YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert B. Reich

lines on the record: 89
first: 2018-11-07
most recent: 2018-11-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, you know what? Donald Trump, when he started out with this thing about the carrier thing, which was a disaster, I mean, it was phony. But if he had actually done something real like that, that would have been great because he just shamed them into doing it. He didn't pass a law. That is exactly what we need moral leadership from people. To reestablish moral norms, that is exactly what's needed. But unfortunately, he didn't follow through with that. And in fact, in the case in the taxes, he gave him all a tax cut rather than... Identifying some companies that were doing what were called tax inversions and shaming them. But I wish he had stuck on the course he started with because we haven't heard much about that since, have we?”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had a hanging of Harvey Weinstein, and look how behaviors change. We need to identify some companies that are bad actors. A company that, I'll give you an example, a company that says I'm going to move my headquarters to the Bahamas so I don't have to pay any taxes in the United States, to the government of the United States that did the basic research for the company, that educated its scientists, that protects its intellectual property, you're not going to pay taxes to that. Well, that company needs to be shamed in a way that Harvey Weinstein was shamed and shut down. And then after that, you won't find too many companies that are going to say that again.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't tell you it's a somewhat magic, but it does start with people. People saying, I'm going to trust my norms and I'm going to start behaving that way, and I'm going to demand the people in my society who I deal with behave that way.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say if you change If you change the norms, the laws will follow. If you try to change the laws to change people's norms, that's not a way to go. You can't do that. You need to change the norms first. We decided as a country that discrimination on race was not acceptable, and then the law changed. It wasn't that the law changed and then the norm changed. Social norms are real important to how a society works, but it's actually real important to how a market economy works”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How has it gotten worse? I don't know. How is it that we did me too? How is it that that changed? It just happens. And actually, I don't like social media. I'm not on any social media. But social media actually apparently makes it easier to change these norms and to shame people. And we need to shame someone who pays himself $800 million a year. We need to shame people who pay their employees $725 and don't give them health benefits and give them schedules so that they can't even get their childcare arranged. We need to shame those people and we need to say we won't do business with you. We won't work on your firms. We want to invest in your firms.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. There needs to be a difference in the norm so that people say this isn't right. And you know people do say that. For 30 years, we've been told to ignore our moral instincts. Did you have to ignore that because in order for our economy to be competitive again, you have to ignore your moral instincts. And we have to now feel free to say how does it...”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it has to be through social norms. I think I'll tell you a little story. In the 1950s, if any CEO had tried to pay himself the equivalent of $800 million, he would have gone to the country club, and the other CEOs at the country club would say, cut that out. You're making us all look bad, and you're going to make socialists out of people. Stop doing that. who are in that strata now don't do that anymore.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They don't actually, if they were feeling that way, then the Republicans would be very happy because it would be showing up in the polls. They are not feeling that way. So one of the worst things is for people who don't think they're participating in the prosperity to see prosperity and see they're not participating. It's worse than if the economy wasn't prospering.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, and I think it would be useful if the people in the middle were feeling prosperous because they wouldn't be voting for people like Donald Trump. So how do we do that? Well, I think we've talked about all the ways that we can do that. I don't think we need to give them a tax cut.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You should get into global finance. Okay, to hide all the money. Anyway, and all I said was it's all dirty money, so just take it. Large middle class used to anchor stability and moderation. This is the question. How do we grow it enough to counter our extreme polarization? Because really a lot of it is about the haves and the have-nots right now.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I get it. They were debating how dirty the money could be. Like, they were making a list of dirty. So Saudi was at the top of dirty money, and I think Singapore was at the bottom. So they're going to move to the Singapore people. I'm serious. This was a discussion at dinner. I was horrified and I wanted to shoot everybody in the head.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the world is awash in Saudi money, and if Saudi money doesn't go in one place, it'll go another place. And if it goes another place and the money that would have gone in the other place will go to this place, money is fungible. I would not say that is a global macroeconomic problem.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're taking on all this debt when interest rates are low, when we roll it over, the interest rates are not going to be so low and interest rates are going to start to take more and more of what we pay in taxes. It won't be very long before the interest takes more than Medicare. And then you're going to have to make hard choices. You're either going to have to raise your taxes, which means you're going to have less money to spend on other things, or you're going to have to cut services one way or the other. But this is going to be a problem and the crunch is coming in about three or four years when this high level of debt will be”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's going to be a problem. And the reason it's going to be a problem is not because we are going to burden our children with this debt. Government debt is, at least the federal government debt is never repaid. It just rolled over. So your children will never and your grandchildren will never have to repay it just as you never replayed the one from World War II. The problem is the interest on the debt.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go bad so quickly. They go bad so quickly, and you wrap it and they don't go bad for much like three times the amount of time, which is really interesting because I think it's 40% of food is wasted getting from the farm to the store. And so this could cut that drastically and get you better food at the same time, which I thought was super interesting. And I thought, wow, that would.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100% Yeah, it was just actually at a meeting yesterday with some venture capitalists, and there's a new technology they're working on that. You know how tomatoes taste terrible when you get them at the store? Because they've been picked too early and they're hard as rocks and things like that. This allows them to ripen. This technology, you wrap, it's a thing, a wrap without chemicals, so you don't have to use chemicals to do it. It's a certain kind of wrap that they're putting on it that you can ship them. They're working on it with avocados because avocados are so expensive.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just interviewed Eric Gardner. My thing is, and it makes me really popular on campus at George Mason University, is to say that we charge too much for college because it's a very inefficient way to educate kids, and we need to learn to use, for example, technology to lower the cost of instruction.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So right now young employees are paid less and so they don't see how they're going to pay off this debt. But what happens now is that that upward slope of salaries is steeper. And so if you wait till you're, you know, in your mid-30s and 40s, you'll be able to pay it off. But it doesn't seem like that now to them.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are going to earn more over their lifetime that makes that a fine investment. It used to be one of the things that used to be in firms, remember I talk about sort of sharing in firms. One of the sharing that used to go on in firms in the old days was that the older employees essentially subsidized the young employees. Because the young employees were basically worthless, okay? It takes two or three years. No, it takes two or three years to learn how to do your job, okay? And we paid them more than they were worth when they were young, and then we paid them less than they were worth when they were older. There was a more equality. There was more equality of pay. Now we don't do that because there is no loyalty and people don't stay with the firm long enough. So you have to sort of pay everybody what they're worth at the time that they're working with you.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think much too much effort and attention is put to number one, making sure everyone goes to college and to the student loan problem. It is a problem for a lot of young people from the perspective that they have their loans look overwhelming. But we know that because of their college degree, whether that's deserved, by the way, or not, whether they learned anything in college or not, and I say that as a college professor,”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think you'll see it all over the country, but we're always pioneering things here on Facebook. Right? Like, it's amazing. But you're going to see it. I just noticed it in Washington recently in Los Angeles. It's just Hawaii everywhere. How do we deal with America's shrinking middle class? You said there aren't, especially young people on the student loan problem. College.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a pretty good, it's just a good, it's like a poll result. It's a good indicator of how capitalism has lost its appeal. And it has a bad odor to it. Do you know that more than half of millennials actually don't support capital? Say they don't support capitalism. And 57% of Democrats in a recent Gallup poll said that they look favorably on socialism. Now, I'm not sure they know what socialism is, but I think it's a pretty good indication that people aren't all that happy with our system. And it's not just the people who are losing from this system. There's a lot of people like me, maybe like you, who are successful and are doing fine by this system who also don't like it, who feel that it's lost its moral legitimacy. And I think that's what we're picking up in all of these. I think you only have to look on the”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not on a shrimp boat for sure. And what his idea of terrorism was that he couldn't hire people to work on the shrimp boat because they were opiate addicted. And the opiates came from Mexico. And so he thought the cartels had created the drugs. Which had created the opiates, which means he couldn't hire people. So he thought the cartels were terrorists”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're bringing in drugs. I was talking to someone who Who was just a reporter, who was just visiting a shrimp fisherman in Louisiana? And they asked what the biggest problem was. And he said, terrorism. And they were like, you're not under siege from ISIS in any way.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't actually worry about that much, but it seems to me that our country has always our model is based on growth. Some of that is productivity growth. Some of it is people moving around. We move to other parts of the country. And some of it is immigration. I don't know why we'd want to screw around with a model that's worked well for us more than 200 years. What's the purpose of that? You might want to have an immigration system that encourages certain kind of people to come as opposed to other kinds of people. We could have a conversation about that. But the idea that somehow we'll be better off if people who want to come here don't come here. I don't know. That's loony.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's a way to nudge them in that direction. Use the tax code to nudge them in that direction. Now, we could also have a tax code that's more progressive than it is. So, what would I do? The first thing I would do, we got, you know, this Congress got rid of the state tax. A terrible idea. But it's politically controversial. So here's what I would say. First thing is that there's a little loophole in the tax code that all rich people know about, which is if your shares have appreciated a lot and you die, then you don't have to pay the capital gains tax on that. At death, the people who inherit those shares inherited at the new basis and they start out wherever it is when they inherited. And that capital gains tax is never paid. As a first step, we should just say that at death, you have to pay the capital gains tax. It's not in the state tax. It's just an...”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because you can change the tax law. Let me give you an example. When companies spend billions as they are now record amounts of billions of dollars to buy back their shares, it's a tax-advantaged way of getting basically the profit of the company to the shareholders in the form of basically their shares are worth more. We could treat that as the equivalent of a dividend and tax them at the moment in which the shares were bought back, tax all shareholders for the increase in the value of their shares, treat it for tax reasons as a dividend. And we might say to companies, okay, if you have a profit-sharing plan that we think meets the criteria with your frontline employees, we'll let you treat a share buyback as a... As a capital gain. But if you don't have one, well, we're going to treat it as a dividend.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes Look, they didn't bail out the banks. They bailed out the banking system. And they bailed out the banking system because we're all better off as a result of it. A lot of innocent people would have been hurt. They would have lost their jobs, their homes, their savings, who had nothing to do with causing this problem if the banking system had gone down. And by the way, the government got its money back. So when you use the word bailout, as people do, Yes, they were bailed out, but we cleverly bailed them out in a way that got all of our money back. Is it a bad precedent? Sure. Do some people get their money saved that otherwise wouldn't have who were responsible? Sure. But on balance, the world is better off because they didn't.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Burson and me, you know. And by the way, do you understand that all of these things, whether it's Bitcoin or whatever? Were borrowed money that was cheap. When the Federal Reserve tried to get us out of that long recession, they printed a lot of money and they threw it into the banking system. Most of it sat there and did nothing. But what was borrowed tended to be borrowed from people who bought it to speculate in financial instruments like Bitcoin, like real estate, like all these debt instruments that I was talking about. And it's a heavily leveraged. So if those things start to go down in price, the people who bought it with that borrowed money have to sell it in order to pay back the loan. And when they get into forced selling, forced selling, forces more forced selling, forces the price down, we're not going to like the way that looks when it starts.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essential bankruptcies going on. We've got a lot of restructuring that's coming, and that says nothing about if the Chinese economy starts to tank or we have problems in Europe. And with the euro again, which is very possible, all of this stuff is way overpriced. When you say debt is overpriced, most people say, what are you talking about? But this debt isn't just held by a bank. It's bought and sold. And these instruments that are bought and sold are way overpriced.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, now that's not such a big market anymore, but there's now a huge market and growing in business loans of all sorts and corporate loans that are packaged and sliced and diced and the quality of the loans has gone way down and the amount of indebtedness that a lot of companies have has gone way up. And these loans are variable weight loans. They started out very low because interest rates were low, as you may have noticed, interest rates are coming up, and so when the interest rates are reset, these companies are going to have trouble paying, keeping up with these loans, let alone paying them back, and we're going to have a lot of debt defaults. There's also a huge bubble in public debt, not just U.S. Treasury debt, but the debt of local and state governments. We may have a few state government.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bubble is stock market. Well, it's stocks in real estate and all sorts of financial assets, mostly it's a bubble in corporate debt. And I don't think you necessarily want me to go into that, but there's a huge, there's been a huge bubble in corporate debt. And do you remember we had these things where they took the mortgage loans and they packaged them and they sliced them and diced them? Yeah.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I do think is that they're about to announce this new headquarters, for example. And I think many people are on to the fact that it's a ridiculous Goat Rode of a circus. Like that there'll be 170 cities that were never going to get this thing that we're offering.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they see unions coming, maybe they see Washington coming. But here's another thing. I think what happened is that there were customers, you know, probably upper middle class professional customers who care about these things who say, you know what, I'm not going to deal with Amazon anymore because of that. They were getting pushback from customers. And here's another thing I bet they were getting pushed back from. Young talent, and I'm not talking about people who work in the distribution centers, but talent at the executive level, who said, I don't want to work for a company like that.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And, you know, the other day Amazon, the company we've been talking about, announced that they were going to not be paying their, they pay $15 an hour to employees that they had, in many cases, been paying a lot less than that. And they had been resisting the idea that they were being unfair. And all of a sudden, after resisting this idea, they're going to pay $15 an hour, which is pretty simple.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we got away from that. And we need to reestablish social norms so that customers and employees say, we don't want to work for a company like that and we won't work. We don't deal with a company like that.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whatever it's union rules or antitrust rules or tax rules, I think you can use those to tilt the system a little bit toward fairness. But in the end of the day, it's a matter of social norms. And this is one of the, I think, the most important point of the book. There was a time in this country where companies would not have behaved that way because it just would have been socially unacceptable. The employees wouldn't have accepted it, the community wouldn't have accepted it, and the customers wouldn't have accepted it.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, we worked in a newsroom and we technically had a union, but that was sort of a joke. On the other hand, if the sort of the senior and more influential people in the newsroom went in and saw and said, you know, you can't treat people like this, whether it's what you're doing with ours or how much you're making us right or you're letting some people in who aren't really paid a living wage. If we had said that to them, I think they would have had to respond to that and it wouldn't have been the union.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We may start our own company together, or we may actually go through this route that they have in the NLRB and you'll be stuck with a union. So please don't make us do this. Please treat us respectfully. And, you know, to the degree that people are better educated these days and they're more professional, there are more professional jobs, and to the degree that the professionals in the firm want to feel good about representing also the non-professionals in the firm, I think that that can work.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, they have moral suasion, and particularly if they're reasonable and if they come together and they say, we want to work with you, but here's why we're unhappy. And by the way, if you don't listen to us, we may walk out together.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little more like Germany, but there are some people like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders that want to say every company must do this. I tend to resist that sort of one size fits all we need a regulation that makes every company do it. We can change anyway. We can change union. The union movement needs to reimagine itself and re-energize itself. But what it is is employees need to get together at individual firms and say, you know what? We're not going to take this anymore. And we want to sit down with you and talk. And we have this union law that says if you have to follow it, this exact procedure, you have an election, and if half people do, then you're the exclusive bargaining unit. And it's a very rigid kind of formula that was very good for the industrial era. It's not good for now.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been bad, but let me just say, you remember I said this started in the 1980s? Well, one of the reasons it started was that unions got piggy and they made companies uncompetitive. They were paid too much. They were too successful. And the result of that was that jobs went overseas and unions were broken. So they overplayed their hand. Now, of course, we wish we had them back in the private sector. They still are something of a factor in the public sector, but in the private sector, 6% of employees are unionized. So we need to bring back a different kind of unionism.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some people haven't walked. So let me go back to the distribution. How do you get companies to do that? They do it because here they have high salaries and the people demand it and there's a limited amount of talent. Right. And so they get that. Along with kombucha shakes and fresh massages and stuff like that, they get all the stuff that they get.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a compositional change. Remember, there are people coming into the economy all the time, and they contend to come in at the bottom, and that has the effect of pushing everyone up on their rung of the ladder. So statistically, you can't say that we haven't gotten a raise in 2020. Some people haven't.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are on the middle 20 years ago earn X and the people who are on the middle 20 years now today earn about the same as X. And we say these people haven't gotten a raise, but they're not the same people. Overall, if you do a different, that's sort of looking at share of national income and median income in groups that change. If you were to actually do longevity studies and look at individual people and what happens to them, in fact their income has gone up. First of all, they get older and when you get older, your income goes up. You go up in the ladder and you go up in the company. So that's one thing that happens. You get more experience and more talent and you get paid more. But if you follow them, their income has gone up.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's not even clear that they're that much poorer. And this I sort of, some conservative commentators have a point. When I was growing up, people didn't have marble countertops. Everyone didn't have their own bathroom. They didn't all have air conditioning. Their cars didn't all have power windows. A lot of middle class families have those things now. And the reason is because they're so much cheaper. And so when we say that the income of the middle class hasn't gone up, there's two problems with that. Number one, we always adjust those figures for inflation, but if we mismasure inflation, then we mismasure income. And I think that's part of the problem. The second is we are making a problem by confusing statistics. When we say that the middle hasn't gone up, what we mean is the people who”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And another thing that's gone on is this sorting, which you know about the big sort that rich people tend to live with rich people and the kids tend to go to school with each other and they vacation with each other. And there's not as much mingling of classes as there used to be. That's a problem that we might, at least in a small ameliorate, if we all do public service together, we might do it with people who aren't like us, whether it's AmeriCorps or the Peace Corps or the Army or other things we might come up with.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can I just say that Israel, there's a lot about Israel I don't like in terms of the way they treat some people who are an Israeli citizens, but and their neighbors. But there's a lot about Israel that's good. And that's a good part of Israel. And by the way, I might point out it's a very entrepreneurial country.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then, what I would do is I take that money away from people who earn, I don't know, earn more than the median income or 110% of the median income or something like that. I'd start to take that away with higher tax rates. Now you say, well, why would you do that? Why give it to them and William and take it away from the other? Because it would reinforce this notion that we're all citizens, we're all equal, and we're all into this together. And here's what I would do in addition. I'd say everyone gets this dividend, but that's the good part. The other part of it is we all have a responsibility to each other, and we all have a responsibility to do three years of public service sometime in our lifetime. Could be when you're young, could be one year old, could be when you're between jobs, lots of different times. But to reinforce this idea that we're all in it together and we're all responsible.”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it is like that. What I would call it is a dividend. I would say as citizens, we all share in ownership of this country. Which has huge resources, but one of the biggest resources is our system, our economy and our political system. And we all deserve to share equally. So I would send a check to every person in the United States for $3,000 on the same day every year or send it to their bank account. And everyone gets it. And then for people who are working, I'd send them another $3,000. Now you might ask, well, why do I distinguish between people working and not? And the answer is because the politics requires that. I'm not sure morality requires it, but the politics requires”
2018-11-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: The ‘bad ideas’ that broke American capitalism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT