WKXL - New Hampshire Talk Radio

Facing The Future | Should the Fed Cut Interest Rates?

This week on Facing the Future we'll look at whether the Fed has seen enough progress on inflation to begin cutting interest rates? Our guest is Gordon Gray, executive director of the Pinpoint Policy Institute. Then, we'll say farewell to frequent co-host Tori Gorman as she takes up a new job with the Congressional Research Service.

Duration:: 44m
Broadcast on:: 18 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

"Well, the first thing I think he would do would be to stand up and tell the truth. I mean, he had a great expression that was "just tell the truth and watch him scatter." "Well, the further way the problem is, the easier it is to postpone the action on it, and that's essentially what we're doing." "Be real." "Because people in New Hampshire are really cool." "I'd say get in the game. This is a problem facing your generation. You have to have a voice in the decision." Welcome to Facing the Future, brought to you by the Concord Coalition on WKXL, New Hampshire's Talk Radio Station. I'm your host, Bob Bixby. Each week we take a non-partisan dive into topics related to the federal budget, the economy, and how it all affects our nation's future. This week we'll begin by looking at the future of interest rates, as the Federal Reserve Board assesses whether enough progress has been made in lowering inflation so that they can start reducing interest rates. Our guest for that discussion is Gordon Gray, Executive Director of the newly created Pinpoint Policy Institute. And then we'll have a very special exit interview with Tori Gorman, the Concord Coalition's long time policy director, as she begins a new job this week with the Congressional Research. So good for the CRS, bad for the Concord Coalition, and we wish Tori well and we'll be talking to her later in the show. Concord Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson joins me for the entire program. So Gordon and Steve, welcome back to Facing the Future. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks Bob. Let's see now, Gordon, you just took part in this new venture, Pinpoint Policy Institute. So before we get into the numbers, could you give us a little background about that? Happy to and I appreciate the opportunity. So the way I view it, the United States has a great story to tell. We are the world's largest economy and we also deliver the highest standard of living to our citizens compared to other major economies. And I think that the building blocks, the pillars of that prosperity are worth promoting and defending. I think when I look at the policy landscape, frankly, the way I've characterized it is I've got clowns left to me and jokers to the right. And I view the policy landscape as one where basic economics are being challenged and this manifests in sort of the rediscovery of bad failed policies. And so we've seen recent examples of this from the left and the right. We've seen a resurgence in tariff and protectionist policies. These are becoming increasingly popular the world over and it's unfortunate to see these policies being rediscovered and reembraced because the economics on these are clear. Trade barriers make Americans worse off. It's that simple. We are also seeing and a lot of this is coming from a populist strain and since we're also in our election year, we're seeing sort of competing populism and out a bidding war and who can out populist each other. So just recently, the president of the United States has announced something like national rent control yet another terrible idea that it's been a demonstrable failure every time it's been tried. And so part of Ben Point's job is to simply protect and defend the basic elements of American prosperity. And if I could reduce it even further, let's just not mess this up. You know harm as a sort of first condition for economic policy and that can be a tough sell, frankly, in a populist environment. Turned out of the economy and also bringing in Steve, but just this sort of background, the question everybody's waiting to hear now is when is the Fed going to finally begin reducing rates after having raised them to fight inflation and held them where they are now for quite some time. So there's been some good news recently on the inflation front. It's kind of marginal good news and it's not like huge reductions in inflation, but it hasn't the last three reports been inching downward anyway, but still stuck, well maybe not stuck, but it's still at a level that's relatively high relative to where the Fed would like it to be. We still have decent job growth, you know, the economy is growing although it's slower than it was last year. The unemployment rate is ticking up a little bit, but not dramatically, it's perhaps even like a healthy increase in the unemployment rate. So Gordon, if you're on the Fed, how are you processing all this and thinking about a potential rate cut? First of all, I think the way I talk about inflation is we tend to view this, I think, through three separate lenses. So first is, you know, what is the rate of price growth just in absolute terms? And on that front, you know, we remain unsatisfied as observers year over year or still at something like 3% second way to look at it is, you know, what is the trend? What has been the movement relative to past prints? And there we've seen, we've seen marked progress, you know, the yearly rate is tending to come down, you know, so essentially, you know, flat negative prints in the last, or negative readings in the top line and core in the last print followed on the heels of a relatively good print before. So the trend in the near term is pretty good. One note of caution is we've sort of seen, particularly in the summer, we've seen some of these movements before. So false dawns on the tempering of inflation. And so I note that for when we sort of talk about how the Fed's got to look at this. And then the last, the third lens through which we look at these, I think, is a sort of relative to expectation. So you take the trajectory, the trend, and other inputs in mind, and you formulate an outlook, and then if you can get upside or downside surprises. And then, you know, I think that can tend to really move minds. And some of the good news we've seen, some of it was expected, most recent print, some of that good news was even better than we thought in terms of the taming of inflation. So that might pull your outlook a little closer in terms of when you're expecting some, some moderation in monetary policy. But also, you know, along the lines, as you've along the same lines as you observed, we've seen some upticks in unemployment. We've seen some, I would not necessarily signs of weakness per se, but weakening in the labor market. So the pace of hiring, just on a monthly basis, has plainly decelerated. I think the last month's jobs report was about 200,000 net payroll growth, about 70,000 of that was in government. You know, those are, those can be aberrational. It's not necessarily the best look at the pace of hiring private sector. We've seen steady increases in unemployment, 10 basis points, essentially for three months on the try. You know, we'd worry about that if that continued unabated, you know, that gets us into that some rule territory, which we can revisit essentially a potential sort of leading indicator of a downturn if the unemployment rate really exceeds recent past averages. So all these come together to an equilibrium that I think the Federal Reserve Chairman in his recent testimony for the Financial Services and Banking Committee, he characterized these risks increasingly in balance or employment and inflationary measures as in balance. One trouble there, or one element is that the last mile of inflation is the most difficult. There was some really great research by doctors, the doctors, Romer David and Christine on basically the track record of the Federal Reserve to stamp out inflation. And essentially what he found is that there's real risk in not being committed. And essentially they coded and characterized the central bank's responses to inflationary periods. And basically they failed and allowed inflation to persist. In those instances where they weren't really willing to risk the unemployment component of their dual mandate. And I think that's we should be mindful of that, just the historical record and the record of the literature. But also some of the comments from Chairman Powell, you know, I think he really marked a signal change in the Fed's direction, you know, way back in 2022, I believe it was Jackson Hole, where he was saying, we are going to control this and we will march toward that goal. So when I read Goldman Sachs sort of putting out reports, I think this week on why wait, you know, somewhat making the case for a July rate, but well, that's why you don't, you know, that's why you wait, is because there's real risk that you're going to fail to control inflation. And then with other elements in the macro economy, you could see ourselves in an inflationary environment while facing a downturn and you want to, you want to tame inflation first. Okay. Well, we'll get to that on the other side of the break. You're listening to "Facial in the Future." I'm your host Bob Bixby, Concord Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson and I are talking with Gordon Gray, Executive Director of the Pinpoint Policy Institute. We'll be right back after these short messages. Welcome back to "Facial in the Future." I'm your host Bob Bixby, Concord Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson and I are talking with Gordon Gray of the Pinpoint Policy Institute. We're discussing inflation, the economy, interest rates, and Steve, as we left off, we were talking about the timing of a potential Fed interest rate cut. What do you think? What's your view on where the Fed is in this cycle? The markets have been agitating for rate cuts since last year and fortunately, from my perspective, Chairman Powell and his colleagues at the Fed have been hanging tough and resisting the urge to start lowering interest rates and I personally think that's the right position to be in. I'm still looking at inflation and as Gordon was saying in the earlier segment, inflation has come down to 3 percent, the last most recent reading in June, but the Fed's target is 2 percent and you take this, roll this back a couple of years, we were at 9 percent inflation in the summer of 2022, inflation fell to a little over 3 percent in the summer of last year, 2023, and here we are a year later and we're still at 3 percent and Gordon mentioned that last mile is, I think, the hardest one. You're running a marathon, you get to the end, you're really tired and maybe you want to stop and I think that's where people are trying to push the Fed. They're saying, "Oh, look, we were at 9 and we're at 3, that's close enough for government work, let's call it a day," and if the Fed doesn't stick to its guns and say, "No, we're going to get to two and we mean it," I'm afraid that for them to ease too soon is going to be problematic. I think it will undermine their credibility and I think it'll make it that much harder to get inflation contained in the future. My view is the Fed's doing the right thing, they're resisting the calls from the markets to reduce interest rates prematurely. Yeah, and the markets seem to be saying, not just September, but November and December, like three cuts, as I recall, in June, the Fed was saying one for the rest of this year. We'll see. Yeah, we'll see and there are political implications to all of this too, which is if you do it too soon and the Republicans are going to say, "Oh, you're trying to help the administration, if they do it too late, then the Democrats are going to say, "What are you doing?" You're trying to make the administration look bad. The political difficulties here, calculations are almost as difficult over the Fed really can just say, "We're blind to these things and we're just looking at the data." Steve, you had another question about studies that confirm what you want them to find. Yeah, there's a term in psychology, you've probably used in economics as well, referred to as confirmation bias, and that's when somebody's doing research or they're looking for a question, an answer to a question, and they find the answer that they're looking for and they stop looking. I think it's always a danger sometimes when people don't consider all the information available and consider both sides of the issue. As an employee of Concord, my job is to try to do fair and balanced research and provide people with information so they can weigh the issue and decide what they want to do. I just wanted to ask Gordon, you've now started a new think tank and so you're clearly you believe like I do, that information and research matters that we can help shape public opinion and shape policymakers' views on what they should do, whether it's a matter of stopping them from doing bad things or encouraging them to do the right things, but I guess let me ask your broader perspective. What do you think the role of think tanks like ours are in terms of helping shape public opinion and moving policy in the right direction? How important is that? How effective do you think that is? Do politicians and reporters and the public care about reading about both sides of the issue, are they susceptible like most people or a lot of people, and they're just looking for the answer that they want to find, they'll point to the study that supports their conclusion and dismiss anything that disagrees with them, and what are your thoughts on that topic? I'll walk back from the end state, which as you said was to shape public policy. If the goal is to shape public policy, then we have to do that through the means through which policy is made, which is our political system. As we know, we have fairly entrenched politics, and so big segments of the country will not change their minds on a lot of issues, and so if that's a given, then you just have to accept the fact that right or wrong, there will be a constituency for bad research on the right and the left no matter what. There are institutions that will satisfy that demand inexorably, and each side has their respective cheerleaders in media and elsewhere. That's just a given, and we can look around the landscape and see those, but there remains a lot of persuadable folks who do ultimately influence the policy debate, and as I talked about in the beginning, that's a space that I've often found myself in, which is when you can have, I think, more nuanced discussions about policy, you acknowledge trade-offs, and so while I recognize the limitations of research, I recognize the limitations of think tanks to shape public policy, it is just simply not the case that public policy is solely a function of good research, it's not. I think if we look at the state of public policy, we couldn't conclude that it's a function of entirely of good research, but I do think it matters, particularly on the margin, in particular, on a critical and dispositive group of folks who are open to some degree of trade-off and compromise, and while that sort of center, and it doesn't have to be the center politically, it can just be the center of a given debate, can be moved by research. But again, to shape that debate, that research can't be locked up in a faculty lounge somewhere, like you have to be able to articulate it, you have to be at a reach audiences, it has to matter for that debate, and that's another challenge, because when you start the more you reduce the research to a popular audience, you lose no odds. So it's a very tricky balance, and I think that's all of our jobs, is to strike that balance between connecting the findings of the research community to policy makers, something that I'm trying to do, I know it's something that you guys work on. You have really defined the difficulty of this, because there are trade-offs and nuances, and when you get out to a popular audience, that becomes more difficult to convey. We did something a few years ago called the Fiscal Wake Up Tour, and it involved people from various think tanks in Washington who were identified with either being progressive or conservative. And the whole idea was we could agree on a set of facts, and we could agree really on the size of the problem, and this was the deficit problem that we were talking about in the debt, and then we could have differences of opinion on the best solutions and talk about the trade-offs, which were you could do this, you could raise taxes, and that might have certain trade-offs, or you could cut spending, and that might have certain trade-offs for programs, and I have to say, people really did like that. Now scaling that up in a way that can penetrate the halls of Congress or a hotly contested presidential campaign, I have to say, is very, very difficult, but it's that sense of getting people to understand that there are trade-offs. It's not like there are absolute answers. We never would have thought that we could have such high deficits and high debt with low inflation and low interest rates for as long as we did. Now, obviously, we're dealing with something different now, but it forces one to go back and look at one's own assumptions, too, and acknowledge that maybe some things didn't turn out quite the way you thought they would, and pick up going forward. That's just a difficulty of the trade, I guess. It is. It is, indeed. You know, having started a new group, I mean, is there some particular issues or some sort of niche that you envision your organization filling that you didn't see being met currently or in terms of topics or issues? In about one minute. So I'm not reinventing the wheel, rediscovering fire here, but rather, I think just being an additional voice, hopefully a voice of sanity, that recognizes the strengths of the American economy and pushes back on, again, that bad research that I think is ultimately, in many instances, self-serving and e-rigorous in particular against excesses on the right and the left. And that's the lane I see myself in. Well, we'll probably bump into you there sometime in that lane, too. So happy to share that lane with as many people as want to be there. You're listening to Face in the Future. I'm your host, Bob Bixby, Concord Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson and I have been talking with Gordon Gray, the Executive Director of the newly created Pinpoint Policy Institute. We'll be right back after these short messages with an exit interview with Tori Gorman, our longtime policy director, as she takes up a new job this week at the Congressional Research Service. Thank you, Bob. Welcome back to Face in the Future. I'm your host, Bob Bixby, and for the rest of the show, I'll be joined by Concord Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson and a very special guest, Tori Gorman, who for the past four and a half years has been the Concord Coalition's policy director and frequent co-host of Facing the Future. You might call this an exit interview because Tori, I'm sorry to say, will soon be leaving us to take up a new position as analyst on the budget and legislative process at the Congressional Research Service. Tori, for hopefully not the last time, welcome back to Face in the Future. Thanks, Bob. Yeah, before we get some perspective, some parting perspectives from you on policy issues, your valedictory address here on fiscal policy, tell me a little bit about the Congressional Research Service and what your new role there is going to be. Sure. The Congressional Research Service, which is affectionately referred to as CRS, it's by its initials, is a legislative branch agency within the Library of Congress. And basically we operate in a support role to the Senate and the House in Congress, both the members and the committees and the people who staff them. So we assist in every stage of the legislative process. So if they have questions about during the early process of bill drafting on a policy idea all the way through committee hearings, floor debate, and then oversight of enacted laws and various agency activities, we publish a lot of research that is related to those functions. So if, for example, a committee staffer wants to get smart really quickly on a particular issue, they can hop on to CRS web page, search on the topic and a whole bunch of reports from the past, I don't know, five years, six years, seven years, it will pop up. So it's sort of a, we're both in encyclopedia, if you will, for the legislative branch. But we also play a support role in helping them draft legislation, get it across the line and then analyzing the impact of that legislation once it's been enacted. In my particular role, I'm going to focus on budget and appropriations law and procedure. So I think we all know that the budget and appropriations process is broken, some changes are probably a foot in the next couple of years, given my experience on the Hill, this seemed like a really good fit and CRS agreed. So I'm going to start next week, this will be my last week with the Concord Coalition and next week I start educating members of Congress and their staff about what the law says about the appropriations process and the budget process and things like the impoundment control act, where the president can't just decide what he does and does not want to spend money on, which I think is going to be very relevant in the next couple of years. So yeah, that's just sort of a snapshot. Yeah, cool. Well B, you know, I have been a consumer of CRS reports because they're really very detailed and well-written and yeah, it used to be that you couldn't get a hold of them. So they're more publicly available now, as I, you know, early, when I started doing this, you couldn't get a CRS report, you'd have to get one from a congressional staffer like I'd go to you or I'd go to Steve or somebody else I do on the Hill to leak, you know, CRS reports. And I guess what's the status now, are those, are they available publicly? Well, so CRS is what we call Hill facing, all right, it's a support agency for Congress. We are not a support agency for the general public, but there, because some of these reports influenced the legislative process, you know, there was a call a few years ago to make some of these reports public and they are. You can go to crsreports.congress.gov and you can type in a topic and see what pops up. Not every report is available there. There's obviously stuff that requires certain clearance. And then there's some stuff that's just not appropriate for public consumption because it pertains to, you know, individual member requests and things like that. So yeah, that some of those reports, like if you want to learn, there's a really good primer on the CRS website about the budget and appropriations process and how it's supposed to work and the different laws that are involved and what those laws say and what the timetable looks like. And there's some good stuff on reconciliation, which if Republicans, you know, run the ticket in November and control the House, the Senate and the White House, I can guarantee you there will be a reconciliation bill in 2025. So if you want to learn about reconciliation and the bird rule, you know, CRS will have all kinds of information. Well, that sounds like a perfect fit for you. And because I know your budget blogs and charts that we've used in our newsletter, the lookout have been widely read and very popular. So they're getting, they're getting a good deal over there at CRS. And of course, we're certainly going to miss that. Steve, let me bring you into the conversation aside from saying farewell to our colleague. You want to get us started on any things you might want to rant about? Well, yeah, I mean, Tori and I actually go way back on Capitol Hill. I hesitate to even put a date on exactly when we met. We both have worked on the House and Senate side sometimes in the same office and sometimes in different offices. And I certainly can personally say that CRS has gotten themselves a good deal here much to our loss and to their gain. I mean, it's CRS plays a very, very important role. I mean, I know as a congressional staffer, I was a big consumer of CRS going back to the times when we couldn't go on the internet and do a search. We literally would, the Congressional Research Service has a big building next to Capitol Hill and they have what's called the Congressional Reading Room and they keep copies of just virtually everything, you know, congressional hearings and their own reports and other documents. And I think probably once a week and sometimes more, I would trek over from my office over to the Reading Room. And, you know, that was when you had to make Xerox copies and you'd pull out your yellow highlighter and you'd underline, you know, the important sections. Whereas, you know, it's quite a different scenario today with the internet. And as Tori mentioned, you know, now that CRS reports are available online, everybody can partake in the knowledge and information that CRS provides. So, you know, I think it's a real asset to Congress and to the country. So. And then the nice thing about it too is it's a nonpartisan agency. So we don't, we're not Republican, we're not Democrat. We ask the question that was answered, right? I mean, it's by and large that the information you get is not tainted by political leanings, which is good. Well, Tori, I want to turn out as some of the issues that you've been involved with over the years, you know, going back to as long as I've known you from say the mid 90s, you know, you've always been interested in bipartisan solutions to some of the thorniest, thorniest general budget issues. And I've always thought that with you at all comes back to generational responsibility. I mean, you seem to be worried about the future. Is that a motivating factor for you? Well, sure. I mean, I'm a mom with two children. I'm worried about the burden that, you know, we're leaving them. But yeah, no, what brought me to Capitol Hill was Social Security Reform. I remember reading an article, I think it might have been in Time magazine. I'm like, Oh, this is really interesting. Started researching it, got a job on Capitol Hill with Congressman Jim Colby, who had drafted along with three other members of bipartisan bicameral Social Security Reform bill. And so I was hired to sort of help get that bill across the across the line. Of course, it never did. We're still waiting for Social Security reform, but you know, once you start talking about Social Security, you know, you sort of talk about where it fits within the context of the federal budget. So that's where you learn about budget and appropriations law. And then from there, just a really deep abiding love of procedure, you know, and how, you know, the good old schoolhouse rock, how a bill becomes a law kind of thing. I just took that 10 levels deeper, you know, you can know as much as, you know, you can be the expert on Social Security reform. But if you don't know how the House and the Senate work and the rules of procedure, you're going to get, you're going to lose every time. So that's sort of the career trajectory there is how it went along. Started with Social Security, but ended up as being a procedure expert. Yeah, think long term and be practical, know how to get there. I guess that's a good road map. You're listening to "Facing the Future." I'm your host Bob Bixby. Steve Robinson and I are talking with our Concord Coalition colleague Tori Gorman about her upcoming departure from the Concord Coalition to take up a new job as an analyst at the Congressional Research Service, we'll be right back after these short messages. Welcome back to "Facing the Future." I'm your host Bob Bixby. Steve Robinson and I are conducting an exit interview with our colleague Tori Gorman, the policy director of the Concord Coalition for the past four and a half years, but no more. Tori is taking up a new job as a budget and legislative process analyst, analyst at the Congressional Research Service and we congratulate Tori for that new job and she'll be educating all the members of Congress who rely on the CRS and their staffs for important and nonpartisan analysis. Tori, one of the things that you've been working on for a long time on the Hill and at the Concord Coalition is Social Security and Steve, you've been working on that issue as well for a long time, so Steve, let me go to you for a question to Tori. Yeah, I think Tori reminded me that this is probably how we initially met. She was with Congressman Jim Colby and I was on the House Budget Committee working for John Kasich and we both had, for whatever reason, had been attracted to the issue of Social Security and I developed a proposal for Congressman Kasich and she had helped develop the proposal for Jim Colby and so over the period of several years, we both sort of had our own ideas and tried to push those forward and she was as unsuccessful as I was and actually getting anything done, so let me ask the question this way. So are there any lessons learned, I mean, we started on this with some idea of where we thought all of this would go and it didn't happen, so as you're thinking evolved over the years about what lessons learned, what did we do right, do you do wrong, what are your thoughts? Well, I think a couple of things, lessons learned early that still hold today are that I think everybody needs to agree that we have a problem in Social Security, it frustrates the heck out of me when we've got lawmakers running around saying we don't need to worry about Social Security, it's solvent until 2030 something, you know, I think that's just the height of irresponsibility. So I think it's really important that we have bipartisan agreement that there's a problem. And is that the second lesson learned is that at least when I started on the Hill in the late 90s, people voters were willing to listen, you know, I worked for a Republican member, a moderate from Tucson, Arizona, which as you can imagine had a really high population of people who were of Social Security age. So to come out with a Social Security Reform bill, you know, it was pretty politically risky for Congressman Colby, but he was very good and I learned how to as well, sit down, talk to people, explain what was going on in Social Security, explain how his bill worked and then sit there and answer their questions until the cows came home. And if you give people that bandwidth, that time, that attention and you enable that conversation and you listen to what they're saying and they in turn, voters in turn, listen to the lawmakers, it's amazing how much compromise can be achieved. He was actually reelected twice after introducing a Social Security Reform bill and he ran on that bill both times. So, you know, it is possible to, you know, quote, touch the third rail of politics and survive. But one thing I'm starting to wonder now, you know, 20 years after the fact is whether, you know, when we first approached the problem back in the late '90s, early 2000s, the Social Security Reform proposals were comprehensive. They did a complete overhaul and basically addressed every problem that we knew existed, whether it was, you know, trying to ensure a minimum poverty level benefit, trying to make sure that elderly widows, you know, were still taken care of, you know, trying to eliminate some of the unfairness in the formula, you know, when, you know, raising the retirement age, you know, raising taxes, basically raising more money for Social Security because we have more beneficiaries collecting Social Security for longer. But it was a soup to nuts piece of legislation. And now I'm wondering that that type of approach may not survive contact with the voters, you know, given the partisan nature of Congress these days, the internet, the way misinformation can fly left and right, the distrust between both sides. I'm wondering if the pathway forward is not a comprehensive reform bill, but perhaps a series of small tweaks, you know, bipartisan, balanced tweaks, you know, that, you know, tweaks that address the issue from both the spending side and the revenue side, but just small things that don't necessarily achieve 75-year solvency, for example, or solve the problem permanently. But something small that helps in the short term, that helps build some trust both between Republicans and Democrats, but also between lawmakers and voters. Yeah. I'm not even sure that we're going to be able to do something like that, but it's, it's got me thinking too about the grand bargain and not just on Social Security, but on these major budget issues where, you know, the debt and the deficits have grown so big and it's, it's become almost too big to solve it one thing. That's the irony. I mean, back when Tori and I started on the Hill, you know, Graham Redmond in 1985 was my first year on Capitol Hill and the goal there was to balance the budget in five years. And as the problem got bigger, we said, well, we can't balance budget in five years, but we'll do it in 10 years. And then it was sort of like, well, I'm not sure we can balance the budget, but we'll keep the debt from rising as a share of GDP. And we sort of, you know, as the problem has gotten harder, we've moved the goalpost because it simply wasn't possible. I mean, you know, for somebody to come forward with a proposal to balance the budget now, I mean, I guess it's technically possible, but it's politically infeasible. I mean, the public and members would never vote for the kind of dramatic changes that would be necessary to do that. So, you know, we've had to set our, set our sights a little, a little lower, because that's, that's all the process will allow. Yeah, I'm, I think the balanced budget number now is something like 16 trillion or 15 trillion or something that you would have to do over 10 years. Don't quote me on that, but it's pretty big. But just stabilizing the debt to GDP ratio at around 100%. I'm pretty sure the number there is around 6 trillion plus interest costs, maybe around 7 trillion. And yeah, I mean, people don't realize how big the numbers are now to try to get at something like that. Agreed. So, yeah. Now, one other thing, I know you've always been a proponent of public education. You mentioned it a little bit more in your work with Congressman Colby back in the day, but I mean, what is the role of public education? I mean, do you think that that is something that lawmakers and groups like the Concord Coalition need to keep at? Absolutely. And this is where I think the responsibility really lies on the voters. I think some voters, I think a lot of voters actually have gotten lazy in their thinking and that, you know, it's it's so possible these days to silo your information to, you know, confirm your own biases, you know, listen to the people that are saying things that you want to hear. We've lost our ability to think critically. And I think it's incumbent upon voters, you know, to stop, to listen to all sides, to give members of Congress the space that they need to explain these complexes used to you, you know, and the possible solutions. And then we can have a nationwide debate on, you know, what we should do. But I just I feel like voters have sort of tuned out the other side. And that doesn't that that's that's not education. That's that's not being that's not that's not knowledgeable. That's not knowledge. And I think that's where we're falling down as voters is we were we're no longer looking for knowledge. We're no longer seeking knowledge. We're just seeking candidates that say what we want them to hear what we want to hear. And that's that's part of the reason why we're stuck. Yeah. Well, hopefully we'll be able to keep at that. Unfortunately, we won't be we won't have you there to help us along. I'll be on the inside. I'll be working from the inside. Yeah. Well, I mean, any any any last one point you want to you want to make about what we need to do? What's you give any magic bullets? Ah, no magic bullets, except for pay for the if we're going to extend the tax cuts next year, make sure we pay for them. Let's, you know, once they you know, the the Concord Coalition saying, right, is once you're in a hole, stop digging. And, you know, follow the Concord Coalition, subscribe to their newsletter, listen to their podcast, contribute to the Concord Coalition, because organizations like these, you know, there are very few that are good government groups that are actually grassroots oriented. Concord's really unique that way. Everybody else is pretty much hill facing. It would be really nice to see the organization grow and thrive both after my departure. Tori, I can't tell you how much I have enjoyed having you as a colleague, particularly on facing the future. And you certainly will be missed. And I hope you'll carve out some time in your new role to listen to the show and maybe send along a few suggestions from time to time. We'll do. Well, I'm sure I'm leaving you in very capable hands. Steve, you know, Steve is way more knowledgeable than all that stuff than I am. So you're, you're in good, you're in good hands. Yeah, well, Steve and I will continue to, it just won't, we just won't be as much fun. Let me put it down. And with that said, tune in again next week. I'm your host, Bob Bixby. This is Facing the Future, and next week we'll be back without Tori, but we'll be back with another edition of Facing the Future.