Pod Save America - “Fire sale on Cuomo books.”

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

Joe Biden’s economic agenda gets closer to becoming reality, Republicans flirt with a debt ceiling disaster, former Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee explains the debate over inflation, and good riddance to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, Joe Biden gets closer to passing the most progressive economic agenda in modern history. Former Obama economic advisor Austin Goolsbee helps idiots like us understand the debate over inflation. And we say good riddance to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. But first, check out Hysteria, where Aaron Ryan and Alyssa Mastromonaco have been killing it with interviews lately. They've talked to Amanda Knox. Yes, that Amanda Knox. Senator Tammy Baldwin and Akilah Green of Black Lady Sketch Show.

New episodes of Hysteria drop every Thursday. And don't miss America Dissected this week, where Dr. Abdul El-Sayed talks all things Delta with one of my favorite COVID Twitter follows, virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen. Check it out. All right, let's get to the news. The normally useless Senate took a break from fucking up democracy this week to pass a trillion dollar infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion budget resolution that includes the rest of Joe Biden's economic agenda, climate, health care, education, and more. Infrastructure got 69 votes, nice, including Mitch McConnell and 18 other Republicans. The budget resolution barely squeaked by with 50 votes, all Democrats. But now comes the hard part. The Senate has until September 15th to turn the budget resolution into

a final piece of legislation, which will require all 50 Democrats to agree on every detail and dollar amount. But already, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have said they have serious concerns about the $3.5 trillion price tag. And to make things even more complicated, Nancy Pelosi has said that until Senate Democrats agree on a final budget, she won't hold a vote on the infrastructure bill in the House. So Joe Biden isn't signing shit until every Democrat from AOC to Joe Manchin is happy, or at least happy enough that they don't blow up everything. And while everyone gets their shit together, the Republicans are blanketing swing districts with a few million dollars of negative ads and threatening to tank the global economy by refusing to raise the debt limit

dan have i missed anything here i think you got it that's a that's a really good summary you got a very sharp attack on the senate as an institution in there i mean that's look it's uh you know it's like it's a softball over the plate did you ever go back to dc you show up at the monocle you're gonna get booed by a bunch of Senate aides. Can't go wrong with shitting on the Senate. All right, we talked about this on Monday,

but I do want to quickly hear your thoughts on why Mitch McConnell gave Joe Biden the bipartisan win that he's been craving. Very unlike Mitch McConnell. I imagine,

I imagine you would have said at the beginning of this process, there's no way Mitch McConnell will do that. I mean, if people check the tapes, I'm sure I did. I'm sure you did. It's out there on the internet, John. We can't get rid of it.

Nailed it again, Pod Save America. Nailed it again. You know, every once in a while, Holly has TimeHop on her phone and she gets, it's been happening this year, five-year reminders of my tweets, which is – Oh, that's tough. Free services in 2016 tweets that I should scrub from the internet. So, I mean, people – a lot of people have asked me this question, like what is the grand strategy here? What is Mitch McConnell trying to do? Is this some sort of brilliant plan to undermine democratic arguments for getting rid of the filibuster by sort of giving – showing that bipartisanship is not dead? I think more likely Mitch McConnell was the caboose, not the engine on this train.

He just had a bunch of members who wanted to do something on infrastructure. There's been sort of a pent-up desire to do something on it. It's relatively non-controversial. It's a chance to do something that doesn't really fire up the base. I mean, even Donald Trump could barely muster any energy behind opposing it. And so he just sort of got on board with it at the end. I think the original thought was it was unlikely to succeed and would blow up at some point. And if it blew up, he could blame Biden and he would just eat up clock. Like this is main goal is make things as

slow as possible. So Biden can confirm as few judges as possible, pass as few laws as possible, make the democratic base get disenchanted, but they were able to pull it together and it got done. And there really wasn't, I don't think there was a lot he could do about it. So he just ended up voting yes. And the, and I will't think there was a lot he could do about it. So he just ended up voting yes. And I will say there were, the thing that is always interesting about infrastructure, which is why people have had sort of some optimism about it over the course of many, many years about it is that there are a lot of traditional

Republican interest groups, like the Chamber of Commerce, who are very strongly behind infrastructure. Corporations are really behind it. So it sort of had a logic to sort of, uh, had a logic to it that allowed it to get done. It also, it didn't end up raising taxes. Uh, it wasn't a lot of social spending. It wasn't a ton of new spending at all when you really dig into the numbers. So like you said, relatively non-controversial with their base, their base is becoming less concerned

about sort of, uh of economic policy anyway at this point. What really motivates them is the culture wars. And that's where the Republicans want to focus. So I almost think it's like taking an economic issue off the table so they can go back to focusing on culture wars and also tell voters, oh, by the way, we're not complete obstructionists. Even though we obstructed the rest of Joe Biden's economic agenda, we did agree with him on this one thing. Yeah, it does. I don't think this was part of some giant plan, but it probably strengthens their argument a little bit against the $3.5 trillion in the budget bill, which I just violated one of the rules that I have about not mentioning the total every time you talk about it.

But it just makes it easier to say, yeah, we're fine to do things with them. Look at this thing we did. But this is way too far better other than the Democrats saying you obstruct everything, you oppose everything. I understand why there's some political moderate modicum of political upside to this. Let's talk about what's next in the Senate. Manchin voted for the budget resolution, but then released a statement saying that he has, quote, serious concerns about the budget's price tag, adding that, quote, rising inflation rates are, quote, not indications of an economy that requires trillions in additional spending. Of course, every time Joe Manchin releases a statement or talks to reporters, you have to pick apart each word, translate it from Manchin speak to words that the rest of us can understand.

I saw that statement and I thought it was a little more worrisome than prior statements he's made about the budget bill where he's just said, you know, I want to be careful that we don't spend too much, that we pay for it, but I'm still behind a pretty significant bill. This seems a little more cautious than he's been before.

And when he said, not indications of an economy that requires trillions in additional spending, it makes me a little more nervous that he's going to try to take that price tag down from 3.5 to less than we had hoped. But what do you think? I generally, I share all those sentiments. We should just be perpetually worried about Joe Manchin. I sort of think a couple things here. One is we should stop paying a ton of attention to what Joe Manchin says. It seems relatively disconnected from what he actually does. And there doesn't seem to be a lot of precision

in the tonality of his remarks. Sometimes he sounds super worried. Sometimes he seems fine. He has been very pro certain things. I think it was just, here's what matters. He voted to advance the budget resolution at $3.5 trillion. So we are starting at a very good number. Two, I think, of course, of course, he and Sinema and some others who were hiding behind Manchin and Sinema are going to want to take that number down. And if I were a betting man, I'd say they're going to take it down to 2.9 because senators are easily fooled like car buyers, right? It's like 2.9 is a lot. Yeah. 2.99 is a lot more than one cent less than three, right? And, but I think a couple of things about it. One, as progressives and activists and everyone we're focusing on this bill, we should start worrying more about what's in it than the price tag.

So composition, not cost. Obviously, there are some points at which you can't do things you want to do if it gets too low, for sure. Right. I mean, even if it ends up at 2.9, that's $600 billion. That's some real money and some real sacrifices you're going to have to make in terms of progressive priorities. Right. But there is a $2.9 trillion bill that is better on the things we care about in terms of climate. Does it have a clean energy standard in there? Can you get immigration in there?

So there's a very progressive $2.9 trillion bill that is better than some versions of a 3.1 or 3.2. So we just have to get away from this that more spending is better. How it is spent matters. And we don't want there to be this definition, this set where it's like, the amazing thing with the extension of the child tax credit, the clean energy standard, all this really important climate stuff, child care. But it's 2.9 instead of 3.5 or 3.3, and therefore it's a giant disappointment.

No. The other thing about this is, of course, like you have been making this point for a long time. It is a frequent tweet subject of yours that, of course, Joe Manchin is going to cut this. Like he's always going to do that. And that's the absolute importance of moving the Overton window. And like progressives and like Sean McAvoy and others talk about that all the time because now the quote unquote centrist position is $2.9 trillion in progressive spending on climate change and child care. Right, which is more than we would have ever dreamed of during the Obama administration, even with huge majorities, even with filibuster-proof majorities in both houses.

And the fact that Manchin and Sinema are most likely, there's no guarantees here, but are likely to be for something of that size and scope, like nothing, there's no guarantees here, but are likely to be for something of that size and scope. It's just another proof point to the idea that centrism is an identity, not an ideology. All they want to be is two steps closer to the center than wherever the party is at that time. They want to take their pound of flour.

Look, if they think that voting for a $3 trillion or $2.9 trillion, whatever it is, hugely progressive piece of economic and families legislation will get them rapturous applause at the next no labels conference. Great. Then we like that is a win for us. Here's what I don't understand. And maybe this is happening or maybe it will happen soon. Like this is basically about what Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin can agree on. Like, why doesn't Bernie just go over to the houseboat, have a nice dinner, talk with Joe Manchin? They hash out all the details.

I mean, this is what it's going to come down to. Bernie's the budget chairman. He's not going to support something that's too far scaled back. Joe Manchin's not going to support something as it is right now. So the two of them just need to sit down and hash it out. Yeah. And I am sure that there are lots of conversations that have been happening, at least at the staff level between Schumer staff, Bernie staff. As we said, they did not pick that $3.5 trillion number out of a hat. That was not something that Bernie cooked up with a

Sunrise Movement at a DSA meeting. It was something that they knew could get 50 votes. Moving over to the House, what do you think about Pelosi's strategy of holding the infrastructure bill until the Senate sends over a final budget? Smart, and her only option. This is her one piece of leverage over the Senate. over the Senate. Her task is so difficult because she needs to find a way to get a House that is on balance more progressive than the Senate to support something.

And if she just passes the BIF, and then which I think we should start calling the budget reconciliation, the Build Back Better Bill, which would be the BBBBB. Oh, brutal. I can't even imagine what the official name would be the BBBBB. Oh, brutal. I can't even imagine what the official name will be when they do it.

It'll be some terrible acronym. That could be good. But this gives her leverage. So she knows that Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema care passionately about the bipartisan infrastructure. A biff in the hand, right? Oh, I'd have the pod title because nothing drives downloads like a bipartisan infrastructure bill. A biff in the hand, right? Oh, I'd have the pod title because nothing drives downloads

like a bipartisan infrastructure reference. Well, the pod description would be a biff in the hand. Senate passes a bipartisan infrastructure bill and a treaties on inflation with an economist. That's what we're here for, to get those downloads going. No, but I do think, sorry, sorry, I interrupted your very smart train of thought here.

Oh, I'm sure. But she – no, she actually said I think this morning in a press – or someone reported that she said to her caucus on a call. She doesn't really have any options. to get votes for both the infrastructure bill and the budget because she's got a whole bunch of moderates that she needs who are a little wary about voting for the budget. And she's got a bunch of progressives who are a little wary about voting for the infrastructure deal. So once again, the theme of all of this is you need to make all the Democrats happy, which sort of brings me my last question on this. Like, who do you think has more leverage in these negotiations, democratic moderates or democratic progressives?

I think they have equal leverage. Yeah, I kind of do too. I mean, it's just, it's a math game, right? You need, there are more than five moderates in the problem solvers caucus or whoever else in the house. And there's more than five progressives in the, so same thing, right? I mean, in the end, and there's more than five progressives in the – so same thing, right? I mean, in the end, you need 50 votes. So you need Elizabeth Warren and Bernie

Sanders, and you need Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, right? In the House, you need Josh Gottheimer, Stephanie Murphy, a bunch of others, and you need AOC and Ilhan Omar, and Ro Khanna, and a bunch of other progressives. And so this is an incredibly challenging thing to do, to pass a bill that keeps everyone happy with no margin of error. Like when we passed the Affordable Care Act in the House, a bunch of the blue dog Democrats, the moderates in the House, voted against it. Because they could, because we had huge margins. That is not available. That is not really an option here. And I think the one positive sign about all this is I think there is some unanimity that one, politically failure is a fucking disaster. And so we all got to figure this

shit out. And two, this is, and I think moderates and progressives are growing, this could be the last best chance for the foreseeable future to do some real good for a lot of people. And so we got to figure it out. Yeah, I was going to say the only thing that could change the calculus and who has the upper hand on negotiations is if democratic moderates decide that doing nothing and letting it all fail is better than spending too much money. And it just doesn't quite seem that they're there yet, because they have to, especially in the House, they all have to face reelection. And what are they going to run on if they don't have either an infrastructure bill or a budget and all of the good stuff in both of them to talk about? When you look back at the politics around

Republican legislative efforts in the Trump administration. When you look at Republican voters, failure to repeal Obamacare, a big, huge, prominent, on display national television failure was much more damaging to them than the either passing the tax cut bill helped them or passing tax cut bill hurt them with independence. So failure would be just, I cannot cover this, failure would be a disaster. There's all this talk of, you know, when you look back at like the Democrats lost the house in 2010 because we passed healthcare. You know what would have been a thousand times worse and we would have lost the Senate too if we'd failed to pass healthcare. So failure is not an option here. Yeah. The only thing I think the moderates could be thinking too is if we wait long enough

and this budget resolution, this budget bill falls apart, then we'll be able to say, well, the only game in town is the infrastructure bill. So let's just pass that because we just lost the budget thing. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think- You could imagine the moderates. I mean, I think that's what they're thinking right now. There is a couple of troublemaking moderates and everyone knows who they are in the house. But for the most part, you know, folks like Stephanie Murphy are very constructive and the progressives across the board, whether it's Bernie in the Senate or the folks in the squad have been very, I mean, they've been strong about their, the leverage they have and they've tried to exercise it, but they've been productive. And I, I, that has, that could change, but it

has not changed on either side of that. And I hope it doesn't. Yeah. And I think they all do understand that they rise or fall together on this one. So, um, all right, let's talk about the Republican strategy here. Um, some of them might've voted for Joe Biden's infrastructure bill and none of them are voting for Joe Biden's economic plan. In fact, they're doing whatever they can to either kill it or run against it in 2022. Uh, Senate Republicans like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz kicked things off by forcing Democrats to vote on a series of budget amendments the other night, like hiring 100,000 new police officers, defunding cities that defund the police, banning critical race theory in schools and federal workforce training, prohibiting universal pre-K and childcare, and barring immigrants from entering the U.S. without a negative COVID test. Very specific on that one. Meanwhile, a right wing super PAC known as the

American Action Network launched a five million dollar ad campaign that attacks 21 swing district Democrats for the cost of the reconciliation bill. Take a listen. First, D.C. liberals spent trillions. Now Americans face record inflation, paying more for gas and groceries, a hidden tax on the working class. Now Nancy Pelosi and her liberal allies are pushing new tax hikes, trillions and more spending, and another socialist health care plan to control what medicines you can get, a socialist prescription we can't afford. So call Carolyn Bordeaux. Tell her to oppose Pelosi's socialist agenda. That was a real journey that ad.

You got a lot in there. How much does that ad worry you? I think that is an absolutely hackish, miserable execution of a pretty decent political strategy. Like there's some, like it's always over-torked. They're like Republican ads come in at a 12 and they should come in at a seven. But hidden tax on the working class is a very good way of explaining inflation. Like that seems compelling. And one thing we know from our time dealing with,

during tough economic times in the Obama administration was people just look, money comes in their account, money comes out of their account. They just look at the cost of things and how much money they have left over at the end of the month. And so it's not really clear where all that's coming from. And so there's no question that the rise in cost of gas and a few other things are eating away at some of the cushion that they had. And Republicans can put that, you can always put other people in charge. But it's going to depend on what the conditions on the ground are in the run up to the election. For that message to work, you're going to need the inflation to be not temporary as a lot of economists think it will be and be something that is prolonged

in the well in the 2022. I do think in terms of how Democrats should respond to that, if the debate is, okay, if we spend more, there might be inflation, which is problematic for a I presume. And if we don't spend more, maybe there won't be inflation. I think that's a hard fight for that's a hard debate for Democrats. Right. It does feel like and you mentioned this earlier, we sort of need to take this debate out of the frame of how much money we're spending on something. And I think talk about the benefits of what is in the budget bill and how we're going to pay for, which is taxing the 1%, big corporations, corporate polluters, in order to save the planet and make people's lives better. Right? Like, I think that we have to stay on that message and make sure that that gets out there

through our ads, through our conversations, and not allow this to devolve into a debate about numbers and figures and how much we're spending. I don't know what you think. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I also think that we should be hitting the Republicans for the things that they are opposing that would help. So a very specific thing is Republicans are trying to stop Americans from receiving checks that will help them afford the increased cost of goods. They want to take money. Do you like that child tax credit check you're getting every month? Well, the Republicans are trying to

stop that. They're trying to take money out of your account. Why are they opposing? Why would this party that says they're a blue-collar populace oppose giving money to working-class people? Because they do not want to ask Jeff Bezos and Amazon and Exxon to pay one cent more in taxes. want to ask Jeff Bezos and Amazon and Exxon to pay one cent more in taxes. And when we tend to win big policy fights with Republicans, it is when we talk as much about the bad things they are doing or the good things they are stopping us from doing as we're just sort of talking about what we have done or what we are planning on doing. And I think that there's been a shortage of that from Democrats and from the White House. You know, like I do think if the White House messages, you know, shots in arms, checks in pockets, look at Joe Biden, he's improving

the economy, he's improving your life, which is great. But I think what it's probably missing, and again, it's early, you get closer to the midterms, you'll probably get more of this message is the contrast with Republicans like you're talking about. I think that's probably essential, especially in selling these two bills. We know this from the election. Joe Biden is never going to be as punchy with Republicans as we perhaps want him to be. But that's obviously part of his political success. He received millions and millions of votes because of it. But his ability to have that conversation or to draw that contrast was certainly limited while Shelley Moore Capito was just beating a path to his office every day. So with the bipartisan bill behind him, that conversation or to draw that contrast was certainly limited while Shelley Moore Capito was

just beating a path to his office every day. So with the bipartisan bill behind him, we're now going to, as you head into, as we will talk about a battle on the debt ceiling and over this budget bill, I think I expect them to get the Biden White House to be more aggressive in drawing that contrast. What do you think about all those amendments that Cruz and Hawley and everyone else offered during the Voterama this week? You know, critical race theory, the defunding stuff. You know, it's a lot of mischief making. It doesn't have a real effect on the bill itself, but it is, I think, a preview of some of the messages they believe will help them in the midterms. So two takeaways from that absolutely absurd exercise that happened. One is it's pretty clear Republicans, despite that ad, do not yet have a very good argument against the Biden economic agenda. Almost all of those amendments that they really pushed were about something other than the plan. That's because the Biden economic agenda is incredibly popular, but in addition to being even, but it's also unhatable. Like that's the big problem for

them is it does not, even the people who disapprove of it, don't disapprove of it strongly. It does not fire them up. So they have to go find other issues to fire them up. And the second takeaway is it's pretty clear the Republicans are watching way too much Fox News. And they are making a fundamental mistake the Republicans have made over and over again in the last decade or so, which is they are running against the Fox caricature of Democrats on actual Democrats. And this is the thing where Republicans look at Fox and they think it's a window, but it's really a mirror. And they're off, Right. And you saw that in the amendment where Tommy Tuberville, America's dumbest senator. Well, in fairness, I don't want to discount Prime Johnson's dumbness,

but they're in a battle. Easy. Wow. Call him for a correction. Yes. You know, he does this amendment where he's like, I'm going to get the Democrats because I've been watching Tucker Carlson and they tell me Democrats love defunding the police. So I'm going to make them all vote. And they're like, great, thank you. You just all gave us a plate now where we can run in ads that we voted against defunding the police

as a response to the inevitable Republican attack ads. You dumb, dumb- Yeah, we should say that every single, all 50 Democratic senators voted against the amendment, which would have defunded cities that defund the police. Every single Democrat voted against that. Or voted for that amendment. Yes.

Whatever it was. Either way, Tommy Tomlin was wrong. We were right. He's dumb. We're smart. Move on. All right. So the final bit of Republican strategy we should talk about here involves the debt ceiling or debt limit. For those of you who don't know, the vote to raise the debt ceiling is a vote that

Congress has taken for over a century. It does not authorize more spending. It merely allows the Treasury Department to pay the bills for the spending that Congress already authorized. It is a completely artificial mechanism that would be utterly meaningless, except for the fact that if Congress ever failed to raise it, which they never have, the United States would default on its debt and cause a global economic meltdown. Which, of course, means that Republicans regularly use the debt limit to extract political concessions from Barack Obama and indeed almost plunge the global economy into chaos multiple times. Those were some good memories we had in the White House, weren't they? Now that we're close to hitting the debt ceiling again,

Senate Republicans are back at it, saying they won't raise it unless Democrats agree to not only drop their reconciliation bill, but to cut Medicare and Social Security as well. So here's what I can't figure out, Dan. Maybe you can help us. I know you wrote a message box on this. Democrats can raise the debt ceiling on their own in the reconciliation bill, but they are choosing not to. Instead, they plan to essentially dare Republicans to vote against it sometime in late September. Why do you think they're doing that? That is a great question, John. But let me read you something from our friend, as close as a friend of the pod as anyone in the Senate is, Brian Schatz, who said, I am predicting with absolute certainty it will resolve itself uneventfully because it always does.

Wow, that is some supreme confidence from Senator Schatz. It's also not true. from Senator Schatz. It's also not true. I think Senator Schatz got to the Senate in 2014, so he was not around for the death ceiling battles of 2011, 2014.

Oh, he was being sarcastic there. I missed the sarcasm. I don't think he was being sarcastic. Oh, okay. Yeah, no, I think he was. I mean, I'm reading it. We should ask him. If he is being sarcastic,

I apologize, but it didn't seem that, the way the reporter wrote it in the article seemed that it was a very... Oh, so yeah, you're saying he got to the senate in 2014 so he missed our he missed our 2011 blues yes for those of you who weren't paying attention to politics in 2011 boy did it suck just so you i mean because it's hard to sort of understand why the debt limit is so dangerous and then people throw around things like you know catastrophic economic meltdown and

you're like really because of a debt limit? Like, what are you talking about? I had to write a draft of a speech that the Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner worked on with me in case we breached the debt limit where the president United States had to go out and talk about how we would pay for certain bills and what would happen to the economy. And it was one of the scariest speeches I've ever written. And we didn't have to use it because we didn't breach the debt limit. But if Congress ever failed to raise the debt limit and we defaulted on our debt, it would be a fucking catastrophe like we haven't seen in our lifetime. Even coming close to breaching the debt limit in 2011 did massive damage to the economy. The market lost trillions of dollars. Companies

stopped investments because of the uncertainty. The US credit rating was downgraded for the first time in history just because we came close to it. I mean, this is a huge deal. And sort of just a little history of this is in 2011, Republicans had control of the House. So there was no lifting of the debt limit unless they put one on the floor. And they were refusing to do that unless there was some sort of agreement on spending. Obama went down a long, torturous, ultimately misguided path with Speaker Boehner to try to cut a deal that would include some long-term cuts to be paired with some short-term help for workers in a tough economy. That did not work. We ended up having to cut an unfortunate deal. After that, President Obama said, I'm never

negotiating on the debt limit again. Ted Cruz and a coalition of really dangerous House members got together in 2013 and said, we're going to shut down the government and not lift the debt limit unless you repeal the Affordable Care Act. A bill that had been in law for three years was about to start offering coverage to millions of people and had been validated in an election that Barack Obama had won less than a year earlier by a very large margin. And that one ended quicker. It was not as damaging. But just the mere, like we're trying, Joe Biden has made tremendous progress in growing this economy, putting it on stronger footing from what he inherited from Trump, getting us out of the pandemic-related economic problems. And all of that is at risk if we end up in a giant showdown here.

And I would say I take this very personally, and this is why maybe I reacted to Senator Schatz's comment, which is these battles are so brutal that when I say the 2013 debt limit battle almost killed me, like that is a literal statement. That is very true. That is very, very true. Yeah. And you had to rush to the hospital. So all that, now that we have all that context, what the fuck are Democrats doing? So I think there are a couple of possibilities here.

One possibility here is passing this budget reconciliation is incredibly difficult already. And if you put the debt ceiling in it, which is a challenging vote for anyone, because it always ends up in – it's a stupid vote. It means nothing, but it ends up in ads because people think it means you were spending more money when you're just paying bills for spending that already happened. It's a political problem because of a misunderstanding that no one has corrected because Republicans like the misunderstanding and the media has not done a great job of actually letting people know what the real truth is. And it's complicated, so it's hard to explain. And up until the Republicans actually came close to breaching it in 2011. There was just a general rule that was the party of the president had to give every vote to pass it. And if they did not have the 50 or the majority, then they would give all of their members, and then the other party would give

just enough to get it over the line. So you would have as many people in the president's party as possible would have to take that bad vote so they could have ads run against them. Obama sort of famously vote was part of the Democrats who voted against it in 06. It was never in danger of not passing. It's just how you do the math to get there. And so there's no damage to the economy. I think there is this fear that if we add, this could be one brick too many to the load to get the budget reconciliation on the line. The other argument for not doing it, there were two related arguments. One is Mitch McConnell and the Senate are not the lunatics in the House, right? All you need is 10 Republicans to work with Democrats to pass it. And we just had 19 Republicans vote for

the infrastructure deal. You can theoretically find 10 Republicans who are not going to do something so fucking dangerous and crazy as put on the line. The other thing, and I don't think this is why they're doing it, but if you were to say, what's the political case for forcing this confrontation with Republicans is, in the words of Kevin Cramer, the senator from North Dakota, we're not going to agree to debt loan without structural reforms. Structural reforms means Medicare and Social Security cuts. And so are the Republicans really going to run on a message that says, if you do not cut Social Security and Medicare, we're going to blow up the economy? And so there could be a sense from Schumer and Biden and others

to just simply call their bluff and really see if they will do it. There are some real risks to that strategy that we can talk about, but I think that may be the reason that got us here. Yeah, because look, one thing that is true is that Republicans were at their lowest levels of popularity during the debt limit fight with Obama. So them trying to play chicken and threatening to blow up the global economy was not very popular. You know who else was at his lowest level of popularity during the debt limit fight? Barack Obama. So this thing, like the political fallout hits everyone when you have a bunch of voters in the country looking at Washington and seeing all they know is that Democrats and Republicans at odds over the debt limit, you know, global economic meltdown possible.

They're going to blame everyone for that. And they're going to blame the party in charge, even if it's not Democrats' fault and Republicans are the hostage takers. The way I would think about this, if I was the Democrats, is every Democrat is going to have to vote for this, whether we do it in the budget reconciliation bill or you do it on its own. They're going to have to take that vote. That's right. To me, the politics of it are much worse if it happens under the glare of the hottest spotlight as we're staring down the default of the United States, whether then it's one line in a much larger Build Back Better bill. Think of all the coverage of that. It's going to be about child tax credits and what's in, what's out, and the debt ceiling

is in there. That's going to get so much less attention. It's going to be about child tax credits and what's in, what's out, and the debt ceiling is in there. That's going to get so much less attention. It's going to be less politically painful. But I think there's a chess and checkers argument here, which is we have to look not at this vote, but down the line. So they will lift it. It'll be for some period of time, but you're going to have to confront it again. And so with, but think about a world in which it's 2023, the Republicans control the house. A, it is a majority dominated by big lie, believing

insurrectionists. And there is no way to get the debt limit raised without Kevin McCarthy's agreement. So what the Democrats should do, then we're really fucked. Yeah, that is. And so like, what can you even imagine what their demands will be? Yeah, no, it'll be it'll be resign. Joe Biden resign or we're not going to. And Kamala Harris. Both of you resign. Reinstall Donald Trump.

Donald Trump gets reinstalled or we blow up the world. So what the Democrats only partial jokes here. Yeah, I mean, that's all on the table, to be very clear. What Democrats should do is either just eliminate the debt ceiling mechanism, which it's stupid, it'd be easy to do, or just raise it so that Joe Biden won't have to deal with it again in his first term. We need to take off the table the idea of a cataclysmic debt limit confrontation in the run up to the 2024 election.

The other thing that would worry me from a Democratic perspective of the regular order is are you – and maybe Schumer is. Like maybe Schumer has this agreement in stone and Manchin was Kyrsten Sinema showing up at a press conference with the rest of the G10 or whatever they call themselves saying, we're going to work on a debt limit deal, right? Oh, shutter. Yeah, that gets really risky really quickly. Okay, well, let's not give them any ideas. All right, when we come back, our friend Austin Goolsbee answers all the questions you were too afraid to ask about inflation. As Democrats prepare a $3.5 trillion budget deal and the U.S. hurls closer to reaching the debt ceiling, concerns over inflation are circling President Biden, with Republicans criticizing

the administration for spending too much and Joe Manchin issuing warnings about the risks of overheating the economy. Here to break it all down is my old friend, University of Chicago professor and the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Austin Goolsbee. Goolsbee, how are you, buddy? Hey, man, we're getting the band back together. That's right. That's right. All right. I want to start with the Labor Department report yesterday, which showed that consumer prices are up 5.4% over last year. Can you help us understand that report and put in some context? Yeah. Okay. So the consumer price index, they keep track of a bundle of goods, they call it, and they just follow the prices of that bundle over time. Now, we had a

surge of prices, but if you kind of peel back the onion a little and look at the report, a lot of people were sort of relieved, even though it was a big headline number. If you took out the categories that are obviously pandemic related, like rental cars and airfares and stuff like that, the inflation rate is coming down. And so there's an argument going on among the economists. Is this a sign of permanent inflation and we're kind of going back to the 70s? Or is this just a temporary thing, not unlike when we had a shortage of toilet paper and we had a shortage of hand sanitizer and stuff like that? I've been more on team temporary, they call it, which is to say it's the virus that's doing this. These are bottlenecks and

they're going to get sorted out over a couple of months. But we definitely saw a burst of price inflation, especially concentrated in these pandemic categories. What is the specific part that is pandemic related that's driving those specific categories? Well, the biggest one by far is cars. And cars is a big component. component of the, if, if the car component is 2%, 5% of total spending, I'd have to guess it was at least 20 to 25% of the increase in overall prices was just from that one category. And that's for a couple of reasons. One of the main one being they can't get computer chips, so they can't make new cars. If you go out to a new car dealership, you know, they're

parking the cars with two or three spaces between each one to make it look like they have more cars than they have. And so the rental car people who normally buy a bunch of new cars, they can't get cars for the rental fleet. So rental car prices are up, all the travel related stuff is up. And then that's spilling over onto used cars, which are up even more than the new cars are up. Are we a victim of our own success in some way here in the sense that the economy has come back faster than at least these businesses thought they would in terms of their production lines and things like that? Yeah, that's kind of an interesting idea. That's a nice way to think of it.

I think we are a victim of our own success in the sense that we came back fast. And when you come back fast, there was a fundamental shift of what people were spending their money on. And that's what went wrong at the start of the pandemic. When the toilet paper crisis, it wasn't primarily because people were hoarding toilet paper. It was mainly because there's two totally different manufacturers of toilet paper. There's office toilet paper, which comes on a big roll. And there's residential toilet paper, which is like fluffy Charmin. And suddenly a third of the workforce decided that it

was going to be working from home all day. And so there's no residential toilet paper and they're having a great depression of the bathroom in the office toilet paper business. That's the same kind of thing that's happening now. And so I do think we're a little bit cursed by our own success. Now in business, there are people who use a phrase, I think it's a dumb phrase, but they say the cure for high prices is high prices. And what they mean by that is nothing gets the supply chain fixed quicker than being able to make so much money because the prices are this high. So if you want to rent a car, I was going to take my son to Yellowstone for graduating from high school. To rent a car in Montana was going to be $700 per day. Okay, so Yellowstone's not going anywhere, so we're going to go to Yellowstone a different time.

But at $700 per day, there's some people I know, a guy who lives in montana he was like 700 a day you can rent my car i'll drive over to the airport and pick you up you know so that's the sense in which i i think that within six months we're gonna have sorted out most of these but it's still a little hairy it's kind of disturbing you go to go fill your. It's like 55 bucks to fill your car. And is that, is the gas prices pandemic or is that something else? Cause I saw the Biden administration called on OPEC to produce more oil. And as we, you know, as anyone has ever been in politics, gas prices is a huge driver of economic sentiment. Cause it's the one thing you can't cut back on. You can not go to Yellowstone, but you've still got to fill up your car and drive your kids to school and drive to work every day and go to the grocery store, et cetera.

Yeah. And it's a very public price though. Maybe with so many people working from home, maybe it will be less impactful than it always was when we were thinking about it. I think there is more going on with the price of gas and OPEC, the countries are fighting with each other and some of them don't want to produce because they want the price to go up more. But there is a pandemic component, which is we've been cooped up for a year and a half, and people are like, I'm going on a trip. And so they're packing up, and we're setting records on car-based vacations. on car-based vacations. And that usage, before you've gotten the refinery capacity back up, and while the people in OPEC are not playing ball, it's going to drive up prices in the short run,

for sure. After the Senate passed the budget resolution the other night, Joe Manchin put out a statement where he talked about concerns about the size, the $3.5 trillion size of the Biden economic plan and saying that we were on the verge of overheating the economy. That's something Republicans have been saying. What does that mean when they say that? And is that something you see as a risk with the amount of money being put in the economy if all these things pass? I guess I would say two things. The first thing that I would emphasize there, the Republicans keep saying, ah, it's a $3.5 trillion. But remember, that's over 10 years, and that's about an 8% increase in the budget. So this is not the 3.5 trillion number sounds like something quite different than what it is. The root of the problem, when you think about overheating as an economist, you're asking, okay, what's the potential? And are we going to get so much money and so much

activity that we exceed our potential? If you exceed the potential, you probably would start driving up prices because the data has nowhere else to go. I have not really viewed this as us getting much above potential for the reason that if you look in the last 30 years, three different times, we've gotten the unemployment rate down much lower than where we are now.

So if you look at the end of the 90s, if you look in the mid 2000s before the Great Recession, and if you look from 2017, when the unemployment rate was four and a half percent, and then we cut taxes $2 trillion on top of it, all three of those times, we didn't see sustained inflation. three of those times, we didn't see sustained inflation. Now, the unemployment rate, if properly corrected to be apples to apples, is around 6%. So it's well above the 3.5% or 4% that it got down to and didn't generate inflation. So I think we're not really in danger of overheating. That's just the matter of this thing of, is this a temporary bottleneck or is this sustained overheating? I'm on the temporary bottleneck side.

There was a period earlier this year when the first sort of inflation numbers or the price of consumer goods went up, where there were some who were pretty dismissive of this as a very, very temporary thing. It's just about the pandemic. Don't worry about it. In the last, and even people who still believe it's temporary, there's been a shift in rhetoric among, particularly our old colleague Larry Summers talked about it. A lot of people were very dismissive of his view that inflation was going to be a big

problem. The rhetoric around inflation has changed among Democrats. The President of Biden said he was going to use every tool available to deal with the help people manage the cost or mitigate the spikes in prices. What are the sort of tools that you have that the federal government has to help people? Because even if it is temporary, it does still, there are families in great need and people who hurt and this affects their lives and the stimulus checks are going less far, things like that. What are the tools in the toolbox? Yeah. So you could think of,

there are some tools that are about, we're going to get you checks and we'll make up for whatever is happening on prices by shoring up your incomes. And if you look at the Build Back Better agenda, there's a bunch of things in it which are good economics, good investments. In my world, they're about expanding the supply side, which would reduce inflation. But on the ground, if the government's going to help you with education, it's going to help you more with healthcare, it's going to pay for pre-K, things like that, that's going to make up for a lot of the price tools. On the other side, everything that the government can do to ease the supply chain burdens and foster manufacturing and, I hope,

reconsider some of the crazy trade policies that the Trump administration put in that drove up the prices of a bunch of the supply chain. I think all of that's important. And it's still in the context that I always say that the virus is the boss. That's the number one thing about the economy. If the Delta variant or some other variant starts raging out of control in the United States, the economy is going to stall. And nobody's going to be talking about overheating in that case. They're going to be talking about what are we going to do to try to get the growth rate

back up? Not unlike what happened at the very end of the Trump administration in November, December, January. The virus spirals up again and you see the jobs numbers go from being big positives to actually being negative again. And so I think we've really got to keep an eye on that. And whenever people are saying, why, why should we consider something big? I think you should consider something big, because there's still a bunch of dangers. We're not out of this mess. You're the Biden administration, obviously management budget and council of economic advisors, your old stomping ground put out out a report earlier this week making the case, it's a very similar case you just made, that instead of the increases in cost is not an argument against doing big things. It's an argument for doing big things. They actually

focused on the sorts of things that were like child care, where the cost has been going up at a rate much faster than the increase in wages over a long period of time. Now, these are costs that are separate, somewhat disconnected from the pandemic specific spikes. Did you get a chance to see that paper and do you have thoughts on their argument about that? Yeah. Look, my personal bias, of course, I'm favorable to that argument. They kind of had me at hello from the Council of Economic Advisors. I don't know. I mean, what did you think about the Council of Economic Advisors from 2017 to 2021? So look, the thing is, I think they highlighted three specific areas, health care. Well, they highlight more than three areas, but I will highlight healthcare,

education, childcare. Those are three places where prices have been rising over the long run, much faster than other inflation, faster than incomes even. And so if you get some relief on that, that would be a great help to a lot of people. Now, the other thing I would say about the 3.5, 3.2, whatever trillion you want to call it, in addition to, but wait a minute, don't you mean an 8% increase? That's spread out over 10 years. So the amount that that's going to juice the economy in the immediate run of the next six months is not going to be that high. And the Biden administration's committed that they want to pay for it, that they're going

to raise taxes on high income people and big corporations to pay for the for the spending that's in that increase. And if you pay for it, it doesn't overheat the economy at all. So I think the rhetoric on this is pretty different from what most economists think will be the economic impact, which they view as pretty positive so far. Are there particular elements of that bill that you think are absolutely essential? Because I was going to be allowed in negotiating and fighting back and forth with Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and others in the House about what stays in and what stays out. Are there things that you think are essential elements for the economy?

I mean, I think over the medium run, the investments in the skill base and the investments in people are critically important. That's how we got to be the richest major economy in the whole world. And that's where we've got to do that. So I think the stuff on community college, I think it's great and vital. And the pre-K and early education, the research is now saying that that's got a benefit to cost ratio of five to one, that you get $5 for every $1 you invest in that. That space, I think, is super important in my world. That space, I think, is super important in my world. Back in the old days when we worked together, I was looking out over the horizon on Barack Obama's chances for election or political prospects. It was so intricately tied with the economy.

So I was always asking people like you and Gene Sperling or others, what is the thing you were worried about? So other than the pandemic, is there something you see on the horizon that gives you pause about this economy? Or do you feel like if we can keep the virus under control, we are on a very good trajectory for the foreseeable period here? Well, first of all, you remember us working together. I remember me working and I remember you relaxed. That is how I was always known. It's just super relaxed always. That is how I was always known.

It's just super relaxed. Always just, you know, the I just cannot get past this. And I have a bunch of research. What my thing is that the number one rule of virus economics is that you must control the virus to help the economy. It comes from research that that I did using a bunch of data on people's economic activities that kind of tracks where they go with their phones. And it shows that governments are not in charge. It's not about lockdowns. It's not about rules and that sort of thing. What happens when the economy goes wrong is that people get afraid

and they don't want to catch the virus. So if they start looking out their window and they're like, holy cow, the hospitalization rate in Florida is the highest that it's ever been in the crisis, that's going to have a negative impact on the economy. And so this recurring cycle of we're going to ignore the virus, it's going to come raging back with a new variant. We've got to break that cycle. People got to go get vaccinated. If you want the economy to come back, you've got to do that. And so I just can't get that. I just can't get that part out of my head. Well, ending on a pro-vaccination message is a good place to stop. Austin Gouldsby, thank you so much for joining us. It's great to talk to you as always. Yeah, great to see you again, Dan. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo gave his two weeks notice on Tuesday announcing his resignation just

seven days after New York Attorney General Letitia James concluded in a 165-page report that Cuomo groped, kissed, grabbed, flirted with, and made inappropriate comments to 11 female employees. Those findings quickly led to calls for the governor's resignation from just about every elected Democrat in America, including President Biden. The New York State Assembly opened an impeachment investigation. Prominent members of Cuomo's inner circle resigned, including top aide Melissa DeRosa and Time's Up Legal Defense Fund co-founder Roberta Kaplan. But it wasn't until Tuesday morning that Cuomo himself gave a confusing speech where he defended his actions, denied the allegations, took responsibility for his actions, apologized to the women who came forward and finally said this. The best way I can help now is if I step aside and let government get back to governing.

And therefore, that's what I'll do. Dan, what do you think changed over the last week? Why did he finally step down after trying so hard to hang on despite mountains of evidence that he had harassed staffers. He resigned to avoid being fired. There was no path. He was going to be impeached and removed. He had no allies. Everyone had left him and it was over. It's actually says a lot about what a absolute historic delusional narcissist he is. It took him seven days to figure that out. historic, delusional narcissist he is. It took him seven days to figure that out.

In those seven days, too, there were reports in the New York Times that at one point he thought about running TV ads, person on the street TV ads featuring New Yorkers saying how Cuomo was doing a great job. That's how much he was ready to try to cling to power no matter what. And the fact that it all fell apart, I think you're right,

he knew he was going to get impeached. The state assembly basically said, we're not cutting any deals with you. We're going forward with this investigation. Don't think you're getting out of this. So that was probably been, I think also public opinion had shifted. Like I remember when these allegations first aired, there were some polls and they're like, oh, people still like Andrew Cuomo. Never mind these allegations, blah, blah, blah.

Well, Quinnipiac last week, 70 percent he should leave office. Sixty three percent said he should be impeached if he didn't resign. I do think what gave these allegations further credibility was the fact that there was an independent investigation conducted by another New York Democrat. And they were able to sort of like look through these allegations, come up with a report. So this was not something that was, you know, where Cuomo could just deny, deny, deny and said it was he said, she said and litigate through the media like there was a process and an investigation that gave the allegations even more credibility. Of course, they should have had credibility at the outset. But when you have an investigation like this, it just it adds to that credibility. And I think I think he couldn't he couldn't avoid that. most famous political family in New York. But ultimately, this is also a story of women who

held him accountable and protected other women from his behavior, right? Whether it is Letitia James, it's the victims that spoke out, it's Kathy Hochul, the soon-to-be governor of New York. And that is a part of this story as well that would not have happened. And it does show that things have changed and he was held accountable for this. And, you know, you know, very, you know, in powerful and important ways. Yeah. Soraya Chamali, who's the director of the Women's Media Center Speech Project wrote in the Washington Post. So what changed in the past week that made him suddenly realize he had to resign the past 60 years did, which I thought was a great way of

putting it. You know, there's a recent study, the Atlantic reported on Democratic voters were more likely than Republicans to believe claims of sexual harassment against a politician in their own party and to believe that the politician would abuse their office in other ways. Those numbers, even among Democrats, have changed significantly, I think, over the last several years. That is not to say that we don't have ways to go here. But I think you would not have seen Cuomo ultimately resign, which he still took a much longer time to do than he should have. But you would ultimately not have seen him resign had you not had the last few years of the Me Too movement, et cetera.

And so I think that things have changed, even if there's a long way to go. Another element of this is just, even before we learned all of these things, Andrew Cuomo was known by virtually everyone who had ever met him, worked with him, interacted with him as one of the worst humans on the planet. Just a historic asshole. Corrupt as can be. Which is like,

I've known a couple people who've worked for him, who've been in his orbit, and I hadn't heard about anything about sexual harassment, but I had heard just the abuse of staff,

verbal abuse of staff. It was just, those stories were everywhere. Also of staff. It was just those stories were everywhere. Also, like potential corruption. I mean, just constant criminal investigation. Like it's been it's been a long years and there's obviously some very like important things that happened in the state of New York while he was governor and, you know, legalizing marriage equality, a huge thing. But like we had like there is this thing that bad people should not be in positions of power. And we're like, well, he's, you know, this is every, you know, everyone loved Cuomo because he gave us, you know, these straight talk and press conferences, but he, like you knew before

that, you know, and it was pretty interesting to people who sort of touted, I mean, it was, the imagine was just a year ago that people were like, we should replace Joe Biden with Andrew Cuomo on the ticket, right? That that was the thing. But you could tell the people who made that case are people who have never been around Andrew Cuomo. People who know about Andrew Cuomo were absolutely like someone that corrupt, that terrible, that abusive, that vengeful should be as far away from the levers of power as anyone, right? Forget whether he was progressive on a couple of, you know, on some civil rights stuff or some other stuff or done a good job managing this or managing that. He was a terrible fucking person. And we should not back people like that just because they are, we think they're good on our issues

or they're good spokespeople or something like that. Plenty of people out there who are good on the issues. Plenty of other people. Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul is set to become the state's first female governor. What do we know about her and what kind of challenges she'll face? I mean, she's obviously coming in at a very tough time with the pandemic, you know, sort of resurging here. you know, crime is up in parts of New York. It's a, you know, New York is a very hard state to manage. I think you coming in after, you know, almost three full terms of Cuomo and sort of picking up the pieces is going to be very hard. But she is someone who, when she was a member of the House, was incredibly well thought of, has real roots in New York and is in the real advantage she has that does not often happen,

even though Cuomo picked her to run with her, she is not, they actually, I think she said this, they have not spoken in months. That's a good thing. Yeah, she's not tied to, she's not part of the Cuomo political machine or Cuomo legacy or been part of any of these disgusting machinations to try to get him out under the accountability he should face. And so I think for a lieutenant governor, she starts with as fresh a slate as someone possibly could in this position. Someone interviewed former governor David Patterson, who of course was New York's lieutenant governor and then became New York's governor after Elliot Spitzer resigned in scandal. And former Governor Patterson said,

I always tell people don't run for governor, run for lieutenant governor. It's easier that way. But it just it brings up a larger point. And I was reading in the nation's effort, Teachout, who ran against Cuomo in 2014, wrote this piece. And she talked about how it is something it is no coincidence that we've had several governors of New York sort of resign and disgrace now, and that the office of the governor of New York actually has too much power over appointments, over the budget process. And it tends to, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And there may be an issue with actually the structure of the governor's office in New York, in addition to just the person who

holds that office, which I thought was interesting. I think Andrew Cuomo would have been a corrupt dog catcher. Like, I mean, he just, like, there's definitely- Well, I mean, we haven't even, yeah, we haven't even talked about Ronan's story, Ronan Farrow's story, which came out right before he resigned,

which was about Andrew Cuomo calling Valerie Jarrett at the White House to yell about Preet Bharara investigating him, to call Preet's boss at the White House and if not explicitly try to pressure them to lean on Bharara to stop investigating, at least certainly insinuating it in a call that was so inappropriate that Valerie walked down to Kathy Rumbler's office and had to tell her about it. The idea that a sentient, theoretically rational human being would think they should call the White House to a political person in the White House to complain about a federal criminal investigation, it just shows how sort of powerful and untouchable he thought he was. Like that is the textbook example of the thing you do not fucking do, right? It's like he

read All the President's Men as a fucking to-do list, right? Like it is not, he's like, follow Nixon. It's not your plan, but that's what he's doing. Well, sort of raising my last point on this, which is you tweeted this the other day. You said the national infatuations with Giuliani after 9-11 and Cuomo during COVID suggest that maybe we shouldn't pick our heroes based on their press conference demeanors. Say a little bit more about what you mean by that. Both Giuliani and Cuomo became these national celebrities because at a time in which Americans were feeling scared and vulnerable, they put on this sort of strong authoritarian persona, right? That they're going to protect us from terrorism or the virus. And so there's two answers. One is we have to think more in a more complex way about what we value in politicians and what they say and how they say it is much, much less important than what they do. Because this is not, there are times when we find out things you never possibly could have imagined. Andrew Cuomo was a well-known

crooked asshole before we even knew that he was exponentially worse than we thought he was. Yet we still deified him because he made us feel strong and that is actually why authoritarianism rises around the world because at a time when a populist feels weak and scared there is someone who comes and speaks to that but the other someone responded to that tweet which i thought was really um uh you know thoughtful said maybe don't deify politicians right they are not don't don't't, don't stand politicians was one of the, one of the takes, which is like, they are imperfect humans. Some of them are good people who make mistakes. Some of them are horrible people who do horrible things, but like, like, let's focus on what, how they do their job, not how they make us feel. Yeah. And I do think your

point about, you know, the reason that people started flocking to Cuomo or talking about him as a possible president was because of these qualities of toughness, right? There was this whole cycle in the last primary in 2020 that everyone said, oh, Democrats need someone as tough as Trump who can hit back as hard as Trump, right? And there is this belief- The Michael Avenatti Democrats? Right, the Michael Avenatti Democrats. There was a little bit of that with Cuomo as well, right? Like that the only way we can defeat this bully is with a bully of our own. And it is just such a fucking stupid, sexist, just backward way of thinking. And it does lead you to the type of

authoritarian leaders that we're trying to run away from right now it pushes you to bad men that's what it pushes you to right well that's what i say it's like you don't know we don't need someone as tough as trump we don't need someone like that and it wasn't it wasn't just that like cuomo got people through the pandemic by being calm and reassuring and stuff like that is that they knew that he could hit back and that was what was appealing. And that is we should maybe rethink why some people think that that's an appealing quality because it shouldn't be.

We have to rethink what strength is, right? It can be quiet, decent strength, like Joe Biden demonstrating to be the sort of strength that allowed people like Elizabeth Warren or AOC to overcome things in their lives and succeed. Like there are, you know, there's lots of different ways to think about it, but just being a big asshole or being a tough asshole is, you know, puts us in a position we're going to have with more people like Andrew Cuomo than we in office. And we absolutely should. Yeah. And just to end this, you know, real strength, of course, and real courage is,

is, is coming forward when it's, when it's when it's really tough, which so many of these women have done. And one consequence of the Harvey Weinstein scandal was that so many more women came forward after that. After Christine Blasey Ford came forward during the Kavanaugh hearings, so many more women came forward as a result of that. So, you know, we should end by just saying, you know, if you or anyone you know is a survivor of sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673. So that is an important thing to mention as well. Okay. That is our show for today. Thank you, Austin Goolsbee, for making us so much smarter about inflation. I feel better.

I don't know about you. Everyone have a fantastic weekend, and we will talk to you next week. Bye, everyone. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Flavia Casas. Our associate producers are Jazzy Marine and Olivia Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

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