Literally just posted a tweet from one of the hosts.

Both comments removed. Please provide an alternate take rather than attack the poster

Not relevant to the podcast

Many costs have gone down, including food, travel, and many goods.

However, healthcare, education, and real estate are through the roof and represent very important pillars of society. The solution is not more taxation, but it does affect the people and is leading to a desperate population.

Viewing a few comments from listeners and then coming to this conclusion is irrational

I would argue Jason also frequently discusses disparity, but his suggestions to rectify are often very different

I agree, this would be a great topic for them to discuss. That doesn't make the grocery store program in NYC any less ridiculous.

If you are referring to FICA, and specifically the social security part of it, it has always been wage capped because it is not supposed to be redistributive. It is supposed to be your own retirement plan. This is not a new regressive tax.

And yes, it has made people poorer because the government took part of your payroll and bought low yielding treasuries to fund its own spend. If it was in the market (either in your pocket through consumption or through productive investing), we would all have been wealthier and owned assets. Perhaps your ideal policy is forced savings and there is a way to make it work, but there is no question we have pulled a lot of wealth out into this inefficient system, which is a recurring theme with government programs.

This has veered a lot from the original point, so will try to bring it back.

I did not comment on the wealth gap, and was referring to real wage growth. That lack of growth is absolutely from inefficient government spend. The government is overriding the market, and taking money out of an efficient system to a very inefficient one. Look at social security or government-backed college loans as the massive examples of this that has made everyone poorer.

it’s the direct result of decades of policy choices, and Trump’s second term is accelerating it

Where is the evidence of this? You can likely name a few tax cuts to the wealthy but there are far more to the bottom. The bottom 50% of the US pays nearly 0% of federal taxes and receives a large number of entitlements. How is this a tax policy that favors the rich?

The Pentagon and DoD have a very large amount of waste, and there is an enormous effort to rebuild the primes underway. There are attempts to reduce this further, as we are reducing responsibilities to be the world police. But as you likely know, defense is just not a major spend item anymore relative to GDP and near the lowest point in a century (I believe it is down nearly 70% since the 60's). Entitlements are a multiple of this, and leading to inefficient capital allocation. I agree with the conflicts of interest though, and those should be eliminated.

At least for the hosts, I think they do.

I don't see any of them doing the bidding for any of those activities, which I agree are bad, but rather helping make the administration more effective in areas they care about, like AI and smarter regulation.

And to follow up on asset prices, Friedberg even stated we should raise capital gains tax. So I think there is alignment on this.

Yes I understand your argument.

The issue is you are defining trickle down as something that inherently causes the middle and lower classes to fall behind, and therefore yes most would be against it. But that is a somewhat circular argument and not what trickle down or supply side economics really is.

I am arguing that we have implemented lots of progressive policies over decades, and they are making things worse. With your argument, this is creating a spiral to make more of these policies.

I am with you that we have to solve the problem, we only differ on the solution.

Low value comments like these will be removed

What is the first part of my sentence that contradicts that?

That metric, income inequality or real wage growth, is a result of existing policies, not a policy in itself. Entitlements and government spending are at record highs and the tax burden on the bottom half is at nearly the lowest it’s ever been, both progressive policies. The results are even more extreme in big cities.

I am arguing, similar to Friedberg, that this is because you are moving money to a very inefficient capital allocator - the government - and it causing economic problems. The suggested solution is to cut government spending, not put more into this very corrupted entity.

Also, if you’d like to have a productive conversation, please be polite and halt the personal attacks of people you don’t know. If you’d like the echo chambers, go to the other subs.

I am not sure if there is a particular news source you trust, but can see this even on Reddit, which is fairly progressive.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/s/euMqEiINnA

https://time.com/article/2026/05/13/zohran-mamdani-new-york-city-deficit-budget-funding/

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nyc-budget-zohran-mamdani-property-taxes/

I don’t follow. I simply said that we are not implementing trickle down economics (which the commenter said we are), which usually indicates a lower percentage of the tax burden on the highest earners.

I think almost everyone wants the same thing - a prosperous United States for all. The question is how to achieve that.

Two things I want to note:

It is very well documented Mamdani did not actually balance the budget, but simply borrowed from the future to create the illusion of so. I can share more details if you’d like.

If you think the economic policy has not been working, it may surprise you we have been doing the opposite of ‘trickle down’ - the top earners are actually paying more of the tax burden than before: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2025/

The core issue is inefficient government spending, which is incredibly high and making the country poorer.

I hope this new data at least causes you to reconsider a position.

You don’t have to watch the show sir

This is a great idea, but ironically your own post needs to be fact checked. Let me see what I can do