Original subtitles

Hi, there. Welcome to the show. Still taking place in this blank void. It's

got white walls, a glass table, and a big dork behind the counter. This is

basically an Apple store that only sells sadness.

Now, we were off last week, and a lot has happened since we last spoke. The

trial got underway for Derek Chauvin, whose entire defense seems to be, see

what had happened was...

Big Boat got unstuck, and for a few days, right-wing media lost their

collective minds over Lil Nas X's new music video. I could describe it to you,

but I think I'd rather let Rudy Giuliani do it instead.

It begins with the, uh, this... whatever he is, this guy... Little

Nas being seduced by the devil in the form of a snake, and then he engages in

a... this ridiculous, uh, really...

rather ugly dance with Satan.

And it's a sexual dance.

I don't know how much of it I should describe, except you gotta get it.

He lap dances him.

Oh, come on. Come on, Rudy.

Don't give us that surprised face.

You can't pretend to be a total stranger to lap dances in the same Oscar season

that you're nominated for Best Junk Adjustment while lying on a stranger's

bed. Also, lap dances is understating things considerably there.

Lil Nas X spends an exquisite amount of time throwing it back at the adversary.

Old Scratch is getting ground on there like an Olive Garden pepper mill.

The whole video is completely incredible. And frankly, the only thing

that could possibly make it more entertaining... is watching a weird old

creep try to describe it in G-rated terms while sitting on the set of a law

firm commercial.

It's not the first remix I expected, but I'm glad it exists.

But Lil Nas X twerking on Satan seems positively wholesome compared to the

news this week concerning Matt Gaetz, a sentient L.L. Bean premium double L

traditional fit polo. Gaetz is being investigated for potentially violating

sex trafficking laws involving a minor, something that he denies, claiming there

is actually a multi-million dollar extortion plot behind the investigation.

Gaetz even went on Tucker Carlson's show this week to explain his theory

unsuccessfully. You say that it was or is underway, there was an investigation.

What is the basis of that investigation?

What is the allegation? That's really not very clear from these news stories.

Yeah, again, I only know what I've read in The New York Times.

I can say that, actually, you and I went to dinner about two years ago. Your wife

was there, and I brought a friend of mine. You'll remember her. And she was

actually threatened by the FBI, told that if she wouldn't cop to the fact

that somehow I was involved in some pay-for-play scheme, that she could face

trouble. I don't remember the woman you're speaking of or the context at

all, honestly.

Wow.

Imagine being the one white man on Earth that Tucker Carlson won't defend.

Tucker was so clearly trying to nope his way out of that whole interview. He

looks like he wants to walk out of his own show. The problem is, if he did

that, it wouldn't be Tucker Carlson tonight anymore. It'd be the Matt Gaetz

digs his own grave adventure hour. Look.

I am sure that there will be more to discuss about this story later, probably

during Matt Gaetz's sentencing phase.

But for now, let's move on to Amazon, a company run by Jeff Bezos, who answers

the question, what if Lex Luthor was... And that's it. Just what if Lex Luthor

was. He's a bold business maniac with too much money, zero empathy, and weird

supervillain vehicles.

He is just Lex Luthor.

This week, counting began on a historic union vote by workers at an Amazon

fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama.

The drive has been seen as a bellwether for the labor movement as a whole. And

Amazon workers, frankly, have plenty of reasons to fight to unionize.

Many complain about grueling work, unsafe conditions, with inadequate

bathroom and meal breaks.

They treat you more like a product or a statistic than an actual human being.

For example, I'm a diabetic, and I don't have time to stop to check my blood

sugar. They have just constant quotas. And if you can't get done what they want

you to get done, then you have no worth inside of their system.

That's terrible.

And the fact that Amazon workers are demoralized is something that you

already knew, but it doesn't get any less upsetting no matter how many times

you're reminded.

It's like hearing that Dennis Quaid's new wife is younger than his son, or

that Helena Bonham Carter has never won an Oscar, or that no one has ever

cleaned a single water park.

Seriously. When has a water park ever felt clean to you?

Open to close, it's full of filthy kids pissing themselves down scalding plastic

slides into recycled water, and nighttime is when the employees fuck in

the tubes.

How would cleaning it even work? What are they gonna do?

Drain the lazy river every night? Of course not. You're swimming in the piss

of thousands of people, many of whom have long since died. Just deal with it.

And while we don't know the results of this vote yet, it is worth looking at

just how hard Amazon has fought it. They've apparently been... They've been

sending workers up to five text messages per day, discouraging them from joining

the union. They've also held mandatory meetings that disparage unionization.

And then there is this.

Something I've never ever seen before in writing about labor for 25, 30 years,

they have anti-union posters in the bathroom stalls.

You know, when you go to the bathroom, who want to look at that?

Yeah, nobody.

Nobody wants to look at anti-union propaganda in the bathroom.

The only thing worse to see while you're taking a dump in a workplace bathroom

stall is an empty toilet paper roll or Kevin Spacey. How did you get in here?

Get out!

I'm shitting, Kevin!

And speaking of bathroom breaks, we've talked before about how Amazon workers

have said that they've had to forego them to keep up with crushing quotas.

And some delivery drivers have reportedly resorted to urinating in

bottles. And just last week, The Intercept published an internal Amazon

memo telling workers that driver associates cannot, must not return bags

to station with poop inside.

Something almost too awful to comprehend, as two of New York's morning

news anchors conveyed in real time.

Some cases, employees defecating in bags. Come on!

It's morning time. People having their coffee and cereal right now. This is one

of those things, Laurie, I'm not so interested in knowing all the details.

Well, because then they come deliver your package. Yeah. Yeah. It's a

revolting story.

Nobody wants to endure a bag of shit over breakfast. That's why Piers Morgan

no longer has a job. And look.

I get not wanting to know details about things. As a general rule, I don't need

to know how most things get done, but I do make an exception if one of the steps

involves someone having to shit in a bag.

That goes for any process.

I'm not really all that interested in how an origami crane gets made, but if

you told me that one of the steps involved you having to shit in a bag,

I'm gonna need a detailed step-by-step look into that procedure because

something horrendous is clearly happening there.

And the fact is, we do have to keep paying attention to this.

because the outcome of Bessemer's vote will have major implications.

Amazon is the second largest private employer in America, and this unionizing

effort could determine whether their employees have the power to demand

decent working conditions.

And the harder the company tries to convince their workers that they don't

need union protection, the clearer it becomes that Amazon executives, much

like the bags that are apparently lying around their delivery vehicles, are

completely full of shit.

And now, this.

And now, some very unwelcome news regarding Peeps. Peeps and Pepsi?

Well, the two are collaborating on a marshmallow-flavored soda.

If we were, the Peeps have allied with the vile Pepsi Corporation and threaten

us now as an unholy liquid.

We can't not talk about Peeps Pepsi.

He lies!

He's completely within his power to simply not mention it!

The only way you can get a drink is through social media and a promotion

that's going on there. It asks fans to use the hashtags hanging with my peeps.

I swear to God, if you use the hashtag hanging with my peeps, I will break into

your house and bite your husband's face.

The Pepsi peeps partnership tops our consumer news today.

Two of my favorite things right there.

If peeps are one of your favorite things, I'm rethinking our friendship,

my friend.

Get his ass, Chelsea!

Get his ass!

I know a lot of people are like, I'll just make my own, right? Get some Peeps

and some Pepsi, mix it together, if they don't win the promotion, right? Oh, that

might also lead to bad things.

Do not attempt to create your own Peep-flavored beverage! The only flavor

you will create is sorrow!

Just days after announcing a partnership with Pepsi, Peeps is continuing to get

into the drink market. Now at 7-Elevens, you can enjoy yourself a little Peep

Latte. No!

Not the lattes!

Everything but our precious lattes!

Moving on. Our main story tonight concerns... The national debt. The

world's most boring 28 trillion dollars.

And I know just saying 28 trillion might sound confusing. How much is that

exactly? Well, to put it one way, it's...

$28 trillion.

To put it another way, it's 28 million millions.

To put it a third way, it's an absolute fuckton of money. But regardless, the

national debt is a complete obsession in this country. Here in New York, we even

have a debt clock that counts up in real time.

It actually made headlines a little over a decade ago when the debt hit 14

digits. The national debt just passed $10 trillion.

So the clock's caretakers had to squeeze a one and the dollar sign into the same

square. It's pretty scary.

It's a pretty big number.

Incomprehensible. It's too big.

The clock was put up in 1989 by Helena Durst's grandfather when the national

debt was just under $3 trillion.

Now that the debt has passed the $10 trillion mark, Durst likes to recite a

poem by her grandfather.

Borrow, borrow, borrow.

Enjoy today and tomorrow, for tomorrow's going to be terrible.

I'm sorry, but that poem sucks.

The rhyme scheme's all over the place, and if tomorrow is gonna be terrible,

why would you enjoy it? That was clearly the work of a man almost as good at

writing poetry as he was at raising children who aren't serial killers.

Oh, yeah. The clock was put up by that Durst family.

The bathroom murder burp Dursts. So thanks very much for the dumb clock that

doesn't tell time, you wealthy bathroom murder burpers.

But the truth is, our national debt is undeniably big. And between the

trillions in coronavirus stimulus bills and the infrastructure plans Biden

unveiled just this week, it's poised to get even bigger. And Republicans in

particular seem outraged by that.

This chart showing debt is not just about the big number. It's not just

about the $30 trillion of debt. This is about tyranny. History is screaming this

warning at us.

Countries that bankrupt themselves and destroy their economies simply aren't

around very long.

There will be a day of reckoning, a debt crisis, and it won't be pretty.

Deficits do matter.

How long do you think your family would last if every month you spent more and

more on the credit card and made the minimum payment?

Not long.

Look. I know that all sounds pretty scary, but for what it's worth, the

national debt is nothing like a credit card. For a start, we don't have 28

trillion airline miles, nor do we get letters in the mail every day saying

we're pre-approved for a brand new national debt. Leave us alone, you

fucking parasites.

But if we have huge clocks to measure it, we're considering an infrastructure

bill that could add two trillion to it, and some are implying that our creditors

could be turning up any day now with a baseball bat to repossess our bridges

and dams because of it, we thought tonight might be a good time to talk

about the national debt, how it works, how valid concerns about it are, and how

we should think about it moving forward. And let's start with the basics, like

the difference between the debt...

and a deficit.

A country runs a deficit when it spends more money on things like the military,

social programs and everything else the government does than it brings in mostly

through taxes. Now, to pay for a deficit, the government then borrows

money, thus accruing...

So the deficit is a yearly measurement of how much we're in the red, and the

debt is the total amount that we owe accumulated over time. And for decades,

in political ads, the debt has been portrayed as a burden that we're placing

on future generations, basically making that argument that we are running up

their credit card, and that one day, the bill's gonna come due.

You owe the United States government, in round numbers, $50,000.

What would you like for Christmas?

I would like you to fix the debt so I can have a future.

I pledge allegiance to America's debt and to the Chinese government that lends

us money.

Congress must stop digging a deep hole of debt that we'll never get out of.

Please stop digging.

Yeah. Pretty dramatic, right?

Crying babies, exasperated Santas, and even a child watching Uncle Sam digging

a grave.

And quick piece of advice here, kids. If you do see a man in any kind of costume

digging a large hole in the middle of the desert, do not approach him. Do not

interfere with his digging. I'm not saying he should be doing that. I'm

saying you're not the one who should try to stop him. If he's willing to dig a

big hole, he's willing to dig a small one. Run away and tell an adult.

A non-costumed adult.

But ads like those are wildly misleading. For instance, that Pledge of

Allegiance ad talked about how much we owe the Chinese government.

That is something you hear a lot.

But for the record, the majority of government debt is actually owned by

American investors.

For example, if you have a pension, you might own some of that debt in the form

of government bonds because they're a pretty safe investment.

Foreign investors only own around a third of our debt. And while, yes, it is

true, China does own over a trillion dollars of it, which isn't nothing, it's

around 5%, for what it's worth, they're not even our largest foreign creditor.

Japan is.

And while the debt is often talked about as being something that we're running up

with new spending, the truth is, before the pandemic hit, most of our debt was

the result of long, steady growth in programs that we'd long ago committed

to, like Medicare and other entitlements. So we are very much

getting stuff for the money that we're spending.

And that actually brings us to a really important point here.

Going into debt can actually be a good investment for the country. Essentially,

as economists will tell you, the key question is...

Are you spending money on the right things?

Right.

Taking on debt to build a factory that creates jobs and increases economic

output is probably a smart investment, especially if it's one that makes this

actual pillowcase depicting a nude Nicolas Cage lounging in a banana peel

with two giant foxes in the background. I mean, look at this thing.

As the description says, it has an... And I am more than happy to co-sign

on both of those claims, and the reason that I am confident is... you can

consider me... a satisfied customer. I feel so much more sophisticated.

The point is, Republicans love to argue that government should be run like a

business, but tend to conveniently forget that some extremely valuable

companies got that way in part because they had long periods where they spent a

shitload more than they took in. So, as you can see, already things are a lot

more nuanced than simply, hey, Uncle Sam, please stop digging.

And it is worth taking a moment to look at the history of the debate over the

national debt, because the argument the Republicans often make is that they are

the responsible ones who want to reduce the debt and rein in spending, whereas

Democrats don't give a shit about it and just love recklessly throwing around

money. But that story just doesn't match up to reality.

Take Ronald Reagan. He spent years complaining that deficits were a sign

that the federal government had simply lost its way.

I think the answer to...

Curing inflation is a balanced budget.

Now, how do you do that?

I mean, it's not... How do you balance the budget?

Well, balancing the budget is like protecting your virtue. You don't spend

more than you take in, right? It's like protecting your virtue. You have to

learn to say no.

Really?

An applause break for that?

Is there anything weirder?

than calling someone's virginity their virtue because as far as virtues go, it

is a pretty shitty one.

I'm not saying that there is something inherently wrong with not having sex.

That is a personal choice. I have frequently not had sex due to lots of

people's personal choices. But if that is the best thing about you, you should

probably get some other virtues.

But the key thing to know is that Reagan didn't, in fact, end up spending his

presidency saying no because he wasn't really promising not to spend money so

much as promi... not to spend it on certain people.

His campaign rhetoric about welfare queens played into the racist trope that

black people were fraudulently benefiting from wasteful government

spending. And as president, he followed through by making cuts to basic elements

of the social safety net like food stamps, welfare, and Medicaid.

But he also massively increased defense spending while cutting taxes so that the

government took in less money, creating large deficits that wound up tripling

the national debt, which I guess in his terms, made Reagan America's hottest

little slut.

Then came these two guys. And between Bush Senior and Clinton, they more or

less did what Reagan had promised to do, cutting spending and raising taxes

enough to achieve budget surpluses by the end of the 90s. And the debt was

briefly starting to come down until this.

this lovable little human rights violation entered the picture because he

immediately signed a massive tax cut and launched an expensive war on terror and

then signed a second round of tax cuts, all of which made our national debt

explode. But Republicans, strangely, didn't seem to give a shit until, that

is, Obama became president. He inherited a historic recession and immediately

signed a large stimulus bill, but...

which afterwards was met with fervent opposition to any additional spending,

mainly from Republicans, who had suddenly re-found their hatred for

deficits. And sometimes they expressed it in truly remarkable ways.

Our free stuff today is being paid for by taking money

from our children and borrowing from China.

When that note comes due...

And this isn't racist, so try it. Try it anyway.

This isn't racist, but it's going to be like slavery when that note is due,

right? We are going to be beholden to a foreign master.

Uh, yeah, no.

That's just not how any of that works. The debt isn't gonna just suddenly come

due all at once, and being in debt to someone is not the same as being

enslaved by them. If you think a portion of U.S. Treasury bonds being owned by

foreign investors is anything like slavery, you know both a very small

amount about the financial system and a very racist amount about slavery.

Also, just generally...

Even if you preface something that isn't racist with, this isn't racist, it will

still sound racist.

I'll show you. If you said, a lot of people buy jeans at Old Navy.

Totally fine. But if you said, a lot of people, and this isn't racist, yeah, try

it, try it anyway, this isn't racist, but a lot of people buy jeans at Old

Navy. Now, that suddenly sounds like something that's gonna require about

three pages of your notes app.

And the thing is, Republicans putting the brakes on Obama's recovery spending

is now widely considered to have been a big mistake.

Most experts agree that the federal government didn't spend as much on

stimulus as it should have following the financial crisis, forcing state and

local governments into austerity that delayed the economic recovery by about

four years.

And then...

came this fucking guy.

He campaigned on eliminating the entire national debt, only to then implement an

absolutely massive tax cut, resulting in huge deficits.

Most corporations who benefited used the money not on investments in things like

factories, but on stock buybacks.

As for individuals, nearly half the tax cuts went to the top 5% of income

earners. So we gave more money to people who already had a lot of it. And despite

claiming that Trump's tax cuts would pay for themselves, they very much did not.

In fact, they did so little to boost the economy, they're projected to cost us 1

.9 trillion over a ten-year period. All of which...

clearly left some fiscally responsible Republicans who voted for those tax cuts

in a pretty awkward position.

You belong to a party that has greenlit a historic expansion of deficits and

debt. And it's just a plain fact.

Do I wish that it was a higher priority for the president?

to rein in spending in the debt? Yes.

Do you think your colleagues, the Republican Party, will rediscover its

concern about debt and deficits? Sure.

I mean, isn't that the most cynical, phony thing? Oh, look, there's an

element of it. Doesn't that make you want to puke? You're touching into

something that, as you know, I have raged against.

I do not like that, Mante Cruz.

I do not like his far-right views.

I do not like him in these reads.

I do not like him when he feeds.

I do not like him by a wall.

I do not like this shit at all.

I do not like him as Santa's elf. That man Ted Cruz can fuck himself.

That is a pretty flagrant admission of a double standard there. Honestly, the

only clear example may have been when Mick Mulvaney, Trump's former chief of

staff said, the worst thing in the whole world is deficits when Barack Obama was

the president, then Donald Trump became president, and we're a lot less

interested as a party.

And that is just flat out admitting the whole game.

But even if you put all of that bad faith hypocrisy aside, we are still left

with the key question, how much debt is too much?

And the interesting answer to that is, nobody really knows.

For many years, we thought that the best way to measure debt was to compare it to

the gross domestic product. Basically, measuring how much in total the country

owes... versus how much it produces each year. And the economic consensus was

that debt exceeding GDP, or even getting close to it, was a hard red line that

could not be crossed without risking a financial crisis. It was something

occasionally expressed in fairly over-the-top ways, like in this John

Stossel clip from 2011.

Our government keeps spending.

You know we're already $14.5 trillion in debt.

But you could say, so what? Look around.

America's doing pretty well.

What's the worst that could happen?

Well, this could happen.

These violent protests broke out once Greece was so deep in debt that Greece

had trouble borrowing more money. Greece spent so much that by last year they

owed more money than their entire economy produced.

No wonder they're in trouble.

We won't reach that level of debt until, well, oops, pretty soon.

We're on a clear track to a Greek-type crisis.

Oh, come on, Stossel. Cutting to footage of a riot can make anything seem more

dire than might actually be the case. I'll prove it to you.

Regé-Jean Page is apparently not appearing on the second season of

Bridgerton. So what?

What's the worst that could happen?

Well, this could happen.

Oh, shit.

Feels pretty scary now, doesn't it?

But the truth is much more complex because A, his character arc is mostly

wrapped up and the Duke doesn't appear in the rest of the novels. It's really a

generational story of a whole family. Also, you can absolutely lose the Duke.

It's actually perfectly in his character to start something he doesn't finish.

But it's much more complex when it comes to our economy, too, because something

fascinating happened around last June.

Largely because of increased borrowing resulting from the first round of COVID

stimulus, our national debt actually surpassed the size of our GDP.

You know, kind of like Greece.

But all those disaster scenarios that John Stossel's performatively

exaggerated voice fluctuations warned us about, none of them happened.

It didn't suddenly cost us a lot more to borrow money due to higher interest

rates. We didn't, as you may have noticed, become Greece.

In fact, despite adding four trillion to the debt last year, interest payments on

that debt actually declined.

And that isn't even a one-off. As our debt has risen in recent years, interest

rates have fallen to historic lows.

So, what is the reason for that? Well, I don't know.

I am not an economist, nor do I know much about math, which I know might

sound surprising to you, given that I do have the face of someone who has a

favorite kind of graphing calculator.

What is shocking, though, is that even expert economists can't really explain

it either.

Here's the former chief of the IMF, basically admitting as much.

To be perfectly frank, we do not, at least I do not, I don't want to talk for

the profession, we've had this steady decrease in the interest rates since the

mid-'80s. continuing, a bit more in the crisis, but, you know, continuing now.

And we have no explanation.

Yeah. They don't know.

Now, he went on to point out that there are any number of possibilities.

It may have something to do with aging populations in advanced economies,

China's high savings rate, the general lack of capital-intensive investment

opportunities, or merely the fact that Richard Campbell of Omaha, Nebraska

hasn't stepped on a crack in the sidewalk in over 30 years. But the point

is, economists really have no fucking idea.

In fact, the Congressional Budget Office has now said that the debt-to-GDP ratio

has no set tipping point where a financial crisis is imminent. So, taken

together, all of this has made many economists start changing the way that

they think about debt, thinking that very basically, so long as our economy

grows at a rate greater than the interest that we're paying on our debt,

we can come out ahead.

in kind of the same way that you would come out ahead if you borrowed money at

2% interest and then invested it somewhere and got 5% returns.

But the larger point is, this whole field is in a bit of flux right now.

Some economists believe that we should not get too complacent that a debt

crisis is still on the horizon, just not at the tipping point that we previously

thought. Another more radical argument is that the government can in fact

create all the money it needs to pay for stuff as long as...

it doesn't generate inflation.

The point is, there is a good faith debate to be had over how to handle our

national debt over the long term. But right now, most economists actually

agree that with interest rates at historic lows, the question shouldn't

really be how much debt are we taking on, as much as what is the value of what

we are getting for it in return.

And there are certainly dumb fiscal decisions that we could make, like tax

cuts for the rich. We've tried that... multiple times now, and if they were the

magic key to eliminating our debt long term, we probably would have seen signs

of it working by now.

But there are smart financial decisions that more than justify going into debt,

like spending on social programs, infrastructure, or on an individual

level... this Nicolas Cage pillow.

It's the second best investment I've ever made after, of course, buying

another Nicolas Cage pillow.

I was worried that my wife would get jealous, so this one is to replace my

wife. And amidst the current crisis that we're in, many experts are less

concerned about us spending too much than spending too little. And if it

turns out that inflation or interest rates do start to rise, we should

absolutely start cutting deficits, although...

not by cutting government programs that people need, but through taxing people

who can afford it. Look, no one credible is saying that deficits don't matter or

that we should borrow as if the sky is the limit. What they are saying is the

debate shouldn't be about whether debt is good or bad, it should be about

whether the investments that we are making are worth it or not.

And if you are still worried about debt because you've been told that you are

burdening your children and children's children's future, well... I actually

have some good news for you because those future generations have a special

message just for you.

Hello. Hello. Hey there. We are your children.

Your grandchildren.

And your great-grandchildren. And we have a message for you.

Stop using us to scare people about the national debt. You idiots clearly have

no idea how it even works.

Take this stupid debt clock.

Do you even know what a clock is?

Clock? Not a clock.

Clock. Not a clock.

Clock, not a clock. See? See.

Also, debt isn't always a bad thing. Yes, going into debt to give money back

to people who already have too much of it is stupid.

Like this guy, sick flamethrower bro.

But you can also use debt to build new roads and bridges.

Which we'll need to drive on. You can use it to improve schools, which would

make us into a more skilled labor force.

You can use it to improve health care so we can be healthier and more productive.

You can even use it to buy these pillows, which will become treasured

family heirlooms. The important thing about debt is what you get out of it.

And what we get out of it.

You see, debt can be a tool for growth.

In fact, the debt-to-GDP ratio isn't as reliable a metric as previously assumed.

The debt-averse doctrine of the 1970s turned out to be largely flawed given

the continuing inverse relationship between rising debt and low interest

rates. So it follows that the economy's capacity to accrue debt without

suffering massive adverse consequences is larger than economists such as Carmen

Reinhart and Ken Rogoff once theorized.

It's so simple. Yep. Easiest thing in the world. I'm nine years old, and even

I understand that.

And if you're so concerned about our future, maybe it's worth spending now on

things like preparing for the impacts of climate change.

The clock is really ticking on that one. That's not a clock! Come on!

So please.

Please. Please.

Please. Believe us when we say we're not as scared of being born into debt as we

are of being born into a country that didn't invest in our future.

And we're also scared of that guy digging that hole. I think that goes

without saying.

So, when it comes to the debt, your children, grandchildren, and great

-grandchildren all have one message for you.

Grow the fuck up.

That's our show. Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you next week. Good

night.