Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won applause at the Libertarian National Convention by criticizing government lockdowns and deficit spending, and saying America shouldn't police the world.

It made me want to interview him. This month, I did.

He said intelligent things about America's growing debt:

"President Trump said that he was going to balance the budget and instead he (increased the debt more) than every president in United States history—$8 trillion. President Biden is on track now to beat him."

It's good to hear a candidate actually talk about our debt.

"When the debt is this large…you have to cut dramatically, and I'm going to do that," he says.

But looking at his campaign promises, I don't see it.

He promises "affordable" housing via a federal program backing 3 percent mortgages.

"Imagine that you had a rich uncle who was willing to cosign your mortgage!" gushes his campaign ad. "I'm going to make Uncle Sam that rich uncle!"

I point out that such giveaways won't reduce our debt.

"That's not a giveaway," Kennedy replies. "Every dollar that I spend as president is going to go toward building our economy."

That's big government nonsense, like his other claim: "Every million dollars we spend on child care creates 22 jobs!"

Give me a break.

When I pressed him about specific cuts, Kennedy says, "I'll cut the military in half…cut it to about $500 billion….We are not the policemen of the world."

"Stop giving any money to Ukraine?" I ask.

"Negotiate a peace," Kennedy replies. "Biden has never talked to Putin about this, and it's criminal."

He never answered whether he'd give money to Ukraine. He did answer about Israel.

"Yes, of course we should,"

"[Since] you don't want to cut this spending, what would you cut?"

"Israel spending is rather minor," he responds. "I'm going to pick the most wasteful programs, put them all in one bill, and send them to Congress with an up and down vote."

Of course, Congress would just vote it down.

Kennedy's proposed cuts would hardly slow down our path to bankruptcy. Especially since he also wants new spending that activists pretend will reduce climate change.

At a concert years ago, he smeared "crisis" skeptics like me, who believe we can adjust to climate change, screaming at the audience, "Next time you see John Stossel and [others]… these flat-earthers, these corporate toadies—lying to you. This is treason, and we need to start treating them now as traitors!"

Now, sitting with him, I ask, "You want to have me executed for treason?"

"That statement," he replies, "it's not a statement that I would make today….Climate is existential. I think it's human-caused climate change. But I don't insist other people believe that. I'm arguing for free markets and then the lowest cost providers should prevail in the marketplace….We should end all subsidies and let the market dictate."

That sounds good: "Let the market dictate."

But wait, Kennedy makes money from solar farms backed by government guaranteed loans. He "leaned on his contacts in the Obama administration to secure a $1.6 billion loan guarantee," wrote The New York Times.

"Why should you get a government subsidy?" I ask.

"If you're creating a new industry," he replies, "you're competing with the Chinese. You want the United States to own pieces of that industry."

I suppose that means his government would subsidize every industry leftists like.

Yet when a wind farm company proposed building one near his family's home, he opposed it.

"Seems hypocritical," I say.

"We're exterminating the right whale in the North Atlantic through these wind farms!" he replies.

I think he was more honest years ago, when he complained that "turbines…would be seen from Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard… Nantucket….[They] will steal the stars and nighttime views."

Kennedy was once a Democrat, but now Democrats sue to keep him off ballots. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls him a "dangerous nutcase."

Kennedy complains that Reich won't debate him.

"Nobody will," he says. "They won't have me on any of their networks."

Well, obviously, I will.

I especially wanted to confront him about vaccines.

In a future column, Stossel TV will post more from our hourlong discussion.

COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post RFK Jr. Pays Lip Service to the Debt While Pushing Policies That Would Increase It appeared first on Reason.com.

America is celebrated for its economic dynamism and ample and generously paid employment opportunities. It's a nation that attracts immigrants from around the world. Yet Americans are bummed, and have been for a while. They believe that life was better 40 years ago. And maybe it was on some fronts, but not economically.

Surveys repeatedly demonstrate that Americans view today's economy in a negative light. Seventy-six percent believe the country is going in the wrong direction. Some polls even show that young people believe they'll be denied the American dream. Now, that might turn out to be true if Congress continues spending like drunken sailors. But it certainly isn't true based on a look back in time. By nearly all economic measures, we're doing much better today than we were in the 1970s and 1980s—a time most nostalgic people revere as a great era.

In a recent article, economist Jeremy Horpedahl looked at generational wealth (all assets minus all debt) and how today's young people are faring compared to previous generations. His findings are surprising. After all the talk about how Millennials are the poorest or unluckiest generation yet, Horpedahl's data show them with dramatically more wealth than Gen Xers had at the same age. And this wealth continues to grow.

What about income? A new paper by the American Enterprise Institute's Kevin Corinth and Federal Reserve Board's Jeff Larrimore looks at income levels by generation in a variety of ways. They find that each of the past four generations had higher inflation-adjusted incomes than did the previous generation. Further, they find that this trend doesn't seem to be driven by women entering the workforce.

That last part matters because if you listen to progressives and New Right conservatives, you might get a different story: that today's higher incomes are only due to the fact that both parents must now work in order for a family to afford a middle-class lifestyle. They claim that supporting a family of four on one income, like many people did back in the '70s and '80s, is now impossible. Believing this claim understandably bums people out.

But it's not true. One of its many problems, in addition to the data evidence provided by Corinth and Larrimore, is that it mistakenly implies that single-income households were the norm. In fact, as early as 1978, 50 percent of married couples were dual earners and just 25.6 percent relied only on a husband's income. I also assume that there are more dual-income earners now than there were in the '80s. While this may in fact be true for married couples (61 percent of married parents are now dual-earners), because marriage itself has declined, single-earner families have become relatively more common.

Maybe the overall morosity on the economy has to do with the perception that it's more expensive to raise a family these days than it used to be. Another report by Angela Rachidi looks at whether the decline in marriage, fertility, and the increase in out-of-wedlock childbirths are the result of economic hardship. She finds that contrary to the prevailing narrative, "household and family-level income show growth in recent decades after accounting for taxes and transfers." Not only that, but "the costs of raising a family—including housing, childcare, and higher education costs—have not grown so substantially over the past several decades that they indicate an affordability crisis."

So, what exactly is bumming people out? We may find an answer in the 1984 Ronald Reagan campaign ad commonly known as "Morning in America." It begins with serene images of an idyllic American landscape waking up to a new day. It features visuals of people going to work, flags waving in front of homes, and ordinary families in peaceful settings. The narrator speaks over these images, detailing improvements in the American condition over the past four years, including job creation, economic growth, and national pride.

I believe this feeling is what people are nostalgic about. It seems that they are nostalgic about a time when America was more united and it was clearer what being American meant. Never mind that this nostalgia is often based on an incomplete and idealized memory of an era that, like ours, was not perfect.

This is a serious challenge that we need to figure out how to address. One thing that won't help, though, is to erroneously claim that people were economically better off back then and call on government to fix an imaginary problem.

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