Tonight we encourage you to ask questions. The back portion of our event will be dedicated to your questions. At the bottom, you have seen where people have already asked question and you can vote on the questions that youre most interested in hearing our authors answer. And, lastly, reminder to everyone that you can see us, but we cannot see you. Feel free to relax and get comfortable. Tonight shes here with her new book. Tonight we are also joined by Zachary Carter where he covers congress, white house, tonight he will discuss price is king. So without further due i introduce stephanie and zachary. There was a tweet from lincoln public, antitrump republicans, how donald trump had run up 18. 17 billion of debt, theres columns in wall street journal, New York Times about debt, debt, but your book calls of deficit as a myth. What do you mean of by the deficit myth and why do you think its important to write at this time. Pleasure to be with you. First, let me start by saying increasing the deficit and adding to National Debt is probably the least bad thing that donald trump has done. We should just get that out there. Look, i understand that we are inundated from the media, mainstream press, politicians, everybody who talks about deficits and debt. Virtually, everybody talks about it in a negative way. It is almost the case they are there to complain about the things or the National Debt. These are presented to us as problems at a minimum and as a National Security threat or threat to future generations. I mean, a real danger to us individually, your share of the National Debt, borrowing from china, all of these things that create a lot of anxiety on the part of the american people, so when you say, why did you write this book, i think that my hope is that i can refuse the level of anxiety. I mean, i start in chapter 1 of the book telling a story about being a child and watching the Television Show sesame street and sesame street was god at teaching us to separate things go categories. These things are similar and unlike the rest of them. As a kid my sister and i were watching and we would play along and they would put a bicycle, automobile, train, tennis shoes, one of the things is not like the other, we would say back the shoe, the shoe. Im an adult now but im still hollering at the television all of the time and i hear often socalled experts on economics talking about the deficit or the debt in ways that i think are just fundamentally wrong and they are getting some big things wrong and im hollowerring at the tv. So a really common criticism that you hear from people who talk about common theory from Stephanie Kelton that deficits dont matter, there was nasty review in the wall street journal, do you believe that deficits dont matter, what do you make of this critique. Dick cheneys deficits matter, my argument throughout my work is that deficits matter but not in the way that we have been taught to believe that they matter. We have been taught earlier that they are inherently dangerous, undesirable, things you do in times of crisis because you have no choice like but that in more normal times deficits are things that we should be avoiding. They should strike balanced budgets and avoid increasing the debt, so i walk flu the book a variety of ways in which deficits matter and one matter way is every deficit is good for someone. That is the reality and so when you see the republicans passing the huge tax cuts at the end of 2017, these were massive tax cuts knowing they would massively increase deficits. If they knew they were dangerous and all the bad things were going to happen and future grandchildren, they wouldnt do that. The reality is that the republicans understand perfectly well that every deficit is good for someone, what they did was to massively cut taxes on corporations and the wealthiest people in this country, 83 of the benefits went to people in the top 1 of the income distribution, in other words, those who least needed the help, but the deficits that the government ran and are running become financial surpluses is somebody elses pocket. Their deficits become our surpluses. The question is who is benefiting from that financial windfall, republicans run financial surplus and they can direct into the hands who they are most interested in helping and i would hope that democrats would reach the point where they too understand that deficits arent something we should be striving to wrestle down and reduce but that the deficits can be used as a tool to carry out an agenda that serves the broader public, that benefits people who are truly hurting and so thats a lot of what i talk about in the book. It feels to me when i read your book, blog posts, opeds, interviews that youve done, theres a real emphasis on how you move supply chains from point a to point b, what kind of society you want to live in in terms of particular economic inequality and the focus seems to be on a sort of social vision more so than a i dont want to say youre not an economist here, but the way the traditional economists focus on debt and deficits is the way of understanding the economy. It seems to have in my mind broader social vision there. First of all, is that accurate description of the way you think about your own work and second, what do you think it does about the economic profession that we focus on debt and deficit instead of social priorities . Yeah, you know, in the book chapter 7 is called the deficits that matter and so thats exactly what im trying to do, to redirect our obsession with deficits to the very real deficits that surround us in our everyday lives and that are crushing in many ways for millions of people in this country. Youre right that for me i look at the federal budget as a world document and the federal government, theyre our elected official and they get to write and pass the budgets that determine where Financial Resources will be dedicated and to what end and in my view anyway, our elected officials are there to act in the interest of the broad majority the people of this country, right, and if the people of the country indicate that they want, you know, everybody to have health care, for example, then i think that congress should be looking for ways to budget our nations real resources so that we can deliver those that material wellbeing to people. So mmnt is about saying, listen, the easiest part of any agenda is finding the money. Thats the easiest part. The challenge is how many of our nations real productive resources, how many workers, how many people, how many how much of our factories, how many machines, how much real resources do we want to producing public goods, education, infrastructure, those sorts of things and how much do we want to leave the private sector so there is a balance there and when i talk about addressing the deficits that matter whether its climate or Retirement Security or, you know, education, student loan debt, all of that is in the chapter that i talk about, i am, im focusing in ways that there may be not common among economists to think about directing real resources to solve in our economy. Ii have to say that the focus reminds me of a fellow who i spent a great deal time studying, i dont know if youve heard him, his name is john leonard king, are you familiar with his work . Am i familiar with his work, i dont know. [laughter] it rings a bell. [laughter] that guy . That guy. A famous political cartoon on that mug of kings looking like a spider in a chair quite frankly. You know, what i think i love about studying king, hes one of the broad thinkers, hes kind of an economist by accident, i think. I feel like he, you know, his life is one where hes surrounded by philosopher and artists and great writers like virginia wolf, you know, all the merchant ivory, melodramas from the 80s and 90s. Dont tell anybody but let know know what you think maynard. He kind of just realized that economics was science that he could pursue to would give his ideas access to power and i feel like when i read his work, very technical economic work its extremely dense and kind of like eating a pretzel covered in thorn but nasty at times but a lot of his work, essays, letters, its very clear he has the ability to distill big complex ideas into fragments that ordinary people could understand because hes fundamentally concerned with ordinary people and what they can understand because he believes the economy is not this sort of weird thing that has to be away from social policy. He believes its a way to address the social policy that he cares about. Hes concerned with war and peace and authoritarian and democracy and all the big problems of the early 20th century. And then i read that stuff, i have to say i feel like the economics profession today doesnt seem to be working at the same level of ambition for the most part. There are exceptions clearly and a lot of very good economists out there but the idea that you would sit down with i feel like economists are there to tell us know, that we cant do the things we want to do and cant solve the problems that we want to solve and my question for you, stephanie, here, what are the big problems that economists need to solve today if its not debt and deficits, what should the great minds from academia be focusing their attention on if its not debt and deficit . Well, i think in the moment it seems to me that the obvious answer is unemployment and this is the big problem to wrestle with in theory and the economy in midst of Great Depression and we find yourselves with tens of millions of people who have lost jobs in the course of shortest span of this magnitude of job losses in the nations history. We have to figure that out. I think that probably right now theres no higher calling than to deal with unemployment but, you know, you know this, you and i know a lot of these people, there are economists all over the country. Now, you and i might agree that there arent enough, but there are economists that are also engaging in the climate space, not necessarily as experts on. And also they bring a lot to the table and to the extent that we can work Better Together and i think economists are not very good at this, we think that our discipline sits higher in the pyramid in the hierarchy than a lot of other disciplines. I did a chapter in the book on this, but i want to talk about your book and i i want to i want you to share with the wonderful people who are here what made you want to study this man who i think its a fascinating figure but what was it about him that made you study and spend years i presume, studying his life. I studied philosophies and undergarage but in 2006 the job i fell into i graduated from college was job with the financial journalists and i was looking at the virginia which is now part of the global. I wasnt terribly concerned of covering banking as as a 22yearold and became excited to cover the Banking Sector and there was this clear shift that happened over the course of 2007 and 2008 where everybody who i talked in the markets was like, oh, we all agree that markets are rational, we all agree that supply and demand, supply and find prosperous equilibrium and we know things will work out if the government stays out of the way and move very quickly to saying, oh, well, obviously the government needs to intervene immediately to rescue the Financial Sector otherwise the economy is going to collapse and society is going to fall in despair and when the shift happens, people were very open with, Financial Market participants were very open with me about the fact that they were changing their minds. I dont want to accuse the people of hypocrisy but all of a sudden they were talking about this guy, John Maynard King and saying his ideas were relevant and key in a way where previously he had been sort of dismissed to academic margins, if you were specialist as an economist, i guess paul had a job in the New York Times but academically it wasnt taken too super seriously and you had to work for a particular institution if you were academic and in the markets they didnt really talk about it like it was a real thing and suddenly thats legitimate. I thought that was incredible not only because people had changed their tune but because the possibilities that were available in terms of policy making just seems incredibly broad and the specific policies that we pursued in 2008 where we basically filled out the Financial Sector and let everybody twist in the wind, that struck me as the not terribly great way to go about rescuing an economy and struck me as as odd that a fellow this famous would prescribe Something Like that so i went and started reading kings. I started reading the general theory. The general theory is a real nasty piece of work. You want to give yourself a big headache, go just open the general theory and start on page 1 and try to get through it. Its a brilliant book, one of the great, great triumphs of western letters, you have to slide through dozens of pages of nasty crazy nonsense until you get to that one gem and youre like, oh, my goodness, the man is god and i went to Read Economic consequences which is the treaty of versailles. Its much easier towns. Economically not nearly as sophisticated. Its what makes him famous i think today as an economists but the moral force of the document and the political ideas involved, i think are just as urgent as everything in general, any piece of political writing ive ever encountered and that is something really serious. Essentially the leaders who have ordered the peace treaty have, you know, theyve assumed over the course of the war or the reparations duties on germany, you know, lost world war i obviously. As a result people are going to be shipping money across different borders and theyre not going to have the Funds Available to mobilize those real resources that make their economies recover and generate prosperity and the really i think brilliant point is that thats not just going to be an economic problem, people are going to blame outsiders for the fact theyre not recovering and theyre not going to be totally wrong because there will be ship in capital abroad that could be spent at home and and that is going to fuel international resentment and lead to dictatorship and war and i thought that connection between economic disfunction and social crisis was something that i had not i felt the sense of unfairness over the bailouts in 2008, but i didnt feel like there were economists who were putting it together saying, like, okay, well, the reason the numbers appear to add up on paper but actually results in socially terrible results, that just didnt feel like that was something that was coming down from high, from people whether republicans or democrats in positions of economic expertise. And king in his work i felt like this deep, deep moral force, and also this concern for things that were not really about dollars and cents. Like he was concerned about equations but he was afraid of dictatorship and war and he was afraid of big social problem. Not the part of gold at the end to have rainbow but the fascism at the end of the rainbow. He was afraid of something bad happening to society and into this community, not of an equation that failed to balance appropriately but and so i just became completely obsessed with the guy and i was a philosophy student so i found a lot of his ideas, very easy to understand him as a philosopher, more so than economicticion. Its not somebody that cared about mathematics even though he studied when he was at cambridge. Hes one of the greatest economists who has ever lived, degree in economics and not mathematics. It is being born when he studied as an undergraduate. I wrote this book because of the crash of 2008 and my feeling of confusion on where the world was going and moral despair and i felt like king is somebody who could speak to that sense of of uncertainty and of unfairness frankly that was in the air at the time. I feel like, you know must feel almost in a sense that you know him, like youre so inside his head and you come to this in the moment right on the praecipes of economic meltdown and you talk about the treaty of versailles and reparations on germany and how king could foresee the kind of the rise of fascism and social unrest and all of that, how did it feel working on this project and looking at what was happening in europe where, you know, the greek debt crisis, not just greeks but not feeling like you were living the moment . Oh, it was terrifying. I remember being so i went to cambridge to to go through his papers at kings college, and in the spring of 2017 and this was past the debt crisis but every single week youll see headlines about golden dawn and these these horrible like farright fascist parties that were rising up in greece and other countries and not just french parties but the conservative parties were also sort of consumeing these parties and making their part of mainstream conservative, you know, policy agenda, and it was frightening. You would go through his papers and be like im really, really worried, im really worried that italy will go fascist very soon and, boom, they would do it. You would keep turning the pages of a document. The idea that there was an economic connection, it was obvious, common sense. I feel like you kind of have to argue that now in the United States in this weird way politically that theres a connection between Economic Policy and social disruption this way which i dont think you actually have to do in europe. In europe people just kind of accept that they might deny that they are not particular policy maker and the idea that these things are connected is just common sense over this. So in a certain sense it was nice being around other people who i think sort of saw this connection between economics and social policy the way i did, certainly being in dc, you just talk to people on the hill, well, all we care about growth and so long as we have growth everything is fine. Okay, but, you know, these people in the industrial midwest who like dont have jobs and their communities are rotting, like are you youre not worried about that, no, because of all the growth. [laughter] what why would you look at the metrics this way . And i felt like theres some things with king when you go through his letters, he has this incredible capacity to communicate to other people and and you i dont want to say that he felt the way i felt looking at these things but i felt a real sense of, there was a real assess thans with a lot of his letters when hes talk about coal miners going on strike. You want 10 or 12 pay cut, buzz off. King is like, oh, my god, huge strike, the country will go into revolt and went into revolt in 1926, huge general strike in britain and enormous moment of upheaval where all of the labor unions refused to go to the work because of the conditions that are being demanded from the government. In a sense i feel like we are seeing some of that today. Obviously George Floyds killing is the spark of all the unrest around the country in the United States right now but i think underlying that theres deep sense of unfairness that that everything, not just the police but everything in life is slated against working people, whatever color they are, particularly black and brown people and that theres no way to to guaranty yourselves that, you know, that tomorrow is going to be better than today, that the political system has abandoned, not just not just a few people of margins but most of the country really and i think that that sort of sense of that crisis is something that king is concerned with, makes his writing come alive in a way that most when i read an economics journal, i read plenty of economic material, it doesnt have the same sort of fire behind it. When you think about canes economics, often times that i gather is that cansian economics that government is supposed to prime the pump, just grease the wheels when the economies slow down and you do a little bit of fiscal stimulus and safely take your hands off and the economy will find its way back to equilibrium path and theres no need for sustained presence on the part of federal government. So looking at where we are at today and recognizing that the risks are continued social unrest and, you know, opportunities for people who might want to take advantage of those anxieties and that unrest, take us in a fascist sort of direction, what do you think if we could have canes in this chat box with us, would he say do something to safeguard the american people, you to provide jobs for everyone, you to provide education, would he embrace, do you think, an fdrstyle new deal program for the 21st century . You know, i think he would approve of your work stephanie, but i think he would be frustrated by the fact that its necessary. He would say, look, we know that these technical questions about money and numbers are just technical questions about money and numbers. We have a Climate Crisis thats approaching us and huge breakdown in relations between United States and china and we know whats happened in the past in the european states have gone have not gotten along and its not been good for the rest of the world and we have deep inequality and just every country, however, whatever stage of development we want to describe them as being and we have deep inequality within each country and also between countries. So he would i think be talking about he would be trying to divide some grand plan to use to kill many birds at once, with one stone. One of big complaints in america that there wasnt enough birds like the country side. He would want to try to do more than one thing with his Economic Policy, he wouldnt just want to kill you mean employment. Relationship between the United States and china and probably separate agenda for europe. If somebody who is always changing his mind its not a change. In a lot of ways i think hes too conservative and just misunderstands the way the world works and he was okay admitting in his wrong and changing course. I will admit i think he was probably smarter than i am and maybe able to come up with big plans that i have not i have not seen but i do think he would be looking at people who are rolling up proposals like the groan new deal and saying its the kind of thinking that we should be working on and we should not be working with tax incentives to encourage private behavior, look, we have crisis that have to be managed but lets go ahead and manage those. He would not was a fudge guy . I appreciate it, but, no, i dont think so. I think cains, he changes every the course but by the end, helesses almost every single political battle that he engages in 1941. When he start winning is when the labor party is empowered and socialtist and era where socialists was a much more thing. Somebody is cable of thinking very big even with your back up against the wall. If he could socialize british medicine in 1943i certainly think the Green New Deal would seem like in a lot of ways i feel like cains would have been mortified by the rhetoric of the Bernie Sanders campaign, not to bust up your old boss or maybe your current boss, i dont know. We are seeing the effects in realtime. So i certainly would see him as somebody who would be talking about the Green New Deal and coming up with some very diplomatic solutions. So it probably wouldnt have worked but some some way to try to resolve tensions between the United States and china. Let me ask you one more question and i know there are a lot of people who want to jump in with their own questions, but, you know, we hear people talk about inequality, income inequality all of the time, its common place but cains road, failure to provide full employment, think where we are today and its arbitrary and unjust description, but that cains called out level of wealth and distribution and looks a whole lot like it does today. I dont recall ever seeing greater treatment of that question being inequality in other work but i havent read it the way that you have and i wondered whether you discovered he had a lot more to say and inequality and some of his other writings. Hes worried primarily of revolution, hes a conservative in the that she knows he doesnt want to see people rising up and overthrowing the system, he think that is the disorder and chaos that results from revolution is not worth whatever prosperity might come from a new system that is built, so hes always trying to do what he can with existing structures of society but if you go back and read the economic consequences, from 1919 he basically says economically inequality is unfair and the Economic System of the gilded age, the opening of world war i, was a ripoff for working people and the only reason people bought into this was because believed tomorrow would be better than today. The story that cain is telling there is wrong. I dont think they thought that tomorrow would be better than today. I think he was coming from a particularly elite perspective, but hes clearly concerned with the idea that escalating inequality is unsustainable and have to make people feel part of same social contract and together, that idea is deeper than his economic sort of technical policy prescription. Hes much more with moral and political beliefs than whatever particular policy agenda that hes concocted any given time to try pursue this and theres periods in time where hes Milton Freedman and when it doesnt work, he says lets do something else. I think inequality matters to him on this moral level that is fundamental to the way that he thinks about the world and and he just does not believe deeply unequal societies would be able to hang together and the position of somebody who wants to enjoy the fruits of being on top. He loves going to the opera and art openings and marry today ballerina, the famous ballerina in london but he loves the highlights and doesnt want to lose it and if you dont have a more equal society, he wont get to enjoy it either. He said more equal and the last thing he points out in the last chapter. The fact he says, we just have too much inequality and so what we need to do is, rein it in and goes out of his way that certain amount of inequality in his view does actually serve useful purpose in terms of, you know, incentivizing people, innovation and that sort of thing, right . Yeah, instead, i want to ask you this question about your work because i feel like there are times when the focus on m p is understandably about deficits and debt, but in a lot of ways i think the sort of more radical implications of your work and to me and, correct me if im wrong, suggests that we can focus more on these questions of distribution than we do on on questions of say growth which is what economists typically are saying. Am i wrong about that . Did i misread you in some way . No, do you mean questions of distribution just with respect to income and wealth with inequality . Right, right, inequality. Yeah. Yeah, so one of the things that mmt have always pointed out with respect to the role of tax and the economy, weve been taught to believe that taxes are primarily useful because they are source of revenue to the federal government, how the government pays the bills, that aint one of them. If they want to make adjustments to tax code not just because they want to peel a few bucks off a billionaire here and a billionaire there to Fund Education and do Infrastructure Investment because they genuinely want to talk the problem of extreme concentrations of wealth and income inequality in this count, then its perfectly legitimate to set forth with an ambitious agenda to adjust taxes on the very wealthy for no other reason than to realign the balance of distribution. I think in a lot of ways, we dont go far enough because we look at the very wealthy as a pay for and lawmakers say, well, we want to, you know, do infrastructure, we want to put some more money in education, we want to improve lives for the broad majority of people but we feel like we have to pay for it and we get money by raising revenue and we dont want to hurt the people in the middle and the people at the bottom and we will concentrate all the pain at the top and thats where the taxes will fall and the problem from my perspective is while that might be perfectly legitimate to try to pass a bill that says we are going to spend, you know, increase money for pell grant or infrastructure or whatever, and along side we will increase taxes on the rich very often without being observed in brief time in the senate and in longer journey as observer of the political process is that even democrats are very reluctant to increase taxes on people at the top. Theres this notion that its finishing that they were punishing success in one day and so what happens is we paired that desire to spend more on education or whatever with a need to raise taxes so that we dont end up adding to the deficit and that forces lawmakers to pick two fights ands you dont just have to pick two fights, you have to convince enough colleagues to vote for the increase spending on education and you have to convince them to close the tax loopholes or, you know, introduce a wealth tax or whatever it is and if you cant win both of those fights, you dont win on your agenda, you dont get the increase spend for education, its a doubleedge sword, a game of playing by rules to avoid adding to the deficit but mmt and myself included look at democrats sometimes and say when you approach taxes this way youre not being nearly ambitious enough because youre trying to peal now have cover the cost to whatever youre trying to do so in the case of a wealth tax, for example, if the wealth tax is to take 2 from, you know, people with very large fortunes and at the same time dont worry, youre not even going to feel it because your wealth will accumulate at much higher rate on an annual basis, then in the sense whats the point, whats the point of theyre not going the feel it . Youre not going to address the extreme concentrations of wealth inequality, so i do approach the tax question differently and i think i come at it with a more ambitious desire to see realignment. Its bad for the way our democracy works. Before we go and, tom, i think we will want to have questions from the audience in a second, before we do that, stephanie, i have a question about the washington legitimacy kind of etiquette. I feel like for a long time, and there are very good people on capitol hill who are, you know, brilliant, thoughtful folks who will listen to arguments no matter where they come from, but there are a lot of people on capitol hill who are not brilliant and not thoughtful and they dont so much listen to the arguments as they listen to the prestige around the person who is saying them. In 1989 if Alan Greenspan had showed up on the hill and told everybody that all horses are really hand grenades, we will stop riding, oh, man, we have to stop riding all the horses and they would have believed him. Did you notice a difference youve been talking about this stuff for a long time. Did you notice a difference in the way that you were treated by folks on the hill after you started working for the Senate Budget committee . Did that have any sort of change in the way that your ideas seem to resinate with staff . You know, i dont think they resinated with staff. Well, zach, i talk about it a little bit in the book. I think there was a certain degree of surprise when i showed up that, you know, they were accustomed to dealing with deficit hawks, people who want to balance the budget really fast, get it done and get it done quick and the deficit doves who were sort of more apologetic and tolerant of deficits while they also we wanted to see them balanced they were willing to go more slowly, but those are the only two sort of birds that they were accustomed to and i showed up. The deficit owl to distinguish my own views from the other birds and i remember that, yeah, look at that. I know youve been living there in texas, right, and im in virginia. [laughter] i think the deficit every time i see you tweet a picture, but the quick story is that people were taking aback. They didnt a lot of folks didnt realize exactly what i was and that people actually had views like i held and i think it took some getting used to and, you know, i think over a period of time maybe either spend taken more seriously but i wouldnt say that it happened in that short kind of span of time that i was there. It was a warming up to but not not a full embrace in a kind of way, i think. Okay, tom, i think we are ready to field some questions here. Has anyone asked any questions yet . We have quite a few actually. We wont have a chance to read all of them but i will read the ones that have most votes. So the first question is, what if any would be the impact of mmt on the Social Security trust funds which consist of exclusively of special obligation Treasury Bonds . Thats for you, stephanie. Well, okay, so mmt per se doesnt have an impact on Social Security but i did wrote a whole chapter on entitlements and tried to make the point that, you know, fdr set up Social Security back in 1935 and he argued that he set it up the way he did so these were his words, no damn politician could ever put his hand on my Social Security program. That was almost a direct quote and what he did was say that everybody was going to pay into it. You were going to see your contribution in form of payroll tax withholding and youd see the money go in and upon retirement, you would draw your earned benefits, right . And so today we have a situation where we continue to believe that the only way the government can maintain its promises to future retirees, their dependents to the disabled, if theres enough money available to do that. So we started as a consequence of Alan Greenspan and his commission in 1983 and writing trust funds, locking up digital dollars called trust funds and if we have enough spreadsheet industries and enough dollars locked in place we can release dollars in the future when we need to make benefit payments and mmt points out the insanity of this and the proposition that the government needs to lock up currency in digital form in order to be able to spend its own currency in the future. What i argue in that chapter is that theres a really quick way, i could do it with a single sentence amendment to the Social Security act of 1935, i could make the whole problem, quote, unquote, go away with a one sentences amendment to that act. Its just about granting congress the Legal Authority to make benefit payments regardless of the balance in the trust fund. Okay. Next question. You kind of talked about it a little bit. How do you think king would have react today Congress Action to covid release, ie, ppp loans, how do you think he would have approached our current Economic Situation . Not to hijack this one, stephanie. Sure. Its sort of my territory. I think king would have been worried about the amount of money being spent and agreed with everything stephanie said about debt and deficits so far but troubled by the way the money has been spent and about the condition that is have been placed on that money. I think the point that stephanie made earlier about king employing about the ability to unlock to tackle inequality directly as as sort of a way to make markets work better. This is a lot of money for the richest people in the country and not a whole lot for everybody else and i think, you know, he also would have been, this is a more deeper philosophical question about work versus work fair in particular. Kings didnt want people to work his whole life. He had utopian workweeks and i think he would have wanted that in a certain sense but hes understood that people take a great deal of moral and social satisfaction from having a job, no how many hours they worked. He recognized that people like participating in their communities through their work and so the fact that we were putting a lot of money into expending unemployment payments instead of making sure that people didnt lose their jobs i think would have troubled him. Thats you know, scholars could dispute me on that on that point but more broadly, look, we need to rescue the economy, we have to do something and we do have to rescue the rich, we do have its not good if all the corporations just fail, but he would have said, the focus needs to be on on income support for all of these people and i dont think the the bill that was passed by 960 margin in the senate focused its priorities on on the types of things that that animateed king, most of it liked. The next question is for stephanie, this person wants to know if you could walkthrough the mechanism that explains why deficits do not matter . Well, let me reiterate first that my position that deficits do matter, but not the way weve been taught to believe. So they matter in a lot of ways, they are an important source of profits so lets put that aside because theres a equation and we dont have time to go through that, but let me do it the quick and dirty way. When i say every deficit is god for someone, the deficit is the difference between two numbers, one number is how many dollars the government is spending into the economy and the other number is how many dollars the government is subtracting out of the economy by taxing us primarily, okay, so that we can use the term deficit to describe the conditions when the government adds more dollars into the economy than it subtracts, we call it deficit, but what we forget is we could just as easily call it a surplus, we are using the word deficit because we are describing what is happening on the governments legger ledger, the outside of government and they would tax 90 away from us, thats 10 that gets deposited becomes our surplus, the real question is who got it, for whom and for what, what was the government doing . Was it building hospitals and schools . Was it repairing infrastructure, was it repairing for health care, was it dealing with Climate Change or did it just become a windfall to the people who least need the help. So deficits matter a lot, right, they are a financial deposit that shows up on somebody elses bank account, the question, you know, for who and for what. Okay. I think we only have time for one more question, so im going to ask this one from zach, first they would like to know about king and the book . Cain is hanging around all of these people, writers and artists and its a very, its certainly given the structures of British Society of early 20th century, very liberated group whose people are swapping lovers, cain is gay until he falls in love with the most famous ballerina in Great Britain and marries her and have a wonderful marriage that lasts for the rest of his life but these people in a lot of way are sort of the moral authority in cains life, hes not somebody who is looking around to if you hang around capitol hill as stephanie and i have done for better or for worse quite a bit, people in capitol hill are locking to what what business groups and lobbyists are going to think about what they do. Cains did not he was never looking over the shoulder what is pharma going to say, what is wall street going to say. He was looking over the shoulder to say what is virginia wolf going to think about what im doing, he always felt intense moral pressure from these people in his life and the pressure extended to the fact that he was even working at government at all. They are like, why are you wasting your time in this terrible, you know, public administration, you could be a writer, poet, painter, wouldnt that be a fine thing and, of course, hes good at it, right. Its actually quite good for the people but hes doing it because hes good at it, but they are constantly writing him and making sure that whatever you do is living up to ideals and has in certain perspective, they think that the power of love and art and letters is capable of breaking down all these barriers between people that they have been built up over time. If you just show people the right painting, if you read them the right novel, theyll be able to communicate across different borders and different languages and understand each other. Its a very beautiful vision and they are constantly telling cai cains live up to that ideal. I think cains as a member, hes kind of an odd duck because hes the only economy in and everybody is artist or writer but in a lot of ways he is sort of trying to realize their vision on the world stage and make it something thats material and concrete in Public Policy and certainly by the end of his life i think hes quite successful. I think the British NationalHealth Service a great example of that, but his great work, the economic consequences of the peace, it was really an apology to bloomsberry for his role in financing war. I was wrong and the war was pointless and a lot of people died. You guys were right and i was wrong. That that dynamic is there throughout his career and its really significant and its one of the things that makes him a very unique economist. Senator martha mcsally, a republican from arizona the author of this new book dare to reply. I senator mcsally, how did you become known as a a10 check who likes to dip. Guest i shared that journey in dare to fly. Thank you for having me on. I went to to being the first woman in u. S. History to fly a fighter jet in combat and when the law was finally changed it was against the law, against policy, i broke through t