The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Podcast – The Case for a Maximum Wage by Sam Pizzigati

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

The Case for a Maximum Wage by Sam Pizzigati Modern societies set limits, on everything from how fast motorists can drive to how much waste factory owners can dump in our rivers. But incomes in our deeply unequal world have no limits. Could capping top incomes tackle rising inequality more effectively than conventional approaches? In this engaging book, leading analyst Sam Pizzigati details how egalitarians worldwide are demonstrating that a “maximum wage” could be both economically viable and politically practical. He shows how, building on local initiatives, governments could use their tax systems to enforce fair income ratios across the board. The ultimate goal? That ought to be, Pizzigati argues, a world without a super rich. He explains why we need to create that world ― and how we could speed its creation.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in once again we have made another podcast we're just tromping our way to a thousand podcasts here one podcast at a time that's how we work here on the

chris faust show we tried doing two podcasts at a time it didn't work because we had too many screens and too many guests and we couldn't figure out who we were talking to including ourselves at the time we didn't do that anyway guys go to youtube.com, Forge has Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button. Go to all the Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, all those different places that we have the Chris Voss show. Just search for him. You'll find the groups and everything over there.

Go to goodreads.com, Forge has Chris Voss, and you can see what we're reading or viewing over there. This is going to be an interesting discussion we're going to have for a lot of reasons. Not only is the author brilliant, the book is brilliant, but it's very topical for what's going on in today's wage market, job market, if you will, post-coronavirus. The book is The Case for a Maximum Wage. The book is by Sam Bisgati, and he's on the show with us today. I like the Italian version of his thing. Of course, I'm on a diet right now. I was telling him in the green room. So now I just have pizza on the

mind. If you hear my belly doing hunger, gurgles or whatever, yeah, that's my stomach on a diet, but I've lost 53 pounds. So I'm doing pretty good. Anyway, let me tell you about Sam. Sam is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. He currently co-edits Inequality.org, the online world's prime portal to issues around maldistributed income and wealth. He has written extensively on economic divides with articles and op-eds appearing worldwide in outlets ranging from the New York Times and The Guardian to Le Monde Diplomatique. He has actually authored four books on income and wealth inequality and co-edited another. His most recent book, this one we'll be talking about today, appeared in 2018.

He's a veteran labor journalist. He spent 20 years directing the publishing of America's largest trade union, the 3.1 million member National Education Association. Welcome to the show, Sam. How are you? I'm doing fine. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming. Awesome, Sauce. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs. The best place would be at inequality.org. That's the website that we have that features the writing and the research that we've been doing. Awesome sauce. So what motivated you want to write this book? I think when I look back

on my life, I grew up on Long Island, right next door to Levittown. And Levittown in the 1950s, when I was a kid, was the center of the emerging new American middle class. And the United States at that time, we did something very special. We created the first society in human history where the majority of people had disposable income after they paid off their rent and their food and their basic necessities. We created the first mass middle-class society in world history. That was something special. And it was a society that we created because we narrowed the divide between the very rich and everybody else.

And unfortunately, that great achievement that we made in the middle of the 20th century, the achievement we made when I was a kid. By the time I was an adult, that achievement had essentially been dissipated. And I've been working ever since trying to remake that equality that we had in the middle of the 20th century. A lot of people have been trying to get back to that golden age of income. I mean, there's some different aspects that went into it. The war, people had all their money in savings from the war, their war bonds. You had the returning GIs that came home with the GI Bill. So there's a lot of different makeup to that sort of thing.

Give us an overarching plug about the book. I think we all recognize, or most all of us, that if you're going to have a decent society, you need a wage floor, you need a minimum wage, that you can't have decency without a minimum wage. But I think what this book argues, and what I've been arguing, other folks have been arguing, is that by the same token, we need a ceiling. If we want to have a decent society, we need a ceiling on income, that we can't let income and wealth just continue to concentrate in the pockets of a precious few people. And if we do that, if we allow that concentration to take place, we're asking for trouble. We're asking for trouble in our democracy. We're asking for trouble in our economy. We're asking for trouble in every aspect

of our life. And this book, The Case for a Maximum Wage, tries to speak to that problem that we're facing now. That's interesting. Right now, there's a lot of things going on with the news, with the coronavirus and everything else. How do you define a maximum wage? Because I guess one of the problems that has been going on for a long time is wages have been stagnant for so long. But what is a maximum wage wage according to your book? Let's go back to Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt proposed a maximum wage, a maximum income. In 1942, at the beginning of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt proposed that all income over $25,000 be subject to a 100 percent tax. Now, $25,000 in 1942 equals about $400,000

today. So that was the maximum wage that FDR proposed. That was the threshold for a 100 percent top tax rate. Now, Congress did not pass that 100% top tax rate that FDR asked for, but Congress did pass legislation the next year that created a 94% tax rate on income, individual income, over $200,000. Our top tax rate hovered around 90% for the next 20 years. And those were the years where we saw the birth of the mass American middle class. And yeah, and I've seen the graphs, I believe, that show the taxation rates being reduced by the ultra-rich. It's all up 1%, as Bernie would say. I don't know, That's a horrible Bernie impression. But you've seen the decline of it to the point recently there was some data leaked. There was some IRS stuff that was leaked that showed that these rich people aren't paying any taxes.

Their corporations don't pay any taxes. They really don't put much into the – you can't say they don't put much in the tax base. They do have employees, and they pay in through that, through their various things. Would self, would people like Jeff Bezos or entrepreneurs be subject to the maximum wage you propose? Yes, because it would be tied not to the paycheck, but to the income. And so what we're proposing is a maximum level, a maximum threshold tied to the minimum wage. So let's say FDR talked about a specific figure, $400,000 in today's inflation adjusted terms. But what if we set that to the minimum wage? What if we said that all income over 100 or 50 or 25 times the minimum wage was subject to 100% tax? If we did that, then the richest and most powerful people in our country,

people like Jeff Bezos, would have a vested personal interest in increasing the minimum wage because the higher the minimum wage went, then the higher that maximum level, that maximum threshold would be. And I think that would be a healthy dynamic for our society. What you're proposing is there's a block range or something, I don't know what the correct term would be. And I think that would be a healthy dynamic for our society. What you're proposing is there's a block range or something. I don't know what the correct term would be, but that's scalable or adjustable and it moves as a block. Yes, that we have a multiple, we have a ratio and that ratio determines what the maximum wage would be. And that maximum would be tied to the minimum wage.

Oh, wow. So basically he could make more than that, but anything that he made more than that would be just worthless, wouldn't it? We've had some authors that have come on the show. And one of the things that these guys do that they have access to that a lot of people don't is high paid attorneys and tax accountants and these guys who can, they can figure any, they can find any gleam of light in any tax law to skirt the laws or park money offshores, et cetera, et cetera. How do we deal with that? In the middle of the 20th century, the rich tried all sorts of things to get around paying their taxes. But what we found was that the federal government, when it was serious about going after those tax loopholes, did a fairly good job of closing those loopholes one after

another. There was one exception, one huge exception, and that was the big oil, the oil industry. In 1982, Forbes did its first list of the 400 richest Americans. On the top 10 of those rich, eight of them were big oil because of the oil depletion allowance and other tax breaks that the oil industry had. And the oil industry had two very powerful people, Lyndon Johnson, who at that time was the head of the Senate, and Sam Rayburn, who is the Speaker of the House. So they had an insurance policy against plugging those tax loopholes. And that created this big oil rich. And that big oil rich financed campaigns against that 91% tax rate that we had back then, and eventually prevailed and started us down the road to the

unequal society that we have today. Oh, wow. So is this anti-capitalism? How would you describe this? Because some people, they start throwing around words like socialism, capitalism. Is this anti-capitalism or how do you think the approach on the approach on it i think it's pro-middle class i think it's pro-fight against poverty i think it's about building a better society so you can put whatever label you'd like to to put on that this doesn't say how our enterprises should be organized all it says is that a few people a precious few people would not be able to grab an outsized share of the rewards that an economy creates. Now, what will be the difference? Does maximizing the wage, does that make it so that people won't aspire to as much?

Like I said, is that anti-limiting income? Is that going to penalize success for capitalism? That's the argument. The argument is that if people can't get really rich, then they're not going to strive. They're not going to create. They're not going to do big and wonderful things. But here's the reality. The reality is that the vast majority of us wake up every morning, go to work, work hard, be creative, do wonderful things. And we do all this without any expectation that we'll become fabulously rich. So if you take away that possibility of becoming fabulously rich, we're still going to work hard, we're still going to be creative, we're still

going to make a positive contribution. But the fact is that there are some people who are driven by the need to become fabulously rich. And if you look at these people, what do they do? They shortchange their families, their bosses and companies, they exploit their workers, maybe they cheat consumers, maybe they play fast and loose with environmental regulations. They do everything to make a buck. They can cause great damage in their haste to make a buck. So a maximum wage would say to these people, listen, there's a lot more to life than making lots of money. And I think that'd be a very positive message for our society to send. So why not just raise the minimum wage and not

really do the maximum wage thing? What's the benefits of doing it this way as opposed to just raising the minimum wage in and of itself with a law? Well, the problem is that the minimum wage hasn't been raising. So we've been creating all this new wealth. All this new wealth has gone to the top and precious little of it has gone to the minimum wage. And the problem is, if we let wealth concentrate at the top, political power is going to concentrate at the top too. And people in the very rich, in the billionaire class are going to have the power to keep the minimum wage low, because the lower the minimum wage, the more wealth, the more income pours into

the pockets of the super rich. So without extremely rich people, we still have extremely rich people like the Jeff Bezos in the world, or would they just be like, we're not going to work that hard? Or I don't know, maybe they go to another country that might have... The problem with a lot of these billionaires, they're pan-globalists. They don't give a crap about democracy or anything anymore. They just, all they care is they actually like governments that will let them do whatever they want. That's right. And they do their best to bring those governments into effect. But clearly, if we move in this direction of a maximum wage, we would hope and we would expect other nations to move into this direction right now. Currently, the United

States is by far the most unequal developed country in the world. And let me just give you one example. Researchers at the Swiss bank Credit Suisse do a global wealth report every year. Earlier this week, the latest report just came out. In the United States, the top 1% of folks in the United States now holds over 35% of the wealth in the United States. In Japan, the top 1% only holds 18% of the wealth of the country. In France, it's 20%. In the UK, I think it's 22%. So we are fundamentally, significantly more top-heavy than other nations in the world. Yeah, we definitely have some issues. I think yesterday we were talking about one of our

authors, and we turned it to rogue capitalism, unbridled capitalism, unfettered capitalism. It seems like capitalism is really out of control in our country. And I'm a capitalist. I've been an entrepreneur since I was 18. I believe in it. But the minimum wage definitely is something that I need to see raised and everything else. What do you think about what's going on right now? I was driving around yesterday over in some industrial centers, going to my storage unit that I have up here. And I noticed lots of signs out front of these. It was like, what do you call them? Industrial complex, industrial off area. Signs were all over. We pay 15 plus an hour, like somewhere $15 and 60 cents. I guess they throw an extra 60 cents in there or something. And Biden,

I believe, just talked yesterday or the day before about companies complaining about how they got to pay $15 an hour and he's good. It's about time that people are getting paid more. And the market, it's interesting, the market seems to be not really fixing itself. I don't know how permanent it is, but fixing itself. You're not going to be able to claw back that $15 an hour and put people back to 10 when the market changes, which I'm not sure. What do you think about those forces that are going on the market? Can the market fix itself or does it really need legislation at this point? I think it really needs legislation at this point. The $15 minimum wage that's beginning to come in now is nowhere near, is still nowhere near what a family really needs to support itself.

We need to change the political calculus in the country, in this country. Right now, the calculus is overwhelmingly tilted, overwhelmingly rigged on behalf of people with wealth and power. And we've got to change that. And it won't change as long as we let that wealth and power remain concentrated in a precious few hands. Definitely. It's definitely tough. What is the minimum wage that you think that, what do you think the minimum wage should be right now for what's going on in the world and how? If you look at researchers who look at a family of four, what a budget should be right now for what's going on in the world and how if you look at researchers who look at a family of four what a budget should be so that there's at least a minimal level of decency for that family then you're talking about a minimum wage and 25 an hour somewhere in that

25 so significantly more than we than we have right now. Wow. $25 an hour. That's quite a jump because I think up until recently it was like 10, but now 15 seems to be the standard. You're seeing all this. The legal minimum wage is still $7.25. Oh, is it really? The federal minimum wage is still $7.25.

That is brutal, man. I don't even know how, what is that per month? $7 per month times what, 40. So that would be 280 times four. So basically you could just call it 1200 bucks, maybe roughly rounding up a little bit, I think. Jesus. And that's before taxes. It's ridiculous. And it's a disgrace that our country is like that. And the shame is that our country was not like this. You know, 50 half century ago, we were on a different trajectory. We were on a trajectory to provide decency for all American working families. And we've gotten off that trajectory as we've let wealth concentrate. Wow. Yeah, it's really important that we change these laws. What do you think about what's going

on with this new poverty system the Biden administration has? I think in July, they start attacking child poverty. They're sending out checks to people that have kids and stuff. I'm all for it. We need to fix poverty in families and children. I'm a little bent because I'm a single guy all my life, and I pay the highest taxes of anybody. And I'd like a check. Hello? I might go adopt some kids after this. I don't know.

I'm just kidding. But what do you think about that program and its contribution to maybe helping fight some of this poverty? I think it's certainly a step in the right direction, but it still leaves us considerably behind other developed nations in Europe and in Canada, which have systems that are much more friendly to working families and don't allow the sort of poverty that we allow in this country. So we're moving in the right direction, but we have so much more to go and we're not going to get to where we need to be as long as we face the obstacle of this super rich at the top, which has so much political power in our country. Definitely. It really does when it comes down to it.

What are some other aspects we haven't covered about your book? I'm thinking... I think that there's another aspect of this, of the negative impact of concentrated wealth that doesn't get talked about much. And that's the aspect of consumerism that in every society, the wealthiest, the affluent people set the consumption bar, they established, you know, this is what you need to have to be successful in life. So the affluent people set that bar. Now, if you have an equal society, and the most affluent people are not that much more affluent, not that much richer than the vast majority of the population, then that bar that they set can be reachable. But if you have a society like ours, when the most affluent are many times more affluent, more rich than average people, then that consumption

bar that defines what success in life is much higher than people where people are at. So what do people do? They feel the social pressure. They feel like failures because they're not anywhere close to that consumption bar that defines success. Maybe they go deeply in debt to buy the things that they have matched that consumption standard. But so in other words, when we allow the wealthy to separate themselves out from the rest of the society, we're creating all sorts of social pressures that go beyond politics, that go beyond economics, that really undercut the quality of lives that we're all living. If we have a more equal society, we'll have a less stressful society. And we'll also have a more, the less stress we have in our society,

the more health we'll have in our society. Because stress and health are very closely interrelated. Now, when you're saying equality, you're going to have people that are going to start doing that whole communism, socialism aspect. What's the difference or how do you separate that or say this isn't that in this use case? How do you respond to those people? I think just look back in American history, some of those honored people, some of the founders of our country talked about the need to prevent wealth from concentrating at the top. So this isn't some un-American notion. This is something that goes back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and

the other notables who founded this country. There was a real recognition that we could not let wealth accumulate in a few pockets and expect to have a decent society. And I think the wisdom of those folks has been borne out by the 200 years of our history. We've seen different times in our history, the anti-monopoly, the monopolists, the RICO, or not the RICO, but the anti-monopoly act to fight monopolies. Although I don't know, a lot of times those things come about because the government just doesn't want competition for someone who's worth more than they are. We have had eras in our country where we've made progress against monopoly power. And those movements haven't been driven by government bureaucrats. They've been driven by popular movements, by working people, getting

together and pushing for change in our society. And by the middle of the 20th century, we were able to put together a lot of successful change. And again, that's the tragedy of my lifetime, that the success, the promise that we showed as a society in the middle of the 20th century, we were going in the right direction and we've been going in reverse ever since. And with Citizens United, some of the Supreme Court decisions have made it so it's so easy to buy the government, so easy to buy politicians, buy rich people. It's not even funny. It's actually illegal just to basically buy a politician, which has almost created an oligarchy in this world. In fact, President Jimmy Carter said we are living in an oligarchy. So take it from him if you like. What do you say to that? We'd have to somehow overturn some of these Citizens United and different laws. We have this government that's owned by these billionaires and billionaire corporations. How are we ever going to get them on our side to make these changes?

It's interesting. You mentioned oligarchs. We just came out at the Institute for Policy Studies. We just came out with a report last week entitled Silver of money. That was 1982. Last year, the end of last year, that same Walmart clan was worth nearly $250 billion. The 10 wealthiest oligarchical families in the United States together hold four times the wealth of the bottom half of the american population i don't think people realize how strikingly unequal we've become we definitely have the the i it's i don't know is it that people i'm always reminding you of that scene in network the movie network the famous scene where he talks about how people just get so beaten down being poor. I got my radial tires, I got my lazy boy, and I just want to come home, watch my TV. I'm sick of everything that's going on.

I just want you to leave me alone for five seconds and let me be in peace. And people are so beaten down. When you're busy chasing your tail, you don't have a lot of time to look up and go what are the politicians doing to screw me and then a lot of people of course i'm always just amazed at how people will pick up the the betsy devos billionaire center for national policy talking points tropes uh of how we don't we it's raising the minimum wage is against whatever it's against the capitalism whatever and you're just like you realize that you're picking up a trope from a billionaire media outlet that that just wants to keep you down and almost enslaved as an indentured servitude we've seen colleges it's almost indentured servitude you get people that are enslaved

for up to 20 years i have friends that are my age they're just now paying off their college loans i'm like holy crap so it seems like there's a lot of stuff that we need to change in our society. And I don't know, man, people just seem to be getting dumber and letting whatever happen. Here's the good news. We can do this. We can make this change. And we know we can do it because we've done it before as a nation. A century ago, at the height of the original Gilded Age, the wealth of the wealthy was even more egregious than it is today. Their power was even greater than the power of the super rich today. But people fought over the course of two generations, and they changed that around. They made a difference.

They created a much better society. And if they did that against the odds that they faced, then why can't we do it? And I think Ames says we can do it. Yeah, I think we can too. It's just, it's going to take, it was interesting to me to see people like the head of Goldman Sachs start sending up warning shots. I think it was at Davos for a speech he gave where they're like, the rich are starting to figure out that they could run into maybe a French Revolution type, eat the rich, pull out the gallows experience if they don't start being nicer to the indentured servitudes of the masses. I thought that was kind of interesting to see that because I'm like, wait, are you saying the quiet part out loud? I don't know. What are the odds for this thing happening? Does it have to take some sort of calamity or some sort of crisis or something

where, like I said, we have to do a French revolution and people just go take the streets with torches and guillotines and take back their power in their country? What really needs to happen? What steps do we need to take? If something is not done, there'll be an explosion of some sort. And that explosion is good for nobody. The French Revolution did not end for French peasants as well as for some of the nobility who lost their heads.

We don't want an explosion. We don't want incredible violence. We don't want social explosion. We don't want incredible violence. We don't want social dislocation on that scale. We want a transition that's peaceful. We want a transition that brings everybody together into a better society. So we have to address the problems we're facing. And there are some interesting ways to go at that. So let's look at one. What's the engine of inequality in the United States today? The engine is the modern American corporation. 50 years ago, CEOs used to average 20 times more than the pay of their

workers. In 2020, major American corporations paid their top executives over 300 times more than their typical workers. That's a huge engine of inequality that we have now. So what's happened is people are saying, why don't we tie corporate taxation to corporate pay rates? So if a corporation has a wide gap between its top executives and its typical workers, that corporation should pay more in taxes than a corporation that only has a modest gap between top executives and average workers. The city of Portland actually passed a law along that line three years ago. That's in effect right now. This past November, voters in San Francisco passed a plebiscite along the same line. So San Francisco will shortly be taxing corporations with wide pay gaps at higher rates than other corporations.

And in Congress, you mentioned Bernie Sanders before. Well, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, my senator, Chris Van Hollen from the state of Maryland are all supporting legislation that would bring that to the federal level. And under this legislation, Walmart would pay $1 billion more a year in taxes because its pay gap was over 1,000 times to one. Holy crap. So there are other things that we can do along this line. We can say to corporations, you cannot get a government contract if your pay gap between executive and worker is over 100 times to one or over 200 times to one. You cannot get a federal subsidy if your pay gap is too wide.

So there are steps that we can take to help build the equality that we need to see in the United States. What's the likelihood of that all going? I think it's not going to go down this year, but I think the momentum is definitely in that direction. There's strong support in Congress for, not majority support, but there is strong support for that. And a number of state legislatures are considering similar bills. So I think we're going to see a breakthrough at the state or the federal level in the next few years. What's interesting to me is how the market forces are changing it. And this is an anomaly. When you wrote your book, there wasn't this coronavirus thing going on, but this anomaly of what's come out of the coronavirus where

workers now seem to have increasingly choice. I'm seeing a lot of choice in their marketplace. One of the things that's driving choice is they've gotten really used to have increasingly choice. I'm seeing a lot of choice in their marketplace. One of the things that's driving choice is they've gotten really used to working at home. I've worked at home since 2004. They're used to working at home. And so now they can actually shop employers that might want to allow them to continue and not work at home.

Everyone's woken up and said, hey, that four hours a day I was commuting, two hours in, two hours out, isn't worth it, wasn't worth it. So why should I bother? And so I think it two hours out. Isn't worth it. Wasn't worth it. So why should I bother? And so I think it's really interesting. And then, like I said, you're seeing this competition for workers. I've seen, is it really true? I've seen people railing on this where they're like places that want to go back to the old way of paying. I realize some of them are

entrepreneurs and their business model maybe depends on that lower wage. But it almost seems like we're going to have to go through almost a hyperinflation or inflationary process to pay for the wages that are being put in. And we're already seeing that in the marketplace, of course, from the debt that we have. But I don't think that's the case. There is plenty of wealth in corporate America, but that wealth is being siphoned off at the top of the corporate ladder. If we narrow those gaps, if we create better jobs, better paying jobs, we'll have less turnover, we'll have more productive enterprises that will be creating more wealth that can be shared. But the key to that is changing the pay structure within corporations.

We can't go on with top executives making hundreds of times more than their workers. In 2018, we did a study. There were 50 corporate CEOs who made over a thousand times the pay of their most typical worker. That's crazy. That's insanity. That is crazy's crazy. That's insanity. That is insanity. When you watch the rise of Wall Street power, the Ivan Bioski age, if you want to call it the 1980s, and how suddenly it just became really popular and the rise of Wall

Street over what we call Main Street, it became really popular to, hey, you know what? It's all about your price of your stock. It's all about raising investor value for investors as opposed to workers. And it's, oh, you fired 20,000 workers? Oh, there your stock price goes up. One of my friends who's been on the show was the CEO of a public company. And he said, look, I'll tell you one of the dirty secrets. He said this on the show. He said, one of the dirty secrets of this business is as a corporate CEO, you might have maybe a good two-year run, maybe two to three years run. He goes, you don't really want to invest in the future because you don't get any options. They give you options on increasing the stock price as a, what do you do? You lay off employees. There's no value given

to you. There's no bonuses given to you to care about employees or to try and make their lives better or advance the company that way. Everything that you're given a bonus on is about investor value and the stock price of the company and increasing sales basically. And he goes, any long-term investment or&D that you say, hey, let's go build the next iPad. Very likely, it's not going to like Steve Jobs were going to be there when it lands. You're giving somebody else the benefit and you just don't care. And so you basically play for the short-term money and the golden parachute out. And then people wonder why we're in the situation we're in. And you can match that arc with the arc of what you said, where there was the rise of CEO pay and the

stagnation for 40 years of wage. And you can arc it with the dissolving of the middle class. And the two just, you can just put all that together and it just mixes like beautiful paint. And throw tax rates into that mix. Because until when did the Ivan Boski era, the Michael Milken era, when did that really begin? When did that take off? That took off in the early 1980s. What else happened in the early 1980s, the top tax rate, the tax rate that the rich paid, which was 70% top tax rate in 1979, 1980, Ronald Reagan elected in 1980, 1981, the Ronald Reagan Tax Act cut the top rate down first to 50%, and then five years later, down to 28% of the rate on top rate.

And that was the stimulus for the Michael Milken era, for the Ivan Boski era. That opened the door to grand fortunes. So people grabbed as much as they could grab and did whatever they needed to do to do that grabbing. If we had a maximum wage in place, that would depress the incentive for that sort of behavior. Yeah, and what's even funnier is we did it again during the Trump administration. I mean, we just don't learn.

There's no trickle-down economics. These guys just buy more boats and houses around the world. And I've known people that work for large companies. They help build them, but they're public companies now. But they have nothing better to do but buy houses. They make so much money. They have 24 houses around the world. They just can't buy enough property for write-offs.

And they go in and they renovate the houses completely, turn it into basically mansions because everything's about getting that write-off for real estate and everything else. And there technically should be nothing wrong with that. But you look at who's the, meanwhile, some person can't afford to, they're living on top, and they've got two or three kids, and they can't live what used to be the American dream. Is the American dream dead in your opinion right now? I'm sorry, I just had a technical problem there.

Yeah, I asked you a loaded question. Is the American dream dead right now? Part of the American dream is entrepreneurism. So maybe it's not dead. I saw a report coming out of, I think it was on Axios, where as opposed to 2008, the collapse of new businesses started, the complete opposite has happened

where we've seen a huge jump in new business filings. So maybe the American dream, quote unquote, isn't dead. I don't know. What do you think is the American dream? I think the American dream is under incredible stress that we have an economy that is increasingly dominated by major firms that put a squat, that squash entrepreneurship. My late son used to be in the computer industry, and he would talk about going to computer fairs, computer conferences, where the big giants like Microsoft

would just come and buy up good ideas they saw on the conference floor and then just put those ideas on the shelf because they didn't want the competition that the development of those ideas would have shelf because they didn't want the competition that the development of those ideas would have brought. So it's a way of a monopoly that dominated the economy, which is not good for entrepreneurial energy. If we had a more equal country, if we had a country where the rich did not have so much power, we'd have a shot of having a more vibrant economy where people could have the

economic security to take risks and go out and try to start new businesses. There you go. Anything more you want to touch on about the book and how it works? Just that I think people should feel a sense of hope amid this very difficult situation that we're in. I mean, it's a situation where the rich seem invincible, that the rich always win. That's the cliche. It's just not true. It's just not true. And if we look at the history of the last century, the rich didn't always win. Let's keep that in mind. And if we do, I think we can build a much better country. Hopefully we can get that to work for us. You got to love it.

You got to love it. Interesting discussion we've had today on your book. Thank you for coming by. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs. Inequality.org is the place where my writing appears along with the writing of a number of my colleagues on income and wealth inequality. We look at the campaigns that people are waging around the country to make our society more equal.

We highlight good ideas for new legislation. Come and see us there. There you go. There you go. Thank you very much for being on the show. We really appreciate it and for enlightening us on some of this thing. And hopefully you can educate some people to make some changes, do some different things with our legislatures and demanding more.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Guys, check it out. It's the book, The Case for a Minimum Wage by Sam Pizzagati. And it's been wonderful to have you on the show today, Sam. Thanks, my audience Thanks for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisvoss. Hit that bell notification. Go to goodreads.com,

4chesschrisvoss. Follow everything we're reading and writing over there. Also go to all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all those different places that we publish and chat about what we're doing. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you guys next time.