Diesel is weighing very heavily on the economy right now, isn't it?

It is.

I mean, that ends up getting baked into goods at stores, right, when they have to pay that higher cost of shipping.

Right.

But you're right that wage growth is solid, real economic growth.

So even adjusting for inflation, economic growth is very good.

Yeah.

Right.

How in the world does Switzerland get away with paying half a percent and being able to borrow money from anybody at that kind of rate?

Yeah, I mean, it's just known as a solid country that has always had very low inflation.

You know, it was a place where, you know, people stored their gold for decades because that was, you know, it was known for its financial sector, its strong financial sector, its free market economy has very low taxes and, you know, limited regulation and, again, limited government debt.

So all those things put together, it's just a solid place that people have confidence in.

Now, I will say, you know, the U.S. has been growing a lot faster than most of Europe, and that is part of the story, too, because lately we've observed a negative correlation between stocks and bond prices.

And that tells us that part of the reason that interest rates are going up is that investors just see a better deal investing in stocks, especially with the AI boom.

So is that something that's sustainable?

Well, I think you will see the market adjust in just the way you described, and we're already starting to see in over half the country house prices are declining by single-digit percent.

I think you'd add to measures of affordability and then also just how much variation is out there.

Yeah, I mean, the variation can be huge.

And that goes for a lot of the measures that Julia talked about.

So things like median value to median income ratio, that varies tremendously across the territory of the U.S. And in fact, at the county level, it correlates a lot with land use regulation, as Julia pointed out earlier.

So what we see there is that, you know, in some places, especially higher wage cities, San Francisco, Boston, New York, places like that, D.C., you see expensive houses.

And then in the middle of the country, where there's not a lot of demand, you see affordable houses.

And then somewhere in between would be other places.

Have these been around a long time? Have they really proliferated recently? Is there like a movement behind density restrictions or is it just kind of decentralized, you know, not my backyard motivations?

Here's all the reasons I'm leaving, all the reasons it's too late to fix this, all the reasons I'm gonna be so much happier without you.

you.You know, I think the manifesto came from just a feeling that things aren't working, and I couldn't bear to think that I just have to reconcile myself to, to that.

He had spent years studying them.

There had been attempts to create an artificial island in the Caribbean.

There'd been an attempt to settle in, uh, some kind of atoll in the Pacific.

There had been an, a lady who wanted everyone to move to Fort Collins, Colorado, for some reason.

So the reason I came to read your research paper, because I am an architect and developer working on trying to bring affordable housing to life, and have been kind of bumping into very interesting problems that I'm seeing, trying to understand the what is not working and maybe now you will explain what you found but my perspective it is either absolutely incredibly scary or possibly an opportunity so can you please walk us through your findings what how did you approach researching this

Yes, I learned a lot about New Jersey housing policy while going through this study.

I had heard of Mount Laurel.

I understood that there was this court case in the 1970s that required communities to allow for housing for low-income households.

And that seemed great.

That seemed like a... an advantage maybe that New Jersey had over other states is that maybe courts were involved here to try to increase housing supply and limit what local governments can do to kind of regulate it out of their jurisdiction.

But I also knew that The conventional wisdom was on similar types of housing targets like Massachusetts 40B law, Connecticut's 83G law, California's regional housing needs assessment laws, that traditionally these have not produced an observable bump in housing production.

So if you were advising them, like where would you look for the abundance that we're desperately needing? Yeah.

What are your thoughts on the fundamental value of this particular act?

Yeah, so I won't venture my own opinion on the act because I do think, as I mentioned, that there's a legitimate debate to be had about the federalism issues.

But if we're talking about voter ID and election integrity measures in general, particularly those enacted by state governments, there actually doesn't seem to be a huge impact on voter turnout.

So a lot of political scientists have studied this, most of them being left-leaning, and they don't find that voter ID laws really suppress the vote.

That seems to be the sort of consensus of the literature right now.

Obviously, that could change, but it seems that the most important argument in favor of voter ID laws is that they will increase Americans' faith in the integrity of the electoral system.

And I think that's very important in an era when a lot of people have a lot of mistrust about experts and mistrust about institutions and about how elections are conducted, big controversy over the 2020 election.

How do you kind of balance the need for accountability and privacy in this instance?

What are some of the other problematic areas?

Yeah, well, so taking a big picture view of this, we don't need to abolish all these programs right away.

And that would cause a lot of social instability and a lot of problems for people who've come to rely on these programs.

But with some simple reforms, we can gradually shrink them and allow the private sector to take their place.

So if we're talking about food stamps, about the SNAP program, the evidence is that there is about $50 billion in improper payments, according to the government's own data, over the last 20 years.

So we need to do more there to ensure that we're not giving money to people who don't deserve it, who don't qualify for it.

And one of the real problems there is that the states administer the program, but the federal government funds it.

Is there a weaning process that you feel like is going to need to be done, especially in the welfare situation with programs like SNAP?

What are some of the other problematic areas?

Taking a big picture view of this, we don't need to abolish all these programs right away.

That would cause a lot of social instability and a lot of problems for people who've come to rely on these programs.

But with some simple reforms, we can gradually shrink them and allow the private sector to take their place.

If we're talking about food stamps, about the SNAP program, The evidence is that there was about $50 billion in improper payments, according to the government's own data, over the last 20 years.

So we need to do more there to ensure that we're not giving money to people who don't deserve it, who don't qualify for it.

And one of the real problems there is that the states administer the program, but the federal government funds it.

Is there a weaning process that you feel like is going to need to be done, especially in the welfare situation with programs like SNAP?

How would you frame it to people as you look at the immediate layout on some of the things you've been working on over at AIER to discuss tariffs?

Yeah.

So tariffs are taxes on trade.

Uh, so they're taxes on things we buy.

You can think of them as sort of like a sales tax, that they're a, a... it's a percentage of the value of a product that you're paying.

Um, but unlike sales taxes, it applies, um, only to products that are produced outside the United States, and so they're, they're a tax on imports, essentially.

Now, why is that important? Well, it, it distorts the economy more in a, in a way that sales taxes don't do.

Why don't you, uh, mention how people can find your work, find you on X, that sort of thing, if they wanna follow you on X or find you over at AIER, Jason?