 There's so many podiums. I didn't know which one to go to. This is great. So it's a real honor and a pleasure to be here today. What a fantastic filled room here. It's so exciting to see all these people thinking about this excessive wealth disorder and how we can raise taxes. I want to spend just my seven minutes talking about what we do at Equitable Growth and how we think every day about the ways in which inequality in all of its forms affect our economy and our society. So hopefully this will tee off nicely about what Paul said, where he talked a lot about the ways that inequality affects our politics and our policymaking. And I want to take it to the next level, which is how is it that inequality, and in particular, excessive wealth inequality, is affecting our economy? One of the things that we've been told for my entire lifetime is that if we just gave the rich people the money, if we gave them their taxes back, they would do things in the economy that would benefit us all. That has been the cornerstone of the narrative about how the economy works that we've been told. They are the job creators. They are the investors. And we're a little bit held captive to them. But if we give them what they want, then they would create an economy where growth was strong, stable, and broadly shared. What we've been doing for the past over five years at Equitable Growth is engaging scholars all across the United States and across the world in understanding whether and how inequality affects economic growth and stability. And what we have learned is that due to new empirical techniques, new data, a new crop of scholars asking new questions, the answer is too often that inequality actually has a negative downward pull on our economy in a variety of different ways. And so if you want to learn more on our website at Equitable Growth, we elevate all the research that we are finding. But let me just give you the highlights of how it is that the research is showing that this story we've been told is in fact wrong. And so whatever you might think on moral grounds or values grounds or fairness grounds about why we need to do something about inequality, underpinning that is also a strong economic argument and one that I think we need to do more to get out there and make compelling to the American people. So the way that we've been thinking about it is we've been compiling all of this research evidence and looking what all these scholars are producing is that we break it down into three buckets, which is that inequality obstructs, subverts, and distorts the processes that lead to strong, stable, broadly shared growth. So let me just give you an example from the research on each of those. Hopefully I can do that in four minutes, but we'll try. So when we think about inequalities obstructions, that's sort of the common sense understanding, right? We know the ways that a child who's born in poverty doesn't have the same life chances as someone who's born at the high end of the income spectrum, but increasingly there is research evidence that shows and because of new techniques and data that economists have, showing with causality that this inequality, this economic inequality is creating real obstructions. So Raj Chetty, who was a founding member of our steering committee, has this research project with a bunch of other scholars where he talks about the lost Einstein's. What he and his colleagues did is they matched data on who gets a patent as an adult, what that person's income is as an adult, with data on third grade math test scores and the third grade person's child's family income. And they're able to show that, low and behold, kids that do really good on third grade math tests actually are more likely to become inventors, okay? Well, totally common sense. They also find that among kids that score really good on that third grade test, the ones who have rich parents, four times as likely to grow up and be an inventor. That means that there's a lot of smart kids who could be adding to our economy, who could be inventing the things that fix climate change, that could be doing all sorts of things, don't have that opportunity. That is a direct drag on our productivity today and far off into the future. And it stymies the kind of capitalism that so many people come to this country to be a part of, right? That we are not the country that we tell ourselves that we are. We also see that inequalities subverts the institutions that create our, make our economy possible. And we think about this in two really big buckets. One is how it subverts our politics. And Nancy's gonna talk about that, I'm sure. Paul talked about that a little bit, so I don't wanna delve on that. But let me focus for a few moments on the other way it subverts, which is that it is subverting the very way that our market works, right? We all know this. We know that what we've been seeing over the past few decades is a rise in economic concentration. What economists would call monopoly or oligopoly. Increasingly, empirical research is showing that this kind of rising economic concentration is having negative effects on our economy through reducing investment, even though profits are high and even though one would think that there's a lot of space for more investment, firms aren't doing it, because rising economic concentration changes their incentives. And it changes those incentives for firms the same way it changes the incentives for the wealthy, which is that the focus becomes on what economists, we have such great terms for things, called rent seeking, which is not about the money you pay your landlord, but is about taking more of the economic gains than is reasonable, than is fair, than not fairness in the equity sense, but fairness in the economic sense, but taking more of the gains of growth and holding on to them, rather than taking the gains of growth and investing those in goods and services and investments that are gonna create economic growth for the future. So we see the ways that this rising concentration is dragging down our economy. And we've known this for a century. A century ago, we put in place laws to prohibit the rise in economic concentration. And decades ago, we stopped enforcing those. And economists were a big part of the reason why, as we started arguing, not me, but the economics profession started arguing that actually leaving everything to the market is the way to go. And we don't really need to worry about rising concentration in that way, so long as it didn't hurt consumers. But the newest batch of research, the latest scholarship, is showing the ways in which concentration is driving down growth, and we need to change the way that we enforce this. So I will end with the distortions, right? Inequality is distorting our investments. It's distorting our consumption. It's distorting consumption so much that firms are making different choices now about where to invest in new products, that it's changing inflation in the following way. When you have all the firms chasing after the millionaires and billionaires, or let's just say the folks in the top 20% and making sure that we have a lot of different kinds of expensive phones to buy, or whatever it else is that we want at the very top, you actually don't have firms who are chasing dollars at the bottom, because that's not where the money is. Well, now it has been documented that that is meaning that inflation is actually higher now for goods and services that goods aimed at the bottom end of the income distribution than at the top. That is macroeconomic implications. It changes how we think about macro policy, and it's a massive distortion of our economy brought on by this excessive wealth disorder. So I hope I've just given you a sliver of some of the evidence that shows the ways that this conversation we're having today, it's about values, it's about fairness, but it's also about the very thing that creates economic growth and stability. Thank you.