Raging Moderates: How Rage Bait Runs Our Economy

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Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway.
And I'm Jessica Tarloff. A lot going on, Jeff.

Lot going on. Yeah.
How was your holiday though? It was really nice. It was

Thanksgiving is not big here, given that it's not America, but. But they love it.
Do they? Why do you say that? I don't know.

I always did like a Friendsgiving when I was living in London and didn't go home for it. And I feel like it's one of our best exports as a holiday.

Like the food, and it's so akin to like pub lunch, you know, like Sunday lunch. I don't know.
I felt like

the Brits that I knew, but also we were students. So maybe it's like a different

vibe than the adults. So my son came home from boarding school and brought his two, two of his closest friends.
And that was a highlight because they're really lovely young men.

And I keep reading how essentially once your kids are 15 their peer group is the most important thing to positive outcomes and I was just

these young men were just so lovely and ambitious and nice and polite and it made me

made me feel really good about my son's prospects but I love I love Thanksgiving I love the food I love the idea of a fairly secular holiday where you just give thanks

yeah I'm I'm totally down for Thanksgiving. What did you do? We were home for it, cooked, which was a big success.
My mom did most of the cooking, but I was Sue chefing.

And the girls, you know, like standing up on their little chairs and cutting their vegetables. It's cute.

Really incredible innovations in knives that you can't hurt yourself with for kids.

So shout out to whoever makes those plastic knives. We love you.
The big controversy in my household this morning is that I asked Brian for some dayquil and he gave me Nyquil.

So

if I seem a little off, it's because I'm half asleep because I took Nyquil at 8 o'clock this morning.

And I could have also read the bottle in his defense because he's definitely going to listen to this and be like, why didn't you just read the bottle?

But anyway, I didn't think my husband was trying to make me go to sleep as I was walking out the door to go tape Raging Moderates. Yeah, sleep's been a big issue for me recently.
I did.

I used to be a great sleeper. Now I'm a terrible sleeper.
And you travel too much to be a good sleeper, I feel like. Yeah.
And I did Xanax two nights ago, which gets me to sleep.

But the next day, I'm kind of heavy and even more depressed than usual. And I've heard it's highly addictive, so I don't like to take it more than five, six times a week.

That's not true.

Maybe twice, three times a month when I need the nuclear option. Then I did an Oedible last night, and that worked.
That was just right.

And the night before, I did nothing, and so that wasn't a very good night of sleep. In some,

I think I'm pretty much addicted here. Anyways, let's let's get

let's get to the

news.

Today we're discussing Trump's latest anti-immigrant crackdown, the viral post about the new poverty line, and why Oxford just crowned Ragebait as its word of the year. All right, let's get into it.

After a deadly shooting near the White House, President Trump has launched a sweeping anti-immigrant push, pausing all asylum decisions, freezing visas for Afghans, vowing to block immigration for what he calls third world countries, and even saying he'd absolutely denaturalize certain U.S.

citizens if he could. Now there's a new escalation.
Eight more immigration judges in New York have been fired, part of a nationwide purge that's pushed nearly 100 judges out this year.

Officials say they're targeting lenient judges. This comes as the White House doubles down on crime and chaos rhetoric.

Even though immigrants commit crimes at far lower rates than U.S.-born citizens and deliver major economic gains, meanwhile, the crackdown is causing its own dysfunction. Courts are overwhelmed.

Businesses and immigrant hubs are hurting, and government staffing is in slow-motion collapse.

Jess, can any immigration system function when decisions are driven by political crisis instead of evidence? No.

All right. Is that the whole episode? Yeah, there we go.
We're done. Yeah.
I mean, if you can't beat them in court, fire the court, right?

Like, it's actually, I don't want to say it's kind of genius, but we've been talking about how many rulings have we been going against the Trump administration and most of these folks that they're not in charge of them, right?

The district court judges, judges, et cetera. But these guys, they can fire.

So I assume that this is the ball just getting rolling in this circumstance. And, you know, they're starting with New York City at this level.

You know, it's the 26th federal plaza right by where I am right now. And it houses the New York City headquarters of ICE.

So no coincidence there. And it's deeply concerning because like immigration is a lot bigger than just the bad ombres that you're allegedly checking.

I mean, there are people who are in immigration courts all the time for all sorts of things, very good people, people that you want to be in the U.S., people who, I mean, not that Stephen Miller would ever admit this, but like I'm sure you know dozens of people who are in the midst of some sort of immigration proceeding and everything is getting lumped in together and everyone is in this state of paralysis, very similarly to what's going on with the tariffs, right?

Where people can't plan their businesses in any way, small to large scale. It feels like the country is just going to grind to an absolute halt.

And I guess that'll, they feel like it'll free up more of a lane for them to push through their batch hit policy. But I'm really concerned about this.

And I know a lot of immigration attorneys who can't handle, couldn't handle their caseloads before the Trump administration, but certainly can't do it now.

And they have everyone from folks who've been rounded up like at a Home Depot type of situation to TPS recipients who are suddenly being told, you got to get out of here like tomorrow, to all of the mistakes the administration is making.

You know, they've detained over 170 Americans, put them in ICE lockup, 20 of them over 24 hours before they were even able to talk to a loved one or a lawyer, which is their right.

And then certainly as an American citizen, you have like a student who was going home from college for Thanksgiving who was deported instead of being able to go back to her family in Texas.

A Guatemalan mother was separated from her two-year-old son. She was in the middle of an asylum hearing, wasn't supposed to be deported.

There's a two-year-old just sitting around like, where's my mom?

And they act like either nothing's wrong or it's always just blame Biden. You guys made a ton of mistakes and we're cleaning.
We're the adults in the room.

I hear this like every day on the five and it drives me mad.

mad well if you hadn't done this then we wouldn't have to do that and all you have is a process problem i get that too you just don't like the way that he's doing it

no obviously the way that he's doing it is sloppy and cruel and incompetent but this is more than a process failure they are trying to shake the foundations of american society as the founders saw it.

There's a reason that all of this is enshrined. I'm deeply concerned, Scott.
Deeply concerned. Yeah.

Yeah, this on so many dimensions, this is

upsetting. Let's just go back to the

trying to provide safety or cloud cover for our men and women in uniform. The alleged perpetrator supposedly worked with the CIA in Afghanistan.
The DC shooting, the National Guardsman. Yeah.

Excuse me. Yeah, the DC shooting, the National Guardsman.

And the key to getting people to cooperate with us when we're in foreign territory and combat is the collaborators with us are considered traitors by their,

you know, sometimes by the people that we're fighting against.

And if they don't have confidence that we're going to get them out of that nation and give them an opportunity to start their lives in the U.S., fewer and fewer people are going to cooperate with our men and women in uniform in combat situations, and more of our men and women in combat will die and have a more difficult time accomplishing their mission.

So,

you know, immediately saying, okay, no more, no more is sort of, well, it's just a blunt instrument that makes no sense and going to a much broader discussion around immigration. Just some facts here.

36% of agricultural workers are undocumented workers, 27% of ground maintenance workers, a quarter of all food service workers, about 20% of construction workers.

Folks, if you want to see inflation start to tick back up to 4%,

we're on our way because these individuals are willing to work at a lower rate and tax our services to a lesser extent than native-born Americans.

And the fact that our immigration is just going to come to a screeching halt, it's just, again, it feels to me like the Trump administration said to ChatGPT, how can I most elegantly, in line with MAGA ultra-conservative doctrine, reduce the economic growth and the prosperity of America over over the next two, five, ten years and make it very difficult to repair, make it such that it would take generations to repair it.

And it also continues this arc where the Overton window keeps getting broader and broader, where the general cadence or algorithm of politics in the United States and the fulcrum between where the Democratic and Republican ideology collides and responds to each other is Democrats go fucking insane.

I know, raise your right hand and say the word asylum and we'll let you in. And a quarter of a million people do that in one month.

And then the Trump administration comes in and says, I know, let's stop all immigration and start demonizing them and separating Americans who are brown from their two-year-olds.

It's like, you know, just, I go back to that same metaphor, adage that you can't see a pendulum at the middle.

But now the pendulum, it appears it's swinging so violently between three and nine. It's not swinging between four and six.
It's swinging between three and nine.

And the numbers between three and nine no longer exist. Oh, we're Democrats.
Well, we're fucking insane. We'll let a transgender swimmer who's 6'5 show up to an NCT to a woman's meet.

And then the Republicans come in and start taking, removing the names of gay servicemen who serve their country honorably off of ships to say fuck you to the LGBT community.

And this is the swing back in immigration. And it's going to have huge negative impact on our economy.

Definitely going to have a huge impact on the economy and also any semblance of a chance of having like a normal immigration policy going forward. Like I don't think that it's

crazy based on what happened for DHS Secretary Christy Noam to say that we need to change our vetting processes. I mean, we know that a bunch of Afghanis got in in 2021 in a hurried process.

They were vetted, right? Most of them went through Qatar. I totally get all of that, but I don't see anyone who has ever defended the way that we actually left Afghanistan, right?

That image will be seared into our memories forever of people chasing after the American plane, right?

People who were promised safe harbor, a new life in America, who helped us for decades during this veritable occupation that we left to either die or we hurried them through this process.

So, Chris, you know, I'm saying that. I think that Democrats should sign on to that, frankly, and just put yourself on the register of being a sane person after a National Guardswoman was murdered.

And hopefully, the second one survives, but he's still in critical condition. I think that that's a normal reaction.

But because of the pendulum between three and nine, we've now gotten to talking about denaturalizing American citizens. We already have a veritable travel ban, what is it on 19 countries?

And the number is going to increase.

When you leave it up to this administration to decide what the rules are and to their own discretion of, you know, what constitutes someone whose values don't jibe with American values, Stephen Miller thinks that's probably me, for God's sake.

right let alone someone who's coming here from a majority muslim country no it's not true because you're white i i just don't. I am.
I think I'm not. But I'm Jew white, which is not great.

I think a lot of this comes down to,

I mean,

yes, there is overt racism in this book. Why can't we get people from Switzerland and Denmark? I'm like, let me think.
What is it about the Swiss and the Danish? South Africans.

It's South African whites. That was the one.
The one

exception to the rule. The asylum, and we're offering refuge and safe harbor to victims, Afrikaners, who are potentially subject to the genocide against white Afrikaners in South Africa.

I'm like, that's who we're trying to protect. That's who we find.
That's who Lady Liberty says. Bring me your tired.
You know, it is so insane. But I just want to get back to the economics of this.

Immigration contributes about $3.3 trillion to the U.S. economy annually, as much as 17% of our GDP.

And the mass deportation efforts, as outlined by the administration, could lead to a loss of 4% to 7% of GDP.

We are seeing a massive decline in the number of kids applying to U.S. colleges because the U.S.
does a small number of things really well.

We make the best weapons, the best technology, the best hardware, software, best media, and we have the best universities in the world. And the ultimate luxury item isn't NRMS scarf or a Ferrari.

It's to send your kid to an elite university. And when a kid comes in from El Salvador or Qatar to NYU, we charge that kid about $280,000, plus they spend another probably $300,000 or $400,000.

Basically, we get a half a million dollars in economic growth from this kid. And by the way, that $248,000 or $280,000 in tuition is like 95 points of gross margin.

I mean, these are the most this is one of the most profitable exports in history is U.S. education in terms of gross margin.
And we're basically saying, no, apply to the Boccone, go to St.

Andrews, maybe consider

a university in Singapore. And I hear it, the kids here, my 18-year-olds' friends, very few of them are applying to schools in the U.S.

And

this is a chill. So we're basically saying, how do we reduce the prosperity and the money that funds a lot of research? Are universities bloated? Should they be letting in more domestic students?

Yes, but it's not by kicking it's not by kicking international students out. It's by expanding their freshman class size.

But this is this anti-immigrant fervor, this again, more performative masculinity, is just going to do, quite frankly, it's not going to address the problem.

I don't think people have a birthright to come to America.

I do think we should have an evaluation system up and down the food chain, whether it's people to help harvest our crops, health care workers, services workers, or people who are going to start tech companies.

But we should be able to figure out a thoughtful way of not only evaluating people who are coming in, but also getting rid of the people who are here.

And instead of putting your separating kids from their daughters, you go to a car wash with a clipboard and you say, here are all the Social Security payments and people with phones here.

I need proof of their citizenship or I'm going to start finding the car wash $10,000 a day.

And then before you know it, when the demand dries up or the supply of jobs dries up, you're going to see people self-deport as they were doing under Obama and Biden. Well, they have been.

I mean, according to DHS records, and I get it, these are actually the only numbers the administration is happy to put out since we don't have a BLS and we can't get a jobs report or anything.

But they say that 1.6 million have self-deported at this point and that they've rounded up about 500,000, I think, at this point, which is less than under the Biden administration, the 500K in terms of who ICE or CPB has detained and then gotten removal orders for.

But, you know,

you've been saying,

make it hard for the businesses to employ these people since we started the podcast.

I'm sure you said it to someone before me, which I'm not going to take personal offense to, but the administration doesn't want to because Democrats and Republicans alike like cheap, illegal labor that the country runs because of it.

So they're not serious about it. And I just,

I know I'm always asking too much of this administration, but just have separate conversations for different types of migrants, for God's sake.

Like they just conflate all of these categories together.

So we think that a BU student who writes an op-ed that you don't like is the same level of risk as the one of 190,000 Afghan refugees who we took in after they helped us and were vetted through that CIA back unit that he was a part of and goes and kills an American service member.

And so it just becomes immigration.

And then that's also why they continue to feel emboldened to carry it on, because there are some people, I mean, more support for immigration policy than like what he's doing for the economy, for instance.

And then we end up having to have this discussion every single week with a new outrage.

And it goes back to the same central problem, which is we didn't have a good policy under the Biden administration, at least for the first three years.

And so they're arguing, well, this is what you get for what you did to us. And we'll have to clean up the pieces when hopefully somebody else gets into office.

Okay, let's take a quick break. Stay with us.

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Welcome back. A Wall Street Strategist set off a firestorm online with a viral Substack post claiming the U.S.
poverty line, officially $32,000 for a family of four, is dramatically out of date.

Michael Green argues that with the real costs of housing, health care, child care, transportation, and other essentials, a family actually needs around $140,000 a year just to participate fully in the economy.

Greene calls it the valley of death.

Families who earn too much to qualify for aid, but not enough to comfortably cover modern expenses, caught in a squeeze that fuels frustration, delayed household formation and political rage.

Critics call his math absurd, saying he's conflating middle-class struggles with poverty. Supporters say he's highlighting a deeper issue.

The official poverty line hasn't caught up to the real cost of living in America.

Whether or not $140,000 is the new poverty line, Green's post has sparked a national conversation about what it really takes to raise a family today and who's getting left behind.

Jess, first off, what did you think of this post? And if the federal poverty line is outdated, how should we redefine it to reflect the modern cost of living?

And how would that change eligibility for government aid? I loved this post. I thought it was one of the more interesting things that I've read on Substack.

And I am a big consumer of many people's Substacks. Mad at you, Ryan Lizza, for making you subscribe.

But it feels like there's a lot of churn out there, but not a lot of thoughtful conversations that are coming from this.

And $140,000 is not a poverty line, but it has sparked so many important conversations that I certainly feel like it's one of the best posts that I've consumed in the last like, you know, six to 12 months, let's say, because it connects to so many of the conversations that we're having all the time about cost of living.

I mean, every election that we've had in the last few years has been an affordability election and centered around this issue that it's not just poor people that are concerned about getting by.

It's about people who should be middle class and are still struggling. And I wondered, I mean, you're the branding expert.

So I don't think that my term is necessarily the right one, but I feel like there needs to be a category like we could call it poverty plus

for people who you're not talking about, you know, need to be on government aid full full stop, but for people that are somewhere in that valley of death, right? Heading, you know, between

60,000 and 140,000, where we need real revitalization of the American dream and American promise to ensure that these people who are working really damn hard can have a decent quality of life, right?

Like fixing our health care system, building a ton of affordable housing, you know, a better better education system.

Linda McMahon's not going to be helping us with that, but child care, the centerpiece of it, you know, New Mexico is rolling out their universal child care policy this month.

So 11% of your spending now is on child care. I think it's probably even higher for me, but on average in New Mexico, that's what it is.
And it used to be that childcare was no expense.

Like Brian, my husband, even grew up, he never had babysitters. He had cousins, right?

Like people, if his parents want to go out to dinner, a family member would come over and help out moms didn't used to work or grandma would take care of you and so when you're talking about a poverty line from 1963 of course of course that formula doesn't make any sense for how life looks today so speaking of child care when i was after my parents split i was eight and my mom

amongst the I was trying to find she worked full time I was eight years old came home lashkey kid so she had someone look after me me after I got home, and it lasted about six months.

And the first woman was this Jesus freak who every time I said the word God would make me sit in the corner, stand in the corner with my arms out like Jesus on the cross for a half an hour.

That feels like child abuse. Yeah, pretty much.

And then the second woman, the thing I remember about the second woman, she was actually kind, but the thing I remember about her was, you know, literally like meth or hysteria would come over the entire community when we'd hear the sound of the ice cream truck pulling up.

And she'd line up her two sons and me, and she'd give her two sons 25 cents and she'd give me 15 cents

to go out to the ice cream truck. Anyways, I said.
It still feels a little abusive.

Anyways, I said to my mom, I said, she was spending like, I don't know,

five or seven dollars a week on child care. And I said, just give it to me.
I'm good. I can handle this.

And relating it back to the other side of the spectrum that kind of ties in immigration and no one's going to feel sorry for families in Manhattan.

I have several friends who have full-time childcare, not even live-in, but full-time childcare. Do you know what full-time,

and this is a decent sample set, full-time child care? And you may know this. Well, because I pay it.
Well, do you have well, you give me your number. I don't think I can actually even admit mine.

All right, well, this is a number I've heard. This is from four different couples.

Full-time, documented childcare, like a nanny, shows up at eight in the morning on the books, shows up at 8 in the morning and leaves at 5 or 6 or gets dinner ready and leaves, right?

Documented full-time nanny, whatever you want to call her, that the going rate is $150,000 a year now. Yeah.

I think that's probably, that's probably right.

I mean, I think most people still don't have, are not on the books, have documented care.

And frankly, since Donald Trump came back into office, this has been a big issue because a lot of people who had undocumented care got concerned that their kids were going to be swept up in an ice raid with their nannies.

But yeah, $150,000 doesn't sound insane to me. So let's,

the, the fly in the ointment here is the following, and that is the poverty line or how they calculate the poverty line and what's powerful about this article.

And $140,000, let's be honest, that's ridiculous. That is not the poverty line.

But

I appreciate that the author was trying to make a dramatic point here, and his point is really valid because the poverty line used to be determined by a multiple of what people spend on food.

But as a ratio of your total expenditures, food has gone way down. Food, the cost of food used to be a third of your income.
Now it's 13%. That's good news.
Food prices have dramatically gotten less

expensive.

But when you assume the poverty line is three times food prices, which in relation to everything else have dramatically decreased, you end up with a poverty line that is not accurate, that's not, in fact, reflect what a family needs to survive.

So, for example, housing, transportation, insurance, healthcare, entertainment, all those things, I think with the exception of entertainment, have gone way up in cost.

So, this does not reflect accurately the cost of what it is to raise a family.

The more accurate thing to say is: okay, if you're going to use food as a metric, then let's take the fact that food has declined, gone from a third to 13 percent, and take the amount you're spending on basic food up by 7.7%, a multiple of 7.7 versus 3, and you'd end up with a poverty line at $82,000.

I think that seems realistic. And I like that number because in my view, I don't like the idea of universal basic income.
What I like the idea of, though, is that universal child care, Pell Grants,

national...

national or nationalized or socialized medicine that effectively says if you're making 50 or 60 grand as a household, we can get you to 80 80 with services, government services that create a certain baseline, create scale, not just handouts,

but child care when it's done, when it's institutionalized across a broader scale, it gets more efficient, it gets more affordable, the care goes up.

It's one of those things that the government actually does fairly well and get people to that.

I like that as a bogey.

You need to work $25 an hour minimum wage, work 2,000 hours, one person or two people, you get above the poverty line, or we figure out a series of programs that raise you up, right?

So I think this is a really important conversation. He's made a really dramatic point.
It's gotten

a ton of traction, but what it really says is we need to update the calculation and the inputs that go into quote unquote the poverty line. Yeah,

I would be enthusiastic about that. I'm

not sure. I mean, adding

more to the government ledger concerns me. Like moving to that versus all the kinds of investments that we can make in American communities as like the first step in it feels better to be.

Because I mean, we were talking about this with the SNAP benefits, for instance, that like, A, the Trump administration shouldn't be cutting them, but also it feels terrible that we have, you know, one in eight Americans that are receiving SNAP benefits.

I think that's what the number was.

So, you know, embracing investment in American society feels like the right answer to this. And, you know, like FDR style, right? A rejuvenation of society.

And this is a little bit like, I don't know if you've seen that Hakeem Jeffries is now using this strong floor, no ceiling as the kind of motto for the Democratic Party

from a book, Oliver B. Libby, who wrote it.

But that to me, I think, is a really good summation of the way that Democrats see how American society should function, that you have this strong floor, right?

And that the government will be there for you if you need help from the government.

But that, you know, if you asked two years ago, the Democrats would have said no ceiling, they would have all of these stipulations.

Well, if you get too rich, we're going to have a ceiling on you, right?

Or, you know, we think everyone should be happy with just a middle-class lifestyle, but we decide that your middle-class lifestyle is at like $100,000.

Now we're like, you earn as much as society will allow you to legally earn. And we're going to be supportive and proud of you for doing that.
And we want to make it easier, right?

We want to cut red tape. We want to make sure that your businesses can thrive.
And so I'm, I'm pretty excited about that. And I feel like it jives really nicely with this.

post and the theory behind how we need to reevaluate what, you know, being poor is in this country, what being middle class is in, is in this country, and how government can effectively work to push people forward into the next bracket.

Because we all want to move up no matter how much you have, everyone is always striving for more. Yeah, I'm mixed on this because it comes down to the mechanisms for how we implement it.

Because I worry that Democrats are fond of big social programs that create a very

inefficient infrastructure middleman that never goes away. And that,

in my view,

there's been a ton of studies done on foreign aid.

And what they came back with is foreign aid has been used as an excuse to create these giant infrastructure and domestic jobs of government bureaucrats that are expensive and a lot of the money or a small amount of the money actually ends up in the hands of the people in a foreign nation that actually need it.

And in my view, a lot of this should be just putting more money in the pockets of people who need it. And I go to the same, you know, I go to the same talk track.

$25 an hour federally mandated minimum wage, which is where it would be if minimum wage had kept pace with inflation and productivity. Would McDonald's and Walmart's stock go down?

Yeah, and it'd be worth it. And you'd have a greater multiplier effect.
I don't like the idea of more and more programs, which never seem to go away, which are inefficiently delivered oftentimes.

So it's all kind of, it's all like the proof is in the pudding, if you will. And I like that as a as a call sign, you know, solid floor, unlimited upside.

But the reality is, unless you start taxing people who make, unless you have an AMT,

good taxes are the least taxing possible. And we've got to pay for this quote-unquote solid floor, if you will, or

not solid floor. What's the term? Strong floor.
What's that? Strong floor. Strong floor.
I would say strong net. But

in America, we've decided that it sucks to be poor, and that does create a series of incentives.

I hate to say it, but having a, you know, there should be basic human dignity, health care. No one should starve.
Kids we should make sure have.

you know, are not food insecure. But we have decided in America, and I think it's the right decision, we have decided to let there be winners and losers.
That's the bottom line.

And if you look at some of our benefits, they are, a lot of people would argue, create the wrong incentive system. So the key always comes out, okay, how are we going to pay for this stuff?

I love the idea of a great society. And the tax revenue we'd need that would be the least taxing, in my opinion, are the following two things.

One, an alternative minimum tax to make over a million dollars federal income tax of 37%, which is supposedly the highest rate right now.

But the bottom line is the very wealthy don't pay these rates because of the 4,000 pages of loopholes in the tax code.

And then also, I think the really big opportunity that people are talking about that would impact very few Americans and not impact their material or psychological well-being is to take the

ceiling on the exemption or take the state exemption down from 30 million to 1 million. Your kid getting $4 million instead of $6 million isn't going to make you or them any less happy.

And we're about to see $120 trillion transferred over the next, I think, 20 or 30 years in inherited wealth. But what I don't like about Democrats is this rhetorical flourish without saying, okay,

this is exactly how we're going to pay for it. Let's have an adult conversation.
And also recognize we need to means test and raise the age on certain entitlements. It's just too fucking expensive.

We can't afford to keep letting old people vote themselves more money. So again, I like the tagline.
I want to see some meat around it.

And I think the American public is ready for an adult conversation to come from the left, if you will. Yeah, I agree.
I saw Bernie Sanders posted about medical debt.

You know, it's obviously a big Medicare for all person,

but talking about the number of people who go bankrupt a year due to medical debt, you know, it's zero everywhere else in the world, 530,000 Americans per year.

And that was a big part of the new poverty line discussion, obviously the healthcare costs.

What you said about an AMT and talking about transfers of wealth, I also don't understand why some of these billionaires, especially the ones who take the giving pledge,

like

don't just wipe out people's medical debt or things like that. It always seems strange to me.
Like if I got into that position, I feel like I would want to pick like the one thing, right?

Like, like malaria, right? It's just like, we're just going to get rid of malaria. And medical debt seems like a good one.

I don't know exactly how it would work with the homelessness problem, but like there are all of these things where it feels like with that awesome amount of money that you could just say, you know what, tomorrow everyone who has medical debt is going to wake up without it.

The innovation around that is that a lot of bad medical debt trades at 10 or 15 cents on the dollar. And so what you could do is you could go out, and some people have done this.

You can go out and buy $10 million of medical debt.

for a million or a million and a half dollars because the hospital system or whoever's trying to collect the debt thinks we're never going to get this. But look, this is,

again, I'm torn on this. I believe we need to move forward and say from this point forward, we're going to lower Medicare eligibility by two years, a year for 10 years.

But the problem with canceling student loan debt and medical debt, and I do think we should figure out ways for people to get out from under.

Don't you think student loan debt and medical debt are very different, though? Student loan debt was a choice that a lot of people made. And I was for some alleviation.

I was at the kind of $50,000 cap, which I think is what Clyburn was talking about initially, saying you can't walk in and like wave a wand and take away half a million dollars of student loan debt for people.

But $50,000 feels like a real amount of money that should give you relief, but that also you're taking responsibility for the fact that you signed up for this.

And I know there are predatory loans and all of that. But medical debt, in majority of cases, is beyond people's control.
Aaron Powell, I think that's a fair point. This is my fear.

The problem is a moral hazard, and that is, okay, if I take on medical debt, at some point it might be purchased by a rich person or the government, and so I'm not going to be a consumer and shop around for MRIs.

One of the reasons that healthcare costs have escalated are now twice as much per capita as they are in other nations is we have no consumer scrutiny.

I go to the doctor, I don't ask what it's costing. I don't ask for the generic.
I don't shop around for who can do a mammogram for less money. There's absolutely no consumer scrutiny of this.

And I worry about debt forgiveness to a certain extent because I think it creates a moral hazard where kids or people who are spending money perhaps and not putting money into their healthcare savings account believe that at some point these debts aren't real and they don't provide the consumer scrutiny around am I really going to get a good job borrowing $150,000 to get a philosophy degree from a tier two university?

I think that we need consumer scrutiny. Should I be putting aside more money for my health care costs or shopping around for where I can get, like I said, these drugs for less money or

I don't even care because I think someone else is going to bail me out. And I know that sounds very unfeeling,

but

your point is the right one.

If I had a 17-year-old daughter who is in screaming pain and needed a root canal, you'd take her to get the root canal regardless of what it costs, even if it means going into debt.

And I feel for that family.

But I really do worry about these bailouts that they create a certain level of moral hazard and a lack of consumer scrutiny that ultimately is the ultimate vehicle for bringing down costs and keeping them in line.

Yeah, I mean, you're, you're probably right. I just, you know, I have fantasies, I guess, about what I would do if I were Bill Gates.

Yeah, if I, if I were Bill Gates. And Bill Gates does a tremendous amount of good for the world, I'm not impugning his philanthropic reputation in any way.

Though Melinda Gates and Mackenzie Scott, I feel like are the real heroes in all of this. But anyway, it was just a fantasy about

what is possible with the level of wealth that's circulating throughout society. I love it.

And again, the innovation there, as long as you didn't

let the other side of the trade know that you were deep pocketed, is go find the debt that's trading at the lowest price and try and clean it up.

And then those people get a message saying that they no longer,

I love that idea.

I just, I, I think that the Democrats have a tendency to talk about the answer is to throw money, let people off the hook without recognizing, okay, what does it mean when you tell students that they, if they take out debt irresponsibly, there's a good chance it'll get paid off.

I don't know

if we end up in an even worse place. Anyways, okay, let's take a quick break.
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Welcome back. Before we go, Oxford just handed us the most on-brand word of the year imaginable.
Ragebait.

The dictionary is basically confirming what everyone else felt in 2025 or what we already knew. The internet now runs on engineered outrage.

Usage of the term tripled as everyone from Jennifer Lawrence to political influencers admitted they're beefing with strangers online just for the hit.

And Oxford's more wholesome finalists, Biohack Aura Farming, never stood a chance. Ragebait is the vibe of 2025, a digital culture that knows it's being emotionally gamed and still can't look away.

Pair it with last year's winner, Brain Rot, and you get the full cycle. The outrage keeps us scrolling and the the scrolling fries our brains.

Oxford says the point is to get us to reflect on who we are right now.

But on this show, we'd argue that there's another kind of rage we're talking about, the frustration coming from the majority of Americans who simply want politicians to deliver consensus solutions, not algorithm-optimized drama.

Jess, your thoughts on rage baiting?

Well, I mean, we have a good name for our podcast, right? Rage is everywhere.

Not always in

the best light necessarily. But I do feel good about the title of the podcast, to say the least.
This does feel like a theme, certainly, of the last year, but I think the last several years.

And we're all aware of what's happening to our brains, right? We've read The Anxious Generation. We talk about our aspirational detox habits and then do nothing about the way that we consume content.

And we also throw up these ridiculous double standards or these high standards that can't be met.

And we talk about this, how we're like, you know, desperate for consensus building politicians that like have a plan, right? And that would indicate that this is a bit of a policy wonk type of person.

But then we also want to have you be someone that's going to break through on social media all the time. And those two things don't necessarily go together, right?

I mean, I'm talking about the guy that, along with my dad, were Michael Bennett's bigger supporters to be president in 2020. So, you know, we have unfair expectations, certainly for how

politicians should behave in this kind of like rage bait universe. But I wish, and I was going back to like wipe out the medical debt.

I wish that like someone could come down and stop it all, could like stop everything that's happening on my phone. Cause I feel sick in the head.
I say this all the time to Brian.

Like I feel like I'm just getting dumber, that I'm speaking more often than not not in tweets rather than full sentences that my PhD supervisor would be proud of. And that's disturbing me.

My children know how important my phone is to me. Like Cleo, my older daughter, will like run into a room and be like, mama, you forgot your phone.
Cause she knows

that I can't live without it, that it's like an appendage to my body.

I'm scared about the damage that I'm doing to them psychologically that way.

And also what with our reliance on tech and being online all the time and how much they're going to have to use it in schools, like they're going to turn into as a result.

So I think it was a very apt word of the year. Yeah,

it's essentially rage baiting as a function of our economy.

And that is from 1945 to the introduction of Google, we connected intangible associations to unearned margin and you use this incredibly efficient vehicle called broadcast advertising, where two-thirds of America were spending five hours in front of one of three channels to instill into a mediocre product these amazing associations, be feel American, grace, toughness, but more than anything, it was sex, right?

That gave us Baywatch and iDream of Genie

and, you know, the AT, whatever it is.

And then the introduction of Google found that, no, the ultimate means of keeping people glued to their phones so we can sell them more advertising and create the most profitable companies in history is rage.

And I really do think we're going to regret. And what you said is really powerful.
You become where you spend your time.

I recognized about five or seven years ago that I was saying things that were confrontational and making a cartoon of people's comments to weigh in with a one-two punch such that I could get a lot of likes because the algorithm loves that.

And the algorithm was shaping my views. And I decided that's it.

I'm no longer going to be shaped by an algorithm sponsored by some weird little man called Mark Zuckerberg based on an economic model fashioned by a woman who claims to give a flying fuck about gender and then creates a business model that convinces teens to start self-cutting.

And I will put out content that I know is going to get just, I'm just going to get pelted in the comments. I'm like, don't let the algorithms shape you.

And you can just see, it teaches you to be an asshole.

If you say, oh, that's a thoughtful comment, but if you lead with something incendiary, the algorithms love it because they know it'll inspire a bunch of comments and people lining up to watch this, you know, this mixed martial arts fight between people.

And it creates a level of hostility and people feel worse and worse about their fellow Americans to the point where we now believe that our enemy is the guy down the street, not Russians pouring over the border in Ukraine or the CCP or income inequality or climate change.

And it happened to me this weekend. I'm not immune to it.
This, a bunch of people have been saying that my book is a pipeline to red pill. And I'm like, I'm trying to be an off-ramp for red pill.

And the language they use is so incendiary. Like, here's another man using marginalized communities to try and get young men laid.
And it's like, where the fuck did I say that? And I start.

typing and thinking I'm going to respond. And I'm like, no, I'll take the hit.

I don't mind, or I do mind, I am not going to engage in fucking Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg's plot to get me hating everybody and start a fight.

It's as if, remember when you were in high school and, or not high school, elementary school, there was probably like anti-bullying shit by the time you got to school, but when I was in school,

it felt like every day, but once, twice a week, kids would start having words. And immediately everyone would surround them and start screaming, fight, fight, fight.
That's what they wanted.

They wanted to fight. Even if you said, hey, Jim, it's my turn to tetherball.
Oh, wait, fight, fight, fight.

Our entire economy is now based on 10 companies trying to get everybody to fight,

trying to get you to weigh in and be angry and use incendiary language and think that the other side is the enemy and show up and be. And I found it happening to me.

And then again, I fall victim to it this weekend. Took me out of my headspace, took me away from my family because the

incentives are for people not to have a thoughtful conversation, not to say, this is where

a book gets it right or it gets it wrong, but to accuse you of being a misogynist. Like, use the word misogynist.
Don't say your thinking's outdated, which it might be. Call them a misogynist.

And then other people weigh in and say, no, this person's not a misogynist. And it just starts.
And every comment is another Nissan ad and is another

more shareholder value. The algorithms at the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet and TikTok have done so much damage to Americans' well-being and their anxiety.
If you wanted to,

I've gotten a lot of pushback from therapists who are like, young men, the answer isn't just economic viability or finding a relationship. It's they need to work on themselves.

And I believe the biggest, and I want to be clear, I think therapy is a wonderful thing for a lot of people, especially people with a history of mental illness or people who have access to therapy.

It's helped a lot of people I know. But there are only three therapists for every 100,000 people in America.

We just can't, you know, we could triple the number of therapists and there's still not enough therapy out there for the people who could probably benefit from it.

I think the biggest therapy bomb in history would be raising minimum wage to $25 an hour, 8 million homes in 10 years, and absolutely regulating big tech. I'm not talking about censorship.

I'm talking about if you spread misinformation that results in harm and you knew it was misinformation, you were subject to the same liability laws as every other media company.

Rage has become, we have connected rage to our entire economy. That is what is fueling our economy right now.

And that is rage and sequestering young people from the rest of their life off of a screen. And I don't know if you're subject to this.

Maybe I'm just played with the wrong toys when I was a kid or I'm insecure or too ego-driven.

I can't help

but just spend too much fucking time on social media as I watch these people make a cartoon of my comments or my work, and it really upsets me. And it shouldn't.

And I realize what's going on here, and I want to respond, and I want to weigh in, and I want to get into it, and I don't.

And unfortunately, I'm not sure that's the right thing to do because when you just let it hang out there, you're leaving a false narrative. But this is damaging the mental health of America.

It creates people feel worse about their neighbors, worse about America. Only one in 10 people under the age of 25 feel good about America.
It's one in two people my age.

Some of that is because I keep taking money from young people vis-a-vis my land of the dead elected officials. But I think a lot of it is just the amount of time you spend online.

Anyways, do you have trouble modulating

your rage? And do you find it impacts your mental health?

I can't imagine how many weird, gross, aggressive comments you get online. Yeah,

I'm not a fan favorite in certain circles.

In other circles, I am a fan favorite, and it's nice to take a trip through there every once in a while. But I really struggle with that as well.
And I thought about that a lot.

for my book and how to process criticism and how to think about criticism from people who you're related to and care about, people who you respect versus

people who, frankly, you disrespect, right?

You have absolutely no respect for because it's all meaningful, especially if those people have a platform, not just in the fact that it can spread like wildfire all over social media, but because.

Folks with a big platform are the ones that are driving American society, right?

They're getting hired into the biggest jobs you can have from the Secretary of War to the heads of these media companies.

Like everyone needs content creators and influencers, whatever you want to call them, you know, on the landing page of their organization, because if they're going to get investment, people are looking for it, right?

You need folks that can show up and do panels for you and be speakers at these masters of the universe conferences that you're always going to. And it's a vicious cycle that keeps feeding it.

And I really struggle with it. And I wish that I was more secure and self-confident that I could say that I, you know, I don't give a fuck and I just move on, but I don't.

I doom scroll through negative Jessica Charlove commentary all the time. And even the nice comments.
They know it. What? They know it.
Yeah. Oh, of course they know.
Well, I also, I talk about it.

It's a threat. It's a threat.
And we've been taught for thousands of years that you need to understand the threat or you're putting yourself in more danger.

And the evidence, the connection, the profit connection is so dramatic and there's so much data. A study of 47 U.S.
publications showed that U.S.

media headlines denoting anger increased 104% from 2000 to 2019. So anger in our headlines has doubled in the last 20 years.

Headlines denoting fear, sadness, and disgust increased 150, 54, and 29% respectively. Why is this happening? Mark Zuckerberg gets richer and richer with rage.

An analysis of 105,000 different variations of news headlines found that for a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by more than two percentage points.

And the best way to go viral, everyone wants to go viral, is to shit talk the other team.

A 2021 study of Twitter and Facebook posts found that the out-group language, especially if it was derogatory, expressed animosity, was the strongest predictor of social media engagement.

We have connected the prosperity of the companies with the most godlike technology to rage. What could go wrong?

Nothing. But, you know, we're stuck in this doom loop too, because

most of the time, 99% of the time, I feel like we're having thoughtful conversations right here on this pod. And we're building a YouTube channel.

And how you get the algorithm to like you on YouTube is to have outrageous headlines for your videos.

And I've even seen sometimes like in the comments where people are like, oh, I, you know, I thought that this this was spicy.

And it's just the two of you like, you know, talking about AMTs or whatever. And I'm just like, yeah,

we're a couple of dorks, right? That have raging moments for sure.

But, you know, you can't, you can't get into the conversation without the algorithm giving you an invitation. And the algorithm only gives you an invitation if you sound like you're a fucking lunatic.

And

I hate it and also don't know how to quit it.

And it's very frustrating and it's certainly a doom spiral for our politics because we're not going to get to the right person necessarily to lead us if this is the only way that we have to kind of get a message out there to people, right?

To push Pat Ryan into your household. Pat Ryan has got to throw some F-bombs around, which is not his usual nature, you know, to register

on the algorithm. algorithm, and it's very frustrating.
And our producers do their best. Yeah,

you got to look at it, I feel like a great business school course, or maybe incorporated into my favorite idea of an adulting course in the senior year of high school, would be incentives, understanding incentives and how behavior is a function of incentives.

All right. Before we go, we're working on an end-of-year-mailbag episode to answer some of your burning questions on all things politics.

Send us a 15-second voice recording to ragingmoderates at propjectmedia.com, and we might include yours. That's all for this episode.
Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates.

Have a good week, Jess. You too.
See you later.

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