 How do we reopen American society in a way that keeps people safe but also puts them back to work in school? One of the most realistic and workable plans comes from a team of policy analysts led by Ovik Roy, the president of the Austin, Texas-based Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. Even without widespread testing, a vaccine, or a cure, they argue that we should reopen schools and allow healthy younger workers to go back to work because COVID-19 kills mostly older people with pre-existing health problems who can be protected without shutting everything down. Roy argues that the massive expansion of government creates a further drag on the economy that is mostly invisible to DC bureaucrats and commentators. The more we lock down the economy, the more we harm those individuals who are most vulnerable who don't have the cash cushions or the white collar jobs that allow them to keep going, he says. Even as he is hopeful that many regulations that have been suspended during the pandemic will never return. Ovik, thanks for talking to reason. Hey, Nick. It's always a pleasure to be with you. How are you? You know, doing as well as I can. You are in Austin, Texas, right? I am, yep. Yeah. Okay. And I'm in New York. So, you know, it's weird. New York is the epicenter in America. Texas has been doing pretty well so far. Yeah. So, you know, talk about your plan. Why is it imperative that we open the economy as quickly as possible? Well, I mean, every single one of your listeners or viewers knows how much economic destruction has been robbed by the lockdowns. You know, everything that's going on the state, local, federal level, it's been incredible as of the time that we're recording this video. There have been, I think, 22 million new unemployment filings by Americans. The impact on economic output could be even greater than that. It's pretty much a catastrophe. We're at basically depression-level reduction in economic activity. Now, you might say, well, all that's worth it because we're stopping COVID-19, right? Well, that's the heart of the paper. The heart of the paper is that maybe we could use a more targeted effort to get the economy back online without this blunt force instrument of locking down everything. And also, by the way, we kind of need to because the core idea in our paper is that, you know, we've been told and there have been all these other papers that have said, well, you know, we just have to keep the economy locked down for a bit here. And once we get the testing going and we get a treatment developed for COVID-19 and we've developed more immunity as a community and we've developed a vaccine, or we're on our way to develop a vaccine, then it'll be fine and we can all, you know, unlock the common everything and go back to normal. The problem is there's a very good chance that we could fail at each one of those steps, let alone all of them at the same time. And any one of those steps, I should say, we're all involved at the same time. And so what happens if we don't get testing ramped up fast enough? What happens if we don't develop a treatment that works in the next couple of months? Maybe it takes six months, maybe it takes 12 months to develop an effective treatment? What then? Are we going to keep the economy shut down for 12 months? And our answer is no, we cannot. The economy shut down for 12 months. And therefore, we have to think about everything we can do to get the economy going again. So let's let's dilate a little bit on the economic kind of havoc that's been wrought so far in your paper. You talk about basically in the month of lockdown, the first month of lockdown, GDP or economic activity declined by about 30%. You mentioned 22 million unemployment filings. In the expansion that took place over the past decade, there were 23 million jobs created. So we're almost back to where we were circa about 2010. What are the costs? You know, part of part of what's going on so far is that the discussion understandably so has been mostly focused on the health outcomes. You know, people are dying. We want to stop people from dying. What are the health outcomes that are related to a depleted or a decimated economic sector? Well, there is actually a lot of academic research on the topic of what happens when you have higher unemployment rates, for example, that there's an increase in mortality due to a higher unemployment. Now, there are some conflicting, you know, countervailing arguments that like or evidence such as, you know, if you really shut down the economy. Yes, you in and of itself, you might have higher unemployment due to deaths of despair and things like that. But because nobody is driving or fewer people are driving, maybe if you were trafficked. Yeah, I mean, it's very complicated to do a true, even a fake true cost benefit analysis, but it deserves to be done. But there is a cost. And I would say more importantly than the cost in terms of fatalities is the human cost of keeping people out of work, right? We all know and there's mounting evidence of the value of work and gainful employment apart from, you know, just, you know, deaths and things like that. So there's a lot of there's a enormous human cost. And by the way, you know, let's not forget that there's also a cost to the massive expansion of government that then creates a further drag on the economy. Think of the fiscal drag that's caused by the massive increase in the federal debt just in the past couple of months, the further pressure on to raise taxes that will come up as a result of that and the acceleration of the potential fiscal crisis that comes from the point at which people basically decide that America is broken, stop buying treasury bonds. There's a lot of downstream effects from what we're doing right now that are incredibly costly and every month that goes by, that's the key thing, every month that goes by, that we continue to shut down the economy means we have to do more of this massive, you know, shovel out the door, trillions of dollars kind of relief. And so the timing is of the essence. We have, we do not have time to sit here and wait for months and months and months to get through this. Do you think that that's, you know, your group is the foundation for research on equal opportunity? I mean, your focus and I think this is, you know, a kind of wonderful mission that you've put for yourselves to talk about how do you how do you take the people in the lower income, you know, whatever you want to call it, quartile, quintile, you know, desktop, whatever. And how do you give them more opportunity? About 37 percent. There's a study that came out recently from University of Chicago Booth Business School saying that if you stretch it, maybe 37 percent of the workforce can work from home full time. You know, that includes most reporters, a lot of a lot of healthcare, not healthcare professionals who are working in hospitals, but people who commentate on all of this stuff. Do you think we're in a lot of ways, the media and the chattering classes are kind of soft selling the difficulty that this is putting on people because we don't work from them. I mean, I've been working from home basically for almost 25 years now. This is bad for me, but it is not a, you know, it's not a degree in in magnitude or it's only a degree in difference, not in kind of what it was before the lockdown. You know, it's funny, Nick, I've been thinking about this a lot because we put out our plan as the time that we're recording is we put out our plan a week prior, we put out actually a revised version today with a lot of new evidence and recommendations. But the point is in the week that in the week that the plan has been out since we've recorded, we're recording this, I've been struck by the number of interviews I've done with people based in Washington who said, well, don't you think it's pointless to try to restart the economy because everyone will want to stay home? And look, I certainly do agree that there are going to be people who are risk averse and people who want to stay home. But DC is a peculiar place in terms of the prevalence of that attitude. And I think it comes down to two things. One is what you described, which is thirty seven percent of Americans have the luxury of being able to work from home with minimal interruption to their employment. Two thirds of the country cannot. That's factor number one. But factor number two, which is arguably just as important, is that the Washington political media ecosystem prospers independently of the functioning of the real economy. So if you compare DC white collar workers to, say, New York City white collar workers or Silicon Valley white collar workers, yes, all those white collar workers can work from home. But if you ask anyone in the investment world, are they happy that the economy is tanking? They're not. If you ask anyone in Silicon Valley whose businesses depend on a robust advertising and business climate, they're not happy. Yes, they can work from home, but the value of their businesses is getting crushed because business has gone to a standstill. So I think those other white collar communities in which there's much more of an awareness of the economic damage and how it affects them directly, I think they're much more eager to get the show on the road. You know, before we go to the specific recommendations that your plan lays out, let's also talk a little bit about the idea of testing and tracking or tracing or whatever, one of the things that is interesting and I think different about your plan than some others that have come out is that you're kind of assuming the worst that we're not going to have robust testing. And clearly between what was promised to us by both federal government as well as state and local governments, we're not seeing that kind of testing, talk about where testing is falling down and why it's actually pretty unlikely that we're going to be doing millions of tests a day on a repeating or a revolving basis. Well, for anyone who really wants a more technical description of why testing is going to be hard to ramp up, I encourage you to read the paper at free app.org. But to boil it down for your audience here, what it comes down to is that there are two kinds of tests, broadly speaking, they're antibody based tests and there are viral RNA based tests that actually look at the amount of viral RNA in your body. The antibody based tests have several advantages and several disadvantages. The advantages are they're quick and they're easy to use. You can even use them from home in certain cases. The disadvantage is their accuracy is a lot lower. And also what antibodies arise after you've had infections. You can go a couple of weeks after you've been infected and not yet have antibodies. The antibodies really start to pop up after the virus has been in your system for a couple of weeks. So an antibody negative test isn't proof that you aren't infected. And an antibody positive test isn't proof that you're immune to future infections. It may be that you've generated antibodies, but they don't actually help your immune system fight off a future infection. You just don't know right now. Now, the DNA tests, the RNA tests, excuse me, what are called PCR tests for polymerase chain reaction, those tests are much more accurate at detecting whether the virus is present in your system. The problem is those tests are much more cumbersome because detecting DNA or RNA in your body is just requires a lot more sensitivity and requires health care professionals to administer the test. And and and do the testing so it can only be done really in clinics and labs and hospitals and places like that. So there's just a bottleneck there in terms of there's only so many health care facilities we have to administer the R2PCR tests. So as a result, we're faced with one choice, tests that can scale up in theory, but are inaccurate and tests that are really accurate, but are very cumbersome to administer and hard to scale up. So we're kind of to say that we it's going to take us a while to scale up the testing a long time. It could be six months. Right. And so I mean, we're kind of early on, if we want to do anything before that, we're going to be kind of flying blind in terms of, you know, do we know what percentage of the population or what individuals are infected or not? You're basic, you know, so I mean, basically what you're saying in your plan is we need to open the economy as quickly as possible. And we're going to be doing that with we're going to be kind of flying without instruments in a very foggy like nighttime scenario. You do say we should be using quarantines and contact tracing as things open up. But what is the meat of what are the actions that need to be taken? Do you think to open up the economy or open up society more broadly as safely as possible? Well, before we get to that, I do want to say we're not flying totally blind at this point, Nick, we do have a reasonable amount of evidence to help us characterize what's actually going on with COVID-19. First of all, there have been a handful of community-wide antibody testing programs. So, for example, very recently, Santa Clara County and Silicon Valley did, they surveyed, I think it was 3,000 or 6,000 people in their community with a demographically representative sample to see how many people were infected. And it turned out that there are about 60 times, 60 times as many people infected with COVID-19 based on antibody testing as people who actually had symptoms of any sort of disease or illness related to COVID-19, which gives us a great deal of confidence that the risk of infection, the likelihood that you'll be hospitalized or died because you've been infected is actually much lower than the worst case scenarios and have indicated. The other thing we know about COVID-19 is that it disproportionately affects the elderly. If you're over 85, you have an over 1,000 fold likelihood of dying from COVID-19 than if you're under 35. So the young are very low at risk for hospitalization death and the elderly are much higher at risk for hospitalization. So those two things and also, by the way, if you're sort of middle aged like you and I are, Nick, then if you have diabetes or you have other chronic diseases, that can make you more susceptible to risk for COVID-19. But we're talking about some stuff. Yeah. And that, you know, if you're, say, 50 and older and you don't have underlying conditions, you're looking at a couple percentage points, two or three percent of being hospitalized lower than that of dying from the disease. So part of your pitch is that the younger you are, the more freedom you should have to reenter the economy. Can you talk a little bit about that and what concrete steps would change if we reopen according to your plan? Right. So that's those are the key things. So it's because we're not flying completely blind, because we do have some evidence as to the relative risk of different populations that does does give us some opportunity to reopen parts of the economy strategically. So our plan is not some just open the floodgates and let everything happen. Come what may, it's more it's more careful than that. So the idea is first, let's reopen the schools K through 12 and pre K, because the youngest people in our country are the lowest at risk for hospitalization and death. And getting people into schools has two effects. One, it helps kids get educated. Two, it also helps the parents of those kids go to work, because right now there are a lot of parents who can't work because they have to take care of the kids every day. So that's a huge opportunity. Now, we do we do take care to say, look, if you are a child who lives with your grandparents or other at risk individuals, maybe it's best that you continue to stay at home. And for those individuals, we got to do more with virtual learning and other online technologies to help those individuals keep up. What about what about teachers? You know, because teachers tend to be, you know, I'm assuming that most teachers are somewhere between about 35 and 65. But do you screen for them or do you allow them, you know, in the more robust version of this, would you allow them to decide whether or not they want to put themselves, you know, around people who may be asymptomatic, but carriers of the disease? In the plan, we recommend that older teachers and staff stay home and don't return to schools. But, you know, ultimately, because schools are run at the local level, you know, localities will be able to experiment with a wide variety of approaches in terms of outhandling. Maybe you really focus on testing or maybe you leave it up to the teacher and say, hey, here are the risks. Sign a disclosure form saying or a consent form saying you understand the risks. And then if you want to continue working, that's up to you. Because there may be some people who feel that way. Like, I don't care if I'm 70. I still want to teach my kids. So let them have the choice, right? So maximize that that latitude. And you also talk, you know, you said like, let people sign waivers saying, you know, that they give informed consent essentially to say, I might be, you know, exposed to COVID-19. You talk in the plan about changing, relaxing the legal liability for states as well as for employers. Can you discuss that a little bit more? Yeah. So one thing we talk about in the plan is so the part of the plan that's about having people reenter the workforce, leaving aside the schools, getting younger people in particular in the workforce. I remember one of the things that's so weird about our situation now from a policy standpoint is the disease disproportionately affects people who are over 65. The workforce is disproportionately under 65. And yet those are the people we're locking out of the economy. Right. So we got to do everything we can to get younger people back into the workforce. And one way we can accelerate that, not just for the youngest and the healthiest people, is to offer a tax credit to employers who offer tests to their COVID-19 tests to their to their employees. Not only would that do a lot to bring more people back to work, but for restaurants and retail shops and other places, it could help those. The consumer feel confident that that restaurant or that shop is COVID free. So it could have two effects. And so employers can do that. But the one the challenges are we have all these regulations right now about the ability of employers to do this kind of thing. Because if you're an employer and you administer a test like that to your worker and you know the result of that test, there are certain privacy regulations in place that that that you'd have to sort of at least create some kind of safe harbor round and also liability around, you know, how safe harbor on the liability around how those tests are deployed. Why is maybe reluctant to do it? Right. But but then you also do create a kind of market in, you know, as you were suggesting, just as a restaurant has a letter grade or something from a food inspection, we would say, you know, we test our employees for COVID, blah, blah, blah, and that that would help make that restaurant seem more acceptable to customers. Why a why a tax incentive rather than a direct subsidy? We just passed a two point two trillion dollar bailout. It's the beginning of multiple more bailouts to come clearly before the end of the fiscal year. Why not just a straight subsidy? You could do it as a direct subspeeming from an economic standpoint, the effect of a tax credit that's, you know, versus a subsidy are pretty similar. So from my standpoint, it's it's not that important, whether it's a direct subsidy or a tax incentive. If you if you administer a test today in theory, it's deductible from your taxes. So the concept here is that this would be something on top of the deductibility of the expense for a for a business. So however you want to do it is fine by me, you know, I'm agnostic on that. Now, you you still talk about in the in the paper that certain types of gatherings would be prohibited. Talk about, you know, you you're basically willing to reopen all aspects of the economy subject to the provisos that you had before. But then there are certain types of, you know, types of, I guess, workplace or businesses like nightclubs and whatnot or bars that you say, you know, this is this is a no-go area. Talk about the restrictions in your plan. And then how do we know when things have passed enough so that we can say, OK, yes, tonight clubs again. I think the way I put it, Nick, is we have to go from a mentality. The mentality we've had for the first month of this lockdown is how do we get everyone to shut everything down if you're a governor? You're like, how do you convince people to stay up the beaches and stay out of the restaurants and stop talking and hanging out with other people and going on dates or whatever, right? So that's been the mentality up to this point. And what we're trying to do with this plan is change the mentality to one where we're thinking every day about what section of the economy we can reopen, what section of the population can we liberate from these restrictions. And so while our plan does accept that some restrictions will need to continue in the riskiest types of activities, like big gatherings indoors, for example, our goal is to say, let's take the lowest risk types of activities and reopen those. So that means anything that you can do safely, you know, taking into account things like social distancing. So when you open a restaurant, let's try to make sure that the restaurant opens up with maybe fewer tables in its floor plan and things like that, which means, of course, the restaurant will not make as much money as it did before, but at least it's something, right? So our goal here, our mentality with all this stuff is to say, how can we open up that part of the economy as soon as possible without jeopardizing public health? And our goal is also, by the way, as evidence comes in, right? We're still very early in the evidence gathering stage here, like you were talking about before. So it may be that over time we learn that certain categories of people that we thought were risky were not or certain types of activities that we thought were risky were not. And the more that evidence piles up, the more we can can reopen the economy with broad public support and broad political support across the ideological camps. What is yours? Well, before we get to broader questions, let me ask you one other thing, which I think would particularly or conceivably raise libertarian hackles. You say that you would require negative tests for COVID-19 for passengers on air and Amtrak. Amtrak is minimal, you know, the number of people who actually travel on Amtrak, even in the Accela corridor is small, but it's a federal system. But why for air passengers? Why would you say you got to have a negative test for that? Well, it's a great question. I mean, at the end of the day, I think you're just going to have a lot of people who are not going to want to fly if they think they're going to be stuck in a metal tube for five hours or three hours or whatever it is with people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2. So you've got to restore confidence somehow. And it's going to be difficult because there are about 2.7 million people who fly on planes a day in the pre-COVID world in the US. So how do you get the how do you get testing up to a scale where you can ramp it up like that? It's going to be hard. But at the end of the day, our economy cannot go back to what it was. Travel is effectively shut down like it is today. So just like with what we were discussing before, you know, it's not that we like these restrictions at all. It's not like that we're that we're trying to create an anti-state. It's quite the opposite. At the end of the day, the way we look at this whole this whole problem is that we've got to lift as many of these restrictions as possible in a way that is aware of the public health risks and strategic about that. Because at the end of the day, if we have another spike in COVID infections, then there's going to be a worse lockdown the second time. So that's not in anybody's interest, right? So we want to have the freest possible economy in this environment. We've got to get, you know, move the ball down the field in a more gradual way. Do you know Ronald Reagan was famous for saying that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program? I think when we talk about spending issues, but especially with the civil liberties or the idea that governments at all levels, but especially the bigger the level or the higher up the bigger the impact is, how do we make sure that some of the restrictions on mobility, on movement, but especially on things like having to test or showing that you kind of an internal passport system almost where I've done this so I can do this? How do you make sure that those are limited only to a crisis period? Well, I think what's what's really what I hope will happen, first of all, is that the the evidence as it accumulates and rolls in will show that COVID-19 is far less dangerous than some of the PhDs out there with their models thought that there was there was enormous deference to a very, very small number of people who are projecting disaster scenarios. I mean, two million people, one of the CDC's original doomsday scenario is 1.7 million Americans dying. Now the accepted figure, which maybe revised downward is more like 60,000, which is awful, but is a long ways from 1.7 or 2 million people. Yeah, I mean, 60,000 is a normal influenza year in the United States. And look, some people argue, well, you can't compare the two because the 60,000 is the result of all these interventions. I don't think we can be sure of that. Maybe they're the result of these interventions. Maybe they're the result of some interventions, but not all of them. Maybe they're not the result of these interventions. If you look at a country like Sweden, where there's been a much more modest policy response, the pattern of the infection has been pretty similar to everywhere else. So even within, you know, this is something that I think will be will be. I hope we'll be discussing for a long time to come when you look at states, you know, a state like Florida, which was very late to lockdown and got, you know, the governor, they're got a lot of grief for letting spring breakers come. Their infection rate is better than a lot of states that locked down earlier and have been more draconian in restrictions. So the correlation between public policy and the path of the disease, it's not it's not exactly clear that, you know, keeping people at home. That's right. So it's going to be very important for organizations like yours and mine, Nick, to to put that pedal to the metal and make sure that we're highlighting the policy response and its relationship to what actually happened. Particularly as time goes on right now, obviously, there's a lot of uncertainty. We don't we can't draw firm conclusions about a lot. But but there is a mounting pile of evidence here that the policy reaction was was an overreaction and a big part of why, by the way, is because most of the policy response is a playbook that comes from influenza and coronavirus COVID-19 is not influenza. It disproportionately affects the elderly in a way that influenza influenza also has a skew towards the elderly, but more because the the elderly are just already sick, whereas the skew here is much greater. And so there was much more of an opportunity to take advantage of that knowledge to say, hey, let's really be careful about nursing homes. Let's be careful about elderly populations. But let's let people go to school, particularly younger kids. And let's let younger people behave responsibly. By the way, with young people, I did your plan and looking through it, I saw the K through 12 stuff. What about colleges and universities? Because this is I know a lot of people in higher ed and obviously, you know, there's tons of young people in higher ed. It's unclear whether or not colleges will be reopening in the fall or, you know, or if they'll be doing it kind of in a in a partial way. Well, listen, I'm a huge college football fan, so I personally hope that the colleges go back. It's a shame you live in Texas then, a state with terrible college football. But that's true. Well, so I so all I say, we didn't address it in the plan because we felt that the college question is very complex, because we've got very large student bodies. You've got a lot of older faculty and staff. So there it just there was just the complexity of how to untie that knot was a little harder, I think. Whereas the K through 12 and the pre-K situation is much more unambiguous in terms of the in terms of the health public health side of it, I think. On the one hand, I'm saying we need to make sure that any incursion, any growth of government in terms of spending or in terms of surveillance powers is sharply limited to a crisis situation and it ends there. On another level, I want to ask you about, you know, there's been a number of regulations and restrictions on business, on health, the TSA, et cetera, where they've been like, you know what, in the face of COVID, we're not going to require and this is part of your paper, you know, states are not going to require medical professionals who are licensed in one state to sit around and pay extra money and cool their heels or take useless tests to be able to practice in another state. How do we make sure that the kind of libertarian animus in some of this to get rid of restrictions that we say, hey, you know what, we can't afford to have this restriction. How do we make sure that that mentality survives the end of the pandemic and that, you know, is it too broad to say if a regulation was getting in the way of helping people stay safe during the coronavirus pandemic? It should never be brought, you know, it should never see the light of day again. Yeah, that's a great question. And again, this is an area where libertarians and other pro-freedom activists have got to put the pedal to the metal and say and hold policymakers and politicians accountable and say, hey, this is ridiculous. Why do we keep? Why do we have these antiquated laws on the books that are all about guilt and style protection and not about actually helping patients and doctors do their jobs, let alone nurse practitioners and nurses and everything else? I mean, when I moved to Texas from New York, you know, yes, I had to get a Texas driver's license, but I didn't have to do it on day one. I had to do it, you know, within a certain time frame. And you didn't have to take a driving exam. Yeah, I didn't. Yeah, exactly. I didn't have I didn't have to stop driving for six months while I got my driver's license. Right. So like this idea that somehow if you move from one US state to another US state, somehow you're suddenly incompetent to practice medicine. It's ridiculous. So what you it's a simple adjustment would be to say for a state to say, OK, the next time your license comes up for renewal, you have to renew it in our state and not in that other state. But in the meantime, we'll honor your license. So it's a temporary thing that doesn't really affect you and allows you to practice immediately if you move to another state. That would be a simple reform that would do very little to undermine state sovereignty and licensure and yet would create a lot more mobility and flexibility. So there are lots of things like that that we could do. Yeah, your background is in health care. I mean, you were a major voice in arguing against what became known as Obamacare and whatnot. How do you think this pandemic is going to affect the health care industry, the medical medical delivery sector? Because, you know, and also, can you make sense of these competing stories? You're here. One was early on, and I know in New York State and New York City, we were told that hospitals were going to be absolutely crushed by COVID patients. We need Andrew Coma at one point was saying we need something like 40,000 ventilators. They had 12,000. They are now loaning out ventilators to other nearby states and things like that. How is this going to affect the medical industry? I really worry about that piece of it on multiple levels. One, I see a lot of small physician practices that are getting crushed because patients aren't coming in and they're just like small businesses anywhere else. And so there are a lot of small doctors practices that are hemorrhaging money right now. The other thing I worry about is hospitals. The biggest problem with our health care system in terms of how expensive it is is hospitals. And now you're going to have every single hospital go to their local senator or congressman and say, you've got to give us more money. You've got to subsidize us more. You've got to protect us for more competition. Because if you don't, what happens the next time there's a pandemic and we go belly up? And so there's going to be an incredible eye fear, an incredible political urge to protect these dinosaur incumbent hospitals that are parasites on the economy. And some of them, not all of them, of course, but some of them, the way they overcharge you because they're a regional monopoly and know they can charge you whatever they want and take advantage of that incumbent protection use. So it's a huge problem. And I think I worry that the movement that we're very involved in to try to create more competition, more choice in how you get your hospital care is going to be stymied by incumbents in this in this era. You know, it's almost kind of quaint to remember that we're in the middle of the presidential election year and that before Bernie Sanders bowed out, he was a very strong proponent of single payer health care. You know, Republicans often talk a good game about wanting to bring the free market into health care, but they all law Medicare, which is a single payer system, one of the weird outcomes of this kind of pandemic and internationally is that single payer systems or non single payer systems, you know, it's hard to say, OK, did one perform better or not? What is your sense first off of how health care is financed? How has that affected different nations responses? And then secondly, politically, within the US, do you think this is going to push people towards embracing single payer health care or not? Or is it just a non issue as far as that particular topic goes? That's a great question, Nick. And we actually are in the process at free of of rolling out a major study of international comparison of international health care systems where we don't directly talk about covid-19 because it's just too new of a situation, but we do talk a lot about international health care system. And just like you said, there's no real correlation between the kind of health care system you have from an insurance standpoint and how your country performed. So Italy is a single payer system. They obviously have borne the brunt of this. On the other hand, so is Taiwan and they've done OK, right? Similarly, Singapore has done reasonably well. There are much more consumer driven system. Switzerland has done all right. They're a consumer driven system. The US is sort of half and half. We're doing sort of in the middle, I'd say. What really seems to have correlated to success in dealing with this pandemic is not single payer versus market based health care. It has been more if you were one of the countries that dealt with SARS, the original SARS in 2003, which is the Pacific Rim countries. If you're Taiwan or South Korea or Singapore and you have that muscle memory of what it was like to deal with SARS, which was just as terrifying for them as covid-19 is for us, that meant that when when the story started coming out of Wuhan, they took it a lot more seriously than the rest of the world did and went swung right into action with a lot of the tools they developed from that experience with SARS in 2003. So my hope is that we will have something. So if you look at those countries today, I mean, pre covid-19, look at those countries today, their economies are reasonably free. If you look at the heritage index of world, you know, economic freedom or the Fraser Institute, whichever one you like. You know, the Hong Kong's and the Singapore's do pretty well on those criteria in South Korea as well. So in Taiwan, so those are relatively free countries and they stayed relatively free despite SARS, the experience of SARS. So my hope is that we should not see this crisis as an excuse for a permanent decrement in our economic freedom. We should, in fact, use it as an opportunity by first of all, making sure that these temporary policy measures are as temporary as possible. But also to the point you made earlier, making sure that we're we're pointing out how deregulation, not just to say telemedicine or license, you know, a license of licensure, but things like the fact that we depended on a single CDC lab to develop the tests for covid-19 in a way that really harmed our ability to respond to the situation, that the FDA went out of its way to stop people from developing their own homemade tests early on in this crisis when it could have really helped. There are a lot of things to reexamine. And again, there's going to be a lot of opportunity, I hope, for people like you and me and others to do that. You mentioned it in passing the idea, you know, we have something like twenty three trillion dollars in national debt right now. And that's probably I mean, we're probably going to spend another two trillion dollars before the end of the fiscal year. I think that's a safe bet, maybe even conservative, almost doubling the federal budget for 2020 in the in the span of a couple months. What is the is there a predictable effect of first off of having a massive national debt like this on economic growth and prosperity? And then what happens when you top that off? I mean, you know, with I don't even know what the metaphor is, but where you might be adding, you know, a couple of trillion dollars of debt in a in a in a couple. Well, we already did in a couple month period. What does that do in the short term in the mid term and in the long term? Do you think to economic activity? Well, in the short term, it's unclear, right? I mean, I think that the biggest impact on economic activity is just a lockdown and getting people comfortable with res res resuming something resembling a normal life in the mid to long term. The picture is bleak in terms of the impact of the fiscal stuff. We don't know exactly when the reckoning will happen, but we do know that and there was a study done in the last recession, the Rogoff and I think it was right hard Rogoff to that study where they said if you if you if your debt to GDP ratio exceeds, I think 90 percent, then the impact on economic growth, the drag on economic growth is considerable and there's no larger country that can bail out the United States. If we we become insolvent, you know, we're stuck. And by the way, before this crisis, we were looking at a situation where within a decade, we're going to be spending more on interest on the federal debt than we were spending on national defense. That's how big the problem is. So, you know, what happens to Bitcoin in this environment? Obviously, Bitcoin price has been volatile in the 2020. But could we see a situation where if people lack confidence in the credit of the United States, the full faith and credit of the United States that we move to alternative assets like gold and cryptocurrency as a store of value? I think that's something that may very well happen as things shake out. And if that happens, then the U.S.'s ability to borrow money to finance that debt will start to decline and become more expensive. And that could lead to a spiraling in terms of the fiscal and financial and economic crisis. So this is a very serious problem. And I really I there's there's no precedent for it in terms of our politicians being able to reduce the deficit in debt. So good luck to us all. Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, one, it's not even an analog. It's just kind of a premonition. I guess after World War Two, there had been massive spending both because of the New Deal, but especially World War Two. And then the federal government really cut spending, particularly on defense, but on a lot of other things and deregulated the economy very quickly. And there was a burst of activity. It doesn't seem like that political economy makes sense anymore. You know, when the when the recession ended, the bailouts didn't end. Government spending didn't end really. So that's going to be quite challenging. Can you also let me look before you move on from that? Let me just say there's a couple of important differences between the World War Two time and now. And the key is the most important difference is that we have Medicare and Medicaid. We have these giant health care entitlements built off of social security in a way that are on autopilot. So World War Two spending was subject to congressional appropriations in fiscal walkery terms. It was discretionary money every year. Congress decides how much are we going to spend on this versus that? The Medicare and Medicaid are not like that. They're on autopilot. Congress actually has to pass laws if they want to restrain spending on Medicare and Medicaid, and that's half the budget right now. So the problem is that, yeah, so that's that's the real challenge is that the structure of the way we spend money is completely different than it was in World War Two. If you look at discretionary spending, it's actually reasonably low as a percentage of our economy by historical standards. It's that mandatory health care entitlement spending that's out of control. I think, you know, a good starting point would be to end the use of mandatory and discretionary as budget terms, because none of it is mandatory. All of it is discretionary. But and and I know even when I started writing about the federal budget in the early 2000s really with, you know, with regularity, it used to be, you know, the starting point of every budget discussion is that 50 percent was in the discretionary, you know, pile and 50 percent was in mandatory. And it's no longer the case. It's more like two thirds is mandatory and it's ramping up quicker and quicker. How how does a kind of diminished or a flat line economy affect, you know, people in the bottom half or the bottom third of the income distribution and of the opportunity gap? Because again, your organization is about trying to create more opportunities for people who have fewer economic prospects, fewer educational prospects. You know, what what can be done particularly to help ignite that part of the economy so that, you know, because this is partly I think about my I have two sons who are millennial and a Gen Z or and like, you know, for the first time, I'm not jealous of them anymore because they are they're kind of being launched into a world that has been driven by economic, you know, geopolitical and economic catastrophe for a long time. And that doesn't seem to be changing, but what do we do? You know, they're in good shape. I mean, they're coming from means and options and all of that. But what do you do for people in the bottom third of the economy when you look at the landscape that we're going to be navigating for the next several years? Well, just just to hammer home that point. So at my organization, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, we have a rule that every white paper we publish, every scholar we hire has to center his work, his arguments, his policy reform ideas around how a particular idea will help improve the lives of Americans whose wealth or income is below the US median. And why do we do that? Because at the end of the day, those of us who believe in free enterprise know that it's free markets that have lifted people out of poverty. It's been the greatest contribution to material prosperity around the world. But it's up to people like us to actually demonstrate that and do the research that shows that and come up with the reforms that will achieve that. And so that's what free op is centered around. So when it comes to this particular situation, that's been why we've argued so passionately about the importance of reopening the economy, reopening the economy doesn't matter for a columnist with the Washington Post, whose job prospects are probably going to be about the same. But for that every day American who works at a factory, it's their life, it's their entire income, it's their entire economic possibility comes from that job or being able to send their kids to school. And so the more we lock down the economy, the more we harm those individuals who are most vulnerable in our economy, who don't have the cash cushions or the white collar jobs that allow them to keep going. And by the way, one of the things that when we put out a plan, one of the questions we got was, well, you're arguing for a partial reopening of the economy or you're advocating reopening the economy for healthy people, younger people, etc. Well, lower income communities, a minority community, particularly African Americans have on average poor health status than say upper middle class whites. So aren't you in a sense creating more racial disparities if you adopt this approach? And my answer to that is in the short term, there may be some disparities in that sense, but the disparities that's even worse is the fact that if you shut down the economy completely, poor people suffer the most. And so at the end of the day, if we want low income people to do better, we have to have economic growth and we cannot have economic growth if everybody is poor. Do you think, you know, this is a dark joke, but early on when it became clear that this COVID-19 was mostly killing older people, it was called the boomer removal remover. We're at the twilight of the baby boom generation being, you know, in the spotlight, culturally, politically, economically. Do you think this is going to speed along a kind of generational rift or a shift from older Americans, people who were born, I don't know, before 1964 is the last year of the baby boom, but to those after. And if so, well, that, you know, is that a positive thing in a strange way? You know, what's crazy, you were talking about the presidential election earlier, Joe Biden is actually too old to be a baby boomer. He's actually a member of the older generation, which is called the silent generation, yeah, which is crazy to think about. It's like, you know, if you're if you're Gen X, you're like, come on, when is it our turn? Well, unfortunately for Gen X, I think, you know, it may be skipped over. And yeah, it's kind of like Prince Charles, right? Yeah, I mean, you know, so so that's a pretty crazy situation. And, you know, it is what it is. But look, I mean, it's hard, Neil Howe, if you if you're interested in generational writing about generational cultural issues, Neil Howe is the smartest guy I know on this stuff. He writes for me at Forbes. He's terrific. In general, there there aren't these kind of there isn't a generational war in the sense of millennials hating boomers. Even though there's this is a meme on Twitter, because people have grandparents and they have relatives and they have people. They care about so I think we're in general, we may have different mores and different outlooks, but in general, we want all of we want our parents and our grandparents to succeed where I think you really see the generational divide is more in the future of our politics. And this goes back to why free op exists. The reason why we built free op is because we have been and are deeply concerned that the modern conservative movement and the modern pro-liberty movement is not adapted to the way in which younger people think about economic freedom. That is to say, you know, there's this concern out there that all the young kids are socialists and all this kind of stuff. That's not what we see. We see millennials, Gen Z, as people who really believe in technology, believe in innovation, believe in entrepreneurship, but they have no patience for the nostalgia for 1950s America in which a lot of black people couldn't vote. And so that's that's the thing that's different from them versus people in, say, Joe Biden's generation. And so what I hope will happen is as we as we move to a world in which younger people are more in charge, we stop having the cultural debates that we were having in the 50s and 60s and instead in the 90s and 2000s. I mean, yeah. Yeah. And we move to a system where or a country where we're not having those kinds of arguments as much, but we're arguing much more about economic policy. And I think when we do that, the pro freedom side has a lot to commend to it. Well, we're going to leave it there. I've been talking with Ovec Roy is the head of free op.org, the Foundation for Research Unequal Opportunity. If you go to their website, you can read their paper, which has already been revised once, a new strategy for bringing people back to work during COVID-19. Ovec, thanks for talking. Thanks, Nick.