Trump’s Big Budget Bomb

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Speaker 10 We live for reasons I will not pretend to understand in an age when the only truly bipartisan idea is that landmark legislation demands triple B alliteration.

Speaker 10 President Joe Biden's signature proposal was build back better.

Speaker 10 Now, President Trump has yoked his presidency, yoked all of us, to his big, beautiful bill.

Speaker 12 Big, beautiful, that gorgeous, big, beautiful bill.

Speaker 10 Let me suggest another name for it. I'll even stay on trend.
The big budget bomb.

Speaker 10 I'm recording this on Wednesday, May 21st. It's always possible things will change.

Speaker 10 But as of right now, the damage this thing will do to the budget if it detonates is hard to properly convey, in part because the size of this thing is hard to properly convey.

Speaker 10 And the budget, to be honest, is only where the problems this bill would cause begin.

Speaker 10 But we have to begin somewhere. When you're thinking about the size and cost of legislation, you got two different sides to keep in mind.

Speaker 10 How much the bill costs, either through new spending or tax cuts, and how much of that cost is paid for versus added to the debt.

Speaker 10 The Inflation Reduction Act was expected to cost about $500 billion over 10 years, and it paid for all that spending and more through tax increases.

Speaker 10 The Affordable Care Act was expected to cost about $1 trillion over 10 years, all of it, again, paid for.

Speaker 10 Trump's 2017 tax reform bill, when you added everything up, left an estimated $1.5 trillion of tax cuts unpaid for.

Speaker 10 But the big budget bomb exists in a class by itself.

Speaker 10 Even a naive analysis, one that buys into some very obvious Republican budget tricks, finds that this bill, as it exists right now, cuts taxes and raises spending by more than $4 trillion over 10 years and only pays for about $1.5 trillion of that.

Speaker 10 So once you add in interest on all that new debt, and we're paying real high interest rates on that nowadays, the budget bomb puts more than $3 trillion, $3 trillion on the national credit card over the next decade.

Speaker 10 But let's not fall for dumb budget tricks. The bill is full of tax cuts that Republicans have slapped expiration dates on.

Speaker 10 The way it's written right now, it wipes out taxes on overtime and tips and car loans, but only for four years.

Speaker 10 That'll expire in 2028, the way Republicans have now written the bill. But we know they have no intention of allowing those tax cuts to expire.

Speaker 10 They want to run in 2028 on the fear that Democrats will let them expire.

Speaker 10 Republicans use this trick a lot. If you look back at those 2017 tax cuts from Donald Trump's first term, they use the same gimmick.

Speaker 10 And in this very bill, in this very bill, Republicans are canceling all those expiration dates.

Speaker 10 I'd use the old fool me once line, but I wasn't fooled on this last time. Not going to pretend to be fooled on it this time.
I do think it's at least a little bit funny.

Speaker 10 The Republicans want budgetary credit for using that expiring tax cut trick in the very same bill in which they are also deleting their last set of expiration dates.

Speaker 10 One thing you'll never hear me say about Donald Trump's Republican Party is that it lacks chutzpah.

Speaker 10 According to the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget, which I think nowadays is Washington's status advocacy group.

Speaker 10 If you take seriously the permanence the Republicans are actually seeking, the big budget bomb will add about $5 trillion to the debt over the next decade.

Speaker 10 $5 trillion. That is an insane number.

Speaker 10 You remember when Trump promised to balance the budget?

Speaker 12 I want to do what has not been done in 24 years, balance the federal budget. We're going to balance it.

Speaker 10 I also remember that. That happened in March.

Speaker 10 So here I've been talking about what the bill does to the budget, but there's this other question too, maybe the more important one. What is it trying to accomplish? $5 trillion is a lot of debt.

Speaker 10 But if we were adding it and it would lead us to invent and commercialize nuclear fusion or perfect a drug that would double our healthy lifespans, then fine, it's worth it.

Speaker 10 But here's what this bill does in the real world. It cuts taxes, mostly for richer people.
It cuts Medicaid and food stamps. Republicans are also allowing some Obamacare subsidies to expire.

Speaker 10 And so the estimate is that between all this, 13 million people, 13 million, will lose health insurance. It's also grimly exact.

Speaker 10 The bill has $1.1 trillion in tax cuts for people who make more than $500,000 a year.

Speaker 10 And it has $1.1 trillion in cuts. to Medicaid and food stamps.
It is a straight transfer from people who cannot afford food and medical care to people who can afford to fly first class.

Speaker 10 The bill also guts the tax credits that support the wind, solar, electric vehicle, and nuclear power industries. China will be thrilled by that.

Speaker 10 So when you think about this bill, you should think about risk. This is a bill that increases our risk of a fiscal crisis.
What if all these other countries were alienating?

Speaker 10 All these investors were scaring. Stop buying our debt, even as we're creating trillions more in debt we're going to need them to buy.

Speaker 10 This bill increases the risk any of us face if we can't afford health care or food for our families.

Speaker 10 If Trump's tariffs cause a recession, this bill will have gutted the safety net millions of us would have relied on for help.

Speaker 10 It pumps tens of billions of dollars into ICE detention facilities and deportation capacity, and so it raises the risk faced by immigrants or anyone else caught up in the administration's mass deportation and detention operations.

Speaker 10 Look, I've been a policy journalist for more than 20 years. I've covered more bills than I can count.

Speaker 10 I cannot remember a crueler or more irresponsible piece of domestic legislation that has been seriously proposed. And its sins are compounded by its size.

Speaker 10 If the Republicans' big budget bomb goes off, we are all in the blast radius.

Speaker 10 My guest today is Catherine Rappel. She's an economics columnist at the Washington Post, an anchor at MSNBC, and she's been covering this closely.

Speaker 10 And I've asked her to come on the show today to help talk through all the different risks this bill brings and what it'll really mean for people's lives.

Speaker 10 As always, my email, as reclineshow at nbytimes.com.

Speaker 10 Kathy M. Pel, welcome to the show.

Speaker 13 Great to join you.

Speaker 10 So

Speaker 10 this big, beautiful bill, big, beautiful budget, it is really quite big. There's a lot in it.

Speaker 10 If you could only tell people

Speaker 10 about three or four of its parts, what would they be?

Speaker 13 I think I would say it is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, from the young to the old, and from the future to the past.

Speaker 10 Walk me through that.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 it has a lot of big bundles of parts in it, which normally we would have more time to digest piecemeal, but those include big tax cuts, which are generally quite regressive.

Speaker 13 They help higher income people more.

Speaker 13 It also includes big cuts to the safety net, particularly Medicaid and SNAP, otherwise known as food stamps. And it includes basically

Speaker 13 eliminating a bunch of climate-related tax credits, which are investments in the future, as well as cutting programs that disproportionately help children, which I would also say

Speaker 13 robs our future

Speaker 13 and will still cost a lot of money, which leaves the bill due to future generations of taxpayers.

Speaker 10 And how big is that bill?

Speaker 13 Depends on how you calculate it. There are a bunch of competing estimates out there, but over 10 years, you know, it's somewhere around $4 trillion.

Speaker 13 And before the negotiations are done, it may well be more than that because there are a bunch of Republicans who want even more tax cuts.

Speaker 10 You and I are both battle-scarred veterans of the 2010 budget level.

Speaker 13 Oh, yes.

Speaker 10 Oh, yes.

Speaker 10 And I think those fights when we were constantly being told by Republicans that we were about to become Greece

Speaker 10 and needed immediate austerity.

Speaker 10 And then, in fact, interest rates were completely fine for years and years

Speaker 10 soured a lot of people on warnings about the debt. But we're in a pretty different interest rate environment now.
So interest rates are a lot higher.

Speaker 13 Yep.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 10 the payments have gotten pretty serious. So interest payments are currently the second highest expenditure in the federal budget.
It's more than our entire national defense spend.

Speaker 10 Adding a bunch more debt on top of that seems a little dangerous. How do you think about the debt burden we're facing down here?

Speaker 13 What's that expression? Something that can't go on forever, won't.

Speaker 13 I think that's kind of where we are, in that

Speaker 13 we cannot continue to sustain this level of deficit spending without, at some point, you would think bond investors revolting

Speaker 13 and needing to, as our political leaders needing to either cut spending or raise taxes or both.

Speaker 13 But when that actually happens, I have no idea. You know, it might be, depending on where Trump is headed, Trump is doing other things to call into question

Speaker 13 the safety or risk-freeness of the U.S. dollar and U.S.
debt. So

Speaker 10 setting that aside.

Speaker 13 this is what worries me.

Speaker 10 So I'm used to doing budget coverage, and you tend to kind of sit in the confines of the budget. You're worried about this provision, that provision.
But there's this interaction effect

Speaker 10 between what Trump is doing elsewhere, the tariffs, the trade war with China. We've seen bond markets shake recently under various fears.

Speaker 10 And then piling on a huge amount of new debt in this budget, if it passes.

Speaker 10 And we have this world where we have much higher interest rates. I think the Trump administration would like to see interest rates come down.

Speaker 13 Oh, Trump has made that more than clear. More than clear.

Speaker 10 But passing a budget like this makes it a lot harder for the Fed to bring down interest rates.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 13 Well, a lot of things that the Trump administration is doing will make it harder to reduce interest rates, one of which is adding a lot more debt piled onto the existing debt that we already have.

Speaker 13 Some of it has to do with the fact that tariffs are likely to increase prices.

Speaker 13 All of these things are kind of coming together to make it more likely that rates either go up or at least don't come down as much as certainly anyone looking for a house would like them to be.

Speaker 10 I know this all gets wonky to try to plug the weird and quite, I think, dangerous budget into the other parts of the Trump administration's economic theory, but I want to try try to do it for a minute because we've just spent months covering the tariffs and the theory behind the tariffs.

Speaker 10 And on some level, the theory behind the tariffs is this,

Speaker 10 that trade deficits are bad. And this world where what's happening is that the rest of the world keeps giving us money

Speaker 10 and we keep taking in all of their investment.

Speaker 10 And that has effects on the dollar and effects on our manufacturing. And the Trump administration wants that on some level to stop.

Speaker 10 They believe America's been ripped off by selling so many financial products in order to buy goods.

Speaker 13 Yeah, that doesn't make any sense, though.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I agree. That's one of the problems with this administration.

Speaker 13 That doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 13 And I think Scott Besant is smart enough to know that it has been to our advantage that other countries or private individuals around the world want our treasuries because it has enabled us to continue borrowing and borrowing and borrowing and not have to make the politically difficult decisions to either raise taxes or cut benefits.

Speaker 13 So I don't, it sounds like you think that the administration wants people to stop buying our debt.

Speaker 13 Is that your theory of the case?

Speaker 10 I think that they believe

Speaker 10 that this world

Speaker 10 in which our financial products are so unbelievably attractive and we are buying so much from the world and giving them our money and they take our debt in that is a bad world. world.

Speaker 10 And they want to shift the balance of trade and inflows and outflows. And that's what the tariffs are largely about.

Speaker 10 And that they're doing this at this moment when they're going to pile on a bunch of debt.

Speaker 13 I think what's happening here is that Trump decided he likes tariffs, and everybody around him scrambles to reverse engineer a justification for it. Well, that I don't disagree with.

Speaker 13 I don't think that anybody is thinking, yes, we need to have more tariffs in order to have more manufacturing, in order to have the rest of the world not buying our debt, because everything Trump wants to do will increase the debt.

Speaker 10 So, I am not arguing there's not a contradiction. What I'm saying is they're doing both of these things.

Speaker 10 And they are putting on a bunch of tariffs.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 10 And they are making us a less trustworthy place to invest. And then, on the other hand, they're going to radically increase our debt and the need to have the world keep buying it.

Speaker 10 And these two things together, making America a both less welcoming place for that kind of endless purchasing of our debt and making America a less trustworthy place to purchase debt and making America a place that needs to sell ever more debt seems like a recipe

Speaker 10 for things to go very badly wrong. Absolutely.
At some unknown point in the future.

Speaker 13 Yes, I 100% agree with that.

Speaker 10 That is where I'm going with all of that.

Speaker 13 Okay. I 100% agree with all of that.
But I don't think that any of this is deliberate. You know, I think Trump is convinced that the bill won't cost anything.

Speaker 13 You know, people like Scott Besson have told him it's going to supercharge growth and we'll grow our way out of debt.

Speaker 13 And then we don't have to worry about whether there's appetite out there to buy more treasuries.

Speaker 10 Do you buy that the tax cuts we're seeing in this bill will lead to a lot of growth we would not have otherwise had?

Speaker 13 I think that it will stimulate demand somewhat in the near term. If people's taxes go down, they have more money to spend on other things.
We saw that last time.

Speaker 13 So, you know, there'll be some supply side effects, some demand side effects, but not enough to overcome all of the other reasons why this is slowing the economy.

Speaker 13 So, like, I was talking with this guy who is the CEO of a Christmas tree company,

Speaker 13 Balsam Hill. They sell artificial Christmas trees from China.
And I was asking, like, So Trump says he's going to help you in the long run by cutting your taxes. And he said, we ran the numbers.

Speaker 13 And if they cut their taxes on their profits by half, that would offset a 2% increase in tariffs.

Speaker 13 So it's just like the numbers don't add up, particularly for industries that are really exposed to the tariffs.

Speaker 13 But in general, like for the macroeconomy, no, these things are not going to fully pay for themselves, even if there is a tiny grain of truth to the idea that they could stimulate the economy, at least in the near term.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 I just, I think, again, I think in some ways it sounds like you're giving them too much credit. Like, I don't think it's as strategic as you make it out to be, but the bad outcome you described.

Speaker 10 Yeah, see, I don't think, yes. I don't hugely care what they think they're doing.
Okay, fair enough. I care what they're doing.

Speaker 10 I agree that all of their different arguments for things are contradictory

Speaker 10 and don't cross domains, that there's no macro theory of the case. Yes.
But they are doing all these things.

Speaker 10 And that seems like a huge risk that is building up beneath the system to me.

Speaker 13 Yes, I agree with that. And again, this Moody's announcement, I think, is.

Speaker 10 Yeah, do you want to describe what happened there?

Speaker 13 Yeah. So there are basically three main ratings agencies.
And for a very, very long time, the U.S.

Speaker 13 debt was rated by all of these ratings agencies as pristine, risk-free, you you know, the gold stars all around AAAs is what they called it. And then over the last 10 to 15 years,

Speaker 13 ratings agencies started knocking us down a peg and saying maybe they're not as good for their word as they seem to be, including because there was a debt ceiling debacle where it looked like we might default on our debt, et cetera.

Speaker 13 More recently, the last holdout Moody's, which I think had not downgraded us in over 100 years, or we've had a perfect rating for them for over 100 years. Moody's basically said,

Speaker 13 yeah, we don't think these guys are quite as 100% good for their money as

Speaker 13 we once thought because

Speaker 13 U.S. deficits have already been on track to be growing and growing and growing.
And now, with the

Speaker 13 likely passage of this additional big, beautiful bill, that problem is only going to get worse. So it doesn't really mean anything per se.
Like it's more symbolic.

Speaker 13 It is more like yet another scolding from the financial markets in a way that lawmakers are acting irresponsibly.

Speaker 10 So when you add a bunch of debt, it matters what you're adding the debt for.

Speaker 10 In this case, we're adding it to extend the tax cuts passed in 2017 and then add a bunch of new tax cuts on top of it.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 10 How do you describe the total tax cut package here? What is it trying to do? What should we, who is it benefiting? What's your gloss on it?

Speaker 10 So overall,

Speaker 13 most Americans will get a tax cut.

Speaker 13 I think a lot of the talking points are relative to, again, relative to what they would have had if no bill had passed, because a lot of the tax code is expiring and people's taxes would have otherwise gone up.

Speaker 13 So when you hear talking points like these are only tax cuts for billionaires or corporations or whatever, that's not quite true. Like, I think I looked this up before we met, but

Speaker 13 basically 94% of Americans will get some tax cut relative to what would have happened if Congress does nothing. But the very biggest benefits definitely go to higher income classes.

Speaker 13 Like, two-thirds, this is from the Tax Policy Center, two-thirds of the plan's tax cuts by dollar value go to those in the top quintile.

Speaker 13 People in the top 1% would get about a quarter of the tax cuts. So that's people making over a million dollars, basically.
They get about a quarter of the benefits.

Speaker 13 And then if you look at the overall bill,

Speaker 13 it's not only that the rich benefit more, it's that the poor come out behind because to the extent that any of this is paid for at all, it's largely paid for by taking other benefits away from low-income people.

Speaker 10 Like what benefits?

Speaker 13 Medicaid and food stamps are the biggies here. Medicaid currently enrolls something like one in five Americans.
It's a huge program. It's a popular program.

Speaker 13 And Republicans have argued that their changes are only about

Speaker 13 kicking off, you know, the freeloaders and apocryphal welfare queens.

Speaker 13 And we'll make sure that everyone who is deserving of this public health insurance program continues to receive it. But if you actually look at the provisions themselves, that seems very unlikely.

Speaker 10 I want to stay on the Medicaid side of this for a minute.

Speaker 10 One of the big ways they're trying to save money in Medicaid without saying what they're doing is cutting it is what's called work requirements.

Speaker 10 And the theory of work requirements is we make you prove that you, if you're an able-bodied person, that that you have worked more than 80 hours or you are looking for work in some kind of intense way.

Speaker 10 And if you can't prove that, you lose your Medicaid because

Speaker 10 if you're going to get the benefit of Medicaid, you should show the responsibility of either working or looking for work.

Speaker 10 The problem is, and my partner, Annie Lowry, has talked about this as the time tax and written about this kind of administrative complexity a lot.

Speaker 10 We make it so hard to do and to prove that huge numbers of people lose coverage through being unable to complete the paperwork.

Speaker 10 And so you're weaponizing time and bureaucratic complexity to deny people a benefit they are supposed to have.

Speaker 10 So

Speaker 10 how much of the Medicaid cut is built around that?

Speaker 13 So a lot of it.

Speaker 13 And I actually did a lot of on-the-ground reporting about a pilot version of this back in 2018, 2019 in Arkansas, where the Trump administration allowed Arkansas to impose work requirements.

Speaker 13 And I'll say a few things. So the first thing is, like, this is a very popular actually provision.

Speaker 13 Something like 62% of Americans like the idea of Medicaid work requirements, including about half of Democrats. So it's, because it sounds reasonable.

Speaker 13 Why shouldn't people have to show that they are productive members of society in order to receive these government benefits?

Speaker 13 But it's not really clear what problem it's trying to solve, in that almost two-thirds of people who are on Medicaid are working. They're working either part-time or full-time.

Speaker 13 And the remainder who are not working have something that is generally considered like an allowable excuse, meaning that they're a full-time caregiver, they're enrolled in school, they have a disability, et cetera.

Speaker 13 It's only a very tiny slice of people who don't have one of these exclusions, one of these exemptions that's spelled out.

Speaker 13 So in Arkansas, most of the people, something like 18,000 people lost their Medicaid within the span of a few months.

Speaker 13 Most of those people were kicked off of Medicaid, not because they were shown to have not been working or have one of these other allowable exemptions, but for administrative reasons.

Speaker 13 Basically, they didn't fill out the paperwork or they didn't fill it out. sufficiently.
There was one guy that I profiled, Adrian McGonagall, who actually was working at a chicken plant and

Speaker 13 he got confused about how to report his hours. It was like not mobile friendly.
The website literally shut down after, I think, nine o'clock every day.

Speaker 13 I don't know, the hamsters had to go to bed or something.

Speaker 13 And he didn't have access to a computer. He only had his phone.
And he thought he did it once and that was sufficient. Anyway, he lost his health coverage.
He had severe COPD.

Speaker 13 Because he was not able to get his medications and to treat this chronic illness, he ended up getting very sick, lost his job at the chicken plant.

Speaker 13 And so this policy that was sold as encouraging people to get jobs actually cost him his.

Speaker 13 He unfortunately passed away quite recently, as I, as I learned, I got in touch with his former legal aid attorney

Speaker 13 who had said that, you know, ultimately Adrian had been one of the plaintiffs in the case to challenge this law and did get it. overturned and he was able to get his Medicaid back,

Speaker 13 but he kind of went into this downward financial and health spiral as a result of all of this. So these things have consequences.

Speaker 13 And there are long-term harms that are created by what seems like

Speaker 13 reasonable paperwork to some people. But the reality is that this is a backdoor way of basically purging people

Speaker 13 from their health insurance. Again, to take it back to to the Congressional Budget Office, that is their assumption as well.
The Congressional Budget Office says, yes, this will

Speaker 13 save

Speaker 13 a lot of money and a lot of people will lose health insurance.

Speaker 13 There will be no change on employment. That is what their assumption is.

Speaker 13 This policy that, again, is supposed to be about making sure only the deserving people get jobs and encouraging more people to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps will actually have no effect on how many people have jobs.

Speaker 10 That's pretty grim.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 10 And it saves a lot of their money, actually, which implies that a lot of people are losing coverage through these paperwork requirements. Yes.
And I just think this is ugly.

Speaker 10 If you want to argue that people shouldn't have health care, fine.

Speaker 10 If you want to argue people should have jobs, we could have all kinds of labor market policies that help people get jobs.

Speaker 13 None of which are in this bill.

Speaker 10 None of which are in this bill.

Speaker 10 But for the administration, the Did Does

Speaker 10 to add

Speaker 10 a huge layer of bureaucratic complexity,

Speaker 10 how good will the other languages of this paperwork be? How quick will the response times in these agencies?

Speaker 13 Will the website shut down after 9 p.m.?

Speaker 10 The website shut down after 9 p.m. It just, it really reveals something, both an unwillingness.

Speaker 10 I mean, Trump has promised not to get Medicaid, an unwillingness to stand up for what they're actually doing, and then an effort to weaponize the very bureaucratic inefficiency that they otherwise pretend to condemn and root out

Speaker 10 against the weakest

Speaker 10 and

Speaker 10 most powerless segment of society, people who do not make enough money

Speaker 10 to get health insurance. Yeah, and there are a bunch of the whole thing just, it actually turns my stomach.

Speaker 13 Yeah, there's a bunch of other red tape that they add.

Speaker 13 They require that people people on Medicaid have to reprove eligibility more frequently, which again, if the process were completely seamless, who cares? But it's not.

Speaker 13 Every time people have to reprove eligibility, even if nothing has changed in their situation, there's a chance the paperwork gets lost.

Speaker 13 People have to find the time to go to the office, you know, to deliver the forms in person, or they have to navigate this clunky website or whatever.

Speaker 13 It's just a matter of like hacking through all of this red tape, American ninja style. You know, that's sort of how I picture it.

Speaker 13 It's an obstacle course, essentially, that they've set up for people to make it harder for them to prove that they are entitled to the benefits that they are legally entitled to.

Speaker 10 And then there are about $300 billion in cuts to SNAP, which is the sort of modern term for the food stamps program.

Speaker 10 And there's also the, a lot of this bill. is about extending tax cuts from the past.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 10 But right now, there are these subsidies for the the Affordable Care Act that are passed under the Biden administration, which have made the premiums in the Affordable Care Act much cheaper.

Speaker 10 They've led to a pretty big increase in the number of people enrolled. And one of the pay-for's in the bill is to allow those to expire.
Do you mind talking a bit about how that'll work?

Speaker 13 Yes. So,

Speaker 13 understandably, there's been a lot of focus on Medicaid.

Speaker 13 There are other provisions either in the bill or part of sort of the broader Republican agenda that will also end up with people losing their health insurance.

Speaker 13 There are these expanded subsidies, essentially, for people to buy insurance on the individual marketplace that have partly been responsible for the fact that the uninsured rate in America, I think, was at its lowest level on record last year.

Speaker 13 It's partly because of Medicaid expansion. It's partly because of this.
And it's like technical and wonky, and people don't really pay attention to it.

Speaker 13 But those expanded subsidies were passed by Democrats and are set to expire at the end of this year.

Speaker 13 Republicans could choose to extend those, just as they are extending a lot of other things on the tax.

Speaker 10 Pretending that extension costs no money.

Speaker 13 Correct. But they have chosen not to.

Speaker 13 So when you see these scarier figures for how many people are going to newly become uninsured from the CBO, you know, over 13 million people, that is inclusive of Medicaid, changes to the Affordable Care Act, and

Speaker 13 some other regulatory stuff that basically Congress is codifying.

Speaker 10 So I just want to put a very fine point on this. According to our best read of what the bill is going to do, we are going to drive 13 million people off health insurance.

Speaker 13 Yes.

Speaker 10 We are going to end $300 billion of spending that gives food to hungry people.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 10 that is going to go to pay for,

Speaker 10 depending on how you calculate it, roughly a quarter of tax cuts goes to the top 1%.

Speaker 10 Like that's the fundamental math of this bill.

Speaker 13 Yes, that is the fundamental math of this bill. And this is part of the reason why I, among others, have characterized it as a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, because

Speaker 13 It is forcing low-income people who would otherwise have access to these safety net benefits that have been around and been popular for many decades.

Speaker 10 Including among Republicans, as Senator Josh Hawley has been saying.

Speaker 13 Well, yeah, I mean, just as an aside, there are Republicans in the House who very narrowly won their elections last year by fewer votes than the number of people who are on Medicaid in their districts.

Speaker 13 So,

Speaker 13 yeah, besides like the human cost of all of this, politically, it seems pretty dumb to me because

Speaker 13 while there is maybe a stereotype of who is the typical food stamp recipient or the typical Medicaid recipient, a stereotype that's

Speaker 13 racialized among other things, people from all walks of life go through periods where they need this assistance. Many of them are Republicans.

Speaker 13 Many of them live in districts that are currently represented by Republicans.

Speaker 13 And at some point, people are going to notice when they can't put food on the table or they can't get the inhaler for their kid.

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Speaker 10 It used to be the case in American politics that Democrats won voters who made less than $50,000 by a lot,

Speaker 10 and Republicans won voters who made more than $100,000 by... a lot.

Speaker 10 And so we used to have these fights over the safety net, but they somewhat aligned with the political coalitions. Republicans wanted to cut benefits like this, but mostly those were not their voters.

Speaker 10 In 2024, Donald Trump won voters making less than $50,000.

Speaker 10 Wasn't a huge victory among them, but he won them. Donald Trump won voters who did not go to college.

Speaker 10 When you look at who is on Medicaid, when you look at who is on food stamps, when you look at who needs expanded health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, it is concentrated in this group of voters who thought Trump was going to make their cost of living cheaper

Speaker 13 for them, yes, and higher tariffs.

Speaker 10 Right.

Speaker 13 There are many ways in which this administration and allies in Congress have run a pretty regressive agenda, not looking out for the common man, shall we say.

Speaker 13 I mean, we haven't even talked about some of the other Doge cuts recently, like closing half of the regional Head Start offices.

Speaker 13 Head Start is the program that serves low-income families by providing pre-K and child care and other ancillary services for the parents.

Speaker 13 My question will be, at what point do Americans necessarily connect the dots? I think with tariffs, people understand the tariffs are happening.

Speaker 13 Some of these other connections I think are a little bit more opaque. And

Speaker 13 some of that is of necessity and some of it I think is by design. Like,

Speaker 13 one of my most deeply held political beliefs is that complexity rewards demagogues. And this bill is definitely a case in point.
Like, budgets are always complicated and make people's eyes glaze over.

Speaker 13 But normally, journalists have some time to digest what's in it and help people understand how it might affect them. Instead, all of this stuff is being dumped at once.

Speaker 13 So, it's very easy to lie about. Like,

Speaker 13 Donald Trump Trump and Republicans in Congress are just looking out for you and are going to make you rich and are going to kick off all of those freeloaders and welfare queens from programs so that you get them and they don't.

Speaker 13 And it's an easier story to tell the more opaque the actual policies are.

Speaker 10 It's why I've thought a fight happening as we speak and we don't know how to resolve yet is interesting.

Speaker 10 So the bill, as initially written, has the work requirements come into play in 2029, after the next presidential election.

Speaker 10 So they get to pocket these assumed savings because we do budget numbers over 10 years.

Speaker 10 But in theory, nobody will feel the thing they are doing to Medicaid until 2029, or at least that thing they are doing to Medicaid.

Speaker 10 But the more right-wing members of their caucus want that brought up to 2026, in which case, people will begin to feel it immediately within this term, such that it could be something that people are upset about come the next presidential election.

Speaker 10 Again, we don't know how it'll play out, but I thought it was quite telling that the Republican majority's preference, not their sort of more freedom caucus minority, was

Speaker 10 let's put this in the bill, but make it the next president's problem. Because you can lie about things until you're thrown off of Medicaid and a bunch of people you know are thrown off of Medicaid.

Speaker 10 And then what just happened comes clear real quickly.

Speaker 13 Yes. Well, there's this fundamental tension within the Republican caucus, as you pointed out, between

Speaker 13 members who think that the provisions are

Speaker 13 not heartless enough

Speaker 13 and those who think that they are too heartless in the political sense, I guess,

Speaker 13 in that

Speaker 13 The people on the budget committee, I should say when we're recording this, we don't know what concessions were given to them as yet in order to get the bill out of committee.

Speaker 13 But the people who voted against it initially said that they wanted these Medicaid work requirements to be moved up. They wanted more of the climate-related tax credits to be rescinded, etc.

Speaker 13 But then there are a lot of other members of the party who are very worried about exactly the political risk you identified, that people will realize they've been kicked off of these benefits and will

Speaker 13 take their anger, justified anger, out on the Republican Party and whoever's on the Republican ticket.

Speaker 13 And this is a problem not only in the House, but it's a problem in the Senate. I think you mentioned Josh Hawley has talked about this.

Speaker 10 Hawley seems to be against Medicaid cuts at high levels altogether. And he's making the argument that I sort of just alluded to.
We are now a working-class party. It is our voters on Medicaid.
Yes.

Speaker 10 Cutting Medicaid for our voters.

Speaker 13 Well, and there's also some disagreement in the party about whether to even call these Medicaid cuts.

Speaker 10 Well, I think there's not disagreement. They don't want to call them Medicaid cuts.

Speaker 13 Yes, fair, fair. But

Speaker 10 they're not. They might play stupid, but they're not idiots.

Speaker 13 Yes, fair.

Speaker 10 They know they're saving money, and that when you save money on Medicaid, what just happened is somebody somewhere did not get health care.

Speaker 13 Right.

Speaker 13 But they are spinning it as it's only the undeserving people who won't get health care, the people who are lazy, who are freeloaders, who are government parasites and can't get their butt to work.

Speaker 10 But what Josh Hawley is saying is

Speaker 10 what Josh Hawley is saying is, look, guys,

Speaker 10 we can't be believing our own spin.

Speaker 13 Yes, we can't get high on our own supply. We can't get high on our own supply.

Speaker 10 If we do this, we are cutting Medicaid for our voters. And what I'm saying is the people writing this bill know what they're doing.
Yes.

Speaker 10 They are not confused about what is happening when you cut Medicaid in this way.

Speaker 10 They know that the only way this saves money or the main way this saves saves money is people who otherwise could have walked into a hospital or a doctor's office and put down a Medicaid card and gotten healthcare coverage that the government would have paid for cannot do that.

Speaker 10 Yes. That's the mechanism.

Speaker 13 Yes, I agree with that. I mean, there are a lot of contradictory things.

Speaker 10 Yes, I just don't want to allow their spin to stand on this show.

Speaker 13 That's my that's a totally reasonable point.

Speaker 13 Yes, so there are members of the Republican Conference who

Speaker 13 want these Medicaid cuts to kick in faster. There are members who want them to kick in more slowly or maybe not at all because they understand that it is their voters who may suffer.

Speaker 13 There are members of the party who don't want to raise deficits. There are members of the party who think that deficits don't matter.

Speaker 13 There are just like part of the issue here and part of the reason why I have been really wondering like, where does this bill actually go is that there are so many mutually exclusive constraints in a party that has a very thin margin

Speaker 13 that it's hard to know who gets to extract what demands in exchange for their vote.

Speaker 13 Because like we haven't, we haven't really talked about the Republicans who are in the SALT caucus who want basically bigger tax cuts for rich people by allowing people in blue state, predominantly blue states, to deduct more of their state and local taxes.

Speaker 13 And they may be the defining, you know, it it seems like the people who are worried about Medicaid cuts hurting their own constituents, they've gotten a little quieter recently.

Speaker 13 The SALT caucus is now louder. So maybe they're the ones who get to

Speaker 13 twist the bill in their direction, but then it's going to cost even more. And what do you do about that? Be more aggressive.
And be more aggressive. And do you end up having the bill cost more?

Speaker 13 Do you end up kicking even more people off of benefits? I don't know. Like these puzzle pieces just don't fit together.

Speaker 10 I was going to say that the

Speaker 10 thing here is that the only thing holding the coalition together is fear of Donald Trump himself.

Speaker 10 That House Republicans, Senate Republicans, whatever they think on most policies, very few of them will dare oppose him.

Speaker 10 Except there was this one thing that happened.

Speaker 13 Oh, I know what you're going to say.

Speaker 10 Which is that Donald Trump had exactly one good political instinct here.

Speaker 10 And he said,

Speaker 10 Maybe one of the ways we should pay for this is we should raise taxes on really wealthy people.

Speaker 10 And not by a ton,

Speaker 10 but maybe just enough to say we're doing it. Yep.

Speaker 10 What happened to that?

Speaker 13 This was one of the few times I think I've seen his

Speaker 13 friends and allies in Congress like visibly recoil.

Speaker 13 And many of them said publicly, yeah,

Speaker 13 that's not a good idea. And so Trump then posted on social media, well, I think they should do it, but it's probably a bad idea.

Speaker 13 So I kind of understand if they don't. This is one of the few times I feel like I've seen Donald Trump back down in one of these fights.
And,

Speaker 13 you know, it's clear that this was in the no-fly zone.

Speaker 10 It was just interesting to see

Speaker 10 this

Speaker 10 vestigial reflex

Speaker 10 of the Republican Party as I understood it to exist in 2013.

Speaker 10 kick in.

Speaker 10 And the one thing Donald Trump cannot do as he tries to build his working multiracial coalition

Speaker 10 is the most popular policy move in his arsenal for a bill like this,

Speaker 10 which is to pay for some of your tax cuts

Speaker 10 by raising taxes on rich people.

Speaker 13 Well, you said the one thing that holds the Republican Party together is fealty to Trump. I think it's fealty to Trump and tax cuts,

Speaker 13 particularly regressive tax cuts. This has been their North Star for

Speaker 13 many, many years. And it does not surprise me that that's their one red line with this guy is that we cannot raise taxes on higher income people and corporations.

Speaker 10 So Donald Trump wins the election running against the high prices of the Biden era. And he walks into an economy where inflation has calmed down.
Things are pretty steady and stable.

Speaker 10 Stock market's in good shape.

Speaker 10 And then he begins raising prices through tariffs. And the tariffs are bouncing around a lot.
Right now, we're on a reduced level with China for 90 days as we negotiate

Speaker 10 a mere 30%. Yes.
But there are tariffs now on all kinds of goods coming from all over the world. Those price increases are starting to show up, are going to continue showing up.

Speaker 10 There's also a huge amount of uncertainty pausing all kinds of business investment because when you don't know what the tariff rate or tax structure will be from day to day, you're not going to make a bunch of long-term capital investments.

Speaker 10 So every forecaster says that the risk of recession has been rising from what they anticipated it would be at the beginning of the year. Now you get a bill like this,

Speaker 10 where we're doing things like cutting SNAP, cutting Medicaid, cutting the Affordable Care Act. How do those two things interact?

Speaker 13 I think it's never really a great time to kick a lot of people off of critical benefits like Medicaid and SNAP. But probably the worst time is when we are about to head into a recession.
Because

Speaker 13 A, that's when people are most likely to need these programs and they automatically kick in. And so there's a little bit of

Speaker 13 the safety. That's what the safety net is, right? It's to catch people when they might otherwise be falling to help them get back on their feet.

Speaker 13 These programs also,

Speaker 13 because they kick in automatically, they're thought of as as automatically stabilizing the overall economy.

Speaker 13 Because if all of these people who were losing their jobs at once stopped spending at once, that's going to lead to kind of a downward spiral.

Speaker 13 They stop spending the places that they would spend their money, stop hiring, lay off people, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 13 But it's effectively like an automatic form of stimulus and helps the economy recover a little faster.

Speaker 13 If instead you have these things coinciding at once, where we have a recession on the one hand and these massive changes to programs like food stamps and Medicaid, then you will have not only greater suffering among individuals in the near term, but potentially a deeper and longer recession.

Speaker 13 And look, I really, I don't think a recession is a faille compli. You know, I don't want to suggest that it's definitely going to happen, but the odds have increased.

Speaker 13 And all of these agenda items are conspiring to make life a lot more difficult, whether intentionally or otherwise, a lot more difficult for the most vulnerable Americans.

Speaker 13 Because again, the tariffs will also increase the prices of the things that they buy. So yeah, it's like, it's the perfect storm.

Speaker 10 So Republicans will tell you that this whole conversation is unfair, that we're ignoring all the ways in this bill that they are expanding help for the working class. So there is

Speaker 10 a somewhat complicated approach to expanding the child tax credit. There are things like no tax on tips, no tax on overtime.
Talk to me about this set of policies,

Speaker 10 the more populist dimensions of this bill.

Speaker 13 So I don't think they're uniformly bad, all of the things that you just mentioned. I do think that we should be doing something to make more assistance available to families with kids, for example.

Speaker 13 But the way that they have structured these changes

Speaker 13 is still not really targeting those who need it. So, just as an example, the no tax on tips thing, it sounds like that would help your typical waitress or other hospitality worker.

Speaker 13 In reality,

Speaker 13 Those people are probably low income enough that they're not going to benefit from this because their income is below the threshold where they would get taxed much anyway, whether that income is coming from tips or from wages.

Speaker 13 The people who are going to benefit are going to be the people who are disproportionately high income who can maybe reclassify more of their income as tips or as overtime.

Speaker 13 So this is going to be like a big boondoggle for accountants and tax attorneys.

Speaker 10 And we've got to the IRS. And we've got to the IRS.

Speaker 10 Yeah. Tax shenanigans are going down.

Speaker 13 Right.

Speaker 13 So this is not structured in such a way that it will actually help the people that I think are being envisioned when you think about tipped workers or you think about people who need overtime pay.

Speaker 13 They are probably gonna see very little benefit, or at least relative to where the dollars are actually going to be flowing. It's primarily going to help higher income people.

Speaker 13 The same thing with like cutting or eliminating taxes on Social Security. Most people under current law, like who are low-income, already are not paying taxes on Social Security.

Speaker 13 The people who are left out of the current system who would be exempt are disproportionately higher income because of how the law currently works.

Speaker 13 So, a lot of these things that sort of sound populist on their face are either symbolic or actually going to be regressive. And it will also distort a lot of behavior, too.

Speaker 13 Like, I should tell the Washington Post to just pay me 100% in tips, and then, you know, all of my income will be tax-free.

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Speaker 10 One of the other ways they're trying to pay for part of this is gutting various tax credits to incentivize clean energy that we're in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Speaker 10 This is another part of the bill under active negotiation. The right-wing of the Republican Party wants to make the evisceration of these tax cuts quite complete.

Speaker 10 The bill, as it is currently written, just makes it profound, is how I put it.

Speaker 10 But solar credits, wind credits, tax cuts for electric vehicles, nuclear, which in general one tends to think about the Republican Party supporting.

Speaker 10 Putting aside even what you think about climate change.

Speaker 13 Okay.

Speaker 10 These were fast-growing, are fast-growing American industries.

Speaker 10 And they are industries we don't want to lose to China, right? We have big tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles for a reason.

Speaker 10 Donald Trump has wanted to bring down American energy prices and wants American energy dominance. These are things that generate energy and contribute to an overall capacity.

Speaker 10 How do you think about what this will mean just for the energy prices and the industries behind them?

Speaker 13 Well, and a lot of the investments have to date been concentrated in red districts as well. I mean, my general view on

Speaker 13 so-called clean energy, green energy, whatever term you want to use, is that

Speaker 13 the transition is coming no matter what,

Speaker 13 just because the economics in the long run make much more sense to electrify everything and to use solar and wind and other renewables as much as possible because, like, on the margin, sunshine and wind are free, and fossil fuels are not.

Speaker 13 So, it's going to win in the long run. The question question is only how quickly?

Speaker 13 And politicians can do things to either speed it up or slow it down.

Speaker 13 And if they slow it down, that means we are just delaying the time until we get the really, really cheap, not to mention cleaner and more renewable energy

Speaker 13 and raising costs effectively in the near term.

Speaker 10 But it does something else too, which is that there is a

Speaker 10 race to have the dominant corporate players in what will be globally important export industries. That's also true.
I mean, as you say, there's a transition going on.

Speaker 10 It's probably going to happen one way or the other.

Speaker 10 And China, who we are obsessed with competing with and for reasonable reasons,

Speaker 10 they've pumped a huge amount of money into trying to dominate solar technology, trying to dominate wind technology, battery technology, EVs.

Speaker 10 So putting aside, again, what you think of renewable energy, and my opinions on it are exactly what one would think they are.

Speaker 10 This is a gigantic gift to China, where their electric vehicle industries are already quite globally competitive. We are keeping those cars out for a reason.

Speaker 10 We worry if they come in, they would beat the cars we are making. But now nobody likes Tesla in Europe.
And we, nobody like liberals don't like Tesla in America, increasingly.

Speaker 10 And we are like cutting the knees out of our other electric vehicle companies, which are using these kinds of credits to catch up.

Speaker 10 And to be really good at solar, wind, and nuclear, you got to fund it. And we're going to stop doing that too.

Speaker 10 Just from their industrial policy strategy, this just seems disastrous for us.

Speaker 13 Yes, I generally agree with that. I mean, I think I am more skeptical of industrial policy more generally than you are.

Speaker 13 And I thought that the tariffs we placed on not just Chinese solar, but global solar back in whatever it was, 2018, and then extended under Biden. I thought those were dumb.

Speaker 13 Like if other countries want to sell us solar on the cheap, let them.

Speaker 13 Let us have cheap clean energy.

Speaker 10 We don't disagree on this.

Speaker 13 Okay. And I agree with you that this set of policies is, again, somewhat at odds with Trump's general pro

Speaker 13 manufacturing renaissance agenda. Like, why are we talking about bringing back sneaker factories and

Speaker 13 maybe doll factories at this point? I'm not really sure. Like, very low-value items.
If we are going to use industrial policy to try to revive or invest in some

Speaker 13 segment of the manufacturing industry, we should be doing it for these goods of the future.

Speaker 10 So, this gets to another form of redistribution that you brought up at the beginning and I wanted to end on, which is the redistribution from the young to the old.

Speaker 10 And is a way that the climate side does this very directly?

Speaker 10 If we are slowing down that transition, slowing down emissions curbs, people who are younger and are going to live in a more volatile climate are going to experience more harm from that.

Speaker 10 But you're making a bigger point about the bill. The bill from a administration that prides itself on being pro-natalist and being pro-kids and wanting to see more kids in America.

Speaker 10 Walk me through that form of redistribution.

Speaker 13 So So there are a number of ways in which babies and kids are basically getting shafted. One is, again, sort of where we started out talking about who pays back the debt.

Speaker 13 At some point, this debt is going to be repaid, will have to be repaid by future generations of Americans, either in the form of higher taxes or fewer benefits. So that's going to be today's kids.

Speaker 13 That's like a very basic point.

Speaker 13 But we are also doing a bunch of things to disinvest in their health care, disinvest in their nutritional development by taking away some of these,

Speaker 13 again, critical safety net benefits that do have a payoff over the long run.

Speaker 13 And then there are other like random things in the bill that just

Speaker 13 seem to be

Speaker 13 bizarrely like,

Speaker 13 I don't know, exacting cruelty upon kids for no apparent reason. Like,

Speaker 13 again, this is really in the weeds, but Medicaid dollars, federal Medicaid dollars cannot be used to pay for undocumented people.

Speaker 13 Some states will use their own funds to provide health insurance to children regardless of immigration status.

Speaker 13 And the bill says, if you do that, if you use your own funds to pay for these kids, then we are going to strip away all of this other money.

Speaker 13 So it's like they're basically incentivizing states to take health insurance away from children. The child tax credit is another good example of this.
Again, it's like buried in the bill.

Speaker 13 Probably very few people have realized it's in there.

Speaker 13 Even though they say they are making it more generous, they're making it more generous, but basically for higher income people, and they are taking it away from a lot of children.

Speaker 13 And the way that they're doing that is that they're saying if either of a child's parents doesn't have a social security number, the child is not eligible for the child tax credit.

Speaker 13 And this does not only affect kids who might have an undocumented parent, it also affects kids who might have one parent who's here legally, too.

Speaker 13 Like if you're on a student visa, you generally can't get a social security number. So if you imagine like a U.S.
citizen has a kid with,

Speaker 13 you know, somebody who is in their grad school class, their child will not be eligible

Speaker 13 for the child tax credit, whereas in the past they would have been.

Speaker 13 And there's also a marriage penalty built into all of this too. Like if the parents in that example don't get married, then the U.S.
citizen parent can claim the kid and get the credit.

Speaker 13 But if they get married, they lose it altogether. So there's like a bunch of like little things in the bill that just

Speaker 13 basically take a lot of resources away from kids in some ways big and small, especially children of immigrants, but not only children of immigrants, cost shifting more of food stamps onto the states that will disproportionately hurt kids because kids make up a huge chunk of the food stamp receiving population.

Speaker 13 So there are a bunch of things like that. And I think that that kind of gets lost in all of this.

Speaker 10 I think that's important, though, because if you look at also where the bill spends new money,

Speaker 10 one of the places that it spends new money is inflicting

Speaker 10 pain and accelerating deportation

Speaker 10 among immigrants. So there's $45 billion through 2029 for ICE detention facilities.
It's a 365% increase annually from where it is now.

Speaker 10 $14 billion through 2029 for ICE transportation and removal operations, a 500% increase.

Speaker 10 So you're seeing them as they cut Medicaid, as they cut the Affordable Care Act, as they cut green energy subsidies. They're spending a bunch of money on funding the

Speaker 10 machines and architecture for deportation,

Speaker 10 for detainment,

Speaker 10 for

Speaker 10 particularly if you begin thinking about other things you've heard from Stephen Miller about suspending due process and for things that could get

Speaker 10 very scary.

Speaker 10 It has been a complaint complaint to the administration that they don't have the resources to do mass deportation and confinement right now.

Speaker 10 This bill is meant to give them that money.

Speaker 13 Yes. And look, because yes, this is a very scary expansion of the detention industrial complex.

Speaker 13 The one piece of all of this that I do want to make sure I emphasize is that Trump says he's going after gang bangers and criminals and drug dealers and whatever.

Speaker 13 And those are the people who are getting locked with this image conjured up of like, these are people living in the shadows committing crimes.

Speaker 13 He's actually been trying to deport a lot of people who

Speaker 13 have permission to be here or had, I should say, permission to be here.

Speaker 13 He is basically de-documenting people to create a larger illegal population or unauthorized population by taking away legal status or, you know, various kinds of temporary legal status that people have.

Speaker 13 He has stripped Afghans, Venezuelans, a lot of other populations of the protections that they had against deportation, their ability to be here legally, work legally.

Speaker 13 So he is basically manifesting this

Speaker 13 scary fantasy that he had been portraying. for many years that we are being overrun with people who are not allowed to be here.

Speaker 13 And he's now saying, no, you've now broken the law, but he basically forced them to break the law by taking away their protections.

Speaker 10 I think this gets to this bigger picture we've been tracking a bit during this conversation.

Speaker 10 Budgets are a way

Speaker 10 we make certain goals possible to achieve and other goals impossible to achieve.

Speaker 13 They're statements of our values.

Speaker 10 So tax cuts for people in general, rich people in particular, definitely check.

Speaker 10 Protecting Medicaid and healthcare for

Speaker 10 working class people, which you have heard them talk about. Nope, Medicaid is getting gutted.
This sort of whole, we're a working class coalition now, not so much.

Speaker 10 Keeping prices down between the tariffs and how much more people will pay as we shift health insurance costs onto them and off of the government.

Speaker 10 We're not keeping prices down.

Speaker 10 Cutting budget deficits, which people around Trump have talked a lot about how unsustainable our fiscal picture is. This bill is a disaster.

Speaker 10 But the Stephen Miller

Speaker 10 mass deportation agenda, the immigration side of this administration and its promises, that is really getting served here.

Speaker 10 I mean, the promises we're keeping here are tax cuts tilted towards rich people and building a huge engine, funding a huge machinery of dedocumentation, as you, I think, correctly put it, deportation and detention.

Speaker 10 Those are our values, I guess. That's the budget.

Speaker 13 Those are our values. I wish they were more more clearly communicated to the public.
But again, the fact that this bill has come together so quickly, it's over a thousand pages long,

Speaker 13 should tell you how much they actually want the public to learn about what is in this agenda.

Speaker 10 I think that's a good place to end. Always our final question.
What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

Speaker 13 Okay,

Speaker 13 so I was thinking about the right three to recommend, and I'm going to give you three very different titles.

Speaker 13 Currently, I am reading Ken Rogoff's book, Our Dollar Your Problem, which has like a sweeping history of how the dollar became the global reserve currency and how much of that was about luck and whether that will persist.

Speaker 13 I haven't finished it yet, but I really am really enjoying it right now. My second recommendation would be

Speaker 13 Demon Copperhead by Barbara King Solver, which came out a couple of years ago and I think won the Pulitzer.

Speaker 13 And it's a beautiful novel that's loosely based or sort of an update of David Copperfield that I think, besides being, you know, extraordinarily written, has some tremendous political insights in it as well.

Speaker 13 I don't know if you have you read it.

Speaker 10 I have. And she's been on the show, and it's a great episode if people want to go back and look it up.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 You know, about sort of

Speaker 13 resentment among she doesn't describe them as Trump voters in her book, but some of them could be recognizable as like the Trump in the diner archetype, Trump voter and the diner archetype.

Speaker 13 And then my third recommendation is going to be Shy,

Speaker 13 which is the musical composer Mary Rogers'

Speaker 13 memoir published posthumously with Jesse Green, who is the theater critic here at the Times. And people who know me well know that I'm a big theater nerd and I I love this book.
It's like very dishy.

Speaker 13 There's a lot in it about, you know, mid-20th century gossip from Broadway and how she dated Stephen Sondheim, who recently passed away but was not known for being attracted to women, and how all of that went.

Speaker 13 And it's just a delightful, delightful, gossipy memoir.

Speaker 13 So definitely recommend that.

Speaker 10 Catherine Rampell, thank you very much.

Speaker 13 Thank you.

Speaker 10 This episode of the Ezra Clan Show is produced by Roland Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker.
Mixing by Isaac Jones and Amin Sehouda.

Speaker 10 Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon.

Speaker 10 The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Annie Galvin, Lais Isque, Marina King, Jan Koble, Kristen Lynn, and Jack McCordick.

Speaker 10 Original music by Pat McCusker, audience strategy by Christina Samieluski, and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rosstrasser, and special thanks to Tyson Brody.

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