Episode 304 – Facing Uncomfortable Truths with Yeva Nersisyan

Steve Grumbine

00:00:43.165 – 00:01:39.687

All right, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese.

My guest today is Yeva Nersisyan.

She has been on here several times before. And she is one of my favorites, because when we talk, we understand class and we understand the working class, and we understand the way the working class has been left behind. And we understand the economics profession has not done the working class any favors by talking about the greatest economy ever, and things like that.

And as we’ve seen the election results, it’s quite clear that that selling point of the greatest economy ever kind of missed the mark with working class people. And in a landslide, the Democrat just got swept off the map like, it wasn’t even a contest.

Yeva is an associate professor and economics department chair at Franklin and Marshall College here in the great state of Pennsylvania. And without further ado, I bring on my guest. Yeva, welcome to the show.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:01:39.871 – 00:01:41.343

Thank you. Happy to be here, as always.

Steve Grumbine

00:01:41.399 – 00:02:02.641

I am so happy to have you. It is so nice to talk to people who get it and people who I genuinely believe want the best for everyone. And you are right up there.

Every time we’ve had you on, including the Medicare For All panels, you have been absolutely amazing. So thank you, so much, for doing this.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:02:02.783 – 00:02:04.465

Thank you for saying that.

Steve Grumbine

00:02:04.885 – 00:03:21.865

Well, it’s true. It is true. I mean, I do like to compliment my guests when it’s appropriate, but it is true.

And I want people to know that people like you exist. That everybody is not overselling the economy, that people are talking about these things in a very real way for people. And it’s a dialectical thing, right? It depends on whose perspective you’re looking at it from.

If you’re looking at it from an investor, you know, all the rate hikes and some of the policies really helped you out. Help Wall street out. I mean, I’ve never seen Democrats more excited to show us the results, how great Wall Street’s doing. It’s like, wait a minute, hold on.

What happened to the working class? What happened to unions? What happened to all these people that you count on to get you elected? And it’s like, oh, yeah, them. Yeah. We’re not worried.

We don’t need them. We’ll go after Dick Cheney. We’ll go after Liz Cheney We’ll pull the Ronald Reagan Cabinet back together again for us.

And obvious, that fell flat on its face. Conservatism is a cancer for the left, and hopefully we can find some radiation and get rid of it. That said, what’s going on with this economy?

I mean, obviously there’s a history there, and I want to get into that with you. But what do you think were the key economic points that kind of decided this election?

Yeva Nersisyan

00:03:22.445 – 00:06:33.715

Yeah, if we think about the short term, obviously inflation is a big one, especially prices of food going up. Home prices is another big one. And home price increases aren’t fully captured in the inflation index that we look at, right?

In many parts of the country, home prices have gone up, I don’t know, 20%, you know maybe more. So that’s not going to be captured in your inflation. And they have kept going up.

So the average home is pretty much out of reach for the American who makes the average income. Pretty much, that’s where we’re at.

And if you add to that the higher interest rates, which were used to fight inflation. So the problem was inflation, which was bad for working people, and then you add to that the solution, which is raise interest rates, which is also bad for people. So we’re going to solve one problem by creating another problem, right?

So anybody who wanted to even become a homeowner, right, that was completely out of reach because of high interest rates, high prices, and therefore how much money you even needed to put as a down payment, even if you could afford that, you know, monthly mortgage payment. So the way home prices were going up, there was no way you could save your way out of that, right?

Because if you need 20%, or something like that, to buy a home, then home prices are going up. Then that’s a moving target, right?

But the way I see it is that this goes beyond the Biden administration. Because for all of its faults, I think the Biden administration did more than Obama did; than Bill Clinton had done. Because Bill Clinton did a lot of things that were definitely not good for working people, the average person, and that’s well known, right? So Bill Clinton dismantled a lot of the New Deal. For example, Obama’s presidency was characterized by doing nothing, right?

So it was that period when a lot could have been done and nothing was really done. And then compared to that, Biden did a much bigger stimulus. He did the infrastructure bill, the IRA, and so on.

You know, the FTC chair, Lina Khan, who was going after monopolies, the NLRB people, he appointed who were better than previous people. Despite all the issues with crashing the railroad strikes. That should not be forgotten. But people do want to forget that, right? Biden did a lot more than Clinton and Obama.

But I think it’s too little too late.

And I think I might have said that when we were speaking last time, which was before the election. Right before the summer, before Biden even dropped out. So I think it’s too little, too late.

Once working class people turn away from the Democratic Party, I think it’s going to be very difficult to bring them back.

And with every election lost, the Democrats, rather than saying we got to go back to our New Deal roots, right, because that was a winning strategy for us, instead they just keep moving further and further to the right. At least on economic issues. And when it comes to economics, there is no alternative to class-based analysis. That’s one thing that I think progressives, the Left, right?

That’s one thing that we should all agree on. Hopefully that there is no alternative to class analysis and class-based politics.

Steve Grumbine

00:06:34.555 – 00:09:35.925

You know, the stratification of voters in terms of their purchasing power, their ability to survive a lapse in employment, their ability to survive a medical emergency, et cetera, I think is a real gaping wound in the American society. I know myself, I am obviously left of most of the MMT community. I think of it like I’ve been on the high side of things.

I’ve lived la vida loco for a little while. Nothing like some, but I did pretty well.

But then, tragedy struck and it took 20 years for me to get to a point where I wasn’t literally looking out the window wondering if I was going to lose my home or not. So I understand from both ends. And you know, I am educated and I do have what would be considered a managerial-style job.

So I am both working-class and managerial-class at some level.

So I understand the dilemma that many face that have 401(k)s that are invested in the retirement programs. And they see the stock market go up, they see the bond yields go up because of the interest rate hikes, and so forth. And you know, to them that’s a great economy.

And I saw moments of that where it’s like, oh, okay, but that is kind of a standard Reagan-style economy. That was the trickle-down that Reagan talks so much about. And obviously it’s supply-side, and so forth.

But we witness breaks in the supply chain that created, you know, at least initially, a lot of these problems.

And then as we flash forward. We’re beginning to see kind of that multipolarity of the world that a lot of the world, the Global South, et cetera, we depend on to make our goods and services in this country, as an empire and an import-focused country. We’re looking at a whole new world now where maybe the Global South is tired of making our cheap goods and services. Maybe China is looking to become more equal. And others are saying, we’re done with you predating upon us.

And you never seen it more evident than within the UN as they voted on things like Gaza and stuff. The rest of the world is saying, we got to end this. And the US is there blocking it.

So there’s a long arm to this economics because we don’t create a lot of the stuff that we use in this country. We import it. And that means we’re reliant on other countries. We stop building things. We stop doing a lot of this stuff.

What do you see as the future of manufacturing? What do you see as the future based on what you’ve seen from this economy? What do you think is the next step? Because they’re demonizing China, still.

Why? Because China’s outpacing us technology-wise.

China, instead of building weapons of war and instead of invading places, they sat there and took care of home. It’s a really, really bad deal. I’m curious as to what your thoughts are on the way the US Is going to try and work it out.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:09:36.225 – 00:11:19.361

Yeah. Geopolitically speaking, I’m really not sure what’s going to happen in terms of, perhaps, there will be some conciliation with Russia and then the attention will be all on China as the new front for some kind of fight. So that’s all possible. But we need China.

But for now, China also needs us. Because we are their source of demand and they’re not at a point where they can rely on their domestic demand. So they are going to continue to rely on imported demand, which, basically, means exporting goods to us.

So I think on that front – unless with the tariffs and so on, right, which is also possible – then China is going to continue to sell to us.

Now, one thing I would say on the global dimension is that the Trump presidency actually presents an opportunity for all the countries who want to, sort of, break away and go their own way, in some sense. I was planning to write this piece on Europe, on how they’re now fretting over what are we going to do – Trump is elected, right?

And of course the instinct is we got to militarize. We got to spend on the military, right? Forget about everything else. We’ve been in austerity-mode for 20 years, to the point where our GDP per capita has really flatlined.

But now we’re going to militarize, we’re going to spend, and so on.

Well, instead they should actually try to work with China and try to build their economy in a non-militarized way. And try to live in peace in a way with the countries that are on the same continent as them.

And the Trump presidency with its isolationist foreign policy, if that materializes, obviously we don’t know that yet because all the promises made – promises not kept thing with Trump and his first presidency.

Steve Grumbine

00:11:19.393 – 00:11:19.969

Right, right.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:11:20.017 – 00:12:28.631

But that gives, at least, them an opportunity to stop being the US’s lap dog, right, for Europeans, for example.

And for China, if we do impose the tariffs, then the Chinese ruling class, because they also have a ruling class, right, they will have then to make a decision. Are they going to allow their domestic wages to grow to allow them to rely domestically on their own demand? Or are they not going to do it?

And I don’t really know the answer to that question about China, but the same is true about the global South to the extent that they can try to somehow decouple from the US and use the Trump presidency with its promises of being non-interventionist right. Now, as far as the future manufacturing in the United States goes, I appreciate the problem of losing manufacturing jobs. I think what has been done to the industrial Midwest is a disgrace.

What has been allowed to happen there is a disgrace and we are obviously reaping the results of that right now pretty much with the Clinton administration’s policies which led to the loss of jobs in those areas.

Steve Grumbine

00:12:28.783 – 00:12:30.519

NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement}and CAFTA job g [Central America Free Trade Agreement], yeah.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:12:30.567 – 00:15:16.285

Yeah. Yeah. And of course the Democrat solution is, well, pack up and leave, pretty much. Right? That’s as good as they’re going to do.

We’re not going to try to create jobs here where people are. Instead the solution is – well, you just go. You retrain. You move, right? You go somewhere else.

That’s been, sort of, the message, right, that we don’t really have anything to offer you in a sense. And instead of these voters, they’re going to try to get some of the more affluent, you know, center Republican kind of conservative voters.

Well, that strategy clearly did not work out very well for them. But even if you leave the politics aside, right, we’re talking about people here.

And so, you know, MMT and the solution of like the job guarantee, right – that you create jobs where people are – you don’t need to retrain them. If you look around in any developed country, there is so much that still has to be done. There is so many needs that go unmet, right?

You can always find jobs for people to do. And the question then is, how do you create good jobs, right? Because good jobs don’t necessarily have to be manufacturing jobs.

So manufacturing – keeping it here – I don’t know if that should necessarily be the goal. The goal should be how do we create good jobs, right?

Jobs where people can have a very good standard of living and they don’t need to have a bachelor’s degree for it, right? Something like that.

And Germany is facing the same problem right now because they’re quickly deindustrializing, or they have to because they can no longer rely on the cheap Russian natural gas. And so they may go through what the US went in the span of 10 years or so. They may go through it in a matter of just a few years, right?

So I don’t know if we need to cling to manufacturing jobs, necessarily. But instead, we need to demand good jobs for the average working-class person which allows them a decent standard of living.

And the other thing, though, is that what we saw with the semiconductors, right? There are certain areas that you could say are important for the nation. That’s where you definitely don’t want to give up your manufacturing. And now, for instance, we do that with the weaponry, right?

Like that’s the last remaining manufacturing jobs in the United States. So because we consider that of national security importance, right, and therefore we keep those jobs still here.

There are other areas like the semiconductors, which you could say are very important. And so the CHIPS Act, which Trump has vowed he’s going to repeal, I think that was a relatively good development.

But again, all of that, when you do it and the goal isn’t to improve people’s living standards, that’s problematic, right? So that definitely should be at the top of the concerns. That hasn’t been for a long time. And again, we are seeing the results of that now.

Steve Grumbine

00:15:16.835 – 00:20:34.625

I go back to 2015, before Bernie had conceded, and you watch people filling the streets, people that were anti Democratic but still willing to give it a shot. You know, people that were not willing to vote at all or maybe had never been politically active in their lives, and they were motivated to move.

They were the working class. They were regular people. There were academics. It was a mix of races, it was a mix of genders, it was a mix of earning potential.

You know, there was a lot of people that genuinely liked the sound of what Bernie said. And one of the big things that came out of that, which the MMT community clearly glommed onto, was the Green New Deal.

And the Green New Deal was something that we, here at Real Progressives, spend an inordinate amount of time both explaining, getting experts . . . You know, we had Fadhel [Kaboub], come on. We had Randy [Wray]. We had Bill Mitchell. We had Warren [Mosler]. We had everybody. Rohan [Grey] and yourself.

And we had so many people come on. Fadhel with his layer cake of the Green New Deal, you know, Bob Hockett as well, who had written a book about this.

And as soon as Biden took office in 2020, it was done. It was all Build Back Better. I mean, Nancy Pelosi called it that “green dream,” or whatever. And Hillary Clinton had called it pie in the sky.

So the Democratic hoi polloi poo-pooed on it. And I remember the transition team from the Bernie team to the Biden team.

And I knew that Stephanie was there, Sarah Nelson was there, Derek Hamilton was there, et cetera. What came out of it, there was no job guarantee. There was no Green New Deal. There was talk of raising the minimum wage.

There was talk of $2,000 checks. There was talk of all sorts of stuff of which little to none of it came to pass.

And we can blame Manchin and Sinema, we can blame the parliamentarian, you know, we can blame onions for breakfast. I mean, we can blame anything we want to blame. But at the end of the day, they didn’t deliver.

And when it came time for the Biden administration to find money to support genocide in Gaza, they found it without any problem at all.

But when it came to actually providing a job guarantee or even ending student debt. You know, the interesting thing is Levy Institute at Bard had put out a paper, I believe Stephanie was part of it. Scott Fullwiler, I think, Pavlina [Tcherneva]. I don’t know who all wrote on the paper, I don’t have it in front of me, but that paper was widely circulated. I know Stephanie had gone on with AOC and they had talked about this.

Biden’s plan didn’t leverage the Education Act that leveraged the emergency powers of the pandemic. And it was like, well, no wonder it fell.

Because if he would have used the proper channel, he could have wiped out everyone’s student debt without even apologizing. But he didn’t. He chose not to. And I will never under . . . well, actually, I think I do understand it, but that would ruffle some feathers for me to explain my theory of that. But regardless, everything that the progressive left had worked for to elevate – as soon as Biden said, nope, I’m going with Build Back Better, all the green shirts with Green New Deal that everybody in the MMT community was buying and selling, it just shut down. Just done. It was like lockstep. It was like everybody turned that off and started just carrying the company water.

And that bothered me tremendously. Because for the last four years, people like Bob Hockett and others – and you know, these are friends – but they did nothing but talk about Donald Trump the whole time. During Trump, it was nothing but Trump. They didn’t build momentum for a Green New Deal to carry us through. There was no positive vision of tomorrow.

It was just, we gotta get Trump. We gotta take him to court. We gotta put him in jail. We gotta get rid of Don the Con. And they had all their nicknames like Donald Trump had nicknames for everybody else. And so, the focus was lost.

And the only people that really suffered, well, was everybody. Because climate crisis will affect the rich and the poor, alike.

It’ll definitely affect the poor more because they don’t have the ability to build trillion-dollar bunkers to wade through climate collapse. But help me understand that. Of all the policy sets out there, that Green New Deal was something to truly build from. And it just got canned.

Just like Medicare For All. Completely dropped. I didn’t hear one word about Medicare For All for the last four years.

And you talk about feeling a sense of disgust? That right there. Those two things just dropped to the floor. Build Back Better, I know, was better than what Obama did. But then again, Obama was nothing more than a Republican in his economic plan as well.

Same with Bubba Clinton. Republican. And Republicans do Republican things better than Democrats doing Republican things.

So people are going to go for the real, you know?  They’re not going for the Coke Zero of Republican. They’re going to go for the Full Monty. So help me understand what the motivation behind dropping all that and just going with these kind of half measures.

You do believe that Build Back Better was better, but obviously the bar is very low.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:20:34.745 – 00:28:03.863

Right. And you know, obviously, I don’t really know all the details. I’m not one of the people they were talking to.

So, yeah, I think on the left we’ve been conditioned not to dream very big, which is a problem.

I remember whenever I would do my presentation about the Green New Deal – which the version of Green New Deal that Randy and I were sort of trying to cost in terms of resources – always included Medicare for All. It included a Job Guarantee. It included greening the economy. So it wasn’t just about transitioning to a greener, more sustainable economy, it was all of those things. And, also, ending the forever wars, and so on.

But I remember whenever I would present that I would always get something saying, well, that’s like a pipe dream. We’re never going to go there, right? It’s not going to happen. And I always wondered, like, how can we say that after the election of Donald Trump?

That’s one of those impossible things that’s not supposed to happen. And then, here you have the right-wing pretty much getting everything that they ever wanted. Like things that they couldn’t even imagine, right?

The kind of tax cuts they didn’t even think were doable. And then they got it all, right?

And so I’m thinking, how is it that they’re allowed to dream big and get it done and we’re not allowed to even imagine how things could be different, right? So I think the Left has that problem. Now, as far as the Biden administration and the Build Back Better, I think the way, at least I thought, about the Build Back Better was that that’s as good as we were going to get, right? That was their Green New Deal, or whatever you want to call it. And of course, it didn’t include a Job Guarantee. Didn’t include a Medicare for All.

In fact, Biden had promised that he would veto a Medicare for All if it ever made it to his desk. And of course, it would never even make it to his desk. We know that much. But even before the Build Back Better, they had the Stimulus Bill, right?

The Recovery and Reinvestment Act, something like that, which was about $2.1 trillion. And that was the one where they could suspend the rules, the pay-for rules, and they could pass it, right? And they knew they had the votes to do it.

And that’s where they were supposedly trying to include raising the minimum wage. And that’s where they said, oh, the parliamentarian says you cannot include it because of blah, blah, blah. I still don’t know why.

And of course at that point you say, wait, who, who said that? I mean, I didn’t know that was a thing, right?

Like most people probably – unless maybe you’re a political science professor – you know, like, who’s the parliamentarian? And how can they have so much power, right? Like, can’t you fire them and put somebody else in place?

You know, all the focus was on sending people the, whatever, 14, 15 hundred dollar checks. Which honestly, the fiscal policy was not done in a very good way, partly because we don’t plan for it. We don’t have any, you know, infrastructure put in place to do good fiscal policy like the Job Guarantee would be.

So we just do this sort of haphazard things. But if you think about raising the minimum wage, right, from $7 to $15, how many weeks would it take you to make that 15 hundred dollars? Right?

Not too many. So if you raise the minimum wage from $7 to $15, like, isn’t that a lot more important than the stimulus checks that you’re going to send to people,right? But of course, we just wasted all the political capital on the stimulus checks and instead we just said we cannot do the minimum wage.

And then the next step was the Build Back Better. And I remember it was supposed to be, collectively, something like $4 trillion, right? Which, during COVID, we appropriated $5 trillion in just a year and this was going to be $4.1 trillion over eight years, right?

So it came to be about half a trillion, $110 of that Covid spending, the sort of fiscal policy stimulus spending that happened under Trump and Biden, right? So $110 of that and then, of course, we’re like, well, how are we going to pay for it?

And you have this alphabet soup of the tax increases that we need to do to pay for it, which then created a lot of resistance. And we’re going to tax the economy for like 10 or 15 years, although the spending is happening over 8 years.

And from the MMT perspective, that’s also very crazy. Why are you withdrawing spending through taxes after you stop injecting income through government spending?

That did not make sense for all of its faults, right? So we have $2 trillion for what they said is the infrastructure bill, which had a big green component.

And then you have the other side, which they called social infrastructure, right? So paid parental leave, paid medical leave, paid vacations, and enhanced child tax credits.

So basically continuing those temporary additional child tax credits where people with children were getting extra payments from the government. So they wanted to do all of that.

And my theory is that if they had actually pushed for the social side first, maybe they would have a chance in the 2024 election. Because I think people have a more immediate change to their standard of living.

People with kids get the checks from the government every month, something like that. You – for the first time now – have the right to vacation in the United States or parental leave or medical leave, like these things that many other nations get and which we can only dream of here in the United States, right?

Which would actually help working-class people more. Because people who have the kinds of jobs that you and I have probably already get some kind of benefits like this from their employers, right? So it’s the people who don’t get benefits because they’re not part of the professional managerial class who would benefit more from this, right?

The working-class people. But instead, they didn’t do any of that, right? Instead, they scaled down the infrastructure bill to $1 trillion, right? They got bipartisan support. They got Joe Manchin to sign off.

And if my recollection is that, at the time, the progressives said, okay, we are going to vote for this and then we have Joe Manchin’s promise that he’s going to vote for some version of that social infrastructure side of the Build Back Better.

And of course, Joe Manchin voted for the infrastructure bill which probably is going to put a lot of money in a lot of pockets, right?

Not necessarily the right pockets, but then he just said no on the other side, right? So the progressives were left with no wind on that front, right? So we didn’t get the minimum wage and we didn’t get any of that.

But I think what’s even worse is that when Biden was campaigning for reelection, none of that came back. He didn’t even say, hey, we tried these things and it didn’t work, but we’re going to try again, right?

So give us a majority in the House or give us, I don’t know, majority in the Senate and we’re going to try again, right? We’re going to try to raise the minimum wage again, or any of this. Even Kamala Harris, right?

I remember a journalist wanted to talk to me after the debate to talk about the economic policies. I’m like, what policies? Like what, what economic policies are we talking about?

Like, if you think about Kamala Harris, if you think about, like, I mean, I’m not even going to go into the Trump thing, right? But then, very late, she’s like, I’m going to raise the minimum wage to $15. At this point, $15 is nothing, right? With inflation and everything.

No, $15 probably wasn’t enough even in 2021. And it’s definitely not enough today, right? And of course, we’re not even going to get the $15, which is quite unfortunate.

So, yeah, I think that’s the way I see it. That there were all these promises and only a little bit of that was done in the form of the infrastructure bill, and so on. Now there were some good things in the Inflation Reduction Act [IRA], and so on, which, but a lot of these take a long time.

Steve Grumbine

00:28:03.959 – 00:28:04.335

Sure.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:28:04.415 – 00:28:40.965

It’s good that we want to revamp our infrastructure. It’s good that we want to make investments in green energy and so on, although it’s probably going to be too little too late there, too.

But these are not the kinds of things that lead to improvement in people’s daily lives. And at the time, raising the minimum wage, on the other hand, would have made a big difference.

And the argument was that, well, if we raise the minimum wage, then prices are going to go up. Well, guess what? prices went up, anyway. And now you hadn’t raised the minimum wage and you had the inflation problem to deal with, right?

How do you win on that kind of an economic result? You don’t.

Steve Grumbine

00:28:41.305 – 00:28:58.689

Yeah.

You know, I go back to the end of The Trump Part 1 presidency and the absolute pressure that was there to get rid of him because of COVID and other things, obviously, too. But I think Covid is what really tipped the scale on that one.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:28:58.737 – 00:28:59.189

I agree.

Steve Grumbine

00:28:59.257 – 00:31:57.005

But then you had the Biden administration basically fold up like a cheap tent shortly thereafter and basically say – hey, we’re out of COVID. And they let all the COVID payments stop. They literally turned off all the inputs that little people had and that was the end because they thought that that was creating inflation.

But folks like Isabella Weber and yourself – even I remember last time we talked about inflation here with you in a previous episode. A lot of this stuff is not like some God-breathed market-driven thing.

This is people in smoky rooms making decisions to jack prices up and to expand their profit margin. And there are signals that not only the media gives – hey, they’re printing money. Instantly their libertarian antenna goes up and it’s like – oh, printing money, that means inflation. So they were able to capitalize on those market signals and the ignorance of the public.

I mean, the Guardian had a great article that showed how many businesses had jacked up their prices like a thousand percent profit increase during COVID. Ridiculous gouging that occurred and opportunism.

The US Government, who has infinite power to regulate business and regulate pricing through the Fed, or other things, instead opted to raise interest rates. Larry Summers talking about we need to lay 10,000 people off or 10 million people off, or whatever.

And it’s like this is the sum total of the way they thought through the problem. It’s fundamentally insane to me that we have made so little progress. If there’s even a real democracy there to defend. If they’re even listening.

Because I mean, study after study after study shows that public opinion has next to no impact on public policy.

It feels like, while Trump lost because of his handling of COVID, I believe a huge impact to Biden and Harris was not just the inflation but the fact that we’ve lived in a virtual live-streamed year-long genocide that the kids are watching on TikTok every day. And they’re hearing Kamala saying, I’m not changing my policy, I’m going to keep the funnel flowing. I’m going to keep shipping billions upon billions of dollars.

And to people that don’t know any better, they’re like, that’s my taxes going to pay for these bombs going to Israel. And why can’t you afford to get rid of my student debt? Or why can’t you afford to provide us healthcare? Why have these costs gone up so much?

I think that the priorities and the fact that it was a literal year of seeing students at universities and encampments fighting back, demanding divest, demanding all this stuff, and literally the tone-deaf administration and many elite Democrats basically told them go screw themselves. And I think that they figured it out afterwards. What are your thoughts on that kind of – I don’t hear you – form of governance?

Yeva Nersisyan

00:31:57.785 – 00:32:51.551

Right. And I think the election results, if they were close, I think then you could point to one factor or another. Maybe this tipped the election results in this state and that is the explanation for that state.

But I think given the kind of results we saw, including the popular vote, I think that this is just people saying we are not happy with the state of affairs, right? I don’t think there is like one or two reasons you can point to. I think it’s just a general discontent with the state of the economy.

I mean, maybe it’s because I’m an economist, but I think all of it comes down to the economy. Bill Clinton knew it, right? The Democrats know it. It’s just that the solutions would require us to make changes to the kind of economy we have.

Just like addressing climate change would require us to make changes to kind of economy we have. So we are just going to ignore and not think about it. Like climate wasn’t mentioned, right, at all in this election.

Steve Grumbine

00:32:51.743 – 00:32:52.423

Nope.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:32:52.559 – 00:33:09.215

In Europe they’re not talking about climate either, right? That’s done. Like we did the IRA, right? We did the infrastructure bill. That’s it. We’ve solved the climate problem.

And now Trump is going to eliminate the EV Tax Credit, which, honestly, I never thought that was a good solution to begin with.

Steve Grumbine

00:33:09.295 – 00:33:09.791

Agreed.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:33:09.863 – 00:34:09.811

I think you have to change the transportation thing. You have to create good public transportation. You look at what China has done with its railroad network and you’re like, this is doable, right?

You can do it in 10 years – the whole country is covered in high speed rail. How can we not do it? Of course, we can. So we just choose not to.

But I think what you said earlier, people were getting these checks and then it stopped. I think that was also a factor because people felt like, oh, something good is possible.

Like I could be getting those $300 per child extra checks every month and now I’m not getting them anymore, right? It’s like you see a better economic situation and then the rug is pulled out of you when the payments stop.

So that’s why I was saying that if they had prioritized those kinds of policies, I think we would be in a different situation now. On the question of the fiscal policy and inflation and so on, a lot of times the blame is placed on the stimulus checks that people got. But what about all the PPP loans, right?

Steve Grumbine

00:34:09.883 – 00:34:11.335

Right.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:34:11.875 – 00:34:17.147

All the millions and millions that some people got, right? Not the rest of us.

Steve Grumbine

00:34:17.211 – 00:34:17.563

Yeah.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:34:17.619 – 00:35:31.847

And where did that money go? Like even in states and places where there were no lockdowns, right?

Then you look at it and, you know – here is where you’re torn as a progressive and as an MMTer – you want to tell people that the government works, it can do good things, and so on. And here you have this kind of program, which is ridiculous the way it was set up, right? While the Europeans, instead – the government was going to just pay people’s salaries, right? That’s the way they had structured it.

Rather than giving millions to small businesses, which in many cases weren’t really that small, and then allowing them to just claim whatever and then get it all excused. While the student loan debt is not getting forgiven at the same time, right? Which also, by the way, could have been done. And we all know that it’s not an affordability question. And I agree with your analysis of why that did not succeed.

I think at some point you have to say, are they really trying to do good things? Or are they claiming that they’re trying and to say – like the parliamentarian thing – the student loan thing, right? And I think to me, again, going back to my point, what’s worse is that none of that made it back into [the] 2024 platform.

What was the economic platform of Joe Biden before he dropped out? I don’t know. Like, do you know, you know, what were the big things that . . .

Steve Grumbine

00:35:31.871 – 00:35:38.931

Genocide. His plan was genocide will fund the Military Industrial complex. That was it.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:35:39.043 – 00:35:48.307

Right. Like, what was Kamala Harris’ offering, right? And there was a New York Times piece about how she’s an incrementalist. I’m like, really? So in . . .

Steve Grumbine

00:35:48.411 – 00:35:59.635

Worse. Oh my God. Let me interject. This is so funny.

There was an op-ed, I think it did come out of the Washington Times, that said Kamala Harris doesn’t need policy to win the election.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:35:59.755 – 00:36:00.243

Yeah.

Steve Grumbine

00:36:00.339 – 00:36:08.105

That is literally the vote blue sycophant. The arrogance of this blue wave mindset. It’s unbearable.

Intermission

00:36:09.165 – 00:36:29.345

You are listening to Macro and Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible.

Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website realprogressives.org.  Now, back to the podcast.

Steve Grumbine

00:36:32.145 – 00:38:19.693

And I want to add to this because you and I both are in the great state of Pennsylvania, which is a very interesting state, to say the least, it’s very purple. And it’s got some interesting Left kind of things. I think it’s like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and then Pennsyltucky.

It’s a very interesting state.

But SEPTA [Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority]mcc, and I want to build on this because I think this is very important as an MMT currency issuer – currency user framework, which is going to show the economy at a different level. You know, SEPTA has been screaming for a year – if we don’t find a way to fix the fiscal problems of the state, we’re going to have to jack rates up for mass transit. Which is important for people without money and people that have to go long distances. It’s also an important piece to maintaining some environmental hedge, right? A little bit. anyway.

Well, anyway, SEPTA is out saying they’re going to raise their fare prices nearly 30% and eliminate dozens of routes, okay?

And this idea is what happens when you cut the spigot off on the fiscal at the federal – the currency issuer side – and it creeps down, slowly but surely, into states and municipalities. Which is one of the key reasons why I, and many other MMTers, were railing hardcore, including yourself.

We did a Medicare for All panel discussion a few years back where we described the major flaw in this concept of state-by-state health care. Which, for whatever reason – for political points or whatever – people just sideswiped us and swept our legs out when we were preaching the MMT gospel. I’ll never understand that. But in any event, the states are literally hemorrhaging money now that a lot of that stimulus has been cut off.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:38:19.789 – 00:38:20.357

Right.

Steve Grumbine

00:38:20.501 – 00:40:34.491

And you’re seeing that in the services, and we’re going to get to a point of austerity.

And once they start cutting services, that concept of having one man’s spending be another person’s income. When it dries up, it dries up. And that means other people stop spending because they’ve got to pinch more pennies. Prices have gone up in real terms.

My mortgage has gone up a hundred dollars a month because of increases in taxes and other inflationary aspects within my local region. In this area, my electric bill has shot up more than $150 a month.

In this area, my cost of gasoline has shot through the roof and my food cost. Overall. We did a minor calculation with student loans kicking back in at $600 a month.

And out of nowhere you could say that I am paying close to twelve hundred dollars a month more to live now than I did before. The student loan payments were turned back on at the end of September, beginning of October. That is real hardcore stuff.

I don’t know how many people can just suddenly absorb $1,000 worth of new spending being put on them. I’m not doing a great job of keeping up with it, to be honest with you, but I’m just one person that happened to millions upon millions of people.

And the homeless rate has shot through the roof.

I mean, California Governor Newsom basically was giddy about outlawing homelessness in California, went crazy sweeping away the homeless encampments, you name it. I mean, there’s no allies in this, but this economy is getting crueler and crueler.

And now that we’ve got Trump in there, he’s got Elon Musk in there trying to find ways to cut spending on top of everything else. And Elon Musk receives $9 billion a year in federal subsidies, I believe. It’s not a year, it’s in total $9 billion for SpaceX and for Tesla. Amazing.

It’s shocking. So why don’t we start trimming right there? Right? Yeah.

Talk to me about the trickle down effect, the impact of states and municipalities, retirement funds, all that stuff that comes when you cut off the federal spigot.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:40:34.603 – 00:43:08.633

Right. Yeah. And you’re right that one of the good things that we did during the COVID stimulus was giving money to state and local governments, which is something we don’t usually do enough of.

If you look at the numbers, the state and local governments actually become a recessionary force in times of crisis and recessions because their tax revenues decrease. Like they’re relying on sales tax and state income taxes, and stuff like that.

So those go down and then they start cutting services and they start cutting spending. And like you said, somebody’s spending [is] someone else’s income, right?

If they have to lay off workers, like I don’t know, firefighters, policemen and so on and so forth. If they have to lay them off, then these people aren’t earning the wages and now they cannot spend. And then it goes on and on.

For the first time in a long time, we actually gave the state and local government a lot of money during the federal stimulus payments, both under Trump and under Biden. And like you said, that has kept them afloat. But if that tide turns and they have to cut spending, right, or raise prices if they’re offering services, then of course that’s going to be a recessionary force.

But my prediction is that after Trump, we’re probably going to get eight years of J.D. Vance. That’s, I think, where things are headed.

And I don’t see Democrats learning the lessons of the 2016 election. They learned the wrong lessons from the 2020 election.

They learned the wrong lessons from the way they did or didn’t do the policies after the 2020 election. And of course, they’re not going to learn the lessons after 2024. So I think they’re not going to be able to win. However, I think Democrats cannot win, but Trump can lose if they actually do go ahead with the austerity stuff, right?

So if the Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy austerity whatever brigade actually gets to work and ends up cutting spending, then that’s going to lead to again, decreased incomes in the private sector and therefore higher unemployment and so on. So I think that’s one way they could lose the election in four years time. I don’t see Democrats actually winning the election on any kind of policy.

One thing that I wanted to say and I forgot was [price] gouging, right? Yes. You mentioned that firms, and we’ve talked about this previously, but it was funny that Kamala Harris was running on that.

I heard so many ads because whenever my kids watched their YouTube videos, they would get all these political ads, which I don’t understand how they decide to put YouTube, you know, political ads on kid-related videos.

Steve Grumbine

00:43:08.729 – 00:43:09.617

Grooming.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:43:09.761 – 00:43:29.157

Yeah. My kids were asking me questions, who’s Kamala Harris? And who’s, I don’t know, [US Senate candidate] Dave McCormick?

And so one of the ads, which I heard because the TV was on, like I’m going to clamp down on price gouging or something like that. And I’m thinking, aren’t you the vice president right now? Where were you two years ago when you actually needed to clamp down on price gouging?

Steve Grumbine

00:43:29.221 – 00:43:29.853

Hello.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:43:30.029 – 00:45:48.245

So, yeah, that’s like you knew that was an empty promise, right? That they didn’t really have a good answer to what to do about inflation.

And partly, I would say the left progressive economists, because we haven’t really been worried about inflation for the past whatever, 20 years or more, we’ve mostly focused on unemployment, right? So inflation sort of has been this thing that’s been put on the back burner.

So in a way, we weren’t prepared; I guess you could say they weren’t prepared to offer solutions that could be quickly implemented, right? Anything that you did was about, I don’t know, increasing the supply, but that was going to take time, right? Things like that.

Like, even if you did do things like Build Back Better, right? Transition to green energy, all of that is going to take time. And meanwhile you need the fossil fuels and so on and so forth, right?

Like, what do you do about that?

I mean, partly it’s because there is not a lot of funding for thinking about industrial planning. For thinking about how to do fiscal policy in a good way, right?

It’s just a small group of economists, like the MMTers and some others, who just worry about these issues. While at the same time, you have all these researchers and all this money about how to do monetary policy when we all know that monetary policy is completely ineffective when it comes to addressing unemployment. It’s ineffective when it comes to, you know, addressing inflation, even though obviously the Fed is taking credit for the reduced inflation, and so on. But we don’t have the same kind of efforts and funding towards, like, how do you do fiscal policy in a way that you don’t increase prices?

Like MMT has obviously the Job Guarantee as an alternative. But if you don’t have a Job Guarantee in place, right, and you do need to do policy like you had during COVID – How do you do it in a good way, right?

So I think that was a problem that came back to bite the Biden administration, ultimately. The same thing about industrial policy, right? Like, we haven’t thought about that because we don’t need industrial policy and suddenly we’re like, well, we don’t have semiconductors, right? Suddenly we need industrial policy.

And that’s again, an area of economics that’s just been ignored pretty much because that’s not a way in which the state is supposed to intervene in the economy because, God forbid, we mess with the market and the market allocation.

Steve Grumbine

00:45:48.625 – 00:49:24.535

Capitalism’s a hell of a drug, isn’t it? Well, listen, there is a comedian and progressive activist who I follow.

Sometimes I’m really feeling her vibe and other times I’m like, what are you saying? Her name’s Kate Willett, and she’s a comedian and she’s really good on most things. I think she’s a part of DSA and I think a lot of the MMT crowd follows her, as well.

But she put something up on Twitter, X, whatever, the other day that I think is worth discussing. Because I see economists, you know, in order to be part of administrations they seem to have to curry favor amongst the loyal. And that creates some sort of warped thinking, I think, unfortunately, defending the indefensible of conservative Democrats instead of thinking about the working class people, which is a destroyer of all things good.

But what Kate says is this, and I want to get your opinion on this because I think it’s going to impact the way we see economics and the different narratives that may come out of the different camps. And what she said was, I think it’s possible the liberal left coalition that makes it possible to elect Dems has been broken, permanently.

As climate change gets worse and wars accelerate, the number of people who will want real change will increase. Resist-libs, AKA the what we oftentimes, forgive me, call shit-libs, you know they will prefer fascism to peace and redistribution.

The coalition for fascism is going to include more and more liberals and the left will have to build quite a bit to offset it. The people who think we are doing Newsom-Pete 2028 don’t get the moment.

I think Gaza demonstrated that centrists want a level of killing which makes the rest of us upset.

They imagine Biden 2028 but to get past all the new GOP gerrymandering and state election fuckery, as she says, you need 60% of the US to vote Pete. And there’s no way. And the follow up from my weight class as Karen is resist-libs will prefer fascism. And I agree. I mean, I’ve seen the silence in the face of a genocide. I’ve seen that.

So when you think about creating the kind of will to have these wonderful policies that MMT had previously and I, hopefully, will again put out there and be front and center of. But when you think about those bold policies, the coalition is fracturing because the Left has had enough. I know I won’t vote Democrat again in the rest of my life. I voted Jill Stein this past election and I’d do it a hundred times over, again.

Rather than vote for somebody that bonded with Dick Cheney, I won’t do it. Not really too concerned about who has a problem with it, either. Because it’s a democracy, right? I don’t believe that.

But yeah, sure, it’s a democracy. In other words, I have a right as a citizen to vote for whoever the hell I want to vote for, even if it doesn’t bear any fruit.

And this kind of coalition that you need – you remember Stephanie said we just have to source the votes -well, the votes are going to be hard pressed because the centrists and the people that were part of the Biden Harris entourage didn’t fight for us, quite frankly. And so now we’re all going to suffer because that coalition has been shattered.

What are your thoughts on being able to get progressive economics out there so that the logical, correct answer to the economic questions that drive us are front and center instead of, you know, being completely sideswiped with partisan bull-hockey?

Yeva Nersisyan

00:49:25.115 – 00:54:17.107

Yeah, I mean, I’m not sure I know the answer to that question.

I feel like the progressive Left has sort of been neutralized in a way, which is very, very unfortunate given how much energy there was after Bernie Sanders 2016 run, right? And then 2020 again. That’s kind of how I feel as well. The establishment chose that they would rather have Trump than give Bernie a chance.

So to the extent that they claim that Trump is a fascist than Hitler, they would rather take a chance with him than allow us to have Medicare for All, or at least a chance to have Medicare for All, right? Which is not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, right?

Like, okay, it reduces your profits somewhat, maybe, or maybe you have to pay higher wages because people don’t have the threat of losing healthcare hanging over their head if they lose their job. All we do is become a little bit more like France or Germany or Norway, and so on.

We’re not becoming a communist country if we give people free or affordable health care. So I often think about the Occupy Movement and how the way things were framed at the time, like the 99% versus the 1%, right?

Sort of trying to target things where the power was. Like Wall Street, and so on, right? And at the time, there were all the books written about the end of neoliberalism, right? This is the end of neoliberalism. That’s what many were saying. And part of me is like, I feel like we’ve been hearing this for some time, right? At least now that’s what I’m thinking.

But I think what the next question was, well, what comes after? I think that’s the question that wasn’t often posed, right? Okay, so it’s the end of neoliberalism. How does it actually end?

What’s this next system that’s coming, right? And it doesn’t always have to be a better system. It doesn’t have to be a more social democratic system.

You could actually, in this crossroads, you could go in the direction of a more fascist kind of state and economy, right? So I think there is a better chance of us getting there than getting anywhere close to Norway or Sweden, and so on. So that tells you how optimistic of a person I am, right?

But there, I think there is some opportunity on maybe catching the disaffected voters because the working class voters through some kind of new Daliesque shift in Democratic Party.

I just don’t think that the Democratic Party is going to make that shift like the Newsom-Mayor Pete. I mean, it’s ridiculous that they’re even on the table at this point. But like after 2016, you could say, okay, 2016 – nobody could imagine that Trump could be elected.

So that’s why they were saying, well, we can neutralize Bernie and move on, right? We’re going to win with somebody like Hillary Clinton. And in 2016, the Democrats didn’t win with Hillary Clinton. And in 2020, they again did not want to give Bernie a chance, right? So Obama put his thumb on the scale and pushed everybody to get out.

And so Joe Biden became the nominee and then he hardly squeaks by, hardly won the election. So, yeah, twice there, the progressive Bernie movement was sort of neutralized. And of course, everything that’s happened since then with the foreign policy and so on, it’s just made things even worse.

So at the level of elected politicians, I feel like there is not a lot of people we can rely on anymore as far as building the grassroots movements and, hopefully, catching some of those disaffected voters who are going to be betrayed by Trump, right? All of his promises that people, I think, are buying are the progressive promises.

It’s like, I feel your pain. I know the system isn’t working.

That’s what he’s telling people, right? I know the system isn’t working. And the Democrats are like, no, no, no, everything’s fine. And people are like, the system isn’t working.

So then they go and vote for this guy who’s actually not offering them any solutions. But that’s what right-wing movements are doing here and in Europe and in other parts. They get all of these left-wing critiques of the system, right?

Things aren’t working for, you know, this is bad and that is bad. It’s coming from the Left. But then the solutions they offer or the like, the reasons, right? It’s not the system, it’s the immigrants.

It’s not the system, it’s, you know, your neighbor, and so on and so forth. Those are the kinds of solutions that the right-wingers are going to propose. And of course that’s not going to help people.

So to the extent that people are going to eventually feel betrayed by Trump, although that’s not a guarantee, right? I mean, he has that cultish attraction to him, which I don’t get. But you know, it’s there, cannot deny it.

Yeah, I mean, the grassroots part, I’m not really sure, right? What do we do there? I don’t really do that kind of work myself, so it’s hard for me to comment. Maybe you know more about that than I do.

Steve Grumbine

00:54:17.231 – 00:57:44.047

Well, just real quick. So from what I’ve done, as someone who is not an economist, but works closely with you guys in my activism, you know, I try and take what I know people are fighting for, that won. And I marry that with an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory, both at the state level, the municipal level and the federal level.

And I’ve brought in the full complement of the geopolitical level, as well. Now, I mean, thank you Fadhel {Kaboub] and [Jason] Hickel and others for educating me there. But at the end of the day, what I’m seeing is a genuine desire.

But we keep getting drowned out by shit-lib version of the world that has got Trump derangement-syndrome posts. 400 social media posts in a row of “Donny tiny hands.” Yeah, and like silly memes that literally suck the oxygen out of the room.

Now, not only does it suck the oxygen out of the room for left-wing activism, but it really, really creates a hero because anybody that can own, quote unquote, the shit-libs is going to be a hero in the working class mind. Because what they see as shit-lib-mindedness is this kind of woke thought process. Now, mind you, I love the real term “woke.”

And hey, I’m aware of what’s going on. I understand the plight of struggle, right? But they’ve weaponized identity politics through a capitalist lens and it leaves a lot to be desired.

And people are seeing through that and they’re tired of being canceled. They’re tired of tiptoeing on eggshells. And there are some people out there giddy to try to be able to say the N-word and stupid crap like that.

But aside from that, though, it’s the elites are trying to tell us that our way of life is deplorable. That we’re just bad. And they’re tired of it.

So they see Donald Trump as a hero telling them, hey man, don’t let those snot-nose rich kids tell you how it is. And you know, there’s something to that. You do want to give the finger to the snot-nose rich kids that are telling you how it’s going to be. You’d like to tell them to go pound sand.

So Donald Trump, at some level, hits that kind of sweet spot in a lot of people that are just tired of elites telling them how they have to be. What they have to do. Who they have to like. How they have to do it. And that doesn’t mean it’s right. I’m just telling you that that is the mindset.

And with that in mind, when these people come out and they say we got to reduce the deficit and we got to cut the debt and we got to cut the fat out of government – there is just not nearly enough people that are out there willing to do that political fight on the grand stage in front of people to educate and tell them, as an activist, and not wiggle away and mealy-mouth it. Because these folks don’t want to hear wimpy tone police messaging. They don’t. They’re tired of it. They’re angry.

And they want to hear people that are speaking properly about how angry they are for this stuff. And they see a lot of people tiptoeing around tone policing and they’re like, the heck with that. I reject it outright.

I don’t even know what they’re saying. I just know they’re telling me that I have to watch my tone and that makes them the enemy. I agree with them. Actually, at some level, I agree with them on that. Because tone policing is the civility police – which ultimately tells people your suffering just isn’t that bad. You need to watch how you speak.

You need to shut up and eat your peas. And I think that that is abusive. I think that’s gaslighting. And I think that we’re reaping the consequences of the police right now.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:57:44.231 – 00:58:36.449

Well, I mean, to the extent that that kind of rhetoric divides the working class people, broadly speaking, which [yes] the Democrats are part of it. And of course, like the people who do the jobs that you and I do, right? Like looking down on people who do other kinds of jobs, right? Like more working class people. That’s, I think, part of the problem, of course. [yes] And I was recently looking at the data of the bachelor’s degree premium – pretty much, if you look at, say, the earnings of men, the median, like weekly earnings of men with a high school degree versus a college degree – and that premium has increased. Like it has doubled since the 2000s, pretty much, right?

Like in nominal terms, some going from something like $360 a week to $730 a week. That’s not a minor difference, right?

Steve Grumbine

00:58:36.577 – 00:58:37.281

No, indeed.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:58:37.353 – 00:59:07.669

So there are people who are doing just fine, like, for whom the economy seems to be working. And they’re not necessarily the people who own like the factories and the stocks, and so on. Although some of these people probably have that, too.

But they are again, like workers, right? If you think about it, they have to work for monies. They’re a different class of workers.

So you’ve had this segmentation which has always existed in the labor market, which has gotten even worse, right? You have some workers – they’re still workers – they have to work to be able to live, right?

Steve Grumbine

00:59:07.717 – 00:59:08.005

Yeah.

Yeva Nersisyan

00:59:08.045 – 01:00:32.413

Who are doing just fine, and they can’t understand that the system isn’t working because it is working for them.

So then you see these tone-deaf things on tv – and I don’t watch a lot of mainstream tv – but occasionally I’ll see a clip of people making fun and saying, oh, people voted for Trump, for Hitler because the egg price is too high. I’m like, really? Like, food is just so offensive. Honestly, if you think about it, it’s not just egg price, right? Like, food prices are high.

And if you’re hardly scraping by and you have children and you’re worried about their future and you see that your living standards are probably lower than your parents and so on, and you’re not happy about it, you shouldn’t be happy about it, right? The liberals want people to just be content with what they have because they cannot relate.

Like I said, for them the economy is working and that creates these divisions which do not help us get anywhere good. So if you think about the, again, the Occupy movement, the message was We Are The 99%. [Yep] 99% of us.

If you think about it, the system is not really good for us. I mean, if we think about climate change, it’s clearly going to, like you said, destroy all of us at some point.

So it’s really not working for the 99% or, you know, 90%, whatever you want to say.

Steve Grumbine

01:00:32.509 – 01:00:32.909

Right.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:00:32.997 – 01:00:42.557

It’s working a little better for a certain part of that 99%, right? And so, you know, all of these results I think could have been predicted, right?

Steve Grumbine

01:00:42.701 – 01:00:43.165

Yes.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:00:43.245 – 01:00:57.321

The 2016 election, the 2024 election, all you had to do is look at the level of economic discontent. And I think it’s hard for people who don’t live in that kind of economic situation to actually see that.

Steve Grumbine

01:00:57.513 – 01:02:22.735

Yeah.The last thing I want to bring up before I let you go, and I do appreciate your time here and I know I always stretch you just outside of economics a little bit here and there, don’t I? I can’t help it. It’s just how I go. But in this particular case, one of the things that started off with when Roe v. Wade was in jeopardy, and this has so many long-reaching effects, you know, canceling student debt got overruled by the SCOTUS.

And when you think about the concept of the Supreme Court – there were many people that were yelling at Joe that were advisors of his people in that consultant group – that were saying, Joe, you need to stack the court. You need to fill the court up so that you can undo all the damage that Trump did with all those federal appointments, and so forth. And Biden said, yeah, you know, I’m not going to do that. And lo and behold, Roe fell and you see the results on student debt, et cetera.

This is not a miss that didn’t have an answer. There were answers for both of these. And they were told, no. Ending the filibuster, no.

All the different tools that they had at their disposal, they were like, yeah, no, we’re not going to do it. Lo and behold, Republicans get in there. Republicans say, yeah, we’re going to do whatever it takes to get our stuff done.

I’m curious, what kind of confidence can a working-class person have in people that lay down their weapons before the battle even begins?

Yeva Nersisyan

01:02:23.155 – 01:02:26.615

I think that, sort of, assumes that they do want to battle.

Steve Grumbine

01:02:27.515 – 01:02:29.899

You’re right. That’s where I was going. Thank you.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:02:29.987 – 01:02:30.355

Right.

Steve Grumbine

01:02:30.435 – 01:02:32.971

Like, they don’t want to. They’re one of the same.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:02:33.083 – 01:02:57.263

So I think if you can be very cynical and say, maybe they wanted this outcome in the case of Roe because, without that, they stood no chance. They weren’t wiped out in the midterm elections because of the abortion issue, which is important. And they were hoping that it was going to carry them, you know, in the 2024 election, too. But it wasn’t enough, right?

Steve Grumbine

01:02:57.399 – 01:02:58.255

That’s right.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:02:58.415 – 01:03:08.985

So you go back again to Obama, right? And now we are so worried that the Republicans have a supermajority. I’m like, Obama had a supermajority too, right? Didn’t he?

Steve Grumbine

01:03:09.105 – 01:03:10.485

He did nothing with.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:03:10.865 – 01:03:13.121

Yeah, like, what is that? What, what did he do?

Steve Grumbine

01:03:13.193 – 01:03:17.897

Voluntarily took the public option off the table without even any pushback.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:03:17.961 – 01:03:33.987

Right? Like, so when I tell this to people, I say, Obama didn’t do anything. And they’re like, well, you know, he only had those two years, and after the midterm elections, and so on and so forth.

First of all, when were the midterms? 2022? You know, I guess that’s when the midterms were.

Steve Grumbine

01:03:34.171 – 01:03:34.755

Right.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:03:34.875 – 01:03:47.939

If you are the incumbent party, you don’t need to be wiped out. Like, if people feel like you’re doing something, you’re not necessarily going to be wiped out.

So if people felt like he was doing something good. Like actually cleaning up Wall Street.

Steve Grumbine

01:03:48.027 – 01:03:48.779

Yep.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:03:48.947 – 01:04:51.539

You know, punishing the people who were at fault for the financial crisis, right? Like bailing out the homeowners rather than bailing out the banks, there are so many things you could have done in those two years.

And maybe then you have the political capital to go and do other things like healthcare, and so on, right? But even there, like, you didn’t put the public option on the table. The stimulus was too small. Well, why was it too small?

It wasn’t too small because Obama went there and said, we need $2 trillion and the Republicans said, no, you can only have $800 billion. He went there with an $800 billion plan, thanks to Larry Summers, right?

We know that now that it was Larry Summers who’s at fault there. And of course, who appointed Larry Summers, right? And so he didn’t even try. Like, that’s the thing. Like, if he really tried hard and if you think about the austerity, right? The sequestration and all of that, he didn’t even try to stop it, right? You could say, well, he didn’t have the votes, and so on and so forth. But did he even try? He went along willingly, right?

Like, he said, we are out of money. He said, we have to tighten our belts because Americans are suffering and they’re tightening their belts.

Steve Grumbine

01:04:51.627 – 01:04:56.015

Take a credit card from the People’s Republic of China. That’d be unmoral.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:04:56.995 – 01:05:04.683

Exactly. Right. So it’s not like he was unwillingly, like, being pushed into those positions. He took those positions willingly. Like, he didn’t fight.

Steve Grumbine

01:05:04.739 – 01:05:05.179

Yep.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:05:05.267 – 01:05:11.867

So then I, like, I hang it all on his doorstep, you know? All of the failures.

Steve Grumbine

01:05:11.971 – 01:05:12.795

I’m with you.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:05:12.915 – 01:05:25.003

One of the many op-eds that are brewing in my head, which I’m probably not going to write, is that, like, for the Democratic Party to stand any chance they have to let go of this myth of the Obama being a good president, right? Like, he was not a good president.

Steve Grumbine

01:05:25.099 – 01:05:25.739

That’s right.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:05:25.827 – 01:06:01.769

And I think that’s more accepted to say about Bill Clinton. But I remember I wrote an op-ed after the 2020 election basically saying that Biden shouldn’t repeat Obama’s mistakes.

And I sent it to a friend of mine just to read. And she said, I think it’s good, but I don’t think it’s ever going to get published because Obama is a very beloved president.

I was like, what? Like I didn’t . . . I . . . so I’m… in the liberal class, right? He’s considered this really good president and, of course, the economic situation doesn’t really support that, right? Like if you look at the unemployment rate, we had the worst recovery on the record.

Steve Grumbine

01:06:01.937 – 01:06:02.649

Horrific.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:06:02.737 – 01:06:27.701

It took us 10 years to go back to the unemployment levels that we had before 2017. So like, when Trump was bragging about the economy, like I had this good economy before and Obama is like, well, that was my economy.

And I was thinking to myself, are you going to take credit for all of those 10 years or only the last few when we had the recovery? Like, if that was your economy, then you should take credit for all of those years, right?

Steve Grumbine

01:06:27.773 – 01:06:28.629

That’s right.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:06:28.797 – 01:06:39.373

With the 10% unemployment and so on. And of course they’re not going to take credit for that and they’re not going to learn from their mistakes and so on. So, yeah.

Steve Grumbine

01:06:39.469 – 01:07:30.827

Well, I appreciate that. See, this podcast doesn’t do glossing over things. We’re willing to punch where punches need to be punched.

And I don’t want people to walk away from this feeling just comfortable. I want them to really examine the stuff we’re seeing.

I’m hoping people listen to us, take notes, consider their circumstances, consider the world around them.

Because when you read the newspaper, when you read these other things, and when you listen to establishment friendly podcasts, you don’t hear any of the truth. It’s all nonstop, you know, they’re just stupid for not liking our bad policies, and it’s horrifically tone deaf.

And I just want to thank you so much for this because the other thing that we do here is we have a website and we have a Substack and we publish people. So if you ever have a wild hair and you want to write an op-ed . . .

Yeva Nersisyan

01:07:30.931 – 01:07:31.387

Sure.

Steve Grumbine

01:07:31.491 – 01:08:32.365

and you’re afraid it won’t get published – You have a friend in us. We will publish it and we have a share army that will make sure everybody reads it. So please, don’t forget us.

We love to publish. So that goes to all you other MMTers out there and class-aware, socialist-minded people. We’re not interested in Centrists. Stop, folks. Sorry.

But we are very much interested in people that understand the glue that holds the working class together from a Left perspective. Because we’re not neutral. We are real progressives and we have hopes and dreams and we’d like to bring all that to focus.

So, Yeva, thank you so much for helping me do this postmortem of what I consider to be an extremely predictable, sad, but predictable election. And thank you so much for filling in some of the voids on the economic side that I think many people just skip by and don’t hear. So, thank you.

Where can we find more of your work? I know that you’re not really on social media, but I did just buy a very expensive textbook.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:08:34.555 – 01:08:37.295

Sorry. I don’t set the prices, right?

Steve Grumbine

01:08:37.795 – 01:08:40.755

That’s true, but it’s good. But anyway, go ahead, tell us.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:08:40.915 – 01:08:49.203

Well, all of my stuff is on the Levy Economics Institute’s website, so I think that’s where people should go if they want to read some of my stuff.

Steve Grumbine

01:08:49.339 – 01:08:49.979

Very good.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:08:50.067 – 01:08:51.891

I do get the op-ed out there.

Steve Grumbine

01:08:52.003 – 01:09:03.675

Okay. All right. Well again, that is an open invitation and I mean that for I really would love it if you would. Because we’re just regular people that would like to lift up people that are doing the work. So thank you so much. Appreciate it immensely.

Yeva Nersisyan

01:09:03.795 – 01:09:04.615

You’re welcome.

Steve Grumbine

01:09:05.315 – 01:10:03.866

All right, so from Macro N Cheese, we are part of Real Progressives, which is a 501c3 nonprofit. If you feel the work we’re doing here is worth anything to you, if you feel like we’re doing good work, we survive on your donations. And it’s the year end, so, being a 501c3, they are tax deductible, folks.

Don’t forget you can give us a one-time donation at our website realprogressives.org you can also go to our substack, realprogressives.substack.com. You can go to Patreon, it’s realprogressives/patreon.com. But by all means, we need your support. And Yeva, you are wonderful. Again, thank you so much on behalf of my guest and myself, Macro N Cheese, we are out of here.