Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for Politically Ecclectics. I'm Robbie Gupta. And today, I'm going to be talking with Yale Law Professor Zach Liscoe, who used to be the chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget at the federal government. And he and I are going to talk about Doge. We're going to talk about infrastructure spending. We're going to talk about government

efficiency generally. And then we'll talk about some myths and truths about the tax code and

essentially questions like, do rich people actually pay less than taxes? How do they evade taxes?

How could we reform the tax code, et cetera? But before we get there, I just want to just lay out a

couple of thoughts. And actually,

it's worth mentioning also that I'm going to tackle a couple of voicemails at the very end of this

episode, by the way. But I first want to just talk a little bit about this question of the Department

of Government Efficiency and, you know, larger efforts around Elon Musk and Trump to, as they say, root out inefficiencies and corruption within the government.

And I come at this, and I talk with Zach about this a little bit.

If you listen to this podcast long enough, I've been spending a lot of time on the question of making government more efficient.

So like the big picture goal of trying to

bring more money to the taxpayers, or at least in case of the federal government, decrease the

deficit because before we return money to the taxpayers, we need to ensure that we're not

leaving future generations with a huge bill. That is a good goal. The question I have asked myself is,

are they genuinely solving this problem? And I think I have a couple of major questions and

issues with what I'm seeing so far. And I think it starts with the tax cuts. Right now,

the Senate and the House of Representatives

are debating legislation that will in all likelihood extend and probably expand existing tax cuts

at a time when we have a growing federal deficit, which is, last time I checked, is something

on the order of 10% of our budget is interest on our debt, which is rising every year.

And some people say it might be the fastest growing government program.

And so what that means is that at this time where Elon Musk and people around him are going around the federal government pointing at this program for that and saying we're returning money to the taxpayer, that party and that

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