Government Funding and the National Debt

TOPICS DISCUSSED

  • Government Funding and the SAVE Act

  • The National Debt

  • Outside of Politics: Paying Kids to Read

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EPISODE RESOURCES

GOVERNMENT FUNDING AND THE NATIONAL DEBT

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TRANSCRIPT

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.  

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers.  

Sarah [00:00:10] You are listening to Pantsuit Politics.  

Beth [00:00:12] Where we take a different approach to the news.  

[00:00:14] Music Interlude.  

Sarah [00:00:29] Thank you so much for joining us today. With a government funding battle quickly approaching again, we thought we would talk about that. And the deficit which is often cited in these government funding battles and has grown quite a bit over the last several years. So what does that mean for us? What solutions could actually address the deficit? We can talk about all that. And then Outside of Politics, we're going to talk about a very controversial suggestion that you should pay your kids to read.  

Beth [00:01:02] Before that, we are excited to announce that our next quarterly live event, which we call the Spicy Live, because it is a different flavor than you get here on the podcast. It's next week on September 19th at 8 p.m. Eastern. If you are one of our beloved patriotic people, you will see the link and password posted in the feed or get it by email if you have those notifications on. If you subscribe via Apple, please send us your email using the link in the show notes so we can be sure that we're getting the information to you. And if you are a paid Substack subscriber, you're going to be invited to this party this time. And we cannot wait to see all of you there and hang out with you. September 19th, 8 p.m. Eastern. Mark your calendars.  

Sarah [00:01:41] Up next, let's talk about Mike Johnson.  

[00:01:45] Music Interlude.  

Sarah [00:01:55] All right, Beth. We've a little over two weeks until the federal funding deadline runs out. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is-- but maybe isn't any more by the time you hear this-- pushing a bill that everybody describes as dead on arrival, which is a six month stopgap package with the SAVE Act attached to it. The SAVE Act requires proof of citizenship. You can't vote if you're not a citizen. But they want to make the documentation requirements even more onerous to prove your citizenship before you vote. And most everybody in the Senate is like, come on. In no way, shape or form are we going to pass the SAVE act. So what is he going to do?  

Beth [00:02:45] Well, he pulled the bill right before we recorded.  

Sarah [00:02:48] Well, there we go. Okay.  

Beth [00:02:49] Because there's not enough support even among Republicans in the House right now. The whipping operation in the House struggles.  

Sarah [00:02:57] Not great.  

Beth [00:02:58] It struggles. Here's the thing about the SAVE Act. I was reading about it this morning. I think one way to think about it would be that you would do something like completing an I-9 when you register to vote. Have you ever started a job and you have to you bring in your passport or you bring in two forms of other ID, whatever? Which maybe sounds reasonable, but the problem is state by state we have very different processes for registering people to vote. It's all decentralized. It would cost a tremendous amount of money to do what the Safe Act requires.  

Sarah [00:03:30] Seems relevant to the rest of our discussion.  

Beth [00:03:32] It does. States are not ready for that. We have some information from the state of Arizona about what happens when you put this kind of requirement in place for registering to vote. And it's not great. It's especially not great for college students and for people who are in between houses. The dumbest thing about this fight is that it's happening because Donald Trump insists on this being done before the election as an election security measure. But everybody who knows anything about this legislation understands that they would take months, if not years, to enact the provisions to operationalize the SAVE Act. This will not be enacted in September and be ready to roll out by this November's election.  

Sarah [00:04:20] Yeah, and Donald Trump is saying shut down the government, which feels like absolutely no one has an appetite for a few weeks before the election. So it seems most likely that he will try to get a six month clean continuing resolution through the House. But he's going to take a lot of flak for abandoning the SAVE act from his far right, which he's going to need pretty soon, because they're going to have another leadership election because it's an election year. And so how's he going to shore up his support on the far right if they're mad about the SAVE act? But everybody else is like there's no way we keep the House if you shut the government down, it's going to be closed anyway. It is the worst job. It is the worst job being the speaker of the House right now.  

Beth [00:05:04] And I think just to put the finest point we can on it, this is another Donald Trump created emergency that doesn't exist in the real world. In the real world, shutting down the government is an enormous emergency. It affects so many people and so many lives and people's ability to pay bills and just ramifications all over the place. It costs so much money. It is so expensive to shut the government down and then start it up again. So that would be the emergency. Instead, Trump is acting like an a "election security measure" to solve what is a very minuscule problem that's already well-handled in the vast majority of states is the emergency. And again, his proposed solution could not be implemented before this upcoming election. So it is a wholly invented crisis.  

Sarah [00:06:02] I mean, I do think he would be struggling with that far right plank no matter what Donald Trump was saying about the SAVE act.  

Beth [00:06:07] Yes, because they don't want to do a stopgap. They don't want to do an omnibus anything.  

Sarah [00:06:12] They don't want to do government.  

Beth [00:06:13] They say they want to go through and pass all 12 spending bills. And I agree that's the way it's supposed to be done and we ought to do it that way, but then they hold those up as well. So I think you're right, they don't want to do government. They definitely don't want to do an omnibus or a stopgap. And that means, given the numbers, he's got to have some Democrats on board. And in the Senate, he's got to have some Democrats on board. It is always going to call for compromise.  

Sarah [00:06:40] Yeah. And they don't like that, and they're going to go after him. There's reporting that Jim Jordan might compete with him in any sort of leadership race after the election. But I just think it's an impossible job because the party is not united by any type of theory or strategy or even outlook. I do think maybe they have some concepts of a plan about how to govern, but that's about it because I don't really think they want to govern.  

Beth [00:07:07] Concepts of a plan is just the phrase that keeps on giving.  

Sarah [00:07:10] We're going to use it forever.  

Beth [00:07:12] I think that there needs to be something more layered than rock and a hard place to describe the movement that Mike Johnson is in and all of the pressures operating on him right now. What I will say is that I have underestimated his ability to get things done before, and I hope that I am underestimating him again and that he will make something happen. He does, I think, understand that he jeopardizes his majority in a drastic way by having a government shutdown. And I think he has very limited time before that threat of government shutdown starts to make the news more than it is right now. And he needs to avoid that.  

Sarah [00:07:52] Yeah, what really bothers me, too, is that this posturing really does hide and make impossible a real conversation around government spending and the deficit, which is important. And we going to talk about that next.  

[00:08:06] Music Interlude.  

[00:08:16] So the United States government debt is currently $35 trillion and accounts for, wait for it, 123.8% of our country's nominal GDP. Now, I can make this a little bit better. I can play with the numbers and tell you that if we just want to talk about debt held by private investors-- because we hold a lot of debt ourselves, we're indebted to ourselves. So less of a big deal. So let's just say we want to talk about debt held by private investors is still 75.7% of GDP.  

Beth [00:08:56] It is problematic on a global level now that the United States holds so much debt. Because we are so influential in world markets, the International Monetary Fund at this point is saying we have a problem when the United States holds this much debt. And just to do a quick review, I know some of you have been with us for many Septembers when we have a conversation like this, but debt and deficit, two different things. The deficit is how much expenses exceed revenue for a fiscal year. So one year at a time, if we're spending more as a government than we're taking in, that's a deficit. The cumulative effect of the borrowing that we do to make up for that deficit is the national debt. And both of them are ballooning every year because of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid obligations that are not touched by this dramatic process that Congress is going through to try to keep the government funded.  

Sarah [00:09:52] And it's one thing when interest rates are low. Look, Japan's debt to GDP ratio has been like 150% for years, but they've also had negative interest rates. So if we are entering a new environment where interest rates are going to stay higher, then the percentage that we're spending on interest payments is a huge problem. Now, it's paradoxically true that our influence inside the global economy is both a real risk of this situation and also a real protection because our debt is in dollars and we can always print more. That's just the long and short of it. Now, we print enough, then we are looking at inflation and we're looking at undercutting people's savings. It's just another way to tax people to pay for the debt, it's the truth. It just feels and looks a little bit different.  

[00:10:49] But we are the reserve currency. So about 3/5 of all assets and central banks around the world are in dollars. So the whole world depends on our currency. And I don't anticipate that changing. I think there was a moment before Xi took a real authoritarian turn, maybe before the invasion of Ukraine, where there were legitimate conversations about what if the dollar is not the reserve currency? What if it moves to China? That seems wholly and completely irrelevant to me. I don't really anticipate. That's the stuff that people try to say to get you to buy gold bars. I'm not really worried ever about us not being the reserve currency.  

Beth [00:11:34] I agree with that in the foreseeable future. I also hear in my head you saying all the time there's no stasis. Things could change. And if they changed, we would be in a world of hurt here. We would be in a world of hurt. I want to highlight and underscore something that you said just a minute ago about this print more money idea. Because I do hear this a lot from people. Like, is money very real? Can't we just print more? Yes, we can. We can and that would create inflation and cause (I think you said it perfectly) essentially a tax on the American people. That is the bottom line. There is no way to address the debt and the deficit that will not in some form tax everyone because there is no one else. When we talk about the United States government, it's at the end of the day just all of us living our lives here. So this money that has to be paid into the government to meet its obligations every year and over time to satisfy some of this debt so that at least the interest rate isn't strangling us, is going to be a tax on us one way or the other. The question is how directly are we willing to tax to get there?  

Sarah [00:12:52] A lot of the ways the U.S. government deals with this debt is to sell it. The Treasury sells bonds. And because most of the banks are required to hold a certain amount of Treasury bonds, it is like a captive pool. There are people that have to buy our debt. But there have been moments like last year when that demand has fallen short even with that sort of captive pool of purchasers. And the government has started to have to offer higher yields, pay out more money for people to buy this debt. And that can spin out of control. And that can cause a situation where you have real tremors in the market, where you have interest rates becoming an unsustainable portion. I read one expert like that's when the Treasury comes to Congress and says, do something, you cannot avoid that.  

[00:13:43] Because that's what we've been doing. We've just been avoiding this conversation except for with the holy pictures that happens every year around government funding. You have George H.W. raising taxes. That was a long time ago. He lost. I think everybody still remembers it despite the fact that it was a long time ago. Clinton cut spending and then watched so much of that surplus be spent on tax cuts and foreign invasions under the George W Bush administration. Obama extended those tax cuts. Trump issued more. He says he's going to make them permanent. There's just not a lot of interest within American politicians of either party in saying we need a tax.  

[00:14:26] Because the other thing you can talk about that actually has to address this, that is like you mentioned before, Social Security, Medicare will account for 60% of all federal spending by the end of the decade unless we address this pension system and the massive cost of health care. Now, because I am the good news girl, the good news is that everybody thought health care spending was just going to increase and increase and increase and increase and increase. And by some miracle of God, it has essentially stayed the same for the last decade. Nobody even really knows why. But who cares? Don't spook it by asking why. Because if that had continued to rise, if Medicare spending had continued to rise in the way people were projecting it would, Lord, would we be in a hurt right now?  

Beth [00:15:14] I was not a fan of the Affordable Care Act. Would have voted against it had I been in Congress at the moment they took it up. But this doesn't feel like a miracle to me. It feels like potentially a result of more people being insured and more people seeing a doctor regularly for preventive visits which are fully covered by most insurance plans. And it feels like possibly a result of the Medicaid expansion. When I look at what's happening with the numbers around Social Security in particular, but also in health insurance plans, as you watch a population age, we tend to spend more money taking care of that population. We're spending all of the government resources at the time of life when people need a lot more health care. And I think that will always be true and is an obligation that we have as a society. I do think that we are obligated to help people as they age. Meet those medical expenses and maintain the best quality of life that they possibly can.  

[00:16:10] But we are not making the investments on the front end that would cause those costs later to go down, and that's what worries me. We have this patchwork system of all these programs that our members of Congress fight over in every cycle to try to fill in some places here and there. But for the most part, the more people who are left behind in terms of health care and education early in life, child care comes to mind, the higher those expenses that the government is absorbing at the end of life are going to be. And I don't really know how we deal with that in a fiscally responsible way because I think it's going to take some transition generations to help us figure out how to reduce that obligation on the back end of life by investing in the front end of life more.  

Sarah [00:17:08] I think there is no investment or even sort of front end of life approach that's going to get us out of the massive costs of the baby boomer generation. It's just a lot of people and we have fewer people paying into the system, and so we're going to have to make some hard choices. But I do want to say that all these economists put together plans and it's like they overall grow the GDP. This is a drag on our economy. This is a drag on people being able to flourish and live the lives they want to. We have full employment. We have unemployment numbers that we would have been drooling over during the financial crisis. So we have done a lot of what we wanted to do. Like health care and health care spending, what would happen to our economy? What would happen to health care spending? What would happen to as a repercussion of this debt and deficit if we detached it from employment? If we detached health care from employment.  

[00:18:02] What would happen if we raised the retirement age? I agree that we want people to have the highest quality of life. I don't have it in front of me, but I know there's these crazy statistics about how we spend like 60% of the Medicare spending in people's like last 30 days just trying to stretch people's lives out in a really painful and cruel way. I always think about [inaudible] when a family says, "Is there anything else I can do?" The answer is always yes. But the question is, should I? That's how we got to the death panels and that whole controversy, because people took something that was a reasonable but very difficult question and turned it into like we want to kill people. But I think that there's no way we're going to get at this, even with taxing all the billionaires, without having some really difficult conversations about these demographic changes and Social Security and Medicare.  

Beth [00:18:55] And one of those difficult conversations is about immigration. Because if you want to expand the tax base, there is no looking at this situation holistically where you can say there's a way around getting more revenue into the government. We must. And if we want our individual tax liability to go down, it means we must have more people paying into the system. And that means more people who are fairly young coming into this country to work all kinds of jobs, not just the high end tech jobs, not just the people with Ph.Ds and MDs and JDs. We need people from all social classes coming into the country to pay more into the tax base if we want our individual taxes to go down, but our revenue overall to go up. And that comes with hardship. I am not saying that it's easy to have large influxes of immigration. I'm not saying that we should do it in the haphazard, disastrous way we're doing it right now. There has to be a process. It has to be done legally. But if we want to deal with this issue, we do need a lot more people coming into this country and working and paying into these systems.  

Sarah [00:20:13] So what you're telling me is that cutting Big Bird won't get it done?  

Beth [00:20:21] No. What we pay for, the arts endowments that get fought over every September is less than one drop in the ocean in terms of America's liabilities.  

Sarah [00:20:33] I just want to make sure that we're all clear on that as we're going to fight about deficits in a very self-righteous, detached from reality kind of way. All that said, I hope they do and I hope they fund the government. Because I'm going to National Park in October again, because I'm a glutton for punishment.  

Beth [00:20:49] Well, let me say this doesn't mean that I think what Congress does in the annual appropriations process is unimportant. It's not. It's very important. It should be done very thoughtfully. The way those executive branch agencies are funded and the mandates that they're given from Congress matter tremendously, affect a lot of people's lives, affect businesses ability to generate more revenue that goes into that tax base. But if we want to not have ballooning annual deficits that translate into ballooning debt, that translates into interest payments that are a stranglehold on the economy, and credit agencies talking about downgrading the credit worthiness of the United States of America as a country, then we must deal with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and we must figure out how to get more tax revenue into the government. And I think that is going to have to be through a combination of raising taxes on some people and some businesses, as well as having new Americans paying into those systems.  

Sarah [00:21:47] And I would like to hear that conversation among our two presidential candidates.  

Beth [00:21:50] Agreed.  

Sarah [00:21:50] But doesn't seem to be a lot of interest. Maybe as I get closer to not funding the government, they'll get questions about this. But what does it even matter? We know what Trump's going to say. We just need to cut taxes. Or we're going to fund it with drilling, which makes about as much sense as funding it by cutting Big Bird's paycheck.  

Beth [00:22:08] We could drill everywhere all day until there is not a drop of petroleum left anywhere in this country and again not make a dent in this problem. That's just what the numbers look like. I'm not against an all of the above approached energy. Be happy to have that conversation. But that's not a conversation about the debt and the deficit. Tariffs will not get us there.  

Sarah [00:22:32] I mean, maybe if you just slap a kabillion dollars on it, but y'all that's just a tax. You're going to be paying for that on the back end. That's just another way to tax people to pay it down.  

Beth [00:22:41] Trump was so mad in the debate that she called it a Trump sales tax. And what she means-- I don't mean to speak for her, but I think what she means is if we charge a tax on other countries to get their goods here, those countries are not going to eat that cost. They are going to pass it on to consumers in the form of higher prices. So, again, do you want to pay it directly to the government or do you want to pay it in terms of every consumer good being way more expensive? But either way, we are going to pay it. This is a classic example of there is no free lunch here.  

Sarah [00:23:17] And it does seem to be interestingly a pretty good consensus around this. I read an article in The Economist about the deficit and how people are ignoring it, and I read an article in Vox about how the people are ignoring the deficit. So I think it's just a new day with the interest rates, and I think people understand that we need to have another conversation because the situation has changed. We can't be in a situation like Japan where we have negative interest rates and this isn't strangling us. If interest rates rise or even if they go down a little bit and stay there for three more years or even one more year, we have to have a conversation about this.  

Beth [00:23:50] The trouble is, every incentive from the voting public is not to have this conversation. The only time people really focused in on this in my recent memory was in the 90s when Ross Perot had his graphs out explaining to everybody. And that's because we were doing really well in the 90s. Right now, even though all of the traditional measurements of the economy look pretty good, the sentiment among American is that the economy is still really bad. And part of that is because we did overheat the economy post Covid to try to prevent a recession, which worked but it gave us higher prices. And now we have the problem that people want those prices to go down. But that's not the goal of the people managing the economy, because deflation is another form of problem for the economy. If we start to see prices go down, we are in a world of hurt that's going to get worse and worse and also hurt people.  

Sarah [00:24:44] Again, ask Japan. You can ask Japan; they know all about it.  

Beth [00:24:47] Ask Japan, exactly. So the goal right now is to level off the increases, not have things decreasing. But nobody wants to hear that, especially in an election year. And so all of us who are going to ultimately bear the cost of this anyway are creating incentives to prevent our political representatives from addressing the problem.  

Sarah [00:25:09] Yeah, it's just bananas to me people talk about like, well, it was better before Covid. Well, yeah, because we had a global pandemic. In what universe do you think we're going back in time to the before where everything was like that? It seems completely detached from reality. It's just wishful thinking. Everything changed. Do you remember? You remember having to stay home and all the restaurants closed and massive amounts of people lost their job? Of course, things are going to be different. Re-electing Donald Trump is not going to put us back in 2018. I don't know. It seems wild to me.  

Beth [00:25:47] It's really difficult. It's psychologically difficult. It is kitchen table difficult. I believe that people are struggling with higher prices. I don't have any fight with their experiences out there. I myself have booked some things lately, bought some things lately and thought, wow, that is really expensive. I cannot believe this is happening. But it is. And I intellectually understand that if those prices go way down, that is just a new type of problem. And so I think we've just got to figure out what kind of pain are we willing to tolerate because there is going to have to be some pain unless we let this explode. Like right now we're still in a position, I think, where we could choose to manage the pain, but it will get away from us and we won't have options anymore. It'll just explode and it'll be what it is. And I don't know what that will be. But again, I know that ultimately American citizens are going to end up paying for it.  

Sarah [00:26:50] Well, choosing to manage the pain and how much you want to pay, it seems like a good transition to our Outside of Politics. We're talking about should you pay your kids to read?  

[00:27:00] Music Interlude.  

[00:27:10] Talk about high prices, Beth, this editorial in The New York Times. I paid my child $100 to read a book by Mireille Silcoff. A hundred dollars is a lot. I'm already still mad a little bit about the tooth fairy inflationary prices.  

Beth [00:27:25] Tooth fairy is pretty expensive. 

Sarah [00:27:27] But separate from the question about whether you should pay your children to read, that also just seems like a lot of money.  

Beth [00:27:32] I read this editorial and I saw the headline and I was like, absolutely not. That is absurd. And then I read it. And she made a point. She made several points. So my daughter Jane, who is 13, does not read much at all right now. It's mostly because she prefers to crochet or paint. She does a lot of non screentime activities that are creative and stimulating for her brain and great, but she doesn't read much. My nine year old Ellin reads graphic novels 100 times each just on repeat. And I think graphic novels are great, but I think that's different from a novel or a piece of nonfiction. For both of them, I would like for them to read more, mostly because it's so pleasurable. And I feel like I've just gone through this period over a number of years of rediscovering that pleasure.  

[00:28:35] When I was a kid, I read all the time, constantly. I read in the bathtub. I read in the car. I read in my bedroom. I read on the trampoline outside. I read everywhere. And I loved it. And then when I got into law school and my career, I really lost the enjoyment of reading for fun until the last couple of years as I have prioritized it more. So I want them to at least have that foundation in this time of life when they can read, to feel that pleasure of sinking into a story and getting lost. And as I read this, I thought, if you have a situation where they just won't, giving them an incentive to do it, to start the momentum of them reading more makes sense to me.  

Sarah [00:29:18] So you did it.  

Beth [00:29:19] So I did it. I didn't give them $100. I did think that was a little steep.  

Sarah [00:29:24] Steep?  

Beth [00:29:25] So with Jane, like all girls her age, I think, love Seoul de Janeiro. If you don't know what that is, it's just a line. It's a modern Bath and Body Works. It's body sprays and lotions and whatever. It smells fantastic. If all 13 year old girls weren't wearing it, I might get some for myself because it is a really nice scent. So anyway, I told her I would buy her something from Sol de Janeiro if she read a novel in a month. I gave her a month to do it. She read the novel in a week. She's writing the sequel now. She has picked out her prize. And she is crocheting for herself a book tracker where she's going to make a little snake that shows what different types of books that she's read in different colors. So the author of this piece was right. There is a momentum. She just needed something to get her over the hump of, like, I don't want to read. And it worked.  

Sarah [00:30:16] Well, there you go. Griffin was a just insanely prolific reader in elementary school. Read the entire Harry Potter series by fourth grade. Just crazy amount of books he would take in. Then I slowed down when he got more in the video games and screens. But when he went to camp this summer, because there are no cell phones, I think he read like eight books in two weeks. Amos has a Kindle and Amos reads for 20 to 30 minutes every single night before he goes to bed. So he goes through a massive amount. And the Kindle has really unlocked it because I was like, whatever. Now, unlocked it too much. And I then was faced with a $300 bill of Manga, which I did not enjoy.  

Beth [00:30:59] Yeah.  

Sarah [00:31:00] But we've got that process under control now and he just rolls through fantasy. Felix, it has to be a book he likes or he'll slow down to a crawl and he won't read. But if it's a book he likes, there is a part of me that's like, man, it's just about getting them the right book because the books have a momentum. It's true for me. I'll read a book and I'm like, I want to know what happens, and I'll read it in a day. Y'all, I neglected my family when I read I'm Glad My Mom Died. I read that book in like 12 hours. It was insane. And so there is a momentum. And I think to me it's the momentum of getting them to do it and the competition of the screens that's really hard. I keep thinking about my grandmother saying if there had been screens or TV, I don't think I'd ever learn to read. I did it mainly because I was bored and I had to kind of really figure it out. So I think in this new sort of highly competitive attention economy, finding what works is fine.  

Beth [00:31:55] And that's kind of my struggle with the graphic novels because I am happy that she's reading something. And I know that those are often very good, very well-written, very interesting. And she loves to write and illustrate. That format speaks to her. So I'm not trying to discourage her from that. I just want to add.  

Sarah [00:32:14] They can get trapped. You kind of have to get them out of a cycle.  

Beth [00:32:17] Yeah. I want her to be confident and experimental, be willing to pick some other things. So for Ellen, instead of this the Sol de Janeiro, I have offered a trip to Claire's to buy new earrings. Something I probably would have done anyway. But just that incentive, like, let's get this book right and then let's go do that. And I'm not going to do it forever. I think we're going to set some bigger goals, maybe for another celebration. But what's so nice now is that we sit down at the dinner table and I'll talk about what we're reading because Chad is always reading something. I'm always reading something. And it's so nice for them to be able to say like, yeah, here's what's happening in my book right now, too.  

Sarah [00:32:57] I love it. And I can't wait to hear our audience's feedback. We got a lot of librarians, a lot of teachers. I'm excited to hear what they think about this. And thank you for joining us today. We will be back in your ears on a regular schedule next week, Tuesday and Friday, with lots of more great conversation. And until then, keep it nuanced y'all.  

[00:33:12] Music Interlude.  

Sarah: Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production.   Beth: Alise Napp is our Managing Director. Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.  

Sarah: Xander Singh is the composer of our theme music with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.  

Beth: Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers.  

Executive Producers: Martha Bronitsky. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliott. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Tiffany Hasler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson. Emily Helen Olson. Barry Kaufman. Katherine Vollmer. Laurie LaDow. Lily McClure. Linda Daniel. The Pentons. Tracey Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stigers. Karin True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Villeli. Amy Whited. Lee Chaix McDonough. Morgan McHugh. Jen Ross. Sabrina Drago. Becca Dorval. Christina Quartararo. Shannon Frawley. Jessica Whitehead. Samantha Chalmers. Crystal Kemp. Megan Hart. The Lebo Family. The Adair Family. Genny Francis. Leighanna Pillgram-Larsen. The Munene Family. Ashley Rene. Michelle Palacios. 

Sarah: Jeff Davis. Melinda Johnston. Michelle Wood. Nichole Berklas. Paula Bremer and Tim Miller. 

Maggie PentonComment