Full Transcript for 2026 Midterms: Promises vs. Economics

We are, in my view, in a phase of what Gramsci calls interregnum, when the old mothers are dead and the new mothers have not been born yet.

Tell me, is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed? And most importantly, what isn't? We ought to do better by the people that get left behind. I don't think we should have killed the capital system in the process. Right now, only about one in five Americans thinks the economy is in good shape. And voters are almost evenly split over which party they trust to fix it.

Every politician has a diagnosis. If you ask Democrats, the problem is tariffs, healthcare and corporate price gouging. If you ask Republicans, we need more deregulation and tax deductions. If you ask the left, it's billionaires and monopolies. And some on the right might say that too. Everyone else is covering the midterms like a sport match.

Who is winning? Who is losing? Who has the most money? We wanted to ask the economic and political economy questions that can get lost in all the noise. Look at your podcast feed right now or anything on social media and you can find a dozen shows or a dozen posts telling you who's up by two points in Michigan or Texas, who's going to control the Senate, and which campaign ad is working.

We're not going to do any of that today. With our team pulled the actual economic platform of candidates, mostly in the Senate races, across the country, from $50 ,000 homebuyer tax deduction and tariffs repeal to banning Wall Street from buying houses, breaking up healthcare middlemen, and making AI data center pay for the power grid. So today we're putting those promises through an economic stress test.

Which of these ideas would actually make your life more affordable? And which ones are just campaign slogans that will backfire? The law of unintended consequences is one thing that I think everybody can agree on.

So, Luigi, before we get to the oddities and the campaign platforms, I want to start with something of a puzzle. Democrats are largely promising to undo what Republicans did in 2025 and 2026. Restore enhanced ACA credits, reverse Medicaid cuts, and repeal tariffs. But Americans were already angry about the cost of living before all that. So, if they delivered everything they're promising, how different would more ordinary Americans' lives actually feel? I think that's a very good question.

I have to say that after reading the various platforms, I came out a little bit depressed. The Republicans seem to lack imagination. If you take out a little bit of populist measures, they resemble very much the platform that Ronald Reagan had almost 50 years ago. And Democrats are kind of a strange mixed bag because there is a bit of a flavor of the abundance rhetoric that you should deregulate.

So, they start to copy the Republican on that front. And a bit of a sort of Democratic Socialist interventionist. But I don't think there is a coherent picture. I don't think that you can easily say this is the Republican platform and this is the Democratic platform. I thought, as I read through it, that there's also a lack of clarity about what relief we could get from existing policies versus what structural cost pressures.

So, lower tariffs, I guess, might ease some prices, but that doesn't guarantee a return to older overall price levels, right? ACA subsidies might reduce household premiums, but that doesn't reduce the underlying price of medical care. And then I started to wonder as I went through this, everybody promises to bring prices down. Is that even the right objective? Shouldn't we care instead about purchasing power and the price of essentials relative to wages? No, that's for sure.

But also, the promise to bring prices down is reckless. A huge deflation is generally terrible. So, what you want at least is prices not to go up. And most importantly, as you said, you want wages to go up farther than prices. But ideally, you want price to be relatively stable and wages to go up. So, the promise to bring prices down, maybe with the exception of gasoline, because gasoline is a very fluctuating price where you see price likely going down.

But seeing the general level of prices down, we have not seen in a while and we're not looking forward to see it. I guess even with fuel, whenever I've seen the we'll bring prices down, I always think that the number of economic variables that go into where prices are are so complicated that the idea that there's one thing you can do that could bring it down just seems insane to me.

I guess you've long criticized Democrats for becoming pretty much the party of big business with some cultural positions layered on top. So, looking at all the candidates, do you see any genuine change in the party's economic thinking or anything that really qualifies as fresh thinking? Or do you think it's just business as usual dressed up as populism?

I think it's just business as well. I think it's just business as well. I think it's just business as well. I think it's just business as well. I think it's just business as well. I think it's just business as well. I think it's just business as well. I think it's just business as well. I think it's just business as well. I think it's just business as well.

I think it's just business as well. I think it's just business as well. I think it's just business as well. The Democratic senatorial candidate in Illinois, Juliana Strattel, proposes a $25 an hour at the federal level. That would be devastating to places like Arkansas. Currently, they have a $7 .25 minimum wage. So that's clearly, in my view, out of the feasible set.

But maybe it's a signal to try to show that she wants to change things radically. The other thing that worries me a lot, some Democrats are in favor of taxing the rich above a million or the billionaire. But except for that, nobody talks about taxes and everybody talks about spending. And we are at the level of deficit that is starting to be worrisome for the U .S.

economy. We will need to be more fiscally disciplined. And I don't see many candidates. There is actually a Democratic candidate for senator in North Carolina that seems to run on a more austerity package, which is remarkable. But in general, you don't see much wisdom here. Isn't that Annie Andrews in South Carolina rather than North Carolina? She's got the taxpayer pledge that calls for balancing the federal budget.

Maybe. I'm sorry. I confused it too. Oh, good heavens. But yeah, I was really struck by this in reading through all the notes that our team assembled, which is that really few candidates address the federal debt directly and almost none offer a detailed plan for making it sustainable. I thought it was also really surprising that it was a Democrat who has the clearest example about balancing the federal budget.

It's so counterintuitive, right, that it would be a Democrat who has that plan, whereas the Republicans seem to be a little bit more spend happy. I guess Ken Paxton in Texas promises spending restraint, but he doesn't seem to have a detailed deficit reduction program. And there just doesn't seem to be a credible financing plan coming from anybody.

Did you see anything in there that I'm missing? But a couple of weeks ago, I saw an early presentation of a paper by this economist at London School of Economics, Tim Basley. And he was showing, looking at both the United States and the United Kingdom, the way the right campaign when he's in power versus not power is very asymmetric. When they are out of power, they campaign for cutting expenditures.

But when they are in power, they don't campaign for cutting expenditure because they want the expenditure because they are in power, which seems to be a bit the pattern here. They talk about eliminating waste, but I'm not so sure that they're in power. That anybody is in favor of generating waste. And so cutting waste is a polite way to say we don't do anything.

Isn't it Churchill who famously said that America will do the right thing once it's exhausted all of their alternatives? And so it may just be that our fiscal situation may have to actually be a crisis before we do anything to fix it. That's true. But one interesting point that I saw in the platforms, particularly the Democrats are campaigning on an anti -corruption policy and they are campaigning in money out of politics.

Now, with different flavors, for example, the Democratic candidate in Illinois is refusing to accept corporate PACs. Now, I was reading that this is a relatively easy pledge to make these days because corporate PACs, are not the major source of finance. The major source of financing are super PACs or other stuff that are more difficult to control.

But anyway, I think there is at least a desire to be seen as not taking corrupt money. And I'm proud to say that Talarico in Texas is actually showing the Powell Memorandum, my famous Powell Memorandum, as Exhibit A of corruption in this campaign. So I think there is some sign of change. That's fascinating. I didn't realize that the Powell Memorandum had actually become part of the midterms.

I think that's amazing. Maybe it's all due to you, Luigi. Maybe somehow you put it in the water all those years ago by beginning to talk about it. Now people are actually realizing it's important. But per your point, isn't even the Powell Memorandum a little bit of a diversion from the real issue? Because the Powell Memorandum is corporate lobbying.

And is that totally the issue today? But I guess, look, we'll give them credit for at least attempting to address it. I think it's very difficult to tell the difference whether it's Musk lobbying or is SpaceX lobbying, because at this point, they're one and the same. And actually, I don't know, because the Democrats are lobbying very strongly against or campaigning very much against Musk.

And they sort of point out against the billionaire. But they are their own billionaires that finance their campaign. So to be honest, the most honest one are the most leftist one because they don't receive any billionaire money and they are campaigning against billionaire money. So I think in that sense, they are the honest one. But if all the Democrats can point at Musk as the problem and therefore pretend they don't have their own billionaire financiers, right? Musk might have done everybody a huge favor in that respect by making himself the villain such that we can all pretend that there aren't lots of other villains.

I guess I also worry, and I'm curious if you had an answer on this, if you can tell. One of the things that worries me is that if the Democrats sweep into power, that we're going to spend the next years investigating Trump. And believe me, I think he needs to be investigated. I'm not refuting that. But that also can become a fig leaf that then we're doing something, we're doing something, we're investigating the corruption of money in politics.

But it actually doesn't fix anything. It just provides a sideshow, a circus spectacle. And I couldn't tell in reading through this what's actually serious versus what might just become a sideshow. I fear that that's the most likely outcome for two simple reasons. Number one is that even if the Democrats win the Senate and the House, they will never have a veto -proof majority.

So any decision they make could be vetoed by Trump. And so their ability to deliver on any margin is very limited. So the only margin they can deliver is congressional investigations. The second is that the Democrats, in my view, look much more divided than the Republicans. And I'm not only talking about non -economic issues, like, for example, support for Israel.

Even in the economic policy issues, I see the Democrats quite divided because we go from a very extreme platform of democratic socialists. Now, the only real democratic socialists running for Senate is Angie Nixon in Florida, who is unlikely to win. But if you read the democratic socialists platform, they even say that you want to nationalize some large firms versus some more moderate Democrats that look awfully like the Republicans.

Yeah, that split in the Democratic Party is going to be really interesting to see how it plays out. But one of the issues that we're circling around here is this idea that there can sometimes be less difference between Republicans and Democrats than you once would have expected. And what can look like it should be a Democratic proposal can actually be a Republican one and vice versa.

So let's play a little game. I'm going to read a few policies without identifying the candidate. And if you're listening, you can see if you can try to guess the party. And you can give yourself a point if you if you do so. So it's this isn't a game of gotcha. It's rather just how hard it's becoming to identify either party's economic philosophy by its by its policy prescription.

So, OK, let's start with this one. A candidate wants to stop out of state investors and hedge funds from pricing local farmers out of land. This candidate wants to strengthen anti -corporate farming laws and appoint private property warriors to fight imminent domain abuse. Republican or Democrat? Pause. Drumroll. Oh, it's Republican Zach Land who is running for governor in Iowa.

He's your favorite guy, Bethany, who is against private equity. So you must love him. No, but seriously, this raises a really interesting question. So is this pro market or anti market? Because restricting capital can protect independent ownership and competition, I guess. But it can also interfere with transactions and reduce liquidity or could actually be a way of just favoring established local interests.

So what I find it strange, if you focus, for example, on housing, the cost of housing is one of the main reasons why we don't see, for example, more internal mobility that helps lift all boats. In the 60s, if you're a janitor in Arkansas and you move to New York, net of your cost of living for the house, you will gain, I think, 70%. And today, if you're a janitor and you move from Arkansas to New York, net of the housing, you lose 7%.

And honestly, the biggest problem for housing is that we don't allow to build bigger buildings and bigger housing where basically local costs are the biggest obstacle. Because if I say that to build anything, you need to exaggerate 100 acres, then only the super rich can afford to build something. And the houses cost a fortune. On the other hand, if you can build an iRise on every corner, cost of housing will go down.

I understand that these are local issues that cannot be solved easily at the federal level. However, the federal level has a huge, huge leverage that I don't see anybody using, which is the tax deduction. And I would say that you can only deduct your property taxes if you live in a town or a city that has a certain characteristic of the building code that liberalize construction.

And so you want to live in a gated community, sure, but you don't deduct your taxes. You want to deduct your taxes, you're going to lobby to change the building code in a more effective way. Because today, at the local level, owners are very influential in trying to restrict supply in order to keep prices up. To some extent, the ultimate Stiglarian control of entry done by the homeowners rather than by the evil capitalists, but is nevertheless very problematic.

I was struck by that, that nearly everybody has a housing plan. Mike Rogers would let borrowers defer student loan payments while saving for a down payment. Ken Paxton promises a $50 ,000 deduction for a home down payment. But do any of these proposals really fix the fundamental issue? No, I would say, sorry, I would say the opposite is if you know that the supply is not very elastic, so it doesn't respond very much on prices, as it is the case if you cannot build.

In fact, giving subsidy to demand will only increase prices. So that is the terrible idea to subsidize demand. What you need to do is make supply more elastic. But that means touching the interest of homeowners, which is a pretty big constituency, and both among the Democrats and the Republicans. So this is a delicate topic. Yeah. And isn't that the fundamental problem is that politicians want to appease two groups who have totally contradictory aims? I mean, homeowners want their houses to appreciate.

And for a lot of people, their equity in their home is one of their major financial assets. Younger Americans want and politicians say they want housing to be affordable, but you can't have both things at the same time. Right. If housing becomes more affordable and prices go down, that means that people's equity in their home also becomes also shrinks.

And that ends up really upsetting people. So I just... To be honest, there is a way to add them both at the same time, which is to have a much lower interest rate, right? When you think about affordability is how much your income goes toward buying a very large house. One version is you decrease the price. The other version is you decrease the cost of borrowing.

Now, to do that, you need to have more stable inflation. We saw that the Fed increased rates because of inflation and pressures. We don't see a lot of initiative in that direction. So I think that that's part of the problem. The other is probably reducing the public deficit because one of the sources of long -term interest rates, especially in the low end, is that people are worried about how in debtor the United States is.

In reading through this, I also saw there seemed to be a remarkably broad agreement on stopping Wall Street from buying single -family homes. And that seems to me, as much as I don't like private equity, it seems to me that it's one of those satisfying anti -villain policies that won't really make a difference, right? Maybe in the short term, we'll keep prices a little bit lower.

But I think that adding more people rent at their reasonable prices is probably better for everybody. In spite of this myth of home ownership, rental society is, number one, more mobile. And number two, invest less of their wealth into one asset that is not destined always to go up. And my concern is that if you have a decline in population, house prices will probably decline.

Having private equity absorbed some of that risk makes a lot of sense to me. I still remember in my reporting after the financial crisis where this idea that renting was better first started to become popular. And I remember a housing advocate said to me, let them eat rent. And I've thought about that a lot and always thought a rental society comes with a lot of risks for America.

It's different than Europe because we don't have the social supports for people as they age. And one of the ways that people have transitioned into retirement is through their ownership of their home. And suddenly, if you have a bunch of people hitting retirement who don't own a home and don't have any place to go and don't have any support from the government or not meaningful support, you've got a really, really unstable situation.

But on the flip side, I hear you. The threat of a population decline is enough at some point to probably make home prices start to go down. And then that's a risk that you would rather see somebody other than homeowners absorb. So I guess where I'm ending up is that it's complicated. OK, back to our little game. What about a federal 10% cap on credit card interest rates? What do you think, Republican or Democrat? I think these days even Trump is campaigning on that.

So I'm not surprised. Trump is campaigning on that. But I think Bernie Sanders and Republican Josh Hawley have also backed related legislation. So I guess based on all my work on this, this does not seem like a good idea to me. It seems like one that will carry unintended consequences in terms of the availability of credit. What do you think? I think we'll definitely have an impact on the availability of credit.

The question, which is a deeper question, is whether that availability of credit is good or bad. Because if it favors consumption that is not particularly useful and then you have people responsible for paying back and so cutting on, for example, medicines or more important expenses in order to pay for the indulgence in consumption, I think it's not necessarily a good thing.

But I don't think that this will resolve anything, let's put it this way. But I'm not surprised. I think that what I see with the sadness is that the current market system has disappointed so many people. Very few are willing to defend it or very few are willing to try to change things in a way that is more market compatible. I think both the left and the right are finding anti -market measures because the mood is such that the market has failed the majority of Americans and the majority of Americans are revolting against that.

And do you ultimately think that that's dangerous, that all of these measures that look to impose limits on the market without actually correcting the fundamental problem driving it will backfire? I don't think that all the measures to regulate the markets are bad, but there seem to be more reactive measures to respond to popular demand rather than well -thought processes.

For example, on the most important issue, which is healthcare, there is a position Medicare for All, which is very popular on the left. But I don't think that will conquer a lot of middle -of -the -world Americans because while they hate the system, a lot of them are much more afraid of change. So moving to something better, and I do believe in me something better, is not that easy.

So let me try. I was trying to think about what I would do if I were a candidate, which of course I'm not. I invented this idea, and I want to try it with you. So I'm going to call it the medic option for all. If you look at the average expenditure between the employer and the employee for the average worker, it's approaching $10 ,000 a year.

Okay? And if you look at what Medicaid spends, Medicare is for older people, and I'm sorry to report older people are much more expensive to take care. But if you look at Medicaid, which is probably an overestimate because poor people suffer more of health issues, but they spend roughly $6 ,500 per person. Okay? So we can have Medicare for All at the cost of $6 ,500.

The problem is the transition, because remember that today, all the money you spend in health care is pre -tax. So there's a huge tax option. So my proposal is this. Why don't we give to every person employed in America the option of buying with $6 ,500 of pre -tax money a Medicaid option, and then receive tax -free the remaining $3 ,500 that he or she can use either to consume or to buy a supplemental insurance.

So one option is to do that. The other option is to remain as you are today. In this way, you fund the Medicaid because you're transferring, but you give option to people, you maintain the status quo, but you make it feasible to have a public option at the low cost that is supported by public finances. Because if you introduce Medicare for all, leaving the system in place as it is, it's going to bankrupt the government.

So what do you think about this? Why will it bankrupt the government? Because it's an additional cost without funding. Today, much of the funding comes from the employer. If you transfer to the government, it's not guaranteed that the employer will increase wages. It will appropriate most of the difference. So it would be a boon for companies and a disaster for federal deficits.

I like that idea. I guess the risk I see in it is that our entire medical system or a lot of it is built on gaming or arbitraging or capturing that difference between commercial healthcare and Medicaid. Certainly, a lot of hospitals are funded by that or make their money by figuring out how to capitalize on that gap. And I worry that if that gap starts to go away, a lot of things underneath it start to break, coming back to the law of unintended consequences.

It's not clear to me that that gap between the $6 ,500 and the $10 ,000 is profit that somebody is capturing, or if that money is actually a payment for something important that we all would agree we don't want to see go away if we could see where it was going. Does that make sense? Absolutely. But that's to some extent the core of my idea.

I don't know either, but if it is real difference, people will not have opted for the Medicaid because it cuts something they really want. On the other hand, if it is profits, it's going to be squeezed out by competition. So we are creating a public option that is competitive and that people choose. That creates a market pressure that is lacking in this moment.

I like your idea better than anything that any of the candidates said. I think the problem with it is that it is more multilayered than that in the sense that, you know, there are hospitals that treat a Medicaid population that can't get by on the amount of reimbursement they're getting from Medicaid. And so the only reason they survive is because of that premium from whatever commercially insured people that they have.

And so if you break that, then that hospital goes away and then that means that care for a portion of the population also goes away. So I just think it is, it gets really complicated given how ingrained that profit gap is in our system. If you think that you can change, improve health care without hurting anybody, this is impossible. Yeah, that's fair.

So there are people who are going to be affected, but that could be a compensating measure. For example, one thing I discovered, one of the bottlenecks in the production of doctors is the number of residency financed by Medicare. Actually, all the residents in the United States are financed by Medicare and are fixed in number since 1996. Actually, we were raised only 8% in 2012.

So imagine that the number of doctors in the United States is fixed by law. If you were to expand those, you will have more doctors and the existing doctors will earn less money. I'm sorry to report, but that's exactly, if you want increased supply is similar to the houses, you need to reduce the bottleneck. And one of the effects is that some of the people, like some of the owner would be less happy and some of the doctors would be less happy.

But that's what the market is about. So let's move on just before we run out of time. I think one of the really interesting places where there is bipartisan, I don't know if we want to call it agreement, but certainly bipartisan overlap is on constraining data centers. You've got Democrat Annie Andrews wants to propose as a two year moratorium in South Carolina.

There's also Mike Rogers, who's Michigan U .S. Senate candidate, wants a one year moratorium on data center construction. So how do we square that with this drive toward AI and this overall kind of national goal, at least coming from the Trump administration, that we have to beat China and we have to charge forward any dangers and costs be damned? It's interesting because that shows that at some level democracy works, 70% of the people are against data centers.

Surprise, surprise, when 70% of the people are against something, both parties try to cater to that demand. Now, you want to understand why people are against data centers. I regarded it two reasons. One is, I think I discussed with you an interesting paper I saw last year, where when you see a windmill to produce electric energy, everybody claims they're in favor of windmills, etc.

But do you want to have one next door? And the answer is no, because they do poof, poof, poof all night. Surprise, surprise. The prices of houses drop 12%. If your only asset is houses, that's a big, big blow. So, data centers run the risk of increasing the electricity cost, making water less available. And so, I think that some of the proposals that I've seen are very reasonable.

They say that, look, these guys need to be self -sufficient. They need to pay for their own energy. They need to pay for their own water. Many public utilities price energy in a cost -plus system. So, if you have a data center that enters and increase demand by a lot, and to increase demand, you have to build new plans that are more expensive.

That cost automatically transferred to you. I think it's perfectly legitimate to people say, I don't want that. I do, too. I couldn't help thinking, though, as I read through these proposals that this is going to be one of those where everybody is looking at exactly the wrong thing. Because the big risk, of course, is that this whole thing just blows up.

And you saw just last week as we're recording this, CoreWeave, a company that is what's known as a neocloud, meaning they're building data centers. Their bonds soared because everybody's starting to realize this thing may come with enormous risks and that the developers of these may not be able to pay their debt. So, I have this feeling that we're all going to be focused on proposals to limit data centers and moratoriums when the real issue is going to be what happens if the economic boom that has been caused by AI hits the skids.

But actually, I don't see the two in contradiction because part of the reason why there is a boom is because some of the costs are externalized. And so, the moment you force them to pay for the cost, number one, there will be less of a boom. Number two, in the bus will be less devastating. Imagine that you build these data centers and then they go bust.

Then the cost of building the capacity to support them will be borne by the communities in their electric bills. And that's crazy. I think it's too late for that. I think the scale of the spending is already such that the bust is going to be enormously painful. And I don't see any proposals to address or manage that, which is that if all of this does go south, what money has already been spent and committed and what does that mean for the overall economy? It certainly will crash our national economy, given the extent of it that is driven by the AI boom.

And I think it will have local impacts as well. And while I agree with your ideas, I think it's too late to change that, given the money that's already been committed. But maybe I'm too negative. No, I think that wouldn't be the first time. No, but Bethany, I can see your proposal for this mid -time election to say make data center bus proof.

It's not in opposition to AI. It's it's in opposition to externalizing the cost of AI into society. And I think that we want the data centers not to devastate the community in case they are unable to pay their debt. Yeah, I have a different proposal. My proposal, which I wish a candidate had, would be that when a data center is being built, every single thing about it should be public.

In other words, you should be able to see in public, in a special file for that, that is on the internet for that data center, who is bearing the risks, who's paying for it, what happens if it goes wrong, who has which contingencies. Because if you dig through a company's financial statements, you actually can't really tell. So it leaves the whole thing pretty unclear.

And I think this is a case where transparency would be enormously helpful. And so that's the proposal I would like to see, which I did not see in anybody's campaign platforms, not surprisingly. To be honest, I don't remember who, but I think that there was a candidate who was asking for more transparency on data centers. Maybe not as detailed as you make it to be, but I think that it is out there.

And the protest of various communities on data centers, I think that transparency is the number one issue. Without transparency, you can't understand what they're doing. You can't even find a way to oppose them if you want. So I think that part of the reason why they are so secretive is because they know that they are not loved and they try to hide their traces.

Probably fair. I couldn't help feeling a little bit of a sense of existential dread is too strong, but just a worry that no matter what happens in this election, that nothing actually changes. I worried whether either party really believes in competition when competition threatens their own supporters. And does anybody want a more functional capitalism or do they all just want government to protect their preferred winners? And I felt, I felt a little, a little hopeless and looking through it.

I guess it's, this is not, you know, we've had candidates who have come along who have promised dramatic change and everything has looked really clear that there's going to be dramatic change and that hasn't happened either. But in this case, it just, it feels like a bit of a mishmash and I had trouble finding anything that would actually happen no matter which way the midterms go.

We are, in my view, we are, in my view, in a phase of what Gramsci call interregnum, when the old mothers are dead and the new mothers have not been born yet. But I see a beginning of a transition. For example, I think the emphasis that most democratic candidates put on anti -corruption in general, I think is a positive change. Hopefully they apply these rules first to themselves and then to others.

It is discussed in a more detailed way, in a sense, of course, Trump campaigned on Drain the Swamp, but it wasn't any detail. I'd forgotten. Yeah, you forgot that, right? Sorry. That's really amusing.

In my view, a good capitalist system does require a good system of law and corruption is the enemy number one for that to work. So, any fight to clean it up, I think, would be a good fight. Yeah, I think that is a positive. I also am going to come back to the idea that at least there is one person who is talking about the national debt and what a problem that is, because I think a lot of things that are problematic do flow from that.

And I've always been a bit of a debt hawk. I just understand that the national debt burden isn't like a household's debt burden, but the math major in me just has never been able to get past the idea that that's money that has to be paid back. And when the money can no longer be paid back, that we've got a problem. And I'd like to see more.

I think a lot of things, I think getting the budget under control and the debt under control, a lot of good things would flow from that. Yeah, I wonder where Stephanie Kelton has gone. The modern monetary theory that this doesn't matter and all this stuff. Well, I think I think the proponents of modern monetary theory had a little bit of a problem once it was basically adopted by Trump.

Right. Because then if you're going to be a supporter of modern monetary theory, you have to support what Trump is doing. Not not everything, but you have to support the Republican. If money really is free, then a lot of the Republican budget decisions that have helped to get us to this state. The Biden administration obviously did its part, too.

But then then you then you have to embrace some of Trump's economic policies and maybe that's a problem.

That's true. Capital Isn't is a podcast from the Stiegler Center and the University of Chicago Podcast Network in collaboration with the Chicago Booth Review. If you haven't yet, you can now find our podcast as a video on YouTube. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. The show is produced by me, Matt Hodap, Brittany Broders, with production assistance from Annie Nazaro, Matt Lucky, Sebastian Berka, Joey Prebst and Andy Shee.

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