Gini in The Time of Covid-19

- We must take a collective responsibility for the inequality of the unjust laws and systems created.

God did not make us poor.

Greed and abuse and power make us poor.

- The great challenge is that economic and social mobility now has stalled out.

- This increasing equality is most pronounced in our country, and it challenges the very essence of who we are as a people.

- People are working full-time and are hungry.

People are working full-time in this country for very little money.

They're not poor enough to get help.

They don't make enough to get by.

They're working while they're rationing their insulin, and they're skipping their meds because can't afford food and healthcare at the same time.

So shame on you.

[dramatic music] - When you look at the Gini based on people's take-home pay, in other words, what they actually have to spend after they pay their taxes and after they receive certain benefits from the government, what we see is that the US is by far the most unequal amongst the OECD countries.

- COVID-19 has really uncovered all of the fragilities across the US economy and across our society in ways that we always knew were there, but really have become quite more pronounced in the face of this health crisis.

- You know, when we got hit with this in March, immediately, we saw a lot of our families, and pretty much families that are working, you know, several jobs to keep food in their homes, they were losing their jobs immediately.

[tense music] - It's amazing because we used to have this small program and we used to have some families that had lost their job momentarily, but they would come in and come and go.

But now we have a whole group of new people that have lost their job.

We see a lot of men.

Men did not come to the food program.

Very few men [indistinct].

But now we see young men coming into the food program.

The numbers have gone up at least six times.

- This pandemic has certainly exacerbated preexisting economic inequalities and put a spotlight on glaring and appalling health disparities.

- Rich kids are bubble wrapped.

Rich people are bubble wrapped.

We have good insurance.

We have good jobs in a pandemic.

We can work at home, and it's the poor who get hit so much harder by all of these things that relate to no health insurance, not good health, not good jobs.

And the pandemic has just put an exponential focus on that and added exponential costs as well.

- Before COVID-19, we had about 37 million people in the US living in food insecure households.

Some of the latest figures that we're seeing is that 20% of people are reporting having had some food insecurity since February.

What we have seen in African American households are for every five individuals, two are experiencing food insecurity.

For Hispanic families, that number might be getting closer to 50%.

- This morning, as I was looking at my calendar and trying to-- you know, to wrap my head around what I had to do today, I was thinking about the kids-- the kids in the school system being fed.

That's a huge topic here in West Virginia.

- Millions of children throughout the United States rely on the meals that they get through their school as their primary source of nutrition.

[stirring music] - We learned on Friday, March 13th, that we were gonna close for two weeks.

So we jumped into it and started serving meals the following Monday.

Our numbers have grown since.

Here in the elementary school, 46 of our families are free and reduced.

So they rely on our school meals during the school year, let alone, during this time when some families are out of work, they don't know when they'll be receiving income again.

So the school is so important to continue these services to make sure no child is food insecure.

- We've seen research come out of numerous research institutes, Johns Hopkins and others, showing that Blacks are disproportionately exposed to both the virus' deadly outcomes and hospitalizations.

- So if you work in a bar or a restaurant or in the hospitality industry or in retail trade or many other areas, many of which are manned by or womaned by low-wage workers, you are going to be in much greater trouble than those of us in white-collar work that can be done from home.

- What I'd like to also point to is that, you know, employers and their choices and the values that they place on the lives of workers are also implicated in this crisis.

We've seen here in JBS meat processing plants in Greeley, Colorado have delayed and dragged their feet on mass testing, encouraging workers, despite them being sick, to come to work.

And all of this is a confluence of not just a pandemic.

It's a crisis of inequality, a crisis of structural racist policies, and a crisis of precariousness of vulnerable populations.

- Our systems are very vulnerable to a crisis like this.

And so we can see that in the incredibly high unemployment rate, the fact that we're really struggling to ensure that people have access to unemployment benefits, enormous food lines that we've seen.

- So the United States' response to this has been a typical patchwork response, as opposed to what you might call a systemic or structural response, but is still leaving people out, and that's the problem.

- We need to start having a conversation about the fact that the safety net programs really-- the metaphor I use is that, you know, if you're watching, like, an "Indiana Jones" movie, and someone's walking through the jungle, when they step on that net, and it picks them up and it throws them in the tree.

That's what this safety net does to Americans.

You know, and so you're hanging up there, and you're struggling, and you're struggling, and you're struggling, just waiting for that miracle of someone coming to, you know, let you stand on your feet again.

- Federal assistance programs need to be strengthened so that they are available to come into play when economic conditions reveal themselves, as opposed to when the pain is already set, and we see the pain, and we say, "oh, my gosh, we need to act now."

The charities can't do it alone.

- It's a big family.

It's a five family.

[indistinct chatter] - The reason that we set up the food pantry 11 years ago was because this county is famous for having true income disparity.

The people that we serve are always going to be there.

Nothing is going to change for them.

They might get that stimulus package, but even so, that's a drop in the bucket when you think about it.

We will still be here.

We will still be giving them as much food as we possibly can.

- We've allowed charity to replace what should have been a pursuit of a more just and equitable system.

I've said this many, many times, but charity is based on the redemption of the giver, when it should have been based on the liberation of the receiver.

- And then we have the fact that the safety net in America, it was fragile to begin with and is being overwhelmed now.

It's good that our Congress acted reasonably quickly to put some big relief packages in place.

But one of the problems is that our government has been neglected for a long time.

And the result is a lot of the systems that are supposed to be getting assistance out to people aren't working terribly efficiently right now.

So a lot of that relief has been delayed.

- My view is that this is only exposing and revealing things that have already existed.

This accentuates them, exacerbates them, but this should be no surprise, what we're seeing when you look at who suffers the most at a time like this.

It's the same groups that suffer in so-called normal times.

- Until COVID, we boasted booming stock markets, very low unemployment levels.

Well, it turns out our low unemployment was masking 20% of prime-age males out of the labor force.

The booming stock markets were masking a lot of people just in desperation with very insecure jobs and in terrible shape.

- As of a couple years ago, the most recent data we have, about 160,000 families in the United States with average wealth of $72 million.

And that is more than the bottom 90% of those in the United States combined.

So this is a real statement of the massive wealth inequality that we have here in this country.

- Whatever economic growth we've had, it's been very unevenly distributed.

So the people in the middle are not getting ahead.

Most of the gains from growth are going to people at the very, very top of the income distribution.

- The rich are getting richer, and the poor are just staying poor.

And our middle income people are just hanging on.

- People like me, who can sit in my apartment and look at my stock portfolio, have made more and more and more money.

Regular working Americans have been making less and less and less money as a percentage of the entire income of our country.

That is making inequality get worse.

- Rich people are seeing their incomes grow by probably 6 or 7%.

And everybody else in America, the bottom 90%, is seeing their incomes grow by something much less than 3%.

That is the story of inequality.

- How many of us are being made--forced to make decisions between life and death, simply because we're working for $10.50 or $11 an hour?

For anyone to look at me and be able to tell me that anyone deserves that, you know, or that it's the person's problem and not the country's problem.

- So the wealth gap in this country is, um-- it's deplorable.

And I think what makes it more deplorable is it was intentional.

[dramatic music] And as long as this country is set up in a way where we're gonna have haves and have-nots, it's gonna be extremely difficult to start to see a shift in the wealth gap in the country.

- While people of color are the ones that clearly hurt the most, low-income whites are not doing much better either.

So while race and color are critical dimensions, class is also a very key dimension.

And we can't look at it as either-or.

They work together in very harmful ways for people who happen to be Black, Hispanic, or low-income whites.

- White communities are falling behind, especially those, you know, left behind in rural communities.

The thing about structural racism, the way that we've, you know, created and designed in this country, it has not only trapped Black Americans.

It's trapped every other minority group.

And when I mean minority, I mean economic minorities and racial minorities.

So it's done such a good job of trapping people in poverty for generations, that now the same people who this was never designed for are now victim to these--to this very vicious and cruel system.

- Families that have lower income are also more vulnerable to economic shocks because they also are less likely to have assets to fall back on, less likely to own their own home, especially after the Great Recession when so many millions of American families lost their homes.

- One of the statistics that has startled many of us, I believe, is the fact that at least half the country has indicated that they couldn't afford a sudden, unexpected $400 expense.

That's over 160 million people in the United States of America.

- I think I sit, like, $24,000 above the poverty guidelines right now.

And then I had to put my car in the shop this week, Like $800 to keep me working, to keep my family mobile.

You know, that's gonna have me choosing, okay, so which utility company can I call and ask if we could work out a payment arrangement?

- The Patriotic Millionaires is a group of hundreds of wealthy investors and businesspeople from around the United States.

And we are really concerned that the growing inequality in our country is destabilizing.

People are not gonna take it anymore.

And we are looking at our own long-term, enlightened self-interest and realizing that we have to change the course of this nation, or our children are not gonna grow up in the same United States where we grew up.

- The American dream is not working for the vast majority of us at this point.

- There's a team at Harvard University, led by Raj Chetty, that's done some very interesting work on the upward mobility of American families and individuals.

And what they find is that mobility has declined quite sharply over time.

If, for example, you were born back in the 1940s, you had a very, very high chance of doing better than your parents did when you became an adult.

And about 90% of those children actually improved on their parent's standard of living.

But if we fast-forward to around 1980, only about half of the people born that year were doing better economically than their parents did once they became adults.

- We don't talk about that, you know, the dwindling away of the middle class in America.

So I just think that's-- it's kind of like that just having a stable and comfortable life where you don't have to worry, you know, where you have enough money in your bank account for an emergency fund to pay six months-worth of bills if you lost your job.

I've never, and I'm almost 50 years old, but I've always worked since the age of 16.

And I've never been able to get to that form of financial stability.

And so it's almost like, will it ever happen?

You know, does it require retirement accounts, and how are you supposed to put money into a retirement account when you need every single penny, every check, to be able to make sure that your family is taken care of?

You know, and so it just seems like it's this unattainable pie in the sky for that great cushy American life.

- If you ask Americans in a survey whether they think their children are gonna do better than they did in life, overwhelmingly, they are beginning to say no.

They are not hopeful about their children's prospects.

- A lot of things changed in the United States in the 1970s and '80s.

First, we had built up these really strong institutions that constrained high inequality at the top and provided counterweights to concentrated economic power.

The 1970s were the height of union coverage in the United States.

It was when we were enforcing our antitrust provisions, making sure that we had a competitive market.

And of course, the 1960s were the peak of taxation for those at the top of the income ladder.

So you had these various ways that we were putting these guardrails on high-end inequality and providing these counterweights across our society.

Of course, the late '60s was also when we put into place Medicaid and programs that expanded the safety net in really important ways.

[dramatic music] - I don't know if people sit and realize, you know, gas is like, what, $2.59, $2.60 a gallon here.

You know, so if you're working--West Virginia's minimum wage is $8.75 an hour, which is considerably higher than the federal minimum wage, is $7.25.

But what, you're working three hours just to put, you know, gas in your tank, and it's ridiculous.

And the greatest country in the world, and too many of us are-- what do they say, two paychecks away from homelessness?

- This is the fact that 62 million people in this country work every day without a living wage.

And if you just raised it to $15, you would have over 300 and some billion dollars going into the economy.

It is amazing to us, as people of faith, When we sit here and look, and we're showing-- they're showing tomorrow prices.

- We have in this country, for a long time, advanced capitalism and financial capital at the expense of workers.

We now are in a place where large corporations have decided that workers are a fungible cost center to be sacrificed in service of shareholder primacy.

- There was a social norm-- really a business norm, back in, say, the 1960s or '70s, that the CEO or the top executives in a company shouldn't earn that much more than the average worker.

And the ratio was something like 30 to 1.

And now it's more in the neighborhood of 300 to 1.

- Since I graduated from high school in 1978, the average pay for the CEOs of our major corporations has gone up over a thousand percent.

People are making ten times more-- over 11 times more than they were back then if you're the CEO of a big corporation.

If you are like most regular working Americans, pay has gone up 13% or 14% over all that time.

- We've sort of broken down the institutions in our labor markets, which make it harder for somebody to start as a janitor and work their way up to, you know, senior management.

Now, if you start as a janitor, you probably work for a subcontractor.

You don't actually even work for the firm that you are a part of.

There's no opportunity for you to work your way up.

You're just stuck as a janitor.

- In America, labor unions have been important, but much less important than in almost any European country.

But they became more powerful after 1935.

We begin to get unions that represent entire industries like the United Auto Workers or the United Steel Workers.

But after that, their power begins to decline, and the labor movement begins to weaken.

These big industries like steel and auto are facing foreign competition, putting pressure on their workers.

- Only about 7% of workers are members of a union, which is, of course, a lower share than before we made the right to bargain collectively legal in the 1930s.

So we have this very, very small share of folks that are in unions.

- People shouldn't have to work free jobs.

That's the point.

People shouldn't work without healthcare.

That's the point.

People shouldn't have to pray to wait for food to come on their table.

That's the point.

If you're working, you should be making a living wage, you should have healthcare in the richest nation in the world.

Every one of you that come into this chamber, one of the first things you get is free healthcare, 'cause we pay for it.

[dramatic music] - I'm going to--my own story is that I was raised believing that all you have to do is get a college degree.

Get a college degree, and then you're gonna get a great job, and you're gonna have the nice house with the picket fence.

You know, the truth of the matter is, I know people here in West Virginia with bachelor's degrees who are working for $15,000 a year.

You know, and then with all this insurmountable student loan debt.

And so it just seems as if all the promises of the generations-- maybe not even promises, but maybe dreams of our ancestors, have kind of--they've been forced to just be whittled away because it's just not the reality.

You know, the reality anymore is that a four-year degree doesn't necessarily promise you a better life.

And it's not like a golden ticket, you know, to escape poverty or, um, even to reach that middle class, I think.

- I've known since at least the day I graduated from college, that the primary difference in my life versus other people in my family was just educational opportunity.

And so I've always known that education was the pillar of progress for people and families.

I will continue to listen to you and work with you, and I'm gonna continue to encourage my colleagues to do the same.

My hope is that we will be able to find the safest way possible to reopen schools, but that we will do it together.

- The United States has a very unequal education system.

In our country, most education is funded at the local level.

So very wealthy communities have plenty of money for educating their children.

Poor communities have far less money for educating their children.

That means that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, because the children of the rich people have this enormous head start over everyone else.

- And that's absolutely the fault of the Supreme Court.

In two decisions, in 1973 and 1974, the Court said, "We are not gonna require states to provide equal funding to school districts," so they can fund poor areas much less than they fund wealthy areas.

"And we're not gonna force states to integrate across urban-suburban lines."

Those two decisions ensured that we would have what we have today, which is many very poor, very segregated schools where the children who go to them are absolutely pointed in the wrong direction, given so much less opportunity than wealthy kids in the suburbs.

- We have pared back our investments in education across all levels.

And of course, we're behind other countries in making investments in early childhood education, which scholars will now tell you is the most important place that we could be investing.

- And this is something that we've been working on in DC.

It's something that people across the country have been focusing on for years, really understanding, even from a scientific point of view, how important these early years of learning are and how much they can impact people's futures.

So education is always gonna be the most important key to opportunity.

But I also know that early childhood education is a place where that opportunity gap between children of color and their white peers starts.

And so that's where I had to start my work.

- Millennials, who now make up the largest segment of the US population, is not starting businesses like the baby boomers did at their age before them.

Why?

They are suffering under $1.5 trillion worth of student loan debt, the lowest home ownership rates in history.

And so many of them can't even dream of starting a business, much less finding the resources, the seed capital, to fund those ventures.

Oftentimes, you know, those seed capital sources come from loans from family and friends, personal credit cards, personal savings.

- Unlike any other country, we make you leave college with debt that you have for the rest of your life.

No other country I know of, the legacy of higher education is higher debt.

It's just uniquely American.

[dramatic music] - COVID scares the hell out of me, because not only am I the only parent of two kids, but what's gonna happen, Lord forbid, if it really did get me hospitalized?

Yeah, I get to tell everyone, no, I don't have preexisting conditions, because I don't have insurance, and I can't go to the doctor to find out what those are.

- We've got an insurance system where 83 million people are either uninsured or under-insured.

And that exposes them to the-- I think, the worst outcomes.

[somber music] - A big number just devalues all those lives that it represents.

I wanted to have a flag for each individual, because we have to value the individual.

You know, when I was growing up, I knew that America was the greatest country in the world.

But to, right now, have that greatness be in COVID deaths.

It's humiliating.

It's angering.

It's unacceptable, just utterly unacceptable.

Communities of color were disproportionately represented.

And they are disproportionately represented here because they're economically disadvantaged oftentimes, because they're the ones who have had to be at the front lines, and because they're the ones for whom healthcare is least affordable.

That is one of the reasons why I created this.

- What we've done is we've put all the responsibility for taking care of ourselves as individuals on ourselves.

And it generates a dynamic where disproportionately we see Black folks dying, but it's poor folk dying in general.

- Now, the question is, as a result of this pandemic, do we do something fundamental about the lack of health insurance coverage for now about 27 million people?

That number will go up because coverage in our country is tied to work.

And when you're out of work, there goes your coverage.

Talk about taking a bad situation and making it worse, the way we link health coverage to employment.

- And they argue that, we have to-- we, the drug companies, have to charge these prices for drugs, because we need to make that money to be able to do the research to keep putting drugs into the marketplace.

That's a phony argument.

Much more money is spent by the pharmaceutical industry on marketing, on advertising, on stock buybacks, on enormous pay packages to CEOs of those pharmaceutical companies.

There's awareness.

Members of Congress are aware that the cost of drugs is too high.

You cannot go to a town hall meeting-- and I've been to hundreds of them, without hearing people in the audience about how much they're paying for their medicine.

They're upset about it.

And they know that the drug companies are getting away with murder.

[dramatic music] - We have 2.2 million people who are in prisons or jails in our country.

It's enormous.

And they're disproportionately people of color.

People who already are in poverty, very low-income, are disproportionately the ones who get thrown into jail.

And someone who is poor gets poorer.

Mass incarceration has turned into industry.

An enormous part of the criminal system is run by people who directly are for-profit companies.

Of the 44 probation agencies that charge money, 13 of them are owned, they're private.

- So the District of Columbia, for example, our response to high crime in the '90s was more incarceration, more stern prosecution.

And what that did was that left so many communities without fathers, without, you know, male kind of role models.

And then when those people returned, they returned in a worse position than where they left.

So not only did they not have strong education and not have a rsum, but now they also had a criminal record.

And that starts to compound.

- Mass incarceration has devastated the Black American communities here.

We're seeing on our streets today massive protests calling for equity and equality and justice to try to reverse the harms that have been meted out in our streets.

And it shows up in our employment system.

This shows up when you see depressed rates of labor force participation for African American men, because one in three are likely to spend some time during their lifetime in prison.

- We really need to take a step back and understand what inequality means-- and in all of its forms.

You know, here in the United States, right now, we are really starting to confront the way that institutions don't support families of color, particularly Black people, and the violence that they experience at the hands of the institutions that are actually supposed to be protecting the safety of us all.

- When I was a young lawyer working on Capitol Hill for Congresswoman Norton, our delegate here in DC, my brother was returning from prison.

And my brother is an incredibly smart guy.

You know, we have a family that, despite not having a lot of financial resources, we are very loving, very warm, and very caring.

And so I saw the difficulties that my brother had reintegrating.

I saw how high the barriers were.

- The Supreme Court's acquiescence and support for criminalization of poverty is really striking and absolutely has contributed to the mass incarceration that we see in America today.

In the early 2000s, the Court had a very strong opportunity to change that.

It was brought a case by a man who was challenging California's "Three Strikes and You're Out" law.

He had stolen under $200 in children's videos, and because this constituted his third strike under the law, he was sentenced to 50 years to life in prison.

He challenged that under the eighth amendment, and the Supreme Court said no, but what is really striking is, within just a few months of that decision, the Supreme Court had a case in which a corporation challenged the punitive damages awarded against it in a civil lawsuit.

And the Supreme Court said those punitive damages against a huge corporation are too large.

You know, that's not fair to the corporation.

[dramatic music] - A lot of it is based on historic injustices and systemic racism that has happened in this country.

Things like redlining.

There are covenants that discriminated against people of color so that it allowed for white families to purchase homes and Black families not to.

And so, you know, 40, 50 years later, where those homes were maybe purchased for $5,000 and now are worth a million dollars, and so you have that wealth that went into white families.

It doesn't allow for those same things to exist in Black families.

- Displacement has run rampant in the District of Colombia.

This has really been deemed one of the hotbeds in the nation for gentrification.

And gentrification has, you know, a different meaning and different connotation to different people, but what is at the heart of it, what is ugliest about gentrification is the displacement of people who don't want to leave their home.

And so I'm a fifth-generation Washingtonian, but I'm one of the only members of my family that still lives in DC.

And that's not unique to my family.

That's something that we see, you know, across the Black community in DC.

It's something that we see across the entire city.

You know, housing has become so unaffordable here that only people with the highest paying jobs can afford to live here.

- The Ward 8 Homebuyers Club was a manifestation of the 11th Street Bridge Park Equitable Development Plan.

And ultimately we-- it was a tool that we can use as a part of our housing strategy to keep people from being displaced.

- Our mission is to help low- and moderate-income people build assets and get families in homes and help revitalize our communities.

We have a vision to help families end intergenerational poverty.

- Part of what we've tried to develop over the last three years is a roadmap for anybody trying to purchase.

We want to give them a clear path to those keys.

- Can a person that's making 40,000 under really afford a home-- I mean, get a home?

- The answer is yeah.

If you make under 40, and you're single person, your household is one, yes, you can, but it's probably gonna be a condo.

If you say to me, well, I need three bedrooms, two baths, a backyard, a front yard, and I'd like to one day be able to put up a playground, then I'm gonna tell you, yes, you can become a homeowner, but you got to move to West Virginia.

- [laughs] - Can you all see this?

- Yes.

- Okay, great.

- Going forward for those who are in the Homebuying Club, to be keeping us on track with these upcoming projects, to find us to be eligible and to walk us through opportunities that you might find out about that we might don't have information or knowledge to.

Like, you know, they're building up St. Elizabeth, they're building up in Northeast, they're building up throughout the entire city, And I'm sure that you all have information that might come across your desk about these homeowner-- these home projects.

So are you all gonna be keeping people in the loop?

Thank you.

- Yep.

That's what we do.

Yeah.

We have a saying, "We want our people to be first."

- Exactly.

- We've had over 600 people participate in the program, and we've had over 90 people that have actually purchased homes.

It really allows for families to-- it gives them a sense of hope that they're not just stuck in one mindset, but they can begin to dream.

[dramatic music] - Well, in the World Happiness Report, which ranks countries every year in terms of well-being, the US is number 19.

We're one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

So for our income levels, we are very, very low.

And we've fallen ten points.

And that is because of our deep inequality, not just inequality in income, but inequality in well-being, that people who are poor have much worse reports of well-being than people who are rich.

- We have a lot of research now on what Princeton researchers call deaths of despair, meaning that they have found that amongst white Americans who are middle aged, roughly, that they're actually dying in greater numbers than they used to.

They call them deaths of despair because they think that the deaths and the problems that come before are pretty related to the economic challenges that those individuals face.

- The American Academy of Family Physicians predict that because of the pandemic, an additional 150,000 Americans could die of, and I quote, "deaths from despair," meaning, deaths from suicide or drug or alcohol misuse.

- The force of this stuff's so addictive, opioids, it's the bad news.

I think Brandon, like everyone else involved with it, from the first dosage, the first party you're at that you get onto it, most people, it has the effect of having a lifetime stranglehold.

I think I have counted from right here, about here, up to 13 different ones of these stones within eyesight of people associated with drug related deaths.

Everybody needs something to do.

You know, you have a population here of 18 to 30-year-olds with not a lot to do but dope.

And when they have something to do, it needs to strike a passion, or they're not gonna do it.

And these folks need that kick-started.

And I think that something kind of dwindles, the flame dwindles, when you're numbed all the time, you're emotionally and physically numbed by the medication that you've illicitly ingested.

And if you have no assignment in life, you have no incentive to improve.

I think Jackson reflects, like other places in Ohio, Youngstown, Steubenville, you know, the great factories and furnaces and the smokestack places, steel mills, those solid jobs where benefits were covered, health insurance was available and got paid.

Schools were maintained.

Standard of living was livable.

Families were able to structure their operations with a certainty of how life was gonna be next week.

- All rise.

- All right.

You all can be seated.

And good morning.

Good morning, everybody.

Thank you for coming to the drug court, and we'll go on the record.

- I got my Sublocade.

- Yes.

You have a big first to discuss.

And it's called Sublocade?

- Mm-hmm.

- And Sublocade is the equivalent of Suboxone, but it's 30 days-worth... - Yeah.

- In your system, so you don't have to track down the pill every day.

You have to be alive to work.

And I know you wanted to desperately put it behind you.

I do.

Your problems here have been so serious that all this effort's been mounted for-- to prepare you to live, that you don't enjoy looking back on, none of you, I know that.

But it's part of your life.

Don't try to just do the minimum.

See how well you can excel.

Okay?

- The five dimensions of inequality, I think we often talk about, are income, education, race, health, and wealth.

And I think those are the five key dimensions, but the sixth one is stress.

- There is trauma associated with poverty.

What if the parents have mental illness that they can't get any care for because they don't have health insurance?

You know, so what if they just can't get out of bed in the morning to get their kids to school on time?

- We've done this work called the geography of desperation in the US.

And we find they tend to live in the heartland in places that have hollowed out economically.

And even then, a larger percent of the population is still living-- adult population, is still living in their parents homes.

Their health markers are terrible-- diabetes, smoking, obesity.

All of the things that track with objective markers of ill health Prime-age males out of the labor force are particularly overrepresented in addiction to opioids.

- West Virginia has been ravaged.

There have been stories where the pharmaceutical companies have shipped in so many opioids to a county that it was enough for over 400 pills for every man, woman, and child in the entire county.

Just this morning, as I was waiting for you to come, there was notice that went out here.

They do have an alert system, and it's, you know, an alert that the fact that there have been a lot of overdoses already.

This is before 8: 00 a.m. - Poor African Americans are three times as likely to be higher up on a 10-point optimism scale than are poor whites.

They're half as likely to report stress.

We know objectively that there is no way that poor African Americans experience less stress in objective terms.

This is a resilience story.

- We've managed to create a system where more and more people are left out, whether it's income, whether it's wealth, whether it's education, whether it's health.

On all those dimensions of equality, we fail the test of justice and equal society.

And sometimes we seem to be proud of it, which is the part that is most disturbing, is we should be ashamed, and yet we hold our heads up and say, you know, we're America.

We're doing it our way, and if it doesn't work out for you, well, isn't that too bad.

Poverty is a result not of bad luck.

It's a result of bad effort.

You just didn't try hard enough.

You didn't take advantage of this wonderful free market system.

You have only yourself to blame.

We're exceptional in that regard.

No other country looks at the poor and points a finger at them, and says, "It's all your fault," but we do.

[tense music] - So if you think about the American dream, you work hard, you get ahead.

If you're poor, you're lazy and you didn't work hard.

We are the land of opportunity.

- America is a nation of rugged individualism.

It comes from our frontier roots, the sense that every man and woman, mostly every man, can make it on their own.

We relish freedom.

We relish liberty, rugged individualism.

The individualism part is appealing.

The word "rugged" though, when you think about it, rugged, it means no, you're not gonna be able to succeed unless you can put up with a lot of bad stuff.

You got to be tough enough to handle it.

- And the idea is you're on your own and good luck.

Sometimes I'm not even sure about the good luck part.

That the federal government role should be minimized.

- There's a real paradox in America and especially in the heartland that relates to the fact that many of the people who need government the most are the ones who want it the least.

And I think the reason for this is because they are feeling that their way of life has been threatened by urban millennials and elites.

And they don't like the direction in which the culture is going.

One of the most amazing things about America right now is how much trust in institutions has declined, and especially trust in government, and especially trust in the federal government, as opposed to local government.

- And we've been fundamentally divided on the right role of government in our entire history, and the person who articulated that most was Ronald Reagan.

- Government is not the solution to our problem.

Government is the problem.

- Our government is not in tune with regular Americans who have to work for a living, is frankly because so many of our congresspeople have to spend so much of their time raising money.

I just stay home and wait for my phone to ring.

I've spoken to two of our congresspeople just today, for God's sakes.

And they call me, and they know exactly what I'm concerned about.

They know exactly what I care about because I'm the person they call when they want to make-- get more campaign contributions for their campaigns.

So it's not that they're bad people.

It's not that they take bribes.

But they spend so much time talking to the wealthy people that I think some of them have actually lost touch with what the rest of the people in their communities care about.

- The United States Congress has become much more representative of economic elites than it used to be.

So those who are representing us in elected office are richer and richer and richer and more disconnected from what the everyday experience is.

- Our policies and laws in this country are made by people who appear, at least on the outside, to be very privileged and very elite.

And so I don't understand how I can even feel represented by my elected officials, whenever there's no way in hell that they understand what my life is like out here.

- There are, I think, over 40,000 registered lobbyists in Washington, There are 435 members of the House and 100 members of the Senate.

They're pretty much outnumbered by the lobbyists.

The lobbying industry has been focused on repealing major parts of the fabric-- the social insurance fabric in our government.

And they've been pretty successful so far.

- The Supreme Court has given a blank check to wealthy people to control our political process.

The Court has continually struck down very reasonable, very important campaign finance laws that the American public supports.

Most notoriously, in the Citizens United case, where it said that corporations have the right to spend unlimited amount of money to win elections.

What this does is it says wealthy people can-- and wealthy corporations, can use their money to choose who represents us in Congress.

The US Supreme Court has really betrayed poor people terribly for the last 50 years in so many ways.

Many laws that hurt the poor could have been struck down.

Instead, the poor are really powerless under the US Constitution.

- We believe that the reason inequality is growing is because rich businesspeople and investors are paying taxes at a far lower rate than people who have to work for a living.

It's just not right.

The rich are getting richer and richer and richer, and actual working Americans... - Large corporations lobbied vigorously to have the Tax Cut Jobs Act passed in 2017.

And that saw that corporate tax rates go from 35% to 21%.

- We've lowered tax rates at the top significantly.

The other problem is we don't enforce the taxes we have on the books, especially when it comes to taxes at the top.

- In America, unlike in Europe and other places, the courts are a very powerful influence over our social policy.

And that's because in Congress, in this democratic system that we have, it's very hard to get any kind of consensus about anything.

Part of Obamacare was this offer from the federal government to pay essentially all of the health expenses for people that were below a certain income limit.

Remarkably, states like Missouri said, we're not gonna do that, we're against Obamacare.

We're not gonna-- we're not gonna create that new entitlement to medical care.

- So it's gone to the courts.

It's before the judicial system trying to undercut and undermine the Affordable Care Act.

It's really one of the-- one of the worst examples I've seen of having extreme partisanship interfere with legislation that the American people want.

People want better healthcare.

They want to be insured.

And I think it's disgraceful that that's how that process evolved.

- In the case of the Supreme Court, nine judges, it's much easier for them to be able to do things than it is for Congress.

- We have a Supreme Court today that is very actively working to promote inequality with its decisions.

And this didn't come about as an accident.

Richard Nixon ran for office on a promise to end the liberal Court and replace it with a conservative one.

He was elected, and in 1969, he went about doing that.

Nixon got the chance to appoint four justices.

And with those four appointments, he was able to completely change the direction of the Court.

The Court that emerged under Nixon was the Burger Court And it was a conservative Court with a conservative Chief Justice, Warren Burger, who had a conservative majority behind him.

Incredibly, for the last 50 years, that's the Court we've had.

- This is where I get emotional.

My oldest daughter is 16 now, and when she was 13, this job was a godsend for us, because it was more money than I've ever made.

You know, it felt like I was getting somewhere.

She overheard me telling a story one night to a friend about a man who had said, well, you know, something about me being poor.

It wasn't a negative comment whatsoever.

My daughter just-- like, she kind of lost it.

And she's like, why did he have to say that?

Why did he have to say you were poor?

Why couldn't he have said we were living in poverty?

- We have Millions of people who really believe they're being treated as second-class citizens.

And they're right.

It's because over the years, these inequalities have compounded over time.

And if that continues, it's not going to end well.

- I think we're at a moment of deep reckoning in this country.

And if we don't manage to come up with at least some sense of shared solidarity, some sense of bringing society back together in terms of a collective sense of responsibility for people who fall behind.

It doesn't mean we need to look like Sweden or Denmark.

We never will.

- I think of Paul Wellstone, Senator Paul Wellstone, who sadly died in a plane accident, a real champion of the middle class, the working class.

And his motto was, "Everybody does better when everybody does better."

- There's a really interesting question right now about whether the crisis with COVID-19 and the crisis with race in America that was revealed by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis... - Say his name!

all: George Floyd!

- Is going to be a kind of inflection point that causes us to make bigger reforms than we otherwise would.

- Now people are saying, you know what?

I think I get it.

I think I see.

And so there is an opportunity to make progress, but I also think that there's an opportunity for unity, especially now that you know, the plight, the difficulties of Black lives has been highlighted so sharply in this country, we can't deny it.

We shouldn't deny it, but now we can make progress as we come out of this COVID-19 pandemic.

And my hope and my prayer is that we'll do that.

- So I'm very excited about this time in history.

People often ask, how did we get social security?

It came out of a tremendous crisis, the Depression.

And we had a leader who said, this crisis is one we must address, not just for today, but forever.

And we need that type of response now, a new New Deal that says, this is not one shot.

This is a change in a structure of income support for all Americans in the United States.

- I mean, this is a tremendous opportunity 'cause it exposes what has been kind of fed as dogma over the last 40 years by one of our political parties that government's bad, big government is bad.

And I think what we're seeing now is, as people are saying, where's my face mask?

Where's my hospital support?

You know, where's my food system?

Where's my wage support?

I think people are recognizing that actually government has a tremendous role to play in their lives.

- Thankfully, now you've got progressive CEOs coming out and saying, you know, we have been at fault in advancing shareholder primacy at the risk of the welfare and well-being of our workforce, and this needs to be reversed.

- And then we need that policy agenda where we can show people that if we come together, we can build institutions that can work for everyone.

And that I think is the hardest thing, because that's gonna require we're building that trust.

'Cause right now, there's not a lot of trust in the United States that institutions will serve the common good.

- Poverty is one of the most urgent items on the agenda of modern life.

There is nothing new about poverty.

What is new however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.