The Dispatch Podcast - War and Peace | Roundtable

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

Steve Hayes invites Jonah Goldberg, Megan McArdle, and famed New York Times columnist David French to discuss the latest in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and dive into the ingredients for a potential financial collapse. The Agenda:—Post-Alaska analysis—Tease 'em, goad 'em, kill ‘em—Security guarantees—We're in debt!—Tariff rebates—NWYT: Backer inners Show Notes:—Listen to Kevin Williamson's interview with Tim Mak on Ukraine —Read Kenneth Rogoff's Foreign Affairs article on the debt crisis The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—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

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Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss Russia, Ukraine, and the diplomatic scramble to end the war.

We'll also discuss the inevitable American debt crisis. Politicians aren't paying attention. Voters don't seem to care, but we sure do. And finally, not worth your time, have you heard of backer-inners? And are some parkers less morally upstanding than others? I'm joined today by my dispatch co-founder Jonah Goldberg and David French of the New York Times, along with Megan McCartle from the Washington Post. Let's dive right in. Welcome, everybody.

David, I want to start with you. We have seen lots of activity over the past seven days. with respect to Russia and Ukraine in the United States, a summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska on August 17th, a subsequent Oval Office meeting with Voldemier Zolensky and an impressive group of European leaders just a few days later. Lots of talk, lots of news coverage, lots of activity. What's really changed?

As near as I can tell, almost nothing, and at this point, we should be grateful for that. You know, if you go back and you look at the moment when Trump is sort of standing there clapping as Putin comes towards him on the red carpet, you really had no idea what was going to come next. And I had a sigh of relief when the press conference, you know, was announced and they came out and there was essentially no deal. And that might sound weird to say when you're talking about an incredibly destructive war that there would be some sort of sigh of. relief over no deal. That's only because it seemed like the only real deal on the table that was realistic to reach in that moment at that time was a deal that would eviscerate Ukraine, that would annihilate Ukraine sovereignty, and wouldn't be a deal at all. And so that seemed to be the realistic fear in the moment. But as, you know, the hours and the days

ticked by, there was just increased confusion. There were all these reports of ashen-faced Trump aides. Then there was some confusion around, okay, was there a migration away from the demand for a ceasefire and now to sort of a comprehensive peace arrangement in the Putin framework? Lots of confusion. So in comes Zelensky and in comes a bunch of European leaders. And I would kind of feel like it was, and it felt like an intervention, Steve. It felt like what we were watching was an intervention to try to see if they could collectively get Trump back in the right frame of mind. And that produced a bit of confusion as well, because there was even a tiny little news cycle about security guarantees for Ukraine that made it seem like

Trump was willing to agree to kind of Article 5, We Will Defend You Arrangement with Ukraine, which would be a massive, massive reversal from everything that he said before. And Article 5, David, just to clarify Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which requires signatories to defend or participate in defending NATO countries. Right, exactly. And so had Trump agreed to some sort of Article 5 type arrangement with Ukraine, that would have been just a massive shift, tremendous.

And then that appears not to be the case. So where are we now, latest news, at least, you know, right before he did the podcast, was that now, Putin seems to be not that eager to have a bilateral meeting with Zelensky. So it's very unclear as to where we are. One thing that we know for sure is the war continues unabated. There seems to be no sign of any meaningful concessions at all from Russia. I think Russia believes it is winning the war with some justification.

But, I mean, we can talk more about that. But as of right now, it's very hard for me to see what concretely has changed. Yeah, Megan, last week, we ended the podcast. by talking about what a good outcome would be. And it's fair to say that the group collectively was not optimistic out of a good outcome for Ukraine or for the United States. And David's right. In some senses, things aren't as bad as we suppose they might be.

On the other hand, just days before this summit, Donald Trump threatened very severe consequences if Vladimir Putin didn't agree to a ceasefire. And Vladimir Putin didn't agree to a ceasefire. I don't see any consequences severe or otherwise, and there's no sign that the United States is really serious about implementing those, about imposing sanctions, about new tariffs, the kinds of things that Trump threatened Putin with in the days leading up to their summit. So should we be heartened by the fact that things didn't go totally off the rails and the United States didn't abet Russia's claiming of U.S. Ukraine, additional Ukrainian territory, further selling out the Ukrainians, or is this sort of status quo ante and the worst is yet to come? Yeah, I mean, look, any silver lining I'll take,

but it feels like shades of the Syria red line where the Obama administration said, you know, if you do this, we're going to, you know, come down on you like a ton of bricks and then Syria did it, Bashar al-Assad did it. And then we didn't come down on them like a ton of bricks. And interestingly, I was in Europe at a conference. And I was actually surprised how mad Europe was that these European officials were saying, we were ready to go. We got all ready and you got us all head up and then you did nothing. And it wasn't just that they were mad that like they didn't get the opportunity to embrickify, I guess. But also that they felt like Obama had, by making that threat and then not following through, had severely eroded their

ability, the U.S.'s ability, but also Europe's ability to credibly negotiate this process. And I think that that's also going to be true here. That, look, in fairness, Russia is a nuclear armed power. It's really difficult. We don't have the kinds of options we have with a non-nuclear their own power. We have to be really careful about escalating. But I think that watching the Trump administration flail around is not given me great hope for a good resolution to this. Yeah, Jonah, do you see any signs that the Trump administration has a strategy at all? I mean, are they operating from some playbook? Do they know where they want this to end up? Or is this just all ad hoc diplomacy by Donald Trump when he's in the room at the moment? Yeah, I think they have a

strategy to get a headline that says Trump delivers peace, right? Not to get peace, not even to get to ceasefire, just say that Trump delivered it, right? And, you know, you particularly with, I mean, this is true of all politicians, you don't want to, like, be, go too deep into Trump exceptionalism. But it's particularly hard with this administration to believe that there's stated reasons for anything. Pick a topic, trade. National Guard troops in D.C., we go down a long list, that their stated reasons are the actual reasons, and that their stated arguments reflect their actual thinking. But, you know, J.D. Vance, as one does when one wants to lay out a serious foreign policy worldview, went on

Laura Ingraham's show and said that, you know, look, here's the problem. Ukraine wants security guarantees, and Russia wants territory. And that's just not true. It's just, it's like, so Vance believes it, they're working on a theory of the case that's wrong. And lots of bad things will flow from a wrong theory of the case. Sure, Russia wants territory in the sense that grabbing more territory is a means to one of their two strategic ends. The first strategic end is to basically make Ukraine like Belarus, right? A vassal state with a pliant, client leadership that is subordinate to Moscow, doesn't necessarily have to join some new Russian empire, but it has to be seen as part of Russia's sphere of influence and basically Putin's bitch. And that's the goal,

geostrategically vis-à-vis Ukraine. The other goal is to force a wedge between the United States and the NATO alliance. And this is the thing that bothers me a great deal about the talk about these security guarantees, is that the form and function of those things really, really matter. because, you know, and I'm not the first person to make this point. There are a lot of foreign policy graybeards who have been making this point. If it's just British and French and German troops on the ground without much American participation and in Ukraine with this vague talk of Article 5-ish stuff or Article 5 like stuff, and Russia does one of ten time-honored Russian tactics, sending green men in, faking a terrorist, attack, you know, something where everybody, like all of the people who miraculously fall off roofs or fall out windows in Moscow, the reason they do that, those kinds of tactics is they

want people to know that the state is complicit and did it, but have this sort of superficial thing that passive aggressively forces it on others to prove it. And so there are all sorts of ways that Russia could attack Western installation, Western troops, tease them, goad them, troll them, kill them, doesn't matter. And then the moment America doesn't get their back, well, then all of a sudden, Article 5 like means kind of nothing. The Western alliance is split. NATO is thrown into even more doubt. And the nations that are in Russia's near abroad are like, crap, security assurances from the West don't actually matter that much. So, therefore, we probably should cut a deal with Putin.

Right. So, like, everyone's talking about what a huge victory it would be to have a security guarantee. To have a real security guarantee, it might really be one, right? I don't know what it would look like. It really matters in the details. But simply having one that gives Russia the benefits of a time out for them to, retool, rearm, recalibrate their craptacular economy, which people aren't paying enough attention to.

You know, Kazakhstan, according to the IMF, just passed Russia in per capita GDP, which is got to be really embarrassing for the Russians. So anyway, my only point is, like, I don't think Steve Whitkoff, who talks about this stuff, the way I talk about the NFL draft, like, I kind of know some of the terms, but I couldn't really defend any of my claims. I don't trust him. And I think Trump, to the extent he understands any of the stuff and listens to any of this stuff, his quote unquote, strategic objective is to add this war to the six bogus wars he claims to have solved in pursuit of a Nobel Prize. And so if the strategic objective is a PR objective, I don't think you're going to get the strategy right.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting if you look at the rhetoric coming, I would point to in particular J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio over the last. last week, they keep talking about the U.S. strategic objective, or at least main objective, being the end of the war and the United States stopping Ukraine. If we keep announcing that our goal is to stop supporting Ukraine, isn't Vladimir Putin's best move to just say, okay, we'll wait? And doesn't that, I mean, my sense is, you know, there's been this back and forth about the ceasefire, leading to a longer-term peace deal or just moving directly to a peace deal. And Putin would rather not agree to a ceasefire.

The Europeans have been pushing in the Oval Office and elsewhere for a ceasefire as a prelude to sort of a broader deal. I guess my interpretation of what Putin is trying to do is just delay because the United States has signaled again and again and again during the campaign in the first eight months of the Trump administration. and now repeatedly over the past several days, as these negotiations are unfolding, that we don't want anything to do with this anymore. Am I misreading this, Megan? No. And I look, I think even beyond what the administration is signaling, I think you can look at Donald Trump and say, this man has the attention span of a meth adult nat. And so it's sort of like the weather in San Francisco. If you don't like it, wait five minutes. And I think that that's also been true historically with Trump's policy in general, with sadly the lone exception of tariffs

and immigration crackdowns. Otherwise, right, he will get bored. He will move on to something else. And Russia just wants to wait for that, which if I were Russia, I would probably feel the same way since I do not support their invasion of Ukraine or indeed their defenestration of random misdigence, although I don't know, perhaps that just signals that Russia really needs to revisit its building codes, then I think, you know, it's not a great look for the United States, let us say. So what you're saying is Moscow needs more abundance dams. Yes.

To clear away their red tape so they can get better building codes. Send parachute in, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, and not Iglesias. There were some really prescient words I heard right before Trump. took office this term. And I was talking to some people who had been following the war, just, you know, moment by moment since it unfolded, since the invasion was launched. And they said that Donald Trump has not dealt with post-war Putin. That the Putin that he dealt with before was a Putin who was used to getting what he wanted without so blunt an instrument, without the sledgehammer, more with, you know, more with a chisel and less with the sledgehammer. And, and less with the sledgehammer.

and that he had had successful little green men. He kind of viewed himself as deft in diplomacy. He could maneuver and get what he wanted. He said, no, no, no, this is not the Putin you make a deal with. This is the Putin who, at this point, had almost a million casualties, hundreds of thousands of soldiers killed, fully invested in the war, total war economy, total not total mobilization of manpower,

but mobilizing, by some estimates, 30,000 new soldiers a month, that he's all in, he's absolutely all in on this, and that Trump has not dealt with that. And you can see that how that's unfolded, that this whole time, Putin has just been in the same position. We keep what we took. We'll take a little bit more. And oh, by the way, Ukraine isn't functionally independent anymore. That's how you end the war. And he hasn't budged one millimeter, not one, you know, one one millionth of the millimeter from that position. And I've just thought of those words that this is not the putin that trump expected to be dealing with this is a putin who is a who sees himself now in that almost czarist war leader mode and he's not backing

down an inch until he's made to back down until it becomes in him in his immediate interest to have a ceasefire to and so that's you know to me the number one critique of the biden administration was this slow rollout of aid, this excessive caution. Because the only thing that was going to stop Putin was that if it just got too costly for him. And then here we have the on again, off again, off again aid. Sometimes it's being turned off of Trump reportedly not even knowing about it. The on again, off again focus on a peace deal. Meantime, Putin just keeps grinding it out. And that's what everybody needs to wake up and realizes he is absolutely dedicated to grinding this thing out.

Yeah, so one quick point on that, just because it's, I think it's really useful for people who don't pay granular attention to this stuff. And this is one of the very few issues that I actually still paying very close attention to. When the Russians said in Anchorage on Friday, we can get to all of these questions about security this and blah, blah, blah, blah, that. Once we've dealt with the underlying or root causes of this conflict, what the Russians mean by that, I mean, yes, it's a euphemism, but they've footnoted it a zillion times what they mean by that. And what they mean by that is a legitimate democratic, Western-facing government in Ukraine. They mean the Zelensky government is the root cause. They mean an independent.

So like basically you, the way to hear it, whenever you hear Lavrov or any of those other guys talking about the underlying causes of this conflict, what you should hear. is the continued existence of Ukraine as an independent state is the underlying cause of this conflict. Everything else flows from that in terms of the Russian position. Putin reiterated this last June at a big conference where he said, look, first of all, we have a saying in Russian, wherever Russian troops set foot, that land becomes ours. And it's on video. Like, I linked to it in my latest column. And he said, look, at the end of the day, There really is no Ukraine because they're our brothers and the country belongs to us. It's part of Russia.

That is their position. They've said nothing fundamental to contradict that. Any ceasefire or pause and they've broken. I tried to do a list once and it just got endless of the number of times they've breaking ceasefires, humanitarian corridors, all these kinds of things. Things that they have agreed to. They've agreed to that they touted about their love of peace and then they wait. But in 2014, they agreed to humanitarian corridor to get in the Donbos to get civilians out of

a city, waited for them to be on the road as they were leading town in compliance with the agreement and then started shelling it. Like, they're bad actors, they lie. Marco Rubio in 2022, there's a great clip of him going on and on about how all these people think he can do a deal with Putin, but you can't because he's just such a liar. But anyway, the point is the strategic objective, there are only two. One, screw with NATO in the Western Alliance. And two, make Ukraine a vassal state at best, a territory of Russia.

And when you hear them say the underlying causes, that's what they mean. I think that's one of the things that struck me as I watched the Oval Office meeting and I watched what transpired in Alaska. We seem to be having this kind of global conversation on two totally different levels. You hear Donald Trump saying, for instance, that Vladimir Putin wants peace. And you remember all of the things that you just spoke about, Jonah. It's clear that Vladimir Putin doesn't want peace. Or if he wants peace, he only wants peace on those sort of absurd terms.

But you watch the European leaders in the Oval Office sort of buttering up Donald Trump. I mean, using his language, we need to stop the killing. they say it's it's this play acting sort of global diplomacy as play acting that seems to me to obscure the real issues at stake i mean the way that you just laid it out jona this is what vladimir putin wants everybody knows this is what he wants he keeps saying it it's not really a question and yet we're having these conversations i think driven by the trump administration that pretend Putin is somebody he's not and pretend he wants something he doesn't. And it's just this bizarre sort of, I don't even know how to describe it.

It's this bizarre thing to watch because you see, you know, reporters are asking questions based on, I think, a series of flawed assumptions based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what's happening. The big players are pretending things can happen or will happen that are never, ever going to happen. And it leads us in this, it leaves us in this weird place where we seemed, we could be making progress. I would say the tone of the reporting coming out of Alaska and then coming out of the European meeting is more optimistic than most people would have thought. But as David points out, without real progress, how, how as, you know, if you were there covering this, this thing, how do you cover it in that? that way. Make that part clear so that people understand this is all of this conversation is just

sort of part of a play. It's not real. David, any thoughts? You know, I think when you're looking at the way people are treating Trump, I think MAGA views it one way, but there's a different way to view it that is much closer to the truth. And I think one of the ways that MAGA views it is look, like look at the way in which people have to come and pay tribute to him. We have the whip hand. We are in charge here. And I've seen some things online of contrasting when he's sitting sort of at a table and all of the European leaders are hovering over him from his first term. And then this next one, he's sitting at the table and they're kind of all around him in chairs like he's lecturing them this time and how things have changed. I don't think this is what's happening at all. I think

what's happening is a lot of people have realized that he can be really easily manipulated in the moment. And Putin realizes that. They realize that. So Putin comes in, and what does Putin say to him? You won the election in 2020, right? You can't have fair elections with mail-in ballots. Oh, I never would have invaded if you were president, right? All of these things. And so that's pumping up Trump. And Trump goes on national television afterwards and makes these points, like Putin's handed him a big win. So what do all of the other people? do. They come and they adopt a similar approach. And if you can look one inch below it, it's not flattery. They're actually seething with contempt. They have contempt. And it is too easy. It is so easy to walk

into the room and to say the things that at least can pull him on side in that moment. Now, the sad thing is, let's suppose the seven Europeans actually in that moment got him to sort of rethink and reset for a bit. Well, he'll be in a different room at a different time with different people who flatter him, and they'll reset him in another way. And this pattern is becoming completely and obviously apparent to everyone at this point. Yeah, I mean, you said it much better than I did. I mean, and all the while, the fundamentals don't change. And Putin still wants what he wants. The quote-unquote root causes are still the root causes,

and we've made no more progress toward peace. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back shortly. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not.

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Before we return to the roundtable, I want to let you know what's going on elsewhere here at the dispatch. This week on The Remnant, Jonah Goldberg, has on Emmett Renson, author of a recent dispatch essay titled The People v. Insanity. They discussed the history of the insanity defense and Renson's personal experience with mental health institutions while living with schizoaffective disorder. Search for the Remnant in your podcast app and make sure you hit the follow button. Now let's jump back into our conversation. Let's move from war and peace and a rather depressing discussion about that to the coming debt crisis, just as sort of a pick-me-up. I was reading this past week an article in Foreign Affairs by Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard professor and the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, who basically took a big, long look at the United States and our pension for accumulating debt, and came to this. Conclusion. With long-term interest rates up sharply, public debt is nearing post-World War II peak,

foreign investors becoming more skittish, and politicians showing little appetite for reigning in fresh borrowing, the possibility of a once-in-a-century U.S. debt crisis no longer seems far-fetched. Debt and financial crisis tend to occur precisely one of countries' fiscal situation is already precarious, its interest rates are high, its political situation is paralyzed, and a shock catches policymakers on the back foot. The United States already checks the first three boxes. All that is missing is the shock. Megan, you have long covered the economy and economics

and long been sounding the alarm on debt and the accumulation of public debt in the United States. You can see how well that worked too. No, I know. Believe me, I feel as useless as you do sometimes has been an obsession of mine. The feeling as useless as me, Steve, is a really low point. I'm sorry to hear that.

Pretty low. Pretty bad. When the dispatch launched in October of 2019, the U.S. debt was $22.7 trillion. It is today $37 trillion and climbing. I guess the first question is, what do you make of Rogoff's analysis? Just be clear, causation does not meet equal correlation. Thank you for pointing out. We'd be living a lot better if we got one percent of that. We have been futilely sounding the alarm in the six years we've been in existence.

Megan, what do you think of Rogoff's framing of sort of this moment? And he talks of a shock. And, you know, I guess by definition, a shock is something you don't see coming necessarily. But if we were to worry about... proverbial shocks that could be the fourth of the four boxes that he would check. What should we be looking for? I mean, it could be anything. The pandemic was such a shock, right?

Where we had to go out and borrow an enormous amount of money to finesse what was happening to the economy. You could have another financial crisis. I don't think that's likely. But, you know, there are some areas of the economy where leverage is popping up again, private credit. You know, the AI build out. There's some question about how. well, those investments are going to pay out. Although, to be clear, I'm an AI boomer long term, but often when you have emergent technologies, things get a little bubbly. And to the extent that

this is being financed with private credit, rather than traditional bank loans or by retained earnings, then there's some question about, is that leverage maybe going to percolate through the economy if they can't pay back their loans? But we don't know what it is. It could be a war, right? I mean, And this is something I am hearing more and more from fiscal experts. I was at a fiscal conference at Hoover last year, incredibly depressing. And, you know, people just looked at these levels of debt, as I had been doing and said, this is unsustainable. And I said, well, how does this go wrong?

And one expert just said, look, something happens. China invades Taiwan. We need money to finance a defense buildup. We go out to the debt market and say, I need $10 billion. And the debt market's just like, yeah, no. I don't think so. But there's also a kind of slow-moving crisis where rates just stay high, where people look at our debt levels and say, something's going to happen. You guys are not going to pay this back in real terms, right?

You are going to inflate away the value of the debt. You are going to cram it down on your financial institutions, very popular option. But one way or another, you are not going to be able to pay this back because you, you are going to be able to pay this back. because you just don't have the economic growth capacity to meet both politically very important entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare and to meet your obligations to bondholders. And that's a really real scenario now.

I think you are already seeing, there's some argument about this, but you're already seeing that the government has been borrowing shorter. So there was a movement at the beginning of the financial crisis where people looked at, or the beginning of the aftermath of the financial crisis, I should say, the kind of early to mid-teams, where people looked at these incredibly low interest rates and said, you know what we should do, we should borrow longer term.

We should convert our debt and little primer for those following along at home is that government debt is not like your mortgage. It's not what's known as self-amortizing. Basically, we just pay interest to the bondholders. And then when that bond comes due, we have to pay them back the full face. value of the bond. And so what we do is instead of just slowly, gradually paying down our debt, we then usually go back into the debt, unless we're running a surplus, we go back into the debt market and we borrow more money under roughly the same terms. And the issue with that is that if interest rates have gone up, you can have a situation where your old debt paid 2%, your

new debt pays 6%. These are, by the way, numbers, for example, not real numbers about US debt right now. And suddenly, now your payments going up. That puts a further pinch on you. Now you want to borrow more money to finesse that. And so that can happen. You know, that problem can emerge very quickly. So what they did was they started making this debt longer term. Well, that's kind of reversed. And now they're borrowing a lot more short. And I was talking to someone who said, I would talk to officials and say, interest rates are at rock bottom, you know, in 2019, 2022, you should be further lengthening the maturity of the U.S. debt structure in order to take this. And they would say, but I would have to pay a higher premium now to get a longer term

loan. Why would I do that? That's costing the taxpayer's money. Like, it was just not possible that interest rates would go up. And so we're now in a situation where our debt service costs are climbing extremely rapidly and where we are extremely vulnerable. Look, I mean, the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget just put out a paper saying that, you know, debt's going to go to 120% of GDP. It's almost 100% now.

And then, you know, at these interest rates, the deficits can go to 2.6 trillion. These are not sustainable numbers even for an economy as big and powerful as the U.S. And I would add that a lot of the things that the Trump administration is doing with tariffs, with kind of uncertain regulatory policy where everything's changing all the time, it's making us a less attractive destination for foreign money already. So you've got all of these confluences of factors that I think do make it a real risk. We won't know what the crisis is until it hits. But we should be assuming that that crisis is very possible.

and treating that like an emergency. We need to get back to a spot where we're not going to have a crisis. And the problem is that no one on Capitol Hill or in the White House is entrusted in doing that because that would mean fiscal pain now. It would mean raising taxes and cutting spending. And why would you do that? Voters hate that. So, well, they're going to hate the financial crisis more, to be very clear.

But the thing is, maybe the guy who voted for it won't be in office when that happens. So, you know, make hay well the sunshines. So, David, I mean, there's been a case and Megan's been making it for treating this like an emergency for decades, really. But we are at this point. I mean, I remember having these conversations about, you know, what was going to be an unacceptable debt to GDP ratio 10, 15 years ago. And we're there. I mean, this is now the moment. And we don't have anybody who's taking this seriously, or he's even talking about it. For a while, Republicans, you know, during the sort of Paul Ryan era, could claim, I think, with some credibility that they were the party who was at least offering to reform the programs

that were driving the debt more than anything else. But here we are, to Megan's point, In FYI, fiscal year 2024, the United States spent $850 billion on defense, but $880 billion, simply on interest payments. Yeah. Is there anybody who's going to make this case other than, you know, a few of us in the wind over here on a podcast? Well, a couple of things. Let me just say, it is a joy to listen to Megan in her absolute wheelhouse talking about

these issues, just the granular detail, fantastic. Second, you know, I feel like, you remember the movie The Big Short, just this really fun movie about the buildup to the financial crisis and how, you know, the way the movie depicts it, not exactly completely realistic, but quasi-realistic, which is the people who saw this were sort of a, saw this coming and at least coming in all of its awfulness were kind of a minority, a small band of quirky people. I don't feel like this about, we have been talking about the debt and deficit in the United States for so long. I'm old enough to remember, and I don't know if you guys remember this, do you remember when the Democrats would run deficit trial commercials against Reagan that in the future the kids were going to be prosecuting the adults for the way that they had allowed deficits to, you know, just to bloom out of control? So I feel like what we have instead, is sort of almost like what you might call a climate change type problem. And that is for a lot of time,

for a very long time, the people who've been saying climate change is an urgent, urgent thing that we really need to get our hands around have been making dumerous predictions about what will happen in the environment that don't happen. And so you can go back and you can look at like a news broadcast from 1998 and it'll say something by 2010, it could be this. Well, 2010 comes, around and it doesn't happen. And I think that part of that we kind of have a bit of that problem in talking about debt and deficits, that there's been a cohort of people talking about the danger of debt and deficits for so long that a lot of people, it's kind of buzzing in their ears. And I remember reading a really interesting Noah Smith column years and years ago

where he said, think of it, think of the debt. And I've used this analogy on the dispatch podcast before. He said, think of this enormous amount of debt as you're walking, down an infinite corridor with an invisible pit that there is a point in which there is too much where people have been getting it wrong is they've maybe put that point a little too low that our economies actually could kind of muscle through all of this in a way that we didn't quite anticipate but the fact that we have not had the kind of crisis that a lot of people predicted doesn't mean that you can just keep accumulating and i think we saw a a bit of a preview of that in the inflation during the Biden era, which was, you know, and

Megan, I don't want to intrude too much into her absolute wheelhouse here, but this sort of idea, come on in, the water is fine. Yeah. Then we can just spend and spend and spend and not have an inflationary effect. Well, that concept is done now. So I think more people are waking up, but at the same time, they're waking up to this reality and turning to one of the worst political classes we've had in the modern history of the United States and say, do something about this. And of course, they're not, at least not right now. Yeah, and something we should be clear about is that almost all of the debt, the really problematic debt was accumulated in two bursts following the financial crisis and during the pandemic.

That people like to yell at Reagan, they like to yell at Bush. But honestly, they were running deficits that were not ideal. I don't love a 3% budget deficit, but they were functionally sustainable. The Reagan deficits were not sustainable, but then they did a tax reform that basically raised enough revenue to lower it to a level where, you know, between inflation and economic growth, you can pretty much run that level of deficit forever because the overall debt to GDP ratio doesn't rise that much. So by the end of Bush's term, for all the yelling about deficits, before the financial crisis hits, right? In 2016, our debt is, our national debt's like a third of GDP.

That is a sustainable level. Under Obama, it rockets up to about three quarters of GDP. And then during the pandemic, it goes up to actually over 100% of GDP, but partly that was an artifact of GDP collapsing in 2020. And then the problem is that a couple things. First of all, I would argue that both after the financial crisis and after the pandemic, we overspent. We did more than we needed to because it was politically popular. Like, we didn't really need to bail out GM. That was not, we did not need to spend $10 billion

doing that. 10 billion net, 50 total. Because this was not something that probably meaningfully improved the performance of the economy at large. It meaningfully improved the fortunes of an important democratic constituency. But by the late 2019s, you have first of all, you have Trump, who's totally irresponsible, does this deficit finance tax cut, makes no effort to pay for it. But then you get on the left this ideology called modern monetary theory, which it's really less of an economic theory than like a gnaustic religious experience that I am unable to access. I kept trying to get people to explain to me how this would work. And there would just be a point where they were like, and then the magic happens, and I would get lost. But the problem was that Democrats wanted an ideology that told them that they did not have to control their spending at all. And, you know, there were also sensible people, like Larry Summers and Jason Furman, who, by the way, I respect deeply, but would say, well, interest rates are really low. We should be borrowing to fund investment.

And I would say, but interest rates might not always be low. And the political economy of our country is such that we're not just going to borrow to fund investment. We're going to borrow it to fund garbage. And then if interest rates, we're not going to pay it back. And then if interest rates go up, we're screwed. Which is, in fact, exactly what happened. So congratulations, Megan, I guess. The prize is that everything's miserable. And that phenomenon, by the time you get to Biden, people are just like, well, we can spend any amount of money and we don't have to pay for any of it, which is exactly what they did. They're sending out checks after vaccinations have started, which is not necessary. The economy is already primed to recover. And they get a huge burst

of inflation, some of which was driven by supply shocks, but some of which was driven by the sheer amount of money that we pumped into the economy. The Trump administration also sent out unnecessary checks after we'd started vaccinating because he wanted to look like a good guy. And all of those factors have driven our debt to an unsustainable level. And then the Biden administration made no effort. There is an argument for spending during emergencies, for borrowing and spending when you are having a once-in-a-century pandemic. But the Biden administration, the deficits didn't really go down much after the pandemic because they wanted to give out goodies to the voters. And now the Trump administration also wants to give out goodies to the voters.

And no one is thinking about, okay, guys, you were creating this enormous risk for the American economy. And it's so enormous that unlike 10 or 15 years ago, this could happen on your watch. and then you can have to do the non-fund part. So, Jonah, I mean, there's a long and bitter indictment to be made of sort of cowardly elected officials who are responsible for this. Both parties, neither parties is wearing the white hats in this. But to Megan's last point, isn't this fundamentally a voter problem? Voters want stuff. They want goodies.

The case that Paul Ryan made, he was able to win over a majority of the Republicans in the House on entitlement reform, got them to put it in their annual budgets, which was, I think, quite an accomplishment. But fundamentally, voters aren't clamoring for this. They're happy to have this. The programs that we're talking about reforming are popular with voters. And it works when elected officials give out goodies to voters to win. votes. It didn't work for Joe Biden, but in general, it works. Isn't this a voter problem as much or more than it is an elected official problem? Yeah, you guys know one of my favorite lines from Orwell is about how a man can feel himself to be a failure and therefore take to drink, and then by

taking to drink become even more of a failure. It's a catalytic thing here, where you've had politicians, cry wolf, say everything is going to go to the hell if we borrow five more dollars, it didn't happen, you have the rotating hypocrisy, right? Sort of like, you know, like just as an example, filibusters, right? On a filibuster, when you're, when the filibuster is inconvenient for you, you start screaming about how it's a impediment to democracy, it's this antiquated relic from a bygone time. And then when your side, when the, when everybody switches teams in and out of power, all of a sudden, the other side picks up the rhetoric that the other team left behind. We've done the same thing on debt for 30 years, 40 years, and in a, particularly in a populist moment, that's a populist moment in part because of the screw-ups about how we've handled the financial stuff.

We have this deep-seated distrust of experts, and when you have this age of cynicism, which assumes that everybody is arguing out of self-interest, and therefore someone else is going to get rewarded. it should be me, there's just little appetite to take anybody seriously about these problems. And this, I was waiting for someone here to bring it up, because it seems to me it brings all of this, what brings all of this together, if you're talking about the craven, gobsmacking, almost, almost evil, I try not to, I try to keep the word evil out of most budgetary debates, but failures of their political class. the idea that will symbolize it the most is if Josh Hawley succeeds in winning this argument that many in the Trump administration favor of giving out bread and circuses checks,

right, just giving cash payments as a refund on the tariffs, right? It's a tariff rebate, which, you know, I don't want to trigger Megan or anybody, but like the whole idea that they're being rebated on tariffs that the Trump administration claims, claims other countries are paying in the first place, just logically you can't connect the dots. But regardless, if they take the money that they're raising in an inefficient growth-dampening way with this new tax that they're bragging about, first Republican administration in our lifetimes to brag about just massive revenues from a tax that they levied, unconstitutionally in any respects, so put that aside. And then they are just going to cut checks to people.

in a Huey-long-style chicken-in-every-pot fiscal act of vandalism, that is a sign that they don't mean anything at all about the debt. And I think that could be one of those triggering things, that just everyone watching from outside the fishbow are like, holy crap, they're really not serious about this. The other one, which I think could trigger this, and I know they talked about it recently on A.O., is the, you know, the Scott Besant argument now, which says the Supreme Court has to agree to the constitutionality of all of these terrorists because if they don't, it will trigger a 1929 style financial collapse, which that sort of rhetoric, which I think is really stupid on the merits for so many reasons I cannot get into here. But there's a real

danger of that kind of rhetoric becoming self-fulfilling. Like if you tell the MAGA base, if the Supreme Court does this, the country is going to go into a financial crisis. And then the Supreme court does it, which I think they should, that's how you get runs on banks and stuff, right? I mean, like, like the psychology of that is really, really, really bad. And he's the responsible one in the cabinet, right? I mean, everybody points to Scott Bassett is the responsible one in the cabinet. So, like, I completely agree. Like so many things that's launched really bad events and cascade events, the reason for

it doesn't need to be rational, right? I mean, like, it wasn't really rational for Gavrillo Princep to kill Arch. Duke Fernand, you know, like, but a lot of things happened after that. The, the precipitating causes of the, the, the 29, you know, stock market crash. We could have an argument about what they were, but, like, it didn't have to be any one of those straws that broke those camel back. The reaction to this stuff could be really, really bad. And we could see, you know, a bond market crisis or something like that happen for really dumb reasons. And saying, oh, well, you know, they shouldn't have done that. Doesn't matter at that point. So can I ask a.

question to the group here it appears to me that a lot of what is there's a lot of value in our economy that is fundamentally notional so we have large amounts of money invested in bitcoin for example in bitcoin although certainly the the use cases for cryptocurrency are growing or expanding they strike me that Bitcoin is valued way beyond its actual economic sort of worth to, you know, economic worth within a market economy. Similarly, we have huge investment in AI, just giant investment in AI by some accounts, accounting for more of our economic growth than consumer spending in the moment. And a lot of that is speculative investment. It is not by based on the money that AI is actually producing, but the thought of what it will do,

how vulnerable are sort of these notional elements of our economy? How vulnerable are we with that many assets tied into vaporware? I don't know. Bitcoin is actually a really small share of the economy. It's a large share of the mind space of people like us. but I don't foresee a problem in crypto specifically right now. Now, that's not to say it couldn't happen, but look, the way... Just a data point on that really quick.

Like, the Sam Bankman-Fried collapse was huge, and it was barely a ripple on the broader economy. Yeah, it just didn't matter. There was a very excellent column on this in the Washington Post, by the way. Can't remember who wrote it. But, you know, so there. there's two kinds of recessions we could have out of that notional value. And one is like the recession of 2001. There's a big run-up in the stock market. Everyone's betting big on, you know, pets.com and that service that would take bike messengers to like deliver you a soda. And they,

when that collapses, when people realize that no, you know, PE ratios of 500 are probably not sustainable. We have a recession, right? Because people feel poor. They cut back on their spending. Governments, especially in California, are getting fewer capital gains taxes. But it's a pretty mild recession. It did not feel mild to me, to be clear. I spent two years looking for a job, however, because I just graduated from business school right into the recession. But it wasn't a big economic event like 2008. What happened in 2008 is that you've got what economists call leverage and what the rest of us call borrowing. And debt crises are different.

Debt crises ripple through the economy. They multiply. They amplify. They take down everything. It's like a snowballing avalanche that just gets bigger and bigger, gathering more, and then it just wipes everything out. And those, that's a different question. So the way that Bitcoin or AI could trigger that kind of really bad deep recession

is if people are levered with. in other markets. Now, after the financial crisis, we did actually do a fair amount of work to keep big financial institutions from acquiring that kind of leverage from having too little equity, having too little of like the core savings of the business in the business and to require people to have more assets for their liabilities and so forth. But every time you do this, there is demand to create products that allow people to take on more risk. And so, for example, in 2008, what failed, what actually triggered the run was not the collapse of Lehman so much as the collapse of this money market mutual fund you've never heard of. Now, money market mutual funds

emerged in the 1970s to get around interest rate restrictions that had been imposed during the Great Depression, because once inflation started taking up, that became a real problem for savers. And so there's always that activity in the market of like, wow, there's all these regulations keeping me from taking too much risk. How can I fix that? And so the question is how much leverage is there in the system? There's more than there was five, ten years ago because private credit is growing. I don't think there's as much as there was in 2007. And so I'm not super worried about a pandemic or level event, a financial crisis level event.

But I am worried that I wasn't worried about that in 2007 either. I had no idea. I knew there was a housing bubble. I called the housing bubble in 2003. The economist was calling it in 1999. What I didn't see was how that was going to ripple through these parts of the financial system that were pretty opaque and that I didn't have a lot of visibility into like what the knock-on effects of the collapse would be. Isn't part of the problem that when people look at things like the stock market or their own 529s or 401Ks or what? whatever have you, everything seems great. Like, hey, this is a pretty good time. It's hard for me to

imagine that these long-term theoretical problems that people have been talking about, as David points out, for years, are actually going to threaten that would cause me those kinds of problems. But it seems to me false confidence. I mean, at some point, that stuff is going to matter, right? Yeah, and it's sort of mysterious to me why markets have been so kind to all of this, except that as the argument that, well, you know, the United States has a lot of problems were kind of the prettiest ugly girl on the block. And, you know, where else are you going to put your money? So I've actually heard that. I mean, what's interesting is I had a conversation with somebody who's involved in running a big sovereign wealth fund from overseas. And we were

talking about this very thing. And he said, what am I going to do? What are we going to do? Are we going to redirect our investments to China right now? Nope, or not. Where are we are we looking? Europe? Nope. The United States is still the best. And we're the best until such time as we're not the best. I just fear that that time is gradually creeping up on us for all the reasons that you've laid out. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch Roundtable. Td Bank knows that running a small business is a journey, from startup to growing and managing your business. That's why they have a dedicated at Small Business Advice Hub on their website

to provide tips and insights on business banking to entrepreneurs no matter the stage of business you're in. Visit td.com slash small business advice to find out more or to match with a TD small business banking account manager.

We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump right in. I have a correction before we get to not worth your time. Last week in our very edifying discussion of crime in Washington, D.C., I mentioned the fact that my daughter had witnessed a homeless man defecating in front of 400 North Capitol, a building that's right near the U.S. Capitol and used this. And it turns out that Jesse Waters has a home? No comment. my daughter heard the podcast probably because she listens to every dispatch podcast or maybe because

she saw a clip on social media but either way she heard this clip and she came to me and accused me of peddling fake news and said that she did not in fact witness this man defecating but she saw the man and she saw the product um and put those things together understood that that's what happened. So just to be clear, abundantly clear, she did not witness this. But I think the broader point holds. That's my correction. Declan Garvey, our executive editor, has started a program a few months ago, and I love it, where the dispatch puts out, publishes a piece, an article, a collective piece of all of our corrections in any given month. We do it at the first of every month. And thankfully, thus far those lists have been pretty small but i like it as a way um to further accountability journalism

and to call ourselves out so i will make sure that i share this with declan and we will have a formal correction um about this in the next article on our corrections um finally i want to end uh with a not worth your time that i would say is of almost the same magnitude of the big things that we discussed this week, war and peace, the future of a peaceful world, the possibility of a debt crisis here in the United States. This one I want to talk about a problem that we've all, I think, faced. You're running late to the grocery store and you're trying just to zip in real quickly, get a missing ingredient for your recipe, Megan, maybe for one of your pies. Or you're dropping a kid at school and you are trying to pull into the parking lot and get out real quickly. And you encounter someone who I call

a backer inner who pulls forward and then rather than just pulling into the spot with the front of his car, instead pulls beyond the spot, backs in, screws it up, takes a lot of time, might even require you to pull in reverse. I encountered a backer inner. I'm here in Northwest Ohio. I ran to the Kroger this morning to get a coffee and I encountered a backer inner and I almost hit him because he pulled forward and then pulled backward. My question to you, and I'll start with you, Jonah, are you a backer inner and assuming you're not, I assuming that none of us are backer inners, but if we have a backer inner among us, I'd love to hear a defense, are you a backer inner? And if you're not a backer inner, is the proper punishment.

for backer-in-ers, the death penalty. So I am not a back-or-inner, but I've done it more than my wife thinks should be permissible by law. She is where you are about death penalty being too good for you. She has some very convoluted theories about, like, I don't want to say toxic maximally

because that's not a term she would use, but like sort of backer-in-er-brose with really large trucks that take a lot, way too much time doing it. So my guy today, just to point clearly, my guy today was definitely

a backer and her bro with a large truck and might have had the truck testicles hanging off the bottom as he did it. Truck nuts. It's truck nuts. Yeah. Come on.

Get it right. So I'm, I will say, I like being able to go first, I like being able to go first and not like fear backing into a shopping cart or a small child or anything like that.

So one of the things I will often do is I will forego a closer spot to the front of the supermarket in favor of a spot where I can pull into it and then go to the other side. So an effect looks like I've backed in, but I've just gone forward. And so there's some specific circumstances where I get wanting to back out because of like the kind of groceries you got to load. You got a lot of stuff and your trunk and blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't get the people who are passionate about it. That's the thing that I think is really weird. I think when the stakes are really, really low and it's really easy to do, do it.

But otherwise, if it's a crowded parking lot, don't mess with people. Don't screw up, you know, don't take time out of people's days and don't increase likelihood of you, like, scratching somebody else's car or whatever. So, yeah, I am not as passionate as you or my wife are about this issue, but I'm basically where you are. Megan, are you a backer-in-er? No, because I learned to drive in New York City, and I find front parking or back parking extremely difficult. Parallel parking, the natural God's way. Extremely easy.

So I always, I will be at the very back at the parking lot finding a spot that I can pull through because the entire problem of pulling a car into a parking garage, which I basically, or a parking spot forward, which I basically didn't do until I was in my 30s. I find it terrifying. I'm too old to learn. I just go out. I will say, look, I am against the death penalty in all cases. The state should not murder other human beings. But have we thought about bringing back the stocks, right? I think that there are a lot of historical punishments that we need to explore in greater depth to handle. is antisocial behavior. Also, certainty of punishment is more important than severity of punishment. David, you, as I recall, have a truck.

You've got a beard. You fit, you know, if we're working from stereotypes that Jonah offered, you fit a couple of the characteristics. Do you have the truck nuts, though? No truck nuts, but, well, you know, soy boys and cuckervatives, this guy's a backer-in-er. Oh no. Are you really? Absolutely. Why? When you purchase a four-wheel drive pickup truck in the south, it's a contractual obligation. You sign it. You agree. And if you don't back in, you have to seek a waiver, an individual waiver of your contractual obligation. No, it's first, it's six of one, half dozen the other. You either do the forward back thing on the front end or the back end. So if you pull in, you're still pulling out and correcting and moving. So it's just where do you put it on the front end or the back end?

And I like to back in because I like to, it's much easier to get out. Yeah, absolutely. And so when you could park far away from the door, pull through, and it would be equally easy to get out and you wouldn't be blocking other people. Now, I am what you might call, you know, some of my peers in four-wheel drive pickup truck done with. say I'm a squishbacker in her because if there is a big train of cars behind me, I'm going to pull in. I'm not going to make everybody wait. So I do, you know, I do request individualized waivers for my contractual obligations in that circumstance. Okay. Suspended sentence, David. Yes, but as a general

matter, yeah, 100%. My truck right now is backed in. Like right now where it is sitting, it is backed in. Oh, man. Yeah, 100%. Well, I'll give you, David, I'll give you. David, I'll give you some backup here. Gary Bubar, a traffic safety specialist with the triple A, told the Arizona Republic, it is actually better to back in if you can. And I will quote, Gary Bubar, what the research suggests is that any time that you can minimize your blind spots, when you exit the parking spot, you're less likely to have any kind of a fender bender or other mishap. When you're backing out of a spot, there are multiple blind spots that can limit your vision and make it more difficult to see any drivers that might be waiting for you or for your spot or coming past

you. So you have some expert backing for your antisocial, totally indefensible behavior, but I do think that we're going to have to consider some kind of a punishment. It is a funny thing that you say about four-wheel drives and backing in because a few months ago, was speaking at a men's Bible study, a prayer breakfast. And I wasn't quite finding. It was sort of an out-of-the-way building, and I wasn't quite finding where I needed to be. And then I looked up, and I saw a parking lot full of Ford F-150s backed in. I was like, that's it. That is the men's prayer breakfast right there. And I was absolutely correct. So I backed in. Yeah, I backed in and joined So can I ask, it's sort of not worth your time adjacent.

Can I make a good parenting tip that's related to this? And this is from hard-earned experience. When your kid as a teenager starts driving for the first time, it also means they start parking for the first time. And they're bad at it. Your kid out there in listener land might be marginally better than the median kid or the mean kid. But they're all bad at it. We establish a policy of, after so many scratches on the paint on the car, in any parking garage, like when you go to the movies, the mall, anything like that, don't even attempt to park next to any other cars.

Go to the first spot, no matter how far away, that does not have a car on either side of the spot. And that's where you park until you get better at this. and you'll be glad you're still waiting by the way that is still where I park my husband finds this very funny and I found it very funny he's from Florida that he couldn't parallel park when we first met and I had to teach him he's now a very good parallel parker because we street park our car I have never become a good garage parker it's terrifying can't you make those spaces bigger but Megan as a fellow New York when you see someone parallel park front end first does it trigger you oh gosh oh my gosh that's almost this bad

That is backer-inners. Well, look, I have, like, if there's enough space, I will parallel park front-in. Sure, sure, but it's not really parallel parking. It's just taking, like, the middle position of this vast open space. Yeah, behind. I will note, backer-inters are natural parallel parkers. Are they? Yes, absolutely.

I have some skepticism there. It is actually a different skill. And I will say, I was always for the parking I needed to do, a very good parker because we had, my parents had two cars when I was growing up, which was a very unusual. but my dad had a work car because he worked for a contractor's trade association and was going out to job sites in Queens and so forth. But we also had the 1977 Chrysler Cordoba that my parents had bought before that, yeah, that was a choice car. Both of these were basically like trying to parallel park the love boat. And my father made me and just drilled me. We did

every time we would go driving. Oh, I couldn't go driving with my mother. It made her too anxious. I should be sitting in the seat. I would do anything. like, but my father, just every time we went out driving, he would make me over and over every time he saw an open parking space. He's like, good chance to practice your parallel parking. So I, by the time I actually got my license, I was an exceptional parallel parker because the cars I was parking on, my first car was a 1997 green Ford Taurus, a beloved vehicle of pharmaceutical sales reps everywhere. And parking that was so much easier than the minivan or the 1977 chrysler cordoba that i always found it very easy and so yes it triggers me

when i see people pulling in uh you know knows first because that was the of course the first thing that i tried to do and my father would just screech what are you doing it's it's it's petting the cat backwards it's like it's just a violation of all the universe believe in um i will say that i think new york city maybe chicago But I think New York City is one of the only major cities where basically if you fail parallel parking on the test, you fail. At least when I was taking it, it was like 30 points on the test and the 70 was passing. So like if you got any else wrong and you didn't do past parallel parking, you failed.

Well, it's also one of the only places where they make you actually parallel park. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. So most people do their parallel parking test between cones, which is not real. and I think they also do this in Chicago, although I don't know, but they actually make you parallel park. And so if you can't do it, you cannot get your license in New York City. Well, I don't want to brag. But God has given me two talents.

I was blessed with the ability to make a clover out of my tongue, and I can parallel park. And I have one of those, you know, full-sized, oversized SUVs, and I can get that thing. into a space with one inch on either side without touching either of the cars and just moving it in. But I agree with you, Megan, it is important to make your kids do that. And so I tried to teach them to parallel park with that car, with the other cars. They're still learning, I would say. That's probably enough of this discussion. Thank you for joining us on this week's.

Dispatch podcast. Megan and Jonah will be back on future dispatch podcast. David probably won't, given that he's a backer-inner, and we are finding suitable punishments for him at this point. I'm going to rally my fellow backer-inners in the comments section to absolutely dog-pile speed. The last major rally of backer-inners was January 6, damn it. Oh, oh. Wow. Off the rails. Off the wheels. Off the wheels. We're a politically diverse community, Jonah. Politically diverse community.

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