George Gilder and economic columnist Bill Schmick join Dalton Delan to discuss economic chaos, AI, income inequality, and America’s populist wave. Gilder sees opportunity in disruption, while Schmick calls for long-term patience amid change. Both agree: The private sector holds the key to recovery — not nostalgic policies or political noise.
In this installment of Eagle Reels, host Dalton Delan welcomes two provocative voices to unpack the chaotic landscape of modern American economics and politics.
George Gilder, a pioneering supply-side economist and former Berkshire Eagle reporter, joins fellow columnist Bill Schmick, a financial writer (and Eagle contributor) and market observer, for a lively and sometimes contrarian conversation.
Gilder, whose 1981 book “Wealth and Poverty” became a touchstone for the Reagan administration, offers a sweeping perspective on investment, technology and the enduring power of the private sector. Schmick, a Marine Corps veteran like Gilder, brings a pragmatic lens to the economic discontent fueling America’s latest wave of populism.
Together, they assess everything from Trump-era trade myths and income inequality to Social Security, AI and the deeper roots of national dissatisfaction. While their views diverge in tone, both men agree on one thing: Real change is coming, and it won’t be tidy. This discussion pulls no punches — tackling tough questions about government overreach, market dynamics, and the role of technology in shaping the American future. Buckle up.
At the Taconic High School broadcast studio, Eagle Reels host Dalton Delan interviews George Gilder and Bill Schmick.
DALTON DELAN: Welcome, George Gilder, and Bill Schmick, fellow columnist at The Berkshire Eagle.
GEORGE GILDER: I started at The Berkshire Eagle, as a reporter.
DELAN: Thank you for remembering your beginnings! You were an early supply-side economist.
GILDER: I was. I wrote Ronald Reagan’s favorite book, “Wealth and Poverty.” It was kind of an inspirational text for the Reagan economic agenda.
DELAN: Traditional GOP economics seem to be upturned right now.
GILDER: It’s chaos, and we’ll see what comes out of the chaos. I don’t pay an awful lot of attention to what Trump does. I mean, he’s full of “art of the deal.” If you read his book, you realize you shouldn’t believe anything he says, because he’s always bluffing and blustering. I think Trump genuinely believes that a trade surplus is national strength, and a trade gap is some sort of deleterious debt. This is just ignorant. Elon Musk said it well, about Peter Navarro being “dumb as a pile of bricks.” Trade deficit means an investment surplus. It’s a lot easier to buy stock, or buy a bond, than it is to actually create new productive capacity that can generate a trade surplus. So trade investment leads consumer demand. In other words, investment comes first.
DELAN: Bill, where do you think we’re going with the policies that we’re seeing?
BILL SCHMICK: The policies that we’re seeing now are chaotic. But in a way, we’re missing the forest for the trees by focusing on this administration or Trump. I don’t think Trump is either the modern-day Hitler, nor the coming of the Lord. We’re in an era of populism. We’ve had many of them in the history of the United States. In that populist era, we should be looking at what the American people are wanting, whether that’s right or wrong. Over the last 40 years, we have become, as a people, dissatisfied, distrustful, and we would like to see change in both the economic and political system. The problem is we all have a different idea of what that change should be. With only 90 days into this administration, within this chaos, there has been an enormous amount of change. This generation that’s coming to power, they demand change. This change is going to create, from an economic point of view, a lot of mistakes. We may agree that government is too big, but want to leave veterans alone. See what I’m saying?
DELAN: You’re both Marine Corps vets. Among federal workers laid off in the midst of this change and shrinking of government, one-third are vets. How do you feel about that?
GILDER: Vets are great. They’ve had nice jobs in the federal government, and maybe a good many of them will end. We’re trying to divide the people into all these various groups that have special interests in some federal program. That is a distraction from the real source of our wealth and jobs and prospects, which is the entrepreneurial private sector of America. It’s been hamstrung by an administrative state that has stifled initial public offerings — new companies forming and going public. This used to be a fundamental possibility in America, and now, as Peter Thiel puts it, to go public is to become nationalized. You have to submit to so many regulations that companies don’t go public until they’re really over the hill. So the public gets to buy companies that are over the hill, and private equity and venture capital get all the big new opportunities.
SCHMICK: I agree. In some respects, it’s a distraction. We all want changes, except for the veterans, except for the teachers. You can’t have change without breaking a couple of eggs.
DELAN: The idea of bringing back manufacturing, how real is that?
GILDER: The United States is second only to China in manufacturing in the world. China has four times as many people, nine times as many engineers, 15 times as many STEM graduates. We can’t go back to manufacturing. That whole image of somehow going back to some lost era is futile and a distraction. This whole idea that the U.S. is somehow a victim of the global economy is just utter nonsense. I mean, we have 70 percent of global market cap, and we’re 5 percent of world population. Most of the economic data you read and that preoccupies Washington is bogus. Judged by the amount of time a typical worker has to spend to earn goods and services, we’re in an era of super-abundance.
SCHMICK: Income inequality in this country has widened. A vast number of people feel that they’ve been left out of our super-abundance. Economic dissatisfaction is the key to why we’re in this period of populism. Something has to be done in this country for income inequality to be lessened, where government spending and government presence in the economy is reduced and the private sector comes back. If that is what it is going to take for income inequality in this country to lessen, so be it. That’s not something that’s going to happen in the next two to four years. It took 40 years of government spending and growth. I’m not saying that was wrong. That’s what we did, and we benefited from it. And yet, there are generations behind us that haven’t.
DELAN: Is Social Security a valid concern for those getting or about to get Social Security?
SCHMICK: I don’t think there should be a worry for those approaching Social Security. For the younger generations, yes, there will be a concern. Between that and Medicare, they’re unsustainable as it stands now.
DELAN: How will artificial intelligence transform our lives?
GILDER: It’ll increase the number of jobs and the productivity of every job.
DELAN: The fear that it’s going to take jobs — you would say: wrong.
GILDER: Did computers take jobs, or did they proliferate jobs and opportunities and create new wealth? This is just another computer platform. The confusion comes from the leading inventors of it, who imagine they’re creating some new singularity. [American computer scientist] Ray Kurzweil lives in Richmond a lot of the time. He’s a great friend of mine, and I admire him tremendously, but his singularity notion, I believe, is not correct. What new computer technologies do is produce distributed multiplicity, not a singularity. We’re not creating a new God in the sky that’s going to take all our jobs and reduce us to peons. We’re opening new opportunities for individuals to create new wealth. That’s what A.I. is about.
SCHMICK: I agree with that. The challenge will be, there’ll be job losses, there’ll be job gains. The challenge to this country is to prepare a population for opportunities in new jobs.
DELAN: If there’s one takeaway from our conversation today, what would that one thing be?
SCHMICK: We should be thinking about being prepared for another five to eight years of conflict and stress. Sometime in the 2030s, we will come out the other side. The more we can have patience with that, the better off we’ll be as a country.
DELAN: Don’t sell your stocks. Don’t move to Canada.
SCHMICK: Right.
GILDER: We’re in an era of unique super-abundance and opportunity, and we should understand this and not get depressed.