The Dangerously Irresponsible Tax Bill — ft. Maya MacGuineas

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Today's number seven.

That's the percentage of global electricity consumed by air conditioning.

Ed, when I bought my most recent car, no one told me it came with three Jews in the form of air conditioning.

High, norm, and max.

Get it?

High, norm, and max.

Just trying to bring in a little...

a little of the tribe humor into the show to show i can make fun of myself ed sorry let's go over the names again heim norm and max is that right no hi hi hi is that a is that a jewish name you're such a wasp yeah hi hi you've done you've never met a jew named hi Spell that for me.

Oh, don't go all like, spell it for me.

No, I'm not doing that.

How many people in Iran?

What's the population of Iran, Senator Cruz?

Listen to me.

Markets are bigger than us.

What you have here is a structural change in the world distribution.

Cash is trash.

Stocks look pretty attractive.

Something's going to break.

Forget about it.

How are you, Ed?

I'm doing well.

I'm doing very well.

How are you doing?

I had trouble sleeping.

So I took just a chip of a Xanax, which makes me kind of down and depressed the next day.

And I miss this big fucking investment that I was asked to invest in.

And of course, it's up sevenfold.

So I hate myself.

What's that?

I can't even talk about it.

I'm just, I can't even talk about it.

Please.

This is an investing podcast.

We need to know.

No, I refuse.

I just don't want to, I just don't want to talk about it.

I don't, like, I have enough money, and yet it's...

Trump coin, Pepe coin, Cumrocket.

It's in the crypto space.

I have enough.

I have enough money, but it's not fucking enough because I want to be more important.

Oh, God.

And I can't get past it, Ed.

We're going to get it out of you sooner or later.

How are you?

Talk about you.

Your turn.

What's going on with you?

And I'm bummed out.

I interviewed this kind of, way back to me.

Fuck that.

I interviewed this guy, Representative Jim Himes, who is really like this talented, thoughtful guy about Iran.

And then

Catherine reminded me that I showed up in a t-shirt, which was really stupid.

Now I feel guilty and bad.

So I'm not only...

You always show up in in a t-shirt what's wrong with that was it was it on your podcast well here's the thing i'm not the pod save america guys i'm not 14 fucking years old right i should show up i should dress i mean i can with you it's fine i can look like an aging skateboarder but was it your podcast i think that's the key distinction if it was his then you got to show up for his thing but if you're your host then you get to wear what you want well that doesn't make me feel any better it was raging moderates it was my podcast okay so that's that's that's okay then that's my view on it at least if it's your podcast you get to set the agenda for the attire.

I'd like to cut at your jib, Ed Elslin.

I feel better about myself.

So all I can think about tonight is how I'm going to get good sleep.

I need a show.

I started watching Patreon last night.

By the way, have you seen Mobland?

No, but you've told me about it, and I've been hearing about it from other people.

I've heard it's very good.

So good.

Okay, well, let's...

I'm not done.

I got to get back into Slow Horses.

Is that what it's called?

I got to get back into that.

I don't know what that is.

All right.

You now have permission to continue with the show.

Thank you, boss.

Okay, here is our conversation with Maya McGinnis, president of the BIPOCs and Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Maya, thank you very much for joining us for the very first time on Profit Markets.

Thanks for having me.

So you are the president of this committee for a responsible federal budget.

We're going to call it the CRFB.

I think a lot of people call it the CRFB.

Tell us, what is the CRFB and what do you do over there?

Yeah.

So the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget or with that excellent acronym, CERPA,

it's been around for decades, three decades plus.

Bipartisan group.

The board of directors are people who've been in government running things like the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office or the Treasury or the Fed.

So they've all been there and worked on these issues.

And it's a group of people who are very concerned about the fiscal health of the country,

worried about how we borrow, not just because there are times when borrowing makes sense, like during COVID, a pandemic, or a huge recession, but we just borrow because our politicians don't like to pay for things.

And so it's a group that does policy work, political work, communications, tries to educate people and get members of Congress to do a little better when it comes to fiscal policy, and not going great right now.

So tell us a little bit about the history of this organization.

And also,

you mentioned that it's bipartisan, which I think is a key point.

I'd love to hear more about what that actually means.

I mean, so many organizations, it's just hard to escape political influence.

And I think a lot of people are skeptical of that concept.

So tell us a bit about the history of this organization.

What are its origins?

And what makes it, as you say, bipartisan or non-partisan?

I think this is one of the strengths of the organization.

So it started in the early 80s with a number of members of Congress who, when they left Congress, felt like their ability to do responsible budgeting was so compromised, so difficult.

They wanted to create an outside organization to kind of push on the issue.

And for many years, that's been pretty easy.

People knew that when it comes to fiscal policy, you can't put in place a debt deal.

You can't make these hard choices unless you have the cover of bipartisanship.

But as we've all observed, it has become absolutely increasingly toxic in terms of polarization and partisanship in Washington and throughout the country.

And that means doing these things together, having members of Congress work on this issue together, has become much more difficult.

One of the strengths is that we really are bipartisan.

I love the fact that our staff has people who are Trump fans, Ted Cruz fans, Bernie Sanders fans, Elizabeth Warren fans, and everything in between.

I think that's a real richness of diversity.

And it allows us to have, I think, a much better perspective in the fact that we are unified on the concerns about fiscal policy, but very different when it comes to political policy.

But I think the main thing to keep in mind is the numbers that we crunch, the policies that we put out there.

It never has a political agenda.

And I think we've done a really, especially in this difficult environment, a really good job of maintaining our credibility that this is not about politics.

This is singularly about the fiscal health of the country.

We've been seeing a lot of comments from the administration basically saying whenever any organization such as the CRFB puts out any sort of data that says anything that seems kind of even remotely negative about what the administration is doing, they say

it's political, they're distracted, or they're influenced by someone else.

So, I mean, I don't really know how you can counter that as an organization, other than do what you do, which is try to collect as many different voices as you can

and then put out the data and make sure it's well researched and peer-reviewed.

I mean, it's something we've also seen that has been happening with the Congressional Budget Office, which it's probably, I'm the only person who my singular favorite government program is the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office.

But these are the guys who score the bills, and they do incredible work.

I actually, my entire career changed because I read a CBO report.

I was happily working on Wall Street in New York and kind of had a normal career path.

And I read a CBO report in the 90s about the budget deficit and just was so taken by it and had to learn more.

But this is a group that puts out really impartial data.

And it's just like, it's like parents at the sidelines of soccer games.

You're too young to have seen that.

But once you've seen it, there's no tougher crowd yelling at the refs, yelling at the umps.

And that's what's happened to CBO.

So they get people saying, you know, you're cheating, you're biased.

That's certainly not true in their case.

And I do think luckily for us, we've built the relationships with both sides that they will grudgingly acknowledge that even when we are hitting them on the bills that we don't like, that they like, that we are also hitting the other side when we didn't like their bill.

There's kind of enough built-up knowledge that we really call it it like we see it.

But yeah, it gets more and more difficult and it gets more and more nasty in terms of you can't just go by the spreadsheets and have numbers that we all agree on anymore.

And that should be the basic starting point.

So your job is basically to tell us when our deficit spending is out of control.

With that in mind, we have this big, beautiful bill that is being revised currently, likely to pass through the Senate either this week or the next.

As the president of this organization, give us your thoughts on this bill.

This is a budget buster.

There's absolutely no question that this is teeing us up for trillions more in additional debt.

First, I think it's likely that it is going to pass.

And I think that's very disheartening that at a time when our fiscal situation is absolutely in dreadful shape and with very first commitment we should make is no passing legislation that adds to the debt.

There's pledges out there like no new taxes, which make no sense for numerous reasons.

But the most clear promise that we should make when you look at our fiscal situation right now, which is so bad in terms of deficit, debt, interest, all of those things is no new borrowing.

So this bill is on course to probably add three or four trillion dollars in new debt.

If you look at the House bill, it would borrow about $3 trillion,

and that includes a number of gimmicks, things that fakely expire.

So if you looked at it on a permanent basis, it would add about $5 trillion.

That is really a dangerous step to take right now.

And if I can just kind of set the stage for one minute, our debt is growing faster than the economy.

That is the definition of unsustainable.

You cannot have that go on forever.

We are in three years going to hit the record of debt to GDP that we've ever had in the country.

The only time we had it this high at 106% was right after World War II.

And we had just fought a world war.

We are on track to be borrowing.

over $2 trillion every year when you assume that the economy is strong.

That's not even assuming a recession.

And interest payments are the single fastest growing part of the federal budget.

And last week, the trustees came out with their newest reports on Social Security and Medicare.

Both of them are slated to become insolvent in 2033, eight years from now.

What do we have?

We have a bunch of politicians who are promising not to fix those programs, not to do anything that would actually fix those programs.

So I put all that framing in just to be clear.

There should be no disagreement that we should not add a single penny to the debt, let alone $3 or $4 trillion.

And

that's, we're set, we're set to do that right now.

We know what the House bill costs.

We haven't seen the score in the Senate bill yet, but it looks like, by all intentions, it would add another few hundred billion dollars in borrowing to the already dangerously irresponsible House bill.

So, yeah, that's me wearing my nonpartisan hat.

There's no partisanship in this,

but it's just the numbers.

By the numbers, this will add to the debt, even with the gimmicks and fantastical growth assumptions that they've plugged in to try to make the debt effects look smaller than it really is.

Just trying to steel man this this a bit.

So both Singapore and

Italy and Japan, or all three of those countries, have, and I think the best metric is to look at debt to GDP ratio.

I think that is the way to look at it.

And

all three of those countries have a greater debt-to-GDP ratio.

And while Italy, you know, questionable, Japan and Singapore both enjoy, I think, fairly low borrowing costs, seem to have pretty robust economies, stable governments.

Why should we be panicked about the increasing debt-to-GDP ratio?

Aaron Powell, there's two concerns.

The level of debt that we have as a share of GDP, and absolutely, we shouldn't be using nominal numbers.

What's important is how it is relative to the overall economy, but also the growth trajectory.

So there's some differences.

Like if you look at Japan that has a debt ratio of about 250, I think, as a share of GDP compared to our 100,

they have a huge domestic demand.

So almost all of that debt is purchased domestically, which means that none of the payments, the interest payments, go out of the economy, which otherwise depresses your standard of living.

That's one of the things we have here.

We have slower growth because so much of our interest payments goes to the

foreigners who own our debt, so the borrowing that we're doing from abroad.

And there's always much more demand domestically in Japan.

They have a higher savings rate than we do.

But the real concern is our debt trajectory.

The facts that we are borrowing faster than the economy is growing, the facts that interest payments, already the second largest item in the budget, are slated to grow faster than any other item.

That's where the concern comes, and it leaves us incredibly vulnerable to the fact that if anything changes, say you have a president who suddenly wants a different policy towards the dollar, who puts in place tariffs and then takes them out, creates a lot of uncertainty.

A lot of things changes that create distrust in the dollar or may mean that we're going to have to pay more for the borrowing and interest rates go up, that huge level of debt that we have, those interest payments go up really quickly.

And that's the big danger that we have, that with $36 trillion in total debt, $28 trillion in debt held by the public, our borrowing costs are very, very dependent on low interest rates.

And if interest rates go up by just one percentage point above what they're projected, that adds about $300 billion in interest payments per year to our debt because the debt load is so large.

So it's the fact that we have so much debt to begin with and the fact that our debt trajectory, meaning this is a structural problem.

We have built in promises to Social Security and Medicare.

And so it's not cyclical, it's structural, and that's where the concerns come.

In order to diagnose or prescribe a treatment, you've got to diagnose the underlying disease.

And

my

understanding of economic history is that every fiat currency ultimately fails because the political pressure to print more money to stay in office and be popular and give people more bread and circuses than they're actually paying for,

those powers are just too great to ignore, given the short-termism of electoral politics.

And we had, I think, $7 trillion, George Washington, George Bush, $7 trillion in deficits.

We've added $30 trillion since George Bush.

If there was a moment when we kind of lost control, if you will, of the ship,

wouldn't it be when George Bush convinced the American public that you can both go to war and cut taxes at the same time?

Isn't it, to a certain extent, we've trained the populace of the U.S.

that they can have a free lunch, we can spend $7 trillion on $5 $5 trillion in receipts.

How much of this is

we've, quite frankly, we've spoiled our children.

And they've just gotten used to this.

And

a lot of the sky is falling hasn't come to fruition.

I remember the big debt clock 20 years ago.

And that is, so far, it feels like we can go to war and cut taxes at the same time.

What do you think has caused this?

Yeah, that's a great question because I sort of go back and say, like, what was the moment where everything changed?

Because it did used to be that we would run budget surpluses when the economy was strong so that we could borrow when the economy was weak.

We had a pretty clear understanding that you were going to balance the budget over a business cycle.

And there was pretty much uniform accepting that.

And while disagreement on the policies to get there, folks would come together and put in place the debt deals when they needed to.

I think you're pointing out the Bush administration is really important.

I was just thinking about it over the weekend in light of events in the Middle East, the fact that we don't think of if you go to war, you raise taxes, when that used to be a no-brainer.

I think I'd add to your list of sort of when the turning point was was after 9-11, when we went into a recession, and I remember President Bush giving a speech saying, can you, we need our citizens to go to the malls to go shopping.

I was young, I thought I can do that.

And I realized that that is not actually a sign of patriotism at its highest level, right?

Like that's when we stop talking about we have to make choices, there has to be shared sacrifice.

Budgets are in fact about facing trade-offs.

And so I think you're right to say that when we suddenly had tax cuts and a war, no tax increases, the whole notion that you have to make choices or trade-offs have sometimes come together and say, if something's worth doing, it's worth paying for, that was pushed aside.

And what I think it's been replaced by is what I think of all these like budget myths or fiscal fantasies out there, the notion that tax cuts pay for themselves.

No, they don't.

MMT, you could just print money and not worry about it.

No, that's going to lead to inflation.

Like there has just been a whole host of fake promises so that politicians can avoid doing hard things.

And I think this goes to your original choice.

In a democracy that's as polarized as ours, we are now at a point where the two teams are so busy fighting with each other and trying to bribe citizens, bribe voters, they just give things away and nobody's willing to talk about like the offsets, the trade-offs, the compromise that generally should go with budgeting.

Is I think about every organization has values and a strategy.

And

when I think of, if I were to try and distill America's strategy over the last 40 years or the government's strategy around how to create prosperity and increase the material and psychological well-being of Americans, if you had to distill it down to one strategy, and I want to get your view on if this thesis is correct, our strategy for the last 40 years has been to cut taxes.

That has been the common theme across all these administrations as far as I is as much rhetoric as there was coming out of the far left and from the Biden administration around income inequality, taxes went down during the Biden administration.

That we have decided in the last four decades that the way to maintain prosperity is to consistently cut taxes.

Would you agree with that?

I would agree with that and there's an and.

So I would absolutely agree that it is all about both sides cutting taxes, and then it just becomes a question of which taxes they want to cut.

And it used to be sort of that Republicans wanted supply-side taxes, tax cuts at the rates, and it would trickle down, and Democrats wanted more targeted tax cuts.

Now it's literally like the new me too is on tax cuts, where if you'll remember when Trump said no taxes on tips, and we're on the policy community, you're all thinking, oh, come on, this is a nutty policy.

And Kamala Harris is like, me too, no taxes on tips.

And it turns out that both of them kind of steal the most fiscally reckless ideas from their other side.

But I want to talk about the spending side too, because yes, it's been tax cut after tax cut after tax cut with very few tax increases in between, which is what we need.

We need to raise taxes and cut spending.

But at the same time, we have a huge problem that comes from automatic growth in our budget.

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest payments, all of those aren't budgeted in the normal way.

They don't go through an appropriations process.

Every year, you don't decide how much you're going to spend on them.

They're an if program.

If you are this age and paid into Social Security, you will get your benefit.

So you qualify, you get it.

Those programs are all going much faster than the economy.

And like I said, you don't have a single politician.

leveling honestly with the American people about the fact that we have to make changes to them.

So on one side, we have both parties tripping over themselves to give more in tax cuts.

And on the other side, we have this automatic growth in the budget that if we do nothing,

spending as a share of GDP will grow quite significantly over the coming years, with neither party willing to address that and both of them promising not to.

And one more, if you go back to when we last ran budget surpluses right after 2000 out of the Clinton administration,

if you look at how we got here, about, this is very rough numbers, but about one-third of it comes from tax cuts, one-third from spending increases, and one-third from responses to emergencies, COVID and the Great Recession.

But if you look at the automatic growth in spending, about two-thirds of it comes from growth in spending plus policies and another third from tax cuts.

But the old, like Republicans want to cut taxes and Democrats want to raise spending, no, they both want to do both.

That's the problem.

We'll be right back after the break.

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We're back with Profitty Markets.

I feel like the Republican Party has benefited from this

brand and image that it is a fiscally responsible party.

They are the fiscal conservatives.

And, you know,

the old phrase everyone always says, or at least used to say, is I'm socially Democrat, fiscally conservative.

I'm just wondering, how true is that?

Like, I mean, is that true that the Republicans, I mean, clearly not right now, are being very fiscally liberal with this new bill.

But just even as we look through history over the last, let's call it like 30 or 40 years, is it actually true that the Republican Party is more fiscally conservative or less fiscally reckless than the Democrats?

Does the data bear that out?

No, it does not.

So what we've seen is that the party that's more fiscally responsible is the party that's in the minority.

It's as though you find fiscal religion as soon as you're in the minority and you want to use it to stop the other party from putting in place their policies.

It's much more about defense than really believing it.

The difference is Republicans talk about fiscal responsibility all the time.

Democrats don't talk about it, but Democrats have actually done much more in terms of when they put in place big new policies, they've done more to try to offset those policies.

Republicans with tax cuts have relied more on the, don't worry, we can grow our way out of it.

We're going to have heroic growth, and that's going to change it.

There's an interesting sort of nuance in this discussion, which is, I think of fiscal responsibility as no new borrowing.

You could actually be a big government fiscally responsible person.

First time I ever met Stenny Hoyer, he said, I am a big government fiscally responsible member.

And that makes absolute sense.

You want new programs.

You're willing to pay for them.

That could be fiscally responsible.

There are a lot on the conservative side who just see it as more about the size of government, whether you're cutting spending or not.

And I don't think the size of government is what makes you fiscally responsible.

I think it's your willingness to pay for what you want.

But this is why I kind of

just think that the no-new tax pledge is about the biggest joke I've ever seen because you have all sorts of members out there who've signed a pledge saying I will not raise taxes.

But you know what they do?

They vote to raise spending.

Over 90% of them have cast a vote to increase spending.

So, if you're saying, I'm not going to raise taxes, but I am going to raise spending, you're just saying, I am going to borrow more.

I'm going to push those costs into the future.

And there's nothing fiscally conservative about that.

So, I think sometimes the language gets a little tricky in there.

Clearly, the ongoing passage of tax cuts that are not offset is not fiscally responsible, leads to higher debt payments, leads to higher spending because of it, and leads to obviously more borrowing.

Scott mentioned this idea that there's never been a fiat currency that's lost it, or that this is sort of a flaw

in the fiat currency.

I would sort of amend that.

In my view, it's almost like this is more of a flaw of democracy, which is that if we live in a democracy, we have a responsibility to please our constituents.

And to please constituents, generally that means spending money on stuff that they will like

or

reducing their taxes.

I want to be more direct.

Isn't this essentially old people keep voting themselves more money?

Or that.

I certainly want to be on the side of democracy here.

Me too.

Yeah.

But it has some real weaknesses, which is when you don't put enough guardrails in, either you can't trust your leaders to do it on their own or there aren't enough restrictions.

For instance, if you pass a budget, which for the record, we really don't do most of the time, we most often run without a budget in place, which is crazy.

We've had a continuing resolution for every year for the past 25 years, for at least part of the year.

But

it's really important to recognize that when you pass a budget, there should be a limitation.

We don't have one in ours.

There's no restrictions on deficits.

The only constraint we have is the debt ceiling, and that's become moronic because people are actually willing to talk about defaulting, which would be the most fiscally catastrophic own goal a country could create.

So there is a problem that we are basically using fiscal bribery for the two parties to fight with each other.

Buffett once said that his suggestion is that if any politician oversees the deficit breaching a certain point, I think he said something like 5% of GDP or something, they're not eligible for re-election.

Oh, yeah.

Does that work for you?

Love it.

Okay.

Love it.

I mean, desperate times call for desperate measures, right?

Like that's, it's all these things, no budget, no play.

They're sort of silly, but the situation's not silly.

The situation's getting desperate.

We are not just harming our economy, leaving ourselves unprepared for the next pandemic or recession or attack,

tying our hands at a time when, because of massive changes in technology, we should be changing our social contract and helping our economy adapt to that.

Like there are going to be many new threats, right?

We're going to have disruptions all over the place.

We don't have a social contract that's ready to deal with that.

We should be talking about that.

We should be talking about cybersecurity, the new kinds of risks, what you do about salt typhoon, volt typhoon, like all sorts of risks that we are not thinking about.

Many of these things are because we're constrained by our budget.

And so the democracy allows us to vote based on the next political cycle instead of the next generational cycle.

And we are really doing what's against what our values are, which is handing an economy that's weaker and more dangerous to the next generation than the one we inherited.

Scott, to your really important point, the AARP is, I think, the worst advocacy group out there, right?

They represent seniors.

They scare them about everything.

There's no question that we need to fix Social Security Security and Medicare.

My father is constantly like protesting outside of any talk I give, saying, keep your hands off my Social Security.

But the truth is we have people living into their 80s and 90s who didn't pay nearly enough money to support that kind of retirement.

And we're not doing anything to change it.

And as a result, Scott, I think this fact is one that you will be as appalled by as I am.

We spend $6 per senior.

on every one we spend on people under 18 at the federal level.

I think most people are probably nodding and recognize this is a problem and it's unsustainable and it crowds out investment and basically robs from Ed's future to feather, you know, my nest very reductively.

And so the question is, all right, let's start talking about realistic.

It seems to me no one wants to have an adult conversation, especially Democrats.

Republicans will talk about cuts.

They'll never talk about raising taxes.

And typically Democrats won't talk about either other than tax billionaires, which to me is just a

populist refrain.

So I just want to propose a couple ideas and you give me a sense for whether or not they're serious ideas.

And

I'll start on the revenue side because that's the less popular one.

Well, actually, they're both unpopular.

But okay, so

Social Security,

you means test it and over the course of 10 or 20 years, raise eligibility from 65 to 72.

People are just living and working a lot longer.

If you have over a million dollars in assets or more than 100 grand a year in passive income, you're no longer eligible.

It's not a Social Security pension fund.

It's called a tax, meaning many of us should not participate.

I should never get Social Security.

So dramatically reform Social Security.

Lower the age eligibility of Medicaid.

Go to socialized medicine.

We pay $13,000 per consumer per capita for health care versus $6,500 and the rest of the G7

need more negotiating power.

And I see at the end of the day, we're going to have to socialize or nationalize medicine and bring the costs down from 13,000.

I don't think we'll ever get to 6,500,

but dramatically lower the costs of Medicaid or at least make it an option for people because it does deliver good health care at what seems to be a fairly efficient price.

And then a couple other fun ones.

Alternative minimum tax for corporations of, say, 30% up from 20 or 22.

AMT

on over a million dollars in income of 40%, AMT over 10 million of 60%.

And then my last one, lower the exemption on trusts from 25 million to a million.

And I think you get a long way towards that.

Do me a favor, stack rank each of those and tell me how much, you know, how big is my crack pipe?

Am I smoking on each of those?

The thing about fiscal responsibility is everybody hates all the ideas.

I love every one of those ideas.

Absolutely.

We got to fix Social Security.

That's absolutely right.

We should index the retirement age after we raise it to 72 so it continues to grow with life expectancy.

We

have to work on Medicare.

And the real problem there is that all the industries involved, the doctors, the hospitals, the insurers, the pharmaceuticals, all beasts to go after.

And so we just have to go after them in earnest if we're going to be able to bring the prices down.

That's a real thing.

I love the AMT.

And I love changing how we tax capital, step-up basis of death, estate taxes, all of those things, I think make incredible sense.

I'm going to give you one more.

We spend so much money through the tax code, tax expenditures, that over the next decade, everything's done in a decade and in budget world or the budget window, we will lose $20 trillion plus of revenue because of all the targeted tax breaks, healthcare exclusion, home mortgage introduction, all of these things.

which are put in place to help make things more affordable, but because of the way they work, they push up the costs, right?

That's a a boon.

You know, thank you, young renters, for subsidizing my house.

That pushes up the cost of housing.

Same with healthcare from the healthcare exclusion.

So I would add those into your list of things I love and everybody else will hate.

But we'll score them for you.

If you want to make the budget plan, we'll look at them and we'll start to figure out how we would cost those out and how far it gets us.

I mean, at the end of the day, it strikes me about 60% of our federal budget.

I'm sorry, 40% goes towards seniors.

It's about to be 50%.

There's no getting around it.

You have to go after Social Security and Medicaid if you're serious about reducing taxes.

And you're going to have to raise revenues.

And to me, the loopholes, as you mentioned, are the real problem.

And that's where AMT comes in.

And you couldn't, you'd have to do it gradually because when you're spending $7 trillion on $5 trillion revenues, you can't just go to you can't go to budget neutrality.

Otherwise, you'd put the economy in a coma.

But is there, and then I'm curious just to get your thoughts.

I'm kind of enamored with this idea of essentially almost zero exemption on inheritance, because when I try to think of taxes, I think of how do we raise taxes that are the least taxing?

And my favorite is my kids aren't going to be any happier if they inherit 10 million versus 4 million.

You're going to die.

Yeah, I'm going to die.

It's no tax to me.

And also, I don't.

I don't think rich kids are any less happy, but I'm not sure they're any happier.

So

in terms of a lot,

I think I've read somewhere it's tens of trillions of dollars that is about to be inherited, that that's a real source of potential revenues that is as least.

It's the easiest way to do this smoothly.

Exactly.

What is your view of that specific tax?

And also,

what are your favorite taxes that in your mind are the least taxing?

I go back to my professor in graduate school who said, tax what you want less of, not what you want more of.

I have always been a fan of the estate tax.

I wrote an article once saying we should have a 100% estate tax, that you shouldn't be able to leave inheritances.

Obviously, that wasn't particularly popular.

And I understand not only do people want to do right by their children, but actually Part of the reason so many people who will never be hit by the estate tax support having a large exemption is because it's aspirational.

They want to think that they are going to have $100 million and not need to worry about it.

But it's a real shame that there is all this money that wouldn't harm the recipients at all compared to some of the other taxes.

The only, I mean, it does have a behavioral effect, right?

Which is a lot of people save so that they can pass on wealth to the next generation.

That could depress levels of savings.

That to me, in my mind, is not

as big a concern as that it makes sense in terms of distributional preferences and economic preferences as a tax that you could increase.

You asked me my favorite taxes.

I

would tax carbon.

I'd have a carbon tax.

I'd have a carbon tax with some kind of a rebate so that you could make the distributional effects make sense.

And I would limit those tax expenditures that I talked about, which is the exact same thing as an AMT.

I just think one simplified tax that would have catch so that there's a limit that you can get away with sort of from using all the many legal end runs in the tax code.

So I think an AMT makes a great deal of sense.

If you want to tax seniors,

you look at consumption taxes.

My sense is a consumption tax, or I'm here in Europe, a VAT, is ultimately a regressive tax.

Say more about it.

Well, it is regressive.

That's the problem with a sales tax in general.

But seniors have already paid taxes on their income.

They're in retirement.

And again, I should be clear, a lot of seniors aren't doing well.

And you definitely don't want somebody who's worked for their lifetime to live in poverty.

But there are many, it used to be that when Social Security started, seniors were the poorest generation there was.

Today they're the richest, the richest cohort, and the poorest as children.

So it does make sense, and you're correct, that this is going to be the biggest transfer of wealth that we've ever seen.

One of the ways that you can tax that, if you need a new revenue stream, is just if you tax consumption, meaning a sales tax or a VAT.

It is indeed regressive, so you'd want to work that out somewhere else in the tax code.

You give back rebates, same as with a carbon tax.

But it is a way that seniors would pay more in taxes than if you went to something like an income tax since they're not generating income the way they were when they were working.

I'm fascinated and in admiration of what Australia has done, and that is a very paternal approach to forcing people to save.

And I like the idea we cost $40 billion, give

every baby $7,000.

You can't touch it.

We're going to invest it across a bunch of diversified low-cost funds and you have access to it when you're 65.

If the market continues to perform the way it has over the last 120 years, you end up with a million bucks.

And then in 20 or 30 years, if we're disciplined and smart enough to maintain the program, you announce that Social Security will go away in 30 years, at which point I think the bond market would love that.

Interest rates would go down and our deficit would go down because our interest payments would go down.

So the idea of some sort of superannual

funding for kids

that ultimately over time, and this is very long-term thinking, which I would argue the government's basic charges is to think long-term, unlike a private company, such that we can ultimately do away with Social Security.

Australia does basically everything right when it comes to budgeting.

I say this all the time, trying to get them to bring me over for junkets to study it because Australia is also a really cool country.

But they do great stuff when it comes to their budget.

They also look at everything from an intergenerational perspective, so they'll evaluate the impacts in the future.

But that Super Anim Fund, I think it's called in Australia, is really interesting.

The question and the challenge for us, and I agree we should try to build that either for kids or for retirement, is our payroll taxes that fund Social Security that we pay right now go directly to my father or existing retirees.

So you can't divert those funds into something else because you have to continue to pay for the benefits that people are getting right now.

So the question is, where do you get the additional funding stream to invest in one of these centralized funds that would have higher returns and allow many people who have no wealth to have a share of the wealth as you have companies and different things that are growing?

In fact, it would align people's incentives right now.

You have so many people who just make money from wages who don't benefit at all from economic growth.

It could create a much better alignment solution right there.

But we'd need to figure out where we get the money to fund that.

And oftentimes you'll hear somebody like when you hear President Trump talking about a sovereign wealth fund, it's like, what wealth?

We don't have.

Wealth.

We're borrowing so much of what we pay.

So we'd have to have the revenue stream to fund what you're talking about.

So it's actually generating real savings, increasing savings, investment, investment and productivity and then you'd get those higher returns

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We've been having this conversation under the assumption that we all agree that this is a problem.

But I'm not sure everyone agrees with that.

And one demographic that I think, especially, maybe we need to just put it in front of them, but one demographic that doesn't seem to care that much about this, and they should, is young people.

Like, that's just not really, when you start talking about deficits, start talking about the budget, for Gen Z at least, the brain just shuts off.

We're more interested in the social justice issues.

I could go on.

So I just love for you to explain for us and spell out exactly how this affects young people.

Like, what does having an exploding and increasing deficit, increasing debt burdens, increasing interest payments, what does that do to young people?

And why is this something that we in particular should care a lot about?

Thank you.

And I think that's the heart of it, because the bottom line with this issue is it is really hard to connect it to people's lives.

They go home, they worry about the cost of health care, higher ed, saving for retirement, job security, their own health insurance, every one of those things.

And nobody, except for my kitchen, goes home and talks about the deficit.

And that's why my kids don't even show up for dinner anymore because it's not their favorite topic.

And that's right.

How do you get people to care?

Scott alluded to something earlier, which is also true, which is many of us have been warning about this for so long and nothing's happened as far as people can see.

It's like, wait a second, you are saying the sky is falling with the deficit and interest rates stayed low and everything looks fine.

Because as a great economist said, this is the termites in the basement.

This is not the exploding problem, the ongoing deficit.

It's the termites in the basement.

And we had incredibly low rates for many reasons from the global economy and actions of the Fed and the amount that central banks purchased.

But that sort of lulled people into complacency.

There was even a big article in Foreign Affairs by Summers and Fuhrman saying, Look, rates are so low, we should borrow more.

And as a result, we've borrowed more.

And now that rates look like they might go up, gone up a little, you realize, oh, we're really vulnerable.

This is like a credit card teaser rate.

This is not a good position to be in.

But for those younger people, and I spent a lot of time

trying to get my kids and their friends to care, and again, they don't come over to our houses often because of the deficit speeches.

But listen, it is more clear than ever that younger people, that you all are inheriting a very dangerous world, much more dangerous than we'd understood.

Much less of the promises of economics.

Every generation will be better than the previous one, and you'll have so many opportunities.

It is a tough time, right?

We're going to need to learn to adapt in terms of work skills.

There's going to be massive changes.

We don't have any of the systems in place for this.

And basically,

Because we've borrowed so much and we don't have the fiscal flexibility or fiscal space as it's known to know that we can borrow if and when emergencies come along right now without interest rates going up.

We've had the incredible privilege as the U.S.

of being able to borrow during emergencies and rates stayed low.

And that actually enabled us to borrow more.

I think it kept us from becoming more disciplined.

But that will not last forever.

And so as there are new challenges, whether it's climate, whether it's friction in the Middle East, whether it's cyber threats,

whether it's global emergencies, whether it's needing to invest in things preemptively, we don't have that that flexibility in the budget.

And you can already see we're not making smart enough choices.

Our investment in human capital has dwindled at a time where we should be massively investing in the younger generation.

So

those things don't create the million man march on the debt.

I realize that.

I do think if we link the fact that housing affordability, because

the mortgage rates that are more expensive, mean that so many young people can't buy a house, that is directly related to our massive borrowing.

The fact that when you're younger is when you need to borrow more and those costs are so much higher than they otherwise would have been because we spent a lot and didn't pay for it.

That linkage is something that I think will make younger people, unfortunately, but justifiably, really quite angry.

I think if they will look at the situation and say, The people who were in charge did not serve as good fiduciaries of this country.

They've made promises to seniors.

They expect us to pay for them.

The economy is not growing as much as one might hope.

There's a lot of problems with the economy.

The debt is creating some of that.

And we are dependent on borrowing.

We're going to have to make a lot of hard choices that we're not used to making.

We don't have politicians who tell the truth on these issues.

We don't have politicians who treat us like grownups and say, if you want these things, we have to pay for them.

And as a result, we've literally passed that bill of trillions on to younger generations.

What I'd hoped is we'd be able to come together and put in place a debt deal soon.

What I worry about now is that younger people are going to get very angry at a time that we already have an overly and dangerously divided country.

This could be another kind of fissure that breaks open when

your generation and younger people start to realize.

I have fewer opportunities.

The economy is not working as well.

My job prospects are not as good.

And they see the linkage to all the massive borrowing and the fact that they owe these trillions of dollars in interest payments as a result.

Well, I would like that.

I would like it if our generation got angry because maybe they'd start to show up and vote on these issues.

I mean, the metaphor that I feel like I try to use

with people who are my age is it's almost like we're sitting at dinner with our grandparents and our grandparents just keep ordering more and more and more and more food.

And

suddenly the check comes and basically what's going to happen is our grandparents are going to die, but it's the equivalent of our grandparents.

They're just going to leave and they're going to leave us with the check.

And it's like, that's what's going to happen over the next 20 years.

We're basically subsidizing old people's lifestyles so that they could live out the American dream, which many of them actually are living that out.

Yes, it's a fading concept, but many of them are getting to do that.

And the idea is like, okay, and then they're going to die.

And then who gets the check?

And it's the people who haven't been able to afford a house for their entire lives.

Just, you know, my metaphors are so much better.

I'm in the club doing champagne and cocaine and using Ed's credit card.

Just easier to understand.

and it's more realistic than Ed's grandpa ordering up.

I mean, it's just not.

Anyways.

I had an analogy, but I'm not going to say it now because it doesn't compare.

Final question for me.

I'd just love to

hear about your career journey, your personal journey.

You've, I mean, incredible resume.

You've been at the Brickings Institution.

You've worked on Wall Street.

You've advised a presidential campaign.

You've been on the editorial board of the Washington Post.

Now you're the president of this incredible organization.

I think many people would probably want to know how you got here and what sort of motivates you and what led you down this career path.

It goes back to that CBO report.

I'm not really kidding.

Like, I...

I am incredibly lucky because I have found a job that is my passion.

And I'm probably the only person whose passion is all fiscal responsibility all the time, budget deficits, debt, budget process, social security reform.

I cannot get enough.

I love this stuff.

In all seriousness, I think it's an incredible gift when somebody's able to find work that they find meaningful, that I believe in it,

and I love, and it never gets boring.

I will acknowledge that when you look at the debt trajectory, I can't say it's been a whopping success.

But we do have a slogan here at the office, which is things would have been worse.

There are a lot of times behind the scenes right now, like on this budget bill.

We're up there tonight.

I'll do a, I'll host a bipartisan dinner tonight, actually, with a number of members of Congress to talk about how the markets might affect what get affected from this and why we need to worry about the demand for treasuries.

But it's, it's incredibly gratifying to get to work on something that you believe in.

And my experience was my first job at Brookings, actually worked at Brookings twice,

was how lucky someone is to get to be paid to learn new things.

I loved being a researcher and learning.

And one of the great things about this job is we're always learning new things.

We have an incredibly smart team of people here.

We're working with folks on the Hill, but the strategy is always changing.

And as the world has changed and gotten, it's become more global.

The politics has become much more difficult.

The stakes are, I think, much higher.

I used to think one of my co-chairs, Leon Panetta, always says, we will make changes.

It's just a question whether it will come from leadership or crisis.

And I was 100% sure it would be leadership.

And now I think it's going to be crisis.

And so we spend time now building break glass plants.

What do you do if there's some kind of a fiscal crisis?

How do we put together a plan where you're ready to go and you can pull it off the shelf?

Like things like that, which feel meaningful, important to me, and are endlessly fascinating.

So when I give advice to younger people,

who knows what your passion will be?

It would have been more lucrative if mine had been Wall Street.

But reading a CBO report, and seeing that I thought this systematic approach of not having any limits on when you borrow seemed really wrong.

And this is when deficits were like $200 billion, not $2 trillion,

gave me a cause that really mattered.

And it's an endlessly fascinating cause.

So I feel very lucky to work on this.

I will say the one thing I wish is that DC weren't so polarized.

I really don't think it's healthy or viable for a country.

to run itself with two teams being more intent on killing each other than guiding the country in the right direction.

And I I think we've reached that point and I'm really worried about that.

At an incredibly consequential moment when there are threats everywhere, disinformation being one of the ones that I worry about the most, we really need to be able to be more unified to do some of the good adult decision making that you need to run something that's fiscally healthy to deal with all of these new economic and global and technological challenges, which we should be able to rise to.

We can handle them, but not if we're broken up as two teams fighting each other.

Ahema Guinness is the president of the Bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

As a leading budget expert and a political independent, she works closely with members of both parties and serves as a trusted resource on Capitol Hill.

McGinnis testifies regularly before Congress.

She's published broadly, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and the Atlantic.

And previously, she worked at the Brookings Institution and on Wall Street.

Maya, this was fascinating.

Thank you so much.

We really appreciate your time.

Thanks for your good work, Matt.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

What did you think, Ed?

She is a serious superstar.

I thought that was incredible.

And I think she explains the issues very clearly.

And she just has such a great command of them.

It's just so helpful.

to have someone like that on these issues that are just kind of complicated and people don't really understand.

Or at the very least,

they're often quite boring discussions but i just think she does a great job of

pointing out why this is important and why we should care and i'm just glad that she's running that organization they have a great president what did you think well my issue is that she's getting in the way of me spending all of your money um

yeah you look you want You want competent people such as Maya

fighting the good fight and thinking long term.

I think the

government is supposed to prevent a tragedy of the commons.

And one thing that, unfortunately,

our democracy, our electoral cycle,

it flies in the face of what is, at the end of the day, the

ecosystem of the atmospherics that should be created in the government.

And that is the difference between a government and private business and why private business people make such shitty presidents.

is that inherently you are focused on quarterly earnings and responding and trying to be very agile on current conditions for a company.

And it's like, if I can perform well over the next three, six, 24 months, I can raise cheap capital and pull the future forward.

Whereas government is really about leadership around sacrifice and thoughtful decisions in the short term that will pay off after you're dead.

And that is, I do think that the best presidents are ones who are reviled in the moment.

And then when we look back on them, think, wow,

that person was thinking about, you know, planting trees, the shade of which he or she would never sit under.

And

our government is not doing that.

Our government is operating more like a private company focused on quarterly earnings as opposed to, you know, they think in two-year cycles now because of the

because of the TikTok cycle and because of just the actual electoral cycle, as opposed to a president, you know,

they're supposed to prevent a tragedy of commons and they're supposed to think long term.

And the idea of even proposing a super animal fund that would start to pay real dividends in 30 or 40 years, I just don't know how any current crop of politicians would do that.

I don't think they

we need more young people.

I realize I'm ranting here, but just as we have age limits on the lower end, I think we should reverse it.

I think we need something to try and get 20 or 30 percent of our elected representatives under the age of 40.

Because the reality is, and I know this firsthand, I'm not that worried about climate change.

I have a home on the beach.

At some point it'll be underwater, but I'll be dead and I don't care.

So I'm not as concerned about climate change as I should be.

And that's a terrible thing to say.

But young people are more concerned about the deficit and they're more concerned about climate change because they're actually going to be around.

And people will respond, well, yeah, but I'm worried about my kids.

Yeah, I get it.

But there's nothing like the fear of your own home being underwater or the fear of you not being able to get a job to motivate you to think long term.

I mean, the only part I disagree with you on there is that young people care about the deficit.

I don't think young people, maybe a few of us are pretty fired up, but I don't think young people fully understand this issue.

And I don't think it, I mean, I think they definitely care a lot about climate change.

That's a big problem.

But I would argue that the deficit is not front of mind and it should be.

But what I liked about her point is that the reason that we're running up these deficits isn't because the politicians want to run America into the ground.

Her point is, and as

you say right now, they got to get voted in.

And in that sense,

the government actually is very similar to the private sector in that we do have these quarterly earnings reports where we have to win over all of the shareholders and it's getting voted in.

And that's one thing about, and again, I don't want to be China.

I don't want to have an authoritarian regime.

But that is one benefit of being China is it is a lot easier to make these long-term decisions and these long-term sacrifices because you don't have to deal with the problem of being popular every two and every four years.

China has a hundred-year plan.

Yeah.

Exactly.

They can do that because they don't have to worry about getting voted in.

So I like that she's focusing on that.

And she's pointing out we need to have a democracy.

We all like that we have a democracy, but we also need to figure out ways to make our politicians less

less susceptible to the short-termism of being voted in.

And I think one way to do that is, I mean, term limits.

That can help, right?

America is really strange.

I feel like everything's becoming, not only is income

becoming unequal and wildly bifurcated, but so is intellect.

And that is there's a small group of people that are so incredibly impressive and smart and have access to the right people and a global perspective and great education.

And those will be the first people they round up when there's an economic shock and a populace decides to blame academics and Jews or someone else.

So anyways, Ed, don't get too smart.

God, the Xanax last night is really kicking in.

I'm really in a bad mood today, Ed.

I'm really in a fucking bad mood.

I think we're on such a terrible trajectory right now.

I can't tell if that's the Xanax or common sense.

Anyways.

How about both?

Yeah, there we go.

The answer is yes.

This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer.

Ms.

Laverio is our research lead, Isabella Kinsell is our research associate, Dan Shalon is our associate producer, Drew Burroughs is our technical director, and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer.

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