Automated Transcript
Sam:
[0:00]
| It's fine. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. And it's looking good. I'm gonna play the intro music and then we'll get started. Here we go. Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Friday, November 7th, 2025. It's just after 3 UTC as we are starting to record. I am Sam Minter. Yvonne Bowe is out this week, as he has mentioned for the last few weeks. He had surgery a couple days ago. He reports that he is recovering well. It was a hernia surgery. It went perfectly, exactly as the doctors would like it to go. He is recovering in a little bit of pain, but a lot less pain today than he was yesterday, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and seems to be doing fine. And we expect to have him back on the show next week if all goes well. So instead, we have Ed and Bruce here who have both been on the show before, but I believe never together.
|
Bruce:
[1:22]
| Yes, hello. And yes, it's good to be back.
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Ed:
[1:26]
| And likewise. Hello.
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Sam:
[1:28]
| That was Bruce talking first, and then Ed, if you can't tell their voices apart or recognize them. So as usual, when we do one of these shows with guest hosts, I let the guests pretty much pick the topics. So the plan here is we're going to have three segments, and in each segment, Bruce will pick one topic, and Ed will pick one topic, and then we'll take a break, and then we will repeat. I'm not going to pick any topics. I'm just going to talk about whatever these guys want to talk about and go from there. So who wants to go first, Ed or Bruce?
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Ed:
[2:05]
| Go ahead, Bruce.
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Bruce:
[2:07]
| Okay. So I wanted to talk about your recent job loss. Okay. And I'm sure that you've already gotten some good advice from a lot of people and some of the advice that I was thinking of giving you, you've already done. But for me, I have had five different jobs in the last six years.
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Sam:
[2:29]
| So just real quick, for anybody who didn't listen to last week's show or see any of my other announcements on social media, I did get laid off from my employer two weeks ago now, something like that. Yeah, some. And it was, I was not surprised at all. I saw it coming from a mile away. I had not, I drifted apart from my employer and like my priorities were not theirs and vice versa. and it was clear I didn't belong in the group I was in, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they gave me a nice fat severance so I don't have to panic and find something right away. At the same time, I don't have enough save to just retire right now. So I know I'm going to have to find something to make money sooner rather than later, but I don't have to be in an immediate, like, oh, crap, I got to have something by next week kind of thing. So that's the current step. So you had five jobs in how long?
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Bruce:
[3:27]
| In the last six years. That's a lot. Yeah, it's just that it's... It's a different story for every one of them, but it's not my fault. I've always done a good job.
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Sam:
[3:42]
| Sure you have. Yeah, that's your story.
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Bruce:
[3:45]
| Yeah, yeah. Well, I didn't cause that door to fly out on the Boeing plane. That happened just two weeks after I started there.
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Sam:
[3:55]
| But the submarine thing was all your fault, right?
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Bruce:
[3:58]
| No, not at all. In fact, I have a government report that shows that it had nothing to do with it. I'm innocent. Okay. So, yeah, I think that you're doing the right thing by doing LinkedIn Premium. You want to update your resume on there, treat your LinkedIn profile as a resume, or make it a copy of your resume. There were three job sites that I would constantly rotate through. It would be LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Indeed. And actually, to tell you the truth, Indeed is the one that I've had the most luck with.
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Sam:
[4:33]
| Okay, good to know.
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Bruce:
[4:36]
| Three of the jobs I've gotten have been through Indeed. So it's a very basic site, not a very pretty site. It's difficult. It's archaic to navigate, but there's a lot of really... Jobs in there. And what I would do is I would just spend a good half hour to an hour every day just looking through at all the job listings. I had searches already built up and just go and apply to everything. And then I would just work on projects for the rest of my free time. And the advice I've got is to, when there's really good, you have access to classes in LinkedIn for job searching. And there are sample interview questions on LinkedIn that are very good because, most interviews are pretty much the same. They ask the same basic questions. And if you know those 20 or 30 questions and you have a set answer for them, especially if you have a story for every one of those questions that they ask, then that will make your answers very memorable and it'll stand out. And also, when you're about to have, so just take, get as many interviews as you can, especially early on so you can kind of be in practice and then you'll be.
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Bruce:
[5:59]
| So when the real jobs come that you really, really want, you'll be relaxed and well-practiced and you'll have those answers already and everything. And also, when you have an interview scheduled with somebody, look them up on LinkedIn and see if you happen to know someone who they know. Because when you go into the interview and you say, oh, I know someone that you know. Have you worked with this person before? And then that just having that, that one person separation really helps because then that's kind of like an instant reference that you can have that you can bring to somebody. So that's, there's other things I could tell you, but don't want to, we got a lot of topics to talk about.
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Sam:
[6:43]
| Yeah, I mean, much appreciated, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, as I said, I'm sort of, I know I can't wait too long before diving full-fledged in because the market is awful right now. There are all kinds of reports about people taking over a year to find anything and doing like, having to find hundreds and hundreds of things just to get an interview and all that kind of stuff. And so I know I can't wait forever, but on the other hand, I also knew that mentally I need a little bit of a break and that also, you know, this is going to be the best opportunity I have to like actually make progress on some of those personal projects. So I better do it while I have the chance. And so like, I'm not, I'm not waiting very long before I actually start like looking at, you know, the real, okay, let's do, like you said, a half hour of searching for jobs every day and throwing out some applications. And also not even like, you know, when, when I had a job and I knew it was sort of, and I want, I wanted something else, but I wasn't like, you know, I was still there.
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Sam:
[7:58]
| I was, you know, when I looked at job listings, I was being pretty picky. You know, I was being like, you know, this job, could I do it? Yes. But it looks like it would suck. It wouldn't be any better than where I was, where I am. And so I'm not going to like save it or apply or anything like that. Whereas I think the situation now is if it remotely makes sense, go ahead and apply. You know?
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Bruce:
[8:21]
| Yeah. Especially early on because you can get those practice interviews in.
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Sam:
[8:26]
| Yeah. And, and, and, you know, I've, you know, in the past, I've done lots of interviews for the kind of position that I had. And so, but it's been a long time since I've done a lot of those. So it'll be interesting to see. But also part of what I have to figure out for myself is like the job I was doing is actually not what I want to be doing. Like you know so i have to figure out like do i apply for those kinds of jobs anyway do i search for completely different sort of things but if i search for completely different sort of things then i don't necessarily have the right experience match for them and potentially like there's you know salary implications and all that kind of stuff so i got a lot to figure out but i've got i've got some time to figure it out too so i'd.
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Bruce:
[9:16]
| Say cast a wide net.
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Sam:
[9:18]
| Yeah and.
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Bruce:
[9:19]
| Apply for everything now because it may not matter. And then when the job offers actually come, you can either, if you don't like it, you can just negotiate up to a super high salary. And that can probably make that...
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Sam:
[9:37]
| That can compensate for doing something you don't like.
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Bruce:
[9:39]
| That can compensate, yes. And so, yeah, don't give up opportunities when they could be there. And you definitely want to do something you really enjoy. You got to put food on the table.
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Sam:
[9:53]
| Well, yeah. In the end, you have to put food on the table. You have to pay the mortgage, you know, all this kind of stuff. And, you know, as much as it's, you know, I've joked before, like, you know, I'm ready to go, like, buy a Unabomber cabin in the middle of nowhere and just sit there, you know, but plus internet. Like, Unabomber didn't have internet. I still need internet. But, like, but realistically, that, no, that won't work. You know, I've got a family. to think about. I got things going on, you know, moving isn't really an option and at least not unless it's, I mean, if we would have to be in a really desperate situation to consider like picking up and moving to a lower cost of living place. And, you know, so yeah, I'm going to be doing all this stuff. You know, I, I don't want to think about all those things. I want to think about my fun little projects. I want to think about like hanging out at home and doing some things around home, spending time with the family. Those are the things I want to think about. But I fully recognize, you know, that the amount of time of runway I have will disappear before I know it. And so, you know, so it's, it's nice to have a little bit of a runway, but at the same time, that doesn't mean wait until you only have a few weeks of money left. Exactly.
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Bruce:
[11:17]
| Yeah. Well, you know, you can also apply for an, for unemployment.
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Sam:
[11:21]
| Yeah, and so Yvonne's already mentioned the unemployment, several other things. He's like, he's given me a little checklist. Do these things, start this thing moving, start that thing moving, and I will. I've been adjusting, you know, you know, Yvonne's joked about like my, my systems for my to-do list before, but I've been, I've completely revamped my to-do list to reflect my current situation, to reprioritize things, to make sure like, you know, all these things are, you're checked off. Like my, you mentioned you get the resume in LinkedIn, correct? I did that like six to nine months ago, but it doesn't have the stuff from the six to nine months. So just make the appropriate little adjustments to make sure it's really up to date, both a, both a nicely formatted resume version and the LinkedIn profile. And I do, I do have the matching completely like word for word, you know, I have to do that. I have to, you know, there's all kinds of little things to do. And and yeah i want to make progress on all those personal projects too and i've got a list of those and even within the last and i've started you know i i've made more progress on a couple of them in the last week than i had in the previous couple months now that that doesn't mean like i got anything to show for it yet but it's going faster well.
|
Bruce:
[12:44]
| You did mention last week that one of the, And I don't live far from you. So if you ever need any muscle to help you with anything, I have an open offer for you. I'll be happy to head down there and help you move any stuff if you need.
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Sam:
[13:02]
| Well, thank you very much. Unfortunately, with a couple of exceptions, most of it's not muscle stuff. Most of it's like open up a bin full of crap and sort through it and decide which things you want to get rid of and which things you don't. That is so hard having more people doesn't actually help with that you know it's just like you have to make yourself do it and that is on my list of things to do but i'll tell you it actually came up you know i i do randomize and i came up go through a bin did come up in the last few days but then i said i picked like i've got four zones where the bins can come from and the one i picked like the bins were actually blocked by other stuff. And I'm like, okay, I can't actually go through a bin until I do some real cleaning in this area too. And so like, I'm, I'm refactoring how I do that, but yeah, that definitely is a goal. And specifically, I think it's a goal for the earlier part of this timeframe, like for part of my decompression will be like doing stuff like that. Just pick out bins, go through them, sort them, take, take what is currently in 20 bins and try to find the three bins worth of stuff I want to keep and throw the rest away, you know? So, Anyway, that's going to happen. Any thoughts on all this, Ed? You've been retired for a while.
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Ed:
[14:31]
| I've been retired almost as long as I worked. Wow. The only time I had any significant job hunting was when I retired from the Army. I had a job ready and waiting. I had written a place, and they said, yes, please. And so there wasn't much of an application process. but then after two years that was with Humana and after two years I was fed up with them so I started hunting and I I actually applied several places had a couple interviews and and what didn't seem to be getting anywhere and then I decided I was I re-looked at my recommendation, list and I said you know I've got people I've worked with and and they're nice people but no one knows them so I said rather than that at this time around I'm going to put some prominent names and I'd check with them to make sure they'd be all right with it. So one of them was the guy, the three-star general I worked for in Europe, and another one was almost as high a ranking. But anyway, I got a call back very quickly from a lady who was looking for several people, apparently. And she said, I wasn't going to really pay much attention to you, but then I saw that you had a general, I can't remember his name, it doesn't matter, the general. and I worked with him once and he was incredible. I decided anyone he would recommend, I would want to hire.
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Ed:
[15:55]
| I probably would have gone. I think she was going to offer me something, but then I got an offer for a job that I really wanted. And so I went there instead. So think about putting somebody real famous if you have them on your recommendation list. Make sure they want it.
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Sam:
[16:11]
| Yeah, no, I've got people of various levels of prominence in different areas, but I don't think I've got anybody who would qualify as famous in my list. You know, I've got... If you do degrees of connection, you go a couple people out, okay, there can be famous people there. But I'm not sure that would work because they don't know me. They know somebody I know.
|
Sam:
[16:38]
| And that's not the same thing. And of my list directly, the people who would sort of be most prominent in their areas are quite likely not in areas that would actually be directly helpful for jobs I could actually get. You know, but and then, well, yeah, and then I want to have the conversation. You mentioned, Bruce, like spread the wide net. And part of that is I do want to contemplate things that are completely different from anything I've ever done before. But, you know, there's so many problems with that, you know, because your experience doesn't lead up to it. You're going to be starting at a more junior area and there's compensation things for that. And also the areas of that I find like most interesting are probably low paying anyway. You know, and so I, you know, but I feel like, okay, explore, you know, and I also want to explore a little bit brainstorming. Hey, can I, can I do things to make money that don't involve actually having an employer? It would be awesome. I don't know that I can, but it would be all, but I should, I feel like I should at least brainstorm on that without just discounting the possibility from the beginning you know if you.
|
Bruce:
[17:59]
| Look on YouTube for side gigs there's an endless list of things you can do there, My oldest brother, he just recently started selling stuff on TikTok, actually multivitamins on TikTok. And I'm like, how is he ever going to make money off that? But it takes time, but he's gradually building up. You never know.
|
Sam:
[18:22]
| You never know. And it's like some of those kinds of side gigs I know I don't have the right mindset for. It just wouldn't work. I just could not do that. But you never know. you're.
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Ed:
[18:34]
| You're a little limited geographically too aren't you because your wife's on the.
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Sam:
[18:38]
| Yeah no moving is not an option for me right now for for any number of reasons that being one of them like that my my wife's job is geographically constrained like we can't move more than a few miles away from where we are really like you know but you know the other thing i'll put out is like I was surprised. I did a post on Facebook and a post on LinkedIn, identical text, just sort of saying, hey, I was included in this, and here's what I'm thinking about it, whatever. And I got all the usual likes from people I knew in high school and stuff on Facebook. But LinkedIn, Like I was surprised by the reach. I'm looking at my stats, 150,000 impressions on that damn post, uh, with a hundred thousand members reached. I had over almost 6,200 profile views from the post. I gained 193 people following me. Um, 1,800 people reacted to my post. I don't know 1,800 people on LinkedIn. I had like a few, because I had been fairly religiously like.
|
Sam:
[19:59]
| If I actually worked with somebody, I would connect with them on LinkedIn. But, you know, I wouldn't like if I got random LinkedIn requests from people, I had no idea. I would reject them.
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Sam:
[20:12]
| But like here, I started getting all kinds of invites and people wanting to connect. I'm like, what the hell? I'll agree to all of them, you know. And so I have a whole bunch of new connections on LinkedIn of people I've never met. I have no idea who they are. I probably wouldn't reach out blindly to any of them, but I guess this means if I actually do, do something interesting with one of my personal projects and want to announce it, more people will see it, you know, so might as well. You know, I had 40 comments, six reposts of my thing, like some of, some of which from people I didn't know at all, you know, 51 people saved it, 43 people sent it on to other people. I'm like, really? Like, i i mean i.
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Bruce:
[20:59]
| Expected the end well because linkedin is like a it's a big it's a big empty room there's a whole bunch of people well it's a well it's actually a bit it's a very full room but it's very quiet not many people talk so or post so uh so when you post i got i yeah so when you post it gets a lot of a lot of attention because yeah.
|
Sam:
[21:19]
| I was surprised i mean i expected to like hear from you know people i'd worked for worked with or for 25 years ago that i hadn't talked to in a decade, but I wasn't expecting it to just be in front of all kinds of people I'd never heard of. I'm like, okay, that's fine. It's perfect timing for that. I mean, I guess I want to get that kind of attention again when I'm actually full-fledged into, okay, now I'm seriously looking for a job, but it can't hurt now either. And a number of people reached out and were like, hey, we'd love to talk to you. Can I help? Blah, blah, blah. And I made an initial response to all of them and have on my to-do list to follow up in more depth with all of them over the next week or so, week or two to, you know, okay, yeah, I'll get on the phone with you. I'll catch up. I'll talk to you about like what's going on, what I'm interested in, what I'm not. You know, there are a few people who are like, look, you know, check the job listings at my company. If there's anything that's good. I'll put in a good word for you, that kind of stuff. And like the first couple I've looked at, there wasn't anything there, but you know, I still appreciate the sentiment, you know, so I don't know. We'll, we'll, we'll see. We'll see. Fun stuff. Like I said last week, too, fun stuff right now. If in six months I have no money-making prospects, I will feel very different.
|
Sam:
[22:45]
| But, you know, we do have ways to make it work past six months. But the further out we go, the more serious the situation becomes. Okay, so enough about my job situation. Ed, what's your topic for this first segment?
|
Ed:
[23:04]
| Well, we're going to look at current things. How about we talk a little bit about Marjorie Taylor Greene?
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Sam:
[23:10]
| Okay, yes.
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Ed:
[23:13]
| Beginning a few weeks ago, she suddenly seemed like a new person. The first thought was maybe somebody had kidnapped her and put in a body double. But she's done a lot of stuff that people don't expect. And a lot of folks, I mean, there's some who are speculating that she had to come to Jesus moment or a road to namascus type moment there's an article in today's times no it wasn't it was in the atlantic today okay talking speculating that actually it may be a lot more sinister because she probably still is every bit as much mega as ever however if she looks at the the results of the current polls and the results of the elections from yesterday and these sorts of things. She has to be thinking that somewhere in the next year or two, there's going to be a new head leader, if you will, for MAGA. And because Trump's days may be over the way things are going right now. And if that's the case, she may be positioning herself to be the new MAGA leader. This thing gave me nightmares that are likely to keep me awake all night. But what do you think? Do you think she's that smart, number one?
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Sam:
[24:25]
| And number two... There are a few things I've heard. First of all, there are several aspects of this that might be in play. One, when she was flipping on the health care thing and flipping on Epstein.
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Sam:
[24:42]
| It seems like on Epstein, this was something that she had been talking about prior to the last election, etc. And she's just holding a consistent opinion from where she was before. On health care, this was a situation where suddenly her direct family members were impacted. And so she saw the effect of it herself. And so there's the notion, you know, Yvonne and I have talked about before, like for a lot of these folks, problems don't exist until or unless they affect you or your family directly. And it sort of hit that. And so maybe that changed her opinion of that. But then also people pointed out. And this is sort of report from a person who knew a person who knew it's one of these things where it's not like MTG was saying it directly herself. But rumor has it that her intention was to run for Senate in Georgia.
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Sam:
[25:39]
| And Donald Trump basically said he would not support her in that endeavor. And so she was pissed at that. and so was acting out a bit in terms of being more willing to do things that did not match up with the Trump agenda than she has been at various times before. But remember, she was one of the ones who was trying to vacate the Speaker when nobody else, including Donald Trump, was supporting that before. So she's got a record of that. And then also, yes, the rumor is that she's interested in running for president.
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Sam:
[26:18]
| Now, I'm not sure that of the various people in MAGA world that could potentially do that, she's the frontrunner, but she's reportedly interested.
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Bruce:
[26:28]
| Well, I'm not familiar with what has happened in the last few days, but I do know that she's been virulently America first. And Trump has definitely drifted away from the America first label that he originally.
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Sam:
[26:43]
| Uh well just as an example bruce today she was talking to you know when nancy pelosi announced that she wasn't going to run for re-election marjorie taylor green was on the view saying all kinds of good things about about uh pelosi and how like great a leader she was and how she was great for her party that's called being she was just very nice yes which is something that's rare but a few months ago i don't think she would have been saying that same stuff.
|
Ed:
[27:10]
| When she was talking about running for senator, she was going to be against Ossoff. Is that how he says his name, Ossoff, or whatever? And supposedly, from what the Atlantic thing, she was somewhere in the range of 15 to 20 points behind. So it wasn't just Trump who told her she wasn't going to do very well.
|
Sam:
[27:30]
| Well, she is in her place because she is in a district that is very aligned, is very red, very aligned with her kind of, it's a perfectly formed district for where she is. The broader a universe she goes out to, the harder it's going to be for her to appeal, even within Republicans.
|
Ed:
[27:50]
| Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, I just thought that was sort of a little interesting thing that we'll be finding out over the next couple of years, but I'm still going to have nightmares imagining her being the next president.
|
Sam:
[28:02]
| Yeah. So go ahead, Bruce. You had more.
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Bruce:
[28:04]
| Well, as far as she's concerned, she's recently, well, the last several months, she's been virulently anti-Israel and especially pointing out over and over that Israel is a nuclear power. And we're always referring to the nuclear power Israel, the nuclear power Israel. It's just getting the word out there that Israel is being very evil, and it's becoming the irony of history that the Jews who were persecuted in the Holocaust—, persecuting the Palestinians to the same degree. And that sense, well, in the last couple of years of the Gaza war, it's amazing how that Overton window has shifted against Israel and public opinion has shifted significantly. And she's been part of that shift, especially on the right.
|
Sam:
[29:03]
| I mean, you can argue the same degree part of what you said, but there's certainly, They've been doing things that are beyond the pale for a while now, and not just since the incident where Hamas went against them, but even looking back a few decades, it's gotten increasingly worse, the treatment of the Palestinians. And, yeah, the rest of the world was already there. But, you know, the U.S. is catching up. Europe is catching up. Europe was there before we were. And public opinion has shifted dramatically in the last year within both parties, frankly. And I think the sort of politicians who've been in place a long time are slow to catch up with this.
|
Bruce:
[30:04]
| Yeah, and this is typically the case in American politics where the politicians are lagging behind public opinion. And so as time goes forward, we'll see that shift be reflected in the electorate, and then the days will be numbered for Israel's unchecked support by U.S. government.
|
Sam:
[30:26]
| Yeah, I think you're right. That's just a matter of time. That doesn't mean no support, by the way, but I think it does mean the U.S. Being more willing to exert its influence to try to change Israeli behavior than they have been in the past and be more aggressive with what they're willing to put conditions on additional military support or whatever. You know, now, of course, the risk of all that and the reason people like Joe Biden and other sort of long term traditional folks are is the worry, of course, is if you do that, you drive them straight into the arms of adversaries. You know, OK, U.S. isn't going to support Israel anymore. Well, Russia will, you know. And what do we do about that? Do we care? You know, how do we react? And that's part of why people are concerned and go slow and all of that kind of stuff. So back to MTG.
|
Sam:
[31:31]
| I feel like she may be interested in exploring all these things, but I seriously question the likelihood of her success. I think even if you're talking within the world of, oh, okay, Trump is eventually gone, whether it's naturally at the end of his term or something else, there are a number of candidates who may want to pick up that baton. I don't see MTG winning that race.
|
Bruce:
[32:02]
| So then I guess that brings the question, who is going to take on the same persona? Who's going to fill that Trump? I mean, no one's ever going to be able to fill Trump's shoes completely as far as his personality, but that brashness. Rudeness, overbearing ruler, who on the Republican Party is going to fill that? MTG maybe might be able to do that. I mean, when you look at her on a stage on a debate, she might be the one who's like insulting the others.
|
Sam:
[32:37]
| From that attitude perspective, she's closer. I mean, people always talk about J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance can't do that. J.D. Vance can do other things, but he can't. This is not what he is. He is not a swap-in replacement for Donald Trump's personality, right? And I think also, I'm not sure that anyone, I'm not sure that the person who succeeds in taking over this movement will succeed by trying to be a clone of Donald Trump. You know, it's going to have to be somebody else's different twist on this.
|
Bruce:
[33:15]
| Someone's going to try.
|
Sam:
[33:17]
| Someone will probably try. Someone will try to, like, imitate that style. And look, there certainly are people out there who try to do that. And most of them aren't existing politicians. It's more like the, you know, the podcast circuit.
|
Bruce:
[33:36]
| Well, Vivek Ramaswamy is probably pretty close to that. He's got a silver tongue.
|
Sam:
[33:43]
| He kind of tried to do that and completely flamed out last time around. I mean, of course, he was going against Trump, which is a different scenario. But, you know, I don't think, you know, I don't know. I don't know there. I have to start like, you know, sorting through like who are who are the real candidates on the Republican side who might want to do this. I mean, of course, they keep talking about, well, Trump's going to go for a third term, et cetera.
|
Bruce:
[34:11]
| Y'all were talking about that a couple weeks ago And I was thinking I will take a bet, from any of you all.
|
Sam:
[34:19]
| And he's not going to do it.
|
Bruce:
[34:21]
| He's not going to try. He likes to have that open, but he's never going to actually try.
|
Sam:
[34:27]
| I think it is more about he enjoys the noise that comes from him saying it than it is that he actually wants to do it. He didn't want this. The only reason he did this second term is it got him out of all of his legal problems. He didn't really want to be president again. You know and of course he wanted to show that you know just get revenge for having lost last time but like.
|
Ed:
[34:53]
| Yeah i think the i think the federalist society wanted him to be president because he with this brashness and nastiness that he has he keeps the the spotlight on him all the time and people keep running after the the bullshit stuff that he spouts out more heritage in the meantime, In the meantime, Vogt and the others are wanting a government.
|
Sam:
[35:19]
| Yeah. I mean, like I said, more heritage than federalist society.
|
Ed:
[35:22]
| I'm sorry. Yeah, I meant the heritage. Yeah, I'm sorry.
|
Sam:
[35:25]
| But yeah, and there may be something to that, but, you know, it's always, yeah, I don't know. I think the, but I think, Bruce, you're right. He doesn't want a third term. He's going to be old. He knows how old he's going to be. He knows he already feels old. He's bored with the job. He delegates almost everything except, like, you know, knocking down the East Wing, you know? Those are the things he cares about.
|
Bruce:
[35:55]
| He cares about his legacy.
|
Sam:
[35:57]
| And, uh, yeah, he wants to build a few monuments to himself and this kind of stuff.
|
Bruce:
[36:01]
| That's what the East wing basically is.
|
Sam:
[36:04]
| Yeah.
|
Bruce:
[36:04]
| No one's going to tear it down again.
|
Sam:
[36:07]
| He wants to do that arch too. That, uh, the, the Arc de Trump for whatever.
|
Bruce:
[36:12]
| Oh, I hadn't heard about that.
|
Ed:
[36:13]
| He may have a harder time getting that through.
|
Sam:
[36:16]
| He wants to build an arch near the Potomac river across from like the Jefferson.
|
Sam:
[36:21]
| Memorial or something that's like based on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Oh no. but named after him instead.
|
Ed:
[36:29]
| Brendan Burgey, the Arc de Triomphella. I think he'll have a harder time getting that through. I mean, the East Wing thing, he just sort of, you know, clearly broke a whole bunch of laws and just tore it down.
|
Sam:
[36:44]
| Well, the actual building of the new thing is always harder than the tearing down of the old thing. Yeah, so we'll see.
|
Ed:
[36:54]
| They could be in litigation over, you know, if they can prove that there was asbestos, I can't imagine a building didn't have a lot of it. If they prove that, then that becomes a real huge issue because asbestos is a dangerous substance they have blowing around in the wind and the dust.
|
Sam:
[37:12]
| Yeah, well, you know. Knock down first, think about those kinds of things later. That's the whole philosophy of this administration. But yeah, anyway, I don't know. I have to start thinking more seriously about who are the Republican contenders. Because, you know, again, the talk of it being Trump, I think that's all just bluster. So we have everything from Trump Jr. To MTG to Vance to a variety of other senators who will undoubtedly throw themselves into the ring again. We've got various people from the commentary world that might jump in. There are a bunch of folks. It'll be, you know, whenever you have an open seat primary like that, it's always a very dynamic situation. And I don't think this will be any exception.
|
Bruce:
[38:05]
| And in the meantime, every one of them will be trying to get Trump's endorsement.
|
Ed:
[38:10]
| Yes.
|
Bruce:
[38:11]
| And Trump will try to exploit that too.
|
Ed:
[38:14]
| His endorsements are not working out all that well lately.
|
Bruce:
[38:18]
| Yeah, well, they're going to want to get it anyway.
|
Sam:
[38:23]
| Yes, they will. And, of course, the dynamics change entirely. If Trump dies and Vance actually is president, that changes everything. But, you know, we got hard.
|
Bruce:
[38:38]
| Oh, he's the healthiest person. Ever. Yes, yes. So that ain't going to happen.
|
Ed:
[38:44]
| In New Jersey, Mikey Sherrill was the one who kept talking about Trump endorsing Ciccarelli. Ciccarelli didn't mention Trump much, but almost every time she talked, she kept saying Ciccarelli is Trump's chosen guy.
|
Sam:
[38:57]
| Well, you know, but that's a general election. And so there's an entirely different set of things playing out for trying to win a nomination within the Republican Party versus winning a general election. But even within the Republican Party, I think the power of a Trump endorsement is declining the further we get into the lame duck situation. You know and the more stuff he does that's unpopular because he's losing support even within republicans i mean you know his support is still high within republicans but it's less than it was as people get dissatisfied with the actual results they see as opposed to the idea of what might happen that they projected onto the scenario before he came back so okay with all of that said.
|
Sam:
[39:55]
| Let's take another break, and then it'll be time for, well, not another break. This is the first break. We'll take a break, and then it'll be time for another topic from Bruce back after this. Okay, we're back.
|
Bruce:
[41:53]
| Hey, I'm just looking out the window here. I think my son has got a campfire going on right now. And it's like, this is a weird night to be doing a campfire out there. But, oh, wow.
|
Sam:
[42:05]
| Has the rain at least stopped?
|
Bruce:
[42:07]
| Yeah, I think the rain has stopped, but it's really windy out there.
|
Sam:
[42:10]
| So he's going to be sending ashes up to the neighbors to set their houses on fire.
|
Bruce:
[42:16]
| Yeah, I hope not. And I might need to call him or something to make sure that everything's like that. He's 29 years old, so he's— So he should know what he's doing. Yeah, he knows what he's doing.
|
Sam:
[42:30]
| Yeah, a little bit different than if you're like a 12-year-old was out there doing it.
|
Bruce:
[42:34]
| Yeah, yeah.
|
Sam:
[42:36]
| Okay, so Bruce, the next topic is yours.
|
Bruce:
[42:39]
| So let's talk about the government shutdown. So it's been going on over a month now, supposedly. I keep hearing in the news that it's like now the longest government shutdown. And so from a libertarian perspective, libertarian to me is like, yeah, this is great. This is like a holiday every day. The government's shut down. But it's disorderly and there's a lot of problems with it, of course. But there's the.
|
Sam:
[43:06]
| Main— I hear you're flying somewhere in a few days.
|
Bruce:
[43:09]
| That's right.
|
Sam:
[43:10]
| What you're thinking about—how's it affecting you then?
|
Bruce:
[43:13]
| Well, my point of view is, as it's always been, that it doesn't make sense for the TSA, for the federal government to be running airport security. The federal government doesn't run security at the mall. Why would they be doing it at the airport? Same thing with the inter-traffic controllers. That should be privatized just like it is in Canada. And so I think as people are waiting in long lines and having their flights delayed or cancelled, they should be looking at it that way rather than saying, ah, the government should be getting this open again because this really doesn't make sense for the government to be running that. So, yeah, I think that, I would think that once you have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people really mad about their flights getting delayed or canceled, that's going to really push the government to get this thing resolved.
|
Sam:
[44:07]
| I think what's always happened in these is that, well, not always, I shouldn't say always, but, There's always, I keep saying always, always is a bad word. Never use the word always. But one of the ways you can get out of these kinds of scenarios is simply it becomes so painful that people start desperately wanting to get out of it. And options that seem to be off the table for both sides start suddenly being palatable because you're having to deal with a situation that real people are feeling the pain, your constituents are feeling the pain, oftentimes you yourself are feeling the pain. I think I read that at one of these previous shutdowns, a turning point was when a national airport in Washington, D.C., that many Congress people used themselves to go back and forth from D.C., started being seriously affected. And all of a sudden, they're like, well, we can't have that.
|
Bruce:
[45:19]
| Yeah. Well, actually, we should probably step back and say, why are we here? And it boils down to the fact that, first of all, Congress has not been able to pass, what is it, 13 appropriations bills or 12 appropriations bills?
|
Sam:
[45:37]
| Yeah, yeah.
|
Bruce:
[45:37]
| They have not been able to do that in October 1st, like in the last long, long time, probably not 20 or 30 years. And so, and on the other hand, you got the minority party, the Democrats, well, right now it's Democrats, that are trying to use the necessity of passing a budget or at least a continuing resolution to... To continue a subsidy that has been going on for, what, like the last five years? It's got the Obamacare subsidies.
|
Sam:
[46:12]
| And specifically, the big, beautiful bill is ending the subsidy, and so they actually want to reverse something that was just passed a few months ago to have it continue. And so one of the things that is brought up in the whole back and forth about, like, well, who's at fault, blah, blah, blah, is –, continuing the status quo would be to let this thing expire. If you just continue existing law, you would just do this. So the Democrats aren't agreeing to just turn it back on for a few months and then we'll punt it a few months and we'll deal with it again in a few months, but we'll just leave things where we are. They are trying to use this leverage because this is the only leverage they have to try to, and they picked sort of the one policy issue that they thought they could make the biggest case about and try to use that as the leverage. And that's where they are.
|
Bruce:
[47:14]
| Well, it's because it's a benefit that has gone to the middle class. It's a benefit for people who are well, actually, it's a benefit for people who are over 400% of the poverty level that are getting this benefit. It ends up being something on the order of, I think it's like $350 billion over the course of 10 years. That's the cost of continuing that subsidy.
|
Sam:
[47:41]
| Well, and when you look at individual pieces, people in individual cases, it makes a huge, It's a huge percentage difference for the individuals who are affected as well. It's not just like 5% here or there. Like in some cases, the amount they're going to have to pay out of pocket doubles.
|
Bruce:
[47:58]
| It's thousands of dollars a year. But it's a benefit going to people who are making good income. So there's really not much justification to be giving this benefit to people who pay for it for themselves.
|
Sam:
[48:13]
| I'd say it's going to people who have decent income. It also does go down the scale as well. It's just less so. But the thing is that the numbers are so big that even for people with those incomes, it's not a trivial amount of money. It's a significant chunk of change. And the notion behind all this is that, you know, without this, the total numbers are just too big overall, and you're wanting to bring the price down for everybody. And it was brought in as a COVID thing initially, but as with most things, if it doesn't go away, people become used to it and et cetera. And then you just also have, I mean... The whole health care thing is out of control anyway, in terms of how much it costs, the pricing, all of this kind of stuff.
|
Sam:
[49:06]
| But you can see where they come in. The bottom line and the reason they picked this issue out of all issues is it's health care, and it's a direct pocketbook issue, and it's substantial amounts, like you said, for the middle class. So this isn't like some small group here or there, and it's not some marginalized group. This is affecting lots of people, and it's affecting them in a serious way, and so you can try to make the case out of it. Now, it's still difficult in some cases because you're still talking future. You're still talking an impact that hasn't happened yet, and you're trying to avoid an impact in the future, and that's sometimes a hard case to make because people just aren't recognizing it, aren't paying attention, aren't whatever. And so, but so far, if you look at the polling on how people are thinking about this, nobody likes anybody involved. Like everybody, all of the numbers, like the Republicans, the Democrats, the president, they all get horrible ratings on this. Nobody likes anybody. But it seems like right now the Democrats are coming off the least worst in those polls. That may continue to change over time. I feel like that's all very dynamic based on how things are going this week. Yeah.
|
Bruce:
[50:29]
| And then another major thing that's been affected by the shutdown is the SNAP benefits. That affects, I think, something like 42 million people in the country, which is more than 10% of the population. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[50:46]
| And in some states, the percentage is significantly higher as well.
|
Bruce:
[50:49]
| Yeah, I can imagine. It's very regional. I saw a headline that said that the courts have said that Trump has to fully fund it. Trump and the administration has said, though, they can only partially fund it out of reserve funds. And so it'll be interesting to see how that goes. But hopefully the people who need it the most will be getting some and... But I think, for me, I'm in favor of giving help to the poorest of the poor. But when it starts reaching up into the middle class, it doesn't make sense. So I think SNAP, I'm not sure exactly what the criteria is for getting into that. But I believe that's still, of course, the poor. But is it really more than 10% of the country that really goes or dies on that?
|
Sam:
[51:38]
| No, I think the national number is actually slightly under 10%. There are some states, particularly in the South, where it's significantly higher. I think I read that the, I forget which state it is, but I think the state with the highest penetration is like a third. And so, you know, and of course those are red states, which is also one of the dynamics at play here.
|
Bruce:
[52:03]
| Yeah. So that's what it's, which doesn't, I really have a hard time believing that there's really that many people who would starve to death. Well, I mean, that's like, well, that's a little exaggeration, are really, really in desperate need of food aid.
|
Sam:
[52:21]
| Well, I mean, unfortunately, I think those numbers are about on par. I mean, and honestly, if there's, my attitude towards it is I would rather give the aid to some people that don't need it than miss people who do need it. But I think that, you know, the numbers are high. There are quite a few folks that can't make ends meet without additional supports like this. And it's not a trivial number. And, you know, they're going to start to be affected.
|
Bruce:
[53:06]
| So another aspect of this government shutdown is the filibuster.
|
Sam:
[53:11]
| Yes.
|
Bruce:
[53:11]
| So this could have really big repercussions. If the filibuster really is removed, then that will dramatically change the dynamic of the way the Congress operates. Yes.
|
Sam:
[53:28]
| And so— I think for the better. I've said this on the show for years.
|
Ed:
[53:33]
| Oh, just a second now.
|
Bruce:
[53:34]
| So, yeah, I think in my mind, I think the filibuster is a good thing, but I'm interested to hear what Ed has to say.
|
Ed:
[53:42]
| Well, if a party has a 51 to 49 majority in the Senate and you don't have a filibuster, the minority party might as well go home because they will not get to do or accomplish virtually anything. And it used to be just to go back historically the Supreme Court justices, could not survive a filibuster if it was someone who was unacceptable, they would filibuster it and you had to come up with a new nominee basically because they were keeping it limbo once we said no we're not going to do that it's 51% we get justices who are, radical both directions because whoever's got control of the Senate can do what they want and ride rush out, and the minority vote no longer matters because the majority vote.
|
Sam:
[54:38]
| You're absolutely right. One of the things that changed over the last 50 years is the willingness to use the filibuster for everything. It used to be going back 50, 70, 80 years, The filibuster existed, but it was reserved for sort of, critical, rare issues, like most things passed with 50 votes.
|
Ed:
[55:05]
| But see, part of that was, they've made it very easy to filibuster now.
|
Sam:
[55:10]
| Yeah, that's part of it.
|
Ed:
[55:10]
| Hey, I want a filibuster, and they take a vote. And if you don't get 60 votes, yeah.
|
Sam:
[55:15]
| Absolutely. That's bullshit.
|
Ed:
[55:16]
| If you want a filibuster, you need to stand on your feet and talk for three days.
|
Bruce:
[55:19]
| I mean, one of the- And cross your legs while you're doing it.
|
Sam:
[55:22]
| One of the proposed filibuster reforms is just make them do it the old-fashioned way.
|
Ed:
[55:28]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[55:28]
| May essentially make it so you can use a filibuster to delay, but not to stop. But my argument, and then Bruce, you can do yours, and I've said this on the show before, but fundamentally the existence of the filibuster, I feel, ends up distorting democracy in both directions. Because what happens is people vote in the party that they're for, whichever party it is, because they're going to do X, Y, Z, Q. And then they get in and they can't do it because of the filibuster, because of other institutional things. And then they get blamed for not doing what they promised, even though they tried to do it, but they were stopped by the other side. And so then you get this cycle of throw the bums out, throw the bums out, throw the bums out, throw the bums out, where everybody's just always disappointed that whoever they brought in couldn't do what they said. And so they're a bunch of liars, and they're ineffective, and they're whatever. And you can't properly give credit and blame for the parties implementing their stated policies.
|
Sam:
[56:42]
| As long as there are, of course, some exceptions where if you, let's say, the majority party decides to eliminate all elections forever, that changes things. But as long as you are continuing to have elections, I feel like letting the party who wins actually implement their agenda means that next time around, the voting public can give a proper, you know, do they like what they got or not? If they like it, they'll keep the people. If they don't like it, they'll get rid of the people. But they can make that judgment properly based on what's actually happened. Whereas right now, people are just judging it based on they said they were going to do acts and they didn't on both sides.
|
Ed:
[57:28]
| There's another option, which is that you negotiate rather than the majority party saying this is the way it's going to be. You sit down and say, well, we need to negotiate until we reach some sort of thing that at least two-thirds of the Senate agrees with. I don't think that's a bad thing.
|
Sam:
[57:45]
| You're right. That would be a great thing. It hasn't existed in 30, 40 years at least.
|
Bruce:
[57:50]
| Well, they are negotiating to some degree. It's just it's behind closed doors, like even now, for the government shutdown.
|
Sam:
[57:57]
| Well, there's always uncontroversial things that pass through the Congress that aren't partisan in nature. And those are the things that get no attention whatsoever because everybody agrees. And those do still continue to happen.
|
Bruce:
[58:11]
| Yeah, well, even now, because when there's an impasse, you end up with a group of centrist senators, some Republicans and Democrats, who get together and they can control the vote because they can sway it one way or another. And so that's when you do get the negotiations. Yes, it's not to the same level as we've had in the past.
|
Sam:
[58:35]
| No, I like even that, like the scenario you've described has not actually resulted in legislation in probably at least 20 years.
|
Bruce:
[58:45]
| Yeah, I don't have the examples on the top of my head.
|
Sam:
[58:47]
| I get the viewpoint of like, hey, maybe government should only ever be able to do things that a super majority supports. You can make that argument, and I'm sure you would, Bruce. Needing two-thirds limits how much can get done, and it can only get done what everybody agrees on. The problem is we're so divided right now, there are very few things that everybody agrees on.
|
Bruce:
[59:15]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[59:16]
| So. So anyway, yeah, look, the one thing that is clear is that eliminating the filibuster would completely change what our politics look like now, because of that and because of the worries that you're talking about, Bruce and and Ed. Donald Trump is pushing for it right now. He talked to senators, but I don't think he's going to get it.
|
Bruce:
[59:42]
| Which is quite notable because typically Republicans have been the one to be in favor of keeping the filibuster. But of course, Trump has no long-term thinking. All he cares about is what he can get done right now, future be dead.
|
Sam:
[59:59]
| And senators from both sides, you know, when the Democrats were thinking about potentially getting rid of it, Manchin and Sinema famously blocked it. But the reports were there were probably five or six other senators who weren't going to go for it. They just didn't want to go on the record at the moment. And I think you probably have at least five to 10 Republican senators who won't go along with this now. and it's because the recognition that.
|
Sam:
[1:00:29]
| Yes, we could get a bunch of stuff with this done right now, but as soon as the Democrats take power again, and we assume at some point they will, there's a whole bunch of stuff they're going to do, too. And one of the arguments against is, you know, I said, like, OK, you get the policy you ask for, but that also potentially brings up a world where the policy swings wildly every few years. And that's not exactly stable either. And it also brings up like when Donald Trump listed the kinds of things he wants to do with it, there's a lot of voter suppression kind of stuff in there. There's a lot of making voter voting harder. There's a lot of locking in things that he's wanted to do. And of course, when I talk about things I would want the Democrats to do, it's exactly the same kind of thing. Expand the Supreme Court, add more states, lock in nonpartisan redistricting and expansive voter rights, make mail-in voting nationwide, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, and so both sides are going to want to do things that advantage them long term. And if if either one of them succeeds in the right set of policies that make it really hard for the other to ever win, you are potentially causing all kinds of long term damage as well.
|
Bruce:
[1:01:53]
| And of course, the because of that, the number one priority is to make the changes that, Not to fix our national problems, but to fix the election system in such a way that locks in their majority through gerrymandering, voting laws, and such to either restrict or cause different outcomes in the elections.
|
Sam:
[1:02:21]
| And you'd hope in an ideal world you would construct all of that in a way that's quote unquote fair. But of course, the reality is either side is going to be sorely tempted to just do something that locks in their advantages.
|
Bruce:
[1:02:38]
| Yes. And that's why it's the number one priority when it comes to when they get into power, whereas the actual real problems in the country have nothing to do with how we're doing elections.
|
Sam:
[1:02:48]
| Although I will say, although, you know, we have the situation with California undoing it right now, for 15, 20 years now, Democrats have been pushing these nonpartisan redistricting things that try to be fair. You know, they haven't been locking in their majorities. Instead, they've been locking in. In some states. No, no, no. In some states, absolutely, there are a handful of states, like Illinois is an example, Massachusetts is an example, that have gone the other direction, but the vast majority of states where they have... Put together something have actually there was a trend that was going for a long time of more and more states instituting these non-partisan.
|
Bruce:
[1:03:39]
| Well the way we do it here in washington is a very good way i i i like the way it is done it's there's no controversy uh there's it's not a there it's like it just they do they do the redistricting note they do the redistricting and there's no fight in the legislature about it right we.
|
Ed:
[1:03:57]
| Almost got it done in pennsylvania but the republicans scuttled it and they scuttled it by two things number one the speaker of the house tried to keep it from ever coming to the to the legislature to get even getting to the floor then when it finally got to the floor the republicans introduced something a hundred amendments of each one had to be debated and they reached uh when the term was over and it never, And then for some reason, it hasn't come back. Well, it hasn't come back up again because we got redistricted in 2020 and we're not going to get it into it. So it's not a problem now. What the hell would we ignore it?
|
Sam:
[1:04:36]
| Anyway, I feel like for these kinds of reasons, we're not yet at the breaking point where the filibuster will go away. I've said for a decade or more that I think all it will take is the right important issue that you have more than 50 but less than 60 votes in favor. And it's something really crucial to the party that is in that zone. And the other thing you've had, though, which I think is very interesting, is that you have had the eating away at it. And just within the last couple of months, the Republicans twice had an override of the filibuster where they had the parliamentarians say, no, this requires 50 votes, and then them say, eh, never mind that. We'll do it with 50 on particular individual bills where they haven't changed the rule permanently, but instead they've said, you know what, on this one vote, let's say we need 50 instead of 60 and just plow right through it. And I think that may be the way that this ends up happening is not through a one and done, we're going to change the rules and we're going to eliminate the filibuster, or even we're going to eliminate the filibuster in a certain category.
|
Sam:
[1:06:03]
| It's just going to be more decisions on one-off votes that says, okay, this time we'll do it. We're not saying forever. We're just saying this time we won't require the 60 votes. And that'll just happen more and more often.
|
Ed:
[1:06:18]
| That's sort of what California has done with the redistricting. It's, you know, it's a one-time redistrict, and then after the elections go back, supposedly.
|
Sam:
[1:06:28]
| Well, after the next census, actually. So it goes until then.
|
Ed:
[1:06:32]
| It goes until then. Okay, I wasn't sure. I knew it was to be temporary, not permanent filibuster. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:06:38]
| Okay, that was all starting on the government shutdown and transitioned into the filibuster because it's been talked about.
|
Ed:
[1:06:44]
| But basically, the reason our government keeps shutting down is it's so dysfunctional. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:06:53]
| So, Ed, your turn. Pick a topic.
|
Ed:
[1:06:56]
| Oh, crap.
|
Sam:
[1:06:58]
| Caught you by surprise.
|
Ed:
[1:07:00]
| Yeah. Okay. You know, I said something out earlier today that I thought might be a little interesting to talk about. a little bit. And that has to do with the income inequality, which gets to the heart of a lot of things that are going on. What triggered it off was a podcast I listened to actually this morning with a guy by the name of Branko Milanovic, who has currently, he's done a lot of research on income inequalities, and specifically has talked about in China and in Russia and in the United States and other places where there are such major income inequalities. The podcast itself was one of the University of Chicago ones. It's called Capitalism slash Capitalism, And just thought of an interesting way. The guy who runs it, his name is Luigi Zincalas. He's from Italy originally, and he's an economist professor at Chicago. And then a lady, Bethany McLean, who's a journalist that writes on economic issues. It's a worthwhile podcast. If you've never listened to it, it's kind of fun to listen to because they do interesting good things. What this came down to Is talking about Is if and can equality A big problem And if it is Why is it there And it's been present throughout.
|
Ed:
[1:08:30]
| You know, the dictatorships, socialist, communist countries.
|
Ed:
[1:08:39]
| Free countries, the United States, it's always there. And in France, it's what led to the French Revolution in 1789, basically, was the massive inequality, people starving to death and others living in great luxury. I don't know what we do about it Because for one thing, it's probably not right to just say Well, we'll take 10% of the wealthy people's money and give it to the poor.
|
Ed:
[1:09:09]
| That's not such a good idea That's what Ayn Rand called that, looting On the other hand, it's probably not appropriate for corporations To pay $50 million to the CEO a year and have people working on the line making the products at $5, $10, $15 an hour and not being able to pay their rent and food and needing to rely on the rest of us to buy SNAP budgets for. Fully employed people should not need to need SNAP. So, you know, some things I don't think would be appropriate at all. They talked about a tax on capital, retained capital value. or we should tax that maybe charge 2% or 3% only of it. But that doesn't work because if a guy's got all of it, like Warren Buffett has billions of dollars tied up in the stock, if he had, say, a 2% tax on his $100 billion, that would come out to, what, something like $200 million a year that they would have to pay to pay that tax.
|
Ed:
[1:10:13]
| No one has $220 or even $200 million, either one, sitting around. So in order to generate the money to pay that tax, they've got to sell their stock, which immediately hits the stock. The price goes down. It dilutes the capital control that the capitalist has of his company. I don't see how that could possibly work.
|
Sam:
[1:10:35]
| I'm getting lost a little bit, Ed. So what was the main thesis that these guys were sort of advocating that you want to talk about a little bit?
|
Ed:
[1:10:45]
| Well, I think they were primarily just discussing, is inkling equality an issue? And if so, they didn't really get into saying what to do about stopping it, just mostly describing that it's present throughout the world.
|
Sam:
[1:11:00]
| Yeah, I mean, from my understanding of things I've read about this in the past, increasing inequality, measured in a variety of different ways, has very often presaged significant societal turmoil. Let's just put it that way. As one of the warning signs. Now, I think you can argue, does that necessarily mean every time that gets too big, something bad's going to happen? Does it mean it's bad in and of itself? I think you have a lot of arguments there, but I think it's definitely... There's a strong correlation of when income inequality gets too high, there's a high chance of turmoil. Now, what if anything you do about that or whether that's just a natural cycle that's going to occur, I think you can argue. I don't know, Bruce, this seems like one of those areas where I imagine your take would be laissez-faire. Whatever happens, happens.
|
Bruce:
[1:12:12]
| Yeah, absolutely. I would say, is the goal a higher average income or do you want a more equally distributed income? That's not the same thing. I just brought up the list of income inequality of all the countries on the world. And we're looking for the United States to see where we are in our ranking. I think we're kind of like in the middle. Like the country with the highest income equality is Slovakia, Slovenia, Belarus. Wow, Belarus, India.
|
Sam:
[1:12:53]
| The highest inequality.
|
Bruce:
[1:12:54]
| The highest, no, highest equality.
|
Sam:
[1:12:56]
| Oh, highest equality. Yeah, I think so. I was expecting the inequality would be, you know, actually fairly poor countries.
|
Bruce:
[1:13:03]
| I may be wrong. It just has it sorted by Gini coefficient. So remind me again what the Gini, is a high Gini coefficient good or bad?
|
Sam:
[1:13:12]
| Oh, let me look it up. I know that's a measure of exactly that, but let me, I think a Gini coefficient of, and I'm not going to talk before I look at it.
|
Bruce:
[1:13:26]
| Oh, zero is perfect equality, one is perfect inequality. Okay, so the countries with the highest equality.
|
Sam:
[1:13:37]
| So lowest Gini coefficient.
|
Bruce:
[1:13:39]
| With the lowest Gini coefficient are Slovakia, Slovenia, Belarus, India.
|
Ed:
[1:13:44]
| India.
|
Bruce:
[1:13:45]
| Wow. Ukraine. Those are the top five.
|
Sam:
[1:13:51]
| What are the bottom five?
|
Bruce:
[1:13:53]
| Well, the bottom five, yeah, as far as... But top five as far as equality.
|
Sam:
[1:13:58]
| Oh, right, right.
|
Bruce:
[1:13:59]
| You would think that Denmark would be like, oh, because they got a very... A Western European country. They're like... 30 out of how many countries are there here? I don't know. About 100 countries here. But anyway, I think there's multiple things you want to go for. Do you want income equality? Or do you want...
|
Sam:
[1:14:24]
| Wait, I still want the answer to my question. Those were the ones with the most equality. What are the five with the most inequality?
|
Bruce:
[1:14:30]
| South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Eswatini, and Colombia.
|
Sam:
[1:14:37]
| Okay.
|
Bruce:
[1:14:38]
| Brazil. So it's like...
|
Sam:
[1:14:40]
| And we're somewhere in the middle.
|
Bruce:
[1:14:43]
| Let me actually get a control F here. Oh, is it USA?
|
Ed:
[1:14:49]
| What I've heard while he's looking that up is that our present level of inequality is approaching that of France before the revolution in 1789.
|
Sam:
[1:14:59]
| Right. Well, and that's the example that's always brought up is sort of, you know, when the inequality gets high enough, the chances of sort of violent revolution increase.
|
Bruce:
[1:15:13]
| Well, I'd say that income inequality probably has very little to do with politics because the United States is like right in the middle.
|
Sam:
[1:15:20]
| And also that this is this is one where probably wealth inequality matters more than than income inequality. There are all kinds of things you could measure and and to answer your question in terms of what do you want to sort of optimize for I don't think I don't think it would be valuable to equalize everything at all that would cause all kinds of its own problems, but I think the notion that you want to look at. I want to say look at medians instead of averages at the very least, but really you have to look at like deciles or something. You look at all 10 deciles and how they're behaving, and you do probably, to be in a healthy state, the difference between your lowest decile and your highest decile probably can't get too great. If it gets too great, you're probably causing problems. Now, what do you do about that? Now, I know Bruce is going to disagree violently, but I actually think one of the proper roles of government is to act as a pump to take things off the top and shove them down to the bottom, you know, to sort of to to make that cycle work more effectively because trickle down does not work. So to some degree, you want to help trickle down along.
|
Bruce:
[1:16:48]
| Well, I agree that it would be good to have the rich help the poor, but I just don't want force involved. There used to be, before we had a welfare state, people would group themselves together into societies, mutual help societies, mutual aid societies. And those all basically went away after the government kind of took over that whole industry or that whole operation of society.
|
Sam:
[1:17:17]
| Those never did all that well. You know, they had limited success in limited areas, but they never had the oomph to actually have the effect that you would want them to have. Yes, they went away, but they were replaced by something that actually was more effective.
|
Bruce:
[1:17:37]
| Well, I think the effectiveness of private industry is going to be better than anything that the government can do. Look at the Walmart.
|
Sam:
[1:17:46]
| Only if the incentives align for private industry to even do the thing. If the incentives don't align, then.
|
Bruce:
[1:17:53]
| Of course the incentives align because the corporations want to serve larger and larger groups of people and they want to serve the masses. Look at Walmart. Walmart has done much more to help the poor than any government program ever.
|
Sam:
[1:18:12]
| Just by providing cheap products that they can buy.
|
Bruce:
[1:18:14]
| Right? Yes, exactly. And finding the efficiencies in the supply chain and pushing those savings towards the consumers. Or even Amazon will be included in that, too.
|
Sam:
[1:18:24]
| Yeah, part of this is long-term versus short-term, too. The problem with how companies like Walmart are currently structured is they're very short time horizons. And sometimes you need to be thinking about a larger time horizon to even deal with these things. But I think the question, though, about what works and what doesn't, I fundamentally think it's an empirical question. Try it and find out. Like the difficulty is I don't have, like you do, sort of the inherent, well, certain things are off the table because, you know, we don't want to force the billionaire to pay more taxes, you know? I'm like, that's fine.
|
Bruce:
[1:19:08]
| It's because the billionaire will always get away with it. The billionaire has ways of not paying any taxes at all by, by instead of, instead of by, by accumulating assets and never selling, they just borrow against their assets and you can't tax your borrowings. And so it's.
|
Sam:
[1:19:24]
| Well, you could, they're all, they're all, you know, there's, what is the law now? What could it be in a, in a world where you throw all options on the table? There are all kinds of things you could do. You could have an instantaneous and automatic transaction tax on all transactions no matter what. And, you know, there are all kinds of things you could do. You could require everybody to deposit all of their money in government-controlled bank accounts that a certain percentage is taken out of every hour. There are all kinds of things you could do.
|
Bruce:
[1:19:59]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:20:00]
| You know.
|
Ed:
[1:20:00]
| You could. Yeah. Well, one of the things I've wondered why we don't do is right now the top five employees in many of the corporations in the United States earn exorbitant salaries in the tens of millions up to 50, 60, you know, as a regular. Basically, that's salary and stock options and other such stuff. It strikes me, and the corporation is encouraged to do that because that's all tax deductible against the corporate profits. So why not put a salary cap that's deductible? And then if the corporation wants to pay more, that's fine, but they don't get to deduct it off of their costs. So, you know, let's say you save $10 million. After $10 million, you pay the guy $50 million. That other $40 million is taxed for the corporation as well as giving it to us. That would encourage, I don't know if it would encourage them or not, but theoretically that could encourage them to either build more factories or invest in their capital or maybe increase the salaries of the workers on the floor. Right now, many of the corporations are, I don't know the current, one of the two to 300 times as much as the average worker is getting, the CEOs get. There's something wrong with that. That's not.
|
Sam:
[1:21:17]
| I also like, I mean, I would be reluctant even myself to like actually put rules on that. Like I wouldn't want to be like, okay, you, we're going to put rules on how much you can pay your employees. I think that's one place where, you know, there's a good reason for market.
|
Ed:
[1:21:35]
| I didn't say we should tell them they can't pay them 50 million.
|
Sam:
[1:21:38]
| I know.
|
Ed:
[1:21:39]
| I'm just saying that 40 million, that would still be taxed. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:21:41]
| No, I know. I know. I know. I just, I feel like there's. There's some fundamental sort of structural things you can do that we should perhaps think about, experiment with, whatever. But I feel like when you get micro about it, where you're trying to make very specific rules about specific things, that's where it always gets screwed up. It never works out the way people want it to. Like you come in with all kinds of good intentions and you set up some system and it breaks down immediately. It has results you didn't want. and people find ways around it in the first microsecond. But having said that, I still think that the fundamental thesis, and then let's take a break and move on, that when there is a high degree of income inequality, you are at risk, I think has historically proven to be true. And so like you either accept that risk and at some point it collapses and you just say that's a natural cycle of things no worries or you know you try to figure out something to encourage that that curve to not be quite as dramatic not to be flat flat would also be bad i think but not to be quite as dramatic yeah.
|
Bruce:
[1:23:02]
| I i don't know if income inequality or at least the genie coefficient which which is a representation of that, is anything that you want to even use as a guide. Because if you look at this list, there's no rhyme or reason behind any of it. It's like you look at the countries at the top of the list and the ones at the bottom of the list, There's no desirability on either end of that spectrum.
|
Sam:
[1:23:28]
| Yeah, I think I found the list you're looking at. And the one thing I would say right off the bat is the list I found is by income. I really would be interested to see what it looks like by wealth instead. But yeah, this, yeah.
|
Bruce:
[1:23:45]
| So another measure that I would want to use instead, or if you're going to use a measure, would be, well, at least you want to look at it. is social mobility.
|
Sam:
[1:23:55]
| Yes, that's a good one.
|
Bruce:
[1:23:56]
| So how likely is it that someone who is poor can move up and become wealthy?
|
Sam:
[1:24:04]
| And that is another, I don't have a measure of that in front of me. By the way, I think, were you looking at the list of countries by income inequality on Wikipedia?
|
Bruce:
[1:24:12]
| I'm looking at the World Population Review. It's countries sorted by Gini coefficient.
|
Sam:
[1:24:17]
| Okay, I think they matched up, so it's probably the same source. But no, I have heard that the social mobility index kind of thing that you're talking about has also been declining over the last few decades in this country, where if you look, you know, 50, 60, 70 years ago, there was more mobility than there is today. Now, when does that become a crisis? When does it not? I don't know.
|
Bruce:
[1:24:49]
| And now that I think of it, just off the top of my head, I think social mobility has a lot to do with just mobility in actual physical location. And people are moving less. That I've seen recently in the news where people are actually staying put less than they have in the past.
|
Sam:
[1:25:07]
| More than they have.
|
Bruce:
[1:25:08]
| Or more than they have in the past. They're moving around less than they have in the past. And part of that has to do with, the cost of living in the most successful cities has gone so high that it's not possible to live where the best jobs are. It used to be that.
|
Sam:
[1:25:27]
| Someone- Unless you already have one of those best jobs.
|
Bruce:
[1:25:30]
| Yes. Like, yeah, I like the, when somebody who wanted to make it big, they'd move to LA and they'd make it big or move to San Francisco. Well, you can't do that anymore. That's because it's just too expensive.
|
Sam:
[1:25:41]
| Well, and on the other hand, if you're looking to go to where the cost of living is less, there are no jobs there.
|
Bruce:
[1:25:48]
| Exactly.
|
Sam:
[1:25:49]
| You know?
|
Bruce:
[1:25:50]
| So it's, and that gets into things like zoning laws, which is a totally different area, but that I have a little bit of expertise that I've gained by being in the planning commission at my city of Alabama. Right.
|
Sam:
[1:26:04]
| Okay. Let's take another break and then two more quick topics and we'll be done and i mean quick topics because we're we've been going a while already so so here we go another break, Okay, we're back. And Bruce, what's your last topic of the night?
|
Bruce:
[1:27:10]
| Oof. Dang, I should have been looking. Oh, let's see. Let's see. Let's talk about Venezuela.
|
Sam:
[1:27:19]
| Okay.
|
Bruce:
[1:27:21]
| Yeah. So this is nuts that we seem to be on the verge of a hot war with Venezuela. I'm certainly hoping that this is just gumbo diplomacy, but it's just infuriating and very disappointing that the military-industrial complex seems to be winning again as far as getting a war started here. So this just doesn't make sense. I don't know if you saw the interview on 60 Minutes or the extended interview.
|
Sam:
[1:28:03]
| I read little bits and pieces of this, but I did not watch the whole thing, and I did not see the Venezuela relevant part. So tell me.
|
Bruce:
[1:28:11]
| Well, the whole interview.
|
Sam:
[1:28:13]
| Oh, the we're just going to kill people quote? Was that from that interview?
|
Bruce:
[1:28:16]
| Yeah, that's part of it. Well, I mean, it's totally fact-free. Everything he's saying is just totally untrue.
|
Sam:
[1:28:24]
| And by he, you mean Donald Trump.
|
Bruce:
[1:28:26]
| Donald Trump, yes. and i was i listened to the extended interview and i was thinking wow you know if there was any way to torture yvonne this would be the way to do it make him actually listen to it it'd be like you know clockwork orange you know you'd be sitting strapped down in a chair forcing to listen to this it was it's just it's it's it's so infuriating that he has no understanding just as an example. So a couple of weeks ago, Putin and Russia announced that they have a, nuclear-powered cruise missile. And so what does Trump announce? We're going to start testing nuclear weapons. And no, that's not a nuclear weapon. It's a nuclear-powered weapon that Russia has. And Russia and the other nuclear powers are like, we haven't been testing. And so now that Trump has said that they're going to start testing, now Russia is saying, or Putin has said, all right well i guess we're gonna have to start testing too.
|
Sam:
[1:29:29]
| And it's.
|
Bruce:
[1:29:30]
| Like it's like this total idiocy because he just.
|
Sam:
[1:29:34]
| Doesn't understand what does not understand.
|
Bruce:
[1:29:36]
| The most basic things.
|
Sam:
[1:29:37]
| Well and this goes back to over and over again like i i still have not seen counter evidence that he understands what seeking asylum means that it's not people from mental asylums yeah you know Well.
|
Ed:
[1:29:54]
| The question with Trump always is, does he really understand, but he knows that a lot of people don't. And he says these things to create fear, antagonism, excitement, and all the sorts of things that drive demagogues.
|
Sam:
[1:30:10]
| I think I would give him that benefit of doubt, like, at the beginning of his first term, maybe sometimes. Sometimes this way, no, I think he actually just has no idea. He has no idea.
|
Bruce:
[1:30:25]
| So just to step back, the situation going on in Venezuela is that Trump and the administration believe that, not Chavez, it's Maduro, is sending drugs and immigrants and criminals into Venezuela, and he's somehow going to stop that. No evidence, especially for the boats that are being shot in the water. There's no evidence. And even if they were drug boats, there's no way they could reach the United States.
|
Sam:
[1:31:00]
| Well, and even if they were drug boats, not that anybody cares about legality. But even if there were drug boats, the legal thing to do is intercept the drug boats and arrest the people.
|
Bruce:
[1:31:14]
| Yeah, and even the law that they think that they're supposedly breaking is not a criminal, it's not a capital offense.
|
Sam:
[1:31:20]
| Right.
|
Ed:
[1:31:20]
| So well then however murder is a capital offense and one of the war crimes capital offense is whether or not the guy is a combatant if they are defenseless and you kill them that is a capital crime in these, boats are being shot with weaponry that they have no defense against they are defenseless even if they're guilty of carrying drugs this is crimes And the guys pulling the triggers at some point may be tried for murder.
|
Sam:
[1:31:55]
| Yeah. And it's key, you know, the Supreme Court gave Donald Trump immunity against this kind of stuff, but not the people under him who are executing.
|
Ed:
[1:32:03]
| Well, the presidents are never found guilty of having. I mean, how much did the Bush get punished for authorizing torture?
|
Sam:
[1:32:12]
| Right.
|
Ed:
[1:32:13]
| But several of the guys who did the torture are, I don't know if they're still in prison or not, but certainly their careers were destroyed. And they were severely punished.
|
Bruce:
[1:32:20]
| I don't think that was the case. I think the people who revealed the torture are the ones whose careers got ruined. The actual torturers never got punished.
|
Ed:
[1:32:27]
| The actual torturers, several of them were... A handful of them. The whistleblowers also got destroyed.
|
Bruce:
[1:32:34]
| So supposedly there's a big chunk of our Navy is right off the coast of Venezuela, ready to fire. But something that I saw in the news today that's very heartening was, let me see if I can find the headline. It says that, I don't have it right now, but it's something along the lines of that there is no legal justification. Uh like the the white house lawyers have uh told the administration that there's no legal justification for doing a land attack or land invasion of venezuela so if we can believe that trump would actually obey what his lawyers are telling him he's gonna do.
|
Sam:
[1:33:16]
| What he wants to do regardless.
|
Bruce:
[1:33:18]
| Like yeah exactly if.
|
Sam:
[1:33:19]
| He decides he doesn't want to because he doesn't want to or because he thinks he'll lose or whatever, then he won't. But what the lawyer says is not going to influence him in the slightest.
|
Bruce:
[1:33:30]
| And the, now the Russians have actually landed there in Venezuela lately. And we don't know, of course, what they were, what they brought to Venezuela, but they, but there is some concern that maybe they brought in some S 400 anti-aircraft, anti-missile batteries there and so what may what what uh the u.s military may think it would be a really easy attack may not be so easy and well the.
|
Sam:
[1:33:58]
| Thing you know these things are always seem to be underestimated.
|
Bruce:
[1:34:02]
| Yeah you know this may if he actually goes in there and attacks this may be trump's bay of pigs.
|
Sam:
[1:34:08]
| It could be.
|
Ed:
[1:34:09]
| Or worse.
|
Sam:
[1:34:10]
| I mean, of course. But of course, his gamble is like, hey, we attacked Iran. We were fine. Nothing happened. They politely asked if they could retaliate against one of our bases. And we said, yeah, go ahead.
|
Bruce:
[1:34:23]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:34:24]
| And no one was hurt.
|
Bruce:
[1:34:25]
| And already Maduro has actually offered everything. It's like Trump even admitted that Maduro has offered him anything as far as even allowing American companies to do the oil extraction. And which, of course, is the real reason behind all this, I think, is that it's a resource-rich nation and Trump sees it and he wants to get some of it.
|
Sam:
[1:34:47]
| So, well, I think Trump in general likes to, and this goes for all the tariffs as well. He likes to threaten something in the hopes that the other folks will capitulate and give him what he wants. At the very least, get a, something he can claim as a win, whether or not it actually like is real. But ideally he also gets some stuff out of it ideally not just for the country but for himself personally and then once he's gotten what he wants then he'll back off whatever he said originally and hopefully it never happens the problem is these are always the games of chicken at some point you're going to hit one of these where you end up stumbling into a real war or you end up stumbling into real negative consequences of other sorts.
|
Bruce:
[1:35:39]
| Or maybe you could end up being defeated. Kind of like, look what is it? Yemen. Yemen basically forced the U.S. to retreat.
|
Sam:
[1:35:48]
| I mean, look, I don't know the specifics about Yemen or what the battle would look like, but the key is there's Donald Trump likes to play risky games. And a lot of the times when he plays the risky games, you end up coming out on top. You end up winning the exchange. And again, at least like being able to claim the win, even if objectively the facts on the ground, you're, you only got back to where you were. Like in many of these tariff situations, he hasn't actually won anything, but he's gotten the other country to say, oh yes, Mr. Trump, we're giving you this, this, and this. And he's like, great, I won. Well, it turns out they were doing those things anyway, but whatever, you get to claim the win. But at some point in one of these you're going to go a little too far you're going to stumble you're going to get in trouble something bad will happen and some of the potential negative consequences are really bad and you know and every time trump manages to do one of these gambles and play russian roulette and not shoot himself in the head people are like oh wow look he's winning. What a genius.
|
Sam:
[1:37:02]
| I got to think at one of these points, one of these things is actually going to like go badly for him. And it's just like, unfortunately, he's not the only one who gets hurt in that situation. I mean, arguably, you know, COVID response was one of those where he mishandled a bunch of it and, and things went badly. And that's probably the main reason why he lost re-election to Joe Biden. If there hadn't been for COVID, he probably would have been re-elected. No problem.
|
Bruce:
[1:37:34]
| You know, he shouldn't have shut everything down.
|
Sam:
[1:37:38]
| Well let's not i don't think that's the thing he did wrong i think there's other things he did wrong yeah we'll disagree more down damn it but no but uh uh but yeah like i i just we've been lucky so far most of his gambles have not had as horrible even when they've had bad results they They haven't been the worst case scenario. And yeah, I don't know if we'll continue to be lucky. We'll see.
|
Bruce:
[1:38:08]
| So it's, it's kind of crazy because next week I'm going on a cruise to the Caribbean. And it's, if you look on the map, it's not that close, but, but in a couple of months, my mom is going on another cruise and she's going down to the, to the ABC islands, which are right off the coast of Venezuela. You can literally see Venezuela from Aruba. She's going to be down there. And so it's like, are they really going to have a war with, With these, with these ships. You could sit there on the deck and watch the fireworks.
|
Sam:
[1:38:42]
| Oh, man. You know, people did that in the Civil War. They went out and picnic and watched the battles and stuff like that.
|
Bruce:
[1:38:49]
| Yeah, very true.
|
Sam:
[1:38:52]
| But, yeah, I mean, cruise ship better not get in the wrong place at the wrong time, you know? Yeah. Okay. Moving on, Ed, your last topic.
|
Ed:
[1:39:02]
| But real quickly, the Supreme Court heard the tariff issue today, and the speculation seems to be that they may say Trump could not enact those tariffs. What happens if indeed they do that? Now we've collected something in the range of $50 to $80 billion in tariff money. That will have to presumably be returned to the people who paid it, which is mostly United States corporations, I understand. What sort of an impact is that going to have on anything? It'd be a stimulus It could be a stimulus, yeah Those CEOs will get a billion dollar salary, huh?
|
Sam:
[1:39:41]
| Yeah, first one thing It'll be a while yet I think, Bruce, you had shared something under CurveGence Corner Slack Where there might be a result before the end of the year Most people I'm hearing are saying they're probably not until June, actually, Now, maybe they'll surprise people and do it early, but most of the chatter seems to be that they will probably release their decision on this at the end of their term in June.
|
Ed:
[1:40:10]
| That's another couple hundred billion in tariffs.
|
Bruce:
[1:40:13]
| But this was a case that was fast-tracked, so they need to give a response because the taxes are being collected.
|
Sam:
[1:40:20]
| They don't need to do anything. They fast tracked it in terms of when they set the hearing, whether or not they are quick in terms of giving their decision or not is entirely up to them. They can release it whenever they want. Now, and here's the thing. Here's why I think most people are thinking they did seem like in the oral arguments, it seemed like there were probably five, maybe six votes to say that Donald Trump couldn't do this. Critically, it's not that he can't do this at all. It's that he couldn't do it under the authority of the specific law that he claimed under the executive order.
|
Bruce:
[1:40:59]
| And he has many other laws that he can reinterpret.
|
Sam:
[1:41:02]
| And that came up in the arguments. They specifically were like, one of the conservative justices actually asked, if we only look at this one particular narrow thing, what's to stop Donald Trump from turning around 10 minutes later and reissuing the same tariff under a different authority, under a different legal authority, and what would we do then? And Neil Keitel, who was arguing the case of the people who think the tariffs are illegal, said, well— then we would sue under that one and we would do this all again. And the justice was sort of like, really? You would want us to like spend another two years going through all the levels of the courts and getting back to the Supreme Court on, you know, okay, now we've said he can't use law A to do this, but now he's trying it under law B. Don't you want us to look at the bigger question? And he was like, no. Oh, really?
|
Bruce:
[1:42:01]
| I would think that he would want them to have a broader view, but I don't know.
|
Sam:
[1:42:06]
| Well, because they didn't argue the broader thing. They didn't argue all of those other cases, right? And so it's been—now, I don't know what the court will do specifically, but what I would speculate is this SCOTUS has, even in cases where they disagree with Donald Trump, has tried really hard to minimize the impact of their disagreement with Donald Trump.
|
Sam:
[1:42:36]
| So, first of all, that will lean towards... If they were going to say, actually, Donald Trump has the authority to do this, they would probably do that quickly and come back with that result quickly. If they're actually going to go against Donald Trump, they will delay their decision as long as they possibly can. And then they're going to jump through hoops to try to make it as narrow as possible to give Donald other things that he can do and make it very specific to this scenario. So that they go against him, but with as little pain to Donald Trump as possible in this scenario. And so you probably will get the thing where the next day Donald Trump reissues the tariffs under something else. They also were really worried about the unwinding and the refunds and all that. Because one of the things is they had the option to pause all the tariffs until this went through all the courts. They did not do that. They let the tariffs stay in place, and now they're worried that the longer they go, the more has to be unwound. So they are worried a little bit about the mechanism of that. And Neil Keitel didn't quite say this, but it was obvious that, like, the implication was, well, if you're worried about that, you shouldn't have let these stay in effect while this goes through the process.
|
Bruce:
[1:44:05]
| That's true.
|
Sam:
[1:44:05]
| You know, yeah.
|
Bruce:
[1:44:08]
| Yeah, and this whole idea of the president having this singular authority to impose tariffs at will just goes completely against the whole idea of the Constitution, of the separation of powers. And now it's true that Congress has given up much of its powers by enacting these laws. Well, then what really needs to—I'm sure what the SCOTUS would really like to do is to push it back on Congress and say, hey, you made this mess. You need to pass laws to actually pull back that power, which they can certainly do.
|
Sam:
[1:44:44]
| In this particular case, the argument is that the specific law that Donald Trump cited talks about all kinds of things, but not tariffs. And that it's a stretch of the language to include tariffs within this particular law. But, yeah, I mean, Congress has shown no appetite to pull anything back from Donald Trump.
|
Bruce:
[1:45:09]
| And that's why I'm so worried that when President Newsom comes along, he's not going to be in favor of removing or removing any of the powers that Trump and Biden and Obama and Clinton and Bush have all pushed and gained through the presidencies.
|
Sam:
[1:45:30]
| One of the specific examples that one of the conservative justices asked of the representative of the Trump administration is, so what you're saying is if a future Democratic president decided that we need 100% tariff on all imported gas cars, that would be fine. He could just do that without any congressional authority, without anything, because that's equivalent to what you're claiming here that Donald Trump is doing just on a different issue for a different reason. And in fact here, and you, I mean, the whole thing with Donald Trump is he's not even having reasons. It's almost just his whim on a day-to-day basis.
|
Bruce:
[1:46:09]
| He's using it as a negotiating tactic. So, yeah, it's really horrible. And so it's kind of a flaw in our system in that every president gains new and new authorities by pushing back on norms. And these norms are never actually enacted into law. And so when it's actually challenged, the Supreme Court says, They can do it because there's no law against it. And so when President Newsom comes in, he's not going to say, oh, I need to remove these powers because he's going to want those same powers for the things that he wants to do. And so I really have no hope that this will ever be reversed, these authorities.
|
Ed:
[1:46:57]
| No one who's willing to run for the presidency is going to be willing to give up power unless it's taken from him. You're absolutely right.
|
Sam:
[1:47:05]
| It's a rare exception. I mean, it has happened, but it's very rare and it takes just, you know, I mentioned, I think on last week's show or the week before, I forget, that there was somebody who had done an analysis of democratic countries who had slid into authoritarianism and worked their way back towards democracy. And in the most common outcome by far was that you you you move back a little bit but yes the new governments retained many of the powers that were added on during that phase and only gave up stuff around the edges it was the the rarest outcome the best outcome but by far the rarest outcome.
|
Sam:
[1:47:55]
| Was when they actually ended the authoritarian interlude with a complete revamping of the country's constitution and everything else to directly make illegal the abuses that had happened that led towards the authoritarian regime in the first place. And that's very rare And because what it requires for it to happen is a unified opposition that is unified around the principles of process and democracy that, you know, this is the right way as opposed to specific policy outcomes.
|
Sam:
[1:48:36]
| That they are willing to enact a system that they think is fair, even if they know that their policy outcomes will sometimes lose. And that's very rare and very difficult because people have to put sort of these thoughts about long-term stability and fairness over short-term policy goals.
|
Bruce:
[1:49:02]
| Yeah. And so we will continue to live under an elected king, which ends up getting switched back and forth every four to eight years. And what has been a seesaw will become more like a whipsaw, where the first day of Newsom's presidency is he's going to have 500 executive orders that he's going to sign, just to reverse all the executive orders that Trump was saying.
|
Sam:
[1:49:28]
| Assuming neither side at any point puts in the kinds of changes that make it impossible for the other side to win again.
|
Bruce:
[1:49:35]
| I certainly hope that that's the case.
|
Sam:
[1:49:37]
| In which case you have like 40, 50 years before you break that.
|
Bruce:
[1:49:41]
| Yeah. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:49:42]
| So, yay! Yay! Ha ha ha ha! Okay, on that, I think we should wrap it up, folks.
|
Ed:
[1:49:51]
| Sounds like a winner.
|
Bruce:
[1:49:52]
| That's great.
|
Sam:
[1:49:53]
| So thank you. Let me give this stuff at the end. I'll thank you all at the very end.
|
Sam:
[1:49:59]
| So you guys know curmudgeons-corner.com. You can see our archives. You can see all the ways to contact us. You can see all our social media, all of that fun stuff, old transcripts, old shows. And you can now buy a mug. You can now buy a mug. Both of you have mugs already. But you can, other people who don't have mugs, you can now buy a mug directly from the website. So go buy mugs, go buy curmudgeon's corner mugs. They're wonderful mugs. They're wonderful mugs. I just gave mugs to Emily, who was on the show a couple of weeks ago, and her um, sir, co-host, Sammy. I gave them both mugs yesterday when, by the way, I was a guest on their podcast, which will be out the one. I actually recorded two episodes with them. The next two weeks of their shows, I think their shows come out on Wednesday. Anyway, the next two weeks of their shows, I will be on as a guest. And so enjoy that. And of course, we have a link to our Patreon where you can give us money at various levels. You will get one of those mugs. You will get a postcard. You will be mentioned on the show. All of that kind of fun stuff at $2 a month or more. Or if you just ask nicely, we will invite you to the Curmudgeon's Corner Slack where Yvonne and I and Ed and Bruce and others are chatting throughout the week and sharing all kinds of stuff. Do either of you have ones that anything you want to share or shall I?
|
Bruce:
[1:51:25]
| Yes, I do have one and I really have a question about it. You just plopped in today. Oh, just in case anybody needs a full body view of my skeleton, enjoy. So there's an in, there's a picture of Sam's full skeleton, which I, which is, I don't understand why you would, how you have that in the first place. Did you just like.
|
Ed:
[1:51:49]
| It's got nothing to do in his hernia, I'm sure.
|
Sam:
[1:51:53]
| No, no, that's Yvonne. This is me. No, I'll tell you. I got myself enrolled in like a one-year clinical trial of something. And part of it was at the beginning, middle, and end, they do a full-body scan of me. And they they said that they're not allowed to actually like give me the data from these scans however they were allowed to show me and i was just sitting there snapping pictures uh with my phone and so yes it was it was actually this morning i went in and had my middle of the one year period full body scan is that is that.
|
Ed:
[1:52:33]
| A ct or mri scan.
|
Sam:
[1:52:35]
| It's it's what was the name of the stupid device uh it's actually just an x-ray i think but uh that's.
|
Ed:
[1:52:45]
| A lot of radiation exposure.
|
Sam:
[1:52:46]
| No it's not it's not your standard one it's it's like this it it's a little bar that slides over you from your head down to your toe over a seven minute period um well that's less than you.
|
Ed:
[1:53:00]
| Have a ct.
|
Sam:
[1:53:00]
| It has a specific name that i i forget but anyway and there's a there's a second piece that has uh that shows some of my organs and stuff too which is fun as well but i shared the skeleton because it was uh it was it seemed a little cooler and and for some reason the skeleton seemed a little bit less invasive than the one showing my organs i don't know but but yeah no it is it's sort of so yeah i i had one at the beginning this one is middle and they'll scan me one more time in another six months and yeah like they're they're measuring like does this effect, X, Y, Z, Q and whatever. And it was just fun. I saw the picture and I'm like, I'm, I'm taking that picture. And, and yeah, I thought I'd share my skeleton. So yes, if you were on the curmudgeon's corner slack, you can see the full body scan of my skeleton. I should get a 3D model, a 3D printed model built and put up in the yard at Halloween. Or just put it behind you. It's a little plastic skeleton? No, it's actually mine.
|
Bruce:
[1:54:05]
| Mine.
|
Sam:
[1:54:06]
| Not just any skeleton. It's my skeleton. So, okay. Ed, do you have one to highlight?
|
Ed:
[1:54:12]
| The only one I noticed is that you posted yesterday that apparently Australia is now generating so much solar electricity that they're starting to give it away and exporting it.
|
Sam:
[1:54:24]
| Yep.
|
Ed:
[1:54:25]
| We're not going to have that problem here, I don't think.
|
Sam:
[1:54:27]
| It's not so much exporting it directly. They were going to make electricity free for the peak midday hours where they were generating more solar energy than either was being used or they could store in batteries. So they were generating in excess. So during the hours that they are generating in excess, they were just going to give it away for free.
|
Bruce:
[1:54:48]
| Sounds like a good place to set up a Bitcoin mine.
|
Sam:
[1:54:51]
| I'm sure people have. So I will add mine as well. There's a chart in the Financial Times that they published on the potential effect of artificial intelligence on GDP per capita. And they presented a range of options. Their range of options went from, on the one end, AI could end scarcity, in which they have the GDP line rapidly increasing to infinity.
|
Bruce:
[1:55:25]
| It had been going up to $500,000. Per person.
|
Sam:
[1:55:30]
| Yeah, well, that's the top of the chart. That was after just a couple years, and it continues to go up from there.
|
Bruce:
[1:55:36]
| Yeah, true.
|
Sam:
[1:55:36]
| At a very steep angle. The other extreme was AI ends humanity. And in that scenario, the line goes down slowly at first and then more and more rapidly. And then again, it's a log scale, so it stops at 1,000, but presumably goes down even further beyond that as humanity goes extinct. And the entire range of options in between.
|
Bruce:
[1:56:01]
| Interestingly, they're both labeled tech singularity.
|
Sam:
[1:56:05]
| Yes. Tech singularity, end of scarcity, versus tech singularity, human extinction. And anything in between. And I said under Curbudge and Coruscant, people used to make fun of me. Bruce used to make fun of me. Yvonne used to make fun of me. For the wide ranges of my annual predictions of the Dow and the price of Bitcoin and all this kind of stuff. That pales in comparison to this range of possibilities that they outlined here. All righty. Okay. So now, thank you, Ed. Thank you, Bruce, for joining us yet again. It's always fun to have you guys. And it was fun to have you guys together, which we have not done before. Hopefully we can do something like this again. but also hopefully Yvonne finishes his recovery and we'll be back next week and we'll have a normal show next week but thank you all goodbye goodbye.
|
Ed:
[1:57:03]
| What did we.
|
Sam:
[1:57:04]
| Okay one at a time let's do this I will go first then Bruce then Ed goodbye goodbye goodbye here here comes the outro, Okay. Thanks again, everybody. So have a great night, everybody. See you. See you later.
|
Bruce:
[1:57:56]
| Okay. Good night.
|
Ed:
[1:57:57]
| Good night.
|
Bruce:
[1:57:58]
| Bye.
|
Sam:
[1:57:58]
| Here comes, I'm hitting stop.
| |
|
