Chapo Trap House - 498 - Child FACTS Credit feat. The Bruenigs (2/15/21)

Episode Date: February 16, 2021

Matt and Liz Bruenig stop by to talk KIDS. First, Matt walks us through what’s going on with the stimulus package, AEI’s insistence that mothers must never stop working, and why liberals are addicted to tax credits. Then we get mad at the damn crotchspawn with r/childfree, read some dear Prudie letters, and finally hold children accountable for long history of abusive behavior. Check out the Bruenigs podcast here: https://www.patreon.com/thebruenigs And People’s Policy Project here: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/ Shoutout to twitter's @demswatchdog for the $2000 check supercut. Our 500th episode is coming up and we’re putting together some best-of lists. Take a minute to vote for your favorite eps on this google poll. We’ll be collecting them into a top list and...I don’t know, doing something with them next week. Probably putting into a youtube radio stream. I’m just having fun here: https://forms.gle/4uouQHSY9vV3fo5JA

All right. Greetings, everybody, and happy President's Day. It's the day we sell out. Just respect to all the presidents out there. Shout out to all the presidents, not just America, other countries, also presidents of companies, homeowners associations, chambers of commerce. You guys are the real stars. Yep. The president of CAP, former president of CAP, near Tandon, and most especially, Trump, our most recent president. She used to be the president of CAP, and now she's the president of no CAP. Well, I hope everyone is staying safe and warm on this president's day as much of the country is blanketed by a frigid ice storm. But you know what? It's crazy. Because of

the harsh weather conditions, can you believe it? The podcast, they said if I came in today, they would uber me a car, they'd pay for a president's day mattress, a hotel, and give me a $2,500 bonus. This snow got Chapo acting brand new. Yeah. Actually, I own a chain of podcasts in the Houston, Dallas area. There's opportunities around us every day. But I would like to introduce, it's me, Matt and Felix today, but joining us today are posting and podcasting power couple, the Brunigs, here to help us celebrate the president's day and all of the presidents. Matt and Liz, how's it going?

It's going great. Thanks for having us. You have both been individual guests of the show, but never before joining us together as the full Voltron, the full Brunig, the Brunig vision. Well, I think when I came on the first time, that very early episode, Matt was still punished Matt. He had just, you know, the late unhappiness had just happened. Yeah. He couldn't be on the show because he was in stocks, a little Dupont circle. Yeah. We're also holding an accountable. I'm going to be honest until this moment, I thought

one of you was a character, the other one was playing. I wasn't sure which. Now I hear you both. And no, I apologize. I hold myself accountable for once. For once in your life. Usually, I'm the one holding people accountable. Yeah. Now you got to do a growth. Yeah. Well, we'll be growing and accounting today. But I guess I'd like to kick things off with Matt and Liz to talk about, like, just what is the state of proposed stimulus spending on like and COVID relief here in America? Because, you know, the second impeachment

trial seems to be wrapping up the way we all expected it would with everyone declaring Trump guilty, but not accountable rather than what I believe he is not guilty, but should be held accountable. And I guess, like, that was the big thing they had to focus on. But like now that that's sort of fading into the background and Trump's finally going to go away, the Democrats and the Biden administration are stuck with this $2,000 or $1,400 check issue. And I guess like Matt and Liz to begin, like, how do you, how would you describe this sort of strange situation we have now where thanks to COVID, basically every mainstream economist agrees

that we need some kind of stimulus and Trump has already got the ball rolling by sending people checks once or twice. And then thanks to the election and a special election, Democrats really tied themselves to this idea of more checks or a $2,000 check or a $1,400 check in such a way that people were allowed to think that policy could involve the government directly giving people money. So how do you see the Democrats now attempting to manage those expectations in the current bill that's being proposed? Yeah, well, they seem to have decided that the amount of money that it would, that would, you know, if you add up the $1,400 multiplied by, you know, the number of people in the

U.S. that that would, that would simply be too high. And it's sort of unclear why, you know, like, what, what is the target? How do we know how much is too much? That's not really specified, but we, but there is some sense it is too much. And so what they've decided to start doing is, aside from cutting it from $2,000 to $1,400, which as you know, there was a big debate, well, we meant $1,400 all along. It's $1,400 plus $600. You know, I don't know. I don't really care about, I guess that. It seems like if you get yourself in a situation where you have to explain to people you meant $1,400 all along, you're not doing politics correctly.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, because I think like they could, they were probably technically correct, but like they can't, you can't get around the fact that like they ran a zillion ads in political speeches where they said a $2,000 check is coming your way if you vote for us. And like the problem is that people took them literally and believed them. If you send John and the Reverend to Washington, those $2,000 checks will go out the door. We will be able to pass $2,000 stimulus checks for the people next week. We'll deliver the $2,000 stimulus checks, and that begins with the $2,000 stimulus. When you send me and Reverend Warnock to the Senate, we will pass those $2,000 stimulus

checks. You send me and Reverend Warnock to the Senate. We will pass those $2,000 stimulus checks. They will make decisions about whether we get people a $2,000 check. We need to pass $2,000 stimulus checks. And if you have to get in a situation where you're saying like, oh, well, actually it's your fault for taking it literally instead of reading further, you've, yeah, you've put yourself on the back hill to start. Yeah. So, but now what's interesting is they're saying even the $1,400 is too much. And so

they're trying to cut it down, but they don't want to cut the $1,400 amount. And so they're, they're into like kind of interesting like metaphysical trouble in which they're saying, well, all the other checks have started to phase out on people who make more than $75,000 a year, or if you're married $150 a year. But what we're going to do is we're going to just bring that threshold down to maybe $50,000 or maybe $40,000. And so we're still going to provide the $1,400, which plus the $1,600 gets you $2,000, but we're going to phase it out more quickly. So people who, you know, a year or two ago, the last time they filed taxes, we're making more than $75,000

a year or $150,000 a year. They won't get as much as they, you know, they won't get the full $1,400,000. And the thing about them is that you can't take Biden's literally, you have to take him seriously. I kind of pose the question to them, like, what if you kept the $1,400, but you only gave it to one person, like as a lottery. Like, would that be, would you satisfy your promise because of $1,400 plus $600, that's $2,000, right? Like the weird position they've run themselves in is in order to make the argument that by $2,000, we always meant $1,400 all along, what they meant is in that last bill that passed where it said $600, that they

wanted to put $2,000 there. But in the last bill that passed, it was phasing out starting at $75,000, not phasing out at $50,000. So for them to change the phase out, they're no longer able to now say, oh, well, we always meant all along, we just wanted that $600 to say $2,000 because they're now changing another parameter of that same law. So, you know, through this process, something has been lost. I don't know where they've, you know, where you want to ping them, but they've broken some kind of promise, like technically. I mean, I don't know that it matters, but, you know, like logically it doesn't hold together. And, I mean, like, it's like a lot of things.

It's being justified on this idea that, like, is it really, at a time when so many people desperately need relief or some cash in their checking account, like, is it the best use of government money to send it to people who technically may not need it? And, like, by that, they mean, like, you know, I guess an individual making over $75,000 a year as based on the last time they filed taxes, which wouldn't account for the fucking plague that's just destroyed the country. Yeah, no, that's true. And there's been a lot of discussion about, I don't know, how do you target need in this context? And it seems like everyone in the discourse, especially

among kind of Democrat policy people, they've decided that unemployment insurance, that's the thing that definitely targets need. But, you know, when you look at the numbers, like the last month of data, there are about 5 million people who are receiving unemployment benefits, but in the jobs report, there are 10 million people who are unemployed, who are actively looking for work. So, obviously, half the people are not managing to get on that program, at least half the people, because that 10 million doesn't include people who just have given up looking for work altogether. And then the other thing is that unemployment benefits, you know, I mean, you can get unemployment benefits and still be relatively well off,

you know, if your spouse didn't lose their job and they make a lot of money, you could still get unemployment benefits. That's not a bad thing, but it's not like everyone who's unemployed is destitute. Some people, they have lots of savings, or they have a spouse who has a lot of earnings, and so that's not necessarily that well targeted either. So you know, I don't know, to my mind, like you try to get as much money as you can out through as many channels as you can, knowing that the unemployment system doesn't work all that well, a lot of people are slipping through those cracks, and also knowing that a lot of people are probably going to slip through the cracks of sending out another

IRS payment. But you know, like Donald Roosevelt said, you go to war with the army you have, and these are the institutions we have, and as best as we can do is you just kind of jam all the buttons and see if we can get the money out and keep people from, you know, starving and getting evicted. Well, I mean, if the defenders of the Biden administration or the sort of just give them a chance crowd, we'll point to, you know, what's being proposed is a $1.9 trillion economic relief package, and I'm just quoting from the Washington Post here. It says, under the proposal, the Internal Revenue Service would provide $3,600 over the course of the

year per child under the age of six, as well as $3,000 per child under the age of six to 17. The size of the benefit would diminish for Americans earning more than $75,000 a year, as well as for couples jointly earning more than $150,000 per year. An analysis by Columbia University researchers of Biden's proposal found it would cut the number of children in poverty by as much as 54%, the equivalent of five million children. I mean, that sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Is there anything else that's being proposed here? It sounds like it's a decent thing that you would want from a Democratic administration, but is the devil in the details here? What's really going on with this?

Yeah, so that's a separate thing from the $1,400 checks. This is the creation of a fully refundable child tax credit. This has been in the works for the past three or four years. There was a bill called the American Family Act that was introduced by Sherrod Brown and Michael Bennett in the Senate. They're just seizing upon this opportunity. Maybe we can get it in. We'll get it in a temporary one-year version. I do think that proposal does make a very big step forward, at least within the welfare state world of American politics. Because right now, the child tax credit and the income tax credit are designed so that poor people can't get the benefit. That's an intentional thing they've been doing since

the 90s because they want to get poor single mothers working and all the rest of it. The child tax credit that they're proposing now crosses that line for the first time, at least since the 90s, and says, no, no, we actually want poor people to get benefits as well, not just lower middle class people and above. That was great. That was a good move in the right direction. The thing that they're starting to mess up, or at least that I've been hammering them on over the past few weeks, is that it really just doesn't make sense to administer a benefit like that through the IRS. The IRS doesn't make monthly payments to people. It makes annual lump sums to people. The child tax credit is an annual benefit. It's based

on annual characteristics about a family, about their income, their marital status, whether the kid lived with them for 51% of the year. It doesn't make sense to try to do that on a monthly basis. It's just going to be a mess. It's not just me saying that. The Tax Policy Center, which is like Urban and Brookings Institute, they say the same thing. I don't know. It's just typical dumb guy stuff. It's like you guys are getting very close to something that could work very well, which had been proven to work very reasonably well, at least over the last year, which is direct payments to families, direct payments to households. But you just got to do it well. Don't make it complicated. Don't throw in

all this bullshit. Just do it as simple and as clear as you could. They're just resisting that for some reason. The net result of that is going to be much less effective than it would otherwise be. I had a piece out today showing that one in three poor children live in families that don't file taxes. But you have to file taxes to get this benefit. We're already setting ourselves up for a losing battle to be like, how do we reach these one in three kids? How do we get them to file taxes? It's like, why are we even doing it? They don't file out W2 and they go to school. You could do it in the, yeah. You could do it at the school level. Turn them into employees and stakeholders of the local educational

institution. And maybe, you know, if they want to clean up the cafeteria while they're at it, they could do that. Yeah. That was a Newt Gingrich thing. He was saying, poor kids do the custodial work at their school. The man was ahead of his time in many ways. Not just about that, but like the Crunchwrap Supreme at McDonald's also. He was the first speaker in the house to have a smooth wife. Totally smooth wife. That's not phase two. But Matt, I mean, what you're talking about is the gravity of like a democratic policy making and policy thinking. It just seems like even if they sort of have their hand on a problem or grasping what could be a potential

solution to it, it seems invariably there's this sort of comalification of how these sort of like, how to deal with social problems. Like, you know, like all these attachments, like, you know, if you do X, Y and Z, if you claim this, you would qualify for this credit or something rather than, you know, the very simple thing of just like, don't make people jump through tubes for it, like just directly like wire the money into a checking account. Like, I mean, this is all intentional, right? I mean, this is like, what, what, what, what accounts for this? Like, the Democrats are liberal solutions, like every problem has to be solved through tax credits.

Yeah. Well, so historically, you know, what happened in the 90s, of course, when they got rid of aid to families with dependent children, which was the cash benefit for out of work single mothers, there was a move towards tax credits. And there were two like main reasons for this one is that if you do it through the tax code, then it's not seen as welfare. And so you think, oh, well, this will be better because middle class families, they don't want to feel like they're receiving cash benefits or welfare. That was like the idea. Of course, I think in the last year, we pretty much definitively disprove that because every time you ask people, did you like to receive that big check? They're like, yes, I did please

send some more. But that was the thought. So put it in the tax code. The other thing is the purpose of these tax credits as they were designed in the 90s was just simply to miss poor kids. So the best way to skip poor kids is to wait till the end of the year, see which one of them are poor, and then say no benefit for you. And the way to do that would be through the tax code. So these programs were intentionally designed to exclude poor kids. And at the time, the idea was, well, that'll be good because that'll encourage their parents to go work. And that didn't really play out that way. But that was the thinking. And so what we're

left with now is this sort of like vestigial structure where this whole tax credit edifice was constructed specifically to exclude poor kids. And so it didn't really matter that, well, poor people don't file taxes, so how are they going to get it? It's like, well, that's the whole point, right? We're not trying to get it to them. But now we are here 20 years later. And in a way, they're kind of saying that was a mistake. That was a mistake we should have never excluded those kids. But we're still going to do the same shit, the same design, the same kind of way that we've been doing it, and hope that we can reach them through this process. And I don't know. I mean, part of it, it just seems like

mindless momentum, turf guarding on some level with some of these institutions who have spent the last 20 years defending these programs. And other parts seem maybe even like pettier than that, right? Like, if you make it a tax credit, guess what? That means that it falls under the jurisdiction of ways and means, which means House Member Richard Neal gets oversight over it. And you saw, you know, he's kind of, you know, a bit of a nutcase himself, as you may have seen, with that Alex Morse election. It's a lot of just petty shit like that, it seems like, and just dumb stuff, momentum. I don't know. That's the best I can make of it.

Well, I mean, as far as the critiques of this, I'm assured that everybody has roundly rejected the advice of Larry Summers, who recently had an op-ed saying, like, don't spend too much money because it'll overheat the economy. And I'm assured that people in Biden circles have rejected that. But like, how would you describe like some of the, like some of the, the naysayers are like, what's the, what are the arguments people make against like this kind of like for generous at a moment of real crisis, like, you know, taking the opportunity to just simply spend money, damn the consequences and give it to people. And like, even if that means giving it money, what's Larry saying about it? Yeah, yeah.

Or people. Yeah, I mean, Larry is saying, you know, that we're close to full recovery and that if you dump all this money in the system, it's just going to supercharge demand so much that we're going to have inflationary problems and stuff like that, which that's been the biggest economic problem for the last 30 years has been inflation. Well, yeah, it's always out of control. It was sort of unclear. Well, what, okay, what if we had three or four percent inflation for a couple of years? I mean, who, what, why would anyone care? Like, I don't know. It just doesn't really have any negative effects. Don't you understand that the Smothers Brothers show would just give you the business?

Yeah, that that's what that's what the thing is in the movie Children and Men, that's what happened. There's three 3.7 percent inflation one year and then boom, no more kids. If you guys want to have, if you guys want to have Johnny Carson making fun of you in his monologue for inflation, be my guest, but I don't want that fate. A lot of people aren't scientific people. I consider myself a very scientific man. Women's ovaries stop working when inflation goes above 1.25 percent. Yeah, no, maybe the late night talk shows will be like, if you guys see the price of milk, it's no longer $3. It's $3.09. I miss, I miss, like, gas price jokes. I like the 2008 election where John McCain made all those stump speeches

about how he hates paying a bunch at the pump. I think we need to bring that back. I do remember the gas price days. Speaking of, speaking of children, though, I mean, like, this gets into like, you know, yeah, what I, what I quoted from the Washington Post like this, a child allowance benefit policy, it's American child benefit policy. And now isn't Mitt Romney cosign something or a version of this that would basically be a monthly child benefit allowance for people in this country? Like, like, what's in the Romney proposal? And I've heard actually, like, surprisingly good reviews of what he's, or what's in that proposal. Could you describe it?

Yeah, so Romney basically won up Joe on the dollar amounts. So in Joe Biden's plan, you get $3,000 if your kid is between six and 17. Romney does that as well. If your kid is younger than that, Joe gives you $3,600. Romney pumps that up to $4,200. And then right before birth, Romney also gives you another $1,400, where Joe doesn't give you anything. So over the course of a kid's life, you get an extra $5,000 under Romney, then you get under Biden, which is already kind of an amusing outcome. But on top of that, and the thing I've been trying to push this last few days is Romney actually designs the benefit in a way that is reminiscent of, you know, sort of social democratic countries. So rather

than an advanced monthly child tax credit that depends on your income for this year, which you don't even know in advance and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, he says he's just going to have the Social Security Administration send out the checks to everyone. Period. No means test, completely universal. Now, if you make over $200,000 or $400,000 a year, they're going to claw it back at tax time. But it's only 3% of people make that much. You know, like it's a very clean and simple way to administer the program, in addition to being somewhat more generous than Biden's proposal. Now, Romney gets into trouble where he tries to pay for it by, you know, cutting TANF and stuff like that, which I even think

even on balance, his plan still is better, even though it has some of those somewhat negative pieces to it. But that seems to be like Democrats want to focus on that. And I'm trying to focus on look at the way he's set it up. The way he's set it up is good. And I should say the way he set it up is the way that I proposed to set it up in my family fund pack paper that I released in 2019, which I believe was the inspiration for the way that he set it up. So I'm trying to like, come on, simple, simple, Social Security Administration, stop with the tax credit stuff, send it out to everyone. Like Romney's got that under wraps. Like he's doing it right. Like, let's do that.

What do you think it counts for someone like Mitt Romney, who represents a sort of like a business conservative point of view, coming around on the idea of like direct cash payments to American families or to basically like to make it possible for people to have families or continue to maintain them? Like, or is it an acknowledgement that like social mobility or education is not a solution to the problem of poverty? Are they beginning to realize what that represents for like the capitalism as a whole? It's a very good question. I actually don't really know what happened with Romney because you remember when he ran in 2008, was it or 2012? 2012. Yeah. He was very much against

the bottom. What was it? The bottom 40% the moochers, which are paid tax and expect the government to take care of them and all that kind of stuff. And now I don't know, like with anything people will tell you, Oh, well, all that stuff he was saying about immigrants and poor people. He didn't mean that he was just trying to win the Republican nomination. I don't know if that's true or not, but here he is now some, you know, eight years later saying we should have a universal child allowance, which is more to the left than even the Democratic Party. And, you know, as best as I can tell, the way that this has evolved on the right wing is a few years ago, like four or five years ago, there was, you know, there's always

this effort to reinvent conservatism, reinvent conservatism, we're going to have an intellectual kind of center right conservatism that will appeal to, you know, Rostow that. Barstool conservatism. We talked about it just the other week. That's the newest number. Oh, yeah, yeah. He, and so what came out of that was the idea of creating a really big child tax credit. So instead of $1,000 a month, which is $1,000 a year, which is what it was at the time, they were saying we should go up to 3,500 or maybe even 4,500 a year. But we're still going to exclude the poor from this calculus. And it was weird because then the arguments they used for why we need to have a big child tax credit because they can't

just say, hey, it'll be good. People will like it. It'll be popular. We'll win elections and it'll cut poverty. They can't say that because they're Republicans. So they invented this really weird rationale in which they said, you know, if you think about it, parents really pay two sets of taxes because they pay their own taxes and then they raise kids who also go on to pay taxes. And so if we give them a child tax credit, we're really counteracting the double taxation of parents through this process. Maybe maybe start paying taxes at a certain age, you know, a very small sort of like symbolic tax to get them used to the idea, get them get their skin in the game from, let's say, age six on. Yeah, that's

something that Michelle Alexander has written a lot about the school to taxes pipeline. And so, you know, based on that rationale, if you think about it, it doesn't make sense to exclude poor parents because they're raised, they pay some tax at least, right, payroll tax, sales tax, and they're raising a tax pay her under this logic. So shouldn't you also give the benefit to them? And you confront them with this and they would just kind of, I don't know, I got the sense of just like, you know, this is bullshit, right? Like, like they just really seem interested in squaring that logic. And that was picked up initially by Marco Rubio and Mike Lee, and they've been big on expanding child tax credit, expanding

child tax credit. Rubio is why they expanded the child tax credit in the Trump tax bill. But for whatever reason, Romney was the only guy who was like, okay, let's go all the way. Let's give it to all families, not just sort of lower middle class and above. And that is what the logic entailed based on the arguments they were using. But Rubio and Lee, I mean, they released a statement a week ago after Romney released his plan in which they denounced it as an abomination. So that's my best guess of like sort of the intellectual heritage of how Romney came to be on this. I still don't want to make it seem like, you know, all Republicans are coming around on

this. It is just that the Romney proposal is a very specific thing. And there have been a number of reactions to the Romney proposal from the right, arguing that it's a bad idea. And it's very interesting the terms in which they describe this bill and warn against why pursuing such a thing would be a danger or like it would be a danger to American society. And I like to get Liz in on this because I just, I saw this tweet from this guy, Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute responding to the idea of the Romney proposal. And of it, he says, read Angela Rashidi on the Romney proposal. I'll give you eight minutes. She notes that the highly evil, Chex notes, National Academy of Sciences found that a third

of single moms with earnings would reduce their hours with a child allowance. So just in case you missed it there, the reason we can't have a child allowance benefit is that it would possibly theoretically lead to a situation in which some single working mothers don't work as much as they currently are now or would reduce it. You know what that means? Yeah. You know what that means? More homework, more enforcement of homework, less playtime, fewer Legos, fewer Legos on the floor, no erector sets. You know what I mean? What I liked about him saying that is I don't think it occurred to him how fucking blood curdlingly evil what he was saying is like he was saying like,

we can never, ever allow a situation to develop in America where a single working mom is able to see your kid more. Right. I mean, time was that if someone tweeted that out, you'd have no idea if they were a conservative or not, right? I mean, because the landscape politically on what single mothers or mothers in general should be doing in the United States is completely mixed up. So, you know, Matt and I have talked about this, but a child allowance or especially like a child care benefit that also pays out as a cash benefit if you want to stay at home gets extremely mixed responses because some people say, well, no, that will encourage or enable women to leave the workforce, which

isn't good for women in general. And then other people just don't like the price tag. One of the problems is that everybody lies about what they really think. And so it's difficult discursively to figure out where they really are. But you know, I debated Larry Mead one time. He called himself the intellectual godfather of welfare reform. He's a real sick. Now he's on race. Godfather. He's moved on to an even more savory intellectual development. You come to me on this day, the day that my daughter earned between $55,000 a year on non-employee compensation and may your first child be a high IQ child. Your first child has a very smooth, fine brow ridge. Yeah. He's an interesting guy. I mean, I don't

want to interrupt, but I just want to talk about the last. He's been his whole career on welfare reform and he was very like straight lace guy. And I swear to God, the last thing he published, he was like, maybe the reason why welfare reform didn't help get black people out of poverty is because they're lazy and they don't like to work. And we just need tougher, no excuses, charter schools to fix that literally was the last thing he published it in a journal. And it was like, maybe there are just differences in cultures. And you're like, all right, Larry, what are the cultures? And he's like, well, there's Northwest European culture. And then there's like the global south. Okay. But I debated him once.

Wait, hold on. Then why does why do Northwestern European countries allow for their people to have so much more free time than America does? It gets so convoluted. He's explaining how he tries to circle the square of that. You know, but what he said, you know, part of the job you do in a debate, maybe the lion's share of what you do in a debate is try to get people to come to terms with and put into words what they actually think. Most people not only cannot explain what they think, they don't even know. It's submerged. They've never asked, you know, probing questions that lead to a very detailed, outlined sense of what they believe. Now, the exception to this is Matt and other artists where there is nothing

submerged. And in fact, he knows every single detail of what he thinks down to like a kind of disturbing granular level. And so by the end of the debate, and Matt was there observing what he had said, what Larry Mead had said is, well, women who stay home with their children are fine. That's even good. Women who are single and want to spend more time at home with their children. That's not good. And the reason he said is because women should have to answer to someone in society and single mothers, because they don't have a husband to be their boss, need the Arby's manager to be their boss. That's what he said. Yeah, everyone needs a bossy. He did it in very communitarian kind of, we all should

serve somebody in the mother. Who does she serve without a husband? The children dumb ass. It's like, well, yeah, I serve the kids. When you're taking care of kids, you're not lording over them as their CEO, right? The kids completely run roughshot over you and you cater to their every whim. They're all little kings, right? You've got to do what they want or they're going to scream at you and you're going to want to kill yourself. Hey, who does he think husbands and boyfriends answer to? I got news from him on that. Oh, the big boss. Oh, ball and chains. Oh, fuck. Yeah, I know. That was the less heralded John Lennon song, man is the Arby's manager.

Heavy is the head that wears the Burger King birthday crown. As compared to what is being proposed, either in the Romney proposal or maybe like the slightly less generous Biden and Democrat one, this is just totally theoretical. There's a long way from this even getting close to being passed or becoming law. How would the proposal compare to programs that are extant existing in the world today and developed comparable nations? Yeah, so I mean, the closest comparison that we had that happened very recently, so we have good data and it's a very similar country would be Canada because Canada just put in place a Canada child benefit. They consolidated

a bunch of tax benefits that they had and they made a Canada child benefit. It's paid out each month, very similar to what's being proposed here. It's actually somewhat more generous than what's being proposed here, not surprisingly. Of course, they do studies. What happened? Did people go to work? Did people stop working? What happened? What they found is overall actually work activity among women slightly increased, but it also slightly decreased among low educated women who had young kids. Low educated women who had older kids, they actually worked a little bit more, but if you had young kids who were below school age, the percentage of them that were employed fell from like 55% to 53%.

That's okay. The kids are like, they're not in school, so someone has to watch them, so that seems fine. It looks like once they go to school, they get back in the labor force. Who gives a shit? That's the biggest thing we have. One of the things that they were trying to cite at AEI is some research from the National Academy of Sciences, which we're trying to guess what this would do. They determined, I think you cited some of it, but the actual number was that they believed that unmarried mothers would reduce their work activity by an average of 1.7 hours a week, which would reduce total work in the economy by 0.09%. That's the type of thing that said John Conner back then.

Let's start Conner, single mother. Did I say more? Did I say more? Who did she have to answer to? The reprogrammed T-800, who she finally understood what it means to have a father, a guy in her kid's life. Case closed. Does she marry him? I haven't seen her. No, no. I mean, she has to watch him be lowered into a vat of molten steel. It's very sad. But you know... That's what a good marriage is like. Every day, the husband and wife take turns being lowered into the vat.

Every day, when Matt logs onto Twitter, I see him being lowered into the vat. It's just a thumbs up. Thumbs up. I'm loving it. But what I was going to say is this is just so bizarre to me because it's like, okay, even if you tally up all the studies and show economic output will drop by 1.7 hours a week among single mothers of this income level or age or whatever, don't they have numbers to show that over the long term, like the net positive, just purely in terms of capitalist

economic growth, what it would mean to have more mothers, I don't know, loving their children and raising them or being in their lives or they become stable, functioning adults and an economy? Yeah. The big counter here would be that when kids grow up in poverty, they're much less likely to be employed when they become adults and they're also much more likely to be incarcerated, do crime, have mental health problems, et cetera, et cetera. If your whole goal was over the long term, maximize the number of people who are productive citizens, keeping people, especially children out of poverty, that's one of the first steps

you're going to take because poverty really plays a number on the brain and brain development and malnutrition and all the rest of it. In that sense, it could never make sense that you would get your way to high employment by having one in five kids grow up poor. It would never make sense to do that, but they just shuffle that off and focus narrowly on what about the small group of low-educated, unmarried mothers who have a kid who's below the age of three and just obsess, obsess, obsess over that? I think it's a shell game, though.

I think all of this talk about what would happen in terms of women's progress in the workplace and what would happen in terms of economic productivity, all of these things. It's not that I think people don't believe them. I just think that there's a sort of grander and more historical motive that you can easily identify, especially in the welfare reform conversations, and it's that the American right and the American left do not want poor people having children. They think those people are messed up in some kind of way, and they don't want more of them in society.

That's all there is to it. Yeah, that was the dysgenic Charles Murray underbelly of the whole welfare reform. I saw that reappear very briefly when they were doing the reformicon child tax credit thing. I was talking about earlier with Ruby O'Neill. The guy who wrote their policy, his name was Robert Stein, and he gave an interview to Ryan Cooper at the week, and Ryan asked him, why don't you include the poorest in here?

He said, well, we don't want to encourage fertility among the bottom quintile any more than we already do. That is what they believe. That's usually something you say when it's like you've all morphed back into reptiles. Or you've got James Bond like chained to like a laser that's slowly cutting into his dick. No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to lower the fertility rates among our poorest. Among super rich people, there are tons of charitable foundations.

I believe there is an arm of Warren Buffett's foundation, in fact, that are aimed at population control, like expressly, especially in the global south. I wonder why so many people are conspiracy theorists in contemporary American society. No, that was a huge Gates Foundation thing, too. They were like, oh, the biggest problem in sub-Saharan Africa is overpopulation. Yeah, right. Even though every single one of those people has a fucking carbon footprint, like 10,000 times smaller than Bill Gates's pinky toe.

Yeah, but foreskins, please, Africa, cough them up. That was such a great... I've been talking a lot about the creative department at the NWO a lot because they've done amazing work in the past year. But the best thing they ever did was making Bill Gates into a Reddit meme in the way that they did Keanu Reeves, where he's the epic science guy, and not one of the fucking worst people alive, and just expressly evil. Just openly like, yeah, we have to keep sub-Saharan Africans from breeding.

Yeah. No, I mean, I think that that's a widespread, the cross political tendency and sensibility that's... Liz, you said on the left and the right, and as far as what the right wing believes, that's pretty easy to parse out. They just don't care if poor people keep having children in horrendous conditions and entering into this unbreakable cycle of poverty or whatever. It's irrelevant to them.

To the extent that they're aware of it, they'd like more, please. But from a liberal or progressive or even left-wing policy perspective, how does that same feeling manifest itself of just like, oh, those people, they should just really not have kids, or the problem is them just, oh, they just keep having kids. That needs to be dealt with or sort of disincentivized in some way. Yeah, so the left and right, if you think about the Twitter tradition of making up a guy to get mad at, that's pretty much 60% of politics. But I think when the right wing makes up a guy to get mad at in terms of population,

they make up an inner-city person, like a black mother with several children who maybe isn't in work or has multiple jobs or something like that. You can see a lot of really disgusting shit to that effect being said right out in the open during the welfare reform debate. They weren't as shy about it. Read any issue of the New Republic under fucking Marty Peretz's tenure. The New Republic until like 2015 was awesome. Every front page was like, is there a new type of black guy?

Do we just like, should you kill yourself? Yeah, if you make $40,000 a year, should you kill yourself? And yeah, all the wars ranked. But I think when folks on the left make up a guy to get mad at in terms of child having, they imagine like a fat suburban woman who has like a Karen haircut and drives a minivan and her carbon footprint is just enormous. And also she might be a conservative and she goes to church and has sort of chick-lit fake nails and all that kind of shit that's tasteless and gaudy that, you know, I think-

I'm already pissed off at this question, Liz. I'm already- Right, right. I mean, you think about the- I fucking hate her. Maybe the average Sam B viewer is not going to like this person, right, who's like, I just love God in my country. I don't understand what everybody's complaining about.

And so when they think about, you know, a minivan full of kids, that's who they're thinking about. So every time Matt posts about his family fun pack, for instance, you know, he gets hit with a wave of, excuse me, we don't need more children. It's actually unethical and even morally wrong to have children. We're overpopulated as it is. And it kind of takes that form, but if you tease it out and, you know, start actually asking, well, who should get to have them then?

Because we need some. Like, what are you going to do? Then you start hearing more and more about sort of uneducated, you know, tasteless, suburbanite, middle American, you know, Trumpy people. That's who they don't want receiving the benefit. Just who are you to claim or demand that families are supposed to be fun? Families are the opposite of fun. Families are for misery and fucking you up, as Philip Larkin said.

But I mean, I guess just to move on quickly, but this is an easy segue as long as we're talking about people who are bitter, uneducated and hate children. I do want to get into, because I know you guys have talked about this on your show. And it is a corner of the internet that I'm kind of fascinated with. And I'm talking about now that our Chapo trap house is gone, probably the single most charming Reddit subgroup is Our Child Free. And you guys have delved into this on your show, but how would you describe the ethos or the prevailing ideology of Our Child Free?

And then I have some choice selections from the group. Well, you know, there are people who just don't have kids. And that's like 99% of my friends and they're fine, normal people, friends of mine. Then there are people who their whole personality is like being a new atheist, except for not having kids, right? So they're like epic science for the win. I did a dunk on someone in public and everybody clapped. It's a very extreme kind of exaggerated form of who I am is not only not having, but actually

hating children and their parents, which leads to a lot of funny hijinks on that. It seems like their their their main concern is things that take place in movie theaters and toy stores. They have that in common with Kevin D. Williamson. Yeah, absolutely. It's like these are these are these are adult men who spend a lot of time in you know, in malls, toy stores and movie theaters and consuming entertainment for children who are obsessed to the idea that the intended audience and sort of target demographic for the products

and things that they enjoy are in fact children themselves. And I'm just going to read one here. This is a this is a this is an R child free post that I have to read here headline. Is anyone else just fucking sick of baby Yoda? The stupid disgusting green crotch bond drives me insane. Who cares if two Yoda's fucked? It just encourages crotch bond mentality and pro crotch bond spaces. Plus, you just absolutely know some this little disgusting sickly child painted green will

win best costume at the opening night of the Rise of Skywalker. Like the hundreds of hours of effort put in by actual fans. Oh, it makes my blood boil. This stupid green. Wait, does he think that the baby Yoda isn't a puppet? It's like just a kid that they know he's imagining that he's his his kid Fisto costume that he spent all that time on will go unrecognized because of some damn kid. But what I'm setting what I think is illuminating about that is that he's furious at at baby

Yoda and as a like a Star Wars character that's appealing to children. But of course, like this, everyone who cares about this shit does because they got into Star Wars when they were children. And like it just seems to be this like weird like sort of psychological distancing of like hating children and childhood among adult men to cover up for the fact that like emotionally they haven't like progressed past being a child or having an unhappy childhood. We also have to acknowledge that we don't know who Yoda's fucked. They could reproduce, you know, part of the genetic list.

True. I mean, it is canon that Anakin Skywalker was immaculately conceived through force manipulation by Darth Sidious. So we don't know how beings as powerful as the Yoda's reproduce. But I would think that even if you hate the baby Yoda for being a baby and if you're one of these people, you would love the baby Yoda for eating all of those eggs of the space frog. Thus, like aborting a ton of potential crotch bottom from existing.

It's a net win. Yeah. Imagining this guy sitting in theater, getting extremely pissed at Rise of Skywalker, not because it sucked, but because there are like porgs in their baby life. Yeah. I love all this shit. Like everyone who gets mad about Star Wars, I like one way or the other, either people who like, I don't know, for like some political reason, they're like the new one or they hate

it or like just going through the trouble to get that like Gina Carano fired. Oh, yeah. Like being mad that she got fired one way or the other because it's like at the end of the day, it's like you're you've spent 12 years arguing over like Star Wars, the pacifier adventures, baby Force one, like these are, this is just the Muppets. That's literally all this is so strictly for babies. And it reminds you that the best way to understand a lot of this very like a emphatic cult, like identity based hostility to children is really just the anger of a kid when a younger kid

comes into the family, like you're, no, I'm baby. Why are you looking at that baby? I'm baby. Like these, like everyone's an overgrown child and they don't want attention to anyone else because that's what it's like. It reminds me of something I did that I'm very embarrassed of that I did when I was, I was like five and there was a kid like probably two years younger than me, like a three year old at the playground and he jumped down like one set of sets on the, on the playground

and his mom went like, you know, good job, Ryan. And I was like, I just went down three steps. I know it was five, but like I'm still very embarrassed by that. Matt does that to our kids all the time to our own children and he has like, we were at an aquarium one time in Boston and there were a ton of little school kids behind us and there was a cuttlefish. I was like, oh, look, a cuttlefish. They're really smart.

And Matt goes, not as smart as me. Like a dozen children behind us. Well, he's technically correct. He's technically correct. Yeah, he's not wrong. My daughter will be like, I can't touch the door. Matt's like, I can't, bam, what's going to happen with that? That is an underrated benefit of having kids as you get to feel like a God.

You don't, you don't know that I'm still here after I put my hands in front of my face. You fucking idiot. Here's one more clip from the art child free that I think sums up a lot of what's going on here. I just really hear it says society really needs to let go of this idea of unconditional love when it comes to kids. A baby doesn't love you unconditionally. A baby is a bundle of 100% pure selfishness.

It wants what it wants when it wants it. And to be honest, most babies under six months probably don't care much about who. They're just a massive black hole of time and energy. And what I love so much about that is like, he's like, the concept of unconditional love as it applies to children means the parents' love for the child. Not a newborn's love for its parents. You know, yes, you're right. It's an infant.

You know, it doesn't have self-awareness yet. It means the fucking parent unconditionally loves the child despite it being a black hole of time, energy and selfishness. But the thing is this person, they can't imagine being a child, but they can't imagine hypothetically being a parent. And so it's all about, well, what about me? Where's the love for me? It's because it's all, it's all transactional.

That's like, they can't even imagine it as being anyone doing anything for any reason other than self-interest. I'm surprised that no one has, you know, floated the idea that little children are abusers. They need to be held accountable, honestly. Yes, they do. We need to start holding babies accountable. They scream at you. They break their promises all the time.

Constantly. They lie. They steal from you. They're kind of violent. Yeah, the first thing they do really that they learn how to do is gaslight. Like little kids gaslight probably more than anyone. Jane takes credit for everything. Oh yeah.

Well, like, I mean, she told Matt that she and God made all the buildings in our city. Just straight face, no joke, just like, yeah, we did that, we made that one. And I was, I was extremely gaslit by that. I think the other thing about child free that I always noticed, it's really funny and again makes it feel like an extremely immature place is that there's a lot of emphasis put on how disgusting and kind of just wrong and maybe even like kind of pedophiliac it is that sex makes babies. They're like fucking furious about that fact.

Well, I mean, that was whoever decided they should be brought into the world that way. Really fucked up. I mean, I understand that, you know, it's maybe not what you expected to hear when you were a little kid, but they'll they'll I think that's why they focus on stuff like crotch spawn. Yeah. I mean, how disgusting it is they feel they're made by sex, they're sex, and then there's a baby in close problem.

They're the vagina. This is unacceptable and I'm like, yeah, man, I mean, most people come to terms with it at some point. I mean, I don't know. It just seems like, like, you know, whether you're on the left or the right, like, and I remember like probably like one of the, one of the times I've got like in the most trouble for something I've said on the show is when I simply answered a question by saying that it's okay to have kids if you want them to, despite how fucked up the world is.

And like a lot of people, I don't know, like it's just people's anxiety over that and it's just like, regardless of what you may think about the environment or, you know, having or not having kids, it seems like it's a bad situation for like any culture or civilization if like a critical mass of people just decide like there's no point in like reproducing yourself or the human race or just like having a future with people in it. I mean, even if you make, I mean, I'm not saying like if you're coming, there are good and bad reasons to come to that conclusion or whatever, but it just, it seems like regardless of where you come in the political, like ideological spectrum, it would seem that like job number

one of a politics worth supporting is like creating the conditions in which like families can or like, you know, the reproduction of children and their transformation from crotch spawn into like, you know, confident adults would be like job number one or like you would be like policy is about making sure that that's possible. Yeah. I mean, it's a fundamental feature of the human life. I mean, I found it very weird. You know, when I got into this, I wasn't trying to, you know, I don't know, encourage

people to have kids or make some kind of statement that way. I was just like, well, this is something our welfare state is lacking that others aren't and it would say it would solve a good deal of our problems. So let's go ahead and do it. And to see that, no, actually it's extremely charged and people get very upset about it. It's like, I just don't, I mean, to me, it's almost like asking, you know, who should we have retired people? You know, it's like, you know, like.

People do ask that. I mean, yeah, but don't open that door, Matt, and well, not even not even should people retire, but I guess I would say should we have anyone over the age of seventy? It wasn't the fucking who is the Obama guy who said, oh, it's a brother, brother, brother beyond seventy five brother, brother should just be doing soil and green shit and wheeling them in and just yeah, and it was fascinating in the way, and Rahm's brother. It was Zika Manuel doctor Zika Manuel, who's like one of the top like brain surgeons in the country.

Like in the way he justified, it was fascinating too, because he was like, yeah, sure, like if you're above seventy five, like you may say, like, oh, you have a productive life or it's fulfilling to you because you like going on bike rides or reading books or cooking a meal or taking it easy. But he's like, by my metric, that doesn't count as a productive or like justifiable life. And it's just like, speak for yourself asshole. What the fuck are you talking about?

Yeah. Yeah. No. I guess he's saying other people, what other people value is not important, only what he values is without wondering whether, in fact, he's the psychopath for wanting to spend all of his time working. Well, I mean, it's taking, he's taking seriously the ideas of our, of our society, which is that you are as valuable as your productive capacity and small children and old people

are not productive. So what do you do about them? And if, if there's no obligation to anybody who can't help you and who cannot like who whose productivity you can't benefit from, then the answer has to be, you know, you just let's see what happens. Or maybe you have to be more proactive than that, or they have to be, they have to be worked out of the equation at some point. Yeah.

We can't, we can't just straight up kill people past a certain age because that would be monstrous. But what we need to do is create, we need to disincentivize living past a certain point. Yeah. And the thing is like, it's like self deportation for the astral plane, but like, this is so crap, like how short, like how short-sighted is this? Cause like, yeah, children in the immediate like, you know, short term are not producing. In fact, they're only taking from society, but like, that's because you're investing them in, in like, in one day them being the workers or like, you know, people maintaining

the fucking civilization that they're going to inherit and old people have fucking been doing it for decades. I mean, even based on like this stupid, like having to justify yourself to like, be, breathe oxygen on this planet, it would seem that like the old people have earned it and that the young people are like, you know, you're, it's not just like a drain because they're going to be productive later in life. Like that in fact will be more productive the more you invest in them. Right.

The kids are learning the people who are in the middle, they make, hey, while the sun is shining, and then there's a time for people to rest and look back with life unsatisfaction. And they think that's one of maybe Weber's original points in, in thinking about disenchantment is there was a point where in history, you could, you know, finish your work in this life and rest and look back and say, yeah, I worked, I did my part. And that was it. And that doesn't happen anymore. I mean, you still work, you work until you die in this country.

And also kids are, are, you know, though people get mad if you say they're non workers or, you know, workers in waiting, everything about our education system is optimized to make them good workers or better workers or to, you know, kind of compete well in the meritocracy. So yeah, I think it's just part of living in a really disenchanted society that eventually people are going to come around to, why are we here at all? There's no point. Maybe there shouldn't be any people. Yeah.

Yeah. Just an algorithm. Yeah. We can all live on, we can all live on the cloud. Well, okay. But just segue slowly from the problems of reproducing the human race and all of the, all the negative externalities associated with continuing life on the planet. Let's get into just like the day-to-day problems of having a family, living, what is polite,

what is, what is a ghost to do, how do I get out of certain awkward social situations? And to that end, I think it is finally time for us to return to my favorite advice column, dear prudence. And Matt and Liz, you are the perfect sounding board to answer other people's dear prudy questions. You guys ready? All right. Yeah.

Let's do it. All right. Well, this first one is a pretty common problem. And it comes up a lot. And I'm just going to read here. It says, dear prudence, my sister-in-law, my sister-in-law and I have very different political views. Actually, my entire family and I have very different political views.

I'm liberal and they aren't. My parents and I had a very intense argument before the last election such that we've mostly avoided discussing politics ever since. I only see my sister-in-law with my parents and we're not very close. During most of the recent election, my brother told me that my sister-in-law and my mother spent a lot of time sharing conspiracy theories. She left out our family group texts and unfriended all Democrats on Facebook. She told my brother and mother that she wants nothing to do with me because I am a communist

who wants to kill babies. My brother says she has lost her mind and told her that I am no such thing. My mother, to her credit, told her to get a grip. If it were just my brother, I could deal with avoiding my sister-in-law and be fine. However, they have an 18-month-old daughter whom I love as if she were my own. I have no children and I am her only aunt. I would be devastated if my sister-in-law prevented me from seeing my niece. My brother wants me to talk to my sister-in-law.

I'm at a loss. She is already pretty irrational, but she is taking this to a whole new level. Should I try to talk with her? What in the world can I say? I know there is a real possibility she won't even speak to me, much less listen what I have to say. Yeah. This is a common thing.

What to do about family relations that have come to a schism because of our contemporary politics over Donald Trump, QAnon, and elite cabals of Satan worshipping pedophiles? Well, Matt's parents are woke. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don't have this problem. Well, my mom is apolitical. She doesn't really care.

I did call her up during this primary because Texas was a key state and I was like, I actually called a lot of my family members up and I was like, hey, guys, I need you guys to go vote for Bernie. It'd be helpful for me, you know, I'm tied in clothes, you know? And they're like, okay, sure. My dad has some politics. I think he voted for Bernie on his own. He voted for him in 2016 on his own, but yeah, I don't really have these issues that other

people have. I can build this one. My family is all Trump people. They're all right wing. I try to be completely honest with them and in so doing, make it totally impossible for them to understand what my politics are, what I think. So my parents will be like, y'all can go out and vote for them Democrats again. I was like, I hate the Democrats.

I don't know. I don't like Democrats. If you turn, if you turn the, if you go far left enough, you can, you know, it's the horseshoe theory, right? You can kind of just be like, yeah, those libs are just losing it today. My dad will be like, do you see that, that, that bullshit welfare Biden's trying to do? I'm like, it is bullshit. Absolutely.

So you have to sort of like fail your politics in such a way that you end up agreeing with them for reasons that they're not fully aware of. Yeah. Well, I would, I just kind of mystify it. I don't know if that's, if that's a, if that's a generally applicable thing. I mean, I, you know, I would also, I guess in all seriousness recommend talking to the sister in law and being like, look, I'm not, I'm not a communist trust, trust me. I'm a Biden voter.

I'm nothing close to even a soft socialist. I think, you know, people should pretty much only get what they can get through the labor market. And I believe in private markets and I have no problem with capital ownership. I like submitting to my boss and I think you should too. And the fact that people get sick and they can't pay for their medicine. I think that's good. I like it.

I wish we had more of it. And I don't want to kill babies. I'm just indifferent to their fate. And then, you know, maybe she would, you know, realize that they're not so different would be my advice. I mean, I think, I think that's very good advice. But like, I mean, the other thing I would consider saying is like, look, like, I hated the Trump was president now that now you hate that Biden is president and you think that

everyone who supports him is evil and, you know, vice versa. But in another four years, it's just going to, it's just going to switch again. Like this shit is never ending. Like there's like no side is ever going to get like, you know, is ever going to be able to like dust their hands off and be like, well, and that's that. We finally won. Unless, of course, you're just a capitalist. But I'm saying like, as far as the day-to-day arguing over this shit, it's just be like,

you know, calm down, you know, you'll win the next one and then you'll feel superior to me. But like, you know, this idea of this apocalyptic feeling about presidential elections, just be like, calm down. It's only for four years. You're going to like, they're going to swing right back again. Right. You know, people's egos get very tightly wound up in political teams, I think.

And I always just try to, you know, and I think one of the reasons, for instance, Bernie is one of the most popular politicians in the United States is because he is an independent. He's not in one of those teams. So it's totally possible for just about anybody to, you know, be open-minded enough to listen to him because it's not threatening to their ego in that way, because he's not from the opposite team. So when I'm trying to talk to people I know disagree with me and trying to get along. I'm like, look, I don't, I'm not batting for anybody here.

I have my views personally, you know, but I'm not asking you to give yours up or anything like that. And I'm not, I'm not coming at you as an antagonist, you know. So who knows? All right. Well, that first question is a fairly standard one. I think it's, there's a chance that like it's, it's a real problem that, you know, listeners, the show may confront themselves or it's just fairly easy to understand, fairly relatable,

fairly common. This next question is a genuinely insane one that I'd be shocked if any, any human being has ever encountered this problem. So let's dive into it. Question, weighted blankets. My brother has a new girlfriend whom I have never met in person, but we have had some virtual introductions. She moved in with him in April two months after they met.

I sent them holiday gifts and two weeks later it received one of these gifts, a weighted blanket back in the mail. His girlfriend believes this was appropriating autistic culture, though she's not on the spectrum herself and has no autistic people in her life. She demanded that it be returned and insisted she and I will have no more virtual engagement until I apologize for the insensitivity of the gift. She also posted some things on Facebook about what a monster her boyfriend's family is for giving such a gift.

It hurts that my brother chooses to play along with his girlfriend. I would feel really terrible if I did something truly offensive here, but my weighted blanket has been a huge comfort to me over the past year. So I mean this is easy. Dude, the booty cannot be that good. There is no way. There is no way, dude. Run.

Run. What the fuck, man? I have some advice here for the brother. Take your hands, sort of make like a C shape. The thing that your piss comes out of, grab onto that, move it up and down and wait until you feel good and you can do that instead of what you're doing now. I mean, I think we all agree with the answer here. I mean, the girlfriend is a monster.

Giving a weighted blanket, just buying a weighted blanket, I mean, is hugely problematic. She should be cut off from the family for sending that gift, in my opinion. Only Matt can speak to this because he has the identity position. Why is this lady? I mean, why is this lady so worried about autistic culture? What's her connection to that? I guess we don't know. She respects it.

She just uses an autistic respect there. I mean, obviously weighted blankets, it can't be a product that's only for autistic people. That's not a big enough market. I mean, I feel like she's not being very autistic in thinking about this, like this would not be viable. Wouldn't that mean like, if it's for autistic, wouldn't that mean that every woman is autistic? Every woman has one of these. No, every woman is is problematically appropriating it and needs to be held accountable, man.

This girl is like the John Brown of autistic. What about the true warrior? What about those those weighted things they put on dogs? Does that count like a thunder shirt? Yeah. All dogs have autism. All cats have BPD. That's true.

It's true. I mean, I mean, I mean, I'm an animal expert. Obvious answer to the question for this person is like, your brother has been dating this person for like a couple of months. Like there's no fucking need for you to apologize to this person, talk to them or fucking apologize in any way. Cut them off. Bye bye.

Don't need. Don't need to flatter the fucking insane person. Is this like the first girl who ever like held her brother's hand, like just putting up with this as an adult male? I mean, I guess there are like some guys out there who do like they enjoy feeling bad and they like the idea of just like some woman fucking yelling at them all the time. But you know, yeah, I don't know. This guy, man, he's got some work to do or or just lean into it.

Yeah. On the next holiday occasion, send her like a model train set or something. Stimming toys. That would that would be fun. That would be funny. They're their first like Christmas after the vaccine and they go to the mom's house and it's just all puzzle placements instead of carpet. She should make a donation to that bad organization.

Oh yeah. Autism speaks. I think. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Why is that a bad organization? That's apparently bad.

That's what they say about it. Yeah. They should see that. See a movie. Yeah. Yes. A range of big family screening for music. The new film by Sia, which I which I'm told is quite good.

Featuring something. The girl from dance moms. Oh yeah. Maddie. Yeah, they got. All right. She was at the Shia LaBeouf video. Glad she's still getting work.

She went from dancing ballet as a 10-year-old to playing an autistic person in a Sia produced movie. Look, and just before I get raked for watching dance moms, it was Matt who decided that we needed to watch all of this. Dance moms is incredible. You guys should check it out if you haven't. Matt and Liz, have you guys checked out Love After Lockup? No, I haven't.

That sounds right up his alley. I'll put that on my list. I'll put that on my list. Put that on the queue. You can come back and have a full episode to discuss that show. All right. All right. Next one.

This is a doozy here. Question. How to set boundaries with my neighbor? My roommate and I have been having more backyard fires as a safer way to see friends during the pandemic. Our one neighbor, Kay, is in her fifties and keeps inviting herself over when we are having a fire. She usually dominates the conversation, complaining about her kids or work, and she

won't take the hint to leave when we are ready to pack it in. We've tolerated it up until now because she doesn't seem to have any friends of her own and the pandemic has been difficult for everyone. However, last night, she crossed the line. A friend, B, was over for a socially distanced backyard fire, and B agreed to pee in a discrete corner of the yard by the shed because she wasn't in our house bubble. Later, Kay walked up to our back door and peed where a welcome mat would normally be in full view.

We were shocked and didn't say anything to her at the time, but her bathroom is literally next door. She was already making us feel uncomfortable, but this act was the final straw. How do we tell her that we don't want her inviting herself over and peeing on our doorstep anymore? See, now that's a question where the answer is in the question. How do you tell her that? You say, don't come to our house and piss on our front door, you fucking lunatic.

What the fuck is the matter with you? All right. I think Kay kind of snapped. I think that, yeah, Kay should fight the girlfriend from the previous two different types of great women. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, man.

That's the point where I think you just got to be explicit and be like, hey, you know, it honestly, it honestly feels like what they're actually asking is, could you ask, yes, exactly. Because like, what the fuck is this question? Like she literally gave you the best out possible where it's like, yeah, you like pissed on my floor, but it's like, this question is either like, it's part of some like ongoing like public degradation thing that they enjoy, or it's like they're hoping that she reads this. That's how she'll get the message.

I love the idea that she might, she does read it, but she's like, ah, I guess other people like to piss on people's front doors either. I'm going to send this to my friends. Some people are really uptight about this. It's cool that you're cool about it though. This is like people inviting themselves over, getting in your way, dominating the conversation and then pissing on the floor is where child-free, exactly what it's like. I love that she does point out that like her actual bathroom is next door and the friend

asked like, just go behind the shed, it's fine, it's not a big deal. And then Kay saw that and was like, aha, the permission has been granted, it's a blanket agreement that everyone can piss anywhere around this house. This maybe there's an intersection here with another subject. She just needed like a codified, explicit set of rules. Maybe this is why the Napoleonic code is better than English common law tradition. Just have to spell it out. So I'm just put a list of rules up in your backyard, like in caddy shack.

That's like, don't piss on the floor, don't piss on my house, you know, don't come unless you're invited, etc. But I mean, I do like the idea like, like, like Matt, you're absolutely right. This person is hoping that someone else will confront this woman for them and like vis-à-vis this woman reading Dear Prudy and being like, ooh, is that about me? But I like the idea that this is someone already so cracked that they would piss on your welcome mat is going to read that and be like, ooh, did I overstep the mark? Yeah, no, yeah, this is like someone who does that is not going to be like, oh, silly me.

I misread the situation again. I always do this when it comes to pissing. Was there alcohol in, I mean, this just, the series of events is very hard for me to understand. It seems like maybe an alcohol type thing. If someone is just completely sober and peeing on your, your door, that's a, they're trying to make a point. Yeah. That's someone you can get out of your house with a butterfly net.

It's like a loud then. Yeah. Castle doctrine applies like that. I have to accept what you're saying here and is that, you know, you, you have a problem with me. So, okay. I'm just basically like being invited over to someone's house, you know, like I'm, I'm trying to respect the COVID bubble, so I take a shit in their backyard and I'm like, I dug

a hole. I dug a hole. You provided a trowel that I found in the shed. What do you want from me? It would be funny to walk in on your friend who's staying over, you're like setting up the couch for him and you come back in and he's just dragging his asshole in the carpet like a dog. This is like too shidey as the bathroom.

He's like, well, you weren't around and I couldn't ask. So, okay. Well, there you go. I mean, proof once again via Dear Prudy that neighbors in laws and friends are a million times more rotten and evil than crotch mone and children that we all have to live. They're way more problematic to our society. And I think just America, American policy makers should look into ways to disincentivize their existence.

Yeah. There should be a child income deduction. You have a kid, you pay the price. All right, take care of it. Well, I think that does it for our episode today. I would like to thank Matt and Liz Brunig for joining us. And Matt and Liz, if people want more Brunigs, they want more People's Policy Project, where should they go?

The Brunigs podcast is patreon.com slash the Brunigs. And my think tank, People's Policy Project is just peoplespolicyproject.org. Join us. Thanks so much, guys. Cheers, guys. Thank you. Bye-bye. Till next time.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.