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- According to exit polls
and again, we don't know
and we may not know for a long time actually what happened,
but according to exit polls,
it seems as though many people said to themselves
echoing and parroting what they heard on Fox News
and from Donald Trump's tweets that he is a business man,
and therefore he knows a lot about the economy
and therefore he is better for the economy
than is Joe Biden.
That's belied by the facts actually
although up until the pandemic
the economy was doing quite well.
It was a recovery that started under Barack Obama
and slowed down under Donald Trump.
Manufacturing jobs have almost not come back at all.
And the tariffs that Donald Trump used
and also the tax policy that he employed,
those are the two big economic policies,
both have hurt average working people, not help them.
But they, again accepted what I considered a big lie.
I think, first of all,
you have a very, very large working class people
who are hourly workers.
Most of whom have not had a college education
or not a college degree,
who have not seen an increase in their wages
adjusted for inflation for 40 years.
There's a lot of frustration, a lot of anger,
a lot of anxiety among this very, very large group.
And they seem to have, and again, we'll know more
but they seem to have gone with Trump
because he sounded stylistically anti-establishment.
He sounded as if he was one of them.
And Joe Biden has been in politics for 50 years.
Joe Biden could not sound antiestablishment.
And that's my reading of it.
Again, we'll probably know much more in the future.
I think it's clear, particularly now, after the Corona virus
how much of our social safety net is really in tatters.
It was invented in the 1930s.
It worked pretty well in the 1950s
and sixties and seventies,
but when we have a calamity,
or when we have a deep recession,
such as what we are having now or the 2008 recession,
we can see there are just too many holes in the safety net.
The changes that were made by Bill Clinton
in terms of welfare,
moving over to the temporary assistance for needy families
also have not proven to be helpful
for families in deep need and in desperate need,
and there are too many of those families right now.
So it is time for an overhaul.
I don't believe if the Republicans keep the Senate
that we're going to be able to rely
on the federal government to make that kind of overhaul,
regardless of what Joe Biden wants.
It's going to fall more and more to the states.
Certain states like California, and the state of Washington,
Massachusetts, New York will probably continue to be
in the vanguard of overhauling these safety nets
although they don't have very much money.
You see the irony now
is that at a time when it is most important
for the federal government to come up
with a big stimulus package
and repair these kinds of safety nets
and help stimulate jobs with a big infrastructure program,
it's very unlikely that the federal government
is gonna be able to do that.
So we're really talking about a long-term plan,
a longterm agenda, maybe after the midterms of 2022
or maybe after the presidential election of 2024, who knows.
But undoubtedly the safety net is one of the big obstacles
to this country being where it should be
in terms of equal opportunity,
in terms of overcoming the deep frustrations
and also the anxieties that so many people have right now
that are completely rational.
I regret that Proposition 22 passed.
I think it's one of the worst examples
of how a few big corporations
with great stakes and profits at an issue
can spend almost unlimited amounts of money,
in this case over $200 million,
in fact, it was closer to 300 million
about the last data I have,
on getting political changes
that are good for the companies,
but not good for the country as a whole.
I think Proposition 22 is opening the gates
to employers misclassifying,
reclassifying workers as independent contractors,
and it's not good for workers.
I think that really Lyft and Uber
have pulled the wool over voters eyes.
They chose also the weakness of the proposition system
which was a very good system initially,
it was a kind of progressive era,
reform in California at the turn of the
and the beginning of the 20th century,
but it has been distorted and distended
and in ways that the reformers never dreamt of.
Most Californians who voted for it,
I don't think they,
frankly I don't think they had the facts.
I don't think they really understood the ramifications
of what they were voting for.
Biden administration really is going to be handicapped
if it doesn't have the Senate.
Now it may, I mean, who knows what's going to happen
if there are runoffs in Georgia, two runoffs possibly,
that could theoretically give the Senate
back to the Democrats if Joe Biden is president
and Kamala Harris is the determining vote in the Senate.
So I don't wanna close the door to that,
but as a practical matter it seems unlikely right now.
And so the question is what can the Biden administration do
without the Senate?
It certainly can reverse the Trump executive orders
that were very harmful to the environment, to workers,
to public safety,
to many of the concerns that we have
about widening inequality.
Also can overturn many of those regulations
coming out of places like the Federal Trade Commission
under Trump,
supposed to be an independent commission
but did not actually act independently.
The labor department and also regulations
that were eviscerated
under Trump's Environmental Protection Agency.
So much can be done.
The real question is, can you go beyond that?
Can Joe Biden create more executive orders,
more regulations that help reduce inequality
and in what areas could he?
I think in labor and the department of labor
there could be more regulations enhancing,
for example, not only the level
at which workers are considered to be eligible
for time-and-a-half overtime.
And that there's no reason that the department of labor
can't do that by its own regulations.
But also cracking down on employers
who engage in wage theft of various ways,
and we know that they're doing it,
cracking down on employers
that sacrifice the safety of workers
for making a profit.
OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
has been on life support under Trump
and under the Trump administration.
There are things that can be done
and should be done in other areas of public policy.
For example, it is possible in education and job training
and also going to some of the environmental areas
to work on the catastrophe of environmental racism,
if you wanna use that term.
Ways in which kind of lack of concern for the environment
has imposed the harshest kind of conditions on the poor
particularly disproportionately black and Latinx people.
There are things that can be done and should be done
in consumer protection and investor protection.
Again, for the most vulnerable people
who are still getting shafted
by financial schemes
that make it very difficult for them to get by.
Not only financial fraud,
but also the ways in which finance companies
and big banks are using the kind of red lining
that they have been officially proscribed,
prevented from using by law.
but nevertheless are still denying black people
and brown people the wherewithal,
the same rates that they give for,
for example, mortgages to white people.
So all across the board,
there are ways in which a Biden administration
can improve things.
The question is how much can they improve things
without legislation?
There also in addition to environmental racism
and labor department,
the justice department can change
under a Biden administration,
to the point where there could be justice reforms
in terms of prison reforms, prosecutorial reforms,
that don't need the congressional action.
A lot of this is a matter
of how the criminal justice system operates.
And again, although much of the criminal system,
criminal justice system is under state law,
there are things that the justice department
can do differently and should do differently,
and maybe Joe Biden, even though he has
a past that suggests, and Kamala Harris as well,
a past that suggest that they are prosecutorially oriented
maybe, just maybe, they have learned their lesson.
I think in all of these respects,
the more that progressive's can organize and mobilize
and put pressure on the Biden administration,
the more likely it is
that that administration will actually use executive orders
and regulatory changes to generate more just outcomes,
more socially fair outcomes.
If it's called democratic socialism
or if it has the word socialism in it,
I think we're probably going to have
to wait another 50 years
before a majority of Americans accept anything.
I mean, yes, we did accept in 1935
something called social security
but even that was a big, big fight.
I think if we get out of the ism category
and out of the labels,
there are many things that Americans want.
In fact, it seems if polls are to be believed
and I don't believe polls very much anymore.
I didn't really, I was skeptical about polls
even before these last two elections,
but nevertheless, we don't have very much else to go by.
Those polls do show a majority of Americans
wanting Medicare for all, for example,
or a single payer system.
I think that we will continue to inch our way
in that direction.
With regard to a universal basic income,
we'll probably see some progress made
on expanding the earned income tax credit
in the direction of a universal basic income.
In other words, a larger and more generous
and more accessible earned income tax credit
gets us toward a universal basic income.
No, it doesn't get us there obviously,
but it gets us toward a universal basic income
and I can see us moving in that direction.
I think that there's going to be
a lot of skepticism
on the part of a large part of American public
about government and governments capacity
to do anything very well.
And that skepticism ironically
has been enhanced by the hapless,
if not malicious government we've had
in the Trump administration.
So once again, sadly, ironically, paradoxically,
conservatives and right-wingers are being rewarded
for their own incompetence in terms of their theme
that government can't do very much.
We also are going to have the specter
of a Biden administration
cleaning up the mess left by
a Republican Trump administration
in terms of the economy,
and in this case, the pandemic.
Well you may recall,
the administration of Barack Obama
also spent the first two years
cleaning up an economic mess,
and the administration of Bill Clinton
in which I was directly involved
spent the first two years cleaning up another economic mess.
So sadly, and again paradoxically,
we are likely to have a situation where Democrats hands
are tied because Republicans did such a bad job.
Let's take the state level.
I think we are blessed,
and I'm gonna continue to express my values.
And it may be that people disagree with my value system
and that's perfectly right,
people can disagree with that.
But in terms of my value system
we are blessed being in a very progressive state,
that is a very large state, a very competent government.
It's not as progressive a state
as many people perhaps wanted it to be
given the results of a bunch of propositions.
But nevertheless, it is a state that is able to do a lot.
And I think on issues of safety nets,
education, infrastructure, and the environment
California will continue to lead the way.
I think Goldman students have a great deal of opportunity
at the state and local levels in California,
also in the state of Washington.
The state of Washington,
I've been watching very carefully,
it's on the cusp of some major reforms,
particularly with regard to Fiscal Policy and taxation.
Elsewhere around the country
there are some terrific places to be.
In Massachusetts under Republican governor Charlie Baker,
there is a lot of opportunity for major reforms,
and Charlie Baker, governor Baker has done a great job.
The question that remains in my mind
is what can students do in Washington
if they really do wanna make change at the federal level?
The Biden administration as I said,
there are opportunities to do things
but let's not, you know, let's be realistic
about the limitations given Mitch McConnell
and the Republican control over
essentially, a kind of a choke-hold, a veto,
over anything coming out,
anything bold and large
coming out of the federal government.
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