S2 Ep1056: Catherine Rampell: Slow Burn

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Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

A few quick programming notes.

Reminder: it's this Friday.

We're doing the World Pride fundraiser, us and crooked media in support of the Immigrant Defenders legal team that is working on behalf of these Venezuelans who have been sent to El Salvador.

Obviously, since World Pride, we are going to focus in particular on the story of Andre Hernandez-Romero, the makeup artist who has been disappeared for no good reason by this administration.

And so we're going to have a little bit of, you know, maybe some tears, a little serious talk, but also some laughs and some revelry and some gayety, if you will, since it's World Pride.

So come on out.

There's still some tickets left.

Not that many.

So you're going to want to jump on it.

It's Friday night in Washington, D.C.

at the Lincoln Theater.

Hope to see you all there.

Just a couple other quick things.

I did a video last night with Will Summer about Curtis Yarvin, the so-called philosopher that has inspired Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen and J.D.

Vance and all these other tech bro oligarch types.

And it was because there's a New Yorker profile of him.

It was very, very long.

And it sunk me into the depths of despair.

So if you want to learn more about Curtis Jarvin and how fucking stupid the supposed philosophy is behind techno-fascism, you can check out the Bullwork Takes feed on your podcast, Player of Choice, or go watch me and Will on YouTube.

And just another reminder while I'm doing this about FY Pod, we're hitting our stride.

I taught the youth about Bin Laden's porn stash on last night's episode.

Last week we had the Mooch's son, Mooch Jr., who's got a new movie out.

And we talked to him about what it was like being in high school when his dad went to work for Trump and then bailed on him.

And we've got a bunch of other good guests planned for FY Pod.

So go ahead and check that out if you haven't.

Today, our guest is a syndicated opinion columnist covering economics at the Washington Post.

She's co-anchor and co-host of MSNBC's new show, The Weekend Primetime, on from 6 to 9 p.m.

Eastern on Saturdays and Sundays.

It's Catherine Rimpel.

Hey, Catherine, welcome back to the show.

Thanks for having me back.

I brought you on because you were popping off on the various lies the administration is telling about their econ agenda.

So I kind of want to take through those one at a time.

But first, I thought, I'm really most interested in your take on the macro view on the state of the economy because I, well, I know about the lies, but I'm confused about the economy.

There's some things happening.

The Atlanta Fed, you know, is projecting a Q2 rebound.

Stock market looks stable on the one hand.

On the other hand, Jamie Dimon's concerned about the bond market.

UBS says recession possibilities ticking back up.

Job growth forecasts are down.

I read one analyst said we may be entering a structurally high rate, high cost era with no off-ramp.

That seems bad.

So I don't know.

What do you make about what's happening out there?

You are not the only one who is confused if that makes you feel better.

Maybe it makes you feel worse.

I don't know.

Nobody knows what's going on.

And that's partly because

there are

so many

question marks about where federal policy is heading.

So there's the tariff stuff, and that has obviously had a huge effect on businesses and will potentially have an effect pretty soon on consumers and workers, meaning that if if the tariffs stick around in high levels and they may well change by the end of my finishing this sentence,

you know, that will lead to higher prices for consumers.

It will lead to lower profits for businesses.

It will lead to those businesses potentially having to resort to layoffs.

So there's a big bucket of question marks there.

Then you also have a big bucket of question marks over this budget bill that you alluded to, which will add trillions of dollars to our deficits going forward.

In addition to cutting taxes and cutting parts of the social safety net, but on what timeline, that is still sort of to be negotiated.

So there are a lot of wildcards there.

So like, for example,

the

tax cuts could potentially boost the economy in the near term, particularly, you know, from a from a demand side perspective, if nothing else, because if people have more cash in their pockets, they're going to spend that cash, maybe even if prices are going up quite a bit.

On the other hand, if they lose a lot of these safety net benefits, and maybe that won't even happen until after the next midterms, but maybe it'll happen sooner, depends how negotiations shake out in the Senate.

That means, well, if they have fewer food stamps, they'll be spending less money on food.

So, how does that

affect the macroeconomy?

Because all of these things have knock-on effects, too.

If people spend less money at their grocery store, then maybe the grocery store has fewer people it can hire, and then those people, or maybe ends up laying off people, who knows?

And then those people end up spending less elsewhere.

So it's, you know, this multiplier effect that you might hear economists talk about.

And besides all of that, if we do have a recession, which I very much hope we do not, to be clear, and I do not think it's a guaranteed outcome, but the more turmoil we have with the trade stuff, the more likely that outcome is.

If we have a recession and we have just gutted the social safety net, then that would make any recession potentially worse and longer, like more painful and longer, because normally,

you know, more people become eligible for food stamps and Medicaid and all sorts of other safety net benefits when

they lose their jobs, when the economy turns south, and that kind of automatically stabilizes the U.S.

economy.

So again, like a lot of these things independently add a lot of risk and uncertainty to the economy, but then in combination, it's even worse.

So, that's why you hear all of these complicated and equivocated forecasts for where things are going.

Because

if we had just kept the economy that Trump inherited and he didn't do any of this stuff, we probably would have had that coveted soft landing that the Fed was looking for, meaning that we keep growing as an economy, inflation comes down, et cetera.

But now, rates come down.

Yeah, rates come down

for mortgages, among other things.

Now, who knows?

Yeah.

A lot of that stuff is like middle distance, right?

I guess I wonder what people are looking at in the short term.

You know, there was probably the last time we had you on, the tariff stuff was so insane that there were a lot of folks forecasting like recession this year, like this fall.

And the taco response from Trump

has, I guess, stalled that.

I was looking at Carl Kentonil over at CNBC.

He was talking about how one signal is that travel plans for the summer are kind of soft compared to what folks had anticipated, you know, coming out of those companies.

So that's one indicator.

At this point, are we kind of in a wait and see, do you think?

Or do you think there might be a change in the environment over the course of the summer?

Well, again, a lot of it depends on who has

our Mad King, who has last whispered in the ear of our mad king.

And

even if he doesn't ultimately do the most destructive possible scenario out there, which might look like something he has proposed and temporarily implemented in the past of, you know, like 145% tariffs on China, et cetera, the uncertainty over everything itself is a drag.

on the economy.

So when you say like wait and see mode, as if that's a, I don't know if you were actually actually saying that was a good thing, but

I think that implies some optimism.

And I guess it's a good thing compared to, oh my God, like the house is on fire and it's actually the owner of the home that's setting the fire in the hopes that they get insurance.

Like that's where we were two months ago.

Right.

But we're still now watching a guy like huffing gasoline fumes and lighting matches wandering around the house to extend this metaphor.

Great job.

And that is also not good because if companies don't know what the rules of the road will be, do not know

what their costs will be,

whether consumers are going to still show up, whether tourists are still going to come, etc.,

that in and of itself leads to a sort of paralysis that can also really weigh on the economy.

I mean, I guess it's not as bad as like setting the thing aflame today, but it's it's like a, I'm really torturing this metaphor.

It's like a very slow burn that also

is not good.

So, none of these scenarios are great.

Again,

I don't think a recession is a fait compli, and I don't want to suggest that, but certainly the odds of recession or at least a significant slowdown, you know, the dreaded stagflation, meaning that you have inflation and really slow, torturously slow growth.

You know, there's a high probability of that, is what I'm thinking.

It's possible.

Okay, last thing on the current economy.

Some of the tariffs, despite the taco strategy, some of the tariffs have still been implemented.

And we've had a significant increase in, you know, if you look at the charts, like how much people are paying, you know, in tariffs over the last month versus obviously last year.

So are we seeing any actual evidence, like any impact of that?

Or is it still kind of small in the grand scheme of things in a really big dynamic economy?

Well, when you say some of the tariffs, as a reminder, we have 10% global tariffs,

which

at one point was considered the worst case scenario.

Trump promised 10% global tariffs during the campaign, and markets did not believe him because they thought that was too stupid, right?

Like even Donald Trump would know better than to have 10% global tariffs because it would be really damaging to the economy.

To be fair, we've carved out, you know, Rolls-Royce engines, some iPhone equipment.

Well, no, I think Rolls-Royce engines, I still heard, I think they, if I, if memory serves, I think they're still at 10%.

They're just not at 25% or whatever it was.

There are some carve-outs.

You know, you mentioned, what did you say, semiconductors and

iPhones?

But there may be more tariffs coming that are like a little bit on more legally solid ground.

So there's still a lot of uncertainty.

We haven't seen any of this show up yet in consumer prices.

If you look at the latest numbers anyway, and I think that's partly because a lot of companies tried to front-run the tariffs.

So they're still working through the inventory that they already have and haven't necessarily raised prices.

If they bring in the stuff and they're paying a lot more for it, they will pass along at least part of those price increases.

So, it could very well be that next month the inflation numbers look way worse, depending on how businesses respond.

Sure.

All right, moving over to Capitol Hill.

Uh, I want to get through you know, some of the lies that you were debunking, but just first, I would like to get the global Catherine Rampell take on the big beautiful bill/slash reconciliation bill/slash turd.

So, the way I have been describing it is that it is essentially a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, from the young to the old, and from the future to the past, which I think is

a nice way of summing up basically all of the moving parts in this bill.

Great news for old rich.

Yeah, exactly.

Congrats.

We've got some old rich listeners out there.

All right.

This is your lucky day.

And in the White House and buddies with people in the White House.

Well, in the sense that, you know, there are tax cuts in this.

They go technically to everyone, but they are most valuable to people at the very top end of the income distribution.

And then they are partly offset by cutting programs that most benefit people at the bottom of the income distribution.

So cutting Medicaid, cutting food stamps,

other safety net programs, et cetera.

And Democrats have been, have finally caught on to some of this and have been talking about it.

But there are also a lot of cuts to programs that disproportionately affect children, for example.

And some of those are the same programs that I mentioned.

You know, children are disproportionately large participants in the food stamp program, as well as Medicaid and CHIP, which is by definition a program for children.

All of those things will be affected as well.

And then there are like changes to the child tax credit that Republicans will say increase the child tax credit, but it also takes it away from millions of

of kids because

if one of their parents is an immigrant

and doesn't have a social security number, then they don't get it, which, by the way, affects children of legal immigrants as well, not only those who are undocumented.

You don't count as a human if you're a child of two parents and one is an immigrant and one is an American citizen.

I'm sorry.

You're a half human.

There are a lot of things that they are doing to go after that particular group, including trying to claw back birthright citizenship and things like that.

That's not related to this bill, but that's part of a broader agenda.

And then robbing the future for the past, some of that is about literally future generations of taxpayers, again, today's children, who will have to pay off the additional debts that are incurred because of this bill, either in the form of higher future taxes or lower future spending on programs they might otherwise be able to access.

But also taking away a lot of renewable energy-related tax credits, which are, I would say, an investment in the future of our energy security and not just how our energy sector will be structured, but how the rest of the economy will be structured.

So there's a lot of like very short-termism at the very least.

And as I alluded to before,

there are intra-party debates within the Republican Party about a lot of these pieces.

So we don't know what the final bill will look like.

We know, for example, that it'll probably have some degree of heartlessness when it comes to Medicaid, but how much heartlessness?

And

when will it materialize?

Will it be before the next midterms?

Will it be after, et cetera.

Yeah, some listeners have been giving me feedback.

There's a lot of like random Christmas tree stuff in the House bill.

Yes.

Like, I really just don't think it's going to get through the Senate.

Like, I did, we did, we were talking about AI.

I forget if it was on yesterday's podcast or recently.

And people are like, well, there's this bill that like guts AI regulation for a decade.

And I'm like,

is that going to get through the Senate?

I don't know.

You know, there's some things overseeing what the judges can do.

Yep.

Like, none of that is technically reconciliation.

Like, it's possible that the Senate will break their own rules and jam through a bunch of stuff that does does not fit in reconciliation, which would be functionally ending the filibuster that Republicans have said that they're for.

Maybe that'll happen and that'll be something that we'll watch.

But I think that the economic stuff is the most likely to get jammed through.

The thing, you talked about the intra-party, there's a lot of time spent on kind of like the intra-party like cleavages and issues, right?

Like, you know, the Josh Hawley's of the world don't love the Medicaid cuts, the Ron Johnson's of the world don't love the debt.

Who likes this bill?

It sounds like a sarcastic question, but I'm kind of serious.

Like, who is really excited about it?

Like, I don't see on my social media anybody that's like, I am the biggest BVP stan

because I represent this part of the MAGA faction.

That's the most confusing thing about it to me.

Well, Donald Trump says it's big and beautiful.

And so, to some extent, everybody else in the party has to fall in line with that.

And you'll hear people like Speaker Johnson sing its praises, and this is the best, you know, the best thing we're going to get.

What do they like about it?

Just that it extends the Trump tax cuts, I guess.

I think it's mostly that.

But they could have just done that.

Well, that would be extremely expensive.

So that's part of the issue here.

It's already extremely expensive.

And then there are a bunch of other tax cuts they added on top.

Yeah, that Trump had promised on the campaign trail, which make it even more expensive.

And then there's like the whole fight over state and local taxes, which were capped in the 2017 tax overhaul that is now being extended.

So if you live in a state with high property taxes or high state income taxes, et cetera, you can only deduct up to $10,000.

But that is expiring this year.

And that was kind of a knock on blue states, right?

It was a way to shake down blue states because those are the ones that tend to have higher state taxes.

But there are some Republicans who live,

who represent swing districts like in New Jersey or maryland or california whose own constituents are also hurt by this and so if you raise the cap as they have agreed to do then that makes it even more expensive so i guess they really like it that's the answer to the question mike lawler really likes the bill well i know that they compromised to

i forget what the latest is but it was like a you can deduct up to forty thousand dollars if your household makes up to 500 grand i don't remember was some kind of compromise i don't remember if he was was super jazzed about it or he was like, this is the best we're going to get.

But I think it puts him at less risk in any event in the next midterms.

So there are a lot of these warring constituencies.

They want kind of mutually exclusive things, whether that might be even more tax cuts or potentially lower hit to the deficit.

So it's a trade-off.

And again, it's not clear to me necessarily which faction will win out in a lot, like on the Medicaid thing in particular.

But I think their main motivation, besides they want to cut taxes, is they want to keep Donald Trump happy.

Which is why I think it's interesting.

The corporate Republican faction was pretty excited about the original Trump tax cuts.

Like you remember them singing the praises.

And, you know, that was true in the Bush era, too.

This one is just, it's a little.

It's a little confusing.

You know, you usually think they're like niche constituencies of people.

You're like, oh, yeah, Grover Norquist was really happy about this.

But like, you know, you're not seeing this this time.

Okay.

Again, there are also some really weird things tucked in there, even on the tax side, like these kind of punitive taxes.

So even the tax guys are worried about like some smaller provisions here, how they might be weaponized.

Will they make it harder for foreign investors, for example, to buy U.S.

Treasury debt?

Like there's a lot of other weird stuff in this bill.

Yeah.

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This is Larry Flick, owner of the floor store.

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Going through a couple of their claims, I want you to debunk.

So I hear Russ Vodo this weekend was pushing back on the critiques from the reality-based community about the Medicaid cuts.

I don't want to play a little bit for you of what Russ had to say.

Look, one out of every five or six dollars in Medicaid is improper.

We have illegal immigrants on the program.

We don't have, we have able-bodied working adults that don't have a work requirement that they would have in TANF or even SNAP.

And those are something that's very important to institute.

That's what this bill does.

No one will lose coverage as a result of this bill.

No.

Nobody will lose coverage.

Is that correct?

No, No, that's bull.

Again, Congressional Budget Office, which is a non-partisan

sort of like scorekeeper referee research group within Congress, they have said something like from the Medicaid provisions alone, I think around 8 million people will become uninsured if you include a bunch of other provisions and policies related to health insurance like the Affordable Care Act, enhanced medical premiums, expiring, like other boring things like that.

The numbers are like double.

Anyway, yeah.

So, yes, people will lose their insurance.

That is not up for debate.

I think what's interesting here is that

now that Democrats have kind of caught on to the fact that, hey, there's some stuff in here that's pretty bad for the public and that we can use as a, you know, as a political cudgel, including on Medicaid, Medicaid.

More people in the public seem to be worried about Medicaid, quite understandably.

And they're showing up at town halls and asking about it.

And the response from Republicans is one of the three following answers.

One, no one will lose coverage, as you just heard.

Two,

okay, some people will lose coverage, but it's only the freeloaders and welfare queens, not deserving people like you.

And then three, we're all going to die die anyway.

So who cares?

That was Joni Ernst, who responded that way.

So I'm not sure any of those are in the realm of both truth and a winning political strategy.

It is true we were all going to die anyway.

Not sure that's going to get you a lot of voters.

Well, if you converted to Christianity, that wouldn't be a problem for you because you would have everlasting life in heaven.

I guess.

I don't know what

to get that.

In heaven, though.

So maybe you're still worse off.

I'm sorry.

Sorry that you're godless.

Or not the right God, at least.

Okay.

Well, Mike Johnson was making the same claim.

We don't need to listen to him.

But,

you know, I guess the point of it is you're not in a particularly strong place when you just have to bald face lie about

what is in the bill.

And like, that's where they're at.

And I guess the bet here is that they can just lie.

And this really, you hate to hand it to Ron Johnson, but this is kind of the case that Ron Johnson is making complaining about this bill over in the Senate, is that what they're going to do in the House is they're going to tell you that they're going to cut everybody's health care, but like after the midterms, right?

And then who knows, 27 might come along.

And, you know, assuming we have elections in 2028, like whether that's J.D.

Vance or Donald Trump Jr.

or whatever will decide they don't want the baggage of it.

So they kick it down the path

and end up not actually doing it, which I guess is possible.

So you can lie about that now because you end up keeping kicking the can,

and anytime it's actually going to happen, you don't do it.

And then, the result of that is the massive skyrocketing of the debt, which

has the other problems that you just laid out.

And so, I guess that's a critique of the bill from Ron Johnson.

Like, there's no way to

make the case for the bill that doesn't just acknowledge the cut.

Right.

Well, that's sort of why I summarized it as: how heartless are they willing to be?

And all of these choices have trade-offs.

If you don't want to take health insurance away from poor people, then you're probably going to add more debt unless you decide not to cut all of these taxes, which it seems like that's the red line, right?

Already, even before this bill, our deficits were not sustainable.

And politicians at some point will have to make really hard choices about reducing deficits that might mean higher taxes, that might mean lower spending or some combination of the two.

Everybody wants this, you know, elusive get out of jail free card, which is just like, we'll grow our way out of it, which, you know, it's just not going to happen based on our demographics, among other things, especially if we're deporting all of the immigrants.

Because you need a large workforce, you need future generations of children, all sorts of other things in order to grow the economy.

So, like, that just assumes a bunch of fairy tale things that are not going to happen.

The on the dead thing, you were on a panel.

I was watching to prepare.

I've watched a couple of your things recently to prepare.

We're going to get to one of them at the end.

But the panel,

you were saying that you think it's very unlikely that Democrats kind of take up the mantle of caring about the debt and deficit

if these guys go forth with this deficit exploding bill that might create issues in the bond markets and all the other issues you just laid out.

I'm kind of inclined to agree with you on that, though.

I'm doing a one-man's journey to make that not happen.

Every Democrat I have on the podcast, I asked them if we can negatively polarize,

can we negatively polarize you into caring about the debt and deficit

in an actual way, not in a Bill Clinton did a good job with this 30 years ago kind of way?

Because that's true, but like not really relevant to what would be required now

to address the debt and deficit.

And also, part of the reason why we had a temporary budget surplus coming out of the Clinton years was about

the demographics of the country.

Like boomers were in their prime earning years, so they were paying a lot in taxes.

Now they are retired or retiring, and birth rates are low.

The good news is they're sticking around and working a lot.

You know, they're not just quitting working at 65, they're rolling 81, 82, running for president again.

A small subset of them refused to retire, but I'm not sure how much additional productive capacity they are adding to the U.S.

economy.

Okay.

So anyways, here's my counter pitch about why we can maybe get back to the Simpson Pulse glory days is that like your point in that panel was that

it's hard to get people to care about debt.

It's not tangible.

It's not affecting their lives, but it kind of is starting to affect people's lives, life right now, right?

Like that if the yield stays high and people, so already people's eyes have glazed over.

So let me not use the word yield.

But if we get into a place where no matter what happens with the economy, the interest rates on people's car loans, student loans, mortgages stay high, like that

is going to impact people in like a real way.

And it's impacting people now.

I talk to people all the time that want to move houses, either upsize or downsize, or have an issue at their house and can't.

because they're like,

how can I move?

Like, I'm kind of stuck given the interest rate environment.

So that will affect people.

They just have to learn that the debt is part of the reason that that's affecting them.

Maybe that's the challenge.

I think that's part of the challenge.

The bigger part of the challenge is all of the things that would be required to solve the problem, you know, to get deficits down, are just fundamentally unpopular.

And again, that includes soaking the rich is popular.

Okay, it is popular, but

Even Democrats are like, well, we're only, the rich are only the billionaires, you know?

And look, I agree billionaires could probably afford to pay higher taxes, but there's just not enough money on that money tree to

get the amount of revenue we need.

How about making all the boomer assholes that want to keep working into their 80s, you don't get Medicare as long as you're working, you know?

Well, so how about that?

That would save us some money.

Would be very unpopular.

All of the things.

That's not going to be.

No, no.

I don't know how you would carve it out just for politicians or something like that.

I'm talking about private sector workers, too.

No, we need more people working.

Like, I think probably we should not be leaning so much on 80-year-olds to fulfill that role.

But yeah, it's like everything that you would do to solve the problem is really unpopular.

Neither party wants to take the short-term political hit to get those things through because it's a it feels like a long-term problem.

It used to be that politicians feared that it would become a big issue in the short term, right?

That like, who was, it was James Carville who said he wanted to come back, die and come back because the bond market was, was so powerful.

And this is kind of what he was referring to.

But what's happened in the many years since then is that the rest of the world has continued lending us money, even when we have these huge deficits.

So they're kind of like, keeping us in the habit, you know, of spending more than we take in and never having to deal with the consequences, or it feels like never having to deal with the consequences.

And at some point, it will become a problem, but nobody knows when that point is going to be.

As you pointed out, like interest rates, yields are rising, and that's painful, but it's not like Greece level or Argentina level or other places that really had major debt crises.

And, you know, the United States has our own exceptionalism and maybe we'll be different and so far that has been the case in part because people have trusted us and the dollar is the global reserve currency and that basically makes it more likely that people will keep feeding our habit when everybody else changes their mind and at some point they I think they will but I could be tomorrow could be 30 years from now that's the only thing that I think will get politicians to act and probably by then it'll be way too late right this is why we have Catherine on this is why you're an economic analyst of choice.

Just the darkest possible possible.

Well, because I depress everyone.

Yeah, the darkest possible comes.

Well, I've got good news for you.

I was listening to the all-in podcast, the tech bros, and I was encouraged that they did not like the bill, and they have concerns about the debt and the interest rates, among other things.

And David Balsacks, the most willing to carry Trump's water, was like, AI is going to solve it.

And then just kind of like moved on.

I was like, how?

It's like, we don't know yet.

We don't know.

It's the nice thing about the techno-optimist crowd is they can can just be like, AI, I'll solve it.

So I can do whatever I want right now.

And

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I've got some other issues.

People are bored with yield talk.

I can already tell.

I know it's CR.

It's important.

The minute.

It's really hard to get people to do it.

You're in the TV business.

What is it called when you look at the ratings for like every three-minute segment?

Whatever that is.

That just was tanking during that period.

So we're trying to recover it.

Immigration.

I want to talk to you, do some science stuff.

You wrote recently for the Post about how Trump has created a surge in illegal immigrants.

It's kind of a cute way of putting it because he's taken away the legal status of many immigrants, particularly the Venezuelans who are given temporary protected status.

That is happening for the Afghans as well.

Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti are on the chopping block.

So we've got that happening on the one hand.

Well, actually, let's just sit with that for a second.

I want to get into some Stephen Miller stuff.

This policy is pretty crazy.

Yeah.

Well, Trump has been warning, fear-mongering for years that the United States is being overrun by illegals, you know, illegal immigrants.

And he is now manifesting those fever dreams into reality by literally taking people who are here legally and rendering them illegal.

So, yes.

In the past week and a half, two weeks, we have added something like 800,000 more quote-unquote illegal immigrants or undocumented immigrants, but that's because he dedocumented them.

And I think people don't realize this, besides this being inhumane and

destroying lots of people's lives, including the lives potentially of many of our friends and allies and

people who assisted our military in Afghanistan, et cetera.

That will also have big effects on the economy because when he's taking away these people's status, what if they're on these programs called like temporary protected status status or they're parolees or whatever, that comes generally with the ability to work.

So he has now effectively taken 800,000 people potentially out of the labor force.

Now, like when employers will start to realize that, I don't know.

I don't think it's, I don't think that happened overnight, but that's going to have big effects on the economy.

In addition to, again,

you know, the human effects that I'm more concerned about.

And then he's also done a bunch of other things to try to make it harder for

legal immigrants to come into the country, whether we're talking about refugees, people who may be more penniless and desperate, and we want to let in because it's the moral thing to do.

It helps our moral standing in the world, or for that matter, scientists and students and, you know, quote unquote, higher skilled people who are also very critical to the U.S.

economy.

He has made it a lot harder for them to come come in legally.

The line from Trump is always, or Trump and Trumpers, is always, we don't hate immigrants.

We only hate those who haven't followed the law, the criminals, you know, the gangbangers, people living in the shadows.

But the truth is he has taken away every

legal pathway to come in here, quote unquote, the right way, and is stripping legal status away from people who did, in fact, do exactly that.

Yeah, I want to get to the scientists, but one thing on this point on the criminals.

There was a Washington Examiner story.

You know, I hate citing some of these outlets, but it's kind of like in Men in Black where you get the real news from the National Enquirer.

That's kind of where we are right now.

Sometimes we get the real news from these places because they...

Or the onion, you know.

Yeah, because they actually talk to the fucking freaks that are populating our government.

But apparently there was a report from inside a meeting between Stephen Miller and ICE and some DHS officials where Stephen Miller was yelling.

You can really picture this.

I want people to kind of get this scene in their head because he gets really mad.

I'm thinking about the scene.

Have you ever seen the scene of him in high school where he's screaming about how he doesn't want to have to clean up his food?

Like, what the hell do we pay the janitors for?

Why do I have to clean up my own food?

Have you ever seen that video?

So I'm picturing.

Okay, it's a good one.

It's worth googling.

So I'm picturing him in that kind of tone, shouting at the ICE officials, you know, who actually are people that have experience as police, right?

As opposed to him.

What do you mean you're going after criminals?

Why aren't you at Home Depot?

Why aren't you at 7-Eleven?

So I guess in private, they belie the idea that they actually even give a fuck about whether or not the people they're deporting are criminals.

They don't care.

And in public, in many ways, they're arresting people when they show up

for their routine check-ins with immigration agents, which by definition means that they are trying to follow the law.

And so you'll see stories like I think in this past week or the week before, there was a high school student in the Bronx

who showed up for his regular ICE or immigration court hearing, something like that, had no criminal record.

He had come in with permission under, I believe, a Biden-era program.

And he was arrested and detained.

And there are a lot of stories like this throughout the country.

The issue is,

besides the fact that like Stephen Miller wants to just round up everyone, whether they're criminals or not, when ICE has these quotas to fill, which reportedly they do, you know, how many arrests they have to make per day,

the people who are abiding by the law, who are showing up at their hearings, et cetera, they're the much lower hanging fruit.

It's hard to find the rapists and gangbangers and drug dealers who are, you know, actually public safety threats, who are in the shadows and not voluntarily going to ICE offices.

It's really hard to hunt those people down, even if I think there's widespread bipartisan support for finding those people.

It's really easy to find people who are voluntarily telling the government where they live, where they work, they're here illegally, or they have some kind of temporary status that allows them to be here legally and to work legally.

Those people are, ICE knows where they are.

So just arrest them.

And so you can see that in the numbers.

Actually, if you look at the ICE detention data

from January before Trump took office versus sometime, I think mid-May,

the number of people in ICE detention who have criminal records has gone up.

You know, it's like one and a half times what it was.

when Trump took office, so it's higher.

The number of people in ICE detention who have no criminal records and no criminal charges, they're only there because of some alleged immigration violation, which is generally a civil violation or, you know, maybe may not even exist at all, has gone up sevenfold.

So the biggest increase in detentions is among people who are by definition not criminals.

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This is Larry Flick, owner of the floor store.

Labor Day is the last sale of the summer, but this one is our biggest sale of the year.

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Go to floorstores.com to find the nearest of our 10 showrooms from Santa Rosa to San Jose.

The Floor Store, your area flooring authority.

From one depressing topic to one, it's even maybe more.

There's a New York Times story out this morning.

I'm going to read a little bit more from it than I usually do just because it's so affecting.

It's like Kate Zernicki.

The story is about how the U.S.

used to light a beacon for science for immigrants throughout the world.

And now some fear it's dimming.

Maybe understated there on the subhead from the New York Times.

Here's how it starts.

Ardem Patapuchian's story is not just the American dream, it's the dream of American science.

He arrived in L.A.

at age 18 after fleeing war-torn Lebanon.

Shout out to the Lebanese.

I'm a quarter-Lebanese.

He spent a year delivering dominoes to become eligible for the University of California.

He went on to get get a post-doctoral fellowship in neuroscience.

He started a lab in San Diego with a grant from NIH, discovered the way human scents touch, and in 2021, won the Nobel Prize.

The Trump cuts got rid of his federal grant to develop new approaches to treating pain.

He posted about this on Blue Sky.

He said within hours he had an email from a Chinese official offering to move his lab to any city, any university he wants with a guarantee of funding for 20 years.

Patapuchin declined, said because because he loves America, but he's worried many other scientists just setting out on their careers, however, are not going to have any option but to leave.

That's pretty depressing.

Yeah.

And the story goes on with many more examples of it.

Yes.

Look, over the past century, science and research have basically been America's golden goose

in the sense that they have contributed way outsize to their

actual part of the economy, to the broader economy.

You know, like that's why we lead in tech, in science,

in a lot of other fields.

And that's why it's been so easy in many ways to attract the best and brightest to come here.

Like it feeds on itself, that we attract the best and brightest to come here.

They do cutting-edge research, and that is an engine for the U.S.

economy.

And then that it begets more and more scientists to come here.

And those who do come here not only are successful in their own right, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that they make American-born talent more productive as well.

There's a lot of research from an economist at NYU named Petra Moser that looks at how changes in immigration law have actually affected all of this over the years.

And

among other things, like the arrival of a lot of

Jewish, German Jewish émigrés who fled the Nazis, revolutionized U.S.

science and innovation, and

probably the Manhattan Project could not have existed without them.

So it's not only about the economy, it's also about national defense, whatever you think of the Manhattan Project.

And that if you look at

the quota acts in the 1920s, when we really clamped down on external immigration, disproportionately immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe.

The scientists who came from those places were more likely to be in some fields than others.

And as a result, those fields in the United States suffered disproportionately.

So basically, like, this is not a hypothetical concern about this brain drain,

you know, solely on this.

For now, I'm just talking about immigration here.

We actually have lots of evidence that American innovation, American productivity, American research benefits when we are able to bring in global talent and suffers when we're not able to.

You know, that's like you can see it in the patent records, for example.

And then on top of that, you mentioned the grants.

And this is another example of slaughtering the golden goose.

Trump has purged a lot of scientists from within the federal government who work on research, work on medical research at NIH,

agricultural research at the USDA, et cetera, has pushed a lot of those people out, has made it much harder to get grants or explicitly cut off grants from private research institutions, whether that's related to like supposed DEI concerns.

There were a lot of grants, science and research grants frozen because of that initially.

And then there's more punitive stuff targeting specific institutions.

All of that is going to affect our ability to cure diseases, to come up with the next iPhone.

You know, the iPhone is based on lots of research done by scientists, uh, researchers at private universities.

It's, you know, Steve Jobs, brilliant guy, Apple, very innovative company, but a lot of what went into innovations like that comes from research being done

at these public research institutions.

So we are going to basically turn off this spigot of talent, turn off the spigot of research that we're developing here.

Some of that's going to move abroad.

Maybe

we'll have new labs set up in China and they'll be nice enough to give us, to lend us the results of those

great discoveries.

I think Europe is also poaching a lot of our scientists right now.

Canada, I think Canada actually, one of those papers that I mentioned, I think Canada was like a big beneficiary of the Quota X, as I recall, from the 1920s, because a bunch of scientists went there.

So, you know, other countries will benefit, but probably on net, the world will be worse off because we have been proven ourselves to be really good at this stuff.

in ways that benefits us,

that has spillover effects for the rest of the world, particularly when it comes to medical breakthroughs.

And for what, I have no idea.

Yeah, the kicker quote in that story: all the medicines, this is from a biologist at Harvard who is an immigrant from the Czech Republic, or probably Czechoslovakia at the time he came.

All the medicines that people take, they were developed in the U.S.

There's essentially nothing developed by anywhere else.

We're on top of the whole thing, and we're really risking it all.

Yeah.

So it's a pretty ominous assessment.

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You just mentioned a lot of the Jewish scientists that have come here.

Do you have any, and I'm sure you have many thoughts on kind of the spate of anti-Semitic attacks we've seen recently?

Yeah.

Anything in particular that strikes you?

It's very ugly.

I'm Jewish and I've been getting a lot of it lately from both the far left and the far right for very different reasons.

And one thing that's very scary about all of this stuff is, you know, if you have, if you're a journalist, if you're somehow in the public eye, you get a lot of hate mail no matter what.

But in a country where it's very easy to secure weapons, firearms, It's really hard to know when these kinds of threats are people just blowing off steam and when they are actually

going to act on their express desire to do harm to various outgroups, whether that's Jews or anyone else.

I guess in Colorado, the guy used a Molotov cocktail or, you know, flamethrower or something and not a firearm.

But,

you know,

it's very disturbing.

Personally, I find it disturbing from the perspective of like everybody should feel safe at night when they go to sleep.

It's very disturbing.

And I wish I knew what the solution is.

But meanwhile, as we are seeing a rise in anti-Semitic incidents

here in the United States,

the Trump administration has been sort of weaponizing that rise to do completely unrelated things,

right?

So, you know, to punish Harvard, to punish Columbia.

like say international students can't come here.

And none of that makes me feel safer as a Jew.

You know, having people kidnapped off of the streets and punished for their speech, historically

not good for Jews.

You know,

going,

we're going to be targeting students at Ivy League schools because we want to protect Jews.

It's like,

wait a minute.

Oh, well, the administration actually sent a survey to all of the professors at Barnard, which is part of Columbia, asking them if they were Jewish.

Like, ostensibly because, you know, like they were trying to identify if there was a rise in anti-Semitism on campus.

But, you know, my view is when the government is making a list of Jewish intellectual elites, it usually does not end well, whatever their stated purpose is.

So, yeah, I don't know what to say, except it's terrible.

And

we've seen this story before.

Again, it's not only Jews who are at risk right now, but if you are a Jewish person and you want to go to synagogue or like the JCC or whatever, it suddenly feels a lot more dangerous than it used to be and nobody's doing anything about it.

And instead, I feel like you have politicians capitalizing on it.

You see these mobs on the internet cheering it on.

And I do worry about more.

copycat behaviors and also this sort of like glorification of political violence not only being used against Jews but against other groups whether they're like pro-Palestine students or anyone else.

And I just feel like the whole country right now feels really on edge and feels like any match could be lit.

And

you could have something really disastrous happen.

And that's not a great feeling right now.

All right.

We're running out of time.

I just want to close with something really quick.

I would feel remiss not to mention this, even down here in Louisiana.

We had a story from Reuters yesterday.

The staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was left baffled on Monday after the head of that agency said he had not been aware that the country has a hurricane season.

According to four sources familiar with the situation, David Richardson, the newly named FEMA director, has no disaster response experience.

So there you go.

You feeling good now?

You ready to sleep?

Are you feeling good about sleeping at night now with this guy

with the best and the brightest in charge?

Yes, the meritocracy at work.

All right.

Bring back DEI.

I don't know.

Whatever concerns the public may have had with DEI,

it seemed like it resulted in slightly more competent people running the Department of Transportation and the military and FEMA.

for that matter than whatever we have now.

DEI versus Fox EI, you know, I don't know exactly how that works.

Final thing, you were with Ezra.

You did Ezra's show as well as mine, which I appreciate.

And, you know, we're just monitoring Ezra right now.

He's maybe gone dark Ezra.

He's flipped.

He's the foil of the left on the internet now.

He's grown a beard.

He told Hassan Minaj.

I think he's taking the creatine.

He's working out.

What did you make?

You were in his presence.

Did you feel kind of a dark energy or a glow-up coming off of podcast host competitor Ezra Klein?

I think Ezra has always been glamorous.

So what can I say?

Do I need to grow a beard, do you think, to compete or

start taking any supplements?

I think intellectual curiosity is the best glow-up one can have.

And you have it in spades.

Ezra has it in spades.

And

this fight with the left is a whole other issue that we could do a different conversation on.

That

I feel like Democrats kind of learned nothing from the last election, but that's a whole separate issue.

We should do another group on that.

We could have a little.

Oh, my God.

I have much to say that's going to get me in trouble, but whatever.

I'll say it anyway.

That is a nice tease for your next

visit to the podcast.

And I'm going to endeavor to get you in trouble when you come back.

Thank you so much, Catherine Rampell.

Thanks, Tim.

Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast.

See you all then.

Peace.

That's

telling you you don't deserve this kind of love.

I'm trying,

and I'm crying in a back street

of a city I don't know.

And I'm trying to go to parties

in a place that I don't belong.

You said it's just a bad day,

trying not not to fix it.

But I'm crying in the back seat

of a taxi in Tokyo.

In the bar, I asked you why you're always on your phone.

You told me that you think you'd like me to be more confident.

Think you meant it like a good thing, but it sounded so me

like you wish you were with someone with a different body.

The Bullwork podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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This is Larry Fleck, owner of the Floor Store.

Labor Day is the last sale of the summer, but this one is our biggest sale of the year.

Now through September 2nd, get up to 50% off store-wide on carpet, hardwood, laminate, waterproof flooring, and much more.

Plus two years interest-free financing, and we pay your sales tax.

The Floor Store's Labor Day sale.

Don't let the sun set on this one.

Go to floorstores.com to find the nearest of our 10 showrooms from Santa Rosa to San Jose.

The Floor Store, your area flooring authority.

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