Plain English with Derek Thompson - If the 2024 Election Is So Important, Why Does It Feel So Boring?

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

"This presidential election is not very interesting, but it is important," the political commentator Josh Barro wrote in his newsletter, 'Very Serious.' Americans certainly seem to agree with the first part. Engagement with political news has been in the dumps, and many Americans seem to be tuning out the Biden-Trump II rematch. But the conundrum of this election is that it is both numbingly overfamiliar for many voters and also profoundly important for America and the world. The differences between a Biden and a Trump presidency for America’s domestic and foreign policy are huge. Too often, these differences are ignored in horse-race coverage—and, sometimes, they even go underemphasized by the campaigns and their own advocates. If you turn on a news segment or read a long article, you’ll probably hear about the dangers that Trump poses to democracy, or the rule of law, or the administrative state. All worthy concerns. But what is at stake for our most basic bread-and-butter issues: abortion, inflation, economic growth, government spending, entitlements, immigration, and foreign policy? Josh and Derek talk about the roots of voter ambivalence, what Trump's second administration could look like, and the biggest differences between a Biden and Trump White House. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail].  Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Josh Barro Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nathan Hubbard, spring has sprung, the birds are chirping, and the pop girls are pop-girling. Oh, and you know what that means, Nora Prenziotti. Every single album is back. This spring is packed with new releases from some of the biggest pop stars in the world, including our girl Taylor Swift, and we'll be covering it all. We'll, of course, break down every angle on the tortured poets department, and we'll also cover new music from Beyonce, Duolipa, Maggie Rogers, Casey Musgraves, and Ariana Grande. It's Pop Girl Spring on every single album. New episodes starting March 28th. On Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to open today's episode with a bit of a confession,

an admission that might make some of you feel angry and make some of you feel seen. I think the 2024 election is kind of boring. I know I'm not supposed to say anything like this. Journalists like me are never supposed to conflate the entertainment value of a piece of news with its significance. But in this case, I'm not telling you necessarily how I feel. I'm trying to describe reality for what it is. For many years now, the news website Axios has been tracking declining attention paid to political news and to Trump in particular. Here are some headlines and dates.

January 2022, news engagement fell off a cliff in 2021. In July 2022, quote, news engagement plummets as Americans tune out. In September, 2023, quote, numb to Trump, data shows drop in scandal interest. And then finally, most recently, in February 2024, quote, Americans are tuning out political news ahead of 2024 election.

In that final article, Sarah Fisher of Axios reported that, quote, engagement with political news and news generally is down considerably compared to the last presidential primary election cycle as Americans continue to funnel their attention toward lighter topics. Fewer people are reading news and political articles and cable news ratings are down considerably compared to the last election cycle. End quote. In the 2020 election, Americans cast the most votes in the history of our democracy.

With the highest turnout share of the voting age population of any presidential contest since 1960, Kennedy over Nixon. But four years later, Americans seem bored and dejected by the prospect of, maybe inevitability, of the Trump-Biden rematch in November. And yet, the conundrum of this election, maybe even the paradox of this election, is that it is both numbingly overfamiliar and profoundly important. The policy stakes of this election are huge, says today's guest. The political commentator Josh Barrow, author of the excellent newsletter, very serious.

The difference between a Biden and Trump presidency for America's domestic policy, taxing, spending, immigration, abortion, and foreign policy are huge. But too often, these all-important issues are ignored in horse race coverage, and sometimes they even go under-emphasized by the campaigns and their own advocates. If you turn on a new segment or you read a long article, you'll probably hear about the dangers that Trump poses to democracy, the rule of law, maybe the administrative state, all worthy concerns. But what is at stake for our most basic bread and butter issues?

What is at stake for abortion? For inflation? For economic growth? for government spending and taxes, entitlements, immigration, foreign policy. I don't think these questions are asked or answered nearly as often as they should be. Inflation and high interest rates, for example, are still a big problem for many families. That is clear. But what would the Trump administration actually do about that?

That's much less clear. The headline of this podcast is, if the 2024 election is so important, why does it feel so boring? But from here on out, I think it might be even more accurate to turn that statement upside down. If the 2024 election feels so boring, what makes it so important? I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Josh Barrow, welcome to the show. Thank you. Good to be here. So in January, the author Kat Rosenfield tweeted that voting in the upcoming 2024 election would be like dining at a restaurant whose menu offered two meals.

One was a large bowl of lukewarm, watery gruel, and the other was a flaming hot Cheeto someone dropped under the couch in 2014 that had been slightly nibbled on by mice. Those are direct quotes. That's completely disgusting. But it's not clear to me that it's entirely wrong as far as it represents the average American. American's attitude toward this election. You and I are going to talk about policy for most of this show, but I want to start with a more general non-policy observation that a feeling of desperate, heavy voter exhaustion seems to hang over everything in 2024. Why? How did it come to this? Yeah, I mean, it's funny you start with that Kat Rosenfield tweet because people got real mad at her for that, and I think a lot of them didn't really understand or think through the tweet very well. Like, if you went to that literal restaurant, and those were the two options on the menu, the obvious play is to order the gruel.

Like, the options are both very unappealing, but they are not equivalent. And it is not even a difficult choice. It's just an unpleasant choice. And so I think that is the point that she was making about this election. I fully expect that Kat Rosenfield is going to vote for Joe Biden. But it's not very fun for her. It's not a, and it's not fun to think about. It's not an interesting, enjoyable election to engage with.

And that, I think, is a theme that really really. runs through for a lot of voters, that this election is sort of deadening in a way that I can't remember any election feeling like in my lifetime. It's important, but it's really not fun to follow or engage with. I think you put your finger right on it. My other general observation before we get into policy specifics was going to be that I think a paradoxical tension at play in this election is that 2024 does not seem like it's about anything in the policy space, but at the same time, it still has very important policy implications. Like, I might be misremembering, but most of the elections in my time, I remember being about

a clear policy theme, like to just quickly run through the last 20 years. The 2004 election, Kerry Bush, was about the war on terror. The 2008 Democratic primary was absolutely about health care policy, and the election ended up being about the impending recession and health care. 2012, Obama's reelection campaign against Mitt Romney was about, it was a referendum on Obama care. was a debate about economic growth. It was a debate about economic redistribution more broadly. That's by Romney's makers versus takers comment played so directly into that theme.

2016 was, of course, about Trump's character and Hillary's emails, but it was also about trade and the economy and immigration. 2020 was the COVID election, in addition to being a referendum on the Trump years. And I think one of the stranger things about 2024 in this election is that it is nominally about the economy and inflation, but I don't think any normal voter has any idea what Trump's economic plan to reduce, say, grocery prices is. The policy focus of this election is incredibly muddy. It's so muddy, in fact, that your sentence about the policy stakes, excuse me, your essay about the policy stakes that we're going to be drawing from and talking about for the next 30 minutes begins with the sentence, quote, this presidential election is not very

interesting, but it is important, end quote. Why? Why do you think like the policy arena feel so abandoned in this moment? I mean, I think first of all, the, one of the biggest reasons this election is not very interesting is that it's a rematch. It's the first rematch we've had since 1956, and it's between two candidates about whom people have spent years forming

opinions. I mean, and it's sort of like you can talk about Donald Trump, but, you know, people have spent so much time thinking about him for the last nine years. In some ways, there's not very much that's new to say. I mean, we'll talk in this show about, you know, the way that some of the things he's actually said

going to do on policy will influence inflation and that sort of thing. But I think for most voters, it's like they don't need more information about these candidates. They already know them. And in some ways, we're answering questions that we already answered four years ago. So I think that's, you know, I think that's the biggest reason that it just doesn't feel very engaging. And then the other thing is, you know, I think people all around the world are dissatisfied with economic results over the last few years. I mean, you look around at other rich countries. And the incumbent leader, in those places aren't down one point or, you know, tied or down two points, they're down like 15, 20 points. Justin Trudeau and Rishi Sunak are going to get absolutely creamed when they come up

for re-election. And there are differences in the U.S. Our economy is doing better than the economy in Canada and in the UK. So that's, I think, one of the reasons that Biden is running better. He's also running better because he's running against a deeply flawed candidate about whom people already have a lot of negative opinions. And you can see in the polling, you know, There's some conflicting data on the extent to which people have, like, rosier views looking back on Donald Trump in terms of his performance. I think certainly people look favorably back on the economy during much of the Trump administration. But his favorable, unfavorable numbers haven't really moved. It's that Biden's are worse than they were four years ago.

But people are, you know, they're facing a choice between two candidates about whom they've already thought a lot and whom they, you know, they're, neither of them is a very exciting choice for a lot of the voters, especially for the swing voters who are going to decide this election. Yep, lukewarm gruel and vermin nibbled Cheeto. That's the choice. Let's talk about the five policy areas that we think can be most affected by the victor in November's election. And I'm just going to lay out the table of contents here at the top to shape our discussion and also listener expectations. We're going to talk about abortion, then inflation, then general fiscal taxing and spending policy, then immigration. And we're going to end with some thoughts about foreign policy. Let's start with abortion. In the news, this week, Arizona Supreme Court brought back a 160-year-old ban on nearly all abortions, as the latest state ruling since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. This is one of more than 20 states to roll back abortion access in some way since the Dobbs' decision. What does Trump say he wants to do with abortion? And what could we conceivably expect unified or strong Republican government control in Washington to do on abortion if Trump leads a full sweep in November? I think there's been too much focus on legislation, not enough focus on

what the executive branch can do on this issue and is likely to do differently depending on who's president. I mean, Trump had his statement this week where he said that he doesn't want a new federal ban on abortion, which he caught some flack for from the social conservative right in his party. It's definitely an effort to try to neutralize what he knows is a negative political issue for him. But the thing is, you know, even if Trump said he was for a national abortion ban, Republicans are likely to have a Senate majority next year, but probably not a very large one. They might have 51, 52 seats. If they retain the majority in the House, it's also likely to be by a very small margin. And so they're not going to get 60 votes in the Senate for an abortion

ban. I don't think that they are likely to do away with the filibuster over that issue. So basically, I think, you know, the big risk if Trump wins on abortion is probably not new restrictive federal legislation. It's what he can do through the FDA and the Department of Justice and Department of Health and Human Services to restrict the availability of abortion around the country, even in blue states that have permissive laws on abortion. There's already ongoing litigation over the abortion pill. You know, a tremendous fraction of abortions are now done medically instead of surgically, but you need availability of the pharmaceuticals in order to, you know, to be able to do that. And so there's, first of all, there's some suggestion when you talk about very old laws, the idea that the Comstock Act from the 1800s, that it prohibits the interstate transport of products for use in abortion, which would include abortion pharmaceuticals.

You can't send them through the mail or in common carriers. And so you could have a federal government that decides, you know, actually abortion paraphernalia is illegal and we're going to prosecute people who are involved in transporting it. That could make it significantly more difficult to get an abortion, even in a blue state, might make it impossible to get a medical abortion. And then there are other courses of action that he can take through the FDA and through the Department of Justice. There's some more niche issues that have to do with service members who want abortions. That's been an area of fighting in Congress right now. But there's a lot that they can do to use the regulatory state to try to make it significantly more difficult to provide abortion, especially

if they take the position that, hey, there are already these laws on the books that, restrict abortion that haven't been enforced, we're going to start enforcing them now. So that, I think, is the big risk on abortion from a Trump victory. It's not legislative. And similarly, on the Democratic side, you know, Democrats talk about codifying row. They have the same issue of getting to 60 votes in the Senate, even if they have a Democratic majority in both houses. And also, if they were to somehow pass a law that purported to prevent the states from prohibiting abortion, I don't think, I would be very concerned about whether the Supreme Court would actually uphold that law. they might say the federal government doesn't have authority to tell states whether they

may not prohibit abortion. So again, it's, you know, if Biden wins again, he will continue to use whatever power he has in the executive branch to try to promote the availability of abortion. And Trump, even if he doesn't get new legislation, he's likely to appoint true believers at these agencies who will seek to use federal power to restrict abortion. We've seen a real pattern with Trump and other Republican politicians where like something happens and then they just pull their hands back and they're like, oh, that wasn't me. Oh, I don't know. FDA, I don't know what the FDA is up to. So, you know, there will be a rhetorical effort to say that he, you know, abortion is for the states. But I think it's likely that they will use the executive

branch to cause a lot of trouble for abortion availability, if he wins. The scenario you're describing is plausible. It's scary for liberals and for many women, specifically. It's also incredibly risky for Republicans. Like, if you're going to use the executive branch to clamp down on interstate shipments of abortion pills, you are going to create a furious political backlash that could wipe you out of office. And what's more, when policymaking happens exclusively at the level of the executive,

the next president can just undo your work in a matter of hours. National abortion policy is a radical yo-yo between administrations that are just using executive orders to do their abortion policy. That is incredibly chaotic. Yeah, I mean, to the extent

that the law stays as it is, then abortion rights are at stake in every presidential election ongoing. You know, they're directly at stake in that election. It's not about, you know, what laws will the president sign. You are depending upon the president to appoint personnel who will ensure that abortion remains available in the country. And so, among other things, I think that is a political disadvantage for Republicans on an ongoing basis, because we've been seeing, you know, and we've been seeing in these referendum votes and in special elections in the states that abortion is salient for a lot of voters who might otherwise vote Republican in,

in elections. And so to the extent that they can argue that, you know, it hinges on the presidency. I think that helps Democrats. And I think you're going to see that argument more from Democrats as we go into this fall. They've been really trying to send this message that, you know, Trump says one thing on abortion and does another, and there he is taking credit for the Dobbs decision. But, you know, I don't think people, this message has really gotten through that, you know, the president through his control of who runs the FDA in the Department of Justice will directly be able to try to criminalize abortion or criminalize many aspects of the provision of abortion. nationally. That's, you know, that I think is a scary thing for pro-choice people.

Let's move to the economy and inflation. We're talking midweek and the consumer price index just came in a touch hotter than economists expected. Inflation is still elevated. The price of food is still the chief concern for voters. Elevated interest rates are a key concern for voters. If you're trying to buy a house, if you're trying to finance a car, if you have credit card debt, elevated interest rates are a huge problem for you. What economic policy has the Trump campaign floated that would affect inflation. And in your estimation, would that policy make inflation better or worse? I mean, if Trump repeats his fiscal policy approach from the first administration, which is to say tax cuts and, you know, like being loose with money, certainly that's going to be inflationary.

You said earlier on that Trump voters don't have a theory of how he'll reduce inflation. I actually don't think that's right. I think the broad theory is, well, he's going to stop spending so much money. He's going to, you know, the Biden sends all this money out to all of these people and, you know, but Trump won't do that. And then that will cut back on inflation. And that's, you know, that's sort of, it's partly correct. I mean, you know, one of the drivers of the excessive inflation we've had over the last few years is that the government overdid it on the COVID era stimulus. Certainly the American Rescue Plan was too large by at least a trillion dollars. We sent out all of these checks and people initially couldn't spend them. But then once the economy reopened and they, you know, they had stuff to go out and spend it on, it. It was just, you know, too many dollars chasing two few goods and services and it pushed the price up of everything. So there's truth to the government ran deficits that were too big. It spent too much money. And that has been inflationary. And that's certainly been the rhetoric on the Republican side. The problem is that when you look at what Trump says he actually wants to do, first of all, you know, he wants to fully extend and then some his tax cut from 2017. A lot of that law expires at the end of 2025.

He's out, you know, when he is donors, when he has fundraisers with rich donors, he talks about how they're going to get tax cuts. On the spending side, he has not been eager to talk about spending cuts. Now, maybe, you know, it's clear that he does not want a political fight over old age entitlements. He sees that issue as a loser. And so, you know, I don't think that Social Security, old age benefits, or Medicare is likely to be high on Trump's spending agenda. One question is, you know, is he going to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act again? Republicans are very reluctant to talk about this issue. It's not a good issue for them.

I think that on some level the party would like to move on from it. But the flip side is that if you're trying to cut spending to offset the cost of your tax cuts, so the tax cuts don't spike a lot of inflation, entitlements for the poor with the Medicaid expansion and insurance subsidies and the ACA being prime candidates, those are things that you can cut that save a lot of money. So I think it's either he'll do what he did last time, which is he'll cut taxes and he won't really try to control spending, and then that will be inflationary. Or he will do tax cuts, and he really will try to take an axe to the insurance.

entitlement state, as some conservative Republicans in Congress would really like to do, that might actually not be inflationary. If he cuts it enough, I mean, that could even, you know, be disinflationary. But those are programs that a lot of people find important, and I think will not be thrilled with deep cuts in them. The last thing to note on this is that Trump is claiming that he intends to impose a 10% tariff on worldwide imports. And so that is, you know, that's a tax increase that is deficit reducing. So to that extent it actually pushes down on inflation, but it also pushes up consumer prices. The Trump people seem to have this theory in their head that if you impose a tariff on goods from China, that the Chinese companies pay the tariff,

and that's not really how the economic incidence works. It's basically like a sales tax on all kinds of imported goods, and you end up with Americans paying more for those, and then the American firms that don't have to compete as hard with foreign firms, they can raise their prices. And that has certain benefits for domestic industry, but that again means higher consumer prices. So I think, you know, overall, he's floated a lot of ideas. is that are likely to actually fuel inflation. He describes himself as a low interest rate guy. This is not an environment where low interest rates are going to contain inflation. And if he doesn't actually do things that cause inflation, they're going to have a bunch of

other effects that I think people are going to find quite jarring. I think you nailed everything that I wanted to hit. I hire in tariffs and trade restrictions, I think it's so important to say, are designed to raise the price of imports and discouraged trade that benefits domestic industries that can then charge more for their products. It doesn't mean that every new tariff inevitably raises the consumer price index, but overall, the incidence is likely to be borne out on domestic consumers. And if you combine that with a taxing and spending policy, we're going to hit a bit of this later, but if you combine that with a fiscal policy that says, I want to cut taxes or extend tax cuts, and I am disinclined to cut spending

on the biggest ticket items like Medicare and Social Security, as Trump said he's disinclined to do, and I am also disinclined to do that, well, you have a situation where you're very likely going to increase the hotness of the U.S. economy while raising prices on consumers that doesn't seem like a perfect formula for reducing the price of eggs and butter. Turning to the Biden administration, and, you know, or at least you strongly suspect, affordability is the critical concern for many voters. What levers are left for a Biden White House or even Democrats legislatively to pull here? Like someone might say, well, gasoline prices are paramount in the eyes of voters. We should do everything we can to pump more crude oil than any country ever. It's like, well, in March,

the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported, and I'm quoting in their analysis, quote, United States produces more crude oil than any country ever. We are making an enormous amount of gasoline, and gasoline prices are also about $1.30 cheaper than their 2020 high. What else can Biden do besides tell Americans that he feels their pain and remind them that the unemployment rate is low. Well, I mean, he can try to cut the budget deficit. I mean, and that's, you know, what he could do in his next term. I mean, right now, the problem is that the lead time on policies to really affect consumer prices is too long for, you know, to be really trying in April of 2024 to improve the fundamentals. I think that, you know, earlier in the administration, if they had

taken a more favorable attitude about domestic oil leasing and that sort of thing, we might have had even more domestic oil production than we have right now. We could have more, even though we are doing as much as we've ever done in history. But if he tries to do that today, it's not going to have an effect on oil prices before the end of his first term. But going into the second term, I mean, it's going to remain

the defining political issue in the U.S. as people feel that things are too expensive. And the biggest lever he has available is the fact that the Trump tax cuts, much of them expire at the end of 2025. If you let them expire, that's about $3 trillion in deficit reduction over a decade compared to if you just extend

the law out indefinitely. The problem is that Biden has committed to not raising taxes on anyone who makes less than $400,000 a year. There's this continued expansion of like what Democrats consider to be middle class and saying, you know, you can only raise taxes on this tiny sliver of the population. It seems to be tied to basically like the, if you have a married couple and they're both GS-15s at the top of the federal pay scale, or if they're both correspondence for the New York Times and the O salary band, like, you know, they'll be just under the cutoff. But if you make any more than that, then you're rich, and then you have to pay more taxes. And so that was $250,000 in 2008.

There's been inflation over the past 16 years, and now, you know, the top correspondents that the New York Times make more, and now it has to be $400,000. But so, you know, this is sort of what happened with the Bush tax cuts, which people may remember they were enacted in 2001. They were originally supposed to expire at the end of 2010. They got pushed out to 2012. And it was one of the issues in that, you know, the Romney Obama campaign, which, as you note was heavily about fiscal policy. And when Obama won, but he was still going to have a Republican

controlled House of Representatives, they ended up cutting a deal after the election where they extended the tax cuts. Actually, the threshold they set was around $400,000 at that time. So that ends up being most of the cost. And again, this time, this tax law was more complicated than the 2001 tax law. So it's actually a little bit hard to figure out what it means if you're trying to hold certain households harmless because it's not just a matter of, you know, we change the rates here. There's all sorts of stuff you have to do with deductions and credits. But probably he has to extend two-thirds or three-quarters of the tax cut in order to keep his promise not to raise taxes on people making less than 400,000. Plus, he wants to give out more middle-class tax cuts. He wants to enhance

the child tax credit. And so that adds, you know, additional hundreds of billions of dollars of cost onto his plan. So basically, he has this opportunity for deficit reduction, but he's made pretty clear that he doesn't intend to use it. And then they also have proposals to raise taxes on high earners and on corporations. And I think it's likely if Democrats have control of both houses of Congress that they will do that. But the Democratic Party really seems to want to spend that money. When they talk about, you know, we're going to raise taxes on corporations and we're going to raise taxes on the billionaire class, they say, we're going to use that to pay for extending the Trump tax cuts for the middle class and for enhancing the child credit. And they take the same

money and they say, we're going to spend this on a child care benefit. And then they take the same money again, and they say they're going to spend it on another set of government programs. I mean, the president just this week was out doing this event on the care economy. The idea, when Democrats talk about the care economy, is that there should be much more federal subsidy of things like child care and old age care. That stuff is, you know, is expensive, and it gets more expensive as the population ages. So while Democrats have some ideas about raising new revenue, the mode the party has been in for 20 years is the idea is raising new revenue is for creating new programs. I don't think that there is appetite among Democrats to raise new revenue and just use it

to reduce the deficit, but that would actually take pressure off inflation and make it possible for interest rates to come down. Because when you ask about levers to deal with inflation, the number one lever that we have been using is interest rates and monetary policy. And the Fed has brought down inflation significantly by raising interest rates into the 5% range. But, you know, that means that, you know, it's over 7% to get a mortgage. And people find that upsetting. It's not what they're used to. If he wants car loans and home loans to be at lower rates, they need to do that deficit reduction in order to take the pressure off the interest rate channel. It seems to me like what you're saying is that neither Republicans or Democrats right now seem

very prepared to deal with a deficit crisis, because Republicans, on the one hand, are very likely to extend the Trump tax cuts and are unlikely to make additional spending cuts in places like Medicare, Social Security, or the military, the biggest bucket items. And Democrats, on the other hand, to the extent that they get any new revenue from the U.S. economy are very likely to feel pressured by their groups or maybe just their own legislative members in the White House itself to use that new revenue to spend on the care economy for extending the child tax credit. So neither party seems prepared to deal with what seems like a kind of new paradigm. I think it's important to say, before we go too much deeper into fiscal policy, that it really is a new paradigm we might be entering. I remember when I was a younger macroeconomic reporter with the Atlantic, I was very agitated about deficits in like 2011.

And I think history proved my deficit hawkery wrong. But we're now in an era where U.S. debts are so high and interest rate payments on the debt are so high, they recently surpassed military spending. So back when I was worried about deficit spending, the U.S. spent twice as much on defense, on the military, as on interest rate payments. We now spend more on interest rate payments than the military, according to Fed data. So we really are entering a period where inflation plus higher interest rates, plus high existing debt might meaningfully constrain or maybe ought to meaningfully constrain our spending and force us to cut certain government programs. I want to think about how that pressure might bear out with a Trump presidency or Biden's second term.

So starting with Trump, if Republicans aren't going to raise taxes and they're not going to cut military spending and they're unlikely to cut Social Security spending and they're unlikely to cut Medicare unless they have some political death wish, what happens? If cuts are somewhat inevitable given this interest rate climate, what gets cut? I mean, you know, I actually think the most likely scenario is that we muddle through for at least another four years. Because, you know, I'd say a couple of things. This isn't, this is an old paradigm of, you know, deficits. it's being a dominant. They return to an old paradigm. Right. Yeah. I mean, if you, like, I wrote a piece about the 1992 election where all three candidates were running on deficit reduction and not just talking about it. Both George Bush, senior, and Bill Clinton signed major deficit reduction packages that had, they were quite unpopular

in the short term because of the way that they cut spending and raised taxes. But there was a sense that high deficit spending was a significant burden on the economy. It was causing interest rates to be high, which was causing mortgage rates to be higher than they wanted them to be. And that they needed to get that under control in order to improve individuals' economic situations. And I think that's very different from the last 20 years where that wasn't really true as an economic force, that, you know, we had sufficient slack in the economy that you weren't really going to bring a lot of benefit to household balance sheets and income statements by cutting budget deficits. And so instead, people had to talk in these abstract terms about responsibility. And, you know,

it's like somehow immoral or unsustainable to borrow in this way. But you couldn't really draw back to like your family will be better off if we reduce the deficit, whereas that was the way the candidates and voters talked in the early 1990s. And I think that was because they learned from years of high interest rates in 1980s and high inflation in the 1970s and the early part of the 1980s. So I think, first of all, it takes some time for those ideas to flow through to the public such that voters are actually interested in hearing about deficit reduction because all the candidates they wanted to talk about it in 1992 because presumably voters wanted to hear about it. And the voters just aren't there yet. They remember that experience.

in 2011, where, you know, we cut, we cut the deficit and it didn't do anything good for the economy. They don't remember, or, you know, most people don't remember the economy of the early 1990s. The other thing is that you said, you know, to deal with a deficit crisis, I think part of the issue here is that it's really more a problem than a crisis, at least right now. I mean, you know, if you don't do anything about it and you continue on this path where deficits are, you know, too large by, you know, the many hundreds of billions or over a trillion dollars a year, you sort of continue in this situation where maybe inflation runs at four and mortgage rates run at seven and the car loans run at eight and a half. And that's painful for people. And also,

I would note, interest doesn't show up in CPI. And so, you know, if a car is the same price, but it has to be financed at 8% instead of 4%, it's gotten more expensive for the consumer, even though the consumer price index doesn't say people should be mad about inflation. So that's part of, you know, people wonder why people have been so upset about the economy, even as inflation has come down. That's part of the answer, that those interest, those, those those financing costs are very real on consumers. They're not counted in the consumer price index. But at the same time, you know, this isn't the early 1980s

when you had, you know, mortgage rates around 20. So I think that it might be painful, but not so painful that the problem actually needs to be fixed in the near term. So I think, you know, I think we shouldn't discount the possibility that these problems just won't be addressed and the can will be kicked farther down the road and we'll just have drag on the economy as a result of that. But, you know, on the other hand, I think it's possible.

that, you know, that Republicans who have this, you know, this muscle memory of repeal Obamacare will send some bill up to President Trump who will then sign it. And it'll probably be structured in some nonsense way like skinny repeal was. People might remember in 2017, Republicans wanted to repeal Obamacare. They couldn't agree on a plan to replace it. And so they sent something up that basically repealed a bunch of the spending and created a completely implausible structure for the health care, health insurance market to start. two or three years out, and the idea was that they would then write a replacement plan later, and they'd really have to because the situation would be totally unworkable under that law.

So you could have something like that happen again under Trump, but I think the most likely scenario is really a muddling through scenario. And similarly under Democrats, you know, they don't have the money for the, you know, the really big child care program that they talked about wanting to do as part of the build back better plan. And there will be, in any theoretical Democratic majority, there will be moderate members who don't want to greatly increase the amount of government spending. But I think to the extent that you get incremental revenue, there will be pressure to spend it on something. Much in the way that, you know, this tax law, bipartisan tax law that's bottled up in Congress right now, they basically found $70 billion under the couch cushions,

and the plan they're trying to do is to divide up among Republicans and Democrats how to spend the money. Nobody was like, well, let's take that 70 billion that we never intended to spend anyway. It's a fraud-ridden COVID-era program. The IRS is just sending money to scammers. Instead of just saying, well, let's not do that, they're fighting over how to spend the money. And since they can't agree on it, they're just going to keep sending the money to the scammers. So I think that there's, you know, there's a lot of inertia here. And, you know, to the extent they can lay their hands on any of that money, there's a real strong impulse to spend it on something. I think I generally agree with your edit on my use

of the term crisis. I think that elevated inflation, elevated interest rates, which as we did in an episode about a month ago, are not always apparent. If you just look at CPI, they're more likely to present to voters as a chronic pain than as a urgent surprise, potentially in the next few years. And I'm not sure it's been properly explained by either politicians or the media that a good way to reduce price pressure is to absorb consumer income through taxes and redistribute less income through spending. That that is a way to mop up price pressure, the same way that higher interest rates

theoretically mop up price pressure. And so we might just be likely to muddle through for the next few years without anything like the kind of national conversation we had about elevated deficit spending in the early 1990s. I think that's a, that is plausible. I am curious when America has its 1991 moment, so to speak, where it becomes more a part of the national conversation, but it clearly isn't there now. You're writing about it. You know, Iglesiasis is writing about it. Noah's writing about it. But so far, the dialogue seems to be contained to a few prominent substacks rather than being a part of a mainstream conversation about how do we bring down the prices of eggs and butter. Oh, we might have to think about this at the federal fiscal

policy level. I want to move on. I do want to know, by the way, correct anything you want to. Correct. Ed prices are driven by by chicken illnesses. Sorry. Sorry. The egg prices specifically are driven by epidemics of illness among chickens. like that's you know of all of the areas of high consumer you know of high cost for consumers that is the one that is least susceptible to public policy and it's kind of my least favorite example but i will say we'll say we'll say we'll say butter or meat prices or or just general um you know uh target receipts um let's go to immigration um if i put on my punditap i think the easiest thing to say about immigration is that trump is hawkish in immigration and Biden seems feckless on immigration. And so Trump will close the border and Biden will dither. Do you think the calculation is that simple? No, I mean, I think there will be differences between them on it, but it's just both of them are really constrained by the facts on the ground in ways that pull them closer together than they would like to be or than they sound rhetorically. I mean, Biden, you know, just the situation now with the millions of migrants coming in in a regular manner is just politically unsustainable. here where I am in New York, the city is spending billions of dollars on social services for migrants

who have come here, in some cases bust up here by the governor of Texas. And it's really eating into the city's ability to spend on residents. And people are really upset about it. And I think that, you know, the Republicans have crowed a little bit about this, but it's true. I think, you know, once the costs of this have been visited upon municipal governments, people's patience wears very thin. And so that's why you've had this hawkish turn by the Biden administration on immigration. Apparently we're going to get an executive action from the president pretty soon. So he's moved in the direction where Trump was on this issue. And then Trump is constrained by the law, just as he was in his first term. I mean, he has a bunch of ideas about ways that he would like to

restrict immigration, but he doesn't have legal authority to do all of them. And then also, you know, to the extent that you can get either legislative changes that would need to be bipartisan, because, again, they need to move through a 60-vote Senate, or to the extent that you want favorable treatment in courts overseen by judges appointed by both parties, Trump is just not going to be able to get that in the way that Biden can. If Biden goes and asks for immigration restriction policies, a lot of Democrats will vote for them. If Trump asks for immigration restriction policies, he's going to get no democratic support whatsoever. And so, you know, certainly they'll talk very differently about the issue. And to the extent that, you know, there is quite a bit of executive power here. And I think Trump

will use it at the margin in a more aggressive way, including in doing things that, you know, the family separations and that sort of thing that a lot of people were very upset about during Trump's term. But overall, he won't be able to restrict immigration in the way that he would like, and Biden is going to have to restrict immigration more than the activists in his party would like him to. This is on ramping us to our final topic, which is foreign policy. Do you think that either President Biden or President Trump has any power to use foreign policy to change the migration policies of Latin America? to pressure certain countries to fortify borders,

to encourage the Mexican government to do whatever it wants the Mexican government to do in order to reduce flow through Texas and Arizona. Is there any lever, presumably, for a Biden or Trump administration to pull there? I mean, yes, there's a lot of interdependency in the U.S.-Mexico relationship, and we've seen Mexico has cooperated with us in various ways on restricting immigration through Mexico. You also see this around the world. I mean, the EU has really leaned on Turkey to contain migrant flows. into the European Union.

The thing is, though, that it's a negotiation. And so you have to give Mexico something in exchange for doing that. And Republicans basically say, well, I would, you know, I would bring back remain in Mexico. You need the Mexican government to cooperate with your effort to, you know, put these migrants in Mexico. And so the question is, what are you, you know, what are you going to offer them? And in the Republican primaries, you had this cockamamie stuff where it was like, well, I'm going to send troops into Mexico, either related to this or related to drug cartel activity, literally is a three. threat to invade Mexico, assuming that, you know, you don't get, I mean, if you had Mexican

willingness to accept our troops in, then you wouldn't have this problem of Mexican non-cooperation on these other issues. And, you know, again, with Trump talking about how he wants a new 10% global tariff, which presumably would be in violation of the USMCA agreement that he himself negotiated with Mexico and Canada, that's another issue where he'd be picking a fight with Mexico. So I think, you know, for example, if you really prioritize Mexican cooperation on immigration issues. I mean, one thing is that you can do less to pressure Mexico on a certain amount of democratic backsliding that they've had. I don't think Trump cares about that, and Biden hasn't been that aggressive on it either. But another big thing is trade, and Trump would sort of have

to make a decision between does he really want a big fight with Mexico over trade, or does he want to, you know, make nice on trade, and maybe that'll help him get something done in immigration. So I think it is possible to influence what the Mexican government does here. The thing is just that there's a price. Last question of foreign policy, we could talk about, Ukraine, we could talk about China, we could talk about Israel and the war in Gaza. I'm going to give you the choice. Where do you think the election makes the biggest difference? Where do you see the largest delta in the way that foreign policy would actually be executed, whether it's Ukraine, China, or the war in Israel? I mean, I think the clearest big delta is on Russia and Ukraine, where Trump has been very clear

that he wants, you know, he wants a negotiated solution that involves Ukraine giving up a substantial amount of territory to Russia. There are difficulties there, including, you know, will Russia even be satisfied with that kind of deal? It's not clear to me that there's the appetite for that. Also, we can't force the Ukrainians to do certain particular things, although we have obviously a lot of influence. But it's clear that he will shift toward a much more pro-Russia position on that conflict, and he's already been, you know, influencing that through his pressure on Republicans in Congress, not to approve new aid to Ukraine. So that's going to be the biggest difference. And then related issues to do with NATO, our relationship to Western Europe. Trump is much less supportive of our

traditional alliances there, and he's much less hostile to Russia. There probably are big differences on China, but I don't really know what they are. There's, you know, in terms of affect, there isn't actually that much difference between Biden and Trump, who both, you know, clearly view China as an adversary and one toward whom the U.S. needs to take a more aggressive posture. I think Biden's policy on China is a lot more coherent than Trump's. You saw during Trump's term and office, you saw during Trump's term in office that he talked really tough about China, but then he was preparing to cut this deal with China where all he wanted them to do was buy a whole bunch of soybeans. And then he was going to fold to them on other issues of much more importance for U.S. economy and our global

strategic interests. Even as the COVID pandemic was starting, he was saying, he was praising Xi and really trying to push back on the idea that something bad was happening in China because he thought it was going to interfere with the soybean deal. So, you know, I've seen the same news reports that other people have seen about how the Chinese aren't really sure who do even prefer in this election. And I think that makes sense. I think that both candidates are hostile to China. Trump is hostile in a more chaotic way and Biden is hostile in a more predictable way. I would prefer predictable. If I'm the Chinese, I'm not sure which I prefer. Final question. Overall, I'm interested in what you think the most important policy difference

between a prospective Biden versus prospective Trump presidency would be, and to review some potential nominees. You know, we didn't talk about some of the fears that liberals have of Trump using his second four years in a more totalitarian kind of way, fears of cracking down on media or just using his general power to make life hell for his enemies and enrich his friends. We did talk about abortion, and in particular, the power that a Trump administration might have to the FDA to reduce the interstate flow of abortion pills, which I think now account for about 60% of abortions in most American states. We talked about taxes and spending policy. Maybe there's a huge difference in terms of the future of the welfare state.

We talked about Ukraine and the war in Ukraine, and Republicans clearly, or at least Trump, Republicans clearly, are less positive on continuing to fund that campaign on the Ukraine side. A 10% tariff, the effect that could have on prices in America or our relationship with Mexico, which could redound to negotiations falling apart on restricting immigrant flow through the Mexican-American border, which in this menu that I've just drawn up, we're going back to the original restaurant metaphor, I suppose, which in this menu that I've drawn up or in anything else do you like to add to it, do you consider to be the most important policy difference

or the one that you're just looking at and fixated on the most? Well, I mean, I think abortion provides the one that is most clear and predictable, which is that, you know, a Trump administration will find a way to interfere with hundreds of thousands of women's efforts to obtain abortions every year in the United States.

So I think, you know, the, I think the roadmap for them to do that is pretty clear through the Comstock Act and the ways that they can interfere with medication abortion and potentially even surgical abortions. So I think that's, you know, the, I think that's an important difference that is, that I think is almost certain to manifest depending on, you know, if Trump wins the election. A lot of other areas, it's about risk where, you know, on inflation, for example, You saw Trump in 2018, 2019 pressed the Federal Reserve

really hard to cut interest rates. And at the time, it was not a crazy idea for the Fed to cut interest rates. And, you know, he did some saber-rattling. It's not as unprecedented as people think. You know, the George Bush Sr. Also pushed the Fed a bunch

around in the early 90s. But, you know, in that instance, it really wasn't such a bad thing. This time, you know, if he appoints a bunch of hacks to the Federal Reserve Board as he was trying to do at the end of his last term, and if he really pushes for low interest rates at a time when it's really inappropriate in the economy,

you could have a spike in inflation up to double digits. And that would have all sorts of really important negative economic effects. But it's also, you know, I think probably that's not going to happen. I think probably we're going to muddle through with elevated but not super elevated inflation. I think on foreign policy, there are all kinds of downside risks, you know, great power conflict, and, you know, situations where really bad things are going to happen in the world that his incompetence and his volatility causes him to fail to manage correctly. But also those risks, sometimes we get lucky and those things don't manifest.

So we didn't really talk much at all about rule of law issues, but I think certainly if Trump is elected, he will direct the DOJ to end the prosecutions into him. And I think that he's likely to use the Department of Justice in a significantly more politicized way than he did in the last administration. Democrats didn't like Bill Barr and Jeff Seventh,

very much, but it's likely to have an attorney general who's much more pliable than the two of them were overseeing the Department of Justice. And I think that that has long run risks for the rule of law in the United States. So I think that there are a lot of important areas. And, you know, on fiscal policy in the future of the entitlement state, I think it's, you know, likely that you'll get differences there, too. Certainly, I mean, the Congress has to write a tax law in 2025 because of the expiration of the Trump tax law. If you have full Republican control, you will get a much less progressive tax code, then you'll get if you have Democratic control. I think the difference in terms of budget deficits might not actually be that large, but there would be significant differences in terms of who's paying taxes

and who's collecting government services. And that's going to have effect on people's everyday lives. It could be the difference between, you know, tens of millions of people having health insurance and not having health insurance. So that, again, is, you know, is a policy difference that is really important if it comes to fruition. Josh Barrow, thank you very, very much. Sure. Thanks, Derek. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin We've got new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. If you like what you're hearing, give us five stars and a nice review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. For feedback and episode suggestions, email us at plain English at Spotify.com.