1581: The Redistribution Recession & You're Hired! Populist President by Casey Mulligan
7 Dec 2025 · 36 min
Podcast episode (Ep. 1581) of Creating Wealth with Jason Hartman featuring economist Casey Mulligan (University of Chicago; former chief economist, Council of Economic Advisors in the Trump administration). The conversation (recorded/posted Oct 27, 2020) covers Mulligan’s books (The Redistribution Recession; You're Hired: Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President), anecdotes from White House service, and policy topics including: the repeal of the ACA individual mandate, Trump-era deregulation (a regulatory-budget approach and deregulatory measures affecting generic drug manufacturing), trade policy differences (tariffs vs quotas and ‘‘America First’’ framing), labor-market distortions during COVID (unemployment benefits disincentives), and campaign/polling observations for the 2020 election. The hosts also reference local housing policy (Portland relocation-fee rule) and business relocations (Gulfstream/Charles Schwab).
Chapters
Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.
Welcome to episode 1581. 1581. Thank you for joining me today from 189 countries worldwide. And how many countries are there worldwide? Well, it depends who you ask. Is the Vatican a country? Is Monaco a country? You know, there are some gray areas, right? Is Palestine a country? You know, there's a big one. That's a dispute. There we go.
There we go.
But 189, I'd say we got pretty good coverage. Can't wait to welcome listeners from North Korea and Cuba when they get access to the Internet. Do you know, in North Korea, for the very few people who are allowed to access the Internet, there are, I think it's 24 approved government, government approved websites. And hey, even though we have a lot more choices here in these democratic countries in the east and the west, but I'll call them westernized countries, even if they may be in the east because, you know, they're democratic, right? So I'll give them that sort of, that broad brush. Sorry if I've offended anyone.
Maybe I have.
I probably have. So that's not my intent. Sometimes it is, but not that time anyway. So, you know, we've got the censors here in our world, right? In many of these countries we've got big tech. We've got big tech companies censoring us. Yes, they are censoring us all the time. The thought police, reminiscent of the TASS News Agency in the former Soviet Union. And guess I looked up the Tass News Agency and I went to their website. They still exist. So even after the fall of the Soviet Union, I guess Mother Russia is still going to have the Tass News Agency or not still going to have, they do have. It's still out there, but probably not censoring quite as much as well Facebook and YouTube and Google.
So there you go.
It's a crazy world we live in nowadays. But hey, our guest today. Our guest today. Let me tell you about our guest today. I think you enjoy this interview is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, Chicago, and a former chief economist for the Council of Economic Advisors in a presidential administration that you are very familiar with. But I will not say which presidential administration yet. But yeah, chief economist.
Wow.
That's pretty good. Pretty good. We get people some big, big fat resumes on this show. Don't going to talk about the redistribution recession. And I think this will be fascinating too. Fascinating and may influence your thoughts on the upcoming election. Yes. But wow, couple of quick things here. I don't have time to go into them because our guest today, we've got a fairly long segment with him. But guess what? Los Angeles, my former home, the City of Angels, well, not quite, but that's the name anyway, is considering selling a bunch of their properties to close their $600 million budget gap. Yes, they have so poorly managed their city that they've got to sell off all these government owned properties. But hey, why the heck should the government own all those properties in the first place? That's problematic in a whole different way. But we won't even go there. And one of our team members, Naresh, posted an article that says, and this is From Yahoo. Money, 4 in 10Americans want to buy a house because of the pandemic. Because of the pandemic. See, people are homesteading. They've realized what I said back in February, that the home is the center of the universe. It and it is. And that means that you've got a lot of good stuff going for your investment. And if you're buying properties through our platform and through our group, then you know the likelihood is you're going to have some nice profitable experiences with those properties. Everything is pointing that way. Everything right now. Now that could certainly change. But wow, there's just a lot of tailwinds, a lot of wind at your back. Meaning good news for you investors. Really good news. And here's one more. Gulfstream, you know those really cool private jets that they make? That's the private jet company Gulfstream, they make those 60 and $80 million private jets, they make cheaper ones too. But hey, who's counting? 10 million here, 10 million there. What's the big deal? Well, they already had a plant in Georgia. They also have a facility in Long beach where I also used to live in Long Beach. And they are shutting it down. They are leaving Long beach because guess what, Long beach happens to be in the Socialist Republic of California. They are taking 700 jobs with them from Long Beach, California to Georgia. Good decision, Gulfstream. Good decision. And hey, Charles Schwab leaving San Francisco to move to Dallas. Another good decision.
Get out of these business. Unfriendly jurisdictions. They are terrible. And here's one more for you, Sarah, one of our team members, you've heard her on the show, she posted an article in our private content group and this one is interesting. Portland has now approved, they say, an option, but I don't quite know what that means.
That probably isn't much of an option. It's a, hey, there's a gun to your head. But it's optional if you want to do this. But I do have a gun to your head, right? That's the way the government works. They don't really give options, they just decide on things anyway. This option in quotes, is to have landlords pay for tenant relocation fees for any rent increase until the end of March. So yeah, that went into effect. This rule goes into effect immediately and applies to any rent increase between September and March 31st of 2021. Tenants must provide written notice that they can't afford the higher rent and will need to move. And I guess the landlord will now have to pay the tenants relocation fees. Wow. Get out of Portland.
While they're just trying to make the housing supply shortage even worse. That's what they're going to do. That's what they're going to do. Because you reward things you want and punish things you don't want and. And then you get the exact opposite of that. Right? So yes, landlords are not going to be interested in buying properties in Portland because they're attacking landlords just like California and New York and all the others that don't know what to do. Yep. Yep. Now. Oh, here's another article from Motley fool and Naresh, thanks for posting this one. It says Portland landlords must now pay relocation cost of tenants who can't afford the rent. So one article says option and that's. Well, that's from OregonLive.com and the other article from Motley fool, which is not embedded in the Oregon disaster, says that tenant landlords must pay the relocation fees.
I'm going with that one.
I think they probably must pay the relocation fees. I doubt it's really an option, but. But yeah, wow. Just crazy. Folks, no matter what you do, follow my advice and move as much of your life to places, environments, jurisdictions, governments that are not desperate and that are friendly to your Cause as a landlord, as a business person, as a citizen, whatever it is, just vote with your feet. That's what you need to do. You need to vote with your feet. And it may take time. It took me a long time to leave the Socialist Republic of California. But I finally did it. Never looked back. You know, I remember one of our local market specialists from Atlanta at the time, right about when I was either had just moved or was about to move, I can't remember, was talking to Sarah, you know, who's on our team. Sarah said, yeah, Jason will be back in California in six months.
Not so much, not so much. One of the best decisions of my life was to make the move. So if you're in New York or New Jersey or California or Oregon or Washington state, you know, maybe not all of Washington state, but at least in Seattle. Get the hell out of there. Get out, get out, get out, get out while you still can. You know, it's crazy what's happening. Okay, hey, without further ado, let's get to our guest. Of course, if you need us, you know where to reach us. I told you too many times. I don't need to say where to reach us again. You can figure it out, because we're here for you. And, gosh.
We got a couple of good webinars coming up.
I'm going to announce soon, so carve.
A little extra time out of your schedule. Maybe next week for an hour, because we got a couple good webinars we're going to share with you real soon here real soon. So that's coming up. And, yeah, let's go to our guest and let's. Let's find out. I already know, but let's find out the presidential administration that this guest was the economic advisor to. All right, here we go.
It's my pleasure to welcome Casey Mulligan. He's a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, former chief economist for the Council of Economic Advisors in the Trump administration, and the author of the best sell book, the Redistribution.
How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy, and the new book, you're Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President. Casey, welcome. How are you?
It's my pleasure to be here.
It's good to have you. And you are actually located in Chicago, right?
Yes.
Fantastic. So, Casey, tell us about the you're hired book. Let's start with that.
You know, I had the honor and great fun of working in Trump's White House for a year, a year off of my university position, and I saw so Many things there that none of nobody's told about. And you know, the White House belongs to the American people. I thought they deserve to know what's really happening there. And I had a lot of fun telling, retelling those stories. So that's the genesis of the book. And the book has about the president and policy. You know, I was a policy analyst, economic policy analyst. So that was my contacts with him. And I go through different policy issues, different types of regulation, immigration, trade, and how the president discussed those with us, how he dealt with them, how he thought about them.
Well, I think even the most left.
Leaning person would have to agree that the media does not like Trump and Trump does not like the media. So they're not giving him a fair trial in the court of public opinion, are they?
Right. Well, that's how he got where he got by serving the flyover country, that people normally aren't part of those institutions. Right. And so it is a bit of a battle from the people who are traditionally used to controlling things and the people in flyover country with Trump as their representative. So that's one reason why Twitter's so important for him, because it allows him to bypass all the information middlemen, if you will.
Yeah.
You know, I gotta say, regardless of who the president is, what party they're with, like the fact that they can talk directly to the people.
Now, liberals hate that.
You know, I've had guests on my show who say, oh, we should ban him from using Twitter. And it's really unpresidential now. Obama, of course, used Twitter and very successfully as a campaign tool. What would be the problem of the president talking directly to the people? How could someone possibly object to that?
Well, there's a lot of things that aren't supposed to be said. And that's why I would say one big reason. Our president was hired by the people. They like it that he says what's not supposed to be said, but nonetheless true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay. Well, you've got some fantastic photos. Why don't you take us through your slides a little bit and let's look at some of those and tell us about some of these meetings you were in.
This is a photo. I was the last guy walking in the meeting. You can see me there. This was a meeting about a health regulation and I like to use it just to introduce what it's like to meet the man before. I've met the presidents of major universities, I've met some presidents of major companies. Anytime you meet somebody like that, if you have you notice that That's a talented person. You're not shocked that they got where they got because they have some pretty impressive talents. And the president is like that. You see that he's a talented person. The thing that really amazed me and caught me off guard is his ability to manage social network. He can say a few words and that can put dozens of people in the line, thousands of people, millions of people. And he would do that. In this meeting, for example, Kudlow was supposed to be there, but the gentleman sitting in the front, Brian, he came in Kudlow's spot. Brian was a very good health expert for the President. And the president just wanted to let people know that you should be coming to the meetings, not sending your subordinates. So he said to Brian, he turns to Brian and says, you're better looking than Kudlow. And the ladies, you can see Kellyanne, and you can't quite see Mercedes and Sarah Huckabee. But they immediately object and say, no, he's not. We think Larry is really great looking. And then he kind of leans over to see them and he says, can we at least agree that Brian is stronger? And we all had a good laugh. But we got the message that, you know, you're not supposed to skip your meetings. Cuddle. Should have been there.
Sure, okay.
That's the type of things and nicknames and so on.
That, you know, obviously very successful business person. So he's conducted lots of meetings over the years. And so, you know, obviously has a talent for organizing a vision, getting people to rally around a vision, you know, getting things done. I mean, he's a get it done kind of guy, for sure. But take us through some of the specifics covered in your books a little bit too, and feel free to thumb through. Slides and anecdotes are great too, but I'll let you control the slides. But I certainly want to ask you about redistribution, and I want to ask you about his populist outlook and why that's good, why cutting regulations is good, but why the left is so. Just so opposed to all of these things.
He's not an ideologue. And I call him an experimenter. That's not the words that he would use, but I call him an experimenter. It's not like he has an ideology and then tries to derive from those principles or ideology what he needs to do. He believes in trying stuff. I think in business they might, these days they might call it fast failure. So you try something, you monitor the feedback so you're not married to what you're trying. Quite the opposite. You try it, and if it doesn't work, you get it out of there and you go another direction. And he does a lot of that. And once you understand that that's how he operates, I'm showing Marconi here in this picture, because Marconi was a really famous instance of that over 100 years ago. He invented the radio, really? And he said in his Nobel Peace Prize speech, he said, I don't know how this stuff works. I just know that it does. I tried many different combinations, and I found some would work. And you theoretical physicists, you figure out how these darn waves do it. But I got a machine that works. I found it by experimentation. And the President is very much like that. And he doesn't want you to know that. So maybe I'm in trouble for telling you this, because if you thought that he wasn't serious about what he was doing, then that would kind of ruin what he's trying to do. So he'll be very bombastic and act like that. This is exactly what's happening. Kind of like yesterday when he said, we're done. We're not negotiating about stimulus before the election. And then today, here we are negotiating again. He was able to get to some quite successful policies. And the one I start with in the book is the individual mandate, which is a terrible idea, but it took a while for people to discover in Washington at least, how terrible it is.
So tell us about the individual mandate.
The individual mandate was actually invented. Some people say it was invented by Republicans. It got bipartisan support for a while there, which is to force people to buy health insurance. And the theory is, and it really is a theory, as opposed to experience. The theory is that health insurance markets can't work unless people are forced to buy it. The reason being that the people who are healthy won't buy it. And then without the people being healthy, it's too expensive, and then nobody buys it. That's the theory again, emphasis on theory. And that theory was pushed very hard in the form of Obamacare. That became the law of the land. You had to buy health insurance or pay a big penalty, right?
Well, the penalty is smaller than the cost of the insurance. So a lot of people just elected to pay the penalty, if that was even enforced, right?
Well, the penalty started out small, but it was ramping up until the President got rid of it. And the President took both views on this. I mean, the experts had told him, you know, the story I more or less told you. He tried that for a few days. In terms of A political trial balloon. And he realized, no, people hate this. I would be best to be a champion of getting rid of it. And which he did. And later on we gave it some thought and realized, yeah, when somebody turns down subsidized health insurance, I guess the White House ought to send him a thank you note because they save all of us money. And the individual mandate is completely backwards in that regard. It punishes people for turning down subsidized coverage. So by getting rid of it, the people who were being forced in the insurance, they were thankful and it was good for the budget. It's kind of a win win policy. And he discovered it that way. And every day since he's been bragging, or let me say every other day, he brags about, I got rid of the individual mandate. He really did. That was a big accomplishment.
Can we even classify Trump as a conservative? A lot of people say he used to be a liberal. Obviously he was friends with Hillary Clinton and many other Democrats, but he's sort of not. He's not that really that easy to pigeonhole, if you will, to try to give him a description. Now, the fact that he picked Pence as his vp, you know, that obviously leans very much to the right, but I mean, would it even be fair to classify him as a conservative or Republican? A lot of people in the Republican establishment obviously hate him. Where would you go with that?
As I said, he's not an ideologue. So right there it's a little bit hard to pin him down because he tries things. Now, he has a life experience, but has taught him some lessons. And you might say those lessons kind of lean conservative or Republican, for example, how much regulation interferes with doing business. The idea that he's used repeatedly, including in the COVID crisis, the idea that big government can't possibly know what's going on in the ground. It's better to delegate some of these decisions to the more local level where there's a better chance that there's real information there. He did that in a number of areas before COVID for example, in housing, a lot of these things around health care, he delegated to the states. And then when Covid came along, it was very natural for him. Again, the experimenter had successful experiments delegating things to states before he tried it again with COVID And that's kind of a Republican approach to things. Right? That putting all the power in Washington is a mistake.
Yeah, no question about it. Talk to us a bit about trade. Everybody cries that protectionism and tariffs, terrible for the Economy. Well, not everybody. Half the people, I guess I should say certainly the media. That's got the loudest voice, unfortunately. But it just seems like, I mean, I want to think of myself as a libertarian, but can't have truly free trade without the parties being equally yoked. Now, of course, that's a biblical concept, but if you look at the Chinese, for example, they don't pay the same wages, they don't have the same regulations, environmental or occupational. They don't have osha, they don't have the epa. So how can you trade fairly when the playing field is so uneven? I mean, free trade is fine as a concept if each side is equally yoked, if you will.
I appreciate the question. It's rather theoretical. I mean, the fact is that the special interests are Heapley and mesh there. And this is not new. I draw the comparison in the book between Reagan and Trump. They're very different on the rhetoric. Trump calls himself the tariff man, right. Whereas you listen to Ronald Reagan on YouTube talk about free trade. He says it so beautifully. Couldn't be better said than Ronald Reagan says it. But the fact is they were both had protectionist pressures on them and they succumbed to those protectionist pressures. No question. There's two differences. One is, you might say, a little more cosmetic. Reagan was going against, so to speak, Japan. That was the thing in the 80s. Now it's China. Partly that's changing the labels now, partly there's an important difference there. You know, Japan is a democracy. Was a democracy. Japan did have military, still doesn't. Whereas China, obviously there are national security concerns with them. So there would be a reason to be tougher on China than we were on Japan. But anyway, they've approached them very similarly. The real substantive difference is that Reagan used quotas. So where Trump, as we all know, ad nauseam, he put tariffs on various imported products, which he might not advertise this, but it raises the prices that we pay here for those products. And where does the money go? Goes in the Treasury. What Reagan did is he put quotas on imported products, for example, limit on how many cars Japanese companies could send here. And that raised prices that consumers paid in the United States. But where did that money go? Went to the Japanese companies. And they're both protectionists. They were both motivated by trying to win votes in Michigan and similar places. But one of them at least got money for our people and the other just gave money to the foreign people. And that's why there's no trading.
That's a really interesting point. A quota could have the same effect as a tariff. But the quota doesn't bring any money into the country. It makes consumers pay higher prices, yet the country doesn't get the money with a tariff. In theory, the consumer would pay a higher price, but at least the country would get paid.
Exactly. That was much more the America first. Even people who had my job under Reagan have told me, they said, hey, the Japanese companies came to the White House and they say, please do a quota. And Reagan gave it to them. And that's why Reagan didn't have a trade war with Japan, because he was paying, in effect, he was paying the Japanese companies. So they're not going to want to fight back. In fact, they were asking for these things.
And by the way, I think that is the reason. I may be way off on this, but I think that was the reason that really the Lexus and Acura brands were created because they couldn't get more. They could only get a quota of cars in under Toyota and Honda. So they had to create new brands to have a new quota on this whole new company, this Lexus line and the Acura line. And now if you see that happening, you see like Hyundai, they have Genesis, but that's more of a marketing thing, which is fine. That makes sense. They're not doing that for the quota thing nowadays, right?
Yeah, I mean, General Motors and Ford and Chrysler got a little burned there. They of course wanted those quotas back in the 80s.
Of course they did, yeah.
And they were quota on the number of cars. So the Japanese said, okay, we're limited on how many cars we can send, we're gonna make more money. And one way we can really leverage making more money would be to whatever cars we send, they'll be luxury cars. So Japan got into the luxury car market in a way they'd never done before. And the quotas really encouraged them to do that. And, and I guess they got the last laugh because they've kept that foothold in the luxury market. Now here we are 30, 40 years later.
Yeah, very interesting. Okay, what else do you want us to know?
I think it's good to talk about the regulatory budget. I mean, he's done so much on regulation, we couldn't finish it in a three hour talk.
What does that graph show us though? So we're running the government like a business, which that's what it is. It should be run like a business to, to an extent.
We had never done that before. In fact, hardly any countries in the world do it even now to have a budget for the regulators say to them the way a CEO would say to its vice president, hey guys, you have a budget, Go out there and make the company better, but stay within your budget. And if you have an idea that needs more budget, come to me hat in hand and explain why. And Trump is the first one to do that with the federal government. Each of the regulators, which are the cabinet members, are given a budget on how much they can regulate. And if they think they need more room to regulate, they need to come hat in hand and ask for an exception or an expansion. And this has really helped propel a whole bunch of deregulation. Hundreds of regulations have been taken out. And the one that I had a graph here is about the regulation of who can manufacture generic drugs. I want to emphasize generic generic drugs are drugs that have been around a long time, that they're off patent already. So it's not like we're learning about how safe they are, who can take them, or how effective they are. But nonetheless, for generations, the FDA had been in the business of handing out permission to manufacture a generic drug, and they were stingy on that permission and it really helped. So there are a few companies, foreign companies, Chinese companies, Israeli companies, who had a monopoly on a generic drug, which is like a mind blowing oxymoron, but that's what they had done. And generic drugs, which most drugs we take, prescription drugs, are generic drugs. We were paying brand 9 prices for a generic product.
So the government was basically a co conspirator in a cartel.
They could charge ridiculously high prices because they limited competition. So the existing entrants or the existing market participants could just gain market share. And there's no startup culture, there's no innovation. Yeah, it's terrible. And that's basically how Wall street and the banking system works too, folks. There's like zero startup culture on Wall street because of all this regulation just benefiting Goldman Sachs and all the entrenched interest at J.P. morgan, the criminals at J.P. morgan, I mean, they just got a $920 million fine or something like that. Absolutely ridiculous. For manipulating the silver market.
Yeah, I mean, you're right on, Jason. This is an example from prescription drugs. But industry after industry after industry has protections like this that come from regulations that limit competition and allow them to go to the bank. And when Trump pulled out some of these restrictions on manufacturing generic drugs, immediately saw the stock of, say, Teva, which is a Israeli generic drug manufacturer, their stock crashed. And the analysts all said, oh no, Trump is allowing more competition in the generic drug market. Too bad for our company, which was raking in the money handover.
So I guess those companies will go and encourage the media because they spend so much money on the media, they're such big advertisers, they'll encourage the media to bash Trump. They'll have their lobbyists go out and do whatever they can. You know, this is draining the swamp is no easy job.
Well, when the data came out, which we knew, economics says, and you knew this how this works, Jason, as you explained, we knew that drug prices were going to be coming down. And sure enough, we saw in the year 2018. I remember the day I got the data, January 10, 2019, we got the 2018 data that said for the first time in 46 years, the average price for prescription drugs is measured by the cpi, which is the standard way we measure price changes. Had come down first time in 46 years.
Yeah. So in real dollars, the price dropped. And the first time in 41 years the average American has actually had a real dollar pay increase 41 years since 1977. It took until Trump made that happen 41 years later, adjusted for inflation. So, yeah, unbelievable. But what are your thoughts for the upcoming election? All of this seems like he would be handily reelected, but that's not the world we live in, is it?
It would seem that he would. These days it's really hard. You know, we know the response to the polls, but polls are not the same as voting. That's why I gotta say, I really don't know. The polls look very bad for Trump, very good for Biden, but again, polls is not voting. And we know that Democrats are pretty unwilling to go out of the House to do things relative to Republicans right now. To go to a restaurant, they go.
Out of the House to do rioting.
Well, most of them don't.
Sorry, sorry.
Joe Biden campaign rallies, writing, same thing.
Most of them don't. I mean, it's disproportionate Democrat, but most Democrats are at home this hold up and that's gonna be tough on Biden. And so we'll see if he can get as good turnout at the polls as at the ballot box as he has in these various polls which are usually conducted by phone. It's much easier from a Democrat's point of view to answer the phone and answer some questions during COVID than it is to get out of the House, go to your polling place and cast your vote.
Also, I think a pollster has to some degree the same type of mentality and personality as a journalist. Right. That's a left leaning career field. So the poll said the same thing in 2016. So we'll see. We'll see.
What's disappointing is, I mean, some serious social scientists should be out there and trying to figure out how big is the bias and that. I don't see it. Maybe they did and they don't want to tell us.
Social sciences, though, isn't a career field that attracts Republicans. That's, that's just not. They're more interested in business and, you know, different kind of things. It's just a different brain.
Right.
It's a different type of mind.
Yeah.
Interesting. So looking in here, you know, it says here, America will never be a socialist country. Chapter three, White House analysis and marketing shifts in the 2020 campaign. Thoughts on that?
Yeah, that was an interesting story. My little hobby, you could say, I read all these laws. A lot of people in my profession, they're too busy to read the law. So they read what the New York Times says about the law. And then the New York Times calls them up and asks them what they think and they say what they read in the New York Times last week. But I was reading, I read these different laws that are in progress and I was reading Medicare for All. Medicare for all has actually been around for 40 years, which was the major unpassed legislation in Congress right now. And I read in there that they want to eliminate private health insurance. They think that private sector is essentially evil and in fact there's parts of it that says exactly that it's morally wrong way of running a market and therefore the government should monopolize it. And I was telling people in the White House this and they couldn't believe it because they were just thinking like, no, if you want to win election, you don't say that. But I said it says it. It says it. You got to look. And I would show them the copy of that page and they were like, wow. And so eventually, after a bunch of conversations like that, we got in this president's speech and the President said, medicare for all will take away private health insurance. And immediately this White House correspondent for CNN said that was the biggest lie in presidential history. Obviously he hadn't read the Medicare for All either. This was in October of 2018. But the cat was out of the bag. The President got it out there. CNN never apologized. But they did start to acknowledge that, yeah, Medicare for all does eliminate an outlaw private health insurance. And then cnn, to their credit, they asked Kamala Harris, hey, you're the co sponsor of this bill. That takes away private health insurance. Tell us about that. Tell us about why you don't want people to have private health insurance. And she, at that moment, she kissed her presidential run goodbye. She was the so called leading candidate till the moment she was asked that question. And then she was one of the first to drop out.
Well, all she has to do is get Joe Biden elected and two months later she'll be president. Because he's probably not gonna fulfill his term. I don't think he can do the job today, much less two months from now, three months from now. We'll see though. We'll see. Anything else you'd like people to know just in general, the workplace, distortions in the labor market, whatever. Just anything else you'd like people to know as we wrap it up?
You know, this started happening in a big way in the last recession with Obama, this idea that we need extra help for people who are poor and unemployed. And I emphasize extra. We already had a system for years of supporting people who are poor and unemployed and that system kind of evolved to try to manage the different trade offs. And Obama very much shifted that trade off. And then in this pandemic, we very much shifted it even more to the point, as a lot of people know by now, most of the unemployed could earn more by not working than working. And that is not fair. But it is also very wasteful. Really. You're asking people, hey, step forward and help produce and you're going to have to pay for stepping forward. That is completely backward, wasteful, perverted. What can I say? It's an economic perversion. But it's become very popular.
One of the greatest concepts that just sums it up so well is simply what gets rewarded gets repeated. You know, you're gonna get a repeat, repeat behavior of what your rewards. So that's unfortunately how that works. So. Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
Give out your website, tell people where they can find out more. And of course, the books are available in all the usual places with great reviews.
Yeah, I have a website, YourHiredTrump.com where you can of course buy the book, read some of the reviews. I put some excerpts in the Wall Street Journal, you can just link to those or watch a little video where I discuss some of these things. If Jason lets me, I'll put this video there as well. This is a good place to really hear about the things that you should have heard about, but you weren't told about our president and what's been going on in Washington.
Good stuff. Casey Mulligan. Thanks so much for joining us.
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