Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. And I'm Matthew Feeney. Joining us today is Alex Narasta, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. Welcome back to Free Thoughts, Alex. Thanks, Trevor. How are immigrants destroying America? There are lots of ways immigrants are supposedly destroying America, according to the critics who like to talk about it. There are the economic ways they're taking our jobs. That's the most common one that you hear. The other way is that they're not assimilating. So culturally, they're going to take over, they're undermining American values.  And as a result, we're going to be like North Korea because of immigrants. They are going to commit crimes and murder us all in the inner cities, especially. They are terrorists.  There are lots of ways in which people claim that immigrants are undermining and destroying America. And all of those ways I just mentioned, the facts are not supportive of their claims. Immigrants are almost entirely and generally across the board a positive force for America and all of those issues that I mentioned, they're less crime-prone than Americans. They add to the economy. They don't have systematically different opinions about public policy that will undermine our system. The terrorism threat is a real one, but is a small one. So the criticisms are just, they are common stereotypes, but there is almost no evidence to support them. So there's a lot to unpack there. So let's start with one of the claims you mentioned, which is that they take jobs or wages. So a common criticism might be, well, if I'm an employer and I could hire an American at $9 an hour and there's an inflow of people who are willing to work for much less, won't that put a lot of Americans out of work because the incentive is for the employer to hire cheap labor? The people who use that argument usually say supply and demand says if you have a big increase of supply, then you're going to have wages fall. But then they always forget about the demand part, which is that immigrants or people, they buy things and the things that they buy, the services they buy, the money that they spend, et cetera, increases demand and boosts the number of jobs that can be supported in a local area. So what you see is in a place where immigrants move, immigrants move to productive fast growing areas and after they go there, the areas grow a little bit faster and wages do a little bit better. Now, the most well-known critic of immigration and economics is George Borhouse, Harvard professor George Borhouse. But if you read his work and he will admit this, he doesn't hide this, the negative wage effects are concentrated on Americans with less than a high school degree, but every other category of Americans sees small wage increases due to immigration because these immigrants are different than other Americans, they have different skills, they don't compete against them. So the net result is that Americans make more money on total, have higher wages because of immigration than lower wages. Well, isn't the speed part of this? So if we have an open border, if we have no restrictions on immigration and we get a huge amount of people who just would say 100,000 Mexicans arrive in Bismarck, North Dakota. And I mean, I think that the assumption is that a lot of people would leave and come to America if they could. So barring just travel times, they would be here. And so if 100,000 people arrived in Bismarck, North Dakota, that would certainly create a problem for workers in Bismarck, North Dakota for some period of time. Yeah, absolutely. And there's a lot of evidence about this. One of the best pieces is the Mariel boat lift in Miami in 1980. What happened is Castro, sort of all of a sudden and unexpectedly allowed Cubans to take off from the port of Mariel to be picked up in boats and to be brought to Miami. And in the course of a few months, 125,000 people did that, went into Miami, which increased the size of the labor market by 7%. Now, these workers were overwhelmingly had less than a high school degree and they entered the Miami labor market without any kind of warning and importantly, they didn't have a choice where to go. They were sort of dropped off there. So it's a natural experiment that allows us to take a look at the actual facts. Because as I said before, immigrants usually choose where to go. They go to high growing areas. So how do you really disentangle the effect of immigration on the wages of the locals from just what the economy was going to do otherwise? But this natural experiment helps us get around that. George Borjas, again, did a nice, a recent paper where he took a look at this and he found that the wages for American men dropped pretty dramatically after, American men who are high school dropouts dropped dramatically after the Mariel boat lift and it recovered about eight to nine years later to what they would be in other cities. But what's fascinating is the wages for Americans with only a high school degree in Miami, which is the next level up, actually increased substantially right after the Mariel boat lift folks arrived. It increased compared to other cities that were similar to Miami before that to such an extent that the actual net wage gain for, or the net wage impact for workers with a high school degree or less who are Americans was positive. So that very point leads me on to the second question, which is, so we've spoken about wages, but there's also concerns some people have about the influence or the effect that immigration has on the government coffers that immigrants come here and they are consumers of government goods. So roads and schools, are immigrants a net contributor fiscally or are they a drain on the quote, welfare state? So it's very difficult to try to figure out the effect of people on the fiscal state of the government individually or as a small groups because the way that government benefits are structured and taxes are structured. So when you're a young person, a kid between the ages of about zero and 22 or 23, you're not going to be paying very much in taxes. You're a consumer, a huge net consumer of government benefits from public schools to welfare, etc. However, between the age of about 22 and 65, you're supposed to be a net taxpayer. Supposed to pay a lot in taxes to make up for what you consumed as a child, but also to sock away money into social security and the Medicare and two other types of programs when you retire. And then after the age of 65, people become a huge net user again of welfare benefits. Now we know it doesn't really work out very well. The government has a lot of problems with its long term debt, totally unsustainable. So trying to fit an immigrant into that, it's interesting most immigrants come in their early 20s, late teens and early 20s. So you automatically skip that first 18 year period of their life where they're always in public schools. And public school costs between about $10,000 to $30,000 per student per year depending on how you count it. So that and if they graduate high school, that's somewhere between $120,000 to $360,000 of public savings just from that not to mention welfare or anything else. So the immigrant comes here at the age of 19. We automatically save all that money. He starts paying taxes by working here in the US economy and they're a fairly net positive going forward. However, a lot of them are lower skilled so they don't make a lot of money. So that also kind of makes up for it and a good amount retire back in their home country. So that's sort of the way it works. When you take a look at all the different models and the peer reviewed papers and the groups that try to measure the net fiscal impact on immigration, the general consensus is they about pay for themselves. The long term fiscal costs of a marginal migrant is about zero. But do they really, if they're coming here for sort of say temporary amount of time and then sending a lot of money back and also do they really pay as many taxes? Do they hide money in terms of not paying taxes into the federal government? And of course, we have to remember Milton Friedman's invocation that a welfare state with open borders is a crazy idea if the American taxpayer is going to be paying for people to live off their largesse.  Is that legal or illegal? Illegal, illegal. So what's interesting though is between about 55 and 75% based on the estimates of illegal immigrants either file tax returns or have money taken out of their paychecks for tax reasons. But the problem, while the issue is though, is that most of these illegal immigrants are low skilled people anyway. They were not paid that much in taxes or zero taxes on the federal level because their income is so low, we have a progressive tax system. And a lot of them would actually get back like a net increase in terms of the earned income tax credit or child tax credit. So they would actually be paid a net if they actually all pay their taxes. So the better thing would be for low skilled illegal immigrants to not file their taxes at all. And the fiscal benefits would be even better because there's some scamming that goes on, of course, for EITC. They're not technically eligible, but the government can't control all of that. But on the Milton Friedman point about how open immigration is good so long as it's not to a welfare state. The second part of that quote that usually gets dropped off is when he says that's why he supports illegal immigration. Because illegal immigrants don't have access to the welfare state, which is how it is under current law in the United States. With the exception of emergency medical care at a hospital, illegal immigrants do not have recourse to means tested welfare benefits. Now, of course, there's some people who scam it. But Obama's Justice Department in 2014 actually sued the state of Pennsylvania for accidentally giving welfare benefits to illegal immigrants and got that money back in one. So if the Obama Justice Department does it, then we know that the government does take a pretty good look at that. But even when immigrants are eligible for means tested welfare benefits, we can take a look at their consumption rates and the percentage of them and the amount of money that they do consume when they get these benefits. And what we find is that immigrants are much less likely to consume these benefits than native born Americans when we take a look at poor people. So much so that if the native born poor people in the United States used Medicaid at the same rate and the same dollar value as native born poor people did, I'm sorry, as illegal as immigrants do, then the program would be 42% smaller. And the kicker is that immigrants have better healthcare outcomes than natives. So you mentioned of illegal immigration reminded me of something I often hear, which is, okay, well, the economic arguments are sound. But I'm pro-legal immigration and anti-illegal immigration. This is a common refrain. People who will say, I'm pro-immigration, I just want there to be some sort of system. And given that there are, I think, something like 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, what is the Alex Narasta solution to not only the current state of undocumented migrants inside the country, but dealing with the number of people that want to flood into the country supposedly illegally? And also just to add to that, isn't 11 million illegal people in the country a per se problem? I mean, it's a, these are 11 million lawbreakers who were largely either not punishing or, in the case of DACA and DAPA, somewhat forgiving, forgiving their previous lawbreaking. That seems to be a per se problem. The reason why illegal immigrants come illegally is because they can't come legally. And virtually all these people who do come in are people that we wouldn't want to exclude for other reasons, like they would hurt Americans, be criminals, terrorists, or health threats or anything like that. It's just that there is no visa category that exists for the vast majority of them to come in interlawfully. Now, if some of them do come in, and let's say they fall in love with an American, they get married, that's usually a way for somebody to come to the United States pretty easily on a green card, but other portions of American law make it impossible for them to adjust their status because it would require them to leave and go to an embassy. But once they leave, after they've been here illegally, they're barred from coming back to the U.S. for any reason for three to 10 years, based on their length of stay in the United States. So there's a lot of catch 22s like this in the law. Even vacation. Any reason. Yeah, there's no reason that they could come back legally. There are the occasional waivers that the government can grant just for certain circumstances, but they're rarely granted. So the problem is not that we have a bunch of people who are breaking the law, it's that the law is virtually impossible to follow for the vast majority of these people in here. I mean, when our ancestors came here during the 1800s or early 1900s, when we had virtually open borders with the rest of the world, you didn't hear stories of like boats full of Italian immigrants crashing on New Jersey to let out thousands of illegal Italian immigrants to go and, you know, go to Newark and work illegally. No, it's because they could come legally. They could land at Ellis Island. They could get off. They go through very quick inspection. Very few of them were turned back. About 2% were turned back to go back to their countries because of health or criminal reasons. And for that reason, it was called the Isle of Tears because 2% were turned back. Under the current immigration system, virtually anybody who wants to come to this country legally has no way of doing so. Ellis Island was called the Island of Tears. I don't know what you'd call our system. Now, of course, President Trump, who is- Oh, and if I could- Please, yeah. Yeah, and sorry. And you asked, like, isn't it just a problem that these laws are being violated, just a problem that there are these just illegal immigrants? To an extent, I think that's right. It's important, I think, to have respect for the law. But in order to respect the law, the laws be respectable. And a lot of what we have now is not respectable. It's not in accordance with reality. It's not capable of being followed, really, by most people involved with it. So I think that is part of the problem. When bad laws create bad consequences, I think we need to talk about reforming those laws or repealing them rather than doubling down and trying to enforce them regardless of the consequences. Also, there's a big difference between somebody committing murder and getting away with it and somebody who breaks immigration laws, but they're basically just international labor market regulations and getting away with it. But isn't that the kind of people that Mexico is sending us? I mean, according to our current president, who is, of course, why we're recording this episode on, what is it? January 27th, 2017, a couple days after President Trump unrolled some of his first executive orders on immigration. But when he started his campaign, he said that Mexico is sending us murders and they're sending us rapists. And maybe that would stand a reason because you have to break the law to get here. So maybe it would be a less law abiding kind of person that Mexico would be, quote unquote, sending us. So do they commit crimes at a higher rate? And are they more likely to be murders or rapists or any other kind of crime is Trump right? When you take a look at immigrants across the board, well, there's a couple ways to measure that. One way is to look at what's called, it's called the area approach. And you take a look at how crime rates are affected in an area by immigrants moving into it or by some new immigration enforcement policy that rounds up illegal immigrants. And then you take a look before and after how the crime rates were affected. And these studies either uniformly find one of two, well, they find one of two conclusions. One is that immigrants have no effect on crime rates in local areas. And the second one is that they're actually correlated with decreasing crime rates. You will not be able to find hardly any study in the United States that I've come across that says that an influx of immigrants into a local area is coincides with an increase in crime with the exception of Miami in 1980 after the Mariel boat lift. Miami is the exception to virtually all the rules I'm talking about in here today for some very odd, peculiar, unique reasons. But when you take a look at places other than Miami, what we see as an influx of immigrants leads to lower crime or no change in crime. The second way that these studies are done is by taking a look at incarceration rates. So the government asks in the census through something called the group quarters where they ask about incarceration, questions about where you're born, if you're an immigrant in the United States, when you came in, if you're a citizen, et cetera. And when you take a look at those, you find that legal immigrants are much less likely to be incarcerated or all immigrants are much less likely to be incarcerated in prisons on the federal and state level. And when you try to use some methods, a statistical method called the residual method to get at trying to estimate who in prison is an illegal immigrant, you find that illegal immigrants are about half as likely as native-born Americans to be incarcerated for a crime. Now, one of the criticisms of this that's leveled by people who don't know much about this system is they say, well, of course, the legal immigrants are deported when they're arrested for a crime, which isn't true under U.S. law right now. And a legal immigrant, if you're captured for committing a violent or property offense, you have to serve your time before you get deported. So this raises a question of risk that I sometimes think about. You mentioned Ellis Island where anyone can go and see the exhibits of all the Mediterranean, Italian immigrants that went through there. And I think most people would agree that Italian migration was a net benefit to the United States. But they would be. Yeah, well, some part of me. But of course, the Italian migrants also brought some organized crime, which affected large parts of the East and Seaboard. And I wonder, today, in 2017, we think Italian migration was worth it, but there was also some associated risks. So how much risk should we tolerate from groups of migrants? So it's interesting you're bringing up the Italian mob. That was one of the big stereotypes back then, is that Italians were very crime prone. There was also a Jewish mob and Irish mob. All these different groups had their mobs. What's interesting is the Dillingham Commission Report, which was a report that began by the federal government in 1907 to study immigration's impact on the United States. It was stacked with anti-immigration eugenicists to come up with an answer that says immigration is bad. That was basically the mission. Everyone they selected had that opinion with the exception of one person. It was designed to produce basically fake facts or methodologically unsound statistics to support immigration restrictions. The one section of the report that did not have a negative finding was a crime section. They said that they could not find evidence that immigrants were more crime prone than native-born Americans. This was at the height of Italian immigration to the United States. It's been going on for about 20 years by that time period. And it continued afterwards. So, and there is a commission report done in the 1930s by the U.S. government that found the same thing. Barbara Jordan's report in the 1990s on immigration. Barbara Jordan is a former Congresswoman, found the same thing that immigrants were less crime prone. And all the research today sort of backs that up. Now, in terms of how much risk are we willing to accept going forward, I think that we can do a simple cost-benefit calculation. We can take a look at the economic benefit of immigrants. We can take a look at the estimated risk based on the recent past and maybe do some kind of estimation about what it could be in the future of terrorism or crime, of violation of rights through other sort of means and say what is that break-even point? How much immigration up to that point? And it could be then in the future, there was a group of immigrants that is so violent that is so crime prone that the economic benefits are outweighed by the damage that they do to the United States. That could happen. But based on what we're taking a look at right now, based on the evidence, the net benefit of immigration, especially if you include the immigrants, you know, the new Americans I like to call them and their kids. What do you mean, the benefit to them? The benefit to them. If you include the benefit to them, it's like undoubtedly hugely positive. If you focus just on the benefit to the Americans who were living here before these immigrants came, it's narrower, of course, but it's still positive. So we do have an area of the world, though. We have Syria, Saudi Arabia. I'm trying to remember the other ones that were in Trump's executive order. So it was Somalia. Somalia. Yemen. Yemen. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya. Libya. But Saudi Arabia was on it. Not Saudi Arabia. Yes, not Saudi Arabia. But I mean, these, there are people there, maybe more than average, maybe a ton, especially in a place maybe like Iran, where they really do want to commit crimes here and hurt Americans to a very large degree. And if given opportunity, they will, especially if given the opportunity to use chemical weapons or things like this. So having open immigration from these countries seems just a little bit of a challenge. Seems just absolutely nuts. That's a good point. People say that all the time. What's interesting is when you take a look at the number of Americans killed on US soil by people from those countries since 1975, you add them all together, the answer is zero. Yeah, but it's different now, right? It could be different, but these are, you know, people from Iraq, from Syria, from Iran, up until the end of 2015, zero. But I'm just didn't exist in 1975 or 19. It didn't exist in 75, but it existed in 2015. Islamic terrorism has existed for a very long time. It certainly did in 1975. It was a well-known effect. Airplane hijackings and the like were very common back then. Islamic terrorism been around for a while. But it's just that the number of Americans killed on US soil by terrorism is just not that great. We think of, of course, 9-11 is the exception of this. 9-11, 2,983 Americans died in those attacks on 9-11, but that is the largest terrorist attack in the world history by about an order of magnitude in terms of its deadliness. It is an extreme outlier when you graph it. Now that attack was, and that attack, by the way, accounts for 99.8% of all the Americans killed on US soil by foreign-born terrorists during that 41-year time period. It was on that one day in 2001. I don't think that it makes a lot of sense to have future immigration restrictions based on an extreme outlier event. Now that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to screen for terrorism. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to screen for national security threats. We should. I think that the government in immigration screening should focus entirely on criminal national security, terrorism, and health threats, entirely not worry about any other nonsense that they ask about, but the threat is relatively small and is relatively manageable, and it's manageable by using methods other than blanket across the board bans that do a lot more harm to a lot more innocent people. And of course, the irony is that a lot of the people that we would ban are fleeing from the very people we seem to be worried about, these Syrian refugees. And I remember a while ago, the Economist Brian Kaplan saying, there's a fact that should reassure and terrify you in equal measure, which is since the rise of ISIS or Islamic terrorism, it has been possible for someone to smuggle themselves into the United States and quite easily purchase a firearm and go on a shooting rampage. And as Alex has pointed out, it's very rare. But it has happened. It has happened, but I think, you know, it's. Almost all those people are people born in the United States, so that Orlando shooter is born in the United States. However, the shooter in San Bernardino at the end of 2015, he was born in the U.S., but his wife was not. She was, I believe, Pakistani when she came over. So they killed 14 people in that attack, but that was the deadliest terrorist attack committed by a foreigner on U.S. soil since 9-11 was killed 14 people in that one attack. So heightening restrictions by country, would that be something that you'd be okay with for terrorism? Because, again, Iran is not France or Iran is not Italy. So saying that Iranians have to get extra screening but only for those things, would that, would you be okay with that? Yes, yeah, I absolutely would be okay with allocating scarce government resources on security checks more to certain populations based on estimates of terrorism or crime based on things like that. I think that's totally reasonable. What's interesting about the Iranian zone and the countries that are on this list that Trump put on this list is there were, when I talk about the Americans killed in terrorism, there are other terrorists from those countries who tried to commit an attack on the U.S. during that time period. So you add up those seven countries, the people convicted of planning an attack or trying to do an American soil, there were 17 people. What's interesting with the Iranians though there were six of them, five of them in the late 1970s were convicted of terrorism because they were planning on trying to kidnap a Minnesota elected official and holding him ransom and they ended up doing it for like a couple hours and they were convicted of, that was considered terrorism at the time. There was one guy in North Carolina more recently who drove his car and hit somebody with it, didn't kill anybody but he was convicted of terrorism and that's who most of these types of people are or they are people who are pushed by the FBI so that there's the stirred people, psychological problems, the FBI finds them, maybe these people don't like America and the FBI sort of pushes them over the edge, gives them a fake bomb, a fake plan, tells them to go out there and plan a terrorist attack, they help out and then these people do and then they get arrested. Now I don't have a problem with those people being incarcerated, those probably are people who would do harm in one way or another. One way or another, I mean, like you have to be a special kind of person to go for that in the first place so I don't feel any sympathy for them. But it's kind of systemic problem you were saying. Well yeah, this is not a problem that's huge and it probably is blown out of proportion by the FBI and the government law enforcement trying to push people in that direction but even with that, I think it's remarkable how few deaths we have from terrorism on US soil, especially since, I mean, I remember after 9-11, everybody, it was like common wisdom, people said oh, this is the first of many, there are gonna be so many terrorist attacks going forward, they're gonna be nuclear or chemical or biological, they're gonna crash airplanes and everything, they're gonna shoot up malls like every weekend or crash trains. It's remarkable how few have been and John Mueller at Ohio State University has done a remarkable amount. And our colleague here. And our colleague here who's an inspiration for a lot of my work on this and he advised me on it and taken a look at some of these threats by visa category and it's just remarkably small threats. We can put up a link to the episode of Free Thoughts that John was on where he discusses some of that risk. I mean, and we can talk about that too, like one of the things that Trump talked about and what people are really worried about is refugees. So I decided to take a look at how many refugees have come into the US since 1975, see how many terrorist attacks they've committed, how many Americans they've killed. This is from any country. This is from any country coming to the United States. A refugee from Myanmar or anywhere. Anywhere, Vietnam, Cuba, anywhere. The reason why I took my report back to 1975 was because I had to go back that far to find a refugee who successfully killed somebody in a terrorist attack. Really, okay. There were three. This is a guy's name that you know. Yes. Yeah, it's that specific. It's that specific. So I, yeah, I can get you the guy's name. You don't need to tell me now. I was just like, it is that specific. It's not just pure numbers on a page. Now these are actual names of Cuban refugees, actually, who were involved in a couple of assassinations in the late 1970s, which counts as terrorism in the United States. So if we take a look at that, we include all those. I found out that your chance of being killed in a terrorist attack on USO committed by a refugee is 1 in 3.6 billion a year. So that's a very small chance of being killed by a refugee terrorist attack. How does that compare to say some of the things like being hit by a car or being murdered by an American? So I like to compare it to murder because terrorism is more similar to that. You know, it's an intentional sort of action.  So I try to avoid those. I don't think they work. So I try to avoid those comparisons. But when you compare to say just normal homicide during that time period, there were about 768,000 homicides in the US during that time period. So your chance of being murdered is about 1 in 14,000. So when you take a look at the, so that's somewhere around 200, you're around 255,000 times as likely to be just in a normal homicide murdered than be killed in a refugee terror stack per year. Aside from refugees, which is a different case because there, as we've talked about you and me personally, the immigrants who make a choice to come to a country are a very different class of people than en masse fleeing of everyone who, but for what's happening in their country, they would stay in it. So it's a different kind of person, correct? So I wanna make two distinctions here. Refugee and asylum or asylum seeker are often thrown together. They're very different. So an asylum seeker I think is what you're describing. As somebody who comes to your country and asks to be allowed in because if they get sent back, they're gonna be persecuted and abused. A refugee, however, is somebody who is overseas outside of their home country, but in another country and they fled for those reasons and they're asking or they want to come to the United States. The thing is, refugees are selected by the US government. We have a horrible system for refugees for a lot of reasons, but in terms of safety and minimizing threats from terrorism or other national security threats, it's pretty good because the government basically selects these people from the beginning and they go through over 20 different rounds of checks. Now security checks, other checks, interviews with them, interviews with people from their supposed hometown to make sure that they are who they say they are. The United Nations does interviews and then they usually try to take a look at the databases in their home countries or other countries that they've been to in the meantime. And at any step along the way, they can be rejected because there's any kind of doubt about their intentions or origins. Now, of course it's not perfect. There have been over three million refugees since the late 70s who have come to the United States and some of them, there have been 20 terrorism convictions for trying to plan or commit an attack here on US soil, so it's obviously not perfect, but they're wildly unsuccessful and the government does actually a decent job of screening them by basically blocking almost everybody. But if we opened it up to say all the Syrian refugees or let's just, I mean refugees, let's stay with immigrants right now. It's sort of a separate issue, but if we opened it up to a lot of people like every person in the Middle East who would want to come here, it seems that one of the things that we would have to be concerned with is that they don't share our values and I don't necessarily mean that we don't eat the same food as they do, but they're not liberal, democratic, free speech, things like this, they want to impose Sharia law and if enough of them, things like this and if enough of them come to say Oklahoma City, which from what I hear has a big problem with Sharia law or at least is always trying to ban it, they could do it. 200,000 Muslim immigrants all decided to go to Oklahoma City could vote to put Sharia law into Oklahoma City and that seems like something we should really be concerned with. So what's interesting is this like for normal immigration, people decide to come, there's a self selection mechanism, like the immigrants who come from country X or from the Middle East are not a random selection of people from the Middle East that hold the average sort of Middle Eastern value or Muslim value in terms of those issues. What they are is people who decide they want to leave their home country, come to the United States for working opportunity, they like to take those types of risks, they're ambitious, they don't mind being away from the culture they're born into, they don't mind being surrounded by people of other religions, they don't mind having to learn another language, types of people who are not typically the type of people who want to impose Sharia law or force their way of life on to other people. So this is crucial self selection mechanism and when you take a look at it in polling data, it actually comes out starkly. So Muslims in the Middle East and other places around the world usually have pretty bad opinions outside the United States on things like violence, genital mutilation of women, the role of religion in the state, lots of illiberal values that were all, I think, rightly abhorred by. But the Muslims in the United States have opinions on these issues that are very similar to that of non-Muslim Americans, very similar to that of native born Americans, so much so that they basically look like they're like four or five years behind other Americans in terms of their opinion on a lot of these liberal issues. So if you think like Americans from 2013, who was a time machine, came over here and they'd vote to impose like these horrible policies on us, then I- They make us all listen to that Psy song. What was it? You're asking the wrong guy, man. Oh, come on. I was looking at me.  But continue, sorry. Oh, well, I was gonna, so expanding it, not just expanding it wider than the Middle East and Muslims, a complaint I sometimes hear from my right-leaning friends is, yeah, well, of course, Democrats or people on the left like immigrants because they're all liberal. And they all want a welfare state and they don't believe in these conservative American entrepreneurial values. And I wonder how true is it that the rest of the world is actually very left-wing and that the people from the rest of the world that come to America are especially left-wing. Is there evidence that immigrants in the second and third generation do have a significant impact on American politics? So- Or in one direction. Yes, of course, they have an impact, but in a particular direction. So what's interesting is, I believe it's Pew comes out with surveys every couple of years or so where they ask people in different countries whether they like free markets or socialism or some kind of mix. And what's interesting is like, I think it was Bangladesh in Vietnam had the most support for free markets. The United States was better than most other countries, but we're not the exceptional outlier that we like to think we are in terms of public opinion. We like the rhetoric, I think, of freedom in free markets. We don't quite, in terms of the political system, appreciate them nearly as much as the rhetoric might suggest. But what about their impact on public policies? So I've done extensive research on this and it's true that immigrants do disproportionately vote Democratic. Now, that's been true since about 1798 for the Democratic Party or the predecessor to that party that had different names at different times. Even when the Democratic Party was a free market party. So the reason why that is is that in 1798, the Federalist Party at that time, which was sort of the nationalist economic protectionist party, which was popular in the cities, decided to run on an anti-Irish, anti-Catholic platform. And immigrants then, as now, are majority Catholics. And they, of course, reacted by not voting for the party that said that they were bad. They voted for the party that treated them like human beings. And that trend has lasted throughout the 19th century and it even lasted without a change after the Democrats went from being the relatively pro-free market party to the relatively anti-free market party that became the progressive party. That trend continued. What's remarkable is that today, so, and that has continued to this day where the Republican Party is the party more critical of immigration, more critical of the groups that these immigrants come from, the ethnic and racial groups that tend to be more harshly worded, they tend to be worried about the impact of immigration, they elect officials who are worried about it, and they tend to want to crack down on it. So the main reason why immigrants vote for Democrats is not because of their opinions on public policies, it is because of the fact of identity politics that the Republican Party doesn't like them, says it doesn't like them, and the Democratic Party is nice to them. Now, the reason why I say it's not because of public opinions is because the general social survey every couple of years does huge by surveys of households and individuals in the United States, and it divides it up by first generation, second, third, fourth, any generation you can find, and when you poll immigrants, their opinions on public policy, on whether taxes should be higher or lower, on whether welfare should be greater or less, whether social security should be expanded, et cetera, on almost every single category, on whether conservative or liberal, it is within the margin of error compared to native-born Americans by every generation and compared to those who are fourth generation or greater in the United States. The small differences that do exist on these issues, when you compare immigrants who are citizens who have naturalized, who have been here for a while, their opinions are even closer to natives on all of these issues. It's the immigrants who are non-citizens who haven't been here very long, who can't vote yet, who have the opinions that are most likely to be different. Now, though, of course, the two issues where there are differences that are systematic, well, there's really three issues. The first one is which political party you consider yourself a member of, big differences for the reasons I described. The second issue is on immigration. Immigrants think that immigration is good for America, there should be more of it. Now, I think that those two things are linked. I think that the opinion of immigrants on immigration and the opinion of the Republican Party are so mismatched that it is very difficult for them and their descendants, at least initially, to not support them. And all the small differences I described go away by the second generation. They're totally blood in, no systematic differences in terms of opinion. The other issue, by the way, is marijuana. So immigrants tend to be against marijuana legalization, which is bad, but it could be a lot worse. Now, one of the issues with that that people raise is, oh, well, you need to take a look at countries of origin. And unfortunately, the sample sizes and the general social survey are not big enough to be able to come up with that. To like figure out Guatemalan. Yeah, or Mexican versus Chinese versus like French. They're not big enough to be able to figure that out. But what's super interesting is when you narrow down the years, because the social survey you could take a look at in a year. So when you take a look at the last 10 years, where the stock of immigrants in the U.S. is pretty similar to those who have come in or coming in now, you know, mostly Hispanic and Asian, overwhelmingly Hispanic and Asian, the results are no different than they were in the 1970s when there are mostly European immigrants who are living in the United States. So it doesn't appear to matter where they are from when they get here. So the answer to my trivia question was Gangnam style, which you should have known that, Matthew, which is for our 2013, Matthew's looking to be very, like I should not have known that. For the 2013 Time Traverse, he would come here now and he would wonder how he elected Donald Trump as president. And so let's talk about some of those things that Trump, who of course ran on immigration, is probably his biggest concern. And sorry, I wanna jump in with one thing, because we just talked about the political impact of immigration and institutions. Everyone, at least on the free market side, who's opposed to, who favors immigration restrictions has been saying, we need to stop immigration because they're gonna ruin our political and economic institutions. And the guy who was doing that more than anybody else is the most anti-immigrant candidate, which is Donald Trump. But it's not, if Donald Trump had a vowel at the end of his name and came from Latin America, everyone would be saying, you know, El Trumpo or something, everyone would be saying, oh, look at how these immigrants are undermining our political institutions. We can't have any more of them. But the guy from New York, he's got blonde hair and he's a white guy, so people don't say that. Trump Piscote, if he was Trump Piscote, or if he took his oath of office wearing, you know, military medals and military gear, like he should have. But anyway, let's talk about some of these things. Okay, that's the wall. So immigrants are pouring over the border. It's unsecured. They're, we've talked about how they're not maybe doing these things, you think, but I keep hearing they're pouring over the border. And it's absurd to have a border that is as open as the U.S. and Mexico border. You can't really have a country if you don't have a secure border. So why shouldn't we have a wall and not just a, you know, a fence, like an effective wall. A huge wall. A huge wall. Yeah, in other word, Trump has ruined. Big wall, bigly wall, whatever. Why shouldn't we have one and then deal with immigration in a more constrained way, be able to deal with the problem without having to worry about the border too? So the issue is that the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border is near a 45 year low. There were more in the late 70s coming today. The Big Surge during Reagan, Clinton, Bush, all that stuff is over. The Great Recession in the United States killed the housing market where a lot of these folks worked in. There's been more enforcement in terms of more border patrol to stop some of them from coming in. And the economies in Mexico and Central America have improved and there's fewer people in this generation than there were in the last one who are able to come. The combination of these factors has really shrunk the number of illegal immigrants who are crossing the border and coming in through that means. So the border, while might have been an effective tool for enforcement 15 or 20 years ago, it is not an effective tool today, just given how few illegal immigrants are coming in across the border and the fact that we have a huge border patrol. So on the Southwest border, there's about 19,000, little less than 19,000 border patrol agents. That's a 2,000 mile border though, I mean. It's a 2,000 mile border, but the number that they have apprehended individually per year, it's about 16 and 2000 per agent per year in 2015. To put that in perspective, that's the lowest it's been as long as we've had this data in the United States, at least since the 1940s in terms of the apprehensions per agent. So the pressure that there is to actually come to this country is a lot less on the Southwest border than people realize. Most of the people coming in illegally now, for the first time in recorded history in the United States anyway, the number crossing the border who were Mexican, the percentage actually dipped below 50% in 2014. It was mostly Central Americans at that point. There were the plurality.  So they show up at the border, they ask for asylum to let in, or they just sneak across and try to get in. So it's a different set of countries, but it's a set of countries that are a lot smaller than Mexico and that have a lot less potential to send people in the United States. And the reason, by the way, and the reason these Central Americans are coming, you've heard this for a while probably, but you say you've heard Mexico has these really strict immigration laws. They fortified their border. Why can't we copy Mexico in terms of their laws? Well, that was really popular from like Rush Lomba and Congressman Ted Poe said this to criticize Mexico in 2010 when Mexico criticized Arizona's immigration laws. Now Mexico, to their credit, heard these criticisms and they changed their laws around 2010, 2011. They passed new laws that substantially liberalized immigration, very much decreased border security on their southboard and made it easier to go to Mexico legally, made it easy for Central Americans to come in and get a permit to work or to do that. And that is the reason why more Central Americans are coming is because they've been able to get into Mexico easier because the United States pressured Mexico to not be so hypocritical in its immigration laws. Now Obama kind of went back on that in 2015 because he wants to outsource American immigration enforcement. He wanted to anyway when he was president to other countries doing our work for us so that he wouldn't suffer the bad publicity and Mexico put some more troops on its border. But still, Mexico, the reason why we had this border surge on Central Americans is because they listened to the U.S. government complaining about Mexican government hypocrisy. But it is an unsecured border, correct? I mean, we have 19,000 troops, but it's an unsecured border. They're not troops. Or officers, yes. Yeah, valiant border patrol bureaucrats. No, border patrol officers doing this way.   But in terms of the danger of these folks coming across, the flow, the numbers of people coming across, it's very manageable. It's much more secure than it was in the past. There are, especially around urban areas where people live, the amount of security is superb. In terms of that, cities along the border have lower crime rates than cities on the interior of the United States. Cities in the United States with higher Hispanic, first and second generation immigrants have lower crime rates than other cities in the United States. So the notion that there's this huge surge in crime, I mean, it's just not supported by the facts. And it's true, the border is not 100% secure. Nothing is 100% secure, but it's a lot more secure than it's been in our entire lifetimes. And building a big expensive wall that'll cost between $24 and $32 billion for doing it along half the border, which is what Trump wants to do. On top of another billion dollars per mile per year for, I'm sorry, million dollars per mile per year for maintenance is just not an effective way to get control of this. If we want to get control of it, we need to have a more liberal and open immigration system so that these folks who want to come here illegally, who aren't criminal or national security threats can actually do so legally so that we can actually check them out and let them come in through the front door. In the 1950s, we had two million illegal immigrants who were Mexicans working in the Southwest. The government, instead of cracking down on enforcement, created a large guest worker visa program where they allowed any Mexican to really sign up for it, work in the US on farms temporarily, go back and forth, made it easy for farmers to get these. Border patrol agents sometimes went around and they spot legalized or granted amnesty to Mexican illegal immigrants by giving them a permit, drove them sometimes back to the border then drove them back to their farms the next day to check them out. It cut the number of illegal immigrant border crossers by 95% in one year after this program was instituted and it cut the number of illegal immigrants in the United States by 90% by making them legal. If we actually care about reducing the illegal immigrant population and making sure it doesn't increase in the future, a liberal, more open immigration system is the only way to effectively do it. Can you put in perspective how weird the situation we find ourselves in actually is? And as Trevor mentioned, we're recording this at the end of Trump's first week as president. It's only been a week. And throughout the campaign, I heard this phrase that we've mentioned once before, which is a nation without borders is not a real nation. And aside from using country, state and nation as synonyms, I wonder, right, is the, you know, historically how secure have these borders been? Is it, you know, by this reasoning, it seems like we were not a country by this definition for the first, what, decade, century? A couple, I mean, how weird and recent is the situation we find ourselves in now? Excellent point. From 1790 to 1875, there were no federal immigration restrictions. There was an open border.  Nothing that came later that we think that a lot of people think may be reasonable, like criminals with a sick, none of that. So you're saying, just clarify.  You take the boat to New York in 1870 and you just get off and say, I'm gonna live in New York now and that was okay. So in New York City was one of the handful of sections. You had to land at a place called Castle Island to go through a very, very quick quarantine if you were sick, but they wouldn't send you back. Okay, so Charleston, South Carolina. Yeah, get off the boat, you're there. That's it, I'm now an American. Some states- Or you wouldn't be an American, but you wouldn't be kicked out. Yeah, you wouldn't be an American. The federal government has always had naturalization rules about when it is you can become a citizen. Well, yeah, they couldn't kick you out. Some states had rules that they tried to enforce about things, but I mean, they never really tried that much and the federal government said they couldn't really do that in a series of cases, I believe called the Milne cases that basically struck down those laws and those laws were not really restrictions. They were just like bonds.  So very, very minor restrictions. So that was the case under the first immigration law passed in 1790, which was just, I mean, it didn't even say anything about immigration. It was only naturalization. It said you had to be a good moral character, had to have lived here for five years, had to be white, shamefully. That was the bad part about it. But in terms of the restrictions about being able to come here, zero. That is the traditional original American immigration policy written by many of the founders who were in Congress at the time and signed by President George Washington into effect. So the notion that a country needs immigration restrictions and a severely enforced border in order to actually be a country, that would be surprising to every president from 1789 through 1875. I mean, I don't know if I would be willing to go back in time and tell Abraham Lincoln that he actually doesn't have a real country that he's fighting a civil war over just because there's no immigration controls. What are the biggest costs to these anti-immigration laws, these restrictions on immigration? I mean, Trump says that he wants the wall, but he wants a big open door. But a lot of the people who advise Trump are actually against legal immigration, not just illegal immigration. But when we have these laws that are restricting immigration, like what are the biggest costs that we have to endure as a nation or as people to these laws? Yeah, so Donald Trump in his position paper that he had when he was running for president on immigration, depending on exactly what, it's a little fuzzy at some points, imagine that. But in terms of what he wants to do, in terms of cutting legal immigration, it could cut up to 63% under his plan, legal immigrants coming to the United States. So a fairly dramatic decrease in legal immigration. So I think it's fair to call him at least in his position paper anti-immigration because he opposes a lot of legal immigration. But what are the big costs to Americans? I mean, the big cost is that we will miss out on an enormous number of people who are some of the most productive people, most ambitious people from their countries to wanna come here to work, to set up shop, to be entrepreneurs, to found businesses. As a result, they will not invent the things they wanna invent because they wanna come to this country because we have better institutions and there are better wages as a result of that. Sergei Bren, who was a Soviet refugee to the United States who co-founded Google when he was older, would not have been able to create Google if he stayed in Russia or the Soviet Union. I sort of get sad thinking about it, but how many other Googles, how many other dramatic, incredible firms were not created because people like Sergei Bren were not allowed? I mean, another example of that that I love is Andrew Carnegie. Born in Scotland, 1836, I believe it was immigrated to the United States in 1848. He, through hard work, determination and entrepreneurial talent, founded a series of firms that ended up being merged together over what was called US Steel, which was the first billion dollar corporation employed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans. Created an enormous value by producing steel more efficiently at lower price than anybody else. Or just a local restaurant or plumbing company or tri-cleaner. And it goes down to that. So immigrants are twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans. And a place like New York City, about 36% of the population is foreign-born, 48% of the businesses right in that city now are owned and were started by immigrants. People are not a drain on the economy. People are good for the economy. People are creative, they are workers, not just mouths who need to eat and consume things. They make things. And the things that they make does not display, they do not displace other Americans by doing so. They increase the size of the economic pie and they increase it a lot more when they're here in this country than they do in their home countries. Thanks for listening. This episode of Free Thoughts was produced by Tess Terrible and Evan Banks. To learn more, visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.


AJ won't talk too much about it, but what do you think it would mean for him to get a thousand yards as a rookie? I mean, well, that seems to be, you know, universally over the course of, you know, the last 20 or 30 years, you know, the thousand yards has always been a benchmark, if you will, of whether you had a productive season or not, which isn't always the case. But, you know, anytime you can do that, it means a lot to any receiver. Should he be in the talk and the running for a rookie of the year? Yeah, that's for the fans to, you know, make that decision, you know, but, you know, I think he certainly put himself in the running for it. Rob, what do you try to emphasize as his position coach now that everyone is keying on him because he is having production? This is where the kind of the hard part comes in for him, right? No, I think he always goes, comes back to fundamentals, you know. He has to make sure that he's fundamentally sound week in and week out because that's what leads to part of productivity. Corey, on the other hand, how has it been for him that, you know, he just seems to jump right in, got his spotlight, got a ton of targets. How has he handled that? Every receiver wants to ball more. That's just the nature of the position. But, you know, I think Corey's done a great job of really not mentoring him, but supporting him. He's done a great job. And your group has been dented and dinged this time of the year. Adarius Jennings, good to have him sitting there that knows the system, knows what to do, can help in the returning game, but help with your group too. Without question, I think the thing that sometimes gets overlooked with him is the fact that he's a true pro. You know he's going to be prepared, you know he's going to know what to do. So anytime you have a guy like that that you can plug and play, there's a comfort level with that.


After months of teasing the idea, Joe Biden finally made the announcement that the government is going to offer some student loan debt relief. For many people, this will be $10,000, and for public loan recipients, they could have up to $20,000 of student loan debt wiped away. While there are a lot of people celebrating this announcement, there are many people on the way who are upset about this quote-unquote end-out in a country where college is almost mandatory to make a living wage and has a history of giving trillions of dollars to the rich, I thought we could discuss the moral case for student loan debt forgiveness. And during this process, we're going to be pointing out a lot of the hypocrisy coming from the rich as well as conservatives on the right because of all the money that they've taken in. I've often said that if people truly understood the vast amount of money that's given out as, you know, welfare to the rich and to the right, their minds would explode. And I brought along a very special guest to help me discuss this. All right, everybody, real quick before we jump into this thing, just a really quick update about the channel. First off, welcome to everybody who's new. I really appreciate it. Everybody who's come along as I come back to YouTube. A lot of you are longtime subscribers. I appreciate you for sticking around while I did the podcast thing. And now I'm back. But yeah, everybody that's new, it's awesome. I'm really glad to regrow this thing and create a new awesome community with this different type of video and covering these different topics. But real quick, because it took such a long break, the YouTube algorithm hates me. So if you could all do me a favor, just as a little behind the scenes with how the algorithm, how the algorithm, how the algorithm works, please like, comment, share, tell people about it, because that really helps out. Because naturally, YouTube pushes out certain videos and everything like that. But since I've been gone for so long and stopped doing that, when you engage with the video, when you like it, comment, share, all that kind of stuff, YouTube's like, Oh, this might be decent. So if you could do me that one simple favor, doesn't cost you a penny, helps me out a ton. I'd really, really appreciate it. So we can get this out there because I'm planning on covering a lot of super important topics, a lot of interesting topics. And I plan on continuing to bring on guests for any of you who follow the podcast. I know a ton of authors who are researchers, academics, philosophers like the dude joining me today. So yeah, hope to get this message out there and all this content. All right. But anyways, let's discuss what we're talking about today. All right, let's do the loan debt forgiveness. So I think it's important to start out by, you know, addressing the fact that we were all kind of sold on this idea that college is the way to go. All right. But I'm 57 years old, so I'm a millennial. And growing up, they were like, Hey, this is what you do.  And because this idea was sold to so many people, college degrees have actually been diluted quite a bit.  So that's kind of where we're going to start with talking about the student loan debt forgiveness. And today I brought along Aaron. Okay, so he's the host of the embrace the void podcast. Make sure you check it out. Aaron has a ton of great guests. And he talks about philosophy along social issues. Very cool guy. He was on the podcast a while ago. I went on his awesome. But yeah, he joined me today. And let me check my notes. So I don't screw this up. So Simon being a podcast host, he's also a PhD student in the Rutgers Graduate School of Education.  And here's why I asked him to come on. He made a tweet the other day. And I'm like, hmm, that's interesting. Because Aaron really looks through that lens of moral philosophy and morality is important. Because when you look at just about every argument and dispute that we have, whether it's about political topics, social issues, or even just debates and arguments between us when we get upset, they're all coming from a moral place. What I think is right when you think's right, where we bump heads and all that. So I love moral philosophy. And I thought anyone would be the perfect guess to discuss this issue. So as I understand it, we have a really severe kind of debt crisis where lots of individuals are sort of in a position where they can't discharge these loans, they can't pay them off, will never be able to pay them off, things like that. And there's, you know, a big complicated history of how we got here involving a mix of cultural valuing of higher education and trying to make it accessible to everyone in a way that I think is good, combined with predatory lending, combined with sort of overselling the economic benefits of that education, etc., you know, on and on. And so, you know, we end up at this place where I think as a culture, we face a serious crisis where if we don't do something about this, you're going to have sort of like a generation kind of loss to endless debt that can't, you know, have children or buy a house or any of these sorts of things, things that we think are important for or that could be important for a good life, or that we think are socially beneficial. So the problem is, how do we back our way out of this crisis? And there we have this problem of democracy, where we have to convince everyone that it's okay to forgive all of these loans. And there we run up against this really, these terrible, I think, kind of moral arguments about who deserves what, essentially. So it's all about desserts. And it's all about choices.  And, you know, not to get too far into the weeds, but I just basically think it's both kind of irrational in a self-interested sense to be against the kind of student loan forgiveness we're talking about, and also immoral in a sense that there's no way to consistently be against this without, I think, sliding towards some other deeply immoral kinds of perspectives, essentially the kind of conservative bootstrapping, you know, the poor deserve to be poor kind of arguments that I think a lot of people who are potentially skeptical about this particular sort of issue would not be in favor, I think, of that larger sort of package. And so I think they should be going in the other direction and sort of accepting the realities that, like, luck dominates our lives on every level.  And that, like, it's not, it isn't really worth ultimately trying to, like, punish other people who made different choices because you think that they deserve those consequences or you think that it's more fair or just or something like that, which is not to say that fairness never matters, but just that in this particular situation, I think, trying to demand a kind of retributive fairness is just going to sort of be, it's going to be like one of those psychological studies where people do things that are harmful to their own self-interest, feel overly motivated to punish people who they think are wrongdoers. So in the 20th century, you used to be able to get a decent job, even if you were a high school graduate. But then America really started pushing that idea of going to college. Jobs wanted more educated workers, so going to college became the norm. Unfortunately, as we made going to college the norm, the college degree has been diluted, and this has been going on for a while. To give you an idea, in 1960, roughly 7.7% of Americans had college degrees, and now it's 37.5%. So this is from an article titled Bachelor's Degree, Generation-Wise High School De Pola. They say Rita McGrath, Associate Professor at Columbia Business School, said that as more people get college degrees, the more a college degree becomes a commodity. Quote, having a bachelor's used to be more rare, and candidates with the degree could therefore be more choosy and were more expensive to hire. Today, that is no longer the case, McGrath said. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, during the time period between 2002 and 2012, the number of people with undergraduate degrees increased by 25%. The growth in the master's and Ph.D. programs was even stronger. Master's degrees increased 43% or by about 5 million people in the past decade. For graduates, the number increased 45%, equating to about 1 million people. This growth, she said, is indicative of a degree arms race. So yeah, we were sold on this idea, like go to school, don't worry, get those loans. Get those loans, because with this degree, you're going to get a great job making a ton of money and you'll be able to pay that thing back. Easy, alright? And we're going to talk a bit about this and some other stories, but my mom, she got a Ph.D., she's a psychologist, right? And this was, it must have been like 20 years ago. She is still paying that loan back. So when you get adopted, that could be upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars. So again, we're told that if you get this degree, you're going to do a great job making some money. And this isn't me bragging at all, okay? But I dropped out of college after a semester. I just kind of looked around. My main reason for dropping out was I was struggling to get by in college, since my credit was terrible. You know, the government loans was only paying for my classes and my housing, but I couldn't do anything else. So I decided to drop out, just start working. I always planned on going back to school, but I never end up going. But anyways, what I was going to say is today, I make and have made more money than a lot of people with college degrees. And again, that's not a brag, but that's a point because we're sold on the idea that you have to go to college to get a good job and make money, then you don't got to worry about student loans. So why on earth is a guy like me without a degree making more money than people with a bachelor's and some people even with a master's degree? All right? So some people, some people out there, ignore what they say that we should not give student loan debt forgiveness because college is a choice, right? You decided to go to college. So because of that choice, you should have to pay it back, right? This isn't quote unquote, fair to other people. But one of the things I wanted to ask and about is, is this really a choice?  Because something I've been thinking about a lot lately is the people who became victims of these like predatory student loans, a lot of them come from bad backgrounds. They were sold on the idea that going to college is going to get them out of that situation. They were taken advantage of by these lenders, right? Put in these situations of debt that are so hard to get out of. And oftentimes the the high class, the higher upper class people who are arguing against this, they were taught from a young age how all this stuff works. They're also in a better position to pay them back. If they fail and can't pay back their loan, most of them have family members who will do that. You know what I mean? So there's a lot of moral luck involved with who this benefits. But when we're talking about deserves, right? Who deserves what? Something that I can't wrap my head around that I'm sure you think about this all the time is this sort of cognitive dissonance, especially from conservatives, because the amount of money that we have given to the rich and corporations, right? Because, you know, Reagan sold America on this idea of trickle down economics, like we have to save them or everybody else is screwed. And my life sure hasn't improved with the trillions of dollars going to these big banks and companies. You know what I mean? So how do you so like looking at that moral argument, how do you think people are justifying? Oh, it's okay. Like we've seen Ben Shapiro, Stephen Crowder, right? Who took these PPP loans, say, Oh, you guys don't deserve $10,000. Even though we see all of these people who have gotten millions or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. How do you think they rationalize that from a moral standpoint? Yeah. So I mean, I think there's there's either two ways these kind of arguments are going to go. Either you're going to argue that this should come down to everybody gets to act in their own self interest. And it's in my self interest to not have my money go towards paying off someone else's loan. Or they're going to say, you know, it's an immoral thing to do, whether or not it's in anybody's self interest, right? So there's kind of two debates to be had there. If it's, you know, if it's the first one, if it's the like, self interest is what matters, you know, like, I think the evidence, as I said, points towards doing loan forgiveness because it's good for the economy and the improving the economy is good for everyone. So as you mentioned, the kind of trickle down idea, I'm just wrapping up reading Piketty's or Capital 21st Center, something like that. And that's been really great and interesting. And at one point, he highlights, you know, the sort of failures, as you say, of the trickle down model that we haven't seen an improvement. What we've seen is a pooling of wealth amongst a very small number of individuals. So, you know, my view is that like, we like that model doesn't work.  So from a purely self interested perspective, I think everyone should be advocating for a pretty radical redistribution of wealth as a way to fund the paying off of large amounts of debt here. And like, I think this is important because a lot of the psychology that I feel like I'm seeing around this issue is a kind of scarcity mentality. I think implicit in a lot of people's thinking is I sacrifice scarce resources to do this thing while paying it off. And I don't want my scarce resources to go towards someone else's excesses, essentially, right, acting like we are a very poor culture or country when in fact we are quite the opposite, right? Like if we were to exercise our tax programs properly, right, we could redistribute a lot of wealth and, you know, reduce a lot of these debt burdens on lower income individuals without having to do like substantial harm to like middle income tax brackets, right? So I think people should be in favor of that. Now there's a sort of separate straight up moral question about like, well, people made choices, and they deserve to experience the consequences, right?  It's nobody else's fault I chose to go gambling or something like that, right? Now you, as an individual that's experienced with addiction, will immediately be thinking, yeah, but did you choose to go gambling a bunch? In what sense did you really choose that, right? And I think that's the reasonable pushback here as well, because everyone's like, well, you chose to take on all those loans. And I'm like, didn't we all grow up in the 90s and all of us, but like a lot of us having this conversation on Twitter, right? The ones who are too old to have jumped to Instagram and too young to be mostly arguing on Facebook, right? So the people we talked to on Twitter, we all grew up in a period where it was like, college is the solution. There was no debate, right?  And unfortunately, some of them are like, you know, also now angry about the situation. Though I think we, you know, we have to have a conversation about that as well. But anyway, you know, we told everybody this was the golden ticket, right? Do this thing.  I think a lot of them. And, you know, at an age in which like, we know that you are not well developed psychologically for thinking about the long-term consequences of your choices, right?  It's not just the golden ticket, but it's like the best period where you're on your own and you get to hang out with friends and live in a nice walkable neighborhood for the only time in your life, etc, right? So like, we really heavily sold this.  Like, I just think we're really pull, you know, like trying to pull an about face there that is not justifiable. So as you can see, although you're not making nearly as much with the degree these days, you still need a degree to go and make a decent living. Look at the earnings for people with a bachelor's degree and now look at the earnings for people with a graduate's degree. So we're forcing people to go to college to make a decent wage. Meanwhile, they aren't making nearly as much money as they used to for having that same exact degree. So one of the biggest issues, and this is something that I've been like really trying to get out there lately is that financial literacy in this country is terrible. Like, I don't know about you, but I didn't learn financial literacy for a long time. I had to self educate myself. I had to learn about credit. I had to learn about interest. I had to learn about saving. I had to learn about investing. There's something that I just really started learning about. I'm like, Hey, like I'm in my 30s, maybe I should learn how 401k works and all that. But anyways, what I'm getting at is we're setting these kids up who we never taught how any of these loans work, right? And then we're putting them in this situation where they have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands in student loan debt. So I tweeted this out earlier. And by the way, make sure you're following me on Twitter at the rewired soul. I love chatting with all of you and talking about, you know, current events, different topics. I also love getting book recommendations. But anyways, I tweeted this out earlier. So check it out, you're going to be paying $22,000 more on a $70,000 loan at the average interest rate. But sometimes that interest rate is even higher. So in order for student loan debt forgiveness, this $10,000 or $20,000, most people are going to need a lower interest rate. And sometimes that comes in the form of refinancing and or consolidating your loans. So check it out real quick. When I'm talking about refinancing or consolidating your loans, so refinancing can help lower your interest rates. Sometimes you're switching banks that can't sustain bagel do it. But with the student loan debt forgiveness, these are like certain types of loans. So some of them that you can't even do that with. Okay. But anyways, do me a favor, leave down in the comment below. If any of you like, I love teaching me people about this, because I don't learn about until I was 36. But leave a comment down below if you want to learn a little bit more about refinancing, just personal finance, how this stuff works, because it's insanely complicated. I wish somebody called it to me. So if you want me to make some content or point you in the direction of some resources, leave a comment down below. All right. But one of the things we're talking about interest rates is that we also need to understand that people who are lower income have higher interest rates. Okay. So like I was just showing you in that tweet, it's really important to do the math on these things. When you have a higher interest rate, you're paying more money. So low income people are paying more money on the same loan because more low income people have worse credit scores. Okay. So just to give you an idea of this thing. Okay. Let's say somebody walks into a car dealership, not even talking about loans. Somebody goes into a car dealership and they have a 700 credit score. Okay. They're going to get a certain interest rate. Okay. Maybe five, six percent below or who knows. Right. Then somebody goes into a car dealership and they have a 600 credit score, 100 points lower. Now they might have a 10, 15 percent interest rate. The same exact car is going to cost a lot more money. And something that you'll notice of this as we discuss good old capitalism in the United States, low income people are often paying more money, which doesn't make any sense when you think about that. So now I wanted to talk about the rampant hypocrisy going on on the right when we're talking about this, like people were losing their mind that people are just getting just a little bit, just a little bit of money. Right. And like, if you're like me, if you're progressive like myself, like we wanted a lot more, we wanted a lot of this like to be like, I don't know, all of it, right? Or at least like 50 grand. And these Republicans are losing their minds. And my girlfriend, she actually just graduated with her master's and we're already trying to set things up so you can start paying this insane amount of money off. So it's good timing that this came through. There's a debate to be had that I'm not going to have today about, you know, should what's better, like should we be grateful just because we got something or should it be more not going to get into that today, maybe another time. But anyways, let's talk about how much money is actually going to other people because yeah, Mike and a bunch of other people, but Mike from the Humanist Report, make sure you check out his channel. There's a lot of great political commentary from a progressive point of view, but he made a great video about this the other day and people like Steven Crowder were screaming about this, but he's not alone because Steven Crowder also tweeted student loan forgiveness sounds really nice to illegal immigrants, people with no life experience, people who don't have families yet, and people who use preferred pronouns. Okay, I don't see how any of that is related. But it also sounds like a right wing propagandist like Steven Crowder who had the entirety of his $70,000 plus PPP loan, including the interest forgiven by big daddy governments. Now, after providing the internet with these receipts, Lance from the surface points out every single right winger who is complaining about government handouts or student loan forgiveness are monstrous hypocrites. Their grip depends on selling you big government and social programs bad, while they love taking advantage of them. Exactly. And to be clear, this is somebody who also runs a podcast. How were you affected? How was your business in particular affected during the pandemic? Steven Crowder. In fact, he was downplaying COVID-19. He's an anti-vaxxer. He complained about masking. So if anything, I mean, you should be the least affected by this pandemic. I get that you have employees, but business was still running. Was it not? So why did you need this $70,000 loan from the government that was eventually forgiven? I mean, the way that we could have had our loans forgiven. If we're, you know, being honest here is we could have just started podcasts and taken out PPP loans and then paid off our student debt with that zero interest. I mean, we saw how they've all been forgiven. So if you want to get really upset about this stuff, there are two book recommendations that I have for you that I just finished. One of them is called pandemic ink. And the other one is called the sickness is the system. Both of these books highlight all of the money that not only went to rich people during the pandemic, but also how much money was wasted, mainly because Trump and his administration were running this whole thing, both incompetently and for their own self-interest. Pandemic ink really points this stuff out. The sickness is the system. That's by Professor Richard Wolff. He is like a socialist economist. He's taught me so much about life, how our system works and how we can do things better. But anyways, highly recommend those books, but they'll make you angry. Like they're super informative, but they'll make it bad. Also, I don't know what got into the White House. I actually found out who runs the White House account and it's great. But the White House account on Twitter was going ham. So they made this thread. I'll link it down below so you can enjoy it as much as I did. But here's Marjorie Taylor Greene talking about how we shouldn't have given this forgiveness. And the White House retweets her clip saying that she received $183,000 in PPP loans that were completely forgiven. But then the thread goes on to show other Congress people and their clips telling people like, oh, we shouldn't have done this. But look at this. So Congressman Vern Buchanan got over $2.3 million. Mullen got $1.4 million. Herman got $1 million. Mike Kelly got $987,000. And the list goes on and on. And so, yeah, I think there's absolutely a moral argument that people were encouraged and pressured and coerced and all the kinds of things into this. Even if they weren't though, like take the person who gambles, right? Let's just set aside addiction for a second. I don't think we still want when we want to be a society where that person dies in the gutter. Right? Like we still are a society that fundamentally thinks that we want to have a baseline of well-being even for people who make a lot of really bad choices as consciously as they possibly could. And so I think the same should apply here. Some people like to make the argument, oh, well, people went in and they got degrees in art management or underwater basket weaving or some like, you know, like non-useful gender theory, right? Like this always gets coupled now with the like anti-woke moral panic stuff. And it becomes, you know, people are going and getting useless degrees even though the data doesn't suggest that at all.  Like that's just, it's a ridiculous exception to our rules of forgiveness and compassion. Yeah. Yeah.  So when we talk about ruining someone's life or a decision they made when they were young, you know, like that, that doesn't sit well for me because people made the same exact decisions, had different outcomes. But even the gambling analogy, it drives me nuts just thinking about how every time there's an economic crisis, it's because big banks in Wall Street made large gambles and we're like, oh, we're going to bail them out. So the gambling is okay in this scenario, but not that scenario and the way to justify it. Think about that for a second. Why is it why is it that when rich people get these bailouts, when they get this money, when they get forgiven, why is that justified? Right? Like I when I got sober, one of my main goals was to do my best to not be a hypocrite, right? And to watch these people do these mental backflips of, oh, here's why I I should get that money and have it forgiven. You see this all the time with welfare as well. You see different different people in the same lower class level, right? And here's why I deserve, you know, Medicare and welfare, right? But you don't. Okay. And this has to do with the attribution bias, where are what's going on with us is a lot more nuanced, right? But them is just a flaw in their character. So for example, a low income person over here, right, like a Republican, like, why are so many Republicans who are lower class voting for Republicans who want to gut these programs, right?  Here's why I need government assistance. But then they hear about people on the West Coast or in Los Angeles, like, why do you need government assistance? Why don't you just move got it out, right? And they get this kind of blanket idea, and it's completely messed up. So what really opened my eyes to all this stuff, just about debt as a whole, was this amazing book called can't pay won't pay by Astra Taylor. And she's from the debt collective. And she discusses how big business gets bailed out all of the time, like this isn't just the pandemic. Like, but this is so key to the hypocrisy that we're seeing with how they're taking so much money. Like, do you know how often like these multi billion dollar companies or these multi millionaires are bailed out? Like, one of the ones that really urged me and there's a lot of great videos about this is Elon Musk, right? He is held up on this throne as the self made man, when a his background does not support self made at all, we need to have a whole conversation about what self made means. But also Tesla, SpaceX, these were all government funded, but people like him are against social programs. Like, do you see how hypocritical that is? So not long ago, I wrote this piece over on my substack. If you want to check it out, it's just the rewired soul.substack.com. But I wrote this piece called the COVID corporate bailout nobody is talking about. Because right now, like we're often told that inflation is because so much stimulus money was given to us, even though it was barely enough to survive. Like for most people, those checks did not even cover rent. But one of the actual primary causes of inflation and the massive layoffs is because of how much money the government has given companies that loaded the stock market during COVID. Like, look at this image. This is from my article, but this is around the time that I started investing and I was I could not understand why were all of these stocks reaching their all time highs when we're in a pandemic and businesses are supposed to be struggling. And it's because the government puts so much money into them. And it's not just this either. This has been going on for years. Just think about 2008, the economic crisis of 2008. That was the year that my son was born, and everything was just going downhill. And I'm freaking out. I actually lost my job. But the whole thing that happened there was that the big banks aside from doing shady, shady loans, but they were all gambling with the economy. And then they were bailed out. And if you look around right now, right this very minute, we're passing things like the Chips Act. And we're also passing the Inflation Reduction Act, which is giving multi billion dollar companies a lot more money. And don't even get me started on the Inflation Reduction Act, because a lot of money is going to fossil fuel companies, even though this is supposed to help the environment. It's undeniable that in the legislative text of the bill, it includes a big buildout of fossil fuels in two huge ways. One, Joe Manchin got put into the bill, a provision that effectively ties the expansion of solar and wind infrastructure development to an expansion of oil and gas leases offshore and onshore. And he went on Fox News and he bragged about this. And he was accurate in how he described it. He said that essentially renewable energy expansion cannot now happen without an expansion of available areas for the fossil fuel industry to drill offshore and onshore. So that's one piece of it. The other piece is this side deal that hasn't been fully fleshed out but has been acknowledged that Manchin got the Democrats reportedly to agree to expedited permitting processes for fossil fuel infrastructure pipelines and the like. So by the way, the side deal is not included in any of the emissions reductions estimates. But if we want to give people $10,000 for $20,000, let's do the low debt forgiveness, that's an issue. So now you might be asking, Chris, why has this been going on? Why is this going on so long? Why are so many big companies and rich people taking all this money and we don't want to give it to lower class people? Well, that goes back to this D-bag, Ronald Reagan. So he came up with this idea of trickle down economics. And the whole idea is give a ton of money to rich people, two companies, and what they're going to do is they're going to hire more employees. So it's going to create more jobs. They're going to use that money to give people increases in wages. Do you see? So that's how it's going to work. And you know what? When it said like that, that sounds amazing, but that's not what happened. Because in the capitalist system, capitalists, these capitalist companies are not incentivized to pay workers more. They're not incentivized to hire more workers. They are incentivized to make more profits for their shareholders. So if they can do that with less people, if they can do that by paying their employees less money, then none of that money that's getting injected in the top is trickling down. Like we're constantly told that all this money needs to go up top because it's going to benefit us. It's going to benefit the economy. And I don't know about you, but I haven't seen anything trickle down to us, right? So when we're talking about student loan debt forgiveness, even this little amount, it's like we've been doing this for decades. It's clearly not working. A lot of people are struggling, barely getting by, barely able to put gas in their car, barely able to put food on the table, barely to keep a roof over their head. Right? Like we need to try something else. But anyways, the last thing I wanted to talk about here and I asked Aaron about is something that, you know, it's kind of weird to think about and it's about how we have free education all through high school. Why isn't there free college? But let me ask you this, this one last thing because this, this keeps coming up and it's something I've been thinking about, but they talk about how, you know, K through 12 public schooling is free, right? A lot of countries, you know, you can at least get like an associates, like what are your thoughts on just getting rid of this whole thing and just having a national, like nationalizing college. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I would say and, you know, like get rid of the student loan system. Like it's hard because a lot of places are going in the opposite direction. So like Australia, for a long time, had effectively free higher education and they have moved towards increased privatizing and like you get loans, but you don't have to start paying them off until you have a decent, you know, like a job or stuff like that. There's various sort of complications to it. But like, it seems to me that we should be going in the direction of again, redistributing large quantities of wealth and income to make either a, you know, bachelor's, an undergrad or, you know, some sort of equivalent training, effectively free for everyone, right? Like that just seems like a very valuable thing as a society to put our resources towards. And I think in a way that doesn't make it too, that doesn't like try to make it constraining, right? So we don't want it to be a system where you can get an undergrad, but only if it's in a degree that we decide is valuable, right?  Like most people, you know, like a lot of the degrees for, like a PhD level stuff, a lot of folks will tell you if they're not going to pay for the degree, don't go for it. Like never pay for like, especially in philosophy, like never pay for a PhD in philosophy, because like, you're not going to reliably have a job option. So if you create a situation in which people don't think they're going to reliably have good job options, like what do you, what sort of pathway are you creating for people at this point? So yeah, I think moving as far in that direction as we possibly can feels like one of the many obvious things that we should be doing that, of course, we won't because we don't have a functioning legislature, a functioning government. And because we have like these, these really weird ethical reactions to the redistributing of wealth for, you know, the sake of greater equity in these kinds of ways. Like I just, if people like that, that was the point of the tweet, right? If $10,000 is your cutoff point, where you're like, well, that seems unfair. We're, we're like, there's no chance. We have no hope of doing, of like pulling the levers that are large enough to like divert the energy the way we need to. So I think people just need to like understand that if you actually want to see things get better, you're going to need to swallow a much larger kind of pill of what feels like unfairness for you. Yeah. So I hope you're leaving this video with a few things to think about, to think about how we help each other out. And maybe if you're a panel like I am to rethink how we're talking to children about college, because we're kind of in this tough situation where college is mostly needed to get a decent job and make a living wage. But as we're seeing that's not the things anymore with the dilution of the college degrees with editorial loans, you know, and one of the things that I feel that I have to do as a father is to start educating my son about financial literacy like I was talking about earlier, because it's not tied in schools. It's not common schools at all unless you purposely go and seek it out. If you purposely take some kind of finance course, you know what I mean? So with my son, I'm going to talk to him about education and is it worth it? And to look at these careers and is it going to, you know, be able to pay your student loans back and all of that? Or should you pay out of pocket? Because in my situation, I the only reason that I'm making more than some people who actually have degrees is because I've had to work 10 times as hard. All right. So there's that's like the trade off. I didn't go to school, but I've had to work my way out. I wasn't able to just hit the ground running. And let's not forget, I spent almost a decade of my life as a drug addict. So that definitely got me back a little bit as well. But so it is possible, but it depends on the industry. But kind of like what Aaron was talking about, too, I don't think that we should have to live in a society like that, where people do have to work that much harder should they choose not to go to college. And if they do choose to go to college, we should be able to guarantee them some kind of job that could pay their loans back. But there's so much more that goes into this that's discussed by people a lot smarter than me about how we need to restructure how we pay for college, how the loans work. Like even if you don't want to go full on free college, we need to discuss how expensive colleges because it's getting really crazy how much people are having to pay just for education. And there's a whole conversation to be had about how a lot of people are just graduating without learning much because college has turned into this capitalist industry where it's more about making money than actually educating people. And I have other videos planned out because college is something that I'm very passionate about. But I have future videos planned out about educationism, like about, you know, do you really need education? What does it actually mean? What does it mean for low income people to actually get in to a good college? There's so, so many conversations just about college. And it's something that we press on so many people to this day. We need to have better conversations about it. All right. But anyways, another huge thanks to Aaron for taking the time to come on, hit him up out of nowhere and be like, yo, come on here and talk about it. So huge thanks to Aaron. Make sure you take out the description. Make sure you follow him over on Twitter. Check out his podcast Embrace the Void. But yeah, Aaron, he's constantly taking a look at all sorts of things going on in politics, social issues. He's writing papers. I'm like, love the dude. He has great book recommendations. He's awesome. So make sure you give him a follow. Okay, but before I let you go, just a quick reminder, the YouTube algorithm is doing me dirty. So if you could leave a like, leave a comment, share it. If you're not subscribed yet, make sure you do that. All of those things really help out. I have so many videos planned out. And if I'm being honest, I struggle to work full time and then justify making these super long videos, when they're not getting that many views. But I'm getting a lot more views than I expected. I am very grateful. I love each and every one of you. But we can do better. We can grow this lovely little community. All right. But anyways, that's all I got for you this time. And yeah, I have some more videos coming out very soon. Might be in the next day or two that I'm going to be releasing that sandbag video I'm working on. So make sure you stay tuned.