If you need to show the financial community that you're saving money, that you're not going to go into debt, then you have to cut back on spending.

Giving everybody $2,000 isn't doing that.

You know what it's doing? It is saving your political rear end.

He's buying votes because he is worried, as he should be, the election of Mamdani and the other Democrats and the justices in Pennsylvania and the redistricting project in California.

Those were all defeats for him.

Everyone he endorsed lost, everyone he opposed won.

That's not a happy outcome.

We are so excited to bring you a special interview that I did with Professor Richard Wolf,

who's an economist, Professor Emeritus at

UMass Amherst, visiting professor at the new school, and founder of democracy at work.

And so here is a great interview that I did with him about the shutdown.

Also, if you would like to see the full interview where we talk about the victory of Mondani

and the fall of the American

Empire, which are not related, by the way. You can do that at useful idiots, podcast.com.

Thank you so much for coming back onto the show, Professor Richard Wolfe.

Glad to be here, Katie. It's always good talking with you. Thank you. Yes. Well, could not be more mutual on my end. I wanted to ask you about the recent shutdown and the Democrats' response to the shutdown and the shutdown of the shutdown, if you will.

So we just ended the longest government shutdown in American history.

And as people probably know, eight senators, eight Democrats voted to reopen the government.

In exchange, all they got was a promise for a vote on health care coverage in

December, and it frees to federal firings for a few months. So what is your response to the shutdown

and also to the way the shutdown was resolved? Well, I think the way I would handle this is to try to put the shutdown in a little bit of historical perspective and having to do with the problems that the Trump administration faces and how it is going to or try to solve them.

And I keep in mind two things. One, that a great deal of what Mr.

...