Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
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Speaker 4: The core position of the Democratic Party is that anybody
Speaker 4: who wants to come to America should be able to
Speaker 4: do so. If that's your position, you're not actually serious
Speaker 4: about helping workers. You're basically trying to hold together a
Speaker 4: political coalition that has very different priorities.
Speaker 5: Why are the Trump appointees on the NLRB so consistently
Speaker 5: voting with bosses?
Speaker 4: You know, one of the biggest problems with unions as
Speaker 4: they operate today is that they have become primarily political
Speaker 4: enterprises and essentially arms of the Democratic Party. And the
Speaker 4: problem is that that's not what workers blocked. I think
Speaker 4: it's pretty sick to say among private sector union workers
Speaker 4: the majority supported Donald Trump in twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: Welcome to counterpoints today.
Speaker 5: We're going to be joined by Oran Cass, who is
Speaker 5: the executive director of American Compass, which is a kind
Speaker 5: of rising what would you call it, new right organization
Speaker 5: that is kind of reshaping the way that the kind
Speaker 5: of right wing associates itself with previously kind of left
Speaker 5: wing ideas like it's really important to have worker power
Speaker 5: to raise wages, and is trying to kind of reshape
Speaker 5: this new populism that folks like Trump are either kind
Speaker 5: of pushing forward or drafting off of. But to explain
Speaker 5: a little bit better than that, let's bring in my
Speaker 5: co host Emily Dashinski as well as Orrin Cass himself.
Speaker 3: Emily welcome, How you doing.
Speaker 4: I'm good.
Speaker 6: I'm in London. If people didn't watch the Wednesday show,
Speaker 6: a second week on the job at unheard so here
Speaker 6: I am coming to you from the UK, and maybe
Speaker 6: we'll talk about the EU elections just a little bit.
Speaker 6: I know Orren probably has some thoughts on them because
Speaker 6: all of these fault lines.
Speaker 4: Were at play. But first, Oran welcome.
Speaker 6: You've been profiled by all kinds of different media outlets
Speaker 6: as really one of the driving forces on Capitol Hill
Speaker 6: of you know, the new right of putting sort of
Speaker 6: policy meat on the bones of populism on the right.
Speaker 6: You were a policy director for Romney's presidential campaign back
Speaker 6: in twenty twelve, and I'm sure we can get into
Speaker 6: some of that. You've joined us on this program before.
Speaker 6: But first of all, welcome more thanks for being.
Speaker 4: Here, well, thank you for having me. It's great to
Speaker 4: see you guys.
Speaker 6: Of course, and in full disclosure, I have involvement with
Speaker 6: American Compass. I'm a fan of American Compass. So we'll
Speaker 6: put that on the table while Ryan starts yelling and
Speaker 6: Oran starts yelling.
Speaker 4: Back, and we'll have it'll all be in good fun.
Speaker 4: So or why don't you start just.
Speaker 6: By telling us, you know, kind of how this populist
Speaker 6: program is going. I know, we particularly want to get
Speaker 6: into immigration because that's probably where there's going to be
Speaker 6: some disagreement. But if we just sort of zoom out
Speaker 6: thirty thousand feet and people say there might be another
Speaker 6: Trump administration imminently, do you feel like if day one,
Speaker 6: Donald Trump or really any Republican president were to take
Speaker 6: office that a lot of these policy proposals, you know,
Speaker 6: against financialization, for example, family leave, some of the.
Speaker 4: Stuff that's on the table.
Speaker 6: Do you feel like it would really have a shot
Speaker 6: at passing or you know, getting the serious attention of
Speaker 6: the President.
Speaker 4: Well, I think absolutely. You know, I think we've seen
Speaker 4: a real sea change in the in the set of
Speaker 4: policy issues people are even talking about on the right
Speaker 4: of center on Capitol Hill in Washington, and then also
Speaker 4: the kinds of policy that moves forward, and so you know,
Speaker 4: I think you see lots of examples of this. I mean,
Speaker 4: one is when it comes to dealing with China with
Speaker 4: free trade. Obviously, the old orthodoxy that you know, free
Speaker 4: trade is good, always more reach, trade is better, Cheap
Speaker 4: stuff is what we want. That's gone. And so whether
Speaker 4: that's talking about restricting investment into China, whether that's talking
Speaker 4: about raising tariffs on China, those are the things you
Speaker 4: see Republican leaders talking about at this point. I think
Speaker 4: you see the same thing on issues like family policy,
Speaker 4: where there are lots of different proposals out there now
Speaker 4: to really increase the support that we provide to working families.
Speaker 4: You see it on industrial policy, where something like the
Speaker 4: Chips Act can pass with bipartisan support, and you see
Speaker 4: a host of Republicans offering other proposals to do more
Speaker 4: of the same, and so in all these areas it's
Speaker 4: a real shift away from the old. Well, if we
Speaker 4: just sort of cut taxes and get out of the way,
Speaker 4: a rising tide will whipt all ships. I think substantively
Speaker 4: people have realized that's not true. And politically, the Republican coalition,
Speaker 4: the people who actually support Republicans and vote Republican don't
Speaker 4: believe that and don't want to hear it, by and large,
Speaker 4: and so both on the substance the economics and and
Speaker 4: on the politics, it is an old different American right
Speaker 4: than we became accustomed to over the past decades.
Speaker 5: It definitely is a different American right, and you know,
Speaker 5: it has a lot of overlap with traditional kind of
Speaker 5: left wing approaches to economic policy, whether it's uh, you know,
Speaker 5: uh antitrust which actually has you know, strong anti trust enforcement,
Speaker 5: has a home on the on a kind of free
Speaker 5: market right, because you need to break up trusts if
Speaker 5: you're going to have free markets. But you know, skepticism
Speaker 5: of free trade, like you said in industrial policy, you know, subsidies,
Speaker 5: support for for families and for you know, just for
Speaker 5: raising children, et cetera. So where where though, do you
Speaker 5: break off from kind of left wing economic orthodoxy. What
Speaker 5: what what do you see as fundamental to kind of
Speaker 5: a populist right economics that that wouldn't overlap with say Bernie's.
Speaker 6: And actually, can I jump in first, because I have
Speaker 6: I wanted to ask about this particularly and I pulled
Speaker 6: a quote. This is from the Charting the Course policy
Speaker 6: series that American Compass released recently. It reads, the intro reads,
Speaker 6: the vital conservative commitment to limited government depends upon bringing
Speaker 6: federal spending under control. Spending determined government size, its economic force,
Speaker 6: and the cost borne by citizens, whether they agree to
Speaker 6: over taxation or not. The higher inflation of recent years
Speaker 6: in surging interest payments on our skyrocketing national debt both
Speaker 6: serve as reminders that one way or another, taxpayers are
Speaker 6: inevitably on the hook for the propaly gets spending of politicians.
Speaker 6: So that sounds again, you were on the Romney campaign,
Speaker 6: You're in a significant role in the Romney campaign in
Speaker 6: twenty twelve. That sounds good to me as sort of
Speaker 6: a traditional conservative. It sounds like something that might allay
Speaker 6: the fears of traditional conservatives. But where does that, you know,
Speaker 6: what ground does that leave to cooperate like someone like
Speaker 6: a Bernie Sanders, What is the distinct between you know,
Speaker 6: American Compass an Orange Cass and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Speaker 4: Well, I, you know, I think it's an important place
Speaker 4: to start to just recognize that these sort of definitions
Speaker 4: of left right, progressive conservative have gotten jumbled in a
Speaker 4: lot of confusing ways in recent decades. I mean, if
Speaker 4: you know, if you ask what was the actual left
Speaker 4: or Democratic Party policy agenda over the last twenty years
Speaker 4: and you know, or thirty years when back to Bill
Speaker 4: Clinton and then Barack Obama, you know, I'm not sure
Speaker 4: how much you would distinguish it from basically the Wall
Speaker 4: Street agenda. I mean, it was aggressive efforts at expanding
Speaker 4: free trade. It was promoting you know, financial deregulation, it
Speaker 4: was obviously trying to bring in a large number of
Speaker 4: low age workers from other countries, and so, you know
Speaker 4: a lot of things that Ryan was saying, like, well,
Speaker 4: but you know, isn't this or that the position of
Speaker 4: the left. Well, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if
Speaker 4: it is. And so you know, if you look at
Speaker 4: someone like Bernie Sanders, I would say, yeah, certainly there
Speaker 4: are places where I would say Bernie has a point,
Speaker 4: whether that's in diagnosing things that are not going well
Speaker 4: in the economy, or you know, on an issue like antitrust,
Speaker 4: where competition is obviously very important and has not been
Speaker 4: promoted very effectively. The problem is that at the end
Speaker 4: of the day, if you look at a Bernie Sanders
Speaker 4: or Elizabeth Warren agenda, it's I would say, confused, if
Speaker 4: nothing else. I mean, I don't know how it intends
Speaker 4: to actually address the problems that we have in this country,
Speaker 4: because it's not willing to, for instance, acknowledge that that
Speaker 4: work actually matters and what we need to be doing
Speaker 4: is promoting work and high wages for American workers. It
Speaker 4: instead is essentially committed at this point to open borders,
Speaker 4: which is fundamentally incompatible that even even on an issue
Speaker 4: like labor. You know, we say that or have always
Speaker 4: assumed that the Left is sort of the pro worker,
Speaker 4: pro labor party. I guess that's true if you mean
Speaker 4: they agree with with sort of union bosses and the
Speaker 4: people who run labor unions, but it's not at all
Speaker 4: clear that their positions align with what the workers in
Speaker 4: those unions want, and in fact, one of the things
Speaker 4: those workers most want is for the unions to stop
Speaker 4: focusing on progressive political priorities. And so I think there's
Speaker 4: this very interesting moment that we're in right now where
Speaker 4: you've had really on both sides for a long time now,
Speaker 4: these political leaders who focused on the kind of very
Speaker 4: niche concerns of their highest income constituents and donors, I suppose,
Speaker 4: and you have this huge mass of Americans who weren't
Speaker 4: really served by either agenda, and what you're seeing right
Speaker 4: now is a lot of folks on the right of
Speaker 4: center are actually focusing on that and trying to respond
Speaker 4: to it and construct kind an agenda that looks more
Speaker 4: like what most Americans want, even as you have a
Speaker 4: Democratic Party that sort of seems to be drifting ever
Speaker 4: further into this kind of weird progressive bubble of among
Speaker 4: other things, that wildly unpopular in addition to ineffective positions.
Speaker 4: And so I think that's that's really the driving force
Speaker 4: in our politics right now, and it's certainly creating a
Speaker 4: lot of opportunity for conservatives to advance the things they
Speaker 4: care about.
Speaker 5: So to me, I think there are kind of two
Speaker 5: different questions embedded in what you said there, and one
Speaker 5: is the you know what is the best immigration policy
Speaker 5: you know, for workers, for low wage workers, for medium
Speaker 5: wage workers, or high wage workers. And there might be
Speaker 5: different answers to to all of those different questions, and
Speaker 5: that's something that we should spend some time talking about.
Speaker 5: But then, but the other question is is immigration and
Speaker 5: are immigrants kind of being used and highlighted in a
Speaker 5: way that distracts us from a more serious confrontation with
Speaker 5: the things that are actually driving inequality, that are actually
Speaker 5: driving wages down, that are allowing kind of the CEOs
Speaker 5: in the top ten or twenty percent to aggregate all
Speaker 5: of the wealth over the last fifty years to themselves.
Speaker 5: So I think it's sort of like two different questions, Like,
Speaker 5: on the one hand, yes, there may be a better
Speaker 5: or worse immigration policy, But if the focus is only
Speaker 5: on immigration policy, are we missing the more fundamental problems
Speaker 5: that we need to be addressing if we're going to
Speaker 5: actually build real worker power.
Speaker 4: Well, I think the way you just sort of focused
Speaker 4: on worker power is exactly right. The underlying question is
Speaker 4: what power do workers have in the labor market? Are
Speaker 4: they going to be in a position where there is
Speaker 4: demand for their labor where you actually have to figure
Speaker 4: out a way to use them more productively, to create
Speaker 4: better jobs, to build a good business. That isn't, in
Speaker 4: essence the secret source of capitalism. I mean, going all
Speaker 4: the way back to Adam Smith when he talks about
Speaker 4: the invisible hand. It's not something that works by magic,
Speaker 4: he says, it's something that works if the things that
Speaker 4: are going to generate the most profit are also the
Speaker 4: things that are going to yield the most output in
Speaker 4: the country and employ the most people domestically. And so
Speaker 4: the problem in recent decades is that we've just released
Speaker 4: those constraints. We've said the best way is to make
Speaker 4: a lot of money, have nothing to do with creating
Speaker 4: good jobs for American workers, because first of all, you
Speaker 4: can offshore and produce elsewhere. And second of all, if
Speaker 4: you complain, oh, we have a labor shortage, then we
Speaker 4: use that as a reason to bring in more workers.
Speaker 4: So I absolutely agree that that the core underlying issue
Speaker 4: is worker power. The question is, Okay, what are you
Speaker 4: going to do about that? And what are the levers
Speaker 4: that what has gone wrong? What are the levers you're
Speaker 4: going to pull? And the answer there is, I think
Speaker 4: in two parts, one globalization and offshoring and the use
Speaker 4: of foreign workers elsewhere. And two immigration the policy of saying,
Speaker 4: if we feel like we don't have enough workers here,
Speaker 4: instead of telling businesses to figure it out, we're going
Speaker 4: to bring in more workers. And I don't know how
Speaker 4: you claim to be serious about worker power or rising
Speaker 4: wages for the interests of workers in the long run
Speaker 4: unless you're willing to be serious about the need to
Speaker 4: actually enforce immigration law and have constraints on who enters
Speaker 4: our labor market.
Speaker 5: Do we have ex three here? So it's a famous chart,
Speaker 5: looks like a little crocodile. It's called for those who
Speaker 5: are just listing. Decline in union membership mirrors income gains
Speaker 5: of the top one percent, and what you see top
Speaker 5: ten percent, that's a top ten percent. What you say
Speaker 5: is a surgeon union membership in the late nineteen thirties
Speaker 5: nineteen four.
Speaker 3: Which then.
Speaker 5: Brings about a more egalitarian economy. In the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 5: you start to see it diverge. In the nineteen eighties
Speaker 5: and nineties, you have a collapse in union membership, and
Speaker 5: at the same time, executives and others in the top
Speaker 5: ten percent are walking away with all the gains while
Speaker 5: everyone else is becoming a miserated So from my perspective,
Speaker 5: obviously the number of workers who are adding to labor
Speaker 5: supply matters, like that's what that's what we call a
Speaker 5: tight labor market versus a loose labor market. A loose
Speaker 5: labor market has what Carl Marks even called a reserve army.
Speaker 5: A capitalism's reserve army is the number of kind of
Speaker 5: unemployed people who are willing to come in and take
Speaker 5: the jobs of workers who might get militant inside the workplace.
Speaker 5: But throughout the twentieth century, you saw pretty steady population growth, right,
Speaker 5: Actually in the nineteen ninety I think we had lower
Speaker 5: population growth than we had in other decades. Yet you
Speaker 5: yet you don't see kind of explosions in wage gains
Speaker 5: at that point. So to me, the most important thing,
Speaker 5: this is what Bernie Sanders would say, the most important
Speaker 5: thing you can do for workers is to help them
Speaker 5: organize unions. And the way that you do that in
Speaker 5: nineteen what happened in the nineteen thirties, you know, the
Speaker 5: federal government stepped in and created the NLRB and other
Speaker 5: kind of pro labor mechanisms that you know, enabled workers
Speaker 5: to actually win these contracts and win these organizing drives.
Speaker 5: There was a lot of union organizing in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 5: but the National Guard and the Army and the Pinkertons
Speaker 5: and others were allowed to go in and violently crush
Speaker 5: and otherwise crush organizing drives. But when the federal government
Speaker 5: was brought to bear on behalf of or at least neutrally,
Speaker 5: as a really it's workers.
Speaker 3: Workers got real power. So how do you feel about a.
Speaker 5: Genuine question like, how do you feel about, you know,
Speaker 5: where does kind of union policy you fit into this agenda?
Speaker 4: Well, I think having a much stronger and more effective
Speaker 4: labor movement is actually an incredibly important part of the
Speaker 4: picture here, and that's something that American Compass has focused
Speaker 4: an incredible amount of attention on, and frankly, it's something
Speaker 4: I think it's really encouraging to see a lot of
Speaker 4: conservatives start to put energy behind as well. I mean,
Speaker 4: you see you know, senators like JD. Vance and Josh
Speaker 4: Holly literally out there on picket lines. I think I
Speaker 4: just saw that, you know, the head of the Teamsters
Speaker 4: union wants to address the Republican National Convention this year
Speaker 4: because there is a recognition that that worker power is
Speaker 4: a good thing, and that a strong labor movement is
Speaker 4: a piece of that puzzle. I think the problem is
Speaker 4: is if you focus only on that, and so I
Speaker 4: think that chart that you put up is certainly a
Speaker 4: relevant one. You could, of course, up a very similar
Speaker 4: chart looking at instead of union membership, the massive influx
Speaker 4: of less skilled immigrants after the nineteen sixty five immigration reform.
Speaker 4: You could put up a similar chart looking at the
Speaker 4: massive shift to offshoring as globalization took off. So all
Speaker 4: of these trends are relevant, relevant. I think you can't
Speaker 4: focus on just a labor movement and organizing in the
Speaker 4: absence of the others, because organizing will only get you
Speaker 4: so far if you have a loose labor market. I mean,
Speaker 4: at the end of the day, the way that organizing
Speaker 4: gives workers power is in part by essentially cartelizing access
Speaker 4: to their labor. Right at the end of you do
Speaker 4: have to have a somewhat tight labor market underlying it.
Speaker 4: If you're going to exert power through a labor movement,
Speaker 4: if you have sort of an unlimited number of unskilled
Speaker 4: often not even in the country legally, workers who are
Speaker 4: certainly not going to be an effective part of a
Speaker 4: labor movement coming in and offering to take the jobs instead.
Speaker 4: If you have the option of just moving the work overseas,
Speaker 4: then your labor movement is not going to be very effective.
Speaker 4: And so what I think is so frustrating, certainly from
Speaker 4: my perspective, is to see on the right of center
Speaker 4: a real willingness to acknowledge the need for sort of
Speaker 4: an all of the above strategy and to say, yes,
Speaker 4: absolutely a better labor movement and more power and representation
Speaker 4: for workers as a part of that. But gosh, you
Speaker 4: sure have to be serious about trade and immigration as well.
Speaker 4: And then you look across the aisle to the left side,
Speaker 4: and you just don't see that. You see the sort
Speaker 4: of base political posturing and talking points about unions even
Speaker 4: when those unions aren't representing workers very effectively, and no
Speaker 4: willingness to take on the immigration element of it. And
Speaker 4: that's what tells me you're, if that's your position, you're
Speaker 4: not actually serious about helping workers. You're you're basically trying
Speaker 4: to hold together a political coalition that has very different priorities.
Speaker 6: Whilst well, I was just gonna say adversely, go ahead, no, I.
Speaker 5: Just say interesting, speaking of holding together, political coalitions that
Speaker 5: have very different priorities. And again another genuine question out
Speaker 5: I gotcha, like why are the Trump appointees on the
Speaker 5: nlrb uh so consistently voting with bosses? And is that
Speaker 5: something that like the Hallies and the Jdvances of the
Speaker 5: world are working on.
Speaker 4: Well, I think there's no question that that Trump himself
Speaker 4: is a sort of an imperfect vessel to say the
Speaker 4: least of a lot of of this this sort of thinking.
Speaker 4: You know, For one thing, Trump in a sense was
Speaker 4: the dog who caught the car and and was elected
Speaker 4: at a point where there was where there was no infrastructure,
Speaker 4: no set of ideas, no broader set of appointees and
Speaker 4: so forth to draw on. And that's why you see
Speaker 4: he comes into power in twenty seventeen, and what are
Speaker 4: the two things that actually try to do Repeal Obamacare
Speaker 4: and PACI big tax cut, Because those were the two
Speaker 4: things that were on the shelf. You still had Paul
Speaker 4: Ryan in charge in Congress. And I think one thing
Speaker 4: that would be very different in any future Republican administration,
Speaker 4: certainly if you have a Trump administration, is when you
Speaker 4: look down Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill and ask you know,
Speaker 4: who's really driving the agenda there at this point. It's
Speaker 4: not Paul Ryan. It is folks like jd Vance, Marco Rubio,
Speaker 4: Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and so you know, certainly I
Speaker 4: think you would see a different dynamic this time around.
Speaker 6: But didn't that tax cut prevent offshoring? I mean, isn't
Speaker 6: there an argument that it prevented offshoring?
Speaker 4: You know, there are elements of the tax cut on
Speaker 4: certainly on the corporate side that I think we're very
Speaker 4: important that that encouraged reshoring, that that encouraged investment, and
Speaker 4: and that's great as a share of the total cost
Speaker 4: of the tax that is not where most most most
Speaker 4: of the dollars were. And so I think that one
Speaker 4: thing you see now also when when you hear sort
Speaker 4: of discussion about well, what should happen to the Taest
Speaker 4: Cut Jobs Act TIKJA as it's expiring and needs to
Speaker 4: either be let go or renewed in parts, is you
Speaker 4: have some folks who are saying, just renew the whole thing.
Speaker 4: You have others saying, well, you know, wait a minute.
Speaker 4: First of all, we can't afford to do that, but
Speaker 4: let's talk about which parts of it actually sort of
Speaker 4: our most important to the economic priorities. But you know,
Speaker 4: I mean I would love to ask Ryan also again
Speaker 4: as a genuine question, not not at gotcha, like how
Speaker 4: do you make sense of the Democratic Party's position on
Speaker 4: immigration at this point? Is is is there some case
Speaker 4: that this is actually somehow good for workers or consistent
Speaker 4: with the sort of rising wages and vibrant working in
Speaker 4: middle class that we want, or I just I don't
Speaker 4: even know what the argument at this point is besides
Speaker 4: sort of what we don't want to get yelled at
Speaker 4: by these progressive groups.
Speaker 5: And I laugh, because how do you make sense of
Speaker 5: a policy that is two different policies like the policy
Speaker 5: the policy that Biden ran on in twenty twenty, which
Speaker 5: is that, you know, Trump's immigration policy is immoral and
Speaker 5: a stain on the fabric of our society, versus the
Speaker 5: policy that he's implementing now, which is like, Okay, actually,
Speaker 5: I'm going to implement Trump's policy, but I'm going to
Speaker 5: do it in a much more gentler way, and I'm
Speaker 5: not gonna I'm not gonna be racist about it when
Speaker 5: I do it. So like, not only can I not explain,
Speaker 5: you know, the rationale behind their policy.
Speaker 3: I can't even.
Speaker 5: Really explain what their policy is because they have because
Speaker 5: they've fluctuated kind of all over the place in just
Speaker 5: a matter of a couple of years. Like one of
Speaker 5: the biggest U turns in like political history, in the
Speaker 5: sense that it was such a salient issue Biden, you know,
Speaker 5: running ads on, you know, on the precise issue that
Speaker 5: he's now done like a basically a complete U turnover,
Speaker 5: like the the the.
Speaker 3: Bill that he tried to pass, complete U turn.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like the build I mean the bill that he
Speaker 5: the BIL that he tried to pass, and the executive
Speaker 5: order is pretty much a shutdown like after you know,
Speaker 5: what is it so after twenty five hundred encounters in
Speaker 5: a day after that, it's shut down.
Speaker 3: People people think people seem to think.
Speaker 6: That people came in during his administration.
Speaker 3: Right, yes, like there was a surge.
Speaker 5: There was a surge, but it like is that because
Speaker 5: Biden was trying to bring people in. You he's got
Speaker 5: he's sending Kamala Harris down to Central America saying, uh,
Speaker 5: don't come. He was trying to keep Title forty two
Speaker 5: in place. He's trying like he's like it's a completely
Speaker 5: inco he has a completely incoherent immigration policy, and he's
Speaker 5: he's sanctioning and otherwise miserating countries or in our region,
Speaker 5: which is you know, creating creating more push. But I
Speaker 5: don't think because he wants to push people like say,
Speaker 5: out of Venezuela or out of Haiti, or out of
Speaker 5: out of Cuba, but just because it's a schizophrenic, incoherent
Speaker 5: foreign policy that doesn't have any relation to that either.
Speaker 3: It's just completely chaotic. But I don't. But in other words,
Speaker 3: I don't think that.
Speaker 5: They sat down and said, what we desperately want is
Speaker 5: to have thousands of people a day kind of like.
Speaker 3: Pouring over the southern border like that.
Speaker 5: I don't that's not what you is that what the
Speaker 5: right things that the Biden administration wanted to do.
Speaker 3: What do you think is that?
Speaker 4: I think the Biden administration would obviously prefer, for political reasons,
Speaker 4: to not have the liability of a border. Right. The
Speaker 4: problem is that the core position of the Democratic Party
Speaker 4: is that anybody who wants to come to America should
Speaker 4: be able to do so. And that's where you know,
Speaker 4: I think you get this fight over, like, well, is
Speaker 4: that open borders or not? And they'll say, well, it's
Speaker 4: not open borders because we think we should have laws
Speaker 4: and so forth. Well, the question is what do you
Speaker 4: think those laws should be. And that's where you see
Speaker 4: even in the context of the so called border bill
Speaker 4: that was supposed to limit or you know, potentially shut
Speaker 4: down the border if you had too many illegal crossings.
Speaker 4: Even then, as as Center Chris Murphy famously said, the
Speaker 4: border is not closed. The goal was to instead expand
Speaker 4: the rate at which we could essentially grant people temporary
Speaker 4: status while having asylum claims adjudicated through ports of entry.
Speaker 4: I think you saw, you know, recently MAJORCIS was talking
Speaker 4: about even sort of opening offices in other countries to
Speaker 4: help people more effectively make these claims. Obviously, you have
Speaker 4: the CBP one app that is designed to you know,
Speaker 4: let you schedule when to show up and assert your
Speaker 4: asside and claim and come into the country. And then
Speaker 4: once you have people who who are here, you have
Speaker 4: the bid administration not only sort of catching and releasing them,
Speaker 4: but then also trying to stretch you know, what are
Speaker 4: supposed to be very limited authorities like parole into essentially
Speaker 4: indefinite legal status with work permits and so That's the
Speaker 4: core question is is you know you can have all
Speaker 4: these fights about who did what with Title forty two,
Speaker 4: and at what threshold do you or don't you shut
Speaker 4: down the border between ports of entry? The question is
Speaker 4: what's your actual goal and what's your orientation. Are you
Speaker 4: willing to recognize that a healthy American labor market requires
Speaker 4: very firm constraints on entry, particularly into the lowage side,
Speaker 4: or are you're going to say no, anybody, anybody who
Speaker 4: wants to come should be able to come, and I'd
Speaker 4: be interested you disagree, But it seems to me that
Speaker 4: the Democrats position and everything they do is very clearly
Speaker 4: we're entered round the position that anyone who wants to
Speaker 4: come should be able to come, and that every policy
Speaker 4: they pursue and position that they take is as a result,
Speaker 4: not actually supporting the interests of the legal workers who
Speaker 4: are here, both both native and of course the many
Speaker 4: prior generations of immigrants who, if they are here legally
Speaker 4: and are in many cases now American citizens, deserve exactly
Speaker 4: the same consideration and are often the most harmed by
Speaker 4: this sort of policy.
Speaker 6: Let's talk about sanctions as worker policy, then, because I
Speaker 6: think we're in maybe some people on the right, those
Speaker 6: of us on the right, have rethought whether or not
Speaker 6: some of those demands a different policy in Central America
Speaker 6: and South America. So would you support lifting sanctions on
Speaker 6: places like Venezuela that a lot of new workers into
Speaker 6: the country of the course, the Biden administration had been
Speaker 6: Venezuela and they have been Cuban. Would you support lifting sanctions?
Speaker 6: Would you support lifting the embargo in Cuba? How do
Speaker 6: you think about them?
Speaker 4: It's an interesting question. I won't claim to be an
Speaker 4: expert on the sort of foreign policy and sanctions element
Speaker 4: of our policy with respect to Cuba and Venezuela. I
Speaker 4: do think the important sort of core premise here, though,
Speaker 4: is that it is not America's obligation to be the
Speaker 4: country of last resort for the rest of the world.
Speaker 4: And so this sort of attempt to establish this linkage.
Speaker 4: You know, you also hear like, oh, well, the US
Speaker 4: did this or that, and you know the nineteen fifties
Speaker 4: or nineteen sixties, therefore we have to do X today.
Speaker 4: The reality is that that's not feasible and it's also
Speaker 4: not consistent with what the American people want. And I
Speaker 4: think that's where the rubber really has to meet the
Speaker 4: road on a lot of this is that, you know,
Speaker 4: so many people are making this collection a sort of
Speaker 4: referendum on democracy and democratic norms, and yet you have
Speaker 4: an administration and a democratic party that is steadfastly unwilling
Speaker 4: to to pursue and implement the will of the American people,
Speaker 4: who overwhelmingly reject this notion that people who want to
Speaker 4: come to America should just be able to come to America.
Speaker 4: They want to see certainly a generous, orderly, legal immigration system,
Speaker 4: but that that has to be the game. And so
Speaker 4: if we're not willing to do that, if leaders aren't
Speaker 4: willing to take that seriously and pursue that course, they
Speaker 4: should not be surprised if they get thrown out on
Speaker 4: their ear.
Speaker 5: I think the problem comes in when we said I
Speaker 5: think Democrats will be happy. You said, Okay, we're going
Speaker 5: to have a generous kind of legal, orderly immigration system.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 5: Now, We're going to sit down and in Congress, we're
Speaker 5: going to rewrite our immigration laws, which haven't been drafted
Speaker 5: or redrafted since the nineteen eighties. We're going to modernize them.
Speaker 5: We're going to make this much more efficient. We're going
Speaker 5: to aim it in a logical direction. I think democrats
Speaker 5: be happy to do that. Nobody is willing. Nobody nobody
Speaker 5: can in our current systems it down and rewrite immigration policies,
Speaker 5: so you end up having this hodgepodge of executive orders,
Speaker 5: illegal crossings, uh, you know, total chaos, lawsuits, and you know,
Speaker 5: nobody can you know, point one in one direction or another.
Speaker 5: I think it's it might be easier to just you know, say,
Speaker 5: forget about Democrats, Like I'll just argue that like in general,
Speaker 5: like more more immigration is actually better for workers more
Speaker 5: more broadly, and we can just kind of take it
Speaker 5: from there, like forget it, forget about forget about what
Speaker 5: democrats believe in one. One kind of issue that I
Speaker 5: have with with the way that you present your your
Speaker 5: labor work over at Americ compasses around the kind of
Speaker 5: market what seems like market fundamentalism around the around the
Speaker 5: labor market. Like it feels like an idea that you know,
Speaker 5: supply and demand drives everything, and that if you can
Speaker 5: kind of come in and you can just restrict supply
Speaker 5: of labor, then you're going to then then you're going
Speaker 5: to solve the problems that you're trying to solve you're
Speaker 5: gonna you're gonna you're going to raise the real wages
Speaker 5: for workers. And the reason I think that that's at
Speaker 5: best incomplete because it doesn't emphasize enough the need to
Speaker 5: do actual union unionizing, which gives workers real power, is
Speaker 5: that if you don't change the structural power, and all
Speaker 5: you do is kind of tilt the needle a little
Speaker 5: bit by tightening, uh, by by creating a little bit
Speaker 5: of a shortage, by not allowing people in, what you're
Speaker 5: going to get is that the people at the top
Speaker 5: still have the power, still have the power, and any
Speaker 5: any changes then are are going to any any profits
Speaker 5: from that are going to flow up to them.
Speaker 3: They're going to make that work.
Speaker 5: And you saw so for example, you saw this happen
Speaker 5: in the pandemic. It was a real example of like
Speaker 5: all of a sudden, companies and particularly like you know,
Speaker 5: restaurants elsewhere like really needed to raise wages because there
Speaker 5: was a huge labor shortage. Not only did we have
Speaker 5: basically immigrations sealed down at the border, lots of workers just.
Speaker 3: Weren't willing to weren't willing to work.
Speaker 5: Some of them were just complete We're just locked out
Speaker 5: so they couldn't find enough workers. And so the first
Speaker 5: part of your theory came true. Like you did see
Speaker 5: nominal wage growth. You know, jobs that used to pay
Speaker 5: thirteen dollars an hour, we're now paying sixteen seventeen.
Speaker 3: Dollars an hour.
Speaker 5: But what you also saw was the economy starting to
Speaker 5: completely buckle, and you saw it on a micro level.
Speaker 5: You'd go, you'd see restaurants that were used to be
Speaker 5: open all day. Now they're only open half the day
Speaker 5: because they couldn't get enough workers to come in, or
Speaker 5: if they were open at all, they would only have
Speaker 5: one section open because they only had you know, this
Speaker 5: number of people who were able to come in and
Speaker 5: that you know, blasted. And then as a result, the
Speaker 5: price of everything goes way up. You start to see
Speaker 5: this have you spike and inflation. And so while nominal
Speaker 5: wages went up during the pandemic, real wages actually went down.
Speaker 5: And that's because you didn't structurally change who had power
Speaker 5: within the political economy, and so all of the kind
Speaker 5: of all of these price movements.
Speaker 3: Just kind of flowed to the very top.
Speaker 5: And so my argument would be, if you don't have
Speaker 5: unions who were able to then fight back against that
Speaker 5: whatever ability you have of pushing up nominal wages is
Speaker 5: just going to lead to inflation across the economy and
Speaker 5: then more profits for the top ten percent.
Speaker 4: Well, I guess I have a little bit of trouble
Speaker 4: in following that story, because it seems to me that
Speaker 4: that is also what a lot of labor economists would
Speaker 4: not incorrectly worry unions would do. I mean, if what
Speaker 4: you're saying is that when workers have power and push
Speaker 4: for higher wages, is that just forces up prices and
Speaker 4: the result is inflation. I mean, fair enough. Maybe we
Speaker 4: have a very long conversation about what was actually going
Speaker 4: on during the pandemic, But I don't see how the
Speaker 4: story is different if it's your union contract driving up
Speaker 4: those wages. If your theory is that higher wages are
Speaker 4: just going to translate to higher prices and therefore no
Speaker 4: real wage gains, than then unions don't really get you anything.
Speaker 4: In fact, a lot of people would say that's exactly
Speaker 4: what unions were doing in the nineteen seventies, that that
Speaker 4: drove stag plation.
Speaker 5: The Well, the idea is that the idea is that
Speaker 5: unions and more worker power, which would also translate into
Speaker 5: more power for politicians who represented workers would be able
Speaker 5: to then intervene and make sure that the richest of
Speaker 5: the rich don't pull out those wages. You get a
Speaker 5: line in your in your compass essay. Was it called
Speaker 5: jobs that Americans do or jobs Americans won't do?
Speaker 4: Yeah? Jobs Americans would do, would would do?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 5: So you had one line that has said, you know,
Speaker 5: windshield installers are paid what they are because that is
Speaker 5: what must be offered to employ the required number.
Speaker 3: The same is true of marketing executives.
Speaker 5: What's interesting about that line is that that's not actually
Speaker 5: my experience. So I had this bizarre experience where I
Speaker 5: used to work for the Huffington Post, which was bought
Speaker 5: by after I'd been there for a couple of years,
Speaker 5: it was bought by AOL, and then several years after
Speaker 5: that it was bought by Verizon. And so because I
Speaker 5: was kind of a senior person at the Huffington Post
Speaker 5: and they'd never really owned media before, I wound up
Speaker 5: being kind of categorized in an executive level at like
Speaker 5: AOL and Verizon, even though like it didn't make any sense,
Speaker 5: which is kind of a but it put me in
Speaker 5: in orbit of all of these basically vice presidents or
Speaker 5: marketing executives and all these types at these corporations, And
Speaker 5: so I was able to get a window into how
Speaker 5: that world operated. And what you saw was this just
Speaker 5: wildly corrupt kind of backscratching going on. And so while
Speaker 5: you might have to pay a windshield wiper x amount
Speaker 5: to get them to come do winshe winshield installers, you
Speaker 5: might have to pay them a particular amount, it was
Speaker 5: actually marketing executives who were deciding what their friends were
Speaker 5: getting paid. It wasn't a question of what do we
Speaker 5: have to pay this person to get them to.
Speaker 3: Do this job.
Speaker 5: It was a question of basically how much can we
Speaker 5: get away with stealing from shareholders here, Like what is
Speaker 5: the most amount that I can pay you and that
Speaker 5: you in the next executive compensation committee will agree to
Speaker 5: pay me, and you just extract all the shareholders wealth
Speaker 5: that way. Not because you had to pay them that
Speaker 5: there were other people who would have done a job cheaper.
Speaker 5: But it's this clubby crony kind of backscratching corporate world
Speaker 5: which is just living off the backs of the workers
Speaker 5: and the shareholders because they have the power, because there's no,
Speaker 5: there are no politicians backed by workers who are cracking
Speaker 5: down on them. There's no union at these companies. Verizon
Speaker 5: did have one, AOL didn't have one. I'm talking more
Speaker 5: about AOL here, And so you wind up with this
Speaker 5: corporate culture that just siphons wealth off of the top.
Speaker 5: And if you don't undo that, just shrinking the number
Speaker 5: of people who are able to apply for thirteen dollars
Speaker 5: an hour jobs is what I'm saying, isn't going to
Speaker 5: change things structurally.
Speaker 4: I guess I feel like we've gone on a little
Speaker 4: bit of a detour here. I mean, I don't disagree
Speaker 4: there are all sorts of problems with THEIG executive compensation,
Speaker 4: but as you noted, I mean other things, Rising is unionized.
Speaker 4: You know, cracking down on stupid employer compensation schemes isn't
Speaker 4: what unions do. And so I think we really do
Speaker 4: need to focus on this question of you know, when
Speaker 4: we talk about worker power, what do we mean, what
Speaker 4: do we think it's going to accomplish, whether it's unionized
Speaker 4: or not. What we think it's going to accomplish that
Speaker 4: could be good? Is it actually focuses companies on investing
Speaker 4: in productivity, growth, at the end of the day, if
Speaker 4: we want real wages to grow in the long run,
Speaker 4: if we want greater prosperity for typical workers, we need
Speaker 4: their productivity to be rising. And businesses are only going
Speaker 4: to have an interest in making investments in their productivity
Speaker 4: rising if they are restricted in part by by type
Speaker 4: labor markets, potentially by a more formal organizing movement in
Speaker 4: who they can higher and how much they have to pay.
Speaker 4: So again, I don't think there's any disagreement that labor
Speaker 4: unions can play a constructive role here. The problem, and
Speaker 4: I mean we've jumped so many steps over it's worth
Speaker 4: remembering back where we started, is the question of whether
Speaker 4: we think it matters if we have a huge influx
Speaker 4: of less skilled workers or or if we prefer a
Speaker 4: situation where there are actually many fewer workers. And it
Speaker 4: is especially interesting to see now in the sort of
Speaker 4: post pandemic tight labor market environment, that all of the
Speaker 4: economists who used to argue that immigration doesn't have an
Speaker 4: effect on wages have now completely turned around on this,
Speaker 4: I mean everybody. And again you have the Biden administration
Speaker 4: out there on this as well, trying to make the
Speaker 4: case that somehow you know, we need to bring that
Speaker 4: upward pressure on wages down by expanding labor supply. And
Speaker 4: that's our new case for why we need high levels immigration.
Speaker 4: And that's just insane. I'm sorry. You can't take seriously
Speaker 4: the idea of worker power and wanting to see workers
Speaker 4: benefit in the long run. If you're then going to
Speaker 4: turn around and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, it looks like
Speaker 4: actually workers are starting to actually sort of gain the
Speaker 4: upper hand here and be able to demand higher wages.
Speaker 4: Let's bring in lots more workers to prevent that from happening.
Speaker 4: You just can't do that. What you have to do
Speaker 4: instead is tell the business community, look, we do see
Speaker 4: that you're under pressure without a lot of workers available.
Speaker 4: You know what, it sounds like you'd better do find
Speaker 4: a way to make those workers more productive. And if
Speaker 4: you do that, you're going to be successful in the market.
Speaker 4: Your profits are going to go up, et cetera, etc.
Speaker 4: And that's the set of incentives you need. And policymakers
Speaker 4: who are committed to creating that set of incentives that dynamic,
Speaker 4: I think should be credited with being pro worker. And
Speaker 4: policymakers who are not interested in that dynamic and are
Speaker 4: instead interested in parating the corporate line that help we
Speaker 4: need more workers should not be credited with, within any
Speaker 4: serious way, being pro worker.
Speaker 6: And I'm putting myself in the shoes of somebody on
Speaker 6: the left right now listening to this, thinking, all right,
Speaker 6: so is orange cast then pro worker if he doesn't support,
Speaker 6: for example, and Ryan, you can add to this, you know,
Speaker 6: significant tax cuts, tax increases on the wealthy, maybe even
Speaker 6: in the middle class, like European style tax system. And
Speaker 6: I know, actually you've been debating people on the right.
Speaker 6: You think the rights a version or allergy to tax
Speaker 6: increases is wrong. But you know, let's say the sort
Speaker 6: of Occupy Wall Street.
Speaker 4: Agenda.
Speaker 6: You know, if you don't support that, then are you serious?
Speaker 6: I know this is funny probably for you, because a
Speaker 6: lot of people on the right will attack you and
Speaker 6: compass for taking money from sort of left wing people
Speaker 6: and they think you're the secret socialist. But if I'm
Speaker 6: sort of a populist, disaffected maybe person on the left
Speaker 6: watching this.
Speaker 4: Why is or in task pro worker?
Speaker 6: Is he actually willing to sort of take the steps
Speaker 6: that Ryan mentioned that would structurally change the economy or
Speaker 6: are these just you know, fun talking points that mask
Speaker 6: something that's really just warmed over conservatism.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, I think in general I'm in favor
Speaker 4: of pursuing all of these angles. I mean, to Ryan's
Speaker 4: point about sort of executive compensation and so forth. You know,
Speaker 4: American Compass has done a ton of work on excesses
Speaker 4: of Wall Street, mismanagement of corporations, et cetera. I think
Speaker 4: getting specifically at that question of sort of who controls
Speaker 4: and sets employee compensation is a particularly difficult one. But
Speaker 4: I'd be the first to acknowledge it's a problem and
Speaker 4: them all ears on what to do about it. I
Speaker 4: think likewise, when you talk about the tax issue, you know,
Speaker 4: American Compass has just put out this work saying this
Speaker 4: idea that we should only ever cut taxes and our
Speaker 4: budget only has a spending problem is just not true.
Speaker 4: Now the flip side, I think it's also important to
Speaker 4: say it's not like tax increases are good for workers, right,
Speaker 4: Like I think it would be wrong to out there
Speaker 4: and say the way we solve these problems for workers
Speaker 4: is to is to raise taxes on somebody else. And
Speaker 4: I think that's where the sort of occupy Wall Street,
Speaker 4: like we just need to sort of if we punish
Speaker 4: the one percent somehow, that will benefit somebody. I'm just
Speaker 4: not sure what the logical chain is there. I think
Speaker 4: the two things we need to focus on much more
Speaker 4: strongly than a lot on the in the Republican Party
Speaker 4: have historically. One is that that budget deficits matter now. Right.
Speaker 4: It's not just a matter of accumulating debt that's going
Speaker 4: to promote some you know, cause some future crisis. Budget
Speaker 4: deficits are are a form of imbalance in the economy
Speaker 4: that has all sorts of consequences that crowd out better
Speaker 4: private investment, that drive up trade deficits and encourage offshoring.
Speaker 4: And so saying actually, we need to get our budget
Speaker 4: deficit under control and that will be a good thing
Speaker 4: for work, I think is really important. And then the
Speaker 4: second piece of it is to acknowledge that, you know
Speaker 4: a lot of the things we spend money on that
Speaker 4: Republicans of historically said well, let's just cut those things
Speaker 4: are really popular with and important to workers. And so
Speaker 4: whether you're talking about you know, the safety net, certainly
Speaker 4: if you're talking about entitlements, you know, your typical working
Speaker 4: family isn't interested in seeing those things cut now Obviously
Speaker 4: there are trade offs in life. Either you have to
Speaker 4: reduce spending or you have to pay more taxes to
Speaker 4: cover the spending. But what we've said is the appropriate
Speaker 4: pro worker view here is number one, you do have
Speaker 4: to close the budget deficit. You have to be willing
Speaker 4: to pay for the government you have. And number two,
Speaker 4: the way to do that is going to have to
Speaker 4: be through real compromise that yes, does bring down spending,
Speaker 4: including in some painful ways, but yes, also it's going
Speaker 4: to have to raise some more revenue in some painful ways.
Speaker 4: And so that's that's the position that we've taken. Again,
Speaker 4: I think it's one very interesting thing that you start
Speaker 4: to see conservatives taking. You know, we just put out
Speaker 4: a podcast where we spoke with both Congressman Rocanna, the
Speaker 4: progressive Democrat, and Congressman Jody Errington, the conservative Republican who's
Speaker 4: chair of the House Budget Committee. And it's very interesting
Speaker 4: to see, you know, Congressman Arrington. Chairman Arrington is more
Speaker 4: than happy to emphasize, yes, they're going to have to
Speaker 4: be compromises here. We can't just do the Republican tax
Speaker 4: cutting thing. Revenue has to be on the table because
Speaker 4: we do have to close this budget deficit, and that's
Speaker 4: exactly the place I want to see conservatives going. Franklin,
Speaker 4: It's very frustrating on the other side of the conversation
Speaker 4: to try to ask progressives, you know, to say, like, look,
Speaker 4: we think there could be some revenue on the table,
Speaker 4: what's the spending that we're going to put on the table,
Speaker 4: and the answer being well, you know, essentially nothing. I mean,
Speaker 4: I mean, you look at the Biden budget. Biden takes
Speaker 4: spending up further over the next ten years while making
Speaker 4: no attempt to pay for it, and that's just not real.
Speaker 4: We're going to have to get past that if we're
Speaker 4: actually going to make the progress that I think you're
Speaker 4: starting to see pro worker conservatives open to open to pursuing.
Speaker 5: One last point on kind of unions and worker power
Speaker 5: before we move back to the question of immigration, the
Speaker 5: economy or worker power. There is that to your point
Speaker 5: about that unions at a micro level, you know, can
Speaker 5: have the same effect of you know, they drive up
Speaker 5: they drive up wages, and then they might drive up
Speaker 5: prices and can have some you know, inflation as a
Speaker 5: result of that. What I'm also talking about, though, is
Speaker 5: the way that union density and a big labor movement
Speaker 5: changes the entire political economy.
Speaker 3: And I think if we can put up Ex.
Speaker 5: Four here, I believe it is or any any of
Speaker 5: these charts that I grabbed kind of show the picture
Speaker 5: that you know, so this is basically the way that
Speaker 5: you're seeing all of the gains flow to, you know,
Speaker 5: very high wage earners. Happens to co inside precisely with
Speaker 5: the time that union power is collapsing. You know, as
Speaker 5: union power is surging in the forties, fifties and sixties,
Speaker 5: you know, the political economy is structured kind of toward workers,
Speaker 5: and eventually these big companies are able to kind of
Speaker 5: beat back the labor movement, to break the back of unions,
Speaker 5: and as a result, the kind of entire political structure changes.
Speaker 3: And so I think we have ex.
Speaker 5: Five here which shows right at the time that unions
Speaker 5: are broken before you break the unions. So it's not
Speaker 5: just that the union in micro negotiations with the company
Speaker 5: are what are producing the effect that you're seeing on.
Speaker 3: The chart there.
Speaker 5: It's also that both parties then are you know, are
Speaker 5: heavily influenced by workers because unions are organized and they're
Speaker 5: able to get out the vote based on their material
Speaker 5: economic concerns, and so they then implement legislation that makes
Speaker 5: it more difficult for people to accumulate that sort of wealth.
Speaker 5: What happens in the seventies and eighties is that you
Speaker 5: see that marginal tax rates just start to collapse, and
Speaker 5: you ask, you know, what to do about this crazy
Speaker 5: corrupt executive compensation. The answer is quite simple, you tax it.
Speaker 5: Like back in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, when
Speaker 5: you had very high marginal tax rates, there just wasn't
Speaker 5: the incentive for executives to go out and do all
Speaker 5: of this stuff. Now, the counter argument to that ninety
Speaker 5: percent tax rate, people often say, well, actually nobody ever
Speaker 5: paid the ninety percent, so it's kind of a myth
Speaker 5: that we ever even had it. But my argument would
Speaker 5: be the point wasn't to collect revenue. It was social policy.
Speaker 5: It was policy aimed at discouraging the type of activity
Speaker 5: that would accumulate that much wealth. So, in other words,
Speaker 5: a corporate rate or a private equity group might be
Speaker 5: able to look at a kmart and say, we could
Speaker 5: bankrupt this pension fund and steal all the money. We
Speaker 5: could break the union, we could sell the land out
Speaker 5: from under it and just keep all the money, but
Speaker 5: at ninety percent tax rate, Like, what's even the point
Speaker 5: of doing it. So we're just going to go to
Speaker 5: try to find things that we can do that are
Speaker 5: actually kind of useful to society, which, to your point,
Speaker 5: and to Adam Smith's point that you quoted in the essay,
Speaker 5: like capitalism works if you're directing people towards socially useful
Speaker 5: projects rather than socially destructive ones. And so what I'd
Speaker 5: say is, like, by reorganizing the political economy so that
Speaker 5: workers have power again, what those workers will do is
Speaker 5: produce policy that produce federal policies that then make it
Speaker 5: very difficult for the top one percent to continue to
Speaker 5: gobble up all of the wealth. And I just don't
Speaker 5: think that's the kind of thing that you can do
Speaker 5: just by say, tightening immigration down at the border.
Speaker 4: Well again, I don't think we disagree that that a
Speaker 4: stronger labor movement is important as well. We'd have to
Speaker 4: have a longer conversation about this ninety percent tax bracket issue.
Speaker 4: It's important to understand that that it would not have
Speaker 4: back then, and anything you would do today would not
Speaker 4: hit your sort of Huffington Post marketing executive and and
Speaker 4: so when you start and conversely, when you start to
Speaker 4: talk about the profits that you're making from from you know,
Speaker 4: taking over in bankrupting Kmart, you know those are typically
Speaker 4: coming through capital gains and if they're even realized and
Speaker 4: being steered into to wealth and other forms. So you know, look,
Speaker 4: American comments has said, there's from with all this stuff,
Speaker 4: we should be we should be trying to make policy
Speaker 4: that addresses it. I would not agree that a ninety
Speaker 4: percent top tax rate is really going to do those things,
Speaker 4: but I do think the point about the political economy
Speaker 4: of labor unions is really important, and maybe we're spending
Speaker 4: just another minute on because I think, you know, one
Speaker 4: of the biggest problems with unions as they operate today
Speaker 4: is that they have become primarily political enterprises and essentially
Speaker 4: arms of the Democratic Party, certainly in the way that
Speaker 4: they spend their money, and the problem is that that's
Speaker 4: not what workers want. I mean, the data is a
Speaker 4: little hard to tease out, but I think it's pretty
Speaker 4: safe to say among private sector union workers, the majority
Speaker 4: supported Donald Trump in twenty twenty, and almost certainly be
Speaker 4: the case in twenty twenty four, and so you have
Speaker 4: this problem. You know, if nothing else, American workers don't
Speaker 4: look politically very different from just Americans generally. And so
Speaker 4: the idea that we're going to sort of use union
Speaker 4: power and sort of organize workers and exert political power
Speaker 4: through them in a way that advances the Democratic Party's priorities,
Speaker 4: it just doesn't make any sense. And in fact, the
Speaker 4: continued effort to try to do that is probably the
Speaker 4: number one obstacle to organizing today. I mean, we've done
Speaker 4: a lot of survey work. One of the things you find
Speaker 4: is that among the significant share of workers who have
Speaker 4: no interest in unions, that the number one thing they
Speaker 4: dislike about them is the politics. And that goes for
Speaker 4: whether you're a Democrat or a Republican. And if you
Speaker 4: ask workers would they prefer an organization representing them focused
Speaker 4: only on workplace issues or both workplace issues and national
Speaker 4: political issues, They'll they'll choose only workplace issues by almost
Speaker 4: three to one. So I guess I would sort of
Speaker 4: pose the question back to you because this is something
Speaker 4: that we've posed to a lot of folks on the
Speaker 4: left of center who we'd love to work with on
Speaker 4: this issue of labor reform of building better work organizations.
Speaker 4: How do you feel about a system that really does
Speaker 4: strengthen the ability to organize, create more and better forms
Speaker 4: of worker power, but also quite explicitly says these are
Speaker 4: not for use in national politics. I mean, almost the
Speaker 4: way you know American compass as a five toh one
Speaker 4: C three, we limit what nonprofits can do in the
Speaker 4: political realm. Would you be comfortable with a model that says, yes,
Speaker 4: we're going to do it a lot more to give
Speaker 4: workers a lot more economic power in the labor market,
Speaker 4: representation in the workplace, but those entities cannot be ones
Speaker 4: that are then turning around and trying to be political
Speaker 4: in ways that workers don't actually want. Is that a
Speaker 4: deal you're interested in or not?
Speaker 5: I think I'd happily agree to it if billionaires were
Speaker 5: also kept out of politics, if corporate America was kept
Speaker 5: out of politics, if corporate corporations couldn't fund super PACs,
Speaker 5: if billionaires couldn't fund super PACs, and basically you just
Speaker 5: I guess you then publicly financed campaigns.
Speaker 3: But I think that the history of giving people.
Speaker 5: Economic rights without giving them political rights doesn't pan out well.
Speaker 3: Like you need both.
Speaker 4: Because and they would still have political rights, they just
Speaker 4: among their I mean, they just would not be using unions,
Speaker 4: which are representing a group of workers that don't agree
Speaker 4: on politics, to exert them. I should say I highly
Speaker 4: agree with you on the corporate point. I would like
Speaker 4: to see us address citizens united one way or another.
Speaker 4: I think getting that out of politics as well would
Speaker 4: be very constructive. At American Compass, we continue to look
Speaker 4: for a partner on the left who would be willing
Speaker 4: to take this exact deal and go out there and say, look,
Speaker 4: workers would be better served, our political system would be
Speaker 4: better served if we reduce both the role of unions
Speaker 4: and corporations in our politics. We have yet to find
Speaker 4: anyone on the left of center willing to agree with
Speaker 4: that premise or write about it. If you were your
Speaker 4: listeners know of any such groups, please do let us know,
Speaker 4: because I think that's absolutely the direction to move.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think the reason you're not going to find that
Speaker 5: is because I don't think anybody believes that kind of
Speaker 5: corporate power and the power of the rich is ever
Speaker 5: actually going to be taken off the political playing field.
Speaker 5: And so just if you take what's left of union
Speaker 5: power away and you take away the ability for unions
Speaker 5: to grow, to grow and then and to become what
Speaker 5: you know gall Braith calls the countervailing force, like without that,
Speaker 5: without that countervailing force of UH of labor unions, I
Speaker 5: think corporate power just becomes too too dominant. So that's why, yeah,
Speaker 5: what what? What kind of reaction have you gotten? Has
Speaker 5: anybody come close? I find it hard to believe that
Speaker 5: anybody would even come close to agreeing to that.
Speaker 4: On the left, well, typically the dynamic is exactly what
Speaker 4: we've seen in this discussion, where the person on the
Speaker 4: left are presented here by you, attempts what they think
Speaker 4: is the gotcha of well, sure, i'd be open to
Speaker 4: that if we could also do something. If you're opening
Speaker 4: saying about proper power, and then we say, yes, that's great,
Speaker 4: we would love to do something about corporate power, and
Speaker 4: then they immediately retreat as you just have back. Now, well, now,
Speaker 4: never mind, I guess I don't think it would actually work.
Speaker 3: Right, because how are you going to do that?
Speaker 1: I mean, I brought it up right if you didn't
Speaker 1: think it was realistic or plausible, like right, like, everyone
Speaker 1: on the left spends all their time talking about how
Speaker 1: we should absolutely do something about Susan's United and so forth.
Speaker 4: So if I say like, yes, great, lets and you
Speaker 4: immediately turn around and say, oh, why bother is not
Speaker 4: going to accomplish anything, then why why are you talking
Speaker 4: about it? Yeah?
Speaker 3: It was because it was It was a it was
Speaker 3: a joke. It was a joke.
Speaker 4: Really wasn't a joke.
Speaker 3: Absolutely right, because.
Speaker 6: You could do it.
Speaker 5: Look, if you could do public financing, then then all right,
Speaker 5: then then maybe then maybe that works. I don't think
Speaker 5: just limiting corporate and top one percent kind of power
Speaker 5: is enough. You also have to you have to empower
Speaker 5: somebody who stands up for people. So is public financing
Speaker 5: in your in your deal, this hypothetical deal that's out there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm certainly open to the idea of it. I
Speaker 4: think you know how you how you do it well
Speaker 4: is of course a massive challenge. And I also think
Speaker 4: you don't want to exclude the role of of individuals
Speaker 4: as donors. I think there's a lot of benefits in
Speaker 4: the in the campaign system to that as well. But
Speaker 4: building a model that that does has reduced the influence
Speaker 4: on both sides, I think is exactly the right one.
Speaker 4: And so I think as we've seen. You know, what
Speaker 4: I think this discussion is sort of emphasized generally, is
Speaker 4: that what you see is the more sort of populist
Speaker 4: conservative view that is I think fair to say ascendant
Speaker 4: on the right within the Republican Party, really does jumble
Speaker 4: a lot of these things. I think it puts a
Speaker 4: lot of pressure on progressives and areas where they sort
Speaker 4: of conveniently pretended to be a lot more pro worker
Speaker 4: than they actually are. But it also creates a lot
Speaker 4: of space for actual progress. I mean, you've had the
Speaker 4: sort of trench warfare of Democratic and Republican Party of
Speaker 4: the last thirty years, neither of whom budging on anything
Speaker 4: and anything that could get worked out having already been
Speaker 4: worked out. As you see both parties, but especially the
Speaker 4: Republican parties shift in its coalition and its emphasis, that
Speaker 4: does create new ground for progress. And so that is
Speaker 4: something we're very interested in pursuing.
Speaker 3: No, I do think it is.
Speaker 5: It is genuinely interesting where the where the Republican Party
Speaker 5: is headed.
Speaker 3: I'm curious to see kind of where that continues to go.
Speaker 5: There's a bill and on the question of individual donors
Speaker 5: is I'm sure you know the bill by John Sarbines,
Speaker 5: which basically matches every contribution that somebody makes up to
Speaker 5: two hundred and fifty dollars by six. So it turns
Speaker 5: like small, small, to even medium size two hundred fifty
Speaker 5: dollars contributions from individuals who choose who they're going to support,
Speaker 5: and so it still leaves a role for individual donors.
Speaker 5: Then it multiplies them by six with federal financing, and
Speaker 5: they have a clever scheme where it's not taxpayer money,
Speaker 5: it's actually money that the I think the SEC or
Speaker 5: the CFPB or somebody collects from, like you know, corrupt corporations.
Speaker 5: So those fines would go into a pool that would
Speaker 5: then be used to support public financing. But do you
Speaker 5: want to ask, do you want to get yours? And
Speaker 5: I don't know if I'm representing the left or what here.
Speaker 5: It's a minority view in general to say that immigration
Speaker 5: is actually good for the country and good for good
Speaker 5: for workers. But I'm sure you saw the report from
Speaker 5: the Congressional Budget Office which revised up its GDP forecasts
Speaker 5: and said that something that over the next decade there
Speaker 5: would be an additional seven trillion dollars in economic growth
Speaker 5: because of the higher rate of immigration that that we're seeing,
Speaker 5: and that the reason that inflation has been actually tamed,
Speaker 5: not not not tamed completely, but why inflation is growing
Speaker 5: less than it was of the pandemic was that the
Speaker 5: that immigration has fueled economic growth to the extent that
Speaker 5: it's you know, just spreading generally and having the American economy,
Speaker 5: you know, drive the American economy grow faster, uh and
Speaker 5: with lower inflation than basically any other economy in the world.
Speaker 5: So I'm sure you've seen this a whole bunch of times.
Speaker 5: What's your what's your response to just the general idea
Speaker 5: that you need workers to grow the economy and that
Speaker 5: if you're not, if you're not growing the economy, simply
Speaker 5: restricting the labor supply only ends up in the end
Speaker 5: hurting workers and they as they say that real wages
Speaker 5: go down even if their nominal wages go up.
Speaker 4: Well, I think there's two things to say. One is,
Speaker 4: again the report that you're talking about is talking about
Speaker 4: GDP and not GDP per capita. It's i think one
Speaker 4: of the sillier math tricks in all of economic policy
Speaker 4: to say, well, immigration is good for the economy because
Speaker 4: GDP goes up well, of course it does. If you
Speaker 4: have more people, there will be more economic output. But
Speaker 4: when we talk about the actual prosperity of the typical
Speaker 4: American worker, we're not interested in overall GDP. We're interested
Speaker 4: in GDP per capita UH, and report, I believe, quite
Speaker 4: notably does does not predict that this is increasing GDP
Speaker 4: per capita or even more importantly, sort of media and
Speaker 4: GDP per capita the median wages of a typical worker,
Speaker 4: because immigration wouldn't wouldn't do that. So let's let's first
Speaker 4: of all be clear about what we are and aren't
Speaker 4: talking about with respect to this idea that you know,
Speaker 4: if you have constraints on the labor market, then then
Speaker 4: you're not going to see real wages rise. Again, the
Speaker 4: driver of whether or not real wages rise is whether
Speaker 4: productivity is growing UH and and particularly whether, if you're
Speaker 4: talking about median wages particular workers, whether the productivity of
Speaker 4: the typical worker is growing. A lot of things need
Speaker 4: to happen for that productivity to grow, but in general,
Speaker 4: I do think it is it is reasonable to say
Speaker 4: that if you want to see a focus on growing
Speaker 4: productivity and investment in that, you need to make that
Speaker 4: a imperative you need to make that key to business success.
Speaker 4: And when you have a massive untapped pool of lower skilled,
Speaker 4: low wage labor available, investing in productivity is not going
Speaker 4: to be especially important. I mean, it's also really important
Speaker 4: to keep in mind that we do have a fairly large,
Speaker 4: in effect natural experiment on this point, because we went
Speaker 4: through all we have gone through long periods in American
Speaker 4: history of both rapid immigration and significantly constrained immigration. And
Speaker 4: I'm pretty sure that in the post war period when
Speaker 4: the US had very low levels of immigration, there is
Speaker 4: at a whole lot of evidence that that was a
Speaker 4: bad thing for the labor market. That seemed to have
Speaker 4: coincided just fine with rapid productivity growth, economic growth, increases
Speaker 4: in output per worker, rising real wages. So yes, more immigrants,
Speaker 4: more people means a bigger economy. But that is one
Speaker 4: of the cardinal mistakes that policy makers made in recent
Speaker 4: decades of focusing on that and not focusing on what
Speaker 4: actually matters, which is the well being of the typical worker.
Speaker 5: But how far would you take it in the opposite direction,
Speaker 5: Like if if more electricians is bad, I would argue
Speaker 5: the more you know, actually, right now, in this economy,
Speaker 5: I think we don't have enough electricians, like we need
Speaker 5: we need to produce more electricians, and sometimes you need
Speaker 5: policy beyond just a price signal, Like I think one
Speaker 5: mistake that economists make is that they is that they
Speaker 5: live in kind of an imaginary land where you know,
Speaker 5: prices dictate supply and demand, just without realizing that there
Speaker 5: are also there's also a real economy. There's a real world,
Speaker 5: Like you can the price for wheat can be whatever
Speaker 5: you want it to be. But if there's if it's
Speaker 5: not raining and you've got a complete drought in a
Speaker 5: particular area, like you're not going to be able to
Speaker 5: grow wheat, Like, you still need real things. The price
Speaker 5: that you can be paying for nurses in you know,
Speaker 5: West Virginia could be quite high, but if there aren't
Speaker 5: any people there who are trained and willing to work
Speaker 5: in that area, uh, You're you're not going to You're
Speaker 5: not going to be able to just solve the problem
Speaker 5: just by raising prices. And if you do raise it
Speaker 5: high enough that you're able to pull nurses away from
Speaker 5: other areas, now you don't have enough over there. In
Speaker 5: other words, you need need more nurses. You have to
Speaker 5: you have to produce more of them. That would be
Speaker 5: my uh argument, How far would you take the counter argument?
Speaker 5: Like if let's say you're if you want to raise
Speaker 5: the wages of nurses, why not go beyond shutting the
Speaker 5: border down? Like would we say, Okay, for the next year,
Speaker 5: we're not going to graduate anybody from nursing school because
Speaker 5: that's going to tighten the labor pool around around nursing. Uh,
Speaker 5: trying to like if because if your poles lever is
Speaker 5: labor supply, why stop that immigration?
Speaker 4: Well, because the policy goal is the well being of
Speaker 4: American workers, right, So the countervailing interest here would be
Speaker 4: people in the United States who do want to be nurses.
Speaker 4: And so I mean, I guess you could say, like, arbitrarily,
Speaker 4: let's tell a bunch of people they can't work, and
Speaker 4: that would I guess, tighten the labor supply, but at
Speaker 4: obviously the very serious expense of the Americans who you
Speaker 4: would be telling can't work. So I think what you're
Speaker 4: trying to solve for is the healthiest possible labor market
Speaker 4: serving the interests of American workers. And that is sort
Speaker 4: of how I would would try to evaluate the policy proposals.
Speaker 4: I would say just again focusing on the nurse example
Speaker 4: a little more, It's worth keeping in mind that one
Speaker 4: thing you would expect to see if you have a
Speaker 4: shortage of nurses, and compensation for nurses therefore starts to
Speaker 4: rise significantly. It's not just a matter of sort of
Speaker 4: moving nurses from one place to another. It's a matter
Speaker 4: of having more nurses over time. And one of the
Speaker 4: things I think we get wrong, and also in sort
Speaker 4: of blaming the tight labor market for inflation in recent years,
Speaker 4: is that if you have a tight labor market, especially
Speaker 4: at the bottom, what you're doing is affecting relative prices.
Speaker 4: You're you're forcing people to drive up wages for one
Speaker 4: set of workers. There are other workers who don't benefit
Speaker 4: from that, and in particular would be the high skilled workers,
Speaker 4: the higher wage workers, whose labor market is not getting tighter.
Speaker 4: And so in a sense, what you are talking about
Speaker 4: at the macro level is a fairly significant shift over time,
Speaker 4: and one that I think would be very important. And
Speaker 4: that's where that windshield white you know, windshield installer versus
Speaker 4: marketing is to example, ultimately comes down. Is that if
Speaker 4: if you move toward an economy in which we really
Speaker 4: need a lot more. Uh, and and to treat a
Speaker 4: lot better and to create better jobs for those workers
Speaker 4: who have been left behind. That's that's also going to
Speaker 4: have a blowback effect on those who have benefited most
Speaker 4: from from this model in a way that I think
Speaker 4: would be very healthy for the society. And so I
Speaker 4: think that's something that certainly makes some people very uncomfortable,
Speaker 4: But is the direction we're going to have to go
Speaker 4: if if we want to address a lot of a
Speaker 4: lot of the problems we have eye plagues. Actually, I
Speaker 4: have to depart, so we should wrap up. But this
Speaker 4: has been a terrific conversation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, Emily had to draw I don't know if
Speaker 5: she mentioned it. Emily had to drop off earlier, she
Speaker 5: had she had to run, you know, a lot lot
Speaker 5: more to talk about here. And I think like as
Speaker 5: long as we're as long as we're talking about growing
Speaker 5: worker power through a strong a strong labor movement, then
Speaker 5: I think I think the left and the left and
Speaker 5: the populist right can certainly negotiate around a sane immigration policy.
Speaker 5: I don't think that has to make or break that potential.
Speaker 3: Coalition there, I hope. So all right, well, there we go.
Speaker 5: Orn Cass, executive director at American Compass and the visionary
Speaker 5: for the new populist Right.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for joining us here.
Speaker 4: This was great. Thank you.
Speaker 5: That was oron Cass, and normally Emily and I would
Speaker 5: go over the interview at this point, Emily had to
Speaker 5: drop off a little bit earlier, so we'll.
Speaker 3: Do that next time.
Speaker 5: We promise we'll do a review of that conversation and
Speaker 5: definitely have cast on again. These are interesting things to
Speaker 5: tease out until next time. These counterpoints we'll see soon.
Speaker 1: Three