The Dispatch Podcast - How The U.S. Racked Up Its $40 Trillion Debt

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, and Mike Warren to discuss the U.S. crossing the $40 trillion debt threshold and the prospect of “growing our way out of it.” The Agenda: —Kevin explains how we got here —Entitlement spending —What would Paul Ryan do —The DOGE effort —Growing our way out of debt —NWYT: Adulthood disappointments Show notes: —Kevin's Wanderland —Kevin on the tragedy of U.S. debt —Steve Hayes on DOGE —"DOGE—the UNIPARTY killed it because it was working too well." The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including audio versions of all our articles and newsletters—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss the U.S. national debt hitting $40 trillion. How we got here, who's to blame, and the prospect of growing our way out of our debt problem. Or, as Treasury Secretary Scott Besson would have it, growing our way out of our debt problem with tariffs. And then not worth your time, the disappointing aspects of adulthood. I'm joined today by the dispatch's editor-in-jutor-in-jured. Chief Jonah Goldberg, national correspondent Kevin Williamson, and politics editor Mike Warren. Let's dive right in. Welcome, gentlemen. We had the unpleasant news last week that the United States had passed $40 trillion in debt threshold. We seem to be passing these huge thresholds, maybe not the round even numbers like $40 trillion. But the new trillion, we seem to be passing these. more regularly at a faster cadence these days. We talk about debt and deficits on this podcast

pretty regularly, but I thought it was worth really trying to understand where we are and how we got here and what, if any, possible solutions there are. And if there are not good solutions, where this is headed in this conversation today. So let me start with you, Kevin. You wrote today about debt and deficits we're recording Monday morning. You wrote last week about the tragedy of U.S. debt, can you give us in a big picture, sort of talk to me like I'm a third grader trying to understand why the United States has $40 trillion in debt? How did we get to this point? Well, because we spend our allowance if you're a third grader and make me spit my coffee out. Kevin, you always talk to me as if I'm a third grader, but really,

for these purposes. So if you look at the end of, say, World War II, which is a good place to start, you know, modern American economic history, tax revenue has stayed about the same as a percentage of GDP, going between kind of 15 and a half percent to 18 percent, depending on the year in economic conditions, and spending has increased a good deal past that.

And to the extent that spending has increased past where tax revenues are, that's where the deficit has comforted. from. And we run one in a sustained way since then. We've also changed what we spend money on. So if you look at the end of the World War two years, the early 1950s, about 80% of federal spending was in some way military or defense related. And all the social services stuff added up to about 20%. That's now been reversed, where national security spending runs a little bit less than 20% of the budget typically right now. And everything else is about 80%. That everything else is largely in time. entitlements. It's Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, things like that. These are programs that

are either created in the New Deal era or in the 1960s, so they weren't around to add to the debt and deficit before that. And they were marketed as being self-funding programs. Now, everyone at the time knew that this was not true. Everyone knew that there was going to be an issue with that, that the payroll taxes would not always cover the expenses, particularly as you saw demographic changes that come in as society's mature. Then the other big fact that, that's been more of an issue in the last decade or so is that interest on previously accrued debt has become a much bigger part of spending. So that's now almost 20%. So we're now spending more on debt service than we are on national security. So it's a big old Pentagon-sized hole in the budget.

And that has been driven by the accumulation of debt and by the increase in interest rates in recent years. For a long time, we had very, very low, low interest rates. One of the reasons the interest rates have gone up have to do with overall market conditions, but another reason they've gone up has to do with the size of the debt itself. As we get more and more debt, we have to compete more against lenders to get that money, and also the less sustainable our situation looks. And so lenders want higher interest rates to make up for that risk. So basically, it's been a spending issue. Now, there have been times when our tax revenue has jumped up a little bit for various reasons. If you look at the turn of the century, the famous misnamed Clinton surpluses, which is a better argument for calling them the Gingrich

surpluses since Congress still does, after all, control both tax policy and spending. During those years, you had tax revenue that hit almost 21% of GDP, and spending did not increase at the same pace. That had largely to do with some things that were very specific to the economy of that time, with the internet boom of the late 90s and all that stuff, and a whole bunch of new capital gains revenue coming in at the turn of the century. I'm not sure those conditions are replicable. But in order to, I guess, balance the budget right now, we would need tax revenues to hit, what, 24% of GDP, something like that, which outside of World War II, I don't think they ever have been. And the notion not to get ahead of the conversation that we're

going to grow our way out of this is just crazy because deficits right now are running around 6% of GDP. So if you wanted to have growth that was enough to offset that, you would need growth of around 6%, which has happened in a few years in American history. I don't connect this to presidents because I think presidents have that much to do with the economy, but if you're just looking at multi-year spans of American history, the only presidency to ever coincide with growth above 6% of real GDP was FDR, and that had to do with a recovery from the Great Depression in World War II. Our modern growth rate has run around 3%, 3.2%, something like that. So unless there's some magical way to double real GDP growth, that's just not going to happen.

And if there were a way to magically double real GDP growth, you'd think somebody would have implemented that policy already because there's a really true. strong bipartisan incentive to do that. It's not one of these things where there's like some good political reason to stop growth from happening. Everybody wants credit for it to make everything easier. So we probably need to raise taxes and we definitely have to cut spending. And the spending that we have to cut is going to be in entitlements, including popular programs like Social Security and Medicare and probably some in national security as well, although I understand that's a more difficult conversation given the state of the world. That's a fantastic little tour of American, modern

American economic history. As it relates to debt and deficits, let me follow up with just a couple of more specific questions. I'll point out first that among the additional challenges, and we will get to the discussion of growth momentarily, is that some of the things that you are talking about, and I think many economists are talking about as potential steps out of this will have negative effects on potential growth, which is a difficult balance to strike. But let me ask you about entitlements specifically and automatic spending. You mentioned entitlements, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. You talk to people who don't do what we do for a living and you call these entitlements, they say, why are you calling these entitlements? That makes it sound like I'm entitled

to get them. I've paid in. I deserve these things. This is right. I am entitled. I am entitled. I am, in fact, any type of it. Yes. But how do you explain that to people who are frustrated that they paid in and that they're unlikely to see that. Certainly people our age are very unlikely to see this. Number one. Number two, those are categorized often as automatic spending. What makes that spending automatic in a way that other spending that we're talking about on national security and social programs is not automatic? Yeah. So the entitlements are programs that don't have to be reauthorized every budget cycle. So, you know, every dollar of Pentagon spending essentially has to be reauthorized every time it runs out. So Army Navy, Air Force Marines, missile stuff, the guys who wax the floors in the headquarters, all that stuff has to be reauthorized. Social Security just keeps going. So Social Security, Medicare programs like that work under a particular legislative formula, and it doesn't have to be authorized from year to year from budget cycle to budget cycle. So entitlements are called entitlements because exactly like you say, you are under the law entitled to certain benefits. just by virtue of having had X amount of income and worked for a wide number of years.

The genius of the way these things were marketed and sold to the public, which was entirely dishonest, of course, is this notion that you have paid into it, like it's a pension fund or something like that. So you've paid into Social Security in much the same way you've paid into farm subsidies. And yes, you paid a tax, and it went out the door under this particular program. But the fact that I've paid into farm subsidies doesn't mean I'm entitled to farm subsidies if I'm not a farmer. The fact that I have paid into our nuclear program doesn't mean I get an MX missile to keep in my backyard, than though I paid into the program.

So the payroll taxes are just a tax. They're not some investment. They're not sitting in an account somewhere. The so-called trust fund is really just a figure of speech. It's a way of talking about the fact that we've collected more in payroll taxes than Social Security benefits cost for a long time. And so as that accounting fiction accrued, that's what we talked about in terms of the trust. fun, but it's not like there's some pile of money sitting somewhere. This was Al Gore's famous lockbox.

Right. And so a lockbox full of nothing. So, yeah, keep it locked all you want. There's nothing inside it to you. It's a lockbox full of IOUs to ourselves. Yeah. I've tried to get a tour of this place, by the way, but they don't let me go. But there's like, there's an underground bunker somewhere where they actually keep the, they

print out physical securities for this stuff. Wow. So there actually is paperwork. There's some like, we need a die hard movie where they break in. again. Yeah, you got to do that. It's like, it's the opposite of national treasure is like absence of national treasure. We might have had some national treasure if not for this. But yeah, there are these securities that we have, these intergovernmental securities that basically are a way of accounting for the fact that the money that we collected in payroll taxes went into the general fund and got

spent generally as general funds do. Originally, you know, the idea for Social Security was that it was going to be a program for low-income people. And FDR's political advisors, who were very shrewd said, you know, we can't do that. We need to make it a program, but also includes the middle class and higher income people. That way you build a political constituency for it. And we should have a dedicated tax to pay it for it as well. And FDR himself, I forget the exact quote,

but it's, you know, no damn politician can mess with my Social Security program now because of the way it's been designed. This political incentives make it very, very difficult to do anything about. Yeah. The saying among people who do policy design is that a program for the poor is a poor program because poor people don't have a whole lot of political clout. It makes a lot more sense to have transfer programs to people who don't have a lot of money and Social Security, which is a transfer program to the wealthiest single demographic in the United States,

which are older people. Older people have just a lot more wealth and assets than the younger people who are paying into the program. Paying into the program. So you've even got me saying it, Steve. It's insidious. It's insidious. You know, Medicare is an especially, I think, egregious example of that, where Medicare beneficiaries tend to be pretty well off on average, certainly compared to people on Medicaid and certainly compare it to, you know, Joe taxpayer who is

supporting this stuff. Last question to you, Kevin, on this. Are there differences in the way that these programs can be changed because they are automatic spending or can they be reformed or changed worse, someone to find the political courage to do this, just the way that sort of annual spending would be? Yeah, they're statutes, so you would have to rewrite the law. that's a doable thing. I mean, every annual spending authorization is a statute as well. So it's harder to change in the sense that you've got to take more of a proactive approach to it than you do with regularly authorized spendering because that just comes up automatically. We have to reconsider this at this point. So there's no legislative trigger saying that we have to reconsider Social Security at this point the way there would be with the Pentagon budget or farm subsidies, you know, the farm bill and that kind of stuff that goes through periodically. So what will probably happen is rather than getting a legislative trigger, there will be a financial trigger of some kind when the bond market says that no longer believes our BS story about our long-term finances and interest rates go back up to something closer to their historic norm, at which point we will be in a real crisis.

And Jonah, it looks like we might be there or approaching this. We have said on this podcast for many years, really for as long as this podcast has existed, that even though nobody really cares of, about debt and deficits at the current moment. At some point, everybody's going to care about debt and deficits. If you look at the turmoil in the bond markets recently, and you look at the response, both fiscal and rhetorical, to the crossing of this $40 trillion threshold, people seem to be waking up.

Do you expect that this pushes us to any serious, discussion of reforming these programs that are driving the debt? No. I mean, certainly not for the remainder of the Trump years, maybe after. You know, it's funny when you talk about how this crisis is maybe here or whatever, if you think about it in terms of, as Paul Ryan, who Mike has talked to recently, he said for years that this is the most predictable crisis imaginable. It's sort of like, let's say we have a telescope that can spot.

an asteroid that we have 100% certainty is going to strike planet Earth. Now, if the telescope sees it only 10 days away, everyone agrees, this is a huge crisis. If you see it 50 years away, everyone's like, well, we can deal with this later, let's study it some more, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so somewhere between 50 years and five minutes from now

is when this debt crisis comes, and I think it's closer to five minutes than 50 years at this point, But that has sort of been the tenor of the conversation. And one of the nice things about America right now, one of the few things that really has going for it, is it's too big to fail. Because, you know, the old adage about if you owe the bank $1,000, you have a problem.

If you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. A lot of the world depends on America staying upright. And so there's a little bit of a grace period built into all of that. At the same time, it's just coming, right? You know, it's just coming and how we deal with it. I think that we're going to need a little mini-crisis. Maybe when Medicare fails or something like that, you know, it's like a few smaller tremors get people to focus on the big one coming.

And I think that will help. But I just, I think Trump and the Trump administration utterly incapable. And I think the Democrats, either because they're in full resistance mode or they are in full, you know, when you're alternating between DSA mode and resistance. mode, the idea of actually cutting entitlements or spending just seems ridiculous. The only thing they'll be interested in is cutting defense at a time when that's more problematic than it's been in a long time. The only thing I would add to Kevin's little history, which was well done, and we should just note, and you cited a couple of things that Kevin's written recently,

Kevin's been writing about debt and deficits longer than I've been writing about dogs. So, you know, I was just thinking the other day that the people who were born the year I started writing about this stuff at National Review started college this year. I mean, Kevin knows this, but he just alluded to it about demographic changes. When Social Security came online, it was something, I don't know, what, 9, 11 workers to every retiree. There was also this thing that we borrowed from Otto von Bismarck by setting the retirement age at 65, which was about the life expectancy for most people. So like this idea that we would be paying for 10, 20, 30 years of more life when health care has gotten,

so much more expensive was just not part of the plan. And now the number of workers per retiree is three, two, heading to one and a half. And if you just think about what that actually literally means in terms of a dynamic economy, it means that, you know, one and a half workers are working to pay for the retirement of one person out there. That just makes things super, super complicated. I should also say just because it's a point of personal privilege, having had a parent who used Medicare, which she was, again, entitled to, whatever, the way Medicare distorts markets, forget the fraud thing for a second, right? I mean, like, fraud is fraud, and we all think fraud is bad, and if you find yourself using Photoshop to make documents to file for reimbursement, you should go

to jail, right? Like, anything that, like, is actually involved forgery or any of that kind of stuff. We're not including our dispatch travel expenses in this problem. We'll edit that out. A lot of the costs of Medicare is the legal stuff. You know, we needed an ambulance to transport my mom like twice a week to get dialysis, right? And it was just basically cab service. But because of the Medicare regulations in northern New Jersey where she was living, if we actually used a full, a real ambulance, they had to charge you the same rates they charge Medicare.

Because if they charged less, they would be charged by bureaucrats with Medicare. fraud. And so the reimbursement rate, they wanted hundreds and hundreds of dollars for essentially something you could do with a minivan because my mom was in a wheelchair, whatever. And once you set up a market like that where there's a floor of that kind of expense, you get all sorts of other players come in, but they're also charging that amount, right? Because then you get all sorts of union stuff and regulatory stuff about like you can't have people undercutting Medicare because the whole way the system works is that vendors have a certain guaranteed amount of business and yada, yada, yada. And the whole bureaucratization of that stuff makes the entitlement system so much more expensive than it would otherwise be.

It is this amazing thing how the left, when they argue for this stuff, they think if you have the government get the profit motive out of everything, it'll make everything cheaper. And, like, obviously there are some examples where that's probably true. Because what you then end up doing is rationing people for how long it takes them to get a knee replacement or whatever. And that brings costs down. But on the whole, in a mixed economy, entitlements, those kinds of health care programs make things much more expensive at a time when people are living 20, 30 years longer than the program envisioned. I'm done. Sorry. Well, when prices don't do what prices are supposed to do, it's a problem for the economy.

Right, exactly. Yeah. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. And we're back. You're listening to the dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. Let me go further on your initial analogy there because I like it. You know, let's say we're not 50 years away from this asteroid. We're not five minutes away, but we're a year away. And we have been talking about this for 49 years at this point. Why? haven't we seen more serious attempts to get in front of this problem? Is it because people, politicians of different parties, don't recognize that the problem is the problem? Is it because they have different ideas about what the solutions should be?

Is it because they don't want to offer solutions because they're so politically damaging potentially? What's the best explanation as to why we have been talking about this? Kevin's been writing about this for two decades. We've been talking about this coming moment, the coming crisis moment, and so little has actually been done about it. Yeah. So I think at the end of the day, the reason for it is there's no natural constituency for it. So because of other work I am doing at the moment, I'm pretty fixated on the differences between Republican virtue and what you might call Democratic virtue. And Republican virtue is this idea that leaders have a sense of.

responsibility to do things for the common good, even if they come at the expense of the current generation, even if they come at the expense of their own political fortunes. But you're a steward, right? And the idea of leadership comes with a certain amount of responsibility. And that's why America's political class had more of that attitude, after World War II, as Kevin was playing out, we're like, it was worth it borrowing the money to defeat the Nazis and save Western civilization, but now we got to pay off that debt. And that's what they did. And so emergency spending that you don't have revenue for has always been tolerable. The British Empire proved that, like, it was worth it to defeat Napoleon, whatever.

And what has happened is that sense of Republican virtue has gone away. The institutionalists who say, hey, look, we have a responsibility here to settle this debt problem. The way you can imagine, like, trustees of a university talking about it, it's like, you know, we have this responsibility. not to kick this problem to the next generation. That sensibility has basically gone away. And some people still use that rhetoric, but most of them are what social scientists call liars. And what's left is the political reality dawned on people.

It's sort of like with a lot of things. You can compare it to like adultery with politicians or all sorts of things. Once the illusion that this is undoable or unsayable goes away, it becomes doable and sayable. and we're all, I don't know, say we're all, but, you know, there are certain people here were definitely Dick Cheney fans here, but Dick Cheney was the guy who said Reagan proved deficits don't matter politically. And Cheney was right about that, but it's a shame he said it out loud.

And it's a shame that he was right. And so I think the people stuck their necks out for this, they kept paying a price, whether you want to say Simpson Bowls or any of these past efforts. And so I know I get a lot of grief for being a both-sideser on a lot of issues. I think there's plenty of blame to go around on both sides. But I will say there's more blame to go around on the Democrats than the Republicans on this. Republicans have all sorts of sins, all sorts of mistakes on the deficit stuff. Certainly in the Trump era, lots and lots of blame belongs to Donald Trump. But 29.7%.

You look at people like Paul Ryan and other people on the right who, took these problems very seriously. And not just the Democrats themselves, but the Democrats led the charge, but lots of liberal pundits and eggheads would say, this is cruel. Sometimes they even say it's racist, this idea of reforming spending.

How dare you call it an entitlement? That's a plantation mentality. You know, there's all this sort of ideological nonsense about sound bookkeeping. And then you get into these moments, and all of a sudden, the same columnists will talk about, oh, this is a bipartisan problem. You know, there's a lot of blame to go around.

There is a lot of blame to go around, but the people who stick their heads up to say, we shouldn't be doing it this way or we need to fix this problem, they're the ones that get shot at. And those shots have historically come from the left. I now think they come from both sides because, you know, Donald Trump has basically said,

I'm never going to touch your Social Security, I'm never going to touch your Medicare, and you get all of these people on the new right saying, brilliant. Finally, someone realizes that this, you know, okay, so like it's brilliant to realize that we'll just borrow from the kid's future to pander to old people today. That's brilliant politics. Gosh, you know, Caesar never thought of anything like that. And so I have an enormous amount of contempt for a lot of people and all this stuff. I think that the, the politics of it probably could be best surmised or expressed by the fact that the person most associated with taking this seriously

is Paul Ryan, who now has nothing better to do than talk to Mike Warren. because he's a former congressman. Hey, he's got a lot better to do than talk to me. Oh, no, wait. I don't want to make that. I don't want to make that argument. Thank you, Steve. Thank you for defending Paul Ryan's honor there.

A lot of people out there saying, Paul, Paul, who? I mean, only the real youths. Well, that's your tuning in here. It's the youngsters, you know. Paul Ryan really, you know, he's sort of seen as the face of entitlement reform. He was on the receiving ends of those Democratic push granny over the hill ads. when he did this, if you go back and look at sort of what Paul Ryan did and why he did it. I remember I went out and did a profile of him in 2012, this is shortly before he was chosen

by Mitt Romney to be his running mate. The profile of him for the Weekly Standard, and it involved going with Paul Ryan to town halls in his district, Janesville, Wisconsin, where he would, I mean, we'd do a 45-minute PowerPoint presentation on debt and deficits. It wasn't the kind of thing. you wouldn't have thought it was scintillating, but he made it pretty darn interesting. I mean, there were moments where he would do the big reveal

on just how damaging these entitlement programs and the automatic spending that funded them would be how problematic they would be, and there would be audible gasps from the audience. He did it in a pretty dramatic and effective way, but Paul Ryan basically decided to take on entitlement reform one because he saw the problem. He was somebody, you know, maybe it wasn't 50,

years out to use Jonas's analogy, but it was 30, and he said, hey, I want to do this. It's really important. We know where this is going. Somebody needs to take this on. But he did it in part because he had decided that he was willing to not be an elective office anymore. This was after the 2006 midterm elections, Republicans had gotten pounded by Democrats because George W. Bush's Iraq War had grown increasingly unpopular. The economy was sort of muddling along. And Paul Ryan was back in his tree stand in Wisconsin, thinking about how he really didn't want to do this anymore. He didn't want to be in the minority. And when he decided that he was going to remain in Congress, he said, I'm going to try to do the really important work that needs to be done. And that's

entitlement reform. So he began putting together a series of projects. They had a number of names over the years. And eventually, when he was budget chairman, he was able to convince Republicans in 2010, I guess 2011 to 2015, maybe 16, to include these entitlement reforms in the actual budgets. And I know I've spoken here before about how after the Tea Party wave brought in a bunch of new supposedly limited government conservatives, I think Ryan discovered that many of them didn't know what actually drove our deficits and debts. So he began...

It's not all aid to Israel. It's not all eight to Israel. Yeah, foreign aid, aid to Israel. It's not always fraud and abuse. Yeah, many of them thought it was pork. If you just eliminate pork, and I'm all for eliminating pork, if you just eliminate pork, we balanced the budget, and that clearly wasn't the case.

So Ryan did these tutorials, five, seven, nine members at a time and sort of walked them through this to the point where they could pass this, and they passed these entitlement forms. All of this to say, Mike, you did get some time with Paul Ryan this last week for the upcoming edition, second edition of the next right newsletter. You talked about a number of different things, but you included in that conversation entitlement reform. What did you ask Paul Ryan, and what did he tell you about this $40 trillion debt threshold

and where the debate is today? You know, it's funny. The conversation was from Ryan's perspective, supposed to be about a new proposal that he's working on through his nonprofit group. They've got a new white paper. They've had a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week with a co-author, with the author of the white paper, about ways to reform social welfare programs

and ways to use sort of new technology to simplify, reduce the complexity. So that's what he wanted to talk about. We did talk about that, and that'll also be in the newsletter. But of course, I had to ask about this. I had to ask about the $40 trillion threshold being met. And it was funny because,

Because Ryan sort of his initial reaction to me just kind of asking a prod, open-ended question about this new number was, gosh, you know, everybody asks me about this. Like, as if, like, he's surprised that he is like the debt and deficit guy. And, of course, like, whenever he was trying to get across with that response, I really didn't have to do much more prodding to get him to kind of go back through exactly really what we've been talking about throughout this entire podcast. And it's interesting how smoothly he is able to explain, just as he was doing in those town halls that you were covering, Steve, which I think we should say you're too, maybe modest to say it. But I think that piece and that coverage at the weekly standard was a big reason why Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan as his running mate in 2012.

I think it's very clear that there was a direct line from your coverage and other coverage to his selection. Paul, if you're listening, you owe me big time. There we go. Barack, if you're listening, you owe Steve big time. Someone owes Steve. That's all we know. Exactly.

That's all we know. But so getting him to talk about it, he speaks with certainly more clarity than I can right now to essentially lay out that, look, we tried to solve this. And in fact, the criticism that you get from the populists, that you can't touch these things. This is a third rail, right? This was always the case. Social Security is the third rail in American politics. He touch it. He gets shocked.

He get thrown out of office. And he pointed out that for four years, the House Republican Conference and the Obama administration voted for on a budget that included this, you know, variations. I think they were tweaked every year, but essentially what would he began calling this path to prosperity, these reforms to Social Security and to Medicare that would try to put them on a more sustainable physical path. and he points out, you know, I think it's very clear. People did not lose their seats in the House of Representatives.

Republicans did not lose their seats because of this vote, despite the amount of money being spent in those ads, right? You mentioned, you know, the pushing granny off the cliff. I remember when that ad came out and it was, there was this moment that felt like, oh, well, this is the end of this, right? Because it's got a very Paul Ryan looking man in a suit pushing granny literally over a cliff. and this was supposed to kill it. And in fact, it didn't.

And to Jonah's point about, who deserves the blame here? I don't really care. They all deserve the blame as far as I'm concerned. But it's worth noting that this ends, this sort of interest and trend ends when Donald Trump comes on the scene. Donald Trump makes it very clear that this is not a part of his program. And so Paul Ryan is not out here to name names or make enemies.

He was very generous toward people who could be, potential allies in this. But he's pretty clear that he views the populist turn in his own party in the Republican Party as the major impediment to getting this done. He has a very positive outlook that this is a moment that it will pass. He said a couple of things to that extent, look, you just need people who are pursuing good ideas and this populist moment will eventually pass. I'm a little more cynical about it. I'm a little more skeptical. But he at least argues that what's happening right now in both parties is just temporary and that basically one of these crises is going to force the hand of lawmakers, of politicians, of people who are looking for votes and that he wants to be

a source for good ideas on that front. Again, I'm skeptical that we're not out of this populist moment because if you look at it on the right, what is it that could solve this not just entitlement reform, which I think is so crucial, but whether it's raising taxes or whether it's increasing immigration for a broader tax base, I mean, these are non-starters in a populist Republican Party. The need to actually cut entitlement spending, not just in the Republicans. Of course, the Democrats are uninterested at the moment, at least, in those kinds of reforms. Any of the pro-growth policies that may help in that we're going to, guard, there's just no interest, right?

Democrat, the Democratic socialists want to increase government spending to spread wealth around more. I just think it's a huge impediment to having, you know, we have this kind of culture of the internet and more participatory politics, sort of democratic values, not necessarily Republican virtue, a democratic virtue. This is the salad days for populists right now. And, you know, Paul Ryan has a sort of optimistic message. this too shall pass, we shall see.

He's certainly not standing back and not offering ideas on various things, but it's looking really, really grim right now. I don't know if I told you guys this anecdote before, but the debt and deficit stuff is really not like the central example any of us would cite about the change of the Republican Party in the last 10 years. It is a good example of it. It's just like we talk about non-interventionism and, you know, or isolationism, and we talk about rhetoric and we talk about, you know, industrial politics.

movies you can be in. I mean, porn movies, you know, all that kind of stuff. But it's interesting, you know, the Claremont Institute, which I think is sort of its migration ideologically is one of these sort of bellwethers of this period. A friend of mine, I will leave his name out of it, was at, this is seven, eight years ago. I can't remember when it was, but it was during the Trump era, attended the Claremont Institute annual dinner, it's a big fancy thing, where they give out, I think it's the Churchill Prize to some hero.

And they, I can't remember who they gave it out to, but it was some MAGA favorable intellectual, maybe Victor Davis Hansen or somebody like that. And they're running a slide show of previous, as like a lot of these kind of dinners do, a slide show of previous recipients. And when the big screen got to Paul Ryan, a guy who received the Claremont Institute's Churchill Award, I don't know, like six years earlier, something like that, the crowd erupted in booze. And so just as a sort of touchstone about where a big chunk of the sort of the ideological cadres of the new right are. And they weren't booing because Paul Ryan was a reduce the deficit guy. They were booing him because he was seen as part of this corrupt enchant regime that we have to get rid of. And, you know, we're going to clean out the stables and have, you know, real populists in there. And that cultural headwind is going to be really hard.

to deal with. Because I don't know that it's possible to create a populism against deficits. And you could just point out at the scoreboard, right? Romney Ryan lost. And Donald Trump has won twice, three times if you ask the real diehard magazine. It's not true, but they would say that.

And they can point to electoral success. It does, just talking with Paul Ryan and sort of going back through that period, which was a period where I was really coming up and learning about politics and political journalism and covering a lot of what Paul Ryan and the House Republican conference were doing at the time, I think we got to, we always have to look back at the Republicans' loss in 2012 as this kind of break, perhaps that Republicans had with the old way

of thinking and the view that Paul Ryanism is an electoral loser. It's not fully true. It's, it's also not fully false either. Yeah, I mean, I think it's more complicated than that. If you look at the 2012 results and you look at the, where certain demographic groups, I mean, Romney and Ryan did pretty consistently well with senior voters, voters who were supposed to turn against them in mass. I mean, I think it's complicated. I also think it's complicated if you look at the Republican Party history on this. And I want to get to sort of MAGA and the populist right and their views of this because I think it really matters now, of course, with Donald Trump as president, having come out of Doge, which I think was

largely a farce. But going back to those early days where Paul Ryan and was budget chairman, and he was pushing these reforms. He had to fight Republicans then. It's not as if Paul Ryan came up with these ideas and said, hey, here's the right idea. And Republicans all sort of nodded. In addition to doing those tutorials that I mentioned, you know, he had to fight politically in order to include this

because you had many Republicans, particularly those involved in the National Republican Campaign Committee that elects House Republicans, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, that elects Republicans running for the Senate. who were strongly, staunchly, and often publicly opposed to these reforms that Paul Ryan was pushing, even in what we regarded at the time as the Tea Party era. This was a time when small government Republicans seemed to exist in some numbers.

And when Paul Ryan was pushing, I think it was then called the Roadmap, pushing these reforms, the National Republican Campaign Committee put out word to its candidates, whatever you do, do not talk about Paul Ryan's reforms. You'll lose. That turned out to have been wrong, thankfully, but he had to fight inside the Republican Party to get there. But I think, Mike, you're right. By the way, to this point, Steve, sorry to interrupt.

Do you remember who one of the chief antagonists? I think he walked it back eventually. But one of the chief antagonists within the party to Paul Ryan's efforts was Newt Gingrich, which I think we should remember an underscore just following new. Newt Gingrich's own path over the last 20 years within the party. So look, I think Mitch McConnell. Yes. Didn't want to do it.

I think he was afraid of losing Republican majorities. He opposed to, there were many Republicans who were publicly, at least public facing sort of sane fiscal conservatives who behind the scenes were undermining Ryan in his effort to get this done. But I think, Mike, you're right to point out that 2015, 2016 campaign moment where Donald Trump not only said he opposed entitlement reform. I mean, let's be honest, I don't think Donald Trump really understood what entitlement reforms were. I think he probably still doesn't understand entitlement reform. But he knew that he wanted to go after Paul Ryan. And he knew he wanted to go after that sort of the old crowd. And he said, in effect, nobody's touching Medicare, nobody's touching Social Security, nobody's touching Medicaid.

Fast forward now to the last couple of years, the second Trump term. You had to begin the second Trump term. lots of hype and coverage and discussion, all driven by the Trump administration itself about this Department of Government Efficiency Doge. And, you know, the promises that came from Donald Trump, that came from his campaign spokesman, that came from his cabinet secretaries, that came directly from Elon Musk, who would take on the position of running Doge, were that we were going to see dramatic reforms in spending and that you could see the elimination of some two trillion dollars in annual spending. And yet at the same time, they were talking about how they would protect

Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, things that were certainly in tension with one another. We have a couple of clips from back then from Donald Trump and Elon Musk talking about these promises and talking about their hopes for Doge. One of the most important initiatives is Doge, and we have cut billions and billions and billions of dollars. We're looking to get it maybe to a trillion dollars. If we can do that, we're going to start getting to be at a point where we can think in terms of balancing budgets, whether it's this year or next year. I think we'll be very close to balancing budgets. The overall goal here with the Doge team is to help address the enormous deficit.

we simply cannot sustain as a country a $2 trillion deficit. Just the interest on the national debt now exceeds the Defense Department spending. If this continues, the country will become de facto bankrupt. I'm confident at this point that we can actually find a trillion dollars in saving. So, Kevin, you look back on that. I mean, of course, the claims were absurd at the time. We pointed that out at the time. It wasn't, Doge was not going to eliminate $2 trillion in spending.

going to be no discussion, no serious discussion of balancing budgets. This was preposterous. But for people who are small government, limited government conservatives, there was some appeal to Doge. There was a public discussion of, hey, the spending is out of control. The government is growing inexorably. We really ought to take seriously the idea of reining it in. And Donald Trump sort of gave lip service to that. And Elon Musk, I think actually in that clip that we just played, laid out the problem in a pretty clear and compelling way. The challenge, I think... For a drug-addicted crackpot, sure. Well, for anyone. At least he had his moment of lucidity there. And the concern that I had at the time, I wrote a piece about this, Jonah, actually.

Well, that was the one. Some reporting. My concern was that they were going to give people sort of a false sense of security, that if we just did these cuts, if we got rid of some USAID spending and we trimmed here and cut weight, the big catchphrases it often is from people who aren't serious about cutting government was waste, fraud, and abuse. Everybody wants to cut waste fraud and abuse. If you cut waste fraud and abuse, you're not actually doing the kinds of structural reforms that are required to eliminate the debts. And my concern at the time was the president would pale a lip service to cutting spending to balance. balancing budgets. And in fact, the spending would continue, perhaps at an accelerated pace,

even if we made these sort of reforms on the side. And if you go back now and, you know, there have been dozens of studies looking at what Doge actually saved, and it is virtually nothing. Doge made some significant cuts to the federal workforce. Those cuts may end up giving some sort of cumulative benefits in terms of savings. But, you know, there are some estimates that overall Doge saved between one and seven billion dollars, maybe 10 billion other estimates, say 55. Doge itself said, I believe, 215 billion. I mean, we're orders of magnitude away from the one and two trillion dollars that Donald Trump and Elon Musk were talking about in terms of balancing the budget.

Kevin, when you look back at Doge, what do you see and why did it end up producing so little in the way of actual spending restraint? Well, if you take all the dumb ideas and all the false ideas and you put them in the same bucket and pretend like they're not dumb and false, you take all the useful stuff off the table and say, we can't do that. What the hell are you expecting? It was an idiotic program from the beginning. Those of us who spent a lot of time in political journalism or around nonprofits have certainly had the experience of meeting very, very wealthy people who are out of their depth in whatever it is they're currently doing. If they were really, really good at selling Cadillacs in Dallas or, you know, running a bank in Milwaukee or something like that, but they're not good at other stuff. And Elon Musk is the world's great example of that. He's really, really good as some of the entrepreneurial things that he's been involved in. He's done some remarkable stuff as a businessman. He doesn't know the first thing about how government spending works or how it needs to be reformed. And we have this thing that we do, and I'm because I'm a low EQ person, I don't understand why this is. But where we take stuff that's obviously false and stupid, and we treat it as though it's serious because the people who

are advocating it seem to care a lot about it rather than just tell them this stuff is false and stupid, so we don't actually have to take it serious. We don't have to pretend like there's some kernel of truth there. So you can look at the public numbers. You can look at where the spending actually happens. It's entitlements, it's national security's interest on the debt. That's the whole enchilada, essentially. And you cut everything else to zero and you still don't have a balanced budget. You just have to get in that stuff and deal with it. And if you have a program that says you're not going to deal with it, then you're not going to deal with it. You know, Doge was the wrong acronym. The one we should have been looking at is BRAC. Yeah.

Which is the, for those you who remember the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the base reallignment and closure committee. And BRAC was a way of taking an unpalatable set of policy needs, which was closing military bases that were redundant or no longer needed, and making it politically possible to do. And the way they did that was by not making the decisions on a case-by-case basis when every individual congressman and senator was going to fight to the death for his local military base, but put him all in one big bucket and said, we're going to have an up-and-down vote on this. And it was actually a reasonably successful way of doing things. And we did actually close a lot of bases that we didn't need and restructure some things in the military an important way. And we will need a similarly

unsexy, laborious program for dealing with spending and fixing the overall fiscal situation. We'll have to put a lot of stuff into a big bucket that nobody wants to drink from and make everyone decide either to pass it or not pass it as one thing. And that's really the only way to do it. we have a real weak spot for these idiotic silver bullet kind of approaches to things. You know, all Doge really was, other than a joke, let's remember this was named after a meme coin, right? It's the Doge coin. All it really was was another blue ribbon committee. You know, we've had a lifetime worth of blue ribbon committees about, you know, this, that of the other health care deficits, this thing, that thing, competitiveness in industrialization, manufacturing,

foreign policy, all the rest of this stuff. They never really add up to very much. No one ever expects them to add up to very much. It's kind of a Washington joke. You know, if you want to kill an issue, you put together a presidential commission to study it. And then you take some people you don't want to hear from for the next five years. You put them in charge of the commission. You let them produce a paper that nobody's ever going to read. And that's that.

Doge was essentially a variation on that theme. It was basically a Blue Ribbon Committee with some illegal, I might add, powers that it enacted in various kinds of ways. Doge was never legally created. They called it a Department of Government Efficiency. It was not a department of anything. there's no department there, which is just a thing that was made up and that was behaving in a fundamentally lawless and unauthorized way on top of everything else. So, yeah, it shouldn't shock anyone too much that this thing didn't work out very well, given the character of the people who were in charge of it and the way its mission was conceived

and the way that it was dedicated to ignoring the actual problem. And that's another thing that we do sometimes is that we focus on non-issues as a way to avoid focusing on the issues, which is why we spend so much time talking about some of these relatively penny-any culture war things or some of the relatively penny-any fiscal things, you know, foreign aid, stuff like that. It's a way of creating an impression of urgency and action and that you're a person who is taking things seriously and trying to take the bull by the horns while not actually doing anything about the real problems. And Doge was, you know, I hate the Washington cliche kabuki, but it certainly was an example of that, I think, in a big way. So I don't necessarily disagree with any of that. I do see it.

slightly different. Oh, good, Johnno. That's good here. Thank you for chiming in. Yeah. Oh, you have something else you're like to add. I do. Thank you, thank you, Kevin.

Thank you for your interest. I don't think it was quite a blue ribbon committee. I don't, I mean, you're right that the impulse was sort of that. But the blue ribbon committees, the point of them is to issue some paper that no one reads, as you say. Doge was actually given real power within the administration to do stuff. And then took more power on its own. Yeah. And I agree entirely that it was, you know, whether it.

it's sort of like, we don't know the price of something if no one is willing. The price of something is zero if no one's willing to buy it, right? Whether or not something is illegal, it kind of depends on whether or not anyone can take it to court and get it prosecuted. But I agree with you that the spirit of it was anti-constitutional and probably illegal. It also was murderous. I mean, like, people hate to hear this. And I think that some of the numbers are exaggerated. But the number of people who died because these guys didn't understand how USAID worked,

is greater than zero and arguably a lot greater than zero. And there are a lot of people on the right who hate hearing this. Apparently, Elon Musk really hates this criticism. And they use a lot of bad analogies about how, you know, simply cutting off aid is not the same thing as killing somebody. Yeah, except if you tell people for a generation that you're going to be a reliable source for anti-HIV viral drugs or for clean drinking water or for malaria treatments or whatever it is, you've created a dependency and an expectation, and then you take it away with no warning.

Like, it's fine if we ought to argue about whether or not murder, but it's a kind of callous, you know, manslaughter or something like that. And it was really, it did not get the attention it deserves. I think it'll be, end up being a huge black mark on Musk's historical legacy. But I think the better analogy is, and this is where I really agree with you, is that we have this way of this silver bullet thing. Each of us, to one extent or another, has been asked by some educated audience member, why can't we just run government like a business? It is one of the most enduring articles of faith

among right of center, decent, upstanding, virtuous Chamber of Commerce type Americans that exists. And it's stupid as all hell. Like government ain't a business, the incentive structures are different, the purposes are different, the ambitions of people,

the room making decisions are different. There are no shareholders per se and stop with the analogies about how taxpayers are like shareholders. And this idea, which starts in the 19th century, basically as a response to the corruption created by terrorists, ironically, is so intoxicating to people on the right. Like, oh, these politicians are stupid. If you just ran it like a business, everything would be fine. And we've seen it over and over and over again.

That was part of Donald Trump's pitch, which was not a new pitch. It was a very old bit. It was Ross Perrault's pitch. You can go all the way back. It's a very common form of argument. At least Herbert Hoover's pitch was that he was going to run government like an engineer. But Musk was the latest iteration of this. It's like these people thought, oh, well, you know, you can't run it like it's JCPenny.

But look at what Silicon Valley does. They have figured, they've cracked the code. They've come up with this new thing. And all of these people, including some dear friends of mine, were very enthusiastic about Doge, because they thought that this was not just the same old run government like a business thing. This was a more libertarian-infused, innovative culture kind of thing, and they're going to come up with workarounds and solves. And they're just wrong.

I mean, they're just simply wrong because the fundamental conservative insight goes back to Chester's and Spence. That you can't fix anything unless you know why it's there in the first place. O' contrary, gender, you can run government like a business. And Doge is a great example of that. unfortunately, the business is Theranos. You make a lot of dishonest, crazy promises about a product that doesn't exist and you don't deliver.

Vo-la. Run government like a business. I was going to say Enron, but I didn't want to feel that old. Part of the challenge, I think, in addressing this and getting this, you know, I'm under no illusions that there's going to be a serious attempt to address these issues. Brack, I think, Kevin, is the right format

because there's a bit of built-in political insulation that made BRAC effective. It was sort of taking old Cold War era military bases that were no longer serving the need that they were designed to serve in that era and either updating them or modernizing them or in many cases just shutting them down, closing them. And it worked in effect because it allowed politicians who should have more courage to make difficult decisions like this to point to somebody else as having made the tough decisions and then offers soothing words about how they're going to work to make things better. It's going to be that kind of a thing, I think that will be the beginning of some attempt to address this. That was what the Simpson

Bowles was meant to do in 2010 and it failed for all sorts of reasons. But part of the challenge here is going to be that there's a fundamental lack of understanding about why we're in this situation. I mean, I think, Kevin, the tour of America's recent economic history that you took us through at the beginning of this discussion would be news to tens of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people who heard it. Because I think many people today, to the extent that people pay any attention to this at all, and that's a different problem. Not enough people are paying attention to it in the first place. But to the extent that people do, they have the views of folks like the newly elected members of Congress, Paul Ryan, was trying to educate when

he was trying to tell them, no, eliminating pork won't solve, won't balance the budget. And there are broader conspiracy-driven arguments about the failure of Doge that have taken hold on the populist right right now. Mike Flynn this morning, again, recording Monday morning, tweeted Doge, the Uniparty killed it because it was working too well. A very smart, and then he links to a very smart analysis of this overall situation in America. And he links to an interview on Alex Jones's show with Honest Polster, who is someone named Mark Mitchell, who walks through for Alex Jones's large but somewhat diminishing audience. That this was all going great. Honest Polster apparently said Doge was the most popular thing Republicans ever did.

I don't think that's actually true. But there's an entire universe that thinks that the reason that Doge failed was because the Uniparty killed it rather than it collapsing under its own way and not being a serious undertaking from the beginning. I want to end by playing a clip from an interview that Treasury Secretary Scott Besson gave last week in an interview with CNBC that goes back to something we touched on brief. earlier in our conversation, and that is the possibility of growing our way out of the problem. Fundamentals are hard to ignore when it comes to the size of our debt with public debt increasing

to now $40 trillion. Yeah, I mean, look, sir, there's nothing magic about the $40 trillion number, and we can grow our way out of that. So, but what we do want to signal is I think that there's been a lot of misinformation in terms of what's going on with the deficit, what's going on with the deficit to GDP. We actually had a fiscal consolidation for the calendar year 2025. We were at about 5.7% of GDP. And one of the things that's temporary here that's influencing the deficit has been these tariff-free funds. And we won't have to do that again.

and the Ambassador Greer through the 301 process is re-implementing the same level of tariffs. And I would expect that our 2026 tariff income is going to be roughly what it was in 25. And we're going to be able to keep that in terms of the budget consolidation. So, Joan, I'll go to you with this. When Scott Bessent was chosen, was named by Donald Trump, I reached out to a bunch of people I regard as very smart and thoughtful on the economy. And I would say there was near universal approval for Besson as Trump's Treasury Secretary, maybe because there were concerns about somebody really bad getting in. Some of these are people who had worked with or known Besson in other capacities.

And I would just say, if you listen to that answer, both the first part in which he talks about growing our way out of the debt, which may have theoretically been possible to use, your old analogy, at 30 years out. It's not possible at a year out or however far out we are now. But also, he suggests that the way to grow our way out of the deficit problem, out of the debt-to-GDP ratio problem that we have, is to re-implement tougher tariffs. I don't know of any, I don't know that I've heard of anything quite so economically

incoherent in the past year and a half. that comes from our Treasury Secretary. Well, I mean, look at it this way. What he is actually saying there is, I'll have to defend them on this. One way to lower the debt is to tax people more. You know, if you're, if you're, well, let's put it this way. One way to lower the revenue shortfall and deal with deficits is to tax people more. And, you know, if we tax people at a Scandinavian rate of, I don't know, like 40% or something like that of people's income,

which is a very misleading thing because, All of these things about like the revenue we get, the federal government gets, leaves out the fact that state and local governments get revenue too. So the total amount of money that people spend in taxes isn't as low as it looks when you compare Europe to the United States on a lot of these charts. Regardless, that's what he's saying. He's saying, now, this is not the tax I would pick. I'm not necessarily in favor of taxing our way to lower deficits. But what he's saying is that we can tax our way to greater growth or what he's trying to say. That's the problem.

Yeah, which is not. Right. You know, and I should say there's another clip of him from around the same time where he's, where he has this thing where he's railing against Democrats who claim that the terrorists need to be returned to the people. And he says, this drives me crazy. Yeah. Because when that money was in the treasury, that's when it was in the hands of the people. Yeah.

Right? Which is a purely Russoian general. general will way that socialists talk about, you know, like, I'm not trying to be pejorative. That's the way socialists talk about this stuff. It is like it is in the hands of the people when we nationalize an industry, you know, when we confiscate the wealth and let it belong to all of us collectively. That's the argument that he's tapping into. And I don't know if he's coming by it sincerely or if it's just partisan, you know, frustration on his part. But it creeps the hell out me. And I suspect that, you know, this is the problem. Bessent, more than any other figure in the

Trump cabinet, is complicated to listen to, because you never know how much of what he is saying is designed for an audience of one versus what he is saying that is designed for the audience of the American people versus what he's saying, which is designed for the bond markets or the stock market. And you have to get super strousy and to try to figure out where his esoteric language is going on this. And I just don't think he's as good at this as his fans think, but it also just makes it very hard for me to read any one

sound bite from him and say, ah, this is why he's crazy or this is why he isn't crazy. That's a pretty damaging soundbite. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive

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Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Okay, we're going to have to leave it there. We have gone on longer than originally intended, but it was a good discussion, and I appreciate you all. sticking with us and educating me along with people listening. I want to turn now finally to not worth your time. And I'm going to take up a suggestion that we got from Jonah on a question that gets us out of the news. I think you have to refer to me the way Mike Warren did in the

newsletter as reader Jonah G. Reader Jonah G. We'd like to know more about Napoleon the third. regular listener. Every time he said Rousseau in this podcast, I knew what he was thinking in the background. There was, true story,

on special report once they did a piece early days of Twitter about, I didn't remember what the controversy was, and they used a tweet of mine, and they referred to me

as Twitter user Jonah Goldberg. I mean, there are days, honestly, when I'm following you, and I think that might be the most apt description yet

when you, you're arguing with Rob MAGA 2684835. There was a funny thing where someone was getting on this Twitter user about, he was complaining about trouble of going to, he was either Afghanistan or Pakistan as a business traveler and then coming to the United States afterward and what a hassle it was. And someone was like, it was very sneering way, well, what kind of job do you have to go to Pakistan on business?

And he said, I'm the prime minister of Norway. Answer the question. So Jonah proposed a question of the group to share with us things that you thought when you were younger would be super cool, but when you grew up turned out to just be a drag. Mike Warren, you're the youngest of... And the least grown up. You're closest to those things you might have thought. Maybe you haven't had a moment where you're. you now realize that some of this stuff is a drag.

Gosh, no. But is there something that you thought would be really cool when you were younger, but it turns out actually sucks? This might tell you a lot about what I was like as a child. I always thought that living on my own, having my own house, being on, you know, just being out of my, of my, the house that I grew up in, which I had, you know, loving parents and a good family and all of that.

But I just thought being on my own was this dream that I had, you know, getting out of school, doing all these things, getting gamefully employed. And I will say that being a homeowner is a real drag. There is always something that's not working. There is always something that needs a lot more money than you think it should to fix or to add or to address. Homeownership is a joy. And I mean that sarcastically. Like, it is, it is rough.

I mean, you didn't have nearly an unhappy enough childhood, Mike. Well, clearly. Hey, which I freely admit. But, you know, I mean, from the moment, we bought our house 10 years ago. And, you know, from the very first, like, two weeks where I had to replace a toilet and, you know, figure out what was going wrong with the plumbing in a different bathroom that was causing some kind of a leak behind a bathtub. It's been all downhill from there, which tells you something. Easy on the Taco Bell, Mike. Come on.

Like one toilet in two weeks. Hey, we're talking about the previous. owners, the previous owners were, this is a problem. Anyway, so that, I would say that. I love, I love our house, but, but it's, it's a lot. And everything's way more expensive than you think. Florence King had a column one time where she was talking about being like 11 or 12 and her parents asked her what she wanted for, for Christmas. She thought about it and she said, an apartment. That's very on brand. Nice. Yeah, it is. Kevin. I was just thinking that homeownership is one of the things that wasn't, wasn't overrated. When we talked about this earlier, I was thinking about

about things that I thought would be a bigger deal in my life than they were like lava and quicksand and things like that. Every boy at some age. No, you know, I was actually going through some of this stuff and I don't have a great answer to that. I love having my own house. Having a car is great. Being able to make, you know, my own decisions about all sorts of things is, is wonderful. So, no, I don't, I can't think of one just immediately off the top of my head. Life's, life's, life's pretty good. Eternal optimist, Kevin. Yeah, probably what people were expecting from Kevin. Just cheery, sunny optimism.

Well, okay, if you want to get dark about it, though, think about the implied point of, think about the implied point of camera. Disposing of bodies, the implied point of comparison. I could not wait to get out, and it has not disappointed, even the most difficult points have been better than the alternative. So although I will add that I'm unusual,

in that I didn't own a home at all until I was almost 50. So the house I live in is the first house that I ever owned. And I mostly lived in apartments and things like that. And because we moved from a big city where real estate cost a lot of money to a smaller town where real estate is a lot less expensive, I've never had a mortgage. And so I think homeownership without a mortgage maybe is a little bit less painful because I get the same stuff. Mike does, you know,

and there's, like, we're going to have to replace our HVAC system here in a little bit. It's going to cost like 30 grand or something like that. It's going to be a huge, huge chunk of money. But I don't have, you know, that $3,000, $3,500 a month, whatever, going out the door. Although I live in a pretty high property tax jurisdiction. So my monthly just, you know, insurance and taxes bill is a lot higher than I would have guessed it was going to be. But no, it's not so bad. I can't imagine a kid, even a kid, Kevin Williamson, really contemplating the joys of having a mortgage.

That feels like it was probably not even on your radar, you know. Funny thing is that I knew it wasn't going to, I didn't think it was going to be that bad. Now, I'm going to hear from a lot of, like, angry Jinz ears who can't afford a house. But our mortgage payment on our house in Lubbock, I remember, was $285 a month. And now, my parents had bought this house in 1973 or something like that. And I remember because my mother got $300 a month in child support from my father and it was just enough to cover the mortgage on the house and the escrow related to the taxes and things like that.

So it wasn't a tough nut to cover. And even at that point, I figured, I can scrow and you have $300 a month. It seemed like a lot of money, but I figured, you know, I'll be able to put that together. Jonah. Well, I mean, the obvious ones for me. Having three houses is a lot less fun, though, isn't it, Jonah? I mean, the obvious ones about things I thought would be really cool that turned out to just be a hassle when I got older and realized them. First of all, just being a sex symbol that turned out, you know, all the dating of the supermodels and all that kind of stuff got really old, really quickly.

No, but... Talk about unperseeable expenses. You know, the one that I have to say that first came to my mind when I proposed this and then Steve was like, well, do you have any ideas for it? And it was like, no, I only have this one stupid one, is shaving. Like, I think there are a lot of things that, like, there are two kinds of things when you're a kid that lead you to think are going to be really cool when you grow up. And one are the things that you're not physically able to do, like Grow Beard, and the others are the things that you're not allowed to do by your parents. And so I think there were a bunch of things like getting my own mail or getting a credit card. I mean, there are a lot of those things that seemed super cool because, you know, you didn't, you know,

see the bill for them. You know, like the credit card bill coming in. It's like, oh, there's a piece of plastic that just gets me stuff. That's awesome. But like, all those commercials, you know, made it look cool to shave. And, like, there was a weird thing where, like, some kids needed to shave sooner than others when I was a kid. And they bragged about it.

And then I was like, also when I got to the edge where I needed to shave was like, really? This is the thing I was, you know, this is the brass ring I was going for? This sucks. Nothing more thrilling. Can I make a suggestion, Jonah? Switch to a cutthroat razor. Yeah.

Like a proper straight razor. I love those things, actually. I've just recently, I don't shave this way every time I shave, but I use one, you know, once or twice a week, maybe something like that. And it makes shaving a lot more interesting. Because you really do have to worry about hurting yourself. No, Jonah, I recall the moment, it was in the seventh grade when there was a kid in my class who was talking about how he started shaving. And the look that the girls gave him, I was like, oh, oh, that's, I need to, I need to get on that. I got to start taking some hormones here.

Exactly. You know, I had a pretty good beard by the time I was in eighth grade and I didn't seem to impress the girls very much. Well, that would creep me out, like a full zizi top on an eighth grader. But, you know, when like Warren, because like there's this great scene from the Simpsons where, you know, because Homer Simpson has that five o'clock shadow, it's part of how he's drawn, where he's shaving. and by the time he gets the last big a shaving cream, scrapes it off his face, it just spontaneously comes back, the full-lop-bought shadow.

And that's worn. I've never seen you where you didn't look like you could have shaved a little closer. I shaved three hours ago. I'm not joking. I remember, I did want a mix and jeans in there. I remember standing next to my dad, and I would shave with his disposable razor,

but with the cap on next to him when he would shave, you know, really shave. Yeah, much less cool. That's why I have a beard too. And also, I shave twice as much as any of you guys because, you know. True. True. I think mine is traveling for work.

Yeah, that's another one. I was really excited back in the day. Like, when you first joined the workforce and you get to go on a work trip or a conference or, you're so excited. and maybe you got a per diem and you can have, you know, the second double cheeseburger at McDonald's with the purdeme. And it didn't cost you anything. It was just so great. And I love, yeah, drinking at the Hilton bar, a couple extra beers.

I so looked forward to it and I loved those first few, you know, again, when I first joined the workforce, it was, you know, maybe two of those a year or three of those a year. And now, and I think this is just, mostly just a function. of age, I find work travel so unbelievably exhausting, even when it shouldn't be exhausting at all, taking the Amtrak from Washington, D.C. to New York. And I get to New York, and it's like I've done a century ride on my bike or something. Like, I can barely stand up. No, I can't see you for a drink. I need to go and take a nap or go to bed at 9 p.m. And it's the same one I travel back. I just I find it so thoroughly exhausting that I don't like to travel for work at all. And the irony is I love

to travel in general. I think it's one of my very favorite things to do is to travel with my family and to take vacations and go visit different parts of the world. But travel for work has just become a challenge. I had a work trip the other day and my wife, called me about nine o'clock after putting the kids to bed and doing all of her stuff. And I answer the phone, you're sort of mumbling and all that. And she's, how long have you been in bed? About two hours. Yeah, it's now a relief.

Well, I did take what probably has to be one of the most challenging work trips ever. I think this was 2004. I traveled with Vice President Cheney to Afghanistan for Hamid Karzai. inauguration. And I won't get the numbers exactly right, but it was something like 22 hours there, 10 hours on the ground, 22 hours back. And it was as exhausting as it sounds. Most of it on a, on a military transport. But worth it to see Jeffersonian democracy bloom like that. It was fascinating. I will say it was an absolutely fascinating trip. I loved it. I loved the trip for a million reasons. But yeah, there was a lot of hope and optimism at the time.

We were young ones. Not so much with the Taliban now, once again, in control of Afghanistan. Where is Karzai these days? Like living in Paris and running a hedge fund? What's his story? It's a good question. It's a good question. I know he weighed in in ways that I found distasteful and unsavory in the aftermath of the U.S.

withdrawal. I don't know if he was working with bad guys or maybe he was, I think he said nice things about the Taliban or tried to diminish how bad it would be to have the Taliban back in control. By the way, since you asked Kevin, according to Bloomberg, today he lives under virtual house arrest in Afghanistan. Yeah, that's probably why you're saying nice things. I mean, think about all the people we know who are afraid to criticize Donald Trump. Yeah. He ain't the Taliban. All right, that was a good discussion. Thank you all for participating. And thanks to all of you for listening. See you next time.

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