The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3617 - Trump Effectively Threatens to Nuke Iran; Fixing America's Wage Problem w/ Arindrajit Dube

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

It's News Day Tuesday on The Majority Report   On today's program:   Trump threatens to end a whole civilization on Truth Social this morning. Implying that he will drop a nuke on Iran. This after he called Iranians animals at an Easter event yesterday. Also, yesterday, Donald Trump said he believed that God supports his war in Iran.   Pete Hegseth gave another ChatGPT written dumbass speech where he compared the rescued pilot that was shot down in Iran to Jesus Christ's resurrection.   Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Arindrajit Dube joins the program for a conversation about his new book entitled; The Wage Standard: What is Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix it.   In the Fun Half:   Ben Shapiro's Zionism have become a pair of concrete socks, shilling for the war in Iran as his viewership tanks.   The Triggernometry guys are left gob smacked by the stupidity of Iranian monarchist Elicia Le Bon as she claims that 150,000 members of the IRGC are ready to defect to Reza Pahlavi with no source for that number.   Donald Trump is offended by a reporter's question about his mental acuity and lashes out in an insane rant about Asian countries not helping in the Strait of Hormuz.   Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat from New Jersey, shills for the war in Iran on CNN as his GOP counterpart Marjorie Taylor-Greene calls to invoke the 25th amendment.   JD Vance doubles down on Trump's nuclear threats on Iran while stumping for Viktor Orban in Hungary.   all that and more   Preorder Molly Crabapple's book: Here Where We Live is Our Country.   To connect and organize with your local ICE rapid response team visit ICERRT.com The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: ZOCDOC: Go to Zocdoc.com/MAJORITY and download the Zocdoc app to sign-up for FREE and book a top-rated doctor. #sponsored FAST GROWING TREES: Get 20% off your first purchase.  FastGrowingTrees.com/majority SUNSET LAKE: Use coupon code "Left Is Best" (all one word) for 20% off of your entire order at SunsetLakeCBD.com  Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com

You are listening to a free version of the Majority Report. Support this show at join the Majority Report.com and get an extra hour of content daily. Majority Report with Sam Cedar. It is Tuesday, April 7th, 26. My name is Emma Vigland in for Sam Cedar, and this is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps. from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, Aaron DuBae, author of The Wage Standard,

What's Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It? Also on the program, Trump's Morning Truth Social says, quote, A whole civilization will die tonight if Iran doesn't surrender, threatening genocide, And yesterday, Trump repeatedly said that God supports his war crimes in Iran, and Hegseth compared the rescue of a U.S. airman to Jesus Christ's resurrection. Speaking of Hegsith, Democratic Representative Ansari of Arizona pledges to introduce articles of impeachment against him next week. Iran rejects another temporary ceasefire, you know, the ones Israel and the United States continuously violates, demanding a permanent one plus concessions.

Marjorie Taylor Green and Alex Jones, of all people, say invoke the 25th Amendment on Trump. Europe begins to openly questions its close economic and defense ties to the United States. Israeli airstrikes kill at least 10 Palestinians near a school in Gaza, dozens more killed in Lebanon, violence escalating in the West Bank. A Marshall Project analysis finds that ICE has detained 6,200 children in Trump's second term, a 10-fold increase from Biden's time. Trump's new budget proposes cutting the TSA workforce by, 15%

you know just being in touch with the mood of the country. Longer lines at airports, please. Graham Platner's campaign apparently already feels Mills is finished in the Senate primary and is

turning the focus to the general. And lastly, Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Jonathan Jackson of Illinois visit Cuba denouncing Trump's collective punishment of the island. All this

and more on today's majority report. Welcome to the show, everybody. It is an majority report. Tuesday, or as we say here on the program, it is Newsday Tuesday. Sam is out this week. I will be

with you this week. Here to talk about the horrors that we wake up to every day in this escalating war with Iran. So this morning, the president of the United States, the esteemed leader and most powerful person on the planet, tweeted, oh, I'm sorry, truthed on his personal social media platform a threat to effectively nuke Iran or commit mass murder. Here it is. This is what we all woke up to this morning.

we could put this up. A whole civilization will die tonight, he wrote. Never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have complete and total regime change where different smarter and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionary wonderful can happen. Who knows?

So, I'll unpack this in a second. We will find out tonight one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death will finally end. God bless the great people of Iran. So he bookends that with a blessing to the people of Iran. After opening with saying that their whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. You know, we're trying to liberate the Iranian girls from the, repressive religious regime by bombing them and killing them.

Kind of a very similar logic here. This is the guy that was just snubbed for that Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, we saw he blessed the Iranian people at the end after promising to nuke them if they don't agree to his demands. It's hard to joke because of what we're talking about here. I'm praying that this is some sort of posture because Iran is winning this. and he feels the only thing that he can do is escalate threats.

But we obviously cannot rule out the possibility of the use of a nuclear weapon. And this is exactly why Iran, the hardliners in Iran, wanted a nuclear weapon. And Trump killed the elder Ayatollah, Harmony, who had had a fatwa on the construction of a nuclear weapon, was not interested in pursuing it, and also was. was in agreement and was abiding by the terms of the JCPOA that Obama negotiated, but the Zionist lobby effectively lobbied against, got their leader of the Democrats in the Senate that opposed it, and got a president in Donald Trump in the first term that scrapped it.

Because diplomacy is a threat to Israel's aims of regional hegemony. The more that the region is in turmoil, the more opportunity Israel sees for expansion. And him talking about this as a civilizational war, this is Nazi stuff. Ultra nationalism, white nationalism, Christian nationalism. This is like looking at global conflict and international relations

through prisms of hierarchies of race and social structure. these are Darwinists, social Darwinists. They don't believe in the concept of collaboration. They believe in dominance, whether that be in the form of religion, ethnicity or nation states. This is that this ideology distilled. I saw that Representative Jim McGovern called this genocidal. That's exactly what this is. And Iran has shown time and time again that they don't believe Trump's social media threats.

because they know that they are causing great pain to the West right now, particularly Europe, with their effective closure of the strait. So this is supposedly for the good of the Iranian people, the effective threat to nuke them. This was yesterday at the Easter celebration in the holiday spirit when Trump was asked about how the United States has been with Israel, been bombing bridges and power stations. This is how he spoke about the Iranian people. Mr. President, how would it not be a war crime to strike Iran's bridges and power plants? Because they killed 45,000 people in the last month, more than that. It could be as much as 60. They kill protesters, they're animals.

And we have to stop them and we can't let them have a nuclear weapon. Very simple. They want a nuclear weapon. They've been trying for a wrong time. I stopped them with the Obama. It's an horrible Iran nuclear deal. I stopped him not getting a lot of different ways. If they had a nuclear weapon right now, this would not be happening.

How can you make that case? This is what the most rational response would be. Two nuclear armed powers, Israel and the United States, have lulled Iran into a variety of different negotiations as a way to lulled Iran. them into a false sense of security so that they can be bombed. Why wouldn't they pursue a nuclear weapon as a deterrent? That's a, I mean, when you're looking at the way that the state would behave rationally, why would they not do so? Why does Israel get to have nukes and Iran doesn't? Because Israel wants to expand and that would be a threat to them and Iran is the most effective regional threat in that, in that way. We are the bad guys. We are the bad guys.

And if there wasn't this completely racist orientalism, the way that we talk about the people of Iran and then also the people of the Middle East, we would be talking about America and Israel right now as the perpetrators, the axis of evil in a world war. Because Israel is now seizing territory in Lebanon, invading different countries. They've already created buffer zones in Syria. they have stolen over half of the land in the Gaza Strip. They are right now stealing Palestinian land in the West Bank, and they're participating in carpet bombing of Iran. We have an entire conversation about how could Hassan Piker ever suggest something like,

or say something like America deserves 9-11? How do people understand that? What's the context for that? This is the context for that. And Sarah Longwell, and people like at the bulwark don't understand it because they sit down with people like Liz Cheney, who in fact do provoke these things. types of actions against America with this evil foreign policy.

Like the, uh, so let's support al-Qaeda because it's a proxy. We can start a civil war, uh, uh, in, uh, for Russia, right? We can, or start like a war in the, uh, periphery for Russia. Like, let's, uh, let's do coups. Let's do all this stuff. These people, Trump saying this stuff, but the Dick Cheney's previously, they provoke violence against America because they inflicted on the rest of the world. Everyone understands that in

2006. We bombed a girl school at the start of this fucking thing. We blew up 160 little girls. And we do this supposedly because of how they treat women. Because, yeah, they don't treat women here. The Republican Party is going to lecture the world on how to treat fucking women. We are the bad guys.

This is a fourth-right situation. But when they talk about feminism in that way, it's exactly the more coded language that Trump used earlier about this basically being a war of civilizations. They will try, they try to use the fact that like the West has the privilege to be cosmopolitan and is at the center of the imperial core and all the wealth and that that allows, which means more free artistic expression, more, more ability for, even though, of course, in the United States, we do not have a very good class mobility.

But either way, you know, in the ways that liberalism defines freedom, we have those. And that's not the case in Iran because of the theocratic regime there. But they will naturalize those differences as a way to make racialized arguments when we know that Iran's government is in place because of blowback from United States policy. In the 1950s, the U.S. overthrew, along with the British, the democratically elected leader of Iran because he dared to question whether or not the Iranian people were being ripped off by BP when they were drilling in Iran. We did a coup. We installed the Shah. And then there was a counter-revolution which brought this government, put this government in place, which has major human rights violations. is oppressive towards women, all of that. But at the very least, the Iranian people are like,

well, this isn't some sort of puppet puppet for the West that's going to extract from us. And there are revolutionary elements in Iran right now that could be helped if you wanted to do this in like a soft power U.S. empire way. But, but they're too belliger. They want blood and they want destabilization. That's it. They want, I mean, what we're going to see tonight. And remember the first day after the first day, after the. started when I came in, I said, I'm worried this is going to lead to us lob to a nuke because

there's no chance that we're going to accomplish the objectives because of just the geography here. But even short of a nuke, if tonight what we do is just blow up a whole bunch of their bridges and power stations, it's fucking disgusting. And I like never considered myself as somebody who'd like leave this country for like that reason. It disgusts me to pay taxes to this shit. Yeah. It's so fucking gross. And the Trump budget wants He wants a $1.5 trillion

Dollar budget He wants to cut from Essentially everything Except for this massive expansion Of the The Pentagon Budget It wasn't enough

Apparently for Israel to be Our aircraft carrier In the Middle East Apparently all this country is good for Is shipping out Weapons of War and death A terrorist nation The Pentagon is a big terrorist

So Yeah And it's not even like the weaponry that we are producing and giving gobs of money to the defense industry for are actually even that effective right now. We're seeing how these cheap drones are making such an impact and there are hundreds of millions of dollars that we pour into one particular surveillance jet. Oh, what do you know? Gone in a second because of some explosion from overhead because of the democratization of warfare via drones. It's a...

it's both an aircraft carrier and a slush fund for Nazis basically yeah and and even like via outdated military strategy let alone the retrograde racist nationalist views

that are held in this administration here is Trump at a press conference yesterday you know the guy who could can't name a Bible passage off the top of his head even when he isn't filled

with dementia and I don't know whatever the hell he's taking. The most godly man in America is asked about whether or not God supports this war. And you'll be shocked to know that Trump thinks he does. You've said glory be to God in this conflict. Do you believe that God supports the United States actions in this war? I do because God is good. Because God is good. And God wants to see people taking care of. God doesn't like what's happening. I don't like what's happening. Everyone says, I don't enjoy this. I don't enjoy this. I don't enjoy it. These two guys don't enjoy it.

You know, people say, oh, boy, they're so tough. They don't like, I don't like seeing people killed. I've ended eight wars. Nobody's ever done it. The person who won the Nobel Prize came to me and said, you deserve the Nobel Prize. She announced that when they announced, they said, goes to Maria.

She's a great person, really a good person. She said, no, no, no. This is ridiculous. They gave me the Nobel Prize. President Trump ended eight wars. I could go over every one of them, including India and Pakistan, where the Prime Minister of Pakistan said, President Trump, saved from 30 to 50 million lives.

That makes me much happier than what we're doing right now. That makes me much happier. We have one more to end, by the way. To end, and how do you end it? This is where, if you are somebody that got suckered by the so-called anti-war branding, of the Republican Party, please look, or I should say the Trump campaign. I saw Tim Dillon was calling it a scam too and whatever.

Whatever is getting that kind of thought out there is fine by me. Because he did scam everybody, even though you had to just kind of remember and have a, have a not a goldfish brain to remember Trump 1.0 if you wanted to understand that like he had John Bolton in his cabinet, for example. But this is when you're in America firster and you don't have a view of human rights that is universal, it's one that's based in kind of like isolationism or America first, which can mean anything.

It can mean removing our obligations to the rest of the world in terms of humanism and protecting rights, which I don't think a country that is a global power like the United States should abdicate that responsibility. an America first kind of ideology versus one that's based in universalism, human rights, and that respects that as an ethic.

Because when you have somebody like Trump that says he's anti-war, what he really means is we have a monopoly of force because we are the largest military on the planet by many times over. And we can use our lethality to bully people into submission and end wars via slaughter.

So if that's your definition of anti-war, you win. You got the president that you wanted and the president he was always going to be. But if you actually care about, like, say, the people that are dying and the destabilizing elements that are going to come from this, then perhaps you should reassess which constituency is more representative of an anti-war coalition because it's always been on the left,

always on the left. historically, every time. And that's why it's important for the, to make sure that the anti-war moment, that constituency is a part of the constituency that elevates the people in power, so they have to listen to us.

I mean, and in part, that's why the Democrats lost in 2024, because naturally that's where that constituency should have been, and they refuse to listen. Well, and because the party is controlled at the top by Zionists. Corey, uh, Joachim Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. support this war.

And the question isn't why they haven't done more to stop it, or it's why the Democrats that know what's going on and aren't corrupted by this, whether it's belief in Zionism or belief in the campaign money that the Zionist lobby spends. Why aren't they speaking out against their leadership more? Because this is a, this is cataclysmic. And there's a certain type of folk who, it's the same people that were saying Kamala is doing just, fine with her pivot to the middle because women are so upset about Roe versus Wade being overturned

that we got this in the bag. There's a certain type of Democrat at the very top that sees things go bad and just thinks, well, this will passively benefit us. And you know who that might be as well? And Ryan Grimm's been all over this is Gregory Meeks and Hakeem Jeffries, who decided not to bring up the war powers resolution prior to the recess, which ends. next Monday. Yep.

Because they, even though they had all the votes and the no votes on the Democrats had all flipped and said, we're going to support this, they had every Democrat on board. Plus, at the very least, Massey and Nancy Mace, who came out publicly. They could have forced this. They didn't want to. But they didn't want to because we'll play a clip of Josh Gottheimer later talking about how once again, it's just that Trump didn't give enough details to Congress. There's a very sizable element in the Democratic Party that is still cast.

by the Zionist lobby that is in favor of this genocidal talk. Fourth Reich. And these war crimes. And they are a cancer. And they thought that they could have their cake and eat it too because it's like that lay down in the grass strategy. If Trump's going to mess up and obviously he is, this is hurting him politically. But what does this do to the rest of the world?

Can we have some sort of opposition party that isn't just thinking about? What can we do to maximize our? strategy of absolutely standing for nothing by making the world worse and having Trump hurt himself instead of using your political capital to change the narrative proactively because there are lives at stake here. It's amazing. There was a poll of like the Iranian diaspora. They're against this now too. There's nobody here domestically that's in favor of this except for like the brain dead maga people who are always going to be on on board with whatever Trump does. Um, it's insane.

It's the conversation we should be having instead of the bullshit about Hassan. Oh my God. Well, but it's exactly why. But that's exactly why they redirected everyone's attention. As Ilhan Omar said, uh, they have hypnotized the world. And people again look in the wrong direction. But it's time that everyone, when people start pointing the finger at you for being against

this sort of thing, it's, you do not get defensive at all. You point the finger right back at them and go on offense. Yep. Um, Lastly, before we go to break, this is just Pete Hegzoth with some more Christian nationalism for you. One downed airmen evaded capture for more than a day, scaling rugged ridges while hunted by the enemy. When he was finally able to activate his emergency transponder, his first message was simple. Ain't nothing going to break.

I sent a message, God is good. in that moment of isolation and danger, his faith and fighting spirit shone through. You see, shot down on a Friday, good Friday, hidden in a cave, a crevice, all of Saturday, and rescued on Sunday. Flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday. Chat, GPT, write me a sermon.

A pilot reborn. Oh, my God. All home and accounted for. a nation rejoicing. And his chat bot is obsessed with like, uh, the freaking sunsets. The,

the, the, the, the vistas. The vistas. God. I'm keeping, I'm combining vestiges and vistas.

The vistas. He's, that's what his chat gbt, uh, kind of settings. They know that that's what he's interested in. You saw the vestiges of a vista? Yeah.

Um, that was an amazing sound job. Matt, thank you for the, um, comic relief. But yes, that is the Secretary of War comparing the rescued airmen to Jesus Christ.

But, you know, it's the crazy Iranians motivated by religion. They can't even see reason, those savages. Yeah, no, it's crazy. Tucker Carlson is making this play, and good luck to him about the appealing to Christian sense of reason and, like, pride in not letting their religion be used in such, like, blatantly propagandistic way. for war crimes.

The Christians I know, they're on Trump's side, and they have been since the assassination attempt in particular. I don't think Tucker's going to win on that. I hope he does. I hope he's able to peel away Christians that think, like, this is disgusting to talk about this way on Easter.

I hope that works. I don't think it's going to. Agree. In a moment, we will be talking to Aaron DuBay about his book, where we're going to be discussing what called the wage standard

what's wrong in the labor market and how to fix it. But first, a word from some of our sponsors. Diamond in the rough. That's the doctor that you're trying to look for here. Finding a doctor that actually feels like

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We are going to be joined by our guests, Arn DuBey. We are back and we are joined now by Aaron DuBay, Provost Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, author of The Wage Standard, What's Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It? Aaron, thanks so much for coming on the show. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Of course. So the term the wage standard, you talk about how the 1980s and 1990s was the period where the

the wage standard that you write about really eroded. If you could define that for us and just talk about that period in history. Yeah, yeah. So let me begin by saying the book has a really simple message, which is that most Americans deserve a raise. And I think the research really shows us that why they haven't been getting one for so long. And this really began in 1980s. And just to kind of give a sense of this, since 1980, the economy grew by about 75%.

Okay? But the median wage, so the wage going to someone in the middle, grew only about 25%, and wages at the bottom even less so. So we have the sense that jobs should at least pay a certain amount. And that's really the core idea of the wage standard, that wages are not made. numbers. The job market's not this well-oiled machine that just matches workers and companies. You know, there's really an element of choice involved. And starting in the 80s, a lot of choices were made that ended up costing a lot of workers their pay. And so that's the key idea of the book.

But the book is also not just about the doom and boom, because what I really show is that we know how we can do better. And in some ways, we have been doing better, but we have a lot to do. And in terms of the lack of growth there and where the wealth kind of went during that period, your book also kind of looks at the difference between managerial and non-managerial wage growth. Can you talk about how that dynamic played out? Yeah. So wages really started growing apart, starting about 1980. And just before we think, well, maybe that's just the nature of capitalism. It always does.

It didn't used to be true. Wages in productivity actually grew quite similarly in the post-second World War period of 50s and 60s and 70s. And wages actually for the bottom and the middle really kind of grew similarly to those at the top. And then we went through, for a variety of reason, extended period where wages just saw. started going apart. So people at the top, like the CEOs or CFOs, just saw enormous pay increases. At the same time, those of the middle and the bottom did not. And these didn't just happen because of sort of inexorable forces beyond our control, like technological change. They really mattered based on choices, including corporate choices, policy choices, and even choices about, as I argued,

my own economics profession, but what we really need to pay attention to. Define monopsony power in the labor market. What does it mean? What does it look like? And how has it impacted this kind of wage stagnation? Yeah. So monopsy is a funny word, but it's basically a simple idea. The employers don't just take the market wage, but rather they have some choices.

they set their own wage policy. And that's kind of a central insight about why some of these things happen, is that, you know, unlike what we sometimes think of in a Econ 101, highly competitive market, if a company chooses to pay, let's say, 10% less than some going rate, it's not like everyone quits. Quits do fall, but it turns out only about 2% from a 10% reduction. So that just means employers have considerable amount of choice and power. Here's a really interesting fact.

Most Americans are in labor markets where there's effectively like three to four employers that are likely to hire them. That gives enormous amount of power to work firms to actually have some choice in setting pay unless there are other countervailing forces. And what started happening in the 80s and 90s is that we really lost a lot of those countervailing forces. And that includes institutions like unions, where a third of American private workforce

used to be union members that affected pay not only for those workers, but also for non-union workers. Today, in the private sector, it's barely over 5%. That makes a big difference. We also have policy changes starting in the 80s. Interesting fact, after the Second World War, the minimum wage rose fairly regularly,

keeping up again with overall economy-wide productivity. Starting in the 80s, we stopped increasing the minimum wage for extended periods of time that really took, you know, where lower wage is really took a hit from basically failure to update the minimum wage. So these are some of the choices that I talk about. And it also kind of undercuts some of the right-wing arguments right now about immigration, which, you know, there have been studies about this as well,

where the idea that removing or kind of ethnically cleansing a certain population of lower-wage workers is going to elevate the wages of, say, American citizens, that's not how this, like, this body of research that, in part, you analyze, or like, that's not what the evidence shows. Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of tools in our toolkit, and it's important to understand that we can make the market work better and we can regulate it better. And that can be done in the context of, you know, immigrants being present in this country,

which, you know, we have had, of course, a long tradition of. What it's really important to understand is we have some choices both at the macro level and as well as at the policy, what I call them, you know, micro level as well as the middle level, the metal level. And, you know, when we actually use those tool kits, we've actually done well. And that's been true consistent with presence of, you know, of immigration in this country. When was, we can kind of start maybe from chapter one where you look at some of this, when was the last significant period of wage growth?

Because we point to the 80s as the beginning of wage stagnation and the explosion of inequality. But when was the last significant period of wage growth? And what can we learn from that time? Yeah. So what's interesting is that actually we've had better wage quotes in the last 10 years than we had in the 40 years prior. It's a funny thing to think about because it's also happening in the context of a lot of challenges. And the challenges are that we've had, you know, high cost of living increases and we have had, of course, a pandemic. But we actually, after the pandemic, in a very tight labor market, ended up raising pay.

at the bottom of the distribution. And this is one of the lessons of the book is that if we choose to pursue full employment policies, we can certainly have better wage outcomes for those at the bottom and the middle of the pay scale. It's really interesting. If you look at when wages grew between 1980 and the present day, certainly, let's say before the pandemic,

between 1979 and 2019, there were only seven years of tight labor market, and that was responsible for almost entirety of the actual pay growth in the middle and the bottom of the distribution. So that sort of highlights how important a full employment policy is. So this is what I say. Like in what I think we need to do, we can start with making sure we do ensure that we have plenty full jobs because that particularly matters for raising pay by increasing worker leverage in the middle and the bottom of the distribution.

Full employment sounds like something that would make every Fed chair in history have some sort of mental episode over. Can you explain why their thinking has been flawed and where your theory of full employment diverges? Yeah. So it's really interesting. We, After 1980, we went through an extended period where we had pretty elevated unemployment rate. Unemployment rate, you know, was rarely as low as 4% after 1980 than before. So one of the reasons is because after the inflation episode of 1970s, the Fed became very wary of reducing unemployment rate. And this was a problem because that actually took a real,

bite out of the paycheck for working Americans until the late 1990s. And this was a really interesting period because the Fed initially was going to start raising the interest rates very quickly because unemployment rate looked like it was too low. And at that time, too little was like even under 5%, which is even now that would just be kind of a good idea. And so, but then they're like, wait, unemployment's falling, but it's not like inflation is going out of control. So maybe we should let it continue. And this was the first time we saw a couple of years, but three, four years of strong wage growth for the bottom and the middle of the paid scale in the late 1990s.

And this was some learning happened here. The Fed for the first time said like, okay, maybe this is all right. Maybe we should allow this. And a similar thing happened in those late 2010s, where again, there was a lot of concern, like unemployment rate is maybe getting too low, but again, there was some learning. So I think that there is, of course, a balancing act, you know, that there is some amount of unemployment. Is it possible that it could be too low? It's possible.

But in my mind, we've rarely been there. The problem has been largely the opposite. You have spent too much time in slack labor markets, and that's really, again, taken a bite out of working people's paycheck. It's also important in analyzing the state of the current economy where you can have really low unemployment, but there can be mass under employment because we really have like this whole part of our economy that is reliant on part-time. work, gig work, people taking second jobs to supplement things. I saw that a majority of teachers

in this country have second jobs now, let alone the people that maybe are reliant on gig work as their full-time profession. It's, it doesn't seem like our traditional metrics have caught up to that reality in the economy that is such a sizable portion. So, you know, this is one of the things that I talk about in the book is that, you know, the macro policy like pursuing full employment is a really important part, but it's not going to get you all the way there. We can't simply stop there. And this is exactly the kind of issues that you raise exactly highlight.

Well, we need other ways to make sure pay states, and that includes in the gig economy, for example. And this is where really policy that really actually sets wage floors is so important. The starting point is the minimum wage, okay? And here it is just a really, you know, a telling fact that we have gone for more than a generation, more than a generation without raising the federal minimum wage. That never happened since the minimum wage was introduced back in 1938. And so this is, you know, a terrible way to set policy. Thankfully, we do have 30 states that have state minimum wages, but that means 20 states.

but that means 20 states, nearly half the country, effectively only has 725, which, by the way, is essentially like not having an minimum wage because it's so low that, you know, there's less than 1% of the workforce that has actually paid that amount. So this is a natural starting place, and what I show is that, you know, we can do well to pursue a more robust minimum wage policy. And I can talk more about the evidence of what we know from that. Please do. Yeah, yeah.

So, of course, you know, the first worry that you hear about, and not unreasonably perhaps, is that, well, if you make companies pay a minimum wage, won't they just stop higher? And that logic kind of makes sense in a simple kind of econ 101 supply and demand framework. Well, you're raising wage, so employers are hiring less. But the reality is that that's not exactly how. the labor market works because when employers have a lot of monopony power here that's funny more again they're choosing to keep pay low even though they realize that that means a lot of people

a lot of workers are turning over right every month it may be hard to even fill vacancies but it's still worth it for the maximizing profit because otherwise you have to raise the wages for everyone. So in that world, when the government comes in that sets a minimum wage, you may not actually kill jobs. You may actually kill vacancies because it becomes easier to attract and retain workers. And that's exactly what we find. So there's a large volume of literature that has really studied this question. Unfortunately, it's actually, ironically, I should say, the dysfunction of our minimum wage setting has been a bananza for nerds like me who want to study the minimum wage because here we have, for example, 30 states that have raised the minimum wage, 20 states have not,

and we've gone for over a generation. Well, you can look to see what happened. Do we actually see jobs really booming in those 20 states that didn't raise minimum wage and jobs just disappearing in the 30 that did? Absolutely not. We find that in fact, back, jobs have grown fairly similarly in these two states, including for lower wage workers, even though pay has grown a lot more in the 30 states that have raised it. So in some of my work, for example, you know, I study what happens in one side of the border when the minimum wage rises in one state and not the other? Because these are relatively similar areas. So it's like a natural experiment. It's like I kind of went in, you know, in a lab like,

here, I'm going to raise wage here and not there. Let's do what happens. Of course, we don't do that in reality, but this approximate that sort of an experiment. And the reality is that these suggest that minimum wages have been highly effective in raising bottom pay without really the worrying job losses that we have heard so much about. And of course, the role of unions is really important, and you write about that as well. Talk about the deunionization of the country that coincided with this period of wage stagnation and the important role that unions had played and why they were undercut.

Yeah. So unions played the most critical role in my mind in creating the post-second World War wage standards. And what we see is in the late 30s and early 40s, we have a huge increase in union density, the share of workforce that are unionized. And that exactly is when inequality fell, really driving wage increase in the middle and the bottom, creating what, you know, was called in the early 50s as the Treaty of Detroit. So basically, this was a labor piece. major employers like General Motors and the worker representatives like United Auto Worker decided to have a agreement that set pay both for union workers but indirectly also for many others, making sure that there was a half to a middle class for working Americans.

And that lasted for a number of decades, but over time, union density has fallen a lot. So like I said, it was around a third, about a third of the workforce in the private sector used to be organized, meaning members of unions back in the 50s, and today it's barely over 5%. And this has been shown to have a huge impact on reducing pay and increasing inequality. It doesn't have to be this way. A lot of our peer countries of other systems and ways, and this is the important thing. Sometimes people don't realize this. But if I told you that not just for those workers, for example, in fast food and other lower paying sex,

But what if I told you most jobs could have in minimum standard, a wage standard? Well, if that sounds like a radical idea, it turns out most of our high-income peer countries of some version of that. And in fact, we can do this in America as well. A lot of them do it through sectoral bargaining. So, for example, in Sweden, at the national level unions, and employers agree on a set up pay standards by for different jobs. Now, you and your employer could negotiate and pay more than that, but you can't pay any less.

So it sets the floor. And this is exactly what we can do in this country as well. And had we done something like that, the fall in union density would not have led to this huge reduction in pay. in the pay because in many countries, these standards that are negotiated apply broadly, not just union members, but setting standards throughout the economy. Can you give some specific examples about other countries that you think are illustrative when you compare to the United States? Yeah. So for example, in France, France actually has about 10% union membership. That sounds very low. But it turns out,

95% of jobs are covered by those contracts as a result that puts a floor for pay. Take another country, a different system, Australia. Australia actually set these kind of wage standards using wage boards, not through collective bargaining. They have collective bargaining as well, but these floors are set by the government. I actually think that's a very interesting system for America. about because given our really low union membership like you know 5% in private sector 10% overall it's going to be difficult to get moved to a sector

sectoral bargaining system in the very near future but what we can do is to have for example an Australia like system where we set wage floors for different types of jobs here's a really interesting thing we're actually starting to see some experiments on that kind of experiments here in this country. For example, in Minnesota, nursing homes have a broad-based floor by different types of jobs. So you could be a registered nurse or a DNA in Minnesota. Whether you're in a unionized job or not,

you are covered by a wage floor, much like in the Australas If we were to take this to scale, and again, it's so important, we can do this at the state level. We don't have to worry about the broken politics in Washington, D.C. We can do this today. We could raise pay for those in the middle and the bottom of the distribution and really try to make up for the lost raises over so many decades. It's is there a way for I'm just trying to think about the union's perspective on that. Like what gets in the way of that here?

Is there something that has to do with the strength of unions or the way that dues are structured or the way that the law is that makes that less, like this Minnesota example, more of an anomaly? Yeah. So the problem in some ways goes back to our National Labor Relations Act because in this country, union organizing happens store by store, okay, company by company. For example, Starbucks is a really interesting example. There's been a lot of activism. Workers have been organizing Starbucks stores, and, you know, many stores are organized, but it's still less than 10% of the workforce. And every single election only leads to one store being organized, and they still don't have a collective bargain. That sort of highlights why these enterprise level bargaining, as it's called, in the United States, is a real anomaly in some ways compared to many of our peer countries that makes it very difficult to have these sectoral standards. There are some places where the unions are strong.

A really interesting example is the Writers Guild. The Writers Guild of America who write the TV shows and so what you watch, they have a sectoral agreement. So when that agreement is signed, as it happened after a strike a couple years ago, that set key floors for anyone, including whether you're a union member or not. But those are the rare examples where unions are strong enough to be able to actually, you know, obtain that sort of agreement. In the meantime, what we can do is besides changing labor law at the federal level, which, who knows, but meanwhile, we can set these standards of the state level. So, for example, in Minnesota, unions and employers have, you know, command.

They sit on a commission and they decide on a particular standard that then is passed. So this is actually feasible. We can do this at the state level even without having to wait to change labor law at the federal level. Lastly, this AI efforts to kind of replace the workforce. I know you've expressed some skepticism. We're seeing a real overvaluating. of it in the economy and with this war in Iran,

who knows when that bubble's going to burst. We've been saying that it's going to for a while, and it hasn't yet, but just, you know, what we shall see. What's your assessment of how that plays into the way, the labor market?

Is it being overstated? What are the concerns? What are the less pertinent concerns? Yeah. So you can't really have a conversation about the labor market in 2026 without talking about AI. And I talked about it a bit in the book. But here's the thing. First of all, we don't know.

We really don't know what the impact of AI might be. There are some concerns that's going to, you know, take over all jobs. I think some of those claims are sort of based on very little actual evidence. But look, there may be disruptions. that are in the future, but the most important thing in my mind is the following. We don't have to simply take this as something that happens to us. We've done too much of that, and this is not the first technological change where there's been worries, right?

For example, automation has been around and people have concerns about automation more broadly. We can regulate this, and we can choose to certain extent how we share any increase in productivity that arise from AI. The Writers Guild of America example that I gave actually is really interesting because in their last agreement, they precisely struck some deals to make sure that some of the gains from use of AI is actually shared more broadly. It's not the last word, but this highlights why it's so important

to have institutions in place that can make sure that that can regulate how AI is used. For example, if it's going to be used in the healthcare sector, our nurses and other health professionals going to be affected by it. Imagine having commissions that actually set not only sectoral but also sectoral standards for how technology is used and adopted.

This can actually go a long way to really make sure that whatever is the impact, right? That we have some say over it and we make sure that any games are actually shared broadly and don't just accrue to those at the very top. Aaron DuBay, the book is called The Wage Standard, What's Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It? Thank you so much for coming on the show that they really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. Of course.

With that, folks, we're going to wrap up the free part of this show and head into the fun half of this show. So much fun. Have some fun talking about the Warren around. and more. Matt, what's happening on your shows? Yeah, there is a left reckoning this afternoon. Remember we got drinks like a couple years ago and I said I want to be like a, I want to transition into, didn't mean to cut you off guard there. Choked on what? But I said as Emma, I gathered himself there. I'm good, I'm good. I said that I wanted to transition into being a wise sage type of fellow. Well, that does not.

start today at all. How far into the drinks was it? Wait, when did you say this to me? You said this to me years ago? I don't remember. I was like 35. I remember feeling old. And, and, and, and, and, uh, and I'm like, I think I need to stop being so, um, so, you know, um, how I am. Um, but I'll say I did not start that today. Here's the thumbnail I made for today's, uh, left reckoning. If you could put this up. Um, um, um, um, and the episode is, uh, the ludicrous wartime Hassan panic and bursting the bulwarks bubble where I we go for about 45 minutes about Sarah Longwell and this whole cul-de-sac we've been lit into by third way and basically people who want to attack Abdul al-Said so that McMarro can be the senator in Michigan talking about cancel Hassan for saying

all these how dare you how dare you how dare you how dare you how dare you Sarah Longwell act like you're the one people should listen to sitting down with Liz Cheney um, blaming progressives for Kamala Harris losing. Um, so we go deep into that. Um, and if you want to, uh, see me at my most of a tuperative and, uh, poorly measured and angry, uh, that will be today at 2.30, uh, right after the show. All right. Uh, we are going to head into the fun half now. Uh, just a reminder, this show relies on your support.

Join the majority report. dot com. So you can support this show. Keep us resilient in the face of That you would bring. They may absolutely Byrd's impression.

Indeed. You know, I mean, speaking of the bulwark, like, they're probably pretty set. They've probably got a funder or two. You want to keep us out there? Apparently, Sarah Longwell has taken money from the Koch brothers.

Interesting. A bunch of former Republicans. I'm surprised. Huh. We don't take money from the Koch brothers. No. Not that I'm aware of me. We rely on your support. Join the majority report.com. All right, guys.

See you in the fun half. Okay, Emma, please. Well, I just, I feel that my voice is sorely lacking in the majority report. Wait. Look, Samma's unpopular. I do deserve a vacation at Disney World. So, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to welcome Emma to the show. It is Thursday.

Yeah, I think you need to do it. for say I'm going to pause you right there. Wait, what? You can't encourage how much to live like this. And I'll tell you why. So it's offered a twerk, sushi, and poker with the boys. Boys, what? Torque.

Sushi and Pants. That's what we call the bids. Twerp, sushi and ties. I just think that what you did to Tim Poole was mean. Free speech. That's not what we're about here. Look at how sad he's become now. You shouldn't even talk about it.

I think you're responsible. I probably am in a certain way, but let's get to the meltdown here. Oh my God. Swish. I'm sorry. I'm losing my fucking mind. So it's offered a twir? Yeah.

Sushi and poker. Sushi and poker. I think I'm like a little kid, a little kid, a little kid. I think I'm like a little kid. I think I'm like, I'm just don't understand. So I'm not trying to be a dick right now, but like I absolutely think the U.S. should be providing me with a wife and kids. That's not what we're talking about. It's not a fun job.

Twerk. That's a real fit. I've got to feel fit, real fit. Willie Walker? It has like the weight of the world on the shoulders. Hogger! It can't do it anymore! It was so much easier.

One of the majority of report was just you. You were happy. Let's change the subject. It's going great. Now, shut up. Don't want people saying reckless things on your program. That's one of the most difficult parts about this show. This is a pro-killing podcast.

I'm thinking maybe it's kind of we bury the hatchet. Left is best. Trump. Violet twirl. I don't see that one. Audible. Audible. Audible.

Emma Viglin. Absolutely one of my favorite people. Actually, not just in the game, like period.