Most voters this November say they care about one thing – fixing America’s affordability crisis. Which party has the most convincing pitch and will get your vote?
I was yelling into the ether at her “drill, baby, drill!” Comments. She must be completely out of touch with the enormous subsidies the US has give the petroleum producers. Where were Mo and David when she spouted the whole diatribe about subsidizing solar and wind. So disappointed in them at that point.
Also: the US is already a net exporter of fossil fuels. The private companies that produce said oil have zero incentive to lower the price though. So what would be in line with her goal would be nationalizing a majority or controlling minority share in all major American oil companies (as most countries have done) and increasing supply to correct the market highs.
However, that would not only be the least libertarian thing you could possibly do, but would be an actual communist policy solution by admitting that the state needs to intervene to correct markets.
This is the kind of question Elleithee or Greene would ask if either of them were interested in actually fulfilling the role of left panelist or moderator respectively.
For example: on KUOW’s week in review the question “so that’s why you want an income tax” has become a bit because the host always asks it to fiscal conservatives when they complain about the budget deficit or the unreliable and complex tax structure in WA. The host also pushes leftists and socialists with counters, rather than just saying “tell me more” and ceding all framing.
She is pushing Hayek/Ayn Rand nonsense that has been discredited by economists of nearly every perspective for about 75 years now. This was an extremely annoying episode that needed more decisive responses to her libertarian dogma from both left and center.
Libertarian dogma is when your education on economics ends after taking econ 101.
On price curves: that is not economics 101. Econ 101 says IF supply increases and IF demand doesn’t increase THEN prices decrease. However, in a classical libertarian framework the government should have absolutely no role in doing anything to affect prices for any specifically targeted goods. The government strategically targeting industries to increase supply and deflate prices is extremely interventionist.
Also, Econ 101 would not support banning Chinese EVs or sanctions against basically anyone. The whole Smithian argument against mercantilism is that geopolitics shouldn’t affect trade.
Wow Mo, total miss on the energy conversation, you gave that one to Sarah… I made an account just because of this 😆
She focused on supply, your counter should have been to lower demand! We have millions of EVs on the road everyday now, cheaper electricity and access to charging would result in less gas powered cars. Reduced demand, greater supply, lower costs. Imagine the gas crisis right now had all those vehicles still been non-ev?! Globally it would be massive. And I'm just focusing on EVs here, public transport and the rest would obviously reduce consumption even further.
And how progressive taxation to fund infrastructure improvements that decrease energy demand by increasing efficiency is the main macroeconomic way to decrease inflation other than taxes and interest rates (which is functionally just a tax on loans). I guess libertarian websites might disagree though, and we all know libertarian websites are quite credible.
(2) The U.S. mostly produces light, sweet crude oil (low in sulfur and thin) through fracking. However, a majority of American refineries were built decades ago to process heavy, sour crude oil (thick and high in sulfur) imported from countries like Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela. Drilling more will NOT fix the problem. (https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/america-produces-enough-oil-to-meet-its-needs-so-why-do-we-import-crude)
Isgur's tortured logic on "Affordability vs wealth transfers". Apparently "Wealth transfers take money from one person and give it to another person in the form of taxes". Wow - so incisive! Yes! I'm in favor of taking money from wealthy people in order to pay for school lunch for hungry children. Isgur was on top form this week - a good little 'heritage foundation' mouthpiece: she'd easily let your child starve to avoid taxing the wealthy. She also conveniently fails to mention that it's been republican administrations responsible for the most calamitous rises in the national debt. tRump foremost among them.
God forbid the taxes we pay every year actually go to helping out our neighbors. How could society ever succeed if we’re not paying those taxes to offset the corporate tax breaks
I will admit, I questioned the "free lunch for all" some 15 years ago when my own child was attending a public school in a wealthy neighborhood (we were bussed in...). I didn't understand why all these kids should be fed using my tax dollars, and would argue that I can make a PBJ for pennies every day. But then I was introduced to the idea of the cost of administering lunches based on need (i.e. it would cost more to hire a staff to monitor and collect the appropriate documentation to assign eligibility). I am a convert. I hope Sarah never finds herself in a position of need. She is always speaking from a place of privilege and it is so darn annoying.
Also 2 things to add: 1) having a universal program funded by progressive taxation means people are contributing what they can to the same cause, 2) a universal program is less likely to be allowed to decrease in quality. If everyone is eating the same quality lunch, the wealthy have an incentive to ensure the lunches for everyone else are good. When everyone eats from the same bowl, no one wants crap in it.
There are wealth transfers of all kinds in America. Yes, in a way the school lunch program is transferring wealth from taxpayers to hungry children. But in the grand scheme of things, that’s a very tiny wealth transfer compared to what America has done in the past. If you use the framework as: a wealth transfer is when the government pays entities to do big things, and makes that entity rich in the process, then what do we find? The military industrial complex is one. We take taxpayers money, and then pay defense companies trillions to make bombs, and a few people get very rich in the process. After the 2008 crisis, the government paid the banks that were responsible for its cause to increase liquidity in the market and help smooth out the issue, and the financial institutions profited handsomely in the process. Infrastructure spending is necessary and it definitely crowns a few winners. Anytime a whale as big as the U.S. government gets involved, it distorts the market and some people win big and some lose. But the one thing that’s always true is that the taxpayer ends up picking the tab. If we’re gonna do wealth transfers, it better be worth it and lead to better outcomes. There better be accountability. (I also like the idea of school lunch programs, for what it’s worth, i see that as an insurance on our investment in k-12 education, I also benefited from them as a child)
Edit to add: a recent wealth transfer includes the tariff debacle. American consumers paid the higher prices for goods and the companies are getting refunded. Talk about double dipping!
Sarah Isgur made 2 points that troubled me. The first was on government run grocery stores. While I am not in favor of it, critics often site the former Soviet Union as the way governments would run grocery stores (Ms. Isgur: "do you like food?"). However, the US Miliary runs commissaries around the world and many have great selection and very low prices. So it is possible for government to run them effectively even if we choose to let private business do it. Let's have a debate based on facts not just dismiss something and paint it over with the worst possible analog. Second, drilling for more domestic oil supplies to lower gas prices at the pump. Much of US production is of "light crude" but many refineries in the US (especially in the south) are designed to process "heavy crude" - and to convert to "light crude" has been cost prohibitive up to this point. Producing more crude oil domestically may allow us to sell the higher priced "light crude" and buy more less expensive "heavy crude", but we have to buy the heavy crude on the global market. Further, it could take 6 months (or as little as 5 weeks), depending on permitting and other factors, to drill a well and have it in production. Oil production and markets are complex, and global, just producing more domestically does not solve our high gas prices without second order effects - like upgrading refineries, etc.
About those grocery stores in the Soviet Union... the problem wasn't that they were government run. The problem was that the Soviet Union was unable to figure out how to build up its economy (plus they were already establishing an oligarchy), and they truly did not care about the people. The United States, on the other hand, is the wealthiest nation or earth. We know how to run things and we have resources coming out of our ears. I am confident we can do things that the USSR could not.
I suppose it’s possible that Sarah could be more condescending, arrogant and flippant, but it isn’t likely. LRC really needs to rethink its panel. I learned nothing from this episode.
I don’t fault Sarah for being Sarah. Or Mo or David. This is a significant failure by the show’s producers in assembling a dynamic, credible, and articulate panel that can provide relevant perspectives on the news of the week. Their rants/raves belong on the Hallmark channel. I’m rooting for the show & hope the producers can save it.
That’s what I’ve been saying for about 2 years now, and they will not do it. The show is no longer a panel discussion and has become a “friends chat about politics” show like the Slate Gabfest or Pod Save America.
Today’s show demonstrated something quite clearly: Isgur is incapable of polite discussion when she actually has a substantive disagreement, and the only reason the show seems amicable is because Elleithee agrees with her on almost everything.
Mo once again proved why he is completely incapable of representing arguments of the progressive or even liberal position, when Sarah described the taxation system as essentially theft. Taxation is the system where we create a society where everyone has their basic needs met, and she seems to be saying that if you're poor, you deserve to starve to death. And Mo's response was silence.
She then says that any spending should have to detail where the funding is coming from, and Mo failed to point out that most of our deficit comes from the tax cuts that are made by Republicans, where there is never an effort to explain how the loss of funding is going to contribute to the deficit.
Even on the conversation of progressive versus moderates, he dismisses the progressives as having big ideas that aren't realistic and then fails to put forward a single big idea that the moderates have.
I am begging the show to have someone on who can coherently represent the actual policy proposals of the left.
When you use tax money to pay for any infrastructure, you end up with a productive asset in the end, and that productivity decreases inflation by increasing supply.
The military is the opposite: you destroy productive assets. A bomb can produce nothing, it can only destroy. You never actually get an ROI on military assets unless you are going to return to late 19th century colonialism.
I’m sorry, but does Mo even prepare for these shows or does he go off vibes? Mo Elleithee is a quintessential moderate democrat that has millions of people running to DSA type candidates. I mean, just name this show the Sarah Isgar show if she is able to run amok with her opposition apologizing to her every time they slightly disagree. Can we have some substantial debate on this debate show? Please!
I think my favorite was the part where, when talking about ideas to help Americans struggling with high food prices, he reflexively advocated for returning to the status quo position because it’s “palatable”. Yea, palatable policy positions of returning to 2023 when democrats were incredibly unpopular is definitely a recipe for a left of center uprising in America. Thanks for the strategy tips Mo.
I have a good friend, much younger, who works at a local nonprofit called Alliance House and she has friends whose food stamps are $25/mo. These Re people with disabilities severe enough that they can’t hold FT, or in some cases PT, jobs. Think about that when you’re shopping at the grocery next time. Will $25 worth of food last you a month? Maybe, if you just bought rice & beans. Milk is now $4/ gal. Eggs still close to that. No fruit or veg. Does anyone see how this affects the diet of half our population & why we have record rates of chronic diseases. So we don’t pay for SNAP & then pay it in healthcare costs. To Sarah: will you consider looking at the revenue side of the balance sheet? Corporations used to pay 5x more of the Federal tax dollars than now. For whatever reason & party you want to blame (although blaming never solves problems), we have a wealth inequality that makes the gilded age inequality look pitifully small. So our tax code needs some intelligent reform. I would love to hear something besides “ cut taxes” from the Conservatives, who then go on to complain about the Federal debt.
The Senate hearing with Dr. Fauci wasn’t just in bad faith. He was treated abominably by the small-minded, mean-spirited, vengeful excuse for a government that Trump has sanctioned and cultivated.
There is genetic evidence linking SARS-CoV-2 to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan and pointing to a spillover from animals (which is how viruses behave in nature). Genetic analysis of early cases revealed two distinct viral lineages suggesting two cross-species spillover events transmitting the virus from animals to humans. A lab leak theory would strongly rely on one strain being present.
Genetic sequencing of environmental samples collected from the market in early 2020 showed that SARS-CoV-2 positive swabs were concentrated heavily in the southwest section of the market where wildlife vendors were located, and these samples were statistically matched to specific stalls where live mammals were sold. These positive samples contained both the SARS-CoV-2 virus and mitochondrial DNA from animals known to be susceptible to coronaviruses including raccoon dogs, Asian palm civets, and bamboo rats.
Homes were mapped of the earliest documented human COVID-19 cases in December 2019 and showed a heavy concentration centered directly around the market. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (campus Zhengdian or Xiaohongshan) is approximately 7 or 8.5 miles from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and they are across the Yangtze River from each other.
Scientists can’t definitively say COVID came from an animal source without having the smoking gun of SARS-CoV-2 isolated from said animal, and we all know those animals are long gone. There’s still a small chance of isolating a closely related coronavirus from bats in the area, again circumstances make this very difficult. Conspiracy theorists feed off of these “gaps” in the rigors of the scientific method.
Dr. Fauci saved lives. No one died from wearing a mask. (They did die though from refusing the COVID vaccine.) I remember Dr. Fauci creating a big tent for all to be heard in difficult times by including consideration of the lab leak theory.
There is a way of handling concerns in the medical field known as the “just culture” technique. It replaces strict blame with systemic learning. It creates an environment where healthcare workers and patients feel safe in addressing concerns about adverse events or safety issues. It identifies weaknesses in the system, maintains shared accountability and will differentiate between an honest mistake (system is fixed and the worker is consoled), choices where risk is not fully recognized (addressed with coaching and fixing flawed incentives) and outright reckless behavior (disciplined appropriately). This makes it different from traditional punitive culture, and people are much more likely to come forward to improve patient care and safety. If only Dr. Fauci had been treated with some semblance of just culture, but that would involve overcoming ignorance.
I live in Minnesota, I have no children. I live in a neighborhood where there are tons of children. I love the school lunch program. Something that was omitted on this program is that the free lunch program isn't income based. So while Sarah kept saying "wealth transfer", it was wealth transfer from tax payers (myself) to children, rich and poor. The school just needs to apply for breakfast and lunch programs to ensure they qualify.
If that's wealth transfer, then so is me paying for the kids around me to go to school. Same thing, I pay taxes for rich and poor and medium income kids to go to school.
I want well fed educated children around me because I hate crime. Yes, I am one of those bleeding heart liberals that believe crime arises from no education and starvation. I'm not saying it's the only source, it's just a sure fire way to put people in nothing-to-live-for situation. I just wish Sarah could find her liberatarian utopia where you pay out of your own pocket for everything including the education of your children lest you be accused of "wealth transfer". Ayn Rand has been a pox upon this country.
Sarah wants to destroy the very system she was a product of. Convenient.
She also wants to destroy the system where taxes fund education by privatizing it. Her being on the podcast wouldn’t be such an issue if Elleithee and Greene had any substantive disagreements with her. However, when the left panelist believes in nothing, they are incapable of pushing back even when they want to.
My cousin's fifteen year old son has more sense of "well if you call that X, then Y is also labeled X" when it comes to politics and he's a young idealist.
Taxes are wealth transfer. What's the first instance of society relying on taxes? Pharaohs gave tax rebates 4,000 years ago when crops were destroyed by flooding on the delta but you had to have an official verify your crop was destroyed. It probably goes back further than that, this was just what little writing survived of taxation.
So I'm sure Sarah has some litmus test for what is acceptable wealth transfer and what is not acceptable wealth transfer but she sure didn't give it nor was she challenged on it. The real problem? The only reason she attacked school lunch programs was because it fit her definition of "wealth transfer" that also covers roads (not everyone has a car).
Why is it that when someone is challenged on this program it's always Sarah challenging something Mo says? It's very clearly not the quality of what they are saying as they both make asinine observations. Sarah just consistently gets away with it.
Labels don't work anymore. You can say that someone is a Trump acolyte and they'll respond you have TDS. So I just type 5,000 word comments instead because a few words can be twisted by the reader to mean whatever they mean.
I think we're largely on the same page politics wise, Collin, but let me offer you some advice that you can ignore. When you say "a Clinton Democrat" or "an Obama Democrat" and infer that they are unevolved conservative Democrats, you are implying that every administration pushes the Overton window so far left that you now view the prior administration as a Conservative entity. Yes, it is not lost on me that in prior comments you have complained about conservatives pushing the Overton window around.
I fundamentally reject this. I find this a regressive view and I definitely have never resolved or benefited from discussing it. Conversely, I believe that liberals from the Clinton era, given the same updated information we have have today, would have very similar positions on most if not all issues.
There is zero chance David or Mo watched a single minute of the Fauci hearing, much less spent any time with the contents of his diary. I guess throw Sarah in there, too. That segment was embarrassing, even for this superficial excuse for an issues program. Had they done so, there is no chance they just skim right over the righteous anger many still have at that little power mad bureaucrat. Oh, and the legacy media that was in bed with him, his mistakes, and his censorship. That was the most telling part of the diary, so understandable why their own performance at the time is humiliating and they just wish it will go away.
Did you find an actual copy of "the diary" somewhere? All I've found so far is something that Senator Paul posted and it's not real useful. It's a cut & paste job that uses apparent excerpts from something to support Paul's accusations. It would be helpful to know what kind of "diary" this was and I'm curious about where he got it. Maybe Sarah's right & Fauci wrote it on a government computer, but I truly don't know. Is it an actual diary, or something else?
I guess I don't find it surprising that Dr. Fauci would write things in a private (assumed to be private?) diary that differ from what he said in public. We were confronted with a totally new disease. There was way more unknown than known. Things were being learned as we went along and science is a messy process. I know that I find it helpful to write things out when I'm trying to make sense of a complex situation and, as a part of that, I usually try to look at things from multiple views and my own view is going to evolve as information develops. I honestly didn't see anything in what Paul posted in his "Reading Room" that wouldn't have been more useful in context.
Having said that, we all have our own personal style. I think, if I'd been in Fauci's place, I'd have spent more time sharing the uncertainty with the public and trying to educate people about that. That's just me. I know there are plenty of people out there who worry more about causing panic and think the best approach in a crisis is to try to give people the feeling things are under control, even when they aren't. Fauci always struck me as being more that type of person.
Some kind of after action assessment is certainly warranted. But I'd much rather the point of it was to learn things that can help us do better the next time we face a novel pandemic. Senator Paul seems to have so much personal animosity that I really doubt he;s capable of doing that. (Actually, the various agencies that were involved in all this should have done this several years ago.)
Did you happen to watch the hearing? Fauci said he was genuinely upset specifically that it had been released in his brief statement and didn’t object to its provenance.
As to your question, there was an X account releasing about 20 pages at a time over the weekend that was very useful. I understand the first 669 pages of the some 1100 haven’t yet been released. It was indeed kept on his government computer and was discovered by someone working for RFK who then got it to Rand Paul.
My pleasure. I agree with your assessment of the most important thing being finding out the ultimate source, I fear the pardon might make that nearly impossible. I have never put much stock in a leak on purpose, and since the release of the diary I read a jarring account of how frequently leaks like that happen. To his credit Obama shut down gain of function in 2013. Rand Paul has been trying for about 4 years to get Fauci to admit whether he just took it off shore after that.
The hearing was interesting in spite of his taking the 5th. Yes, there was absolutely some theater, what day is it, what color is your tie. But it did appear to me the GOP senators came with many good faith questions that still deserve answers, and were thinking that he was going to at least engage. Said differently, there was some search for truth beyond the suspicion they were just laying a perjury trap for him, and taking the 5th was an unpleasant surprise.
I didn't watch it. I was working at the time and, once I found out how it went, decided there were other ways I needed to spend my time instead. I'm a bit curious about what they asked him. It probably hints at where they're trying to go with this.
The one site I found online, other that Rand Paul's, seemed to show kind of an interesting pattern. The first entries were in 2001. There were only a few entries before the pandemic. I haven't read it yet, but that also makes me wonder what this document actually was.
This is just my opinion, so it's not worth much. I think pretty much everyone involved in the pandemic response was doing the best they knew how to do at the time. Even the people whose behavior seemed totally nuts to me. People are going on now about what a mess it was, but it could have been a whole lot worse. How it got started? The best information I've read on that suggests that we don't know for sure and may never know. Seems like the majority of people working in that field think it was probably spillover in the market. It COULD have been a lab leak. Those kinds of things are possible and they're serious. (And the people working in that field would probably really rather it WASN'T a lab leak because that might make it a whole lot harder to keep doing some of the research they're doing.) Because it happened in China, the rest of the world didn't get timely access to investigate and the market was cleaned up, etc etc. To me, the important message there is the EITHER of those things are possible and BOTH of them are serious. Personally, I don't think there was any deliberate plan to turn the virus loose on the world. If it was a lab leak, it was an accident, and it was a Chinese accident.
Mo once again proved why he is completely incapable of representing arguments of the progressive or even liberal position, when Sarah described the taxation system as essentially theft. Taxation is the system where we create a society where everyone has their basic needs met, and she seems to be saying that if you're poor, you deserve to starve to death. And Mo's response was silence.
She then says that any spending should have to detail where the funding is coming from, and Mo failed to point out that most of our deficit comes from the tax cuts that are made by Republicans, where there is never an effort to explain how the loss of funding is going to contribute to the deficit.
Even on the conversation of progressive versus moderates, he dismisses the progressives as having big ideas that aren't realistic and then fails to put forward a single big idea that the moderates have.
I am begging the show to have someone on who can coherently represent the actual policy proposals of the left.
Because he is just a partocrat. He has no vision, no principles, and believes the US Civil War started because people weren’t willing to sit down and compromise. He is fit only to do what he has done: help Democrats lose primary campaigns.
Oh, Sarah. We're trying to lower gas prices now. Saying you're gonna increase supply does not magically increase supply. It would take YEARS for any new oil production to come online.
The fact no one asked her how we refine all that crude oil shows that Mo and Green are way outside their depth or scared to call Sarah out on her bullshit talking points
Sarah Isgar is opposed to subsidies for alternative energy. Is she also opposed to the billiions in subsidies that oil companies receive?
I was yelling into the ether at her “drill, baby, drill!” Comments. She must be completely out of touch with the enormous subsidies the US has give the petroleum producers. Where were Mo and David when she spouted the whole diatribe about subsidizing solar and wind. So disappointed in them at that point.
Also: the US is already a net exporter of fossil fuels. The private companies that produce said oil have zero incentive to lower the price though. So what would be in line with her goal would be nationalizing a majority or controlling minority share in all major American oil companies (as most countries have done) and increasing supply to correct the market highs.
However, that would not only be the least libertarian thing you could possibly do, but would be an actual communist policy solution by admitting that the state needs to intervene to correct markets.
Nuclear energy is also being heavily subsidized. There was no mention of that either.
This is the kind of question Elleithee or Greene would ask if either of them were interested in actually fulfilling the role of left panelist or moderator respectively.
For example: on KUOW’s week in review the question “so that’s why you want an income tax” has become a bit because the host always asks it to fiscal conservatives when they complain about the budget deficit or the unreliable and complex tax structure in WA. The host also pushes leftists and socialists with counters, rather than just saying “tell me more” and ceding all framing.
She is pushing Hayek/Ayn Rand nonsense that has been discredited by economists of nearly every perspective for about 75 years now. This was an extremely annoying episode that needed more decisive responses to her libertarian dogma from both left and center.
Price curves and increasing supply lowering prices is economics 101 not some weird libertarian dogma.
Libertarian dogma is when your education on economics ends after taking econ 101.
On price curves: that is not economics 101. Econ 101 says IF supply increases and IF demand doesn’t increase THEN prices decrease. However, in a classical libertarian framework the government should have absolutely no role in doing anything to affect prices for any specifically targeted goods. The government strategically targeting industries to increase supply and deflate prices is extremely interventionist.
Also, Econ 101 would not support banning Chinese EVs or sanctions against basically anyone. The whole Smithian argument against mercantilism is that geopolitics shouldn’t affect trade.
101 is about as far as she's gotten. Mainstream economics has gone a bit father since Adam Smith.
Noted leftist HW Bush called it “Voodoo economics”
Wow Mo, total miss on the energy conversation, you gave that one to Sarah… I made an account just because of this 😆
She focused on supply, your counter should have been to lower demand! We have millions of EVs on the road everyday now, cheaper electricity and access to charging would result in less gas powered cars. Reduced demand, greater supply, lower costs. Imagine the gas crisis right now had all those vehicles still been non-ev?! Globally it would be massive. And I'm just focusing on EVs here, public transport and the rest would obviously reduce consumption even further.
And how progressive taxation to fund infrastructure improvements that decrease energy demand by increasing efficiency is the main macroeconomic way to decrease inflation other than taxes and interest rates (which is functionally just a tax on loans). I guess libertarian websites might disagree though, and we all know libertarian websites are quite credible.
I came here to scream into the void about the energy conversation. 100% what you sad, but also:
(1) Our oil production is higher than ever! U.S. crude oil production grew dramatically from roughly 5.8 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2000 to record highs near 13.7 to 13.9 million bpd in 2026 (https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcrfpus2&f=m)
(2) The U.S. mostly produces light, sweet crude oil (low in sulfur and thin) through fracking. However, a majority of American refineries were built decades ago to process heavy, sour crude oil (thick and high in sulfur) imported from countries like Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela. Drilling more will NOT fix the problem. (https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/america-produces-enough-oil-to-meet-its-needs-so-why-do-we-import-crude)
Mo needed to push back so much harder!
Yes! So many more things he could have said...
Isgur’s feelings don’t care about your facts.
Isgur's tortured logic on "Affordability vs wealth transfers". Apparently "Wealth transfers take money from one person and give it to another person in the form of taxes". Wow - so incisive! Yes! I'm in favor of taking money from wealthy people in order to pay for school lunch for hungry children. Isgur was on top form this week - a good little 'heritage foundation' mouthpiece: she'd easily let your child starve to avoid taxing the wealthy. She also conveniently fails to mention that it's been republican administrations responsible for the most calamitous rises in the national debt. tRump foremost among them.
God forbid the taxes we pay every year actually go to helping out our neighbors. How could society ever succeed if we’re not paying those taxes to offset the corporate tax breaks
But she doesn’t kill insects in her house because she’s just such a good person.
I will admit, I questioned the "free lunch for all" some 15 years ago when my own child was attending a public school in a wealthy neighborhood (we were bussed in...). I didn't understand why all these kids should be fed using my tax dollars, and would argue that I can make a PBJ for pennies every day. But then I was introduced to the idea of the cost of administering lunches based on need (i.e. it would cost more to hire a staff to monitor and collect the appropriate documentation to assign eligibility). I am a convert. I hope Sarah never finds herself in a position of need. She is always speaking from a place of privilege and it is so darn annoying.
Also 2 things to add: 1) having a universal program funded by progressive taxation means people are contributing what they can to the same cause, 2) a universal program is less likely to be allowed to decrease in quality. If everyone is eating the same quality lunch, the wealthy have an incentive to ensure the lunches for everyone else are good. When everyone eats from the same bowl, no one wants crap in it.
There are wealth transfers of all kinds in America. Yes, in a way the school lunch program is transferring wealth from taxpayers to hungry children. But in the grand scheme of things, that’s a very tiny wealth transfer compared to what America has done in the past. If you use the framework as: a wealth transfer is when the government pays entities to do big things, and makes that entity rich in the process, then what do we find? The military industrial complex is one. We take taxpayers money, and then pay defense companies trillions to make bombs, and a few people get very rich in the process. After the 2008 crisis, the government paid the banks that were responsible for its cause to increase liquidity in the market and help smooth out the issue, and the financial institutions profited handsomely in the process. Infrastructure spending is necessary and it definitely crowns a few winners. Anytime a whale as big as the U.S. government gets involved, it distorts the market and some people win big and some lose. But the one thing that’s always true is that the taxpayer ends up picking the tab. If we’re gonna do wealth transfers, it better be worth it and lead to better outcomes. There better be accountability. (I also like the idea of school lunch programs, for what it’s worth, i see that as an insurance on our investment in k-12 education, I also benefited from them as a child)
Edit to add: a recent wealth transfer includes the tariff debacle. American consumers paid the higher prices for goods and the companies are getting refunded. Talk about double dipping!
Well said. I came here to say something similar.
Sarah Isgur made 2 points that troubled me. The first was on government run grocery stores. While I am not in favor of it, critics often site the former Soviet Union as the way governments would run grocery stores (Ms. Isgur: "do you like food?"). However, the US Miliary runs commissaries around the world and many have great selection and very low prices. So it is possible for government to run them effectively even if we choose to let private business do it. Let's have a debate based on facts not just dismiss something and paint it over with the worst possible analog. Second, drilling for more domestic oil supplies to lower gas prices at the pump. Much of US production is of "light crude" but many refineries in the US (especially in the south) are designed to process "heavy crude" - and to convert to "light crude" has been cost prohibitive up to this point. Producing more crude oil domestically may allow us to sell the higher priced "light crude" and buy more less expensive "heavy crude", but we have to buy the heavy crude on the global market. Further, it could take 6 months (or as little as 5 weeks), depending on permitting and other factors, to drill a well and have it in production. Oil production and markets are complex, and global, just producing more domestically does not solve our high gas prices without second order effects - like upgrading refineries, etc.
About those grocery stores in the Soviet Union... the problem wasn't that they were government run. The problem was that the Soviet Union was unable to figure out how to build up its economy (plus they were already establishing an oligarchy), and they truly did not care about the people. The United States, on the other hand, is the wealthiest nation or earth. We know how to run things and we have resources coming out of our ears. I am confident we can do things that the USSR could not.
I suppose it’s possible that Sarah could be more condescending, arrogant and flippant, but it isn’t likely. LRC really needs to rethink its panel. I learned nothing from this episode.
Agree. I can’t listen anymore. Her snarky tone is like fingernails on a chalkboard.
I don’t fault Sarah for being Sarah. Or Mo or David. This is a significant failure by the show’s producers in assembling a dynamic, credible, and articulate panel that can provide relevant perspectives on the news of the week. Their rants/raves belong on the Hallmark channel. I’m rooting for the show & hope the producers can save it.
I would encourage you to reach out to Jennifer Ferro at jennifer.ferro@kcrw.org
I agree, Isgur and Elleithee have their place on the show, they just shouldn’t be dominating it and talking exclusively with each other.
That’s what I’ve been saying for about 2 years now, and they will not do it. The show is no longer a panel discussion and has become a “friends chat about politics” show like the Slate Gabfest or Pod Save America.
At least Pod is entertaining. LRC is annoying and frustrating to listen to.
Today’s show demonstrated something quite clearly: Isgur is incapable of polite discussion when she actually has a substantive disagreement, and the only reason the show seems amicable is because Elleithee agrees with her on almost everything.
Mo once again proved why he is completely incapable of representing arguments of the progressive or even liberal position, when Sarah described the taxation system as essentially theft. Taxation is the system where we create a society where everyone has their basic needs met, and she seems to be saying that if you're poor, you deserve to starve to death. And Mo's response was silence.
She then says that any spending should have to detail where the funding is coming from, and Mo failed to point out that most of our deficit comes from the tax cuts that are made by Republicans, where there is never an effort to explain how the loss of funding is going to contribute to the deficit.
Even on the conversation of progressive versus moderates, he dismisses the progressives as having big ideas that aren't realistic and then fails to put forward a single big idea that the moderates have.
I am begging the show to have someone on who can coherently represent the actual policy proposals of the left.
Did Isgur get her economics degree from Prager University?
When you use tax money to pay for any infrastructure, you end up with a productive asset in the end, and that productivity decreases inflation by increasing supply.
The military is the opposite: you destroy productive assets. A bomb can produce nothing, it can only destroy. You never actually get an ROI on military assets unless you are going to return to late 19th century colonialism.
I’m sorry, but does Mo even prepare for these shows or does he go off vibes? Mo Elleithee is a quintessential moderate democrat that has millions of people running to DSA type candidates. I mean, just name this show the Sarah Isgar show if she is able to run amok with her opposition apologizing to her every time they slightly disagree. Can we have some substantial debate on this debate show? Please!
I think my favorite was the part where, when talking about ideas to help Americans struggling with high food prices, he reflexively advocated for returning to the status quo position because it’s “palatable”. Yea, palatable policy positions of returning to 2023 when democrats were incredibly unpopular is definitely a recipe for a left of center uprising in America. Thanks for the strategy tips Mo.
I have a good friend, much younger, who works at a local nonprofit called Alliance House and she has friends whose food stamps are $25/mo. These Re people with disabilities severe enough that they can’t hold FT, or in some cases PT, jobs. Think about that when you’re shopping at the grocery next time. Will $25 worth of food last you a month? Maybe, if you just bought rice & beans. Milk is now $4/ gal. Eggs still close to that. No fruit or veg. Does anyone see how this affects the diet of half our population & why we have record rates of chronic diseases. So we don’t pay for SNAP & then pay it in healthcare costs. To Sarah: will you consider looking at the revenue side of the balance sheet? Corporations used to pay 5x more of the Federal tax dollars than now. For whatever reason & party you want to blame (although blaming never solves problems), we have a wealth inequality that makes the gilded age inequality look pitifully small. So our tax code needs some intelligent reform. I would love to hear something besides “ cut taxes” from the Conservatives, who then go on to complain about the Federal debt.
The Senate hearing with Dr. Fauci wasn’t just in bad faith. He was treated abominably by the small-minded, mean-spirited, vengeful excuse for a government that Trump has sanctioned and cultivated.
There is genetic evidence linking SARS-CoV-2 to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan and pointing to a spillover from animals (which is how viruses behave in nature). Genetic analysis of early cases revealed two distinct viral lineages suggesting two cross-species spillover events transmitting the virus from animals to humans. A lab leak theory would strongly rely on one strain being present.
Genetic sequencing of environmental samples collected from the market in early 2020 showed that SARS-CoV-2 positive swabs were concentrated heavily in the southwest section of the market where wildlife vendors were located, and these samples were statistically matched to specific stalls where live mammals were sold. These positive samples contained both the SARS-CoV-2 virus and mitochondrial DNA from animals known to be susceptible to coronaviruses including raccoon dogs, Asian palm civets, and bamboo rats.
Homes were mapped of the earliest documented human COVID-19 cases in December 2019 and showed a heavy concentration centered directly around the market. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (campus Zhengdian or Xiaohongshan) is approximately 7 or 8.5 miles from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and they are across the Yangtze River from each other.
Scientists can’t definitively say COVID came from an animal source without having the smoking gun of SARS-CoV-2 isolated from said animal, and we all know those animals are long gone. There’s still a small chance of isolating a closely related coronavirus from bats in the area, again circumstances make this very difficult. Conspiracy theorists feed off of these “gaps” in the rigors of the scientific method.
Dr. Fauci saved lives. No one died from wearing a mask. (They did die though from refusing the COVID vaccine.) I remember Dr. Fauci creating a big tent for all to be heard in difficult times by including consideration of the lab leak theory.
There is a way of handling concerns in the medical field known as the “just culture” technique. It replaces strict blame with systemic learning. It creates an environment where healthcare workers and patients feel safe in addressing concerns about adverse events or safety issues. It identifies weaknesses in the system, maintains shared accountability and will differentiate between an honest mistake (system is fixed and the worker is consoled), choices where risk is not fully recognized (addressed with coaching and fixing flawed incentives) and outright reckless behavior (disciplined appropriately). This makes it different from traditional punitive culture, and people are much more likely to come forward to improve patient care and safety. If only Dr. Fauci had been treated with some semblance of just culture, but that would involve overcoming ignorance.
I live in Minnesota, I have no children. I live in a neighborhood where there are tons of children. I love the school lunch program. Something that was omitted on this program is that the free lunch program isn't income based. So while Sarah kept saying "wealth transfer", it was wealth transfer from tax payers (myself) to children, rich and poor. The school just needs to apply for breakfast and lunch programs to ensure they qualify.
If that's wealth transfer, then so is me paying for the kids around me to go to school. Same thing, I pay taxes for rich and poor and medium income kids to go to school.
I want well fed educated children around me because I hate crime. Yes, I am one of those bleeding heart liberals that believe crime arises from no education and starvation. I'm not saying it's the only source, it's just a sure fire way to put people in nothing-to-live-for situation. I just wish Sarah could find her liberatarian utopia where you pay out of your own pocket for everything including the education of your children lest you be accused of "wealth transfer". Ayn Rand has been a pox upon this country.
Sarah wants to destroy the very system she was a product of. Convenient.
She also wants to destroy the system where taxes fund education by privatizing it. Her being on the podcast wouldn’t be such an issue if Elleithee and Greene had any substantive disagreements with her. However, when the left panelist believes in nothing, they are incapable of pushing back even when they want to.
My cousin's fifteen year old son has more sense of "well if you call that X, then Y is also labeled X" when it comes to politics and he's a young idealist.
Taxes are wealth transfer. What's the first instance of society relying on taxes? Pharaohs gave tax rebates 4,000 years ago when crops were destroyed by flooding on the delta but you had to have an official verify your crop was destroyed. It probably goes back further than that, this was just what little writing survived of taxation.
So I'm sure Sarah has some litmus test for what is acceptable wealth transfer and what is not acceptable wealth transfer but she sure didn't give it nor was she challenged on it. The real problem? The only reason she attacked school lunch programs was because it fit her definition of "wealth transfer" that also covers roads (not everyone has a car).
Why is it that when someone is challenged on this program it's always Sarah challenging something Mo says? It's very clearly not the quality of what they are saying as they both make asinine observations. Sarah just consistently gets away with it.
Because Elleithee as a Clinton Democrat is right wing in his fundamental worldview.
Labels don't work anymore. You can say that someone is a Trump acolyte and they'll respond you have TDS. So I just type 5,000 word comments instead because a few words can be twisted by the reader to mean whatever they mean.
I think we're largely on the same page politics wise, Collin, but let me offer you some advice that you can ignore. When you say "a Clinton Democrat" or "an Obama Democrat" and infer that they are unevolved conservative Democrats, you are implying that every administration pushes the Overton window so far left that you now view the prior administration as a Conservative entity. Yes, it is not lost on me that in prior comments you have complained about conservatives pushing the Overton window around.
I fundamentally reject this. I find this a regressive view and I definitely have never resolved or benefited from discussing it. Conversely, I believe that liberals from the Clinton era, given the same updated information we have have today, would have very similar positions on most if not all issues.
Clinton was viewed as right wing at the time and within his own party in the 1990s.
Being culturally/socially liberal and fiscally conservative shouldn't restrict one from voting or labelling themselves Democrat.
There is zero chance David or Mo watched a single minute of the Fauci hearing, much less spent any time with the contents of his diary. I guess throw Sarah in there, too. That segment was embarrassing, even for this superficial excuse for an issues program. Had they done so, there is no chance they just skim right over the righteous anger many still have at that little power mad bureaucrat. Oh, and the legacy media that was in bed with him, his mistakes, and his censorship. That was the most telling part of the diary, so understandable why their own performance at the time is humiliating and they just wish it will go away.
Just carry the narratives for the Left. That's the show!
Did you find an actual copy of "the diary" somewhere? All I've found so far is something that Senator Paul posted and it's not real useful. It's a cut & paste job that uses apparent excerpts from something to support Paul's accusations. It would be helpful to know what kind of "diary" this was and I'm curious about where he got it. Maybe Sarah's right & Fauci wrote it on a government computer, but I truly don't know. Is it an actual diary, or something else?
I guess I don't find it surprising that Dr. Fauci would write things in a private (assumed to be private?) diary that differ from what he said in public. We were confronted with a totally new disease. There was way more unknown than known. Things were being learned as we went along and science is a messy process. I know that I find it helpful to write things out when I'm trying to make sense of a complex situation and, as a part of that, I usually try to look at things from multiple views and my own view is going to evolve as information develops. I honestly didn't see anything in what Paul posted in his "Reading Room" that wouldn't have been more useful in context.
Having said that, we all have our own personal style. I think, if I'd been in Fauci's place, I'd have spent more time sharing the uncertainty with the public and trying to educate people about that. That's just me. I know there are plenty of people out there who worry more about causing panic and think the best approach in a crisis is to try to give people the feeling things are under control, even when they aren't. Fauci always struck me as being more that type of person.
Some kind of after action assessment is certainly warranted. But I'd much rather the point of it was to learn things that can help us do better the next time we face a novel pandemic. Senator Paul seems to have so much personal animosity that I really doubt he;s capable of doing that. (Actually, the various agencies that were involved in all this should have done this several years ago.)
Did you happen to watch the hearing? Fauci said he was genuinely upset specifically that it had been released in his brief statement and didn’t object to its provenance.
As to your question, there was an X account releasing about 20 pages at a time over the weekend that was very useful. I understand the first 669 pages of the some 1100 haven’t yet been released. It was indeed kept on his government computer and was discovered by someone working for RFK who then got it to Rand Paul.
My pleasure. I agree with your assessment of the most important thing being finding out the ultimate source, I fear the pardon might make that nearly impossible. I have never put much stock in a leak on purpose, and since the release of the diary I read a jarring account of how frequently leaks like that happen. To his credit Obama shut down gain of function in 2013. Rand Paul has been trying for about 4 years to get Fauci to admit whether he just took it off shore after that.
The hearing was interesting in spite of his taking the 5th. Yes, there was absolutely some theater, what day is it, what color is your tie. But it did appear to me the GOP senators came with many good faith questions that still deserve answers, and were thinking that he was going to at least engage. Said differently, there was some search for truth beyond the suspicion they were just laying a perjury trap for him, and taking the 5th was an unpleasant surprise.
Thanks for the conversation!
I didn't watch it. I was working at the time and, once I found out how it went, decided there were other ways I needed to spend my time instead. I'm a bit curious about what they asked him. It probably hints at where they're trying to go with this.
The one site I found online, other that Rand Paul's, seemed to show kind of an interesting pattern. The first entries were in 2001. There were only a few entries before the pandemic. I haven't read it yet, but that also makes me wonder what this document actually was.
This is just my opinion, so it's not worth much. I think pretty much everyone involved in the pandemic response was doing the best they knew how to do at the time. Even the people whose behavior seemed totally nuts to me. People are going on now about what a mess it was, but it could have been a whole lot worse. How it got started? The best information I've read on that suggests that we don't know for sure and may never know. Seems like the majority of people working in that field think it was probably spillover in the market. It COULD have been a lab leak. Those kinds of things are possible and they're serious. (And the people working in that field would probably really rather it WASN'T a lab leak because that might make it a whole lot harder to keep doing some of the research they're doing.) Because it happened in China, the rest of the world didn't get timely access to investigate and the market was cleaned up, etc etc. To me, the important message there is the EITHER of those things are possible and BOTH of them are serious. Personally, I don't think there was any deliberate plan to turn the virus loose on the world. If it was a lab leak, it was an accident, and it was a Chinese accident.
Thanks for the info!
Mo once again proved why he is completely incapable of representing arguments of the progressive or even liberal position, when Sarah described the taxation system as essentially theft. Taxation is the system where we create a society where everyone has their basic needs met, and she seems to be saying that if you're poor, you deserve to starve to death. And Mo's response was silence.
She then says that any spending should have to detail where the funding is coming from, and Mo failed to point out that most of our deficit comes from the tax cuts that are made by Republicans, where there is never an effort to explain how the loss of funding is going to contribute to the deficit.
Even on the conversation of progressive versus moderates, he dismisses the progressives as having big ideas that aren't realistic and then fails to put forward a single big idea that the moderates have.
I am begging the show to have someone on who can coherently represent the actual policy proposals of the left.
Because he is just a partocrat. He has no vision, no principles, and believes the US Civil War started because people weren’t willing to sit down and compromise. He is fit only to do what he has done: help Democrats lose primary campaigns.
Oh, Sarah. We're trying to lower gas prices now. Saying you're gonna increase supply does not magically increase supply. It would take YEARS for any new oil production to come online.
The fact no one asked her how we refine all that crude oil shows that Mo and Green are way outside their depth or scared to call Sarah out on her bullshit talking points