 Welcome to the Reason Roundtable, your weekly libertarian podcast that worries more about the gas bags floating up out of Washington, D.C., man. I'm Matt Welch, joined per common law by Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Catherine Mangiward. Happy baseball season, everyone. Hey, Matt Welch. Howdy. Happy Monday. Yeah, that's right, Peter. So a lot has transpired since the State of the Union speech last Tuesday. If you remember it at all. For instance, Rihanna got pregnant, and apparently we've started an intergalactic war. But there was a critical and very chaotic three-minute passage of President Joe Biden's speech that carried over into the following days into this week, likely next month, most of this year, and why not the presidential race in 2024 as well, started off by the president stating quite falsely that Republicans want to take the economy hostage unless he agrees to their economic plans, which include making the Social Security and Medicare programs sunset. Republicans erupted into House of Commons-style hollering in response. Biden then shot back that he'd be happy to give anyone copies of what he called the proposal. Then apparently Cruella DeVille dressed Marjorie Taylor-Greens, started shouting liar. Biden said, oh, we all apparently agree that Social Security and Medicare cuts aren't going to be part of the debt-sealing negotiations, and then everybody rose to their feet in rapturous applause, and our idiot political commentariat gushed about how Biden had laid a masterful trap for Republicans. Kaboom. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the Bakersfield Comet, had already agreed the week before to keep entitlements out of the debt-sealing discussion. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been loudly rejecting any notion of sun-setting Social Security and Medicare since last March, and in fact the author of the so-called proposal to do so, Senator Rick Scott from Florida, also said again last March that, quote, no one that I know of wants to sun-set Medicare or Social Security, end, quote, Scott's so-called blueprint, which Mitch McConnell vociferously rejected upon arrival last year, simply said as an aspirational goal, not some kind of retroactive rip-it-up, quote, all federal legislation sun-sets in five years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again, end, quote, and of course Joe Biden used to say stuff like that, as Rick Scott was cheekily pointed out on Twitter. Yeah, I wouldn't use the term cheekily with Rick Scott, not he doesn't even have cheeks. He looks like Fire Marshall Bill from the old and living color comedy sketch. There is no doubt that President Joseph Reiden Bobonette, the second, made very effective politics out of the whole stunt. Did he really save Social Security in Medicare last week? No. Yeah. No, he didn't. You really? Why? Do you say that? What makes you say that? I heard he did, though, Peter. You may have heard wrong, Katherine, maybe word. I don't know where you're getting your information from. But some of us did. Peter, did some of us read reports? Did you find that stash of quail roots? Yeah. Some of us read the reports produced on a regular basis by the Medicare and Social Security Trustees and the Congressional Budget Office. And what those reports tell us is that in about 10 or 12 years, depending on who you believe, Social Security is going to be insolvent, which means that benefits will automatically be cut by 20 to 25% across the board. So that means that if Joe Biden successfully prevents Republicans from touching Social Security, then all of the beneficiaries at that point will lose about a quarter of their benefits immediately. Now, these are estimates. It might be a little bit more or a little bit less. But that's Joe Biden's plan so far as we know it right now. He did say that he has a forthcoming plan that's going to extend the life of the trust fund for maybe another 20 years or so. But we haven't seen the numbers on that. And historically, those sorts of plans have been a little bit rife with what we might call bullshit, just like numbers that don't... It's the official term in Joe Biden's America is malarkey. With malarkey, with numbers that don't add up and are kind of fake. So right now, that's Joe Biden's position is that we shouldn't do anything and we should wait a decade or so and then let Social Security cut itself by 20 to 25% immediately, which would affect the people who are most vulnerable the hardest because Social Security goes to people who are quite well off as well as people who are struggling. Peter, before I lateral to Nick about a related issue about all this, can you give us any sense of the amount? So the day happens, we are insolvent day happens. How much money or how do you characterize the amount of money to uninsolvent it? Like is there a dollar figure on it? Is there a tax figure on it? Is there any way to sort of wrap our puny Matt Welch size brains around this concept? So to understand this, it's helpful to understand how we pay for Social Security right now. And so I'm going to bracket this by saying we don't actually pay for Social Security right now. We have a trust fund that is fake. But let's for a moment just ignore that and assume that the trust fund is kind of real or at least real as an accounting fiction. And so the way we do this is that we have a payroll tax on the first $147,000 of income that people earn. It's actually $160,000 in 2023 and it's gone up since 2015 from like $118,000. So some of us are still living in the past where it's 2022 and it's a better past. It's a better past. I haven't seen the Super Bowl yet. So did 2023 even really happen? We're not even in 2023. And so, right, OK, so it's about so the first hundred and something thousand dollars of income is charged to payroll tax, which is typically split between an employee share and an employer share. Or if you're self-employed, you pay the whole thing. Obviously that split between employer and employee is itself kind of fake because it mostly sort of ends up being passed on. But that's sort of, but that's how it's how we account for it. And so in order to make social security solvents for the next 75 years, which is sort of the long run horizon at which point we don't even think about it anymore, we would need to raise an additional 3.4 percent of all payroll over that period of time, according to the trustees. And so there's a bunch of different plans to extend the life of the Social Security Trust Fund. You look at the Congressional Budget Office, they've got a whole suite of options that you can go and look at. But I think the one that we should talk about most is raising the payroll tax, right, so basically uncapping income there, right? So the one of the prevailing ways to do that is not actually to just say that all income over one hundred and forty seven or one hundred and sixty thousand dollars would be taxed, but instead to say, well, we're going to keep that cap at one fifty or one sixty, but then we're going to start taxing income over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And the thinking there is that that that that will make sure that only people who are making more than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, i.e. the rich in political parlance are subject to the new to the new tax. And if you do that, Congressional Budget Office reports that there's going to be some economic effects if if that happens because what happens if you start taxing all of that money a lot higher than you're taxing it right now? One thing that happens is people earn less per extra dollar that they earn over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And so that just means they're making less period, even if they're making the same amount of money pretax, right? So if you were making three hundred thousand dollars or whatever that is per year, you're going to be earning less, even if there's no other change. But because people are because each marginal dollar is worth less, the Congressional Budget Office also says that people will, on average, work less because people will be somewhat less motivated to work because because working is is worth less for them. And so there are economic effects and there are there is an economic drag to to to taking a path like that and to increasing taxes, even if you do end up sort of making the Social Security Trust Fund somewhat more solvent for the next several decades as a result. Let's talk more about taxes and drag, Nick, back when you entered the chat. Yeah, that's right. Meatball Ron just entered the chat back in your carefree youth, Nick, when you were doing a lot of drag and taxes. Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. You wrote a great piece with Varanik Deruji with a headline to 19 percent solution, which pointed out that the historical size or share, let's say, of how much the federal government was gobbling from GDP was around 19 percent. And we deviated above that 10 years ago. And you guys sounded the warning that that would threaten to create both political instability and drag on the economy. So where are we now with those numbers? How will the short term victory of Joe Biden's autopilot affect the ratio? And what will the might those side effects look like? So according to the CBO, between 1972 and 2021, so this comes up to last year and includes two massive years of covid spending outlays by the government average 20.8 percent of GDP average revenue was 17.3 percent. It's estimating for the next 10 years, outlays will be 23.2 percent and revenue will be 18.1 percent. So essentially, we have just we are looking at spending substantially more money as a percentage as a ratio of the economy than we ever have in peacetime. There was a spike during World War Two, where spending per GDP as a percentage of GDP reached 40 percent. But, you know, where this is uncharted territory, where we're going to have, you know, massive, persistent, completely unrestrained spending. We might well have record revenue coming in, but the annual deficits and the national debt will just continue to grow at the same time. More people as a percentage of the population will be above 65. So they'll be collecting Medicare and Social Security, probably working less. So, you know, this is it's a really, really bad situation. And the worst part of it, and, you know, Matt, just to push back a little bit on you talking about Joe Biden, I mean, it's important that the Republicans all leapt to their cloven hooves to applaud the idea that they are not going to cut old age entitlements. Absolutely. What so ever. And so like what Peter's talking about, all of that spending so secure on things like Social Security and Medicare are just going to take up more and more resources. And, you know, that is it's not going to be a productive decade looking forward. The other thing that I'll throw in for Social Security, and I have a short video op-ed that I'll be coming out in a couple of days about this. But according, you know, you can find different studies that find different things, but all of them come, all of them basically agree that if you take that 12.4% of income that gets taxed, the payroll tax that goes into Social Security in 2016, the tax foundation did a study where that worked out to about 20 or $21,000 a year for the average, so an average worker paying into Social Security would get about $21,000 a year from that. And if they had put 10% of their income into a conservative, typical IRA or 401k plan that was split between a 60% stocks, 40% bonds, they would have gotten three times that. And virtually every analysis of Social Security shows that it is a generally weak output for, you know, for people, particularly even average workers. So it's, you know, we're doing everything we can to sustain a system that was passed in 1935, started cutting checks in 1940 in a radically different economy in a radically different world when people were living shorter lives and old people to be old was to be poor. We are, you know, it's mind boggling. And I mean, it's, you know, I think a lot about how Jar Jar Binks was a senator in Star Wars. And like, you know, when you look at the State of the Union, it's Jar Jar Binks in filling every seat there. They might have different predilections and stupid focuses, but they're all it's not gonna cut Social Security. Yeah, no, I was all about ready to congratulate Peter for not taking the bait and just took it. I'm gonna revoke that congratulations. Do not congratulate Catherine. What are your least favorite parts of the Biden MAGA populist convergence as expressed, especially at the State of the Union last week. And there were so many parts, I think, you know, we talked about some of them in advance, just the the increasing convergence in terms of the willingness to use federal power to manipulate all kinds of commercial transactions and the sort of junk fees stuff was a great example of that just classic, classic populism, right, just like taking kind of harnessing people's anger at a, you know, a thing that was just not the president of the United States business like resort fees for crying out loud and rallying people around that. But I do think, you know, what we saw at the State of the Union was just a bunch of people realizing for the first time, I think that those of us who have been watching this question for a long time already knew, which was that no one wants to cut Social Security or reform it in any way. And I guess it makes sense to me that there was still a widespread belief that there were two sides to this issue. And, you know, the fact that Joe Biden managed to get on TV that there is there is only one side that everyone agrees that they're going to do nothing as long as humanly possible is, you know, it had that it had that ring of like, yeah, man, duh, to those of us who have been watching, but I get it that other people thought maybe Republicans were going to try and solve this problem and whether they thought it was a good thing or a bad thing to solve it by quote unquote sunsetting, which is also an amazing, like it's such a perfectly crafted term for people to misunderstand. Like when the sun sets, it goes away, Matt. It's gone forever. That's how the sun works or something like I don't understand. It's a technical term about, you know, that that people crafting legislation use. It does not mean the same thing as permanently abolishing or defunding or eliminating Social Security and everyone involved know that knew that Joe Biden, most of all, and he exploited that confusion and misunderstanding. Misa worried, great fireball will never come back. Stop. I will kill you. Yeah, that is just knife in the as a matter of fact, as you mentioned that Catherine, it reminded me that Jimmy Carter's 1979 speech, which I wrote about last week. It's kind of the timeline analog to Biden's speech in terms of where he was at in his first term. He comes out in favor by name of sunsetting programs. We need to stop the regulatory, you know, beast from just fattening forever. And we need to like figure out what's going on and and such that these things. And I don't think that he's portrayed as a monster. Well, to be clear, I am greatest monster. That's true. To be clear, I'm pro I'm pro sunset, both pro actual sunsets and pro the routine setting of legislation. Like that would be a perfectly good mechanism to keep these policies in check to routinely review them for whether they still fit the world that we live in. It's just it's not. It's not what actually happens. It's not what actually works and it isn't going to happen. I want to point out, Matt, because this meme, I forget exactly how it entered my timelines. But over the weekend, it was having heavily there, which is that and I'm paraphrasing it, but that Jimmy Carter speech is closer to Pearl Harbor than it is to today. Yes. And, you know, it is just amazing that people are not talking about the actual transformation of old age entitlements into something that is targeted and helps poor people regardless of age. But let's just say, OK, old people, you know, because I've lived through a lot of shit, they get special benefits just for being 65. Like, I mean, it is just it's mind numbing. And one of the things that Jimmy Carter was, you know, bitching and moaning about was that Ronald Reagan was going to destroy the, you know, social security because it was part of FDR's new deal. And Ronald Reagan left office touting. And this is actually, I believe in the 17th 19 percent solution story that you referenced earlier. But Ronald Reagan said that his greatest achievement as president was securing funding for social security and Medicare for the next generation, which worked out to be about true. Towards the end of his presidency, he jacked up payroll taxes. That was part of a big tax package right at the end of his thing. And it's like he goddamn him for that because he used to be he used to be critical of mandatory social security. Peter Catherine mentioned that she kind of understands, you know, people being surprised that to learn that there are Republicans jumping up and down on their cloven hooves, plotting the not touching wearing Rick Flair style clothing, by the way, I loved Marjorie Taylor Greene's rolled fur coat. She explained that she must have gotten it from. She was dressed up as the balloon. Yeah, it was her balloon costume. We're in a pretty good place politically, is what I'm trying to say. But yeah, Peter. So again, Catherine said that that it was sort of understandable that people would be surprised to learn that Republicans actually are not in this day and age, all that interested in holding the debt ceiling hostage over cuts and social security and Medicare. OK, so let's let's let's give people a slight break on this. But how many damn political journalists and commentators, including people who you forward in the slack every damn day were out there in September and October and November of twenty twenty two, saying the midterms need the biggest story before the midterms that Republicans are totally going to hold the economy hostage to force social security cuts. Total bullshit at the time, total bullshit now. And these are people who are supposed to be sophisticated observers. What do we make of that? Well, I think you wrote about this. And I think part of what we make about it is that Democrats as in people who are like actual elected officials, but also they're boosters in media, Democrat aligned journalists, pundits want this to be the Republican position. And they want it to be the Republican position because they view it as politically beneficial to Democrats. That's why Joe Biden did what he did at the State of the Union is because he believes it to be politically beneficial. And frankly, if that were true, it would be correct. And to the extent that people believe that it is true, it is correct. Like I just I agree with the short term political calculus that Democrats want to demagogue this issue and they think that doing so is good politics for them. And I like just on the getting people to vote for the merits, I think that the answer is pretty clear. People are going to vote against Republicans for this. But Mitch McConnell has been saying we're not going to do that. And the and the Rick Scott plan, which is the the sort of the the source material for the Democratic argument that this is the big thing that the Republicans want to do, that that that is not something that Republicans stand by at all. I mean, there was a quote just within the last week in USA Today from Mitch McConnell, who is, you know, the top Republican in the Senate. Unfortunately, that was the Scott plan. That's not a Republican plan. Rick Scott is, to be clear, a Republican senator. But this is this is what Republicans are doing now is distancing themselves from any effort to make any kind of meaningful changes to entitlements, despite the fact that, as I have said many times, in about six years or so, one of the big Medicare trust funds is going to be insolvent. And in 10 or 12 years, Social Security's big trust fund is going to be insolvent as well. And somebody is going to at some point have to step up and do something. And I think that that something that is going to be done is not something that anyone on this podcast is going to approve of. It's going to be sort of tax increases and budget gimmicks some combination of the two, possibly some very token spending cuts, you know, stuff that is essentially trivial, that doesn't really matter. And that's what's going to happen. And it's going to extend the life of Social Security and or Medicare for at least a decade or two, they're going to kick the can down the road. And that's going to be that. And I think that that's the way the politics are shaping up. And I think that that's sort of the question is about is about the sort of the lefty journalists who are political analysts who are trying to say that Republicans are just desperate to cut entitlements. I think you could say that that was more true in an era when Paul Ryan was a very prominent Republican. And when Paul Ryan was a, you know, was a one of the Republican leaders, but it's just not true anymore. Republicans under in the in the Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump era have basically given that up. And that was one of the lessons that Republicans took from the Trump presidency is you have to say, we will never cut Social Security and we will never cut Medicare. Those things are totally off limits. They're the third rail of American politics. Nick, I know you have special fondness for the Republican backbencher chorus of thumbs downing crazy costume nuttiness. What what do you make of that? I mean, we're so it's Joe Wilson. You lie it was 2009. And it was like a big deal at the time. And like, wow, he broke decorum. And he apologized. And there was a there was a vote against him, like censoring him. And like, we're just not there anymore. What what do you think about this sort of Republican worldwide wrestling federation thing that's going on right now? Yeah, I think it is unfortunate because it's if the lack of decorum, you know, was was motivated by a need to make things better. That would be one thing. But it really is. I think it's just reflective of incredibly like double digit IQs among people like Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert. And Marjorie Taylor Green has emerged as like a leader of the Republican Party, at least rhetorically because there aren't any legislative leaders. I mean, somebody like Kevin McCarthy, you know, to call him an empty suit is really to diminish, you know, the way suits look on mannequins. I mean, they're kind of nice. I mean, he just is terrible. Mitch McConnell may be as, you know, as as kind of brain dead as Donald Trump or the older Republicans at this point. I don't know. I mean, but it's a party that is either is both on autopilot and then has a bunch of really stupid nihilists involved. And again, I think Mitch McConnell is tactically savvy and a reasonably intelligent political operator was his actually. Mo is he just wants Republicans to to fill seats. He wants it. It's entirely about short term electoral calculus. And there's almost how you get someone dressed as a balloon. And there's yes. And there's almost no actual sort of legislative or policy initiative. There's no principle other than, you know, but where I think his mental capacity and his political talents have diminished is that this should have been a big year for the Republicans, including in the Senate, and he was not able to manage the candidate selection and the you know, the races that would have helped do that in a way that I think he has done in previous moments and things like that. But, you know, your point is taken. I mean, this is not, you know, Mitch, you know, the Republican Party doesn't stand for anything even rhetorically anymore. And that is, you know, one of the great takeaways of Trump is that he came in and was like, OK, you guys are the party of limited government. You're the party of maybe immigration on some level, maybe free trade, you know, and maybe actually interventionist foreign policy. And he's like, well, you're not that anymore. I've, you know, I've changed that. And I really do think that the younger Republicans in the House who seem to have some energy are just really nihilistic. They don't care about policy. They are not serious about anything. And all they like is trolling. And that's, you know, a party filled with Marjorie Taylor Greene's is not going to be an effective counterbalance to the status quo. And that, you know, in the end, like I don't I'm not particularly anti Republican more than I am anti Democrat, but this, you know, and this this this kind of dualism has flipped or this equation has flipped at various points. But when you have, you know, you have two major parties and when one of them is not putting up a good coherent fight, the status quo, you know, maintains itself and it grows a little bit more and more. And that's one of the reasons why we're going to have, you know, 23 percent of GDP spending for the next decade, because there's no way to to bring that back. Catherine to close out the segment. Let's fling some poo in the Democratic direction as well. Is there a nihilism or a sort of a magical thinking ism that is sort on the increase of kind of a modern man, modern monetary theory, I can never figure out that stupid acronym. Let's just write a big check and have the trillion dollar coin. But looking at Social Security, we used to have Barack Obama saying that he's not going to kick the can down the road on his watch and now just like no one on the Democratic side is doing this. Criticized Democrats, Catherine. Delighted to. I will say the people I felt the most kinship with by far in the in the room during the State of the Union was that sort of somber faced seated block of the Supreme Court and like the Joint Chiefs down there. Like every time everybody like started getting up and shouting and yelling and there was just like the the like stillness of that section. I was like, yes, this is me. Like we have like fight flight or freeze. And I am just absolutely like with team freeze at this point. But yeah, I mean, I think that the the variant of nihilism that you see in the Democratic Party and Democratic leadership right now is they recognize that there's kind of a big sales pitch in being anti-capitalist. And I think it's not a coincidence that some of Joe Biden's most interestingly awkward moments both in the speech itself and then he's done some tweets afterward is where he has said, I'm a capitalist, but we got to take all the money from everyone who are in their money in the market. That that's out of fashion. You know, he it's sat awkwardly, I think with what we understand of the kind of progressive elements of the Democratic Party who are the parallels to the Marjorie Taylor Greene's who would never say I'm a capitalist, but or would say like something more like, well, we live in a capitalist system. That's just the reality. You know, they sort of they could acknowledge it but not be in favor of it. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that. I think we're going to see the Democratic Party claiming to be anti-capitalist or at least elements claiming to be anti-capitalist while absolutely doing nothing to substantially change the system that we exist in because it's a good one that benefits them and they know that and politically it wouldn't actually be expedient to undermine it. It's the same as these Republicans who are like, well, I'm for small government but and they sort of start skipping that first part eventually and that's where we are now. So I think, yes, there's there's an equal kind of emptiness in terms of broad based like large vision policy goals on the part of both parties. And, you know, the other thing I thought was like during Biden's speech, you know, if you were looking at the prepared text while he was talking, the places he ad-libbed, he repeatedly ad-libbed variants of, I know this proposal isn't really popular with anyone, but like in several places because his proposal aren't really popular with anyone like he's right about that. That was not sort of the right move tonally for the State of the Union, but they're not even that popular with its own party. And he knows it and he's kind of trying to hedge that. And then the little Social Security kerfuffle was just a surprise that fell into his lap. There was a funny bit of legislative trolling in the House a couple of weeks ago before the State of the Union when House Republicans held a vote to on a bill that like wouldn't do anything but denounced socialism in all its forms, basically just to see how many Democrats would vote for and against it. And 86 voted, 86 Democrats voted against denouncing socialism in all its forms and 14 voted present. That's really the kind of work that I'm just makes me proud to be an American. All right, remember, send your to the point email queries to roundtable at reason.com. This one comes from frequent correspondent Leonard Goodnight, if that is his real name, he writes, we hear a lot in libertarian circles that prohibition doesn't work as a rationale for ending the drug war, legalizing abortion, prostitution, etc. Generally, I think that's correct in principle. But there's a problem with that logic. It works too well. Prohibition also doesn't work when the thing being prohibited is murder, rape, robbery or arson. Shouldn't those be illegal? Where do you draw the line between prohibition doesn't work? So we shouldn't have this law and prohibition doesn't work. But we still have to have this law, Catherine. I think the distinction between those two categories is how broad based the consensus is about which about whether the thing should be illegal. So when I think about prohibitions and particularly when reason uses that term, we very, very often use it to mean laws that are at odds with the culture or with a substantial part of the culture. Everybody agrees murder should be illegal, though we disagree on the edges of what exactly murder is and whether the murder I want to do today specifically should be illegal sometimes. But that is a very different matter than say abortion, which I've written about one of the big, big problems with making abortion illegal is that people live side by side, you know, their neighbors disagree about this question. And when that happens, people will see it as morally right to oppose the law, to violate it or to support others who want to violate it in a way that I don't think is generally considered true for these kind of very basic thou shalt not kill type rules. That's an imperfect metric, of course, right? There are different times in history when everyone agreed that slavery should be legal. We all agree. So no problem. Oh, here, obviously, there was in fact still a problem there. But that I think is the useful distinction sort of when asking this question, you know, will a prohibition of this kind succeed or fail? A lot of it hinges on, are you fighting a cultural status quo or are you operating in an in an environment where there is really deeply held substantial disagreement? Those are the prohibitions that fail. Nick, more to add. Yeah, I mean, there's also the question of the type of activity we're talking about murder is bad because it takes away somebody's right to life, you know, liberty and I assume the pursuit of happiness. Drinking or doing certain types of drugs as opposed to other types of intoxicants doesn't. It's, you know, voluntary behavior freely chosen by consenting adults. And when you start to ban those types of activities, those are the things that are going to persist in a big way. Your murder is a rare phenomenon and most crimes against people's rights and property are relatively infrequent. Something like drinking is not or or drug taking and things like that. And, you know, any law when it's passed needs to be, you know, per Catherine's kind of comments, you know, it needs to go through some kind of cost benefit analysis because it could be a right moral and proper law. And if it's going to become a disaster, once it's implemented, you got to really kind of think about different ways of restraining that type of behavior. But with these other kind of prohibitions, I don't, you know, I think the whole category needs to be rethought. You shouldn't be trying to keep people from doing behaviors that, you know, they have every kind of moral right in a free society to participate in. Peter Moore, I basically agree with Nick, that's the right distinction. Are are you taking away somebody else's life? Somebody else's freedom? Somebody else's property? If so, then it's okay to prohibit it even if that prohibition does not fully eliminate the activity. And in fact, I think that the one thing I would sort of really add here is I sometimes think that it's at least a little bit of an error for libertarians to say prohibition didn't work period with no caveats. Because in fact, the best evidence we have is that prohibition did reduce drinking by something like 30 to 40% in the country. It obviously had an effect on alcohol consumption. Now, it also had a bunch of terrible side effects and unintended consequences. It turned alcohol into a black market that was a vector for a huge amount of crime and violence, and just sort of, you know, blackmark a bad black market activity. It degraded the quality of drinks not just in a way that was like less artful, but that was also literally dangerous to the people that was consuming them. So it made drinking more dangerous. It also it also tended to reduce drinking most amongst people who were already light casual non problem drinkers. And so it drove problem drinkers into ever more ever and even more dangerous drinking situations. And that's the kind of thing that prohibitions on personal behaviors that may in some cases have some social negatives. I mean, I would say, like, we have to acknowledge the existence of problem drinkers of problem gamblers, people who have personal issues with those things. But the way to solve those problems is not by by prohibiting them by making them illegal and throwing people in jail. The way to solve those problems is by treating those issues individually and as sort of as as as personal problems rather than by making them crimes. And so I don't know that I like that this the sort of the phrasing prohibition doesn't work. I think prohibition doesn't work as intended. Prohibition has terrible unintended consequences and is ultimately worse for society is a better way of thinking about the problems with prohibition. Doesn't fit on a bumper sticker, Peter. All right, let's go quickly to a I should probably say I have almost certainly at some point in my life said prohibition doesn't work. I said all the time. There's a big Urban Institute study last week. Didn't get a lot of attention. Got some study on public school enrollment declines. The author Thomas D has been doing some of the best work out there. I think he's in Stanford on a pandemic era bleeding from K through 12 enrollment. Basic takeaway is that over the two main school years of the pandemic, so beginning in the fall of 2019 and ending in June 2022, public K through 12 enrollment did not bounce back as advertised. It declined by around 1%. Meanwhile, to the extent that we have the numbers and the reporters kind of measures different things that there private school enrollment was up 4% just in the last school year and homeschooling was up 30% in the last school year. And most weirdly, and this is what attracted most of the headlines, we don't know where about 400,000 kids are that dropped out of the system. It's not explained by going to new forms of schooling or just by the shrinkage of the overall school age population. Catherine, you follow the stuff pretty closely. What did you find particularly interesting and noteworthy about the study? I mean that the scale, the size of the numbers surprised me somewhat. I think it was entirely predictable that if you say to a bunch of especially older kids, you know, high school age kids and very, very young kids. So kindergarten age, if you say to their families, school is absolutely required, you must go and then also say we won't be providing school services for a couple of years. You're going to lose a bunch of people out of the system. They're going to say absolutely not to hell with this. And as in the case of the central anecdote in one of the articles that spun out of that study, they're going to go get a job at Chipotle because that's a much better use of their time than trying to do some kind of janky online schooling that nobody put any thought or effort into. I can't even say I blame the Chipotle defectors, frankly. The thing that's interesting to me, the Chipotle defectors, the thing that's interesting to me is, you know, of course, these students, of course, these people are findable. Like no one is easier to find than an American 17 year old. I guarantee you that every single one of these hundreds of thousands of missing students have a TikTok presence, have, you know, a thousand ways that you could find them online. It just to me, it really is just like one more blow to the myth that the thing that public schooling is doing is somehow creating a common cultural basis and shared basis of knowledge for American students. It is not. There are so many ways in which people are not participating in the system for perfectly good reasons. And this just brought all that to the fore. It pushed another batch of kids out of the system. But it's this has always been true. It has always been true that like even if the kids bodies were in the building, they were not consuming anything substantively that was like making them into good American citizens and voters. They were just getting through it. And now that's not even that. And it's just it's just absurd to me that people can still straight facedly say that the public education system in the United States is like a worthy one that we should fund more. Peter, we've been criticizing Republicans a lot on this podcast for not really having much in the way of policies. But Sarah Huckby Sanders, a governor of Arkansas, I believe she gave the response state of the union spate of the union address. And in between various culture or stuff, she talked basically about education. And she is one of the many governors, most of them Republican, who are kind of leading with their chin on on aggressive school choice. Is that not a Republican like signature issue in this age? Yes, I think that Republican governors have an opportunity to actually make a difference here. Republican governors, unlike Republican senators, actually have real responsibilities to voters who are going to make the decision about whether to pull the lever for Republican or Democrat, who's going to be in charge of their state, who's going to be the chief executive for the for their state. And so they're going to be responsive there. And they're going to just make they're going to be engaged in the business of governing at least somewhat more than say, Marjorie Taylor Green or Rick Scott. And I think that Democrats handed them this opportunity. And it's really interesting that if you in some ways, if you think about it, Republicans right now are acting as defenders of the public school system. And Democrats and teachers unions who have positioned themselves sort of that way, at least by in terms of messaging over the last decades have throughout the pandemic, teachers unions contributed to what is what we are now seeing as the meltdown and breakdown of public schooling school closures, especially the longest closures in blue states and blue cities were driven heavily, not exclusively, but heavily by teachers unions. And the results is that people are just opting out of public school entirely, not opting into sort of other kind of quasi publicly funded things and backpack, but no, just opting out entirely. And that is going to cause huge problems for the for the teachers unions that wanted to stay home for a year or two because of the pandemic. Nick, other things to add about the study or about the politics surrounding it? You know, one thing that's interesting to me, because I went to Catholic school, but Catholic schools, which, you know, circa 1960, I think that was their peak year in the country, they have been losing people at the same or a faster rate than public schools, traditional public schools. And they actually lost lots of kids during the pandemic. In the first year, they actually had a bigger loss than than conventional public schools. And they haven't really bounced back fully. So that is to me is kind of interesting, because Catholic schools traditionally are low are low cost private schools. But if you go back to 1960, the number of kids who are in private schools has not really changed very much. It still is stuck around 10%. What it where the action is, is in alternatives to conventional public schools, some of that is homeschooling where the numbers are still kind of small, but the growth of publicly financed charters. So I think that's actually one of the places to go and they tend to be less unionized or not unionized at all. And then the other thing that I think that's worth keeping in mind is not to pass out. I don't know the right phraseology of this, not to pathologize the COVID lockdowns as the thing that changed everything. Because when you look at school districts like New York, and especially Los Angeles Unified School District, which is the second largest district in the country, they have been losing people losing students for decades, because they suck. And that, you know, the COVID experiences has accelerated certain things. But it's, you know, this is a long slow decline, which is kind of similar to when we were talking about old age entitlements. This, these are, you know, kind of systemic, slow moving, you know, arteriosclerosis type problems in American politics today. And it's not clear. I'm not as sanguine as I used to be. And even as more states have passed backpack funding where, you know, in every state in the country, education is either the single largest or second largest line item in a state budget. So when govern when things change at the state level, and money that the state was going to be sending to a local school district goes to a kid's parents instead, it's a big deal. But I don't know, I don't know how much, you know, like the teachers unions kind of like old age entitlements and conventional schools, they are in it for the long haul. It is really hard to ultimately find that place where, you know, there's a tipping point and actual like serious systemic reform is going to take place. The in New York, the uptake of available parents or families to participate in the system went from about 67% in the late 90s to about 75% under Mayor Bloomberg, who a lot of that is charter school, public charter schools, that brought people back into the system. And then it started tanking again. So it was a lot of the long decline was just in terms of population. But in terms of percentage of the population, they had shown increases from the dark old days of the 80s 90s. But that is now accelerating. There's a big Empire Center report on that derived from the Thomas D study to talk about the just absolute and yes, pandemic related acceleration over the last couple years of exit out of New York. But a lot of that too is that people with families just left the city because it's why stay for a variety of different reasons work related in other ways. All right, at Nick Gillespie's insistence, correct insistence, I might add, we're making time for a lightning round of yesterday was a Super Bowl big deal in America, the biggest televised spectacle of the dang deer, the Kansas City chiefs, as Catherine well knows, beat the beat the San Diego pitchers is my favorite name of a non existent. You go around like Europe or Asia, there's always people would like bogus like a chat GPT prompt teams there. No, they beat the Philadelphia Eagles 3835 very exciting. And so let's do a lightning round beginning with Catherine and her ladies book club of your very favorite thing about the Super Bowl yesterday. I like the Ben Affleck Duncan commercial. And I will not be taking questions about that. Yeah, I mean, I've enjoyed the arc of Ben Affleck, which like now just encompasses I think a certain generational despair, which I enjoy a lot. And the tidbit that I learned about that commercial is that apparently a bunch of the customers at that particular donkeys were just absolutely furious that the service wasn't that great that day. Like they were they greeted being served by Ben Affleck exclusively with as one write up put it invective flecked outbursts, which is a try to say that three times fast. Yeah, I that's all I'm here for I'm here for like despairing Ben Affleck serving me donkeys and like just super casual Rihanna like she was just like she was marking the steps she was walking through low energy screw you she was chill. She was just like, yeah, I'm Rihanna, I'm pregnant and I'm playing the Super Bowl. What do you want? I'm amazing. You're welcome that I'm here. And I think we should all bring that energy into 2023. Nick, you'll agree that that was no Dunka Chino performance by Ben Affleck. Yeah, no, no, that's for sure. What was your favorite part of the spectac yesterday? Well, I'll start with my the biggest disappointment I was pregnancy and all I thought that Rihanna was going to disrobe to some kind of you know, creative effect. Yeah. And just got bigger by that. I know it was like I found it. I am not here for low energy halftime shows, you know. And I one of the things I went back, it was only really in the 90s that Super Bowl halftime shows became like big, big things. The 90s was a long time ago. Yeah, it's for the 90s are closer to Pearl Harbor than we are. I mean, like everything is closer to Pearl Harbor. And you're sorry, I'm starting to think like maybe, you know, we need Pearl Harbor to generate more activity. But like Pete Fountain, the jazz player, you know, like he he appeared at the Grambling State University marching band have appeared at like they were appearing in halftime shows into the 90s. And it's just like, what the hell is going on? Like, you know, the halftime show, I like last year's, which got trashed because it was seen as like a Gen X sell out. It was fantastic, you know. So I didn't like that. What I want to come for is I had to end up watching the end of the game on the ESPN gamecast, which is a they've had it for years. I just it's kind of like an old 80s style handheld video game. It's like watching that. And I loved, you know, the last minute or two on gamecast where you get these slow moving diagrammatic updates of what happened. And it's so exciting to watch a game that was as close as that one on gamecast and know that, you know, it's like the light from a dying star in a different galaxy. You know, you're receiving it long after everybody involved is dead. It was really great. So that's what I like to do. That is a beautiful and poetical. Peter, what was your favorite moments? William's sister selling whiskey ads. I didn't watch it. Yeah. But since your favorite brings up Pearl Harbor, I just want to say that it's I hate this transition for us. It is Michael Bay's worst movie. And to bring this full circle kind of peak Ben Affleck in a certain way. I think what we saw yesterday was peak Ben Affleck. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, I think he was also in a commercial for the the the making of how Nike landed the Air Jordan. There's a Ben Affleck picture coming up at that time. Yes, I think it's true as long as we're talking about about Ben Affleck is from this point forward, he's going to be known as somebody. He's going to be known as a Matt Welch impersonator, that's right, rather than the other way around. Thank you. I hope you'll I hope you'll put that story in today's show notes, where I'll see Matt Welch tried out to be a Ben Affleck impersonator. I was recruited, sir, way and OK. My favorite part of the Super Bowl, part of, you know, ongoing middle age sogginess was as it went from like the pregame show to the the whatever the they called it the of the pre kickoff portion of the of the programming. They had some voiceover of Johnny Cash narrating a poem about the tattered flag and and all this footage and just like, well, she's she's gone through a lot this kind of stuff. And there's like that whole section and then just going through like babyface for some reason, playing a guitar left handed America, the beautiful with like seventy five chord changes, key changes. And then it goes to Chris Stapleton playing great version, absolutely great version on electric guitar of and singing of the national anthem, causing the Philadelphia Eagles head coach. I forget Giovanna Robisi or something, whatever his name is just just ugly cry. He's just like balling on the sidelines. Well, this this fat country dude is just warbling out wonderfully. I loved all. And then then I read flyover of a lady lady Navy pilot gals. Just I loved every little bit of the Americana over the top schmaltz at the beginning. I'm here for that. I'm disappointed that up with people didn't participate or that the Chinese air balloons didn't fly over. That would have been. There was a children's course, I should say, who are also like, well, the Johnny Johnny Cash was talking about. She she's looking OK. Then they're like they're paying to the kids chorus, doing mums and Oz love it. 10 out of 10, no notes. All right, let's go to what other culture we have been consuming out there in the world. Nick, why don't you start us off? OK, so I read and now I need to find it again, the fantastic new book by Verlin Lewis and Hyrum Lewis. I don't know what the relation is, but there are two separate people, separate but equal. It was called the myth of left and right, how the political spectrum misleads and harms America. Matt Welch, I want to remind you of a book that was published about a decade ago, maybe 12 years ago called the Declaration of Independence. This brings the receipts that we, you know, failed to, you left like stuffed in the bottom of your wallets. You know, that book was closer to Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor than we are to that book. I or to Pearl Harbor itself. But it is the myth of left and right, how the political spectrum misleads and harms America is a fantastic book of political science. And it is these guys are not pushing a libertarian alternative to things. But when they talk about how people who call themselves conservative or liberal, right or left Republican or Democrat attempt to essentialize these categories, and it is it is something that needs to be read and understood by everybody in a political journalism kind of enterprise, because this clarifies so much about why our political discourse is just rancid and useless and obfuscatory. The one thing that I will add, and this is having had several conversations with Jonathan Haidt, what is interesting is when you look at the political spectrum or political tribes from a political point of view, as opposed to a psychological view, you get different readings and what Haidt and other people, somebody like Karen Stenner, who used to be a Princeton and wrote a book called The Authoritarian Dynamic years ago, we'll talk about is that, you know, psychologically, there are certain types of people who kind of are going to be have certain types of temperaments or predilections that get expressed in certain types of political outlooks like conservative and liberal and things like that are libertarian and authoritarian. And that's important and that's an essential part of understanding politics. But the myth of left and right, how the political spectrum misleads and harms America by Verlin Lewis and Hiram Lewis really explains the politics of the current moment and why the two parties don't seem to be particularly different from one another, but act as if they are absolutely, you know, you know, the devil versus angels or something like that. Really good book. Peter, what did you consume? So I watched Magic Mike's Last Dance, the third film in the Magic Mike franchise. You know, it's a movie about male strippers and middle age female empowerment and six pack abs. But as it turns out, it's also a movie about zoning and historical review boards and why they're bad. And I wasn't expecting that. I really wasn't at all, though maybe I should have been because this movie like the first one is directed by Stephen Satterberg, who is one of the great observers of of modern life and one of the great movie directors of the last 30 years or so in part because whatever budget level he is working at, he always manages to find some way to to add in some sort of for some of reality, right? Like these movies seem even even at their most ridiculous always seem to take place in something like a real and recognizable world with real and recognizable characters. And I want to be clear, this is a completely absurd and completely ridiculous movie. But it has a lot of small sharply observed little bits in it, in particular, the way that historical preservation review boards are basically used as political tools by powerful people to stop stuff that they don't like that other people are doing, not to actually preserve historical things in a way that like makes any kind of sense. And so this is a movie about a wealthy older woman who hires a stripper to conduct a male dance review at the the historical theater that her husband kind of owns, but she has become the she now runs as part of a kind of divorce type settlements. And she's like this is this is a way of getting revenge on her husband and trying to make him mad. And so what he does is he uses his political connections, including going up to like MPs in the British Parliament to try and stop this thing from happening, not by like, you know, making a big moral issue about it. But by saying at one point that the stripper stage that they built was three quarters of an inch too high. And therefore they're going to have to shut down the whole thing. And it's actually that's that is how a lot of zoning and like sort of historical review stuff works. It's not really about the preservation of the of the neighborhood character or something important. It's about somebody is mad that somebody else is trying to do something that is interesting and innovative and they're using their political connections to get it shut down. It's not exactly a great movie, but it's fun and and better than I expected. And again, just really sort of sharply and amusingly observed and Channing Tatum is a genuinely charming dude at all times. Listening to Peter. I loved Sotterberg's first movie, Sex, Lies and Zoning Ports. Yeah, it's a classic, which came out, I think, closer to Pearl Harbor. Absolutely. Listening to Magic Mike 3 reference to it is kind of like, you know, like if you follow New York Post on Twitter, which is the world's greatest newspaper, at least America's, there's always like, you know, this celebrity just dunked on that celebrity about having an affair with this celebrity and you've just recognized absolutely nobody in the story at all. It feels really great. The fact that this this is the third in the Magic Mike trilogy. Like, OK, that's great. I I've checked out of whatever this is. Oh, no, no. The Magic Mike. I Peter, I appreciate your review because I'm a big Magic Mike fan and, you know, that would have the Magic Mike franchise that was instrumental in reviving Matthew McConaughey. It's also a great portrait of kind of of crappy Tampa and the and the weirdness of the Tampa economy, where you've got all these guys who are like, well, I'm sort of a stripper, but I also do construction and maybe I'm trying to start a furniture store. And it's just it's a great movie about like an under a place that doesn't get a lot of attention in Hollywood. And it actually seems like to have taken an interest in the people there. Again, Sotterberg is is a sharp observer of real humans and their real lives. There's a great little bit where like one of the characters is like, I'm a Medicaid insurance administrator or something like that. And it's just like, oh, those are the types of jobs people actually have in Tampa. And you don't see that in a lot of films. Catherine, what do you got? I have a sports ball that is not the Super Bowl. I want to recommend to people. I've talked about it before, maybe. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Substack. That's what I'm recommending to you. You're so mad. You're so mad at him because he is my nemesis. He beats me every year for the Los Angeles Press Club columnist of the Year Award every year, every single year. He beats me. It's fine. Because of that, I took an interest in LeBron James's beating of his NBA scoring record. If I can't do it, at least LeBron can do it for me. And went to read the fairly substantial piece that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote on his Substack about having his record broken and once again, infuriatingly, it is absolutely gentlemanly, charming, gracious, thoughtfully written. And I hate it. So I recommend to you Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Substack. He says in the subsection, why I'm thrilled that LeBron broke the record. Whenever a sports record is broken, including mine, it's time for celebration. It means that someone has pushed the boundaries of what we thought possible to a whole new level. And when one person climbs higher than the last person, we all feel like we are capable of being more. He's right. And it's cool to celebrate human accomplishment. Fine. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a gentleman, a scholar, a victor, even in defeat. He also brushes back Magic Johnson a little bit. He does. He says he's but he's like again, so gracious. He's like my friend. We have been friends for so long. If he said anything, I would believe him. He is unfortunately slightly mistaken in with regard to whether or not I am mad about this record being broken. And that's totally fair because had it been broken some years ago, I would have been hyper competitive and angry about it and probably done something crappy. But now I'm 75 and I have wisdom. And so I have moved beyond these petty grievances. It's it's good, Matt. I know. I read it. It's very good. I just want to register my surprise that neither Catherine on her current religion journey nor Nick on whatever journey he's been taking mentioned the two some of the greatest Super Bowl ads there were is about Jesus. Jesus. Jesus had some good commercials during the Super Bowl. Go check it out. I'll leave it at that. I did. I did Baptist this weekend, by the way, with Jason Russell, our esteemed managing editor. The Cool Baptist as he described them and they were indeed props to the Cool Baptist of Clarendon. Again, bad names up and down. What I saw and I saw sitting next to Nick Gillespie, it was uncharacteristically quiet during this. He only was checking his phone sometimes and not asleep. And not asleep. Usually there's a little snorkeling sound when you sit next to Nick at a movie theater. We saw a fantastic movie called Pimball, The Man Who Saved the Game and it's by the Bragg brothers who work for reason. Meredith and Austin Bragg. I wouldn't just say that because they work with them. I would say if anything there are Matt Damon and Ben Affleck very much so it is the story of Roger Sharp, who is the spectacularly mustachioed GQ journalist and Pimball player or would be GQ or I guess he ended up having a pretty decent career. But he helped overturn New York City's ridiculous. And are you kidding me? They really had this 35 year ban on Pimball in 1976. And it's just sort of the story about how that happened. And it's also a love story. And it also has the single greatest. And I hope they win an Oscar just for this cinematic deployment of a bad finger song in the history of film. It is it's terrific. It's just really funny and warm spirited. And I I just can't say enough about it. It's the beginning. It's a theatrical release sometime soon. It's on the festival circuit and doing very well. There was a special screening that we watched in Manhattan and just great. And go check it out. Pimballfilm.com is the place where you can go and find out more information about it. But it's just really funny and nice. Yeah, it'll be coming to video on demand in March 17th. Matt Welch. OK, that's great. All right. Thank you for listening to this slightly longer version of the Reason Around Table podcast. Check out all our podcasts at reason.com slash podcasts. Nick, anything coming up in New York City that you would like to invite people to after your spectacular triumph last week with Cat Roseville? On March 9th, we will be having a Reason Speakeasy Thursday, March 9th with Anthony Scaramucci. Oh, wow. We'll be talking about why this is going to be the greatest year ever for Bitcoin and other forms of cryptocurrency, as well as talking some trash about a Queen's real estate developer who once led a little country called America. That is very exciting. OK, thank you for listening. We'll catch you next week. Goodbye.