Episode 87 – A Just Transition Through Participatory Governance with Cindy Banyai

Macro N Cheese – Episode 87
A Just Transition Through Participatory Governance with Cindy Banyai

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Cindy Banyai [intro/music] (00:00):

These type of programs that we can create that will boost our economy, they have a massive effect on women’s participation in the economy because women are the ones who typically step out, do the caregiving.

I do have a doctorate, I do teach this. And so when I get up and I start breaking it down for people, I think it will resonate because of that. And so I am really looking forward to being an expert on how government works in our government.

Geoff Ginter [intro/music] (00:34):

Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

Steve Grumbine (01:34):

All right. And this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today I have a candidate – yes, a candidate – from Florida. Her name is Dr. Cindy Banyai and she’s the Democratic nominee for the US house of representatives in Florida’s District 19, spanning the coastal Southwest Florida and Boca Grande to Marco Island. She’s a mom of three native Floridian, a small business owner, and part of the faculty of Political Science and Public Administration at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Dr. Banyai has been a decorated professional in the field of community development for almost 20 years, collaborating with nonprofits around the world on issues such as homelessness, children’s services, education, and sustainable development. She’s running for Congress to be the servant leader Southwest Florida deserves, fighting for our water, our health, our community. Dr. Banyai believes together we can create a Southwest Florida where the sun shines on everyone.

And with that, I did not bring her on because she’s the great candidate from Florida. I brought her on because she actually is one of the candidates that we seek out to shine a spotlight on because she understands Modern Monetary Theory.

And because of understanding Modern Monetary Theory, it has brought about a bunch of hope, hope that we at Macro N Cheese and Real Progressives like to elevate so that you, our listeners, and other voters and people that are just in the citizenry, so they can be weaponized with knowledge so they can be activated, and so they can see the possibilities. So with that, let me bring on my guest. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Cindy Banyai (03:26):

Oh, thanks for having me.

Grumbine (03:27):

Absolutely. So what is it that brought you to Modern Monetary Theory? How did you learn this?

Banyai (03:34):

Yeah, it’s kind of a funny story actually. So you’ve probably heard that candidates, we have to make calls to donors. And one day I accidentally, or perhaps fatefully called somebody who is a MMT follower – proponent. And he explained the concepts to me and hooked me into a network of people. And it was really fantastic for me because it was actually like finding a home, a home for this economic theory that I already had.

I had been a longtime participatory budgeting proponent, and to find the group of people that kind of wrapped into a concise theory all of these things that I have been, you know, essentially telling my students at FGCU for years, I was just so excited. And I am just so proud to be part of this because I think it will really change the game for us candidates when it comes to legislating.

Grumbine (04:29):

That’s fantastic. I find it interesting because everybody’s journey to MMT is always very different and it’s always a big, huge wake up call, whether it be a blinding flash to the obvious in your case, because you already knew it, or whether it be some cataclysmic event that just brings out this new understanding and changes everything. It’s like all the downstream connections, all those neural connectors, oh my goodness, this changes everything.

And when I look at our Congress and I look at the makeup of our representatives, the vast majority of them have not had this awakening. And I would say that the vast majority of the voting population in America has not had this awakening either. But I did notice you had written an article about Social Security and you mentioned someone who has had a huge impact on the view of many in terms of waking people up and that’s Stephanie Kelton, who just recently released a New York Times bestseller called “The Deficit Myth.” And I noticed that you mentioned her. Can you talk about Stephanie Kelton for a minute?

Banyai (05:37):

Yeah. It’s just so fantastic to have somebody who’s been an advisor to politicians and candidates and who is really out front telling the story about our economy, the way that it really actually works. Again, she’s somebody that I was very fortunate to have learned about through this process. The idea that we can be freed to a certain extent from these economic shackles in our policymaking is revolutionary.

I mean, it’s allowed me also to be able to talk to people in my district and they tell me their concerns, and they go, we really need to fix that. And I go, yeah, we do. And yes we can because we don’t have to worry about the conceptualization of our American economy as if it were a household budget. It simply doesn’t work that way. It’s just not that simplistic. It’s not simple cash inflows and expenditure outflows. And so I was really happy to have learned about her stewardship in this space as well.

Grumbine (06:42):

The person that brought us together, a common friend, Scott Ferguson, we had him and Ben Wilson on few weeks back discussing their Unis proposition for the university system to provide a complementary currency, to begin changing the austerity within the university system and local communities. And I just found it really fascinating because right on the heels of it, he says, you’ve got to meet this lady. She is fantastic. She’s amazing. You guys are going to hit it off famously. I can’t wait to get you guys together.

And with the way that this COVID-19 experience has gone, and with the way this electoral series has gone with Trump and Biden and Bernie losing or falling out, or however that went down, it has been very depressing, quite frankly. And people I talk to are not feeling very hopeful. They’re feeling very depressed and very sad and feel like there are no good alternatives right now, and a tremendous amount of despair.

But I think that one of the big things, and I don’t know if you’ve talked to her or not, but a lady named Pavlina Tcherneva, who is a great economist friend of Stephanie’s, and one of the MMTers who recently put out a book called “The Case for a Job Guarantee.” She says, MMT represents genuine hope.

And I’ve been carrying that hope, which is what keeps this program going. But we are always looking for candidates. And here you are, right in the middle of this desperate time, and we’ve got someone out there that understands this. Do you see the hope that comes from a representative body that understands us? Do you see the real big moment here? This is like momentous. Is that something you see? Or is that overly simplistic?

Banyai (08:33):

No, I think it is, because I’ll tell you what, when I talk to people around my district, even Democrats, they go, “Oh, but the deficit.” “Oh, the debt.” “Oh, if we could only just solve those problems, then we could do all these other great things that we really want.” And then I get to kind of turn around and say, “but what if we did it? What if we could just reframe our thinking, understand that we have strong bones to our economy, and that we can fund the things that need to be funded?”

And if they give me a little bit more time, I start talking about how all of these programs that we love, like Social Security, like Medicaid, like Medicare, you know, these are fantastic programs that absolutely help individuals, but the reason that they are still around and so successful and frankly, the reason that they were proffered in the first place is because they are ultimately macroeconomic interventions. And they are some of the most coveted types of social programs around the world.

Other countries look and wish that they could do that. They wish that they had the strength of our economy to be able to continue to grow our economy by providing such supports. And this comes down to the fact that we need the people who would otherwise be, you know, taking care of elderly family members, or taking care of sick family members, or going into debt to do those things. We need those people to be able to be part of our economy, to be productive, to work, to create, to build businesses.

And when we do that, we all grow together. And it’s this concept that we’re growing together. And I think it’s especially important for a candidate like me, who’s interested in equity, because these type of programs that we can create, that will boost our economy, they have a massive effect on women’s participation in the economy, because women are the ones who typically step out, do the caregiving. So they are often left out of the economy.

And frankly, because we see this in other countries… like China wishes, they had this level of ability because then they would be twice as productive as they are right now, but they simply can’t. And so, like I said, when I get somebody to actually listen and get excited about economics, like I am, that’s what I tell them. And this is actually by the way, for anybody who’s listening, this is how you reach across the partisan divide to explain the benefits of essentially all government expenditure, is that every time we do it, it has a bonus and an amplifying effect across our broader economy.

It truly is an investment that changes the narrative that a lot of folks who are particularly conservative when they want to say that these programs are benefiting individual people and they have to be the right type of people for us to give them that money. And my position for a long time has always been, we should just do it because these are the benefits. These are the outcomes when we do it, you know, let’s take the morality off the table. It’s like, we should do it because here are all the positive benefits. And that actually wins a lot of folks over because we don’t have to get in that moral push and pull.

Grumbine (11:52):

Right on. I’m a former Republican, and my journey from the right to the left has been well documented. But one of the big reasons for that departure from being a Republican to a fire-breathing progressive is the understanding of Modern Monetary Theory. Because so many of the pitched battles that Republicans and Democrats have are based in faulty knowledge of this concept.

Everything from the national debt, which just the net money supply in the end, and the deficit, which is just the amount of money left in the economy that wasn’t taxed, and these basic concepts of socialism, well, socialism is about means of production and ownership versus public purpose spending. There’s all these misconceived notions of what they are. And quite frankly, we’ve had the media that has helped make those kinds of bad understandings very pervasive.

And politicians have exploited it over the years because they got to get elected. Donors push for things. It’s a really terrible situation in terms of what I consider to be gaslighting and misinformation. I’m curious, what do you see as the reception in Florida, which has gone to DeSantis? And you’ve got basically a lot of people that are migrants to Florida, that are not native Floridians, that have come there later in life, many of which are very conservative. How do you see this playing out in Florida?

Banyai (13:22):

Well I’ll tell you what: Social Security is a huge issue in my region. Our district, even though the majority of people, the biggest part of our electorate are working families, people of working age, we do have a very large component of people who are retirees, people that have Social Security as a major part of their income in their retirement. They live off of it. And there’s not a voter in this district that is not worried about Social Security ending and that’s across the party line.

And so when we see things like Trump threatening to eliminate the program through the rollback of the payroll tax, that’s got a lot of people’s attention. It’s one of the reasons why I wrote that op ed, because I wanted to give everybody hope – just like you were talking – hope that we can get out of this grind of, “Oh, can we pay for it?” And the “Oh, Trump is going to take away Social Security.”

I said, no, we can make a guarantee, a political guarantee in Congress that we will fund it. And that’s powerful. And that’s how we can win over voters who might not have a full understanding of everything in this space, but we can take an issue that they care about and we can promise to protect it.

Grumbine (14:48):

It’s interesting. I love the way you said that. I think to myself back 2016 when Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were on the fight and they were debating and Hillary literally laughed at Bernie, “Ha ha ha,” you know, “it’s pie in the sky,” and she mocked him, and “how are you going to pay for it, Bernie?” And she really sought to squash the concept of this dreaming big. And it really was devastating because it was picked up by the media.

It was picked up by many of the pundits out there. And sadly, Bernie didn’t fire back with the knowledge that you just laid down. What a shame, right? He had Stephanie Kelton in his ear. It was a perfect opportunity to let the genie out of the bottle. And instead he basically said, “Well, we’re going to do a Wall Street, speculation tax. We’re going to do this. We’re going to do that. And we’re going to raise the cap on Social Security.”

And you think to yourself, wow, you had a really big, huge moment there to save the world. And I say to myself, I fear for Democrats. To many people’s chagrin, I am a registered Democrat. And I say this because how are you going to work within a party that genuinely doesn’t support this thinking? How will you act internally there to take this nudge?

It’s like, you know it’s true. You got the proof. You know what’s going on. And all of a sudden you’re surrounded by fiscal conservatives that still believe that the national debt’s the bad thing. We got the Pete Peterson Foundation still funding many people on the Democratic side, just like the Republicans. This is a bipartisan issue for sure. How do you fancy playing in that arena? This is a tough call. I don’t know how you do it. I’m interested.

Banyai (16:35):

Well, honestly, like I said, for me, I found the home in the kind of comprehensive understanding of things that I already knew to be true, with MMT. So for me, this is really just a continuation of the education piece that I’ve been participating in for most of my academic career. And my public career is just talking to people about the value of things like participatory budgeting, which I am a huge, super big fan of.

But in just talking to people: “No, this is how it really works. This is what we can really do. And by the way, this is how the government actually works.” Because what ends up happening is that the vast majority of people are not political scientists. The vast majority of the people are not experts on government in any way, shape or form. They know what they know, and most people understand their household budget.

And so when you get leaders coming up there and telling you, “Oh, it’s just like your household budget or your small business budget, in/out, you wouldn’t be able to run your business on X amount of deficit,” which by the way, I’ve heard people say that, but it’s total trash because a lot of big businesses run on massive, massive, massive deficits, but I digress, I digress. But that’s what people say because they get it, right?

Because basically it would be really hard for most people to run a household budget on massive debt. You’d go bankrupt at some point. But that’s what people know. And that’s what the politicians who want to essentially stop different types of policy… That’s all, this really is. These are stopgaps to policies they don’t like. The deficit component is a poison pill to anything that the Republicans don’t like, that’s all they have to say.

And then everybody goes, “Oh, you’re right. I guess we can’t afford it. Cause we have to be responsible. We all want to be responsible, so we have to live within our means.” And then that clicks with people. And so when I do the public messaging, I’ve tried really hard to break it down so people can understand it. Look, we make the money, the money goes around, it gives a relational value to everything.

We have a strong economy. If we didn’t have a strong economy this wouldn’t be a possibility, but we do, and it is, and this is how it actually works. And people get it. I think when I get into the 117th Congress and I’m with my colleagues, I’m probably going to be a lot stronger, not going to lie because I will be able to come with not only this understanding, but I have credentials to be able to say, Hey, I actually know what I’m talking about.

Grumbine (18:56):

Yes you do.

Banyai (18:58):

There’s a lot of people that are in Congress and I absolutely think that we need lots of different types of representatives from different types of areas. But I am an expert in this area. I do have a doctorate. I do teach this. And so when I get up and I start breaking it down for people, I think it will resonate because of that. And so I am really looking forward to being an expert on how government works in our government.

Grumbine (19:25):

It’s so funny. As you’re saying that I have a Master of Business Administration and Master of Science, the idea here was that, you know, I’ve got enough education, so forth. And because I’ve been an MMT activist for so long, I’ve been doing videos for five years and a lot of people had no idea when I said that federal taxes don’t fund spending, they’re like what? “You’re crazy. You’re a crank. You’re a cult leader. You’re an idiot.” You’re all this stuff.

And so I started putting my stinking degrees in the background of my videos so that it would be like, what’s your credentials? Well, there’s my credentials. But you think to yourself, that means I got taught every wrong thing about economics. Didn’t learn anything. Right? It’s like, that is about as worthwhile as, I don’t know. I mean, nothing, it’s trash. And I did get to learn everything wrong, so having to unlearn that has helped me in some ways.

But I’m curious – a lot of people revile credentials. They revile what they see as elitism and so forth. And in this kind of a populist blowback moment here, I’m just curious because I’m totally with you. I’m totally thankful that you do have credentials to kind of lay that down. But how do you think we reach people that have that kind of resistance to what they might see as elite credentials, “you don’t understand my plight. You’re not one of the people.” How do you get past that?

Banyai (20:49):

Right. Well, like I said… keep in mind I said, I’m going to be throwing my credentials out in the 117th Congress, to all the people up there. This is not what I do on the campaign trail when I’m talking to people. I actually am very purposeful in how I talk about issues and about solutions to people, really try to make it accessible in how I talk about it.

That’s the educator and somebody who’s also lived and worked abroad and understand varying power discrepancies between people and language capacity. So I’m very cognizant to do that. And I think the second component of that is that I am a real person. This is what makes me a very different person. And even though I do have a doctorate, when I talk about it, it seems like I’ve lived this K-pop kind of life, but it’s really just because I never really took no for an answer for anything.

I just like, Hey, I want to do that. So let me go move overseas. Hey, I’m going to be a professional boxer. Sure. Let me hop in the ring. Well, you know, I might as well just live and work overseas for eight years and traveled all bunch of different countries and work there. Okay. No problem. And it wasn’t because somebody was funding me. It wasn’t mommy and daddy funding me back home. No, no, no. They actually really wanted me to come home and stop being so crazy.

It was just the audacity to do these things. And so when I come back here and I have my own family, I’m a single mom. I run my kids to school every day. I do my own shopping. I clean my own house. I play softball with my friends once a week. You know, I like to drink beer. I am not an elitist in that way. I am not somebody who’s funded. I don’t have a trust fund. I’m on the verge of medical bankruptcy, frankly. So I understand the things that regular people are going through because I am, in fact, a regular person. My friend took me shopping last weekend and so now I have a nice suit, kind of thing.

Grumbine (22:46):

Gotcha. I love that. It was kind of a setup to give you an opportunity to say that and I really like how you answered that, but it brings me to the next series of questions. You brought up two things that I think that are vital in this conversation. Number one, you’d talked about the Social Security being important, especially to the people in your community, but it’s important to everybody around the country. I mean, this is something that is a core staple of the New Deal.

This is something that everyone feels very wedded to. But yet you’ve got forces that are trying to privatize it, trying to make it seem like it’s not stable. Make it seem like it’s going to break and fall apart at any moment. You wrote that article and I’d like to talk a little bit about that here in a minute, but how do you message this? What do you think is the way to penetrate to people to say, Hey, this is what’s going on with Social Security.

Banyai (23:40):

Yeah. Honestly I included a quote in my op ed there and I can’t remember if it came from Stephanie Kelton or James Galbraith – whom I did a podcast with last week – and it’s that Social Security is not broken and doesn’t need to be fixed. And really, if we just tell people that enough, maybe they’ll get it because yeah, folks are getting their payments, they’re living it, you know?

And it’s only when we hear the doomsday things from politicians that we start to get worried about it. By the way, we’ve also created these incredibly complex components to what should frankly be a really straightforward system. And it is because yes, there are people that want to privatize it. They want to make their own money off of it because it could potentially be a big pot of money for somebody to invest in, to play around with.

But why we did all of these things, even down to the payroll deduction and the individual accounting and the trust and all these other things, these add administrative overhead. This is the thing that’s also crazy to me when I talk to people who are like fiscal conservatives, quote unquote, because it’s the same people will in one breath say that we need to be fiscally conservative and in the next breath will say, but we need to have the programs have accountability for A, B, C, D, and E.

And every one of those things that you put in there, that’s somebody’s job to oversee. So that’s administrative costs, it’s bureaucracy, it makes it harder. And they know this, they know this, they know that it makes it harder for people to get into the system, which is exactly what they want. But we actually spend more money on that overhead component than we would if we had just given the cash directly out to people.

This has been a long time thing for me. I was like, we should just hand it to people, because we cut out all this crap that then becomes its own poison pill. Because again, it comes down to the fact that there are factions of people that don’t want these – period – because they do want to privatize it, they want their own interests, or they just don’t want these group of people to get things. And so they work it into the policy and then they convince all the rest of us that this is how we need to do it.

And then they’ll turn around and start criticizing it for the very things that they put in there. And frankly, I am so acutely aware of this and so ready to go out and call out people because they will use parlance like “accountability” and they will use “efficiency” and “effectiveness.” Now my consulting job, my consulting firm is evaluation. I eat, sleep, breathe, effectiveness and efficiency.

There is not a single one of these hucksters that’s going to be able to put a program in front of me, put a policy in front of me, and say, “we’re working on efficiency.” And if that doesn’t have the metrics in it and that doesn’t have the right kind of measures to actually get these things accomplished and not just be these stupid barriers for access, then I’m going to call him out on it. And I will probably be the only one doing it. Cause I’m going to be the first evaluator elected to Congress.

Grumbine (26:46):

Nice. I like the way you said that.

Intermission (26:48):

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Grumbine (27:24):

Let me just say you brought up some things about the trust funds. Now FDR was up against some tough stuff. The fear of socialism was ridiculous. So, what he tried to do apparently was to make it get past the fears of socialism and so forth. So the skin in the game was to make people believe that they were paying into it and to put that hook in there to make it stick.

But the value of doing that is now the thing that’s killing it. And it’s the very thing that keeps bringing the Paul Ryans of the world out of the woodwork to say, “wouldn’t it be better if we privatized?” I’m just curious, when you go to the Hill, what do you fancy will be the environment, the culture, the war that we’re dealing with in Congress. What do you fancy that would look like? What are your challenges there?

Banyai (28:38):

I think the challenges are some of the ones that you talked about, how do we get rid of these PayGo mentalities? How do we roll back the fears on socialism? And I’m almost to a certain extent thinking that the fact that the Trump camp and all of their followers just call literally everything socialism. Maybe people will just get tired of it. It’s like you can’t just call it…

Not everything a Democrat ever does is socialism, guys. Okay? We’re going to need you to help yourself to a textbook here. But so maybe we’ll get over that hump and we can just start really doing legislation. The other thing that I want to do, and it will be a challenge to convince everybody, but I really want us to start legislating around outcomes a little bit more. We at the federal level have been putting way, way too highly prescriptive programs together.

And again, this just leads into the high administrative costs, its barriers to participation for umpteen different types of people in organizations. And it’s because everybody’s sticking their little finger in the pot there at the federal level. But if we really retool the way that we do things and go back to having those big, bad, audacious goals, like going to the moon, things like that, and then just provide the funding for it, just what we’re supposed to do, and then let the expert organizations, or if we’re giving it in a kind of a block grant to counties and cities and states to do these things.

And if we really start doing it towards outcomes and we can measure this, then we’re going to get a lot more done. We’re going to be a lot more efficient. We’re going to be able to do some of these things that conservatives like to talk about, like eliminate administrative overhead, because we won’t need to have somebody, you know, rubber stamping all of the stupid boxes that people needed to check.

So, you know, we can do more, in more meaningful work, if we do that. So I would love to do that. You want to talk about like a lifelong project for a nerd like me? That’s what it is, is transforming our legislature to legislate by outcomes that are nested and localized from the federal level down to the local level.

Grumbine (30:55):

That’s really cool. I like that. Let me tell you one of the big things about the MMT side is the federal job guarantee, which is a core component. It’s a superior automatic stabilizer. And it is one of the very few prescriptive core tenets because MMT tells the money story. And the money story is that, you know, governments tax because they are trying to create a liability that’s only payable in that currency.

It’s the way they provision themselves. So without the tax, the money itself is just pieces of paper. So the concept of the tax creates unemployment. By creating unemployment, the government has a responsibility to create the solution, and that’s the federal job guarantee. Either have an unemployed buffer stock of people or an employed buffer stock of people. And I’m just curious, have you been exposed to the MMT version of the job guarantee?

Banyai (31:49):

Yeah, I’ve adopted it. I think that it’s a really important thing that we need to do. It will revitalize and restructure our economy by creating essentially a floor of basic wages and benefits and parameters now in the age of COVID, you know, health standards that will make all the other employers who are far below that, have to compete for employees. And that to me is a really important thing that we need to do in terms of helping regular people in our economy.

The other thing that I’ve been talking about with people that I think is really important and I think will really help us as we start to… it helps me as I pitch a jobs program. I’ve specifically, by the way, I’ve been pitching a universal jobs program as part of a fiscal stimulus that I think is going to be necessary in the 117th Congress. We’re going to have to be making major investments into our economy to not only just get people back to work, but to save small businesses, revitalize those small businesses, as well as improve our infrastructure and all that stuff.

So that’s how I’ve been pitching it. But when I talk to people and they go, Oh, well, this sounds easy to them, right? Well, it’s really not so different than the way that we do other things in the government right now. There’s procurement all the time: that’s a transfer of government dollars to a private business to do stuff. Now I think the difference of what we’re looking at here is how we structure it. And do we create this floor for folks in order to be part of…

So rather than just having a procurement process where we’re doing low bids, and then we just low bid it out, that we say, Hey, we can still have public-private partnerships in this respect. It would just have to be within the context of a universal jobs program. Right? And when you talk about it like that, and then you point out the fact that we already do this, the government already is the major employer in most areas, including here in Southwest Florida, you know? That if we just expand it out and start really giving people the option, right, that will make everything else in our economy, more competitive and more fair for individuals.

Grumbine (34:04):

Absolutely. One of the things that really drew me to this, the idea of being able to revitalize local democracy by having it federally funded, you know, the currency-issuing federal government, but locally administered. I envisioned showing up to my local town hall as part of my community and being a part of the team that decides what jobs our local community is going to be investing in. I’m looking at propositions and proposals and really reinvigorating democracy at a grassroots level, baked right into the program.

And that in and of itself… you talk about fundamentally transforming government. When you bring people into the process, how can you not be transforming it? And to me, that was a huge democracy enhancer, number one, and number two, the idea of every time somebody is trapped in a bad situation, they’re trapped in a bad marriage, they’re trapped in a bad area where the local community is not taking care of them, whatever, the ability to have a federal job wherever you go, as a right, and be able to pick up and go and know that right away, you have your healthcare, you have a job, and you have security.

That to me is just a very powerful message. I got caught up in the global financial crisis back in ’08 – ’09, and many people such as myself got torn down through that. And we’re about to go through it again and thank goodness right now, knock on wood, I’m in a better place than I was then, but many people are not. And I think that this is a real core thing, and I know it’s part of the Green New Deal proposals that Markey and AOC and the gang have been advancing. I’m just curious what your take on the Green New Deal and that job guarantee component, and possibly even talking about a just transition.

Banyai (35:58):

Oh yeah. I’m all in for all of that. But I want to say something. As you were telling part of your story there is – and I hadn’t really thought about some of the things that you said, like what if you could get out of a bad marriage or abusive situation like that, and a job guarantee would help you with that – you know what that is? That’s…

Grumbine (36:19):

Freedom. Yes, yes.

Banyai (36:23):

It’s freedom. And that’s the thing that a lot of people, especially our conservative folks, are talking about. “Oh, freedom. Liberty.” Well, there is nothing more freeing than being able to get out of a bad situation and not be shackled to your job or your poverty, essentially, because there’s an option. And so that’s beautiful. So anyway, I just want to comment on that. Because it was like light bulbs going off in my head, but…

Grumbine (36:51):

I love it.

Banyai (36:51):

And before I get to the Green New Deal, because I absolutely, I’m a huge environmentalist, but I also want to say that the other thing that made my heart sing when you were just talking here is about completely rethinking the way that we do governance, participatory governance, this participatory budgeting component of it. This is honestly a major component of my life’s work, of my research, of what I’ve worked to find around the world.

And I have come to the conclusion, through my education and work, that this is what we need to do. We need to invite people into the process, the design process. Way before. There needs to be processes for civic engagement the entire time. And we can do it digitally, we can do it in person, we can do it a combination of it. We should be mindful of whom is there, so it’s not always the same players, that we’re reaching marginalized communities, but they are actually part of the process.

Because what happens, especially in local government – and I’ve seen it here in my own town – is they come up with a plan, it’s roundabouts in the city, or it’s a new building, or a new park. They pay a consultant. The consultant brings a plan. They present it to the people. They call that the public forum and they say, great, this is what we’re going to do. And there’s no time to change. The only time – and this is another thing that’s funny – the only time change happens is when people are pissed off.

They’re coming in droves, they’re making t-shirts, they’re protesting, they’re sending hate emails. That’s the only time that we see change, you know, and that’s crazy. And then the government goes, “Whoa, all these people are mad.” And so they react to them. But the thing is, if you had invited those people that would potentially be pissed off at the end, into the beginning of the process, as well as other people who have a different perspective, you can actually come up with a much better product in the end.

You save money. That whole thing that the fiscal conservative folks are really worried about. Now, the process can take longer. I will say that. I have worked in collaboration for many, many, many years. It is not for the faint of heart, and it is not easy, and navigating people is a challenge. But it’s worth it. It’s worth it because you get through those pain points.

So then when you do come out and now you’re presenting your beautiful park or your brand new roundabout to the people, you’ll have a hundred people that will show up to that meeting and say, “I had a part in this,” and you will have very little of those people coming in and shooting it apart at the last minute. Very few.

Grumbine (39:34):

Oh my God, let me let the cat out of the bag. I am a process fricking freak. Okay. I’m a scrum guy. I am a brainstorming kind of Kanban kind of guy. And I have this vision of local governance in participatory governance, not just participatory budgeting, and the idea of turning our local communities into scrum groups.

Banyai (39:59):

Awesome. I love that.

Grumbine (40:00):

I envision people brainstorming, throwing ideas on the board, moving them around in affinity groups, going ahead and prioritizing them and having the whole gang joining in and working collaboratively. People come into the groups, go out of the groups. Anybody in the community can join these working teams and be a part of community building. And it just gets me super excited.

We’re trying to use some of that thinking within Real Progressives. It’s a challenge, as you well know, trying to create collaborative environments, especially in a virtual world. But I see this as a real opportunity to create some paradigm shifting local governance structures that allow people to really be involved and to see, right there in front of them, the fruits of their work, and to see the change happen right in front of their eyes. I’m curious, what do you think?

Banyai (40:51):

Well read my book. You just…

Grumbine (40:53):

Your book – tell me about your book after, but I want to hear about this, seriously.

Banyai (40:56):

Well, yeah, it’s a process. Yeah. We can do this. And I will tell you, when I describe who I am in my field, I’m an evaluator, but I’m also a community developer. This is what people in community development advocate for all over the world, all over the world. This is what we do. We try to get people involved, we try to design processes. We run things like charettes.

Charettes are very specific, but you know, we design these processes to bring out these voices. And so, yeah, there’s a bunch of different ways that we could do it, but it does take a structure, it does take a process, and it does take flexibility of government. And that’s the other thing that ends up happening is that when we put all of these means testing and things on, from the federal government in particular, we hamstrung our local communities and their ability to be adaptive with that funding. Right?

And so this is a whole plight for me. And yet we could do this. We just really need more people that want to do it and that can start to roll back those controls and some of the policies that various local governments have. Because this is the thing, this is how we make communities sustainable. This is how we better use funding. This is how we have vibrant and engaged communities is when we actually bring people to the table in a meaningful way.

Grumbine (42:20):

I absolutely love it. I want to hear your take on participatory budgeting though. I’d love to hear a crash course in participatory budgeting.

Banyai (42:31):

I mean, honestly, it is what it sounds like. You have the pot of money for a government. It works better, honestly, with smaller government entities and you can make it as broad or as narrow. I’ve seen it in a lot of different ways where maybe the city council will say, okay, this is our fixed budget, right? So it’s our road, police department, and the, whatever, the buildings.

These are kind of like, we have to have this money. But then there’s the rest of the expenditure that is programs and school supports or whatever, right? That’s softer. And then you engage people in a process through prioritizing their needs and wants for the community, and frankly, just that part of listening to what people need to want is hugely important and missing often, right?

And then you start to get people to put relative percentages or whatever, based on what they want, into those programs. You just can do it like that. I’ve seen other places where they do it, where the municipal government will give, whatever: Here are the pockets of money for these things that we know are prioritized. And then they will open it, even, to like a grant kind of process for the people in the city to get funds for it. So they really take it even out of the city’s purview – it’s a public private partnership or partnership with nonprofits – to do things, but they have to engage in this highly participatory process.

I’ve seen it where it also has to be place-based too, right? So it’ll be, this neighborhood has this pot of money. And this one, this one. And I love it because it not only is just this really engaging process, but you get additional benefits from that process. People care about their community more. People meet their neighbors. They develop relationships.

Here’s the kicker – and this is in my dissertation, this is in my book – when you do that, you have amplifying effects afterwards. So those people that met each other through a participatory budgeting meeting and they were engaged in the process, they find out they both love beer and they both home brewers. They’re like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we set up our own little business of a brewery here,” and then they set up and now you have a new business.

And that’s like a very, very brief example, but I’m telling you from my research, this happens all the time. This is actually how we spur development in communities – and it doesn’t have to be really sophisticated communities, communities of all kinds around the world – is we give space to people to connect with one another, to have a meaningful part in the process, and to have a vested interest in that community where they are. The benefits are astronomical. And it goes everything from mental health to safety in the community to businesses.

Grumbine (45:23):

Wow. Okay. I’m sold on participatory budgeting. I already was, but now I’m really there. Alright. So you spoke about having issues with healthcare and medical debt and bankruptcy and things like that. I’m just curious, Joe Biden’s recently come out and said these… No, not recently, he’s been staunchly against Medicare for All, for some time now, which is disappointing, of course.

I’m just curious. Medicare for All was a very big push. Many people are Medicare for All single-issue voters. It seems to be a no-brainer, especially in the midst of a pandemic. What are your thoughts on healthcare and how do we make this something for regular people? Because I know for myself, there’s a lot of things I don’t tend to. I allow to go.

I realize I’m cutting my life short because I’m not doing preventative care, because I can’t afford it. And I’m privileged in that sense, in that I probably can afford to get occasional surgery. Many people can’t afford even that. What is your take on healthcare? Where do you go with it from here?

Banyai (46:23):

Well, let me start by sharing my personal story on this and why I am a champion for universal health care. Yes. My youngest daughter, who just turned three this year, spent the first two years of her life in and out of the hospital fighting a rare blood disease. And while she was fighting for her life, I was fighting the insurance companies.

And I just firmly believe that no person in this country should be facing medical bankruptcy. That it shouldn’t just be a thing that happens. That I shouldn’t have to be spending my precious time where I should be tending to my very ill child, arguing with an insurance company over whether or not they think that the medicines that her doctor prescribed are really, truly needed. And the whole thing makes me sick. And I know that there’s an alternative.

I have lived in two countries with national healthcare. I lived in Taiwan and Japan. And the way that people treat their bodies, just like you were saying, is totally different when they know that they can just walk to a provider, get seen in a relatively reasonable amount of time, and they know it’s not going to bankrupt them. In Taiwan, especially at the time I was living there, I mean, they were like a middle income country and a high end of the middle income country at the time too. They can manage it.

You know, what’s wrong with us here? So what I want to add to the discussion here, because I actually did some research and have some papers that I’ve done comparative analysis between the Japanese national health care model and the US model. What I want to add to the dialogue as we’ve moved towards a universal healthcare is adapting some of the things that the Japanese model has.

They include cost setting from the central government – we have that with Medicare – but for everybody, right, everybody gets it, not just one program. Also they have a sliding scale user fee so that you pay in every month, a small amount, so as a student, I was paying $25. That helps to have the skin in the game and things like that and provide some flow in the economy around it. And then they also have an emphasis on preventative care, right? They fund those things and those are the major components of it. And these are doable things.

The other thing, by the way, last thing, is decentralized implementation, which we have in part with Medicaid and Medicare, but we don’t do it well. It’s decentralized to the state level rather than the local level. But in Japan, and this is a true story, I was covered by the Japanese national health insurance when I became pregnant with my first daughter and I was living in Fort Myers. I had her in Cape Coral.

I could not buy insurance in the United States because pregnancy was a preexisting condition. This is pre-Obamacare. I couldn’t give any company enough money to cover me as a pregnant woman. I was still covered by the Japanese national health insurance because I was still technically finishing the last year of my doctorate. So I had my daughter in Cape Coral, got the receipts. I walked to City Hall in my university town and they cut me a check for the amount. They paid me back.

Because they see also again, that city hall is a center of government service too, right? So this is the national healthcare program, but this is the office that serves our community right here in city hall. And so we could very easily have something like that as well.

Grumbine (49:56):

You know, Kelton says, it’s not a matter of how we pay for it, it’s a matter of how we resource it. And AOC was famous for saying, it’s not a matter of how we pay for it, it’s how we resource it. And one of the big things that I think is important that is oftentimes left out of the discussions is how, in fact, we generate enough doctors, nurses, gurneys, et cetera, to be able to have enough hospitals, to have enough beds, to have enough of all the things that we need to be able to, in fact, produce the real resources to provide healthcare to all.

Right now in this country, it’s such a privileged position to be able to have quality high-level healthcare, Cadillac healthcare, that we would definitely need an infusion of jobs. This would be a huge job creator as well. And then we would have infrastructure that would need to be built to support it, which is yet again, more fiscal stimulus, if you will, more fiscal growth in a positive direction, serving the people.

But I’m curious, they don’t frequently talk about, they always talk about just how are we going to pay for Medicare. They never really talk about how we’re going to resource it, not the finance, the resource, the real resources. What are your thoughts on how we would prepare for something like universal healthcare?

Banyai (51:18):

For me, the answer is we just look at things systemically overall and focus on the key interconnected components of it. Because you’re right, that there will be various stresses on the system if we suddenly, you know, made it possible for everybody who was sick, to go to the hospital.

Grumbine (51:37):

Terrible, isn’t it?

Banyai (51:39):

I know. Horrifying. So if we really looked at it, so if we look at the gaps in our workforce, if we looked at the affordability of housing, if we looked at how good our schools are doing, because these are the things that prevent us here in Southwest Florida from having nice things, for all intents and purposes, right? Is that we have a perennial shortage of general practitioners, of nurses, of CNAs, because we have a hard time bringing those folks into our community because we have high end houses, but not a lot of affordable housing.

We also don’t have good schools, you know, our public schools, not as great as I would hope. I mean, they’re terribly underfunded, so it’s not their fault. And our teachers work really hard. But if somebody’s moving from another state and they have young kids, they’re going to look at that and say, Hmm, maybe I’m not going to go and get this job there. The other thing is, is because our economy is so skewed – I call it a doughnut economy – we have a lot of low wage jobs because of the tourism industry, you know, we have retail, food service, things like that, hotels.

And then we have a lot of entrepreneurs and people on the top side of the economy. We don’t have a lot of those mid-level professionals, right? And because of that, we don’t have diversification in jobs. So you have the other problem with trailing spouses. So you hire a GP and they’re married to a professional, their partner is a professional, they’re going to have a hard time coming and building a life here. So if we look at things systemically like that, we recognize that we need to have a systemic approach to just about everything we do.

That we can’t just say “here, we’re going to make a program for this one little piece, and it’s going to solve all the problems,” that we really need to be coming up with participatory systemic solutions, and they need to be flexible and adaptable to the locality.

Grumbine (53:38):

I love it. So let me just ask you, if you had a parting word for our listeners, what do you think would be the key message yourself and possibly even to your campaign constituents and so forth, and also where can we find more information about you?

Banyai (53:57):

Yeah, absolutely. So you can definitely check me out on my website. It’s my name, Cindy Banyai dot com. That’s cindybanyai.com. And you can check everything out about the campaign and go there. And if you think I’m somebody that you’d like to support, you’d like to have my voice in Congress, you know what to do.

And the final thought, I think though, looking back at this conversation, and honestly I’m such a big dork and a wonk with all of this, this has been just a completely uplifting and spiritual experience to be speaking to somebody who cares about these things like me. But I would say that we can do this. We can fund what’s important. We can envision our communities and our country to be better and we can work on it.

We don’t have to be beholden to the lies of people who have other interests at heart. We can do this. We can fund Social Security. We can fund Medicare for All. We can fund sustainable communities. We can fund fiscal stimulus to get people back on their feet. We can fund the Green, New Deal. These are all things that we can do. We just need to have people with the political will to do so and the moxie to stand up to the boldface liars who’d rather do something else.

Grumbine (55:29):

Oh, thank you so much. This was fan-freaking-tastic. I really, really appreciate this. I hope we can have you back on again, in the future.

Banyai (55:37):

Yeah, absolutely. I’d love that. Thanks so much for this today.

Grumbine (55:40):

Absolutely. Alright. Well with that, I’m Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese. This was Cindy Banyai and I hope to goodness that you guys listen to this and share it around freely. And we’ll talk to you soon. Thank you so much. Have a great day, everybody. We’re out.

End credits [music] (56:00):

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.