A Syllabus for Ivanka
Ivanka says Americans “don’t want a guaranteed living wage;” the 6 minutes of the Cohen hearing that may mean we finally get to see Trump’s tax returns; PLUS: inside Miami-Dade College’s quest to keep its adjuncts from organizing. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.
This week on Off-Kilter:
- Ivanka (no expert on wages) says Americans “don’t want a guaranteed living wage”
- Meanwhile, in the real world: “A living wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid. A diet. A stress reliever. It is a contraceptive, preventing teenage pregnancy. It prevents premature death. It shields children from neglect.” (Read Matthew Desmond in the New York Times)
- The four bills in Congress that would close racist & ableist loopholes in the New Deal (read Rachel West for TalkPoverty)
- “Income inequality is rising so fast, our data literally can’t keep up” (read EPI in the Washington Post)
- Factoid of the week #1: Two-thirds of U.S. kids live in asset poverty
- Factoid of the week #2: The richest 1% own 40 times the average family’s wealth
- The 6 minutes of the Cohen hearing that may mean we finally get to see Trump’s tax returns
- Universal health care gets another shot in the arm
- Congressional Dems speak out against Trump’s SNAP rule — and three #HungerFighters from this week’s national anti-hunger conference on how their lived experience shows why #SNAPMatters
- Miami-Dade College is going to shameful lengths to keep its adjuncts from organizing
- and more…
… in an all-ICYMI episode. (That’s right, Indivisible’s Chad Bolt stays all pod long.) (Warning: this episode contains singing.)
This week’s transcript:
REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off Kilter, we are going all ‘In Case You Missed It’ all episode long because we had a guest get sick, things happen but that means I get to spend lots and lots and lots more time with my beloved co-host Chad Bolt and hey, there is no shortage of news to catch up on this week so I’m down if you are Chad.
CHAD BOLT: I’m here for it.
VALLAS: Are you here all pod long?
[SINGING TO THE TUNE OF “ALL NIGHT LONG” BY LIONEL RICHIE]
BOLT: All pod long!
VALLAS: Oh! There it is, we’ve got Will doing back up guys. This is going to be a fun episode, you know it’s going to be fun becase we’re going to start with a headline of the week and that headline of the week says a lot and it’s Chad, I’m just going to throw this right over to you.
BOLT: It sure does. Lay it on me.
VALLAS: Ivanka Trump, who receives millions for existing says Americans don’t want a guaranteed living wage. That of course comes to us from Think Progress who nailed it on the headline front this week. Before I bring you in on this Chad, let’s get a little clip of Ivanka saying what she said.
[START CLIP]
IVANKA TRUMP: I don’t think most Americans in their heart want to be given something. I’ve spent a lot of time traveling around this country over the last four years, people want to work for what they get. So I think this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people want. They want the ability to be able to secure a job, they want the ability to live in a country where there’s the potential for upward mobility.
[END CLIP]
VALLAS: So Chad —
BOLT: Let’s get right into it. Are you kidding me?!
[LAUGHTER]
VALLAS: I think that is the appropriate initial response.
BOLT: This is absurd coming from Ivanka Trump who thanks to the tax law her dad and his Republican enablers pushed through congress now stands to inherit at least $22 million tax free —
VALLAS: For existing.
BOLT: For just doing nothing?!
VALLAS: I will say before we even get to all the levels of the hypocrisy because it is an onion of hypocrisy and also frankly a piece that The Onion almost couldn’t have come up with itself if it had tried while we’re on onions, I just want to start by saying that this reflects about as much understanding of work as her father appears to have when it comes to say, grocery stores because working and receiving a living wage, that’s the quid pro quo, when you work and you get the living wage that’s not doing nothing and so maybe she doesn’t understand how wages work but that also wouldn’t surprise me.
BOLT: I would not also be surprised at all, in fact because her financial disclosures tell us that along with her husband Jared Kushner they earn $82 million in outside income through interest, capital gains, and royalties from their businesses and in Ivanka’s case that her father helped her start, these are not wages. We’re talking royalities, when the headline says she’s bringing in money just for existing —
VALLAS: It’s not wrong.
BOLT: It’s not wrong.
VALLAS: It’s not hyperbole. This is actually the life she leads. AOC said it well as she often does on the Twitters, here’s AOC’s tweet in response, “As a person who actually worked for tips and hourly wages in my life, instead of having to learn about it secondhand” and I frankly wouldn’t even give Ivanka that much because clearly she hasn’t learned about it at all, “I can tell you,” AOC continues, “that most people want to be paid enough to live. A living wage it’s a gift, it’s a right, workers are often paid far less than the value they create.” And she’s right on the money.
BOLT: Yeah absolutely, I know Rebecca you and me both are former tipped workers making the tipped minimum wage and that totally resonates with me, it’s like yeah, I think most workers if not all workers want to get paid more for the work they’re doing.
VALLAS: And deserve to be paid more, especially I really appreciate AOC’s note there about workers being paid less than the value that they create that we don’t talk nearly enough as a society about how much we have devalued work and labor, especially given that we’ve watched, and this statistic comes to us from the Economic Policy Institute, our friends over at EPI, productivity has grown 6.2 times more than workers’ pay since 1973. So just think about that, the worker productivity that workers through their labor are producing and we talk plenty about shareholders on this show which wealthy shareholders, CEOs are all reaping the benefits of as well as rich people across this country in varying forms. Those types of enrichment are all being concentrated at the top thanks to increased productivity but while workers are being paid less and less and less in real terms despite working harder than ever before and producing more than ever before.
BOLT: It’s not like this is an accident. It’s not like whoops, well the gains just fewer and fewer of the gains are going to the workers. These are all conscious choices, it’s lax anti-trust laws that have allowed corporate consolidation that disempowers workers, it’s the disempowering of worker unions, it’s changes in CEO compensation, in the tax treatment of CEO compensation, it’s the tax law that was passed in 2017 encouraging record levels of stock buy backs that enrich shareholders.
VALLAS: And did nothing to boost worker pay.
BOLT: Exactly, these are all conscious choices that congress has made and underscores the need to send folks to Washington who are going to make different choices.
VALLAS: And Chad you started to tee this up and I really want to go hard on this because I think it’s important not just as a talking point but really for folks to understand the policy. It’s not just a headline to say that Ivanka receives millions just for existing, there are policies in play and ones that Republicans in office are actually making even worse and making more extreme in terms of the concentration of wealth that they’re creating in the dynasties that they’re allowing to flourish and those many of which come from, not just all the various tax policies you just mentioned but one specific one and that is the estate tax repeal that is high on the list of Ivanka’s own father.
BOLT: That’s exactly right. It’s not bad enough that when Republicans passed the tax law at the end of 2017 there was a huge expansion in the value of an estate that was exempted from the estate tax. A couple can now inherit $22 million tax free and it’s not until the 22 millionth and first dollar that you have to start paying the estate tax. But it’s also the Republicans aren’t done, they would like to get rid of it altogether. And that is a terrible, terrible policy idea. The estate tax is one of the best weapons we have against the concentration of wealth in this country and it’s really encouraging to see that candidates for president for example on the Democratic side have proposals to expand the estate tax like we should both subject more of the value of the estate tax and raise the rate itself and invest that money in actually helping working families get ahead.
VALLAS: This has been a big part of the conversation that AOC and Elizabeth Warren and others have all been championing that we need to be taxing wealth in addition to income. That’s not something that Republicans are interested in hearing about and they’ve all been panicking in droves that all of a sudden we’re actually having a conversation as a country, we’ve talked about this a little bit in the last few weeks on this show about making sure that obscenely wealthy people who have second and third yachts are paying something that starts to resemble their fair share. Actually last week it was fun, the snow day gummed up our regularly scheduled programming and so we had a little best of snow day and I was listening to it this weekend and one of the segments that we had brought back was one of my favorites, actually back from before the show was Off Kilter, it was back from when it was Talk Poverty Radio.
BOLT: Nice, throwback.
VALLAS: Right, TBT, Talk Poverty Radio and it actually featured your current boss before he was your boss, before he was at Indivisible his name is Ezra Levin, folks on this show I’m sure know him.
BOLT: But just as awesome.
VALLAS: He has always been awesome and he back in the day was at the Corporation for Enterprise Development which is now called Prosperity Now, an organization you also worked for, you used to work for him there too.
BOLT: That’s right, you’ve got all the history.
VALLAS: I mean you know, I did my checking on you before I put you on this show as a regular, didn’t I?
BOLT: We go way back.
VALLAS: Yeah, also I know and love you. But Ezra came on with Alex Lawson, this was the segment we’re reviving and we were having a conversation, the three of us, really the founding fathers of this country and the original principles on which this nation was founded and how much they were rooted in exactly the kinds of problems that you’re describing right now which was about trying to reduce the concentration of wealth and the inherited wealth and the concentrated power that goes along with that in a way that they didn’t want that to be what this country was about. It was intended to be a place and this was what we mean when we say the American dream, much as that phrase gets coopted by the right all the time about everyone having the chance to make something of themselves, even if they weren’t born into a certain segment of this society. That is exactly what this kind of a policy debate gets into and bringing it back to Ivanka, here she’s trying to have it both ways. I want to sit here and do nothing for my wealth but people who are working two and three and four jobs to try to support their families and put food on the table, those people no, we can’t have a minimum wage for them. she walked it back a little bit in some Fox News assists, trying to paper over the obvious botch she had been quoted saying there shouldn’t be a minimum wage but that’s the people she’s talking about and she doesn’t even know.
BOLT: Yep. That’s exactly right.
VALLAS: So Chad the conversation that I wish we were having more of here so let’s have the conversation we want to have.
BOLT: Let’s do it.
VALLAS: I don’t want it to be able Ivanka anymore, I’ve had my fill, I’ve had my fill of Ivanka. I think that where this really should go and where maybe if Ivanka read this piece in The New York Times.
BOLT: She probably should.
VALLAS: So Ivanka, here, we’ve got some reading for you my dear. It comes to us from Matt Desmond, who of course is a Pulitzer Prize winning public sociologist.
BOLT: Wrote “Evicted”.
VALLAS: Wrote “Evicted”, had him on the show back in the day, actually when the show was Talk Poverty Radio, right, so two TBTs Talk Poverty Radio references there, he wrote this amazing piece on the minimum wage. Chad tell us about it, you read it.
BOLT: Yeah it’s a great piece that really pulls together probably what a lot of us think is obvious and that’s that actually paying people more money, in this case through a higher minimum wage actually improves their lives. It tells the story of a couple of different low wage workers, one is a fast worker named Julio Payes who lives in Emeryville, California. He was working multiple low wage jobs and he actually got involved in the Fight for $15 before Emeryville eventually raises its’ minimum wage. Not only, in fact, did they raise it to $15 but in 2019 it goes up to $16.
VALLAS: Amazing success for that movement.
BOLT: Which is amazing, these are incredible stories of workers who mobilized and now have seen an improvement in their own lives. Part of the story was that he has a younger brother who saw how much his older brother was going to work and offered to pay for an hour of his time to spend time with him.
VALLAS: I have to say, of all the parts of this amazing piece, and I want you to read a section from it in just a second because as we were talking about before we were taping, it reads almost like poetry in parts because Matt Desmond is such a beautiful writer, as anyone who’s read “Evicted” is aware. But in telling this piece of this man’s story, it’s shared that his little brother, and the context here actually to back up a little bit because people might be wondering well yeah, he’s a teenager or a young person, of course he’s getting minimum wage. He was trying to support the family. And so here he was, interrupting his life and going and working multiple jobs to try to support his family, and yet an 8 year old brother who wasn’t getting to spend any time with him because his brother who was then 24 years old I think and working all these jobs was working just these bananas hours and his brother comes to him and says I want to save up money, how much for an hour of your time? Just let that sink in. Let that sink in, sorry, there’s other people’s stories to share too.
BOLT: I was as moved by this piece as you were. One of the other stories is a woman named Alexandria Cutler who was a food service worker in Pittsburgh and she went to the doctor, had a number of health problems, her doctor said it might be your poor diet and it turned out she was eating a lot of fast food and in a stroke of good fortune her employer through an accounting error actually starting paying her a few more dollars an hour accidentally.
VALLAS: Through an error.
BOLT: Through an error but it was kind of like, as if her wage was raised through a minimum wage.
VALLAS: An accidental raise, wow.
BOLT: Exactly, so she started going to the grocery store more, she was eating more healthy, noticed a change in her diet, noticed a change in her overall health but then her employer caught on to the accident and decided to take those wages back by lowering all of her future paychecks and so it forced her into a decision between having to choose between going back to the fast food diet she was on before that was leading to poor health outcomes or taking on extra shifts so that she wouldn’t have to do that.
VALLAS: There’s so much in that but the health connection is just such a real one and we talk a lot about the dollars and cents part of the equation when it comes to what raising the minimum wage means in people’s lives, the health effects are so significant and there’s so much research there. Rachel West who was on the show some numbers of weeks back and nerding out about all the different research that we have on all the many ways that raising the minimum wage is associated not just with improving people’s incomes and their family’s budgets but with health effects as well that are in this story are really abundantly clear. I want to interrupt you sharing these stories because there’s actually a paragraph from the piece that I want you to read that really gets into that and to some of the other far-reaching benefits as well.
BOLT: Yeah so here it is. “A $15 minimum wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid. A diet. A stress reliever. It is a contraceptive, preventing teenage pregnancy. It prevents premature death. It shields children from neglect. But why? Poverty can be unrelenting, shame-inducing and exhausting. When people live so close to the bone, a small setback can quickly spiral into a major trauma. Being a few days behind on the rent can trigger a hefty late fee, which can lead to an eviction and homelessness. An unpaid traffic ticket can lead to a suspended license, which can cause people to lose their only means of transportation to work. In the same way, modest wage increases have a profound impact on people’s well-being and happiness. Poverty will never be ameliorated on the cheap. But this truth should not prevent us from acknowledging how powerfully workers respond to relatively small income boosts.”
VALLAS: And that paragraph right there sums up so much in the way of research that’s been done over the years about what happens when we move to a living wage and I want to let you continue sharing some of the powerful stories that help put a face on this issue, which is about so much more than dollars and cents.
BOLT: I think that paragraph wrapped in a paragraph of beautiful poverty prose, some of the other data points that Desmond lays out in this piece and it’s that higher minimum wages are associated with better health outcomes like lower rates of smoking, it lowers instances of child neglect, a one dollar raise in the minimum wage lowers child neglect reports by 10%, it lowers premature deaths.
VALLAS: It goes on and on.
BOLT: IT goes on and on, it’s just a good reminder both of how quickly the punishment of poverty spirals but how impactful even a small boost in wages is for low wage workers.
VALLAS: And for all those reasons how deeply, deeply offensive on a fundamentally human level the kinds of comments we heard from Ivanka are because of what she is saying people who are not born into great wealth deserve and what they don’t deserve and it was all the things you were just describing right down to a chance to even be healthy.
BOLT: We can’t say that everybody in America if they just work hard enough they’ve got the opportunity to make it. We have to make our policies so and do so in a way that is inclusive of everyone along lines of race, along lines of gender, to make sure that we’ve really got a just economy that’s working for everybody.
VALLAS: And it’s not hyperbole when we say poverty wages, that’s a phrase that we use often on this show, it’s a phrase that gets used often in the minimum wage conversation and in the progressive ecosystem more broadly but we’re really talking about poverty wages when we’re talking about $7.25 an hour, that is the federal minimum that hasn’t budged in ten years because Republicans in congress don’t want to allow people who are working incredibly hard like the people you’ve been describing and the people who are profiled in Matt Desmond’s amazing New York Times feature are. They don’t want to give them the living wage that they are working incredibly hard to receive and certain are deserving even if they aren’t earning it, receiving from their employers. So we’re going to need to take a quick break but don’t go away Chad because I’ve got you all pod long.
[MUSIC]
So Chad coming back still Off Kilter-ing here all pod long with Chad Bolt, we’ve been talking about the minimum wage and dunking on Ivanka a little bit for some of the stuff she said as well as walking through this really beautiful Matt Desmond piece, beautiful and heart- wrenching at the same time. But you were just teeing up beautifully Chad what I want to point to as the good news flipside of this whole conversation which is the ways in which the minimum wage movement, the fight for $15 movement is actually working not just to raise wages, not just to boost that poverty level wage floor but actually to close some significant racist as well as ableist loopholes that we still have in place that hail all the way back the New Deal. So what’s the good news there.
BOLT: As transformation as the New Deal was, exactly as you said, there were some serious, serious gaps that fortunately legislation has been introduced in congress to try and fill. So I’m going to mention four bills really quick. So the first is a bill that would actually go a long way to help disabled workers earn the minimum wage. Because you may not realize this but actually employers are still allowed to pay disabled workers a sub-minimum wage, all they have to do is apply for it and get a certificate from the Department of Labor that basically gives them permission to pay them less an hour. So this bill would freeze an issuance of these certificates and phase them out over the next six years while it gives employers and workers the support to transition those workers into competitive employment.
VALLAS: I want to give a quick shout-out to my dead sis and colleague Rebecca Cokely who of course runs CAP’s Disability Justice Intiative and is a friend of the show. She was quoted in a piece that Mary O’Hara, another friend of the show over at The Guardian about this bill and I think Cokes summed it up nicely when she described the sub minimum wage for people with disabilities as a fossil of disability policy. It is, it’s as old as fossils and should be thrown back underground, I guess with fossils?
BOLT: Totally.
VALLAS: Is that where fossils are, quick fact check?
BOLT: When I was a young hill fossil —
VALLAS: Oh, is there such thing as a young fossil though? I think you’re pushing it.
BOLT: I think I’m mixing up archeology.
VALLAS: You were a young hill something.
BOLT: So I was sitting on the other side of the table from these employers who were coming in to lobby against effort to pay disabled workers the minimum wage.
VALLAS: Where’s our shame bell, I’m sorry, I can’t actually let that sentence escape your mouth without our shame bell.
[GONG SOUND, “SHAME”]
There it is.
BOLT: They would come in and say gee, Chad, these workers, they like the situation as it is because they may not be able to find jobs at all if not for us paying them sub-minimum wages and those were my younger days but even at the time I was like something doesn’t sound right to me about that. And it just plays into the myth that there’s this false choice between paying people a higher wage and having jobs at all.
VALLAS: And also it’s one of the tropes that gets trotted out all the time, which is not super different in some ways from what we hear from say, the Trump administration when it comes to why they want to take away Medicaid from people who can’t find steady work. They say it’s for people’s own good, that’s just the frame that makes it sound a little less heartless to be paying people with disabilities a discriminatory, archaic sub-minimum wage as though they don’t deserve the same wages as other people. There’s a lot more to it than that, it brings in sheltered workshops which we’ve talked on the show about before, which are often places that people with disabilities go and end up effectively warehoused and doing work that is far below their capacity and their skill. I’ve actually talked to folks on this show as well who have been trapped for years in sheltered workshops, being paid pennies an hour for their work and then finally when they manage to get out and to have a service provider or somebody really help them find an off ramp and I mean the pun there, they end up in competitive employment, some of them end up in grad school, end up with advanced degrees, end up running the organizations that are leading the movement to end this discriminatory policy, it’s time that we stopped treating people with disabilities as some kind of an underclass that it’s ok to pay less because of their disability status.
BOLT: That’s exactly right and by the way when I took those meetings on the hill, those employers coming into lobby for the status quo, the people they didn’t bring with them — disabled workers.
VALLAS: Funny about that. I want to give a quick plug to some of our colleagues who run #cripthevote, they had a fantastic tweet chat earlier this week on this and other related issues, really talking about how poverty and disability go hand in hand, this is a big party of why and we’ll put a link to the round up of that really fantastic tweet chat, which includes some of the people I just mentioned on our nerdy syllabus page.
BOLT: Awesome, so the second bill we’ve got four of these.
VALLAS: I’m here for it.
BOLT: Rolling right through, the second is the Raise the Wage Act!
VALLAS: Woo hoo!
BOLT: This is the $15 minimum wage —
VALLAS: You looked like you needed some cheering there, I didn’t quite do enough but I hope that did it.
BOLT: It was sufficient, it was enough.
VALLAS: Well the Raise the Wage Act which we’ve talked about on this show —
BOLT: The Raise the Wage Act, so it would also phase out the much lower tipped minimum wage, which we’ve talked about here before, which by the way let’s name that for what it is, it’s got deeply racist roots, creation of the tipped minimum wage was a compromise with southern Democrats that thought professions occupied predominately but blacks at the time like waiters and bell hops deserved to be paid a sub minimum wage, or actually at that time, no minimum wage at all.
VALLAS: That’s right.
BOLT: Finally by the sixties advocates found just to get a tipped minimum wage established and up until 20 years ago it used to move in tandem with the minimum wage. So when the minimum wage went up, so did the tipped minimum wage. That was until 1996 when the National Restaurant Association persuaded congress to decouple them and the tipped minimum wage has stayed where it was ever since.
VALLAS: And these things don’t just fall out of the sky, they don’t just accidentally happen, a little name that folks may remember who used to run the National Restaurant Association and happen to be running it back during that era that you just mentioned, you know where I’m going with this don’t you?
BOLT: Did he have an infamous plan called the 9–9–9 plan?
VALLAS: Oh did he ever I’m talking about some Herman Cain, that dude, that is literally what he was doing back in the 90s, was trying to figure out how to make sure that tipped workers didn’t get wage increases on schedule with other minimum wage workers. That was his life’s mission back then, before he decided he was going to have the 9–9–9 plan and do stuff with pizza.
BOLT: It’s just another example of powerful industry using their entrenched power to further entrench their wealth.
VALLAS: Which now has doubled down on that kind of a playbook and we’ve talked a lot on this show and actually are probably due to bring this back up in the coming weeks, they’re outright subverting democracy because they know that raising the minimum wage is popular and if they’re going to manage to keep costs down for the restaurant industry they better take the issue away from the voters who they know would like to see it different.
BOLT: That’s exactly right because, and we see time and again when minimum wage is on the ballot, not only does it typically pass but it even drives turnout, turnout is higher when voters are voting to raise the minimum wage.
VALLAS: Because voters don’t just like it on the left side of the aisle, they like it on the right too. It is really, really popular, it is a thing people can agree on across party lines, across demographics, across ages, across income levels, just not if you’re Republicans in congress or the National Restaurant Association, let’s also be clear about the other villians in this, there are more bills though. We keep getting hung up on each of these bills Chad, I’ll you keep talking, sorry.
BOLT: So one of the other professions exempted from the minimum wage law and still is is agricultural workers. So Senator Harris introduced a bill to extend minimum wage protections to the agricultural jobs that don’t currently have them as well as overtime pay requirements, the first overtime pay requirements for ag jobs. And then the fourth one was a bill introduced by Congresswoman Jayapal along with Senator Harris, the first domestic workers’ bill of right which, among other things, would extend minimum wage protections to home health aides, which is one of the fastest growing professions in the country and tragically is not subject to minimum wage protections.
VALLAS: Huge on all fronts and those last two get almost no attention, people talk a lot more about tipped and even to some extent now about the disability piece of this but those other carveouts are huge and are growing by the day because of the fields that they impact. So really, really, really important, more on all of those bills on our syllabus page and a quick shoutout to the author of the piece rounding all of those of course wait, who might it be Chad?
BOLT: Rachel West!
VALLAS: Of course it is, Rachel we love you and all your minimum wage nerd-ery. So Chad, I feel like that’s probably the conversation that we should be having on minimum wage and we’ve assigned Ivanka a good amount of reading there, so maybe we leave it there for now.
BOLT: I think we’ve given her at least enough for a week or so.
VALLAS: So Chad, a lot going on in the minimum wage front these week, hoo I need a break after all that. Why don’t we go to Congress where things are not slow at all, that joke didn’t land even with you so I guess it won’t land with anyone else.
BOLT: I was like well that is where the bills are introduced.
[LAUGHTER]
VALLAS: Oh yeah, we were just talking about congress.
BOLT: We were already on congress.
VALLAS: OK yeah, I need a new segue, Will I’m starting their piece over. [LAUGHTER] Good point, how do bills get made Chad, how does a bill become a law? OK, let’s move.
BOLT: Well, the National Restaurant Association –
[LAUGHTER]
VALLAS: Oh my God.
BOLT: Visits congress —
VALLAS: Oh my God.
WILL URQUHART (PRODUCER): The same people that did the work for the National Restaurant Association to fight Prop 77 here were the same people who put up the billboard in New York against AOC.
VALLAS: Yeah.
URQUHART: So Chef Andres here in DC, a very famous chef, when AOC first came here and couldn’t afford rent, he offered her free room and board.
VALLAS: Right.
URQUHART: And he’s one of the people who funded this fucking asshole group and he got a whole bunch of good press because they’re all fucking lazy as shit for cheering on the Democratic Socialist right after he fucked over a shitload of workers. That’s my rant.
VALLAS: Let it all out guys, let it out, we’re ready for the segue. So I think we’ve given Ivanka enough reading before next week’s episode of Off Kilter but Chad because I’ve got you all pod long.
[SINGING TO THE TUNE OF “ALL NIGHT LONG” BY LIONEL RICHIE]
BOLT: All pod long!
VALLAS: Thank you Will, still here for it, this is quite the episode I have to say, one for the books. So sticking with congress here for a second there is a particular hearing that happened here this week that everyone is talking about.
BOLT: Oh my gosh Rebecca, I know exactly which one you’re talking about.
VALLAS: Of course you do because everyone’s talking about.
BOLT: It was in the House Budget Committee, it was a hearing on the GOP tax scam and the effect of workers in the economy.
VALLAS: Chad I love you so much because you are exactly and really the only person who I think would come up with that hearing. Of course, what I’m talking about is the Michael Cohen hearing.
BOLT: You weren’t talking about that one.
VALLAS: I wasn’t actually, I do want to talk about, I think it’s important but I think we have to talk about the Michael Cohen hearing first.
BOLT: Alright let’s do it.
VALLAS: So we’re not going to talk about everything everyone else is talking about because other shows can do that but I really want to zoom in on here and there were a lot of bombshells in this hearing, I think it’s going to take a while to digest all of the what this hearing and what the bombshells were dropped in it mean and what it means for the Russia investigation and for Trump but there was a particular moment that I had Will pull out and we have a little clip for you, it’s a little present for you Chad.
[START CLIP]
REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: The Trump Golf organization currently has a golf course in my home borough of the Bronx, Trump Links. I drive past it every day going between the Bronx and Queens. In fact, The Washington Post reported on the Trump Links Bronx course in an article entitled ‘Taxpayers Built this New York Golf Course and Trump Reaps the Rewards.’
“That article is where many New Yorkers and people in the country learned that taxpayers spent $127 million to build Trump Links in a ‘generous deal allowing President Trump to keep almost every dollar that flows in on a golf course built with public funds.’
“And this doesn’t seem to be the only time the president has benefited at the expense of the public. Mr. Cohen, I want to ask you about your assertion that the president may improperly devalued his assets to avoid paying taxes. According to an August 24th — August 21st 2016 report by The Washington Post: ‘While the president claimed in financial disclosure forms that Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, was worth more than 50 million, he had reported otherwise to local tax authorities that the course was worth ‘no more than 5 million’.’ Mr. Cohen, do you know whether this specific report is accurate?”
MICHAEL COHEN: “It is identical to what he did at Trump National Golf Club at Briarcliff Manor.”
OCASIO-CORTEZ: “Do you know — to your knowledge, was the president interested in reducing his local real estate bills, tax bills?”
COHEN: “Yes.”
OCASIO-CORTEZ: “And how do you do that?”
COHEN: “What you do is you deflate the value of the asset and then you put in a request to the tax department for a deduction.”
OCASIO-CORTEZ: “Thank you. Now on October 2018, the New York Times revealed that ‘President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents.’ It further stated for Mr. Trump: ‘He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing his tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.’ Mr. Cohen, do you know whether that specific report is accurate?”
COHEN: “I don’t. I wasn’t there in the 1990s.”
OCASIO-CORTEZ: “Who would know the answer to those questions?”
COHEN: “Allen Weisselberg.”
OCASIO-CORTEZ: “And would it help for the committee to obtain federal and state tax returns from the president and his company to address that discrepancy?”
COHEN: “I believe so.”
OCASIO-CORTEZ: “Thank you very much. I yield the rest of my time to the chair.”
[END CLIP]
VALLAS: So that was a little bit of a somewhat lengthy clip, longer than some of the clips we run on this show but felt like it was important for folks to hear all of that back and forth because there is a ton of really, really significant stuff that got said, I think that’s the technical term Chad in terms of where not just the Russia investigation goes but actually and here we are why this is a gift to you what comes next in terms of Trump’s tax returns and whether we get to seem them.
BOLT: She laid the case out really well. In fact when she was quoting the Times I was quoting along with her, dubious tax schemes and instances of outright fraud. That is the New York Times piece from October 2018.
VALLAS: It didn’t get nearly enough attention considering what it found.
BOLT: It certainly did not and so I hope folks will check it out but again, she laid out the case so well here, these are the kinds of schemes that the president obviously has engaged in for decades and learning, getting his tax returns would allow the American people to learn the extent to which he has engaged in these kinds of schemes to avoid paying taxes. We’d learn by how much he’s avoided paying taxes, if he’s paid the taxes that he legally owes, the extent of fraud that he’s committed and of course it could also tell us the extent to which he has conflicts of interest due to his foreign business entanglements when he’s conducting foreign policy on behalf of the United States. So AOC laid it out really well here, this is the case for the House Ways and Means committee and particularly its’ chairman Richie Neal to get to use his existing authority to get Trump’s tax returns.
VALLAS: Honey —
BOLT: Honey.
VALLAS: Sorry I just had to throw that in there for you.
BOLT: Get those tax returns ready honey!
VALLAS: Almost like you didn’t have your own talking point ready Chad, it’s like I don’t even know you anymore, who are you? Who is this man in my studio?
BOLT: AOC laid out the case so much better than me.
VALLAS: Not true Chad, you laid the case out she just picked it right up, she spiked it, but you’ve been on this train for quite some time.
BOLT: Actually I have to say I’ve just been really, really impressed. One of the things we try to do at Indivisible is demystify what’s going on in congress, what’s going on in DC, both process and policy so that folks that know they want to be an effective advocate to their member of congress know what’s going on and they know how to speak the language a little bit. And watching AOC in the first couple weeks of her tenure in congress, I’ve just been really impressed. She’s so good at demystifying an issue at the top of her line of questioning and then just asking simply, straightforward questions like for example today when she basically was like can you name names for us, you don’t know the answer, what are the dubious schemes that the president engaged in but who would know? These are the kinds of useful, straightforward questions that I wish more members of congress used when they have these oversight opportunities and I can’t wait to seem more of it from her.
VALLAS: If you haven’t actually read it, The New York Times’ investigative reporting that Chad was mentioning exposing the president for committing tax fraud, that’s what it is, let’s just call a spade a spade is on our syllabus page as well, it is well worth the read and really should be front of mind for every American until we see these tax returns.
BOLT: Absolutely.
VALLAS: So there was another hearing this week that everyone is talking about.
BOLT: Yes, it was the hearing in the House Budget Committee on the GOP tax scam, which we know is only further enriching shareholders because of the slash in the corporate tax rate —
VALLAS: Chad, I know you really want to talk about that hearing and we should and that hearing is really important but that’s not yet again the hearing I’m talking about.
BOLT: We’re going to talk about it.
VALLAS: Well you are a co-host.
BOLT: But go ahead, I think you got rights here and you should be enforcing them, probably more fervently than you are, you’re letting me walk all over you by talking about the hearings I want to talk about. But the hearing I was referencing in this case is actually a hearing no one was talking about, not nearly enough people so let’s give it some mattention and that is that Secretary Perdue, Sonny Perdue, he’s the Secretary of Agriculture, he oversees the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which among many other things oversees the SNAP program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, which helps 40 million Americans put food on the table in any given month and he sat there and he took some pretty hard questions. We’ve actually got a clip that Will’s going to play from Congresswoman Marcia Fudge.
[START CLIP]
REP. MARCIA FUDGE: It is important to me to try to understand what your disdain is for poor people or people who have had, fallen on hard times or people who are just living on the edge. Because what you’re doing in these proposals is hurting those very people.
[END CLIP]
VALLAS: Now of course Congresswoman Fudge is talking, as listeners of this show will know about the administration’s proposed rule to take food stamps away from 755,000 Americans who are struggling to find steady work. Those are folks who are unemployed, folks who are pounding the pavement looking for work, folks who are working but can’t get enough hours at their job, could actually be more people who lose SNAP than even that number because that number comes to us from the Trump administration itself, from its’ own estimates, so how much can we trust it, we don’t know. But he was sitting up there and he was getting skewered and deservedly so for that proposed rule because it came out of his agency, the USDA and a lot of the folks that I actually spent a lot of this week with here in DC were people from across the country, hunger fighters who work at food banks, who themselves are people who have experienced or are experiencing hunger and poverty, who all had flown into town for a big conference that is run by our friends at FRAC, the Food Research and Action Council on Feeding America, which they do every year, big hunger conference. But the purpose of it is to all go tell their policymakers what SNAP means to them and what hunger in America looks like, and so we actually pulled a little round up together of some of the folks I met at that conference, the amazing advocates who frankly Sonny Perdue would do well to listen to instead of his wealthy colleagues in Trump’s cabinet, let’s take a listen to some of those folks.
[START CLIP]
MARRIANE: So I take a cab all the way to the other side of the city to get that one, I think they used to let me get it every other week and so I take a cab, run in, grab the box, have it running and then spend money on the cab to get food and that is all we’d eat. If they had taken away my SNAP benefits or cut them to something that was even lower than what they were, I wouldn’t have survived, I know I wouldn’t have, people don’t understand that those benefits are life savers. The people that get those benefits, they depend on them, that’s how they live, that’s how they survive and I know from first hand experience. It’s changed me as a person, I wasn’t the most sympathetic person when I started this journey, it breaks my heart when I see those people now. We’ve seen them, a lot of them, since the beginning. We know we’ve helped them, we’re helping them survive but I want hunger to go away and I want to be one of the reasons that it does.
When I see them families that come and ask us for help, I know immediately what they’re going through, I know they’re stressed, I know they’re just trying to make it go, just to make a go of it and their family. We have people that they barely last two weeks now. So we’re already as a food pantry, we’re already being stressed to the max. we used to have extra food every week at the end of the week. We’d go through everything now, if you only give someone three months of SNAP in a three year period that doesn’t help them get a job any faster, in fact that’ll stop them from even being able to look for a job.
PATRICIA: By me getting that Social Security retirement check, it’s cut my SNAP benefits down to $15 a month and I completely lost my medical so all my medical insurance is gone. I didn’t qualify for it anymore. So I had to go onto in California it’s called Covered California, which is part of the Affordable Care Act. I lost from $192 a month for SNAP benefits down to $15 a month, plus now I’m having to pay for medical insurance. When it first happened to me I was like without medical insurance and I was like how am I going to get my insulin and I was worried how am I going to pay for my insulin. I can’t afford this, there’s no way. Am I going to eat? Am I going to have my medicine? What am I going to do? Luckily I have a son that told me mom I’ll help you out, I’ll help you out. So having to rely on my children to help me with my medical, it’s very difficult. I’m sorry, you can’t starve people number one and it’s at the point where you’re starving people, you cut it, that’s it, there’s no more food coming in, you’re starving people. My health doesn’t allow me to do a lot of things now so cutting and getting people not qualified, what kind of dignity is that? You can’t go hungry.
And it makes me angry when people think that you’re just living off the system. No, I’m utilizing benefits that I put into, I worked for my entire career. And no I’m not taking advantage, I’m just trying to live and survive and eat. I think food is a right that we all have and that right shouldn’t be taken away from anybody.
JOLLE: SNAP benefits, they are good, it could be much better because they’re not enough. And so I can’t even imagine saying oh, we’re going to cut it out. What is that? Your daily bread is a real thing, you should have more than bread but you should be able to have food and not run out of food because it’s a part of life, you’ll die if you don’t eat. So SNAP has to expand, they have to find more money so we have food, SNAP literally you’re happy. You’re sitting around a table and you’re eating. And it sounds weird, it sounds like what, it shouldn’t even be a discussion that you don’t have food, you know what I mean? And so you’re sitting at the table and you’re putting food on their plates and everybody’s happy, everybody’s talking, nobody’s hungry, it smells good. And everybody’s full and it’s a happiness, it’s joy. And so if you go on the opposite end and you don’t have food then everybody’s depressed, sad, mad, angry, hurt, starving, sick and it’s polar opposites.
[END CLIP]
VALLAS: And those were the voices of Marianne, Patricia, and Jolle, all fantastic women I was so thrilled to get to meet at this conference. Don’t go away, need to take a quick break, more Off Kilter in just a few.
[MUSIC]
You’re listening to Off Kilter, still talking to Chad Bolt all pod long. Secretary Perdue I hope you’re listening although this would be an interesting podcast choice for you given how you feel about poor people and people who face hunger but hope you were listening because those are the kinds of people who would have their SNAP taken away if this rule takes effect and those are some of the consequences that human beings across this country would suffer if you move forward with this rule.
BOLT: Even if he’s not listening he will definitely hear because these folks are not going away. I was at this conference last year and they were nice enough to invite me on a panel to talk about what are the most effective advocacy things we could be doing and I was there with a couple of our friends in this space and literally in the room someone stood up and said well we would organize right now and so they organized a sit in at the conference to take place the next day on the hill over cuts to SNAP.
VALLAS: And that was in the farm bill debate.
BOLT: Yes that’s right exactly, in the early days of that and so these folks really, really speak, give voice in such an authentic way to folks with lived experience who are experiencing hunger and they’re a force to be reckoned with, they’re not going away.
VALLAS: #HandsOffSNAP is where a lot of this conversation is still going on, join in if you haven’t checked it out recently and of course I would not be me and this show would not be this show if I didn’t do a little shameless plug, which I know is your favorite type of tactic Chad. Your favorite kind of plug is a shameless one.
BOLT: I’ve been know to make one or two.
VALLAS: And that shameless plug is for a good cause, that is handsoffsnap.org, the one stop shopping to raise your voice in response to this rule, you have until April 2nd to do that. We need to hear from you, the Trump administration needs to hear from you and clearly Sonny Perdue needs to hear from you about why Trump and his Agriculture Secretary Perdue need to keep their hands off SNAP. So I’m feeling in the need for a little bit of good news, you got any good news for me from congress?
BOLT: So we did have introduction this week of a pretty big bill, Congresswoman Jayapal introduced her Medicare for All Act.
VALLAS: Woo hoo!
BOLT: Which is a really really big deal.
VALLAS: Will’s cheering too.
BOLT: I can’t understate it, for years we were playing defense, obviously following the election in 2016 we were coming into Congress under total control of Republicans obviously Trump in the White House and their number one legislative threat, number one priority was repeal the Affordable Care Act.
VALLAS: That’s right.
BOLT: Take healthcare away from 23 million Americans or more. And so for two years we were in a defensive posture and thanks to the amazing constituent pressure that we saw in every corner of the country and every corner of the progressive ecosystem uniting against ACA repeal, people making their voices heard for the very first time, picking up the phone, calling their members of congress, going to town halls, we were able to stop that and then of course those same folks who mobilized in many cases for the first time around the ACA repeal they were the same folks that in 2018 were doing all of the work on the big blue wave in the 2018 midterm elections and so they were the same groups that ended up delivering the majority back to democrats in the house. And so what that means is that we can take on an offensive posture now, and we really should be and democrats should spend this congress introducing big idea, big progressive ideas that get at some of the big policies that we want to see. Not because we think they’re going to pass this congress. The senate is still controlled by Republicans and so they will not, and obviously Trump is in the White House.
VALLAS: You noticed those things too? It wasn’t just me?
BOLT: I track things in DC.
VALLAS: Here and there you keep track of which chambers of power controlled by which party, it’s good, it’s good.
BOLT: This is one of my most astute observations.
VALLAS: This is why they pay you the big bucks.
BOLT: That’s right, so it’s not as if Trump is signing into law the Medicare for All act. But what we should be doing during this congress is having these big debates, laying out the different policy issues, convening experts, drafting legislation, running up co-sponsors, this kind of thing. And so it’s really exciting this week to see Congresswoman Jayapal’s Medicare for All Act get introduced with over 100 co-sponsors.
VALLAS: It’s not the only version of this bill, there’s actually, we’re in this moment now where people are almost competing with each other for who has the best universal health care plan. It wasn’t that long ago that Medicare for All was just a talking point, it was a bumper sticker, it was viewed as extreme, Bernie got called out for being too blue sky about it back in the day, now we’re in a place where this is the mainstream position of the Democratic Party and that shows that we’re watching progressive in congress catch up to where the country is because this is what Americans have been clamoring for and finally their leaders are actually championing the cause.
BOLT: That’s exactly right and Jayapal’s bill I should say is single payer in it’s truest form. It eventually phases out most private insurance and so part of the reason our healthcare system is so costly and that so many people are still locked out of it because we have so many different payers. There’s obviously scores of different insurance policies, there’s different public payers like Medicare and Medicaid for example but more than that and so it’s a tremendously complex system that drives up costs, that lock people out based on affordability and other factors. And so this bill would really go far, not only to make sure that everybody had access to healthcare but that the suite of benefits covered was a truly comprehensive list.
VALLAS: Something that’s really important as part of that that I want to call out and we’ve talked about it on this show before, this is not the first Medicare for All type bill to do this. But increasingly what we’re watching is that the goalposts have really been moved and a lot of ways disability advocates have justifiably been critiquing some previous Medicare for All proposals because you can’t really have universal health care if you’re leaving out 1 in 4 to 1 in 5 Americans and I’m talking here about people with disabilities by leaving out long term services and supports from the coverage and the suite of benefits that are encompassed in universal health care. And we’ve seen this from a bill that was introduced not that long ago from Rosa DeLauro and Jan Shakowsky, Topher Spiro my colleague here at CAP had a lot to do with that particular bill and Rebecca Cokely had a lot to do with the LTSS piece of that bill so credit where it’s due. But now we’re increasingly see that become the norm and this is another bill that includes that and that makes a very clear statement that you can’t have universal health care if you don’t have LTSS.
BOLT: That’s exactly right and it brings me back to something that I really like about the Jayapal and that is it puts the for all in Medicare for All and this is actually a healthcare plan that includes eligibility for undocumented immigrants. So it really goes far to ensure that immigrant communities aren’t locked out of our health care system. It builds on language from the ACA that language that uses residency to determine eligibility instead of other dangerous approaches like leaving it up to the secretary, this actually uses the ACA standard of residency to make sure that even undocumented immigrant communities have access.
VALLAS: So Chad I bet you thought that stay all pod long was going to feel like an eternity but it’s flying by.
BOLT: It’s flying by, we’ve got so much more to talk about!
VALLAS: I know, I’m literally scrolling through my list and I’m like do we have enough time to hit on all these things? So I think we’re going to have to pick up the pace and actually make the rest of this a lightening round. You down for a lightening round?
BOLT: It’s probably better that way. My last name isn’t Bolt for nothing!
VALLAS: Oh! There it is, I was wondering when you were going to find a way to work that into some episode at some point with some time but you know what the day was today.
BOLT: We’re just going to bolt through the rest of this one.
VALLAS: Oh, we’re not done doing it apparently, we’re still going, he’s not done guys, he’s still here all pod long.
BOLT: You really get the nuts and bolts of my jokes.
VALLAS: Oh! That one kind of hurt, not going to lie, that kind of hurt. No it was great, it was great. So I gotta say there’s one more thing in congress that we need to acknowledge and it actually brings us to a video that was getting a little bit of attention so we’ve got a few people talking about climate this week and folks might have seen a little video making the rounds on the internet that has been sparking some level of controversy. I’m of course talking about Diane Feinstein, Senator from California with a lot of egg on her face after not being super respectful to some activists who came and told her what they thought about the Green New Deal.
BOLT: Indeed.
VALLAS: Now I don’t feel like we really need to litigate that to death, Twitter has done that for us, thank you Twitter for saving us some time. But what I will say is and I’m going to spin this as a positive, the response and the attention and the outrage that we have seen following the release of that video by the activists just reflects such incredibly broad momentum across this country for taking bold and swift action to address climate change which we know we only have just over a decade to address before we forfeit the planet and I think what we also saw is it doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican, Americans are going to hold their leaders accountable to taking that bold and swift action that we need and that really was my takeaway from this whole DiFi kerfuffle.
BOLT: That’s exactly right and big big credit to the Sunrise Movement who is leading so well on Green New Deal and were the folks in this video. Green New Deal is a big, bold proposal that is of the magnitude that it will take to tackle the threat of climate change. we only have a little more than a decade to do it and so it’s going to take a mass mobilization of this kind to make sure we do nothing short of preserve the planet.
VALLAS: Now a little bit of a contrast for you, that’s the problem, that’s the need but where is our current leadership in this country, people in power, we’ve got on the one hand Trump, his pick to lead the climate security panel is someone who has called climate change and climate science a “cult” so just going to leave that one there. Speaks for itself, meanwhile where is Mitch McConnell since you reminded us the Senate is still Republican controlled?
BOLT: Indeed, that was my sage analysis. So Mitch McConnell still won’t even recognize that climate change is real, that climate change is man made and he certainly is not putting forward any proposals to do anything about it.
VALLAS: So he won’t even say those things.
BOLT: That’s exactly right.
VALLAS: Won’t even acknowledge the problem let alone embrace any kind of a solution, so ladies and gentlemen the Republican Party when it comes to the destruction of our planet.
BOLT: Yes and I should really say this just like Sunrise was in the DC office of Senator Feinstein last week they were also in Mitch McConnell’s office as well, making sure that they heard the same message about the urgency to save our planet.
VALLAS: So Chad I’m going to switch course a little because we need to bring that shame bell back out, I hope that Will, it’s not too buried in your chest of sound effects because boy do we need it for this next one. So a little trip down to Florida as we’re talking about climate change, places that are going to be massive hard hit and already are on the front lines of this. But switching gears and over to the labor organizing front, Miami-Dade college is doing something absolutely reprehensible and despicable. They are trying to stop their faculty and staff from organizing. And specifically it’s their adjunct faculty, adjunct professors who are trying to organize, trying to join SEIU one of the largest labor unions and Miami-Dade College, they are going to such lengths to try to keep their underpaid professors and I’m going to get into that in a second from organizing that they actually have in the past couple of weeks sent emails issuing warnings to their faculty and their staff that sound a hell of a lot like threats of retaliation should the school’s adjuncts succeed in this union drive, really, really shameful stuff and actually in the course of it saying to them what do you mean you need benefits from us or a living wage, there’s Medicaid right? Shouldn’t that be enough?
So shout out to my friend Josh Eidelson a fantastic labor reporter over at Bloomberg for breaking this story but I want to actually share a little bit of the color here to help people who are maybe thinking wait a second, college professors, why would they need to be in a union? Or college professors, how are they not getting paid a living wage? Well for anyone thinking that have a little bit of a schtick for you to share. So adjunct professors, we are talking about people who in many cases turn to second and third jobs to try to put food on the table. These are people who many of them turn to food banks, some reports sleeping in their cars, even being forced to take other kinds of desperate measures like turning to sex work, there have been reports from the Guardian actually shining a light on this, all trying to desperately make their academic careers somehow economically viable but being paid these paltry wages for the teaching that they’re doing. There’s actually even on the internet, Chad, an adjunct’s cookbook that offers tips on how to turn scraps of food like chicken bones and orange peels into edible meals for adjuncts who are struggling to afford food, you can’t even make this up.
BOLT: That’s like an Onion article.
VALLAS: It is, it actually is and the site pokes some fun but it’s making a really important point.
BOLT: That’s terrible.
VALLAS: And so in the face of this kind of tremendous financial precarity one quarter of part time college faculty many of whom are these adjunct professors that we’re talking about end up turning to public assistance programs like Medicaid to make ends meet. So this might not be something folks are thinking about when they’re thinking about the face of a professor but a lot of people have actually said and I’m going to reiterate this message because I think it really helps to capture some of this, adjuncts in many ways are the fast food workers of the academic world. That is who these people are and so to deprive them of the ability to collectively bargain and to organize so that they can be paid a living wage and have benefits like health insurance for themselves and their families, shame bell for Miami-Dade so bring it out, Will.
[GONG SOUND, “SHAME!”]
And I want to be clear I’m not saying anything but good things about Medicaid, which is an incredibly vital program that provides health insurance to tens of millions of seniors and people with disabilities as well as low income workers like some of these folks that we’re talking about but the fact that we have public assistance in this country like Medicaid is not a substitute for employers like colleges in this case to pay their friggin’ employees a living wage and to give them the benefits that they need so they can have economic stability. So I’ll dismount from my little soapbox there brought to you by Miami-Dade College.
BOLT: That was a very impressive, I completely sat that one out because you were doing such a magnificent job with it.
VALLAS: Well I am the daughter of professors, I have some feelings about this, my dad has done some organizing of his own of these types of folks, I feel pretty passionately about this one. So Chad I want to go into in the last few minutes that we have of this Bolt round is that what we’re calling it? Oh God.
BOLT: New segment on Off Kilter starting now.
VALLAS: I shouldn’t have said that because it’s totally going to be a thing. So we’ve got a couple of factoids of the week and it starts with one of the pieces that we’re reading this week that has a headline that really sums it up pretty well, has to do with inequality.
[…]
So heading next into some of our factoids of the week, some of the things we’ve been reading on the internets we want to share with our dear listeners, one of them comes to us from the Washington Post, the headline pretty much sums it up, income inequality is rising so fast our data literally can’t keep up. What do we know from this, Chad?
BOLT: Yeah I loved this story because I love all stories about data. So this one is the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau they jointly track wages but they don’t track wages are the very, very top due to privacy concerns so this reminds me back when we were working on the tax bill together, there were some states where so few people pay the estate tax there’s actually no data available in those states on the estate tax and it’s the same idea here.
VALLAS: Showing how few people actually get hit by it or used to get hit by it right?
BOLT: Even fewer people get hit by it now.
VALLAS: That’s right.
BOLT: So the government doesn’t track wages at their exact amount once you hit that top threshold, once you hit the limit they stop tracking details above that limit. So the data just shows those incomes at exactly the threshold, so what that means is we don’t have precise data to know just how exactly the very top earners are doing which means we don’t know the exact story of just how bad income inequality is getting.
VALLAS: So it could be even worse than we even know.
BOLT: That’s exactly right. It reminds me of one of my favorite books, it’s call “Leading Indicators” It’s by Zachary Karabell, definitely recommend.
VALLAS: You are such a nerd that this is one of your favorite books and I say that as one of the highest compliments I could bestow on a human, Chad.
BOLT: What’s not to love? It’s the history of some of the leading data points that we use to characterize our economy so it’s the history of unemployment and how the GPD data point was developed and at the origin of federal unemployment insurance the very first thing that the government had to do was collect reliable data to show just how much of a social problem unemployment was and what the root causes were. So it just goes to show that data isn’t everything. As we were just talking about earlier in this show it’s important to hear the stories of people with lived experience and workers are more than just people and data points on a chart. But you do need good data to do good policymaking so I hope that the problem addressed in this Post article can be fixed.
VALLAS: And that brings us to one of our factoids of the week which is that the top 1% richest people in this country now own 40 times the average family’s wealth, I’ll let folks sit with that to process it. We talked a little bit before about the wealth side of this it’s not just about income. So when we’re talking about Ivanka and her wise words, actually the opposite when it comes to people sitting around and doing nothing and expecting money where she’s of course talking very well about herself and others like her, that’s the kind of picture that these numbers start to paint for us. So one other factoid of the week because I feel like there’s another one tied for that great honor, do you think facts sit around and are like man I really hope I’m going to be the Off Kilter factoid of the week?
BOLT: Absolutely, what else would they be doing?
VALLAS: They just talk to each other and they’re like no, no it’s totally going to be me.
BOLT: I’ve been getting lobbied by big facts.
VALLAS: Oh big fact is calling you like yo Mr. Bolt I heard you were really fast also I want to be the factoid of the week.
BOLT: And I’ll be like no bolt about it!
VALLAS: I really have to shut this down before it gets any worse, Will is actually going to actively leave the studio and be like I’m done with this show. So other factoid of the week it is tied with that one but really needs to also be put out here is that two thirds of American kids now live in what’s called asset poverty, which we talked about on the show before it’s a measure that tells us what would happen to you if you sudden lost your paycheck or faced a financial emergency, do you have anything in the bank that would protect you from poverty if that happened to you for a few months, really on full display in the shutdown but we are talking about two thirds of kids in this country that is not a them, that is an us, that is a massive, massive widespread problem.
Well Chad I think we’re out of time and have already gone over and I actually can’t even believe that we’ve hit our limit because we actually had more things to talk about.
BOLT: I can’t believe there are more segments to the show after you finish In Case You Missed It every week.
VALLAS: Well there aren’t this week because this week itw as just you and me all pod long.
[SINGING TO THE TUNE OF “ALL NIGHT LONG” BY LIONEL RICHIE]
BOLT: All pod long!
VALLAS: And let’s actually leave it on that note because why would we possibly say anything that can’t top that. Chad, thanks so much for spending so much time this week especially on short notice.
BOLT: My pleasure.
VALLAS: Always love hanging out with you especially when it’s extra long.
BOLT: See you next week.
VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.
