[laughs]

You have a, you have a revenue curve that's rising faster than spending, so what's your job as the Congress? It's to fill that gap, and that's a surplus.

So what do you do with that surplus? Well, you have a tax cut or a spending increase.

Now what happens is the spending curve starts rising faster and faster, and now it exceeds the revenue curve.

Now what's the job of Congress? It's to take away money from the public, the money that's already promised and built into the law.

And that's just political dynamite.

It's political dynamite for both sides, and there's, that's a much longer history of how both parties got there.

[laughs] Right.

So the real voters disproportionately are the elderly, and this is a bribe by politicians, but it's locked us in for the end of time by our way.

Right, so You know, we can quickly get into these problems and I will, but I try to keep weaving in the optimistic side of this story.

The optimistic side is that as long as we can sustain economic growth, and I would argue that a lot of these policies certainly weaken that growth, but as long as we sustain economic growth, we always have the ability to do more things.

So among the problems are not just the political one that you just referenced in terms of who votes and who doesn't and who gets bribed, but that once you build these policies in and you could argue that there's a legitimate reason for, say, giving the elderly tomorrow's elderly more than we give to today's elderly.

But once you lock it in and lock it in at an unsustainable rate of growth, you create a dynamic that really dominates budget policy.

And I'm really trying to get, by the way, our profession as well as others to really recognize this game of how you define what's a winner and a loser.

So winners and losers is the language of politics.

What would your solutions be? What would you do on healthcare? What would you do on social security? What would you do on the tax system? Let's start there.

Um, so tell us what is fiscal democracy and, and why is that relevant to how the working class and, and y- the young are, are being, uh, I, I guess left out of the American dream?

dream?Right.

So we, we discussed earlier the extent to which the things we've built into the system keep growing and growing in ways that are preventing us from doing new things.

The Fiscal Democracy Index I developed, uh, a while back, and, uh, uh, it's actually, uh, was discussed first in the, one of the other books you mentioned, Dead Men Ruling.

So in some sense, the, the current book, Abandon, is a, a follow-up to Dead Men Ruling.

And this Fiscal Democracy Index essentially is a measure of how much of revenues are left over after you take into account all of the automatic policies that have been built in from the past by past Congresses.

So, uh, over time, more and more spending growth in our economy has been preordained essentially by dead men.

So where, where do we fall down on presentation?