Does the government have a role to play with those other things? Or does that fall somehow to the thousand points of light that Bush talked about? Civic organizations, well-intended foundations like my own, mentorships, parents, guidance counselors. I mean, who is going to be that connective tissue?

Well, I think we can't understand where we are in this post-pandemic era unless we look not only at the infection itself, the virus, but at the consequences of the government policy is for dealing with the calamity. I mean, we've lost a million people. It's in a terrible catastrophe. The government interventions, which were massive, may have saved us from the second great depression, but I learned that every government intervention has an unintended consequence. And if you have massive government interventions, you can have massive unintended consequences. And the unintended consequences of our COVID emergency relief programs were to shoot a fire hose of borrowed money at American households so that their income levels actually rose above trend during the emergency. It's the only national economic crisis in which a per capita disposable income actually increased. I mean, because people had more money to spend than they could spend, the savings rate more than doubled during the emergency. So people carried forward a nest egg of over two and a half trillion dollars coming out of 2021. Now, you can use that to either supplement your work earnings or to substitute for it. And I think what we're seeing at the moment is a fair amount of substituting for work. It may turn out that there are people in a sort of a premature and unsustainable retirement. We will see that money be spent down and then we'll see whether people go back into the workforce or whether they become kind of like long-termers like I was describing for the prime mail dropouts.

It's kind of like unemployment. I remember I had a cousin once who was on unemployment and she was like, oh, man, I got to start looking for a job because my unemployment is going to end next

week. This is going to be, I mean, I assume that the two and a half trillion dollars is being spent down right now. It's hard to get month by month numbers on this, but it looks like it's being spent down right now. And then we're going to hit the point of reality and we're going to see who's going to be going back into the labor force and who's going to be a new long-termer.