The Dispatch Podcast - Can the U.S. Tax Code Be Simplified?

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Mike Warren, Scott Lincicome, and Megan McArdle to discuss our overly complicated tax code and our launch of Dispatch Markets, featuring Scott's latest newsletter. Steve, Megan, and Mike then discuss New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax and how the democratic socialist mayor has governed so far.The Agenda:—Donald Rumsfeld's tax letter—The cost of tax compliance—Political will for tax reform—Personal vs. corporate tax complexity—Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax—Economic policy in New York—NWYT: J.D. Vance's small crowdDispatch Recommendations:—Trump Retribution Campaign Threatens to Unravel Indiana GOP—Is Private Credit in Trouble?—The Decline and Fall of Orbánism Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes, and I want to start today with some very exciting news. We at the dispatch are very pleased to announce the launch of dispatch markets in partnership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. This project will explore U.S. capitalism and economic policy at a time when free enterprise is no longer the assumption and the backdrop. It's increasingly the argument, front and center, and often under attack from both the progressive left and the populist right. Expect topics to range from how the Trump administration's tariffs are rippling through the economy to the challenges facing the Federal Reserve system, from AI and the future of work to tax policy. The authors will bring the intellectual honesty, respect for economic realities, and a willingness to grapple with tradeoffs that we hope have become a hallmark of the dispatch.

The roster is impressive and we're very excited about it. Contributors will include Scott Linsicum, Vice President of Economics at the Cato Institute, lecturer at Duke University Law School and author of the Capitalism Newsletter here at the dispatch since 2020. Megan McArdle, a dispatch contributor and Washington Post columnist, host of the reasonably optimistic podcast

and author of The Upside of Down. Carl Smith, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former Bloomberg columnist, a longtime vice president at the Tax Foundation. Kyla Scanlan, author of a widely read substack and in this economy, as well as a Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator fellow and New York Times contributor,

Marian Toopi, founder of Human Progress.org, co-author of Super Abundance and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and today I'm joined by two authors of Dispatch Markets, Scott Linsicum and Megan McArdle, as well as by Dispatch Senior Editor Mike Warren. We'll discuss Scott's just-published newsletter on our overly complicated tax code and the political right fight over how to reform it. We'll also discuss New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani's proposed tax on second homes within the city worth $5 million or more. And finally, for not worth your time, a small crowd for Vice President J.D. Vance. Let's dive in. Hey, everybody, thanks for joining. I want to start with a letter that Donald Rumsfeld used to send to the IRS every tax day.

The former defense secretary wrote, I have sent in our federal income tax and our gift tax returns for fill in the year. As in prior years, it's important for you to know that I have absolutely no idea whether our tax returns and our tax payments are accurate. Rumsfeld goes on. The tax code is so complex and the forms are so complicated that I know I cannot have any confidence that I know what's being requested. And therefore, I cannot and do not know.

and I suspect a great many Americans cannot know whether or not their tax returns are accurate. Scott, you have a terrific newsletter out Friday, the inaugural issue of the dispatch markets vertical, and you went very deep on tax complexity and reminded me, actually, of the Donald Rumsfeld letter. What's the problem here? Well, the problem

on its face is just simply that the tax code keeps getting more and more complex, and that forces all of us, including me, and probably a lot of other people listening to spend countless springtime weekends, toiling away in our home offices, trying to find receipts and PDFs and things that were mailed to us by random universities that had you out to speak and so on and so on, to simply send the government another check. A very frustrating process. So that's, on its face, it keeps getting more complicated. But buried beneath that is the reality that Congress loves handing out goodies or punishing

folks via the tax code. And there has been an explosion in what are called tax expenditures. This is just ways to give this person a credit or that energy supply, a credit, and on and on, deductions and on. And the taxes are the easiest way to do that for lots of boring political reasons that maybe might get into. And thus, almost every year now, every other year, surely, there's another tax thing that's added to the code and it just keeps getting longer and long. So you have some examples of just how long the code is and just how much time people spend I'm just going to read a little bit from your piece talking about how much Americans spend on their taxes.

$536 billion in 2024, 2025, 1.7% of 2025 gross domestic product. These are numbers according to our friends at the Tax Foundation. And Scott, you write, to put these figures in context, $536 billion is more than the corporate income tax will generate this year around twice as much as Trump's tariffs will raise. And more than 43 times the IRS budget, the $7.00. 1.1 billion hours spent complying, meanwhile, is the equivalent to 3.4 million full-time American workers, almost the population of Los Angeles, doing nothing but tax paperwork for a full year. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I think we will want to do, and I expect that you will continue to do,

you've done this in the past in your dispatch markets column, is explain to people the sort of of unseen costs of government intervention, government regulation, government tax policy. How do you make that clear? I mean, I think you've done it in a sort of fun and entertaining way there. And goodness knows, lots of people are going to be reading dispatch markets. But for the couple million people who don't read dispatch markets, how do you make that case? How do you frame that up so that people understand that? Yeah, it's hard, right? Especially because so much of Washington policy discussion is about, budgetary cost, right? How much did Washington spend on this? And that's it all. And so when you hear about, you know, Cylindra, for example, a famous green energy boondockle from the Obama years, I'm dating myself, I know, but they say, oh, we lost. We had a $900 million loan or whatever. But that's only the budgetary cost, right? So I think it's always important when you're talking to normal folks out there, right, is to explain that that is only the tip of the eye.

right, that there will be costs simply in time and energy handing out that money or lobbying for that money. So there's a cost. And then the other big thing is the opportunity cost, right? So all of the resources that went to build the factory that ended up being empty at Cilindra or plenty of other examples these days around the country are resources that can't go to other things that are more productive, right, that would have been done anyway. And so that's another big cost. So you have to always talk about these other kind of things that are buried in there. You know, taxes are an easy example. You talk about the time cost. I know guys like you, Steve, don't care about time costs, but most of us do. That's a shot at me because... It's an inside joke because Steve likes to wait in

gas lines at Costco. I mean, fake news. Based on an old column I did. I don't like to wait in gas lines at Costco, but I'm willing to wait in gas lines at Costco for the perceived savings. The perceived savings bring me so much joy that you can't put a dollar amount on that, despite Scott's very entertaining newsletter about this years ago. Steve, it gives you opportunity to read all of our newsletters. Of course. Exactly. So there's really no opportunity cost, right?

Also, Steve doesn't sleep, so his time is, any hour of his time is valuable because he doesn't, like the rest of us, lose. a third of them too. I read all of our stuff before it's published, Mike, just so you know. Sorry. Well, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, there's this Washington Post subscription, too, obviously. Obviously. It's got to get through. But I will say on a slightly more serious note, I think that's the other thing, right? Trying to, so that piece was on time costs and used waiting in line at Costco as an example of how much time we spend that has a real monetary value as well, right? And there's good economic research on this as well. So that's, I think,

the other part of this, right, is not simply using big numbers and wonky things about, you know, taxes or tariffs or whatever, but talking about like our everyday lives, right? That we deal with all of these things. You know, I wrote many years ago a column on my guard, my home gardening, right? And that was about how now we have this luxury of being able to waste time in a garden because we actually don't have to grow food ourselves, right? It's like a fun activity, not about actual sustenance. Yeah, you find examples like that and try to convey those complex concepts and ways people actually intuitively understand. Scott, can I ask something? Because I was reading your newsletter, and it just occurred to me as I was filing my tax return. We heard so much in 2017 about the Trump

tax cuts, or I think the official name of it was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Yeah. And this was described as this monumental, by proponents and opponents of it, this monumental sort of sweeping tax overhaul. And it did seem that way. I mean, there were major policy changes to the tax code. But yet we're still talking about the complexity, in a way that the complexity, which I think people like Paul Ryan, who was the speaker, was seeking to sort of simplify the tax code. It may be simplified in a relative sense. But ultimately, we're still having this conversation. you're still writing about the complexity, it seems like the political will to do what you're talking about

to sort of actually affect that change. I mean, if it couldn't be done in 2017 with Paul Ryan at the helm and Donald Trump ready to sign it, when could it ever be done? Well, exactly. It is a Herculian task because it is not simply one provision. It is hundreds of provisions. And every time you go after one of these provisions,

you are going to inevitably arouse the resistance of political constituencies that want that provision, or even got created because of that provision, right? And then there's an entire industry, the tax preparation industry, that benefits financially from all the complexity in the aggregate, right? So it is extremely difficult nut to crack. This was the genius of the 1986 Tax Act, was they, as chronicled in the great book,

showdown at Gucci Gulch, they wanted to do a base broadening and then getting rid of all of the complexity and so what they did was they just went after everything at once and they forced, there was just actually limited lobbying bandwidth for everyone in Congress and so they just forced them into a piranha-like contest against each other

and actually managed to really do a pretty good job at simplifying the code. And in fact, they tried to run that playbook with Obamacare again and I think it didn't work quite as well, in part because there were actually fewer special interests, like still a lot, but it was limited to one sector, whereas with the tax code, you could go after everything in once. It was great.

We should do that again. Yeah, right. I think the salt tax is just a fantastic example of the difficulties here, right? So one of the very good things that the TCJ did... Wait, tell us what the salt tax is. Yes. Tell us what the TCJ is. So the state and local tax deduction, right, is...

was, and now is again, we'll get to that, a big deal for a lot of taxpayers, particularly ones in high tax, blue states mainly, people with very high property taxes and state tax. Well, you could deduct that from your federal income taxes and get a nice break, right? The salt tax is bad for all sorts of reasons. If you want a progressive tax code, it is actually very, it benefits mainly rich people. If you want more housing, it distorts the housing market. You can go down the list, right? And of course, it adds to complexity. TCGA lowered the amount of salt deduction you can take to 10 grand, which dramatically limited, especially by raising the standard deduction as well.

It really reduced the number of people who were going to itemize their taxes at all. They just take the standard deduction, move on, right? But, of course, people in blue states in high dollar areas, high tax areas, freaked out about this and have been fighting for years to get that salt. cap raised or eliminated entirely. And they did it in the one big beautiful bill act. They got raised to $40,000. And it's going to go up again as well. And you had Republicans holding up the entire bill over this one. Republicans from New York, which is one of the big state where there are a lot of Republican representatives with high tax. Right. Well, their constituents had, you know,

$3 million homes in Westchester or whatever. We're very upset about not being able to get a tax break and, hey, God bless him. I don't want to pay taxes either. But still, that type of politics is brutal, right? And it really will take another 1986 flamethrower approach to do this. It just the bandwidth, especially right now with Republicans, it just doesn't seem like there's much my bandwidth. Because as I wrote in my column, not to give it all away, you know, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act did some decent stuff on extending the TCGA generally, but larded on all sorts of new handouts, right? No tax on tips. No tax on overtime. Senior deduction. No tax on auto loan interest, but only if it's an American-made car, on and on. And so these things are just

irresistible. It's political catnip on a campaign trail. And again, because tax bills now move through reconciliation, you don't have 60 votes in the Senate or whatever. It's just so easy to spend my money, your money, taxpayer money, via the tax code, instead of doing the heavy lifting of actual spending and appropriations. And there's not really a process anymore. I mean, all of the stuff, not all of it, but a lot of this stuff is thrown in at the last minute because people don't have time to read the bills. Somebody can sneak provision in, you know, in the last second before colleagues are aware of this and it gets worse and worse. Megan, you, by coincidence, on your very terrific, reasonably optimistic podcast last Friday.

Thank you. Did a solo pod like Jonah and the Ruminant, only policy focused and less about the dogs and other matters, did a 20-minute podcast with the headline, I'm not anti-tax, but this one should go. And you get into the complexity of the corporate tax, corporate income tax. Is the corporate income tax more complex than,

personal income tax? And if so, why? So the basic problem is this. People get really confused when I argue that we should basically not totally eliminate the corporate income tax. There are some reasons you want to keep a very low one for record-keeping purposes to prevent people from claiming that their small business, like owns their house and buys their groceries and so forth. But in general, the problem with taxing a corporation is that income is very hard to calculate for a corporation. This is the fundamental issue. And the reason it is harder to calculate for a corporation is that their expenses relative to, like, needed to generate the income that they get. They vary much more widely than they do for people.

Right? The basic operating expenses of one human being, they're just not that different, human beings plus or minus some health care. And actually, I think one of the reasons we get so emotional about health care is that it's the product where the basic amount you need to survive, the price of that varies the most widely between people. And as you may have noticed, this is also a very complicated policy area where we're constantly wrangling. So for a corporation, let's take two basic examples. I want to build an aluminum smelter. I need to buy a lot of raw material.

I need a lot of fixed capital investment. I'm going to need to buy a ton of electricity and turn that box site, as it's called, into aluminum. On the other hand, I want to start a consulting business. I need a room and a laptop and a telephone line or, you know, an internet connection. And there I'm ready to go. Maybe I get some subscriptions to, like, information services, right?

And the difference, so if, for that consultation, consulting business, everything I make over my quite low fixed expenses can be profit. Now, usually often these businesses start, that profit is what we would, aka personal income. But for the aluminum smelter, or for like a grocery store, profit margins for groceries, after you've accounted for all of their rent and the lighting and the refrigeration and then the actual stuff they sell us, their profit margins are generally in the one to three percent range. Whereas for a low fixed cost, high productivity business, they can be in the 40, 50, 50, 70% range. And you don't want to tax those things the same because otherwise you're going to end up

basically putting all of anything that takes capital and is a low margin out of business. And so you have to decide what their actual income is, what their actual profit is, not just how much revenue they took in. And if you don't do that, if you have what's called a gross receipts tax, so for example, The city of Philadelphia used to do this. They had a gross receipts tax. And you could actually visibly see the effect by driving through the neighborhoods near the border

because you would just, there would be no businesses, no, no, retail, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Cross a street and bam! It's like an explosion because you were saving, you know. It's like liquor stores in New Hampshire, you know, where it just... You stole my joke, my word. That was literally... It's not a joke, it's a reality, Scott.

I love driving... into New Hampshire from Massachusetts and just like all of the vape stores, the like tobacco, the liquor stores because of course they're syntax. Live free or die, baby. Yeah, that's right. So anyway, because of that,

you actually just need to figure out, spend a lot of time figuring out when expenses. Now, like, look, for a lot of things, that's pretty basic. If I pay wages, that's obviously an expense. But okay, what if I tell my employees that can take their clients out to dinner? that's like maybe I'm generating some sales, maybe I'm not.

How do you expense that? Because here is a thing, in the old tax code before 1986, as we just talked about, the expensing was, let us say, very generous. And so the temptation for employers is to give employees something they don't have to pay taxes on, unlike their salary, which is like a very large expense account, and a company car, and all of this stuff. So then one of the things the 1986 tax reform did was crack down on all that stuff. I think people who don't spend a lot of time diving into this

just think, well, we just got to close the loopholes. No, no, the loopholes are all the result of 90 years of arguing about what income is. Another example is corporate jets. This was Obama's favorite, right? Was like the corporate jet. And what it turned out, if you knew anything about this, you knew how stupid this was, first of all,

because this was a tiny, tiny, teeny, tiny amount of revenue. It was like functionally arounding it. in the budget. But second of all, what you were actually wrangling about was not whether you could expense corporate jets, because some people have to be able to expense jets. Like, for example, airline companies, what you were actually arguing about was should we depreciate them over five years or eight years, right? And what depreciation is for those not following along at home, is just the recognition, like, if you're a cab driver and you're, if you're driving for Uber and you're driving your car, you're not just consuming gas. You're actually consuming the car. You're going to have to

replace it faster, right? So depreciation's a little line item in your tax return that says, I use some up some of my car and I'm going to need a new one soon. My home office depreciates every year I have to calculate. Yeah. So anyway, like we were just arguing about should you take that expense over five years? Should you break it up into five chunks or eight chunks when you're deducting it on your taxes, right? It was the amount of money it cost the treasury was negligible, but it like sounds bad because I am not going to try to go out and explain depreciation to the average voter. And this makes the tax code opaque. It leads to a phenomenal amount of structuring activity

where people structure what their corporation does into lower productivity, but also lower tax activities. So this is just economically destructive. I thought that was one of the most interesting points that you made on your podcast. Can you go deeper on that for us? why does that incentivize that behavior? Yeah. So the ethanol subsidies are a great example of this, right?

We subsidize ethanol. This is not a good way to use corn at all, but it is a good way to get votes in Iowa, which has the first primary in the nation. And so basically you've basically gotten agribusinesses and oil companies to do this, like, environmentally not great, economically destructive and inefficient thing.

And there's a ton of these things in the tax code, in part because we tend to use the tax code to subsidize stuff because it's somewhat more opaque to voters. It's not costing the treasure any less, but if you structure it as a tax subsidy, it's harder to explain to voters that you were just basically giving these companies money. And so this happens a lot.

There was a great one. there was a, basically they had tried to do a biofuel subsidy in the tax code and it ended up basically incentivizing companies to create this toxic sludge called black liquor as a side effect of other processes to define that as a biofuel, which it was not, and get a tax break for it. And this stuff is all over the tax code. And it basically, it also does things. So you see this in housing a lot. where you get all these subsidies. So, for example, you give tax breaks for certain size developments,

but not other sized developments, well, or certain amounts of affordable housing and not others. And you see a lot of cliffs there where you have artificially kind of encouraged people. And again, I'm not necessarily against the government providing housing for people who are not able to be productive in the labor market. But you then, like, you should just do that. You should just pay for it.

You should not make it into this very, very, very, complicated tax code because it's really inefficient. And the net result of this is that a lot of those stats on how much effort and resources are wasted in the tax code, it's not that none of it is on the personal side, but a really disproportionate amount is on the corporate side. And so my proposal is this. We get rid of the corporate income tax, or we basically drop it down to like 1%, an amount that is not worth evading. we then do away with the special exemption, the special treatment of capital gains,

which is another way, right? Like, because we have a corporate income tax, we also treat capital gains specially to try to offset the capital destroying aspects of the corporate income tax, right? So we've now got like two different, all of these, we've already got complexity in the tax code. So just get rid of the special treatment.

Tax it is ordinary income. Tax it once, when it hits a person, when a person realizes cash, they pay tax. I also, like, I will now go even further with my incredibly controversial, get rid of the estate tax, and also treat inheritances as income,

which they are. I think you can, like, arrange, you can allow people to break it up over a certain number of years so that you're not, you know, like, but they just treat it as income. It's all income. Because what you actually want to do is tax people.

You think you want to tax corporations. Corporations do not have hopes and dreams or consumption. Ultimately, it's all about some shareholders, some manager, someone that you think deserves to pay more of the tax bill. Just eliminate the middleman. Tax the people. Yeah. I'd add two points. I agree with almost everything Megan said there. Okay. Well, no, on the policy prescription side, like we disagree a little. But I think the other things that we need to know about the corporate tax are one is it creates these massive, distortions that run against other apparent national government priorities.

You know, for a really long time, it was just fixed, in fact. We were taxing corporate tax disproportionately harmed large capital investments because you couldn't deduct those investments quickly. You had to amortize them over a long period. And so it effectively was making it less profitable to build a factory, especially a big fancy semiconductor factory, right? then it would be to have a software company or something that doesn't have those big, huge upfront investments. So what you were doing basically for a government that was trying to have semiconductor

manufacturing, right? You had a tax code that was literally pushing, you know, well, not literally, pushing against that, right? So there's, and there's all these weird distortions. The other thing, though, that's, I think, really important about the corporate tax is corporations hire the most sophisticated professionals to figure out every single way they can minimize their tax liability. So, you know, you and I, we have turbo tax, or maybe now chat GPT, or maybe you have your accountant buddy down the street. No, like corporations have like armies of the smartest, most sophisticated tax professionals in the world. And of course, they have potential multinational offshore places.

They have all of these incredible ways to avoid, or, of course, to lobby for even more breaks. And so it is just a vehicle for waste and cost and distortion. And I agree entirely. I mean, you know, I see the point of having a 1% then be fine.

I'm a nix-it-all-together guy, but whatever, right? It's just, it certainly is just terrible. Even now that they've done some simplification, it's still just absolutely terrible. still growing more. Yeah. Yeah. I should have said, too, that, like, one of the most important ways that companies avoid taxes, right, is that you basically, they leverage differences in international tax.

Right. And then you basically structure things so that any activity, most of the profits end up in the country with the lowest tax rate. And now, like, the Biden administration's idea was we should get a cartel to crack down on that. I think it would be just actually, I mean, my proposal is, no, no, no, we should, if you can't beat them, join them. Like, let's just, let's be the country that everyone wants to take all their profits in because our corporate income tax is so low. Steve, you need to cut in here because I'm afraid Megan and Scott are going to try to out libertarian each other on this.

That's okay. That'd be all right with me. I don't want to stop that. Well, it could get bloody. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. This episode is brought to you by Tell Us Online Securities. Oh, tax season is the worst.

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In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees earn an average of over $24.50 an hour. Employees also have the opportunity to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. And we're back. You're listening to The Dispatch Podcast. Let's jump in. I want to circle back to the politics point a little bit here because, you know, I've been in Washington for a long time. I was not here for the 1986 Graham Rudman Hollings, all of the tax debates back then. I came a little bit later. But there have been sort of pretty consistently until, I would say, roughly 10 years ago, eight years ago, six years ago, big debates about tax reform in the country in Congress, in congressional races at the presidential.

I mean, if you go back to 1996, remember Steve Forbes, who's this, you know, awkward publisher, not a TV-friendly guy in a TV-friendly moment in American politics, proposed this 17% flat tax and goes from and also ran, you know, an asterisk in the polls to at or near the top of polls on the Republican primary side in the days before the Iowa. caucuses in the New Hampshire primary. And there was at the time, you know, Forbes had proposed this 17% flat tax. Phil Graham, also running for president, senator from Texas, came up with his own flat tax proposal right before the Iowa caucuses. And it was a 16% across the board flat tax, which reminded me of the scene from the movie, there's something about Mary when Ben Stiller.

picks up the hitchhiker, and they have this discussion about exercise and marketing. I'm going to start my own company. Really? You on in? Uh, no, I'm not, I don't really have any, you know, money or... You heard of this thing, the eight-minute abs? Yeah, sure, eight-minute abs. Yeah, the exercise video.

Yeah, well, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this. Seven. minute ab. Right. Yes. Okay. All right. I see where you're going. Think about it. You walk into a video store. You see eight minute abs sitting there. There's seven minute abs right beside it. Which one are you going to pick, man? I would go for the seven. Yeah. Bingo, man. Bingo.

So I'm just going to point out for historical sake, that movie came out, I believe, in 1998. This tax reform debate was in 19. I don't think there's really any question that the Fairley brothers built that scene around the Steve Forbes Phil Graham competitive tax reform proposal bids in the 1996 Republican primary. So, Mike, there was, at the day after Phil Graham made his announcement, by the way, Jack Kemp's announced the results of his 1996 tax reform commission. So we saw this a lot. We saw this, you know, more recently in 2016, there was the Herman Kane 999. 99. We're just not having these debates anymore, it seems to me.

As the code continues to get more and more complex, why is tax reform not a bigger part of our political discussion? Before I answer that question, I want to contend with your idea that Steve Forbes is not TV ready because you may recall that after he dropped out of the presidential race, he actually hosted Saturday Night Live. And so disproving that. And furthermore, the musical guest on that episode was Rage Against the Machine.

and I just love that idea of Steve Forbes introducing rage against the machine, the most sort of a lefty rock group that you could think of. So why aren't we having these debates anymore? Steve, like, we talk about this all the time. We're not having any policy debates anymore. I mean, what are we really talking about that has any real significance? We debate Iran policy when we launch a war with Iran. We debate tariffs when, well, if Scott had his way, we would be debating tariffs all the time.

But when we have a liberation day moment. We sort of move from moment to moment. And I think in a lot of ways, leave the Democratic Party aside for a second. The Republican Party, the ruling party in Washington right now, they move in the direction of wherever the president, wherever the leader's gesture of that moment is. And there is no sort of policy debate to be had because Donald Trump doesn't really have any sort of philosophical or ideological views about taxation. if anything, he is very much of that ill-guid that says,

okay, who can come to me and I can give handouts to, who can I help subsidize, who can I punish that I don't like or who angers me? So there's been, I would say, you know, in my 16 years in Washington, there has been such a degradation of the conversation that's going around in, you know, on Capitol Hill, in think tanks, and even in media,

It feels like those of us in the media that try to write about this or talk about this or ask politicians about this feels like we're almost fighting a losing battle even bringing these kinds of issues up because at the end of the day, it seems like there's none of the institutional knowledge or interest in debating some of these issues. And the reason I asked Scott at the beginning about the tax cut and jobs act, right, the TCJM, the 2017 Trump tax cuts, is because that really does feel like it was like the end. of those debates. And I'm not saying that, look, you know, everybody on this podcast thinks and writes and talks about these issues and a whole lot of other issues. But when it comes to elected officials, it's just not a part of the conversation. And it is a baffling question for me because I go out on the trail. I'm on the trail right now trying to cover some, some races and some primaries. And when you ask, you know, folks who are running for office about policy questions, they almost are like taken a back, like, oh, hold on. Wait, you're asking me about what? You're not asking about what Trump said.

You're not asking me about horse race stuff. And you could tell they're a little uncomfortable about it. Yeah, you can actually see this, I think, in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, this tension. Because there were, I think, tax writers who actually wanted to have a good tax bill. That's fair. Right. And they wanted to just extend TCGA, make full expensing permanent. That's the deduction for capital investments, that kind of stuff, and go along with it. But the issue is that you had Trump just previously promising no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on, and so they had to deal with that stuff too. And I think one of the kind of clever things some of the tax writers, Republican tax writers, did was all of those gimmicks expire, or at least they're scheduled to expire. That's a whole other

story, if they actually will. And while the good stuff, the stuff they wanted, permanent, right? So they're like, okay, just three years of this nonsense and permanent good stuff and will mullah. But there's just this huge tension between the kind of Trump show and actual people who want to make policy in Washington, right? And it's a brutal dynamic. Yeah, it certainly is the case that there are people who are having these debates and people, I mean, on the hill, you know, well-meaning, hardworking policy, you know, on tax and tax reform. But beyond that as well, we are shorthand for them sometimes is the get done caucus. It's not sexy, but people have to do the basic work of government, and there are good people doing it. We just don't have much of a public

debate. I mean, even the one big beautiful bill or the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, you know, there were debates about it, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise, but in terms of getting, you know, having a sort of fully engaged continuing debate on the relative tradeoffs or the policy merits of these kinds of bills. We just don't have it the way that we used to. Well, as promised, I want to play a video that New York City Mayor Zoran Mamdani released on Tax Day, Happy Tax Day, he said, released this on social media. And it fits perfectly with the kinds of things that we were saying. And I think Mom Donnie might not be the way I would have done it, is seeking to engage this debate on sort of his progressive populist socialist terms, and there's no question he met to provoke with this video.

When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich. Well, today, we're taxing the rich. I'm thrilled to announce who's secured a pieterterre tax, the first in New York's history. This is an annual fee on luxury properties worth more than $5 million whose owners do not live full-time in the city. Like for this penthouse, which hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin bought for $238 million. This period of tear tax is specifically designed for the richest of the rich. Those who store their wealth in New York City real estate, but who don't actually live here. But even so, they're able to reap the huge financial rewards of owning property and, dare I say, the greatest city in the world.

And most of the time, these units are sitting empty, since again, they don't actually live here. This is a fundamentally unfair system that hurts working New Yorkers. Now, it's coming to an end. This tax will raise at least $500 million directly for the city. It'll help fund things like free childcare. cleaner streets and safer neighborhoods. As mayor, I believe everyone has a role to play in contributing to our city. And some, a little bit more than others.

Happy Tax Day, New York. I love the succession theme music that's playing underneath. Is that what that was? Yeah, it's a rip-off of the succession theme and really trying to play into that, the evil rich people on that show. Remember them? Don't you want to tax them? Yeah.

Indeed. Yeah. Megan, I'll start with you on sort of the policy implications of this. Let's just say, if you're an average New Yorker making an hourly wage, you voted for Mom Donnie, you wanted some reform, you like the idea of soaking the rich. Is this good from a policy perspective for that kind of a voter? Complicated. Like, it's not, if you think that you're actually going to raise $500 million, then I guess there are worse ways to raise it. I mean, here's the thing.

What you're going to do is crash the market for high-end New York real estate. And people who have PIA tariffs are going to sell them. And then that real estate will be worth less, which will lower your property tax collections. So that's great. And then you're not going to totally crash the market. But, you know, New York is also – and to the extent that New York is doing this instead of raising the income tax on its highest earners, which was the alternative plan that they'd settled on, you know, it's better. But that said, the people who have pay a tiers,

I guess you could say they consume a scarce real estate unit that someone else could be in. And that is true, but they're not that many of these apartments. It's not like London where you have whole neighborhoods where, like, literally no one's there. And it's a little freak. And not literally, but you walk through some parts of, like, Kensington. And it would just feel weirdly empty at night because it didn't seem like anyone was actually residing in any of the houses.

But those people, when they come, they consume a lot of services. They consume a lot of, like, retail and restaurants and all that stuff. What they don't consume is normal city services, right? They don't ask you to educate their children. They don't use the roads that much. All of the expensive... They don't ride the bus. They don't ride the bus.

But they also don't, like, generate a lot of trash, right? All of the stuff you have to pay. for as a city. So it's not clear that by chasing those people out, it's actually net fiscally beneficial, given that this is on the margin going to ease the real estate taxes you collect, lower them. And also, to the extent that other people move in who are residents of New York, you get some income tax from them. On the other hand, I will say that a friend who is on the board of a New York City private school says those people are already leaving. Yeah.

They just, they don't trust Mom Dani. And so this private school, which is a, like, pretty prestigious private school, is basically they're now having trouble filling their places for, especially for older kids. People are just decamping to the suburbs or to, like, Florida in one case. He said, like, one of their hedge fund people just left, moving to Florida. And Kathy Hochel, by the way, who hilariously. This is the governor of New York. The governor in New York who has to.

to sign off on this, right? Like, Momdani is claiming credit for this. The New York State Legislature has to sign off and the governor on New York City raising its taxes. But, you know, five years ago, Hockel, I think it was 2021, she was saying, you know, don't let the doorknob hit you on the butt on the way out, you know, traitors. We don't need you. You're not, if you voted for, you know, like, Trump, if you're one of these, like, get the hell out of here, go to Florida. And then she has apparently realized that those people paid a lot of taxes and she needs them and was actually saying, like, you know, if you go to Florida, you know anyone who has moved there, tell them to move back. Yeah. And I think the PA, A Terra tax is basically an attempt to say, okay, well, we're not

against people who live here because you guys generate a lot of income taxes for both the state and the city. It's just owning, it's, we're going to do a new property tax on owning property in New York, but I think it's just generally the signals that Momdani is sending is, I hate rich people, and I'm going to screw them. Yes. And you can argue that that's totally fair. Those rich people are parasites. They don't pay their fair share.

I do not think that is an accurate account of what the New York City tax base and service base looks like. But leave that aside. If that's what you think, like, those people are, a lot of them are just to be like, you know what? I don't need the hassle. New York's a great place. It's got a lot of amazing, like, culture and so forth.

There are a lot of places in the world with a lot of amazing culture. forth. And they're just like, it would be much less of a pain in the butt to have real estate somewhere else, stay in a, you know, stay in a hotel the few nights that I want to come to the city and just not have the hassle. Or downgrade my P.A. Aterra to one, like, another thing you're probably going to see. Ken Griffin can sell his fabulous mansion and buy like a nice little $5 billion apartment that he's not going to have to pay taxes on. And a $5 million apartment really is little in probably the fanciest areas of New York, but it's probably big enough to have a few people in for dinner when you want to do that. And like, do you're entertaining in a restaurant?

Do you're like, and so I think ultimately what this is going to do is crash the ultra high end of the New York City real estate market quite a bit, in part because it's happening at a time when remote work and telecoms and shifts in the global economy and so forth, have just made it less essential to be in urban areas like Silicon Valley, like Seattle, like New York. These places have depended for decades on having a moat. Can't really move your highest earners out in New York. You need that, like, knowledge cluster. You still need it. It's less valuable than it was. It's easier to hop on a plane and, like, do it somewhere else. People, their upcoming cities like Austin that are starting to become real tech hubs and so forth. And, like,

New York has to really grapple with the fact that there is competition. But don't you think, Megan, and you're a native New Yorker? I am. I grew up there. That this is such a sort of politically populist move here. Like there has always been this kind of, particularly in Manhattan, right, a kind of like, you know, the rich people are finally getting what a lot of regular New Yorkers have always kind of felt. They're finally having to do pay their fair share. Politically, this seems really savvy of Mamdani, irrespective.

of all of the problems that you have raised about what this might mean for revenue. You know, this is something that at least a segment of New York's population has wanted in some way, maybe not in understanding the specifics of how it would happen and what it would look like, but a way to kind of just stick it to very wealthy class that has become in the last couple of decades, ultra wealthy. And that wealth has been sort of even more imposing in ways that sort of trigger that the lizard part of your brain, as journalized said. Yeah. So I think is it politically savvy in the short term? Probably. Lots of things are politically savvy in the short term. It was politically savvy in the short term for New York City in the 60s to build up all sorts of running deficits and so forth.

It then turned out to be not so politically savvy when the city almost went bankrupt in the 1970s. There's a great documentary on this, by the way, called Drop Dead City that I highly recommend watching. It's, I believe, on Netflix. And it chronicles that my dad was actually a budget analyst in the city of New York during those years and was an assistant. He was a budget analyst under Lindsay and then he was an assistant to Abe Beam when all of this was going down. And so had a front row seat to the disaster. And, you know, a thing that happened in the 60s was that New York, for a variety of reasons, and you can argue that it would have happened anyway.

But New York kind of actively chased its most. manufacturing out. And people within New York City politics were trying to stop that and saying, like, no, you can't just keep jacking up all the taxes and regulations and so forth on manufacturing without losing it. And people were just saying, well, A, we don't need them. And B, they can't really leave. How are you going to leave the city in New York? A lot of people could leave the city of New York. Sounds familiar. Yeah. And I think that this is the thing. New York, one thing to remember is that this is actually quite new. You know, the rise of finance as the,

I don't want to say loan, but now close to the loan anchor of the New York City economy. The culture industry is still there. It is struggling. It has not recovered from the pandemic. Tourism is constrained by the fact that the unions have made it.

The city has done deals with the unions to both basically make it illegal to operate in Airbnb and constrain hotel construction. Cost of a hotel room in Manhattan is out of control. The advertising industry, is not what it once was.

Television production has moved out of New York and L.A., which is very expensive, and two other places. Within the New York City area, there are some studios in New Jersey, but there's also for scripted shows more and more Atlanta, Vancouver, etc.

Those businesses are still there. They still generate a lot of money, but, like, linear TV is dying. Linear TV is what the industry calls, basically, your cable plus broadcast. That industry is dying. And New York doesn't have a lot of movie stuff, to do location shoots there,

but what it has is a lot of television. And that industry is going to be gone in 10 or 15 years unless it figures out how to pivot to video, pivot to video as we at the dispatch are doing. And so ultimately, they are really more dependent than ever on finance, which was one important, but not actually even that important aspect of New York. Wall Street was one aspect of New York's economy in the 70s.

it is now the overwhelming anchor in terms of revenue. And if that anchor goes away, it can't go away entirely. There's just a lot of reasons that it's kind of stuck there. But the more of it, the more the hedge funds move out, the more all of that stuff, the more you try to tax away all those salaries and people move either to the suburbs,

or they just move somewhere else, right? These people are more mobile than they used to be. the more New York's tax base is going to hurt. And that is what Hockel is kind of belatedly waking up to. And what Democrats just kind of assumed couldn't happen. And that is, it can. It is happening. Yeah.

I mean, Mike, I agree with you on the mom, Donnie political movement. I think he's, I think he is a genius politically. I mean, I think he's the way that he's, the way that he's, the way that he injects himself into the debate. We're talking about him now. but we're talking about him for substantive, populous, progressive reasons. It's not just, he's not Eric Swalwell for all of the reasons that we think. Eric's Wawahwell isn't great. But he manages to do this and he sort of comes up with policy proposals that I think are mostly disastrous.

Mostly will be, have horrible results on New York City, on the economy in New York City. But it's almost like he's, it's like there's a race. There's a competition. On the one hand, he's. rolling out these proposals that I think are likely to do damage to New York City economy and lower his popularity as the damage becomes more and more obvious. But at the same time, he's growing his presence. He's, you know, becoming a nationally known Democratic Party spokesman. One of the things he rolled out this week, you know, he ran on this controversial proposal of having city grocery stores. And he announced this week that they would be opening the first of, you know,

these in 2029, so not right away. And the cost is likely to be $30 million. I don't know a lot about what it would cost to open a grocery store in New York City, but $30 million is quite a bit of money. Do you think he's backloading these proposals so that he can sort of up his, what are they used to call it, the cue? His cue score, yeah. You know, be more in the debate, drive. the debate and then these policies that he's proposing don't actually take place. They're not implemented until much later in his term or because he's a true believer. I mean, I think, you know, by most indications, he believes that the things that he's doing will help is just a matter of like cutting through the red tape and figuring out how to set this

thing up and that's going to take three years. A couple things. One, I think I agree with you about Mom Donnie's savvy. I think he is, he smartly focused the first couple of months. of his administration on the kind of boring tasks that a mayor must worry about and did it in a way that was also engaging with the city and with the media on fixing potholes, right? I think that was one of the videos that he's put out. So he didn't lead with the million, you know, gazillionaire tax.

He's only getting to that in April. But I do think that he is a part of a continuum within the. Democratic Party. You can include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another New Yorker, and they all sort of are the children or grandchildren of Bernie Sanders, which sort of has, on the left, has taken policy seriously in the sense that they look at what their party has been standing for. Maybe they have sort of exaggerated or made up a few things that their party is standing for and saying, we want something different and is engaging in essentially a democratic socialist ideas for what government can do, what government ought to be doing, what the tax code should look like

in order to pay for that. And I would say my observation on this is that there is no competition, not just within the Democratic Party, but within the political arena at large, with this force within politics. I think there is nothing happening on the right. I think the right is sort of going to be caught looking at a world in which these policies are more popular than they think, certainly in the short term, and they're going to be sort of trying to play catch-up and relearn a lot of the lessons that Republicans had to learn kind of in the 60s and 70s, as the New Deal sort of grew into the great society and the excesses of that required, I think, conservatives and right-of-center policy people to come up with better solutions. I think they're

going to be Johnny's come lately on it, because, as what I said before, the policy is not what is motivating folks on the right. The center of the Democratic Party is a whole other story, but I think there is, this is like a long-winded way of me saying, I think there's a vacuum for policy. I think the Democratic socialists, as flawed as I believe that they are in this,

are filling a part of that vacuum on their side, and everybody else in politics is, to mix all my metaphors here, is like whistling past the graveyard on this, and they need to wake up. Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the Dispenter, You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles.

You can sign up at the dispatch.com slash join, and if you use the promo code roundtable, you'll get a month free. Speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and more. Okay, we'll be right back. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Before we get to not worth your time, I want to ask you both if you have a story that you've read in the dispatch over the past few days that you would recommend that our listeners go and check out.

Mike and I'll start with you. David Drucker, our colleague was on the road in Indiana looking at the retribution campaign that Donald Trump and his allies are making on the, they're waging it on eight state senators who defied Trump's wishes to redraw the map, the congressional. map in the middle of the decade. It was an incredible stand that those state senators did, which blocked that change to the map. Trump is claiming he's going to go after them. And I think anytime that we get out on the road and tell you what people are really thinking, what these state senators who made this move are saying, and what their challengers are saying as well, I think is enriching. And I definitely recommend everybody go read it. Megan? I'm going to recommend a little bit of an oldie but a goodie because I haven't gotten to talk since I read this, but it was the April

7th morning dispatch on private credit so good that I had people on Wall Street tell me that they thought it was really well done and unusually well done for media organizations that are often really struggling to talk about this subject intelligently. So if you happen to miss that one, if that doesn't tickle a memory, I highly recommend that you go back to your morning dispatch email, which I'm sure you all get and read religiously and reread that one because it really was a treat. Yeah, and if you're not a member yet, the only way you'll be able to read the whole thing is by becoming a member at the dispatch.com slash join. Yeah. That was really great one, Megan, and it was led by Alex DeMis, who's one of our reporters who has a history in those, in covering those things.

So it very much showed, and I got the same kind of response that you did. So we will put that, the show notes, we'll put Drucker in the show notes, along with some of the things we talked about earlier today. I'm actually going to recommend a Jonah piece, which pains me for reasons. What? I think everybody can understand, but it's really good. And it's the decline and fall of Orbánism, looking at the loss of Victor Orban in Hungary last weekend and the implications for Orban in Hungary, but also, and especially the implications for the New Right here in the United States. very, very smart look at those issues. Finally, for not worth your time, a little bit more of an on the news, this is more of a Sarah Isker not worth your time than a Steve Hayes not worth

your time because I think one of her criteria early on was, you know, what are the youths buzzing about on the interwebs? There was a picture this week that surfaced on Twitter of the crowd at an event that Vice President J.D. Vance attended in Georgia, and the event was sponsored by Talking Points USA. No, Turning Point, USA. What did I say? Talking Points. Talking Points, USA. Although that is a great rebrand. I mean, maybe, right? Turning Point, USA. And I did not give either of the panelists to heads up that we were going to be talking about this. So I'm not sure that you've seen it. but if you've seen it, I'm usually somebody who doesn't, you know, this happens all the time in the last few weeks of a campaign, right?

The opposing side goes and takes pictures of empty rooms and says, oh, this person has no momentum. This person is determined to lose or destined to lose. I don't usually pay attention to that. But I did think this was pretty notable. I mean, it was a huge space. It was maybe a third filled, if that. These were free tickets that were provided.

I'm interested, Mike, if you've seen it, if you have, does it tell us anything? I mean, we know Republicans are down in the polls. Donald Trump's approval is very low. J.D. Vance's approval is very low. Poll after poll shows an enthusiasm gap, hurting Republicans. But you're in Georgia. This is an election year in Georgia. If ever you're going to show up to something like this, it would be sort of at a moment

like this, no? How much should we read into? picture like that. So there's actually a lot going on in that picture in terms of what could explain it. I think it's probably a combination of a lot of different things. One is something that I think actually deserves a little more reporting treatment, which is what's going on with Turning Point USA as an organization since the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, who was the founder and leader of that organization since his death last fall, I think the organization itself is going through a bit of an identity crisis and trying to figure out how it, you know, they have this big, famous charismatic

leader who's now no longer there. And I think that has a lot to do with the organization as a whole that might explain what's happening, at least in part. I think what you described is J.D. Vance's low approval, particularly in the Trump administration's low approval among young people that looked like maybe young people were sort of, there was almost like, is this going to be Reagan 2.0 in the way that sort of young people were on the side of Ronald Reagan, particularly the 1984 election. And after the 2024 election, it seemed like the trend might be going that way. I don't think that's the case anymore. I think a big explanation might be. I'm here in Georgia. The weather is wonderful. I have been. I've spent four years on an SEC campus at this time of

year in a neighboring state, but it's essentially the same kind of weather. It's a great day to be outside. It was a great day to be outside on that day to sit, you know, in University of Georgia has some beautiful lawns to sit on. Who wants to sit in an arena and listen to, and then not that popular vice president. There was the lieutenant governor who was running for governor, Bert Jones, was also there, not necessarily a huge draw for the kids. So look, I think when it comes to kind of the opportunity cost or the other options that are out there for young people, going to see J.D. Vance in April is just not the draw of that maybe it would have been in an actual presidential election year. Yeah, Megan, how much should we read into this picture of this single image?

I think Mike makes many good points. Although it is like if the weather is competing with you, that's not a great sign for your candidacy. I feel like... Right. It would have been packed if it were storming. Yes, okay, fair enough. Senator Barack Obama would have filled that space, right? in, like, 2006. So I think, look, my baseline opinion of J.D. Vance is that, like, I liked some of the iterations of J.D. Vance. It's not the current iteration is not my favorite. But I always had some skepticism that he was going to be president. I still think that his best path to the presidency is for Trump to die in office, simply because it's not about whether you'd even be a good president.

I think Hillary Clinton would have been a better president than Donald Trump, but she was a really bad politician. In America, the filter is you got to get past. It's not like a parliamentary system where you can just be on the list, and it's your turn, and you go. You got to get past the public. And if the other party's brand is sufficiently damaged, George H.W. Bush, who I think was a wonderful president,

can get past the filter, but in general, you've got to get past the filter. And J.D. Vance doesn't have it is what they call it in Hollywood, where you get two equally good-looking people and you put one of them on screen and they're amazing. And you put the other one on screen and it's like, ah, he doesn't, he just doesn't resonate with the crowd. He's a really good debater. He skunked Tim Walts. And I think he's a good enough politician to get into the Senate, maybe even without Trump's endorsement in a different year. We can argue about that, right? Like, maybe that's not true. It took a lot to pull him over the edge. I don't think MAGA, J.D. Vance, could have gotten into the Senate without Trump, but I think a completely different guy who was running on, like, his old persona of empathetic right-wing centrism. Maybe. I don't know. But all of that aside, to get the presidency is a whole different level of charisma and performance, and he doesn't have it. He's never going to have it.

And I think that this is going to affect the race to be his successor, because Trump likes people who are obsequious, and he likes people who are craven, but he doesn't like losers. And he is, unless he dies in office, in which case, all bets are off, right? Although in that case also, I think J.D. Vance just ends up owning all of Trump's bad policy ideas and loses in 2028. But unless, I think this has got to elevate Rubio, who is having a bit of a moment, right? The Marco Rubio memes are the best thing about American politics right now.

There's about the only thing, political thing, that Americans in a bipartisan way can kind of gently enjoy without destroying each other. He has been competent. You may disagree about a bunch of the stuff that the government has done, but he has executed competently and has executed without doing, the JD Vance attack dog.

Let's talk about the Haitians eating cats and dogs stuff. And so I think overall, you've got to think Rubio's now got a much better shot at getting the King's nod for the Royal Succession did, you know, a year ago.

Yeah, I mean, Vance, this is sort of angry edge to everything that Vance says and does these days that was different than the Hillbilly elegy J.D. Vance, which was fundamentally sort of optimistic. And I think, you know, you talk to people who know Vance and have known him for years. There are many different theories about why that is.

One of them being that he understands what he had to do to get to where he is. And he sort of continues to resent it to this day that he's had to make arguments that he didn't fundamentally believe in a way that I think Rubio has, Rubio has certainly changed his positions and his approach, you know, The industrial policy, Marco, is very different from the Marco that ran in 2016. In fact, when I was with Marco Rubio in the earliest days of the 2016 presidential race in both Iowa and New Hampshire, the topic that he led his stump speech with, I still have the audio from these, was corporate tax reform. No longer making many of those arguments. Full circle, though.

Yeah, as I say, I'm always a little dismissive of attempts to make too much of a crowd shot. But I think there are enough of these and it's supported by enough other data about the enthusiasm gap and some of the other things that I mentioned. That this has to have Republicans pretty alarmed. I mean, the event that I went to cover in Florida, which was this road rally, MAGA parade, sponsored by some local Republican clubs, beautiful day. This was outside. and, you know, they had 50 people on a field that was more than an acre. And, you know, the visuals were certainly bad, but I think the reality of it, if you're a Republican, it has to be alarming.

With that, we're done. Thank you both for joining today. We are very excited to be launching dispatch markets and look forward to the contributions from you, Megan. Well, I will be writing the next newsletter. So, you know, get a subscription. subscribe. It's going to be hot, some awesome chart action, but I'm not spoiling it. Who doesn't love hot chart action? Megan, don't oversell it. Don't oversell it.

Yeah, Megan, we don't do that kind of cheap clickbaity stuff, you know. Come for the hot chart action. I mean, these visuals, I'm telling you, sexy. The conversion surges that we're going to see in our data are amazing. Oh, sometimes it's a little too close to true. Thank you all for joining us, and we will see you next time. Finally, if you like what we're doing here, you can rate review and subscribe to the show on your podcast, Player of Choice to help new listeners find us. And as always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at Roundtable at the Dispatch.com.

We read everything, even the ones from people who haven't seen. There's something about Mary. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible, Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening.

Please join us next time.