← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
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Sam.
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Saint gonna change. Welcome friends, to edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those of our kids, those looming down the road, and those that Mr. Trump and the GOP that control our Congress may or may not get together to impose on us as we move forward. Before jumping into today's updates, a couple of announcements as you have become used to them. The first is a reminder that next Wednesday will be the second Wednesday of the month, namely May 10th. And that means we'll have our regular monthly Economic Update at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square, Thompson street, to be precise. And I want to invite you all, if you are in the New York area, if you're from this part of the country or you're visiting, please consider joining us at 7:30 in the evening. Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square Park. Very famous park. It's the only church on the park, as you will notice when you get there. We're very proud to be there. We welcome you all. It's a chance for me to meet you and vice versa, and a chance to go into these topics with more depth than is possible on the radio. So once again, May 10, Judson Memorial Church, 7:30pm Number two. I want to thank the many of you that have subscribed to our Democracy at Work YouTube channel. It's a way for you to see the video version of this program and to be very supportive of us at the same time because it builds our relationship in and through the YouTube community. So we're very grateful for you for doing that. And finally, because I don't want to forget, I want to remind you to make use of our websites rdwolff with two Fs com and democracyatwork.info both of those websites allow you to communicate with us what you like and don't like about the program. Both of those websites allow you with a click to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, allow you to see the kinds of work we're doing above and beyond this program, as well as being a complete archive of this program from the beginning back in March of 2011. So please make use of these websites to communicate with us, to partner with us in all the ways that our joint efforts and this joint project have in mind. It's important for us, I think it's also useful for you to take advantage of all that we do to literally, hour by hour, enrich and update both of those. Rdwolff with two Fs com and democracyatwork.info. all right, let's jump into the updates for this week, May of 2017, while all eyes are turned to France, where on the 7th, which may be before or after you actually see or hear this program, the second round of the presidential election. It's down to a struggle between the extreme right wing candidate, Marine Le Pen, and it's hard to put him in an exact category, but let's call him a middle of the road. Emmanuel Macron. These are the two who finished first and second and therefore they're in the runoff to become the next president of France. There's excitement and tension because it's a remarkable election in many ways. I'm not going to rehash what I've already said about this on the program or what's in the mainstream media. So let me focus you on a couple of dimensions you might otherwise miss Marine Le Pen is a classic Trump style politician. Her biggest campaign issue is being anti immigrant France. For the French immigrants to be reduced, to be sent out, to be limited in the scope of their influence on French culturall the rest. She also makes an effort, as Mr. Trump did, to reach out to working people by suggesting that the two major middle of the road parties have been very poor in addressing workers interests in France. And that's true enough. And she's hoping to appeal to working people and to make them more willing than they might otherwise be to vote for a candidate with such far right perspectives. And her hope is that what befell Mr. Trump will also befall her and that she will surprise folks because the polls show her lagging pretty badly in terms of the chances to win. On the other hand, Mr. Macron, he was an official in the Socialist government of Francois Hollande, a government that became so unpopular because it had promised the mass of the French people a relief from austerity and then didn't provide it, in fact became an administrator of the very austerity it had campaigned against. The French public did not forgive Mr. Hollande for this betrayal. There's really no nicer way to say it. And Mr. Macron saw his political future being either going down with Mr. Hollande's ill fated ship or cutting loose and becoming his own independent politician. He chose the latter road that would have made him unable to win in any case, except for the self destruction of the leading conservative candidate, Francois Fillon. Fillon, as the French pronounce it, who got caught giving government jobs to his wife and children and that basically plunged him out of the running. He came in third after Mr. Macron. So here we have it. A pretty stark race between an outsider, Marine Le Pen, a right winger, an anti immigrant nationalist, a France first, however you want to put it on the one hand, and the establishment on the other. Mr. Macron has been part of the Socialist Party establishment pretty much the way Mrs. Clinton was part of the Democratic Party establishment. And in France politics, socialist is pretty much what Democrat is. Here in the United States it has next to nothing to do with anti capitalism in any significant way. But here's the most important thing. The race is shaping up to be long shot for the right winger, easier shot for the middle of the road. It'll give France a chance to continue the middle of the road, the doing more or less what has been done, thereby driving the French working class into a greater and greater dead end. The very conditions that produced a surprising result of this election, as it did in Britain and the United States and Greece before, and Spain and Italy and so on. In other words, changing very little, which certainly doesn't augur well for France's future versus making a sharp turn to the right. And that seems to scare a majority of French people. But perhaps most interesting are the 20% of French people who voted for a relatively unknown Jean Luc Melanchon, a left winger who is critical of capitalism, who is openly welcoming anti capitalist politicians and policies of various kinds of not really a fundamental change of society. He either doesn't believe in it or hasn't felt that he can dare say so. So he dances around it, but more left wing than anybody else. And what's interesting is you see something parallel in France and its election with what happened in the United States. Mr. Melanchon's supporters are not about to be brow beaten by the publicity into voting against Marine Le Pen, whom they clearly don't want, and voting for the lesser evil, Mr. Macron, whom they have no reason to support either they are choosing in large numbers not to vote or not to vote for either of those two candidates. What in French politics is called spoiling your ballot. But it basically means sitting on your hands, something which a significant number of Bernie Sanders supporters also did when it came to choosing between Trump and Clinton. In other words, it's the beginning of the shaping up of a left wing that is becoming confident enough that it can and should build its own political operation, its own political party, and not to be simply always choosing between what other parties provide them with alternatives. That is the perhaps most important new development both in the United States and England on the one hand, and now in France on the other My next update is about our former President Barack Obama. This week it was announced that he has accepted to give a paid speech for an investment bank. The bank is named Cantor Fitzgerald, and they have an annual Health Economics Investors conference scheduled for September. And Mr. Obama has accepted to be the principal speaker there for a fee of $400,000. Now, you all know that during the race between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton, and indeed earlier in the primary struggles between Mrs. Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the question of giving highly paid speeches to Wall street banks came up more than a few times and charges were leveled and accusations made as to who's in whose pocket. I don't know who's in whose pocket, but I do have to report to you. If a former president of the United states accepts a $400,000 speaking fee for an evening's discussion paid for by a New York investment bank, that's an economic update I need to make, especially when I can add the following information. The chairman and chief executive of the Kander Fitzgerald Investment bank is one Howard Lutnick. You might be interested in who he supported during the last Republican primary. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Jeb Bush in his effort to become the presidential nominee. Then, some years earlier, in 2008, it turns out that the same Mr. Lutnick was a big supporter of John McCain, the very person who ran against Barack Obama in that election. Why do I bring this up? Because the head of a bank that gives regularly to major Republican candidates is perfectly happy to give money to a major candidate of the other party, suggesting, if you need such suggestions, that the people with a lot of money understand that they need to spread it around so that they are in good graces with whoever of the two particular parties wins. And that goes right to the first story of today, the establishment Republican and Democratic Party, Jeb Bush, John McCain, Barack Obama. Sure, you give money to them all because those basic parties are your allies. And if you give them money, you can count on them to be friendly to you. That's the very reason why people on the left like Sanders, like Melanchon in France and so on, and people on the right look upon the establishment, left or right part of the establishment as their problem and the problem that they have to solve. Next economic update. Well, I have to go back to corporate taxes. President Trump and the GOP keep talking about how they're going to do something about taxes, they're going to cut corporate taxes, as if this is a long overdue, very necessary, universally understood. It's none of those Things that is again, I can say the Republican and Democratic leadership, they support these sorts of things. But then again they get the big bucks. And then again they are the establishment. But let's you and I who aren't, let's talk turkey about corporate taxes. So let's begin. The official rate of corporate profits tax taxes that companies pay on the profits they earn is 35%. And the Trump administration and the Congress want to reduce it to 15%. At least that's the major conversation. That's a tremendous drop. But let's take a step back. Do corporations actually pay 35% of their profits? The answer is unambiguously no, and they haven't for many years. So common is it for corporations not to pay the 35% and by the way, for corporations in other countries not to pay whatever the official rates are there that economists long ago calculated something called the effective corporate tax rate. This is the rate which varies from country to country that takes into account the exemptions and deductions that corporations can use, their accountants can use to reduce the part of their profits they actually have to pay tax on. So here we go. The effective corporate tax rate back in the 1950s was 50%. That's right, 50%. Sizable. By 2011, it had dropped almost continuously. A couple of blips up and down, but a long term decline. So it was in the neighborhood of 15%. That's right, 50 to 15. Over the last 50 years, the effective corporate profits tax has dropped catastrophically. Corporations have been on the receiving end of our effective cuts in their tax rates for 50 years. They're not overdue for a tax cut. They don't need a tax cut. They have been blessed over and over again by tax cuts. It's a bit of a scandal. And let me drive it home in another way. The OECD compares the effective corporate tax rates among the 30 or so countries whose economics it monitors the average of all those countries, and they're mostly upper income industrialized economies like the United States. The average is 16.1% the United States. And these are averages for 2000, 2005, the latest data we have that is comparative. The average for OECD countries in that five year period was 16%. The rate for the United States over those five years, 13.4%. We're not average. We're not even marginally below average. We're one of the five lowest corporate tax rate advanced industrial countries in the world. Our tax rate is much lower than, for example, I'm going to pick the high One. So you can see Australia, Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium, Spain, Japan and so on all have much higher effective corporate tax rates than we do. The notion that our capitalist corporations can't compete in the world because of the tax rate is simply nonsense. And no amount of repeating it changes that, unless you don't want to believe it in the first place. The next update has to do with that remarkable bank, Wells Fargo. As you all know from this program and others, it got caught over the last year having faked hundreds of thousands. Some estimates go as high as 2 million fake accounts. Accounts that were created for people who had not authorized it, who did not permit it. People who were suddenly confronted with credit card bills and account fees for accounts they didn't know they had and certainly had never signed on to have. It has become clear that particularly Latin American, Latino American communities were targeted for this sort of behavior. And it's been going on since 2002. So about 15 years, Wells Fargo got caught. They admitted it. They paid some fines. And so it was interesting earlier this year when they had a session of their stockholders, because it turned out that the company's stock took a dive when it got caught doing all of this illegal activity. Their chief executive was summarily bounced out. But the people who run a bank are the board of directors, roughly 12 to 15 people in most cases. So the question came, what would the stockholders do to vent their upset that their investment had become less valuable because of the illegal, immoral, unethical behavior of this board of directors? Unless, of course, you believe that the board of directors knew nothing about any of this for 15 years. And so a large number of shareholders came to the annual meeting determined not to vote. As you do at each meeting. Each meeting of a board of shareholders decides whether to reelect the board of directors. That's how governance of corporations works. So at this year's meeting, shareholders came and didn't want these directors anymore. An awful lot of them came. It was pretty close. It looked like you might get the 50% or more to vote against at least some of the directors as a sign that you can't do this kind of thing and simply keep your job, as if you hadn't done this. Illegal, immoral, costly, damaging to the millions of people who had phony accounts set up, damaging to the people who invest their money in this bank, et cetera. Arrived the savior, Warren Buffett. He owns a big chunk of Wells Fargo shares, and his judgment was, these are good guys, they made a mistake, he voted to keep them, and so they all kept their jobs. Nobody lost their position on the board of directors because Warren Buffett, a single man, made a decision. And we allow in our society a single man to make a decision. And because he has a lot of money, he can keep in power a bank that has literally violated the fundamental trust of the people who it, quote, unquote, has as clients, the people who it has as customers, and all the rest of the. A comment on our capitalist system. And there's not much more I can say. The last update is also one about taxes. And this one has to do with a scandal. One more scandal. You've heard a bunch of others. One more won't hurt you this time. It has to do with the trillions. That's how much it is now. Trillions of dollars of profits earned by American corporations, led by the names like Apple, Google, and so on, that they've earned on foreign activities, or at least what they can claim are activities abroad. Under American tax law, if you earn money on activities abroad and you don't bring it back to the United States, you don't have to pay taxes on it. You can keep it in an account overseas. And. And so they have enormous accounts, literally hundreds of billions of dollars when you add them up, over trillion of money that is kept in accounts overseas by these big corporations. Now, let's be real clear. That denies to the United States the taxes on that profit that these companies are escaping. That means hundreds of billions of dollars the United States government does not have to help people with their social needs, to help students who need loans, to help maintain our infrastructure, to develop our schools and medical facilities. You get it? We don't have that money because we permit those corporations to escape their taxes. Well, do they? The same corporations, having not paid the taxes we need, and they should have on their profits, taking advantage of the law their lobbyists helped to write, we now have a further crisis. They claim that we ought to give them a tax holiday. We ought to let them bring the money back without having to pay taxes, because look at the wonderful benefits we'll all have when that money comes back into the United States. The implication being it will then be used by these companies to hire people to expand production. In other words, suddenly, for the good of the country, having not paid the taxes they should have for years, they should be rewarded by being allowed to bring that money back without ever paying any of the taxes that they should have paid all along. That's really what they're proposing. Well, I've talked about this in the past. I wouldn't be bringing it up again if it weren't for the following wrinkle that's important for everyone to understand. Those same corporations who are holding hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign accounts to avoid paying taxes on them have wanted to take that money. Not to use it to increase production, not to use it to hire people. They've wanted to use it to pay higher salaries to their top executives and to pay out dividends to the investors who own their shares. And they found a way to do it. And once I explain it to you, you'll see why that gives the lie to the claim. If we give them the tax holiday that Trump has, by the way, suggested he may do, we're not going to get the good results for our job situation that they promise. Here's why. These companies have used the piles of cash that they have in foreign accounts by going to local banks here in the United States and borrowing roughly 70% of all the money that they have sitting in those foreign accounts. They borrowed them in this country saying to themselves, look, it's cheaper for us to pay very low interest rates on these huge loans, 1%, 2%, because we're saving all the taxes we would otherwise have to pay if we brought that money home so we can borrow the money here in the United States. And what do they use it for? To pay higher salaries to their top executives and to buy back shares of their stock from their investors. In other words, they distributed it to their executives and to their shareholders so that if they bring that money back the way they now claim we should be allowed to do without paying taxes, you know what they're going to have to do with it? They're going to have to pay back the loans to the banks. There's not going to be any money to hire millions of people. It's all a fraud. They have used the way finance works to borrow here in the United States, the money that they needed to take care of who they take care of, executives and shareholders and investors, so that when that money finally comes back, it'll just be used to pay off the debts. We know what they're going to do with it. They because they already did that. This is a fundamental demonstration that to take seriously the arguments for corporate tax cuts is to be gullible and to be at the play of the people who are running this system for their own immediate benefit. End of story. We've come to the end of the first half of economic update for today. Since this is the first session of the month of May, I will Very shortly, shift over and interview Dr. Harriet Frad on the intersection of economics and psychology. I know that many of you are interested because you let us know. Stay with us. We'll be right back for that interview. Try me out for the evening. Living in a. Your figure is a dar Take me to that fire. One better off alone. One who helps me to the side Take me to that room get me through this night. I'm better off with water. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. For this charming part of May 2017, as it is the first of our May programs, I want to introduce Dr. Harriet Fraad, who is with us on the first of each monthly program. Dr. Fraad is a mental health counselor and hypnotherapist in private practice in New York City. She writes a great deal in a variety of publications. You can find her work at Harriet Fraud. That's F R a a d harrietfraud.com and she also blogs at our website, democracyatwork.info where you can also find her work. Dr. Fraad, thank you very much for being with us.
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It's a pleasure.
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All right, We've decided, you and I, in preparing this program, to talk about this remarkable concept that's remarkable, particularly here in the United States, called family values. And by that seems to be meant two things that we're having a difficult time putting together. And I want to draw you out with your psychological insights, particularly. On the one hand, we are a society that makes a great claim in a variety of places to being committed to the family as an institution, to the values of family life, of family relationships and all of that, and the importance of family. On the other hand, if you look at our economy the way we do on this program, you will be acutely aware that particularly over the last 30 or 40 years, whether you look at the stagnation of income, of the need for women to go out to work in order to sustain even basic family incomes, if you see the shrinkage of supports of various kinds that the government used to provide for people, assaults on the funding of public schools and all kinds of other facilities, you begin to get the feeling that the economy doesn't somehow share the family values that the rest of the society talks about, the divorce rate, the teen pregnancy rate, the number of young people choosing not to get married. I mean, it could be on and on. Is there some disconnect? Is there some contradiction that you can explain to us between an economic system that seems to undermine family in many cases and a cultural overlay that celebrates.
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It I think they're really closely related because on the one hand, you have people like Trump and the religious right trumpeting family values while they take away every support that families need to be able to survive. And that's because family values rhetoric is a cover for taking away government support from families. Whether it's the people who were organizing against providing public education to all children or under Reagan, the people organized and siding with Reagan to limit Head Start for all American children. They cite the sanctity of family values and family decisions as a reason not to support families. And that's a cover. The whole thing is about saving money for their priorities, which is more for the rich and more for the munitions industry, which is one of the wealthiest industries, in fact, the wealthiest, that we have.
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Who are the they that you're referring to?
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I'm talking about people like Trump and the Republicans who support them and many of the Democrats as well. I'm talking about the wealthy who want to maintain a low tax environment with more and more money for themselves and less and less for the 99%. And one of the things that every other Western industrialized nation seems to understand and be able to admit, and they have completely confused and not admitted, is that families don't exist without support. The human family has never existed without support. In the earliest caves, they never found people alone. They found people in groups. People lived in tribes and groups. Later, people lived in extended families so that the isolated nuclear family was never capable of taking care of a child. Now people say, wait a minute, that's nature. Animals take care of their babies. You know, mother lions are very nurturing with their little cubs and so on. So of course people will take care of their babies. That's not true. Human beings are social animals. The size of a baby's brain, when it's born is the size of a delicious apple or a small fist by the time that baby dies. Even if it's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, the brain is about the size of a Nerf football. That brain grows from neuronal connections built socially. We are social creatures. And the proof of the matter in the United States now that parent that just because you're pregnant doesn't mean you're going to be able to or willing to take care of the needs of an utterly dependent child for 24 hours a day, highly unlikely, illogical proposition, is that five American children are killed every day by their parents, overwhelmingly by their parents. They're abused or neglected to death. Those children who need most parental care are most likely to be killed. In fact, the figures are that the chance of death by maltreatment is three times greater for children under one than it is for children from one to four. And kids from one to four have twice the risk of being killed as kids from 5 to 14. The younger you are, the less likely you're going to have some state support in school and the less likely it is that you'll be able to run away, the more likely it is you're going to get hurt or you're going to get killed.
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Now, so the argument really is, if I hear you correctly, that successful family requires a whole network of supports in the larger community, some of which are going to be provided by whatever governmental apparatus, federal, regional, local, because that's how we solve most of the problems we have as communities to organize, whether it's the police department or the fire department or the school department, the ways of supporting our communal life.
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That's right. And the United States has the greatest amount of child abuse. And of course, our high rates of child abuse are very much low estimates. Children don't file reports and so that most child abuse is never reported. And so that you have a terrible situation because Americans don't get help. Look at the difference in a young mother's life. If she's a teen mother in France, she has a social worker assigned to her for five years. If she's a teen mother in the United States, too bad for her. Trump suggested let the angels help. By angels, he means people who feel charitable.
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And is your basic argument that the shortage, the rarity, the inadequacy of supports for the family is driven by finances? That is, it's driven by a general anti tax mentality that says we're not going to give the government what it would have to have to provide these supports.
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It's driven by that same greed. However, it's masked in the language of the sanctity of the family into which the state should never intervene?
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Well, let's talk a little bit about that because that's a very key part here in the United States, this notion that somehow the conservatives, religious or not, are protecting us from the evil imposition or insertion of the government into the privacy and sanctity of the family. What is it that you have to say about that kind of story that's presented as the rationale for not having the government involved?
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Well, partly it's the terrible right wing ideology that has spread throughout the Democrats and the Republicans where they have not said we need government support, that the government is your Savior not is some kind of external evil, outside intervention that must be fought. And so we've allowed that ideology. In addition, people don't feel their government helps enough and so they're quick to villainize that. And we don't have the anti capitalist forces that said, no, that isn't. It's corporate America that outsourced your job and mechanized and robotized and made you unemployed and cut your benefits for their money. It's a muted voice in the United States.
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But then you're basically suggesting that the conservatives and so forth are doing the work of the corporations and the rich. They're providing a cover for their refusal to spend the money to take care of massive people by making it not about saving money, which would be an ugly admission to make, but instead making it a very politicized, principled notion of.
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The sanctity of this family. And really, family is falling apart in the United States. Not only aren't people getting married, but there are foster children. There are more foster children than ever. Many, many more grandparents have to take care of their children now because parents aren't capable of it. Child abuse figures are spiking. Child deaths go up. Nobody can avoid. If you read the newspaper a story of somebody who's beaten their kids to death or throwing them in front of a train or whatever they do, or the pictures of people who have passed out or died from overdoses with their kids in the car, it's breaking down and that's known. But they don't care. They just want more money at the top. And the evangelical community is divided. But perhaps the biggest of the evangelical community is focused on family. A perfect example. It brings in over $118 billion a year in donations and gifts and grants just to keep up its property. It pays over $101 million a year. And it has campaigned against every progressive support for families. And I think that's because religion has lost its relevance in the business community. When you are running a business, you don't think, what is the ethical way to do this? How do I take care of my fellow men and women here? You think, how do I maximize profits and lower costs? That's the logic of capitalism. Not because you're evil, but that's the way. You're a, quote, good business person in capitalism, right? So religion's influence is in the family.
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In other words, they've.
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They'Ve retreated from the rest and they want that to be felt. They don't want the kind of supports, the kind of preschool and after school and summer programs that other countries give the kind of support for young parents they want to be, that it erodes their only source of relevance in people's lives, support for their families.
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So the churches becoming part of this alliance to talk endlessly about family values and yet not to block a society.
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From undercutting them by, in fact, to support the undercutting. And that isn't the whole evangelical community. The evangelical community is divided. But in terms of the biggest, richest, like focus on the family, it's unambiguous. And it's something I've thought about because I thought, wait a minute, if you care about families, well, maybe they don't care so much about families as buttressing their own positions. And that would make sense.
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I remember once years ago being in Paris and coming out of the hotel where I was staying and seeing a demonstration on the street in front of us and inquiring and looking at what was going on, I noticed that the issue was that the government had threatened to withdraw support for daycare centers that were a very important part of every community in Paris.
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Everyone.
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And their marching arm in arm were people carrying the red flag who represented the Communist Party of this area, marching arm in arm with nuns for from a local Roman Catholic church. France is a Catholic country. And they were all together demanding that the government do this. And the government the next day withdrew the bill because as the headline said, if the communists and the nuns are together, your government cannot proceed. There was a clear then example of a religious institution having it very clear that its notion of family and what is to be done for family meant they wanted the government to continue to provide daycare for the young people. And they were out in the streets as nuns advocating for that result.
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They were. And France provides daycare for under threes for a dollar an hour. And then starting at 3 years old, free daycare for everyone. And at every daycare center, free for children from three to five, there is a trained pediatric nurse, there's a sick room so that kids can go and be taken care of while their parents work. And they have fewer percentage of their mother's work than do in the United States. They have after school programs, they have summer programs. Their programs can never cost more, even if it's a summer program, than 15% of your salary. They have a huge network of child supports. Every other western industrialized, wealthy country does. We are way, way behind. And people were fighting for that because it's the backbone of support for their family. Plus they get family allowances if they have more than two children they get money for the government. They also get school allowances to have their children's school paid for. And the logic is, you are creating the next generation of workers. Why should it only be your responsibility and not the societies that will benefit from your work? That is a very American perversion, putting it all on the backs of parents who can't afford it and more and more who can't. 40% of children are with a single mother. And our daycare situation is another example. 90% of Americans children who are in daycare are in programs that are not quality programs. That's government information.
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Well, you know, I'm reminded of the relevance of the recent struggles over the Affordable Care act, which are still ongoing. If you look at that act, it brought 21 million more families, at least into some kind of medical insurance. It doesn't take a genius to understand that to deprive a family of medical insurance threatens the family, threatens the health of the parents, threatens therefore the viability of that family unit to survive. If a parent gets sick, how are they going to pay for the cost?
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Or if a child gets sick, how are they going to manage the daycare?
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So the stresses and strains put on a family by not covering them is obvious. And yet the entire Republican establishment has been trying to figure out ways with Mr. Trump of cutting the Obamacare, risking withdrawal in one of the various versions of coverage for millions of people. And the truth of it is, when you look at it as an economist, it's clear that the upset comes from the fact that the price to pay for it was paid for by taxing wealthy people who don't want to pay that tax.
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Right.
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But you can't have it both ways. If the people who run the political parties who run this system don't want to pay, then the pradling or the babbling about family values is undercut by the reality that their tax programs are destroying the very thing they claim, perhaps in church on Sunday, to be in favor of, but they're not. That contradiction seems very stark since one of the first things you would do to support a family would be to take the anxiety of getting sick out of all the other stresses and strains that destroy family life.
- [49:43]
A
Right. Plus, a sick child means you can't go to work and you don't have childcare that takes care of them. We should bear in mind that one of the reasons 90% of children who are in daycare or in less than quality daycare is the average daycare costs Americans $16,000 a year. So children are in terrible Situations, they're left alone. They're put in a room, crowded, watching television and wet diapers. They're constantly at risk because parents have to work. 40% of mothers are the sole support of their children. And so you're abandoning the next generation. Now in the United States, those people who are saving money maybe don't care. They're going to export these people's jobs anyway, let them die. And the actual situation is such that they are dying. The United States life expectancy rate is now going down. People are dying younger. White people are dying younger, and babies are dying. We have less. We have a higher rate of babies dying, the mortality rate of newborns, and a lower rate of life expectancy than Cuba, a poor island, because they make that a priority. We don't. And the philosophy is basically, saves money, let them die. But they're not going to say that. They're going to say, family values, we're not going to intervene in these families. Or Obamacare is too controlling or whatever ideological flux.
- [51:32]
B
It mandates things. This portrayal of health insurance, you know, it was a very clever thing over the years of a capitalist development when the government came in and did all the things that private capitalism couldn't do for the working class, whether it's provide them pensions a la Social Security, or medical care, insurance a la Medicare and Medicaid. When the government came in and did all this, the fear of the people who run this society was that they would have to pay for all of this.
- [52:05]
A
They was going to have to pay.
- [52:06]
B
So they had to change the whole way and make the government negative, evil, scary, intrusive, so that people would have a gut sense that they shouldn't look for that solution. Meanwhile, there is no other solution for them. This is an economy that has not raised real wages for workers in 40 years. It has plunged families now into debt to keep up their standards of living. The debt is another cause of anxiety on top of their stagnant incomes. I mean, it's amazing that we don't have more breakup of our families than we do. And meanwhile, trying to hold this craziness together is this ideology of we're so committed to family values. It kind of blows your mind when you confront it.
- [52:56]
A
It does. And what you have to look at is you have to say, okay, what happened? Now, part of it is in Europe, all over Europe, and in all the other Western wealthy countries, there are all of these benefits. Maternity leaves, paternity leaves, family leaves, guaranteed vacations, health insurance, public daycares, health insurance. Even in Canada, just on our Border. However, we successfully crushed the left in the 50s, which would have had a voice for support, supporting vulnerable people and supporting families. And the left has not had that voice. The left would promise hope to the.
- [53:46]
B
Forgotten because it could say a left, if it was willing to do this and to buck the system here of that's developed, would be the one to take the bull by the horns, if you pardon the metaphor and say if you really want to have family values, if you want to save the family as an institution, these are the government supports that are necessary to make that possible, as they have been in every other society.
- [54:17]
A
Absolutely, you'd have to.
- [54:18]
B
And you'd have to aggressively push that kind of an argument. Otherwise you're always going to be in the defensive against people who portray the government as a burdensome intrusion, as if some other way could be found to support the family. And I guess the religious people think if you go to church enough, that'll do it. But you do need concrete, real supports too, not just those that come from.
- [54:44]
A
Well, the church gives supports in a lot of ways. It gives supports in making people who the system has made to feel irrelevant, relevant in the eyes of God and the church. It is. Carl Marx said religion is the sigh of the oppressed. Very compassionately he said that religion is a haven in a heartless world. Religion is the opium of the people. And I think now religion is embattled. Fewer people are religious. God hasn't brought home the pork chops, that's for sure. And also people have found real opiates. Maybe religion was the opium of the people before. Now heroin is the opium of the people. And heroin overdoses are the biggest cause of accidental death. And so they're competing with these other things, real opium and people's disillusionment with a church that didn't deliver. And so they're pushing. We are the only source for the family, and they are not the friends of people who want actual government support for families, without which families are utterly falling apart.
- [55:59]
B
Kids, you could be very sardonic here and suggest that the churches are trying to become the only thing that a broken family can turn to, when in fact it could fix the system and it wouldn't be broken in the first place. But the churches maybe are hesitant to go there since what role is then left for them?
- [56:18]
A
Right, a much smaller role, which is what religion has in the rest of wealthy industrialized nations. Also, you have the problem that the left has not been strong enough to offer hope and promise and a chance and real family values in the United States, that's just beginning, where people are looking at what's coming down in terror and starting to unite. But those forces are far more powerful. It was the left that organized those demonstrations. Even if the nuns joined them, it was the left who champions childcare centers in France and elsewhere.
- [57:03]
B
Will you come back and continue this conversation?
- [57:05]
A
Of course. Or start another one? Whatever you want.
- [57:08]
B
All right. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you all for listening. I want to remind you, be a partner of this program. Make use of what you learn here. Share it with those that are friends and neighbors through social media, through conversation. I want to thank truthout.org that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that has been a solid partner of ours for all these years. This is Richard Wolff. This is Economic Update. And I look forward to being with you again next week. Change, change, change, change, change, change Things gonna change. Sam.