YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Furman

lines on the record: 77
first: 2020-08-26
most recent: 2020-08-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Bleak House for Sure. I love that you have a woman's voice in it. Esther Somerson, I love the huge number of, you know, every Dickens thing you can imagine is in that book, villains, heroines, scoundrels, you have a little murder mystery right in the middle of it, a police inspector. So I think that book contains everything.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I didn't intend to go into public policy. I ended up almost accidentally at the Council of Economic Advisors in the middle of grad school. I discovered I liked it and ended up staying in government longer than I expected. But there have probably been a dozen things from Joe Stiglitz calling and asking me to come to the Council of Economic Advisors to something that happened yesterday.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have grad students that come to me and say they love my career trajectory. How do they have it? And I don't know what to answer them because what I've done has been pretty idiosyncratic. I don't know that it would work out for even one out of 10 other people that tried it, presumably a bunch circumstances, et cetera. So I think it's always been hard to have this. Maybe a little bit harder now because the think tanks tend to be more tribal, more partisan, and so there may be a bit less of a space for just wanting to think what you want to think as opposed to being useful in the short term.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Draw the criteria narrowly enough, you can have a set of people that includes just one and they can be the very best in that set.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't, yeah, I think you're, honestly, I think you are embarrassing me. I think this isn't the way I'd think about myself. I know it is. It's certainly the case for any human being that if you...”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economists who have been chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and read everything that Charles Dickens has ever written. But I yeah, I think you're kinder about me than I would be, frankly.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Goodreads is the third platform I've been on. More people are on that platform than others. So that's why I'm there. I actually don't even particularly love the platform, but it's where other people are. I started the reviews for myself just to remember what I thought about a book and why I thought it. And now there's a few people that are reading my Goodreads reviews, but I still rarely spend more than half an hour on any one of them. And for me, I'm always trying to discover, I think a little bit like you, Tyler, although presumably a much lesser version of you, really omniperous and read in a lot of different genres within fiction and non-fiction, always trying to find new things. And, you know, good reads I've gotten to know if it's young adult fantasy. It needs to have at least a 4.5 or above or you shouldn't read it, but it's not like I'd not read Madame Bovery because it got 3.7 because a bunch of...”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mostly did what I wanted to do and not what I was told to do. So if I wasn't interested in a subject, I did very, very little on it. And if I liked something, I would read 12 other books that no one told us to read on the topic. I remember when in the Harvard application, they had a, you list all the books you'd read in the last year. I wrote down that list and then I was so terrified they would think that I was a liar that I ended up, that I ended up cutting that list in half less they would think I was making things up.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't think, remember that far past high school, but we had a geometry teacher at my high school named Mr. Sturm, who just the level of rigor he brought to proofs and thinking was something that I learned a huge amount from.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different voices, but I would love to see more people paired up, take inequality, force people who have two different sets of numbers to write a paper together so we can have something that we can reliably understand is the truth on the issue, or alternatively understand what those differences are. Yeah, I'd love to see more of that.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, we started that paper. The goal was largely to estimate the economic effects of the 2017 tax law. And we had a number of conversations. We agreed on the general modeling approach. And we said, you know what we're going to do? We may reach two different sets of point estimates. And if we have two sets of point estimates, we're going to put them together in a table, and there's going to be a crosswalk. So you can see what assumptions I used, what assumptions Robert used. In the course of writing that paper, we converged and we ended up having quite similar views on the causal question of what the impact of this law would be. We then evaluated the law quite differently. So the body of the paper, we intended to actually have different voices, but we ended up having a pretty unified voice when it came to the conclusion and what inferences we drew from all of this.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did read there is a literature on economic pedagogy and the scariest paper I read in that literature, I can't remember who it was by, compared performance on a test a year after an economics class. People had taken the class to people who hadn't, asking them questions like, you know, what's the opportunity cost? And the two groups performed quite similarly. That is certainly my biggest objective is to have students who in my class most of them aren't going to take another economics class so that when they're dealing with an issue 15, 20 years from now, they're thinking to some of the ideas we talk to them, that's my highest and most important objective, and that's the hardest one to be sure you've accomplished or even know how to evaluate whether or not you have accomplished.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that I think David Labeson and I hope did very well and certainly tried very hard to do and seemed to be something the students appreciated was convey our enthusiasm and excitement for economics. In David Labeson's case conveyed that enthusiasm for how many different things in your own life it helps you to think about decision making under uncertainty if you enter an auction, if you're dealing with splitting a bill with your roommate deciding whether to do your homework In my case I think I brought more excitement to the questions about public policy. We talked about tax policy, health policy, climate and the like so I think one thing we did hopefully was teach students but another thing is tell them here's this whole area of knowledge that can help you in so many different ways that you might not have realized you may want to not just pay attention in our class but maybe even keep learning about it in the many different ways you can learn about it.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we did all of that with frankly less sort of randomized trial, rigorous evidence than I would do on most of the public policy questions that I work on because it's simply not there. We used an awful lot of judgment. I talked to different people. I ask you your opinion of this question. I think what we did was good, but that there's some other thing we could have done in terms of changing how we do the lectures, how we do the assignments that would be even better, that it's right next to us and that I don't realize it because the evidence is there. I'm painfully open to that possibility myself and would love to know. The observation that we're operating at 30% capacity, that's probably true, but that's only useful if you can tell me what I need to do to get to 50 or 100 and I don't know where to find that information.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But David Leibson this past semester we did micro. Next semester we're doing macro. We have over 600 students. We put a huge amount of effort into rethinking the course, how we taught the course, what we were teaching in the course, how we did assignments, how we assessed people what we expected them to know.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hard thing is that there's so little that we have evidence on. I co-taught the introductory economics course at Harvard this year.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a great place where more competition and more choices. I'm fine with the big tech companies entering it. I think that would be a good thing. But as long as we put some of the rules in place up front, I'd love to see some smaller ones and just the fact that payments aren't simple and free for anyone anywhere in the world between anyone else and anyone else in the world to me seems like the lowest hanging fruit for billions of people and something that we should fully be able to solve in the near future.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly, if you look at differences in mortality, differences in health outcomes, behavior, genetics, social environment, I think all matter a lot more than healthcare. It's much easier to know how to change healthcare, though, than it is to know how to change all of those others. So I think at the margin, we might have more gains that we're able to make in healthcare, even if I agree with you. I don't think that's the number one factor in health.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just more and more of the economy is in areas that are harder to measure the quality of, like healthcare being the most notorious.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“GDP could be more meaningful if we measured it. The inflation rate Gets harder and harder to measure over time. So I think the one that probably has deteriorated in meaningfulness is the measure of inflation. Number one, we don't measure it well. And number two, it's sort of low enough that it's hard to get that excited about”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't see any large benefit to allowing that. And on the precautionary principle, I don't see any particular problem we'd be solving by allowing a greater mixture than we do.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did a six week honeymoon in Africa, started in Cape Town, ended up on a island off the coast of Tanzania and climb Mount Kiliman on the Off the coast of Zanzibar, actually small island off the coast of Zanzibar. Climb Mount Kilimanjaro in between those two. So I think that's what anyone should do.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He wants my college roommate. When I saw him in the John Grisham one that he was in the Rainmaker, I think it was, that was his first super successful one. The day I met him in college when he showed up at college told me he wanted to be a movie star, told me he was going to be a movie star. He was completely confident of it. And I cried at the end of that movie when I saw that he had achieved his dream and his plan.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might be something conventional like Blade Runner, but I'm really partial to a romantic. Had never heard of it, walked in there, and found it just so delightfully pleasant, fun, and I've watched it probably twice since then. It's made me happy every time I've seen it.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's so good everything in it is so plausible and real in a way that you can only have in hard sci-fi. It operates on sort of every time level, a time span of years, especially in the first book and a time span of billions or maybe it was trillions of years by the time you get to the third book. And just the way you think about computers is different when you hear about, when you learn about the human computers that they have there, the Fermi paradox is something I worried about from time to time. Now I'm almost scared of an alien civilization discovering we exist and wanting to destroy us and make sure they don't find out about us.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spent ridiculous amounts of time in high school and to some degree middle school on juggling, so that's probably just practice.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just, it's an amazing city, and you can, you know, Walk right outside, children can have a lot of autonomy in New York. They can ride the subway. They can take the bus. They can get so many different types of food, have so many different types of experiences. I think it's an amazing place.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I understand. I'm really bearish on blockchain. It's, you know, and maybe I know less than everyone that's excited about it, but everyone that's excited about it also has a stake in it and a reason to be excited about it. To me, very little of it seems like something that couldn't be done more cheaply and efficiently with the types of systems we've had in the past. I mean, they couldn't do anything resembling what Visa and MasterCard, the number of transactions they process a second today. We just can't do that with blockchain technology.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not saying that I care an awful lot about violations of someone's right to life, like murdering them or theft and sexual assault breaking and entering all of these things. I think these are problems too. And all of our law enforcement violates some principle. We take people and lock them up. We take people's rights away in all sorts of ways. And there's a process for deciding whether you're allowed to have a search warrant, whether you're allowed to put someone in prison. And so I think we need to put Processes around this that respect balances of rights, but I would hate to give up a tool that could keep us safer.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wanted poster for somebody, and then if somebody with their eyes recognizes that face, call in a tip line and have the person arrested, I don't know why we would want to give up on a tool.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I agree. You're allowed to have a police officer on the street. Looking at somebody, you're allowed to, but software based.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it should worry you. And so If the UK moves forward establishing the digital markets unit, I recommended as they have been moving forward, would love to have you on it asking that set of questions. I don't think that something has downsides and concerns is in this case at least a reason not to do it. I think in some spaces like messaging, they're reasonably mature. The iPhone have introduced an emojis in a world of required interoperability. We could have figured out a way to do that. And by the way, if the world lost an emoji, probably would still have turned.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I worry about that, and that's why you want to apply it, for example, more or make it mandatory for large companies and not for Tyler Cowan's new virtual reality company. So I think there's a set of costs and benefits, and I think the right way to get that mix of costs and benefits is with the large companies, the lack of portability creates a barrier to entry, entrenches them and reduces competition. So I'd turn the dial one way for them. And for smaller companies, I'd turn the dial the other way or not even have a dial.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now that you say it, to some degree it does. I said I'm not sort of immersed in how the policy making in Europe gets done on the issues of privacy. And I think Huawei is sort of easier to understand that somebody's tracking you or somebody's keeping data on you or someone's deciding what the search results about you are. And that's transparent and you can see that happening and you can decide if you think that's fine or if you think that's not fine. In some cases Europe decided it wasn't fine. Huawei was an awful lot of information that I don't have access to and that you don't have access to either.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think you want to put it all in one bucket. Antitrust, the cases against Google were brought through a very technocratic, relatively independent, I think, honest process. The tax proposals are coming from politicians. And yes, absolutely, your public choice models, I think, apply a lot more to those politicians. I think those politicians are right that they're missing out on a bunch of taxes they should be getting. I think they're wrong to have sector-specific levies and proposals, in some case jury-rigged just to get at American companies. So yes, antitrust in Europe, I think, is fair. Taxes, I think, is a bit sort of anti-American if you want to call it that. And privacy. Unless sure of the answer to. My guess is it's more that's what Europeans believe as a belief about the world and not a form of protectionism.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think maybe I'm not as immersed in public choice as you are, Tyler, but given where we're sitting, I think that the Europeans have a pretty fair and impartial antitrust system that is largely blind to nationality. Look at what they did in Siemens and Alstom. You had a merger of two major European companies, one from France, one from Germany. The commission said they couldn't merge both of those countries were infuriated. I think they take a tougher approach to antitrust, but they take that across the board with their own companies and with American companies. I think they do it in a pretty even handed manner.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can make laws that are dependent on size. The recommendations that I made in my UK report were a code of conduct for the largest players and it wouldn't apply to the medium or small ones. That's easy to do if the code of conduct is around anti-competitive behavior. That's much harder to do if the code of conduct is about something that's considered a human right. It's not like we would say Industrial safety rules shouldn't apply to a small business and only should apply to a big business. If you think that a business shouldn't be killing people, it's workers. You think that you should think that regardless of the size of the business. So privacy has been approached from a human rights frame rather than from a competition and economic frame. I think there's some merit though to that human rights approach.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have mixed feelings about it. I think privacy legislation is important. I think it's something that people care about. I personally for myself don't care that much about it and tend not to do lots of privacy settings on things even when I have a choice and know what I'm doing. So I don't personally relate to it as much, but something that people care about. I'd like in a world where I thought people were informed, I would think competition and choice would fully solve the problem. I think it contributes to solving the problem, but probably isn't enough. GDPR also, though, is cumbersome and in some ways has been an impediment to competition because the big companies can navigate it much more easily than small ones can.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the right question is the counterfactual of what would the price of online advertising be if there were five online advertisers and companies instead of two online advertising companies? I think it would be... Lower, I think the price of those products. We also pay separate from that, of course, in the form of privacy, in the form of giving up our data, and then in all sorts of ways of less innovation that we don't even see because something doesn't exist because it was too hard to enter the market.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many ways to network with people. These are advertising companies, first of all. But online advertising, I mean, you know. If something drives up the price of steel, am I going to say, well, I don't have to pay any more for steel because I don't buy any steel. Well, I buy a lot of products that have steal in them and I'm paying more for those products. I am paying more for any product that has to pay more in advertising fees to Google and Facebook, which dominate the online administration.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are a little bit more like merger to monopolies. And when you have that, I have less of a presumption of efficiency. If you grew, I think you're probably efficient. We probably shouldn't do anything about you. If you bought a bunch of things, I get more worried.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, not Amazon per se. I think those are sectors where, first of all, there's a whole set of social concerns and democratic concerns are probably much more important than anything in terms of competition. But those are areas where you can see Google and Facebook didn't get to where they are today through organic growth. Walmart was largely organic growth. It was efficient. It opened up a new store. Then it opened another store, then it opened another store. And each one of those stores was better than the other things in the neighborhood, so it succeeded. Amazon, a lot of organic growth, although certain key important acquisitions along the way. Facebook has three major social media companies all in one because it bought two of those three. Almost every component of Google was kept the search algorithm, was purchased at some point along the way.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a lot of fondness for Amazon. I order a lot from Amazon. I've personally benefited a lot from Amazon. I think an awful lot of American customers do. I think Amazon's online retail platform also is to some degree competing with brick and mortar retail. And once you place it in that market, it's a relatively small player in all of it. So personally, I actually think Amazon would probably be lowest on my list of concerns, but that doesn't mean I have no concerns about Amazon and don't think it needs to be. Monitored. In the context of a report in the United Kingdom, I don't think would constrain an awful lot of what's good about Amazon's business model”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put Brexit primarily in a medium to long term cost of the set of microeconomic efficiencies associated with somewhat worse supply chains, somewhat worse composition of imports and exports. And yes, putting that in the couple percent of GDP poorer over the long run seems about right. Is that two? Is it five? I don't know. I think it's a negative number and it's not a large upfront negative number.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With what your consumption is and the marginal utility of your consumption. So maybe they should actually have a lower interest rate now than the pure safe rate of return. So I think there's a couple other different factors going on there.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so much damage was done to economic forecasting by the experience of the 1980s. We had this brief, relatively brief period of unusually very high interest rates. And people built that into their forecast. And for the next 20 or 30 years, there was something almost that felt normal about the 1980s and then the decline from the 1980s felt strange when a lot of what we've seen in interest rates in recent years is going back to the types of interest rates and the type of trend we were on before then. In terms of a longer term decline of interest rates, you have to be careful about are you what's happened to risk associated with interest rates, bonds used to be more risky than they are right now. Bonds might be negatively correlated.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If the extremes, though, does not symmetry, rates can't go down by ten percentage points, rates could go up by ten percentage points. So I think there is some tail risk there. I don't know that it's so large that I would make a big effort to deal with it. If you want to deal with it, you don't even need to reduce the deficit. You can just borrow more long-term and lock in the low interest rates you have now. I wouldn't want to go hog wild and assume it'll never happen either.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think that the risk is symmetric. If you look at the last 140 years, about 25% of the time interest rates have been, real interest rates have been lower than where they are now, 75% of the time they've been higher. You look around the advanced economies today. most all of the advanced economies real interest rates are lower than they are in the United States. So I think there's a certain amount of symmetry. I think rates could go down. Rates could go up.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, right. There's ultimately a resource constraint that we have in terms of what the potential of the economy is. You can relax that resource constraint at the level of the planet with the United States borrowing, financing consumption from other regions in the world and paying those regions of the world back in the future. But by the way, if what we're doing with the rest of the world is financing consumption and financing investment, that will come out of our well-being in the future. So no, I don't think we have a free lunch there.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have interest rates that are lower than our growth rate. That means we can on a sustained basis run a primary deficit. We can spend excluding interest in excess of what we collect in taxes. Right now, though, our primary deficit is set to be about 4% of GDP. That means our debt under that plan would asymptote to about 400% of GDP. And perfectly possible that we'd be fine at 400% of GDP, I'd like to sort of explore how far we could get a whole lot more slowly than committing ourselves to our current fiscal trajectory, which is a 400% GDP steady state debt, or something even higher than that.”
2020-08-26 · Conversations with Tyler · Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source