Point of View August 1, 2024 – Hour 2 : Economic Policies, The Election

[00:00:00] Hour 2 Point of View

[00:01:18] President Biden and now his successor Kamala Harris are touting their economic record but I believe they made a number of mistakes. What do you think are the biggest mistakes that the president has made in his time in office?

[00:01:48] At the beginning of 2021, year over year inflation in the United States was 1.4%. In the month after the passage of that bill, inflation jumped right up and ultimately rose by more than 6 percentage points for only the third time in U.S. economic history and ended up over 9% in early 2022.

[00:02:08] That's the flame that lit the fuse of inflation. The Fed contributed with some excessive monetary policy and we've been pretty much fighting that inflation battle ever since. They didn't do the Fed any favors by continuing the pattern of big spending bills with deficit financing.

[00:02:27] They did the infrastructure bill, they did the CHIPS Act, they did the inflation reduction act. All of these have the same character. All of them contributed to inflation we see right now.

[00:02:37] So it's hard for them to run and say, we did these things. This is what you hear every day. We did these things. We did the American Rescue Plan, the inflation reduction act, CHIPS infrastructure. The flip side to every one of those is a problem that Americans really have disliked and have contributed to the weak numbers they have at the polls.

[00:02:55] You know, you see there's discussion among economists because some will come out and defend the President's plan. Some of his own, some of the Democratic's own economists did not defend the American Rescue Plan thinking it might be inflationary.

[00:03:07] But you do have a varying opinion among economists. Why is that? What's the difference there? Well, I think it has to do with the genuinely difficult part of task of taking the inflation rate that went from 1.4 to 9.1. Notice the dispute about that.

[00:03:25] And trying to carve it into pieces. One piece due to the aftermath of the global pandemic, so-called supply chains, and that's a real phenomenon. It certainly contributed to inflation. The cost of shipping internationally went up dramatically, and even domestically things got tough to move from place to place.

[00:03:44] The second piece is how much came on the demand side from the Federal Reserve? The Federal Reserve pumps $5 trillion in cash into financial markets that kept the interest rates at zero.

[00:03:54] So it had to be something. And how much is due to the tax spending decisions made by the Biden administration? So I don't think anyone would assign zero to the Biden administration. The question is, how much of the blame do they get?

[00:04:08] You know, Milton Friedman used to say that inflation is anywhere and always a monetary phenomenon, meaning it had to do with too much money chasing two little goods. Do you think that-is that playing a big role here?

[00:04:23] Certainly, I think it plays a big role. And to put this in Friedman's terms, the problem in 2021 in his view would not be the American Rescue Plan. It will be the fact that the Fed didn't jack rates up right away to counteract it. And the Fed didn't.

[00:04:36] It kept rates at zero throughout 2021, and those checks went out and people spent the money and without the inflation.

[00:04:43] So, you know, Mr. Friedman loved to assign primacy to monetary policy and make it the first line of defense against inflation, but both fiscal and monetary factors can play a role.

[00:04:54] Let's switch to Republicans and talk about that for a minute because Republicans after the Second World War really became generally free market people. They wanted to-they enjoyed free markets. They liked free trade and supported free trade. Democrats tended to prefer tariffs and oftentimes have trade restrictions.

[00:05:15] Donald Trump has come in, he's changing that approach. He likes to call himself Tariff Man.

[00:05:21] He imposed some tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum, tried to impose some other tariffs. And now he's talking about if he is elected, imposing a 10% tariff across the board on all imports, and I think a 60% tariff on Chinese goods.

[00:05:38] You might make a case for some things, but what has happened to Republicans that they've moved away from the generally free trade approach?

[00:05:48] Well, I think it's been a continual erosion as much as an abrupt change. I can think back to 2001, so a long time ago now, when trying to get then-President Bush trade promotion authority fast track the ability to negotiate trade agreements,

[00:06:04] got through a Republican controlled house represented by one vote. So trade was already becoming a sticky issue over 20 years ago. It became progressively more so as China became a bigger player in the world economy, so that's the big factor, number one.

[00:06:20] How do you deal with China? And then number two, Mr. Trump, who has just flipped the script on the Democrats, tried to appeal to blue collar workers in unions by protecting their jobs, by protecting their industries, and that's all these tariffs are, they're pure protectionism.

[00:06:38] The trouble is the losses for everyone else are much larger than the gains of those small numbers of individuals, and that traditional critique of trade held Republicans together, and today no longer seems to.

[00:06:52] We're also hearing this term on industrial policy. The Biden administration is looking at that, but you also have someone like Senator Marco Rubio, Republican Senator from Florida talking about industrial policy. So take a second to tell us what do we mean by industrial policy?

[00:07:09] Industrial policy is deliberately favoring one industry over the others, using either subsidies or special regulations or just preferred tax treatments and it amounts to the old freight of picking winners.

[00:07:27] We're going to figure out that semiconductors are a target of industrial policy now. We're going to say they're going to be winners. We're going to give money to semiconductor firms to build fabrication plants in the United States, and that's going to be a good thing for everybody.

[00:07:41] So it really has two key features. Number one, the decision making is taken out of the hands of the market, out of the hands of consumers, households, businessmen where normally they have to compete for workers and capital on a level playing field and may the best products win.

[00:07:57] And instead, the government is saying this is the important thing. You guys don't know what you're talking about. We're smarter than you. And then the second thing is using the taxpayer to back these efforts and that's where danger really begins because once you put it into a government setting, the government doesn't like to admit that they've done something wrong.

[00:08:16] So they rarely let things fail. And the real critique of industrial policy is that we will pick the wrong people but keep plowing money into them to disguise that fact for a long, long time.

[00:08:25] My guest by phone is Dr. Doug Holteken. He is president of American Action Forum. Former head of director of the Congressional Budget Office did that for a few years and we're talking about economic policy.

[00:08:37] When we come back, we want to find out more about this industrial policy when we come back. This is Viewpoints with Kirby Anderson.

[00:09:02] If you mention the term killer robots, people are likely to think of the Terminator movies. But these are real and will change the nature of warfare.

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[00:10:27] He suspects that Russia and China may already have automation where early warning systems trigger a reflex to launch missiles in return. Killer robots are no longer merely the stuff of science fiction. I'm Kirby Anderson and that's my point of view.

[00:10:43] Free booklet on a biblical view of patriot preachers go to viewpoints.info slash patriot preachers. Viewpoints.info slash patriot preachers. You're listening to Point of View, your listener supported source for truth. My guest by phone, Dr. Doug Holtzaken. He is the president of American Action Forum,

[00:11:10] former director of the Congressional Budget Office and got his PhD in economics from Princeton University. Doug, you were talking about industrial policy. Democrats seem to be embracing industrial policy. You saw that with the CHIPS Act where they're trying to subsidize the creation of more chips.

[00:11:30] You see it to some extent with the expansion of electric vehicles that the Biden administration is pushing. But it seems that Republicans are increasingly, they've been sort of stayed away from that, but they seem to be embracing industrial policy as well.

[00:11:45] Well, I think they do so at some risk, to be honest. There isn't a track record of successful industrial policy in the United States. You just can't name something where the government said, no, all of you folks are not very smart.

[00:11:58] We're going to build this and they will make the United States successful. I think the temptation to embrace it now is driven almost entirely by fear of China and the notion that somehow the Chinese are using

[00:12:11] governmental resources to amass tremendous leads in various technologies, whether they're cloud computing or quantum computing or particular products like EVs. And we have to do the same thing. I think that's misreading the lesson in history. This became the largest strongest economy on the globe,

[00:12:30] not by having the government act like the Chinese but by getting out of the way and letting the, what is now, 315 million very smart Americans decide for themselves. You know, it's interesting because we occasionally criticize China for subsidizing their businesses and their products and so forth,

[00:12:45] making them cheaper. But we do a lot of subsidizing ourselves directly or indirectly. Yeah, you don't want to broadcast that too loudly but you get some feedback on your show. It's really, I think, done something sort of quite remarkable.

[00:13:05] Quietly the United States has killed the World Trade Organization, the sort of global agreements to keep barriers to trade low by literally subsidizing our domestic industries and so the Europeans have responded, the Chinese have responded.

[00:13:18] The developing world is incredibly unhappy with the state affairs because their governments don't have enough money to subsidize anyone

[00:13:25] so they don't know how to play in the subsidy game. But it has led to a real fragmentation of what had been a global consensus on the way to do business. Let's talk a little bit about what is a real concern out there and that's the federal debt.

[00:13:39] It's been growing dramatically. If Biden, I guess, Kamala Harris is elected, she has, I don't think, any plans to cut federal spending. I did hear former President Trump in his acceptance speech at the RNC say he made a quick mention that he wants to cut spending.

[00:13:58] No details on that. But how are we, since so much is spent on entitlements, social security, Medicare, Medicaid and some of these others, how do we get control of this federal debt if we don't start looking at spending and is there enough spending there to cut?

[00:14:16] So the issue is not to literally cut the spending. Cut is a scary word, particularly when we start talking about entitlement programs. But the reality is you cannot solve the accumulation of debt, get it under control and start to decrease the amount that we have out there

[00:14:33] unless you deal with social security and Medicare. Those two programs combined will spend $36 trillion over the next 10 years. That vastly exceeds the $21 trillion that Congress will decide on its own what to spend in the annual appropriations.

[00:14:49] So that's become a sideshow and it is the largest portion of the federal budget. It's also the fastest growing. So security is going to grow at about 5.5% per year, Medicare at about 7%. And I say that not to sort of focus on the numbers themselves.

[00:15:04] The key fact is that faster than revenues will grow. So you have the two programs that are the largest growing faster than any possible way to finance them.

[00:15:12] So the key is to bring those growth rates down closer to something that looks like the growth rate of the economy, say 4%.

[00:15:18] And then you've got a real chance at fixing this problem. Until you do that, you don't really solve anything. You just keep having the gap between spending and revenue widen every year.

[00:15:30] But you said, I think you said you can't really talk about cuts and even if you're saying we're going to slow the rate of growth, that ends up being defined in the media and by the opposing party as a cut.

[00:15:43] I agree. It's been the Achilles heel of the careers of people like me who have argued that we need to have these programs perform better.

[00:15:54] The real reason we need to have them perform better is not because Green Eye Shades people like former CDO doctors want the programs to get cut. It's because they're not serving their beneficiaries very well. So here's the best example of that.

[00:16:06] I'm currently enraged by the situation in Social Security. The trust fund that finances Social Security spending is going to go bankrupt in the next 10 years when it does,

[00:16:16] benefits will have to be cut by 20% across the board. That's unthinkable and you and I both know Congress is not going to let that happen. But what that means is we don't know when or what Congress is going to do to the Social Security program.

[00:16:29] So if you're 55 and thinking about retiring in 10 years, you don't know what your Social Security benefits will be. And you can't make a retirement plan without knowing that. That's a terrible way to run a pension system.

[00:16:39] We need a Social Security system that we should be proud of. This is America. We should have a first class Social Security system. So I'm frustrated at the lack of willingness to reform Social Security because it's not doing its job right now.

[00:16:51] It's creating a lot of uncertainty among seniors. It's supposed to get rid of uncertainty among seniors. It's exactly backwards. And so I would like to see these fixed, yes, they can contribute to the debt problem but they can also be better programs and that's what we need.

[00:17:06] So I want to also talk about the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That passed in 2017. I thought that was a great piece of legislation. There are only several good parts in that.

[00:17:18] Much of that is coming due, I guess, next year. And so Democrats are already wanting to change that. They want to change the corporate income tax rate from 21%. I think they want to push it up to 28%.

[00:17:31] I think I've seen that Republicans are suggesting lowering it just a little bit. Donald Trump has suggested lowering it to 15%.

[00:17:38] What part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act do we want to keep? Do we want to keep it all? Can we do it, given if a divided government? So I think the right way to think about the challenge next year, and you're right.

[00:17:53] At the end of 2025, all of that 2017 law sunset accepts some of the corporate provisions. And so something has to happen. And what should happen should be thought of as doing tax reform to raise the revenue that we want

[00:18:07] and not preserving in its entirety the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act or getting rid of it in its entirety. Instead, we should take the pieces we want to keep and then do better pro-gross tax reform with the remainder.

[00:18:19] So what would that look like? Well, I think the corporate provisions are the sort of real clear winner in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In the five years leading up to this passage, we lost about five headquarters of companies every year.

[00:18:31] You can remember these battles. They talked about debt-addictorial firms and the treasure we go have there. They're inversions. Yeah, they're inversions. And since it passed, we haven't lost a single headquarters. And the one company that was in the process when it passed came back.

[00:18:45] That was Pfizer, wasn't it? It has been an undisguised success. I mean, it's just been enormously successful. All those jobs are here. The investment is not flowing overseas. It's flowing here. The money's being repatriated back here. All of the things we wanted to have happen in that act.

[00:19:00] So if you're going to do a tax reform, the first thing you do is you broaden the base and you raise rates as little as possible. And in the list of rates that you want to touch, I think the corporate rate should be last.

[00:19:11] That's been a very successful policy. Don't mess with it. Start thinking about the rest and what you need to do. If you were advising President Trump and his running mate, JD Fance, what would you suggest would be the best economic policies for them to consider?

[00:19:29] Well, they have some already. From his first term, Mr. Trump's record on controlling the growth of the regulatory state is extraordinary. He said he was going to have one regulation in and then make two go out.

[00:19:44] And I never thought it would be done and he did it to an extent that it was just unprecedented. So do that again. That was very successful. No reason to change. Number two, really genuinely do a better job of controlling spending.

[00:19:57] His record in his first four years in office was not very good. It was big spending. He needs to control that. He has said he's not going to touch social security and Medicare. We've talked about that. I would politely disagree. I think we need to get on that.

[00:20:11] And then the real issue is going to be this issue with trade. And where I think that on balance proposals for say a 10% across the board tariff amount to a $3 trillion tax increase on America's consumers of imports.

[00:20:27] And I don't think it's good conservative economic policy to raise taxes on consumers in that magnitude. We've got a little list in a minute. Tell our listeners about American Action Forum. American Action Forum is on paper in a Washington think tank, a policy institute.

[00:20:43] In reality I built it like a campaign policy shop where the candidate is market oriented ideas.

[00:20:49] And every day we get out of bed to 25 or so of us and weigh in on behalf of the private sector and market oriented ideas in the pursuit of economic freedom and growth. And I encourage everybody to go to their website. You can check that out pointofview.net.

[00:21:04] We have a link to that website. Doug, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure, Meryl. Thanks for having me. That was Dr. Doug Holtzak, and president of American Action Forum.

[00:21:13] When we come back, we're going to turn to the presidential race with Richard Lam talking a little bit about how the presidency has changed over the years. So stay with us on point of view.

[00:21:23] It almost seems like we live in a different world from many people in positions of authority. They say men can be women and women men. People are prosecuted differently or not at all depending on their politics. Criminals are more valued and rewarded than law abiding citizens.

[00:21:49] It's so overwhelming, so demoralizing. You feel like giving up, but we can't. We shouldn't. We must not. As Winston Churchill said to Britain in the darkest days of World War II, Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never yield to force.

[00:22:08] Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. And that's what we say to you today. This is not a time to give in, but to step up and join point of view in providing clarity in the chaos.

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[00:23:01] The opinions expressed on Point of View do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of this station. And now here again, Dr. Merrill Matthews. And welcome back. You know as we head towards the presidential election in November, it seems that the role of the presidency,

[00:23:22] the office has been changing or at least evolving over time. And so we wanted to reach out to Richard Lim. He is the, he has the podcast This American President. He appears in numerous media places. Stacy on the right. He is also in Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal.

[00:23:41] He was at the White House and at George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate for a while. He's got his master's degree from Syracuse University and a bachelor's degree from the University of California at San Diego. And he is a frequent appearer here on Point of View's Millennial Roundtable.

[00:23:58] Richard, thank you for joining us. Thank you. Always good to be here. And yes, I did undergrad in San Diego and grad school in Syracuse. And I can safely say that Syracuse is the colder of the two locations. I won't even argue that point.

[00:24:15] Tell us how did you get so interested? I mean, you've got the podcast This American President. How did you get interested in the presidency? You know, so I've always been that guy in the group of friends who would say random historical facts out of nowhere.

[00:24:34] And I think that traces back to when I was a kid, let's say about eight or nine years old, and my mom would take me to the library every Saturday and just get really interested in different subjects. And there was a time I was into science and astronomy

[00:24:54] and wanted to be a pilot. But history was something that just stuck with me. And I always say that if you like a good story, you're going to like history. When people think history, they might think having to memorize dates and names for a quiz in high school.

[00:25:13] That's not really what history is. History is just the story of people and countries and the story of people trying to get along. And if you like a good story, you're going to like history. One of my favorite historians once said that there's no excuse

[00:25:28] for a boring history lecture because history is just about people and people struggle and just figuring stuff out. It's a very good point. I'm going to read something you've written here. The experiments are made up of real people. People who do great things, make mistakes, have feelings,

[00:25:47] go through personal and professional struggles, et cetera. In the end, every figure in history, no matter how great they were, was just a human as you and me. Talk a little bit about the human side of the American president.

[00:26:03] Yeah, so one of my favorite historical productions is John Adams. It was the HBO miniseries. It's really great. And it was before things got really crazy in Hollywood. Nowadays, I don't think you could make anything positive about The Founding Fathers anymore without making it exclusively about slavery.

[00:26:28] But it was one of those times where they actually could do something honest about The Founding Fathers. And one of the best things about that program, the most famous miniseries, is that they show The Founding Fathers getting old, throwing old, losing teeth, their hair grays,

[00:26:49] they get liver spots. And it was a great reminder because the images we have of The Founding Fathers are these idealized portraits where they look like, or statues and busts where they look perfect. They look like Roman gods. They were people.

[00:27:09] And just like people, they were capable of incredible things and they accomplished incredible things. They also made mistakes because who doesn't? And they had families. They came from a context in which they had communities and they were real people.

[00:27:31] These figures were not people that existed somewhere out there in a history book. They existed the way we all exist. And so that's one of the great things. And I think it's an important thing to remember to know what the proper role of a historical figure is,

[00:27:51] not to save us, not to solve all our problems, but to execute a position and that's what they should do. It's an interesting point because you have a whole industry out there that's dedicated to try to make the president or the presidential candidate look perfect.

[00:28:10] And so with Kamala Harris, now that she's going to be a presidential candidate, we've seen a lot of times where they talk about word salad, she mixes her words up, she just says some strange and odd things and so forth.

[00:28:24] But now that she's a candidate, you have the media coming out. You have her handlers and so forth coming out. And you hear them talk about how great she is, great decisions she's made, strong, courageous and so forth. It's almost like we're trying to make you think

[00:28:39] that this person does not have faults. Yeah, absolutely. And I think since the advent of modern media and media and technology have been ever advancing. So back in the day in the founding, it was a lot less personal because presidents,

[00:28:57] you knew about presidents through pamphlets and through mouth and through newspapers, and then that became a radio where the president, you could hear the president's voice and the president would be like a real person. And then of course television and social media has changed all that.

[00:29:14] And so as technology has progressed and things have gotten more personal, the packaging of the candidate has become so crucial and so specific, but it also means that you could portray people in a very dishonest way. Now this isn't entirely new.

[00:29:34] If you look, let's say at the ninth president of the United States, William Henry Harrison, he was a wealthy man, came from a prominent family. His father signed the Declaration of Independence. But in order to beat Andrew Jackson's party,

[00:29:50] the party of a common man, they had to rewrite William Henry Harrison into a common man himself. They said that he'd like to start her lip-slot cabin even though he actually had a giant estate. And so the inherent nature of politics

[00:30:06] in which people are being packaged in a certain way to win votes, that has always been with us. And I think it's really up to the American people to be able to discern between what is real and what is not real.

[00:30:21] You know, you have mentioned, I think you did one of your podcasts on this American president about what happens if the president is incapacitated. And we've had some. We've had Woodrow Wilson who was struggling health-wise at the end of his life.

[00:30:34] You had FDR who was oftentimes in a wheelchair but didn't want to see that. And then of course with President Biden, you have what looks like some physical or maybe mental decline. Yet they try to in some ways hide that. What happens when a president is incapacitated?

[00:30:52] Well, you said it exactly right. It seems to be the case that presidents tend to hide their health issues because presidents often see themselves as indispensable to the country. And so if you especially have a president during a crucial time, they'll want to stay in office.

[00:31:13] It's ironic because you could point out the most dramatic event situations in which presidents hid their health issues. And you actually have to go back to Grover Cleveland who had a tumor removed from his mouth and it was during an economic panic

[00:31:33] and he basically snuck onto a boat to have the tumor removed quietly so that nobody would know that the operation was happening. And it wasn't revealed until decades later. Then you had, as you said, Woodrow Wilson who had a stroke that rendered him basically paralyzed

[00:31:53] and his wife ended up doing a lot of the presidential work for him. And this was a year and a half this lasted. So that is one of the most egregious examples. FDR hid the extent of his polio. People knew he had polio

[00:32:08] but they didn't know the extent of it and the extent of the impression that he wasn't that sick. Then you had John F. Kennedy who had all sorts of problems. He had a terrible back. At some points in his presidency he had to be on a wheelchair

[00:32:25] and he could barely lift anything up. He also had Addison's disease. And then, of course, you mentioned Joe Biden and so that's five instances that presidents have hid their health. All of them happen to be Democrats. It's interesting.

[00:32:40] And they also try to say that Ronald Reagan was declining during his presidency. Well, I would challenge anyone who says that to watch a clip of Ronald Reagan's speech in 1992 at the Republican convention three and a half years after he left office where he's still looking great

[00:33:02] and a heck of a lot better than Joe Biden looks right now. So it's fascinating but it seems to be a tendency for presidents who generally look at themselves as the most important person in the country. They usually are. And they don't want to leave power.

[00:33:15] And so that's what happens. The president gets sick. It's very hard to get them to admit to it. We're going to take a quick break. We're talking to Richard Lim. He is frequently on the Point of View Millennial Roundtable and also an expert on the presidency

[00:33:30] with his podcast, This American Presence. We'll be back in just a minute. To Point of View, final segment on Point of View, my guest by phone Richard Lim. He is a frequent appear on the Point of View Millennial Roundtable and an expert on the presidency.

[00:34:11] And Richard, you know, Republicans have long looked back at Ronald Reagan as sort of a model presidency, model for the conservative president, somebody that we would like to get more conservatives like him. But Republicans seem to be turning away from that model. Is that your sense as well?

[00:34:30] Yes, absolutely. And I think if you look at the platform that we see from the Republican convention, you'll definitely see that. I mean, the Republican Party's positions have changed dramatically on tariffs. It's moved away with President Trump's candidacy from the pro-life movement.

[00:34:53] And it's definitely moved in a more populist, less ideological direction. I also want to point out with that said that we are 40 years removed from the last time Ronald Reagan ran for president, which is almost the bulk of my lifetime so far.

[00:35:14] And it's not surprising that this is the case. George Washington was the most beloved president, the most beloved man of his age, and he was a federalist. Well, four years, literally the year after George Washington died,

[00:35:28] the party turned away from him and turned to the Party of Jefferson, which had opposed many of Washington's policies. And so it doesn't take long for people to move on. And even say look at the presidency of Grover Cleveland. He was nominated by the Democratic Party three times.

[00:35:47] He's known as the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms. So he was their nominee three times. He won twice, but by the end of his second term, his party had completely abandoned him. And Grover Cleveland was really the last Democrat who was conservative, a Jeffersonian.

[00:36:05] And so when he refused to move in the progressive position, his party abandoned him. So it's definitely not a surprise that three decades from now with the country changing so dramatically that you're seeing a reshuffling of the party. And I think while President Reagan stood for many things,

[00:36:24] many broad things that Republicans still love, I think people understand that policies have to adjust to some extent with the time. You can keep the principles that Ronald Reagan fought for, but the policies might have to adjust. And Ronald Reagan might say the same thing.

[00:36:41] I mean, this was a person who came into office talking about how the Soviet Union was the evil empire, and he ended up signing agreements with the Soviet Union because the situation had changed. And he still hated communism, but he recognized that the Soviet Union was changing.

[00:36:59] And so I think Ronald Reagan himself would have understood that principles can stay the same, but policies have to adjust at times. You know, the Constitution defines the role of the president. The president has also taken on certain powers over time,

[00:37:14] certain things that they feel like they can do. How has the public changed in what they want from a president? Because it seems to me they want different things today than they might have 30, 40, 50 years ago.

[00:37:29] Oh yes, well, you know, it's fascinating because if you look at what a president, what the word president actually means, is a presiding officer, president presides. And before the Constitution was ratified, there was a president in the Continental Congress or the Congress of the Confederation.

[00:37:51] And that person though did not have executive power. They were merely a presiding officer. They led debate. But so the actual term doesn't necessarily denote executive authority. Well, the Constitution gave the president executive authority, calling him the chief executive. But what was the role of the chief executive?

[00:38:11] It was to execute the laws. It was to execute the laws that Congress passed. And George Washington said Congress because it was the body closest to the people and because we're a nation where the people rule, that was the driving force in the government.

[00:38:29] And George Washington said that the Congress was like the first wheel that turned, that set all the other gears of government into motion. It was not the president that did that. The president merely executed those laws. And that's how our presidents used to be.

[00:38:44] But over time, presidents have seen themselves as national messiahs. Who promise the American people, I will solve your problems, your health care problems, any wealth inequality problems if you hate your boss. I'll help you with that.

[00:38:58] And since then, the American people have shifted from seeing the president as an executive to seeing the president as a savior. And that puts too much weight on the presidency. And when a presidency ends nowadays, people feel disappointed.

[00:39:16] They say, oh well, you know, there was all this hope and then it ended up not being that great. And they get disillusioned. And whenever I hear people say those kind of things, I think, well, why did you put your hope in the president in the first place?

[00:39:28] Our system is based on consensus. And it's based on the people's representatives debating out issues deliberately in a deliberative process. But since the rise of the progressive movement, we've seen the president, we've tried to shoehorn in policies through the Trojan horse of the presidency.

[00:39:48] And that to me is such an unhealthy aspect of American politics where we fetishize the presidency. We fetishize leadership and strong men, and a strong man rather. And we put all our hope in a president. We find ourselves disappointed later on.

[00:40:04] Well, maybe you shouldn't have put your hope there in the first place. And I think people who fetishize the art of leadership really fall into this category.

[00:40:12] You know, I have an issue with Obama when I think in 2012 it was he said he couldn't get his agenda through Congress. So he says, I have a pen and a phone and I'm going to start calling people and I'm going to sign executive orders.

[00:40:27] Essentially, he was trying to do what he couldn't get through Congress. He just was going to try to do by executive order and essentially threaten the Republicans to sue him, which they did in some cases.

[00:40:38] But that seemed to be a major shift in the attempt by the president to sort of take on powers without going through Congress. Well, that's what happens when a president sees themselves as a savior.

[00:40:52] They don't think anyone should be in the way of whatever they think is right. If you look at our early presidents, they did not look at their relationship to the law versus Obama's relationship to the law. Obama felt he could make the law through his pen.

[00:41:08] Early presidents felt, you know who makes the law? The people's representatives. Again, because they're closest to the people. And so by that measure what happened then was that presidents would not campaign on a platform because all that stuff legislation was the purview of Congress.

[00:41:25] Now, the president has a role in legislation. He can sign her veto laws, but they often saw that role as a constitutional check, not in terms of their own policy preferences. They would not veto legislation just because they disagreed with it.

[00:41:42] They would actually sign laws they disagreed with out of deference to Congress. What they would veto were laws that they felt were unconstitutional. So, president was trying to look at it the way a judge looked at it. What does the law say? I don't make the law.

[00:41:56] I merely enforce the law. Congress has the job and it's a modest humble role for the president. But since the advent of the progressive movement, we've seen presidents, essentially parties have used presidents to shove their policies through some sort of charismatic figure.

[00:42:14] And that has again led to a lot of bad legislation that hasn't fixed our problems and it's led to disillusionment because people look to the president for solving all their problems. And in that sense the people don't have to have the responsibility of solving their own problems.

[00:42:31] So, someone who's fascinated by presidents, I am fascinated by presidents, but for all that is good in society, please do not put your hope in the president. The president, I think, encourages responsibility on the part of the American people.

[00:42:49] Richard, we've got to end it there. Thank you so much for joining me. Always great to be on Point of View. You can find out more about him plus he'll be on the Point of View Millennial Roundtable.

[00:43:00] I want to thank Megan for engineering, Steve for doing the producing, and a thank you. Pena Dexter will be back sharing the weekend edition tomorrow. The Bible tells us not to worry, and yet there is a lot of worrying stuff in our world today.

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