This is the first episode of Central Air, a weekly politics podcast from and for the political center. Every other part of the political spectrum has a podcast — so, why not us?

Josh Barro, Megan McArdle and Ben Dreyfuss talk about the state of the political center, and the exciting new initiatives that focus on what centrists are for, not just what we think is too extreme. Also this week:

The oddly low-key government shutdown, and Democrats’ uphill fight to use the shutdown to get voters to focus on expiring Obamacare subsidies, naked cyclists in Oregon and the political trap of fighting Donald Trump over immigration, the overwrought freakout over Bari Weiss’s installation at CBS, and finally, did it make any sense that the Nakatomi Corporation would have had $640 million worth of bearer bonds in a vault in its new Los Angeles skyscraper?

Learn more about Central Air — leave comments, sign up to support the show and receive updates on this new podcast — at www.centralairpodcast.com.

Megan, Ben and I react to Donald Trump’s very long address to Congress, the topic he did not want to talk about for very long (inflation), the tariffs he seems to realize people are skeptical about, and his emerging feud with the Premier of Ontario.

Megan also discusses what she hated most about the speech (it had to do with RFK Jr.) and Ben identifies an emerging vibe shift — Trump, he says, is no longer riding high upon the vibes like he was a few weeks ago.

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I'm back again with another talkative podcast for the political center with Mike Pesca, Ben Dreyfuss and Megan McArdle. This week we’re (unsurprisingly) focused on the ongoing actions of DOGE: the firings and freezes that Megan correctly identifies as less a cost-cutting effort than a strategy to punish and diminish institutions that Republicans see as dominated by the left. We also discuss Elon Musk’s family drama, the imminent return of Andrew Cuomo to New York politics, and the imminent release of the woke Snow White movie.

Feedback? Questions? Get in touch at www.joshbarro.com or email [email protected].

We’re back again with another podcast with views from (and disagreements within) the center about Elon Musk, who has been the prime mover behind a lot of the news this week— efforts to cull the federal workforce, the (illegal?) pause on grants foreign and domestic, and the apparent shutdown of USAID. Plus: Trump’s sudden announcement (and sudden pause) of big tariffs on Mexico and Canada; venting about the DNC Chair election and about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s apparent glide path to overseeing our health policy apparatus, and we talk about the DCA plane crash — and the apparently irresistible urge the president feels to speculate about why it happened.

If you have feedback, we continue to encourage you to email [email protected].

I’m back in your ears this week — testing out an idea. There’s a lot of political chat shows out there aimed at slices of the ideological spectrum, but the middle is underserved. Shouldn’t we have a show to digest the news, hash out some civil disagreements, talk a little bit about how the right and left are screwing things up, and also have a little fun?

Ben Dreyfuss, Megan McArdle, and Mike Pesca join me this week to discuss Trump’s first week, the big economic promises he’ll have trouble fulfilling, the relative apathy of “the Resistance” compared to 2017, what we’re looking forward to about his presidency, the war on DEI, the TikTok ban reprieve, and even the newest unit of measure of time: the “Ramaswamy,” which is negative one days. Let us know what you think: [email protected]

How are state and local governments faring post-COVID? It's a pretty different picture than what we're seeing with the federal budget deficit. States enjoyed generous federal aid and surprisingly strong tax collections during the pandemic. In 2021, state governments were flush — sometimes, they even made responsible choices, making deposits into their pension funds and building up their rainy-day funds to extremely high levels. Other states committed to new programs and spending. Now it's a mixed bag. To talk about how the states are managing all of that, I talked to Yale Law School professor David Schleicher, an expert on state and local government finance, for a wide-ranging conversation about how states have (and have not) learned the lessons of their budget crises from the Great Recession, and how they’re adjusting to once-again lean times.

Visit joshbarro.com for a transcript of this episode and to sign up for my newsletter.

We are back with Peter Suderman’s semi-annual visit to the Very Serious podcast! Getting ready for spring, Peter and I talked about best practices for muddling fresh fruit into cocktails. We talked about Peter’s philosophy of the 41-bottle bar, about his favorite non-alcoholic cocktails, and about why he has no use for vodka. We also talked about “x-tini” cocktails — relics of the bad old days (the 1980s and the 1990s) when bars would mix together any brightly colored fruit liqueur with spirits and sour mix and who knows what else and call the drink some kind of “-tini.” But we also talked about a silver lining of that age — the espresso martini, birthed then and once again popular today, which Peter has methods for improving (think gin or mezcal).

Visit joshbarro.com for a transcript of this episode and links for the books, bottles and recipes we reference.

We’re back with another episode of the Very Serious podcast, and this episode has a friend of the show: Prof. Jason Furman, who teaches economics at Harvard.

Or, as Jason put it to me, he’s a bit of a foul-weather friend of the show:

Jason: Inflation does fluctuate a bit. Sometimes it looks a little bit better — during those times, you don't have me on your show. Sometimes it looks a little bit worse, and then you desperately call me and want me back on your show.

I suggested that the Jason Furman Very Serious Index could be yet another inflation indicator to keep an eye on, among all the others.

Jason: Yeah. And the big open question is, is that a lagging indicator of past inflation, or does that help us predict future inflation?

Indeed, the inflation outlook has worsened in the last few months. It looked like we were making progress in cooling inflation toward the end of 2022, but after a combination of revisions to data and hotter reports in recent months, it now looks like we haven’t actually made much progress at all. At the same time, the economy has continued to show decent growth and strong job gains — a set of facts that have economic analysts talking less about soft and hard landings and more about “no landing”: the possibility that we will avoid recession for a substantial period while also experiencing persistently too-high inflation.

I talked with Jason about why inflation hasn’t come down much despite the Fed’s substantial interest rate increases, what can be done to tame inflation over the next year, and how we have ended up with the Fed as “the only game in town” — with monetary policy being the only useful policy lever, even if it is an imperfect one, for taming inflation.

There was no national “Red Wave” in last November’s elections, but there sure was one in New York. Republicans won a clean sweep on Long Island, even washing George Santos into Congress. They lost Asian and Hispanic support in New York City, turning swathes of Brooklyn red and Queens purple. I invited progressive journalist Ross Barkan to talk about what happened in New York, and what Republicans and Democrats across the country can learn from it. We discussed crime, schools, future housing policy that might be more possible now because Democrats lost the suburbs, and also ornery billionaire James Dolan, who owns the New York Knicks and Rangers, Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall and is using facial recognition technology to bar his enemies from his entertainment venues.

Visit joshbarro.com to sign up for my newsletter and to find a transcript of this episode and other relevant links.

A few weeks back, I wrote about the ethic of homeownership, and how I think it is unlikely to be dislodged from American society. If we’re going to improve our housing policy and ensure more adequate supply, we’re going to have to work with that ethic, not against it. And I think that’s a feasible thing to do. That piece was a response to an article in The Atlantic by Jerusalem Demsas, and I wanted discuss housing issues in more depth with her. The result, I think, is a really interesting conversation — starting with how the housing shortage causes homelessness, moving through the politics of building support for more housing supply, and then talking about the homeownership society — why Americans want to own, when that’s the right impulse, when that’s misguided, and what can be done to make renting and owning good options for the circumstances they suit.

Find our newsletter and ways to support the show at joshbarro.com, plus relevant links and a transcript of this episode.