Gary Gensler

speaker

649 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4d ago

Gary Gensler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Freakonomics Radio · 684. He Helped Clean Up the Last Crash. Does He See Another One Coming? · 7 Aug 2026 podcast

That's the taxes and the tariffs.

And we spend about 23% of the economy, six percentage points mismatch.

Then you look at that 23% of the economy spending at the federal level, and you say, well, what can we adjust?

The bulk of it, well over a majority of it, is what in Washington is called entitlements, what we all know is Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, only about four percent of our overall economy, is the discretionary spending, half of which is the

the Defense Department and half the non Defense Department.

And so you say, well, can we take this on?

Can we fill the deficits that are running at $1.7 trillion a year right now?

Can we fill that with just adjusting the non defense discretionary?

And the answer is no.

The arithmetic of it all really runs into the political

Side.

I was hoping you'd have some magic solution though.

We just lost a remarkable public servant, Alan Greenspan.

We can debate the pluses and minuses of his career, but one thing he did in the 1980s, he was asked by then President Ronald Reagan to chair a commission on Social Security reform.

Somehow there was a political consensus at that moment to make some reforms on Social Security, which effectively cut

What benefits for you and me?

They said, all right, retirement age isn't gonna be fully at sixty-five, it's gonna creep up and I think now it's closer to sixty-eight if you want full benefits.

That political consensus doesn't exist today.

Some people look to the nineteen nineties and say, what led the federal budget surpluses at that point in time?

And did it have some relation to productivity gains that were coming in the economy with computerization and the Internet and so forth?

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