Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds and among a Latino independence. Trump's approval rating has dropped from forty three percent in February.
To twenty nine percent in May. I wonder what happened. We have such a great show for you today.
The Washington Post own Dana Milbank stops by to talk to us about Republicans turning the tide against Trump's big, beautiful bill. Then we'll talk to Mark Dunkleman about his new book, Why Nothing Works, Who Killed Progress and how to bring it back?
But first of the news, Somalie the girls are fighting Elon. He's tweeting at how bad Trump's signature bill is and saying it's a disgusting abomination.
It was only a matter of time.
Now.
I do want to point out he's not saying it's a disgusting abomination because he's against cut snap benefits for poor children. He's not saying it's a disgusting abomination because he is against this idea that a seven year old, that if you are the parent of a seven year old, you have to work eighty hours a week. Okay, that is not what This is the work requirements for Medicaid, right, you have to work to get emergency healthcare, even if you have a seven year old child.
So I don't know who is going to do that childcare. There. He's not complaining that.
You know, there will be several states in which twenty five percent of all children will be affected by these cuts. No, he's not talking about that. He's talking about the fact that it grows the deficit. You know why it grows the deficit? Can you guess why, Jesse Kennon?
Because it's really stupid and cuts Texas for the rich.
It does a couple of things. It's the purest distillation of MAGA. So it cuts taxes for the keeps this stupid tax cut from expiring. And then it does lots of crazy Trump stuff like no taxes on tips. How the fuck you even going to do that, man, No taxes on tips. Everything's going to become a tip. It's basically like they put someone in charge of everything who doesn't know how to do anything, and here we have
a bill. The Congressional Budget Office, nonpartisan independent analysts have projected the Trump's bill, which extends the twenty seventeen tax cuts would add between two point three and five trillion dollars to the deficit in the next ten years. By the way, I want to point out the only people who are standing up to Trump or Elon mush the world's richest man who used to be a Trump megadonor and the very far right, you know, the Rand Paul crew.
Those guys have complained, but everyone else in the Republican Party is going along with it.
Somali Michael Temaski at The New Republic a bold idea that many of us Burnie bros. Have been very on board for for decades.
Yeah, so it really yes, Yes, I know your pomatic to stick.
It in there, right, Okay, so yes.
Mike Tamaski points out what I think all of us really should be talking about, which is that this is actually, believe it or not, all they need to do is raise taxes on very very rich people, and that Republicans have brilliantly convinced people that somehow that is not the answer to the problem. The answer to the problem is raised taxes on very very rich people.
Thank you, You're welcome.
That's it. That it was a very smart article and He's right, and that's it.
So I think that this is truly one of those things that we saw coming with Project twenty twenty five, and we're like, oh, this is going to be the whole areas part, which is federal employees must now write essays praising Trump's policies. I really really can't wait to see what happens when they go to get that from chat GPT and what it spits out.
Yeah.
You know, many people are saying that this is all very stupid. Now, look, this is all this North Korea style stuff, right, like how you will talk about, dear leader. This is like the ideological stuff. And by the way, it's so much of it is from Project twenty twenty five. I'm glad you talked about this because you and I
have done so much on Project twenty twenty five. This is this ideological purity stuff which comes from the Office of You know, remember with twenty twenty five, they the whole idea was to create a federal government that does Trump's bidding, that does the kind that ideologically aligns with trump Ism. And you know, this is what this is, the ideological alignment to a trump Ism.
Yeah, my personal favorite because we have the questions is number three, how would you help as the president's executive orders and policy priorities of this role. I really can't wait to see how chat shept answers that I might type it after this and send it to the group chat.
It reminds me so much of all of the other things that Elon tried to do. Remember the like five things you do in a day email and that went to like members is dependent on you know, people who work in national security tell us five things you do in a day. It's that same kind of idea that like, federal employees are somehow getting some kind of freebie from the federal government as opposed to they're just workers who could actually make more money in the private sector.
Yeah, well, totally well, speaking of government and competence, as we know, Republicans love to prove that government doesn't work by hiring well totally inept people for jobs. And one job we don't want topt people in is FEMA chief since those are very big problems that need very big answers with a lot of improvisation, and FEMA Administrator David Richardson said that he didn't know there was such thing as hurricane sees it twitch.
Oh boy, oh, what are we doing your team? Look, they have put together an insane group.
I don't know.
Look, you've elevated people who really only care about MAGA and nothing else, and you've put those people in jobs. A lot of them are not necessarily set up for those jobs. And then you find that they, you know, do things like they don't know about hurricane season.
Maybe he was kidding, maybe he wasn't kidding.
Whatever it is, it's not great. Dana Milbank is a columnist at The Washington Post and the author of Fools on the Hill, The Hoolians, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists who burned down the House.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Dana Milbank, Molly, to be back with you, Where do we start? Donald Trump mad at Michael Wolf.
He's got a lot of people to be mad at now, and at top of the list is Elon Musk.
But why is Michael Wolf occupying any segment of Donald Trump's brain?
Well, I mean, this is a dangerous path to go down in terms of why it is anything at any given You know, why is the president point sharing some posts about Joe Biden being replaced by a robot? You know, it's whatever is under his skin at the moment. I mean, I think if we're looking in a global sense this week, I think since the Taco moment, since he kept you know, worried that he'd be seen as a chicken, he wants to be as bullying as possible to as many people
as possible. So, you know, I guess that that would be my pop psychology as he has to look extra pugnacious.
Let's talk about instead of pecho analyzing my man, let's talk about the the Senate, which is now So there's this House bill. It is a bill that has a lot of pork. I want to talk about the judicial stuff that's snuck into the bill.
You know about this, right, you mean limiting the abilities.
Yes, let's talk about that.
So in the big beautiful bill, which is theoretically supposed to be a bill which keeps the tax cut going for very wealthy people and also does all sorts of cuts to snap and medicaid and work with rioments, it.
Makes it harder to register and makes it harder to stay on in.
All of that, and also grow somehow manages to grow the deficit, which is you know, this math is kind.
Of incredible by for a trillion dollars.
Right in that bill is this crazy little bit that limits the power of judges to sue the administration in the big beautiful bill. So can you just answer me this, because as Donald Trump is working on this, right, Trump's sweeping tax cut bill includes provision to weaken court powers.
Right, So this big beautiful bill, and he's.
Out there with Thoon trying to convince him to do it. But doesn't the Senate Parliamentarian still exist or does she only exist for Democrats exist.
But has been overridden repeatedly. But you're right about the various things tucked in the inability to press contempt proceedings. I think it limits standing in any case when people are challenging the administration. Yeah, there's this provision restricting any state from interfering in any way with artificial intelligence, making any regulation.
Right, regulation, God forbid anyone wants to regulate guys, go on anybody.
And now you even have Marjorie Taylor Greens thing tarn it. I didn't know this was in it, and if they don't take it out, I'm going to oppose the bill. She's too late, too late, It's too late, Yes, there's all kinds of and I'm sure we're going to continue to find nasty things.
All along the way.
But you know, yes, all of those things are outrageous in their own right. But you know, I think the focus needs to be on six hundred billion dollars in cuts, although they're not calling in cuts to Medicaid and the.
SNAP, they're just adjustments.
Adjustments, So a lot of twenty nine year old men on their couch playing video games. Mike Johnson seems to think, But you know, the food stamps snap as they're called, and all of these clean energy credits which are actually benefiting people in Republican districts across the land. But you know, there's this massive transfer of wealth, literally taking from the poor and giving to the rich.
Even Elon Musk is now out there saying.
It is a disgusting abomination, not just any abomination, but a disgusting one.
Well, so Elon Musk agrees with Rand Paul right that in fact, this is the horseshoe there right right. Elon Musk, he's criticizing this because he thinks cut more.
Right, he thinks it's pork field.
Of course, it is pork field in some ways, but it's also an extraordinary amount of cuts. I mean, the reason is so expensive. I mean it does have, you know, huge cuts to discretionary non defense spending, there's no question about that, but it has even larger tax increases. So that's why that's going on.
But you know, Musk is not in the best position.
I mean, I guess he's now trying to distance himself as quickly as he can for this administration. But this is the guy who said he was going to cut two trillion dollars and they're due to be sending the actual recisions package of all the things he cut in that apparently it's nine billion dollars. So that's that's what all of this was about, and it wound up costing the government far more than that, just in terms of lost efficiency.
They had to rehire all those people.
Elon Musk played government and he learned quickly, but not as quickly as someone who actually would know what they were doing. And I do think to want watch Elon sort of percolate in real time. You know, he said we're going to cut trillions of dollars and then he gets in there. I mean, look, we don't really know what Elon was doing in there, right, I mean besides like copying all our data.
Right and e merging everything on you know, all of our bank records, our tax records, our medical records and sharing them with his twenty something meter staffer.
So no, who are ideologically very right wing, one of whom is called Big Roles.
So no, we don't know what's happened, or maybe maybe we never we'll find out what's happened.
The overall impact in terms.
Of the federal budget and the deficits will be negligible from what he's done, mostly because it's all illegal. It was done without input from Congress. That's why they're turning around. They amount they're actually asking Congress to cut his poultry. But the impact is huge in terms of the human cost, not just in terms of the federal workers whose lives have been disrupted or the you know kids in Africa
who can't get there aid to medicine now. But the Post is reporting today on a whole bunch of you know, other disruptions, including to social security, you know, things that are popping up in many ways. They made the bureaucracy worse than it was to start with.
Yeah, for sure, that's true. The usaid. I mean, look, you know it's that question of should the richest man in the world be cutting food and medicine for the poorest children in the world. I mean, you know that's the Bill Gates question, Like is that good? I mean, I think it's bad.
You're really going out on a limb there.
Well, yeah, exactly, I think, But I don't understand, like how he didn't It didn't occur to him that people might not like him if he did stuff like this, Like did nobody say, like, maybe you shouldn't you know, there was a reason all those rich people gave money to charity during the Gilded Age? I mean, like the Rockefellers had gained this out. I mean, do you think nobody mentioned.
That to him? See now we're psycho analyzing. Yeah, true, but maybe even harder than Grantrum. What was he thinking? He surely didn't calculate all the damage it would be it would do to his reputation.
Seventy one percent that is the revenue drop. Right, since he's gotten involved, people no longer buy Tesla's basically right.
And how does that?
I mean, do you suppose people say, right now he's back at Tesla he's criticizing Donald Trump, all is forgotten, forgiven. I don't think so. I think that's done. I think he's killed his audience there now. He's certainly gotten a huge benefit in terms of SpaceX and starlink.
And also investigations that are no longer going.
Right, considerable benefits to that.
So what else do you think?
Like, so, we have this bill the Republicans wanted to get passed by July fourth. It will likely be the only piece of legislation Trump passes. I think that's a fair assessment.
I think that's right when you certainly the only major piece of legislation. I mean, I think they've passed something protecting gas stoves or oh.
Yes, that reminds me of Trump's first term, right, gas stoves, the Committee to weaponize the government.
Right, But yeah, no, they've they've dumped everything into this one package. And man, I mean, you have to say they're going to have to enact something because they have no reason to exist if they're if they're unable to do that. But it's still very difficult to see how they thread the needle here. I mean, the way they got it done in the House is basically we're saying all right, well, the Senate's going to change it anyway, so.
Just go for it.
I'm not sure that's going to cut it, because you've got a lot of a couple of dozen Republican House members from Biden won districts or otherwise vulnerable Republicans who have now walked the plank on Medicaid cuts, on food stamp cuts, and on all these green energy credits. And it may well be for nothing because these things will be scaled back in a sense, so they didn't actually achieve the purpose of this, but the vote.
Is still there.
You've been covering Washington for a long time, you've been writing this column.
I like how you point that out each time they talk.
Well, I mean that you have some historical knowledge of the situation.
You're young and spry.
Nothing has prepared us for this moment, right.
Yes, But I mean these people did have these jobs, certainly, not true for all of them, Like some of them could have probably had better jobs, but they chose these jobs because they love power, and yet they have given away almost all of their power to Donald Trump. So, like you know, Paul Ryan used to get up in the morning and say, like I am going to solve government waste. Right, Mike Johnson gets up in the morning and says, what I'm going to make Donald Trump happy?
That seems to be what he's doing.
Man, I guess we could go back through the you know, what has motivated these guys over the ages.
I think it is sort of this.
In this case, it's the worship of the man and the belief that he will do the right thing in the face of all kinds of evidence showing that he doesn't do the right thing.
So I don't really worship him.
Right, you were able to get the House Freedom Caucus, these are the these are the deficit hawks and all that you were able to get them to vote for a four trillion dollar increase in the debt ceiling and something just completely blows the lid off of anything resembling fiscal responsibility. And they said, well, we trust Donald Trump, and so it's not going to happen here, but there it's going to happen with the Doge package, and that's
all going to work. And now we see that that was you know again, the nine billion dollars, that was nothing. And Musk has you know, walked away from any notion of you know, substantially cutting the federal government.
So what motivates them is?
You know, it's the question I tried to answer and writing in The Destructionists, you know, going all the way back to Nude Gingrich. I mean, obviously you can't have any daylight between you and Donald Trump if you're going to keep your political career.
So what good is it doing you?
You know?
I mean think about a guy like Tip Roy, who I think actually believes the stuff he says about federal spending and shrinking government and all that, and now he's just another piece of the machine that is expanding that federal government.
So at some.
Point it just became about power for its own sake, but impotence in terms of the actual policy.
But I want to add something here, which is I think there's the same thing that there was before we're Republicans, certainly in the Senate, but I also think in the House that when they're alone, they're all like this.
Guy, Oh my god. Like I don't think.
They're like this guy, Yeah, this is great, Like I love a reality television host. We're all going to get reelected. This is going to be great. Like I think they still understand that. I mean, We've seen one thing. It's that Trump can't defy political gravity. But Terry Lake, right, Roy Moore, those people can't.
Well, it's the perpetual story that all the people around Trump get destroyed by Trump. You know, must be the most recent example of that, and Trump just walks along as if unscathed, as if nothing had happened. Now, I think what you're describing is probably true of most in the Senate, most Republicans in the Senate. It's probably true
of congressional leadership. It's not true of the three dozen or so in the House Freedom Caucus, the truly maga, the true believers, you know, who actually get up in the morning and really care about all right, well let's make sure there's no DEI and can't have any trans rise, you know, people who are actually fired up about you know, that kind of thing.
So you know, it's a mixture of both of them. So how were they able to get what is it? Only?
I think it was only one no vote, one courageous present vote from Andy as right, the head of the Freedom Caucus, and then two guys who apparently fell asleeve.
In that was the sat move.
They didn't vote for it, but they didn't vote against them, but that you know, that's all political fear. And you know, you see the way he's now, the way he's been going after Ran Paul, and heck, you know Rick Scott, and you know he is able to bludgeon them. It is a fair question to ask what these guys think they've gotten out of it. So, I mean, they get to wear the congressional pin on their lapel, and they have lots of people calling them sir and ma'am, and
they get to go on Fox News. But the few who came into into government with the conservative principles of of free trade and limited government and individual liberties, well I don't think they're delivering much home to their constituents on that count.
That is definitely true.
I wonder if you could sort of talk about we have these governorships, We have a bunch of races happening on the local level in a bunch of different places. We have the trade war that is the you know has been postponed again.
Right, Well, yes and no, but yeah.
Yes and no. Right, So talk us through where we are with trade.
The elections piece of that is important too. Where are we with trade? Well, it depends on when your listeners are listening, because that's going to change by the minute. One thing that hasn't changed is the sense of chaos, right so you know, whether it's the tariffs are one hundred and forty five percent against China or no, no, maybe they're down to fifty percent, or bit they're up
to one hundred percent. You can't possibly know if you're running a business what the tariff regime is going to be. You do know that tariffs are overall higher, and you do know that everybody's afraid to invest. And now there's this added element of chaos with the courts. Will they be able to invalidate the whole thing or you know, now it appears the appeals court is going to be a trio of Trump appointed judges. Almost Okay, maybe he's
back on with his tariffs. So the key there is not the level of tarifs, but just you know the level of chaos. And clearly China is putting the screws to Trump right now. So that's not going anywhere. We are going to be seeing that in terms of prices, which gets your initial question about the elections. Now, I just did a piece it's coming out this week on you know, I've just been watching all of this. Democrats suck, Democrats need to do this. The Democratic brand is toxic,
the weak, the woke. I counted, you know, I just did an ex assert there were three five hundred and fifteen occurrences of Democrats need to just in the last month. And yeah, their brand sucks, but you know what else, The Republican brand sucks, like four or five points less than the Democratic brand sucks. And if you look at the generic ballot, you know, when you ask people, you know which part you're going to support in your local election,
you know you're in New York district. Democrats are leading that they have been leading that consistently throughout the polls. I mean, even when you look at wacky poles like Rasmussen, I don't think we're looking at some you know, historic repudiation of Trump what we've seen so far, but you've certainly seen and the special elections we've had pretty much a clean sweep for Democrats, and they certainly look to be profiting from not doing anything other than not being
Donald Trump. Which is why I think there's a lot of there's a lot of wasted time saying well, you know what should Democrats do this, that or the other thing. They're democrats. You can't organize them around any one particular principle, you know, until and unless you have a party leader, which isn't going to happen for a couple of years. The only thing they have to do is not be Donald Trump. And that does seem to be working for them.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Dana Milbank, Molly, pleasure as always to talk with you.
Mark Dunkelman is the author of Why Nothing Works, Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It back?
Welcome to Fast Politics.
Mark, Thank you Groll to be here.
So your book is called Why Nothing Works, and this is a topic we are very involved in right now, and it's sort of why the best efforts of government sometimes don't produce the results we want. So get me into how you got here and why you decided to write this book.
So I was taking the train into New York a lot back, like a decade ago, and when you were at Brown, I was at Brown, I was living in Washington, I had clients in New York. I was like always on the train, always coming to Penn Station and always being like.
So Amtrak got you here?
Is what you're saying, Amtrak got me there, and I would end up at Penn Station, which is like was like it's a little bit of now, but like back then, like it was just like totally a rat pit, Like it was the grossest. I mean, people don't realize it's but Penn Station is like a second most heavily traffic transit hub in the world. Like more people go through Penn Station than go through La Guardia, Newark, and Kennedy combined on any given day. It is the city's front door.
And that's because people are coming there from New Jersey, from Long Island, from Connecticut, from Washington for Boston. Like everyone's converging in this thing. And like I'm sitting there thinking to myself as I'm reading this old classic liberal book called The Powerbroker about Robert Moses who like destroyed the South Bronx by building the Cross Bronx Expressway. Why was he able to do like this crazy thing while
everyone was screaming at him to stop. And then like decades later, like no one objects to a nicer Penn Station, but they can't get there. And so like that set me on this journey of like what happened to progressivism, that we can't get big things done anymore. And like I realized over the course of time, like we'd actually
done it to ourselves. Like for all that we complained about the Republicans and the Conservatives, and we complained about Trump and Reagan and Bush and whatnot, like this is something that we did do ourselves, which means like one, like that's sort of embarrassing, but two, it means if we get it to ourselves, we can get ourselves out of it. But I don't think that most of us are even thinking of it that way.
So the net neet here is regulation or something else.
The net net is like we progressives used to be leave that, like we could solve the problems if we put power in the hands of big institutions, Like the whole Upper South didn't have electricity, so like we and like private utilities weren't going to extend wires to these poor farmers who were like living in the nineteenth century.
So we as progressives during the Nobul era, created the Tennessee Valley Authority, and we hired federal workers and they built the wires and the power stations and all this stuff. They did these big things. They condemned whole tracks of land so they could build dams and reservoirs, and they reforested hillside did they did all this?
This is like Lyndon Johnson Master the Senate stuff, right, Yes, yeah, we're going full Robert Carrow and yes, podcast right.
So we're going for Robert Carrow. And like back then, we empowered these big bureaucrats to do these big things.
And then like people like Robert Carrow writing in the nineteen seventies, so a few decades later and like Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson and like all this stuff that's happening in the cities and seventies were like we're like whoa, Like these big powerful people that we've empowered to do these big things actually are bad, right, Like like Robert McNamara got us into the Vietnam War, right, Robert Moses, who the power brokers about, Like you know, built the
Cross Bronx Expressway like the bureaucrats.
And he hurt a lot of poor people. The thinking is that these moves towards progress hurt a lot of people, and so they need to be looked at differently. And looking at them differently then made democratic politicians afraid to do stuff.
Well, it's not even they continue to say they wanted to do stuff, but they wanted to create procedures that meet it so that when they wanted to do stuff, like if it was going to hurt poor people, or it was gonna hurt like historic buildings, or it was gonna hurt the environment or an invagered species or uh, you know whatever, Like we created a zillion things that you had to check off before you could do anything big, and like that was all well intentioned and like frankly,
like back then, like when like it was that like these like white men and like charcoal suits and fedoras were just like telling people to move out of your houses because we got to build a highway there, or we're going to do slum clearance, like whatever. It was like it was appropriate to like put more checks on these establishment figures. But now we put so many checks on them that like literally in many cases, you can't get obvious stuff done. And it makes voters enraged. It
makes even progressives enraged. And when we are enraged and government isn't working, and the Democratic Party is the party of government and government doesn't work, it's not good for us. It's good for Trump and like this to me, like for all that we can complain about all the things that he's and like absolutely we should call them out and like we should fight back and whatnot. This is the sort of right.
But this is a different issue than that. This is something that's separate. I'm very much subscribed to the idea that you can walk into you gum, you can deal with the Democratic parties problems. One of them, I think big mistakes of twenty sixteen was thinking that everything, that every problem was caused by Trump and not examining the world that got us there.
I think that's exactly right. We've created a system that doesn't work like that, that's our doing in many cases. And like people may not like him, but like at least he says I'm going to blow up the system. And we too often get caught in this in the traff of being like no, no, no, the establishment works well. Like everyone's been to the DMV. Everyone's like realizes that, like we've got all this clean energy that we can harness, but we're not getting it because there's no transmission line.
There's clean energy in Canada. Massachusetts wants to have clean energy message doesn't sit next to Canada, so you have to find some state that's allowing a transmission line through it. And basically all of them said no, so like we couldn't get the clean energy. Like that's frustrating to people.
And it's super expensive, like the Second Avenue subway in New York because like the most expensive two miles of public Cranso ever built, Like like it's way more expensive here than it is in England, and England is more expensive than Spain, and Spain is more expensive than Turkey, and like we're just at the top of the food chain. And it's not because like concrete and steel are more expensive here though they may be a little bit, or
the labor is more. It's because there's so uncertainly that there's so many, so many barriers you have to clear, and so much uncertainty in like are you actually going to get to do this project or whatever it is that like nothing works, and like people are just sitting there around and being like geez, Like the whole system seems broken and Democrats seem to be on the side of the system. That's lousy, right.
I think the people who listen this podcasts to understand nuance and off. Yeah, to know that you can both see how Trump was elected and how this led to that, you know, without saying like you can't criticize this because it somehow will enable more trump Ism, when in fact, the lack of criticism of this is what God is
to Trump is. So I wonder if you could explain to me sort of what you think the ways in which you could streamline this would be The question is really the streamlining things to make a world in which you can do these things you need to do.
Yes, I see this as like a continuum, And at one end you have the Robert Moses and Robert McNamara folks who like are like, I'm going to do stuff. I don't give a damn what anyone says to me, Like I'm going to listen to no criticism, I'm going to broach no compromise. Right, That's one end. The other end is a system in which if anyone objects to
anything like, the project goes down. And that's sort of what happened with with Station right, Like, there are lots of projects you can point to in this country where like someone doesn't want more housing near their house and they claim that, you know, like that's the only place
where this kind of orchid grows. So like you can't write like it's too many, So like it is a middle ground between these two where everyone has a voice, Like everyone who has a is going to be affected by a project, is able to say to the person that is ultimately going to decide, like, here's my concern, and then that person or institution is given the responsibility of weighing all the stuff, like is it worth it to like endanger this species if we get this much
more housing, or we're able to take this many cars off the street, or whatever it is. And we need to have some ability for someone to have some discretion to make a choice without it being like incredibly litigious and going to court and like end us processes.
I want you to explain Penn Station, because for my own adification, I'm in and out of there all the time. What it looks like they did was build a whole other station under the post office and now you have to walk through the old Penn station to get to the new Penn station. Is that what happened? And is there was there some level of crazy that led to that.
So the problem with Penn Station is that there are too many people who have skin in the game. There's Amtrak, which owns the old Penn station. There's Madison Square Garden, which it's above it. There's Bornado, which has like the which owns all the property around there and all the businesses. There's the community Board, there's the state, there's the Long Island Railroad, the Amtrak and the New Jersey Traider. Like everybody's got some like vested interest and so like, you're
absolutely right. What they ended up doing was saying, there's no way we can move Madison Square Garden. We'd have to give too much money to the Dolans who own that property, and like where would they put the place? For the Knicks and the Rangers play like like, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this old underused post office across Eighth Avenue and turn that into a train hall. Even though the trains still basically stop under Mathis Square Garden. You end up having to walk back.
So that's sort of bananas. But like now at least there is a nicer place to stay. And I will say, like pensation today is nicer than it was. Like, let's give Jenna Lieber and the MPT credit for that.
Yeah, as someone who also just spends a ton of time on Amtrak and truly does despise spending seven hundred dollars for a train ticket, you know, some crazy amount of money. I bought a plane ticket for a fifth of that, So what the fuck is going on here?
The trick of it here is that Amtrak is a federally owned corporation, and so Republicans are constantly saying, privatize at, privatize at, privatizet And then they say, but I'm a senator from Alabama, and I'm a Senator from Missouri, and I'm a senator from Indiana, and you must send trains to my state. I want my constitution to have it.
So they're talking on it both sides of their mouth, right, Like the profitable part of Amtrak, he could very easily run a profitable railroad that goes between Washington, Philadelphia and New York Providence in Boston like that, Like that part of it makes sense that seven hundred dollars you're paying is going to subsidize this larger corporation that is running these wildly inefficient like nobody uses them trains to parts of the country just because members of the of Congress
are demanded in exchange for their votes to give Amtrak a federal subsidy. So the whole thing is totally bananas. It's really quite angering. You're absolutely right, your train ticket from to Washington should not be that expensive, but a lot of that money is going to subsidize train service between Tennessee and Mississippi.
So why, I mean, couldn't you just fucking privatize it. Why are democrats not being like, okay, let's privatize it.
Well, because it was private until the nineteenth seventies and we were going to lose train service altogether. So the federal government came in and saved in the way that we think of like big tech today, like you know, Google, Amazon, like these huge corporations that like nobody could touch. That's what the railroads were at the beginning of the twentieth century, like the Pennsylvania Railroad, the New York Central Railroad, the
Baltimore O Highlight. They were these huge, incredibly important corporations and they ran across the country and people hated them because they were so big, and like if they charged too much, there was something you could do because like only the New York Central Ranch of that town or whatever it was, right, right, they could raise prices on sending trade like they were big, scary was vand or built and like these guys in top hats and they
sat like ornate boardrooms in Philadelphia and told everybody what they had to pay for stuff. Like in the same way that we, like most of your listeners are going to be angry about these big tech corporations. Is the same dynamic. But over the course of the twentieth century, we built roads and highways, we subsidized airlines, and like
all these huge corporations were like reduced to nothing. So like the federal government came in and saved any railroad stuff at all, Like it was all going to go like right, they had enormous capital expenses because they had tracks all over the country, and the federal government came over and saved them. And that's the beginning of the
Amtrak in like the seventies and eighties. And now we've got this strange Frankenstein monster which has a profitable service in the Northeast corridor in a couple of other places, and we're subsidizing it, and we're subsidizing ridiculous routes because that's what Washington demands mostly Republicans.
So insane.
All right, so give me your quick fixes for all the things that are making me irritated, because I'm now very irritated about this.
Well, here's what I think. I think that for all the Trump talks about the deep state, the truth is that in most cases, the people who are the deep state, like the bureaucrats who are like trying to figure stuff out like they are, or they live scared, right, they are constantly afraid that they're going to get slapped down by the White House, or slapped down by Congress, or slept by by a lawsuit. They can't make decisions quickly.
They can't take any risks, right. They know that if they want to do a big project and it's got some cost, that it's going to cost a there's going to be a corner of a national park that's going to be developed, or there's going to be some houses that have to be playing through eminent domain. Like everyone
is running scared, so nothing works. I want to give government back the ability to make discretionary decisions in a pretty expeditious way where we accept that there are costs to progress, and we're going to accept those costs if they're good for working class people generally. Like that should
be our brand, as Democrats should be. We're going to make the tough choices that are good for the working class, whereas the Republicans want to do things that are good for the very rich and they are not actually getting stuffed downe like those is going to turn out to make government less efficient, less useful. But we should be the ones that want to do government reform so that the bureaucracy finally works again like it did decades ago.
I want you to give me one example of how I mean. This stuff is fascinating and I'm super interested in it, But give me one example of a way where we can do this.
Okay, As I said earlier, there is clean water generated hydro power in Canada. In Quebec. They've got dams, they got lots of power. They would love to sell the United States and they'd like to get it to Massachusetts, which wants to buy it. Because if you buy enough power from Canada, you could basically do the equivalent of taking seven hundred thousand cars off the road, like all
those tail pipe missions. So it's great. The problem is that in order to do that, you need to build a transmission line through Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and New York, and basically none of those states want to do it. Somebody needs to be able to say, listen, Maine, we're going to give you a good deal. We're going to pay you a bunch, you're going to get some of the clean energy for free. We're going to subsidize you know,
nice better furnaces for poor people in Maine. But you have to allow this transmission line to go through.
Why don't they want it?
They believe that it's going to ruin a portion of the main Woods and there's going to be, you know, across the Appalachian Trial are going to be wires, and everybody along has some little objection and wants to get their little extra piece. There needs to be someone big, some big institution they can say listen, I hear you main Like, we're going to do what we can to make it so that when you're in this gorge or whatever, like your site line is not affected by a transmission
wire or whatever it is. But we're going to do it like this has been going on in Maine. Since twenty sixteen. Charlie Baker cut this deal in twenty sixteen. It is now twenty twenty five. The line hasn't been built. We need a process by which everybody gets to have their say, but then someone is able to say, yes,
we're going to build the line. And my book is just a whole series of stories like this about how well intentioned efforts to make it so that like a little town in Maine that doesn't want the transmission line has some say and like whether it goes near a school or not, or et cetera, et cetera, but that we've built so many checks into the system that like no one can make a decision, and then nothing gets done and then everyone's angry.
I'm so depressed. This was very good and interesting. Thank you for coming on. I hope you'll come back.
I would love to do it. This is a great show. I love your audience and I love you so thanks for having me on. No mormical Food.
Jesse Cannon bi junk Fast.
You know what we need more of medical journals. That's what the world needs. So RFK Junior. He's on the case and I can't wait to read the Maha World Report and Journal or the Maha Journal of Medicine, because he's going to make them.
It's not going to be called Maha. It's going to be called ha ha.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Miss Yeah, it's going to be called ha ha and uh haha. None of us are going to be laughing. Very scary stuff. This guy should not be in charge of our medicine. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going.
Thanks for listening.