Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post’s veteran economic columnist since the late 1960s, died at 79 in 2025 after decades of nonpartisan analysis on Social Security and Medicare, warning their aging demographics would force tax hikes or benefit cuts. He praised U.S. population growth over stagnant Europe but cautioned against unchecked illegal immigration’s strains, linking it to past assimilation struggles. Samuelson tied gas prices—dropping from $3.68 in 2012 to $2.06 by 2016—to fracking and Saudi OPEC defiance post-Great Recession. Criticizing the 2016 election’s divisiveness, he lamented Trump’s and Clinton’s focus on personal attacks over policy ideas, undermining democratic discourse. His legacy: sharp economic insights delivered with measured pragmatism, even when unpopular. [Automatically generated summary]
So what do you want people to learn from your columns?
What's the pro?
unidentified
Well, my view is that I'm trying to teach myself, I'll learn something new in every column.
I don't always succeed.
And I'm trying to explain things to people so that even if they disagree with me, which many of them do, they will come away with a lot more information and a better analytical understanding of at least one point of view.
But I think I would be failing if people didn't learn something from most of my columns.
I wouldn't say I'm particularly ideological, although I'd say I'm slightly right of center.
I would say I'm sort of mainstream, but on the right side of mainstream and not on the left side of mainstream.
But I am not pushing a partisan agenda.
I'm pushing, to the extent I push an agenda, it's my agenda and not one of the party's agenda, or in most cases, even not any of the major senators or members of the House of Representatives, which may explain why over the years I don't detect that whatever I've written has influenced anybody to do anything, either good or bad.
In the last, say, year or so, is there a column that's gotten more reaction than any of the others?
unidentified
You know, I'd have to go back and think about that.
When I write about Social Security and Medicare, which is sort of what the government provides older Americans, including me, I usually get a pretty large reaction.
I've been writing about this now for over 20 or 30 years.
And my basic theme has been this is going to essentially squeeze out the spending on older people, which were now growing as a proportion of the total population.
It's basically going to squeeze out spending on other groups or result in large tax increases.
And that this is essentially unfair to younger Americans and that we need to revise these programs.
They are part of the social fabric.
They're very important.
But we ought to have higher eligibility ages introduced gradually and slowly.
We ought to have less generous benefits for the wealthier retirees, people like me who have saved or have had the benefit of a retirement account, employer-provided retirement account.
And that we ought to modernize these programs in a way that we have not done.
And we have not done it essentially for political reasons because older Americans are a very large group and they're politically acute.
And also many of them feel not without reason that they've been promised these benefits and the government has no right to even reduce them by a penny.
I know I've read your column for years and it always has good numbers in there so we can kind of figure out, try to figure out what's going on.
So I've got a ton of numbers and I've got a lot of your columns from the year and I want to get you to explain this.
First thing I want to put up on the screen is the United States population for the last eight years, basically talking since Barack Obama has been president.
There they are.
It started out in 2009 with 307 million and we have gained up to the present enough that we can say we have at least 324 million people in the United States.
When you see that kind of a growth rate, does it mean anything?
unidentified
Well, to me, it's an optimistic thing.
It means that the United States is still growing as a body of people.
It's a very big country.
We have room for a lot of people.
If you look at some other advanced societies, they are not growing.
They have birth rates that are less than two for each adult woman.
And so if you have two adults and you have one offspring, pretty soon your population begins to go down and it gets older.
And you have a problem, it seems to me.
You have a welfare state that needs to support this older population, but you have a shrinking economic base because the number of new workers coming into the system is less than the number of older workers who are exiting the system.
And so you have a system that is basically fixed to fail.
That is not the case in the United States.
We have the same problems, but they're not nearly as acute.
If you look at, say, Italy or Germany or Japan, their birth rate is a little bit above one.
And in 40 or 50 years, they're essentially not going to have very many young people left in relationship to the older population.
This is a huge political problem, and I think it underlies some of the problems we see in Europe today and in slow economic growth.
They have aging societies, and they simply cannot produce the kind of sustained economic growth that countries with growing populations have.
I don't want to leave the impression that growing population is the only thing that matters.
It obviously isn't.
You can have large numbers of poor people.
And over, historically, as countries have gotten richer, their birth rates have gone down.
So population by itself is not a good thing, but population in conjunction with reasonable economic growth is a sustainable political and economic model.
We only have it up to 2014, but it shows we have 42.2 million foreign-born up through 2014, and that's when the population was only 319 million.
But what about that ratio?
Any other countries of the world have that kind of foreign-born population?
unidentified
You know, I really don't know the comparison with other countries.
I think that what this says for the United States is that I think having immigrants has been a great thing to the United States.
In fact, the country wouldn't exist if we didn't have immigrants.
On the other hand, absorbing the immigrants and assimilating them into American society that's already there is not an easy task.
It's never been an easy task.
And it seems to me that that is the fundamental reason why we need to curb illegal immigration and we need to reorient our immigration policies to having more skilled immigrants come in who will have an easier time assimilating and contributing to American growth and to being part of the American fabric.
But I think in general this is a healthy thing as long as we can to some extent control it.
We can't control it entirely, but we can control it more than we have.
And I think the fact that the United States has a tradition and it's part of the political culture and part of the, I think, and the economic culture of absorbing immigrants, that that bodes well in the long run.
But people forget or they don't register enough on both sides of this argument.
One is that we have assimilated millions and millions of immigrants in the past, so we should be reasonably optimistic about our capability of doing it now.
But on the other side, that when we've had waves of immigrants, there's always been social tensions, there have always been economic tensions.
And so just the notion you ought to have unlimited immigration seems to me also to be a formula for failure and is bound to create the kind of reaction to the inflow of immigrants that we see today, which is in its worst forms quite ugly, and in its mildest forms is understandable.
How far do you go back in your own family where your family were immigrants?
unidentified
I believe, you know, this is something I want to research more and I sort of haven't researched enough, but in both cases, both my mother's side and my father's side, their forefathers came in the 19th century.
Now, my wife's, on the other hand, my wife's parents immigrated from what is now, I think, Latvia to the United States.
And I warn our audience, there's a lot of numbers in this show.
This is, and we're talking about the time that Barack Obama has been president mostly from 2009 to 2016.
These are gas prices.
What's happened to the average gas price per gallon?
And you go back to 2009, you can see it on the screen.
It was $2.41.
It went up in 2012 to as high as $3.68.
And it's now back down to an average, although from a day-to-day basis, this may be off $0.05 or $0.6.
$2.06 nationwide.
What does that mean to an economy?
unidentified
Well, I think what this little table shows you, one, is that we don't control oil or gasoline prices in any sort of obvious way, or you wouldn't have these kind of huge fluctuations.
You'd have gasoline selling at $1 or $150 or $2 forever.
Secondly, what you see in the trend is that in 2009, you have to remember we were in the midst of the Great Recession, which was a consequence of the financial crisis.
And so people were driving less, companies were producing less.
This was a worldwide phenomenon.
And since gasoline and oil are worldwide commodities, the lack of demand against a sort of an existing supply resulted in depressed prices.
As we recovered from the Great Recession, prices went back up and they got back over $100 a barrel for crude oil.
Then you had two things happening.
You had sort of the introduction or the expansion of oil shale production in the United States in both the Midwest and in Texas with fracking, which increased our capacity dramatically.
So the supply was increased.
And then you had the sort of the breakdown of OPEC and the production of huge production of gasoline and oil by Saudi Arabia, which so the supply basically overwhelmed demand and prices went down again.
Before we go any further, what's your reaction without getting into the individuals so much of this election season?
What are your observations?
unidentified
Well, I'm not sure I'll share my observations, but I will share my feelings.
I feel I'm a pretty patriotic person.
I think America is a great country.
I'm glad that I'm American, and I think it's one of the greatest things that can befall anybody to be an American citizen.
And I've been pretty much proud of the United States most of my life when I'm 70.
I'm not proud of the United States for this election.
I feel this at a very kind of gut level.
I think Donald Trump is a man that stirs animosities, and that's the wrong kind of campaign to run.
But I'm not crazy about the fact that the Democratic Party produced a candidate who is widely mistrusted, and she must have something to do with it, the origins of that mistrust.
But I'm particularly bothered by the Trump candidacy.
We people in the sort of the ideas business, pundits, scholars, whatever, like to think that we could resolve most of our problems if we simply have open, honest debates about them.
Well, that's a little bit naive.
I discovered that pretty early when I started writing a column.
But it's not so naive to think that ideas would play some role in major elections.
And yet in this campaign, a lot of it has just boiled down to sort of personal attacks and counterattacks.
And it's pretty discouraging, frankly.
2025 also saw the death of sports writer and author John Feinstein, who died at the age of 69 from a heart attack.
Feinstein joined C-SPAN's Q ⁇ A in 2011 to discuss the role of the federal government in sports and the overlap of sports and politics.
John Feinstein, author of One on One, a new book, how much impact does the federal government have on the world of sports in this country?
unidentified
You know, I go back and forth on how I feel about that because sometimes I think it would be best for government just to stay completely out of sports.