Overspending, Welfare & BLOAT Will END The US w/ Conor (Counterpoints) & Cameron Barrett
BUY CAST BREW COFFEE TO SUPPORT THE SHOW - https://castbrew.com/ Become A Member And Protect Our Work at http://www.timcast.com Host: Tim Pool @Timcast (everywhere) Guests: Conor @counterconor (X) Cameron Barrett @econoboi (X) Producers: Lisa Elizabeth @LisaElizabeth (X) Kellen Leeson @KellenPDL (X) My Second Channel - https://www.youtube.com/timcastnews Podcast Channel - https://www.youtube.com/TimcastIRL Overspending, Welfare & BLOAT Will END The US | The Culture War with Tim Pool
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Culture War debate show, I guess.
Sometimes we do discussions.
We try to have civil discussions, but sometimes they get heated debates.
And moving forward, we are planning on having many of these shows live, pre-recorded, simply because we wanted to do it live.
We're like, how do we do a show live Saturday night?
It's not really something you can do.
Tomorrow night, we are going to be pre-recording the next episode of The Culture War, live with the studio audience, and we're allowing our audience members to come up and join the debate.
So moving forward, this is our pilot.
We're going to figure out how we do it.
So it's going to be chaotic, but don't worry.
Alex Stein will be joining us to make sure that if it is chaotic, we can blame him.
It's going to be fun.
But today, we're going to be talking about overspending, government bloat, welfare, and these policies that will bankrupt.
I'm a science fiction, political, and philosophy nerd, Marine Corps and law enforcement veteran.
I think the easiest way to identify my politics is a never-Trump Republican.
Funnily enough, I was on this stream a few weeks, maybe a month ago or so, arguing that we needed a state and statism and welfare and all that kind of stuff.
But I think that the left can go way too far with this stuff, and you can effectively bankrupt or destroy a society if you're not careful.
Relatively speaking, but there's, of course, essential functions for the government that we should be performing, and that's where I get into trouble and fight with libertarians and ANCAPs.
Yeah, because, no offense to him, but I checked out the comments underneath my thing, and they're like, oh, this statist, leftist, communist piece of garbage.
He's arguing for indefinite spending.
What an a-hole.
And then it's like, guys, like, no, I do have reasonable positions to allow.
Yeah. And then they're like, ah, no, private tolls.
That's socialism.
Let's start with the biggest government ever.
What does that mean to you, big government and spending?
Do you mean like debt spending and unlimited...
Budgets or what?
unidentified
Yeah, I joke about big government, obviously.
I mean, I think that, in principle, government should be as small as possible.
I mean, obviously, you shouldn't have more government than you think you might need.
But obviously, it's a debate about what the institution should really look like and how expansive they should be.
I happen to believe in a pretty big welfare state.
I think that part of the conceptual reason why we would always need a welfare state, essentially no matter what, is that one of the reasons why the bottom 20% are the bottom 20%, they're poor, is because they're overwhelmingly people who just don't work or they have
And so fundamentally in a market capitalist system, whether you like it or don't like it, there's not really a clean way, clearly, you know, from across history for essentially the market to get income to these people.
And as well, since these people are unequally distributed, right?
So if we were to imagine
Identical twins.
One makes $70,000.
The other makes $70,000.
They live in the same city.
One of them lives completely alone, just in a studio apartment.
And then the other one has, like, a child and a disabled spouse.
Well...
Even though they have the same income, the person who has a child and a disabled spouse, which arguably is through no fault of their own, or at the very least we might say that children and people with disabilities should be taken care of, that person's going to be much poorer unless we provide disability benefits, child allowances,
And I think that part of believing in community is having these sort of, you know, democratic procedures for voting for taxes and voting for institutions that distribute money to these people.
And obviously, the proof is in the pudding, right?
You know, when you have a welfare state that's well-functioning, children aren't in poverty.
The elderly aren't in poverty.
People with disabilities aren't in poverty.
You know, the poverty rate in general just completely flatlines when you have a well-functioning welfare state.
And that's not what necessarily the U.S. has, but I think that we should tend towards that direction, not strip away all these benefits.
But my argumentation effectively is going to be that we have this schism in the United States of America politically, culturally, etc., etc.
Some may call it a civil war at times.
But the issue is that in order for a welfare state to work, you need fiscal conservative and social conservative instincts.
So one of the things that I see most often criticized about the welfare state, about Scandinavia, about the Pacific Northwest, about California, is perverse incentive systems where you effectively get people who are – I'm just going to say it.
Parasitic, dysgenic, and those might be like words that are loaded where it's like, oh, you're a fascist or whatever.
But when you have generation after generation after generation that are on social benefit programs, they're not getting better, they're not integrating into the economy, they're taking wealth that could be used for more productive measures, etc., etc.
We have to look at that and we have to look at that as a systemic failure.
And so that's where I don't begrudge fiscal conservatives who say, we've sent billions or trillions of dollars on these programs and the stats have stayed almost the same.
or social conservatives who are saying that we are incentivizing degenerate behavior.
Yeah, so it's going to be mostly a cultural argument because I think that people can already identify that we're arguing about, like, how big should the state be and what services should it provide.
I have very specific, like, thoughts on that.
But the thing is, like...
Hard drug use is terrible.
Being a single parent, while not always your fault, is sometimes your fault.
And here's all the pro-social behaviors that you should be taking part in, and then we should prioritize those as a society.
And obviously we're having a sensible conversation between sensible people, but as soon as we leave this room we're kind of bombarded with messaging that says, "Oh, this is cis-heteropatriarchal.
This is right-wing, this is the gateway to fascism." When realistically most people kind of have these social incentive structures in their lives and they see the benefits and the downsides.
The parents to the children to the grandkids to the great-grandkids, this sort of exponentially decreases, right?
So in terms of the people who stay on benefits, the overwhelming majority of people who are on benefits kind of fall into two categories, right?
We've got people who actually just need temporary help, and so they stay on benefits temporarily.
Take food stamps, for instance.
I think the average person stays on food stamps for less than a year, right?
Now, the people who stay on food stamps long-term, they're overwhelmingly the people that I describe in this group, not including the unemployed, right?
These are people who simply struggle to work or have essentially an inability to work.
They have disabilities, they're elderly, they have caregiving responsibilities at home
And so if we really want to support people into work, the best thing that we can do is get rid of the means tests, we can universalize these programs, and we can afford to do that if we just had a better tax system.
But kicking people off of their benefits, especially with this concept of, well, I want to prevent generational poverty.
Number one, generational poverty, especially after multiple generations, is really not that common.
And to the extent that it is, it's because these people have essentially ailments, right?
And I ask this because we would then concede that humans,
Are constantly in the process of evolution.
Evolution is not like one day a duck has a baby and it's an alligator, right?
Over long periods of time, genetic traits do confer changes in a species, in an animal.
And so I'm curious if you think it is, I suppose, macro enough that if you have a group of people that are incapable of producing more than they consume, if you prop up this group of people, they will...
Create more people incapable of producing more than they consume.
But while I was researching this, because obviously there's, I would say, a liberal or progressive bias to search engines, one of the things that I found is that with the stickiness of social benefits, oftentimes what happens is people, because there are time
limits stuck to these social benefits, oftentimes around five years, what happens is people will go off, go on, go on, go off, et cetera, et cetera.
And so it's effectively this wave
Of them doing it and getting to Tim's point about whether or not we're incentivizing like an antisocial element of our society.
That's actually specifically what I'm arguing about.
Because I think that there's a resentment from the middle class and the working class who are like, you know, just barely surviving, paying bills, getting by, all that kind of stuff.
And then they see this, you know, I hate to say it, but true, parasitic class of people who are jumping back and forth on benefits over and over again.
And sometimes it is intergenerational.
Even in your own statement, it's 35 to 45 percent.
But doesn't that carry over to subsequent generations?
And so as a result, majority of people are getting off of the benefits, but there's still a third that stay on?
unidentified
Well, I'm just talking about people who stay in the bottom 20%, right?
So it's, again, the people who stay in the bottom 20% is necessarily a bigger group of people than are actually on benefits, right?
Or at the very least, we could say that the kind of people that you're describing is a smaller group than the entirety of the bottom 20%, because not everyone takes benefits.
We have a very complicated system for even getting...
The benefits, obviously, as a veteran, you can probably relate to that somewhat.
Let me just step away from the genetic component of what I asked, but also, as you mentioned, the social component.
If there are people, you know, I'm not going to say if.
There's a viral video where a woman says, here's the food I make for my seven-year-old.
She's morbidly obese, and she's taking a bunch of chicken nuggets, and she's doing like 50 nuggets, and then she's like putting oil on them and then deep frying them, and then she's putting like whipped cream on ice cream.
She's like, this is what I give to my kids every day.
If you have bad practices outside of genetics, their children are going to be on benefits too.
And then a society that says, don't worry, it's fine, we got you.
Eventually you get a lot of these people that will create more people.
I know fertility is down, but presuming that people are going to have children, they're going to perpetuate that cycle.
unidentified
Yeah, well, I mean, again, so we have to kind of segregate the conversation here, including, I can kind of include what Connor just said about people with disabilities who might have...
Maybe it's their fault that they're disabled or something like that.
So obviously, if you wanted to say, well, we should have certain rules by which people qualify.
Obviously, if you were to say, oh, I sprained my ankle, so give me $1,000 a month in disability.
I think most people would say, well, that does sound a little ridiculous.
And so you might have a list of rules.
And every country that has disability benefits has different qualifications.
And some things count and some things don't.
So you have to figure out the details here.
But at the end of the day, what I'm making an argument for is kind of twofold.
One is the principal argument that we need a welfare state to support people with all of these groups of people, but obviously also, inclusive of that, people with disabilities, right?
Well, it kind of goes to your point, though, Connor.
When you said that we need this culture of just bullying people and telling people to, I hate to say, pick themselves up by their bootstraps, but similarly, we just need to tell people to man up, go get a fucking job, that kind of thing.
Now, I think that in general, we can...
Do a time series here and look at when we didn't have welfare.
When we didn't have welfare, this kind of culture did exist.
And getting welfare benefits was a political...
Trial and experiment.
People advocated for it.
People shot it down.
Eventually, we get Social Security.
Eventually, we get Medicare.
Eventually, we get Medicaid, all these different things.
Now, pre-welfare, you saw so much riding like this.
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.
If you have to take money from charity, some conservatives say, oh, well, charities will just fill the gap that welfare takes.
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.
And charities are in fact bad because it creates the kind of culture that you're talking about.
Now, the last thing I was going to say, one last sentence, was that...
We had that culture, and poverty was really high, right?
We had a high, high level of poverty.
Once we institute state welfare benefits, guess what?
All the people who qualified for them, the poverty rates declined precipitously.
They continued to decline all the way up until the 90s and 2000s when benefits kind of bottomed out.
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, right?
Now, you know, I'm not a religious person, right?
So, you know, people have different justifications for their moral views.
But, you know, I think just letting somebody with like a disability starve and die and live a worse life, I guess selfishly, you could say that by forcing, there was an interesting study about Social Security that talked about this.
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.
From their families?
Yeah, from their families, right.
Now, some conservatives might say that that's a bad thing, but then some conservatives...
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.
We want people to kind of atomize.
Now, that's a debate in the conservative community.
My only point was that by not having these benefits, we create a lot of financial burdens for the broader community.
And I don't think that forcing elderly people to live in the house of their children necessarily means that you have better or worse community.
It just means elderly people are living in higher levels of poverty.
You've kind of steered it for a second, so I want to steer some of this, okay?
You actually kind of steered into a point that I wanted to make.
So, support people who the market does not support, okay?
I am a statist.
So ultimately, I do believe that women who are raising children are not like drags on our society.
They're actually a pro-social component of our society, and it's important that they raise healthy, happy, productive children for all of our sakes, and especially the sake of the future.
Now, if we wanted to say, because I feel like we could circle the...
I think that a actual...
Principled social conservative, if they think about it for 30 seconds, they don't want women to be starving.
They don't want the kids to be starving.
And they do want people who are productive to kind of get back into society reintegrated and supported.
Okay, I think those...
If a social conservative thinks for more than 30 seconds, they'll do that.
Fiscal conservatives, maybe not so much.
Now, because they'll say, not with my money.
Now, that being said, we're talking about pro-social and anti-social behavior, which I think is like another component of this.
We're not just making fiscal arguments.
We're not only talking about taxes, debt, all that kind of stuff.
The other thing that we're talking about is pro-social stuff.
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.
We've actually seen a drop in labor force participation rate, which is effectively people who participate in the economy.
But the place where it was most pronounced was actually men over the age of 55. 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.
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.
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.
So this is where we need to change the expectations, at least in my opinion.
We're going to have to do this just for survival.
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.
We are going to have to become extended family units again.
We are going to have to work together as a community in order to survive.
We are going to have to adopt pro-social behaviors from the early 20th and late 19th century just to survive.
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, they're going to end up eating cat food and their pets because they're not going to be able to survive.
So we need to...
Yeah, I mean, we can't rely on the government benefits.
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.
It's not a big deal.
But what Tim kind of said...
unidentified
Just to be clear, it's not a big deal in some conceptual sense.
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?
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.
We want kids.
We want the human species to perpetuate.
We're the people who, like, want pro-social behaviors to be implemented over and over and over again, and hopefully we'll be around as a species in 100,000 years.
So if we're looking at a, I don't know what you said, like a 40% cut in the population, something like that.
There are 72 million millennials, 69 million Gen Z, 40 million Gen Alpha, and Gen Alpha is ending this year.
Caveat, Gen Alpha is slightly shorter than previous generations.
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.
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.
So currently, right now, we're facing a gap of 16 to 18-year-olds.
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.
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 boom post-World War II and then X being a smaller generation.
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.
We literally will not be able to afford it without automation, without extreme amounts of automation.
Well, yeah, look, I mean, those are many different conversations.
I think that we, again, have to segregate the conversation.
Fundamentally, even if you have a declining population, and for some reason we don't want to let in immigrants, and obviously I think there's some analysis on that.
My point is, even if we were to assume, obviously I think immigration is a solution to that problem, especially in the medium term, essentially.
Now, even if we don't agree with that, even if we say, okay, we're not going to let in immigrants and the population is declining, we still have fundamentally two things that enable the welfare state to exist.
We have an amount of money.
And we're still going to need a way to give them some level of money.
Obviously, you might say, similar to Japan, right?
We might have a declining population.
Prices are going down instead of up.
Deflation's happening.
We might need to cut benefits for that reason.
Or because maybe tax burdens would get so bad for the economy or whatever.
Yeah, yeah, whatever.
That's a very practical conversation.
But principally speaking, there's no reason to think that, oh, because we have a declining population, even if we don't let in immigrants, which is the big caveat, and I guess technology doesn't get substantially better, right?
So those are two big caveats.
That we would obviously just get rid of the entirety of the welfare state, or we would substantially cut it back to a quarter of what it was.
No, we would still have a pretty sizable welfare state under those circumstances, and we should.
Okay, so now we're talking about policy, but you've given me a couple of things.
So I I stand by what I said earlier, which is effectively we need to reimagine what the golden years look like, which is right now.
It's effectively having your retirement from this is a boomer thing.
This isn't even a millennial.
I don't think that's going to happen anymore.
I think that the way that we...
And maybe it shouldn't because it's probably, relatively speaking, antisocial.
What probably should happen is we should get more used to extended family groups, living in properties next to each other, family compounds, all that kind of stuff.
Now, that doesn't mean that you need to be in tenement housing like the 19th century where you're sleeping with your wife and then your parents are in the next room.
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.
That's not what...
But at the same time, we're going to have to find a dignified shift to this.
And this is where I'm going to challenge the fiscal and social conservatives in the chat.
I don't feel they're ready to have that conversation because they're typically the people who are doing better economically.
So they will still be able to afford that life through their income.
And so they're basically saying, well, the rest of society can buzz off.
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.
These are meteors that are coming for our culture, whether you like it or not.
unidentified
That's not true, though, because, again, we can look at societies that have higher rates of taxation, more generous retirement benefits, right?
Well, I don't know how much Scandinavia taxes to fund their pension system, honestly.
It depends.
I was just thinking specifically about Germany, right?
So Germany has, I think, 10% payroll taxes.
Obviously, here we have about 6.2%.
6.2%.
That's on the employee side.
On the employer side, 6.2%.
In Germany, I think it might be 10 and 10. We have examples of societies that have substantially higher payroll taxes to fund social benefits, right?
And we don't see like, oh, the economy collapses.
We don't see like, oh, so many terrible antisocial things happen in these countries because of the high payroll taxes.
In the United States, right, we could do two things to fill this gap that you're talking about.
So like Tim said, in 2035 or 2033 or whatever year it is, the trust fund is scheduled to decrease, right?
scheduled to go to zero.
All that means is that the accumulated money from Social Security, the trust fund aspect of Social Security goes to zero.
It doesn't mean we don't have any money for Social Security
And then...
If that happens, benefits go to 75% of their current levels.
So we can still pay out 75% of the inflation-adjusted benefits come 2033-2035.
Now, if you wanted to raise all of that money with our current demographics, all you'd have to do is get rid of the cap on Social Security.
So right now, there's a cap.
If you make more than $150,000 a year, you don't pay any extra Social Security tax on any of that income.
Very regressive way to do things.
If we got rid of that cap, and then we said, 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?
We keep the statutory rates the same for the employees.
We increase it on the employers.
And we've solved this entire gap.
And this is not calamitous.
Well, just one second.
This is not calamitous.
This is not, you know, a Great Depression is going to happen.
None of that.
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.
Yeah. So that right there just throws your premise into question.
unidentified
No, it doesn't, Tim, because the Laffer curve, the idea of the Laffer curve is you raise taxes to such an erroneously high level that people all of a sudden start dropping out of the labor force precipitously.
If you're talking about a national employment tax, right?
If we're going to say that there's free movement of labor and various different jurisdictions have different tax rates, then you've got a competition, but you need a 7% increase in labor taxes.
unidentified
No, no, no.
It goes to 7%.
It's already 6.2%.
I'm talking about a less than 1% increase, right?
I mean, this is not a calamitous thing that you guys are describing.
Someone said it would be easy, but why wouldn't they?
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.
We've seen it happen for 30 years.
unidentified
Well, no, no.
So what you're talking about is much more on the margin.
Right now, we have a service-based economy, a consumption-based economy, right?
So even if a lot of manufacturing and stuff, we've already seen this happen.
A lot of manufacturing goes overseas.
It's not as if we've seen GDP go down.
We haven't seen recession after recession because of the manufacturing decline.
If you live in a house where you don't produce anything and you have a universal trade currency for your house, I know you don't, but let's just say for your house, you're like, hey.
If I give you this currency, you can come to me and buy stuff.
But you don't make anything in that house.
Repairs are needed.
So you go to someone and say, I don't make anything, but I need steel for my house.
I'll give to you, Mr. Chinese National who makes steel.
You give him currency for your house.
What he buys from you is going to be the rights and control of your house, your land, your properties, because you don't make anything to exchange.
This is actually what we've been seeing in the United States with China buying up large swaths of farmland.
We go to China and we give them U.S. dollars in exchange for their labor.
We then bring those products from China.
And it's not just China, but largely China.
They then give us...
These are not just hard products, but also the...
The resources need to make other products in the United States.
So famously, like bicycles, for instance.
They'll say, assembled in the USA, but the metals actually produced and manufactured in China and shipped here.
So you think you're buying an American product, but you're not.
China then takes those U.S. dollars and says, hey, America is not producing anything.
They're a service-based consumer economy.
So what can we buy from them?
Their labor?
In exchange, hold on.
Our labor is cheaper than American labor.
We don't need that.
So what do we do with these U.S. dollars?
What we've seen over the past 30 years, they've been buying up large swaths of our land and housing.
They then rent it back to our own citizens.
If you do not produce something but promise labor or value in exchange for a resource, the only thing you have to sell is the clothes off your back.
And that's what this country has been doing for 30,
unidentified
Well, Tim, part of a service economy is the idea that like construction services, for instance.
Like we still produce a lot of housing in this country.
So let's go back to the main point I said of the resources we need for those services to exist are produced by foreign countries for which we give them money.
They don't need to buy our service from us because their labor is cheaper.
What will they buy?
We don't produce raw materials for the most part, so they're not going to buy from us.
They don't need our service.
unidentified
Wait, this is a complete mess.
The United States produces a lot of raw materials.
We do make a lot of intermediate goods and capital goods and things like that, right?
Corporate securities, control of our corporate systems, our land, our hard assets.
If you don't produce things to trade, which we are producing, which we are not producing to keep up with the consumer economy, you will end up with them buying your hard assets from you.
So, I think that this is, even if you think that it's all going to be okay, it's all going to come out in the wash, etc., etc., there is an underlying anxiety of the American economy, which is, what is the American economy actually backed by?
Now, this is a mistake that I actually think Trump makes, so, you know, throwing a little shade to the right, is that the main thing that we do is services, and we also do defense.
We are the American, you know, we are, for better or worse, the world police.
So anyways, but the point is, so this is actually where I get frustrated with the Trump admin, though, because they're effectively saying, we don't need soft power, why do we need to be involved in East Africa?
We don't need soft power, why are we involved in West Africa, Asia, whatever.
We're talking about the welfare state here.
We will move back to it, I just want to make this point because I think it's important.
I have no problems moving back to welfare, but I want to make this point.
Is that the underlying anxiety of the American conservative, I think, even if they're not able to articulate it, is that effectively we're selling tax software.
To the international economy, that's actually something that my mother does.
But realistically, eventually, those economies are going to complexify to the point that they can produce their own domestic software, and they're not going to need American software in order to do it.
This is to the tunes of billions of dollars, by the way.
I know I'm a very verbose person, but I've also been very patient.
So the other thing, though, that backs the American economy is defense.
And so the reason why I get frustrated with the Trump admin is because Because in my opinion, you see Marco Rubio in a meeting.
It looks like he wants to eat a gun.
I think the reason why he wants to eat a gun is because America is giving away its soft power.
And then also in our hard power, the MAGA movement is not interested in flexing international soft power.
And so I look at the American economy, which is primarily like digital services in the defense industry.
And if we're not selling our hard power, and if digital services will be replaced by domestic competitors eventually, what the hell is the American economy backed by?
And I worry about that for the future of the next American century.
Just real quick to pull it all back, just to connect this.
The reason that this came up is because how do we fund a welfare state?
Yeah, and I can answer.
unidentified
So I think we hear a lot more talk like this in small countries, right?
So small countries will phrase it like, well, we need to learn how to climb the value chain.
We need to climb the value chain, right?
And so what they're essentially saying is...
Kind of similar to what you guys are saying.
We need to find ways to be able to export goods that people want to buy because we want to get foreign currency reserves and we want to invest in foreign capital, things like that.
We need to be able to import the things that we need for machines.
If you wanted to talk about, hey, we need a coherent strategy for the United States to innovate, to climb the value chain, to produce things that people need, I don't know who would really disagree with that.
Again, that's a completely separate conversation from the welfare state.
Now, if you wanted to make the case that, oh, well, the...
The welfare state is limiting our ability to produce technology?
So I think what Tim and I are kind of poking at, maybe not masterfully, but we're poking at it, is that in order to have enough wealth, resources, money, time, energy, in order to create the welfare state, you need to actually have goods and services produced that you're selling to people who are interested in purchasing them.
Another thing that I forgot a moment ago in order to say that it seems like our economy is backed by is...
Being the world's reserve currency?
And also being heavily invested in the security of the international energy industry, effectively oil and petroleum.
And so the thing is, if we see people drifting away from us, for instance, Iran with Russia and China, then let's say that Saudi Arabia, BRICS, all that kind of stuff, they're moving away from our currency.
And this is, again, where I get frustrated with the current administration, is that it seems like we're hurting ourselves and potentially these precarious things on which the entire American commercial empire is built is kind of like...
The floor is being pulled out underneath us.
Now, if we want to move back to welfare to just like, how do we create this kind of thing?
And we just want to say, we are going to make enough money that we can tax in order to create a welfare state.
Well, but I don't, again, I don't think the anxiety is totally relevant.
So for instance, there's only one country where we have, you know, a global reserve currency, right?
You know, it's America.
America has, you know, the global reserve currency, right?
Now, obviously, a lot of other currencies are held in reserve.
America just dominates that, essentially.
Now, when we look at all these other countries that are not the global reserve currency, Australia, Norway, the UK, New Zealand,
They have huge welfare states, right?
They have bigger welfare states, more expansive welfare states than America does, right?
And so when we try to link these two arguments and say, oh, well, if we don't have the global reserve currency and if we have even more massive deindustrialization, that's going to cause us to not be able to have some adequate level of welfare state.
Why don't we see that in all these other countries?
Is the reason why all those countries that you just listed I think are comfortable with the United States as the global reserve currency is because our involvement in the energy industry internationally, our involvement in security internationally, and they look to us as the world leader.
So that's where I get pissed at the current administration because it feels like they want to give away our position.
And then I think that eventually if it got bad enough, there would be these orbiters.
Orbiting nations that would say...
Why are we deferring to the United States?
They're psychotic and they're giving up their power and they're screwing us over.
We spend about 3.5% of GDP on our defense industry.
Obviously, that includes all the international security that we provide.
If we were to ask all these countries, we've got countries like Iceland and Norway and Australia that are spending 45% of GDP on all their different government programs, which includes their own militaries, obviously.
If we were to say, if you tick that up to 46.5%, What, is Australia going to completely collapse?
Their welfare state's not going to be sustainable?
But this gets into something that we brought up earlier, which is immigration and integration.
So I think that what's effectively happened over the past century without an explanation to the American people or the developed world is that we saw birth rates all trend towards two per 100,000.
And effectively, even if you look at West Africa, East Africa, all that kind of stuff, they might be at four right now.
They're trending towards two, right?
And then a lot of developed countries.
Yeah, exactly.
The current, I think we're at 1.66 as a nation, which includes Hispanics who have a higher birth rate than the North European Caucasian population.
So then this gets into immigration and integration.
You say, well, we can use immigration as an economic stopgap in order to offset some of these challenges that we have with the welfare state.
But then what I'm gonna say,
We're at 1.5.
I know that not a lot of people in Chad believe me, but I do have conservative tendencies.
As a conservative, I'm going to say that integration, if you're going to have immigration...
Integration has to be a core component of that.
We need to have a national message.
What does it mean to be American?
What do we believe in?
What are our principles?
And we also have to force people to integrate into that because, as an example, our labor force participation rate hovers around 60% right now, which, by the way, decreased substantively since the 2008 market collapse because I think people stopped believing in the economy as much.
And then when you look at the Scandinavian countries, the Scandinavian countries, as an example, I know I'm picking the high example, but I'm going to be a dick about it.
How do you bump labor force participation rate by 10%?
unidentified
Well, so you've kind of fallen into one of my points, right?
So that's what I was going to say, was that if we look at those societies that have much more generous welfare benefits, they have higher labor force participation, both in general and also prime age, and they also have higher...
Now, it's fair to say that...
If you have a generous welfare state, it's not going to cause people to just – all of them are just going to collapse out of the job force because we're going to get on these generous benefits.
That doesn't happen in the countries that have very generous benefits.
So to your question – You're going to have to address that specifically.
I would argue that they have an industrious culture, and you said no.
Why?
unidentified
I don't know.
So I think that for the most part – obviously, I'm sure culture has an effect on the margin, right?
But the big things, right?
So why has labor force changed over time?
Look at America.
America, in terms of prime age labor force participation, so people between 25 and 54, the people who really should be working if you want your economy to be healthy, that's at record levels in America.
There is a story, though, that did come out recently.
I would obviously have to look at the statistical data rather than just a random editorial, but there was something saying that effectively, like, the next generation, I guess it's alpha, as they're coming into the workforce, there's, like, 25%?
The reason why I asked about the point at which if you tax people too much, the system breaks, is that we are going to have in 10 years 58 million boomers projected, 70-ish million millennials.
I know millennials aren't dying of old age, but there's general mortality.
It's kind of sad.
And Gen Z will be around 68 million.
So we're going to need a labor force to support...
In 10 years, the boomers on Social Security, 50 million, but there's only going to be 40-some-odd million Gen Alpha to begin entering that workforce.
The solution then for that issue is going to be we're going to have to tax people more.
The issue with mass migration, as we've seen from the Democratic Party, which is largely unskilled labor, is that labor force of a country is going to be divided by, you know, a wave of from high skill down to low skill.
You can't just flood the low skill bracket and leave the mid to high skills.
You can have a Chinatown where they only speak Chinese if they're producing things to treat with other people.
The issue is normally the way the labor force expands is that a new generation enters the low-skill portion of the workforce and then gains those skills over time.
And then some people jump to the high point.
Some people are geniuses.
Some people are dumb.
Non-skilled labor, you're going to keep seeing a collapse of the mid-range and the high-range, meaning all of the higher-level functions are going to be strained and collapse, and you can't have everyone fighting over the same jobs in the low- You've got to boy, if you'll indulge me.
80% of immigration into the United States is going to be Hispanics, right?
So what I'm talking about with integration is we need to look at school.
And I hate that conservatives are retreating from school.
We need to look at that as a socialization apparatus in order to prepare the next generation for the workforce.
And we have looked at it that way for a very long time.
My frustration with MAGA and some of the walking away from education movements and the gutting of the DOE, we don't have to get into details.
But the reason why I get frustrated with that is because effectively what you're saying is, everyone, every man for himself.
And so we have people who are going to be homeschooled.
We have people who are going to go to private school.
They might do well individually.
But when we're talking about on a culture-wide basis, if we're decreasing the quality of education, then effectively what we're not doing is we're not socializing that next generation and we're making it more difficult.
You're saying that flooding the bottom tier?
I would want the bottom tier within two or three generations to be climbing to the higher echelons.
Why not?
I'm Irish.
I'm a mud-dwelling, bog-dwelling, rock-throwing...
Okay, a substantive amount of these, though, are not questions.
They're statements.
They're problems that you and I are coming up with that are effectively going to affect the way that we said.
And then you're using what I would say is pretty sanitized language in order to describe things that are actually kind of, like, worrisome to the fiscal and social conservatives of the country.
So what I see when the population goes down and that we only have so many options, which is immigration, and you say it's a distribution issue, what you're saying is more taxes.
Well, for better or worse, fiscal...
I would love to hear how we need to increase distribution without increasing taxes.
So if the excess resources generated per person is, let's just say, like 1% of a labor unit, whatever that means.
Let's say a human requires 80 labor units.
I'm using a fictional thing to represent value.
And they produce 100.
That means one person doing work will provide an excess of 20. Now, hold on.
That person wants that 20 for themselves.
I get to go to the movies.
I don't have to work on the weekends.
So when we decide we're going to tax a portion of the units they produce, if we take one...
Unit of labor from that person, they might not notice and say, okay, fine, at least I got enough time off on the weekends.
But that one is not going to sustain a single individual.
If you have 100 million people and they're all working, you're now generating a ton of excess labor, which can be distributed as a welfare state.
But with a population collapse, your volume is going to decrease, and the total amount will exponentially decrease that you can support in a welfare state due to a decrease in volume.
In standard business, this requires a price increase.
You can either sell one million widgets for a dollar, or you can sell one widget for a million dollars if you want to pay your bills.
Yeah, so Econoboy, the question is, is your answer to that problem, because Tim and I have brought this problem up repeatedly, is your answer effectively automation, integration, better tax structure?
unidentified
Well, yes and no.
So I already said about 45 minutes ago or something like that, pretty close to the beginning of the conversation, that it's entirely possible that if we become South Korea 20 or 30 years from now, right, where we have just...
I was going to say this real quick because you brought up U.S. debt, so I brought up the U.S. debt clock.
I think it's fair to say that we've already traveled well beyond the capability of the welfare system, and now the ship is sinking and we're planning like it's not.
You know, we have, I mean, there's, you have to look at sort of taxes as a percent of GDP, like how much does the United States tax compared to other countries?
The reason, the only thing I was going to say was, the reason why we run such high deficits is because we just choose to.
Like, we could obviously tax more and solve the fiscal problems that we have.
So if I said something like, you know, I personally got unemployment benefits before, and it really helped me.
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 a hundred bucks a week, some ridiculous amount of money.
But that fed me.
And I'm appreciative of that system.
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.
But that is the minority of homeless people.
Most homeless people are homeless because they cannot not be homeless, and a lot of them want to be homeless.
So, for instance, there's a group that calls themselves the Avrats in Washington.
These are young people who refuse to get off the streets.
They want to be a part of this group.
They receive welfare benefits.
Then in California, one of the biggest problems with homeless people in California where I worked is if you go to them and say, we will literally take a house.
It's a three-bedroom.
You can live in it like a house.
They go, no, we refuse.
Give me money instead.
And if you walk up to them and say, I would like to give you food or I'd like to give you clothing, they would say, give me money instead.
What they end up doing is they end up receiving benefits, and they use it on—what we see a lot of is they'll stand outside of a supermarket.
They'll tell young people, I got $200,000 in food benefits.
I'll buy whatever you want.
Just give me $100.
And then young people—not always young people.
This is big in Seattle.
They'll be like, deal.
I get $200 worth of groceries for me, and you get $100 for heroin.
And that's what they end up doing.
unidentified
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, Tim, obviously, so we— We're now talking about mechanically, how do you distribute benefits and how should we prevent people from using benefits for drugs or whatever?
Or people say, if you give child allowances, what if the money doesn't actually go to the children, right?
And here's what I'll say.
I'll make a big point and then I'll directly address your point.
The big point is, there's just so much research on this.
There's so much research on what do poor people do with the benefits that they get.
What do they do?
And the overwhelming amount of that money, like 90, 95, 99% of it, depending on the program, goes towards just the things that poor people need to live.
It goes towards rent.
It goes towards food.
It goes towards their car payments or whatever their circumstances are.
Now, to the exact type of person that you're talking about, Tim, which is a huge minority of the people that are receiving benefits.
I mean, think about it.
There's 70 million people on Medicaid, another 70 million on Medicare.
There's hundreds of millions of people in this country who are receiving some kind of cash payment or government benefit.
The minority of the people that you're talking about, how should we handle them?
I can tell you what some other countries do.
For instance, I think it's in Finland.
You get cash benefits, which is called your housing allowance, but it's just cash.
It's meant to go towards your housing expenses.
There are some people who have a history of not paying their landlord and just irresponsibly using the money.
They have terrible credit.
And so the state comes in and says, okay, we're just going to directly pay your landlord because we can't trust you with cash.
So there is some paternalism and things like that.
I don't know that you're saying that.
Some conservatives will say, and that's why we just shouldn't have these benefits.
Well, in Econoboy, to kind of move it, because I feel like we're dancing around this point repeatedly, Tim and I, unfortunately for chat, are statists.
So they're like, oh, this is just three filthy communists.
So this is the concern, though, is that we have seen...
Perverse incentive systems destroy economies, okay?
So, as an example, Venezuela, it was effectively like a mono, what would you call it, like a mono-commodity economy for a long time, generous welfare state, but what happened when their commodity was oil, what happened when they kicked out all the capitalists, and what happened when the oil economy didn't do what they were predicting it to do,
it effectively destroyed their economy.
And so as a result, you have people who are starving, all that kind of stuff.
That's something that I absolutely want to prevent here.
But if we look at Maoist China, if we look at the Soviet Union, if we look at historical examples of socialism, I think you identify as a social democrat.
The socialism has been disastrous through command economy flubs.
Now, not just that, but we also see micro disasters.
So if we're talking about like California or the Pacific Northwest, I've had these conversations.
I know it's anecdotal.
However, they're not pleasant places to live in certain regards, even for the ultra wealthy.
My family, I hate to bring it up, but I have a family member who the husband makes around, you know, probably more than $150,000.
the wife makes more than $150,000 or whatever, but because they were living in the Pacific Northwest in a major urban center, they effectively had to walk through drug-addicted homeless people who were being subsidized by the state who made the common areas less livable.
And so that's where the intent behind what you're saying can be 100% noble.
Let's take care of homeless people.
Let's get them food.
Let's make sure that they have clean needles so they don't pass diseases.
But there are rotted urban centers inside the United States of America, particularly in, let's say it, left leaning cities where the perverse incentives have overtaken the original noble intent.
And so that's what I think a lot of people are worried about.
unidentified
I'm angry.
Gavin Newsom to be in charge of designing my ideal welfare state.
Sure. I don't think, I think that there are a lot of...
Some Swedish guy.
Yeah, exactly.
We need some Swedish guy.
But no, I mean, yeah, there's a lot of problems within, I think, democratic politics with regards to how we talk about these things and certainly the solutions.
It's ironic because, like,
You have a lot of Democrats that they're like, oh, we need to do this, that, and the other to prevent exactly what you guys are talking about.
But the answers are actually a lot simpler.
So I advocate for things like universalizing welfare benefits, having an efficient tax code.
You talk about homeless people in these urban cities.
One of the things that I find so interesting when you see people who travel to Nordic countries and they come back, one of the first takeaways that they have is...
There's just no homeless people.
What the hell?
I thought you go to a major city, there's just a shitload of homeless people.
Same thing with Canada and a lot of those urban centers.
It's like, well, what are those countries doing?
It's not that they don't have people that struggle with housing, but what do they do?
They offer...
Pretty generous benefits to people to get into housing.
They offer a housing-first approach to people.
They do jobs training.
There's just this holistic benefit.
And they tend to have either a non-market system or an efficient market system for distributing housing.
It ends up being very affordable.
Take a city like San Francisco.
A city like San Francisco will dump a ton of money, like nominal dollars, into public housing.
Oh, we're going to build public housing, and we're going to let homeless people live there, and then they're not homeless.
They'll get on their feet and all that stuff.
One of the biggest problems with these cities is not the fact that they want to offer benefits, which is kind of, it seems like how we're framing the conversation.
It's not the benefits themselves.
It's the fact that in San Francisco, the zoning ordinances are so ridiculously constrictive that to build like 100 units of public housing costs $100 million or some ridiculous amount.
And so that's a problem holistically of governance, but it's certainly not a problem with the welfare state or the idea that we would offer things.
This is a safe space amongst three communists who are all discussing how to distribute the economy.
Okay, this is a safe space.
Share the wealth.
Yeah, right.
So we are talking about how we distribute these things, but I think that, so for instance, exactly what you're saying with housing.
There are a lot of well-intended left-leaning people, liberals, Democrats, all that kind of stuff, and they talk about things that I think are criminally insane as if it's completely
Okay. And so the reason why is because the cities, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, right?
The biggest cities in the world or whatever.
They're already very claustrophobic.
Tens of thousands of people crammed together elbow to elbow, all that kind of stuff.
Their solution to housing costs in these already very claustrophobically built cities that people want to live in for, I would say, intangible reasons.
They want to be cool.
They want to be in New York.
They want to be in Los Angeles.
They want to be in Miami.
Their solution is to take a 1,500-square-foot apartment and then split it up into three 500-square-foot units.
That doesn't sound like human thriving to me.
That sounds like a rat's nest.
So that's where the intent of some of these policies, it's like we need to think more comprehensively about the kind of lives that we want to build for human beings.
And I feel like the left sometimes, generally speaking, has very terrible ideas.
You're saying it's only an effect of governance, which I agree with, but the governance matters because what's popular on the left, some of it's incredibly stupid.
unidentified
Well, look, if we're talking about...
We have an immovable object and unstoppable force here, right?
We have a shitload of people who want to live in L.A. My autism and your autism.
Right, yeah.
We have a shitload of people who want to live in L.A. And we obviously have...
A limited geographic area, right?
And so the natural solution to that, that Yimby's would suggest, is build densely.
Now, obviously, hey, if you want to have a 2,000 square foot home in the middle of LA, it's just going to be really expensive, right?
Even if you do the policies that Yimby's are talking about, right?
You're going to have to pay a lot more for a huge apartment.
But I don't know that that's necessarily bad for people's culture or sense of community.
Look at a city like Tokyo, biggest city on the planet.
It's an insanely sprawling, just metropolis, right?
They have...
Very affordable units.
They have units that are much more expensive, but it's very, very densely built.
When you go to places like that, everyone who visits there, people who live there, there's a, not famous, but, you know, he's a Noah Pinion, Noah Smith, he's a guy who blogs a lot.
He actually lives in Japan most of the time, in Tokyo.
You know...
They don't talk about, like, I guess in some sense it's like, oh, I wish I had more space in some intrinsic sense.
But it's like, damn, it's so nice to live in a dense area with, like, all this stuff around me.
There's so much to do.
That's the reason why people go to cities like that, right?
You can't have your cake and eat it, too, and be like, I should have a $100,000 home in a place that millions of people want to live.
We could argue that this is an issue of governance, though.
So, for instance, here's your commie take of the day.
I think that there effectively should be affordable districts within the city where you just know that your working class is going to work there.
So, for instance, New York City, one of the most expensive, beautiful cities.
Well, not beautiful.
It's actually a rat's nest.
But it's one of the most sought-after, is what I was looking for, cities on the planet.
But, you know, basically swaths of Brooklyn should be held for the working class because they are the people who make the city run and they should not have to have a three-hour commute in order to make it.
No, my point is the authority structure is completely tied to its economic structure.
So let me tell you, I went to Singapore and they had a problem with a bunch of, I think it was Filipino and Indian people who had come then to be used as cheap labor.
They were told, you will do this or else.
And when they started protesting, they arrested them all and beat them publicly in the street.
So when you get cheap slave labor from foreign countries to maintain your standard of living under threat of mercilessly beating them in public, you can maintain those standards of living.
Absolutely, I will not, because you keep changing the subject.
You are trying to act like the social order.
Oh, you're not going to let me make a point.
You keep changing the point that the social order of a society is connected to its spending.
Houses in Chicago are falling apart, and because their public housing has fallen apart in Chicago, Because people mistreat the properties, do drugs, and fire guns at them.
If you did that in Singapore, you would be beaten in public.
unidentified
So what Singapore does is not just that, Tim.
You'd agree they don't have one policy.
What Connor said was, I think that working class people should be able to live in city centers without all these different bidding wars happening.
And they just essentially get press out of the area.
How does Singapore do that?
Well, they don't do that by beating people with canes.
They have a non-market public housing system, right?
That's the thing you wouldn't let me make the point on.
That's the point, right?
That you have to have all of these things together.
You have to have an efficient system for building housing, obviously.
I guess if you're Tim or Connor, maybe you, I guess, need to have some crazy stuff, right?
But, hold on, there's a point here that I think Tim is making, very passionately, that I agree with, which is effectively that if you're going to have a welfare state, you need a level of what's considered, particularly in America, socially conservative enforcement.
Because what happens, what we're worried about, what we're talking about, when we're talking about entire areas of LA being overrun with the homeless, when we're talking about the Pacific Northwest having all these issues with needles on the street, when we're talking about San Francisco having human feces and that just being like a normal thing, what we're talking about is we're talking about the state intervening in order to try to make people's lives better,
but not feeling like they have the authority to enforce equality or standards.
And so that's where I don't think that you can have one without the other.
unidentified
To address your points, both of your points directly, right, when it comes to like, oh, what do we do with these people who are just on drugs and they're fucking everything up in downtown for us?
Obviously, look, I mean, I think, look at the city of Houston.
The city of Houston, they decreased their homeless population by about 50% over the last 12 years.
And the city of Houston is a city with a revenue cap, right?
They literally cannot raise taxes to, like, infinite levels because the people say you can't do that, right?
We had to figure out a creative way to do this.
What they did was they had a camping ban mixed with public housing for homeless people.
And essentially they said, hey, if you're homeless and there's room in the shelters, you've got to go to the shelters.
And then the shelters are connected with resources for homeless people.
Hey, rehab, clean needle, all this kind of stuff.
That decreased the homeless population by like 50%, right?
Now, to be fair to Tim's point, we didn't do that by beating the shit out of homeless people on the street, but we did say you have to do certain things and there's certain obligations that you have.
I don't necessarily disagree with that.
My only point about Singapore was that they have a huge system of public non-market housing, which is one of the fundamental ways that you can extend affordable housing to people in addition to those behavioral things you're talking about.
Well, Tim, I mean, obviously, I don't know that...
Look, I'm not...
I'm from Texas, not Portland, right?
So maybe I had a friend...
This is a funny story.
I had a friend who...
She lives from Texas as well.
She worked in San Francisco for a while.
And she's super woke, liberal, socialist type.
And she comes back from San Francisco and she's like, you know, honestly...
They're way too far.
They're way more woke than even your Texas socialists, I guess, which is kind of funny to think.
So I'm from Texas.
I'm not from San Francisco.
If you say, hey, you can't 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.
You don't need to spend as much money on property when it's not being vandalized because you beat the people mercilessly in public if they do.
If the cost of Pruitt-Igoe was $100 million to fix because of the vandalism, and the cost to fix the Singaporean is $1 million because of the merciless beatings, one can be sustained and one cannot.
Yes, we need to be interested in that.
But I will, I must say this, I must add, I can solve the gang violence.
Four shootings in Chicago was they would force you to wear a diaper and a baby bonnet and make you crawl across Roosevelt Avenue while saying, I'm a big baby boo-boo on camera while everyone got to watch and throw popcorn at you.
Not a single one of these people would commit that crime.
When people feel disrespected, they kill each other.
And this is a total aside.
I just wanted to bring it up in the context.
If we did have cruel and unusual punishment, and what I mean by that is not torturous maiming or anything like that, but literally, we're going to make you wear a diaper and bunny hop down the street, and then you're done.
But Tim, this is where we get into an argument about authoritarianism versus liberalism or libertarianism philosophically, where are we talking about an individual society where people are free to live with maximal liberty, or are we talking about an authoritarian society?
And here's the thing.
As much as I'm for compassionate beatings, I'm a huge fan of this, I still like living in a relatively speaking free society.
This is why I can travel to see you.
This is why I can speak my mind on a public platform, all that kind of stuff.
And so I'm looking for...
and security, and I'm trying to do that as best as I can.
That's kind of what we're arguing about from a policy perspective.
But, Econo, you know, you say that I'm dragging away from things, but I'm going to drag it away one more time, okay?
So, let's say...
That ideally, in major metropolitan areas, we allow cops, firefighters, EMTs, and retail and service workers who actually make the city function to live in low-cost housing so they can make the city function, okay?
I get it.
Socialism, communism, whatever.
Check in Spurg out.
However...
If we see a collapse, a correlated collapse in the birth rate, where our major urban centers actually have, I don't know, a less than 2.15 birth rate, what I would probably say is that that's bad urban design.
It's a bad culture, and we shouldn't be incentivizing it.
And I do think that the United States, not just the United States, I think the entire globe.
Needs to stabilize from a population perspective in order for us to be a species.
unidentified
We can tie these two things together.
For instance, I think there was some evidence out of France.
They studied their child allowance program.
It's like, hey, when you give people cash, one of the reasons why people don't have kids is because they just don't feel like they can afford it.
Obviously, that's a big reason.
Or they might have less kids than they otherwise would have.
But getting on to culture, I feel like there is a antenatal popular wing, especially on social media, of the left.
Where liberals and progressives effectively say, your life is for you.
There's no afterlife.
So what you need to do is you need to maximize your pleasure in this life and you need to minimize your pain.
And so as a result, don't have kids.
And so I think that this combined with the technologies of condoms and the technologies of birth control, that part of the world is going to be a part of the world.
So for my thing is like...
Are you pronatal?
Are you going to have kids?
unidentified
I mean, well, yeah, I don't want to talk about my family planning.
Fully admitting, I just had my first kid this year.
28 is old to have a kid, historically.
unidentified
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, obviously...
I'm way old.
Historically, that's true.
But I think when we talk about collapsing birth rates, actually, that's a good segue, is that when we talk about birth rate collapse, what you find is really not that people are just...
How do I put this?
It's not that people are deciding to have less kids necessarily.
When you look at birth rates by age cohort, you see that...
She was looking at our baby daughter and started crying because of just how much she loved the baby and how cute she was, and I started laughing, and then she smiled, and it's like, that is a degree of joy and happiness you don't experience without kids, and people are being told not to do it.
Women are being told to go get jobs instead.
I gotta be honest.
I kind of feel like when you look at a man or a woman looking at their children...
Or I'll tell you one of the most horrifying things.
There was a viral video several years ago of a man holding his teenage son who died.
And the sound he was making was like the wail of demons emerging from him.
It was horrifying.
Like the amount of emotion you get from children is being cut out from people who don't understand it.
And we're telling women who have biological restrictions that men don't have to go get jobs instead.
To go get educated and get jobs.
And I'm fine with education and jobs for women so long as they're aware the idea of having it all is not the same for women as it is for men.
If you'll indulge me a quick emotional aside, okay?
I served in the military.
I enlisted in 2006.
I got out in 2010.
Very intense.
Very cool experience.
It made people I loved.
It very...
Overall crazy thing.
Got my four-year degree, became a law enforcement officer, served for four years there.
Also very intense, very crazy experiences.
I'm a rational person.
I try to rationalize my emotions away from me, where if I feel a feeling, I try to process it real quick, figure out what it is, and then push it away.
When I had a child, I was not able to rationalize my emotion.
It's so overwhelming.
It's so powerful that, yeah, I'm tired.
Yeah, I'm grumpy.
Yeah, I'm rude.
Yeah, like all this kind of crap.
The kids are such an overwhelming, emotionally deep kind of thing that I think that getting drunk and trying to hook up with chicks or whatever, it's all, no offense to anybody in chat, but it's bullshit.
Well, I mean, I think to you guys' point, this is, I think, in some sense where people from the left kind of come from, where we have this sort of...
Solidaristic empathy for that kind of situation.
I think children especially are the most defensible group to...
Give welfare benefits too, right?
Because obviously children don't choose to be born into poor families, even to the extent that we might think that they're going to be poor later in life because of generational poverty.
Well, there's still a really, really strong reason.
There's a very strong intuition, I guess, that most people have that, look, children just don't fundamentally choose their circumstances.
And so they should be very well supported by the community.
And in this case, I'm using the state as kind of a proxy of the community that you get some sort of basic benefits when you're born as a child.
But I would just extend to the point that you guys are making.
I would extend that same thing over to all these other groups, you know, people who have disabilities that aren't within their control.
So what I was going to say is I'm actually happy with the large welfare state as long as it's enforced with requirements and we don't tolerate hedonism and abuse.
I think a lot of people, even on the right, would agree with, here's a guy who was a carpenter for 20 years, and then he lost his hand in an accident, now he's struggling to work.
Let's help that guy out.
Most people are going to be like, okay, and the guy's going to say, I will, he says, I will do any work that I can do.
I'm so grateful to all of you helping me.
Then there's a morbid, lubious, homeless person saying, I refuse to get a job.
There's going to be a line where it's like, conservatives and most people are going to say, I think most people are going to say, I will gladly help anyone who is trying, who helped to help themselves, and they need to lift up, but I don't like the abuse.
unidentified
Before you jump in, Connor, let me just respond to that.
So a lot of conservatives will say stuff like that.
I'm not saying you're a conservative, but a lot of conservatives will say stuff like that.
They'll say, oh, well...
You know, I'll gladly help the deserving poor, right?
The people who really deserve their benefits.
But then there's this group of people who, I don't know if we agree necessarily, but that is a minority of people who get benefits, like a very small minority.
Most of these people that I'm talking about, again, I don't think there's necessarily bad behavior.
Well, the evidence, I think, would speak against that.
But the point is, though, is that when we start to say, oh, well, in order to achieve benefits, right, you have to...
Whatever.
Like, you have to fill out so many job applications, and you have to do drug tests, and you have to do X, Y, and Z kind of different benefits tests and means tests, right?
That's a burden that's applied to everyone who applies for those benefits, right?
We spend more time administering benefits to government employees, and what we see is the deserving poor that Tim is describing that so many conservatives have in their head, they are disproportionately the victims of stuff like that because their benefits end up getting cut.
Maybe not a weight tax, but would you incentivize like, for instance, let's say that we have welfare recipients who are receiving thousands of dollars per month or whatever.
Would you say, hey, as a part of this...
You need to show up to physical training Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 6 a.m.
If it's bad, I think one thing to underscore is that if it's bad for poor people, it's bad for everyone.
Working out is good for you.
Well, being morbidly obese is obviously bad no matter what.
And I think with healthcare specifically, you tied it to Medicaid recipients.
We have a completely, in some sense, a socialized healthcare system.
Because you either have private insurance, which is obviously cost-sharing, or you have public systems, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, the VA, all that stuff.
Pretty much no matter what, we have this sort of communitarian, like, we're subsidizing from the healthy to the sick.
And so we have a generic problem with people being obese, right?
And so if that's the case, then you'd want to have these kind of requirements probably for everyone, right?
You want to have, you know, you want to tax on healthy foods, and you'd want to say...
I didn't hear a great response to the insurance thing.
Like with the healthcare industry specifically, right?
We're all in a big pool essentially, right?
There's no way to not basically subsidize someone's unhealthy decisions, this and that.
Obviously, if you might make unhealthy decisions, like some people maybe through the course of exercise, like maybe your preferred form of exercise.
overweight well i i can respond well i was just gonna the last thing like maybe your preferred uh preferred form of exercise uh like me right is like doing jujitsu and wrestling like that's a dangerous fucking sport if i like bust my knee doing jujitsu like i am i'm exercising right i'm doing a responsible
Well, but here's the thing, though, is that once we start saying, you can do some, like, some disabilities are your fault, but some aren't.
I didn't have to do jujitsu.
I didn't exercise a certain amount.
Again, this is a burden that's applied to everyone, even the deserving poor.
And what ends up happening in practice, when we see all these different tests done from state-level experiments to cities to federal benefits to different countries, what ends up happening is not solving the problems that you're talking about.
We don't see obesity rates go down amongst poor people.
When things like that are implemented, what we see is the deserving poor that you want to actually help, they just aren't able to access their benefits.
Yeah, so what Econo said, which I did here, which is you're adding...
You have to structure these things properly, where if you're adding these things, you're effectively adding an administrative cost to the distribution of the benefit.
And so realistically, for instance, do we want to hire a retired drill instructor to meet up with homeless, obese people Monday, Wednesdays, Fridays?
Well, you want to pay him 60 grand a year.
I guarantee you.
I mean, I think it's hilarious.
I want to do it too.
I just don't know if the rest of the American public wants.
It's not authoritarian if they're asking for my money.
In exchange for my money, you have to exercise.
And it's not always about exercise.
Some people can't.
A guy who's got brittle bone disease...
Right.
We need to make sure that you are being as healthy as possible.
We're giving you Medicare and Medicaid.
When you go to the doctor, if the doctor says, and I know that there's going to be corruption in doctors, but if the doctor's like, you are overweight.
However, I do understand that your arms are broken and your legs are broken.
We are not holding that against you.
We are going to maximize.
It's about being responsible with the money being gifted to you when you can't provide for other people.
unidentified
Well, here's, I think, the difference between you and I, Tim, is that I think what it's more about is just what's the best way to do the things that you want to happen, right?
Like, okay, we have this problem.
We have a bunch of obese people.
I think the last time I saw was about 10% of our healthcare expenditure could be related to problems with people being obese, right?
So about 1.5%, 1.6% of GDP or something like that, right?
Which is a lot of money, obviously.
And so it's like, okay, well, what's the best way to reduce people's obesity and also extend the benefits that we think that they need?
First of all, if we're correlating people over 65 and saying half are obese, we can do a blanket assumption that if they tend to receive Social Security benefits, then there's going to be a same demographic breakdown.
However, I'd actually argue obesity is probably higher because that's why they're collecting benefits, because they are ailed by their obesity.
As you mentioned, obesity is a large factor in why people are suffering medical issues.
unidentified
Well, all I was going to say was that the best way, like, when people are obese, it's because they have easy access to a lot of very sort of dopamine-hitting foods, you could say, right?
And so the best way to solve that problem is not to, again, like, if we have this aggregate problem with obesity, which obviously we do, the best way to solve that problem is not, A minority of the population should have to go to exercise facilities or lose their benefits.
The best way to solve that problem is, hey, universal system of health benefits, which lowers administrative costs, which means there's less government bureaucrats, which is a simpler administration.
It saves costs, obviously, because the government can negotiate those costs.
That's cheaper on that end.
And then on the back end, if I was just going to say on the last thing, on the back end, the more efficient thing to do is to make unhealthy practices more expensive for everyone.
That might mean taxing sugar or having...
You know, taxing sort of caloric density of foods.
These are how you align the incentives properly and efficiently.
And I said, if we extrapolate that, we can assume that you have about a plurality or half of the people over 65 on benefits are at that number, but it's probably higher.
That's why they're getting medical benefits.
unidentified
So you think of all the people in this country, you think most people are on benefits and obese?
Among older adults with obesity, 84% have multiple chronic conditions, which is the 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 healthcare costs and potential need for long-term care.
That's the point.
If you are over 65 and getting medical benefits, it is because you are...
Obesity is a very likely contributor to this, considering half of people over 65 are obese.
The libertarian argument against you would be the people who are not on the government dole, who are not receiving public benefits, should not be compelled to any kind of behavior because they're not receiving any kind of benefit.
So even if you're obese, but you pay your taxes and you're not on government benefits, you shouldn't have to show up Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
unidentified
When it comes to healthcare specifically, they are still taking out of collective pots of money.
We can break bread on the fact that during elementary school, middle school, high school, physical training shouldn't just be some guy smoking a cigarette telling your kids to walk around the lap a few times.
It actually should be, this is how you do a push-up.
This is how you do a pull-up.
This is how you lift weights.
This is the way your cardiovascular system works.
All that kind of stuff.
PT, physical training, should be a course that we take very seriously in America.
And then when I was younger, I was like, you can't make me go and do some random community service.
How dare you?
Now I'm older and I'm like, it's not that we're trying to force you to do something painful.
It's that you're going to high school for a purpose.
To be the best you can be.
To be healthy and fit.
And public school is paid for from my money.
So if you want...
First of all...
There's a lot to fix.
You shouldn't be compelled to go to high school.
They do.
If you do choose to take public benefits to go to school, I don't think it's unreasonable to say, hey, at 18, when you're graduating, for that summer, you're going to go to basic training.
You're going to be stronger.
You're going to be faster.
You're going to be smarter.
And you're going to come out to the workforce the best you can be.
I'll give my hot takes since we're wrapping up and giving hot takes or whatever.
So what I would do is you don't have the franchise.
You don't have the capacity to vote unless you do.
Two years of military, Peace Corps volunteer style, like working for an NGO, or retail or restaurant, because I swear to God, retail or restaurant is so brutal that, you know...
Yeah, so, you know, we did jump a little bit all over the place, but I am happy that we were able to agree on compassionate beatings for people, and then also on poor people fat camp.
If you enjoyed, you probably hated my last experience based off of the comment section.
However, if you enjoyed this show or if you enjoyed me in the previous one, type in Valor Media Network, common spelling V-A-L-O-R.
That is a new channel that's starting up.
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I'm live there Monday through Friday, you know, five hours a day.
So if you enjoyed it, please come over and check us out.
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unidentified
Yeah, sure.
My name is Econoboy.
It was really fun being here.
I do want to shout out Matt Brunig.
He's been a pretty influential.
I was very pro-welfare before I got onto his writings, but he helped crystallize a lot of things.
And so if you're interested in reading more about that, you can follow his stuff at The People's Policy Project or obviously my stuff, econoboy.substack.com.
It was a really fun conversation.
And yeah, I think my closing thoughts on this general argument would be that, look, there's a lot of people in society who don't work, who can't work, who...
We think children would have some sort of very fundamental right to benefits.
And we need to give benefits to those people to help them.
And certainly the most effective way to lower poverty is to do those things.
And that's pretty much what I try to crystallize and argue for here.
And hopefully that was at least a good summary of what people should do.
