August 7, 2025 • 48 mins
The New Republic’s Meredith Shiner examines the death of the Voting Rights Act and how it has shaped our politics today. The Economist’s Mike Bird details how Trump’s tariffs are shaking out.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 shanator Marsha Blackburn has announced she
will run for the governor of Tennessee.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
God help us all, we have such a great show
for you today.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
The New Republic's own Meredith Shiner talks to us about
the Voting Rights Acts Death and how it shaped our
politics today. Then we'll talk to the economists own Mike
Byrd about Trump's tariffs and how they are shaking our
very financial core.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
So, Molly, we have many many things changing under mister
Trump and Project twenty twenty five and combating domestic violent
extremism is no longer a FEMA priority apparently.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
So let's talk this through. Basically, Wired found these documents.
By the way, if we did not have Wired, we
would be missing a lot of stuff because Wired is
on it.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
So Wired has really good reporting.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
Could I go on my soapbox?
Speaker 3 (01:06):
There's been a few times that I've said to you, Hey,
could you pull this from Wired? I don't have a subscription.
I subscribed because I feel bad because they're doing such
great work.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yes, Wired, Katie Drummonds, come on the podcast. Actually, I'll
just email you after this. She's really good. The direct
the editorial director. So FEMA is planning to direct states
and tribes to immediately stop certain activities intended to combat
domestic violent extremism.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
So violent extremism is pretty bad.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
You would think that saying violent extremism is bad would
not be a partisan act, but this White House thinks
it is. And I think that really tells you all
you need to know about what the Trump White House
is doing. So, according to an unpublished bullet and FEMA
funds may not necessarily be yanked back from states which
(01:59):
are not fight I mean, it's just yet another trumpy
thing they're doing to it too covertly wink wink, nod
nod to their friends, and none of us should be
shocking but not surprising.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
So a new study shows that you know, a lot
of people puzzle over how is the American economy's still standing?
Like it just seems like it should have all these
bad indicators. Every Jim Kramer and CNBC Pundo is always
like we're going in the ditch, and yet we don't
drive into the ditch. Apparently it's our youngest consumers who
are driving half of household spending.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yes, it turns out that children, they cost the money.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Children are both expensive and also Generation Alpha likes to spend,
likes to spend. They there you know they like to spend.
Here are the things they spend money on. Food like
pop par beauty, and items during drops. I don't know,
and this makes me depressed. Items during do you know
(03:00):
what to drop us? I do know what it drops?
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Okay, just well, you.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Have a birthday coming up.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
I want to make sure that you know.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
You're still dropping something for my birthday.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
I actually made your birthday present last night, and my
wife left very hard at it.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
I hope it's a rudy julian A cameo.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
Are you seeing a flood of anger? Ak? A mic
foot of anger?
Speaker 2 (03:23):
A mic flood of anger.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
So Nebraska Congressman Mike Flood had a town hall. Everyone
in the world screamed at him for two and a
half hours.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
It's crazy to listen to it as audio listeners haven't
done it because you would think that you're at a lettered,
skinnered concert and they haven't played Freebird.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
That was a musical reference.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
So I want to talk about this for a second,
because a lot of us are feeling real bad and
we're feeling real stressed. We're watching Donald Trump just disassemble
the federal government in real time. We've got billionaires doing
all sorts of sketchy stuff to have more money, because
what they really need is more money. It's just a
really terrible time to be a person who cares about
(04:04):
American democracy and democratic norms. But let me tell you something.
As angry as you are, people around the country are
angry too. And just because it doesn't necessarily get the
same mainstream media coverage, it's happening. And you see these
town halls and you see these lines. And I talk
to James tell Erico about this, and he said he
(04:26):
had huge lines for his town halls. People are angry
and they don't like having you know, Trump is cutting Medicaid,
is cutting food stamps. They are taking things away from
people and they are mad. So I understand the trauma
of the twenty twenty four election, especially after the twenty
sixteen election. We are a country that now has elected
(04:48):
Trump twice, which is hard to grapple with as a
person who thinks of themselves as like lives in a
smart country. The fact that we've elected Trump twice. It
doesn't make me feel goo great about where we are.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Fine.
Speaker 4 (05:02):
Run's a little contrary to the notion.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Yes, but I want to point out people are really mad.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
They feel really, really unhappy with the direction the country
is going. And Trump's polling has fallen through the floor.
He is as unpopular as anyone ever. Basically his young
people who voted for him have huge regrets. We have
Trump podcasters saying that they didn't realize he was lying
about paying for IVF, that they're mad about the Ebstein files. Mean,
(05:32):
there's never been anyone with less of a mandate than
Donald Trump. And to show how nervous he is, he's
trying to cheat on the midterms already.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
It's like months and months and months away.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
So if you're feeling bad, just know that the rest
of the country is maybe not all of the country,
but a lot of the country is feeling the way
you are.
Speaker 4 (05:53):
Agreed, And I think you put that very well well.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
Speaking of things to be mad about and how bad
billionaires are at running things, Elon Musk thought he could
run the government like a startup where you say, justify
your job to me, or you're fired. Well, it turns
out that Trump administration has now rolled that back, that
email that he sent, because it was insanely dumb and
causing a lot of problems.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
You know, Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Nope, Look when he did it, it didn't work, and
now it's taken them somehow three months to roll it back.
I think what's important is when you don't understand what
the federal government does, it's very easy to want to
chop it up and put it in a wood chipper.
But the federal government does a lot of stuff that
keeps us safe. They do a lot of things that
(06:39):
you know, protect us that we don't necessarily know about,
that we don't necessarily completely understand until they mess up.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
But I think the most.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Important thing about Elon musk Department of Government efficiency is
that it's likely that it cost us the taxpayers twenty
one point seven billion dollars analyzing the ways generated by
Doge Dick Blumenthal's office twenty one billion dollars.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
So, in other things that contradict what Trump says, there's
an FBI report that this proves Trump's claim of a
Biden era out of control crime wave.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yes, I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you we're lying about
the crime wave. The FBI, which still I guess, does
some stuff that isn't completely by Trump, that aren't completely
dictated by Trump. Annual figures released Tuesday reflect a four
point five year on year.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Decrease in violent crimes.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
So when Donald Trump fought for and one, his victory
was built on this idea that there was an out
of control crime wave.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
In fact, it turns out that crime is down.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
It's fallen fourteen point five percent from the twenty twenty
three figure. At least, all violent crimes nationwide, murder and
manslaughter have fallen fourteen percent.
Speaker 4 (07:58):
Yeah, a trend that's been going on for quite a
while and.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Has nothing to do with Ready.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
Yeah, just as it had nothing to do with his
buddy Verdi Giuliani when he took credit for it.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Right, The analytics of fighting crime have gotten better.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
It does not have anything to do with Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Meredith Shiner is a contributing editor at The New Republic.
Welcome Too Fast Politics. Meredith, thank you again for having me.
Oh you're so prepared and nice and good.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
What an endorsement.
Speaker 5 (08:34):
By the way, I have to tell you that I've
never been more famous than when I did this podcast
and in my Instagram comments, it was a lot of
my friends, but also a lot of my friends' moms
who are maybe a little bit too addicted to MSNBC
and now think I'm the coolest person ever.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Oh moms, We love moms. You're in Chicago, you know.
I talked to Anna Capara, who is the chief of
staff of Governor Pritzgar, his speech writer, his like sort
of right hand who is I think of like as
one of the sort of genius communicators in the Democratic Party.
(09:13):
And she was a boson who came up with like
team fight versus team cave. And I talked to her
on Monday, which is two days ago maybe, and she
was saying to me that the minute they knew this
was going to happen, that the governor was like, we
will protect them, We will be here. You know, they
should come here. You are in Chicago, talk to us
(09:35):
about what it's like to have a good governor.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
It's nice. I think about this a lot.
Speaker 6 (09:39):
As the federal government is disintegrating, where you live continues
to matter more like whether you were in a blue
state or a red state. Although I do think when
we have authoritarianism no one is fully protected. But when
you see elected officials actually recognizing the reality that we're
living in, I think that's a really important co.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Opponent towards us moving forward in any way.
Speaker 6 (10:03):
When you have elected officials in Washington, particularly Democrats, who
aren't fully reckoning with the threats we're facing in this moment,
it makes it really hard for everyone else to understand it.
And so I think one of the most important things
about JB. Pritzger and Illinois welcoming these House Democrats is
to say we are recognizing this reality and this is
not normal. Throughout the press conference, I think that that
(10:26):
was a real theme, the idea that you would just
read district halfway through a term.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Jerrymandering is already a.
Speaker 6 (10:32):
Problem on its face, but the idea that we are
super charging that now only five years or I guess
four and a half years after January sixth. I mean,
all of these things exist in context, and at the
federal level we're seeing disintegration. But we've always really seen
states as these laboratories, particularly for conservative politics. I think
(10:52):
about that Gail Collins book, As Goes Texas and how
all of these ideas on policy really incubated on Texas,
experimented there and then got implemented and enforced on the
entire country, whether it was education or even some of
their lacks gun safety rules or sba'd yes, which was
the end of Roebi Wade. And so when you see
(11:15):
democratic states really recognizing that they also have a rule
to play in being leaders, that's really important. And you know,
I'm old enough that in twenty eleven, I was a
reporter for Politico and I was in Madison, Wisconsin when
those Wisconsin Senate Democrats left the state because Scott Walker
was trying to enforce a union busting rule, like at
(11:38):
the birthplace of American unions.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
He was trying to destroy labor.
Speaker 6 (11:42):
And so those Senate Democrats crossed the border and came
to Illinois as a safe haven. And I think, going
back to your conversation about fight versus not fight, I
think that that's really important. But there's a second part here,
and it's connecting the fight to the issues and communicating
why that fight matters.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
If we're just looking at a binary between fight and
non fight, we're in internet comment wars. But when we're
looking at.
Speaker 6 (12:07):
A paradigm where you are fighting and you were talking
about what is happening and what matters.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
I think that's the most important thing, right.
Speaker 6 (12:15):
Like I mentioned before the show, today's the sixtieth anniversary
of the Voting Rights Act. That means for people like me,
I'm a millennial, the Voting Rights Act is younger than
my parents, Okay, And so we think about so many
of our freedoms and justice as durable and sustainable and
self sustaining. But really they are young, and they are fragile,
and these freedoms and rights are so easy to erase.
(12:38):
And that's what we're seeing now, and that's what we
really need our leaders to articulate.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
And that's what we're hopefully seeing in Chicago today.
Speaker 6 (12:45):
Although I will say my last note on this is
that I checked the front page of both the Chicago
Tribune and the Dallas Morning News before we hopped on
to see how they were playing in both places, and
the Tribune had the story pretty up high.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
The Dallas Morning News is now.
Speaker 6 (12:59):
Lee with the surprise twist of fifteen finalists for food
and drink entries for the Texas State Fair versus ten.
So you have to scroll laser Freddy Guts, Laser focused
on democracy. You have to really scroll down far to
see that people in Texas are about to lose their rights.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
I would love you to talk about the Voting Rights
Act and your time as a reporter. Just talk us
through that story that you told us about before you
came on, because it was amazing.
Speaker 7 (13:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (13:29):
So, the Shelby County Holder decision, which was really the
first major blow the Supreme Court issued against the Voting
Rights Act, happened in the summer of twenty thirteen. And
one of my pet beliefs is that the summer of
twenty thirteen was a huge turning point in our country.
This was right after the Obama reeleft, but this was
really when the Republican Party was trying to figure out
(13:52):
who they were. And what I remember about that time
was that decision came down around the same time as
the Senate was negotiating a bipartisan bill to reformer immigration system.
And this was a period of time where Jeff Sessions
and his top communicator, Stephen Miller at the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
God, I forgot that Stephen Miller worked for Jeff Sessions.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
That was from season one, Season one.
Speaker 6 (14:19):
I'm really calling back to an original season that was
terrifying to us. And so what I remember about that
summer was that Jeff Sessions was very, very popular with reporters.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Everyone was going to him to find.
Speaker 6 (14:32):
A throwaway quote vias in the both sides framework of
DC political journalism, when you have a bipartisan immigration bill
on one side, it turns out that the other side
is Jeff Sessions xenophobia. And so every day people were
crowding around him to get a quote to basically try
to tank.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
This immigration bill.
Speaker 6 (14:51):
Okay, So the day that the Shelby County Holder decision
came down, Shelby County is in Alabama, where it basically
talked about the idea that preclearance was unconstitutional and kicked it.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Back to Congress to try to fix the formula. I
would love you to talk.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
This through Voting Rights and what happened with Shelby County
and how those two things were related for decades.
Speaker 6 (15:14):
The Voting Rights Act established a law where it gave
the Department of Justice some authority to basically look at
the performance and operations of different districts to make sure,
especially that black Americans had the freedom to vote. Because
if we think about back to Jim Crow and poll
taxes and literacy tests. They were imposing barriers to the
(15:38):
franchise that were then deemed illegal right but by virtue
of the fact that the Voting Rights Act was made
into law. And so the thing that the Supreme Court
attacked was this idea that the Department of Justice could
create a formula to basically rank voting jurisdictions to make
sure that they were operating fairly and justly. And what
(16:00):
John Roberts knew and what the conservatives on the Court
knew was if they tried to find a technicality, and
the technicality back in twenty thirteen was that they wanted
Congress to come back together and to redo the formula,
to make it new, to try to modernize it, like
in some sort of weird, made up version of what
they thought could be constitutional, because they get to decide
(16:20):
what is and isn't and there's no rhyme or reason
for what that is. If they put it on Congress
and put the onus on Congress to fix it, it would
never happen because Congress could never get their act enough
to get together to do it. And so they took
away a key power of the federal government to make
sure that elections were free and fair across the country,
because remember, the federal government doesn't actually run elections, the
(16:43):
local jurisdictions do. The thing about this was that this
was actually a huge blow to voters across the country
because they no longer had the oversight of the Department
of Justice to make sure that their elections were free
and fair, and it left it up to these munis.
And as we are seeing now twelve years in the future,
(17:03):
there are huge vulnerabilities with that right. And I think
the thing that was so challenging about that time and
being on the Hill at that time, is that people
didn't think this was a big deal. They didn't think
it was that important. And so I brought up that
sort of context about Jeff Sessions because I wanted to
find Jeff Sessions that day to talk to him about
this decision, because he was a senator from Alabama, but
(17:26):
before he was a senator for Alabama, he had been
a judicial nominee.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
That was too racist to be confirmed.
Speaker 8 (17:33):
Yes, I remember it well, and when I asked him
what he thought of the decision, I want to read
this direct quote because it's absolutely unhinged.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
He said it was good news.
Speaker 6 (17:45):
I think for the South, in that the Supreme Court
found there was not sufficient evidence to justify treating them disproportionately,
then let's say Philadelphia or Boston, or Los Angeles or Chicago.
And when I pushed him on whether he supports pre
clearance on principle, because remember the Supreme Court said we
should fix the formula this, then Republican senator said, well,
(18:06):
I don't think it should exist in Shelby County. Shelby
County has never had a history of denying voters, and
certainly not now. I mean the amount of a historical
kutzba to be like Alabama didn't discriminate against voters. I mean,
this is the foundation that they were laying twelve years ago.
(18:26):
And I wanted to talk about this today because people
think that all of these things are new right, and
that it's just Trump and you know, Bolden for a
second term.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
He's doing all of these things and it's.
Speaker 6 (18:36):
An anomaly and we can go back to something that
existed differently. But what I want to remind people is
that this is a system's problem. This was a party problem,
and this was the project, just like repealing abortion and
making it illegal potentially across this country is a Republican project.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Restricting rights, rolling back civil rights. That's also a project,
and they are succeeding, right.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
So tell us what John Lewis said when you talk
to him about this quote.
Speaker 6 (19:07):
So, because I am a rebel rouser, I went to
the CBC press conference, the Congressional Black Caucus press conference afterwards,
and I mean there's c SPAN video of this, and
you should see everyone's faces when they're like twenty five
black members of Congress standing up on a stage to.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Talk about what a dark day this is.
Speaker 6 (19:23):
You know, sometimes on your reporter and it's probably surprising
because I'm talking a lot now. Some reporters love doing
the big wind up and reading an essay. I basically
just said, I'd like to read you a quote from
Jeff Sessions that he just told me. What John Lewis
said was basically talking about his lived experience. I mean,
this is a person who almost died on the Edmund
(19:45):
Petties Bridge to try to secure the rights to vote
for other people. And so he talked about the poll taxes,
he talked about the literacy tests, he talked about everything
that like he had to endure that he fail.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
The history that was real, and I think.
Speaker 6 (20:03):
That's so important, especially like in this time and this
landscape where everyone is trying to put misinformation out there,
everyone is trying to like reverse history to remember that
there are people who lived and fought for these rights,
and that we're going to have to do that again.
What John Lewis said to me was, I was born
(20:25):
in Alabama. I lived in Alabama most my young life.
In Alabama. The same year that Barack Obama was born,
white people and black people couldn't sit together in a
bus station or ride together in a taxi cab.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
They had to change that.
Speaker 6 (20:37):
Teachers, college professors, lawyers, and doctors, and they were told
they could not reader write well enough that they failed
a so called literacy test, and they were not able
to register to vote until after the Voting Rights Act
was passed and signed into law on August sixth, nineteen
sixty five. We have made progress, yes, but we are
not there yet. It is still needed today in Alabama
and throughout other states in the Old Confederacy and other
(21:00):
parts of our country.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
And so that's what he said, and that is what
is true.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yeah, that's crazy, you know, as much as we think
of ourselves as being a democracy for a long time.
We are actually have not been a multi racial democracy
for very long.
Speaker 6 (21:14):
No, And you know, I think people really take it
for granted, you know that we were able to live
a certain way. I think about my four year old
and the world he's going to grow up in, and
that's really overwhelming to think about, because I feel like
none of us were naive enough to think that progress
was linear, right, and that there weren't going to be
these fights, and there weren't going to be factions of
(21:36):
people who were fighting to roll back these rights.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
But the way that has.
Speaker 6 (21:39):
Been normalized, the way that these assaults are happening every day,
the idea that Greg Abbott in Texas can just sort
of comply with the President of the United States try
to snap redistrict even though that's not really allowed in
their constitution, and then like for his Attorney general to
say they're going to come to Illinois and get these
members of their delegation, Like, we have to stop and
(22:02):
think about how outlandish that is, because we're living in
a time where every piece of news seems more outrageous
than the last.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
And I don't want us to get.
Speaker 6 (22:11):
To sensitize to the fact that this isn't normal and
that we could live in a world that looks different.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
Yeah, I think what's happening in Texas is partially their
complete lack of respect for any norms and institutions. But
I also think part of it is that Ken Paxton
wants the mega endorsement for Senate, John Cornyan wants the
mega endorsement for Senate, and Cash Battel just wants to
keep his job well and.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Keep going to sporting events.
Speaker 6 (22:38):
Like what is his job other than going to sporting
events and sitting in luxury boxes?
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Right, Cash Battel does not want to have to fly
commercial discuss I'm going to pick John Cornyan of that
list of people throughout, which is maybe going to be
a surprise to folks because now it makes sense.
Speaker 6 (22:53):
You know, I spent a lot of time covering Senate
leadership and congressional leadership, and I try to at least
have a memory as long as I've worked. And something
that people probably forget about John Cornyn was that he
was up for reelection in two thousand and eight, which
is the year that Barack Obama won his first election.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
It was a huge waveyer and John Cornan's ads.
Speaker 6 (23:16):
Your listeners can google this. They were Big John ads.
It was just a song that said Big.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
John over and over again.
Speaker 6 (23:22):
It didn't even mention he was a Republican because it
was not a convenient year to talk about being a
Republican and conservative values. And I raised this to say
that these people have no core. They don't believe in anything.
And so when we're trying to impose reason, when we're
thinking about it like normal people who care about normal
(23:42):
things like being able to turn on PBS in the
morning and seeing educational cartoons, right, we're thinking about it
totally differently than the way they experience it.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
They don't believe in anything. They just believe in holding
onto their power.
Speaker 6 (23:57):
And I think what we're increasingly learning is that that's
not really towards an end except for like owning the lips. Like,
these people don't really care about anything except for breaking things.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
And for a long time, they've broken the government.
Speaker 6 (24:12):
To run on a broken government, Right, you don't flirt
with defaulting on our debt or having a government shut down,
or any number of things that they have done in
the past fifteen to thirty years.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
If we want to go all the way back to
new but now we're seeing sort of.
Speaker 6 (24:27):
Like the end result of that nihilism, and it's hard
to process because there's no actual logic to it. So, yeah,
they want to keep power, like you're right, Like maybe
you want to keep your like first class seats or
John Cornyan likes that a twenty two year old drives
him to the steps of the Capitol, and you have
(24:47):
a lifestyle.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
That you get to maintain, but it's for nothing.
Speaker 6 (24:51):
I wish I could answer your question better than I
am right now, but I think that that's sort of
what we're all sitting with, is that there are definitely
some evil people who want to do evil things, and
then there are a.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Lot of people who just don't care.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Yeah, what is important about this moment in American life
as we sit here, is that it's not so much
that these people are evil. It's so much of it
is that these people are not brave. It's easier to
do the wrong thing than it is to do the
right thing. And I think we're seeing that just quite
(25:26):
a lot along the Republican Party, right Like Susan Collins
knows what the right thing is and she knows what
the wrong thing is, and it's easier just to do
the wrong thing, or just to sort of say a
little bit that she's not happy, but not really take
a stand on things.
Speaker 6 (25:43):
I don't want to take your Susan Collins bait, because
we could do an entire episode on her, and I've
written multiple magazine articles on her.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
But you know what I mean, some of the less
evil senators. Yes, well, And.
Speaker 6 (25:55):
The piece of your comment, which I think is so
right that I really want to build on, is this
idea of bravery or courage. And I think about this
not just in terms of our elected officials, but all
of the institutions that exist around them. So we haven't
even touched on the fact that yesterday RFK Junior said
he's going to end our mRNA vaccine program, the same
(26:16):
week that we have the news that we could prevent
HIV with an mRNA vaccine.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah, well, they're not that preventing HIV. I know, I know,
I know. But where was pharma?
Speaker 9 (26:27):
Where were all of these moneyed interests, these people who
are making billions on the pharmaceutical industry, None of them
could make a phone call to like a United States
senator and be like, you know what, not this idiot
different idiot.
Speaker 6 (26:40):
Like, we aren't so far away from a time where
the Senate used to do their job and there were
people who couldn't get confirmed. And so when you see
these universities paying hundreds of millions of dollars to this administration,
when you see the pharmaceutical industry not putting up a
fight to stop RFK before he dismantled the entire scientific
(27:02):
research infrastructure of this country, it wasn't just that these
elected officials had no courage.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
It was that.
Speaker 6 (27:08):
Literally everyone around them in the system didn't. And that's
really overwhelming to think too, Like, I don't think any
billionaire is going to save us in any.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Capacity, certainly, not not even a little Nope, Nope. They're
not going to save our newsrooms.
Speaker 6 (27:24):
But when Trump announced his sort of roster of cabinet
nominees this time around, I was.
Speaker 10 (27:31):
Like, you know, I think all of them will get through.
But if there's one who might not, it's the guy
who could wreck the multi billion dollar pharmaceutical industry with
his quackery. And even that didn't happen. And so like,
when the like vultures of capitalism don't even have the
courage to act, You're like, well, what are we doing here.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
And what is it for?
Speaker 6 (27:54):
And that connects sort of to your like original Texas
question too, of like these people don't really believe in anything,
and they're destroying everything.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Just for the sport of it. And that's really bleak
to think about.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Medness. You have to
come back all the time. I wish we had it
added on such a depressing no, no, no, it's fine.
That's what our people do.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Thank you, Medness, Thank you. Molly.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Mike Byrd is the economist Wall Street editor.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Welcome, too Fast Politics, Mike.
Speaker 7 (28:27):
Burn, thank you for having mega.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Oh, I'm delighted to have you so prade wars are
good and easy to win discuss.
Speaker 11 (28:36):
It depends what you're talking for. For American consumers, not
so much. Maybe for some people. It depends what your
aims are.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
If your aim is to crash the United States economy
as it.
Speaker 11 (28:47):
Going, yeah, that probably helps if that's one of your aims.
It's been really interesting so far, because up until a
couple of days ago, I think you would have said
those not so much. A sign of that happening. We
got these massive, massive revisions to the labor force numbers,
came out the Bureau for Labor Statistics, which really sort
(29:08):
of changed the analysis of what people think has happened
in the last few months April and May.
Speaker 7 (29:13):
In particular, the employment number is much worse than.
Speaker 11 (29:16):
People had thought, and it sort of does paint a
picture of a labor market that's been weighed on by
the tariff news a lot more than the previous numbers did.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
So explain to us what that means.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Like, I thought it was pretty interesting that we had
all of these Trump apologists saying that in fact, it
was not the trade wars but instead AI that was
causing this is an AI that's causing.
Speaker 11 (29:43):
It, I'd be surprised if it's AI. Frankly, there's been
a lot of discussion about this, but I still think
it's more of a prospective thing. Looking forward, you might
start to see that showing up in some areas where
white collar employment at the really entry level, you might
expect that to slow down. That's not really what we're
(30:04):
seeing in the job numbers at the moment. I do
think there is a little bit more of an indication
that the tariffs are weighing on things, partly because the
uncertainty of what's going on at the moment, Even if
you leave aside the fact that it's bad policy, that
the tariffs are a bad policy, the bad for American consumers,
they're bad for American businesses, even American exporters, because they
can't be the imported parts they need to make the
(30:25):
products that they're actually selling. Even if you leave that aside,
just the pure uncertainty of the economic impact, because there's
been so much sort of volatility in what people are
expecting from the tariffs, is going to weigh on those decisions.
If you are thinking of hiring ten people, so you've
got a small business, you employ ten people, you're thinking
of expanding to doubling the size, are you going to
wait to make that decision or are you gonna make
(30:47):
it now right with the aftermath of all the tariffs,
all the announcements, everything so and cert if you have
any exposure to those sort of supply chains, you're gonna wait, basically,
or you're very likely to wait relative to what you
might have been thinking in March or February, which is
going to weigh on the unemployment numbers.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Undoubtedly, the whole point of this exercise was to bring
manufacturing back to the United States. These tariffs were supposed
to create a manufacturing boom.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Have they in fact done that.
Speaker 11 (31:17):
No, But if you look at the structure of American manufacturing,
I think there's a sort of there's an idea that
lots of people have built up, and it's built up
from I think the sort of twenty years after the
Second World War in the US, where the US really
was a manufacturing type, it made huge amounts of items
that it was dominant in. If you look at something
(31:39):
like cars, US production of cars was something like eighty
or ninety percent of the global total, So you've got,
you know, a single city, Detroit making a majority of
the world's cars. Nothing has worked like that for a
long time. And if you listen to manufacturing groups, what
they'll say about the tariffs is is very very clear
that they need inputs, imported inputs to make the items
(32:03):
they sell, either that they sell domestically or that they export.
And what there has been this very sort of shuden
Freuder trend of is manufacturers coming out and saying things like, oh,
you know, you can just buy American. You know, we're
pro American label, we're pro American manufacturing, so we're happy
with these tariffs, and then two three months down the
line actually looking at the way their businesses operate and saying, oh,
(32:26):
actually it was a bit more complicated than that. It
turns out we import a lot more than we'd expected,
and you know, we're going to have to raise prices
or we're having serious difficulty. There's big bottlenecks here. So
funnily enough, these American manufacturers are first people to suffer
because they're the most regular, immediate importers. You're going to
see a sort of delayed reaction with consumers because the
(32:48):
inventories take.
Speaker 7 (32:48):
A while to work through. You know, this warehoused goods.
Speaker 11 (32:52):
A lot of people imported as many these items as
they could before the tariffs came in. But for the
smaller American manufacturing businesses that need a sort of constant
stream of this stuff, they've been hit pretty immediately by this.
So not only is it not good for them, but
in the grand scheme of things, it's pretty bad that
some of the first victims.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
I think everything's changing so much. I still don't understand
what tariffs are on, what tariffs are off, Like, how
are the tariffs with Lesotel give us this sort of
four one one on where we are with tariffs.
Speaker 11 (33:20):
Sure, so I think you've got to keep there's a
lot of good graphs going around. It's basically two lines
or two numbers you've got to keep in mind. One
is the number of where US tariffs are going to
go to. So all of the you know, quote unquote
deals coming out these sort of fairly flimsy agreements with
other countries for.
Speaker 7 (33:38):
Various tariff rates.
Speaker 11 (33:40):
They'll come into force over time, depending on what they're
negotiated for. And for example, you know the EU, one's
going to be a flat fifteen percent on most things.
Same with Japan it's going to be ten percent. Of
the UK it's going to vary. There's been a lot
of talk about a much higher number potentially for India.
Speaker 7 (33:57):
Those are sort of coming in slowly over time.
Speaker 11 (33:59):
The the effective average tariff rate on US imports now
is about eight or nine percent and is steadily climbing
with each passing month. So the actual number that American businesses,
American consumers are going to pay is just ratcheting up
higher and higher as the various tariffs begin to properly
come into force. Those are the two things I think
(34:20):
you need to really keep an eye on. So there's
lots of people investors who got very excited that, you know,
the tariff rates that were announced in April are being
reduced in various deals, or they're being delayed or whatever.
But the reality on the ground and for actual American
customs American imports, is that tariffs are sort of ratcheting
(34:41):
up with each passing month, and you'll only see the
full economic effect of that over time as these two
sort of lines join one another, and a lot of
that isn't currently being paid and it will be paid eventually.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Does the consumer end up having to pay these tariffs
right now?
Speaker 2 (34:59):
We're sort of in a moment where there has.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
Been like a lot of things were already bought, and
then also the administration has bullied a lot of companies
into not raising their prices or not being transparent about tariffs.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
But that can go on forever, right.
Speaker 11 (35:15):
Yeah, totally, And all the best literature on this, all
the best economics literature shows effectively the same thing every time,
which is you might get some compression of the margins
of the companies that produce the goods.
Speaker 7 (35:29):
So say you've got a European car maker, they.
Speaker 11 (35:32):
Might take a small hit on their profit to keep
market access, and then you've got a distributor in the US,
they might take a small hit on their profits as well.
But in a long term tarists are overwhelmingly paid. The
incidence falls on the consumer that's buying them, right. This
is one of the most consistent findings in economic literature,
(35:53):
full stop. It's one of the few things that you know,
almost all economists really agree on, is where the incidents
of this falls. It falls on the consumer. This will
eventually feed through be the case. What I think is
interesting is how much sort of economic damage it has,
and particularly how salient it is by the time of
(36:13):
the next presidential election, and I suppose by that midterms
as well. It presume it is going to be salient
at the time of the midterms, because I think that's
going to matter a lot to how long lasting the
tariffs are. You know, during the twenty twenty election, for example,
tariffs weren't an enormous issue in that election, and a
lot of them ended up being kept, which is a
sort of particular outcome. You know, it's quite difficult politically
(36:36):
to reduce tariffs. You have companies that have gotten used
to them that have reoriented their supply chains.
Speaker 7 (36:41):
It's quite a difficult political cell.
Speaker 11 (36:43):
If it's a huge issue, If it causes a recession,
and this is a big issue at the time of
the next year's election, then I can imagine some of
these tariffs being repealed at some large international agreements to
do so. If there isn't a recession, if there's just
a sort of slow down, or it's a little bit
harder to identify the tariffs as the obvious cause, and
it's not a big issue at the next election, then
it's much harder to imagine a future administration really peeling
(37:06):
these tariffs back, which is concerning if you're someone who thinks,
you know, the terrorists shouldn't have come in the first place,
that they should be reduced to free traded is relatively good.
Speaker 7 (37:15):
That's a big concern.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Yet once the sort of prices go up, there's no
way to put the genie back in the vinyl. We
find ourselves in a situation where things are more expensive,
they will continue to be more expensive. This money will
be paid into some kind. It'll be like a corporate tax,
but it's really like a sales tax because it's a
tax on the things you buy, right, I mean, so,
(37:40):
isn't this just sort of like the same as a
flat sales tax and the money actually does, in fact
go to the government.
Speaker 11 (37:48):
It's the same as a flat sales tax in the
sense that it's a hit to consumption. The only problem
is it's distortionary, right that it only applies to production
done overseas. It doesn't apply to American product, which is
why economists tend not to like it when they're much
more in favor of sales and consumption taxes. You know,
there's lots of people that talk optimistically about how maybe
(38:09):
this could be tweaked into some sort of American vat.
I don't personally think that that's going to happen. I
think it looks quite difficult to happen. On the revenue
raising part, this is the most difficult thing, right, which
is the reality that despite the demand destruction they're here
to the American consumer, the damage the supply chains, this
is going to raise revenue. It is going to raise
(38:30):
hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue, and it's going
to be very, very difficult for any future administration to
give that up. America runs a six to seven percent
of GDP deficit, which at a time of relatively full
employment in peacetime, there's no lockdowns going on at the moment.
This is an insanely large amount of money, and the
(38:51):
idea of a future administration coming in and saying we're
going to volunteer to get rid of several hundred billion
dollars a tax revenue is really really difficult to mention.
That will be one of the biggest problems in sort
of taking a step back where we are right now.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
But that assumes that this doesn't lead to a financial crisis.
Speaker 11 (39:11):
Yeah, I mean definitely, it presumes I think if you
get a recession and you get sort of public sentiment
that this is hugely damaging.
Speaker 7 (39:19):
But yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
It's hard for me to imagine that most Americans are
going to eat a twenty five hundred dollars increase in
all their expenses and that they a have the money
for it. I think the biggest problem for trumpsm in
some way is that it's not going to work, so
these people aren't going to be able to afford it. Oh,
I was going to say the biggest problem with trump
(39:42):
Ism is that the public market seem to love him
no matter what he does, they seem to just not
react to inflation. And I think that is part of
why we're getting so much trouble.
Speaker 11 (39:55):
Yeah, and I think part of that is down to
the fact that you have these two stories going on
at the moment, right, these two narratives, one of which
is you've got an American economy that is both inflation
looks relatively sticky, the labor markets no longer improving in
a significant way, so you'd likely get a.
Speaker 7 (40:14):
Sort of growth slow down.
Speaker 11 (40:16):
At the same time, you've got the tariffs really beginning
to bite, and we know that they're going to bite
further and further.
Speaker 7 (40:22):
Down the line.
Speaker 11 (40:23):
And the fact that this is, you know, a sort
of as close to the central political issue for the
president as you could possibly get. Right, this is a
consistent view that you's had for forty years on trade
related stuff.
Speaker 7 (40:36):
There's no way they're budgeting from this.
Speaker 11 (40:38):
At the same time, you are this other narrative, which
is what's happening in financial markets, which is all of
these massive tech companies are going to be the primary benefits,
by a primary beneficiaries from this colossal AI build out
and the expansion of AI related stuff. So you have
this weird sort of the reality of what is happening
right now I think everyone would agree does look great,
(41:00):
and then the vision of what's going to happen in
the future it seems extremely rosy and interesting and positive.
And that's why you have this huge market disconnect from
I think sentiment and perhaps what's happening in the real
economy right now. It is a huge gap, and it's
difficult to see that getting resolved actually unless the AI
(41:21):
story really sort of bursts.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Because right now the stocks that are driving the market
higher are these tech stocks. It feels like AI could
be just a sort of endless cycle of wells creation.
It won't matter that manufacturing and is in the toilet,
but sooner or later consumer spending will fall to such
(41:45):
a level that it will be recessionary.
Speaker 7 (41:47):
That's the big question.
Speaker 11 (41:48):
And I think basically what's happening in the markets in
the moment is very much the presumption that we don't
get a recession. The presumption is that you might get
a slow down, but no bigger recession, no financial crisis.
This stuff is all just going to be worked for
over time. I no, we're heading into such a bright
future and that the AI build out and stuff is
going to be so expansiory that it's not going to
(42:09):
matter as much. Now, I would say that's the sort
of bold bet the markers come back a lot more
than I would have expected to, even in a sort
of recovery scenario. Like remember the last time we spoke,
and remember how this looked dead, And where we are now.
You know the S and P's record highs. You know,
pretty much every day a lot of these tech stocks
have rallied enormously this year. It just feels like a
(42:31):
different universe to where we were in the middle of April.
Despite the fact that the reason things went bad in
the middle of April was the tariff stuff, and on
that front, not all that much has changed. You know,
You've had a bit of a climbed up, but you're
still going to have the highest tariffs that you've had
in many, many decades in the US. It's still going
to squeeze consumer spending. You're still going to wind up
US allies, it's still going to wreck supply chains that
(42:54):
exist at the moment. And yet everyone the narrative has
shifted when people have sort of decided they don't care
so much about this and it can all be worked through,
and it sort of handwaving situation relative to the very
optimistic future for these big tech companies.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
It seems bad.
Speaker 7 (43:09):
It's tough. If they're right about the AI stuff, then
maybe it doesn't.
Speaker 11 (43:13):
Matter, right if you look at the stocks, when you
look at the companies that are really affected by this stuff,
it's not like Nike, which is just sort of ruined
by tarifs like these a serious, serious damage to a
major importing business. It's not like they're trading at like
distant record highs and doing incredibly well.
Speaker 7 (43:29):
It's all these.
Speaker 11 (43:30):
Companies that are like Nvidio, like Meta, like Google, where
you know they have exposure overseas, but it's mostly through
selling digital services to foreigners, right, it's not they have
to bring in huge amounts of material that goes through
customs into the country and basically it's just allowed this
(43:50):
sort of Yeah, this total bifurcation in people's views of
what's happening.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
It's really interesting that one of the other trade problems
is chemicals.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
Is the mens is the China's punishing of the United States.
Can you talk us through the danger of these because
so China has these rare earth minerals who can't get
them anywhere else.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
They are not shipping them to the States. I mean,
how does that end?
Speaker 7 (44:16):
It's tough.
Speaker 11 (44:17):
I mean, basically, this has been I think a much
stronger card for Chinese negotiators in the trade negotiations than
people had understood before Trump came back into office. I
think the sort of conventional thinking was that the US
is actually able to squeeze Chinese negotiators more than in
the other direction because Chinese producers sell so much more
(44:39):
to the US than goes in the other direction. But
actually things have changed even since the first Trump administration,
and certainly since you know a lot of people set
their views of what Chinese manufacturing in Chinese trade looks
like sort of twenty years ago. China does have a
sort of critical dominance in some of these industries. You know,
when you talk about rare as things like magne and
(45:00):
that's important in various kinds of industry. They have built
a supply chain that means they're basically the only providers
of these things.
Speaker 7 (45:09):
Now.
Speaker 11 (45:09):
I think a enlightened US trade policy could have seen
this coming quite a long time ago. You know, there
are the other sort of industrial and commodity exporting countries
in Asia which are either neutral or pretty close security
partners with the US, I think would have been very
(45:30):
happy over time, in exchange for some market access to
the US, to have engaged in the establishment of separate
supply chains to these things, because often when we talk
about rare earths, it's not that the actual commodity is
wildly rare, and it's certainly not often that the commodity
is only found in the ground in China. This is
a question of processing things that are found in lots
(45:53):
of different places, or even looking for them in the
first place. So it's not something that's sort of a
facet of nature that China has to be dominant in
these areas. There is a lack of planning, and you know,
I lived in Singapore and Hong Kong for a long time.
I would travel to Korea and Japan and all over
the place, and you'd have manufacturers and politicians gripe that,
(46:14):
you know, why were the US government helpers on this stuff?
Why can't we get some sort of partnership going on?
And it didn't seem, honestly like anything that use. Certainly,
the last Trump administration was interesting. It didn't always seem
like the Biden administration was that interested in that side
of things. In terms of the realignment on trade. They
were very interested in having these companies invest in the US,
(46:36):
but less so in establishing as sort of relationship in Asia.
Speaker 7 (46:40):
So that was always very difficult.
Speaker 11 (46:42):
And I think it's part of what's given China this
very strong hand on the rare's issue, which makes life
difficult for American manufacturers as well. You know, these are
really really severe bottlenecks if they can't get hold of them,
and then not supply chase that you can whip up overnight.
These are things that people should have been thinking about
and engaging in a little time ago.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
Mike Bird, thank Yale.
Speaker 7 (47:04):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
No moment ou Jesse Cannon, so male.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
He's some of the most dismaying news we've had come
out of Washington in a while. Is RFK Junior deciding
that his pet project to get rid of mRNA vaccines
has gone through?
Speaker 4 (47:23):
He's getting rid of them? What are you seeing here?
Speaker 1 (47:26):
Yeah, so you'll remember that RFK Junior said he wasn't
going to do that, He wasn't going to take away vaccine.
So far he's removed the COVID vaccine recommendation, he's fired
the CDC Vaccine Committee, he's replaced scientists with anti vaxers,
he's canceled vaccine hesitancy research, and he's pulled five hundred
(47:47):
million dollars in mRNA vaccine research. And he's pulled five
hundred million dollars in r ofm A research. So I
think he is in fact an anti vax And by
the way, mRNA vaccines are the future of fighting cancer.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
So there we go.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
Thanks for listening.
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 shanator Marsha Blackburn has announced she
will run for the governor of Tennessee.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
God help us all, we have such a great show
for you today.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
The New Republic's own Meredith Shiner talks to us about
the Voting Rights Acts Death and how it shaped our
politics today. Then we'll talk to the economists own Mike
Byrd about Trump's tariffs and how they are shaking our
very financial core.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
So, Molly, we have many many things changing under mister
Trump and Project twenty twenty five and combating domestic violent
extremism is no longer a FEMA priority apparently.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
So let's talk this through. Basically, Wired found these documents.
By the way, if we did not have Wired, we
would be missing a lot of stuff because Wired is
on it.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
So Wired has really good reporting.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
Could I go on my soapbox?
Speaker 3 (01:06):
There's been a few times that I've said to you, Hey,
could you pull this from Wired? I don't have a subscription.
I subscribed because I feel bad because they're doing such
great work.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yes, Wired, Katie Drummonds, come on the podcast. Actually, I'll
just email you after this. She's really good. The direct
the editorial director. So FEMA is planning to direct states
and tribes to immediately stop certain activities intended to combat
domestic violent extremism.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
So violent extremism is pretty bad.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
You would think that saying violent extremism is bad would
not be a partisan act, but this White House thinks
it is. And I think that really tells you all
you need to know about what the Trump White House
is doing. So, according to an unpublished bullet and FEMA
funds may not necessarily be yanked back from states which
(01:59):
are not fight I mean, it's just yet another trumpy
thing they're doing to it too covertly wink wink, nod
nod to their friends, and none of us should be
shocking but not surprising.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
So a new study shows that you know, a lot
of people puzzle over how is the American economy's still standing?
Like it just seems like it should have all these
bad indicators. Every Jim Kramer and CNBC Pundo is always
like we're going in the ditch, and yet we don't
drive into the ditch. Apparently it's our youngest consumers who
are driving half of household spending.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yes, it turns out that children, they cost the money.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Children are both expensive and also Generation Alpha likes to spend,
likes to spend. They there you know they like to spend.
Here are the things they spend money on. Food like
pop par beauty, and items during drops. I don't know,
and this makes me depressed. Items during do you know
(03:00):
what to drop us? I do know what it drops?
Speaker 4 (03:02):
Okay, just well, you.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Have a birthday coming up.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
I want to make sure that you know.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
You're still dropping something for my birthday.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
I actually made your birthday present last night, and my
wife left very hard at it.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
I hope it's a rudy julian A cameo.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
Are you seeing a flood of anger? Ak? A mic
foot of anger?
Speaker 2 (03:23):
A mic flood of anger.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
So Nebraska Congressman Mike Flood had a town hall. Everyone
in the world screamed at him for two and a
half hours.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
It's crazy to listen to it as audio listeners haven't
done it because you would think that you're at a lettered,
skinnered concert and they haven't played Freebird.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
That was a musical reference.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
So I want to talk about this for a second,
because a lot of us are feeling real bad and
we're feeling real stressed. We're watching Donald Trump just disassemble
the federal government in real time. We've got billionaires doing
all sorts of sketchy stuff to have more money, because
what they really need is more money. It's just a
really terrible time to be a person who cares about
(04:04):
American democracy and democratic norms. But let me tell you something.
As angry as you are, people around the country are
angry too. And just because it doesn't necessarily get the
same mainstream media coverage, it's happening. And you see these
town halls and you see these lines. And I talk
to James tell Erico about this, and he said he
(04:26):
had huge lines for his town halls. People are angry
and they don't like having you know, Trump is cutting Medicaid,
is cutting food stamps. They are taking things away from
people and they are mad. So I understand the trauma
of the twenty twenty four election, especially after the twenty
sixteen election. We are a country that now has elected
(04:48):
Trump twice, which is hard to grapple with as a
person who thinks of themselves as like lives in a
smart country. The fact that we've elected Trump twice. It
doesn't make me feel goo great about where we are.
Speaker 2 (05:02):
Fine.
Speaker 4 (05:02):
Run's a little contrary to the notion.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Yes, but I want to point out people are really mad.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
They feel really, really unhappy with the direction the country
is going. And Trump's polling has fallen through the floor.
He is as unpopular as anyone ever. Basically his young
people who voted for him have huge regrets. We have
Trump podcasters saying that they didn't realize he was lying
about paying for IVF, that they're mad about the Ebstein files. Mean,
(05:32):
there's never been anyone with less of a mandate than
Donald Trump. And to show how nervous he is, he's
trying to cheat on the midterms already.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
It's like months and months and months away.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
So if you're feeling bad, just know that the rest
of the country is maybe not all of the country,
but a lot of the country is feeling the way
you are.
Speaker 4 (05:53):
Agreed, And I think you put that very well well.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
Speaking of things to be mad about and how bad
billionaires are at running things, Elon Musk thought he could
run the government like a startup where you say, justify
your job to me, or you're fired. Well, it turns
out that Trump administration has now rolled that back, that
email that he sent, because it was insanely dumb and
causing a lot of problems.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
You know, Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Nope, Look when he did it, it didn't work, and
now it's taken them somehow three months to roll it back.
I think what's important is when you don't understand what
the federal government does, it's very easy to want to
chop it up and put it in a wood chipper.
But the federal government does a lot of stuff that
keeps us safe. They do a lot of things that
(06:39):
you know, protect us that we don't necessarily know about,
that we don't necessarily completely understand until they mess up.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
But I think the most.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
Important thing about Elon musk Department of Government efficiency is
that it's likely that it cost us the taxpayers twenty
one point seven billion dollars analyzing the ways generated by
Doge Dick Blumenthal's office twenty one billion dollars.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
So, in other things that contradict what Trump says, there's
an FBI report that this proves Trump's claim of a
Biden era out of control crime wave.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yes, I'm shocked, shocked, I tell you we're lying about
the crime wave. The FBI, which still I guess, does
some stuff that isn't completely by Trump, that aren't completely
dictated by Trump. Annual figures released Tuesday reflect a four
point five year on year.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Decrease in violent crimes.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
So when Donald Trump fought for and one, his victory
was built on this idea that there was an out
of control crime wave.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
In fact, it turns out that crime is down.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
It's fallen fourteen point five percent from the twenty twenty
three figure. At least, all violent crimes nationwide, murder and
manslaughter have fallen fourteen percent.
Speaker 4 (07:58):
Yeah, a trend that's been going on for quite a
while and.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Has nothing to do with Ready.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
Yeah, just as it had nothing to do with his
buddy Verdi Giuliani when he took credit for it.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Right, The analytics of fighting crime have gotten better.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
It does not have anything to do with Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
Meredith Shiner is a contributing editor at The New Republic.
Welcome Too Fast Politics. Meredith, thank you again for having me.
Oh you're so prepared and nice and good.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
What an endorsement.
Speaker 5 (08:34):
By the way, I have to tell you that I've
never been more famous than when I did this podcast
and in my Instagram comments, it was a lot of
my friends, but also a lot of my friends' moms
who are maybe a little bit too addicted to MSNBC
and now think I'm the coolest person ever.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Oh moms, We love moms. You're in Chicago, you know.
I talked to Anna Capara, who is the chief of
staff of Governor Pritzgar, his speech writer, his like sort
of right hand who is I think of like as
one of the sort of genius communicators in the Democratic Party.
(09:13):
And she was a boson who came up with like
team fight versus team cave. And I talked to her
on Monday, which is two days ago maybe, and she
was saying to me that the minute they knew this
was going to happen, that the governor was like, we
will protect them, We will be here. You know, they
should come here. You are in Chicago, talk to us
(09:35):
about what it's like to have a good governor.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
It's nice. I think about this a lot.
Speaker 6 (09:39):
As the federal government is disintegrating, where you live continues
to matter more like whether you were in a blue
state or a red state. Although I do think when
we have authoritarianism no one is fully protected. But when
you see elected officials actually recognizing the reality that we're
living in, I think that's a really important co.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Opponent towards us moving forward in any way.
Speaker 6 (10:03):
When you have elected officials in Washington, particularly Democrats, who
aren't fully reckoning with the threats we're facing in this moment,
it makes it really hard for everyone else to understand it.
And so I think one of the most important things
about JB. Pritzger and Illinois welcoming these House Democrats is
to say we are recognizing this reality and this is
not normal. Throughout the press conference, I think that that
(10:26):
was a real theme, the idea that you would just
read district halfway through a term.
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Jerrymandering is already a.
Speaker 6 (10:32):
Problem on its face, but the idea that we are
super charging that now only five years or I guess
four and a half years after January sixth. I mean,
all of these things exist in context, and at the
federal level we're seeing disintegration. But we've always really seen
states as these laboratories, particularly for conservative politics. I think
(10:52):
about that Gail Collins book, As Goes Texas and how
all of these ideas on policy really incubated on Texas,
experimented there and then got implemented and enforced on the
entire country, whether it was education or even some of
their lacks gun safety rules or sba'd yes, which was
the end of Roebi Wade. And so when you see
(11:15):
democratic states really recognizing that they also have a rule
to play in being leaders, that's really important. And you know,
I'm old enough that in twenty eleven, I was a
reporter for Politico and I was in Madison, Wisconsin when
those Wisconsin Senate Democrats left the state because Scott Walker
was trying to enforce a union busting rule, like at
(11:38):
the birthplace of American unions.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
He was trying to destroy labor.
Speaker 6 (11:42):
And so those Senate Democrats crossed the border and came
to Illinois as a safe haven. And I think, going
back to your conversation about fight versus not fight, I
think that that's really important. But there's a second part here,
and it's connecting the fight to the issues and communicating
why that fight matters.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
If we're just looking at a binary between fight and
non fight, we're in internet comment wars. But when we're
looking at.
Speaker 6 (12:07):
A paradigm where you are fighting and you were talking
about what is happening and what matters.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
I think that's the most important thing, right.
Speaker 6 (12:15):
Like I mentioned before the show, today's the sixtieth anniversary
of the Voting Rights Act. That means for people like me,
I'm a millennial, the Voting Rights Act is younger than
my parents, Okay, And so we think about so many
of our freedoms and justice as durable and sustainable and
self sustaining. But really they are young, and they are fragile,
and these freedoms and rights are so easy to erase.
(12:38):
And that's what we're seeing now, and that's what we
really need our leaders to articulate.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
And that's what we're hopefully seeing in Chicago today.
Speaker 6 (12:45):
Although I will say my last note on this is
that I checked the front page of both the Chicago
Tribune and the Dallas Morning News before we hopped on
to see how they were playing in both places, and
the Tribune had the story pretty up high.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
The Dallas Morning News is now.
Speaker 6 (12:59):
Lee with the surprise twist of fifteen finalists for food
and drink entries for the Texas State Fair versus ten.
So you have to scroll laser Freddy Guts, Laser focused
on democracy. You have to really scroll down far to
see that people in Texas are about to lose their rights.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
I would love you to talk about the Voting Rights
Act and your time as a reporter. Just talk us
through that story that you told us about before you
came on, because it was amazing.
Speaker 7 (13:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (13:29):
So, the Shelby County Holder decision, which was really the
first major blow the Supreme Court issued against the Voting
Rights Act, happened in the summer of twenty thirteen. And
one of my pet beliefs is that the summer of
twenty thirteen was a huge turning point in our country.
This was right after the Obama reeleft, but this was
really when the Republican Party was trying to figure out
(13:52):
who they were. And what I remember about that time
was that decision came down around the same time as
the Senate was negotiating a bipartisan bill to reformer immigration system.
And this was a period of time where Jeff Sessions
and his top communicator, Stephen Miller at the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
God, I forgot that Stephen Miller worked for Jeff Sessions.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
That was from season one, Season one.
Speaker 6 (14:19):
I'm really calling back to an original season that was
terrifying to us. And so what I remember about that
summer was that Jeff Sessions was very, very popular with reporters.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Everyone was going to him to find.
Speaker 6 (14:32):
A throwaway quote vias in the both sides framework of
DC political journalism, when you have a bipartisan immigration bill
on one side, it turns out that the other side
is Jeff Sessions xenophobia. And so every day people were
crowding around him to get a quote to basically try
to tank.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
This immigration bill.
Speaker 6 (14:51):
Okay, So the day that the Shelby County Holder decision
came down, Shelby County is in Alabama, where it basically
talked about the idea that preclearance was unconstitutional and kicked it.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Back to Congress to try to fix the formula. I
would love you to talk.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
This through Voting Rights and what happened with Shelby County
and how those two things were related for decades.
Speaker 6 (15:14):
The Voting Rights Act established a law where it gave
the Department of Justice some authority to basically look at
the performance and operations of different districts to make sure,
especially that black Americans had the freedom to vote. Because
if we think about back to Jim Crow and poll
taxes and literacy tests. They were imposing barriers to the
(15:38):
franchise that were then deemed illegal right but by virtue
of the fact that the Voting Rights Act was made
into law. And so the thing that the Supreme Court
attacked was this idea that the Department of Justice could
create a formula to basically rank voting jurisdictions to make
sure that they were operating fairly and justly. And what
(16:00):
John Roberts knew and what the conservatives on the Court
knew was if they tried to find a technicality, and
the technicality back in twenty thirteen was that they wanted
Congress to come back together and to redo the formula,
to make it new, to try to modernize it, like
in some sort of weird, made up version of what
they thought could be constitutional, because they get to decide
(16:20):
what is and isn't and there's no rhyme or reason
for what that is. If they put it on Congress
and put the onus on Congress to fix it, it would
never happen because Congress could never get their act enough
to get together to do it. And so they took
away a key power of the federal government to make
sure that elections were free and fair across the country,
because remember, the federal government doesn't actually run elections, the
(16:43):
local jurisdictions do. The thing about this was that this
was actually a huge blow to voters across the country
because they no longer had the oversight of the Department
of Justice to make sure that their elections were free
and fair, and it left it up to these munis.
And as we are seeing now twelve years in the future,
(17:03):
there are huge vulnerabilities with that right. And I think
the thing that was so challenging about that time and
being on the Hill at that time, is that people
didn't think this was a big deal. They didn't think
it was that important. And so I brought up that
sort of context about Jeff Sessions because I wanted to
find Jeff Sessions that day to talk to him about
this decision, because he was a senator from Alabama, but
(17:26):
before he was a senator for Alabama, he had been
a judicial nominee.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
That was too racist to be confirmed.
Speaker 8 (17:33):
Yes, I remember it well, and when I asked him
what he thought of the decision, I want to read
this direct quote because it's absolutely unhinged.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
He said it was good news.
Speaker 6 (17:45):
I think for the South, in that the Supreme Court
found there was not sufficient evidence to justify treating them disproportionately,
then let's say Philadelphia or Boston, or Los Angeles or Chicago.
And when I pushed him on whether he supports pre
clearance on principle, because remember the Supreme Court said we
should fix the formula this, then Republican senator said, well,
(18:06):
I don't think it should exist in Shelby County. Shelby
County has never had a history of denying voters, and
certainly not now. I mean the amount of a historical
kutzba to be like Alabama didn't discriminate against voters. I mean,
this is the foundation that they were laying twelve years ago.
(18:26):
And I wanted to talk about this today because people
think that all of these things are new right, and
that it's just Trump and you know, Bolden for a
second term.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
He's doing all of these things and it's.
Speaker 6 (18:36):
An anomaly and we can go back to something that
existed differently. But what I want to remind people is
that this is a system's problem. This was a party problem,
and this was the project, just like repealing abortion and
making it illegal potentially across this country is a Republican project.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Restricting rights, rolling back civil rights. That's also a project,
and they are succeeding, right.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
So tell us what John Lewis said when you talk
to him about this quote.
Speaker 6 (19:07):
So, because I am a rebel rouser, I went to
the CBC press conference, the Congressional Black Caucus press conference afterwards,
and I mean there's c SPAN video of this, and
you should see everyone's faces when they're like twenty five
black members of Congress standing up on a stage to.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Talk about what a dark day this is.
Speaker 6 (19:23):
You know, sometimes on your reporter and it's probably surprising
because I'm talking a lot now. Some reporters love doing
the big wind up and reading an essay. I basically
just said, I'd like to read you a quote from
Jeff Sessions that he just told me. What John Lewis
said was basically talking about his lived experience. I mean,
this is a person who almost died on the Edmund
(19:45):
Petties Bridge to try to secure the rights to vote
for other people. And so he talked about the poll taxes,
he talked about the literacy tests, he talked about everything
that like he had to endure that he fail.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
The history that was real, and I think.
Speaker 6 (20:03):
That's so important, especially like in this time and this
landscape where everyone is trying to put misinformation out there,
everyone is trying to like reverse history to remember that
there are people who lived and fought for these rights,
and that we're going to have to do that again.
What John Lewis said to me was, I was born
(20:25):
in Alabama. I lived in Alabama most my young life.
In Alabama. The same year that Barack Obama was born,
white people and black people couldn't sit together in a
bus station or ride together in a taxi cab.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
They had to change that.
Speaker 6 (20:37):
Teachers, college professors, lawyers, and doctors, and they were told
they could not reader write well enough that they failed
a so called literacy test, and they were not able
to register to vote until after the Voting Rights Act
was passed and signed into law on August sixth, nineteen
sixty five. We have made progress, yes, but we are
not there yet. It is still needed today in Alabama
and throughout other states in the Old Confederacy and other
(21:00):
parts of our country.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
And so that's what he said, and that is what
is true.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yeah, that's crazy, you know, as much as we think
of ourselves as being a democracy for a long time.
We are actually have not been a multi racial democracy
for very long.
Speaker 6 (21:14):
No, And you know, I think people really take it
for granted, you know that we were able to live
a certain way. I think about my four year old
and the world he's going to grow up in, and
that's really overwhelming to think about, because I feel like
none of us were naive enough to think that progress
was linear, right, and that there weren't going to be
these fights, and there weren't going to be factions of
(21:36):
people who were fighting to roll back these rights.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
But the way that has.
Speaker 6 (21:39):
Been normalized, the way that these assaults are happening every day,
the idea that Greg Abbott in Texas can just sort
of comply with the President of the United States try
to snap redistrict even though that's not really allowed in
their constitution, and then like for his Attorney general to
say they're going to come to Illinois and get these
members of their delegation, Like, we have to stop and
(22:02):
think about how outlandish that is, because we're living in
a time where every piece of news seems more outrageous
than the last.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
And I don't want us to get.
Speaker 6 (22:11):
To sensitize to the fact that this isn't normal and
that we could live in a world that looks different.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
Yeah, I think what's happening in Texas is partially their
complete lack of respect for any norms and institutions. But
I also think part of it is that Ken Paxton
wants the mega endorsement for Senate, John Cornyan wants the
mega endorsement for Senate, and Cash Battel just wants to
keep his job well and.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Keep going to sporting events.
Speaker 6 (22:38):
Like what is his job other than going to sporting
events and sitting in luxury boxes?
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Right, Cash Battel does not want to have to fly
commercial discuss I'm going to pick John Cornyan of that
list of people throughout, which is maybe going to be
a surprise to folks because now it makes sense.
Speaker 6 (22:53):
You know, I spent a lot of time covering Senate
leadership and congressional leadership, and I try to at least
have a memory as long as I've worked. And something
that people probably forget about John Cornyn was that he
was up for reelection in two thousand and eight, which
is the year that Barack Obama won his first election.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
It was a huge waveyer and John Cornan's ads.
Speaker 6 (23:16):
Your listeners can google this. They were Big John ads.
It was just a song that said Big.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
John over and over again.
Speaker 6 (23:22):
It didn't even mention he was a Republican because it
was not a convenient year to talk about being a
Republican and conservative values. And I raised this to say
that these people have no core. They don't believe in anything.
And so when we're trying to impose reason, when we're
thinking about it like normal people who care about normal
(23:42):
things like being able to turn on PBS in the
morning and seeing educational cartoons, right, we're thinking about it
totally differently than the way they experience it.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
They don't believe in anything. They just believe in holding
onto their power.
Speaker 6 (23:57):
And I think what we're increasingly learning is that that's
not really towards an end except for like owning the lips. Like,
these people don't really care about anything except for breaking things.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
And for a long time, they've broken the government.
Speaker 6 (24:12):
To run on a broken government, Right, you don't flirt
with defaulting on our debt or having a government shut down,
or any number of things that they have done in
the past fifteen to thirty years.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
If we want to go all the way back to
new but now we're seeing sort of.
Speaker 6 (24:27):
Like the end result of that nihilism, and it's hard
to process because there's no actual logic to it. So, yeah,
they want to keep power, like you're right, Like maybe
you want to keep your like first class seats or
John Cornyan likes that a twenty two year old drives
him to the steps of the Capitol, and you have
(24:47):
a lifestyle.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
That you get to maintain, but it's for nothing.
Speaker 6 (24:51):
I wish I could answer your question better than I
am right now, but I think that that's sort of
what we're all sitting with, is that there are definitely
some evil people who want to do evil things, and
then there are a.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Lot of people who just don't care.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Yeah, what is important about this moment in American life
as we sit here, is that it's not so much
that these people are evil. It's so much of it
is that these people are not brave. It's easier to
do the wrong thing than it is to do the
right thing. And I think we're seeing that just quite
(25:26):
a lot along the Republican Party, right Like Susan Collins
knows what the right thing is and she knows what
the wrong thing is, and it's easier just to do
the wrong thing, or just to sort of say a
little bit that she's not happy, but not really take
a stand on things.
Speaker 6 (25:43):
I don't want to take your Susan Collins bait, because
we could do an entire episode on her, and I've
written multiple magazine articles on her.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
But you know what I mean, some of the less
evil senators. Yes, well, And.
Speaker 6 (25:55):
The piece of your comment, which I think is so
right that I really want to build on, is this
idea of bravery or courage. And I think about this
not just in terms of our elected officials, but all
of the institutions that exist around them. So we haven't
even touched on the fact that yesterday RFK Junior said
he's going to end our mRNA vaccine program, the same
(26:16):
week that we have the news that we could prevent
HIV with an mRNA vaccine.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Yeah, well, they're not that preventing HIV. I know, I know,
I know. But where was pharma?
Speaker 9 (26:27):
Where were all of these moneyed interests, these people who
are making billions on the pharmaceutical industry, None of them
could make a phone call to like a United States
senator and be like, you know what, not this idiot
different idiot.
Speaker 6 (26:40):
Like, we aren't so far away from a time where
the Senate used to do their job and there were
people who couldn't get confirmed. And so when you see
these universities paying hundreds of millions of dollars to this administration,
when you see the pharmaceutical industry not putting up a
fight to stop RFK before he dismantled the entire scientific
(27:02):
research infrastructure of this country, it wasn't just that these
elected officials had no courage.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
It was that.
Speaker 6 (27:08):
Literally everyone around them in the system didn't. And that's
really overwhelming to think too, Like, I don't think any
billionaire is going to save us in any.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Capacity, certainly, not not even a little Nope, Nope. They're
not going to save our newsrooms.
Speaker 6 (27:24):
But when Trump announced his sort of roster of cabinet
nominees this time around, I was.
Speaker 10 (27:31):
Like, you know, I think all of them will get through.
But if there's one who might not, it's the guy
who could wreck the multi billion dollar pharmaceutical industry with
his quackery. And even that didn't happen. And so like,
when the like vultures of capitalism don't even have the
courage to act, You're like, well, what are we doing here.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
And what is it for?
Speaker 6 (27:54):
And that connects sort of to your like original Texas
question too, of like these people don't really believe in anything,
and they're destroying everything.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Just for the sport of it. And that's really bleak
to think about.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Medness. You have to
come back all the time. I wish we had it
added on such a depressing no, no, no, it's fine.
That's what our people do.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Thank you, Medness, Thank you. Molly.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Mike Byrd is the economist Wall Street editor.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Welcome, too Fast Politics, Mike.
Speaker 7 (28:27):
Burn, thank you for having mega.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Oh, I'm delighted to have you so prade wars are
good and easy to win discuss.
Speaker 11 (28:36):
It depends what you're talking for. For American consumers, not
so much. Maybe for some people. It depends what your
aims are.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
If your aim is to crash the United States economy
as it.
Speaker 11 (28:47):
Going, yeah, that probably helps if that's one of your aims.
It's been really interesting so far, because up until a
couple of days ago, I think you would have said
those not so much. A sign of that happening. We
got these massive, massive revisions to the labor force numbers,
came out the Bureau for Labor Statistics, which really sort
(29:08):
of changed the analysis of what people think has happened
in the last few months April and May.
Speaker 7 (29:13):
In particular, the employment number is much worse than.
Speaker 11 (29:16):
People had thought, and it sort of does paint a
picture of a labor market that's been weighed on by
the tariff news a lot more than the previous numbers did.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
So explain to us what that means.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Like, I thought it was pretty interesting that we had
all of these Trump apologists saying that in fact, it
was not the trade wars but instead AI that was
causing this is an AI that's causing.
Speaker 11 (29:43):
It, I'd be surprised if it's AI. Frankly, there's been
a lot of discussion about this, but I still think
it's more of a prospective thing. Looking forward, you might
start to see that showing up in some areas where
white collar employment at the really entry level, you might
expect that to slow down. That's not really what we're
(30:04):
seeing in the job numbers at the moment. I do
think there is a little bit more of an indication
that the tariffs are weighing on things, partly because the
uncertainty of what's going on at the moment, Even if
you leave aside the fact that it's bad policy, that
the tariffs are a bad policy, the bad for American consumers,
they're bad for American businesses, even American exporters, because they
can't be the imported parts they need to make the
(30:25):
products that they're actually selling. Even if you leave that aside,
just the pure uncertainty of the economic impact, because there's
been so much sort of volatility in what people are
expecting from the tariffs, is going to weigh on those decisions.
If you are thinking of hiring ten people, so you've
got a small business, you employ ten people, you're thinking
of expanding to doubling the size, are you going to
wait to make that decision or are you gonna make
(30:47):
it now right with the aftermath of all the tariffs,
all the announcements, everything so and cert if you have
any exposure to those sort of supply chains, you're gonna wait, basically,
or you're very likely to wait relative to what you
might have been thinking in March or February, which is
going to weigh on the unemployment numbers.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Undoubtedly, the whole point of this exercise was to bring
manufacturing back to the United States. These tariffs were supposed
to create a manufacturing boom.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Have they in fact done that.
Speaker 11 (31:17):
No, But if you look at the structure of American manufacturing,
I think there's a sort of there's an idea that
lots of people have built up, and it's built up
from I think the sort of twenty years after the
Second World War in the US, where the US really
was a manufacturing type, it made huge amounts of items
that it was dominant in. If you look at something
(31:39):
like cars, US production of cars was something like eighty
or ninety percent of the global total, So you've got,
you know, a single city, Detroit making a majority of
the world's cars. Nothing has worked like that for a
long time. And if you listen to manufacturing groups, what
they'll say about the tariffs is is very very clear
that they need inputs, imported inputs to make the items
(32:03):
they sell, either that they sell domestically or that they export.
And what there has been this very sort of shuden
Freuder trend of is manufacturers coming out and saying things like, oh,
you know, you can just buy American. You know, we're
pro American label, we're pro American manufacturing, so we're happy
with these tariffs, and then two three months down the
line actually looking at the way their businesses operate and saying, oh,
(32:26):
actually it was a bit more complicated than that. It
turns out we import a lot more than we'd expected,
and you know, we're going to have to raise prices
or we're having serious difficulty. There's big bottlenecks here. So
funnily enough, these American manufacturers are first people to suffer
because they're the most regular, immediate importers. You're going to
see a sort of delayed reaction with consumers because the
(32:48):
inventories take.
Speaker 7 (32:48):
A while to work through. You know, this warehoused goods.
Speaker 11 (32:52):
A lot of people imported as many these items as
they could before the tariffs came in. But for the
smaller American manufacturing businesses that need a sort of constant
stream of this stuff, they've been hit pretty immediately by this.
So not only is it not good for them, but
in the grand scheme of things, it's pretty bad that
some of the first victims.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
I think everything's changing so much. I still don't understand
what tariffs are on, what tariffs are off, Like, how
are the tariffs with Lesotel give us this sort of
four one one on where we are with tariffs.
Speaker 11 (33:20):
Sure, so I think you've got to keep there's a
lot of good graphs going around. It's basically two lines
or two numbers you've got to keep in mind. One
is the number of where US tariffs are going to
go to. So all of the you know, quote unquote
deals coming out these sort of fairly flimsy agreements with
other countries for.
Speaker 7 (33:38):
Various tariff rates.
Speaker 11 (33:40):
They'll come into force over time, depending on what they're
negotiated for. And for example, you know the EU, one's
going to be a flat fifteen percent on most things.
Same with Japan it's going to be ten percent. Of
the UK it's going to vary. There's been a lot
of talk about a much higher number potentially for India.
Speaker 7 (33:57):
Those are sort of coming in slowly over time.
Speaker 11 (33:59):
The the effective average tariff rate on US imports now
is about eight or nine percent and is steadily climbing
with each passing month. So the actual number that American businesses,
American consumers are going to pay is just ratcheting up
higher and higher as the various tariffs begin to properly
come into force. Those are the two things I think
(34:20):
you need to really keep an eye on. So there's
lots of people investors who got very excited that, you know,
the tariff rates that were announced in April are being
reduced in various deals, or they're being delayed or whatever.
But the reality on the ground and for actual American
customs American imports, is that tariffs are sort of ratcheting
(34:41):
up with each passing month, and you'll only see the
full economic effect of that over time as these two
sort of lines join one another, and a lot of
that isn't currently being paid and it will be paid eventually.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Does the consumer end up having to pay these tariffs
right now?
Speaker 2 (34:59):
We're sort of in a moment where there has.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
Been like a lot of things were already bought, and
then also the administration has bullied a lot of companies
into not raising their prices or not being transparent about tariffs.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
But that can go on forever, right.
Speaker 11 (35:15):
Yeah, totally, And all the best literature on this, all
the best economics literature shows effectively the same thing every time,
which is you might get some compression of the margins
of the companies that produce the goods.
Speaker 7 (35:29):
So say you've got a European car maker, they.
Speaker 11 (35:32):
Might take a small hit on their profit to keep
market access, and then you've got a distributor in the US,
they might take a small hit on their profits as well.
But in a long term tarists are overwhelmingly paid. The
incidence falls on the consumer that's buying them, right. This
is one of the most consistent findings in economic literature,
(35:53):
full stop. It's one of the few things that you know,
almost all economists really agree on, is where the incidents
of this falls. It falls on the consumer. This will
eventually feed through be the case. What I think is
interesting is how much sort of economic damage it has,
and particularly how salient it is by the time of
(36:13):
the next presidential election, and I suppose by that midterms
as well. It presume it is going to be salient
at the time of the midterms, because I think that's
going to matter a lot to how long lasting the
tariffs are. You know, during the twenty twenty election, for example,
tariffs weren't an enormous issue in that election, and a
lot of them ended up being kept, which is a
sort of particular outcome. You know, it's quite difficult politically
(36:36):
to reduce tariffs. You have companies that have gotten used
to them that have reoriented their supply chains.
Speaker 7 (36:41):
It's quite a difficult political cell.
Speaker 11 (36:43):
If it's a huge issue, If it causes a recession,
and this is a big issue at the time of
the next year's election, then I can imagine some of
these tariffs being repealed at some large international agreements to
do so. If there isn't a recession, if there's just
a sort of slow down, or it's a little bit
harder to identify the tariffs as the obvious cause, and
it's not a big issue at the next election, then
it's much harder to imagine a future administration really peeling
(37:06):
these tariffs back, which is concerning if you're someone who thinks,
you know, the terrorists shouldn't have come in the first place,
that they should be reduced to free traded is relatively good.
Speaker 7 (37:15):
That's a big concern.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Yet once the sort of prices go up, there's no
way to put the genie back in the vinyl. We
find ourselves in a situation where things are more expensive,
they will continue to be more expensive. This money will
be paid into some kind. It'll be like a corporate tax,
but it's really like a sales tax because it's a
tax on the things you buy, right, I mean, so,
(37:40):
isn't this just sort of like the same as a
flat sales tax and the money actually does, in fact
go to the government.
Speaker 11 (37:48):
It's the same as a flat sales tax in the
sense that it's a hit to consumption. The only problem
is it's distortionary, right that it only applies to production
done overseas. It doesn't apply to American product, which is
why economists tend not to like it when they're much
more in favor of sales and consumption taxes. You know,
there's lots of people that talk optimistically about how maybe
(38:09):
this could be tweaked into some sort of American vat.
I don't personally think that that's going to happen. I
think it looks quite difficult to happen. On the revenue
raising part, this is the most difficult thing, right, which
is the reality that despite the demand destruction they're here
to the American consumer, the damage the supply chains, this
is going to raise revenue. It is going to raise
(38:30):
hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue, and it's going
to be very, very difficult for any future administration to
give that up. America runs a six to seven percent
of GDP deficit, which at a time of relatively full
employment in peacetime, there's no lockdowns going on at the moment.
This is an insanely large amount of money, and the
(38:51):
idea of a future administration coming in and saying we're
going to volunteer to get rid of several hundred billion
dollars a tax revenue is really really difficult to mention.
That will be one of the biggest problems in sort
of taking a step back where we are right now.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
But that assumes that this doesn't lead to a financial crisis.
Speaker 11 (39:11):
Yeah, I mean definitely, it presumes I think if you
get a recession and you get sort of public sentiment
that this is hugely damaging.
Speaker 7 (39:19):
But yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
It's hard for me to imagine that most Americans are
going to eat a twenty five hundred dollars increase in
all their expenses and that they a have the money
for it. I think the biggest problem for trumpsm in
some way is that it's not going to work, so
these people aren't going to be able to afford it. Oh,
I was going to say the biggest problem with trump
(39:42):
Ism is that the public market seem to love him
no matter what he does, they seem to just not
react to inflation. And I think that is part of
why we're getting so much trouble.
Speaker 11 (39:55):
Yeah, and I think part of that is down to
the fact that you have these two stories going on
at the moment, right, these two narratives, one of which
is you've got an American economy that is both inflation
looks relatively sticky, the labor markets no longer improving in
a significant way, so you'd likely get a.
Speaker 7 (40:14):
Sort of growth slow down.
Speaker 11 (40:16):
At the same time, you've got the tariffs really beginning
to bite, and we know that they're going to bite
further and further.
Speaker 7 (40:22):
Down the line.
Speaker 11 (40:23):
And the fact that this is, you know, a sort
of as close to the central political issue for the
president as you could possibly get. Right, this is a
consistent view that you's had for forty years on trade
related stuff.
Speaker 7 (40:36):
There's no way they're budgeting from this.
Speaker 11 (40:38):
At the same time, you are this other narrative, which
is what's happening in financial markets, which is all of
these massive tech companies are going to be the primary benefits,
by a primary beneficiaries from this colossal AI build out
and the expansion of AI related stuff. So you have
this weird sort of the reality of what is happening
right now I think everyone would agree does look great,
(41:00):
and then the vision of what's going to happen in
the future it seems extremely rosy and interesting and positive.
And that's why you have this huge market disconnect from
I think sentiment and perhaps what's happening in the real
economy right now. It is a huge gap, and it's
difficult to see that getting resolved actually unless the AI
(41:21):
story really sort of bursts.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
Because right now the stocks that are driving the market
higher are these tech stocks. It feels like AI could
be just a sort of endless cycle of wells creation.
It won't matter that manufacturing and is in the toilet,
but sooner or later consumer spending will fall to such
(41:45):
a level that it will be recessionary.
Speaker 7 (41:47):
That's the big question.
Speaker 11 (41:48):
And I think basically what's happening in the markets in
the moment is very much the presumption that we don't
get a recession. The presumption is that you might get
a slow down, but no bigger recession, no financial crisis.
This stuff is all just going to be worked for
over time. I no, we're heading into such a bright
future and that the AI build out and stuff is
going to be so expansiory that it's not going to
(42:09):
matter as much. Now, I would say that's the sort
of bold bet the markers come back a lot more
than I would have expected to, even in a sort
of recovery scenario. Like remember the last time we spoke,
and remember how this looked dead, And where we are now.
You know the S and P's record highs. You know,
pretty much every day a lot of these tech stocks
have rallied enormously this year. It just feels like a
(42:31):
different universe to where we were in the middle of April.
Despite the fact that the reason things went bad in
the middle of April was the tariff stuff, and on
that front, not all that much has changed. You know,
You've had a bit of a climbed up, but you're
still going to have the highest tariffs that you've had
in many, many decades in the US. It's still going
to squeeze consumer spending. You're still going to wind up
US allies, it's still going to wreck supply chains that
(42:54):
exist at the moment. And yet everyone the narrative has
shifted when people have sort of decided they don't care
so much about this and it can all be worked through,
and it sort of handwaving situation relative to the very
optimistic future for these big tech companies.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
It seems bad.
Speaker 7 (43:09):
It's tough. If they're right about the AI stuff, then
maybe it doesn't.
Speaker 11 (43:13):
Matter, right if you look at the stocks, when you
look at the companies that are really affected by this stuff,
it's not like Nike, which is just sort of ruined
by tarifs like these a serious, serious damage to a
major importing business. It's not like they're trading at like
distant record highs and doing incredibly well.
Speaker 7 (43:29):
It's all these.
Speaker 11 (43:30):
Companies that are like Nvidio, like Meta, like Google, where
you know they have exposure overseas, but it's mostly through
selling digital services to foreigners, right, it's not they have
to bring in huge amounts of material that goes through
customs into the country and basically it's just allowed this
(43:50):
sort of Yeah, this total bifurcation in people's views of
what's happening.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
It's really interesting that one of the other trade problems
is chemicals.
Speaker 1 (43:59):
Is the mens is the China's punishing of the United States.
Can you talk us through the danger of these because
so China has these rare earth minerals who can't get
them anywhere else.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
They are not shipping them to the States. I mean,
how does that end?
Speaker 7 (44:16):
It's tough.
Speaker 11 (44:17):
I mean, basically, this has been I think a much
stronger card for Chinese negotiators in the trade negotiations than
people had understood before Trump came back into office. I
think the sort of conventional thinking was that the US
is actually able to squeeze Chinese negotiators more than in
the other direction because Chinese producers sell so much more
(44:39):
to the US than goes in the other direction. But
actually things have changed even since the first Trump administration,
and certainly since you know a lot of people set
their views of what Chinese manufacturing in Chinese trade looks
like sort of twenty years ago. China does have a
sort of critical dominance in some of these industries. You know,
when you talk about rare as things like magne and
(45:00):
that's important in various kinds of industry. They have built
a supply chain that means they're basically the only providers
of these things.
Speaker 7 (45:09):
Now.
Speaker 11 (45:09):
I think a enlightened US trade policy could have seen
this coming quite a long time ago. You know, there
are the other sort of industrial and commodity exporting countries
in Asia which are either neutral or pretty close security
partners with the US, I think would have been very
(45:30):
happy over time, in exchange for some market access to
the US, to have engaged in the establishment of separate
supply chains to these things, because often when we talk
about rare earths, it's not that the actual commodity is
wildly rare, and it's certainly not often that the commodity
is only found in the ground in China. This is
a question of processing things that are found in lots
(45:53):
of different places, or even looking for them in the
first place. So it's not something that's sort of a
facet of nature that China has to be dominant in
these areas. There is a lack of planning, and you know,
I lived in Singapore and Hong Kong for a long time.
I would travel to Korea and Japan and all over
the place, and you'd have manufacturers and politicians gripe that,
(46:14):
you know, why were the US government helpers on this stuff?
Why can't we get some sort of partnership going on?
And it didn't seem, honestly like anything that use. Certainly,
the last Trump administration was interesting. It didn't always seem
like the Biden administration was that interested in that side
of things. In terms of the realignment on trade. They
were very interested in having these companies invest in the US,
(46:36):
but less so in establishing as sort of relationship in Asia.
Speaker 7 (46:40):
So that was always very difficult.
Speaker 11 (46:42):
And I think it's part of what's given China this
very strong hand on the rare's issue, which makes life
difficult for American manufacturers as well. You know, these are
really really severe bottlenecks if they can't get hold of them,
and then not supply chase that you can whip up overnight.
These are things that people should have been thinking about
and engaging in a little time ago.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
Mike Bird, thank Yale.
Speaker 7 (47:04):
Thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (47:07):
No moment ou Jesse Cannon, so male.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
He's some of the most dismaying news we've had come
out of Washington in a while. Is RFK Junior deciding
that his pet project to get rid of mRNA vaccines
has gone through?
Speaker 4 (47:23):
He's getting rid of them? What are you seeing here?
Speaker 1 (47:26):
Yeah, so you'll remember that RFK Junior said he wasn't
going to do that, He wasn't going to take away vaccine.
So far he's removed the COVID vaccine recommendation, he's fired
the CDC Vaccine Committee, he's replaced scientists with anti vaxers,
he's canceled vaccine hesitancy research, and he's pulled five hundred
(47:47):
million dollars in mRNA vaccine research. And he's pulled five
hundred million dollars in r ofm A research. So I
think he is in fact an anti vax And by
the way, mRNA vaccines are the future of fighting cancer.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
So there we go.
Speaker 1 (48:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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