Episode 75 – Navigating the Coming Great Depression with John Harvey

Macro N Cheese Episode 75
Navigating the Coming Great Depression with John Harvey

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John Harvey [intro/music] (00:00:03):

The federal government has the spending power and the responsibility to make sure that these people who have been thrown out of work or these people who have ended up with no sales at the restaurant and so forth to replace those incomes like we did during World War II.

It seems to me that no, we’re not going to convert Trump votes. That’s not a realistic goal. What you want to do is get these people who haven’t been voting to come out, to be excited about something. And they’re not going to be excited about Sleepy Joe.

Geoff Ginter [intro/music] (00:00:39):

Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

Steve Grumbine (00:01:34):

Oh yes. And this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. John Harvey, John T. Harvey at that, is going to be joining me today. And I am extremely happy because John’s a long time friend. And he’s also known as the Cowboy Economist for some of you all have troll around the YouTube University, is a brilliant man. He’s also a Professor of Economics at Texas Christian University since 1987, after earning his PhD in economics that year from the University of Tennessee.

Specializes in international economics, particularly exchange rates, macro economics, history of economics and contemporary schools of thought. John is also a post-Keynesian and a friend of the program and a friend of mine. And I would love to welcome him to the show and thank him so much for taking the time to be with us today. So, John, thank you, sir.

John Harvey (00:02:27):

Well, thank you. And thank you for the great service that you folks do, getting the word out. I mean, this is unprecedented in, I guess, progressive economics. I can remember back when I was in grad school, University of Tennessee back then was like a hotbed in institutionalism of post-Keynesian economics. And I got invited out along with Chris Brown, one of my other grad school friends to go out to lunch with Paul Davidson and, I think, Alfred Eichner and Ann Mayhew and Terry Neal, all these big names, right?

And so I just sat there very quietly, very scared, and the conversation among the four soon turned to, member back when we thought we could make a difference, and we didn’t? And I thought, great. I’m just finishing my Ph.D., and this is what I’m hearing from the senior scholars in my area, because I was already thinking, gosh, we need to make a difference.

Well, now we are making a difference. And this is for people who have struggled in this area and who have been thinking to themselves as everyone does with MMT and Post-Keynesian Institutional Economics. That is really just common sense that it’s really the way the economy actually works, but we can’t break through. You guys are helping breakthrough in a tremendous way. So thank you.

Grumbine (00:03:33):

Listen, you know, we’re in the middle of what looks to be one of the ugliest periods in American History. It might be the ugliest period I’ve ever experienced in American History, save for the great recession that we went through in 07, 08, nine, some would say still going through, but with this pandemic and coupled with the Trump presidency, and then all the nonsense that occurred during the primary with Bernie Sanders and now, us staring down the barrel of a deficit hawk on the Democrat side and a mad man in the Republican side with a global depression heading our way.

If we’re not already in it, these are unprecedented times in most of our lifetimes anyway. We do have some history we can draw upon. I assume that there were some parallels that we can glean from the wall street crash of 1929 and so forth. What’s your take on our current situation?

Harvey (00:04:36):

Well, you know, one of the things that you didn’t mention, and isn’t getting mentioned a lot right now is climate change, which quite honestly, in the overall scheme of things is the real killer. Yeah. That’s going to be where the repercussions are going to be with us for the next century, if not longer than that. And it’s been pushed completely off. It wasn’t exactly center stage for our government to start with, but now it’s a complete afterthought.

We’re so desperately trying to solve this other problem. So I totally agree with you that what a horrible combination of events. I keep apologizing to my daughters say, sorry, this was largely my generation and others that brought this upon you, especially the climate change stuff. And we have an absolute idiot in the white house. I don’t know. I prefer to think he’s an idiot than he’s doing this on purpose, cause that would make him evil.

And you’re absolutely right that we’ve got this global slowdown and someone who doesn’t know what to do about it. And our other choice is someone who doesn’t know what to do about it in a slightly different way. So your question was about historical parallels and of course the obvious one is the great depression. We don’t have the same reasons behind it.

The great depression really was more sort of private sector oriented in the sense that well, okay, the 1920s was a period of massive economic expansion and huge increases in technology and productivity, unprecedented, and a big shift from Americans living on farms. I think 1920s was the first time we had an equal number of people in cities and in farms and the people who lived in the cities, the people who had jobs with Ford for example, are much more sensitive to the business cycle than a farmer is. Farming life, agricultural life, you can absorb the unemployed.

Uncle Bob’s going to live with us for awhile. He’s going to help pick some corn or something like that. We have an informal way of taking care of those who have had these issues that generally have nothing to do with what any of their choices to take care of them. But that wasn’t true of the market system. You know, you can’t say Uncle Bob going to work with me on the line for a while here at Ford as well, no, no he’s not. And so that’s not the way this works.

So we have this massive increase in investment in lots and lots of things in the 1920s that are sort of one time purchases. People are gonna buy a car. People are going to buy a refrigerator. Governments are going to build roads, paved road. We’re going to build service stations. We’re going to build refineries, rural electrification. But once you get done building refineries, you just maintain them. All right? So we get this tremendous boost and people were being pulled off the farm and into the city, which was a beneficial thing at the time because farm productivity was also going up and we didn’t need as many farmers.

But then when these things start to slow down, it’s like, okay, we’re done building these factories. We’re done building these service stations. Oh, and there’s a fantastic, this is a fellow whose name has been lost. Oh, good lord. Now I can’t think of his name, the institutionalist guy who basically started the NBER, and I’m going to have to look it up now. I have a piece under review at the JPKE with him in it. And I can’t believe I’m not going to put the name right now, but he has a fantastic book on business cycles that came out in 1913 that is a thousand times better than anything that has come out in the economics profession since then.

Wesley Clair Mitchell. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. My Google is faster than your Google and I foolishly switched from Google to, I know I’ll just look up the article I just sent out to the JPKE and I’ll look for his name in there. So that’s exactly right. Wesley Clair Mitchell, but he describes all this back in, before the great depression, you know, you have this accumulation of layoffs, which of course, you know, then spreads. All right.

So we’ve got a different cause. I will say this, that leading up to the coronavirus crisis, the economy was already slowing down. We had had three consecutive quarterly declines in physical investment spending, which only twice since World War II, has that not been something that preceded a recession. So It may have already been slowing down, but Hey, coronavirus, I hate to use this word trumped, all that.

So, then we have a collapse level of economic activity and we did in both periods during the great depression and right now, I think it was probably less of a problem back then. I don’t know, maybe I don’t know the economic history, but today in both parties, except for a very few exceptions that anyone who’s listening to, this knows who they are. They confuse the economy with the market system and they’re not the same thing.

The economy is the means by which we get food, shelter and clothing and so forth. And you don’t have to have a market system for that. A market system can be very useful for it, but you don’t have to have that. So the consequences that when we have people, you know, like say here in the state of Texas that are going hungry, who are losing jobs, the only logical response you get from people is, well, we have to go back to the market. We have to increase the level of commerce again. We have to open the state back up.

Then that’s not the only choice. And unfortunately, having grown up in a society though, we tend to think of markets and economy as the same thing. And obviously we could have done something like we did during the great depression with the new deal stuff, which is of course what we’re talking about in our school of thought right now. But the new deal was an extra market employment of people. They looked at social problems. They said, well, have we got any social problems right now?

Well, let’s see, the Tennessee Valley keeps flooding all the time. Maybe we can go build a dam. Boy, it sure would be nice for people over here to actually have a park nearby. So let’s employ people, people that we already have enough food for, which is absolutely still true right now. We’ve got enough food for everybody. The people who were living in houses before all this happened are still living in that house.

The people who are living in apartments, what they don’t have now is the income to allow them to stay there. So what we want to do is of course put people to work and, you know, have the federal government provide the funding. So in that sense, we tried to solve the problem during the great depression with the new deal. Then around 1937, we decided boy, that deficit sure is getting big. You know, we need to start balancing the budget.

And then unemployment went from 14 back to 19%. And so your comments earlier about the deficit hawk ring true about that, but really it’s not until World War II, once we get to World War II, we’re employing all these people. And a w if you think of it, a sort of socially useful task, as far as we were concerned, beating the Germans and the Japanese. I’m sorry, Italians.

I left the Italians out. Any Italians. Anytime. Um, and all the other access, minor allies. So we’ve got them to work doing this, but these are jobs that wouldn’t exist if the Japanese hadn’t bombed Pearl Harbor. And they bring unemployment down to 2%. Okay, why don’t we do that right now? Why don’t we make sure that we don’t have to open up the economy? We could create a cottage industry of people making masks, even if we never used the masks.

Did you know that the metal recycling and that, that they put together during World War II, really they didn’t use any of it. It was just to make people feel like they were doing something useful and helping. So there are so many things that we need right now. Now the social distancing, I think is a huge difference between the two that during World War II, everyone could go to a factory together and had the need been masks and respirators, then they could have gotten together and do that.

That’s more difficult now, obviously, but the real problem is going to be, as you said earlier, when these payments stop and they’re already inadequate to start with, then what are you gonna do about paying your rent? What are you gonna do about paying your mortgage, about your credit card? And we’re going to come out on the other side of this thing, hopefully with people with mountains of debt.

And there is no reason, no logical reason why the federal government could not have generated incomes for these people so that when we come out the other end, well, I was just saying to Melanie, my wife, and I’m very angry right now. I’m very frustrated with what’s going on in the country and here in Texas. And I said this some time ago on the radio here in town, that we’re not going to get it exactly right. The government response is not going to be exactly right.

It’s either going to be too little or too much. It’s either going to be too little to address the problem or we will have, Oh, we actually didn’t need that much help. Which side do you think we need to err on? To me, it’s very simple. We need to err, on the side of whoops, you know, we helped too much. It’s like when you get the antibiotics from the doctor and she says, you know, okay, you have to take these for 10 days.

And probably what she’s thinking is, but you only need it for seven, but we’re making sure we’re going to err on the side of caution. So right now we could have easily in the federal government. I say easily. I, the mechanics of it, obviously it would be a challenge, but then Hey, so was trying to transfer Ford from building cars, to building tanks. And we worked that out. And so to find a way to generate income for the unemployed, for the entrepreneurs of, you know, owners of restaurants and so forth.

So that at least during this period, they don’t have accumulating debts so that when we come out the other end, do people really expect that at the other end there’s going to be this big surge in sales that allows them to pay off all their back rent and back payments. Of course not. And so if we had provided this and we could have done this, then we wouldn’t have the pressure from the states and I’ve been taking this approach.

And I’m trying not to blame, for example, Governor Abbott here in Texas, because Washington left him no choice. Now Governor Abbott probably maybe would have done it anyway. I don’t know. But as the situation stands, the state of Texas depends on commerce in order to generate tax revenue. And the people here in the state depend on commerce, and Washington could have addressed that just like we did in World War II.

Think about the fact that most of the people, I shouldn’t say most, but many, many, many of the people we employ during World War II were providing nothing that was going to be used in the market system. They’re building aircraft carriers, they’re building planes and tanks. So, you know, in a sense we were just giving them money. I did a radio interview the other day with a gentleman and I was talking about, you know, green, new deal and things like this.

And when we got done talking, he said to me, yeah, I can hear the emails already. Why should we give people money for doing nothing? And this was like a month ago when we knew things were really bad. I was like, you gotta be kidding me. That’s your takeaway from this? Your takeaway is we shouldn’t be paying people to do nothing. What is your alternative then? How are we going to fix this in a world where we have a global pandemic?

So I don’t know. I wandered around there a lot, Steve. It’s sort of the stream of consciousness comparison of the great depression and what we’re facing right now. But the bottom line is that the federal government has the spending power and the responsibility to make sure that these people who have been thrown out of work for these people who have ended up with no sales at their restaurant and so forth, they have a responsibility to replace those incomes. Like we did during World War II.

When we had people working at factories and we had people going overseas and you know, of course the vast majority of those people don’t actually fight. Most of them are doing administrative tasks and supply tasks and so forth. And none of them are contributing to the market system. And yet we all agreed. Yeah. But that’s okay because we have a really important social goal here. Well, we have a really important social goal right now, and that is for us to emerge from this healthy both physically and financially. And it’s a nightmare right now. It’s an absolute nightmare.

Grumbine (00:15:38):

Yeah. So here’s the thing, right? So, you know, we’ve had these extra payments made into the system to support us through this, for example, there was an extra $600 in weekly unemployment checks. They had delays put in or forbearances on mortgages and rent delays and businesses were getting forgivable loans, forgivable, federal loans, all of these things, we’re there to cushion this and they are set to expire right now. Right?

And so you look at this and a lot of businesses have kept people employed based on the additional monies coming in to keep them afloat. But once this additional money stops flowing, we are going to be looking at, there’s like a tsunami waiting like the water just left the beaches and we’re picking up shells and conches and looking at the bones of sharks.

And then everybody’s missing the wall of water that they’re confusing as the horizon, but really it’s right there getting ready to slam through. And we’re not just talking about service workers this time. Not that that’s minor, but just the point is that the blast radius of this is going to be far more wide open going to take everyone down with it this time. And the fear I have knowing everything that you already stated, what the federal government can and can’t do.

There’s a political ball game going on right now has nothing to do with the government’s ability to do, has everything to do with the volleyball game going on between Democrats who have interests in making this president look as bad as he can look. And also the president who’s trying to prove to his Republican cohorts that no, we really needed to open the economy.

While you have people such as our friend Pavlina Tcherneva who have put forward nationalizing payroll as an option, put forward a federal job guarantee, you name it. And none of those things are even being discussed. And to be fair, and let me just say the pox on the progressive movement, our own people, aren’t talking about it either. And it’s got very little energy behind it, even though it is absolutely a rock solid proposition. There’s very little energy getting it into the right hands. I don’t see very many positive outcomes coming here.

Harvey (00:17:56):

No, no, no. I don’t either. I mean, not only is the government clearly dysfunctional and as you say, a lot of game playing going on, but the most depressing, well, what you already said is the most depressing thing, but the second most depressing thing is that even if you know, okay, let’s replace Donald Trump with Joe Biden and who wouldn’t do that. Although quite honestly, if I picked out a phone booth in any city in the nation and randomly pointed to a name, I could say, Oh, well this person would be better than Donald Trump.

So not exactly a ringing endorsement to Biden, but certainly better than Trump as most of us are. But then you’ve got the problem of, they’re still not talking about these progressive ideas with the green new deal. These aren’t, Hey, let’s make our life a little bit more pleasant. These are more along the lines of, Hey, let’s make sure that we can still live on this planet in the next century.

Let’s make sure that we actually have a democracy still, that we can spread the power back out. And of course we all know what’s happening with that. And at the same time, we need to have a massive undertaking as if we were fighting a war against global warming. And right now, of course we have this wonderful short term problem of the Corona virus.

But these things are profitable. These things are social problems that, you know, especially global warming, this isn’t something that the private sector is going to solve because it’s not profitable. So they’re not going to do it. But you’re right. These things are not being talked about even in the democratic party. Now I didn’t know that about, Progressive’s not really pushing it, or are you saying that they’re kind of backing off right now so that they don’t interfere with Biden’s chances?

Grumbine (00:19:23):

I think Progressives, both activists and the politicians, are wrapped up in Donald Trump. So this is where the curse and the blessing is, so to speak, this goes back to impeachment. It goes back to a number of things. Every time we try to clobber this guy, every time somebody takes a shot at Trump, it makes him stronger because the things that we are doing to him.

His base sees as he’s a hero because he’s withstanding yet again, another political contrived, whatever from the liberals, right? The liberals are doing this again. And so to us, it sounds like the most logical thing let’s impeach the guy, but they’re failing to understand the logic of the people that voted from the begin with. And I say this in a very candid fashion.

The democratic party is creating Trumpers even in the midst of all this black lives matter because they are being clandestine in the way they hold their primaries, because they are not being above board, because they’re not listening to the people. You’ve got Nancy Pelosi showing you her Viking range and her triple open wide refrigerator where she can share her latest boutique ice cream.

And people are sitting there trying to figure out how they’re going to pay their electric bill, how they’re going to keep their kids. What happens if we got to go back to work and our kids now have to go back to school without masks. People are having real life problems. She’s talking about what Sherbert she likes. So I think that we’re creating Trumpers and they’re not all racist. There are people that are fed up and frustrated.

And because of that, there’s a genuine disdain for the news because they see it as liberal media. There’s so many things that this has had deleterious societal impacts, by the way, the Democrats have conducted their business. And you got Donald Trump who should have been the easiest person in the world to knock off in 2016. But instead he won and here we are going into 2020, you would think that after impeaching him and watching his failed approach to the Corona virus, that ultimately he would be easy to knock off as well. But instead we put up sleepy Joe, as he calls him

Harvey (00:21:28):

Mr. “People Ain’t Black”,

Grumbine (00:21:31):

I guess the point is, is that you’ve got this situation where the truth is so muddied that when you have something important, like a federal job guarantee to talk about, Pavlina just put up this great book, The Case for a Job Guarantee. And you’ve got this great position paper that she put out through Levy about nationalizing payroll. And these are things that we at Real Progressives, have pushed really hard.

You’ve had Rashida Tlaib’s Boost Act has been put up there. And these things are just not getting the kind of discussion from anyone, from the activists. I would like to see advancing these things, the politicians, whose job it is to try and pass laws. It’s almost as if they’re saying it won’t work. So we’re not going to talk about it. And it’s deeply disturbing because we’re not changing conversation at all.

Harvey (00:22:20):

I think you’re absolutely right about the fed up and frustrated people. But I think a lot of those fed up and frustrated people simply aren’t voting at all, and I’m not a political expert by any stretch. Well, I did major in political science, but the international stuff. It seems to me that, you know, we’re not going to convert Trump voters. That’s not a realistic goal.

What you want to do is get these people who haven’t been voting to come out to be excited about something. And they’re not going to be excited about sleepy Joe. And so, you know, that’s what worries me. It doesn’t worry me so much that we’re causing the Trump people to dig in. They were a lost cause, just like the Confederacy.

Let’s see. I don’t know how I worked that in. And we want to have somebody exciting running for office. Hey look the progressives that won primaries recently, and by wide margins, they got to come out and vote. But I’ll tell you who doesn’t get blamed often enough and all this. And it’s the economics discipline itself. The discipline that ultimately advises these people in both parties.

There was a piece, I’m sure you’re probably heard of it, by I’m going to forget the name again. Paul Romer. I didn’t forget. Paul Romer, a recent Nobel Laureate had written a piece in 2016 saying that modern mainstream macroeconomics had become such a joke that it’s not scientific research anymore. He literally said it’s not really science anymore. And I totally absolutely agree.

I don’t agree with his solution, but these are the people, the Larry Summers, the Kenneth Rogoff’s though. Who’s the New York times guy – Krugman – I can never think of his name. Those are the very ones who are turned to by the Democrats and the Republicans for advice. And they don’t understand the macro economy and to them, you’ve seen what they’ve written over the last year about MMT and about the green new deal.

So if I put myself in the place of being a politician who doesn’t understand economics and I am dependent on my advisors to do that, give me a framework in which to place it. Then these are neoclassical economists who still as the core macro theory view, that the economy tends to fix itself, that the economy takes care of itself. And you know, don’t worry.

Now Krugman would be in the camp of, but let’s help it hurry up and fix itself while you know, your Friedmanites would be like, Oh no, the more we intervene, the more difficult will be for the economy to recover. So did you know that macroeconomics is becoming increasingly unpopular with econ PhDs? They’re coming out, just specializing in micro and honestly just specializing in constraint optimization and a new mathematical way to show it in some area that has nothing to do with economics.

But Jamie Galbraith has a YouTube interview where he talks about today economists aren’t concerned about policy. They aren’t concerned about macroeconomics. They are obsessed with their own little puzzles. So to some extent I absolutely blame the establishment of the democratic party. In fact, I remember back in the previous election, my wife and I went to the Tarrant County, which is what Fort Worth is in democratic convention. And we’re horrified by the smug attitudes of those who were backing Clinton rather than Sanders. Okay. You come back Clinton rather than Sanders. That’s fine, but can we have a conversation? They don’t see any point talking to us. We’re the children.

Grumbine (00:25:40):

Yeah, I got to interject here. One of the things that really frightens me and strikes me as odd as we’re going through this process, this whole concept of not Trump and you made that point, a brick wall could be better than Donald Trump, but that’s not a political analysis. And that doesn’t advance the ball. And Joe Biden’s quote of nothing will fundamentally change.

Couldn’t be more terrifying to us progressives right, because we recognize the problem. I’m not sitting there pointing right or left. I’m saying, we see the problem let’s fix it. And he’s saying, Hey, nothing, fundamentally will change. You billionaires, don’t worry, man, you elect me. It’ll keep on going. You can call me status quo Joe.

And that whole concept there to some seems like it’s no big deal, but here’s the problem. When we pass the ACA, even now, even in the one time where Bernie and Joe debated, he still was defending the ACA and there’s a ego there. And there’s an intention of making these public private partnerships and neoliberal concepts of privatization as a policy solution. The only solution.

Harvey (00:26:50):

It’s that confusing economy with market. It’s not something that I’m making a conscious choice. It’s just the Biden can’t see beyond — I know how to help black Americans well, we’ll stimulate the economy in the inner city. We’ll get more businesses built. But anyway, yeah. You’re exactly right.

Grumbine (00:27:03):

And it’s the frustration when you put forward Medicare for all. Now I worked on the ACA in I T. I worked for an it integration company with the state of Pennsylvania during the implementation. And one of the things that we were laughing about with the development team was the, you know, how easy it would be to give everyone Medicare for all.

And they said, see this code right here, where it says, date of eligibility, you make that birth and make the end death. And while we’ve got our healthcare problem solved with one IT switch. Obviously we know real resources and making sure we have enough doctors and nurses and gurneys and x-ray machines and ventilators and masks and so forth is very important there.

So real resources are really the constraint. But the concept here is, is that we’ve got this simple solution. So who is really opposing this? And what I always hear is people say, well, the program will run out of money. We won’t be able to afford. And I think the fundamental lack of understanding of the creation of dollars has always been a key problem with all this stuff.

And the fundamental idea that without the government, there is no real market. The government sets the market, creates the market, builds the parameters for the market. The idea here of once again, going the Paul Ryan route of privatizing or providing subsidies for insurance of all things, not care, insurance, it’s just a fundamental flaw in thinking and people hear the word healthcare and they think ACA affordable healthcare.

I can tell you, I cannot afford to get the kind of treatment I need because I can’t afford the copays. I cannot afford my affordable care. And so you look at this depression that’s coming down the pipe and you look at the cost. That’s not like healthcare got cheaper. Now. It’s not like accessibility has grown.

Harvey (00:28:53):

Indeed. They’re stretched for resources, right?

Grumbine (00:28:56):

Yeah, absolutely. So you would think fundamentally you talked about shovel-ready jobs in that first part, you talked about the ability to get work done. And some of that metal wasn’t even used and so forth. Well, in this particular case, you’re trying to find a way to not just stimulate the economy, provide good jobs and to actually solve the problems, not just the economic problem, but all the problems that go with that.

And there are legitimate expenditures that could be done to serve the public purpose right now that have nothing to do with pork belly anything. And they’re not even getting talked about, John. They’re not even getting talked about.

Harvey (00:29:34):

Remember early in the primary when it seemed hopeful?

Grumbine (00:29:38):

Yes, I do. I was actually counting my chips.

Harvey (00:29:42):

And my whole family, including my two daughters, are hardcore Sanders supporters. And my one daughters, the one that I play most of the computer games online with, I mean, she’s just devastated right now and I’ve been encouraging her. She can claim my British citizenship. Maybe you need to move. Go to Scotland.

Grumbine (00:29:58):

Can I be your son? Your adopted British son.

Harvey (00:30:02):

Can you cut the grass for us and sure, sure? I’ve got Irish citizenship through my grandfather. All you had to do was fill out 10,000 forms and pay $300. And he became Irish and we could run a pub and sit and complain about, you know, America. And so we’ll see what happens. But no, I was trying to explain to my many Democrat friends around here who are terrified of Bernie Sanders.

You don’t understand how bad things are. You think that just a simple, slow down Trump is going to fix things. And it’s not. I mean, if we had had Clinton in last time, we’d still not have decent healthcare. We still wouldn’t be addressing climate change. We’d clearly be better. Nobody’s going to argue otherwise.

I tried to come up with an analogy and it’s like, okay, right now it’s like Thelma and Louise were driving the car towards the cliff and Trump’s got his foot on the gas. Biden’s smart enough to take his foot off the gas, but I’m not sure he’s going to use the brake. And I’m not sure he’s going to think to turn the car. And that’s what I thought that Sanders, it doesn’t have to be Sanders, but honestly, I’m not really voting for Bernie Sanders.

I’m voting for Stephanie Kelton, right. But whoever she’s advising, then you don’t understand how close we are to the edge of the cliff. It’s not that the car is going to now sort of slowly slow down and stop right at the edge. We’re already hurdling off the edge and this sure as hell didn’t help the whole Corona virus thing.

So talking about the ACA and whether or not we have the resources surely to God, the country that spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country on the planet also can come up with resources. There may be adjustments that need to be made. But I think I saw an Onion article on this — U S doesn’t want to do universal healthcare because no one else has been able to figure out how to do it. So, you know, why should we try to figure it out?

Well, geez, there are developing countries that are ahead of us on that. So yeah. Yeah. What else you want to talk about? Is there anything cheery we can talk about? I’ll tell you this. And again, I’m not a political expert, but it strikes me that the black lives matter thing has hurt Trump much more, not with his followers, nothing’s going to hurt him with his followers, but hurting much more than the coronavirus thing.

Now that may be changing. Now we’re having a resurgence, but I think he could have successfully dodged blame for coronavirus. But I’m sure you saw on the news that he just tweeted something and then he deleted it with one of his supporters yelling white power. And maybe that will encourage the non-voter to come out and vote. But that’s the only little silver lining I can see right now.

Intermission [music] (00:32:35):

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Grumbine (00:33:27):

You know, it’s funny. And I know that this is more about economics than it is about politics, but I want to raise something to you. We talked about the federal reserve and the federal reserve is a creature of Congress. However, when we put a new administration in, that new administration actually puts forward all the different appointments in all the different agencies, including the federal reserve.

When you’re a neoliberal, you put forward people that have a neoliberal bend through their whole strategy. With that in mind, how is it possible that we look at this political landscape and say to ourselves as Joe Biden goes in and they repopulate all the halls of all these agencies, including the federal reserve with neoliberals. This is not just a four year thing.

Now we’re looking at a young neoliberal vice president who would probably be the succession candidate. So we’re not talking about a progressive once again. We’re talking about 12 years now because Biden won’t put in more than one term. So we’re looking at, let’s say 12 years of neoliberal rain and the IPCC gave us, I think it was 12 years, three years ago.

So I really wonder in the grand scheme of things, how we work through this, given the fact that Democrats, once they’re empowered go back to sleep. It doesn’t seem like they’re willing to fight when their own is in power. When they have the policy, right. Obama’s first two years, nothing was done and they could have done a million things with super majority.

Harvey (00:35:03):

Yeah. I don’t know the answer. I do wonder. And this is a very cruel thing to say. It strikes me as just all these champagne liberals that are driving the democratic party policy. They just want to have changes in social programs and stuff, but they don’t see the basic economic issue because they don’t have a basic economic issue. There’s a common view. Okay. Let’s take the East side of Fort Worth is very poor. How do we help them?

Well, better education, except if there’s only a limited number of jobs, all you have done is made more intelligent, unemployed people, which not a bad thing, But our problem is there aren’t enough jobs. And this goes back to the economic discipline and the people that the Democrats are talking to when they are talking about policy. When they’re talking to the Paul Krugmans. Paul Krugman doesn’t see the need for a radical change in the way the economy works.

He sees the need for change, but not a radical change. Not the ones we’d be talking about. Because again, as I said earlier, the mainstream view is the economy basically takes care of itself. And so the only problem in the inner city in America is that they have those bad educations. So if we can improve the education. I give an example to my class.

I can’t remember what the numbers are now, but there’s like 1300, I think, in that range or 1600 NFL players. All right, let’s say we set as a goal we want more NFL players, right? The analogy here being that those are jobs. So we set to work with these tremendous programs and colleges and high schools all over America, really focusing the PE classes on training, these students for football. Gosh, then how many NFL players will we have?

Well, the exact same number, because it’s limited by how many teams there are and the size of the roster, right? So, you know, making them better football players, isn’t going to change that. What we need to do is expand the league and then ironically, expanding the league, we don’t even have to improve the training, right? Now we’ve got more NFL players.

Well, if people think there’s enough jobs and they really do think that I really think in the back of people’s minds, that you know, well, except for the great depression, there’s enough jobs. And if you’re not working, it’s because you’re lazy. And so as long as that’s there, then I think it’s very difficult to get any enthusiasm behind a progressive movement that is going to create jobs, that is going to create. I’m sorry. I started to get into the UBI thing.

You probably have another broadcast where you’re going to do that. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. There’s absolutely no enthusiasm for doing anything big because they don’t think there’s big problems.

Grumbine (00:37:29):

It’s funny you say that. I’ve gone through this process in my own head because I keep trying to recalibrate how I approach my own messaging. I’ve gone in there with dropping dynamite in the lake, trying to bring the fish into the top, waiting for other people to scoop up the fish and nurse them back to health. I’ve tried to be the kind gentle soul that, Hey, no, let me show you where that link is. Let me help you with that.

And I’ve come to the unfortunate realization as I’m debating rank and file Democrats who should largely be on my team, so to say, but they’re not. They’re out there literally saying, well, if you wanted all those things more, you should have voted. I’m like, guys, we didn’t even have a primary. If you actual primaries, we have Bernie Sanders won. Okay. So don’t tell me that. Why would you lie to me? Why would you say that, but that is the conditioning.

And so in my mind, and it’s like with any disruptive technology, do you remember when they were talking about bringing the internet for people to go shopping and people like nobody’s ever going to do that? And all of a sudden, everything I do is online. Yeah. But back then you thought, no, and now you’ll go through a mall and they’re ghost towns. They’d be better off as apartment complexes than actually malls.

But this is the kind of disruptive technology that happens. Well, in my mind, the type of disruptive change that has to occur occurs when you have things like going on with black lives matter on the streets right now. It’s unfortunate George Floyd had to pass to make people look at this, but that’s where we’re at. And in my mind, unfortunately, because these people, if they aren’t seeing blood in the streets, or they’re not seeing people setting cars on fire, they don’t think there’s a problem. Like the NFL has suddenly got a black lives matter.

They’re already talking about bringing Colin Kaepernick in. There’s all these things that are happening suddenly as a result of this. There has to be a disruptive change to show people, Hey, you are very naive. You are short sheet in the bed. They need to go the full measure to find out what the real problem is. And we’re starting to see cracks in that veneer. And maybe it’s because everybody’s been trapped at home, that they were able to see this without the bread and circuses. But as we reopen, it’s going to be very challenging to get past people’s apathy and inertia. What are your thoughts on that?

Harvey (00:39:47):

Well, I think that what you guys are doing that all the publicity we’re having, you know, Stephanie Kelton’s book just came out. Oh, and I’m very excited that for the first time in my life, I have an endorsement on the back of a New York Times, bestseller — The Deficit Myth is a triumph. It is absorbing, compelling and most important of all empowering, John T. Harvey, Texas Christian University.

And I believe it was number 13 when it came out. So that’s really important. And I keep going back to the economics discipline. And you know, when I try to explain to people which candidate I’d support, I look immediately to see who their economic advisors are. I guess I don’t have a definitive answer for you about how to get people moving.

But I think with The Deficit Myth coming out right now and with Pavlina’s is book coming out, I guess it’s already come out. I haven’t gotten mine yet, but it’s already come out that maybe this has created, you know, you just talked about how, when you’re trying to explain to people how all this works and you’ve tried different approaches. Stephanie’s book, what I liked about it. Well, I liked a number of things about it because my actual endorsement was actually much longer than that.

And they just put a little bit on the back cover, but it was humble. It wasn’t saying this solves everything. It wasn’t saying, Hey, we figured something out, you know, really clever. And all you’re going to do is snap your fingers, all our problems. She doesn’t say that. There’s enough room in that book to do what you need to do to convince somebody. In a blog post, there’s not enough room because they’re going to be left with doubts.

They’re going to be left with things that you weren’t able to address during that blog post or during one of these interviews. This is close to 300 pages and it’s an easy read. And you’ve got enough in there to convince somebody that you gotta make them pick up the book. But the fact that it’s on the New York times bestseller list may be helpful. But if it could say to people, this is what I’ve been trying to tell you.

This is the problem it’s explained in here in a way that I couldn’t have explained it. And by someone who is an expert in this field, and by the way, let me also add here that people like Fadhel and Stephanie and Pavlina, they have so much energy. I don’t, um, I like public speaking and you know, well, hell in high school for our talent show, I did stand up comedy. But when I’m done, I’m done. And at heart, I’m an introvert. So I need to get out of there. And they’re not like that. Or if they are, they’re finding it for the cause, and they’re making sure that they get out there and, and put the word out.

I do the Cowboy Economist thing because I can do that at my house, at my own pace and so forth. And I do a lot of these things too. And I do a lot of speeches actually for the local optimist club. And I tell them about MMT and actually people are generally pretty open to it. But nevertheless, I just wanted to give a shout out to them for all the work they have been doing all the groundwork and to their families for not being able to see them as often as they would be able to otherwise.

And that Stephanie and Pavlina could actually have written these books in between all this other stuff is really something else. So I’ve come to a conclusion or come to an answer to your question is how do we get people fired up? They got to read these books. This is how you convince somebody. A word or two at the bar may plant some seeds of doubt. But when they walk off, they push it away. There’s enough in the book, I think to really make a big dent.

Grumbine (00:42:58):

If you haven’t read the books, and this is a shout out to anybody listening that is wondering about both Pavlina’s book, The Case for a Job Guarantee, and also Stephanie’s super big hit, The Deficit Myth. She didn’t just write it. She actually reads the audio book. She’s the voice of the audio book too. I didn’t know that. Yes. And it is absolutely amazing.

And just to put it in perspective, Real Progressives has decided, backdoor, that we are going to sponsor sending The Deficit Myth to any candidates who are willing to read the book. Caveat will be that they have to do a writeup at the end about the book. Have to put it out there and say, Hey, I read this book and it’s great. And we’re willing to buy these books, whether it be on Kindle or whether it be hardback, whatever paper printed.

But you know, as I think about this, there’s a lot of people out there that are really on the go that just can’t sit down with their legs crossed and read a good book. And the audio book goes down smooth. She’s got a great voice and you can sit there and cut your grass and you can listen to this and you will absolutely have your eyes open.

And one of the things that was the most validating for me was, is that about, I’d say 70% of the book I’ve said in some way, shape or form, not nearly as coherently as, or it’s the 30% that I didn’t have in my back pocket in terms of the way that she phrases things, the stories and the tie ins. That was the key. You have these islands of thoughts. She was able to put bridges between the islands that make it all one cohesive thought and she would pull back on the previous chapters.

And she would remind you, chapter two, we talked about this. Well, now we’re going to expand on this more and talking about the Phillips Curve and NAIRU and all the other things that we just assume are true, but she breaks it down and shows, Hey, these aren’t God-breathed, we made these things. You don’t have a clue. They’re shooting for the moon, and they’re always going conservative.

And so the idea here is, is that, you know, she doesn’t want to cast aspersions, whether they mean to do these things or whether they don’t mean. That’s my job as an activist. She’s trying to win over souls within that polluted community. And I’m absolutely blown away.

I want to write a long letter to her telling her how much that means to me that she put this stuff in writing, because this is absolutely the weapon for every activist out there to use in a good way to be able to pass this book on and hand it over to somebody after you finished it. To carve it up, highlight it, fold pages, write notes, do whatever you got to do, but take this very seriously because it’s a game changer

Harvey (00:45:42):

And it’s written, you know, it’s not talking down to anybody and it’s very humble. I really like that. It comes across as very different if you’ve just read Larry Summers attack on it or Kenneth Rogoff’s attack on it. And then you read this, you’d be like, well, wait a minute. That’s not what they’re saying.

So yeah, we needed something like this for a long time and how she was able to squeeze this out in between all the other. Plus she moved. How many years ago now? Five years. Moved universities. So that was a big change in her life. And I’m really looking forward to the job guarantee book because in my intermediate macro class, I said the advanced macroeconomics, I already assigned a couple of articles by Pavlina.

One of them is a very theoretical one that I really liked because she then uses the theory to then talk about the real world, and how it’s applied to the real world, but I’ve always felt my section on the job guarantee was inadequate. I would love to see how that book works out as something I could assign in class.

But anyway, yeah, if you want to get people going, if you want to get these people who are sitting around not doing anything, you know, the non-voters. Of course, you still got to change the democratic party. So maybe we’re doing that with the progressive winning as they have been,

Grumbine (00:46:48):

Weaponizing knowledge, one mind at a time. That’s where we’re at, man. So let me ask you with that in mind. Let’s just say hypothetically, the federal government still fails. Doesn’t do its job. And as these layoffs and foreclosures hit, what are some things that regular rank and file people might notice? What do we face? How different is this than the great recession that we just experienced? I mean, what are some of the things that people might do to protect themselves? How do we go through this year?

Harvey (00:47:20):

You know, I don’t have an answer to that because it is so bad because let’s say I’m thrown out of work or I own a restaurant and that restaurant, you know, can’t open up now, I’ve still got rent, it’s going to accumulate. All right. So even if they were kind enough, because they were forced to not to foreclose on you, then at the end of this, you’ve still got that rent to pay. So I don’t know what people are going to do.

And the social distancing part is absolutely necessary, but it’s killing us in terms of being able to imagine a recovery that doesn’t involve something that isn’t going to happen, at least not until Trump’s out of office. And that is a huge intervention and a permanent intervention until this is over from the federal government to help these individuals who are suffering right now because of no fault of their own.

And unlike that one radio host that I was talking to, I don’t feel bad about giving people money to do nothing, because if we don’t do that, then at the end of this, you know, we already talk about recent college graduates don’t spend money because they’ve got so much debt accumulated, okay, let’s expand that to everyone in the economy. And now how are we going to recover from all this?

I think the best way for the average person to defend themselves is to vote Trump out of office and vote Stephanie Kelton in. There’s no other way, you know, at this point to solve this problem.

Grumbine (00:48:39):

I’m curious about this though. The Congress itself, the house, which is run by the Democrats at this point and the Senate, which is now still run by the Mitch McConnell’s of the world. And neither one of them are advancing any bills to Donald Trump. And that’s a problem. The house has passed a few things that the Senate has sat on.

And so at the end of the day, as important as Trump is, you look at the other two branches of government, the Supreme court and the Senate and the house. And we’re not getting anywhere there either. Even with these most recent wins, they aren’t directly helping us yet. That’s a future state thing, but it does seem like there’s still an incredible amount of partisan gamesmanship. Trump has even had an opportunity to veto these, right?

Harvey (00:49:30):

Yeah.

Grumbine (00:49:31):

So we’re in this awkward position where yeah, Trump is a horrible guy and he absolutely is beyond the shadow of a doubt, but we’re not getting legislation there. So we can point to him and say, the man vetoed the thing that would have saved your life. He’s not even getting that chance. So I worry so much that we see Trump as a panacea and in reality, that there’s so much dysfunction in our government that we do have some control over.

I don’t think we take it seriously. And maybe this is a matter of voting because these local and state positions, these judges that you vote on in your local communities, all this stuff, every step of our government is part of the problem or part of the solution. And I think that so much is dependent on us getting a strong message out there, making sure candidates have enough air cover, to speak boldly to Kelton’s book The Deficit Myth, my goodness. That’s the playbook, right? I mean, I don’t know of any other way around it. I don’t.

Harvey (00:50:28):

And what you’re saying about voting, I kept coming back to that before the primary thinking, we still have a chance to stop them. If we were to get Sanders in and to a lesser extent, Warren, although she was employing a couple of left leaning, neoclassical economists, but there was still a chance then it seemed like, and then of course he starts winning and heavily, and then all the other stuff happened.

So you’re right. Except I worry about the democratic party stopping. I remember back in the previous election, when one of my establishment Democrat friends said, Oh, thank goodness we have super delegates or we’d end up with a candidate like Donald Trump. You mean one that wins? Of course. Well, anyway, I won’t go into that.

Another thing I hadn’t really thought about until recently, and I guess it’s just because I’m not that much into politics is we need to abolish the Senate, which has never going to happen. And I think we have Rhode Island to blame for it. I was asking one of my friends in the political science department, do other democratic countries have an institution like the Senate. And he says, none. None of them do. They’re based on population, not on geographic area.

And we all know the problem in the Senate in terms of how many Republicans represent, you know, we have what, 10 Republican senators who States add up to the population of Los Angeles County. I don’t guess we’re getting rid of the Senate either, but yeah. I mean voting and then maybe the, I hate to say third party out loud, but I don’t know.

Grumbine (00:51:54):

You need a strong third party presence to actually exact some leverage somewhere, somewhere. There’s gotta be leverage. Do you want my votes or not? Yeah. I’m of the mindset. And I’ve speak about this whenever anybody would give me five minutes. I don’t think the solution is parties in general right now. Not that you don’t vote, not that you don’t support whatever, right?

The idea is that the solutions and you’re seeing it happen right now. You’ve got a tri partisan. You’ve got Republicans out there. Even with black lives matter marching with Progressives. You’ve got true, honest to God, socialist and anarchic libertarians. We’ve got a full 99% out there marching together. To me, that is where the power lies. And it takes time.

This neoliberal world we’re in keeps us employed or lacking employment, which means that we’re struggling to get out to these events. The virus is making it dangerous to get out to these events. And yet in the grand scheme of things, I’ve never seen anything create so much change so quickly. Now mind you, some of this has been veneer, some of this is window dressing, but the truth of the matter is, is that I have seen substantive change in different aspects.

The conversation is wide open about policing. If we changed that with the economic profession and we make that about a job guarantee and making sure that we aren’t destitute and making sure that the green new deal happens because of climate change, you name it to me, that’s it, man. We don’t seem to be able to vote our way into the power. And we don’t seem to be able to talk our way into power. They will go up their message and they will give us the neoliberal response.

Harvey (00:53:37):

And pat us on the head.

Grumbine (00:53:39):

Yeah, exactly. Good little boy. Now run along. Let us grownups take care of this.

Harvey (00:53:43):

Exactly how we felt at that local convention. You know, thanks for what you said. Yeah. Move on.

Grumbine (00:53:49):

Hideous. And you know, and you think to yourself, if we actually had real direct representation, this wouldn’t even be an issue, but it’s all the electoral college representation where you’ve got this fly over States that get the same sway. There’s so many things that are fundamentally flawed.

Harvey (00:54:07):

And I go back to the economics profession again, let’s say we did get people in. What if the medical profession was giving the advice as cigarettes are no big deal smoke all you want. Amen. Well then what are we going to do? You know, I was thinking when you talked about the police a minute ago and something that doesn’t, I don’t think it’s talked about enough.

I really want to look this up and see how much truth there is to this. But I’ve heard the idea that as we have changed tax rates and state and local governments have gone more and more to say property taxes here in Texas, we still don’t have an income tax. And so we’re starting to starve these local communities.

And so we have police forces with very little money and we’ve got police forces that are raising money by fining people for various things in Ferguson. And you don’t fine the rich people because they’re going to fight it. You fine the poor people. And so, so much of this to me, we cannot solve this. We cannot solve all these various problems without a fundamental change in thinking about economics.

And it goes all the way even to the black lives matter thing, that if we had a job guarantee, we wouldn’t have people trapped in poverty. And you see the people that work at the post office, you often see people of color working there and what a tremendous source of a good, decent job that people could have right there. And over time, one would hope that we would see the economics even out.

But I think initially you’re going to see a lot of people of color taking advantage of a job guarantee because they’re the ones that have been screwed over up until now and have been put in a position of a self fulfilling prophecy where we don’t educate, we don’t try to establish businesses and so forth. So anyway, I see The Deficit Myth and The Job Guarantee book as just absolutely fundamental to anything else that we do that until we change our approach to economics, nothing else is going to get fixed.

Grumbine (00:55:54):

That’s a great point. And I guess we can end on this. Ask you one big question here. You know, I’ve heard Jamey Galbraith speak rather forcefully about the way that the orthodoxy has blocked out heterodox voices and kept you out of journals and kept you out of academia and kept you out of these really important areas where the ability to influence policy and so forth is clearly on display.

As we’re talking about this depression and you’ve got neoclassical still guiding our way out of this thing. Yeah. Talk to me, how do we overcome the orthodoxy within academia and the profession itself? How do we deal with that? Because it’s such a respectability politics and all this other, we shouldn’t talk so harshly. So how do you guys overcome that? I mean, it seems like there’s a clamp.

Harvey (00:56:46):

Yeah. And you know, I mentioned the Paul Romer article a moment ago and he’s a Nobel prize winner and a neoclassical because you can’t win a Nobel prize if you’re going to be a classical cause that’s, who’s voting for you. And, you know, I told you that he wrote this piece that really slammed in very, I mean, he didn’t hold any punches. He did revise it and hold some punches because he caught so much hell. I was on a panel with him as a matter of fact, before he won the Nobel prize.

And I wanted to ask him about the article and he was saying, my gosh, everyone was on him about how can you dishonor the names of our revered scholars? Well, cause I want macroeconomics to be right. You know? And so what he got in terms of just what you said, respectability the backlash was in terms of ancestor worship, how can you say bad things about Milton Friedman, which he did in the article. And he was absolutely right.

So his attempt within the school of thought was met with a great deal of, I guess, resentment. And I don’t think he’s gonna change anything though. As I said earlier, graduates coming out with neoclassical PhDs right now, they don’t like macro. I saw a piece the other day that said that at one major university in their PhD program, they were discussing taking macro out of the core of courses that all students had to take. My God, would you not expect me to know unemployment inflation, GDP growth?

Well, if you’re going to specialize in that area. Sure. I don’t expect everyone to know exchange rates. I don’t expect everyone to know labor markets in detail work at any rate, but you would expect all economists. I think the average person on the street would assume that economists know something about unemployment rather than, Oh, I didn’t take those classes, those weren’t very interesting. Now. So what do we do? Well, as a funny, you should mention Jamey Galbraith because I asked him this very question down there at the LBJ School, they sponsor a little workshop conference thing every two years.

And so not the last time, but the time before that there were bunch of good papers. You can imagine this sort of stuff. That was, I think Stephanie actually presented that the one I’m thinking of right now and then Pavlina the next one. But so we’re out. The conference is over and we’re at this barbecue place in Austin, Texas, and we’re drinking beer and so forth. And I said to Jamey, what are we going to do? And he said, nothing. It’s lost.

The economics profession is lost. And I said, well, what can we do? And he looked around the room and he said this right here. We speak directly to policymakers. We talked to people who were in public policy, but economics is dead. And so I don’t know how I feel about that, but he certainly hasn’t given up. There’s not like he’s saying, Oh, well we can’t do anything. No he’s saying no, I’m using a different angle.

I’m sick of talking to the people that believe that the more unrealistic the assumptions are on the model than the more significant the model is, which is from Friedman, by the way. He says, there’s nothing we can do. Not in the profession. I don’t have an answer. There’s Jamey Galbraith’s answer. And I’ll tell you, even at my own university, I have this book on contending perspectives and economics that I had no desire to write, by the way. It’s a long story. How I ended up writing.

It was really hard to write from the perspective of other people’s schools of thought. And I had people in those schools of thought read the chapters for me. I wanted it to be really fair. And this is required course in our department is why I wrote the book because there wasn’t one, I’m feeling pressure from the younger members of the department. I’ve been there for 34 years from the younger members like, yeah, do we need to teach that? Do you know anything about it? They know nothing about it.

And so maybe Galbraith is right that the economics profession has, you know, shot itself, not just in the foot, but in the head. And we need to focus, not on changing economics, but on changing the politics and on changing the economic views of politicians. You know, it’s a problem because then you get back into the respectability thing you were talking about, but I’ll give you Jamey Galbraith’s answer there and I’ll leave it at that.

Grumbine (01:00:41):

Well with that, John, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time with us today. We are very much in scary times and it’s good to know that we have a few good guys and gals out there, especially with Stephanie and Pavlina and others and yourself putting out great work, help educate people to fight back. It is an intellectual war. It’s not just a physical war. It’s an intellectual war, a knowledge war, a paradigm war.

Harvey (01:01:08):

And I can’t tell you how much of a difference it makes to have things like Real Progressive and Macro N Cheese. When we didn’t have anything like this before. There was no community out there that was saying, no, you’re not losers.

What you’re talking about does make more sense because we were getting nothing but disrespect from our own profession. It’s really nice to have all these people on Facebook and on Twitter and so forth to give you a boost when you’re feeling really low.

Grumbine (01:01:34):

Well, you guys have been my heroes and I think I’m in my 10th year now of not taking a day off of pushing this. It’s been 10 years that I have been maniacally devoted to this cause, and I’m not an economist, but I’ve been around enough now that I know what resources to pull out and I know who to bring in and I can answer some questions that’ll get us in the right ballpark of having a good conversation.

And I know enough to stop when I don’t know what I’m saying. Anyway, with that, John, thank you so much for taking the time with me today. You’re a special guy and hopefully we’ll see more of the Cowboy Economist soon.

Harvey (01:02:14):

Well, as a matter of fact, let me close with this. I took a break from cleaning up what we call the Hobbit room. It’s the room over the garage, the ceiling so low, you can’t be any taller than a Hobbit to go in there.

And I had been using that as the Cowboy Economist studio, but when my daughter came back from law school, her bedroom blocks access. Guess what I’m doing today? I am cleaning the Hobbit room so that the Cowboy Economist studio can be set up again. So hopefully he’ll be back in the saddle soon.

Grumbine (01:02:39):

Awesome. Awesome. Look forward to it. Alright, folks with that, this is John Harvey and Steve Grumbine saying thank you so much. And we’ll talk to you again soon. Have a good one everybody we’re out.

Announcer [music] (01:02:56):

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