SIO24: Can We Rely on the CBO's Projections?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode number 24 and I'm your host Thomas Smith. Alright, today I've got some stuff to talk about as always. So the CBO finally announced its analysis of Trumpcare or as you'll hear later I suppose maybe I'll start calling it Ryancare. We'll see. To be to be to keep an eye on that for later. Anyway we're gonna talk about that and I I'm going to talk about the CBO in general, because there have been a lot of Trump attacks on the integrity of the CBO and allegations of how inaccurate it's been, that it's useless, stuff like that. So I wanted to take a look at what the CBO is, what they do, their predictions for Obamacare, whether they were right or wrong in their predictions for Trump slash Ryan slash slash Republican care and, And we can put those predictions into perspective.

0:01:25 Thomas: I also, in the interest of full disclosure, today's voicemail segment is the bulk of the show. And the reason is, there were some really excellent questions posed in some voicemails this week. And sorry, I couldn't include everybody's, I got a lot, but this was great because I had some great ones to choose from. And there were things that I just wanted to talk about anyway. Anyway, so the bulk of this episode is going to be a really fascinating voicemail segment where I talk about four different issues that are things that I would have wanted to talk about anyway. So thanks for those calls. They were great. That's going to be later on. But for now, let's get over to our analysis of the CBO.

0:02:13 Thomas: First, just to knock out a couple of quick news items. There was the whole tax release fiasco last night as of when I'm recording this. Rachel Maddow tweeted that she had Trump's tax returns, we come to find out it was just one from 2005, and then Trump released him himself to sort of scoop her, so this whole thing, I'm not going to talk too much about it, but if you listen to Opening Arguments, we had a show where we talked about what we could potentially find, the answer is not all that much, tax returns don't tell you that much but if he were to release all of his tax returns it would paint a much broader picture, picture just getting a hold of one tax return in 2005 definitely tells us some stuff but I, there was no guarantee that it was, it definitely wasn't going to be a bombshell and I think that it was a little absurd how much people were clamoring over this.

It's it's interesting, it might be news, but after this is all said and done, it, it's possible that Trump could have leaked this to Maddow himself. I don't think there's evidence of that necessarily, so I'm not, I'm not claiming he did. It's a possibility. All I'll say is this certainly went much better for Trump than it did for Rachel Maddow and for the American people.

Pretty much the person who got out of this best was Trump. He paid more in taxes than we would have thought. It wasn't some like Mitt Romney thing where he paid some tiny percent of taxes. He played a decent percentage for a wealthy person. And he also only had a $105 million write-down of that initial huge, almost billion-dollar loss in 1995, I think it was.

0:03:51 Thomas: So that shows that he actually is quite wealthy. So he's probably as rich as he says he is, to be honest, based on this tax return. So this did a lot for Trump and not anything for Trump's opponents, really. A lot of people have been talking about how this is a big distraction and it's distracting us from everything else. I don't think that's true. I already think today, and we'll see as you're hearing this, it'll be tomorrow and ensuing days, I don't think this has been that much of a distraction. I think we're still keeping an eye on the important things. This healthcare bill is really important, which is why I've put focus into it. This is millions, potentially millions of people's lives, people losing healthcare. So that's vitally important. I want to keep my eye on that. And so with that said, let's, let's get over to that, enough of this these little news items, I can't help but talk a little bit about every, all the madness that is happening, but I'll go ahead and reject, resist the temptation to talk anymore about news items and just go over to my CBO analysis.

0:04:50 Thomas: Alright, so briefly, very quickly, what is the CBO? Well, like many things, it was a result of Nixon. A lot of things start with, well, Nixon tried to screw people over in the 70s, so we had to make some new rules. A, a lot of things seem to be that. The, what was happening was, the president had a lot of control over the overall budget, and what Nixon threatened to do, it got so bad, again, Nixon has a great ability to take things to an extreme, that's what he's good for in presidential history, but he decided he was, he threatened to not give the money for anything that disagreed with what he was doing. So it's called impoundment. He would impound the money before anything that disagree with his policies, and that was too much of an overreach into the legislative branch power.

0:05:43 Thomas: So this act in 1974 called the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act was designed to stop that impound process. And it also created this formal process through which the Congress would develop its own budgetary priorities independently of the President, and the Congressional Budget Office is a part of that process. So here is the CBO's mandate. It is to provide Congress with objective, nonpartisan, and timely analysis to aid in economic and budgetary decisions on a wide array of programs covered by the federal budget, and the information and estimates required by the congressional budget process, and this includes projections on the effect on national debt and cost estimates for legislation.

0:06:33 Thomas: Keeping this in mind, let's look at what the Republicans and what the Trump administration has been saying about the CBO prior to their report coming out. So this is funny, because this shows that they knew it was going to be a terrible score that their legislation was going to get. They didn't wait to see and then say, well, maybe it would be a good score, and then they'd say, oh, great, CBO, brilliant, they're so great, they're tremendous, tremendous, uh, instead they knew it was going to be bad, so they started bashing it ahead of time, which, which is very interesting, shall we say, Gary Cohn, Trump's top economic advisor, said they've really been meaningless consistently. Tim Scott, Republican, said they are consistently inconsistent. Oh, that's so clever. And another quote here by Representative Larry Bouchon, Republican from Indiana, said it's a red hearing.

0:07:25 Thomas: I don't know what that, the CBO score itself, I suppose, is a red Herring. Sean Spicer said if you're looking to the CBO for accuracy you're looking in the wrong place. Even better is Newt Gingrich, who said that the CBO is a left-wing, corrupt, bureaucratic defender of big government and liberalism.

0:07:47 Thomas: But the one that really takes the cake, last one to look at here, the Republican preemptive judgment of the CBO, is Mick Mulvaney, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, he's Trump's budget chief essentially, and he says that estimating, analyzing a bill of this size is just not the best use of the CBO's time, which is funny because that's literally what they do, that is what they, they do. And to make it even funnier, in case you forgot, last week I talked about how this bill is being passed. It's being passed with budget reconciliation. So it's not as though this is some policy bill that it's kind of fuzzy what it's going to do and maybe it'd be hard to analyze the differences.

0:08:32 Thomas: No, this is being passed or will attempt to be passed using reconciliation, which which is specifically a budgetary process. And the idea that the Congressional Budget Office shouldn't look at a bill of that kind is, of course, absurd. And now's where we get to, if you don't know the punchline already, everyone, to the fact that the Republicans are saying that this is a partisan liberal propaganda unit. The Republicans appointed the CBO director. That's right, Keith Hall, current CBO director, was appointed by party leaders in the House and Senate in 2015, not even that long ago, and he's a Republican. Appointed by Republicans.

0:09:17 Thomas: So the idea that this Congressional Budget Office is going to be some liberal conspiracy is, of course, absurd. So, how is the CBO staffed? One might ask. Well, beneath that director, again, Republicans picked by Republicans, but I made that point already, we don't need to dwell on that, beneath the Republican director, Keith Hall, is a staff of about 230, made up of economists and public policy analysts with advanced degrees. They use a series of economic models they've developed over the years to come up with estimates, and each major score or forecast is treated as like a group research project, project, so there's many different people contributing in different ways, and they include a lot of people to try to audit the work and ensure that it's accurate and defensible. Their, so, you, goal is to be nonpartisans, and who knows if they're perfect?

0:10:11 Thomas: I'm sure they aren't but when you have a lot of people checking work and they're held accountable for their predictions, you can do a pretty good job of getting to be nonpartisan in your estimates. But we can look at what actually happened. We can look at the ACA and the allegations of the Trump administration and people speaking for the Trump administration that they just blew it. That the CBO blew it with the AC and therefore we can't listen to anything they say. Well, let's look at what ACTUALLY happened. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. Here we go. Let's start with what the CBO got wrong in the prediction of the ACA. The CBO badly overestimated the number of people who would be enrolled in the exchanges created by the ACA. They projected something like 21 and then adjusted to 22 million, and the true number was only 10 million so far.

0:11:05 Thomas: So that's a pretty big miss. So what happened? Well, these things are incredibly complex. From what I can tell in our research, mine and Haeley's, it's something to do with the individual mandate. It looks like the CBO thought the individual mandate, which is, I think everyone would be familiar, but just in case, it is the part of the ACA that made people pay a penalty if they didn't enroll in insurance, insurance, that individual mandate was not quite as effective as they thought.

They thought it would make a lot of people jump into these exchanges, and they thought it would make higher income people jump into these exchanges, but it actually just didn't. And another component of, of what they got wrong, was that they underestimated how many people would enroll in the Medicaid. Overall estimates of how many people would become insured were pretty close, but how they would become insured was a little bit off, so not as many people in the exchanges, that estimate was pretty far off to be brutally honest, it was quite far off, and how many would be insured through Medicaid was, was also, so that was short. So that compensated for it a little bit. So the overall total number was pretty close. I have here that they predicted the uninsured rate would fall by half, and it has fallen by 43%. So, modest error. Douglas Elmendorf was the director of the CBO from 2009 to 2015 during this critical time for the ACA. Here's what he had to say.

0:12:41 Thomas: The CBO's predictions were not as accurate as we would have liked, but they were more accurate than the uninformed guesses of a lot of people at the time, and more accurate than the informed guesses of many other organizations. Conversations, I wish we had done better, but I am proud of what we did. So that's what, that's, that's the overall impression of the director at the time. Of course, he would have some stake in wanting to have, uh, to, to appear to be more accurate in retrospect. In retrospect, but I feel like that's not an unreasonable statement, especially given that predictions are difficult there. It would be astounding if the CBO was right on, on everything. But let's look at what the CBO was right about when it comes to Obamacare. Let's look at the big picture.

0:13:27 Thomas: Millions of people gaining coverage. And I know that that's a way to fudge it, to make it look good, it's worthwhile looking at the bare-bones numbers, but let's not forget that it wasn't as though the CBO predicted 20 million people would get insured and 20 million lost insurance, like it was directly diametrically opposed, 23, it was 20 million people gaining insurance policies through the exchanges and 10 through Medicaid. The actual number was 10 through the exchanges and 14.4 through Medicaid. So, overall number not that off, and let's look at some things that got very close. The CBO predicted that the number of non-elderly people lacking insurance would drop to 30 million in 2016, and the actual number turned out to be 27.9 million.

0:14:17 Thomas: Another highlight, the CBO predicted that 89% of the non-elderly would be covered. By last year, the CDC put the actual percentage at 89.7. So there's a couple of very close estimates. I'll link the Forbes article I saw that was pretty scathing. It was probably the most scatting review of the CBO projections. That was still reasonable because there are a lot of scating reviews that are based on revisionist history. That's just not true, just saying that they're a liberal conspiracy and all that. That is just not true. But there were some problems with the modeling, and those would be problems that it would be wise for the CBO to let everyone know how they've adjusted them. So, it would would be wise for them to issue some sort of report or something or some findings saying that here's what we got wrong, and why. They do, to a certain extent.

0:15:05 Thomas: And by the way, these bad predictions, they revise them every year. So we're comparing, to look at the bad results, we're comparing their initial projections, which, to be fair, is what we're getting now for Ryan care, Trump care, Republic care, comparing those to the final numbers. We can also compare each year, though, and each year they adjusted what they found to get closer. Now, you can argue, one could argue, I'm making the counter arguments here because I want to try to be as fair as I can, you could argue that that's not as effective, because what really matters is the CBO estimate before the law is passed, because that's what you're using to estimate the effects of the law. And that's true. But this isn't to say that they're in strict denial of reality.

0:15:52 Thomas: They adjusted their numbers as they got better data. So, if you want my opinion, and this would stay consistent if it's a liberal law they're adjudicating or a Republican law, I think the CBO is not perfect, however, they are an organization that is held accountable more than most people, I mean, think of all the projections and predictions that pundits make every day, especially in the election, and they're not held accountable for it, including me, I made a few projections I was wrong about, and I tried to hold myself accountable. People gave me some crap on Twitter for predicting that Trump would lose in a landslide. I was wrong about that, you know, and I'm still sad that I was wrong about it. But think about how many claims go unanswered, how many projections just disappear and we don't hold people accountable for it.

0:16:42 Thomas: The CBO is held accountable more than I would say most things are. Most organizations and most individuals and most pundits are on this kind of thing. I would Say they're probably the best game in town. If If Republicans have a legitimate gripe with some modeling for this report on their bill, I would say I would certainly entertain that if they could point to a specific problem, like say the CBO is using this. Assumption, and we think they should use a different one. Something like that. But we aren't seeing that. We're just seeing this is a liberal conspiracy, essentially. And I'm not strawmanning. I've read you the official quotes from the Trump administration. That is the claim. Like, this is the CBO's fake news, essentially So let's get to what the CBO had to say about the Republican healthcare bill.

0:17:33 Thomas: They predict that 24 million people will lose insurance. 24 million. Now, I gotta ask Republicans, does it make you feel better if the real number is like 18? You know, if the real number is something like the amount they missed for Obamacare, is that okay? So 18 million people losing, that would be cool. 24 million, not cool. What I mean to say is, 24 million losing healthcare is a very unambiguous prediction, and it would be astounding if they were off by the orders of magnitude you'd have to be off for the bill to be like more people becoming insured. Here's another part. It does also predict that this bill will decrease the federal deficit by $337 billion.

0:18:23 Thomas: However, that savings is going to come from cutting Medicare, and that's something Trump promised he would not do. And that's also something to put some more intricacies into the analysis of this bill and how it works. That's something that, when it comes up for review in five years, I think it's in, oh man, my years are way off, no, I think it'll be in 2020. When those pending cuts to Medicare take effect, when they start to take effect, do you really think that Congress is going to allow that to happen? Do you think the voters will allow that happen? No, they'll probably not allow the changes to go through. So here's a prediction you can hold me accountable to.

If, if in this, happens, if this bill were to go through, the reason that we're saving money, that that taxpayers are saving money on it, is the cuts to Medicare they're saying in a few years down the road, we're going to cut Medicare, and therefore this bill is is reducing the deficit. Congratulations, Republicans. Now fast forward a few from now, when these cuts are set to go go through, there's going to be pandemonium because people do not want Medicare to be cut, and no one is ever going to run on a promise of cutting Medicare. So they'll say, what were we thinking? Okay, we're not going to do those cuts. We'll get the money elsewhere.

And they'll just have to find a way to get the money from somewhere else. So that's what my prediction would be. If this AC, no, it's AHCA, were to go through, that's the Republican bill. I don't think it's It's going to go through, which is another prediction you can hold me to. Somebody keep a scorecard of all these predictions. Now, in fairness, the CBO predicts that average premiums will not increase as much as they would under ACA. So that is potentially a point on the good side for the AHCA.

0:20:18 Thomas: But that is to be expected when 24 million people are losing insurance, including elderly people who will be hit the worst, they will be at the most by this because they're not going to get as much money. Elderly people in areas of high health care costs will not get as much in subsidies. So with those kinds of of patients off of the expense roll, I suppose it's natural to assume that premiums would go down a bit, but they will still be going up. So Trump promised that premium would go go down. The CBO is saying that they will be less than ACA, but that's not the same as going down. So they'll be 10% lower, even though the CBO has said that premiums would be 20 to 25% higher for a 64-year-old by 2026.

0:21:11 Thomas: So they're still going to go up, just not as much according to this projection. But in the interest of fairness, they are projected to be a little lower than they would would be under ACA. So overall, it's not good, you already knew this, I'm sure you saw the headlines. I wasn't gonna dwell too much on what the CBO was predicting about the Republican plan because, you know, it's bad, you've already heard it, 24 million people losing insurance, I mean, that's, that you don't need much more than that, if that was their only projection this would be a terrible bill, and it would be bill that's absolutely opposed to what Trump has promised, but there's even more bad stuff. So my overall impression, and what I take home from all of this research, is not perfect. The CBO is not perfectly perfect.

0:21:56 Thomas: However, it's pretty good at being nonpartisan. Where it seems to be wrong, it is not wrong for partisan reasons. It is not right because it had some Republican or liberal theory about things. Like all models, like all projections, projecty people, had to use assumptions. Assumptions and some of those assumptions can prove to be wrong. Some of those models can prove to be right. If it were easy to project with 100% accuracy, the world would be a very different place, I think. So I think this is probably the best game in town. I think the CBO report is significant and it should be used with a fairly high degree of confidence, but with some knowledge that it can be wrong, but not wrong turning 24 million into zero.

0:22:49 Thomas: It's not going to be that wrong. I think we can all rest assured that it is not going be that wrong. With that said, I'd like to get over to an extra long voicemail segment for this week because, boy, there were some great thought-provoking calls this week. I couldn't get to all of them, but there was so much in this I wanted to talk about. So thank you for your calls this weak. Let's get over the the voicemail.

0:23:13 Clip: It's time to check the voicemail. And of course, if you'd like to leave a message, that's 916-750-4SIO. That's 9-1-6-7-5-0-4-7 4-6. Let's check out this week's messages. Hi,

0:23:34 Voicemail: Thomas. Alexey here. You're calling the health care plan Trumpcare. I've heard some people call it Republicare instead to make sure that they get all of the blame too, because this is really a Republican plan. And they've been trying to do it for a while. There's an idea out there that Republicans may try to do a health care reform and then blame Trump for his failures. And then if it's called Trump care, you may be playing into that plan. So, Republican. Thanks. Bye.

0:24:03 Thomas: Thanks, Alexei. Yeah, a lot of people commented with things like this, comments about me calling it Trump care and whether that's right. I think this is a very worthwhile topic, so let's think about this. If we were to forget everything about strategy and any motivations for calling it any one thing and just look at what it is, the truth is it's Paul Ryan care.

0:24:23 Thomas: It's him dialing it back as much as he can and getting as much as he could get done in a bill called a health care bill that has almost nothing to do with health care in reality. If you listen to Paul Ryan talking about the bill, he's incredibly excited to have defederalized Medicare starting in like 2020 or something, and the block grants and lowering taxes on the rich. That's what this is about. This bill really is sneaking in some benefits and rolling back some taxes on the rich that were used to pay for Obamacare. The healthcare part is all just being dialed back. There's nothing really new in it whatsoever. It's just dialing back Obamacare. And that's something that, you're right, Republicans have wanted to do.

0:25:11 Thomas: And Paul Ryan specifically has a lot to do with the details of this bill. So Ryancare is probably a more accurate name. Now, to look at the claim that Republicans want this to fail and then they can blame Trump, I really don't know where to start with that. First off, if that were true, would that be bad for us? For me as a liberal, as someone who doesn't like Trump, is that a bad thing if the Republican Congress is fighting with Trump? I actually don't see why that would be a bad things personally. Maybe I'm missing something. Feel free if somebody wants to chime in with why that matter. I would be fine with playing into that. Secondly, I don't know how that would work because Trump has nothing to do with this bill.

0:25:59 Thomas: I mean, he really if you look at the details, sure, I guess I have to remember at all times that facts don't matter and there is no reality, something that I keep having to say when I'm talking about kind of the misinformation that's going into this whole thing. Because Ryan claimed that the CBO report on the healthcare bill was good and more people would be insured and all this crap. That's just not true. So I suppose in a world like that where you can just claim anything, does anything matter? I mean, there's almost no sense in talking about strategy in a world where anyone can claim anything about anything. So it's not, we may live in that world with Republicans. I don't know how well they can get away with it. But if we do live inthat world, I don't know, I shouldn't even, there's no point talking about anything because they can just claim this health care bill, which results in something like 20, depending on the estimates, 20 million fewer people with health care.

0:26:57 Thomas: They can just say, no, it's actually more people get healthcare. And then Republicans believe it. And what could you or I do about that other than to try to get out the correct information? But one of the reasons that I'm motivated to call it Trumpcare is because Trump campaigned on it. And he might, I mean, in a close election, in an inside 130,000 vote election difference, something like that might have been the difference. Now, I know a lot of things were the difference, but claiming that more people would get insured and premiums would go down and costs would go down, he made just the most inconceivable collection of claims about how bad Obamacare is and about how good his plan would be, that I think, since he used that to win the election in some ways, that we ought to pin the results on him.

0:27:51 Thomas: So that was my I thinking behind it? I don't know how much this all matters because the plan, no matter what it is, it's horrendous. I don'T even think it'll fly. Do you think it will be better for us if it's called Republicare or whatever, you know, Ryancare or something, and it doesn't pass? I DON'T know. I'M NOT SURE THAT... Maybe that'll be better. I'M not sure it WILL be. Because Congress already has an awful approval rating, an absolutely dismal approval rating. And that doesn't stop Republicans from getting reelected. So maybe the least we could do is give Trump a horrible approval rating. He already has a pretty bad one. But if we can continue to erode that, maybe that will at least result in his not being reelectED. Whereas it seems no matter how low Congress's approval rating is, it doesn't seem to ever threaten Republicans.

0:28:43 Thomas: But I suppose that's probably because that's a a bipartisan thing. I mean, it's flip-flopped a little bit back and forth. It's been Democrat controlled in recent years. So it having such a low approval rating, I mean it doesn't, it kind of harms both parties. Whereas Trump having a low-approval rating I would think could only harm Trump and Republican chances at re-election, I would hope. So that's kind of my thinking about it. But maybe since it's foggy, it unclear, maybe it does make sense to go with what's strictly empirically more correct, which is that it's Paul Ryan care. So I think there's a lot to be said for that. But my reasoning would not be because there's some Republican plot to blame it on Trump. I don't understand that reasoning, because if that's happening, I would be happy to have Republican Congress blame stuff on Trump, that would be awesome.

0:29:36 Thomas: That's what I've wanted all along through the election, through the primary, and now in Trump's presidency, I have have wanted Republicans to stick up for something, to stand for something, and to stand against Trump. So if that were actually happening, if Republicans were coming and saying, look, here's why this healthcare bill doesn't work, it's because Trump promised impossible things, that would be great. That would be absolutely great news in my book. So, all right, I think that's a good enough answer for that. I hope I illuminated my thinking on that a little bit to anyone who was confused, confused, but I think from here on out I'll go with Ryan Care, unless it changes, I mean, it could change if they if they try to do something in future bills, which they're threatening to, there's going to be two or three waves of of this, maybe.

0:30:23 Thomas: But I don't know if that will happen if wave one never gets off the ground, but anyway, if it changes, I may change, but for now, I'm going to go with Ryan Care, because that's more like what this is.

0:30:40 Voicemail: Hi, Thomas, it's Michael Schaefer. Just listen to to the episode on the ethics of having children, essentially. Wow, a spectacular interview. It brought something up in my mind, and this might be because I was on the phone this morning with a certain lawyer talking about wills and living wills. When you talk about viability of a fetus and at what point does it not ethically make sense for increased NICU treatments, perhaps research, that sort of thing. It made me think about end-of-life decisions. Personally, I believe that that's a place where our country and world need to go is to stop focusing so strongly on end-off-life situations and keeping people alive by any means necessary.

0:31:37 Voicemail: My personal philosophy and preference would be to pull the plug relatively quickly on myself, should I get there. And I was thinking about how this applies to extremely premature babies. Obviously a very difficult question because you've got somebody potentially with a very long life ahead of them as opposed to somebody who's elderly and is considering a DNR or something like that. But when we look at a baby that is 24 weeks or something like that, they're going to be in the NICU for weeks, perhaps months, and may have serious lifelong consequences. Whose decision is it, and what are the ethical decisions behind not going all out to save that 24-week-old baby at any cost?

0:32:36 Voicemail: So just really something to ponder. I certainly don't have any answers, but great show. Keep up the good work.

0:32:43 Thomas: Thanks, Michael. I totally echo the sentiment that I don't have all the answers. I don't have any answers on this. This is not any area of expertise for me, but I wanted to play that and I wanted echo the idea of this being a huge problem currently in our society. We spend so much on end-of-life care. It's where so much of our healthcare expenditures go, and all it really does is extend a potentially not very happy state of life for another, you know, few months or something. So it like keeps, it can sometimes, in the worst cases, it just keeps someone in prolonged pain for a few months with very low quality of life and costs an extremely high amount amount of money.

0:33:29 Thomas: It's something, I think Peter Singer wrote a book called Rethinking Life and Death, and I think it's pretty old by now. So maybe we need to re-re-re rethink life and death in light of where medical technology has gone. But I hadn't thought of it in terms of how early we are increasing viability. But furthermore, I guess I hadn'T thought in detail about what what viability at that age even means. You know, when you save a 20-something week old baby or feed, I don't know, the terminology is getting a little muddy. When you are sort of saving that life, but are you really? I mean, it's a horrible quality of life oftentimes.

0:34:17 Thomas: They might not live very long. I just never thought of those problems. I think it's something that there's certainly no easy answer to. But I also, my biggest instinct in this, and reading Peter Singer as well, is that our intuitions are not very good on this stuff. And humans, as a result, what we're doing, and our medical ethics, honestly, aren't that great right now. Because what we'RE doing is, whenever there's a life, we do everything we can to save it, and we don't really ask whether or not we should be, you know? And I know that can sound like a callous question, like, well, of course we shouldbe trying to save any life we can. But when you start taking on a more Peter Singer worldview, I reference him because he's foremost in my mind.

0:35:02 Thomas: I'm sure there's others working on these problems, but he comes to my mind first. The extended worldview, I think a more thoughtful and realistic worldview is that you can look at everything in terms of resources. When you start looking at, okay, how much, if I donated right now to buy some mosquito nets for people, you can put an actual dollar amount on life, on like one human life. I forget the amount, but it's only a couple thousand dollars. You could save a human life for a couple thousand dollars, and when you start look at that versus, or we could spend hundreds of of thousands of dollars trying to save a 23-week-old fetus that is not going to survive anyway, and even if we do save it, the quality of life will be awful and it'll probably die at a later.

0:35:55 Thomas: But, you know, questions like that are difficult. They're horrible to consider, but we can't just avoid them. I don't think we can just sort of duck them and say, no, we just need to try to save this, spend all the money, spend All These Resources because we're We're uncomfortable with the idea of letting a life end, and I don't think we can duck those questions. I think those are questions that society needs to take on.

And let me just say for me, because this has become a more real issue for me obviously, going through pregnancy, as I'm sure so many of you listeners have, I still would say we're, I think, 17 weeks along now, if eight weeks from now, whatever the minimum viability is, if eight months from now something were to happen and we had a decision of, do we want to try to Expend tons of resources to save a baby that's not really viable, but maybe, you know, medical science can sort of get it to some viability and then it'll have a kind of a a terrible life full of a lot of suffering and stuff like that, if we had to make that decision, it would be incredibly difficult. It would be emotionally horrifying, and it would never be something that would be easy. But I still would say no, we don't, I mean, again, there's, of course, my opinion matters a lot less than Lydia's in this situation. But once the baby's outside of of her body, I would say it's sort of the joint opinion of the parents to decide what's going on.

0:37:35 Thomas: And my side of that opinion, and I believe Lydia's would be as well, though of course that's something you have to discuss more, is I would not want to waste a lot of resources on something that's just not going to be a good quality of life. Of course, it's all contingent on the facts. It's all contingent on what do doctors estimate would happen? What do, you know, what do most people go through in this situation? What does it look like? Of course, it's all dependent on all those things. But granted, if those things are as Travis Reeder sort of represented them, I can't imagine being so selfish personally. I can imagine being so selfish as to want to waste tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, of medical resources resources, on that kind of thing.

0:38:26 Thomas: I mean, it's, ultimately, I know it's... I'm not trying to insult anybody, but we can be selfish as humans, and we can be shortsighted as humans. And I don't blame anyone, certainly, especially now, with how much I want... I know that I want our baby to be born, and I want her baby to be healthy, and all that. It's... I'm not... I get it, and don't blame blame anybody, but also it's something that humans need to make an effort to be smarter than our intuitions and smarter than our basic kind of emotions on issues like these, because lives are at stake. So that's my initial thoughts on that. I agree, very, very serious questions to ponder, and I'm by no means any sort of expert.

0:39:13 Thomas: So I would look forward to having having either Travis back or another guest, if there's somebody who is more in that field of study. Either way, somebody on to speak more intelligently than I can on these questions, because it's fascinating. So thank you for the voicemail.

0:39:47 Voicemail: I'm considering broaching the thing.

0:40:13 Voicemail: If you do that, you may be able to answer that question. Do we have an obligation? And I look forward to it.

0:40:24 Thomas: Hey, Dave, thanks for the call. First, I would like to say that I was pretty convinced by Travis's, I think it was his teacher's, his ex-teacher mentor's argument that there are these first order kind of intimacies that we can't be obligated to do. I was very convinced by that argument. Now, I will say that is a little bit contingent on, I'm more of a consequentialist, so I think there could be times where it would, I mean, maybe there would be some fine line between obligation and just being, you should be compelled to do certain things if it would do enough good for the world. Like, for example, let's say, and I know philosophy is full of weird hypotheticals, but this is something that comes to mind.

0:41:12 Thomas: If someone were to tell me, totally random hypothetical, of course, but if it were to come down to the fact that this is meant to illustrate that I I think consequences ultimately bind everything, but that's a later debate. If someone were to say, you need to have sex with this person or the entire world is going to explode and humanity will no longer exist, all you have to do is ratchet up the consequences enough, and I think that virtually any right can be countered in that way. If you ratchet the consequences up to, and it just depends, I mean, okay, 100,000 people die. No, not convinced, okay, 150,000 people, 200,000, and then all the way up to humanity as you know it will end, and every sentient life will end if you don't do X.

0:42:01 Thomas: It's virtually impossible for me to imagine not being compelled to do X, I mean, there may be some things that are just not possible to do, in which case there goes humanity, but as far as being morally compelled held or obligated, I think that you just have to imagine consequences getting bad enough, you know? And then, I don't know, maybe you could still phrase it as though you have a right to something, but you're just willing to forego it if consequences are bad enough. Maybe someone who believes more in a rights-based kind of morality would put it that way. I don't know. That's something, a topic I absolutely love, something I mentioned I would want to talk with Travis about later or any other philosopher who specializes in it, maybe.

0:42:48 Thomas: But as to your question, as far as obligations go, so the first answer is no, I don't think anyone's obligated to get an abortion because I do agree with Travis. I'm convinced by his argument that that's too strong of a word. That's too strong of acclaim. And let me just remind anyone who forgets, this was specifically a question about if you think it's morally wrong to have children, If you think you're morally obligated to essentially use birth control and not have, create human lives, I asked the question, would a woman then be obligated to abort if she were to get pregnant? And I sort of offered it as a counter argument or as a potential question to what he was saying. And I think he gave a great answer, which again, as I said, there's certain things you can't be obligate to do.

0:43:38 Thomas: I do take that on. But in the more abstract way, to just look at what an obligation is, I think that this gets really into baseline kind of moral philosophy questions that can be tough to answer. But I'll give you a little snippet of my view just because you asked. I thinkthat there really is no bridging the is-ought problem in a totally secure way. It's sort of like there's no answer to hard solipsism, really, other than there's just practically no reason to waste time with it. I believe that the is-ought problem is kind of the same. No matter what your system of morality is, no matter what it is, and someone, philosophers out there, correct me if you think I'm wrong, no matter What It Is, I can always say, well, what if I don't want to do that?

0:44:25 Thomas: You know, it's like, even if I believed in divine command theory, even if I believed in God telling me, you need to, let's say, worship me, or whatever, whatever the command is, I Can always just say, well, what if I don't want to? You know, there's nothing will ever, no moral system will ever compel people and make them be good. It just won't happen in a way that's like philosophically consistent. Otherwise, it would be coercion. But I think the answer to your question is a little simpler, maybe, unless I'm missing something. I think it's actually pretty simple. I make a moral moral obligation under a given view of morality, under a given moral system, an obligation would be something that we could judge people morally for not doing.

0:45:13 Thomas: And maybe that doesn't sound like strong enough language for some of you, but you always will have the option to just not do something pretty much and face the consequences. And that's what I think an obligation is. So if I have an obligation to do X, if I don't do X that means people can and say, wow, he's morally wrong for not doing X. And I think that's an important thing. Whereas if I don't have a moral obligation, if it's something that morally is neutral and I don'T do it, there's no room for anyone to judge me for that morally. And I think there can also be room for shades within that of here's something you probably ought to do, but you're not obligated to do. So if you do it, then you are laudable. And if you don't do it no one's really going to to judge you. I would put, maybe I would put something like adoption in that category.

0:46:01 Thomas: When I find out someone has adopted a child, I think, wow, that is a really great thing that they did. But I don't think right now, under the current system of morality, under the prevalent views of society, we don't feel obligated to adopt. Now, maybe we're wrong. Maybe we should feel like it's a moral obligation to adopt, certainly a possibility, but currently I don't think in American society we feel that way at all. So that would be an example of something that you're not obligated to do, but it is morally good, and people will probably pat you on the back for doing so. But to pick a simple real world example, I think you have a moral obligation when you hit someone's car in the parking lot to leave a note. And what that obligation means is certainly you can ignore it.

0:46:48 Thomas: A lot of people do every day. Maybe some of you have ignored it. Fortunately, I haven't bumped anyone in a parking lot, really. So I haven' had to face that moral quandary yet. But it's something you can avoid doing. However, if someone found out, it would be something to where they could say, wow, that person, they did not fulfill their moral obligation to society. They did something, they profited in a way, often they cheated the system. Like, they would expect someone else to leave them a note. They would hope they would want to live in a world where if someone bumps your car, they leave you a note. We all want to live in that world. However, sometimes we get short-sighted and we don't want to leave a note, and that's not fair. You have a moral obligation to do so, so people can morally judge you for it.

0:47:36 Thomas: So that's my views on that. I hope I hit your question in the right way, but let me know what you think.

0:47:50 Voicemail: Hey, Thomas, my name is Hausdorff, a patron of all of your shows. I absolutely love what you do. In particular, I've really enjoyed your recent focus on politics. Like yourself, I, in the past, haven't really paid attention to politics, but I'm getting into it now for obvious reasons. I really loved your recent episode with Dr. Price and your follow-ups about whether or not we're able to change people's minds. And I've had a lot of those ideas kind of percolating around in the back of my head. And last night, I had a very annoying conversation with my father-in-law that, I'll spare you the details, but it didn't go great. But the thing that really kind of jarred me a little bit after I hung up, I found myself thinking, I really hate everything the Republicans do. And that was a red flag to me because this just can't be right. I mean, I've got my opinions about what we should do and the values that we should have and how governing should be done.

0:48:42 Voicemail: What are the odds that one of the parties gets everything exactly wrong? That just seems basically impossible to me. And it makes me afraid that I've done the same thing that I've accused Republicans of doing, which is, you know, this is my team, that's your team. Everything that my team does, I like. Everything that your team does I hate. And I really don't want to be that person. And so one thing I was thinking about, which I actually thought might be a good segment for your show, is to look for things that the Republicans do that I like, that I agree with. Hey, they did this thing and I like it. They're trying to pass this legislation and I I think that's a good idea. Seems kind of a hard sell because as I'm looking at what they do, it seems like everything they do is crap. But that's kind of the whole point, right?

0:49:28 Voicemail: If I'm looking for things that we agree with, I won't just immediately take things uncritically and like, oh yeah, that's garbage. It'll give me motivation to try to see things from a different perspective. And I think that would be better for sort of for everybody. It'd be a good exercise for myself, sort of to clarify my own thinking. And it'll help conversations with, you know, my father-in-law and other Trump supporters to not just make everything us versus them. And like I said, I thought it might be a good segment for your show. Maybe you could do some of my homework for me. All right. Thanks again for all the work you do on your show, I absolutely love what you're doing. Bye. Wow, Hausdorff, this is something I think about a lot. Thank you for this message. I think this is something we all need to think about. Man, I have so much to say about this.

0:50:14 Thomas: Where do I even begin? So I think under normal political circumstances, this is something we should be pretty concerned with. Under Trump's circumstances, I'm not as concerned because Trump is truly an ignorant fool to an extent that we just have not seen in politics. I really, really believe that's true, and I have mountains of evidence for that that I've already talked about on the show, not worth getting into again. But assuming we both agree on that premise, that makes me less worried about everything at least he's doing being wrong, because pretty much everything he's doing is wrong. And when he is right, it's accidental.

0:51:00 Thomas: So I'm not terribly worried about, like, what are the odds that everything a totally ignorant, ignorant narcissist who's proud of his ignorance and essentially thinks he's a genius... It's not surprising to me that he would come to the wrong conclusion, especially being advised by people like Bannon. You know, it's not surprising to be said that someone uniquely unqualified would come to wrong conclusion almost every time. Now, if we're going to ignore Trump, pretend Trump, Trump didn't happen, and try to talk about just Republicans and Democrats for a minute, then I think we have a much more interesting thing to discuss. The first thing that comes to my mind is that there's sort of two axes on which to break this asymmetry, where everything one side does is right and everything the other side does is wrong.

0:51:55 Thomas: You're taking the view or I guess tackling the axis of let's find things Republicans do that are right. But there's another side to that equation, which is what do Democrats do that is wrong, but that maybe if someone is too caught up in partisanship is sort of blind to. And I do believe there's a lot of integrity to be found in highlighting that, even if you're not willing to go so far as to say Republicans are doing things right. Being a check on your your own party, I do think is quite valuable. I think there's more hypocrisy on the right, but I think there is quite a bit of hypocrisy on the left because in general, I think that most politicians, I'm pretty cynical about politicians.

0:52:45 Thomas: I think they are motivated by the wrong things. I think they will say whatever to get elected. And so I'm already starting from a position that most politicians are kind full of crap a lot, and so are going to say things that are politically expedient, and are going to have a short-term memory, and are going to kind of ignore when they're being hypocrites and call out hypocrisy on the other side.

So that already would suggest that there's going to be a lot to find wrong on the left. But if we forget that element for a second, if If we just look at the overall kind of worldviews, another reason I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that the right is getting stuff incorrect most of the time, I wouldn't say all the time but most of the time, is how entwined their worldview is with something that pretty much everyone listening to this show knows is nonsense, which is belief in God and belief in Jesus, Jesus, you know, something like 60% of people in this country believe, you know, Genesis happened literally. It was stuff like that. So the religious right and right-wing politics in general is very closely entwined with a religious worldview. And so it's not a mystery to me that when you're trying to get answers to real-life problems from something that's pretend, that you would come to the wrong solution. That's not surprising to me. So issues like abortion, issues like stem cell research, issues like gay marriage.

0:54:23 Thomas: I mean, those are three pretty big issues, and I'm fully confident in saying that Republicans have been totally wrong on them. Now, when we look at something like immigration, maybe there's a little more gray area. I think there's a lot wrong with the right's view on immigration. However, I think that the left has sort of forgotten that Democrats were in favor of a lot of the things that they were - some Democrats were in favor of a wall not too long ago. They've been in favor of some sort of immigration reform. And as Donald Trump has made this his main issue, and granted, he's coming from a xenophobic kind of view on it - if you're calling Mexicans rapists and you're calling immigrants criminals and you think they're going to be more evil or less apt to be able to live in our society than other people, then yes, you're coming from the wrong side of things.

0:55:14 Thomas: You have a xenophobic view of the world and you're wrong. However, I think Democrats in response to that have forgotten that the Democrat side has had concerns with immigration and has wanted immigration reform. Immigration reform has been a bipartisan issue for a while, even if there wasn't a solution, exact solution that could be agreed upon. But the idea that there is a problem with immigration is not a just a Republican issue. So that's one area where I think maybe elements of the Republican Party might be correct in some of their views. I have to tread carefully because I wholeheartedly do not endorse Trump's xenophobic picture of America.

0:56:04 Thomas: Just so everybody, just so we're clear. Tell you what, another issue this will be another thing people might get mad at me for. I am really anti-gun personally. I don't have any interest in guns. I wish there were fewer guns. However, when looking at the data, I worry that the left's idea of gun control is maybe not going to be as effective as we might think. California, in particular, likes to go absolutely batshit over gun control, and I just don't know what difference it's making. I think there could be some validity to the idea that all we're doing in California is making it more annoying for responsible gun owners.

0:56:50 Thomas: This is hard for me to say, because I hate guns. I have no interest in them. I don't want to own a gun. I likely never will. I can't imagine it. And I don't want people to have guns. However, I do think that there may be some validity to the Republican, to a certain Republican's view on this, that gun control really only applies to people who are not going to break the law anyway. Now, Andrew said in a recent Opening Arguments episode that the research shows, in his opinion, that the best solution would be a federal, like, national database or something. So that would be something I might be interested in if the research show that that's going to make a huge difference.

0:57:36 Thomas: But these small-time kind of increasing the delay from two weeks to three weeks for buying a gun and doing stuff like that, like I don't know how much of a difference that's it's going to make. And I think some parallels could be made to the things that people are doing in Texas to try to stop someone, to make it as inconvenient as possible for someone to get an abortion. There's something there. There is something worth looking at there. It wouldn't be the idea that every teacher should have a gun to stop shootings in schools. Now, that's absurd. And there are certainly absurd views to be found on the right regarding guns, No question. But I do wonder in that situation if the left solution is not really going to work.

0:58:25 Thomas: So those are a couple of areas just off the top of my head where I think Republicans, maybe they're not right, but I don't know that they're as wrong as maybe partisanship would lead us to believe. But I have absolutely no issue with the idea that Trump could be wrong about virtually everything because he's an incompetent person. And he's worse than that. He's worse than someone just taking a stab at things like, oh, maybe this, maybe that. He's overconfident in knowing that he has the right solution based on no research, based on nothing, because he can't read. He has no attention span. I think he can read. I'm not saying he's illiterate, but I don't believe that he does read.

0:59:11 Thomas: I think he has no attention span. There's reports of the fact that like the briefings you have to give him, you have can only give him like two pages or three pages max. There needs to be lots of pictures. I mean, there's stuff coming out of these leaks inside the White House. It's going to be hilarious if it weren't so horrible and sad for the world. It is going to be pretty hilarious one day to read all the books that come out of this administration, because I think he's uniquely unqualified. So, it's not a mystery that he's wrong about virtually everything. So, I hope that tackles the question. But that, you know, that's a segment I could almost consider trying to do, finding areas where the right could be correct on something. But I don't know. I think it might be more valuable to try to talk to people on the right, not people like Price per se.

0:59:58 Thomas: I'm not sure. I still am undecided if I ever want to try and do that again. But, I have been hearing, I've been looking outside of my little bubble to try to find people on the right. And I'm looking forward to trying to set up conversations with people I disagree with more and see where that goes. So that's an effort that I'm going to make, but you've really given me a lot to think about. I think we all should think about that. And I don't, I do hate partisanship. I don't think it's good. I think that we need to constantly try to be less bad than the other side and less tribal, but we can all be uniformly in opposition to Trump. That's easy. All right. Well, I know that was a long voicemail segment, but all four of those very interesting things to think about.

1:00:44 Thomas: And every single one of those voicemails gave me something that I wanted to talk about independently, like I just really did. So I know there was a bit long, but thank you for the thought-provoking voicemails this week. I really enjoyed them.

1:01:08 Thomas: Niall O'Donnell, thank you very, very kindly for your pledges, much appreciated, and of course, I've got to thank my all-time greats. After I thank my all-time greats, I'm going to tell you who Monday's guest is, and I'm pretty sure you're going to be excited. I am very, very, very excited. So, but first I'm gonna thank the patrons, who by the way already know who the guest is because I announced it on Patreon, another little benefit, you kind of know what's going on ahead of time.

And I will do my best to release this interview early to patrons over on patreon.com/seriouspod. But my all-time great pledgers are Travis Peterson, Matt Garrett, Dale, Brian Garefort, Peter Skelton, Steve Sigmund, Adrian Borchoff, Roger Metcalf, Adam Hicks, Matthew Maxson, Andrew Waddington, Zabby, Matthew Statton, John Bodley, Esquire, Ian Ryan, Ian Rosano, Jonathan Moyet, Kaylee Reiser, Jesse Sakashite, Fukasumi, Donald J. Trump, Super Genius, Michael Schaefer, Sammy, and Hunter Ashe. Thank you guys so much for being my top patrons. Okay, on Monday, I am very excited to announce that my guest will be none other than Lawrence Krauss. I can't tell you how amazing it was to speak to Lawrence Krauss.

It's recorded, it's in the can, so I am not going to jinx anything because it's already in my possession. The interview is done. It is happening. It already happened. I think you'll enjoy it. Lawrence Krauss. I'm really excited. So that's Monday's interview. And again, thanks to everybody who makes this show possible and makes it such that I get to talk to people like Lawrence Krause.

1:02:52 Thomas: Very selfish there, but hopefully you'll benefit from it as much as I did. So if you'd like to check that out potentially early, and you'd to get a heads up as to future amazing A-list guests like Lawrence Krauss, go to patreon.com/seriouspod. Alright, thank you guys so much, and I will see you then.