As Election Day approaches, Peggy Bailey from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities joins Paul and Goldy to discuss the devastating potential effects of the House Republican agenda and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. The proposals, supported by candidates who will be on your ballot this November, include a wholesale dismantling of federal government programs, cutting benefits, shifting costs to states, and penalizing working families in order to slash taxes for the rich. Bailey reveals the massive economic disinvestment and inherent racism and discrimination in the trickle-down agenda of Project 2025 and the House Republican agenda, even as she emphasizes the need for the federal government to revitalize the economy from the bottom up with investments in those who have been marginalized.

Peggy Bailey is the Executive Vice President of Policy and Program Development at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She previously served in the Biden-Harris Administration as the Senior Advisor on Rental Assistance to HUD Secretary Marcia L. Fudge. She also served as the Director of Health and Housing Integration for the Corporation for Supportive Housing, where she focused on Medicaid expansion and finding sustainable funding sources for the services that people with histories of homelessness and chronic health conditions need to maintain their housing.

Twitter: @PeggyBaileyDC  @CenterOnBudget

Further reading: 

Report from the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities: House Republican Agendas and Project 2025 Would Increase Poverty and Hardship, Drive Up the Uninsured Rate, and Disinvest From People, Communities, and the Economy

Stop Project 2025 Comic Book 

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Speaker 1:

The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.

Speaker 2:

It’s time to build our economy from the bottom up and from the middle out, not the top down.

Speaker 1:

Middle-out economics is the answer.

Speaker 2:

Because Wall Street didn’t build this country. Great middle class built this country.

Speaker 1:

The more the middle class thrives, the better the economy is for everyone, even rich people like me.

Speaker 3:

This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.

Goldy:

Paul.

Paul:

Hello, how are you?

Goldy:

I’m great. I’m sure you’ve seen it. I know you’ve seen it because we’re in the same text threads, the cover of the Economist of all places today. They have a special report on America’s economy and the title, the headline on the cover is The Envy of the World. The American Economy is the envy of the world after four years of Joe Biden and the end of neoliberalism and governing from the middle out and investing in the American people and in public infrastructure and in climate technology and in bringing manufacturing back home, our economy is the envy of the world. And so that’s why, Paul, on today’s episode, we are going to discuss proposals to dismantle all of that.

Paul:

Well, Halloween is coming up, right? So it’s time for some scary stories.

Goldy:

Oh my God. And is this a horror show today. We should release this on Halloween. It would be the scariest episode of the season. This is the episode in which we talk in detail about what Republicans are promising to do and not just the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which Trump now disclaims, even though it was written by all these Trump people explicitly in advance of a new Trump administration, but also the House Budget Committee controlled by Republicans and the Republican Study Commission. They have proposed budgets. We’re going to go through the Republican agenda. This is what they’re promising and you like any of it, Paul?

Paul:

I am not a fan of Project 2025 or the other policies. I mean, this is one of those things that when I first heard about it, I just couldn’t believe that they put it in writing and that in fact the Heritage Foundation was so aggressively promoting it. That’s the shocker, that they thought this was a winner. They had books coming out that JD Vance wrote the foreword for or the introduction, and they went on a speaking tour. They were kind of like applauding themselves before they cross the finish line. It’s a very bizarre way for a behind the scenes supposed policy organization to act, I think.

Goldy:

You got to admire the confidence of sociopaths, Paul. It is a marvel to behold, but hearing you talk, I don’t think now that I can trust you to give an unbiased description of it. So fortunately we have a guest who has looked into it in detail. Peggy Bailey is the executive vice president of policy and program development at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She previously served in the Biden-Harris administration as the senior advisor on rental assistance, and she’s also served as the director of health and housing integration for the Corporation for Supportive Housing where she focused on Medicaid expansion and finding sustainable funding sources for services that people with histories of homelessness and chronic health conditions need to maintain their housing.

Goldy:

She has gone through these proposals line by line and produced a detailed report of what it would cost, not just in dollars, which is immense because as you know, it’s a lot of tax cuts for the rich and corporations, but also the human cost on the American people and the American economy.

Paul:

I respect her bravery for going through every page of these things. It seems like if I were to do that, I would wind up like a character in an H. P. Lovecraft story who gazed into the abyss and life became an eternal nightmare afterwards. So I’m really curious to hear what she has to say.

Goldy:

Well, let’s talk to Peggy.

Peggy Bailey:

Hi, Peggy Bailey. I’m the executive vice president for policy and program development at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That means that I oversee alongside our president and CEO Sharon Parrott our policy agenda, both our federal policy work and the work that we do at the state level trying to help advocates influence state policy, whether it’s around budget and tax, but also increasingly in the same areas that we work on federal work, housing, healthcare, food assistance, immigration work, and of course budget and tax policy.

Goldy:

Recently, you took a bullet for the rest of us in that you’re not just looking at the type of policy that you want to do, but you actually went through the Republican proposals, including the Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025. If you could just, I don’t know, broadly describe what the Republican agenda would be if they had complete control.

Peggy Bailey:

Sure. So right, in addition to making sure we’re four things, we need to make sure to point out the things that people really need to fight against, especially those of us who are interested in helping people with the lowest incomes be able to live lives that are not just stable, but to be able to thrive. And so the overriding thing to understand is exactly where you were headed, that Project 2025 is part of a suite of Republican proposals that all have the same themes, have the same policies, and are moving in a direction that really benefits the wealthy and wealthy corporations and shifts a lot of the burden to low and middle income families.

Peggy Bailey:

Big picture, there are a few ways that we’ve kind of organized the elements of Project 2025. The first thing to know is that these proposals would cut benefits, benefits that people have right now and benefits that they rely on, whether it’s cutting access to health insurance, cutting access to food, housing, blocking people who are immigrants from being able to come to this country and live the American dream. There are ways that the proposals would seriously undermine people’s ability to keep benefits that they already have.

Peggy Bailey:

The second thing that these proposals would do is shift costs from the federal government to state’s governments. We know that when the federal government doesn’t live up to its responsibilities, it’s states and localities that then bear the burden. One example of this is in the homelessness space, where the federal government doesn’t provide universal rental assistance and therefore many people are living on the streets because they can’t afford a place to live. It’s states and localities that are trying to address that problem when the federal government really does need to step up to put its resources behind that problem.

Peggy Bailey:

The third thing that it would do is shift the tax burden from wealthy corporations and wealthy people to middle and low income people by continuing and making deeper the tax cuts to the wealthy that were included in the 2017 tax bill while not providing any positive tax relief to low and middle income families.

Peggy Bailey:

The fourth thing that the proposals would uniformly do is simply undermine the federal government in totality, getting rid of agency’s wholesale, hurting our ability to provide safe food, safe water, healthcare, protect fair housing rights, things like that would be undermined with the lack of investment. One thing that’s overarching everything that you can’t shy away from is the racism and discrimination that is inherent in all of these proposals. They may look colorblind, but their impact is most definitely not and would disproportionately impact people of color.

Paul:

One of the rebuttals I’ve heard to conversations about Project 2025 is that every presidential candidate makes promises and they don’t follow through on them. Do we have confidence that these are policies that Trump would pass in a hypothetical second term, or if Trump wins the presidency and there’s a Democratic House, would that offer a check to the proposals?

Peggy Bailey:

Well, that’s why it’s important to understand that Project 2025 is just one data point in the overall extreme Republican agenda. In our report, we highlight the Republican Study Committee’s budget proposals, we highlight the House Budget Committee’s recent resolution. Those three things put together along with evidence of recent legislative activity, show that this isn’t about the current presidential election so much as part of a steady strategy that extreme Republicans have. If you think about the Dobbs decision and the reversal of Roe, that was a 50-year march to get to the place we are today. We should think about these proposals that would punish people with low and middle incomes and benefit the wealthy and wealthy corporations as part of that same sort of consistent steady march that we need to work against.

Goldy:

And to be clear, this isn’t about fiscal responsibility. It’s not like, “Oh, we’ve got to make the tough choices in order to balance the budget and get our books in order.” It creates massive deficits at the same time that it defunds the federal government, disinvests in the American people and just makes cuts, and we’ll go into some of the details, cuts to programs that people just take for granted, but it’s just huge deficits come out of this due to the tax cuts for wealthy and corporation side of this.

Peggy Bailey:

Exactly. Another piece that has to be considered is the lack of raising revenue in any of these strategies. The three proposals that I highlighted would repeal parts of the Inflation Reduction Act that call for increased spending in the IRS as an example. So it’s not only cutting taxes for the wealthy and wealthy corporations, but cutting the federal government’s ability to enforce the tax rules that are on the books. And that’s just one way that these agendas don’t think about the need to raise revenue because it’s just unfathomable to think that in the wealthiest country in the world, we can’t take care of people with low incomes.

Peggy Bailey:

We know that it isn’t their fault necessarily that they have low incomes. They’re working, they’re not getting paid wages that allow them to afford to meet their basic needs or they face inabilities to be able to work and federal benefits like Social Security don’t pay high enough for them to afford their basic needs. Therefore, it is the government’s role to fill in that gap until we do create the structures to have living wages in either through work or through public benefits. And so that mindset of the pie is only so big so we can’t afford to do this. Just really when you think about the wealth in this country and the disproportionate way that economic justice shows up, we can make the changes if we want to.

Paul:

It seems like a lot of these issues that you’re talking about in the report, healthcare, education, housing, these are issues that don’t just affect the lowest portion of the economy. It also affects middle-class families as well. Do you have any information about how these cuts and restructuring in Project 2025 threaten the economic security of middle-class American families?

Peggy Bailey:

Yes. One of the key examples is in the healthcare space actually where it is possible from these proposals that four million people with middle incomes could lose their health insurance because they lose access to premium tax credits that help them afford care through the Affordable Care Act. Another thing to think about too is how many of us are helping family members who might be on Social Security or family members who might be accessing other benefits? It could strain any of us who have middle or higher incomes as well because our family members might need extra support.

Goldy:

It also, when it comes to healthcare, it basically allows insurers to discriminate again based on pre-existing conditions, which was just a horrible feature of the old system. And one of the most popular things about the Affordable Care Act is the fact that pre-existing conditions don’t prevent you from getting coverage or raise your insurance.

Peggy Bailey:

Yeah, that’s right. That’s one of the most popular pieces of the Affordable Care Act. And along those lines, it would allow for junk plans to enter into the market, plans that barely cover people and might seem like a good deal because they’re inexpensive, but in the end, don’t actually cover people’s needs should a crisis arise, and then all the people that get put into those junk plans would be out of other plans that could potentially make the whole system more expensive.

Paul:

I mean, we could be here all day talking about all of these various features.

Goldy:

Features, you say features, I say litany of horrors.

Paul:

Yeah, yeah. But Project 2025 also aims at environmental and labor protections, rolling those back. Could you talk a little bit about how that ties into broader economic inequality and also who would benefit the most from these changes?

Peggy Bailey:

Starting with who would benefit the most from these changes. It is part of the general theme of the proposals that the plans would benefit people who are well-resourced and companies who are already wealthy, making them wealthier. The interaction between the labor protections and environmental protections and general trying to work toward economic justice. The Republican plans would undermine the federal government’s ability to impact the environment to continue to help enhance the workplace in ways that feed into this narrative that the federal government is ineffective. And then, okay, so then we’re going to cut funding and undermine it, which then keeps this loop going around the overall narrative of the federal government being ineffective rather than investing in climate and labor protections and climate in particular.

Peggy Bailey:

We can see already the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act and the historic investments in climate and environmental protection policies that are already having an impact on the overall economy and this connection between the jobs that people can have in the future as technology takes over many jobs that people would once had and moves to a place where the environmental policy, climate policy, the ways that we’re overcoming the climate crisis allows that labor force to shift into those spaces without that future looking space for where the workforce should move will create problems we already see in some communities, particularly in rural places where there wasn’t the ability to adapt to the changing, the ways that the world was moving away from manpower to technology, and those places are very depressed right now and are struggling to survive as communities.

Goldy:

Looking at this list, and it’s long, and again, we’ll provide a link in the show notes and we encourage people to go through this so that you don’t need to read Project 2025 and the other budget reports all by yourself because oh my God, again, thank you for doing the nasty, dirty work for us. But you look at this-

Peggy Bailey:

[inaudible 00:19:30] the team on that one [inaudible 00:19:30].

Goldy:

But you look at this, it’s everything from ending Head Start to ending assistance for low-income seniors and people with disabilities through SSI to slashing SNAP, what a lot of people consider food stamps to stigmatizing low-income children who get free school lunch, eliminating those lunches during the summer. What we talked about with healthcare, eliminating, I think it was 17 million people would be cut from Medicaid and it goes on and on and on, and it’s clearly selfish, mean-spirited, racist. But I’m curious, do you see a coherent economic philosophy behind this? Because it’s obvious that the House Budget Committee, the RSC, the Republican Study Committee, what does that stand for?

Peggy Bailey:

The Republican Study Committee.

Goldy:

The Republican Study Committee and Project 2025, they are largely going in the same direction. Each of them have their own little specifics that might differ a little bit, but it’s definitely part of a unified program. Is there an economic philosophy that runs through this? Are they explaining why this might be a good thing to do for the country or is the point of it just to be cruel?

Peggy Bailey:

I definitely can’t speak to them and they’re overriding theory of the case, but the way that it resonates with me is the cruelty part, is the idea that we have to punish people for not having enough money to meet their basic needs. It is the idea that we just don’t have to take care of each other, and it’s an underwriting theme that capitalism solves all problems by itself and that free markets are the way to solve all of the country’s problems when we know that that’s not the case. And for people to be able to meet their basic needs, whether it’s housing or healthcare, there is a need for the federal government to play a role to shore things up for people because healthcare and housing and access to food are basic human rights that everyone needs in order to live stable, solid lives and have a foundation for thriving.

Peggy Bailey:

The other piece is that it is inherent in the system that there are going to be some people who have less than through no fault of their own, and some of it is circumstances that are pre-described. It is not fair that your zip code can dictate how your health and help and have me be able to predict some of the worst outcomes are likely for you. It is not fair that throughout this country’s history, we’ve prevented Black people from being able to have access to housing or access to certain jobs. It is not fair that women don’t make the same amount of money in jobs that their male counterparts do. There is nothing inherent to being a woman that means you should get paid less. So while we work to correct those inequities, it is my belief that it is fundamental to the federal government that they shore things up for people who have been disenfranchised and need help just basically meeting their basic needs.

Goldy:

Most of their proposals, as we know, run counter to the available and empirical evidence of what actually works. I mean, it’s just amazing every time they try to eliminate Head Start, it’s one of the most successful programs ever. It’s just there’s all these studies showing how it creates these lifelong benefits, not just for the children who go through it and their families, but lifelong benefits that end up growing tax revenue and reducing costs on government and improving outcomes for everybody involved. So we’ve talked a lot about all the bad stuff. What should we do instead? What would a fairer and more empirically supported economic agenda look like?

Peggy Bailey:

Well, it would be taking a community-wide approach to the way that we support people. A lot of the bat within these extreme Republican proposals comes out of an idea that if you have something, then you’re taking something away from me, so I have to give you less so that I can have more. Well, let’s shift that instead and recognize that if we help people, we all do better. One of the ways that we can do that is by expanding and increasing the Child Tax Credit. That is one of many examples where we learned in the pandemic we can make a true difference in families’ lives. The pandemic relief packages included things like expanding the Child Tax Credit, eviction prevention dollars, housing rental assistance for people experiencing homelessness, other additional food assistance, and we rallied and showed that through this suite of programs and giving people more resources, we were able to cut poverty by more than half.

Peggy Bailey:

So it shouldn’t take a pandemic to teach us what really works. Another thing from the pandemic we should have learned is that there are people who are making way too low of salaries that we depend on to get groceries at the grocery store and feed us at restaurants, and those jobs are essential, and teachers, the hoops and miracles that teachers had to implement during the pandemic. And those jobs are still there, we still need it, still don’t make enough money and need the same supports that we provided during the pandemic, not because of the pandemic, but because these jobs are really important and that we’re not paying people enough to be able to work in them.

Peggy Bailey:

So the Child Tax Credit is one positive piece of the agenda that we should be moving forward. Another thing is to be able to keep the summer food program that has been created where kids have additional access to food during the summer months. We also, during the pandemic, created an emergency housing voucher program for people experiencing homelessness, more resources for rental assistance so that we can truly end homelessness is another part of a positive agenda.

Goldy:

Right, and that’s one of the distinctions between, I don’t want to get into a political conversation here, but between the two competing sets of proposals. Obviously expanding the Child Tax Credit is a feature of Harris’s economic plan, whereas dramatically cutting support for the earned income tax credit and the Child Tax Credit. Again, two programs that are shown to be really efficient and effective. That seems to be throughout all the Republican proposals.

Paul:

We usually ask something we call the benevolent dictator question, which is, if you had ultimate power, what would you do? But I think in terms of the subject matter today, we might flip that into a malevolent dictator question, which is what kind of policies would you propose to prevent a future presidential administration from enacting a plan that would tear down government the way Project 2025 would? Are there any policies you’d recommend to ensure that some future president doesn’t try to turn into a dictator? Can Project 2025 proof our government?

Goldy:

That’s a hypothetical, right?

Paul:

Yes. Yeah.

Goldy:

Paul, you’re not thinking of anybody in particular?

Paul:

Of course not. Certainly not.

Goldy:

Okay.

Peggy Bailey:

So I think the key piece of all of this is to make sure that we are doing the work with Congress to help them understand the evidence behind the positive things that work, like the Child Tax Credit expansion, like giving families better access to food and cash supports in general, like housing assistance so that when they create legislation, they’re making these things permanent. They’re permanently expanding the Child Tax Credit. They’re permanently providing universal rental assistance. That way we understand what the priorities are for the country. We know that the resources will be there for the long term. It allows states and localities to be able to invest in the places where there are gaps and know that things like rental assistance will be paid for, so maybe they should invest in housing supply and better quality housing. That is really the way to shore these things up, whether it’s about protecting against a dictator so much as making sure that American families know what supports they have and don’t have to question whether the federal government is behind them and wants them to do well.

Goldy:

And do you think, Paul, get to the final question?

Paul:

Yep.

Goldy:

Oh, since Nick’s not here, I’m going to ask it this time. Since he usually hogs that one up. Why do you do this work?

Peggy Bailey:

That’s a great question and I’m really glad that you asked it. I have done a lot of thinking about what is my why, and I am really happy to be at an organization where I can fully flesh out my why. I am an African American woman who grew up in what was then a rural place in Texas. Now, it’s a suburb of Dallas. I benefited from federal programs. I was born in the early ’70s, and we were able to move from a place that still today actually is one of those zip codes I mentioned that you can predict really not great outcomes for kids. We were able to use benefits from HUD at the time that were trying to promote fair housing opportunities in suburban communities where we were able to buy a house and move into that small community where I thrived and got to be where I am today.

Peggy Bailey:

But the frustrating part for me is that over 50 years later, there’s still kids growing up in that place where I moved from that don’t have the same access to things that will help them achieve the things that I’ve been able to achieve, and that those kids are Black kids and in this country, the way that racism and discrimination have shown up, it is a situation whereby the grace of God go I. I live that every day knowing that it wouldn’t have taken much for me to be living in a much different situation and to have to struggle and feel like this country is working against me. That’s what I’m trying to correct is to make sure that this government is the wind behind these kids, especially Black kids, instead of a force that they’re having to fight against day after day after day.

Goldy:

Well, we thank you for your work.

Peggy Bailey:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Goldy:

My main takeaway from this, Paul, I think is the one, it was Peggy’s as well is just the utter cruelty of these proposals. I mean, there’s no economic justification for it. I guess it’s the trickle down stuff that the way you grow the economy is just to cut taxes on the rich and on corporations and to deregulate everything and let the invisible hand of the market have its way, and we’ll all benefit. But it’s like, oh my God, it even gets to the point where they want to totally defund Amtrak, both subsidies and capital investments, as well as defund all federal money for public transit.

Goldy:

I mean, Amtrak is absolutely crucial to the economies of, well, on the Northeast Corridor. You couldn’t get around the Northeast Corridor without it. It carries so much traffic, but you know what? Screw them, a lot of them are blue states anyway, so we’re going to cut Amtrak and just the cutting SNAP and school lunches and the summer lunches and housing assistance. And the big thing is tying these programs to proving that you’ve got work when you need the most. It’s like saying, “Well, you know, we’re going to tie unemployment benefits to work. If you’re not working, you shouldn’t be getting unemployment benefits. You shouldn’t get housing assistance. You shouldn’t get SNAP. Your kids shouldn’t get school lunch because it’s a moral hazard and all that, Paul.” It’s just, it’s amazing.

Paul:

Well, yes, I mean, maybe at some point when we’re off mic, you can tell me how you really feel about this Goldy, but I think that it’s important to remember that this will also make a small handful of people phenomenally rich, like richer than we have seen. I mean, we already have people who are disgustingly rich, but this would elevate a whole new class of robber baron, I think by basically taking us back to a pre New Deal America, back to the 1900s, I guess you could say. For really rich people, we would be making America great again.

Goldy:

Right. That’s why one of their pet projects, of course, and people need to understand this, the cutting funding for the IRS. Why do you do that? Because it’s actually really difficult and expensive to investigate wealthy tax cheats. It’s basically like saying, “Oh, you got money. Don’t need to worry about it. IRS can’t investigate you because we’ve cut their funding.” It is so naked and transparent in what this is about. It’s, I don’t know, an economic coup. It is basically a plutocratic takeover of this country as if they haven’t already, they don’t already have outsized power, but what little tax they pay and what little support we provide to the American people, to working people, to the disadvantaged, to the middle class. No, we got to eliminate all that and increase the budget deficit by trillions of dollars over the next 10 years.

Goldy:

I think it was, was it Penn Wharton? Said that Trump’s proposals would increase the national debt by $7.5 trillion dollars, trillion dollars. In doing that, it’s not like you’re giving people money. No, you’re taking it away. It’s amazing. Again, we talk a lot about economic theory and economic policy on this podcast. The amazing thing is that a lot of the things that they are just so desperate to eliminate are programs that work, they have decades of proven results. There’s no programs that have proven to lift more children out of poverty than the Child Tax Credit and the earned income tax credit. And so of course, we need to get rid of that.

Goldy:

We’ve seen the tens of millions of people who have been added to the healthcare roles under the Affordable Care Act, so we need to undermine that. We’ve seen the results of the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act actually creating, bringing manufacturing back home and creating good jobs. So we need to get rid of that. Again, we mentioned it Head Start, there’s almost no program that’s more studied than Head Start. Head Start is the model for high quality early learning. And every study shows that it creates lifelong benefits, not just to the children, but to their communities. Better outcomes in nearly every category you can think of until you have to get rid of that.

Paul:

Well, Goldy, the good news not to be Pollyanna here, but the good news is that the more the American people hear about this, the less they like it. And so I think it’s really important to get the word out about Project 2025 and some of these other plans. I’m going to throw in something here that just came out this week that I really enjoyed. It is a comic book that was put together for free by volunteer comic artists and comic writers. You can download it for free at stopproject2025comic.org. And it’s some of my favorite comic creators, I’m a comic guy, putting together comics, explaining what the policies in Project 2025 are. It’s a really accessible, fun way to learn about this, and it’s free, and I have already sent it to some people I know who are not especially politically oriented, and it gotten a great response with it so far. So this is another way. Not everybody listens to economics podcasts.

Goldy:

Really?

Paul:

Unfortunately. Yeah, no, we’re still working on it.

Goldy:

I thought this is the way you actually serve the masses was through an economics podcast. I thought I was reaching the kitchen table.

Paul:

Yeah, well, it’s an important first step, but yeah, I’ll throw that in the show notes too. I think it’s a really important resource, and it’s an interesting way to communicate about issues like this.

Goldy:

Yeah, and we’ll provide a link to that comic book in the show notes along with a link to Peggy’s report. Just one final takeaway, Paul, and I just have to point this out, and I don’t have the polling in front of me, but one standout thing about this is how immensely unpopular these proposals are. I’ve seen polling on many of these in the past. I don’t have the numbers in front of me right now, but you could step through this. This is a very unpopular policy agenda, and when you have one of the two major parties with an economic policy agenda that is broadly despised, plank after plank after plank.

Paul:

That is horrifying to the population.

Goldy:

Right? This is not something that the American people are asking for. It’s just not. It tells you how broken that party is and how broken our democracy is that they can run on everything that they run on or things that nobody wants. It’s stunning. It is just, oh my God, so happy Halloween everybody.

Paul:

Yeah. What are you going as for Halloween, Goldy?

Goldy:

I’m going as a, I think I’ll just-

Paul:

I have an idea. I have an idea. I think I’m going to get you one of those silk boxing robes and on the back it’ll say, “The envy of the world.” And you can go as Biden’s economy.

Goldy:

I’m going to go as Bidenomics. That’s great. I like that. I will go as Bidenomics. Again, links in the show notes, and of course, we always appreciate it if you subscribe, leave a review, give us a good rating wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 7:

Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Threads at Pitchfork Economics. Nick’s on Twitter and Facebook as well, @NickHanauer.

Speaker 7:

For more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Pitch over on Substack. And for links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, visit our website, pitchforkeconomics.com. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.