A (0:10)

Welcome friends to another edition of Economic Update. It's a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Debts, jobs, incomes, our own and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics professor all my adult life and I hope that that enables me to provide some useful updates on what is happening to the economy around the world. Before jumping into the program today, I want to remind and invite those of you that either live and work in the greater New York area or who might be visiting that the next monthly Economic Update, the one that I do in person at the Judson Memorial Church in in Lower Manhattan, will take place on Wednesday May 9th at 7:30. That's the Judson Memorial Church right on Washington Square. You can't miss it. Wednesday, May 9th at 7:30. Please, if you'd like to meet me and give me a chance to meet you, here's a way to do a live session of Economic Update. And I look forward to those of you that might be in New York on May 9th to join me there. And then I want to begin today's updates by a discussion of something that has existed for a long time in Germany. But I recently had occasion to discover how few people in the United States at least have any idea about what the Germans have now taken for granted. The word in German is called Mitbestimung. That's a mouthful. And let me tell you what it means. The loose translation in English is co determination, helping to make the decisions. Where does this Mitbestemung, where does it occur? It occurs in enterprises that's right, inside corporations in Germany by law. The law that set this up, most famous law that set this up was passed in 1976 in Germany. And the law specifically entitles workers to elect their own representatives to sit on the board of directors of German companies. Here's how it for all companies that have 2,000 or more workers, the workers and the workers alone elect just under 50% of the members of the board of directors. Remember, the board of directors is the one that makes the basic decisions in a corporation. What to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the profits. This gives workers a direct representative place at the table for corporate decisions. For companies with 500 to 2,000 workers, 1/3 of the board of directors is elected by the workers. Let me give you an idea of the logic behind this. The assumption in Germany and in the law is that the owners, the shareholders of a corporation and the board of directors they select the majority of will be Looking out in running the corporation for what's good for them, that is the shareholders and their representatives will do what's good for the shareholders. Therefore, if you want a corporation, the Germans reason to also be responsive to the needs of the workers, then they must have a seat at the deciding table. Also they have to have workers representatives in the room at the table. When the basic decisions about what a corporation does are deliberated, debated and decided. And that's the law. Corporations must do that. And they have been doing it now for almost half a century. By the way, German capitalism has a better record over the last 20 years than American capitalism has. A much lower unemployment rate, has a much greater role growth of wages and so on. That's not even all that the Germans do. They have a second law which gives all workers in every workplace the right to form what's called a workers council. Elected entirely by workers, it exists virtually in every workplace in Germany. And it's to be the representative of, of the workers in the decision making of the corporation. Now please note with me, Germany also has trade unions. The trade unions are a voluntary association that workers can or cannot choose to join, to build and so on. And the unions struggle with the employers over big questions like wages and basic conditions of work. But the day to day organized work of how you run a corporation, how people treat each other, how much information workers have about what the corporation is or isn't doing, that's taken care of by the representatives on the board of directors and by the works councils. It is a stunning example that one can have a modern capitalism, perhaps one of the most efficient of modern capitalisms. And the efficiency has not been compromised by giving workers a role. On the contrary, it's one of the most efficient capitalisms in the world. And even the capitalists in Germany credit the relationship with the workers that they've had to accept. They fought it at first, but they've had to accept it as being an engine of, of progress, even for German capitalism. Let me be clear. The owners of the shares, the corporate executives, they still run the show, but they have to run it with an eye on what the impact of any decision they make is on workers. Because the workers are going to know about it, the workers representatives are going to know a lot of the information behind it. And you're not going to be able to trample on workers the way you do in, in places like England and the United States. That may have something to do, for example, with the fact that in Germany there's a national health insurance that covers Every person from birth to death. It may have something to do with the fact that the tuitions at all universities in Germany today are zero. Not just for German citizens, but for any citizen, any, anywhere, who comes to and is accepted for entry to a German university. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. My next update has to do with research done by something called the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, itep. And if you're interested in what I'm about to go over with you, you can always go to the web and find iTunesP, which does this research. And the research I'm going to report to you about has to do with corporations who have access to a lot of special conditions in the tax code that allow them to reduce the amount of taxes they have to pay. I want to stress here, these are things these corporations have done before. The mammoth tax cut that was given to them last December by Trump and the Republican Party. Before that, there were already many, many gimmicks inserted into the law, usually by the lobbyists for the companies that benefited from the law being changed in this particular way. Okay, here we go. First, there was a group of 15 corporations that ITEP found interesting. Together, these 50. These are major corporations in the United States. If I had more time, I'd give you all their names, but we don't. These 15 major corporations together in the year 2017, the year just passed, together, made $24.5 billion worth of profits. We're talking about big corporations. That's just their profits. Okay, these 15 companies that made roughly $25 billion in profits were able to get. This is what I want you to Pay attention to. $1.4 billion in rebates from the United States Treasury. Let me explain again to make sure you get it. These 15 companies made 15 billion. Excuse me. These 15 companies made $25 billion in profits. The taxes they paid on that were zero because of gimmicks in the law. They got the government to give them 1.4 billion in rebates. So ITEP calculates ready that their combined tax rate, these 15 mega corporations were, was minus 5.6%. Try to imagine what it would be like if you got a salary. You worked all year. The tax bill on the salary was nothing, zero. And the government sent you some money as a rebate so that your tax rate would be minus something. I'll give you one company's name because it's in the news a lot and I thought you'd enjoy it. Amazon received a $137 million federal rebate on its 5.4 billion in US profits in 2017. That's an effective tax rate for Amazon of minus 2.5%. And lest you miss the implications, Amazon made $5.4 billion in profit. It paid no tax whatsoever. That is their contribution to the costs of the United States government. Schools, hospitals, roads, national defense, you name it, was zero. But on top of it, they got a rebate of $137 million. And where did the government get the 137 to give to Amazon? On top of them not being required to pay any taxes? Well, there, on behalf of Amazon, I want to thank all of you. Because you paid the taxes that allowed Amazon to have a negative tax rate. Your tax rate is positive. Amazon's isn't. Who's laughing on the way to which bank? As we speak, I need to bring to your attention a remarkably ugly example of the mixture of capitalism and politics from one of my favorite states, Kentucky. They recently passed a law which really requires that kind of shaking of the head that you all know what that means. A law was passed that allowed only one kind of doctor with one kind of specialty to evaluate the illnesses of of miners suffering from black lung disease. Previous to this law, a variety of different doctors could be the evaluators of how sick a person was a minor from having contracted black lung disease. When you work in the mines, why is this important? The law in Kentucky requires that victims of the epidemic of black lung disease must be compensated. They get a benefit covering their medical expenses and so on. That has to be paid either by the coal companies for whom they worked or by the insurance companies that are maintained by those coal companies. But how much you get and whether you get any benefits and depends on how you are evaluated by a doctor. I hope you're beginning to get this story. The doctors in question, right, that were the kinds that were allowed and uniquely allowed, are connected to coal companies. Oh, goodness. So a coal company connected doctor is the only one allowed to evaluate one whether a victim of black lung disease is indeed a victim of black lung disease and has the disease and therefore qualifies for the benefits. Clearly, the doctor who decides you're not qualified saves the coal company or the insurance company of the coal company lots of bucks. How to take the law, how to take politics and make it work so that the coal companies can either save on their insurance premiums or save on the money they would otherwise have to pay to the people who got sick working in the mines. What a connection of capitalism and politics. Before going on to my next update, I want to remind you, as we often do at this point in the program, that we maintain two websites, rdwolff with two Fs.com and democracyatwork.info that's all one word, democracyatwork.info. those websites are available to you 247 at no charge ever. Through those websites you can communicate to us and let us know what you like and don't like, would like to see on the program, which we urge you to do. Likewise, you can follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If you are interested in viewing this program as a video rather than simply audio, please check us out at patreon.com P A T R E O N and I want to take this moment to thank our Patreon community folks that regularly go to patreon.com economicupdate to see the video version. They are a very loyal group, a very supportive group, and I want you to know that everyone associated with this program appreciates their interest and their ongoing support. We also maintain Podcasts Left out and Puerto Rico Forward. Other podcasts are in the works that we hope to add soon. The Puerto Rico Forward is available on Apple Podcasts and Google Play as well. Take a look at our websites folks. Take a look at our Facebook and Twitter accounts. I think you will find them very rewarding and interesting. Let's return the Federal Reserve bank of San Francisco did some research recently that I wanted to bring to your attention. The federal government keeps records not only of how many people are working or unemployment or are unemployment, but also a more finely investigated set of statistics. And the one that I want to talk to you about are people who have part time jobs. And they work it out even more detail than that because they distinguish between people on part time jobs who want a part time job and people who are on a part time job. In the language of the government, involuntarily, that is they want a full time job but they could not find one and they had to settle for a full time part time job. I thought you might be interested to know that in 2017, the last year for which we have data, involuntary part time employment was higher by many millions than the number of involuntary part timers back in 2006, which was the last year before the crash of 2007 and 8. Why am I telling you this again? Because it is my job, partly, as I conceive it, to let you know that when you hear the phrase recovery applied to the American economy since the crash of 2007 2008, you are probably wondering if you're like most Americans, if there's a recovery, why is my situation so un. Recovery like. So I'm here to explain to you that you're right. The use of the word is what's wrong? We don't have a recovery. Or to be more accurate, we have a recovery. For a small share of the American population, the big majority have not had a recovery. Even if they got a job after being unemployed, the job was lower paid, fewer benefits, less security, or in the case of the statistics gathered and reported on by the Federal Reserve bank of San Francisco, you were more likely to be an involuntarily part time employee than before. That's not a recovery, folks. It means you're maybe not as bad off today as you were in 2009, 10 and 11. But recovery, if it has any real meaning, means that whatever your situation was before the crash of 2007 and 08 has been reacquired by you. That hasn't happened. Those jobs, most of those good jobs that left haven't been recovered. They're not there. And anymore they're either replaced by computers and robots or they've been moved to other parts of the world where people can be paid much less than you. The next economic update is about the problem of eviction in the United States. I haven't spent a lot of time talking about that, so I wanted to do that in two ways. First, a few years ago a book was written and, and you know, it says relevant today as it was four or five years ago when it was published. The author is Matthew Desmond, D E S M O N D and the book was called Evicted. Easy title to remember. It got a lot of attention. People like Bill Gates and former President Obama named it among the best books. It was a they had read and it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Desmond's team of researchers has been doing work and I want to report to you on the work in the book. But also since the book, he's even developed an eviction lab that studies evictions. So here's some of the things he found that I think shed light on the American economy and, and once again on the very questionable nature of that so called recovery we're supposed to believe in, here are the most stunning statistics. In the many, many communities that they studied, they found that on average 1 in 50 renter households had been evicted. The figure was 1 in 25 households had been evicted in Milwaukee and 1 in 9 in Richmond, Virginia. If you looked even further In Richmond, as they did, you discovered that one in five renter households were threatened with eviction in 2016, even though not all of them got to that point. I want to talk to you about what this entails. Number one, an eviction is a losing proposition for both the landlord and the tenant. For the landlord, it usually means that the landlord has been unable to collect the rent for some period of time. Given the expenses the landlord has in maintaining the property, this is a loss for the landlord of income, for the family, the tenant, the renter. It's, of course, much more tragic because that family has to go through the trauma of being literally thrown out of their home. And typically that's the husband and the wife and the children and perhaps some elderly relatives that are being taken care of. The shame, the costs, the dislocation, the interrupted schooling. You can imagine, for those of you that haven't even gone through it, what an eviction is as an experience shaking up the lives of every person there. In many cases, evictions occur because the people being processed by the landlord don't understand the law, don't have access to a lawyer, don't even show up in court, which automatically means a judgment against them. Here's something that struck me. For the evictions that they studied across the United States, the median amount of rent owed by the family was $686. Now, folks, no matter how you count, to subject a family of fellow American citizens to the trauma of an eviction, the adults, the children, in order to resolve a matter of 686, if that's the median, it means half of the people evicted owed less than $686. What kind of a society puts people through that kind of a trauma for that amount of money? It's a real question whether you should put any family through such a trauma, period. But for that, you know what this means. I haven't done the arithmetic, but I could. That if a single person like Jeff Bezos took his hundred billion dollars of assets and made 10 billion of that available, leaving him with 90 billion, which would still leave him the richest person in this country, that $10 billion would resolve and remove the need to evict anyone in the United States for a couple of years, what morality, what commitment to family values allows what I just said to be true? And it is true. What's the problem here? I don't think the problem is the tenant, and I don't think the problem is the landlord either. The problem is we don't have an economy that can provide to America's families the jobs, the supports and the income that would allow them to have a decent home. Occupy it like everybody else. We are subjecting a sizable number of people to a fundamentally irrational waste of resources and of their lives for amounts of money that shouldn't in a million years be allowed to cause such damage. My last update, and we're pressed for time, has to do with Mr. Trump's tariffs on on China. He proposes the the Chinese, he says, are terrible. They put a 25% tariff on US cars, making US cars more expensive for Chinese citizens, who therefore don't buy very many of them. In all of his tirades, he neglects to mention that the United States has had since 1963, a 25% tariff on trucks made outside the United States and brought here. That's right, the United States does and has been for 50 years, exactly what Mr. Trump finds so objectionable in what the Chinese do, who haven't had their tariff on anywhere near as long. That's only one of the many contradictions in all of this tariff conversation. Here's the truth, folks. It's all about looking a certain way to the media and to Mr. Trump's political base. It makes no economic sense. It isn't justified. It's kind of nonsense, pure theater for the votes and maybe a few extra profits for some of the car companies, although they certainly couldn't get those profits if they got access to China for their cars and China got access to the United States for their trucks. We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. I hope you found these economic updates interesting. Please stay with us after a very short break. We will be right back. Welcome back to the second half of today's edition of Economic Update. In this second half, we're going to devote ourselves to two major issues that bear some discussion. And in both cases, the issue we're discussing is a response to the many, many folks like you who have emailed us or communicated otherwise to us that they want these topics dealt with on the program. We appreciate your interest. We appreciate your taking the time and trouble to ask these questions. And so here are the discussions we hope will respond to your interest. The first one has to do with this ever present and ever thorny topic of socialism. What exactly is it? Where does it come from? What what does it mean? And what are the different meanings attached to it? Since it is entering our political discussions again in a way that it really hasn't for quite a few years, until the crash of 2008 put capitalism in such a bad light that people became more interested again in looking at this question of socialism. Let's begin by talking briefly about the very word. Socialism, for at least the last 150 to 200 years, has been, in a way, the other of capitalism, the critique of capitalism, the alternative to capitalism. And that's kind of interesting because you'd think that the alternative to the name of a system like capitalism would be the name of another system, but that's not really how it started. Socialism wasn't the name of a system because for most of its history, there wasn't a system to attach it to. It was a critique of capitalism. It was a way of thinking about capitalism that was supported by, endorsed by people who were critical of capitalism, didn't like it, who basically thought we could do better as a human race than capitalism, and called this critical approach to capitalism socialism. But why did they? You may be interested to know. It's because capitalism was connected in people's mind with something called individualism, the notion that what was unique about this new system that comes into existence around the time of the French and American revolutions and takes over the world in the period since, that this new system was fundamentally different from the systems, the big systems that had preceded it. Slavery on the one hand, feudalism on the other. In those systems, whoever you were born to determined your role in life. You weren't free in the sense that that word came to have meaning. If you were born to a slave, ipso facto you were a slave. If you were born a master, ipo facto, you weren't a slave. You were destined to become a master too. And ditto was serf and lord. With capitalism, however you were born, and it was kind of open, you could become an employer, you could become an employee. You weren't necessarily one or the other. If you were born to a worker, it didn't mean you couldn't be an employer and vice versa. So there was this notion that in capitalism, everything was about the individual. Everything that happened to you was a result of whatever you could achieve, whatever you undertook. And that was really different from being born into a society where the person you were born to determined your fixed place in a system. So capitalism prided itself, as it still does, on its individualism. And the critics got the name socialists. Why? Because they said that it was a mirage, this notion of individual freedom, that we were still not only shaped by the communities in which we grew up, but that it was important if we were going to hold our societies together, to be Just as concerned about how the society works as we are about how each individual functions. Because if a society is all focused about individuals that this argument went, it'll blow apart with the struggle of all the different egos. You have to have a commitment to the team. If I could use a modern sports imagery, otherwise you're not going to win the game. It's not about how each individual basketball player or baseball player plays. It's how they. Here we go, teamwork. How they get together and produce a. A result that is more than simply what each individual does. So the critics of capitalism got the name socialists versus the defenders of capitalism, who were called individualists. Well, capitalism got going in the 18th and 19th century, and then it got going a little bit more, spreading. And it quickly became clear, and this was particularly true already by the time of the middle of the 19th century, that capitalism worked real well for a bunch of individuals who got to be employers, but didn't work nearly so well for the vast majority of individuals who somehow found themselves as employees. In other words, the, the individualism was kind of justifying the good luck or the good work of the few, but also justifying the bad luck or the bad work of the many. And so the critics began to say that capitalism turned out not to be so different from slavery and feudalism. Yes, everybody was, in some technical sense, free, but the vast majority of children of workers became workers in turn, and the majority of the children of employers ended up in the better positions, going to the better schools. You know the story, you don't need me for that. This led the socialists to make a decision, not a decision they had to make, but a decision they did in fact make, most of them, in the second half of the 19th century. And the decision was, okay, we think the human race can do better than capitalism. We think that capitalism has done real well for some individuals, but not for the society as a whole, that it has produced an unstable economy, the ups and downs of the business cycle. It has produced extraordinary inequality of wealth that has permeated the rest of society. So we socialists, they said, want to go beyond criticizing this system. We want to change it. And here's what they decided was the way to do that. They noticed that the capitalists, the employers, used their wealth that they were accumulating to be very influential. Let's say. I'm trying to be polite here on the government and, and that the government really served them more than it served the average person. So since we had, in most Western countries, universal suffrage already by the 19th century, in other words, everybody got a right to vote. Well, not everybody. Men, not so much women and so on, but large numbers of people. The mass of at least male workers had the vote. The socialists got the idea, here's how we'll make a new and better society. We'll use the vote, we'll capture the state and use the power of the state to make a change towards a more socialist economy and away from the individualism of capitalism with the instability and inequality that produced. And so socialists began to work on how to capture the state. And there were two kinds. One group of capitalists said, the way we do that is by working in elections. We try to get people to vote for our candidates who will then win office, because we are the majority, after all, working people are. And once we have the state apparatus in our hands, we will be able to change society. The other group said, no, that's not going to work. They're never going to let us do that. We have to make a revolution. We have to literally throw them out, the rascals, and take over the government. But whether you were a peaceful election type socialist or a more militant revolutionary socialist, the idea was in EOA to capture the state and to use the state to make a change. And a change in what direction? Basic idea of socialists, simple. The state should take over the stores, the factories and the offices, run them as enterprises of and for the people. The state would make sure that the job conditions and the distribution of the output would be roughly equal among people. You wouldn't allow the inequality, you wouldn't allow the unfair influence, wealth accumulation and so on. In the hands of a few, you would make it much more democratic, much more egalitarian. And so the socialists struggled until in 1917, they actually won, in this case with a revolution in Russia. And at that point socialism became identified, particularly social, strongly with Russia, with revolution and with a kind of strong anti capitalism compared to that other socialists who never agreed with the Soviet Union. And what happened there, continued their idea, no, no, we have to work with elections and make change slowly and more gradually. The first group, the ones who liked what happened in Russia, supported Russia. They changed their name from socialists to communists. The others kept the name socialists. That all happened right after the Russian Revolution, around the years 1918, 20, 21, 22. And so it has been ever since. One group of socialists wants to capture the state peacefully with elections, the other one with revolutions. But either way, when they win, they want to take over the enterprises, run them communitarily, collectively. The communists want the government to do it directly. The socialists are willing to let private enterprises continue, but with heavy government limits and controls. And so we have it to this day a struggle between socialists and between them and the capitalist order. Last point. It is the case, and this is very important, that lessons were learned by socialists over the last hundred years. And those lessons have changed what socialists want and mean. Not all socialists. Some are still the peaceful ones, the revolutionary ones, the reformists versus the revolutionaries and so on. But another group has said, look, we have to face something. The revolutions in Russia, China and elsewhere didn't work out as well as we thought. On the one hand, they did lift those countries out of poverty, they were very good at that. But on creating a socialist, egalitarian, democratic society, they weren't so good. And so we have to adjust. We have to learn what they succeeded at doing and do that again and learn what they failed at doing and make sure not to do that again. And out of that has come another kind of socialism which says we don't want to focus on the state the way the first wave of socialists did. We want to focus on the workplace. We want to change it from a top down, undemocratic place where a few people tell you what to do from the minute you cross the threshold into your job until the minute you leave. We want to make it instead a democratic place where democracy governs, where we all get together, one worker, one vote, and decide what we do as working people, what we want, the wealth that we create to be used for all of that. It's a socialism from the bottom up rather than one from the state down. And so socialists now are a much more heterogeneous, diversified group of people. They share the notion that we can and should do better than capitalism, but they differ fundamentally on how to do it and where to start and where to focus your energy. Socialism is the shadow of capitalism. As long as there's capitalism and there are people who are critical of it, there will be socialism, which means it's going to be around a long time. It's going to. It may pay to heed a little bit what those folks are thinking and saying. The second topic I want to talk about is what's going on in the 50 states of the United States. Almost without exception, the following argument is being made. We, the governors and the legislatures in the 50 states, would like to do useful things for people that they need, but we can't because we don't have the money. There's just not the money. We'd love to do it there's just not the money. What did the governors and legislatures in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona, what did they tell their teachers? We'd love to pay you a decent salary the way way other states do. We'd love to provide the funds for quality public schools for our children. We just don't have the money. I'm going to give you a particular example that caught my attention recently. It's in the state of Connecticut, and there was a bill brought to the state of Connecticut to support paid family leave for workers in the state. Here's how it would work. The fund that would be set up by the state would have in it money taken from every worker's wages, a very small amount of money taken out of your weekly wage to set up a fund. And this fund would pay for up to 12 weeks of time off per year for a worker, capped at no more than $1,000 a week for new parents to care for babies or for workers to recuperate from illnesses or to nurse seriously ill family members. We have no federal paid family leave in the United States. We are the only advanced, rich, industrial country that does not have a law requiring paid family leave. We shout louder than all the other countries say in Europe about our family values, but we in fact don't support them with our money, just with our rhetoric. Well, here's the state of Connecticut. They have a bill. This wouldn't cost very much. Connecticut, after all, is one of the richest states in the union. And yet the Hartford Current, perhaps the major newspaper in the state of Connecticut, having said that family leave was a good thing, an appropriate thing to do, makes the simple claim, unfortunately, we cannot afford it. That is, they hide behind the claim that there isn't any money. How do they put that claim forward? How do they justify that? First they mention that the government, the state of Connecticut, is on the track to have a $200 million deficit in its forthcoming budget. Next, it says that there are serious burdens that the state has which unfortunately leave it without money. And to give an example, it mentions the money being set aside to cover the pensions of public employees. You know, teachers, firefighters, police persons, things like that. And so we're terribly sorry, but past politicians, bad guys, you know, made promises to public employees don't, you know, which were now a burden on us. And so it's really too bad. But we're going to pay off these unionized public employees, and that just doesn't leave us enough money to give paid family leave to workers in Connecticut the way they have it in Every other advanced industrial country. The entire discussion in the Hartford Currents editorial explaining why they're against this paid leave act, an editorial that appeared in the Hartford Current on April 12th of 2018. The entire story is there just isn't the money because of the other expenditures. And chief among them, in fact, the only one that it really names is the money given to pensions and pension workers for their pensions. So I want to talk about the two flaws, the two lies, the two mistakes, whichever word you prefer, that are in the editorial and that are in the justification that every government practically in the country, state government, is using. Let's start first with the pensions. A pension for a public employee was established in a negotiation that took place between the public employees, often represented by unions and. And the government. They negotiated a deal every three or four years like in any other industry. And the employer said, I would like to pay you thus and so and give you this and that. And the workers said, no, we would like to have this and that. And they negotiate. Governments like to say to workers the please let us give you not a wage increase, but instead an improvement in your pension. If you will forego a wage increase, we will improve your pension. Workers sometimes not always accepted that. Why did the government push it? The answer is simple. For a politician to get the public employees, say the governor of Connecticut, to get the public employees of Connecticut to do without a wage increase by promising them a big improvement in the pension means that that governor doesn't have to raise taxes now. Because if you don't have to raise the wages of workers now, you don't have to raise taxes now. You only have to raise taxes later when they qualify for the pension, because that's when you'll need the money. You won't need it now. And so it's attractive for a governor who wants to say to the public, see, I don't have to raise your taxes, but because I got the workers not to demand as high an increase as they might otherwise, leaving out the little detail that that politician, to improve his career, has postponed the money that has to be paid until later. Well, later has arrived. You cannot now undo the contract that was reached between the government and the workers, which was part of their pay package. If you want to take back the pension, then give them the salary that they agreed to forego to get the pension, which is never proposed or even mooted by the governments that are making these claims. Wow. But now let me turn to the bigger issue, because the stunning thing about the government in Connecticut and in so many other States is really, when they talk about the fiscal crisis of the state, that there isn't enough money. They never say a word about what we call the revenue side of the budget. Budgets are not only about whether you can spend for this or that, whether you spent more on this or that. It's also about the money coming in. If in Connecticut they were willing to tax the rich in a way they haven't for 50 years, they would have the money to be out of the red, to not be one of the most indebted states of the union. Why is Connecticut indebted being one of the richest states of the union? Because it doesn't tax those rich people. It borrows money. And you guess from whom? From the same rich people who are saved from having to pay taxes and instead lend the money to Connecticut, which then of course has to pay them back and pay them interest to boot. The state wouldn't have a deficit, it wouldn't have an accumulated debt if it had taxed those rich people. And there are more rich people per person in Connecticut than in almost every other state of the union. And that's been true for 50 years. But the politicians and their supporters in the right wing and unfortunately in the circles of journalists and academics act as if raising taxes is some utterly out of this world impossibility. But of course it isn't, not at all. You could tax the rich. And by the way, the claim of the rich, which I find stunning, that if you do that, we will run to another state. That's nonsense. Let me tell you why. It's expensive to leave, especially suddenly. You have to lower the price of your house. You may have to forego all kinds of business opportunities in order to do what? Will you incur all those costs to go to another state where, for all you know, they will be doing what Connecticut is going to do now next year or the year after, for all you know. For all you know, you might be worse off in the state to which you're going, which means you won't go. And if you do, and if the prices in the rich neighborhoods of Connecticut drop a bit, that's not a major problem either for most people. It's a problem for those who are the richest. And they're the ones who have done best over the last 30 years. They're the ones who just got a spectacular tax cut last December. If anyone can afford to help out. So we have decent education, so we can give 12 weeks of paid family leave to new parents like every other industrialized advanced country does, they actually do more in most other countries than 12 weeks. So don't tell us you don't have the money. The money is there, but you as politicians are in the pockets of the money, which is why you don't go after it. Let me get at this in yet another way. Last December, the GOP and Mr. Trump passed a tax bill that cut corporate profits taxes by 40%. Every business gets a big tax cut. What a wonderful time for the state of Connecticut to come in and say to these businesses, look, you're going to be saving only bundle on your federal tax. We are going to take a small portion of that as an increased state tax to do all the things that need to be done in this state to make it a livable place. You'll still be ahead because your taxes will still be significantly lower than what they have been. It's just not as low as 40% less. It'll be maybe 30% less. Less because we're going to pick up the other 10 to do good things in Connecticut and every other state. Perfect timing. And yet this idea, I have not seen or heard a single governor or state legislative body propose it. So I'm doing it here. But don't lose sight, please, of the basic the money is there. The money has always been there. It's just that the people with lots of money long ago figured out that they need to buy and control politics so that nobody touches their money. So the job of the politicians in the pay of the rich is not to say, hey, I'm taking care of the rich. You lose to the rest of us. No, no, no. Instead, they have to tell us and expect us to be dumb enough to believe that there just isn't any money. We'd love to do it. It's a great idea. There just isn't any money. It's unconscionable. It's where this country's capitalist system has delivered us. And it's something that ought to make your blood boil. I want to thank you for staying with me through this program, for sharing it. I hope you can partner with us to bring it to other people's attention. I want to thank not only you for watching and listening, but also truthout.org, that independent source of daily news and analysis that has been our partner for a long time. And I look forward to speaking with you again next week.