Interview Only w/ Mechele Dickerson - Does America Need A Middle Class New Deal?

nutrients antioxidants. There's also no preservatives and no shortcuts. The Wild Grain boxes are fully customizable. In addition to their variety box, they have a gluten free box, a vegan box, and a new protein box. I will tell you I have done the gluten free box. I have done it a second time. I have also used the code the todcast code. You use the promo code toodcast at checkout you get thirty dollars off. I've already used it as a gift to somebody else who loves this bread. It

is hard to find good gluten free bread. It is fantastic. They give you step by step instructions. I really dig this. There is nothing like having an artesion bakery in your freezer to chase away the winter chill. Now is the best time to stay in and enjoy some comforting homemade meals with Wild Grain. I obviously highly recommend it. It is worth giving Wildgrain to try. Right now, Wildgrain is offering my listeners thirty dollars off your first box plus

free croissants for life. Come on when you go to wildgrain dot com slash podcast to start your subscription today.

That's thirty dollars off your first box and free croissants for life when you visit wildgrain dot com, slash podcast, or simply use the promo code podcast at checkout. This is a sponsor I absolutely embrace, so use that code well.

As we get to the run up of not Just Campaign twenty twenty six week Campaign twenty twenty eight, one of the things I'm going to actively be seeking out are academics and authors and historians that are that are trying to lay out visions that look forward, not necessarily relitigating the past and whether it's in How are we going to reform and change and modernize the public education system, which I think is something that I hope our next

presidential campaign can begin to discuss. And in that vein, there's a terrific new book out by a professor at the University of Texas Law School, by Michelle Dickerson. She's my guest today.

up here in a minute and bring in Michelle, is that I view it as this better be a book that anybody running for president, I don't care which party you're running from, ought to read, because whether you're a liberal or conservative, the goals that are outlined here in this book, I think are something that frankly, both the left and the right aspire to. We're just disagreeing on

how we get there. But it does begin here with I think the reminder that in order to have a middle class, you actually have to have government policy that wants to have a middle class. And I think that was before we begin our conversation. The most important insight I think that I took away from this book. So, without further ado, let me bring in Michelle Dickerson, University of Texas Law School. Been there, multiple books, She's written multiple books. Is again not a I don't this doesn't

strike me. It didn't strike me as a political book. It struck me as a answer to the economic anxiety that has essentially been reflected in what has been now twenty years of what I call vote against politics. We know what we don't want, nobody's yet come up with the answer for what we do want. So Michelle Dickerson, welcome to the podcast.

how is it that we have a middle class? And this is a point that you just made in the introduction. We have a middle class because political leaders decided we needed to have a middle class. Now, part of it was in response to the depression, but after the depression in World War one world War two, political leader said, you know what, it's not a bad thing to have a middle class. They do good things for the US economy.

And also as political leaders, we need to do good things for lower and middle income folks who are looking to achieve the American dream to have upward mobility. So I landed on the middle Class New Deal because we created the middle class roughly as part of the First New Deal, and political leaders need to stop. And I agree with the way that you framed this. This is not a left or a right, or a Democrat or

a Republican book. This is a book for all political leaders to make a decision do we care about the middle class in this country or not?

to be in the middle class, even as we aspire to be. Even when you're not in the middle class anymore, you still want to say, well, I've got middle class roots, right, there's something about it, right, we want to be here. But this is not something a free market economy creates. Free Market economies, when left unchecked, create uber rich and a lot of poor. It actually, it doesn't automatically create

a middle class. And I think understanding the history of the great building of the middle class of the fifties,

the GI Bill, that was a government essentially making sure the troops that came home didn't become poor, gave them an opportunity to stay out of poverty, not even necessarily bringing people from poverty to the middle class. The development of the suburbs, the development of all of these things were in support of the middle of creating a middle class.

And I think that might be hard for some of my free market conservative friends to sort of wrap their arms around, but guess what government actually has to create the conditions to allow a middle class to exist. Did I summarize your argument parently?

middle income people since the nineteen eighties. So if we want the free market to control, what that means is we will have the uber uber rich and everyone else will be struggling. So it's really hilarious to me when people look back at the middle class and all of the wonderful things it did. It helps people go to college,

it helped people buy homes. But if we really wanted to put labels on what happened that the factors that helped to create the middle class, we'd have to say things like socialism and interfering with free markets, And of course nobody wants to say those words. The S word is just horrible. Well, fine, don't call it socialism, just call it what do we think this government owes to people who work hard, get up every day and try to do the right thing, and yet continue to struggle.

If your response is we owe them nothing, then we need to just say that.

whether or not you care about the economic security of most families in this country, one of the things that I always say when people ask me, well, why is it so good to have a middle class? I can point to lots of things like toasters, or trash cans or Ford pickup trucks. Billionaires can only buy so many of those. So even if you don't care about the stability of human beings, the economic stability of human beings, y'all ought to care whether or not you can sell

lots of pickup trucks and trash cans and microwaves. That's what the middle past also does. They drive spending in this economy. And if they're struggling financially, or if they're scared and we're seeing a lot of fear now, which is also unhealthy, then we're going to have a week economy.

to home ownership, and retirement security. And that those things Government has to involve itself if you want to have those guarantees, and that that that middle class is less about income and more about does the average American able

to achieve those five goals in life?

Why is it so hard for me to be able to either go to college myself and not drown myself in student loan debt or help my kids go to college? Why is it so hard for me? And I'll tweak one thing that you said, it's not so much now to be able to own your own home. It's to be able to find affordable housing, even to rent in a lot of cities. Why is it so hard for me to find stable and secure housing? Why am I drowning in debt? Why don't I have savings? So you're

absolutely right. My book isn't arguing that everybody needs to earn the same thing, but everybody in this country that works hard and wants to achieve. Whether we call it the American Dream, upward mobility, I really don't care.

and the back as an independent contractor. We have to ask why is it. In the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, people that worked had a defined benefit pension plan. That's what my parents have and I talk about them in the book. My parents get two I won't say checks, because it's not checks anymore. Two deposits into their checking account every month because they worked their entire lives and

they have guaranteed retirement income. I am terrified to think what we're going to see in about ten years when people start retiring. They don't have pensions and they have not much saved in a defined contribution for a one K four three B plan.

and ZAC gen X is the first generation. You know, you know, we're the ones that I had to figure out what is four O one K mean? Okay, it's like alphabet soup? Yeah, right, Ira roth Ira? What is that? Right? There were all these sort of new sort of you know, tax coded you know, numbers and numerologies or the names after senators who came up with the idea that we're all designed essentially to keep Americans from being angry that pensions were going away. I don't know any other way to describe it.

day because it was so complicated. Well, if I can't figure it out, imagine just a normal didn't doesn't have two degree, you know, isn't in bankruptcy employee that's sitting

down trying to figure out what do I need to invest in, and when do I think I'm going to retire, and what level of income do I think I'm going to need the things that employers used to do for their workers.

for Amazon right there, they're independent contractor. They have a lot of political leverage, right and the whole And there's some that will argue, well, independent contractors allow people to make more money because it can be a side hustle and right. You know, there are different ways that have been used frankly to convince or persuade parts of the population. No, no, no, no no. These these empower you, These don't hurt you,

you know. And I'm not asking you to be a political messaging guru here, but I think that's going to be the political challenge to an obvious policy conundrum. Right.

And I can say this from personal experience. I have a twenty five year old son who worked briefly for Amazon, but he didn't work for Amazon. He worked for a delivery service provider and they treated him very well. But at the end of the day, he was never going to work for Amazon, and he was never going to

get forty hours a week working at the DSP because it wasn't set up for them to be full time forty hour a week. You got to give them benefits.

your company. Because at the end of the day, when you have fewer employees your cost or less as a business, and you're not at grade of a risk of having a strong union presence, because if you have fewer employees, you're less likely to have to deal with those pesky unions.

has to deliver. If you're craving a winter reset, start with pieces truly made to last season after season. Quint springs together premium materials, thoughtful design, and enduring quality so you stay warm, look sharp, and feel your best all season long. Quins has everything you need men's Mongolian cashmere sweaters. I have one. I have to say, really into it. They have wool coats, leather, and swede outerwear that actually hold up to daily wear and still look good. Outerwear

is especially impressive. Think down jackets, woll coats, and Italian leather outerwear that keep you warm when it's actually cold. Each piece made from premium materials, Quints delivers the same quality as luxury brands at a fraction of the price. The result is classic styles you'll love that hold up year after year. You know me, I love me my quarter zips. Quints has quite a few of them. They're great, They're both light and warm. There's nothing harder than business casual. Right,

you get these things? What can I wear? What can you wear at the meeting? What do you wear on a zoom? I have to say it's as if Quinn sort of says, hey, look, we've got the modern sort of working wardrobe ready for you, clothing that looks stylish, looks good, but is actually practical and isn't going to break the bank. So refresher winter wardrobe with Quint's go

to quints dot com slash chuck for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. And it's also available in Canada. That's qui nce dot com, slash chuck, free sh and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Quints dot com slash chuck go to Predictable Health cust You know there was a time, I want to say twenty years ago, where I thought that there

was a deal to be cut with big business. You know I would hear the complaints, you know, because I've worked where I worked I'd have interactions with this CEO of ge and I've had interactions with the CEO of Comcast and interactions with other CEOs, and all of them would complain about the cost of healthcare, and so you could I always thought that there was this great grand bargain where the government would say, look, we can save you some money. We'll take care of health We'll take

healthcare out of your situation. Then you can go back to having pensions or you can go back to you know that there was this grand bargain to be had, so to tackle predictable health costs, you know, is it

realistic to stick with the employer based healthcare system that ultimately we're still kind of attached to, even though the Affordable Care Act was supposed to make this a bit more portable. Do you think we need policy fixes that sort of deal with the world that we live in, or do we need to radically rethink how we deliver health insurance to folks or health care.

from a school of education, and foreign exchange students. So we were talking about the middle class and this particular class session we were talking about insurance and one of the students from the Netherlands finally asked a question says, I don't understand why when we're talking about health insurance you all keep talking about jobs. What do jobs have to do with anything? And then we had to explain to her, Well, in the US, that's how we provide

health insurance. So if we leave it with businesses, businesses have to assume the cost. So rather than pushing the cost onto employees, tell them that, you know, whether we want to say that there are caps on what they can charge or but businesses can lobby Congress and be much more effective in coming up with solution that individual

employees can. I will also say, and this is not necessarily a model that can be scaled, but when we look at the way that a military personnel in this country, how they receive health insurance, they receive it from the government. Is it perfect? They would probably say no, Is everyone covered? Yes they are. So we have to do something radical

because we can't continue with the status quo. And I would also again thinking back to the past, although I'm not going to stick say in the past, I want us to be thinking in terms of the.

tied into work was because in World War Two there was a wage controls, so they couldn't increase wages. So what businesses did is say, oh, but we can give you non wage benefits. Once that happened, it became the norm. And so one of the things I want political leaders to do is to say, well, if it wasn't the norm until we created it, maybe we can create something new and that'll then become.

People hate the system, but they like their own health.

But you know, that seems to be the type of thing that that that in a in a mature setting, that that people would accept the idea that this is trade offs. This isn't you know. Okay, I want this guarantee,

but it means it won't get it over here, okay, and you put it out.

be responsible for providing it? Ignoring who may be providing it right now, but who going forward do we think should be responsible for providing it? That to me is

a much more productive conversation than relitigating, well, it's not fair if businesses have to do this and it increase their costs. Okay, let's just assume that your true. Let's go forward.

were going that public education was essentially going to extend another two years, that there was going to be guaranteed public education up through quote unquote fourteen years of it, so you divided up how you want to divide it up. Right, You had your primary and secondary, and then you have essentially free community college, right the first two years of

community college. The fact that we haven't gotten there, you know, the fact that we're still, like a think, debating university universal kindergarten in some states we have, I would argue the entire our education debate is just sort of stalled, right, and we're stuck with this terrible system of charters and where everybody has taken education in their own hands. And you know, you're discussing in some cases more about higher education.

But I feel like the entire educational system just desperately needs a twenty first century makeover, and it's so politically polarized that we don't know how to do it. What are a few steps, a few ideas you're putting out there in the book that you think could make a tangible progress here.

community college education, employers need to be willing to hire them and pay them a decent wage. The challenge now is that the bachelor's degree has largely become the gateway to the middle class. So employers also need to come into the conversation and say, we're going to hire people and treat them decently even if they don't have a bachelor's degree. But you're absolutely right, we've got to look

at what happens starting in kindergarten. I would like to start actually in preschool as well, And how do we treat lower and middle income children in public schools, And how do we treat rich children and lower rich children who are more likely to be educated in private schools. So we need to have an honest discussion when we're talking about charters and vouchers and all of these other things. Most lower and middle income kids in this country are

educated in a public school somewhere. If they are in a rural area. There are no such things as choice options. There's no choice.

income children and lower rich and rich children. What can

we do with the public school system to try to close those gaps. One of the things that we do now is we still treat public school the public school calendar is if we're in a great economy, So for three some three months of the.

the reality for lower and middle income families. And so you're what I do, both in the book and also when I'm giving different talks, is we have to focus on K twelve because it's too late once children are about to turn eight, age eighteen.

But ultimately, we are not going to have a good labor force if we don't have a good public education system. And well, look, politically, the impediments have been a weird

combination of people who don't want you know, I joke in the state of Virginia, it's the people that own an amusement park called King's Dominion that was making it impossible for school districts to even start two weeks earlier.

You know, it would be like these weird you know, And then there was some teachers' unions are like no, no, no, no, we want we want our time off because a lot of teachers, because they're underpaid, spend their summers looking for extra in and are afraid of that going away, right, So,

which then tells you we really aren't investing very well in our school teachers if they feel like they need a second job in the summer. So it's a it's a it's been a weird challenge to sort of break this norm of summer break.

UT faculty I worked at. I was at the law school at William and Mary and so I know I know about you know, those gated communities there. Yeah, and it was just striking. It's like, oh, so if you all don't want to lose cheap high school labor, that's the reason you want to. Oh, okay, that makes sense. Yeah, but for the school teachers, one of the things that we can do if we're using our K twelve buildings more effectively, we can actually allow the school teachers that

want to they don't have to to pick up extra money in their area of expertise.

you know, it's like you know, it's almost like that every labor union was viewed through the prism of Jimmy Hoffa, right, and it's just like they're all, you know, and it really the damage, the perception damage Jimmy off did to the entire concept of collective bargaining and unions is is I think one of those one of those moments that probably we as sort of historical journalists need to unpack and realize, look at the damage this did. But there's now sort of an open mind on this. Now there's

less ideological divide about labor unions. There's still some skepticism in corporate right now, the divide really seems to be corporate America versus everybody else. Right, you have a Donald Trump that in theory sees, you know, wants to be

on the side at least of the trade unions. They're there, and I think with AI, the fear of AI job displacement, why collar were workers who you know, I've been you know, I've been a little skeptical of news of news rem unions myself, sort of like you know, I've always viewed unions as to protect the physical labor folks more than necessarily the but that's my own bias, and I will

I'm you know, at the same time, the only way you're going to get equal treatment is through collective bargainy, right, we're about to I think we're going to see this in college sports. By the way, that's a separate topic, but you seem to peg one of the one of the reasons why we had a strong middle class in the fifties and sixties was because we openly accepted labor unions. So how do you bring that back?

what is a union? And it was jarring to me until it occurred to me that we had so demonized unions that a lot of students fifteen years ago really weren't familiar with the benefits that unions actually could provide. Students now they know exactly what unions do. Part of it is because I think they've looked at their local baristas who have gone out on strike. They've looked at in the educational context, some of the graduate assistants that

have gone out on strike. I will not talk at all about sports because I'm very involved in that space at the University of Texas. I'm not going to talk about that. But yeah, I think that we have to acknowledge that nothing good has happened to lower and middle income workers since we gutted union. I would say Jimmy

Hoffa is a very bad visual. I will also say that the destruction of pat Co by Ronald Reagan was another one of those moments exactly where we forget that that then told everybody else you can go out and

destroy union two.

possible for your company to be productive. So, whether it's there on the boards or you are genuinely working toward these so we're all rowing in the same direction. We don't have that now, but I think we may get that if no other reason, young people are going to demand it.

but it was important at the time, and it's why I was able to go to college. Little did he know how important that would be in that moment. Well, guess what. That's why I am here to tell you about Etho's life. They can provide you with peace of mind knowing your family is protected even if the worst comes to pass. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy, all designed to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. There's no complicated process,

and it's one hundred percent online. There's no medical exam require you just answer a few health questions online. You can get a quote in as little as ten minutes, and you can get same day coverage without ever leaving your home. You can get up to three million dollars in coverage, and some policies start as low as two dollars a day that would be billed monthly. As of March twenty twenty five, Business Insider named Ethos the number

one no medical exam instant life insurance provider. So protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free

quoted ethos dot com slash chuck. So again, that's Ethos dot com slash chuck. Application times may vary and the rates themselves may vary as well, but trust me, life insurance is something you should really think about, especially if you've got a growing family, how do you eliminate You know, a lot of this take the union issue is that

are classified. Sometimes people get blinded by race and ethnicity, when really our divides have always been class, and race and ethnicity have been sort of used as wedges to to to advance a class argument one way or the other. You know, well, maybe it's impossible, and maybe I'm asking you a political question and you're not offering a political question. But that seems to be something that we've got to get over as a culture before we all embrace a union mindset.

anybody at SEIU exactly.

worker in mind? What made me actually think that I was sort of onto something here because I've been writing this book for an eternity. But it was the twenties, it was before the twenty sixteen election. We heard all of this, oh the angry middle class, and Hillary Clinton

and Donald Trump were talking about how much they loved the middle class and the angst of the middle class. And then I kept asking, so, exactly which middle class are we talking about here? Because it is absolutely true, absolutely true, that there is economic inequality and that there is anxiety. There's economic anxiety, but that has been true

for black and Latunal workers forever. The shift that we're seeing now is the same way that the black and Latino middle class has been treated, is the way the entire middle class is being treated. And if we can get lower and middle income workers to say, this is not tribalism, this is not people that don't look like us,

we are all being treated the same way. None of us can afford to send our kids to college, none of us can find a forty hour full time job where we are called an employee, and none of us

can find an affordable housing either.

that they aren't. And that's okay. It's your job as the politician to figure out a message that both appeals to them and at the same you know, in a self centered way, but at the same time can help help a greater good. Where do you prioritize poverty programs

in your vision here for a renewed middle class? Or and you sort of see in an odd way that it kind of if you revive a intentionally revive a middle class, right, because essentially we're arguing that we intentionally dismantled it, so you've got to intentionally bring it back that you're actually creating an anti poverty program without having to target the poor.

focus of this class. And then I realized that my emphasis in teaching and also in the book is the goal in this country has always been to take people from being poor to being middle income upward. Mobility is wired into the DNA of people in this country. So

though I am focusing mostly on the middle class. I need us to be sure that we're doing things to help poor people to become somewhat financially stable, because without that, they can't become middle class. And looping back to a comment that you made earlier, everybody wants to be middle class. It's the norm. It's viewed as you know, sort of apple pie and and America and the national anthem. Given that,

I think we need to say, let's focus on the middle class, because people who are poor are aspiring to be middle class.

tax credits for being innovative, but not be forced to do anything for the human beings that you have now caused to lose their jobs. So again, if the lower income people that want to become middle class, and if the middle class folks who would like to remain middle class for the rest of their lives looked up economically and said those are the problems, rather than looking around at each other and saying, well, because that person is of a different race, so that person is a different ethnicity,

they're are the problem. I think we could actually work on some solutions here.

the car right, whether it was electricity, personalized, you know, getting it to any place. You know, more and more that we got it, and we had to come up with a whole bunch of laws because left, you know, whether it was the oil barons, the railroad barons, the auto barons, left of their own device. They were you know, not everybody was going to be like mister Hershey, who thought I'm going to build a city with an amusement park and have this wonderful community. There were a few

companies people like that, but not many Hershey. I find that to be just just as a quick sort of a sidetrack here. Where do you put Hershey in sort of that in that world of you know, should corporations behave the way he did in building a community and wanting to have that or was that just sort of

an outlier type of thing that wouldn't work for other industries.

will always be a Costco member. When I go into Costco, these are the happiest employees you will ever see. I took my children. Now we're twenty two and twenty five, but we and their boys so they would eat everything that wasn't nailed down. We'd go into Costco and get those samples. They have gone back now as adults and have seen some of the same employees that used to allow them to raid the samples when they were children. So it can work. It definitely can work.

are struggling. They are not struggling because of race issues and class issues. They are struggling because they don't know how they're going to pay their bills at the end of this month. So if you want these people to continue to support you, you're going to have to figure out a way not to just say they're doing okay,

but to actually help them to do okay. We can't He will not be able to continue to tell people that the affordability issue is a hoax, because at the end of every month, when people don't have enough to pay their bills for that month, they know it's not a hoax because they're living it.

middle class. It will drive people into one direction or the other, but it will drive them into you know, is this We've got ten years, We've got twenty years? Is this fear of a lost generation? What is your timetable here of like, look, regardless of whether they your book is the blueprint, We've got to do something about saving the middle class and expanding it rather than what we've seen.

We need to look a little bit to the history, though, I want to focus going forward to say how do these economies end? They don't end well. So the fact that there was a Great Gatsby party at Mara a Lago over Christmas, I thought, oh, that is a symbol that you perhaps really don't want to have.

it ain't going to be you. But you know what, if we don't have that mindset that you know, that is sort of that is what has always sort of created the engine of growth in this in this country. So, you know, how do you embrace the aspiration? You know, making middle class aspirational?

stable economically and politically. To the point that you've just made, we have got to make young people believe that if they work hard, they try hard, things will be good for them or things will get better.

he talk about the middle class. He could talk to the middle class because there was a point in his life when he was poor, right, And so when you have gone, when you understand the importance of upward mobility, that you were a poor kid in arc and Hope, Arkansas who ultimately occupied sixteen hundred Pennsylvania abvenue, you can speak about the struggles of the poor and what it takes to get from there to where he was because he literally had to do it.