The 2019 framing: infrastructure and the California model
The earliest treatment of the Green New Deal in these excerpts comes from a February 2019 episode in which Charlie Dice filled in for Bob Zadek and interviewed Mark Joffe, a senior analyst at the Reason Foundation. Dice described the proposal as associated with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, noted that Kamala Harris had said she was a co-sponsor, and compared it to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal response to the Great Depression Not Enough Bricks (2019).
Dice summarized the proposal as he understood it: a combination of bold transportation initiatives, multi-billion dollar high-speed rail projects, and new solar power plants in the desert, with the aim of reaching zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. He asked Joffe what lessons California offered, and Joffe answered with the timeline of California high-speed rail: the High-Speed Rail Authority was set up in 1996 to develop the plan, the plan went on the ballot in 2008, and service was projected to start in 2033 along the Los Angeles to San Francisco corridor — a total period of 37 years from project conception to project implementation. Joffe contrasted that with the Green New Deal’s framing of a systemic threat that has to be solved by 2030, and said it seemed very unlikely that high-speed rail could achieve that objective given the length of time these systems take to plan and implement Not Enough Bricks (2019).
Joffe also addressed the China comparison. He said advocates point to China’s build-out of high-speed rail within the last decade, but that two things must be considered: shoddy construction practices that have resulted in casualties, and weak property rights in China, which make condemning the necessary land simple. He said he did not think most people, including most progressives and moderate Democrats, want to see average people losing their houses willy-nilly, and that a democratic process with proper compensation would take years to adjudicate — making a national high-speed rail network operational by 2030 very hard to imagine Not Enough Bricks (2019).
Dice put the stronger charge to Joffe: that the proposal was more about seizing power than protecting the environment. Joffe declined that reading, saying he believed a lot of progressives sincerely believe anthropogenic global warming is a serious problem requiring immediate government action, and that he would not look at everybody’s intentions as negative. His criticism was instead of central control: high-speed rail is a technology going back to the early 1960s, implemented in Japan as early as 1964, and in 2012 and 2013 Elon Musk published a paper asking why California was using old technology and proposing the Hyperloop. Joffe said the problem with central control by people not keeping up with the latest technology is that a solution that may not be the right one gets shoehorned onto society, whereas the market is a laboratory for experimenting with ideas and letting the best ones win out Not Enough Bricks (2019).
Time accounting, municipal finance and federalism
Dice pressed a related objection: that environmental policies neglect a time accounting element of energy consumption, front-loading fossil fuels for construction — mining materials, transporting them, manufacturing them — and that electric vehicles still require generating electricity to power the system. From a libertarian perspective, he said, central planners reconfiguring an energy infrastructure almost always involve more base inputs, more oil and gas, in order to produce less of the desired outcome Not Enough Bricks (2019).
The conversation then turned to public sector credit. Joffe said he became interested in the issue while working at Moody’s Analytics, part of the credit rating agency, thinking about quantitative techniques for municipal financial health. He said that since he started in 2011 and 2012, when things were bad, state and local finance had entered a benign period with notable exceptions: Puerto Rico had a bankruptcy in 2017 that had been coming for several years, and bondholders looked likely to take a major haircut. By and large, he said, most cities and states were able to support municipal bond principal and interest payments, and new debt issuance was relatively moderate; total municipal bonds outstanding had not changed much since 2009, in contrast to federal debt, which had more than doubled. The big problems, he said, were public employee pensions and other post-employment benefits, concentrated in specific governments — problems in the state of Illinois, and in California school districts such as Los Angeles Unified, which he said contributed to the strike a couple of weeks earlier Not Enough Bricks (2019).
Dice drew out the federalism theme, noting Bob Zadek’s book Power to the States: How Federalism 2.0 Can Make America Governable Again and the idea that states were designed as laboratories of democracy, with the federal government never meant to engage in behemoth projects. He said California wants its own spin on policy from the environment to immigration, and that reframing the question from left-right to what works and what the numbers show would yield technology that works. He cited Gavin Newsom’s speech invoking “California values” against the President’s vision of America, and suggested California could be seen as trying the objectives of the Green New Deal on a smaller scale Not Enough Bricks (2019).
The 2020 episode: a union demand
In a July 2020 episode, Bob Zadek described a battle around the country over whether to reopen schools during the pandemic, and said that in Los Angeles one of the most powerful teachers’ unions in the country had announced it would not go back and teach in the fall unless the school district agreed to a list of demands. Those demands, he said, included equal pay, Medicare for All, income equality, and adherence to the Green New Deal California’s New Union Gag Order Violates 1st Amendment (2020).
Zadek framed this within a discussion of what he called a profound imbalance in power given by statute, describing a school board member named Jeff who is allowed to say something but better not show up at the next school board meeting, because the district would be sued. He said Jeff keeps quiet rather than harm the school district, and asked whether he was being too alarmist about jurisdictions that enact what he called gag bills California’s New Union Gag Order Violates 1st Amendment (2020).
The 2022 episode: the Inflation Reduction Act as vehicle
In a September 2022 episode, Bob Zadek introduced the Inflation Reduction Act as a misnomer and asked Thomas DiLorenzo to apply the principles in his book to what Zadek called that monster piece of legislation Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022).
DiLorenzo said a Democratic congresswoman had said the day before that the primary thing about the so-called Inflation Reduction Act is that it is really the Green New Deal — a massive amount of additional environmental regulation. He said opinion polls the Democratic Party pays for tell them people are concerned about inflation more than almost anything else, so the name was chosen to make people think it addresses their main concern. He called that a big lie, and said the bigger lie is that several hundred billion dollars of additional spending will pump up demand, that the Fed will print extra money to finance it, and that this will increase inflation, while higher corporate taxes and especially higher energy taxes push up prices of just about everything Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022).
Zadek qualified one point: he said it is not that the energy industry will be destroyed, but that costs will rise and be passed downstream, with the burden ultimately borne by ordinary people. DiLorenzo agreed with the qualification and added that the Biden administration’s energy secretary, asked on a television news show what the administration could do to bring down the price of gasoline, laughed and gave no answer — which he read as evidence the administration wanted higher oil and gas prices, having vetoed the Keystone Pipeline from Canada and discussed banning offshore drilling and drilling on government lands. He said energy companies cannot pass on such costs indefinitely, illustrating with Turkey, where gas cost the equivalent of $18 a gallon and a young man with an MBA drove a scooter because automobiles carried a 100% tax Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022).
Across episodes
The topic recurs in three episodes, and the treatment shifts with the political moment rather than building an argument. In 2019 the Green New Deal is discussed as a set of infrastructure proposals, with Mark Joffe supplying the high-speed rail timeline and the China comparison and Charlie Dice supplying the time-accounting and federalism framing. In 2020 Bob Zadek mentions it only as one item on a Los Angeles teachers’ union’s list of demands. In 2022 Thomas DiLorenzo treats the Inflation Reduction Act as the Green New Deal’s actual legislative vehicle. The excerpts show no shared definition of the proposal across the three, and no participant in a later episode responds to an earlier one.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the text, sponsor list, or legislative status of any Green New Deal bill, nor the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act beyond the spending, tax and energy points DiLorenzo asserts. They do not give the outcome of the Los Angeles school reopening dispute, the fate of California high-speed rail, or any court ruling on the union legislation discussed in 2020. No guest in these excerpts defends the Green New Deal on its merits at length; the closest is Joffe’s statement that he does not question proponents’ intentions.