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
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'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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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, 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.
There are 72 million millennials, 69 million Gen Z, 40 million Gen Alpha, and Gen Alpha is ending this year.
Caveat, Gen Alpha is slightly shorter than previous generations.
So if you want to add a few years because this is based on labor cycles of 18-year-olds, then we could estimate Gen Alpha to be about 48 million or let's just say the next generation of workers.
We're also currently right now facing what's called the demographic cliff because when the Great Recession happened, a dramatic drop in fertility occurred those two years, which means for the next couple of years, we're expecting a major drop off in 18-year-olds.
So currently, right now, we're facing a gap of 16 to 18-year-olds.
So that's entry-level work and labor for businesses.
And we're starting to see businesses actually close because they can't find entry-level labor.
And if you look at the population distribution, there's a natural element to this of the boomers into the X, right?
Because the baby boom post-World War II and then X being a smaller generation.
However, what I'm saying is, if this S curve distribution is going down, then it kind of doesn't matter what we're arguing about from a welfare state perspective.
We literally will not be able to afford it without automation, without like extreme amounts of automation.
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.
No, it doesn't, Tim, because the Laffer curve, the idea of the Laffer curve is you raise taxes to such an erroneously high level that people all of a sudden start dropping out of the labor force precipitously.
If you're talking about a national employment tax, right?
If we're going to say that there's free movement of labor and various different jurisdictions have different tax rates, then you've got a competition, but you need a 7% increase in labor taxes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
When people feel disrespected, they kill each other.
And this is a total aside.
I just wanted to bring it up in the context.
If we did have cruel and unusual punishment, and what I mean by that is not torturous, maiming, or anything like that, but literally, we're going to make you wear a diaper and bunny hop down the street, and then you're done.
But Tim, this is where we get into an argument about authoritarianism versus liberalism or libertarianism philosophically, where are we talking about 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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.