The Bulwark Podcast - S2 Ep1056: Catherine Rampell: Slow Burn

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

Jamie Dimon is spooked about the bond market, business uncertainty about tariffs is dragging the economy, and it seems like no politician will get serious about our nation's debt until it's too late. Meanwhile, Republicans don't even like their own spending bill since they only lie about it—it's just in service of making Trump happy. Plus, Stephen Miller reportedly wants ICE to step up raids at businesses, the immigrant brain drain is bad for America, and the antisemitism coming from the left and right is pretty scary for Jews. 

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After a quick assessment, Tonal sets the optimal weight for every move and adjusts in one-pound increments as you get stronger, so you're always challenged. Tonal lets you choose from a variety of expert-led workouts, from strength to arrow-hit to yoga and mobility to keep you coming back for more. For a limited time, go to tonal.com to get $500 off your tonal purchase, plus a free four year warranty. That's tonal.com for $500 off, plus a free four year warranty. tonal.com. Hello and welcome to the Bullwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. A few quick programming notes. Reminder, it's this Friday. We're doing the World Pride Fundraiser, us and Crooked Media in support of Immigrant Defenders, the legal team that is working on behalf of these

Venezuelans who have been sent to El Salvador. Obviously, it's World Pride. We are going to focus in particular on the story of Andres Hernandez Romero, the makeup artist who has been disappeared for no good reason by this administration. And so we're going to have a little bit of, you know, maybe some tears, a little serious talk, but also some laughs and some revelry and some gaiety, if you will, since it's World Pride. So come on out. There's still some tickets left. Not that many. So you're going to want to jump on it. It's Friday night in Washington, D.C. at the Lincoln Theater. Hope to see you all there. Just a couple other quick things. I did a video last night with

Will Summer about Curtis Yarvin, the so-called philosopher that has inspired Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and JD Vance and all these other tech bro oligarch types. And it was because there's a New Yorker profile of him that was very, very long and it sunk me into the depths of despair. So if you want to learn more about Curtis Yarvin and how fucking stupid the supposed philosophy is behind techno-fascism, you can check out the Bullwork Takes Feed on your podcast Player of Choice or go watch me and Will on YouTube. And just another reminder while I'm doing this about FYPod,

we're hitting our stride. I taught the youth about Ben Laden's porn stash on last night's episode. Last week we had the mooch, his son, Mooch Jr. who's got a new movie out. And we talked to him about what it was like being in high school when his dad went to work for Trump and then bailed on him. And we've got a bunch of other good guests planned for our flypods. So go ahead and check that out if you haven't. Today, our guest is a syndicated opinion columnist covering economics at the Washington Post. She's

co-anchor and co-host of MSNBC's new show, The Weekend Prime Time, on from 6 to 9 p.m. Eastern on Saturdays and Sundays. It's Katherine Rimpel. Hey, Katherine, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me back. I brought you on because you were popping off on the various lies the administration is telling about their econ agenda. So I kind of want to take through those one at a time.

But first, I thought, I'm really most interested in your take on the macro view on the state of the economy because I, well, I know about the lies, but I'm confused about the economy. There's some things happening. The Atlanta Fed is projecting a Q2 rebound. Stock market looks stable on the one hand. On the other hand, Jamie Dimon's concerned about the bond market. UBS says recession possibilities ticking back up. Job growth forecasts are down.

I read one analyst said we may be entering a structurally high rate, high cost era with no off ramp. That seems bad. So, I don't know. What do you make about what's happening out there? You are not the only one who is confused if that makes you feel better. Maybe it makes you feel worse. I don't know.

Nobody knows what's going on. And that's partly because there are so many question marks about where federal policy is heading. So there's the tariff stuff, and that has obviously had a huge effect on businesses and will potentially have an effect pretty soon on consumers and workers, meaning that if the tariffs stick around in high levels and they may well change by the end of my finishing this sentence, that will lead to higher prices for consumers. It will lead to lower profits for businesses. It will lead to those businesses potentially having to resort to layoffs. So there's a big bucket of question marks there.

Then you also have a big bucket of question marks over this budget bill that you alluded to, which will add trillions of dollars to our deficits going forward. In addition to cutting taxes and gutting parts of the social safety net, but on what timeline, that is still sort of to be negotiated. So there are a lot of wild cards there.

So like, for example, the tax cuts could potentially boost the economy in the near term, particularly from a demand side perspective, if nothing else, because if people have more cash in their pockets, they're gonna spend that cash, maybe even if prices are going up quite a bit. On the other hand, if they lose a lot of these safety net benefits and maybe that won't even happen until after the next midterms, but maybe it'll happen sooner,

depends how negotiations shake out in the Senate, that means if they have fewer food stamps, they'll be spending less money on food. it'll happen sooner. Depends how negotiations shake out in the Senate. That means, well, if they have fewer food stamps, they'll be spending less money on food. So how does that affect the macro economy? Because all of these things have knock-on effects too. If people spend less money at their grocery store, then maybe the grocery store has fewer people it can hire, and then those people, or maybe ends up laying off people, who knows? and then those people end up spending less less elsewhere. So it's you know this multiplier effect that you might hear economists talk about. And besides all of that if we do have a recession which I very much hope we do not to be clear and I do not think it's a guaranteed

outcome but the the more turmoil we have with the trade stuff, the more likely that outcome is if we have a recession and and Medicaid and all sorts of other safety net benefits when uh, they lose their jobs when the economy turns south and that kind of automatically stabilizes the US economy. So again, like a lot of these things independently add a lot of risk and uncertainty to the economy, but then in combination, it's even worse. So that's why you hear all of these complicated and equivocated forecasts for where things are going because if we had just kept the economy that Trump inherited and he didn't do any of this stuff, we probably would have had that coveted soft landing that the Fed

was looking for, meaning that we keep growing as an economy, inflation comes down, etc. But now... Rates come down. Yeah, rates come down for mortgages, among other things. Now, who knows? Yeah. A lot of that stuff is like middle distance, right? I guess I wonder what people are looking at in the short term. There was, there was Friday last time we had John The tariff stuff was so insane that there were a lot of folks forecasting like recession this year like this fall and The taco response from Trump has I guess stalled that I was looking at Carlton over at CNBC He was talking about how one signal is that travel plans for the summer are kind of soft compared to what folks had anticipated coming out of those companies.

That's one indicator. At this point, are we kind of in a wait and see, do you think, or do you think there might be a change in the environment over the course of the summer? Well, again, a lot of it depends on who has- Our mad king. Our mad king who has last whispered in the ear of our mad king. And even if he doesn't ultimately do the most destructive possible scenario out there, which

might look like something he has proposed and temporarily implemented in the past of, you know, like 145% tariffs on China, et cetera. The uncertainty over everything itself is a drag on the economy. So when you say like wait and see mode as if that's, I don't know if you were actually saying that was a good thing, but I think that implies some optimism. And I guess it's a good thing compared to, oh my God, like the house is on fire and it's actually the owner of the home that's setting the fire in hopes that they get insurance. Like that's what we were two months ago. Right. But we're still now watching a guy like huffing gasoline fumes and lighting matches wandering

around the house to extend this metaphor. Great job. And that is also not good because if companies don't know what the rules of the road will be, do not know what their costs will be, whether consumers are going to still show up, whether tourists are still going to come, etc., that in in and of itself that leads to a sort of paralysis that can also really weigh on the economy I mean, I guess it's not as bad as Like setting the thing aflame today, but it's it's like a I'm really torturing this metaphor It's like a very slow burn that also is not good. So

None of these scenarios are great. Again, I don't think a recession is a fail complete and I don't want to suggest that, but certainly the odds of recession or at least a significant slowdown, you know, the dreaded stagflation, meaning that you have inflation and really slow, torturously slow growth. There's a high probability of that is what I would say. Still possible. Okay, last thing on the current economy.

Some of the tariffs, despite the taco strategy, some of the tariffs have still been implemented. Yeah. And we've had a significant increase in, if you look at the charts, how much people are paying in tariffs over the last month versus obviously last year. So are we seeing any actual evidence, any impact of that, or is it still kind of small in the grand scheme of things in a really big dynamic economy? Well, when you say some of the tariffs, as a reminder, we have 10% global tariffs, which at one point was considered the worst case scenario.

Trump promised 10% global tariffs during the campaign and markets did not believe him because they thought that was too stupid, right? Even Donald Trump would know better than to have 10% global tariffs because it would be really damaging to the economy. To be fair, we've carved out Rolls-Royce engines, some iPhone equipment, a handful of things. Well, no, I think Rolls-Royce engines, if memory serves, I think they're still at 10%. They're just not at 25% or whatever it was. There are some carve-outs.

You mentioned, what did you say, semiconductors? Some iPhone. iPhone. But there may be more tariffs coming that are a little bit on more legally solid ground. So there's still a lot of uncertainty. We haven't seen any of this show up yet in consumer prices, if you look at the latest numbers, anyway. And I think that's partly because a lot of companies

tried to front run the tariffs. So they're still working through the inventory that they already have and haven't necessarily raised prices. If they bring in the stuff and they're paying a lot more for it, they will pass along, at least part of those price increases. So it could very well be that next month, the inflation numbers look way worse depending

on how businesses respond. Sure. All right. Moving over to Capitol Hill, I want to get through some of the lies that you're debunking, but just first, I'd like to get the global Catherine Rampel take on the big, beautiful bill slash reconciliation bill slash turd. So the way I have been describing it is that it is essentially a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, from the young to the old, and from the future to the

past. Which I think is a nice way of summing up basically all of the moving parts in this bill. Great news for old rich. Yeah, exactly. Congrats. We've got some old rich listeners out there. All right. This is your lucky day.

And in the White House and buddies with people in the White House. Well, in the sense that, you know, there are tax cuts in this. They go technically to everyone, but they are most valuable to people at the very top end of the income distribution. And then they are partly offset by cutting programs that most benefit people at the bottom of the income distribution. So cutting Medicaid, cutting food stamps, other safety net programs, et cetera. And Democrats have finally caught on to some of this and have been talking about it.

But there are also a lot of cuts to programs that disproportionately affect children, for example. And some of those are the same programs that I mentioned. Children are disproportionately large participants in the food stamp program, as well as Medicaid and CHIP, which is by definition a program for children, all of those things will be affected as well. And then there are changes to the child tax credit that Republicans will say increase the child tax credit, but it also takes it away from millions of kids because if one

of their parents is an immigrant and doesn't have a social security number, then they don't get it, which by the way, affects children of legal immigrants as well, not only those who are undocumented. You don't count as a human. If you're a child of two parents, and one is an immigrant, and one is an American citizen. I'm sorry, you're a half human.

There are a lot of things that they are doing to go after that particular group, including trying to claw back birthright citizenship and things like that that's not related to this bill, but that's part of a broader agenda. And then robbing the future for the past. Some of that is about literally future generations of taxpayers, again, today's children,

who will have to pay off the additional debts that are incurred because of this bill, either in the form of higher future taxes or lower future spending on programs they might otherwise be able to access, but also taking away a lot of renewable energy related tax credits, which are, I would say, an investment in the future of our energy security

and not just how our energy sector will be structured, but how the rest of the economy will be structured. So there's a lot of like very short-termism at the very least. And as I alluded to before, there are intra-party debates within the Republican Party about a lot of these pieces. So we don't know what the final bill will look like.

We know, for example, that it'll probably have some degree of heartlessness when it comes to Medicaid, but how much heartlessness and when will it materialize? Will it be before the next midterms? Will it be after, etc.? Yeah, some listeners have been giving me feedback. There's a lot of random Christmas tree stuff in the House bill. I really just don't think it's going to get through the Senate.

We were talking about AI. I forget if it was on yesterday's podcast or recently and people were like, well, there's this bill that like guts AI regulation for a decade. I'm like, is that going to get through the Senate? I don't know. There's some things overseeing what the judges can do. Yep. Like none of that is technically reconciliation. It's possible that the Senate will break their own rules and jam through a bunch of stuff that does not fit in reconciliation, which would be functionally ending the filibuster

that Republicans have said that they're for. Maybe that'll happen and that'll be something that we'll watch. But I think that the economic stuff is the most likely to get jammed through. You talked about the intra-party. There's a lot of time spent on kind of like the intra-party cleavages and issues, right? Like, you know, the Josh Hollies of the world don't love the Medicaid cuts, the Ron Johnson's of the world don't love the debt. Who likes this bill? It sounds like a sarcastic question, but I'm kind of serious. Like, who is really excited about it? Like, I don't see on my social media anybody

that's like, I am the biggest BBB stan because I represent this part of the MAGA faction. That's the most confusing thing about it to me Well, Donald Trump says it's it's big and beautiful And so to some extent everybody else in the party has to fall in line with that and you'll hear people like Speaker Johnson Sing its praises and this is the best, you know, the best thing we're gonna get. What do they like about it? Just that it extends the Trump tax cuts, I guess. I think it's mostly that it's- But they could have just done that.

Well, that would be extremely expensive. So that's part of the issue here. It's already extremely expensive. Uh, and then there were a bunch of other tax cuts. They added on top. Yeah. That Trump had promised on the campaign trail, which make it even more expensive. And then there's like the whole fight

over state and local taxes, which were capped in the 2017 tax overhaul that is now being extended. So if you live in a state with high property taxes or high state income taxes, et cetera, you can only deduct up to $10,000. But that is expiring this year. And, um, that was kind of a knock on blue states, right?

It was a way to shake down blue states because that those are the ones that tend to have higher state taxes, but there are some Republicans who live, who, who are represent swing districts like in New Jersey or Maryland or California, whose own constituents are also hurt by this. And so if you raise the cap as they have agreed to do, then that makes it even more expensive. I guess they really like it. That's the answer to the question. Mike Lala really likes the bill.

Well, I know that they compromised to, I forget what the latest is, but it was like a, you can deduct up to $40,000 if your household makes up to 500 grand. I don't remember. It was some kind of compromise. I don't remember if he was super jazzed about it or he was like, this is the best we're going to get. But I think it puts him at less risk in any event in the next midterms. So there are a lot of these warring constituencies.

They, they want kind of mutually exclusive things, whether that might be even more tax cuts or potentially lower hit to the deficit. So it's a trade-off. And again, it's not clear to me necessarily which faction will win out in a lot, like on the Medicaid thing in particular. But I think their main motivation besides they want to cut taxes is they want to keep Donald Trump happy. Which is why I think it's interesting.

The corporate Republican faction was pretty excited about the original Trump tax cuts. Like you remember them singing the praises. And you know, that was true in the Bush era too. This one is just, it's a little confusing. You usually think they're like niche constituencies of people you're like, oh yeah, Grover Norquist was really happy about this, but you're not seeing this this time.

Okay. Again, there are also some really weird things tucked in there, even on the tax side, like these kind of punitive taxes. So even the tax guys are worried about like some smaller provisions here, how they might be weaponized. Will they make it harder for foreign investors, for example, to buy US treasury debt? There's a lot of other weird stuff in this bill. Yeah.

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promo code bulwark at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindeleteeme.com slash bulwark and enter code bulwark at checkout. That's joindeleteeme.com slash bulwark and enter code bulwark at checkout. That's join delete me.com slash bulwark code bulwark. Going through a couple of their claims. I want you to debunk it. So he had Russ vote out this weekend was pushing back on the critiques from the reality based community about the Medicaid cuts. I don't know, play a little bit for you of what, what Russ had to say. Look, one out of every five or six dollars in Medicaid is improper.

We have illegal immigrants on the program. We don't have, we have able-bodied working adults that don't have a work requirement that they would have in TANF or even SNAP. And those are something that's very important to Institute. That's what this bill does. No one will lose coverage as a result of this bill. No. Nobody will lose coverage?

Is that correct? No, no, that's bull. Again, Congressional Budget Office, which is a nonpartisan sort of like a scorekeeper, referee research group within Congress, they have said something like from the Medicaid provisions alone, I think around 8 million people will become uninsured if you include a bunch of other provisions and policies related to health insurance, like the Affordable Care Act, enhanced medical premiums,

expiring, like other boring things like that. The numbers are like double. Anyway, yeah, so yes, people will lose their insurance. That is not up for debate. I think what's interesting here is that now that Democrats have kind of caught on to the fact that, Hey, there's some stuff in here that's pretty bad for the public and that we can use as a, you know, as a political cudgel, including on Medicaid, more people in the public seem to be worried about Medicaid, quite understandably, and they're showing up at town halls and asking about it.

And the response from Republicans is one of the three following the answers. One, no one will lose coverage, as you just heard. Two, okay, some people will lose coverage, but it's only the freeloaders and welfare queens not deserving people like you. And then three, we're all going to die anyway, so who cares? That was Joni Ernst who responded that way.

So I'm not sure any of those are in the realm of both truth and a winning political strategy. It is true we were all going to die anyway. Not sure that's gonna get you a lot of voters. Well, if you converted to Christianity, that wouldn't be a problem for you because you would have everlasting life in heaven. I guess. I don't know what your premiums are in heaven though. So maybe you're still worse off. I'm sorry. Sorry that you're godless. I'm not the right god at least. Okay. Well, Mike Johnson was making the same claim. We don't need to listen to him. But I guess the point of it is you're not in a particularly strong place when you just have to bald-faced lie about what is in the bill. And that's where they're at. And I guess the bet here is that they can just lie. And this really, you hate to hand it to Ron Johnson,

but this is kind of the case that Ron Johnson is making complaining about this bill over in the Senate is that what they're gonna do in the house is they're gonna tell you that they're gonna cut everybody's healthcare. But like after the midterms, right? And then who knows, 27 might come along and, you know, assuming we have elections in 2028, like whether that's

JD Vance or Donald Trump Jr. or whatever, we'll decide they don't want the baggage of it. So they kick it down the path and end up not actually doing it, which I guess is possible. So you can lie about that now because you end up keeping kicking the can and anytime it's actually gonna happen, you don guess is possible. So you can lie about that now because you end up keeping kicking the can and anytime it's actually going to happen, you don't do it. And then the result of that is the massive skyrocketing of the debt, which has the other problems that you just laid out. And so I guess that's a critique of the bill from Ron Johnson. Like

there's no way to make the case for the bill that doesn't just acknowledge the cuts. Right. Well, that's sort of why I summarized it as how heartless are they willing to be. And all of these choices have trade-offs. If you don't want to take health insurance away from poor people, then you're probably going to add more debt unless you decide not to cut all of these taxes, which it seems like that's the red line right already even before this bill our deficits were not sustainable and Politicians at some point will have to make really hard choices about

Reducing deficits that might mean higher taxes that might mean lower spending or some combination of the two everybody wants this You know elusive get out of jail free card, which is just like we'll grow our way out of it, which You know It's just not going to happen based on our demographics among other things, especially if we're deporting all of the immigrants Because you you need a large workforce. you need future generations of children, all sorts of other things in order to grow the economy. So like that just assumes a bunch of fairy tale things that are not going to happen.

On the debt thing, you're on a panel, I was watching to prepare. I've watched a couple of your things recently to prepare. We're going to get to one of them at the end. But the panel, you were saying that you think it's very unlikely that Democrats can take up the mantle of caring about the debt and deficit if these guys go forth with this deficit exploding bill that might create issues in the bond markets and all the other issues you just laid out. I'm kind of inclined to agree with you on that, though I'm doing a one man's journey to make that not happen. Every Democrat I have on the podcast, I ask them if we can negatively polarize you into caring about the debt and deficit in an actual way, not in a Bill Clinton did a

good job with this 30 years ago kind of way. Because that's true, but not really relevant to what would be required now to address the debt and deficit. And also part of the reason why we had a temporary budget surplus coming out of the Clinton years was about the demographics of the country. Like boomers were in their prime earning years, so they were paying a lot in taxes. Now they are retired or retiring and birth rates are low. The good news is they're sticking around and working a lot. You know, they're not just quitting working at 65, they're rolling 81, 82, running for president again.

That's true. So that's nice. The small subset of them refused to retire, but I'm not sure how much additional productive capacity they are adding to the US economy. Okay. So anyways, here's my counterpitch about why we could maybe get back to the Simpson-Pulse glory days is that your point in that panel was that it's hard to get people to care about that it's not tangible. It's not affecting their

lives, but it kind of is starting to affect people's lives right now. Right? Like that if the, you know, yield stays high and people already people's eyes have closed, glazed over. So let me not use the word yield, but you know, if we get into a place where no matter what happens with the economy, the interest rates on people's car loans, student loans, mortgages stay high. Like that is going to impact people in like a real way. And it's impacting people now. I talk to people all the time, like want to move houses, either up size or down size, or have an issue with their house and can't because they're like, I'm why, how can I move? Like I'm stuck given the interest rate environment. So that will affect people. They just have to like learn that the debt is part of the reason that the interest rate environment. So that will affect people.

They just have to like learn that the debt is part of the reason that that's affecting them. Maybe that's the challenge. I think that's part of the challenge. The bigger part of the challenge is all of the things that would be required to solve the problem, you know, to get deficits down are just fundamentally unpopular. And again, that includes... Soaking the rich is popular.

Okay. It is popular, but even Democrats are like, well, we're only, the rich are only the billionaires, you know? And look, I agree billionaires could probably afford to pay higher taxes, but there's just not enough money on that money tree to, to get the amount of revenue we need. How about making all the boomer assholes that want to keep working into their eighties,

you don't get Medicare as long as you're working. You know, so how about that? That would save us some money. Would be very unpopular. All of the things. That's not gonna be popular. No, I don't know how you would carve it out just for politicians or something like that.

I'm talking about private sector workers too. No, but we need more people working. I think probably we should not be leaning so much on 80-year-olds to fulfill that role. Yeah, it's like everything that you would do to solve the problem is really unpopular. Neither party wants to take the short-term political hit to get those things through because it feels like a long-term problem. It used to be that politicians feared that it would become a big issue in the short-term, right? It was James Carville who said he wanted to come back, die and come back to the bond market was so

powerful and this is kind of what he was referring to. But what's happened in the many years since then is that the rest of the world has continued lending us money, even when we have these huge deficits. So they're kind of like keeping us in the habit of spending more than we take in and never having to deal with the consequences, we take in and never having to deal with the consequences, or it feels like never having to deal with the consequences. And at some point, it will become a problem. But nobody knows when that point is going to be. As you pointed out, like interest rates, yields are rising, and that's painful, but it's not like Greece level or Argentina level or other places that

really had major debt crises. And the United States has our own exceptionalism and maybe we'll be different. And so far that has been the case in part because people have trusted us and the dollar is the global reserve currency. And that basically makes it more likely that people will keep feeding our habit. When everybody else changes their mind and at some point they, I think they will, but I could be tomorrow, could be 30 years from now. That's the only thing that I think we'll get politicians to act.

And probably by then it'll be way too late. Right. This is why we have Katherine on. This is why you're an economic analyst of choice. Just because I depress everyone. Well, I've got good news for you. I was listening to the All In podcast, the Tech Bros, and I was encouraged that they did not like the bill and they have concerns about the debt and the interest rates, among other things. And David Balzac, the most willing to carry Trump's water, was like, AI is going to solve it.

And then just kind of like moved on. I was like, how? It's like, we don't know yet. We don't know. It's a nice thing about the techno-optimist crowd is they can just be like, AI will solve it. So I can do whatever I want right now. And the super intelligent computer will figure it out later.

I've got some other issues. People are bored with yield talk. I can already tell. I know. It's issues. People are bored with yield talk. I can already tell. I know. It's important, but it's really hard to get people to care about. You're in the TV business. What is it called when you look at the ratings for every three-minute segment, whatever that

is? That just was tanking during that period. Sorry. So we're trying to recover it. Immigration, I want to talk to you and do some science stuff. You wrote recently for the Post about how Trump has created a surge in illegal immigrants. Kind of a cute way of putting it because he's taken away the legal status of many immigrants, particularly the Venezuelans who are given temporary protected status.

That is happening for the Afghans as well. Cuba and Nicaragua, Haiti are on the chopping block. So we've got that happening on the one hand. Well, actually, let's just sit with that for a second. I want to get into some Stephen Miller stuff. This policy is pretty crazy. Yeah, well, Trump has been warning, fear maugering for years that the United States is being overrun by illegals, you know, illegal immigrants. And he is now manifesting those fever dreams into reality by literally taking people who are here legally and rendering them illegal. So yes,

in the past week and a half, two weeks, we have added something like 800,000 more, quote unquote, illegal immigrants or undocumented immigrants, but that's because he DEDOCUMENTED them and and I think people don't realize this besides this being inhumane and destroying lots of people's lives including the lives potentially of many of our friends and allies and uh people, you know assisted our military in Afghanistan, etc. That will also have big effects on the economy because when he's taking away these people's status,

what if they're on these programs called like temporary protected status or they're parolees or whatever, that comes generally with the ability to work. So he has now effectively taken 800,000 people potentially out of the labor force. Now, like when employers will start to realize that, I don't know, I don't think that happened overnight, but that's going to have big effects on the economy. In addition to, again, the human effects that

I'm more concerned about. And then he's also done a bunch of other things to try to make it harder for legal immigrants to come into the country. Whether we're talking about refugees, people who may be more penniless and desperate and we want to let in because it's the moral thing to do, it helps our moral standing in the world or for that matter, scientists and students and, you know, quote unquote, higher skilled people who are also very critical to the U S economy. He has made it a lot harder for them to come in legally. The line from Trump is always, or Trump and Trumpers is always, we don't hate immigrants. We only hate those who haven't followed the law, the criminals, you know, the

gang bangers, people living in the shadows. But the truth is, he has taken away every legal pathway to come in here, quote unquote, the right way and is stripping legal status away from people who didn't, in fact, do exactly that. Pete Yeah, I want to get to the scientists. But one thing on this point on the criminals, there was a Washington Examiner story, you know, I hate citing some to the scientists, but one thing on this point on the criminals. There was a Washington Examiner story. I hate citing some of these outlets, but it's kind of like in Men in Black where you get the real news from the National Enquirer. That's kind of where we are right now. Sometimes we get the real news from these places because they actually talk to the fucking freaks that are populating our government. But apparently there was a report from inside a meeting between Stephen Miller and ICE and

some DHS officials where Stephen Miller was yelling. You can really picture this. I want people to kind of get this scene in their heads. He gets really mad. I'm thinking about this. Have you ever seen the scene of him in high school where he's screaming about how he doesn't want to have to clean up his food? What the hell do we pay the janitors for?

Why do I have to clean up my own food? Have you ever seen that video? I have not. Okay, that's a good one. It's worth Googling. I'm picturing him in that kind of tone, shouting at the ICE officials who actually are people that have experience as police, as opposed to him. What do you mean you're going after criminals? Why aren't you at Home Depot? Why aren't

you at 7-Eleven? So, I guess in private, they belie the idea that they actually even give a fuck about whether or not the people they're deporting are criminals. They don't care. And in public in many ways, they're arresting people when they show up for their routine check-ins with immigration agents, which by definition means that they are trying to follow the law. And so you'll see stories like I think in this past week or the week before, there was a high school student in the Bronx who showed up for his regular ICE or immigration court hearing, something like that, had no criminal record. He had come in with permission under, I believe,

a Biden-era program, and he was arrested and detained. And there are a lot of stories like this throughout the country. The issue is, besides the fact that like Stephen Miller wants to just round up everyone, whether they're criminals or not, when ICE has these quotas to fill, which reportedly they do, how many arrests they have to make per day, the people who are abiding by the law, who are showing up at their hearings, etc. They're the much lower hanging fruit. It's hard to find the rapists and gang bangers and drug dealers who are actually public safety threats, who are in the shadows and not voluntarily going to ICE offices. It's really hard to hunt those people down. Even if I think there's widespread bipartisan support

for finding those people. It's really easy to find people who are voluntarily telling the government where they live, where they work, they're here legally, or they have some kind of temporary status that allows them to be here legally and to work legally. Those people are, ICE knows where they are, so just arrest them. And so you can see that in the numbers. Actually, if you look at the ICE detention data from January before Trump took office versus sometime in, I think, mid-May, the number of people in ICE detention who have criminal records has gone up, it's like one and a half times what it was when Trump took office, so it's higher.

The number of people in ICE detention who have no criminal records and no criminal charges, they're only there because of some alleged immigration violation, which is generally a civil violation or may not even exist at all, has gone up sevenfold. So the biggest increase in detentions is among people who are by definition not criminals. From one depressing topic to one that's even maybe more, there's a New York Times story out this morning. I'm going to read a little bit more from it than I usually do just because it's so affecting. It's by Kate Zernicki. The story is about how the US used to light a beacon for science for immigrants throughout the world. Now some

fear it's dimming, maybe understated there on the subhead from the New York Times. Here's how it starts. Artem Potapuchyan's story is not just the American dream, it's the dream of American science. He arrived in LA at age 18 after fleeing war torn Lebanon. Shout out to the Lebanese. I'm a quarter Lebanese. He spent a year delivering dominoes to become eligible for the University of California. He went on to get a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience. He started a lab in San Diego with a grant from NIH, discovered the way human sense touch and in 2021 won the Nobel Prize. The Trump cuts got rid of his federal grant to develop new approaches to treating pain. He posted about this on blue sky. He said within hours

he had an email from a Chinese official offering to move his lab to any city any university he wants with a guarantee of funding for 20 years. Potipuchin declined because he loves America, guarantee of funding for 20 years. Potipuchin declined because he loves America, but he's worried many other scientists just setting out on their careers, however, are not going to have any option but to leave. That's pretty depressing. Yeah. And the story goes on with many more examples of it.

Yes. Look, over the past century, science and research have basically been America's golden goose in the sense that they have contributed way outsize to their actual part of the economy, to the broader economy. That's why we lead in tech, in science, in a lot of other fields. And that's why it's been so easy in many ways to attract the best and brightest to come here. Like it feeds on itself that we attract the best and brightest to come here. They do cutting edge research and that is an engine for the US economy and then that it begets more and more scientists to come here.

And those who do come here not only are successful in their own right, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that they make American born talent more productive as well. There's a lot of research from an economist at NYU named Petra Moser that looks at how changes in immigration law have actually affected all of this over the years. And among other things like the arrival of a lot of German Jewish emigres who fled the Nazis revolutionized US science and innovation and probably the Manhattan Project could not have existed without them. So it's not only about the economy, it's also about national defense, whatever you think of the Manhattan Project. And that if you look at the quota acts in the 1920s, when we really clamped down on external immigration, disproportionately immigration from

Eastern and Southern Europe. The scientists who came from those places were more likely to be in some fields than others, and as a result, those fields in the United States suffered disproportionately. in the United States suffered disproportionately. So basically like this is not a hypothetical concern about this brain drain. You know, solely on this, for now I'm just talking about immigration here. We actually have lots of evidence that American innovation, American productivity, American research benefits

when we are able to bring in global talent and suffers when we're not able to. That's like, you can see it in the patent records, for example. And then on top of that, you mentioned the grants. And this is another example of slaughtering the golden goose. Trump has purged a lot of scientists from within the federal government who work on research, work on medical research at NIH, agricultural research at the USDA, et cetera,

has pushed a lot of those people out, has made it much harder to get grants or explicitly cut off grants from private research institutions, whether that's related to like suppose a DEI concerns, there were a lot of grants, science and research grants frozen because of that initially and then there's more punitive stuff targeting specific institutions. All of that is going to affect our ability to cure diseases, to come up with the next

iPhone. You know, the iPhone is based on lots of research done by scientists, researchers at private universities. It's, you know, Steve Jobs, brilliant guy, Apple, very innovative company, but a lot of what went into innovations like that comes from research being done at these public research institutions. So we are going to basically turn off this spigot of talent, turn off this spigot of research that we're developing here. Some of that's going to move abroad.

Maybe we'll have new labs set up in China and they'll be nice enough to lend us the results of those great discoveries. I think Europe is also poaching a lot of our scientists right now. Canada actually, one of those papers that I mentioned, Canada was a big beneficiary of the quota X, as I recall, from the 1920s, because a bunch of scientists went there. So, you know, other countries will benefit, but probably on net the world will be worse off, because we have been proven ourselves

to be really good at this stuff, in ways that benefits us, that has spillover effects for the rest of the world, particularly when it comes to medical breakthroughs. And for what? I have no idea. Yeah. The kicker quote in that story. All the medicines, this is from a biologist at Harvard who is an immigrant from Czech Republic or probably Czechoslovakia at the time he came. All the medicines that people take, they were developed in the US. There's essentially nothing developed by anywhere else.

We're on top of the whole thing and we're really risking it all. Yeah. So it's a pretty ominous assessment. You just mentioned a lot of the Jewish scientists that have come here. Do you have any, I'm sure you have many thoughts on kind of the spate of anti-Semitic attacks we've seen recently? Yeah. Anything in particular that strikes you?

It's very ugly. I'm Jewish and I've been getting a lot of it lately from both the far left and the far right for very different reasons. And one thing that's very scary about all of this stuff is, you know, if you're a journalist, if you're somehow in the public eye, you get a lot of hate mail no matter what. But in a country where it's very easy to secure weapons firearms, it's really hard to know when these kinds of threats are people just blowing off steam and when they are actually going to act on their expressed desire to do harm to various out groups, whether that's Jews or anyone else. I guess in Colorado, the guy used a Molotov cocktail or, you know, flamethrower something and not a firearm, but you know, it's very disturbing. Personally, I find it disturbing

from perspective of like everybody should feel safe at night when they go to sleep. It's very disturbing. And I wish I knew what the solution is. But meanwhile, as we are seeing a rise in anti-Semitic incidents here in the United States, the Trump administration has been sort of weaponizing that rise to do completely unrelated things. Right? Right?

So, you know, to punish Harvard, to punish Columbia, like say international students can't come here, and none of that makes me feel safer as a Jew. You know, having people kidnapped off of the streets and punished for their speech, historically, not good for Jews. Yeah. We're going to be targeting students at Ivy League schools because we want to protect Jews. It's like, wait a minute. Oh, well, the administration actually sent a survey to all of the professors at Barnard, which is part of Columbia, asking them if they were Jewish. Like ostensibly because, you know,

like they were trying to identify if there was a rise in antisemitism on campus. But you know, my view is when the government is making a list of Jewish intellectual elites, it usually does not end well, whatever their stated purposes. So yeah, I don't know what to say except it's terrible. And we've seen this story before.

Again, it's not only Jews who are at risk right now, but if you are a Jewish person and you wanna go to synagogue or like the JCC or whatever, it suddenly feels a lot more dangerous than it used to be and nobody's doing anything about it and instead I feel like you have politicians capitalizing on it you see these mobs on the internet cheering it on and I do worry about more copycat behaviors and also this sort of like glorification of political violence,

not only being used against Jews, but against other groups, whether they're like pro-Palestine students or anyone else. And I just feel like the whole country right now feels really on edge and feels like any match could be lit and you could have something really disastrous happen. And that's not a great feeling right now. All right we're running out of time I just want to close with something really quick. I feel remiss not to mention this steaming down here in Louisiana. We had a story from Reuters yesterday. The staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was left baffled on Monday after

the head of that agency said he had not been aware that the country has a hurricane season. According to four sources familiar with the situation, David Richardson, the newly named FEMA director, has no disaster response experience. So there you go. You feeling good now? You're feeling good about sleeping at night now with this guy? With the best and the brightest in charge? Yes, the meritocracy at work. All right. Bring back DEI.

I don't know, whatever concerns the public may have had with DEI, it seemed like it resulted in slightly more competent people running the Department of Transportation and the military and FEMA for that matter than whatever we have now. DEI versus FoxEI, you know, I don't know exactly how that works. The final thing, you were with Ezra. You did Ezra's show as well as mine, which I appreciate. And you know, we're just monitoring Ezra right now. He's maybe gone dark Ezra.

He's flipped. He's the foil of the left on the internet now. He's grown a beard. He told Hasan Minhaj, I think he's taken creatine. He's working out. What'd you make? You were in his presence. Did you feel kind of a dark energy or a glow up coming off of podcast host competitor Ezra Klein? I think Ezra has always been glamorous. So what can I say? Do I need to grow a beard, do you think, to compete or start taking any supplements?

I think intellectual curiosity is the best glow up one can have. And you have it in spades, that Ezra has it in spades. And, um, this fight with the left is a whole other issue that we could do a different conversation on that. I feel like Democrats kind of learned nothing from the last election, but that's a whole separate issue. We should do another, another group on that. We can have a little...

Oh my God. I have much to say that's going to get me in trouble, but whatever. I'll say it anyway. That is a nice tease for your next visit to the podcast, and I'm going to endeavor to get you in trouble when you come back. Thank you so much, Katherine Rappell. Thanks, Tim. Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast.

See you all then. Peace. Took a train to the house of life, cause you saw it. In the back of a magazine that you liked so much, you bought it. Do you ever have a good time, but there's still this voice that's telling you to stop and just let it go. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that.

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that.

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. Do you ever have a good time but there's still this voice that's telling you you don't deserve this kind of love? I'm trying and now I'm crying in the back street In a place that I don't belong You said it's just a bad day Trying not to fixate But I'm crying in the backseat of a taxi in Tokyo

In the bar I ask you why you're always on your phone and You told me that you think you'd like me to be more confident Think you meant it like a good thing but it sounds so mean Like you wish you were with someone with a different body The Bullork Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.