The David Pakman Show - BONUS FREEBIE: New Mexico makes childcare free, RFK weighs blaming mass shootings on video games

Episode Date: September 13, 2025

-- On the Bonus Show: New Mexico is making childcare free, RFK Jr. weighs blaming mass shootings on video games, sugar consumption goes up when it's hot outside, and much more... Become a Member: https://www.davidpakman.com/membership  Subscribe to our (FREE) Substack newsletter: https://davidpakman.substack.com/  Buy David's book: https://davidpakman.com/book 

Hey, everybody, David here. What you're about to hear is an episode of the bonus show. We do a bonus show every day for our members. And for a limited time, we will release one of the week's bonus shows on Saturdays exclusively for our audio podcast listeners. If you'd like to get access to all of the bonus shows, simply sign up at join packman.com. Here is that bonus show episode. welcome to the bonus show new mexico is doing something that no other state has done no it's not making soylent free at the point of purchase it is making child care free the program starts in a couple of months it's expected to save families twelve thousand dollars a year per child and it'll be available to all residents regardless of income no state has done that this before. This is something New Mexico has been working on for a while. They created this early childhood education program and department. The idea was always to expand eligibility for universal child care. Now the expansion is full. There is no income eligibility at all. And it's basically

up to a $12,000 credit towards child care. Now, I don't know, you know, different states have different childcare costs. You might say, $1,000 a month is not what it costs. You know, daycare is more expensive or right. Well, it doesn't cover everything. But the whole point is regardless of income, you will have up to $12,000 available here. And the idea also comes with the plan to construct new child care facilities, which will pay staff a minimum of $18 an hour. I do think, Pat, in thinking about this, it is important to consider that in general in New Mexico, wages are lower and cost of living is lower. And so while these numbers may sound extremely low for a place like New York City, it costs a lot less to live in New Mexico. People tend to earn lower wages

in New Mexico. And this is a very interesting program. Well, that makes New Mexico the perfect candidate to try this. And if it succeeds, I'd love to see other states do the exact same thing. New Mexico is also uniquely positioned to be able to pull this off because they have an oil and gas fund. So they're basically able to tax the energy companies and that money can go toward this child care initiative. It makes a lot of sense to do this for a number of reasons. Of course, you're directly helping families, giving them that $12,000 annually. You're also going to boost the workforce participation rate because there are a lot of parents who would like to be out working, but they can't because they have to stay home and take care of their kids. So that's going

to help the economy overall lead to more revenue probably for the state as well. And then you also improve child developments and equality, regardless of if you can afford the best child care, your kids are going to be better off because the state is going to be able to offer you this money for it. So I think it makes a whole lot of sense. There will probably be Republican pushback because they'll write it off as free things for everyone. But it seems to make a lot of sense to me. The other thing is people love to jump in when when initiatives like this are attempted, like when you think back to the failed Vermont attempt to do universal health care, which unfortunately failed. I mean, it was it was less a problem with the idea,

but the execution. But anyway, a lot of Republicans react by going, listen, Vermont has, I'm trying to, I think it's 600,000 people. Let me just make sure I know. Vermont has 650,000 as a population. It was more, it was even lower back when they proposed this. Vermont can do things that other places simply can't do. And one of the realities is that when, you have a smaller population from an administrative standpoint, things might be easier, but there's also fewer people paying into whatever the program is. So it's like it's not a guarantee that just the lower population makes it easier to do something. In a way, it could make it more difficult, smaller risk pools or sometimes harder to predict

the expenses of. With New Mexico, there's kind of two things going on. There are people already saying, oh, New Mexico can afford to do this because they only have like 2.1 million people living there. Fine. It's not clear that that makes it necessarily easier. But there's another thing about New Mexico, which is it's the fifth largest state by area. And sometimes there are actually more challenges when services are more geographically distributed

with a lower population density. So I don't really put much stock into those types of arguments, Pat. Right. I think it's reasonable to assume that some states will have an easier time pulling off a program like this than other states because governments divide their budgets up differently. they have different sources of revenue and, of course, the politics state by state are different, but there's no obvious reason to me why this would fail in any particular state. Like I think New Mexico can pull this off and I think New York could pull this off.

And maybe some red states could as well. They may have to change their tax structure and be willing to tax corporations more. But there's no reason to me anyway to believe that they wouldn't be able to do this if they put the effort into it. No, same here. And sometimes it's just what happened to Republicans stick to itiveness? If we decide we want to do something, we're going to be able to do it. But in all seriousness, I'm super interested in this.

I'm interested in seeing how it goes. And hopefully it's the sort of program that's going to be mirrored elsewhere as well. We are going back to old ideas. Everything old is new again, Pat. What if mass shootings are caused by video games? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. looking like a veritable traffic cone, making himself up or doing tanning to look like Donald Trump at this point in time. Once again, he is again spitting out a whole bunch of these older notions that I thought we had moved beyond. And one of those during an hour

long event was we should consider, we should consider whether violent video games are a factor here. Now, one interesting thing that Kennedy said was that Switzerland. has a comparable number of guns to the U.S. but have almost no mass shootings. And I think that that's a fascinating comparison because what Republicans love to do is say, hey, listen, guns can't be the problem because by rate, Switzerland and the U.S. have sort of the same gun density. But there are some really important differences. I'm going to get back to the video games in a second. As we've talked about it, and I'm sure you can fill in the blanks here, Pat, I won't remember everything. Number one, a lot of the guns people have in Switzerland are like a rifle that's

mounted somewhere or in some basement. It's just like a kind of cultural thing that you have in Switzerland. It's not handguns in the way that people in the United States are doing it. In terms of people carrying guns around far less common in Switzerland. Culturally, it is a completely different relationship. In Switzerland, they don't have the sickness we have in the US of seeing a gun as something to solve an interpersonal problem with. So just looking at the gun density doesn't really tell you everything you need to know about Switzerland. Also, there are much stricter regulations when it comes to gun ownership in Switzerland. So having to go through those hurdles, whether it be proving that you know how to handle the weapon or just going through the process in general goes to

show that you're probably more likely to be well suited to be able to carry that firearm and not be negligent with it. Also, only ex-military personnel in Switzerland are allowed to keep guns in their homes. So these are presumably people who have been trained in firearms and know what they're doing. So the fact is that, yes, the rates of ownership may be similar, but the fact also is that they get a lot more training and there's more regulation over there than here. All right. So RFK at baseline, starting with something that's kind of nonsense, which is the problem isn't guns because Switzerland also has guns. But then he throws out, you know, connections with video games, connections with social media, et cetera. I don't have any problem, Pat, researching every single

one of those things. And the social media connection should be researched. But we have a ton of research. I mean, a decade ago, I interviewed a professor who had researched the effect of violent video games on guns. My best recollection of the data is that there is not a link between violent video games and shootings, but that there may be some link between people predisposed to aggression, having their aggression escalated from playing a lot of violent video games. But that's a very tenuous connection to going out and shooting people. And also, even though we do have a ton of mass shootings in the U.S. compared to other countries, it's still a relatively infrequent event. And so the law of small

numbers also makes it difficult to find such a correlation. Well, we were just comparing gun ownership rates between here and Switzerland and the mass shootings that happen here and in Switzerland. It turns out that Switzerland also has video games. It also has psychiatric medicines. It also has social media and the types of things that typically people on the right are willing to blame these mass shootings on. I also think that there is a defensiveness sometimes from people who, like me, who say, we've got to deal with the guns themselves at least to some degree. Sometimes people on what I might call like our side, and I kind of hesitate to say that, we get

a little defensive when all of these things are brought up. I am like research all of it. I want to know every. If there are 15 different causes, I want to know all of them. But that also includes how easy it is to get guns, ready availability, all of that stuff. A bunch of these have been studied, and we already have an answer. But like, I think it's important for us not to get defensive, but to say it is they who don't want to deal with the lowest hanging fruit, which is the guns themselves.

Well, that's a difficulty, right? Because we want to have an open mind. We want to be able to hear out every possible argument, right? But it gets to a point where we've already researched these causes, possible causes. It gets debunked and it's time to move on because we've already spent. the time and money researching that one particular possible causal link, we didn't find out that that was the case. So we now want to move on to other things and actually spend their time and money wisely. So that's why it's so annoying when RFK and others rehash the video games

talking points or with plenty of other things too, going back to this idea that maybe vaccines cause autism. We've gone through that. We've studied it. If there's some new data that we can discover that makes us want to research things differently or look at it again. Of course, we can do that. But shy of that, we should be moving on to other possibilities and not wasting our time. We are anxiously awaiting the answer to what causes autism, which RFK told us he was going to give us during September. And I think, I think they're going to talk about Tylenol in that conversation. We'll cover that when it actually goes public. A Republican has become a Democrat.

Oregon State Representative, Saruse Javadi, or some people say Cyrus. I've seen that name pronounced both ways, Pat. Oh, I didn't know it could be pronounced that way. Yeah, it's quite a fascinating thing. I grew up with a Sarus. Anyway, Cyrus or Sirius Javadi has, by the way, this one I really don't know how to pronounce. Okay, this one's not a joke, just to be clear.

Sometimes I joke about it. Javadi has left the Republican Party and is becoming a Democrat. And in a statement to Newsweek, he said that the reason he's doing this is the Republican party has abandoned the principles that drew him to it in the first place. Those are limited government, fiscal responsibility, free speech, free trade, and the rule of law. And what I find so interesting about this, Pat, is that those are principles that are nowhere to be found in MAGA. I mean, limited government.

Trump's getting involved in everything. Trump's buying pieces of companies. He wants the government directing what private business should be doing. responsibility. Trump blows up the deficit every time he's present. Free speech. They're suppressing speech all the time. Free trade. Tariffs are the opposite of free trade. Rule of law. I don't think I have to give you too many examples of the ways in which MAGA does not represent the rule of law. I respect Javadi because he is saying, here are my principles. I don't just abandon my principles because my party has abandoned the principles. And I find that. I find that, I find

this fascinating. I don't expect this to really become a bigger trend, if I'm, if I'm honest. Yeah. If anything, the real story is that Javadi is the only Republican nationwide who were hearing about do this. If actual Republicans who wanted to stick to principle and weren't just going along with whatever Trump says to further their own personal interests and further their own power, if they were doing the right thing, then of course they would also switch to becoming Democrats or at least leave the Republican Party. We saw some of these examples back during Trump's first term, but we've gotten to a point now where if you were going to get off the boat, you probably already left. And so now we sometimes hear about people defecting from the Republican Party and

switching to becoming Democrats, but it's few and far between. So, you know, this isn't even like a U.S. representative. This is a state level representative, someone from Oregon here. So it's, it's harder and harder to find these examples, I think. Are you at this? point, um, thinking about whether they're sort of like, will whoever comes after Trump be MAGA and, you know, will it be Vance or whoever? But then there's also will whoever replaces Trump change on some of these big philosophical issues that the Republican Party has changed so much on, certainly since, since even Bush was president, but if you look at Reagan, I mean, it's a complete and total 180.

Or do you think that at this point, the Republican Party is. so committed to this, that this is some version of MAGA is what is going to stick. I could see there being a fracturing because no one else is going to have that cult of personality to keep people in check and keep everyone unified. There could be a branch that is like the JD Vance type branch that is maybe closer to corporate interests and like Elon Musk, for example, trying to do more types of like traditional Republican things. And then you could have like a Marjorie Taylor Green conspiracy theory type branch who is a lot different from the traditional Republicans and whoever has dominance over

the party could swing back and forth over the next few election cycles. That's what I'm thinking at this point, that it'll fracture in some way. All right. Join me tonight. I will be on the California redistricting funding funding. fundraiser, emceed by Brian Tyler Cohen, Brian Tyler, Tyler Bryan's, and Tyler Cohen. It's like six people are going to be emceeing this thing. I will be on around 7.50 p.m. Eastern with the comedian Leslie Jones, who I guess is going to be

at a nail salon while the stream is happening. It's a whole thing, Pat. This is a really wild thing. We, it's going to be streaming everywhere, including on our YouTube. channel and in other places. So that's tonight. And then I'll be back tomorrow with a new show and a new bonus show.