Incorruptible Mass

US Economy

• Anna Callahan • Season 6 • Episode 9

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We continue our series on our economy with a broad view on how America is doing. We discuss real and ideal tariff policy, the disappearance of the middle class, and how vanishing economic opportunity is a threat to our democratic society.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

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JONATHAN

Okay.


ANNA

Hello, and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. Our mission here is to help us all transform state politics because we know that we could have a state whose legislation and policy reflected the needs of all of us who live here. And today we are going to be talking about the economy. We're going to be talking about the national economy.


We'll talk a little bit of— well, boy, Jordan and I and probably Johnathan could go on forever about income inequality, but we will hope to keep that to a small portion of today. We'll talk about the middle class, we'll talk about Trump's tariffs and how that's affecting the economy, as well as, you know, the trade deals and the way that that works out for him and what it's doing for Trump instead of doing for us. And then we will talk about the possibility of a recession or worse that either could be coming or we might be in already. But before we do any of that, let me have my illustrious co-hosts introduce themselves, and I will start with Jordan.


JORDAN

My name is Jordan Berg Powers. Of many things I do, I'm a PhD student right now at Brandeis on social policy, and I have backgrounds in economics, and I love talking about it.


ANNA

And Jonathan.


JONATHAN

Jonathan Cohn, he/him/his, an activist living in Boston in the South End and has been active in issue and electoral campaigns here in Boston, Massachusetts for a number of years now.


ANNA

And I'm Anna Callahan, she/her, coming at you from Medford, where I'm a city councilor, done a lot of work on local politics across the country. And I love thinking and talking about the economy. I think we're here in part because things are a-changin', right? I think everybody listening to this has probably heard that the stock market has gone up, the stock market has gone down, you know, these trade deals are on, the trade deals are off, and the lack of knowledge about what's going to happen, the pure turbulence in the system is not great. So first, if we can do it super quick, just tell me what your thoughts are about that.


JONATHAN

After, Jordan, you can go first and I'll tag in with another related question. Right.


JORDAN

I think, you know, so one of the things I think a lot about is just like, what is it, what's happening to America with the thinning out of the middle class and like how invisible that is for most people. And even if you define the middle class the way a lot of think tanks do, people are, it's not the traditional thinking of a middle class, right?


So if we think about a middle class as, like, people can work and live comfortably most of the time, even today when we're talking about a middle class, we're talking about people who work. And if they miss work or miss a payment, they actually would be in a lot of economic trouble. They're not saving a lot. Maybe they're saving a little in their homes, but there's not a lot of excess ability to spend money on big things, on big investments in our societies.


And so one, the middle class is thinning out. And also how we define the middle class is less and less, I think, what most of us would think of as a truly middle class, which is the ability to sort of build generational wealth through regular work in a sort of regular 40-hour work week. Those days are definitely gone, or at least gone for most Americans. So I'm really interested in that because I think we don't appreciate how much spillover there is to that. And I'll just give you, like, my easiest thing that I think about all the time.


It used to be that most that most museums, most art museums, a lot of art itself, most colleges depended on middle-class people to keep them afloat. So you would get middle-class people, not just rich people, middle-class people donating to nonprofits, donating to all of these institutions. And as you're thinning out, what you're seeing is that nonprofits are all struggling. There's less and less money from fewer and fewer people. A lot of the institutions we think about — YWCAs, all these other places that depended on people giving $1,000 here, $500 there — people are unable to make those sorts of larger donations, not just small donations. And so our society is still sort of geared around this idea of having large amounts of people being able to give towards things.


More and more what's actually happening is it's not just that rich people can buy literally a presidency, it's that rich people are actually now dominating every part of our society. So everything from art museums to schools to higher education institutions are now totally dependent on very rich people rather than dispersing that among a larger group of people who are able to donate enough sums that then it sort of democratizes decision-making and democratizes the way our society looks.


So when we're seeing a thinning out of the middle class, I like, yes, it's a problem because people are struggling. And yes, that has real-world effects on people's everyday lives. But it actually is about when people say it's the threat to democracy, it's because every single part of our society depends on all of us to contributing a little something and that's few and fewer and fewer people ever to do so.


JONATHAN

I can just tag in really quickly on that. And this isn't necessarily just like a macro-level economic comment, but just to kind of state directly some, okay, I threw that in your point, is just that the way that we understand democracy in this country and setting aside all the limitations to how one might conceive of democracy in the case, it is very much so connected to the idea of a middle class.


And I think especially because of that meaning that, let's say dispersion or broadening of who has the resources to engage in a democratic process on any level and who has the time to engage in a democratic process on any level. And both of those come from, let's say, with Jordan's kind of description of, let's say, a middle-class status is having that ability for, like, needs are met and modest comfort can be afforded. But that creates the ability to participate in civic life and that in a way that can be very difficult if you are to participate in civic life, if you are working like 80 hours a week or kind of in terms of, or like, kind of 80 hours a week and then also raising children at the same time or other types of ways where that dominance of what you need to do to just get by takes away from the ability to engage in other spheres, which weakens the civic sphere as well.


And then also, according to Jordan's point, there's also the dynamic is if you're weakening that civic sphere, we in the US often overrely on that civil society sphere to do what government won't do. Because in their heart, rich people don't want government to do that work. So you have the situation where those institutions— if you no longer have a broader base of people to be somewhat involved in those kind of civic institutions and they get weakened, then it ends up becoming like either work doesn't get done or work is only being funded when those with the most money weren't funded.


ANNA

So I love that this has turned already to, like, how does inequality affect our economy? And how does inequality affect democracy? Right?


JONATHAN

Yep.


ANNA

These are two great questions, and I'm gonna throw in my two cents as well. So before COVID we, you know, notoriously had the highest income inequality since 1929, right before the giant crash, the worldwide crash that brought in fascism and all sorts of horrible things. And guess what? During COVID that inequality skyrocketed. People don't really talk about inequality anymore with numbers. They don't show the graphs anymore because, you know, one thing I read was that during COVID worldwide, about $3 trillion went to the top, like 1% of people from workers to the top 1%. So we are truly in a phase of inequality that is deeply unhealthy.


And I think people don't like— I love making these connections because I think people think that things happen and they don't know why and they don't understand that the solution is actually to reduce inequality. So, for example, when inequality is too high, you get all sorts of bubbles. You get bubbles in the stock market, you get bubbles in the housing market, you get bubbles in, you know, in all sorts of places. And then you have— there will be a bubble and a crash and a bubble and a crash. And that's due to this instability in our economy. It’s due to too few people having all of the money, right? That's a huge problem.


And then in democracy, you know, it is where you study inequality and you come to understand that inequality does cause political unrest. It causes a bunch of odd things. It causes people to brag more. Is that weird? Well, it's a reality, right? It causes people to admire the wealthy more. It causes more gambling and it causes people to want to be sort of the accidental wannabe millionaire, right?


So they think this, I remember hearing in the last couple of election cycles about the Latino community that now has shifted and now wants to— they believe that maybe they can become millionaires. And so that is part of the reason why they were attracted to Trump, that they see that as a beneficial thing. And what people don't understand is that that's not some odd, random thing happening, right? That is what happens to people when inequality is too high. It is a natural progression. So what we have to do is reduce inequality, and then we're gonna resolve all these problems that we have in our economy or the problems that we have in our democracy. So that's kind of my place that I wish people understood these things.


JORDAN

Yeah, I'll just say really quickly that, you know, I always joke with people like, if you wanna make America great again, we should go back to the 1950s tax code.


JONATHAN

Yeah.


JORDAN

Like it's just really that simple. When rich people steal all of your money — because you do all the work and they get all the money and all the benefits and all of the things from it — then what happens is your life is more terrible. Just like straight up, it's really that simple. There used to be a time where when you made money for rich people, the way to ensure that it went back into your pocket is that we tax them and then the government spent that money and built schools and built highways and paid people out of the government or just to try to build that middle class. And that's when most of the art museums were built. That's when the nonprofit sector was built, right? That all happened because there was a tax code that created that reality. We just need to go back to the Republican Eisenhower tax code.


ANNA

Exactly.


JORDAN

And that would so, like, yeah, it's just that simple. Rich people have all the money and that's making all of our lives miserable. You work and you don't get benefit from it. Other people may get that benefit. They get the overwhelming majority of the benefit.


And so now we're in a society where you— I watch a lot of Hallmark movies and like the Hallmark movie is now not like you're going to earn your way or somebody's like a great middle-class person. It's like the person finds a rich person. It's always just like the person is rich, and you're going to find that rich person. And because we all intrinsically know that basically the quote-unquote “American dream” is dead. And the only way in fact to get by is to just be lucky enough to find a rich person.


Right, like that's, you know, and so like that's the breakdown of this like of, of, even imagination that I think that Anna's talking about. But yeah, let's make America great again. Let's go back to 1950s tax code.


JONATHAN

If I can just chime in quickly a few things. One, I would love to read Jordan's academic paper analyzing the careers of people in Hallmark movies over time and what—.


JORDAN

It'll be my next PhD.


JONATHAN

Exactly.


ANNA

He talks about that a lot. Piketty talks about that too.


JONATHAN

Yeah, no, 'cause I feel like that would be fascinating about what those markers in popular culture of what different careers signify for different characters over time and how that changes would be fascinating. English major.


Second thing is we wanted to note, when talking about the extreme wealth that exists, the thing that was striking, is when you had earlier this year, when you end up really ongoing stock market turmoil, when Trump basically was doing tariffs and move, like constantly, both destructive use of tariffs and then constantly changing them. And you would see like stock market, like all the different stock market indices just like plummeting. And then you would hear about how much wealth got destroyed for a particular, the, like for certain rich people in particular, right? Like there was a lot of, there was Broadway time, but you might hear about how like for somebody like Elon Musk, who would lose like a lot of wealth and that happens.


And the amount of wealth that gets destroyed by that is obscene, is like absurd. And like because of how obscene the amounts of wealth are in the first place, where you could just lose, because if you're somebody with that ridiculous of amount of money, you can just lose all of it in one day and maybe you'll gain some of that back later. And it all has no bearing on your day-to-day life for the most part. Right, it's like other than your status and your ability to buy out.


ANNA

Yeah, is an interesting phrase because there was that day when Trump announced that like, oh, he was there with— what's the guy, the banker guy? And he was like, oh, and he earned that was when Trump announced, he said on Truth Social, he's like, “oh, good time to buy.” And then like, you know, so the tariffs were off and suddenly, who was the guy who earned and he bragged about it like two, you know, billion dollars that in one day. So, you know, losing and you're gaining and whatever, I mean, is that really, you know, to say lose, it.


JONATHAN

Speaks to that fundamental kind of abstraction that exists in money when it is that large and the way that it is divorced from any actual— when it's divorced from the fundamental material values of meeting needs and exists only in the more abstract realm of asserting and controlling power when it gets to be that large.


The other quick thing, this is a little off-topic, but it came to mind during the session. One of my big, this is a side big pet peeve of mine that is in economic discourse is, I was just thinking in terms of attitudes to companies is the Republican desire and sometimes Democratic desire of putting work requirements on social benefits, which make them purely subsidies for bad employers, as opposed to the model of like a social benefit program should exist because you want to meet people's needs.


And so you figure out what, what you need to meet people's needs in terms of whether that is food assistance, whether that is healthcare, whether that is extra economic support. And that is, as I understand, the common way of approaching that in Europe is you have a need, you structure a system so the need gets met, and that the US tends to have some mix of work requirements in them, but the fact that Republicans just want to fully extend that shows that like they solely view it as a subsidy to bad employers because it's fundamentally incoherent logic where you should be working if you're getting benefits.


But if you're, if you're working and you're relying on benefit on such benefits, that means your wages aren't high enough because your employer is underpaying you to keep all of the money for themselves. And so that's a particular, just like such a perverse logic where the only value of any type of social program and that conservative mindset is just to subsidize profits. Yeah.


JORDAN

And subsidize the stock market, essentially.


ANNA

Yeah.


JORDAN

So I guess I'll just say, I think one of the other things that I think, so obviously the Trump tariffs are like a huge part of the news at the moment. And one of the things I always joke about that frustrates me about the Trump administration is that he takes a lot of leftist complaints that have had for years, but he does them in really terrible, crappy ways. And so for years, people have complained about NAFTA and, and like, and like, we needed to get rid of NAFTA because it was really bad deal for Bernie in 2016.


ANNA

That was the thing is, Bernie was going around talking about TPP with all the unions. Suddenly it was a thing.


JORDAN

That's before we get to TPP is— because, so before, you know, Ross Perot, right? The “sucking sound.” It's hard to hear jobs going to, you know, and like that legit happened. And then, and then after they got sucked out of Mexico to China and other places, right? So like, so like, what does Trump do? Trump like redoes, right?


JONATHAN

Yeah.


JORDAN

So Bernie talks about, you know— so then Obama not only promises to redo NAFTA, not only does he not redo NAFTA, he then proposes a deal that's worse than NAFTA. Pacific Coast, right? For Pacific countries, for TPP, to Anna's point, right? So that makes no sense. And then on top of that you get— but then Trump redid, so Trump read in NAFTA. And I never hear that a new CNN is not like when it was like, “oh, this is a terrible deal for America.” He made that deal. NAFTA's been dead since Trump has been in prison. He renegotiated that deal and no one says that. How are we have such little memory as a country that we can't remember that Trump re-negotiated our deals with Canada and Mexico. So if he doesn't like them, he can literally blame himself. But of course he won't, right? But like, yeah.


JONATHAN

Trump is like, who is the asshole who negotiated these exploitative deals for the American people? Yeah. It's like kind of the meme of “we're all trying to find the person who did this.” It's like, Trump, talking about his own trade deals.


ANNA

Yeah.


JORDAN

So, like, I just don't understand why we don't talk about it. But the other thing is that one of the things that— so it's called the USMCA. And he said it, “we'll replace the nightmare NAFTA” is what he said at the time. But apparently no one has this memory that he did this already. But anyway, that happened in 2020. It wasn't that long ago.


And so, and so one of the things that's also frustrating is that, you know, a lot of the right-wing media is talking about that. They have quotes of Nancy Pelosi and all these Democrats talking about the tariffs. And like, that's again, the problem is that, yeah, Democrats actually should have been using tariff policy for generations, but like, you don't tariff countries and you don't tariff every country. So now we can't do a policy because Trump ruined that too. Because he doesn't know how to do it properly.


You tariff industries and then you create policies to promote that industry through tax incentives in the country, right? You do it by industry. That makes sense that you want to promote it because there's jobs, because the cost that you are going to incur because it is incurred by regular people, depending on what it is, right? One of the things, right? So it's incurred by the people purchasing the item. So if Americans are going to pay more, it's going to offset the jobs that you want to create, right?


So like one of the ones that they complain about, I saw the Aaron Sorkin nonsense about like, we can't tax steel because like, oh, it'll cost all this money per job, and like that's unfair to the American people. But like actually we should tax steel and we should make Americans pay more for steel because that long-term union job actually pays more than the cost. And there is a benefit to having that job until we figure out maybe there's something else we want to do with those people. Maybe we want to treat whatever it is. Like I'm not saying it has to be forever, but you should have an economic plan about how tariffs work. You don't just tear off countries.


JONATHAN

Right.


ANNA

So I loved the— there was a clip going around that was, like, this guy getting grilled by some member of Congress, and they were like, who actually pays tariffs? And the guy was like, Flum-Di-Flum-Di, Marm-Bly-Barm-Bly, you know, like he did not want to answer that question. It's like, no, who pays the tariffs? Because the answer is US importers. Like that's who pays the tariffs. Anybody who is buying a good from abroad and an American— it's only Americans who pay tariffs. That is the— there's no other way to define it. You can say anything you want to, but this concept that other countries are finally paying us is utterly absurd, because they're not paying us anything. It's just not— it's so outside of reality.


JONATHAN

It's also, it's like, there's also, I feel like, the fundamental incoherence in the way that the Trump administration has been using tariffs in that they both want to talk about tariffs as this massive, beautiful revenue source, but also that the tariffs are going to bring back— What kind of “bring back jobs”? And if the jobs— if you succeed at this, like, reindustrialization plan, then you're not really getting the money.


Like, no, you're like, then you're not really getting that money anymore. Maybe you might be getting— raising some tax revenue from the company here, but you're not really, but if you took all the money, like taking all the taxes away from court, you freed corporations of their tax obligations here. You're not getting the tariff money anymore. You've designed a policy that you say that you actually want this tariff revenue to disappear if you want to reindustrialize here. And so there's like, it's striking to see them talk about like basically two goals that you cannot achieve at the same time because he fundamentally doesn't understand economic policy.


JORDAN

It's a totally incoherent policy across the board. It's just, yeah. We both want to have tariffs to use to bully other countries into changing their policies, but we also want to create jobs here, which are obviously opposite. We want to change how we purchase and sell with other countries, then we're not going to create our own. Those are two totally opposite goals.


And then on top of the fact that if the goal is to create an industry, as you're saying, a locally created industry, as you've said, then they would stop paying for it across, but then they wouldn't pay the money for the tariff. And on top of all of that, you don't tariff countries because it doesn't make any sense. It's just like, you don't— you tariff an industry. How do you tariff a country? It's also just— there's not an economic person, there's not a degree in economics that's like “the way to do it is tariff a country.” Like, I should be clear that you remember, this is bonkers.


Remember that one trade official in the Trump administration in his book made up a fake person that was just himself, too. Yeah, Peter Navarro. who's the person who's behind all of this? It's his book, it's created all this because it was the number one when the son-in-law Jared Kushner googled on Amazon, when he looked on Amazon for the number one book of trade policy in China, Navarro's book was number one because the right-wingers, they buy their own books, they artificially inflate their things. And so that's the reason we're stuck with this, is because he went on to Amazon to find trade policy. But we're just in the worst timeline.


And I will say this: it's made worse by the media who also for years has talked about trade wrong. They do not understand how trade works. They always talk about trade as it's always beneficial. It's not always beneficial. There are, definitionally, the one thing Trump does get right, there are winners and losers in trade. You need to, but they're not, they're usually workers or people or industries. They're not countries. That's how it works. And so you need to figure out an adult way to govern.


And the problem is that the right wing is not an adult way to govern. And the media treats their ideology as equal to the adults. So the adult way to govern is you're balancing lots of competing interests, right? There's going to be a benefit to tariffs. There is also a downside to tariffs. You are weighing those on industry by industry, and then you're creating policies to support them.


JONATHAN

Right.


JORDAN

So if you're France, you're tariffing wine, you're tariffing other things that French farmers do because you have a belief and then that's something that France should do, right, for whatever reason. So you're going to create policies that protect that thing that you think is for you, for your country, right? So that's not, they're not tariffing everything that comes in from the EU, they're tariffing things to protect certain industries. So you're doing a— that's an adult way to do it.


It's the same thing with taxes, right? The people who want tax, people who like us who are thinking about taxes, we're thinking about what's the right mixture, how high or how low to get our benefit, but not, we're not taxing out of control. And what does the media do? You get an NPR, what is NPR? Who do they talk to? They have one person who's like, “I have this moderate increase in taxation with all of these facts.” And who did they juxtapose it with? A bonkers person who's like, “I don't believe in any taxes. There should be no taxes.” It's a childish way to go about the world.


But the media treats these two things the same. It treats one group of people who are doing serious thought about balancing the cost and effect, not always perfectly, but at least trying to balance the cost and effect of things with people who are just immature idiots, who are just like absolute morons.


ANNA

Right.


JORDAN

Just like “everything's bad. All taxes are bad. All pop, all things are bad.”


JONATHAN

Right.


JORDAN

They're juxtaposed as equal.


JONATHAN

Yeah.


ANNA

And so on this topic of like complete idiocracy, right, I'm gonna talk about the way that the tariffs have been done. And it's like, great, every country is being tariffed, which means with these gigantic tariffs, and especially China, where most of any American company that builds anything, like half of them, like what do they say? Like 90% of all strollers are made in China, 95% of all toys are made in China. I mean, like if you import anything and then you double or triple the price, you double the price of that.


And like suddenly these American importers, literally those mom-and-pop ones, they're just gonna close shop. They will no longer be able to run their business and their entire business will die. So you got a ton of those people who are like, wow, if this doesn't stop, then we're literally dead. We have to fire all our employees. We'll have to stop production of anything. And so suddenly the entire economy, like we don't, we start getting— no shipments start coming in, shipments stop. Our entire supply lines are in a total freefall and disaster. Nobody knows what the heck is going on, which is why those stock market starts crashing. And then he's like, “oh well, we'll reduce or we'll get rid of all the tariffs.”


Okay, so now suddenly the stock market explodes. People are like, “okay, well, I better buy everything.” And then people are like, “holy shit, let's buy everything we might need for the next six months.” So then there's a gigantic— everything starts flooding again, and it looks like things are doing well, but it's not because he puts the tariffs on again and then people are again in this “oh my God, maybe we have to fire everyone.” Some actually, really have closed. Some shops have closed.


So this is not like— and we have not yet seen what is going to happen because of this wild turbulence that has happened to the supply chains, to the prices, to the ability for small shops to remain open and to be able to make plans. And I think three, six months from now, we're gonna start seeing what the actual repercussions are of the complete idiocracy of doing your policy this way. And I know, Jonathan, you wanted to talk about these tariffs and trade deals as serving a completely different purpose for Trump.


JONATHAN

Yeah, no, 100%. That, as I've been doing before, that the way to view how Trump is dealing with economic policy here is not as economic policy, but as an extortion and bribe operation, where you extort other— you basically interact with other countries as a mob boss trying to extort everything out of other people in order for them to do business.


And then for anybody domestically who might be disadvantaged from them, either you want to see them consolidated into larger companies — I was thinking of this when you were just talking now, Anna, where a kind of like monopolization or Walmartization effect that can be knock-on for smaller producers not being able to survive is a good thing to Trump — but on the flip side of that, all of the farmers who always get hit, because in terms of things that the US is a big exporter of, we're still a very big agricultural exporter.


His default is always to try to get money to bribe them so that they don't see the same, they don't feel the impact, feel the retaliation from other countries, but then you're just using your extortion money to pay your bribe. Like, it's gonna have to bribe other people off. And what's the real gain from any of that? Yeah.


ANNA

And the other thing about that is when you're pissing off everybody, right? When you, when you're not industry-specific or even country-specific, which is like, everybody gets 25% when you are pissing everyone off, then you don't have— you're actually, what he doesn't understand. Because I get the extortion economy. He thinks that everybody's gonna wanna make deals with him. What really happens is people go to— they don't stop talking to you. They're gonna talk to the US. They're gonna talk to each other and be like, “let's cut the crap out of there. Cause we can't handle the insanity, like the total idiocracy.” So now China and the EU and India, you know, BRICS countries, like they're all gonna be talking to each other and figuring out how to do trade without going to America. That is not good for us.


JORDAN

It's just, I want to say also, because it's not true that it's every country, lest we forget that Russia was not— yeah, so, you know, Russia, Russia, Russia, he is clearly in the bag for Russia. He is a Russian agent. The KGB could only dream of a Trump presidency.


JONATHAN

It is legitimately wild how there are so many things that the Trump administration is doing is that like, if you were, let's say, like the 1960s, like, KGB planning what to do to the US by like, “let's start dismantling Voice of America and USA and like destroying US scientific research and like alienating the US from trade partners,” trying to then even attacking Hollywood, his latest thing to maybe make it so that you don't have as much film distribution — that would literally be a dream.


JORDAN

It's a fever dream of the KGB. But I think the other piece to the bribe economy that I think it's really important to get is like, not only will they stop doing trade with us, but the way to get out of it is you literally just give them a plane and then you get whatever you want. So it's like you personally enrich him and then tariffs go down on you. But like, we all lost, like we all don't get any of that benefit. He personally— like you literally give him a bribe through crypto, which is just a bribe. It's just a “if I give you money and then I get a payment and the payment is I get a policy I want,” that's a bribe. It's not, you know, it's not what the New York Times calls it, “investment money in crypto.” It's just a pyramid scheme. There's not a real thing. It doesn't really exist. It's money that he could take out that somebody gave to him, and they exchanged it through a fake bank.


It's like the worst type of easy crime possible. It is the equivalent of a digital money, like just literally bags of money being handed to Trump for a policy change. And it's weird that people can't grab how easily this is a bribe. But anyway, so it's just like you get this weird thing. And Americans love to hate trade in other countries. And there's lots of ways I would like for us to reorient around my economic philosophies, which are more leftist.


Our economy only works if the dollar underpins the world economy. I see the most stupid crypto commercials about the dollar goes up and down, but we should be towards this thing that's towards Bitcoin because there's only a little bit of it. It doesn't expand. I was like, that's insanity. It will never grow and it will only ever have its value. That means that it can't be flexible to the changes in the world economy or our economy. We have done that before and it was awful for people.


JONATHAN

It's just like, “what if we brought back the gold standard,” but also with more crap about adding a layer of crime.


JORDAN

Right, it's just like— one of the genius of Alexander Hamilton was creating a system where our dollar then goes around the world and helps support our economy. And there's, again, I have a lot— like we could get into the weeds of how to fix this. There's lots of problems with it. Not always beneficial to regular people, let alone people who are working-class people. There's lots of problems. But generally speaking, our economy functions because the dollar goes around the world. And if that stops happening, as Trump is pushing us, heralding us towards, it's gonna be so bad.


People really do not get how much of our economy is oriented towards these things and undoing it willy-nilly like idiots. It's just like, you need a plan, you need a policy, you need some coherent philosophy to do it. And the media, of course, does not understand it, but they don't know how to report on it because they fired all the economic reporters. So there's literally no one to explain it. So you get the New York Times reporting on it in ways that make no sense, that are not bound in economic principles, that are based around silly ideas of like first, you know, high school-level economics, like “trade good, supply and demand good.” It's just nonsense. That's much more complicated.


JONATHAN

And I feel like that you have one problem with a lot of how we talk about trade policy. So like Trump views beyond just kind of what I know with like extortion and bribes, that Trump views trade policy through also a lens of xenophobia. And I think that there's a lot of the folks who like, “oh, it's a Republican base who supports what he's doing, support it out of the belief that you can't have positive some interactions with other countries, and we should hate all other countries, and we should extort them to benefit ourselves.”


But you also get the one thing that can be damaging on the flip side is the way in which — and this is the problem in the Obama administration with the Trans-Pacific Partnership — of trying to launder a liberal positivity for other countries in order to enrich US companies in ways that are actually not beneficial broadly, because I think about how one of the big things in the Trans-Pacific Partnership was literally just protecting the IP of, large U.S. corporations in ways that are not benefiting regular people. It's just benefiting the tech industry and Pharma versus other countries and how that gets kind of whitewashed through the lens of trade.


ANNA

Well, my friends, I'm gonna have to wrap it up, but how fun to chit-chat about the economy. Speaking of the economy, if you guys have a couple extra bucks, we've got a link below. You can always donate to the show.


JONATHAN

In terms of non-extortion donations.


ANNA

Oh yeah, anyone watches women's sports? “Everyone watches women's sports,” the T-shirt that Jordan is wearing today. So yeah, and we always appreciate everybody who donates, everybody who listens, everybody who forwards this show to their friends. we are going to continue talking about the economy for the next couple of sessions as well in our deep dive. And we look forward to chatting with everyone next week.