 Hi everybody, we're gonna go ahead and get started. I think folks are just gonna continue to stream in, but I know that there are a lot of folks who are also plugging in online, so let's go ahead and jump in. So, welcome to today's event. Fair shot, big ideas for an equitable economy. My name is Rachel Black, and I co-direct our Family Center Social Policy Program here at New America, where we are working to place families of experienced marginalization and exclusion at the center of how social policy is made and who it should serve. I think we'd all agree that that doesn't describe Chris Hughes. Chris Hughes is a co-founder of Facebook, co-chair of the Economic Security Project, and the author of the book that we're here to discuss fair shot rethinking inequality and how we earn. I think you all should pick up a copy. They're located outside, but if I were to give you the Cliff Notes version, I think it goes something like, I won the game, I know it's fixed, and I have an idea of what we should do about it, and the idea that he arrives at is a guaranteed income you can critique my assessment later. In drawing this lesson from his personal experience, I think Chris offers a really powerful counter narrative to the ones that most actively shape policy today that view wealth as an indicator of the merit of the player and not the fairness of the game. This perspective was on full display during the tax reform debate when Senator Grassley said that the elimination of the estate tax, quote, recognizes the people that are investing as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it's on booze or women or movies. This effectively lumps in 99.8% of taxpayers into that latter category. But narratives are frequently told because they're true but because they're purposeful and throughout our nation's history, narratives around who has wealth and why have served to maintain the material benefits of whiteness and justify treating those who struggle financially as though they can't be trusted to make their own choices. This was an explicit message made by the administration's proposal a couple of weeks ago to convert a portion of the benefits of families receiving SNAP or food assistance from cash deposited on their EBT card, they could use it with their own discretion, to a shelf stable box of food items called America's Harvest Box or as OMB director Mick Mulvaney termed a blue apron type program for people in poverty. Though the proposal has rightfully attracted a wave of mockery and criticism, the truth is that we already tolerate a range of policies that send the same message. And for decades, poor and working class families have heard it loud and clear. Last fall, we published a paper which you can also find, whoops, my bad, no offense Chris, becoming visible with one of our panelists today, Ayesha Nandaro in her organization, Springboard to Opportunities in Jackson, Mississippi. And as part of that, my colleague Alita Sprague and I conducted interviews with women served by Springboard Living and Public Housing in Jackson about their experiences accessing public assistance programs like SNAP and TANF or Cashville Affair. For context, to even qualify for a minimum amount of financial support in Mississippi, families must document and submit intimate details about their household, their finances and even the composition of their urine for drug testing and navigate a Byzantine maze of paperwork that clearly communicates to families like theirs that they are not to be trusted and that their time isn't valuable. In the end, the odds of being approved for what amounts to less than $6 a day in TANF benefits are bleak. In 2016, Mississippi approved just 1.4% of applicants to the program. Public officials justify the way in which they ration benefits as measures to curb waste, fraud and abuse by, and this is direct quote, liars, thieves and hypocrites. To drive home the point to the women participating in TANF that they are essentially modern day welfare queens, the state imposes additional prohibitions on where they can withdraw funds and restricting access at places like casinos, liquor stores, nail salons and lingerie shops with absolutely no evidence that this is necessary. Carla, the mother of a mother of two we interviewed summed up her experience this way saying, the world has already labeled any type of assistance you get from the government as bad, you are less than human, you do not matter. So though the harvest box has drawn the most attention, the biggest threats in the administration's budget and ideas broadly embraced by the GOP from work requirements to drug testing would take Mississippi's approach and make it standard practice. In concluding, if you're shocked, Chris says that in addition to the immediate defense in response to this political moment, we need to offensively pursue bold solutions that tap into our biggest hopes and dreams for the country we want to live in. We cannot allow our short-term political battles no matter how important they are to prevent us from dreaming an audacious dream and building an American economy in which everyone prospers. The guaranteeing incomes implicit recognition that poor and working-class families, like all families, should be able to lead self-directed lives, provides an essential recalibration of where we need to plan our goalposts by anchoring them in the values of dignity and belonging. But we shouldn't stop there. A guaranteed income is an idea that's born from a history of activism and thought leadership among poor and working-class Americans and people of color like Carla. We shouldn't just trust that they can make decisions for their household. We should trust their ability to broadly define the change that we need and lead our collective movement to get there. In 1967, the National Welfare Rights Organization, a coalition of thousands of welfare recipients across the country that was led by Black women, demanded decent income as a right and emphasized the disproportionate burden of unpaid-cared work on low-income women. Likewise, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panthers, both advocated a guaranteed income and guaranteed employment as material preconditions for social citizenship. Both pieces of that agenda live on today through the policy platform of the Movement for Black Lives. Derek Hamilton is providing essential intellectual leadership for the idea of a federal job guarantee program, and we're thrilled to have him contributing to this conversation. A glimpse of what a guaranteed income could look like in practice is underway in Stockton, California, where Mayor Michael Tubbs is launching the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, or SEED, which is the first municipal-led basic income pilot. Significantly, the SEED pilot will also center community engagement, and it's designed in an evaluation, which is an important recognition that policy can serve as a tool for building economic power and political power. When asked about his fears for the project, Mayor Tubbs said, I really don't see any risk. Even if it fails, families get $6,000 a year. So to conclude, just as previous movements have identified, the agenda for an equitable economy extends beyond a guaranteed income, but when families getting $6,000 through a policy that they've had a role in shaping is defined as failure, we'll know we're getting closer to playing a game that's actually designed to give people a fair shot. So we have a really exciting panel lined up. We're gonna start out with Chris in conversation with Mia Birdsong, which carries two affiliations that uniquely position her to manage today's conversation. Mia is a program fellow in the Family Center Social Policy Program at New America, where she is gonna be leading a new project, Blind Spots to Bright Spots, which aims to reveal the wisdom and creativity of communities that experience marginalization and oppression as essential to achieving an expansive, future-facing, intersectional and liberatory version of the America that we all deserve. It's gonna be awesome. She is also a senior fellow at the Economic Security Project, where she is expanding the current universal basic income movement to include perspectives and leaderships from communities experiencing economic and racial injustice. They're gonna chat for about 30 minutes, and then we're gonna bring in the rest of our panel, including Aisha Nandaro, who's the CEO of Springboard to Opportunities in Jackson, Mississippi, and Derek Hamilton, who is a professor of Economics and Urban Policy at the New School. I know there are a lot of folks following us online. You can follow the conversation or even send us some questions by following us at New America FCSP and using the hashtag fair shot. And with that, I am gonna turn it over to the capable hands of Mirberg-Song. Thank you. Thank you all for joining us for lunch. I'm gonna jump right into this because we have lots of things to talk about. Hi. Hi. So you open your book, talking about, among many other things, the political and economic decisions that were made to get us to this place of kind of unprecedented economic inequality. And I think sometimes people think of the economy like they think about the weather, right? It just kind of happens. So can you talk a little bit about how we got here? I can, but before I jump right into that one, I just have to say a quick thanks to you, Mia, for doing this to New America, for hosting Aisha and Derek for being up here. I'm doing like a dozen events on this sort of mini book tour. This is by far the most impressive group of people that are coming together for an event and being able to do it here at New America and have it be online. This is just amazing. So thank you for hosting and thank you guys for doing this. So it's so important to me, this particular question is one that I wish, it's only been a few months since I've finished the book, but I wish I'd even gone harder into. Because it's so important to get right. So many people talk about the economy as if it is something that just happens. And I find it's almost sort of like how a lot of folks in Silicon Valley talk about something like the singularity. Like it's just gonna happen. There's this idea that there are these massive systems that exist and we just sort of live on top of them and we have to ride the ways. And particularly when it comes to the way the economy works today, my view is that it's in fact exactly the opposite. We have designed today's economy through a whole host of decisions made in the late, starting in the late 70s into the 80s and then certainly continuing through today that make it possible for a very small group of people to get enormously wealthy. Unprecedented in American history. You've gotta go back nearly a century. Well at the same time, nearly unprecedented, you've gotta go back a century. Well at the same time, the vast majority of everyone else, the 99% has a hard time making ends meet. And the importance though of saying that that we have the control over it is that we can see when it began and how it happened reforms in the tax code in the late 70s and 80s that made really meaningful changes. The welcoming a period of globalization without really thinking about what worker protections would come with it. And by the way, also some positive things like investments in the internet which was in fact a government investment that then created the kind of digital economy that we increasingly live in. So it's just so important to me in the book to make clear that the income inequality that exists today is very much something that we culturally or at least our political leaders have chosen. And we have the power to choose a different course. And I think so much of this battle is beating back against the resignation of like, well this is just the way things work. This is the future. And guaranteed income is one of a sort of a set of much larger ideas that I think are needed to reset us on a sustainable path. So can you talk a little bit about how you kind of got to the idea that guaranteed income needed to be part of the solution? So it was a long time coming. So I'll take you back a couple steps. So I grew up in North Carolina. My little town Hickory, the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. My mom was a public school teacher. My dad was a traveling salesman. I was an only child. And we did okay. We were middle-class. I got financial aid of scholarship to go to a prestigious boarding school, then on to Harvard, and then while there, roomed with Mark Zuckerberg and the rocket ship story of Facebook is well known. I don't have to relate that part. So what happened to me though is I came into an immense amount of money at a young age. And to be honest, a lot of it felt unearned. I mean, I say it's on the cover of the book. And nearly half a billion dollars for three years worth of work is nothing if not a lucky break. I mean, let's be honest, let's call it what it is. But with that, I think I felt came an immense responsibility to figure out, okay, you've got an immense amount of money. My husband and I decided around Facebook's IPO to give virtually all of it away over the course of our lifetimes. And so we began a journey really from the perspective of philanthropy. Okay, what is the most effective thing that you can do with a dollar that you can invest? That took me internationally at first, which I talked a little bit about in the book, where I really got exposed to a lot of the evidence that shows that cash, dollar for dollar, is one of the most, if not the most, effective intervention out there, to not just to empower people to follow their own dreams, to make their own choices, but also just on the data, health outcomes, education outcomes, et cetera. So I went initially internationally and then over the past really three years have been much more focused domestically and became intrigued about the idea of UVI and then co-founded the Economic Security Project with Dorian Warren and Natalie Foster to ask these big questions, is UVI really feasible? Is it too expensive? Do we want that? How does it interact with the safety net? And over time really came to believe that we can provide an income floor to people who need it most in the country, providing them cash, and there is already an immense base of evidence to suggest that it will be impactful. So long story short, I came from philanthropy but then came to really believe that the only way that we can do this is through public policy. Philanthropy can be a catalyst, we need more of it in the space, but we have to make headway at the state level and eventually I think federally to really reset the playing field to make it fair. So I want you to talk a little bit about what specifically you're proposing, but before that, can you share a little bit more of the evidence? Because I think this is one of those things that, I'm not sure everybody knows that actually a tremendous amount of evidence exists about cash. So can you just talk a little bit about what you know? Yeah, this is one of the things too where I sort of peeled back the layers of evidence here. It took me time. A lot of the time when we talk about guaranteed income, people tend to go internationally because there are so much, there are over 200 studies internationally about the power of cash transfers. I mean, there's so much, there's a great sort of summary report the Overseas Development Institute put out that synthesizes a lot of it, which I encourage you to check out. So there's an immense base there. But when I came to the US context, I like a lot of other people had a sense that cash hasn't really been done that much here. We haven't really had a guaranteed income. We came close in the early 70s when Nixon favored it, passed the House, failed in the Senate. There were a few studies then that were meaningful, but that was originally the only evidence base that I could turn to. And then I discovered Alaska, where they have a small kind of guaranteed income, if you will, of $1,500 for every Alaskan. There's some evidence there that shows actually more just in the last year that shows people generally work just as much so it shows improved health and education outcomes. But then I really, really began to understand the biggest evidence base is around the earned income tax credit, which I don't know about for a long time. I think a lot of people think about it, but if you take a step back and really look at what it is, it is the world's largest cash transfer program. It's $70 billion a year that eclipses Bolsa Familia, it eclipses all of the other major cash transfer programs, and it provides nearly 30 million Americans with cash in the form of these tax rebate checks with no strings attached. And there's an immense evidence base that shows health outcomes improved, kids stay in school a year longer, their performance on test scores improved. We've looked at cigarettes and alcohol abuse, workforce participation stays the same, if not increases. There's so much evidence there. So my view has really come to be that we have by all accounts some of the most robust evidence that cash with no strings attached, put the moral case aside just on the empirical is one of the most powerful things that we can do to lift people out of poverty and to stabilize the lives of the middle class. I mean, already the EITC lifts more people out of poverty than unemployment insurance, food stamps, and housing vouchers combined. And I think with a massive expansion of it and modernization, it could really be the framework that a guaranteed income could be fashioned out of. And this is essentially what you're proposing, right? Can you talk a little bit about what that would look like? So my view is trying to keep it simple, which is not always easy when you talk about something like their income tax, credit and tax code, is that if you make less than $50,000 and you're working, the big expanded definition of work, which hopefully we'll talk about, then you should get $500 a month. No strings attached, full stop. Administered, in the same way it's administered today, provided monthly so that it comes via direct deposit or debit card into your account. And importantly, because it's a tax credit, it, just as it does today, it doesn't throw you off of other important safety net benefits. So it's a really key point that I emphasize and what I'm putting out there is that this is complimentary to the existing safety net of benefits. So the pay for, which is what everyone always asked about, is bringing taxes back into their historical line, taxes on the 1% in particular, back into historical line at 50% on income above 250K and closing the big blue poll, Buffett Rule, things that many of you would think about taxes all the time will be familiar with. This is not a pure UBI, which I'm pretty clear about in the book. And my approach is that I think the debate about automation and the rise of the robots I think is interesting. There are good arguments on one side that say jobs are over, there are good arguments on the other side that say that this time is not actually different. I'm very focused on income inequality and the problems of today. So we very well may need a UBI in 2030 or 2040, but my view is that we should start with a guaranteed income for the people who need it most as a kind of foundation that it's very much possible to pay for in the here and now. And yeah, so let's talk about how you think about work in the context of what you're proposing. So as we know, the earned income tax credit is tied to formal, as of now, participation in the formal economy. You gotta get paid to prove to people that you're working. The issue is in many states, things like independent contractors and gig economy are not covered. And the even bigger issue in my view is that a lot of work that's already happening by the account of a lot of economists, 30 million people participate in this workforce that the state currently just totally neglects. I mean, by an AEI, by the count of even AEI of the American Enterprise Institute, over half of the people who people say are not working are actually already working in jobs like childcare, or in study, they're just not getting paid for it. So my contention is that this is real work. You mean specifically like parents taking care of their own children or like their own parents. Parents taking care of their own children at home. Right now we say no, no. If you're working at home with a three-year-old and a five-year-old, that's not real. You gotta go get a minimum wage job at Burger King to count. And only once you do that and you participate in our formal economy will we allow you to receive the earned income tax credit or other kinds of benefits. I think that's pretty backward. And in a lot of the work that we've been doing at the Economic Security Project, we've been in a lot of different states. We were just in Mississippi with Ayesha a couple weeks ago talking to a lot of hardworking moms who are working day in and day out. And they in a lot of cases are sort of combining both work in the informal sector with work in the formal one. But so my view is that we need to expand the definition of work. I am not at all interested in work requirements. I mean I have a whole chapter in the book that goes into how I believe work requirements have historically been and right now are being very cynically used to throw people off of government benefits by playing into these narratives. And I'm not at all interested in that. What I'm much more interested in is it's similar to what we did in some ways with marriage. You know my husband and I were part of the marriage equality fight. And what we did is we expanded the definition of marriage by focusing on what it is. It's about love. And as soon as we were able to say love is love and marriage should be really broader to encompass that, you know, we really turned a corner in that movement. So my hope is that we can have a much broader definition of work. I mean the one, I had an event last night where the obvious question is okay, well how far do you take the definition then? I would take it really far. Because my view is that people want to be of purpose. People want to work in some way. I think it's very hard to find. There are certainly people who are disabled and elderly who can't work. And that is exactly what the safety net is for. But this idea that there are all these people out there, whether they're like 20 something guys who just want to put up their feet and play video games or the myth of the welfare queen that all these people would just want to say it. I think that is a myth. So my hope is really to encourage a conversation that is a broader definition of work. And the one last thing I'll say on this, I know I've gone on long. But it is, in the conversations that I've had over time with a lot of people, my colleague Dorian and I took a trip to Ohio last summer. We had all kinds of conversations with people in Cleveland and in Youngstown. Ohio what we heard consistently is that people just want their work to be recognized for what it is. And they want the purpose that a good job used to bring. And right now jobs unfortunately are not providing that too much of the time. And so when we talked about things like, well what do you think of a universal basic income? People are like, well what is that? It's like cash, but cash for what? For nothing, who's paying for it? How long am I gonna get it? It's just sort of, generally it was hard to find a conceptual frame for it. And instead when we had the same conversation with people and said, well if you're taking care of your community, your family, or you're participating in your community, what we would hear back is, well yeah the community and our government should take care of us. This sort of symbiotic kind of relationship. As long as you're working in some way, we believe you certainly shouldn't live in poverty and you should have a fair shot at the American dream. And that was like, across the board, Trump voting Republicans, yes. And sort of traditional democratic. And so there was a sense that people want to have their participation recognized. The kind of participation income so that they have a fair shot, that they have an opportunity to success. And that has been really formative in my own experience. I'll come back to that in a minute. So you also include students in this definition of work too, which I think is really important to talk about. Yeah, I was on financial aid in college and Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskowitz were my roommates when we started Facebook. They dropped out. I did not. They came from different kinds of families than I did. And I often wonder if I hadn't been on financial aid and hadn't been the first in my family to ever have a chance to go to a school like Harvard would. I've made a different decision. Would I have, and how would that have impacted things like the equity calculus or whatever in early Facebook days? And that's when I lose a lot of sleep over. But I do think a lot of college students already have a guaranteed income in the United States. It's just called mommy and daddy. And they don't have to do work study. And they get to spend all their time studying or coding on the side or pursuing their passions. And I do think that that is oftentimes how institutional and structural problems just be specific. Classism and racism get passed on down and a kind of guaranteed income that says to students that when you're in school you are working and you should be able to focus on your studies, recognizes that and levels the playing field a little bit more so that more people have a bit more freedom to figure out what they wanna do. What does this not solve for? A lot. There's so many things I worry about even in let's say a world where we have a guaranteed income exists tomorrow. Worry a lot about healthcare. If you don't have a healthcare system that is affordable and accessible, you can see a lot of the cash that comes being eaten up in the healthcare sector. I worry a lot about housing. Particularly in not just in the Bay area but we see across the country the cost of housing. If you look at what's driving up the cost of living. So we all know median wages haven't increased and meaningfully budged in 40 years but the same time that people haven't gotten a wage the cost of living is 30% higher. Housing, healthcare, childcare up, up, up and housing is a big piece so I worry a lot about without housing policy, similarly a lot of the cash being eaten up by just increased, increased rents. And obviously we have to have an education system that provides opportunities for people to climb the ladder. So there's a lot that a guaranteed income doesn't solve. I do think though and the reason that I work on this issue is because we spend a lot of time talking about housing, healthcare and education and sometimes I think we overlook the simplest solution and particularly when it comes to income inequality and I think you could make meaningful change in each one of those areas but still not meaningfully budged on the problem of income inequality without a kind of reset policy that provides the fundamental economic opportunity. So I believe we have to have all of these policies really move in tandem and a guaranteed income is extremely powerful, I think more powerful than people often think at first blush but certainly not a silver bullet. So I think all of us agree that folks who experience economic injustice need more agency, right? Aisha, can you talk about in the work that you do like how you think about the power of agency and control for the folks you work with? I think you will be in a second, just talk loud. Just talk loud? Oh, I know and there I go. I know, I know. You know, so for me, thank you all and Mia, thank you for the setup. For me, when I really think about the ideal of a guaranteed income and the ideal of cash, for me it really is a sense of agency. So it goes a much broader conversation in the context of the work that I do. So currently I work with low income families that live in affordable housing. When I say low income, I'm talking extremely low income, not that working population that's making about less than $50,000 that Chris talks about in his book, I'm talking about their population that makes about $14,000 a year. And that's $14,000 with a combination of cash as well as government subsidies. So the sense of agency that we will like for them to have actually does not exist because they do not have an opportunity to make any decisions for the most part in their day to day lives about how they govern themselves. And so a lot of times those of us who work in this space, we say the systems that we never go into what the systems are, for families who live in these spaces and extreme poverty, there are multiple systems, this is plural, that intersect on their life at various points. And all of those systems come with their own set of rules. And so each time you engage with a system, you're losing a piece of your dignity, you're losing a piece of your agency. So each time you go to try to figure out your snap, that's a system that has its own set of rules that you have got to figure out how to interact with. Every time you're trying to figure out your housing, that's a different system with a different set of rules. So agency and, thank you, pregnancy, brain, I just went out the head, agency in control, it's something that is nonexistent. And to me, that's the piece of the guaranteed income aspect that I love because I think it gets to be a much broader conversation. We can really say, okay, if someone is given a small amount of cash each month, that it really needs it and they truly can use it however they want to, but no one telling them how to use it, that it's freeing up their bandwidth and that's taking a sense of scarcity off of them for just that moment in time. And it's giving them agency and control and how can we show up differently in communities if we have that agency and control returned because it needs communities that I work in, there's no control, there's no agency, there's scarcity, you're constantly stressed and waiting for the other shoe to drop. And so I really do believe that with this idea of a guaranteed income, we have an opportunity to really start talking about community engagement and justice and equity at a much broader context than just income and economic security. It's a much broader conversation for me. Did it roll for a second? Thank you. Thank you, what do you want to do? Well, so I also have visited with Aisha, I know all these people by the way, these are like all my people. I visited with Aisha and the women who you work with and I think one of the things that, I think it's also important for people to understand is that, so I do this workshop around universal basic income introducing the idea to folks and in the workshop I asked people to imagine what would shift in their lives if they didn't have to worry about money anymore, which is not, what that amount is that we don't really talk about, like I try to keep it broad. People are not becoming billionaires but they just don't have to worry about it anymore. And what I think is important for people to understand is the ease with which folks can actually imagine what their lives would look like if they had agency. So that it's not, I think the idea of not having agency in control is, I think for folks who do, horrifying and the idea of living that way for a long period of time. You'd think that, some might think that it would be hard for people to find that agency if, but that's not true. And so I just think it's important to point that out, like how easily people could just like picture their lives and what that would mean for themselves and for their families, for the children, for the communities if they had a piece of agency. So I want to point that out. And the other thing I think about is that, and this is what I feel like the women who I talked with in your community and folks across the country who experienced economic injustice have taught me, is that they really, really like the idea of guaranteed income and it doesn't solve for everything, but that the underlying ideology, right, of flexibility, of trust and agency is really how we should rethink the whole safety net system. So talk to me a little bit about, again I think the same question that I asked Chris, like what this doesn't solve for, but how the idea of allowing people to have way more flexibility and control would help us build a way, a stronger safety net system and really like rethink the whole contract with America. What's with the contract with America? We need to basically really tear down our safety net system and start all over. So we need to tear it down and when we're rebuilding it, we need to rebuild it with those who are actually impacted by the safety net system at the table. We've got to quit working in silos and doing these things in a bubble because they're actually not working and they're doing harm. I am still not even enough to believe that those individuals who are doing harm are not intentionally doing harm, but it's just ignorance. But in this day and age, if you choose to be ignorant about any particular subject matter that's not acceptable, there are poor people all over the place if you wanna have a conversation with, they are more than willing to talk to you about what their lives look like. We're not willing to do that because that makes us uncomfortable. We've got to get to a place where we are no longer comfortable with our ignorance. So that's first and foremost. Safety net, you know, America's contract is some BS. We need to rethink it and start over. As far as cash not solving, everything is exactly right. And when Chris and ESP was with us a couple of weeks ago in Jackson, over and over and over again, it came up about this idea of trust. All of our women talked about feeling like they were not trusted to make the decisions that they know are the best for themselves and their families, which is absolutely correct. Why should they feel that way when everything that we tell them is actually really opposite of that? We say, oh, you know, if you want to live here in this affordable housing complex, you cannot have your husband living here. Or if your husband does live here, he has to be on the rent roll and all of these things. So it's all of these pieces that come up that tell us that we don't trust them and they recognize that. And it really is just wanting that sense of dignity and freedom to use Chris's words that we all take for granted that each of us has. And the piece to me that is always so phenomenal when we have these conversations about cash with our moms, they're not talking about a lot of money. Nobody is trying to be rich. That idea, they truly have bought into the notion that more money, more problems. So no one is trying to be rich. No one is trying to, last week specific, two weeks ago specifically, someone said, I don't want two cars. I just want one car. Why would I need two cars? What am I gonna do with that? And that was just really so baffling to me. It really is just wanting the idea of if an emergency happens, I can deal with that emergency for my family, which currently they don't have. And I can just attack on to that because I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I think a lot of people often ask me, $500 a month, what's that really gonna do? You know, that's six grand a year. And yeah, if you do the math, I mean, my proposal's on a per capita basis so that people can enter and exit relationships as they wish. So it adds up, that's 12 grand a year, but at first you hear $500. Like what's that really gonna do? There was a conversation I had in Cleveland where I just asked the conversation to a group of people who most of whom were either at the poverty line or below. And it was silent for several, it was silent for a while. And then finally one woman spoke up and she looked me directly in the eye. And she said, I had asked about $100 a month, what difference is that gonna do? And she said, anybody who's asking that question has never had to choose at the end of the month between making rent and buying groceries. And she didn't say another word. She'd have to, no one else there did. It was just, it was such a powerful moment where a modest amount of money can empower people to just be a little bit more above water. It's not like all their problems are solved and oh, I can drop out of the workforce now. I got it all, that's just not the experience. It is the power. And for us, it's that modest amount. And so, mine is a little bit more extreme and Chris, I would like to give women $1,000 a month. And that's really because the population that I work with will have the downfalls to this increase. So those vouchers and subsidies that we talked about will automatically increase or decrease. So my proposal is really, how do we make sure that we're doing good while at the same time not doing harm? So my number that I'm playing with is $1,000. But to go back to what Chris was saying, and then we gonna let Derek talk. I got you, I got you. No one's ever seen me this patient in my life. I got you. To go back to what Chris was saying, people aren't going to drop out of the workforce for that subset of the population who doesn't have access to the workforce. That small amount of money will give them access to the workforce. It would allow you to pay for transportation in some of these rural communities where transportation doesn't exist. You can get a car. You can go back to school because your Pell Grant will pay for you to go to school, but it will not pay for your books or your uniforms or any of that. It will allow you to have childcare. So that modest amount will allow a large subset of our population to enter the workforce. And we never talk about that because in our community, we refuse to see extremely low income people. And I don't know why that's our reality. Well, I do, but that's a whole nother topic. That's another panel. Okay, go Derek. I'm gonna set you up Derek, I got you. So my reintroduction to, in my reintroduction to kind of the idea of guaranteed income, I quickly remembered that this is something Martin Luther King talked about. This is something that Panthers talked about. And both MLK and the Panthers talked about our right to guaranteed jobs and guaranteed income. They saw these two ideas as being something that we didn't have to choose between. So Derek, you've been talking a lot and not here obviously, because I don't like to talk yet, but out in the world, talking a lot about the idea of federal guaranteed jobs. So can you talk a little bit about how you think about that, what you think that would provide for folks, what you think the impact would be? So Rachel set the conversation up very well in the beginning. We certainly need a structural change from how we deal with poverty. Rather than trying to manage people's seemingly bad behavior, we need to empower people so that they can have agency in their lives and be self-determining and achieving the goals that they set for each other. The Nobel Laureate of Marta Sin, I would translate what he calls human capabilities as fitting this frame. How do we empower people so that they can make decisions as it relates to their lives? The irony is we have the rhetoric that we don't wanna manage other people. We want other people to have access to the market. So that the market, which is somehow in our ethos is being natural, transparent, fair, efficient. All these words, we believe that everybody should have access to all those things, but poor people will manage because the reason they're poor must be because they're making poor decisions. Well, that's all wrong. I mean, there's nothing natural about our economy. As Chris pointed out, we've structured inequality over the years. We have a tax code that structures inequality. The government does not, corporations now, they're currently subsidized to a large extent. If we think about the number of employees that are resulting from contracts, from federal contracts, we even have in our declining public sector, we still have about 15% of our workforce employed through the government. So what the federal job guarantee is intended to do is literally eliminate working poverty altogether. So the jobs would be useful jobs to address things like care work. So we would offer individuals engaged in elder care, childcare, the dignity of a wage that is above poverty along with the benefits that go along with that. The jobs would provide a public option to a private sector that over time has been able to usurp more and more of our national income in the form of profits, dividends, et cetera, so that workers have a viable option from the private sector so that even the workers that are in the private sector by having that public option will be able to bargain better for their dignity and their wages because that threat of being destitute as a result of unemployment would literally go away. And then I can say a few other things, I'd say the jobs would be useful. Like I said, we need to rebuild our physical as well as in the 21st century, we need to think about human infrastructure. Again, we've talked about care work but environmental crises? Well, how about we invest in transforming not only the U.S. economy to green, the entire world? We can do big things with our public sector in the ways we have done in the past and at the same time empower people so that involuntary unemployment is no longer in existence. So when we talk about the natural rate of unemployment, that's a choice that the Federal Reserve Bank makes a decision on with regards to that inflation unemployment trade-off. Well, let's get rid of that choice. Why don't we have direct employment so that there's no longer the concept of natural unemployment, that involuntary unemployment is literally eliminated. The last thing I'll say and I won't talk forever is the other thing we need to think about beyond just income is wealth, right? We've talked about addressing poverty, working poverty and involuntary unemployment as well as providing useful goods and services that our country surely needs. But if we really wanna address inequality and really wanna give people agency freedom and choice, there's nothing more paramount than wealth. And if we understand how wealth is generated, for the most part, wealth begets more wealth. We think of wealth as an output, but its strongest capacity is as an input, what it enables you to do. So my colleague William Darity and I, not only have we talked about federal job guarantee, we've also talked about Baby Bonds. In fact, one of my colleagues who's a co-author is in the audience, Daniel Bustillo, he's also worked on us with that. So Baby Bonds would literally be trust funds for all Americans. We're talking about universal bold policies to give all Americans access to the things that we know generate wealth, generate economic security and generate basically freedom. So I do want to talk a little more, actually. So can you, just to get a little bit granular, can you talk about, so if I, for example, you were talking about jobs that are about care, right? So I think you're currently, you're talking about jobs that currently aren't paid, right? So if I'm staying home and I'm taking, you know, I have an infant, say I have a six month old, which I think God do not anymore. Sorry. Some of us are dealing with that or going to deal with this too. I have a dog. I have a dog. I have a dog. I have a dog. So what would that, so how would my life change? I've got a six month old, I can't afford childcare, so not me I can't, but just imagine I can't, because we're imagining I have a six month old. Sorry. So how would my life change? Like what would be different if we had a federal job guarantee? Yeah, so, you know, we talked about federal job guarantee being universal, but it's also gender conscious. In America, we structured our work in such a way that women often are assigned, whether they choose or not care work for their children as well as their elders. So with a federal job guarantee, if we think about human capability type jobs, it would empower you if you want to leave your home and go to work or do whatever else you want to do, because we would professionalize care work. There would be an alternative so that somebody could provide quality, not just care, but quality care in that area. Or if you so choose to stay home and do this work, we can professionalize it with a literal wage as well as benefits so that it's almost a back door way of doing single payer health insurance by providing, it ain't single payer health insurance. It provides a public option with health insurance, so that's another way to get coverage. So that I could get a wage for staying home and taking care of my kid? Yeah. Okay. So talk about what it might look like for folks who are working at low wage work right now. Like how does this help them with kind of collective bargaining? Yeah, so again, we have many approaches and ways to address things. Chris's plan that he put forth of providing a targeted income through EITC, I like it, one concern I have is the potential to subsidize low wage work already. It's impact on employers with regards to not having to provide certain wages because this works as a subsidy for them. So in a sense, a federal job guarantee would professionalize this in a way that individuals would not, we would not be subsidizing the private sector, but rather directly employing workers and providing a viable alternative to the public, to the private sector. So give me an example though. Right, so for example, if we don't think that the care work that right now is being done is of adequate quality. In fact, what are the incentives from the private sector? The private sector is motivated to generate profits and there are a couple of ways to do it. You can generate that through attaining additional revenue or you can generate it through lowering costs. And with lower costs, you might have lower quality. So if the federal government is directly engaged in something that we deem is really vital and important for our public use and public good like care work, then we could impose a certain quality not only on the good that's being produced, but even the labor standards by which we hire workers in that sector. So that's the way we work. All right, I am going to open it up to you all who I hope have lots and lots of questions. We're gonna get you on the mic so the people in the internet can hear you. Yeah, I applauded earlier because when Aisha was talking about starting all over with our safety net because I think that for this to work, we really have to think big and it may not be what you had in mind, but I wanna talk about social security. We spend $1.2 trillion a year on social security, but we all know that not all old people are poor and not all poor people are old. Have y'all given any thought to that as a starting point for a difficult conversation, admittedly, but I think to try to accomplish what we're after, some of the resistance says, how do we pay for it? And we're talking like tens of billions, but when we have this other commitment already out there that we're calling a safety net, but it's really, in my view, outdated and there's a lot of money being spent. So Chris, you talk about how to pay for this. Can you break that down a little bit? You might not be a surprise that I take the opposite side on that particular one. I mean, social security, I think there's a good argument to expand social security, which perhaps shows where my politics are. I mean, the things that people talk about when they talk about cutting social security are one example is there's a benefit that older people get if they have dependence. So my dad was older. He had me when he was 51, 52. So when I was 16, we got a social security check. He got a social security check because I was still a minor and he was on that kind of benefit. That's the money that they use for my, the travel expenses that made it possible for me to go away to boarding school. Even though I was on the financial aid there, you still have all these other costs to make it possible. So these kinds of things that people often cite as places in social security where to cut. I mean, it's just one random example that I happen to benefit from in my own life, but I don't know, I'm not convinced. If anything, I think that there's an argument. Some people use the argument that perhaps we should use the social security administration to be the conduit for providing the guaranteed income instead of the earned income tax credit. And that was the idea back in the 70s. Some of the issue with that is that it would throw people off, it would count as income, throw people off a lot of other critical benefits. So that's not the tax that I take, but I think it's an area of exploration worth. The issue of how to pay for this, right? That's the thing that comes up a lot. I mean, we are the wealthiest nation in the world and there's smart people, so I tend to not worry about that too much, but you actually talk about how, I think sometimes we think that there is scarcity whether it's not. So you talk about how we would actually pay for your proposal, can you talk about that? So bring marginal rates up to 50% on income above 250K, closing enacting the Buffett Rule would be enough to pay for, to bring taxation from capital gains to ordinary income rates so that people who are making money off of latent wealth are paying the same rates. The idea that Warren Buffett should pay the same tax rate as his secretary. But so just to talk about the order of magnitude here, I mean, what I call for over a course of 10 years, even if you assume no economic growth comes from it, which by the way, Roosevelt Institute has modeled it and they think it's up to a full additional point of GDP growth, but even if you put that aside and just look at the cost itself, it's roughly on the magnitude of the tax bill, the cost is, it just got passed at the end of last year. It's about $2 trillion over the course of a decade. And my view is if people talk all the time like guaranteed income, man, sure, that sounds great. That's never gonna happen, it's too expensive. Somehow we have the political will to enact tax cuts on corporations and the richest 1%, but we don't say well that's too expensive when we could do the exact opposite and provide this. So in my view, that would bring rates back into the historical average. We're not talking about enormously higher rates. That's where they were for most of the 20th century and it happened to be that economic growth was not only higher than it is now, but much more broadly shared. Can I start in real quick? Oh, sorry, sorry. No, go ahead. We lead with the pay for question, I think, far too often. That's part of the rhetorical problem that we have in our country just like demonizing poor people. We have the rhetoric that the government is like a household and how they have to balance their budget. That's just false. The government is a sovereign owner of the US currency and I'm not saying we just print money out infinitum, but we exaggerate the problems associated with deficit to our detriment and we only do it when it comes to trying to enable people. And as Chris pointed out, that was not even part of the conversation in this last tax cut. The US government issuing money towards productive use is a good thing and I think we need to get out of that concern of that trap of always leading with that question because it constrains it. I'd say just a couple of other things. Obviously there would be, if we have some of these bold ideas, some of the money that we currently spend on basically managing poverty or trying to maintain subsistence would go away. Some of the money we spend on incarcerating individuals as a result of poverty or even mental health issues, that would go away. I'd also like to think of social security and say that some of the big reasons of why it's successful is its universal nature. The fact that we have all Americans included. We have used the term of saying baby bonds is like social security over the life course because you are right that we don't have any economic security program for young adults when they're just starting their life at a crucial point when they need to build their economic security over their lifetime. So imagine a young adult that's able to purchase the economic security of an asset like a home, like a new business, some seed capital, or a debt-free college education. We should think about how to come up with policies so that we start all over the life course and not just think of the twilight of our life. Yeah, actually, God, this pregnancy brings. It goes back to, I was definitely going to say what Derek said as far as how it's leading with the pay for. Because you're right, whatever the proposal is, they're all very expensive. I tend to think that there's an opportunity for private philanthropy to pay for some of the early demonstrations since people really want that evidence sometimes that we believe doesn't exist. But then as we get that evidence, there are opportunities in their funding that already exists within our government that can be restructured to pay for everything that we're talking about. And the reason, a lot of folks always sometimes are really surprised at my take on social safety net system given the space that I work in, but it really goes back to what Derek was in earlier about opportunities to create wealth. Within extremely low-income communities currently, there's no way for wealth to be created, which is why we have this generational poverty that exists over and over again. And I am very concerned about some of the subsidies that will be impacted when I am successful in getting my money from my women. But that's the risk I'm willing to take because I recognize that in affordable housing, there are three types of housing. There is your choice-based housing voucher, which if you get that and you can go anywhere that someone will take it. There is public housing, which is on the housing authorities and then there's your place-based voucher, which actually stays in that place. All of that's rental. You are not getting equity. And so in those situations, I've seen where there's a grandmother living in one complex and a daughter living around a corner and an auntie living around a corner. And so in order for us to get to a place where we really are creating wealth in these low-income communities, we're going to have to do something drastically different. Any questions here? Hi. My name is Jeff. So Chris, I have a question about your system. I know Derek will have an answer to this too. So I am unemployed, I've been looking for every year. What does your system do for people like me who are looking for work and having trouble finding it? So the guaranteed income that I'm advocating for is tied to this broad definition of work. But it relies on unemployment insurance to help the temporarily unemployed. So if you... That lasts for six months. It should be bigger, absolutely. Yes, there's no question. So if you are employed in any kind of fashion, then whether it's gig economy, independent contractor, formal work, what have you, then you have the guaranteed income. But the safety net is... That's why when I was talking earlier, I see these as really important... This is an important distinction to make because the guaranteed income is overlapping with the existing safety net. It's there to stabilize the lives of the people who need it most and also provide that economic opportunity that's required. But it is incredibly important that, in my view, and Ayesha and I might disagree a little bit on this, that the safety net not be dismantled to fund this. I think we should be having a conversation about unemployment insurance and making it much bigger or expanding it. I think Ayesha does not believe it should be dismantled to fund this. I think you're saying remake it better. Yes, totally. And Derek, what about you? How does guaranteed the federal job guarantee? I mean, the true minimum... I'll say a conservative answer on this. The true minimum wage literally is zero. So again, the federal job guarantee meant to eliminate involuntary unemployment altogether. Great. All right. Here, and then, orange shirts, and then my sister over there. In the 1970s, and through the 1970s, businesses trained the workers for the jobs they needed. That was a common investment. That would be in the ads. We'll train EKG technician. And now, Montgomery County Community College charges a couple of thousand dollars for someone to get a certificate for something that the businesses used to train workers for. And no one talks about the lack of investment by businesses in what they claim is their need for a cheaper workforce from somewhere else where they can't find the people they need for the jobs. And then my other question is, I've visited Community Land Trust in Baltimore and Frederick where they built affordable houses in a land trust that protects it in perpetuity for that income level. So you always have that affordable housing. It doesn't go into the marketplace and become something other than affordable. And I don't know whether you were familiar with that. Can you pass it to the behind you? I want to get a stack of two questions. Hi, my name is Isabelle. And I guess I have to say that I have agreed with everything that you guys have said. I would love to see any of the things that you all describe as implemented. However, my question is, even thinking back to the first days of the United States of America in terms of U.S. culture and how so much of American identity is based upon this Benjamin Franklin style, you know, working for and earning your income, et cetera. Just that you're supposed to work up from something. You're supposed to earn whatever you have. And I just, I see it as difficult for any type of new program certainly at the federal level to be passed. It would be a large new entitlement program for tax restructure, anything like that. And I know that there's a lot of focus now on testing things at the local level, at the state level, at the city level. But I guess my question is just if you see a future in the next century or whenever when a significant change of the type that you all are talking about could happen at the federal level in this country given our sort of cultural DNA for how we value work and how we talk about work. So the question of work, which I would love, and kind of the American ethos of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, the gravity-defying idea of that, the fallacy of that, which I think you talk about so many books. And I'm sorry. I don't have pregnancy, brain is an excuse. What was the beginning? What was the first thing you talked about before Land Trust? Do you guys remember? Training, yes. Kind of the workforce, kind of lack of investment in training workers. I'm going to get you two first, those two first, and then we'll... Oh, then you're done. I'm happy to speak to whichever one you don't want to. I thought... I'll just jump in. So I'll go with the job training. You know, job training is like one of those things. I find that the biggest arguments against cash tend to be on the left, there are education and job training. On the right, there's small business growth. It's like, well, do we really need to give people cash when we can just, you know, have them... We just need more job training programs. We need more money in education. And they're distinct but related because their job training is, in the end, I think of just a kind of education. Job training, I'm curious what Derek and others think, really has a pretty checkered history of being successful. There's a lot of evidence that suggests that a lot of money has been plowed into it and we've seen pretty disappointing results. Now, there have been some changes in recent years. The Obama administration was on a different track record. There are some promising new results, worthy of more exploration, but the evidence suggests that training is often over-hyped. I do think that the kind of professional education and skills-building education, of course, we need more of that. I very much think that we do. But what I have heard is that, to say you need to go back to a community college to get trained. So if you're just putting yourself, if you don't have a dollar of savings, so half Americans don't have a dollar of savings, can't find $400, you've got to think about, okay, how am I going to enroll for a semester? So, I'm going to have to figure out what the future costs, even with financial aid, probably about $1,000, let's say. Now I have to take off work, so figure out an employer that's flexible enough to enable me to take off. A lot of people, particularly in their 20s and 30s, in that period of life, have to figure out childcare costs. Gas, to get there and get back. You can do all of those things, but then what happens when your kid gets the flu or there's some other, or your car gets in a wreck, and then everything, you know. So, my view is not, isn't that, of course we need more investments in education to make it better, but we just overlook that people need cash, cash, to be able to self-actualize and be able to make those basic ends meet so that they can then go out there and be able to take advantage of the educational opportunities that we talk so much about. I'd say job training without a job attached to it is an inferior approach than just job training. So a federal job guarantee would include job training, but we would have a job waiting for you after the fact. Chris brings up some really interesting issues that matter with regards to race particularly. We know that there's a surge in exploitive for-profit colleges that are intended to usurp resources, and many of the students don't graduate or end up with degrees that don't have a return in a marketplace or are saddled with debt once they graduate. So if we are, you know, one thing we need to do is rethink the purpose of education and stop the norms that exaggerate the economic returns to education. Education is something that we should have, period, irrespective of its economic return. Obviously it does have economic returns, but we know that black people with a college degree, they have lower wealth than white dropouts. We know that black people with higher levels of education still have twice the unemployment rate compared to white individuals. We know that a black woman with a college degree has greater likelihood of, I'm sorry for saying this, an infant mortality than a white woman who dropped out of high school. So education is not the panacea, but if we are going to look at job training, we really should have the promise of a job attached to it afterwards. I'll really quickly mention the question about the political question. I think we need a vision, right? We need a long vision. If it's not in this moment, then we start planning, we start the grounds well. People on this stage are brighter than me in terms of development social movement, but we start social movement so that we can get there. We stop worrying about the, you know, we need to think about a policy apparatus that is not caught up in the moment where we always have to make compromises with ourselves without a grand vision to get us where we want to be. I think if the ideas are cogently presented to the American populace, now obviously the federal job guarantee is not anti-work, it is included with wealth work, but what it does is it provides a public option. It provides a public option to employment from the private sector, which has different motivations around work than perhaps the public sector would. It also provides a public option for the goods that are generated from these jobs. In other words, there's quality elder care that's not caught up simply in trying to maximize profit where they might shortchange some of the quality in order to achieve that goal. So I'm rambling on, but let me just say that these ideas are starting to take hold. We need a long-term strategy and we need to be not so compromising. A big fear I have is that as these ideas take a hold, that we start bastardizing them ourselves. We start compromising before we even bring them into market under the guise that, oh, it's not realistic. Someone told me that it's because progressives have lawyers at the bargaining table that compromise happens before we even get to the table. So I think the other thing I'd like to just add to that in terms of the idea of, you know, is it feasible to have these big ideas happen, right? America has a long history of, I mean, if we think about the five-day work week, ending child labor, ending slavery. Like, these are all things that I'm sure at the moment people were like, that's too big ending slavery. Let's just make it less crappy, right? Let's have work requirements for how long a slave can work or you can't beat them. And other folks were like, no, human bondage is just not okay. And that's a really big idea, but we're going to go for it anyway. And if we didn't have people who thought in these big ways, who dreamed big, who thought of the future we actually want instead of the one that they thought was politically, you know, expedient in the moment, then, I mean, three of us would not be on the stage right now, huh? Yes. What you just said is just that, so what I was thinking about during this event is the fact that looking at other countries that do it differently than us, particularly European contemporaries, as well as when large changes came about in the United States. So like, when were the single biggest legislative changes to U.S. policy? No commas in your sentence. Oh yeah, thank you. Do you think it's going to take another war, which is when things like healthcare happened in Europe during Reconstruction or the Civil War in the U.S., World War II? Is it going to take another war? Is it going to take another market crash? Don't answer that yet because I want to get your question. No, no, it's okay. I want to get your question and then I'll let y'all... It's funny, we're kind of on a same vein here. And so, a couple of things. First, when she talked about the idea of our pull yourself up by the bootstraps, I laughed because I was thinking that's so funny. We're a country who's stolen inhabited land and said, look what we found. So I'm like, hmm, that's so cute how we always have this view here and just kind of forget that and then we celebrate Columbus Day and keep it moving. So my question was actually around the fact that many of the individuals in this room might be, like, preaching to the choir, so to speak, that quite a few of us are probably in agreement with what you're saying, even if we have some questions about this piece or that piece. And so I'm thinking about the fact that there are so many, like, empty seats in this room. And I'm also thinking about the fact that it's primarily, and I think, just from a quick and maybe not anymore, it was primarily women in the room. So I'm thinking about the extreme conservative who's not here. I'm thinking about a room full of men when we start talking about equity with regard to gender and all of those issues and what would need to be said for them to even remotely take these policies into consideration because they are quite frankly some people that never want to see equal slices of the American pie. They're very... How do we get these ideas to play on both sides? Right. And is there a point where you do compromise with it? And because if you don't and you stay in your ground, it goes many, many years before the full process because we know slavery went on much longer than it should have, it should have never existed. But I'm sure someone probably was saying the big idea long before, but constantly having to get people on board to far longer. Okay. Here, we only have a couple minutes. I know you have answers for this. So that other folks can get on this. I do think this will tie to your question too. I do think at least when it comes to the issues I work on, guaranteed income, the opportunity to repeal and replace the tax bill that was passed last year is an enormous opportunity for this issue, particularly if we structure it through a modernization of earned income tax credit, making it monthly, making it flat, making it much bigger. And I do think that moment will come and I do think that there's an opportunity to really build momentum now to get there. I will also say, and this touches on your point, if you talk about guaranteed income, I went on a CNBC show last week and I was talking about guaranteed income but the broadcaster said that we were talking about UBI and the guest that was on there was the former chair of the CEA under Bush, under George W. Bush. And the host asked him, well, what do you think of this universal basic income? Oh, this is a horror idea, people want to work, that's what America's all about, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the host was like, and then I actually interjected and said, but if we make it a monthly modernized EITC with a bigger definition of, oh, I love the EITC, that's what I would be for, all the things. And so it seems like a small thing but I do think that there's an opportunity to invest in something, the EITC's been expanded by every president since Ford, Republican and Democrat alike, that I'm not thinking that we're going to get a huge Republican groundswell here but I do think that there's a language that we can be smart about using here that can effectively get us, at least if not everywhere we want to go, a meaningful way in that direction and in the, you know, five years, not necessarily the next 50. I totally agree. And as far as the conservative aspect of it, I am in Mississippi, you don't get too much more conservative than that. And so, you know, the way that we're really thinking about the work there, the way I'm really thinking about it, it's really about the narrative like Chris was saying and really building the case to the other side about what it is truly costing for individuals to be poor in Mississippi and how that impacts the state's bottom line. I'm very clear that, you know, most of our legislators and elected officials do not quite care about the population that I'm working with and publicly, well, publicly they do privately, who knows. But if we can change the narrative and talk about it in a way that really gets where their heart is or where their bottom line is, that's the way to get it done. And as far as the war, will it take another war? I think the war is here now and it doesn't matter of recognizing that and charting, gaining, taking advantage of the momentum that's already here and existing. Yeah. I mean, I took your question to mean literal war because you referenced Europe. But, you know, I'd say that, you know, we're currently in the longest, one of the longest, I think the longest war in American history. And we spent a whole lot of money in that and we seem to be going the other way. I'd say that the New Deal, WPA and CCC preceded World War II. But the Second Economic Bill of Rights coincided and your point is still valid in the aftermath of Europe. There were a lot of reforms in European societies. But I do think there's precedent where we don't necessarily need a war. But we do need a political movement. In terms of some of the ideas, somebody wrote a headline about baby bonds that read an idea that a conservative could love. Baby bonds doesn't dismantle the U.S. capitalist system. Some people have critiqued it because of that. What baby bonds does is arm everybody with some capital so that they can participate in capitalism. We know that if you don't have capital in a capitalist system, you are locked out. You don't have chance or opportunity of freedom. So that's what it's intended to do. And then, like I said, the federal job guarantee, it's based in work. So that's in the ethos of American system. And there are conservatives, with his name, Kevin Hastert, who's the Trump's counsel of the head of the CEA. He's come out in favor of a federal job guarantee, but we should be careful. And this comes in to the point we made earlier. What he has in mind might be very different than what we have in mind or I have in mind. We're not talking about work fair or punishment or punitive actions to punish poor people in order to get some wage. We're talking about jobs that empower people so that they can have social engagement at work with useful productive work, as well as the benefits and wages that come along with having a decent job. All right. Thank you. Derrigation, Chris. Thank you all. We don't have time for another question. I want to say that Chris is going to be out at a table out here somewhere signing books. So go that way. And thank you. Okay. Well, we can have, you can totally, you can, we'll be around so we can, we can have a conversation as we continue. Our webcast is ending, so. Thank you Mia. Bye the internet. Thank you. Thank you all.