Hello 2018

Jared Bernstein brings his crystal ball for a look-ahead at what’s on deck for 2018 — plus Rebecca Cokley on the rush to diagnose Donald Trump with mental illness. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

“Welfare reform”, infrastructure, bye-bye legal pot, and if no one takes Trump’s phone away from him, maybe nuclear war? To help unpack what’s on deck for 2018 (that we know of so far), Rebecca talks with Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden. Next, questions about President Donald Trump’s mental health hit a fever pitch this week, following his tweets about the size and potency of his nuclear button. Such questions are of course nothing new; throughout the campaign and Trump’s first year in office, news articles, op-eds, and tweets critical of him have routinely deployed words such as “crazy,” “insane,” and “unstable” as epithets against the man. Rebecca talks with Rebecca Cokley, a senior fellow for disability policy at the Center for American Progress, about the implications of armchair diagnosis — and of the use of mental health language in such critiques — when it comes to how our society views mental illness.

This week’s guests:

• Jared Bernstein, Senior Fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
• Rebecca Cokley, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and former Executive Director of the National Council on Disability

This program aired on January 5th, 2018

Transcript of show:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. Happy 2018 folks! To start the year off right I sit down with Jared Bernstein with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities for a look at what’s on deck in congress in the weeks and months ahead. Then I sit down with the brilliant Rebecca Cokley , senior fellow for disability policy at the Center for American Progress. For some real talk about the ableism permeating much of the conversation around Donald Trump’s mental health. Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Welfare reform, infrastructure, bye bye legal pot and if no one takes Trump’s phone away from him, maybe nuclear war? To help unpack what’s on deck for 2018 I’m joined by Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden and of course a friend of the show. So good to have you back here Jared.

JARED BERNSTEIN: Thank you for inviting me.

VALLAS: Happy new year!

BERNSTEIN: Thank you, you too. May it be better than last one.

VALLAS: I have a feeling that it might be because as people might have noticed it’s an election year so we could see some interesting things happening in the fall of this year. But before we get to any of that, you can’t really start off 2018 without talking about what happened at the very end of the 2017 which was the tax bill that gives huge tax cuts to millionaires, billionaires and wealthy corporations was signed into law, there was actually a moment where it sounded like Trump was going to sign it into law at Mar-A-Lago which I thought was perfect. [LAUGHTER] Right? But help bring us up to speed, what does that mean in terms of what we’re going to see playing out this year, where do things go on the tax front?

BERNSTEIN: It’s an unpopular bill which I think is actually interesting and important because it is a tax cut and you sort of have to work hard to make a tax cut unpopular with the American people but Republicans achieve that and I think the way they did that was the average person paying attention to this debate knows in their heart and soul that you don’t help them by cutting taxes on multi-national corporations. I think that, I’ve been railing against supply side trickle down nonsense fairy dust for decades now and I actually take some solice in the fact that people just don’t believe that. Unfortunately this is the most unrepresentative piece of legislation I’ve ever been witness to. The congress was, the Republican congress was so clearly doing the bidding of their donor class as opposed to their constituents. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen as much of a bait and switch in terms of the folks who helps Trump get to where he is and the extent to which he’s hurting them. As you mention, the plan is highly regressive especially as it phases in, most of the benefits even as it starts out most of the benefits disproportionately go to the top. But as it phases in some of the individual benefits expire and the ones for the corporates just keep going. So there’s that. I will say one thing though. This plan increases the deficit a lot and there will be a certain amount of stimulus to the economy, not trivial in 2018 and 2019. I think the unemployment rate which is already low, 4.1% as we speak, the unemployment rate is going to go even lower than that, possibly for rates we haven’t seen for many decades and part of that will be the stimulative effect of the deficit spending in the tax cut. Now that’s more Keynes than Laffer, let me put it that way. It’s pretty straight ahead government spending versus a trickle down story.

VALLAS: Jared, I’m getting you a bumper sticker that says “More Keynes than Laffer”

[LAUGHTER]

BERNSTEIN: I may not be the only one who wants that so yeah. But that’s going to be something to look for this year.

VALLAS: Well a lot of the attention in covering the tax bill which is now a tax law has been paid to the huge outsize benefits that it gives to already very rich people and to already very rich corporations. There’s been some level of attention given to the fact that a lot of middle class and lower income families are actually going to see tax increases under this law. That’s something that some Republicans have been extremely blatant in lying about, saying no one is going to see a tax increase, no middle class family is going to see a tax increase under this bill. A lot of that got walked back in the last minutes of the debate. But what can families who are not super wealthy expect to happen to them this year but then in the longer term?

BERNSTEIN: Well this year the first thing some people in the middle class might notice because there are some middle class tax cuts initially out of the gate. They do fade as I mentioned is changes in withholding tables. So the way that works is that the government withholds a certain amount of your paycheck so that when you’re finally hit with your tax bill you’ve already paid some of it. And if your tax bill goes down then your withholding table should change. So some Republicans have made a big deal about how your paycheck is going to look bigger. Well, I’ve done some of the number crunching on that and I don’t think anybody is going to notice. First of all, there’s already been some implementation challenges. One of the things the Republicans have done in their imminent wisdom is massive defund the IRS and meanwhile given them this really complicated tax package to deal with. Interestingly, this package way complicates the code which is something we really didn’t need but the IRS I think their employment is down something like 13,000 over the last five years or so, so that’s going to be tough for them. So if they even get to changing the withholding tables, I don’t think people are going to notice that very much. To some extent in 2019, in April when you file your 2018 taxes some families might recognize a bit of a tax cut there. But as you’ve suggested by 2025 these cuts are gone and meanwhile right out of the gate if you’re a wealthy inheritor or someone who is a big shareholder at a top corporation, you’ll see bigger benefits right away. Let’s be clear about this by the way because people make a lot of noise, especially Trump about the stock market. The stock market is on a tear, we can talk about that if you like but remember 84% of the benefits of the stock market are held by the wealthiest 10%. 40% are held by the wealthiest 1% so the stock market is not some democratic institution. People depend on their paychecks, not their stock portfolios and that’s what’s most important to them and the tax cut does nothing in that regard.

VALLAS: And the last piece to flag on the tax bill and then we’ll move on to more things that haven’t happened yet. The tax law also repeals what’s called the individual mandate from the Affordable Care Act and in many ways that got described and aptly so at the end of the tax fight as the tax fight having become the health care fight. And a fight that people throughout the progressive community, throughout communities across this country have been engaged in at different phases throughout last year and which now we’ll talk about where that’s headed now. What does the repeal of the individual mandate mean when it comes to what health care looks like in this country?

BERNSTEIN: I think we should reference that along with a couple of related things. I think one of the interesting things I think would resonate I think with you and our listeners, Rebecca is the extent to which this tax cut plays out with poor people. We haven’t really talked much about that. In terms of the individual mandate according to the non-partisan congressional budget office, they’ll be 13 [million] fewer people with health insurance because of it and a lot of those, about 5 or 6 million are from Medicaid. So what does the individual mandate have to do with Medicaid? Like what’s that all about? Well it so happens that because of the individual mandate people find out, they have in their head this thing out there called Obamacare and I have to go get insurance or I’m going to pay a fine, they learn that they’re eligible for Medicaid, particularly in the expansion states. And so without the individual mandate, the CBO I think probably correctly estimates that there are going to be fewer people finding out about that. Premiums will go up and that’s going to be a real stress, especially for people whose income levels put them above some of the health premium subsidies.

But there are other impacts that we should reference. One that’s very important, I think underappreciated, one of the best antipoverty programs we’ve talked about it a lot in terms of helping low income working families is the Earned Income Tax Credit. Well by dint of a technical change in the tax plan it’s a shift in the way they calculate inflation, 19 billion less goes to the EITC. Now they did increase the Child Tax Credit a bit which is another subsidy for low income working families but they structure it in such a way that it doesn’t help low income people very much at all. So I think this is the plan that is not going to help low income people nearly enough and in some ways as I’ve mentioned will hurt them.

VALLAS: So now anything piece of what congress is going to have to do that frankly should have happened last year but we’re still dealing with it because it didn’t get concluded last year was end of year funding. Literally keeping the government open. Now part and parcel of this is also a debate around CHIP, children’s help insurance which was left hanging out there at the end of last year, still having not been reauthorized so we’ve got about 9 million children who were sent home for the holidays without their health insurance program having been put on secure footing. Also part and parcel of this debate is of course around immigration and specifically DACA recipients who have an also uncertain fate. Tell us a little bit about what’s going on with what’s often called the CR, the continuing resolution that kept the government open at the end of last year so we didn’t have a Christmas shutdown and where are things headed on that front?

BERNSTEIN: Well I will but let’s just pause for a second and recognize that this congress was able to push through with tremendous urgency a massive cut in the estate tax so that wealthy heirs wouldn’t have to go another week without inheriting billions of dollars from their rich [descendants]. The corporate tax cuts, the carve outs for rich pass-through businesses, all of these kinds of arcane regressive aspects, these folks worked day and night to resolve that. And they did, they got the vote. They had a legislative win but for whom, and whose cost? It’s in that context that we should view their ineptitude in dealing with DACA and child and basically funding the government. Now of course, this is a long-term problem. We’ve had nothing but these budget patches, you correctly labeled them CRs, continuing resolutions for those who want to sound like a D.C. insider.

VALLAS: Nobody should want to.

BERNSTEIN: Yeah.

VALLAS: Don’t make it sound good.

BERNSTEIN: Don’t do that in public. And that kind of patchwork has typically reflected the preferences of the type that I just mentioned. Now CHIP, the problem there is that I do think that there are members of congress who want to extend CHIP, there are even members of both parties who want to help the children whose deportation is threatened with an expiration of DACA. However, it’s a matter of what you’re going to have to swallow. And there are strategies wherein we could imagine Republicans trying to put CHIP and DACA in packages with cuts to welfare which we know is part of their agenda, cuts to SNAP, cuts to Medicaid, cuts to Medicare. And do this kind of horse trading the Democrats at the last minute will see if they have the spine to block. But that’s the kind of thing that worries me. I am initially worried that CHIP and DACA won’t be adequately supported but I guess if I had to flip a coin on it I’d have to say say there is a good chance they will be ultimately in the same sort of patchwork way we’ve seen. But at what cost?

VALLAS: So if you had to look into your crystal ball, January 19th is the day everyone is looking at right now when the government runs out of funding and we could see another shutdown, that’s certainly looming not just for federal workers who are wondering if their paychecks are still going to come in and if they’re going to work on the 20th but for a lot of other folks for whom a shutdown really has dire consequences. If you had to put your money on it, do you think we see a shutdown?

BERNSTEIN: I don’t, I think they’ve gotten very good at not shutting down the government. Which is another way of saying getting very good at these two to three to four week patches. So good for them, what an accomplishment. It’s sort of like they’ve figured out how to kind of keep the lights on sort of.

VALLAS: It’s like when your dad is trying to compliment your new significant other and the compliment is that all of her tattoos were spelled correctly.

[LAUGHTER]

BERNSTEIN: Yeah, so we’re talking about it in a really low bar here but I think that the kind of will they, won’t they in some a distraction. It’s what I was saying before because I think they have figured out that they can make patches, at what cost? I know you’re, I think this one of the real attributes of what you’re doing here is you got to get into the weeds and see what’s in the agreement, at what cost are Democrats accepting perhaps some sort of extension on DACA or CHIP or what sort of tradeoffs are being made there. That’s the sort of thing we’re going to need to be looking at.

VALLAS: So rumors are swirling about what else 2018 could hold. It feels like every single day and sometimes every new tweet from certain people who need not be named tells us new things about what might be on the agenda. But there are certainly two issues and you’ve mentioned both of them that I want to dig into that feel like they could be priorities for at least certain Republicans in leadership as well as Donald Trump in 2018 and one of those is infrastructure. And there are all kinds of new stories telling us that McConnell wants to bring about a new era of bipartisanship this year, maybe he’s noticed it’s an election year, I don’t know. Maybe that’s what’s causing him to change his tune and those stories end up going hand in hand of a discussion of oh well maybe infrastructure is the next big thing and it’s going to be Republicans working together and working with the White House to try to create all kinds of jobs just like Trump promised in his campaign. What do you think an infrastructure — you’re already making a face as I’m asking the question!

BERNSTEIN: I’m very skeptical about infrastructure. There is no plan. I discount everything Trump says but I particularly discount that discussion because there’s not a plan. To the extent that they have a shell of a plan it’s a really bad one and the Democrats know that. I’ve talked to high ranking senators about this and they recognize that what Trump is talking about, this kind of private public partnership where somehow you leverage $800 billion from $2 billion of government spending is just not something they’d want to get behind. I mean for one thing, the minute you start involving private sector partners in an infrastructure plan it means that the infrastructure build outs have to have a return on investment otherwise why would private investors get involved and that invokes toll roads and the kind of things that spin off revenue. And that’s not the kind of infrastructure that I know Democrats would support.

VALLAS: It also means you’re only going to see investments in certain types of projects.

BERNSTEIN: Exactly.

VALLAS: Ones where you know you’re going to see a return on investment.

BERNSTEIN: Rural projects, replacing pipes in Flint, Michigan, that doesn’t exactly return Goldman Sachs the kind of ROI they’re looking for. So I don’t think there’s going to be an infrastructure bill and by the way if you actually listen to Paul Ryan he has no appetite for any more spending on anything really. They got what they wanted which was a big ass tax cut and they don’t, it’s funny. As we know these folks, they invoke the deficit completely opportunistically but when it comes to spending that’s when you’re going to hear goodness there’s a deficit out there. They just don’t care about the deficit when it comes to tax cuts but when it comes to spending on things that probably you and I would look at and say well that’s worthwhile, not so much.

VALLAS: And you bring up the deficit I feel it’s always as many times as we have this conversation on this show we would be remiss if we didn’t make crystal clear what you just said. Deficits are a four letter word when it comes to anything that has to do with spending that might help middle class families, working class families, low income folks struggling to make ends meet but if it’s about tax cuts for the donor class then oops maybe deficits are totally fine and we’ll pretend we don’t hate them as Republicans for as long as it takes them to pass the legislation.

BERNSTEIN: It may even be worse, it may even be great, let’s build up the deficit by enriching the donor class and then we can point to it as a reason to cut and slash and burn all the stuff that the Democrats would like to expand or even preserve. And in fact that’s not a hypothesis. That’s what we’re seeing. And you’ve mentioned this, we’re seeing an attack, a continued attack, this is nothing new on what they would call the welfare state and what I would call anti-poverty programs that invest in kids and their future and I’m not just saying that to be cute or to play with words, there’s actually a really important substantive, deep body of research that shows a lot of these programs whether it’s SNAP or Medicaid or the Earned Income Tax Credit, they do work as investment programs. They’re not just consumption programs that help you today, housing subsidies, same thing. If you actually follow these kids over their lifetime, they have better employment outcomes, they have been earning outcomes, health outcomes, educational outcomes than kids who weren’t exposed to some of these programs. And that’s what they’re going after.

VALLAS: Well let’s get into that a little bit. It’s a good segue into the other big fight that we keep hearing might be looming. Republicans didn’t even wait until the ink was dry on their tax law to start to tell us exactly what you just said. How they intent to pay for the huge hole they just blew in the deficit that they didn’t hate for a minute or saw was an opportunity to create a climate where cuts to programs that help families afford food and housing and get to work because they need childcare and so forth. We can’t afford all of those things Jared, because look at these huge deficits that oops we created but let’s pretend we didn’t do that part.

BERNSTEIN: So let’s do a tiny bit of history here, a little fiscal history here. If you actually look at the share of GDP that we spend on low-income programs. Take health care out of the mix for a second because that has some unique problems. It’s been flat for ten, fifteen, twenty years. The idea that we’ve been breaking the bank or the budget by spending more and more on low income people is demonstrably false, so let’s get that straight. Now if you put healthcare back in it’s true that the share goes up but that’s the same if you look at the private or the public sector and that’s because health care prices in this country are uniquely high. That’s actually another way of stating the problem that well we spend 18% of our GDP on health care, other comparable countries spend 10 or 12% with essentially better outcomes. They get the same health outcomes but they insure everyone. So that has to do with our inefficiencies in our system. So we’re not overspending. The spending that we’re doing, I’m not saying every dollar is perfectly spent but the spending that we’re doing as I said in my last set of comments has really important positive long term impacts so this really has to be fought hard against. I know you’re joining the fight but I will be too and I think the things that we’re going to be fighting against are block granting, so there’s going to be initiatives to block grant Medicaid and SNAP, nutritional assistance and I think we’ve talked about this before. Basically a block grant is a code word for a systematic cut. The Republicans will tell us they’re kicking it to the states to let them do what they want but in fact what they’re kicking to the states is a much constrained program in terms of the spending so that’s just a budget cut in disguise. Work requirements, I think we’re going to see work requirements, they’re going to try to push for those.

And again, those are just ways I think to kick people off the rolls and discourage participation. Let’s be very clear about this, if you’re an able bodied person and you’re a Medicaid or SNAP, you’re already connected to the job market. You’re either working, you’re looking for a job, you might be unemployment which by the way a lot of people on SNAP they go to SNAP because they’re unemployed and that makes perfect, you can’t live on these programs. SNAP pays $1.40 per meal, so nobody is living off of health insurance coverage or SNAP.

VALLAS: And if they are it’s not well.

BERNSTEIN: Nobody is getting rich off of these programs and there is a massive incentive to work. So if the jobs are available people will try to take them and in fact it’s one of the things that probably should get more attention, the job market is pretty strong right now. I think we haven’t seen enough on the wage side but in terms of employment just in December the African-American unemployment rate hit its lowest rate on record going back to the earliest 1970s when the data start, 6.8%. that’s too high but that’s an important number.

VALLAS: So should we be thanking Trump for that, Jared?

BERNSTEIN: Absolutely … not.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: That was an appropriately short pause in between the first and second words.

BERNSTEIN: Every president is going to take credit for the economy. So Trump is not doing anything that anybody else wouldn’t do there. I would say he gets uniquely negative credit for this sort of thing because of course his agenda has been the establishment Republican agenda to defund the various sorts of things we’re talking about. I’ve never seen a bigger bait and switch in terms of going after the programs and policies and the living standards of the very people who helped you get to where you are than from this administration. He is coasting off of economic trends that began well before he became president and thus far he hasn’t totally screwed them up. I’ll give him credit for that.

VALLAS: So we should be thanking Obama and recognizing that Trump inherited a really strong economy is what I hear you say.

BERNSTEIN: I worked for the Obama administration and I’m not averse to thanking Obama. I think President get too much credit for good economies and too much credit for bad economies. With the exception of these economic shocks, so when you have a recession that’s when the president is super important and yeah Obama did a lot as did the Federal Reserve, by the way to help offset the weight of the greatest recession since the Great Depression and that helped set us up for a recovery that we are still enjoying. This is the ninth year of the expansion, that’s a long expansion.

VALLAS: And of course you mention the federal reserve which is bringing up interest rates and the role that that plays in full employment. But I want to get back to this potential set of threats to nutrition and housing and disability benefits and so much more that Paul Ryan and Donald Trump like to call quote unquote, “welfare reform.” You and I would disagree and say that’s not at all what they’re talking about. They’re talking about benefit cuts and we’ve talked a lot on this show about what the word welfare brings to the American human brain. Tons and tons of social science research helping us understand that it’s an incredibly racially coded word. The media has a huge role to play in actually creating that set of images that come to mind when you hear the word welfare. But you actually just wrote an op-ed in the New York Times telling the media basically saying stop using the phrase welfare reform this isn’t what they’re doing.

BERNSTEIN: Welfare reform, entitlement reform, fixes, overhauls, repairs, they keep coming up for euphemisms for cuts. And there’s no reason not to, to make the lives of these politicians easier by doing their euphemistic bidding for them. So yes, let’s tell this story plainly and call it what it is.

VALLAS: So what would you call it?

BERNSTEIN: Oh, a systematic attack on a set of anti-poverty and social insurance programs that if they have their way will significantly cut them both in terms of their spending and their effectiveness.

VALLAS: So one of the things Paul Ryan loves to hold up as his favorite program and a model for everything else is of course Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or TANF. That was the program that was created in 1996, our listeners are very familiar with this, we’ve talked about this at various points. It is what people used to call welfare and today in many ways is actually an example of why block granting programs as you were describing is so harmful. What have we learned from 1996 that lawmakers should have at the forefront of their minds as they think about whether they want to take on what Trump and Ryan call welfare reform?

BERNSTEIN: Precisely what you said about block grants is the most important because you’re going to hear exactly the argument you just suggested, this worked for TANF so it’s going to work for SNAP and other things, Medicaid. But the facts are very different than that story. TANF by dint of its block grant is still getting the same nominal funding that it was getting 20 plus years ago, nominal funding so it hasn’t been adjusted for inflation or population growth and if you look at the extent to which TANF, it’s an anti poverty program, you’d want it to respond in a recession. You’d actually want your TANF caseloads to grow, that’s what a safety net does. TANF was completely missing in action in the deepest recession we had since back in 2009. Compare that the SNAP or food stamps which is a federal program, hasn’t been block granted, that’s what they want to do. SNAP was very responsive. Great it picked people up and now, by the way, the economy is improving, poverty is coming down, the SNAP rolls are coming down as well. So it’s a classic comparison and that to me is the most important. Donna Pavetti at the Center on Budget where I work has done a ton of work on this and she shows that the anti poverty effectiveness has fallen by something like a factor of three if not more. And that’s what happens when you just kick these to the states and say good luck, do your bet but here’s a fixed funding stream that isn’t going to respond to need.

In economic terms you’re completely losing the countercyclical function of these programs which is what they were in no small part invented for.

VALLAS: And of course another major failing of TANF and we could have an entire episode devoting, entire year of episodes devoted to the failings of TANF but it’s playing out in Maine as we speak news this week breaking that Governor Paul LaPage there decided to divert a whole bunch of funds from cash assistance to poor families with children and their TANF program away to other types of state spending because of state budget gaps.

BERNSTEIN: The aversions like that are really toxic and that’s what happens when you start screwing around with these block grants. The thing about SNAP and Medicaid, I’m not saying their perfect, but they work really well. So they ain’t broken so I don’t think we need to fix them, there’s that word, you’re going to hear it. Fix it, we’re going to reform it. I’m going to say something else about this. When I was very much in the heart of the welfare reform debate –

VALLAS: In 1996

BERNSTEIN: Yeah, and I remember that the job market was quite strong back then and that actually made a difference. There was a supply shock as people were leaving the welfare rolls coming into the low income segment of the economy. And I actually think that the low wage job market is going to be quite strong in 2018, at least in terms of job creation. We’re already seeing that, I mentioned that a minute ago about the black unemployment rate being historically low, still too high but historically low. Well job quantity is one thing, job quality is something else so I think what we really need to be pushing this year maybe we can even find some Republican allies, I’m not confident but maybe is programs that are work supports. The Earned Income Credit, the Child credit, housing subsidies, transportation, Medicaid is actually a really important work support. People are going to find, low wage people are going to find work in this economy if my predictions are correct. I think the unemployment rate could fall to the mid 3’s, we haven’t seen rates like that since the 1960s. We’re going to see people working but will they be earning enough for families living standards, that’s a really important question.

VALLAS: Well you’re really getting to the crux of it.

BERNSTEIN: Minimum wages.

VALLAS: Well this is where I was going to go. If you listen to Paul Ryan what you hear is well the difference between poverty and not poverty is having a job. All these people over here, if they just wanted to work and get off their Fox News couch that their eating their Fox News bon bons on, I’m saying that because that’s the Fox News perception of poverty, right.

BERNSTEIN: So there’s no such thing as Fox News bon bons?

VALLAS: There will be after we just said it. You just created I’m sure some kind of a million dollar idea. So but there’s this kind of setting up of the mythical poor person who is someone who just doesn’t want to work when you know and I know that that’s not what the numbers bear out and that’s not the reality. It’s people working at poverty wages.

BERNSTEIN: The problem with the Ryan Republican mantra on this is they think that the only thing a poor person has to do to get a good job is to want a good job. And that completely belies the demand side of the equation which as I said I think is going to be in place this year. But it also belies the fact that for middle and low wage workers we’re looking at three decades of the erosion of job quality, a low unemployment rate helps in that regard but it doesn’t change everything and we’ve actually seen even as the unemployment rate comes down to historically low levels that wages have not responded very quickly to that. And so that’s an area of really important focus this year, we’re going to have to help improve job quality and that’s something that if our Republican partners were earnest they would be happy to do. Because we’re not talking about Fox bon bons, we’re talking about people in the job market.

VALLAS: So if only Paul Ryan and Donald Trump were serious about helping that forgotten man and forgotten woman —

BERNSTEIN: Well forget Trump and Ryan, those guys, it’s a family show.

VALLAS: Well it was until you came on, Jared.

BERNSTEIN: I’m not saying they’re not influential but they’re not the only game in town and Trump by the way, he’s completely mercurial. I don’t listen or believe anything he says, I don’t believe his tweets because what he says one minute, he says totally different in the next minute. There are Republicans who are somewhat sympathetic to the thing that I’m saying. The problem is that they don’t want to spend any money on it because they don’t want it wasted, $1.8 trillion CBO score of the static cost of the tax code, including interest rate cost, 1.8 trillion over ten, that’s what, circling back to where we started. That’s what’s such a terrible constraint. The reason I hated the tax cut so much has to do with the regressivity as we discussed but it’s also because it wastes its deficit financing wastes so many useful resources. I’m not against a bigger deficit at a time when we’re closing in on full employment and could really help react some people who’ve been left behind who still don’t have an economic foothold. I’m not against trying to help them, a subsidized targeted jobs programs and the Earned Income credit, those are good expenditures. A 14% cut in the corporate rate and goodies for heirs of wealthy estates and their pass-throughs, that’s a waste of valuable resources.

VALLAS: Jared Bernstein is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, he’s also former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, he just made this no longer a family show but I’m going to invite him back anyway, Jared thank you so much and I like your crystal ball I hope it ends up being right.

BERNSTEIN: Thanks very much.

VALLAS: Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Questions about President Donald Trump hit a fever pitch this week follow his tweets about the size and potency of his nuclear button. Of course, such questions are nothing new throughout the campaign and Trump’s first year in office news articles, op-eds and tweets critical of him have routinely deployed words such as “crazy”, “insane” and “unstable” as epithets against the man. But what are the implications of the use of mental health language in such critiques when it comes to how our society views mental illness? For this conversation I’m joined by Rebecca Cokley, she’s a senior fellow for disability policy at the Center for American Progress and my good friend, Cokes, thanks so much for coming back on the show.

REBECCA COKLEY: Thanks for having me, Vallas.

VALLAS: So I want to start with a devil’s advocate question before we get into the nitty gritty of where I want to go with this. I’ve had a lot of conversations with a lot of folks who some of whom are seeing lots of these tweets and these articles and it’s making them uncomfortable but also a lot of whom are the ones writing these tweets and writing those articles. And the response that I get is one that I want to put to you to hear how you respond. Why does it matter? People can use all kinds of language but isn’t this just about people being a little too PC?

COKLEY: I’m going to actually read a quote from a colleague of mine, Leslie Templeton who is with the Women’s March disability caucus who yesterday morning posted a series of snapshots of news clips talking about the mental status of 45. And what she said has really stuck with me and what she said was, “When you read stuff like this having said issue yourself, it makes you feel small. It makes you feel inferior, it makes you feel weak. Since Trump came into office, the several attacks on him using ableism have affected my own mental health. I have felt less capable then I ever have before. Not only do I feel like my rights are being attacked by Trump, I feel who I am and my identity, as well as those in my community, are being attacked by the American people.”

And it matters because these are peoples’ lives. The accusation of someone unfitness to serve in any sort of role whether as a parent as a colleague, as a boss, as an educator is impacted by the slightest accusation, especially around mental health. It’s not about someone being PC or not, it’s really about the understanding that there is a lack, there is a lack of understanding about the impact of labeling someone without irrefutable proof. It’s much easier to be able to sit back in your armchair with your phone when you have 90,000 twitter followers and send out a tweet and have that language literally reverberate across the internet versus being a college student just trying access mental health services talking about your disability on twitter and then being expelled for harboring a danger to campus when there is no evidence to prove it and you haven’t done anything.

VALLAS: So inherent in the labeling but of course it just doesn’t just stop with labeling it’s not like people are just saying Trump has some kind of mental health diagnosis. There’s a connection there to his negative behaviors to unpopular policies that he’s been seeking to advance to a whole range of things that people are viewing as negative that then are being explained by this labeling. So what I’m hearing you say that by extension people who themselves have mental health disabilities, mental illness, intellectual disabilities and so forth are being implicated in the negative behaviors by extension.

COKLEY: Definitely and I think one of the challenges of this whole conversation is with all this armchair diagnostics is people that are doing it aren’t even clear what a mental health disability is. We sit there and see articles titled like, “Can someone with the attention of a kitten on crack make a decision?” “Trump has social autism” “Trump has a dangerous disability”. I think armchair diagnoses are fundamentally unqualified because it shows that people do not know what mental illness is. They don’t think, they still like to think about the other, the unknown, the shadow in the corner of the room, the thing we don’t talk about versus acknowledging that it’s your son seeking therapy, it’s your best friend who is grieving the loss of their mother. It’s your boss who is now taking anti-anxiety meds. It’s much easier to castigate those folks out of your village than to say no these are real people and in some cases even me.

VALLAS: There’s a particular significance of this conversation having to do with the presidency or really with any elected office. Because this is not a new phenomenon that we’re talking about. Buried in this is it’s basically forever been gospel that people with mental illness or mental health disabilities are essentially categorically unfit to serve. Even ever having sought treatment whether for depression or for substance misuse, even just that can be a black mark that can disqualify someone from being taken seriously as a potential candidate, whether to folks who would be helping them fundraise or backers of other kinds or to the general public is really where that goes. So in reinforcing this kind of narrative around what mental illness is and tacking it onto Trump’s face, there is a much deeper consequence that a lot of people aren’t thinking about when they’re using this kind of language that has to do with maintaining the status quo or even taking us backwards in terms of representation by people with disabilities in elected office.

COKLEY: No definitely, when we’re talking about people with disabilities writ large we’re talking about 54 to 58 million people but if you’re zooming in specifically on people with mental health disabilities or mental illness, we’re talking about 10 million people in this country, we’re not talking about strangers. And I think as we’re talking about the fitness of somebody, it really is much easier to point at somebody’s stability or mental fitness versus actively talking about behaviors. And I think when you start forcing people to say what are the fundamental behaviors that we’re seeing this person do that make them unfit it makes us uncomfortable because it is, it requires us to be specific. It requires us to get down to the nitty gritty details of something versus having the luxury of being able to sit back and point over the other side of the room. I think we’ve seen a number of advocates, both advocates with mental health disabilities and advocates with other types of disability who are exercising allyship to the mental health community. So this is truly problematic and this is what we’ve seen around conversions around gun control, around conversations around mass shootings. Which is if it’s somebody who is white and affluent behind the gun, it’s a mental illness. If it’s a person of color, they’re criminally disturbed, if they’re from a country other than ours they are automatically a terrorist. They’re a religious fanatic versus being able to actively address what are the actual problems here? What are the behaviors that we’ve seen? What are the behaviors that are evident in this person’s history that we should be pointing at to say no we screwed up here. We dropped the ball, we elected somebody who was unfit to become president of the United States. Versus oh well we don’t know where this came from, this is out of nowhere, this is psychosis, this is ADHD, this is whatever else they can pull out of the DSM with like five minutes before they go online. So I think that there really is a challenge.

Also we have a history in this country of electing people with disabilities. Both people with obvious physical disabilities. I think right now we can look at Senator Duckworth and Representative Langevin as people with physical disabilities that are currently serving in government. Going back historically, there were times when two presidents ago, President George W. Bush was doing things that people weren’t sure of and people were like oh he’s nuts, he’s crazy. It seems like a real easy kneejerk to when you don’t like somebody’s policies or you feel like somebody’s policies are out of touch with your values. Versus being able to drill down and to say no, this is why this is a problem. This behavior puts us in danger, this exercise of X value has this impact.

VALLAS: And you actually just talked about in some of the examples that you lifted up is that people would not in this moment be looking at Trump and saying man, his disability makes him unfit to serve if it were a physical disability that they were labeling him with. that’s something that people at their core would understand would be deeply offensive and out of step with American values and it’s not where we are as a society. But yet if it’s a mental illness that people are labeling him with from their armchairs, all of a sudden that seems to be equivalent to unfitness to serve.

COKLEY: Well it’s kind of funny isn’t it when you look back at one of the biggest criticisms he took on the campaign was his open attacks on Serge Kovaleski, the reporter with the disability that manifested itself as an apparent disability. And yet it’s much easier for them to be like oh no, look at Trump, he’s bananas. He’s unstable.

VALLAS: Serge Kovaleski of course is the New York Times reporter who Trump mocked openly during a rally on the campaign trail by flapping his arms in the air and saying “ohhhh” and that was his rendition of how Serge Kovaleski lives and behaves.

COKLEY: And I think one of the most interesting things when you go back to that conversation is if you talk to the disability community then about their response to that, the concern was less about the teasing and the mocking. We deal with that from not disabled people on a daily basis, I mean I can go into Adams Morgan on a Friday night and be mocked at least ten times in thirty minutes if I walk down the street after 10 pm. I can deal with that but the fact that it was held up as inspiration porn that most folks didn’t even realize what disability Mr. Kovaleski had and that people weren’t concentrating that Trump was running on killing Medicaid and killing Social Security and attacking benefits and programs that disabled people’s lives fundamentally depend on which was way more critically important to the community as a whole than a bully.

VALLAS: So you often talk about what you refer to as a hierarchy of disability. And what this gets into is a conversation that’s often had in the policy context that for a long time for example it has been a lot easier to get health coverage that helps you out if you’re a person who has kind of a physical illness or a physical disability, a chronic health issue that is physical where as mental health coverage, a lot harder to come by. That’s something the Affordable Care Act was huge in establishing was so called mental health parity. But that conversation is almost never had when it’s not about policy but it’s just about social perceptions and stigma. I think a lot of what we’re seeing here, at least the way it seems to me and I want to hear you weigh in on this really is this massive gap between the trust that the American people, I should not say the American people I should say a lot of people in this country have for the potential leadership or decision making by people who are either people without disabilities or people with physical disabilities compared with their counterparts who have mental health disabilities or mental illness or intellectual disabilities and so forth. Am I right to be characterizing it that way?

COKLEY: Oh I think you’re definitely right. When you look at how people are treated by and large when they have a physical disability that’s apparent. I’ll even use myself as an example, being a little person I mean I walk in the room and you can tell that I’m a little person. Nobody is going to object to me asking for a stool or jumping on the chair to push the chair down because they can see it. Both for a long time I wasn’t as out about having obsessive compulsive disorder and it wasn’t something I frequently talked about until I was in my 20s and was actually challenged by a friend and mentor of mine Andy Imparato who is very outspoken about having a mental health disability. And Andy and I were in a four hour car ride from D.C. to Newport News for the Virginia Youth Leadership Forum where the two topics of conversation was one, why haven’t I then proposed to my then boyfriend now husband and two, why don’t I talk about having OCD?

VALLAS: I have to say I’m personally very happy that number one led to you guys being married because you have a very amazing husband but sorry to interrupt, just wanted to give Patrick a shout out there.

COKLEY: And it was a four hour long conversation. I’m sure Andy remembers it well, about why I was hesitant to talk about it and why I had put myself out as an advocate, as a spokesperson, as somebody working in the disability space but I was not coming to the table with my whole self there. And so I tried it that night. I was like you know what for shits and giggles I’m just going to do it. I will do it, and Andy was like we’ll do it and then we’ll talk about it on the four hour ride back to D.C. and see how it goes. And so I did. I addressed the fact that I walk in the room as a little person and that’s a privilege. And I often don’t think we talk about disability as privilege. There is a privilege to my existence as a person with a physical disability. There’s a privilege to the fact that unlike 80% of disabled people, I grew up in a family just like me.

And then address the fact that in addition to being a little person I also have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and I used to wash my hands like 200 times a day. The number of particularly young women that came up to me afterwards was amazing. It was about 50 young women that pulled me aside that all wanted to talk about mental health disabilities. The fact that I had a job, the fact that I was in a relationship, the fact that I was being paid to go around the country and talk to other young people with disabilities. The fact that I was working on a presidential campaign at the time was huge. So I think a lot of times when we have internally stigmatized our own mental health disabilities for a long time and then we face a public that criminalizes mental health without any need for that. Without any criminal behaviors associated with it. With no more reason other than to say that you don’t like somebody, for no more reason than to say that somebody is evil or you don’t agree with their decisions. It invalidates that part of their humanity. And so it makes it that much harder for folks to come out.

VALLAS: I want to get to the solutions part of this narrative, I referenced up top I’ve had a lot of conversations, particularly over the holidays but also in the last few days back with folks, some of whom as I said have been feeling uncomfortable seeing some of these tweets including from their colleagues and from their friends or on Facebook, really, really offensive, ableist posts. But they haven’t really wanted to say something to those people because they haven’t known what to say. And I’ll be honest I personally have not broached this conversation on air yet or in writing because I also have been not entirely sure what I would want to say when we move past the piece of the conversation that’s about why this is a problem to how we do better. You started to get there by talking about the importance of precision in language and I feel like we’ve started to get there in talking about the need to bust the myth that somehow mental illness or a mental health disability is equivalent to unfitness to serve but how do we do better when it comes to language and specifically what’s your advice to those folks who are out there wanting to be good allies and frankly wanting to be good humans who do better on this and who are more thoughtful? What’s the advice you would have for folks who are wanting to have those hard conversations with people who maybe aren’t really getting why this is a problem?

COKLEY: I think I’m going to channel two good friends of mine, Alex Hardy who is a mental health advocate up in New York and Preston Mitcham here in D.C. who are always very quick to remind me and others of the importance of checking in our friends. And I think checking in on your friends, your friends that have mental health disabilities and saying hey how is it going? Do you need anything? How are you feeling in this time or space and listening, doing some real deep listening as to what people are encountering because it’s hard right now. I think also connecting to organizations that work with folks with mental health disabilities, whether it be groups like Dan Fisher’s Psych Survivors Network or certain chapters of NAMI, National Association on Mental Illness that are doing some really good things. And engaging to see what needs to be said, what is the right language to use and asking your friends. That’s honestly one of the biggest things that I find is so much of language is the fear of saying the wrong thing versus the take five seconds and asking your friends what’s the right thing to say. What are they comfortable with? It might not be person first language, it might be identity first or vice versa but find out where their heads are at.

And I think as long as we continue to hold mental health at arms length as the other, we can’t have the conversation that we really need to be having on this right now which leads to the criminalization of mental health and the knee jerk reactions of being able to say oh that person can’t do that job because they’re nuts.

VALLAS: I want to read a tweet by Julia Bascom a good friend of both of ours, who leads the Autistic Self Advocacy Network as it’s executive director. She says, “We can conclude that the president is unfit to serve without armchair diagnosis or violations of medical ethics. We can resist racism, totalitarianism and a nuclear threat without ableism. We don’t need this, we can do better, progressives have a moral obligation to do better.” Powerful words from Julia and thank you Julia for tweeting that. But it feels to me that that piece of call to action language doesn’t quite go as far as some people are wanting to go in terms of being armed with what they then can say to folks who say fine, I get it, maybe that’s not what I should be doing but I don’t want this guy to be my president and I’m interested in say, invoking the 25th amendment, a lot of conversation about the 25th amendment, particularly in the wake of mental health professionals coming out and joining forces and saying it may actually be relevant here given this particular president. So would love to hear you as we close out here with any suggestions you have about how people can handle these kinds of hard and honest conversations when folks are looking for guidance about how they can actually engage in this conversation but in a way that is not ableist.

COKLEY: I think going back to the last line of Julia’s tweet, progressives have a moral obligation to do better. And man, what did we do before we had 280 characters, I mean, I think 140 made things much more easily to be, actually that’s a good point to make. You have 280 characters. Double the size, like ableism is lazy. I can see you doing it with 140, not that it makes it excusable but if you have 280, use your brains and come out with more creative writing than just knee-jerking to ableism. But that aside, we do have a moral obligation to do better. We are the party that comes up with mental health parity thanks to Senator Paul Wellstone. We are the party that is pushing for the U.N. Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. We are the party that is pushing to end subminimum wage programs for people with disabilities. We are the party that is pushing to increase access to mental health services on college campuses and programs for young people with mental health disabilities. Why are we then at the same time being so quick to use disability diagnosis as a weapon? Because we don’t like the president and we think the president is acting like a jackass. If President Obama wasn’t afraid to say Kanye was a jackass why can’t we say that President Trump is being a jackass.

VALLAS: Well I think great words to end on there, a lot more here to talk about but want to plant the flag here to say we’re going to be having lots more of conversations in the months ahead about people with disabilities and particularly people with mental illness, mental health disabilities in elected office and how we can do better in increasing their ranks further rather than adding to the barriers that people face to taking those kinds of roles in this society. Rebecca Cokley is a senior fellow focusing on disability policy at the Center for American Progress. She’s also a friend of the show and someone you’ll hear from lots more soon so Cokes, thanks again for coming back and I look forward ot having you back soon.

COKLEY: Thanks for having me Vallas.

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.`