Josh Barro On Defending Biden

Josh is an old friend, and a business and political journalist. He has worked for Business Insider, the NYT, and New York magazine. He currently runs his own substack called Very Serious, and he cohosts a legal podcast called Serious Trouble, also on Substack.

We talk Biden — Josh’s political hero. You can listen right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app — though Spotify sadly doesn’t accept the paid feed). For two clips of our convo — why Biden isn’t polling better despite the improving economy, and the “emotional terrorism” Hunter has wrought on his family — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: growing up with a dad teaching econ at Harvard and a mom raising four kids; studying psych at Harvard before going into banking; monetary policy and the Fed; props to Mnuchin for the CARES Act; how the stimulus in early Covid helped Trump at the polls; the excessive flood of stimulus in 2021 as an overcorrection to 2008; the subsequent spike in inflation; how the US economy recovered from Covid more quickly than the rest of the West; how wages lagged behind inflation after 2020 but recently surpassed it; today’s low unemployment and high consumer spending; slowing inflation; Biden’s new strategy to quash student debt; how national debt is only a problem relative to GDP and growth; how inflation reduces the burden of debt; the lunacy of Modern Monetary Theory; the excess of Trump’s tax cuts; the continuity of his trade policy toward China into the Biden years; Biden’s factory building; his extremism on cultural issues; what happens when he has a McConnell moment; Trump’s crazed dynamism; the new NYT poll on Trump’s chances against Biden; Josh’s jump to Substack; his porn stache; and his reasons for liking America more than Europe.

Browse the Dishcast archive for another conversation you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Michael Moynihan on Orwell and conspiracy theories, Vivek Ramaswamy on his vision for America, Sohrab Ahmari on his forthcoming book, Freddie deBoer, Leor Sapir, Martha Nussbaum, Spencer Klavan, Ian Buruma, Pamela Paul and Matthew Crawford. Please send any guest recs and pod dissent to dish@andrewsullivan.com.