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GOP vs. Rule of Law (with Ted Nordhaus)

August 12, 2022
Notes
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:06

    Welcome to Begg to DIFER, the Bulwark’s weekly roundtable to session featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I’m Mona Sharon, syndicated columnist, and policy editor at The Bulwark, and I’m joined by our regulars, Bill Galston of The Bookings Institution and The Wall Street Journal. And Linda Chavez of the Nistana Center. This week, Walter Olson of Vaccato Institute is sitting in for Damon Linker, And our special guest is Ted Nordhaus, founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute and author of an eco modernist manifesto.
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:46

    We’re going to begin with a discussion about the inflation reduction act, specifically the climate aspects of that legislation and the question of nuclear power, but I want to assure listeners that we will get to the FBI executing a search warrant at Mar a Lago in our second segment. Welcome one and all. Ted Nordhaus, I have been wanting to get you on for a long time because I have the sense that a lot of our discussions about environmental matters, about the climate are missing an important piece. And I think that’s the piece that is filled by the breakthrough institute work So I’d like to begin with you and ask you to discuss the pros and cons of this bill. It’s called the Inflation Reduction Act, but a lot of it deals with climate.
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:37

    And so I’d like to ask for your view. I’ve heard it described as an eco modernist bill, which would mean it should get your staff of approval, but let’s hear what you have to say about it.
  • Speaker 2
    0:01:48

    Sure. And thanks for having me on the show. So we just passed what we now call the Inflation Reduction Act of twenty twenty two, formerly known as build back better. And at this point, from where we started, you know, over a year ago when the effort to do a budget reconciliation package was sort of first floated in Congress. What we have now is something that is sort of significantly scaled back there were a whole set of very sort of far reaching social policy and it’s been through multiple variations.
  • Speaker 2
    0:02:27

    But, basically, what we have now is really mostly just a package of tax credits for various sorts of clean energy technology and infrastructure. And so I think that, you know, insofar as you could say, well, this is an eco modernist package. And for your listeners who don’t know what eco modernism is, we’re really kinda consider ourselves in an alternative to traditional environmental, thought, and advocacy that is sort of much more pro technology, much more pro economic growth and development, and just focus on really sort of promoting and advancing technological solutions to environmental problems. And obviously, a lot of the focus in this current package is climate change, and this is a package that really makes a a kind of range of fairly significant arguably the sort of largest package of federal investments in clean energy technology that the federal government has ever made. So from that perspective, pretty positive.
  • Speaker 2
    0:03:27

    We do a lot of work advocating nuclear energy as key climate solution. And really sort of for the first time, nuclear is on a reasonably level playing field with other clean energy technologies that changed all the tax credits so that they’ll be technology neutral. Which means that nuclear plants, both existing plants and potentially new plants can qualify for it. So on balance, I think it’s a reasonable pretty good piece of legislation. And, you know, I’d like to say that, you know, the first rule after twenty five plus years of working on the climate issue is that sort of the stakes around any particular kind of climate policy initiative are almost always lower than what people claim.
  • Speaker 2
    0:04:10

    This is not going to put the United States on track to zero out emissions in two thousand and thirty five, probably not even two thousand and fifty. It’s going to kind of continue to sort of accelerate what is a long
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:21

    term process of decarbonizing the US economy. Great. Now, I want to probe a little further with you because you are an expert on nuclear technology. The argument’s one here is against nuclear power. And, you know, cards on the table, I’m gonna admit that I’m a big advocate for nuclear energy myself and have written about it.
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:42

    Not an expert by any stretch, but I would like for you, if you would, to address what I think are people’s objections, and I’ll try to be as fair as I can. People are worried, first of all, about the potential for accidents. So can you address that
  • Speaker 2
    0:04:59

    problem? Yeah. By the numbers, statistically, over now, over sixty years of substantial commercial nuclear energy operations globally. There have been three significant accidents. The accident, a three mile island the accident at Chernobyl, the accident at Fukushima.
  • Speaker 2
    0:05:23

    The two of those accidents in the west under the sort of basic Democratic free open societies have killed nobody. So there has not been a sort of single death attributable to an accident at a commercial nuclear power plant. In the western world ever in over sixty years. And by that measure, it is the safest energy technology humans have ever invented, safer even than wind and solar, which are very, very safe. And vastly safer, than burning fossil fuels, which even before one starts to talk about what may or may not happen due to climate change, just millions and millions and millions of deaths every year just from air pollution.
  • Speaker 2
    0:06:10

    So, you know, nuclear is extraordinarily safe And we’re now talking about commercializing a new generation of reactors in the next decade or so. That are even radically more safe than the radically safe nuclear technologies we have today. Howard Bauchner:
  • Speaker 1
    0:06:27

    Yeah, can you talk a little bit about so called SMRs small modular reactors? Yeah.
  • Speaker 2
    0:06:32

    So these are small reactors. So, you know, your kind of grandfather’s nuclear plant is a one gigawatt light water reactor. Those are the kind of big things that, you know, you drive by them, you kind of consume them from miles and miles away. That’s where Homer Simpson goes to work. One gigawatt plant is enough electricity to power a million homes.
  • Speaker 2
    0:06:54

    So every one of those, like big plants, a million people get their electricity twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year, and they will run for, you know, eighty years. Small modular reactors are radically smaller. So the first one that we’re likely to commercialize is the new scale reactor. This is also what’s called a light water reactor, so it’s very similar to those big reactors. But instead of being a gigawatt, which is a thousand megawatts, the new scale reactor, each one of these reactors will be seventy seven megawatts.
  • Speaker 2
    0:07:29

    So less than a tenth the size of a conventional reactor. There’s another reactor that’s not a light water reactor. It’s a different kind of cooling technology called the Okla reactor that is currently seeking to be licensed at the NRC. That will be one point five megawatts, and it’s being targeted initially for off grid communities places in Alaska or where it’s very expensive to get electricity. So that’s about six hundred times smaller than those big conventional nuclear plants.
  • Speaker 2
    0:08:01

    And the idea with these small modular reactors is that you can crank them out in factories. And you kind of avoid a lot of the things that have made nuclear costly and difficult to build in recent decades. Because basically a large nuclear power plant is just a massive public works project. And we’re not that good at, you know, we can talk about why, but we’re not so great these days massive public works projects. So as colleague of mine sometimes says, for nuclear to have a real kind of future in the west particularly.
  • Speaker 2
    0:08:33

    We need to ship from building airports to building airplanes. And that’s what you’re really doing when you’re going. From this conventional very large public works project that we have historically powered the grid with. To these much smaller modular reactors. And
  • Speaker 1
    0:08:50

    it also makes the regulatory burden much lighter. Right? Because once you’ve approved one small modular reactor, you can just stamp them out. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:08:57

    Well, that is true in theory. Okay. We are going to find out in the next couple of years whether the nuclear regulatory commission despite a very significant mandate from Congress to modernize its licensing regimes to license advanced small reactors is actually capable of reforming itself.
  • Speaker 1
    0:09:20

    Okay. Well, let’s leave that then to one side, and let me get to one other question that people worry about, and that’s nuclear waste.
  • Speaker 2
    0:09:28

    So nuclear reactors create waste. They actually create much less waste than pretty much any other energy technology. So all of the waste, the sort of high level waste, created in the entire history of the US nuclear reactor fleet can be stored in essentially if you just stacked it, it would be about a three story building, about the size of a football field. That’s after seventy years of operating and powering about twenty percent of the entire US electrical grid. And nuclear is literally the only technology and industry that actually captures all of its ways, can account for all of its ways.
  • Speaker 2
    0:10:10

    And is responsible for keeping it away from any way that it might negatively affect the public. As opposed to, you know, under gas or coal plant where we just spew it out into the atmosphere, and it makes people sick. Or even, you know, you look at solar and we haven’t had that much of it, but no one has any idea what we’re gonna do with all these solar panels, which have about a twenty year lifetime after they’re done, and it’s very, very toxic ways. And the solar industry and the utilities, nobody has any responsibility to do anything with it. So we’re just gonna have a huge amount of very toxic sort of silicon based stuff.
  • Speaker 2
    0:10:50

    Starting in about fifteen, twenty years from when we really started to deploy a lot of solar panels. And no one has an idea what they’re gonna do with it. We don’t know where it’s gonna go. We don’t know how the public’s gonna be safeguarded from the toxic waste that kinda leech out of this stuff as it breaks down. So, yes, nuclear creates ways like any energy technology, it creates a relatively small amount of waste.
  • Speaker 2
    0:11:14

    We actually know exactly what to do with it, which is essentially just dig a really deep hole in the ground and stick it in there. Or you can reuse it and much of the energy potential that was in that uranium fuel when we started putting it into the reactor is still there when we take it out. It just needs to be reprocessed. And for a bunch of reasons, we don’t need to get into here, we don’t do that. So you can either reprocess it and basically entirely use it again, or you can stick it in a big hole in the ground.
  • Speaker 2
    0:11:44

    It’s not gonna go anywhere. The risks of the public are really low, and we have this crazy conversation, which is really based on a lot of just missed impressions about nuclear that sort of somehow because it takes a long time to break down. That’s, like, you have to put it in this hole and, like, you have to make sure that no one ever does anything to it or finds it or stumbles across it for ten thousand years. But really, you’re just putting it in one place. It’s not really gonna go anywhere.
  • Speaker 2
    0:12:11

    The Yukka Mountain storage solution which we’re not going to pursue because people in Nevada decided, you know, it was really dangerous is not really dangerous at all. And we’re arguing about sort of whether there’s any potential for very small amounts of radioactive material to get into a single aquifer over many hundreds or thousands of years and compared to, like, all of the other potential public health and environmental health risks that future publics that are gonna face this is really basically irrelevant and we treat it like it’s this sort of great existential threat to
  • Speaker 1
    0:12:49

    future human civilization and energy is simply not. Howard Bauchner: Right. So the question is always compared to what? Yeah. Yeah.
  • Speaker 1
    0:12:58

    Okay. So, Wally Olson, do you agree with my advocacy for nuclear? And do you want to register any questions, comments, or whatever for Ted Nordhaus?
  • Speaker 3
    0:13:10

    I do agree that nuclear is the best hope and can’t claim to be any sort of expert on the question. We’ll throw out one or two more points of possible interest in Ukraine and it’s struggled with Russia. There’s a lot of talk about how a different kind of threat to the integrity of nuclear power plants, not accident, of course, might be indenturing the environment or people or both in the operation if I’m pronouncing that correctly or other installations. Anything to say about that?
  • Speaker 2
    0:13:45

    Yeah. I mean, it’s an interesting thing. They’re sort of like, oh, it’s a sort of terrible idea to have a nuclear power plant in the middle of a war zone. And, you know, the truth is that certainly a conventional large nuclear power plant is about the most hardened piece of infrastructure you can have in a war zone. So, yes, you know, I think if the Russians really decided that they wanted to destroy a plant and cause a major nuclear accident that would have impacts in terms of radiation exposures in Ukraine and beyond.
  • Speaker 2
    0:14:14

    They could But we should just be clear that that’s a sort of an intentional decision by a major sort of hostile power this is not sort of something intrinsic to the nuclear plant. And frankly, Russia has lots and lots of ways to terrorize Ukraine. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed by artillery shells. The sort of added risk that a bad thing will happen to this reactor, I mean, the bad thing is gonna happen with that reactor if the Russians decide that they’re gonna go sort of blow up its core or its cooling system with a bunker busting. Munition that can actually get through the four feet of concrete that it’s surrounded with.
  • Speaker 3
    0:14:57

    Accidental destruction by incidental fighting is not a very likely It’s
  • Speaker 2
    0:15:01

    not plausible. Yeah. Yeah. All of the critical things are on the nuclear island inside the containment systems. It’s four feet of concrete and steel.
  • Speaker 2
    0:15:12

    So if you wanna kinda go and do damage to that stuff, you really have to decide you’re gonna go do damage to it, and a random piece of artillery is not gonna do that.
  • Speaker 3
    0:15:20

    Okay. And if I could turn to a point that is somewhat related, Western Europe, of course, is facing an energy crisis because of the natural gas cutoffs and a couple of other factors related to the war. And I, like many people, have long thought that the French system of heavy reliance on nuclear sounded great and would therefore insulate them from some of these threats. I understand though that Francis is also having problems. Could you tell us a little about how that works and, you know, perhaps the mystery is a base versus variable generation and that sort of thing?
  • Speaker 2
    0:15:53

    France has really sort of had the most reliable, and frankly, the cheapest electricity in Europe for decades. Because it gets seventy five eighty percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants. This summer there are sort of two kind of things going on that have kind of made it problematic. The first is that, you know, when Macron came in, he actually came into office promising to reduce France’s dependence on nuclear power plants and nuclear energy. So he had promised to take its kind of nuclear share of its electrical system from about seventy five percent today down to fifty percent And because of that and those plans, they stopped investing in maintenance and kind of taking care of those plans in the same way because they assumed that a bunch than we’re going to be sort of mothballed fairly soon in the same way that Germany very unwisely has mothballed its nuclear fleet.
  • Speaker 2
    0:16:52

    So about a year or so ago, as the sort of full scale of Europe’s energy challenges even before the Ukraine war become clear, France reverse’s score says never mind. We’re not gonna close these plants down. But they had not been doing the maintenance and they had to do a bunch of maintenance to kind of continue to operate all of these plants. And so you had a bunch of plants as they kind of headed into the summer that were down for maintenance or that because they hadn’t done the maintenance had issues that they have to shut them down to deal with. And then on top of it, you know, when they have these heat waves, a lot of the French nuclear plant fleet takes its water from sort of freshwater sources, basically rivers, major rivers.
  • Speaker 2
    0:17:32

    And when the water gets very hot, the plants have to be often not shut down, but they can’t run at full capacity because the water’s not cold enough to fully cool the plant when it’s running at full capacity. So a number of plants on top of having a lot of plants closed. They also in the middle of the heat wave did have to sort of ramp down those other plants. And one thing to be clear is that to your question about sort of base load versus variable generation, that created a bunch of problems for France and for a sort of brief period, they were actually a net importer of electricity when almost all wees. Historically, they’ve been a major exporter sending clean nuclear energy to England, to Germany, and to a bunch of other places, but they were actually importing.
  • Speaker 2
    0:18:17

    But what they were not importing was variable renewable energy, you know, German wind and solar that they were importing because their plants were shut down. They were having to burn or import more coal and gas, which is actually what Germany has to do as well because these variable sources of generation are kind of useful or can be useful secondary sources of electricity, but it’s you really can’t run of, you know, an electrical system primarily on those sources of electrical generation in most places. So that’s what happened in France.
  • Speaker 1
    0:18:50

    Because of the very ability. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:18:51

    Yeah. Because, you know, the the wind isn’t blowing all the time. The sun isn’t shining. You get very long periods of of lulls when people don’t expect them, and then you get really big problems. So you basically have to have an entire secondary backup electrical system because when the wind doesn’t blow and it doesn’t blow for three weeks, you gotta keep the lights on.
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:15

    So what do you have to do? You gotta have a bunch of coal and gas plants sitting around that you turn on when the wind and solar aren’t
  • Speaker 1
    0:19:22

    there. Right. Okay. Linda, do you have things you want to add or ask about?
  • Speaker 4
    0:19:29

    Well, I have a question and that is on the feasibility of getting these nuclear plants built given America’s history of opposition to this. And is there anything that we know in terms of this bill or how the public is gonna react and how the regulatory world is gonna react. It should give us assurance that this money is actually gonna be spent and that we are going to see nuclear power plants built in the U.
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:57

    S? That’s a really great question. So there’s some money that is definitely going to be spent. And that is tax credits to support the continuing operation of existing nuclear plants. Some of which are having big economic challenges for a number of reasons.
  • Speaker 2
    0:20:15

    Again, I won’t go into depth on that now. So that money will support taking the plants that provide twenty percent of our electricity today and making sure that they stay open. There’s additional money for new plants. In the form of tax credits. And the challenge with the new plants is that no one wants to really build anymore of these large one gigawatt plants or a couple under construction in Georgia, and I believe those are likely the last ones that we’ll build in the United States for a long time because they’ve been so over budget and delayed.
  • Speaker 2
    0:20:46

    So then the question is, how long will it take to license and commercialize this new generation of smaller reactors? And, you know, certainly, if you go by the history of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that’s gonna take a long time and it’s not gonna go well. Several years ago, Congress directed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to modernize its licensing, to help commercialize advanced reactors. The commission has been under going a process to try to do that. And like I said, I think it’s an open question whether they will or whether it’s gonna require further congressional action.
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:22

    So with nuclear, and this is really true, not just of nuclear, you’ll recall that part of the deal that Mansion cut was some expectation of reforming environmental permitting and siding for energy and infrastructure broadly. So I think there is a very, very big question here, both for nuclear and for all the renewables and the many of the other things that are in this bill about whether any of it will get built or certainly at the scales that anyone’s talking about because it’s so hard to get anything permitted and built between the National Environmental Policy Act and various other things that just make it really, really costly and difficult to build infrastructure of any sort in this country. So nuclear is definitely in the same bucket and in some ways it’s worse because in addition to the environmental sighting and permitting, we’ve got to deal with the NRC, and the NRC does not have a good track record.
  • Speaker 1
    0:22:15

    Okay. Bill Galston.
  • Speaker 5
    0:22:17

    Oh, just a very quick comment on Linda’s question, which I agree is crucial, by just about any measure the United States has the worst permitting process in the Western world. And this is a huge problem because when you’re talking about major projects, time is money with a vengeance. In many cases, it takes us ten years to complete the permitting process for projects, which in countries like Canada and Germany, take an average of two years. And people have been trying to do something about this for a long time, but we’ve been chipping away at the problem at the margins. And There needs to be a real all hands on deck discussion, including the environmental community, about the social costs of building so many choke points into our permitting process.
  • Speaker 5
    0:23:15

    Okay. That’s the end of my little sermon. Now I’m gonna ask Ted to do something that he’s a demonstrated expert at doing, namely looking ahead So Ted, based on what you now see, and assuming that the implementation problems surrounding the inflation reduction act can be overcome, will nuclear power be cost competitive with everything else in say ten years? Will that be
  • Speaker 2
    0:23:45

    any issue? We just actually did a major sort of modeling project where we modeled the whole grid. And we assume that the first nuclear plants are available and commercialized in the early 2030s. The first new generation. What we find in is very, very interesting, is that the value of having reliable twenty four seven clean electrical generation to a grid that is attempting to be carbonized is just enormous.
  • Speaker 2
    0:24:16

    You have all of this sort of variable renewable energy that’s cheap, but then you have to, what they call, firm it up. You have to have backup or you have to have something else. And nuclear is really the best candidate for that. So basically, what we find is that what was really interesting in this modeling this that we did is that even when we assumed very high cost associated with these first new reactors, and we assumed very little technological learning so you don’t get a lot of cost decline as you manufacture and deploy more of them. A clean grid still wants this technology.
  • Speaker 2
    0:24:52

    Even when it’s expensive because having clean generation that is on all the time is just incredibly valuable. So my view is that if we can actually get these plants licensed and we can commercialize the first plants in the next decade, we will build a lot of it. And the big question again, I keep coming back to really the regulatory question. I mean, since its history, its formation in nineteen seventy five, This is an amazing statistic. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has never licensed a new design for a new nuclear plant that was subsequently built in almost fifty years.
  • Speaker 2
    0:25:33

    So if that doesn’t change, no, we’re not gonna get a lot more nuclear. And if it does, I think we will.
  • Speaker 1
    0:25:39

    Alright. Thank you. That was very, very, very enlightening. So I wanna thank you so much, Ted, for joining us. And we will be checking back with the Breakthrough Institute to see how things are progressing.
  • Speaker 1
    0:25:53

    So — Right. — thanks so much for
  • Speaker 2
    0:25:55

    your help. Yeah. Well, happy to be on the show. And thank you guys.
  • Speaker 1
    0:26:01

    Alright. And because we live in a split screen world, We devoted the first part of this podcast to a serious discussion about an important policy matter, the nuclear power question. And now we have to turn to the utter insanity of our politics. This week. The FBI executed a search warrant at Marlago on Monday and pretty much the entire Conservative Republican world went crazy including some of the people who, until quite recently, were the fair haired boys of the anti Trump crowd, that is Rhonda Santos.
  • Speaker 1
    0:26:50

    There was a lot of hope placed in this character that he would be sort of the post Trump figure who would take the Republican Party above and beyond Trump, but here’s what Ron DeSantis said about what happened with the FBI. Did he wait for the facts? Did he say we have to allow the process to unfold? No. He said the raid of Marlago is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the regimes, political opponents, the regime.
  • Speaker 1
    0:27:20

    Mhmm. While people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves, now the regime is getting another eighty seven k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries, Banana Republic. And so forth. So we are now in a situation, Linda, where the Republican Party has become such a cult that they seem to be saying that their guy is above the law no matter what.
  • Speaker 4
    0:27:49

    Yeah. That’s right. I mean, this is to lock her up front. Right. They wanted to lock up Hillary Clinton because she had a, I think, proper email server in her home, and it had on it some classified information, and they were already to lock her up.
  • Speaker 4
    0:28:07

    Well, you know, as improper as that may have been. Having worked in the White House issue did moment, You know that you don’t take anything from the White House and certainly not any document that has any classification on it from secret on up. Any place outside your office. And in fact, if you have to get rid of it, you have to put it in a burn bag at the end of the afternoon. But did a former president honor those rules?
  • Speaker 4
    0:28:36

    No, he did not. He apparently packed up several boxes, we know that fifteen of them were retrieved by the archives from Mar a Lago earlier this year. And now apparently more boxes of materials were retrieved in this search warrant. And the idea, the hypocrisy of people claiming that the former secretary of state should be locked up, but somehow Donald Trump is free willy nilly to take whatever he wants. And even though there were negotiations going on, there could be even been a subpoena issue, which we did not find out about until after the raid.
  • Speaker 4
    0:29:20

    But apparently, there had been a subpoena issued and they still were not cooperating. And so then there was the search warrant, and they went in. So I expect we’re going to hear a lot of whining, a lot of screaming, we’ve already heard a lot of accusations referring to the FBI as the Gestapo really disgusting stuff. And we’re going to hear more of that. I’m quite sure.
  • Speaker 1
    0:29:46

    Well, Allison, the former president has made it part of his signature behavior to undermine confidence in every institution of our society that causes him the slightest bit of worry. So whether it is the press, which of course he described as an enemy of the people. The military, the courts, the FBI, the CIA, the electoral system. He manages to call into question the integrity of all of our institutions and you could say, well, okay, that’s one guy, but it isn’t. It’s an entire political party.
  • Speaker 1
    0:30:27

    So now you have Kevin McCarthy who will be the next likely next speaker. His response to this search was to threaten the attorney general to issue a tweet saying, preserve your documents and clear your calendar, you know, to Merrick Garland. It is a little frightening, more than a little frightening what Donald Trump has been able to do to the once great Republican party.
  • Speaker 3
    0:30:56

    Well, Mona, I I think I maybe paraphrasing you when I remember a line from the last day or two of First, they apologized for him and then they became him. And — Mhmm. — that was a distinction, which I think is a very real description of what’s happened over the last year, which is that people who had already, in my view, described themselves by their willingness to apologize for him and and say, well, you know, Trump, you know, his own acoustic person. They’ve begun to imitate the same moves of moving instantly to do. We’ll minimize any institution moving to lie or to assert facts that they can’t possibly know the truth of.
  • Speaker 3
    0:31:38

    This was a remarkably widespread reaction, including as you just said among people who thought better of and very depressing on the whole. From our standpoint, still very early into this with relatively few explanation and most of the cards face down the table. Our task is to avoid falling into this tenancy too. Guess that we must know what the basis is. We must know that the FBI and similarities have either behaved well or have not behaved well.
  • Speaker 3
    0:32:10

    What we should be realizing instead is just at this stage, a lot of it is hidden from us. We will gradually find out earlier if Trump decides to release the contents of the warrant. And the inventory list perhaps not for quite a while if he does not. And so any judgments about whether or not the government behaved properly need to be postponed until we have thoughtful information.
  • Speaker 2
    0:32:32

    Howard Bauchner:
  • Speaker 1
    0:32:33

    Bill, what Wally says is absolutely right. You know, the leaping to conclusions the assumption that because the FBI rated Mar a Lago, that it must be illegitimate, it must be a democratic plot to hurt the dear leader, whereas, of course, if they were, for example, to have rated the residents of barack Obama for some reason. You could imagine all of these people would be saying that they were certain that Obama was guilty of something. But the craziness it’s ratcheted even further up. It’s beyond that.
  • Speaker 1
    0:33:09

    You have New Cambridge, Rand Paul, Trump’s lawyer, Jesse Waters, a TV guy at Fox, all suggesting not just that this was illegitimate or some sort of a political hit job, but that the FBI was planting evidence at Mar a Lago. I mean, it becomes hard to see how with a crazed party like this that we can see the future where they are gonna return to power.
  • Speaker 5
    0:33:39

    Well, fortunately, as long as we’re in democracy, they don’t get to make that decision.
  • Speaker 1
    0:33:45

    The
  • Speaker 5
    0:33:45

    American people do. And I thought that you and our audience would be interested in the results of a poll that was just released. On this set of questions. It was morning consult poll and the American people by a margin of twelve percentage points approved of the search and that goes for independence by an even larger margin. The only people who don’t approve that are Republicans, of additional interest is a question put to the respondents of this poll.
  • Speaker 5
    0:34:20

    As to whether they believe that Trump ever broke the law as president of the United States and The sum of people who think he definitely or probably did is fifty eight percent of the total. Those who think probably not or definitely not or only thirty one percent. So beneath the den, of Trump’s defenders and their willingness to say absolutely anything, whatever its factual basis, The American people are in the process of making up their minds about this man. And the indications are that they are not reacting favorably. At this point, all of this could change.
  • Speaker 5
    0:35:06

    But there’s a big difference between mobilizing your course porters on the one hand and actually persuading people who aren’t already with you, and I don’t think all of this noise is doing the latter.
  • Speaker 1
    0:35:19

    At
  • Speaker 4
    0:35:20

    all.
  • Speaker 1
    0:35:21

    Right. So that is a ray of hope. So, Linda, maybe you could say, if you wanted to take the optimistic view here that, you know, we have to bear in mind that even the whole Republican Party is not half the country. Right? Right.
  • Speaker 1
    0:35:35

    The people who identify as members of the Democratic and the Republican parties are actually small numbers and the plurality is independence. That’s the biggest group is independents. Now, of course, the independents tend to lean one way or the other, but they call themselves independents for a reason. It means that they’re not all in. And, you know, as we talked about last week, you know, when we saw the response of the voters in Kansas, to the party’s extremism on abortion.
  • Speaker 1
    0:36:07

    It could well be that though these Republicans are incredibly loud and they are highly, highly crazy and destructive, that we are seeing, even though that we think of them as half the country, they’re not there may be a third, and maybe not even that if you pare down the number of real Trump loyalists. We’re
  • Speaker 4
    0:36:27

    dealing actually with a very small percentage of the whole. Well, I think that’s right. And I’m very encouraged by Bill’s polling numbers because I had not heard them before, and I think that data is very important. There’s also another factor. The attorney general is the the unusual thing of coming out and having a very brief statement that he issued on this search.
  • Speaker 4
    0:36:51

    And I think both you and I have used the word raid. We’ve got it ban ourselves from using that because it’s really not a raid. It’s simply a search warrant that was executed at the house and it was done very peacefully and apparently done in such a way that the former president would not be embarrassed by if they didn’t show up in their usual win breakers with FBI on the back and have former president Trump not decided to make public. We wouldn’t any of us know about this right now. Yep.
  • Speaker 1
    0:37:19

    And they chose a time when they knew he wasn’t
  • Speaker 4
    0:37:21

    going to be there. I was gonna have to it was very low key. But the attorney general because of the craziness on the part of the Trump allies including Kevin McCarthy, you being rich and others had to come out and he had to make a statement and one of the things he announced was that because of all of the publicity, because the former president decided to make this public keep of the unusual staff filing in the court to have the search warrant and the list of documents and anything else that was taken. During the search made public released unsealed. And I think that’s very important and it’s very important because we will soon know at least the purpose of the search warrant.
  • Speaker 4
    0:38:12

    Were they just looking for documents that somehow the archives thought, you know, were missing. Was there something more specific, you know, that they were looking for? Wasn’t highly classified documents? Was it, you know, special compartmented information or intelligence? Was it something I’ve I’ve always had my death theory, which was Kim Jong un, his love letter to Trump was taken down tomorrow, Waco.
  • Speaker 4
    0:38:40

    And who knows? That actually would be something that in addition to having intelligence value has monetary value too. It might be something that would be worth a great deal of money. So, you know, who knows what it is, but we’re gonna know at least in part soon, what it is they retrieved and what it is they were looking for. And that’s going to be very useful.
  • Speaker 4
    0:39:01

    I’m very flat. That the attorney general did that. And by the way, I’m also very reassured by his temperament, by the way in which he calmly came to the podium made this announcement, refused to be made into taking questions and said what he had to say and left.
  • Speaker 1
    0:39:21

    Wally, this is the party that was supposed to back the blue that used the Association of The Democrats with defund the police to great effect in the last election. Now they are the party that is anti law enforcement that wants to defund the
  • Speaker 3
    0:39:40

    FBI, that has been circulating? Altria, but if you could hold that idea for a moment, I wanted to respond to what Linda was saying a moment. Sure. Because on the question of the release of the search warrant and the inventory of things taken. The reason the justice department has a protocol against ordinarily publishing that after the fact is for the protection of defendants.
  • Speaker 3
    0:40:04

    Instead, they put the cards in the defendants hands because that list and that warrant are left with them, it’s up to the defendants to decide whether to go public. And if they believe that some of the information might put them in about life, they don’t have to. And it’s good to have that protocol because it’s not as if defendants in just department actions are given a whole lot of advantages on the playing field. But in this case, as I understand the situation, we can’t be sure that we’ll be seeing those documents soon because guess what could happen? It’s only a motion to the court.
  • Speaker 3
    0:40:35

    Trump’s lawyers could come and say, no, please don’t grant permission to publish those things. Now the public might draw its inferences from that. I think it would be amusing to see all of the Republicans who have been screaming about disclosing these things, turn on a dime because you know they turn on a dime. And say, how how dare they consider disclosing these things I’m gonna have my popcorn ball ready when that happens. But that could be that could be the way this develops.
  • Speaker 1
    0:41:03

    Yeah. Right. Fair point. Okay. Bill Galston, you wanted to make another point.
  • Speaker 5
    0:41:08

    Yes. Just very briefly, we learned two things from the very brief Merrick Garland statement. One we’ve already discussed, that is the, you know, petitioning the court to unseal the warrant and the receipt, but he also put to rest one of the canards, to be fair, all so factual uncertainties, namely, was this something that FBI did on its own? It was always inconceivable. Right.
  • Speaker 5
    0:41:44

    That was the case, but he came right out and said, I personally approved this action. And I think that was an important thing to do, even though it’s an obvious thing to do, he threw a net of protection and personal responsibility over the FBI, and he will no doubt pay the price in the form of investigations next year, but he has done exactly what he should have.
  • Speaker 1
    0:42:13

    Alright. Well, the attorney general behaved with integrity he emphasized the rule of law that they are doing things by the book. But what we now know is that significant chunk of the American people and pretty much the entire Republican Party doesn’t believe in those things anymore. And with that, let’s turn to our third topic, which is Biden’s very good week.
  • Speaker 3
    0:42:45

    So
  • Speaker 1
    0:42:45

    we don’t have a huge amount of time because we’ve run long, but I’d like to just note that the president signed the chip’s bill this week and received Bill Galston, I’m gonna go to you first, received some good news on inflation, on the stock market, and he is about to receive the Inflation Reduction Act for his signature, jobs report came in strong, so your comments on the new spring in the president’s step?
  • Speaker 5
    0:43:15

    Well, On the one hand, all good things, I guess, come to those who wait.
  • Speaker 1
    0:43:20

    On
  • Speaker 5
    0:43:20

    the other hand, I think it’s important not to overstate the significance. Of the list you just recited. All of those are good things. It’s my experience. That a raft of legislative accomplishments rarely Trump’s the facts on the ground as experienced by average voters.
  • Speaker 5
    0:43:45

    The fact that gasoline, which topped five dollars a gallon is now below four dollars a gallon in the national average is genuinely good news for the president if the good news on the inflation front continues for another three or four months. Then public opinion, which is always a lagging indicator when it comes to the economy, may start to turn. Will that be enough to change the outcome of the midterm elections? I don’t know because the conventional political science wisdom is that assessments lock in at about now and that events that occur in the two or three months before the midterm are not going to be hugely significant in changing public opinion, but the drop in the price of gasoline has been so substantial as to get people’s attention. That I think is the best news.
  • Speaker 5
    0:44:44

    But as I said, recitations of legislative accomplishments, a tactic that I unwisely propose that president Clinton employ at a similar low point during his first two years tends not to have the kinds of positive political consequences that those recommending it might want.
  • Speaker 1
    0:45:06

    Linda, I gather that president Biden is actually taking advice from former president Clinton according to a piece that I read today. Which is not altogether a bad idea because despite our problems with president Clinton, he was very popular. But, Linda, one thing, I’m sure Bill’s right, that you can rack up a lot of legislative accomplishments, and it’s not gonna move voters very much. But when you can pick a fight over something that people care about with the other party, that might help And one of the things that the Republicans did this week was that they opposed a measure to cap insulin prices at thirty five dollars a month. So what do you think about that?
  • Speaker 1
    0:45:54

    What do you think about it substantively? What do you think about it as a potential fight that could work to the democrats advantage? Well,
  • Speaker 4
    0:46:03

    first of all, I’m married to a diabetic, and so this is personal. Now, you know, we can afford more than thirty five dollars for insulin, but there are an awful lot of people out there who cannot. And I think this is the kind of issue that basically going hard on the issue would be very important. And I also think that while it’s absolutely true that just going through and giving a recitation of all of the accomplished is not going to help the president or his party in the midterm elections. Some of the changes that we’re seeing and most specifically in the economy are going to make a difference.
  • Speaker 4
    0:46:43

    I mean, people aren’t going to feel differently in November if they are going to fill up their gas tanks and gas is three fifty a gallon or thereabouts. It’s gonna be a lot different than when it was five dollars a It’s going to be very different if when they go to the grocery store. The prices are not continuing to increase, and it does seem that inflation cooled a bit. And so I do think that there is room for some optimism on the part of Democrats, but I think also that the winning ticket is going to be doing exactly what you are suggesting by your question. And that is portraying the Republicans as extreme, an extremist and out of touch with regular families.
  • Speaker 4
    0:47:28

    And certainly, The idea of being able to negotiate prices for drugs is something that’s popular with people. We don’t understand why you can look online. You can get drugs from Canada. You can get drugs from Mexico. They’re a heck of a lot cheaper than going to your local pharmacy.
  • Speaker 4
    0:47:46

    People don’t want that. People want to be able to get drugs here in the United States that are priced the way they are around the world. And insulin is one of those drugs. This is not a new drug. This drug has been around since the nineteen twenties.
  • Speaker 4
    0:48:01

    And so the idea that the price of insulin continues to mount is awful. And for Democrats to have that as an issue and able to say to the millions of diabetics out there, Republicans tried to let pharmaceutical companies gouge you. On a drug that is necessary for you very survival. That I think would be a good issue.
  • Speaker 1
    0:48:25

    Wally, the Republicans are going to portray this legislation as a huge tax and spend bill that will increase inflation instead of decreasing inflation, although the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget, whose chairman we’ve had on our podcast several times, would dispute that, but they’re going to focus on that. They’re going to say it’s big spending, and they’re going to focus on the fact that over ten years the legislation proposes to hire new IRS agents. So what’s your analysis?
  • Speaker 3
    0:49:00

    Well, of course, they’ll say that and there’ll be a lot of truth in the fact that it does raise some important taxes. You see that raising corporate taxes is very much part of the plan that spending or, in some cases, spending through tax credits and the like is an important part of it. And, of course, the hiring of all those new IRS officials or employees. I think that it’s unpopularity as well indicated by the fact that the democratic leadership has now kind of gone to press and said, oh, this is all misunderstood. It’s not nearly a bigger deal and a lot of those employees would do to be hired anyway.
  • Speaker 3
    0:49:38

    Well, you know, they are executing this kind of retreat from the accomplishment because it’s genuinely got a lot of unpopularity out there. People have figured out that if the IRS has given a lot of new employees, and money, it will probably be more involved in their life. And I do recommend turning Takeda’s page both. I can’t possibly get into the insulin issue. It’s way to complicated, but my colleague, Mike Cannon, has written about how government has caused a lot of the insulin problem by its previous messing things up, perhaps it can’t get any worse or perhaps it can.
  • Speaker 3
    0:50:12

    I don’t know. On the IRS, there are interesting figures out they’re indicating that the highest rates of tax audits are in some of the poorest areas of the country rather than the richest. Maybe that will change or maybe it won’t So again, I think that the public is quite right to see the passage of very large new government interventions as something that Republicans, you know, it’s practically their job and frankly compared with the things Republicans have been doing it instead of slightly. I think it’s very innocuous to have them as the party precise expansions. I I wish they’d spent all of their time on it, frankly.
  • Speaker 1
    0:50:49

    Yes. Fair enough. Okay. Thank you. And with that, we will now turn to our final segment highlights and lowlights of the week.
  • Speaker 1
    0:50:58

    Okay. Bill Galston, you first. I
  • Speaker 5
    0:51:01

    have a highlight. It’s piece of writing, actually, done under real time pressure It’s an analytical piece in the New York Times by David Sanger and Amy Chen entitled What could the US do if China were to put a slow squeeze on the island, that is Taiwan. And it’s really an excellent example of how the press at its best can explain a complex matter to its lay readers in a manner that really mobilizes some of the key evidence and the key alternatives and makes clear what the problems are and the competing considerations confronting policymakers. So if you want to spend ten minutes learning in general about the lay of the land facing the United States as it confronts an escalating military threat to Taiwan, you could hardly do better than suspend them on this piece.
  • Speaker 4
    0:52:04

    Thank you, Linda Chavez. Well, it has been exactly a year next week from the evacuation of Avcans from Afghanistan in our withdrawal. And there are now about seventy nine thousand Africans who are in the United States but they are only here with temporary status. Most of them have a slow status that gives them only two years of legal res in the United States. And this is a real travesty.
  • Speaker 4
    0:52:33

    So I wanna report on some good news, but it’s only the beginning. Don’t know that it will actually get through. The U. S. House and Senate announced the introduction this week of the Afghan Adjustment Act.
  • Speaker 4
    0:52:47

    And this is a bill which would give those tens of thousands of applicants already in the United States a clear pathway to permanent presidents. This is something long overdue. We should have been able to accomplish this more quickly than a year, but at least it is the beginning. And I would hope that the bill will pass, but also that it will be more generous than just the seventy nine thousand currently present in the United States that it will open the doors for others. Some of whom are in various places across the world.
  • Speaker 4
    0:53:19

    And some of whom are showing up at our southern border, claiming refugee status, and being asked to be admitted into the United States. You know, we hear a lot about Central Americans, Mexicans and others, but there are a lot of Ukrainians and Asians who are showing up there as well. So let’s hope that that will pass us.
  • Speaker 1
    0:53:40

    Amen, one of the most shameful things that the Trump administration did was to practically zero out the number of refugees that we were taking. From all over the world. So thank you for that. Wally Olson,
  • Speaker 3
    0:53:53

    do you want a rig that will infuriate you? Yes, you’re admitted. You do. Right. Nashville, Sam, published in Nashville, Tennessee, runs a piece by my old friend, Ravi Balco, who does investigation of police and law enforcement matters.
  • Speaker 3
    0:54:11

    Let me approach it by saying what goes on in environmental court in Tennessee. Now by saying environmental court, you’re going to think, oh, we need bigger, stronger environmental courts that can applaud higher penalties. Well, in fact, these county environmental courts in Nashville and Memphis, here lots and lots of nuisance complaints. Typically, and at low income people by snitches, by people who say I saw an inoperable car in their driveway or I saw them with too much outside storage, and he goes through it. And your blood will begin to boil.
  • Speaker 3
    0:54:45

    It’s actually very much like possible Hollywood movies because developers, for example, send in snitches in order to clear properties where they want to do redevelopment by driving poor landlords out of business. It is a tool. And normally, I’m one who thinks that the rule complains about gentrification, oh, honestly, find another issue. On the other hand, sometimes poor people are really being driven off the land by nickel and dime actions. They show up in environmental court, and they can’t handle it, and they lose their land.
  • Speaker 3
    0:55:15

    So, again, not easy to sort the villains from the heroes institutions that may sound great on the surface, make sure not to have terrible operations and practice. Lessons there for both left and right, and of course, always lessons from Libertarians who are often the first to see that stuff.
  • Speaker 1
    0:55:31

    Excellent. Could not agree more. Thank you for that. Alright. I have a new favorite publication as of this week.
  • Speaker 1
    0:55:37

    It’s a satirical website from Australia called The Shovel. So my attention was drawn to something where they said they had a new initiative in Australia to get forty percent of members of the parliament to say nuclear properly in the next five years, so that was amusing. But here’s the one that I wanted to highlight. This is their editorial about the FBI investigation of Trump. We are certainly no fans of Donald Trump.
  • Speaker 1
    0:56:06

    Let’s make that clear on the outset, but yesterday’s raid by the FBI on the home of a former president sets a dangerous precedent. A precedent which now means that anyone who evades taxes attempts to undermine an election sexually assaults women, manipulates the value of their assets, uses state resources to enrich themselves or aids in a bets the overthrow of a democratically elected government will be subject to investigation. Is that the world we want to live in? Where anyone accused of insurrection can be subject to questioning from law enforcement officers and it goes on. It’s highly recommended, the shovel.
  • Speaker 1
    0:56:45

    Thank you. You’ve given me a smile this week. Alright, with that, I want to once again thank Ted Nordhaus who joined us for our first segment. I want to thank Wally Olson for sitting in. And my usual panel, our Producer is Katie Cooper, and our sound engineers, Joe Armstrong.
  • Speaker 1
    0:57:05

    Thank you to them, and thank you, most of all, to our faithful listeners. We appreciate you and we look forward to your comments and ratings and all of that. So we will return next week as everything.
  • Speaker 4
    0:57:27

    You’re worried about the economy. Inflation is high. Your paycheck doesn’t cover as much as it used to, and we live under the threat of a looming recession. And sure you’re doing okay, but you could be doing better. The
  • Speaker 5
    0:57:38

    afford anything podcast explains the economy and the market detailing how to make wise choices on the way you spend and invest.
  • Speaker 4
    0:57:45

    Afford anything talks about how to avoid common pitfalls, how to refine your mental models, and how to think about how to think. Make smarter choices and build a better life. Afford anything wherever you listen.
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