Overspending, Welfare & BLOAT Will END The US w⧸ Conor (Counterpoints) & Cameron Barrett
Summary
In this pilot episode of The Culture War Debate Show, we talk about overspending, government bloat, and the policies that will bankrupt or destroy the United States. We are joined by a couple of audience members to debate these ideas.
Transcript
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Culture War debate show, I guess.
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We try to have civil discussions, but sometimes they get heated debates.
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And moving forward, we are planning on having many of these shows live, pre-recorded, simply
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We're like, how do we do a show live Saturday night?
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So tomorrow night, we are going to be pre-recording the next episode of the Culture War live with
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the studio audience, and we're allowing our audience members to come up and join the debate.
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Alex Stein will be joining us to make sure that if it is chaotic, we can blame him.
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But today, we're going to be talking about overspending, government bloat, welfare, and
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these policies that will bankrupt or destroy the United States.
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I'm a science fiction, political, and philosophy nerd, Marine Corps, and law enforcement veteran.
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I think the easiest way to identify my politics is a never-Trump Republican.
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Funnily enough, I was on this stream a few weeks, maybe a month ago or so, arguing that
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we needed a state and statism and welfare and all that kind of stuff.
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But I think that the left can go way too far with this stuff, and you can effectively bankrupt
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I do a show with Pisco, actually a soon-to-be reoccurring guest on the TimCast.
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And so I'm here to defend the welfare state and government spending.
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And my preview for my audience was I never miss a chance to defend big government.
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Relatively speaking, but there's, of course, essential functions for the government that
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And that's where I get into trouble and fight with libertarians and ANCAPs.
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So this is interesting, because you're like a medium government guy.
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Yeah, Connor said that he's like, I'm looking forward to this opportunity to shift this
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Yeah, because no offense to him, but I checked out the comments underneath my thing, and they're
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like, oh, this statist, leftist, communist piece of garbage.
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And then it's like, guys, like, no, I do have reasonable positions to allow.
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I must admit, too, when people call me a statist, because I say things like, I'm okay with public
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What does that mean to you, big government and spending?
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Do you mean like deficit spending and unlimited budgets, or what?
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I mean, I think that, in principle, government should be as small as possible.
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I mean, obviously, you shouldn't have more government than you think you might need.
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But obviously, it's a debate about, you know, what the institution should really look
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You know, I happen to believe in a pretty big welfare state.
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You know, I think that part of the conceptual reason why we would always need a welfare state,
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essentially, no matter what, is that one of the reasons why the bottom 20% are, the bottom
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20%, you know, they're poor, is because they're overwhelmingly people who just don't work or
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they have trouble accessing the labor market, right?
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So we've got unemployed people, caregivers, elderly people, children, disabled people,
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And so, fundamentally, in a market capitalist system, whether you like it or don't like
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it, there's not really a clean way, clearly, you know, from across history, for essentially
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And as well, since these people are unequally distributed, right?
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So if we were to imagine the same, you know, two people, right?
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One of them lives completely alone, just in a studio apartment.
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And then the other one has, like, a child and a disabled spouse.
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Well, even though they have the same income, the person who has a child and a disabled spouse,
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which, you know, arguably is no, you know, through no fault of their own, or at the very
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least, we might say that children and people with disabilities should be taken care of,
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that person's going to be much poorer, unless we provide disability benefits, child allowances,
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Well, let me ask you, or why not just let them die?
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I mean, I happen to, you know, I believe in a state.
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I believe in, in some senses, collective responsibilities, you know, communitarianism and things like
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And I think that part of believing in community is having these sort of, you know, democratic procedures
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for voting for taxes and voting for institutions that distribute money to these people.
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And obviously, the proof is in the pudding, right?
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You know, when you have a welfare state that's well-functioning, children aren't in poverty.
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You know, the poverty rate in general just completely flatlines when you have a well-functioning
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But I think that we should tend towards that direction, not strip away all these benefits.
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But my argumentation effectively is going to be that, like, we have this schism in the
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United States of America politically, culturally, et cetera, et cetera.
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But the issue is that in order for a welfare state to work, you need fiscal conservative
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So one of the things that I see most often criticized about the welfare state, about Scandinavia,
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about the Pacific Northwest, about California, is perverse incentive systems where you effectively
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get people who are—I'm just going to say it—parasitic, dysgenic.
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And those might be, like, words that are loaded where it's like, oh, you're a fascist
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But when you have generation after generation after generation that are on social benefit
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They're taking wealth that could be used for more productive measures, et cetera, et
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We have to look at that, and we have to look at that as a systemic failure.
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And so that's where I don't begrudge fiscal conservatives who say, we've sent billions or
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trillions of dollars on these programs, and the stats have stayed almost the same, or social
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conservatives who are saying that we are incentivizing degenerate behavior.
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So how do we have a system that protects the weak from just being tossed out without creating
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So this is a—it's going to be mostly a cultural argument because I think that people can already
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identify that we're arguing about, like, how big should the state be and what services
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But the thing is, like, what I get frustrated with, with the left, with liberals, with progressives,
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with leftists, is that they don't seem to have any taste for saying, hey, no, you're
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Being a single parent, while not always your fault, is sometimes your fault.
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And here's all the pro-social behaviors that you should be taking part in, and then we should
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And obviously, we're having a sensible conversation between sensible people, but as soon as we
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leave this room, we're kind of bombarded with messaging that says, oh, this is cis-heteropatriarchal.
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This is right-wing—this is the gateway to fascism.
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When realistically, most people kind of have these social incentive structures in their
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lives, and they see the benefits and the downsides.
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I'm not so sure you guys are going to disagree on a lot of these, right?
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But you don't want dependent generations that aren't actually contributing, do you?
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So I think that where Connor is mistaken, and I think where a lot of people are mistaken
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on this, is that if we were to look at people who were born poor, right?
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So people born in kind of the bottom 20th percentile of people.
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I mean, they consume—it's about—last time I checked the data, there's about 1.6 people
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on average, obviously, in these households, they consume about $30,000 worth of things
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So about, you know, call it $18,000 per person.
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So this is a pretty low-income group of people.
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If we were to track those children and say, well, where do they end up as adults?
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You know, what you find is that the majority of them end up in a higher quintile than when
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So typically, between maybe 35% and 45% of people end up staying in the bottom 20th percentile,
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So if we were to, you know, go from the parents to the children to the grandkids to the great-grandkids,
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So in terms of the people who stay on benefits, the overwhelming majority of people who are
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on benefits kind of fall into two categories, right?
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We've got people who actually just need temporary help, and so they stay on benefits temporarily.
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I think the average person stays on food stamps for less than a year.
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Now, the people who stay on food stamps long term, they're overwhelmingly the people that
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I describe in this group, not including the unemployed, right?
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These are people who simply struggle to work or have, you know, essentially an inability
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You know, they have caregiving responsibilities at home, and they don't have financial support.
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And so if we really want to support people into work, the best thing that we can do is
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We can universalize these programs, and we can afford to do that if we just had a better
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But kicking people off of their benefits, especially with this concept of, well, I want to prevent
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Number one, generational poverty, especially after multiple generations, is really not
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And to the extent that it is, it's because these people have essentially ailments, right?
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Like, you know, these things happen, and it plunges people into poverty.
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And I ask this because we would then concede that humans are constantly in the process of
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Evolution is not like one day a duck has a baby and it's an alligator, right?
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Over long periods of time, genetic traits do confer changes in a species, in an animal.
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And so I'm curious if you think it is, I suppose, macro enough that if you have a group of people
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that are incapable of producing more than they consume, if you prop up this group of people,
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they will create more people incapable of producing more than they consume.
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Well, can I address something real quick that you just said, though?
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I hear what you're saying where you're saying that over generations, 35 to 45 percent of
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And as a result, over the course of a matter of time, there's going to be less and less
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people on it or the people have more opportunities to get off of it.
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Not necessarily people who stayed on benefits, but that would be even less people.
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But while I was researching this, because obviously there's, I would say, a liberal
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One of the things that I found is that with the stickiness of social benefits, oftentimes
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Because there are time limits stuck to these social benefits, oftentimes around five years,
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what happens is people will go off, go on, go on, go off, et cetera, et cetera.
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And so it's effectively this wave of them doing it and getting to Tim's point about whether
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or not we're incentivizing an antisocial element of our society.
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That's actually specifically what I'm arguing about, because I think that there's a resentment
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from the middle class and the working class who are just barely surviving, paying bills,
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And then they see this, I hate to say it, but true, parasitic class of people who are jumping
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back and forth on benefits over and over again.
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Even in your own statement, it's 35 to 45 percent.
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00:13:00.320
I've talked to people who survived mass shootings.
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I talk to a guy with a goose laugh, somebody who dresses up as a pirate on the weekends.
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But doesn't that carry over to subsequent generations?
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And so as a result, majority of people are getting off of the benefits,
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Well, I'm just talking about people who stay in the bottom 20%, right?
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So it's, again, the people who stay in the bottom 20%
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is necessarily a bigger group of people than are actually on benefits, right?
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Or at the very least, we could say that the kind of people that you're describing
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is a smaller group than the entirety of the bottom 20%,
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You know, we have a very complicated system for even getting the benefits.
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Obviously, as a veteran, you can probably relate to that somewhat, right?
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It actually got better in the past decade, believe it or not.
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I was just talking about the VA, Veterans Affairs.
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So basically a decade ago, I would have had all the nightmare stories
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You walk in, you can't see anybody, you get a six-month appointment.
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You know, they basically just say, hey, hopefully you don't kill yourself.
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I'm going to write that down because that's another.
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That is where ultimately I end up going with my question.
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Yeah, because are we incentivizing bad behavior?
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And then at the end of the day, are we saying, hey, maybe kill yourself?
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But Connor, I think we have to stay clear with, again,
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what I think is the fundamental purpose of the welfare state, right?
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So we have to look at this group of people, right?
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Unemployed, caregivers, elderly, children, disabled people, students.
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There's no bad behavior in any of that list of people, right?
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But I think that fiscal conservatives and social conservatives
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And number two, they would have questions about, like,
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how do we enable society in order to actually support these people?
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But social conservatives basically say, as an example,
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we're talking about, you know, this 35% to 45%.
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And you're not saying that all of them are bad.
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Yeah, but the point is that what social conservatives are concerned with
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who effectively just use benefits as their employment.
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And so they bounce on and off of the system over and over again.
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So obviously, like you said, benefits are complicated.
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Now, again, I have to keep going back to this is a minority of people.
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the overwhelming majority are these people that I just described.
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it's kind of like, oh, these able-bodied people
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There are people who, we were talking about evolution,
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which obviously I don't think that you can do that in a few generations.
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But there are people who are legitimately disabled.
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But the reason why they're disabled is because they have bad life habits.
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They have lower back pain because they're obese.
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They do things that effectively ruin their lives physically, mentally, spiritually.
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And then they expect people to perpetuate their existence.
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And I think that's what a lot of people get frustrated by.
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It's also like a spiritual, motivational, cultural issue.
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Let me just step away from the genetic component of what I asked.
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But also, as you mentioned, the social component.
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If there are people, you know, I'm not going to say if.
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There's a viral video where a woman says, here's the food I make for my seven-year-old.
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And then she's like putting oil on them and then deep frying them.
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And then she's putting like whipped cream on ice cream.
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She's like, this is what I give to my kids every day.
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If you have bad practices outside of genetics, their children are going to be on benefits too.
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And then a society that says, don't worry, it's fine.
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Eventually, you get a lot of these people that will create more people.
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But presuming that people are going to have children, they're going to perpetuate that cycle.
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Well, I mean, again, so we have to kind of segregate the conversation here.
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Including, I can kind of include what Connor just said about people with disabilities who might have.
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Maybe it's their fault that they're disabled or something like that.
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But so obviously, if you wanted to say, well, we should have certain rules by which people qualify.
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Like obviously, if you were to say like, oh, I sprained my ankle.
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I think most people would say, well, that does sound a little ridiculous.
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And every country that has disability benefits has different qualifications.
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So, you know, you have to figure out the details here.
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But at the end of the day, what I'm making an argument for is kind of twofold.
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One is the principal argument that we need a welfare state to support people with all of these groups of people.
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But obviously also, inclusive of that, people with disabilities.
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Did you hear about fraternal societies in the early 20th century?
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My response would just be that I think that people, anarchists who rely on that are, I think,
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Well, I mean, it kind of goes to your point, though, Connor.
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When you said that, you know, we need this culture of just like bullying people and telling people to,
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you know, I hate to say pick themselves up by their bootstraps.
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But, you know, similarly, like we just need to tell people to like, man, go get a fucking job.
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Now, I think that in general, we can kind of do a time series here and look at when we didn't have welfare.
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When we didn't have welfare, this kind of culture did exist.
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And getting welfare benefits was a political, you know, trial and experiment.
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Eventually, we get Medicaid, all these kind of different things.
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Now, pre-welfare, you saw so much riding like this.
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There was this culture where, oh, if you have to take any money from the government, you're just a bum, lazy piece of garbage or whatever.
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If you have to take money from charity, you know, some conservatives say, oh, well, charities will just fill the gap that welfare takes.
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Well, back when we had the kind of culture you're describing, people said, even if you take money from charity, you're a bum loser and you shouldn't do that.
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And charities are, in fact, bad because it creates the kind of culture that you're talking about.
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Now, the last thing I was going to say, one last sentence, was that we had that culture and poverty was really high.
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Once we institute state welfare benefits, guess what?
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All the people who qualified for them, the poverty rates declined precipitously.
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They continue to decline all the way up until the 90s and 2000s when benefits kind of bottomed out.
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Well, philosophically, like I said, I mean, I have a kind of intuition about, you know, a sense of community and a value of human life.
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So, you know, people have different justifications for their moral views.
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But, you know, I think just letting somebody with like a disability starve and die and live a worse life.
00:20:03.440
I guess selfishly, you could say that by forcing there was an interesting study about Social Security that talked about this.
00:20:09.920
By having Social Security benefits, for instance, it allows elderly people to live more independently from their parents or from their, not their parents, from their kids, I should say.
00:20:20.660
Now, some conservatives might say that that's a bad thing.
00:20:24.640
But at the same time, a lot of conservatives, like I saw Dennis Prager make a video similar to this where he said, well, actually, the thing that we want is for people to be individualistic.
00:20:33.800
Now, that's a debate in the conservative community.
00:20:35.480
My only point was that by not having these benefits, we create a lot of financial burdens for the broader community.
00:20:41.480
And I don't think that living in a, you know, forcing elderly people to live in the house of their children necessarily means that you have better or worse community.
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It just means elderly people are living in higher levels of poverty.
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Or the children live in the house of their parents.
00:20:58.460
OK, so one of the you actually kind of steered into a point that I wanted to make.
00:21:02.960
So support people who the market does not support.
00:21:08.280
So ultimately, I do believe that women who are raising children are not like drags on our society.
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They're actually a pro-social component of our society.
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And it's important that they raise healthy, happy, productive children for all of our sakes and especially the sake of the future.
00:21:23.540
Now, if we wanted to say because I feel like we could circle the, you know, the well, there's all these people who actually do deserve these benefits.
00:21:33.140
I think that a actual principled social conservative, if they think about it for 30 seconds, they don't want women to be starving.
00:21:40.960
And they do want people to who are productive to kind of get back into society, reintegrated and supported.
00:21:48.200
OK, I think those if a social conservative thinks for more than 30 seconds, they'll do that.
00:21:51.980
Fiscal conservatives, maybe not so much now because they'll say not with my money.
00:21:56.420
Now, that being said, we're talking about pro-social and anti-social behavior, which I think is like another component of this.
00:22:02.760
We're not only talking about taxes, debt, all that kind of stuff.
00:22:06.480
The other thing that we're talking about is pro-social stuff.
00:22:08.700
And what's actually interesting is this is something that I bumped into during research for this is since the advent of the welfare state, which I guess we could say is like the 40s, I guess.
00:22:16.720
We've actually seen a drop in labor force participation rate, which is effectively people who participate in the economy.
00:22:23.620
But the place where it was most pronounced was actually men over the age of 55.
00:22:29.200
So all the boomers who are telling us, like, pick yourself up by the bootstraps, you know, you've got to work until you're dead, never take social benefits, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:22:36.400
If you actually look at it, you see old people effectively stop working as soon as they hit 55, and you see like a 20% decrease.
00:22:49.120
You're saying it's ironic for the conservatives.
00:22:50.920
Yeah, because that's the generation that tells us the most that we just need to work our butts off, whereas they are the people who are participating in the economy less and less.
00:23:00.440
When Social Security was first launched, I believe it was five workers were needed to prop up one recipient.
00:23:08.460
Based on the scale of benefits and the buying power, as of today, it's 2.1 on average.
00:23:14.460
It's the latest data that goes into paying a Social Security recipient.
00:23:18.020
People on Social Security do not get paid enough to actually sustain a standard of living.
00:23:22.000
And we expect by 2035, Social Security to reach not necessarily insolvency, but the point at which it can only pay out what goes in, which is 77%.
00:23:32.200
So either they have to increase taxes or they have to cut Social Security.
00:23:37.760
Now, on top of this, Gen Z is smaller than the millennials, and Gen Alpha is about half the millennials.
00:23:48.180
And to end, if we want to extend the generation by a couple of years, the high estimate may be 48 million.
00:23:55.360
In 10 years, we are not going to have a labor force that can fund a welfare state.
00:24:02.440
So this is where we need to change the expectations, at least in my opinion.
00:24:05.960
We're going to have to do this just for survival, okay?
00:24:08.880
We're going to have to reset expectations around what people can materially expect out of the state and what they can expect out of the economy.
00:24:14.860
We are going to have to become extended family units again.
00:24:17.340
We are going to have to work together as a community in order to survive.
00:24:20.200
We are going to have to adopt pro-social behaviors from the early 20th and late 19th century just to survive.
00:24:25.060
Because that's an economic calamity that literally, if we try to pay for people to live in 1,400-square-foot single-family homes by themselves,
00:24:33.140
they're going to end up eating cat food and their pets because they're not going to be able to survive.
00:24:40.360
This is effectively like an economic implosion.
00:24:48.020
At a party, someone bet $20 for someone to eat cat food and I did it for free.
00:25:01.320
So, Econoboy, so far, you've argued that the people that I'm targeting or want to target are the parasitic elements of society are not that big of a deal.
00:25:14.760
Just to be clear, it's not that it's not a big deal in some conceptual sense.
00:25:18.300
It's just that if you just look at the people who are consistently poor, it's all these people who I would say don't exactly exhibit bad behavior, right?
00:25:31.160
Tim brought up a point that I think is very pertinent to the conversation where, effectively, like, it's the conservatives who are pro-natal.
00:25:40.000
We're the people who, like, want pro-social behaviors to be implemented over and over and over again.
00:25:44.440
And hopefully we'll be around as a species in 100,000 years.
00:25:46.860
So, if we're looking at a, I don't know what you said, like a 40% cut in the population, something like that.
00:25:53.260
So, there are 72 million millennials, 69 million Gen Z, 40 million Gen Alpha, and Gen Alpha is ending this year.
00:26:00.520
Caveat, Gen Alpha is slightly shorter than previous generations.
00:26:03.800
So, if you want to add a few years, because this is based on labor cycles of 18-year-olds, then we could estimate Gen Alpha to be about 48 million, or let's just say the next generation of workers.
00:26:16.760
We're also currently right now facing what's called the demographic cliff, because when the Great Recession happened, a dramatic drop in fertility occurred those two years, which means for the next couple of years, we're expecting a major drop-off in 18-year-olds.
00:26:29.960
So, currently, right now, we're facing a gap of 16- to 18-year-olds.
00:26:34.580
So, that's entry-level work and labor for businesses, and we're starting to see businesses actually close, because they can't find entry-level labor.
00:26:42.980
And if you look at the population distribution, there's a natural element to this of the boomers into the X, right, because the baby boomed post-World War II, and then X being a smaller generation.
00:26:54.240
However, what I'm saying is, if this S-curve distribution is going down, then it kind of doesn't matter what we're arguing about from a welfare state perspective.
00:27:03.100
We literally will not be able to afford it without automation, without, like, extreme amounts of automation.
00:27:08.340
But, real quick, sorry, just a quick point, automation still is going to be owned by someone, and that means new taxes on automated systems.
00:27:17.600
One proposal is that if Uber intends to fully automate its fleet, they would have to pay a substantial amount of taxes.
00:27:30.760
Well, yeah, look, I mean, those are many different conversations.
00:27:33.240
I think that we, again, have to segregate the conversation.
00:27:36.680
So, fundamentally, even if you have a declining population, and for some reason we don't want to let in immigrants, and obviously we, you know, I think there's some analysis on that.
00:27:46.540
My point is, like, even if we were to assume, like, obviously I think immigration is a solution to that problem, especially, like, in the medium term, essentially.
00:27:52.720
Now, even if we don't agree with that, right, even if we say, okay, we're not going to let in immigrants, and, you know, the population's declining,
00:27:59.020
we still have fundamentally two things that enable the welfare state to exist, right?
00:28:04.780
We have an amount of money and distribution of income in society.
00:28:09.660
There's still going to be people with disabilities, the elderly people, this and that, right?
00:28:13.500
And we're still going to need a way to give them some level of money.
00:28:17.140
Now, obviously, you might say, you know, similar to Japan, right?
00:28:25.720
We might need to cut benefits for that reason, or because maybe tax burdens would get so bad for the economy or whatever.
00:28:34.700
But principally speaking, there's no reason to think that, oh, because we have a declining population,
00:28:39.420
even if we don't let in immigrants, which is the big caveat, and I guess technology doesn't get substantially better, right?
00:28:44.780
So those are two big caveats, that we would obviously just get rid of, like, the entirety of the welfare state,
00:28:50.020
or we would substantially cut it back to a quarter of what it was.
00:28:52.560
Because, no, like, we would still have a pretty sizable welfare state under those circumstances, and we should.
00:28:58.720
So now we're talking about policy, but you've given me a couple of things.
00:29:02.920
So I stand by what I said earlier, which is effectively we need to reimagine what the golden years look like,
00:29:11.320
which is right now it's effectively having your retirement from – this is a boomer thing.
00:29:17.620
Millennials don't think they're going to retire.
00:29:18.820
They think they're going to work until they're dead, but the boomers, they effectively think that with social benefits plus retirement,
00:29:27.140
they should be able to spend two decades effectively not working,
00:29:30.500
and they should be able to maintain their 1,500-square-foot house on a quarter-acre lot.
00:29:36.660
I think that the way that we – and maybe it shouldn't because it's probably, relatively speaking, antisocial.
00:29:41.620
What probably should happen is we should get more used to extended family groups living in properties next to each other,
00:29:49.020
Now, that doesn't mean that you need to be in tenement housing like the 19th century where you're sleeping with your wife
00:29:57.740
No, you don't need to have your – I forget grandpa's name, but you don't have grandpa in three degenerates sleeping with grandpa in bed all day two feet away from you.
00:30:08.060
But at the same time, we're going to have to find a dignified shift to this.
00:30:10.760
And this is where I'm going to challenge the fiscal and social conservatives in the chat.
00:30:13.940
I don't feel they're ready to have that conversation because they're typically the people who are doing better economically.
00:30:20.260
So they will still be able to afford that life through their income.
00:30:24.240
And so they're basically saying, well, the rest of society can buzz off.
00:30:27.340
But what I'm saying is that population collapse, immigration as a stopgap, and then the money distribution being taxed so heavily that we can still support our welfare state,
00:30:39.580
these are meteors that are coming for our culture whether you like it or not.
00:30:43.340
That's not true, though, because, again, we can look at societies that have higher rates of taxation, more generous retirement benefits, right?
00:30:52.340
Well, I don't know about – I don't know how much Scandinavia tax is to fund their pension system, honestly.
00:30:56.960
I was just thinking specifically about Germany, right?
00:31:08.700
And so we have examples of societies that have substantially higher payroll taxes to fund social benefits, right?
00:31:16.080
And we don't see, like, oh, the economy collapses.
00:31:19.360
We don't see, like, oh, so many terrible antisocial things happen in these countries because of the high payroll taxes.
00:31:25.960
In the United States, right, we could do two things to fill this gap that you're talking about.
00:31:30.440
And so, like Tim said, in 2035 or 2033 or whatever year it is, benefit – you know, the trust fund is scheduled to decrease, right?
00:31:40.420
All that means is that the accumulated money from Social Security, the trust fund aspect of Social Security, goes to zero.
00:31:46.820
It doesn't mean we don't have any money for Social Security.
00:31:50.360
And then if that happens, benefits go to 75% of their current levels.
00:31:55.160
So we can still pay out 75% of the inflation-adjusted benefits come 2033, 2035.
00:32:01.960
Now, if you wanted to raise all of that money with our current demographics, right, all you'd have to do is get rid of the cap on Social Security, right?
00:32:11.000
If you make more than $150,000 a year, you don't pay any extra Social Security tax on any of that income.
00:32:17.760
If we got rid of that cap and then we said, you know, we might have to say, oh, you know, our tax is going to have to go up on the employer side to 7% or 8%, right?
00:32:26.820
We keep the statutory rates the same for the employees.
00:32:36.220
This is not, you know, a Great Depression is going to happen.
00:32:40.380
And if we're smart and we just allow in immigrants, which we've been doing, there's 50 million foreign-born people that live in this country,
00:32:46.180
we would completely avoid even the tax increase.
00:32:51.360
So that right there just throws your premise into question.
00:32:54.400
Because the Laffer curve, the idea of the Laffer curve is you raise taxes to such an erroneously high level
00:33:00.900
that people all of a sudden start dropping out of the labor force precipitously.
00:33:05.740
An example I can give you that I personally experienced is in Cook County, when they raise the taxes by 0.25%, contract labor left to do Bache County.
00:33:14.260
Well, that's because of an anti-competitive tax measure, not because taxes were too high.
00:33:18.300
Obviously, if you have free flow of labor and capital, like between counties do, you have to be more sensitive about your tax planning.
00:33:24.060
So you're going to need tariffs to maintain this.
00:33:28.540
If you're talking about a national employment tax, right?
00:33:30.980
If we're going to say that there's free movement of labor and various different jurisdictions have different tax rates,
00:33:36.600
then you've got a competition, but you need a 7% increase in labor taxes.
00:33:44.200
I'm talking about like a less than 1% increase, right?
00:33:47.220
I mean, this is not a calamitous thing that you guys are describing.
00:33:54.900
No, no, free trade is not the same thing as people can easily shift their entire domestic production base and their entire labor base.
00:34:01.620
I don't know if that would be easy, but why wouldn't they?
00:34:03.380
If you're talking about a company that generates, say, $10 billion per year in revenue, and they're looking at 0.75%, they will spend that money and go to Mexico.
00:34:14.620
So what you're talking about is much more on the margin.
00:34:17.500
Right now, we have a service-based economy, a consumption-based economy, right?
00:34:20.800
So even if like a lot of manufacturing and stuff, we've already seen this happen.
00:34:29.000
We haven't seen recession after recession because of the manufacturing decline.
00:34:34.780
You said we're a service-based and consumer-based economy.
00:34:40.280
Like what do we produce that generates the products to be consumed?
00:34:46.440
Well, if we're not a manufacturing economy, what are we consuming?
00:34:58.380
Well, houses are an asset, but also there's a depreciation to a house because as you consume
00:35:03.120
the house, quote-unquote, it goes down in value.
00:35:09.460
I mean, obviously there's a—when I say you consume a house, I don't mean in some literal
00:35:15.140
So we're talking about houses, and you say there's a depreciation.
00:35:18.200
Houses need to be repaired or someone's got to be hired to do that.
00:35:25.800
So what are we giving to these foreign countries so that they give us steel in return?
00:35:32.460
Well, they either invest it in, you know, U.S. securities, U.S. assets.
00:35:36.560
I mean, they do something with it, obviously, that you would normally do with U.S. dollars.
00:35:40.200
So let's bring this down to the root of the phrase equinemia, which I'm sure you're familiar
00:35:46.700
It's the root of economy, which means household management.
00:35:49.040
If you live in a house where you don't produce anything and you have a universal trade
00:35:55.260
currency for your house—I know you don't, but let's just say for your house, you're
00:35:59.160
like, hey, if I give you this currency, you can come to me and buy stuff, but you don't
00:36:08.500
So you go to someone and say, I don't make anything, but I need steel for my house.
00:36:12.900
I'll give to you, Mr., you know, Chinese national who makes steel.
00:36:18.600
What he buys from you is going to be the rights and control of your house, your land,
00:36:24.700
your properties, because you don't make anything to exchange.
00:36:27.400
This is actually what we've been seeing in the United States with China buying up large
00:36:32.360
We go to China and we give them U.S. dollars in exchange for their labor.
00:36:36.220
We then bring those products from China, and it's not just China, but largely China.
00:36:40.880
They then give us—these are not just hard products, but also the resources need to make
00:36:52.120
They'll say, assembled in the USA, but the metals actually produced and manufactured in
00:36:58.120
So you think you're buying an American product, but you're not.
00:37:00.920
China then takes those U.S. dollars and says, hey, America is not producing anything.
00:37:15.300
What we've seen over the past 30 years, they've been buying up large swaths of our land and
00:37:23.120
If you do not produce something, but promise labor or value in exchange for a resource,
00:37:29.700
the only thing you have to sell is the clothes off your back, and that's what this country
00:37:34.980
Well, Tim, part of a service economy is the idea that like your construction services,
00:37:40.480
for instance, like we still produce a lot of housing in this country.
00:37:46.100
Well, Tim, that's just the trade intensity of the economy.
00:37:49.080
You still have this entire domestic economy that's based on not just services, but also
00:37:54.140
So let's go back to the main point I said of the resources we need for those services
00:37:58.200
to exist are produced by foreign countries for which we give them money.
00:38:01.780
They don't need to buy our service from us because their labor is cheaper.
00:38:05.640
We don't produce raw materials for the most part, so they're not going to buy from us.
00:38:11.460
The United States produces a lot of raw materials.
00:38:15.660
We do make a lot of intermediate goods and capital goods and things like that, right?
00:38:19.240
But we are a service and consumer economy, meaning the majority of what we are trading
00:38:23.600
between ourselves is the services, not the raw materials.
00:38:26.960
Steel plants have been closing across this country quite a bit.
00:38:29.740
We call the Pittsburgh Steelers a Steelers because they made steel there.
00:38:39.860
The value of the economy is being extracted, and we are not going to be able to maintain
00:38:44.500
a welfare state when our assets are being bought off our backs because we don't produce anything
00:38:51.840
So no, just because you trade, that doesn't mean that value is being extracted from your
00:38:56.380
Obviously, when people buy things from other countries, they're assuming that there's some
00:39:02.120
So they might sell raw materials, but we use those materials to whatever.
00:39:08.660
So what can China buy from us if their labor is cheaper than ours and they're producing
00:39:15.380
Well, you can look up what China buys from the United States.
00:39:23.640
Corporate securities, control of our corporate systems, our land, our hard assets.
00:39:28.120
If you don't produce things to trade, which we are producing, which we are not producing
00:39:33.060
to keep up with the consumer economy, you will end up with them buying your hard assets
00:39:42.080
So I think that this is, even if you think that it's all going to be okay, it's all going
00:39:47.880
There is an underlying anxiety of the American economy, which is what is the American economy
00:39:53.920
Now, this is a mistake that I actually think Trump makes.
00:39:56.020
So, you know, throwing a little shade to the right, is that the main thing that we do
00:40:02.200
We are the American, you know, we are, for better or worse, the world police.
00:40:06.820
So when I see, yep, Trump did brag famously that we were selling weapons to Saudi Arabia
00:40:11.960
in exchange for lots of money, good for our economy.
00:40:14.920
So anyways, but the point is, so this is actually where I get frustrated with the Trump admin,
00:40:19.080
though, because they're effectively saying, we don't need soft power.
00:40:25.240
Why are we involved in West Africa, Asia, whatever.
00:40:27.420
Right, because we're talking about the welfare state here.
00:40:31.640
I just want to make this point because I think it's important.
00:40:35.980
We do manufacture weapons and the best of them.
00:40:39.020
So the point is that everybody wants to be our friend because we manufacture the best
00:40:46.280
So what I would, well, sometimes, but so we can move back to the welfare.
00:40:50.140
I have no problems moving back to welfare, but I want to make this point is that the underlying
00:40:53.820
anxiety of the American conservative, I think, even if they're not able to articulate it,
00:40:58.460
is that effectively we're selling tax software to the international economy.
00:41:05.400
But realistically, eventually, those economies are going to complexify to the point that they
00:41:10.980
can produce their own domestic software and they're not going to need American software
00:41:15.220
This is to the tunes of billions of dollars, by the way.
00:41:18.480
Sorry, guys, listen, I listened to you for 10 minutes.
00:41:21.720
I know I'm a very verbose person, but I've also been very patient.
00:41:25.200
So the other thing, though, that backs the American economy is defense.
00:41:28.320
And so the reason why I get frustrated with the Trump admin is because, in my opinion,
00:41:35.340
I think the reason why he wants to eat a gun is because America is giving away its soft
00:41:40.020
And then also, in our hard power, the MAGA movement is not interested in flexing international
00:41:45.340
And so I look at the American economy, which is primarily like digital services in the
00:41:51.180
And if we're not selling our hard power, and if digital services will be replaced by domestic
00:41:55.880
competitors eventually, what the hell is the American economy backed by?
00:41:59.360
And I worry about that for the future of the next American century.
00:42:01.920
Just real quick to pull it all back, just to connect this.
00:42:04.300
The reason that this came up is because how do we fund a welfare state is the question.
00:42:11.540
So I think we hear a lot more talk like this in small countries, right?
00:42:17.140
So small countries will phrase it like, well, we need to learn how to climb the value chain.
00:42:23.880
And so what they're essentially saying is kind of similar to what you guys are saying,
00:42:27.360
is like, we need to find ways to be able to export goods that people want to buy, because
00:42:32.500
we want to get foreign currency reserves, and we want to invest in foreign capital, things
00:42:37.280
We need to be able to import the things that we need for machines, right?
00:42:39.660
And so if you wanted to talk about, hey, we need a coherent strategy for the United States
00:42:44.620
to innovate, to climb the value chain, to produce things that people need, I don't necessarily,
00:42:50.520
I mean, I don't know who would really disagree with that.
00:42:52.560
Again, that has nothing to do, that's just a completely separate conversation from the
00:42:57.420
Now, if you wanted to make the case that, oh, well, the welfare state is limiting our ability
00:43:02.800
to produce technology, that would be a very difficult argument to make.
00:43:06.540
So I think what Tim and I are kind of poking at, maybe not masterfully, but we're poking
00:43:12.340
at it, is that in order to have enough wealth, resources, money, time, energy, in order to
00:43:18.600
create the welfare state, you need to actually have goods and services produced that you're
00:43:22.700
selling to people who are interested in purchasing them.
00:43:24.720
Another thing that I forgot a moment ago, in order to say that it seems like our economy
00:43:28.900
is backed by, is being the world reserve currency, and also being heavily invested in the security
00:43:35.720
of the international energy industry, effectively oil and petroleum.
00:43:39.420
And so the thing is, if we see people drifting away from us, for instance, Iran, with Russia
00:43:43.960
and China, then let's say that Saudi Arabia, BRICS, all that kind of stuff, they're moving
00:43:50.120
And this is, again, where I get frustrated with the current administration, is that it seems
00:43:54.640
like we're hurting ourselves, and potentially these precarious things on which the entire
00:43:58.960
American commercial empire is built, is kind of like, the floor is being pulled out underneath
00:44:04.040
Now, if we want to move back to welfare, to just like, how do we create this kind of
00:44:06.960
thing, and we just want to say, we are going to make enough money that we can tax in order
00:44:11.480
to create a welfare state, what does that look like?
00:44:15.060
I'm just saying, this is the underlying anxiety.
00:44:17.080
Well, but I don't, again, I don't think the anxiety is totally relevant.
00:44:20.200
So, for instance, there's only one country where we have, you know, a global reserve
00:44:25.500
America has, you know, the global reserve currency, right?
00:44:28.560
Now, obviously, a lot of other currencies are held in reserve.
00:44:33.460
Now, when we look at all these other countries that are not the global reserve currency, Australia,
00:44:39.920
Norway, the UK, you know, New Zealand, they have huge welfare states, right?
00:44:45.640
They have bigger welfare states, more expansive welfare states than America does, right?
00:44:49.540
And so, when we try to link these two arguments and say, oh, well, if we don't have the global
00:44:53.720
reserve currency, and if we have even more massive deindustrialization, that's going to
00:44:58.200
cause us to not be able to have, you know, some adequate level of welfare state, why don't
00:45:07.960
Is the reason why all those countries that you just listed, I think, are comfortable with
00:45:12.140
the United States as the global reserve currency is because our involvement in the
00:45:16.720
energy industry internationally, our involvement in security internationally, and they look
00:45:21.540
So, that's where I get pissed at the current administration because it feels like they
00:45:26.080
And then I think that, eventually, if it got bad enough, there would be these orbiters,
00:45:32.140
orbiting nations that would say, why are we deferring to the United States?
00:45:35.760
They're psychotic and they're giving up their power and they're screwing us over.
00:45:40.300
We pay for a lot of security of a lot of countries around the world.
00:45:42.700
Well, but, Tim, even that, people make that argument, oh, their welfare states are subsidized
00:45:48.560
You know, look, how much money do we spend on the military?
00:45:52.040
We spend about a trillion dollars a year in terms of total defense consumption, right?
00:46:00.560
So, we spend about 3.5% of GDP on our defense industry.
00:46:03.480
And obviously, that includes all the international security that we provide.
00:46:06.220
If we were to ask all these countries, we've got countries like Iceland and Norway and Australia
00:46:10.880
that are spending, you know, 45% of GDP on all their different government programs, right,
00:46:16.420
which includes their own militaries, obviously.
00:46:17.780
If we were to say, oh, yeah, you know, if you tick that up to 46.5%, what, is Australia
00:46:24.980
Their welfare state's not going to be sustainable?
00:46:30.860
But then the question is, what does their 3% look like versus our 3%?
00:46:35.280
Because our economy is so large, 3.5% looks like, I don't know, F-35s.
00:46:40.440
It looks like special forces who have every techno gizmo.
00:46:43.560
3.5% of the Australian economy, sorry, Australians, it looks like trucks.
00:46:52.380
But all you're doing, sorry, real quick, all you're doing is you're showing me why I'm
00:47:00.940
There is a point at which you tax people too much and the system collapses, yes?
00:47:10.580
When you socialize too much, does the economy eventually collapse?
00:47:13.040
The answer is yes, because we've seen it dozens of times throughout history.
00:47:16.520
Well, it depends on, obviously, how you're socializing things and also what kind of taxes
00:47:21.720
Now, if you wanted to say, hey, you know, the United States doesn't have an optimal tax
00:47:27.140
On my sub stack, I released the Left Needs Better Tax Policy article series where I talked
00:47:33.360
But even if we were to look at suboptimal tax codes, right?
00:47:36.280
You know, look at, you know, like the Nordic countries, all the five different Nordic countries,
00:47:40.060
They have things like payroll taxes and income taxes and wealth taxes and inheritance
00:47:47.460
You know, these are forms of taxation that are not necessarily optimal.
00:47:50.040
And they're forms of taxation that they have that are way higher than our current levels
00:47:55.140
The last thing that I'll say, Connor, is that, again, we don't see this sort of deleterious
00:48:01.860
They actually have higher GDP per hour work than we do.
00:48:05.600
But this gets into something that we brought up earlier, which is immigration and integration.
00:48:09.960
So I think that what's effectively happened over the past century without an explanation
00:48:14.260
to the American people or the developed world is that we saw birth rates all trend towards
00:48:20.980
And effectively, even if you look at West Africa, East Africa, all that kind of stuff,
00:48:31.040
The current, I think we're at 1.66 as a nation, which includes Hispanics who have a higher birth
00:48:37.640
rate than, you know, the North European Caucasian population.
00:48:42.160
So then this gets into immigration and integration.
00:48:44.060
You say, well, we can use immigration as an economic stopgap in order to, you know, offset
00:48:50.120
some of these costs that we're going to have, or these challenges that we have with the welfare
00:48:54.220
But then what I'm going to say as a, I know that not a lot of people in Chad believe me,
00:49:02.000
As a conservative, I'm going to say that integration, if you're going to have immigration,
00:49:06.780
integration has to be a core component of that.
00:49:14.700
And we also have to force people to integrate into that because as an example, our labor
00:49:18.760
force participation rate hovers around 60% right now, which by the way, decreased substantively
00:49:23.920
since the 2008 market collapse, because I think people stopped believing in the economy
00:49:29.080
And then when you look at the Scandinavian countries, the Scandinavian countries, as an example,
00:49:33.340
I know I'm picking the high example, but I'm going to be a dick about it.
00:49:50.280
How do you bump labor force participation rate by 10%?
00:49:56.600
Well, so you've kind of fallen into one of my points, right?
00:50:00.220
So that's what I was going to say, was that if we look at those societies that have much
00:50:04.380
more generous welfare benefits, they have higher labor force participation, both in general
00:50:08.620
and also prime age, and they also have higher employment rates, right?
00:50:13.180
Now, it's fair to say that if you have a generous welfare state, it's not going to cause people
00:50:19.380
to just, all of them are just going to collapse out of the job force because we're going to
00:50:24.440
That doesn't happen in the countries that have very generous benefits.
00:50:32.460
You're going to have to address that specifically.
00:50:33.980
I would argue that they have an industrious culture, and you said no.
00:50:37.820
So I think that for the most part, obviously, I'm sure culture has an effect on the margin,
00:50:46.920
America, in terms of prime age labor force participation, right?
00:50:50.040
So people between 25 and 54, the people who really should be working if you want your economy
00:50:54.340
to be healthy, that's at record levels in America.
00:51:07.680
It might be a little bit weird, the audio here, but...
00:51:10.760
There is a story, though, that did come out recently.
00:51:13.060
I would obviously have to look at the statistical data rather than just a random editorial.
00:51:17.360
But there was something saying that effectively, like, the next generation, I guess it's
00:51:21.780
alpha, as they're coming into the workforce, there's like 25%, like,
00:51:29.520
So Gen Z is split right now with the oldest Gen Z around 26, 27 years old.
00:51:35.860
And then the youngest, I think, are early teens.
00:51:38.200
So the mid of Gen Z is supposed to be entering the workforce right now, but we're seeing a
00:51:47.180
And so, listen, for the sake of the argument, I'll track you wherever you're going, but
00:51:52.680
that news story is an alarm bell because I would make that almost an exclusively cultural
00:51:58.720
The reason why I asked about the point at which, if you tax people too much, the system
00:52:03.160
breaks, is that we are going to have, in 10 years, 58 million boomers projected, 70-ish
00:52:13.180
I know millennials aren't dying of old age, but there's general mortality.
00:52:18.680
So we're going to need a labor force to support, in 10 years, the boomers on Social Security,
00:52:27.180
50 million, but there's only going to be 40-some-odd million Gen Alpha to begin entering
00:52:34.540
The solution then for that issue is going to be, we are going to have to tax people more.
00:52:47.740
The issue with mass migration, as we've seen from the Democratic Party, which is largely
00:52:52.420
unskilled labor, is that labor force of a country is going to be divided by a wave of
00:53:00.600
You can't just flood the low skill bracket and leave the mid to high skills.
00:53:05.320
Which is why I argue about integration, which is I think that these are largely, listen,
00:53:12.840
You can have a Chinatown where they only speak Chinese if they're producing things to
00:53:17.840
The issue is normally the way the labor force expands is that a new generation enters the
00:53:23.780
low skill portion of the workforce and then gains those skills over time.
00:53:32.560
But if you flood 20 million non-skilled labor, you're going to keep seeing a collapse of
00:53:38.800
the mid-range and the high range, meaning all of the higher level functions are going to
00:53:43.540
be strained and collapse, and you can't have everyone fighting over the same jobs in the
00:53:49.600
And so when I say integration, I don't specifically mean Asians in Chinatown need to speak English,
00:53:55.680
What I mean is that they need to go to, well, not the Asians in particular, right?
00:54:03.280
Yeah, like 80% of, we're talking about Hispanics.
00:54:05.800
80% of immigration into the United States is going to be Hispanics, right?
00:54:08.800
So what I'm talking about with integration is we need to look at school, and I hate that
00:54:16.140
We need to look at that as a socialization apparatus in order to prepare the next generation
00:54:21.580
And we have looked at it that way for a very long time.
00:54:24.460
My frustration with MAGA and some of the walking away from education movements and the gutting
00:54:32.840
But the reason why I get frustrated with that is because effectively what you're saying is
00:54:38.300
And so we have people who are going to be homeschooled.
00:54:40.820
We have people who are going to go to private school.
00:54:42.180
They might do well individually, but when we're talking about on a culture-wide basis,
00:54:46.840
if we're decreasing the quality of education, then effectively what we're not doing is we're
00:54:50.620
not socializing that next generation, and we're making it more difficult.
00:54:55.000
I would want the bottom tier within two or three generations to be climbing to the higher
00:55:02.040
I'm a mud-dwelling, bog-dwelling, rock-flowing...
00:55:06.560
And how many generations has your family been here?
00:55:09.000
Three or four generations of social development.
00:55:11.580
You can't take people who grew up on farms and ask them to go code.
00:55:15.840
Sure, but that's what I'm talking about, a three or four generational project.
00:55:22.720
We're going to have an immediate problem that immigration won't solve.
00:55:25.880
Well, obviously, immigration has its own issues, right?
00:55:28.740
So you do have to have a sort of methodical and thoughtful immigration process.
00:55:32.900
But again, these are all separate conversations, right?
00:55:40.640
But you cannot advocate for mass spending on welfare while ignoring the collapsing labor
00:55:45.860
force, the fluctuation in the tax base, and the wealth resources.
00:55:51.480
You say increase the taxes because we can make up for the wealth.
00:56:01.340
Um, the point is to say the welfare state is a question of distribution, right?
00:56:12.100
And I don't want to repeat them, but, you know, the six groups that I mentioned...
00:56:15.860
So we've got all these groups of non-workers, people who struggle to work, things like that.
00:56:19.620
And then we've got all these people who are working.
00:56:21.620
Whether we have a declining population, de-industrialization, struggles to climb the value chain, questions about
00:56:33.320
Those are all reasonable questions to ask, okay?
00:56:35.880
But the question of the welfare state is how do we want to distribute the income that we
00:56:43.040
I assume we wouldn't suggest that in 30 years we're going to have no income, right?
00:56:47.680
We're going to have a ton of people working and a ton of these non-workers.
00:56:51.460
The rates hovered around 50-50 essentially for the last, you know, fucking like 40 years
00:56:57.180
And it was lower back in the 1940s and 50s because women didn't work.
00:57:00.680
And so, you know, for all those reasons, that's why I keep bringing it back.
00:57:06.980
But fundamentally, we need the welfare state, even in a society with all those problems that
00:57:13.560
And I would argue that even in that society, we should have a relatively expansive welfare
00:57:17.700
Perhaps relative to the time, because maybe there's less income and maybe we have depreciation
00:57:22.340
and stuff, but we still need a wide welfare state.
00:57:25.480
A substantive amount of these, though, are not questions.
00:57:28.180
They're problems that you and I are coming up with that are effectively going to affect
00:57:32.160
And then you're using what I would say is pretty sanitized language in order to describe
00:57:36.300
things that are actually kind of like worrisome to the fiscal and social conservatives of
00:57:44.620
So you're saying something like, well, it's a distribution issue.
00:57:51.200
So what I see when the population goes down and that we only have so many options, which
00:57:57.420
is immigration, and you say it's a distribution issue, what you're saying is more taxes.
00:58:02.560
Well, for better or worse, fiscal, I would love to hear how we need to increase distribution
00:58:17.560
So then the question becomes, so you're saying it's a question of distribution.
00:58:20.100
You're saying like, oh, we can just increase this tax, like, you know, 0.75%.
00:58:26.460
Well, I feel like I remember that from about 30 minutes ago.
00:58:29.500
But the point that is that I like to think of myself as a fairly rational, statist, Burkean
00:58:39.940
People hate that, but that's the way that I feel.
00:58:42.880
Everyone else is to the right of me on this issue.
00:58:49.020
Well, these are not incompatible conversations.
00:58:53.240
So if the excess resources generated per person is, let's just say, like 1% of a labor unit,
00:59:07.060
I'm using a fictional thing to represent value.
00:59:11.920
That means one person doing work will provide an excess of 20.
00:59:22.220
So when we decide we're going to tax a portion of the units they produce, if we take one unit
00:59:28.920
of labor from that person, they might not notice and say, okay, fine, at least I got enough
00:59:32.580
But that one is not going to sustain a single individual.
00:59:35.260
If you have 100 million people and they're all working, you're now generating a ton of
00:59:40.640
excess labor, which can be distributed as a welfare state.
00:59:44.040
But with a population collapse, your volume is going to decrease and the total amount will
00:59:48.860
exponentially decrease that you can support in a welfare state due to a decrease in volume.
00:59:53.800
In standard business, this requires a price increase.
00:59:56.160
You can either sell one million widgets for a dollar or you can sell one widget for a million
01:00:02.700
So, Econoboy, the question is, is your answer to that problem, because Tim and I have brought
01:00:06.800
this problem up repeatedly, is your answer effectively automation, integration, better
01:00:15.440
So I already said about 45 minutes ago or something like that, pretty close to the beginning
01:00:19.020
of the conversation, that it's entirely possible that if we become South Korea 20 or 30
01:00:36.080
It's very possible that we'll have to cut benefits because of some fiscal sustainability
01:00:41.080
Like, eventually, you probably don't have enough money to distribute at current levels.
01:00:44.700
But, you know, we have benefits that are tied to inflation.
01:00:46.760
And if deflation happens, you know, you just lower the benefits commensurately, right?
01:00:50.620
It's all about achieving what we think of as a relative standard of living.
01:00:56.520
So it's possible that what you're saying does happen.
01:00:58.480
Maybe in 20 or 30 years, nobody's having any kids.
01:01:02.660
We're just kind of poor, right, for various reasons.
01:01:05.440
You know, we just don't have the money to redistribute like we used to.
01:01:07.760
And so we'll have to adjust our expectations of what basic needs means, like you said.
01:01:13.460
But that's not a comment on how much, relatively speaking, within societies we should distribute
01:01:19.400
to people who are struggling with these things that I talked about.
01:01:35.160
So let's say that we have, I don't know, like we have $5 trillion that we want to redistribute,
01:01:41.180
And we, you know, maybe about that's what government's going to get, right?
01:01:43.660
We should before, I don't know how much time we have, but...
01:01:46.340
Okay, so then we will talk about debt, servicing the debt, all that kind of stuff.
01:01:52.580
Let's say that we have $5 trillion that we want to redistribute.
01:01:54.880
That's what we can kind of like afford, quotation marks.
01:01:57.820
And we distribute it based on, you know, these different groups that I talked about.
01:02:01.640
And like, maybe we have some military needs or whatever that is.
01:02:03.980
And we go into the future and all these calamitous things happen.
01:02:06.960
And let's just say, God, you know, damn, we can only raise $4 trillion, right?
01:02:12.320
Well, distributionally, there's no reason to think that we would all of a sudden not have
01:02:23.460
Maybe those benefits just have to go down some amount, right?
01:02:25.860
But fundamentally, just last thing, we need welfare and we need a lot of it, relatively
01:02:31.480
speaking, to prevent all these people from living in poverty.
01:02:35.480
I was going to say this real quick because you brought up U.S. debt, so I brought up the U.S.
01:02:38.980
Look, I think it's fair to say that we've already traveled well beyond the capability
01:02:45.580
And now the ship is sinking and we're planning like it's not.
01:02:53.800
You know, we have, I mean, there's, you have to look at sort of taxes as a percent of GDP.
01:02:58.720
Like how much does the United States tax compared to other countries?
01:03:01.620
The reason, the only thing I was going to say was the reason why we run such high deficits
01:03:07.000
Like we could obviously tax more and solve the fiscal problems that we have and we could,
01:03:12.160
So I was, let me tell you, you guys know how far away from the city we are right now.
01:03:18.820
We're not, we're not in the, in the sticks per se, like in the central West Virginia where
01:03:34.800
So we're about an hour and a half outside of any major metro, probably a little bit more.
01:03:39.620
Well, to be fair, we're an hour from Frederick, I guess, 300,000.
01:03:55.900
When you say bungalow, you just mean like a really small house?
01:03:59.300
Bungalows are single story, thousand square foot homes.
01:04:03.580
We're not in central, we're in the eastern panhandle, so we're not that far.
01:04:05.720
But how much do you think a bungalow goes for in this area?
01:04:08.180
Well, in this area, we're right outside of D.C.
01:04:11.080
An hour and 40 minutes outside of D.C., you mean?
01:04:12.880
It's still going to be really expensive because you have all these people commuting in.
01:04:15.740
If it's a half million, I want to take a hammer.
01:04:18.760
Yeah, I want to take a hammer and hit myself in the head.
01:04:21.360
So how is a young person who's getting an entry-level job in the city, how do they start a family
01:04:29.820
How much do you think a bungalow cost three years ago in this area?
01:04:35.440
There was a house not far from here that we were looking at.
01:04:47.640
There was a bungalow in this area for $250,000 three years ago.
01:04:57.320
And it's crazy because back then I was like, there's no reason.
01:05:04.420
Talking to my brother like, hey, maybe you should buy this one.
01:05:10.000
And I went and looked at a house the other day, also in this area, and it's $450,000 and it's dilapidated.
01:05:19.100
My ultimate point is with the debt-to-GDP ratio, the lack of new workers coming in, and the taxation level we're at right now, you cannot take more from Gen Z already.
01:05:36.860
And you're saying, let's take more money from them.
01:05:45.220
And Japan's actually a great example to talk about what Tim's talking about.
01:05:48.000
So Japan, declining population, crazy debt-to-GDP, right?
01:05:53.220
Very, very high standard of living, and very affordable housing.
01:05:59.780
They just have a way, way more efficient and better system for building housing, right?
01:06:05.100
And so, you know, to the point that Tim's making, it's not that what Tim is saying is an unreasonable thing to care about, right?
01:06:11.460
Like, obviously, affordable housing is important.
01:06:14.140
But we're linking all of these different conversations.
01:06:21.780
That's completely irrelevant to the fundamental point of we need to distribute money to non-workers.
01:06:30.440
We need a way better system for building housing.
01:06:34.180
But even if I take all those things to be true, we still need to give a lot of money to these people.
01:06:47.620
I consider myself to be kind of like a liberal, but liberal these days just means, like, do you agree with their worldview or not?
01:06:55.360
So if I said something like, you know, I personally got unemployment benefits before, and it really helped me.
01:07:00.320
I lost my job through no fault of my own, went through a lawsuit, and while I was in this limbo period for several months, I filed for unemployment and kept up with it, followed the rules, and they paid me like $100 a week, some ridiculous amount of money.
01:07:13.000
But that fed me, and I'm appreciative of that system.
01:07:16.320
I've also worked for homeless shelters, and I have personally met many homeless people who, through no fault of their own, ended up losing their property, losing their job, but quickly turned things around when given the opportunity.
01:07:29.760
Most homeless people are homeless because they cannot not be homeless, and a lot of them want to be homeless.
01:07:36.120
So, for instance, there's a group that calls themselves the Avrats in Washington.
01:07:42.060
These are young people who refuse to get off the streets.
01:08:19.060
They'll tell young people, I got $200 in food benefits.
01:08:27.100
And then young people, not always young people.
01:08:31.880
I get $200 worth of groceries for me, and you get $100 for heroin.
01:08:36.240
Tim, obviously, we're now talking about mechanically, how do you distribute benefits?
01:08:44.020
And how should we prevent people from using benefits for drugs or whatever?
01:08:48.760
Or people say, if you give child allowances, what if the money doesn't actually go to the children?
01:08:54.420
I'll make a big point, and then I'll directly address your point.
01:08:57.120
The big point is, there's just so much research on this.
01:09:00.460
There's so much research on what do poor people do with the benefits that they get?
01:09:06.340
And the overwhelming amount of that money, right?
01:09:11.960
Depending on the program, goes towards just the things that poor people need to live.
01:09:22.760
Now, to the exact type of person that you're talking about, Tim, which is a huge minority
01:09:30.000
There's 70 million people on Medicaid, another 70 million on Medicare.
01:09:33.340
There's hundreds of millions of people in this country who are receiving some kind of
01:09:40.620
The minority of the people that you're talking about, how should we handle them?
01:09:43.860
I mean, I can tell you what some other countries do.
01:09:46.040
Like, for instance, I think it's in Finland, you get cash benefits, which is called your housing
01:09:52.460
It's meant to go towards your housing expenses.
01:09:54.780
There are some people who have a history of not paying their landlord and just irresponsibly
01:10:01.440
And so the state comes in and says, okay, we're just going to directly pay your landlord,
01:10:06.680
So there is some paternalism and things like that that these systems probably require.
01:10:15.340
Some conservatives will say, and that's why we just shouldn't have these benefits, right?
01:10:19.860
The solution would be anybody receiving government health benefits should be required to be on
01:10:24.000
a specific diet and engage in specific exercises.
01:10:27.080
Well, in Econoboy, to kind of move it, because I feel like we're dancing around this point
01:10:30.400
repeatedly, Tim and I, unfortunately for chat, are statists.
01:10:35.840
So they're like, oh, this is just three filthy communists having a conversation about communism,
01:10:44.800
So, you know, to your point, I accept that some level of government redistribution needs
01:10:52.260
So we're filthy communists compared to the chat.
01:10:54.500
So you making that point again, you're not going to find argumentation.
01:10:58.920
But it sounds like what Tim brought that up as like this sort of inherent...
01:11:02.960
It seems like it's sort of inherent criticism of the welfare state, right?
01:11:05.900
And it's like, that's just very much not a reason to be skeptical.
01:11:11.920
So this is the concern, though, is that we have seen perverse incentive systems destroy
01:11:19.380
So as an example, Venezuela, it was effectively like a mono...
01:11:29.340
But what happened when their commodity was oil?
01:11:31.800
What happened when they kicked out all the capitalists?
01:11:34.140
And what happened when the oil economy didn't do what they were predicting it to do?
01:11:40.320
And so as a result, you have people who are starving, all that kind of stuff.
01:11:43.620
That's something that I absolutely want to prevent here.
01:11:49.780
But if we look at Maoist China, if we look at the Soviet Union, if we look at historical
01:11:54.040
examples of socialism, I think you identify as a social democrat, the socialism has been
01:12:02.480
Now, not just that, but we also see micro-disasters.
01:12:06.740
So if we're talking about like California or the Pacific Northwest, I've had these conversations.
01:12:12.280
However, they're not pleasant places to live in certain regards, even for the ultra-wealthy.
01:12:17.660
My family, I hate to bring it up, but I have a family member who the husband makes around,
01:12:27.520
But because they were living in the Pacific Northwest in a major urban center, they effectively
01:12:31.400
had to walk through drug-addicted homeless people who were being subsidized by the state,
01:12:37.900
And so that's where the intent behind what you're saying can be 100% noble.
01:12:44.900
Let's make sure that they have clean needles so they don't pass diseases.
01:12:47.560
But there are rotted urban centers inside the United States of America, particularly in,
01:12:53.440
let's say it, left-leaning cities, where the perverse incentives have overtaken the original
01:12:59.960
And so that's what I think a lot of people are worried and scared about.
01:13:02.400
Well, look, I wouldn't put, you know, I wouldn't want Gavin Newsom to be in charge of designing
01:13:08.740
I don't think, I think that there are a lot of...
01:13:13.920
But no, I mean, yeah, there's a lot of problems within, I think, democratic politics with regards
01:13:19.540
And certainly the solutions, it's ironic because, like, you have a lot of Democrats that they're
01:13:24.980
like, oh, we need to do this, that, and the other to prevent exactly what you guys are
01:13:28.440
But the answers are actually a lot simpler, right?
01:13:30.560
So I advocate for things like universalizing welfare benefits, having an efficient tax code.
01:13:36.320
You know, you talk about homeless people in these urban cities, right?
01:13:39.040
One of the things that I find so interesting, when you see, like, people who travel to Nordic
01:13:46.360
countries, and they come back, one of the first takeaways that they have is, there's
01:13:52.860
Like, I thought you go to a major city, there's just a shitload of homeless people.
01:13:58.520
Well, no, because there's a lot of homeless people in cities like Detroit and stuff,
01:14:07.220
Same thing with Canada and a lot of those urban centers, right?
01:14:09.420
So it's like, well, what are those countries doing, right?
01:14:12.040
It's not that they don't have people that struggle with housing, but what do they do?
01:14:15.340
They offer pretty generous benefits to people to get into housing.
01:14:22.360
Like, there's just like this sort of holistic benefit.
01:14:24.440
And they tend to have either a non-market system or an efficient market system for distributing
01:14:33.820
A city like San Francisco will dump a ton of money, like nominal dollars.
01:14:38.900
Oh, we're going to build public housing, and we're going to let homeless people live there.
01:14:45.020
One of the biggest problems with these cities is not the fact that they want to offer benefits,
01:14:49.660
Which is kind of, it seems like how we're framing the conversation.
01:14:54.100
It's the fact that in San Francisco, the zoning ordinances are so ridiculously constrictive
01:14:59.220
that to build like 100 units of public housing costs $100 million or some ridiculous amount,
01:15:04.800
And so that's a problem holistically of governance, right?
01:15:08.880
But it's certainly not a problem with the welfare state or the idea that we would offer
01:15:13.800
things like cash benefits, clean needle exchanges, like all those things that you just mentioned.
01:15:20.800
This is a safe space amongst three communists who are all discussing how to distribute the
01:15:28.660
So we are talking about how we distribute these things, but I think that, so for instance,
01:15:35.560
There are a lot of well-intended left-leaning people, liberals, Democrats, all that kind of
01:15:40.280
stuff, and they talk about things that I think are criminally insane as if it's completely
01:15:48.560
So not in my backyard versus yes in my backyard.
01:15:53.880
And so the reason why is because the cities, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, right?
01:16:00.940
They're already very claustrophobic, tens of thousands of people crammed together elbow
01:16:05.840
Their solution to housing costs in these already very claustrophobically built cities that
01:16:10.160
people want to live in for, I would say, intangible reasons because they want to be
01:16:17.740
Their solution is to take a 1,500-square-foot apartment and then split it up into three 500-square-foot
01:16:29.860
So that's where the intent of some of these policies, it's like we need to think more
01:16:33.940
comprehensively about the kind of lives that we want to build for human beings, and I
01:16:37.220
feel like the left sometimes, generally speaking, has very terrible ideas.
01:16:42.120
You're saying it's only an effect of governance, which I agree with, but the governance matters
01:16:46.120
because what's popular on the left, some of it's incredibly stupid.
01:16:48.980
Well, look, if we're talking about, we have an immovable object and an unstoppable force
01:16:54.460
We have a shitload of people who want to live in LA.
01:16:59.360
We have a shitload of people who want to live in LA, and we obviously have a limited geographic
01:17:05.840
And so the natural solution to that, that YIMBYs would suggest, is build densely.
01:17:10.160
Now, obviously, hey, if you want to have a 2,000-square-foot home in the middle of LA,
01:17:15.580
Even if you do the policies that YIMBYs are talking about, right, you're going to have
01:17:20.920
But I don't know that that's necessarily bad for people's culture or sense of community.
01:17:24.420
Look at a city like Tokyo, biggest city on the planet.
01:17:26.960
It's an insanely sprawling just metropolis, right?
01:17:33.040
They have units that are much more expensive, but it's very, very densely built.
01:17:36.800
When you go to places like that, everyone who visits there, people who live there, there's
01:17:40.180
a, not famous, but, you know, he's a Noah Pinion, Noah Smith.
01:17:45.540
He actually lives in Japan most of the time in Tokyo.
01:17:48.240
You know, they don't talk about, like, I guess in some sense, it's like, oh, I wish I had
01:17:53.480
But it's like, damn, it's so nice to live in a dense area with, like, all this stuff around
01:17:58.920
That's the reason why people go to cities like that, right?
01:18:01.000
You can't have your cake and eat it, too, and be like, I should have a $100,000 home
01:18:06.320
in a place that millions of people want to live.
01:18:09.240
No, I, okay, I agree with you that that's a stupid impulse.
01:18:12.280
And so, just to add to that, the problem with a lot of these cities is they require civil
01:18:22.020
You're talking about, like, in New York, they're like, you have to live in New York to be a
01:18:27.420
San Francisco, for instance, if you want to be a cop there, you've got to live in the city
01:18:32.180
They don't pay you enough to afford a house there.
01:18:34.880
We could argue that this is an issue of governance, though.
01:18:36.900
So, for instance, like, this is, here's your commie take of the day.
01:18:40.420
I think that there effectively should be affordable districts within the country, or excuse me,
01:18:46.740
within the city, where you just know that your working class is going to work there.
01:18:50.700
So, for instance, like, New York City, one of the most expensive, beautiful cities.
01:18:56.720
But it's one of the most sought after, is what I was looking for, cities on the planet.
01:19:01.980
You know, basically, swaths of Brooklyn should be held for the working class, because they
01:19:06.880
are the people who make the city run, and they should not have to have a three-hour commute
01:19:17.040
But, Tim, project housing has failed because...
01:19:22.860
I mean, like, I think that, for instance, when you look at Singapore, Singapore is a very
01:19:27.580
So I think a lot of people say, oh, we can't Singapore apply to the country.
01:19:31.920
If you want to argue that we should cane people in public for violating the law...
01:19:37.640
That's what Singapore does, and that's why they...
01:19:39.440
Well, that's not why they have a nice urban downtown.
01:19:41.920
That's not why they have affordable housing, though.
01:19:51.420
He's talking about affordability, not necessarily whether or not it's a nice place to live.
01:19:54.520
No, my point is, the authority structure is completely tied to its economic structure.
01:20:02.660
So let me tell you, I went to Singapore, and they had a problem with a bunch of, I think
01:20:05.940
it was Filipino and Indian people, who had come then to be used as cheap labor.
01:20:12.400
And when they started protesting, they arrested them all and beat them publicly in the street.
01:20:16.200
So when you get cheap slave labor from foreign countries to maintain your standard of living
01:20:20.280
under threat of mercilessly beating them in public, you can maintain those standards of
01:20:24.640
So when we look at it, the reason I brought up-
01:20:26.700
I'm sorry for laughing because I'm agreeing with Singaporeans, but sorry.
01:20:29.300
No, but the reason I brought up Singapore was not to talk about like their entire justice
01:20:33.860
They have a very sort of draconian set of regulations on a lot of things, which I'm sure a lot of them
01:20:39.660
Like their drug policy, for instance, is extreme.
01:20:41.500
Your house can't fall apart in a place where they beat you for your house falling apart.
01:20:47.600
Did you know that they checked the toilets in Singapore?
01:20:53.020
In Singapore, there are people where if you leave food on the table, they can report you
01:20:58.240
to the police and you can get in trouble for this.
01:21:01.760
It is considered improper if you don't flush the toilet and people actually look.
01:21:05.580
So if you have a house and there is gum on the sidewalk, that's illegal.
01:21:10.420
If you have housing in the United States, what do we end up seeing?
01:21:17.420
And we're required to pay for services from the public coffers to fix it.
01:21:23.360
So Tim, the reason I brought up Singapore was not to talk about their civil society,
01:21:41.120
You keep changing the point that the social order of a society is connected to its spending.
01:21:50.200
And because their public housing has fallen apart in Chicago, because people mistreat the
01:21:56.500
If you did that in Singapore, you would be beaten in public.
01:22:03.860
What Connor said was, I think that working class people should be able to live in city
01:22:07.520
centers without all these different bidding wars happening, and they just essentially
01:22:14.120
Well, they don't do that by beating people with canes.
01:22:17.120
They have a non-market public housing system, right?
01:22:21.360
So that's the thing you wouldn't let me make the point on.
01:22:25.140
That you have to have all of these things together.
01:22:26.980
You have to have an efficient system for building housing, obviously.
01:22:29.940
I guess if you're Tim or Connor, maybe you, I guess, need to have some crazy stuff, right?
01:22:35.360
The individuals that live there, and obviously some public as well.
01:22:43.720
If someone can't afford to buy and maintain a house, who pays to maintain it?
01:22:49.400
Now, in Singapore, if you don't maintain your property, they will beat you in public.
01:22:53.760
In Chicago, if you don't maintain your property, it just falls apart and there's drugs and guns
01:22:58.860
I want to, he's passionately making a point that I thought was an overview of what we
01:23:05.700
were going to talk about today, which is effectively, you know.
01:23:08.560
Wait, Connor, do you agree with me on the point that to do what you're talking about, you
01:23:16.360
But, hold on, there's a point here that I think Tim is making, very passionately, that
01:23:21.180
I agree with, which is effectively that if you're going to have a welfare state, you
01:23:25.580
need a level of what's considered, particularly in America, socially conservative enforcement.
01:23:31.800
Because what happens when you, what we're worried about, what we're talking about, when we're
01:23:35.200
talking about entire areas of LA being overrun with the homeless, when we're talking about
01:23:39.660
the Pacific Northwest having all these issues with needles on the street, when we're talking
01:23:42.860
about San Francisco having human feces and that just being like a normal thing.
01:23:46.360
What we're talking about is we're talking about the state intervening in order to try
01:23:50.440
to make people's lives better, but not feeling like they have the authority to enforce, like,
01:23:57.500
And so that's where I don't think that you can have one without the other.
01:24:00.380
Well, obviously, like, to address your points, both of your points directly, right, when it
01:24:03.880
comes to, like, oh, what do we do with these people who are just on drugs and they're
01:24:08.660
Well, obviously, look, I mean, I think, look at the city of Houston, actually.
01:24:11.580
You're about to get accused of being a Nazi, but...
01:24:15.400
The city of Houston, they decreased their homeless population by about 50% over the last
01:24:22.060
And the city of Houston is a city with a revenue cap, right?
01:24:24.400
They literally cannot raise taxes to, like, infinite levels because the people say you
01:24:30.040
So they had to figure out a creative way to do this.
01:24:31.440
What they did was they had a camping ban mixed with public housing for homeless people.
01:24:37.220
And essentially, they said, hey, if you're homeless and there's room in the shelters,
01:24:43.300
And then the shelters are connected with, like, resources for homeless people.
01:24:46.180
Hey, rehab, clean needle, you know, all this kind of stuff, right?
01:24:49.680
And that decreased the homeless population by, like, 50%, right?
01:24:53.140
Now, to be fair to Tim's point, we didn't do that by beating the shit out of homeless people
01:24:57.860
But we did say you have to do certain things and there's certain obligations that you have.
01:25:03.500
My only point about Singapore was that they have a huge system of public non-market housing,
01:25:08.520
which is one of the fundamental ways that you can extend affordable housing to people
01:25:13.840
in addition to those behavioral things you're talking about.
01:25:17.540
Pruitt-Igoe, probably the most famous instance of failed public housing.
01:25:27.040
If we were to create a massive 33-building, 11-story complex housing cheap for people
01:25:33.360
who can't afford it to replace tenement housing, it can work if you go to the people who are
01:25:38.360
destroying it and mercilessly beat them in public when they do.
01:25:41.640
Because that's how Singapore maintains what you're talking about.
01:25:54.120
...the enforcement of law from the things we're spending money.
01:25:56.720
I just said you need an enforcement of these things.
01:25:59.180
I just don't think beating them in the street is right.
01:26:04.360
The point I said was don't use Singapore as an example because that's how they enforce it.
01:26:09.280
Then we agree that if Houston has social enforcement, you will lose your house if you vandalize it.
01:26:14.380
You will be kicked out, then people stop doing these things.
01:26:18.100
We have in these cities like Portland, needles all over the street.
01:26:23.700
Well, Tim, I mean, obviously, I don't know that...
01:26:33.260
She worked in San Francisco for a while, and she's super woke, liberal, socialist type.
01:26:38.540
And she comes back from San Francisco, and she's like, you know, honestly, they're way too far.
01:26:44.800
They're way more woke than even, like, your Texas socialists, I guess, which is kind of funny to think.
01:26:50.120
If you say, hey, you know, you can't, like, start beating the shit out of people and breaking windows and doing drugs if you're going to be in social housing, I'm not going to have a huge problem with that.
01:27:02.840
If we look at the city of Houston, which is why I use that as an example, this is a city that can't raise a lot of taxes.
01:27:09.220
They have to come up with creative solutions to do things, and they did that.
01:27:12.280
And obviously, they did that without the extreme social policies of Singapore, right?
01:27:17.400
Well, but, Tim, I've never said we shouldn't enforce...
01:27:20.460
I said, well, don't use Singapore as the example because they do.
01:27:23.060
Tim, what did I use Singapore as an example for?
01:27:26.320
And I said, don't use it as an example because they maintain it by beating people in public.
01:27:30.360
Through vicious beatings, not compassionate beatings.
01:27:32.000
They also maintain it through public investment.
01:27:35.340
We're three communists here sharing our love of communism.
01:27:38.400
This is sarcastic for the sake of the Clippers.
01:27:40.020
Say it one more time, and that'll be the last one.
01:27:41.140
You don't need to spend as much money on property when it's not being vandalized because you
01:27:45.540
beat the people mercilessly in public if they do.
01:27:48.940
If the cost of Pruitt-Igoe was $100 million to fix because of the vandalism, and the cost
01:27:53.860
to fix the Singaporean is $1 million because of the merciless beatings, one can be sustained
01:28:00.420
I must say this, I must add, I can solve the gang violence and shooting problems in
01:28:08.520
If the punishment for shootings in Chicago was they would force you to wear a diaper
01:28:16.740
and a baby bonnet and make you crawl across Roosevelt Avenue while saying, I'm a big baby
01:28:21.940
boo-boo on camera while everyone got to watch and throw popcorn at you, not a single one
01:28:27.960
There's sexual fetishists out there that would enjoy this.
01:28:34.200
A lot of what people assume is gang violence in Chicago is actually honor shootings.
01:28:38.700
When people feel disrespected, they kill each other.
01:28:43.120
If we did have cruel and unusual punishment, and what I mean by that is not torturous, maiming
01:28:48.560
or anything like that, but literally, we're going to make you wear a diaper and bunny hop
01:28:55.400
Over one weekend, people would be like, hell no, I ain't come in that car.
01:28:59.040
But Tim, this is where we get into an argument about authoritarianism versus liberalism
01:29:02.780
or libertarianism philosophically, where are we talking about an individual society where
01:29:07.680
people are free to live with maximal liberty, or are we talking about an authoritarian society?
01:29:12.640
As much as I'm for compassionate beatings, I'm a huge fan of this, I still like living
01:29:22.400
This is why I can speak my mind on a public platform, all that kind of stuff.
01:29:25.780
And so I'm looking for the balance between freedom and security, and I'm trying to do
01:29:32.180
And that's kind of what we're arguing about from a policy perspective.
01:29:35.560
But, Econo, you say that I'm dragging away from things, but I'm going to drag it away
01:29:40.580
So let's say that ideally, in major metropolitan areas, we allow cops, firefighters, EMTs, and
01:29:48.720
retail and service workers who actually make the city function to live in low-cost housing
01:29:58.960
However, if we see a collapse, a correlated collapse in the birth rate, where our major
01:30:05.420
urban centers actually have, I don't know, a less than 2.15 birth rate, what I would probably
01:30:14.580
It's a bad culture, and we shouldn't be incentivizing it.
01:30:17.800
And I do think that the United States, not just the United States, I think the entire
01:30:21.360
globe needs to stabilize from a population perspective in order for us to be a species.
01:30:30.300
So, for instance, I think there was some evidence out of France.
01:30:32.880
They studied their child allowance program, right?
01:30:35.540
So it's like, hey, when you give people cash, like one of the reasons why people don't have
01:30:39.140
kids, right, is because, well, they just don't feel like they can afford it, right?
01:30:43.300
Or they might have less kids than they otherwise would have.
01:30:45.120
Isn't that kind of like a, sorry, continue, but I feel like this is like a reported thing
01:30:49.240
versus like a demonstrated thing, but I'll listen.
01:30:51.400
Well, I was about to get to the evidence, right?
01:30:52.700
So France had this child allowance program, and they essentially, whatever, some mumbo-jumbo
01:30:59.040
But they found that this actually increased the number of French people by like millions
01:31:11.540
Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that France has like this booming population.
01:31:15.960
It just means that they'd have a much lower than otherwise population if not for these
01:31:21.400
And so the welfare state is perfectly compatible, especially when we're talking about the birth
01:31:30.100
Paid parental leave, cash benefits when you have kids, having, you know, baby boxes that
01:31:39.260
So, for instance, like all of these things, I think any sensible social conservative should
01:31:43.680
You should be for high quality early childhood education because you want a smart population.
01:31:47.600
You should be for high quality education because you want a productive population.
01:31:51.460
You should be for people getting socialized and becoming intelligent and all that kind
01:31:58.080
But what I'm asking, though, is an optimization because what you're talking about.
01:32:04.180
Real quick, real quick, just because I want to complete a thought.
01:32:06.680
You're saying that it increased millions of people.
01:32:09.420
So there are millions of people who were born through social welfare programs that would
01:32:17.920
Because if we're below 2.15, I think we have a problem.
01:32:21.340
So we can look at the most extreme example, perhaps Hungary, right?
01:32:24.840
So Hungary spent on just family benefits, right?
01:32:29.860
We said earlier in this conversation, the United States spends 3.5% of its GDP on its
01:32:36.460
That's the effort that the Hungarians are putting into getting people to have kids.
01:32:40.100
As a pro-natalist, I will accept this as a part of your plan.
01:32:42.940
Now, I think, look, I think we should have very generous child benefits.
01:32:50.440
Didn't they bump up temporarily by like 0.1 or 0.2, and then they drop back down?
01:32:57.640
Like there's more people having kids in Hungary than otherwise.
01:33:00.280
But obviously, it doesn't completely reverse the problems.
01:33:05.320
Like, why do Mormons have more kids in Utah than like people in Texas?
01:33:10.800
Well, they have this sort of conservative fundamentalism.
01:33:13.420
And they, you know, on average, let's say they want to have more kids.
01:33:15.940
So what you're saying is we should lie to people and tell them that if they have
01:33:32.860
But that's exclusively going to affect like the most intelligent people who are...
01:33:39.120
If you are married and have at least two children, no taxes.
01:33:42.820
Well, but Tim, again, that's kind of what Hungary does.
01:33:48.860
Well, yeah, but financially, like, financial reasons are only so big a portion of why people
01:33:55.840
And so even if we have a lot of benefits, they're not going to have a ton of kids altogether.
01:34:04.980
But getting on to culture, I feel like there is a antenatal popular, like, wing, especially
01:34:11.920
on social media, of the left, where, like, liberals and progressives effectively say,
01:34:19.960
So what you need to do is you need to maximize your pleasure in this life, and you need to
01:34:25.920
And so I think that this combined with the technologies of condoms and the technologies
01:34:29.860
of birth control, that partially contributes to it.
01:34:38.080
I mean, well, yeah, I don't want to talk about my family planning, obviously.
01:34:55.880
Fully admitting, I just had my first kid this year.
01:35:04.660
I mean, you know, but I think when we talk about collapsing birth rates, actually, that's
01:35:08.120
a good segue, is that when we talk about, like, birth rate collapse, what you find is
01:35:17.420
It's not that people are, like, deciding to have less kids necessarily.
01:35:20.680
When you look at birth rates by age cohort, right, you see that...
01:35:25.660
Well, essentially, what you find is that the reason why we have birth rates declining is
01:35:33.200
Overwhelmingly, the reason why birth rates are declining is because we don't have teenage
01:35:40.640
And part of that is because, you know, women entering the workforce, getting an education.
01:35:44.940
I think that this is why it kind of bumps into what Connor was saying earlier, which
01:35:48.100
is, like, look, at the end of the day, the welfare state cannot solve all issues.
01:35:52.360
And when we're talking about, like, oh, women aren't having as many kids because they're
01:35:57.320
I mean, like, what are we supposed to do about that, guys?
01:36:03.240
But basically, my wife, thankfully, was like, hey, I love having kids.
01:36:14.200
You know, despite not being a rich man, my wife hasn't had to work since 2020.
01:36:17.760
You mentioned the liberal idea of maximize your pleasure, minimize your pain.
01:36:22.960
But I think the issue is that if you've never had a kid, you don't realize how much more,
01:36:31.240
Like, I'm going to embarrass my wife right now.
01:36:33.380
She was looking at our baby daughter and started crying because of just how much she loved the
01:36:40.660
And it's like, that is a degree of joy and happiness you don't experience without kids.
01:36:49.360
Instead, I've got to be honest, I kind of feel like when you look at a man or a woman
01:36:55.900
looking at their children, or I'll tell you one of the most horrifying things.
01:36:59.400
There was a viral video several years ago of a man holding his teenage son who died.
01:37:03.620
And the sound he was making was like the wail of demons emerging from it.
01:37:09.960
Like, the amount of emotion you get from children is being cut out from people who don't understand
01:37:16.400
And we're telling women who have biological restrictions that men don't have to go get
01:37:24.260
And I'm fine with education and jobs for women, so long as they're aware the idea of
01:37:28.300
having it all is not the same for women as it is for men.
01:37:36.360
If you'll indulge me, a quick emotional aside, okay?
01:38:02.860
Where if I feel a feeling, I try to process it real quick, figure out what it is, and
01:38:08.120
When I had a child, I was not able to rationalize my emotion.
01:38:18.740
But the kids are such an overwhelming, emotionally deep kind of thing that I think that getting
01:38:24.840
drunk and trying to hook up with chicks or whatever, it's all...
01:38:27.240
No offense to anybody in chat, but it's bullshit.
01:38:29.920
And I'll just add to you, like, if that was not the case, human beings would have died
01:38:35.560
Well, I mean, I think to you guys' point, this is, I think, in some sense where people
01:38:40.140
from the left kind of come from, where we have this sort of solidaristic empathy for
01:38:46.580
Like, I think children especially are the most defensible group to give welfare benefits
01:38:51.560
Because obviously children don't choose to be born into poor families, even to the extent
01:38:54.800
that we might think that they're going to be poor later in life because of generational
01:38:58.140
poverty, well, there's still a really, really strong reason.
01:39:01.360
There's a very strong intuition, I guess, that most people have that, look, children
01:39:05.120
just don't fundamentally choose their circumstances.
01:39:07.580
And so they should be very well supported by the community.
01:39:10.480
And in this case, I'm using the state as kind of a proxy of the community that you get
01:39:13.540
some sort of basic benefits when you're born as a child.
01:39:16.540
But I would just extend, and to the point that you guys are making, I would extend that
01:39:19.300
same thing over to all these other groups, you know, people who have disabilities that
01:39:25.820
I'm a communitarian as well, not a communist, a communitarian.
01:39:31.100
So if we agree fundamentally on that kind of thing, like you said, it's just really a
01:39:34.160
question of, like, how much should the benefits be?
01:39:36.900
And I mean, I think mechanically speaking, I was just going to say mechanically speaking,
01:39:41.460
the best way to do these things is just to have a system of essentially universal cash
01:39:46.220
And then for some, you know, if you have disabilities like extra costs, you just have special benefits
01:39:51.060
But the fear is if we have a hedonistic, nihilistic society, then what are we incentivizing?
01:39:55.800
So what I was going to say is, I'm actually happy with the large welfare state, as long
01:40:01.260
as it's enforced with requirements, and we don't tolerate hedonism and abuse to an extreme
01:40:08.540
I think a lot of people, even on the right, would agree with, here's a guy who was a
01:40:12.220
carpenter for 20 years, and then he lost his hand in an accident, now he's struggling
01:40:17.480
Most people are going to be like, okay, and the guy's going to say, I will, he says, I
01:40:23.800
Then there's a morbid, lubious, homeless person saying, I refuse to get a job.
01:40:28.300
There's going to be a line where it's like, conservatives and most people are going to
01:40:32.120
say, I think most people are going to say, I will gladly help anyone who is trying to
01:40:36.500
help themselves and they need a lift up, but I don't like the abuse.
01:40:39.700
Before you jump in, Connor, let me just respond to that.
01:40:41.500
So a lot of conservatives will say stuff like that.
01:40:43.500
They'll say, I'm not saying you're a conservative, but a lot of conservatives will say stuff
01:40:47.700
They'll say, oh, well, I'll gladly help the deserving poor, the people who really deserve
01:40:53.960
But then there's this group of people who, I don't know if we agree necessarily, but
01:40:57.380
that is a minority of people who get benefits, like a very small minority.
01:41:01.800
Most of these people that I'm talking about, again, I don't think there's necessarily bad
01:41:05.340
Well, the evidence, I think, would speak against that.
01:41:08.820
But the point is, though, is that when we start to say, oh, well, in order to achieve
01:41:14.200
benefits, right, you have to whatever, like you have to fill out so many job applications
01:41:19.160
and you have to do drug tests and you have to do X, Y, and Z kind of different benefits
01:41:26.000
That's a burden that's applied to everyone who applies for those benefits.
01:41:31.560
Well, yeah, and what we end up seeing, and the reason I would eliminate them is because
01:41:34.920
what we end up seeing is more government bureaucracy, right?
01:41:38.960
We see more people who are paid just to file paperwork.
01:41:45.080
We spend more time, you know, administering benefits to government employees.
01:41:51.360
And what we see is the deserving poor that Tim is describing that so many conservatives have
01:41:55.080
in their head, they are disproportionately the victims of stuff like that because their benefits
01:42:00.440
In 2002, 39.3% of Medicare beneficiaries were obese, a marked increase from 32.5% to 97%.
01:42:08.960
In 2018, 42.8% of adults age 60 and over were obese.
01:42:15.240
There is an issue of you don't take care of yourself and then demand I pay for it.
01:42:23.800
I've been called an authoritarian before because I think that we should incentivize certain behaviors
01:42:34.380
Maybe not a weight tax, but would you incentivize...
01:42:37.880
For instance, let's say that we have welfare recipients who are receiving thousands of
01:42:42.800
Would you say, hey, as a part of this, you need to show up to physical training Monday,
01:42:51.300
Dude, I would love to see welfare beneficiaries working out on the side of the highway at
01:43:01.260
There are a lot of people who need help and I want to help them.
01:43:05.440
In fact, for tomorrow's culture war, I'll be donating $10,000 to wounded warriors and
01:43:11.920
I did that because Destiny offered $10,000 for the debate between Will Chamberlain and
01:43:18.760
He then backed off and said, I'm not giving money if Tim Pool's involved.
01:43:21.540
So I said, I'll double it and help out more veterans and more first responders.
01:43:30.360
That being said, you want me to pay for your Medicare, but you won't eat healthy and
01:43:36.020
You are basically taking my money, spitting in my face.
01:43:40.020
So if they said, if you came to me and you were homeless and morbidly obese and said,
01:43:48.680
I am going to give you a place to live and you're going to drop 50 pounds.
01:43:52.840
And if you do not work out with me every day, I will kick you out.
01:44:03.660
If it's bad, I think one thing to underscore is that if it's bad for poor people, it's
01:44:10.640
Well, being morbidly obese is obviously bad no matter what.
01:44:12.760
And I think with healthcare specifically, you tied it to Medicaid recipients.
01:44:16.700
We have a completely, in some sense, a socialized healthcare system, right?
01:44:20.660
Because you either have private insurance, which is obviously cost sharing, or you have
01:44:24.720
public systems, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, the VA, all that stuff, right?
01:44:28.220
And so pretty much no matter what, we have this sort of communitarian, like we're subsidizing
01:44:36.080
And so we have a generic problem with people being obese, right?
01:44:40.340
And so if that's the case, then you'd want to have these kind of requirements probably
01:44:44.780
You want to have, you know, you want to tax on healthy foods and you'd want to say-
01:44:48.800
But this is where people get pissed, though, okay?
01:44:51.440
So for instance, talk to a libertarian guy named Lactoid.
01:44:57.100
If you're doing all of the right things, if you're working, taking care of your family,
01:45:01.860
taking care of your community, and paying your taxes, people should leave you the hell
01:45:06.780
Insurance is like inherently, like, when you need it.
01:45:13.680
I like the fat poor people working out at the park idea, okay?
01:45:17.600
Now, whether or not it would ever get instituted is a different question.
01:45:20.340
But the point is that, like, yeah, like, if you're going to take from society, we're
01:45:26.480
We're competitive creatures, but we're also cooperative.
01:45:28.820
So if you want to cooperate, then you have to give, not just take.
01:45:32.160
One of the notes that I took is that, especially on the right, but definitely on the left as
01:45:36.820
well, we don't- we always talk about, like, privileges and rights.
01:45:43.500
Like, even if you're a liberal or a libertarian, you probably have, at minimum, voluntary duties
01:45:48.020
to your community, to your family, et cetera, et cetera.
01:45:50.180
If you're a statist like myself, there's probably compelled duties to your society.
01:45:59.400
But there are people of your ilk who want to give all the money, but not have any of
01:46:06.960
It's like when a parent is spanking the child and saying, it hurts me to do this.
01:46:14.640
I think that- oh, I didn't hear a great response to the insurance thing.
01:46:18.620
Like, with the healthcare industry specifically, right?
01:46:22.820
There's no way to not basically subsidize someone's unhealthy decisions, this and that.
01:46:26.820
Obviously, if you might make unhealthy decisions.
01:46:28.460
Like, some people, maybe through the course of exercise.
01:46:34.440
Well, I was just gonna- the last thing, like, maybe your preferred form of exercise, like
01:46:39.360
me, right, is like doing jujitsu and wrestling.
01:46:42.640
If I, like, bust my knee doing jujitsu, like, I am- I'm exercising, right?
01:46:49.540
Well, but here's the thing, though, is that once we start saying, you can do some-
01:46:54.500
like, some disabilities are your fault, but some aren't.
01:47:00.460
Again, this is a burden that's applied to everyone, even the deserving poor.
01:47:04.660
And what ends up happening in practice, when we see all these different tests done, from
01:47:09.080
state-level experiments, to cities, to federal benefits, to different countries, what ends
01:47:13.180
up happening is not solving the problems that you're talking about.
01:47:16.640
We don't see obesity rates go down amongst poor people when things like that are implemented.
01:47:20.340
What we see is the deserving poor that you want to actually help, they just aren't able
01:47:29.560
A better system of distribution, which we do agree on.
01:47:34.820
Your rates go up or down, depending on your life factors.
01:47:38.180
When I apply for health insurance, they're like, do you smoke?
01:47:46.680
And then you get a bunch of people getting money from me, and they're intentionally being
01:47:51.000
Now, as for the jujitsu thing, I'm talking about, are you putting in a reasonable effort
01:47:57.980
If your disability is that you have no legs and you struggle to do aerobic exercises, so
01:48:06.060
And I think part of that welfare should be, when it comes to healthcare, proper education
01:48:15.360
So that means your doctor shouldn't just be saying, you ate too much, your benefits are
01:48:18.460
No, it should be saying, for this week, we want you to try and hit these calories per
01:48:23.560
And if we see that you're not improving or that you're doing poorly, you're gonna put
01:48:28.180
You think everyone should do that, though, right?
01:48:31.040
But if you are getting my money, it's a requirement.
01:48:33.540
So what Econo said, which I did here, which is you're adding...
01:48:38.000
You have to structure these things properly, where if you're adding these things, you're
01:48:42.100
effectively adding an administrative cost to the distribution of the benefit.
01:48:45.700
And so realistically, for instance, do we want to hire a retired drill instructor to meet
01:48:52.000
up with homeless, obese people Monday, Wednesdays, Fridays?
01:48:55.140
Well, you want to pay him $60,000 a year in order to work out fat people?
01:49:00.740
I just don't know if the rest of the American public wants.
01:49:03.280
The amount of money we will save on healthcare costs by having one trainer train people
01:49:09.040
is more than we would spend on their healthcare.
01:49:14.980
I don't know what I am, but I'm telling you, if we're going to spend...
01:49:17.980
If we spend $10,000 per person on 10 fat people, and we can cut that down to a $40,000 loss
01:49:24.660
by hiring one $60,000 drill instructor, we good.
01:49:29.580
Listen, I used to joke that I was an authoritarian centrist.
01:49:33.500
You're coming along for the ride, so I'm not hating.
01:49:36.280
I would love to have Arlie Ermey working out fat people down at the local park.
01:49:40.120
It's not authoritarian if they're asking for my money.
01:49:51.860
We need to make sure that you are being as healthy as possible.
01:49:56.460
When you go to the doctor, if the doctor says...
01:49:58.800
And I know that there's going to be corruption in doctors, but if the doctor's like,
01:50:01.080
you are overweight, you are overweight, however, I do understand that your arms are broken and
01:50:10.800
It's about being responsible with the money being gifted to you when you can't provide
01:50:15.860
Well, here's, I think, the difference between you and I, Tim, is that I think what it's
01:50:19.020
more about is just what's the best way to do the things that you want to happen, right?
01:50:26.840
I think the last time I saw was about 10% of our healthcare expenditure could be related
01:50:33.000
So about one and a half, 1.6% of GDP or something like that, right?
01:50:39.020
And so it's like, okay, well, what's the best way to reduce people's obesity and also extend
01:50:46.060
It's not conditioning benefits on a minority of the population.
01:50:55.340
Well, I'm talking about like of the obese people, right?
01:50:57.420
So of people on Medicaid who are obese, like that's 25% of people or something like that.
01:51:02.300
First of all, if we're correlating social security people over 65 and saying half are obese,
01:51:09.200
we can do a blanket assumption that if they tend to receive social security benefits, then
01:51:13.780
there's going to be a same demographic breakdown.
01:51:15.360
However, I'd actually argue obesity is probably higher because that's why they're collecting
01:51:19.520
benefits, because they are ailed by their obesity.
01:51:23.320
As you mentioned, obesity is a large factor in why people are suffering medical issues.
01:51:27.380
Well, all I was going to say was that the best way, like when people are obese, it's because
01:51:31.100
they have easy access to a lot of very sort of dopamine hitting foods, you could say, right?
01:51:36.040
And so the best way to solve that problem is not to, again, like if we have this aggregate
01:51:40.440
problem with obesity, which obviously we do, the best way to solve that problem is not,
01:51:44.600
oh, a minority of the population should have to go to exercise facilities or lose their
01:51:48.980
The best way to solve that problem is, hey, universal system of health benefits, right?
01:51:53.580
Which lowers administrative costs, which means there's less government bureaucrats, which
01:51:58.460
It saves costs, obviously, because the government can negotiate those costs.
01:52:02.580
And then on the back end, if I was just going to say on the last thing, on the back end,
01:52:05.320
the more efficient thing to do is to make unhealthy practices more expensive for everyone.
01:52:10.440
That might mean, you know, taxing sugar or, you know, having, you know, taxing sort of
01:52:17.620
Like, these are how you align the incentives properly and efficiently.
01:52:20.580
You keep saying minority, even though it's not an established fact.
01:52:27.800
You are saying a condition should not be based on a minority of people.
01:52:31.720
Tim, you said people on benefits who are obese.
01:52:39.020
No, 48% of people over 65, to which I said, likely, people over 65 who are on medical benefits
01:52:49.160
You didn't say people, you didn't say elderly people when you were reading from the AI or whatever you're
01:52:58.720
And I said, if we extrapolate that, we can assume that you have about a plurality or half
01:53:03.480
of the people over 65 on benefits are at that number.
01:53:10.520
Of all the people in this country, you think most people are on benefits and obese?
01:53:19.860
Among older adults with obesity, 84% have multiple chronic conditions, which is the
01:53:25.400
leading cause of death among those 65 and older, affecting 32.5 million adults over 65, type 2 diabetes, cancers, likelihood of mobility limitations and disability, elevated
01:53:38.820
health care costs and potential need for long-term care.
01:53:42.880
If you are over 65 and getting medical benefits, it is because you are- obesity is a very likely
01:53:49.100
contributor to this, considering half of people over 65 are obese.
01:53:52.960
I'm telling you, this is not passing in the villages of Florida, by the way.
01:53:58.460
They are not going to show up to fat, poor person golf-
01:54:09.360
Well, it's just that we might be talking past each other.
01:54:12.420
You're saying the general population over a certain age is fat.
01:54:15.060
I'm saying of the people who are getting medical benefits, obesity is a significant contributor
01:54:26.000
No, but I already said earlier that obviously a big portion of the cost that we spend as a
01:54:30.400
health care system is because people are obese.
01:54:32.920
What I'm disagreeing with Tim on is that, okay, we've got a population of people that are on
01:54:37.880
We've got a population of people that are obese.
01:54:39.740
We have an intersection between these two people.
01:54:45.320
Now, if we were to say, hey, we have this problem where 10% of our health care costs are
01:54:50.920
Well, if that's the case, then we shouldn't only focus on people on benefits and who are
01:55:00.240
And the most efficient way to do that is to have a universal system of public health insurance
01:55:04.420
and making it more expensive to live that kind of lifestyle.
01:55:09.360
I think that a substantive amount of this will not be possible because of the freedom that
01:55:15.820
The libertarian argument against you would be the people who are not on the government
01:55:20.380
dole, who are not receiving public benefits, should not be compelled to any kind of behavior
01:55:23.920
because they're not receiving any kind of benefit.
01:55:25.560
So even if you're obese, but you pay your taxes and you're not on government benefits,
01:55:29.500
you shouldn't have to show up Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
01:55:30.960
But when it comes to health care specifically, they are still taking out of collective pots
01:55:38.400
You and I can break bread on the fact that during elementary school, middle school, high
01:55:44.200
school, physical training shouldn't just be some guy smoking a cigarette telling your
01:55:50.940
It actually should be, this is how you do a push-up.
01:55:54.880
This is the way your cardiovascular system works.
01:55:57.940
PT, physical training, should be a course that we take very seriously in America.
01:56:06.480
In order to graduate high school, you should be required to do three months of basic training.
01:56:14.660
Not compulsory military service, basic training.
01:56:18.160
You're compelling adults to do a certain kind of state-mandated activity.
01:56:22.680
You do realize they already do that for high schools.
01:56:26.320
So my high school in Chicago required community service to graduate.
01:56:32.980
You're just saying, hey, in addition to the time after high school, you should have
01:56:37.960
I mean, like I think Switzerland has a couple years.
01:56:40.540
I think Taiwan has the same thing where you can do like community service.
01:56:52.320
All of the high schools where I grew up required 20 hours, I believe, of community service.
01:56:59.860
It was usually two weekends because you do like four hours a day.
01:57:05.040
When I was younger, I was like, you can't make me go and do some random community service.
01:57:09.040
Now I'm older and I'm like, it's not that we're trying to force you to do something painful.
01:57:16.360
To be the best you can be, to be healthy and fit.
01:57:25.660
You shouldn't be compelled to go to high school.
01:57:28.300
If you do choose to take public benefits to go to school, I don't think it's unreasonable
01:57:32.700
to say, hey, at 18, when you're graduating, for that summer, you're going to go to basic
01:57:41.980
And you're going to come out to the workforce the best you can be.
01:57:44.640
I'll give my hot takes since we're wrapping up and giving hot takes or whatever.
01:57:48.760
So what I would do is you don't have the franchise.
01:57:51.620
You don't have the capacity to vote unless you do two years of military, peace corps,
01:57:57.700
or volunteer style, like working for an NGO, or retail or restaurant, because I swear
01:58:03.900
to God, retail or restaurant is so brutal that, you know...
01:58:07.320
Let's be serious, because I would agree with you if it was service in some capacity.
01:58:12.480
Meaning you've got to provide some kind of community service.
01:58:23.600
But in some way, you provide a service to your community.
01:58:27.100
And we're never going to be able to get that in the United States of America, barring
01:58:32.320
But I do think we would be better if we did it.
01:58:41.100
Service guaranteed citizenship was, you don't have to if you don't want to.
01:58:44.720
All rights are afforded to you, but you don't get a say in how we run government if you
01:58:49.580
It's not authoritarian in any sense of the imagination.
01:58:51.240
So I would actually, I would agree with, if you want to vote, you've got to do some
01:58:58.200
Well, when the government collapses, you and I can put our heads together.
01:59:00.740
We can rebuild society and this will be a part of it.
01:59:09.000
Also, if you guys want to give your final thoughts before we go.
01:59:12.400
So, you know, we did jump a little bit all over the place, but I am happy that we were
01:59:15.980
able to agree on compassionate beatings for people.
01:59:28.700
If you enjoyed, you probably hated my last experience based off of the comment section.
01:59:32.320
However, if you enjoyed this show or if you enjoyed me in the previous one, type in Valor
01:59:43.420
It's a bunch of first responders, military veterans who are all hanging out, talking shop,
01:59:48.220
trying to be better men, trying to make the world a better place, all that kind of stuff.
01:59:51.960
I'm live there Monday through Friday, you know, five hours a day, five days a week.
01:59:56.380
So if you enjoyed it, please come over and check us out.
02:00:06.960
I was very pro-welfare before I got onto his writings, but he helped crystallize a lot of
02:00:11.620
And so if you're interested in reading more about that, you can follow his stuff at the
02:00:15.100
People's Policy Project or obviously my stuff at kanaboy.substack.com.
02:00:21.280
And yeah, I think my closing thoughts on this general argument would be that, look, there's
02:00:26.600
a lot of people in society who don't work, who can't work, who, you know, we think
02:00:30.260
like children would have some sort of very fundamental right to benefits.
02:00:35.360
And we need to give benefits to those people to help them.
02:00:37.980
And certainly the most effective way to lower poverty is to do those things.
02:00:41.780
And that's pretty much what I tried to crystallize and argue for here.
02:00:45.620
And, you know, hopefully that was a, you know, at least a good, a good summary.
02:00:51.760
We're back tonight at 8 p.m. for youtube.com slash TimCastIRL.
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