The Disaster That Just Passed the Senate
01:03:
(Ezra Klein)
So I'm taping this introduction on Tuesday, July 1st.
01:06:
(Ezra Klein)
The Senate passed Donald Trump's big, beautiful bill just moments ago.
01:09:
(Ezra Klein)
50-50 vote, Vice President J.D.
01:12:
(Ezra Klein)
Vance, the tiebreaker.
01:14:
(Ezra Klein)
This bill, it is a bad piece of legislation.
01:18:
(Ezra Klein)
Trillions of dollars in tax cuts, very much tilted towards the rich.
01:22:
(Ezra Klein)
Savage cuts to Medicaid, to nutrition assistance, to green energy.
01:27:
(Ezra Klein)
And even with those cuts, we can expect more than $3 trillion to be added to the national debt over 10 years.
01:33:
(Ezra Klein)
And I think befitting policy like that, the bill is hugely unpopular.
01:38:
(Ezra Klein)
A poll from late June found nearly two to one opposition to the bill.
01:42:
(Ezra Klein)
Vulnerable Republicans do not seem excited to run on the wreckage it's going to create.
01:47:
(Ezra Klein)
Tom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina, a state Trump has won over and over again, just announced he's stepping down at the end of this term, in part over the Medicaid cuts.
01:57:
(Ezra Klein)
But bad policy only matters if people know about it.
02:02:
(Ezra Klein)
And a lot of people don't.
02:03:
(Ezra Klein)
And hearing about this bill, even those of us covering it can't keep the whole package in mind.
02:08:
(Ezra Klein)
The Times has a great list of nearly all the provisions.
02:10:
(Ezra Klein)
I'll link it in the show description.
02:12:
(Ezra Klein)
A lot of them would be major policy fights on their own.
02:14:
(Ezra Klein)
But in part because of that, and because the Trump administration is flooding the zone with so many other major policy fights, it has been hard to focus attention on what is passing and what can actually be done about it.
02:28:
(Ezra Klein)
And so I asked Matt Iglesias back on the show to go through what is in this bill and why it has been so hard to generate the kind of political force on it that we saw in Trump's first term when Obamacare appeal went down to defeat.
02:41:
(Ezra Klein)
Matt, of course, is the author of The Soul Boring Newsletter.
02:44:
(Ezra Klein)
We spoke, I should say, on Thursday, June 26.
02:47:
(Ezra Klein)
As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.
02:59:
(Ezra Klein)
Matt Iglesias, welcome back to the show.
03:02:
(Ezra Klein)
Really glad to be here.
03:03:
(Ezra Klein)
The big, beautiful, Chuck Schumer calls it, big, ugly, Bill, what is your high-level description of how this thing fits together?
03:12:
(Matt Iglesias)
Well, you have two different versions.
03:15:
(Matt Iglesias)
They both contain about $5 trillion worth of tax cuts, of which they're trying to sort of disguise the cost and say it's more like $4 trillion.
03:25:
(Matt Iglesias)
But it's trillions, trillions of tax cuts, mostly tilted toward wealthier people, although some for middle-class, working-class people.
03:32:
(Matt Iglesias)
And then it's offset by cuts to nutrition assistance, cuts to clean energy programs, and cuts to Medicaid.
03:39:
(Matt Iglesias)
And so there's a lot of disagreement between the House and the Senate about exactly how to do the Medicaid cuts.
03:46:
(Matt Iglesias)
And that's sort of a lot of what the wrangling is about.
03:49:
(Matt Iglesias)
But that kind of broad shape of the bill, that's been the sort of locked in framework for months.
03:54:
(Ezra Klein)
So has Donald Trump just always been Paul Ryan in orange makeup?
03:59:
(Matt Iglesias)
I don't know that he's exactly Paul Ryan in orange makeup, but he has always been in favor of big tax cuts.
04:08:
(Matt Iglesias)
And there is some pressure to offset the cost of those tax cuts with spending cuts.
04:13:
(Matt Iglesias)
The big change is that Trump made Republicans be much more cautious about cutting Medicare and Social Security.
04:19:
(Matt Iglesias)
And so that means that the Trump era Republican cut proposals fall much more heavily on poor people specifically rather than on the elderly, which was sort of the Paul Ryan version of this.
04:31:
(Matt Iglesias)
And I think it's a really underplayed aspect because Trump has actually gained a lot more support from low-income voters than Republicans had in the past.
04:41:
(Matt Iglesias)
He's changed really the image of the party with regard to how it relates to lower-income people.
04:46:
(Matt Iglesias)
But the policy is incredibly unfavorable to them.
04:49:
(Ezra Klein)
So this is a bill where some of the most brutal cuts fall on Medicaid users.
04:57:
(Ezra Klein)
How do they cut Medicaid?
04:59:
(Matt Iglesias)
Well, this is part of what they're disagreeing about.
05:02:
(Matt Iglesias)
But one of the big ways is that they're changing what's called Medicaid provider taxes.
05:07:
(Matt Iglesias)
So states raise money for Medicaid in part by taxing the hospitals and other providers who provide Medicaid services.
05:18:
(Matt Iglesias)
And the House and the Senate have different ways of putting even stricter, tighter rules on the use of these provider cuts.
05:25:
(Matt Iglesias)
Then the other thing they do is big work requirement rules.
05:28:
(Matt Iglesias)
So you're going to have to certify that you are working or participating in some kind of work-related activity.
05:36:
(Matt Iglesias)
And a lot of people are expected to fall through the cracks of that kind of system, really reduce spending.
05:42:
(Matt Iglesias)
They're also putting higher enrollment barriers for Affordable Care Act subsidies and so different rules around immigration status.
05:50:
(Matt Iglesias)
But the biggest ones are those provider cuts and the work requirements.
05:54:
(Ezra Klein)
And the way Republicans defend this out on the trail is, look, all we're saying is if you're on Medicaid, you should either be working or if you're an able-bodied adult, you should be trying to find work.
06:09:
(Ezra Klein)
And you said people fall through the cracks of it.
06:11:
(Ezra Klein)
But when I talk to people who do Medicaid work, who know about how these work requirements work, they say, no, they're not going to fall through the cracks.
06:19:
(Ezra Klein)
This is a very onerous paperwork and reporting requirement that people often just fail to be able to do.
06:28:
(Ezra Klein)
They check in with the government, but then forget to one month or don't realize they have to.
06:33:
(Ezra Klein)
And that it's a way of using administrative burden, like all this paperwork,
06:37:
(Ezra Klein)
to kick people off of the program.
06:40:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, I think you could see there's a mismatch between the way Mike Johnson characterizes this.
06:46:
(Matt Iglesias)
He talks about, you know, we've got all these able-bodied young men who are sitting on the couch all day playing video games, collecting Medicaid benefits.
06:55:
(Matt Iglesias)
But you don't collect Medicaid benefits.
06:57:
(Matt Iglesias)
Medicaid defrays the cost of your medical bills.
07:00:
(Matt Iglesias)
Able-bodied young men are not racking up incredible medical bills, almost by definition.
07:06:
(Matt Iglesias)
So for the bill to save money, it has to be cutting off care to people who are in fact sick and in need of medical care.
07:15:
(Matt Iglesias)
That's how the savings work.
07:16:
(Matt Iglesias)
And it's also, you know, it's easy to neglect how hard it is to fulfill certain kinds of requirements.
07:23:
(Matt Iglesias)
But people, you know, who are poor, who are dealing with medical problems, who have a lot of stuff going on in their lives, aren't always able to get all this checkbox stuff done, which is why millions of people are going to lose coverage.
07:35:
(Matt Iglesias)
And it's why it's going to save a meaningful amount of money.
07:38:
(Matt Iglesias)
The only way to offset the cast of tax cuts is to deny medical care to people who need treatment.
07:43:
(Ezra Klein)
I really want to underscore this thing you just said because I think you stated it very clearly.
07:48:
(Ezra Klein)
You could save money in Social Security by not having Social Security send people checks every month.
07:56:
(Ezra Klein)
Mm-hmm.
07:57:
(Ezra Klein)
But you cannot save money in Medicaid that way.
07:59:
(Ezra Klein)
Right.
07:59:
(Ezra Klein)
The way Medicaid has to save money is that somebody who would have gone and gotten treatment for cancer—
08:08:
(Ezra Klein)
got in treatment for COPD, got in treatment for an aching back, whatever it might be, will now either not go get that treatment
08:19:
(Ezra Klein)
Or somehow this person who was on Medicaid and was poor enough to qualify for Medicaid is going to pay for it some other way.
08:25:
(Ezra Klein)
We, the federal government, are implementing an onerous set of paperwork and reporting requirements where if people who are already poor, sick, or otherwise disorganized cannot or do not abide by them, when they get sick, they will not be able to get chemotherapy or they will have to go into medical debt to get chemotherapy.
08:50:
(Ezra Klein)
Why?
08:50:
(Ezra Klein)
So I can get a tax cut?
08:53:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yeah, I mean, there's a profound sort of ideological disagreement, right?
08:57:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, you know, one of the things like Gallup asks people is, should it be the federal government's responsibility to make sure that everybody gets health care?
09:06:
(Matt Iglesias)
And about 60 percent of the public says yes.
09:10:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, at the highest level of abstraction, the public has sort of progressive view about this.
09:15:
(Matt Iglesias)
And Republicans don't.
09:17:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, they were not for the Affordable Care Act.
09:21:
(Matt Iglesias)
The most conservative states don't accept Medicaid expansion funds.
09:25:
(Matt Iglesias)
They have tried to impose work requirements in Arkansas, for example.
09:30:
(Matt Iglesias)
So we ran the experiment.
09:31:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yeah.
09:31:
(Matt Iglesias)
does putting work requirements on Medicaid increase employment?
09:36:
(Matt Iglesias)
And the answer was no.
09:38:
(Matt Iglesias)
When they did it, employment didn't go up.
09:40:
(Matt Iglesias)
People did lose coverage, but employment didn't go up.
09:43:
(Matt Iglesias)
And Republicans didn't reverse course after that.
09:46:
(Matt Iglesias)
They didn't say to themselves, oh, our goal here was to get more people working, but didn't succeed at that.
09:52:
(Matt Iglesias)
They said, you know what?
09:53:
(Matt Iglesias)
This cut the rolls.
09:54:
(Matt Iglesias)
It cut spending.
09:56:
(Matt Iglesias)
We're happy with that.
09:57:
(Matt Iglesias)
And
09:57:
(Matt Iglesias)
That's a free market view.
09:59:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, if you want a television, you've got to pay for it yourself.
10:03:
(Matt Iglesias)
If you want chemotherapy, you've got to pay for it yourself.
10:06:
(Matt Iglesias)
And I think that's a morally questionable worldview.
10:09:
(Matt Iglesias)
But, you know, I think it's something that Republicans believe in pretty sincerely, but they also don't want to articulate in those terms because it sounds terrible.
10:19:
(Ezra Klein)
In the 2012 election, Mitt Romney famously got caught on tape saying, look,
10:25:
(Ezra Klein)
There's 47% of this country that are just takers.
10:29:
(Ezra Klein)
They're not paying income taxes.
10:31:
(Ezra Klein)
They're just getting things from the federal government.
10:33:
(Ezra Klein)
And I'm paraphrasing him here, but he basically says, look, our job is going to be harder because that's always going to be a popular politics.
10:39:
(Ezra Klein)
And those are not our voters.
10:42:
(Ezra Klein)
Donald Trump won voters making less than $50,000.
10:46:
(Ezra Klein)
It is very plausible that a majority of people on Medicaid now vote for Republicans.
10:52:
(Ezra Klein)
So I think the politics of this used to be, the way people understood them, is that Republicans want to make these cuts for the ideological reasons that you're describing.
11:01:
(Ezra Klein)
But they were cuts to the Democratic Party's voters.
11:05:
(Ezra Klein)
Yeah.
11:05:
(Ezra Klein)
Now they are very substantially cuts to the Republican Party's voters.
11:09:
(Ezra Klein)
They are cuts to Republican states.
11:11:
(Ezra Klein)
They are cuts to Republican hospitals, rural hospitals in areas that vote for Republicans that are very dependent on the care that gets financed by Medicaid in order to stay open.
11:23:
(Ezra Klein)
This is Republicans' old ideology coming into conflict with their new coalition.
11:29:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yeah, absolutely.
11:29:
(Matt Iglesias)
And, you know, if you look at the share of people who are on Medicaid by state, there's seven states where over a quarter of the population is on Medicaid.
11:39:
(Matt Iglesias)
One of them is New York.
11:40:
(Matt Iglesias)
One of them is California.
11:42:
(Matt Iglesias)
But the other five are New Mexico, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, and West Virginia.
11:48:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yeah.
11:48:
(Matt Iglesias)
And then you look at states like Mississippi and Alabama, if they would accept Medicaid expansion funding, there's a huge potentially eligible population share in those states.
11:58:
(Matt Iglesias)
And it's a big conflict inside the heart of Republican politics.
12:02:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, Mitch McConnell's from Kentucky.
12:04:
(Matt Iglesias)
It's one of those states.
12:05:
(Matt Iglesias)
He's someone who, I guess his political swan song is really just saying what he thinks about everything.
12:10:
(Matt Iglesias)
He said about this, you know, I know my colleagues are hearing from people who are worried about Medicaid, but like, we've got to get this done.
12:18:
(Matt Iglesias)
And his literal words were, they'll get over it.
12:20:
(Matt Iglesias)
which I think is not something a person running for re-election would say.
12:24:
(Matt Iglesias)
But that's very emblematic of what you're talking about.
12:28:
(Matt Iglesias)
There's just a conflict between what is the Republican Party electorate and their ideology, which has shifted in some ways, but really remains focused on low taxes, on investment income, low corporate taxes, and wanting to cut spending on programs for the poor.
12:47:
(Ezra Klein)
Let's talk about the tax side of this bill.
12:50:
(Ezra Klein)
Mm-hmm.
12:51:
(Ezra Klein)
You can cut taxes in a lot of different ways.
12:53:
(Ezra Klein)
It's not just like a giant individual income tax cut.
12:57:
(Ezra Klein)
What are the major things this bill does?
13:01:
(Ezra Klein)
And I don't just mean here is it tilted towards the rich or the poor.
13:03:
(Ezra Klein)
I also mean just how does it change the incentives for people to do or not do things in the economy?
13:10:
(Matt Iglesias)
The centerpiece of this bill is taking the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, taking temporary provisions from that bill and making them permanent.
13:20:
(Matt Iglesias)
So a lot of that is just small reductions in the income tax rate at every particular bracket.
13:26:
(Matt Iglesias)
Some of that is an expansion of the child tax credit, and some of it, a lot of it is corporate tax breaks, you know, different ways to sort of lower the taxes of businesses that have large investments.
13:39:
(Matt Iglesias)
Trump then also piled on, on the campaign, these new ideas, right?
13:43:
(Matt Iglesias)
No tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime.
13:47:
(Matt Iglesias)
Those weren't really, like, fleshed out in the campaign in a real way, but Congress has felt the need to put some version of them in here, which is part of why Republicans are having trouble with this, because sort of making TCJA permanent is non-negotiable for them, but delivering on Trump's promises is also non-negotiable.
14:07:
(Matt Iglesias)
And so that's turned this into this very, very, very expensive sort of thing.
14:11:
(Ezra Klein)
The no tax on Social Security didn't really make it in, though, right?
14:14:
(Ezra Klein)
Because of various budget rules.
14:16:
(Ezra Klein)
Bird rules, yes.
14:17:
(Ezra Klein)
I'm just going to give a very quick budget explainer before I go on.
14:20:
(Ezra Klein)
In order to not have this be subject to the filibuster, in which case it would not pass, Republicans are using a legislative vehicle called budget reconciliation.
14:27:
(Ezra Klein)
This is now used for almost everything that's very big.
14:30:
(Ezra Klein)
The Build Back Better, the Inflation Reduction Act used it.
14:33:
(Ezra Klein)
And it has weird rules on it, according to something called the Byrd Rule.
14:38:
(Ezra Klein)
And one of those rules is it can't really do all that much to Social Security.
14:41:
(Ezra Klein)
Other rules are that everything has to be explicitly budgetary in nature.
14:44:
(Ezra Klein)
And so then the parliamentarian goes through and things get challenged and the parliamentarian decides like, well, is doing this really a budget thing?
14:52:
(Ezra Klein)
Are you trying to sneak in another change and calling it a spending and tax change?
14:56:
(Matt Iglesias)
So one thing about this bill that's a little strange, I guess, is if you talk to sort of conservative tax wonks, the thing that they are most excited about is the business provisions.
15:09:
(Matt Iglesias)
100% bonus depreciation for equipment, domestic R&E expensing.
15:16:
(Matt Iglesias)
So these are sort of corporate tax breaks that conservatives believe will encourage more investment and sort of make the economy more prosperous.
15:24:
(Matt Iglesias)
That totals to about $700 to $800 billion worth of cost, which is, you know, I don't want to say that's not a lot of money, but it's a relatively minor share of a $5 trillion tax bill.
15:37:
(Matt Iglesias)
So the bulk of the sort of dollar cost of the bill is repealing the alternative minimum tax, expanding the standard deduction, and just rate cuts in individual income taxes, and this 1099 pass-through deduction thing, which is,
15:54:
(Matt Iglesias)
Basically, if you own certain kinds of closely held businesses, you get to just claim a huge tax cut.
16:02:
(Matt Iglesias)
So, for example, if you are like a real estate developer or you own golf clubs, you just arbitrarily pay a lower tax rate.
16:10:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, and then there's a $200 billion estate tax cut.
16:14:
(Matt Iglesias)
So, you know, again, on the merits, the conservative view is that these kind of tax cuts encourage higher levels of savings and investment in the economy.
16:24:
(Matt Iglesias)
Because the people who save and invest are disproportionately very rich, it has a very skewed distributional tilt.
16:31:
(Matt Iglesias)
So they've also thrown in all kinds of other stuff that
16:34:
(Matt Iglesias)
doesn't have that same kind of impact, right?
16:37:
(Matt Iglesias)
So there's like a bonus standard deduction for senior citizens.
16:41:
(Matt Iglesias)
So that's supposed to be something that you can like go to a town hall and say to, you know, grandma, like, this is what I did for you.
16:47:
(Matt Iglesias)
But the cost of that is $90 billion versus $212 billion for the estate tax cut.
16:53:
(Ezra Klein)
It's amazing the way a bill this big begins to warp one's ability to talk about big numbers.
16:58:
(Ezra Klein)
Like, that's only $90 billion.
16:59:
(Ezra Klein)
That's pocket change.
17:01:
(Ezra Klein)
Usually when we have these big fights over tax cuts,
17:04:
(Ezra Klein)
Those of us for who our sins have to read a lot of Congressional Budget Office reports know this long-running fight over whether or not when a bill like this has its cost estimated by the Joint Committee on Taxation and sort of but not exactly by the CBO, they'll use something called dynamic or static scoring.
17:22:
(Ezra Klein)
And the debate here is static scoring just sort of totals up how much things cost.
17:27:
(Ezra Klein)
And then dynamic scoring, in theory, also runs a model saying, well, will this help grow the economy or not?
17:36:
(Ezra Klein)
And if it does help grow the economy, then in theory that should offset some of its costs because a faster-growing economy creates more tax revenues that then can be put in.
17:44:
(Ezra Klein)
So the sort of Republican argument is always that
17:47:
(Ezra Klein)
These things are overestimated in their cause because they're using static scoring, not dynamic scoring.
17:51:
(Ezra Klein)
We need to use dynamic scoring.
17:52:
(Ezra Klein)
So they got, in this case, dynamic scoring.
17:57:
(Ezra Klein)
What happened when they got the dynamic scoring, Matt?
18:00:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yeah, so the dynamic score actually raised the cost of the bill by about $400 billion.
18:06:
(Matt Iglesias)
Why did it do that?
18:07:
(Matt Iglesias)
Well, because it expands the deficit by trillions of dollars, which they think in the current climate will raise interest rates.
18:15:
(Matt Iglesias)
Importantly, I mean, this would raise interest rates throughout the economy, but it means that the federal government's interest rate costs will go up, and that swamps the growth impact.
18:24:
(Matt Iglesias)
that this bill is supposed to have.
18:27:
(Matt Iglesias)
One reason for that also is that the dynamic modelers see a very muted growth impact because the big pro-growth measures are temporary.
18:39:
(Matt Iglesias)
Bonus depreciation, interest rate limits, domestic research expensing, those are all extended through 2029.
18:46:
(Matt Iglesias)
So if you're talking about changing, like, the long-term trajectory of business investment—
18:51:
(Matt Iglesias)
A temporary extension doesn't necessarily move the needle that much.
18:55:
(Matt Iglesias)
If you're adding trillions of dollars to the debt in what's already still a somewhat inflationary environment with some upward pressure on interest rates, you create bigger costs for the federal government.
19:06:
(Matt Iglesias)
But I mean, also, I would say bigger costs for like...
19:09:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, if you want to get a mortgage, if you want to get a car loan, if you want to build a house, any kind of project like that.
19:16:
(Matt Iglesias)
And that's a big difference in 2017.
19:18:
(Matt Iglesias)
When Trump was president before, interest rates were super low.
19:22:
(Matt Iglesias)
So the kind of like professional deficit hawks were saying, oh, this is bad.
19:28:
(Matt Iglesias)
But the modeling was kind of like, it's probably fine.
19:30:
(Matt Iglesias)
But like now it's not fine.
19:32:
(Matt Iglesias)
The deficit is a serious issue and this makes it much worse.
19:36:
(Ezra Klein)
I have genuinely not seen a big tax cut bill fail a dynamic score like this.
19:43:
(Ezra Klein)
I know this has like a sort of naive question begging quality to it.
19:49:
(Ezra Klein)
But there is some world in which you would have expected that to get Republicans who are running a policy process here to like stop for a minute and
19:58:
(Ezra Klein)
and wonder if this bill is well-designed for the moment in which they are trying to drive it.
20:04:
(Ezra Klein)
Like, in theory, they care about the debt.
20:06:
(Ezra Klein)
In theory, they are trying to grow the economy.
20:07:
(Ezra Klein)
The fact that this gave them so little pause, aside from listening to Donald Trump and, like, paying off big donors, what they are even trying to achieve here becomes a little bit opaque.
20:20:
(Ezra Klein)
They're not going to get more people working.
20:21:
(Ezra Klein)
What is all this for?
20:24:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, Donald Trump, I think even his fans would acknowledge is not a super detail-oriented policy wonk.
20:34:
(Matt Iglesias)
He is a person with a certain kind of feel for the vibes in the electorate.
20:39:
(Matt Iglesias)
Some of this stuff, right, like the idea of, like, there should be no taxes on car loan interest rate payments, I think that's a terrible idea on the merits.
20:49:
(Matt Iglesias)
But I also acknowledge that, like, it probably sounds good to most people.
20:53:
(Matt Iglesias)
And so he kind of hit on some of this stuff over the course of the campaign trail.
20:57:
(Matt Iglesias)
And they're putting it in the bill.
21:00:
(Matt Iglesias)
And it really raises the cost, even though it doesn't relate to sort of the core objectives of Republican Party tax policy designers.
21:09:
(Matt Iglesias)
And, you know, one of the things I have often lamented about the Democratic Party in recent years is that it has lacked the kind of strong leadership that can sort of, like, make choices and put its stamp on things.
21:22:
(Matt Iglesias)
Republicans have very strong leadership in the form of Donald Trump, and that means that nobody wants to tell him
21:30:
(Matt Iglesias)
you know what, this overtime thing, we can't do it.
21:33:
(Matt Iglesias)
It's undermining our goals here.
21:35:
(Matt Iglesias)
It's going to backfire, even though it sounds good to people.
21:38:
(Matt Iglesias)
They don't really want to pick and choose between these provisions.
21:42:
(Matt Iglesias)
So they've come up with something that's just too big to pull off unless you want to make the spending cuts even bigger and even harsher, which already, I mean, they're facing a lot of pushback and
21:54:
(Matt Iglesias)
some dissension inside the caucus about what they are going to do.
21:57:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, if you took trillions of dollars more out of spending, you could make this work.
22:01:
(Matt Iglesias)
Once upon a time, Elon Musk was claiming that he was going to find $2 trillion worth of fraud in the federal government.
22:08:
(Matt Iglesias)
That didn't happen.
22:09:
(Matt Iglesias)
The difference between the state of the world, in which you can save hundreds of billions of dollars in fraudulent Social Security payments, and one in which you can't, should alter your policies.
22:19:
(Matt Iglesias)
But we're just, we're not in that mode.
22:21:
(Matt Iglesias)
This is a lot of money.
22:24:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, this is really a lot of money to put on the credit card at a time of high interest rates because I feel like
22:36:
(Ezra Klein)
There is such a tendency for the out-of-power coalition to emphasize the deficit and the consequences of unpaid-for spending or tax cuts.
22:47:
(Ezra Klein)
I'm always, even as I think about it, like trying to catch myself, am I just sort of doing motivated reasoning here?
22:53:
(Ezra Klein)
But the Biden administration really did pay for the Inflation Reduction Act.
22:58:
(Ezra Klein)
That really did have pay-fors in it.
23:00:
(Ezra Klein)
Barack Obama paid for the Affordable Care Act.
23:04:
(Ezra Klein)
How are you thinking about the debt and deficits right now?
23:08:
(Ezra Klein)
What is actually the problems and why is it actually different than maybe it was 10 years ago?
23:13:
(Ezra Klein)
And how much does this actually then matter layered on top of that?
23:20:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, I remember four years ago, we were talking about the American Rescue Plan, which was not paid for, you know, deliberately.
23:28:
(Matt Iglesias)
It was a stimulus measure.
23:29:
(Matt Iglesias)
And some people were saying, this costs way too much money.
23:32:
(Matt Iglesias)
It's too big.
23:33:
(Matt Iglesias)
And my thought at the time was interest rates have been super low, like forever, for basically my whole career.
23:42:
(Matt Iglesias)
So I, A, sort of just like don't believe that inflation and high interest rates can happen.
23:48:
(Matt Iglesias)
And B, if it does happen, the politics is just going to shift.
23:53:
(Matt Iglesias)
We're going to be back to where we were in 2011 when everybody was fanatically focused on deficit reduction.
23:59:
(Matt Iglesias)
And that might be good.
24:00:
(Matt Iglesias)
And I was just completely wrong about that.
24:02:
(Matt Iglesias)
Inflation did go up.
24:04:
(Matt Iglesias)
Interest rates went up to get inflation contained.
24:07:
(Matt Iglesias)
It became a serious kind of concern.
24:09:
(Matt Iglesias)
And then we got the IRA, which, sure, I mean, it was paid for, but it wasn't like a deficit reduction bill.
24:18:
(Matt Iglesias)
And then there was nothing.
24:20:
(Matt Iglesias)
There was no big speech about how, you know, we got to get everybody around the table and talk about things.
24:25:
(Matt Iglesias)
And Trump came back with just incredibly fiscally irresponsible proposals.
24:31:
(Matt Iglesias)
And it's weird, right?
24:33:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, everybody in politics, you ask anyone and they'll be like, voters are really upset about the cost of living, right?
24:40:
(Matt Iglesias)
And I get that it is a little bit complicated to explain to somebody why a giant deficit-increasing tax bill will raise your cost of living.
24:52:
(Matt Iglesias)
But, like, it will.
24:54:
(Matt Iglesias)
Factually.
24:54:
(Matt Iglesias)
How?
24:55:
(Matt Iglesias)
Because it's going to raise interest rates, right?
24:58:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, it's going to raise the cost of money.
24:59:
(Ezra Klein)
Why will it raise interest rates?
25:01:
(Ezra Klein)
Explain to me like I'm five.
25:03:
(Matt Iglesias)
All right, here we go.
25:04:
(Matt Iglesias)
So when the budget deficit goes up, the federal government needs to sell more debt.
25:10:
(Matt Iglesias)
And the federal government is the safest entity you could lend money to in the universe, certainly in the United States of America.
25:17:
(Matt Iglesias)
So however much money is sort of loaned to the federal government drains the pool of potential savings that could be lent to everybody else.
25:27:
(Matt Iglesias)
That's sort of one way to think about it.
25:29:
(Matt Iglesias)
Money will become scarcer.
25:30:
(Matt Iglesias)
Loanable money will become scarcer because the federal government's borrowing all of it.
25:34:
(Matt Iglesias)
Another way is to look at it through the inflation mechanism, right?
25:37:
(Matt Iglesias)
The gap between what the federal government spends and what it taxes is like extra money into the economy.
25:44:
(Matt Iglesias)
That has an inflationary impact, which the Federal Reserve then has to offset by keeping interest rates higher.
25:50:
(Matt Iglesias)
And so, you know, you have J.D.
25:52:
(Matt Iglesias)
Vance and Trump and others who are like screaming, like, Powell's got to get the interest rates down.
25:57:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know what, I think reasonable people can disagree.
25:59:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like, should there be a quarter-point rate cut next meeting or should there be no rate cut?
26:05:
(Matt Iglesias)
But if you borrow trillions of additional dollars, that's going to make it harder to make the case for those kind of rate cuts.
26:12:
(Matt Iglesias)
It's also going to make it harder for these short-term rates to pass through.
26:16:
(Matt Iglesias)
to the the longer term rates so you know if you're talking about young people who want to buy a house the sticker price of a house matters but the price of a mortgage also matters it's a huge influence on what you can afford to do in practice small business loans car loans you know large equipment um i don't really think people should be financing consumer purchases uh with credit card debt but a lot of people do
26:40:
(Matt Iglesias)
And so, you know, it's going to raise costs across the board for middle class people, take away health care from lower income people, but big strain on rural hospital systems.
26:50:
(Matt Iglesias)
We haven't talked about the energy provisions, which are going to make electricity probably more expensive in the face of rising demand.
26:57:
(Ezra Klein)
Let me come to the energy provisions in one second.
26:59:
(Ezra Klein)
The other thing I just want to emphasize that you said there is.
27:02:
(Ezra Klein)
When we tend to talk about cost of living in a bill like this, we tend to be talking about interest rates and inflation just as you did.
27:08:
(Ezra Klein)
I do just want to state the obvious, which is that if you were poor and you had Medicaid and now you don't, like your cost of living just went up.
27:19:
(Ezra Klein)
Health care just became much, much, much more expensive for you if you do not have some other form of equivalently subsidized and comprehensive health insurance sitting in your back pocket.
27:30:
(Ezra Klein)
If you were on food stamps, on SNAP, and you get thrown off the program because of these proposed cuts, food just became much more expensive for you.
27:40:
(Ezra Klein)
Republicans sometimes try to pretend that government transfers are not real, that the role they play in people's budgets is not real, but it is a real role.
27:52:
(Ezra Klein)
So the whole thing for a president who ran...
27:57:
(Ezra Klein)
promising to bring down the cost of living.
27:59:
(Ezra Klein)
And also, by the way, promise to balance the budget.
28:03:
(Ezra Klein)
It's just the scale of the dishonesty and the cruelty is so staggering.
28:12:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yeah, so there's a sort of robust debate happening about the health impact of Medicaid cuts.
28:19:
(Matt Iglesias)
The sort of lottery-style evidence tends to show a fairly muted health impact, but has a small sample size.
28:27:
(Matt Iglesias)
If you look at different research designs that let you get more statistical power—
28:32:
(Matt Iglesias)
but some more questions about causation, it tends to show that many lives will be endangered by these Medicaid cuts.
28:40:
(Matt Iglesias)
But what even the skeptical analysis shows is that the financial benefit of Medicaid is large.
28:46:
(Matt Iglesias)
And I think it's important for affluent people to not lose sight of that.
28:50:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like, my son has been to see the doctor a lot of times in the course of his life.
28:56:
(Matt Iglesias)
He's never actually had a serious medical problem.
28:59:
(Matt Iglesias)
If we had just been unable to get him medical treatment all these times, I think in the grand scheme of things, he would have been fine.
29:05:
(Matt Iglesias)
But, like, the anxiety to loving parents of not being able to take your kid to the doctor when he's sick is extreme.
29:13:
(Matt Iglesias)
If you had any ability to pay for medical care for your sick child, like, you would do it.
29:19:
(Matt Iglesias)
And so what we see is that Medicaid expansion states reduce medical debt
29:23:
(Matt Iglesias)
by about $1,400 to $2,300 per person.
29:29:
(Matt Iglesias)
Because, like, people try to get health care when they feel that they need it.
29:33:
(Ezra Klein)
Per person on Medicaid or just per person in the state?
29:36:
(Matt Iglesias)
Per person on Medicaid.
29:38:
(Matt Iglesias)
The other thing is that you get uncompensated care in hospitals, right?
29:41:
(Matt Iglesias)
Because we don't actually have a system in the United States where we're going to just, like, leave you on the street corner.
29:47:
(Matt Iglesias)
if you're having a stroke, something like that.
29:49:
(Matt Iglesias)
So, you know, you are shifting costs onto foregone care by poor people, medical debt by poor people, uncompensated care for hospitals, which is then paid for by the insured population.
30:01:
(Matt Iglesias)
And there's this threat that hospitals will just go out of business.
30:05:
(Matt Iglesias)
I'm in Maine right now, in a very rural area.
30:09:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, hospitals don't have a ton of customers here.
30:12:
(Matt Iglesias)
If they lose care,
30:13:
(Matt Iglesias)
10-15% of their customer base and have higher uncompensated care burdens.
30:19:
(Matt Iglesias)
Some of the facilities will just close.
30:21:
(Matt Iglesias)
Senate Republicans have been talking about creating some kind of hospital bailout fund to prevent this, but it seems crazy to me to address business model problems for hospitals by giving them direct payments to stay in business even though they're not treating people rather than to just let people get treatment.
32:52:
(Ezra Klein)
I do want to talk about the energy credits.
32:54:
(Ezra Klein)
Yeah.
32:55:
(Ezra Klein)
Tell me about that side of the bill.
32:57:
(Matt Iglesias)
Sure.
32:57:
(Matt Iglesias)
So the Inflation Reduction Act created a lot of tax credits for different kinds of zero carbon energy.
33:05:
(Matt Iglesias)
So they took what were existing investment and production tax credits for wind and solar, somewhat different ones for geothermal, somewhat different ones for nuclear.
33:14:
(Matt Iglesias)
They folded it all together into a technology neutral tax credit
33:19:
(Matt Iglesias)
program that was made permanent.
33:21:
(Matt Iglesias)
Republicans in the House have proposed basically just scrapping all of this.
33:27:
(Matt Iglesias)
So that would leave us with, like, less financial support for clean energy than we had in the previous Trump administration.
33:34:
(Matt Iglesias)
So the context for this is that
33:37:
(Matt Iglesias)
Electricity demand is going up a lot, primarily because of data center construction.
33:41:
(Matt Iglesias)
The pipeline for building new natural gas turbines is sort of bottlenecked.
33:48:
(Matt Iglesias)
The actual turbines are not available.
33:51:
(Matt Iglesias)
Most of the new electricity that is coming onto the grid in the United States is utility-scale solar or onshore wind.
33:59:
(Matt Iglesias)
There's going to be less of that built.
34:01:
(Matt Iglesias)
If the house person...
34:02:
(Matt Iglesias)
were to pass.
34:04:
(Matt Iglesias)
You would also cut off sort of promising speculative research in sort of clean firm technology.
34:10:
(Matt Iglesias)
But so, yeah, I mean, we're going to have less but dirtier electricity and higher bills.
34:16:
(Ezra Klein)
There's also a dimension to this where these were
34:19:
(Ezra Klein)
promising sources of investment.
34:21:
(Ezra Klein)
I was reading a story the other day about how this is throwing battery investment into some turmoil.
34:27:
(Ezra Klein)
That was a pretty bright part of the U.S. economy.
34:30:
(Ezra Klein)
We've done a lot to begin building the supply chains.
34:32:
(Ezra Klein)
We consider them important.
34:33:
(Ezra Klein)
We also consider the solar panel supply chains important.
34:37:
(Ezra Klein)
And one way that we were inducing those chains to grow in the U.S. and to grow in sort of like friendly countries was using these tax credits.
34:45:
(Ezra Klein)
So there was always like a little bit
34:47:
(Ezra Klein)
of a lot being done by this part of the IRA, right?
34:49:
(Ezra Klein)
It had these intense by American provisions because we were trying to like onshore this technology, but also we were trying to install a lot of the technology.
34:56:
(Ezra Klein)
But if you rip this up, I mean, you have the increasing climate change risk and consequence.
35:03:
(Ezra Klein)
You have the increase in electricity volatility and possibly in electricity bills.
35:10:
(Ezra Klein)
Then you also have the seeding
35:13:
(Ezra Klein)
Yet more to China, which is investing just massively in solar technology and battery technology.
35:20:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, you look at charts of Chinese utility-scale solar installation, and it is astonishing.
35:28:
(Ezra Klein)
This just has this quality of destroying, like, a useful part of the economy, right?
35:35:
(Ezra Klein)
just because they ideologically don't really like renewables and didn't like the IRA?
35:39:
(Matt Iglesias)
The battery stuff especially, you know, because batteries have just gotten a lot better over the course of the past 5, 10, 15, 20 years.
35:47:
(Matt Iglesias)
Batteries are mostly made in China.
35:49:
(Matt Iglesias)
They are mostly made through China-dominated supply chains.
35:52:
(Matt Iglesias)
This has been a sort of Republican critique of electric car promotion, that you're just going to make the United States more dependent on a Chinese supply chain.
36:02:
(Matt Iglesias)
Democrats tried to address that concern by putting money into creating an American supply chain for batteries.
36:11:
(Matt Iglesias)
Republicans are not assuaged by that and now just want to get rid of the supply chain.
36:15:
(Matt Iglesias)
Leaving aside the electric cars, right, I mean, if you look at the war in Ukraine, if you look at the fighting between Israel and Iran, battery-powered drones—
36:26:
(Matt Iglesias)
or I think very clearly sort of the future of warfare.
36:29:
(Matt Iglesias)
It is genuinely dangerous for the United States to cede battery technology entirely to the People's Republic of China.
36:38:
(Matt Iglesias)
It is probably not viable to just try to have like a military-only batteries industry, because like the batteries that are in military drones are not special.
36:49:
(Matt Iglesias)
And so if you have a good civilian industry, you can have a good military industry.
36:53:
(Matt Iglesias)
Also, the amount of money at stake specifically there is just not very big.
36:59:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, a lot of it seems sort of cultural identity politics.
37:03:
(Matt Iglesias)
Trump claimed in his first campaign that he was going to bring back the American coal industry.
37:08:
(Matt Iglesias)
That just like completely didn't happen during his first term.
37:11:
(Matt Iglesias)
But he's like, he's making another run at it.
37:14:
(Matt Iglesias)
They're going to classify coal as a critical mineral.
37:17:
(Matt Iglesias)
And they are seemingly trying to like cut off
37:19:
(Matt Iglesias)
all other potential forms of energy other than coal.
37:24:
(Matt Iglesias)
And wind in particular is really big in red states.
37:29:
(Matt Iglesias)
Iowa, Kansas.
37:31:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, these are just like places with big, empty, open space that are good for building wind.
37:35:
(Matt Iglesias)
So I don't even know.
37:37:
(Matt Iglesias)
I don't know that there's any logic to it other than just kind of effective disdain for batteries and for renewables.
37:45:
(Ezra Klein)
They also seemed, and you can tell me if this is still true in the current versions of the bill, but they seem to be causing havoc in nuclear loan guarantees and subsidies, things that might support things like advanced geothermal.
37:58:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, there are a bunch of...
38:00:
(Ezra Klein)
more...
38:01:
(Ezra Klein)
I don't know how to describe this.
38:03:
(Ezra Klein)
I feel like in environmental politics there's this weird cut where there are a couple clean energy technologies that are on the other side of, like, the left-right culture divide and nuclear and advanced geothermal were both there.
38:16:
(Ezra Klein)
But they seem to be, like, slashing into that, too, the sort of...
38:21:
(Ezra Klein)
center-right or right-wing innovation types I know have seemed very very very unhappy about what this bill is doing to the kinds of energy that they support and get excited about
38:33:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yeah, the House bill in particular does.
38:36:
(Matt Iglesias)
The Senate bill reflects more input from those kind of people via Lisa Murkowski and other kinds of things like that.
38:44:
(Matt Iglesias)
But in the House bill, they were going to basically get rid of the Energy Department's loan program office, which has been supporting most nuclear development, and get rid of tax credits for geothermal, things like that.
38:56:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know,
38:57:
(Matt Iglesias)
Those technologies, Republicans sort of like them more than renewables, at least in principle.
39:03:
(Matt Iglesias)
But they're very speculative, right?
39:05:
(Matt Iglesias)
So the provision of subsidy to keep investment flowing into those industries is very important.
39:12:
(Matt Iglesias)
Because, like, you can't actually make money right now investing in advanced geothermal.
39:18:
(Matt Iglesias)
there's the hope that in the future, as they sort of adapt drilling technologies to the case of hot rocks, that this will, like, unleash incredible amounts of clean energy in the long run.
39:33:
(Matt Iglesias)
But, like, somebody needs to drill the money-losing wells today.
39:37:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, it's interesting.
39:39:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, there's a...
39:40:
(Matt Iglesias)
We say that Republicans like nuclear and geothermal a lot more than they like renewables.
39:46:
(Matt Iglesias)
And I think that's true of sort of D.C. Republicans, Republican Party theoreticians.
39:52:
(Matt Iglesias)
But, you know, the Republican Party is very attuned to the fossil fuel industry as such.
39:57:
(Matt Iglesias)
And the natural gas industry is, I would say, more fearful than...
40:02:
(Matt Iglesias)
of nuclear and geothermal than they are of wind and solar because gas sort of complements renewables, right?
40:09:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like when the sun doesn't shine, you just turn on the natural gas plants.
40:13:
(Matt Iglesias)
The whole virtue of clean firm technology is that you don't need to turn it off when the sun isn't shining.
40:19:
(Matt Iglesias)
And that's the stuff that could actually put fossil fuels out of business for that reason.
40:23:
(Matt Iglesias)
And so on an interest group level, there's as much or more hostility to those kind of clean firm technologies, even though like theoretically Republicans are more open to it.
40:32:
(Ezra Klein)
Back up to inauguration.
40:34:
(Ezra Klein)
You've got all the tech CEOs arrayed at the inauguration.
40:38:
(Ezra Klein)
If you're listening to J.D.
40:40:
(Ezra Klein)
Vance interviews he's given, he's very pro-nuclear.
40:44:
(Ezra Klein)
There's influence from people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who have been pro-technology and they want a lot of innovation.
40:49:
(Ezra Klein)
And Musk is known for rocket ships and electric cars and batteries are very important to him.
40:54:
(Ezra Klein)
And that sort of promised like futuristic Trump administration, what I would have called like reactionary futurism, Mark Andreessen, Joe Lonsdale, right?
41:03:
(Ezra Klein)
Like, I think the sort of folk understanding of where their ideology had gone is like, we need an authoritarian in order to drive us past...
41:13:
(Ezra Klein)
like, the weak, risk-averse, interest group-fractured mess of politics and into the techno-futuristic technocracy that we've all been imagining.
41:26:
(Ezra Klein)
Like, that just has all seemed really weak, right?
41:28:
(Ezra Klein)
Like, Elon Musk went around and, like, cut into USAID, which is horrible, and, like, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but did not build...
41:37:
(Ezra Klein)
a government capable of innovating in some different way or getting to space a lot faster.
41:41:
(Ezra Klein)
All this stuff where you could have imagined a sort of techno-futuristic right, you know, the dark abundance right.
41:47:
(Ezra Klein)
It's just not happening.
41:50:
(Ezra Klein)
You're just not seeing it.
41:52:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yeah, I mean, some of that is, I think, the slipshod nature of Doge, you know, which was put together by people who didn't really know very much about the federal government and didn't seem inclined to, like, read any books or things like that.
42:08:
(Matt Iglesias)
But, you know, I think that the hyper-partisan nature of Trump's politics basically makes it impossible to do these kind of good government reforms or futurism, things like that.
42:21:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, something either party finds, right, is that if you're trying to do things on a party-line vote—
42:27:
(Matt Iglesias)
in an era of high polarization.
42:30:
(Matt Iglesias)
You are working with very thin margins.
42:33:
(Matt Iglesias)
And that means you can't alienate any of the people who are inside your coalition.
42:39:
(Matt Iglesias)
And so you have to do everything as these kind of buy-offs.
42:44:
(Matt Iglesias)
And that just makes it really hard to, like, advance, you know, a futuristic vision.
42:50:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like, you can't drive...
42:53:
(Ezra Klein)
I want to push on this because that's true up until Donald Trump gives a damn himself.
43:03:
(Ezra Klein)
And then it's like RFK Jr., a Democrat until 45 minutes ago, can be head of HHS.
43:09:
(Ezra Klein)
Tulsi Gabbard can be head of national intelligence.
43:12:
(Ezra Klein)
And if Donald Trump wanted there to be big subsidies for nuclear in this bill, they would be there.
43:19:
(Ezra Klein)
I do think this reflects a sort of mixture of, I think the dynamic you're saying is sort of true, but I think that dynamic reflects a kind of a drift, right?
43:29:
(Ezra Klein)
Those people are there, but in the end, they did not maintain power.
43:33:
(Ezra Klein)
You don't hear that much about Mark Andreessen at Mar-a-Lago anymore.
43:36:
(Ezra Klein)
Elon Musk, very famously, is now not on the inside of the Trump administration.
43:41:
(Ezra Klein)
And Trump himself was never actually ideologically bought in.
43:45:
(Ezra Klein)
And J.D.
43:46:
(Ezra Klein)
Vance, I guess, doesn't care or doesn't care enough to engage or doesn't want to, like, talk to Donald Trump about it or something.
43:51:
(Ezra Klein)
But the entire political economy of Trumpism is that you don't have a strong policy process.
43:58:
(Ezra Klein)
But if some random person can get Donald Trump to like something, Donald Trump can make the rest of the Republican Party do anything he wants, including support, like, crazy tariffs they would have never touched at other times.
44:10:
(Ezra Klein)
He's just not because he doesn't, he's not engaged on any of this or doesn't care or actually opposes it or something.
44:18:
(Matt Iglesias)
Well, I mean, there has never been, I mean, you mentioned tariffs, right?
44:21:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, tariffs is the economic policy topic on which Trump has persistently fought with sort of conventional Republican Party thinking over a course of like 10 years now.
44:35:
(Matt Iglesias)
And that's just like antithetical to this idea of like a more dynamic American economy.
44:43:
(Matt Iglesias)
And the fact that
44:44:
(Matt Iglesias)
There was like a sect of futurists who were so annoyed with Joe Biden that they decided Trump was going to be their champion.
44:52:
(Matt Iglesias)
It never really made sense in light of Trump's, like, profound commitment to trade protectionism.
44:58:
(Matt Iglesias)
Not just because trade is important on its own terms, but because, like, the whole debate of trade protection is, like, pretty literally—
45:06:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like, should we say that the costs of economic change are worth paying for the benefits of growth and dynamism, or should we not?
45:18:
(Matt Iglesias)
And, like, Trump has been very clear that as long as the people paying the costs meet a certain Trumpy vision of, like, a kind of person who he likes—
45:28:
(Matt Iglesias)
He doesn't want change, right?
45:30:
(Matt Iglesias)
So, like, he supported the longshoremen union in opposing port automation because he's a longstanding personal relationship with the head of the East Coast stock workers.
45:40:
(Matt Iglesias)
And because, you know, it's like burly white guys, like the kind of people he likes.
45:44:
(Matt Iglesias)
He likes the coal mining industry, right?
45:46:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like, it's very obsolete.
45:48:
(Matt Iglesias)
But he doesn't want it to be put out of business by change, by dynamics.
45:52:
(Matt Iglesias)
I think, you know, one should have known that on some level.
45:54:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yeah.
45:55:
(Matt Iglesias)
But the other thing I would say is that everything with Trump ends up being closer to baseline Republican Party politics than it kind of seems at first glance, right?
46:06:
(Matt Iglesias)
So like, Tulsi Gabbard is in his DNI, but we bombed Iran.
46:09:
(Matt Iglesias)
RFK Jr. is in his HHS secretary, but like, we're not like regulating the fast food industry.
46:17:
(Ezra Klein)
No, we're cutting Medicaid.
46:18:
(Matt Iglesias)
Right, like there's aspects of like Maha that kind of remind me of like an Ezra Klein column from 15 years ago, but none of that is happening.
46:26:
(Matt Iglesias)
There's no like actual taking on agribusiness concerns, driving transformation of the food system to make people healthier.
46:34:
(Matt Iglesias)
There's no aspect of Trumpism that's like, I'm going to take on the stakeholders in conservative politics in like a really meaningful way.
46:45:
(Matt Iglesias)
There's kind of, you know, there's a lot of personalism.
46:47:
(Matt Iglesias)
There's like, I can jam this no tax on tips thing onto the political agenda.
46:54:
(Matt Iglesias)
But I'm not going to say we're going to do no tax on tips instead of a business tax cut.
47:00:
(Matt Iglesias)
We're not doing choice-making populism where the Chamber of Commerce is like, no, Donald, like, you can't do that.
47:09:
(Matt Iglesias)
We need our business tax cuts.
47:10:
(Matt Iglesias)
It's just kind of yes and, hope it all works out for the best.
47:14:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, Trump feels that it all worked out in the first term.
47:17:
(Matt Iglesias)
People liked that first Trump economy.
47:19:
(Ezra Klein)
Here's the thing about Donald Trump.
47:21:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, everybody knows that he's got just an incredible intuition for public opinion and for what's popular and what's unpopular.
47:28:
(Ezra Klein)
So, like, granted, this bill has a lot of bad ideas, but at least, Matt, it's really popular in polling, right?
47:33:
(Ezra Klein)
Like a huge political winner.
47:35:
(Ezra Klein)
No?
47:36:
(Matt Iglesias)
No.
47:36:
(Matt Iglesias)
No, I mean, the polling is terrible.
47:38:
(Matt Iglesias)
People really don't like Medicaid cuts.
47:41:
(Matt Iglesias)
This is, like, actually a big transformation of politics, is that Medicaid has become dramatically more popular over the past 10 years.
47:49:
(Matt Iglesias)
There's a lot of people who have had Medicaid in the past, or who, like, have a friend or a family member who's on Medicaid.
47:56:
(Matt Iglesias)
And they basically like it.
47:57:
(Matt Iglesias)
This has become a popular program as there's been class realignment.
48:03:
(Matt Iglesias)
As rich people become Democrats, they sort of still feel sentimental about the poor.
48:07:
(Matt Iglesias)
And as poor people become Republicans, they still like having health insurance.
48:11:
(Matt Iglesias)
So this has become, like, really toxically unpopular in a kind of striking way.
48:17:
(Matt Iglesias)
But it hasn't been the subject of a lot of attention.
48:20:
(Matt Iglesias)
I would not say that the dominant story of Trump's first six months in government has been the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
48:27:
(Ezra Klein)
Yeah, so I really—it is extremely unpopular.
48:31:
(Ezra Klein)
And I am actually surprised how unpopular it is because of how little attention it's gotten.
48:35:
(Ezra Klein)
—
50:13:
(Ezra Klein)
So did you hear about Dave?
50:27:
(Ezra Klein)
So,
50:28:
(Ezra Klein)
You and I have talked a lot over the years about what gets called popularism and sort of your argument that big problem for the Democrats is that they don't take enough popular positions or abandon enough unpopular positions.
50:39:
(Ezra Klein)
And that like sort of one of the strengths of Donald Trump is that he has done a bunch of that, moderating on Medicare, moderating on Social Security.
50:45:
(Ezra Klein)
But there's always been this other question, right, which is even if you are taking a popular or unpopular position, how much attention is that position getting?
50:53:
(Ezra Klein)
Like, what is politics about?
50:55:
(Ezra Klein)
Is it about your good issues or is it about your bad issues?
50:58:
(Ezra Klein)
And one of the sort of arguments you've been making about Democrats in the past month or so is that they are not doing enough or not succeeding in doing enough to make politics about this bill, which should not be a crazy thing for politics to be about.
51:15:
(Ezra Klein)
Right.
51:15:
(Ezra Klein)
This is a five trillion dollar, depending on how you count it, bill that is actually going to be the signature legislation of Donald Trump's term.
51:23:
(Ezra Klein)
So walk me through that critique.
51:25:
(Ezra Klein)
And is that a problem with the Democrats, a problem with the media, a problem with like the voters who aren't paying attention?
51:30:
(Ezra Klein)
Like, how do you understand the sort of failure of this bill to become the thing we are talking about?
51:36:
(Matt Iglesias)
It's a mixed bag.
51:38:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, I do think obviously on some level, it's just harder to get people engaged in a discussion of like JCT dynamic scoring and like Medicaid eligibility rules than something like
51:50:
(Matt Iglesias)
were deploying Marines to the streets of Los Angeles.
51:54:
(Matt Iglesias)
That being said, like eight years ago, Affordable Care Act repeal was a really, really big deal.
51:59:
(Matt Iglesias)
And there were big protests about it.
52:02:
(Matt Iglesias)
And a lot of that was that there was a healthcare advocacy infrastructure that Democrats had built up during the sort of ACA years and that continued to exist there.
52:11:
(Matt Iglesias)
A lot of that advocacy infrastructure has withered over the past few years, both because Democrats are more focused on climate change, but also because the Medicare for all wars have become a sort of like an ugly pain point for people.
52:25:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, if you stand up and say, like, I really want to talk about health care, you're going to get a bunch of people saying, like, we should do Medicare for all.
52:34:
(Matt Iglesias)
And like now you're fighting with people to your left instead of like making a point about Republicans.
52:39:
(Matt Iglesias)
That said, like, party leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are talking about this a lot.
52:44:
(Matt Iglesias)
They are constantly talking about how they want to get more people talking about it.
52:48:
(Matt Iglesias)
They are trying to get their colleagues in Congress to talk about it more.
52:51:
(Matt Iglesias)
I think a big problem is that the Democratic Party is leaderless at the moment.
52:57:
(Matt Iglesias)
The leadership that they have is held in low regard by their own voters.
53:02:
(Matt Iglesias)
And there is a lot of interest in factional infighting.
53:06:
(Matt Iglesias)
We can have debates about abundance.
53:08:
(Matt Iglesias)
We can have debates about Zoran Mondani.
53:10:
(Matt Iglesias)
There's a lot of stuff that—and, like, me too.
53:13:
(Ezra Klein)
Like, my Twitter feed is national.
53:16:
(Ezra Klein)
And there's a lot more debate about the NYC mayoral primary right now in it than about the actually national Big Beautiful bill.
53:24:
(Matt Iglesias)
Right.
53:25:
(Matt Iglesias)
And it's because, in a genuine way—
53:29:
(Matt Iglesias)
Democrats are interested in stories that have implications for factional infighting.
53:35:
(Matt Iglesias)
And I think one of the ironies of this bill is that, like, Democrats all agree about it.
53:39:
(Matt Iglesias)
Jared Golden, Marie Glusenkamp-Perez, Adam Gray, the most moderate members in the House are like, this is terrible.
53:46:
(Matt Iglesias)
We're all voting no.
53:47:
(Matt Iglesias)
The most liberal members also don't like it.
53:50:
(Matt Iglesias)
So there's nothing...
53:52:
(Matt Iglesias)
to fight about.
53:54:
(Matt Iglesias)
And conservative people are pretty disengaged from it too.
53:58:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like they're not making a lot of noise about it, which I think is tactically savvy on their part.
54:04:
(Matt Iglesias)
You can say it's a failure of the media.
54:05:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like I kind of wish that, you know, the mainstream media would like only run articles about things that I think are important.
54:12:
(Matt Iglesias)
But also like we're doing business here.
54:14:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like my articles on this subject do not perform as well as my articles on other things that have...
54:22:
(Ezra Klein)
Let me ask you about that, because we both covered, we were at Vox at this time, we both covered the Trump administration in its first term, their effort to repeal Obamacare.
54:33:
(Ezra Klein)
Yeah.
54:34:
(Ezra Klein)
And maybe I'm misremembering this, but I remember that as very dominant news for an extended period of time.
54:41:
(Ezra Klein)
And I'm not sure if that's because there was less that happened in the middle of it, like us bombing Iran.
54:46:
(Ezra Klein)
I don't know if it was because it was a clearer narrative.
54:51:
(Ezra Klein)
I have this view that these massive omnibus bills have become harder for people to talk about because there's just too much going on in them.
54:58:
(Ezra Klein)
I think this is actually a problem for Build Back Better,
55:00:
(Ezra Klein)
which Democrats had trouble messaging and trouble getting people to think about because it just did 80 different things.
55:06:
(Ezra Klein)
I think it was a little bit true with the Inflation Production Act.
55:08:
(Ezra Klein)
But there does really feel like there's a difference between how central the Obamacare appeal effort was in Trump 1 and the way attention feels like it slides off of this in Trump 2.
55:22:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yeah, and, you know, I mean, I think the analogy to the Biden-era megabills is a good one.
55:27:
(Matt Iglesias)
And at the time, Democrats at least were claiming to believe that if people were paying a lot of attention to the contents of Build Back Better, like, they would love it and there would be this outpouring of public enthusiasm for them and they were struggling to get attention to a bill that was a very miscellaneous hodgepodge of things—
55:47:
(Matt Iglesias)
I would say that's probably working in Trump's favor at the moment right now, that people are having trouble sort of getting their minds around an initiative that's not very popular.
55:58:
(Matt Iglesias)
There's always this idea, like, is Trump trying to distract our attention from things?
56:02:
(Matt Iglesias)
And, like, probably they didn't have a war with Iran for the purposes of distracting our attention from this legislative fight.
56:10:
(Matt Iglesias)
But that is what happens, right?
56:13:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like when you do big dramatic things on other issues and just kind of say, you know what, I'm going to trust that congressional leaders can get this done without me spending a lot of time driving attention to it.
56:26:
(Matt Iglesias)
I think that may be a good strategy.
56:28:
(Matt Iglesias)
Trump, during the ACA repeal fight, really pivoted his own messaging to, like, talking a lot about the need to do this and, like, staging big splashy events with House Republicans, things like that, because he believed as—
56:43:
(Matt Iglesias)
Presidents tend to—I mean, you've written about this many times over the years, but there's, like, a persistent belief that if the president talks a lot about something, that's going to cause people to want to do what the president is saying.
56:54:
(Matt Iglesias)
And all the evidence is that that's not true.
56:57:
(Matt Iglesias)
And I think Trump is pretty wisely just not talking about this and saying, like, it's party politics.
57:03:
(Matt Iglesias)
He can convey his opinions to senators without making it a dominant story in the news.
57:10:
(Ezra Klein)
At the same time, I've been thinking about how unbelievably uninspired the Democratic messaging is on this.
57:17:
(Ezra Klein)
You know, when I was prepping for this conversation and I'm watching Hakeem Jeffries on the House floor, like holding up an Elmo puppet or Chuck Schumer...
57:27:
(Ezra Klein)
Whether the C-SPAN messaging is good or bad, that's just, like, not the kind of thing that breaks through.
57:32:
(Ezra Klein)
Democrats have a lot of money in their campaign accounts.
57:34:
(Ezra Klein)
You could imagine really, really slick videos where you're talking with, you know, you're doing the kind of man on the street thing with people who use Medicaid in very Trumpy districts, talking about, like, what Medicaid means to them, what it's done for them, and, like, how they would feel if it was...
57:51:
(Ezra Klein)
slash to the bone or at these rural hospitals.
57:54:
(Ezra Klein)
Like, I'm not saying everything would break through, but it doesn't seem impossible to me if you had millions of dollars to message things that you could come up with some things that would dramatize what is happening here, right, in ways that might get some attention.
58:09:
(Ezra Klein)
Democrats and Republicans seem to have allowed this to become an inside game in Congress, right?
58:16:
(Ezra Klein)
Yeah.
58:16:
(Ezra Klein)
And inside games are not that attractive to people to cover.
58:20:
(Ezra Klein)
And that's not been true on, say, the immigration stuff where Democrats are going getting like arrested by ICE because they are trying to create mass mobilization events.
58:30:
(Ezra Klein)
I feel like the news media, we're always like, well, is the thing going to pass?
58:33:
(Ezra Klein)
And if it seems like they have the votes, the coverage kind of turns down because we just sort of cover uncertainty and conflict.
58:39:
(Ezra Klein)
But there needs to be something.
58:42:
(Ezra Klein)
But it does not feel impossible to me to create interesting content about this.
58:48:
(Ezra Klein)
But...
58:49:
(Ezra Klein)
everybody just feels like they're playing by real congressional rules in a way that, you know, then the attention goes to the things that do not work that way and have more compelling visuals and mass participation in them.
59:02:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, I think that the...
59:06:
(Matt Iglesias)
Younger, especially, members, the more media-savvy members, but just a lot of the sort of safe district members are not serving their caucus goals very well.
59:19:
(Matt Iglesias)
They are putting a lot of time into thinking of ways to...
59:25:
(Matt Iglesias)
to be creative about the immigration issue and be seen as, like, fighting Trump on the level of tyranny.
59:32:
(Matt Iglesias)
We had these nationwide No Kings protests that was, like, very successful.
59:37:
(Matt Iglesias)
That was well organized.
59:38:
(Matt Iglesias)
It got attention.
59:40:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, there were good visuals, things like that.
59:42:
(Matt Iglesias)
Those could have been No Medicaid Cuts protests, but they weren't.
59:47:
(Matt Iglesias)
We know that the democracy message has, like, fallen flat in the Trump districts, right?
59:55:
(Matt Iglesias)
Whereas the healthcare stuff is, like, shocking to Trump voters.
59:58:
(Matt Iglesias)
It's new information.
59:59:
(Matt Iglesias)
It directs them firsthand.
60:01:
(Matt Iglesias)
And then if you ask the kind of frontline members, what are you most comfortable talking about?
60:06:
(Matt Iglesias)
It is Medicaid.
60:08:
(Matt Iglesias)
It's OBBBA.
60:09:
(Matt Iglesias)
They're like, eh, on this immigration stuff.
60:11:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, I think that there is...
60:14:
(Matt Iglesias)
blame to be leveled at Schumer and Jeffries for just a kind of lack of creativity on their own messaging, a lack of skill, things like that.
60:23:
(Matt Iglesias)
But also, there are many dimensions of political efficacy.
60:27:
(Matt Iglesias)
I don't think either of those are guys who were, like, ever known as, like, the viral video guys.
60:32:
(Matt Iglesias)
And, you know, the members who are sort of gaining clout inside the coalition are finding that the way to gain clout is by doing advocacy on sort of more post-material things that I think are more engaging to Democratic donors.
60:48:
(Matt Iglesias)
And I don't think it's serving the country well.
60:50:
(Matt Iglesias)
I don't think it's serving the party all that well.
60:54:
(Matt Iglesias)
When Cory Booker did his talking filibuster, that was primarily focused on these— I mean, obviously, he talked about a lot of things because he was going for 24 hours.
61:03:
(Matt Iglesias)
But, like, his key message— 25.
61:06:
(Matt Iglesias)
His key message point was about Medicaid and Medicare.
61:11:
(Matt Iglesias)
So a lot of this, I think, does go back to this factional argument, right?
61:14:
(Matt Iglesias)
It's like Democrats in 2017—
61:17:
(Matt Iglesias)
I think, felt self-confident about the Democratic Party.
61:21:
(Matt Iglesias)
And we're like, you know what?
61:23:
(Matt Iglesias)
What brings us together is healthcare, and we're going to talk about that.
61:27:
(Matt Iglesias)
And now there's like a lot of uncertainty, a lot of depression, a lot of infighting.
61:32:
(Matt Iglesias)
And so it's like, you know what brings us together is healthcare.
61:34:
(Matt Iglesias)
So like, that's boring.
61:36:
(Matt Iglesias)
And like, we need to fight with each other.
61:39:
(Ezra Klein)
You can tell me this is something you're saying, but at least something I'm taking out of what you're saying or feels true to me, which is that a lot of what is engaging Democrats and liberals, and certainly abundance has been part of this, is like a working backwards from 2028.
61:52:
(Ezra Klein)
I feel Democrats, their mind is not even in 2026 in the midterms.
61:57:
(Ezra Klein)
It's in 2028.
61:58:
(Ezra Klein)
They're sort of disassociating in many ways from like this moment or Zora and Mamdani maybe being an exception to that.
62:04:
(Ezra Klein)
People are interested in Mamdani not because they care so much about the New York City mayoralty, but it's like maybe he means that in the future, we're going to have all the kinds of Democrats.
62:13:
(Ezra Klein)
If you're a democratic socialist and we actually want like running the party, right?
62:16:
(Ezra Klein)
People are doing a lot of like projecting forward.
62:19:
(Matt Iglesias)
Right, like, Mamdami holds forth the possibility that in the future, Democrats will break with the longstanding bipartisan pro-Israel consensus.
62:29:
(Matt Iglesias)
That's interesting.
62:30:
(Matt Iglesias)
You look at, like, the New Jersey gubernatorial primary.
62:34:
(Matt Iglesias)
It was just a bunch of Democrats running.
62:36:
(Matt Iglesias)
Mikey Sherrill won, and, like, good for her.
62:37:
(Matt Iglesias)
I like her.
62:38:
(Matt Iglesias)
She's against Medicaid cuts.
62:39:
(Matt Iglesias)
But, like, so is everybody, right?
62:41:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like, it's just about New Jersey, and therefore people are appropriately not interested unless they happen to live in New Jersey.
62:48:
(Matt Iglesias)
But what happens between now and 2028 is important for millions of people.
62:55:
(Matt Iglesias)
And it would be good to get some more focus and some more attention on it, even though it doesn't connect to any of these blue sky, what is the future of Democrats?
63:07:
(Matt Iglesias)
Because everyone just agrees that the future of Democrats is that they're going to support progressive taxation and a social safety net.
63:14:
(Matt Iglesias)
But I actually think that's important.
63:15:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like, that's the actual foundation of the contemporary Democratic Party.
63:19:
(Ezra Klein)
One of the critiques I got over the past couple of months that I had not been expecting is people being like, Abundance doesn't talk about things like Medicaid and universal health care.
63:27:
(Ezra Klein)
So that shows you don't...
63:28:
(Ezra Klein)
It's like, no, no, I just took that as settled.
63:30:
(Ezra Klein)
I just didn't think...
63:31:
(Ezra Klein)
I didn't need to edit my support for Medicaid or for universal health care.
63:34:
(Matt Iglesias)
But I mean, it's a great example.
63:36:
(Matt Iglesias)
If you would put...
63:37:
(Matt Iglesias)
a chapter in the book where you were like, Medicaid is good and we should have incremental expansions of healthcare access, people would have read it and be like, that's a boring chapter.
63:46:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like, why is that in the book, right?
63:48:
(Matt Iglesias)
It's not good content to just sort of reiterate Democratic Party conventional wisdom.
63:54:
(Matt Iglesias)
But...
63:55:
(Matt Iglesias)
There's millions of people with health care on the line, and it is important to find ways to talk about it, find ways to get people engaged with it.
64:03:
(Matt Iglesias)
But there is, as you say, like so much investment in what does it mean for 2028?
64:07:
(Matt Iglesias)
What are the prospects for generational change in the Democratic Party?
64:11:
(Matt Iglesias)
That's interesting to people.
64:13:
(Matt Iglesias)
But again, it has like nothing to do with Medicaid.
64:14:
(Ezra Klein)
Yeah, I've honestly heard more about the David Hogg infighting around the Democratic Party and primarying older Democrats.
64:21:
(Ezra Klein)
It's funny, it's just not a thing that has...
64:24:
(Ezra Klein)
I've been thinking a lot about the dynamics that sustain attention.
64:26:
(Ezra Klein)
You get attention on one thing.
64:28:
(Ezra Klein)
And so there have been plenty of good tweets on this or a video or a floor speech.
64:33:
(Ezra Klein)
But the question of how do you sustain attention, it requires people arguing about a thing.
64:39:
(Ezra Klein)
And the other thing that I think is real here is that the dynamics of social media algorithms means that people are mainly talking to others within their coalition.
64:52:
(Ezra Klein)
And so arguments that happen within the coalition are very salient.
64:56:
(Ezra Klein)
And then arguments that happen between the coalitions are much less so.
64:59:
(Ezra Klein)
There's like less engagement between the two sides.
65:03:
(Ezra Klein)
And so the things that they debate become a really big deal during an election, say.
65:07:
(Ezra Klein)
But in off times, it actually creates a sort of weird dynamic where it's like, okay, yeah, like all the Democrats are against this.
65:15:
(Ezra Klein)
But you're an intentional merchant.
65:17:
(Ezra Klein)
What do you think would make this more salient?
65:20:
(Ezra Klein)
What do you think the actual hooks of it are?
65:22:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yeah, I mean, you know, I do think, obviously, Medicaid cuts and hospital closures is good.
65:28:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, I think trying to do stunts and events— Good for getting attention, not your— Yeah, yeah, yeah.
65:33:
(Matt Iglesias)
Right, right, right.
65:34:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, it's sort of the attention-grabbing part.
65:37:
(Matt Iglesias)
I also think conservatives writ large, I would say, have been pretty disciplined about not debating this kind of issue in a way that is a little bit challenging to deal with.
65:49:
(Matt Iglesias)
So, I do think that it would be helpful to have more of an affirmative agenda.
65:55:
(Matt Iglesias)
on healthcare that people would be talking about, that they would be arguing with.
66:00:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, if you could get people together on, like, here is how we want to make healthcare more affordable for the American people, they want to make it less affordable, then you can have a somewhat more focused and structured argument that hopefully, like, gets some people on the right to, like, articulate their opinions about this, because otherwise it's sort of too easy to sort of let things slide.
66:25:
(Matt Iglesias)
I will say the other thing.
66:26:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, you raised the point that political media is very interested in process and in sort of like wins and losses.
66:34:
(Matt Iglesias)
The Republican Senate margin is just big enough that I don't think anybody thinks this is not going to pass.
66:42:
(Matt Iglesias)
The question is, what will this be?
66:45:
(Matt Iglesias)
But, like, the House majority is thin, but, like, House moderates have never blocked a bill, as far as I can remember.
66:53:
(Matt Iglesias)
I'm sure, like, in the 1870s it happened.
66:56:
(Matt Iglesias)
But it's always been Senate moderates who have more independent stature or sort of known in their home states.
67:04:
(Matt Iglesias)
But we're no longer in a mode where it's like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and one other person can block this thing.
67:10:
(Ezra Klein)
Well, and Josh Hawley wrote a piece in The New York Times.
67:14:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yeah, don't cut Medicaid.
67:15:
(Ezra Klein)
Saying that the Medicaid cuts were bad.
67:16:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yes.
67:18:
(Ezra Klein)
Right?
67:18:
(Ezra Klein)
Steve Bannon has a—there is something here.
67:21:
(Ezra Klein)
I mean, there is a weirder dynamic here and a more exploitable dynamic than just Democrats like Medicaid and Republicans don't.
67:28:
(Ezra Klein)
Because a bunch of the rising populist generation of Republicans think they shouldn't be doing this and have clearly just been cowed into submission.
67:35:
(Ezra Klein)
Yeah.
67:36:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yeah, I mean, I think that's right.
67:37:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, it should be a good opportunity for things.
67:39:
(Matt Iglesias)
Maybe it will even happen.
67:41:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, I saw for the first time we had Medicaid protesters at the Capitol, people in wheelchairs whose arms had been zip-tied to keep the Capitol safe, I guess, from these people who can't walk.
67:54:
(Ezra Klein)
Well, you know how seriously Donald Trump and the Republicans take the safety of the U.S. Capitol.
67:58:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yes, the integrity of the U.S. Capitol has always been his top thing.
68:02:
(Matt Iglesias)
So, you know, I mean, maybe it's—
68:03:
(Matt Iglesias)
just about to begin now, this mobilization.
68:06:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, I think a great thing for Zerhan Mamdami to do would be to spend some time talking about, like, a big consensus issue.
68:14:
(Matt Iglesias)
Because one thing I'm thinking about is, in whose interest is it to facilitate a lack of factional infighting?
68:21:
(Matt Iglesias)
And it's like, the guy who just won the contentious primary, he already won.
68:26:
(Matt Iglesias)
So, like, now what he needs is to remind people, people who didn't vote for him, of, like, all the stuff they agree with him about.
68:32:
(Ezra Klein)
It's just an amazing, though, revealed insight into how weird the dynamics of political attention are.
68:39:
(Ezra Klein)
Because I'm not saying you're wrong.
68:41:
(Ezra Klein)
You're right.
68:41:
(Ezra Klein)
But that it's obvious to both of us it would be more meaningful to
68:46:
(Ezra Klein)
for the 33-year-old assembly member who won a New York mayoral primary to really engage on this Medicaid bill than all of the Democratic politicians who actually hold office and might have a vote.
69:00:
(Ezra Klein)
There just is something.
69:01:
(Ezra Klein)
There's something about the way attention does not accrue to power that is really interesting.
69:09:
(Ezra Klein)
Hakeem Jeffries can't get people to pay attention, and he's the minority leader in the House.
69:14:
(Ezra Klein)
I agree with you, Zoran Mamdani could.
69:16:
(Ezra Klein)
AOC has been obviously messaging about this, but I think probably could focus on it more, right?
69:21:
(Ezra Klein)
Like, attention is such an unevenly distributed capacity, right?
69:26:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yes.
69:27:
(Matt Iglesias)
Well, and, you know, some of this is the old saw about, you know, dog bites man and man bites dog, right?
69:33:
(Matt Iglesias)
But so it's like, of course, the Democratic leaders are, like, saying this is bad, right?
69:37:
(Matt Iglesias)
You know, we had, like, I think Jimmy Kimmel played an important role in the ACA repeal.
69:46:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yeah, you know, in part because he's not a very political person.
69:50:
(Matt Iglesias)
So when he decided to talk about something, it was like, oh my God, you know, Jimmy Kimmel.
69:55:
(Matt Iglesias)
And like the actual point, I agreed with the point he was making, but it's not like nobody else had ever thought of that in the preceding 10 years of talking about this.
70:04:
(Matt Iglesias)
It was just you heard from somebody fresh and somebody famous, like really sort of banal point about the importance of those pre-existing conditions regulations.
70:14:
(Matt Iglesias)
And if you could just find somebody new to talk about health care, everybody likes to talk about who is and isn't going on Joe Rogan.
70:22:
(Matt Iglesias)
And like, where's he at on Medicaid cuts?
70:25:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like, I don't know.
70:26:
(Matt Iglesias)
Right.
70:26:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like, that's interesting.
70:27:
(Matt Iglesias)
Right.
70:27:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, obviously, I hope everybody watches The Ezra Klein Show and talks about this with their friends, because one of the things about attention in a social media era is, like, we're not passive, helpless victims of the attention economy.
70:40:
(Matt Iglesias)
I mean, we decide, to an extent, what to pay attention to, what to give hearts on, what to argue about, what to retweet, what to discuss with our friends, things like that.
70:51:
(Matt Iglesias)
And, like, part of the message here is, like, the meta-message, right?
70:55:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like,
70:55:
(Matt Iglesias)
You, the listener, ought to try to increase your personal level of engagement with this topic and with content that relates to this topic and not just be monomaniacally focused on factional positioning for the future.
71:11:
(Matt Iglesias)
It's good to talk about abundance, I think, is important.
71:14:
(Matt Iglesias)
It's good to talk about the housing legislation that's pending in California.
71:19:
(Matt Iglesias)
That's a big one.
71:20:
(Matt Iglesias)
But, you know...
71:22:
(Matt Iglesias)
we all do need to also talk about aspects of consensus.
71:26:
(Ezra Klein)
I think that is a good place to end.
71:28:
(Ezra Klein)
Also, final question.
71:29:
(Ezra Klein)
What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
71:31:
(Matt Iglesias)
Laura Spinney's book, Proto, How One Ancient Language Went Global, about the rise of the Proto-Indo-European language.
71:38:
(Matt Iglesias)
That's a really good one.
71:39:
(Matt Iglesias)
Wuthering Heights, which I just finished, a classic novel.
71:43:
(Matt Iglesias)
That's what I've been trying to get on for my reading and things like that.
71:47:
(Matt Iglesias)
But I also revisited Paul Starr's classic, Social Transformation of American Medicine, because I've been trying to get my attention back on the healthcare issue.
71:56:
(Ezra Klein)
Did you really, or are you just saying you did?
71:58:
(Matt Iglesias)
No, like I picked it up.
71:59:
(Matt Iglesias)
I was reading through it because I wanted to read about the origins of our path-dependent healthcare system.
72:05:
(Matt Iglesias)
I will tell you, I did not do like a cover-to-cover reread.
72:08:
(Ezra Klein)
That book is great.
72:10:
(Ezra Klein)
And just while we're doing old healthcare books, if anyone just wants to read a book about how differently healthcare and just policy processes work, something you and I talk about sometimes when we get together, is that it feels like
72:22:
(Ezra Klein)
There's no policy process anymore.
72:24:
(Ezra Klein)
But David Broder wrote a book about the 1994 health care fight, the Bill Clinton health care fight called The System.
72:30:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yeah.
72:31:
(Ezra Klein)
And you see read that book and you read about just like how much energy went into the crafting and debating and recrafting and re-debating and committee members and everything of the Clinton health care bill.
72:43:
(Ezra Klein)
Yeah.
72:43:
(Ezra Klein)
And you think about the insanely slapdash way just a giant bill right now is being put together and barely debated and like things traded in and out, no serious analysis, just ignoring what is actually out there.
72:55:
(Ezra Klein)
And you just realize how, I don't want to say it's unserious because the consequences here are deadly serious, but there's been a real deterioration.
73:04:
(Ezra Klein)
of the procedural scaffolding and deliberative structure of politics and how we make bills, particularly on the Republican side.
73:14:
(Ezra Klein)
Although not only, I think, on the Republican side,
73:17:
(Ezra Klein)
But if you read that, I think you'll be more shocked by it than people realize.
73:21:
(Matt Iglesias)
Yeah, because if you read Jonathan Cohn's book about the 10-year war, about Obamacare, right?
73:26:
(Matt Iglesias)
That's a halfway house, right?
73:28:
(Matt Iglesias)
It's not the same committee-driven process from Broder's book.
73:32:
(Matt Iglesias)
Like, it's become more leadership-driven, but they are still very focused on
73:37:
(Matt Iglesias)
on the actual policy stakes.
73:40:
(Matt Iglesias)
At critical points, like people in the White House are like, no, you have to do it this way for like boring, wonk kind of reasons.
73:49:
(Matt Iglesias)
And like lots of members of Congress really don't want to.
73:52:
(Matt Iglesias)
And they're like pushing them on the policy merits really hard.
73:55:
(Matt Iglesias)
And that seems completely out the window these days.
73:58:
(Ezra Klein)
Matt Iglesias, thank you very much.
74:01:
(Matt Iglesias)
Thank you.
74:21:
(Ezra Klein)
This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Roland Hu and Jack McCordick.
74:25:
(Ezra Klein)
Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker.
74:29:
(Ezra Klein)
Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Amin Sahota.
74:32:
(Ezra Klein)
Our executive producer is Claire Gordon.
74:34:
(Ezra Klein)
The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Annie Galvin, Jan Koble, and Chris Stinland.
74:40:
(Ezra Klein)
We have original music by Pat McCusker.
74:42:
(Ezra Klein)
Audience strategy by Christina Samulewski and Shannon Busta.
74:45:
(Ezra Klein)
The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.