The Economy, Artificial Intelligence, and the Policies Shaping America’s Future
Friday, September 25, 2026, on Common Sense Radio, with Bill Sayre, weekdays, 11 o’clock till Noon.
Ryan Young, Senior Economist with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, joins Bill to review and evaluate key national economic reports recently released, most all of which affect the economic wellbeing of the Vermont people — inflation, interest rates, income, job creation, economic growth, deficits and debt. What we can learn about the health and vitality of the general economy, and the connections, as both cause and effect, with monetary and fiscal policy, including tariff policy. What should we know about Julian Simon, and the award named in his honor?
Potential Questions and Issues
What happened to Treasury interest rates last week? How does that affect mortgage rates, and why? How do mortgage rate rates affect the housing market, and why? What are the factors causing longer term interest rates to change? Inflation rate? Demand for credit — Federal Government; Artificial Intelligence and Data Center investment.
What factors should we consider in evaluating Artificial Intelligence, some say Super Intelligence, how it has evolved, how it will evolve? What limits, if any, should be imposed by government on Artificial Intelligence? What are the similarities and differences for Articial Intelligence, and other examples of profound and uncertain change, opportunity or risk, such nuclear war, climate change, or overwhelming national debt>
What should we know about Xi Jinping’s visit to the White House? What topics will be discuss? What does each side hope to gain from the meeting? What are the parallels between China’s view of Taiwan and the South China Sea, and United States’s view of Cuba and the Gulf of Mexico, some say the Gulf of America?
What is important to know about the Julian Simon Award, and the person for whom the award is named, Julian Simon? Why is it understandable that some — particularly engineers and planners — predict future conditions by extrapolating, mechanically, from current conditions? What assumptions are implicit in this process? No change in technology? Or in tastes and customer preferences? Also, the idea of a downward sloping demand curve? It underestimates the power of human ingenuity? Innovation. Is this one of the reasons that we don’t hear much about input/output matches? Was Malthus one of the first, and most prominent, public policy analysts to make this mistaken assumption about human behavior?
What should we infer Bill Gates recent comments on Artificial Intelligence? And the comments by a recent insider of Anthropic about the ability of AI to accumulate wealth for itself and to use it to control human activity, with a 10 percent change to exterminate humans. The Tony Robbins Story about his AI assistant purchasing a car, and delivering it to his home.
How were our Founders influenced by the same factors as Adam Smith, author of the Wealth of Nations? Did the Founders read the writings of Adam Smith? What is the Age of Reason, and the Enlightenment? What are the parallels between a free marketplace of ideas, and a free market for goods and services?
What will be the effect of advances in Artificial Intelligence on job growth and economic growth — short term and long term? What examples did Adam Smith consider to understand the effect of invention and innovation on economic growth and prosperity? What is the connection between the freedom to choose, freedom to compete — and the freedom to think, and to create and invent? How was the Patent System another innovation of our Founders? And what is the connection to property rights, and the fundamental rights associated with private ownership of property?
What will be the effect on economic growth and innovation, if we were to adopt the proposal for a government sovereign wealth fund to own half the stock in artificial intelligence companies?
What do we know about increases in wages, and wage growth relative to inflation? Do we know about wage or income growth, for low wage workers, as compared with workers with higher levels of income? What should we understand about interest rates, deficits, and debt? How do large deficits, and rising debt, affect our home mortgage market, and thereby, home construction? What is the crowding out effect? How does crowding out affect Federal investment and spending, as well as private investment?
A recent report said the highest one percent of wealth holders held 30 percent of the wealth, and that the lowest 50 percent held 3 percent of the wealth. Does this seem like a reasonably accurate estimate? How does this take account of the capitalized value of social security and Medicare payments — both as an asset and as a liability?
What would Adam Smith say about Government ownership of the stock of a company that processes rare earth minerals? What are rare earth minerals, and why are they important? What other examples, such as in high tech companies, do we have? What issues are at stake? What is the difference between public/private partnerships and public investment in private companies? Is it only a matter of degree, or are there substantial qualitative differences? Under what conditions, historically, have exceptions been made? During times of war, and existential national crisis? Will those who want more federal stock ownership in private companies, find ways to assert existential crisis? Examples — global warming, other examples?
What would Asam Smith say about the current popularity, particularly among young adults in school, of socialism? What did Marx and Engels have to say about Socialism, as a stage between Capitalism and Communism?
A recently released indicates that Vermont is one of the few states in which population has declined, as the natural rate of growth is negative, and as out-migration exceeds in-migration. Particularly, declines in our working age population, and young families? What does this tell us about difficulties Vermont will face in growing the economy, and producing tax revenue, while limiting the growth in demand for government services?
