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- [00:00]
A
The Dispatch Podcast is presented by Pacific Legal foundation, suing the government since 1973. Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. I'm joined today by Washington Post columnist Megan McCardell, a Dispatch contributor, and my Dispatch colleagues, national correspondent Kevin Williamson and Executive editor Declan Garvey. On this week's Roundtable, we'll discuss our national debt after President Trump announced a new war on fraud to be led by Vice President J.D. vance, and the president's claim from the State of the Union that he can balance the budget overnight. If we just get rid of some fraud, then the teenage dating recession. Should we worry that teenagers aren't partying in 2026 and aren't really even getting together? And finally, not worth your time are unread emails. Before we get to today's conversation, please consider becoming a member of the Dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up@thedispatch.com join and if you use the promo code Roundtable, you'll get one month free. And if ads aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership, no ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and much, much more. Let's dive. Megan, I want to start with a question to you. In his otherwise long but mostly forgettable State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, President Trump announced that J.D. vance would be leading the administration's new war on fraud, and the president, in announcing this, said he'll get it done and if we're able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight. I want to address this in two sort of separate but related conversations. One having to do with the debt overall, the annual deficits that we've been running that are getting worse, and then this question of fraud and how much fraud is a part of our ongoing fiscal challenges. So starting first with fraud, I think pretty much anybody you ask is going to say it's a good thing if the federal government's going after fraud. I think there's one of the reasons that people, particularly on the center right, applauded the thinking behind what led to the announcement of Doge and the goals that Doge pursued. But it's important to remind people for context that Doge started out as an effort to cut $2 trillion from the annual budgets. Then it was $1 trillion. Then it was later revised down to $150 billion was the goal. And if you look at the results of what we found from Doge, in fact, federal spending was higher every single month this year, 2025, than it had been in 2024. So while Doge, I think maybe succeeded in some ways in the overall picture, it failed. Is there any reason for us to believe that the newly launched war on fraud with General Vance will come up with different results?
- [03:36]
B
No. General Vance may make a valiant charge at fraud. And look, stopping fraud is good. I would argue that it's not always good. This is one of my most controversial opinions is that the optimal amount of fraud is not zero. Which is not to say the ideal amount of fraud is zero. But as with anything else, the amount you have to spend to root out the fraud matters. And there is a point at which, and I think in some ways the United States government is past that point, especially in terms of how much we nickel and dime federal employees in a desperate effort to make sure that they never ever waste a single dollar of taxpayer money, which in the abstract sounds great and in the actual doing of it means that our procurement process are insane. They are so strenuous, designed to prevent any kind of unfairness, any kind of wastage that like they take a ton of time. The canonical example of this is the multi page procedure for buying bottled water for troops or other government workers in the event that there is not potable water on site. Right. Do government employees actually need a memo to tell them when they can run to Costco? Would any other company operate this way? No, because it's insane and in fact it's costly. Right. Having to have all those procedures means things take longer. And what is one of the most expensive things you do? It is waste the time of the people that you are paying a great deal of money to do government work. So that's one issue is how are they going to go after the fraud if they are going to go after it in ways that produce net benefits for the federal government. All to the good people should not be defrauding the United States government. And if they do, they should spend a lot of time in the pokey. The second issue is, is this going to generate like trillions in savings, which is what it would take. The United States budget deficit is almost $2 trillion a year. No, most of what the government does is not fraud. It is mailing checks to people. And like there is not a lot of fraud in Social Security, there's more fraud in Medicare. But it's very hard to root out without causing people to not get their medical bills paid and die, which would be Very unpopular. Most of the budget is just stuff we spend money on. People don't want to believe that because they feel like they don't see it. And I actually wrote a column about this last week. This is especially true with healthcare is that if you think about what healthcare spending looks like, every year we get these new treatments and they're great and they're for things like, you know, in the past decade we have cured cystic fibrosis. Functionally, you have to stay on a medication for life, but you have a normal lifespan. A disease that used to kill people in their 30s, if that. We have cured hepatitis C, we have invented new immunotherapies, we have found a drug that seems to almost cure obesity. And all of those things are quite expensive. And you buy the option to use those things a little bit every year and you pay for that through your health insurance premiums. But the thing is, it's a weird kind of transaction, right? You don't know which of those conditions you're going to have. Mostly you're not gonna get cystic fibrosis, you're not gonna get hepatitis C and so forth. And so it just feels like you're spending a lot of money on nothing, right up to the point where something goes wrong. And then you desperately need whatever expensive thing the government or your private insurer has been paying for. And so there is this illusion that there must be a large sum of money in the government that does not go to some important interest group that does not go to something that people want done. And that's just not the case. If it were easy, it would already have been cut. Believe me. Republicans want to cut taxes, Democrats want to increase spending. And if there were some easy sum of money that you could find to finance those things, it would long since have been exploited.
- [07:31]
A
Yeah, Kevin, the look at the recent Minnesota fraud scandal. Well documented prosecutions came out of it. It really was a significant amount of money in the context of what a state spends. And the over site was basically non existent. Some of the things that were discovered, some of the reporting that you saw from sort of right wing YouTube stuff overstated the problem, overstated the results, provided things that weren't entirely accurate and may have distorted the picture that the average YouTube user or the average social media news consumer has a distorted understanding of what actually happened. But what actually happened was really, really bad. The president and vice president yesterday announced that they were going to suspend payments to Minnesota from Medicaid to attempt to attack that. That's all to the good, but as Megan points out, that feels like the proverbial drop in the bucket. It's one state, one program. There's fraud. Go get it. I'm for it.
- [08:34]
B
Amen.
- [08:37]
A
If we did this at every state level, can we even make a dent? We should do it. Just to be clear, we should do it, I think. But to Megan's point, you know, unless it costs, you know, billions and billions of dollars to go after it, how much will it matter?
- [08:53]
C
It's not going to matter. It's worth noting that the reimbursements they've suspended to Minnesota are measured in the millions of dollars. I think it's $269 million at the very high end. The fraud estimates there run into the $1 or $2 billion. Our deficit is measured in trillions of dollars, and our debt is measured in hundreds of trillions of dollars or tens of trillions of dollars, depending on how you look at it. So it's not going to make any difference on that front. You know, I've written that same column that Megan has once or twice that once you get to where you're spending a buck 50 to get rid of a dollar's worth of fraud, you're not spending your money wisely. I understand the moralistic need to police that stuff, and when it's opportune, I think we should. But just for scale, you know, our deficit this year is going to run something like 5.8% of GDP. There's not welfare fraud and Medicaid fraud and Medicare fraud. That equals 5.8% of GDP. That's like eight times or nine times the size of the whole, like, AI and data center industry. We don't have that much fraud in our economy. We just don't. Medicaid fraud is pretty common. Partly it has to do with the way the program is structured because there are a lot of third party providers, and anytime you put money on the table, people will figure out a way to pick it up. People got really angry with me years and years ago when I was complaining that the Affordable Care act was making it easier to identify, to recognize lots of quack therapies like chiropractic and, you know, aromatherapy and Reiki and stuff like that, the pseudoscience stuff. And we do spend money legitimately on things that are not really medical care. And we probably should stop doing that. We should probably reform what's eligible for that and what's not. But as long as you have that basic structure, you're going to find people who figure out ways to pick up the money you put on the table and that program, you know, to reform these things is going to be a bigger and deeper and wider thing than identifying specific illegal abuses. Because so much of the problem is not what's illegal, but what's actually legal. You know the problem with Social Security, yeah, we've got some disability fraud, and that's a real thing, and we should probably work with that. But the problem with Social Security isn't the illegal stuff that people do with Social Security, it's the legal things that people are eligible for.
- [11:03]
A
These are structural problems. Yeah, the problem down here in the way that they're set up, we have
- [11:08]
C
big structural problems with our entitlement system and big structural problems with our tax system. And as I was pointing out in the course of complaining offline about something in the Dispatch the other day, in the United States, taxes and transfers equal 40 odd percent of GDP all handed together. So that's a bunch of money you're talking about. Something close to half of the US Economy is accounted for by taxes and transfers. So when you've got problems in those systems, you've got real economic problems that have to be eventually dealt with, but you're certainly not going to fix the deficit overnight. With JD Vance, who makes stuff up, by the way, about this stuff. J.D. vance is very famous for lying about Haitians in Springfield and that sort of thing. But if we're going to do this, here's what I want. If the problem actually is fraud, then you don't fix fraud by withholding payments. You fix fraud by prosecuting people for fraud. So there's a trillion dollars of fraud out there. I want to see indictments and investigations and trials and convictions with numbers that add up to roughly a trillion dollars or whatever the number is they're going to get to, but they're not going to get there because there's nothing like that. It's just. It's just silly.
- [12:14]
A
Declan. The President did this. I think with doge. It was all sorts of talk about doge. Relatively few. You know, you had the administration hype. You know, every single program that the administration found that had some fraud, or certainly the ones that sounded worse. It was like the old days of the Citizens Against Government Waste Pig book, which was great. I loved it. I wrote about it back in the day. Some of the programs that they found were truly absurd. And you could highlight those to show how out of control some government spending had gotten.
- [12:46]
C
Every conservative columnist in America had that data marked on his calendar like, I'm taking this week off because the column
- [12:51]
A
just writes itself and you went to Capitol Hill and there was a guy dressed in a pig outfit. And look, I do think it was important, it's important to address those things. And you know, some of the, the absurdities did demonstrate just how out of control some of these bureaucracies had gotten where they were spending money on silly things both here and overseas, that the federal government has no business doing good to eliminate those, full stop, no qualification needed. But in, in terms of fraud, Government Accountability Office estimates that the United States loses somewhere between 233 and $521 billion with a B to improper payments. And that finding has to say, has been consistent over the past decade. Plus, these are massive amount of money. Declan, what do we know about how the Trump administration, J.D. vance and those who are going to be working underneath him or alongside him are going to set about addressing those improper payments, this fraud that the President talked about on Tuesday night?
- [14:01]
D
Yeah, I mean, I do think there is a tendency for people who are more focused on these more important, more structural drivers of the national debt to kind of downplay or dismiss some of the waste, fraud and abuse stuff. That's become a punchline in some ways as a get out of jail free card for that's my answer on the national debt whenever I'm asked about it. But I do think the GAO numbers that you cite, a couple hundred billion dollars a year is a big deal. We should take it seriously. And I think even setting the numbers themselves aside, it's disproportionately damaging to civic trust too, when you think about we're all getting ready to pay our taxes in a month or so. I don't particularly enjoy it any year, but I'm not going to enjoy it anymore knowing that some portion of it is getting siphoned off by scammers. And I do think that there is value in bringing some accountability so that people can trust that their tax dollars are worth it, that they should buy into the system, that this is something that we're all doing together. The problem, I think, is when it is used as an excuse or a pretense to not deal with any of these structural issues that we're talking about, the entitlement reform, Social Security, et cetera. So I did talk to some people who understand how this stuff works. The problem, as Megan outlined, is that the costs for going after a lot of this stuff, determinations have been made over the years that it's just not worth spending prosecutor time going after things under a certain threshold because you only have so many U.S. attorneys, you only have so much resources. And the sentencing guidelines for these crimes often end up. These people don't serve any jail time. You don't get that deterrent effect, especially if you're a first time offender. You can steal. I mean, I don't want to be encouraging anybody, but it sounds like you can steal a pretty decent amount of money. Yeah.
- [15:56]
A
Declan, can you tell us the exact threshold where we're.
- [15:59]
D
Okay the. And. And you'll get probation, you'll get house arrest, you'll get, you know, pay fines and restitution, whatnot.
- [16:07]
A
Yeah. What was the name of the guy? Remember the commercials from the guy who wore, like, question marks on his suit and he did ads telling people, come and get government. There's government money everywhere for you. We just need to know what the threshold is so we don't get prosecuted.
- [16:21]
C
It's probably worth noting, by the way, that the improper payments in that GAO audit are not all fraud or not even mostly fraud. Yeah, they're people who are getting paid for legitimate services they've offered, but the paperwork wasn't done right. Or they've double paid somebody, or they got a one time bill and they sign it up as a monthly bill. And what's interesting about it can also
- [16:40]
B
be underpayments where, like, we didn't pay them enough. So.
- [16:45]
C
And a lot of the overpayments come to their attention because businesses alert them that you've sent us a check twice for the same, you know, package of office supplies that we sent you. And we don't want to cash this check because we know you'll eventually figure it out. And we don't want to get charged with fraud at some point in the future because of your mistake.
- [17:03]
D
It sounds like there are kind of two camps. There are going to be prosecutors who really care about going after this stuff, want to root it out, want to do a good job. And then there's also, like, as we saw with JD Vance yesterday, a real particular focus on Minnesota. Because Tim Waltz is an opponent of the Trump administration. I wouldn't be surprised if California and Gavin Newsom are a big target of this division. And so there's going to be a tension between actually trying to go about this in a responsible way, whether that's adjusting those sentencing guidelines so that you have more of a deterrent effect and you're able to go after some of the, you know, broken windows policing, but for fraud and making it more of a likelihood that you're going to get caught and you're going to go to jail. And that being the effort, it also could very well end up just being let's go after blue states and people who might run for president in 2028. And so the guy who's going to be running this division, Colin McDonald, his confirmation hearing was yesterday. And the first thing that Chuck Grassley, the chair of the committee, said was, I just got this new org chart from the DOJ that I want to enter into the record and it says here that you are going to report directly to Todd Blanche and Pam Bondi, which is a direct contradiction of what JD Vance said last month, which is this is going to be run out of the White House and report to me. And so there is kind of a tension there and there's still plenty of details that need to be figured out, but I am not confident that this is going to do all that much on net.
- [18:36]
A
All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we will be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. Are you looking for another opportunity to catch the Dispatch live and in person? On March 11, we're headed to Dallas, Texas for Dispatch Energy, the current state, an event focused on the future of energy innovation. Did you catch the dad joke? Catch Jonah Goldberg, me and more of your favorite Dispatch authors as we discuss the policy and politics that power our nation's energy sector. This will be an evening of conversation with some of the nation's premier experts. Plus there's a reception for all attendees. The event takes place on Wednesday, March 11 at 5:30pm Central in Dallas, Texas. There's still a few tickets left. Head to the dispatch.com currentstate to learn more and to get yours. And we're back. You are listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. So here's my main concern and I am echoing here a piece that I wrote about Doge last spring, which is sort of the furthering the misunderstanding of what really is driving our debt. What's driving our debt is very clear at this point. It's the entitlement programs and now interest on the debt. Entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security is counted. The accounting is a little bit different, but we'll lump Social Security in there for the purpose of this discussion. If you look back at the 2000 and tens, sort of in the aftermath of the Tea Party movement, you had a Republican Party that was willing to address structural reforms and entitlements. It was in their annual budgets that they offered. Paul Ryan, of course, led this effort to get there. He had to provide tutorials in small groups for newly elected members of Congress. These are people who are supposedly solving these problems and addressing these things, many of whom came to Congress believing that if they just eliminated pork barrel spending, they would have balanced budgets, the debt would go away. That wasn't the case. He had to educate them. Is there anybody that we can look to in Congress today or politics at the national level who's proposing serious entitlement reforms of the kind needed to do the hard work?
- [20:54]
B
No.
- [20:55]
A
Nobody?
- [20:56]
B
No. Look, the Obama years were kind of a for everyone. How I learned to stop worrying and love the budget deficit. You know, I mean, for all my critiques of Obamacare and its fake budget math, Obama at least had to, you know, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. And Obama had to pay that tax. He had to pretend he was gonna reduce the budget deficit. And he had a bunch of gimmicks that were never going to really reduce the budget deficit. Most notoriously, he added the student loan program to the budget because within the 10 year window, you know, people would be making payments and it would look like this was budget deficit reducing. Then of course, it started to add cost to the deficit. Similarly, they had this wonderful long term care program that everyone knew was the math was awful. Like it was gonna absolutely destroy the budget because long term care is incredibly expensive. And there's another thing that no one wants to believe. Europe has not solved this problem. No one has solved this problem. It's just incredibly expensive to provide round the clock care for old people. But the thing was, because this insurance program would be collecting premiums in the first 10 years and it wouldn't start paying out benefits, for a while it looked like it was budget deficit reducing. And so Obama did a lot of that, but at least he felt like he had to do a lot, lot of that. And then Trump came in and was just like, no, I don't care. I'm doing a tax bill that blows up the deficit. Democrats had seen the wonderful things they could do with all of that borrowing during Obama. So they would pay the lip service, but they had no intention of reducing the deficit. Republicans, Paul Ryan left Washington in despair. And then Biden comes in and the pandemic is ending and our deficit is huge and it's a good time and inflation is rising and it's a good time to pull back and say, okay, well, we had the emergency, we had to spend a bunch of money on the emergency, and now we've got to go back to budget sanity. Which is what the United States did after World War II. And instead they were like, but what if we just borrowed a lot more money and spend it on stuff we want? And that is now the dynamic, in part because both parties are grossly irresponsible, and in part because they assume that the other party will be grossly irresponsible, even if they aren't. So why should they let the other guys have all the fun? And so ultimately, I think the way we're going to fix this is that we're going to have a fiscal crisis and we're going to get to the point where you can't borrow money. This is what's happening in Britain right now. And you can see that the politics is incredibly ugly. Britain can no longer borrow affordably to finance its budget deficit. And it has made a bunch of stupid policy choices that were predicated on the fact that the politicians who made them didn't have to pay for them at that moment. The most notorious of which is triple lock on pensions, where pensions rise by the highest of either. I think it's wages, GDP growth, or inflation, which means that literally their pension system is designed to grow faster than the economy and there's no way to stop it. And now they're having to make a lot of ugly choices. And we're going to be in the same place because no one before that point is going to be the guy who takes a punch ball away at the party.
- [24:20]
D
Not to get too much into our editorial strategy behind the scenes, but we've had a lot of coverage of that in the uk, particularly France, and their entitlement reform push. We've probably done three or four TMDs morning dispatches on that over the last year or two. And the reason for that is because that I think we all believe that's our Ghost of Christmas Future. And they're warning us from across the pond of where we're going to be. Somebody uses the metaphor, probably somebody on this podcast of the national debt is you're sprinting down a dark hallway and there's a hole somewhere in the hallway, but the lights are off and you can't see it. And just because you haven't hit it yet doesn't mean you're not going to eventually.
- [24:59]
B
There is a great Rudy Doornbush quote. He's a former economist, he's a late economist. It was about the Mexican peso crisis, but it's just a broadly applicable quote where he says the crisis takes longer than you expect, and when it arrives, it goes faster than you can imagine. And that was the story of the Mexican peso crisis. It took forever, and then it took a night. And that is what the United States is setting itself up for. I don't like it. I would love to be proven wrong about this, but I don't think I will be.
- [25:32]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think part of the challenge is right now, you can't get people to care about this. You can talk about it. So you're blue in the face. We do. And it's hard to communicate the extent of the problem and really what. What the problem is. When you have the President of the United States saying, we're going to balance the budget overnight by addressing fraud and then vowing to protect Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. That was sort of. It was sort of the best picture of what the problem is on a. On sort of a public understanding basis. But, Kevin, play devil's advocate for at least a minute here. It's also the case that people have been warning about this impending doom for decades, and it hasn't come. And I do think some of the public, and I talk to some of these people say, I don't know, you guys have been saying this forever and it hasn't happened. Why shouldn't I think about this like, you know, the doomsayer warnings about climate change. You know, there's still ice in the Arctic. Iran doesn't have a working nuke. You guys have been saying this for years, and none of these problems that you warn us about are happening. And meanwhile, I'm just there living my life, doing the things I want to do. Why should I fret about the kinds of things that consume you Washington dorks?
- [26:52]
C
Do you remember there was a great movie about maybe 10 years ago, maybe longer, called Take Shelter? Michael Shannon, I guess, is this guy who's slowly losing his mind, and he's building the storm shelter in his backyard, and he keeps having these visions of apocalyptic destruction, and everyone around him is just, like, pitying him, and he loses his family, and he's just gone nuts. And the last scene of the movie is this just wall of tornadoes coming in, like 60 tornadoes all at once. And they really wish he'd built the shelter and finished it up. I feel like that character sometimes talking about this stuff. You know, the famous line on this, of course, is from Hemingway, that these things happen, you know, gradually, then suddenly. And that's how these things go. You know, it's not. It's not impossible to imagine, you know, kind of radically different fiscal footprint for the United States. A lot of my friends on the left like to talk about the immediate post war years in the Eisenhower economy and how tax rates were, you know, 91% or whatever they were at the top. And which is true. They were. Of course, nobody really paid that. And taxes as a share of GDP were a little bit lower than they are now. But what's worth looking at is if you look at the early days, I'm kind of an Eisenhowerologist. I know I bore everyone to death with this stuff. But in the early days, in the first couple years of his administration, about 80% of federal spending was national security and, you know, defense and defense related things and everything else was 20%. So, you know, social services, entitlements and all that were 20, 21% of spending. And recently we've been about the opposite of that, where we spent, you know, around 20%. Now, a bit less of the. Of the federal budget on national security and everything else adds up to about 80%. The thing is that national security spending didn't really shrink all that much as the share of gdp, although it shrank a little bit. Just everything else grew so big that it went from being a tiny little piece to being the vast majority of it. And it's not true, I think, that we're not feeling this stuff already. People who are, you know, writing the budget certainly feel this stuff when you've got debt services now taking up. Megan will correct me on this because she's a better head for numbers, but what is it, a third of federal revenue now or 40% of federal revenue now?
- [28:45]
B
I actually have the CBO. Of course, you do score up in front. Yes, of course I do. I mean, interest rates have gone down a little bit. But let's see, as a percentage of GDP, net interest is 4. It's about a fifth, basically.
- [29:00]
C
But as a percentage of federal revenue, of tax revenue, it's a big chunk now.
- [29:05]
B
Yeah, as a percentage of federal revenue, it is about a little. It's a little under a third. It's closer to a quarter, but yeah.
- [29:12]
C
Okay, so that's. That's still a bunch of money going out the door that you can't spend on, you know, fixing potholes in Sheboygan or whatever.
- [29:19]
A
For nothing, right?
- [29:20]
C
Well, not for nothing. Just for stuff that we've already spent on.
- [29:22]
A
Right.
- [29:22]
C
You know, it's that unwelcome credit card bill that comes in after the vacation you spent too much money on, to use an unfortunate domestic metaphor. But as that number grows, you get two things that happen. You get pressure within Congress, because they want to spend that money on other stuff now they can't, they don't want to raise taxes. And I'm just barely old enough to remember. Not barely old enough, but was it 2012, the Republican primary, while those jackasses up there on stage and they were asked if you were offered a balanced budget deal that was $10 in spending cuts for every dollar in tax increases, would you take it? And every one of them said no. And I screamed and stamped my feet at them. And by far the best deal you're ever going to get. The actual deal you're going to get is not going to look that good. You might get two to one, you might get one and a half to one or something like that, but it's not going to be 10 to 1 for sure. The one thing that kind of gives me a little bit of hope is the Canadians went through this in the 90s and their deal actually was something like $10 or loonies or whatever they call their fake money up there of spending cuts for every dol increases. And that was a left wing Canadian government in charge at the time when their fiscal crisis hit. And they work through it in about the way you'd kind of want them to. You know, Canadians are relatively responsible people and Americans are maniacs. So I don't know if our odds are as good.
- [30:32]
B
Yeah, the Canadians are crazy. Like they sort of sat out the Great Depression and the global financial crisis. They're just somehow like an unusually responsible people.
- [30:43]
C
Yeah, you know, they have to think about us like roughly the way we think about Mexico, like this, this unstable time bomb on the southern border that. I'm married to a Canadian, so I know a little bit about this. And she is, has an unstable time bomb in her life in the form of her husband. But yeah, it's a bit of mess. But yet you get people, particularly my, you know, fellow point headed libertarians who are always saying that, you know, it's going to be the day after tomorrow, you know, if we pass the Affordable Care act, then there's going to be, you know, a failed bond auction and interest rates are going to go to 315%. And there's always that Chicken Little approach. But that's not how these things typically happen in a big, complicated, sophisticated economy such as ours. But they start to impose real costs and they impose costs in ways that aren't obvious to us. One of the points I always like to use to illustrate this is the radical disconnect you've seen in the last 20 years between the United States economy and the sort of median European Union economy or the United States is now, in terms of GDP per capita, twice as wealthy as the European Union. And our GDP per capita is like 150% of Germany's. And they're the richest country in the UK. And that is because we've had so much economic dynamism, investment, entrepreneurship and all that sort of thing compared to our European counterparts. But the more you suck this stuff out of the economy, you take that capital out of there, you use the money on spending you've already had, you tamp down that dynamism. And it's not so much that you wake up one day and say, oh hell, we've got to cut Social Security payments by half. It's that the GDP growth we would have had over the last 30 years is half of what it should have been or might have been. And the economic dynamism in the United States is a lot less than it would have been. And these industries that should have come into existence and thrived and created lots of jobs and wealth and filled up everyone's 401ks just didn't happen because we created economic conditions that were not optimal for that kind of thriving.
- [32:33]
B
So let me actually argue it's worse than that.
- [32:35]
D
Please do
- [32:38]
B
to steal from another magazine group podcast.
- [32:41]
A
We should have done this like a, like a Dispatch live or a Founders town hall where we all came with a drink. I mean, this is, this is, this is getting rough.
- [32:49]
B
I have a funny story that I will tell you about this before. Not worth your time. But here's the thing. Europe can get away with having bad economic policy and like, eroding the dynamism of their economy because the United States economy is still out there being dynamic, creating new value, creating new products and services that they will use, providing demand for their own products and services. I mean, you think about a country like Denmark where Novo Nordisk is moving GDP because so many fat Americans want to take Ozempic.
- [33:19]
D
You're welcome.
- [33:20]
B
Yes, you're welcome, Danes. And like, no joke, I used to actually tell Europeans because we are the primary market for pharmaceutical innovation and medical device innovation. And I used to tell them, if I were you guys, I would shoot. Shut up about how like, it's disgraceful that America doesn't have national healthcare. And I'd be like, no, this is terrible. You guys don't want this.
- [33:40]
D
It's awful.
- [33:40]
B
You guys want your free market system. Not that the United States healthcare system is all that free market, but rant for Another day. But if the United States goes down, there's nothing to replace it. There is no other economy. Because, you know, even China is aging now. They're like they're getting a boom from moving people from low productivity agriculture into cities and so forth, but they're aging faster than we are. And a big part of what makes economies dynamic is having a lot of young people around. They don't do immigration. We do. We did. Which allows us to bring in smart people from all over the world and jam them all together in a small area where they can bounce ideas off each other. And so if the United States runs into that kind of crisis, everyone else suffers, everyone else's growth goes down. The European social welfare and heavy regulatory state, which is already completely, completely unsustainable outside of the Nordics, who have cleverly balanced their pension systems and can probably just kind of coast off of other people's growth, they will suffer worse than we will from it in a lot of ways.
- [34:42]
C
And we've never seen an Argentina style fiscal crisis in a country that's 23% of the world's economic output.
- [34:50]
B
Yeah, I just think that what Europe can get away with, we cannot. And that any crisis in our case is going to be much worse for both us and everyone else.
- [34:59]
A
Okay, time for a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. But you do have some people, Declan, and last word on this to you quickly. You do have some people who argue, make the argument that in effect, the United States is too big to fail because so much of the rest of the world benefits from our dynamism. We can kind of keep going and this will never catch up to us. Thoughts on that?
- [35:30]
D
I hope they're right. That would be great. But my old boss used to tell me that hope is not a strategy. So I will end on one optimistic note. And it's kind of a trolly optimistic note, but there was this great article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that we'll put in the show notes featuring a friend of the Dispatch, Alan Cole, who is a Tax foundation guy, economist here in Washington. He placed his entire life savings in a prediction market that the government deficit would not decrease. Last year with Doge, and he got a 40% return. And so I think if we just all start doing that year over year, we'll build up enough wealth, something will. There's no issues with this plan at all. I think I should say I'M not offering financial advice.
- [36:17]
A
Right. We need some kind of formal disclaimer.
- [36:19]
D
This is not binding. But no, it was. He made like $200,000 or something by betting against Doge and Elon Musk. So I think we're going to ask him to start rating for free, right? We're not. We're not going to pay him as contributor rate anymore.
- [36:32]
A
Yeah, he could be a dispatch investor. Well, Declan, I want to start with you on our second topic today because you are closest to the Utes, as we say, interesting study out this past week from the Institute of Family Studies about trends in teenage dating. And Brad Wilcox down there calls it a dating recession. And I'll just share some of the data with you in a graph that they put together. Percentage of folks, this is comparing 2024 to the 1980s. Teens responding to these questions. Teenagers are dating and partying less. Percentage of 12th graders who do the following in the 1980s. Percentage who ever go on dates 87% 2024 46% Percentage who visit friends weekly 88% 2024 69% Percentage who go to parties monthly 12th graders in the 1980s 74% in 2024 44%. And finally, the percentage of 12th graders who spend a daily hour of leisure alone in the 1980s, it was 43% 2024 75%. Declan, what's going on?
- [37:53]
D
Well, thank you for I am closest to my teenage years, I guess, but I did notice some gray hairs under this hat the other day. But we have one of our contributors is working on a piece right now called the Cell Phone Theory of Everything. And basically, good thing Jonah's not here, because there are no monocausal explanations for anything. But he's basically going to argue that the cell phone is a monocausal explanation for everything. And I do think that there is a lot of validity to that in this case. I mean, it started to happen toward the end of my time in high school, which again, was more than a decade ago, but is really the case now. My youngest brother is closer to that age where hanging out with your friends is now sitting in somebody's basement and scrolling your phones together. You're not going to parties, you're not going out. And we have published a piece, it was 2021 at this point from Yuval Levin at the Dispatch that we will also link to. But he was pointing some of these trends out years ago that, yes, there are all these benefits that we're seeing, like teen pregnancies are down, drunk driving is down, car crashes are down. The flip side of that is that people aren't dating, people aren't getting their driver's license, people aren't taking risks in their lives. And so the societal challenges that we're facing and young people are facing are. It's no longer people are taking too many risky behaviors and taking too many risks. It's now that he calls it a failure to launch or people are just not doing anything at all, which is a very different but equally important problem.
- [39:28]
B
Yeah.
- [39:29]
A
Megan, is this all about the prevalence of the phone, the rise of the smartphone?
- [39:33]
B
Yeah, I think it is. I don't know if you followed this story about clavicular the looks maxer. Who.
- [39:41]
A
Can you explain who is clavicular and what is? I mean, you don't have to explain this to me because I know, of course I'm hip.
- [39:48]
B
I mean, you've always want to go
- [39:49]
D
to the youth correspondent.
- [39:50]
A
I'm hip to these things. Nobody who actually is hip to these things would use the phrase I'm hip to these things. By the way, who is clavicular and what in the world is looks maxing? David French actually made a reference to this on this podcast within like the past several weeks. So maybe some of our listeners already get it.
- [40:09]
D
Well, he's a classic frame monger. Yeah, frame monger.
- [40:12]
C
I just want to say I could be downstairs playing with Play Doh with 2 year olds right now while we have this discussion. I think I might go do that now.
- [40:21]
B
He's an influencer who like started young trying to make himself. To make literally maximize his looks. Right. That's what it is. Although they're now like maxing everything he calls having sex slay maxing. But sadly, like a guy who wrote a profile, I think it was a guy, might have been a woman wrote a profile of him for the Times and said it didn't even really seem like he was interested in the sex. It was more like it was something that he was doing to like count coup against the universe.
- [40:52]
C
That's a hypothetical.
- [40:54]
B
But the thing is, right, so this kid literally hit himself in the face with a hammer. He also illegally obtained like testosterone and other sort of hormones and supplements and steroids and so forth and now thinks that he is sterile as a result of this. I mean, he's like 20.
- [41:12]
A
Sorry, why? Why did he hit himself in?
- [41:14]
B
Because, oh, it's supposed to improve your jawline. Like you slowly. You're basically causing the bone to like get denser. Like you get micro cracks and then they're Filled in. And then you. It's supposed to change your jawline.
- [41:27]
C
You know, if this kid needs some help getting punched in the face, I bet there are people who would just line up and volunteer for this.
- [41:33]
B
The thing is that, of course, like, it's unfalsifiable. We don't know what he would have looked like if he had not hit himself in the face with a hammer. And he's reasonably good looking, but, like, he's also curiously vacant. I watched a few of his videos and, like, there's nothing there. Why he has no personality? Because I was interested in the phenomenon. He seems to have no personality other than talking about looks maxing. Right. And I think it's actually part of a broader trend in how people perceive, like, success or how they treat their bodies, how they treat their lives. Do you remember the photo of Madonna at the Grammys a few years ago? Or the film of Madonna? The Grammys.
- [42:12]
A
I will say I don't. Nobody will be surprised by that.
- [42:15]
B
She looked horrifying. She looked swollen and misshapen and so forth. It was one of these plastic surgery disasters where people do way too much to their faces and then it just looks inhuman. And I was like, why would she do that? Right? It looked terrible. And then I went and looked at her Instagram. She looked great on Instagram. And I think that this is one of the things that you see with actresses especially who have too much plastic surgery, is they're looking at, like, what do I look like in the mirror when I'm just staring at myself? What do I look like in a photograph? Right. And I also think we do this to our houses, by the way. The open kitchen is, like, not a great housing design, but it's very easy to film. And so HGTV made all of their kitchens open floor plan. And then everyone was like, oh, that is what a sexy and glamorous home looks like. And then everyone did it. And then the pandemic hit and they were like, my God, this is noisy and I have no privacy and I hate this. I wisely preserve the walls in our house, and I would just like to take credit for that. But there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about how. And another substack on wine where people, like, the bottom of the wine market has collapsed. People buy $30 bottles, but they don't buy, like, $12 bottles. And as someone who is kind of committed to the $12 to $15 price point, I was sad to hear this. Although, more wine for me. But I actually think, like, so the Substack article was really interesting because it said people are spending on experiences. They're spending on the really special glass of wine that they have in a resort, and they're not spending on the daily glass of wine that they drink every night. And I thought this is actually a great metaphor for how people are treating their lives, which is as an Instagramable event. Right. They're having the glass of wine that's really fancy that they can take a picture of and show people that they had this super fancy glass of wine in this super fancy setting, but they're not living their normal lives or not like, having an ordinary experience with a glass of wine every night. And that's everything. Everywhere, these kids are chasing an Instagramable life, and most people's lives are not Instagramable most of the time. And in fact, like, I think if we think about our own lives, how many of the things that you really remember that are the most important things in your life are movie moments. Okay. Your kid being born. Right. But in general, your wedding. Right. I still remember looking down the aisle at my husband, but in fact, like, I've been to a fair number of luxury resorts, at conferences and stuff, I've done this stuff. And the stuff that I remember is just like, the ordinary, everyday stuff. And that is what a relationship is built out of. Right. I think about all the dinners I had with my mom where we laughed, and my mom died in 2023. And my sister and my mom and I, we would laugh. And it's not because, like, we are particularly hilarious people. It's because we just got each other and because we're enjoying each other. Like, why do I laugh at my dogs? They don't tell jokes. I laugh because they delight me in a very ordinary, everyday overtime thing. There is, you know, like, half of the jokes my mom and my sister and I told, half the jokes my husband told me and I tell, they're just like, this funny thing happened five years ago. It was mildly amusing, but now we've turned it into a funny joke. But all of that stuff has to happen over time, every day and consistently. And the kids aren't doing that. Instead, they are scrolling other people's highlight reels, and then they're attempting to build highlight reels of their own. And that is not a way to build a life. Sorry, that was a really long and extended rant. I've been thinking about this for a while.
- [45:56]
A
Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of truth in what you say there. And let me actually posit that the flip side of what you're describing also contributes to this problem. If everything in your teenage years had been videoed or had the potential to be videoed, you might be a lot more risk averse than you are today if you're going to join the cheerleading squad and you know that your screw up could be captured forever and distributed to the high school and distributed well beyond the high school. So that everybody who's watching is going to be looking at this mistake that you made when you went left and everybody else went right. You might be less inclined to go and make those mistakes. At a time and an age when kids are most concerned about public perceptions, how their friends are seeing them, how popular they are. And I think that's contributing to this kind of maximal risk aversion that has people think it's just a lot easier. I'm not exposing myself. I'm not putting myself out there. If I sit in my room and I'm scrolling or if I can carefully choreograph, you know, this picture at prom with my friends. And I think that contributes to this problem as well.
- [47:11]
D
That's called risk aversion. Maxing Steve, the kids are risk aversion.
- [47:16]
A
This is now a thing. Maybe if we put a name on it like that, they'd be more aware of it.
- [47:20]
C
I just think if there were video evidence of my teen years in my early 20s, I wouldn't really have any kind of social anxiety to speak of because I would still be in jail.
- [47:30]
A
Yeah, no, but, but that's a real thing. Like, all jokes aside, like, that's a real thing. I mean, I was, let's say I was one of my teachers growing up. This is through elementary school and into to junior high and high school. You know, one of my teachers invariably described me as a rascal. I was rambunctious, I liked to play pranks. I, you know, would occasionally have a beer with friends on a Friday night.
- [47:55]
B
And occasionally.
- [47:56]
A
I mean, okay, regularly, regularly. But look, you know, I, I did that stuff. I'm certain that I wouldn't have been doing that and been out as much as I was if I thought it was going to be filmed. You could go the other way and say, you know, for people who are sort of class clowns, they would be doing more of those things because they would be filmed and then they could be sort of Instagram famous. But, Kevin, how much does this contribute to the dating question? I want to get to the dating question. Is it just that dating sort of is an outgrowth of socializing more broadly, therefore, there's less dating today than there used to be? Or is there something specific about that process that kids are not doing as much anymore? And is it the same reasons that we can point to?
- [48:44]
C
Yeah, I think the smartphone has probably shaped that in other ways as well. You know, there's the old parlor game, do you go back in time and kill baby Hitler? Mine is, do you go back in time and punch Steve Jobs in the face really hard before he can inflict the iPhone on everybody, Try to explain to him, you know, what's going on? I think there's also just a kind of, particularly among younger men, a sort of broader nihilism about, you know, why should I invest in relationships and things like that when I can get 80% of what I want out of video games and pornography and such like? So I don't have super, super high hopes for that. But I wasn't joking about, you know, the going to jail thing. I mean, there's a lot of things that were sort of normal in, or seen as normal in the 1970s, 1980s, early 1990s that were pretty common that you would probably get into trouble on a. On a college campus for now.
- [49:32]
A
Yeah.
- [49:33]
C
And might get into legal trouble for now. Maybe we should have gotten legal trouble before then too. Maybe we were wrong and they're right now. I mean, not the other way around. But it's a very different environment and one that seems fraught and one in which the risks seem higher in some ways. I think that someone once described the golden age of sexual promiscuity as being the 4P years which were post pill, pre plague, meaning when birth control pills were available but HIV hadn't showed up. And, you know, the worst thing that was gonna happen to you was gonna be gonorrhea or chlamydia or something like that that you can get, you know, couple of shots and clears right up and life goes on. That obviously changed in the. In the 80s and 90s when sexually transmitted diseases became, in some cases, a death sentence. Thankfully, that's not the case anymore. But I think that that sort of heaviness has stayed with us in some ways. And it's gotten worse in some ways as we become more isolated and as we're more likely to see ourselves as victims when we have experiences that we're unhappy with. I think I started looking at the world differently the first time I read about someone successfully suing a bar for him getting drunk and causing a car wreck. And, you know, it's. I understand why bars have rules about cutting people off and that sort of thing, but that's really your fault. And this is kind of one of those things where you need to put the responsibility on the person doing the thing. But we've got this broader sense of kind of group collective culpability for things that I think has really tamped down some of that stuff. But mainly I think everyone's right. It's the, it's the phones.
- [51:03]
D
There's one other takeaway from, we're talking about this. There's a new Institute for Family Studies survey and report on some of these trends. And one of the main takeaways there was an increase in young people saying that they are afraid of bad experiences, dating, afraid of being broken up with, afraid of something going wrong and not wanting to take that risk. I do think that there is kind of a broader phenomenon of resiliency which again can also be traced back to the smartphone. Because the way you build resiliency is by having experiences and bad things happening and you realizing that life goes on and you can learn and grow from it. But the fewer of those kinds of experiences you have, the more importance any individual risk takes on. And so why would I risk getting embarrassed and turned down or broken up with? I don't know how to handle it.
- [51:56]
C
The resiliency thing is interesting to me because us old generation X types talk about how our parents just kind of let us be feral and run around and do what we're going to do. And I think that we did grow up less risk averse, more autonomous in some ways. But I also bet that I had more friends who died before they graduated from high school than your average 18 year old does now.
- [52:17]
A
Yeah, I mean, part of me wonders if this isn't just the sort of natural evolution of things, you know, I mean, I remember back in the day you'd get the olds saying to us, to our generation, you know, you kids with your loud rock and roll music these days and you know, they lament that we weren't growing up in precisely the way that they had grown up over all these years. And I talked to my parents about sort of the way that people in their generation used to date and they would go on multiple dates with multiple people in the course of a month. And there wasn't this kind of, you know, sometimes they would go steady, but it was more common to sort of date around something that by the time I was in high school and college, you didn't do. You got a, a boyfriend or a girlfriend and you kind of, you know that was your boyfriend or girlfriend. You didn't have a lot of those different kinds of dates. I wonder if this isn't just sort of the natural evolution. Yes, of course it's attributable to the phone, but the reason that we find it so alarming is just because it's different and it might not actually be bad. Am I trying to force optimism where optimism doesn't belong here?
- [53:20]
B
Megan, they don't seem happy about it, right? They have really high levels of anxiety. They seem, if they were just like contentedly hooking themselves up to the experience machine, closing their eyes and allowing the wave of short form content to wash over them, I mean, we could have that argument. But I mean, first of all, I do have a really fundamental belief that forming a family with someone and having deep in person relations is really fundamental to human thriving. And the fact that they're not doing that. You can't look, I mean all of us, we more than most people live our lives in a public performance, right? I'm married to another journalist and so all of his public performances end up washing back on me. He puts pictures of our dogs in every cocktail newsletter he writes. And yet like, the important stuff is not the stuff that happens on stage. And we have to work really hard to say like, no, actually that is the least important part of our life. It's very important to me, to be clear. My work is very important to me. But the most important thing in my life is my husband and my sister and for them to put everything in public. If I had kids right now, I would be really tempted to become Amish, I guess, is what I'm saying.
- [54:41]
A
I share the temptation.
- [54:42]
C
Giving us some thoughts.
- [54:44]
A
Yes, exactly. So if those things are most worth your time, we will switch now to something that may very well not be worth our time.
- [54:53]
B
Although before you do that, I did promise a story before Not Worth youh Time that I Should tell. So I, you know, my husband and I, we share a refrigerator as most spouses do. And in that refrigerator are many beverages. And yesterday morning I had after State of the Union I was up late at night doing a Washington Post chat and I have to go into the office at 8:30 for a Washington Post live interview. I'm interviewing Jake Auchincloss. And so I go to the fridge blearily, I grab Coke Zero out of the fridge. I walk into the green room where there are a bunch of people I do not know and I pop my Coke Zero open, take a sip and realized I have grabbed one of my Husband's DC brows.
- [55:41]
A
And at that point, you might as well keep going.
- [55:44]
B
All of these people who do not know me had just watched me like insouciantly popping a beer at like 8:25 in the morning.
- [55:53]
D
And I mean, you were. You had to go talk to a member of Congress.
- [55:57]
B
And then I had to go, no, I only took a sip. I mean, so that's really more of
- [56:00]
C
a Fox News thing.
- [56:04]
B
I don't like day drinking. I also don't like beer. And so I did throw it out, but for a moment, what a waste. I was the most swaggering, like, old school journalistic figure. Yeah, sure, McArdle just walks in, got her beer with her.
- [56:20]
A
She's Irish, Come on.
- [56:22]
B
She likes to have a roadie before she gets going in the morning.
- [56:25]
A
Like, it was really very tempting to do a not worth your time and just switch to our experiences like that, but I will stick to the not worth your time that we had previously scheduled that, that I had wanted to do with this group. Last week, before we started recording, we had a discussion about email management and out of control inboxes, and we all sort of compared notes about just how irresponsible we are with email management. So I thought I would just ask you, in a very short amount of time that we have left, how many emails are in your inbox and if you can tell how many unread emails are in your inbox. And Kevin, I will start with you.
- [57:09]
C
Well, I brought this up because I thought I was out of control because I have 203,769, but apparently I am like a squared away puritan compared to the rest of you maniacs who have much, much higher numbers.
- [57:22]
A
Yeah, Megan, I think he's talking about you. And he's definitely talking about Jonah, who's not here, which is great because we can beat him up in absentia. Megan, what's your total for all accounts?
- [57:35]
B
Actually, not all of my accounts, but for my two primary accounts, which is my Gmail account and my work account, I have 833, 387 unread emails.
- [57:45]
A
Those are unread.
- [57:47]
B
Unread, Yeah. I can't see how many emails I have. That's just the unread ones, Declan.
- [57:54]
D
It might not surprise you that much. Four? Yes.
- [57:57]
B
Oh, no, you're one of those people.
- [57:59]
D
Three of them have come since we, since we started recording this podcast. So that is tells you everything you
- [58:05]
A
need to know right there.
- [58:06]
D
Yeah, that's, that's, that's a personality type. I use a Ross, our Morning Dispatch editor, got me on this email client, Superhuman, which makes me feel like a superhuman, where I just schedule a bunch of things to come back to me when I'm more likely to be up for dealing with it. But, yeah, right now, four.
- [58:23]
A
Megan's number causes me great stress. Your number maybe causes me more stress and concern. Mine is. So I have 299,419 total emails, of which 211,056 are unread emails. And some of that is, we have to say if you do what we do for a living, you end up getting out a bunch of sort of junk lists, you know, PR lists, and your email kind of gets out and people send you a bunch of junk. So most of mine are of that variety, but I don't go through and clean them up. Megan, do you remember what Jonah's total was?
- [59:04]
B
I think we were in the same ballpark. Yeah, I don't remember what it was. It's pretty impressive. Slash distressing.
- [59:11]
A
What accounts for that? And does that stress you out or. Not really.
- [59:14]
B
Not really. It's a ton of flack emails. It's just I get so much spam from people who are like, our club is opening in Miami and we'd like you to cover it. I'm like, huh? The number of people who just spam journalists randomly, like, they buy long lists and they don't look at your coverage area. They don't look at anything about you. They just send you a spam. They're like, you know, yes. Hola.
- [59:40]
A
Right, Right.
- [59:41]
B
So it's like, that's what a lot of it is.
- [59:44]
A
So many emails. You're never, ever going to do it. I mean, I don't. I don't pay attention to flack emails anyway.
- [59:50]
B
The problem actually is, though, that the volume is so high. Like, I have a policy. When I get an email, I respond immediately because my ADD is such that if I do not respond immediately, it will. I will never remember that email existed. But the problem is there's so much of it that, like, I do get valid emails that are just lost in, like, 40 spam emails. And I'm looking down them and I'm trying to pick out the people who I want to respond to, but I don't always make it. And Declan tells me that he has an email out to me, which I will now go search, and I will apologize and cringe. I'm very sorry.
- [60:24]
D
Well, you just did it now. You don't have to do it again in the email. But I. So I still remember, I think it was like September of 2024, I was like both of you getting all of those spam emails. And I said for this month, every time I get one that I don't want, I'm going to make them take me off their list. And it was a pain in the ass for 30 days, but it cleared like I there are certain companies that I will tell you afterwards, that's broker, journalist, email address.
- [60:52]
A
Yes.
- [60:52]
D
And then if you just say take me off this list 30 days, I'm clear. And it is very freeing.
- [61:00]
B
I really worry though that like I'm signaling to them that I have read their email and that it will just make the problem worse. Which can be the case with some of these spammers is you respond to them and what you've told them is that's a live email box.
- [61:12]
D
That's true.
- [61:13]
A
Yeah, seems possible. Okay, well, we'll leave it there. We may ask Jonah to account for his when he joins us again next week. But until then, take it easy. If you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And speaking of support, here's a shout out out to a few folks who joined recently as premium members. Lou H. Sarah Estelle and Joe A. Glad to have you aboard. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns or corrections, you can email us@roundtableispatch.com we read everything, even those of us who have several hundred thousand unread emails. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in and a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.
- [62:23]
B
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C
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C
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