Daniella Ballou-Aares

"We all feel viscerally that it's really a barrier to American competitiveness over the long term. So they did polling of Harvard Business School alumni over the years. This is looking at comparing 2011 and 2019 polling. And what that polling alumni basically said is that people see the political system and the education system and the healthcare system as basically areas that are diminishing American competitiveness."

"One of the most core ways to look at this is through the trust in government, which has continuously trended down since the 1960s. And is pretty stubbornly low in the 20s across administrations now. This is from Pew, long term research that they've been doing polling of American people."

"Another way to look at it is the function of Congress. We see that it just continues to decline down from 750 to 250 bills. The left-hand chart here on enacted, so the productivity of Congress, the delivery of the product to Americans continues to go down. And not only is the amount of product, so to speak, in terms of policy going down, but we don't see any correlation between the preferences of citizens and the policies come out. This is actually relatively old data."