Air Date: 10-17-2026

Today we look at how being poor in America is made harder on purpose. The hours of paperwork it takes to keep food assistance or Medicaid are there to shrink the programs quietly by attrition and make failure feel like a personal problem. The same design runs through a healthcare system that profits when care is denied and the patient doesn't have the time to fight back. The alternative is the kind of program you'd design if you thought everyone living in a wealthy society was worthy of a dignified life.

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we look at how being poor in America is made harder on purpose. The hours of paperwork it takes to keep food assistance or Medicaid are there to shrink the programs quietly by attrition and make failure feel like a personal problem. The same design runs through a healthcare system that profits when care is denied and the patient doesn't have the time to fight back. The alternative is the kind of program you'd design if you thought everyone living in a wealthy society was worthy of a dignified life.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include

The Brian Lehrer Show

Citations Needed

What A Day

Pitchfork Economics

and Unf*cking The Republic

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 4 sections;

Section A, Social Insurance and Worker Protections

Section B, The Time Tax and Burden by Design

Section C, Health Care Under Attack

And Section D, Affordability Politics and the Rising Left

And now, on to the show.

Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and she coined the idea of the time tax in a 2021 article. Now she's got a book called The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time and How to Fix It, where she looks at something many of us have come to accept just, as a fact of life, that trudging through bureaucracy is the price we have to pay to get the services and benefits we're entitled to.

Spoiler alert, I'm gonna ask her, "Isn't this just as bad in the private sector?" but Annie, welcome back to WNYC. Always good to have you on. Thank you so much for having me. Why did you focus on this for a book? I felt it was almost 20 years ago when I started to notice this when I was out reporting.

And really when I was talking with people, the thing that I was concerned about had to do with federal safety net benefits. I was talking to a group of veterans who were homeless, and they just couldn't access the help that the VA wanted them to access. But then I started seeing it everywhere, and I think you're completely right.

Private businesses do this, to their customers. the number of kind of cookie notifications and terms and conditions we're expected to comply with, to get loans, to go out to college, it's, it's really, really everywhere, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't hit certain people harder than others. Right, and that's part of the point. Some can shrug it off as an inconvenience. For others, I guess people who disproportionately need govern- government help, and those would disproportionately be poorer people, it's more than that, right? Absolutely. So I would say that, yes, higher income people might face the same issues, but they have more resources.

They have more time. They can hire an accountant to do their taxes. They can decide to just pay that medical bill even if that doctor that they want to go to is out of network. Whereas lower income people, they don't have the capacity to do that. other groups of people that I think are disproportionately affected by this, are, are people who, are not native-born to this country, not US citizens, people with a history of involvement with the criminal justice system, women who tend to be lower income, tend to be the people who are getting benefits on behalf of their kids, tend to do a lot of the household management, so, signing your kids up for afterschool or summer programs, that kind of thing.

And then, yes, low income Americans, absolutely, which is something that we've known. you can go back to Cloward and Piven were writing about this in the 1960s, and I'm sure there's great examples from even earlier than that. One of the most interesting things to me from the book is your notion that a lot of people assume these systems are just badly designed or poorly administered, but you argue that at least in some cases, making benefits difficult to access is actually part of the point.

It's like, with Trump, you hear the critics sometimes say the cruelty is the point. in this case, the bureaucracy is the point Absolutely. I think we can see this really clearly with businesses actually. So in a lot of cases it's really easy to sign up for something online, but then there's this subscription that you don't quite notice, and finally months later when you realize that you've been paying $15.99 for something, you go to cancel, they say that you have to write a letter or you have to call.

You can't just do it online. And I think that that's a pretty clear example of, businesses wanna make it really easy, for you to spend money and they wanna make it as hard as they can for you to stop spending money. 

And so yes, in terms of the government, I think this is a fundamentally illegitimate way to make programs smaller. So if we say that, we have a program that we wanna be helping an at-risk kid who just happened to be born to a low-income family, I think it's fundamentally illegit- m- illegitimate to make that program harder for that family to get on merely because of the paperwork.

And, that's understanding that yes, there's going to be checks, there's gonna be fraud checks. We wanna make sure that they are actually eligible. Mm-hmm. But a lot of this stuff is really, really unnecessary, and it's purposeful. It is impressing upon people that they are poor. It is shrinking the size of programs by making them onerous to use, which, is, is...

In my mind, this is a huge public policy problem, and it's affecting all of us.

Listener writes, "I'm 85 years old, and I feel as if I will spend whatever years I have left doing paperwork. It totally consumes my life. Can't stand it." Tracy in Teaneck, you're on WNYC. Hi, Tracy. Hi. Thank you. I am blind, and I need to verify my identity to get through the New Jersey Property Tax Relief and to get access to Medicare online, and the, the app they both want to use is called ID.me, and I have spent, about 10 hours this week trying to do this, and I still don't have my identic- identity verified.

I'm not any closer than I was when I started because it's, it's demanding that I take pictures either with my phone or with my computer camera, so I have to have somebody help me with that. Mm-hmm. I finally got a picture of my ID, and then it said it had expired. It hasn't expired. It's a nightmare. Have you asked anybody about this, like in your particular case, somebody who's blind, if there are not accommodations- Yes, I have, and, and people say no.

No, we, we're having trouble with this too. But apparently, different agencies implement it differently. So the IRS has one way of doing it. Mm-hmm. Medicare apparently has another way. Mm-hmm. New Jersey has another way, and m- I'm, I'm in contact with my assembly person, who says that she can find me a workaround.

But really, why does it have to be so hard? Thank you for putting a human face on, on this, from, from Annie's book. Tracy, good luck with all that. Do you have any advice for somebody like Tracy? th- this is r- really, really tough, and I think that you've identified a lot of the issues. Very often, the government will have workarounds for people who, like you, have blindness or vision loss, or might have any of another issue.

But that means that you're working in some other system, and who knows how well it works. As you point out, all of these r- programs have different rules. You might have to do the same thing of ID verification multiple times. And, the easier it is for you to do something, perhaps because you're, happen to have the good grace to be in a healthy body, or you have money, or you have, a fancy iPhone and an up-to-date computer, which a lot of people don't, the more issues that you're working with, the harder it's going to be to comply.

And what I would say, just in terms of advice, 'cause I think that this is really, really hard, is that very often these offices will have folks who are supposed to help people with disabilities, with differences, and very often they'll also have, an advocate service. So the IRS has- Hmm ... the Taxpayer Advocate Service, and very often those people can help.

But I would love to tell you that there was some magic wand you could find that you could wave, and it would just make it easy. I've never found one. And just hearing this story, it breaks my heart, and it makes me- Yeah ... so angry. So angry. and I sincerely hope that you get it sorted, but I'm sorry that you have to go through this.

In 1977, The New York Times was reporting on the, quote, "Affordability gap in housing," adding this, "According to a major congressional study, only 15% of American families can afford a medium-priced new house."

Unquote. But The New York Times, like the AP, highlighted the issue of affordability, but placed the blame not on landlords and the private housing market and the need for constant profit in the housing sector, but on the actual cost-reducing policies like rent control as well as restrictions on developers.

Consider a story from October of 1979, headline, quote, "Lack of affordable housing plagues elderly." Unquote. The story focuses on seniors who live on or around Long Island, New York, stating, quote, "For the elderly who want to sell homes they no longer need or can no longer afford, there are few housing alternatives on the island.

Rent control in Nassau County has brought non-subsidized apartment construction to a halt, and because of traditional opposition to multifamily construction in both counties, apartment rentals are few and expensive. Even if new construction exists, its costs are so high that rents would far exceed what many of the elderly can afford."

Unquote. Thus, when the issue is merely a matter of what individuals can afford, anything can be blamed for being too expensive. It was more convenient for The New York Times, a paper that, as we know, explicitly calls itself a capitalist paper, as they did in 2018, to cite rent control and construction cost as the culprits Rather than to cite property owners who choose not to build in rent-controlled areas and who choose to pass whatever costs they'd like onto the renters and buyers, and of course, the broader regime of for-profit housing and its, and its need for hockey stick graph growth.

If the focus is merely on housing affordability, then of course there's no requirement to confront the market-based housing system, much less the politics of rights or what one is owed. Everything must be oriented and positioned to satisfy the insatiable needs of capital. In another report on housing, this time in New Jersey and from 1981, The New York Times had the headline, quote, "Housing is Called Big Issue," end quote.

And in it, The Times uncritically echoes many of the very same talking points it had just a couple years earlier. The story opens with this. Quote, "A panel of Republican state legislators saying that a lack of affordable housing in New Jersey is becoming the major issue of the 1980s has been conducting public hearings to gather information for a legislative initiative," end quote.

Now, among the panel's proposals, the article says, are the following, according to Peter McDonough, a legislative aide for the Assembly Republicans. Quote, "Easing environmental constraints in some potential growth areas adjacent to the Pinelands in Atlantic City, providing better protection for tenants whose buildings are being converted to condominiums, making more, quote-unquote, 'creative use of state pension funds for financing new housing construction.'

Mr. McDonough also said a key target of the Republican legislators was rent control, now in effect in about one-fifth of the communities in the state." Quote, "Apartments where people can wait out the lack of affordable housing are just not being built anymore because rent controls make it so much less profitable than other building ventures," end quote, he said.

Panel members, he said, were investigating whether new apartment developers should be given an exemption from rent control for the life of a mortgage, end quote. So once again, again assisted by corporate media like the New York Times and AP, capital-friendly solutions that get rid of rent control, that get rid of any rights-based orientation of housing are the main focus to so-called reduced costs, and that includes, of course, getting rid of environmental labor regulations, labor requirements, and a lot of safety regulations.

And again, if this looks familiar, it's because it's the same prescription being offered by the majority of corporate and liberal Democrats today. We must change regulations to please the needs of capital and help their profit margins, and in hopes that we get this trickle-down effect. Right.

Trickle-down abundance. They'll provide us with so much more because we have provided them with everything they could possibly want. Now, again, not coincidentally, the people proposing this are overwhelmingly funded by the real estate industry, both in the 1970s and '80s and today. And of course, the New York Times does not question these prescriptions.

It simply accepts them as value neutral, objective prescriptions that could reduce housing costs and make it so quote, unquote, "affordable" because that's what the real estate lobby insists needs to be done. So let's switch topics into healthcare, 'cause during the 1970s and '80s, health insurance premiums were rising as well.

According to the Social Security Administration, expenses for premiums and subscription charges rose by 17% from 1969 to 1970 alone. This trend continued throughout the decade, with premiums increasing by 11 to 13% each year up until the late '70s. Now, Republican presidents throughout the 1970s, namely Nixon and Ford, routinely promised, quote, "affordable health insurance."

Richard Nixon did so in, in his 1974 State of the Union address. Let's, uh, let's listen to that clip here. The time is at hand this year to bring comprehensive, high-quality healthcare within the reach of every American. I shall propose a sweeping new program that will assure comprehensive health insurance protection to millions of Americans who cannot now obtain it or afford it with vastly improved protection against catastrophic illnesses.

Now, President Nixon would go on to plainly state his opposition to single-payer healthcare, which again, at that point existed in several other countries and was working quite well. But you have to tweak and maintain the fundamental profit logic of capital when coming up with these so-called affordability solutions, and this is where politicians do their most exquisite work, right?

How there's this problem, we have to have a solution, but I need to have a solution that comports with the infinite profit logic of capital, so I'm going to propose a tweak in using the vague rhetoric of affordability. So let's listen to that clip right here. Now, I recognize that other plans have been put forward That would cost eighty billion or even a hundred billion dollars and that would put our whole healthcare system under the heavy hand of the federal government This is the wrong approach.

This has been tried abroad, and it's failed. It is not the way we do things here in America. That's not the way we do things here in America, right? Like, why would we make them better? I don't know. Of course not. Which is a bit tautological. Two years later, in Richard Nixon's successor Gerald Ford's own State of the Union address, this from 1976, Ford essentially rewords Nixon's own statements, and poorly at that, which is unsurprising if you know anything about Ford.

But let's listen to that clip here. We cannot realistically afford federally dictated national health insurance providing full coverage for all 215 million Americans. The experience of other countries raises questions about the quality as well as the cost of such plans. But I do envision the day when we may use the private health insurance system to offer more middle income families high quality health services at prices they can afford, and shield them also from their catastrophic illnesses using resources now available.

He uses the weaselly phrase federally dictated, just as Nixon said the heavy hand of the government, right? It's all this idea of big government is actually the problem. When a state takes care of its citizens in a way that may hurt the profit margins, private capital, obviously that is seen as not the American way, which is true, because it's not the American way.

Well, it, I mean, it doesn't have to be. The health insurance industry, which heavily funds both parties, you know, especially in the 1970s, it doesn't need to exist. It's a wholly superfluous industry. It is a completely parasitic industry. It provides no value, does not provide healthcare, doesn't provide technological innovations, doesn't provide any efficiencies.

It is just a middleman to shake you down, and getting rid of it and creating a single payer system is, again, the obvious rational solution that several countries have come up with. So you have to maintain this insurance system, and undermining its profit motives or its profit incentives is unacceptable, so the way you tweak the system, this was obviously reached its nadir during the Obama years, which is to federally subsidize it with government funding.

Because the profit motive of the health insurance industry can never be questioned. It is part of the so-called American way. And both Nixon and Ford's comments are just the predecessors of what Donald Trump recently said just this past April, when he told reporters that, quote, "We can't take care of daycare.

We're a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We're fighting wars. We can't take care of daycare. You gotta let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it, too. It's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things." They can do it on a state basis.

You can't do it on federal. We have to take care of one thing, military protection. We have to guard the country, right? So it's saying we can't actually take care of our people and their own health and their own lives and their own kids because we have to constantly feed a military machine that kills other people's kids abroad.

But obviously, the system is set up where the government will not take care of its own residents. And so you have this through line from the 1970s all the way to today. Now cut to the 1980s. Overall, the problems of exorbitant housing and healthcare costs only worsened in the following years.

Right-wing institutions, like their policymaker counterparts, they seized on these concerns and of course blamed big government. In 1989, for example, The Heritage Foundation introduced its own plan entitled Assuring Affordable Healthcare For All Americans, which as many have noted, served as the basis for later the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare.

The Heritage Foundation outlined its four objectives of the document, the first of which read as follows, quote, "All citizens should be guaranteed universal access to affordable healthcare," unquote. The plan's main innovation was to create the consumer base for insurance companies, and more abstractly, to further commodify healthcare, creating so-called efficiencies such that it was in the United States.

According to The Heritage Foundation, quote, "The plan would give the same tax incentives for all healthcare coverage regardless of type of employment of the family earners. Thus, the worker in a small business or one who is self-employed would have the same tax benefits for healthcare as the employee in a Fortune 500 company.

Not only would this provide a powerful incentive for insurance to those who currently have no such incentive, but it would also allow households to shop around for the best plan to meet their needs," unquote. Everyone loves to shop around for insurance. It's a fun activity. That's right. It's what it means to be free, Adam.

That's true. In 2010, the Affordable Care Act passed, of course, largely based on this plan in, in logic, codifying The Heritage Foundation's vision into law.

I wanna just focus on lower income Americans, and I wanna quote from an excerpt from your book that was in The Atlantic, talking about a woman who is just trying to get assistance to get back on her feet.

She talks about how the state was asking her for data on, quote, "A nearly weekly basis and requiring her to re-enroll in each program every month or two. She did not own a computer and struggled to use the government website on her cellphone, meaning she would have to go to the library, attend a Circles meeting," which you explain in the book is about, helping people g- basically go through this process or call someone for help.

"It takes me hours," she said. "Sometimes if I submit an application to one program, it messes up the whole entire other set. Then I have to go back and fix all of it." This is someone who is really in need of assistance from the government. She's doing everything right to try to get back on her feet, try to get support, and it seems like the government doesn't want her to be able to do any of this.

Why? No, it's absurd, right? And this is a low-income mom, and a lot of the state's interest in this person, Marcella, is in her kids. We don't want her kids to be hungry. We want her kids to be able to get to school, right? And so what had happened was that she had screwed something up on her taxes, or she claims that the salon that she was working at in, nine years ago, eight years ago, s- basically said that it had paid her more than she had actually received, and so that changed her eligibility, and she gets labeled internally as a fraud risk, despite the fact that she has never, ever been tried for or actually, charged with fraud, right?

They've just labeled her as a risk, and she maintains that the problem was with the salon, not with her. But she doesn't have the money to hire an, an, an accountant or, a tax person to help her with this, or a lawyer. She's a manicurist with three kids. What was she supposed to do? So, she had to take out a loan to pay this restitution, and again, this, this was all over kind of a couple hundred dollars, and Marcella's never made more than, $30,000 a year, so the sums are really small.

And ever since then, despite the fact that there's never been another problem between her and the state with all of the information that they're giving, that she's giving them, they've said that she has to reapply for these programs constantly. They're just, they're just, They're harassing her, is the way that I see it.

I don't think she would describe it that way. And even the intervention of a Republican state official didn't stop this from happening. It just keeps on happening. And so, yeah, she's been kicked off one program or another more than 120 times. It, it's, it's interesting 'cause I feel like there are so many parents of this situation.

I keep thinking about the time when I was living in Washington, DC. When I first moved to DC, I had very briefly lived in Maryland for a couple of months with family while I looked for work in DC, and then moved to DC, and I thought everything was fine. And about seven years later , I got a letter from the state of Maryland saying that, that I owed them taxes for living in Maryland this entire time, which I had not been living in Maryland.

And it took the, what a very kind woman, who happened to be a tax attorney, and happened to enjoy my work, who responded to a message I put out on Twitter, like Twitter befo- in the before times, who was like, "I can help you." And she did, and she is an American hero. But genuinely, it took someone being like, "I can help you with this process.

This is just a mistake." If that wouldn't have happened, I would've needed to pay the state of Maryland thousands of dollars, or fight the state of Maryland based on a belief that I lived somewhere I did not live. And, I'm a person who's employed, has been employed this whole time. I cannot imagine how difficult this is for someone who's not.

But then you go into how, you quote, or you write in the introduction of your book, quote, "The country's libertarian politics and racial diversity have also continued to spur lo- policymakers to create contingent limited initiatives." So we don't have universal healthcare, no universal child allowance, no universal retirement benefits, no mandatory voting with easy to access polling sites.

So yes, there's kind of general incompetence and the confusion of federalism, but you argue that it's our politics and our racial diversity that has created this situation. How so? Absolutely. I think this is... Just as an aside, I see you on your tax issue. I'm currently, as I am rolling this book out, I had a California driver's license and I lost it, but I live in New York now, and California will only send a replacement license to the address that is on your license, but I don't live there.

And so I'm trying to get in touch with the family that lives in that house now, or that apartment now, because if I can't turn in the physical license here in New York, I will need to get a learner's permit and go through like driving school and take the test. the written and the- Mm-hmm ... and, and it's like gonna take months, which means I can't drive a car.

Not that... I don't have one in the city. I can't drive a car, but I also can't rent a car, and I'm a little bit like, "What am I gonna do?" But anyway, so I see you on that. And it's just- Yeah ... it's absolutely cons- constant. Again, The Time Tax, I, I'm so glad you wrote this book because it's something where it's like people think "Oh, this is just about poor people, or just about- No, it's not

people who are e- having to deal with the system a lot. But I'm like, if you think about it for long enough, everybody has a story about I tried to change my address, and there was like a misspelling in the last name, and now I can't get any mail," or something like that.

Everybody has a story like that. But, but I do wanna talk about like- The politics and the diversity. Yeah, race. So Our peer countries that send up, set up these kind of bureaucratically elegant systems, and we don't. We have everything being contingent, right? And non-universal. There's, basically no benefit that I can think of in the United States that's actually universal.

Social Security comes close, but it's not. You have to pay in, right? A lot of people don't qualify for Social Security. Medicare, yeah, there's... that's might be, might be close to the only one, I think. and I don't know if there's some exclusions. I think it's, 99% of seniors get it, but anyway.

why don't, why don't we do this, right? Like, why do we make everything so contingent? And it's straightforwardly because of race, right? you can go back, and there's a historian, Ira Katznelson, really specializes in this period of time. When we're setting these big programs up during the New Deal, race is a gigantic issue because you still have Jim Crow in the South.

We're not actually a participatory democracy until 1965, right? With, with, all adults of all groups being able to vote. And so, there's, there's some technical reasons. There's also just the federalist reason, right? the federal government can't do things. It has to send them to the states.

The states have these incentives to kind of people, keep people off of programs. But no, and, even when you're thinking about kind of the issue that I'm most worried about currently is we're applying, starting next year, a work requirement, work reporting requirement in Medicaid. We came up with work requirements.

That was a Jim Crow policy. It was invented in 1944 in Louisiana in order to get women and kids, harvesting crops during the harvest season. So they basically said, the state said, "You can't get your cash welfare payment unless you go work," but also, if you're working, you won't get cash welfare. So they were just disenrolling thousands and thousands of people.

So, it's not the only thing, but it is a major thing, and I think it's also why we have this kind of obsession with fraud and welfare queens, which leads to a lot of the bureaucratic burdens. But yeah, no, this is a catastrophe with a lot of fathers, and it's just, that's one of them.

I, I do wanna mention, 'cause you talk about this, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which has created that nationwide work requirement for Medicaid and expanded work requirements for SNAP. House Speaker Mike Johnson argued, quote, that the policy is our, quote, "Not some onerous burdensome thing," but they seem real onerous and burdensome.

But that seems like kind of part of the point. Oh, absolutely. And, Republicans have been able to say that they aren't cutting the program. We're not cutting it. They're taking $1.2 trillion out of those two initiatives over 10 years. How could that not be a cut? And it's because people have to comply with the work requirement, and if they can't, either because they can't work or because they can't effectively report what they're doing to the government on these horrible systems, right?

Like, the number of people who are going to get disenrolled, basically not because they aren't com- aren't in compliance with the work requirement 'cause they're working or they're volunteering or doing something, but merely because they can't tell the state that they're doing it because it's annoying, because these systems are terrible, because, what if it's down?

What if you don't have a computer? What if you don't understand? And, these work reporting requirements are applying to people who have, medical conditions, right? Who, are living in tents, who are homeless. And so, yeah, it's a really cruel way to do it, and I think it's a really low integrity way to do it 'cause you're just making work for people.

Either they're not gonna be able to perform the work, so they're not gonna get insurance or the SNAP benefit that they need, or you're just making, adding busy work to their lives. and notably, particularly in Medicaid, they're not expected to increase employment. We know that work requirements in the Medicaid program especially don't get people to work.

Your conventional story around Social Security solvency starts, I think, many times with demographics, where people say, "Oh, there are too many people retiring, too many people getting benefits, and so we need to figure out a way to make it affordable." And really, the first place they look, because they've misdiagnosed the problem as one of demographics, is they think, "Well, we just need to cut the benefits.

We need to make sure that we are spending less." But really, the question is why? How did we get to this point? And that's what Roosevelt's work is focused on. That's what my work is focused on, is really getting to the correct diagnosis, 'cause if we can't diagnose the problem, we're not going to treat it.

And the underlying diagnosis is a weaker economy, one that was battered by the Great Recession, and one in which earners are not really participating as much as they could in the economy. I don't know if you saw the recent report out that a quarter of the American workforce is, functionally unemployed, means they are involuntarily working, part-time hours, that they are earning poverty wages, and that directly contributes to the long-term health of Social Security because the money comes from wages.

So if we have a better economy, we can really get to the root of, the solvency crisis as well as thinking about how we can bring in more revenue. I know we'll talk about all of those pieces from the top, but I think getting the diagnosis correct will set us on a better path to have a conversation about what the future of this program looks like.

So I guess our view for the longest time has been that the challenges that Social Security faces are largely a byproduct of rising inequality. When Social Security was set up, as I recall, 85% of all income was captured by the tax because even rich people got paid wages for their income. Today, I think it's under 50% of all income is affected by the capbecause so much income in the country is above the cap and is in forms of income, not wages, that aren't addressed by the Social Security tax at all, aren't affected by the Social Security tax at all.

For example, capital gains, which are Social Security free and are the source of most income for most wealthy people. So are you telling us, Nick, that you don't pay Social Security on most of your income? No. No. No. So Nationwide put out this survey. They had a really good piece out where they asked kind of true and false questions about Social Security to the respondents, and they asked whether or not they thought a person earning $200,000 a year versus earning a million dollars a year, if they're paying the same rate in Social Security tax, and only 34% of the respondents correctly identified that as true, which is part of the problem.

They either think that the richest Americans are paying more because they're earning more, or they don't know, and that, I think, is part of this fundamental mismatch because- Yes ... you're exactly right, Nick, that we have a Social Security payroll tax cap. We only tax up to a certain amount. Now, you're not going to receive, more benefits if you're wealthier above that amount, but you can contribute more.

So the effective tax rate you're paying on those wages, that's fundamentally unequal, and so that creates a systemic imbalance. And you're right. It-- Early on in the program, it captured, in the high 80s to 90%, and it was fixed at a moment in 1983 when the, when the last major reform to the program was set, that we were capturing 90% of wages in the economy.

And that precipitously fell because, as I think we are correctly identifying here in this, in this conversation, that inequality pushed wages far higher for those people above the cap. So as people were earning more money, escaping the Social Security tax, and then converting that money into something that wasn't, as you mentioned, Nick, it wasn't, labor income.

It was, income from capital. It was income from other sources- Right So I think- Yeah ... that has really skewed the, the finance base for the program in a way that I think could be reversed, and I think that's the policy fix we should be talking about, not whether or not we should be cutting the program's benefits.

Yeah. Right. It's two-pronged, the, the problem. One is that rising inequality has pushed a larger share of wages above the cap- And the other is that it has reduced wages' share of the overall economy substantially over the past 40, 50 years. And it's one that we've correctly identified. I think you, you had Catherine Edwards on talking about, you know- Mm-hmm

labor income and AI generation, and she's written a paper for us where she talks about the overall health of the program as functionally a component of economic management. If we did better ensuring that wage earners could earn more and be more productive, we wouldn't have to worry about things like, the growth of the program's benefits because it would be covered by the economic productivity if we were better at allowing more immigrant labor to come into this country and work effectively, if we had childcare that provided opportunities for people to come into the labor market.

If we could manage the economy better, Social Security would be better, and I think those are the fundamental connection points that we wanna make. I think what most people just don't understand is that, I think the cap is now 185,000 bucks or plus or minus. Yep. Right? 184. Yeah, okay. And, and it didn't change.

Yeah. So if you, if you make $185,000 a year, 12 and a half percent of your income is devoted to Social Security Right? The six you pay and the six your employer pays. Yeah. Yeah. And it's actually more. We know that employers shave their wages to cover some of that tax, so employees- Right ... are paying, more than their half, essentially, be- in, in lost wages.

And so that, I think, is the other fundamental mismatch when we talk about what people are paying into this program. We made a promise to them the benefits would be available and guaranteed when they reach retirement. Yeah. And we wanna ensure the benefits are there because they paid in over this period of time, and I think that's, that's one of the reasons protecting this program i- is, we think, vital for our civic infrastructure as well.

Right. So if you make $185,000 a year, y- y- you devote a lot of your income to Social Security. Yeah. If you make $18 million a year, I just did the math. It's- In wage income. I- yeah. Yeah. Well, no, in any income. Or, or other, yeah. Right? Let's just assume you also make $185,000 in- Right ... in wage income.

Yeah. Which may not be true, but let's just assume that you do. is it .01% of your income to Social Security? Yeah. You basically don't even notice that you're spending the money. Yeah. And that disconnect, I think, is really, is part of the, the problem here. And even in components of the economy where we think about labor income being reclassified, for example, as profits.

Right. Um, people set up a pass-through. Mm-hmm. They set up an S corp where they are generating income through their labor that would in any other time in our economy- Right ... be classified as labor income, be subject to the payroll tax cap, and that, that money would also flow into the program. Right. And so in fact, there are, Social Security Administration actuaries who have assessed the value of a proposed reforms that would capture some of that pass-through income and even raise the payroll tax cap at a more conservative level than what we would argue for, and you could actually close the solvency gap just with those reforms.

You wouldn't raise taxes. You wouldn't have to, raise the payroll tax for current, workers who are paying into the program. So you mentioned the solvency gap, and you're talking about the so-called trust fund, the, for, for- ... the, the Social Security Trust Fund. The lockbox. What I find amusing about all this is that for decades we've had critics telling us that the, the trust fund is a fiction.

It's not really there. And now that it faces insolvency, we've gone, "Oh, no, that trust fund that I'm told was fictional, now it's real, and it's insolvent, and that's why we need to cut benefits by 30%." Yeah, it, it cuts both ways for people- ... in this conversation because really it is an accounting tool.

And I think that's- Right ... the way we should be thinking about it, is a tool. The reason it was set up in the first place was to accumulate more income from a working population because the SSA actuaries understood and accurately predicted that there'd be a lot of baby boomers retiring and drawing on social security benefits.

So we needed to get over that hill, which is why we generated a trust fund in the first place, which is why it generated reserves, and it was held by the federal government for that purpose. And as that trust fund is depleted, we then run into the statutory problem where, the program itself is required to make cuts if it doesn't have those reserves in place.

But again, these are, these are changeable problems. These are fixable problems, things that Congress can address. But it's a functional tool that's allowed us to accomplish a specific task, and that's part of the misdiagnosis problem, is that the, the 1983 reformers correctly identified the demographic trends, and, even today we have better, worker to beneficiary ratios than they thought we would in 1983.

So we're actually doing better in some senses in terms of the demographics of the situation. But the Great Recession and the, the lack of economic growth long term has really taken a hit to the program. And, I think the, the challenge is protecting the program and, and correctly identifying the problem, otherwise Social Security is used as a punching bag for every conversation related to, "Oh, we spend too much.

Oh, the government is, is too generous to certain populations." And I think that misidentifies the problem and actually obscures the solution, which is why Roosevelt is in this fight.

I spent the past six years being the power of attorney doing everything from my mom, and just recently she is applying for Medicaid. I'm applying to Medicaid for her with someone I hired to apply for Medicaid, and it's still a year and a half later.

We've gone through three different employees at this company who we paid a lot of money to. Would you like me to say the number? Sure. And we paid, $13,500 for this company to do the Medicaid application for her. Wow. she's been down to no money for a year and a half, but, and we've gone through three people who I'm not always sure of their level of competency with this company.

But then recently I was just on the phone. this is multiple, and multiple people are going through this all the time. I was just on the phone because Medicaid in Connecticut is asking for a Schedule A that is not a tax document. It's something from a prior estate planning form perhaps, that her lawyer in the Midwest said hasn't ex- existed for 35 years.

Hmm. He refuses to help me with this. I'm trying to conjure up her, banking, numbers from 2011 when the trust was created- Hmm ... 'cause she didn't actually just put her, her car, her house, which have all been sold, you know- Hmm ... six years ago. well, whenever, like five, four or five years ago, to keep paying down her, she went into assisted living, skilled nursing, memory care, back to skilled nursing, which is where she is now.

And so I was on the bank and I was on the, with a, with the bank for, an hour and a half, and they s- have, they couldn't answer my question. They have to probably do research 'cause it's so far back. So, so I still don't have the information to give them, to them, and apparently her application is, or whether there will be a big penalty is pending, what was, what were the items that were placed in the trust at this time?

I mean- Mm-hmm ... this is 2011 we're talking about For, this is all for, for a Medicaid application, right? So, yes. So it can reimburse her, where she is currently staying in Connecticut, where she's been for a year with Medicaid pending. Thank God she was able to get in because she was at a sister facility where we were paying buku bucks, 

And one of the things from this story, gee, that's I'm sure making everybody's heads explode like it's making my head explode, is the paradox of, if somebody's poor enough to be on Medicaid, you're paying this advocate, you have to pay them $13,000 to be the advocate. But if you're poor enough to be on Medicaid, who's got the $13,000 or without at least, further bankrupting yourself?

Annie, is your head exploding? My head has exploded. I am so sorry. And again, it's like, for what? What, what is the risk that your mother is defrauding the government or not obeying by the rules if she's in a skilled nursing facility? this is, this is absolute madness, the notion you would go to a private firm.

And, like for the prior caller, I am so sorry. I hope this gets sorted. I would certainly publicize this and tell your state's Medicaid administrator that this is happening. Huh. And the thing that, that makes my heart break even more, Brian, I know as you've talked about on your show, HR1 is rolling out, which is gonna cut a trillion dollars from the Medicaid program by putting more paperwork on people.

Right. Right? This is, this is about to get a lot worse, and so I sincerely thank the caller for sharing, her family's story, and I really hope it gets sorted, in a way that, that will ensure that her mom can get the care that she needs. So G in Westchester, there's maybe one good bit of concrete advice from Annie Lowrey, and that's to contact the New York State Medicaid director, and, and complain right up to the top of that particular chain.

That is what you said, Annie, right? Yeah, absolutely. Find whoever is running Medicaid and I couldn't quite tell whether she was in Connecticut or New York, but whoever is running, the, the Medicaid program there, I would certainly write this all out. and they have to know when these systems are creating these problems.

Yeah. You mentioned the, the one big beautiful bill. Yeah, the work requirements, and you're right, we've covered this on the show a number of times. The work requirements for Medicaid eligibility. So much of the country supports that politically because it sounds like a fair social contract. If you're getting your basic stuff paid for by the government, you should at least be working in some way, right?

If you can't work, in the private sector enough because there isn't a market for you, whatever, that you get these things done privately. If the government is subsidizing you, then you should at least be looking for work or going to school or doing volunteer work, which also counts. fair social contract to a lot of people's thinking.

But what it actually does for many people is just place a time tax- When they are qualified through the actual, behaviors that they're exhibiting, the work that they're doing, but the time tax dissuades them from going through with the application. That's, that's that, right? Absolutely. And notably in the case of Medicaid, two things, Brian.

One is that some states have actually had work, work requirements in their Medicaid program before, and it didn't lower the unemployment rate or change the employment rate- Ah ... among people subject to the requirements, so it does not effectively get people to work. Why would that be? Because a lot of people who are on Medicaid are already working if they can, but they can't always prove that to the state in the way that the state requires, which is really burdensome and onerous.

It can often be on these really rickety systems. So you might be working or volunteering for 80 hours a month or in school, but you also have to prove that. It's not just the work requirement, it's that you have to prove it. Yeah. The other thing is that this work requirement is being applied to people, who, are older Americans, 61 years old, to people who might n- not be able to prove that they have a disability because they can't access healthcare in the first place.

Right. To people who are homeless. How are you going to comply with a work requirement if you are homeless? I don't have an answer to that question. They're not going to be able to. So then they won't have Medicaid coverage, and then what happens if they end up in the ER or they need a psychiatric medication or some other kind of medication?

Right. This is gonna kill people. You know- It's gonna... People will die. that is going to happen.

So why has every attempt to patch this broken system, including the Affordable Care Act, fallen short of actually solving the problem?

Because you can't build a for-profit system around a service whose entire purpose is to make itself unnecessary. See, in most industries, the profit motive and the stated goal of the businesses are aligned. Like a car company wants to sell cars, so it wants you to buy more cars. But a health insurer's stated goal is a healthy population, except a healthy population doesn't need insurance.

A healthy population doesn't file claims. A genuinely healthy customer base is, at least on a balance sheet, a customer base with nothing to sell to. The industry doesn't make money on health. It makes money on the gap between premiums collected and claims paid out. So every dollar, actual dollar that's spent on actual care, is structurally a dollar that this company doesn't want to spend.

It's why we don't have healthcare in this country. We have sick care, a system that's engineered to manage illness profitably, not to produce health, because health is bad for the top line. And this is the thing that our own reporting keeps coming back to. The system isn't broken. It's working as it was designed, designed to generate returns for shareholders, not outcomes for patients.

And once you see it that way, every infuriating feature of American healthcare makes a lot of sense. Like why insurers fight so hard over prior authorization. It's because every denied or delayed claim is an averted payout. Why deductibles keep climbing, because it pushes cost risk onto you before the company touches its own money.

Why pharmacy benefit managers exist as an entire industry unto themselves, taking a cut between manufacturers and patients. We've reported before, the three top PBMs pull in over six hundred billion dollars in a single year, and all they do is push paperwork. See, none of this is incompetence, it's optimization.

It's just optimized for the wrong variable. Look at what that optimization costs in pure administrative waste, because this is where the efficient private market falls apart on contact. Medicare, the public government-run program, spends about 2% of its budget on administration. That's roughly in line with Canada's single-payer system.

Private insurance, on the other hand, runs administrative costs around 13%. That's a six times efficiency gap because Medicare doesn't have to spend money finding reasons to deny your claim. It doesn't need armies of underwriters that are pricing individual risk, and it doesn't need to court shareholders.

The private model spends a huge chunk of money of every premium dollar running the apparatus of profit extraction before it reaches a doctor. This is also the honest answer as to why Obamacare, for all the good that it legitimately did, like cutting the uninsured rate from persistent double digits to around 9% at its best, it's why it was always gonna hit a ceiling.

The ACA never removed the profit motive from health insurance. Instead, it regulated around the profit motive. It was always just gonna be a patch on the incentive structure instead of a replacement, and patches degrade. So at an absolute minimum, if we keep any version of this private market structure, it has to be subsidized massively and permanently, and it has to be insulated from becoming a political football so that a single hostile Congress can't gut it.

But that's the minimum, and even there, you're paying the private industry's built-in inefficiency tax forever. The real answer here is universal coverage, coverage that extracts the profit motive from the relationship between the sick patient and the caregiver. But here's where there's a twist. Mike Johnson, Senator Mike Crapo, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan before them, and Donald Trump himself didn't just strip healthcare from millions of people.

They might have opened a door to real progressive change. Because the only way that real change ever happens in this country, the only way we swing the pendulum back, is when enough people are crushed, uninsured, underinsured, buried in medical debt, maybe watching a parent or a child denied care over a missed form.

This is kindling. Their short-term victory in killing access to healthcare may be exactly what sets up Medicare for All for the long-term win.

We've just heard clips starting with

The Brian Lehrer Show describing how the ‘time tax’ of needless government paperwork is often deliberate to discourage people considered undeserving from getting the benefits they're legally entitled to.

Citations Needed examined how corporate media and both parties have used vague "affordability" rhetoric since the 1970s to protect profits rather than confront the market systems driving up living costs.

What A Day traced America's lack of universal benefits to its history of racism, which also produced the work requirements Republicans are now using to strip Medicaid from eligible people.

Pitchfork Economics argued that the real threat to Social Security is a weaker economy and inequality pushing income above the $184,000 cap for social security contributions, not too many retirees.

The Brian Lehrer Show in part two of their discussion illustrated the paradox that accessing Medicaid can sometimes require expensive advocates and a mountain of forms.

And Unf*cking The Republic explained why for-profit insurance can never deliver real healthcare, since denied claims and climbing deductibles are profit optimizations, not incompetence, all serving shareholders over patients.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

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I sometimes ask a discussion question to spark responses. Listeners love hearing from each other so jump in and share your story.

Do you have a story of government or corporate bureaucracy that either forced you to pay a heavy time tax to get what you needed and deserved, or was there one so bad that it made you give up as some would like you to do?

October 15th just passed and that's the actual last day of the year to complete and e-file your taxes after filing for an extension back in April. So, as someone with ADHD that's what I was doing for about 8 straight hours at the last possible moment. Of course, I was using corporate software that is the easiest way to do my taxes because the tax prep companies have successfully lobbied for decades to ensure the government doesn't make it easier so that their software continues to be necessary.

During that process, I realized that the automatic quarterly payments I'd been making all year hadn't actually been going through because the absolutely ancient website that I've been using for more than 15 years, which now looks exactly the same as it did in 2010, seems to basically not have the ability to switch which bank account payments are drawn from. I tried to switch accounts months ago, thought it worked, and only found out now that it didn't. I then learned that, in order to switch bank accounts, I basically needed to create a whole new profile, which seems ridiculous even by 2010 standards. That funneled me into a more modern website with the full suite of identity confirmation checks. Once I had run that gauntlet, I was spit out onto the new IRS website, where I was promptly met by an error message

So, tell us about a time that your righteous anger was sparked by the time and effort required to engage with the government or, more often, a corporation contracting with the government. Did you make it through or give up?

If you would like your comments included in the show you can record a voice message or email us through our link in bio in the show notes.

One more note for today,

In lieu of a full commentary that I didn't have time to prep this week because I was doing my taxes and finally activating the social media machine I've been building over the last few months. All I have to say now is that the social media machine I've been building over the last few months is active.

It's been a big effort, and keeping in mind that everything we're doing now is experimentation, I feel pretty good about what we've been able to put together. If you check us out on almost any platform, you'll see some version of a collection of material related to each episode that spans from quotes, articles and books written by experts featured in the show to small clips of the show with some additional commentary from me that isn't actually in the podcast.

As I said, everything we're doing is experimentation. I would love for you to not just check out what we are putting out on social media, but please feel free to give us feedback as well. If there's something we're doing you don't like or something you'd like that we're not doing, please let us know.

If you are allergic to social media, you might consider joining our Discord community, which doesn't suffer from the same algorithmic issues that most social media does. We post all of our social posts in a dedicated channel there. Patreon is somewhat similar but different. They recently implemented a social media-style algorithmic feed, but their entire goal is to not have it be enshitified. You can follow us on Patreon for free or sign up as a patron and catch most of our social media posts there as well.

If you've used Patreon before, you might be aware that you can get emails sent to you every time one of the creators you patronize posts something new. That is not the way it works for their more social content, so don't worry about being inundated with an email every time we post something.

Just to reiterate, I really would love your feedback on any of this because, as a podcast listener, you are absolutely, by definition, our target audience. You would make the perfect beta tester to review what we're doing and help us make any necessary refinements.

We've begun including a link in bio to our link tree in the show notes, so you can find every platform we use in that one convenient list so check that out.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;

Section A, Social Insurance and Worker Protections

Followed by Section B, The Time Tax and Burden by Design

Section C, Health Care Under Attack

And Section D, Affordability Politics and the Rising Left

His opponent in the 1932 presidential election, the Democratic governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, offered little in the way of specifics on how to solve the crisis, but he spoke with optimism and charisma.

His true genius lay in his ability to build a coalition and bring people together, and he would need that skill to launch what he called the New Deal, an ambitious program that he had promised on the campaign trail. After he accepted his party's nomination for president, Roosevelt promised, quote, "I pledge you, I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people."

The New Deal was vague, but it reflected Roosevelt's belief that government's purpose was to serve a central role in times of great crisis. Roosevelt won in a landslide in the 1932 election, carrying 42 of 48 states. He got right to work on calming the nation in his inaugural address on March 4th, 1933, when he said, quote, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Throughout the address, Roosevelt called for action. The speech initiated a period known as the Hundred Days Initiative that created much of the early New Deal framework. The vision that became the New Deal grew out of long-term collaboration amongst business and political leaders from both parties, as well as academics and intellectuals. Through this collaboration, Roosevelt's program ultimately rested on three pillars: relief, recovery, and reform. The relief initiatives were emergency measures designed to feed the starving and put wages into pockets through public works, stopping the spread of homelessness. The recovery initiatives tried to restart the economy and stabilize industry.

And the reform programs were safeguards meant to prevent future economic collapse. Roosevelt's first target was the banking crisis. He immediately decreed a one-week bank holiday, halting bank runs and allowing banks to stay afloat. During the recess, Congress rushed through the Emergency Banking Act, instituting institutional inspections designed to restore public trust in banks.

Roosevelt drove the point home in his first fireside chat, using the radio to speak directly to Americans and rally support for his programs. The administration then followed up with the Glass-Steagall Act, which reshaped American finance by creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protect everyday savings.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act was one of the New Deal's most successful programs. The program sought to bring desperately needed relief to farmers. Farmers had lost their purchasing power as prices dropped and markets for their crops evaporated. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 was part of a broader farm relief law that combined measures to raise agricultural prices with provisions addressing farm debt and emergency financing.

The most controversial part of the bill paid farmers to reduce their output, as reduced supplies would increase crop prices. Farmers struggled to accept the program, as being paid to not produce was counter to everything they had ever known. It was also difficult to accept that a solution to starvation involved destroying milk, especially during a time when people were so desperately in need of it.

Perhaps the most popular long-term program was the Tennessee Valley Authority. The Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA, was established in 1933 to develop the Tennessee River watershed through flood control, improved navigation, and hydroelectric power generation, bringing electricity and economic development to a region spanning portions of seven states.

Before the TVA, much of the region was without electricity and lacked many modern conveniences. At a time when government assistance was associated with Marxism, work programs that built public works were actually wildly popular. The Civilian Conservation Corps checked all the boxes and, as a bonus, satisfied Roosevelt's long-standing interest in conservation.

The program put jobless young men to work transforming public land, focusing on national parks, public forests, and flood control projects. With an original budget for only a quarter million workers, the program endured until the start of World War II and served a total of nearly three million men. Over its lifetime, the Civilian Conservation Corps contributed to major projects such as Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park and the construction of the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, while also building trails and improving facilities throughout America's national parks.

And they also planted more than three billion trees. Through the Civilian Conservation Corps and its companion programs, the Works Progress Administration, Civilian Works Administration, and Public Works Administration, the government provided an estimated fifteen million jobs to struggling workers during the New Deal.

Roosevelt saved the boldest initiative for the end of his first 100 days when he unveiled the National Industrial Recovery Act. The NIRA sought to stabilize the private sector by raising prices, regulating production, improving wages, and reducing competition between businesses. Congress authorized the nation's leading industrialists from across multiple industries to collude to devise codes for fair competition, encouraging them to set standard pricing and organize market share.

The NIRA, of course, immediately faced intense scrutiny as many saw in it the centralized economic planning of a Marxist economy. The legislation also delivered a major victory for organized labor by establishing minimum wages and maximum working hours while affirming the legality of unions and collective bargaining, goals which labor had been fighting for since the end of the Civil War.

Despite all the new programs, progress in turning the economy around was extremely slow. Success was limited with occasional glimmers of hope, but long-term solutions seemed out of reach. By 1934, the public grew weary of the lack of progress. The expanding agricultural crisis unfolding on the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl created demands for even more action.

Radical opposition to Roosevelt began to emerge, which spurred him into action during a period known as the Second Hundred Days, which began in 1935. Francis Townsend, a physician from Long Beach, California, developed what he called an old-age revolving pension. Townsend believed this program could provide security for older Americans while also stimulating the overall economy.

Under Townsend's plan, every person aged 60 or older who had retired would receive a two hundred dollar check each month. To receive the next month's payment, they would have to spend the previous month's payment in full. Townsend hoped to turn America's over-60 population into an army of consumers who would retire earlier and pave the way for a younger workforce.

The movement gained significant traction and eventually prompted Roosevelt to push for the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935, which ended up becoming the largest government program in American history. Roosevelt's version of social insurance differed from Townsend's proposal because the Social Security Act established an old-age insurance system for covered workers, financed by payroll taxes paid by both employees and employers.

But the program didn't stop there. It also contained provisions to provide direct relief to the impoverished and mothers of dependent children. To combat joblessness on a massive scale, the Works Progress Administration put millions of Americans back to work on vital public infrastructure, while its innovative cultural projects employed writers, actors, and artists.

The program left a lasting legacy still visible today. New Deal public works funding helped construct the Triborough Bridge and LaGuardia Airport in New York, the San Antonio River Walk, and Florida's Overseas Highway, connecting Key West to the mainland. Beyond the impact of its alphabet soup programs, many of which were ultimately retired, the New Deal permanently reshaped the role of the American government.

so talk about what you see as the importance of this DoorDash action, including what it took to make it happen. Well, one of the things that struck me the most about this DoorDash case as I wrote in the piece, was just how brazen it was that DoorDash committed these acts, at the time that it did. Because it's important to understand that throughout most of the country, there are really no minimum floors for DoorDash workers.

The company takes the position, as a lot of gig companies do, that their workers are independent contractors, each running their own small, very, very small business, as opposed to employees who have rights. And this distinction matters because basically all of our workplace laws, whether it's minimum wage or unemployment insurance or safety and health, all of these laws protect employees, but they don't protect independent contractors.

And so DoorDash and its peers, Uber Eats and others, they treat their workers as independent contractors, and that means that throughout most of the country, no one is calling them on this very much, and there's no minimum wage really that is being applied to these workers. New York City and Seattle are the two cities in the country that have set a minimum pay rate or a minimum pay standard for delivery workers like DoorDash and Uber Eats workers.

And in both cases, it's, it's interesting, like the background of what happened in New York City because first the city passed this law setting a pay standard, and then DoorDash amazingly responded. What they did was they changed the app to make it really hard for customers to tip. Okay. So before that, you could tip ahead of time, like when you're placing the order, and it was really easy to see how you would tip.

And then they changed it so that you really had to-- you could only tip after you got your order, and you had to hunt for the option to tip. So then the city council passed a law saying, "You have to let people know about the ability to tip up front when they're placing the order." And DoorDash challenged that saying that, to make it clear that there was a, where the tip was up front, that that was a First Amendment violation and, and other kinds of legal claims, and they lost that, right?

And so then, the law is the minimum pay standard has been in effect And the city was very clear that they were keeping an eye on DoorDash. And, and this was even before Mayor Mamdani took office that, some of these things were happening. But then once M- Mayor Mamdani took office, his commissioner of DCWP, Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, Sam Levine, sent out notices and said, "Look, we're gon- be careful about compliance.

We're gonna be really looking at this." And that whole history, and even knowing that the city had this, activist new administration that was specifically looking at them and, and knowing, this whole history, the fact that DoorDash wasn't completely meticulous about making sure all workers got paid, to me was something that was very, very telling.

Yeah. Because, these companies are very sophisticated, and if you value something, like they will focus on it. Right. And yet, even though they knew they were under scrutiny, they still hoped that this would like go under the radar. And it speaks to what they imagined the context was or would be.

It's the brazenness as, as you put it. And I think part of the context they're relying on is this perspective that we see out there, which is if you can get away with it, it's good. I think about Margaret Thatcher. There is no society. It's just I got mine, let the devil take the hindmost, and these are the kind of company strategies that are, that are lionized, that are celebrated.

So I understand why DoorDash would think, "Eh, we'll get away with it. It'll, it'll still work." Well, what's extraordinary to me about it, though, is that throughout most of the country, they have literally no pay floor. they can just make up whatever amount of money they wanna pay to, to people.

And to be clear also, all the laws regarding workers' tips and workers having a right to their tips, again, comes from our minimum wage laws, which cover employees. And so- Right ... there have been cases that have been brought, the DC Attorney General's office, the New York Attorney General's office, and the Illinois AG's office, they all brought cases because DoorDash was allegedly retaining work- workers' tips.

And they were basically using a formula that if the customer... they would have an amount they were gonna pay to the worker. They'd say, we're gonna pay you, work, delivery worker, $10 for this delivery." And I don't know if it was 10, I'm just saying that to make the math easy. Right. And if the customer tipped $8, DoorDash would pay two.

If the customer tipped $10, DoorDash would pay zero. Mm-hmm. So they were using the tips to subsidize, they were keeping the tips by using the tips to subsidize their own obligations towards the workers. And so DoorDash paid $30 million in these three cases for keeping workers' tips, but those cases were all brought on a consumer theory, on the theory that consumers intended these tips to go to the workers, not they weren't trying to further enrich DoorDash.

Right. And so to me- You're getting away with this and the entire rest of the country and New York City and Seattle have passed these minimum pay laws and, just comply. It, it, that they were, wouldn't just comply in those places when they've been given such a lack of guardrails everywhere else is just very, very striking.

Well, they're, they're playing a long game, They are, they're, they're skating where they figure the puck's gonna be is, is my feeling. And, let's just talk about gig economy. Gig economy. we hear that and we see it presented As if it was just about picking up some, some spare cash, that that's what folks are doing.

And that's like gaslighting. we know from our lives that this isn't kids saving up for summer break, It's people who need work, and yet somehow they're not real workers, which is just what you're talking about. But the gig economy is the economy, and that's why we have to look at these structural problems that you outline, and you, and you've started on it with just the simple misclassification of workers.

But there are structural problems when we elide gig economy as if it were a side thing, when in fact it's becoming, the thing for a lot of people. Yes, I think that one of the things that I'm very concerned about right now is the spread of this gig model to... Already it's problematic enough that it's so prevalent in the transportation and food delivery sectors, but it has begun to spread to other sectors as well.

For example, Katie Wells, who now works for AI Now, wrote a report and then a follow-up report about Uber for nursing and Uber for nurses, and companies that are using this kind of gig model where they hire people, nurses and others in the healthcare industry, and they hire them as 1099, allegedly, 1099 independent contractors and not as employees with rights.

And this obviously has all kinds of implications for patient care because for, people are not necessarily having the continuity. Y- you might have a different person who is not familiar with that hospital. The fact that they don't have rights to protect them against, retaliation if they complain about unsafe conditions, for example, right?

Because the protection against retaliation for whistleblowing, that applies to employees and not to independent contractors. So the spread of the model is very concerning. There are a number of enforcement offices. Denver Labor and the San Francisco City Attorney's Office have done great work, specifically among the two of them, where they've done a few cases involving gig staffing agencies, and these are businesses that are basically sending people to work as a dishwasher in a restaurant or stocking shelves at a, at a supermarket or, or working in a warehouse.

Jobs that have never, ever, ever been independent contractor types of jobs, just like the healthcare jobs have never been independent contractor jobs. And Denver Labor and the San Francisco City Attorney's Office have been quite successful in a number of cases in getting these businesses to reclassify the workers as employees with rights as opposed to independent contractors.

Because the argument that they're running their own business when they're stocking shelves or, or working as a dishwasher is just on its face completely ludicrous.

how much are Social Security payments annually? The average benefit amount is around 2,200, is around $2,200 a month for the average beneficiary, and it obviously is, How many b- beneficiaries are there? roughly over 70 million beneficiaries, and, and this includes people, and like I said at the top, this includes people who are receiving survivor's benefits.

These are people who are receiving spousal benefits. Do you remember what the aggregate amount that goes into the economy is from Social Security? Pa- a- annual payments. Yeah, I'd have to look at the, the specific payment amounts that come into the, the program, but we know that it's, it reflects billions of dollars of economic activity, but I'd have to look at the actual, again, from the trustees report that details a lot of those aggregate statistics.

Yeah. I wish I had them right at the top of my hands, but that, that's a piece that absolutely is in, the trillions of dollars, and you have roughly 70 million beneficiaries. and that's why we talk about part of this cut being devastating is if the average monthly Social Security amount is around $2,200, that's a $500 haircut that people have to take, and for many beneficiaries, that's their only source of income.

It's hard for me to imagine how someone lives off of $2,000 a month and meets all of their expenses, and it's even harder to think about that if they lost a third. So my calculator says, $150 billion. If it's 70 million times 2,200, I, I don't know. we gotta look it up, but it's a lot of money- Yeah

and it's a lot of haircuts, and it's a lot of restaurant visits, and it's a lot of rent, and it's a lot of, a lot of things. So r- Rey, if you were in charge- of Social Security and just wave your magic wand, what would you do? Absolutely. We've, we've spent a lot of time at Roosevelt thinking about this issue.

We actually just put out a paper around the history of the program and its guarantee and its promise. I think when we think about Social Security itself, if I had a magic wand- Yeah ... it would be to come back to the negotiating table when we were thinking about Social Security reform because the initial package included, federal unemployment insurance, it included u- universal health insurance.

We were talking about ensuring the vast majority of risks that people are experiencing in their life, and for various reasons, those things went off the negotiating table, and we got Social Security, and we got many other things that came along with it, like disability insurance. We now have SSI, Supplemental Security Income.

And so what I would do, absent constraints, is thinking about how can we guarantee the promise of this program as it was designed, and one is th- through guaranteed benefits, through ensuring that individuals have access to those benefits in a clear, easy and dignified way. I think we can have this DOGE- Yeah

conversation around what it did to the Social Security Administration being, abjectly horrible thing. but we should make it as easy as possible for people to access the benefits, and then we should think about the other things surrounding the program. What about the people that have worked, really physically demanding jobs up to that, up to the age of retirement?

Yeah. Having bridge benefits so they can access those benefits earlier. Right. What happens if a single mom is caring for her children for a good portion of her working years? We should have care credits that recognize that form of labor. So there are ways of reforming the program that reflects the economy we have, while also protecting, the dignity and security of people coming into retirement.

Interesting. One final question. Why do you do this work? Yeah. I think a lot about, my parents coming into retirement. my dad worked a physically demanding job on an oil field. my mom's a cancer survivor. The idea that they would have to take a cut in their Social Security benefits that they paid into during their working years, doing some of the hardest work I could imagine- Yeah

but also raising a family, and then thinking that, their moment of retirement should be one where they can access a, a dignified retirement that allows them peace of mind. The idea that in this moment, people like my parents would have to worry about that rather than thinking about how they're going to spend that time, to me is a moral failure, and I'm in this fight because of that specifically, because I think we can do better by our promise.

And, and thinking that we can just cut our way, or that benefit cuts would be easy and they wouldn't be a real tragedy for a lot of- Yeah ... families in this country is something we wanna correct.

So Goldie, at the end of the day, to fix Social Security- Mm ... it's got to be some variation on my idea. Basically, we have to capture more income- Right ... that is now finding a way to evade the tax, whether that's capital income, or dividend income, or pass-through income, or whatever it is. The problem isn't Social Security, the problem is the way in which our, economy has evolved- Right

to provide income, particularly to wealthy people, which is not subject to that tax. Right. That's the problem. This is a system designed to work in a 1930s- Economy ... industrial economy- Yes ... where most people's income came from wages- Yeah ... not capital income, and- Where the economy was less unequal Yeah.

Correct That wages consumed a much larger portion of the economy than it does now. So as inequality grows, an increasingly smaller portion, I don't know how to... A decreasing- Yeah ... portion of the economy is actually subject to the Social Security tax. That's right. So by way of example, wages in 1970 were 51% of the economy.

Today, they're 41%. So 10%, that's $3 trillion, plus or minus, that used to be wages and is now other things, mostly corporate profits. But if- And, and 90-some percent of that would've been subject to the Social Security tax. Correct. Right. Right. So now you're talking about, well, what's 12% of, we'll call it 10% of 3 trillion, it's 300 billion extra that would be going into Social Security if we didn't have an economy- And that would cover the gap.

And that would cover the gap. Right. We would- Be growing the trust fund instead of shrinking it. Yeah. there is, there is another solution which I think, and the Republican Party might find more politically palatable, and that is, and this is a two birds with one stone approach. What we do is we eliminate Medicare, so we don't have that trust fund problem either coming up.

So no more Medicare, and then all of us boomers die early. Well, not you, Nick, 'cause you got plenty of money. Yeah. But people like me who couldn't afford to buy insurance on the private market or pay for, insurance, we die early, thus reducing the stress on the trust fund. Problem solved. Works for me. No more boomers.

Right? We get, that demographic problem goes away like that, 'cause instead of, most pe- the average lifespan, for somebody my age being 83, that's what they say. At 63 years old, on average, median, I should expect to live to be ab- that's what I need to expect in terms of saving. We'll die by, in their early 70s.

They save, 10 years of Social Security benefits. That's right. Yeah. Right there. Well, Soylent Green, it's people. Well, there we can solve the ground beef problem too. That's true. All at once. Exactly. If as these boomers die, look- We can make them into hamburger ... maybe not, maybe not ground beef, but let me tell you, any meat, no matter how tough, slow-cooked with onions, tender and delicious.

T- Even me. Delicious. Exactly. I would, I would be tasty that way. Exactly. Exactly. Goldy, I think we've solved the nation's problems. R- right. Look, the point is, all joking aside- ... as I, as I said during the interview This is not a fiscal crisis. No. This is not a fiscal problem. This is not a budgetary problem.

This is not something that requires a lot of sacrifice. It is a political problem. There are multiple ways around this. Lift the cap, add in capital gains. However you wanna do it, there are multiple things that can be done without cutting benefits- Yeah ... and in fact, with increasing benefits, and there's a strong argument to make- Yeah

for increasing benefits rather than cutting. That's right. We can do these things with the political will. Absolutely. And the fact that we haven't is because- Neoliberalism It's, yeah, it's politics.

I think when you say Uber for nurses, a lot of folks, a shudder goes through their body, but- Right

if you, if you pick up a paper, you might be told, "This is where we're at. This is where we're going. get with it." And I just wanna a- ask again, it's, the crucial questions have to do with this misclass- misclassification of workers as independent contractors, but also the wholesale wage theft that often goes along with that, and then the entities that might be looking out for people in that situation are being starved of resources.

So, we've got a kind of pincer move going on here. Absolutely. There's really been, first of all, in terms of the, the media coverage of the gig, the gig industry, been really striking in that they have repeatedly promoted the idea that this is what people, what workers want. Workers want flexibility, and the only way you can get flexibility is by not being an employee and not having any rights.

And there's nothing-- I've been a labor and employment lawyer for, over three decades. there's nothing in the law that says that you can't have flexibility as to your shifts or hours and still be an employee. That is a choice that these companies are making. Right. The thing that is so sad to me about this is they could create really great jobs that they could be proud of, and instead they choose this low-road model.

But the other point that you made about the starving of government agencies that are enforcing these laws is very much true. The federal government, even in better times, was the Wage and Hour Division, which enforces the wa- minimum wage and overtime laws. The Wage and Hour Division had really diminishing staffing over recent decades.

Right now, I think they have somewhere between six and seven hundred investigators for minimum wage, overtime, child labor enforcement for the entire country. And then many states don't even ha- barely have, will have a skeletal staff for enforcing these laws, five or six people at most.

Florida doesn't even have a state labor department. Literally nobody at the state level in Florida enforces the minimum wage laws there. And then even in places that are more worker-friendly and states that, that are less hostile to workers' rights, there's still this longstanding, austerity and operating from scarcity and not really, thinking of public safety in a very narrow way.

Yeah. And not thinking of public safety as, as wage theft. That's something that really affects public wellbeing, even though it leads to housing instability, food instability, and a lot of harm to communities. Yeah, I think it's important to, to lift up the way that these problems that we're talking about are like, they might seem like they're on paper, they're behind the scenes.

It's not a boss coming out and saying, "Hey, you particular people, we're not gonna pay you." It's, it, it's structural things that they're allowed to get away with based on classifications, based on line items that many people may never see, may never be given to understand, and I guess that's where I would like journalists to step in to say, "This is what is happening, and this is why even though somebody on the news might say, 'Look at this chart, the economy's doing great,' you're still struggling."

and make those connections for people. I guess I, I, I want more from journalists in this moment when we see, as you're saying, corporations being very clever, about obscuring what it is that they're doing. Yes. I've long felt, as people talk about de- defunding the police and there's that whole conversation, we have already 100% defunded the police that address corporate abuse of workers.

Say it. We have de- OSHA, the state, state, the federal Department of Labor, state labor departments, and, there's research out there showing that wage theft, the dollar amount involved, is as great as all other kinds of theft- Right ... combined. Right. And so, it's just a question of, often I've seen, we've seen in the past few years a lot of focus, a lot of law enforcement focus on retail theft and- Yeah

obviously that's bad. I 100% do not support retail theft, and I know that it has broader, societal impacts. But it has been striking to me to see the extent to which resources have been found on that retail theft on a scale that is, very different from wage theft. And it just makes you think about why is that and who has access to decision makers about where resources go and who doesn't have the same level of access.

So- Yeah ... there's just really a lot more need for government to be meeting... There are wonderful people in government who are doing the best that they can, but we really, really need a lot more commitment to having government serve working people's needs. And I think that journalists and the light that they can shine play, play a role in that.

Next, Section B, The Time Tax and Burden by Design

Well, right now something that's happening, I, I mentioned in the introduction, there are these new work requirements and paperwork rules for more than three million people, who have been cut from food assistance, because of what was passed in the big beautiful bill. So a woman in Arizona told CNBC she answered a mountain of documentation requests.

She's done this since February, and she still has not gotten benefits, and her word for what she's experiencing is just humiliating. And the stated reason for these rules is reducing waste and providing accountability. But what is really happening here? I see it in moral terms Food assistance should not be a program for low-income, at-risk Americans who might not be able to eat enough, who are also good at paperwork.

Mm-hmm. That's not what that program should be, right? And as you point out, we are dropping millions of people, including tens of thousands of children, but then the people who are remaining on the program nevertheless have to comply with these work requirements, these expanded work requirements. Notably, SNAP already had work requirements.

Mm-hmm. We just extended them- Mm, mm-hmm ... to more people, such as older Americans. Do we want all of these programs to have this cut for, okay, yeah, sure, this is assistance for lower income Americans, provided that they have a smartphone and a Wi-Fi connection? That's not what these programs are about, and I am terrified that some states will just drop the SNAP program entirely 'cause it shifts costs to the states, and I am very worried about what is about to happen to Medicaid, which will have a national work requirement for the first time.

You think it's a probability that SNAP payments could be cut on the state level. Where do we see that, say, as a probability? One of the provisions of the bill is that it says that states that have an improper payment rate of more than 6% will have to shoulder part of the cost of the SNAP benefit itself.

Can you just explain what you mean- Yeah ... when you say that? So a lot of programs, in SNAP, each state gets something that is called an improper payment rate, and that's not a fraud rate, doesn't have anything to do with fraud. It has to do with the state's likelihood of overpaying or underpaying a benefit, and this is often by a small amount, $50, $100 a month, and it's often because the paperwork and the rules are so confusing.

So somebody might just not understand what the state meant by a certain income measure, or they might not be able to really say, "Oh, this is how me and my housemates split up the cost of certain staples," which is part of the SNAP determination. Mm. Or a civil servant might be working on a really rickety, crummy computer, and they might have just heard something wrong, they put something in.

And so the big beautiful bill, it says that if states have a overpayment or an underpayment rate of greater than 6%, they are gonna have to pay part of the cost of not just the administration of SNAP, but the benefit itself. States have never had to do this before. Hmm. This could be hundreds of millions of dollars.

It sounds catastrophic, too, to families. Oh, yes. And states are not actually obligated to have a SNAP program or a Medicaid program. Oh, I didn't know that. And there's some concern that states will drop out of SNAP. They will say, "We cannot afford to be paying part of the benefit cost. We literally do not have the money.

What are we supposed to do?" And states can't go bankrupt, right? they have to make these really hard choices. So when you look at why Arizona, why it has, had a 50% decline in its SNAP rolls- Mm-hmm ... it's because they have, in an effort to drive their improper payment rate down to avoid that fee from the Trump administration, they've instituted excessive fraud checks, excessive paperwork requirements.

Because here's the thing, a person being denied benefits who should've gotten them does not count as an improper payment. Wow. So it's not that in Arizona there are fewer people who need assistance, it's that- No ... more people are being cut from the program- Yeah ... because of paperwork. Yeah, either they can't do the paperwork- Mm-hmm

or, the state gets the paperwork and nevertheless determines that they're not eligible 'cause they didn't do something correctly. That's why. It's that people just can't get the paperwork done, and the state is... It would rather have a denial than an improper payment. I want you to lay out, though, because there are some people who don't have any touchpoint to this, and so they say, "Well, then how come you can't just fill out the paperwork correctly?"

But tell, kinda describe what we're talking about here. What type of paperwork sometimes trips people up, where they just don't have all of the answers to what's being asked of them, or they might check the wrong thing on a document? what, what are some of the things that you have encountered in your reporting?

A lot of listeners to this program, they'll see a government form, and they're like, "Eh, it might be annoying, but, I get it done," right? Even something really complicated like your 1040, your, your tax return, people manage. Although, I would note that's quite complicated. So when, when we're thinking about the tasks and the questions that states are asking, specifically low-income Americans, 'cause I really do think that the time tax hits everybody.

So there could be just difficult questions to answer. So that thing I said about SNAP asking you to figure out how y- you and your roommates split up the cost of grocery staples. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Right? wait, what is a grocery staple? What, rice, coffee, beans? we don't have a system for that. Or I don't really know.

It's just a hard question. It's also a judgment question. Yes ... because what you're actually having to lay out is how you live. Mm-hmm. And it's, you're doing this under threat of, oh, don't defraud the government, right? Mm-hmm. Even something as simple as income. States might ask for gross monthly income or cash income.

You might have to collect all of this paperwork. What are you getting from here and here and here and here? You might say to yourself something like, "Ooh, if I sold something on Facebook Marketplace, does that count?" Right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Does that, do they know about that cash? It's just really complicated.

Then there's- your argument, though, is not so much that these questions are being asked, it's the convoluted way. 'Cause, the other side of this is you do want checks and balances. You do want to understand where the need is for the person who is asking for help. Sure. Absolutely. I think that I always distinguish between means testing on the basis of income and other simple characteristics, and testing on the basis of all of these other really complicated ones, right?

We don't ask these hard questions in an easy and obvious way. And it's not that it's not important. I think that we don't do a cost benefit for all of these questions and say, "Okay, actually, how many people are we looking at here?" Or could we, if we could take a peek at their tax return, would we find that?

If we could take a peek at their financial records, could we find that? Is there another way to do it?

I think that the, the best case argument you get for the aspect of the time tax that impacts poor Americans, you get- that you get from conservatives, especially the hoops poor people have to jump through. And y- you mentioned one example, a old law in Michigan that required people to know not when their child was born, but when their child was conceived, which is you- as you make the point, like OBGYNs don't ask you that.

Is that like, they don't want people to be seeking government assistance. In, in the best case scenario, they want people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. But as you write, that's not what happens when people lose access to these kinds of services. What does? They just get poorer, right?

We know that they, they get poorer, they probably get sicker in some cases. Their children have worse outcomes, right? And also, they come not to trust the government. This erodes social trust, and it erodes trust in government. And we know that these big participatory programs that people like, like Social Security and Medicare, they can increase voting rates, they increase people's sense of, how the government is working, right?

But these, these really burdensome programs, they sour people on the government, and there's actually new research showing that even if you don't have to comply with this, even if you're not a Medicaid user, welfare user, beneficiary of those initiatives, it actually en masse reduces, political trust.

People just don't like it, I think. And I think that this is something where, 50 years ago perhaps, or 30 years ago perhaps, there was this feeling that, you needed these burdens in the programs to get mass support for them. But I don't think that's true, because Americans perspe- perception of why people are impoverished has changed a lot.

It used to be very much a personal responsibility thing. But particularly among Democrats now, there's much more of a sense of, race, institutional precarity, low wages, right? This is a systemic issue, not a personal issue. So this is a giant problem, and I, I think we've both mentioned a couple of states that are...

you're dealing with California, a blue state. I deal with Maryland, a blue state, while living in another blue city that should be a state, DC. I live in California now. You were in Utah. So this is a bipartisan issue. Everybody has to pay the time tax, and the time tax applies to pretty much everybody, and it has many fathers.

So getting rid of it seems like it's going to be very challenging, especially because I think when we look at other countries that have less of a time tax... You mention in the book, you mention, I believe Estonia, which has the lowest time tax, which is also a much smaller country. I'm thinking about countries where it is extraordinarily easy to vote or get a marriage license, even though, as you mentioned, in Estonia you still have to get divorced in person.

So- They just changed that, actually. Oh, fantastic. Hooray for Estonia. Estonians now can 100%, they can get divorced online. Fantastic. But I think that, there's a lot of problems. It's a bipartisan issue. It's, we've had federalism. Also, we're a very, very large and very, very racially diverse country in comparison to a lot of countries where processes are much easier, but they're also much smaller.

So with all of that known, how do you think we can start to get rid of the time tax? Look, I actually think the fact that this is like- A problem with a thousand knots that you can untie is, is in some ways I think actually means that, yeah, we can do this, right? there's a lot of problems to solve, and we know how to do this, and there have been efforts, that have really, really helped, During the pandemic, for instance, we lengthened re-enrollment periods, we got rid of in-person mandatory interviews, and, it really worked, and it reduces, reduced, the burden that we were putting on people. So yeah, I think that there's some really, really great ways to do this, and I don't think it'll be worth it, but I think that HR 1, the one big beautiful bill act, is gonna be so catastrophic in so many communities that there might be an opening to do this.

I also think that the, people were really excited about DOGE, which DOGE did not, center the citizen experience. It was completely ineffective. If anything, I think it made the problem worse. But there was a lot of excitement about that, about making the government less bureaucratic and improving service delivery.

You've even seen, Mayor Mamdani in New York has his, version of DOGE, and it's, it's really... I think that people are really into it. And so, I, I see that there's, actually a lot of things that we could do. let the IRS do people's taxes for them You don't have to do that, right?

If you still wanna do your taxes by hand, yeah, go ahead, right? Just harmonize the income standards between programs and make it so that if you're getting SNAP and Medicaid, that those two programs are talking to each other. It's a fairly simple thing to do. Get rid of asset testing, which we still have in some programs, and we know doesn't, actually...

So the point of asset testing is to make sure that somebody doesn't have low income but actually has, some giant bank account hidden somewhere with tons of money. And you end up making everybody who's applying to these programs, comply with the asset test, and it's really hard to prove a negative, and it's really annoying to do, and they kick people off for, having a small amount of money set away for their own funeral costs, for instance.

You could just get rid of asset testing. And so I see that there's, actually a lot of ways to do this, and I do think that Democrats have moved to this place of, we should no longer have just a series of, really, really arcane refundable tax credits for everything. maybe we can be the people who are, like, competent and make government simbral- simpler and improve service delivery.

Annie, I th- I think my question here would be that we hear so much simultaneously about the onerous requirements and regulations our government asks of us. But then I think that, I see all the time that there are people who, often it's extraordinarily wealthy people, who are able to get away with massive fraud on the government.

Is there a way to combat the kind of fraud in which people are basically sealing- stealing from their fellow citizens, with, COVID funds, for example, while also reducing the onerous requirements on middle-income and poor people? Oh, absolutely. I think that if we had agile, modern administrative systems in place that would be cheaper for the government to run, there would be less fraud and fewer improper payments.

So fraud and improper payments are two distinct concepts, right? Fraud is intentional. It is almost, the most, it is mostly, it is mostly perpetrated by businesses and individuals. So if you look in, the Medicaid and Medicare programs, the fraud is coming from, nursing homes or providers that are basically lying to the government about the services that they're giving to defraud the government, right?

And then there's improper payments. So what share of payments are improper? Either they're too high or they're too low. That's different. But both of these issues, we could bring down improper payments and eliminate fraud by actually having less rickety, crappy government systems and having more straightforward rules.

So bizarrely, I think everybody's incentives are really aligned here, and we could have a smaller government, less bureaucratic overhead if we actually just had the sort of nice digital systems that other countries have. And I do think that you're right, right? we're not gonna turn into Estonia.

It is a tiny, tiny, tiny country, but you know- Improving government contracting, like we can do that. We can do that. The bar, the bar is on the floor here, right? Nowhere to go but up ... if we should be able... Yeah, exactly. We, we, we do this in the stupidest way possible, and there's a lot of problems where we could really...

And as you point out, yeah, stop people from, from stealing taxpayer money. It's terrible problem.

Okay, Annie, I want to spend some time on voting. The midterms is coming up, and I think it may be the clearest example of your whole argument.

I want to start with a small absurdity. Why do we vote on Tuesday? We vote on Tuesday because back when we were an agrarian society, the days were limited that, Congress wanted us to hold elections, by the need for people to go to church on Sunday. And often they would have to travel for, a day to get to their polling place 'cause they might be going on foot or they might be going by horse.

And you had to avoid market days also. And so it ended up being that Congress in, I believe, the 1840s decided that Tuesday was the day. And this is not a holiday. Novel- Even though there's been legislation proposed to make Tuesday a holiday. But tho- those have largely failed. Yes. If you speak to residents or citizens of some of our peer countries, this is one of these things about American life that they're like, "Wait, what?"

Either the polls will be open for longer or they hold them on Saturdays or it's a holiday. And in a lot of places, at least in some places, voting is obligatory. You have to do it. Who pays for the fact that our voting system is still organized around the lives of people who lived nearly two centuries ago?

We do not have high voter participation rates, and so that means that the voting public is not representative of the actual American public. And I would say that vote by mail has started to change this, but there's n- now real attacks on vote by mail, and I think- Mm-hmm ... precisely for that purpose. What you are doing when you hold elections in a really complicated fashion is you allow politicians to pick their voters instead of allowing the American public, as big as we can make it, to pick their politicians.

Leaving aside outcomes, that is not good for small D democratic reasons. We know that this fall millions of people plan to vote by mail in the midterms, and President Trump has ordered that the Postal Service can only deliver your ballot if you're on a new federal list of eligible voters. And just recently the Supreme Court allow parts of that order to move ahead, at least for now.

And the stated reason is voting by non-citizens, which researchers have found to be rare. So run it through your test. Is this protection of our voting system or another time tax? Voter fraud is extraordinarily rare. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, 'cause it certainly does. but as far as we can tell, it has not changed the results of a single election, major election this century.

It is a problem that you should have safeguards against, but again, I think that there needs to be a cost and a benefit here. What is the benefit for certain politicians of excluding so many voters? They're trying to shift the outcome of the election. What is the cost? Democratic participation, the right that we have to vote.

And the system is already hard enough as it is, in part because we don't have a unified system. We have 10,000 voting jurisdictions. All of them have their own little practices and rules and budgets, and there are some strong regulations about this. But nevertheless, we know that it's already hard enough, and this is anathema to us as a country.

And, fundamentally, there is a belief that it should be hard. There was this Florida state senator who co-sponsored a bill to restrict voter registration, and he said out loud, "I don't have a problem making it harder. I want people in Florida to vote as bad as a person in Africa who walks 200 miles across the desert.

It should not be easy." Now, that's on record. A- and so why do we keep pretending the burden is an accident? When you ask non-partisan experts, even experts coming from outside the US, "Okay, what could you do to f- fix this?" Things like early voting, things like having better voting machines, things like keeping the voter rolls updated.

yeah, all of that's good. Less work for people, more work for the states, right? Hmm. one of the most heartbreaking parts of your book, honestly, had to do with children. Of course, healthcare for children, schooling for children, but also the staggering number of Black children in this country who will be subject to CPS, Child Protective Services.

You write half of Black children in this country will be subject to an investigation at some point in their childhood. CPS investigators, they have enormous authority to intervene in families' lives. And look, I think that we need a system of child protection, absolutely. But in most cases, CPS is investigating what I would describe as kind of the potential for harm or the reality of poverty as opposed to child abuse- Mm-hmm

which is a terrible problem that I wish that we could stop. And these are invasive, they're time-consuming, they're, embarrassing for the parents. They are deeply traumatizing. You know? And I wanna say, and I know this from personal experience because my mother was a child welfare worker for the majority of her career, one of the things she complained about consistently was the amount of paperwork that she herself- Oh, yeah

had to fill out. And so she couldn't spend as much time in the home because she had to fill out, double the amount of paperwork for every single person that she visited. Absolutely. One thing I've heard from people in all kinds of agencies is that they're like, "I would love to actually help. I'm an expert, and nobody asks me what I think about reforming these systems or actually accomplishing my goal."

We actually know one way to reduce the incidence of CPS involvement in a family's life, or even more importantly, the actual incidence of abuse, is to get those families out of poverty. Give them SNAP benefits. Give them a bigger earned income tax credit. Right, something that we actually saw work during the pandemic when parents were actually given the money to be able to care for their families.

You tell the story about poverty dropping within families with children. What did you find, and why didn't we keep that up? Oh, gosh. So the Child Tax Credit has been around for a long time, and during the pandemic, Congress briefly, for two years, it made it much bigger, and it actually sent the money out, so it wasn't like a one-time, you're-gonna-get-this-at-tax time.

They sent, the checks out for six months, and then they sent a lump sum, which was really unusual. And it cut the child poverty rate in half. And it prevented tons of kids from going hungry. It kept families housed, at a time, when that could've been really dangerous. But, the, the theory among the Democrats who had been pushing for this policy in Washington for such a long time was that once people had it, you could never take it away, which- Mm-hmm

tends to be true. But it came during this moment in the pandemic where people were also getting, big unemployment insurance payments. They were getting stimulus checks. They just didn't, really clock what was happening because the government was sending them so much stuff. Mm-hmm. And they didn't really know.

And a, a lot of families were receiving multiple things at once. Mm-hmm. And then, because it was temporary, I think the families didn't really believe that it would always be there, and if it were, I think it would've changed their behavior and their welfare in a much more profound way.

Now, Section C, Health Care Under Attack

letter that came originally from Canada said four million people are impacted by this, and this is just this particular pharmacy sending me this letter Millions of Americans are turning to Canada for cheaper prescription medications, but now they're gonna need a new plan. It's because of a new federal rule kicking in at the end of this month.

It's gonna be blocking people from getting their medication that way. KDKA investigator, Megan Schiller, is here to explain why it's happening, what this could mean for your family. Yeah, Ken, it's estimated somewhere between two to four million people rely on these cheaper prescriptions out of Canada, and an estimated 89% of the Americans who order and import these medications are over the age of 65.

We met with one local woman out of Squirrel Hill who says this change is gonna cost her more than $1,000 a month. 2,100. Mm-hmm. 2,400. Mm-hmm. But I can't do that. The medications to save her eyesight sit on the kitchen counter, but Randi Cohen tells me she doesn't know how she'll get them anymore. And they said, "We are anticipating there's gonna be a problem getting your meds in October.

We encourage you to refill everything now. And even if you don't need refills, refill it anyhow." She reached out to KDKA Investigates after receiving this urgent message sent to her and millions of other Americans who use a Canadian pharmacy to purchase and personally import their prescription medications.

Now Cohen says she's left scrambling because buying her meds stateside isn't financially feasible. When I order from Canada, I get three of these little vials and it's $180. I just checked my insurance just this week again, and using my insurance, and everybody has different types of insurance, in my case, if I were to buy one bottle, it'd be $639.

If I were to do it and get three bottles at one time, I c- it would be $1,000. That means ordering this medication from Canada saves her $820 every time she orders, but now a new federal rule looks to block that. Customs and Border Protection will prohibit personal prescription imports starting October 22nd.

Previously, packages valued under $800 could pass through customs easily without formal entry paperwork. But now stricter enforcement essentially blocks mail order parcels, including personal prescription shipments from foreign countries. This is not a partisan issue. It's not a Democrat issue. It's not a Republican issue.

Gabriel Levitt is the CEO and founder of Prescription Justice, a non-partisan organization dedicated to lowering prescription drug prices and expanding access to safe imported medications. What do you think is gonna happen for those people? That makes me very unhappy to think about, and I've heard countless stories of people who believe personal importation is their lifeline.

I do wanna pull back a little off of the soapbox and say some people like saving money, and that is absolutely fair, especially when- prices are so high now Levitt says many people are working behind the scenes to carve out an exception in this rule to allow for prescriptions. Cohen says she's in a better spot than many.

Yes, these are my eyes, my corneas. I wanna be able to see. But see, people get respiratory, inhalers. They get blood thinners. They get all different types of medication from Canada that they can't afford here, and these are life-threatening issues. Cohen tells me this is one of those walk in somebody's shoes situations.

If you don't need expensive prescription medications, you may not even be familiar with the hoops people are already jumping through.

First off, there is no American healthcare system. There's just a patchwork of overlapping, half-built solutions that were never designed to work together. They don't talk to each other, and they leave huge coverage gaps. So first off, you've got, of course, the ACA exchanges or Obamacare. These were the marketplaces that were created in 2010, like healthcare.gov at the federal level or state-run versions like Covered California.

These are built for people who don't get insurance through a job, or they don't qualify for Medicare or Medicaid. So it's the last resort tier, the self-employed, the gig worker, the small business owner, and so on. And it was supposed to be the fix. And who could have imagined that a system that was written and lobbied for by insurance companies wouldn't ultimately work to our benefit?

Who knew? Now, before the ACA, and still running alongside it, you've got employer-sponsored insurance. That's the dominant model in the United States since World War II, when wage controls pushed companies to, compete for workers with benefits instead of just pay, and it calcified from there into the backbone of American healthcare.

So half of the country gets coverage this way, which means half of the country's access to medical care is tied to whether or not they have a job and whether their job is full-time and whether their employer eats part of the premium or passes it down. Now, layer on top of this union insurance, and you've got negotiated benefit plans that used to be the gold standard, but they also have been gutted as union density has collapsed over the last forty years.

But it's still meaningful for organized labor, especially in the building trades and transit. In fact, it was union coverage that spurred private corporations to build the system in the first place because union health benefits were so highly coveted. Then we have the government-sponsored tier, Medicare for seniors, Medicaid for low-income households, CHIP for kids specifically.

These were the closest things that we actually had to public universal coverage, right? Not just coincidentally, by the way, they're also the most efficient parts of the system, but we'll come back to that. And then there's just absence, the uninsured, and the strategy there is, "Don't get sick, and if you do, go to the emergency room," because federal law says that they have to stabilize you regardless of ability to pay, and that's the plan now for tens of millions of Americans.

So we have six systems, zero coordination, and healthy people are constantly getting pushed off one and onto the other, like losing a job and falling off employer coverage, aging off a parent's plan at twenty-six, aging into Medicare at sixty-five, falling in and out of Medicaid eligibility as income fluctuates by, let's say, a few hundred dollars a month Each one of these transitions is a place where people potentially fall through.

So now compare that to, I don't know, every other wealthy democracy on Earth. To be clear, though, there is no single socialized medicine model. It's a complete spectrum. So the UK's National Health Service, for example, is about as close to fully socialized as it gets. You've got the government who owns the hospitals, employs the doctors, and so on.

Canada runs a single payer, but delivery stays private. So doctors and hospitals are independent. The government's just the one who, pays the bill. Countries like Germany and Switzerland run tightly regulated nonprofit multi-payer universal systems where everyone is required to be covered.

France has a blend of public insurance with a private supplemental layer. So across the world, you've got different mechanisms and different trade-offs with things like wait times, choice, and funding. So I don't want to pretend that these are equally good or free of their own political fights, but every one of these countries made a decision that healthcare isn't contingent on your employment status or your income or luck, and the results speak for themselves.

We spend more per capita on any of them by, a lot, and we have shorter life expectancies and a higher infant mortality in return

So this is where we go from abstract to material. The last 12 months have produced some of the worst coverage numbers since before the ACA existed. So starting with the Obamacare marketplaces, we have effectuated enrollment, meaning people who actually paid their premium and are actually covered, has dropped 13% between 2025 and 2026.

So it went from a record 22 million people down to 19 million people. That's according to KFF. So this is the first enrollment decline on the ACA marketplaces since the first Trump administration, an actual drop of nearly 3 million people. And KFF's own prediction says that it could keep falling down to an average of around 17 million enrollees within the end of this year So in another KFF survey that was taken during this period, 17% of the existing enrollees said that they weren't even confident they could keep their premiums for the rest of the year, like they can't afford them.

So this is the real-world impact of the GOP killing the enhanced premium tax credits. See, when these expired under the big beautiful bill, the average enrollee trying to keep their exact same plan saw that their premium payment went up 114%. So some, as a result, downgraded coverage, others just dropped it entirely, and the impact is already showing up in hospitals.

Like the New York Times just issued a report in July that said that hospital operators, including community health systems, are seeing a sharp rise in uninsured patients, and that is tied directly to the people who lost coverage when those subsidies disappeared. And this isn't even close to over because premiums are rising independent of the subsidy fight.

So the Health System Tracker's nationwide analysis found that a median proposed twenty twenty-seven marketplace increase will be 15%. That's on top of the 18% median increase this year, so that's two straight years of double-digit increases. That's the second highest requested change since 2018, and if this holds, premiums will have risen more than a third in just two years.

And I can attest to the fact that small businesses are getting hit just as hard. The same research group's review of small group plans, which is companies with 50 or fewer employees, found a median proposed 14% increase again for 2027. So things are just gonna keep getting worse across the board. So obviously, these are terrible trends, but the most inhuman, in my opinion at least, is what's transpiring with Medicaid, especially when it comes to children.

So the one big beautiful bill cut around $900 billion in Medicaid over the next ten years, and the CBO projects that this means that more than 10 million fewer people will be enrolled in Medicaid by 2034. The AMA, mind you, estimates that it's 11.8 million who are gonna lose coverage, and it's already happening.

Like Georgetown University's Center for Children and Families found that nearly two and a half million children have lost Medicaid or CHIP coverage since January of 2025. Five states saw an enrollment drop of 10% or more, and they're purging people in this dystopian bureaucratic way because they're forcing states to renew Medicaid recipient eligibility every six months instead of annually, and it's putting a huge burden on the states that have to pay for all this paperwork and the people to administer it.

They're trying to break the states by design. And starting next year, adult beneficiaries have to prove that they're working or volunteering at least 80 hours a month, or that they're enrolled in school, just to keep coverage that they already qualify for. Two Brown University epidemiologists wrote in STAT that getting a medically frail exemption from the work requirements is a nightmare, and they gave an example.

They said, "Somebody undergoing cancer treatment lacks the right renewal form," let's say, and then gets dis-enrolled. Then they have these long wait times with no path back in, and somewhere in that maze, they stop getting chemotherapy because they can't afford it. So in their words, quote, "Paperwork here is not merely an annoyance, it's a matter of life or death for millions with Medicaid coverage."

So let's tally where that leaves us. Marketplace enrollment is already down roughly three million and falling. Premiums are up 114% just to keep their existing plans, rising another 15% next year regardless. Medicaid is on track to shed 10 million plus people by 2034, with two and a half million children already without coverage.

These are the nails in the coffin

On Saturday, August 15th, The New York Times editorial board published an op-ed noting that the Republicans are trying to hide the cuts they have made to healthcare in the US. The editorial board called the expansion of affordable healthcare to millions of Americans one of the great achievements of the federal government in this century.

Before the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, in 2010 without a single Republican vote, about 18% of Americans under 65 had no health insurance. With the passage and later expansion of the ACA, also known as Obamacare, the number of uninsured had fallen below 10%. But now, the journalists note, Trump and the Republicans are working to uproot that achievement. While they extended Trump's 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations in their July 2025 budget reconciliation bill, the one they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed without a single Democratic vote, they refused to extend subsidies that enabled people to afford healthcare insurance in the ACA marketplaces.

The Democrats shut down the government last fall to try to force Republicans to restore those cuts, foreseeing that higher prices for premiums would drive healthier people out of the markets and out of healthcare insurance, while the loss of those healthier people from risk pools would drive up premiums for those remaining.

They were unsuccessful, and as they warned, without the subsidies, people dropped their health insurance. A report from the Department of Health and Human Services in late June twenty twenty-six showed that at least five million people lost health insurance in the first six months of the year, a drop of about thirteen percent.

For those remaining, premiums have spiked. The editorial board notes that a middle-income, middle-aged couple with two children could pay an additional thirty-five hundred dollars a year, more than doubling their premium from before the cuts. Deductibles also jumped this year by about a thousand dollars a person as people chose cheaper policies that offered less coverage.

Democrats shut down the government also because they wanted to restore the cuts of about a trillion dollars over the next ten years Republicans had made in funding for Medicaid. In their budget reconciliation bill, Republicans placed what they called a work requirement on enrollees, requiring them to prove they have a job or a valid exemption.

But as the editorial board notes, the work requirement is really a paperwork requirement that will throw people eligible for the program off it because they have not filed the right paperwork. As the board reports, Elizabeth Zhang and Gideon Lukens of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that about two of the three people who will lose Medicaid because of the new requirement are legally entitled to it.

They estimated that up to fifteen million people are at risk of losing Medicaid coverage. That, in turn, will force hospitals, especially rural hospitals, to cut back services or close. Although still legally required to provide services to everyone, they will not be reimbursed for the cost of such care and will drop labor and delivery services, for example.

Those closures will not just mean poorer healthcare, they will mean lost jobs. As The New York Times editorial board noted, Republicans deliberately put off the implementation of most of the Medicaid cuts until after the twenty twenty-six midterms. New York Times reader K.A.M. from Marin County, California noted in a comment on the story that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defines onerous paperwork differently than Republicans in Congress.

Bessent recently announced the Treasury will no longer require shell companies to disclose even the name, address, and identification of people who own an interest of more than twenty-five percent or who exercise significant control over the company, as Congress required in the twenty twenty-one Corporate Transparency Act.

Congress designed the law to combat money laundering, but Bessent says the paperwork puts an undue burden on businesses. In eighteen eighty-three, sociologist William Graham Sumner published What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other, concluding that the answer was nothing. In a time when unregulated industrialization was making fortunes on the one hand and driving down wages on the other, creating extremes of rich and poor, Sumner turned on its head the traditional idea that the economy of the United States would provide a living to any man who worked hard.

Instead, Sumner argued that anyone who did not succeed in the United States must be negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent. Not only was it unfair to make the industrious and the prudent responsible for such shiftless men, he wrote, it would ruin the country by destroying individual enterprise.

Sumner called for a laissez-faire world in which those who failed should be permitted to sink into poverty and die to keep the U.S. from becoming a place where lazy people wanted a handout. In the end, such people needed to be purged from society for the good of the nation. At the time, those succeeding in the industrializing economy nodded along with Sumner.

The Republican New York Times editor wrote that even though Sumner's views are singularly hard and uncompromising, it is difficult to quarrel with their deductions, however one may feel one's finer instinct hurt by their apparent cruelty. The Trump administration seems to have embraced Sumner's belief that the nation depends upon the survival of the fittest. As microbiologist and senior health reporter Beth Mole reported last year in Ars Technica, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to believe that the key to health is not to rely on the vaccines proven to prevent infectious diseases, but rather to have a strong immune system fortified, as he wrote in a 2021 book, through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition.

He accused those who support vaccines of misleading the American public for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry. This seems to explain why he has claimed, without evidence, that the Texas children who died of measles were malnourished, and that we don't know what was killing the 83 Samoans who died in the country's 2019 measles epidemic, during which Kennedy associated with members of the anti-vaccine movement there.

It would also explain why he promised to turn away from promoting vaccination to exploring new treatments for measles, including vitamins. And it would help to explain the effort to change the vaccine schedule for children by separating the MMR vaccine into single-disease vaccines. Rather than two shots requiring two doctor's visits, the vaccine series would require six.

Experts say such a change will mean poorer children will not get the whole vaccine series, putting them and their communities at risk. If overall health can fight off germs and illnesses, then measures like the pasteurization of milk and the tracking of foodborne illnesses are unnecessary. The US is experiencing a particularly bad wave of foodborne illness.

It's driven both by hot weather that nurtures food contamination and by federal funding cuts that scale back the ability of federal agencies to conduct food inspections and provide grants to state and local health departments that used to be able to trace outbreaks quickly. Deirdre McPhillips of CNN reported that so far this year, the US has reported about ten thousand five hundred cases of foodborne illness.

Between twenty twenty-one and twenty twenty-five, the annual average was about fifteen hundred cases. At least nine thousand four hundred and eighty-one people in seventeen states have fallen ill with cyclosporiasis carried by lettuce from Taylor Farms, and thousands more cases are being investigated.

It's the largest cyclospora outbreak in US history, spurred by cuts of more than forty percent to food safety detection systems. It's not just lettuce. Frozen organic blueberries sold in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia have been recalled for E. coli.

Fresh jalapenos from Taylor Farms have been recalled for salmonella. One point five million dozen eggs sold in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and New Mexico have also been recalled for salmonella. Anna Skinner of Newsweek notes that while the focus has been on produce, in fact, FDA records show what she calls a steady stream of recalls that includes prepared foods, salad dressings, soups, bakery items, and ready-to-eat products potentially contaminated with salmonella, listeria, or foreign materials, including pieces of metal.

As former US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams wrote in USA Today, "You cannot effectively focus on chronic diseases while you're being repeatedly overwhelmed by acute infectious outbreaks." He called for restoring the mandatory tracking of all eight pathogens that were covered by the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, or FoodNet, before the administration cut the surveillance down to just two, and for filling the leadership positions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration that are currently vacant.

He called for inspectors to prioritize high-risk foods and imports, and for the Department of Health and Human Services to reaffirm that vaccines are safe and effective. In the 1890s, the determination of those like William Graham Sumner to keep government out of society in order to promote individualism had undermined public health and safety.

Producers adulterated tuberculosis-carrying milk with chalk and formaldehyde, decorated candy with lead paint, and scooped melted ice cream off the bottom of the vat to refreeze for sale the next day. And what was in sausage meat was a terrifying mystery. In the early 20th century, middle-class Americans demanded regulation of the food and drug industry, ushering in the reforms that we now call the Progressive Era.

And Finally, Section D, Affordability Politics and the Rising Left

corporate news media sell a lot of messages, but perhaps the overarching one is, "This is how it is. You could be mad about it. We might give you a personal profile, but hey, this is just how it is."

And how it is, is that there are thirty-four point five million people living in poverty, according to the Census Bureau. The United States has the second highest poverty rate among major developed nations in the OECD, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, trailing only Costa Rica.

You're not happy with that? Well, welcome to corporate media's echo chamber, where your dissatisfaction is naive at best. When people try to fight for something better, we get a lot of noise about how that can't work, it won't work, and you know who else wanted social change? Communists, socialists. The idea is that we'll be frightened off from wanting healthcare because you know what?

Russia. The good news is that ever-increasing numbers of people just aren't buying what elite media are selling, which is the same old top-down, racist, why would you even speak up blather that we've been listening to for decades, and then the narrating of the nightmare that we're living through. It's not that DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, are the answer, but ask yourself, why won't corporate media engage the questions they pose?

In 2000, when USA Today was covering activism in Seattle around the WTO, it reported, quote, "Little noticed by the public, the upcoming World Trade Organization summit has energized protesters around the world," close quote. I think that that's emblematic of corporate news media.

citizens, person on the street, let's get your opinion. But wait, you got together with other people to try to actually change things? Well, now you're marginal and maybe criminal, and certainly stupid . Right. I, I, I think we're seeing this now writ maybe larger because now the protesters are inside the house, right?

Now groups like DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, are making inroads, electing candidates, reaching people who are disaffected. And so it seems like elite news media are bringing out their rhetorical guns, and you've been documenting that. I'm, I'm thinking of a piece you wrote in August noting The Atlantic magazine article headlined The DSA Is a Parasite, but there's lots.

Where would you start if you're talking about the way that corporate news media are treating DSA, yes, but also the very word socialism? I think the piece that you mentioned is a perfect place to start. The DSA is a parasite. It's a particularly odious example of the kind of coverage I was writing about, and I, I was pretty disturbed actually to see the headline because it's such a loaded framing to characterize socialists or any group of people, Black and brown people, anyone, to characterize as a roach or vermin or a parasite.

That's pretty dangerous language that I think has real-world consequences and can, in fact, harm people. There are different ways that they frame this, and you identified many of them in your introduction. The scariest and worst to me are the ones that mimic the language of, of, frankly, of genociders the world over.

It's that parasite language, that vermin language. But I think more common than that is what you said about presenting people, any activists, any group of people who are trying to challenge power and change things, fundamentally unserious, ridiculous, fringe, marginal. I think that's the more common framing.

Mm-hmm. And I was thinking about what you said about, you just have to grow up, or when you're older, you'll understand, which has been a, a message I've heard actually my whole adult li- as long as I've been politically engaged- Right ... which I'd say started when I was 18 and, and could vote, became very interested in American politics.

And that's always what I've heard, and I think one thing that's really changed a lot, and that it accounts in many ways for the, the resurgence we're seeing of socialism in the United States and the success of DSA, is, the fact that millennials have grown up, Mm-hmm. I'm, 43 years old.

I'm gonna be 44 in December. I'm not exactly a kid anymore. I don't feel like a kid. I don't have the same freedom that I did as a student or as a young person, and many people who were characterized as very young and silly for a long, long time, which was always the media framing around millennials, my, my generation, are now, parents.

They're trying to buy homes. They have serious jobs. They have all the same adult responsibilities as everybody else in this country, and they're in a much, much worse position financially than their parents were overall on average. It sounds like folks are feeling reached, feeling listened to, feeling like there might be something they can be part of to bring change, and we're seeing that clamped down on in subtle and less subtle ways, which are, is part of the things that you write about.

Just to get to the core of it, what is it that is being demonized? Because it sounds like organizing, It sounds like- Right ... getting people together to fight for something they want is being treated by elite media as in itself suspect. Yes, exactly, and I think there's a lot of internal contradictions in the framing, in the pushback to DSA.

I wrote in a piece for Fair, I mentioned what Barack Obama said when he was leaving office in January 2017, I think is when he said this, but he, he made an explicit appeal to young people. He said, "If you don't like where the country's going, grab a clipboard, get out there, get some signatures, run for office yourself."

Hillary Clinton made a similar remark about 10 months earlier in 2016 when she was on the campaign trail. So these are things I've heard my whole adult life. You need to do the work, and you should stop complaining or, or posting on social media. You should actually get out there and do the organizing work, and that is exactly what DSA has been doing, and that's why we're in a stronger position than we've ever been since the beginning of the organization.

There's consensus around that, and I know a lot of people who've been DSA members for much longer than I have, and there's a new seriousness here. We've adapted to changing conditions, and I think a lot of the credit for that goes to people who took that in, who admired Obama, who worked for him, in many cases, quite literally worked for him, and said, "You know what?

That's right. We sh- we need to approach this in a very serious and disciplined way, and we want it to work, and we want to actually have some power on the left," which growing up in the '90s, I, I did not really perceive us as having any organized power, frankly. I knocked doors for Ralph Nader in college, and I was Proud to do so, but it didn't feel then, and it certainly turned out to be the case, that we didn't come anywhere near electing Ralph Nader president- Right, right

as much as I admire him in many ways. So conditions have changed, and we've adapted to those changes, and I'm very proud of what we're doing. But what you hear from the media and also from powerful actors in the Democratic Party is that they now want to shut that down, which is at odds with everything else they've ever said about youth engagement.

But what they mean by youth engagement is, "Go vote for who we tell you to vote for- Mm-hmm ... and stay out of it otherwise." And I think DSA has a much more serious and holistic approach to political organizing. 

Let's listen to a clip here from October 2015. The first voice you'll hear is that of CNN's Dana Bash, who is moderating the debate, and here follows up after asking Sanders this question, quote, "Do you think taxpayers should pick up the tab for wealthy children to attend college?" End quote. Now, when she shifts to asking the same question to Hillary Clinton, this is what happens.

And, and Secretary, Secretary Clinton, it's not just college tuition. Senator Sanders is talking about expanding Social Security and giving all Americans Medicare. What's wrong with that? Well, let me address, college affordability- Okay ... because I have a, a, a plan that I think will really, zero in on what the problems are.

First, all the 40 million Americans who currently have student debt will be able to refinance their debt to a low interest rate. That will save thousands of dollars for people who are now struggling under this cumbersome, burdensome, college debt. As a young student in Nevada said to me, "The hardest thing about going to college should not be paying for it."

So then we have to make it more affordable Yes, Adam, you can refinance the debt, right? That's, that's how to make it more, quote-unquote, affordable. Yeah, and if you're wondering, Chelsea Clinton did not have a job when she attended Stanford University. So you have to have access, you have to be able to afford it.

There's exotic work requirements. Nothing can be rights-based. Everything has to be moderately more affordable. It means tested to death. Yeah, I do like the question about why should, quote-unquote, taxpayer pay for rich kids' colleges. The answer to that, of course, is why should we pay for rich kids to go to public parks or public libraries or have a fire department?

Right, or walk down the sidewalk. Right. 'Cause it's free to them at the point of purchase, but of course, the idea is that you tax them significantly more on their incomes and their capital gains and their trusts. Therefore, they... It is not effectively free in the aggregate. It's just exotic means testing creates unnecessary cost and bureaucracy, and of course, makes it more subject to political gutting because it becomes racialized.

Right. It's just another clever way of doing regressive taxing. Right. And of course, this is why Dana Bash is where Dana Bash is and why she keeps getting promoted in CNN, because she asks dopey right-wing questions. So let's switch to the 2026 midterm strategy when Democrats have now revitalized their obsession with the almighty A word Congressional Democrats, and even occasionally Trump and his ilk, have been reviving affordability rhetoric yet again as they prepare for the twenty twenty-six midterms that, of course, are coming up later this year.

It's clear that Democrats are attempting to achieve the success of Mamdani and his twenty twenty-five New York mayoral campaign, which made the cost of living its chief policy concern without having to actually make the kind of rights-based political commitments he made. Now, while Mamdani's campaign promised things like free buses and free childcare and city-owned grocery stores, most Democrats aren't willing to talk about free things and rights-based language, but they want to capture the vibe and the energy of vaguely gesturing towards so-called affordability.

This is what makes the word a kind of perfect liberal banality in that it can mean whatever you really want it to mean, and it's precisely in the wheelhouse of our podcast for just that reason. In April of twenty twenty-six, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus introduced a so-called new affordability agenda.

In the press release, the caucus vowed to address, quote, "The biggest parts of most Americans' budgets, including prescription drugs, groceries, housing, utility bills, gas, and childcare." It includes several potentially useful policies, including increased vacation time and some nods to cheaper utilities, groceries, and childcare.

Though the proposals are very light on specifics, promising merely to, quote, "Crack down," unquote, on companies, quote, "Overcharging," without defining any of these terms. And its prescriptions to make housing cheaper is predictably to build more housing, thus advancing the abundance approach to lowering housing costs, not rent freezes or building public housing, which has been the kind of left-wing solution.

But increasingly, the capital-friendly supply side approach is now won the day, and it certainly is even won the day among so-called progressives in Congress. And now this new affordability agenda also promised to, quote, "Offer every first-time homebuyer twenty thousand dollars in down payment assistance and expand rental assistance," meaning a substantial amount of public money would go right into the landlord's pockets.

It would, of course, be more equitable and efficient to, at the very least, place controls on housing prices. But in US politics, reducing the power of real estate is a third rail, even for the so-called Progressive Caucus. Additionally, conspicuously missing from the list of top expenses named are health insurance and medical bills, which studies show are currently larger expenses than people's own utilities.

Now, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in twenty twenty-four, on average, health insurance and medical costs accounted for about eight percent of annual household spending. And in early twenty twenty-six, the Center for Economic and Policy Research reported that, quote, "One in eight working families paid more than ten percent of their income on healthcare, with burdens highest for low income and rural households."

End quote. This is a major problem with a clear solution, we'd argue. Single-payer healthcare, universal coverage for everyone. Yet, this policy is nowhere to be found in the Progressive Caucus's new agenda That's the far left flank of the affordability agenda for 2026. Let's look at the New Democratic Coalition, or the NDC, which consists of 114 House Democrats, released a somewhat similar agenda which claims to approach affordability from five angles.

Quote, "Groceries and household essentials, healthcare, housing, energy, and families, especially child and elderly care." So how does this plan s- seek to lower cost? Through incrementalist policies that don't threaten to meaningfully curtail industry pol- practices. For example, the NDC pledges to drive down the cost of groceries and household goods by incentivizing, quote, "competition," end quote, holding corporations accountable for unwarranted price hikes.

What makes a price hike warranted and what makes it unwarranted? We don't know. They don't say. There's no mention of price controls. That, of course, would be communism. To its credit, the NDC promises to, quote, "crack down on corporate bad actors that drive up cost in order to promote competition and fair pricings of goods."

But how they would crack down, what does it mean to have fair pricing? Again, these questions remain unanswered. It's just a vibe. It's a vague commitment without rights-based language or clearly defined mechanisms for enforcing this incrementalism. In the healthcare section, nowhere are even the most familiar and arguably safest proposals for free and universal healthcare mentioned, namely Medicare for All.

And how do they plan to address expensive housing? With, again, abundance policies, which nearly always urge the, quote, "cutting of red tape," i.e., decreasing or removing safety, environmental, and labor regulations for developers Now, how have major media outlets presented these lukewarm market-friendly policies?

With overwhelming support, of course, if not a bit of criticism from the right. Here are a few examples. Axios from December 2025. The headline, quote, "Democrats Target Trump's Affordability Crisis," end quote. From The New York Times that same month, quote, "How Democrats Used One Word to Turn the Tide Against Trump," end quote.

Wonder what that one word is? That's right, affordability And just one more thing about this December 2025 New York Times piece. The Times notes that the mentions of the word affordability in emails from members of Congress had grown from zero in 2020 to 92 in 2025, with 70 of those occurring in November and December 2025 alone.

The Times added this, quote, "Affordability resonated in a way that other terms failed, say strategists, politicians, and political scientists, because it echoes how voters think about their personal budgets rather than the more abstract academic language of economics, activism, and policy." End quote. Yeah, my favorite media trope is the highly paid consultant who lives in DC or New York and puts on a straw hat and his overalls and becomes a man of the people.

People don't need your hat for looting economics and activism. They just need simple affordability policies. I'm just a simple country consultant. Oh, yeah, okay. That's... You really nailed it. the salt of the earth people. Thank you for your populist insights. Exactly, Adam, and The Times really hails this as a shrewd, strategic decision, never pausing to consider that educating the public about those, quote-unquote, "abstract policies" and the inequality that's inherent in US economic structures could actually be valuable.

Popular education might actually be helpful, not just hip buzzwords. But the trend has only continued since. Here are a few more headlines from earlier this year. The Guardian from January 2026, quote, "Democrats go all in on affordability in bid to turn voters against Trump." End quote. New York Times opinion from April of 2026, "Hillary Clinton: How to fix affordability."

Politico from later that month, April 2026, "The Congressional Progressive Caucus has a plan for high prices." Also Politico two days later, "Centrist Democrats beef up affordability message." And even The Nation got in on this from early May 2026. Quote, "A compact with America: The Congressional Progressive Caucus releases its new affordability agenda."

End quote. Now, The Nation even excuses the Congressional Progressive Caucus' absence of policy proposals for freeing necessities, writing this. Quote, "It makes the tough strategic choice to put forth not what CPC Chair Greg Casar hails as progressive flagship reforms, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, tuition-free college, et cetera, but rather sensible, immensely popular reforms that could center a platform that Democrats could unite behind."

End quote. Right. So here's the progressive wing of the party throwing their hat behind incrementalist affordability non-rights based language. That is a... Again, the supposed progressive wing is supposed to be the ones pushing the Overton window left with rights-based language. But Washington is captured by this idea, and of course, this is almost certainly a, a top-down edict from Democratic leadership, that the nation is fundamentally conservative, and the party went too far left and too woke.

That's conventional wisdom pushed by people like David Shor and Matt Yglesias, because, because again, it has no empirical basis. But we must pander our language not around rights-based language like Medicare for All or tuition-free college, which again is clean and simple and usually polls somewhere in the 60s or 70s.

No, we have to go back to aspirational-based access or affordability language. We're gonna work to make things more affordable by doing X, Y, and Z. What the mechanism for that is, why you should trust us to do that, why we should not think Republican rat fucking or mucking up the, works would make that more difficult.

Because no matter what Democrats do or no matter what they propose, they're gonna get uniform Republican recalcitrance and opposition, and they're gonna be labeled socialist anyway. So it's unclear to me why you would concede all this ground and focus on these capital-friendly reforms unless you just want to attract more capital funding and capitalist donations and not rock the boat too much.

Well, I'm gonna bring you back to what DSA, what that actually looks like day to day. But if we could roll through some of what folks will have gleaned from news media coverage of not just DSA, but socialism in general, which is used as, a slur and, as I say at the top, a thought stopper.

So one of the arguments is this is silly, and because it's silly, you're gonna hand power to the right. So you're just gonna lose. Another argument is, well, it's just young people with blue hair and, and they can't lead us anywhere. But then another, and you talk about how they, the arguments fight with themselves, because another argument is, well, socialism is just rich white people cosplaying as working class, so it's not really real.

Th- the arguments don't agree with one another, but they seem to add up to, yeah, this would be good, but it can't happen, so you're mean to even introduce it to people. And that, I think, only works when media don't talk about what's actually happening on the ground. It only works when it's a purely rhetorical argument.

Yeah. Exactly. And the media really, they can't make up their minds about us because they're throwing a lot of things at the wall to see what sticks and trying to find something that's actually going to work against DSA and, and so far they've found things that have gained a little bit of traction here and there but not really enough to stop us.

And that's why there's this constant, are we ridiculous snowflakes who've never had any real-world experience, don't know what we're doing, really naive, really silly? Or are we terrifying terrorists- Right ... who hate America, who are trying to harm people? And, those are both ridiculous caricatures that have nothing to do with the actual people in the actual organization, but they're also just fundamentally contradict each other.

we can't be both Scary and silly and not going to win. So you can see the limits of that thinking and the limits of the coverage and the pushback, and I guess I would also say that the people in the organization are... They're just, in fact, very serious, ordinary people, There is very much a framing of it's white people, it's privileged people, it's college kids who had all the advantages.

I don't think that's entirely wrong, but I also don't think that it's a bad thing to be a privileged person who is standing in solidarity with people who've had fewer privileges in their lives. I think that's actually what you're supposed to be doing, and that's, that's another message I grew up hearing, right?

That from Democratic Party leaders, from progressives in my community, from all of my teachers, all of my educators my whole life have said, "With great privilege comes great responsibility." That's actually a very, very mainstream American message, and it's bizarre to me to now say, "Oh, we didn't mean that."

We didn't mean it if you're actually talking about economic policy or changing conditions or helping people in a material way. We only meant that you should, I don't know, work for a nonprofit. I m- I'm- Yeah ... I'm not sure what else that could mean- Right ... other than what we're now seeing. Exactly.

Well, part of what reporters have to grapple with is just facts on the ground, and the facts on the ground are that DSA-supported or self-defined socialists have been winning elections, have been appealing to people- Right ... and people are voting for them. Like, for example, Zohran Mamdani, our mayor here in New York City.

"Zohran Mamdani Crashes the Party" was New York Magazine's profile headline, and I think that gets what we're talking about, which is there's a lot of rhetoric about bottom up, and we should listen to people, but then when somebody does that and organizes, somehow they're interfering with the way that things should actually work.

It's a, it's a big tell, I think, on elite media, the treatment of Mamdani. Absolutely. And I, there's a real mystification. Some of it, I have to say, some of it is very evidently bad faith and comes from, ideological enemies, and some of it, I think, actually just reveals the naiveté of, of corporate media and of certain types of political operatives, that they, they really are mystified, truly mystified by what's going on because they can't imagine doing things the decent, honorable way.

They're like, "What is the secret? What's the trick?" "Are you taking money from China?" Right. "Are you Ru- Russian bots?" All of this frankly, conspiracy thinking because they themselves have never, would never spend time on a project that didn't immediately enrich them, improve their social standing, get them a job, 

So the idea that there now are tens of thousands of people motivated by a desire to help each other and to improve conditions for everybody, it just doesn't make any sense to them, and that's very revealing of, of their worldview and of their own personal experiences, what they would or wouldn't do to help other people.

But then also the fact that they're like, "Because I can't imagine it, you shouldn't either." Right. It, it- Right ... it'd be one thing if they went away with their opinions, but they don't. They, they put them in our face every day and say, "You have to stop thinking this way. This isn't gonna work." And it's almost like a threat, 

Right. It's, "It's not gonna work 'cause we're not gonna let it work." Right. I find it frightening. Yeah, and it's also a, a loss of control, right? the people who are used to being the gatekeepers, used to being the ones who tell us what to do, it's a threatening thing to them to now have a large and growing group of people who are saying, "Actually, I don't-" I don't care what you're telling me to do.

I, I feel like I'm drawn to this person. I'm gonna vote for this person, work for this policy, join this organization. And it, it's, it's destabilizing and threatening to the entire order that these people have built their lives and careers around. So in, in a way, I have some sympathy on a human level. Right.

It's like they thought they were doing everything the right way, and it's really stopped working for them. that's a lesson that the left has had to learn over decades, right? If it's something's not working, you're supposed to recalibrate. You're supposed to figure out another way. It does call into question what are their ultimate goals?

Do the people who are the anti-DSA faction in the Democratic Party, do they actually want Democrats to win? It's hard to believe that some of them really want that, given the choices that they're making. Because the energy in the party quite clearly is with the rising socialist tide, and if you're shutting down enthusiastic young people, people who've never participated before, people who were drawn to this or that campaign because it gave them hope, and you're saying, "No, we can't have that kind of energy," I think you're working against the interests of the party and the country, and I think you're doing it for other reasons.

Obviously, this is not, an ad for DSA. It's really about socialism and its place in corporate media's conversation and how they define it. Because you can see different ideas taken seriously, but then once they get a label, then they go off the page. And it's odd, and it's an infantilizing of the reading public, as though we don't understand what can happen and what we can work for , 

What we've been hearing from voters, Chris Stansing was just here, and she says she was out in Ohio and voters were saying to her, "This is the most expensive Senate race this state has ever seen." It's always the most expensive race in every state. they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

My kid just lost the elective in his elementary school. Now they only have recess. They don't have music any longer. There is so much money flooding into our politics when we are fighting over how we don't have enough money for Medicare, for Social Security, for paid parental leave. How, how do you fix that?

Well, Katie, I'll tell you, I met a guy. His kid is a great baseball player. The scouts told him, he might actually be able to go all the way, and he can't afford to put his kid in baseball. this is one way the affordabil- ability crisis is destroying people's dreams, let alone groceries and gas and healthcare.

and you ask yourself, like, look at our primary. We got outspent 11 to one, $70 million of outside spending against me. $70 million. What you could do with $70 million. Insane things for people, but we're spending it on politics. Now, why? Where's that money coming from? Almost always special interests that are largely paid into by billionaires or corporations spending their money to rig a system to make sure that corporations get to do what they want with our politics.

And I think it's important for us to understand how this happened, where it came from. My campaign is about getting money out of politics, putting money in your pocket, passing Medicare for all. If we are not willing to stand up against Citizens United, that means we're not willing to stand up for healthcare, we're not willing to stand up to end endless wars.

How do you overturn Citizens United in a Senate that is gonna be divided? If Dem- the Democrats win, it's still gonna be close. Well, number one, I think you've gotta go win on the merits. I think the challenge we sometimes have is, as Democrats, we do these polls, we try to figure out where people are, and then we say, "Just go talk to the people who already agree with you."

I think that's ridiculous. You've gotta actually go and persuade people who don't agree with you, and we're doing that every single day on this campaign. Number two, we've gotta address the fact that the filibuster is anti-democratic. Y- you should be able to win on a majority, and I think we need to end the filibuster.

The third thing I think is really important for us to understand is y- there's belt and suspenders, right? The Supreme Court wrongly decided the Citizens United case in the first place. They interpreted the corporations as people and money as speech. I think there's belt and suspenders. One of them is let's go and try and end Citizens United, and if the Supreme Court wants to make another bad decision, there's other ways to do this.

Imagine having public funding that comes in equal and opposite to the spending from corporations to support campaigns- It- ... that are being hit by that corporate money. It sounds so great, and I don't wanna be a bee in the bonnet here about it, but how do you convince Republicans to get on board, or even some of your fellow Democrats to get on board with doing away with it when it is, it is largely what allows or gets politicians elected in the first place?

You win on the merits. I don't think anybody out there running for public office is saying, "Wow, I can't wait to go be in the handmaiden of a corporation that gets to decide how they pick the pockets of the people I ask to vote for me." And I believe in a better politics. Now, maybe I'm Pollyanna-ish about this, but the other side of that is that everybody has to get elected by the people.

That's why I'm so bullish on going and having a conversation with folks all over this state in Michigan, and all over, frankly, the country, about what it looks like to unrig our politics. Doesn't matter where you are in the state of Michigan, whether your county voted blue or red, you still can't afford your gas.

Y- you still can't afford your groceries. And all of that goes back to the way that corporations are able to turn themselves into monopolies and oligopolies to rig the system against you. Let's talk about Medicare for All. When you, w- in, in Michigan, you were able to help lead the effort to clear up to $700 million in medical debt for about 300,000 people.

Where does that stand today? Still happening, right? It's a process. The way this works is that the, organization that the county worked with is now working with large, healthcare providers to clear out their debt. Basically, a contract to buy their debt away. And every couple months, people get letters clearing their debt away from them.

But the bigger question we should ask is, why do we have $225 billion in medical debt in America in the first place? In the richest, most powerful country in the world, and we're fighting a war to the tune of billions of dollars a day that's just raising our gas prices 'cause Donald Trump is president, and Mike Rogers, the guy I'm running against, would just be a rubber stamp on all of that.

It's because we've allowed our corporate insurance system to dominate our politics, to tell us the best possible way we can have healthcare is to charge us a premium every paycheck, and then charge us a deductible, which is the money you have to pay to get the health insurance you thought you already paid for.

And most people are just pissing mad about having to do that. People hate the health system, insurance system here, but people do still come to America for the best healthcare. So how do you keep- Right ... the best healthcare, but also reform the system? Here's the sad thing. You're right. A lot of people from other countries come to America for the best healthcare.

Those are the richest people in those countries. And here in America, actual Americans are thinking about how to end around the healthcare system on its own terms. You talk about America first, I'd like a healthcare system that's America first, that guarantees healthcare for every single American. I'm not so interested in some Amir coming from some other country to get a heart procedure.

I'm a lot more interested in making sure that if you have a heart attack in America, it's not gonna cost you an arm and a leg on the back end. What do you about doctors that are, that are taking all their, their, their, practices private? 

The best doctors are doing that.And you're speaking exactly to the problem here. They are exiting the insurance system because the insurance system is more interested in gatekeeping healthcare for patients and figuring out how to squeeze doctors. So they're saying, "You know what? I'm out. I don't wanna be a part of that anymore."

And that goes back to the profit motive inside health insurance. Medicare for All would guarantee you health coverage from cradle to grave without premiums, co-pays, and deductibles. It would be an even rate for everyone, and it would be a fair rate. A lot of folks are saying, "You know what? I can't make the insurance system work, plus I have to hire two more employees to bill, to figure out how to bill these insurance companies that don't have the same billing codes."

I wanna turn to, the attacks against you. The President of the United States has called you a jihadist. Republicans are saying you have no business in the Senate. if you are elected, you will be the first Muslim senator. They're going after your faith. I would just love to hear from you what your faith means to you, and how you think it, it, it, it has to do with your politics.

if there's any jihad, it's gonna be the one against medical debt. So I in- I, I implore Donald Trump, if you're interested in taking on medical debt, come join me. Taking on money in politics, come join me. But at the end of the day, the average American is not as worried about how I pray. They're worried about what I pray for, what we all hope for.

When you look your kid in the eye, you wanna know that they're gonna have a better life than the one that you had. And right now, I think when most of us look our kids in the eye, we're worried about their future looks like. Faith is important to me, but it's also private to me. I want to be able to live in an America where nobody tells me how or, what circumstances I can pray in, and I have no interest in telling anyone else how to do the same.

So it has nothing to do with your politics? But what I'll tell you is there are ideals about this country that I think we all hold dear, and I think that's the thing that unites us beyond our differences, right? That idea that we can say, "You know what? We believe in something that's bigger than us." And as a person of faith, I believe in that.

But it's also why I believe in the power of our Constitution and the power of this country to create something that's greater than the sum of its parts.

That's going to be it for today.

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Everything Everywhere Daily

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What A Day

CBS Pittsburgh

Unf*cking The Republic

Letters from an American

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and The Moment

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