The Chuck ToddCast
Full Episode - The U.S. Retreats From Being The Leader Of The Free World + Why The Biden Economy Felt Bad & Why Trump’s Is Even WORSE
08 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the significance of the U.S. retreating from being the leader of the free world?
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Chapter 2: How does Trump's approach to foreign policy differ from previous administrations?
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of Trump's pardons on political loyalty?
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Of course, I have to open up to do a little representing here to say I'm relieved and surprised. at the committee's decision with the University of Miami in football is an understatement.
Chapter 4: How is the American economy affected by technological changes and inflation?
I don't think any of the sins that I've been identifying of this committee should somehow be washed away. What they have done with the SEC in Alabama is as suspicious as ever. And I do not blame anger out of the folks at Notre Dame. I think the strangest decision was Including Alabama. Actually, the strangest decision was including Oklahoma. We can have a longer discussion about that.
And I have still have a bunch of stuff to say about this. I love the fact that now all these ESPN personalities like Kurt Herdstreet are saying we should get rid of this TV show. Good luck getting your bosses to agree to do the TV show. But you are correct. The college football ranking shows created this antagonism of fan bases, suspicion, conspiracy theories, all of that.
The behavior of the committee, the lack of sort of consistency, the decision, all that business, they have nobody to blame but themselves. I had a friend of mine quickly text. He said, well, all your whining worked. And I'm like, hey, don't encourage me. I hope that's not the case.
In a weird way, I hope it wasn't outside agitators like myself and others pointing out facts that they were unaware of. I should hope they were – that they didn't need people to point these things out. But to say that –
How this went down and it is going to do nothing but encourage more activity like the activity a bunch of us, University of Miami partisans participate in over the last few weeks. There will be more of that come next year until they finally get rid of this committee and allow basic metrics. What happens on the field dictates everything. Hard stop.
But like I said, I'll have more to say about college football. And for those of you don't care about sports or college football or have written off college football because you don't like how they've been doing this for, frankly, 100 years, they have never gotten their postseason right. I get it. I understand. And I will put this at the end of this podcast.
Let me give you a rundown of what I got going on today. We, of course, have got sort of – I want to go through a little bit of the national – of the new national security strategy memo that gets updated every year by whoever's in the presidency. And to say there's a departure, not surprising, but a departure – of what role America should play in the world is an understatement.
Bottom line, the president of the United States does not want to be the leader of the free world if you take the national security strategy update seriously. I want to get into that a little bit on this Trump pardon anger at Henry Cuellar and what it really tells us about how the pardon system works in the Trump White House. I have an interview with Jared Bernstein.
He was Joe Biden's chief economic advisor when he was vice president and essentially played the same role when he was president. He's got some interesting takes on what he thinks the Fed will do and ought to do. That's that decision is going to happen later this week. So I think this is a very timely interview. But it's not a partisan.
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Chapter 5: How does 'Medicare for More' propose to change healthcare access?
And so it's Medicare for more. And what that means is is lowering the age of Medicare. I've heard it.
Fifty. Would you go down to 50 has been the number I've always seen of.
Yeah. And so, you know, because it's you might hear people talk about a public option. That's really very similar to what I'm talking about.
Chapter 6: What are the challenges of competition in the healthcare market?
And this is the idea that whether you're in your workplace looking at what you can choose or you're going into the Obamacare exchanges, you can, you know, if you're if you're of a certain age, you can choose Medicare, which is a less expensive form of care because of the kinds of cost controls I mentioned earlier. And, you know, someone who's on it now, it works well.
Right.
me ask this why you know it's interesting did did you expect when the affordable care act happened and the idea was that there was some there was a hope that you'd have more insurance companies come into the marketplace um did you think we would have the big you know the progressives usaa geico i don't think they really did get into the marketplace um where did you assume more would have jumped into this
I did. And I do think that competition has been somewhat insufficient in that space.
Every day is a UnitedHealthcare buying up another company.
Exactly. There's vertical integration, there's horizontal, vertical meaning up and down through the hospital systems, and then there's horizontal. So there's... That kind of integration, particularly in some of our larger cities, is putting upward pressure on costs. And in the piece that Neil Mahoney and I just wrote, we went after that. We said we have to block that.
You know, you have a lot of investors supporting that kind of integration. But on the insurance point, Remember, when we did the ACA, we made a political, because I was in the Obama administration then, we made a political calculation that we were going to go, you know, through the insurance companies, not around them. We were going to adapt them as allies.
No, I mean, that was the mistake the Clintons made, right, which was trying to go after the insurance companies. And Thelma and Louise, it wasn't Thelma and Louise, Harry and Louise, sorry. Thelma and Louise was the movie. Harry and Louise became the faces of the opposition. Yeah. You know, and then it I mean, I understood the pull.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of the child tax credit in economic policy?
You're right. You guys made a political day. We're going to have Harry and Louise on our side, which they if I remember, they actually re-upped the ad and were.
Well, they we never would have legislated that if we had, I think, if we had gone with the, you know, trying to crowd them out. And, you know, I think that's why Medicare for more is going to be a tough sell, because they recognize that that kind of competition, they don't want to compete with the government. They recognize that Medicare can provide less expensive health care for for people.
And, you know, they kind of are resigned to assigning that to seniors. But if you take that down to 50, they're going to fight you tooth and nail for those mansion reasons I said before. But we still have to go there.
Well, it seems, especially if we're living longer, I mean, it just I guess that's got to be the fear. I mean, that would be the argument against bringing the age down. Medicare is only going to get more stressed if because people are going to be living longer and on Medicare longer.
Chapter 8: How do the historical relationships with China impact current U.S. policy?
Well, not necessarily because we're not getting into the policy weeds. So it's not that this is going to be free for people. I mean, Medicare is not free for anybody now. You still have Part B premiums and all that. No, they would have to pay an actuarially fair premium rate if you're on Medicare. It's not free. It's not like Medicaid, which is kind of free health care.
But that premium is going to be considerably lower than what you're paying to the private sector.
Future of work, not just AI, but the length of the work week. you know, we've, there's been chatter about this for multiple generations, right. And what, what the, what the work week's going to be. You're starting to see, I think Bernie Sanders is advocating a 32 hour work week. Um, but it really all goes back to what's full time.
And cause what full time, what the definition of full time is then of course triggers whether you get benefits or not. And so that's why this is, I think an important issue. Um, Where are you on that issue, and is that something that you think is coming?
Well, first of all, the way Senator Sanders talks about it is he wants people to work eight hours less per week but not take a cut in pay. And that strikes me as unrealistic. I don't see how that works. I think that leads to lots of unintended consequences that would be detrimental to workers.
If you wanted to have the option of a four-day week, and people could still be considered working full-time and get those same sorts of benefits, that's a conversation worth having. But output would go down, and so we'd have less growth, presumably. And that's kind of a trade-off. It's interesting because for economists, a lot of time, social welfare, well-being is too easily analogized to GDP.
But if I told you we can have less GDP, but we can work less hard, you might say Europe. Right.
That is what somebody would say, Europe. Look at them. Guess what? And we drove right past them in our GDP.
We drove right past them in our GDP, but when it comes to if you actually look at measures of happiness, they actually kick our butts in a lot of ways, especially around this issue of work. So the problem I have with the conversation is when it sounds like there's no trade-off. If you accept that there's a growth trade-off, but maybe you improve social welfare – Fine.
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