← The Bulwark Podcast
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- [00:00]
Josh Barro
O O Ozempic.
- [00:03]
Tim Miller
Hi, I'm Michael from the Warren Treaty. You know the jingle now discover the facts About Ozempic, a GLP1 only Novo
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Josh Barro
Nordisk makes FDA approved Ozempic. Learn about the real thing. Talk to your healthcare professional today. Call 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit ozempic.com to view the medication guide and to learn more about Ozempic.
- [00:21]
Paige Cognetti
Semaglutide injection.
- [00:22]
Josh Barro
0.5 milligram, 1 milligram and 2 milligrams.
- [00:30]
Tim Miller
All right, ladies, when you've done the
- [00:32]
Josh Barro
work, we want your hydration to do the same. Introducing new Gatorade lower sugar now with
- [00:37]
Tim Miller
no artificial flavors, sweeteners or colors. And 75% less sugar and all the
- [00:42]
Josh Barro
electrolytes of regular Gatorade now available nationwide.
- [00:58]
Tim Miller
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. A few live programming notes tonight, after Donald Trump's address to the nation, some combination of your Bulwark faves will be live on YouTube and substack. Maybe me. We'll see. Check it out. I will definitely be live tomorrow night at about 8 o' clock in the east where I'm continuing my streaming experiments. It's just me alone. I'm vibing out. I'm having an orange wine. I'm answering your questions. So come join us on YouTube or Substack for that as well. That is Thursday night about 8 o' clock in the east. All right, we got a double header today in segment two, it's the mayor of Scranton, Page Cognetti, who I think had my favorite launch ad of the cycle. So I'm excited to talk to her. She's running against a Republican who's a pretty big dweeb. So it should be a good conversation. But up first, welcoming back co host of the podcast Serious Trouble with Ken White. And now I was on this a couple weeks ago, Central air with Megan McArdle and Ben Dreyfus. He also writes on substack at Very serious. It's very serious. Josh Barrow. How you doing, sir?
- [02:08]
Josh Barro
I'm doing well, Tim. Thanks for having me.
- [02:10]
Tim Miller
It's April Fool's Day. I'm not a big April Fool's Day guy. I don't sense that you are either.
- [02:14]
Josh Barro
No, I find tricks unpleasant.
- [02:16]
Tim Miller
Yeah, that sounds right. We're also tomorrow, I guess if you're listening to this on Thursday morning, it's the one year anniversary of Liberation Day. And so that's a good thing also for us to mark. And we're going to get into the Economics of the war. But first, we just have a couple of news items. We got to touch on what's happening with Iran. Or maybe they're news items. I guess that's probably what we should talk about. Trump has a speech tonight at 9:00. the time of this taping. We don't exactly know whether that is him cutting and running, him escalating, you know, him both. Both. Him debuting, you know, a new wing to the White House. Maybe it's not even about the war. Maybe he just was going to do a PowerPoint presentation about the different types of marble. We'll have to see. He has a bleep this morning that says, this. I want to read to you. Iran's new regime president, much less radicalized and far more intelligent than his predecessors, has just asked the United States of America for a ceasefire. That sounds good. We will consider when Hormuz Strait is open, free and clear. Until then, we're blasting Iran into oblivion, or as they say, back to the Stone Ages. I should note that Iran's president, Massoud Pezeshkin, think of that. Right. Has been president since 2024. So they don't. They don't actually have a new regime president. I don't. I don't know what he's talking about there. So it's unclear if this is like, intelligence he's gotten from the actual negotiators on the ground or if he saw a news report where the Iran regime president was. Was sounding a little bit open to a ceasefire and he's just kind of weighing in on that, like a radio talk show call in person, on his social media.
- [03:47]
Josh Barro
Or he made it up, like.
- [03:49]
Tim Miller
Or he made it up.
- [03:49]
Josh Barro
Yeah. I mean, much like, you know, he was saying that he spoke with some former president who told him that they wished they had done what he did in Iran.
- [03:58]
Tim Miller
You don't think that was Bill Clinton? You don't think Bill Clinton kind of wishes he had bombed Iran? I feel like that's possible. Trump's lying all the time. So I'm not saying it's definitely the case, but I'm raising one eyebrow at Bill Clinton as possible.
- [04:10]
Josh Barro
I forget whether it was the New York Times or the Washington Post, but one of the papers reached out to. There aren't that many living former presidents and all of their spokespeople denied that it was them. I would note that Trump's statement did not actually specify that it was a former president of the United States who had made this comment to him. So maybe there's a Much larger universe of presidents, of homeowners associations and such, former presidents who could have made that statement. But he just makes these things up. And it's also possible that there's something in his head that he made up about some person, that some official in Iran who he is then misidentifying as the president. So he might have a real person in mind, even if the story is fake and the person might be someone else or he might just, you know. But I. The more important thing in this statement is him now saying that we're not going to stop until the strait is open. When his administration for the last couple of days has been saying, well, actually we have several key objectives here, and reopening the strait isn't one of them. And if England wants the strait open, they should go open it themselves. So this is, this is a different position than what they've been publicly taking for the last couple of days. But the explanation of what the war is for and what will constitute success and when we can stop just keeps changing.
- [05:20]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I should say that the Iran parliament this morning, statement out of Iran Parliament said that Strait of Hormuz will not open and we've not held any negotiations and we will not hold them. So kind of a Sherman esque statement there. Hard to know who to trust in this back and forth. I mean, it's just unreliable narrators all around. And so I guess we'll just sort of wait and see from the President. One of the reasons I wanted to have you on today was this is true for the economy, which is I want to spend most of the time focusing on. But it's just also true generally about Trump. You've been a consistent Trump opponent, but maybe not with the hysterics that I have. You know, Josh, you're a rational person. You're kind of even handed. You know, I try to be. You look at the facts. You know, I'm an emotional roller coaster. I'm an emotional wreck. And like, I've looked at the last few weeks and I'm like, this is a disaster of unimaginable proportions. It's the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Oh, it's very bad. So I'm just kind of wondering, as you assess kind of the state of the war as it is right now, do you see it as completely absurd and ridiculous as I do?
- [06:26]
Josh Barro
It's outrageous. And it's outrageous on several levels. I mean, no one authorized him to do this. There wasn't even an effort to try to sell people either domestically or abroad on the idea that this was a good idea. In addition to the fact that a lot of people are dying, it does not appear to be producing a better regime outcome for the people in Iran. And it's causing all sorts of trouble all around the world. And we're already seeing in Asia the really significant fuel shortages because they're closer to the Persian Gulf. We're going to start feeling these effects in a few weeks. Now, it's not going to be quite as bad here because we are a net oil exporter. But I think some people have this, this misconception that because we are an oil exporter that we're actually better off when the price of oil goes up. There are oil producers in Texas who are going to have a windfall and there are local economies in parts of the US that will benefit from investment in oil and gas. But most US Consumers interact with oil by paying for gasoline and by paying for other products in which the petroleum products are a cost component. And those people are going to see prices go up. And then also the fact that we may be setting off a global recession here because you have other countries that are net importers that are just going to be in much more pain. They're not going to be able to buy as much of our goods. And so you have negative knock on effects from the fact that this causes so much economic damage globally. And then it's also outrageous because they don't seem to have planned for any of this. They're making it up as they go along. They've no idea what they're doing. And there are certain obvious things that like if you were Donald Trump and you were coming back into office and you were dead set on invading Iran, you at least would have done certain things to prepare. I mean, for example, they didn't refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
- [08:02]
Tim Miller
Right. It runs out in April, it runs out in two weeks.
- [08:05]
Josh Barro
Yeah, but the thing is that the
- [08:07]
Tim Miller
whole Strategic Petroleum Reserve runs out in two weeks. But the last amount that they released like that now runs out April 15th.
- [08:15]
Josh Barro
We drew down a lot of this when Russia invaded Ukraine. That was the previous driver of a significant global disruption in oil supplies. And we were able to somewhat moderate the price effects of that by gradually releasing the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Then the situation stabilized. I mean, frankly, Biden should have started refilling it in 2024.
- [08:34]
Tim Miller
Gas was cheap.
- [08:35]
Paige Cognetti
Right.
- [08:35]
Josh Barro
But you know, it was. Gas was still cheap, even a little bit cheaper in 2025. And so Trump, you know, a should have just generally been taking advantage of the low price to refill it. And B, if he thought that he might launch a war in the Mid east, then he especially should have refilled it because he should have known that there was risk that there would be another one of these global supply disruptions. And they didn't do it, I guess, because, you know, when you're refilling it, it has a marginal upward effect on oil prices because the government is out there being a big buyer of oil and that's, you know, a little bit of short term pain. But it was a good time to do it because gasoline prices were low. And we'd be in a better position right now to ride this out if he had done that. And it's just clear that this wasn't some grand strategy that he came in in January of last year knowing that he was gonna do this. What happened is they did this thing in Venezuela, which was, on its own narrow terms, a really tactical success. And it worked. We went in, we got Maduro, we took him out. The new government is at least somewhat more friendly to us than the old government was, even if we haven't brought freedom to Venezuela. And so it's clear he looked at that and was like, oh, that worked. Let's do that again. You can't do the same thing in Iran for a number of reasons, one of which is that it's a much more ideological regime that has objectives other than kleptocratically enriching the leaders who you could then theoretically kind of deal with. So he's improvising. And one of the few redeeming traits that Trump had was that he was sort of gun shy about this stuff. He did appear genuinely reluctant to get himself into significant military commitments that would be difficult to back out of. But I think that he was just feeling arrogant after the Venezuela thing and took the temptation. And there's always people around you in the Republican Party who want to invade Iran. And he made this decision that he can't really just Taco. It's not clear that you can do that here. It's not clear that you can actually cause the strait to be reopened simply by backing off and get gasoline prices to fall by the dollar a gallon that they've risen in the last month.
- [10:30]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I think it's understated. The arrogance coming off of the Venezuela success combined with when people talk about the way that Israel got us into the war. It's like part of it is Israel and MBS and others were preying on Trump's false arrogance and his Megalomania and how he's high on his own supply. And also the fact that, hey, remember these guys tried to kill you. You should get them back. There was a little bit of the vengeance effort, but there was also the. I think that Trump was really impressed by the Israeli military of the recent other actions. You know, whether it be the pagers or whether it be, you know, going after that nuclear last year and the 12 Day War, and it's like, oh, look at this, you know, I can be a winner by kind of riding shotgun with these guys who are really good. We're going to take out the Ayatollah. We know where he is now. You know, we can do the Venezuela thing, part two. And, you know, I think that, like he was a willing partner in large part because he liked that part of it. It felt like it was going to go really well because he thought that Israel was really skilled at this, which they are, but there are limits.
- [11:33]
Josh Barro
Yeah. I mean, and Israel is really skilled at a number of things. They also seemed convinced that Iran just wasn't going to close the straight, in part because Iran had taken fairly conservative responses to some of the prior escalations over the last couple of years because Iran did not want to get into a full scale war. But the problem is now they were in one, whether they liked it or not. And they have clearly made the determination that for their existence and survival they need to do this. And while the Israelis have many impressive capabilities, reopening the Strait, it looks to me, looks like is going to have to involve a substantial ground troop presence that will be under extreme threat. And it's not clear that that's viable. Which I think is part of why the President leaves open the possibility that we just won't fight to get the strait reopened. The global destabilization that is going to happen because of this oil shock, I don't think people have even really thought through yet.
- [12:23]
Tim Miller
Yeah, well, I want to talk about the disabilities and just one more thing on the geopolitics, then we'll get to economic stuff. It's just the other thing is the MAGA guys like to look at this stuff in a kind of base dominance versus weakness, confidence versus. That is the prism with which they look through a lot of this stuff, a primitive prism. And through that prism it's like, who has been buoyed by this? Like, who is more confident? Like, Iran has had a lot more damage done. Sure. But like right now in this moment, I think Iran looks at this and goes, shit, we can close the strait, like we have more power than we realized we had. You know, the remaining leaders who are alive and it's Trump and Vance who are looking at this and going, how do I get out of this? How do I get out of this fight? How do I back out of this fight while saving face? Right. Just like from a schoolyard bully, you know, schoolyard fight. Like who's the most likely to back out and go home to mom Standpoint, like Iran is in a more powerful position right now, even though obviously they're weaker militarily.
- [13:25]
Josh Barro
I'm not sure how much that matters. I mean, obviously aesthetically this administration cares about looking strong and you know, the nonsense focus on social media, DHS and you know, the whole ethos that Pete Hegseth has, I get that. But they always seemed to understand on a basic level that voters are fundamentally driven by ordinary cost of living issues. And that's why the President has been so focused on he wants the 10 year yield below 4%. He wants lower mortgage rates. That's why he's harassing the Fed. And up until he launched this war, he was having modest success getting those longer term interest rates down. They then soared. Once he started this war, he's focused on the stock market because he knows that people care about how their portfolios are doing. And that's also, I think, why over the last month he keeps doing these interventions that appear more aimed at the financial markets than at Iran, trying to say, hey, this is going to end soon, this is going to end soon because he wants to keep the oil price down and stock prices up. But the problem is that voters aren't looking at the barrel price of oil. Voters care about the price of gasoline. And you can project an image of strength and you can do things that move financial markets around, but if you're not actually getting the pump price down, then that's not going to serve you politically. I think that he had up until the last few weeks seem to have shown an understanding that Iraq, even though he was for it at the time, and lies about having been against it all along, he understands what a misadventure that ended up being for the Republican Party, that it was not popular to go do these foreign adventures, that people really do care are very much about just what's happening at home. That's why America first worked as a slogan. And that's just all completely gone out the window. And it doesn't matter how cool you look on social media, people are going to be really angry. I mean, gasoline is already really Expensive. And we haven't even yet hit the effects of. To the extent that we do import oil from the Gulf that's still in transit. It's gonna be a few weeks from now that finally the oil starts to be missing. But then it's going to be missing and things are going to get even more expensive and there are going to be shortages of things and people are going to be absolutely furious. They're not going to care about what they're seeing on television.
- [15:33]
Tim Miller
Let's talk about the specifics of that because you're speaking my language about the global crisis. I think that it's hard for people to wrap their heads around right now like the immensity of the crisis and all the different ways in which the energy crisis is going to manifest in their lives because it more than just the gas pump. I just think it's absolutely cataclysmic. And even if tonight he announces that he's out, there's still going to be reverberations of that for months to come. I should just say one other idea about tonight. We'll see. I'll just throw it out there as a prediction is that the market is closed tomorrow.
- [16:04]
Josh Barro
The market is closed on Friday.
- [16:05]
Tim Miller
It's Friday, right? The market is closed Friday. So you do have a three day weekend. If you're going to escalate for, try to escalate and end for four days. It's not, not maybe the worst decision if you're letting it go from the markets on a three day weekend. But anyway we'll let it sit there. But the reverberations I think just as you've been mentioning, are immense. And around the world we're already starting to see this might come to us a little bit later, but it's happening.
- [16:30]
Josh Barro
The key thing people need to understand this sounds very basic, is that you have to bring the amount of petroleum products that get consumed down to match the volume that is available. And so prices go up in the financial markets, it moves based on people's expectations of well, what's the situation going to be two months from now, et cetera. But ultimately, if you have less crude oil flowing into Japan, there needs to be less jet fuel made, there needs to be less gasoline, all of the products in the stack. And that means you have to actually get people to not do things that they were going to do. And the price needs to go up to bring the supply and the demand into balance. And a lot of consumption of petroleum products is very inelastic in the short term. Like Your office is 30 miles from where you live. You still have to drive there every day. If gasoline goes up by $2 a gallon, you're just eating that cost. It's not actually causing you to consume that much less gasoline. And as a result, sometimes the price really needs to move a lot in order to change behavior enough to bring demand in line with supply. So that's why you can see these really wild swings and why they talk about the possibility of $200 a barrel oil as a result of this. Because really the price needs to go up a lot to the pain point where people decide, okay, I'm actually not going to make that trip, I'm actually not going to produce this plastic product, et cetera. And so you're starting to see that pullback on a very small scale. I mean, United Airlines announced, for example, they're going to pull down about 5% of their schedule in the second and third quarters of this year. They've already canceled their flying to Tel Aviv and Dubai. That's 1% of the schedule. They're going to pull down some Tuesday, Wednesday flights, some red eyes, that sort of thing. That's a 5% reduction, give or take, in the amount of jet fuel that United is going to use. But if you need to start pushing airlines to a point where they need to do 20% less flying in some market, that sort of thing, you're going to see huge changes at the airports and you're also going to see big increases in fares because you have a substantial reduction in supply and that flows through into price. And so you just imagine that process happening over and over again. In every industry in the economy that relies on petroleum products, there will be direct consumer effects. Some people can work from home more, some people will cancel road trips that they were planning to take, et cetera.
- [18:38]
Tim Miller
The EU is already telling people to do that, right? The EU is in some EU countries, they're starting to say work from home, don't consume as much.
- [18:46]
Josh Barro
And so at least in the US you will have some offset from the fact that you will have oil driven economies in parts of the country where there is more work and more profit. And those people will have more money to spend and they'll go out and spend it on some things and that will offset part of the economic cost here. But the way most people are going to experience this is that if the strait remains closed or the amount of petroleum flow through the strait remains greatly reduced for an extended period, it's going to have to mean not just higher prices, it has to mean actual lifestyle changes where people use a lot less fuel brought about by those price changes so that we don't run out of it. So the effects are enormous and global. And then, of course, and we can talk about, you get downstream political effects from that. People get very. This is part of why I found it funny that the President is trying to lay this groundwork to convince people it's someone else's fault that that oil is getting more expensive, that it's Europe's fault for not reopening the Strait. I mean, people blame the President for high gas prices even when they're not his fault. And so the idea that he's.
- [19:46]
Tim Miller
This time it's his fault, right?
- [19:47]
Josh Barro
This time it is his fault. But even if it wasn't like the idea that he's going to escape political hell by spinning some story about why it's someone else's fault that gasoline got more expensive, I can't believe that he actually thinks that's going to work. But I don't think that's going to really hit the President how much political damage this is doing to him until several weeks from now when you have significantly more energy supply disruption than we're already experiencing.
- [20:11]
Tim Miller
In some ways, the geopolitical impact. Also, it's hard to predict how bad it's going to get. If you live in the UK Right now and they're coming up very soon on having petroleum shortages there. Gas is already higher in Europe, in Canada, in Asia than it is here, and it's going up even more. And, like, they only have one person to blame, like America. And you have Donald Trump out there saying today, oh, maybe we'll drop out of NATO. He is, like, pushing the accelerator on all the stuff that Mark Carney was talking about, you know, back in, you know, whenever that was in Davos a couple of months ago about how these people need to feel like they need to reorient the world. I mean, like, the rage globally against him is going to be significant because, like, there's real pain that's coming.
- [21:01]
Josh Barro
And also, I mean, again, as I note, like, people tend to punish their local politicians when the price of gasoline goes up. And so what you will see politicians all around the world try to do is tell a story about how this is Donald Trump's fault. And that might work better than Trump's blame deflections strategy, because it's true. But usually that still doesn't work. Mark Carney is one of the few examples of a politician who in recent years seems to have had success pointing at A domestic economic problem, saying it's Donald Trump's fault and actually riding that to an electoral victory. You know, he took over as the leader of the Liberal Party in Canada and the rise in, you know, anti
- [21:38]
Tim Miller
American bulwark audience is familiar with Carney. Carney is the most bulwark leader worldwide. Macron's position there was. He was pushed aside by Mark Carney with his Trump derangement syndrome.
- [21:53]
Josh Barro
Yeah, and you know, that worked in part because it was so obvious and so proximate and people were so personally offended by the way that Donald Trump has treated Canada. And rightly so. Carney, of course, also moved the party to the center on some other important issues, most notably a carbon tax. So, you know, I encourage Democrats to look at that. The fact that you can abandon unpopular parts of your agenda and be rewarded electorally for it. Mark Carney shows us that that is true. But so he's sort of the exception that usually doesn't work. And so the administration has been very happy to see left wing regimes down in Latin America becoming unpopular and losing elections. It's happened in Chile, it's probably gonna happen in Colombia soon. But like, what goes around, comes around there. If he causes a global recession, that's not going to be good for the popularity of what's his name in Argentina, Malay. The right wing leaders that come in, they're similarly going to be negatively impacted by this and you're going to see disruption in ways that could actually be negative for US Geopolitical interests.
- [22:51]
Tim Miller
Other disruptions here also are happening. On top of that, we talked last week with Wiesenthal about the fertilizer issue and how it's going to affect food helium and how that affects various industries. One thing you mentioned earlier when you're talking about all the negative outcomes on this was interest rates. One thing Trump had going for him economically was that he was putting in this new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, basically corruptly. And we could debate the scale of the corruption of him pushing through Warsh, but he was pushing through somebody that he wanted to lower interest rates. And one thing that was working out for Trump was that the slowdown of the economy even before this war happened was going to make it not very controversial for the Fed to continue to lower interest rates a little bit more as the year went on. That's pretty hard to do now. I mean, you look at the bond yield going up significantly, mortgage rates are going up, borrowing rates are going up across the board right now. Spiking, really, since the war started. Warsh is going to be in a pickle.
- [23:50]
Josh Barro
Well, I mean, first of all, he still has the issue of the investigation into Jay Powell and Senator Tillis from North Carolina saying that he's not going to allow any nominee to move forward so long as that investigation remains ongoing. And to date, the administration has been stubborn about that. Jeanine Pirro appealing and an unfavorable ruling that she got there. So I don't think it's clear that Warsh is going to be on the Fed anytime soon. The Fed was already in a difficult position in that the labor market appeared to be weakening, but inflation still appeared to be sitting above target. And so those are forces that push in opposite directions in terms of what you should do with interest rates. And so you could make a plausible argument for rates up a little, rates down a little. You couldn't make a plausible argument for rates down a lot, which is what the President really wants. You now have the Fed in a different difficult position where this pushes upward on interest rates, in part because you have the government out here spending additional hundreds of billions of dollars on this war that's going to have to borrow. The government was already in, you know, to already borrowing too much money, which tends to push up interest rates. So you have that force. And then you have oil prices in the short term, if they spike, that's inflationary.
- [24:58]
Tim Miller
Right.
- [24:58]
Josh Barro
That's, you know, one key component of spending, that it's gone up a lot, on the other hand, and if you're causing a recession that might be deflationary, people are going to be poorer. They're going to have less money to go out and spend. As they spend more of their money on gasoline, they can't afford to spend as much on everything else. That can actually be a deflationary force. And also because of that, that might further weaken the labor market, which also calls for looser monetary policy. So the Fed is still in a position where it's not really obvious which direction they should go on interest rates. Part of why rates have gone up in the market, some of it has to do with even wider expectations for deficits. And some of it has to do with the fact that it's likely that the effect of this oil shock is going to be a significant upward pressure on CPI over the next year or so. And that's going to put the Fed in a position where it's not going to be able to cut or may even have to raise interest rates in the short term in order to put a lid on inflation. But that's going to be really painful economically for the US if the Fed is having to raise rates to fight inflation at a time when the labor market is already soft because of the oil shock. Shock that could cause a lot of unemployment.
- [26:01]
Tim Miller
Are we staring down the barrel of stagflation?
- [26:03]
Josh Barro
Our last experience with stagflation was similarly to do with an oil supply shock.
- [26:07]
Tim Miller
I don't think, well, we'll see if they get washed in there. It's kind of unimaginable that he would get in there and then increase interest rates. Right? I mean, so isn't. Well, isn't like the bigger concerns set interest rates. That's true.
- [26:19]
Josh Barro
The Federal Open Market Committee sets interest rates, which consists of all seven members of the Federal Reserve Board and five presidents of regional Federal Reserve banks on a rotating basis. Most of those people are not people who are directly in the pocket of Donald Trump. People do this headcount with the Fed board where they talk about how many of the members Trump appointed, which I think is the wrong way to think about it. I mean, first of all, Powell is a Trump appointee. I don't think anybody thinks that Powell is someone who's in his pocket.
- [26:45]
Tim Miller
Ray was a Trump appointee.
- [26:48]
Josh Barro
So you have Steve Myron, who's sitting on the Federal Reserve Board, who had been the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors and continues to be out there saying that we should have substantial interest rate cuts and is being very hacky. If war is confirmed, that just puts him in Myron's seat. So you have, you know that Trump doesn't even gain an additional warm body on the board through the confirmation of Kevin Warsh, just ends up displacing Myron in his seat on the board. Jay Powell can remain on the board at least until 2028. And you know, again, if no one gets confirmed into Powell's seat, you get to stay until some new person is confirmed into your seat on the board. You can stay until you die, in theory, if no one else is confirmed. And so I don't know if it's going to be possible to confirm anyone to the Fed this year. I don't think the Senate's going to be more hospitable two years from now, because even if there isn't a Democratic majority, they're going to have an even narrower Republican majority there in the U.S. senate. And then you have the other two Trump appointees, Christopher Waller and Mickey Bowman, have been a little more favorable toward rate cuts over the last year. Plus. But I mean it when I say a little more favorable poll There's a reasonable debate to be had about should we have cut another quarter point, should we have cut a quarter point less? That's sort of the realm that they're in. They're not here to cut rates to 1% because the President says so. And then you have the Fed bank presidents who aren't appointed by the President at all. So even if Kevin Warsh came in really hot to do deep rate cuts, and again, once Warsh is in, he's no longer dependent on the President's goodwill because he already has the job. Warsh has a long career history in which he's generally been pretty hawkish and appeared to have real ideological grounding sometimes that I disagreed with. Significantly more hawkish than me. So I also, I don't necessarily think that Kevin Warsh is going to the Fed to do whatever it is that Donald Trump tells him to do. But even if he wanted to, he doesn't control the Fed himself.
- [28:36]
Tim Miller
So he can't and also doesn't control the bond markets and what else is happening with the rest of the economy in the way that.
- [28:43]
Josh Barro
Yeah, that's the other thing. If you cut interest rates in a really inappropriate way, the Fed only directly
- [28:48]
Tim Miller
controls short term interest rates rates, does it change mortgage.
- [28:50]
Josh Barro
Right. If what the market thinks is you've cut rates too much, it's going to cause inflation to spike, you're going to have to raise rates later in order to address that. Long term, interest rates might not even fall now like the 10 year rate which drives mortgage rates, the 30 year rate. Those could go up on rate cuts. If the expectation is that the Fed is going to have to do a U turn,
- [29:09]
Tim Miller
just briefly on the. I think we have an agreement on this. But on the economy, before Trump created this moronic disruption, there's a little Internet fight between Oren Cass, Trump's protectionist policymaker, and others. Okay, well, I'm assuming hate him. On the other side of him, Oren Cass said this. Since the tariffs were at the one year, as we mentioned, since Liberation Day, since the tariffs, growth ticked up and inflation down, manufacturing demand and productivity rose and consumer sentiment improved. The dollar didn't appreciate, retaliation didn't occur. The administration successfully leveraged tariffs into favorable deals and commitments. So that's the spin from the pro tariff crowd on how the economy was going before the war.
- [29:51]
Josh Barro
We continue to lose manufacturing jobs. The one thing I will say is I think the idea of there are many things wrong with the tariffs. The expectation that they were specifically going to be inflationary I think was Sometimes a little bit oversold, and for a similar reason to what I was talking about with oil a moment ago. Ago, which is that if you tariff a particular item, it raises the price of that item, but it also makes us consumers poorer. They have less money to spend on other stuff. And so tariffs will tend to push the price of imported goods up and the price of everything else down a teeny tiny bit because everyone is poorer. And it's easy to think about this if you think about other tax increases. Generally, the expectation is if you went out and raised the income tax, that would be disinflationary. If you raise the income tax and don't have new government spending to offset it, you're taking money out of the economy, you're taking money out of people's pockets. They go out, there's less money chasing all the goods that are out there. Inflation should come down. A tariff is just a tax that happens to be on a very specific set of goods, and it has that similar disinflationary effect. So I think it's true that of the many problems that we should have expected from tariffs, it was not necessarily that they were going to goose the inflation rate, although again, the mechanism by which the inflation is offset is that they make everyone poorer. So they don't really like to talk about why they wouldn't be so inflationary. But the tariffs have not produced the economic objectives that the President laid out here. It doesn't appear to be causing the reshoring. We continue to lose manufacturing jobs. And it's also because of the extremely chaotic nature in which the President has done this. It has not fostered business investment. Businesses don't know what to do. They don't know what rates they're going to be taxed at, on what activities. And so you have this weird economic situation over the last year where there's been this sort of freeze where companies don't want to make changes, they don't want to invest, they don't want to hire or fire. They're a little bit scarred from their experience in Covid where they laid a lot of people off and then they had shortages and they couldn't hire enough people. So there haven't been mass layoffs, but it's also been a really tight time for labor market hiring. And if anything, that logjam on that is about to be broken by this Iran war. I mean, that inflation data, where things had we started from an elevated rate of inflation and we had some Federal Reserve tightening that happened to try to fight that. And Inflation continued to moderate modestly, although it's still, even before the Iran war was still above the 2% target. And now we're going to see the short term effects of the oil shock are definitely going to push that upward. So I don't know what success there is for them to brag about here on the tariffs. Although I'm sure what Orin is up to here is the idea is to say, see, look how good the last year was and then everything going forward, he can say that it was about Iran.
- [32:28]
Tim Miller
Yeah, Blue collar jobs are about a half million below trend in addition to manufacturing jobs down. And it's just happening across the board. A couple other things that we have news this morning. Donald Trump showed up to the Supreme Court today. They're discussing the birthright citizenship case and the challenge to his executive order banning birthright citizenship. I guess this is the type of thing where a mob boss goes to sit inside the courtroom to try to bully a witness. I don't know if there's a different theory there. I don't know why else he would do it. Maybe he's bored. He doesn't want to talk about Iran. He's tired of getting people calling him, getting bad news. He wants to go in there where his phone, he doesn't have his phone and he can kind of doze off a little bit. I don't know. What's your take?
- [33:11]
Josh Barro
I don't know what he's up to. It's definitely not going to impress the justices and I'm not sure he's dumb enough to not realize it's not going to impress the justices. Like they're, I mean, these are nine very egotistical people. They don't like being pushed around. The conservatives on the court, I think are a little bit sensitive about the perception that they are a political arm of the President. And this is somewhat like the tariffs. This is another one of those cases where they can show their independence from him without really having to break from any of their key judicial philosophies. I think the black letter text, the Constitution is pretty clear here about what is required in terms of who's a citizen. So I don't think he's gonna get his way and I don't think he's even dumb enough to think this is gonna help him get his way. I think he thinks somehow that he benefits politically from these high profile fights with the court cuz it fires up the base. But he doesn't have to win another primary.
- [34:02]
Tim Miller
I'm not sure he's good at the blame game. It's kind of hard right now. Like he doesn't have a lot of people to blame. Like his, his go to move even before he was a politician, you know, going back to bankruptcy time, it's like, oh, so and so's fault. You know, they're out to get you. He's good at that. He's good at identifying someone else, you know, to point a finger at. It's harder to do. When you're the president, you control both chambers of Congress. You know, you've, you're dumb.
- [34:28]
Josh Barro
There's also no cameras in the court. So, you know, to the extent you're going there for a photo op and I guess they'll get him entering the building. Yeah, but it's not, it's not even a photo op.
- [34:37]
Tim Miller
Also, people don't know what's happening. So he feels like maybe he can go out of there and rant and rave about it and talk about how, you know, these guys don't want us to have a country anymore. They want us to bring in the cantaloupe calved, you know, third world people from shithole countries. I don't know. I guess that's maybe the thinking. Yeah, we'll see. I also don't think it's going to work. And we'll do one more serious topic because your subject is very serious.
- [35:00]
Josh Barro
I'm very serious.
- [35:01]
Tim Miller
And then we'll do a little bit of silliness.
- [35:02]
Josh Barro
I had someone the other day I was talking with and they were like, oh, and so your newsletter not serious. And I was like, no, it's very serious. That's the opposite of what the title is.
- [35:10]
Tim Miller
Yeah. It's important to understand Josh is a very serious person. If you have any questions about it, you can look at the swag that he sells. You know, it's on the hat, it's on the shirt.
- [35:19]
Josh Barro
I guess you do have hats. We don't have hats. Maybe we should have hats.
- [35:22]
Tim Miller
You should get hats. I don't know. Yeah, it's important. It's important to have branding. I saw a couple hats out there at the no Kings rally. A couple bull workouts. Appreciated that. Last serious topic, you wrote about sloppyism and how the adolescents have taken over policy making. And you kind of grapple with this age old question that you and I are both dealing with at the same time as elder millennials, which is, are things getting worse or am I getting old? And you grappled with that through the context of policy.
- [35:48]
Josh Barro
I mean, I'm definitely getting old. The question Is, does it, does it feel like things are getting worse because I'm getting old, or are they actually getting worse?
- [35:55]
Tim Miller
There you go. Thank you. For more precise.
- [35:59]
Josh Barro
You're getting old too.
- [35:59]
Tim Miller
Seriously? Yeah. For more precisely, more seriously enunciating the conundrum that we're processing and you looked at the context of policymaking and how kind of stupid a lot of the proposals are. Donald Trump and his tax bill had all these gimmicks, no tax on tips, et cetera. And now we have a lot of Democrats who are copying this with tax gimmicks. Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia, teachers shouldn't pay tax. Katie porter. Nobody under 100k should pay tax. Van Hollen and Cory Booker, they're proposing a bunch of tax carve outs for lower middle class, middle class people. What's your problem with those policies? Why do you call it adolescent?
- [36:38]
Josh Barro
There's an element of it that's like, I should just be able to have ice cream for dinner. I don't have responsibilities. Other people should take care of things and just this arbitrary choice of which people are favored and should be excused from the shared responsibilities that we have in society to finance our government. And it's different groups of people depending on which politicians. You have Steve Hilton running for governor of California saying veterans shouldn't have to pay income tax there, but it's treating taxes as though they are a penalty or something that reflect a moral judgment that you're disfavored and therefore you should pay rather than them being the price of a civilized society. And it's childish when anyone does it, but it's especially kind of like an
- [37:17]
Tim Miller
airline boarding mindset towards taxes. If you're an elderly, you get to board first. If you're a baby, you get to board first. If you're a veteran, you get to board first. If you have a limp, you get to board first. If you pay your way out of it, you get to board first. It's like that for taxes.
- [37:34]
Josh Barro
Sounds like you have a whole airline take here.
- [37:37]
Tim Miller
I mean, it's insane. The airline boarding process is insane. I watched a family of nine pre board me because one member of the family was, I don't know, maybe 10 years younger than President Donald Trump. One person who had, you know, looking like they had a little bit of a limp and they boarded their entire family first. That's just not a way to have a society. Josh.
- [38:01]
Josh Barro
Yeah, I don't know.
- [38:02]
Tim Miller
You know, we all have, we all should board, you know, just based on, based on, based on merit from each According to our ability, to each according to our need.
- [38:10]
Josh Barro
If you fly Delta, they promise you they'll have the bag to the bag claim within 20 minutes of your plane's arrival at the gate. And so I like to check my bag, and then I just have a backpack. I don't need to worry about overhead bin space, and then I can just board last, and I don't need to. I get completely out of that rat race. But anyway, to your point about this, you know, the ranking and the need to figure out who's worthy. I understand why the airlines do this. But ultimately, you know, if you're a Democrat, you're supposed to be able to say to people that the government provides valuable services to you that you should be willing to pay for. And I think some of that broke down during COVID you know, the period where in a lot of blue states, you had public officials explaining why actually it wasn't important for the government to open schools that your children could be sent to all day. A little bit undermined their ability to say, hey, you know, you really should pay for your share of this because the government is doing something important and valuable here. Like, they. Not only were they not opening the schools, they were saying, well, actually, it's not as important that the children be in school. Like, the teachers unions would have gone insane if you had said that in 2018, that it wasn't, you know, that it didn't matter that much whether kids were in school or not. Suddenly the positioning on that flipped and the way they could message that flipped. And at the federal level, what you see from Senator Van Hollen and Senator Booker basically trying to create extremely high thresholds, you know, again, in the ballpark of $100, around which, you know, people should pay no federal income tax at all. It's both disclaiming the idea that what the federal government is doing is worth paying for. And it's also at a time when we have a yawning budget deficit where we already can't afford tax cuts in the first place. And they're saying, well, this is paid for because we have plans to raise taxes on the rich and corporations to offset these middle and lower income tax cuts. But the problem with that is you need the tax increase anyway to close the budget gap. And Democrats have a whole laundry list of new things they want the government to spend money on. They claim they want childcare benefits and paid leave benefits and big new subsidies for green energy that the Republicans have gutted. These things all cost money. And it's like they come up with one tax. You know, it's, oh, we're going to have this tax on people who make over a million dollars. And then they come up with seven different things that the amount of that tax collection theoretically finances. You can only use it once. And if you decide to use it on this middle and lower income tax cut that both, you know, it completely stands in the way of what Democrats putative policy agenda is for a more activ of larger government with more services. And it comes at a time where the Fed is having to raise interest rates that push mortgage rates to a place that people are dissatisfied with in order to counteract those government budget deficits.
- [40:39]
Tim Miller
Counterpoint. Yeah, I hear you. I hear everything you're saying. You're correct on the merits. We cannot just raise taxes on people over a million dollars and also give people paid leave and do a green New Deal and cut taxes for everybody under 100,000. The math doesn't not work on that. But I concur. That said, Donald Trump's gimmicks worked. And the most important part of being in campaign politics right now is winning the campaign. And maybe just the American people are adolescent and you just have to factor that into your strategies and you have to treat them like children and you propose a lot of silly, gimmicky things and then you just deal with the consequences when you get into office, you're the mayor of New York. That seems to be working for him. You're in New York City. He did some gimmicky proposals. People liked it. People got on board for that. Now he's in there, now he's in charge. Now he has to make some hard decisions. He's cutting some, you know, he's doing some budget cuts, you know, he's doing some budget cuts in areas he had criticized before in libraries and elsewhere. Maybe that's the thing to do. Promise them candy and then govern with broccoli.
- [41:43]
Josh Barro
Well, I mean, for one thing, I think people notice if you promise things and then don't do them. And so that might feel good during the campaign once, but the people will then punish you for breaking your promises.
- [41:52]
Tim Miller
But then they forget you can run again. So that's how it worked for Trump. He promised them and they're mad at him. And then he left for four years and went to Mar a Lago and then he came back and they're like, remember?
- [42:01]
Josh Barro
Well, he was defeated for re election. And then we had a Democratic administration that presided over exploding inflation and a border that they failed to police. And they brought him back in. I mean, we discussed this when you were on Central Air a few weeks ago. The skeleton key to how did Donald Trump get elected again was that Joe Biden drove the reputation of the Democratic Party into a ditch. And so voters decided that Democrats had been even worse and even more.
- [42:26]
Tim Miller
But also, Donald Trump promised a lot of popular stuff.
- [42:29]
Josh Barro
If Biden had done a better job getting inflation under control and had not allowed millions of people to enter the country without authorization and had no strategy for dealing with that, Kamala Harris would have won that election regardless of Trump coming out with no tax on tips.
- [42:46]
Tim Miller
Snap reaction. If there are two candidates running for president in 2028 and one candidate does very well with people who understand how budgets work and one candidate does very well with people who don't, who do you think's more likely to win?
- [42:58]
Josh Barro
I think this is a gotcha question. I don't like it, but I look back to way politics.
- [43:02]
Tim Miller
That's a gotcha question.
- [43:04]
Josh Barro
I look back to the way that politics worked 30 years ago because again, I try to remember that it's not.
- [43:08]
Tim Miller
You are getting old. And we have answered the question to the conundrum.
- [43:11]
Josh Barro
It's not that people are newly idiots, that's the problem. But it's like in 1992, you had three leading presidential candidates all running on deficit reduction. And it wasn't this sort of eat your vegetables moralistic like we have to live within our means. That's why we introduce the budget deficit. No, they were out there saying, I want to cut the deficit so mortgage rates will come down. And in the 1980s, you had this understanding that fighting inflation and bringing down interest rates were like the key job for the president. In the Morning in America ad that Ronald Reagan ran in 1984 was about how interest rates and inflation were lower. So it's not that people are excited about the idea that you will do an austerity budget deal that raises taxes and lower spending. It's that people will reward you if you come into office and implement policies that cause inflation to fall and interest rates to fall.
- [43:58]
Tim Miller
I agree with you. I think that people should go and then do the policies that do that and also throw on top of that a little cherry on top, little candy like, hey, we'll give you a little tax break too if you, you can. I mean, Bill Clinton did these intersectional things that are very popular that we need in order to win the election.
- [44:15]
Josh Barro
It is true that Bill Clinton ran on a middle class tax cut in 1992, which he did not deliver. And he got reelected. Although 1994 was rough along the way.
- [44:24]
Tim Miller
True. Yeah.
- [44:25]
Josh Barro
Yeah.
- [44:26]
Tim Miller
I don't know. We just need something for working class people to get excited about. You know, that's different. And if it's. And if it's.
- [44:33]
Josh Barro
They can be excited about lower inflation and lower interest rates.
- [44:35]
Tim Miller
Better than free money.
- [44:36]
Josh Barro
Like, lower interest rates are, like, especially important for people with. With lower incomes.
- [44:40]
Tim Miller
Final topic. Also very serious.
- [44:42]
Josh Barro
Yes.
- [44:43]
Tim Miller
You offered on social media a contrary view regarding Brian's bimbofication and whether it constituted a double life life. You wrote this. I don't understand why people take Brian's interest in women who seek to cartoonishly enhance their feminine sexual characteristics as a sign of incompatibility with his wife. And I agree with that. Yeah, I agree with that. Kristi Noem, like Brett Baer severely saying on Fox that Kristi Noem is shocked by this and she wants privacy for her family. It's like, no, this was not a double life. This is a standard South Dakota life. I mean, maybe the saline breasts are a little different, but having a husband who is doing weird stuff on the Internet, that is like a slightly exaggerated version of what he does with his wife once a month. Isn't that just heterosexual marriage in South Dakota? I think so.
- [45:32]
Josh Barro
I saw someone on. On Twitter making a good observation that, you know, that because Brian, which, by the way, why can none of these people spell their names correctly? Brian, you know, had this interest in women who were in this, you know, bimbofication, which is not. Not a fetish that I'd heard of before a few days ago, where, like, you know, they put saline in to get enormous breasts and that sort of thing. And then, you know, obviously we've seen the photos of him positioning himself as though he had large breasts. It's kind of like a Sam Rockwell White Lotus situation where, like, Sam Rockwell liked the lady boys so much, he decided he had to be one. So whatever this Brian situation is, I want to first note that it is a fundamentally heterosexual proclivity that we're looking at here. This is about Bryon and his relationship. Relationship to women. But be that as it may, I mean, the whole Mar a Lago face aesthetic. And it was always amazing to me that Kristi Noem, who 10 years ago kind of looked normal, that to be the governor of South Dakota, this what I think of as a wholesome Midwestern state with, like, fairly modest aesthetic approaches to get this, like, this thing that makes you look like a female to female transsexual. This like the Mar A Lago like, you know, blow up your lips as big as possible, and then the, like, the really obvious weird, like, face work that is. It's not just her. This aesthetic is popular in these Republican circles right now, and it is, like, it's super unnatural looking. It's actually kind of funny in the context of them, you know, being concerned about, you know, like, the rise of trans identity and people like, doing, you know, making unnatural changes to their body. I mean, it's ironic in a way. It's just another version of that.
- [47:11]
Tim Miller
And also, Maha, it's a little bit of a. It goes contrary both to the attack on drag queens and to the attack on. On unnatural additives in our foods.
- [47:20]
Josh Barro
Yes, yes.
- [47:22]
Tim Miller
Yeah, you're putting the additives right into your face. I don't know why you can't now eat a lucky charm.
- [47:29]
Josh Barro
Yeah. But so anyway, it looks to me like there's two people into that marriage who have unnatural ideas about what a human body should do.
- [47:37]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I definitely don't think it's a double life at all. I think that it's very. Congratulations. I would say, what Brion was up to and what Christie was up to. And we honor the straights getting into some kinky stuff in the Midwest. Okay. All right. I think the more straights that are. I want to change it from bimbofication to elonfication. The more straight men that are elonfication their bodies, I think maybe the more they'll start to not give. Wait, I don't care as much about.
- [48:08]
Josh Barro
What is it to elonficate your body.
- [48:10]
Tim Miller
Have you seen Elon shirtless? I mean, talk about.
- [48:15]
Josh Barro
I saw those unfortunate yachting photos.
- [48:17]
Tim Miller
Yeah, the yachting photos and his whole body. And he's very top heavy. He's got kind of like. What was George Costanza's dad's name? Frank Costanza. Frank Costanza, yeah. He kind of needs a manzier or a bro. Kind of like Frank Costanza. And they weren't quite as comically Jessica Rabbit in their size as Brian's breasts, but they're getting there. They're on their way. Okay, that's Josh Barrel. We went way too. And poor Paige Cognetti. She's gonna have to transition from that. So, Josh, I'll see you soon. Keep on looks maxing. And up next, the mayor of Scranton. All right, we are back. She is the mayor of Scranton. She's running in Pennsylvania's 8th congressional district against the Trump endorsed first term Congressman Rob Bresnah. It's Paige Cagnetti. How are you doing, girl?
- [49:16]
Paige Cognetti
Great. Thanks for having me, Tim.
- [49:17]
Tim Miller
I'm excited to have you. It was maybe, I don't know, times of flat circle a couple months ago now when you launched the campaign. And I loved your opening launch ad. It was one of my favorites of the whole cycle. And so I just want for people, rather than having you redo it live on the show, I'm just gonna play a little bit of it. I'm gonna play a little bit of it for folks. Yeah, I'm sure you got your stick down. I'm gonna play a little bit of it for folks. So let's.
- [49:42]
Paige Cognetti
When our mayor went to prison for corruption, the Democratic machine thought they could put in another crony. So I took on the powerful and corrupt Democrats and ran for mayor as an independent with a simple idea. The government should work as hard as the people it serves. They called it Page against the Machine. As mayor, we did things differently. We lowered costs, cleaned out the corruption, managed the finances, bought the utility companies, built cool parks, we slashed the cost of doing business, built nearly a thousand more homes, and welcome new businesses. So everyone here has a shot at the American dream. We listened. Rob isn't brave enough to hold a single real town hall. I've held dozens in Trump country. We built a government for everyone. Rob says Scranton is not what we want. Well, Rob, I say day trading away the public trust is not who we are. So, yeah, I'm running for Congress.
- [50:27]
Tim Miller
I love it. I love it. So we got the most of the gist of it there, but, you know, give us your.
- [50:34]
Paige Cognetti
Yeah. What's fun about that ad is a lot of those lines we actually wrote in 2019 at a coffee shop. When I was first running for mayor. Right. In 2019, the mayor of Scranton went to federal prison for extortion. There was not supposed to be a mayoral election that year, and I was very pregnant with our first daughter, and I was not going to raise our daughter in a place where corruption was okay. The backdrop of that would be, you know, before that, I was on campaigns. I was in the Obama administration at the Treasury Department. I went to business school. I was in finance for a bit. I moved to Scranton in 2016 to be with my husband, who I met 20 years ago when I was on the campaign trail. And I started reading the paper, trying to figure out what I was going to do for my next career step. Started looking and realizing that there was real corruption happening at the Scranton school district. We didn't know at the time it was also happening at the city, but unfortunately, this is a region that is steeped in public corruption. We have had mayors, county commissioners, judges, state senators go to prison for public corruption. I started fighting in 2018, fighting that corruption. School board. I worked for the auditor general at the state level in 2019. We were calling out fraud and waste and abuse on school districts across the commonwealth, was calling out waste in nursing homes and the inability of the state to do what they need to do for our seniors. So I was happily doing that when the mayor got arrested and went away and the local Democratic party decided they would do what any local party should do in the wake of a huge corruption scandal. Go behind closed doors with a number of people who nobody knows their name. Just 25 or so people nobody knows they are anoint the next mayor, the Democratic nominee for mayor in a special election. Great idea, guys. The local paper even wrote a story essentially like, meet your new mayor, because the electorate is very Democratic. I had different ideas, so I switched to independence and I ran as an independent. There was a moment in 2019 where I was in a courtroom, A couple other people had done the same as me. Switched to independent. It was one side of the room, the local Democratic Party. The other side of the room was the local Republican party and the independent candidates. The local Democrats were trying to kick us off the ballot, saying that we couldn't actually switch to independent. This was a primary election, something, not a special election. We won, obviously, but I've been fighting the local Democrat machine for a long time. We call corruption out wherever we see it. Unfortunately, corruption just is in a lot of places, especially in this region. Democrats, Republicans, it doesn't matter. We have to call it out. We have built trust back in Scranton. This is my seventh year as mayor, so one in 2019, one again in 2021, one again in 2025. We've tried to rebuild trust at every single time, and it's been a lot of fun. So when Rob Bresnahan comes along and. Right. He actually campaigned on banning stock trading. He said that he would ban it. It was sickening. He comes along, becomes one of of the most active stock traders in Congress. Same thing. I was really happy. I am really happy being mayor, but realized I can't let this stand. I can't let this guy trade away on our pain. Literally on our pain. And so we're running for Congress. But again, that ad, we wrote many of those lines on the back of a napkin at a coffee shop like seven years ago.
- [53:50]
Tim Miller
I love that for that reason that it's real. And the other thing I like about it is, you know, one of my complaints about the Democratic Party and some of this has been thrust upon them, like just to be fair. Right. Some of this is like Trump is trying to tear everything down. Trump is so corrupt. And that the Democrats have found themselves being oftentimes like the defenders of the machine, like the defenders of the status quo, you know, against this kind of wrecking ball that has ruined our politics. And like, people don't want that. Right. Like, voters aren't looking for, for the machine. Like they're looking for maybe a different type of reform, a different type of person challenging the things that they're unhappy about, whether it's corruption or anything else, like costs going up, job loss. And so I like that you're challenging that kind of status quo within the party.
- [54:41]
Paige Cognetti
Yeah. And you think about, so 2018, we're fighting the school district, which all the school board is Democrats. Right. It's a democratic town in 2018, I'm on the part of the auditor general's office. We're calling out agencies that are under a Democratic governor's administration. Right. You can't be political, you can't go on party lines when you're talking about actually governing. And I agree with you, and having been in the Obama administration and seeing folks in the Obama administration who had been in the Clinton administration, there are folks who get defensive about a program or a policy that they put in place. And I get that that's human nature. You have to be able though, to pivot, see how a program works or not, and either make changes and reform or throw it out. The problem, of course, with, you know, Doge, where we were a year ago, was just throwing everything out. It's like my mom, my mom lives with us through a multi generational household and she's a big sewer and we have a six year old daughter, so she's kind of teaching her. So it's always like measure twice, cut once. That's the, you know, that's basic. The problem with Doge was it was just cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, go in with the chainsaw. We have to be willing to go in, you know, with a red pen or something, you know, more severe, not, you know, not hold dear something just because it was so and so's policy 10 years ago. We have to be able to look at it, say, look, this didn't work, let's change it. That's what the American people deserve, is for us to be able to do that. I agree that, you know, over time, sometimes, and certainly in the Biden administration, too. Things that weren't working. There was not a willingness to accept that it wasn't working in power. We need to be able to do that. We need a lot of folks in Congress who have learned lessons and taken those classes on entrepreneurship, like Fail Fast. Right? It's not working. Let's go. People are waiting for things to change. The system isn't working and it hasn't been working under any of the previous administrations, to be honest.
- [56:31]
Tim Miller
So being in Congress is different from being mayor in a lot of ways. There's many parts of the job that aren't that fun. You can't achieve as much immediately. People frustrated with Congress. Congress isn't doing anything right now. It's mostly Mike Johnson's fault. So if you look at Congress right now, is there somebody you look at that you're like, that person is at least doing a good job in a challenging situation? That's the type of congressperson I want to model myself after.
- [56:53]
Paige Cognetti
Yeah. So mayors are big fans of mayors. Obviously. We have our own mayor friend crew. I'm on the executive committee of the US Conference of Mayors. The former mayor of San Jose, Sam Licardo, is an excellent member of Congress. When you go into Sam's office, instead of him saying to you, so what can I do for you to. Today, he has like five different policy proposals and he's like, so this is what I need from you guys. I need you to go talk to this person. He is ready to go at all times. He has so much energy and is so thoughtful and the same thing. Right. Mayors have to get things done. We have to move fast. We have to fail fast and change, change our direction if we need to. Sam embodies that and I would love to serve with him.
- [57:34]
Tim Miller
Well, kind of beyond that at Congress and even more broadly about where the Democrats are. I had another guy run running. In some ways, it's a very different demographic, but a parallel situation to yours, which is a guy named Bobby Polito. He's running in the Rio Grande Valley down on the border of Mexico. And he's running in a place where there's a lot of working class voters, mostly Latino voters, that Democrats have lost ground with in a district the Democrats used to do very well in and they've lost ground with. And I was asking him kind of, what are you offering? That's different. NEPA is a similar type situation. The town of Scranton is Democrat, but the broader area is an area that used to be very Democrat. But Donald Trump made huge gains there going back to 2016 did well in 2024 as well. What do you think Democrats have to do differently? What's something that is different from what you're seeing from the Harris campaign or other unsuccessful campaigns in the region?
- [58:31]
Paige Cognetti
Yeah, we have to fight for people. You gotta fight. And Donald Trump came in in 2016 with a message that he was gonna fight for people and he was gonna drain the swamp. And that's what people wanted to hear. Right. They we could talk about how that maybe hasn't been the case. Certainly in the case of Rob Bresnahan, we have a new member of Congress elected in 2024 who is the poster child for D.C. corruption.
- [58:53]
Tim Miller
We're coming back to Rob in a second. Don't you worry.
- [58:56]
Paige Cognetti
Getting it on the grift. But I get it, right? I get that people feel left behind. Look at in 2022. So the district went for Trump three times, but also went for Josh Shapiro and John Fetterman in 2020. Right. People see Josh Shapiro, they see somebody who's going to fight for them in 2022. They saw, you know, every county, you know, every day with John Fetterman like that. That works for people. I don't think most people here actually care about party. There's a lot of independents out there too, that are disenfranchised in primary. They just want to see you fight for them. After I get off here with you, I'm actually on my way to a public utility commission hearing to fight the gas company for yet another rate hike that they are going for. Right. As mayor, we have been fighting, you know, fighting these g that are trying to take advantage of us for a long time. I think people need to see you in action and see that you've done this and see that you're real. It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or Republican or Independent. They just want to meet you and understand that you understand what they're going for and then be willing to take on the hard fights and do what we've done in the city. Tell people no that have never been told no before. Right. That's not, you know, it's not easy, but it has to be done. And we've got a great record of success doing that.
- [60:06]
Tim Miller
I'm with you. I think that one element of this, right, is the Democrats kind of recapturing that. Like, we're going to fight these entrenched institutions. We're going to fight the people that are screwing you over. We're fighting the people in power. Right. Like we, we Aren't them like, we're trying to actually go after them on your behalf. Right. So that's good. That's step one. I do wonder though, if there's also a cultural element to this. Right. Like, and maybe in some of the cultural issues, Democrats are kind of have, like, have become really an urban, you know, coastal party and representing those values. I'm wondering if you see that, like, are there any issues kind of besides just the, the corruption issue where you feel like Democrats have gotten a little out of step with your constituents, the
- [60:45]
Paige Cognetti
Democrats in this area? No, I think we continue to see really, really solid middle of the road leaders in our region. I think national Democrats and the way that people spin Democrats and the way that things are pitched on social media, spun on podcasts are meant to make it seem, never here meant to seem that it's this coastal elite thing and that's not the case. I mean, we don't run a city in a partisan way. Right. And I don't think that. I can't even tell with different leaders, you know, different mayors in our region. I don't know if they're Democrat or Republican. We really are just trying to.
- [61:23]
Tim Miller
Well, when you're hearing from people, are there complaints about Democrats, like about immigration, Is it about, you know, other cultural issues
- [61:30]
Paige Cognetti
or is it not that certainly folks are kind of like, well, you know, the cultural issues and kind of my pushback is usually like, when was the last time you actually heard someone talking about a cultural issue? Like, really? Right. We have this in the zeitgeist. That's. Oh, the Democrats are always talking about cultural issues. I think that is Republican spin that has been very successful saying like, oh, this is what they care about that has been put on to Democrats. That is not the case. So I always push back. Really? Tell me when the last time that you heard that was.
- [62:00]
Tim Miller
Let's talk to what you can kind of do oversight wise when you get into Congress, when you're talking about corruption. Because again, that's, I think different than. It's more challenging than doing it in a mayor's office. But it's possible. Obviously one of the things you're hitting on the note, stock trading with your opponent who has been comically corrupt on his stock trades. I mean, just absurd. He's talking to his financial advisor before he's going to vote on stuff. So that's one element. Another one is crypto. He's been doing crypto trading. And I don't know, the Democrats, I think in Congress, some of them have been A little bit hesitant. They don't want to alienate. Alienate people that, you know, do use, you know, that invest in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies and are doing so in an upfront way. But, man, I look at this and just look at what's happening with the administration, with your opponent, with others. Like, the degree of the crypto corruption is out of control. And I'm just wondering kind of what you think could be done about that or if there are other things that you'd be focused on.
- [63:02]
Paige Cognetti
Yeah, I mean, my opponent talks to his financial advisor. He said it himself. He'd like to tell you, and he'll tell you. He doesn't, but we have him saying it himself. And then just yesterday, we learned that the Defense Secretary was talking to his financial advisor to try to make money before going into war. Similar to Rob Bresnahan, who is actually the original on this. Rob Bresnahan was trading missile stocks before Trump went into Iran the first time. So I don't know if maybe the Defense Secretary is getting his stock tips from Rob Bresnahan. It's hard to say. But it's all. Whether it's crypto, whether it's AI and tech stocks, whether it's the defense. It's just all told, we need to make sure, first and foremost that members of Congress and if we could get their members of the administration are just, you know, put your money in index funds, put it away. You'll probably do better over time anyway. But it's breaking trust, right? People do not trust politicians. They don't trust government. They don't trust institutions, and they sure as hell don't trust Congress. So why are we making it worse? Why are we making it harder? We need to make sure that we're stopping that. It doesn't matter what it is. I mean, if nezepotism is a real big problem, right, with crypto, it's unclear to me, me how the president's family can be so deep in making money on these policies, or lack of policies might be better. You know, Lutnick's sons are in some enormous data center deal in Texas. Like, this is the stuff, of course, on a larger scale, but the same stuff we've been fighting in northeastern Pennsylvania, right? It's these. These favors for friends, these nepotism, like hire your nephew or, you know, make sure that you give the money to. To somebody's friend. Like this. This is the stuff, people. This is exactly the reason why people think that their vote doesn't count and our democracy doesn't work. We have to go after it. It doesn't matter. Democrats or Republicans. Right. A lot of Democrats, big stock traders too. We have to be able to call it all out. I do think there are a lot of current members of Congress who want a critical mass to be able to do this work. There's a lot of really good candidates out there that want to do this work. I think given where we're at right now with crypto is a great example of the different folks that are making money off of this. I think we can kind of hit rock bottom. I sure hope we've hit rock bott grift and that we can get to Congress in 2027 and start to make some real changes.
- [65:11]
Tim Miller
Yeah. When you're talking about fighting, going after industries that are screwing people over, you talked about some examples locally. How do you look at that when you look at it from more of a federal environment, oversight of big tech, or are there other areas that you think would be something you'd want to focus on?
- [65:29]
Paige Cognetti
There's tech and data centers. We chat about that. But insurance, insurance just, I mean, generally seems like a scam. We had an enormous flood in September of 2023. You know, hundreds of different properties that were, that were damaged, 20 properties that are completely condemned. I think I can count on one hand the business or businesses or families that felt that they got a fair deal from their insurance company. Right. And every time, you know, every time you turn on a baseball game, football game, the stadium is always named for an insurance company. Right. There seems to be a pretty obvious connection between, between families getting screwed after a flood and whatever. Pick your field that's named for an insurance company. We need some real reforms there. People are hurting so much and then the worst moment of somebody's life, they call the insurance company and are told, oh, sorry, there's this clause on page 27 that means that we can't help you. Goodbye. That's the kind of stuff again that makes people feel like they are being exploited and it's just wrong.
- [66:26]
Tim Miller
I definitely don't think insurance companies should have enough money to be sponsored. Not only do sponsoring savings their own owners of sports teams that just own insurance companies. You didn't make anything, you didn't create anything. You didn't create a widget. You're just taking money from people who are going through the worst thing that ever happened in their life.
- [66:46]
Paige Cognetti
Right. If it worked, that'd be one thing, but it doesn't. My husband's business flooded our Home was okay, but hundreds and hundreds of homes here. And then we didn't even get money from FEMA. So. So the threshold for FEMA previously two years ago, was $23 million. Your public infrastructure damage had to be $23 million. That's a lot, right? Bridges, creeks, all these things. ARP damage was $7.5 million. We didn't make the threshold to get reimbursed for that. So city of Scranton, we had to pay that money. This current administration and this Republican Congress has enabled them to, I believe, quadruple the threshold. So we're talking $100 million, the level of destruction of public infrastructure, that's $100 million. That's just catastrophe in the true meaning of the word. So we've got a lot of problems with the way that they're taking away even the things that we need the most in cities and counties and townships with these extreme weather events. They're taking that away, too. Fema, of course, shut down right now, and we are trying to get this grant money for people. If you just. It's absurd. And again, why we need more mayors in Congress. We need people who have gone through this and tried to help their towns understand what people need. So that when we're making federal policy, when we're putting the budget together, putting programs together at the federal level, there are programs that actually work on the ground.
- [68:08]
Tim Miller
Another catastrophe is the foreign policy of this administration. Right now you're seeing this war in Iran and big debate in the Democratic coalition is, is the degree to which Israel's our partner in this war, their influence was helping to cajole Donald Trump. I think that there are a variety of, obviously, elements that got us into this. Wondering how you assess what's happening right now with the war in Iran and whether we should be reconsidering the scope of our relationship with Israel and some of our other allies in the Middle East, Saudi, uae, et cetera.
- [68:47]
Paige Cognetti
It's just so hard to know, right? We don't have any information. I don't know that Congress has that much information themselves. Certainly the American people, the service members and their families don't have enough information. And that's been the most galling thing. The Bush administration at least had the decency to lie to us about why we were going into Iraq. We have nothing. So that makes it so hard. And, and again, like, it makes. It makes people's wheels spin. It makes them distrust. We're pretty much at every point, there's something that comes out that makes regular folks just more concerned that they are getting exploited. Yesterday we see the House Republicans thinking about cutting health care again to pay for the war. I mean, it's unbelievable how out of touch these folks are. We've got gas prices that are over $4 here now, which is really tough on folks. We have our Easter food giveaway downtown right now. You know, people are literally waiting in line for a ham to feed their family on Sunday. And we are going into continued into week five of a war that nobody has any information about. I think it's really scary that there's no information. I worry that there's no plan and it's really hitting people's pocketbooks. And of course, for military families, a lot of military families here, they've got sons and daughters and husbands and wives that are over there without any sort of idea of what the goal is.
- [70:11]
Tim Miller
All right, I have a Scranton section I want to close out with. It will get increasingly fun as we go along. The first one is a little less fun because it's about Scranton Joe Biden. You mentioned as you were telling the story of the mayorship and how the mayor was corrupt and they had a backroom deal passing it on to the next person. Obviously not exactly the same. Joe Biden wasn't corrupt and vice president, people knew who she was. That said, looking back on that exchange, how do you reflect on the hand that old Scranton Joe left us with in 2024?
- [70:42]
Paige Cognetti
I will first say that being the hometown of the US President is wonderful. We are proud to have somebody that grew up on North Washington Avenue make it to the Oval Office. That is something that we will always be proud of and I think increasingly proud of as the politics of it subside a bit. I was displeased in July of 2024. I thought there should have been at least a mini primary and some semblance of democracy to your point, in the same way that there should have been a more democratic process in the local Democratic Party when the mayor, you know, triggered a special election. So that was something like. That was a huge missed opportunity and something that we'll be writing in history books for a long time, but it was really tough to get through.
- [71:30]
Tim Miller
Is there a real Dunder Mifflin in Scranton? Do you have a paper company?
- [71:34]
Paige Cognetti
We do have the Pen Paper building. There is a real paper company. It has been there for over 100 years. So that opening montage that has the brick building, that is still there and it was family run until just a few years ago. It's a great family that owns it. It's a lot of fun to have.
- [71:49]
Tim Miller
Do you have a favorite niche character from the Office?
- [71:52]
Paige Cognetti
We have an office 5k. So a pitch for that first weekend for Saturday in May. Every year there's an office 5K. People come from all over the. We've had Germans come and Australians come and you dress up as your favorite character. I dressed up as Dwight last year. Good reminder for me I need to figure out who I'm going to be this year. There's one guy who had. It's not actual chili, but he has a giant chili bowl and he runs the whole 5K. Like, with the chili bowl. It's just. It's just awesome. It's so much fun.
- [72:18]
Tim Miller
When is the 5K? When is the office 5K?
- [72:20]
Paige Cognetti
First Saturday in May.
- [72:22]
Tim Miller
First Saturday in May.
- [72:23]
Paige Cognetti
Come on up.
- [72:24]
Tim Miller
That's when we have Jazz Fest down here. But those two options for people who are looking for a first Saturday in May vacation, you could do the office 5k or could come to Jazz Fest in New Orleans. All right, I want to close with this. We like Michael doing the boom roast it. And so I want to give you a chance. I will be the Michael. You a chance to roast two people. And then, you know, if you do a good job, I'll give you the boom roasted at the end. So we are going to start with your opponent, Rob Bresnahan.
- [72:48]
Paige Cognetti
Rob Bresnahan has a helicopter. I share a Ford Edge with my mom. This is a guy who rides around our district giving pizza to TSA workers who are not being paid, thinking that the pizza apparently will be given to their landlords, I guess to pay their rent. This guy could not be more out of touch. And we have to continue to make sure people tie together that he is cutting their health care, cutting funding for schools, cutting FEMA and our ability to help you out in a storm and making money off of it himself as he day trades away as a member of Congress.
- [73:24]
Tim Miller
Boom. Rusted. Finally. This one's for me. Jdv.
- [73:29]
Paige Cognetti
Oh, gosh. That's a tough one. It's a real tough one. He came to the district recently and I'm happy for him to keep coming back.
- [73:39]
Tim Miller
You want to see more of JD Vance in your district? You don't think that his.
- [73:43]
Paige Cognetti
I am happy to see more of J.D.
- [73:45]
Tim Miller
you think like the hall monitor vibe of telling people, you know exactly how they need to work hard, order in order to, you know, how many bar.
- [73:57]
Paige Cognetti
How many Barbies do you get for Jade? Like, have you.
- [74:00]
Tim Miller
I think you get two children.
- [74:01]
Paige Cognetti
Like share one doll and two crayons or something.
- [74:03]
Tim Miller
You get two or three dolls. You don't think that his book, the Appalachian Book, is resonating?
- [74:10]
Paige Cognetti
Yeah, you know, I did. I scanned my email and I did get an email from Barnes and Noble touting the book. And I was, you know, I'm eager to read it. I just can't wait.
- [74:18]
Tim Miller
We'll see. All right. The shady Vance. Appreciate you, girl. Get back out on the campaign trail. And you got a mayor, too. Andrew got a parent. You've got a lot happening.
- [74:26]
Paige Cognetti
Yeah, we're having fun, though. My mom makes it all happen. That's the thing.
- [74:30]
Tim Miller
Thank you for taking the time. That's Paige Cognetti. Thanks a lot to Josh Barrow as well. Everybody else will be back tomorrow with one of your faves. See you all then.
- [74:37]
Josh Barro
Thanks for understanding.
- [74:39]
Tim Miller
Saw salesman art branding, Capari commissions.
- [74:42]
Josh Barro
I was sitting in the kitchen trying to guess where she was living now.
- [74:46]
Tim Miller
Hotel room in Houston with the shades against the sunshine. I'm baby still scram like it's 1999. What I saw rolling through with the Borg podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.