Giving Ventures Podcast: Episode 99 – Tackling America’s Debt Problem with Romina Boccia

This transcript has been AI-generated and lightly edited for clarity. Some inaccuracies may remain.

Peter Lipsett: I have a long fence line with an empty property next to me. And over the last five years, the autumn olive plants and the wild raspberries have just grown bigger and bigger. They’re pouring over the fence. They’re choking out the trees. And these noxious plants are technically all on the other side of the fence. And it isn’t a problem I made, but every year that I don’t do anything about it, it just gets more problematic for me and for my yard. And my wife and I’ll go out there and we’ll beat the overhang back a bit. But despite hours of hard work, it seems like nothing has changed. And I feel like this is an apt analogy for what we’re going to talk about today in terms of federal spending and the debt. I mean on the one hand, it’s this far away thing we don’t really feel, but it’s always there. It’s continuing to grow. It’s encroaching on the financial stability of our future and that of our kids. And worse, it always feels like it’s somebody else’s problem. And we didn’t make it directly, but we’re all going to get stuck with the consequences.

You know, our national debt now has surpassed $36 trillion, which is just an obscene and crazy number. And no president has overseen a surplus since President Clinton. And that was just a brief and fleeting thing. Couple that with the cliffs we’re facing on Social Security, the continued problems with Medicare and Medicaid that we’re seeing played out in Congress now, and add in all the entitlement spending. And you are talking about a problem that seems insurmountable.

So how in the world do we get America’s finances back to some orderly system? I wish I was coming to you with a great solution, but I am happy to say there are smart people and great groups out there working to bang the drum to try to drive to some semblance of sanity on this. And I am thrilled to have one of those scholars with me today. Romina Boccia is the Director of Budget and Entitlement Policy at the Cato Institute, and she spends her days analyzing problems and promoting solutions around debt, entitlement, federal spending broadly. She’s the co-author of a new book, Reimagining Social Security: Global Lessons for Retirement Policy Changes. There it is. And she also is a fellow board member of mine with America’s Future. Hello, Romina.

Romina Boccia: Hi Peter, thanks so much for inviting me on the podcast.

Peter Lipsett: Well, thank you and thank you for being somebody who is working on these big, large, intractable issues. You know, as with all things, debt and spending, it’s kind of hard to know where exactly we should begin. But perhaps a big picture question first. You know, I have a lot of concern around the debt. You obviously have a lot of concern around the debt. Do you have a sense of the broader public perception around the issue of national debt and government spending? I mean, does anybody really care?

Romina Boccia: I work with a lot of people who care. So it could be selection bias. They come to seek me out because they care. But if you look at public polling, there’s widespread support around 85% of voters agree that Republicans and Democrats must work together to solve the debt challenge. So people are aware of it and they don’t always recognize that the real pain they’re feeling now is related to the debt. So instead they might talk about the inflation or now the new term is affordability, but it all ties back to the debt. Or you might read about how young people are having a hard time affording a mortgage because the mortgage rates are so high or people feeling locked in to their current mortgages because if they were to move for greater opportunities, a new job, for example, and they would have to sell their house with their great mortgage rate, they would have to assume a much higher rate now, 6%, 7% that makes housing more expensive for them. These are all problems that are associated with the excessive government spending and the excessive debt. And so I disagree that we’re not feeling the pain. It’s just that people don’t know where it’s coming from. And so they’re looking in the wrong places, but it is coming from excessive spending. The reason we had the 25 to 30% increase in prices since 2021, 2022 was because the federal government did an exorbitant amount of stimulus spending, over $7 trillion when it’s all said and done. That is about the size of the annual federal budget. And the government basically doubled the annual budget just to do the stimulus spending.

And then at that time, it was really difficult for the government to borrow. And so what happened is that the Federal Reserve, despite all of these ideas that it’s somehow independent, decided to buy up about $5 trillion of that newly issued debt. And that’s how the Fed creates new money. And when you have the growth in the money supply outpacing the growth in the economy, you get inflation. And that’s exactly what we experienced. And so it’s really fiscally driven from the stimulus spending and then the fact that the Federal Reserve accommodated it.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, and that’s a bipartisan problem. I mean, that was Republican and Democrat presidents, Congresses of all ilks. I mean, it was everybody. It’s a government problem, right? At the end of the day, it’s not a people problem. And it’s also an unwillingness to recognize when a crisis is over. Is that fair?

Romina Boccia: Yes, we have yet to return to the pre-pandemic spending levels, but worse than that, we really have entered a new normal. And I mean that in two ways. One is that our interest rates remain high after the pandemic has ended, and the federal government is now spending over a trillion dollars just on interest on the debt. You have to wrap your head around this. This is more than we are spending on defense. In fact, the Congress just passed a defense bill, the biggest ever, it’s $900 billion, if you look at dollar terms, and yet we’ll be spending more on interest on the debt than on that defense bill. So that’s one way in which we’ve entered a new normal. The other way is that whenever the United States suffered a crisis, and even when politicians went all out on the taxpayer credit card in order to address the crisis or because they’re taking advantage of the crisis. You might’ve heard the old adage, never let a good crisis go to waste. Despite all of that, once a crisis would end, you would actually hear talk about deficit reduction. You would get bipartisan plans put in place to reduce spending and the deficit. For example, after the Great Recession, we had the Budget Control Act. We had major fights over the debt limit.

And the politicians actually agreed to cut spending after the crisis ended. That is not happening this time. President Trump came into office promising spending cuts. We got DOGE. DOGE failed. They did not bring about the spending cuts that we were promised. And instead, we actually got a huge increase in the deficit from the July One Big Beautiful Bill Act of about three and a half trillion dollars. And while there were some spending cuts in the bill, the tax cuts far exceeded the amount of spending Congress was willing to reduce.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, and it’s just problem after problem. And it can just, you know, we want the good compounding in the stock market. These problems compound just the same way. All right, let’s hone in on one of these problems. We’re going to unpack all these, which is the subject of your new book that you held up a second ago. There it is. Reimagining Social Security, which is so important. I mean, my wife and I joke all the time. You know, we’re never going to see Social Security. Unfortunately, we’ve saved. We have our 401Ks, our 403Bs, IRAs, you know, all those things. Like we’re going to be fine. But a lot of people aren’t. A lot of people are really looking down the barrel of a gun on this. We all know the situation is bad. But do people understand how bad it really is?

Romina Boccia: They don’t. We just conducted a national survey of over 2,000 Americans using YouGov. The Cato Institute did. My colleague, Emily Ekins was the lead on this. And most Americans do not understand how Social Security works and they underestimate how severe the funding shortfall is and what it would take to avoid benefit reductions. One thing to keep in mind is we do have a fiscal cliff looming on Social Security where Congress can no longer ignore the problem. And that’s in the fourth quarter of 2032, assuming Congress doesn’t make the problem worse until then. In the fourth quarter of 2032, Social Security will no longer be able to pay benefits in full. And the amount of payroll taxes that are projected to come in at that time will only cover about 75 cents of every benefit dollar. So Congress will be confronted with the threat of an automatic spending cut or a delay in most people’s Social Security benefits until the government can pay them in full. So that will create that window of opportunity for reform because Congress can no longer ignore the problem. But in the sense that how people have a very favorable opinion of Social Security. And I kind of get it, right? It’s like a program where you get money back. And there’s a lot of story and mythicism around the program where people believe that it’s not a welfare program that it’s somehow different. People believe a quarter of Americans, according to the Cato survey, believe that they have a private account at the Social Security administration. A lot of Americans think that the benefits that they’re receiving from Social Security that they already paid for them and they’re just getting their money back. And in many cases they feel like they’re getting a raw deal. And so it’s a very different program from, for example, food stamps or Medicaid, where people have the sense that it’s a welfare program. With Social Security people believe it’s an earned benefit that they are entitled to because it’s just their money. And none of that is true. That’s a convenient story politicians have told, which allowed this program to emerge in 1935 as the very first federal welfare program. Before Social Security, all we had were programs to support veterans, which people got. You fought for the country, you risked your life, perhaps you got injured in combat, and now we’re going to take care of you as a thank you.

But the American people did not support a broad-based welfare program that anyone could qualify for at that time. So in order for politicians to sell the American people on Social Security, they had to come up with this elaborate story that it was an insurance program and it wasn’t a welfare program. But that’s not really how it works. It works like every other welfare program in the sense that taxes collected from workers today pay for benefits for retirees today. Nothing was saved. The taxes that people paid in the past were spent immediately. The one catch with Social Security is that early beneficiaries made out like bandits. They got incredible returns because they started collecting benefits only after a few short years. So they had not paid in enough to cover what they were eligible for. And so that’s why some people call it a Ponzi scheme because it acts like a Ponzi scheme where early investors gain their returns from the addition of new investors entering the scheme. With Social Security, early beneficiaries got paid out of a huge labor force. And now, as our fertility has been declining, you no longer have as many workers to cover the cost for every retiree. The program’s costs are going up where younger workers are getting a raw deal. And if those benefit cuts I talked about earlier would take place, younger workers would actually end up collecting less than they would pay in over their lifetimes.

Peter Lipsett: Now, in your book, you highlight the fact that, you know, America isn’t the only place that has some kind of old age insurance program like this. Canada, New Zealand, Germany, a bunch of others. And some of them have been facing the exact same problems we have, maybe even worse in certain cases, and yet have made reforms, have done things. I don’t want to spend the whole podcast talking about Social Security, although we certainly could, but what are the big takeaways from those reforms that Cato and other think tanks are thinking we should be applying here?

Romina Boccia: Yeah, so the impetus behind the book, Reimagining Social Security, was to consider how other nations that are older than the United States proceeded with reforming their retirement programs. And so we have these great examples because the kind of fiscal crisis that the United States is going to hit over the next decade or so, many European countries and other Anglo-speaking countries hit in the 90s. And some of that is because the United States is a younger nation. Some of it is because the dollar, our exorbitant privilege allows us to borrow more at lower rates than is possible for other countries because the dollar acts as a global reserve currency. So we have a lot of things going for the United States. But now we’re getting into a position that some of these other countries were in before. So I wanted to take a look at how did they overcome the political barriers to reform, which are, I think, the biggest obstacle to reform in the United States? And then also what reforms did they implement? And now we have roughly 25 to 30 years in each of these case studies to look at how did they pan out? What can we learn from these other countries’ approaches for how to make reform happen? And then what reform should look like for it to be durable and effective over the long term? And one thing that stands out is the United States has a very robust private retirement saving system.

A majority of Americans participate in 401ks and IRAs, and they’ve aggregated more savings than the size of the entire US economy. So people are taking advantage of this private retirement system. That is a very good thing. We should lean into that. It has become much easier for Americans to prepare for their own retirement over time than was the case when Social Security originated. So a lot of the reasons for why Social Security was necessary just no longer apply. Think of it as what the government can do best is act as a backstop against poverty in old age. That was sort of the original promise that Social Security was built on. It’s since expanded far beyond that where the highest income, highest net worth Americans who are eligible for Social Security also receive the highest benefits. In our survey, the Cato survey, only 9% of respondents were aware that benefits can reach up to $60,000 a year for an individual. And the individuals who qualify for that $60,000 a year benefit also happen to be the wealthiest individuals with very high lifetime earnings and therefore the ability to accumulate a lot of savings in retirement. And so what we’re observing with Social Security right now is this Robin Hood principle in reverse, where younger working Americans are struggling to get by and are facing a tax increase in order to keep giving benefits for wealthier Americans that yes, they pay taxes into the program their whole life, but they also pay taxes for food stamps and they’re not receiving those. So it’s really a question about who should get this money, especially when you realize where it’s coming from, not from prior savings, but actually current workers’ taxes. So looking at these problems and solutions from that perspective, I find that among all the countries in our book, which include Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, and Canada, I am most fond of the New Zealand system because it basically covers all bases with a flat benefit that’s predictable, you know what to expect, and it’s roughly the size of the current average Social Security benefit. So think $1,800 to $2,000 a month. That keeps people out of poverty and provides some of the lowest income earners with enough income where they don’t need to save in addition to that. For middle and upper income Americans, they can supplement that basic benefit with their own savings and investments. And if we had such a system, people would know what to expect from the government, and then they could more easily calculate how much more they need to save and invest to reach the living standards that they desire. With the current system, the benefit formula is so complicated that most people have no idea what to expect from the system. So they can’t really rationally save either.

We also know that because Social Security is so expensive, because it tries to do so much more than poverty protection, it is crowding out private savings. And so if we could enable more people to save privately, it would cost them less because the returns in the private market from a balanced portfolio are much better than the returns on Social Security. And we could save taxpayers’ dollars by going back to Social Security’s original purpose of keeping people out of poverty, but not acting as an income replacement program for upper and higher income earners, which is not necessary. By the way, Germany is the birthplace of the Social Security system that we have in the United States. The UK had a similar system up until 1994, and then they actually started making the transition to a flat benefit system similar to the New Zealand one I mentioned earlier. So they’re a good example of a country going from a Social Security-like earnings related benefit towards reforming in a way that it becomes more of a flat benefit. But the way it works is basically you want to reduce benefits for the highest income earners and you lift up benefits slightly for the lowest income earners and you can pay everyone enough of a benefit that they can make a decent living without deterring them from saving and investing on their own.

Peter Lipsett: But as you say, the political will, the political trickiness of all that is the real problem. And it’s why it’s so important to have groups like Cato and these other groups out there pushing. Okay, so let me throw a question to you to kind of lead into this debt piece. So I led off saying you’re upset about the debt, I’m upset about the debt. Yesterday, I was meeting with a donor who is very upset about the debt and just says it’s massive, it’s huge. And she proposed an idea that she gave me permission to ask you because frankly, I pooh-poohed it a little bit. But what do I know? You’re the actual expert. She said, you know, should we allow some kind of, because it’s so massive. I mean, as you say, the interest is bigger than our defense budget now. Is there some path to allow donors to help who just feel that this is a terrible problem to actually maybe get a charitable deduction or something, tax credit or something for helping to pay this down? Would that be feasible? Would there be any political will for that? And bigger picture, would it make a dent in the debt?

Romina Boccia: I think it’s a very interesting question and I appreciate the donor’s interest in contributing to solving the debt problem. I’m curious, Peter, why did you pooh pooh it? What did you reply?

Peter Lipsett: I think it was Massachusetts at one point had a checkbox or a line where you could pay more in your taxes to go to the budget and like no one did, zero people did it, right? Maybe this is a little bit different because her idea actually involves some kind of credit, a tax deduction or something like that for it. So maybe that’s probably better. I don’t know, maybe I’m just too cynical, but yeah, I’d love your thoughts on it.

Romina Boccia: Well, I think the way to approach this is to think about the problem we’re facing is not just the current size of our debt. The problem is that the debt is growing faster than the economy. And then we have to think about what’s causing this growth in the debt. Because we’re sort of like, we have higher revenues chasing much higher spending and spending going up at a rate much greater than revenues. So how do we need to approach this problem if we want to stabilize the debt? We’re not even talking about paying down the debt. At this point, we’re just trying to keep the debt from growing to new record heights. By the way, over the next 30 years, our current publicly held debt, what we borrow in credit markets, where the treasury sells bonds to investors, is projected to grow from about 100% of gross domestic product, or the size of our economy, to 180%. And that by the way, is the best case scenario. No crisis, no pandemics, no major foreign affairs that we, foreign battles that we get involved in. And so that’s your best case scenario. So how do we keep the debt from growing and what would that actually entail? Well, one thing is that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act saved about a trillion dollars in spending cuts. Yes, it also cut taxes by far more than that. But we would actually need to do that 10 times. We would need to save about $10 trillion over the next 10 years, about a trillion a year, or cut our deficit in half from like 6% of GDP to 3% of GDP. And then we could roughly stabilize the debt at the current level and prevent that exorbitant growth. So one issue, as you raise, probably how many people are actually going to donate to the federal government to reduce the debt. By the way, people can do that now. They can go to the Treasury site and there’s an easy way to donate to the federal government. If people are inclined to do so, they can absolutely do that already. Now they don’t get a tax credit for it, but that would be ineffective because if you donate $1,000 to pay down the government debt and then you get a tax credit for $1,000, that’s $1,000 that the government’s not collecting in revenue. By you putting a thousand dollars towards paying down the debt, that doesn’t mean that that money is now not available for what the government is going to spend next year. So that doesn’t work. You’re just basically moving money around. Right. In the end, we’re just as worse off. Now you could say, let’s do it. Make it a deduction, in which case you don’t get the full value of your donation, but only the portion of whatever tax bracket you’re in.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, roughly a third, let’s say.

Romina Boccia: Yeah, roughly a third. Okay. But then again, now you get a little more money to come into the treasury, but it doesn’t solve the problem. So in many, I would say it’s a non-solution. I’m not opposed necessarily to the deduction because if the government still gets to keep two thirds, that’s great. I agree with you, probably not a lot of people would donate, but it wouldn’t make a dent at all in our debt crisis. If you think about the Dell donation, I don’t know if you heard about this, but in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress established so-called Trump accounts where new babies born in the United States get $1,000 invested in a fund that when they’re 18, they can draw down, people can invest over time. And the Dell family just made a major gift, over $6 billion, I believe, to seed fund Trump accounts for children who are already born up to the age of 10. And it’s interesting. The Dell family could have put that $6 billion towards paying down the debt, but instead they decided to seed these Trump accounts where that money can grow and gain more value over time. This is kind of an interesting decision, but if the Dell family had decided to pay down the national debt, $6 billion, we wouldn’t have even noticed it. It’s not even a rounding error. The problem is that the debt is going up by $2 trillion just this year and every single year from here on out. And in fact, we’re going to have a $3 trillion deficit by the end of the decade. So even the largest gift ever made as this Dell gift was called is a drop in the bucket when you compare it to our national debt problem. We need to slow the growth in spending in the programs that are driving the debt ever higher. And those are Medicare and Social Security.

Peter Lipsett: I appreciate that. I appreciate this donor suggesting this because I think she feels the same thing that so many of us do of just like, this is such a big problem and we’ve got to deal with it and no one seems to be paying attention to it as your research seems to suggest. And we’ve got to try something, right? We’ve got to try something. So that kind of gets me to the crux of this, right? I mean, this show is targeted at philanthropists like that donor who are thinking creatively, who want to put their money to work to solve problems, right? You work at Cato Institute, you work with a lot of different organizations out there focused on this. Talk to us for a bit about the work that you’re doing, about the work you’re seeing out there that is actually trying to build the political will and try to put the solutions out there to make a real change in our awful situation financially.

Romina Boccia: You know, last year I was the most optimistic I had been in over a decade that we were actually going to solve this debt problem. And the reason for that was that there was a group of 60 members of the Congress between the House and the Senate that supported the establishment of a fiscal commission to bring, to create that space, that bargaining space where we can talk about how to slow the growth in major healthcare and retirement programs that are driving us deeper into the debt crisis. By the way, on that note, more than 100% of our total unfunded obligation, like the long-term liability that the federal government has assumed because it’s promised a lot more in spending than it made laws to collect in revenues, more than 100% of that $75 trillion long-term liability, which is two and a half times the size of our current economy. That’s how much money we would have to invest today to have that be available to pay for those promises is because of Medicare and Social Security. Over $50 trillion of that long-term unfunded obligation is Medicare alone. And then the rest is Social Security, about $25 trillion. So that’s the real issue we’re facing. And we need bipartisan support to tackle these programs. Because when parties attack each other over actually trying to solve the problem, even when everyone can agree not to cut anyone’s current benefits, but just to slow the growth in the generosity of future benefits, which by the way, in our survey, about 60% of Americans support slowing the growth in future benefits is all we have to do, but you have to get agreement to get that done. And so I was very encouraged by the Fiscal Commission and some of the groups that were working to build that support, including the Cato Institute, was working very closely with the bill authors on shaping the actual commission bill. Groups that were most helpful included the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget. They’re a centrist group focused on the debt and deficits. And so they work with both sides. The people who work there are a mix of Republicans and Democrats. And so it works very well to bring both sides together. Other groups that are doing really great work on the budget include EPIC, the Economic Policy Innovation Center, which is a spin-off by Paul Winfrey, who I worked with at the Heritage Foundation. And they’ve hired a lot of great people who have experience also on Capitol Hill. So they tend to be very good also about the current policy battles that Congress is fighting and really talking to staffers about how to approach those. And then I’ve been very encouraged in seeing the Concord Coalition spin off a grassroots activist group called Concord Action, because at the Cato Institute, we are a 501(c)(3). And so I can supply Congress with information, reform ideas, and even help shape legislation. But what I can’t do is tell constituents to write to their member of Congress or draft letters where constituents can ask their members of Congress to vote one way or another on a certain bill. I can’t basically organize people politically because that goes into lobbying territory. And so the Concord Action Group has basically adopted my roster of, you know, my ideal world, what are the policies that Congress would enact, which I handed to them also on a silver platter. I wrote a report called A Fiscal Agenda for the Next Congress. And so if you kind of look at what we recommended there and what Concord Action is engaging people on and activating them on to call their members of Congress and write in, there’s a lot of overlap. So I’m very happy that there’s an outfit now that’s trying to organize people on a grassroots level because the fiscal commission I mentioned that made me so optimistic was actually killed in the last Congress and it was killed by single issue organizations. And there I have to, you know, my friend Grover Norquist, I appreciate a lot of their work on the tax front, but when it came to the fiscal commission, they were one of those single issue groups that opposed it because they said it could potentially facilitate a tax increase. But you have to think about if you’re striking a great bargain, a grand bargain between the parties, there probably will be some form of tax increase. But the idea is to solve the overall problem. And in the end, you’re going to have to solve it mostly on the spending side because it’s the growth in spending, that’s the driver of the problem. But you can’t rule out a tax increase entirely, but it would be agreed to by both sides. And by the way, there are ways that you can increase tax revenues in a pro-growth manner by, for example, broadening the tax base, like getting rid of a lot of loopholes in the tax code that are subsidizing certain production behavior or certain consumption behavior, and in the end, make our tax code less efficient. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be a tax increase on Americans in the form of say, higher rates. You know, that would be the worst way to go about it. But you can increase revenues by closing loopholes, for example, and there you could have an area for bipartisan support. But yeah, they were one of the groups that opposed the fiscal commission. And then on the left, you have groups like the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. So you can kind of tell where they’re coming from, or Social Security Works and Congress just got scared.

Peter Lipsett: AARP, were they part of that? Was AARP part of that as well?

Romina Boccia: Yeah. Yeah. AARP is sort of a big force behind that. You know, Congress got scared because it was in an election year and so they didn’t want to get attacked. And a lot of these groups are willing to lie. I wrote a piece, Debunking Myths, about the Fiscal Commission Bill that these groups were spreading. Like they’ll lie. To scare people, they’ll make up things that aren’t even in the bill. But most people don’t read the bill. They’re not going to verify. They’re just going to believe whatever they’re told. And so support dropped, but, you know, those members, a lot of those members, unfortunately also are retiring now. You know, there was Jody Arrington of the House Budget Committee, Representative Schweikert of Arizona, who’s been a great ally on these issues. They could name several others that haven’t committed to running in these upcoming midterm elections. And it’s really like a roster of members who want to do the right thing. They want to fix the problem and they haven’t been able to get ahead and make any, get any traction. And so now they’re wondering, you know, am I just spinning my wheels here and contributing to making the problem worse? I don’t want that on my record. I don’t want that to be part of my legacy. And they’re thinking about leaving Congress now because the institution has become so sclerotic and gridlocked. And, you know, the way to think about the debt problem is not, you can think about either, do we need handcuffs to basically keep Congress from spending more and making the debt problem worse? Or do we need political cover because we have structural drivers of deficits and debt, the so-called autopilot entitlement programs, and we actually need to create the space for a compromise solution to be able to emerge. And I would say we need both, but we mostly need that political cover. And so I’ll continue to push for an effective fiscal commission where we can create the space for Congress to actually talk about reform options and enact them together.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah, well, it is, it’s just a really big problem. And it really, really matters. It’s really important the work you’re doing and these other groups that you mentioned. I appreciate that there’s a good coalition of organizations working together, talking to each other, trying to figure this out. And, you know, I think you make a really good point there about the handcuffs versus which you need. You need some breaks in there somewhere. But the politicians, if they’re going to, you know, you got to make sure they feel the fire and or you got to give them the cover to do what’s right and that can be a hard, hard thing to do particularly in a 501(c)(3) context. But you can do some of that, but as you say the 501(c)(4) is, the PACs, it’s all got to work together towards this broader solution. So Romina, thank you for the work you’re doing. Thank you for going through all this. I know we could have spent two more hours unpacking. We didn’t even talk about Medicaid and Medicare other than a passing reference. And then of course you reminded me that it’s even worse than all the other problems. And so we really probably should have spent time on it, but you know, it’s close to Christmas. We need to have some positive things too. So thank you, Romina for all your hard work on this.

Romina Boccia: Thank you, Peter, for having me on. And I encourage your listeners to get a copy of Reimagining Social Security for a hopeful path forward. And then I would also love to encourage folks to subscribe to my Substack, The Debt Dispatch. It’s free, The Debt Dispatch on Substack. It’s read by members of Congress and folks running for Congress. So it’s a great way to reach those audiences.

Peter Lipsett: There you go. Yeah, if this is a topic you care about and you probably do, if you’re listening all the way here to the end, then you should definitely do that because it’s got lots of good stuff. Romina, thanks so much.

Romina Boccia: Thank you, Peter.

Peter Lipsett: Romina and I continued to talk and nerd out about some of this stuff after we stopped recording. And we got on the topic of the 2005 Bush reforms that President George W. Bush was really proposing that came so close to passing. And she made the point that research suggests that all recipients across the board would have been better off, would be receiving more money had those passed. And it’s important to note that it was really AARP that came in at the last minute and killed it. And as regretful as that is, it does prove a point, which is the power of these groups to actually affect change and the power of the donors behind them to affect change. This matters and that means you matter. You as somebody who gives to organizations that care about limited government, personal responsibility, free enterprise and financial sanity can actually make a difference. Romina rattled off the names of several groups that are doing important work in this space from Cato to EPIC to Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and others. It’s so important that you are in this fight. Yes, in the 501(c)(3) way, maybe also in the 501(c)(4) and the political ways as well. Donor dollars can get us across the finish line and hopefully lead to more dollars in everyone’s pocket by having a better fiscal policy for this country. Well, if part of your fiscal policy in your house is charitable giving, here at the end of the year, we were dropping this with just a few days left, but you can still open a donor advised fund to manage that giving, do it in a nice, simple way, a safe way, private way, and with Donors Trust, a way that aligns with your charitable values. That is what we do. We work with folks who care about issues like what we’ve been talking about today to make sure that their philanthropic impact is really felt. We would love to be helpful to you if we can do that. Go to DonorsTrust.org, learn more, and let’s start a conversation about how we could be helpful for you in your philanthropic journey. Well, that’s it for today. As always, thank you for being a giver. We’ll talk more soon.