Noah Smith

I don't actually know.

It could have been some worries about spooking financial markets, because if you do that, maybe financial markets will take it as a signal that you intend to do, you know, borrow more and not stop.

So maybe the short maturity that we kept it at was some sort of credibility signal.

But I'm just hand-waving here.

I don't actually know.

Your guess is kind of as good as mine here.

We did miss an opportunity.

Okay, so I interrupted you about austerity.

Oh yeah, austerity.

So austerity just means cut spending, raise taxes.

You know, and there's lots of ways we can do both.

We can reverse all the Trump tax cuts.

We can tax, you know, a higher corporate tax probably isn't going to hurt us.

We can do higher capital gains tax.

And we need to raise taxes, not just on the rich, but on the upper middle class.

You know, like people making, you know, $150,000 a year need to be paying more taxes, not just the people making a billion dollars.

Obviously we should raise taxes on people making billions of dollars.

And I'm in favor of raising taxes in a progressive manner where billionaires get their taxes raised more than regular people, but regular people need their taxes raised too.

Regular people need to pay more taxes because that's how they do it in Europe.

You know, there's, it's, it's in a, like we need, we could have a VAT, we could have higher income taxes, things like that.