When you're chewing on life's gristle, don't grumble, give a whistle.

And this will help things turn out for the best.

Welcome to the Cato podcast. I'm Gene Healy, senior VP for Policy at Cato.

With me, as always, my co-host, Ryan Bourne, the R. Evan Sharp Chair for the Public

Eckert Understanding of Economics.

Good to be with you, Gene.

Beaming in from the People's Republic of Cambridge Mass is Jeff Myron. He's Cato's VP for Research.

And he also teaches economics at Harvard, where he personally represents something like 40% of existing ideological diversity on campus.

Welcome, Jeff.

Nice to be here.

And here in the studio with us is Tommy Berry, a director of the Bob Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court

were here. Howdy. Thanks for having us. We're coming up on the first Monday in October,

or as Tommy likes to call it, the most wonderful time of the year, because the Supreme Court is back on the job.

Later in the program, we'll talk about some of the big cases coming up this term. But first, with all last minute attempts to broker

a deal having cratered as of 12.01 a.m. Wednesday, the federal government shut down. Roughly 750,000 federal workers are expected

to be furloughed, many departments closed, and our panel is here to help us all process the trauma.

Ryan? Well, Jeff, the government is currently shut down, as Gene said.

That's because Congress hasn't enacted any of the 12 appropriations bills for the

2026 fiscal year.

Without those or the so-called continuing resolution, parts of the federal government just

have to shut down, at least the unfunded functions

that aren't deemed essential in inverted commas to public safety. So we'll discuss how we got here

...