Welcome to the Dividend Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio

and dividends in your understanding of economic life.

Well, hello and welcome to this week's Dividend Cafe recording from my hotel in Louisville, Kentucky.

I am getting ready to suit up and go speak a couple times at a

conference today. And in the meantime, I have actually put a lot into this week's Dividing Cafe.

I'm kind of excited to talk to you about it. Let me give a little context of what we're going to do

today. Over the years, I've had quite a few people ask me,

you write so much about economic growth, about concerns with the national debt or concern

with government spending. What would you do to solve our pending debt crisis? And I've always

shared various policy views. I've appreciated various elements of the conversation.

But the context of what would you do is a little different when you limit yourself to the possible.

You know, the things I would do are not possible, politically possible.

The realities of a democratic form of government mean that there are various things that need to be done and will be done that are painful and people do not like pain and I do not like appeasing people.

And so therefore I don't generally get into the conversation

because the political side, the reality side of this is not what I do and not what I ever will do,

not what I have any ability, giftedness, or desire to do. Conceptually, there is, I think,

a benefit in thinking through ideals around policy or at least

objectives that drive certain outcomes. And so this is where I think today is going to go a little

bit is I've over the years had a fictitious place. I think I've had this, if I remember correctly, I'm pretty sure I made the term up

30 years ago, literally in my young 20s, a place called Dave Land that was just meant to be

a metaphor for a fake place where in Dave Land you can do this or you would not have that

kind of a catch-all for this

...