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July 25, 2025 - The Culture War - Tim Pool
01:59:32
Overspending, Welfare & BLOAT Will END The US w/ Conor (Counterpoints)

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) @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

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@counterpointspol
01:25:55
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tim pool
32:38
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Speaker Time Text
tim pool
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Culture War.
A 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, but 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 or destroy the United States.
I got a couple gentlemen with me.
Sir, would you like to introduce yourself?
@counterpointspol
Yeah, hi.
Great to be back.
My name's Connor.
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.
So that's what I'll be arguing today.
tim pool
Right on, sir, who are you?
@counterpointspol
Hey, everyone.
Go buy a conniboy on YouTube and all the things.
I have a substack, conniboy.substack.com.
I do a show with Pisco, actually a soon-to-be reoccurring guest on the Timcast.
And so I'm here to defend the welfare state and government spending.
And my preview for my audience was I never miss a chance to defend big government.
So that's why I'm here.
tim pool
Well, here's my question for you.
Are you a small government guy?
@counterpointspol
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.
tim pool
So this is interesting because you're like a medium government guy.
@counterpointspol
I'm a medium government guy.
tim pool
Versus a big government guy.
@counterpointspol
Exactly.
Yeah, Connor said that he's like, I'm looking forward to this opportunity to shift this conversation a little bit.
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.
tim pool
I must admit, too, when people call me a statist, because I say things like, I'm okay with public expenses for roads.
unidentified
Yeah.
And then they're like, oh, no, private tolls, but that's socialism.
tim pool
Let's start with the biggest government ever.
What does that mean to you, big government and spending?
Do you mean like deficit spending and unlimited budgets or what?
@counterpointspol
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 institutions 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 trouble accessing the labor market, right?
So we've got unemployed people, caregivers, elderly people, children, disabled people, students, right?
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, 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 the same two people, identical twins, one makes 70 grand, the other makes 70 grand, they live in the same city.
One of them lives completely alone, just in a studio apartment, and then the other one has 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, things like that.
tim pool
Well, let me ask you, or why not just let them die?
@counterpointspol
Well, I mean, of course, that is always.
unidentified
Yeah.
@counterpointspol
That is an intuition some people might have.
I mean, I happen to, you know, I believe in a state.
I believe in having a government.
I believe in, in some senses, collective responsibilities, you know, communitary, communitarianism and things like that.
And so.
tim pool
Oh, you're a communist.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, yeah, of course.
No.
tim pool
I am kidding.
@counterpointspol
No, I believe in community, right?
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.
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, like, we have this schism in the United States of America politically, culturally, et cetera, et cetera.
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, et cetera, et cetera.
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 spent 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.
tim pool
So how do we have a system that protects the weak from just being tossed out without creating generational dependencies?
@counterpointspol
Bullying.
tim pool
Bullying.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, so this is a, 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 thoughts on that.
But the thing is, what I get frustrated with with the left, with liberals, with progressives, with leftists, is that they don't seem to have any taste for saying, hey, no, you're actually screwing up.
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.
tim pool
I'm not so sure you guys are going to disagree on a lot of these issues.
@counterpointspol
I can get pretty spicy pretty quick.
tim pool
But you don't want dependent generations that aren't actually contributing, do you?
@counterpointspol
Well, it's an empirical question, right?
So I think that where Connor is mistaken, and I think where a lot of people are mistaken on this, is that if we were to look at people who are born poor, right?
So people born in kind of the bottom 20th percentile of people, this is a pretty poor group of people.
I mean, they consume, it's about, last time I checked the data, there's about 1.6 people on average, obviously, in these households.
They consume about $30,000 worth of things on an annual basis, right?
So about, you know, call it $18,000 per person.
So this is a pretty low-income group of people.
If we were to track those children and say, well, where did they end up as adults?
You know, what you find is that the majority of them end up in a higher quintile than when they were born, right?
And that's only after one generation.
So typically between maybe 35 and 45% of people end up staying in the bottom 20th percentile as they- What specifically?
The people who stay in it.
Yeah, it's about 35 to 45%.
Now, that's only after one generation.
So if we were to, you know, go from 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, you know, essentially an inability to work.
They have disabilities.
They're elderly.
They have caregiving responsibilities at home and they don't have financial support.
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?
They have disabilities.
They're just old at a certain point, right?
Like, you know, these things happen and it plunges people into poverty.
Yes.
tim pool
Do you guys believe in evolution?
@counterpointspol
I do.
I do.
tim pool
That wasn't a trick question.
I know some people don't.
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.
@counterpointspol
This is a J.F. Gary Eppi argument.
tim pool
And I'm not saying it's a fact.
I'm asking you to question.
@counterpointspol
He's asking the question.
I mean, I think that...
So the, or social evolution.
So, okay, I hear what you're saying where you're saying that over generations, 35 to 45% of the people actually end up staying on it.
And as a result, over the course of a matter of time, there's going to be less and less people on it, or the people have more opportunities.
That was just people who were, they stayed poor.
Not necessarily people who stayed on benefits, but that would be even less people.
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, they will, 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 anti-social 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% of the population.
After one generation, right?
So the point that I say is...
And so as a result, majority of people are getting off of the benefits, but there's still a third that stay on?
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.
You know, we have a very complicated system for even getting the benefits.
Obviously, as a veteran, you can probably relate to that somewhat, right?
It actually got better in the past decade, believe it or not.
I think so.
Like Biden and Trump, I guess.
tim pool
It's gone down the consumption of welfare?
What do you mean?
@counterpointspol
I was just talking about the VA, Veterans Affairs.
So basically a decade ago, I would have had all the nightmare stories that everybody was talking about.
You walk in, you can't see anybody, you get a six-month appointment.
They basically just say, hey, hopefully you don't kill yourself.
Good luck.
That's what I experienced like 10 years ago.
tim pool
In Canada?
@counterpointspol
Yeah, they'd be like, hey, maybe kill yourself.
Well, I mean, I'm going to write that down because that's another.
tim pool
That is where ultimately I end up going with my question.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, because are we incentivizing bad behavior?
And then at the end of the day, are we saying, hey, maybe kill yourself?
Well, but Connor, I think we have to stay clear with, again, like what I think is the fundamental purpose of the welfare state, right?
So we have to look at this group of people, right?
Unemployed, caregivers, elderly, children, disabled people, students.
There's no bad behavior in any of that list of people.
But I think that's right.
fiscal conservatives and social conservatives wouldn't necessarily have that beef with it.
What they would have beef with is number one, the parasitic people that we're talking about.
And number two, they would have questions about like, how do we enable society in order to actually support these people?
Fiscal conservatives are some of them.
I hate them viciously.
They're like, well, not with my tax dollars.
Those people drive me crazy and up the wall.
But social conservatives basically say, as an example, we're talking about, you know, this 35 to 45%.
And you're not saying that all of them are bad.
Some of them are disabled.
Some of them are taking care of families.
Overwhelming majority.
Yeah, but the point is that what social conservatives are concerned with is that there does exist a subclass of people who effectively just use benefits as their employment.
And so they bounce on and off of the system over and over again.
There's multiple reasons for that, right?
So there's multiple reasons for that.
So obviously, like you said, benefits are complicated.
Some people fall off.
Different administrations come in.
So people fall off and get back on benefits.
Now, again, I have to keep going back to this is a minority of people.
And of the people who stay on benefits, again, the overwhelming majority are these people that I just described.
Now, for the people that you're describing, this kind of like, oh, these able-bodied people who don't have any sort of ability to be able to, sorry, real quick.
There are people who, we were talking about evolution, which obviously I don't think that you can do that in a few generations.
But there are people who are legitimately disabled, but the reason why they're disabled is because they have bad life habits.
They have drug addictions.
They have lower back pain because they're obese.
They do things that effectively ruin their lives physically, mentally, spiritually.
And then they expect people to perpetuate their existence.
And I think that's what a lot of people get frustrated by.
It's not just a physical issue.
It's also like a spiritual, motivational, cultural issue.
tim pool
Let me just step away from the genetic component of what I ask, 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.
@counterpointspol
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.
Like obviously, if you were to say, like, oh, I sprained my ankle, so give me $1,000 a month in disability, right?
I think most people would say, well, that does sound a little ridiculous, right?
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 know, we have to figure out the details here, right?
But at the end of the day, what I'm making an argument for is kind of twofold, right?
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?
The market fails these people.
We cannot leave the market to its own devices.
These people will just be poor and in poverty.
Quick interjection.
Did you hear about fraternal societies in the early 20th century?
I did hear.
I did watch that debate.
Yeah, my response would just be that I think that people, anarchists who rely on that are, I think, misunderstanding a lot of that history.
That's being polite.
Can you be ruder?
Well, I mean, well, it kind of goes to your point, though, Connor.
When you said that, you know, we need this culture of just like bullying people and telling people to, you know, I hate to say pick themselves up by their bootstraps, but, you know, similarly, like, we just need to tell people to like man up, go get a fucking job, right?
That kind of thing.
Now, I think that in general, we can kind of do a time series here and look at when we didn't have welfare, right?
When we didn't have welfare, this kind of culture did exist.
And getting welfare benefits was a political, you know, 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 kind of different things, right?
Now, pre-welfare, you saw so much writing like this, right?
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, right?
If you have to take money from charity, you know, some conservatives say, oh, well, charities will just fill the gap that welfare takes.
Well, back when we had the kind of culture you're describing, people said, even if you take money from charity, you're a bum loser and you shouldn't do that.
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.
tim pool
So honest question, why not let them die?
@counterpointspol
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.
Families.
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 living in a, you know, forcing elderly people to live in the house of their children necessarily means that you have better or worse community.
It just means elderly people are living in higher levels of poverty, right?
And I think that's just bad.
tim pool
Or the children live in the house of their parents.
@counterpointspol
You've kind of steered it for a second, so I want to steer some of this, okay?
So one of the, 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, you know, the, well, there's all these people who actually do deserve these benefits.
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 antisocial 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 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.
So I wanted to point out that irony, but why is that ironic?
Why is it ironic?
You're saying it's ironic for the conservatives.
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.
tim pool
So I have a question.
When Social Security was first launched, I believe it was five workers were needed to prop up one recipient.
Based on the scale of benefits and the buying power, as of today, it's 2.1 on average.
It's the latest data that goes into paying a Social Security recipient.
People on Social Security do not get paid enough to actually sustain a standard of living.
And we expect by 2035, Social Security to reach not necessarily insolvency, but the point at which it can only pay out what goes in, which is 77%.
So either they have to increase taxes or they have to cut Social Security.
Now, on top of this, Gen Z is smaller than the millennials, and Gen Alpha is about half the millennials.
Estimated around 40 million people.
And to end, if we want to extend the generation by a couple of years, the high estimate may be 48 million.
@counterpointspol
Yeah.
tim pool
In 10 years, we are not going to have a labor force that can fund a welfare state.
@counterpointspol
Sorry, if you'll let me drive for a moment.
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, okay?
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.
We can't rely on the government benefits.
This is effectively like an economic implosion.
tim pool
And I've eaten cat food before.
@counterpointspol
Cat food.
tim pool
I have indeed.
@counterpointspol
In order to survive or as a joke?
tim pool
At a party, someone bet 20 bucks for someone to eat cat food and I did it for free.
@counterpointspol
It looks suspiciously like tuna.
So, I mean, it's not impossible.
tim pool
It literally is tuna, and there's no salt, so it's very bland.
@counterpointspol
Okay.
Well, hold on.
tim pool
No one needed to know that.
@counterpointspol
But I want you to.
So, Ikana Boyce, 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 comes.
Let's just be clear.
It's not that 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?
But this is actually...
Tim kind of brought up a point that I...
Yeah.
Tim brought up a point that I think is very pertinent to the conversation where effectively, like, it's the conservatives who are pronatal.
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.
tim pool
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.
@counterpointspol
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 like extreme amounts of automation.
tim pool
But real quick, sorry, just a quick point.
Automation still is going to be owned by someone, and that means new taxes on automated systems.
One proposal is that if Uber intends to fully automate its fleet, they would have to pay a substantial amount of taxes.
People are saying like 30% on top of that.
@counterpointspol
Effectively payroll tax for robots.
tim pool
Yes.
@counterpointspol
Well, yeah, look, I mean, those are many different conversations.
I think that we, again, have to segregate the conversation.
So, fundamentally, even if you have a declining population, and for some reason we don't want to let in immigrants, and obviously, we, you know, I think there's some analysis on that.
We can let in pro-social immigrants.
I'm a civic nationalist ultimately.
My point is, like, even if we were to assume, like, obviously, I think immigration is a solution to that problem, especially like in the medium term, essentially.
Now, even if we don't agree with that, right?
Even if we say, okay, we're not going to let in immigrants and, you know, the population is declining, we still have fundamentally two things that enable the welfare state to exist, right?
We have an amount of money and distribution of income in society.
There's still going to be workers.
There's still going to be people with disabilities, the elderly people, this and that, right?
And we're still going to need a way to give them some level of money.
Now, obviously, you might say, you know, similar to Japan, right?
We might have like 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 like the entirety of the welfare state or we would substantially cut it back to a quarter of what it was.
No, like we would still have a pretty sizable welfare state under those circumstances.
And we should, you know, we should have.
Okay, so now we're talking about policy, but you've given me a couple of things.
So 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 thing.
Millennials don't think they're going to retire.
They think they're going to work until they're dead.
But the boomers, they effectively think that with social benefits plus retirement, they should be able to spend two decades effectively not working and they should be able to maintain their 1,500 square foot house on a quarter acre lot.
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 and yeah, like no, you don't need to have your, I forget grandpa's name, but like you don't have grandpa in three degenerates sleeping with grandpa in bed all day, two feet away from you.
That's not what we're talking about.
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.
That's not true, though, because, again, we can look at societies that have higher rates of taxation, more generous retirement benefits.
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%.
That's on the employee side.
Then the employer side, 6.2%.
In Germany, I think it might be 10 and 10.
And so, you know, 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 anti-social 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, benefit, you know, the trust fund is scheduled to decrease, right?
So 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.
I'm just explaining for the audience, right?
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, right?
All you'd have to do is get rid of the cap on Social Security, right?
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, you know, we might have to say, oh, you know, our tax is going to have to go up on the employer side to 7% or 8%, right?
We keep the statutory rates the same for the employees.
We increase it on the employers.
Then 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, we would completely avoid even the tax increase.
tim pool
Are you familiar with the laugher curve?
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
So that right there just throws your premise into question.
@counterpointspol
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.
tim pool
It's not erroneous, high level.
An example I can give you that I personally experienced is in Cook County when they raised the taxes by 0.25%, contract labor left Dubach County.
@counterpointspol
Well, that's because of an anti-competitive tax measure, not because taxes were too high.
Obviously, if you have free flow of labor and capital like between counties do, you have to be more sensitive about your tax planning.
tim pool
So you're going to need tariffs to maintain this.
@counterpointspol
No, no, no.
There's no tariffs between a county.
tim pool
No, no, no.
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.
@counterpointspol
No, no, no.
It goes to 7%.
It's already 6.2%.
I'm talking about less than 1% increase, right?
I mean, this is not a calamitous thing that you guys are describing.
tim pool
So real quick, do you believe in free trade?
@counterpointspol
Yeah.
tim pool
Okay, so then everyone goes to Mexico.
@counterpointspol
No, no.
Free trade is not the same thing as people can easily shift their entire domestic production base and their entire labor base.
tim pool
I don't say 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.
@counterpointspol
Well, no, 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.
tim pool
Let me ask you some questions real quick.
You said we're a service-based and consumer-based economy.
Sure.
How is that funded?
What do we produce that generates the products to be consumed?
@counterpointspol
What do you mean?
What do we produce?
tim pool
Well, if we're not a manufacturing economy, what are we consuming?
@counterpointspol
Oh, well, we're consuming a lot.
Well, a whole bunch of different shit, Tim.
We're housing and food, electronics.
tim pool
We don't consume a house.
Houses are hard assets.
@counterpointspol
Well, houses are an asset, but also there's a depreciation to a house because as you consume the house, quote unquote, your asset goes down in value.
tim pool
Like lumber and aluminum and these materials.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, obviously there's a, when I say you consume a house, I don't mean in some literal sense.
tim pool
We'll try this again.
So we're talking about houses, and you say there's a depreciation.
Houses need to be repaired, or someone's got to be hired to do that.
This requires materials like steel.
@counterpointspol
Sure.
tim pool
Okay, well, we don't manufacture that.
We're importing it.
@counterpointspol
Okay.
tim pool
So what are we giving to these foreign countries so that they give us steel in return?
@counterpointspol
We're giving them dollars.
tim pool
And what do they do with the dollars?
@counterpointspol
Well, they either invest it in U.S. securities, U.S. assets.
I mean, they do something with it, obviously, that you would normally do with U.S. dollars.
tim pool
So let's bring this down to the root of the phrase equinomia, which I'm sure you're familiar with, right?
@counterpointspol
No.
tim pool
It's the root of economy, which means household management.
@counterpointspol
Okay.
tim pool
If you live in a house where you don't produce anything and you have a universal trade value, a currency for your house, let's just, 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 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 metal is 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 US 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, 40 years.
@counterpointspol
Well, Tim, part of a service economy is the idea that you're construction services, for instance.
We still produce a lot of housing in this country.
tim pool
China doesn't need to buy services from us.
Their labor is cheaper than ours.
@counterpointspol
Well, Tim, that's just the trade intensity of the economy.
You still have this entire domestic economy that's based on not just services, but also you're still producing something.
tim pool
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.
@counterpointspol
Wait, this is complete.
The United States produces a lot of raw materials.
Why we do make a lot of intermediate goods and capital goods and things like that, right?
tim pool
But we are a service and consumer economy, meaning the majority of what we are trading between ourselves is the services, not the raw materials.
Steel plants have been closing across this country quite a bit.
We call the Pittsburgh Steelers the Steelers because they made steel there.
They don't make steel there anymore.
@counterpointspol
Tim, circle this back to the welfare state.
We've gone a little bit far afloat here.
tim pool
The point is this.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, what's the point?
tim pool
The value of the economy is being extracted, and we are not going to be able to maintain a welfare state when our assets are being bought off our backs because we don't produce anything anymore.
@counterpointspol
Well, no, no, no.
Okay, so I get the misunderstanding now.
So, no, just because you trade, that doesn't mean that value is being extracted from your economy.
Obviously, when people buy things from other countries, they're assuming that there's some value added to buying those products, right?
So they might sell raw materials, but we use those materials to whatever.
We ship lumber in from Canada, we use that to build a house, right?
tim pool
So what can China buy from us if their labor is cheaper than ours and they're producing largely our raw materials?
@counterpointspol
Well, you can look up what China buys from the United States.
tim pool
They're buying our land.
@counterpointspol
Well, they don't just buy land, obviously.
tim pool
That's what they buy.
@counterpointspol
They buy a lot of intermediate goods.
They buy services from us.
tim pool
Corporate securities, control of our corporate systems, our land, our hard assets.
If you don't produce things to trade, which we are not producing to keep up with the consumer economy, you will end up with them buying your hard assets from you.
@counterpointspol
Okay, so if you'll indulge me, economy.
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, et cetera, et cetera, 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 I see.
Yep.
tim pool
Trump did brag famously that we were selling weapons to Saudi Arabia in exchange for lots of money, good for our economy.
@counterpointspol
Based.
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?
So sorry.
We're talking about the wealth state here.
We will move back to it.
I just want to make this point because I think it's important.
tim pool
Just fair point.
That is a great point.
We do manufacture weapons and the best of them.
@counterpointspol
Right.
So the point is that everybody wants to be our friend because we manufacture the best weapons and we know how to deploy them.
tim pool
And some of the both sides.
@counterpointspol
So what I would, well, sometimes.
But so we can move back to the welfare.
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.
Well, Connor, sorry, guys, listen, I listened to you for 10 minutes.
I want to make a whole point, okay?
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, 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 and 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.
tim pool
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 is the question.
And an economy is in this state.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, and I can answer.
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 is like, we need to find ways to be able to export goods that people want to buy because we want to get, you know, foreign currency reserves and we want to invest in foreign capital, things like that, right?
We need to be able to import the things that we need for machines.
Right.
And so 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 necessarily, I mean, I don't know who would really disagree with that.
Again, that has nothing to do, that's a completely separate conversation from the welfare state.
Now, if you wanted to make the case that, oh, well, the welfare state is limiting our ability to produce technology, that would be a very difficult argument to make.
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 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.
What does that look like?
We can do that.
Small point.
But I'm just saying, this is the underlying anxiety.
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, 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, you know, 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?
This is where I get pissed at MAGA.
I'm sorry.
This is where I get pissed at MAGA 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.
And so that's another one of my pay for a lot of security of a lot of countries around the world.
Well, but Tim, even that, like people make that argument, oh, their welfare states are subsidized by our military expenditure.
You know, look, how much money do we spend on the military?
We spend about 20.
2.5% GDP.
unidentified
All right.
@counterpointspol
We spend about a trillion dollars a year in terms of like total defense consumption, right?
That doesn't.
They're mostly at like two or 1.5.
All right.
And so we spend about, yeah, like exactly, Connor.
So we spend about 3.5% of GDP on our defense industry.
And obviously that includes all the international security that we provide.
If we were to ask all these countries, like we've got like countries like Iceland and Norway and like Australia that are spending 45% of GDP on all their different government programs, right?
Which includes their own militaries, obviously.
If we were to say, oh yeah, if you tick that up to 46.5%, what is Australia going to completely collapse?
Their welfare state's not going to be sustainable?
No, obviously.
The question just because you agree with that, Connor.
Okay, I agree with that.
unidentified
Thank you.
@counterpointspol
But then the question is, what does their 3% look like versus our 3%?
Because our economy is so large, 3.5% looks like, I don't know, F-35s.
It looks like special forces who have every techno gizmo.
3.5% of the Australian economy, sorry, Australians, it looks like trucks.
You know what I'm saying?
We still have cooperation between defense.
Of course.
But all you're doing, sorry, real quick, all you're doing is you're showing me why I'm pissed Off at Trump.
tim pool
I want to ask a question.
There is a point at which you tax people too much and the system collapses, yes?
@counterpointspol
You say again?
tim pool
I'll phrase it this way.
@counterpointspol
When you socialize too much, does the economy eventually collapse?
The answer is yes, because we've seen it dozens of times throughout history, Venezuela being a recent.
It depends on, obviously, how you're socializing things and also what kind of taxes that you're using.
Now, if you wanted to say, hey, you know, the United States doesn't have an optimal tax code, I would agree, right?
On my Substack, I released the Left Needs Better Tax Policy article series where I talked to this fact.
But even if we were to look at suboptimal tax codes, look at the Nordic countries, all the five different Nordic countries, right?
They have things like payroll taxes and income taxes and wealth taxes and inheritance taxes and income taxes.
These are forms of taxation that are not necessarily optimal.
And there are forms of taxation that they have that are way higher than our current levels of taxation.
The last thing that I'll say, Connor, is that, again, we don't see this sort of deleterious collapse of those economies.
They actually have higher GDP per hour work than we do.
Right.
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 costs that we're going to have or these challenges that we have with the welfare state.
But then what I'm going to say as a, I know that not a lot of people in chat 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.
Sweden is at like 70%.
There's literally like a 10% difference.
Oh, in terms of labor force participation?
Labor force participation rate.
But that's kind of my point, though, right?
So I want to make a couple of points.
Sorry, real quick.
This is a directed question.
How do you bump labor force participation rate by 10%?
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 employment rates, right?
So just generally more people going to work.
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.
I would argue that that's because of culture.
Well, no.
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?
No, no, no.
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, right?
America, in terms of prime age labor force participation, right?
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.
Record levels.
The reason why it's recorded high, I'm assuming you're saying.
Well, record high, yeah.
Okay.
I mean, I don't know the difference.
Well, record low would be the opposite.
So I would be worried if you were like this.
No, record levels.
I don't know if the, this might be a little bit weird, the audio here, but real quick, 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% like not in education, employment, or training.
tim pool
So Gen Z is 50, is split right now with the oldest Gen Z around 26, 27 years old.
And then the youngest, I think, are early teens.
So the mid of Gen Z is supposed to be entering the workforce right now, but we're seeing a lot of, they're called NEETs, not in education, whatever.
@counterpointspol
Employment or training.
tim pool
Right, there you go.
@counterpointspol
And so listen, for the sake of the argument, I'll track you wherever you're going.
But that news story is an alarm bell because I would make that almost an exclusively cultural argument.
tim pool
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 to that issue is going to be we're going to have to tax people more.
@counterpointspol
Or immigration.
tim pool
Indeed.
@counterpointspol
Or immigration.
tim pool
But immigration doesn't solve the problem.
It does bandaid some of it.
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 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.
@counterpointspol
Which is why I argue about integration, which is I think that these are largely...
Listen, Econoboy, I...
tim pool
You can have a Chinatown where they only speak Chinese if they're producing things to trade 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.
But if you flood 20 million 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.
@counterpointspol
You got a boy, if you'll indulge me.
And so when I say integration, I don't specifically mean Asians in Chinatown need to speak English, right?
What I mean is that they need to go to, well, not the Asians in particular, right?
Let's be real.
tim pool
They go to school a lot.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, like 80% of, we're talking about Hispanics.
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 like 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?
tim pool
It's a giant.
@counterpointspol
I'm Irish.
I'm a mud-dwelling, bog-dwelling rock farm.
From Irish, no, but.
tim pool
And how many generations has your family been here?
@counterpointspol
Three or four.
tim pool
Three or four generations of social development.
You can't take people who grew up on farms and ask them to go code.
It doesn't work.
@counterpointspol
Sure, but that's what I'm talking about, a three or four generational project.
tim pool
Well, a nation building over 100 years.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
Well, obviously, we're going to have an immediate problem that immigration won't solve.
@counterpointspol
Sure.
Well, obviously immigration has its own issues, right?
So you do have to have a sort of methodical and thoughtful immigration process.
But again, these are all separate conversations, right?
So, oh, you know, the welfare, but I don't think they are.
Okay, so do you agree?
tim pool
You cannot advocate for mass spending on welfare while ignoring the collapsing labor force, the fluctuation in the tax base, and the wealth resources.
@counterpointspol
The welfare code increases taxes because we can make up for the wealth.
Well, hold on real quick.
You said that you can.
You've held up real quick several times.
Okay.
So let me just.
I'll write it down here.
Yeah, write it down.
The point is to say the welfare state is a question of distribution, right?
That is the question of the welfare state.
We've got all these groups of non-workers.
We've got, and I don't want to repeat them, but the six groups that I mentioned.
All the ones that we actually care about.
unidentified
Right.
@counterpointspol
So we've got all these groups of non-workers, people who struggle to work, things like that.
And then we've got all these people who are working.
Whether we have a declining population, deindustrialization, struggles to climb the value chain, questions about the tax code, whatever, right?
Those are all relevant questions.
Those are all reasonable questions to ask, okay?
But the question of the welfare state is how do we want to distribute the income that we have in society?
I assume we wouldn't suggest that in 30 years we're going to have no income, right?
We're going to have a ton of people working and a ton of these non-workers.
The rates hovered around 50-50 essentially for the last, you know, fucking like 40 years or something like that, right?
And it was lower back in the 1940s and 50s because women didn't work.
And so, you know, for all those reasons, that's why I keep bringing it back.
I understand you guys' questions, but fundamentally, we need the welfare state, even in a society with all those problems that you're talking about.
And I would argue that even in that society, we should have a relatively expansive welfare state.
Perhaps relative to the time, because maybe there's less income and maybe we have depreciation and stuff, but we still need a wide welfare state.
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.
But I can agree, Honor, and that doesn't change my point.
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.
So you're saying something like, well, it's a distribution issue.
It is.
Okay, I'm not stupid.
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.
What do you think?
I would love to hear how we need to increase distribution without increasing taxes.
tim pool
Like applicators like in Star Trek.
@counterpointspol
Well, we're not there yet.
We're not there yet.
We're not there technologically.
So then the question becomes, so you're saying it's a question of distribution.
You're saying like, oh, we can just increase this tax like, you know, 0.75%.
People won't even notice.
It's not that big of a deal.
Who cares?
Not what I said.
Well, I feel like I remember that from about 30 minutes ago.
But the point that is that I like to think of myself as a fairly rational, statist, Berkeian conservative some of the time.
People hate that, but that's the way that I feel.
Everyone else is to the right of me on this issue.
They want more fiscal conservatism.
They want less taxes.
They don't want more.
tim pool
Well, it's an issue.
@counterpointspol
It's an incompatible conversation.
tim pool
It's an issue of volume.
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 1 million widgets for a dollar or you can sell one widget for a million dollars if you want to pay your bills.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, so Connoboy, 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?
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 credible you mean yeah, demographically, right?
So we're very skeptical on immigration, people aren't having kids, right?
And we have this huge demographic imbalance.
It's very possible that we'll have to cut benefits because of some fiscal sustainability issues, right?
Like eventually you probably don't have enough money to distribute at current levels.
But, you know, we have benefits that are tied to inflation.
And if deflation happens, you know, you just lower the benefits commensurately, right?
It's all about achieving what we think of as a relative standard of living.
And when I say relative, I mean to the time.
So it's possible that what you're saying does happen.
Maybe in 20 or 30 years, nobody's having any kids.
Innovations go down.
We're just kind of poor, right?
For various reasons.
You know, we just don't have the money to redistribute like we used to.
And so we'll have to adjust our expectations of what basic needs means, like you said.
But that's not a comment on how much, relatively speaking, within societies we should distribute to people who are struggling with these things that I talked about.
So why are you so hopeful?
It pisses me off.
Well, I'm not hopeful.
It's just optimism.
Yeah.
It'll be fine.
We'll figure it out.
We'll dial it in, guys.
Okay, think about it.
Like Tim said.
So let's say that we have, I don't know, like we have $5 trillion that we want to redistribute, right?
And we, and, you know, maybe about that's what government's going to get, right?
I don't know how much time we have, but we have an hour.
Okay, so then we will talk about debt servicing the let's say that we have $5 trillion that we want to redistribute.
That's what we can kind of like afford quotation marks.
Sure.
And we distribute it based on these different groups that I talked about.
And like maybe we have some military needs or whatever that is.
And we go into the future and all these calamitous things happen.
And let's just say, God, you know, damn, we can only raise $4 trillion, right?
Like, that's like the most we can raise.
Well, distributionally, there's no reason to think that we would all of a sudden not have unemployment benefits.
We would not have retirement benefits.
We would not have maybe a basic income.
We would not have student benefits.
Maybe those benefits just have to go down some amount, right?
But fundamentally, just last thing, we need welfare and we need a lot of it, relatively speaking, to prevent all these people from living in poverty.
I'm not a minarchist or an anarchist.
tim pool
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 pending like it's not.
122% debt to GDP?
@counterpointspol
Japan's having 240.
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 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.
tim pool
Yes.
@counterpointspol
And you absolutely could.
unidentified
So I was, let me tell you.
tim pool
You guys know how far away from the city we are right now.
Sure.
We're not in the sticks per se, like in the central West Virginia where you're five hours from the nearest city.
unidentified
Sure.
tim pool
No, we're about an hour and there's some, there's Winchester.
It's a town of, I think, what is Winchester?
30,000?
30,000 or 40,000?
That's the closest city to us.
Martinsburg, I think, is like 10,000.
So we're about an hour and a half outside of any major metro, probably a little bit more.
Well, to be fair, we're an hour from Frederick, I guess, 300,000.
A bungalow in a rural area.
How much do you think that costs?
@counterpointspol
Based off of the current economy, 300 grand.
tim pool
You're wrong.
@counterpointspol
More?
tim pool
What do you think it is?
@counterpointspol
When you say bungalow, you just mean like a really small house?
Yeah, like a thousand square foot house.
tim pool
Bungalows are single-story, thousand-square-foot homes.
@counterpointspol
In what?
In central West Virginia?
tim pool
We're not in central.
We're in the eastern panhandle, so we're not that far.
But how much do you think a bungalow goes for in this area?
@counterpointspol
Oh, right here.
Well, in this area, we're right outside of D.C. I mean, you know.
tim pool
An hour and 40 minutes outside of D.C., you mean?
@counterpointspol
It's still going to be really expensive because you have all these people commuting in.
If it's a half million, I'd want to take a hammer.
tim pool
It's $600,000.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, I want to take a hammer and hit myself in the head.
That doesn't surprise me.
tim pool
So how is a young person who's getting an entry-level job in the city, how do they start a family and buy a home?
And I'll tell you why this number matters.
How much do you think a bungalow cost three years ago in this area?
@counterpointspol
Oh, yeah, like 200K.
tim pool
200K.
There was a house not far from here that we were looking at.
It was two.
You're getting depressed.
The Gen Z producers are throwing up right now.
Guys?
I'm looking at the Gen Z producers.
I don't know.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, you're screwed.
tim pool
Sorry, guys.
There was a bungalow.
There was a bungalow in this area for $250 three years ago.
Now it's $600.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, that was a steal.
tim pool
And it's crazy because back then I was like, there's no reason.
I don't need investment properties.
I'm not going to buy it.
I was encouraging other people, talking to my brother, like, hey, maybe you should buy this one.
He didn't.
We went and looked at it.
Now it's $600.
I went and looked at a house the other day, also in this area, and it's $4.50, and it's dilapidated.
Anyway, sorry, my ultimate point is with the debt to GDP ratio, the lack of new workers coming in, and the taxation level we're at right now, you cannot take more from Gen Z already.
You disagree.
These people can't afford to start families.
They can't afford to buy homes and you're explaining to them.
@counterpointspol
We can take money from them.
Oh, let me explain to you.
Blood from a stone.
Yeah, you mentioned Japan earlier.
And Japan's actually a great example to talk about what Tim's talking about.
So Japan, declining population, crazy debt to GDP, right?
High standard of living.
Very, very high standard of living and very affordable housing.
How do they accomplish that?
They just have a way.
All the dead people.
They just have a way, way more efficient and better system for building housing, right?
And so, you know, to the point that Tim's making, it's not that what Tim is saying is an unreasonable thing to care about, right?
Like, obviously, affordable housing is important, but we're linking all of these different conversations.
Oh, we have a high debt.
We might have a decreasing population.
Housing is more expensive.
That's completely irrelevant to the fundamental point of we need To distribute money to non-workers, and I agree.
Fuck, we need a better tax code.
We need a way better system for building housing.
And population decline is a problem.
But even if I take all those things to be true, we still need to give a lot of money to these people.
tim pool
Let me, so let me say this: I agree that I'm a fan of welfare systems.
Communists.
I personally, I consider myself to be kind of like a liberal, but liberal these days just means like, do you agree with their worldview or not?
@counterpointspol
Sure.
tim pool
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 100 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 call 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 food benefits I'll I'll buy whatever you want just give me a hundred bucks and then young people not always young people this is big in Seattle they'll be like deal I get 200 bucks worth of groceries for me and you get a hundred bucks for heroin and that's what they end up doing yeah yeah well I mean Tim I obviously so we we're not we're now talking about like sort of mechanically
@counterpointspol
how do you distribute benefits and like how should we prevent people from like you know using benefits for drugs or whatever or like 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 here i'll make a big point and then i'll make a 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 right what do they do right and the overwhelming amount of that money right like 90 95 99 of it right depending
on the program goes towards just the things that poor people need to live they it goes towards rent it goes towards food it goes towards their car payments right or you know whatever their circumstances are now to the exact like 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 right 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 right the minority of the people that you're
talking about you know how should we handle them i mean i can tell you what some other countries do like for instance i think it's in finland you get cash benefits which is called like your housing allowance but it's just cash right it's meant to go towards your housing expenses there are some people who have a history of like not paying their landlord and just like 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 right because we can't like trust you with cash so there is some like paternalism and things like that that these systems probably require but
that's not i i certainly wouldn't you i don't know that you're saying that that's not some conservatives will say and that's why we just shouldn't have these benefits right and that's ridiculous solution would be anybody receiving government health benefits should be required to be on a specific diet and engage in specific exercises well in in economy to kind of move it because i feel like we're dancing around this point repeatedly uh tim and i unfortunately for chat are statists so they're like oh this is just three filthy communists having a conversation about communism right
that's what that's what they're thinking right which degree of communism do you want right so so you know to to your point i accept that some level of government redistribution needs to exist i think tim accepts that as well so we're filthy communists compared to the chat um so you making that point again you're not going to find argumentation but what i think that but it sounds like what tim tim brought that up as like this sort of inherent it seems like it's sort of inherent criticism of the welfare state right and it's like that's just that's just very much not a reason but the concern this is the concern may i
just so 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 uh 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 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 same thing with i can tell you how to prevent it well sure let's talk about that momentarily 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 uh 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 my family i hate to bring it up but i have a family member who uh the husband makes around you know probably uh 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 and scared about well look i wouldn't put uh you know i'm angry i wouldn't want uh gavin newson to be in charge of designing my ideal welfare state sure um i don't think i think that
there are a lot of swedish guy yeah yeah exactly we need some swedish guy um 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 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, right?
So I advocate for things like universalizing welfare benefits, having an efficient tax code.
You talk about homeless people in these urban cities, right?
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?
Like, I thought you go to a major city.
There's just a shitload of homeless people.
So hold on.
What?
Quick meme.
They freeze to death.
Continue.
Well, no, because there's a lot of homeless people in cities like Detroit and stuff, right?
That are very visible, right?
They also freeze to death, but continue.
But they're very visible, right?
I mean, you get what I'm saying.
Like, that's not really true.
Same thing with Canada and a lot of those urban centers, right?
So it's like, well, what are those countries doing, right?
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.
Like, there's just like this sort of holistic benefit.
And they tend to have either a non-market system or an efficient market system for distributing housing.
Like it ends up being very affordable.
Take a city like San Francisco, right?
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, right?
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, right?
So that's a problem holistically of governance, right?
But it's certainly not a problem with the welfare state or the idea that we would offer things like cash benefits, clean needle exchanges, like all those things that you just I'm hearing you.
This is a safe space amongst three communists who are all discussing how to distribute the economy, okay?
This is a safe space, all right?
How to 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 normal.
One of them is the NIMBY movement, right?
Or the YIMBY movement, right?
So not in my backyard versus yes in my backyard.
You think YIMBY's are insane?
I think YIMBYs are a little insane.
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, because 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.
When we talk about major cities.
They're saying it's only an effect of governance, which I agree with, but the governance matters because what's popular on the left, so that's incredibly stupid.
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.
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 Yimbies 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 Yimbies are talking about, 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 he's a Noah, Noah Opinion, Noah Smith.
He's a guy who blogs a lot.
He actually lives in Japan most of the time in Tokyo.
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 $100,000 home in a place that millions of people want to live.
No, I agree with you for a stupid impulse.
tim pool
And so just to add to that, the problem with a lot of these cities is they require civil servants to live in those city boundaries.
So then you end up with problems in Chicago.
@counterpointspol
Are you talking about like in New York, they're like, you have to live in New York to be a police officer?
tim pool
I believe it's true for most jurisdictions.
San Francisco, for instance, you want to be a cop there, you got to live in the city limits.
Good luck.
They don't pay you enough to afford a house there.
@counterpointspol
Lots of them.
I agree.
We could argue that this is an issue of governance, though.
So for instance, like this is, here's your economy take of the day.
I think that there effectively should be affordable districts within the country where, or excuse me, within the city, where you just know that your working class is going to work there.
So for instance, like 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.
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 more running.
tim pool
But hold on.
Let's project project housing has typically failed.
@counterpointspol
Well, Tim, project housing has failed because other reasons.
Well, yeah, we just don't do it right, right?
I mean, like, I think that, for instance, when you look at Singapore, Singapore is a very densely populated, and it's a city, right?
So I think a lot of people say, oh, we can't Singapore apply to the country.
We're talking about cities here.
tim pool
If you want to argue that we should cane people in public for violating the law.
@counterpointspol
Yes.
Conservative take.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
tim pool
That's what Singapore does, and that's why they're not.
@counterpointspol
Well, that's not why they have a nice place.
That's why they live in downtown.
That's not why they have affordable housing, though.
tim pool
Sure.
But it actually is.
@counterpointspol
It's just a benefit.
No, it's not.
Come on.
That's right.
tim pool
Yes.
If you spit gum, you can be caned.
If you don't flush a toilet, you can be caned.
@counterpointspol
He's talking about affordability, not necessarily whether or not it's a nice place to live.
tim pool
No, my point is the authority structure is completely tied to its economic structure.
@counterpointspol
Well, I did.
tim pool
I didn't.
@counterpointspol
Let me make a point.
tim pool
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.
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.
@counterpointspol
No, that's not true.
So when we look at it, No, but the reason I brought up Singapore was not to talk about their entire justice system, obviously.
They have a very sort of draconian set of regulations on a lot of things, which I'm sure a lot of them we wouldn't necessarily agree with.
Like their drug policy, for instance, is extreme.
tim pool
Your house can't fall apart in a place where they beat you for your house falling apart.
@counterpointspol
Well, no, not.
I don't know.
tim pool
Did you know that they check the toilets in Singapore?
Don't use Singapore as an example.
Let's just move on.
@counterpointspol
No, no, we're not going to move on.
tim pool
Okay, in Singapore, there are people where if you leave food on the table, they can report you to the police and you can get in trouble for this.
Usually it's a fine.
It is considered improper if you don't flush the toilet, and people actually look.
So if you have a house and there is gum on the sidewalk that's illegal, if you have housing in the United States, what do we end up seeing?
It gets trashed, it falls apart, and we're required to pay for services from the public coffers to fix it.
In Singapore, they beat you in public.
@counterpointspol
So Tim, the reason I brought up Singapore was not to talk about their civil society, you could say.
You keep trying to make a point.
Tim, forgot.
tim pool
No, no, no, no.
@counterpointspol
You won't let me make a point.
tim pool
Absolutely, I will not because you keep changing the subject.
You are trying to act like the social order.
You're not going to let me make a point.
Honor said, no, you keep changing the point that the social order of a society is connected to its economic, to its spending.
Houses in Chicago are falling apart, and because the public housing is falling 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.
@counterpointspol
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 pressed 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?
So 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 do some crazy stuff, right?
tim pool
Who maintains the house?
@counterpointspol
The individuals that live there and obviously some public as well.
tim pool
Okay, so let's break this down.
You have public housing.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, yeah.
tim pool
It has to be maintained by somebody.
If someone can't afford to buy and maintain a house, who pays to maintain it?
unidentified
The state.
@counterpointspol
The state, okay.
tim pool
Now, in Singapore, if you don't maintain your property, they will beat you in public.
In Chicago, if you don't maintain your property, it just falls apart and there's drugs and guns everywhere.
unidentified
Singapore.
@counterpointspol
He's passionately making a point that I thought was an overview of what we were going to talk about today, which is effectively, you know.
Wait, Connor, do you agree with me on the point that to do what you're talking about?
They have intentional public investment.
Yeah, of course.
unidentified
Okay.
@counterpointspol
Well, we agree.
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 when you, 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 like equality or standards.
And so that's where I don't think that you can have one without the other.
Well, obviously, like 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?
Well, obviously, look, I mean, I think look at the city of the city of Houston.
I'm not about to get accused of being a Nazi.
Well, no, no, no.
I mean, 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?
So they 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 like resources for homeless people, hey, rehab, clean needle, you know, all this kind of stuff, right?
And 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.
tim pool
So let's pull this up.
Pruitt Igo, probably the most famous instance of failed public housing.
And why did it fail?
Crime, vandalism, juvenile delinquency.
I agree.
If we were to create a massive 33-building, 11-story complex, housing cheap for people who can't afford it to replace tenement housing, it can work if you go to the people who are destroying it and mercilessly beat them in public when they do.
Because that's how Singapore maintains what you're talking about.
@counterpointspol
You keep cutting away someone's light beating people.
What about the city of Houston, Tim?
What about the city of Houston, Tim?
You keep trying to beat them.
tim pool
You keep trying to exclude the enforcement of law from the things we're spending on.
@counterpointspol
I didn't.
I just said you need an enforcement of these things.
I just don't think beating them in the street is right.
What about the city of Houston?
tim pool
I agree.
We don't need to beat them in the street.
The point I said was don't use Singapore as an example because that's how it is.
@counterpointspol
I used Houston as an example.
tim pool
Then we agree that if Houston has social enforcement, you will lose your house if you vandalize it.
You will be kicked out.
Then people stop doing these things.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, well, Tim.
tim pool
And we have in these cities like Portland, needles all over the street.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, yeah.
Can you compromise on compassionate beating?
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 lived 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.
Like, they're a little bit, they're way more woke than even like 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.
Well, yeah, if we look at the city of Houston, which is why I use that as an example, this is a city that can't raise a lot of taxes.
They have to come up with creative solutions to do things.
And they did that.
And obviously they did that without the extreme social policy of Singapore, right?
tim pool
But still enforcement.
@counterpointspol
Well, but Tim, I've never said we shouldn't enforce.
tim pool
I didn't say you did.
I'm talking about it.
I said, don't use Singapore as the example because they do.
@counterpointspol
Tim, what did I use Singapore as an example for?
tim pool
Public housing market.
@counterpointspol
Yeah.
tim pool
And I said, don't use it an example because they maintain it by beating people in public.
@counterpointspol
Through vicious beatings in the public.
They also maintain it through public investment.
tim pool
Okay, okay.
@counterpointspol
Okay.
Communists here sharing our love of communists.
This is sarcastic for the sake of the point.
tim pool
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 Igo 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, but I must say this.
I must add.
I can solve the gang violence and shooting problems in Chicago like that.
@counterpointspol
I'm curious.
Constitutionally?
tim pool
No.
If the punishment for 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.
@counterpointspol
I disagree.
There's sexual fetishists out there that would enjoy this.
tim pool
You're correct.
unidentified
They want to bring back that tomato and my point is public shame.
tim pool
A lot of what people assume is Gang Valley in Chicago is actually honor shootings.
unidentified
Sure.
tim pool
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.
@counterpointspol
Sure.
tim pool
That's all you do over one weekend.
People would be like, hell no, I ain't coming in that way.
@counterpointspol
But Tim, this is where we get into an argument about authoritarianism versus liberalism or libertarianism philosophically, where are we talking about like 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, you know, 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, you know, speak my mind on a public platform, all that kind of stuff.
And so I'm looking for the balance between freedom 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 Ikano, 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, Chakensberg out.
However, if we see a collapse, a correlated collapse in the birth rate, where our major urban centers actually have like, 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.
We can tie these two things together.
So for instance, I think there was some evidence out of France.
They studied their child allowance program, right?
So it's like, hey, when you give people cash, like one of the reasons why people don't have kids, right, is because, well, they just don't feel like they can afford it, right?
Obviously, that's a big reason.
Or they might have less kids than they otherwise would.
Isn't that kind of like a rep?
Sorry, continue.
But I feel like this is like a reported thing versus like a demonstrated thing.
Well, I was about to get to the evidence, right?
So France had this child allowance program, and they essentially, whatever, some mumbo jumbo with the study design.
I don't want to get into it, but they found that this actually increased the number of French people by like millions of people over a long period of time, right?
What did?
Well, their child allows.
They agreed on compassion for the program.
They're child benefits programs, right?
Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that France has like this booming population.
It just means that they'd have a much lower than otherwise population if not for these benefits, right?
And so the welfare state is perfectly compatible, especially when we're talking about the birth rate.
You know, look, paid parental leave.
How do we optimize that?
unidentified
Right.
@counterpointspol
Well, I can tell you, right?
Paid parental leave, cash benefits when you have kids, having, you know, baby boxes that we send to people.
You know, how do you reconcile that?
Public school?
How do you reconcile that with?
So for instance, like all of these things I think any sensible social conservative should be for.
You should be for high quality early childhood education because you want a smart population.
You should be for high quality education because you want a productive population.
You should be for people getting socialized and becoming intelligent and all that kind of stuff and getting a good education.
So these things I'm perfectly fine with.
But what I'm asking, though, is an optimization because what you're talking about.
Well, I can tell you, let me hear two questions.
Real quick, real quick, just because I want to complete a thought.
You're saying that it increased millions of people.
So there are millions of people who were born through social welfare programs that would otherwise not have been born.
That's awesome.
Is it still below 2.15?
Because if we're below 2.15, I think we have a problem.
unidentified
Yeah.
@counterpointspol
Well, Connor, obviously, so we can look at the most extreme example, perhaps Hungary, right?
So Hungary spent on just family benefits, right?
They spent like 6% of their GDP.
We said earlier in this conversation, the United States spends 3.5% of its GDP on its military.
So imagine twice the U.S. military.
That's the effort that the Hungarians are putting into getting people to have kids.
As a pronatalist, I will accept this as a part of your plan.
Right, right.
Now, I think we should have very generous child benefits, but obviously it's not a panacea, right?
For instance, like one of the reasons why.
Didn't they bump up temporarily by like 0.1 or 0.2 and then they drop back down?
Yeah, it has like an all-else equal effect.
Like there's more people having kids in Hungary than otherwise.
Obviously, it doesn't completely reverse the problems.
You know, a lot of it is culture.
Why do Mormons have more kids in Utah than people in Texas?
unidentified
Right.
Yeah.
@counterpointspol
Well, they have this sort of conservative fundamentalism and they, you know, on average, let's say they want to have more kids.
So what you're saying is we should lie to people and tell them that if they have a ton of kids, we will all populate the stars.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's what I'm saying.
Like, I do agree.
Texas.
tim pool
Taxes.
@counterpointspol
That's kind of what Hungary does, and it doesn't reverse the effect.
Tim, I agree with it in principle, but that's exclusively going to affect the most intelligent people who are two or three.
tim pool
If you are married and have at least two children, no taxes.
@counterpointspol
Well, but, Tim, again, that's kind of what Hungary does, and it doesn't – it just doesn't – like, financial reasons are only – Well, yeah, but financially, like financial reasons are only so big a portion of why people are not having kids, right?
unidentified
Sure.
@counterpointspol
And so even if we have a lot of benefits, they're not going to have a ton of kids altogether.
I think that, you know.
Do you believe getting onto culture?
Sorry, I know we're talking about economics.
It's your strong suit.
But getting onto culture, I feel like there is a antinatal popular like wing, especially on social media, of the left where like 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 partially contributes to it.
So for my thing is like, are you pronatal?
Are you going to have kids?
I mean, well, yeah, I don't want to talk about my family planning at all.
I want to.
I'd hope I'd have kids one day.
But anyway, the point is, though, is that how old are you?
I'm 28.
unidentified
Okay.
Yeah.
@counterpointspol
So not an old man like Connor over here.
Yeah, but I have two kids.
tim pool
I actually do want to stress this too.
Fully admitting, I just had my kid, first kid this year.
28 is old to have a kid, historically.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, obviously.
Yeah, historically, that's true.
I mean, you know, but I think when we talk about collapsing birth rates, actually, that's a good segue, is that when we talk about like 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- Well, essentially, what you find is that the reason why we have birth rates declining is because teenagers aren't having kids anymore.
Overwhelmingly, the reason why birth rates are declining is because we don't have teenage pregnancies.
tim pool
20-year-olds aren't either.
@counterpointspol
Well, 20 to 24 are going down as well.
And part of that is because, you know, women entering the workforce, getting the education.
I think that this is why it kind of bumps into what Connor was saying earlier, which is like, look, at the end of the day, the welfare state cannot solve all issues.
And when we're talking about like, oh, women aren't having as many kids because they're deciding to work and get educations.
I mean, like, what are we supposed to do about that, guys?
Well, I mean, I don't see any women, but basically my wife, thankfully, was like, hey, I love having kids.
I like taking care of them when they're young.
I want that to be my priority.
And we just meshed on that.
I've been very fortunate.
You know, despite not being a rich man, my wife hasn't had to work since 2020.
tim pool
You mentioned the liberal idea of maximize your pleasure, minimize your pain.
@counterpointspol
He didn't.
tim pool
But I think the issue is that if you've never had a kid, you don't realize how much more like.
@counterpointspol
It's so much deeper.
It's so much deeper.
tim pool
Like, I'm going to embarrass my wife right now.
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 got to 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 it.
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, 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.
Women have time that men have seven.
Robert De Niro had a kid.
He's like seven years old or whatever.
@counterpointspol
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.
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.
When I held, I'm a rational person.
I try to rationalize my emotions away from me, where if I feel a feeling, I try to like, you know, 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.
But 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.
tim pool
And I'll just add it.
@counterpointspol
It's bullshit by comparison.
tim pool
If that was not the case, human beings would have died off a long time ago.
unidentified
Sure.
@counterpointspol
Well, I mean, I think to you guys's 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, right?
Like, I think children especially are the most defensible group to give welfare benefits to, 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, and 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.
They should get a lot of support.
People who want to be able to do that.
I'm a communitarian as well, not a communist, a communitarian.
Yeah, yeah.
And so that's what, exactly.
So if we agree fundamentally on that kind of thing, like you said, it's just really a question of like how much should the benefits be.
And I mean, I think mechanically speaking, I was just going to say mechanically speaking, the best way to do these things is just to have a system of essentially universal cash benefits.
And then for some, you know, if you have disabilities, like extra costs, you just have special benefits layered on top of that.
But the fear is if we have a hedonistic, nihilistic society, then what are we incentivized?
tim pool
So what I was going to say is I'm actually happy with a large welfare state as long as it's enforced with requirements and we don't tolerate hedonism and abuse to an extreme degree.
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, 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 morbidly obvious 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's trying to help to help themselves and they need to lift up.
Well, I don't like it.
@counterpointspol
Before you jump in, Carl, let me just respond to that.
So a lot of conservatives will say stuff like that.
They'll say like, I'm not saying you're a conservative, but like, you know, 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.
tim pool
I think you're wrong.
@counterpointspol
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.
You would eliminate those.
Well, yeah.
And what we end up seeing, and the reason I would eliminate them is because what we end up seeing is more government bureaucracy, right?
We see more people who were paid just to file paperwork.
We see those government 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.
tim pool
In 2002, 39.3% of Medicare beneficiaries were obese, a marked increase from 32.5 to 97.
In 2018, 42.8% of adults age 60 and over were obese.
So Tim This is not, But Tim, let me ask you, because this is funny, this gets back to the Singaporean thing.
@counterpointspol
I've been called an authoritarian before because I think that we should incentivize certain behaviors and we should punish other behaviors.
A weight tax.
Yeah, would you make the weight tax?
Yeah, but 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 the physical training Monday, Wednesday, and Friday?
tim pool
Absolutely.
Well, let's pause real quick.
@counterpointspol
I would love to see welfare beneficiaries working out on the side of the highway at 600.
tim pool
They can live in the highway.
They can be in a park.
So let's break it down.
@counterpointspol
I'm laughing, but I'd love it.
tim pool
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
@counterpointspol
Sure.
tim pool
There are a lot of people who need help, and I want to help them.
I make donations.
In fact, for tomorrow's culture war, I'll be donating $10,000 to wounded warriors and $10,000 to Tunnel to Towers.
I did that because Destiny offered $10,000 for the debate between Will Chamberlain and Peace Co.
Liddy.
I offered to do it on Culture War.
He then backed off and said, I'm not giving money if Tim Poole's involved.
So I said, I'll double it and help more veterans and more first responders.
I want to help people who I think deserve it.
I'm a big fan of Tunnel to Towers.
Don't know as much about Wounded Warriors.
That being said, you want me to pay for your Medicare, but you won't eat healthy and you're morbidly obese?
You are basically taking my money, spitting in my face.
That is offensive.
So if they said, if you came to me and you were homeless and morbidly obese and said, I need help, I said, here's what we're going to do.
I am going to give you a place to live and you are going to drop 50 pounds.
And if you do not work out with me every day, I will kick you out.
That's how I would personally do it.
I think that is fair.
@counterpointspol
The Marine in me is saying yes.
unidentified
Yes.
@counterpointspol
If it's bad, I think one thing to underscore is that if it's bad for poor people, it's bad for everyone, right?
So like being morbidly morbidly obese is obviously bad no matter what.
And I think with healthcare specifically, like you tied it to Medicaid recipients, like we have a completely, in some sense, a socialized healthcare system, right?
Because you either have private insurance, which is obviously cost sharing, or you have public systems, Medicare, Medicaid chip, the VA, all that stuff, right?
And so 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 lower taxes for healthy people.
But this is where people get pissed, though, okay?
So for instance, talk to a libertarian guy named Lactoid.
You know, talk to Fabian Liberty or whatever.
If you're doing all of the right things, if you're working, taking care of your family, taking care of your community, and paying your taxes, people should leave you the hell alone.
But that's what insurance is, though.
Insurance is like inherently when you need it.
Okay, but I want to, but I'm trying to, listen, I'm not.
There's no avoiding subsidizing.
I like the fat poor people working out at the park idea.
Okay, I think this is brilliant.
Now, whether or not it would ever get instituted is a different question.
But the point is that like, yeah, like if you're going to take from society, we're reciprocal Creatures.
We're competitive creatures, but we're also cooperative.
So if you want to cooperate, then you have to give, not just take.
One of the notes that I took is that, especially on the right, but definitely on the left as well, we always talk about like privileges and rights.
We don't talk about duties, right?
And here's the thing: like, even if you're a liberal or a libertarian, you probably have at minimum voluntary duties to your community, to your family, et cetera, et cetera.
If you're statist like myself, there's probably compelled duties to your society.
And so that's where you've been very great.
You've agreed with compassionate beatings.
That's awesome.
But there are people of your ilk who want to give all the money, but not have any of the duties.
tim pool
It's like real, real quick.
It's like when a parent is spanking the child and saying, it hurts me to do this.
@counterpointspol
It hurts me more than it hurts you.
Well, but that's kind of my point.
I think that, oh, 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.
I'm technically a little bit overweight.
tim pool
Well, I can respond.
@counterpointspol
Well, I was just going to, the last thing, like maybe your preferred form of exercise, like me, right, is like doing jiu-jitsu and wrestling.
Like, that's a dangerous fucking sport.
If I like bust my knee doing jiu-jitsu, like, I'm exercising, right?
I'm doing a responsible thing.
tim pool
I'm going to go with that.
@counterpointspol
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 jiu-jitsu.
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.
tim pool
It just means you need a better system.
So for health insurance, a better system of distribution, which we do agree on.
For health insurance is private, your rates go up or down depending on your life factors.
When I apply for health insurance, they're like, do you smoke?
No.
Do you drink?
No.
Do you exercise?
unidentified
Yes.
tim pool
They're like, your rates are cheap.
Taxes don't do that.
Taxes say one size fits all.
And then you get a bunch of people getting money from me and they're intentionally being like, I ain't going to work out.
Now, as for the jiu-jitsu thing, I'm talking about, are you putting in a reasonable effort to try and be healthy?
If your disability is that you have no legs and you struggle to do aerobic exercises, so you're lifting, you can still eat better.
And I think part of that welfare should be, like when it comes to healthcare, proper education on how to be healthy.
So that means your doctor shouldn't just be saying, you ate too much.
Your benefits are gone.
No, it should be saying for this week, we want you to try and hit these calories per day.
We're going to check your vitals next week.
And if we see that you're not improving or that you're doing poorly, you're going to put your benefits in.
@counterpointspol
I think everyone should do that, though, right?
But Ecano.
tim pool
Everyone should, but if you are getting my money, it's a requirement.
@counterpointspol
Yeah.
So what Ikano said, which I did hear, 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 in order to work out that people?
tim pool
I guarantee you.
@counterpointspol
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 to do it.
tim pool
Because they're wrong.
The amount of money we will save on health care costs by having one trainer train people is more than we would spend on their health care.
@counterpointspol
Listen, you're just no longer a liberal.
That's all.
Well, but again, I think when we think about it.
tim pool
I don't know what I am.
But I'm telling you, if we're going to spend, if we spend $10,000 per person on 10 fat people and we can cut that down to a $40,000 loss by hiring one $60,000 drill instructor, we good.
@counterpointspol
Well, I mean.
tim pool
And they're happier and healthy.
@counterpointspol
Listen, I used to joke that I was an authoritarian centrist.
I'm an authoritarian centrist.
You're coming along for the ride.
So I'm not hating.
This is perfect.
I would love to have Arlie Ermy working out fat people down at the local park.
That'd be great.
tim pool
I'm an authoritarian if they're asking for my money.
@counterpointspol
In exchange for my money.
tim pool
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 also going to be corruption in doctors, but if the doctor's like, you're 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.
@counterpointspol
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, like 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 one and a half, 1.6% of GDP or something like that, right?
Which, you know, 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?
It's not conditioning benefits on a minority of the population.
tim pool
It's not a minority.
Okay, to be fair, 48% is a minority.
I can call it a plurality.
@counterpointspol
Well, I'm talking about like of the obese people, right?
So of people on Medicaid who are obese, like that's 25% of people or something like that.
tim pool
First of all, if we're correlating Social Security, 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.
@counterpointspol
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, oh, 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, right?
Which lowers administrative costs, which means there's Less government bureaucrats, which is 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, you know, taxing sugar or, you know, having, you know, taxing sort of caloric density of foods.
Like you keep.
These are how you align the incentives properly and efficiently.
tim pool
You keep saying minority, even though it's not an established fact.
So I will just read some data points.
unidentified
Wait, what?
@counterpointspol
He's talking about how many people are fat.
tim pool
You are saying a condition should not be based on a minority of people.
Let me give you the data.
@counterpointspol
Timmy, you said people on benefits who are obese.
That is a minority of people.
You just read it out.
You said, what, 40% of Medicaid recipients?
tim pool
That's no, 48% of people over 65.
To which I said, likely, people over 65 who are on medical benefits probably are more obese.
Guess what?
@counterpointspol
You said Medicaid just now, earlier.
You didn't say people, you didn't say elderly people when you were reading from the AI or whatever you're reading from.
tim pool
You are incorrect.
It was 40% of people over 60 in 2018.
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.
@counterpointspol
So you think of all the people.
Of all the people in this country, you think most people are on benefits and obese.
tim pool
84%.
I just pulled it up.
Want me to read it?
@counterpointspol
No, no.
tim pool
How about I read it?
@counterpointspol
You guys are.
tim pool
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.
@counterpointspol
We might be telling you that.
This is not happening in the villages of Florida, by the way.
They are getting wasted on golf carts.
They are not going to show up to fat poor person golf.
They're not showing up to PT.
tim pool
Harley, Ermy, and Week.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, no, that's not happening.
tim pool
Just come back in on the ground.
@counterpointspol
I'm not saying it's not a good idea.
I'm just saying that it's not going to happen.
Well, it's just, we might be talking past each other.
When I say minority of the population, the general population over a certain age is fat.
People who are on government benefits, people like more fat.
tim pool
Of the people who are getting medical benefits, obesity is a significant contributor to this.
@counterpointspol
Like Medicare.
Medicare or Medicaid.
No, but I already said earlier that obviously a big portion of the cost that we spend as a healthcare system is because people are obese.
What I'm disagreeing with Tim on is that, okay, we've got a population of people that are on benefits, right?
We've got a population of people that are obese.
We have an intersection between these two people.
Sure.
That intersection is not most people, right?
Now, if we were to say, hey, we have this problem where 10% of our healthcare costs are related to people being obese.
Well, if that's the case, then we shouldn't only focus on people on benefits and who are also obese.
We should focus on all people who are obese.
And the most efficient way to do that is to have a universal system of public health insurance and making it more expensive to live that kind of lifestyle.
I have heard both of you.
I think that a substantive amount of this will not be possible because of the freedom that American citizens enjoy and enjoy.
That's probably true.
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 receive it.
But when it comes to healthcare specifically, they are still taking out of collective pots of money.
Agreed.
Either public or private health.
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, like all that kind of stuff.
PT, physical training, should be a course that we take very seriously in America.
tim pool
I got one you'll like.
@counterpointspol
For military preparedness as well.
tim pool
Here's one.
In order to graduate high school, you should be required to do three months of basic training.
@counterpointspol
I have the opinion that Listen.
tim pool
Not compulsory military service, basic training.
@counterpointspol
Well, but you're compelling adults to do a certain kind of mandated activity.
tim pool
You do realize they already do that for high schools.
Well, no, obviously, my high school in Chicago required community service to graduate.
@counterpointspol
Yeah, yeah.
No, I'm not saying, I'm not saying what you're, I'm just, I'm framing it in that way.
You're just saying, hey, in addition to the time after high school, you should have.
I mean, like, I think Switzerland has a couple years.
I think Taiwan has the same thing where you can do like community service.
unidentified
All right.
tim pool
All right.
One month of basic training.
My high school in Chicago.
@counterpointspol
That's not enough to learn anything.
Three weeks.
tim pool
That's not enough to learn anything either.
Three months is good.
All of the high schools where I grew up required 20 hours, I believe, of community service.
@counterpointspol
Which is almost nothing.
That's like a weekend.
tim pool
Sure.
Well, it was better than nothing.
It was usually two weekends because you'd do like four hours.
@counterpointspol
You'd go over the summers.
tim pool
Yeah.
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 we are, 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 into the workforce the best you can be.
@counterpointspol
Okay.
I'll give my hot take 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 retailer restaurant.
Because I swear to God, retailer restaurant is so brutal that, you know.
tim pool
Let's be serious because I would agree with you if it was service in some capacity.
Sure.
Meaning you've got to provide some kind of community service.
So that could be police officer, EMT.
It could be firefighter.
It could be a nurse, it could be a doctor.
It could be working in a shelter.
It could be something.
It doesn't have to be the military.
But in some way, you provide a service To your community.
@counterpointspol
To the community.
And we're never going to be able to get that in the United States of America barring an actual governmental collapse.
But I do think we would be better if we did it.
tim pool
And that actually is a liberal concept.
People don't understand that.
Not a libertarian.
Starship Troopers, read it.
Service guaranteed citizenship was: you don't have to if you don't want to.
All rights are afforded to you, but you don't get a say in how we run government if you don't contribute to that.
It's not authoritarian in any sense of the imagination.
So I would actually, I would agree with if you want to vote, you've got to do some kind of civic duty.
@counterpointspol
True.
Well, when the government collapses, you and I can put our heads together.
We can rebuild society, and this will be a part of it.
Agreed.
Poor people fat camps, compassionate beatings, and also service guarantee citizenship.
tim pool
We're going to wrap up now.
So if you guys want to give your final thoughts before we go.
@counterpointspol
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.
You know, I think that was...
tim pool
I don't know that.
@counterpointspol
But, you know, my name is Cotter.
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.
It's a bunch of first responders, military veterans who are all hanging out, talking shop, trying to be better men, trying to make the world a better place, all that kind of stuff.
I'm live there Monday through Friday, you know, five hours a day, five days a week.
So if you enjoyed it, please come over and check us out.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, sure.
My name's Econoboy.
It was really fun being here.
You know, 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 at conaboy.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, you know, we think like 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 tried to crystallize and argue for here.
And, you know, hopefully that was at least a good summary of what I wanted to do.
tim pool
We're back tonight at 8 p.m. for youtube.com slash Timcast IRL.
It's going to be fun.
Don't miss it.
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