David Pakman and guest David Packman dissect the 2024 election landscape, contrasting Packman's viral YouTube strategy with Trump's potential vaccine claims. They critique presidential debates as entertainment rather than policy tools, analyze withheld intelligence on Russian meddling, and examine the Kyle Rittenhouse case as a cultural symptom. The conversation further explores Biden's healthcare proposals versus Trump's coverage reductions, while unpacking Republican tax cuts through tribalism and debating minimum wage impacts against scarcity arguments, ultimately revealing deep ideological fractures in American politics. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Debates and Economic Turnout00:12:24
Hello, world.
My guest today has a really cool political commentary show on YouTube, and he's actually about to hit one million subscribers.
He's a really intelligent guy, and he makes me sound like a moron.
Please welcome David Packman.
Cool, man.
So, thanks again for doing this, man.
I know you're a super busy guy, especially with what you do and what's going on right now in politics.
These days, yeah.
Yeah.
There's so much stuff in the media to digest and to be able to talk about.
I feel like you must be busy.
Yeah.
I think it's a lot of people are confused when I say this, but I think it's actually good to limit the amount of stuff, of inputs.
So, I'll have some designated time to figure out what's happened in the last 24 hours.
What do I want to talk about tomorrow?
But then I also have time to just Totally unplugged.
So, usually from the time I'm done with the Friday show until I start preparing for the Monday show, I'm not even paying attention to what's going on in the news or politics because it does get pretty toxic and just exhausting.
So, I actually, it's more important for me to find time to just read things that have nothing to do with news, read philosophy and history and, you know, go biking and do that type of stuff because otherwise just the burnout is too, it happens to everybody if you don't.
Yeah.
So, what is your background?
Like, what, what, How did you get started in all this with commentary and political?
Your show, The David Pacman Show, before all this started, what were you doing?
Well, this started so long ago that I was just in college before the pre David Pacman Show era.
I was a junior in college and I was sort of dabbling in college radio, reading sports scores at halftime on the college radio station and that type of thing.
And I liked something about it, but it wasn't that exactly.
So when a community radio station started up in North, Hampton, Massachusetts, which is where I grew up.
After moving to the US, I just signed up and basically was given an hour every other week to do a show.
And that's how it started.
It went from once every other week to once a week, twice a week, four times a week.
And then, you know, for the last few years, it's been my full time thing five shows a week.
Wow.
So currently you're doing five shows a week?
Right.
We're a Monday through Friday show.
And then on top of the hour show that we do for the podcast and the YouTube clips, we'll do A members only show for our paid subscribers.
And then lately, there's a lot of live streaming as well.
You know, we had the conventions, we've got the debates upcoming.
So, this is like these three months are like the busiest of the four year phase.
Yeah.
One of my favorite things to watch is when Trump does the, when he addresses the media, like in the Rose Garden or whatnot, and you'll commentate over it.
That's my favorite thing to watch.
Yeah.
And what's crazy is I started that on a whim and people really seem to like it.
And I think what, What people tell me is that they have some sense that it's important to listen when the president is speaking, but it's also so unbearable for a lot of people in my audience who don't like the president, where doing it in a community setting with other like minded people is good.
And incredibly, during the Republican National Convention, some of our RNC streams actually had a bigger audience than Trump's own YouTube channel, which is crazy to think about.
Wow.
Yeah.
Do something interesting.
During the RNC, or I don't know.
The latest one he did that was in front of the White House with the White House in the background.
I tried watching another person who was doing something similar where they had like their face in the bottom left corner.
And I think it was on the Daily Wires channel.
The guy was sitting there like drinking some scotch or whatever.
And it was so different to what you were doing because he was just sitting there the whole time, like, mm hmm, exactly, exactly, exactly.
Like he was just like nodding his head, agreeing with everything the whole time.
And it was just so weird just to see like the difference in, in, uh, Opinion or just like the way people are who are on each side.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, if Joe Biden were to win, even though I'm going to vote for Joe Biden, I think that if I covered a similar Joe Biden event, I wouldn't be sitting there just nodding along to everything.
I would be critiquing it, but from my perspective, which is to Joe Biden's left.
So that's interesting that there's a crowd that just liked it all and just kind of ate it up.
Do you think that Trump being president has sort of helped this niche that you're in, this niche of political commentary or people that are more political on their YouTube channels or on any other media platforms?
Absolutely.
And I've talked, I've gotten people who call in and they say, Are you worried your show won't do as well if Joe Biden is the The president.
And it's like, well, it's not that I'm worried.
I know it won't do as well if Joe Biden is president, but that's okay.
And we're still, I mean, listen, if Joe Biden's president, if Trump loses, he'll be triggered for at least six months, if not longer.
So the Trump stuff is going to continue even if Joe Biden wins.
That's number one.
There's going to be no shortage of Trump stuff.
I don't see him disappearing.
I see him saying it was rigged.
I see him being around anyway.
But then we'll also have Republican obstruction like we saw during Barack Obama's presidency.
So we'll have that to talk about.
And we'll also be able to critique Joe Biden from the left.
And so I don't think there's going to be any shortage of material in a Joe Biden presidency.
And by the way, I'm not acting like it's definitely going to happen.
We could have another four years of Trump as well.
So, what do you see from your perspective happening, like as far between now and the election?
What do you see happening and why do you see that happening?
So, one of the things I've been predicting for a while is that at some point in October, Trump's going to say we got a vaccine.
And, um, It is going to have nothing to do with Donald Trump because Trump is not in the business of getting vaccines.
The vaccine may even be from a pharmaceutical company or university in another country.
But my prediction was that Donald Trump would say, I did it.
We got a vaccine.
Vote for me.
And in fact, we just learned about the Trump CDC sending out a letter to states on August 27th saying, be prepared for a vaccine in late October.
And so I think it's very clear at this point.
Point that if they need to make an emergency use authorization to claim that they got a vaccine, they've determined that it might help Trump get reelected if he can take credit for a vaccine.
So I'm almost certain we're going to see that before November 3rd.
What do you think is going to happen with the debates?
Do you think that those are actually going to happen?
Do you think that Biden is going to participate in that?
Yeah, I mean, so as of now, everybody's agreed to three presidential debates and one VP debate.
The dates are on the calendar.
They start in late September.
I do think there's a question of is it possible that there's some disagreement over the parameters and it ends up with somebody saying, I'm out?
So, for example, Joe Biden has asked for a live fact checker during the debates, which I think is obviously to his advantage and it's not to Trump's advantage.
I don't see any way Trump goes for that.
So, that could cause a problem.
Hopefully, the networks that are carrying the debates will be live fact checking, but I think the idea of an official live fact checker.
Trump's not going to go for that.
I don't think there's any way.
But it's possible that some of these disagreements could end up getting somebody to walk away.
I think I've said before, I don't really need debates this time around.
I mean, I'm fully decided.
It's really hard for me to imagine anybody being undecided at this point.
But if Joe Biden were to say, I won't debate, I think it would be objectively bad for him, particularly when there are people that are making the case that Biden cognitively isn't there.
I don't think it would be good optics for Biden to back out.
I think Trump could back out with less.
Of a repercussion, but I still don't think it would be good for either to say I'm not going to debate.
Yeah, the debates, it seems like the debates are just a lot more for entertainment, right?
A lot more like they're entertaining, they're good for TV, you can make a lot of money with the ads, the ad space during the debates because everybody's gonna watch them.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the issues, there's two issues.
One, I've never seen Donald Trump speak in depth about any issue.
So if the format allowed for 40 minutes on one question, I think it would be very bad for Donald Trump because he's not shown me ever that he can talk about an issue in that depth.
The other problem is it never gets to that because the format of the debates is meant to be more entertaining and less substantive.
So they don't want to talk about one thing for 40 minutes either.
Like a point to the debates is you're not going to change anybody's vote.
Do you think?
Like, I don't think anybody who voted in 2016 who's voting this year, I don't think a debate is going to change anyone's mind at this point.
My instinct is the same as yours.
And I recently interviewed a political scientist named Rachel Bidikoffer who feels very strongly that really it's about activating people who are already on your side or suppressing the vote of the other side more than it is about changing people's minds.
And if you think about it like at the personal level, if you had to either change someone's mind or just get somebody who already agrees with you to go out and vote, it's much easier to find people who agree with you and just to encourage them to vote than it is to actually change minds.
So the debates.
I don't think they are likely to change too many minds unless something goes really wrong.
Like, if you really make a mistake, that can change votes.
But the debates could activate different constituencies and maybe affect turnout.
What are like the biggest talking points that you've seen that people get riled up about the most on the left?
Like, as far as I know, one of the big things is, you know, obviously healthcare and like a living wage, right?
So, On any particular policy, you know, the left is a spectrum.
So to say here are the issues where my views are different than the left's, it sort of ignores that everything is on a spectrum.
I think right now, the most important and pressing issues, if you look at the data, are coronavirus, the economy, and race relations.
So certainly, like in 2016, the minimum wage was a big, big thing.
Is the Democratic Party going to support a $12 or a $15 an hour minimum wage, or what's going to be the minimum wage?
During the Democratic debates this year, there was a lot of debate about Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax versus Bernie Sanders' tax plan versus Joe Biden wanting to uncap taxes on Social Security.
You know, there's all these different proposals.
Right now, Americans are saying coronavirus is the top issue.
And on that, Joe Biden is very much ahead of Trump.
Number two is the economy.
And obviously, that relates to coronavirus because the reason we have the economy we have right now is because of coronavirus.
And number three, race relations.
And all three of those are not particularly good.
For Donald Trump.
Now, Republicans are typically strong on the economy.
And even right now, there are polls that have Trump ahead of Biden on the economy, but by very, very little.
Often the Republican candidate is five, 10 points ahead on who will better deal with the economy.
The latest Fox News poll has Trump one point ahead on the economy.
So those are really the three big issues right now.
Why?
So why is he not much farther ahead on the economy, in your view?
Well, I think people recognize that the economic Destruction of the virus is worse than it had to be because of his handling of the virus.
In other words, Trump didn't create the virus, of course, and every country had to deal with it, but other countries dealt with it in a way that was more responsible, and thus they mitigated the economic damage.
I've heard you use the term before.
Russia, Rittenhouse, and Intelligence00:13:22
What is an enlightened centrist?
Can you explain this to me?
Sure.
I found this interesting.
So there's kind of a movement of people.
And when I say this, this could be like your friends on Facebook.
Like I have friends on Facebook that fall under this umbrella.
Or.
There's media pundits that fall under this umbrella.
Like it exists kind of everywhere.
Yeah.
People who see politics and they sort of position themselves as being above the partisan fray.
They don't fall for the left's talking points and they don't fall for the right's talking points.
They are in the middle and they are objective and they are sort of unbiased arbiters of what each side says.
These are really people who are playing characters.
It doesn't really exist in the way that they want us to think of it, which is you can't believe these folks because they're partisan in this way, and you can't believe those folks because they're partisan in that way.
You can believe me because I've found enlightenment.
So, enlightened is a sort of tongue in cheek, right?
They've found enlightenment.
They've found the sort of truth, and it happens to be right in the middle of two sides.
The odds of that being the real truth are very low.
And of course, nobody is really above bias.
We all are constantly dealing with.
Our own biases and the idea that somebody could have sort of seen the light and gotten outside of that paradigm is very hard for me to believe.
I definitely see what you're saying.
I feel like I talk to a lot of people who are like this a lot of people that are more philosophical.
They like to speak in the philosophical terms and people that are really educated on history and that can say, go back to historical events and make it seem like they're being very objective and they're not biased in one way or another.
Well, sometimes there's a confusion between neutrality and objectivity, which I think is important.
Which is neutrality is like a position.
Like I can say I'm neutral on whether climate change is being affected by human activities or not, right?
That's a position that I'm taking.
But objectively, the science is overwhelming.
So if I want to assess the evidence objectively, I couldn't possibly come out neutral, right?
99.98% of the science is at least to some degree human activity on Earth is affecting what's going on with the climate.
So Could I claim neutrality?
Of course.
But that wouldn't be objective because it would not be actually dictated by the facts.
And so I think a lot of times there's a confusion between neutrality and objectivity.
They're very different things.
Especially when it comes to climate change, for sure.
There was something that recently came out yesterday or the day before about Congress not being able to get briefings from intelligence briefings.
So, the United States has all of these different intelligence agencies, different agencies that work in different areas.
They focus on different things.
And they brief both members of Congress as well as elected officials.
And when we're at this phase in the presidential campaign, the nominee on the other side, the challenger, also starts to get those briefings.
So, if you go back to 2016, you might remember that not only was Barack Obama briefed about this.
Trump dossier.
But Donald Trump, as the Republican nominee, was also briefed about the Trump dossier.
And so the idea there is that if Trump were to win, he would enter and already kind of have some information about what the intelligence community has been paying attention to.
And this also applies to the House and Senate.
So even though the intelligence agencies right now, many are headed up by people that Donald Trump chose, the idea is that intelligence is so crucial to national security that the intelligence agencies have a role to, a responsibility to inform both everybody regardless of their party affiliation.
Well, a few weeks ago, the briefing started to contain material that included Russia's trying to meddle again and they prefer Donald Trump, among other things.
This was not the only thing, right?
You know, China has preferences, Iran has preferences.
Okay.
And the decision was made after news of these briefings broke that Democrats were no longer going to be briefed by intelligence agencies in the normal way.
They would get like a couple.
Page written report.
Normally, these are like in person briefings or at least teleconference in the age of coronavirus.
And it seems like a very clear partisan move to just sort of limit the possibility that, again, it becomes a news story that Russia has preferences here and the preferences are the preference is not Joe Biden.
Yeah.
So in the first election, obviously, Russia was doing a lot of shit on social media, like a lot of targeting, like especially on Facebook, right?
With like pushing certain things towards certain people, trying to get people riled up in their own little echo chambers on Facebook.
What specifically are they trying to do as far as meddling in this election?
What matters is what do intelligence agencies say that they are doing?
And again, the information has been clamped down.
So I wish we knew more about exactly what they were doing, but it would probably be in line with what they always do, which is you want to foment unrest and create an environment where people question whether democracy is functioning.
So, as an example, if people are questioning whether their mail-in ballots are going to be counted, that's something that plays right into Russia's hands.
As an example, if people are unsure whether they will know the day after or the week after the election who really won, which is, by the way, an idea that Donald Trump has been promoting, that plays into Russia's hands.
And I think it's really important to mention a lot of people, when they hear Russia, they start throwing around the term Russiagate, they say that these are conspiracy theories, etc.
There's really nothing secret about any of this.
And so it is true that Russia has done this for decades and to many countries, it's not just the United States.
It's true that the United States has meddled in elections in other countries.
So, all of these things are true.
Countries regularly try to affect outcomes in ways that are favorable to them.
For Russia specifically, the idea is if Russia wants to be taken more seriously on the world stage, what is in their interests is to make Western democracies look like they aren't functioning very well.
And having a presidential candidate like Trump publicly questioning whether you can trust the election results.
Plays right into that idea.
What is your perspective on what happened with Kyle Rittenhouse?
Or what's his name?
Rittenhouse?
R I T T E N?
Kyle Rittenhouse and what's going on with him.
He's in, he finally turned himself in, right?
And now he's got a lawyer who's going on Tucker Carlson saying that he was completely, it was completely self defense.
He had every right to be out there with his gun.
And there's a lot of, it just seems like this is the kind of thing that fuels people.
Yeah, so a couple of different things on this.
I mean, first of all, I actually don't think that this is really going to be a big issue for the election come November, but I'll talk about why in a little bit.
Let's first just talk about what happened.
So, there's going to be a legal case here.
There's going to be a prosecution that's in progress for double homicide, and I don't know exactly what other charges have been brought against Kyle Rittenhouse.
And there may be a plea, there may be a trial.
We just don't know yet.
So, from the legal perspective, whether any of what took place with self defense is going to be adjudicated.
There's going to be a process for that.
And, you know, trial by media is not particularly useful.
What we're seeing are a couple different things.
So you have some people who are saying that what happened here was sort of a cold blooded murder by Kyle Rittenhouse.
That would be sort of like one side.
And on the other side, you do have people, including some right wing pundits and even Kyle Rittenhouse's attorney, John Pierce, I believe his name is, who are sort of framing Kyle as some kind of hero that.
His marksmanship is amazing.
His self control is amazing.
That he was he only shot a couple of people when many other 17 year olds would have shot way more than two people in those situations.
You know, really, really kind of a very different perspective.
You know, the self defense component is going to be different in each of the two counts, I think.
I think in the second count, it's going to be something that's more plausible than in the first.
But again, I want to try to stay away from sort of like trial through videos.
Right.
I think the real problem is.
A cultural problem where, you know, this is a 17 year old kid who crossed state lines.
Now, initially, there were people saying that he brought the guns across state lines.
It was later alleged that actually someone in Wisconsin gave him the gun.
It's irrelevant because if you're under 18 in Wisconsin, you can't be carrying around a gun anyway.
So, that's number one.
Giving the kid a gun was also a crime.
So, you know, if you really want to get into it, you're just going to go into this kind of black hole of these different details.
But the idea that we should be celebrating.
Vigilante 17 year olds with long guns, that's a major cultural problem for me in the United States.
And then you'll have, of course, some who are saying, and Tucker Carlson has said, listen, if you can't trust the police, isn't it natural in some sense that a 17 year old kid with a rifle would be the one policing?
No, it's not natural.
There's nothing natural about that whatsoever.
And so for me, that's like where, you know, there's going to be a trial, all of these details are going to be adjudicated.
That's a real cultural problem that I don't know how we overcome.
Yeah, there's something really wrong with having your 17 year old kid patrolling the streets with an automatic AR 15.
Like, especially you're 17, there's you're not even a fully developed human yet, and you're you have the power that kind of power in your hands.
And not only that, but you're thrown into this chaos where there's going to be conflict no matter what.
So, like, I think it's a not only a cultural problem for sure, but like, the parents, where the fuck are this kid's parents at?
Yeah, and you know, that gets complicated because the where are the parents is also used by some on the right to justify law enforcement treating poor and non white youth in a way that we know is completely counterproductive.
So, I, you know, where are the parents is very relevant, but I also want to be careful with just throwing that off as a sort of blanket thing.
But, you know, when people get into this stuff about, well, listen, this was a good guy with a gun because he also had a first aid kit.
Or this is a bad guy with a gun because two weeks before he sucker punched a teen girl.
It really misses the bigger cultural point that I think you and I are kind of making here.
Either way, it's just fucked up, period, for a 17 year old to be carrying a weapon like that out in the middle of the streets, in the middle of a riot like that.
There's no place for him to be there.
At the same point, there's no point for not making any excuses for anybody, but the guy who ran up behind him trying to hit him in the head, why would you run up behind a kid with an automatic weapon trying to take him out?
It just seems like a bad idea on both sides.
Yeah, sure.
And you can make the case that the person who ran up behind him saw the guy with the gun as a threat and wanted to stop the threat and that it was maybe ill conceived.
I mean, this is the problem.
Good point, too.
What we know is a problem is a 17 year old in a different state than the one in which he lives, illegally walking around with a rifle, right?
That's definitely a problem.
The other stuff, a lot of it is details that are going to have to be sorted out.
On top of all of it, I just don't feel like one of the best arguments.
Against Trump is that, you know, he is not being a leader the way he talks to people.
Like when you're constantly just making excuses and blaming other people and just talking the way you do and just being talking shit 24 7 about anybody and everybody on Twitter, it's not somebody that you can.
I just don't feel like he has those characteristics of a leader that you would want to run a country, especially the most powerful country in the world.
Well, obviously, that's my perspective.
But I think that you don't have to only ask the opinions of partisan Americans to get a valid opinion on that.
If you look around the world, you know, the United States under Trump is not part of more and more important conversations, conversations about climate, conversations.
The Case for a Public Option00:02:40
I mean, listen, the U.S., Trump announced that he will not be joining the global effort for equitable distribution of a coronavirus vaccine.
You know, we're just out of a lot of important conversations that we should be leading on instead of.
Just not leading.
We're not even in a lot of these conversations.
It's embarrassing.
But under coronavirus, with the death toll approaching 200,000, it's not just that countries are laughing at us, they actually pity us.
I mean, it's a real change compared to what the United States was under previous administrations.
What is your opinion on healthcare and where we're at now and what can be fixed?
What do you think the best case scenario for healthcare in the country would be under Joe Biden if he got elected?
Sure.
So Joe Biden's plan on healthcare is not Medicare for all.
That's very clear.
And he says he's not for Medicare for all.
But if Joe Biden gets his way, he's going to be able to do some pretty important things.
So, one is Joe Biden would create a public option.
And, you know, the public option is where Barack Obama started the negotiation with Obamacare, and it ended up being negotiated away.
And a public option is no panacea, but it would be a really important thing.
Important thing to have a public option.
It would put downward pressure on prices from private insurers, and it would be a really great thing to have.
Joe Biden has also talked about significantly increasing subsidies for people to reduce the number of people that are without health care to make it more affordable.
Again, it's like there are better plans that are more comprehensive, but if Joe Biden could do both of those things, it would give millions of additional people health care, people who don't have it right now.
Biden has said he would be open to lowering the age where you can get Medicare.
So currently it's 65.
And if that were lowered to 60 or 55, that's also millions of Americans who could get on Medicare who currently can't.
So, you know, is it nothing?
No.
These are significant proposals.
Is it Medicare for all?
Certainly it's not.
Is it going to get everybody health care?
No.
It'll get relatively close, but it's not going to get everybody health care.
But these would be, I mean, listen, when you compare to the Trump proposals of 2017, which would have kicked about 25 million people off of health care.
If you give me the option, take healthcare away from 25 million or give it to 25 million more, I know which one I choose every time.
Jobs, Inflation, and Minimum Wage00:11:04
Yeah, I hear a lot of arguments.
I mean, you're in Boston, I'm in Florida.
I'm on the west coast of Florida.
Throughout my life and my upbringing, I've always thought of Republicans as being wealthy people who don't want to pay a lot of money and don't want to pay a lot of tax, right?
And what I've noticed more and more and more in the last couple of years is that.
A lot of the people who are Trump supporters, especially around here, who I just have everyday conversations with, one of their biggest reasons for being Trump supporters is not wanting to pay tax and wanting to pay less tax.
And they say that, you know, the Democrats will socialize everything and, you know, commies, blah, blah, blah.
And more and more of the most outspoken Trump supporters aren't even in, they're probably in one of the lowest tax brackets.
So this has been studied pretty extensively because you're right that if you look at it and you say, wait, what, Why do these Trump supporters want taxes lowered for people who earn way more money than them?
It doesn't seem to make any sense.
One person who studied this quite a bit is Jonathan Haidt.
He's a social psychologist.
And what he has found is that it seems as though the behavior is irrational at the individual level.
Like, yes, lower someone else's taxes and not mine.
That doesn't really seem to make sense.
But what Jonathan Haidt found is that it's consistent with group priorities.
If you are a Republican and you identify in total with the package of Republicanism, and that can include whatever is important to you in it, right?
It could be being against abortion or being against gay marriage or what could be anything that you are sort of saying this policy of lowering tax on people that are far richer than I am is good for my group.
And even if it's not good for me in a direct way, because it's good for my group, as I've been told, I'm going to go for it anyway.
And it really comes down to group.
Priorities.
And you can find like evolutionary stuff to support this, and there's psychology material to support it.
But that's the gist of it, where it's like that's what explains people supporting policies that don't really seem like they would actually benefit them.
Yeah, it's more of the tribalism coming out, right?
Yeah, and tribalism has become a sort of fraught term in the sense that it's now thrown around sometimes appropriately and sometimes not, and then it's used as a pejorative.
But from an evolutionary social psychology standpoint, there's a lot of scholarship that explains this pretty well.
I want to go back.
I watched an interview recently with the guy Kyle Kalinske where he's talking about, he gives the example of Walmart executives trying to convince their employees to sign up for programs so they can actually afford to live while earning their low income wage working for Walmart.
Are you familiar with this?
No, I was looking for it as you were mentioning it.
I've not seen that.
Okay.
I think it was a conversation about a living wage, like raising the minimum wage across the board.
So that way people don't have to work two jobs to survive or work two or three jobs to have a roof over their head.
I see all these things as different things.
They're all related to what is the worst situation that we as a rich country should allow anybody to be in.
Fundamentally, that's what this is about.
Is it okay for people to die of hunger in the United States?
There are some who would say it is okay.
And there are others who say we're such a wealthy country.
There's no reason anybody should ever have to die of hunger in the United States.
That's a really easy thing that we can figure out if we kind of put our minds to it.
So, on minimum wage, at absolute minimum, the minimum wage should have kept up with inflation dating back to 1968, is often used as a number when the modern minimum wage era has started.
It hasn't.
So, without even debating anything, there should at least be.
An adjustment of the minimum wage to inflation matching the late 60s.
Now, that's like really easy, and you'll still find people who don't even agree with that.
When it comes to living wage, I do think that it's complicated by the fact that the country is huge and the cost of living is really different from state to state, and even within states.
Like the state of New York has New York City, one of the most expensive places in the country, and it has these ultra rural spots.
Far from New York City, that are some of the cheapest places to live in the country.
So we need to figure out what we mean by living wage.
Sometimes people look at can you rent a two bedroom apartment on the salary, the average salary?
So, if the average salary in New York City doesn't allow you to rent an average two bedroom or any two bedroom, then that's probably too low of a salary there.
But there will be people who hear that and say, well, nobody says you have to live in New York City to work in New York City.
Okay, fine.
So that kind of becomes a debate.
But that probably needs to be regionalized to figure out what is it that, based on cost of living, needs to be paid to everybody.
Basic income is a whole other idea.
Basic income, conceptually, is the idea that as a society, we are better off when nobody is in a situation of desperation, which I agree with.
And that by spending money on the upfront to ensure that nobody is literally out of money, I mean, still, some of these basic income proposals are pretty modest.
You're not really going to live any kind of Good life in a lot of the country on that, that we are actually doing something that's going to be good in the long run, that when people have enough money for food, they're not likely to steal, as an example.
You know, there's all these kind of societal benefits from it.
But that's a bit of a different question than minimum wage.
Okay, yeah.
No, one of the reasons.
So quickly, what is the argument against raising a minimum wage with inflation?
So there's a.
You'd really have to ask someone who opposes it, but my instinct is that some people would say that there's.
That it's arbitrary to say it should be tied to inflation, that it should be tied to something else, or that it was too high before, or whatever.
There's others that say it would be too costly for small business.
There's others who would say, no, the wage really should be this low for minimum wage jobs because they're minimum wage for a reason and they're not meant to be living wage jobs.
I'm not a good spokesman for why we shouldn't raise it because I think clearly we should.
Right.
I had this discussion with a close friend of mine who owns his own construction company the other day.
He explained it's really, really difficult.
To find entry level laborers who have a driver's license, who have their shit together enough to be able to show up to work on time every day, to be able to show up to work every day of the week.
He has to filter through tons and tons of entry level job people to be able to get somebody to stick just at minimum wage.
And the people who do come in at minimum wage, they typically don't have a background or they don't have a skill set to bring to the job that's going to.
Benefit them.
Basically, they come in knowing nothing.
They have to, they come in basically with a blank slate.
They learn how the industry works.
They learn how to do their job.
And if they stick around for long enough, for six months to a year, they can get promoted.
They have the opportunity to make more money, to build a career, and to very quickly earn up to like six figures working in a construction industry, being like a job supervisor, things like that.
And he said his argument that is if you raise a minimum wage, what's the incentive?
To go work out in the hot sun in Florida, I can sit at home, make $800 a week, and not do anything.
When, why would you want to go bust your ass in the hot sun making $15 an hour for four hours?
Okay, so there's two different things there.
I mean, the making more sitting at home is a very temporary thing because of the enhanced unemployment, because of coronavirus.
It applied to very few people.
It's temporary.
I don't know that it deserves too much discussion necessarily.
The other one is interesting because it sounds like what your friend is saying is, Why would somebody earn minimum wage with me in the hot sun when they can go earn minimum wage at McDonald's?
And that to me suggests that he shouldn't be paying minimum wage.
It sounds like he is not actually in the business of minimum wage jobs.
He should be paying more already, right?
I mean, if the complaint is I pay minimum wage and McDonald's pays minimum wage and people are just going to go to McDonald's, then that sounds to me like it should drive up.
The wage that he's paying, and he would then get better people who would prefer to do what they could do with him at a higher wage than to be at McDonald's, right?
Or am I missing something?
So, right now, I think he pays a little bit more than minimum wage.
So, these other jobs like McDonald's or other things that require less skill or that are easier, they're not outside.
If they raised the wages of those to meet his starting wage, it would reduce the incentive.
Right now, there's 11% unemployment.
So there's a lot of people looking for jobs.
I think in the immediate, if that were to happen, I don't think it would have a big impact on the fact that 11% of the country is still unemployed and a lot of people are looking for jobs.
There's a theoretical discussion there, which is a common one, which is if every job pays more, comparatively, people earning slightly above minimum wage now feel like, hey, now I'm at the minimum because everybody else got a raise and I didn't.
That's a real thing that we know that often the people most opposed to minimum wage increases are the people making just above minimum wage.
So, psychologically, that's very true.
It's not really useful to us in terms of policy, though.
There's a contingent that thinks minimum wage isn't supposed to be a living wage, these are temporary jobs that are a place you're passing through on your way to something else.
The unfortunate reality is, for as long as businesses are allowed to pay minimum wages that are so low, They're going to continue doing it.
So, someone's permanently going to be in that situation.
And so, the problem I have with the analogy you present is that it's really like a scarcity mentality.
But if you actually realize that this is one of the richest countries in the world, we should really have an abundance mentality, which is nobody should be, there's no reason for anybody to be hungry.
Scarcity Mentality in Policy00:00:36
There's no reason for anybody to be poor if we decided to fix it.
When you apply a scarcity mentality, you can justify a lot of really weird things.
But when you recognize the position that the United States is actually in, very quickly you realize that just allowing a lot of this stuff to happen because it sounds like it's natural is quite frankly immoral.
Yeah, that's a very good point.
I agree with that.
I am completely an idiot when it comes to this kind of stuff.