Glenn Loury
The Glenn Show
Larry Kotlikoff – Do We Need an Economist in the White House?
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Larry Kotlikoff – Do We Need an Economist in the White House?

This week is my friend Larry Kotlifkoff—esteemed economist, entrepreneur, and author—is on the show. As you may or may not be aware, Larry is also a former presidential candidate. He didn’t have the kind of high-visibility campaign of a Kamala Harris or a Donald Trump (or even a Jill Stein), but as he sees it, someone has to impose some informed economic thinking on problems like inflation, healthcare, and inequality. Why not him? He believes the nation should be run by experts who have the knowledge and experience to actually understand the complex national and global systems that hum beneath our everyday lives. I have my doubts that calculations and models are a viable substitute for politics, but Larry is as close to a true believer as you’ll find.

I ask Larry at the beginning whether green-eyeshade calculations are really a substitute for the values and principles that candidates, at least nominally, use to make the case for themselves. Larry thinks they should be, and he walks me through some of his proposed fixes for various troubled segments of our economy. Social security, for example, is in danger of collapse, and Larry proposes to replace it. Both Trump and (though she won’t admit it) Harris are in favor of tariffs, but Larry and I both think that’s a terrible way to run international trade. Fixing all sorts of problems by “taxing billionaires and corporations” has become an article of faith for Democrats, but shouldn’t we be concerned about what they spend rather than what they bring in? And we end with the big questions: the national debt and inflation.

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0:14 Larry Kotlikoff for President?

5:40 Larry’s plan to save social security

9:30 Reincentivizing work, saving, and staying in the US

14:55 Rewriting the story about income and labor

21:08 Why a 10% tariff could amount to a new national sales tax or worse

23:33 Glenn: Trade with other nations is not a zero-sum game

29:15 Taxing billionaires on consumption rather than income

34:43 The price of shame

38:40 Maintaining competitive conditions with universal health insurance

44:49 What’s causing inflation?

52:26 How big of a problem is the national debt?

Recorded September 4, 2024


Links and Readings

Larry’s Substack

Larry’s homepage

Larry’s book, with Philip Moeller and Paul Solman, Getting What’s Yours: The Secrets to Maxing Out Your Social Security

Larry’s book, with Scott Burns, The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America’s Economic Future

Larry’s book, Jimmy Stewart Is Dead: Ending the World's Ongoing Financial Plague with Limited Purpose Banking

Larry’s financial planning program, MaxiFi

Larry’s book, You’re Hired: A Trump Playbook for Fixing America’s Economy

Larry’s book, The Healthcare Fix: Universal Insurance for All Americans


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Glenn Loury
The Glenn Show
Race, inequality, and economics in the US and throughout the world from Glenn Loury, Professor of Economics at Brown University and Paulson Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute