Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
Mister Garbaschoff, tear down this wall.
It's the Ricchet Podcast with Stephen Hayward and I'm James Lilas and today we go to the Conservative Crossroads and dot to Rob Johnson, no Henry Olson. So let's have ourselves a podcast.
And you took ten thousand dollars. That's a lot, and help them do it.
You know.
The other thing is, whistle blowers came to you as early as twenty nineteen.
Let's look as early as twenty nineteen.
Whistle blow don't talk over me early talking about in nineteen.
It's my hearing pal. As early as nineteen, don't come.
Whistle blowers came to well, I should call you a prisoner because you ought to be in jail.
Welcome everybody.
It's the Ricochet Podcast, number seven hundred and seventy six.
Well that sounds patriotic.
I'm James Lynx here in Minneapolis and I'm joined by Stephen Hayward and I presume California.
Yes, and this is the Ricochet Podcast.
You can join us at by the.
Way and be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web.
Why don't you go there?
Well, not now, I mean you're you're you're leaning forward, elbows on the table, wrapped, waiting to see where this is all going to go.
But you know, when we're done, amble over and see what all the fuss is about. Stephen? How are you today? How have things been? It's been two weeks.
Last week I was I was flat with a with a stomach bug, not the stomach flu. There's no such thing as stomach flu. I don't think, I mean, you can't have influenza of the you know, the g I part. It was some bug, some neuro some campy, back to some something.
Right.
I'm fine.
I'm still getting over a respiratory bug I caught a week ago. But I'm back up and fighting form and very happy about the news.
This week just been. You know, I'm not tired of winning. I'll just put it that way.
Well, let's go down those lists of winds as you see them. I'm sure some people regard them as mortal blows against the American experts. But with your sunny optimism, in your particular prism, what are the things that you what winnings do you like today.
Well, I think the biggest story of the week, and I think you can't overstate how big it is is the Trump administration rolling back what's been known as the endangerment finding of the Opening.
That would be the one.
Yes, yeah, that's the most consequential thing that I've got to explain.
Well, I mean, look, I used to be when I lived in Washington.
I marinated in all the fine points of the climate policy and energy debate. And it's so and I want to avoid the technical details because it gets thick and boring in a hurry. But what's important is is that this was step one, now almost twenty years ago, essentially for the federal government to take over the entire energy system of the United States, and that meant nationalizing all the electric utilities. They never said that's what they were doing, but that, in effect is what was happening.
And you know, I actually used to read through.
These fifteen hundred page draft plans of the EPA and because I have a high threshold of pain, Well, so if the Trump administration has done is not merely a
simple bureaucratic step. But to make a long story short, they've done patient work quietly over the last several years Will Biden was president to lay the groundwork to not only roll back the cornerstone of their power grab overpower good by that included our client standards, other things you and I have covetched about forever, but to make it stick legally. And that's very important, and that gets the way the bureaucratic wheels grind, and I think they are
going to be able to make it stick. But to me, the most delicious part of all this is watching the press coverage. So the ABC Evening News said Trump rolls back the power of the United States to control the climate.
That's what he said, Like, you know, we have a knob in the ebs.
You do just control the climate by turning a knob, I mean, And you know, the New York Times is having a fit.
I love their headline.
Here is Trump allies near total victory in wiping out US climate regulation. And I thought, gosh, the Times that's like it's a bad thing, right, And the Time says that looks like they're going to be able to make the stick. Unlike other things Trump is doing, that may be reversed on day one by a democratic president.
Now I'm just a little old Country hic moron up here in the fly flyover states. But to me, this is like reading a headline that says the Administration relaxes ban on flogistin there is a I mean, let's go back to two thousand and nine here, if I can read my notes. At two thousand and nine, which is when they began, the EPA found that carbon dioxide, which I hope I never have anything to do with, methane, and nitrous oxide, which of course that stuff you get
at the dentist. It makes you feel better now, and three other greenhouse gases quote endangered the public health and welfare of current and future generations. So one of the Clean Air Act this was said, and then SCOTUS ruled
a little while later that the agency could set the determinations. So, in other words, it's huge, huge power was lent to these people predicated on the science that all of these greenhose gases are going to cause changes in the climate that will be catastrophic, that will be expensive, that will kill people, that make the seas rise, all the rest
of it, And that has been gospel ever since. Right, we are living in an era, as we've talked before, of the authoritative, settled science, all the things that people know, all the institutions that people trusted, all of the experts and the rest of it. All that credibility is being dismantled. And this is one piece of that. Now you're right about the hysteria. I mean, the Barack Obama be tweeted out that said that the endangement finding served as the
basis for limits on tailpipe emissions. And I found that to be an interesting way to put it, because it's most of it's supposed to make people think, you know, of those huge, choking, horrible, stinky, dark clouds that come from the back of every car. Tail pipe emissions I'm guessing at this point are significantly cleaner than they used
to be, in part because they have to be. But she remember back in the days of leaded gasoline when I was a child, I mean you would actually see you would see these anti pollution ads are the ones that had the fake Indian with the tear rolling down his cheek, and you would see fleets of cars and this massive dark smoke billowing from underneath them.
I can still smell this stuff.
Well, that isn't the case anymore so, finding saying that tailpipe emissions might not be the thing exactly that gets people all head up. And he also talked about power planned rules are going to be relaxed.
Well, maybe we need more power plants, and maybe we need more nuclear plants, but he says it's just to the only reason is so the fossil fuel industry can make more money.
Yeah, you know this recent cold snap we went through a couple of weeks ago, coal and oil save the day. You know, we actually don't generate any serious amount of electricity with oil anymore. It used to be fifty years ago twenty percent, but then oil got expensive, as we know,
and we shifted to coal and natural gas. But in the North the East, where they have been blocking natural gas pipelines, they had to fire up a lot of oil and diesel power generators to keep the lights on and keep people warm.
And they've been on.
For I mean, I think I just read earlier this week that they finally in the New England shut off the last of the oil fired power plants they put online for emergencies. Steps the tailpipe thing, Oh gosh, I know all the statistics on this, and yes, emissions of some things are down almost one hundred percent from what
they were fifty years ago. To dramatize it for listeners, I show students a slide, and you'll appreciate this because you're old enough as I am to have worked on a carburetor at one time in the line, Right, I always like to pop the hood and fiddle with the screwdriver and the carburetor. It probably made things worse. But we don't have carburetors anymore. We went to fuel injected engines, right. And another thing is that little flaps on our the gas tanks where we put the nozzle in.
We didn't used to have those.
Well, I show a slide to students when I go through all this, and I show on the left side a nineteen sixty seven Mustang parked in a driveway with the engine off, and on the riot, I'll show a late model or on two thousand and five Mustang driving down the highway at sixty miles an hour. And the trick question is which one of these cars is putting
out more air pollution? And of course the trick answer is the Mustang parked in the driveway is emitting more pollution with its engine off than the Mustang driving down the road of sixty miles an hour with the engine on.
Explain that way. Explain that counter intuitive example, Miss Well.
The technical term was fugitive emissions.
The reason we sealed up engines the way they are now that you can't get to him anymore, is to stop essentially gasoling from evaporating.
It really was that simple.
It used to be tons of place like La where I grew up, significant amount of you know, gasoline evaporating into the air from our old style cars from fifty sixty years ago. We have none of that anymore. And that's why SOMEMOG levels have fallen, depending on the city you're in, you know, by fifty sixty seventy percent. And I could say I can bore you silly, But I also stop there and say Obama doesn't know what he's talking about.
As usual.
Well, we're in a bit of a bind here because we say, well, you know, cars are cleaner today, the air is cleaner today.
We don't need this stuff. A lot of the reasons that we have these advancements and we have cleaner engines.
And the rest of it is because there has been the heavy thumb of the federal government pushing down the scale and telling everybody what they want.
I mean, so we have to admit that probably.
We would not have the progress that we do if it had been left up to the consumer or the industry itself.
I mean, what are you gonna do?
But the point is is that after you've done a certain amount of work, then the existence of the agency has to perpetuate itself and it has to justify itself. So you have ever more attempts to get cleaner and cleaner and cleaner and cleaner, which are incremental and small and petty in what they accomplish, but actually great in the impact that they have on driveability, on the shape of the cars, on survivability, and you know all of
that stuff. So yes, I'm not gonna be one of those guys who say we should go back to where it was in sixty.
Eight when they were dumping cadmium in the river.
You could say that markets have aally would have fixed everything, and maybe that's so.
False.
Five, But we did clean things up.
I mean, you remember ecology was oh yes, that's what it was called back then, and it had all the raiments and all the trappings of a religion as it does to this day. But it won, and it got a lot of stuff good, and it changed public consciousness.
But we have never moved.
It seems like we haven't moved at all in public consciousness.
About the imminent demise of the late great planet Earth, right of spaceship birth.
It seems like we're still back in seventy nine sixty nine, where people are protesting somebody dumping cadmium in the river.
Well, I actually think there has been some changes in public opinion now. Of course, you're right, the climate cult or the environmental cult as I like to call them, the true believers still think the world's coming to an end tomorrow, and they get way too much press attention. I think for a variety of reasons, and I've looked at a lot of surveys on this, a lot of the public has been suffering from a while now from what I call apocalypse fatigue. Right, we we're hearing all
this stuff, and that's one reason why. It's why I think it doesn't stick anymore. I think what you would say is, and again my sort of summary line on this is what regulation did was in a few instances, make us get after things we would have otherwise ignored and it's sped up technological change and development that was already in process in the marketplace.
But most people don't know.
For example, that a lot of kinds of air pollution were falling in the sixties pretty fast before the first Clean Air Act passed. That wasn't because companies wanted to be good. It's because they wanted to be more efficient in their resource use. They also face some lawsuits, you know, local nuisance suits and so forth, and so so. Regulation certainly has a role, but it's not the case. Well,
I always put it this way. You know, it took the civil rights movement of the century to get to their milestones in the sixties with the Civil Rights Act. A lot of the environmental organizations problemed today weren't founded until after all that landmarkt legislation was passed in Congress and then mostly lived the just file lawsuits.
Well, one of the unexpected results of this is the end of the stop start, stop start engine. I don't have one of those, Oh yeah, because I absolutely despise the idea, no matter how many people tell me that they're wonderful and efficient and the.
Rest of it. Every time I drive in a car with one of those things. I just I just.
First of all, the idea of legislating out of existence the American urged to put it in neutral and revit just because you can, just because you can. I mean, when I drove a stick, I used to just absolutely love, you know, just winding that thing up and then dropping it.
It's unamazing.
I mean, that's as American as using too much lighter fluid on your barbecue, which we should all.
Do, absolutely so.
And then it's overfilling your zipon and putting that in the pocket and getting one of those rashes.
But yeah, gosh, it's great to be an American.
Speaking of great Americans, we got Henry Olsen back, Henry Senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
You can find his writings, oh, in.
Countless places, the Washington Examiner, Commonplace, the Liberal Patriot, Brussels Signal. We'll have to ask him about Brussels here in a bit. You can also catch him on the air right here at Ricochet, thet On Audio Network, because he.
Hosts Beyond the Polls and is of this year.
He's launched a new series, Conservative Crossroads, and we'll talk a little bit more about that later.
As well, Henry, welcome back.
Well thanks for having me back.
Well good, So here we are now, Kime.
When we had you back on last but probably the president's poll numbers were higher than they are now. I think he's thirteen thirteen points underwater or something like that. Of course, Gallup is pulling out of that business. I don't know why is this accurate? Is this a reflection of a fickle public? Is this because of ice? What's driving the numbers at the moment.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of things driving the numbers that First of all, the economy is not bad, but it's not rip roaring good, especially if you are the sort of person who had a difficult time in the Biden inministration. Real wages are still lower than they were when Joe Biden took office. Getting better, but you're still poorer on average than you were, and I think
people expected a quicker turnaround. I think the sheer amount of chaos and action that is coming from the Trump administration, much of which is geared overseas, is sending a message he doesn't care about us, us being the marginal voter who can go either way. And then I do think that it's a case of people want the president to succeed on his objectives with immigration, but they think that the in the street, in your face, and all too often violent tactics, even if provoked, are a step too far.
And I think the combination of those things is why the swing voter in America had swung toward him and now are currently swinging against second.
Boitt is interesting.
As much as we were told that we were done with foreign wars and entanglements and all the rest of it, We're going to be America first, But it's not as if we are engaged in protracted, long kinetic exercises in places with building of the sort that we had before. Is it possible for those people who are suspicious of foreign entanglements and or adventures still might be saying, hey, you know, if Cuba topples of its own court after we cut off the gas, maybe that's a good thing.
You know, there's not a whole lot of support for long ground wars. There's not a whole lot of opposition in the Trump coalition to short victorious wars or the exercise of American power to stop the bad guys. And I think Venezuela was a perfect example of that Operation
Midnight Hammer, and Iran was another example of that. And if they managed to topple or significantly reform the regime in Cuba without firing a shot, not only will jubilation be heard in South Florida, but I think most people who are open to voting for Trump would be very happy with that.
Okay, Henry, I want to ask you about the Gallop decision to stop daily tracking polls. And I mean, I wonder is it just because some of the other people are doing it now that they don't need to anymore, or has it gotten more difficult or expensive or related to this, and or I observe that every recent president has landed in the low forties after a while, going back now at least to George W. Bush right, And I'm wondering now if that's a new pattern in American presidential approval.
So the whole number is, it's not meaningless.
I understand the correlations between low approval ratings and how you fare in the midterms. I wonder if this is the new normal in American presidential politics, whereas you know the other party doesn't like you, and so you're already you know, you're already down to fifty percent, and then the independence and the swing voters who pay attention at various levels, they defect in a hurry, and so everybody lands after a couple of years down around forty two to forty five percent.
Now I think there's some, uh, there's some truth to that, but there's also I think the general fact that we haven't had a successful presidency in unambiguously successful presidency in many decades. So you've got Obama coming to power, saying that he's going to bring hope and change, and then he focuses his attention on things he didn't campaign on, leading to Obamacare, and you have President Trump's chaotic first
couple of years. And then you have Joe Biden, who said he was going to bring normalcy back and instead he heightens the divisions and we have the highest inflation in forty years and the breakout of war. So you look and you say, why would you expect approval ratings over fifty percent when you actually look at the interplay between what these candidates said and did, and I think Trump is falling into that same a pattern.
Yeah, well, all right, But the counter argument, though, Henry, is that Trump was almost re elected in twenty twenty even with the COVID disaster and impeachment, and Kamala Harris almost won in twenty twenty four despite inheriting the terrible record and ratings of Biden. So that's why I think that now maybe there's I have a look at the numbers the way you do, which you know you don't sleep.
Because you're up all night looking at these things all over the world.
We know this, But I'm wondering if that the numbers simply less not insignificant, but less meaningful than it used to be.
I think what's true is that we have a much narrower event band, you know, and that is caused by partisanship. That if eighty five to ninety percent of people who are going to be polled are on one team or the other, they're not going to give the leader of the other team a whole lot of credit. But that
doesn't explain the variation within the band. And that's what I was trying to say, is that Donald Trump has negative job approval, but his strongly dislike or strongly disapproved numbers doesn't really rise above forty or forty one percent. That's the other team, and the same is generally true during the Biden administration. Yeah, he had terrible job approval numbers. But the difference between forty eight or fifty and forty one or forty two is the people who somewhat disapprove
and sometimes they can somewhat approve. So yeah, I'd say we no longer. We'll get a president who will get sixty percent or seventy percent job approval ratings, as was not uncommon at all during the fifties through the nineties. But the difference between forty two and forty eight is not caused by partisanship.
Yeah, Okay, let's shift gears to your new initiative, Conservative Crossroads, and I want to ask you a question. Is there I want to have a debate with yourself. In other words, I want to see if we can't create a schizophrenic episode of Conservative Crossroads by asking you, Henry Olsen, there are one or two issues over whatever time, Fray you want, that you have substantially changed your mind about, and what are they and why?
I've substantially changed my mind about a lot of things over the last since you and I met each other many years ago. I've changed my mind about the possibility and the desirability of a very small federal government. I think that the rise of the New Deal, while diverted in directions that are inconsistent with American Republicanism, was actually,
on the whole a largely beneficial and unstoppable trend. Because of the question for human dignity, I've changed a lot about that, So that means I've changed my mind about questions like the appropriate level of taxation and spending. You know, I would have agreed with always trying to starve the beast in the eighties, and now I don't agree with starving the beast. I think raising taxes on people is
not necessarily a job killer. It depends how you raise them and where you raise them level that they're at. And then you know, with respect to foreign policy, I would say I became I was very chastened by the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and the failures of our allies to actually act as allies as opposed to supplicants. You know, I was at a Canadian embassy event thirteen
years ago, and I learned. I listened to them, and I realized that American leadership and American deership, and I politely said, yeah, you can talk about different levels, but
you're going to have to do more. And I've never been invited back to the embassy, But so I have moved on a host of issues in a way because Ronald Reagan said in his nineteen seventy seven Seapack speech that an ideologue fits the facts to meet his theories, like sitting them in a pro krusty in bed, where if they stand over for people who aren't interested in either the Perry Percy Jackson series or Greek mythology, that means if you're too long for the bed, pro Krusty's
cuts your legs off. Whereas a conservative somebody who ejects changes his not principles, but his direction based on facts on the ground. And I changed my direction based on what I consider to be facts on the ground.
If I may interject, let's go to taxation.
Taxation, for example, I think is something that the state ought to do the least amount of because it's a distorting mechanism. It requires obfiscation of private property by the force of the state. And my example, when I sat down and put and wrote out a check for my estimated taxes for the state of Minnesota, I felt like an absolute fool. There are times when I just think, oh, yeah, well,
there's a lot of wasteful spending on there. But you know, on the other hand, Social Compact, Wendy Anderson, and now I feel like an idiot because billions of dollars of that that that we all sent to them was completely misused, was completely wasted, was spent on fraud, and the state did nothing about it and.
Doesn't seem to really particularly care other than saying, look over there.
So I'm I'm less inclined to say yay taxation, and I'm curious to know what you what your rationale is for saying yes, by gum, let's hoover up more into the arms of the state, and the next time.
They'll spend it absolutely correctly.
Next most of the money is spent correctly. I mean, yes, there's fraud and they should be doing more about it. And Minnesota is an egregious example, but you know, let's take a look at where we are. I favor state level tax cut. States tend to be in a position where they aren't running deficits, they have access revenues they've
already met. I mean, Steve laughs because he's in California with yeah, but you take a look at Republican states that have been cutting income taxes dramatically in the last five years. It's all from surplus revenue. And you read the budget announcements and they're always saying, well, we're doing this, and we're spending money on K through twelve, and we're doing this, and we're doing this. That's because most states have met the basic level of what their voters want.
They have a strong safety net, they have a strong transportation system, they have a strong public safety system, they have a strong support for public education, in the environment. In those worlds, yeah, let's cut taxes, but that's not where the federal government is. We're running five to six percent of GDP deficit, nearly two trillion dollars. We've got nearly one hundred percent of GDP in debt. We're never
going to pay that debt down. We're going to We're paying spending a trillion dollars a year, over three percent of GDP simply to pay the interest on that debt. And it strikes me that, yes, there's plenty of places I would like to cut I've written about it, but we're not going to solve that deficit problem, and we're certainly not going to pay for the national defense that
we need to counter China based on growth. And I think it's we should raise taxes to recognize the fact that forty years have starved the beast, have simply bloated the debt, and we're not going to start the beast because Americans don't want to starve the beast. Republicans don't
want to starve the beast. So the question is, how can we get to put the beast on a diet and how can we increase our muscle through taxation so that we do what people want, what we need, and we don't bankrupt our children and grandchildren.
In the state, you have to gate Donald Frum going in front of the you State of the Union and saying we've got to raise taxes on the middle class because that's where money is.
Look, there's a lot of ways you can raise revenue. You know, for example, people who are wealthy seniors pay only about on an average, twenty eight percent of their cost in Medicare Part B and Part D premiums. If you're making one hundred and fifty grand and you're seventy years old, why not pay one hundred percent. You know, why is it that people who are in the top two tax brackets get in deduction for home mortgage interest at all? They don't need it to buy their home.
This is just a layap, you know, a giveaway. There's lots of ways to raise revenue without raising rates. And let's see where we come after that, before we talk about raising taxes on the middle class.
Oh oh, Henry, I was afraid you were going to go full Rhino on us and you were not disappointing.
Well, gee, you know, let me put it to you this way. You can't win a national election. Yeah, okay, right, who provide Donald Trump his majority are people who voted for Obama against Romney, Obama against McCain, carry against Bush. And the reason he had a popular vote majority is the people who voted for Biden and Clinton who decided to change their votes. You can't win a majority with.
What well, well, let me give let me give it to you that.
Look, I'm in considerable agreement with you for different grounds. First, I think I'm with James that I still have Milton Freeman's attitude that I'm for cutting any tax at any time for any reason except now here to be wonky for a minute, and because you just did some yourself, we couldn't stop you.
I think it was Bill Bill A. Scannon, the late Bill NA Scan.
A good conservative, Republican economists, libertarian, Cato Institute guy, I think twenty years ago. He did the empirical work, and I found convincing that in fact the Reagan tax cuts and other attempts actually increased spending. Wasn't the debt he was looking at. He said, it didn't have the effect of starving the beast. Instead, the beast figured out new ways to gorge. Which is why I've thought, and boy,
get a lot of pushback on this. I thought, Okay, if starve the beast doesn't work, maybe we ought to adopt the strategy which is yours, I think. But I'll stay it this way, serve the check. And my proposition is if the American people, all the American people, the middle class teams bring up, if they had to pay for all the government we got, they might want a lot less of it, and so there would be a failure nerve of Republicans or anybody else.
You know, I just don't see what I see from the States where you don't have the deficit. Problem is that Republicans don't want to cut You take a look at the example I like to use of Alaska. Alaska state has no packs, state packs, no sedale tacks, but they do have the permanent fund of oil dividends, and
each person gets thousands of dollars a year from the state. Well, because of the shortfall and oil, they've been cutting that in app and when Governor Donalleevy took over in twenty nineteen, he presented a you know, let's shrink the state budget. He said, we can double what you get, which is thousands of dollars a year regardless of income for each person. So a family for would get like seven grand a year back. All we have to do is cut state
government twenty five percent. He was nearly impeached crually, I mean not impeached. He's nearly recalled. They had definitely his approval ratings, saying he had to retreat. They've been spending down their savings every year, and each year he says, let's have a discussion about what level of state we have. Republicans don't want to cut government twenty five percent to
get thousands of dollars back in their pocket. No possible tax cut can give individuals more money than doubling the PFD and Alaska would have given and they almost ran the Republican out of Dodge.
Yeah, but you know what he has to be able to do in Alaska as he hasn't been able to get the federal government to lift their thumb off of oil production.
So you made all the numbers.
Alaska production peaked in the eighties at two million barrels a day. Now it's under five hundred thousand bears. It's fallen by more than seventy five percent, and of course oil prices adjusted for inflation, have actually gone down. But of course, you know democrats and the environmental group stuff. Okay, you know all that part of it. But the other thing is Henry. And I'm surprised that you haven't invoked our mutual hero Ronald Reagan, who used to say, you know,
it's the problem with spinning is growing like this. He put his arm up at a forty five degree angle, something like this is what we need to do is make it grow like this, and he'd lower his arm to a thirty degree angle.
That works.
And so, for example, Florida has not cut its budget. However, Florida's budget today, the state of Florida, its budget is lower than the budget for the state for New York City under Mundami, Right, with a bigger population, much better results. Right, So I don't think it's really I think you put it. I always hate that phrase, a false choice, that's overused
and it's a cop out. But I do think in this case it's not a matter of having big slashing of budgets, but it does need some kind of discipline we haven't seen for a long time.
Yeah, I don't have Again, I don't have a problem with spending discipline. But that's doesn't allow you to cut every tax all the time. You know, is that you don't have a whole lot of tax cutting going on in Florida. You know, of course they don't have an income tax, and you've got a little cutting of taxes on the edge.
Let me ask you, Oh, let me sorry, let me bring us up.
Sorry to interrupt, Henry, but it does play into the longer history of this. Desantas has been making noises about abolishing the property tax.
Ye, the idea about that idea, Yeah.
It's a terrible idea.
That's what I think too.
But yeah, the reason why it's a terrible idea is that the reason why it worked in California when you know, the people when we were younger and Prop thirteen cut property taxes by about two thirds, was because California had a massive budget surplus and basically kept the level of spending up by transferring the burden from the property tax to the income tax. Florida doesn't have this multi billion dollar annual state annual state surplus that it can just
throw around. It's got reserves. But if you want to abolish the property tax, people want well funded public schools. They want well funded public safety, police, probation, fire that comes from the property tax. If you abolish the property tax, something has to pay for it, because I can tell you Republican voters don't want to significantly cut in those areas. You can change the rate of growth somewhat, you know, get rid of some wasteful employees in public education, fine,
I'm fine with that. Renegotiate contracts so it's not goal plated, and you can fire bad teachers. Great. So you move from having to replace one hundred percent of current spending with eighty five percent of current spending that's good, but you still have to actually spend what people want and tax for it. And that's why government Desanta's idea is not a good one, because he's talking about eliminating the tax without really prudently preparing for backfilling.
The spanis well, yeah, I mean, I get that. The problem is that the cointacular nature of the state means that everything is interconnected and started to do this without doing that. You can say, we can get rid of the property tax and then we'll find a better way
to fund the schools. Well, we'll do that by eliminating public schools and giving everybody a voucher, and in the long run that may indeed work, and all of a sudden you've cut the costs because you're not having to deal with unions, etcetera, etc. But that second part isn't going to happen, and the first part requires the second part to happen, and the second part requires a dismantling. Everything becomes just like trying to do a Rubik's cube in the.
Dark during a hurricane.
The reason a lot of people want to get rid of the property tax, there's something that galls them to think that they can actually own something. But if they don't continue to cough up with the state requires them, the state will come and take it away. And so you don't really own your home. Nobody really does. And
I can understand why that animates some people. I see your point there about the you know, the funding mechanisms, but gosh, let's start with schools and fix that and then maybe go to the funding mechanisms.
TV. You had something else because I wanted to ask.
Get into the question and hear about the Conservative Crossroads the new podcast.
Yeah, well, I was going to propose a whole new topic for Henry to take up on Conservative Crossroads, and it's immigration.
Ah.
And there's two parts of this, and maybe the need more than one. I mean one is I'll confess. I'll make a guilty confessional listeners who will flame me for this. I was always something of an immigration dove. I was not open borders, and I thought there were the numbers were too high, but generally thinking immigration, even a lot of illegal immigration, had economic benefits. I'm now an immigration hawk.
That's something I've changed my mind about, rather dratic, dramatically, but you know, a lot of our libertarian friends, like the Cato people, are still effectively open borders and have always numbers about how even in high numbers it's great for us.
So I think that's dubious.
And then the second related part is birthright citizenship coming before the court soon. And you know, it used to be the person's the only people who denied or made the case against birthright citizenship in a serious way, where our friends John Eastman and Ed Erler, and that was about it. But now there are more and more people Elin Morman up there in Minnesota, down from James and a lot of other people Richard Epstein, I think, to some extent are saying, yeah, wait a minute, maybe this't
so clear. So anyway, there's two topics for you. But where do you fall out on all that? And if you want to talk about public opinion, that's fine.
Yeah, Well, you know, first of all, Conservative Crossroads is going to have a debate in early March between Mark Raccrian and Neil Bradley from the US Chamber on the question of H one B visas. There you go, yeah, yes, we are not shying away from this, you know, is Mark coming down down? My view on illegal immigration is Sonny bonos, it's illegal. I do not have much sympathy for people who have managed to evade the law here.
And I also think that Trump, with his famous use of leverage, ought to deport everybody everywhere he can find, because that puts the leverage on the left and businesses to finally deal with the question that we haven't dealt with the last thirty years, which is how much and
what types? When you get to that point, I would be perfectly happy to have a reasonable amount of migration that's tied to employment and tied not to visas that are essentially indentured servitude, which is what hb ones are, but instead are general we think you have the skills as long as you can show that you have some degree to support yourself and your immediate but not extended family come on in and you're not tied to a particular employer while you're here. I don't know what that
level is more on either out. It's less than a million and a half a year, which is what we've been taking in legally, mainly because of chain migration. And I think we should have everifying mandatory. I think there should be audits, and I've written these things. These are not new. I think the irs should pivot its audit from high wealth individuals to business returns, and disallow wage and benefit deductions for people who are not found on everify.
You want to stop illegal migration, stop feeding the beast, stop giving the ability to be here. They're most of them are not on benefits or scamming the system. They're working, and they're taking jobs that could go albeit at higher wages and benefits, to meet the expectations of native born Americans. So get at the people who are feeding the beast. And I think that we should have a much higher tax on remittances from people who can knock demonstrate that
they're in the country legally. You want to let's dry up the swamp and get at the demand for illegal.
Okay, well we'll take one of your rhino horns back from you then, Henry, that was good.
Well, no, I just want to be clear.
Beast wise federal governments stopped starving, and beast wise immigration starve.
Just so, just in case anybody.
It should be US plus not competition off.
By the way, Henry, your invocation of Sonny Bono allows me to tell a rob long type story.
It's thirty five years ago.
Now we're more When he was mayor of Palm Springs. I don't remember how it happened, when we had lunch together and he was then planning to run against Gray Davis, remember him for a lieutenant governor, And I said, oh, Sonny, I've got your your bumper sticker. It'll be better Sonny than Gray. And maybe our producer can put in a rim shot at this point, but still he was great.
That guy was so underestimated, and boy do I miss him?
Yeah? No, I mean that skiing accident was a terrible thing, and he was much much more effective and much smarter than the people are willing to give him credit.
So Conservative Crossroads is about, you know, the discussion is going on within the right. Yes, how much of the pro immigration Chamber of Commerce stiment that you're describing before, how much of that is held by the right these days, because it seems to me to be about a ninety ten issue.
Well, it depends what type of immigration you're talking about. If you're talking about illegal immigration, it is, which is why I'm not having a discussion on illegal immigration. You know, I may have something later this year about mandatory use of the verify, where I would guess the Chamber will say no, we don't want that business burden. But on legal immigration is dramatic differences of opinion. We may very
well come up with that. You know, I think we're the Republican base, but I think more broadly, in terms of the potential Republican coalition, there's significant differences not on the question of illegal immigration and deportation, but on questions of h one B's, on questions of the degree to which we should have legal immigration, the degree to which we should have forbearans, for people who have been here for a long time, or have American citizen children, and
so forth. There's a large difference of opinion questions, and they're unquantifiable. They're difficult things to nail down because people
will say, yes, illegal has begune. But on the other hand, when presented with the example of somebody who's been here for thirty years, has never done anything wrong, has got a business, the wife, child, the rest of it, has lived in an exemplar real life, a lot of people say, well, you know, I can see making you know you can't vote, but you have to do this, and they come up with this elaborate process which other people think the minute we get that it's going to be amnesty and forget
about it, and they're all going to be citizens.
And that's that.
That's one part of it.
The second part of it that we don't talk about is the cultural impact of this and how it changes places. Specifically when small towns have to deal with influx is because they're the guys who work in the meatpacking plant or or you.
Know, the factory or whatever.
And that's a conversation that the right doesn't seem to want to have at all, and it's sort of it's left to return with the unsavory types on the internet, to go straight straight to the mass deportation theory and saying just everybody got to go.
One of the things Conservative Crossroads is trying it is trying to do is say, we have to talk about these things. We can't pretend that we that we agree on everything, because we don't. We have large agreement at the level of principle. We have large disagreement on specific things. And it's precisely by leaning into it that you minimize the opportunity of people to present themselves kind of as
you know, the custodian of the secret key. This is what they don't want to tell you, and then you open up all these weird conspiracy theories and bogus stuff. But if no one's talking about the problem and the only person who's talking about the problem is a maligned nut job, some people are going to be seduced by
the maligned nutjob. So let's let's open the doors. Let's have these discussions and say it's okay for conservatives to talk about it, and hopefully that means a healthier conservatism in the.
End, especially when somebody is saying there's no such thing as the great replacement theory, and then you have somebody in Spain saying, what we knew need to do is to replace all these people greatly.
Yeah, and every other college course is and whiteness, right, I mean they put that on the titles, and gee, we're not supposed to think.
They mean it.
Before we you know, before we go, and we're going to let you and we're not going.
We're not done. We're not done with you yet.
Henry Concert Conservative Conservative Crossroads is the coming podcast. It's going to be great. But also you've written elsewhere. You're in commonplace.
You wrote a piece.
About the st FU or the st the state of the Union speech, and you're giving some advice to the president. Now, we're all tired of the State of the Union speeches, especially when it becomes a long, legislative loundry list of things that are good that we can spend money on. It would be nice if somebody got up read a postcard, since State of Union is great, good Calvin Coolidge, goodbye.
But no, so you would said that he should.
Talk about tariffs and let's start there, because tariffs have not been in the forefront of the American imagination or discussion recentlyncas just ninety other things he's done, but.
That he should bring them up and he should tell people that they're good.
Why.
Look, what the president does not have is a coherent, consistent argument for his economic policies. He's one of his strengths is that he's transactional. But in this case, the political thing is that one of his weakness is that
he's haphazard. And what I'm saying is, Look, what you need to do is tell the American people what you say in pieces elsewhere, but put it all in one place, which is Look, the reason we have had a weak economy that doesn't work for every American, for the last three five years is this, we've favored foreigners and consumption
more than Americans and production. We bring people in, often illegally to compete with you for jobs, and that drives down your wage benefits because guess what, somebody who comes from Guatemala, where the minimum wage is three dollars an hour, is going to accept a lower salary than you, who have to have expectations of an American style of living. People in Indonesia, where it's even poor, of course they're going to work for lower and that means the factories
are going to go overseas, and that hurts you. The way we solve this problem is by cracking down on immigration illegally, reducing legal immigration so that we have a tighter labor market so that you can get the higher paying jobs that Americans want. And we reduce foreign trade so that we don't have foreigners undercutting us. And tariffs are a way to do that. Is that if you put in a tariff, what happens is somebody wants to outsource jobs. Great, if you want to satisfy the economics community,
you can call them pagoovi and taxes on externalities. You know, is that the externality is social decline and growing social angst because of declining relative living standards in America. And what that does is it will create an incentive for people to produce in America. That means we'll move from an economy based on cheap labor and cheap consumption and cheap goods that sends money out to other countries, enriches them, and allows places like China to potentially destroy freedom. And
give me a chance. It'll take me more than a year to turn it around, but we've seen the turnaround before. Franklin Roosevelt turned the economy around in the Great Depression, Ronald Reagan turned it around in his administration. I'm going to do it now. Give me a chance.
By the way, Henry, I can't believe you mentioned Pegoo because you know what happened is Trump heard that and he's giving us mister magoo instead.
Come terrass.
Well, it's all over the place.
Yeah, well, I'm going to doubt that he's actually going to put Pagoovian taxes. However, who I know, you know he understands pagovi and taxes and he can make that argue.
Yeah, as I'm afraid of Okay.
So what else should he tell the people. I imagine that there will be discussion of immigration.
I imagine there might be discussion of foreign policy, and I'm sure that this is one of the things that Conservative Crossroads is also going to deal with, because there does seem to be well.
We've had a discussion on Israel already, we have one coming up on Ukraine. Depending what happens in Iran, we might have one in Iran, but I'm planning to do one on NATO, the nature of American alliances, and so forth. So we will cover many of those topics because they are actively being debated within conservatism, but broadly, Trump has
and Populism's worldwide thesis is essentially this. We were told after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that if we embraced globalization in the economy, we would have a rising real living standard for everybody, that that would lower tensions in the world by democratizing the world and making them richer, and that if we push social progressive measures, we will reduce tensions internally by bringing the excluded into the mainstream. What has happened is all three of these policies have failed.
Globalization has enriched our adversaries and foreign countries at the expense of the working class throughout the West, and it is deliberately hurt our ability to make things, which I don't know. Cyber warfare doesn't seem to replace bombs, even if they're delivered by drones. You have to make things to protect yourself. They have not democratized the world. Instead, China has used our wealth, our ideas to build the
largest military that an adversary of ours. Their Bluewater Navy is already more powerful than the Soviet Unions ever was, and they're building massive numbers of ships each year. And that's because we gave them the money and the material and the ideas. Do you think that was a good idea? Progressive social values, some of them have worked to lower tensions.
On the other hand, the speed and the degree and the anti West, anti westernism that is on display with so many of these advocates has actually dramatically increased social tensions. So what you've got is a catastrophic failure. And if I were Donald Trump, I would make that case and tie all of my things together under the rubric of I'm here to replace the failed system that has hurt us economically hurt us socially and threatened our freedom. Only
you wanted to change. I'm giving you change, give me the chance. That's how I would do it.
You know, sometimes you just miss the old days of the end of history. But now the end of history seems to be like a Warner Brothers logo. And then Donald Trump bursts in like porky big at the end of it and waves his hand across the screen. But he's not saying that's all, and he's saying something else is about to begin, and we'll see what it is, and we'll hear what it is. On Conservative Crossroads Henryelsen. Henry,
thanks great as ever, lots of fun. Didn't even get to talk about Europe, but that'll be the next time everybody listen to Conservative Crossroads here in the Ricochet Audio Network. Henry, have a great day, great weekend, et cetera, and we'll talk to you later.
Same to you too. Thank you for having me back.
Always a pleasure.
Well before we go, dang, I hate to do it to just hate to do it, but friend of the show and a friend of the site, John Ecdall died And if you're hanging around on conservative Twitter, you've probably found that, and if you were following Charles C. W. Cook, who usually is here, you will have noted that he mentioned that that. As a matter of fact, he tweeted at the time that John was his best friend and he died of cancer at forty seven, so he has
a long ex post about this is very Charles. Of course, the fellow would have spoke English accents talking about Florida and football, which I love, and he said during the pandemic, and I'm not.
Going to do this in Charlie's voice.
During the pandemic, John and I started a business together that, relative to our expectations, did pretty well for a while. As is typical, most of our ideas didn't pan out, but that didn't matter. We had fun coming up with them at the bar, adding just one more drink to the tab to make sure that we hadn't missed an angle or forgotten to write something down crucial in the back of an increasingly ragged napkin.
I'm forty one years old, and with the.
Exception of my wife, I've never met anyone who's easier to talk to than John. If we went for lunch, we'd go for hours chatting about sports and roller coasters and with kids in the new iPhone. And the unforgivable changes is he made epcoc and EPCOP ninety nine. I shall miss that immensely. The last time I saw him, I said the same thing I said every time I chatted with him over the last eleven years. Talk to you in a bit, So that's bad, and said, yeah,
and his memory be a blessing, as they say. Of course you might want to talk about on his most triggering tweets, which was a masterclass in trolling.
Yeah, you know, I followed.
Him, I never knew him, interacted with him, but most famous one, I think it's like a decade ago. And he pointed out that what was the Ford F one fifty and you know, the GM equivalent the best selling cars in America?
Buy a lot.
And then the question was how many people in the Washington Post or New York Times newsrooms know anyone who drives a pickup truck? You would have thought somebody had thrown a dead mouse in the middle of the newsrooms.
It was outrageous to ask the kind of question.
I mean that the parallel question that's even older, is how many of you know an evangelical Christian in the Washington Post newsroom, right, same outrage. Why just the impertinence of asking such a question. Uh, But I do think, James, we ought to add that Charlie has set up a gofund me account for John's family. Uh, and it's on his tweet. I don't have it handy. Maybe we can put it in the show notes or something. But that
would be if people are so inclined and able. I think that would be a nice gesture for Charlie and John's family. You know, it's uh, I I don't know about you, James, It's it's hard for I think it's hard for guys in middle aged to lose their best friend because it happened to me ten years ago. And you know, it's a shock, it's a surprise. You can't believe that a healthy person's uh suddenly goes downhill in a hurry. And anyway, it's just, you know, it's a
I don't know. We're not very good at that. I think I'll speak from no anyway, Yeah, no, no, no, we're not. One of the things I learned though, when I was just sort of googling around and you know, assembling some stuff about John that I didn't know. I never met him, I knew him, but then he he was involved in in the co founder and the web designer for a site called uni Watch, which is basically about uniforms, which is about sports uniforms and charting the minute derivations and changes and the.
Rest of it, which is what the Internet is for. Frankly, that's just basically what it's for. Yes, it's a massive disinformation machine. Yes, it's a massive dark thing with tor browsers, probably run by the CIA to coax people to get defended from Thailand.
I don't know.
Yeah, it's all sorts of awful things, but at its heart, it is a mechanism by which people can find each other and share things and dive into the things that they love with at the level of detail in the community that you just didn't really get to fined before the Internet. And John was good at it on the technical side and the human side as well.
So I hope Charlie or somebody can keep up uni Watch, only because we still have not yet been able to prevent the Seattle Seahawks from those dreadful lime green uniforms that you wear from time to time.
Oh don't time don't don't you know, you know, and also the strange topography sometimes that you see Sam Darnold.
As a matter of fact, when he was a Minnesota Viking, for some.
Reason, we would look at the back of his jersey and it would look that the D was actually sort of more like an O. And so he became to us amongst my friends, Sam Darnallo, which sounded like some great stage musician, magician, and we would call it the Great to Darnallo.
Whenever he came. And you do that in public and people look at you like you're an absolute idiot.
What do you mean, Darnallo?
It's darnay never mind, never mind. It is a uniform thing. Hey, folks, you should go to Apple. You should over the podcast thing and give us five stars.
You should probably be happy with the with the volume A level on this one, because I presume that that's been fixed and the ads have been coming in and plasted.
Your ears off, and that everything is fine.
You should go to Ricochet itself and sign up if you haven't, because when you say sign up, great, give him an email, get lots of junk. Well that's just what I want. No, we want you to go there and give it money. It's just a little. It's just a little, but that's what enables you to access the member feet, and that's what enables you to call.
Him to write comments. I mean, if you've been to these other sites with a discus.
And I got discus on my sight, I got some really good commentators. But every once in a while I got to step in and just give somebody the eighty six. There's some sites that I love. I absolutely love the sites. Never do I go to the comments because it's such, it's just vile.
So, yeah, you.
Got skin of the game. As founder brother Rob Long once said, is he a father?
Is he a past?
Yet?
We don't know what reason is Ecclesiastical Journey's skin of the game, which means that everybody has to subscribe to a code of conduct, and that keeps things interesting, it really does. I mean, it's sort of like the old days when you wore a tie and a suit down on the airplane. Everybody sort of likes those old days. Well that's what Ricochet is like in the member side. It's like wearing a sit. I shouldn't say that. That sounds uncomfortable, you know.
What I mean.
It's where adults behave, and now.
We are done.
We'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet four point zero, Bye bye.
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