Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/14/24: Ryan CLASHES With Right-Winger On Immigration, Biden, Economy - Counterpoints Fridays

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

Ryan debates Oren Cass, the Executive Director of the American Compass, on Immigration, Biden, and the economy. Oren Cass: https://x.com/oren_cass To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, let's get to the show. The core position of the Democratic Party is that anybody who wants to come to America should be able to do so. If that's your position, you're not actually serious about helping workers. You're basically trying to hold together a political coalition that has very different priorities. Why are the Trump appointees on the NLRB so consistently voting with bosses? You know, one of the biggest problems with unions as they operate today is that they have become primarily political enterprises and essentially arms of the Democratic Party. And the problem is that that's not what workers want.

I think it's pretty safe to say among private sector union workers that the majority supported Donald Trump in 2020. Welcome to CounterPoints. Today we're going to be joined by Oren Kass, who is the executive director of American Compass, which is a kind of rising, what would you call it, new right organization that is kind of reshaping the way that the right wing associates itself with previously kind of left wingwing ideas, like it's really important to have worker power, to raise wages, and is trying to kind of reshape this new populism that folks like Trump are either kind of pushing forward or drafting off of. But to explain a little bit better than that, let's bring in my co-host, Emily Jashinsky, as well as Oren Kass himself. Emily, welcome. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm in London. If people didn't watch the Wednesday show,

it's like we're going to drop it unheard. So here I am coming to you from the UK. And maybe we'll talk about the EU elections just a little bit. I know Oren probably has some thoughts on them because all of these fault lines were at play. But first, Oren, welcome. You've been profiled by all kinds of different media outlets as really one of the driving forces on Capitol Hill of the new right, of putting sort of policy meat on the bones of populism. On the right, you were a policy director for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign back in 2012, and I'm sure we can get into some of that. You've joined us on this program before, but first of all, welcome, Oren. Thanks for being here. Well, thank you for having me. It's great to see you guys.

Of course. And in full disclosure, I have involvement with American Compass. I'm a fan of American Compass, so we'll put that on the table while Ryan starts yelling and Oren starts yelling back. And we'll have it all be in good fun. So, Oren, why don't you start just by telling us, you know, kind of how this populist program is going? I know we particularly want to get into immigration because that's probably where there's going to be some disagreement. But if we just sort of zoom out 30,000 feet and people say there might be another Trump administration imminently, do you feel like if day one Donald Trump or really any Republican president were to take office that a lot of these policy proposals, you know, against financialization, for example, family leave, some of the stuff that's

on the table, do you feel like it would really have a shot at passing or, you know, getting the serious attention of the president? Well, I think absolutely. You know, I think we've seen a real sea change in the set of policy issues people are even talking about on the right of center, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, and then also the kinds of policy that moves forward. And so, you know, I think you see lots of examples of this. I mean, one is when it comes to dealing with China, with free trade, obviously the old orthodoxy that, you know, free trade is good, always more free trade is better, cheap stuff is what we want. That's gone. And so whether that's talking about restricting investment into China,

whether that's talking about raising tariffs on China, those are the things you see Republican leaders talking about at this point. I think you see the same thing on issues like family policy, where there are lots of different proposals out there now to really increase the support that we provide to working families. You see it on industrial policy, where something like the CHIPS Act can pass with bipartisan support. And you see a host of Republicans offering other proposals to do more of the same. And so in all these areas, it's a real

shift away from the old, well, if we just sort of cut taxes and get out of the way, a rising tide will lift all ships. I think substantively people have realized that's not true. And politically, the Republican coalition, the people who actually support Republicans and vote Republican, don't believe that and don't want to hear it, by and large. And so both on the substance of the economics and on the politics, it is a whole different American right than we became accustomed to over the past few decades. It definitely is a different American right.

And, you know, it has a lot of overlap with traditional kind of left wing approaches to economic policy, whether it's, you know, antitrust, which actually has, you know, strong antitrust enforcement has a home on a kind of free market, right? Because you need to break up trusts if you're going to have free markets. But, you know, skepticism of free trade, like you said, industrial policy, you know, subsidies, support for families and for, you know, just for raising children, etc. So where, though, do you break off from kind of left-wing economic orthodoxy? What do you see as fundamental to kind of a populist right economics that wouldn't overlap with, say, a Bernie Sanders?

And actually, can I jump in first? Because I wanted to ask about this particularly, and I pulled a quote. This is from the Charting the Course policy series that American Compass released recently. The intro reads, The vital conservative commitment to limited government depends upon bringing federal spending under control. Spending determines government size, its economic force, and the cost borne by citizens, whether they agree to overt taxation or not. The higher inflation of recent years and surging interest payments on our skyrocketing national debt both serve as reminders that one way or another, taxpayers are inevitably on the hook for the profitably good spending of politicians. So that sounds, again, you were on the Romney campaign. You're in a significant role in the Romney campaign in 2012. That sounds good to me

as sort of a traditional conservative. It sounds like something that might allay the fears of traditional conservatives. But where does that, you know, what ground does that leave to cooperate like someone like a Bernie Sanders? What is the distinction between, you know, American Compass and Oren Cass and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren? Well, Well, you know, I think it's an important place to start to just recognize that these sort of definitions of left-right, progressive, conservative have gotten jumbled in a lot of confusing ways in recent decades. I mean, if, you know, if you ask what was the actual left or Democratic Party policy agenda over the last 20 years, or 30 years, going back to Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama, I'm not sure how much you would distinguish it from

basically the Wall Street agenda. I mean, it was aggressive efforts at expanding free trade. It was promoting financial deregulation. It was obviously trying to bring in a large number of low-wage workers from other countries. And so, you know, a lot of things that Ryan was saying, like, well, but, you know, isn't this or that the position of the left? Well, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if it is. And so, you know, if you look at someone like Bernie Sanders, I would say, yeah, certainly there are places where I would say Bernie has a point, whether that's in diagnosing things that are not going well in the economy or, you know, on an issue like antitrust where competition is obviously very important and has not been promoted very effectively. The problem is, at the end of the

day, if you look at a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren agenda, it's, I would say, confused, if nothing else. I mean, I don't know how it intends to actually address the problems that we have in this country, because it's not willing to, for instance, acknowledge that work actually matters. And what we need to be doing is promoting work and high wages for American workers. It instead is essentially committed at this point to open borders, which is fundamentally incompatible with that. Even on an issue like labor, you know, we say that or have always assumed that the left is sort of the pro worker, pro labor party. I guess that's true if you mean they agree with sort of union bosses and the people who run labor unions, but it's not at all clear that their positions align with what

the workers in those unions want. And in fact, one of the things those workers most want is for the unions to stop focusing on progressive political priorities. And so I think there's this very interesting moment that we're in right now where you've had really on both sides for a long time now, these political leaders who focused on the kind of very niche concerns of their highest income constituents and donors, I suppose. And you have this huge mass of Americans who weren't really served by either agenda. And what you're seeing right now is a lot of folks on the right of center are actually focusing on that and trying to respond to it and construct an agenda that looks more like what most Americans want. Even as you have

a Democratic Party that sort of seems to be drifting ever further into this kind of weird progressive bubble of, among other things, is wildly unpopular in addition to ineffective positions. And so I think that's really the driving force in our politics right now. And it's certainly creating a lot of opportunity for conservatives to advance the things they care about. So to me, I think there are kind of two different questions embedded in what you said there. And one is, what is the best immigration policy for workers, for low-wage workers, for medium-wage workers, for high-wage workers? And there might be different answers to all of those

different questions. And that's something that we should spend some time talking about. But the other question is, is immigration and our immigrants kind of being used and highlighted in a way that distracts us from a more serious confrontation with the things that are actually driving inequality, that are actually driving wages down, that are allowing the CEOs in the top 10 or even 20% to aggregate all of the wealth over the last 50 years to themselves. So I think there's sort of like two different questions. Like on the one hand, yes, there may be a better or worse immigration policy. But if the focus is only on immigration policy, are we missing the more fundamental problems that we need to be addressing if we're

going to actually build real worker power? Well, I think the way you just sort of focused on worker power is exactly right. The underlying question is, what power do workers have in the labor market? Are they going to be in a position where there is demand for their labor, where you actually have to figure out a way to use them more productively to create better jobs, to build a good business, that is, in essence, the secret sauce of capitalism. I mean, going all the way back to Adam Smith, when he talks about the invisible hand, it's not something that works by magic. He says it's something that works if the things that are going to generate the most profit are also the things that are going to yield the most output in the country and employ the most people

domestically. And so the problem in recent decades is that we've just released those constraints. We've said the best ways to make a lot of money have nothing to do with creating good jobs for American workers, because first of all, you can offshore and produce elsewhere. And second of all, if you complain, oh, we have a a labor shortage then we use that as a reason to bring in more workers so i absolutely agree that the core underlying issue is worker power the question is okay what are you going to do about that what are the levers that what has gone wrong and what are the levers you're going to pull and the answer there is i think in two parts one globalization and offshoring and the use of foreign workers elsewhere. And two, immigration or the interests of workers in the long run,

unless you're willing to be serious about the need to actually enforce immigration law and have constraints on who enters our labor market. Do we have an EX3 here? So this is a famous chart. Looks like a little crocodile. It's called, and for those who are just listening, decline in union membership mirrors income gains of the top 1%. And what you see- 10%, top 10%. That's the top 10%. What you see is a surge in union membership in the late 1930s, 1940s, which then brings about a more egalitarian economy in the 1970s. You start to see it diverge. In the 1980s and 90s, you have a collapse in union membership. And at the same time,

executives and others in the top 10% are walking away with all the gains while everyone else is becoming immiserated. So from my perspective, obviously, the number of workers who are adding to labor supply matters. That's what we call a tight labor market versus a loose labor market. A loose labor market has what Karl Marx even called the reserve army. The capitalism's reserve army is the number of kind of unemployed people who are willing to come in and take the jobs of workers who might get militant inside the workplace. But throughout the 20th century, you saw pretty steady population growth, right? Actually, in the 1990s, I think we had lower population growth than we had in other decades, yet you don't see kind of explosions in wage gains at that point. So to me, the most important thing, this is what Bernie Sanders would say, the most important thing you can do for workers is to help them organize unions. And

the way that you do that, what happened in the 1930s, the federal government stepped in and created the NLRB and other pro-labor mechanisms that enabled workers to actually win these contracts and win these organizing drives. There was a lot of union organizing in the 19th century, but the National Guard and the Army and the Pinkertons and others were allowed to go in and violently crush and otherwise crush organizing drives. But when the federal government was brought to bear on behalf of, or at least neutrally as it relates to workers, workers got real power. So how do you feel? A genuine question. How do you feel about where does union policy fit into this agenda? Well, I think having a much stronger and more effective labor movement is actually an incredibly important part of the picture here. And that's something that American Compass has focused an incredible amount of attention on.

And frankly, it's something I think it's really encouraging to see a lot of conservatives start to put energy behind as well. I mean, you see, you know, senators like J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley literally out there on picket lines. I think I just saw the, you know, the head of the Teamsters Union wants to address the Republican National Convention this year because there is a recognition that worker power is a good thing and that a strong labor movement is a piece of that puzzle. I think the problem is if you focus only on that. And so I think that chart that you put up is certainly a relevant one. You could, of course, put up a very similar chart looking at, instead of union membership, the massive influx of less skilled immigrants after

the 1965 immigration reform. You could put up a similar chart looking at the massive shift to offshoring as globalization took off. So all of these trends are relevant. I think you can't focus on just a labor movement and organizing in the absence of the others, because organizing will only get you so far if you have a loose labor market. I mean, at the end of the day, the way that organizing gives workers power is in part by essentially cartelizing access to their labor, right? You do have to have a somewhat tight labor market underlying it if you're going to exert power through a labor movement. If you have sort of an unlimited number of unskilled, often not even in the country legally, workers who are certainly not going to be

an effective part of a labor movement coming in and offering to take the jobs instead. If you have the option of just moving the work overseas, then your labor movement's not going to be very effective. And so what I think is so frustrating, certainly from my perspective, is to see on the right of center a real willingness to acknowledge the need for sort of an all of the above strategy and to say, yes, absolutely, a better labor movement and more power and representation for workers is a part of that. But gosh, you sure have to be serious about trade and immigration as well. And then you look across the aisle to the left side and you just don't see that. You see the sort of base political posturing and talking points about unions,

even when those unions aren't representing workers very effectively, and no willingness to take on the immigration element of it. And that's what tells me, if that's your position, you're not actually serious about helping workers. You're basically trying to hold together a political coalition that has very different priorities. So inversely, well, I was just going to say inversely. Go ahead,

Ryan. Go ahead. No, I just say, interestingly, speaking of holding together political coalitions that have very different priorities, and again, another genuine question, I gotcha, why are the Trump appointees on the NLRB so consistently voting with bosses? And is that something that, like, the Hollies and the J.D. Bances of the world are working on? Well, I think there's no question that Trump himself is a sort of an imperfect vessel, to say the least, of a lot of this sort of thinking. You know, for one thing, Trump, in a sense, was the dog who caught the car and was elected at a point where there was no infrastructure, no set of ideas, no broader set of appointees and so forth to draw on.

And that's why you see he comes into power in 2017. And what are the two things to actually try to do? Repeal Obamacare and pass a big tax cut. Because those were the two things that were on the shelf. You still had Paul Ryan in charge in Congress. And I think one thing that would be very different in any future Republican administration, certainly if you have a Trump administration, is when you look down Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill and ask, you know, who's really driving the agenda there at this point? It's not Paul Ryan. It is folks like J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton. And so, you know, certainly I think you would see a different dynamic this time around.

Or didn't that tax cut prevent offshoring? I mean, isn't there an argument that it prevented offshoring? You know, there are elements of the tax cut on certainly on the corporate side that I think were very important that encouraged reshoring, that encouraged investment. And that's great. As a share of the total cost of the tax cut. That is not where most of the dollars were. And so I think that one thing you see now also when you hear sort of discussion about, well, what should happen to the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, TICJA, as it's expiring and needs to either be let go

or renewed in parts, is you have some folks who are saying, we just renew the whole thing. You have others saying, well, you know, wait a minute. First of all, we can't afford to do that, but let's talk about which parts of it actually sort of are most important to the economic priorities. But I, you know, I mean, I would love to ask Ryan also, again, as a genuine question, not a gotcha. Like, how do you make sense of the Democratic Party's position on immigration at this point? Is there some case that this is actually somehow good for workers or consistent with the sort of rising wages and vibrant working middle class that we want, where I just, I don't even know what the argument at this point is besides sort of, well, we don't want to get yelled at by these progressive

groups. And I laugh because how do you make sense of a policy that is two different policies? Like the policy that Biden ran on in 2020, which is that, you know that Trump's immigration policy is immoral and a stain on the fabric of our society versus the policy that he's implementing now, which is like, okay, actually, I'm going to implement Trump's policy, but I'm going to do it in a much more gentler way. And I'm not going to be racist about it when I do it. So not like, not only can I not explain, you know, the rationale behind their policy, I can't even really explain what their policy is because they have, because they've fluctuated kind of all over the place in just a matter of a couple years. Like, one of the biggest U-turns in, like, political history in the sense that it was such a salient issue. Biden running ads on the precise issue that

he's now done basically a complete U-turn over. The bill that he tried to pass- A complete U-turn? Yeah. The bill that he tried to pass in the executive order is pretty much a shutdown. Like after, you know, what is it? So after 2,500 encounters in a day, after that, it's shut down. People seem to think that that means- After 4 million people came in during his administration. Right. Yes.

Like there was a surge. But is that because Biden was trying to bring people in? He's sending Kamala Harris down to Central America saying, don't come. He was trying to keep Title 42 in place. He has a completely incoherent immigration policy. And he's sanctioning and otherwise immiserating countries in our region, which is creating more push. But I don't think because he wants to push people like, say, out of Venezuela or out of Haiti or out of Cuba, but just because it's a schizophrenic, incoherent foreign policy that doesn't have any relation to that either.

It's just completely chaotic. But in other words, I don't think that they sat down and said, what we desperately want is to have thousands of people a day kind of like pouring over the southern border. Is that what the right thinks that the Biden administration wanted to do? What do you think, Oren? I think the Biden administration would obviously prefer for political reasons to not have the liability of a border crisis. The problem is that the core position of the Democratic Party is that anybody who wants to come to America should be able to do so. And that's where I think you get this fight over like,

well, is that open borders or not? And they'll say, well, it's not open borders because we think we should have laws and so forth. Well, the question is, what do you think those laws should be? And that's where you see, even in the context of the so-called border bill that was supposed to limit

or potentially shut down the border if you had too many illegal crossings, even then, as Senator Chris Murphy famously said, the border is not closed. The goal was to instead expand the rate at which we could essentially grant people temporary status while having asylum claims adjudicated through ports of entry. I think you saw, you know, recently Mayorkas was talking about even sort of opening offices in other countries to help people more effectively make these claims. Obviously, you have the CBP One app that is designed to let you schedule when to show up and assert your

asylum claim and come into the country. And then once you have people who are here, you have the Biden administration not only sort of catching and releasing them, but then also trying to stretch what are supposed to be very limited authorities like parole into essentially indefinite legal status with work permits. And so that's the core question is, you can have all these fights about who did what with Title 42 and at what threshold do you or don't you shut down the border between ports of entry.

The question is, what's your actual goal and what's your orientation? Are you willing to recognize that a healthy American labor market requires very firm constraints on entry, particularly into the low wage side, or are you going to say, no, anybody who wants to come should be able to come? And I'd be interested if you disagree, but it seems to me that the Democrats' position and everything they do is very clearly oriented around the position that anyone who wants to come should be able to come, and that every policy they pursue and position that they take is, as a result, not actually supporting the interests of the legal workers who are here, both Native and, of course, the many prior generations of immigrants who, if they are here legally and are in many cases now American citizens,

deserve exactly the same consideration and are often the most harmed by this sort of policy. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day.

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Brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council. Let's talk about sanctions as worker policy then because i think orin maybe some people on the right those of us on the right have rethought uh whether or not some of this demands a different policy in central america south america so would you support lifting sanctions on places like venezuela that a lot of new workers into the country of the course the biden administration had been venezuela and they have been Cuban. Would you support lifting sanctions? Would you support lifting the embargo in Cuba? How do you think about that? It's an interesting question. I won't claim to be an expert on the sort of foreign policy and sanctions element of our policy with respect to Cuba and Venezuela.

I do think the important sort of core premise here, though, is that it is not America's obligation to be the country of last resort for the rest of the world. And so this sort of attempt to establish this linkage, you know, you also hear like, oh, well, the U.S. did this or that in the 1950s or 1960s, therefore we have to do X today. The reality is that that's not feasible and it's also not consistent with what the American people want. And I think that's where the rubber really has to meet the road on a lot of this is that, you know, so many people are making this election a sort of referendum on democracy and democratic norms, and yet you have an administration and a democratic party

that is steadfastly unwilling to pursue and implement the will of the American people who overwhelmingly reject this notion that people who want to come to America should just be able to come to America. They want to see certainly a generous, orderly, legal immigration system, but that has to be the game. And so if we're not willing to do that, if leaders aren't willing to take that seriously and pursue that course, they should not be surprised if they get thrown out on their ear. I think the problem comes in when, I think Democrats would be happy if you said, okay, we're going to have a generous kind of legal, orderly immigration system. All right, now we're going to sit down and in Congress, we're going to rewrite our immigration laws,

which haven't been drafted or redrafted since the 1980s. We're going to modernize them. We're going to make this much more efficient. We're going to aim it in a logical direction. I think Democrats would be happy to do that. Nobody can in our current system sit down and rewrite immigration policies, so you end up having this hodgepodge of executive orders, illegal crossings, total chaos, lawsuits, and nobody can point in one direction or another. I think it might be easier to just, you know, say forget about Democrats. Like I'll I'll just argue that like in general, like more more immigration is actually better for workers more more broadly. And we can just kind of take it from there. Like forget it. Forget about forget about what Democrats believe. One kind of issue that I have with the way that you present your labor work over at AmeriCompass is around can kind of come in and you can just restrict

supply of labor, then you're going to solve the problems that you're trying to solve. You're going to raise the real wages for workers. And the reason I think that that's at best incomplete, because it doesn't emphasize enough the need to do actual unionizing, which gives workers real power, is that if you don't change the structural power, and all you do is kind of tilt the needle a little bit by tightening, by creating a little bit of a shortage by not allowing people in, what you're going to get is that the people at the top still have the power and any changes then are going to, and any profits from that are going to flow up to raise wages because there was a huge labor shortage. Not only did we have basically immigration sealed down at the border, lots of workers just weren't willing to work.

Some of them were just locked out. They couldn't find enough workers. And so the first part of your theory came true. You did see nominal wage growth. Jobs that used to pay $13 an hour were now paying $16, $17 an hour. But what you also saw was the economy starting to completely buckle. And you saw it on a micro level. You'd see restaurants that used to be open all day. Now they're only open half the day because they couldn't get enough workers to come in. Or if they were open at all, they would only have one section open because they only had

this number of people who were able to come in. And then as a result, the price of everything goes way up. You start to see this massive spike in inflation. And so while nominal wages went up during the pandemic, real wages actually went down. And that's because you didn't structurally change who had power within the political economy. And so all of these price movements just kind of flowed to the very top. And so my argument would be if you don't have unions who are able to then fight back against that, whatever ability you have of pushing up nominal wages is just going to lead to inflation across the economy and then more profits for the top 10%. Well, I guess I have a little bit of trouble following that story because it seems to me that that is also what a lot of labor economists would not incorrectly worry unions would do. I mean, if what you're saying is that when workers have power and push for higher wages, that just forces up prices and the result is inflation. I mean,

fair enough, maybe. We could have a very long conversation about what was actually going on during the pandemic. But I don't see how the story is different if it's your union contract driving up those wages. If your theory is that higher wages are just going to translate to higher prices and therefore no real wage gains, then unions don't really get you anything. In fact, a lot of people would say

that's exactly what unions were doing in the 1970s that drove stagflation. Well, the idea is that unions and more worker power, which would also translate into more power for politicians who represented workers, would be able to then intervene and make sure that the richest of the rich don't pull out those wages. You had a line in your Compass essay. Was it called Jobs that Americans Do or Jobs Americans Won't Do? Yeah, Jobs Americans Would Do. Would Do, yes.

So you had one line that said, you know, windshield installers are paid what they are because that is what must be offered to employ the required number. The same is true of marketing executives. What's interesting about that line is that that's not actually my experience. I had this bizarre experience where I used to work for the Huffington Post, which was bought by, after I'd been there for a couple of years, it was bought by AOL. And then several years after that, it was bought by, after I'd been there for a couple of years, it was bought by AOL. And then several years after that, it was bought by Verizon. And so because I was kind of a senior person at the Huffington Post, and they'd never really owned media before, I wound up being kind of categorized in an executive level at like AOL and Verizon, even though it didn't make any sense or

whatever. But it put me in an orbit of all of these basically vice presidents or marketing executives and all these types at these corporations. And so I was able to get a window into how that world operated. And what you saw was this just wildly corrupt kind of backscratching going on. And so while you might have to pay a windshield wiper X amount to get them to come do windshield installers, you might have to pay them a particular amount. It was actually marketing executives who were deciding what their friends were getting paid. It wasn't a question of, what do we have to pay this person to get them to do this job? It was a question of, basically, how much can we get away with stealing from shareholders here? Like, what is the most amount that I can pay you and that you, in the next executive compensation committee will agree to pay me. And you just

extract all the shareholder wealth that way, not because you had to pay them that. There were other people who would have done the job cheaper. But it's this clubby, crony kind of backscratching corporate world, which is just living off the backs of the workers and the shareholders because they have the power, because there are no politicians backed by workers who are cracking down on them. There's no union at these companies. Verizon did have one. AOL didn't have one. I'm talking more about AOL here. And so you wind up with this corporate culture that just siphons wealth off of the top. And if you don't undo that, just shrinking the number of people who are able to apply for $13 an hour jobs is what I'm saying isn't going to change things structurally. I guess I feel like we've gone on a little bit of a detour here.

I mean, I don't disagree. There are all sorts of problems with executive compensation. But as you noted, I mean, among other things, Verizon is unionized. You know, cracking down on stupid employer compensation schemes isn't what unions do. And so I think we really do need to focus on this question of, you know, when we talk about worker power, what do we mean? What do we think it's going to accomplish? Whether it's unionized or not, what we think it's going to accomplish that could be good is it actually focuses companies on investing in productivity growth. At the end of the day, if we want real wages to grow in the long run,

if we want greater prosperity for typical workers, we need their productivity to be rising. And businesses are only going to have an interest in making investments in their productivity rising if they are restricted in part by tight labor markets, potentially by a more formal organizing movement in who they can hire and how much they have to pay. So, again, I don't think there's any disagreement that labor unions can play a constructive role here. I mean, we've jumped so many steps over. It's worth remembering back where we started is the question of whether we think it matters if we have a huge influx of less skilled workers

or if we prefer a situation where there are actually many fewer workers. And it is especially interesting to see now in the sort of post-pandemic tight labor market environment that all of the economists who used to argue that immigration doesn't have an effect on wages have now completely turned around on this. I mean, everybody, and again, you had the Biden administration out there on this as well, trying to make the case that somehow, you know, we need to bring that upward pressure on wages down by expanding labor supply. And that's our new case for why we need high levels of immigration. And that's just insane. I'm sorry. You can't take seriously the idea of worker power and wanting to see workers benefit in the long run if you're then going to turn around and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, it looks like actually workers are starting to actually sort of gain the upper hand here and be able to demand higher wages. Let's bring in

lots more workers to prevent that from happening. You just can't do that. What you have to do instead is tell the business community, look, we do see that you're under pressure without a lot of workers available. You know what it sounds like you'd better do? Find a way to make those workers more productive. And if you do that, you're going to be successful in the market. Your profits are going to go up, et cetera, et cetera. And that's the set of incentives you need. And policymakers who are committed to creating that set of incentives,

that dynamic, I think should be credited with being pro-worker. And policymakers who are not interested in that dynamic and are instead interested in parroting the corporate line that help we need more workers should not be credited with, within any serious way, being pro-worker. And Oren, I'm putting myself in the shoes of somebody on the left right now

listening to this thinking, all right, so is Oren Kass then pro-worker if he doesn't support, for example, and Ryan, you can add to this, significant tax cuts, tax increases on the wealthy, maybe even on the middle class, like European style tax system. And I know actually you've been debating people on the right. You think the right's aversion or allergy to tax increases is wrong. But, you know, let's say the sort of Occupy Wall Street agenda, you know, if you don't support that, then are you serious? I know this is funny probably for you, because a lot of people on the right will attack you and Compass for taking money from sort of left-wing people. And they think you're the secret socialist. but if I'm sort of a populist, disaffected, maybe a person on the left watching this,

why is Oren Kasper a worker? Is he actually willing to sort of take the steps that Ryan mentioned that would structurally change the economy? Or are these just fun talking points that mask something that's really just warmed over conservatism. Well, I mean, I think in general, I'm in favor of pursuing all of these angles. I mean, to Ryan's point about sort of executive compensation and so forth, you know,

American Compass has done a ton of work on excesses of Wall Street, mismanagement of corporations, et cetera. I think getting specifically at that question of sort of who controls and sets employee compensation is a particularly difficult one, but I'd be the first to acknowledge it's a problem and I'm all ears on what to do about it. I think likewise, when you talk about the tax issue, American Encompass has just put out this work saying this idea that we should only ever cut taxes and our budget only has a spending problem is just not true. Now, the flip side, I think it's also important to say it's not like tax increases are good for workers, right? Like, I think it would be wrong to go out there and say

the way we solve these problems for workers is to raise taxes on somebody else. And I think that's where the sort of Occupy Wall Street, like we just need to sort of, if we punish the 1% somehow, that will benefit somebody. I'm just not sure what the logical chain is there. I think the two things we need to focus on much more strongly than a lot in the Republican Party

have historically. One is that budget deficits matter now, right? It's not just a matter of accumulating debt that's going to promote some, you know, cause some future crisis. Budget deficits are a form of imbalance in the economy that has all sorts of consequences that crowd out better private investment, that drive up trade deficits and encourage offshoring. And so saying, actually, we need to get our budget deficit under control, and that will be a good thing for workers, I think is really important. And then the second piece of it is to acknowledge that, you know,

a lot of the things we spend money on that Republicans have historically said, well, let's just cut, those things are really popular with and important to workers. And so whether you're talking about, you know, the safety net, certainly if you're talking about entitlements, your typical working family isn't interested in seeing those things cut. Now, obviously, there are trade-offs in life. Either you have to reduce spending or you have to pay more taxes to cover the spending. But what we've said is the appropriate pro-worker view here is, number one, you do have to close the budget deficit. You have to be willing to pay for the government you have. And number two, the way to do that is going to have to be through real compromise. That, yes, does bring down spending, including in some painful ways.

But, yes, also is going to have to raise some more revenue in some painful ways. And so that's the position that we've taken. Again, I think it's one very interesting thing that you start to see conservatives taking. We just put out a podcast where we spoke with both Congressman Ro Khanna, the progressive Democrat, and Congressman Jody Arrington, the conservative Republican who's chair of the House Budget Committee. And it's very interesting to see, you know, Congressman Arrington, Chairman Arrington is more than happy to emphasize, yes, there are going to have to be compromises here. We can't just do the Republican tax cutting thing. Revenue has to be on the table because we do have to close this budget deficit. And that's exactly the place I want to see conservatives going.

Frankly, it's very frustrating on the other side of the conversation to try to ask progressives to say like, look, we think there could be some revenue on the table. What's the spending that we're going to put on the table? And the answer being, well, you know, essentially nothing. I mean, you look at the Biden budget, Biden takes spending up further over the next 10 years while making no attempt to pay for it.

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It's time for skills to speak for themselves. Find resources for breaking through barriers at taylorpapersilling.org. Brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council. One last point on kind of unions and worker power before we move back to the question of immigration, the economy, or worker power there. To your point about unions at a micro level can have the same effect. They drive up wages, and then they might drive up prices and have some inflation as a result of that. What I'm also talking about, though, is the way that union density and a big labor movement changes the entire political economy. And I think if we can put up EX4 here, I believe it is, or any of these charts that I grabbed kind of show the picture that, you know, so this is basically the way that you're seeing all of the gains flow to, you know, very high wage earners happens to coincide

precisely with the time that union power is collapsing. You know, as union power is surging in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, you know, the political economy is structured kind of toward workers. And eventually, these big companies are able to kind of beat back the labor movement to break the back of unions. And as a result, the kind of entire political structure changes. And so I think we have EX5 here, which shows right at the time that unions are broken, that before you break the unions. So it's not just that the union in micro negotiations with the company are what are producing the effect that you're seeing on the chart there. It's also that both parties then are heavily influenced by workers because unions are organized and they're

able to get out the vote based on their material economic concerns. And so they then implement legislation that makes it more difficult for people to accumulate that sort of wealth. What happens in the 70s and 80s is that you see the marginal tax rates just start to collapse. And you ask, you know, what to do about this crazy, corrupt executive compensation? The answer is quite simple. You tax it. Like back in the 1970s and 1980s, when you had very high marginal tax rates, there just wasn't the incentive for executives to go out and do all of this stuff. Now, the counterargument to that 90% tax rate, people often say, well, actually, nobody ever paid the 90%. So it's kind of a myth that we ever even had it.

But my argument would be the point wasn't to collect revenue. It was social policy. It was policy aimed at discouraging the type of activity that would accumulate that much wealth. So in other words, a corporate raider, a private equity group might be able to look at a Kmart and say, we could bankrupt this pension fund and steal all the money. We could break the union. We could sell the land out from under it and just keep all the money. But at 90% tax rate,

what's even the point of doing it? So we're just going to go to try to find things that we can do that are actually kind of useful to society, which to your point and to Adam Smith's point that you quoted in the essay, like capitalism works if you're directing people towards socially useful projects rather than socially destructive ones. And so what I'd say is like by reorganizing the political economy so that workers have power, again, what those workers will do is produce policy, produce federal policies that then make it very difficult for the top 1% to continue to gobble up all of the wealth. And I just don't think that's the kind of thing that you can do just by, say, tightening immigration down at the border.

Well, again, I don't think we disagree that a stronger labor movement is important as well. We'd have to have a longer conversation about this 90% tax bracket issue. It's important to understand that it would not have back then and anything you would do today would not hit your sort of Huffington Post marketing executive. And conversely, when you start to talk about the profits that you're making from taking over and bankrupting Kmart, those are typically coming through capital gains, and if they're even realized, and being steered into wealth and other forms. So look, American Cummins has said there's problems with all this stuff. We is that they have become primarily political enterprises and essentially arms of the Democratic Party, certainly in the way that they spend their money. And the problem is that that's not what workers want. I mean, the data is a little hard to tease

out, but I think it's pretty safe to say among private sector union workers that the majority supported Donald Trump in 2020. That will most certainly be the case in 2024. And so you have this problem, you know, if nothing else, American workers don't look politically very different from just Americans generally. And so the idea that we're going to sort of use union power and sort of organize workers and exert political power through them in a way that advances the Democratic Party's priorities, it just doesn't make any sense. And in fact, the continued effort to try to do that is probably the number one obstacle to organizing today. I mean, we've done a lot of survey work. One thing you find is that among the significant share of workers who have no interest in unions,

the number one thing they dislike about them is the politics. And that goes for whether you're a Democrat or a Republican. And if you ask workers, would they prefer an organization representing them focused only on workplace issues or both workplace issues and national political issues, they'll choose only workplace issues by almost three to one. So I guess I would sort of pose the question back to you, because this is something that we've posed to a lot of folks on the left of center who we'd love to work with on this issue of labor reform, of building better worker organizations. How do you feel about a system that really does strengthen the ability to organize, create more and better forms of worker power, but also quite explicitly says these are not for use in national politics? I mean, almost

the way, you know, American Compass has a 501c3, we limit what nonprofits can do in the political realm. Would you be comfortable with a model that says, yes, we're going to do a lot more to give workers a lot more economic power in the labor market, representation in the workplace, but those entities cannot be ones that are then turning around and trying to be political in ways that workers don't actually want? Is that a deal you're interested in or not? I think I'd happily agree to it if billionaires were also kept out of politics, if corporate America was kept out of politics, if corporations couldn't fund super PACs, if billionaires couldn't fund super PACs. And basically, I guess you then publicly finance campaigns. But I think that the history of giving people economic rights without giving them political rights doesn't pan out well. You need both.

Oh, to be clear, they would still have political rights. They just would not be using unions which are representing a group of workers that don't agree on politics to exert that. I should say I entirely agree with you on the corporate point. I would like to see us address Citizens United one way or another. I think getting that out of politics as well would be very constructive.

At American Compass, we continue to look for a partner on the left who would be willing to take this exact deal and go out there and say, look, workers would be better served, our political system would be better served, our political system would be better served if we reduce both the role of unions and corporations in our politics. We have yet to find anyone on the left of center willing to agree with that premise or write about

it. If you or your listeners know of any such groups, please do let us know, because I think that's absolutely the direction to move. Yeah, I think the reason you're not going to find that is because I don't think anybody believes that kind of corporate power and the power of the rich is ever actually going to be taken off the political playing field. And so if you just, if you take what's left of union power away, and you take away the ability for unions to grow, and then, and to become what, you know, Galbraith calls the countervailing force. Without that countervailing force of labor unions, I think corporate power just becomes too dominant. So that's why, you know, what kind of reaction have you gotten? Has anybody come close? I find it hard to believe

that anybody would even come close to agreeing to that on the left. Well, typically the dynamic is exactly what we've seen in this discussion, where the person on the left, represented here by you, attempts what they think is the gotcha of, well, sure, I'd be open to that if we could also do something, if you're open to doing something about corporate power. And then we say, yes, that's great, we would love to do something about corporate power. And then they immediately retreat as you just have back behind. Well, now, never mind. I guess I don't think it would actually work. Right, because how are you going to do that? I mean, I was being

facetious when I was saying that. If you didn't think it was realistic or plausible, like everyone on the left spends all their time talking about how we should absolutely do something about Citizens United and so forth. So if I say like, yes, great, let's, and you immediately turn around and say, why bother? It's not going to accomplish anything. Then why, why are you talking about it?

Yeah. It was because it was, it was a, it was a joke. It was a joke. But it really wasn't a joke. Look, if you could do public financing, um, then, then, all right, then, then maybe, then maybe that works. Um, I don't think just limiting corporate and top 1% kind of power is enough. You have to empower somebody who stands up for people. So is public financing in your deal, this hypothetical deal that's out there? Yeah, I'm certainly open to the idea of it. I think maybe how you do it well is, of course, a massive challenge. And I also think you don't want to exclude the role of individuals as donors.

I think there's a lot of benefits in the campaign system to that as well. But building a model that does reduce the influence on both sides, I think is exactly the right one. And so I think as we've seen, you know, what I think this discussion sort of emphasized generally is that what you see is the more sort of populist conservative view that is, I think, fair to say ascendant on the right within the Republican Party really does jumble a lot of these things. I think it puts a lot of pressure on progressives in areas where they sort of conveniently pretended to be a lot more pro-worker than they actually are. But it also creates a lot of space for actual progress. I mean, you've had the sort of trench warfare of Democratic and Republican Party of the last 30 years,

neither of whom budging on anything and anything that could get worked out having already been worked out, as you see both parties, but especially the Republican Party, shift in its coalition and its emphasis, that does create new ground for progress. And so that is something we're very interested in pursuing. No, I do think it is genuinely interesting where the Republican Party is headed. I'm curious to see kind of where that continues to go. There's a bill on the question of individual donors.

I'm sure you know the bill by John Sarbanes, which basically matches every contribution that somebody makes up to $250 by six. So it turns like small to even medium-sized, $250 contributions from individuals who choose who they're going to support. And so that still leaves a role for individual donors. Then it multiplies them by six with federal financing. And they have a clever scheme where it's not taxpayer money. It's actually money, I think the SEC or the CFPB or somebody collects from like, you know, corrupt corporations that, so those fines would go into a pool that would then be used to support public financing. But I do want to ask, do you want to

get your, and I don't know if I'm representing the left or what here, it's a minority view in general to say that immigration is actually good for the country and good for workers. But I'm sure you saw the report from the Congressional Budget Office, which revised up its GDP forecasts and said that something like over the next decade, there would be an additional $7 trillion in economic growth because of the higher rate of immigration that we're seeing. And that the reason that inflation has been actually tamed, not tamed completely, but why inflation is growing less than it was in the pandemic, was that immigration has fueled economic growth to the extent that it's just spreading generally and driving the American economy to grow faster and with lower inflation than basically any other

economy in the world. So I'm sure you've seen this a whole bunch of times. What's your response to just the general idea that you need workers to grow the economy, and that if you're not growing the economy, simply restricting the labor supply only ends up, in the end, hurting workers as they see their real wages go down, even if their nominal wages go up? Well, I think there's two things to say. One is, again, the report that you're talking about is talking about GDP and not GDP per capita. It's, I think, one of the sillier math tricks in all of economic policy to say, well, immigration is good for the economy because GDP goes up. Well, of course it does. If you have more people, there will be more economic output. But when we talk about the actual prosperity of the typical American worker,

we're not interested in overall GDP. We're interested in GDP per capita. And that report, I believe, quite notably does not predict that this is increasing GDP per capita, or even more importantly, sort of median GDP per capita, the median wages of a typical worker, because immigration wouldn't do that. So let's first of all be clear about what we are and aren't talking about. With respect to this idea that, you know, if you have constraints on the labor market, then you're not going to see real wages rise. Again, the driver of whether or not real wages rise is whether productivity is growing. And particularly whether, if you're talking about median wages for typical workers, whether the productivity of the typical worker is growing. A lot of things need to happen for that productivity

to grow. But in general, I do think it is reasonable to say that if you want to see a focus on growing productivity and investment in that, you need to make that an imperative. You need to make that key to business success. And when you have a massive untapped pool of natural experiment on this point because we went through, well, we have gone through long periods in American history of both rapid immigration and significantly constrained immigration. And I'm pretty sure that in the post-war period when the U.S. had very low levels of immigration, there isn't a whole lot of evidence that that was a bad thing for the labor market. That seemed to have coincided just fine with rapid productivity growth, economic growth, increases in output per worker, rising real wages. So yes, more immigrants,

more people means a bigger economy. But that is one of the cardinal mistakes that policymakers made in recent decades of focusing on that and not focusing on what actually matters, which is the well-being of the typical worker. How far would you take it in the opposite direction? Like if more electricians is bad, I would argue that more, you know, actually right now in this economy, I think we don't have enough electricians. Like we need to produce more electricians. And sometimes you need policy beyond just a price signal. Like, I think one mistake that economists make is that they live in kind of an imaginary land where, you know, prices dictate supply and demand, just without realizing that there's also a real economy. There's a real world. The price for wheat can be whatever you want it to be, but if it's not raining and you've got a

complete drought in a particular area, you're not going to be able to grow wheat. You still need real things. The price that you can be paying for nurses in West Virginia could be quite high. But if there aren't any people there who are trained and willing to work in that area, you're not going to be able to just solve the problem just by raising prices. And if you do raise it high enough that you're able to pull nurses away from other areas, now you don't have enough over there. In other words, you need more nurses. You have to produce more of them. That would be my argument. How far would you take the counter argument? Let's say, if you want to raise the wages of nurses, why not go beyond shutting the border down? Would we say, okay, for the next year,

we're not going to graduate anybody from nursing school because that's going to tighten the labor pool around nursing? I'm trying to... Because if your policy lever is labor supply, why stop at immigration? Well, because the policy goal is the well-being of American workers, right? So the countervailing interest here would be people in the United States who do want to be nurses. And so, I mean, I guess you could say like arbitrarily, let's tell a bunch of people they can't work and that would i guess tighten the

labor supply but at obviously the very serious expense of the the americans who you would be telling can't work so i think what you're what you're trying to solve for is is the healthiest possible labor market serving the interests of american workers. And that is sort of how I would try to evaluate the policy proposals. I would say just again, focusing on the nurse example a little more, it's worth keeping in mind that one thing you would expect to see if you have a shortage of nurses and compensation for nurses therefore starts to rise significantly, it's not just a matter of sort of moving nurses from one place to another. It's a matter of, of having more nurses over time. And,

and one of the things I think we get wrong and also in sort of blaming the tight labor market for inflation in recent years is that if you have a tight labor market, especially at the bottom, what you're doing is affecting relative prices. You're, recent years, is that if you have a tight labor market, especially at the bottom, what you're doing is affecting relative prices. You're forcing people to drive up wages for one set of workers. There are other workers who don't benefit from that. And in particular, it would be the high-skilled workers, the higher-wage workers whose labor

market is not getting tighter. And so in a sense, what you are talking about at the macro level is a fairly significant shift over time and one that I think would be very important. And that's where that windshield installer versus marketing executive example ultimately comes down, is that if you move toward an economy in which we really need a lot more and to treat a lot better and to create better jobs for those workers who have been left behind, that's also going to have a blowback effect on those who have benefited most from this model in a way that I think would be very healthy for the society.

And so I think that's something that certainly makes some people very uncomfortable, but is the direction we're going to have to go if we want to address a lot of the problems we have. I apologize. Actually, I have to depart, so we should wrap up. But this has been a terrific conversation. Yeah, no, Emily had to drop. I don't know if she mentioned it. Emily had to drop off earlier. She had to run. You know, a lot more to talk about here. And I think like as long as we're talking about growing worker power through a strong labor movement, then I think the left and the populist right can certainly negotiate around a sane immigration policy. I don't think that has to

make or break that potential coalition there. I hope so. All right. Well, there we go. Well, Oren Kass, executive director at American Compass and the visionary for the new populist right. Thank you so much for joining us here. This was great. Thank you. All right. That was Oren Kass. And normally, Emily and I would go over the interview at this point. Emily had to drop off a little bit earlier. So we'll do that next time. We promise we'll do a review of that conversation and uh definitely have uh cast on again these are interesting things to tease out until next time uh this is counterpoints we'll see you soon

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