How optimistic should we be about our government?: Amanda Lang joins The Hub Roundtable to break it down

The following is the final installment of The Hub’s new series The Business of Government, hosted by award-winning journalist and best-selling author Amanda Lang about how government works and, more importantly, why it sometimes doesn’t work. In this series, Lang conducts in-depth interviews with experts and former policymakers and puts it all in perspective for the average Canadian.

This episode’s featured guests are The Hub‘s Rudyard Griffiths, executive director at The Hub, and Sean Speer, editor-at-large. With the series’ host, Amanda Lang, they discuss the Business of Government series’ key takeaways including growing questions about Canadian state capacity, the risks of government complacency, and the need to inject energy and dynamism into Canada’s governments.

You can listen to this episode of Hub Dialogues on Acast, Amazon, Apple, Google, Spotify, and YouTube. The episodes are generously supported by The Ira Gluskin And Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation and The Linda Frum & Howard Sokolowski Charitable Foundation.

AMANDA LANG: Welcome to the Business of Government. I’m Amanda Lang. This is a special podcast series for The Hub. On it, we’re aiming to take a closer look at how our governments function in Canada. Things like their effectiveness, but also their failures. We’re taking a non-partisan, non-jaundiced view of how what’s arguably the most important service is delivered to Canadians. And our aim is to understand what we could do better, differently, what’s going wrong, and maybe even celebrating some things that we’re getting right. Some of the subjects that we want to explore include why it sometimes feels like our governments just aren’t that good at big projects; big procurements seem to go wrong time and again, from new jet planes, and commissioning ships to, of course, the famous IT system that pays federal bureaucrats. It can feel like government bungles things as much as possible and at a much greater rate than the private sector. In this series, we want to ask the question, how is government functioning? Is it working well? Where are the shortfalls? What could be done better? We’re also going to look at the size of government. Sometimes it only ever seems to increase in size. Is there an ideal size for governance? And we’re harking back to nudge policies. Remember them? Are they still being used? And could our own psychological behaviours be used to better effect to help govern us better? So, let’s get started.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, the Executive Director of The Hub. Welcome to this, a special edition of our Roundtable. We’re convening Amanda Lang, who’s been joining us here at The Hub with some great insight and analysis on the business of government, as long as contributing regularly with Sean on a series looking at public policy developments as they relate to the economy on a biweekly basis. Sean Speer joins us, our Editor at Large, and we thought we’d have a debrief with Amanda on her series, The Business of Government. What did we learn? What are the key takeaways? This is a big topic as Canada fights its way out of the effects of the pandemic, the reworking of government in our lives. Where’s it all headed? Well, let’s go to Amanda Lang first. Amanda, this is fun; we get to flip the tables, so to speak, Sean and I get to interview you. I’m sure you’ll be back at us with a few comments and thoughts of your own.

But let’s begin there, Amanda. I mean, great series. Lots of different voices. I loved how you wove together people inside government, economists outside government, people deep in the civil service, people at the, what we think as the pinnacle of government, Premiers, people commanding the machinery of government, so to speak. If you had one big takeaway from the series, what would it be?

AMANDA LANG: So I would preface this answer by saying what I think we all wanted to do here was a kind of an unbiased, unjaded, blank slate approach. So I came at it from that point of view and try to get at, to your point, the people who could give that, the different lenses into government and how it functions. The thing I take away is actually a sense of optimism, if I can say that. I mean, I found that the folks who understand it the best on both the bureaucracy side and on the political side. They see the problems. They acknowledge the problems. But there is this sense of shared belief that there are a lot of good people trying to do good work. And then there was this constant through line that I think is really important for all of us to remember that we’re doing okay in Canada. We do always try to elevate our game, and complacency, of course, is the biggest enemy we can have. But as governments are measured, we still stack up in the world. So as a starting point for the conversation, I think you could say, “Let’s go from good to great,” but we don’t have to be too depressed about what’s going on here.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Sean, why don’t you come in on this?

SEAN SPEER: Yeah, I’ll just jump in, and, Amanda, I’d love to hear your thoughts about this. There’s been really since the late 1970s and early 1980s an ideological conflict about the size of government. You had economist Livio Di Matteo on for an episode to talk a bit about what the empirics tell us about the optimal size of government in terms of maximizing the economy as well as addressing social needs. But what’s interesting, it seems to me, in recent years is that that debate has shifted from less of a focus on the size of government and more on the capacity and abilities of the state.

A big part of that, it seems to me, is a consequence of the fact that because of demographics, climate change, something you and I talked about a couple of weeks ago, the rise of China, and so on, government is probably going to be bigger, not smaller, moving forward. Just by the function of arithmetic, in a way. And so, in that sense, talk a bit about the evolution of that debate and the growing attention and focus on this idea of state capacity.

AMANDA LANG: Yeah. And I think this was one that it is super important not to get drawn into the partisan on, right? Because it’s so easy to go—if you’re on the Right, you say small to zero government, and on the Left, you want big government. I don’t think that’s true. I mean, I don’t actually think, if you drill into it, anybody wants a big government per se. And the capacity question, Jason Kenney made this point excellently as well, which is, if you just use healthcare as an example of the difference between size and spending, and capacity, everybody will nod their head. We get it. We spend so much on healthcare, and it will only grow. And yet, are we delivering? Are we efficient? Are we getting the ends we want? And I think we can also all agree, lots of room for improvement.

So I do think that’s the place to look because of the size—and again with Livio, we talked about size in terms of program spending, which is the big nut. It’s not the bureaucracy. Of course, it’s how we spend the tax dollars. And we didn’t get into particularly because it’s harder to measure in a comparative way size when you add in regulatory reach or all the ways government’s policy that influences the economy, which is where you start to get closer into the seventies, eighties percent of government reach into your economy. And there’s all kinds of good things about that. How it’s done has to be, I think, our focus. And to me, you’ve got to the most important question here, which is its size. Yes, it does matter. Those are tax dollars. We should spend them wisely. How they’re spent has to be the focus. And I wish that more of the conversation wasn’t just a knee-jerk, how it’s spent, but we actually dug into that. There’s lots of—and then The Hub’s healthcare competition is an example of how you can do it, right? What’s a simple policy fix for a hard problem? Let’s do more of that.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Amanda, coming out of COVID, there is an understanding, maybe with this particular government in Ottawa it was trending even before COVID, of significantly adding to the government’s headcount. So you have this idea of the teeth and the tail. So you have this fairly, now large bureaucracy, arguably increased by almost a third over the last seven, eight years—a conversation about frustration about the delivery of services, the quality of services in Canada. I was struck, and I really urge listeners to go back because it’s quite a get, so to speak, to have the former Clerk of the Privy Council in this series, Wernick, talking about the machinery of government. I was struck by that conversation, Amanda, the extent to which—and I understand as a former Clerk, he’s part of a very elite club, and it’s a club that often speaks with one voice—I was surprised at the extent to which he felt that the status quo was not only adequate but up to and sufficient to meet the needs and challenges of the country. And I wonder if you were surprised also by that conversation—the extent to which it made me worry a little bit about an internal Ottawa voice that might not really understand the frustrations in the rest of the country, the extent to which people are turned off from government and want to hear that maybe the status quo isn’t okay; that we need some pressure points on government. We need change. We can’t just keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

AMANDA LANG: Yeah, I totally agree with you that Wernick certainly conveyed a sense of belief in and optimism about the quality of work being done and the quality of workers, right? He’s happy with the civil service. Now, what I would say, one thought I have and this is my own thought, so I don’t know for sure. My guess is that when you occupy his role—and we should of course remember—listeners should remember—he’s occupied many roles over his 40-odd years in Ottawa. So he’s been inside the inner workings of the civil service. He gets it. He’s worked with deputy PMs, and then he had the top unelected job in the country. And his point—the big takeaway for me—was there are good people in there. There are people who are innovative, who do want to work hard, and those are the ones you need to unleash. And so he talks about the learning software of government. His whole thing is, “Let’s figure out. If we’re bringing in consultants, don’t make that political football. Ask the question: When is that appropriate? And could we be doing more? Is this an opportunity to say, ‘Do we need internal leadership or strategy, or something that we are not giving our people?'” Because there are good people.

And so I think the ring of truth for me, Rudyard, was, anybody who’s worked in a big organization, and I’ll pull on the CBC as an example, the bigger they are, the more likely they are to have people who you’re not really sure what they’re doing. They’re there; they’re filling a desk; they’re doing some small amount of work, but there are always also talented, hardworking, smart individuals. And in my experience, they find one another and they have a lot of fun. And the analogy I always use is a stream running really quickly through a big pond. And they don’t let the rest of the pond bother them. It’s big and it’s still, and who knows what’s out there? But the stream’s moving. And I feel like that was what I took from Wernick: there are good people who work hard in government, and we need to tap them. Now, a counterargument, of course, would be, and Sean’s had some experience, obviously, in the inner workings of this stuff, how do you figure out what’s in the rest of the pond and dig it out and make sure it’s a little bit—because those are our tax dollars and we do get offended when they’re abused. So I would say if Wernick had a tilt, it was slightly more positive. But I think it’s because you so rarely get that view, and he wanted to make sure it was brought out.

SEAN SPEER: But I just want to seize on both of your observations there because I think there’s a ton of insight and it comes back to this point of state capacity and maximizing the human capital that we have within our public service. One of the things that strikes me, Amanda and Rudyard, is that in recent years, we’ve seen as the size of government has grown, actually counterintuitively, morale within the public service has seemingly declined.

I think we do need to have a hyperfocus on the extent to which the rules that we’ve imposed on government, oftentimes with good intentions around accountability and transparency and the fact that it’s a unionized work environment and so on, is actually disempowering people. It’s not giving agency to the type of people you’re talking about, Amanda, so that they—if you’re coming into public service, some, of course, are self-selecting because of job security or whatever, but a lot are self-selecting because they’re public-spirited. Why don’t you talk a bit about what you heard over the course of the series and what we can be doing better to elevate and support those people who do want to make a difference and are incapable of making a difference?

AMANDA LANG: And I think you’re getting at a bunch of really important issues here. And it may actually be grounds for exploration in future work. And that is how we work and which jobs we’re going to focus on. At the expense of others is the future, right? Whether it’s the way AI and other technologies will change our labour force. What I heard repeatedly from people, including Lisa Raitt, who kicked off the series. It’s so refreshing to hear somebody who believes in government, did it for the right reasons but could say in an unjaundiced way, “Things are broken.” It takes nine months, and you realize that actually the bureaucracy’s dragging its feet because they don’t want to do the thing you ask them to do. That you heard a little bit of that there are ways for people inside government to slow things down if they don’t think it’s the right thing to do. But remember, that right thing has a politically elected representative asking for it. So that’s a problem.

So I guess I would turn the question back to you guys and say, wouldn’t it be great if our government was the place where innovative thinking around which jobs do we keep, which jobs—and how are we going to soft-land people out of jobs that we don’t need anymore? And what does that process look like? What’s a humane way to figure that out? Because it was Sean’s work on the extent to which government jobs was the job growth that this government was bragging about that led me to The Hub in the very first place. Just data that tells a story. And that’s always the most interesting, to me, story to hear, which is just facts. And so, yeah, to me it’s—and I did hear a little bit of that, like, “Let’s dig in, let’s make government the innovative place to figure out how we get more capacity, how we get efficiency.” There’s a human side to that, that government might be best suited to solve.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Yeah, I mean, I think the recent labour negotiations with the federal public service were interesting to the extent to which, I don’t know, I try to look at things of the glass half-full, but the extent to which the right to work from home in a sense is almost enshrined now in collective bargaining. Those trends, to me, suggest that there are bigger problems here in terms of the culture of government and its willingness to innovate, to adapt, to become more responsive. I don’t know what you think, Sean, but again, I’m trying not to be too cynical here, but big organizations, whether it’s the CBC, the government, certainly not The Hub right now, they have interests, and those interests are often related around the acquisition of more resources, more prominence, more power, more influence. These are, to me, inherent characteristics of often big, large, complex things. And we understand that often with corporations. And sometimes I think we have too much cynicism towards corporations as being relentlessly self-interested, relentlessly bent on the acquisition of power. I think often, Sean, we give government a pass. We tend to think that those same drivers, those same organizational institutional forces just aren’t part of government because everyone is publicly interested and focused on the collective good. I’m not always sure that that unfortunately is the case. I worry about these broader currents that inform the massive entity that is the federal government in Canada.

SEAN SPEER: Yeah. James Buchanan won a Nobel Prize for his work on public choice economics, which he described as “politics without romance.” I think what you’re suggesting is that we need to look at the government without a romantic eye. That’s why we’re so grateful for Amanda for the series over the past several weeks, which really did lift the hood up, including elected officials, non-elected officials, and so on.

I would just say that I suspect the government needs to be prepared for greater scrutiny in the coming years, in large part because of some of the pressures and demands that I mentioned earlier: aging demographics, climate change, and so on. The scarcity of public finance is going to become greater. I mean, just take the provinces for a second, Amanda and Rudyard. Several Canadian provinces are presently spending something approaching 50 cents on every program, spending a dollar on healthcare. At some point, that becomes unsustainable. It’s just going to lead to greater questions about what government does well, what it does poorly, what should it do, what shouldn’t it do.

And I’m not sure, to Rudyard’s point, that it’s quite ready for that conversation. Just as we’re speaking today, the government has announced a new exercise to identify $15 billion in efficiencies, which may or may not be a good idea. But it seems to me at this point we need something more systematic rather than just a weed-whacking exercise that we have every five or ten years or so that the government gives us a bit of money back after growing exponentially for the previous five or ten years. Why don’t you talk a bit about that, Amanda? Did you get a sense that there’s openness to that kind of systematic scrutiny that I’m talking about?

AMANDA LANG: To be fair, I think it does exist. And what I heard from people like Wernick is that it’s a constant process actually inside government. To me, it’s a bit of an aside, but the whole public ask for $15 billion, that signals to taxpayers that there’s money lying around in Ottawa, right?

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Exactly.

AMANDA LANG: That there’s just a lot of waste. And I think that’s deeply unfair. And I think we all know as intelligent humans that if you have to cut $15 billion in a month, it’s not going to be the right stuff. It’s going to be big expensive, long-term payoff stuff that we actually wish they wouldn’t cut. But anyway, that’s an aside. One of the debates that Wernick pointed to, and this is important, is inside Ottawa there’s a tension between the decentralized system where departments function as independent units and a much more centralized one where there is an overarching of HR and finance, and all of these functions that will bring everything together. And I do think that’s an important debate. It’s a healthy one—it is going on in circles in Ottawa for sure. I think that might be one that could get political teeth. And if you had a Prime Ministerial candidate or a Finance Minister who wanted to say, “We’re actually going to revamp how this works,” and some of us would have maybe a tendency to lean one way or the other, but you could actually unleash some of these departments a little bit more than they are and find the efficiencies within them, and stop doing overlapping functions.

I mean, I think there’s a lot of that extra bureaucracy that comes from some of those functions, and there’s savings in that. But things like Phoenix, the pay system that’s been such a debacle, that just sends a shutter through an organization like this, right? That’s where you get the layering in of “You better hire consultants instead of taking ownership of something,” and “You better have five people’s signatures on it so that you’re not the only name on that document.” And that’s unfortunate, right? Because it can—and that happens in corporations all the time, too. When you get a culture of low risk of an unwillingness to fail, you just suffer the cost of it. And in this case, of course, the bottom line is for the taxpayer, nobody else.

SEAN SPEER: To that point, in the 1990s, of course, the Chretien-led government undertook a program review. Of course, it was focused on the large budget deficit and growing concerns about the federal government’s fiscal sustainability. But it wasn’t a weed-whacking exercise; it was comprehensive. The government got out of things. It transformed itself. But 1995 is actually a long time ago. One wonders if we need something like that.

Just to put a fine point on it, guys, the Public Health Agency of Canada, which is a federal agency that in theory was conceived after SARS to play a major role in international surveillance, through a previous exercise like the one the government’s about to undertake in the name of just finding some efficiencies, eliminated its international surveillance function. So I do think there is a real risk if it’s not systematic, if it’s not comprehensive, it doesn’t start from the premise that this isn’t just about finding short-term savings; it’s about reinvigorating state capacity. The risk is it actually could do more harm than good. Kinda counterintuitive.

AMANDA LANG: What I would just add to that, Sean, is when you think back to what the Chrétien-Martin team did, it was one of the biggest empowering times for provinces. Fiscally hard politically, it paid off. And really, it was Prime Minister Harper who followed through and actually empowered provinces in new ways, and he gets credit/blame for that, but the fiscal groundwork was laid by Prime Minister Chrétien, right? If you’re going to push costs down, you better push power down and accountability down too. And the only reason I raise that is we, the citizens of this country, should be aware when so-called fiscal decisions are made. They have deep lasting policy and political ramifications. So we do need to be mindful, pay attention; it does make a difference, what’s happening.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: If I’m optimistic in a mischievous way, it’s that I think there are real parallels now to the Chretien era. We’re just seeing, in the last little while the bond rates across the world in the United States and Canada surging to new highs in this cycle. Debt servicing costs in Ontario now equal approximately the entire spending on K–12 education in the province. Federally debt servicing is up to almost our total expenditures annually on the Canadian military. I wonder, Amanda, if history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. And I wonder if the future of government, in some ways, is a story of factors and forces that lie outside; exogenous shocks that come along and force change and require a system to adapt. I just wonder if this ever happens—that horrible word—organically from within as opposed to the Chrétien reforms, I don’t think would’ve occurred if there hadn’t been an acute fiscal crisis, a crisis threatened the credibility of the Canadian dollar that called into question our ability to service our debt obligations. I do worry that Canada’s one of the highest debt-to-GDP on a per capita basis. When you add in government private debt, non-financial corporate debt, we’re right up there above Greece, behind only Japan on a per capita debt basis. Wow, that’s not a great place to be.

AMANDA LANG: I agree. I mean, one of my favourite sayings is, “The best thing about life is that you’re graded on a curve.” But in this case, we may look better than some, but we are next to the United States. There is a safe option right there for the world’s investors. And I would add to your list there, if we’re going to stir-up concerns. As we transition away from that good, stable source of revenue of oil and gas in this country, that will create new fiscal realities. So yeah, for all those years when we were told, “It’s different this time,” and believe me, that was even by people like Paul Martin who came around to, “It’s okay to have this level of debt-to-GDP because, because, because… we invented new policies, MMR, to help us find our way through it.” I think history does rhyme. I think we need to be quite careful about that because, as you say, it’s not often an internal choice; it is usually forced upon us by some event or another.

SEAN SPEER: What might be a bit different this time, though, is the changing media landscape. I was struck that this was something that Jason Kenney really zeroed in on in talking about his experiences as Premier in Alberta, particularly around COVID. His argument for those listeners or viewers who haven’t seen the episode, which I’d strongly recommend you check out, is that the decline of legacy media for market reasons, in part because of trust reasons, has led to the expansion of what would call independent media or alternative media; a movement The Hub at least in theory, is part of. But he said that it’s having a pretty profound effect on politics and policymaking. Why don’t you just talk a bit about that, Amanda?

AMANDA LANG: Yeah, and I mean, I really appreciated the candour that Jason Kenney brought to that conversation because this is—I mean, I think we can call him a believer in the process. He’s been political for, I think, the right reasons, and I think he has done it multiple federally and provincially. And there was a time when you would’ve called Jason Kenney far-Right. I remember that he represented the Right of the Right side of his party. And the thing that he’s quite frank about is that he found himself not Right enough. He found himself being accused of being part of some Davos-led cabal of conspiracy of the East. And I think it was a really personally discomfiting situation for him because that’s not where he lives. And what I took away from it is “Yes, mainstream media, which has only itself to blame, of course.” There’s something else afoot, I think. And that is because of social media and the way that it can be manipulated, there’s a loss of basic goodwill. There’s a loss of benefit of the doubt, which I think if you take anything away from this series, I hope it’s that. I hope people can listen to it. And actually, here, people mean well, including me. There’s no agenda here. It’s just people trying to get to the bottom of things and share information. And you can take it, you can leave it, you can add to it; you can do whatever you want with it. This is, I think, what The Hub does too, right? It’s just there’s important stuff happening, and we should talk about it. And to me, Kenney’s point was sort of that all the goodwill he had generated through decades of public service with personal sacrifice involved and issue after issue of his bonafide—he’s laid out for people and a single issue, it was gone. It was gone. And that’s painful. That was, I think, probably personally painful.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Well, just in our final moments, let’s go around the horn and just lead listeners with concluding reflections. I think mine, and I really appreciated, Amanda, that the approach that you took to this is that I think we all agree, and we agree at The Hub, that there’s too much negative discussion of government, a knee-jerk, I think at times Americanized conversation, unfortunately, especially on the writing Canada, that all government is bad and we should just simply get rid of it. And I don’t know, live as if it was the Middle Ages. I guess there were serfs and castles and Dukes and Duchesses. So, I mean, there’s no move to freedom. I guess that’s basically my point. We need a system to organize society. Government has pluses and minuses. Thankfully, we have one in Canada, which is democratically accountable, and relatively transparent. Unlike other governments around the world, we often get to see what it’s doing, and we get to see right into it to the—whether it’s a Clerk of Privy Council appearing on a podcast or a premier who’s willing to share their thoughts. I think that’s something positive about our culture.

So I just hope that people take away from this series a sense of nuance, right? That when we’re having a conversation about government, we have to approach this with some nuance. There’s things that government does really well that, frankly, we don’t want corporations doing because we don’t want to introduce a profit motive into our relationships with the state and with each other. There are some areas where profit is not what you should be pursuing. You should be pursuing a collective common purpose through democratic institutions and publicly accountable institutions that, yes, came and should be more efficient. I think that is key. But I really did appreciate, Amanda, the contribution to this conversation because we need that nuance; we need that context. We have to move away from the black and white manikin view of “homo-economicus” versus, I don’t know what you call it, “homo-government”. What’s your take, Sean? What were your final reflections on this excellent series?

SEAN SPEER: Yeah. As someone who cares about government and public service, my major takeaway is that there is a need to inject some energy, some fresh ideas, fresh perspectives institutionally and then even at the human resource level.

Former Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick talked a bit about the relatively modest interchange program that the federal government currently runs with private sector executives and nonprofit executives coming in and out of the system. He characterized it principally as giving people different perspectives, either those leaving government or those coming in. But I think it’s actually much more important about injecting those perspectives and experiences into the system. One of the consequences of a highly unionized federal public service or provincial public service, for that matter, is it can become a bit closed. And I think we’re seeing some of the negative consequences of how closed that system has become. And so it seems to me increasingly the focus ought to be less on should it be a percentage point, more or less as a shared GDP, and how do we enliven the public service so that it brings forth the kind of energy and dynamism and ideas and people that can match the major challenges our society faces, from aging to climate change to evolving geopolitics. That’s the big takeaway for me. And I’m so grateful to Amanda and the guests for having set that out so powerfully over the past several weeks.

AMANDA LANG: It’s been really refreshing for me to do this, so thanks to The Hub for doing it. I would say if I had a takeaway on it, there is definitely work to be done, but Canadians can be—I think we can understand that we’re ready to do it. In other words, we’re well-placed to make these changes. It’s not that there aren’t things that need to happen; there are a lot of things that should happen here, but that this dance between our bureaucracy and our political system, which is so important, both of them are robust. So we can fix them, and we can focus on how they interact in a way that just makes us stronger. And to me, it’s a very positive thing. But we shouldn’t shy away from looking at it. It’s the most important service in the country. It is the most important thing that shapes how we live and how other people will come to us. You go back to those global investors. And so, if they’re getting up to anything in auto every day, I hope it’s their own business, and how they run it is at the top of the agenda, is what I take away. But lots of reasons for me to feel good about that. And a reminder: I tend to default to this: people aren’t there to cause trouble, and they’re not there to be bad at their jobs; most people want to do good and produce something good. And I come away with a sense that’s probably what we’ve got working for us, and that’s a good thing.

RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Excellent, Amanda. Well, thank you so much for taking this series under your wing, and also a big thank you to Amal Attar-Guzman, our Producer, for pulling it all together behind the scenes. And yeah, I urge listeners and viewers to check it out; it’s all on The Hub, www.thehub.ca. Just simply search for Amanda or go to the Dialogues page and scroll down to look for the installments in the series on the website and on your favourite podcast platform. So thank you again, Amanda. Great to have this conversation with you and to wrap up the series. And I know you’ll continue to be chatting with Sean every two weeks, sharing your thoughts on the intersection of economics, the economy, business, and public policy. And we really appreciate those insights too. So have a great day, guys. We’ll talk again soon.

AMANDA LANG: Thanks, guys.