Peter Thiel
speaker
1,088 appearances
12 recordings
11 series
first heard Jul 2024
last heard 15 Jun
Peter Thiel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
But somehow the relative outperformance of the U.S. and the absolute stagnation decline of the U.S., they're actually related things. Because the way the conversation's grooved, every time I tell someone, you know, I'm thinking about leaving the country. They'll do what you say and they'll say, well, every place is worse. And then that somehow distracts us from all the problems in this country.
And then we can't talk about what's gone wrong in the U.S. because everything is so much worse.
Yeah, I mean there are a lot that are pretty obvious to articulate and they're much easier to describe than solve. Like we have a crazy, crazy budget deficit.
And presumably you have to do one of three things. You have to raise taxes a lot. You have to cut spending a lot. Or you're just going to keep borrowing money.
It's not that high, but it's gone up a lot.
It peaked at 3.1% of GDP. which is maybe 15%, 20% of the budget, peaked at 3.1% of GDP in 1991. And then it went all the way down to something like 1.5% in the mid-2010s. And now it's crept back up to 3.1%, 3.2%. And so we are at all-time highs as a percentage of GDP. And the way to understand the basic math is the debt went up a crazy amount, but the interest rates went down.
And from 2008 to 2021, for 13 years, we basically had zero interest rates with one brief blip under Powell. But it was basically zero rates. And then you could borrow way more money, and it wouldn't show up in servicing the debt because you just paid 0% interest on the T-bills. And the thing that's...
that's very dangerous seeming to me about the current fiscal situation is the interest rates have gone back to positive like they were in the 90s and early 2000s, mid-2000s. And it's just this incredibly large debt. And so we now have a real runaway deficit problem. But people have been talking about this for 40 years and crying wolf for 40 years. So it's very hard for people to take it seriously.
How does that work? Well, it's to people who bought the bonds and it's – A lot of it's to Americans. Some of them are held by the Federal Reserve. A decent amount are held by foreigners at this point because in some ways it's the opposite of the trade current account deficits. The U.S.
has been running these big current account deficits, and then the foreigners end up with way more dollars than they want to spend on American goods or services. And so they have to reinvest them in the U.S. Some put it into houses or stocks, but a lot of it just goes into government debt. So in some ways it's a function of the chronic trade imbalances, chronic trade deficits.
Man, I always find that hypothetical. It's a ridiculous hypothetical. It is ridiculous. You ask ridiculous hypotheticals, you get ridiculous answers.
I think my answers are probably all in the very libertarian direction. So it would be sort of – Figure out ways to have smaller governments. Figure out ways to increase the age on Social Security. Means test Social Security so not everyone gets it. Just figure out ways to gradually dial back a lot of these government benefits. And then that's insanely unpopular.
So it's completely unrealistic on that level.
Yeah. Basically anyone who – pretty much everyone gets it because it was originally rationalized as a – as a as sort of a pension system, not as a welfare system. And so the fiction was you pay Social Security taxes and then you're entitled to get a pension out in the form of Social Security. Right.
And and because it was we told this fiction that it was a form of the pension system instead of an intergenerational Ponzi scheme or something, something like that. You know, the fiction means everybody gets paid Social Security because it's a pension system.
Whereas if we were more honest and said it's just a welfare system, maybe you could start dialing – you could probably rationalize it in a lot of ways.
And then if you put more in, you get somewhat more, and then it's capped at a certain amount. And that's why Social Security taxes are capped at something like $150,000 a year. And then this is one of the really big tax increase proposals that's out there is to uncap it, which would effectively be a 12.4% income tax hike on all your income. Adjust to Social Security?
Sure, because the argument is, the sort of progressive left Democrat argument is that it's, you know, why should you have a regressive Social Security tax? Why should you pay 12.4% or whatever the Social Security tax is? Half gets paid by you, half gets paid by your employer. But then it's capped at like 140, 150K, some level like that.
And why should it be regressive where if you make $500K or $1 million a year, you pay zero tax on your marginal income? And that makes no sense if it's a welfare program. If it's a retirement savings program and your payout is capped, then you don't need to put in more than you get out.
Yeah, but look, it gets away with it.
Showing 661–680 of 1,088 · page 34 of 55
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