 Awesome lineup of brilliant speakers covering a wide range of issues relating to the next recession. I'm going to go over the agenda in a minute, but first I would like to thank the Groundwork Collaborative for their support of today's conference. It has been a pleasure to work with Janelle Jones and others at Groundwork in planning and executing the program. Janelle learned everything she knows at the Economic Policy Institute. And we're not at all bitter about the fact that she left EPI for Groundwork several months ago. Josh Bivens and Connie Raza have done an extraordinary job putting together their panels and they have both prepared excellent papers to frame today's conversation. Those papers are available in the back and also on our website at www.epi.org. There are short essays by all the other panels that will also be posted in a couple of weeks, as will the video of the conference, which is being live streamed. So thanks to those who are joining us electronically as well. I also wanted to thank John Schmidt, the Vice President of EPI for his wisdom and care in designing and inviting speakers for today's event. So we've organized the conversation into two panels with a keynote by former CEA Chair Christina Romer, who played an essential role in crafting response to the last recession in between. The first panel is on the causes and consequences of the next recession. What might trigger a recession? What factors should we be tracking? What have we learned from past recessions, including the most recent downturn, who is most vulnerable in a downturn, and what determines the severity and the duration of a recession? The second panel will double down on how best to respond to the recession when it does come in terms of the economic tools and levers at our disposal and in terms of the politics of the moment. How do we ensure a laser focus on the race, gender, inequality, and work of power issues in the response that we craft to the recession so that we also can use the crisis to build for the future, to build the economy we want for the future, as the right has done so effectively in the past? Both panels have a significant state policy component for two reasons, both because states experience recessions very differently and because the tools at their disposal are different and limited. We don't know exactly when the next recession will occur, and so if those of you who are hoping to find the date of the next recession today, you can leave now. I was going to tell you we were going to reveal that at the very last section of the last panel, but I thought that might be a little bit of false advertising. But we do know a lot about what has led to past recessions, and we can and we should be assessing the effectiveness of past responses, and we can and we should and we must strategize now about how to address the politics of obstructionism that we have faced in the past. So when we talk about the economics and the politics of response to a recession, one of the key issues that we face every time is around the use of fiscal stimulus and monetary policy, but in particular, can we afford to respond effectively to a recession? And these issues tend to work against working people and in the favor of the already rich and powerful, and I think some of it is a toxic mix of bad economics and bad politics, but they're united by the belief that the problem, the greatest danger to the economy is that workers are going to be too confident, too empowered, and are going to benefit too much from some of these responses. This is obviously madness. The greatest danger to economic health in today's US economy is the relative powerlessness of workers and the outsized influence of the rich, and so we need to keep that in mind. That has to be kind of our background and our framing for this. I mean, if we think that the problem in the economy is that working people have too much wealth, too much income, and too much political voice, and that that is what's ruining the economy, then we would have one set of solutions. But policymakers remain convinced that some of the measures that will provide a boost to workers' clout and labor markets, like letting unemployment stay really low for a really long time through either low interest rates or expansionary fiscal policy, will somehow be a bad thing. And that has been, I think, the root of a lot of the problems that we have faced. And the bad politics have to do, oftentimes, with the policymakers' fear that if workers gain too much power or too much voice, then the income growth will be zero sum and that that will take away from the people at the very top. During an actual recession, a lot of times we put this conflict on hold. But one of the questions that we want to talk about today and that we will be talking about is not just the immediate response to a recession, but the several years after it. At what point do we say we have now reached the optimal unemployment rate? And one of the things that we want you to be thinking about today is that the optimal unemployment rate, economists sometimes act as though there is sort of one single objective number about what is the optimal unemployment rate. But if you think about it, the Chamber of Commerce might have a different view in mind than the labor movement. And that isn't a single objective number. That having a tight labor market is really good for working people and not as good for employers. So those are some of the kinds of concerns that we want to use today's discussion and your presence here to frame and to answer. So if I could ask everybody to make sure you've muted your cell phone so we're not listening to take me out to the ball game throughout the course of the day, that would be wonderful. And without further ado, I would like to introduce Josh Bivens, the research director of the Economic Policy Institute, who will introduce and lead the panel. Thank you so much for being here and I'm forward to a great day with you. So thank you so much for coming today. We have a really good first panel. I'm not sure if they're all going to file out now or if I'm going to introduce an order. Yeah, why don't you just come on out? And I'll introduce as people sit down. And so I think the way we're going to run this panel is I'm going to give a sort of summary statement basically of the paper I wrote, sort of the framing paper for the piece that is available in the back that Theo mentioned. And then we're going to go through. We're going to have each of the panel members give about a five-minute sort of summary statement about what they think it's important for you to know about the next recession. And then we're going to have a bit of a back-and-forth conversation. And then at the very end we'll open up for a few audience questions. And so I think first I'll just go through and I'm going to introduce everyone on the panel. We have Derek Hamilton, who is the executive director of the Kerwin Institute at the Ohio State University. Amy Hanauer from Policy Matters, Ohio. I didn't realize we had such an Ohio-centric panel. I don't know how that happened. Heather Boucher, the executive director and chief economist for the Washington Center of Equitable Growth. And Angela Hanks, who is with the Groundwork Collaborative. And they're going to be great. And I'm just going to start with... No, no, you're going to be great. I'm going to start with just kick off sort of my view of what I think is important to know about the next recession and then we can hear from the rest of the panel. I mean, what I would want to tell people about the next recession is that we're terribly unprepared for it in the United States. And we're not unprepared for it for the way you often hear, like reflexively if you listen to it. I won't name a media outlet. Lots of media outlets talking about the next recession tell us we are out of fiscal and monetary space to fight the next recession. The evidence for these claims is really weak. I mean, basically in regards to being out of fiscal space, the evidence is, look, the debt to GDP ratio is higher than sometimes it often is. But actually this doesn't tell us anything about whether or not the U.S. actually has the capacity to fight the next recession with the public spending that will be needed to end it and restore growth. I mean, we know markets are not thinking we don't have capacity to throw more debt in finance and new spending. And interest rates continue to be extraordinarily low, really deep into a recovery. I mean, and one reason why smart market participants might be more than willing to give the U.S. government money is they know we are an incredibly lightly taxed country for a rich developed nation. And so if there ever does come a time in the future where we do need to reduce the debt to GDP ratio, we have a huge fiscal capacity to do that. So this idea that we're constrained from doing the right thing in the next recession just because we have a high debt to GDP ratio I think is really silly. I think concerns over monetary space are slightly better founded. The Fed, we really are going to enter the next recession with interest rates lower than normal. And these rates will almost certainly slam into the sort of zero lower bound that was a problem in the last recession. This isn't great. But it's a fact that Fed rate cuts are actually pretty weak T generally to pull the economy out of recession. So if our plan was ever, we're just going to rely on that. It's not a great plan to start with. So just pointing to monetary space and saying that's a problem. I think that that's far from the end of the story. So I would say, you know, I don't think we face hard economic constraints to responding smartly to the next recession. I think we face some political constraints that has kept us from being better prepared and doing the right thing. So one example of these political constraints, something Heather will talk about more in depth, you know, we haven't made a dent in inequality over the last 10 years. And inequality drags heavily on the ability to generate the aggregate demand growth we'll need to get back to full employment. So that's a real political failure. We haven't made a dent in the political clout of finance. One, the next recession comes, it is a sure thing that finance will shoulder its way to the front of the line in terms of sectors asking for help from the government. And if the past is any indication, they're going to be able to convince policymakers that the crisis is over as soon as their markets are fine. Look, who cares what's happening in the labor market? As long as the crisis and finance is over, lots of policymakers will want to believe that. I think most importantly, the political failures that policymakers haven't absorbed just the reams of evidence that demonstrate that, you know, fiscal policy that aims resources to low and moderate income households is extraordinarily effective at ending recessions and restoring growth. And that this kind of fiscal expansion needs to be sustained, not just while there's an official recession, but until the economy is actually healthy again. The sooner these political failures have also made it more likely that the next recession is going to come sooner rather than later. And just a couple quick sort of observations on that. In terms of monetary policy, in terms of when the next recession is coming, the Federal Reserve has been by far the most sort of consistently thoughtful, major policymaking institution over the past decade in the American economy. And yet, even it, I would argue, has been a little hamstrung by conventional wisdom and has sort of reverted back to form and started raising rates sooner than they should have in this last cycle. I think these rate increases actually are starting to drag on growth. You started to see it in 2018. I think you're going to see it in 2019. I think the Fed seems to have realized this and they have now signaled pretty strongly up. We're going to hold off for a while. I think that's good. But still, we've done these rate increases over the past 18 months. I think that's going to be a drag on growth. I think the reflexive debt phobia that cloud smart thinking on fiscal policy has returned in some measure. You've got the House of Representatives reinstituting Pago rules, which I don't think is very wise. And even worse, you have actual Democrats floating the idea of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. That's clearly a not smart thing to do. And in terms of the political power of finance, the current administration and congressional Republicans have been really determined to peel back every regulatory check on finance in recent years. Just as a number of financial markets are starting to look a little frothy, to be clear, we don't have like a stock market bubble that we saw in 2001 or a housing bubble that we saw in 2006 just waiting out there, obviously ready to pop. But we do have financial markets that are starting to look a little frothy and we have regulators who are just being stripped of the power to do anything about that. That seems like a really bad recipe for the next couple of years. So why will the next recession come? Not super sure. And anyone who says they are sure I think is lying to you. I would say that the Fed has been a little quick on the trigger this time, but they are being far from reckless. Fiscal policy rhetoric has turned really bad and the temporary fiscal boost of 2018 is fading. But overall policy is nothing like as austere as it was, say, during the second term in the Obama administration when congressional Republicans really throttled spending growth. We haven't seen that level of return to austerity yet. Despite complete financial regulatory capture, there's not a huge and obvious bubble today. While there's no one obvious trigger, there's a lot of growing pressures that sometime in the next couple of years are going to require some nimble and smart macroeconomic management. If nimble and smart describes to you the current administration in Congress, then I think we're living in slightly different worlds. No matter why it comes, when it's here, the next recession is going to require mobilizing expansionary fiscal policy to deliver quick relief. And in the past, support for this kind of fiscal stimulus has been really hard to organize around and make salient to the public. And so I'm hoping that's what today's events can can help change. How can we make the public understand the stakes involved in this and how to do the right thing? And so that's what I want people to know about the next recession. And for the next remarks, I'm going to turn to Derek. All right, so I'm going to begin by defining the last recession as a missed opportunity. We certainly did not go into a depression and we should be applauded for that. But we have not done anything to fundamentally change the iterative cycle of consolidated economic and political power at the top. But in my five minutes, I'm going to focus largely on race and wealth disparity. In particular, I'm going to look at the racial wealth gap, pre and post recession, and discuss policy in a political economy that can affect policy so as to avoid the traps of what happened last time. We know that recessions impact vulnerable populations and stigmatized racial groups worse than others. The unemployment numbers for blacks revealed that indeed they were the first fired and the last tired. But when it comes to wealth, the paramount indicator of economic security, we know that the meager wealth that blacks had accumulated prior to the recession was virtually wiped out after the recession. So looking at numbers, we know that we black households had a loss of about 53% of their net worth value. But again, they started with about $12,000 in median wealth and went down to about $5,000. It was a loss of about 16% for white households. And we can look at the recession prior to that and know that it's not all housing. The stock market bubble wiped out about 30% of the black net worth and whites had a modest gain of about 2% over the period of 1999 to 2002. The paper that I submitted for this panel with Chris Famigetti, who's a doctoral student at the new school, we looked at home ownership pre and post recession and looked at we did blind or hockey decompositions and looked at the component of home ownership disparities by education by race. And we found that for highly educated blacks that the component of their home ownership that's due to unexplanatory factors, things that might be attributable to a policy regime, they fared the worst compared to other groups. In other words, highly educated blacks in the aftermath of the great recession, the most recent one, their home ownership, which is a key indicator of wealth, they fared worse off. Okay, so the great recession wiped out wealth. Typical, I'll skip this a little bit. We know that education by looking at highly educated blacks is not the panacea for upward mobility and economic security, especially when we're looking at racial disparity. We know that black households with college degrees typically have less wealth than white households without a high school degree. And we also noted wealth provides agency to have economic security. So this coupled with discriminatory and structural barriers inhibited the abilities of blacks to translate their demographic and social economic status into home ownership. In terms of political economy, we know that whether it's a recession or not, whether we're an expansion or recession for the past 50 years, America has been in that iterative cycle of consolidated economic and political power where all the productivity gains have gone to the elite and upper middle class and real worker wages have remained flat. But to fully understand the interactions of politics and economics and why the status quo will trend towards this concentration of power, how that can persist, one would have to embrace the third pillar of this relationship and that is race or more broadly the existence of a permitted underclass marked by a subaltern identity by which more dominant identity groups maintain a status quo and are willing to sacrifice vertical positioning in exchange for social status and horizontal positioning. Two things we know that are unambiguous from racial stratification. Black workers are made worse off. The capitalist class which is overwhelmingly white is made better off. But what is ambiguous is the economic positioning of the white working class. White privilege offers real material and psychological benefits. An authentic racial coalition to address this paradigm of growing inequality would necessitate that the dominant white group give up the class privilege associated with white privilege, that benefit. But this privilege is based in an amoral notion of what we define as benefit. It is largely predicated on self interested neoliberal tribal norms in which accumulation knows no bound. The good news is that change might be happening. If we look at younger generations and current social movements, they are beginning to redefine economic good to incorporate things like morality, things like sustainability and things like humanity. We need a sustained politics that is not narrowly constrained by what seems feasible, whether feasibility is defined where a feasibility is defined in the politics of here and now or a politics of our immediate past which has been increasingly dominated by economic consolidation and plutocracy. We need bold, transformative, race and gender conscious economic bill of rights where there is a set of enabling goods and services that are so critical to individual life, liberty and self determination that their quantity, their quality and access to these goods should not be at the whim and vulnerable to the pricing and rationing that comes about from firms trying to achieve their fiduciary responsibility by profit maximizing for their shareholders. We need policies where public options directly compete with and crowd out inferior private options that ensure universal and quality jobs, healthcare, housing, schooling, financial services, capital and the free mobility without the psychological and physical threat of detention or bodily harms at the hands of a state sanctioned terror because someone's social identity is linked to a vulnerable or stigmatized group. And then I could go on about federal job guarantee but I think Josh might get mad at me for going on longer and longer in my time. Wow. Okay. That's a lot to follow. Thank you so much, Derek. And it's great to be here. So I can't tell you when the next recession is coming. I definitely think the other folks on this panel are more equipped to do that. But what I can tell you is what it means for communities like Cleveland where I'm from and and what we are going to need from federal policy. And I want to just start by saying like there has been a generation of under investment in in Ohio and in America. A generation of under investment in families, in communities, in environmental sustainability and in our ability to deal with all of the crises that are coming not just the recession but the climate crisis, the inequality crisis, the racial inequality crisis that we face in all of our communities. So it is crucial, crucial that we use this next crisis. We use this next recession to address that generation of bad policy. So I want to say kind of four key things about what I think the recession means from the vantage point of somewhere like Cleveland. First of all, recessions are just much harder on some economies than they are on others. Yes, they are harder on some states, but they are also much harder on certain communities within every state. And what clearly emerges for me from both the data and from what I from what I see is that they are much harder on manufacturing economies, obviously, that they are harder on poor rural communities and that they are harder on the black community. And Ohio has an outsized portion of all three of those, of all three of those kinds of communities. And when I say that they're harder, what I mean is that like at least twice as many people are formally unemployed in a recession in each of these communities than in the rest of the economy as a whole. What I mean is that there are foreclosure rates, there are neighborhoods in Cleveland, where people saved for their entire lifetime and passed their house on to their kids and their kids continued to contribute to that house and that house is still worth nothing, you know, 10 years after the last recession. So there are just when I say that it hits them harder, I want to kind of convey that that's just not just numbers, but sort of just in how people are able to live. The second big thing that I would say is that recessions really start earlier and end later in our in America than they do in, you know, in sort of the financial press. In fact, in Ohio, we really no longer fully recover from recessions at all anymore. We still when you control for population, we still don't have the job levels that we had prior to the last recession. And prior to the last recession, we hadn't actually made up the number of jobs that we had prior to the previous recession. So we are kind of it starts earlier and it ends later. And in some ways, it never fully ends. The third point that I just want to make like I'm often invited to these things to talk about like what should state policy be doing in Naomi's Naomi Walker is going to give some great thoughts on that later today. But I just want to really reinforce that we need y'all here in DC to deal with this like we don't have the capacity at the state level. And in some ways we of course in Ohio don't have the will at the state level certainly to address that generation of under investment, but also to deal with recessions because we can't borrow at the state level. So there are definitely state policies that we are pushing for every day at policy matters, Ohio, my organization. But we're going to need federal action if we're going to get out of this. The fourth thing that I want to say and this might be the main point I want to make to a room full of maybe economists is that you know, it's hard to just measure by the numbers what recessions do to our communities. It's not purely economic. It's not just the unemployment numbers. And it is not the case that as soon as unemployment levels return to like right now where they're quite excellent that everything's copacetic. Recessions leave lifelong scars on families, on individuals and communities and yes to savings and earnings as I described with sort of lost housing values, but also to children's development, to family stability, to long term physical and mental health. Like it's just for those of you who talk to people who are social workers or addiction counselors or nurses in places like Cleveland and Dayton in Youngstown or in Appalachian Ohio. The consequences are really, really severe. Suicide rates go up, child abuse rates go up, birth weights go down, test scores go down. We see long term lower economic earnings for kids who grow up in a household where a parent lost a job. So I just kind of want to really kind of reinforce to you all that these things are kind of staggering in their effects on communities. So I am really counting on the magic of the Q&A to bring out all of my solutions because I was kind of charged with spending these first four minutes talking a little bit about the problems. But I do just want to say that one thing about solutions, which is that sometimes there's kind of a fetishization of the shiny new innovative solution. And I am all for shiny new solutions to the degree that we can find them and implement them. But I want to say that like some of those very boring old tools in our toolbox are very much what we need in recessions, right? Unemployment compensation, right? It's counter cyclical. It's increased when we need it. It ramps back down when we no longer need it. Like it's a pretty useful tool. Now, does it need to be fixed in the fact that it always was overly helpful to white men in proportion to how helpful it was to African Americans and women and other communities of color and other vulnerable communities? Absolutely. Like that's a tool that needs to be updated to reflect the society and the economy that we have. But it is a very familiar tool. So I'm going to stop there and hope for the Q&A to get to some of my other solutions. But if you take nothing else away, please take away like we cannot waste this opportunity to demand real reinvestment that we've long needed. Thank you. Angela? Thank you. Thank you. I'll just associate myself with all of the comments that have been made so far. So I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about some things that happen when a recession hits. And really, I think one of the things that people start to think about when there's a recession is who and what is to blame. Some of this is about scoring points, but I think some of it is also about figuring out where the problems are so you can figure out what the right solutions are. So I want to focus on those problems so we can talk about some of the solutions later in the panel. So something that happened during the last recession that I certainly noticed in my work quite a bit was a recession hits, unemployment, spikes. And something happens sort of outside of that, all of a sudden you start to hear that workers are not that great. They don't have the right skills. They haven't gone to school. They are unequipped or ill-equipped for the workforce. And somehow those things are unrelated to the fact that we're in a recession and people are losing their jobs all over the place. And employers all of a sudden have this huge supply of workers they can choose from. So they can choose for their administrative assistant to have a master's degree if they want because there are a bunch of people who are unemployed and they have more options. And to some extent, they're making some rational choices about who they can choose. What is strange to me about that is it does often feel like that disconnect between this phenomenon where workers get worse, this phenomenon where people are losing their jobs, are very disconnected. And the problem with that is it leads us to the wrong conclusions about what types of investments we need when people are unemployed. So certainly that leads us to make investments in education, which can be good. However, it also distracts from other types of investments and policy choices we need to be making. So certainly workers need access to more affordable education. And frankly, even during the last recession, that's not really what happened. So there was this whole hysteria around the skills gap. But it's not like we moved ahead with advancing free college as a solution to the skills gap. It was like, well, workers should really go back to college and they should take on $40,000 in debt and cross our fingers and hope that they can get a job that makes half of what their previous one used to. The reality is those workers need power. They need the ability to bargain with their employers. They need the ability to sit on boards, to figure out opportunities for work sharing, to figure out how to ensure that they still have access to benefits that they need to make sure their families can survive a recession. And so focusing on workers as the problem and not a part of the solution is something that is both bad for workers. And it also leads us to the wrong policy conclusions about what's causing the problem and what we need to do in the future. So I would say just generally like we should be clear that workers are not to blame and we should not put this on workers. I think Amy's point was a good one. This is really the responsibility of the not of states, not of workers, but of the federal government to propose some bigger policy solutions and public investments. Moving quickly over to who and what is to blame. Again, not for the purpose of scoring points, just for the purpose of really being clear about what the problems are with our system that are causing these shocks that are making families more vulnerable. It's bad policy. It's policies that make sure that workers have less power. It's financialization. It is a system that denies all of us the power that we need to be able to come up with the right solutions. And it's also significant disinvestment that we saw to Josh's point almost immediately after the great recession. The Budget Control Act was enacted in 2011. That was, I mean, felt like minutes after this huge near-depression crisis. So it really is bad policies. And that's something that we can do something about. We can hold policymakers accountable and make sure that a recession is an opportunity to make public investment, to really think about what do we want the future of this country to be? How do we want workers to have access to good jobs that create a decent standard of living? Do we want people to have access to health care? Do we want people to not endure financial ruin when the stock market dips? Do we want black households to have some shred of wealth in this country? These are all choices. And I think the biggest thing that I think is important about thinking about who is to blame and who is not is that we do have choices and policymakers have those. And they need to be making decisions in favor of all of us and not the wealthy and the powerful in these moments. It's workers, it's communities that really need the help and we should be thinking really critically now about how to do that. Heather? OK, thank you. So I also want to associate myself with all the comments already made. And I'm going to echo a few of them. So I want to just spend a couple of moments talking about the ways in which inequality as a framework underscores all the things that we've been talking about up here in the ways that it both obstructs, well, it obstructs, it subverts, and it distorts the processes that lead to economic stability. At Equitable Growth, we spend a lot of time looking at the empirical evidence and I'll get to this maybe at the end of my four minutes. But I do want to underscore that a lot of the things that have been said, and especially some of the things that Amy said about the long-term effects of recessions, are really underscored by research evidence that shows causality, that have long-term implications for productivity and growth. But a couple of years ago I edited a book called After Piketty. And as a part of that, I invited Mark Zandy, who runs the Moody's dot com forecasting model, to contribute an essay where he looked at whether or not inequality actually affects, if you look at inequality in a macroeconomic model, would it help us understand what's happening in the economy? And he found two things that are worth elevating in this conversation. One is that, well, you know, if you kind of just add inequality in, it doesn't really seem to affect forecasting this month. But what it does do is actually make it more likely that the economy will have a crisis. That means that once you sort of think about the role of inequality in our society and our economy, it actually makes it more likely that it'll help you understand the underpinnings for crisis. And I start there because in January, and I actually brought this because it's one of my favorite books, and I had nothing to do with it actually. So they should be so happy that I'm talking about it here today. Jonathan Ostry, Prokesh Langani and Andrew Berg wrote this book called Confronting Inequality. They're three IMF scholars that looked at data from around the world and found that once you think about inequality, it actually has a determinant effect on economic stability. The places that have higher inequality actually are more likely to have shorter spells of economic growth. So I wanted to start there because I think it's important to understand that a lot of the undercurrents of what we've been talking about are the very distortionary ways that allowing so much of our wealth and income but also political power to reside among an economic elite not only makes recessions more protracted, perhaps more likely, but also affects our ability to deal with them politically. And here I want to just point to a couple of things. So first, let me actually just in the time remaining and to not repeat anything that anybody else has said, I want to point to the effects of inequality on our politics. So a couple of remarks have been made about the Recovery Act the last few years. One of the things that we've learned from political science research is that alongside economic inequality, that is both cause and consequence of political polarization. So it is part of the subversion of inequality is that it's made our politics that much more difficult. And for those of you who are not completely meshed in the political science research, I'm happy to talk to you about what I've learned from dipping into that work and seeing all of the evidence that they've amassed that these things go hand in hand. And having lived through as an economist the past 20 years here in Washington and what happened during the crisis and after the crisis, the fact that when the Recovery Act was voted into law, it did not receive a single vote from a Republican legislator in the House and only had three votes from Republicans in the Senate, one of whom actually became a Democrat quite quickly after, really underscores the inability of our politics to deal with these kinds of economic crises and how politically polarizing and partisan they become. Perhaps Dr. Romer can speak to that in her comments later on because I know she lived through that as well. And then of course after, instead of strengthening the Recovery Act, whether or not we would put in place policies that had consensus from the most part among economists that they would do good, the political process actually delivered nothing and moved us in the wrong direction. So we can see that as a function of politics, but I wanted to underscore that there's an economic component to that as well and that in not to echo what Josh said at the very beginning, the fact that we haven't dealt with inequality is a part of the reason that dealing with the next recession may be much more difficult than we anticipate. And so I think that we have a lot of ideas that we can talk about, tried and true, perhaps some new ones for how to deal with the next recession or even how to prevent the next one from happening. But where we need to focus our energy and our attention is understanding how the extremely high inequality is leading to a political system that may make that those implementing those much more difficult. So maybe the answer to dealing with the next recession is actually to think about the big levers we have to address inequality, like thinking about tax revenue or thinking about the regulation of capital more generally. All right. Well, thank you so much to all the panelists. That was great. I have long nuanced questions and I realize they're all the wrong questions because a couple of you alluded to this. I just want to go through and say let's say that the recession has come. You are a advisor to a policymaker. I want you to couple quick things you would tell them to do out of the gate. And I want to give a couple criteria, which you can reject or accept. I mean, one, I think we want them to act quickly to stabilize the economy and boost it. I think two, we want them to act quickly to alleviate human misery. I think those are not exactly the same thing. There's a lot of correlation. And then three, Heather just pointed out like how much resistance there was even to passing the Recovery Act during a crisis. I think part of the criterion for policy now has to be not just technocratic. How big is the economic multiplier? Will the public rally around it? Will it actually be durable? And so I think that should be part of it. And then I guess as well, something Derek mentioned in the political economy, I mean, we might as well just start making recessions times when we can sort of further, broader, progressive goals. And so add criteria, tell me I'm wrong on some. But one way or the other, give me a couple policies that you think you would really want high on the list. And why don't we just go maybe just straight down this way, start with Derek, and then? So in the end, I get to go last, right? Yes. All right. All right. So advice I'd give. I think Christina Roma always had the right approach also. Come bold, come big. And I would do it with public jobs. That's the immediate thing you want to do. But as Rahm Emanuel said, and I think I'm still in line for Mamie, never let a good crisis go to waste. I know I'm paraphrasing. It's not exactly right. But if I was the leader or advising the leader, I would use it as an opportunity for a social movement, just like FDR did with the New Deal. We have historical precedent of a big bold policy regime that led about a better America. Obviously, there was the Faustian bargain that excluded blacks. But we can do it differently this time, where it's a race conscious and gender conscious new type of new deal, a brand new new deal that I would use with this recession. I'd be bold. I would not necessarily grounded in inequality, although Heather may be right that inequality could be bad for the economy. But there could be another context in where inequality could lead to growth. We have a history of slavery. We have a history of exploitation in America, society where capitalists have exploited labor and have been able to grow an economy. But that's not the type of growth that we want. We want a more just growth. So I would ground this new movement in morality. And again, part of grounding in morality would dissipate some of the premium that gets attached to identities and as a mechanism to politically stratify us. So these are some of the things I would do. I'd learn from history. I would go be bold. And I would do a federal jobs guarantee as one of my main cornerstones to avoid the possibility of a recession that could move us into a depression as well as address the moral hazard of having to deal with too big to fail because we would have policies in place to protect Main Street from Wall Street. Yeah, and that's a perfect intro. We Ohio people like to set each other up because I definitely do think that public jobs is kind of the cornerstone of what is going to be needed to sort of emerge from a recession stronger and more able to deal with kind of the inequality that Heather and others mentioned. And I think you can sell it to the public on that basis as well. Look, we got to get the damn lead out of the pain in Cleveland. We've got to clean up our houses. We've got to be having more energy-efficient ways of both producing energy and consuming energy. And we've got to prepare for the climate problems that we're having in our communities with floods, with fires. They differ in different places in the country. But every community is dealing with the effects of climate crisis. And we've got to deal with the drug crisis that is affecting places like Ohio. So every single one of those things that I just mentioned offers an opportunity to hire someone during a downturn when interest rates are low, when wages are relatively low, pay them decently, and have them not just become employed during that time when unemployment is high, but also have them contribute things that prepare us better for whatever we're going to face down the road, like if we deliver pre-K, if we hire a pre-K teacher now, if we deliver let-abatement, if we hire someone to do let-abatement now, if we deliver drug treatment now, all of our communities are going to be strengthened and better able to face whatever crises are coming our way. So I wouldn't wait until we have a crisis. I would start now with a few things. One, I think there is a lot of energy around the fact that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was extremely unpopular when it was passed in a law in 2017, remains extremely unpopular now. Whatever comes down the pipeline in the future, we are looking at a very low share of revenue as a share of our GDP, and that's a problem that we should be solving right now rather than waiting until a recession, so we should be focusing on figuring out how we're going to raise tax revenue, and particularly thinking about reexamining the fact that we've lowered tax rates on capital to such an extensive degree. As a part of that we need to also be thinking about what is it that we're putting in place to ensure that the wealthy can't avoid taxes and closing those kinds of, dare I say loopholes, a word I hate, but figuring out how we can make sure that people at the top are paying, and I think there's a lot of political energy around that now, and so I think that's something that we should be focused on doing now. Another reason that that is a good thing to be focused on in the near term is that that has not led to the kinds of investment that the American people were promised, so there doesn't seem to be an economic downside to making those tax changes. Second, we should not be waiting until a recession to shore up our automatic stabilizers. I mean Amy already mentioned unemployment insurance, but there is a whole host of programs out there that are, that ramp up during economic downturns and then automatically ramp back down. And instead this Congress is moving in the wrong direction on many of these and some of the states, things like putting in place work requirements on food stamps, wrong policy for the, for, you know, that program. So thinking about the myriad of ways that we could shore up the automatic stabilizers, extend them and make sure that they are fully financed and functional. So those are the two big things, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't wait. So I, I agree. I would say I would maybe actually start with a little pep talk. That pep talk would be we can afford it. I think this goes to Heather's point about the tax law. The White House put out some numbers a couple of weeks ago that showed 10-year projections for just how low our revenue will get because of this tax law that they passed. And so one of the things that's really great for them is that they can cut taxes for rich people, they can starve our government and then a recession hits and they can say, well, we can't help people, we can't afford it. We can afford it. And that should be the pep talk that we all give ourselves, we give our leaders. When a recession hits before a recession hits every day, we can afford it. So, so that's number one. The other thing is we should spend the money. We should spend it and we should keep spending it until people are okay. You know, this is again going back to what happened during the last recession. We did spend some money and then just a year and a half after the recession officially ended, we had these really strict rules put on how much money the federal government could spend, which is sort of, you know, 2011, people were doing so great. So, so we have to keep spending the money. It really matters for families and certainly in the last recession we would have been better off if we had kept focusing on making public investments throughout to ensure that people were were actually safe and secure. And then the other thing I would say that this is sort of hard to say during, but we really do have to plan ahead. To Derek's point, the greatest economic crisis that's ever befallen this country also produced investments that created the white middle class in this country and really created some sustained economic growth for a long time. So, we have to be ready and we have to plan ahead in order to be able to do that. And also we have to think about planning for the future. This can't just be about getting through the crisis. It has to be about what is causing us to feel these crisis crises so deeply in our communities and how do we make sure that that doesn't happen the next time around. We're certainly not there right now and I would, I think it's probably easy to say that we're certainly not heading in the right direction on that front. I don't think we're making the types of public investments we would need to make sure we don't have another big crisis on our hands. But that's where I'd start. But, but pep talk first. First I want to say, by the way, the panel should chime in whatever, don't just wait for me to ask a question and tell people to go down the line. I just want to echo two things, at least two things. One, I'm very happy Heather said automatic stabilizers just because you, if you have a panel on recessions and you don't say that they take away your economist card. And so that's good that that happened. As for the pep talk, we can afford it. I mean I could not agree more and I would even say in a recession it's not just we can afford it. It's better than a free lunch. It's someone paying you to eat. It is more costly, even in fiscal terms, to not do the recession fighting. So I could not agree on that more. Can I jump in? Yeah. So I want to jump in on this, making the most of a crisis comment, the theme up here. You know, one of the things that we know about the New Deal era is that the policies that were put in place, first of all most of them weren't put in place until many years after the crisis, right? It was the mid 1930s, whereas the crisis started earlier on. So it did take them some time. So it's important to remember, right? It does take the humans that have to do the policy some time. And I want to underscore something that Angela said about being ready, right? And I think you guys sort of said that as well. A lot of the policies, most of the policies in fact, that were put in places a part of the New Deal had already been tested in places around the country or in other, were built off of other federal programs. So it's not just sort of saying we're going to take advantage of it. I think we're, you know, having lived through the crisis of, you know, 2007, 2008, there was a lot of talk of taking advantage of the moment, but there was also not enough readiness of tried and tested things that we could put in place off the shelf. So I think our job as people that think about policy is to actually get out there, test these things, write those reports, make the argument now for what can come off the shelf when those people have to deal with it. When we think that there may be this political moment, but I also want to stress that it didn't feel in 2008 that the public, like, was the, did the public want us to make the most of the crisis in the way that we talked about it? I don't know about you all, but I did a lot of talk radio during those years and every single one, there were, you know, tons of people that would call into these shows talking about how that's not what they wanted. So there's a political challenge there that I'm curious how people think that maybe that's another area of expertise, but it underscores that. Yeah. I mean, I think that the policy ideas have always been there. I think we kind of know what to do. I think the problems to me are political, and I know you don't disagree with that. I mean, the problems are political and the constraint of the rhetoric and the period that we're in of not being able to think outside of the box. We've taken things off the table. I agree that the New Deal came about a little bit, came about some time after FDR got in the office, but it was a momentum that propelled FDR into the office and continued on that eventually led to the New Deal. So from my view, we need a political movement. And I think they are beginning to muster up. You know, I would be remiss whenever you hear me on the stage, I always reference William Barber and the Poor People's Campaign where he talks about economic justice as a moral imperative. We need more voices beyond economists. In a lot of ways, economists constrained the debate. We put false constraints on what we can and cannot do under the guise of having some technical expertise that, frankly, is not even valid. But so that's why I think we need religious communities to bring in morality. We need legal communities to talk about structure. We need variety. We need movements on the ground to build the momentum to make the leaders do what we need them to do to have a better economy. And I'll just add on a couple of tools that really are already out there. I mentioned unemployment compensation, but Angela mentioned shared work, which may not be familiar to every single person. But Angela did a lot to help us in Ohio bring it about. But that's a policy whereby if you need to sort of have 20% less product because of the demand, instead of laying off 20% of your workforce, you can cut everybody's hours by 20%. It keeps people attached to the labor market. It keeps people getting their benefits. It enables you to ramp back up quickly when demand increases. And it prevents some of the very crises that I mentioned in terms of the despair that comes to people when they lose their jobs entirely. So that's a really innovative solution. On the flip side of that is overtime, which, of course, Economic Policy Institute has been blowing that horn forever. But when we have weak overtime protection, it means that as the economy starts to ramp back up, it's easy for employers to just pile more work on their existing workforce instead of adding new workers. And if they're forced to pay time and a half, it increases the incentive to add people back into the economy. So those are two kind of existing reforms to things that we really know well that help reduce the pain of recessions and get us out of them more quickly. And I should also say to the point that the Black community is over-targeted to be last hired, first fired. Right? Did I get that right? Yeah. Both of these tools are particularly designed to do just that, to make sure that whatever jobs we have in our economy, they are being well shared. They are not just being sort of hoarded by the people who have long-time seniority or long-time sort of established seeming skills in a particular job. So what I hear is, one, I appreciate that we should start preparing now. I mean, basically down the line, almost all of you said something that didn't have to wait for the unemployment rate to spike, which would help a lot, whether it's public jobs, an economy with a larger public footprint is just more stable generally. So even if you started before recessions, it's a good thing to enter the recession with. I would say it strikes me that is very different from the rhetoric we heard as the 2008 recession began. Most people forget that George W. Bush stimulus, which was January 2008. And in that debate at the time, there is a mantra that it had to be timely, targeted, and temporary. The temporary was the real problem, because basically the recession is going to be over soon. And so we're going to miss it if we wait too long. And that's as people who push sort of public investment and infrastructure projects as a response to that, we were told, nope, it's going to take too long. By the time those come online, everything will be fine, and it'll be entering the economy too late. And I think that targeted, temporary, timely mantra was meant to construct kind of a bipartisan, centrist consensus about what to do. But then less than a year later, there are no votes at all in the House of Representatives for the Recovery Act, even though the crisis has gotten much worse. Like, has the attracting centrists from both parties shipped just completely sailed? And we don't need to think about sort of that kind of slice-of-the-ven diagram. Is it just go big on the progressive agenda? Any thoughts on any of that? If it leads to us making small, time-limited investments that don't help people, then that's not what we should be going for. I mean, I think everyone's talked about this in terms of an opportunity, but the reality is, like, with the New Deal and with the Great Recession or with the Depression and the Great Recession, we were sort of in uncharted territory. And so I am somewhat sympathetic to the fact that, like, it means that you're not really sure what to do and what's possible. I think now we have no excuse. We have no excuse not to wholly prepare ourselves for what could potentially be coming down the road. So I think as, you know, I think there is probably still, when people panic, some interest in coming together and tweaking around the margins. But the reality is, like, we know better. And if we don't do better the next time it's on us. Well, so we should be so lucky that, so if we think that the next recession will happen within the next presidential, so not during the next two years of the Trump administration but a future administration. And you want to put in this place this agenda, there's an implicit assumption here that you not only have the presidency but the House and the Senate of a political party that might want to take action. And I think that it looks, at least from what I'm understanding about the political environment, that getting the Senate into the democratic realm may be quite difficult. Even if it is, it might be quite small. Of course, when the Social Security Act passed, if I'm remembering correctly and somebody correct me, I believe it was 93 senators voted for it. And we haven't seen numbers like that in our lifetimes for bipartisan big actions that help working families. So, I mean, I think figuring out, I agree with you, right? And the timely, targeted and temporary, I mean, they came up, Larry Summers and Jason Furman came up to the Hill, they said that. And then, I mean, every member of Congress was saying that that was the mantra. And it gave them a focus. So it wasn't just bipartisan. It also gave them a focus on how to think about specific policies. But how you think about bipartisanship in this era of political polarization, I mean, that's going to be the challenge. So it seems to me the most important thing is that you build that movement now so that you can get policymakers in place that want to do fact-based policymaking. Let's just start there and then maybe we can make some progress. Yeah, the bipartisan consensus is that markets of king and governments are inefficient. So it ultimately leads to policies that tinker around the edges and try to arm corporations so that they can have the power to be better stewards, not stewards, but to lead to, yeah, stewards of efficient distribution. So I think that framing constrained us and we led to that bipartisan missed opportunity to fundamentally change the course direction of our country as a result of the recession. So I know no one here is going to predict the date of the next recession, or maybe you'll make news and you'll do it. What is worrying you, though? Like when you look out at the economy, the slice of the economy that you pay particular attention to, everything look great? Are there very recent warning signs? Are there chronic problems that just haven't been solved? What is your view about where the real weaknesses are? Not just the real weaknesses, but real weaknesses that actually could lead to a recession or just slower growth that leads to higher unemployment? I think we should actually put that one on the table as well. We could avoid natural recession and still make life worse off for people that's in the cards. So what worries you when you look at your slice of the economy? Yeah, well, a lot worries me in Ohio. And I think, you know, certainly when you look at student debt levels and when you look at family debt levels in general, when you look at people's ability to pay off their car loans lately, you see something that feels very unsustainable. People do not have savings and they're not able to get through crises. They're not able to get through a short-term job loss. We've screwed up a lot of our safety net programs. We've turned a lot of them into block grants. We've made the things that were automatic about them less automatic. We've increased the barriers and increased the roadblocks and the kind of hoops people have to jump through in order to get these basic, basic needs met. And that's going to screw us up when we enter the next recession. And then, you know, we do have kind of a crisis of despair that I think is very directly linked to our inequality, both racial and economic. But, you know, we have levels of addiction in Ohio that are, you know, decreasing our life expectancy after an entire century when life expectancies were growing for both black and white Americans. So I think that there is a lot to be deeply concerned about. And a lot of it is our problems that I think a targeted jobs program could actually contribute towards and kind of have our economies and our communities emerge stronger. And the last thing I'll just say just a little bit more on your last point, your last question about the kind of political division is that I think it's really essential that we frame these solutions as about solving the problems in our local communities, right? Like, if you've lost a neighbor to drug addiction, if you've had a good manufacturing job and your kid can't get one, then you don't need to be told that something's sort of an automatic job, stabilize or whatever. Like, you just need to be told like, look, we're going to get your kid treatment. And so I think that it's really important that we frame our solutions in ways that people in communities, Republican, Democrat, rich, poor, white, black, or other can understand. I mean, I think Amy's spot on. The only thing I would add in terms of another concern is the political ramifications of the next Great Recession was such a polarized country, it could be an opportunity for, again, a new deal type movements where people are fed up and said, you know, we're taking back government. We're going to use government to provide agency for people now, not agency simply for corporations. But the other extreme is that we can end up with a fascist like state. We can have somebody with a despotic message to come in and escape, go to others and lead to more divisive, you know, we're seeing some of this right now at our border. So that, you know, these are serious fears. And we need to, again, I think ground our movements and morality to avoid those potentials. Either you two, why don't we? No, I'm terrified of politics. So just what Derek said in climate change. Go ahead. Yes, we should all be scared. We should. So I think the biggest thing that worries me is that we're just unprepared. We're in what most people say is a good economy right now. And like a lot of people are still struggling all of the time. As Derek mentioned in the beginning of panel, black wealth was already much lower than white wealth. It hasn't rebounded since the last recession. Black unemployment is always twice as high as white unemployment even now. We are not prepared for another economic downturn. And that really worries me. And I think we have there's a lot of space for us to prepare for it now. So certainly I think sort of ringing the alarm on what's happening in DC right now and sort of the disinvestment that's happening that makes this more vulnerable. But I think there's also some work that can be done in addition to the policy work that we all need to do here in DC around organizing, around preparing so that there is support for big public investments for us to do big things as a country when there's an opportunity to do it. So going back to something Angela said in the opening statements about the who's to blame and it's not to score points but it's actually to get the analysis right. I think that was super important. And it makes me wonder about not to make everything about the last crisis but we need to be clear. Did we let policymakers off the hook a little bit by focusing so much ire on sort of like bad actors in the financial sector? Like on the one hand, I of course think there was a ton of fraud that was not prosecuted and that should have happened. And yet Jamie Dimon can't legislate a stimulus program that would employ people policymakers can. And so how important is it to make sure that the blame and at least the accountability is on people who can actually deliver the goods? I'm going to say I think that's really important. I think one of the things so back to the next the last question. I mean, I think that one of the one of the things that I think is most threatening to us taking action is people's trust in the capacity of government to actually do things not just big things but to do anything. And I think that one of the things that certainly I saw bubbling up during the Great Recession was this lack of trust in government as an institution. The lack of trust that government was on people's side. The lack of trust that government had acted in the right way in the preceding decades. And we know that the crisis was caused in no small part by financial deregulations that had happened decades before that people weren't held accountable for. And so it's not Jamie Dimon's fault necessarily for taking advantage of incentives in a system that he might be a fool to not take advantage of because they're legal or whatever. I mean, not to pick on him or to make any statements about him. But the fact that we had deregulated so much of our financial industry and at the same time allowed inequality to spiral. I mean, the work of Atif Mianan and Amir Sufi they keep coming out with paper after paper. And if they're not a name that these are not scholars you recognize they definitely should be because they have shown with this really interesting empirically based research the ways in which high inequality led to a lot of wealth that needed some place to go that made its way into credit because of deregulation. And then they talk about how the people with the money focused on getting deregulation as a political project. So I think that figuring out yes, where we place blame but not just looking in the moment but how we got here and the lack of our government to focus on what it's supposed to be focusing not protecting the market but making sure that people have what they need. That's what our government supposed to be doing in a democracy. And we lost sight of that and now we're here trying to fix it but we have to build that trust back up. I'll just underscore a point that Heather made that there's sort of like two ways that policymakers are at fault here. One, it's not holding the financial sector accountable and passing laws that can actually constrain the sector in some ways that doesn't allow them to harm the rest of us. But there's also a second way that policymakers also have some ability to exercise control over how much influence folks like Jamie Dimon have in our politics. So I think it's both important for them to actually regulate the financial sector but also to think about who we want to have a say in our government and is it just 10 wealthy people or is it the public and voters and people living in this country? Yeah, and I would just be remiss if I didn't point folks toward the Demos resources on this where they talk about an economy with a voice for everyone and a place for everyone, a democracy with a voice for everyone, an economy with a place for everyone. And they've documented the degree to which wealthy people have much more impact on our economic decisions and our political decisions. And so I think it's a really tough circular problem which is why I've never worked on campaign finance because if we give outsized influence to people who have money on who makes our decisions then the decisions are going to accrue to that. And I think it's really, really problematic. We see it in Ohio. You certainly see it here in D.C. And I think it requires really social movements and good funding of social movements and of organizing to say, look, we're going to show people how to get an economy, how to demand the things that would actually work for them. On our phone call, I made the tongue-in-cheek joke that what I want to come out of the next recession is somebody end up in handcuffs, but not a young black person for smoking weed. So, but I'm somewhat serious in that and this fits with the comment of who's to blame. You know, I don't want to see anybody suffer, so I'm not happy when I see those images. But there needs to be some accountability and the narrative needs to shift from families and workers being responsible for the crises all the time and back on to some of the individuals that got us into this in the first place. I know we're running out of time, but I'll also add that if we do have this greater accountability of corporations and if we had a more a stronger public safety net, then we wouldn't have the moral hazards of having to bail out the corporations and those individuals. And then we could let the market discipline them. That's part of the tragedies. That as even as they in great engaged in malfeasance, they will also bailed out. So the work people were upset at that and rightfully so. So, you know, I'm going to end with a federal job guarantee not only provides automatic stabilizers from macro points of view, they provide regional stabilizers. So areas like Ohio would get a greater share of resources. They would keep people out of poverty in the first place. And again, if we had this in place, we could build up our public infrastructure and allow the market to discipline firms that engage in bad behaviors by letting them go bankrupt. So I think now we're going to allow some audience Q&A. And I think there's a couple of people with mics. And if you could just wait for the microphones, I think we have a couple on the front row here. I'm Steven Schafferman with basic income Earth Network. And I'd like to ask for all of you to comment on the idea of universal basic income. Back in 2008 and 2009, when the Fed was talking about quantitative easing, a lot of my basic income friends were talking about basic income as quantitative easing for the people, distributing money directly. I have no problems with the government offering agency to individuals so that they can be self-determining in their lives. And that may mean direct cash payments. The actual UBI in which everybody gets the same amount across the economy that I have issues with for practical reasons, not philosophical reasons. I think it can be inflationary. And I think you could end up with unintended consequence of exacerbating inequality because those at the bottom necessarily have to consume. And those at the top would have greater resources to invest and enrich their coffers even more. The only thing that I would add is just, I think we have to think about the political trade-offs between a tax on our safety net and universal income. I'm all for writing everyone a check as long as we keep making sure that long-come people can eat and be housed and, well, we don't really make sure that they're housed, but that they can eat. That's about all that we really guarantee and that we have unemployment compensation in downturn. So I think that we just have to think hard about those trade-offs. But I certainly think that many people could use more cash. Yeah, I would echo what both folks already here said. And I think that one of the explicit trade-offs is that we live in a country where people don't have access to safe and affordable child care or enriching and affordable child care or health care, which are very big ticket items that a basic income isn't ever going to make up for those families. So when you think about politics, making sure that we are attending to people that need that extra money for care purposes, be that their own health or a family member or someone aged in their family and how we square that circle given the resources even if we increased our taxes enormously, how would we do that and how do we prioritize? I'll just agree with whatever you said. I think that's right. Yeah, I mean, I'll just say quickly, I agree with almost all that. The devil's in the details. That's always true. That is true just 10 times over when you're talking about the universal basic income. How much? Where does it phase in? What are you doing with the rest of the tax code? I would say that the one place I'm sort of unambiguously pro is you could call it a universal basic income for kids, like a universal child allowance that seems like a very good thing to do. I would say as well, I do worry that a UBI emphasizes the role of the federal government as a peer checkwriter and maybe de-emphasizes its role as a provider of public goods in a more efficient way than the private sector can and so that's something else. But yeah, I think it's really complicated. Plus one to that. We have microphones around. I think there's three up front here. I'm having actually a tough time seeing the audience. There's so much light in my face. So feel free to take some agency yourselves with the microphones and pick out people. Hi, my name is Jerome Siegel. I'm the state chair of a new political party that was just certified in Maryland called Bread and Roses. I wanted to ask about actually something. I didn't even hear the word so far. Inflation. And I'm not a professional economist, but my understanding is that often we get into recessions or recessions are made worse because of deliberate fed policy to deal with inflation by raising rates in order to cut aggregate demand. And I got a comment and a question. The comment is from the point of view of morality which has been raised as sort of similar to be part of this, but it seems to me that it hasn't been brought to the macro area properly because if this is true that this is actually deliberate policy, macro policy to reduce aggregate demand. The question is who bears the brunt of the choices we make as a how to control inflation? And if that's the way in which we frame macro policy, the answer is very obvious that controlling inflation is good for everyone in the society, but only a very, very small part of the society really bears the brunt of the policy instrument we use for that, which is to deliberately induce unemployment. So if we framed macro policy, that way I think it becomes very, very fundamental that basically the society as a whole from the get go has basically been focusing on one particular segment of the society to do the heavy lifting of macro policy. Okay, now our question though is this, and we used to talk about this years ago, like in the 70s, right, about alternative ways of dealing with inflation other than raising rates. And so I don't know if there's been much economic research, I remember Brookings used to do this with TIP program 40 years ago, but do you guys have any new alternative policies that you think we should be pursuing that people running in the primary should be talking about or that Brett and Rosa should endorse for how we should deal with inflation? Anyone wanna? I mean, I'll just note that inflation isn't really a problem right now. So, and I think in no small part it's, I mean, it's not a problem. So I don't think it should be something that we should be really worried about in terms of whether or not deficit spending is gonna lead to inflation or thinking about it in Fed policy. I mean, the Fed has been having a hard time keeping inflation at the level that it went high enough, not low enough. Yeah, I mean, bankers benefit from higher interest rates. They get a higher yield on their initial investment, but I agree with a lot that you said in framing the question that in part we're not at our productive capacities. There's plenty of areas in which we can invest that will lead to greater productivity without the fear of inflation. And then the last thing, again, I'm gonna give a shameless plug to a federal job guarantee. If we had a federal job guarantee in place, then the dual mandate of what the Fed does, if they're gonna spend more time on the price control mandate of their dual mandate, that would be less concerning to Americans because we would have in place an automatic job stabilizer and the insurance that everybody has access to a job with decent wages and decent benefits. And just to echo Heather quickly, I mean, I do think it is underappreciated how much the central problem of macro policymaking, like inflation has fallen off the board. There was a time where it was like the central job, aggregate demand was always trying to run too fast ahead of the economy's ability to produce. And so it was always the job to restrain aggregate demand growth to keep inflation in check. We are now in the era where the problem is the opposite. It is generating aggregate demand, not restraining it. And I feel like that is not filtered through nearly enough to sort of the policymaking class in DC. In fact though, just one tidbit about inflation, there's a new working paper that we put out at Equitable Growth by an economist whose name is escaping me right at the second, actually showing that because of inequality and the ways that firms are refocusing their investment to reach those high earning markets. So they wanna go where all the money is. There's more productivity and there's more innovation happening and therefore there are lower prices happening at the high end of markets and there's actually higher inflation now for low income consumers because nobody really wants to produce for people that don't have any money. So actually, I mean, I think that the bigger issues around inflation are, how are prices changing across the income distribution? What is happening to low income families? And I wanna underscore something that Derek said about basic income, that we have to be thinking about some of the unintended consequences of different policies and what those might have on prices for low income folks. I'll just say, I mean, the things that are really more expensive now than they were a generation ago are childcare, college, healthcare, and care for your elderly parent. And the things that are less expensive are TVs and phones, well phones, whatever, phones are more plentiful. So public jobs would go a long way toward addressing the unaffordability of a lot of those basic services. I think we have someone in the front right here. Oh, sorry, after. Can you guys talk about how you think about the prioritization and trade-off between shoring up and reforming existing programs and pushing forward new, bigger programs like around healthcare, childcare, jobs guarantee? I mean, that's a great question for someone from Ohio because we spend a lot of time just defending really the very basics of kind of a social safety net and kind of the public schools that we deliver. And at the same time, we are always kind of articulating like other states are providing preschool, other states are providing childcare, other states are providing transit, maybe we should do those things here. And so I really do think that you've got to be pushing for both simultaneously, and sometimes the incremental short-term gains are shoring up or defending something that already exists, but I think if you're not putting forth a big vision of the kind of economy and the kind of America we want to have, you're gonna lose the long-term debate. So it's always both, I think. Well, and I think that some of the places, implicit in your question and implicit in what you said, Amy, is that there's policies, there's programs that we have now that we know are effective, that we need to shore up. There's ways that we need to make sure that they're much more inclusive, which is an agenda that people have been working on and there's still a lot more work to be done there. Derrick's talked a lot about that. I mean, we've all talked a lot about that this morning. And then there are places where we need new policies because there are urgent needs that we never addressed like access to childcare, right? So in a world where we didn't think women work, that wasn't maybe the top priority. Now this is an urgent need for most working families in a place where that was a massive lost opportunity in 2008 to build childcare facilities all across the country. So the prioritization, I think, isn't about old versus new. It's about what do we need to shore up the economy? What do the American people need? What do communities need? And then prioritizing there, but focusing on not ignoring the institutions we built that shoring those up in the process. Yeah. Really quick, I agree that it's not either or. I think we should definitely do both. But I also think we need to ground our larger vision in a new rhetoric, in a new movement where we think about the evolution of a democracy, however well we practice it. We've talked about human rights, civil rights. We need economic rights. We need to think about what set of goods are so essential in people's lives so that they can have freedom of choice in an authentic way and be self-determining and think of that bundle of goods that we need, like housing, like basic income, I don't mean UBI, like a job, et cetera, healthcare. We need to think about that, childcare, et cetera, and that's what government should be repurposed for. No, I'll just agree. I mean, I think in the States and at the federal level we've lost a lot in the last decade especially. And when there are states that are implementing ridiculously harsh work requirements for Medicaid that are trying to limit access to SNAP, I mean, we have to fight those fights too, but we should be also thinking about what's next in the future. So I think we have time for one more question. Yes, and so if we could get up front here, she's been very patient. Let me get a mic. I don't mind. Yeah, around, yes. I'm Dr. Caroline Poplin. I'm an attorney and a physician, but what I'm really gonna ask you about my qualification is that I was born in the Truman administration. And I remember when life was different, the second half of the new deal, which ended in 1968. Policies are very good, but you need to have a story. When I was growing up, government was good and corporations were bad. So we had lots of government regulation, we had protection of labor, all of that. The Republicans have a story. It's that government is terrible and they've turned it into a self-fulfilling prophecy when they're in charge and corporations can't do anything wrong. You have to, you're in a position to put together a story about what happens when those things switch because if people believe, and lots of them do, lots of young people like you, that government can't do anything right, you're not gonna have policies. You won't get that far. You have to tell a story. Just a list of policies, which is what Hillary did, doesn't do it or reaching across the aisle or things that we need. You have to say who's responsible for where we are now and why and that it is not a zero sum game, the economy, that there's enough for everyone if it's structured right, but you've got to tell a story. Yeah, I think you are spot on. I completely agree with you. I want you reference Truman. I hope I get the person's name, but the Democratic nominee ended up being Truman, but my understanding is that a lot of that was taken away from someone who was the more popular candidate preceding Truman. And if I were to do a science fiction movie, I would use that demarcation and imagine what the world could have been like if Henry Wallace, with his vision of a global United world that was talking about providing public power to everyone across the globe, what we could have had today. So I should have mentioned this at the beginning, but my organization, Groundwork Collaborative, we're new, we're about six months old and our mission is actually advancing a coherent, persuasive, progressive, economic worldview and narrative. So I will go back and tell my boss about this comment. He'll be very happy. This is why we exist. But I think it truly is, for all of the reasons that you mentioned, I think that's totally right. We know what works. We know what creates a strong economy. We know what helps families. We don't do a great job of selling it and the right has done an amazing job of selling their version of what America should look like. So it does matter because we have to get people on our sides when we're saying we need to make these big public investments. They aren't like, why? So I very much appreciate that. That is very affirming to my organization, but I think it is also true that we have some work to do in that respect. Well, and I think that story starts with rebuilding trust in government. I mean, there's no two ways around it, which, and I think a lot of us have talked about what that story should, those elements should be, but how you do that and how you do that and make sure that you're building up something that is both responding to democracy, to democratic claims and is inclusive, that's the challenge in front of us. Couldn't agree more with everything everyone said. We can have an economy that works for everyone. We just have to create it and we're making the choices. We just have to make the right ones. Thanks. Okay, so we are out of time. We're gonna wrap up this panel now. Could we get a round of applause for everyone on the, and we're going to have a short break. So feel free to grab some coffee and then we'll have our keynote speaker. Thanks so much. Please take your seats. Our program is about to begin. Please take your seats. Our program is about to begin. Okay, good morning everybody. Come please take your seats. We're about to begin. Take a seat. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. That was a wonderful, amazing first panel. I thought really substantive and thoughtful and useful at this particular moment in time. I am honored and delighted to introduce our keynote speaker today, Professor Christina Romer. Christie Romer, as you all know, is a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, co-director of the Monetary Economic Program at NBER. And in 2009, President Obama invited Professor Romer to chair the Council of Economic Advisors. She was a natural choice, having devoted much of her academic work to studying and understanding business cycles and evaluating the use of fiscal and monetary policy in the historical context of the Great Depression and also using cross-country comparisons over time. In 2009, she was no longer studying history but charged with crafting responses to the most severe downturn since the Great Depression. She lived both the tough economic choices and the political reality of that moment. So we couldn't think of anybody better to join us today in this broad conversation about the next recession. We are truly delighted to have Christie Romer join us here today to provide some insight into the next recession. Please welcome Professor Christina Romer. Bring it back. Thank you. Thank you so much. It is just such an honor and a pleasure to be here. I thoroughly, I think this is an amazing event and I so thoroughly enjoyed the first panel. And it's certainly as an incoming speaker, I'm sitting here, I'm not sure what was more intimidating the many things that they said that I was planning to say or the few places where I disagreed with them. So we'll see how that goes. You know, I thought I'd start by sharing with you one of my most precious possessions. And it's a Christmas ornament that I'm pretty sure is unlike any other in the world. And it's this one, it's a counted cross stitch ornament that my daughter made for me the first Christmas we were back from DC. It is a representation of that ubiquitous sign that you saw at any of the Recovery Act infrastructure programs. This one says this ornament funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act right down to that black and orange tiger grant symbol. And every holiday season when we take this out, it makes me remember a time when the government took bold action to help stem the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And so in my talk today, I wanna reflect on one what made the Recovery Act possible and some of the obstacles that policy makers had to overcome back in 2009. But then I want in the spirit of the conference to turn to the prospects for fiscal policy in the next recession. Why it will be even harder the next time around and especially sort of part of the focus of that previous session of what could we do today that might make fiscal policy a more viable tool for economic stabilization the next time we need it. So let me start by taking you back to 2008 and 2009 and ask that question of what made it possible to use fiscal policy so aggressively at that particular moment in time. And I'm gonna say here first never underestimate the power of fear because the world economy really was imploding right before our eyes. And I will never forget the first Friday of December in 2008 because I had been in DC as the designate for CEA chair for all of a week when the employment report for November 2008 was released. And if you remember it, it was awful right. We not only learned that we'd lost half a million jobs in November but we also learned that we'd underestimated how many jobs we'd lost in September and October of that horrible fall. And so that was another 200,000 job losses in revisions and so all told that morning we learned that employment was three quarters of a million jobs lower than we might have thought just the night before. And I remember it vividly because I was pulled out of a meeting, the president-elect was still in Chicago but I was pulled out of a meeting because he wanted to be briefed on the numbers by phone. And when I got on, I was just practically incoherent. I just kept saying, oh my God, this is so awful, I'm so sorry, oh my goodness, it's a catastrophe. I just kept going and he let me keep going. I felt like forever. And finally he stopped me and he said, Christie, it's not your fault, but wait for it, yet. And so that really drove home to me the magnitude not only of what the country was facing but what I was facing. And I think that sense of crisis and urgency certainly led the president to support a fiscal stimulus of unprecedented size and at least help keep Democrats in Congress United. And I think it did win us the crucial yes votes of those three Republican senators that Heather mentioned, especially the two brave women senators from Maine. I think something else that helped us was a broad professional consensus in favor of bold fiscal action. So really as a way of getting outside views and of making the case within the transition team for aggressive fiscal stimulus, Larry Summers and I undertook a sort of a reaching out. We started just calling all of the economists we could find kind of across the ideological spectrum to talk, to get their opinions on what we should do. And though the right-leaning economists tended to favor tax cuts over spending increases, what was really striking is that with just one exception, sort of everybody was in favor of a substantial fiscal expansion at that point in time. And I think this professional consensus carried over somewhat at least to the political realm. And there was a mention, I think it was Josh who mentioned that Congress under President Bush had signed a substantial tax rebate early in 2008 called the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008. And it really drives home the idea that at that point stimulus was still a selling point, not an epithet. And so I think that that's an important thing to realize. And finally, and this is gonna be a theme that comes up in some of what I say and where you might see a little disagreement with some of what's been said. I'm not sure we realized it at the time, but I think the fact that the US debt to GDP ratio was relatively low did give us room to maneuver. So this is just the Congressional Budget Office's numbers for the federal debt held by the public as a share of GDP. And certainly thanks to the Clinton-era budget surplus, the housing boom's effect on revenues, we did enter the great recession with plenty of fiscal space. Our debt to GDP ratio was under 40%, close to its post-war low. And it really was the case that policymakers never had to seriously question whether the US had the borrowing capacity to undertake a bold fiscal response to the crisis. All right, now while these conditions made it possible to pass the Recovery Act, one of the things we learned was that using fiscal stimulus was still far from easy. I think because monetary policy had been the key anti-recessionary tool for the previous 20 years, we had little knowledge of exactly how well fiscal stimulus would work and especially which types of stimulus would be the most effective. So for example, aid to state and local governments, so they didn't lay off teachers and first responders, was something that really hadn't been used as a counter-cyclical tool before. We also unfortunately learned that ramping up infrastructure spending really is hard. In the modern era, even supposedly shovel-ready projects are subject to bureaucratic, legal, and logistical delays. And finally, I think I'll be the first to admit that we managed expectations both around the economy and around the Recovery Act poorly. I think neither the economics team nor the communications folks spent enough time explaining to the American people just how severe a crisis we were facing and how large the risks were. And even though our estimates of the actual impact of the Recovery Act turned out to be spot-on, our forecast of where the economy was headed without stimulus caused us no end of headaches, right? That it allowed people to say that the Recovery Act was ineffectual when in fact it was merely too small relative to the unexpectedly large worldwide collapse that we were facing. All right, well, that's the past. Let's turn now to thinking about the future and about the next recession. And I think as so many people have already said this morning, no one knows when the next recession will come or what will cause it. But I do think it's important to point out that economic fluctuations don't follow a regular pattern and expansions don't simply die of old age. Something has to knock us away from full employment. It might be the bursting of some new asset bubble, a trade war, a decline in consumer business confidence. And right now, though there are tensions in all those areas, the US economy appears to be relatively stable. So unemployment is blessedly low and even some workers that we had thought had left the labor force forever in the wake of the Great Recession seemed to be re-entering as one of the benefits of a fairly high-pressure economy. But importantly, another recession will surely come at some point. And again, as I think has been mentioned, we are gonna enter that next recession in a difficult position. So this shows you the well-known graph of what's happened to the federal funds rate, the main interest rate that the Fed controls. And as you can see, even with a few rate increases that we've had, interest rates are still at basically the lowest level they've been in 60 years. And importantly, they're gonna stay there, I think, for the foreseeable future. And we could talk about why, but it certainly seems as though that equilibrium real interest rate, the real interest rate that you need to have to keep it full employment is just really low. And it may, for example, be part of a reflection of some of the things that Heather was saying about higher inequality means that a lot of the income is going to people that don't spend much of it. So how do you get enough demand? It means that the equilibrium real rate has to be very low. But I think the big picture is what it means is the Fed will have limited ammunition the next time we fight a downturn. And for that reason alone, fiscal policy will be more important than ever. Now, compared to 2008, however, we will have one big advantage in using fiscal policy, which is we have a lot better understanding. So one consequence of the use of fiscal stimulus, not just in the US but around the world, has been just a blossoming of research on its impacts. And almost without exception, these new studies find that stimulus is very effective. So for example, just at a broad level, countries that took more aggressive fiscal actions following the 2008 crisis, so like China, Australia, and yes, the United States had less severe post-crisis recessions than those that did less like France and Italy and the UK. And actually one of the most persuasive studies looks specifically at that state and local fiscal relief component of the Recovery Act. That was about $100 billion of the original fiscal stimulus. And that was a part of the Recovery Act where we had probably the least information or least certainty about what its impact would be. And an interesting point is that for practical reasons, much of that relief to state governments was just tied to the historical generosity of its Medicaid program because it turned out that the easiest and fastest way to transfer money from the federal government to the states was just to increase that federal Medicaid matching percentage. And as a result, there was variation in how much of the state fiscal relief states got that wasn't tied to current economic conditions in the state. So what you can just see from this picture is that areas like DC, New York, Vermont got more of the state fiscal relief for relatively exogenous reasons than other states like Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. And that relatively exogenous variation let economists do is to see, well, did states that got more of this state fiscal relief for reasons unrelated to current conditions in the state did they do better? And the answer is absolutely. So this is just, if you're into reading scatter plots along the horizontal, we're gonna have that relatively exogenous amount of state fiscal relief that various states got. And along the vertical, we have what happened to the change in employment in that state in the first sort of six months of 2009. And what you're supposed to see is a positive relationship. What it means is that states that got more of this state fiscal relief did better or probably the right way to say it is, they did less bad, right? So that they had smaller employment losses than states that got less of this state fiscal relief. The other thing that was amazing about this study is their estimated cost per job saved or created was really low on the order of about $26,000 per job year. And so I think one of the things we learned from this study is that aid to states is likely to be one of the most straightforward and effective forms of anti-recession fiscal policy. All right, well, while we have the benefit of better understanding of fiscal stimulus the next time around, we are gonna face two huge disadvantages. One, as again has been so mentioned before, is just the evaporation of the political consensus in favor of stimulus. And what's so ironic is that this blossoming of new research has, if anything, helped to make the professional consensus in favor of fiscal policy even stronger than it was in 2008. And this is actually, I don't know if you're familiar, but the IGM Forum at the University of Chicago does periodic surveys of its economic expert panels. And the experts are all distinguished economists but importantly they lean left, right, center. And one of the questions that they asked was whether they agreed that the Recovery Act helped to lower the unemployment rate. And what you're supposed to notice is 97% of the experts agreed or strongly agreed that stimulus was useful. And actually they asked a similar question back in 2012 and what was really striking is the number of people that strongly agreed is even bigger now. I think that is the idea that we have better evidence than ever before that fiscal policy is a very effective tool for dealing with a recession. Now, unfortunately, any trace of political consensus in favor of fiscal stimulus in a recession has evaporated. And one of the things I found so striking is that even actions like extending unemployment insurance during the long downturn which used to command just strong bipartisan support are now highly controversial. I think it's just truly frightening how divided the two parties have become on this fundamental issue. A second disadvantage that I think we're gonna face is an evaporation of our fiscal space. And here's where you're gonna see perhaps a little daylight between me and the earlier panelists. So fiscal space just refers to really the room that policymakers have to take fiscal action and it can be pretty well proxied by a country's ratio of their debt to GDP. And part of the reason I feel so passionate about it these days is I've been doing a lot of research with my colleague and husband, David Romer where we look at how a country's fiscal response to a financial crisis varies with their debt to GDP ratio. So we're gonna look at a broad sample of relatively advanced economies going back to 1980. And we're gonna estimate how the response of their high employment budget surplus, that measure of sort of deliberate fiscal policy after a crisis varied with their debt to GDP ratio. And this figure's gonna show you the results. So the blue line shows what countries with fairly low fiscal space with a high debt to GDP ratio did to their high employment surplus. And the red line shows what countries with a low debt to GDP ratio typically do after a financial crisis. And what you're supposed to see is the countries with a lot of fiscal space, that red line do exactly what you'd want them to do. They cut their high employment surplus. They let their, they deliberately move their budgets into deficits. But what you see is that countries that started a financial crisis with a high debt to GDP ratio take their budget surplus in exactly the wrong direction. That rather than running expansionary fiscal policy, they actually end up running contractionary fiscal policy. And the numbers are huge. This is increasing their budget surplus by as much as 4% of GDP. And actually one of the new papers that we just did is actually looking at why countries behave that way. And we find it's a mixture of sometimes countries with a high debt to GDP ratio really do run into trouble for markets, really do find they can't borrow or have to pay a very high interest rate. But we also do see a big role for policy makers ideas that it seems like policy makers get it into their heads that if they have a high debt ratio, they can't do anything. The reason I point this out is if you look at what's happened to our fiscal space to our debt to GDP ratio over the last 10 years, it is quite surprising and I think quite worrisome. So we certainly see the actual budget deficit as measured by the CBO has gone up a lot. And then their projections are even more horrible going forward. And so I think one of the things that means is we are likely to hit the next recession with a lot less fiscal space than we had back in 2008. And actually I think this feeds in again to something that Heather said earlier. I think it really points out a way in which the Trump tax cuts are even more destructive than we might have realized. So of course they had terrible effects on inequality on who we were redistributing income to. But another effect is that they've set and trained long-term structural deficits that are eating up the fiscal space that we could actually use and would need to use the next time that we faced a recession. All right, so that brings me to the last big topic which is I've suggested there are gonna be problems in using our fiscal policy in the next recession. Are there actions we could take today that would make it more likely that we would be able to use fiscal policy in the future? And here I have a few suggestions. The first is to do exactly what EPI is doing today, which is to try to educate the public. I think that think tanks, congressional committees, thought leaders have to be highlighting the new research on the effectiveness of fiscal policy. And here I'll make a plea to spot like the young researchers who actually do in the work publishing it in top economics journals because I think we need to kind of take the partisan battles of the past out of the discussion and focus on the new empirical research. The other thing we're gonna need to do is to be honest about describing the findings. So most of them are strongly of the view that fiscal stimulus works, but not all of them go in exactly the same direction. For example, it appears that tax cuts that show up just in lower withholding as we had in the Recovery Act or as we saw in the Trump tax cuts don't seem to pack as big an expansionary punch as writing people a highly publicized tax rebate check. I think a second thing that we should do is to rein in our budget deficit in good times to make fiscal space for bad times. And here let me just be clear that I agree with so much of what the panel before said. There is a tremendous amount of good spending that we should be doing right now. We need to be investing in infrastructure. We need to be taking massive actions to combat climate change. We should be expanding access to healthcare and education. So every American has an equal opportunity to thrive both physically and economically. But I think we shouldn't give into the view that budget deficits don't matter because I think that they do. And one important way that they do is in limiting the fiscal response to a recession. So I basically put in a plug that in times of full employment, we should pay for the good things that we want to do with higher taxes and cuts in unnecessary spending. And here I couldn't agree with Angela Moore. We can afford to do the things that we need to do, but we ought to pay for them, right? We ought to be using taxes and cuts in unnecessary spending to do the good things that would make the economy stronger, right? And I think that it will have the benefit besides accomplishing good things of getting our debt to GDP ratio, moving in the right direction, which is it needs to go down rather than up as dramatically as it has been so that policymakers won't hesitate to do fiscal stimulus when they need to. And finally, again, I think just such a crucial point from the earlier panel is we need to plan right now for the fiscal policy that we would use in the next recession. Again, thinking back to December of 2008, when the world is falling apart, that is a hard time to be trying to design the perfect fiscal stimulus. We should be thinking about that right now. And so for example, building on that study that I mentioned that state fiscal relief is a really valuable tool, we should be thinking right now about how we could do it more equitably, more quickly, so that we get it to the states that are most severely affected if we face another recession. Another place where I really agreed with the panel a lot, I think in devising an effective public employment program for hard times would be another great thing to do. This was something that President Obama would have liked to do in 2009. And we just couldn't figure out a way to do widespread public employment quickly and cost effectively. In fact, I had the surreal experience of, I just started calling cabinet secretaries in 2009 and I said, how many people could your agency or department usefully employ if funds were available? And a typical answer was, oh, tons, maybe 15, even 20,000. And I'm sitting here going, we have 15 million people unemployed, a couple 100,000 public jobs is just not going to do much. But I think widespread public employment should be possible. Oh, thank you. And here, we've already had several references to the Great Depression and the New Deal. I just wanted to actually give you some numbers that will really drive that home. Franklin Roosevelt in the winter of 1934 managed to put four million people to work through the Civil Works program. That was eight months after he had taken office. And a WPA routinely employed close to three million people in several of those years in the mid 1930s. And of course, my favorite, the Civilian Conservation Corps put hundreds of young men to work improving our national parks and doing other conservation projects. And I've actually one of the few truly joyous times of my time in Washington was when quite early on in my tenure, a group of now very old men who had worked on CCC projects came to see me at the CEA. And their description, not only of what the public employment had meant for their families, one well-known, probably not well-known fact is we sent these young men off to the woods to do this work. And then they sent three quarters of their paychecks home to their mothers. And so it not only helped them, it helped their families. But these men who are now all in their 80s and 90s were describing how this job in this terrible time not only had saved their families, but transformed their lives and made them more productive citizens going further or in the future. And so what I really think we should be doing, I think with enough creativity and planning, we could surely come up with a program that could put large numbers of people to work doing useful activities in the next serious recession. And we heard some great ideas, getting the lead out of the houses in Cleveland. So I'd put public school repair, environmental cleanup, as an economic historian, I'd love to see all of our government documents digitized, teachers' aides in classrooms. There are ways we could put lots of people to work, but I think only if we have the programs in our back pocket ready to go when the time comes. And I think coming back or moving a little bit into the political realm, I think a fiscal policy that puts people directly to work doing useful things is gonna be a lot more palatable to both politicians and voters than the more amorphous fiscal stimulus. And then finally, I think as Heather mentioned, better and stronger automatic stabilizers would be really valuable, right? So a more progressive tax system naturally means that tax revenues go up more in a boom and down more in a recession. And that's great for stabilizing output. But again, we should think more creatively. Could we make extensions or expansions of unemployment compensation in long or severe recessions automatic? Could we make state fiscal relief automatic as well if the unemployment rate in a state hits a certain level? I think those kinds of things that we could be thinking about now would be excellent additions to our anti-recession arsenal. Because I think taking politics out of the use of counter-cyclical fiscal policy is the best way to make sure that we'd have the right policy response at the right time. Now, what surely is the case is that all of the moves that I've described would help make fiscal policy a more viable tool in the next recession. But I don't have to tell you that any of them are gonna be an incredibly heavy lift in the current political environment. But I guess the reason I'm here, I think the reason we're all here is that we just can't stop trying to nevertheless get them to be part of the discussion. Because facing another economic meltdown with our most effective counter-cyclical tool is not just gonna be a heavy lift, it is truly unthinkable. So we've gotta think about this now. So thank you. Thank you so much, Christie, for those words. And I really enjoyed the way you played off of the earlier panel and with both the areas of agreement and disagreement. I wanna follow up on maybe your last point, which is around the politics and timing and magnitude and sufficiency. So in the last recession, after the Recovery Act passed, just barely, as we talked about, just squeaked by, a lot of the political support for further stimulus evaporated. Even though, as people talked about, clearly unemployment was still high, the economy was very far from healthy. So looking back, what kinds of support from outside forces like think tanks or grassroots activists or media might have been helpful to you at that moment in time and what kinds of backup were you looking for? What did you feel you needed from the White House? So I think that is a great question and a great point. Because I think, and here I'll describe a way, I think we were naive when we did the Recovery Act because an economist natural approach to this is to say, let's do what we can get through now, sort of make a good start on this. But then, of course, if things are really bad, Congress will understand that and will go back and ask for more. And I think exactly the mess that we got into is the same situation where it's clear you need more fiscal stimulus is the situation where they can say, yeah, we'll see, it didn't work. We did that, all right. And so I think that's why I think the highlighting, the research that says, no, you can't just say we still have unemployment and you did stimulus, so it didn't work. To say, for God's sake, it was the next Great Depression and it helped, but we need to keep doing more. And that is highlighting the research that it works. I think working, reaching out to members of Congress to explain, again, just how incredibly valuable it is. But I do also think that, it came up some in the earlier panel of we were trying hard to make it bipartisan. We had a big chunk of tax cuts because one, we thought that would be fast and we thought it would help to get it to be a bipartisan bill. But it also turns out that's not, it was really striking, but most people didn't realize they'd gotten a tax cut, right? So it didn't build that kind of public support. And so I think thinking more this time about giving people a job, not a check. Or really doing the things that make people see their lives better. I'll give you another example of regrets that I have for my time, which was, I think if we had done more to help troubled homeowners. We were so focused on, we do need to stabilize the financial system, but so many people were losing their homes. And I certainly sitting here saying, well, homeowners in general are the top half of the income distribution. It seems like maybe that's not the best way to spend a ton of money, but by George we should have said to the banks, you need to write down these mortgages. And so I think being more aware of what will build public consensus and then the think tanks can play such an important role of highlighting that. Great, and I'll say one thing about building bipartisan consensus, and I'll say it so you don't have to, which is that to some extent during that period there was not a good faith effort from both parties to fix the recession. I think it was Mitch McConnell who said, absolutely, he didn't really wanna fix the recession because he wanted to hang it around the neck of Barack Obama. And so that makes it a lot more difficult. And I think what that says to us in terms of the time that we have now to prepare for the next recession is we need to be honest and forthright about people who are obstructionist for the sake of obstruction as opposed to you sort of honest players and that's it. I wanted to mention I was so taken with someone, I think it was Heather who was pointing out, we think of Franklin Roosevelt solving the Great Depression and what we often forget is we went through three years of absolute hell before Roosevelt was elected. And so at one level I am so grateful that President Obama came in right in the heart of the downturn, but in some sense because we took very radical action very quickly, we didn't go through some of that unbelievable pain. But I can remember at one point David Axelrod saying, you know what, the American people have never had their holy shit moments in the sense that I think maybe they never realized just how huge the shock that hit the economy in September and October were. And maybe we never had the, that wasn't there to build the consensus around doing an even bigger stimulus. I like the point that you made about the shift in the economics profession around the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus and that that's one of things that's changed in the last 10 years. Do you think there's also been a shift in the economics profession around the relative risk, the debt constraints? And so the fiscal hawkishness because I think that's something that has been more bipartisan in the past and maybe there's some change now. Yeah, I do. And I actually, I do find myself in a little bit of a strange position because there's no one that thinks that fiscal stimulus is as valuable a tool in a recession as I do. I do think though having looked at the evidence, I think it's a matter, you wanna have the space to do it. But I think what has changed, it used to be the IMF or the OECD, a lot of these international organizations in the middle of a downturn would say, oh what you gotta do is get your debt down. And that's crazy, that's not the right time to do it. And so it's fabulous that they are no longer giving that advice to countries facing terrible crises. I think the right time to do it is when things are relatively good, exactly so then you're in a position to use it when you need it. And that's part of, when the Trump tax cuts passed, I'm sitting here thinking in 2010 or 2011, this would have been a godsend. We would have designed it differently, but we needed the fiscal stimulus then. And how ironic that people refused to do it when we needed it, and then we got it when we were basically closing in on full employment. And that is exactly backwards. One last quick point before we turn it over to the audience, you talked about fiscal space. And I get that point about the debt to GDP ratio, but do you think measuring fiscal space is as simple as just looking at that one measure, the debt to GDP ratio, or are there more dimensions we ought to be taking into account? Absolutely, and so actually one of the things that David Romer and I did in our Brookings paper is to look at other ways that you might think about envisioning it. For example, how easy is it for a country to borrow? And so by that, if you look at a country like the United States or Japan, even though we have a high debt to GDP ratio, the world is very happy to lend to us. That's a way of saying that it shouldn't be a constraint. A market force shouldn't be a constraint. It does seem as though it is a constraint on policymakers that often, I mean, we saw this so much in 2010, European policymakers like, we must contract fiscal, and it's like, for goodness' sake, your unemployment is over the roof. You've got to be going in the other direction. So there are two ways you can go around it. I wanna do both of them. I wanna both educate people and say fiscal stimulus works in a bad time, it is what you should do, and in good times, that's the time to get your fiscal house in order so that you can do what you need to do in a recession. Great, on that note, let's open it up to questions from the audience. I think there are folks with microphones out there. There we go. Thanks very much, Dr. Romer, terrific session. My name's Greg LaRoy with Good Jobs First. We did a ton of monitoring of the data that came out during the recovery, recovery.gov and the state websites and so on. I think there were sins of omission and commission about people understanding the job creation benefits. It's not, you know, there was public hiring. There was a ton of teachers and public safety workers and public health workers and not just construction workers who got jobs as a result of it and they didn't know it and nobody told them they got it. Fault many people for that. And then when the quarterly data started coming out of recovery.gov, we tried to get the media to cover the fact that thousands of companies were putting false goose eggs in their job creation reports. They were saying things like in the narrative, they'd say we saved the second shift with the Recovery Act contract and then you put a zero in the job column and they were clearly like ideological, they didn't want to admit the fact that the Recovery Act was benefiting their companies. Thousands of companies were doing that every three months and nobody held them to account. So whoever drives the communications next time on this, omission and commission. That's a, I mean, we tried. So I mean, one of the things that they wrote into the Recovery Act was that the Council of Economic Advisers every quarter had to make a report to Congress and we would try to show go beyond just the Recovery.gov to highlight sort of what was actually happening because when you create a public sector job, that has spillovers. They go out and an employed worker goes out and buys things and that puts other people to work or we tried to highlight. So actually that paper I told you about the state fiscal relief, that started with four smart young staff economists at the CEA. I said, look at the Recovery Act and find me, what do you think it's doing? And that turned into an award winning publication but it was trying to get good evidence. And yes, I mean, I feel strongly we could have done better and we should have done better to make the case of just how valuable this was and how valuable even more fiscal stimulus would have been. More questions from the audience? More questions? Hi, I think what is so terrifying about this. Introduce yourself. Oh, sorry, my name is Kim Lemkele. I work on capping CEO pay, hopefully. We'll see. What I think is so terrifying about this topic for most people is that we aren't meaningful participants in the stock market, right? But it sort of hangs like this sort of Damocles over our head. We lived through it, we lost jobs, we lost our houses, including renters, like banks were foreclosing on rental properties all over the place. And so one of the things that I'm seeing in the stock market that makes me very nervous, I just wondered your thoughts is that we've been in this buyback economy now for a while where nobody is buying stocks except companies buying back their own stocks. Companies are no longer innovating but are manipulating their stock prices specifically for the purpose of inflating executive compensation. And you see sort of executives treating their companies like ATMs. I'm wondering how nervous that makes you as a potential future cause of what might happen next. Hey, this is funny because I was having a conversation with someone in the coffee break about sort of where's the next recession going to come from. I did try to give you the sense that this expansion won't die of old age, but it shocks. It's a collapse of a housing bubble. It's a collapse of the stock market that can set things off. And so certainly to the degree, and again what we were discussing is if stock prices are high because of fundamentals because we have good technological change and our economy is working well and our firms are profitable, that's not something to worry about. If stock prices are high because of manipulation or people are going a little bit crazy, that's exactly when stock prices can go really high but then they can fall really fast. And that does set and train. Consumers don't feel like they can spend. Companies cut back on investment and that is one of those shocks that we absolutely do have to worry about. So I think it is something, I don't see yet the kind of asset price bubbles that would set off, the burst of which would set off a terrible downturn but it's exactly what everybody should be looking for because we have learned how vulnerable we are to that. Okay, I think we are sort of out of time but let's take one more question. There's one up here in the front. One more quick question. My name is Yuren Wang, I'm a journalist. So would you talk a little bit about the risks for the next recession in the context of global economy because the 2008 crisis was not just regional or national, it has both causes and effects across gold. So if the US tries to prevent the next recession, it might be also necessary to consider what happens in Europe, in China, in countries that have close relationships or interactions with the US. Oh, that's such an important point. So thank you for making it because I think one of the things, I've thought long and hard about why sort of everybody underpredicted how severe the 2008 recession would be in the US and I think part of it was, we kept having this, what turns out to have been an unrealistic hope that we were having all these things going wrong but the rest of the world would help to hold us up and exactly as you pointed out, what we learned really in January and February of 2009 was that no, the rest of the world is going down with us and that therefore it just magnified the downturn. And so absolutely the rest of the world needs to be afraid of things going on in the US. I would actually say looking where we are today, I'm more worried about causation running the other way. So an uncontrolled Brexit frightens me a lot. I think watching some of what's happening in Italy and whether they could get into such a fight with the EU that we have some real shocks coming from that, the slowdown in China I think is something that could hurt the US economy, could hurt the European economy. And so I actually, I think the worldwide sort of, if anything, the rest of the world is less healthy in a lot of ways than the US economy. And so I think the risks of a worldwide slowdown or severe problems especially in Europe or China could well be where our next recession comes from. So I think the idea that we are interrelated, the idea that countries throughout the world have really low interest rates and really high debt to GDP ratios makes me worry. In 2009, almost every advanced economy did a fiscal stimulus and that was unbelievably valuable. That coordinated effort was really valuable and coordinated monetary policy. And I fear we have not only lost our ability to use those policies as much in the US but in the rest of the world. And so figuring out right now what we will do, not just here but around the world is really important. On that sobering note. Sorry. I think we're gonna bring this to an end. I think it really is important for us to keep in mind though the interconnectedness, the integration of the global economy that brings both advantages and risks. And this is a moment. But our next panel is going to lift us all up by helping us think hard about how we can work together to address the next recession in a much more strategic and effective way than we've done in the past. We're gonna take about 10 minutes for you to take a little bit of a break. There's lunch in the back of the room. And then we will meet back here in about 10 minutes for our last panel. But please join me in thanking Dr. Christina Roma. Please take your seats. Our program is about to begin. Hi everybody. So we are charged with talking about how to respond to the next recession. So the first panel really focused on the economics of the next recession and recovery. And then with an insider's eye, Professor Romer really helped to still lessons learned from the last recession and really highlight some of the things for us to think about going forward, especially in the last session. Going forward, especially around the economics and the politics of the next recession. And this panel is gonna focus on the organizing that will allow us to win the next recovery. And to lay the groundwork for the fairer full employment economy that we want longterm. So I first wanna thank EPI and Groundwork Collaborative for making this space. I think that the fact that we're having this conversation in the context of the economics conversation that came before is a unique opportunity for all of us to be thinking across these various disciplines. And EPI has played such an influential and important role in the infrastructure for progressive organizations that are moving power, building work, both in states and on the federal level. The vision for the day, I mean I think really animates what we need to be looking forward to as we are looking at the next recession. So what to expect from this panel? One I would say is provocation. I think we're here to catalyze a conversation about how to create the political will in order to win the next recovery and to respond to the next recession in the right ways. The second is insight. Our panel is a bunch of accomplished strategists with diverse campaigning experience. And so I think I'm really looking forward to the conversation that we're gonna have. So let me introduce folks. I'm gonna do it in the order that they're gonna speak, except for me because I'm speaking now. Naomi Walker, the director of the ERN Network, which is the Economic Analysis and Research Network, part of EPI. It's a state and local research, it's a network of state and local research and policy groups that are improving economic conditions for working families. And she's gonna talk about the role of states and how they need to get prepared for the next recession. Zoe Lipman, the director of vehicles and advanced transportation program at the Blue-Green Alliance is gonna talk about how our response to another crisis, climate change, can fuel our response to the next recession. Margarita George, the executive director of Healthcare for America Now is gonna discuss the importance of both the healthcare and the tax fights in our response to the next recession. And Bill Spriggs, the chief economist of the AFL-CIO, will discuss core programs to stabilize working people in a recession and the steps we need to take now to update and stabilize those programs. And I'll be your moderator. I'm Connie Raza and I'm the chief of campaigns and policy at the Center for Popular Democracy. To frame our conversation, I just wanted to start with a little bit of the grounding for the paper that is at the front that I wrote for this event. So recessions are broadly felt economic crises that have the potential to shift momentum toward broadly shared prosperity or to amplify the velocity of the concentration of wealth and power. And to orient the recovery toward outcomes that reduce rather than boost wealth inequality, especially along racial and gender lines, we need the right policy proposals in a sort of break in case of emergency package. And we have to have the political infrastructure to win them. So organized money and organized people hold sway over the deciders during these crises. In other words, we have to be building our power. Fortunately, we have the beginnings of both the policy package and the power building to win because our communities are in a chronic crisis. And so understanding that our communities are in a chronic crisis to which they are responding already with long-term solutions, thinking about the next recession as an acute crisis that's felt across the broader spectrum of the population gives us the opportunity to think about how do we couch the solutions we're already building towards in order to respond to the next recession. So some of the work that's already going on obviously efforts to defend and expand worker rights and power to reign in Wall Street and the power of capital in our economy and our democracy to overhaul the energy infrastructure in order to meet the challenge of climate change to build resilient communities in order to cope with the impacts of climate change to strengthen our social safety net, to reclaim public goods and services, to refocus the Fed on full employment, to repeal the regressive tax restructuring of 2017 and implement more progressive tax structures and so much else. These all can be the foundation for the work that we could push during the next recession, but we need to weaponize these for our recession readiness package. I know it's Bellicose language. I'd argue that what we need is a good economic version of the Patriot Act. This was a ready-to-go package of policies that were pushed through because we were in a moment of crisis and that folks who ordinarily would have stood up against these policies because they're the wrong policies agreed to because they were responding to this moment of fear as Professor Romer pointed out and were feeling the pressure from a broader set of the public than they ordinarily would have in order to act in a way that felt like it was securing us. Well, we have the benefit of the right ideas and could make a ready-to-go package of policies that we know will help restructure our economy in a way that allows everyone to thrive. So a sort of weaponized spark to the recovery that would really help fuel a rapid recovery but would also lay the groundwork for an ambitious and progressive policy infrastructure going forward and build power. And with this kind of long tail, we've seen how the shifts that austerity has made has a long tail. We could also have a long tail and be able to think about what are the policies that give us momentum moving in not just shared prosperity because of those policies but a shift in how we're thinking about policy into the future. But in order to win the next recovery, we have to start now. And so we have to engage a broad set of organizations and leaders in preparation and we'll have more to say on that, I'm sure. And we'll all have more to say because we're trying to stick to a strict five minute, five minute limit on our comments. And then I'll have a few questions but I think this is really an opportunity for all of us to engage the entirety of this morning and think about how we work together in order to win the next recovery. So with that, I will turn it over to me. Great, thanks so much, hi everybody. So I think for folks who focus on state level action and activism, we have two roles as we get ready for the next recession. And the first is to move smart strategic campaigns that really put pressure on our state policy makers and federal policy makers to make sure that the kind of fiscal aid gets to the states that Dr. Romer talked about that can really help ward off the worst effects of a recession. So that's job number one. But I think the second part is that we also have to be very focused on making sure that the state legislatures and the governors make policy choices about the state budgets that are smart and help workers and help move the state economies more quickly into recovery. And as Amy mentioned in her piece before, the important thing to know about state budgets is they're not like the federal budget. The states can't run deficits, they can't print money, they have to stay focused on, at least slightly focused on their bond ratings. And so they have two tools to really address recessions. One is to cut taxes and raise taxes, and the other is to cut spending. And one of the things that we've seen far too often is what happens in states, if there is not a smart political campaign, if we're not organized and pushing forward, they far too frequently will cut spending, which is the absolute worst thing to do in the middle of a recession. And so right now is the time that we as advocates and that state policymakers and governors should really be focusing on how do we get ourselves ready for the recession? How do we set the state up for success? And I think one of the things that's important to know is that, and again, not making any predictions about when the actual recession is gonna happen, but you could imagine what happening before 2022, which means that all of the governors that are in office now and many of the state legislators who are now in office are gonna be those policymakers that are gonna be making the choices that set us up for how we get through a recession and how we come out of the recovery. And so they've got the rare gift of time and they should use it wisely and we should really use that time wisely to get ourselves ready for the recession as well. And so governors should work really closely with state legislators, with members of their congressional delegations, set up interagency task forces right now to start talking about what are the bold, proactive approaches that states should be taking to make sure that they're ready. And I'm gonna go through them in sort of laser-like fashion because I wanna focus more on what I think is a more interesting conversation and that's sort of the political ramifications of not doing that. And so states should be moving right now to shore up their reserves and get their rainy day funds in order. And it's not enough just to build up the rainy day funds. They also have to have the policies in place that allow them to spend those rainy day funds. A lot of states have really convoluted rules about how you can access them or it takes a super majority in the legislature to vote and support how to use those funds. States should shore up their unemployment insurance systems which Amy talked about. I'm not gonna dig into that a lot. But one of the big things I would say is that states should really, right now, and even in the recession, work to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy. And again, because of the constraints that state budgets, that state policymakers face about how they get their budgets in balance, if they don't raise taxes, the only option they have is to cut spending. And that is just an incredibly terrible thing to do in the middle of a recession. And right now, there are some political opportunities, and I think MJ's gonna talk more about maybe some of the political opportunities around taxes, raising taxes on the wealthy is incredibly politically popular right now. 76% of voters, Democrats, Republicans, and dependents think that the wealthy should be paying more. And so we should be seizing that political moment and using it to raise taxes to help shore up state budgets but also make them more equitable. States should also stop spending like drunken sailors on bad economic development deals that really don't deliver very much for workers and communities and cost states, millions and millions of dollars over time. And so I think one of the key things is that one minute is that we've gotta really be at the top of our game and progressives and folks that care about working people and economic justice have to really seize this opportunity. If we don't, the right wing will. They have a history of using recessions to drive forward their economic agenda and their narrative arc, which is all about going after government, going after the workers who work for government and their unions and cutting taxes and maybe during the Q and A I'll give a couple examples of what that looks like. But I think the bottom line is, Republicans have shown a willingness to use power and wield power in the midst of a recession and coming out of a recession and we better make sure that we're ready to do that too. Thanks and I have to say, having listened to the previous panel on this panel I had hoped it would make me shorten my comment instead there's so much more to say. But as has been alluded to in previous discussions we are facing at least two crises right now. One is a urgent climate crisis and another is a ongoing and destructive economic crisis for working people. And we have to address both, seriously address both of those together if we're going to be successful. Taking action on climate is one of the potentially most promising opportunities for economic growth and economic stimulus. But if our solutions to climate ignore working people and only reinforce the inequality and inequities of our current economy, not only will they not be lastingly effective but there is no way that we can build the kind of momentum and support to see them be successful or see them become reality. By contrast, acting on climate in ways that are centered in the needs and aspirations of working people and their communities have the potential to heal divisions and to build the kind of movement, galvanize a movement that addresses both economic and climate crises. This starts at all levels, whether we're talking state or local or national, with bringing working people whether that's labor, communities, environmentalists, equity and justice groups to the table as a starting point. And it requires a bold, inclusive worker-centered agenda that can not only address our climate and environmental concerns at the scale that both equity and science demand but also address the underlying issues that leave so many Americans today living paycheck to paycheck and bearing the disproportionate costs of economic disruption and technological change. We need to act now and there are also some really great opportunities within this arena to address a recession if and when it comes. And I could, there are many to talk about. I'm gonna jump into just a couple of the kinds of responses that fall into this category. And again, I'd also be happy, you can talk more in the questions. First, we have an incredible opportunity over a pair of America to invest in a new generation of infrastructure that is prioritized to strengthen communities both from a resilience and economic health perspective to rebuild a critical infrastructure that we need for health and safety to rebuild industries so they're suitable for the new economy. And in particular, and this has come up in a number of different arenas, we have an opportunity to target investments at communities who have been undermined by historical, racial inequity, disinvestment and deindustrialization. And finally, I think there's a critical opportunity to ensure that the mechanisms we use ensure that our public dollars actually deliver fully to the public. And I wanna throw out two super quick examples of this. They're the kinds of things that we are already doing and could be rapidly implemented. One came up earlier, which is an investment in thousands of our schools. We have thousands of aging schools and investment that looked at bringing in new technology, getting lead and other toxics out, rebuilding schools with clean, safe and domestically manufactured materials and improving energy efficiency would have effects of not only demands really improving student outcomes, but improving safety and health for students and teachers, but it returns funds to allow for more investment in schooling, but also to taxpayers. Another thing that we are seeing right now is examples of investing in cleaner transit in ways that build on existing by America and Davis-Bacon and similar kinds of programs, but go beyond them to incentivize community and community workforce agreements spur apprenticeship and Priya's apprenticeship. Ah! And any number of other kinds of, and a number of other efforts that actually draw people into long-term careers. I will say two other things super fast then. I would love to talk about the opportunity we have to implement a national strategy to lead in manufacturing the next generation of clean and emerging technology in America and to do that in ways that retain and build jobs. This is a huge opportunity. It's one in which we can actively address not only long-term growth, an issue that came up earlier, drawing investment out of financialization and back into workers and productive capacity in the US and do that in ways that don't just build jobs because I think we actually have a lot of jobs at the moment. What we don't have is jobs that are good jobs and are getting better as opposed to poorer jobs that are getting worse. We have an opportunity to not only build 21st century technology in America, but to do it not with 19th century working conditions which too much of it is happening today, but with a build a whole new generation of jobs. And finally, I just wanna say super fast two things. We also have an opportunity to reinvest in workers and we need a, and maybe there are others who will talk about this, we need a globally competitive social safety net that helps ensure that we can talk about the examples, but that we position workers and communities to cope so that they do not bear the bulk of the impacts of technological disruption, economic change. These are natural things that happen in the economy and there are many ways that we can think about piloting now, but also in a recession responses that do a much better job of preparing workers for change, delivering ongoing work-based training and helping secure communities when economies change. So I, that was really short. Is it on? Oh, it is, wow. I can't see any of you. Whoever was on the panel before that was like the lights are in my eyes, that is in a real way the lights are in my eyes. Thanks for having me, Margarita George, healthcare for America now. So I just wanna talk a little bit, sort of big picture about this question of what we can do to be ready for the next recession. And I wanna thank the panel before me because almost all the answers were there. And so all I have to do is summarize some of what the colleagues on the earlier panel said and just add a couple of twists. So there's obviously a very robust conversation happening about healthcare right now. Healthcare was the hottest issue of the last election. It's gonna be the hottest issue of the next election. Anybody not working on healthcare if you wanna get on the action with the hottest issue now is the time. And that's actually very good for us, right? It's really good for progressives because the underlying thematics of the conversation about healthcare really are about all the big picture issues that we need to resolve if we're gonna advance a progressive agenda. And by that I would just mention a couple of the big ones that is the role of government, the ever contested role of government. Taxes and revenue on healthcare. A lot of people actually don't know that I work on healthcare, they think I work on taxes. And that's because almost every sentence that I say about healthcare will eventually lead us back to taxes. So I think the question about taxes and coming out of the closet, because we should, because we're the progressive, so we actually believe in progressive taxation. We believe in middle class folks paying more taxes and the rich incorporations paying their taxes so that we can have investment and make choices that really do reflect our values. And then we have to deal with a huge issue across all sectors, and it doesn't matter if you're working on climate issues or health issues or workplace issues. And that is the huge question of corporate influence that has captured democracy. Somebody said it earlier, the young lady that got up and made the comment at the end, this issue of what is our story? One reason why in healthcare, we spend a lot of time contextualizing issues like prescription drug costs or the Affordable Care Act or Medicaid expansion or Medicare for All, it doesn't matter pick. We contextualize that in a much larger story about how the economy works. That is also a story about how democracy works because we should not take for granted that folks know, right, regular people, I'm not an economist. I think that makes me good at my job because as it turns out, most other folks in America also are not economists. Therefore, there is never a time in the many years that I knocked on doors, there was never a time that I knocked on somebody's door and they asked me about fiscal stimulus. Like ever, there was like never, not even one time. But, right, your mom, I need her address, yeah. I want to do it at least once. But I think that the other thing that sometimes we take for granted here in the Beltway is that regular people understand that for instance, tax breaks for the rich in corporations cost money, right? Like that, I couldn't believe it when I first came to DC and I was working with my colleagues Americans for Tax Fairness and they were just, you know, we were just like plugging along, thinking everybody understood that tax breaks for rich people mean that it's like less Medicaid and education for us. It's actually not true and that brings me to what I sort of perceive as the paramount thing that we could do to really be ready for whatever the next calamity or opportunity is gonna be and that's organizing beyond the Beltway, right? When we went, years ago, when we were thinking about passing at healthcare reform, the Affordable Care Act and we brought together HCAN's coalition, we didn't spend a whole bunch of time thinking about the policy because other folks had thought about the policy. We thought about two things that were tied to power analysis. One is that whatever the solution is to the healthcare crisis and lots of people have lots of opinions, the key feature of it is a much larger role for government and what does that mean in a country where we really have a record low confidence in government right now and where actually folks think that the government is something other than themselves and so we have some real challenges with agency when folks don't even recognize that they have the power to influence what the government does. And then secondly, we have lots of confidence that when we elect people, the right people from the right party, they're gonna go up to the hill and do all the things that we want them to do. I don't know where that comes from cause it's crazy town, right? Like that is just not true. In order to advance the policy that we want, we have to be organizing 24 seven and really build an independent constituency for power in states and we know on every single issue and healthcare is no different, it might be the best example that in order to stop President Trump from taking away people's healthcare or in order to advance a large reform where we expand healthcare for 25 million people, it requires real organizing out in districts. That is the way to influence lawmakers regardless of which political party they're from. So if we wanna be ready for whatever the next big thing is, then we've gotta do the relatively unsexy work of organizing 24 seven in the states. So I'm gonna pick up on that last point and especially when it comes to thinking about the problem at the state level. While the stimulus packages Christina mentioned in its early form was heavily favored to getting money to state and local governments, it was far from sufficient because we know for this downturn, we suffered the biggest loss in public employment in the history of the United States and we have not recovered. We have not recovered from that. So what has to happen is we have to get state and local governments out of the fear of making public investment. We need an insurance for state and local government. Now when we did the great recession, we kind of ignored the elements from the Great Depression that gave us some lessons in part because we didn't have to invent them. We had social security, which addressed many of the economic risks that people face, but there's an economic risk which we now know people face that we had not envisioned. When you wake up in the morning, you think there's gonna be a teacher in the school, you think there's gonna be a cop on the corner, you think there's gonna be somebody to fix the stoplight. This downturn, we found that that's not true and I need that same insurance that social security gives me over my personal life. We have to think about our corporate life and so we need an automatic stabilizer that assures that we still get the same public investment even in a downturn because even if the economy fails, kids still need to be taught, fires need to be put out, lights need to be changed, potholes need to be fixed. This is nothing to do with anything other than just the necessity of life, we need those things to be insured. Who should pay for this? If we have a downturn, we know who will have caused it, we have to have a financial transactions tax because they create the mess, they get all the upside, now we've passed a tax cut that gives them even more of the upside and then we have to pay for the downside. So they need to pay to ensure that our public sector is still there for us in the next downturn. Why is this key? Because in the next downturn, it's not likely to be like the Great Recession where we lose millions of jobs and everyone is gonna be galvanized. It's far more likely to be like the 2001 downturn which was very shallow in terms of job loss but everyone needs to remember, it took us a long time to recover even the shallow loss of jobs from 2001. We've forgotten that because then we got whacked in 2008 and it was like, oh, 2001 wasn't so bad but we shouldn't forget how long it took. George W. Bush did not go into his second election with the same number of people employed as when he took office. It took that long in order for us to recover from that downturn and we didn't get the jobs and we call it a peak in 2007, 2008 but we didn't really even get back to 2000. So the next downturn is not likely to be as deep. It will be more shallow and therefore the focus and the ability to generate this recovery is gonna be more difficult. We have to fix our unemployment insurance system. It is not a state-based function. This is a federal function because economic downturns are a national phenomenon and just as we have to ensure the public sector, we cannot have a state-based unemployment insurance system. It does not make sense. It does not make sense because this next downturn is gonna highlight the nine states that have already cut the maximum duration of unemployment below 26 weeks and many of us who fight for extended unemployment benefits assume that states are getting there, they're not. The replacement rate for workers who lose a job should not be dependent upon the state on which they live. I have always said, if you are poor, you are not an American. If you are poor, you're a Mississippian, you're a North Carolinian, you're a Georgian because you quickly find out you are poor in your state, that's not the same. And so we have to ensure that Americans are Americans all the time. There should only be one state and if you're poor, you should be a poor American. So unemployment insurance is one of those key issues and we must make sure we don't lose jobs. The number one thing isn't a jobs program. Afterwards, that's when it's a disaster. Ensuring the public sector means we won't lose public sector workers. Had we not lost public sector workers, there would be hundreds of thousands of jobs which we would not have had to worry about. And the unemployment insurance system, had we been able to bargain for shorter work hours and used unemployment to fill in the gap, we wouldn't have had the overreaction of manufacturing and it looked like, oh, wonderful recovery because they overreacted in manufacturing and then we were able to get them to respond and start hiring back. The key was don't let them lose the job in the first place. So that's what we need to fix first. Those two elements and then we need to fix in our mind. We need to fix in our mind exactly what was raised before. Tax cuts for the wealthy cost us because they cost us these opportunities. Telling Wall Street they can't be taxed on their financial transactions that ruin our economy, that can't be because that cost us the opportunity of having a truly flexible economy that can serve us. Inequality is gonna kill us in the next downturn because the next downturn is gonna be too shallow to give us the easy galvanizing. What we're gonna get is more polarization. And so without an adequate safety net to take care of the length of time is gonna take the recover from the next downturn. We're gonna have a lot of people suffer unnecessarily. Thank you all. I wanna start our sort of conversation part thinking about how we should think about states and federal. We sort of started at the state and got more and more to the federal. So I would love for you guys to reflect on how we should be thinking about and strategizing around what states need to do, what the federal government needs to do and how we prepare both our members, where we have members and our governments to do the right thing in a recession or a downturn. I'll keep going, I apologize. But one of the key things that occurred during this downturn that states did to rein in expenditures was to make a massive cut in higher education. That is what we have not recovered from. And change without us having an election changed the way we view higher education. Higher education is now something pursued by individuals and the individual's benefit and therefore the individual should pay for it. And that is the model we now accept. And we accept this as another commodity that's in the private good and therefore something that is not a public good and therefore something that we, all of us don't have a collective interest in. The result is the obvious. You now have universities running businesses because you told them they have to get the revenue. Now, anybody who's confused about this, just look at all these parents who paid money to get their kids into school. You said this is what you wanted. You want business. You don't see this as a public good. So this is just one of those ways in which the downturn has taken our eye off the ball of a bigger picture of us, the need for thinking about what are public goods versus private goods. And we need the language to reassert what are public goods. Sure, I'll go. I totally agree. And I also think, I mean, one thing we've seen in terms of the interplay between the state and the federal is in terms of setting up the terms of the debate for a future recession, terms of the debate which would allow us to make a credible case for large investment because we've connected the dots on tax breaks for the rich in corporations, investments that people want and values. Oftentimes what we see is a lot of opportunity for learning from the states. We certainly see that on healthcare. Almost everything that rises to the top at the national level on healthcare started from the states, including, for instance, examples of how we get through partisan gridlock. We just had three states, three conservative states that expanded Medicaid. Three Republican states that expanded Medicaid. We know Medicaid is increasingly important to Republicans. They recognize it as a political advantage or a political liability, depending on which Republican you're talking about. So I think in terms of the state, federal, connect, it is true, I don't know how to solve this problem, but it is actually true that we don't have a coherent story about the economy. The other side has trickled down and it's a simple way for them to explain the economy and it actually sort of makes sense to people though they're not buying it anymore partially thanks to this tax law that didn't work out so well for them. But what we don't have is an alternative on our side that connects the dots simply and helps people understand how the economy works. It lays out a rationale for then us coming along and saying we actually, as one of the previous panelists said, we can't afford it, right? That is fundamental to raising people's expectations which is then fundamental to building the political demands and the political power to pass policy. I think a great place to sort of pioneer those models is in states. We've seen a lot of successful measures on health care and other issues. The Florida rights restoration measure, right? If folks are following that debate, 1.4 million returning citizens, former felons got voting rights back in a measure in Florida that got a million more votes than any candidate or any other measure on the ballot. Totally bipartisan in a state where things could have really gone south, right? Given how racialized the issue could have become. I think we should be looking to states and using the states as a laboratory, frankly, to figure out how we have some of these bigger debates and how we're able to advance policy even in circumstances where it seems like the political lineup is not with us. Yeah, and I would just say, too, I wanted to piggyback on one of the points that Bill made. It's not just higher education that didn't bounce back and public employment didn't bounce back after the election. Also K through 12 education spending didn't bounce back. And so as late as 2016, there were still 25 states who hadn't returned to pre-recession levels of spending. And so you look at that at a time when school populations, school enrollment, what's the word? School enrollment is increasing, but spending is flat or decreasing and it has real impacts long-term. And I think examples like that speak to the desperate need for state policymakers and federal policymakers to work together on solutions and to really think very carefully before cuts are made because it takes so long to rebound and get back to the place that we can really support folks in their communities. I might just quickly add on that to say it's not only state and local policymakers who need to start now, but we have in either the climate or infrastructure or whatever space, we have urgent issues at a state level and it takes more than saying, hey, we wanna solve our economic and climate problems together. We actually have to do the hard work of getting all the stakeholders to the table and having the hard discussions to figure out how you do that and meet people's needs. And that's a process that does take some time, but is actually proving to be extremely effective to solving hard problems, problems that were previously divisive and separated constituencies at state level and crafting solutions which are very applicable at a larger economic or energy or climate space. So just would urge people starting those discussions at a ground level now. That's great, thank you. So I wanna get to this question about the story that we're gonna tell and how we make sure that the right actors and policies are blamed in the public eye coming out of sort of a, or going into a financial downturn. So I'm gonna pause it something and then ask a question. So the right wing ideologies of austerity, of trickle down economics and of sort of a radical individualism sort of won the day in the last recession and partly it's because they seem like common sense by now. Even thinking about the federal government is like a family and if you were experiencing a financial problem you would cut back and so the federal government should cut back obviously, right? And so it really builds on sort of both this kind of like common sense that has been built over time and on this fundamental distrust of government of sort of that idea that government effectively provides public goods and services and of public sector workers. And I wanna pull in a thread from the race class narrative work that Demos and Anachankar Osario and Ian Haney Lopez have done where they've shown how this ideological commitment to the idea of government overreach has been really enmeshed with economic anxiety and racial fears, right? And so when you trigger one you trigger many if you think back to sort of the famous quote from Lee Atwater what he says is he's sort of introducing what Ian Haney Lopez has identified as dog whistle politics is he says you start with the N word and then you can't say it anymore. And so then you start talking about busing and whatever and public programs that are identified with black and brown folks. And even though you're not saying black and brown folks people are understanding that's who you're talking about. And then you can get even more abstract and talk about taxes and so forth and people still understand that racial element. So it seems to me that the common sensing of, I just made a verb, of sort of like a deep trust in government and that government is us. This understanding that it is ours and not some third party really demands that we also be thinking about, right, cross racial solidarity and shared prosperity which is part of the teaching that the race class narrative puts forward. Like that seems to me as crucial to the solution but getting there is my question. So how do we identify the right villains and how do we communicate about that in the sort of lead up to and in the face of the next recession? I'll go first since I went last again. My analogy to folks is if you have a rose you don't order it from the top because if you ward it from the top the leaves will get wet and you get what's called rot. You get the little black spots. If you wanna grow a rose, you ward it from the bottom. You grow a rose by watering it from the bottom. And so I'd like to call what we're experiencing now mildew and leaf rot. And we know it goes to the top of the plant. And it kills the plant because you kill the leaves at the top instead of watering at the bottom where you grow the roots and the foundation. We have to get people at the state and local level the reason why people accept and can act more bipartisan is because we all think we're gonna have schools and roads and firefighters and people who patch the road. We all believe that that's the space in which we feel comfortable and understanding how the government operates. Our challenge is at this level of inequality the other things that government used to do which was to fix inequality which was to address the people who were being priced out of a market driven system were few in number. But because of inequality we've priced the middle income out of housing. We've priced the middle income out of childcare. We've priced the middle income out of college. The very fundamental things that they see as the investments in their life shelter and their children. And so we have to get people thinking that government can address that too. And so that the government doesn't just have to address inequality at the very bottom but the government can address inequality further up the income screen. And that that's good when the government does that because that's watering the roots. I would also say I mean just as an example of how the other side used narrative so effectively in the last recession is if you think back to 2011 so states were still really coming out of the recession even though the official recession had ended and states experienced budget deficits usually for a couple of years after the official recession ends. And so Wisconsin governor Scott Walker was able to prey on those economic insecurities of folks and talk about the budget crisis to really drive through this horrible Act 10 which that was the name of the law when it was enacted what the bill was called was the emergency budget repair bill. And it was all based on like be framed it up so that it looked like it was gonna be the fix to all the woes of the state budget and that if only we could cut back on those greedy public employees benefits and make them pay more for their own and wipe out collective bargaining for public employees everything would be okay. And all of those words are also the dog whistle that Connie is talking about because it's like who even in liberal Hollywood sort of portrays public workers as the sassy black gal at the DMV or anything else and it's like sort of what is in folks minds and it's this sort of racial anxiety and economic anxiety created a situation where somebody like a Scott Walker can get elected and then drive through these really horrible things. Same thing happened in Michigan with Governor Snyder got elected and drove through the emergency financial manager bill which if y'all will remember it gutted collective bargaining and also just took over in local communities completely gutted democracy and said like yeah so you elected a mayor doesn't matter the state should take that under control and also racialized overtones of which cities got taken over. You know who were the constituents in those places that suffered under emergency financial manager and so I think our challenge is really like multiple levels is we have to do an extraordinary amount of organizing in communities to help people understand who the real villain is. It's not public sector workers. It's not black folks. It is the folks that are destroying the economy making you lose your jobs, gutting our schools, all of that. And then I think we have to hold our elected officials accountable for using that language too and you know the thing that you just mentioned somebody reminded me earlier that Barack Obama said in the midst I think whoever told me is the latest 2010 was like families have to tighten their belts government should too and it's like not helpful at all and so we should be calling out those politicians that say stupid things like that even though I love Barack. Or politicians who don't say anything, right? So just one basic thing I want to mention is it's very easy for the opposition to monopolize the conversation about government and taxes given that our side doesn't talk about it, right? I mean we don't ever talk about it and like you know here's the thing I just know from being an organizer for a lot of years as it turns out when you have nothing to say and your opposition has a lot to say people tend to believe your opposition. It's you know they're pretty persuasive compared to like silence so anyway just like a basic thing and I have to say you know on healthcare we saw this a lot, right? We passed the Affordable Care Act, Democratic members of Congress because remember we didn't have to move any Republicans we just had to get Democrats to act like Democrats. Democrats passed this law, they got smacked around during 2009 during the Tea Party you know during the Tea Party stuff and they all got scared and never said the word healthcare again. You know fast forward and it's I mean frankly it's shocking to be working in a moment where like Democrats are discovering that Medicaid is popular and that people care about pre-existing conditions, right? That was true back then too. The polling on Medicaid is not different today than it was 10 years ago. Medicaid has always been very, very, very popular but we still couldn't get Democrats to really say much and that really allows the opposition to monopolize that conversation. So I think at minimum on our side if we're gonna have some narrative change or you know we have to get elites to actually say things like we're for raising taxes on the rich corporations and a lot of middle class people and we think government plays an essential role in many of the best legacies, some of the not best but also many of the best legacies that we have in public health for instance are about the role of government and stepping up in that way. The other thing that I would say about this question of narrative is I think the attributing blame to villains and helping people understand who in fact is to blame for the state of the economy is critically important but the other thing is we have to have something different to say about heroes because the hero of the democracy story in this country is always a politician and that's just the wrong hero. The hero of the democracy story has to be the voter. It can't be Barack Obama or Joe Blow that we're gonna elect to Congress and so we're not gonna get to a more vibrant sense of democracy and I think the big lesson on this and Naomi could talk about this a lot is just look at the success we've had with ballot measures in states. When we need to do something hard we take it to a ballot measure because we can actually depend on voters more than we can many politicians. So I think that's another really important piece of telling a coherent story that is about how the economy and democracy works and how all people brown, black, white people can come together and really create something that reflects their shared values and interests but time should have taught us by now we don't get there by obscuring the facts and we don't get it by not talking about race and not talking about gender. So I think the stuff coming out of the Peoria Project and the research coming out of Demos is really exciting because it really validates what I think a lot of organizers have known which is a direct authentic conversation that actually names like real things. People are very receptive to that and that is the best way to advance a better story. I just want to follow up real quickly on a couple things that folks have said. First, I think the premise of this panel in a way was how to prepare for recession. I think one of the key political issues we have today is that in some sense many working people feel like they've been in a recession for several decades and some communities have been in depression for several decades and we have to have any no matter whether it's climate change or any other initiative infrastructure you name it, if our solutions don't speak to that in a way that's practical we will be divided but if we can do that it's powerfully uniting and to follow up on the ballot initiative I think people when they can see what the practical outcome would be people are prepared to do unusual things like raise taxes and there's we shouldn't be shy to think that this is just something about changing the narrative around the public sector. I think we along with trickle down and anti-regulatory push and an idea of kind of an inevitable economic disruption we've accepted that jobs, technology will change and jobs will be lost. We won't be able to, the workers don't have the training as came up very vividly earlier. These things are absolutely not inevitable and we can take direct action to prevent and retard layoffs to get ahead of transitions if we start soon enough so that in fact we have the incentives that drive companies and these can be enacted at a state or a federal level that drive companies to reinvest in workers rather than just take the profits out of the company that we incentivize reinvestment in plants in communities. I can think of, I was listening to the folks from Ohio I can think some vivid examples of this right now in Ohio where communities are coming together to say no we need to come up with a variety of policies that re-incentivize investment back in this plant or conversely discourage actively disinvestment. And so there are things that can be done that bring together people in Ohio right now across the political spectrum. Strange bed follows from labor, environmental business, you name it. So I just throw that out there as we shouldn't leave what we can do in the private sector behind as well because it is shaped fundamentally by policy. So your turn. So I'm gonna ask folks to keep your comments or questions to a couple or three minutes but I would love to hear from the audience we've had such great contributions from this panel from the first panel and also obviously from Professor Romer and would love to hear any questions or comments. Hi, my name is Ariane Higovesh from the Institute for Women's Policy Research and we're doing a lot of work on automation and the future of work and women. I was very happy to hear both Bill and Zoe allude to technology and technical change. I have a very specific question on hours of work. The new deal brought the 40 hour week, right? Every other big industrial wave brought reductions and working hours. In the US apart from work sharing that has never been such a big deal and work sharing is helpful but it's almost like something you ramp up during the recession and then it goes. So can we do something with reduced having a shorter working week not just more overtime pay, getting paid vacation, something that we can start to push now and will it help or can we just give up on that? Well at many states are pushing very hard on paid family leave and that's been successful because people understand the need for it and as Zoe was just mentioning, right? We have allowed ourselves to be bullied into the view that robots will eat our jobs and therefore we don't deserve to get paid. This is a language of rent seeking and those who are pushing it are rent seekers. So the people who pushed that view are the Ubers of the world who do arbitrage on labor regulations. They're just rent seekers, they're vampires. So we must push back against that. We must push heavily for the right of workers to organize so that when productivity, the implication of robots is higher productivity. This is why they say there would be fewer workers. That means the ones who are left are more productive, therefore should be getting paid more money. This is never in their equation because they're rent seekers. So they don't view it as oh I'm gonna increase your productivity and therefore increase your wage. I'm gonna increase your productivity and therefore I get more profits, I will do more stock buybacks and therefore I will get paid more money. So what we have to do is short circuit that so that we don't allow this inside dealing that these corporate executives are able to do to inflate their pay through that behavior and not be intimidated by technological progress, but instead harness the profits from technological progress to do exactly what you said. Why don't Americans get two months off? When everybody looks at our health disparities and we talk about how much we spend and we look at these other things, it always astounds me that no one says yeah, but you know in France, even though they smoke and eat butter, they live longer than we do and nobody says yeah, what about those two months off? It's always astounding that no one says the what to me is the obvious. They don't work themselves to death. Is that a miracle? I mean it's almost common sense that if you get two months off a year that's paid and you take it seriously and if you retire at a younger age that actually you might live longer. Is that not common sense? I super quick follow up. I agree with everything. I wanna tell one tiny story. I do a lot of my work in the automotive sector which is the most robotics intensive in the world. And we have very good examples of the impacts on robots and quality of work. And there are in the auto sector factories where working side by side with a robot means the company is expanding, it's hiring more workers and robots. People are well paid, they have workers' rights, they have full benefits. And there are places in America where people are literally being killed by robots on the job and they barely make more than a minimum wage. And the difference between those two factories is not the robots. It's whether or not they have a union or are in a state that is heavily unionized, whether the state enforces OSHA and health and safety laws. And it's not about technology. It's about the rights of workers and the policies that states put in place. Everyone, Kate Gallagher-Robbins, Center for American Progress. Thanks for such a great conversation. A question I had, one of the outcomes of the Great Recession was a real demonization of people with disabilities and an effort to cut particularly federal disability programs. So, but we haven't really talked much about that today and I'm wondering if you guys could talk a little bit about sort of the role policy-wise and in the movement and organizing that people with disabilities have played and will play and maybe how we think about that in the context of the next recession. I would say on healthcare, people with disabilities, especially in the last couple of years in the fight back on the ACA have been critical messengers, maybe the most powerful messengers around the issues of Medicaid, pre-existing conditions, expansion of coverage. And the polling that had just recently been done really shows them to be very powerful spokespeople. So, I think they're gonna continue to be, especially as we're fighting through this state-level slog on work requirements in Medicaid, they are gonna continue to be an incredibly powerful constituency. One other thing that I would say is there seems to be much more understanding in the public that people with disabilities are a very widespread community and it's not just people that have been officially designated by SSDI or whatever as people with disabilities, but that in fact there are many different kinds of disabilities and we're even seeing a lot of organizing among children with autism as part of the people with disabilities community. So, I think there just seems to be a lot more knowledge of people with disabilities and they seem to be much more visible as spokespeople. That's all to the good because they have incredible credibility around the healthcare issues and they're able to speak from a position of really moral authority, right? Like a civil rights battle for people with disabilities that are increasingly being marginalized and we've seen that, you know, I don't know if folks are working on the public charge. I mean, we've really seen it like across the organizations that we work with and touching a number of different issues. So, in a lot of ways, they're very intersectional spokespeople that I think can be leveraged on a lot of these, on this bigger story, a lot of these issues. It's one of the reasons we have to fix the unemployment insurance system. We need to make the benefit from unemployment comparable to the benefit you would get if you got a disability check. And that's an easy fix and there's no reason why my unemployment check shouldn't actually be based on what would I get under social security for disability. Because we know there's a cyclical component to people applying for disability and that's the reason why they thought it was a target because they were trying to view those workers as shirkers and it was a broad sweep and it just adds another group that they get to demonize and they no longer use dog whistles. They just demonize us. So, I think that's one key component but it's also I think for those of us who are progressive and need for caution on thinking through ideas about job guarantees because there are many people that you have to think about how do we support you properly when you may not be able to do 40 hours. There'll be accommodations that are necessary to let you be a protective worker. There are a lot of things that have to be addressed and I'm not the one who's in favor of because somebody has a serious muscle or skeletal issue to say work is better than killing them. So, I think we have to keep that in our forefront and we have to fight back, have to fight back against this notion that someone with disabilities is a shirk or they're not a shirk. One thing that I would add is I think that in preparation for the next recession that actually we need to be talking across communities that are organizing around particular kinds of investments and we need to be thinking together about how we build in again that foundation into the recovery and the rapid response that helps us continue a longer trajectory of policy change and structural change. And so really thinking about how are we engaging organizations of people with disabilities in conversations about things like infrastructure and other kinds of interventions that we could imagine to be immediate interventions and again why I think today is really exciting because I think that we need the sort of policy smarts, the economic smarts and the organizing smarts in order to be able to do that. There was somebody over here and then we'll come to the front. Hi, my name is Juliette. I'm from Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. I'm French and I do agree we eat a lot of butter and I'm healthy I think. But I wanted to get back to the changing the narrative and how to shape a different story and I wanted to hear your opinion on how much this right wing neoliberal narrative is embedded in economic departments and universities and schools in general in the media and how we hear it every day from like five years old to all throughout your life. And so I wanted to hear what do you think we should be doing about this? Why is that way? Well, I am not an economist but I've heard things about economic departments that are not all good. So, but no, I can't really answer that question but to further my economist friends who can. I mean, I will say I think part of the decline in people's understanding about the economy can also be traced to the decline in unions and unions used to have education departments that could help explain to large numbers of workers how the economy worked, who was getting screwed and why and that with the attacks on unions as union resources have dried up, that public education function has also dried up and so I think it demands us to think about what are other ways? One, we should make sure that more workers can organize and rebuild our unions and we should also be thinking about are there other organizing opportunities, other organizations that can really embed and a narrative almost feels like too slick of a way but it really is education about how things work in their organizing. So, I think it gets to the lack of diversity in the profession. This is the least diverse of any of the social sciences. The mode, the most often occurring number for the number of black faculty at an American university in economics is zero. The mode for never having had one is the peak. Most departments have never had a black economist and women are finally having the space, a moment to raise their voices within the profession to talk about the lack of diversity when it comes to gender. So, part of this is this is a very white male dominated view of the world and it is a profession that is prone to be sycophants and that's because the media wants to hear what the media calls economic news is Wall Street. The media business page, compared to the sports page, on the sports page, right, if your team is doing poorly then they'll turn on them. They'll say the Washington football team sucks and nobody thinks anything of it. The business page, oh Wall Street is so smart, they're so wonderful, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a cheerleading page. It stinks, it's not journalism. And the economists who get quoted there are part of the cheerleading squad. So this is a sickness and our journalists are treating policies that are logical progressions. If you look at America from 1946 to 1980 there's a logical progression of movement. They treat people on that spectrum as socialists and they use this term, right? It's like we did Medicare and Medicaid because of course the elderly are being priced out of healthcare, shouldn't we have healthcare for the elderly? And what are you gonna do about children? You want children to die before they get Medicare? I mean, this doesn't make sense. Isn't the logical progression you did for the elderly and the poor, everybody? Isn't that the logical progression? Isn't that where the country was going? The tax rates, in effect when Ronald Reagan was president, now they say, oh you're a socialist. You want the marginal tax rates of Ronald Reagan's presidency? Oh my goodness, you're a horrible person. And the press feeds into this. They treat Congress people who suggest those marginal tax rates as if they're the Bolshevik storming the barricades. So we have to do something about the way that the press has fed into this business narrative in spades and have what they call business pages that aren't business pages that aren't critical of what's going on. So can I just pick up one thing and then you can go to me? Okay, so I love the kind of comparison between the sports pages and the business pages partly because I am not a sports fan, but I know that sports fans can cite statistics. You don't have to be an expert. You don't have to be certified in order to feel like you can educate yourself about your team, about the field, about where people are in relation to it, right? There are experts and that's important. And I mean one of the things that I think is such a service of the ERM network is that the way that they work with power building organizations in their communities in order to equip folks to be able to speak about what they experience in the economy in such a way that they can be heard by people who are used to hearing economists speak about it. But mostly people think only economists can speak about the economy because it's super specialized. We all live in the economy. And so finding opportunities to have more of that education feels to me like super important. And just a plug, like I actually think that getting ready for the next recession and really leveraging the ongoing organizing that's happening already in order to get ready for the next recession is one way in to help equip people to participate in the conversations about the economy. Naomi, you were gonna say? That's exactly right. The ERM groups, the policy groups in the States, think tanks like Economic Policy Institute are also a key for helping to educate a broader swath of people. Yeah, I was just gonna say real quickly. I think the more that we're able to drill down to what is the real problem and how do we solve it, the better. I know there's been a variety of polling that ask people, so how do you think is the economy? And they're like, oh, I hear it's going up. And they're reflecting what they read in the business page, which is reflecting the stock market. But when you ask the same people, like how's your situation? Totally different story. And the more that we can separate between kind of the economy that's in the business page and what's actually happening in factories and people's jobs, what are the things you need to do to fix that? And we may find that there are actually things that we can do once you break through that. And I think we're seeing some, I think people, this trajectory, since the time you talked about, we've sort of come to the end of all the things that we, all the dismantling of our government, of siphoning, you know, of increasing inequality. And people are suddenly at a place where they're not getting more slack. Where they already tried, you know, mortgaging their houses, that didn't work so well. And people are really saying, so what do we do? And I think this is a real opportunity to jump into that breach with practical solutions that change some of the things that need to be changed back. It's a great place for us to end. What do we do? Great opportunity for us to jump into the breach, let's do it, let's, well, win the next recovery. How about? Thank you all. Hi, so I'm, this is gonna be very quick. So I didn't even want them to get up. Only bit of logistics. We're gonna be hosting essays from many of the panelists and many outside authors on our website over the next couple of weeks reacting to this event. So please keep checking in if any about this interested you. And with that, I just wanna say how about a round of applause for this panel, the panel before and Kristi Romer. Thank you so much for coming.