Medicaid Mess and Budget Battles

Who pays the costs of Medicaid?

Here’s a little chart ChatGPT made for me:

Here’s another one when I asked how often Congress includes multi-year spending cuts in whatever budget it manages to pass.

ChatGPT is not hallucinating but I am running out of patience with this budgetary bluster. Willy said it best, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

Here’s a chart I didn’t have to ask ChatGPT for because it’s burned into my brain.

I yell a lot in this episode where we talk about Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” as it makes its way through the budgetary “process” and what that means for Medicaid, SALT deductions, and the deficit.

I feel like it’s deserved.

Topics Discussed:

• The Costs of Medicaid

• Republicans Divided on the Budget

• Outside of Politics: Personal Creativity

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Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

• Reimagining Citizenship from Pantsuit Politics

Medicaid & Budget Resources

• Opinion | Josh Hawley: Don’t Cut Medicaid (The New York Times)

• Medicaid Financing: The Basics (KFF)

• Budget Basics: Medicaid (Peter G. Peterson Foundation)

• Republicans Propose Paring Medicaid Coverage but Steer Clear of Deeper Cuts (The New York Times)

Our Team’s Personal Substacks

• By Plane or By Page (Sarah’s Substack)

• Thoughts & Prayers (Beth’s Substack)

• Napp Time (Alise’s Substack)

• I, too, sing America (Maggie’s Substack)

• How Pantsuit Politics grew by moving to Substack (Sarah and Beth with Substack CEO Chris Best)

• Also, church breaks my heart (Beth via Thoughts & Prayers)

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

Our show is listener-supported. The community of paid subscribers here on Substack makes everything we do possible. Special thanks to our Executive Producers, some of whose names you hear at the end of each show. To join our community of supporters, become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

To search past episodes of the main show or our premium content, check out our content archive.

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:09] And this is Beth Silvers. You're listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today we're talking about Medicaid as Republicans try to enact their agenda through one big, beautiful bill. When it comes to Medicaid, they're facing some tough realities financially and a philosophical dilemma. Who are Republicans for and what is their promise to voters? We're going to break down those questions today. And then Outside of Politics, we are often asked how we managed to talk about issues like this all day, every day and stay sane, happy, focused, productive. There are lots of answers to that question, but one of them is leaning into more creative work. So both of us, plus Elise and Maggie, have been writing more over the past few months. We're going to tell you about that at the end of the show.

Sarah [00:00:48] But first, we are celebrating 10 years of Pantsuit Politics, and we have reached that milestone for one very simple reason. Listener's consistent financial support. Book deals come and go. Speaking gigs can disappear. And the ad-pocalypse can and has come for us at Pantsuit Politics. We are here, 10 years later, putting out episodes twice a week because of all of you who financially support the show. That's it.

Beth [00:01:19] We really try to honor that support by making a lot to thank you and to make your investment in us worth it. Sarah breaks down the headlines every morning. I go into a single issue in the afternoons. We make a bonus spicy episode on Thursdays, and it is spicy this week. We know that we make a lot. There's no test, it's just a buffet. We want you to take what you like, leave the rest, and know that you are contributing to our business in a way that allows us to continue to make these two free episodes every week.

Sarah [00:01:49] Now, for those of you who have not yet financially supported our show, we really need you. We would love to have you. And we have made something very special for this summer to lure you over to our community. We are going to do 30 days of meditations on re-imagining citizenship. It's going to begin on June 5th. They're going to be very short, two to five minutes every day. They're going to end on July 4th. We're going to refill our proverbial tanks that have been pretty emptied by the last few months, few years, and reflect on our role as citizens that connects us all one to each other.

Beth [00:02:29] And we're going to have some fun. Our beloved long-time listener and executive producer, Norma, who is also known as the driest wit in every comment thread, is bringing the Pantsuit Politics Film Club to the Spice Cabinet. She has selected six films in complimentary pairs. We'll talk about them over the course of the summer in three different chats. The first two are good ones. Women Talking and 12 Angry Men. She's just coming out of the gate strong. So it promises to be a very special summer at the Spice Cabinet. We really want you to be there. We really think this is where we do some of our best work. We really this is where the best connections happen in our community.

[00:03:07] We really think there's something special going on here and we want you be part of it. So please join us. You can find the link in the show notes on our social media at Pantsuitpoliticsshow.com. Next up, let's talk about Medicaid. Sarah, I was thinking about the price of Medicaid, which is what is driving the discussions in Congress right now, and how important it is to just stay kind of zoomed out on the fact that healthcare inflation has been going on a lot longer than we've been talking about inflation for anything else, much longer than we'd been chatting about the price of eggs. And that is because we keep getting better at healthcare. People get more specialized, the equipment gets better, the drugs get better. The regulations get tighter, and that's had some really amazing results, and it has been really expensive.

Sarah [00:04:10] Yeah, and I think the problem with all these conversations and what fuels so much of the Medicaid discussion, it fuels any conversation about healthcare, is people feel like we are spending more and the specialists get more specialized, but overall people are still pretty unhappy with healthcare in this country. They're certainly unhappy with the state of health, I would say, in this county, in their own lives, and the lives around them. And so I think that's bubbling underneath any conversation about Medicaid. People are mad about what they're paying for their own healthcare. They're definitely mad if their taxes are paying for other people's healthcare.

Beth [00:04:52] I think that what we are able to do in healthcare on some unconscious level raises everyone's expectations about what our quality of life ought to be like. And I think that we also have to recognize that we just don't want to get sick in general. We don't want to interact with the healthcare system much if we don't have to. I also have just been thinking a lot about how I'm not sure insurance squares with bodies because most insurance is for things and for catastrophic wreckage of things that can then be prepared and then you're kind of done and you move on from it. And the people for whom health insurance is absolutely essential, it's not a one-time catastrophe that is then remedied and they are restored to their condition before the catastrophe. It is an ongoing life-changing situation. And I think that's part of why we keep running into insurance making everyone unhappy because we're trying to spread that cost over a risk pool the way we would if we were talking about cars or houses; and bodies are just so much more complicated than that.

Sarah [00:06:06] Well, Medicaid gets the closest to what the rest of the world has decided, which is we're not going to try to particularly find a way to profit from spreading that risk over people we're choosing to insure us. So most of the world, particularly Europe, parts of Asia, Canada, obviously have government health insurance, has its own problems-- but that’s the thing, it's like if you put the 68 million people on Medicare, which is public health insurance for people over the age of 65, and the 70 million people that are on Medicaid, which is Public Health Insurance for low-income families and people with certain disabilities, well, that's about half of America. So we got half of America under one system, half of American under the other system, a healthcare industry trying to navigate both systems. Boy, whatever could go wrong.

Beth [00:06:59] And those systems are designed as a replica of the private insurance systems. And so they are financially unsustainable. Even as we've tried to figure it out, with Medicaid we have this partnership between the federal government and the states, we're still in this model that I think fundamentally leads to a lot of unhappiness because you're trying to manage care and access to keep the cost down. And that cost focus in any part of the system just puts a lot pressure everywhere. So I think we recognize, first of all, it is an imperfect system. It is a very, very expensive system. Right now, Medicaid accounts for about 20% of total healthcare spending, all healthcare spending. A fifth of it is Medicaid. That's again how many people are involved in the severity or the intensity of the care that they need. And the federal government pays part of those costs.

[00:08:03] If you have seen in reporting about this, the acronym FMAP, that's the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage. So we don't write a federal budget and say here are the number of dollars we will spend on Medicaid this year. We just know that we will have to spend dollars on Medicaid this year and we kind of anticipate what that might look like based on past experience. But we're putting in a percentage to go along with what states are paying. And what states pay depends on the wealth of those states. There is an income per capita formula. So the wealthiest states like California and Massachusetts get 50% of their costs paid by the federal government. Mississippi, with the lowest per capita income, gets 77% paid by federal government

Sarah [00:08:49] And that just adds up to a lot of money. The fiscal year 2023 Medicaid spending totaled $880 billion. The federal government paid 69% of that- $606 billion, about 8% of the federal budget.

Beth [00:09:05] And in order to cut taxes, House Republicans are trying to get that number down. They want to give $5 trillion in tax breaks. And because of that, they need to find at least 1.5 trillion in spending reductions from Medicaid food stamps and green energy programs. I don't know how you spend that when the bulk of the revenue that we are going to lose from taxes would have been paid by people who make $400,000 or more a year. So you really are taking money from the bottom in order to benefit the top of the income scale.

Sarah [00:09:46] I think that's a great way to say it. People who make over $400,000 a year are going to get to keep more of their money and people on Medicaid are going to lose their benefits. That seem like an unfair spin.

Beth [00:10:00] And it is plain enough that it is dividing the Republican conference. So that's what we're going to talk about next. Sarah, I know you were really interested in an editorial from Josh Hawley because it really does lay out the contours of the division in the new MAGA Republican Party.

Sarah [00:10:27] Well, look, Josh Cawley is a great politician, and he understands, and has for a long time, and has been motivated to-- that's why Kim and Elizabeth Warren are like, I don't know if they're buddies, but they work on a lot of legislation together, because he is motivated to be the party of the working class. He really wants to reformulate the Republican party as a party that protects people at the bottom end of the socioeconomic spectrum and their benefits under Medicaid and the like. To me, it's not even just the people who are like, okay, I want to protect and expand Medicaid. I want to be the party of the working class. To me, the toughest one is like you have the fiscal hawks who really haven't they always been a bit out of place in a party that's so desperate to cut taxes? I guess not when money was cheap and our interest rates were low. Maybe that worked for a long time, right? You could square that corner.

Beth [00:11:36] Well, I think you square it philosophically by saying the fiscal hawks are not only fiscal hawks, they fundamentally don't believe that government should be collecting taxes because they don't think government should do things. And so they both think people should keep more of their own money and government should stay out of basically every aspect of life.

Sarah [00:11:58] To me, here's the thing, if you are a Josh Hawley or you're a Sarah Stewart Holland, and you don't want to see these work requirements, which basically just increase the administrative burden on the government, they cost money, they keep people away from benefits that they qualify for because you have to jump through so many confusing hoops, be happy. They pushed them to 2029. All the committees stayed in for hours and hours and hours marking up these bills, and they pushed all this out to 2029. They do this all the time. If you scratch at the surface of so much of these budget talks, particularly hilarious to me-- I mean, first of all, I looked up the numbers. It's like 95% of the time, they don't do reconciliation. They don't really do with the part of the process they're supposed to where they lay out the priorities. Like 75% of time they don't do the 12 bills that they're supposed to pass, the 12 separate appropriation bills. I think they've done that like twice in the last 15 years.

[00:12:59] And then even when they get it through, even when I get an actual budget bill through, here's what they do, they sequester or they push it off knowing that when that timeline hits, everybody will be like, oh, goody, nobody's paying attention. We're not doing any of this. They're not going to do these work requirements. It's like 2029 and states can get out of it if they don't want to. It's too hard. So if you're a person who actually hates Medicaid and wants it to be harder for people to get on Medicaid, (not Josh Hawley, but some other portion of the Republican party who fundamentally just believes people shouldn't be on Medicaid) I'd be mad because they're not going to do this. They pushed it to 2029. What do you think is going to happen then? Give me a break.

Beth [00:13:43] Well, they pushed it to 2029, so it'll be a different president. They don't want Donald Trump to be saddled with this because he doesn't want anyone saying that he cut Medicaid in any way. And we know the work requirements don't work because we've tried them lots. Now, that's still a problem politically because I think a lot of people think work requirements sound like common sense. I think that that is probably a winner in the spin of all of this for Republicans.

Sarah [00:14:06] I don't know, they have a lot of people on Medicaid. You still think it sounds like a winner?

Beth [00:14:12] Well, I think it sounds like a winner. I think when people run into the reality of it, it will not be. It will not be popular.

Sarah [00:14:18] They're clearly concerned. Did you catch I think it was Guthrie's committee who passed a rule at the beginning of the markup that lasted for like 23 hours that you could not use another representative's name?

Beth [00:14:29] It was 26 hours, but yes. Yeah, 26 hours to do lots of little things. And I think that they believe that adding this bureaucracy won't ultimately get assigned to them because people are used to the government being big and bureaucratic. So I think they're trying to like work around the margins here. It's like a sneaky way to make it harder for people to get access to care, and make it harder for people to afford it. And that's the big thing. There are lots of estimates about how many people will lose healthcare because of this. The biggest piece to me is that way more people than that will have trouble paying for their healthcare. Lots of people on Medicare, so they've reached 65, they're on Medicare now, cannot afford the Medicare co-pays. And so they have Medicaid to help them pay for their Medicare. That's a population that will really suffer under this bill.

Sarah [00:15:25] The bigger issue to me is I don't care if you institute your most beloved dream of work requirements, it doesn't pay for your tax cuts. It doesn't matter. I don't care if you get your conservative wet dream and get all these work requirements and roll it out like Georgia has, because also, PS, it costs the government money to do all this work. Especially since you've probably fired half the people that are supposed to do it under DOGE. Doesn't matter. Where's Chip Roy? It doesn't matter. It's not going to pay for the tax cuts. It's not going to pay for the extension from 2017. It's not going to pay no tax on tips. It's not going to no tax on overtime. They dropped the social security. My dad came in this morning, he's like, it's going to really help me. I'm like, that's not in there. They're still going to tax social security.

[00:16:16] So they've been selling that, it landed, people think they're going to get it and they're not. Even the overtime stuff is like they're hiding the ball. I think it's still taxed on payroll, but not on an income or something like that. But it doesn't even matter. It's not going to pay for it. All these people that have been crowing about the deficit and spending under Medicaid and spending under Medicare, and they've got both houses and the presidency, and they are not going to get anywhere near addressing this deficit.

Beth [00:16:55] And I don't think they'd be anywhere near addressing the deficit without the tax cuts. Chip Roy is out there. He has said to say that we have a gulf is an understatement. Like the Freedom Caucus is really mad about how this is coming together because what's happening is what always happens. You have just a bunch of different factions at work and everybody gets a little bit of what they want but not the whole thing. And so we end up just continuing to balloon the deficit and the debt. I think it's really interesting that you have the Republicans who get tagged with the label moderate, which I think is a bizarre tag in today's political climate for just about anyone. But the fight that they're waging is for the salt deduction. So they want a cap in states that tax people a lot under state law. They want a bigger break on federal taxes for people who are paying a lot in their states. And that's the hill that they are willing to die on. Meanwhile, you have people fighting for Medicaid.

[00:17:56] Meanwhile, you have people saying, "We're spending too much money, we can't possibly do all that." But it seems like everybody's united around the tax cut portion. It's like that part can't be debated. And that's what I think it's weird. I think it’s healthy to debate a lot of this stuff. I was listening to one of our old episodes and I was mad at myself listening back to it because I was really apologetic about my defense of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. It was in a reconciliation process and those two were holding things up for Democrats. And I was like, well, I kind of think they have good points, and I'm sorry, I know everybody's mad about that. And I'm listening back, I'm like, why are you sorry? It's good, parties should debate. There should be fights about these things. They're important. This is the job of Congress to fight these things out. It's wild to me that there isn't a substantive real fight about the scope of these tax cuts within the Republican Party.

Sarah [00:18:49] It's because this is our fault. This is the people of the United States' fault. All we want is tax cuts. All we want forever and always is tax cuts. There has been a lot of things that have changed over my time in the American political system. Lots and lots of things are different from like when George H. W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton. But guess what isn't? No one wants to increase taxes. No one want to look at people and say, we can't cut taxes forever, continuously, until the end of time. First of all, eventually we get to zero. And second of all we're a bigger, more complicated country. It's expensive and no one wants do it. But you know what, there was a glimmer when Donald Trump like a week ago was like, maybe we could raise taxes on the super rich.

[00:19:45] Great idea. Everybody likes that idea. Could we agree on that? Could y'all just instead of extending the 2017 tax cuts, which will primarily benefit the wealthy, could you maybe raise taxes on the wealthy? That'd be great. Something, literally anything to raise money. I know, deep down, all of you understand that we are not going to address our massive deficit with cuts. Surely to God, in your heart of hearts, when you're alone in the middle of the night at 3 a.m., just you and the Holy Spirit, can be honest about that.

Beth [00:20:30] On the one hand, I think it's correct that the public needs to get right with the fact that we can't forever be paying less and receiving more, because that's really what we want. We want to be paying and receiving more. On the other hand, I don't really fault people for saying these systems seem pretty flawed and they are cutting the federal government back. And I do feel like I'm getting less all the time, so I would like to pay less for it. It makes me sad that this Medicaid fight doesn't seem to be prompting a discussion around like what our alternative systems are. Is this the best way? Could we gradually transition to a saner system? I think that Mark Cuban is really onto something when he talks about how maybe at the federal level, we need to say there is a percentage of every person's income beyond which they should not have to pay anymore for healthcare. There's an acceptable percentage of every person’s budget that could go to healthcare. And if they exceed that percentage, we're just going to pay for it. Maybe that's what we need to do.

[00:21:33] I think we need rewire the system. I think the federal system looking like private insurance sort of but not and influencing private insurance but sort of, but not, and all of that influencing what people actually charge for stuff but not, we just keep dabbling. This is what happens every time Congress takes a swing at it. They dabble. And I know that was a critique of the Affordable Care Act. There were people saying, that ended up dabbling more than we wanted to. We wanted to fundamentally reorder things, and instead we dabbled. And you can't change it all overnight, but you could have those debates. And watching Congress continuously refuse to have those debates in a meaningful way that go somewhere and plan and do the hard work of saying to people, "Yeah, even while I'm still sitting in this seat, you're going to experience some change. I'm not just going to kick it down the road and tell you I did something," is frustrating. And so I get why public sentiment is like, yeah, charge me less. You seem to be doing less. I'd like to pay you less to do it. I think that's kind of the vibe.

Sarah [00:22:36] I'm ready for all kinds of big changes. I'm done with the dabbling. I like the percentage of income. I would like an income cap on Medicare. I'm sorry. Like, Bill Gates probably qualifies for Medicare. Why? What are we doing? Why are the super wealthy qualifying for Medicare? That's what's so wild to me. America is so inconsistent. It's like if you're poor, what the heck? Why are we paying for things for you? But it doesn't matter how rich you are, we'll gladly pay for your healthcare and Medicare. What? That doesn't make any sense, guys. That's not philosophically consistent at all. So there's all kinds of things I'd like to go back to the drawing board on with some of our social safety net. And it's not like it has to be like immediately. You phase it in. The people who signed up for a certain system, fine. We cover you until you're outside of it, but the people signing up now, we're going to do things a little bit differently. I just don't know why we keep dabbling. I mean, we're not even dabbling. 2029, my ass. Ain't nothing going to happen in 2029.

Beth [00:23:41] I think what we mostly want is a social safety net where the federal government is poverty insurance-- and not even insurance, where the government is a backstop to extreme poverty. I think that's what most of us are looking for. And I think a lot of the sentiment that both conservatives and progressives have criticized in very different contexts over time is that the government, by trying to not directly be that ends up exercising a lot of control. And that control starts to look dumb when you map it on top of 330 million people over 56 or whatever we are at states and territories. It's really hard to have your fingers in everything when we are this diverse. And so I just think a lot of these systems amount to the public saying please just ensure that there is some standard of living beyond which we do not let one another fall. And do that without all of the paperwork and paternalism. But that is not the conversation in Congress. This is more paternalism. This is you have to prove to us that you're working these many hours a week. And make sure you are working those hours even though you qualify for Medicaid. So a lot of things in your life are not conducive to supporting your full-time employment right now. It's bananas. And it's false. It reads as false.

Sarah [00:25:07] It doesn't even matter. He doesn't have the votes. Why are we spending 26 hours at committee meetings for bills you don't have to votes for? You can lose three. Right now you've definitely lost more than three in the House, much less in the Senate, where Hawley's like, "I'm not voting for it." Like, what are we doing? What are we going to do with this big, beautiful bill? I would like to ask.

Beth [00:25:28] And I think that that gets to this breakdown in Congress, and I know that there is a lot that we've complimented former Speaker Pelosi on lately, but she also cares just about the House. And a lot of people care just about the Senate. And I Think what we're seeing right now with Mike Johnson is that the House for their members, for their votes in their districts, need to tell people, well, we did it. It was the Senate. If you're unhappy with the substantive result, blame the Senate or blame the Democrats or blame anybody but me. That's why they spend 26 hours on this because they want to be able to say, "I did the thing. So keep electing me and be mad at everything else in the system." I have thought Mike Johnson didn't have the votes before and he has proven me wrong. So we'll see how he continues to navigate this. He says it's going to be done by Memorial Day. So that's our deadline hanging out there. We'll see. And the Senate says it absolutely is not going to all be done by Memorial Day. We'll be continuing to watch this dance between Mike Johnson and John Thune and the President of the United States.

[00:26:31] And I really appreciate hearing from all of you who have experience with Medicaid or who have an understanding of how these cuts would affect your state because that's the part we didn't really cover. Medicaid is administered very differently across the states. So when you make these changes around the periphery, there is a very disparate impact depending on how the state program is set up. So we'd love to hear from you about what the effects might be in your state. And next up, we're going to take our exhale of the episode in Outside of Politics. Sarah, I don't know about you, but I feel like whenever I tell people what I do for a living, they're like, "And how are you even minimally happy?" And part of my answer to that is I do get to go beyond the headlines. I don't just see the news alert and get mad. I get to see the news alert and then say, "I wonder what's going on there." And dig into it and spend as many hours as I need to getting behind it. And that kind of helps me work through it. But also, I think all of us once we knew the election results decided really intentionally to shore up the self-care components of our lives.

Sarah [00:27:52] Yeah, a big component for me is I have to get out of my own head. And the main two ways I do that are reading and traveling. Definitely reading because that's beyond the sleep. That's the only time when my brain is not very busy. And so I write about both of those things on Substack over the last year. I started mine in the beginning of 2024, but in the last three months, six months probably, you've started a Substack, Maggie started a Substack, Alise has started a Substack. So clearly there's some creative energy out there. I started mine in part because I was putting all my summaries of what I'd read on Instagram, and I'm really trying to not work for free for Instagram or Facebook. And so I was like, this is dumb. I want to put this in a place for myself, a place that I own that I can tell people that this is where you can find my reading reviews, this is where you can find my thoughts on whatever the latest it novel is, or the classic piece I'm reading over the course of the year. And so I did that all last year and I really, really loved it. And thought, well, what else can I move over to Substack? Because I write these travel itineraries, I travel so much.

[00:29:04] And basically the situation is I love all y'all, but I can't answer you one by one in my DMs about where I stayed, what Airbnb I went to and where I ate. So I put every trip in these itineraries and they're literally like this is what we did. This afternoon we ate here. This is the line we encountered, here's how to miss it. I've written them up about all our national park trips, about all are European trips. I wrote a big one I'm really proud of about Japan. And so I was like, well, I'm going to move all this over to Substack, too. I really love it. I really loved writing those. It feels like I get a little bit something else out of all the work it takes to plan them because it's a lot of work to plan these trips. And so my little Substack is now called By Plane or By Page. And I think it's just a great space. I like being over there. I like being on notes. I like seeing what y'all are writing. I like having the space. It feels very much like kind of beginning days of blogging where you have a thought and you're like, I have some things I like to say. But we can't all fit it in two episodes a week. We can't always fit it in even the stuff we make on our Pantsuit Politics Substack. Creativity breeds creativity, and the more you write, the more think, and the more you have to say. And it's just really nice to have a place in a community over there to share all that.

Beth [00:30:25] We did a live video chat with the CEO of Substack a few months ago now, I guess, talking about our experience moving over there. And I said in that video that to me Substack feels like a mall. There are some people who are very precious about it as sort of a writerly community for certain types of writers. And I don't feel that way. I feel like Substack is a mall and it's nice because you can set up just about any kind of store there and people see all the stores as they're browsing through and sometimes you go there because there's an anchor store that you want to visit but then maybe you find other things and sometimes you just like-- everybody's just walking around seeing what they like and there's something for everyone. And so because it feels just so open like that to me, it felt like a good place to maybe put some of the creative energy that I didn't really know what to do with. I think I have been wrestling with how much to talk about my faith on the show. It is such a big part of my life. It is a big focus of how I want to grow as a person right now.

[00:31:41] I'm really aware of the fact that people listen in all different spaces around faith, and some folks are really hurt by churches and don't want to come to their politics show and have that hurt activated. Some folks just think it's all like hocus pocus and don' want to hear about it anyway. So I've wanted a space to explore that more and to explore it in different forms. I tend to write in very short form on Substack. I write a lot of poetry. I call my Substack Thoughts and Prayers because it is often just like a quick thought but that I wanted to get out and share. I just wrote a piece about how I called it Also Church Breaks My Heart, because I am in a lot of spaces talking about how much I love church and how committed I am to it, and that's true, but I wanted it to say that it's also really hard, and open some conversation about that. So I kind of think of my Substack as like this tiny little craft shop in the mall, that you're like, wonder how they're affording the lease here. But it is because it's just such an open canvas for people to come and do their thing on and I really enjoy that.

Sarah [00:32:55] Yeah, I think it's such a great space, no matter what you're interested. Obviously, I'm a big reader. The amount of Substacks that are like for longreads are incredible. If you've like, I've always wanted to read this book, but I feel like I can't tackle it alone. Like I'm reading War and Peace with Footnotes and Tangents this year. It's such gift. It's a such incredible way to read along with things. I even have my own little book club over at Substack called First Books Book Club, where we're reading, really, really famous, best-selling author's first books that made them famous. So we read Daniel Steele's Passions Promise. And now we're reading James Patterson, Along Came a Spider. Going to read Tom Clancy, Louis Lamour. So reading together that way, I feel like it's a really good space for book clubs and there's a lot. Whatever you want to read or read along with, you can. Maggie's doing one where she reads all the presidential biographies. Hers is called I Too Sing America, but she wants to read them written by women.

[00:33:53] Some of y'all going to have to join Maggie because some of y'all going to have to write these biographies because there's not a biography of every president written by a woman. So you're going to have to join Maggi over there and help her out on her project by writing some of these actual presidential biographies. And then Alise writes Napp Time after her last name. We talked her into that. She wasn't sure about it, but I was like, "No, Alise, it's awesome." Because she's coming out from being in the trenches of early motherhood and has a lot of creative energy. So it's just fun to see how people use the space and if they put tight bounds around what they write about there or if it's totally open. I think it's just really fun to see not just our team but how all kinds of people use that creative energy, what they have to say, how they want to say it. There's some people spilling realty on the publishing industry right now if you're into that over on Substack. So whatever you're fascinated by, if you want to hear more from our team, it's a great place to be.

Beth [00:34:51] Yeah, Alise is really writing about like food and culture, movies and books and things that she enjoys. I think that the four different personalities involved in our business really come through on these individual creative pursuits that we're into. And I do think you can see how we're all just trying to be like full and complete and pretty transparent people. So, if somewhere in that mall there's something else that appeals to you, we'd love to see you there. And we'd also love to hear about what you're writing, because we know many, many of you write on Substack and elsewhere on the internet and are doing lots of things to kind of feed who you are in a stressful time.

Sarah [00:35:31] And, of course, if you do not yet financially support Pantsuit Politics, we need you. Our goal is to get to 5,000 paid subscribers on our Pantsuit Politics Substack where we have a film club and also our own book club and lots of shows, the Good News Brief every Thursday. There's so much that you can partake in over there. We depend on you to make these two free shows a week here at Pantsuit Politics. So we really hope that if you've ever considered financially support our show, this membership drive will be the time you finally decide to make the leap and join us over at Substack.

Beth [00:36:07] Thank you so much for spending time with us today. We'll be back with you on Tuesday with another new episode. Until then, have the best weekend available to you.