Feb 26, 2013
Nothing pairs better with technical difficulties than still more technical difficulties. But live streaming or no, you can't keep a podcast down. So here we are! Greg Dworkin joined us to set up the day's discussion of the looming sequester, and the continuing traditional media insistence that the fault lies somewhere other than where the data says people are placing it. This morning's edition of The Fix tells us that far fewer people are closely watching the sequester as compared with the numbers of those who closely watched the Fiscal Thingy, even though they set up pretty much exactly the same way. Why? Perhaps because the Fiscal Thingy included the dreaded "T" word (taxes), whereas the sequester is about spending cuts, and most people like to think the government isn't spending money on them, anyway. That opened the door for a far-ranging discussion of why some people seem to have such difficulty understanding their position in an interconnected world (and therefore tend to become Republicans), whereas for others, the understanding comes much more naturally (and they therefore tend to become Democrats). Where do we see this dichotomy played out? Everywhere, from privatization of government services to how we make policy decisions on financial regulatory reform, to, well, everything else. But the financial regulation story is an easy one to understand, and a Bloomberg editorial we discussed makes that surprisingly clear. What does that portend for the future? And does the crazy story surrounding Jack Lew's contract with former employer Citibank fit in as a piece of this puzzle? A surprisingly coherent show, given the technical circumstances!