The Ricochet Podcast - The Huddled Masses

Episode Date: August 4, 2017

This week, our good pal Larry Kudlow sits in for the making-tv-great-again Rob Long. We’ve also got Henry Olsen, author of The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism who tell us what why Reagan’s greatest influence may have been Franklin Roosevelt, how The Great Communicator would’ve come down on the health care debate, and supposes who would have won in... Source

We have special news for you. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. Remember I told you, don't sell your homes, don't sell your homes. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. Larry Kudlow sitting in for Rob today.

I'm James Lalix. We speak to Henry Olson about Reagan and Mickey Kaus about immigration. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Bye-bye. Welcome, everybody, to the Ricochet Podcast number 363. We're brought to you today by the fine people at LendingTree. You know, rates always go up, they go down, but regardless of what is happening with the rates, you can always get the right offer for you with LendingTree.com.

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all of the time for way less money. With Texture, you get access to dozens for one low price. Right now, Texture is offering Ricochet listeners a 14-day free trial. Way to go to texture.com slash ricochet. And we're brought to you by Ricochet. This is where Rob would step in and say things and make you feel guilty and make you sign up. Peter, you want to give that a whack or should you leave it for me? I'm very happy to leave it to you. I just like to hear how you sign up. Peter, you want to give that a whack or should you leave it for me? I'm very happy to leave it to you.

I just like to hear how you put it. What it comes down to is, please, please join. We need you. It's a wonderful site, but it has some, nobody's getting rich on, actually, all we want to do

is cover our expenses so Ricochet can sustain itself. Now, let's hear what James does with that bald statement. Well, that's the pith of it. That's the gist of it. That's the marrow. You've narrowed it down there.

We're doing the membership drive thing again annually. So you can go to Ricochet.com and become a member this very moment. If you're listening to the podcast, by the way, and you're not a member, you're only getting half of the Ricochet experience. There's the member fee. There's all kinds of little freebies and little details and quirks behind the pay wall. And once you see them, you'll want to stick around. There's also that new tier for podcast listeners that's $2.50 a month.

And once you sign up for that, as Rob is wont to tell you, you'll soon pitch in for the whole boat. Rob's not here because Rob's off doing that television thing, adding to the popular culture. So we got Larry again. Larry, how are you doing today? I'm good. I'm wounded by that, but I'm still good.

I'm tough. Why are you wounded? The TV part. I mean, you know, you got to keep the brand going. Well, you do television yourself as well. I got to fight off the MSNBC crowd. It's hammer and tongs right now. Hammer and tongs.

Well, hammer and tongs with them trying to convince us that we're on the edge of Weimar Germany collapsing into the Hitler-type regime that they all knew was coming. But kind of hard for them to say so when we've got good economic news. Of course, Hitler made the factories work again, too, so you can't say that. We got July jobs at 209,000. Is that good? Yes, very good. Overall, it's a very good report. In fact, job reports are sort of picking up here.

They had a little bit of a lull for a while. But this one was quite good and pretty much across the board. I suppose you could say we need more help on wages, 2.5 percent over 12 months. That's been pretty steady. if you had a stronger overall economy, particularly if you had a kicker from business investment and equipment, you could move that wage barometer up to 3%. So I'd like to see that. Larry, if we may, let's just pause and consider the good news that we have here. The Dow crossed 22,000.

Growth in the second quarter is almost a percentage point higher than it was in the first quarter. We've gone from one point something or other to two point something or other. And jobs are up. So here's the question. How can the markets be so diluted? How can they be so mistaken? Don't they understand that the chaos in the White House is going to wash over into every aspect of American life, including the economy? What's going on here? I hear that argument. It's so interesting that the stock market in particular has ignored virtually all of the what I'm going to call them political shenanigans going on and the crossfire between the left media and the Trump administration. There's been no impact that I can find.

Look, I've said this a million times. I've said it again. Profits are the mother's milk of stocks. Profits, okay? Right. And profits have been surging in the last several quarters. I can't give this all to Donald Trump. I give it a lot to the ingenuity of American business and entrepreneurs, but they're making very good money.

And that's the basic reason why the expectation of lower tax rates, particularly business tax rates for large and small companies. That's important, and that's still very much alive. The news about that is pretty good, in my opinion. But the other part, it's ignored. Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal economic columnist, he's no big conservative guy. He's a straight shooter. He wrote a good column about the tremendous impact of Trump's reduction in costly regulations on businesses, both large and small, particularly small businesses, you know, which don't have the battalions of lawyers and accountants that big businesses have. And this regulatory reform is in place. I mean, already, literally hundreds of regulations have either been suspended or erased altogether. They don't require legislation. Others will require legislation, like health care, for example.

But nonetheless, in finance, in energy, in various labor markets, regulatory burdens have been lifted. That's contributed to a better spirit. That's contributed to more job creation. And it's also contributed to more profits. And it's showing up in the stock market. So I can give Trump some credit there. But overall, business is leading the charge. And, you know, let me add one thing, OK? Well, globally, by the way, business looks a little better globally. And so that's a good thing, too. But I will give this Trump administration, the president himself being a businessman.

They've ended the war on business. they've ended the war on business. They've ended the war on success. They've ended the war on fossil fuels. And don't think these companies don't get that because they do. The White House is not, you know. Barack Obama used to insult businessmen, successful businessmen and women. He used to call them names, you know, the whole fat cat business. This is a completely different environment. You got a guy in there who wants

business to succeed, who wants small business to succeed, and who really himself, his whole life, likes success. Okay, imagine that, and would like to reward success rather than penalize it. So I can give Trump credit for some of these intangibles, so to speak, but I will give him credit for lifting regulatory burdens in his first six months. Got it. According to National Public Radio this morning, however, the energy industry is very unhappy with Trump because he signed the sanctions on Russia, and there's a lot of investment with Russia. I'm not particularly concerned about that system. Let me give you a second take on that, okay? Some of these energy players, I'll give it a maybe, okay?

But here's the thing. Energy exports have been wide open. Now, that law was changed two years ago so i can't you know the congress did that two years ago under obama however obama did everything he could to stop it with epa rules and whatnot to block it trump has opened that door wide. Now, in effect, Trump's policies on energy, fossil fuels, fracking, coal, the whole nine yards, he's got Putin over a barrel. This is the point I want to make. We're going to be selling so much energy in different forms to Western Europe and most particularly to Eastern Europe so that Putin will no longer have the capacity to blackmail these countries if he wakes up in the morning and decides to take over Georgia

or Ukraine or any of the Baltics. And he'll say to others, you mess with me, I'm going to cut off your supply of oil and particularly natural gas. Wrong. Trump is encouraging natural gas, liquid natural gas terminals, and he's encouraging exports. And this is a huge change. So I don't want to see any grousing by energy companies because they've got new pathways to success. Well, there's no grousing from our family's energy company, small as it is, because what you're talking about before, Larry, the rollback of regulations, we're in the petroleum handling and distribution business up in North Dakota, not a big operation, but it's enough to get the EPA's attention constantly.

And the idea that somehow that we're not going to be hit with another set of regulations, which accomplish nothing, take money out of the company, and set us up for some penalty down the road if we don't dot every I and cross every T, is liberating. And in the case of our company, we can say, well, maybe we can get another truck this year. Maybe we can pay our drivers more because we don't have to worry about this stuff coming down the pike. I mean, small business people, if you have a bad year, the regulations don't care. And if the regulations really bite, then you got to mortgage your house to make your payroll. And where do you go for that? Well, it depends where you look, I suppose. You could save $20,000 on your mortgage if you went to the right place. 80% of the people... I'm sorry larry i'm doing an ad i gotta do this this actual ad go go james go james you're on a roll

well basically i was telling you that you know depending on where you get your mortgage you could save a lot of money but 80 of the people only get one mortgage offer just one and if you just go to your bank chances are you'll get taken advantage of perhaps. Well, LendingTree doesn't want that to happen. Here's the thing. The average LendingTree customer can save $20,000 over the life of their loan. That's the average savings. And whether you're looking for a new mortgage, refinancing, home equity loan, LendingTree is the only place where you can get up to five, five real offers from America's top lenders and compare each side by side for free. And it only takes three minutes.

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LendingTree.com slash Ricochet. LendingTree LLC NMLS number 1136. Terms and conditions apply. Thanks to LendingTree for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And I hate to interrupt everybody there, but we've got to go to our first guest with pleasure henry olson he's the senior fellow with ethics and public policy center studies and provides commentary on american politics there his work focuses on how to address consistent address things consistent with conservative principles the electoral challenges that face modern american conservatives his new book is called the working class republican ronald reagan and the return of blue collar conservatism published in june 2017 welcome him to the podcast hello henry stop all right

let me read that let me read that intro again because i'm okay all right hey we're pretty good. Oh, great. All right, I'm James Lallex, and I just introduced you, and I'm going to ask you the first question here. Henry, some say that if Ronald Reagan were running today, he wouldn't be able to be elected. Is that true, or is that baloney? I think it's total baloney. I think Ronald Reagan would have seen the populist trends that Donald Trump saw that no one else in the Republican Party saw, and I think he would have preempted that and married it in a way to conservative principle that Trump continues to struggle to do even today. Henry, Peter Robinson here.

You're on with James Lilacs, who just spoke to you, but also with me, Peter, and Larry Kudlow. Both Larry and I served in the Reagan administration, of course. And I have to confess, I haven't had a chance to read your book yet, but I've been reading all the reviews. The book is for tail end of the summer. I'll get to it, I promise. But can you briefly, what I can't pardon, less libertarian than they suppose? Or are you arguing that Democrats misread Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was less liberal than they suppose? Because Reagan, I'm actually arguing both, but my primary focus is on Reagan is because he is much more of a live presence in today's political debates. And I think the Republican misunderstanding of Reagan is more recent and hence more correctable.

The Democrats have gone down their path of misinterpreting Franklin Roosevelt now for over five decades. And I don't think there's going to be a whole lot I can do to dissuade them from the path they've taken. Okay, so again, if you could just give a summary argument now. In what way, what is the principal way in which Republicans misread Ronald Reagan? They place Reagan as being much more interested in liberty in the abstract and consequently being more anti-government than in fact he was.

He was much more interested in helping the average person make their way in American life. And so consequently, he was somebody who always had a room for many of the programs that were initiated by Franklin Roosevelt and was perfectly happy to support them both as governor and as president he was for uh a hand up in american life for the average person but against state direction and guidance and the replacement of self-government by the rule of a bureaucratic few and do you draw a distinction between ronald reagan ronald reagan and the new deal on the one hand and ronald reagan on the and the great society on the other that is to say oh yes, and Reagan drew that distinction himself. Yes, yes, go ahead.

For Reagan, when he issued a commemoration of FDR's 100th birthday, that was the day he wrote in his diary that the press is always trying to say I'm opposed to the New Deal. And he said, I voted for FDR four times. I'm not trying to tear down the New Deal. I'm trying to undo the Great Society. Right. Larry? Well, yeah, I basically agree.

I'm going to come back to Henry's ideas about tax policy, with which I generally disagree. But I think that Reagan was a populist, and he was for the common man. And I think he expressed that time and time again i mean reagan reagan was against the uh the washington swamp and he never had uh he never had roots to the east coast barely had roots to wall street for example that was not a constituency of his but when i was there the the issue the issue here the issue with the Gipper and the New Deal, Gipper was a New Deal liberal for many years in politics. That is quite true.

As president, though, when I caught up with him, his issue was not to tax and spend and regulate, which was the heart of FDR's program, taxing, spending, regulating, and getting elected, as per Harry Hopkins. Reagan, however, was in favor of the safety net as long as it didn't rise and rise to the extent where it no longer paid to work. He was very strong on the work ethic and the virtues of work, but he would not dismantle Social Security. In fact, the 1983 Bipartisan Commission on Social Security basically solved that problem.

Really, I was going to say for 40 years plus, because it's still okay, despite the gloom and doom. Reagan, however, was quite skeptical about nationalized medicine. And so he was leery about Medicare. He was very leery about Medicaid. He was not opposed to temporary help, for example, unemployment benefits, but he was also very sensitive to the issues of incentives to work, save, and invest with respect to his tax policy. So, you know, I always saw, look, John F. Kennedy, Democrat, turned his back on the New Deal. The New Deal was the prevailing Democratic policy when Kennedy was president.

He turned his back, and he went to tax cuts and deregulation and sound money. Ronald Reagan, another ex-New Deal liberal, turned his back on the New Deal in almost every respect except for, I could argue, Social Security. So he appealed also culturally. Don't forget Reagan's cultural appeal, which is completely different than today's. Reagan was pro-life, pro-family, pro-church, if you will, pro-values,

pro-civility. There's one for you. He tried to illustrate that fact-based arguments reaching across the aisle to Democrats would work better than smearing personalities. Henry, what does Larry get wrong?

That's a pretty comprehensive summary of the 80s. What's wrong? Yeah. First, we have to understand that the New Deal was a fundamental break in American political governance, that the early conservatives opposed social insurance, opposed mandatory regulation of businesses to require recognition of labor unions,

opposed the taxes that were used to pay for the massive expansion of the public university system at the state level. They felt that was every bit as much a part of the New Deal as the more regulatory and directive elements. For Ronald Reagan to break with that as he did... So that would be the Robert Taft position, roughly? Well, Taft was always less anti-New Deal than his reputation. There's some lines about that in Eisenhower's autobiography, where Taft is actually willing to

expand some Social Security benefits, which were originally much more limited than they are today. But Reagan always was willing to support Social Security. He was always willing to support legitimate public programs. He says he's for public housing. He's opposed to federal aid for education in the 1950s, not because it's unconstitutional. It will be because he said it's not, that states and localities are spending money and increasing their taxes on their own.

Why do we need the federal government? This is a completely different argument. And what it means is that he accepts the basic idea of the New Deal, that government can have an active and positive role to play, both in prevention of poverty and providing advancement. Where Reagan ends up disagreeing is the way that these, what he called humanitarian ends or humanitarian aims, were used to mask control for its own sake. And this is why he opposes Medicare.

It's not that he doesn't think the federal government should have a role in alleviating genuine poverty. He says he's for that. He says he's for that in 1961. He says he's for it in 1962. He says he's for it when he endorses Barry Goldwater in 1964. He opposes Medicare because since the other alternatives could remove the humanitarian need, there was no need for it. So if you want that, you be teaching seeking socialization or its own pain and this is something i think conservatives have never really grasped

is that reagan inactive government in a way that early conservative many libertarian today still a resistant to but he was against replacement of self-government individual initiative with a centralized bureaucratic society it's something he deeply oppose and that more than anything else is what he's trying to accomplish. Right. That feels right.

Well, Larry may have his argument. Hold on, Larry. I want to ask one more question. That feels right to me, fundamentally feels right. But one more question before Larry comes back in, Henry, if I may. Peter, you're still speaking. So the question runs as follows. Reagan famously delivered that line, the government is not the solution, the government is the problem in his first inaugural address.

But of course, as you're about to point out, no doubt, the prefix to that was in the present crisis, the government is not the solution, the government is part of the problem. But aren't we in the same crisis now? Hasn't government simply metastasized much more than it had during the 1980s? That is do what he attempted to do, which is contain the thing. Shrink it where you can. That is to say, what practical difference would your argument make if Republicans embraced it today? Well, I think what Reagan always sought to do was – I think if Reagan were alive today, he would want to shrink the federal government. But I think what he would do is place a priority, as he always did, on maintaining support for people who need it. He would phrase the entitlement question entirely differently, not as one of cost, but one of

preserving our obligations. He would be somebody, I think, who would be seeking ways to make sure that we trimmed back the entitlement states so that people who didn't need the support don't get it or get less of it. In that 1983 bipartisan compromise, part of that was putting in the first tax on Social Security benefits for people earning a certain amount. And in a letter, Reagan approves of that. It's not something that he was forced on. He actually liked that tax.

And he said there should have been a means test on social security from the beginning. The people who are receiving it don't need it. And I think that entire way of framing a positive obligation that government has allows people to have a more positive explanation as opposed to simply saving money or abstract liberty to where specifically government can be cut. And that's exactly the problem we face today. Unlike Reagan, who was dealing with more of, he didn't have to deal with the core entitlement questions to get the fiscal BM out of the federal government under control.

Larry, that sounds pretty good to me. Over to you. Yeah, no, I agree with much of that. You know, Reagan used the phrase constantly, the truly needy. And he kept saying to us, to OMB, for example, because we were spending hawks, that these safety, social safety net programs must be directed at the truly needy, but no more than that. So he had a very modest expectation for government, okay? And he did, in his heart, I think, and he said this, government is the problem, not the solution. At the margins, you can reinterpret that. And again, we were slapped back at OMB.

We wanted to cut more of the social safety net than he wanted us to cut. So I agree. But again, he wanted to limit that to the truly needy. He wanted to limit the role of government, and that's where he broke completely with FDR's extravagant use of government. Reagan, by the way, was quite hostile to regulations regarding the economy. He was a free market capitalist. He was a supply-sider. He wasn't necessarily opposed to what I will call safe relations, though, again, he looked at that with a somewhat jaundiced eye to make sure it was really true. But he did not like regulations in the economic zone. Let's not forget one of his earliest and most dramatic actions in his entire administration was to fire the traffic controllers.

And that was a union that supported him during the campaign. He didn't like what they were trying to do. He thought they were overbearing of everything FDR tried to do. So, you know, I want to tamp down Reagan and the New Deal to absolutely the truly needy. Look, let's face it. FDR attempted to tax and regulate every single aspect of the economy, every single aspect. And he hated rich people. He was a traitor to his class.

He did not understand anything about economic growth. Reagan was really, as he matured anyway, cut from a completely different cloth, completely different cloth. Henry, Peter, do you want to work? Oh, go ahead, Henry. Go ahead. What I would argue is a couple of things. One is that that is one view of FDR, and as I go into my book, that's actually the source of the division in the 1948 Democratic Party,

is that those who thought that the true heir of FDR ought to be one who wanted to tax, regulate, and dominate every aspect of the economy, split and formed the Progressive Party under Henry Wallace. And the remaining part of the Democratic Party supported Harry Truman. If you look at the platform, it is much more modest and much less interested in controlling for its own sake. And Reagan sided with Truman. Truman was the last Democrat he voted for. And even in his autobiography, Reagan says good words about Truman and says, I think if Truman had lived longer, he would have come over to the other side like I did. Now, it's very hard for me to say that Reagan could say that without having some understanding that he was for some elements that were part of the Truman platform, which were a rather extensive, by conservative standards, social safety now. And I think what's happened over the last 50 years is that the heirs of Henry Wallace have grown more and more important in the Democratic Party, that you've moved more and more towards the progressive party ideals, although not the

means of nationalism as part of that party's platform, but rather that the heirs of Henry Wallace have increasingly dominated the Democratic Party. And that means that Ronald Reagan could be every bit, as he always said in his autobiography, every bit for Franklin Roosevelt, but every bit against what that became. And the fact that that's a mixed legacy of Roosevelt, something Reagan always ignored. And so I can't say that Reagan didn't miss something, but I do think you have to say that Roosevelt did a lot of things that Reagan liked, and that it wasn't all the Henry Wallace interpretation of Roosevelt. Right. Henry, Peter here one more time.

Just a couple of little data points to see what you do with them. I heard fascinating, you may already know about this, a fellow called Gene Copelson who's written a book on Reagan, and he went through the audio tapes which i confess i had never listened to extensively but there are tapes reagan as governor for some reason they taped everything he said when he was speaking out of the state we have better records of him when he was on the road and what's interesting is of course he got on the road he got more fewer questions about this or that uh agent piece of the policy agenda or legislative agenda in California, more questions on foreign policy, but also more questions on his fundamental political philosophy.

And there Reagan says a number of times, I was a 1932 Democrat. Look at the platform on which Franklin Roosevelt first ran for office. It calls for a reduction in government spending it calls for a smaller federal government right so you've got that and reagan is saying that as late as the 1960s and early 70s when he's the governor of california that's the kind of roosevelt republican he is according to the words coming out of his own mouth and the second bit which i'm sure larry will remember it just occurred to me in the the cabinet room, as you know, Henry, each president gets to hang, by long tradition, hangs portraits of three presidents.

And Ronald Reagan had Abraham Lincoln in the place of honor over the fireplace at one end of the room, as many Republican presidents do. And at the other end of the room, he had, as I recall, Dwight Eisenhower. But the other president he hung was Calvin Coolidge. And I don't know how you hang a portrait of Calvin Coolidge if you really revere the New Deal. Okay, what do you do with those two? Well, first of all, at the same time as Reagan is talking about that, he's also expressing opposition to right to work. He's also expressing support for public universities.

He's also saying, when he's running for governor, that his program called the Creative Society is not meant to get government out of the way. It's not meant to put government in the role of good Samaritan, handing out good conduct medals. He is supporting when he has a budget problem in his first year. Rather than try and significantly cut back Medicaid, he passes a tax increase. And he calls it, in cabinet minutes, help and tells a story to his fellow members of the cabinet

how before this help used to charge private patients differential amounts, but now we've got this help, and that lets people pay for their medical care without having to charge other people more. Reagan always had a very strong commitment to the sorts of programs that were part of the New Deal. And if he at times exaggerated or emphasized the elements of Franklin Roosevelt's platform that called into question the growth of federal government, he never called into question his support for the basic programmatic impulses

that were in fact a key to what we became, to what the public legacy of the New Deal was. And Reagan holds both of these. The way to reconcile it is to look at the way that the New Deal could have been interpreted, which is towards boards and controls and bureaucrats and direction, to which he was opposed in 1932 and to which he was particularly opposed after his conversion, but that he never disagreed with the programmatic support that helped working people avoid poverty and help people navigate the vicissitudes of life.

But he understood, Henry, with respect, he understood the failures of the New Deal to revive the economy. That's why I... No, but that gets to the question of the distinction between the planning aspect of the New Deal and the helping aspect of the New Deal. Well, but I...

That went... But Medicaid... Medicaid was never part of the New Deal. That came way later. And... No, I understand that that came way later.

And Reagan was... But it's also something that... When Reagan was president... Go ahead. I'm sorry. I don't mean to be rude. I just... When Reagan was president, he did not favor Medicaid. In fact, Reagan, the son in law of loyal Davis, Dr.

Loyal Davis, Reagan was very much opposed to the government running of health, which he saw as a different issue than Social Security. And I think, by the way, he was correct about that. It is a different issue. And so I just want to be sure. I mean, to associate Reagan with the New Deal, I think in a very limited way when he was a young man, perhaps, but as he grew and was certainly when he became president, saw the failures of a command and control economy, which is what the New Deal ultimately wanted. And I'm a great supporter of Amity Shlaes' book on this subject.

And I think Reagan really, again, I'm going to say to you, we wanted in 1981 and 82, the Office of Management and Budget. by the way, we had support from the Treasury Department. We wanted to curtail as much of the health care stuff as possible, the LBJ Great Society stuff. We wanted to curtail welfare as much as possible. We wanted to curtail any basic big government program spending. And he let us do that in many cases. I mean, the non-entitlement discretionary budget was slashed. It actually declined in real terms for several years. But he did not let us take away what he called the basic safety net, which was Social Security. So I think there's perhaps a historical disagreement you and I may be having,

but I think those are the facts. Yeah, well, he also did not significantly try to pare back some of the cost of Medicare because of some price controls, but he didn't really take issue with Medicaid. I disagree with you on that. I can't recall any presidential initiative that tried to significantly curtail Medicaid. In fact, program growth continued. And then he did institute and successfully passed through Congress an expansion of Medicare into the more comprehensive catastrophic health,

which was a Reagan initiative that was repealed in 1989. It was a Reagan administration initiative that included tax increases on senior citizens to help pay for the extended health benefits. And what I show in my book is that Reagan, throughout his life, including 1979, when he writes a private letter to a doctor asking his views on health care, says that no one in America should go without health care if they can't afford it, and the government has a role to play for that. So I don't see how you can segregate Social Security from health care, given that Reagan himself, in word and in deed, did not do so during his public life, including that as president and as governor. We always came in below the current services baseline on Medicaid.

Always. Now, regarding Medicare, by the way, I think his tax increase proposal for catastrophic was not a good idea, and I don't think he really agreed with that. I think that was more of a Democratic push, and he signed on to it. I, by the way, personally am not opposed to catastrophic. That's something that could come in handy in the current Obamacare debate. But Reagan didn't like raising taxes at all, and he didn't like raising taxes on seniors, even though a case can be made. It's to this day debatable whether the fix in 1983 actually was a tax increase on seniors' income. That stuff came later, I might add, particularly under Bill Clinton. But most of the people who supported the Social Security fix in 1983, including Moynihan and including Alan Greenspan, and we did it reluctantly at OMB, that was done more as a contribution.

We looked at that more as a contribution rather than a punitive tax hike. And I think to this day, the taxes on seniors is a terrible idea and has helped to thwart economic growth. All I'm trying to say is if we're debating Ronald Reagan's philosophy, that Ronald Reagan, with that specific tax hike, he signed off on it, and in a private letter that's contained in the Skinner edited volume, he approves of it because it's a way in his mind of doing what should have been done to begin with, which is not providing aid to people who didn't need it. And I know Reagan did not like raising taxes, but he did raise taxes on occasion when he felt the alternative was taking away public benefits from people who didn't need it.

And one thing I do want to note, that Reagan often used the phrase that people deserve public support through no fault of their own, they needed public support. That phrase, you borrowed from Franklin Roosevelt, that Roosevelt used the exact same phrase to describe the exact same justification for the extension of what Roosevelt would have called the dole in many fireside chats. And Reagan absorbed that. He absorbed so much of the helping side of Roosevelt's philosophy, while at the same time, oddly, not absorbing the managerial directive side of Roosevelt's philosophy's philosophy while at the same time oddly not absorbing the managerial directive side of roosevelt's philosophy and i don't think that we can ignore that when we're trying to understand what the intellectual legacy of this man was or why he was able to connect with roosevelt democrats in a way that republicans still have a hard time doing today well i would

just say... I am opposed, however, to all the regulatory and tax interventions that we see in modern life, including those which have essentially provided incentives not to work rather than incentives to work. And I think Reagan would be with that 100%. Oh, wait a minute. The two of you can't just end on an agreement. Hold on. Henry, Peter here, we're going to have to get together again because I want more fighting.

You two. You guys want to fight? I'll fight back. Henry, thank you so much. Henry, don't get sucked into it. He's a troublemaker, Henry. Believe me. No sweetness and light at the ending here, boys. James. No, I. James.

No, I'm here. I just thought that Henry had gone. Goodbye, Henry. No, I'm here. One last question, then I'll let you go. This one is speculative and impossible to answer, but what the heck. We like to say that Reagan would have won today. I hope he would have.

But what if Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump were going at each other in the primaries? In the modern climate, in the modern culture, who do you think would have appealed to the most people? Oh, I think Reagan would have won. I think Reagan would have won because he would have had Ted Cruz's constituency, plus he would have eaten into a lot of Donald Trump's constituency, that Ronald Reagan would have been able to keep fiscal conservatives

and social conservatives in a way that Donald Trump never really appealed to in the primary, and that he would have been populist enough that he would have excited many of the people who came out and voted for Trump for the first time. And I think Donald Ronald Reagan would have won quite easily. I said speculative and hard to answer, and you proved me wrong. Thanks. It's been a great segment. We hope to have you back again soon to talk about Reagan or whatever you happen to write about next. Thanks.

Thank you, Harry. Well, thank you very much for having me on. Thank you. Appreciate it. You know, I was a good liberal in college during the age of Reagan. I view the Reagan administration all those times differently. I just remember them as being completely, you know, in retrospect, I was just wrong, wrong, wrong about nearly absolutely everything.

But I had a lot of support telling me that I was absolutely correct. I mean, every fortnight you would get your copy of The Nation or The New Republic, and it would feed right into everything that you believed about how essentially human civilization was coming to an end and fascism was descending on America and all the rest of it. Oh, and they've never been held to account for any of those predictions, have they? Well, if you would like to hold future generations accountable to things that are printed today, what do you do? Well, you can either scour the web and save it and print it, which you don't, or you possibly can read as many magazines as you can carry around.

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And our thanks to our friends at Texture for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we go to Mickey, Mickey Kaus, our old friend. He's helped invent political blogging back in the 90s, an effort that continues to this very day at kausfiles.com. In 2010, he famously ran for Barbara Boxer's U.S. Senate seat in California and debated. The senator declined to appear, so he debated a box. He's now one of the leading experts on immigration policy, and you can find him on Twitter, at Kaus Mickey.

Welcome back. Thank you. Okay, here's the deal. We learned this week that Emma Lazarus's poem on the Statue of Liberty's plinth, if that's what it is, it's actually law. It's law equal to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. How did that happen exactly? Was there a national poetical law

act that I missed? And what other poems might now have the same problem? Well, it's a good poem, you know. I thought it was a mistake to attack Emma Lazarus. It's become a thing among my immigration restrictionist

colleagues that this Emma Lazarus poem really isn't that important. And I think Americans still like it. And we saw with the reaction against the Trump travel ban that it's our self-image that we're a place that takes in refugees. And I think it's also our self-image that we're a place that takes in unskilled workers and people can rise from ditch sticker to be very important CEOs, etc., etc. And so I think

just rhetorically, leave Emma Lazarus alone. You know, Mickey, hi, it's Larry Kudlow. I may surprise you. I actually like the Purdue bill, at least so much as I understand it. And I thought Steve Miller did an excellent job in the press room. He did. You know, my response to the Emma Lazarus thing is, you know what, Mickey, we did it. We did it. We did it for 100 years. But now times are completely different because we didn't have ISIS back then and we didn't have radical Islamic terrorism back then. But I would argue in terms of her poem and her hopes for America, we succeeded. We did it. We took them all in. But now it's a completely different story.

Well, that's true. Very good point. And the economy has changed. We don't need unskilled workers the way we did in the 1800s. We can't use them. So it's not such a – it's sort of cruel to them and certainly cruel to our unschooled workers to take in millions and millions of them. So, no, I think it's a good bill. I thought Steve Miller did a very good job. I just, there are just a couple of points that I balked at.

Mickey, Peter here, Peter Robinson here. I don't want to leave Emma Lazarus behind too quickly. Here's why. I wrote the speech that President Reagan delivered when the Statue of Liberty was rededicated in the 1980s. I don't know if Larry remembers this, but some New Yorkers, the thing was falling apart and of course i had him quote emma lazarus and it was a really if i do say so it was a really very moving speech it is just central so what i'm saying is what what jim acosta's point about emma lazarus he was making a very deep point and you started by granting that and the deep point is this is the way we think of ourselves. This is the way Americans understand the very nature of the country. And if you start monkeying around with immigration, you're starting to change something very profound. I'm willing to grant, of course, that you do have to change immigration.

But what I don't hear you saying, you can't ignore Emma Lazarus. You can't ignore that point. It's too deep in tens of millions of Americans. How do you address it? Well, you say we take plenty of refugees. We take 50,000 under the bill. They still take 50,000 refugees a year. That's close to the historical average. And also people forget that from the 1920s to 1965, we had very low immigration. We really had a very strong restrictionist period. And those were, in the long arc of history, very good years for America.

So it's not un-American to restrict immigration. And we're not going back down to the 1920s level. We're going back down to 1980. That's not so bad. And the problem is the economy has changed. So unskilled workers at the bottom get the short end of the stick in terms of automation, in terms of trade, and also in terms of unskilled immigration. Changing immigration isn't the biggest factor, but it's the lever that we can most easily reach. It's much easier than stopping the march of robots or stopping international trade, neither of which we really want to do.

So it's a logical move to make, and we should be frank that we're not giving up our notion of we're a nation that takes in refugees. We have about 20 percent of the world's total. I've already said that. And we just – we can't take in 100 percent. Okay. Now, one more question if I may. And you read everything about this. You read all the academic studies and so forth.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but validate me if I'm right. Layman Robinson watches this argument for years, and as best I can tell, for a number of years, the evidence was mixed on whether permitting large-scale immigration to continue as it has since the 60s, under the law that was passed in 65, whether or not that harms the country economically. Well, they go on welfare. No, they don't go on welfare.

They pay certain taxes. They don't pay income. Very hard to figure out on net whether it was a benefit or not. Now, this is my impression, and I'm asking you if I've got it right. In the last couple of years, there have been a number of studies, and I believe this is centered in the work of Jorge Borjas at Harvard, that say it may be on net a slight benefit to the country economically overall. But the important fact is that below that one figure, you're getting a huge disadvantage. It is now clear.

It is now not a point of argument. It's statistically clear that Americans who lack college educations, what we used to call blue-collar workers, do get harmed. That is now unambiguous, right or wrong. I think that is the consensus. There are still people who dispute the finding that unskilled workers are harmed. And one can exaggerate the harm. It's not, you know, they don't lose 20% a year. It's 3% to 5% over a couple of decades, according to the New York Times this morning.

It's in the order of 3% to 10% for every 10% increase in, you know, the competitors in your skill group. So it depends what skill group you're in. And the horrible thing about it is that the lower down you go, the worse it is. So if you're an unskilled… If it's Barbara Boxer or hang up on her uh it um it's it's uh so it's jim it's james acosta right if if you're if you're a black high school dropout uh the impact is much worse and you probably never get into the labor market uh because you can't get on the first rung than if you're

somebody a little higher up. So that's the problem. The poorest of the poor are the most screwed. Okay. And one more question, and then I'm sure Larry and James want to come in. But this is a question I think I can anticipate Larry may ask this. At least let's put it this way. I'm sure Larry gets it as often as I get it.

And that we just were talking to Henry Olson about the legacy of Ronald Reagan. So here's what Robinson and Kudlow, who served in the Reagan White House, get a lot. Listen, Ronald Reagan signed an amnesty in 1986. He was a warm humanitarian man. He enjoyed Hispanic culture. For that matter, he called for the statehood of Puerto Rico. If Ronald Reagan were alive today, he would be appalled by Mickey Kaus and this RAISE Act, this Cotton-Purdue Act that Donald Trump just endorsed yesterday to restrict immigration

to those with skills who speak English. Ronald Reagan was an Emma Lazarus man. What do you do with that, Mickey? Well, he probably was. I don't take orders from Ronald Reagan. But the problem is that Reagan was double-crossed in 86. The deal was, you know, we will take steps to make sure that there are no more illegals, and we will amnesty the three or four million who are here. We amnestied the three or four million, and then we got 11 million more illegals and we will amnesty the three or four million who are here uh we amnestied the three or four million and then we got 11 million more illegals because we didn't do the enforcement part so i think while he what while your characterization of reagan was was completely right i think he would also be appalled by what happened after 86 me so uh it's a little like you

know at harper's magazine we had a special feature, if Orwell were alive today, weighed in on, and it's impossible to tell what Reagan would do if he were alive today. But you're right that his basic sentiment was MLS-ers. Yeah, I mean, I agree with Mickey. Actually, we're both right in a sense. Reagan was, I won't say he was duped, but the legislation that materialized later did not create the border security that he hoped it would, nor did it create various limitations. California, who was very popular, had a huge Hispanic vote, Mexican vote. You know, I think he would have leaned in the Emma Lazarus direction. And again, I just feel the deal with that, with Emma, she was right and we did what she wanted. That's all. But times have changed.

And as they always have. And the other question, Peter, this is tricky business. On the economics, the George Borges stuff and so forth, there have been a million, million studies on this. At least a million. Yeah. It isn't really 1,000% clear the impact of immigration, you know, on blue-collar workers, for example, or less than blue-collar workers.

But the best stuff I've seen actually came out of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. And I'm sorry, I cannot remember the woman's name who did the research. If you lived along the border, you really were at a disadvantage. You were at a wage disadvantage. And that was troubling. And she was in favor of immigration, what I call immigration reform, which I still regard myself as an immigration reformer. I legalized the 11 million people who are here. But she acknowledged the data showed you really got harmed down at the border. And ironically, you know, that's not where Trump's message resonated so much as it did up in the in the Rust Belt states,

which is obviously not next to the Mexican border. So there are a lot of factors involved with this slump in blue collar jobs and blue blue-collar wages, education being one of them. And I might also add very low economic growth in general. I mean, look, we've had 16 years of 2% economic growth in this country. That is the worst patch over the longest time since the Depression. And so everybody has been hurt. Blacks have been hurt. Hispanics have been hurt.

Blue collars have been hurt. I mean, I understand the technological change, but the reality is we should have created more growth, more income, and higher wages with better jobs. And we haven't. So it's very complicated. But the reality is we need more growth, among other solutions. The problem is that if you read the Washington Post this morning,

they advocate more immigration because it produces more growth. And if the only way to get more growth is by having more people and hurting the people at the bottom who are our greatest social problem, it's not worth having the growth. There are other ways to get growth, and I'm all for growth, and growth is great. But if growth becomes the end in itself, then it's used to justify all sorts of things, and one of them is greater unskilled immigration. Yeah, well, I don't buy that.

I mean, Mickey, I think we may agree on this. I don't think willy-nilly limitless unskilled immigration is the solution to growth. I mean, you're using, sure, as a standard identity in economics, growth equals the change in the rate of productivity plus the change in the rate of employment. So the idea here is let the immigrants, let the low skilled or unskilled immigrants come in. That will pick up the so-called employment growth and that will raise overall GDP. I don't buy that. I absolutely do not buy that. And I do believe the shift in sentiment, which is widespread on Capitol Hill, regardless of who's the president, towards a skill-based immigration policy is exactly right.

I think this unlimited family-based chain immigration stuff has done a lot of damage in a lot of areas. And I think that's really – there's almost a consensus on that. It all sort of depends on how you portray it and how you message it and whether you're a meanie or whether you're a good person. I understand that. I'm not a meanie, but I don't think the unlimited unskilled should come, and I don't think the family chain should be permitted anymore. Well, I agree with that completely.

For some, Summers seems to think that greater immigration is the solution to his, what he calls, secular stagnation. And I've never figured out why that is, other than what you just said, that it just increases demand to have a whole bunch more people around. It's a case mickey where aggregate counting can be very misleading i i really well everybody loves the emma lazarus poem because it makes you feel good it's a no sentiment but the minute you start to break it down into actual policy and say well how many huddled masses and then people wave it away it's

the idea that counts. Well, that's true, but the idea has to translate into specific policies, and that's where you realize that legislating by poem is probably not the wise thing to do. And what Larry said is, I think, very important. We used to have a frontier. Then the frontier closed, and we changed. That doesn't, you you know the same thing probably with a period of more open immigration and taking in 20 of the world's refugees

well solutions to me would seem to be to annex canada uh and then just uh use the northwest territories to yeah but canada wait wait you just fell into a wonderful trap. Canada has this policy. Exactly. Canada, yes, we should use Canada. So does Australia. And by the way, Britain used to, and I think they'd like to return to it. So you've got to think about that. Why is it up immigration such that we emphasize merit-based immigrants?

Why is that bad? Skill-based immigrants. Why is that bad? Skill-based immigrants. And by the way, it's not just merit and skills. Something that Steve Miller said, immigrants who are capable of what he called self-sufficiency, and that includes some working knowledge of the English language. In other words, it's a point system. It's not an arbitrary system necessarily. And to me, it's eminently sensible and pragmatic. And it can't be inhumane. It cannot be inhumane. And here's how I know that it can't be inhumane. Because just last week, Rolling Stone put Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, on the cover, and the story was, why can't he be

our president? And then this week, our President Donald Trump said, okay, folks, I'm in favor of the same immigration system that Canada has. It's got to be, right? It's got to be humane. It's cool and it's hip. Okay. But you see, this business, just one last point. I don't mean to be redundant. But when Miller talked about self-sufficiency and he was talking about the whole, the entirety of this point system, and I don't necessarily know every detail, but I think he was saying is we will bring in folks in a legal way who can help this country almost from day one or perhaps from day one. And that judgment cannot be made on one point. It has to be made on a bunch of points. But I think that brings you closer to the Emma Lazarus line. Because after all, in those days, in those days, quote unquote, people came to America to help and we were helped by them in the main. So that's a judgment we've sort of lost now with all these people on the free immigration

left saying we should admit anybody, willy-nilly, whoever they are, just bring them in with no other consideration. That's a big change. That's a big change from what M. Lazarus was talking about. Because the two positions are immigrants should come here to help America

versus the position of America is here to help the immigrants. And if the second point is your primary idea, then you want to bring them in and sign them up and get them to vote D. Mickey, thanks for coming on today. Cowsfiles.com, as ever. And the subject that you love isn't going away.

So we hope to have you back soon. Mickey, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Mickey. Thank you, Mickey. Thanks. But you asked why is it bad if we require them to have skills. It's bad because jim acosta's

grandfather came here unable to speak three phonemes of any language and had no skills whatsoever aside from putting one wooden block on top of the other or that's whatever the narrative it was so that's why it's bad because of that and uh we have to let everyone in but you know you're right when it comes to the downward pressure on wages, when it comes to too many people chasing too few jobs, if you're hiring, you know, in some places, like North Dakota, for example, which is booming, it's almost impossible to find somebody to man your cash register, let alone drive your truck.

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sponsoring this the ricochet podcast well guys before we go larry um kelly changing things bringing order discipline how's that looking to you looks good looks good um i think the stock market was going through the general kelly rally this. I think that had a big part of it because here's an insight I will share. It was not mine. It was my friend John Batchelor, great radio man and dear friend of mine. Batchelor made this point the other night. He said Donald Trump has enormous respect for generals and military and their discipline because he went to high school at the New York Military Academy. And it was an important experience in his life. By the way,

it was a happy, good, positive experience. So what I'm suggesting is Trump may actually listen and abide to the disciplinary processes that General Kelly will bring. And if that is the case, we are all better off and we all owe Anthony Scaramucci an enormous favor for being as obscene and uncivil as he was. Because guess what popped out of that can? John Kelly. And that's an awfully good thing. So I'm kind of bullish on this story. Me too, for what it's worth.

Me too. The Marines have landed. That was a showstopper. I've never had 10 spare seconds before on this show. Well, the last thing we're gonna get into hey so hold on no because we can't let that great larry's bullish on john kelly excuse me james larry's bullish on john kelly but you know what larry let me just push back a little bit because you've been bullish on chief crazy horse over and over again and he brings in a new person and then this new person and larry's always there saying this time it's going to work

what when at what point is this guy finally going to break your heart no so answer that question and then also what do you say what do you say to somebody like bill crystal who at this point they're the never trumpers bill Bill Crystal, the George Wills, how do you persuade them to cut this administration a little more slack? I don't think I can. I mean, on that point, I don't think

I can. But I'll go back to your first clause. Look, regarding tax cuts, and also regulation, but let me stay with tax cuts. That was the principal reason I supported Trump. And, of course, Steve Moore and I and others, Steve Miller and so forth, we wrote the campaign tax cut plan. It is still alive today.

My point, Trump has never let me down on this tax issue. He wanted to do taxes first before health care. I just spent, I had a very long session with him, I guess two-ish weeks ago on that. I mean, he still wants a 15% corporate tax. He may not get it, but he still wants to fight for it. He still wants to fight for the repatriation. He still wants to fight for the individual tax cuts. All this came out of the campaign. So he's never let me down. And I still believe, although the White House has been messy, I don't disagree with that.

And some things happen that you just break your heart and misstatements and so forth. But nonetheless, I do not believe he's lost his focus. I just don't. And so the Kelly thing's going to make things a lot easier but i don't think the chief of staff was the chief predicate for getting the kind of pro-growth policies that trump promised in the campaign i don't think so yeah i think it's going to help and i have high hopes for it and i'm breathing a sigh of relief but no trump has never let me down on these pro-growth policies.

He has kept his promise. Well, musically, we don't know whether to go out with high hopes from the Kennedy campaign or never going to let you down by Rick Astley. I'll leave that up to the Yeti. Thanks, everybody, for listening. And thanks to LendingTree, ZipRecruiter, and Texture for sponsoring this podcast. Please support them for supporting us. Don't forget to go to the iTunes place and leave a review.

It'll help people discover the show, which keeps it going, of course. What else keeps it going? Money. That's right. Podcast listeners, join today on our brand-new podcast listener tier, only $2.50 a month cheap, and you get to comment. What fun. Well, we'll see everybody in the comments.

Thank you, Larry. Thank you, Peter. Thank you for listening, folks. We'll see you at Ricochet 3.0. Next week. Good night. Oh, it's sweeping, it's setting up I want to go with this arresting show I'm a young man from the land of the ice and snow From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow

Such a field so green And the whispered tales of dawn Of how we come in tides of war We are your Overdose Ricochet Join the conversation. Bye.