The Munk Debates Podcast - Robert Reich On COVID-19 And Its Shakeout Of The Global Economy

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, former U.S. labour secretary, Robert Reich, joins us to discuss the once in a generation societal challenges presented by COVID-19.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesmen to statesmen like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background to where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Thanks for listening to the Monk Debates podcast. For the next couple of weeks, leading up to the U.S. election on November 3rd, we are changing the format for this podcast.

Instead of a debate, we are going to provide you with in-depth interviews with some of the world's smartest thinkers on the big issues driving the U.S. election, from the pandemic to the economy to the polarization of U.S. politics and society. We are calling this mini-series the Monk Dialogues. Like our debates, the focus of each Monk Dialogue is smart and civil conversation, free of spin and focus on the facts. In this installment of Monk Dialogs, we feature Robert Reich, former U.S. Labor Secretary, Economic Inequality Activist and Filmmaker,

on how to meet the once-in-a-generation societal challenges presented by COVID-19 and its shakeout on the global economy. Here is his dialogue with Monk Debates Chair, Rudyard Griffiths. Hello, I'm Rudyard Griffiths, host of the Monk Dialogues, and welcome to this, our third program in a 10-part weekly series. As our guide tonight, we're exceedingly fortunate to have back a former monk debater. His name is Robert Reich. He was the U.S. Labor Secretary under President Clinton.

He's a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley. Many of us know him and love him for his extensive book publications over 18, including a number of global bestsellers. Rob Reich is also the founder of Inequality Media and the host of a YouTube weekly talk show, The Common Good. Robert, great to have you here on the Monk Dialogues for our conversation tonight. Well, thank you, Rod. I'm delighted to be here, and thank you for inviting me.

Well, let's kick off with drawing, I think, out of some of the key kind of arguments set out in your most recent book. And maybe you could explain for viewers why you think that this election is historic for America, that you see it as a pivot, an inflection point where America has a choice, a choice between what you believe is an inclusive and representative democracy and something else, something darker that looks more like an oligarchy, the rule by the rich over the many, the poor. Why do you think that is the way that we should be thinking about what's at stake on the ballot in the United States come November 3rd. Rudyard, I think that Donald Trump is not the cause,

but is the consequence of 40 years of stagnant wages at widening inequality in the United States with more and more of the wealth of the country and more and more of the power over politics and over the economy centered in a relatively small number of very, very fortunate people. The Greeks called it an oligarchy, this kind of system of government and system of economics.

I use that term because I think it is a descriptor of what we are heading toward, at least in the United States. Other countries are heading toward the same sort of degree of inequality, but not as quickly as the United States. I think the stagnant wages particularly, and also the overwhelming power and wealth lodged in the very, very top, caused many Americans over the past 40 years to become increasingly disillusioned and angry with the system. I remember when I was Secretary of Labor, I used to go out to the Midwest and the so-called Rust Belt and the South.

And talk with workers who described themselves as Democrats or Republicans, conservatives, liberals, didn't really matter. But I remember in the 1990s, 25 years ago, many of them expressing anger and frustration that they were working harder than, never, and they were not getting ahead. Since then, the situation has only grown worse. And I think in 2016, Donald Trump tapped into that reservoir of anger and turned it into resentment and even hate, racism, misogyny, xenophobia. We've seen it all before. These are not new sentiments. We've also seen these sentiments linked before to economic anger and a sense of frustration, a sense of unfairness, But I think that Donald Trump, even if he loses the election, will not go away. That is, Trumpism will not go away from the United States.

We will not see this kind of angry populism remedied until we begin to have an economy that is working for everyone and a democracy that is truly representative. Thank you, Rob. So just to build on that, I mean, one of the things that you've really become known for over the last number of years is your kind of principle. against economic inequality. You've done this through documentaries, through your own writing and books. And I just wonder what your views are that we're now six or so months into this pandemic. And one of the consequences of the pandemic, despite all the other issues that we're having to grapple with, is an explosion of economic inequality. Has that surprised you? For some of the same reasons I suggested before, Rudyard, we've laid the foundation for this.

people who are in the bottom half or the bottom 10% of the income ladder, they tend in the United States not to have very good health care. Their housing situation is precarious. Their work situation also is precarious. Many of them have been dubbed so-called essential workers, which means that they are in warehouses or in factories or in hospitals as hospital orderlies and others who were the last to get personal. protective equipment, if they even have it today. They do not have paid sick leave. They don't have the health insurance they need in order to be able to take time off during this pandemic. The United States doesn't have a public health system as such designed to protect the most vulnerable workers and most vulnerable people in our society. So we were set up in a way for

the poor, disproportionately black and Latinx, to some. for the most. Meanwhile, people at the top, they not only have continued to work and be employed, many of them using remote equipment, laptops like I'm talking to you on, but also many managers and professionals at the very top have had the benefit of being in high-tech industries or related industries that have had really a lock on what consumers need. Amazon, when say, thank goodness, Amazon is there because so many people do need to order through Amazon, cannot use retail stores any longer. But another way of looking at it is that Amazon has generated extraordinary profits and extraordinary stock prices for its top executives, including Jeff Bezos.

And Jeff Bezos shouldn't be faulted for this, but antitrust laws were designed primarily to avoid this kind of enrichment. Rob, I think your message about sharing the bounty of the economy more justly, more fairly across different groups is an admirable one. But it isn't a refrain that we've heard now for quite some time. Yet the force is not just an American society, but in many advanced economies around the world, seem to be consistently pushing in a different direction. What is at the root of that?

Are there other forces out there that you identify as responsible for, you know, a trend that, as we've just discussed, existed before the pandemic has intensified during the pandemic. And, I mean, not to look at the glass half empty, but one could say that this trend is entrenched and it's not going away. Well, you could say it's entrenched and it's not going away, but I think it has to go away and it has to be reversed. I want to just emphasize to you that almost every wealthy, advanced society, country in the world has seen widening inequality over the past 20, 30 years. That's partly due to technological changes, globalization. But the United States is the outlier. What's going on here is that the very wealthy have transferred or at least translated some of that wealth into political power, enough political power to get dramatic tax cuts and to stop antitrust laws and to change the

rules of the capitalist game to benefit them and handicap everybody else. The point is that in the United States, more than any place else, wealth has found its way into politics. And politics has altered the rules of the game to enable wealth to become even larger and more intense and more entrenched. One other point, as we're talking about COVID, because I think your point was the coronavirus kind of exemplifies and both illustrates and has made all of this that much larger. Compare the United States to Canada in this regard. In the United States, we are seeing approximately a mortality rate of 60.3 people for every 100,000 people in the United States. In Canada, you have 24.6 people who are dying per 100,000. Now, what's the difference?

I think that even had we had a Democrat in power beginning in 2016, we would have seen that kind of a difference because the lack of a public health system, the lack of health insurance, the lack of an adequate safety net has meant coronavirus takes more lives. If we had the same rate as Canada in terms of deaths per 100,000 people, there would be 117,000 fewer Americans dead today. that's a large number of people. It certainly is. It certainly is. So give us a sense of what you think the policy prescriptions going forward are going to be because there's a debate raging about how this economic recovery should unfold. Because it seems like some of these responses, most notably the monetary response,

have actually worsened the challenges of economic inequality, including here in Canada coming out of this crisis. Well, there are two fundamental principles that I think we all need to understand and agree upon. One is that monetary policy, that is central bank policy, setting interest rates, cannot do it alone. Here in the United States, the Federal Reserve Board, Jerome Powell, they have reduced interest rates down to near zero. And what Jerome Powell said on October 6th publicly was that Congress has got to act. The central bank can't do it alone. A monetary policy is inadequate.

You need fiscal policy that is going to stimulate the economy. And the Republicans and Trump and the Democrats here in the United States cannot agree on fiscal policy. It needs to be, in my view, highly stimulative. And that failure to agree is not only a human tragedy, but is also leading to an economic tragedy. This coronavirus-induced depression, recession is not going to go away anytime soon. Which gets me to my second point. No amount of proper macroeconomic policy, even if you had the right balance between fiscal and monetary policy, is going to really do much good as long as the coronavirus is uncontained. I can't read a crystal ball, but I can tell you that at least in the United States, we're seeing a resurgence of coronavirus.

that is going to lead to further economic downturns and economic problems for many, many people, a great deal of unemployment and joblessness, but also hunger. The latest data we have here in the United States is that one out of four families with children are experiencing food shortages, are actually hungry. This is the richest, supposedly the richest country in the world. and yet one out of four families with children is experiencing hunger. Wow. Those are sobering statistics.

Rob, before we go to questions, I'm just curious of your take on this. I mean, is there a limit to what you think governments can spend? I mean, we are seeing this extraordinary level of government funding and support for different industries and groups. This is a crisis. I think people understand why that spending is happening. but I think there is some growing nervousness, I know certainly here in Canada, about the extent to which we can sustain this spending

and maybe also what its long-term consequences are of significantly increasing our debt levels at the subnational and national level. What's your view on the kind of limits of fiscal capacity of governments to confront this crisis? It depends entirely, Rudyard, on how far a country is from its capacity, its economic capacity, its full capacity, at near full employment. Right now, Canada and the United States and many other countries are far from their productive capacity. In fact, there is so much unemployment that government has got to spend. This is not a

new principle. John Maynard Keynes understood this in the Great Depression and led the way toward a kind of prosperity. Certainly World War II was a full employment system. We wouldn't want to go back to any kind of a warfare, obviously, but we do need to understand that now is not the time to worry about government debt. In fact, the issue is ultimately the ratio of the debt to the GDP, to the entire economy. And if government is not going to spend its way out of a deep depression,

then the economy is going to start shrinking. which means that the ratio of the debt to the GDP worsens. That's an austerity trap. And we've been there before. We know what it means. We shouldn't go there again. Okay. Let's start taking some questions.

So, Rob, this question comes from Peter in Thunder Bay, Ontario. He asks you, why isn't anyone in the United States talking about top marginal tax rates? If you want to make America great again, you should look at what made it great in the first place historically. America built. Peter goes on, all of their infrastructure, their interstate systems paid for two world wars by taxing the wealthy. I assume you agree with that, Rob, but let's have you maybe unpack some of the history and the theory behind it. Well, Peter, I do agree with it. And many people don't realize or remember that under Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican president in the United States in the 1950s, the top marginal tax rate in America was 91 percent.

Now, that doesn't mean that the rich paid 91% because they obviously used tax deductions and tax credits against their incomes. But it does mean that the highest marginal tax rate was substantially higher than it is today. And that enabled the United States to invest in, as we never have invested before or since, education, basic research and development, infrastructure, the entire national highway system, and other kinds of infrastructure and educational investments, we have not done subsequently. We have a deficit in this country of public investment. And if you don't make public investments, you cannot expect your economy to grow in the future. Why then has the top marginal tax rate dropped so substantially in the United States? For the very reason I was talking about before, Peter, and that is because wealth has concentrated at the top, and that concentration of wealth has turned itself into political power, given the power that comes from

donating to political campaigns, lobbying, mounting public relations campaigns, and buying off of many experts. Rob, would you agree, though, that, you know, the nature of capital has changed since the time of Dwight Eisenhower, that, you know, money can move with a click of a button, that it's much harder for national governments to sustain high tax rates in the face of the mobility of wealth in a globalized, interconnected world? Well, the question is what you mean by high tax rates. We right now have a top marginal tax that is theoretically 37%.

But as Donald Trump has shown and demonstrated in terms of paying $750 in 2016 on a much, much greater wealth and income than that, there are many, many ways in which in the United States system, loopholes have been created. And you can get rid of those loopholes. There's no law of nature that they have to be there. Other nations have on balance higher marginal taxes and more progressive systems than the United States. So the idea that somehow wealthy people in the United States are going to go somewhere else with their wealth because the taxes are too high here defies logic. I mean, these are great points.

These are really fundamental issues. So I really enjoy balancing these off you. So what about the argument to try another one that high-touches, tax rates impede innovation, that people will go to jurisdictions that have lower tax rates to exploit their ideas, exploit their human capital in, again, in a world that values not a physical gold mine or a piece of infrastructure, but a series of zeros and ones that are assembled in a code that they can move anywhere in the world. Well, again, there are two separate arguments built to what you just said, Rudyard. One is, and I want to state it again, the notion that people

are going to leave the United States because other tax jurisdictions are more favorable, simply is not true because on balance, marginal taxes are higher in other countries than they are here in the United States. The second point embedded in your question was whether we can expect the degree of entrepreneurialism, if high marginal tax rates come back in America, as they were much higher, even 40 years ago, 30 years ago, certainly 60 years ago. And I think the answer to that has to do with human nature. That is, I suspect Jeff Bezos, for example, would still have a great incentive to build a company like Amazon. If at the end of his rainbow, he thought there was $20 billion instead of $200 billion.

In other words, you don't need the extraordinary degrees of wealth to get innovation. We had a lot of innovation when tax rates were much higher. Good point, Rob. Silicon Valley was built, no small part, some of that time during the administration of Dwight Eisenhower. So point taken. Let's go on to another question here. Jody's asking, much of your recent work seems to focus on saving capitalism, also the great project of FDR.

Will you ever switch to abandoning capitalism? How many times should we save a system that in Jody's view is neither natural, she believes? She uses the word organic. I'm not quite sure what that means or optimal. Jody, it's a good question, but a lot of it turns on how you define capitalism. That is, there's no country in the world, even including China, that doesn't have some degree of private property and free exchange of goods and services. The real issue, it seems to me, is what kind of capitalism we're talking about.

Are we talking about at the one extreme kind of Nordic capitalism in which you have very thick safety nets if people, for no reason of their own, fall down? Or you have public investments, very substantial public investment of a sort that we've already talked about in terms of investment in education and infrastructure and basic research and development. or do you have the United States kind of brutal capitalism in which there is no family leave? There's certainly no paid leave. There's no sick leave. There's no vacation leave. There is basically a trend toward more and more people who are independent contractors in which they're misclassified. They no longer have any labor protections at all.

While you have socialism for the rich, that is people at the very top get bailed out as the banking system. did in 2008, and as the big corporations are now getting bailed out by the Fed, and you have CEOs who, instead of getting paid 20 times the typical workers' wage as they were paid in the 1960s, in the United States are now paid 320 times the typical workers' wage for doing basically the same work that they were doing before. That's socialism for the rich. I think the United States is an example of a country that has brutal. capitalism for most people and socialism for the wealthiest and the most privileged.

Okay, Rob, let's take some more questions that have come in. We'll get one of those up for you right now. This is from Derek from Sydney, Australia. Great to have someone from Down Under sending a question. He asked, the last major effort to address economic inequality in America was Roosevelt's New Deal. You've written a lot about this. This was a 30-year period after the hyper-iniquality of the gilded age. Are we looking today at a 30-year-plus fight to address economic inequality in our own time, or could meaningful change happen sooner? And if so, why? Derek, I think you are very accurate to pick up on the gilded age of the 1880s and 1890s,

which was followed by the progressive era. And it really began in 1901 in the United States with Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, but somebody who was kind of an accidental president because the president, William McKinley, had been assassinated. Roosevelt started the progressive era. He really did believe in capitalism, but understood that capitalism could not survive unless there were regulations, unless anti-monopoly laws were passed, unless we had a progressive income tax. And then his fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, continued that tradition. I think that in the second Gilded Age, we're now in, And it is a second gilded age.

We have about the same degree of inequality as we had in the 1890s. We have the same extraordinary degree of poverty as we had proportionally in the 1890s. We have bribery and corruption as we did in the 1890s. I think on almost any scale, we are in a second gilded age now. And I do think there's some reason to believe that like the progressive era that started in 1901, the public is outrage. The American public has had enough. If you look at the election results of the midterm elections in 2018, you see the beginnings of a wave that could be interpreted.

And I prefer to interpret it this way as the second progressive era. How would you, Rob, square that analysis with the fact that, you know, Bernie Sanders, who really was the standard bearer of the progressive, modern progressive 21st century argument, was shouldered away for a very traditional institutional democratic candidate. Well, you talk about Joe Biden as a traditional institutional candidate, but take a very close look at his positions, his economic platform, also his platform on the environment and several others. And they are far more radical than any other Democratic candidate has put forward in the last 40 years. And I should know because I worked for Bill Clinton and I helped him shape his.

platform in 1992. Joe Biden, I think, can be analogized to some extent with somebody who became president, that is FDR in 1932, when the public was ready for fundamental change. I'm not saying that Joe Biden is an FDR, but what FDR did was take advantage of the public's desire for boldness. And I think there's every reason to believe that Joe Biden, if he's elected, will also take advantage of the public's desire for bold change. We've had a record now in the United States of 40 years of stagnant wages, if you adjust for inflation, more and more wealth and power aggregating at the top. Bernie Sanders ran on this, but Bernie Sanders platform has found itself into the mainstream of American politics, certainly of Democratic, capital D, American politics.

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Monk debate memberships are 30% off this month for new enrollees. Visit monkdebates.com slash membership for more details. Now, back to our Monk Dialogue with former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Lots of questions that have come in. Let's get another one up on the board here. Continue our conversation. This is Elizabeth from Toronto, Ontario. You've recently been in a Twitter fight with Elon Musk, who's called you, quote, a modern-day moron for chastising his treatment of Tesla workers. Why is Musk, in your view, a symbolism of what is wrong with much of modern-day capital?

Well, I don't think he is necessarily epitomizes what's wrong with modern day capitalism, but I don't like the way he's treated his workers. He has fired his workers for trying to form a union. He has not adequately protected his workers from COVID. He has not provided personal protective equipment. At every step along the way, he has sacrificed the well-being of Tesla workers. That, to me, is unacceptable. I salute him for his innovations, but I do. I, do not think we should tolerate somebody who makes a great deal of money on the backs of his or her workers. Rob, how would you respond to the person who's watching tonight who says, you know what, I agree with that. It would be terrific if Tesla's workers had better health plans, if, you know,

they could unionize. But look at the innovation that he has created. Look at the wealth that he has created, not just for himself, but for all those shareholders, including his employees, or shareholders in Tesla. You know, that more, you use the word brutal, other people might say aggressive style of American capitalism is really an engine of progress. Well, it depends completely on how you define progress, Rudyard. If progress means that you have an economy that grows dramatically,

but it grows because a few people at the top are doing wonderfully well, The benefits of economic growth are not spread widely. In fact, it's growing in part because people have to spend more on such things as health insurance or health care or we have to spend more on police protection or private security guards. That's not progress. I mean, to me, progress is where the typical worker and below is doing better than he or she did 10 or 20 or 30 years before and is doing better than his or her. her parents did. Now, with regard to the stock market, let's be very clear. In the United States, the top richest 1% owns half of all of the stocks over the stock exchanges sold in the United States. The richest 10% of Americans own 92% of the United States stock market. That is not a broad-based

prosperity system. That's not a system that is going to generate a lot of benefits. if a particular company or a lot of companies see their stock portfolios do much, much better. That's going to help the people at the top, but it's not going to help many other people. Right now, the Federal Reserve Board is bailing out big American corporations by absorbing the debt that many of them created over the last 10 years when they borrowed in order to buy back their shares of stock. Now, they gave the stock market a kind of steroidal sugar high, but that is dangerous and it sets up what economists call a moral hazard problem because a lot of big companies now will take the same position that big banks take.

That is, they're too big to fail. That's not a good position to be in from the standpoint of average people. Robert, you worried it all about the United States' currencies status as the global reserve currency. The U.S. dollar has fallen precipitously since the onset of this crisis. The fact that you do hold the global reserve currency is a huge economic advantage to the United States. You know, are there implications here for the trillions of dollars that are being spent, the debts that are being occurred with these massive deficits on the value of your dollar? If you're looking at the next 20 to 30 to 40 years, Rudyard, I am concerned.

If we were going to continue to have very, very low interest rates, near zero interest rates, as we've had, and the degree of government spending we have had so far out into the future for the next 10 or 20 years, yes, there'd be reason to seriously worry about the United States as a reserve currency because other countries would begin to worry, in turn, about the United States dollar and the stability of the dollar. But right now is not the time to do that. I want to emphasize this. The biggest danger is that we don't spend enough. We don't hold interest rates down enough. And therefore, that the economy does not grow. It stays in the doldrums. The biggest challenge right now, again, I want to emphasize is the coronavirus. Those are the two biggest problems, a failure to stimulate the economy adequately and also a failure to contain the coronavirus. if these two failures go on much longer, that is for another six months, a year, year and a half, then we are going to be not only the United States, but all countries are going to see the depression worsen.

Okay, sobering words. Let's go to another question that's come in from viewers in advance. Ken from Halifax writes, how would you convince a voter in America's industrial heartland who voted for Trump for the first time in 2016 to. come back to the Democratic Party, a party that arguably hollowed out U.S. manufacturing by favoring trade liberalization, financial deregulation, and its own share of tax cuts for the wealthy. How would you try to bring them back to a Democratic Party that you've been justly a critic of at times for its own close ties to Wall Street, to financial deregulation, to favoring wealthy

donors with access and, you know, an undue say over public policy? Well, I think there are two points here, Rudyard. One is I'm not going to indulge in a false equivalency between the two American parties. The Democratic Party does have a Wall Street corporate contingent, but relative to the Republican Party that was treated by Donald Trump to, and corporate and Wall Street contingent in the Republican Party, treated by Donald Trump to extraordinary tax cuts. and amazing degrees of regulatory rollbacks, the Democrats really would offer and have offered nothing like that. So the first point I'd make with any skeptical Rust Belt or Midwesterner

with regard to Joe Biden, I would say, look, the Republican Party really is a Trojan horse for corporate and Wall Street interests. The record of the Democratic Party, and you go back, you don't have to go back to Roosevelt, just go back to Obama and Clinton. and if you want, Jimmy Carter, that record has been much more favorable to average working people than Republicans. Secondly, I talk about health care, which is on Americans' minds. Most people today are spending a fortune on copayments or deductibles or simply trying to afford increases in premium prices for health insurance. And the Affordable Care Act that was put into place under Obama with no help from the Republicans at all, has been a factor in keeping a little bit of check

on this increase in health care costs. But we have to go further. The Republicans refuse. Donald Trump said in 2016, you remember, I want to get rid of the repeal the Affordable Care Act and I'm going to substitute something much better. The Republicans never came up with anything much better. In fact, they never came up with anything, period. And Donald Trump is now in the Supreme Court trying to get the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act. I would talk to average working people, and I do about health care. To build on this, let's go to a question from Don Cowan here in Burlington, Ontario. He's asking, should the Republican Party win the election or probably more likely retain

control of the Senate? What do you expect to see in the economy? What are the consequences of that? And Don says, we've yet to hear a plan or a strategy from the governing party. I assume he means a Republican Party, regarding the future direction of the economy. What is the Republican economic agenda? I frankly don't know. This party has not put forward a platform.

Donald Trump has not put forward a platform for his second term. They talk about more tax cuts, more trickle-down economics, more benefits for the wealthy. That's not, to me, a strategy. And should Democrats have accepted something less than the $2.5 trillion? dollars or more that they were looking for in terms of fiscal stimulus, that seems to have really created a chasm between themselves, and especially the Republicans in the Senate, to create any kind of fiscal stimulus at any amount prior to the election. Well, let's be clear about the numbers.

In May, the Democrats in the House passed a stimulus that would be about $3.2 trillion. And then recently, they came down to $2.2 trillion. They tried to accommodate Republicans and the Trump administration. And what the Republicans, at least the Trump administration came back with is $1.8 trillion. But Mitch McConnell said there's no way that the Republicans and the Senate are going to agree to $1. trillion, even though that number came out of the Trump White House. So it's a mess. And I think that given that we're three weeks to the election, there's no way that there will be agreement before the election. My hope is that after the election, once the smoke clears, that there will be a little bit more clarity about who is going to have the power, and therefore there is at least the possibility of achieving some agreement.

You're so well-versed in Washington from your time there. So what happens with the lame duck session of Congress after the election? Can major legislation be passed, or is that traditionally a period where those decisions are put off until after? after the new Congress is sworn in in January? Rudyard, I don't think there's a traditional lame duck period. I mean, it will be lame duck in the sense that Congress will not be in power after January 3rd. But we do have these crises, this economic crisis and the coronavirus crisis.

And these people who are in Congress, they are listening. They have to be listening to some extent to their constituents. So I wouldn't be surprised if something moved during the lame duck session. What I'm most concerned about, to be completely frank with you right now, is that Donald Trump is not going to accept a loss on November 3rd, and he will contest the results in a number of states. And that will lead to a contested election. We've had three contested elections that Congress has settled in our history, all of them in the 19th century. But I wouldn't be surprised if this contested election found its way back to the House of Representatives January 3rd. Wow, that would be a situation indeed, and what high stakes, certainly.

Let's go to another question that came into you. This is from Helen and Calgary, Alberta. What do you think is the biggest public policy failure that has encouraged economic inequality in our lifetimes? And what has done the most to address it? I think the greatest failure underlying a lot of failures is the failure to constrain big money in American politics. That is, as wealth began to concentrate at the top of 40 years ago, there were opportunities to pass laws and regulations that would have tried to make it more difficult to translate that wealth into political power. Some of them were enacted into law, not enough in my view. And then the Supreme Court felt in a number of very questionable decisions that even those minimum constraints on the power of great wealth would fall afoul of the First Amendment, freedom of speech in the United States.

I think that we probably have to have a constitutional amendment. But the biggest failure, again, is big money in politics. That has led to all kinds of mischief in the United States. The biggest success over the last 40 years has probably had a lot to do with somebody who is never associated with his success. That is Alan Greenspan when he was head of the Federal Reserve Board in the 1990s. He allowed unemployment to drop to 3% without raising interest rates. Now, once unemployment got down to 3% in the United States, That actually began to mean that employers had to find people, train them, give them raises,

do things that employers have not done, oh, did not do before or since. And that actually was the first era, first time in the post-war era, at least since the late 70s, when inequality began to contract. Inequality began to be reduced in the United States. Interesting. So full employment is not only a public policy good in its own right. It has these multiplier effects. Well, Rob, that concludes our hour together. I just want to thank you for the, not just the substance of this discussion, but the tenor and the tone. I think the volume meter in so many of our public conversations today is kind of up there at 11 and 12.

And you approached this conversation with insight, civility, and substance. You're an honorary Canadian. Thank you, Rob. I was just going to ask you for that title. Thank you, Robert. Thank you for arranging this. Thank you for listening to the Monk Dialogues with Robert Reich. We hope you enjoyed the opportunity to listen to smart civil conversation

on the societal challenges presented by COVID-19 and its shakeout on the global economy. For more information on the Monk Dialogs, visit our website at monkdebates.com slash dialogue. We appreciate your feedback on this podcast. Please give us a rating and write a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download your audio. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public dialogue, one conversation at a time.