[Music] so liz what's on your radar [Music] well how could it be that americans simultaneously distrust their government believing it's wasteful with their hard-earned dollars but they also want to empower federal government bureaucrats to do more just 20 percent say they trust the government in washington to do the right thing just about always or most of the time reports pew in recently released polling data noting that this finding has actually held steady over time changing very little since george w bush's second term in office but only a measly eight percent of survey respondents describe the
federal government as responsive to the needs of ordinary americans and get this just six percent say the phrase careful with taxpayer money describes the federal government extremely or very well another 21 percent say this describes the government somewhat well that's less than a third of americans total offering even tepid approval of the government's money handling but perhaps people feel this way because inflation has recently ticked up to 8.6 percent or perhaps because biden keeps blaming this pocketbook pain on putin instead of acknowledging that his stimulus largesse got us into this mess or perhaps they feel
this way because a new government accountability office report found that 20 percent of federal unemployment relief handed out due to the pandemic was wasted ending up in the hands of fraudsters or people who were actually technically ineligible people broadly say the government responds well to natural disasters about 70 percent of respondents to pew agreed with the statement people also give the government generally high marks for keeping the country safe from terrorists some 68 of respondents feel this way though it's really hard to say whether they're referencing tsa's loving pat downs which statistically speaking actually do
a very poor job of protecting us from terrorist attacks or whether they're referring to something else the government gets bad marks however on both setting immigration policy and alleviating poverty with three quarters of respondents in each category expressing dismay at government competence in both areas you might think that all of this scares people off from wanting their government to do more for them but no a staggering 59 of survey respondents from both parties say it is the government's job to protect people from themselves but who does all this protecting who do we empower to intervene
in our lives for our own good to tell us what not to eat drink smoke and snort to tell us where to put our money when we earn it and how much money accumulation is too much and where we ought to build our houses and how we ought to educate our children well government officials of course but 65 of all respondents reported that all or most people who pursue elected office do so to serve their own personal interests so why again would we trust them it is these people the self-serving ones who we call politicians
who have failed historically to deliver results and been so wasteful with taxpayer money it's these people that the majority of americans think will use their power to smartly protect people from themselves what of course lots of people on both sides of the aisle have inconsistent political beliefs that don't logically follow public opinion polling consistently shows us that americans don't really know that much about the inner workings of government or the details of specific policies because they're too busy living their normal lives and pursuing work and play which is exactly what they should be doing being
able to exist somewhat apart from politics is a sign of a healthy republic hopefulness that the government can deliver and that politicians will rise to the occasion is not something to disparage we shouldn't become weary and defeatist in response to government fecklessness but we should perhaps be a little tougher on politicians we should expect a little more prudence from them when they're spending our money and we should at absolute minimum re-examine the basic premise that we want them to protect us from ourselves when they've repeatedly proven themselves incapable of almost all of the basic functions
we elected them to perform it really disturbs me when i look at this polling data that people are so inconsistent with with the types of things that uh they expect government to do uh but also giving the government such consistently low marks in some of the most important areas i mean setting immigration policy poverty alleviation administering public housing and welfare these are things that we absolutely i mean i'm a libertarian so i'm supposed to be all like burn it all down but like to some degree man i walk past we're both new yorkers i walk
past public housing projects in my neighborhood and i think it is good that people in my neighborhood have access to that type of housing and i want it to be administered well i don't want to look at paint exactly i think that goes to our earlier appointment we talked about trying a method seeing that it's not working out well and then doubling down on it instead of doing something different you know i do so i don't agree with the the idea that the government is there to protect us from ourselves i think that very american
concept is why you have so much government overreach why you have so much of this large criminal system so much of what i see in the criminal system are things that are just regular you know regular life disputes that the the government has no business getting involved in so i do agree with you on that point i think though i think the government is there to serve the people and i think that kind of reconciles this uh this disagreement you know what i mean amongst people and about what's happening right i think people expect their
government to do for them to do for them and so they keep trying to put their faith there and in so many ways don't have any choices about the taxes right i don't trust me well speak for yourself ciao we can all get creative no i i think you're pointing to something interesting though i think the libertarian notion is a little bit more negative rights oriented yes you're talking about a more positive rights conception of like i'm interested in what the government shouldn't do for me yeah and and the things that they cannot abridge or
or infringe on whereas you're talking a little bit more about what the government ought to proactively do especially once they've collected our money and and deposited it into their their coffers uh yes and i think i think it's tough because like one of the things that i really appreciate about the sort of like technocrat leftist types like the iglesias of the world is that they actually are somewhat interested in measuring results and they are somewhat interested in paying attention to when the government experiments with ex-policy um what are the outcomes the eb test things they
they have a natural proclivity toward that and for whatever reason that's not shared by most people especially most people on the left um i think it i think there is um i think there's probably a divergence between you know what we want to see and how how these things get measured what are the metrics for them and how um i guess genuine or disingenuous we find it based on what like media spin can be but um i do agree as far as like poverty immigration all these different things right you do embolden this government that
you want to help with these things you are paying all this kinds of money and the exact groups that most need help most need resources are not receiving that help right like you said we do have nycha housing but you can see you know nycha housing when you see it you can see the quality of it versus you know everything else so i i don't disagree that you know america's emboldened a large federal government just as i also think the same thing for state governments right i pay a lot of new york taxes federal and
people the privilege of living in the city i pay for the privilege of living in the city and lining nypd's pockets and i have a big issue with that though you know we pay for the subway well one thing i actually think about a lot that's it's a very concerning sort of political sentiment tied shift is the degree to which we've really in recent years moved away from wanting things to be means tested and in my ideal world uh we would do a whole bunch less of handing out money we wouldn't do covid stimulus checks
uh given to people um but one of the ways that we could even marginally improve on these things is making things mean to test it because you know uh a family of relatively high earning lawyers who live in like an expensive city in america probably don't need government box handed to them how many of them are the ones that are really getting getting that right i mean there's a huge a huge component of america's upper middle class i really think like one way we could actually like streamline this and be much more efficient with government
dollars is if we return to the era almost like the the 90s and the early aughts of wanting things to be mean means tested as opposed to being universal we see this now with aoc wanting universal um you know college debt relief and stuff like that and it's like well why are we doing that for my friend who is a lawyer at a white shoe law firm in new york when or my friend who's a doctor who works out on long island now when in reality they're not really the types of people who need that
debt forgiven because they make three hundred thousand dollars but maybe that's uh so as a lawyer as a lawyer that works in this field right a black lawyer and i know lots of black and people of color that are able to enter enter these fields because they were able to get student loan debts right they otherwise didn't have access to it yeah they might be in this profession now but they aren't originally in the same places of privilege that other people are in they don't they they do need this that relief they do have families
and people are they making six figures now are they making oh no i mean i sure am not i'm a black lawyer i think you're touching on something that's important like something that i like about like the marxist am i allowed to say that on air like i like the marxist so what i don't know something that i like about the marxist is the degree to which they're paying attention to the class component and so like one thing that i think you're you're tapping into is that like not all lawyers are created equal not all
lawyers are making three thousand dollars a year at a white shoe law firm there's lots of different paths that people may pursue and perhaps even having like public service loan forgiveness is something that incentivizes people to pursue something fast but i think the thing that we really need to be doing in our political rhetoric is saying okay like are you actually able to afford repayment of this debt right or not uh and and i think it's important to be pretty clear about that and we could have some amount of federal government largesse hand it out
to people who legitimately come from situations of poverty yeah but like i don't know the people that i'm talking about are people rich people who will have their loans forgiven uh when in reality their salaries could forgive their loans and they could just stop going out to fancy michelle and start dinner i feel that and i get that but i guess for me it's about not placing the focus there there are significant amount of people that could really benefit um from the from having their loans forgiven and when you think about even like the public
interest repayment from my program i don't have any student loans just for the right i just want to throw that out there so no one thinks i'm advocating for my own personal interests right but i look at you know a lot of my colleagues and stuff they are stuck working in public interest for 10 years that's a long time to be in it exactly exactly in a not lucrative field and not able to move and not having this mobility so yeah they took out all these loans they took out at least i think the average
law school that is like 110 000 that's a lot of money they've got all these loans and then they're forced to work in like public interest for the longest where they're making shillings i they pay us in shillings yes and that's why i don't work for them you get it right so they're forced to do that because they don't have any options so i do think there has to be but they do have the option like they consented to that arrangement and that they judge that to be a good deal and they get to rejudge
that at any time if they want to maybe but when you you know we have to look at like the true voluntariness of a choice i guess they made a choice they consented to it but let's get super close oh why but do they really really really truly have these options right like listen i get it i'm not i'm not totally unsympathetic to the position that like okay this is a privilege this is a benefit that you can take out these loans i'm from a country where you can't get someone if you can't afford it
you can't go so i do get that but i think in a large way when you look at people are going to take the options they have if you know what i mean if i can go to college but it means i'm going to take out this large sum of money and then work with the you know the parameters that i'm given okay but if i could get these forgiven and maybe you know put this money i'm not just working to pay back all this debt and i can put this money back into the economy
i can you know uh incentivize it in this way but who forgives it i forgive it with my taxpayer dollars when i busted ass to graduate college in two years instead of four with no debt taken on by working my way through it like and it's but if we do we want to go through a life of a life of well i had to do it and it's not fair and that's not i'm not interested in like the pulling the ladder up after you type thing but i am interested in like there's this there's this
basic component of like our our federal government like our debt and our deficit is absolutely enormous we just keep attempting to spend money on things and we haven't accounted for it yeah and at some point this catches up with us and in fact we're saying stimulate like the the stimulus checks that led to inflation as an example of this a very salient example of this stimulus or barely shillings i don't know if i'm going to blame them for an iron number for inflation everything oh no but that segways if anything they owe me more money
that perfectly though the average cost of gas is now over five dollars a gallon associate professor of economics at denison university fadal kaboom joins us next to weigh in
