C (2:58)

The way, a guy on the record.

B (3:00)

Who has no problem leaking, he leaked to professor to go ahead and get there to be a special grand. I think it's lost in the sauce at the end there. But again, either Andy McCabe leaked or James Comey leaked. And the only way to figure it out is you indict him. Which, by the way, would be a misapplication of the law. That's not how you figure it out. That's not even what's going on here. What's going on here is that the Cruz conundrum has been cracked. Andy McCabe put his hand up when asked by the inspector general and said, yeah, it was me. The leak was me. They did an investigation. McCabe copped to the leak. That is Comey wasn't lying. Even the CNN panel with two Trump defenders admitted, yeah, if nothing changes, the case is dead. But guess what? Nothing's changed. The case is dead. This is just like saying, you know, either James Comey is the Green River Killer or that Gary Ridgeway guy is gotta figure it out. Someone killed those 50 to 80 prostitutes, Jim or Gary. And that, my friends, that is how you bring a prosecution in Belarus. On the show today, I got more Comey not going to be distracted by a hegseth gathering of the warriors or the plan to have Tony Blair solve Gaza. I mean, that's why we have the Just list. Again, I feel a little guilty plugging away at the Just list, but we put a lot of work in it. And I feel less guilty when I tell you that if you text Mike to 33777, we'll give you a discount. I feel a little needy there. Needy when I give you the 33777 code. Guilty when I don't. But when I plug the Gist list, you know, this could be fun. If you look at today's Gist list, I did a little AB testing. I made one analogy on the show and another analogy that you'll pick up with just some different clauses changed. You could tell me which analogy worked better. Comments accepted over there on Substack on the show today. All right. Mentioned the Comey spiel, mentioned a lot of Comey got to mention. Keep mentioning Comey lest we become Belarus, Venezuela, any of the countries that Freedom House rates is not. But you know what's a big political issue in our country, one that underlines so many and informs so many other political issues. We are told inequality. That's the driver. It's all about inequality. Only Andrew J. Taylor of North Carolina State says, yeah, maybe not has an interesting book that looks at history, looks at public opinion and looks at inequality itself and contends that we as a people have a tolerance for inequality, American public opinion and economic policy. Andrew J. Taylor, up next, cooler temperatures are rolling in. And as always, quints is where I'm turning for fall. Staples that actually last from cashmere to denims to boots, the quality holds up and the price still blows me away. In fact, the price is so low it's shocking. But it's also super soft. In the case of their cashmere sweaters, 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at brace yourself $60 and the denim fits right. And the question that maybe you ask is what makes it different? Well, they partner directly with good ethical factories. Skip the middleman. You know this really, it's a little bit of a cliche, but it does kind of work. Somewhere those middlemen are making money and laughing and laughing and mocking you for paying too much for a cashmere sweater. Quince has really become a go to across the board. Bedding, bath, cookware, travel accessories. Keep it classic and cool this fall with long lasting staples from quince. Go to quince.com/the gist for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's quincom. Slash the gist. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/the gist. Income inequality is an issue that fascinates me for different reasons I think than it fascinates or in raptures the minds of critics of how the American economy is going. Yes, it is true. We're having more concentrated wealth at the top 10% or 1% or 0.1% of the earners control 14% of the money. I should say the wealthiest control 14% of the wealth. Okay, but what should the number be? Whenever we talk about income inequality, one question I always have is who should be losing money such that the ability for One group to raise up in the decile of income in distribution is offset by someone who has to leave that decile. That's the thing about climbing the ladder of income distribution. In order for you to get to the top 10%, someone's got a BE jettisoned out of it. These are, but some of the questions touched upon a really interesting look at the politics of inequality. Not so much the economics, but how much our understanding of what the people, the American people, really think about inequality maps onto what our politics are and what the people actually tell the politicians. Andrew J. Taylor is a professor at North Carolina State University and he is out with a new book called A Tolerance for Inequality, American Public Opinion and Economic Policy. Professor Taylor, welcome to the gist.

C (8:46)

Thanks for having me, Mike.

B (8:47)

So this book is a lot of things and it's a valuable contribution to, I think, I don't know, you. You tell me the conventional wisdom or what's taken as the conventional wisdom about the disconnect between the American people's clamoring for more income equality and the message that they're giving their elected officials and the policies that the elected officials are enacting. So, yeah, that is question one. Was this book motivated by you looking at the political science and saying people are just assuming a lot of things that no one's really studied?

C (9:24)

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. So I think this is generally what a lot of politicians, particularly Democrats, and increasingly some Republicans as well, particularly in the era of Trump and political scientists believe, and that is that the political system is in some way rigged in terms of economic outcomes in favor of the wealthier. You gave a variety of different plausible definitions of the wealthiest or the wealth, the wealthier segments of American society. But however defined, they have an advantage in the American political system, and that is as a result of the fact that they vote more, they're more politically active, they are more energetic in the political system, they have greater knowledge of politics, they give, of course, more money and more of them populate positions of political power, whether that be at the federal level, in Congress or in the presidential administration, whether that be at the state level. As a result of all of these things, they're able to influence economic policy, move it to the right and make it more favorable to their own self interest, and therefore make them increasingly wealthy.

B (10:44)

Right. So a couple of things that you don't necessarily dispute or you tell me that if we measure it fairly, income inequality is growing. Is that something that you generally concede?

C (10:57)

Yes, there are a couple of caveats to that. I mean, there's some work that show suggests that a lot of those measures don't count government transfers. So they don't count, you know, welfare payments and other kinds of transfers from government. That would mitigate the inequality a little bit if you counted those. Another thing is, and I talk about this in the book, the measure that we tend to use with regards to income inequality in the United States is called a Gini coefficient. And this measures the dispersion in a particular community of individuals based upon their income. The thing is though, that tends to exaggerate inequality at lower levels. So you might have, and I look at congressional districts, for example, you might have a district, let's say in Mississippi, around Jackson, where there is a significant amount of inequality according to the Gini coefficient. And it's similar to one that say in, in the New York or San Francisco area. But that's largely, I've been to all.

B (12:03)

Three places and let me tell you, when I'm in and around Jackson, I'm not feeling the have and the have nots like I am here in New York or when I go to the Bay Area.

C (12:12)

Exactly. Even though the haves may have multiple, the same multiples of income of the have nots in Jackson as they do in New York, it's largely because the poor are very poor and the wealthy are pretty wealthy rather than the wealthy are very wealthy. And there's a sort of floor under a lot of the particularly least well off people in that congressional district.

B (12:38)

Right. Because if I raise someone's income from a thousand to two thousand, I've doubled their income and I've really skewed the ratio of the 2000 heir to the rich guy. But I haven't really in practical terms done anything in terms of have and have nots and real inequality.

C (12:58)

Exactly, exactly. But with those things in mind, the original question is largely true. If you, if you do look at same indicator of wealth in the concentration of wealth in the United States since the, in the post war period since the 1980s, it has started, it has grown and it is unusually high compared to peer advanced industrialized democracies.

B (13:22)

Another thing that I do take from reading your book that you agree with is that Republicans, especially In the last 40 years or so, they generally do favor and vote for policies that. Well, I want to be fair, you tell me that do exacerbate inequality as we measure it.

C (13:40)

Well, no one really votes for inequality.

B (13:42)

That's right. They vote for the policies.

C (13:44)

They vote for policies and then we make then Economists and political scientists and others critique those policies and try to ascertain whether they contribute to inequality or not.

B (13:55)

But.

C (13:57)

If you do accept that, for example, across the board tax cuts and efforts to decrease government spending in domestic policy area leads to greater inequality, then yes, obviously people with right of center politics generally vote Republican and Republicans generally embrace those policies.

B (14:17)

Right? Right. Then there are regulations which are a little more skewed, especially with the will of the voters. But let's get to that. A main point demonstrated many, many ways in charts and in surveys is that stipulating everything we said, one of the hallmarks of the argument about Democratic that Democratic politicians make is that the will of the people isn't being represented given these unequal outcomes. But you show over and over again that if you look at the policies that are voted on, it is not true that the will of the people has been disregarded. And especially on some economic policies like say welfare, the American public is quite conservative.

C (15:02)

Yes. So in the first couple of substantive chapters, I look at sort of the development of economic policy outcomes from basically the post World War II period right up to the present and then match them up against measures of public opinion. And in the aggregate level, there really isn't much of a disconnect. And in fact, when there are times of disconnect, so for example, in the second half of the 1970s, prior to the Reagan Revolution in 1980, when they are out of step, it is actually that policy is often to the left of public opinion rather than the other way around. But generally it does a pretty good job. Policy matches up fairly well against aggregate measures of public opinion. The same goes for individual policies, individual economic policies as well. You mentioned social welfare policy. But I also look at health care policy. I look at environmental policy, energy policy, housing policy, labor policy in the post World War II period. And for the most part there are obviously exceptions. There is a pretty good correlation between our measures of American public opinion and our measures of federal economic policy output.

B (16:18)

So maybe it's the case that the people are getting the policies they want, but are they getting the outcomes they want?

C (16:25)

Well, that's a different question, right? That is, policy is an instrument, as you said, and what we try to do with policies is get the desirable outcomes that we want. And sometimes policy does that, and sometimes policy doesn't. However, I do show, for example in the second substantive chapter in chapter three, that regardless of Americans personal financial circumstances, they don't really care too much about this sort of abstraction called equality or inequality. They're much more interested in their own personal circumstances, their family circumstances, and whether those are in an upward trajectory or they are improving as opposed to worsening.

B (17:10)

Yeah.

C (17:11)

Rather than, you know, am I or is the country or is my state more equal than it was last year or five years ago?

B (17:21)

Well, I wouldn't think they'd care, but I would think that they'd want to prosper. And maybe it's too difficult to explain to them or to get their minds around an abstraction, but if the abstraction is. Does turn out to be an excellent explanation for why they're not prospering, then maybe we could provide the linkage between inequality affecting their lives. I don't know if that's fair or not.

C (17:48)

Yeah, plausibly, plausibly. But again, even if they are thinking about that, I think even the instruments that they look at to alleviate inequality or improve their own personal circumstances are often different from the ones that we think that they would be looking at. So, you know, a lot of political science literature says, you know, because of inequality, Americans are increasingly, particularly those further down the. The income or wealth ladder, increasingly moving back towards redistribution and redistributive policies to rectify the situation. We talked about perhaps social welfare or maybe we're seeing a lot in the news, of course, in the last few years about plans to offer a wealth tax that is considered to sort of be punitive, but also to be able to equalize incomes better than they currently are. But particularly people of lower incomes tend to feel that there are different ways that we can do that. So they're very interested in, for example, the government providing public goods that government should be spending money on schools, that government should be spending money on healthcare, not necessarily in a redistributed manner, but to provide sort of basic services for everybody, regardless of their circumstances. They also believe greatly in tax cuts rather than spending increases. And of course, they can benefit from those depending upon how the tax cut is, what kind of tax cut it is as much as they can to direct transfer payments to themselves. So they have a sort of very interesting the they here is looking at people of what I call less affluent or lower income people have some sort of interesting understanding of what economic policies that they want. And they have an interesting understanding that's different, I think, from what political science thinks of what kind of economic situation they want to find themselves in and what they think the country should be.

B (19:57)

Isn't it true that people think about this straightforwardly? I'm not going to say simplistically. So if you give them a scheme by which they can qualify for something that earns them, something that can be spent on something that will never be as popular as we're going to open a free clinic and you go and get health care. Just direct point of service interventions.

C (20:24)

Well, I think probably. And also, especially if it's not means tested. Yes.

B (20:30)

People hate that generally, don't they?

C (20:32)

Yes. You know, like the public school system is a good example. Right. I mean, everybody can send their kids to public school regardless of their means. And it's not seen as a kind of handout or it's not seen as a act of charity or benevolence by the state. It's seen as an investment in one's capacity to be a productive citizen. And those are the kinds of policies. You see this a lot. For example, with regards to social welfare policy. So there's a bit in the book about that shows how consistently and at high levels Americans have supported this idea of welfare, work for work that, you know, in order to be able to. And this was at the heart of the 1996 welfare overhaul legislation, if you remember past in the Clinton years, that if you are going to get welfare, then you have to work or demonstrate that you're looking for work being something.

B (21:31)

Like if I'm recalling the poll right, 89% of people thought that welfare benefits should end after two years.

C (21:37)

Yes, something along those lines. Those are the kinds of public policies that people of lesser means, Democrats, Republicans, but people of the lower income levels, those are the kinds of policies that they embrace. Those are the kinds of policies that of course, the American federal government has largely supported over the last 40 to 50 years.

B (21:58)

Another interesting avenue of inquiry in the book is the question of whether lower income, less educated, blue collar Americans care, I'll quote from you care to receive representation from legislators more like themselves or the current fat cats in Washington. What'd you find there?

C (22:17)

Yeah, so there's some research in political science that sort of suggests, look, if only we could change the sort of socioeconomic composition of members of Congress, you know, we'd have more blue collar members of Congress, more sort of, you know, AOCs, and more people with those kinds of modest backgrounds, then public policy would change because they'd be more sympathetic or empathetic to the less well off. They understand what it's like to, you know, try to make ends meet and the policy outcomes would reflect the interests of that segment of our population more. But there's just no evidence to that effect. For example, if you match up, if you look at the net worth, the education the occupations of members of Congress over the last 50 years, they don't match up at all with districts, which sort of suggests, given for example, that we argue that when black districts with large numbers of black Americans elect black representatives, that's a function of them expressing a desire to have someone like themselves represent themselves. Well, blue collar districts don't elect blue collar members. Blue collar members often come from white collar districts and vice versa. And I've also was able to get some data now we have data that about the net worth not just of members of the House of Representatives, but the candidates who run against them. And so you can do some surveys here and look at who votes for the wealthier candidate and who votes for the less wealthy candidate.

B (23:55)

When people have the opportunity in a democracy to vote in the less wealthy candidate, the answer is.

C (24:01)

And they don't. They don't, you know, they don't care.

B (24:04)

The counter argument would be like, well, the wealthier candidate can fund campaigns, but even norming for that, you find they don't.

C (24:11)

Yes, yes. So there's no indication that the less well off, the less affluent, the blue collar Americans want more than their more affluent compatriots. A blue collar Congress.

B (24:26)

What policy preferences have blue collar voters consistently shown to have that are different from richer voters?

C (24:33)

Well, increasingly, interestingly enough, they are more moderate. So one of the things that the book sort of talks about, and this is sort of for something I want to explore going forward, is the tremendous polarization at higher income levels, at white collar levels, at higher levels of education. So if you take, for example, tax.

B (24:58)

All right, policy. Andrew Taylor. I know you're wanting more. I know you're saying, well, that's some inequality, but I know he's got more inequality in there. Of course he does. And for Pesca plus subscribers, 13 more minutes of inequality talk. You're welcome. Go to subscribe.mike pesca.com to sign up to be a Pesca plus subscriber or to get the show ad free. Wait, is that different from the Just list? Yes, it is. The Just list is the written stuff. The Peska plus stuff is the audio stuff. They're separated. We'd love to connect and we can't. Long story. Get to it in a while. But right now we'll get to more tolerance for inequality for all you Pesca plus people. And now the spiel, James Comey has been indicted because he allegedly lied under oath. I say allegedly because that is the convention. And the word allegedly affords people in the news some legal coverage. It also communicates as a norm that people accused of crimes are not yet convicted of crimes. Good to keep that in mind. But the word allegedly indicts Comey possibly more than the actual indictment. Just the whiff of the allegation makes it perhaps the case that Comey did the thing he is said to have done, but he didn't. Sometimes when it seems quite obvious the opposite, that the alleged criminal is the actual criminal, it's just that he hasn't been adjudicated yet, we are tempted to add perhaps a modifier or even a tone of voice to allegedly, plausibly, we might say, or you know, something that connotes nominally allegedly. I said something like that about Tyler Robinson, the man who clearly shot Charlie Kirk, allegedly. But in this case we should add an opposite modifier, faux allegedly. Because I could say, though it is alleged that James Comey lied under oath, it is only being literally alleged. After career prosecutors looked at this exact evidence and said, I shall not bring a prosecution. And then the President said, you shall not be employed as a prosecutor henceforth. He got his own person to bring the prosecution. And she is very, very unqualified, except on the one score of doing what Donald Trump says. So by the standards of this administration, she is very, very qualified. So we could say, or we must say, allegedly, James Comey lied under oath. But the facts are this supposed lie has been cleared up, which is why the prosecutors did not bring the case. He was, I'll say it again, he was asked in a 2020 hearing about testimony that had taken place years earlier, did you ever instruct an underling to leak? He said no, and that in fact has been documented to be the case. It was Lisa Page who was told to leak. Andy McCabe, I know your eyes are glazing over now at the details of an 8 year old leak that was brought up again at a five year old hearing that just reaches the limit for the statute of limitation. But the details of the case aren't important to Trump or his people. It's just that we lashed out against the political enemy using the powers of the state. Hooray. And what do you call that? Well, you don't. Or at least historically haven't in this country called it a liberal democracy. Even throughout all our abuses, all our many abuses, all our abuses that many, many historians have so helpfully documented and they put in the classroom and the warts and American history is treated, maybe forefronting the warts, but that's okay, that's a corrective. But even if you go through the abusive history of the United States, which is now the number one textbook in America. The Abusive History of the United States. The Trail of Tears and the Palmer Raids, and of course, slavery. All real abuses. Maybe I shouldn't have this tone of voice, but all the sins of American executive excess. This, to my mind is terrible word, but it's unparalleled. There has never been, I do not think, and I've been looking through this, as blatant a prosecution for purely retributive means as this one. Now, there was a prosecution of Eugene V. Debs, the socialist candidate, and that was pardoned. He was pardoned four years after, and then during the Alien and Sedition Acts, John Adams, who seen mostly as a great champion of liberal democracy, went after his political opponents and won. A congressman from Vermont named Matthew Lyon was put in jail, but. But he was exonerated afterwards, and history regards him as a champion of free speech. What happened afterwards might not be determinative. I think, though, if you look at it very strictly, it was a terrible law that Adams put into effect, but it was the law. And by the four corners of that law, his prosecution, Lyon's prosecution, wasn't even as bad as James Comey's is. There have been prosecutions of politicians, and they always call every time they're prosecuted a political prosecution. And maybe, definitely, you could parse through the motivations of who has power and who's out of power. And the out of power tend to get prosecuted more than those with some power to protect them. Now, maybe someone I'll steal. Man, this for the Trump fans out there are the ones who doubt what I'm saying. What about the Alvin Bragg prosecution of Trump? And remember, my framing was there has never been an abuse of power by the executive, and that one was a local, not federal, matter. But even Alvin Bragg, who was the decider, did decline to bring a prosecution originally. Under one theory of prosecution. This won't work under that theory of prosecution. Then another one was invented, constructed, concocted. Anyway, another one was brought about, and he said, this theory of prosecution will work. So it wasn't the case that he just fired prosecutors or just brought a prosecutor on who replaced one who said, I can't in good conscience bring this prosecution. And another important factor in the Alvin Bragg case, other than the fact that it was local, not executive, and other than the fact that there were no prosecutors in the office objecting to it, is that he won. He got the prosecution. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it was New York, but, you know, Comey's being prosecuted in a part of Virginia that's pretty pro military and is not really the most logical place to bring this case. It was congressional testimony, so that would seem to be a D.C. prosecution. But it was during COVID and he was testifying from his home in Virginia anyway. Winning doesn't mean much, or it might mean millions of dollars that Trump eventually has to pay, though the New York Court of Appeals disagreed recently. But winning at least shows that the theory of prosecution was solid. And I think in this case there will not be a win. That's a data point. If this one doesn't stick, as I don't think it will, it will show and redound to the theory that this was a nothing prosecution to begin with. This was a prosecution that was purely, not mostly, not largely, not certainly not some, but purely political. I still have a little bit of faith in the legal system. Federal prosecutions almost always end in, well, very, very frequently ending conviction. And if the outcome of this one is what I believe it will be, either a not guilty verdict or maybe exoneration via judicial intervention, then James Comey will be the person who was most unfairly prosecuted for political reasons by the most powerful person in the world. Which is a terrible thing. It is shameful and it is depressing that the remedy for all of this, perhaps upon James Comey acquittal, will not be impeachment. And because where impeachment and conviction to be on the table, every Republican knows that they will be slitting their own throat during the Trump era. And that is where the real politics comes into play. That's it for today's show. Cory Warra produces the gist. Ashley Khan is our production coordinator. Two very different jobs can't get into the org chart, but on it is Jeff Craig, who's our social media coordinator, and Kathleen Sykes who writes the aforementioned, arguably too often aforementioned gist list. Michel Pesca is the COO of Peach Fish Productions and thanks for listening.

D (33:54)

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