 Okay, I'm Reed Kramer. I direct the asset building program here at the New America Foundation, and I want to welcome you all here to this event this afternoon on the politics of inequality, featuring two veteran Washington reporters, David Corn and Tim Noah, and their new books, which together will give us a couple of vital entry points into the topic of inequality. And I think I'm supposed to announce for those in Twitterland the hashtag inequality is yours. So my colleagues and I in the asset building program focus a lot of our work on advancing public policies that help families move forward in their lives economically. We're interested in the tools and the policies and the resources that help people move up the economic ladder. Now the advent of the Great Recession clearly focused our attention not only on the issue of economic security, but also on the distribution of resources that can either impede or facilitate this upward climb. And leading up to the recession, it was pretty clear that the trend lines didn't look particularly good. There's many different ways to measure inequality, but almost undeniably it had been increasing for a number of years. Poverty had been fairly persistent with some fluctuations, but median wages had stagnated and it was very clear that there was a divorce from productivity gains. There were no longer going to increase wages in the middle. Meanwhile, the share of the very upper income folks at the very top, the stinking rich as Tim calls them, they were increasing their share of total income. Their tax burden was going down. So it's kind of a natural and important question to ask if inequality is linked and connected to the performance of the economy, and if it is, what we can do about it. The next question is whether or not we have the political process in place that can get us over the hurdles. And I think that today's discussion is going to be helpful to those questions. We're going to dig into the politics and the policies of inequality. We have Tim Noah with us, who's currently a columnist at the New Republic. And previously when he was at Slate, he wrote a very important 10-part series on inequality that became the foundation for his book, his first book, The Great Divide. Divergence? Divergence. I knew it was wrong. The Great Divergence, America's growing inequality crisis and what we can do about it. Tim's book is really, I think of it as a public service, because he takes a complex topic, he dives in to the data, he gets to the bottom of very current debates, looks at the trends, and then kind of lines up the usual suspects to see what might explain these trends. And some factors are more kind of culpable than others. But he really prosecutes an effective case that I think is very illuminating. And he's then going to tell us why it matters and what we can do about it. He does offer a number of prescriptions. Many writers have a last chapter problem to actually put some real big things on the table that I think match the magnitude of the problem. And I think we're going to look forward to hearing about those. Of course, a lot of his recommendations are going to be very difficult to enact. And that's the rub. And it is. Politics comes into play. It's very difficult to navigate America's unique political landscape, getting over hurdles. And this is where David's book comes in. David Corn is Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones, also long-time Washington editor for the nation. And his book, Showdown, the inside story of how Obama fought back against Banner Cantor and the Tea Party, is actually not a study of economic trends, but it's a look at politics. It's a look at real world actors navigating, changing conditions, unfolding events, special interests, competing interests. And it turns out that governing isn't so easy after all. And inside the book, you can kind of learn a lot about how the White House operates and responds to very well-reported insiders' account that focuses on the story between the midterm elections up until earlier this year. So it's very contemporary. And it covers a lot of the very tax and fiscal policy debates that determine who pays what share ultimately. And so a lot of the White House and Congressional Republican negotiations are ultimately about equity and about inequality. And David's first draft of history, I suspect it's going to be an enduring draft, really captures some of the very interesting details that unfolded during those debates. So well-told, insightful account, both books, worth getting, getting your hands on. Very informative. But we're going to hear from them, both of them directly today, and get to the bottom of some of these questions around inequality with politics and policy, with analysis and action, and we're going to see how they all connect. So here's the plan. Tragic come up to the podium and present some highlights of his book. He's brought some images for us to look at together. He'll speak for about 15 minutes. Then David will come up and offer his perspective on some of the unfolding negotiations with the White House. And then we'll have the reporters sit down and interview each other and include you in the conversation. So if you'll help me welcome Tim to the podium, we'll get started. One of the tragic outcomes of my writing this book is that in the course of writing it I learned how to do PowerPoint about 15 years after everybody else, and I fell hard for the technology. But I think this is a pretty good way to walk briskly through the data in my book. What you'll be missing is the kind of texture in the book, the sort of historical narratives about people like Walter Ruther and Bryce Harlow, but hey, I want to give you a reason to buy the book, right? Here is the problem as illustrated by Katherine Mull Brandon, who incidentally is a really brilliant at depicting economic trends. She has a website called visualizingeconomics.com that I recommend to all of you. Which does a lot in particular with inequality. You see the income share for the top 1% is quite large at the end of the 1920s. It then shrinks and then starts to grow again in the late 1970s. And here you'll see it a little more vividly. You have really between about 1934 and 1979 a period that's called the Great Compression where incomes were becoming more equal. And this became to be regarded as a natural outcome of mature capitalism. Simon Kuznetz, the Nobel Prize winning economist, wrote a very influential paper where he said that after an initial period of disruption created by industrialization advanced industrial economies tend towards greater income inequality. And it was true for a while, but stopped being true in the late 1970s. And here you see that the income share for the top 1% doubled after 1979. And here you see that the trend, the further up you go, the income scale, the faster the trend is accelerating. So it's really driven by those at the very top, especially the top 0.1% and the top 0.01%. Recessions are bad for rich people. And during the 2007-2009 recession, the 1% took a bigger hit than the rest of America as you would expect from people who get a lot of their income from capital gains. This caused a few commentators. I won't mention anybody, but Megan McCartle was one. And she said in her Atlantic blog that this meant that possibly the income inequality trend was over. But it was not over. It was, recessions are always hard on the top 1%. As soon as the recovery began, the top 1% started increasing its income share again. As of the end of 2010, it still wasn't back to its pre-2007 level, but it will get there. This is some data that came out too late to be included in my book. It's from Emmanuel Saez, who with Thomas Piketty wrote a 2003 paper that kind of invented the vocabulary of the 1% versus the 99%. And the money quote is that 93% of the recovery, as of 2010, 93% of the recovery ended up in the pockets of the top 1%. It was a members-only recovery. Inequality is an international trend, as you see here. But the United States, it's worse in the United States, and it's getting worse faster in the United States than just about anywhere else. Among industrialized countries, the United States is the undisputed champion when it comes to income share for the top 1%. Important caveat, although this is an international trend, it is not a universal trend among advanced industrial democracies. Tokyo, Turkey, I should probably cross grease off that list. Chile and Italy actually grew more equal after the mid-1990s. Latin America in general, very associated with income inequality. Latin America incomes have been growing more equal in this period. In my book, I say that France was also growing more equal, but a study that came out after my book went to press showed that inequality was on the rise in France. Even so, if you go back to the mid-1980s, there's little net change in equality trends in France, and the same is true for Hungary and Belgium. A number of people say, or they don't say it so much anymore, but they have said in the past, and some still do, I don't need to care about income inequality because we have so much mobility in the United States. This has become a subject of discussion in recent months. Actually mobility in the United States lags that of other comparable countries, and here I show it by a statistic that I call income heritability, the likelihood that you will occupy an economic position relative to everybody else in society that is the same as your parents. Another study that came out after my book went to press, this from the Council of Economic Advisors, Alan Kruger, is very interested in income inequality, and he did a chart last winter that showed that even if you don't care about income inequality, you sort of have to if you care about mobility because greater income inequality appears to correlate roughly, but there still seems to be a rough correlation between income inequality and what's here called intergenerational earnings elasticity, but again that's what I call income heritability, as inequality goes up, mobility goes down. So what's causing this 33-year trend? It's not gender because the income gap between men and women has actually narrowed, and it's not race because the income gap between blacks and whites is essentially the same. Full stop, the fact that the income gap between blacks and whites is essentially the same is a truly startling and dismaying fact in itself. If you went into a time machine, went back 33 years and told people that the income gap between blacks and whites would be unchanged a third of a century later, they would have told you you were out of your mind, but in any case the gap hasn't increased, and that means that race can't really be causing this, except indirectly a couple of people have pointed out to me that race has affected our politics and our politics has affected what our government does, and that is certainly true, particularly when you consider the realignment of the white South into the Republican Party. Changes in federal taxes and benefits play some role, but not as much as you would think. The effective tax rate, all federal taxes for the top 1% is lower than it was in 79, but not hugely lower, which is remarkable given that the top marginal rate today is at 35% is half what it was when Ronald Reagan took office. Strangely, the income tax is actually slightly more progressive today than it was in 1979, and that's because in spite of the drop of the top marginal rates, we've taken so many people off the income tax rolls at the bottom. This was a conservative idea invented by Senator Russell Long and championed by Ronald Reagan and then Bill Clinton, and like a lot of old conservative ideas, it's a conservative idea that today's conservatives want to abandon, they want to raise taxes on the poor in order to make it more possible to lower taxes on the rich, which is fairly mind-boggling. Immigration has had a limited effect. Most of the immigrants have only lack a high school degree, and so the principal native-born population that's affected are high school dropouts in the United States, and they have seen their incomes reduced by 7.4% because of immigration. That's a little less than 0.4% per year. For everybody else, immigration really has had no significant effect, and interestingly, I just did a TRB column a few weeks ago about this new Pew study which found that Mexican immigration in the United States is way, way down, partly because of economic development in Mexico, partly because of demographic changes in Mexico. Some people think it'll go up again once the recovery is in full swing in the United States, but the downward trend is actually about a decade old, so it predates the recession. We may actually, in classic American style, we may be arguing about something right now in the political realm that in the real world is already evaporating. Trade had a limited but growing effect. It really didn't start to have a significant effect until the late 1990s, and the reason was that until then, most of the U.S. trading partners had incomes that were comparable to those, roughly comparable to those of the United States. That changed with the rise of trade with China and Mexico, especially China, of course, which is paradoxically manages to be a rich country and a poor country at the same time with a billion workers whose wages are not, they're going to come up, but it's going to take a while because there are so many of them. This is Rachel Maddow's favorite chart in the entire world, and it illustrates a point made by Larry Bartels in his book Unequal Democracy, and it shows that if you want to do something about income inequality, a good start would be to vote for Democrats for president because going back to 1948, you see opposite trends. Under Democratic presidents, the largest income gains have been at the bottom and have tapered off as you go up the income scale. Under Republicans, the precise opposite, the biggest income gains have gone to those at the top and tapered off as you go down the income scale. People also observe there has been more economic growth under the Democrats than the Republicans. Again, this is going back to 1948. The important caveat is that when you get above the 95th percentile, these partisan differences start to evaporate. Rich people do extremely well no matter what party the president belongs to. The decline of labor is a hugely important factor. It's so big and obvious that it scarcely needs to be discussed at length. Union density peaked in 1954 at about 40 percent of the private sector workforce. Today it's down to about 7 percent, which is what it was before the New Deal, and a sentence I found myself tempted to write multiple times as I was writing this book was it's as if the New Deal never happened. The shortage of skilled labor relative to the demand for skilled labor contributes to income inequality. The high school graduation rate rose and rose and rose through the 20th century as technological demands on workers also rose and rose and rose. In the 1970s, though, it dipped and then leveled off. When the most recent technological revolution, the computer revolution came along, the supply of skilled labor relative to demand suddenly was short. You see that here as a supply and demand curve. So far I've talked entirely about one kind of income inequality, which is the skills based kind of income inequality. When we talk about the income inequality trend the last 33 years, we're really talking about two trends, mostly unrelated. One is the divide between skilled labor and unskilled labor, and that's complicated and has many factors, and that's why most of my book discusses that. But we also have the 1 percent versus the 99 percent, also hugely significant, probably in the last decade more significant than the other. You hear some debate sometimes among liberals about which is more important. I think if you're looking back over 33 years it's indisputable that both are very important. The reason I don't discuss the 1 percent problem at great length is because the causes are very simple. There are two causes. One is runaway CEO pay and pay for top executives generally, which Nell is a great expert on, and the other is the financialization of the economy, deregulation of Wall Street, conversion of investment bank partnerships into corporations. This chart kind of shows you who are the top 0.1 percent in the distribution of income. In 79, 48 percent were executives and managers at non-financial corporations. They've dropped a little bit down to 43 percent. The second biggest chunk is the financial professions. They were 11 percent in 79. Now they have jumped to 18 percent, and my guess is they, that's 2005, my guess is they have just continued to grow ever since. You hear a lot about how artists and sports figures and entertainers contribute to this. They don't contribute very much. There just aren't enough of them. So they were 2.2 percent in 79. Now they're up to 3 percent, not a hugely significant portion. The paper he wrote that I cited earlier in March concluded such an uneven recovery can help explain the recent public demonstrations against inequality, which I just think is a model of academic understatement. So that is the great divergence, and in question and answers later I'd be happy to talk about some of the solutions I discuss in my book. Let me give my thanks to the New America Foundation, which has become sort of a fountain of ideas in Washington, D.C., and thank Reed for inviting us. I thank Tim Noah for making inequality sexy, well, almost. We at Mother Jones, I think before Tim's series, but kind of in the same vicinity, put out a bunch of charts on inequality, and I have some handouts, and we can share them, but you can also find them on our website. It became kind of a viral sensation, and we literally got millions of hits on them as the Occupy Movement was arising, which really quite honestly surprised all of us, but it showed that there was a great demand for information, particularly I think, and this is what Tim does so well, for information that takes us out of the cut-and-dry academic context and puts us in either a historical context or a current context that people can relate to as they're trying to make sense of what they see going on around them in their own lives. Now, I hadn't realized this until Reed pointed it out to me, but that I had written a book about income inequality, in that a lot of what happened in the context of my book was about economic fairness. My book is a behind-the-scenes narrative of what happened in the White House and the Oval Office after the disastrous for Democrats election in 2010 through the lame duck session and the budget fight and the debt ceiling debacle and through the beginning of this year, and again and again and again a lot of these issues turned on some of the fundamental notions that we're discussing here today, and I was really intrigued with explaining and describing and chronicling the intersection of politics and policy governing and campaigning, and it came about from conversations that I had with people at the White House, particularly in the lame duck session about what the President should and shouldn't do about extending the Bush tax cuts. You remember that was sort of the first big fight that happened after the 2010 elections. Back in 2008, I'll drop back a second here, especially prior to the collapse of the market in September 2008, Obama as a candidate, as a Senator, routinely talked about the erosion of the American dream. By that he meant a decline in middle class incomes and a decline in what was perceived to be general economic security for people who were not in the top 1 or 5 or 10 percent, and he noted it was one of the reasons he was seeking the office of President. He wanted to do something about this, and that was even before Tim's slate series, but once he got into office he had a first worry about putting out the fire and preventing the collapse of modern American capitalism and high finance, and I think his efforts probably had a positive impact on income inequality if only to prevent it from becoming worse. Imagine if there had been no stimulus, according to the CBO, the stimulus saved or created 3.6 million jobs, not enough as was needed but more than zero. Imagine if there had been no auto bailout, but as we saw and as Tim sort of got to with some of his charts, the top 1 percent was still able to recover quicker and better after the financial crisis in terms of the market going up and wealth rising again, then the ability of American workers had to recover in terms of finding jobs or getting higher incomes. The market came roaring back, but jobs and income did not, and so that's something I think the President has struggled with in terms of post stimulus and particularly after the 2010 election when he was now sort of on the run politically. And the first big engagement that happened was that fight over the tax cut deal. You know the issue seemed to be to most Americans who were paying attention, which may not be most Americans, that whether or not the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would be extended because they ran out at the end of 2010. Republicans in Congress were saying well we won't allow these, demanded that they be extended, otherwise they would not vote for the extension of the tax cuts as they applied to the middle class. So there was sort of a game of high stakes chicken. You know, some Democrats and liberal Democrats, progressive Democrats, were egging the President on to have a standoff with the Republicans over this and show the whole world what a surprise. The Republicans seemed to favor tax cuts for the rich more than anything else. The President was faced, I think with a tough dilemma. He of course was on record, had campaigned against these tax cuts for the rich, particularly on the notion of economic fairness. And that was before the crash occurred. But now he and his political advisors, particularly Joe Biden, believe that they couldn't win this fight largely because some Democrats in the Senate wouldn't stand by them out of fear of being accused of being in favor of tax hikes, even though this was just a return to old tax rates. And the President also wanted to do something to address the economic situation at hand. Basically, he wanted a second stimulus. But because he had lost the messaging war and the first stimulus, there was no way it was going to pass by a Senate filibuster or even maybe get enough Democratic votes in the House to pass. So he very slyly, and I think outside the observations of many pundits, came up with a plan that would have all these income-boosting policies in a package in terms of the payroll tax cut, which helped middle and low-income Americans more disproportionately, as opposed to those on the high end. Unemployment benefits, which were running out, which Republicans wouldn't renew, and plenty of tax credits for working in middle-income Americans that were part of the original stimulus, but they were expiring. And again, these are all things that the House and Senate Democrats were not able to get through on their own. So the President came up with what might be called a bit of a devil's bargain. He would sacrifice his position on tax cuts for the wealthy in order to get all these great policy gains. And in terms of pure numbers, it was like $240 billion in second stimulus to, I don't know, $20 to $80 billion in new benefits, including estate tax cuts for the wealthy. So this was his way to sort of address some of these economic fairness issues in a manner that he could not otherwise do. And in the way that it was covered in the media, and I count myself as part of this, it looked more or less as if he had lost, that the tax cuts for the wealthy were going through, despite his unequivocal promise to get rid of them. And it was a matter of, in my case, when you do a book and you go back and you look at things over time, and after the dust has settled, you get to have a little bit of a different evaluation sometimes when you're involved in the cable debate of the nanosecond. And I think ultimately that was his attempt. And he kind of realized he was about to head into the desert in terms of the House Republicans coming in, and there'd be no chance to legislate anything, let alone tax benefits for working Americans or the working poor. It was like the gas stop, last gas, for 250 miles. So he had to tank up. The price was yielding on the Bush tax breaks. But it was a way of, I think, of setting up what would come across in the next year and a half. Through the budget fight at the beginning of last year, and the deficit fight that went through last summer that was very ugly, Obama kept trying to use these confrontations with Republicans to advance some of these larger messaging points about economic inequality, about fairness. He really started doing this reframing almost a year ago when he gave the speech attacking the Ryan budget after it was first released. Remember, it got rid of the Medicare, it got rid of the Medicare guarantee, had draconian cuts, and also a trillion dollars to sell tax breaks for the wealthy above and beyond the Bush tax breaks, which it also would continue. And the president, after sort of laying low on some of this fight for the first few months of the year, gave the speech down a few blocks away at George Washington University when he claimed that the GOP proposal would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we've known. And he cited all the statistics, 25% cut in education, cuts in health care, revamping Medicare and Medicaid in ways that would really either put the burden on seniors or make it harder for the poor to find health care. And he said, these are the kinds of cuts that tell us we can't afford the America that I believe in, and I think you believe in. And he went even further. He said, I believe the Ryan budget plan paints a vision of our future that is deeply pessimistic. Now that was really, I think, quite a, not a breakthrough moment, but in politics when we talk about budgeting, we usually don't talk about it in these larger, more noble terms, optimistic, pessimistic. But the president was saying that the Republican view was one that would sort of guarantee that we couldn't do anything about economic mobility if poor or children from stressed out economic families were not able to go to college. Well, sorry, you're out of luck. If we, you know, if we were talking about revitalizing our infrastructure as a way to create jobs and lift some income, well, we're out of luck in that as well. And he said, you know, this, I think is sort of dovetails a little bit with the notion of economic, how we think about economic inequality. He says, this vision is less about changing the basic social compact in America. It's, I don't think there's anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don't have any cloud and Capitol Hill. And I think when we talk about economic inequality, we do it in sort of wonky terms. But when you sort of boil it down, it's really about a social compact. Do we as a nation sort of come together communally to try to address this and try and think of economic equality as a social good that is best for our, for us over the long run and over the sort of the wide landscape of our society. And so Obama without using the term equality inequality was really talking about economic fairness. And in the weeks ahead, as he shifted towards the deficit ceiling fight, again, about as wonky as subject as we've ever had, you know, dominate the headlines, he kept trying to sort of tether this debate to these larger notions. Remember, talk him talking about shared sacrifice. If we're going to do this, ask be shared sacrifice. And he kept talking about the need to preserve investments in education and job creating initiatives such as research and development, I mentioned infrastructure. And he kept talking about this is what we need to protect and preserve the middle class. He talked about how middle class incomes had been stagnant since 79. And it was his way of addressing the inequality issue without sounding like and I think it was kind of it was ingenious to do this without sounding like this is a charity case. You know, this is you know, the and he and he continued to develop this theme up until even today. I mean, at the end at the deficit crisis, the Republicans and the president both saw their numbers approval ratings just hit, you know, rock bottom it. Congress got I think to 13% approval ratings. And you know, I was asking pollsters, could you get to the negatives? They were going so low, Obama still was in the low 40s, he did better. But his messaging, if you started asking people, do you think this idea of investment and shared sacrifice is better than the idea of cutting government and cutting taxes and sort of hunkering down. And again, and again, the polls were showing that the most Americans favored the former, not the latter. So he seemed to have scored some advances. And then he went on to propose a jobs bill that was a center point for more confrontation on some of these greater issues. And with the rise of the Occupy movement in the fall, Obama, I think very, very interestingly, decided to reprise a speech he had given in 2007, to a bunch of Wall Street executives at NASDAQ up in New York City. Back then, he had told the corporate guys, maybe there are a few gals there, that corporate excesses, such as extravagant CEO compensation, and the subprime mortgage fiasco would undermine American capitalism. And he can and he suggested that Wall Street shenanigans would sort of cut Wall Street off from Main Street and do damage to both. And again, he was talking about the idea of economic opportunity being connected to the notion of economic fairness. And he said to them, we kind of warned them, in an impressive way, that they had to be mindful not to become, not to cut the connection between Wall Street and Main Street. Now, not many of them I think listened at that point in time. But in the fall of 2011, he wanted to inject that thinking back into the political debate. And a CBO study that had come out in that fall on income inequality had had caught his eye. That study had said that the wealthiest 1% had tripled their income since 79. And the middle class had seen a 1% rise each year. So tremendous gap. So to give this speech, he chose Asuatomy, Kansas. At the time, the White House tweeted out a tweet. Can anyone tell us why? And most of the answers were something like, it's right in the middle of the country, geographically speaking. That wasn't the right answer. The right answer was that in 1912, Teddy Roosevelt had given what is probably the most radical speech ever delivered by a president or ex-president, as he was at the time, in Asuatomy, Kansas. It was called the New Nationalism Speech. And he was responding to the rise of industrialization and the growing power of wealth and the tycoons. At the time, he said the citizens of the United States had to effectively control the mighty commercial forces. And he called for a square deal, which would entail rigorous government regulation of the workplace and big finance. Obama's speech was not as radical. No surprise. But he talked about the raging debate over the best ways to restore growth and prosperity, restore balance, and here, his term for inequality, restore fairness. That this was a make-or-break moment for the middle class and for those fighting to get into the middle class. Again, talking about social mobility. And he noted that the United States had become a nation of greater inequality, claiming that a child born into poverty now had less of a chance of reaching the middle class than a child in such circumstances 50 years ago. This isn't about class warfare, he said. This is about the nation's welfare. And he was setting up a theme that I think he saw as being a center point, one of the touchstones of the coming campaign in 2012. And it carried through to the spring, at the beginning of April, he gave a speech, and it was kind of the first speech he gave of the campaign lashing into Romney. It was a quasi-lash. He was working up to it. But it was a speech to newspaper editors who had assembled here in town. And he was again attacking the latest version of the Ryan budget. And he called it thinly veiled social Doranism. It's an antithetical to our entire history as the land of opportunity and opportunity. And he also put mobility for everybody who's willing to work for it. So once again, he was tying his agenda of tax fairness, of investments. One reason we can't give tax breaks to the rich, he argues again and again, is that we need to invest in education, R&D, and other things in order to build and protect the middle class so that there is greater mobility and there is income security over the long run. So that's how he sort of gets at this issue. And he started noting that actually Romney is tied to the forces who would say we don't have to do that. We'll just let the market do this on its own. And we can see from Tim's chart, if you look at the great divergence, market forces have worked on income in the last three decades. And it hasn't been a pretty picture or a pretty chart. In a more recent speech in the beginning of May, the speech he gave, Obama gave, that was the official launch of the campaign down at Virginia Commonwealth, and he gave the same speech in Ohio the same day, he tried to sort of combine both sides of the American experience, rugged individualism, letting markets work, and the communal nature we have for one another, thinking of the best of private equity, we might say, and a barn raising in an Amish country. And he said, we believe the free market is one of the greatest forces for progress in human history, that businesses are the engine of growth and that risk takers and innovators should be rewarded. But we also believe that at its best the free market has never been a license to take whatever you want, however you can get it. We understood that alongside our entrepreneurial spirit, our rugged individualism, American only prospers when we meet our obligations to one another in future generations. And he noted that up to 2008, a shrinking number of Americans did fantastically well, while most people struggled with falling incomes and rising costs, and the slowest job growth in half a century. So he seems to really be absorbing the message that Tim has been putting forward, thank you Tim, and reading the charts but reacting to the same issues, but trying to put them in a political context that connects and that will work. And that brings us to the last couple of weeks and his attack on Mitt Romney and Bane. It was like this is the wrong way to go about, you know, creating jobs. In some instances you might, in some instances you may not, but the priority with Bane is about maximizing profits. And you might remember a Sunday two back, Cory Booker supposedly as a surrogate for the Obama campaign went on and kind of dismissed the Bane ads. Now Cory gets a lot, I like Cory a lot, he's very motivated, a great motivational speaker and sent some very courageous things, but he also gets a lot of money from private equity people based in New York. And he clearly didn't like this attack and within other parts of the Democratic big tent there was some grumbling about Obama going after business. And of course the Republicans made it sound like he hated all free enterprise and that this, you know, and that if you attacked Bane or raised questions about Bane you were nothing other than a communist. But I thought in response to Cory Booker's remarks he was asked a question at a press conference about this and I thought he really handled this tremendously well and gave a better response than anyone from the campaign or any of the talking heads that had been chewing on this over the past few days, which shows you one reason why he's president. And he said when you're president, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, as in you know who, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot. Your job is to think about those workers who got laid off and how we are paying for their retraining. Your job is to think about how those communities can start creating new clusters so they can attract new businesses. Your job as president is to think about how do we set up equitable tax systems so that everybody is paying their fair share that allows us to then invest in science and technology and infrastructure, all of which are going to help us grow. My main, I'll skip ahead, my job is to take into account everybody, not just some. My job is to make sure that the country is growing, not just now, but 10 years from now and 20 years from now. Now a cynical political observer would say, when the economy stinks, it's great for you to say don't judge me on the economy now, judge me on what I can do for you 10 years down the road. But at the same time I think he's Obama in the last three years and as a candidate has been trying to figure out how to address these very hard to wrestle with political and policy questions about income and economic fairness in the country and I do think it will be at the center whether the issue is bane or something else but we at the center of the debate we have in the next five months and if Tim wants anything in his last chapter to happen anywhere in the next four to eight years he better hope as he says that a Democrat gets elected if not in just in the White House but in the House and Senate as well because I do believe there's a profound philosophical difference here and if you ask Mitt Romney in a moment of candor what he would like to see, he'd like to see creative destruction he believes in it but we see some of the ramifications and manifestations of that in Tim's chart and this is the debate that will be joined and hopefully it will have it will count as much as in a debate over what surrogates say or who ate dog meat or not in the coming months so thanks for listening okay thank you Tim and David and actually last time we had David here he was interviewing Elizabeth Warren when we were debating what to do with financial reform and he made news that day by asking her for the first time publicly whether she would consider running for public office and I think she said I'd rather gouge out my eyes and David being the the news savvy reporter went back and wrote it up as she didn't say no I was right and you were right so David should we make some news today what can we ask Tim uh are you ready for the Senate I actually you know I let me ask you about a poll that just literally came out today that Chris Salism's writing about in the Washington Post I saw it as I as I came in here because you know as you could tell from my my comments you know my concern on my area of interest is how to talk about this stuff in a way that leads to you you know the the opportunity to do the policy that you'd like to see happen and this poll was done by Jeff Guerin who is a democratic poster who I like a lot often gives democrats bad news so they can tell he's honest but he was he was polling independent voters and he said which party is better positioned to improve the economy has better positions for improving the economy and of independence you know right now 40 percent said the republicans and 37 percent said democrats not good news and so he's in said okay here are two perspectives the republicans want to cut spending and lower taxes to get the economy going the democrats say we need to invest in education infrastructure and science what do you say 40 46 went with the with the republican view and 44 went with the democrats again not good news for the democrats but then he asked the question this way who do you trust to look out for the middle class and 49 percent said of the independence said the democrats and only 33 percent said the republicans so a real big the others were kind of close big difference here in your terminology so as you talk about income inequality you know are there ways to talk about in terms of protecting building enhancing bolstering boosting you know the much cherished middle class right um yes and that's mostly what uh president obama is doing um as you were discussing those poll results i was thinking um it's uh as a democrat i find it really delightful that um the republicans seem to be finding that every time they try to attack obama it doesn't really work because people like obama and simultaneously the democrats are discovering that every time they attack romney it kind of works so there's kind of asymmetrical warfare going on that for for once actually benefits democrats um the uh yes the middle class is an important part of the story uh there is all sorts of uh debate that goes on academic debate and also political debate about the extent to which the middle class is endangered and uh but when you sort of scrape away all of the um vanity of all the people involved in the ideology what you find is that there are some people who think that the middle class has shrunk a lot and then there are other people who think the middle class has shrunk some so there seems to be broad agreements the middle class has shrunk and that is uh problematic now part of the story is that um a number of people who were middle class have moved up and become more affluent and a lot of conservatives think that's an argument stopper um but the fact is we still need a middle class uh barrington more famous harvard sociologist said it very pithily no bourgeois no democracy and uh you know this is based on you know looking at societies all all over the world different historical periods uh and um i don't think the president can put it quite that way but the middle class is in fact uh uh a uh a a central building block of democracy it's hard to sustain democracy without a middle class and and tim actually the debates around mobility and and the data are a little old at this point we're not actually able to get a hold of some of the more recent data that uh reflects the impact of the recession and i think that uh argument will be a little harder to make now because of middle class families that had a lot of their wealth and housing uh have really taken a big hit and there's a lot of kind of debt overhang for many families uh now meanwhile securities and stocks at the very top have rebounded and i think this is going to be one of the key drivers of inequality going forward and it's one thing that you didn't really focus on in your book the extent of wealth holdings and wealth inequality and i wanted to ask you right right uh always with the wealth i i took the position in my book first of all my book is really i think of my book as principally a history of what happened in the last 30 years uh and to tell that history you also have to go back and look at the pattern for the past hundred years um and that so it's kind of a history with a final chapter that proposes some solutions and uh historically uh what have americans started thinking americans really never thought about uh when they thought about distribution issues fairness issues uh they thought about the distribution of wealth uh for a very long time as late as uh whenever it was the early 20th century when uh teddy roosevelt gave his famous speech about the mouth he didn't talk about the malfactors of great income he talked about the malfactors of great wealth um the first really substantial uh study of distribution of income in the united states was produced by a guy named wilfred king in 1915 uh he was a progressive he later became a kind of a right-winger but he was he studied at the university of wisconsin under the famous progressive economist richard ealy and he laid it out and so the question becomes why did why did why did we have to wait until the progressive era before people started looking at incomes and the reason was that um we had uh for a long time an agriculture based economy and when you're talking about a negrarian society what matters as well what you need your piece of land uh in order to uh produce food that you may live on and bring the extra to market to sell wealth really was what mattered but as we became an industrial economy uh king believed the progressives believed and i believe that that income mattered more um uh you uh didn't want to give workers workers weren't going to grow their own food uh they were going to buy their own food and urban workers in the city industrial workers uh and so they needed income and so what really mattered in people's lives was income it took it took the sort of left of center a while to accommodate itself to the idea that you know the the agrarian ideal was a thing of the past and that we were going to be an industrialized nation um i think that's still basically what we are when i look at wealth uh i i think there are some interesting patterns but but basically there are so few people in america who really possess wealth that um and it's so difficult to figure out ways to redistribute wealth that um uh i i i think it's it's kind of too difficult to grapple with i mean statistically speaking the you know percentage of households that actually possess uh any meaningful kind of wealth is is tiny um and uh uh you did have a lot of wealth that was lost in 2008 in the form of um you know collapsing housing prices and so on but if you're talking about the subprime market a lot of that was make-believe wealth to begin with um i think the real tragedy for people who lost their homes was that they lost their homes and not that they lost some theoretical uh amount of wealth um that uh so that's my kind of long answer to why i focus on income uh but in the book i i'm also just mostly just following the lead of 20th century economists who really were more interested in income than wealth um all right well let's get to your last chapter uh you you do have some pretty big proposals in there maybe you could talk about some of the major ones and then david could give an assessment of whether they're feasible or not right uh number one soak the rich soak the rich yes um even though uh even though uh the income tax is not a major cause of income inequality uh it can certainly be used to ameliorate income inequality uh and also we're going to have to raise taxes a lot in this country we're gonna have to raise taxes on the middle class um uh the president won't tell you that but that's definitely going to be part of the future and uh if that's going to happen it's going to be especially important to demonstrate that as david said the rich are paying their fair share so i think that not only do you need to raise uh restore the clinton era top marginal uh tax rate for incomes over 250 000 but you need to lay in uh additional brackets over uh one million and uh 10 million now nancy polosi last week uh horrified a lot of people by saying that she wants to um uh she's willing to cut a deal making the threshold one million dollars and a lot of people said god that is a terrible policy uh to let people whose incomes are between two and fifty thousand and uh one million off the hook um i agree that from a policy point of view it was a terrible idea but politically i'd be curious to see if you agree with me i thought it was pretty smart because well you know chuck schumer tried to make that case last year when uh or 2010 when they were having this fight over the bush tax cuts and um you know larry summers and a lot of the policy people in the white house didn't like it because you actually capture a lot of revenue between two and fifty thousand and one million right and so you know to give let those people off the hook i mean schumer was doing it for political reasons but if you you know if you're trying to put together a policy uh uh uh you know a set of policies that makes sense you know that you know you end up with the price of a tax hike being accused of raising taxes without bringing enough in uh to sort of you know you you you only fill the you don't fill the hole enough right for the same pain but the beauty is it's it's an offer you only extend when you know the other side is not going to accept yes so you run on it yeah you can run it but it also sets you know and geithner was worried about this too it sort of it sort of sets a new bar at what sort of taxation is acceptable right so after the election what nancy pelosi says was one million dollars that was my pre-election rate now it drops back to 250 000 and when people say oh you were bargaining in bad faith she can just say well what do you think the republicans do you know the interesting thing is you know the whole issue of taxation which we could do a couple hours on here in terms of politics and policy is so vexing for the democrats there's a quote in my book in which they're you know after the i think it's after the 2010 election or right about that what they're talking about what to do whether i have a tax cut fight over the bush high end tax cuts in the white house and and biden you know says you can you can hear him saying this there's one thing i know it's that the democrats in the senate never hang tough on a tough tax vote and they uh you know the the idea of being accused of raising taxes even if all you're doing is restoring rates that work from an economic boom time of the 90s or raising rates in people making over 250 000 over a million you know still spooks so many democrats because they fear being called tax hikers and what's made the fear even more intense than it ever was was um is citizens united the fact now that any super PAC could come in at a moment's notice and spend 100 000 500 000 and you and call you you know a tax hiker you you don't even know who's behind it so you can't even it's not like the other candidates doing it and you can accuse them of lying or being disingenuous so that's really made it harder for you know for some democrats you know when they were having this discussion in the white house um and in the capital about whether to have a a pre-election vote on the bush tax cuts for the rich um in the summer of 2010 harry reid was for doing this nancy pelosi was for doing this i think obama would have gone along if you thought they could win it and the rest of the party was with them but you know but barba boxer that great liberal uh you know from democrat from california who was up for reelection came to harry reid and said don't make me have this vote now of course she would you know is against these tax breaks but when you have people and you know and i don't mean this to you know make you're ready to hang tough i don't i don't mean to make her sound more craven than any other democratic senator but when you have a situation like that it's very difficult and i think you know a lot of the outside critics who are saying you know accusing obama of selling out on the bush tax cuts you know didn't have a full understanding of the political dynamics on the democratic side so while you know so so whether you make it a million or whatever you know i just see the raising taxes in the in the near future on any of these brackets you know seems such a heavy lift more so than than when clinton did it you know with that budget in 1993 another of tim's recommendations is about fattening government payroll and tim you can talk about that if you'd like but but david i also wanted to know from you whether this was ever part of kind of internal white house deliberations you know one of the you look at the the the employment numbers and it's very dramatic what's happening at state and local government levels where we're increasing jobs in the private sector we're losing them in the public sector at the very time when we you know should be addressing the job problem you know is that part of the calculations internally and well yeah well tim you know in tim's last chapter he talks about you know increasing you know the government payroll and that you're putting you know hiring people directly is the most direct form of using tax dollars to create employment I mean it kind of seems pretty darn obvious oh but I'd spoke to several of the economic policy people in the Obama administration but you know particularly the time period after the first stimulus when they were trying when the policy people wanted more stimulus in 2009 and 2010 when they thought that the economy was really getting much weaker and the stimulus wasn't doing enough and they could you know they're saying you know it's really hard to come up with job creating ideas if you're not creating jobs yourself you know giving money to states you know trying to create different programs that will you know different investments that will eventually lead to jobs the whole notion of shovel ready projects which has become a joke for conservatives that's all kind of harder because it's more indirect and so the you know so the I but the I but but they were working within a political constraint which you know which I won't take issue with that just sort of you know creating you know public works administration again and deciding to build a Hoover dam or you know or hiring people you know directly to do other infrastructural projects or other things seems to be again really hard within our political climate well it's funny I from a historical point of view it's amusing because in 1933 you know FDR was concerned about you know unemployment was 25 percent and he was concerned that families were in a starve in the winter and he got Harry Hopkins to start what was the forerunner of the of the WPA and you know the Obama administration talks about how they've created over three years not quite four million jobs Harry Hopkins created four million jobs within a period of three months and you know four million jobs back in 1933 went further was a huge much bigger portion of our overall economy so you know I wrote a piece about this with with Charlie Peters for Slate around the time the stimulus is being discussed so it has been done in the past I you know there are sort of new difficulties environmental impact statements and all sorts of things that didn't exist back in 1933 those are jobs right exactly those are federal jobs let's open it up to questions from the floor if you'd like to ask Tim or David about their book we'll have a mic going around and let's start right here on the aisle Hannah will deliver the mic other hands let me see who would like to get into the conversation yes I'm just a bit confused on the causes and the cure you mentioned the among the causes of the income inequality would be weak unions and the skilled labor shortage the cure part of the cure would be to raise income taxes on the middle class which from an economic point of view it's hard to explain but it makes sense but still isn't wouldn't that be seen politically as contradictory if the if part of the problem is growing income inequality in a weaker middle class yes it is a contradictory and I when I said the taxes are going to have to raise on the middle class I didn't mean in order to address the problem of income inequality I meant in order to address the problem of the deficit so I think that reality is something that we're going to have to steer around as we as we talk about solutions to income inequality but absolutely it from a income distribution perspective it doesn't help to start a tax on the middle class but it does help ameliorate it if you jack up taxes significantly higher for those at higher income okay in the back here one of the less covered aspects of inequality is the fact that you have a small number of rich people using up a lot of human and natural resources and products that don't necessarily improve human welfare I know one study shows that after seventy five thousand you know that your consumption doesn't really improve your happiness I was wondering if you encountered any other studies of the waste of inequality and how you think that these studies could be used in a political argument I did see some I did look at some of these happiness studies they're usually wielded by conservatives to sort of argue that that you know there may be a lot of income inequality but there isn't commensurate unhappiness studies do seem to show that above really above the level of subsistence money does not buy happiness it can buy you out of misery if you're poor but it won't affirmatively buy you happiness the moon belongs to everyone and so forth and it's also sometimes argued you know Joe has a refrigerator that costs two hundred dollars Sam has a refrigerator that costs two thousand dollars but really what is Sam isn't getting anything extra for his two thousand dollar refrigerator you know yeah I guess but he wants the two he must have some reason for wanting that two thousand dollar refrigerator I think it's very hard to kind of figure out you know which material goods enhance people's lies and which don't it's it's very subjective and you know I prefer not to go there I do however in the book look at just the question of sort of quality of life questions the standard of living questions rather you know how does the middle class standard of living today compared to in the 1970s and and I was building in part on some really great work that Bob Wessel and David David Wessel and Bob Davis of the Wall Street Journal just in the late 1990s and Elizabeth Warren has also done some work on this and what you basically find is that the little things are cheaper and the big things are more expensive education costs a lot more cars cost a lot more houses cost a lot more health care costs a lot more TVs are cheaper so it seems to me if the big things are a lot more expensive that's a real problem let's go right here in the front and then we'll go over here and then one or two more possibly I'm Pete Chetley from Brookings and my question is these this great divergence goes back to the end of the Carter years and my question is why haven't the Democrats been able to make more political hay out of that well I think that's the nut of it in a lot of ways I mean you can talk about whether it's income inequality you can talk about the you know tax fairness economic fairness and you see that when you often raise these questions which you know sometimes from a political perspective are called populist issues you're accused automatically of class warfare which is what they've done with the president you know for the past few years and the politics of envy you know that's the other cliche the politics of envy I have to interrupt just to say I did a blog item a few months ago to try and clear this up I said you know talking about income inequality is not class warfare this is class warfare and then I showed a little clip from the gangs of New York the scene where they show the draft riots yes yes but you're lucky you know class warfare was here you'd really be in much more trouble but Democrats seem to be pretty you know to be somewhat divided internally on how far to go down this road you saw this just with Cory Booker and others questioning the bomb is questioning of Bane Capital I was talking to a fundraiser a bungler for Obama recently who said you know one reason our side has so much trouble is that when I'm raising money for Obama I'm already working against my own interests you know I'm working for higher taxes so I'll have less and I have to take a more you know a wider view of what my interests are and plug in communal good you know Republicans seem to be very aligned with their you know with with sort of a greed is good let the markets work let's not have you know we don't care about fairness we let's have creative destruction rugged individualism wherever you want to put it you know the Democratic Party when you can go from Mark Warner to Paul Wellstone that's a pretty wide ideological divide you know which um which hasn't really shifted much in the last 30 40 years the Republican Party where you used to go from Nelson Rockefeller to Jesse Helms you know now you go from Jesse Helms to Michelle Bachman and it's got you know it's moved to the right and it's gotten a lot more narrow so I think the Democrats have always had this internal disagreement about how far to go and talking about this whole range of issues and how far to go in taxing the wealthy how far to go and you know in in what I in what Roosevelt said and having the citizens get together to you know to check the mighty forces of commerce and that is just you know since Roosevelt's day you know it's it hasn't really gotten it's it's it's hacked together in that front and um and Democrats have succeeded you know both taking a popular stance and not doing so you know there were you know the pro business Atari Democrats you know and when Clinton ran he was running as some guy you know as a new Democrat like Mark Warner who understood business who could be a Democrat who could work with business to get part when he was the leader of the House said hey there's there are all these industries out there that are not that new industries that have not given money to the Republicans so these will be our industries Democratic industries so of course we're not going to go after them and regulate them and talk about any issues that offend them so a lot of issues a lot goes into this but um it's it's complicated I would also just add that that um the fact that Mitt Romney the Republican now de facto nominee was chairman of Bane Capital is a gift from God for Obama I think because you can be very pro-capitalist and still look a scans at the at the private equity business because it's it's a way to get rich without without exposing yourself to risk I mean it's hugely ironic I think that this former partner of Romney's has just published a book about how we need to throw more money at rich people to encourage them to take risks because the author Edward Connard he worked for Bane Capital Bane Capital was they did some venture capital and that's laudable but mainly it was a private equity firm and the deal with private equity is you you you you load up some debt you buy these companies and you rig the game so that if the companies fail you still get a profit and if the companies succeed you get more profit so you'd rather they succeed than they say fail but there is no downside risk there is no risk of failure I'll throw one thing too having just read this biography around me and he talks about how he left a secure job to you know start this risky operation and become you know a true entrepreneur in Bane Capital he only took the job because they had a Bane Consulting guaranteed him his old job back at a promotion if Bane Capital didn't take off so he risked absolutely nothing to go into a field where you're almost guaranteed to make money because you get money on the fees first and then you get money on the profits if profits come all right let's get a couple more comments here well let's take them all together and then let them respond we'll go here here and over here and uh let's see Dave you wanna fix your mic I grew up under President Eisenhower when the when the top tax rate was 91% so it's certainly hard were you paying that tax rate huh were your were you were your parents paying that no so it's hard to take the the argument whether it should be 33 or 36% seriously. But as far as class warfare, I think the, I mean, my feeling is that the republics have basically have been playing class warfare and a simple example of, actually, other trade agreements, such as NAFTA, which basically sends a lot of jobs overseas and the result is that the working class here gets put in a terrible trap. Yeah, it's one of Tim's culprits. You can talk about him. Okay, let's go here and then over here. Thank you so much. I'm probably the only non-American here. I'm French and resident in Norway. I came to the United States to set up a foundation to understand what we are talking today. Thank you very much. I learned a lot and I met the last five months both to right, left, and so on, also like you. My understanding is, my opinion after working for European Commission is we are addressing the wrong context. Context I call agricultural society, industrial society, and we are now in Norwich economy. Basically politically, my understanding or my assumption, working assumption is in Norwich economy, local democracy and individual empowerment are critical. And I was invited by Chinese government and my most important project this year is for Chinese to help them work with them to understand this transition from industrial society to Norwich society. Now in that respect politically, what do you think about local democracy from village to state? And how can you play a multiply effect because your solutions are fireman solution. I haven't provoked it, okay? And I will even ask you to sign the book you wrote. But you don't address structural adjustment from industrial society to Norwich society. And one of them is empower local democracy and individuals to address. Okay. Yeah, good point. And then right here in the front. Thank you. It seems like a corollary to the question about mobility is that there's also a generational divide in some of these issues. And it felt like they're trying to get at that for a little while with the student loan questions. And I'm wondering if demographics may in part just be on our side. And if in appealing to what will be an increasingly larger part of the electorate, we might be able to change some of the conversation about these inequality questions by simply hoping the bad guys die off. Yeah. Thank you. Demographics are destiny, eventually. To address that point. I do think there is a generational shift in terms of what we were talking about today, what I would call economic security. For those of us of a certain age, and from a certain class, but it didn't have to be that high a class, but middle class, there was a certain presumption growing up that you could find a job, you could have more or less what you wanted. If you got, maybe you get rich, maybe not, but that you wouldn't have to have a lot of mobility in terms of your job, you'd be able to have a family and that you could have a stable life, more or less, from whatever point you decide to settle down, whether it's when you're 25, 30, 35, whatever. And that I think is completely out the window for anybody who hasn't hit retirement yet. And I think felt perhaps more poignantly the younger you go. And the president is clearly trying to address some of that, but I think it's like inequality, the notion of economic security is hard to sort of fully define and already get at it in a short-term immediate way. But it could be as he tries to address things like the student loan and education and investments, you know, instead of a wide way, these are things that are good for all sorts of issues and sort of preserving the middle class, but also narrow the inequality gap. You know, maybe you don't go at it for that reason, but for other reasons and it has that net effect. So I mean, that's probably the most optimistic assessment I could have in that regard. And I would answer with student, the student loan problem, I don't really think is a student loan problem per se. I think it's a cost of tuition problem. And the, what I thought writing my book was the most controversial policy solution I proposed was I said we need government price controls on college tuition and fees. And I send my manuscript off and then I, while it was off at the printers, I sat down to watch the state of the union address. Lo and behold, Barack Obama in the state of the union doesn't say, it doesn't call it, you know, government price controls on college tuition and fees, but he called for essentially the same thing. He said he was putting colleges and universities on notice that if they can't get these costs under control, the federal government would use its leverage to make them get them under control. Now what was remarkable, and I'd love to ask you about this, David, is that Republicans who will call Obama a socialist at the drop of a hat left this one entirely alone. The best I can come up with are two plausible explanations. One is that Republicans hate colleges and universities so much that they love the idea of them getting beaten up by the president. And the other is that Republicans send their kids to college and that they are as frightened as everybody else by the spiraling cost of a college education. I don't think it's a ladder there. I think they dropped the ball. I think in some ways I think they probably didn't believe that he was serious or that maybe that it could even be done, but I think if you put out a 10 point plan for price controls in colleges, you'd have Mitt Romney all over that pretty damn fast. So it's potentially a campaign issue for the fall. It's there for the picking. But it also gets back to what you asked about in terms of class warfare earlier too. It just seems to me that there is this tremendously embedded portion of our political DNA in which it goes back to the Pomerades and goes back to that anytime you talk about fairness, equality, there is this automatic reply that it's basically communism. It's basically non-American. We've talked in the last few days in the political world about birtherism because Trump has brought it back the last two days. And Mitt Romney says, of course he was born here. I don't believe any of this stuff. But what Mitt Romney has done again and again and again is to say that Obama has his government-centric vision for America. He wants to basically turn it into a European society where government does more and that he doesn't believe in business and markets and that he doesn't understand America. He doesn't get America. He doesn't believe America is unique or special. And it's all a way of playing into that same long tradition that he's different. He's the other that there are real Americans, as Ted Nugent would say, and non-real Americans. And he's not a real American. And if you talk about this sort of stuff, it's not really American. And it's a kind of debate which the president acknowledges in a lot of his speeches. It's this push and pull debate that we've had that goes back to the beginning of the nation. And I think Obama's not as good as TR, but has given a pretty good shot at trying to have and wage this debate from the progressive side as well as can be done at this point in our political culture. And I think it's a dangerous game actually for Romney to play because I just saw a poll the other day that showed demonstrably there is more racial prejudice against Mormons. I mean, there is more prejudice against Mormons than there is against African Americans. And it's a more socially acceptable prejudice. So if he wants to start calling Obama the other, that's an awkward theme for him to sound. Well, both of these books will be relevant for the coming campaign and debates showdown by David Corn and The Great Divergence by Tim Noah. And thank you both for being here and for you for joining us. Thank you.