The Ricochet Podcast - Addressing the Elephant in the Room

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

Conservatism and the Republican Party have been at an impasse for some time. On the one hand, we're beholden to the enduring principles of our founding, on the other we're proud members of the world's most innovative state. Henry Olsen joins Steve and James this week to discuss life at the conservative crossroads. (Check out his new podcast series of the same name here!)Plus, Lileks and Hayward celebrate the EPA's move to drop the greenhouse gas "endangerment finding," and mark the departure of a friend of Ricochet. Rest in peace, Mr. John Ekdahl. 

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. It's the Rickshay podcast with Stephen Hayward. I'm James Lylex, and today we go to the conservative crossroads and talk to Robert Johnson. No, Henry Olson, so let's have ourselves a podcast. And you took $10,000. That's a lie.

And help them do it. You know, the other thing is whistleblowers came to you as early as 2000. Let's look. As early as 2019, don't talk over me. As early as 2019, it's my hearing, pal. As early as 2019, don't call me,

whistleblowers came to, well, I should call you a prisoner because you ought to be in jail. Welcome, everybody. It's the Rickusay podcast number 776. Boy, that sounds patriotic. I'm James Lillick here in Minneapolis, and I'm joined by Stephen Hayward in...

I presume California. Yes. And this is the Rikershay podcast. You can join us at Ricketts. Show.com, by the way, and be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. Why don't you go there? Well, not now. I mean, you're leading forward elbows on the table wrapped, waiting to see where this is all going to go.

But, you know, when we're done, amble over and see what all the fuss is about. Stephen, how are you today? How have things been? It's been two weeks. Last week I was flat with a stomach bug. Not the stomach flu. There's no such thing as stomach flu. I don't think.

I mean, you can't have influenza of the, you know, the GI part. It was some bug, some noros, some campy bactors, some something, I think. Right. I'm fine. I'm still getting over a respiratory bug I caught a week ago, but I'm back up in fighting for him and very happy about the news this week.

There's been, you know, I'm not tired of winning. I'll just put it that way. Well, let's go down those lists of wins as you see them. I'm sure some people will regard them as mortal blows against the American experiment. But with your sunny optimism and your particular prism, what are the things that you...

What winnings do you like today? Well, I think the biggest story of the week, and I think you can't overstate how big it is, is the Trump administration rolling back what's been known as the endangerment finding of the Obama years. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. That would be the one, yes.

That is the most consequential thing that I've... Right. Well, I mean, look, I used to be... when I lived in Washington, I marinated in all the fine points of the climate policy and energy debate, and I want to avoid the technical details because it gets thick and boring in a hurry. But what's important is that this was step one, now almost 20 years ago, essentially for the federal government to take over the entire energy system of the United States, and that meant nationalizing

all the electric utilities. They never said that's what they were doing, but that, in effect, is what was happening. And, you know, I actually used to read through these 1,500-page draft plans of the EPA, and because I have a high threshold of pain. Well, if the Trump administration is done is not merely a simple bureaucratic step, but to make a long story short, they've done patient work quietly over the last several years while Biden was president, to lay the groundwork, to not only roll back the cornerstone of their power grab, overpower, because by that included our compliance standards, other things you and I have coveted about forever. But to make it stick legally, and that's very important. And that gets the way the bureaucratic wheels grind,

and I think they are going to be able to make it stick. But to me, the most delicious part of all this is watching the press coverage. So the ABC evening news said, Trump rolls back the power of the United States to control the climate. That's what he said. Like, you know, we have a knob in the EPA.

Just control the climate by turning a knob. I mean, and, you know, the New York Times is having a fit. I love their headline, here it is. It's Trump allies near total victory in wiping out. U.S. climate regulation. And I thought, gosh, the Times report does like it's a bad thing.

Right? And then the Times says that it looks like you're going to be able to make the stick. Unlike other things Trump is doing that may be reversed on day one by a Democratic president. Now, I'm just a little old country hickmoron up here in the flyover states. But to me, this is like reading a headline that says the administration relaxes ban on phlogiston. Yeah, right. There is a, I mean, let's go back to 2009 here. if I can read for my notes,

2009, which is when they began, the EPA found that carbon dioxide, which I hope I never have anything to do with it, methane and nitrous oxide, which is, of course, that's stuff you get at the dentist that makes you feel better. And three other greenhouse gases, quote, endanger the public health and welfare

of current and future generations. So one of the Clean Air Act, this was said, and then Scotas ruled a little while later that the agency could set the determinations. So in other words, this huge, huge power was lent to these people, predicated on the science that all of these greenhouse gases are going to cause changes in the climate that will be catastrophic, that will be expensive, that will kill people that make the seas rise, all the rest of it. And that has been gospel

ever since. Right. We are living in an era, as we've talked before, of the authoritative settled science, all the things that people know, all the institutions that people trusted, all of the experts and the rest of it, all that credibility is. being dismantled, and this is one piece of that. Now, you're right about the hysteria. I mean, Barack Obama tweeted out that said that the endangerment finding served as the

basis for limits on tailpipe emissions. And I found that to be an interesting way to put it, because it's supposed to make people think of those huge, choking, horrible, stinky, dark clouds that come from the back of every car. Tailpipe emissions, I'm guessing, at this point, are significantly cleaner than they used to be,

in part because they have to be. But you remember back in the days of leaded gasoline when I was a child? I mean, you would actually see, you would see these anti-pollution ads, the ones that had the fake Indian of the tear rolling down his cheek, and you would see fleets of cars

and this massive, dark smoke billowing from underneath them. I can still smell this stuff. Well, that isn't the case anymore. So finding, saying that tailpipe emissions might not be the thing exactly that gets people all head up. And he also talked about power plant rules are going to be relaxed.

Well, maybe we need more power plants and maybe we need more nuclear plans. But he says it's just to, the only reason is so the fossil fuel industry can make more money. Yeah. You know, this recent cold snap

we went through a couple weeks ago, coal and oil saved the day. You know, we actually don't generate any serious amount of electricity with oil anymore. It used to be 50 years ago, 20%. But then oil got expensive, as we know, and we shifted to coal and natural gas. But in the Northeast, where they have been blocking natural gas pipelines, they had to fire up a lot of oil and diesel power generators to keep lights on and keep people warm. And they've been on for,

I mean, I think I just read earlier this week that they finally, New England shut off the last of the oil fired power plants they put online for emergencies steps. The tailpipe thing, oh gosh, I know all the statistics on this. And yes, emissions of some things are down almost a 100% from what they were 50 years ago. To dramatize it for listeners, I show students a slide, and you'll appreciate this, because you're old enough as I am to have worked on a carburetor at one time in life, right? I always like to pop the hood and fiddle the screwdriver and the carburetor. It probably made things worse, but we don't have carburetors anymore.

We went to fuel-injected engines, right? And other things, the little flaps on the gas tanks where we put the nozzle in. You didn't used to have those. Well, I show a slide to students when I go through all this, and I show on the, left side, a 1967 Mustang, parked in a driveway with the engine off. And on the right, I'll show a late model around 2005 Mustang, driving down the highway at 60 miles an hour. And the trick question is, which one of these cars is putting out more air pollution? And of course, the trick answer is the Mustang parked in the driveway is emitting more pollution with its engine off than the

Mustang driving down the road at 60 miles an hour with the engine on. Explain that way. Explain that counterintuitive example, Mr. Hay. Well, the technical term was fugitive emissions. The reason we sealed up engines the way they are now that you can't get to them anymore is to stop essentially gasoline from evaporating. It really was that simple. It used to be tons of a place like L.A. where I grew up, significant amount of, you know, gasoline evaporating into the air from our old style cars from 50, 60 years ago. We have none of that anymore. And that's why smog levels have fallen, depending on the city you're in, you know, by 50, 60, 70 percent.

And I can say, I can bore you silly, but I'll just stop there and say, Obama doesn't know what he's talking about as usual. Well, we're in a bit of a mind here because we say, well, you know, cars are cleaner today, the air is cleaner today. We don't need this. A lot of the reasons that we have these advancements and we have cleaner engines and the rest of it is because there has been the heavy thumb of the federal government pushing down the scale and telling everybody what they want.

I mean, so we have to admit that probably we would not have the progress that we do if it had been left up to the consumer or the industry itself. I mean, what are you going to do? But the point is, is that after you've done a certain amount of work, then the existence of the agency has to perpetuate itself and it has to justify itself. So you have ever more attempts to get cleaner and cleaner and cleaner and cleaner, which are incremental and small and petty in what they accomplished, but actually great in the impact that they have on drivability, on the shape of the cars, on survivability, and, you know, all of that stuff. So, yes, I'm not going to be one of those guys who say, we should go back to where it was in 68 when they were dumping cadmium in the river. You could say that markets eventually would have fixed everything, and maybe that's so. Hard to falsify, but we did clean things up.

I mean, you remember ecology was. Oh, yes. That's what it was called back then. And it had all the raiments and all the trappings of a religion, as it does to this day. But it won. and it got a lot of stuff good and it changed public consciousness, but we have never moved. It seems like we haven't moved at all in public consciousness

about the imminent demise of the late great planet Earth, right? Of spaceship earth. It seems like we're still back in 79, where people are protesting, somebody dumping cadmium in the river. Well, I actually think there has been some changes in public opinion. Now, of course, you're right, the climate cult or the environmental environmental cult, as I like to call them, the true believers still think the world's coming to an end tomorrow, and they get way too much press attention. I think for a variety of reasons, and I've looked at a lot of surveys on this, a lot of the public has been suffering for a while now from what I call apocalypse fatigue. Yeah, right? And that's one reason why it's, why I think it doesn't stick anymore. I think what you would say is, and again, my sort of summary line on this is what regulation did was, in a few instances, make us get after things we would have otherwise ignored.

And it's sped up technological change in development that was already in process in the marketplace. But most people don't know, for example, that a lot of kinds of air pollution were falling in the 60s pretty fast before the first Clean Air Act passed. That wasn't because companies wanted to be good. It's because they wanted to be more efficient in their resource use. They also face some lawsuits, you know, local nuisance suits and so forth. And so regulation certainly has a role, but it's not the case. Well, I always put it this way. You know, it took the civil rights movement in the century to get to their milestones in the 60s with the Civil Rights Act.

A lot of the environmental organizations prominent today weren't founded until after all that landmark legislation was passed in Congress. And then mostly they'd live to just file lawsuits. Well, one of the unexpected results of this is the end of the stop-start, stop-start engine. I don't have one of those. Oh, yeah. Because I absolutely despise the idea, no matter how many people tell me that they're wonderful and efficient in the rest of it. every time I drive in a car with one of those things, I just

I just I just I mean first of all the idea of legislating out of existence the American urge to put it neutral and revet just because you can just because you can I mean I when I

when I drove a stick I used to just absolutely love you know just winding that thing up and then dropping it it's unamary yeah I mean that's as American is using too much lighter fluid on your barbecue which we should all do absolutely Absolutely so. And then you're overfilling your zipper and putting that in the pocket and getting one of those rashes.

But I guess, it's great to be an American. Speaking of Great Americans, we got Henry Olson back. Henry, senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center. You could find his writings. Oh, in countless places, the Washington Examiner, Commonplace, the Liberal Patriot, Brussels, Signal. We'll have to ask him about Brussels here in a bit. You can also catch him on the air right here at Rickachachey at the audio network because he hosts Beyond the Polls. And as of this year, he's launched a new series conservative crossroads.

We'll talk a little bit more about that later as well. Henry, welcome back. Well, good. So here we are. Now, I can remember when we had you back on last, but probably the president's poll numbers were higher than they are now. I think he's 13 points underwater or something like that. Of course, Gallup is pulling out of that business. I don't know why.

Is this accurate? Is this a reflection of a fickle public? Is this because of ice? what's driving the numbers at the moment? Yeah, I think there's a lot of things driving the numbers. That, first of all, the economy is not bad, but it's not rip-roaring good, especially if you are the sort of person who had a difficult time in the Biden administration. Real wages are still lower than they were when Joe Biden took office,

getting better, but you're still poorer on average than you were. And I think people expected a quicker turnaround. I think the sheer amount of chaos and action that is coming from the Trump administration, much of which is geared overseas, is sending a message he doesn't care about us, us being the marginal voter who can go either way. And then I do think that it's a case of people want the president to succeed on his objectives with immigration, but they think that the in the street in your face and all too often violent tactics, even if provoked, are a step too far.

the combination of those things is why the swing voter in America had swung toward him and now are currently swinging against. Second Boyd is interesting at as much as we were told that we were done with foreign wars and entanglements and all the rest of it were going to be America first. But it's not as if we are engaged in protracted, long kinetic exercises in places with the nation building of the sort that we had before. Is it possible for those people who are suspicious of foreign entanglements and or adventures still might be saying, hey, you know, if Cuba topples of its own accord

after we cut off the gas, maybe that's a good thing. You know, there's not a whole lot of support for long ground wars. There's not a whole lot of opposition in the Trump coalition to short victorious wars or the exercise of American power to stop the bad guys. And I think Venezuela was a perfect example of that. Operation Midnight Hammer in Iran was another example of that. And if they managed to topple or significantly, reformed the regime in Cuba without firing a shot. Not only will jubilation be heard in South Florida,

but I think most people who are open to voting for Trump would be very happy with that. Okay, Henry, I want to ask you about the Gallup decision to stop daily tracking polls. And I mean, on the one hand, I wonder, is it just because so many other people are doing it now that they don't need to anymore, or has it gotten more difficult or expensive? Or related to this and or, I observed that every recent president has laid, landed in the low 40s after a while. Going back now, at least to George W. Bush, right? And I'm wondering now if that's a new pattern in American presidential approval.

So the whole number is not meaningless. I understand the correlations between low approval ratings and how you fare in the midterms. On the other hand, I wonder if this is the new normal in American presidential politics, whereas, you know, the other party doesn't like you. And so you're already, you know, you're already down to 50%. And then the independents and the swing voters who pay attention at very, levels, they defect in a hurry. And so everybody lands after a couple of years down around 42 to 45 percent. No, I think there's some, there's some truth to that, but there's also, I think, the general

fact that we haven't had a successful presidency, an unambiguously successful presidency in many decades. So you've got Obama coming to power saying that he's going to bring hope and change, and then he focuses his attention on things he didn't campaign on leading to Obamacare. And you have President Trump's chaotic first couple of years. And then you have Joe Biden, who said he was going to bring normalcy back, and instead he heightens the divisions. And we have the highest inflation in 40 years and the breakout of war. So you look and you say, why would you expect approval ratings over 50% when you actually look at the interplay between what these candidates said and did? And I think Trump is falling into that same pattern.

Yeah, well, all right. The counter argument, though, Henry, is that Trump was almost reelected in 2020, even with the COVID disaster and impeachment. And Camilla Harris almost won in 2024, despite inheriting the terrible record and ratings of Biden. So that's why I think now maybe there's a, I haven't looked at the numbers the way you do, which, you know, you don't sleep because you're up all night looking at these things all over the world. We know this. But I'm wondering if the number is simply less, not insignificant. but less meaningful than it used to be. I think what's true is that we have a much narrower band, and that is caused by partisanship,

that if 85 to 90% of people who are going to be pulled are on one team or the other, they're not going to give the leader of the other team a whole lot of credit. But that doesn't explain the variation within the ban. And that's what I was trying to say is that Donald Trump has negative job approval, but his strongly dislike or strongly disapprove numbers doesn't really rise above 40 or 41%. That's the other team. And the same is generally true during the Biden administration.

Yeah, he had terrible job approval numbers. But the difference between 48 or 50 and 41 or 42 is the people who somewhat disapprove. And sometimes they can somewhat approve. So, yeah, I'd say we no longer will get a president who will get 60% or 70% job approval. ratings, as was not uncommon at all during the 50s through the 90s. But the difference between 42 and 48 is not caused by partisanship. Yeah. Okay. Let's shift gears to your new initiative conservative crossroads. And I want to ask you a question. Is there, I want to you have a debate with yourself. In other words, I want to see if we can't create a schizophrenic episode of

conservative crossroads by asking you, Henry Olson, there are one or two issues over whatever time you want that you have substantially changed your mind about and what are they and why? I've substantially changed my mind about a lot of things over the last, since you and I met each other many years ago. I've changed my mind about the possibility and the desirability of a very small federal government. I think that the rise of the New Deal, while diverted in directions that are inconsistent with American republicanism was actually, on the whole, a largely beneficial and unstoppable trend because of the quest for human dignity. I've changed a lot about that. So that means I've changed my mind about questions like the appropriate level of taxation and

spending. I would have agreed with always trying to starve the beast in the 80s, and now I don't agree with starving the beast. I think raising taxes on people is not necessarily a job killer. It depends how you raise them and where you raise them and what level that they're at. And then, you know, with respect to foreign policy, I would say I became, I was very chastened by the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and the failures of our allies to actually act as allies as opposed to supplicants. I was at a Canadian embassy event 13 years ago, and I learned I listened to them, and I realized that American leadership meant American doership. And I politely said, you know, you can talk about different levels, but you're going to have to do more, and I've never been invited back to the embassy.

But, you know, so I have moved on a host of issues in a way because, you know, Ronald Reagan said in his 1977 C-PAC speech that, you know, an ideologue fits the facts to meet his theories like sitting them. in a pro-crusty in bed where if they extend over, for people who aren't interested in either the Perry-Persy-Jackson series or Greek mythology, that means if you're too long for the bad pro-crusties cut your legs off, whereas a conservative, somebody who rejects, changes his not principles, but his direction based on facts on the ground. And I changed my direction based on what I consider to be facts on the brand. If I may interject, let's go to taxation. Taxation, for example, I think, is something that the state ought to do. the least amount of because it's a distorting mechanism.

It requires the confiscation of private property by the force of the state. And in my example, when I sat down and wrote out a check for my estimated taxes for the state of Minnesota, I felt like an absolute fool. There are times when I just think, oh, yeah, well, there's a lot of wasteful spending on there, but on the other hand, social compact, Wendy Anderson, and the thing. Now I feel like an idiot because billions of dollars that we all sent to them was completely misused, was completely wasted, was spent on fraud. And the state did nothing about it

and doesn't seem to really particularly care other than saying, look over there. So I'm less inclined to say, yay, taxation, and I'm curious to know what your rationale is for saying, yes, by gum, let's hoover up more into the arms of the state, and next time they'll spend it absolutely correctly.

Well, most of the money is spent correctly. I mean, yes, there's fraud, and they should be doing more about it. And Minnesota is an egregious example. But, you know, let's take a look at where we are. I favor state-level tax cuts. States tend to be in a position where they aren't running deficits. They have excess revenues.

They've already met. I mean, Steve laughs because he's in California. Right. Yeah. Yeah, but you take a look at Republican states that have been cutting income taxes dramatically in the last five years. It's all from surplus revenue, and you read the budget announcements, and they're always saying, well, we're doing this and we're spending money on K through 12, and we're doing this, and we're doing this. That's because most states have met the basic level of what their voters want.

They have a strong safety net. They have a strong transportation system. They have a strong public safety system. They have a strong support for public education and the environment. In those worlds, yeah, let's cut taxes, but that's not where the federal government is. We're running five to six percent of GDP deficit, nearly two trillion dollars. We've got nearly 100 percent of GDP in debt. We're never going to pay that debt down.

We're spending a trillion dollars a year, over 3 percent of GDP, simply to pay the interest on that debt. And it strikes me that, yes, there's plenty of places I would like to cut. I've written about it, but we're not going to solve that deficit problem. And we're certainly not going to pay for the national defense that we need to counter China based on growth. And I think we should raise taxes to recognize the fact that 40 years of Starved the Beast have simply bloated the death. And we're not going to starve the beast because Americans don't want to starve the beast. Republicans don't want to starve the beast. So the question is, how can we put the beast on a diet and how can we increase a beast?

our muscle through taxation so that we do what people want, what we need, and we don't bankrupt our children, grandchildren in the state. Do you advocate Donald Trump going in front of the state of the union and saying we've got to raise taxes on the middle class because that's what the money is? Look, there's a lot of ways you can raise revenue. You know, for example, people who are wealthy seniors pay only about on an average 28% of their cost in Medicare Part B and Part D premiums. If you're making $150,000 and you're 70 years old, why not pay 100 percent? You know, why is it that people who are in the top two tax brackets get

in deduction for home mortgage interest at all? They don't need it to buy their home. This is just a lanyap, you know, a giveaway. There's lots of ways to raise revenue without raising rates. And let's see where we come after that before we talk about raising taxes on the middle class. Oh, Henry, I was afraid you were going to go full rhino on us, and you were not disappointing. Well, gee, you know, let me put it to you this way. You can't win a national election. Yeah. People who provide Donald Trump, his majority, are people who voted for Obama against Romney,

Obama against McCain, Kerry against Bush. And the reason he had a popular vote majority is the people who voted for Biden and Clinton who decided to change their votes. You can't win a majority with one. Well, let me give it to that. Look, I'm in considerable agreement with you for different grounds. First, I think I'm with James that I still have Milton Friedman's attitude that I'm for cutting any tax at any time for any reason. Except now here to be wonky for a minute, because you just did some yourself, we couldn't stop you.

I think it was Bill Nis-Scanon, the late Bill Niscan. Good conservative Republican economist, Libertarian, Cato Institute guy, I think 20 years, ago, he did the empirical work that I found convincing that, in fact, the Reagan tax cuts and other attempts actually increased spending. It wasn't the debt he was looking at. He said it didn't have the effect of starving the beast. Instead, the beast figured out new ways to gorge, which is why I thought, and boy, I get a lot of pushback on this, I thought, okay, if starve the beast doesn't work, maybe we ought to adopt a strategy, which is yours, I think, but I'll state it this way, serve the check. And my proposition is if the American people, all the American people, all the American

people, the middle class James Bringup. If they had to pay for all the government we got, they might want a lot less of it. And so there would be a failure of nerve of Republicans or anybody else. You know, I just don't see a whole, what I see from the states where you don't have the deficit problem is that Republicans don't want to cut. You take a look at the example I like to use of Alaska. Alaska State has no tax, no state tax, no stale tax. But they do have the permanent fund of oil dividends and each person gets thousands of dollars a year from the state. Well, because of the shortfall in oil, they've been cutting that in that. And when Governor Dunleavy took over in 2019, he presented a, you know, let's shrink the state budget. He said, we can

double what you get, which is thousands of dollars a year regardless of income for each person. So a family of four would get like seven grand a year. You know, we'd get like seven grand a year. year back. All we have to do is cut state government 25%. He was nearly impeached. I mean, not impeached. He was nearly recalled. They had his approval rating saying he had to retreat. They've been spending down their savings every year. And each year he says, let's have a discussion about what level of state we have. Republicans don't want to cut government 25% to get thousands of dollars back in their pocket. No possible tax cut can give individuals more money. than doubling the PFD and Alaska would have given,

and they almost ran the Republican out of Dodge. Yeah, but you know what he hasn't been able to do in Alaska as he hasn't been able to get the federal government to lift their thumb off of oil production. So you may know the numbers. Alaska production peaked in the 80s at 2 million barrels a day. Now it's under 500,000 barrels. It's fallen by more than 75%.

And, of course, oil prices adjusted for inflation have actually gone down. But, of course, you know, Democrats and the environmental groups. Okay, you know all that part of it. But the other thing is, Henry, and I'm surprised that you haven't invoked our mutual hero, Ronald Reagan, who used to say, you know, the problem is spinning is growing like this. He put his arm up at a 45-degree angle. Right. It's going like this is what we need to do is make it grow like this, and he lowers his arm to a 30-degree angle. That works. And so, for example, Florida has not cut its budget.

However, Florida's budget today, the state of Florida, its budget is lower than the budget for New York City under Mondami, right? with a bigger population, much better results, right? So I don't think it's really, I think you put it, I always hate that phrase a false choice that's overused and it's a cop-out. But I do think in this case, it's not a matter of having big slashing in budgets, but it does need some kind of discipline we haven't seen for a long time.

I don't have, again, I don't have a problem with spending discipline, but that doesn't allow you to cut every tax all the time. You know, is that you don't have a whole lot of tax cutting going on in Florida. You know, of course they don't have a income tax. And you've got a little cutting of taxes on the edge. Whoa, let me ask you. Oh, let me, sorry, let me bring us up. Sorry to interrupt, Henry, but it does play into the longer history of this.

DeSantis has been making noises about abolishing the property tax. Yes. The idea, yeah. It's a terrible idea. That's what I think, too. But, yeah. The reason why it's a terrible idea is that the reason why it worked in California when, you know, people, when we were younger and cut property taxes by about two-thirds,

was because California had a massive budget surplus and basically kept the level of spending up by transferring the burden from the property tax to the income tax. Florida doesn't have this multi-billion dollar annual state surplus that it can just throw around. It's got reserves, but if you want to abolish the property tax, People want well-funded public schools. They want well-funded public safety, police, probation, fire.

That comes from the property tax. If you abolish the property tax, something has to pay for it because I can tell you, Republican voters don't want to significantly cut in those areas. You can change the rate of growth somewhat, you know, get rid of some wasteful employees in public education. Fine, I'm fine with that. renegotiate contracts so it's not gold-plated and you can fire bad teachers great so you move from having to replace 100% of current spending with 85% of current spending that's good but you still have to actually spend what people want and tax for it

and that's why government the sanis's idea is not a good one because he's talking about eliminating the tax without really prudently preparing for backfilling the spending well i don't say yeah i mean i get that the problem is that the spectacular nature of the state means that everything is interconnected and it's hard to do this without doing that. You can say we can get rid of the property tax and then we'll find a better way to fund the schools. Well, we'll do that by eliminating public schools and giving everybody a voucher. And in the long run, that may indeed work. And all of a sudden, you've cut the costs because you're not having to deal with unions, et cetera, et cetera. But that second part isn't going to happen.

And the first part requires the second part to happen. And the second part requires dismantling everything becomes just like trying to do a ruby cube in the dark during a hurricane. The reason a lot of people want to get rid of the property tax, there's something that galls them to think that they can actually own something, but if they don't continue to cough up with the state requires them, the state will come and take it away. And so you don't really hone your home.

Nobody really does. And I can understand why that animates some people. I see your point there about the funding mechanisms, but gosh, let's start with schools and fix that. then maybe go to the funding mechanisms. Steve, you had something else because I wanted to ask, get into the question here about the conservative crossroads, the new podcast. Yeah, well, I was going to propose a whole new topic for Henry to take up on conservative

crossroads, and it's immigration. And there's two parts to this, and maybe you need more than one. I mean, one is, I'll confess, I'll make a guilty confession of listeners who will flame me for this. I was always something of an immigration dove. I was not open borders, and I thought the numbers were too high, but generally thinking immigration, even a lot of illegal immigration had economic benefits. I'm now an immigration hawk. That's something I've changed my mind about rather dramatically. But a lot of our libertarian

friends, like the Cato people, are still effectively open borders and have always numbers about how even in high numbers it's great for us. So I think that's dubious. And then the second related part is birthright citizenship coming before the court soon. And, you know, it used to be the person's, the only people who denied or made the case against birthright citizens. in a serious way were our friends John Eastman and Ed Erler, and that was about it. But now there are more and more people, Elon Werman up there in Minnesota down from James, and a lot of other people, Richard Epstein, I think, to some extent, are saying, yeah, wait a minute, maybe it isn't so clear.

So anyway, there's two topics for you, but where do you fall out on all that? And if you want to talk about public opinion, that's fine. Yeah, well, you know, first of all, conservative Crossroads is going to have a debate in early March between Mark McCoroughan and Neil Bradley from the U.S. Chamber. on the question of H-1B visas. Ah, there you go, yeah. Yes, we are not shying away from this. Which side is Mark coming down,

my view on illegal immigration is the sunny bonoes. It's illegal. I do not have much sympathy for people who have managed to evade the law here. And I also think that Trump, with his famous use of

leverage, ought to deport every everybody everywhere he can find because that puts the leverage on the left and businesses to finally deal with the question that we haven't dealt with for the last 30 years, which is how much and what types. When you get to that point, I would be perfectly happy to have a reasonable amount of migration that's tied to employment and tied not to visas that are essentially indentured servitude, which is what HB1s are, but instead our general, we think you have the skills, as long as you can show that you have some degree to support yourself and your immediate, but not extended family.

Come on in, and you're not tied to a particular employer while you're here. I don't know what that level is. It's less than a million and a half a year, which is what we've been taking in legally, mainly because of chain migration. And I think we should have E-Verify mandatory. I think there should be audits, and I've written these things. These are not new. I think the IRS should pivot its audit from high wealth individuals to business returns

and disallow wage and benefit deductions for people who are not found on E-Verify. You want to stop illegal migration. Stop feeding the beast. stop giving the ability to be here. They're not on, most of them are not on benefits or scamming the system. They're working and they're taking jobs that could go, albeit at higher wages and benefits to meet the expectations of native-born Americans. So get at the people who are feeding the beast.

And I think that we should have a much higher tax on remittances from people who cannot demonstrate that they're in the country legally. you want to let's dry up the swamp and get at the demand for illegal okay so good we'll take one of your rhino horns back from you then henry that was good well no i just want to be clear beastwise federal government stop starving and beastwise immigration starve just so just in case anyone everybody it should be us plus not competition off by the way henry your invocation of sunny bono allows me to tell a Rob Long type story. It's 35 years ago now or more when he was mayor of Palm Springs.

I don't remember how it happened, but we had lunch together. And he was then planning to run against Gray Davis, remember him, for Lieutenant Governor. And I said, oh, Sonny, I've got your bumper sticker. It'll be better sunny than Gray. And maybe our producer can put him a rim shot at this point. But still, he was great. That guy was so underestimated. And boy, do I miss him.

Yeah. No, I mean, that skiing accident was a terrible thing, and he was much more effective and much smarter than the people are willing to give him credit. So conservative crossroads is about, you know, the discussions going on within the right. Yes. How much of the pro-immigration, Chamber of Commerce sentiment that you're describing before, how much of that is held by the right these days? Because it seems to me to be about a 90-10 issue. Well, it depends what type of immigration you're talking. about. If you're talking about illegal immigration, it is, which is why I'm not having a discussion on illegal immigration.

You know, I may have something later this year about mandatory use of E-Verify, where I would guess the chamber will say, no, we don't want that business burden. But on legal immigration, there's dramatic differences of opinion. We may very well come up with that. You know, I think where the Republican base, but I think more broadly in terms of the potential Republican coalition, there's significant differences, not on the question of illegal immigration and deportation, but on questions of H-1Bs, on questions of the degree to which we should have legal immigration, the degree to which we should have forbearance for people who have been here for a long time or have American citizens. children and so forth. There's a large difference of questions. And they're unquantifiable. They're difficult things to nail down because people will say, yes, illegals be gone. But on the other hand, when presented with the example of somebody

who has been here for 30 years, has never done anything wrong, has got a business, wife, child, the rest of it has lived in exemplary life. A lot of people say, well, you know, I can see, you know, you can't vote, but you have to do this and they come up with this elaborate process,

which other people think the minute we get that, it's going to be amnesty and forget about it and they're all going to be citizens and that's that. That's one part of it. The second part of it that we don't talk about is the cultural impact of this and how it changes places, specifically when small towns have to deal with influxes because they're the guys who work in the meat packing plant or the factory or whatever. And that's a conversation that the right doesn't seem to want to have at all. And it's left to return with the v unsavory types on the internet to go straight straight to the mass deportation theory. and saying just everybody got to go. One of the things conservative crossroads is trying to do is say, we have to talk about these things. We can't pretend that we agree on everything because we don't.

We have large agreement at the level of principle, but we have large disagreement on specific things. And it's precisely by leaning into it that you minimize the opportunity of people to present themselves kind of as the custodian of the secret, key. This is what they don't want to tell you. And then you open up all these weird conspiracy theories and bogus stuff. But if no one's talking about the problem, and the only person who's talking about the problem is a malign nut job, some people are going to be seduced by the malign nut job. So let's open the doors. Let's have these discussions and say it's okay for conservatives to talk

about it. And hopefully that means a healthier conservatism in the end. Especially when somebody is saying, there's no such thing as the great replacement theory. And then you have somebody in Spain saying, what we knew need to do is to replace all these people greatly. Yeah. And every other college courses and whiteness, right? I mean, they put that in the titles. And, gee, we're not supposed to think they mean it. Before we, you know, before we go, and we're going, we're not done with you yet, Henry.

Never. Conservative Crossroads is the coming podcast. It's going to be great. But also, you've written elsewhere, you wrote in commonplace, about a piece about the STFU, the State of the Union speech. and you're giving some advice to the president. Now, we're all tired of the State of the Union speeches, especially when it becomes just a long legislative laundry list of things that are good that we can spend money on.

It would be nice if somebody got up, read a postcard since State of Union is great. To call Calvin Coolidge, goodbye. But no. So you would say that he should talk about tariffs. And let's start there, because tariffs have not been in the forefront of the American imagination or discussion recently. Linkus, just 90 other things he's done, but that he should bring them up and he should tell people that they're good. Why?

Look, what the president does not have is a coherent, consistent argument for his economic policies. One of his strengths is that he's transactional, but in this case, the political thing is that one of his weakness is that he's haphazard. And what I'm saying is, look, what you need to do is tell the American people what you say, in pieces elsewhere, but put it all in one place, which is, look, the reason we have had a weak economy that doesn't work for every American for the last 35 years is this. We've favored foreigners and consumption more than Americans in production. We bring people in often illegally to compete with you for jobs, and that drives down your wage benefits, because guess what? Somebody who comes

from Guatemala where the minimum wage is $3 an hour is going to accept a lower salary than you who have to have expectations of an American style of living. People in Indonesia where, you know, it's even poor, of course they're going to work for lower, and that means the factories are going to go overseas, and that hurts you. The way we solve this problem is by cracking down on immigration illegally, reducing legal immigration so that we have a tighter labor market so that you can get the higher paying jobs that Americans want, and we reduce foreign trade so that we don't, have foreigners undercutting us. And tariffs are a way to do that, is that if you put in a

tariff, what happens is somebody wants to outsource jobs. Great. If you want to satisfy the economics community, you can call them Pigouvian taxes on externalities, you know, is that the externality is social decline and growing social angst because of declining relative living standards in America. And what that does is it'll create an incentive for people to produce in America. That means we'll move from an economy based on cheap labor and cheap consumption and cheap goods that sends money out to other countries, enriches them, and allows places like China to potentially destroy freedom. And give me a chance. It'll take me more than a year to turn it around. But we've seen the turnaround before. Franklin Roosevelt turned the economy around

in the Great Depression. Ronald Reagan turned it around in his administration. I'm going to do it now. give me a chance. By the way, Henry, I can't believe you mentioned Pagoo, because you know what happened is Trump heard that, and he's giving us Mr. Magoo. It's dead. It's all over the place. Well, I'm going to doubt that he's actually going to put Paguvian taxes and have stated to have it, however, who I know you know, he understands Paguvian taxes and he can make that argument. Yeah, as I'm afraid of. Okay. So what else should he tell other people I imagine that there will be discussion of immigration. I imagine there might be discussion of foreign policy.

And I'm sure that this is one of the things that conservative crossroads is also going to deal with because there does seem to be. Well, we've had a discussion on Israel already. We have one coming up on Ukraine. Depending what happens in Iran, we might have one in Iran, but I'm planning to do one on NATO, the nature of American alliances and so forth. So we will cover many of those topics because there. They are actively being debated within conservatism. But broadly, Trump has Trump's and populism's worldwide thesis is essentially this.

We were told after the fall of the Berlin Wall that if we embraced globalization in the economy, that we would have a rising real living standard for everybody, that that would lower tensions in the world by democracy, democratizing the world and making them richer, and that if we push social progressive measures, we will reduce tensions internally by bringing the excluded into the mainstream. What has happened is all three of these policies have failed. Globalization has enriched our adversaries and foreign countries at the expense of the working class throughout the West, and it is deliberately hurt our ability to make things, which I don't know,

cyber warfare doesn't seem to replace bombs, even if they're delivered by drones. You have to make things to protect yourself. They have not democratized the world. Instead, China has used our wealth, our ideas, to build the largest military than an adversary of ours. Their blue water navy is already more powerful than the Soviet Union's ever was, and they're building massive numbers of ships each year. and that's because we gave them the money and the material and the ideas. Do you think that was a good idea?

Progressive social values, yeah, some of them have worked to lower tensions. On the other hand, the speed and the degree and the anti-West, anti-Westernism that is on display with so many of these advocates, has actually dramatically increased social tensions. So what you've got is a catastrophic failure. And if I were Donald Trump, I would make that case and tie all of my things, together under the rubric of I'm here to replace the failed system that has that has hurt us economically, her socially and threatened our freedom. And only you want to change, I'm giving you change, give me the chance.

That's how I would do it. You know, sometimes you just miss the old days of the end of history, but now the end of history seems to be like a Warner Brothers logo and then Donald Trump bursts in like Porky Pig at the end of it and waves his hand across the screen, but he's not saying. that's all. He's saying something else is about to begin. And we'll see what it is and we'll hear what it is on conservative crossroads. Henry Larson. Henry, thanks. Great. As ever.

Lots of fun. Didn't even get to talk about Europe but that'll be the next time. Everybody listen to conservative crossroads here in the Rurcache Audio Network. Henry, have a great day, great weekend, et cetera, and we'll talk to you later. Same to you too. Thank you for having me back. Always a pleasure. Well, before we go,

dang, I hate to do it. Just hate to do it. But a friend of the show, and a friend of the site, John Eckdahl, died. And if you're hanging around on conservative Twitter, you probably found that. And if you were following Charles C.W. Cook, who usually is here, you will have noted that he mentioned that. As a matter of fact, he tweeted at the time that John was his best friend, and he died of cancer at 47. So just he has a long ex post about, this is very Charles, of course, the fellow with a bespoke English accent talking about Florida.

football, which I love. And he said, during the pandemic, and I'm not going to do this in Charlie's voice, during the pandemic, John and I started a business together that relative to our expectations did pretty well for a while. As is typical, most of our ideas didn't pan out, but that didn't

matter. We had fun coming up with them at the bar, adding just one more drink to the tab to make sure that we hadn't missed an angle or forgotten to write something down, crutching on the back of an increasingly ragged napkin. I'm 41 years old, and with the exception of my wife, I've never met anyone who's easier to talk to them, John. If we went for lunch, we'd go for hours, chatting about sports and roller coasters,

and the kids and the new iPhone and the unforgivable changes as he made to Epcock and that Epcock in 99. I shall miss that immensely. The last time I saw him, I said the same thing, I said every time I'd shuddered with him over the last 11 years. Talk to you in a bit. So, that's bad and sad. And may his memory be a blessing, as they say. And may his memory be a blessing, as they say. Of course, you might want to talk about his most triggering tweets, which was a master class in trolling. Yeah, you know, I followed him. I never knew him or interacted with him. But the most famous one, I think is like a decade ago. And he pointed out that was the Ford F-150 and the GM equivalent. The best-selling cars in America buy a lot. And then the question was, how many people in the Washington Post or New York Times newsrooms know anyone who drives a pickup truck? you would have thought somebody had thrown a dead mouse in the middle of the newsrooms. It was outrageous to ask that kind of question.

I mean, the parallel question that's even older is how many of you know an evangelical Christian in the Washington Post newsroom, right? Same outrage, right? Just the impertinence of asking such a question. But I do think, James, we ought to add that Charlie has set up a GoFundMe account for John's family. And it's on his tweet. I don't have it handy. Maybe we can put it in the show notes or something.

but that would be if people are so inclined and able, I think that would be a nice gesture for Charlie and John's family. You know, it's, I don't know about you, James. It's hard for, I think it's hard for guys in middle age to lose their best friend because it happened to me 10 years ago. And, you know, it's a shock. It's a surprise. You can't believe that a healthy person suddenly goes downhill in a hurry.

And anyway, it's just, you know, it's a, I don't know. We're not very good at that, I think. I'll speak for myself anyway. No. No. No. No. We're not. One of the things I learned, though, when I was just sort of Googling around and assembling some stuff about John that I didn't know. I never met him. I didn't know him. But then he was involved in and the co-founder and the web designer for a site called UniWatch, which is basically about uniforms, which is about sports uniforms and charting the minute derivations and changes in the rest of it, which is what the Internet is for. Frankly. That's just basically what it's for. Yes, it's a massive disinformation machine.

Yes, it's a massive dark thing with Tor browsers, probably run by the CIA to coax people to get fend from Thailand. I don't know. It's all sorts of awful things, but at its heart, it is a mechanism by which people can find each other and share things and dive into the things that they love with a level of detail in the community that you just didn't really get to find before the Internet. And John was good at it on the technical side and the human side as well.

I hope Charlie or somebody can keep up Uni watch only because we still have not yet been able to prevent the Seattle Seahawks from those dreadful lime green uniforms that you wear from time to time. Oh, don't you know. And also the strange topography sometimes at the UC. Sam Darnold, as a matter of fact, when he was a Minnesota Viking. For some reason, we would look at the back of his jersey and it would look that the D was actually sort of more like an O. And so he became to us amongst my friends Sam Darnallo, which sounded like some great statements. magician magician and we would call him the great Darnallo whenever you came

and you do that in public and people look at you like you're an absolute idiot what do you mean Darnolo it's darnallel it's a uniform thing hey folks you should go to Apple you should over the podcast thing and give us five stars you should probably be happy with the volume level on this one because I presume that that's been fixed that the ads haven't come in and blasted your ears off

and that everything is fine you should go to ricochet itself and sign up if you haven't because when you say sign up oh great give an email get lots of junk well that's just what I want no we want you to go there and give it money it's just a little it's just a little but that's what enables you to access the member feed and that's what act enables you to call them to write comments I mean if you've been to these other sites with a discus I got discus on my site I got some really good commentators but every once in a while I got to step in and just give somebody the 86 there's some sites that I love I absolutely love the sites never do it

I go to the comments because it's such, it's just vile. So yeah, you've got skin in the game as founder, brother Rob Long once said, is he a fathered him? Is he a patent? Not yet. We don't know what he's an ecclesiastical journey. Skin of the game, which means that everybody has to subscribe to a code of conduct, and that keeps things interesting.

It really does. I mean, it's sort of like the old days when you wore a tie suit on the airplane. Everybody sort of likes those old days. Well, that's what ricochet is like in the member side. It's like, I should. say that. That sounds uncomfortable. You know what I mean. It's where adults behave. And now

we are done. We'll see everybody in the comments at RICOC-4.0. Bye-bye. RICOCHAY