Matthew Iglesias (4:01)

That was not, you know, my subjective experience of it. But it was nice to meet some people. You know, it's a lot of good folks out there. It's good to, it's good to talk very politic.

Mike Pesca (4:11)

Alison Schrager is with us. She's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a Bloomberg opinion columnist covering economics. She's the author of An Economist Walks into a Brothel and Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk. Alison, is it true that you and Matt will be combining for a million or a billion Americans walk into a brothel? How would that work? Would the brothel be able to handle that influx of business?

Alison Schrager (4:35)

Well, I mean, I guess it depends whether or not access to sex workers is a human right, like health care and other things.

Mike Pesca (4:41)

You punted on that in the book. All right, topic one. From the blocks of Alvarado to the one on one freeway, Trump deployed them without asking the United States Marines. The headline in the New York Times a couple days ago was trump Jumps at the chance for a confrontation in California over Immigration. That is analysis. That is not news. And I have no problem with it. I don't think you can understand the situation without understanding that part of it. But you also can't understand what's going on without understanding that in between Trump presidencies, 11 million immigrants, legal and illegal, came to the country, the largest percentage and raw number ever. And people wanted a fix and Trump promised it. So, Matt, I go to you first. I do think you need all this stuff to explain how we got to flashbangs and curfews and bumbling mayors and troops in the streets or what else is there? What else is there that we need to factor in to really understand what's going on?

Matthew Iglesias (5:42)

You know, I mean, I do think that you have to understand that Trump wants a fight about this topic, right? I mean, there is a limited capacity of the federal government to sort of process deportations, right? There's, there's logistical constraints, etc. They have legislation pending before Congress that, you know, it's going to do many things and what. We'll talk about it. But one of the components of that bill is like, more money for immigration enforcement, et cetera, et cetera. While they're waiting on that, the question is, like, what do the ICE agents do? Right? The speediest way to maximize the number of people who you deport would be to send the extra personnel to, to conservative jurisdictions where conservative governors and local sheriffs and so on and so forth want to cooperate.

Mike Pesca (6:29)

And then you seek out the places with the least friction, right?

Matthew Iglesias (6:32)

And then you sort of, you know, have the. So the reason we had record deportation levels when Barack Obama was president was that there was a surge of resources and also a lot of local cooperation. But Trump wanted to send ICE to do high profile raids in the places where they would receive least cooperation because he, he wants to deport people. He believes in his immigration agenda, but he also wants to fight with Democrats about immigration policy. And then you have in Gavin Newsom, not a purple state Democratic governor or somebody who's, like, really worried about his home state politics. He wants to win a Democratic party primary in 2028. So the people on both sides of this table, you know, welcome an escalation. And they're, they both seem to be getting what they wanted, right? I mean, Newsom got to do a live stream at prime time that lots of people tuned into. Trump's got, you know, his sort of unpopular tax bill off the front pages. You know, riots, immigration, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, it takes two to tango. And I think you have this incentive on both sides, which is people who are looking for a fight rather than looking to sort of, you know, like, solve a resource optimization problem.

Mike Pesca (7:46)

So, Alison, you take whatever parts of that you want, but the one thing that I will say is Trump sought out the immigration enforcement mechanism that most amplified his message. That is true, but that's what he's been doing all along. And sending Kristi Noem to pose an athleisure in front of a bunch of detained people in El Salvador, is that exactly as well? I don't know. If that makes it illegitimate. In fact, you could even argue that Trump's qualities as a showman actually help quell immigration because people aren't coming from the southern border because they are scared of Trump.

Alison Schrager (8:23)

Yeah. I think unfortunately we're also not getting more productive legal migrants too, which is, you know, not, not great for the economy. But I mean, it's just, you know, Democrats, it's just like, I just don't understand why they just keep giving him these wins. I mean, he went there raring for a fight, but he also knew they would fight back as opposed to, you know, is he said they could have cooperated or they, but they didn't have to. Like, I know we're going to talk about the Merrill primary later, but it feels like every ad we see in New York for mayor is I will fight Trump.

Mike Pesca (8:55)

Yeah.

Alison Schrager (8:55)

So he went somewhere where they are sort of running on a ticket of I'm going to fight this guy. And now we have these optics of these like blue state mayors and governors saying, I will do my best to make sure that we don't enforce our, our laws around illegal immigrants. Which, you know, I think is that there's, there's a split in how people feel about illegal immigrants. They don't want more illegal immigration, but a lot of people are very attached to the undocumented migrants in their lives, in their communities. So they don't really want to see them deported, but they also don't want to see, hey, we're also going to ignore the law.

Mike Pesca (9:31)

Matt, you're a fighter who will fight for people like you. But I think in most of these cases, or in so many cases, Trump diagnoses a problem, sends in or has a solution, and the solution makes it worse. Worse. Is that actually what's going on here?

Matthew Iglesias (9:46)

Well, I mean, it depends what you think the problem is. Right. I mean, I mean, Trump is definitely making the problem of urban unrest worse.

Mike Pesca (9:53)

With what he's doing acutely in this city. But I'm talking about the big problem of immigration.

Matthew Iglesias (9:59)

Would like to inspire people to self deport. Maybe doing it this way helps with that. I mean, I think that's pretty, that's a sort of like a, a known unknown about this. I don't think we have a lot of sort of literature on this. You know, I, I, to me, the big question about Trump and immigration policy is, you know, he doesn't have a button on his desk that's like, now the mass deportation happens. Right. The way he does say with tariffs. Right. He can't, there's say, 11 million, maybe 12 million, sort of like legacy undocumented people in the United States. There's then, I think, about 8,8 million more recent arrivals, which is a mix of parole people with pending asylum claims, people with tps, and people who snuck in illegally under Biden. So it's a large block of people. If there was a magic button that would make all those people go away and Trump pushed it, I think the practical consequences of that would actually be quite negative for the economy. You know that I think. I think if you pitch it to people as a message, it's like, should we get rid of all these illegal immigrants? I think most people say yes. I think if you actually, actually did it, just like, you know, if you ask people abstractly like, should we make all our socks here in America? They're kind of like, yeah, sounds great, like, let's get the sock factories. But, you know, when your socks cost $50 or whatever, you're gonna be mad, right? If your favorite restaurant is closing and the price of beef has tripled and, you know, so on and so forth, like, people would be upset about that. So if I got to control the minds of every single progressive person in the United States, I would say, like, don't fight Trump on this. You know, criticize him if you think he's doing things that don't make sense, but he's the president. Let him do this stuff that we believe will have negative consequences. And, like, we'll talk about that when it happens, but, like, make him own it. Because I think this question of sort of like, battles in the streets between left wing activists and ICE agents prevents us from calling the question of, like, do we actually want to remove millions of people who are mostly in the labor force, who mostly aren't criminals, et cetera, from our society and from our economy, particularly in a situation where Trump has succeeded in deterring additional people from coming, which I think was the. The biggest pain point for everyone during Biden is that nothing Biden did was credible. Trump is credible. He stopped the inflow of people. And I think, you know, would be better off just like now, focusing on cost of living, economic concerns, etc. Etc.

Mike Pesca (12:39)

Yeah, I think that progressive people, many of them have family members or at least commitments towards what they see as, you know, the human rights of undocumented workers being allowed to continue working. It's so important for them that they're not going to let the experiment play out and then say, see, See what you wrought? Because in the immediate, and right before them is the urgency of moral act, of course, that defines a progressive more than what you're saying.

Matthew Iglesias (13:09)

No, no, no, I mean, I think that's totally right. And so, you know, I mean, I get to mind control everybody in the country.

Mike Pesca (13:15)

Oh, right, that's right. I forgot, I forgot that was your.

Matthew Iglesias (13:17)

Premise, is that, you know, social media has just made it a lot easier to organize a medium sized protest than it used to be. Yeah, right. I mean, if you go back in time, 20, 30 years, it was hard work to get a group of protesters out on the streets. So no matter what the cause was, you had to be like a pretty much like people who had your shit together and could do hard work and were conscientious to turn out marchers in the streets today. You know, you can, you can put on Instagram and people will show up and unfortunately means that you have a lot of very undisciplined political activism occurring all over the place. And Zeynep Tufekse, I think that's her name, her 2017 book about this before she became a Covid person, is really, really good. The whole dynamic of social protest has become much harder to control, much more undisciplined. And I think it's, you know, my official position is it's bad, but I don't know what you do about it.

Alison Schrager (14:13)

But do you think that, yeah, if, say, Trump, we just sort of, if progressives are sort of like, all right, do your thing, bury yourself and didn't really say fight back around sort of the people who are maybe more, less sympathetic, like. And Trump sees a good political opportunity here. The more deportion deportations he does, the more upset progressives get, the more disorder there is, the more he wants to deport more people because he gets to keep playing out this fight. If they're just like, hey, you know, you sent a potential gang member to Ecuador by accident. Oh, that's too bad, you know, maybe we wouldn't be here now.

Matthew Iglesias (14:52)

Yeah, I mean, I, I think that, I. Listen, I think that if there was not as much opposition on this, you start to get into exactly the, the Taco Trump dynamic, where it's like, sure, people who've been arrested, you pick them up out of the jail and you deport them. But, like, is it smart politics to go kicking down the doors at a restaurant and locking up busboys? Like, is that a great photo op for you if, if this Home Depot thing hadn't generated protests? Right. It's like, there's somebody who's hiring those guys to, you know, rebuild houses that burnt down in a fire, and now they're gone. And, you know, it's a. It's a problem. I, you know, I was talking to a guy who does. It's like he's got a roofing company in D.C. and some of his people were on TPS or something, and it got revoked and they left, which, yeah, like, that's what Trump wants, but, like, you know, now he can't fix people's roofs. And, you know, like most people who own roofing companies, this is not a super progressive person, but, like, everybody cares about their self interest, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, I mean, I get that it would be. It would be tough, but I think that this. This dynamic of fight for every inch has made life a little bit easier for Trump than it needs to be, and to an extent, harder for some of the more sympathetic immigrant cases, because Trump's now looking to make an example out of people.

Mike Pesca (16:23)

Each of you, if you were to give the Trump administration advice, would they have been smarter to seek out this fight, but to stop short of the Marines and the National Guard? Because everything that Bass and Newsom are saying. Well, not everything Newsom saying, he keeps saying, arrest me. But everything that Bass and the leaders of California are saying are points one and two. This is unconscionable. No one's called out the National Guard without the okay of a governor since 1965. And that's true, and that's hard to rebut. But then they have to pivot to, of course, these people in the street, please do not set any more way mos on fire. So absent the National Guard and the Marines, are they really doing much? Absent them, Maybe even the mayor and the governor, when he's not saying arrest me would be saying, message one, people in the streets, you've got to stop it. So how smart is Trump to send in the National Guard?

Alison Schrager (17:15)

I think pretty smart. I mean, I mean, especially after 2020 and the feeling like, which, you know, which more spread and economically damaging to communities. I think there is a feeling certainly that blue states can't. Can't control their cities. So whether or not that's fair in this case is an issue. It is a question. But I think he's still running off of that sense that these. These are cities that are not enforcing federal laws and sort of can't crack down on crime or lawlessness or riots. So it looks like he's being serious. And I don't know. I mean, I'm in New York, so I don't know if I have a good friend sense of how most the polls I see only are flashing to me on Twitter are completely different depending on who's showing them to me. But I imagine that there is something appealing about, like, I'm taking control, which is. Was always his appeal to a lot of people.

Mike Pesca (18:04)

Yeah. I have to say also, I'm in New York. We are in different boroughs, just for geographical diversity. I want to assure the audience, but I am in New York. And so I am watching this from afar, although the news keeps saying and protests are occurring in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and yet 200 people show up at City Hall. I read the newspapers from those cities and the headline is Riot in L. A. Also, 35 people showed up at City Hall. But I think that the. The symbolism and the procedure of Trump violating the norm of waiting for the governor is bad. But in actual practical terms, I don't see the National Guard as having done anything bad. The videos I get of Twitter of people calling either the National Guard or the LAPD a bitch, a bitch boy, and then getting shot at with a foam pellet. I'm not putting that on Trump or saying this redounds to Trump's detriment. So I come. You know, I don't. I'm not a typical swing voter, but I come across saying, yeah, it's something to worry about procedurally, but generally, people don't vote on procedure. They. They vote on the actual injustice before them. And my point is, it's not scanning as this gross abuse of power as it's actually being conducted, unless you're of the ilk to interpret it that way, no matter what. Matt, do you see it that way?

Matthew Iglesias (19:23)

I don't know. I mean, well, we got to see what happens. To some extent, it seems like could get worse. It seems like, you know, when we first started talking about planning this episode, the boil was getting hotter. And since then, it's gone down. And I think that that's good. So, you know, I mean, I think, like, one very reasonable question one could ask about all of this is why didn't Gavin Newsom just call up the National Guard in the first place? And then a secondary question you might ask is, did Secretary Hegseth, you know, send a note to Newsom's chief of staff and be like, hey, maybe you guys should call up the National Guard? Right? I mean, like, we, like, literally don't know.

Mike Pesca (20:04)

You're a handsome guy with good hair. I'm a handsome guy with good hair. Let's get on the same what, what.

Matthew Iglesias (20:08)

Happened in the process. I mean, the Tom Cotton sending the troops op ed from 2020 became this, like, media story, obviously, infamously, which I think always detracted from, like, the substance of the issue, which I thought was kind of interesting, like, why didn't Trump send in the troops back then? And conversely, like, why didn't the governor of New York call up the National Guard to intervene at that time? You know, we, we got to talking about like, New York Times, op EDS and cancel culture rather than what was actually happening here. I think that it is good that this unrest in LA seems to be going down relatively rapidly. It probably could have been handled a little bit faster and a little bit smoother if both Trump and Newsom were more in a mood to cooperate. You know, like, the question of, like, how do you contain urban unrest in a social media flash mob universe is, like, interesting and, like, actually worth thinking about on the merits. Not, you know, not just as a purely political story.

Mike Pesca (21:16)

Well, I'll tell you one thing that's. I don't know if it's coming to a boil, but the headlines tell me it's tightening and surging. That is the New York mayoral race. Newport polls show a Cuomo Mamdani face off in a tightening New York mayoral race. I have to say I've covered and witnessed hundreds of political races. Maybe four are not described as tightening. They're always tightening at the end, from 30 to 20, from 20 to 12. And then you got the ranked choice voting. But Alison, as a New Yorker and someone who I don't know, will you be casting your ballot in any either of the primaries? I am a registered Democratic Democrat for this very purpose of not being disenfranchised.

Alison Schrager (21:55)

I am too.

Mike Pesca (21:55)

Okay, very good. Is if you could, if you could register for any party that doesn't have a stranglehold on a city, would you be a Democrat?

Alison Schrager (22:03)

Well, I used to be. And I was for years unaffiliated, which is what I'd prefer to be. But in the last mayoral primary, some PAC contacted me and talked me into registering. They said otherwise. Amaya Wiley, Mayor is on you.

Mike Pesca (22:18)

Oh, really? So what, it was big Catherine Garcia Pack?

Alison Schrager (22:22)

No, it was just anyone who is not crazy pack. And they're like, you know, vote whoever you want. And they walked me through all the paperwork. They made sure I did it before the deadline. And then I showed up and they still wouldn't let me vote. So I worked hard to become a Democrat. So I now vote in, like, everything.

Mike Pesca (22:41)

Okay, that's awesome. So as someone who I think our listeners can glean isn't, isn't inclined to back socialism in general. Can you explain. And I've read a lot of political science and Matt Glaciers is slow, boring is fundamental to this. It seems that socialists are getting less popular and doing less well at the polls and we see fewer socialists in the positions of power. Although every once in a while a socialist gets through and his name is Brandon Johnson and, and he runs the city of Chicago basically into the ground. Brandon Johnson pulling at 15% there. Eric Adams polling at 20% in New York. But why is this particular socialist Mamdani doing so well? Is it the free grocery stores, do you think?

Alison Schrager (23:25)

You know, I don't know. I mean, it makes no sense to me. Like, even if you want to get behind a socialist, why would you go against, go with a 33 year old who's never had a job job, like a full time job. It just seems like at least with Bernie Sanders, like at least he's been a lawmaker for a long time. Like you could be like he knows how to do stuff. The only thing is he has really good social media game. I mean his mother's a famous filmmaker, so I guess he's just packaged well. And you know, there's a lot of voters in New York, I guess, who might be naive. Although that poll you mentioned, that had the tightening race, apparently that was an internal poll that didn't include Staten Island.

Mike Pesca (24:04)

Well, that's part of the Mamdani plan after the free grocery. No, I lie. I lie. But you know, it'd be interesting. Matt, I would like to ask you, obviously a lot of this has to do with who Mamdani is running against. A very flawed Andrew Cuomo. But doesn't this say something about the deficits of all the other candidates who should at least on paper represent decent enough democratic choices to someone who don't want, want the 33 year old socialist or the guy with 33. I'm exaggerating allegations of sexual harassment.

Matthew Iglesias (24:34)

Yeah, I mean this does. It reminds me of the race in Chicago a couple years ago. I was in Chicago at that time. I was doing a fellowship at Chicago Institute of Politics and I was watching like a train coming down on the city where there were so many candidates in that race who would have beaten Brandon Johnson. You know what I mean? Like, and you ask anyone, you'd be like, do you prefer like the incumbent mayor or Johnson? They preferred her. There was a congressman, a Latino congressman from the west side. People preferred him, et CETERA but the more conservative people in Chicago really, really liked Paul Vallis. And I would have voted for Vallis over Johnson. But it was obvious that if you want a candidate to lose a mayor's race in Chicago, a guy who went on a bunch of conservative talk radio shows in the suburbs to talk about his problems with Barack and Michelle Obama was like not the right guy for that race. And like Chicago, right in Chicago, like every other candidate in the field would have beaten Johnson, but it went down to a one on one race. It was very close in the end and I was telling people, I was like grabbing them by the lapels. It's like, sure, fine, like Vallis is too right wing, but like it's fucking Chicago. Like, policy is not going to go off the rails to the right. Like, who cares? Cuomo is differently flawed than valis. But there was so much bandwagoning to Cuomo from the establishment, like the business community in New York City, right When Cuomo announced, they were all like, this is it. This guy is going to be our savior. And he's like a, he had the name recognition, but he was a poor choice. If you had Whitney Tilson or Zellner Myre or Brad Lander or anybody else up there to just be like, let's not do socialism, you know, I, I think that they would win, but they didn't differentiate themselves. They weren't interesting. They didn't have the wave of early support. You know, I, I think, I, I don't live in New York, unlike YouTube, so I, I don't get a vote in this. But I, you know, I think I'll tell my dad, my brother, et cetera, like, vote, vote for Eric Adams in the general election. Because, I mean, I also think like Mandami is an interesting story, but even in the polls that show him surging, he's losing. And so I think. Right, right, right.

Mike Pesca (26:56)

Like surging polls show that after all the first of all the first votes, he's down by 30 even in the polls that he commissioned data for progress, which somehow is not shamed out of stopping polling. But then after all the ranked choice voting, he gets maybe a little bit closer. But first I want to note that in the Matt Glaciers world, everyone's wearing lapels. I don't know, maybe it's the lyrics. Sit down. You're rocking a boat. It's pretty cool. But in this, yeah, you come, you come dressed for success. Yeah, but won't ranked choice voting. If Chicago had the ranked choice voting, wouldn't it have undone the phenomenon that you're talking about.

Matthew Iglesias (27:33)

But no, because ranked choice has this. It's like, I think people want ranked choice voting to promote kind of centrally position candidates.

Mike Pesca (27:41)

That's what, that's what the people who, who promoted and foisted it upon.

Matthew Iglesias (27:45)

Because, because the mental model is always like Ralph Nader running in 2000. So, like, you can rank him first and Gore second. It's fine. But you get these excluded middle situations where you have like eight kind of like regular Democrats who aren't Andrew Cuomo in this field. And then you have two people with big blocks of. So, you know, the number one, number two rankings end up mattering a lot. I mean, we'll see. I say, look, I'll, I'll eat my hat if. But I, I think Mandami is just gonna lose at the end of the day that, you know, Cuomo is going to ramp up his messaging to get the number 5 preferences of Adrian Adams supporters and whatever other stuff like that and do. Okay, but Mandami has sort of marketed himself as the opposition to Cuomo and that has, like gained him some support. But, and he's also, I mean, he's really downplayed like socialism and some other kinds of things like that in, in his labels.

Mike Pesca (28:45)

I mean, he does free buses. That is socialism. And free grocery stores.

Alison Schrager (28:50)

Sorry, government run groceries.

Mike Pesca (28:52)

Government run groceries. Because grocery stores, which run on a 2% margin, they're ripe for the most social media. Right. For disruption.

Matthew Iglesias (28:59)

But, you know, he's just telling people like, well, everything will be free. And, you know, I don't know. Right. I, I think most people, when they think about it, understand why that doesn't work, but there's a lot of very left wing people in New York.

Alison Schrager (29:13)

Well, the demographics of his polling is just fascinating to me.

Matthew Iglesias (29:16)

It's like his support is all like.

Alison Schrager (29:18)

White college educated people in Brooklyn.

Mike Pesca (29:20)

70% of black New Yorkers support, support Cuomo and he's doing very well with Latinos. Maybe people don't know this. New York is only 20% black. It's about 33 or 35% Latino and white, 15% Asian. Maybe they'll swing the whole election. But that's absolutely true. This is an election where white people want to impose socialism on people of color who don't seem to want socialism. Sorry.

Alison Schrager (29:45)

Well, maybe because they're more concerned about crime or his plan to put homeless people on, on the subway on purpose.

Mike Pesca (29:50)

Yes, well, only, only in the kiosks that have been abandoned once, you know, that it becomes a very good idea.

Matthew Iglesias (29:57)

Yeah, you know, I mean, this is a general pattern that you have, which is that, you know, most white people are Republicans, but white Democrats tend to be very, very, very left wing, whereas it's the exact opposite for African Americans, that the default for a black moderate is to be a Democrat. And so, you know, they anchor the sort of moderate wing of the Democratic Party. And you know, you had some African American candidates in the race and they weren't able to cut into Cuomo's black base. And that's sort of what's driven this dynamic ultimately. Yeah.

Alison Schrager (30:33)

I also wonder if there's something to New York mayor race. I mean, Matt is a, you know, of all of us. Well, I guess you're from Long island, but Matt actually grew up across the street from where I am now.

Matthew Iglesias (30:43)

There you go.

Alison Schrager (30:43)

And you know, maybe it's just sort of like we need a sort of corrupt mayor. Like, I think we, I think people like colorful mayors. I mean, Bloomberg was just super competent and like technocratic. But like, I kind of wonder sometimes if you just need a mayor who's like a little crazy and corrupt and that somehow people feel like that's what I'm not saying I'm endorsing that view, but like that that's the person who gets stuff done. Like, I think Cuomo kind of has an, a compelling pitch of, he's like, yeah, I'm sort of corrupt, but like I'm a product of this whole machine and I can get stuff done.

Matthew Iglesias (31:15)

See, but to me, I mean, this is, this is Eric Adams. Like he has all these weird scandals, but they're about like the Turkish consulate and like, who cares? And crime is down and he's got, you know, they're putting garbage in, in trash cans. I, I, I went to high school with, with, with Commissioner Tish. So, you know, I'm supportive of the whole, the whole deal over there. You know, I do think that New Yorkers don't necessarily like, Mayor of New York City is an incredibly high profile office because the whole national media is centered there. It's not that powerful like an actual government job. Like, most of the stuff all of these candidates are promising they can't actually do because this authority party rests with the state legislature, which encourages a certain amount of irresponsible behavior. Like most of the Zoron supporters who I know who are like trying to talk me into it just keep assuring me like he's not going to do X, Y or Z, which, you know, great. I, I mean, I, yeah, that's, that's I also hope he doesn't do those things.

Mike Pesca (32:20)

That's exactly a Trump appeal. They ask you to take him seriously and not literally or whatever. I just want to make a couple points. One is that that I have a question over Cuomo's strategy and technique which is just not to address except in the broadest strokes the accusations of sexual harassment. And the normal playbook would be to do an interview, a friendly interview or something where you get it all out there. And he just never really did it. He gave a press conference and now he's been counter punching. And I think he thinks it's going to win him the election and it just might. We have 12, 13 days until the election. He might drop a ton of negative ads on on Zoron's head. I mean, you said in Chicago people don't like you denigrating Barack Obama. He did once call Barack Obama as the lesser of two evils. Still pretty evil. And that doesn't play well, even though in the last debate the Cuomo quote about shucking and jiving came up. So one was a 2008 supposed dig at Obama and what is 2013? I don't know. This is the number one issue. But I do, I do kind of fault all the other candidates and it can't be the case that they all pop above 1%. And I don't fault Michael Blake and I don't fault for fault Tillwit Nelson or Tilney Whitson or Whitney Tilson or whatever his name is. I'm being funny. I wonder if Myrie Zellnor is running just to try to suck some of the Zohan my Tom Donnie vote. Oh, mz. This is who we're talking about. But. But I don't know why Lander is going nowhere. I don't know why Adrian Adams is going absolutely nowhere. I don't know why Stringer is going nowhere. There's a should be a plausible case for any of them to be the reasonable person who's not Andrew Cuomo and they haven't been able to do that. And I don't know if that's baked into the structure of. I think it has something to do with choices they've made as candidates or communicators. Do you think that that's a fair critique?

Alison Schrager (34:18)

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think Zorab just got a lot of energy behind him and he has a really slick social media strategy and they just don't.

Mike Pesca (34:29)

They try to. I mean, Stringer calls Trump a schmuck, right? That's Something that would be an ad we'd have paid attention to at one point. I don't know what Adrian Adams is doing. She was good in the debate. She seems more or less competent. She's the only black woman in the race. That's sometimes a plus in a place not like New York 1%. She's not a joke. She shouldn't be a joke. She's a serious person. She doesn't have a string of shameful stances on the issues. More so than anyone else. I don't know why she's at 1%, but she's at 1%.

Alison Schrager (35:00)

The same reason why Catherine Garcia didn't win last time time, but she almost did.

Mike Pesca (35:04)

And if it wasn't, if it wasn't for that, that meddling candidate who the pack talk you out of, she might have.

Matthew Iglesias (35:10)

Well, you know, I mean, I do think I, you know, it's important though, like, Garcia came close, I think largely on the back of the New York Times endorsement. Right. I mean, the fundamentals were good, but. But the New York Times editorial page had a lot of agenda setting power in New York City. And they put out there, you know, if you are interested in a moderate, competent person, this Catherine Garcia, who you probably haven't heard of, is the person who you should look for. And so she got a ton of second and third preference votes from lots of different people. And, you know, she ultimately lost. Adams had a strong constituency among the kinds of people, people who don't necessarily read the New York Times, but the Times got out of the local endorsements game. And so there's no focusing institution that can say to people, if you think Cuomo is sleazy and you're not a socialist, this one's the best one. And like start getting a conversation going about that person. And that's actually like a really valuable role that the New York Times, you know, that somebody could play. I mean, the, you know, the gist could have played it. Right. I mean, it's like you sort of have to.

Mike Pesca (36:28)

But I got to tell you, Katherine Garcia, she was out there as the combo Warren Klobuchar for that role. She was perfect for that role.

Matthew Iglesias (36:35)

Yeah.

Mike Pesca (36:35)

I don't know who it would be with this group. Is it Adams?

Matthew Iglesias (36:37)

I have no idea. You know, and I mean, I was an early Garcia supporter. You know, she's great. I wish she had just run again. I think that would have been like the most logical person to fill the Catherine Garcia lane. Would it be the like, just like I told you so about Adams?

Mike Pesca (36:54)

Yeah, I did listen to a podcast of hers where she did admit to in her ranked choices ranking paperboy, paperboy Prince who ran last time. That was a little, little shameful. Okay, in a moment we will talk about the thing that these riots are said to have distracted from. And it's a big thing. Is it abusing beautiful thing Back in a minute. And this is the minute we promised we'd be back in on, not even mad. We've got Matt Iglesias here, we've got Allison Schrager. We're now going to talk about the big beautiful and big back Bernard bill, the bill that's taking a back seat to whatever's going on in L A Riots, unrest. And Matt, on your politics, and that's politics with an X podcast, you were saying all the unrest in L A is distracting from the bill and that comes at a cost, right?

Matthew Iglesias (37:57)

Yeah, I mean look, you know, this legislation, it's a, it's a big deal. I think it's, it's is quite harmful. It's going to increase the budget deficit. It's going to cost a lot of people their health insurance. It's going to have a negative impact on certain aspects of the energy economy. And it also just, it plays to the Democratic Party's strengths. Health care is the sort of long term issue that people most trust Democrats on, that they have sort of underlying progressive moral values about immigration is exactly the opposite. People think, you know, Democrats are too kind of soft and weak there and you know, and Republicans are also having a lot of trouble getting the T's crossed and the eyes dotted on this legislation. And that's been the case from the beginning because they want to fully extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs act which requires a large budget hole because it was deliberately structured to sort of disguise its full cost cost. But Trump has also promised like three or four other gimmicky things. They also want to expand the SALT deduction. He also wants additional money for immigration enforcement and the military. And then they want to tell people that they're not kicking people off their health insurance. And it just like it doesn't, it doesn't work mathematically. So they keep going in circles amongst themselves that exactly what they want to do because there's a, of lot, a lot of unpleasant trade offs in this space. And I think, you know, it's, it's important for people to pay attention to it. There's trillions of dollars at stake. It's a, it's a really big deal and I think a quite bad piece of legislation. Although exactly what's in or out of it keeps changing day to day.

Mike Pesca (39:39)

Yeah. All the, the Congressional Budget Office and all the outside groups that have looked at it do say it will add something between 2 1/2 billion and up to 4,4 billion over 10 years.

Matthew Iglesias (39:49)

Trillion.

Mike Pesca (39:49)

Do you think trillion? Yeah. Yeah. So do you, I always wonder, do you think if they said 400 billion a year we'd be like that's nothing. But when you do the 10 year calculation then it becomes real or not because the Republicans don't seem to care. So two part question, Alison. Part one, where are you on the bill? And part two, if you had to sacrifice some parts of it, like let's say you were a responsible Republican legislator, what would you leave in? What would you take out?

Alison Schrager (40:13)

I like, I mean like any bill, I like some aspects of it. I hate others. I mean no bill is all good or all bad. I like to think this will be the last like self indulgent bill because debt will become a bigger problem. I mean I, I don't like it adds to the debt but I don't really see anything in the political either on either the right or the left to deal with it. I think even the Democratic freakout about the fact anyone could possibly ever lose Medicaid suggests that the, they haven't really grappled with our spending problems because you know what, like our social programs are probably going to be, have to be smaller and better targeted in the future if we want to take on debt. On the other hand, Republicans haven't grappled with the fact we're probably also going to have higher taxes. I actually support extending tgca. I think just certainly with the, not that I would have chosen to have tariffs but in that situation we're facing some economic weakness. A big tax increase is probably not ideal. When TGC came out it kept being sort of described as a tax cut for the rich, but it really was a tax cut for people of all income levels. So increasing taxes on most people. I'm with you Mike, but I just don't think that's wise right now. That said, there are things about it I really hate. I mean if I could do, if I could write my own bill and people and I had no political constraints, I would actually get rid of all sorts of deductions and just lower rates and have a broader tax base and I mean and so raising the deduction TGCA was, was a good thing. But the thing I hate about this is it sort of adds just, just more gunk to the tax code, the no tax on tips. I, as an economist, I hate salt. I think there shouldn't be a salt deduction at all. But as I said, as New Yorker itemizes, I'm a little bit more ambivalent about it personally. But as an economist, I'm going to say we should not raise the salt limit. In fact, we should probably get rid of it altogether. So I said, like all these new distortions in the tax code, I hate it. They're expensive, they're not good for the economy. So I would probably. Those are the things I hate.

Mike Pesca (42:10)

Yeah. I was reading in 2017, I went back and read some New York Times analyses of the debt, the deficit. Sometimes just to amuse myself, I go back and read that op ed by Benjamin Apple Baum who said inflation's not going to happen. Just laugh. He was a nice guy. He came on the show. But I was reading, I was asking myself, is the New York Times as an institution, do they actually have the credibility to say that the debt has gotten out of control? Have they ever said this? And there was an article in about 2017 that said, yeah, the debt at this point really is out of control. And I realized the debt then was about 17 trillion. So it's so crazy, I almost wonder if the difference between 33 and 36 trillion trillion is as a percentage, so small that that's one reason why these Republicans, but they should care, shouldn't criticize.

Alison Schrager (43:07)

The debt when we were talking about the American Rescue plan or build back better, or do they only worry about it when a Republican's in office?

Mike Pesca (43:16)

Right. So then I would say, to be fair to them, the thesis is during times when stimulus is needed, you need to stimulate. I would say the second giant bill, there was not enough capacity in the economy to justify that level of spending. And Furman and Larry Summers agreed with me. It was actually the other way around. I agreed with them. But why, Matt, do you think it's just pure. Alison had this theory that this could be the last one, the last truly profligate spending bill because we're going to get smacked in the face. But do you have a theory of the case of why Republicans are going down this road? Just fear of Trump, economic illiteracy, something else.

Matthew Iglesias (43:56)

You know, I mean, I have been surprised by the past five years worth of trajectory around this when American Rescue plan was happening. You know, I remember talking to Jason Furman at that time and he was like, this is too big, it's too much, blah, blah, blah. And I was saying, like I don't know, Jason. Like, you're probably right. Um, but if it goes too big and we get inflation, then, like, the political vibes are just gonna shift, right? That, you know, 10 years ago, 10 years ago @ that time when he was in the White House and the economy was in a deep funk and interest rates were super low, he was saying, like, we, we gotta do more stimulus. And all the political hacks, the political hacks in the Obama White House were like, no, no, no, people hate deficits. Like, we need to put serious deficit red production stuff on the table that faded away over time. And fair enough, interest rates were low. And I just kind of thought, you know what, like, if we go too big on this, like, the politics will change and it'll be fine. And that is not what happened at all. Biden went forward with another big proposal that didn't go in Congress because it was too much for Manchin. They tried to rejigger their proposals to have a deficit reducing influence, but they then really chipped away at all of that in the implementation. They did a lot of stuff through executive action that was costly and deficit adding. And then Trump ran on the campaign and he was like, cost of living is too high, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And has he won on the basis of that message? And he's been very inattentive to it. I mean, again, even if you want to stipulate that, like, the core TCGA extension is just like, it's baked into the cake, these are Republicans. That's what they want to do. You really don't need to put hundreds of billions of dollars of extra stuff on top of that. You know, and in terms of spending, I mean, to Allison, I would say, look, there's a real case for cutting back on America's health care and retirement entitlements. She talked about, we have to make this stuff better targeted. But cutting Medicaid is the reverse of making it better targeted. Right? I mean, we have Social Security benefits going to people who are in the top third of the income spectrum. You could roll that back. That would be better targeted. You have Medicare Advantage plans that would be better targeted. There's stuff you could do with site neutral payments that both Trump and Biden in some sense kind of like proposed and then never really did anything. Anything about that would be better targeted. Going after low income people's health care is, is making it worse targeted. I mean, it's making it smaller. But, you know, this is a classic sort of dynamic going back to the, to The Reagan era of, you know, do you go after like substantively weak claims or do you just go after the weakest people in society, the people who are least likely to be able to advocate for themselves. And the cuts here have a lot of that character. Now some of the other cuts, the cuts to the EV subsidies, some other stuff like that. Fine, great. Like, you know, like we've got to do something that's, that's fluff the Democrats put in and now are mad at Elon Musk, who's the main recipient of it. Like, but like poor people's health insurance. I don't know.

Alison Schrager (47:19)

But I mean like, not everyone on Medicaid is necessarily the most vulnerable. Some people are and they definitely need Medicaid and that's why we have the program. But like work requirements on able bodied men, I mean, I don't know if that's necessarily the most evil thing we could do. I mean.

Matthew Iglesias (47:34)

Yeah, but like, I mean, do you know any able bodied men, like young men are not racking up enormous doctor bills.

Alison Schrager (47:43)

That doesn't mean we should give them Medicaid.

Mike Pesca (47:45)

Well, but I thought your point was these days no one's able. Have you seen the men? You seen the shooting there?

Matthew Iglesias (47:51)

But I just mean if you're talking about financial savings, right. I mean savings in health care comes from either reducing payment levels to providers or from reducing the amount of health care services that people are able to consume, right? Like it's sick people who are consuming health care services. The disenrollments, you know, some like.

Mike Pesca (48:17)

Like.

Matthew Iglesias (48:17)

Healthy, able bodied people are not generating a lot of savings by cutting them off from this program. What you're doing is you're creating re enrollment barriers and so you're hoping certain number of people drop off who are utilizing services. It's like, you know, if you were going to say, well, at the end of the day this was a tough cut, we hurt some vulnerable people. But it's what we had to do in order to bring down the debt. Okay, maybe, but this is part of a package that in the aggregate, you know, adds 2 to $4 trillion worth of debt. And like it does, I mean it does cut everybody's taxes, but it cuts rich people's taxes like a, like a lot. Right. And you could do less.

Mike Pesca (49:00)

What tax. But I always object to that because who pays taxes? This is true. A disproportionate amount of taxes, percent of taxes are being paid by the. It's not disproportionate. There's the progressive tax cut.

Matthew Iglesias (49:13)

Yes, it is not bad.

Mike Pesca (49:14)

You can't design a good tax cut that the rich aren't going to benefit from the most because they pay them well.

Matthew Iglesias (49:19)

But like you don't need to do the SALT expansion at all. Right? Like that doesn't need to be in there. We don't need no tax on car loans. Like that's a stupid idea. That's regress. Like it, I guess it like sounds good to people but like it's, it's distortionary. Right. It has no real growth benefit. It's regressive and like, you know, there's just a lot, a lot, a lot of fluff in here.

Mike Pesca (49:44)

And then no tax on, no tax on overtime is certainly just going to play out based on people who are self employed will just, I'm looking at what they do is over time, you.

Matthew Iglesias (49:55)

Know, like I'm here on your show. That's overtime, right?

Mike Pesca (49:57)

Yeah. It's not actually going to add to the economy in any way way. Whereas I do think the tax cuts really. Well, I don't think it, I think all the evidence shows that the tax cuts might not have been perfect, especially from a progressive, reasonable progressives view of the world. But they were helpful to the economy. And people, everyone, even people who objected to the tax cuts did benefit from the tax cuts. They were a net positive in a way that a lot of these programs, the popular programs, tax on tips, tax on overtime, they're not going to be a net positive. I can't make the case that they're going to crater the economy. I won't say, but they're not good.

Matthew Iglesias (50:34)

The budgetary situation, the macroeconomic situation in 2017 was different, you know, from how it was now. And I did not love the full structure of TCGA as written when it was passed. But I said, I wrote an article at the time, I was like, this is, it's going to be fine. You know, like it has some good things, it has some bad things in the aggregate environment. Tax is going to be fine. Nobody for. It's politics, right? Like nobody wants to cut the deficit, nobody wants higher taxes, nobody wants steeper spending cuts. And so all the political people have like talked themselves now into the opposite of where they were when Obama was president. It's like deficit reduction, it's a loser. But like I do think people would like to see lower mortgage rates, people would like to see more home building, people would like to see cheaper car payments. And you know, I do think both in the White House and in Congress, I mean everybody has to start thinking at Some point about like what, what do they want to deliver for people at the end of the day? Because there's now all this, you know, J.D. vance is like tweeting that the Fed's got to cut interest rates. But if you're interested in long term rates, like the Fed has limited control over that in a situation of high and rising deficits and at or above target inflation.

Alison Schrager (51:50)

I think it's like the thing that annoys me about this whole not this particular conversation, but the debt conversation more largely is, I mean, everyone agrees the debt's a problem, but like everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one really wants to die here is that like Democrats are incensed about the idea that anyone loses Medicaid, but they aren't really talking about entitlement reform anyway. You know, Republicans again are just giving more and more tax cuts and but like everyone complains about the debt, but no one really wants to give on anything. And the things people agree on are bad about this bill, like are kind of small potatoes anyway in the grand scheme of our debt because no one is really sort of willing to take on the sort of any sort of political risk in terms of what would actually meaningfully reduce the debt and as Matt points out, lower the, the tenure in a way that would help consumers.

Mike Pesca (52:39)

Yeah. I say there is no, there is no constituency within the Democratic Party that are true debt hawks. There is no one who is willing to die here, even if in the Republican Party the real hawks are guys like Chip Roy and then maybe people who I don't even take as seriously as him, like Thomas Massie. There's no equivalent that I can see articulating these positions as putting debt is national security risk as one of their top three items. Unless you have that, you're never really going to get anything until I think the markets smack America in the face for their profligacy.

Matthew Iglesias (53:13)

Well, I mean, I would look at Jared Goldin as probably the biggest sort of fiscal responsibility champion among, among House Democrats. What's striking.

Mike Pesca (53:22)

So he's, he's a main Democrat who every term might not get reelected.

Matthew Iglesias (53:26)

Exactly.

Mike Pesca (53:27)

And he's been there two terms.

Matthew Iglesias (53:28)

What's striking to me about this though is how rapidly it's changed. Right. So in 2012 you had on the table a proposal from the Obama White House that would have quite significantly cut Medicare, discretionary spending, various other things. And their demand was they wanted to eliminate tax deductions. Right. And so create like one for one one in terms of revenue increases and spending cuts. And then you had Republicans who were saying, no, we don't want to do that deal. We want to do your spending cuts plus more spending cuts. And, you know, that was a. They, they didn't come together. They didn't compromise. Legislating is hard. Bipartisanship is difficult. But they were both like, bidding serious deficit reduction. Either the Ryan proposal or the Obama proposal would have reduced the deficit quite a bit. And what they wound up doing, which I think was not well designed or well timed in terms of Budget Control act, also reduced the deficit. And we had quite a bit of deficit reduction for a number of years. And then the politics completely slipped away once Trump started running, not solely because of him, but like, it's a chain reaction of events. And the economic situation has made it much more appropriate to be having the kind of negotiations that Obama and Ryan were having back then. And, you know, it makes me sad.

Mike Pesca (55:00)

Now is the time in the show where we talk about those little indignities or big indignities that just, that just grind your gears, that get your goat. They're the goat grinders. I give a space to complain. I'll go first, because in the goat grinder segment, I've talked about, I think, every sense. I've talked about earbuds that are so small that fall out of your ears. That's hearing. I talk about a lot of things related to sight without seeing. I probably wouldn't get nearly as annoyed. But my goat grinder today is smell. Not the sense, but smell during the summer. Summer is a time of bad smells. And maybe suntan lotion, like they called it in the 80s or barbecue is a good smell. But in general, the defense de facto smell of summer, I posit, is just worse than the de facto smell of other seasons, which is to say no smell. So it is mostly, it is a bit the smell of garbage. It is also the smell of urine, which I think becomes more piquant in New York and New York subways. But in New York, there's a lot of smoking marijuana outside. And I actually don't know if, like Proust in the Madelines, there is an inherent sense of, wait, what's going on? And maybe in 20 years when marijuana is totally legal, it won't have that free zone of chaos with it. But all the smells of summer, especially in New York, are less appreciated and more assaultive than the smells of any other season.

Alison Schrager (56:26)

Is this specific urban summer smells.

Mike Pesca (56:29)

I spend most of my time in New York, but, you know, if invited to Martha's Vineyard, I, I will go probas first yes.

Matthew Iglesias (56:37)

This is such a New York vibe. The stinky summer.

Mike Pesca (56:41)

Yeah. Matt, what's your goat grinder?

Matthew Iglesias (56:44)

So, you know, I got a kid who's in fourth grade, and his school's great. Teachers are great. I like it. We do in D.C. a kind of an annual standardized testing cycle for the kids, like, which is fine. I support it. It's important. Accountability measure, et cetera. But they don't do the tests. Right, right, right. At the. The end of the year, they have this, like, month gap between when the assessment is done and the actual end of the school year. And then they just don't. They just, like, don't fucking do anything because there's no teaching because the assessments are done. And so it's like the teachers just, like, peace out. And the kids are going insane, and it's getting hotter and stinkier everywhere. And it's like, we need to. We need to, like, run through the end of the tape with our schooling here and not just like, there's honestly so few days of school. Like, they should teach kids on all of them.

Mike Pesca (57:38)

Yeah. And well, as cross me still, ideally.

Matthew Iglesias (57:41)

Well. But I'll take. I'll take anything.

Mike Pesca (57:43)

Just teach. Just keep them out, keep them occupied. I agree. I have two kids in private school, and one has a school year, and the other one, who is a senior, they just gave up. They just said, you know, about this second semester seniorhood. We also do, too. They're out of school. They graduate sometime in May, which is fine. He's scooping ice cream now, which is better than whatever he would have been doing in June in a private school in New York City. Alison, what's your goat grinder?

Alison Schrager (58:09)

It sounds so trivial compared to urban disarray and lack of education. But AirPods, just the fact that they keep wanting to interact with gadgets they don't want it to while I'm using another. Like, when they first came out, it seems like they work so well you can make calls on them. They. They talked to my phone. Now they want to talk to everything else while I'm on the phone. Like, how did the technology on them get worse?

Mike Pesca (58:33)

Well, now, you know, have you read all the stories or seen it in real life that the millennials, the youngsters, are going with the wired headphones? Going back to wired. Yeah, I think it's a fashion choice. I think there's something about. About the dangling string that cannot be wired.

Matthew Iglesias (58:48)

Headphones here. You know, I'm a. I'm a podcasting professional. I don't know. Yeah. What you're doing.

Mike Pesca (58:53)

I got the ones right, the little ones right here. But the, the whole pot. They do of. Wait, am I connected to the right thing? Hold on. Why am I getting my wife's headphones? Why is she listening to Real Housewives on headphones? That is. That is a fun 12 minutes in the beginning set up of every Not Even Mad episode. And speaking of which, if you don't, don't, please subscribe to the Not Even Mad specific feed where you will hear Matt and Alison tear each other's throats out over economic issues with which they disagree. And even if you don't listen to that feed, come join us again in a couple of weeks. Alison Trager. Thank you.

Alison Schrager (59:28)

Thank you.

Mike Pesca (59:29)

And Matt Glaciers. Thank you.

Matthew Iglesias (59:30)

Thank you.

Mike Pesca (59:31)

We're not saying we're right. We're not saying you're right. We are saying we're not even mad.

Alison Schrager (59:37)

Foreign.

Mike Pesca (59:41)

And that's it for today's show. Corey War produces the gist. Kathleen Sykes is the editor in chief and also chief investigative journalist of the GIST list. Ashley Khan is our production coordinator. Michelle Pesk is our cbso. Astro Green runs our social. We got a lot of people here. Plus the intern, Leo Baum. Improve. And thanks for listening, Sam.