You’re Hired!

Chief Economic Adviser to Trump on What It’s Really Like to Work in the White House

Casey Mulligan served as the chief of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers from July 2018 to June 2019. During that time, he experienced a different version of the events that have made recent headlines (i.e., Ukrainegate) in other White House “tell-alls.”

Mulligan’s new book, You’re Hired! Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President, has much the same cast of characters as Bolton’s recent memoir, but it follows a very different script. Mulligan is an economics professor at University of Chicago and, as such, the focus of his book is on ideas — not attitude. However, we do learn a great deal about the personalities working behind the scenes, including that of the “Tariff Man” himself.

Professor Mulligan joins me this Sunday to tell the story of his time crafting analysis and advice on regulations, international trade, immigration and prescription drug policy for the President. A picture emerges of a politically incorrect president who has a hard time admitting he is wrong, but who also listens to his economic advisers (in most situations).

Hear from the man who has been called “the smartest man in the White House” how he used supply and demand to advance one of the biggest deregulatory pushes in recent history. Is Trump genuinely opposed to Washington insiders and special interests, or is it a self-serving act to appeal to his populist base?

We will compare the legacies of Reagan and Trump on the vital issue of international trade and will also discuss how the continuation of generous unemployment benefits is adding to the costs of pandemic and delaying economic recovery.

Transcript

Bob Zadek: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek show, always the show of ideas, never once the show of attitude. Thank you for listening this Sunday morning. This morning’s guest will give us a firsthand look at the operation of one of the more unusual White Houses in American history. When you have somebody in the White House who has never once before held elected office, things are bound to be a little bit unusual, but in this case, they were very unusual as you will learn.

This morning you will get firsthand views of some larger than life figures who have been on the news almost every night. Besides the President, you will learn about Bernie Sanders, Jeb Bush, and many others.

This morning’s guest is Casey Mulligan. Casey served as the chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers for a full year between 2018 And 2019. He has just published a book that has been called “riveting” among other accurate and complementary observations. His book is entitled You’re Hired and is about the untold successes and failures of a populist president, President Donald Trump.

Casey will share with us what he observed, and his opinions on President Trump and his policies. He’ll give us an inside look of what it’s like to be in the Oval Office in the White House during the tenure of a populist president — one of the few we have had in our history. Casey, thank you for joining us this morning and welcome to the show.

Casey Mulligan: It’s my pleasure. I wish everyone could get to meet the President. It’s my pleasure to explain to people what it’s like.

Inside the Oval Office, and First Impressions on Meeting the President

Bob Zadek: Now, you served as the chief economist in a group called the Council of Economic Advisers, part of the executive branch of the White House. You got a phone call and were asked to serve in this position. Of course, you accepted. You served for a year — that was your term — and then went back to teach at the University of Chicago, where you are now.

When you accepted the invitation to serve, was it because the position itself was so interesting, and was a chance to learn and to encourage others to adopt policies that you believed were correct? Would you have accepted the call from any president or administration because the job is so darn good, or would you have declined others?

Casey Mulligan: The position is a great opportunity to serve and to learn. The Bush Administration twice had approached me about essentially this position. I took them seriously for the exact reasons you mentioned, but it didn’t pan out. The important issue was whether my talents (and there’s a lot of talents I don’t have) fit with what President Bush was trying to do, and they really didn’t. When the Trump Administration called, that match was a lot better. I had written some books on President Obama’s major policies that President Trump was trying to reverse, and I had a lot of expertise on how we could do better than what President Obama had done.

Bob Zadek: What specifically was there about the invitation from Trump that made it appealing. What policies specifically got you excited and energized to join the administration?

Casey Mulligan: Initially, it was Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act. The president promised voters that he would repeal that, and when that failed, that he would try to clean it up a lot and make it better. Since that was my most recent book at the time, that was very attractive. I worked on that maybe 10–20% of the time, and ended up working on a lot of other things that were even more interesting the rest of the time, but I didn’t know those were coming down the pipe.

Bob Zadek: In your book, you offer wonderful, firsthand insights. It’s clear to me from reviewing the book that you didn’t have an agenda. You were just sharing what you had learned with the reading public. When you were serving as the chief economist, did you intend to write a book and take notes accordingly, or did it occur to you after the experience that that would be worth sharing with the public?

Casey Mulligan: It’s kind of in between. After I arrived, I realized that there was a niche opportunity, if you will. I knew from studying Obamacare that what you read in the press is often quite untrue. Going there, all I knew about the Trump White House in terms of the day-to day workings was what I read in the press, which I knew was wrong. But then what am I going into? I have no information, right?

I have information that pretends to be information, but I knew that I didn’t have real information, so I was fearful. When I got there, I got to see what it’s like, and I realized that there was a need for somebody to tell me about what it’s really like. I’ve written books before, so as time went on, I started having better and better notes, and thinking about a book and how it would be organized. Ultimately, when I got on and reflected backward, I ended up reorganizing everything. I realized that the populist party was really essential to understanding how the president operates and how his staff work for him.

Bob Zadek: We’re going to spend a lot of time during this hour talking about specific policy issues: how the president approached them, what conclusions he reached, and his successes and failures. Before we roll up our sleeves and get into policy, tell us about your first meeting with the president, either one-on-one or in a small group, and how your expectations measured up to reality in that close up and personal experience with the president.

Casey Mulligan: All the meetings were in a small group. I have some pictures in the book to show how it works. In the typical Oval Office meeting, there’s a handful of chairs around the President’s desk for the guests. In my meetings, we did not have press in the room. Maybe the listeners have seen pictures of Kanye in the Oval Office — it was the same setup. There were four or five chairs for Kanye and his folks. That’s the type of meeting that transpired. The first time I met him was to talk about how the economy had done in the past year and how that fit or didn’t fit with his policy goals. He covers a lot of ground in a short period of time, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

“Maybe the listeners have seen pictures of Kanye in the Oval Office — it was the same setup. There were four or five chairs for Kanye and his folks.”

I was a bit in amazement at the man. That was kind of my first reaction. I actually give the analogy in the book about the first time I ever went to a Bears game. I’ve been a Bears fan my whole life, but I was fairly old when I went to my first game in person. The Chicago Bears were playing Barry Sanders of the Detroit Lions, and I was really amazed at how Barry Sanders ran around our Bears like they were children. I could really appreciate Barry Sanders. I don’t know if he’s the best football player out there, but I could say, wow, his talents are at another level. That’s kind of the reaction I had to President Trump — his talents are another level. I can’t say he’s the best president ever. Maybe he is. Regardless, I feel sorry for his competition. He’s a tough talent to go against.

At the end of the meeting, we actually brought in a bunch of people for a picture, which is unusual. We had around 40 people in the Oval Office at the end, and then he pulled me aside in front of all of them and asked, “How are you doing? How’s the job going here?” He made me feel like he’d known me forever, which I knew wasn’t true, but I still felt it. He’s a good retail politician. He knows how to keep people in his presence and make them feel good. It was a totally opposite experience when I met Jeb Bush on the 2016 campaign trail. Maybe that’s why Jeb lost — he did not make the people around him feel good. I certainly didn’t feel good when I was with Jeb, and that’s the opposite of what you hear in the news.

“He made me feel like he’d known me forever, which I knew wasn’t true, but I still felt it.”

In fact, I remember the New York Times ran a couple stories about how Jeb was brought up by Barbara Bush who taught him to be kind and polite and a nice person, and how Trump of course is a mean person. That is the exact opposite of my personal experience.

Insight into Trump’s Twitter Habit: Impulse or Strategy?

Bob Zadek: Your description of the many larger-than-life characters — Navarro, Bolton, Bernie Sanders, Jeb Bush — they seem to be fair in how you have shared your experiences of them. If our listeners and your readers are at all interested in learning not just about policy, but the players in Washington, then this is a perfect read.

Now, before we get into economic policy, share with us, if you will, Trump’s relationship to Twitter. Many people, certainly the ruling class, view Trump’s relationship to Twitter as boorish and politically incorrect. It goes without saying that it’s kind of strange. Often, he makes statements that don’t appear to be defensible, so maybe you can help us understand the relationship between Trump and Twitter, why the President does it, and whether it accomplishes his goals.

Casey Mulligan: My second chapter is called “I Wish He Would Stay Off Twitter,” which I think most Trump voters have said to themselves more than a couple times in the last three and a half years. Actually, a lot of the White House staff says that to themselves and to each other.

To understand why he does it, I think you need to drill down to the foundation here, which is that he is a populist president. He won the election because of support outside of Washington and outside of both parties. He was going to reverse some of what he and the voters considered as failed policies. The Washington insiders are invested in those policies and didn’t want that. They’re smart people and can fight back. Also, they are heavily supported by TV and newspapers. To counter this, Trump needed his own network.

That’s a necessity if you’re going to be a populist president, and maybe that’s why we haven’t had many in history as you mentioned. Twitter was his own network; it could go directly to the people, and until recently, when Twitter started putting some labels on his tweets, it was unfiltered by his political opponents. You don’t just have a network and people watch — you need to give them a reason to watch.

He’s been successful at that, and right now he’s at 80 million followers. His stuff gets retweeted and replayed on standard news channels and newspapers. I have some estimates in the books. Something like 200 million people say they frequently hear of what he tweets, which is way more people than would watch the Super Bowl. In the United States, it’s been very successful, and he understands that to have a network, you have to give people a reason to tune in. It’s the bizarre and bombastic stuff that gets people tuning in. NBC has got to get something out of it, otherwise they wouldn’t play it. So, maybe they get to call him a name or call him inconsiderate, or worse. He views the trade as being worth it for having his own network where you can reach the people directly.

Now, the thing he does on Twitter, which I explain in the book, is figuring out how to exaggerate a topic so that the press covers it. The one I talk about in the book was with some GDP numbers that had exceeded expectations. You know, when the Obama people were exiting the White House, they said the economy couldn’t grow more than one or 2%. We were coming in way ahead of that, and the press wasn’t covering it.

He said, “Well, what I need to say about the GDP numbers so that the press will cover it? Should I say it’s the best? It was the best in 12 years? Should I say it’s the best in 20? Should I say the best ever?”

“[T]he thing he does on Twitter, which I explain in the book, is figuring out how to exaggerate a topic so that the press covers it.”

Clearly, he viewed this as a trade where the press gets to call him a liar, but then they have to talk about the issue that he thinks is not a part of the conversation and needs to be, such as how well the economy was growing at that time. He’ll say things like, “I’m the best President ever, or since Lincoln,” and then of course there’ll be a fact check by the Washington Post. They’ll say, maybe he’s done some good things for African Americans, but maybe Lyndon Johnson was better. That forced them to talk about some of the policies that he did for African Americans. Now, in the case of the GDP one, he didn’t exaggerate it. He told Dan Scavino, who runs his Twitter (the President isn’t just sitting on the couch in the middle of the night typing on his own phone) to just take what the Council of Economic Advisors typed up and put it exactly into the tweet, and see how that plays out. If it doesn’t get enough attention, then maybe we’ll exaggerate it. Exaggeration is one of the methods they use to have that trade.

Trump’s Pragmatism: A Maverick Leader

Bob Zadek: That’s a perfect example of what you do throughout your book, which makes it such an easy and informative read. The country, me included, would look at those tweets and say, this is an example of no impulse control, but you explain that it’s quite the opposite. It’s carefully thought through, whether or not it’s a sensible strategy. It is not just some impulse, middle of the night, wake up, have a drink of water, and send out a tweet, it’s carefully thought through to accomplish a goal. This is the kind of insight that the country really benefits from.

“It is not just some impulse, middle of the night, wake up, have a drink of water, and send out a tweet, it’s carefully thought through to accomplish a goal.”

Now, getting over to policy a bit, during your tenure at the Council of Economic Advisers, economic issues have, as they always are, been front and center of the measure of a successful administration, and some of the very large and obvious issues like trade and immigration have been big deals. Now, they are more than just economic issues, but they really are profoundly economic issues. Does the President have a governing philosophy when he approaches these issues? Is there a set of core values and consistent governmental policies that can help American voters understand more? What dictates how the President will make decisions? Or, is it more pragmatic, where you look at every issue without a governing philosophy, and you just decide what’s the best decision for that particular problem?

Casey Mulligan: I just want to push back a little bit on the term philosophy. I would not call him an ideologue. It’s not like he read Ayn Rand and said, I understand the world now and this is how I’m going to organize what I do. He’s more empirical. He’s been around for a lot of years, and he’s continued to learn while he’s in the White House, and when he sees patterns that work, he’ll reapply those patterns.

So, for example, the idea of federalism, that maybe things are better handled at a local level where the information and incentives are better, is from a philosophical or theoretical point of view. Trump, I think, arrives at things like that from a more practical point of view. He’s seen it enough times where it worked, and when somebody wasn’t doing federalism and it didn’t work, so he would be willing to apply that.

In fact, I think he’s increasingly growing attracted to that approach. There have been a few times where people have used the federalism argument with the president and I think they were successful. There was a recent example about Ben Carson’s agency’s regulations around zoning in suburbs, and there was a battle in the administration about that. My advice to some of those going into that battle was to remind them how federalism could work — that maybe localities have better information and incentives to deal with the people, and yet Ben Carson’s agency didn’t want to surrender power. They want the power in Washington. In the end, federalism carried the day and the president wiped out those agencies’ regulations that had been in place since the Obama administration.

Bob Zadek: One of the complaints about Trump’s policy making is that he changes his mind a lot. You explained in the book that it’s a function of experimentation in policymaking, which to me was an eye-opener. Tell us about how President Trump does or does not use experimentation in policymaking, rather than making decisions by being committed to a certain point of view.

Casey Mulligan: He is very much an experimenter. I believe business people call it fast failure. But in any case, it’s pretty novel in the political sphere. In fact, I think one of the present things the president gets wrong is that he assumes other politicians operate that way, and they really don’t. He, not being an ideologue, has the freedom to do that. How are we going to solve these intractable problems that previous presidents weren’t able to budge on? You could either formulate a new theory from the ground up and use that, or maybe just try something and see how it works. If it works, you stay with it. If it doesn’t work, you get rid of it. That’s been his approach. He had a life before he was in the White House, and that was something he had learned throughout his life, and perfected it pretty well.

One example I gave in the book was with the individual mandate, which is the requirement in Obamacare that everybody has to buy health insurance. Most of the experts agreed that we need to do that. Otherwise, people won’t sign up until they’re sick, which will raise the prices and people won’t buy, there won’t be a market for health insurance, and there will be a terrible death spiral. On the campaign trail, Trump was hearing a lot of compelling arguments against it from people who weren’t experts, and so he changed his position 180 degrees saying that the individual mandate is one of the worst policies ever, and he’s going to get rid of it, and he did get rid of it. He still brags to this day about how he got rid of the individual mandate, which I guess candidate Biden wants to bring back.

I had a book about Obamacare, which discussed the individual mandate a little bit, but I didn’t totally understand it myself. I didn’t give the party line that you have to have and so on. Once I was brought on board with his administration, one of my assignments was that I had to give some serious thought to the individual mandate: what are its costs and benefits. As we thought through it, we realized, this individual mandate doesn’t make sense; the experts were actually wrong about this. What you’re doing is punishing somebody who doesn’t buy subsidized health insurance, and who turns down government assistance.

Shouldn’t we send a thank you note to people who turn down government systems? Why are we punishing them? You know, so much health insurance is subsidized. Maybe it would make sense in a world where you didn’t have subsidized health insurance, but that’s not our world. That’s not the Obamacare world. The individual mandate was a huge pain for consumers and taxpayers. There was a good reason in terms of economics to get rid of it, but he says it was a great political move too. Even Obama privately acknowledged to some of his people that maybe the individual mandate was a big political mistake of ours if we could do it over again.

Rethinking Trump’s “Tariff Man” Economic Policy

Bob Zadek: It was not only a bad political mistake, but a bad economic mistake as well. As a libertarian, and one who yearns for totally free markets, so that the price mechanism of free markets helps us understand what goods and services are really worth, I found myself quite pained with Trump identifying himself as a tariff man. I’ve been kind of pained that he’s been interfering with the free market.

Why would he tax American consumers merely because of their choice of wanting to buy something made in a foreign country? After all, aren’t I allowed to buy whatever I want to buy? Ronald Reagan is one of my heroes in American history, but your book made me realize that my views on his approach to foreign trade are kind of misplaced. Help me understand Trump’s approach to tariffs, foreign trade, buying goods manufactured overseas, and what he sees to be the ultimate goal of his policy.

Casey Mulligan: Yeah, my book has a social media bibliography so it links to videos and tweets and stuff. One of them is a link to a Ronald Reagan video talking about the virtues of free, international trade. Ronald Reagan can explain, probably better than anyone (including Milton Friedman), why free international trade is a good thing, but that’s not what he practiced. This really goes for all the presidents in between and before Reagan.

There were special interests in Washington that get served. I wish they didn’t, but they do get served. You know, they perennially give special favors to car companies, and Ronald Reagan was serving them up just as well as other presidents have. What he used at the time was mainly a quota arrangement for Japanese car companies.

For example, there’s only so many cars you can send over here, so you guys figure out which cars you’re going to send, but there’s going to be a limit on how many cars. Japanese companies love that because they avoid competing with each other for space in our market. In fact, after I’d written that chapter and sent it around to some of the Reagan people, they said, “Yeah, the Japanese companies would come to the White House during the Reagan years and ask for a quota.”

The American car companies love it too because it keeps out competition. The consumer of American automobiles ends up paying more, but who do they pay more to? They pay more to the Japanese companies and the American companies. President Trump did very few quotas. He did tariffs instead.

“In fact, after I’d written that chapter and sent it around to some of the Reagan people, they said, ‘Yeah, the Japanese companies would come to the White House during the Reagan years and ask for a quota.’”

So, he would put a tariff on imported goods. The consumer pays more and the domestic producer is happy with special interests getting served, but at least the money doesn’t go to the Chinese companies — it went into our Treasury. That would be an improvement, I would say. I think Milton Friedman wrote in The Wall Street Journal a few times in the 80s that same point that Reagan was so bad with these quotas, that it actually would be an improvement to have a tariff man, and we have our tariff man.

Bob Zadek: Both Reagan’s quota policy and Trump’s tariff policy have the effect of increasing the cost to the consumer. Why isn’t there a third choice, which is neither quota nor tariffs, the result being consumers pay less, with some manufacturing done overseas because there’s a comparative advantage. Is it simply that it’s a political reality that the car companies have so much power, they will end up being protected?

Casey Mulligan: If you had this swamp totally drained, to use the President’s metaphor, there would be no tariffs. But the swamp isn’t drained, and there are interests that have to be served. Need I remind people that Mrs. Clinton did a campaign in Michigan where the car companies are, and they are powerful interests. Ronald Reagan made them many promises and delivered on those promises. So, that’s one of the failures in the book — that the President has not totally drained the swamp. There are still special interests that get these favors, and interfering with international trade has been a common way to deliver those favors.

Now, there is also the intellectual property problem around the world. In Reagan’s day, the problem was that the Japanese weren’t respecting our copyrights and other intellectual property, as well as the other East Asian Tigers. How do you solve that problem? Reagan threatened tariffs. He didn’t do so many of those, but he threatened them, and it took them a number of years. Eventually, in a second term, he got some trade deals with Japan and the Asian Tigers to respect our intellectual property rights. Now, we have the same issue only with China.

The same issues have arisen and tariffs are being used. There were some economists back in the Reagan years who recommended that tariffs may be something to use to change that behavior. No economist recommends that now. I’m not sure what changed in terms of professional analysis because Adam Smith is still known to all of us. But anyway, you have these special interests to serve, and then you do have this intellectual property issue, which is an important industry here in America.

The Economic Factor in Trump’s Immigration Policy

Bob Zadek: What is the core principle that governs President Trump’s immigration policy — another policy that I find painful. I’ll ask you to speak to the economic issues, but just to mention in passing, is my view that people in this world have an inherent natural right to travel to improve their lives, and that right is personal to the immigrant, and should not be interfered with. That’s my starting point.

Speaking to the good or bad of the policy, tell us what dictates President Trump’s immigration policy, and your own views that you express very persuasively in your book about immigration policy, because it appears somewhat cruel to people. There’s a lot of bad labels that are put on it. Help us understand what drives the policy decisions on immigration and whether, in your view, the administration has achieved their policy objectives.

Casey Mulligan: Sure. With immigration there are two areas. One would be more in a legal area, which would not be my expertise, in the issue that the laws are broken and not enforced. I did notice a typical pattern in some of those areas, that they would just do the same thing that the Obama Administration did and then get criticized. Obama also recognized the idea that, if we give special treatment to children at the border, we’re going to have more people carrying children up to the southern border. But when Trump acknowledges this, he’s not considered to be cool.

The area that we worked on in the Council of Economic Advisers is to come up with a plan that he could call his own immigration plan. His question was, what would the immigration laws look like if we did them right? That’s the project he gave us. To be empirical, one thing we had to do, and gladly did, was to assemble a data center. What are the immigration laws around the country? How are they working out? What about around the world in other countries? What are they doing, and are there things we can learn?

When we presented our findings, one of the things he said privately was, “Hey, citizenship is our most precious commodity; we ought to be selling it; we ought to get money for that.” I was really taken aback by that, because that’s exactly what Gary Becker, the Chicago economist and Nobel Prize winner wrote a book about, called “Immigration: A Radical Proposal,” and his proposal was to charge for citizenship. The reason he was willing to consider differently than your natural rights view was due to our welfare systems.

It might not make sense to let people in for free when welfare benefits are going to be part of those decisions. So, he said, well, maybe we should charge at the border. The president derived that on his own; we did not give him Becker’s book and or discuss it with him. He came up with that on his own, which kind of gave me an insight in terms of his capabilities to think like an economist, or at least like a Gary Becker.

What he ended up being excited about was mimicking some of the international systems, such as the point-based systems of Australia and Canada, where the points are based on economic contributions. This may help to approximate the radical Becker model in the sense that if you had a fee at the border, the people who pay the fee are the ones who have the most to gain when they come here. You can try to mimic that point system, because prices are better than regulations.

He put together a regulation reform package that is essentially the Australian and Canada point system based on economic contribution. That’s how we would decide which applications are accepted versus rejected when coming into our country. Now, of course, and we all knew this from the beginning, Pelosi would never sign on to any immigration reform package that the White House puts together. But he at least wanted to be able to say what his principles are, and how much better things could be if there was a cooperative Congress on this issue.

An Anecdote about Bernie Sanders

Bob Zadek: You have some interesting observations about Trump’s relationship and interactions with Bernie Sanders, another larger than life figure. Is there an anecdote or a story you can share?

Casey Mulligan: You know, Bernie Sanders is also a populist. He’s not going to be a president, but he’s a populist. I could tell that the President really appreciated that and paid attention to it. There’s also the defensive point of view that maybe he could siphon some of Sander’s populist support away and learn something from him. Bernie Sanders, especially when I was there, seemed like an outsider.

Now, he seems much less like an outsider than he did at the time. Actually, it’s interesting that the President is aware of a lot of elections of primaries and senate primaries, and he has a lot of these in his head that he’s thinking through. One of the things he thinks about is HW Bush’s comeback in the summer, which President Trump may be doing right now, and he was thinking about that election, and how Bernie Sanders is a Dukakis type of character. He told us the story about Dukakis wearing that army helmet in the tank, and how foolish that was.

Bob Zadek: When he looked like a chipmunk.

Casey Mulligan: He thought that was the type of mistake that Bernie Sanders would make in a campaign, so we were amused by that.

Final Thoughts: Covid’s Impact on Trump’s Bid for Reelection

Bob Zadek: The last topic, which will be a big issue in the campaign, is the President’s handling of the COVID epidemic. How much should that be an issue in the campaign? And if so, how should the voters, from an economic standpoint, evaluate what Trump did or didn’t do with respect to the virus?

Casey Mulligan: I think, if people want to put weight on that, I totally understand that from a lot of perspectives it overwhelms any other policy area that many presidents in the past would have dealt with. Now, it turns out, my council actually had a couple medical doctors in it who also had econ degrees, and we actually worked on pandemics before we knew anything about this pandemic.

The thing that we emphasized in our report, which came out in September and which we worked on for a couple years, is if you’re going to have a pandemic, innovation can help prevent its costs from getting too far into the trillions. We talked about how you want to get the FDA out of the way in terms of testing and discovering a vaccine. Also, you need to be able to manufacture that fast magazine on a large scale. There are some vaccine technologies that don’t allow that.

Bob Zadek: In your opinion, were you happy with the economic aspects of the handling of the pandemic or not? We have about 30 seconds.

Casey Mulligan: I think the warp policy that came from that report is very impressive. We got to get a vaccine to in hindsight say it was worth it. That warp speed program is 50,000% or something like that, and it follows based on the economics that we’ve carefully worked out.

Bob Zadek: Casey Mulligan has written You’re Hired: Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President. It is a must read for anybody who is interested in politics and wants to understand how our country really works, and wants firsthand observations about many of the people we see on the news every evening. What you will learn in the book is so different than what you learn from mainstream media.

Casey, thank you so much for sharing your insights, for your service in the Council of Economic Advisers, and for making our country a bit greater again. I’ll be back again next Sunday. Have a good rest of the weekend.