonderful and we can all applaud him in this and I don't know why
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  he's doing it. But it happens once.
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  Yeah, but if he's doing it out of a profit incentive, you know,
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  he's waking up at night thinking, how can I do this
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  better? And not only that, it's
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  replicable, other people can do it too, right?
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  So anytime you rely, and this is one of the the the real
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  teachings of the American founders, anytime you rely on
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  the goodness of a human being to occupy a place, be it an office
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  or a position in a private corporation, you have made a
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  terrible mistake. Yeah.
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  And it's just that simple. If, if, if men were angels,
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  Madison said, no government would be necessary.
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  But men are not angels. I think people take what you
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  just said is correct, and people misinterpret it to mean that
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  there's no room for altruism in a free market system.
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  And that's not at all what we're saying.
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  Be as ridiculous. Have as many altruistic people
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  as as you can fit in the room. But sure, when they're done
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  being as altruistic as they can be, if there's still more that
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  needs to be done, it's the profit incentive that's going to
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  get you there. Profit incentive always does the
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  heavy lifting. And, and, and I'll give you
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  another example of I, I guess we'd call it an unintended
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  consequence, but it fits in beautifully with your story.
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  Anybody. And, and you and I, you when we
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  were in high school in the 80s, just to kind of give people an
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  idea of the time frame. And this applies.
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  I'm, I will cheerfully admit to me and not you, but when I
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  smoked a lot of weed back in the 80s, it really wasn't that good.
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  And then no, it was weak. It was garbage.
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  They called it rag. We eat a lot of times various
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  other things that I won't say here because it'll make you
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  angry and and then Ronald Reagan, who whom I love, don't
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  get me wrong, but everybody I love has some bonehead ideas.
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  And Reagan was not immune. He started the war on drugs and
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  the just say no campaign and heavy.
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  I mean, Nixon started the war on drugs, but Reagan really ramped
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  it up. And as a result, a lot of
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  marijuana coming into the country and other drugs too,
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  were seized. And the the drug producers
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  started realizing they were taking a hell of a risk.
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  And the bigger the the the shipment, the bigger the risk.
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  So they started making it more potent so they could make the
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  shipment smaller. And ain't that something?
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  These people, they know what they're doing.
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  They've been in business for a long time.
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  They know the risks, they can calculate the rewards.
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  Now isn't that interesting because I did a study some years
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  ago for the Mackinac Center in Michigan and it was looking at
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  differences in alcohol consumption across states, where
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  in the states had different laws about alcohol production and
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  sales. So some of them were highly
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  regulated, some of them were much more free market.
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  And what I found in this study is on average the more regulated
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  estates markets were, the more the consumers consumed alcohol
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  in the form of liquor as opposed to beer.
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  And one of the one of the arguments I gave is look at.
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  The way to explain this is you can fit a lot more, pack a lot
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  more, punch into a smaller container.
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  It's the it's the same exact phenomena and you see it.
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  You see it often enough. Get words and numbers on
• 11:10
  civil.com and on Civil's TV and mobile apps.
• 11:14
  Regular episodes are free. Sign up for an annual membership
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  to support our show and for access to member exclusive
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  content. I want to draw our attention Ant
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  to something that you and I talk about quite a lot and and that's
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  the, the relative strength behind the forces of capitalism
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  and socialism in these United States.
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  And you know, we would, I think all stipulate that socialism has
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  become more popular in the last ten 1520 years.
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  Would you have any problem stipulating to that?
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  I, I can't, I I wouldn't argue against it, but I, I don't know
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  any I I don't know any data one way or the other.
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  But look, we've got Bernie Sanders and AOC and right, the
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  people are are actually in the halls of power claiming.
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  To be socialists because I mean back in the IT was before my
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  time, but back in the 50's, the McCarthy era, Congress actually
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  had committee set up to ferret out socialists.
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  Yeah, and it turns out they didn't need to because nobody
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  was going to vote for them anyway.
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  But but somehow, somehow it became more acceptable, Right?
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  It, it's not the, it's not a, that, that overwhelming scar
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  across the forehead that it once was.
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  And, and I found something from Gallup today that goes from 2010
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  to 2025 and it shows the positive ratings of capitalism
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  and socialism by Americans over that period of time.
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  And I can tell you the, the, the headline was that capitalism is
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  becoming less popular. And indeed it is.
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  It's gone from roughly 61% to 54%.
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  So down 7% over the last 15 years.
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  That's not a tragic drop, but it's a meaningful one, Right. 7%
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  is more than more than people might think it.
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  Yeah, well, they might think it's 7 per 100, but it's it's
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  more meaningful. It's a bigger shift than people
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  might realize. The socialism side went up from
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  36 to 39. Well, that's interesting.
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  Up only 3%. Three percent, 4%.
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  So people are becoming less irked with socialism, but not
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  nearly to the degree that they're becoming more irked by
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  capitalism. How interesting.
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  How do you Do you have an explanation for that?
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  I have a provisional explanation and I think what they're really
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  irritated with and, and here we're always back to the same
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  arguments with the same terminology.
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  I don't think people conflate free markets and capitalism.
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  We do not conflate free markets and capitalism.
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  These are two completely different things.
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  Now, they're not completely different.
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  They're related, but different. And in a capitalist society,
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  once capitalists get in bed with government, you end up with
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  crony capitalism. And I think that's what people
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  truly despise. And as luck would have it, I
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  also truly despise it. And I'm guessing you do too.
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  Oh yeah, and in fact, you don't just get it with capitalism, you
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  get cronyism with socialism also.
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  The problem is the cronyism. That's correct, but I think the
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  cronyism is literally woven into socialism.
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  It can't be explicated with. I was going to say you can't
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  have socialism without cronyism. Yeah, but you can have free
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  markets. We just consistently decide not
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  to, right. And, and, and what do I mean by
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  this? I mean, everybody goes on and on
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  and on about how we have market failures in healthcare because
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  it's so damn expensive. There's no market failure in
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  healthcare. That's government failure.
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  It's it's 11 of, if not the most regulated market in the United
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  States. What are the other regulated
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  markets in the United States? Education, sky high costs.
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  Housing, sky high costs. Take your pick.
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  Wherever you see over regulated markets, you see spiking costs
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  and then people blame capitalism.
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  And it's it's hard to do a what if you and I can imagine what
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  the healthcare market would look like if the government weren't
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  involved. But that's because we've been
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  looking at this for a long time. However, in the case of
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  healthcare, there are some examples we can kind of point
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  to. I point to the same 2 every
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  time. Yeah, 1 is LASIK surgery and,
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  well, cosmetic surgery in general.
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  These are surgeries that largely aren't covered by insurance, and
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  so consequently you have a market without the insurance
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  involved. You don't have the government
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  involved nearly as much, and so you have much more of a free
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  market. And the prices of those things
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  have either remained steady or actually come down over time,
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  but certainly not gone up nearly as much as healthcare in
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  general. And the Lasik, For example,
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  Lasik surgery is almost free compared to what it once was,
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  Right? Right.
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  This was a remarkably expensive procedure that people paid out
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  of pocket. I think last time I checked, it
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  was under $1000. Yeah.
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  And, you know, look, I haven't checked it religiously, so
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  correct me if I'm wrong out there in the comments, but it's
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  just not expensive. If you really want LASIK
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  surgery, you can go get it. The other, for my money, is
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  veterinary care. Yes.
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  Right. And and again, no insurance.
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  Well, you can buy insurance if you want, but it's not
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  mandatory. Right.
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  And if you want insurance on a pet, it it doesn't cost that
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  much. I I don't, I have a dog who who
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  I absolutely adore. We don't have dog care
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  insurance. When there's a problem, we go to
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  the vet, we pay $65, and then we go home and I can choose.
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  It's easier for me to find a vet than it is for me to find a
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  primary care physician. Right.
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  Not only easier aunt, a lot easier.
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  And these, these aren't, these aren't exactly the same product,
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  but they're in the same universe in the neighborhood.
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  One's government regulated, one's not.
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  The government regulated. Price goes through the roofs,
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  the other one doesn't. Now let me let me back off a
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  minute because you and I both used to term that we should
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  probably put some flesh on. That's cronyism.
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  Yeah, sure. Cronyism is is a situation when
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  you've got people who who stand to benefit from government
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  intervention actively going to the government and encouraging
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  the government to intervene. It's it's essentially the buying
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  of influence. It's a buying of influence, a
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  good case, and you. Know we, you and I have been
• 18:26
  having a, a Twitter disagreement with a gentleman who just can't
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  fucking understand a damn thing. And you know, I'm right.
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  You know, this is a stupid, stupid person.
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  But he starts with a kernel of truth.
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  And that's always where this sort of thing becomes dangerous.
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  And we're going on with him about Robert F Kennedy and, and
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  vaccines and all of this nonsense.
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  And he keeps saying, yeah, but the vaccine makers, they want to
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  keep you sick, so you keep buying more vaccines.
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  Now, that's idiotic, that that's just idiotic.
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  That's not how vaccines work. But he also says things like,
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  and how did these these big pharmaceutical companies get so
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  much influence in the 1st place? And there he's got an an honest
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  question, right? That is a very good question to
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  ask. How did they get this kind of
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  influence? How did any industry or
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  participant in any industry get this kind of influence ever?
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  And the answer is always the same.
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  They buy a seat at the table and they buy it with campaign
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  funding. Yeah, and I think it's even more
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  insidious than that. Once you get the government
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  regulating your industry, then the government, the regulators
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  are not industry experts. They're politicians and
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  bureaucrats. So they will turn to experts for
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  the experts advice in writing the regulation.
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  And who do they turn to? The people who are being
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  regulated. Those are the ones who have the
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  the experts. Opinions.
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  They turned. They turn to their lobbyists
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  because their lobbyists synthesize the expert opinion on
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  the one hand, and the political know how on the other.
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  For example, in the case of minimum wage, Walmart lobbying
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  the federal government to increase the minimum wage.
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  That's right. In favor of.
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  In favor of and. And people never, ever stop to
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  think about that. Yeah, I mean, think it through.
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  Why would what if Walmart wanted to pay its workers more?
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  It just pays its workers more. Go ahead and pay more.
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  Why does it need the? Government involved.
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  The answer is so obvious, it's so obvious that people can't
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  even see it. And the obvious answer is that
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  Walmart wants to cripple its competition mom and pop stores
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  who can't afford to pay more in minimum wage.
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  Yeah, yeah, Walmart was already well, this, this case goes back
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  to when we had the minimum wage, national minimum wage
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  predominantly at 7/25 an hour. At that time, Walmart was paying
• 21:13
  more than the minimum wage so to.
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  Raise the wage would. Not yeah, it would not have cost
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  Walmart a penny, but would have put a bunch of its lower cost
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  competitors out of business. Ain't that?
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  Now, now, let me go back to the insurance case, because part of
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  the reason insurance was so expensive leading up to to the
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  Affordable Care Act was because the government made it very
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  difficult for health insurance companies to operate across
• 21:40
  state lines. Why was that So?
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  The insurance companies themselves argued for
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  legislation that would make it difficult for them to operate
• 21:50
  across state lines. Why?
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  Because it would set up little fiefdoms, little local
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  monopolies. It's, it's not that they didn't
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  want to operate across state lines, it's that they didn't
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  want anybody else to operate across state lines, right?
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  And this is always the answer. But at the risk of beating the
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  same dead horse for another half hour.
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  This is this is cronyism. Yeah, it it's absolutely
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  cronyism. I And I think that's what people
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  have in mind when they say they hate capitalism.
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  Yeah, and I'm with people 100%, but just be careful.
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  It's not a feature of capitalism, it's a feature of
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  humans and you'll. Get in the.
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  Socialism as readily as you will in capitalism.
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  And, and This is why Ant and I almost never speak in glowing
• 22:40
  terms about capitalism because it confuses things.
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  We talk in glowing terms about free markets, right?
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  And the the freer the better. But this, of course, brings us
• 22:53
  to the foolishness of the week. Because nothing.
• 22:55
  We're done with the. Episode here nothing we just
• 22:58
  talked about constitutes the foolishness of the week, which
• 23:02
  is a little baffling but aunt, I want to bring us to Portland OR
• 23:07
  a town that you and I have visited before and and.
• 23:10
  Yeah, it's a nice. Town had had doughnuts in that
• 23:13
  were actually pretty good. Probably didn't live up to the
• 23:16
  hype but pretty good. Their City Council has approved
• 23:22
  a scheme and you know when I use the word scheme it's about to be
• 23:27
  bad, bad news. Well.
• 23:28
  When you say City Council in Portland, I know it's going to
• 23:32
  be bad news. They are now levying fines on
• 23:36
  owners of vacant commercial properties.
• 23:39
  They're levying fines on owners of vacant commercial properties.
• 23:42
  OK, so time out. I'm assuming here that nobody in
• 23:45
  the City Council bothered to ask why the properties were vacant.
• 23:50
  Well, it might have had something to do with previous
• 23:53
  City Council rulings. I'm, I'm guessing that they're
• 23:58
  not going to be terribly interested in hearing that, but
• 24:03
  you would have to pay for, for properties vacant.
• 24:07
  And keep in mind these are like little storefronts, right?
• 24:10
  For properties that are vacant for at least six months but not
• 24:15
  a year, the owner would pay $500.00.
• 24:17
  At one year, the fee jumps to 1000.
• 24:20
  After two, it's 2000, then to 3500 after three years and 5000
• 24:26
  after five years. If the vacancy reaches 10 years,
• 24:29
  the fine jumps to 7500 and then increases another thousand every
• 24:34
  year beyond that. And, and just to put some flesh
• 24:38
  on the bone, because people are probably saying, well, for most
• 24:42
  people that's $500. What's the big deal?
• 24:45
  There was a a building downtown, the Schwartz building if you
• 24:48
  want to go look it up for yourself, which was 8 vacant for
• 24:51
  15 years before a coffee shop opened up.
• 24:56
  It would have been a $95,000 fine had the ordinance been in
• 25:00
  effect, $95,000 on a piece of real estate.
• 25:07
  That definitionally is not supporting a business.
• 25:11
  I mean, it's not like people are fighting over the ability to get
• 25:15
  into the Schwartz building so they can open up a business.
• 25:18
  You can't lure somebody in because doing business in
• 25:22
  Portland is is no can of corn as as our friends in the Midwest
• 25:28
  might say. And Portland's problems is, I
• 25:33
  don't know Portland has a homelessness problem.
• 25:35
  I know Seattle. Absolute Portland absolutely has
• 25:38
  a homelessness problem. Yeah, yeah.
• 25:41
  See. And this is this now becomes a a
• 25:44
  thing. And I'm not saying anything
• 25:46
  about homeless people or what you should do about it.
• 25:48
  I'm simply pointing to the outcome that if you have a bunch
• 25:52
  of homeless people there, customers are going to be less
• 25:55
  likely to show up. And that means that the
• 25:57
  businesses now go under and now you've got a vacant.
• 26:00
  Storefront yet we have all kinds of businesses here in Tucson, AZ
• 26:04
  that I won't go to after dark because the the homeless are out
• 26:09
  like moths around a street light and they cause a lot of
• 26:13
  problems. They're they're threatening,
• 26:14
  they're hostile. I'm not I'm not interested.
• 26:18
  And imagine the chilling effect that has on local business.
• 26:22
  But there's light at the end of this tunnel.
• 26:24
  And because in their infinite wisdom, the Portland City
• 26:29
  Council has given business owners an out that they can take
• 26:36
  instead of paying the fine. And that is to display
• 26:41
  government approved art in the windows of said this empty
• 26:45
  businesses. Government approved art.
• 26:48
  Yes. So they're going to have lots of
• 26:50
  art where there are no businesses.
• 26:55
  Who is doing the government? Approving.
• 26:57
  You can't make this shit up. This is so ridiculous that if I
• 27:01
  if I told you, hey aunt, I got this great idea, you'd have me
• 27:04
  committed. Oh, I'm yeah, I'm.
• 27:08
  No, I agree with you. It's completely stupid.
• 27:09
  I'm just thinking through the unintended consequences in ways
• 27:13
  to make money here. For example, if you and I
• 27:18
  traveled to Portland once a year and with our complete abysmal
• 27:25
  lack of talent, painted some modern art.
• 27:29
  Yeah, I don't think so. And displayed it in the
• 27:33
  businesses. In fact, we give them a cut,
• 27:36
  we'll pay them little bit of money.
• 27:39
  No, actually they would have to pay us a little bit of money
• 27:41
  because there we're going to get fined $500, they pay us $100,
• 27:46
  will display their art there, their net $400.00 better off,
• 27:49
  we're $100 better off and we do that for X number of
• 27:53
  storefronts. I don't think that math works at
• 27:55
  all, Aunt. But, but, but no, I'm not doing
• 27:59
  any of that. No, but at the end.
• 28:02
  At the end. What do you get?
• 28:04
  You don't get anything. You still have bacon
• 28:05
  storefronts. You have at best crappy art, but
• 28:09
  you still have the problem that caused the whole thing in the
• 28:11
  first place. Oh, and I would submit that that
• 28:14
  problem will continue to get worse because you're not doing
• 28:17
  anything serious to make it get better.
• 28:20
  Yeah, you aren't addressing the issue.
• 28:22
  You're addressing the flummery around the issue.
• 28:25
  I, I say this all the time, if if you're not making things
• 28:29
  better, you're making them worse.
• 28:31
  So there you go. Go make them better or suffer
• 28:35
  the criticism. But this is just asinine.
• 28:38
  Just asinine. Wow.
• 28:40
  Yeah, well, Speaking of asinine, we've got some jobs numbers.
• 28:45
  I'm sorry, my head's still stuck on the Portland thing.
• 28:50
  Jobs numbers. Do you know what's so strange?
• 28:52
  So we did an episode just a few weeks ago on the June jobs
• 28:56
  numbers when they got adjusted down by that huge amount and.
• 29:01
  Then and then the the the nice lady who ran the Bureau of Labor
• 29:05
  Statistics paid for that with her job.
• 29:08
  Yeah, they fired her. So the the numbers were the June
• 29:12
  jobs numbers. The initial estimate was that we
• 29:14
  that the economy added 147,000 jobs in June, which would be and
• 29:20
  then, yeah, which isn't bad. And then a month later they did
• 29:25
  some more math and they discovered, oh, the economy
• 29:27
  didn't add 147,000, it added 14,000.
• 29:32
  Now that's and she gets, yeah, she gets fired, Trump says.
• 29:36
  They're making up the numbers, the whole thing.
• 29:39
  He installs somebody new, so we can expect that the numbers are
• 29:43
  now officially not made-up. Right.
• 29:48
  And. What's the latest update still
• 29:51
  for June 13,000 loss as they got worse?
• 29:58
  The hits just keep on coming. Just keep on coming and and
• 30:03
  let's well go ahead. If you've got a technical point,
• 30:06
  go ahead because I've got political points.
• 30:09
  I, yeah, I want to just look at the numbers for a moment.
• 30:12
  We go through BLS goes through these three rounds of revisions
• 30:16
  as they get more and more information.
• 30:17
  It's the third round that basically you can say, OK, this
• 30:20
  is the right number and I've got the jobs numbers going back to
• 30:25
  January in and into last year November, December, last year
• 30:32
  November, the economy added 261,000, December added 323,000.
• 30:38
  Now comes January, now we take a hit, but it's still not that
• 30:41
  bad. We add 100,111 thousand January,
• 30:43
  102,000 in February, 120,000 in March, 158,000 in April.
• 30:50
  And what happened in April? The tariffs kicked in.
• 30:56
  Yeah. And in May, we added 19,000.
• 31:01
  In June, we lost 13,000. So far, it looks like we were
• 31:06
  adding 79,000 in July and 22,000 in August.
• 31:10
  So what happened was when those tariffs hit the jobs numbers
• 31:15
  that were already down by about half compared to what they were
• 31:18
  in 2024, the job numbers got cut by a factor of 10.
• 31:24
  Imagine. That they are 110th what they
• 31:25
  were. If only two guys with the
• 31:29
  podcast could have predicted exactly the suck.
• 31:34
  Now people are going to say. It was us and we did, yes.
• 31:37
  People are going to say, well, this is Trump Derangement
• 31:40
  Syndrome. I'm this nothing to do with
• 31:42
  Trump looking at the numbers. I'm just reporting what I'm
• 31:45
  telling you. I'm not saying it has to do with
• 31:47
  Trump. I am saying it has to do with
• 31:48
  the tariffs now. Whether?
• 31:50
  Trump has the tariffs, or if Biden it hasn't imposed the
• 31:53
  tariffs, it would have had the same effect.
• 31:55
  Stop thinking this easier for these people in office right
• 31:59
  now. It has everything to do with
• 32:01
  Donald Trump. He came into office saying I'm
• 32:05
  going to implement tariffs. And people who knew better said,
• 32:11
  now, Donald, if you implement tariffs, the following terrible
• 32:14
  things will happen. Oh, and by the way, you probably
• 32:18
  don't have the authority, be it legislative or constitutional,
• 32:23
  to have these tariffs in the first place.
• 32:25
  More on that and then he. More on that in a moment.
• 32:28
  And he said, fuck all you guys, I'm going to have these tariffs.
• 32:31
  And then we did. And exactly what sensible people
• 32:36
  predicted would happen, happened.
• 32:39
  And come to find out, federal judges are lining up in
• 32:45
  agreement that the legislation he used to pass the tariffs is
• 32:51
  incorrect. Why?
• 32:53
  Because it doesn't use the word tariff.
• 32:55
  The entire piece of legislation does not include the word
• 32:59
  tariff, nor does it include the word tax or revenue or any of
• 33:04
  the words that you could say really means tariff.
• 33:07
  And then if you look at the Constitution, God help us all,
• 33:11
  we should do that. All taxing power belongs to
• 33:15
  Congress, period. And tariffs are a tax period.
• 33:22
  So no matter how you slice this, it's the Trump administration's
• 33:27
  fault. They knew better.
• 33:30
  And they said, we don't care what you say, we're doing it
• 33:32
  anyway. Because as Trump said, just very
• 33:34
  recently, I'm the president of the United States.
• 33:37
  I could do whatever I want. And and then the minute this
• 33:42
  jobs number hit, you've got Besant out there saying, and,
• 33:47
  and Trump as well saying you're really going to have to wait a
• 33:51
  year for our policies to bear fruit.
• 33:55
  All this from the very people who told us that all we have to
• 34:00
  do is implement these policies and America will be wealthy
• 34:04
  immediately. Well, which is it?
• 34:07
  Is America going to be wealthy immediately?
• 34:09
  Because if so, that didn't happen.
• 34:11
  Do we have to wait a year? Well, why would another year of
• 34:15
  this make any difference at all outside of a bigger, worse
• 34:18
  difference? And there you go.
• 34:21
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• 34:23
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• 34:28
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• 35:23
  Use the code words and numbers. That's one word for 50% off an
• 35:28
  annual subscription. I got it underline here because
• 35:31
  I know people are just itching to say Trump derangement
• 35:34
  syndrome. The fact is that again, it
• 35:38
  doesn't matter who's in office, this policy would yield the same
• 35:41
  outcome. We all knew this, Economists
• 35:43
  know how this works and we warned this kind of policy is
• 35:47
  going to give you this effect. And lo and behold, it it is
• 35:51
  given this effect. Now somebody might say give the
• 35:54
  other side its due. How do you know it was the
• 35:58
  tariffs that did this? It could have been something
• 36:01
  else going on in the economy. Well, well, I can.
• 36:06
  I can point to something. I've been for the past 18
• 36:10
  months, two years in my new position.
• 36:13
  I give summaries to people about economic forecasts and I show
• 36:20
  not just a suite of forecasts, 40 to 50 forecasters, and I'll
• 36:26
  average them out and say, OK, the crazy people on this side
• 36:29
  balanced with the crazy people on this side, the average looks
• 36:31
  like this. This is what you can expect.
• 36:33
  And I go a step further. I say based on what I'm seeing
• 36:37
  when I look at these forecasters, I can tell you not
• 36:39
  just what to expect, but I can tell you what the pessimists see
• 36:43
  and what the optimists see. And for the past two years,
• 36:49
  every single time I gave this talk, I would point to the
• 36:53
  pessimists and I would say, look at the pessimists.
• 36:56
  Even the pessimists aren't forecasting recession month
• 37:00
  after month after month after month.
• 37:02
  It's the same thing. The pessimists never, never
• 37:05
  forecasting recession until February.
• 37:10
  In February when he, when the president first started talking
• 37:13
  about tariffs, all of a sudden the pessimists we're forecasting
• 37:17
  recession. And then as you start to
• 37:19
  implement them in March and got serious about them in April, the
• 37:22
  pessimist just got more pessimistic.
• 37:24
  I mean, down to, you know, forecasting recessions like we
• 37:27
  haven't seen since the 1930s. This is, I could see it happen
• 37:33
  week by week in response to the press that was coming out of the
• 37:38
  White House. So I can tell you it's it is, it
• 37:41
  is exactly that. It is the tariff policy that's
• 37:44
  driving what we're seeing. And, and, and I got to get into
• 37:47
  this Trump Derangement Syndrome business.
• 37:50
  You brought it up I think twice, maybe three Times Now.
• 37:53
  And we do get this criticism more, more often than you might
• 37:58
  think, because there is a cadre of people out there who will
• 38:03
  take any criticism of Donald Trump's so personally that you
• 38:08
  must be deranged in order to have even made.
• 38:13
  And, and I would submit this, where were the people telling us
• 38:17
  that we had Biden Derangement Syndrome when we criticized his
• 38:21
  policies week after week after week for four solid years?
• 38:28
  Never heard it once. Never.
• 38:30
  Not once. But somehow, for a certain
• 38:34
  sizable enough segment of our population, Donald Trump
• 38:39
  represents a a religious, a messianic figure.
• 38:43
  And I would say if anyone has Trump Derangement Syndrome, it's
• 38:48
  them. He is a politician.
• 38:51
  He is not worthy of your respect.
• 38:53
  He does not do good things. Write them off the same way you
• 38:58
  wrote off Biden and Obama and Clinton and both Bushes.
• 39:04
  Let. Me, Let me be easier here
• 39:08
  because I don't want to. I don't want to make this
• 39:10
  personal about the president. Rather, I would say anybody who
• 39:16
  supports him should listen carefully to what we're saying
• 39:20
  here because he's only nine months into his term.
• 39:25
  He could. He could end this term as a
• 39:28
  great president. There's ways to do this, and
• 39:32
  what we're pointing out are the ways not to do it.
• 39:35
  He's got plenty of time in front of him.
• 39:37
  He's got plenty. He's already exercised
• 39:39
  authority. He doesn't have Berkeley
• 39:42
  speaking. Use that to do some good.
• 39:45
  Absent some sort of massive global convulsion, that's not of
• 39:51
  his making, right? That's an important caveat.
• 39:55
  He can't be a great president, right?
• 39:57
  Great presidents only occur. They only come around when
• 40:02
  things are so grim. And you could pull a people out
• 40:07
  of that kind of hole, right? This is why we think of in the
• 40:13
  20th century. There are only two great
• 40:15
  presidents in the 20th century, and they were FDR and Reagan.
• 40:20
  They share almost nothing politically right there.
• 40:23
  Their programs were radically different.
• 40:26
  But it was the times that made them great.
• 40:31
  It was Roosevelt in World War 2. And and you know, we can say
• 40:35
  whatever we're going to say about the Great Depression, but
• 40:37
  nonetheless, and it was Reagan with the Cold War, you needed
• 40:42
  those things. Bill Clinton lamented after
• 40:45
  having two relatively successful terms, that there was no real
• 40:49
  defining moment for him. And, and I don't want this to
• 40:54
  sound like I, I've said this before and people give me the
• 40:58
  grace to think about it the way I mean it, not the way they they
• 41:01
  might want to hear it. But how do you think Bill
• 41:04
  Clinton felt on 9/11? My guess is he was thankful he
• 41:08
  wasn't in office. No, I don't think that at all.
• 41:12
  Really. No, I, I think he was sitting
• 41:14
  there saying, if I, if that had happened on my watch, I would
• 41:18
  have been known as a great president because I would have
• 41:22
  done ABC. And I think I remember the day
• 41:27
  after it happened or that maybe it was maybe a little more than
• 41:32
  that. I was in New York.
• 41:33
  I lived in New York at the time. And people in New York, it's
• 41:37
  hard to explain to people not in New York how hard New Yorkers
• 41:40
  took this. And I was upstate, not even in
• 41:43
  the city. And they said, what do you
• 41:46
  think's going to happen? And I said, well, President
• 41:49
  Bush, George W could come out of this as being widely understood
• 41:55
  to be one of the greatest presidents of all time.
• 41:58
  And people went, do you really think that's going to happen?
• 42:01
  I went, oh, no, no, I don't think, I don't think that's
• 42:03
  going to happen at all. But it could in a way that
• 42:08
  nothing on Clinton's watch would have yielded that outcome.
• 42:12
  He didn't have the opportunity, right?
• 42:15
  So Trump, if he is going to be remembered as a great president,
• 42:19
  has to seize upon something that's not his fault.
• 42:25
  I don't know what it's going to be.
• 42:26
  It could have been the debt, but he's just running it up worse
• 42:29
  and faster. So it's not going to be that.
• 42:31
  He seems to think that this immigration business is going to
• 42:36
  work, but it's just making everybody angry.
• 42:40
  In the end, it's going to turn out to be a bit of a nothing
• 42:42
  burger. And, and look, people don't
• 42:44
  understand. He he is deporting far fewer
• 42:47
  people than Barack Obama ever did.
• 42:50
  So if you hate Donald Trump for deporting people, you do also
• 42:54
  hate Barack Obama because you have to.
• 42:57
  And if you don't, you're a hypocrite.
• 43:00
  Now he's blowing up boats as they leave Venezuela and might
• 43:06
  or might not be in international waters.
• 43:08
  But even if they were, they weren't heading to the United
• 43:11
  States anyway. What?
• 43:13
  What the hell is that all about? So look, nothing's adding up
• 43:16
  here, right? He he needs a rational plan that
• 43:22
  addresses real problems, but he has crazy plans that make more
• 43:26
  problems, and tariffs chief among them.
• 43:30
  You know, for years when we've talked many times about the debt
• 43:35
  and people have taken me aside after the talk and said,
• 43:37
  seriously, what can we do about this?
• 43:40
  And time and again, I have said what we need is a is someone to
• 43:45
  come along who's going to kick politics in the teeth and do
• 43:48
  what needs to be done. It would have.
• 43:51
  Been Trump. Could have been.
• 43:53
  Trump has given us half of that. He successfully kicked politics
• 43:56
  in the teeth. And you know, I hope, I hope
• 44:01
  that in his remaining 3 1/2 years he turns it around.
• 44:06
  He, I will bet he. Could in the same way Bush could
• 44:09
  have become a great president. Hear me when I say this, I will
• 44:13
  bet any amount of money anybody wants to bet that the debt will
• 44:19
  be higher when he leaves office than when he came into office.
• 44:23
  Any amount up to and including the value of my house.
• 44:30
  This is how certain I am that he will not make a a lick of
• 44:33
  difference in in a positive way with the debt.
• 44:37
  And he could have. He was in in our lifetime.
• 44:42
  He was the guy who really could have done that and he just chose
• 44:47
  not to. He'll blame it on COVID, right?
• 44:50
  And then he'll blame it on something else later.
• 44:53
  Probably Supreme Court justices after they smack down these
• 44:57
  idiotic tariffs. And what what worries me is the
• 45:02
  next guy who comes along, and I don't think it's going to be a
• 45:06
  Republican, the next guy who comes along would similarly have
• 45:11
  the ability, based on the groundwork that Trump has laid,
• 45:16
  to kick politics in the teeth and do what needs to be done.
• 45:18
  And I'm desperately afraid that the next guy is going to kick
• 45:22
  politics in the teeth and try and undo plus what Trump has
• 45:27
  done and then we just get this pendulum going back and forth
• 45:30
  with with a wider arc than before.
• 45:33
  Right. What?
• 45:33
  What's going to happen from here on out until cooler heads
• 45:38
  finally prevail, which might mean forever, right?
• 45:41
  This might cooler heads may never prevail again.
• 45:44
  But what's going to happen is every time we have a partisan
• 45:49
  switch at the level of the presidency, the first thing the
• 45:53
  new president is going to do is going to walk into the office
• 45:57
  and sign a raft of executive orders, undoing all the
• 46:02
  executive orders of the clown who came before him.
• 46:06
  And we're just going to keep doing this.
• 46:08
  Now, We should not be governing by executive order.
• 46:13
  I understand why we might need them in under rare
• 46:17
  circumstances, but legislation belongs in the hands of
• 46:22
  Congress, and if Congress refuses to legislate, there's
• 46:27
  not much you can do about it. And I the more I think about it,
• 46:30
  James, the more I end up with that conclusion that the
• 46:35
  ultimate problem here is Congress.
• 46:38
  Congress is correct, abrogated. Its authority is is asleep at
• 46:41
  the wheel and has been for decades.
• 46:44
  Decades. That's right, they, they can't
• 46:46
  wait to cede more authority to the executive branch because
• 46:51
  that means that they're not accountable to it.
• 46:53
  Right. And how is it that 98% or, you
• 46:56
  know, whatever the absurd absurdly high number is of our
• 47:00
  representatives get re elected If they're so bad and we hate
• 47:04
  them so much, what the hell? It turns out we're all, we're
• 47:10
  all OK with it. How do I know?
• 47:13
  Look at the re election rate. We're all, you know, all
• 47:16
  literally OK with it. This conversation reminds me
• 47:20
  when I was a kid and saw Star Wars for the first time.
• 47:24
  And at one point in Star Wars, they say something about the
• 47:28
  emperor has dissolved the Senate.
• 47:30
  And they say, well, how, how will you know the government
• 47:33
  keep control and all this stuff. And I'm thinking, how can, how
• 47:36
  can the leader just dissolve the Senate?
• 47:38
  I said, well, you know, it's fiction.
• 47:40
  And I look around today, I can see how that can happen.
• 47:45
  You get a Senate, you get a Congress that does nothing to
• 47:48
  the point that the people say, well, yeah, go go ahead and
• 47:51
  dissolve it. It hasn't done anything for 50
• 47:52
  years. And, and I'm just going to point
• 47:55
  out here that the Uber sci-fi dorks who listen to us largely
• 48:01
  because of you, they need to send you hate mail about what
• 48:04
  you just said. Why?
• 48:07
  Because that didn't happen in Star Wars.
• 48:09
  But I just I. It did all right, all of you get
• 48:13
  on your keyboards and send James hate mail, because we all know
• 48:15
  that it did happen. Oh, it happened, just not in the
• 48:19
  movie. You said it happened.
• 48:21
  Episode 4 A New Hope OK, this is great if you are not watching
• 48:26
  the video. If you're listening to our
• 48:27
  voices right now, James just went.
• 48:29
  His eyes all went squirrely because he doesn't know what
• 48:31
  episode 4 A New Hope is. I know what Episode 4 is.
• 48:34
  That's Star Wars. Star Wars one.
• 48:37
  There are only three Star Wars movies.
• 48:41
  Star Wars, right, 4-5 and five. Strikes Back and Return of the
• 48:45
  Jedi. That's it.
• 48:47
  And what you're talking about is I, I'm almost positive in the
• 48:51
  prequels. No, couldn't be.
• 48:54
  I didn't even watch the prequels.
• 48:56
  That's Disney nonsense. All right, well, we'll find out
• 49:00
  either way. We're.
• 49:01
  Bought. I will.
• 49:02
  I will bet you I will. I will bet you a cigar.
• 49:06
  But I can't give you a cigar. You'll just vomit if.
• 49:09
  You win. If you win, I'll send you a
• 49:11
  cigar. If if I win, you won't send me
• 49:14
  one. If, if, if I if you win, I will
• 49:18
  send you a couple of little containers of Uber hot hot sauce
• 49:24
  from right here in Arizona. Superb.
• 49:28
  There we go, so mad. Happy note, Aunt Well.
• 49:33
  I mean, we, we need to ask the question, what should we do?
• 49:36
  Because we're talking about. Things in theory we've talked
• 49:40
  about the facts, but what should one's response be and.
• 49:44
  I think one of the very first things we should do is lean on
• 49:49
  Congress to do its constitutional duty.
• 49:52
  Yeah, I think so. And people are going to say,
• 49:54
  well, what does that mean? You can write your congressman
• 49:57
  in. It sounds stupid, but it
• 50:00
  actually does have an effect. Can you know why?
• 50:03
  Because relatively few people do it.
• 50:06
  Follow your congressman on Twitter and tweet at them.
• 50:10
  They pay attention. There is somebody in their
• 50:13
  office whose job it is to keep a running tally of of positive and
• 50:17
  negative mentions. When they add to tell your.
• 50:21
  Congressman to wake up and do his job.
• 50:23
  Wake up and do his job and and notice this is not a partisan
• 50:27
  thing. Not partisan at all.
• 50:29
  And not partisan is really important because I want to draw
• 50:33
  this back to civil's platform of human respect, that one of the
• 50:41
  great ways you can move all of this forward is by employing
• 50:46
  human respect specifically to the people around you who
• 50:50
  disagree with you. So if you're a Trump supporter,
• 50:52
  go find someone who isn't. If you aren't a Trump supporter,
• 50:55
  go find someone who is and have a reasonable conversation with
• 51:00
  them. We both, whether you, whether
• 51:03
  you're for Trump or against him, we both have the same problem,
• 51:06
  which is a Congress that isn't and hasn't been doing its job.
• 51:10
  And here's the. Crazy we work together.
• 51:13
  Stop using the phrase Trump Derangement Syndrome.
• 51:16
  Just stop using it. It's insulting if I am speaking
• 51:20
  out against something the most powerful politician in the
• 51:24
  United States has done. I am not deranged.
• 51:29
  I'm exercising my First Amendment rights.
• 51:33
  I would like to have a conversation about it if and
• 51:37
  only if people on the other side of the issue can be civil.
• 51:42
  They also have to care about evidence, because evidence
• 51:47
  matters, and you can't just wipe it away because you don't like
• 51:52
  it the way Trump himself did with the Bureau of Labor
• 51:56
  Statistics. You have to take these things
• 51:58
  seriously, and if you can do those things, you can have an
• 52:03
  honest and honorable conversation with somebody you
• 52:05
  disagree with. If you can't do those things,
• 52:08
  you can't. It's really that simple.
• 52:11
  You might as well just cut it there.
• 52:14
  I think everything you just said, aunt, kind of maybe it's
• 52:17
  everything I just said is kind of the same as telling people to
• 52:21
  be nice to each other. And it's hard.
• 52:24
  Yeah, it's hard. Look, it's really, really hard
• 52:28
  and I fail at it. You're going a step further.
• 52:31
  I fail at it every. Day further, you're asking
• 52:33
  people to be nice to people they don't want to be.
• 52:35
  Nice, that's right. Look, and I freely admit that I
• 52:38
  fail every day when I try to be nice to people, but the.
• 52:42
  I can attest to that. Go fuck yourself.
• 52:44
  But the important part is that I keep trying, right?
• 52:48
  Because I know how. It's because I know how
• 52:50
  important it is. So you keep at it and you keep
• 52:52
  at it and you keep at it, and it's an ideal that you hold.
• 52:57
  And you may never actually reach the height of the ideal, but
• 53:01
  that doesn't mean you stop trying anyway.
• 53:04
  Yeah, sometimes pushing toward it.
• 53:06
  Is important. It's more it's, it's more
• 53:08
  important that I'm better today than I was yesterday than than
• 53:13
  if I were to be perfect today. Anyway, I'll catch you at next
• 53:17
  time, aunt. We got a couple of days off here
• 53:19
  and until then, have a great life.
• 53:22
  See you? See you in a little bit.
• 53:23
  See you next time, James. Words and Numbers is a Civil
• 53:26
  original podcast. We work with Civil to advance
• 53:29
  their mission of upgrading civilization by exploring ideas
• 53:33
  that promote civic equality and cooperation.
• 53:36
  We believe the most pressing issues humans face, war,
• 53:39
  poverty, debt, tribalism, arise from coercive institutions that
• 53:44
  bring out the worst in us. We at Civil look to voluntary
• 53:47
  solutions to these and other problems.
• 53:50
  We invite you to explore Civil's new platform at civil.com
• 53:55
  thatscivl.com.