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- [00:00]
Jack Armstrong
Foreign.
- [00:10]
Joe Getty
Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln radio studio at the George Washington Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty.
- [00:18]
Jack Armstrong
Armstrong and Getty. And now here's Armstrong and Giddy. Philadelphia Zoo announced last week that a pair of nearly 100 year old tortoises recently welcomed their first hatchlings. You may have seen the tortoises on the MTV show 99. And pregnant.
- [00:47]
Unnamed Contributor
Markets are surging. If you're listening to us live. So the bounce back has begun and moving up. Get into that later also. Latest polling on the whole tariff thing. Get into that later also. And oh, and I just saw real. The real ID deadline is a month away. This is going to be my all time greatest hit screw up. Because it's been, I've seen it coming for so long and known the entire time for years that at some point I will be at an airport ready to get on a plane someplace I need to go.
- [01:24]
Jack Armstrong
Yes.
- [01:25]
Unnamed Contributor
And they'll say we no longer accept your driver's license. You need your real id. Even though I knew it for years. I am. That is going to happen to me.
- [01:32]
Jack Armstrong
It's like your high school teacher assigned you a book report due in 20 years and you waited until the last night and you're up all night.
- [01:39]
Unnamed Contributor
Right? That is going to happen to me.
- [01:42]
Jack Armstrong
Yeah. It's funny, Judy. And I heard that report and I have a feeling I spoke for many, many millions of Americans when I said, do we have real IDs? I've completely lost track. Is ours real? She looked at it and said, yeah, yes, we do. How that happened, I don't recall.
- [02:00]
Unnamed Contributor
Well, I sure don't have one.
- [02:02]
Jack Armstrong
Are you sure?
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Unnamed Contributor
I'm positive.
- [02:04]
Jack Armstrong
You might. When did you last renew your license?
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Unnamed Contributor
I don't know.
- [02:10]
Jack Armstrong
So, so your driver's license, is it? Yeah.
- [02:14]
Unnamed Contributor
Oh, it is. Well, maybe I do have a real.
- [02:15]
Jack Armstrong
Life like the updated. Does it have like a hologramy looking thing on there or.
- [02:20]
Unnamed Contributor
Yeah, yeah, maybe I do have it.
- [02:25]
Jack Armstrong
Done and done, sir. That's my point. Nobody has any idea, but it's critically important. Yeah. So speaking of economics and that sort of thing, which a lot of people are doing these days in reference to the tariffs, but this too shall pass, I hope eventually. And some of the support and lack of support are coming from some interesting areas for the tariffs. And we can talk about that more later, but I'm kind of tariffed out. We brought this up kind of briefly at the end of the show yesterday.
- [02:55]
Unnamed Contributor
I could talk about tariffs for many more hours.
- [02:58]
Jack Armstrong
Well, you should feel free. How about one room over? Anyway, I Found this so interesting, big survey of America's employers, especially manufacturers. They cannot find reliable conscientious workers who can pass a drug test. A good worker, like a good man can be hard to find these days. And who is this writing in the Alicia Finley, who I think is a terrific writer, but she says blame government which showers benefits on able bodied people who don't work while at the same time subsidizing college degrees that don't lead to productive employment. And the result is millions of idle men and millions of unfilled jobs. What an economist would call a deadweight lost to society.
- [03:47]
Unnamed Contributor
So failing the drug test, is it mostly the marijuana, the Mary Jane, the lettuce, the hippie lettuce.
- [03:54]
Jack Armstrong
Lettuce, yeah. I don't know. I suspect so though. Sure, I think it's mostly pot, but I think that's just brilliantly. Simply put, we are showering benefits on able bodied people and subsidizing useless college degrees as, as a people because the government is theoretically doing our work right. Well, I for one don't like either end of that anyway. 40% of small business owners in March reported job openings they could not fill. Construction companies, 56% said, yeah, we have unfilled jobs and we can't find anybody. Transportation, I have a feeling that's mostly truck drivers. 53% manufacturing, which the president is, according to many people, admirably trying to shepherd back inside the country more. 47% of manufacturers say, no, we've got openings we can't fill. Well, so that's according to last week's National Federation of Independent Business survey.
- [04:55]
Unnamed Contributor
That might be a flaw in the President's plan that hasn't been discussed enough. He wants to bring back the 50s or 70s or whatever golden era of manufacturing that we used to have. But back then people would do those jobs. Jobs we if. If half the manufacturing jobs out there you can't fill. Now what if manufacturing did come back to the United States? Who's who in theory is going to do those jobs?
- [05:21]
Jack Armstrong
Well, not illegal immigrants because thank God the border's been closed and the statistics are astounding. Biden was a scoundrel anyway.
- [05:29]
Unnamed Contributor
Well, is it going to be the woman's studies major from your local university that goes works there? Probably not.
- [05:34]
Jack Armstrong
Well, it could well be the dudes who have no disability on disability who are heaved off of that system. But that would take some tough love and that's not very popular politically speaking. I mean, if you go into one of the districts of the rust belty places or appalachia or whatever, where you have just ludicrous levels of people on disability. Happened to read a couple things about this recently, didn't, you know, flog you with it on the air. But. And if you go into those places and say we're kicking off everybody on disability who's not like missing a limb, you will lose an election by 70 points, if that's even possible. Once people are on the dole, man, once people have a benefit, whether legitimate or perhaps questionable, taking it away is political poison. As you know, labor departments job openings and labor turnover survey businesses tell a similar story. There are twice as many job openings in manufacturing now than in the mid 2000s. As a sheriff, save for the pandemic, America's workers shortage is the worst in 50 years. Decades ago, productivity enhancing technology and yes, inexpensive imports caused men who worked on shop floors to lose their jobs and drop out of the workforce. But that generation is sailing into the sunset and there are many fewer young Americans who want to work in factories. Listen to this. Now. The labor force participation rate among young among working age men is now about 4,5 percentage points lower than in the early 80s. Okay, this is not like the 1910s. This is the 1980s. 5 points lower. As a result, there are about 3 1/2 million fewer men between the ages 25 and 54 in the workforce and 1.3 million between the ages of 25 and 34.
- [07:20]
Unnamed Contributor
Even with a significantly bigger population than we had in the 80s. Right.
- [07:24]
Jack Armstrong
Then there would have been, were it not for this decline. Labor participation among working age women, on the other hand, recently hit a record in part because they are having fewer children and then people aren't coupling and that sort of thing. At the risk of stereotyping, women are more inclined toward helping professions such as services than those that require physical labor. Well, that's just true. It's undeniable.
- [07:47]
Unnamed Contributor
So I've not done a manufacturing sort of job before, so I don't know what it's like. But I certainly feel like there's a social stigma around it that doesn't help.
- [08:03]
Jack Armstrong
True.
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Unnamed Contributor
Why it is why there's not a social stigma around having a meaningless soul deadening paper pushing job in a cubicle. I don't know why that is. I mean, maybe the other way around should be there shouldn't be any stick around any jobs working for a living is considerably better than not, whatever the hell you're doing. So I always.
- [08:28]
Jack Armstrong
The vestige of the 20th century where a job where you used your brain as opposed to your back was Seen as a higher status job.
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Unnamed Contributor
God, I don't know. Some of these jobs or you use your brain. That's barely.
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Jack Armstrong
Not much.
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Unnamed Contributor
I mean, but they certainly don't seem like they'd be much more enjoyable as starter jobs.
- [08:47]
Jack Armstrong
Right? Tedious is tedious. I, I had a sort of manufacturing job for one summer and it was pretty tedious, honestly. But I'm sure it is. I, you know why I went ahead and took it and kept it? It was because it paid pretty good. It was my best option. Right. So. Yeah.
- [09:02]
Unnamed Contributor
And you got in. You and well, you should have to make a living. You got to support yourself somehow.
- [09:07]
Jack Armstrong
No you don't. What kind of monster are you? Listen to this, would you? So where have all the good working men gone? Some are subsisting on government benefits or living off their parents. About 17% of working age men are on Medicaid. 17%. Seven and a half percent on food stamps and 6.3% on Social Security. Many claiming disability payouts. According to the Census Bureau. Many spend their days playing video games and day trading.
- [09:31]
Unnamed Contributor
Well, day trading. Hilarious.
- [09:35]
Jack Armstrong
Speculating on meme stocks or you tell.
- [09:37]
Unnamed Contributor
Somebody you're day trading. I don't know how often you're actually trading and making any money because you don't want to say I just play video games and live in my parents basement. So you say you're a day trader. So I don't remember our good friend Craig the healthcare genius's statistics, but if I remember correctly, originally Medicaid was only supposed to cover like a tiny percentage of people, period. Now it's covering percent. Maybe now it's covering. And that would have been of like the old and you know, people that have got all kinds of physical or mental problems. Now it's 17 of working age men. Not. Not like senior citizens. That's nice.
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Jack Armstrong
Yeah. A couple more stats. Other missing men are taking longer to finish college or pursuing graduate degrees. Only about 41 of men complete a Bachelor's degree in four years. Even though study after study shows they don't teach. You don't have to work. There's great inflation. It's dopey. Only 41% and a quarter take more than six years. Wow.
- [10:41]
Unnamed Contributor
Because you're in no hurry to get out of college. My dad used to comment about perpetual college students and I never really understood what he was talking about. And I'm sure it was a small number of people back when he was in college, but now it is a lot apparently. I'll just stay in college. I'll just keep Borrowing money and because I'm too young or, or, or, or unwise to understand what I'm doing. And I'll just keep this game going of I get to sit around with my friends and discuss the world without ever having to engage in it.
- [11:13]
Jack Armstrong
Yeah. And I have disability. My thumb hurts on Thursdays final stat. Then I'll, I will, I will stop. We're just, we are a fat, lazy, comfortable society.
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Unnamed Contributor
We're headed to France.
- [11:25]
Jack Armstrong
Right? We are headed straight toward France. Yeah. The unemployment rate, Jack, consider this. Among recent college grads with a sociology degree is about 7%. And their median wage if they do have a gig, is $45,000. According to the Federal Reserve Bank. Soc grads could earn twice as much working on an auto assembly line which pays an average hundred thousand dollars a year. Good gig, but not many want it. The reality is that masses of young people, writes Alicia Finley, who again is a genius, has been taught that capitalism is exploitive. They don't want to work in factories. They'd rather mooch off taxpayers or their parents. How Karl Marx is that?
- [12:04]
Unnamed Contributor
Yeah, some of it is that I'm sure, but I just, I think a lot of it is just the cultural that would be embarrassing for your parents and for you if you worked over at the.
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Jack Armstrong
Whatever.
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Unnamed Contributor
Factory.
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Jack Armstrong
Yeah.
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Unnamed Contributor
More embarrassing in our current society than if you just live at home and you know, you say you're a day trader. It shouldn't be more embarrassing to have a job at a plant than to live with your parents. But I think it is.
- [12:31]
Jack Armstrong
Or having taken six years to get an undergrad degree in gender studies, you're now getting a master's degree in the theoretical decolonialization of art or whatever the.
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Unnamed Contributor
F.
- [12:47]
Jack Armstrong
Oh, good times make for soft people, man. There is no more iron law of humanity than that.
- [12:53]
Joe Getty
Armstrong and Get Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty. The Armstrong and Getty Show.
- [13:13]
Unnamed Contributor
The Los Angeles jury has awarded a man $50 million after he was seriously burned by a Starbucks drink. Now the person got burnt pretty good.
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Jack Armstrong
But on his junk.
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Unnamed Contributor
On his junk and says he can't have sex anymore. Although you would make that argument if you're trying to get $50 million. So whether that's accurate or not, I do not know. But. And I'm not a lawyer, but I don't know how you work this out in society. On one hand, I'm going through the drive thru at Starbucks. I don't deserve to be maimed for life.
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Jack Armstrong
No, certainly not in my privets. Yeah.
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Unnamed Contributor
On the other hand, it's an impossible expectation that nothing ever goes wrong, ever. And, you know, nailing down whether it was the employee's fault or the person in the car's fault is difficult. I mean, if you ever go to Starbucks and you get more than one drink, they give you that cardboard holder that the drinks fit in. And this person claimed that they didn't secure the tea in it. It was sitting at an angle and then it spilled.
- [14:11]
Jack Armstrong
Maybe it was.
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Unnamed Contributor
Or maybe you hit it on the window or with your elbow or whatever. I don't know. But anyway, you can't get everything perfect all the time. $50 million. The problem with this, to me is, is it what, it's what drives so many of the things that make us nuts in life. The fact that the school won't let your kid play. If it's rained the last two days, you have to stay inside for recess because they might slip and some jury will award $100 million. I mean, it's, it's just, it's an unworkable situation for society. So I don't. And, you know, you, you wouldn't want Starbucks to be able to, like, here comes my, my girlfriend's ex boyfriend. I'm going to throw hot tea in his face at the drive through. And there'd be no penalty for that. I mean, so there's got to be a line somewhere, obviously.
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Jack Armstrong
Yeah. I just think we've gotten so far off track as a society because it's very different than virtually any other legal system on Earth. You're not going to get a $50 million reward like this in Argentina or probably Britain, I don't think. But I don't think we as people understand how far off we've gotten. And a big reason for that. What is the number one profession among legislators? It's not even close. You know, it's an attorney.
- [15:25]
Unnamed Contributor
Right. And the, the whole jury thing, where this is one of the reasons that we regularly say, you know, don't make those jokes about how to get out of jury duty, show up on the jury. So you could say, so you could be there as a smart person say 50, $50 million is insane.
- [15:42]
Jack Armstrong
Yes.
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Unnamed Contributor
Because you got a, I'm, I'm guessing you got a jury full of people say, Starbucks is rich, they can afford it. I don't like them anyway, you know, that sort of thing.
- [15:52]
Jack Armstrong
Right? Yeah. Yeah. Boy. If there's one technology mankind has not perfected, it's the getting the cup lid to click on the cup thing in the world of coffee. And, you know, granted, I'm An, I'm an older fellow now and I. I've learned the hard lessons of life. Sometimes more than once, usually more than once before I absorb them. Boy, anybody who has boiling hot coffee and assumes that lid is on their right. You are a bold man and a foolish one.
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Unnamed Contributor
Yeah, I just, when I heard that, I just thought, oh crap, this is going to lead to even more. Sorry, we can't allow you to do.
- [16:27]
Jack Armstrong
This stuff or you get like room temperature coffee.
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Unnamed Contributor
Right. Coffee can't ever be. That might be the reaction from Starbucks. No more hot coffee. I know lots of people order stuff extra hot because I've known baristas order stuff extra hot. It's already so hot you can't drink it. But it's the idea that it'll be. It's so hot that by the time you get to work on your 15 minute commute, it'll still be hot. Well, I'll bet that goes out the window after this settlement.
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Jack Armstrong
Yeah. So I shouldn't say this, but everybody's thinking about it, so I will. So this guy got $50 million because he could never have sex again. Was he any good at it? I mean, does that factor into the juries? Yeah, I mean, you think they should.
- [17:09]
Unnamed Contributor
Interview previous lovers and say, so how much of a loss is this for humanity?
- [17:13]
Jack Armstrong
Well, yeah, I mean, because it's obvious lost to him, no matter his skills, but to humanity. Because shouldn't that be a 50, 50 thing?
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Unnamed Contributor
Consortium, etc on a scale of meh to wow, where was he exactly?
- [17:26]
Jack Armstrong
I'm just, I'm asking these questions. I don't have the answers.
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Unnamed Contributor
Yeah, God dang it.
- [17:31]
Joe Getty
Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty. The Armstrong and Getty Show. The Armstrong and Getty Show.
- [17:42]
Unnamed Contributor
So I mentioned this last week and we never got around to it. I'm glad we are now. And I'm looking forward to Joe's reaction to this. So this is Ezra Klein of the New York Times on Lex Friedman's podcast from a couple of weeks ago. And Lex Friedman's an interesting guy if you've never heard his podcast. First of all, they're all two to four hours long. I don't know who listens to those whole things, but he has people on of all different kinds of political stripes and worldviews and stuff like that, and he just wants to hear what they think. And he, and he opened with this great question for Ezra Klein of the New York Times, who, if you don't know his act, he is a columnist, writer, liberal, progressive. Not a bomb chucker though. That's just his. I mean, he's a really smart. He's an intellectual, but he's a progressive. And Lex had him on to say the first question was, basically, lay out the progressive point of view or the Democrat point of view of the worldview. And I thought, okay, this is fantastic. I'm going to hear this from a smart guy. And I thought, I am going to. I was listening to this podcast in my earbuds as I was, like, doing laundry or something like that. And I thought, I am going to, like, in a relaxed manner, listen to this, see if I can find any common ground, like, fully understand, you know, where they're coming from.
- [19:00]
Jack Armstrong
Right.
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Unnamed Contributor
Not the cable news version, but, like, the intellectual version of how they see the world. And I didn't make it more than, like, 30 seconds before I said out loud in my bedroom, oh, you gotta be effing kidding me. So this is how it went.
- [19:16]
Ezra Klein
You can define the left in different ways. I think the left has a couple fundamental views. One is that life is unfair. We are born with different talents. We are born into different nations. Right. The luck of being born into America is very different than the luck of being born into Venezuela. Um, we are born into different families. We have luck operating as an omnipresence across our entire lives. And as such, the people for whom it works out, well, we don't deserve all of that. We got lucky. I mean, we also worked hard and we also had talent, and we also applied that talent. But at a very fundamental level, that we are sitting here is unfair. And that so many other people are in conditions that are much worse, much more precarious, much more exploited is unfair. And one of the fundamental roles of government should not necessarily be to turn that unfairness into perfect equality, but to rectify that unfairness into a kind of universal dignity, Right. So people can have lives of flourishing. So I'd say that's one thing.
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Jack Armstrong
He has a very low voice for a child. Yeah, I'll hold back for now. I see what you mean, though my eyes were wide.
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Unnamed Contributor
You don't deserve that. That's when I said in my bedroom, oh, you got to be effing kidding me.
- [20:45]
Jack Armstrong
Wow. Well, and. And I want to hear the next part, obviously, but he kind of denied his own purpose there at the end. We're not trying to come up with some perfect equality.
- [20:56]
Unnamed Contributor
But, yeah, let's hear a little more, and then we can discuss.
- [20:59]
Ezra Klein
The left is fundamentally more skeptical of capitalism and part of the unchecked forms of capitalism than the right. I always think to talk about because what we call unchecked capitalism is nevertheless very much supported by government. So I think in a way you have both. Markets are things that are enforced by government. Whether they are how you set the rules of them is what ends up differing between the left and the right. But the left tends to be more worried about the fact that you could get rich building coal fired power plants, belching pollution into the air, and you could get rich laying down solar panels. And the market doesn't know the difference between the two. And so there's a set of goals about regulating the unchecked potential of capitalism that also relates to sort of exploitation of workers. There's very fundamental questions about how much people get paid, how much power they have. Again, the rectification of economic and other forms of power is very fundamental to the left.
- [21:57]
Unnamed Contributor
Okay, so it reminded me, of course, when Obama said, you didn't build that attitude. And I thought, okay, that's Edward Klein just laying that out a little more clearly. I heard a podcast with this guy, he's got the most famous economics podcast in America. I can't remember what his name is, but anyway. And he's, he leans left, but he, his, his take on the whole, okay, even if you got a situation where, where you like in the most blatant example, it's not fair that this person, you know, they're born with a better brain. Their parents got him a tutor, they had connections to get him into a better school, whatever it is, versus someone else. How is the government going to weigh in to fix it? He said, even if I buy all the lack of fairness, in what sense could you structure a government that's going to even that out, that doesn't do more harm than good?
- [22:58]
Jack Armstrong
Well, exactly, the last phrase is the key one. And it is interesting to me to hear somebody who's obviously fairly intelligent, like Ezra Klein, be so narrow in his vision, so incredibly unwise to not recognize that if you empower somebody. I was going to summarize his screed as the following. I'm so smart, I, and people like me should be in charge of everything because we will make it good. But a guy who is reasonably intelligent to lack the wisdom to see that a government empowered to right all of these picayune wrongs or equalize somehow or other, even if not a perfect equality, but like getting us halfway there, that government would be so awesome and not in the modern word, like causing awe and horror, so powerful and monumentally huge, it would be terrifying. How do you miss that? As, oh, no, we would just do the good things, not the bad stuff.
- [24:02]
Unnamed Contributor
Well, right. And then the problem being that where do you draw the line between unfair advantages that people didn't earn and choices that you make? Because lots of people make really, really bad choices in life. I've made bad choices in life that damaged me a lot. And some people keep doing them. I don't dismiss the idea. It's like I haven't told my story about the Uber driver I had the other day. Maybe I'll do that for the podcast today. But I was thinking in, in that trip, which was really sketchy, that this poor guy is never going to be able to do very well in life. So I got a better brain than he did. That is unfair. That's not his fault. It's not my credit.
- [24:46]
Jack Armstrong
But then you got all the life.
- [24:47]
Unnamed Contributor
Choices that people make. And I've seen so many smart people make horrible life choices. What is the government going to do to even out results there?
- [24:55]
Jack Armstrong
And I've known the proverbial C student.
- [24:58]
Unnamed Contributor
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
- [24:59]
Jack Armstrong
And I'm not going to go with the old trope that, but they're very street smart and blah, blah, blah. No, I've known some people who aren't very bright, but they make good, sound moral decision after decision, and it benefited quite nicely from those decisions anyway.
- [25:19]
Unnamed Contributor
What makes a person, though, get up in the morning and want to pursue the idea of that person has more than that person. We need to get them closer together. What is that?
- [25:31]
Jack Armstrong
Well, and the means that they use to pursue that goal are often horrible from my point of view. I mean, if you have a charitable view of the world and you think I ought to do something to help those people, you have my full blessing until it becomes. And what I am going to do is, at the point of the government's gun, take money from people and compel them to do these things. Because that's the opposite of generosity. That's, you know, totalitarianism. I hate to even use the word fairness in any context in this because it's become such a cliche, rhetorical cliche of the left. Because people have an instinctive view of what fairness is from childhood on. That is everything should be fair. That's at least the ideal. Whereas, you know, being born with a better brain or a worse brain or taller, good looking or talented or whatever, that the difference among people is 100% fair. It's the very definition of fairness. Nothing has been done by anybody to pervert the natural unfolding of it. Nobody cheated anybody.
- [26:42]
Unnamed Contributor
Right. The Jefferson idea of just you go as far as your talent and effort will take you.
- [26:47]
Jack Armstrong
Right, exactly that. It's there could be nothing more fair than you get dealt a hand in life. And then you've got to go from there with, you know, the help of the people around you. And the people care about you and the government protecting your rights. That's why the government exists. And off you go. Read Harrison Bergeron, the great Kurt Vonnegut short story if you don't have a lot of time. Read Thomas Sowell's Conflict of Visions if you have more about this sort of thing. But I hate, and it breaks my heart that my daughter is autistic and life will always be extremely difficult for her. I, I, I hate that I adore.
- [27:32]
Unnamed Contributor
Her.
- [27:35]
Jack Armstrong
But I wouldn't use the word unfair to describe that. It just is.
- [27:43]
Unnamed Contributor
I got kicked off of a jury before I made it, the only time I've ever made it this far to like actually get into the courtroom. And they started, the lawyers start asking me questions. And the question that got me kicked out was looking back to the starting point of your life, where you've end up now, is it more the circumstance you were born into or your life's choices? And I went with life's choices and that got me kicked off the jury. Yeah, that I think life's choices. Good vocal fry from Ezra Klein. I don't know why socialism goes with vocal fry. I don't know why those two things go together. But I still think life choices have more to do with it than where you were born, who you were born to, and brain power you have in term where you're going to ultimately end up. And he obviously does not believe that. And then even if you agree with Professor Klein, you're still at the point of how could the government fix that anyway? Well, right.
- [28:40]
Jack Armstrong
And my response to all of it would be, so what? So now what are you going to do? That is always the question at every moment of your life. Okay, so now what are you going to do?
- [28:50]
Joe Getty
The Armstrong and Getty Show. Get more Jack, more Jack podcasts and our hot links@armstrongandgetty.com the Armstrong and Getty.
- [29:02]
Unnamed Contributor
Show.
- [29:06]
Jack Armstrong
So speaking of policy, and this is so incredibly important, Jack is afraid it will vanish into the dustbin of history. And I think he's probably right. But now, even for instance, the New York Times is admitting keeping the schools closed was a horrific idea and utterly unnecessary. I called it a disaster before. No, Mount Krakatoa covering your village in lava is a disaster. This was a crime, a partisan political crime, and the victims were children and society as a whole.
- [29:37]
Unnamed Contributor
And one of the worst things our government has ever done.
- [29:39]
Jack Armstrong
Yes, I would agree. Absolutely. It was like the internment of the Japanese or whatever. You could even make a case for that. The scientific case for keeping the little kids out of school was null and void within a few months of the beginning of COVID Any New York Times writing paying the price. School children in Massachusetts, Ohio and Pennsylvania are still about a half year behind typical pre Covid reading levels. In Florida and Michigan, the gap is about three quarters of a year. In Maine, Oregon and Vermont, for instance, it's close to a full year. This morning, group of academic researchers released their latest report card on pandemic learning loss. And it shows a disappointingly slow recovery in almost every state.
- [30:18]
Unnamed Contributor
And maybe school closures. Yes, and maybe you're going to get into this or they get into this, but that's just meas the learning without measuring the disruption to classes. We've heard from lots of teachers of kids are different now. They, they missed a couple of years of having to sit there and pay attention and get homework done. And they just, they're not. You can't get them back in the groove.
- [30:39]
Jack Armstrong
They don't really get into that. And I'm really glad you brought that up because the sociopsychological damage to kids, hell, that might make the reading scores look like, you know, I think so. School closures during COVID set children back in most districts have not been able to make up the lost ground, obviously partly because kids, when they're that young, they absorb information in a way that I envy with every fiber of me. And you can't just have them not do that for a while and say, all right, now we're going to do it even more than usual. It's not the way kids work.
- [31:10]
Unnamed Contributor
Yeah. Does everybody not know that or whatever. But anyway, up until about age 8, your brain runs about a thousand times faster. It does after that, you take a kid out of school for two years before age eight, oh my God, you've done damage to them.
- [31:22]
Jack Armstrong
Yes.
- [31:22]
Unnamed Contributor
That's a horrifying.
- [31:24]
Jack Armstrong
Yeah. So. And here we get into a couple of the more interesting specific aspects of this. One of the reason for the lack of, you know, catching up progress is school absences. A huge rise has continued long after Covid says. Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist, member of the research team that we're going to talk about a little bit, said the pandemic may have been the earthquake, but heightened absenteeism is the tsunami. And it's still rolling through school.
- [31:51]
Unnamed Contributor
Right? Part not just not showing up to school is still a problem.
- [31:54]
Jack Armstrong
And as I've said many times, when the New York Times isn't being just unforgivably, idiotically biased, they actually do some pretty good deep dive reporting. And they look into the state variations, according to a new report from scholars at your big name universities, comparing performances across states.
- [32:10]
Unnamed Contributor
I hope you're not going to tell me that blue cities and states even got poorer performance than red. I hope you're not going to tell.
- [32:18]
Jack Armstrong
Me that I'm going to need you to sit down. Need you to brace yourself, Michael. Jack's about to need a big hug. All right. And you know how he loves that from other males. So today's report shares a wide variety of outcomes in the states that have made up the most ground. They're getting close to how they were doing five years ago, but the overall picture is not good. And I will skip some of the specific stats and get to what they call the blue red divide. Political leaders in red and blue America made different decisions decisions during the pandemic. Gavin Newsom, I'm looking at you, you lying monster. Because Pritzker, you child grooming scumbag.
- [32:58]
Unnamed Contributor
Because rage, reds, death, Santis and people like that wanted kids to die. For some reason, they enjoy stacks of dead children at their skulls.
- [33:08]
Jack Armstrong
Right? Exactly. Many schools in heavily Democratic areas stayed closed for almost a year from the spring of 2020 to the spring of 2021. Or longer.
- [33:17]
Unnamed Contributor
It was longer than that around here.
- [33:19]
Jack Armstrong
Cal. Unicornia. Yeah. In. In some Republican areas, by contrast, schools remain closed only for the spring of 2020 and opened right up. Yeah, and this helps explain a partisan gap in learning loss. Get in the specific stats.
- [33:35]
Unnamed Contributor
I can't believe this wasn't more fairly reported on or discussed or whatever. I use this example all the time because I got it in my own life. I got two schools seven miles apart, the public school and the private school. My son's now in the private school. Barely shut down at all. The public school was closed for like two years. And there were not. I was joking. There were not stacks of dead children everywhere.
- [34:00]
Jack Armstrong
Nor teachers.
- [34:01]
Unnamed Contributor
Nor teachers. The private school was fine. Now, how do you explain that teachers union public schools. How do you explain that that school's open over there and it's not like they got tons extra money for some sort of special ventilation or something like that. What a joke.
- [34:17]
Jack Armstrong
Randy Weingarten, the head of the big teachers union, who is a demon from hell, sent to punish us for our sins. Used it like other unions did as leverage. You want the kids back in. I can tell you really, really want the kids back in. You got to give us more money. You got to give us more of this. You got to give us more of that. No. Then the kids stay home.
- [34:34]
Unnamed Contributor
I fully believe she was doing that and knew that. And I honestly don't know how she sleeps at night. I don't. I don't.
- [34:40]
Jack Armstrong
Because she has no conscience. She's a monster.
- [34:42]
Unnamed Contributor
You are a monster. You certainly don't care about children. I mean, you're beyond not caring about them. You're fine with them having awful lives if you can have more power. You're a disgusting human being.
- [34:52]
Jack Armstrong
But you know what? She's like? Yaya Sinwar of Hamas. She cares in children insomuch as they are leverage, just like Sinwar and Hamas cares about Palestinian citizens.
- [35:03]
Unnamed Contributor
I put her in that category.
- [35:04]
Jack Armstrong
Deaths or leverage.
- [35:05]
Unnamed Contributor
Yeah, I'd put her in that category, but I know plenty of teachers that. That's not what their angle was. They believed the whole it was too dangerous to have schools open thing for some reason.
- [35:16]
Jack Armstrong
Yeah, because Trump said it was good to open them. The left went crazy explaining how incredibly unwise that would be. And if there needed to be more horrifying irony for the political left, all kids were hurt pretty badly. Poor kids were just decimated.
- [35:36]
Joe Getty
Armstrong and Getty.
- [35:39]
Jack Armstrong
Why should you listen to Armstrong and Getty on demand?
- [35:42]
Unnamed Contributor
We're not boring. A lot of news is boring and tedious and depressing and makes you angry.
- [35:47]
Jack Armstrong
You don't want to live your life like that.
- [35:49]
Unnamed Contributor
Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty.
- [35:51]
Jack Armstrong
We're Armstrong and Getty.
- [35:52]
Unnamed Contributor
We try to bring you the truth.
- [35:53]
Jack Armstrong
And help you figure out this crazy modern world.
- [35:56]
Unnamed Contributor
How about something about a comedic tone?
- [36:00]
Jack Armstrong
We have a winner. Yes.
- [36:03]
Unnamed Contributor
Listen to Armstrong. You get it on Demand on the.
- [36:05]
Jack Armstrong
Iheartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.