Taped on August 17, 2021

Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Catherine Rampell:

You can argue about various kinds of regulations that protect only the person who has to abide by that regulation. Like should you have to wear a bike helmet when you’re biking? I put that in a different category from, are you potentially putting other people at risk of an infectious disease?

Preet Bharara:

That’s Catherine Rampell. She’s an opinion columnist at the Washington Post. She’s also a politics and economics commentator for CNN and a special correspondent for PBS NewsHour. Rampell made her name as an economics reporter at the New York Times where she was the founding editor of the Economics Blog. These days her expertise extends far beyond economics. She’s written extensively about everything from vaccine mandates to immigration policy, and she brings a data-driven approach to all of her analysis.

Preet Bharara:

Today Rampell and I talk about the unfolding crisis in Afghanistan and the United States’ moral responsibility to protect its Afghan allies. We also discuss the business community’s decisions around vaccine mandates and whether we should be concerned about inflation. That’s coming up, stay tuned. Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from Maria in Buffalo, New York who asks, “I read that Andrew Cuomo has $18 million leftover in campaign cash. What can he do with that money?” So that’s an interesting question.

Preet Bharara:

Obviously the governor of New York has announced his intent to resign, that should become effective in a few days. But one notable fact about his departure is that he has this enormous war chest, more than $18 million. And lots of people have been speculating with respect to that fact what it means for his political future. The state assembly has announced it will not proceed with impeachment. If they continue with the impeachment process, that could have been preventing Andrew Cuomo from ever running for statewide office again, or at least for the governorship. That’s off the table.

Although Carl Heastie, the assembly speaker backtracked a little bit and said there would be a report forthcoming from the assembly, so we’ll see a second report at sometime soon. But there’s a lot of speculation about whether or not Cuomo will try to make a comeback, a political comeback of some sort. Part of the reason they think that is because of the question that Maria asks, this $18 million leftover in campaign cash and an enormous war chest.

Now that’s not unusual to have money left when one leaves office suddenly. Eliot Spitzer left under a cloud. He had about $2.9 million in campaign cash. Same is true for former attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, who had a pretty substantial war chest himself, about $8.5 million. So what can he do? Well, first let’s discuss what he cannot do. He cannot use that money, the 18 million for personal expenses. He can’t use it to take a trip for himself. He can’t use it to buy jewelry for himself or a house or a yacht or anything like that.

But otherwise, he has pretty broad ability to use it for political purposes. He can’t use it in a federal or a New York City campaign because the rules are more stringent, both on the federal level and on the city level. But he can use that money for a future campaign for himself. He can use that money to give to other candidates of any party. He can use it to give to party organizations. Those are fairly clear cut ways that he can use those campaign funds as prescribed by law.

Now there’s another more murky area, a category of expenditure that he can engage in, that is campaign related, and the law is not fully clear there. As David Goodman points out in an article in the New York Times, “There can be some room for interpretation, campaign finance lawyer said. He could spend it on an effort of rehabilitating his image or even on travel so long as the activities could be pegged in some way to his past government service or a future campaign for state office.”

And here’s another way he can use the money, which is a little bit controversial and people don’t love. He can use it to pay legal bills, which he has a significant amount of, and that’s not new. Eliot Spitzer used campaign funds to deal with legal issues. The former speaker of the New York State House, Sheldon silver used campaign funds, so did Eric Schneiderman. So far, according to public reports, Cuomo has already spent $285,000 on his personal lawyer who spoke on his behalf in connection with the sexual harassment scandal.

In fact, Governor Cuomo used campaign funds to pay legal expenses back when we investigated the closure of the Moreland Commission in 2014. It’s a bit of a more open question according to legal experts, whether or not if he ends up getting sued by some of these women and he wants to settle with them and pay a sum of money to resolve the claim, whether he can use campaign finance funds for that.

And while often people don’t like the idea of departing politicians being able to use campaign funds to get out of legal jeopardy and legal trouble, it’s better than the alternative, which may also be possible, which is the taxpayers pay for it, depending on the circumstances and the laws of the particular locality. Now there are a couple of other options and they relate to another question I got in an email from Jonah who asks, “Does Andrew Cuomo have to give the money back or can he give it away?”

And the answer to that question is he can do both. And there’s a long tradition of politicians who leave in disgrace in particular, calling up donors and seeing if they want their money back. Both Eliot Spitzer and Eric Schneiderman did that. About 20% of the campaign funds that Schneiderman had were returned to donors and about 50% of what Eliot Spitzer has. It’s unclear how Andrew Cuomo is going to go about trying to return or if he intends to return or wants to return any of the $18 million to people who gave him that money in good faith thinking that he would continue in office or run again, but we’ll see about that.

Now on the question of whether or not he can give it away, he certainly can. And there’s precedent for that too. In fact, the departing governor is permitted to give to non-profit organizations of any type so as long as two conditions are met, the group is registered in New York and he does not have any direct connection to them. And so it has been suggested, and there’s precedent for this with Eric Schneiderman as well, that given the nature of the scandal that engulfed his governorship and given the reasons that Andrew Cuomo’s had to leave office and given how much money he has in his war chest, that it might be a pretty good idea for him to donate a substantial amount to one or more nonprofit groups who protect the rights of women and help the victims of sexual assault. Not a bad idea.

Stay tuned, there’s more coming up after this. My guest this week is Catherine Rampell. She’s an opinion columnist at the Washington Post and a commentator for CNN and PBS NewsHour. Catherine Rampell, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Catherine Rampell:

Great to be here.

Preet Bharara:

How are you?

Catherine Rampell:

I’m doing all right, all things considered. Always have to have that a disclaimer in this weird year and a half and all sorts of troubles in the world, but all things considered, doing fine.

Preet Bharara:

Good. We’ve been wanting to have you on the show for a while. You and I had, I think a brief discussion a year and a half ago, weeks before the lockdown happened. So I’m glad we finally made it work each in our respective homes. So have you become one of these people, I don’t think you have, who is suddenly overnight on Twitter an expert in all matters relating to Afghanistan?

Catherine Rampell:

No, I hope not. I hope I don’t come off that way. I definitely have strong thoughts about how we have treated our allies and other vulnerable Afghans who are refugees there. And I’ve written quite frequently about refugee policy in the past so I do feel competent to weigh in on that issue. But everything else in Afghanistan, a little bit out of my lane. So I try to be humble if I can.

Preet Bharara:

I’ve been trying to do the same.

Catherine Rampell:

And acknowledge that I don’t know what the right military decisions are.

Preet Bharara:

It’s all the same people who overnight became armchair prosecutors and then expert epidemiologists and then Afghan. We’ll definitely talk about refugees and immigration.

Catherine Rampell:

We are a country of Renaissance men and women.

Preet Bharara:

We are, enabled by social media.

Catherine Rampell:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

So further to that, we are recording this on Tuesday afternoon, August 17th. And there was a lot of discussion about what to do with interpreters and allies and other folks who have been aiding the US cause and aiding our government and our country. For a lot of years, there’s a backlog I understand of about 18,000 applications for special immigration visas. And you wrote what I thought was a pretty powerful piece in the Washington Post and you tweeted it out with the language, “Get people out, deal with paperwork later.” Why is this so important to do it and to do it in that way?

Catherine Rampell:

We have been failing our Afghan allies basically for as long as this war has been going on. And what I mean by that is there are interpreters, cultural advisors, drivers, fixers, embassy clerks, et cetera, who have put their lives on the line, who have put a target on their own backs and the backs of their family members to help us, ostensibly also to create a free and democratic state in Afghanistan as well. But they were protecting American national security interests too.

Catherine Rampell:

And we have promised these people that we would make sure that they were safe, that if the Taliban or others came after them because of their association with the United States, we would get them out. We even created a special category of visa, special immigrant visa that is for interpreters and others who have helped either the US military or the US government in some other capacity. There’s a version of this program as well for those who helped us in Iraq.

Catherine Rampell:

We have this program for our allies in Afghanistan, and it is severely broken. The weight to get processed is years on average. And we have basically abandoned these people. So this was the case well before to be clear, well before either Biden announced the date of the troop withdrawal this year, or Trump had announced the deal with the Taliban last year. We have been failing these people through multiple presidential administrations.

Preet Bharara:

But it wasn’t as urgent before.

Catherine Rampell:

I mean, to some of these people, it was urgent of course, right? Hundreds of people who have helped us have been documented as being assassinated either themselves or their family members because of their help for us. So it’s not like there was no risk to them or no lethal consequences to these delays in the past. But yes, it has gotten much more urgent as soon as it became clear that the United States was withdrawing all or almost all of our military presence from the country.

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Catherine Rampell:

And if you talk with refugee organizations, they will say we have been telling this White House, the Biden White House, that it was really, really important to basically speed things up, to accelerate this process. This process is always very slow because the incentives are to do more and more vetting, right? You don’t want to be the bureaucrat who let the one security risk through the cracks obviously. On the other hand, these people for the most part already had security clearances as a condition of-

Preet Bharara:

They were helping us in the first place.

Catherine Rampell:

Right. I mean, these were people who sometimes were carrying weapons around US generals, right? If we didn’t trust them to do that, we shouldn’t have let them. The bar for then getting them out of the country should at least be the same as whatever bar they had to clear to get those kinds of jobs.

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Catherine Rampell:

But in any event, these refugee and human rights organizations have been saying it’s really important to make sure our allies get out as well as other vulnerable Afghans. There were people who helped media organizations like my own, the Washington Post, there are human rights advocates, there are other people who are likely to be targeted. But at least deal with the people for whom this special immigrant visa has been created.

Catherine Rampell:

And a number of these groups kind of gift wrapped an evacuation plan that was based on historical precedent, where we have, for example, airlifted a lot of Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon to Guam. We did the same thing for Iraqi Kurds who had been targeted by Saddam Hussein in the ’90s. We took them to Guam. We said, “Okay, this is a controlled setting. You’re in the middle of the Pacific. You’re not going to swim to the United States mainland if you are a security risk. We’ll process you here where you’re out of harm’s way and then if you qualify, we’ll transfer you to the mainland.” We’ve done this before.

Preet Bharara:

So you’re not saying that we should airlift tens of thousands of Afghans to Ellis Island. You’re saying, do something along the lines of what we’ve done before in Guam or somewhere else [crosstalk 00:13:22].

Catherine Rampell:

Or a military base.

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Catherine Rampell:

Right. So a military base, I mean, in the continental US. So we could have done all of this. We could have gotten these people out to safety, finished processing their paperwork somewhere else where they were not going to be assassinated, and we chose not to do it.

Preet Bharara:

In your mind, is there a ranking of categories of Afghans who have aided the US, in other words, do you put people who helped the military up higher, people who help journalists a little bit lower, do you view them all as kind of the same and in the same category of priority?

Catherine Rampell:

I think they are all worthy. If their association with us, whether it’s as a news organization or the US military has put them in danger, we need to keep our promise to them. They helped us, we need to make sure that they are safe. And I don’t think that there is time really for prioritization among these tens of thousands of people many of whom have again been waiting for years, either through the special immigrant visa program or through various other kinds of refugee programs to come to the United States. Just get them out. Again, deal with the paperwork afterward. If it turns out that someone doesn’t qualify, we can send them back. That’s an option.

Preet Bharara:

Right. Although that becomes a little bit tough and dicey also to send people back.

Catherine Rampell:

Yes, of course. But leaving them there to be executed because their paperwork isn’t in order I think is a… that’s a more permanent decision.

Preet Bharara:

It’s funny every once in a while people will comment and send an email thinking that they know what my view is on something based on a question I’ve asked. I agree because I’m just trying to play devil’s advocate or get at the core of what someone’s argument is. And on this one, I will say unabashedly that I agree with you. And in fact, it seems to make so much sense both as a matter of morality, as a matter of promise, as a matter of reliance, and as a matter of basic humanity and safety for these people. Who could be opposed to this, Catherine?

Catherine Rampell:

Oh, well, there are plenty of right-wingers, the sort of usual xenophobes.

Preet Bharara:

But it’s the same right wing, but aren’t some of these? And again, maybe a taxonomy is too difficult and it’s blowing my mind so maybe you can help me unpack some of this a little bit. But it seems to me, there’s a category of people who are opposed to Biden who are using what appears to have been a series of mistakes, whether you like Biden or not, I’m sorry, this was not a well done withdrawal.

Preet Bharara:

And if you’re a person who thinks that there’s nothing to criticize here, then you really need to re-examine yourself and your views about politics and your tribalism. But people are using some of the scenes that we’ve seen out of Afghanistan in the Kabul Airport to bash Biden and to blame him for not protecting these folks. And isn’t it some of these same folks or people aligned with some of these same folks who are now starting to say, like Laura Ingraham and others, “Why should we be bringing a bunch of Afghans to the United States?” Do you get that?

Catherine Rampell:

I mean, consistency I’m not sure was ever their strong suit. But on the other hand, I think we should have expected this turn of events. Look, even Trump has actually, from what I had seen yesterday, I don’t know if this has changed, made the reverse change of heart, where if you look at his policies while he was president, he was not only very anti-refugee writ large, he also had basically ground the special immigrant visa program to a halt while he was president.

Catherine Rampell:

There was a big lawsuit that said that they were taking too long to process these visas. The Trump administration fought it. If you look at the numbers of people who came in under Trump versus and the several years before Trump was in office, numbers are much, much lower, et cetera. So he clearly had no fealty to these people who have helped us again, put their lives on the line to, in many cases, to protect US troops, and yet sent out some press release yesterday saying how dare Biden abandon our allies. So look-

Preet Bharara:

Speaking of consistency and lack thereof, there you go.

Catherine Rampell:

Look, so I’m sure it was totally cynical obviously, and not a genuinely held belief. But look, I’m happy for him to keep advocating on behalf of our Afghan allies and refugees if it manages to get a few of his followers on board, although I’m not convinced it will. But yeah, I mean, the argument from Laura Ingraham’s and J.D. Vance’s and others of the world has been we should be afraid of these people, they’re not going to be vetted.

Catherine Rampell:

We’re just going to let in all of these terrorists. Some have suggested this was a big scheme as part of the so-called white supremacist. What’s it called? The great replacement theory. This is a secret plan to bring in all of these brown Muslims to take the place of good old fashioned true white Americans, et cetera. And obviously we could have seen this coming, but besides the fact that all of this stuff is blatantly bigoted, it also ignores the fact that again, many of these people… the ones who were applying for special immigrant visas for the most part had security clearances.

Preet Bharara:

That’s the point.

Catherine Rampell:

They were protecting us.

Preet Bharara:

Allowing these people in, but definitionally the people that were staying in Afghanistan who should get some protection and safety and status are the people who helped us to protect them and to protect us because the mission was twofold, right? So that’s where that argument tends to fail. Is there any economic argument that you’ve heard people make for or against this kind of policy?

Catherine Rampell:

I mean, not specifically about the Afghan potential evacuees, but there is a long standing discourse over whether immigrants in general and refugees in particular are good or bad for the US economy and, or the US budgets. And the restrictionists, those who want less immigration always claim that immigrants are bad for the economy, and they drain federal budgets, et cetera. And particularly they make this claim about refugees, which I guess in some sense would make intuitive sense because refugees are people who often come here penniless, right? They come here out of desperation.

Catherine Rampell:

And in fact, the Trump administration, early on in Trump’s presidency, commissioned an internal study over what was the budgetary effect of refugees specifically. I think probably Stephen Miller was involved in commissioning this. And they found that in fact, over the course of 10 years, refugees actually paid more in taxes than they received in benefits. When they first come they do need a lot of assistance, right?

Catherine Rampell:

They need help with housing and food and everything else because they often come here with just their clothes on their backs. But over time, they find jobs, they get off of benefits and they actually are an economic boon to the United States. And again, that’s refugees and that’s the selection of immigrants who you would expect to be least likely to have a net fiscal benefit to the US. But if you look at immigrants writ large, the same is true in fact.

Catherine Rampell:

There was a big study done by a group of economists for the National Academy of Sciences a few years ago, maybe about four or five years ago, where they looked at all of the possible studies that had been done on the economic and fiscal impact of immigration and they found that in fact, immigrants in general tend to pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. Certainly at the federal level, at the state and local level, if their kids are in school, they might take more out, receive more in terms of benefits because it costs something to educate the kids. But then when the kids grow up, the children of immigrants tend to be among the most productive contributors to the economy that we have, more productive than those who were not the children of immigrants. So-

Preet Bharara:

Is that in business circles? Put aside politicians and others, is it your sense having written about this and studied this for a long while, that putting aside political considerations that generally speaking in the business community, immigration is viewed as a positive?

Catherine Rampell:

Yeah. There are actually a number of non-profit coalition type things that receive a lot of support from the business community for various kinds of immigration reform, whether we’re talking about a permanent legislative fix to DACA, for example, or fixes to the skilled immigration system, which is incredibly broken or for seasonal agricultural workers, the business community in general has been supportive of more legal pathways to immigration, which makes sense, not only because these are productive workers for the most part, but also immigrants are overrepresented amongst the entrepreneurs, founders of Fortune 500 companies, for example.

Catherine Rampell:

So many of the founders of the Googles of the world for example, are themselves immigrants. So they may have some personal reason to align their organization with this effort, but there’s also just a business incentive. You want the most qualified workers to come here and contribute to the United States.

Preet Bharara:

It gets me wondering on a bunch of other issues, which we’ll talk about… at least some of which we’ll talk about also, is this idea that on issues that are considered progressive, and I don’t think immigration should be progressive or conservative view, I think that there’s a lot of good for the country, and there are lots of people who come to this country from other places who end up being in their own politics, progressive or not progressive. And that really, to me, shouldn’t matter so much.

Preet Bharara:

But we always think about how much laws can do and politicians can do, and how much protest or individual lobbying and activism can move the needle. Do you think at the moment that businesses and corporations and the business community in general has a greater ability to affect public policy and to lead on issues like immigration than they’ve had before or is it about the same?

Catherine Rampell:

That’s very hard to judge. Certainly the business community for better or worse, I think has been able to exert a lot of influence over policy through lobbying over the years. And again, some-

Preet Bharara:

I’m talking about things like… I’ll give you an example. That was an unfair I think overly broad question. Things like family leave or other kinds of things, is it politicians who lead or businesses who lead?

Catherine Rampell:

Yes. I think politicians listen to the constituents who matter most to them. And sometimes that is their funders, whether it’s individuals or companies that donate money to them, sometimes it’s their base. So I’m sure the exact concoction of incentives varies to some extent from politician to politician and from issue to issue. Probably the areas where the business community has the most influence are the ones where the public isn’t paying attention, where it’s not a particularly salient issue to the typical voter.

Catherine Rampell:

So as an example, there are a lot of trade restrictions that are put into effect for the benefit of very particular industries or even individual companies, and are costly to consumers. But most consumers don’t pay attention to it. They’re not paying attention to trade policy, they’re not paying attention to whether we have tariffs on steel or not, or at least even if they’re aware of it, it’s not the primary issue for them. Most voters have pretty weakly held beliefs on trade.

Catherine Rampell:

In fact, the last I had looked, most voters are relatively pro-trade and have become more pro-trade over the years despite the stereotype that particularly fueling Trump’s rise that Americans had become more isolationist and anti globalist or whatever. In fact, the opposite has been true. And same deal actually with immigration, that Americans have become much more pro-immigrant in recent years despite the rise of Trump. But most people-

Preet Bharara:

Can you pause on that for a second?

Catherine Rampell:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

Is there any research or data to suggest why that… Is one reason on immigration, for example, as the most census shows that we’ve become a more diverse country, or is it something more complicated than that?

Catherine Rampell:

To be honest, I don’t know how I would assign responsibility for those trends. I think it’s probably partly demographics. If you are coming into contact with more people whom you might have otherwise otherized and realize that they’re human and interesting in ways very much like you and in ways not like you, but not in a threatening way, maybe that means that you are more accepting of them.

Catherine Rampell:

Certainly, I remember that after the 2016 election, there was some social science research to suggest that the areas that had been more pro-Trump were ones that had fewer immigrants, or had a smaller increase in immigration, something to that effect, that there had been this narrative that all of these people were voting for Trump because they were upset that their counties were overrun with foreigners or whatever, but in fact, that didn’t seem to hold up in the data. So it could be that.

Catherine Rampell:

I think there’s also the possibility that Trump himself motivated people in the opposite direction of his own beliefs, if that makes any sense. He was such a polarizing figure on a number of issues. I think he drove people in the opposite direction, people who might have otherwise been ambivalent about some particular issue or other. Immigration is one, trade, as I mentioned, is another, although I think support for trade had been rising even before Trump and support for universal healthcare coverage of some kind also went up under Trump’s presidency even as he and his fellow Republicans had been trying to pare back Obamacare, et cetera.

Catherine Rampell:

So there is some… To some extent, I think it’s these structural things, to some extent, there was this Trump effect. And I wonder how much that may fade in the years ahead, maybe once he’s out of office and people aren’t as horrified by our treatment of immigrants, separation of the border, et cetera, they’re going to go back to being afraid of them, I don’t know.

Preet Bharara:

It depends on what lessons his acolytes have learned and the people who would walk in his footsteps like Ron DeSantis among others. And maybe they will adopt some of the planks of Trumpism, maybe they’ll adopt all of them, maybe it will be a hybrid, I don’t know. My conversation with Catherine Rampell continues after this.

Preet Bharara:

Can we talk about COVID for a moment? What’s your sense of how much the economy in the country, and you can speak globally if you want, but in the country is stalled or on pause because of lingering doubts about when we might have the end of the disease? Because some things look like they’re churning along and we had a great jobs report, everyone says. The S&P 500, I think has doubled since its low, one of the speediest recoveries from a low to a doubling, I think in history, perhaps. So is COVID still a drain on the economy or not?

Catherine Rampell:

There is a lot of uncertainty about that, which I realize is not a satisfying answer. But for example, the jobs report that you mentioned which was gangbuster numbers, better than expected, upward revisions to previous months. That is based on a couple of surveys that were conducted largely before the recent spike in COVID cases because every month the unemployment numbers and the hiring numbers, they’re from two different surveys, but they’re based on a snapshot of basically the middle of the month, more or less. And so that was in I guess I think it was indexed to July 12th or somewhere around there.

Catherine Rampell:

And it was really in the back half of the month that case rates went up. So there’s a big delta shaped asterisk about that report. And the question is what happens going forward? Will consumers and workers change their behavior because they’re worried about engaging in normal economic activities that maybe they had re-emerged from their homes and decided to go to restaurants and movies and fly on planes and stuff again and now they’re going to retrench? There is the risk that that will happen.

Catherine Rampell:

On the other hand, the sort of good news bad news version of that forecast is I think a lot of people have COVID fatigue and they’re tired of holding up, even though they tell pollsters that they think people, even healthy people should stay home as much as they can. Gallup had a bunch of questions about this recently where they asked people, “What’s the right behavior right now?” And the share people who said, “You should stay home, you should isolate,” went up. But are they actually going to act on that advice? I don’t know. Because I think people are just exhausted and ready to move on with their lives.

Catherine Rampell:

But it’s interesting to me how businesses have adapted to all of the anxieties and frustrations of their customer bases. Because to some extent, you want as much mass squaring and, or vaccine checks, proof of vaccination, et cetera, in order to get the people who want to feel safe to feel safe and feel comfortable going to your establishment, whether it’s a cruise ship or a restaurant. But on the other hand, having those kinds of requirements can also alienate a set of your customers.

Catherine Rampell:

So you see companies kind of deciding which set of their customer base are they willing to cut off, right? Because either decision will get them in trouble and will potentially lose them some business. I mean, I remember a year ago when the airline executives were begging the Trump administration to require mask wearing while in flight because they didn’t want to have to-

Preet Bharara:

They didn’t want to be the bad guys.

Catherine Rampell:

Right. They didn’t want to be the ones to say, “I’m sorry, sir or ma’am, you have to wear your mask.” They want to be able to point to this federal ordinance or whatever and say, “If it were up to me, you could do whatever you want. But big, bad government requires it.” And this would have the benefit for the airlines of basically allowing them to pass the buck, keep people feeling safe and in theory, limit some of the heat that was being directed their way from the anti mask wearing contingent of their customers.

Preet Bharara:

Right. When they say, “You got to put your phone on airplane mode when you’re still at the gate,” they can point to federal regulation.

Catherine Rampell:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

And I think you’ve written about this as well. You’re talking about masks and airlines and businesses. Now we have the issue of vaccination. It seems to me the same issue is playing out. Although some airlines, United and others have basically said for all of its staff, they have to be vaccinated, otherwise they can’t work. Is business going to be, again, that’s a theme, I guess, in this conversation, just curious, your thoughts, is business going to be the tip of the spear on mandatory vaccinations in this country?

Catherine Rampell:

I am very pessimistic about that happening for exactly the dynamic I was just describing, that for businesses it is risky to implement a policy that is going to be polarizing. Even if they think it would be good for their bottom line, it would keep people safe, maybe it’s the right thing to do as well if they care about that. I think that they’re going to be too skiddish. And there have been all of these fawning news stories about lots of companies that have publicly announced that they are requiring vaccination for workers and in some cases, customers.

Catherine Rampell:

But if you actually look at the numbers, the companies that have primarily been announcing this are ones for whom their workforce is already almost entirely vaccinated. And in some cases they’re kind of creating a two-track policy where they have a mandate for people who are vaccinated and no mandate for those who aren’t. So Walmart is an example of this, where Walmart got all of this great splashy news coverage for announcing a vaccine mandate.

Catherine Rampell:

But in fact, the requirement was only for basically their white collar workers, people who worked in corporate or in the regional, whatever, management offices and not for their workforces who probably needed more motivation to get vaccinated, people who work in their retail stores or in warehouses. It was the same deal for Walgreens, Uber and Lyft also had a requirement of vaccination for their corporate employees, not for their drivers who are contractors but who are probably likely to have lower vaccination rates.

Catherine Rampell:

Or another example is Danny Meyer’s high-end restaurant group announced this again for both their staff and customers, which is great. I’m glad that they’re mandating this, but who’s going to these high-end restaurants in New York? Probably people who are more likely to be vaccinated anyway. And Danny Meyer is the founder and still chair of the board for Shake Shack, and there was no mandate there. It’s a separate company.

Preet Bharara:

Right. That’s a very interesting dichotomy in those two places. But do you think there’s a difference between or greater efficacy or less with respect to the mandating of vaccines for employees, a workforce of a company, whether it’s a restaurant, business or something else, versus a vaccine mandate for patrons, customers, whether they’re coming to a concert or diners and restaurants? Does one have a greater effect on public health generally than the other or are they in tandem with each other?

Catherine Rampell:

I think what really matters is for any kind of government intervention, right? Are there externalities here? Right? If people engage in this activity, are they going to put other people at risk? You can argue about various kinds of regulations that protect only the person who has to abide by that regulation. Like should you have to wear a bike helmet when you’re biking, for example? I put that in a different category from, are you potentially putting other people at risk of an infectious disease by patronizing this concert or this restaurant or this gym, or what have you?

Catherine Rampell:

And if there is a risk of that, then yes, I think that it is warranted for there to be some sort of requirement for people to take precautions that will protect those around them. And those kinds of precautions can be mandated by the establishment, either the concert venue, the gym, the fancy restaurant, or they can be mandated by the government. And I think you kind of have to have government playing bad cop here because again, otherwise you’re going to have businesses sorting into the lane that… Basically just reflecting back the existing preferences and behaviors of their own customers.

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Catherine Rampell:

So if we’re talking about who’s going to go to a Danny Meyer restaurant, who’s going to go to some theater or whatever, I mean, Broadway theater’s actually kind of interesting because it’s most of… Well, a number of Broadway shows rely heavily on tourists. So I don’t know what’s going to happen there because the tourists may come from places where vaccination rates are lower. But I think you probably need government intervention to actually affect behavior again, for both the workers in these industries and for the customers, consumers, if the goal is to limit the spread of disease.

Preet Bharara:

I find this point you’re making really fascinating as I’m hearing you talk about it. I have, I guess, a further question. And the point is that there are businesses who don’t want to be the bad guy, but they understand rationally that both for their own workforce and for productivity, and also to the extent they care about the general welfare of the public, that mass mandates or vaccination requirements would be good, they just don’t want to be the ones to be implementing them alone or piecemeal. And I get all that.

Preet Bharara:

And so when these things are mandated by localities, businesses, by and large, I think have not protested but they quietly go along with it. But you have the reverse happening to, that I think there are politicians who are also weak and you would hope that they would be thinking, “Well, economics and good public safety policy and medicine and science all conspire to tell us that some of these mandates would be good.” And are there some of those people who have the opposite view and they don’t want to impose the mandates, but they’re hoping that the local businesses do and they’re hoping that people stay home?

Catherine Rampell:

Yes. I think there is a lot of passing of bucks.

Preet Bharara:

With one exception. But that’s all well and good, and I get that. But you do find, and we talked about Florida and the cruise industry and Ron DeSantis a moment ago, you would think that a smart-minded, good faith person who understands the science, but also is a political creature and ambitious and wants to become president would basically say, “Yeah, look, I’m against this stuff, but the court said it’s doing it. Or an industry like the cruising industry said it’s doing it. What am I going to do?” But a guy like that goes to the extra mile and does what businesses are not doing in the opposite direction, he’s deciding to fight it. Can you explain that other than I guess pure politics?

Catherine Rampell:

I think there’s a very interesting counter example here, which is the governor of Arkansas Asa Hutchinson who had signed legislation maybe in April that barred school districts from requiring mask mandates, at school districts and I think localities in general, I forget. It wasn’t only schools. But I would see it has become a very critical issue given the rise in infections in his state and the start of the school year.

Catherine Rampell:

And he said that he regretted signing that law because he thought school should be able to decide for themselves whether this was a necessary step to keep kids and presumably teachers and other staff safe. And he asked his legislature to reverse it and they refused and a court struck it down. And he even went on TV and said, “I regret having done this, but thank goodness the court stepped in and held that as unconstitutional.”

Catherine Rampell:

And I give him props for acknowledging that the policy was wrong, I think that takes a lot of courage. And now he’s saying, “I want to do what I think is in the interest of my state.” So there is… In some ways, you kind of want government to bail out businesses and be the bad cop, but sometimes government doesn’t want to… government by which I mean politicians. And then you need courts, also part of government but different part, to rescue politicians from themselves.

Catherine Rampell:

And judges are obviously much more shielded from day to day political considerations. They vary somewhat from state to state, but they’re more able to make polarizing or otherwise controversial decisions. Now, in the case of Ron DeSantis, I think he wants this fight. I think he’s trying to, I don’t know, martyr himself. Martyr is maybe not the right word, but he wants to be able to say-

Preet Bharara:

No, because he doesn’t want to die.

Catherine Rampell:

You’re right, exactly. Doesn’t care if his fellow Floridians do apparently. But he is happy to keep having this fight with Biden, with the courts, with others to say, “I am the true champion.” Now, I don’t know. Maybe in the back of his mind, he’s saying, “Gee, I really hope I lose this case.” I have no idea, but-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, he’s probably not saying that, he’s probably not.

Catherine Rampell:

I don’t know that he cares.

Preet Bharara:

Because he’s seen some of the straw polls that put him in second place behind the former president himself.

Catherine Rampell:

And I think it’s pretty clear that he’s pursuing this strategy as a prelude to a presidential campaign. Whether it will actually succeed is a separate question. And I do wonder how many Floridians will die on the altar of what is ultimately Ron DeSantis’ failed presidential campaign.

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask a more basic question on behalf of people who are trying to understand spin that people put out on economic metrics? I consider myself a reasonably educated person. But in 2021 and people on all sides do this, they site year over year statistics, whether it’s about employment numbers or sales or gas prices or unemployment or the stock market or whatever the case may be. Are all of those year over year increases or decreases just nonsensical and statistical noise because a year ago we were in the middle of a complete shutdown of the country?

Catherine Rampell:

It does definitely distort a lot of economic measures. And I feel for all of the economists who are hoping to use long-term time series data to do assessments of whatever and they’re going to have all of these screwy numbers because of the pandemic.

Preet Bharara:

But if like Delta Airlines says, “Year over year we’re up 49%,” does that mean anything?

Catherine Rampell:

I would not necessarily look at that particular comparison, but if Delta Airlines says today versus 2019 or some other benchmark, that still may be informative. But yeah, a lot of the key economic metrics are really distorted right now. And it makes it hard to assess where we are because you have this low base, if you’re comparing things year over year, a very low base from last year.

Catherine Rampell:

You also have some hopefully temporary shocks that are distorting numbers because supply chains are still in many cases, bottlenecked and people are still afraid to work or what have you. So there are a lot of things that make it difficult to assess our relative economic health right now. And even near term things. Like I said, if the jobs report was based on surveys conducted before the recent Delta driven surge, how informative is that? And that’s much more recent. So it’s clear as mud right now.

Preet Bharara:

So here’s an economic metric that I always wonder about, and maybe I’m just cranky, but I hope you can address it, and that is gas prices. And sometimes grass prices are up, sometimes they’re down. When I worked in the Senate, I remember being a staffer and various senators on the Democratic side did a press conference about high gas prices. People now we’re talking about high gas prices to complain about the Biden plan. Are gas prices at any given time, a real indicator about anything? Is it a real bellwether of anything or is it just sort of political football?

Catherine Rampell:

Well, I don’t want to discount the fact that they really do matter to people’s pocket books, right?

Preet Bharara:

No, of course. But I mean, are they an indicator of something more broad in the economy and, or is it fair to say that the particular policies of presidents affect gas prices or do they just ebb and flow?

Catherine Rampell:

So in general, I think presidents get too much credit for any good development in the economy, too much blame for any bad one. They do not control major economic forces, they do not control gas prices. And gas prices in general are very volatile and responsive to lots of world events and shocks. And in fact, when the federal reserve is judging inflation and whether they are adhering to their dual mandate of maximum employment and stable prices, they generally strip out gas prices, they strip out-

Preet Bharara:

I knew it.

Catherine Rampell:

They follow what is called core inflation. And core just means we strip out gas prices, energy prices, I should say and we strip out food. Because both of those come from commodity markets that are really volatile, that can be responsive to some weird natural disaster or a drought if we’re talking about food that causes numbers to bounce around and don’t necessarily reflect the underlying forces of price pressures, like what’s going on, how hot is the economy? How stagnant is the economy? It doesn’t really tell you that much

Catherine Rampell:

Now, gas prices can eventually feed into other prices, obviously we saw that to some extent in the ’70s. But gas prices alone generally economists say like, “Set them aside, they’re not that informative.” Again, that’s not to say they don’t matter to consumers pocketbooks, they do. It’s just when you’re trying to gauge all of these macro economic measures of health, they’re not that useful.

Preet Bharara:

Now that’s an interesting point. It’s sort of an analog to this issue that I’ve talked about with some guests and written about, which is the trimming of the mean. You get all this noise at the extremes when you’re trying to come up with a relevant assessment of a dataset. And if you have noise in it, that’s a problem and you have to strip out the extremes. And in this case, you strip out gas and food, and that makes perfect sense. But you mentioned inflation. Should we be worried about that? Are people overly worried about that, under worried about that?

Catherine Rampell:

I have been saying for several months don’t freak out. It looks like the factors driving inflation are mostly transitory, to use the term of art because of reopening pains. Meaning that everything got shut down, right? And then all of a sudden, everybody wants to do stuff again, everybody wants to go to the same restaurant again, and there are fewer restaurants open, at least in New York. Everyone wants to travel again, and there’s a finite number of flights, maybe even fewer flights than there were a year ago. Everyone wants to go on a road trip and cars are hard to come by.

Preet Bharara:

Look, I’ll tell you what’s difficult, what’s gone up. And I take Ubers some time. I hadn’t taken one in months and months and Ubers and Lyfts are a lot more expensive than they used to be. Is that a sign of inflation or is that just reopening noise?

Catherine Rampell:

So where I was going with all of this is that it seems like these are temporary reopening pains, that you have this sudden return in demand, supply has not yet caught up. It’s hard to ramp up capacity to meet that increase, that sudden surge in demand. And that’s true with Ubers. There are a lot of… Uber’s had trouble finding drivers because the work was seen as risky, because for a long time, people weren’t taking Uber so like, “I’m going to find something else to do,” whatever. So there is this sort of transitory effect and it will go away.

Catherine Rampell:

Now the risk is that people don’t judge these price increases around them to be transitory. And then it becomes sort of a self fulfilling prophecy in that people say, “Huh, prices are going up across the board. I guess I should raise my prices or I should demand more money from my boss this year so that I can afford the rising cost of living.” And then it becomes-

Preet Bharara:

It’s a psychological domino effect, right?

Catherine Rampell:

Right, right. It becomes self-sustaining.

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Catherine Rampell:

And that’s the state of the world you really don’t want to be in and you get this kind of inflationary spiral. And I don’t think we’re there yet. Certainly bond yields don’t suggest we’re there yet and you can kind of impute what people’s expectations are for inflation, longer-term inflation are from bonds. So I don’t think we’re there yet, but I am worried about that happening for a number of reasons. Because again, these supply chain bottlenecks, these reopening pains, whatever you want to call them, they have persisted for longer than I think most people expected them to. You’re still having trouble finding chips, microchips to… So that’s holding up-

Preet Bharara:

Potato chips are fine.

Catherine Rampell:

Maybe potato. Maybe, I don’t know. There are shortages of all sorts of weird things. So for all I know, potato chips, some brand of potato chips having issues too. But chips which go in cars, which go in various other kinds of electronics, cell phones, things like that, those are still hard to come by. There’ve been, as I said, shortages in other realms as well. And then you have other kind of freak problems.

Catherine Rampell:

Like there were natural disasters in Germany and in China, I think last month like floods that washed out roads for factories that probably messed up supply chains that were already quite fragile. The Delta variant has caused problems already. I remember reading an article a couple of weeks ago about how shipping crews, I think in East Asia were not being allowed onto land. I forget what country it was in, probably China or South Korea.

Catherine Rampell:

They weren’t allowed to come onto land because there was concern about the Delta variant and you don’t want more people coming and going onto your borders. And so these sailors who were on these big container ships were stuck there and that could have some effect, right? Like are they going to be willing to work forever if they can’t get any time off? I don’t know. And then there was a cyber attack on a port, I think, in South Africa.

Catherine Rampell:

So there were… In addition to the big picture of how do we ramp up production again, how do we get these fragile supply chains back up and running, you have all of these other annoyances that are happening, which will further restrict supply at a time when people, it seems like, are willing to buy stuff. And the longer that goes on, the more it can feed into these expectations and it becomes self-sustaining. So that’s what I am worried about. I think it’s an unlikely scenario still at this point, but I would-

Preet Bharara:

So you’re telling me, I just want to be clear to our millions of listeners, that Catherine Rampell says, “You should not worry too much.”

Catherine Rampell:

Yeah. Again, I try to be humble about this because we’re in a state of the world that we… we’re facing circumstances that we have never faced before. And so it’s very hard to know how things are going to shake out. It’s hard to say like, “Oh, well, the last time we had a global pandemic X, Y or Z happened.”

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Catherine Rampell:

Because we didn’t have a global pandemic in a globally interconnected economy like the one we have today. So it’s very hard to know how things are going to shake out. But for now, it looks like these factors are mostly transitory, they will fade. So long as consumers and businesses believe that they will fade, I think we’re fine. And to some extent, the more we talk about inflation, it’s sort of perverse, but the more we talk about it, I feel like the more we can almost will it into being, and I get this sense that there are-

Preet Bharara:

Should we cut this out of the podcast?

Catherine Rampell:

No, no, it’s fine. I think it’s a bad strategy to pretend people aren’t worried about it because that can backfire too. I mean, there are countries that have doctored their inflation statistics hoping that that will magically transform people’s expectation and instead, that denying reality also causes people to panic. And I think what the Biden administration has been doing with some moderate success is basically acknowledging people’s concerns about the issue and then very publicly talking through, “Here’s what we think caused them. Here’s the various paths on which these numbers could go if these kinds of contingencies happen.”

Preet Bharara:

Right. But does that matter? I mean, are small businesses, are mom-and-pop restaurants and other folks adjusting their prices up or down based on that kind of explanation from the White House?

Catherine Rampell:

Maybe not directly, but if that’s the chatter that they hear, if that enters people’s brains, so they’re not only hearing Mitch McConnell or whoever saying repeatedly, “Biden is going to cause hyperinflation,” then yeah, I think it can help. I don’t know that people are making their day-to-day decisions solely on press releases from the White House. I assume nobody is doing that.

Catherine Rampell:

But the general discourse matters. And like I said, I think those of us who write about these issues, who talk about these issues in public fora, I think it’s important to just be as clear as possible about what we think is going on, what the risks are and to be humble about what we don’t know. And I think the fed has been doing a pretty good job at this as well in saying, “Here’s what we think is happening and here are how things could go awry, but here are the tools that we have to deal with it, et cetera.” And I think that’s why you see financial markets so far remaining pretty calm and bond yields not reflecting expectations of persistent higher inflation.

Preet Bharara:

Catherine Rampell, thanks for joining us, it was a real treat. Thanks so much.

Catherine Rampell:

Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Catherine Rampell continues for members of the CAFE Insider Community. To try out the membership free for two weeks, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. I want to end the show this week by talking once again for a moment about Afghanistan. Obviously there’s been a lot of impassioned debate about the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw US forces and the way they’ve gone about it.

Preet Bharara:

Those are two separate questions by the way, and I think should be considered as such. But there seems to be at least in this moment, I think a fairly broad consensus that we should do whatever we can to help the Afghan citizens who risked their lives, really risked their lives to help us. As I discussed with Catherine Rampell in the interview, military interpreters and contractors and their families find themselves in an especially precarious position as the Taliban solidifies control of the country.

Preet Bharara:

A lot of people think legitimately that if we don’t get them out, we’re leaving them to die. They helped us, how can we abandon them? And I am one of those people. And so lots of folks have been reaching out to ask how they can help. And I’ve been thinking a lot about what can be done. So let me share a couple of things that we at CAFE have learned. There are about nine official organizations that partner with the US government to help resettle refugees. Two of the leading groups are the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and the International Rescue Committee.

Preet Bharara:

As we speak, both of those organizations are helping process Afghan special immigrant applications at Fort Lee in Virginia. There’s also an organization called No One Left Behind that’s also doing great work and worthy of your consideration as well. You can find the full list of organizations and links to donate in the show notes for this episode. These groups rely on federal contracts and also charitable donations to fund their efforts, so please consider giving.

Preet Bharara:

As I said a moment ago, there appears to be a rare bipartisan consensus that something has to be done for the interpreters and other Afghan allies. Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa has advocated for expediting the special immigrant visa or SIV program. This is what she said this week about our Afghan allies, “We will take them. Iowans have always been very welcoming to those that need to immigrate and those refugees that were running away from disaster in their own country. And I do think we can play a role and I think it’s important that we do that.”

Preet Bharara:

And then of course there was this beautiful letter sent by Republican governor of Utah, Spencer Cox to Joe Biden. This is what he wrote in part, “I’m deeply saddened by the human tragedy currently unfolding in Afghanistan. I recognize Utah plays no direct role in shaping the US diplomatic or military policy, but we have a long history of welcoming refugees from around the world and helping them restart their lives in a new country. We are eager to continue that practice and assist with the resettlement of individuals and families fleeing Afghanistan, especially those who valiantly helped US troops, diplomats, journalists, and other civilians over the past 20 years.”

Preet Bharara:

And the governor closes his letter by saying, “Please advise us in the coming days and weeks how we can assist.” Well, those sentiments are wonderful and helpfully bipartisan, but let’s see how long that lasts. Because already on the right, or I suppose the far right, people are already starting to fear-monger about refugees. You may have seen this from Laura Ingraham of Fox News, who said, she really said this.

Laura Ingraham:

Is it really our responsibility to welcome thousands of potentially unvetted refugees from Afghanistan? All day, we’ve heard phrases like, “We promised them.” Well, who did? Did you?

Preet Bharara:

And perhaps quite predictably, former Trump senior advisor, Stephen Miller, he of anti-immigration fame spoke out on Twitter against accepting refugees. He wrote, “It is becoming increasingly clear that Biden and his radical deputies will use their catastrophic debacle in Afghanistan as a pretext for doing to America what Angela Merkel did to Germany and Europe.” To my mind, those kinds of sentiments are ugly and un-American. So maybe the bipartisan consensus that’s developing won’t stand, but I hope it does.

Preet Bharara:

As I posted on my Twitter account this week, welcoming refugees is one of the things that makes America great. Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Catherine Rampell. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag Ask Preet, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338 that’s 669 24 PREET. Or you can send an email to staytuned@cafe.com.

Preet Bharara:

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE Studios and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Your host is Preet Bharara. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The senior producer is Adam Waller. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The CAFE team is Matthew Billy, David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan, Chris Boylan and Sean Walsh. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m Preet Bharara, stay tuned.