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Bobby Jindal, former governor of Louisiana, stops by to talk to the full crew about How Trump Wins the Populist Patriots and how that particular group has been ill served by Democrats and Republicans alike and what Republicans can do to win their support. The Jobs Report is out with “unexpectedly high” numbers: 266,000 new non-farm jobs. Remember when the reports were always “unexpectedly low” under Obama? Rob attempts to explain why Obama is responsible for Trump’s great economy even though he hedges his bets by saying presidents can’t control the economy. Then John Yoo, detainee at UC Berkeley, joins the podcast, again, to talk impeachment. John has the most beautiful suggestion for what Trump should do, should there be an impeachment trial in the Senate. You’ll want to hear this one because it’s a winner. Big league. And if you disagree, let us know in the comments.
Finally, congratulations to @garymcvey for winning the prestigious Lileks Post of the Week competition for his post, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: This Never Happened to the Other Fellow. We only hand out 52 of these per year, folks.
Music from this week’s episode: Kokomo by The Beach Boys, because our regular producer, @blueyeti, is vacationing in the Bahamas. Our fill-in producer, @max, is currently looking out the window of his office at an actual snow storm in New Hampshire.
Have a great weekend!
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Can’t really see it in the picture but it is snowing pretty hard.
Wow. You’re not in Texas, Dorothy. You’re definitely not in Texas. :)
Trump also had a major deregulation push, and businesses aren’t worried that he is going to sink them with new regulations.
Of course Obama gets some credit for the current employment boom, etc.
If Obama hadn’t made things so bad, Trump couldn’t have made them so much better!
Not all deficits are equal. A Republican-administration deficit to win a war, or to actually DO things that Democrats mostly just talk about such as long-term infrastructure, is not the same as a Democrat-administration deficit just for current-year spending such as welfare, food stamps, etc. Or even the Democrat idea of “infrastructure” which usually ends up just being bribes to unions, maybe a few make-work “projects” that don’t really do anything…
at least it’s not sunday lol
BINGO
deficits and debt don’t matter.
what matters is total government spending.
these so called fiscal conservatives pay too much attention to the deficit.
deficits and debt are accounting artifacts.
it’s better to have a deficit with a 500 billion dollar budget than a surplus with a 1 trillion dollar budget.
remember, the real tax is what government spends, not what it collects.
Barry “i have a shady past” Obama hates capitalism and the US constitution.
He does not believe in private property rights and voluntary cooperation.
He has never held a job in the private sector.
community organizers don’t create jobs.
The other thing is, you have to look at what the Fed is doing. During the late 90s NASDAQ bubble we ran surplus is only because Greenspan was goosing the economy. They got rid of the 30 year T-bond. That’s the most extreme example. You have to incorporate that.
The neat thing is we have so much debt now, when interest rates go up the whole government goes broke when the 10 year bond hits 4%.
Clinton reduced the capital gains tax.
Bull market during the 1990s led to higher than expected taxes collected from capital gains.
A surplus occurs when the money comes in faster than congress can spend it.
From 1995 to 2000 we had divided government (newt vs. bill).
as a result no large spending bills were passed and in 1997 newt and bill agreed to cut capital gains tax rate.
Greenspan told treasury department lower the deficit and we will lower interest rates.
We never ran a surplus in the 90s. The total year-over-year debt increased every year (although it came very close one year).
The last time the debt went down year-over-year was 1957.
https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt.htm
Well they babble about something during the Clinton administration that I think was really the result of Greenspan going nuts.
I cant believe you had international Superstar John Yoo on and didnt ask him about his appearance in the movie the Report.
Where the actor playing him all but twirls his mustache in arch villainy.
I don’t know if it’s just his natural voice, or the mic he uses or EQ settings or what. But any time John Yoo is on any podcast, I have to turn the treble WAY down. Or every piece of glass I have would shatter. And even then it’s still risky.
Disagree. He believes in his right to property.
I’ve heard two serious discussions about how good the internal dynamics of these employment numbers are. There’s been nothing like it in a long time. Part of it is people just need the dollar, and we have the best economy on the planet, so it feeds back on itself.
Entrepreneurs are basically the only thing that improve the economy. The other thing you need is human capital development. Procreating taxpayers / FICA slaves. Big families + good parents + efficacious education that is fairly priced.
American workers can’t compete against extremely poor, desperate people that don’t need as much money for their output. I keep saying this, but we are doing every single thing wrong in the face of automation and globalized labor markets opening up. The only way this is going to be fair is if everything is going down in price all the time.Better living through purchasing power. Prior to the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening up of China, this stuff didn’t matter as much. We need to focus on “comparative advantage”, but try selling that to the average voter.
Breitbart News covered the Louisiana governor race very closely. The Republican that came out ahead in the primary had a ton of money to smear the other Republican. He wasn’t a very good candidate otherwise, and he was really hated by some Republicans in certain counties. It was almost like he was some kind of a scoundrel or something.
A scoundrel of a politician in Louisiana? Never happen.
It sounded like he tried to buy the election and didn’t do one thing right except throw money at it. I don’t remember the details except that he was really hated by a certain segment of Republican voters for some reason, and this drove down turnout. I don’t think he had any other political experience, either.
This is like California. Republican Trump haters want to blame it on Trump but it’s a lot more complicated than that. California was dealing with vote harvesting, staggering outside money etc. I think one of Devon Nunes podcasts has a good explanation of it. There are others.
Rob is charming but he sounds like a broken record. STEM education is not the problem. It’s people stuck in the past who think everything is about economics saying the same things over and over that are the problem. He’s also a good example of why an Ivy League education is helpful only for the connections it provides and has nothing to do with really knowing how to think. It was so nice to hear Peter and James shut him down.
When are we going to completely overhaul how we develop human capital in this country?
Just because you are not ‘allowed’ to say anything, does not mean that you won’t say anything.
Dear Peter: there is no such thing as someone on the right who is “anti-worker”. There are plenty of us who are anti-labor union. Plenty of us who see the ever increasing regulatory regime that pretends to help workers is actually destructive. Plenty of us who think that the best way to get folks the best money and benefits they can is to free up the capital and creative energy of businesses, large and small
But literally none of us are anti-worker. Well, Rob is sort of anti-worker, but that’s more about him being against the little guy, than it is him being against workers. ;-)
It hit 71 here in Aiken, SC yesterday . . .
He uses his voice as his garage door opener . . .
Labor unions are anti-worker.
Anti-, that is, the 99.9% or so of workers who are not part of the particular labor union.
When Best Little Whorehouse in Texas was on Broadway, the music was provided by a nine-member country band. However, because of the size of the house, union rules required that the producers pay an additional sixteen musicians to sit around and do nothing.
In return for this occasional windfall for well-connected members of the musicians union, we can only guess at how many shows closed sooner because of these unnecessary costs, and how many shows never opened in the first place, putting or keeping actors and crafts people out of work.
Historians note that union activity exploded after the Civil War. The simple reason was, white workers organized to engage in violence to keep out newly freed blacks looking for work.
How sad, but I guess not too surprising, that they could find sixteen musicians who weren’t too ashamed to sit around getting paid for doing nothing.
Hey, I’d do that. 😁
Edited to add: Recorder gigs can be pretty scarce.
It gets worse. Here’s something I posted on Yahoo! News some years ago:
When we read about Lincoln Center stagehands making over a quarter of a million dollars a year, it becomes obvious we’re dealing with an extortion racket: they’re not contributing $250,000 a year in value to these theaters, but instead they’re being paid off so they don’t disrupt productions. The money comes out of the hides of the performers — fewer and less well-paid jobs — and the theater-going public — fewer and more expensive shows.