Hey parents, join the LA Kings on Saturday, November 25th for an unforgettable kids day presented by Pear Deck. Family fun, giveaways, and exciting Kings hockey awaits. Get your tickets now at lakings.com/promotions and create lasting memories with your little ones. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Last week I released a show titled "If Missing One Paycheck Is a Problem for You, You Are Behaving Stupidly." It was episode 616 of the podcast. I encourage you to go back and listen to it if you have not yet listened to it. But today on the show I have a guest who listened to that show and took Umbridge with me.

She wrote to me on Twitter saying, "This content, this meaning this content, this show is unbelievably shamey and tone deaf." And she followed up with a series of arguments in a Twitter thread, which I'll share those arguments with you and then we'll bring her on the line. I thought this would be a great discussion for us to have to talk about practical personal finance, especially as it relates to people in our current environment, especially our current political environment.

So here are my guest's comments. She writes this, she says, "If I see one more personal finance thought leader shaming federal employees or anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck, I swear, look out, y'all have made me mad on a Saturday. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go to my side gig and work so I can pay my gas bill, but I'll be back." She wrote to me and wrote specifically about me and my content.

She says, "First off, if your first thought is to use this historic moment of the government shutdown to weaponize the financial independence philosophy to promote your shady podcast with some clickbait headline, re-examine your priorities. Secondly, way to show us who you are, making a name for yourself on the backs of people caught off guard by the behavior of a sociopath who happens to be in the White House.

But anyway, you're not the only one," referring to me. "I wish you were, but you're not." She references a tweet by another man. "Hmm, what do these two guys have in common? Could it be, just making a guess here, honestly?" With a link to an article titled "Unpacking Privilege, Straight White Male Is the Lowest Difficulty Setting in the Game of Life." Anywho, you're both numbers guys, you math a lot, you got that awesome emergency fund set aside, so let's math.

800,000 federal employees are furloughed right now. 4 million government contractors are also affected. And a significant number of those government contractors, they're janitors, security guards, maintenance workers, not exactly moneybags positions. Here's the GS schedule. This dictates pay levels for federal employees. You'll see there's a base and then regional variations.

She links to a data table showing the salary tables for government employees. Here's another view. It doesn't reflect the higher and somewhat rarer senior executive service levels. Most working federal stiffs are GS 1 through 15. Links to another article on the federal government pay scale. So if you're not a super duper extra special SES type, the most you will ever earn in the federal government right now is $122,000 per year.

And that's after years of service and making it to the top or coming in from the private sector. The bottom third of tiers of federal government employees are making less than $40,000 per year, often in our most expensive cities. And she links to a chart of how much each federal employee makes and continues with this commentary.

You know that whole drain the swamp thing and the general hatred of federal workers that a certain element likes to encourage? Here's where federal employees work. Gives a listing, a link to an article showing where federal employees work. No one's getting rich in the federal government. Well, maybe some are, but Congress isn't furloughed.

A few of them are doing the right thing. Links to an article from CNN indicating that more than 70 members of Congress are choosing to reject their paychecks during the government shutdown. Oh and hey, federal government workforce is 35% people of color, half of them black, 43% women. So yeah, let's pick on people who demonstrably earn less in equivalent positions with equivalent education to their white male counterparts.

Links to an article indicating the demographics of the federal workforce summarized. I have more to say but cannot even. Main takeaway, if you are carving out a little brand for yourself in the financial independence, fire, or personal finance space, remember this. You don't know someone else's life. So offer real help or sit down.

If you do want to help, a food bank is a good place to start and links to some information on food banks there in the Washington DC area. Lisa, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. I'm glad you're here today. Thank you. You do such a good job of channeling me.

Great. And bonus, you clean up my potty mouth. So that's like really good. I did choose to censor a few of your adjectives there in that tweet. So I want to skip past all the stuff at the beginning. If there's time, we'll get back to it. But the basic argument that I hear you saying is essentially this.

If I were summarizing, your basic argument is that many federal employees don't have very much money because they aren't paid very well. You link to various articles on the federal pay scale showing that it starts at relatively low numbers. You allege that many employees earn less than $40,000 and live in expensive cities.

And then you're further frustrated that many of these people are black or brown or red or yellow in their skin color, which you believe means that they earn less than white people. Is that a good summary of your basic argument as you put it to me in that series of tweets?

No, those are all supporting points in a bigger argument. They're important points. I think that I've lived in Washington DC. I didn't grow up here, but I've lived here for 30 plus years. And I have learned a lot about what kind of the vast majority of the country perceives as federal workers and what federal workers really do as people.

And so I wouldn't say, I think those are all extraordinarily important points in terms of really understanding who works in the federal government. I'd also link that, however, to a much bigger point about shaming anyone who is living paycheck to paycheck. I think, first of all, a lot of people in the United States don't realize that many federal workers really are living paycheck to paycheck, not because they're irresponsible, but because they're making poverty wages.

About a third, I actually looked up that to figure it out, about 600,000 federal workers make $50,000 or less per year. And that's not a poverty wage in a lot of parts of the country. But if it's the only wage for a family of four, it might be. So just to know that.

But the second and bigger point that I was making, just as you made a point beyond the federal worker picture, for those of us who don't work in the federal government, I don't, I assume you don't, is that if you're living paycheck to paycheck, it's actually quite possible, especially right now, even in the richest country in the world, for a high level of personal responsibility, intelligence, sharpness, to actually coexist with financial trauma and financial difficulty, and longstanding financial difficulty.

So I think that's, you and I are on the same page with regard to the importance of personal responsibility and how you literally can't get out of poverty or get out of debt without that. But I think where we part ways, and my biggest argument is, I believe there's a significant portion of people in this country who are not able to get out of debt, are not able to get out of poverty, whatever the color of their skin, whatever their gender.

And they are highly responsible people. It's not because they're being stupid with their cable bill. There's a way bigger, slow-moving debt crisis happening in our country right now. But it has nothing to do with personal responsibility. It has a lot to do just with the way that our economy runs, to be honest.

We run on debt. So then when I published a podcast episode with the title, the thesis of the show was encapsulated in the title, "If missing one paycheck is a problem for you, you're behaving stupidly," it sounds like what you're saying is that's very frustrating because for somebody who is working hard, they feel as though they're expressing personal responsibility, but they're still going to be very much pinched financially if they miss a paycheck.

Then it sounds like that's very frustrating to you because you believe that's exactly the wrong thing to say to someone who's in that situation. Is that what you're saying? >> Yes, exactly. I would amplify that by saying I don't object to it just because like, "Oh, it's a mean thing to say," but because if you're being very pragmatic and very hard-headed about how you want to reach people who are in trouble, if you start with that, I think their shame is going to prevent them from learning.

Their shame is going to prevent them from getting anywhere, particularly where, as has been the case for people that I've known, they're doing all the right things already. You can imagine how frustrating it is for one of the people profiled in the NPR piece that you were looking at, the single mother whose kid is in college who's been working for TSA for 16 years.

And your response was, "Hey, if you've been working there for 16 years, you've had time to figure this out." I'm here to tell you it's not that easy for a single mother. I was a single mother. I actually do have a kid in college. I'm no longer a single mother.

But for over 10 years, I was widowed. I was working, but I wasn't in a great place for career advancement. I didn't have a lot of energy to get my act together. It just happens. It wasn't because I was having steak dinners or running up my cable bill. It was a little bit more basic than that.

So you can imagine how frustrating it is to have someone come along and say, "Well, you've just been stupid for 16 years." It's like way to negate my entire existence. Do you have any idea? It's not as simple as take the bus. I'm already taking the bus. It's not as simple as stockpile insulin.

My drug, my pharmacy won't give me more insulin than we need for a month. And I can't afford to buy it from Mexico. So these are the very real concerns people, I think, have when they're told, "You've just been stupid." Right? So let's assume the fact. Let's talk about the mother that was reported in the NPR story.

I forget her name. But let's assume that you're speaking to somebody. And so if you were given the same platform that I have, and you feel like my shaming that mother and using strong and emphatic language, things like that, is inappropriate, what would you say if given the chance to speak to that mother?

Yeah. Well, it's very... Gosh. I mean, I think the first thing is I would relate my own experience to hers. And so I don't want to pry, Joshua, but I always love people's life stories. And so I'm imagining you have some really difficult things that have happened to you in your life.

In fact, I would hazard to say most of us who are doing personal finance work, it's partly because we haven't liked that feeling of being helpless. And we want to help other people feel less helpless. And so I would probably, though, come at it from a "Not only have I been there, but I'm still there" point of view.

I don't know how much you've followed. I'm not a new blogger, but I'm very new at the project that I'm working on now, because I've been in chronic debt for about 20 years. And I'm just being a very, very, very and I'm just being transparent about that. And I'm saying, I've learned a ton of good stuff about managing money, and I'm on a path to become debt free.

But don't come to me for advice about how to get out of debt. Do come to me for advice about how to just live your life and keep going and not get in trouble and eventually find your way out. So I think I would never paint myself as having the expertise to tell that woman how to live her life, but just show her my life and see if there are things from my life that she can adapt that she would be interested in, if that makes sense.

It's a very interesting question, because I think I do perceive some parallels with her. I definitely felt like, what if that were me? What would I do? One thing that I have done, I'll just add this because it is advice. I've had to shift gears lately. I now have one full-time job and some gigs.

But for about 20 years, I was self-employed, and I never felt comfortable having just one job. And a lot of us who work in this world talk about stackable income. I think it's crucial. It's really crucial. But that's not the same as saying to her like, what were you thinking not having a second job?

If that makes sense. Yes. So one of our questions here is basically communication methodology, displays of empathy. How do you show somebody that you care about them? When do you be direct and metaphorically slap someone across the face? When do you come alongside and sit and cry with somebody?

That's basically a communications methodology. And I was going to go on to another point. Let me go ahead and respond to that briefly. So I wholeheartedly agree with you in terms of moderating one's tone when communicating with people. I think any of us who've sought to work with people have learned that one particular tack is not effective in all circumstances.

I think there are times in which you metaphorically want to slap somebody across the face. There are times in which that can be an effective communication tactic. There are times in which that's exactly the worst thing that you could possibly do. And if you do that in that circumstance, then you can really cause all kinds of problems and really hurt somebody.

And so in general, when you create content for a public audience, it's very difficult to know who the person who is listening to that content will be. So I'll concede here fully and clearly that I took in that podcast an extremely blunt and perhaps intentionally inflammatory tone in an intense effort to trigger somebody to confront somebody with a very clear and specific argument.

And I did that intentionally. And I have a graphic designer who prepares all of my artwork for my shows, and I send her over my titles, and she got that title. She's like, "Wow, that doesn't sound very nice." And I said, "Well, I don't know." And I would say specifically, this is definitely one thing where men are very different than women.

And in general, my bias, if I'm speaking to a woman, if I'm speaking to the single mom in that story, I would generally be much more soft, much more empathetic in my approach. If I were speaking to a man, I would also seek to be empathetic, but I would default more quickly to a direct confrontation, because a lot of times that's more effective with men.

So we never know. And so my hope in creating a show like that, my hope is that it would be effective at breaking through. And sometimes, when I think back to many of the stupid things that I have done and the times when I have behaved stupidly, sometimes you don't see it until you get very emotionally intense about it.

And so I wholeheartedly concede that that particular tone was recorded – sorry, that particular show was intended to be inflammatory, it was intended to be confrontational, it was intended to make somebody think in a very kind of loud and direct way. So I concede that point. I'll give you a chance to comment, and I want to move on from there.

Any comment on that? Yeah, a couple things maybe that we'll come back to. I agree with you totally about the methodology. I think a lot about how we all have to build personas for ourselves, whether you're a blogger or not, even just an ordinary person with a Twitter. Build a little bit of a persona for who they represent themselves to be in those social settings versus like – we're all much more complex than that, obviously.

But I think related to that, and if we can come back to this if we have time, it would be great, is yes, methodology, it's sort of different approaches, and I think gender differences sometimes, intentional differences, but then also there's a sort of set of assumptions. I singled you out, but really it was part of a bigger pattern that has been centuries in the making in the United States, which has to do with being only about personal responsibility and losing a lot of the nuance about what happens in larger contexts.

That's a huge thing to unpack, so we can come back to it. Maybe it's even its own other conversation. I don't know. But glad to just kind of put a marker on that. It's like the assumptions we're making about personal responsibility and then come back to it later. Well, I think that fits into where I'd like to go from here because any long-term listener of radical personal finance would know and be familiar with how I seek to keep things quite varied.

So sometimes I do very light, fluffy content. Sometimes I do very heavy content. I try to keep the show interesting, and as a broadcaster, of course, that's always a challenge to know. So I think we can agree that I was extremely blunt. But this is where I do want to go on and speak to specifically what I said and also specifically to kind of the broader impact of that.

So the premise of my show, the argument that I advanced, was very specific, and it was summed up in the title. Quote, "If missing one paycheck is a problem for you, you're behaving stupidly." And of course, that wouldn't be true 100% of the time. I tried to provide at least one or two very simple examples of caveats.

If somebody has newly employed, for example, and they haven't had a chance to – this is their very first paycheck, right? They just got hired, and all of a sudden their job shuts down, and they were desperate for that paycheck. I think most of us have been there where you're asking your boss and you're saying, "Please, can I have just a short advance on my paycheck?" Certainly.

Then the lack of being able to make it through one paycheck is not a measure of stupidity. It's a measure of – sorry – of behaving stupidly. I want to be careful because I'm using "stupidly" as an adverb, just simply describing behavior, not people. But certainly in those situations, it's extremely understandable.

But that argument is very, very clear. So do you agree or disagree or how much do you agree with my argument that if you have been in a situation where you've been earning income, you've been working in a government job, etc., that if missing one paycheck is a problem for you, you are doing it incorrectly, and you can't expect anything but problems because you're living so close to the line?

What are your thoughts in terms of do you agree with the argument? >> I would love to say that I do, because as I mentioned, I really am a huge fan of personal responsibility and of planning and of saving and all of those things. So I wish that I could say that.

But as we're talking, I'm sitting here looking at something called the Housing Plus Transportation Index. This is an incredible instrument. I highly recommend if you love to geek out and play with numbers, it's htaindex.c as in cat, n as in neighborhood, t as in tragedy.org. And I'll send you the link for your readers after this.

What you can do here is you can plug in any city you'd like, and it will tell you what housing plus transportation costs on average for people living in that city. So I'm looking at San Francisco, and most people living in San Francisco are spending 41% of their income.

So that's an average, right? So some people are spending a lot more, some people less. 41% of their take-home income is going only to housing and transportation. In Dallas, it's 44%. In Cleveland, it's 39%. I can put in any city you'd like. We can find out. It gets kind of addictive to look at this.

But you kind of get the gist of my point, which is for most people in America, I don't know, 50 years ago, maybe 15% or 20% of their paycheck was spent on these things. Now, and don't quote me on that one, because I haven't looked that up, but it's just sort of general rule of thumb.

It was a lot less to live and travel in America about 50 years ago. Now people are spending sometimes close to half what they're bringing home just on that. So that's one among several reasons why I would tend to disagree with you. The other being that there's a dimension of this that disproportionately hits women, single parents, people of color who are already earning less, not because of educational attainment, but just because of discriminatory practices.

There are people with disabilities, people whose gender is not either man or woman, people who identify as gay or lesbian. They may be in and out of work, but if they are holding down jobs, they may not have access to all the terrific jobs that other people have. And they're spending about 40 to 50% sometimes before they even get home.

So in that scenario, it becomes really difficult. And mind you, if you have one setback, 40% of Americans, this is a much quoted cited figure, 40% of Americans are about $400 away from disaster if they have an emergency. When you have that level of people in America who are not saving, I don't think we can anymore blame like, "Oh, everybody's lost the saving habit." There's actually some functional things that are happening.

One of them being that it no longer pays well to have a little bit of savings in a passbook account, which is what my parents raised me to do. It's like, "Put aside a little bit in a passbook account. You'll get 4% interest." Well, if you're lucky and you're really smart, you'll get 2% interest now.

And most people don't have enough money. I wouldn't say most, but many, many people don't have enough money to invest in a mutual fund. You usually have to have... This isn't always true, but often you have to have about $1,000 to get into a mutual fund. Thankfully, places like Acorns and others are changing that.

I know I'm rambling a bit and bringing in a lot of different factors. I hope you can edit me to sound really super smart, but my main takeaway is when I started... I come at this from a place of deep shame myself because I've had a lot of advantages and yet I was just in a lot of debt, partly because of personal situations and partly, I think, because of some bad decisions.

When I really began to look at how hard it is to save every month, that is number one when I started to get really interested in personal finance and started to teach myself things. But it's also when I think I developed a real... I no longer could say it was just stupidity.

I couldn't in good conscience say people are living paycheck to paycheck because they're just not planning well. I think good planning can help. If I didn't think that, I wouldn't be participating in the personal finance community. But I do think the way to approach it is not to presume that the individual is at fault.

So that's a very long way of saying, "I wish I could agree with you and I don't agree." >> Andrew: Understood. So that's entirely fine. So let me share a few thoughts for you to consider and we'll see if we wind up in any common solutions or if we're very far apart.

So first, I concede, without question, I concede that the United States of 2019 is different, very different, than the United States of 1919 or of 1989 or any year that you want to face. I concede that point. I concede the point that costs are extremely high. As far as I can tell, the housing and transportation index affordability scale is entirely accurate.

I concede the point that different people have different advantages in life. Some people have more advantages than others. I concede that point. I concede the point that many people have experienced intense trauma that makes them psychologically unequipped or poorly equipped to deal with the challenges of the modern world.

I concede all of those points. And yet, once we go through that, you still have to come to a point of saying, "Well, what do I do?" And I also happily concede that personal responsibility is not a panacea. It's not something that just simply solves everything. You can take personal responsibility.

I could take personal responsibility for everything in my life and still be diagnosed with cancer. It happens all the time. I could take personal responsibility for everything that happens in my life, be hit by a drunk driver, and become a quadriplegic. So we all have to concede, as is in some ways obvious, but of course useful to acknowledge, that things happen that we're not in control of.

And yet, we have to choose to respond. And so what I'm trying to do is to incite somebody, to shock somebody, to say, "You know what? Even when my circumstances stink, even when I live in an expensive place, I am choosing to live here." Because with the exception of somebody who is a physical slave, somebody who's a sex slave, or who's physically locked up, or who's jailed in San Francisco, in the San Francisco County Jail, everybody who lives in San Francisco chooses to live in San Francisco.

Now, they choose for different reasons. Some people live there because they like it. Some people live there because that's the only place they can think they can find a job. But that is a conscious choice. And so in choosing to live there, every person who lives in San Francisco is making the choice to accept this extreme unaffordability.

Every person who chooses to live in Des Moines, Iowa, or in, I don't know, you pick the city, we all choose to live there. Every one of us who chooses to live in the United States of America, we choose to live there. And so even if everything is against us, even if we are complete victims, the only rational response is to say, "What choice can I make?" And I'm happy— - Yes, I would interrupt and say, "Choice says," because if you can't make that one, you might make another one.

- Fair enough. Fair enough. So what choices can I make given my constraints? And what I find very frustrating, and I'm perceiving this, and so feel free to correct me if I'm projecting something onto you and to something similar to the arguments. What I find deeply frustrating is if you don't offer somebody something that they can actually do, then nothing ever gets better.

Now, I have not reviewed your work on budgeting, et cetera, but what I mean is it's fine to begin with empathy. Great, we need that. It's fine to begin with understanding. We need that. It's fine to begin with acknowledgments of trauma. That's great. But at the end of the day, nothing about any of those things is going to change the actual circumstance that somebody is in.

Maybe there's a small argument you could say if somebody feels validated and affirmed and psychologically in a better state, then maybe they'll be able to get up and go to work better the next day. True. But all of those things basically lead to a continuing, a constant and perpetual continuing of a culture of victimhood, where instead of saying, "What small choice can I make in this circumstance?" Because for every single person in a brutal situation, for every single mother who just doesn't earn a lot of money and is discriminated against by everyone and is handicapped and doesn't have money and they can't save money and they're completely behind there, we can point to somebody else who has those exact same situations and they're scrimping and scrapping and some little bit is getting tucked aside.

If we're talking about money, the point I made, they're setting something aside. They're doing something so that they're not at the risk of one single paycheck. And at the end of the day, that has to be acknowledged if we're ever going to make any progress. Go ahead. I don't think you and I disagree very much at all.

I think it really is semantics or a little bit of a different worldview, but we arrive at similar places. Thank you for admitting you haven't yet read my work at the traumatized budget, which is currently in beta. It's on medium. And eventually I'll shift to a website if it feels like enough people really want to hear things the way I'm doing them.

But I definitely don't groove out on victimhood. Nor do a lot of the people that I really resilient people that I've come in contact with who have been living paycheck to paycheck, have been dealing with debt. I sometimes say, you actually, if you want to know how to like hack your grocery list and make things work, ask a poor person.

If you, you know, sort of one of the pieces of advice you gave in your podcast was, you know, you could go to your neighbor and say, my children are hungry and they'll feed you. And I'm like, yes, a poor person already knows that. Like they've done that many times over.

So there's, I think the difference is to not that you're doing this, but the assumption that it's either or. Either it's all about, like, if I bring up someone's disadvantages, especially if I do it in my intersectional feminist way, and we're talking about race, we're talking about gender, and we're talking about sexual preference.

I think a lot of people will hear that and they'll be like, you're just making excuses. You're just, you know, coming from this, like, you know, safe space culture, like, you know, sit down and grow a spine. I don't think that having a spine is necessarily the opposite of what I talk about when I talk about some people have had some different difficulties getting to where some of us start.

You know, some of us start out at a place we take for granted that there was a little wealth in our family. We were able to go to dad for, you know, to loan us a thousand bucks for something. And some people don't have that. I think you can have both understandings coexist.

In other words, you can acknowledge someone's difficulties and that they didn't start at the same spot in the race, and you can inspire them. What choices do you have? Make those choices. You can do both. And that's what I'm hoping to do. So what I actually, since you asked about my work, what I do with the little posts that I've been putting up is I try always to have really pragmatic, immediate advice, like, do this and do this.

And it's hard because I'm also not painting myself as a great expert. I'm just a fellow traveler, but there's some things I've learned how to do. But I always try to focus on what can I give this person right now who's drowning? They don't need my sympathy. They need a rope.

You know, like, they need to get out of the drowning. So I don't know if that makes sense to you. But, you know, and you've alluded to kind of sort of the current sociopolitical moment. I think like you, there are many times that I'm just wringing my hands because I feel like people are not talking with one another.

And so often we share values. We share a lot of values. And so I'm really excited to be able to talk with someone who's really focused on the personal responsibility end of the spectrum, where I'm really focused on the, you know, kind of big picture context that individuals have to operate in.

Because I think you and I can learn so much from one another. I've learned so much already from this conversation. Yeah. So one comment on kind of solutions. One thing that you haven't done, which I expected, is you haven't thus far taken on an overt political tone in any of the comments that you've made, which is what I expected.

Because most of the time when I receive feedback such as yours, usually people generally are seeking to say, "Well, you should advocate for a political position. You should advocate for, you know, after all, if President Trump would just make a different choice, then he could open up the government and then that would alleviate the suffering of these people.

Or if you come from the other end of the political spectrum, if Senator Schumer or Speaker Pelosi would just, you know, open up the government, then that would solve a solution." Basically, so I want to first, you're welcome to comment on it, but I'll tell you why I think almost any kind of conversation or anything that paints, you know, so-called sympathy or, I didn't mean to say so- called sympathy, anything that just focuses on the victimhood or the alleged victimhood of people who are working for their federal government is because it's an impossibility in terms of changing the political system is an impossibility.

In some ways, the people who are working for the federal government and to find their lives disrupted probably ought to be thankful because usually when people are political pawns, they're usually marched off to war and sent off to some, you know, forgotten corner of the world to die for the political ambitions of the politicians in charge.

So, not getting paid is probably better than being sent off to war. So, we can be thankful that this is the way that this particular TIF is being worked out. But at the end of the day, when you cut through all that stuff, it just, it seems to me that, and I concede it's important, especially in interpersonal communication, it's very important to just acknowledge where somebody's coming from because it certainly can feel extremely raw to not acknowledge where somebody is coming from in terms of the challenge that they're facing in interpersonal communication.

At the end of the day, the only solution is for each person to recognize, and that's why I tried to focus on, if you are working for the federal government and you're expecting to be paid long term, it's hard for me to imagine what you're thinking. Now, you may have your own reasons for doing it, but to expecting to be paid long term, expecting your pension to be paid out long term, this is, it's not reality.

And so, I don't mind bearing a little bit of the burden of being somebody who is speaking bluntly to try to say, "You gotta face reality. If you didn't see this coming, it's not because you weren't affirmed, it was because you weren't paying attention." And how can we not pay attention to one of the most important things of our life, which is our income stream?

Yeah, I listened to, and probably will listen again to that portion of the podcast. As you can imagine, living here where, even though I've never worked in the government, it's sort of all around me. I'm aware of the relationship between this particular metropolitan region and the federal government. And it really gave me pause.

And it's funny, I've been thinking about it since because this is going to make you laugh, but it actually has not ever dawned on me, even knowing that the federal government has been in some crisis. It's never dawned on me that a federal job is now not a secure job anymore because of the many shutdowns and the political maneuvering, what have you.

I chalk that sort of ignorance of mine up to age a little bit. And by ignorance, I don't say that I necessarily agree with you, but I definitely am giving it a lot of thought. So I was born actually the same year that John F. Kennedy was killed. So I've been around for a while, and I actually have a memory of a government, federal government that worked better than this one did.

I was doing a fellowship, I was in my 20s, when Newt Gingrich led the charge for the first really significant shutdown that the government had had for a very long time. And it was really the first time that it was used in such a highly political, kind of as a bargaining tool.

It didn't work, but they keep trying it, you know. And I've lost count of how many shutdowns there have been since then. I guess there's a part of me that's like feeling hopeful that perhaps we'll renew that commitment to politics across the aisle and to people, co-sponsors from different parties, good heavens, if that could ever happen again, passing bills and kind of like making things work.

Maybe I was naive even then, you know what I mean? Maybe I was even then sort of over-believing in federal government. But I do feel, you know, I feel that you have a point, and I'm just, I'm sitting with it, you know, because I don't kind of know what would come next or how we would, how things would work.

We're really relearning how federal, state, and local government can or should work with one another. You know, cities now are taking on the majority of the work around climate adaptation, and nobody could have foreseen that. But that's what's happening because the federal government's not doing a whole lot. So.

- Well, I appreciate you're considering it. And I think we all, especially those of us who have a political bone, I think most of us would desire for there to be an ability for people to talk, which is why I invited you on the show today. I don't, I've argued with plenty of people on Twitter, but I don't find it to be particularly productive, because it tends to be an echo chamber where we go and try to find who we can.

And, you know, I thought about, in responding to your tweet thread, I thought about responding point by point and, pardon the hubris in the statement, but point by point trying to tear you to shreds, you know, because I wrote down each of, you know, I wrote down each of the logical fallacies in your comments and blah, blah, blah.

And I could do that, but I don't see that as being particularly productive. And I thought this would be a more interesting way to discuss it. So, I think most of us do look for it. But unfortunately, I would say what I try to do is look at the hard facts.

And my concern is that we, that seems to be difficult to do. And I haven't gotten to it yet, but my first, it was supposed to be before Christmas, I was going to do yet another show, which is a common theme in radical personal finance, yet another show on the federal debt.

You know, we are in an incredible territory for the last year. In 2018, the federal deficit was almost a trillion dollars, and it is on track for that in 2019. And yet, you know, we're arguing about 5.7 billion dollars over funding for a border wall and ignoring a trillion dollar deficit.

And unfortunately, basically, we have two political parties, those who want to spend all the money times three and those that want to spend all the money times two. And there's really no functional difference between those because at the end of the day, we're past all the money, the money's gone, the money's run out.

And even the federal budget shutdown, one of the things that's happened in the last 50 years, and the difference between JFK is if you, versus an administration like JFK versus today, it used to be that a US president in his executive power to be able to direct things and the Congress and their budget allocations, they had a huge amount of control over the money.

In turn, what I mean is specifically the percentage of federal spending that was discretionary was very large, whereas today, the total discretionary spending is something like, I don't have the charts in front of me, but this is directionally accurate, something like 25 or 30% of the federal budget. So that means that instead of having large, grand sweeping political agendas, I'm going to run on this particular thing, I'm going to get elected into office, and we're going to radically divert the federal budget.

At this point, the federal budget is so constrained by the entitlement programs and by defense spending, that the most that a US president can affect or the most a US congressman can decide about is really only a small piece of the pie, it's 25 or 30%. And so it is absurd that we have these arguments.

It's absurd that we are engaging in a $5.7 billion argument, which is, I don't know what metaphor to draw, what analogy to use to show how meaningless that is and the trillions of dollars that is the federal budget, but that is the moment that we're in, unfortunately. And I guess to close this particular thought stream out, I would just say, I don't see any possible way that it improves.

I don't see any change. I don't see any solution. I see no possible way that it improves. So my pragmatic solution is, assume as we live in the sunset of the American empire, and as we face the decline and collapse of the American empire, now, how do you and I as individuals succeed in the face of collapse?

And how do we help those around us who we can affect succeed in the face of collapse? And that's my question. I assume at this point that it's a fact that the American empire will die and is dying, and it will take several decades until it ultimately dies. Now, how do I help individual people prosper in the face of that?

Because at the end of the day, when somebody is disabled and they're depending on that social security disability paycheck for everything that they have, and they can't work, at the end of the day, that person's life is still important when the federal government runs out of money. So I've still got to figure out how to help care for them when the federal government runs out of money.

I can't fix the federal government, but I can work on trying to help that person. - Is this, I'm taking it all in, but I'm assuming it's a rhetorical statement. I'm not sure you need anything from me on this just now, do you? - No, yeah, correct. I just was giving you an opportunity to, if you have any response, I was just giving you an opportunity to respond.

- I do have some thoughts. They're not especially well-formulated, so I don't spend very much of my time. Interestingly, I do spend a lot of my time on the macro forces that have brought us to this moment. So that could be a productive, interesting conversation for us one day.

I haven't spent as much time thinking about what's next or how that's going to play out at a really big picture level, the way you're thinking about it. So it's interesting. I think you and I are kind of meeting at the fork of the road, and I've given a lot of thought, not nearly enough yet, but a lot of thought actually to the concept of American empire and how deeply flawed and messed up that was to begin with, and what it was based on was economically and humanely unsustainable.

And no empire can go on forever because they're always based on some essential, there's a word just at the tip of my tongue, but just some essential taking advantage of, there are haves and have-nots in every empire, right? A lot of have-nots working, passing up the wealth to the haves, that's my feeling.

And because that's gotten us to where we are, other forces have gotten us to what you're talking about, but here we are, we're about to lose it all, and I think you are probably right that we are about to lose it all. My hope would be, could we possibly get ourselves to more of a collaborative model of all the things in your podcast, the one that really sticks with me right now is, if you're out of food, you live in a wealthy country and you can go to a neighbor and you can ask that neighbor to take you to the store.

I don't think that's true for every single person, but it's true for enough of us that I could go to my neighbor and she could say, "I have extra potatoes." Maybe, just maybe, we have a shot at being that kind of America, I don't know. I would hope that we would, when everything fell apart in 2008, I was looking at how frugal people were becoming and how collaborative they were becoming, and it was like the first blush of the sharing economy, and it really did feel like it was sharing at that point.

It wasn't just driven by money. I was like, "Wow, could we become those people, the people who share? That could be really amazing." Pollyanna, but that's where I'm at. I certainly do hope it, and I would say, in general, when neighbors talk to neighbors and work with neighbors and don't just yell at one another, in general, the solutions are common, and it does exist.

And one of the just the basic, my diagnosis of, of course, it would be foolish to think that any one thing is what causes the problems, just like it would be foolish just in any kind of physical ailment. I think one of the aspects of myopia in the modern kind of Western system of medicine is we try to identify one thing and say, "Well, this one particular thing is causing this other one specific problem," but the body is a whole organism, and so there may be a multitude of factors and symptoms are expressed in different ways, and they might have common causes or they might not.

In the same way, when I analyze a society, I see that there are, well, I identify multiple things, but I do think one of the aspects of it, and this is where you get the political arguments between classical conservative arguments and classical liberal arguments and the place of the state, etc., which is certainly in today's political climate, this is not particularly a common argument, but I look at it down to – I look and think about the doctrine of subsidiarity, which is basically the idea that if something can be handled on a small and local level, that's the best place for it.

And I would say many of these pains that we are facing are – or can be caused by the fact that we're trying to handle things on too large of a level. For example, this is why I'm opposed to all entitlement programs. I'm opposed – personally, I'm opposed to all welfare programs, and the reason is that a large government bureaucracy doesn't have the capacity to identify if somebody is in truly in need and they're in need of charity or if somebody is choosing to go without – sorry, somebody is choosing because of personal laziness or lack of personal responsibility, etc.

So you and I as individuals, if we go and interact with our neighbors, we can go and we can see and we can say, "Man, this person is in a rough spot," and we can open up our storehouses and dispense copious charity without any reservation, recognizing that they simply need help.

But on the other hand, we can go to our neighbor and the neighbor is asking us for help and we can identify, "Wait a second. This person doesn't actually need help. What they actually need is to get a job. They need to get to work. They're lazy, and I'm not going to facilitate this behavior." And so individuals can make that kind of choice, whereas a government bureaucrat, it doesn't have the – number one, it's not possible for them to either gather the data because they have to have a standardized process and a set of intake forms, etc., but they have to have a standardized process, and they're not allowed to make those kinds of decisions because government is supposed to serve all.

And so, I mean, we all have different – >> Well, I think there's a partnership that needs to develop because I actually think there's a role for a larger government to figure out, in collaboration with local and state governments, some standards, and certainly the federal government has to enforce the Constitution.

And I made a very similar argument not too long ago and was brought to heel by some considerations around, for example, we see that, again, it goes back to who you are in your body, what risks you might run. A person like me feels perfectly at home in my neighborhood, and I'm just doing great, and local government's good for me.

But in other situations where you have local governments that have been corrupt, that have had brutal policing strategies, that have done stop-and-frisk type things at will, and they don't feel like they have any oversight, they don't have to answer to anyone, suddenly it does become important to have a feeling of accountability, and I think that's where a better federal government could play a better role, is in exerting some accountability, some common standards, some shared standards.

And I know that's very controversial and super liberal, and I'll own it, but I will say, I work in a field where local decision-making is the most important thing, and I love what you're saying so completely, but also there's this delicate partnership that has to do with local accountability that I think we should keep in mind as well, if that makes sense.

>> JF: Well, I have no – trust me, I get along well with liberals, I have no problem. I get along well with most people from just about any perspective. So I don't mind a good liberal argument. The concern to me is when – I would rather deal – me personally, I would rather deal with the local thugs who may or may not have badges than ever deal with the federal thugs who control everything.

And that's the problem, is that if you have a virtuous people, of course, it sounds great, but if you don't have a virtuous people, then you essentially go on a constant pendulum. President Trump is certainly a very different person than President Obama, and President Obama is a different person than President Bush before him, who was a different person, etc., back on down the line.

And my concern is always anything that – I guess we can't go on and on, otherwise we wind up just talking for hours about political theory, but I'm always very concerned about the power that any person or entity or political party has, because I always think, "What if I'm in the minority position, and I'm automatically in this situation?" - Well, thank a career federal worker, because they are the backbone who keep things consistent when these politicians come and go.

That's actually the secret, right? - Well, don't assume too much about my niceness. I don't have many nice things to say about most of those. I would be happy if they just eliminated the TSA, but that would be better than paying them. Lisa, anything else that you'd like to say as we kind of wrap up today's show?

- No, no, no. I'm looking forward to our continued deepening disagreements over the years, Joshua. It's really great to meet you. - I like that attitude, Lisa. And I thank you for listening to the show and for being willing to share your thoughts. And I would just simply – I would say to you this.

Each of us – and this is one of my goals with my listening audience – each of us has an opportunity where we can make a difference. And each of us has a unique voice where I think that difference is most importantly applied. And so I think there's a place for, again, strong and offensive public arguments.

I think there's an important place for those arguments. I also think that there is an important place for individuals to come along and to work with individuals very empathetically. And only the people who are involved in that circumstance and in those details will actually know the difference. And I think of it like this.

If you walk into a friend's house and we have that ability of someone we know to instantly discern their emotional state, and you should be able to discern if you know somebody, does this person need a sharp and clear word or does this person need a loving hug? That's the place of us as individuals.

Now, the place of being in a public space where you're speaking in public I think is very different, and it's important to convey messages clearly. And my hope is that there are enough kind of soft, thoughtful shows in the archives to help people who are in that emotional state.

And I hope that my blunt and clear words about – and the message I wanted to share was simply this. No matter the circumstances you're in, you always have a choice and you have to choose to do the thing that's best going to be for you. So Lisa, thank you for doing your work and I'll continue doing my work and hopefully one by one we will be able to help our neighbors.

Tell us your website and I'll point your Twitter handle Lisa, but go ahead and tell us your website in case any of my listeners are interested in reading more of your work. >>LISA Thank you. So I should have an actual website this fall, but for the moment you can find me on Medium.

If you go to Medium, look for the Traumatized Budget or look for me on Twitter @CheapBohemian and I'll get you there. >>SAM Thank you for coming on Lisa. >>LISA Thank you so much, Joshua. It's really a pleasure to talk with you. Don't just dream about paradise, live it with Fiji Airways.

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