Mechele Dickerson on Why the Middle Class Was Built—and How It’s Being Broken

The middle class in America didn’t just happen—it was built through government policies after World War II. In this episode, law professor Mechele Dickerson explains how things like affordable housing, stable jobs, and access to education helped create a strong middle class—and why those same supports have weakened over time.
She breaks down why it’s harder today to afford basic things like housing, college, and healthcare, even for people who are working hard. The conversation shows how education, jobs, debt, and housing are all connected. When one becomes unaffordable, it affects everything else.

Dickerson also explains why common ideas like “just work harder” or “cut spending” don’t match the reality many people are facing today. Wages have stayed mostly flat while costs have gone up, and many jobs no longer offer the stability or benefits they used to.

The episode also looks at bigger economic ideas like trickle-down economics and why those policies haven’t helped most middle-class families. Instead, wealth has increasingly moved to the top while more people struggle to stay financially stable.

This conversation focuses on what’s actually happening to the middle class in America, why it matters, and what kinds of policy changes could help rebuild economic stability for everyday people.

Buy The Middle-Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility and the American Dream:  https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9780520423398

Guest Bio 
Mechele Dickerson is a law professor at the University of Texas whose work focuses on housing, consumer finance, and economic justice. Her research examines how financial systems shape everyday life, especially for families navigating homeownership, debt, and economic instability. She is the author of The Middle Class New Deal, which explores how policy decisions built—and are now reshaping—the American middle class.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:16

We're never going to understand that the reason that so many middle class folks are experiencing downward mobility is because of what's happening with the eight to ten people or so that control the top. So why is there no political will? At some point, politicians decided they didn't have to care about the voters.

SPEAKER_03 0:42

Well, hey there, folks. Welcome to another episode of Faithful Politics Podcast. I am your faithful co-host, Josh Bertram, Pastor Josh Bertram. Also, of course, we have the Faith Roundtable, and I'm the pastor of River City Underground. You can check all that out on the website. Of course, we always have our host, Will Wright. Will, it's good to see you. Co-host, our political co-host. I almost called you the faithful co-host, Will.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

I am a faithful political co-host.

SPEAKER_03 1:11

You are a faithful political co-host. Does that make me a political, faithful co-host? Anyway, I'm not going to keep going down this lane. But today I'm super excited because we're joined by Michelle Deggerson. She is a law professor at the University of Texas, whose work focuses on housing, consumer finance, and economic justice. Her research digs into how financial systems impact everyday people, especially those navigating home ownership, debt, and economic instability. And we are super excited to have you on, Michelle, to talk about your latest book, The Middle Class New Deal. Thanks for coming on and sharing some insight and time with us.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Glad to be with you. I'm glad to be back with you, given that I just got thrown into wherever.

SPEAKER_03 2:01

So, you know, it's so funny. Well, man, I am super excited to have this conversation, Michelle. And I gotta ask, just to set up, can you kind of give our audience a sense of your work, you know, and what brought you to this place of studying the middle class in the way that you have, before we dig into the insights of the book, which are fantastic? What what give us a little bit of your story so that so our audience can get to know you a bit?

SPEAKER_01 2:26

Well, in telling you the story, it's a little bit of a story of failure. And I like to share this story for lots of reasons. First, because I think it helps, at least I hope it helps, when I sort of tell how long it took me to get this book done, that you need to stick with things, you need to be patient, you have to have resilience sometimes, but also sometimes you just you have to kind of pivot in ways that you hadn't expected. So uh the first book that I wrote was on homeownership. And as I was finishing, well, actually I had finished the book, and then I realized, hmm, so you spent this time writing about why it's so hard for lower and middle-income families to buy a home. And the problem actually isn't just the ability to buy a home, it's that housing is unaffordable, and folks were struggling to just find an affordable place to rent. And then when I thought about affordability with respect to housing, I realized, oh, oh no, it's everything. It's not just they can't afford homes. All of life is unaffordable. The things that we think of as being what it means to be middle class, the ability to find a good, full-time, 40-hour-a-week job, the ability to help your kids go to college if they want to do that, the ability to avoid debt, the ability to have some both sort of emergency savings, but also retirement savings. So I'm working on the book and everything's kind of going okay. And then we hit the 2016 election. And everybody was talking about the middle class then. Now, folks were talking about some other stuff too. We'd put that to the side, but I thought actually, we're hearing some strains of stress, being depressed, and also being very angry. So I had sort of thought through the book at that point, but then I had to kind of change my focus. And I'd almost finished the book. In fact, I had finished the book, and then 2020 came and the pandemic. Well, you can't for real write a book about the middle class if you don't talk about the pandemic. So I had to rewrite the book. But the great thing about the, I'm sorry, there's nothing good about the pandemic. Everything about COVID was awful. So let's just preface that. I used to teach classes on the on COVID when the pandemic was on. So I've learned to say there's nothing good about the pandemic. But if there could be something good about the pandemic, it's we saw how different people's lives were different based on their economic group. Rich people didn't suffer in the way that lower and middle income folks did. Rich people could work from home. Lower and middle-income people, the our essential workers that everyone claimed they loved at the time, they had to work face to face. Their unemployment rates were skyrocketing. So watching what was happening to our country and the humans in our country during COVID told me, okay, so I had to rewrite the book. And then just when I thought it was done, I think it was the end of 2023, the first publisher, whose name I won't call, dumped me. And I don't know if it's they didn't like the book, they didn't like me, they thought I was stupid. I mean, who knows? But they dumped me right at Thanksgiving. And, you know, I'm a Christian, so it's like Thanksgiving Christmas. That's kind of not the time. I want to be upset. So I just decided I'm gonna push that to the side and I will deal with it come 2024. 2024 came. I found a new publisher. I rewrote the book. It came out this year. Not the best date in the world. Publication date was January 6th, but we'll go with, you know, what we give, what you know, what we get. And that's sort of my path to how it took me a long time to write this book, but it came out exactly when it needed to come out.

SPEAKER_02 6:44

Sorry, sorry about that.

SPEAKER_00 6:46

The uh that that is an amazing story because it's it's so it's so weird that that you had a book ready to go. I mean, like, years ago, and it it didn't come out when it was supposed to, and it came out now. And now, like, I mean, I I j I mean just this morning I watched you on The Daily Show. So it's like that's cool, you know?

SPEAKER_03 7:11

Like super cool, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

It it it must it must mean something. But but I I I want to get to your your book and sort of like the meaning behind it. So you wrote a book, it is about middle class New Deal. When you talk about the middle class, like who exactly are we talking about? Like and and maybe what's the what's the best way to kind of even think about the middle class? Because I think the the way that most people probably think of the middle class is you go on Google, you're like, what is the the range of wages people make? You know, and like you look at your your pay stub, you're like, yep, I'm I'm I'm in the middle class, or actually I'm below the middle class. So like, well, what is the middle class?

SPEAKER_01 7:54

Yeah. So one of the reasons, what the main question that I, the main response to your first question is the middle class, in terms of how I define it and how I talk about it in the book, is economic. It is not a psychological or an emotional feeling. Because when you talk to people who are just above the poverty level in this country, and people who are literally millionaires, they feel middle class, they self-identify as being middle class. And because the middle class in this country has always been the norm. And we talk about middle class values, we talk about a middle class way of being. But the people that I'm talking about are people that don't earn enough money to afford what I call the markers of the middle class. And so when I talked about, there is no government definition of the middle class, which I didn't realize when I started writing this book that no one defines the middle class. The census doesn't. The government will say when you make too much money to get government assistance, but they don't say when you become too rich not to be called middle class. So the definition I landed on in the book is actually the one that colleges and universities use when they decide whether or not a family is entitled or a student is entitled to either reduced tuition or no tuition. So the band is, you know, roughly for Texas, our program, I think it's a family that earns less than$100,000 a year, gets free tuition. And a family that earns, I'm gonna say less than 125, although I may have the numbers off slightly, gets reduced tuition. The reason I landed on that number is, well, the candid reason is I got sick of arguing with people over what the middle class is. But the other reason is I'm gonna trust whoever the universities hire to come up with the number, and I'm just gonna roll with whatever they come up with.

SPEAKER_03 10:02

I mean, I love that. That's a very practical way of just moving forward and saying, okay, hey, let's just get an operational definition here. Exactly. And you know, I do hear that, right? And it's interesting, even as you're saying, like, what is it about the middle class that everyone like idolizes, right? And maybe you can kind of we'll we'll bring that out as uh as we're going through the argument of your book, but I'd love you to kind of explain, maybe in the in in the clearest terms that you can muster right now in this moment, like what's the central argument of the book that you want people to see? Like, hey, if if they don't understand this part of the argument, then the rest of the argument breaks down essentially. They have to understand that it's essential.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

Yeah. They have to understand that the middle class in America was created because of choices and policies that political leaders enacted after the New Deal and uh World War II. And it was created. It was created. It didn't just arise. They did create it out of no, they created it with policies. They did things like we think it's probably a good idea with all of these returning, and I'll say servicemen, obviously there were some women, but it was mostly men. When all of these servicemen came back to this country, we need to make sure that there's like a better life for them because we don't want to go back into a depression. And more importantly, at that time, unlike now, we actually valued humans that did things like buy homes. So when you think of what happened after the New Deal, people were able to buy new homes because they could get a 15 to 30 year mortgage. That product did not exist until federal leaders decided to allow banks to offer it. They insured those loans. Well, if you don't give banks a reason to lend, and if you don't give them some sort of a guarantee that they'll be repaid, then they're not going to loan folks money so that they can buy a home. The GI Bill allowed people to come back, either go to a four-year college or get some sort of post-high school training so that they could get a good job. So we created, now there were other things that existed at the time, like we had a robust manufacturing economy, which we don't have now. But federal leaders, you know, well, I won't even say federal, state, local, and federal leaders all decided we've got to do something to get our country, to keep our country economically stable. We don't want to go back to a depression. So it wasn't an accident, it was intentional.

SPEAKER_00 12:51

Got it. So so whenever there's like especially during that period of time, any large-scale government policy, legislation, what whatever that ostensibly gives, you know, disadvantaged people money. Like we can we can interpret that in today's modern context and probably immediately go to, you know, whoever the poor, the minorities are of our community, whatnot. But I'd imagine back in those days, it like if you're thinking about the poor and like the disadvantaged, you're not thinking about black people. You're you're probably thinking about like very, you know, impoverished white, white folk or or whatnot. So like how how how much is is sort of racism at play with kind of like the the development of of the middle class, in your opinion?

SPEAKER_01 13:43

Yeah, so at the time federal leaders, or and I'll just focus on the federal leaders right now, we're creating the middle class. Racism and discrimination were legal in this country. And so we are, thank goodness, under a totally different environment now. But until we had the Civil Rights Acts that were passed, it was perfectly legal to say this bank is not going to loan to a black person. This, I'll call it the real estate industrial complex, are going to engage in redlining to say that if you try to buy a home in a certain part of a city, we're going to deem that neighborhood to be dangerous. All of the neighborhoods that were deemed to be dangerous and coated red were low income, and all black neighborhoods were deemed to be dangerous. So you're absolutely right. At that time, the federal government did little, I would say did nothing, but we'll just I can't say that there might have been a little bit of a thing that I don't know about, but they did very little to help create a black middle class because they could and they did legally discriminate against uh black folks that were trying to become and remain middle class. And back to Josh's uh uh point earlier. The other thing I want people to get from the book is to keep asking yourself, why is it so hard to become middle class and why is it so hard to remain middle class? Because that's what we're seeing, I think, now with people struggling and stressed and depressed.

SPEAKER_03 15:21

Yeah, and you're you're essentially arguing that the middle class was built, right? That's what you're saying. It was built, it's intentional. Everyone needs to know that it's like, so like, I mean, I don't even know if I ever asked the question where the middle class came from, right? I just knew I I just called middle class right now. We're called middle class. We're middle class, okay. And it's like, okay, well, that's cool, but then this reality, like, oh, these are actually came from policies that were put in place that created incentives, right? That restructured incentives because of the backing of the government that came from, my guess, especially right, the wealth and the dominance and hegemony produced by World War II for America as a whole, even though you know, specific segments of our population, right, i.e., of course, the black population was not given the full advantage of what had come in, right, from that hegemony and from that wealth that was produced. And, you know, so it's not something that was discovered, natural, naturally produced necessarily. What so, but why people keep using it though, right? As the the we we kind of think about middle class, I kind of would hear this growing up. Well, if they worked harder, if they made better choices, if they took some res personal responsibility, then they can get middle class.

SPEAKER_02 16:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:45

But you're saying that is incomplete. So why is that incomplete?

SPEAKER_01 16:50

So if you work harder, let's focus on the work harder part. And this is the reason that Gin, I think Gen Z, the the uh Gen Z hates boomers, right? Because boomers always say if you just work hard, you'd be fine. And Gen Z's response is, okay, when you graduate, or my response for Gen Z is when you graduated from college, or when you graduated from high school, if you didn't go to college, what kind of jobs were available for you? So if you graduated from college in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and maybe early 90s, the job that you get, you would call a job. When young people are graduating from college now, they have to quantify the job. It's a full-time job. Or it's a job, but it only lasts for a year, but we're hoping that they're then gonna be able to pick it up. Or it's an my favorite, it's an internship, and then you find out it's an unpaid internship. But if you don't take that unpaid internship, you're not gonna be positioned to be able to get a full-time job. And so if you work hard, that I totally agree with that, as long as we're talking about the same jobs, it's got to be apples to apples. So when you're telling a young person, if you work hard in your 32-hour-a-week job because you can't get a 40-hour job because they don't want to give you benefits, if you just keep working at that 32-hour-a-week job, you will make it. And of course, the person that is struggling and doing their best and they're a great worker, they're like, I don't have benefits. I don't have, I mean, I'd have health insurance, I certainly don't have a pension. So who are you to tell me that all I have to do is work hard when the full-time high-wage manufacturing job that you may have had when you came out of college or even high school, those don't exist anymore. The second part is the choices. You know, they're just making bad choices. I personally have never had avocado toast. I almost want to go and have it because I hear people criticize so much about the whole avocado toast thing, right? Um love avocado toast. I don't, it it I is it like honey on a on a piece of bread? I mean, I don't whatever avocado.

SPEAKER_03 19:24

You know, you're putting avocado on it, put some bacon, you know, maybe some onion on some toast. It's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

I hey, if it makes you feel better, I haven't had it either. So maybe maybe it's maybe it's a white person thing. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 19:35

I don't know, but I like hearing all this time about the avocado toast. And if they just stopped give if they'd give up their avocado toast, they'd be And so again, when we're talking about, you know, you just need to sacrifice. A story I read, I think it was last week in the New York Times. A young woman, 24, 25 years old. She was a nursing student, so she's doing exactly what we tell young people you need to do. Go into a profession that's not going to be eliminated by AI, right? So she's trying to get her nursing degree, going to school and working, I think maybe you know, part-time job. She had a car, and the car was the reason she ultimately had to fall for bankruptcy. Now her expenses were the car, insurance on the car, and maintenance for the car. The car was not a Lamborghini, it wasn't a Benz, it wasn't a BMW, it was a Kia. So the idea that you can no longer as a young person afford a Kia sort of blows apart the myth that they're trying to live these lavish, you know, avocado toast-fueled lives. All she was trying to do was to go to school to improve her lot in life so that she could become economically stable. But the cost associated with IKEA caused her to have to file for bankruptcy.

SPEAKER_02 21:11

Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

No, I was just saying, so I struggle now when I hear people, and partial partial part of it is because I have a 25 and a 25, 22 and 25-year-old sons, and I teach law students, and I spend a lot of time with undergraduates because I'm a lot of I spent a lot of time in the athletic space at Texas. So I I'm just not real sympathetic when I hear people say it worked for me. It could work for you if you only fill in the blanks, because those blanks look very different now than they did, you know, 30, 40 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

Yeah, you know, I can I can relate with with the nursing student because when I was in college, I had a little small pickup truck. It was repossessed like three times. It's like I could I just couldn't afford my car payments. And I can't remember if if you had to have car insurance at the time, but I'm pretty sure I didn't have it as a college student. And I don't ex I don't necessarily expect it to be any better today. So like when you think about

SPEAKER_01 22:16

the the middle class like how how do you how do you escape the middle class is that something that you know you find people are you know looking to do like to actually have that that upward mobility and then like what like what's the hesitation that you're seeing from from not wanting to change the system to to like healthy middle class so I think a lot of middle class folks now would be perfectly happy to die middle class because the fear is that downward mobility is the only mobility that they are going to experience in life. And so although everyone always, you know, I think as a nation we sort of we strive we work hard we always want to do better. But given where we are right now I think people would be perfectly happy if they could stay in place and not tumble out of the middle class. And you know one of the things that you know I said on the on the uh daily show that you two mentioned earlier we've if we look horizontally and attack each other, we're never going to understand that the reason that so many middle class folks are experiencing experiencing downward mobility is because of what's happening with the eight to ten people or so that control the top. So why is there no political will? At some point politicians decided they didn't have to care about the voters. I mean it's striking to me because again when it takes you more than a decade to write a book you've I've read a lot of congressional testimony and they always bring in people not anymore but they used to bring in people to talk about what's wrong with the middle class? What can we do to save the middle class? And we had hearing after hearing and people kept saying the same things over and over and then I realized oh you all don't actually care about doing anything to save the middle class. You just want to bring them in so you can pretend like you care about them, but you're going to keep voting in ways that make really clear you don't care anything about the middle class.

SPEAKER_03 24:39

I I I absolutely agree. I I think it's so clear that our politicians don't care about us right now. It just seems to me that it's I don't feel listened to by any politician right now. And I I haven't felt listened to in quite some time by a politician. And I I don't know what that means because we need a government you know I'm a firm believer in government and we need we need good people in government and I I don't have any interest in going into the government. It's like it sounds like a nightmare to me and it's like but but then who who takes over right I'm not saying I'm like the person to take over but it's like when the idea is that when good men don't want to do it or good people don't want to women and men don't want to be involved right like because it's a a nasty business then who does get involved? Well nasty people that don't care. And then they have power in the purse strings and the weapons right and things like that that the government brings and the coercive power of that government. And you know it it's like I guess I want to bring this even closer to home because I I think that you're you've already done that but I think that the argument is is really effective like to me when you're talking about education work housing debt savings like you don't treat them as separate issues you actually treat them as interconnected things. And I would love for you to kind of talk about that like what is the connection between these things education work housing debt savings you know you don't have to name all those things but just kind of that idea of like what is the interconnection there in terms of creating the middle class and and what's happening to these things.

SPEAKER_01 26:30

So I'll start with education but I'll start with K-12 education. So the although each state in the United States guarantees that children are entitled to a free public education, the type of education you get even we'll just assume everyone's going to a public school so we'll put the privates to the side even if you are going to a public school you get a radically different type of education both in the building and more importantly outside of the building if you were rich and if you were not rich. We saw that a little bit during COVID. So one of the reasons that children who go to high wealth schools were able to go back earlier is because they had schools that had better ventilation. You had parents of the children in those schools that did things to supplement they brought in fans or they had masks or you had social distancing or whatever your school wanted to implement. But the other thing that we see in high wealth schools are things like more experienced teachers. We see that they have better technology we see that they have more a more robust curriculum more advanced classes they teach more languages they have robotics or whatever you can imagine that you would want a child to receive to then be competitive for college. But in addition to what the children receive physically in the building they have these things called rich parents and there is nothing more formidable than parents who are determined to do the best thing for their children. I don't say that in a negative way that's just the way it is but and I'll pick on a school that's in my area my children did not go there so I'm not picking on my kids' school but they and I won't call it by name they have a very good football they've had a historically good football program and they sell the parking spots for their home football games and the money that they generate from selling the parking spots is given to their athletics program. So you can imagine what kind of a facility they have and the type of equipment that the students have that go to that school. I will add that each home game has an average of 10,000 people to go to this high school football game. Now you compare that kind of support from parents just to the school through booster clubs or parent teacher organizations. And the third thing that makes young people more competitive for college is the shadow education of SAT prep courses and private tuners and private trainers. The result is rich children have higher college attendance rates. If you go to college in the unfortunately in the space that we're in right now you're the one that's more likely to get a good job. If you only have a high school degree you're not going to get that full-time permanent 40 hour a week with benefit job. Once you have the good job you can have savings once you have a good job you can save enough to put down a down payment for a home and you can avoid drowning yourself in debt when you go to college because your parents were probably able to help you pay to go to college. So they're all the intertwined that the term that you used everything is connected which is why when I hear and like the$15 an hour things that people have been saying that's terrific and I hope we do that. But if that's all we do, we're not going to save the middle class I refuse to listen anymore to people saying well all we have to do to save the middle class and they pick one little narrow thing and my response is we got to do it all because we used to have it all and when we had it all we had a robust middle class you know when when you think about the middle class and truthfully I I have not really thought that much about the middle class like as a group I mean I I think I've been middle class most of my life if not whatever the level is below it but you know like I I think of the middle class more abstract kind of like like I don't know dust this is probably a terrible analogy but I'm gonna I'm gonna go with it.

SPEAKER_00 31:28

So so you can't like dust doesn't just appear right dust is just the accumulation of all the things and then we give it a name or like that's dust right and if we want to stop the dust we have to do a bunch of things like you're saying like we have to make sure we do regular cleaning dusting you know human shed you know whatever this is probably TMI but like like like like you get the point is that middle class is very abstract dust is very abstract you know there's not a one size fits all solution to fix the middle class but there are a number of different things we could do. So I I want to know like what are those like different things? If we were to create a sort of holistic model to you know improve the the lives of middle class in America like what what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 32:18

So I'll answer it by talking about AI. Every time I talk about jobs the first thing that people tell me is well you know all jobs are going to disappear because AI and you're not gonna have jobs and you know since November things have gotten to the point that something that took you X amount of time to do you can now do it in X minus 2 million, right? And so my response is okay so let's assume that that form of technology will eliminate some jobs. This is not a new discussion. Every time we have a new form of technology we always eliminate some jobs. The discussion I want to have is if you're going to have technology to eliminate jobs because it's more efficient, more productive whatever term they're using, who gets a cut of the uh the benefits right and if what we're saying is that and I'll use uh the Commonwealth y'all y'all state from what I hear you know looking you know online you have a pretty big budget brouhaha going on now involving whether or not your state is going to continue subsidizing tech companies data centers. Data centers yeah so for me it is just the most bizarre concept that states are saying we're gonna have data centers here whose sole job is to put people out of work and we're gonna subsidize their cost by not taxing them. And so when I hear things like that, if we want to actually make sure that people have full-time jobs when you're asking yourself should we subsidize and give tax exemptions to an industry whose one of their main purposes is efficiency and to cause people not to have a job, what are we even doing here? So each and each so I'll talk about housing as another one the Senate the U.S. Senate for the first time in quite a long time act who knows whether it'll ever pass, but at least it made it through the Senate and it was bipartisan. It was Tim Scott Republican and Elizabeth Warren Democrat who were the co-sponsors of the bill and the bill the thing that I love about the bill is actually structural. First they agreed to it they did something we're not just looking at our navels and saying well you know maybe something they actually said let's focus on housing affordability and I think it was like 980. I don't think anyone voted against it. Who knows what happens with when they try to reconcile it with the House bill but at least we have a recognition and an acknowledgement from one side of the of Congress that we have a housing affordability crisis. And what they are doing and what I want everyone to do is to say ignore the way housing is right now and think of what housing could be. One of the things that they're actually doing in this bill is they're they're focusing on rental housing. So as much as I would like to say that everybody should be able to own the home they live in, we have to be realistic for right now what we need people to be able to do is to find affordable housing. And the second thing they're doing and I've I don't think I've ever seen this in a Senate in a U.S. Senate bill with bipartisan support is they're actually talking about manufactured housing. Now born in Memphis lived in the Commonwealth live in Texas now we call them trailers for folks that don't know what manufactured housing is right but I'm not saying that should be what people aspire to and I'm not saying that a middle class family's goal should be that they want to live in a manufactured home. But I need us to stop being boxed in and saying well everyone should aspire to live in a 3200 square foot home on a half acre lot with a big front and backyard and a certain set off from the street. If that's what we're going to see say as our only modelity crisis. So you know Will my my argument is I want every politician local state and federal pick one thing. I don't care which thing you pick if your thing is education K-12 you go with that. If you don't care about K-12 and you want to focus on college affordability go with that. But pick one thing and when you're focusing in on that one thing ask what can we do? What can we add? What can we change?

SPEAKER_03 37:06

What can we modify to make life better for people in this country who want to become and remain middle class yeah I I really it's very compelling your argument and it's not just diagnostic you know obviously like you're saying in the you just mentioned with Washington and the Congress hearing congressional hearings you've gone through and the the need for policy and law and legislation on this because it was a political solution that essentially created the middle class, right? A set of policies. So idea if that's the set of policies that created the middle class and it has to be sustained or renewed or whatever it is so that the middle class can continue to exist in the way that we've we've conceptualized it, I guess, or even probably even in a better way, right? It's kind of what you're arguing. And i if the government's going to play a central role in rebuilding it now and I know we've been kind of talking about this but I I would love to like what kind of what kind of public imagination is required for us and what is the what is the government like what what should they do in terms of like yeah like what what would a new deal look like around all of these things, right? And and and we haven't even really touched on debt very much the debt crisis that we have. But what what would the New Deal like look like? How how could government do that in in in the fear of too much government how do you respond to the fear of too much government?

SPEAKER_01 38:45

So I'll answer that part first and then I want to go back to not only did policies create the middle class policies have also killed the middle class. And so when I often talk about the book I'll get the well we don't want the government we don't want big government and my view is well big government's already involved it's who they're choosing to help that we need to focus on. So the Commonwealth of Virginia wants to seem to help you know data centers. I would suggest maybe you'd want to help the middle class people that live in the Commonwealth. One thing that the government did in the I think it was the early 1980s was the government decided that they were going to allow more choice. So the reason people don't have stable retirement anymore is because we've shifted from a model where it was called a defined benefit plan. Most people just think of it in terms of a pension. My guess is none of the three of us and most of the people that are listening to us do not have a pension. Well pensions used to be the norm. My parents are in their 80s or almost 90 they'll turn 90 this year God willing they'll turn 90 this year and they are in a retirement community they get four deposits every month Social Security Social Security pension and pension because they're retired uh teachers and educators when the federal government decided to change tax laws to make it more advantageous to businesses not to care about the retirement security of their retired workers we ended up with the alphabet soup of defined contribution 401c 403b and all of these other things that shifted the risk of retirement security to workers and so when people and I hear it you know quite a lot people will say you why do we want to think the government should be involved in my response is because they've always been involved the difference is over the last 50 years they've shifted from caring about human beings from caring about workers from caring specifically about the middle class to only caring about businesses and caring about rich people. So I'm not asking them to become more involved than they already are. I just want them to shift their focus and care about normal human they just wake up every day they work hard and they're wondering why they can't get ahead I'm I'm curious about like triple trickle down economics.

SPEAKER_00 41:40

I was just just a young young toddler or whatever when Reagan was president but growing up I've heard this term over and over again and in Trump's second term he passed the one big beautiful bill which was supposed to have a bunch of tax cuts and we heard this term again trickle down economics and I don't really understand what it is but I think just sort of broadly speaking my understanding is you make the people really rich at the top and you know we we us little middle class people will will receive the crumbs which will you know fill our our pockets on the table.

SPEAKER_01 42:16

Yeah yeah is trickle down economics a solution to kind of help the middle class it hasn't worked it didn't work in the 80s it's not working now what we have is an a is a trickle up economy and the reason I believe we're having a trickle up economy is because we have people productivity with workers is stronger now than it's ever been so this notion that you know workers are lazy well you know the the the the the reason that capital deserves to get everything is because workers aren't doing much in fact they are we'll use an example Amazon is a very productive company it you know generates significant extraordinary revenues for the owners it is a profitable company but when the person shows up at your house in a blue jacket and leaves a package for you it is more likely than not that that person is not employed by Amazon. The person is more likely employed by a delivery service provider and they are a part-time worker for this delivery service provider they don't receive Amazon benefits they don't receive a paycheck from Amazon so when we're looking at the productivity of an Amazon they are being productive off the back of independent contractors temporary part-time workers who do a fantastic job you know people love Amazon well not everybody but you know most people love Amazon you need something tomorrow you don't feel like you want to have to go out and find it you go on Amazon a couple of clicks and that thing is dropped on your front porch the next day but all of the hard work of pe human beings that are working Their labor and the productivity of their label is trickling up. Trickle down just isn't working. And it doesn't have to work because the people at the top are not required to share any of the wealth, the enormous wealth that they've been getting, certainly for the last, you know, 20, 30 years.

SPEAKER_03 44:40

Yeah, and it has been absolutely enormous, hasn't it? Just the massive amounts of wealth that my I'm guessing fract fractions of which could probably, you know, distributed, could solve enormous problems that people are facing, that people in desperate poverty, not only in America, right, but around the world, which we've cut under this administration, so much of that, if not all of it, I don't know. But I know we've cut a lot. And it's like almost like there's a moral deception here. Like, you know, that we praise hard work, we talk about hard work, we say building up by your bootstraps, but then we also dismantle and criticize the institutions that make hard work actually do something, produce something. Is that a fair way to put that? Yeah. Or how would you put that?

SPEAKER_01 45:37

No, we dismantle the institutions that make hard work work, right? And so if you have a workforce that doesn't pay people decent wages, wages have been largely stagnant for lower and middle-income workers since the 80s. I mean, has it increased somewhat? Yes. And for the lowest wage workers, it actually increased quite a bit during COVID because there were so many labor shortages. But if you look at the amount of wealth at the top 1%, or even the top 20%, and you compare what they have been earning relative to the bottom 80%, it's it's it's upsetting, it's disgusting, it's sinful, whatever term you want to use, but it's just not right. And one of the things, you know, I every time someone talks to me about, you know, the pull yourself up by the bootstrap thing, my response is, well, first you have to have boots, right? And so if you don't give people what they need to become economically stable, you can't criticize them when they're always struggling because what did you expect? So no, I totally agree with you.

SPEAKER_03 46:54

Yeah, and it's like I guess what is the what is the collapse of this middle class security, right? Which is what we're talking about. Obviously, the middle class has been stagnating and it's being taken away with the sense of like security. What does that do to people psychologically and morally? What what do you think?

SPEAKER_01 47:16

So I'm really scared because we have a country of stressed, depressed, and angry people. And it's not healthy emotionally, psychologically, for that many people to be depressed, stressed, and angry because they act out in ways that both harm themselves and harm others. And for uh I keep telling everybody that I know, and most of the time they ignore me, but particularly for young men, and I focus a lot on young men because I have two of them, uh, and also my next research likely going to be a book, is gonna focus on young men. But for anyone that has a young man under the age of 40, I tell them, you need to know what your son, your grandson, your nephews, you need to see what type of social media they are consuming. Because that is, you see the anger that's coming, specifically, I'm talking now, but young men, but also young people generally. Every time I give a talk, I inevitably will either get an email or a young person will pull me to the side and say, I gave a talk yesterday, and the young lady said, Thank you for what you said. I finally heard someone that hears what I'm going through. So the fact that young people are walking around thinking that no one cares about them, that everyone is judging them, that everyone is telling them that it's their fault that they can't get a good job, that it's their fault that they can't move out of their parents' house, that it's their fault that they don't have savings, that it's their fault that they have to use payday loans to pay for things that 50 years ago, well, first payday loans didn't exist 50 years ago, but you have to use a payday loan to pay for things that everybody else would have just taken it out of your savings to pay for. So in addition to the fact that I view this as an economic crisis, I view it as an emotional, emotional crisis for young adults in particular, but also the middle class. And I view it as a moral crisis for this country because I just I wake up some days and I ask myself, how can we be so cruel to our fellow citizens when they're trying? And why are we blaming them? And why are we making them feel as if they are bad people when we know good and well that the reasons they are struggling is because we've put a system and structures in place that pretty much predetermined they're gonna fail.

SPEAKER_03 50:19

I think that's a really powerful question. And you know, I I would love to I I think I know where this is going. Just two really quick questions that are kind of two parts of the same coin. Or two sides, I guess. The first is what happens if we don't do anything to the next, like what happens to the to the middle class? My son's 12. What happens to him and the middle class in 20 years, 10 to 20 years? And again, just what what what gives you hope, maybe, on the other side of that, that we can achieve what we want.

SPEAKER_01 51:02

If nothing changes, I don't think the America that we have right now will exist. There is a level of pent-up anger, and if the pent-up anger ever comes out, I think we're sort of facing a reckoning that most people in this country aren't prepared for. You know, this notion that we're going to eliminate all jobs and we really don't need people to work, my response is, what are they supposed to do? I mean, I think it's yeah, what are they going to do? Right. You know, they they can't go someplace to summer because they don't have a job, right? They can't go out and have leisure time because they can't afford to have leisure time. So every time I hear this, well, there will there will be no job, I always say, what are they supposed to do? Because at least, I mean, I love my job, right? I know not everyone loves their jobs, but I think most people love how it makes you feel when you have a job. And although people like to criticize, you know, Gen Z and say they're lazy, I don't think that's true. Because I think most human beings like working. We find a sense of purpose and fulfillment that comes from working. Uh, why I am hopeful, I am hopeful because I spend so much time around young people. And they have really helped me grow as I've been writing this book, because I have shifted from what I thought was going on to sort of, you know, open up your eyes. Oh, that's the reason that this is happening. So when people are saying, you know, young men, they just won't move out of their parents' home. Well, the reason they can't move out of their parents' home is because they can't afford to. So it's not that they're a bunch of bums and they just want to live in their mama's basement. If they can't find a job that pays them enough to be able to pay the rent, well, yeah, they're still going to be living in their parents' homes. So one of the things that what I've taught classes of at the courses at the law school on the middle class, students are very clear. So young people are very clear what they want. They are not looking for, you know, a lavish lifestyle. We'll go back to the avocado toast, right? They are not looking to be able to eat avocado toast every morning for breakfast. They would like to not say, am I going to put gas in my car or am I going to eat today? Right. And I think that they are going to demand things from our political leaders that people in other generations didn't necessarily feel the need to demand because they were doing okay. You know, we look at some of the election results that have been shocking. I mean, I'll use the example. I don't understand New York politics. I'm not a New Yorker, I've never lived in New York. But the fact that the mayor of New York is someone that nobody in this country would have guessed a year ago, should tell you that something is going on in this country. And his platform included a heavy emphasis on affordable housing. So, to the extent that we have political leaders that understand that the people that you care about, the older people with wealth, with every passing day, there are fewer of them, and there are more younger people who are going to demand that you do things like help me find an affordable home, help me be able to go to college and not drown myself in debt, help me be able to have some kind of retirement security. So young people, they bring me hope because I think that they are going to keep telling their parents, their grandparents, and our political leaders that they're not going to accept what we are doing to them, in my mind, for no reason other than just pure greed and selfishness.

SPEAKER_03 55:15

Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I wonder how much I wonder how much, you know, this this reality of the younger generation and the reality of um the the the immigration numbers that were coming in and that the white majority would be lost, you know, within the next, I don't know, 20 years, 30 years, something like that. Maybe sooner, just depending on these countings. But I just wonder, you know, obviously, I mean maybe it's not even wondering, but how much that's pushing the Trump administration, the things that they're doing, the things that you know, the hundred million deportations there that the DHS has put out, like a hundred million, that's a third of the country, you know. And my guess is they're not they're not going to export the high class, right? The the elite and the rich, right? It's the lower classes that they want to get rid of. And I don't know. It's awful. It's awful. And I think we need to do everything we can to kind of figure out a way to move forward, and that's what we're trying to do. And I I appreciate it, Michelle, so much for coming on, sharing your perspective with us. How can people connect to you and anything that you would present to them to get involved with your work or with the book or anything like that?

SPEAKER_01 56:40

Yeah, they that's like they I can be found on Twitter, X, I still call it Twitter. I'm also on Blue Sky. If they are interested in buying the book, The Middle Class New Deal, they can get it either through your independent bookstores or you can get it on Amazon if you want to do that. But the main thing that I tell young people that I talk to all the time is keep talking, keep fussing, keep squawking, but more importantly, vote. You've got to vote. If you're not gonna vote, then I don't want to hear you complaining about how horrible our political leaders are, because if you're not willing to go out there and work for your candidate, and my view is I want them to become single-issue voters, right? If housing is your thing, don't vote for anybody that's not whose platform doesn't include affordable housing. If college affordability is your thing, don't vote for anybody unless they are prepared to do what you think needs to be done. But they you've got to remain politically active and engaged, even though I think some forces are out there hoping that they can suppress their vote and not get let them get out to the polls.

SPEAKER_03 57:47

Yeah, yeah, I I I hear you on that. Well, thank you so much for being here, Michelle. It's an absolute pleasure to have you on the program in the world.

SPEAKER_01 57:56

Thank you for having me. I've loved chatting with you, notwithstanding getting you know thrown into the wherever at the beginning.

SPEAKER_03 58:04

Absolutely. And to our viewers and listeners, guys, thanks for sticking with us. Share this with someone who needs it to make sure that you're sharing this good stuff with people who really they do need to hear this and bring these conversations out. Read the book, pick it up. We'll put links in the description in the show notes. And until next time, guys, keep your conversations not right alive up. Thanks.