Episode 139 – Critical Mass with John & Aaron Yarmuth

Macro N Cheese – Episode 139
Critical Mass with John & Aaron Yarmuth
September 25, 2021

 

[00:00:04.030] – John Yarmuth [intro/music]

Stephanie Kelton has been able in that book to talk about the way money works in a way that any reasonable person can understand. It is the least wonky economics book I’ve ever read  … The debt ceiling is a ridiculous policy to have or a law to have in place.

We’re the only country in the world that has one that operates like ours does, not many countries have any statutory debt limit. There are a couple of countries, I think Denmark’s one that have a debt ceiling, but it automatically rises the more they spend. So it’s in effect not a debt ceiling.

[00:01:42.070] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

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

[00:01:43.520] – Grumbine

Alright, and this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Folks, I always get excited about the guests I have. But I am really, really excited about today’s guest. I have Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky’s Third District, the Democratic chairman of the House Budget Committee, and his son, Aaron Yarmuth, who is a journalist and who is also the guy that brought his dad to the MMT table.

I am beyond excited. And if you all remember, I’ve probably got more miles out of this than I care to say. But when Rep. Yarmuth was on C Span and he talked about the Deficit Myth, the hairs on my arm literally stood on end.

And I was like, yes, yes, 15 years doing this ten years ago is five. And man, we got somebody out there doing it publicly. And he said the big word. He said Modern Monetary Theory. And he said Stephanie Kelton in the same breath and Deficit Myth. I almost fainted. So, welcome.

[00:02:43.890] – J. Yarmuth

I hope I sold a lot of books.

[00:02:46.180] – Grumbine

I don’t know about the books, but you made a lot of people huge fans, myself included. This is a really big deal to us. We’ve been wandering in the forest, if you will, the great 1%, the true 1% of the people that actually know what the heck MMT is.

And here’s this guy who’s not only in Congress, but he’s actually part. He’s not just part. He’s the Chairman of the House Budget Committee. That is really, really big stuff. Let me just start out before I go into this any further because my excitement is getting the better of me here.

[00:03:20.560] – Grumbine

Why don’t I let you tell me how you came to this? Aaron, why don’t you tell us the story?

[00:03:26.960] – Aaron Yarmuth

Well, I don’t have a great story in terms of the book. I guess reading the book itself was in some ways validation for a lot of the things that I sensed about federal spending and the economics, the dynamics between taxpayers and the two general thoughts that I had at different points in my life, where anytime anybody made reference to the kitchen table budgeting, I immediately was skeptical.

And it’s an eye roll kind of association because I don’t know that there are any similarities between the family budget and the federal government’s budget. And the other one was the idea that some point in time when balancing the budget was a hot topic.

It just occurred to me that naturally, if the federal government is going to balance a budget or even run a surplus especially if taking a surplus, they’re literally taking more money out of taxpayers’ bank accounts, pockets or whatever, than they need to spend. And that inherently can’t be right. That can’t be good.

And nobody wins in that regard, because what’s the federal government going to do with money that it doesn’t use. And so there’s a sense there’s a disconnect somewhere there. And then reading an actual economist, the brilliant writer and mind, talk about it, Stephanie Kelton. It was like just validation and then some. It was remarkable seeing the light.

[00:04:59.210] – Grumbine

Indeed. So, back to your balanced budget comment. I spoke to you off air. But here’s an article by the Washington Times of all papers.  The headline says John Yarmuth, House Budget Committee chairman, sees no way to balance US budget. And one of the quotes in here that I love is “In a ten year window, the deficits right now are too high,” Mr. Yarmuth said.

“There’s no way to get it balanced without ludicrous assumptions.” As I’m reading this. I’m just chuckling because I’m going to ask your dad now. Rep. Yarmuth, John Yarmuth, hero of MMT. When you hear that now, in retrospect, what does that bring to mind, how do you feel about that now?

[00:05:40.200] – J. Yarmuth

Well, I think that the idea that’s in that quote, I’m amused by a lot of people who take things I say and offer them as if they’re on their face absurd. And yet they really don’t have any argument against them. They just think they sound absurd. And that’s because they’re dealing in this antiquated way of thinking about debt and deficits.

And my conversion – I guess it’s the best way to put it – is similar to Aaron’s in that I’ve been on the budget committee now for 13 years. I guess my second term on the budget committee, Paul Ryan was chairman, and he used to put up all these charts that we’re predicting financial Armageddon in the country and saying, we just can’t keep assembling debt like this and all these bad things are going to happen.

And as time went on, we kept increasing the national debt and none of the things that he said would happen have happened. So, OK, maybe we need to start thinking about this differently. And I do. And that’s when I heard about MMT and started learning about it. And at first I was very skeptical of it because it seemed to me that it was like, okay, this makes a lot of sense until it doesn’t.

And then Congress has to step in, which is always dangerous to rely on Congress to fix something. But the more I got into the weeds about MMT and read more and read Stephanie’s book and had a number of conversations with her and others, I began to realize that this is the way as a federal government, we have to keep thinking about what we spend money for and how we generate those resources.

And I think back to the famous Abraham Lincoln quote, which is that the legitimate role of government is to do for the people what they won’t do – or can’t do – as well for themselves. And that certainly relates to spending probably more directly than anything else we do because we are the ultimate banker. We are the ultimate provider and creator of resources.

And anybody who’s looked at state and local government knows they’re not in that same position. And certainly households and businesses aren’t. And that’s what I think the great contribution of MMT in general, and certainly Stephanie Kelton specifically because she has been able in that book to talk about the way money works in a way that any reasonable person can understand.

It is the least wonky economics book I’ve ever read. When she talks about things like comparing the federal government to the banker in Monopoly, that’s something that people relate to. And the book is so brilliant from that perspective.

But I look at what we’re doing right now, and I’ve been saying for months now, that, to me, the greatest accomplishment of the Biden administration so far, has been that they’ve started asking the right questions in the right order, which is the first time in generations that that’s happened because historically, at least in my experience and I’m 73 whatever the issue was whether it was health care, education, housing, you name it.

The first question was, what can we afford to do? And now, the Biden administration has said, what do we need to do? What do the American people need us to do? And then once we answer that, how do we create the resources for that?

And that’s an important change in mentality. I think MMT implies that, if not explicitly says that. So I think there’s a growing sense that we’ve been doing things and thinking about things not only wrong way, but in a dangerous way.

[00:09:31.000] – Grumbine

I agree with everything you said. The one thing that’s very interesting to me is Joe Biden has been in office, very powerful office, now for an incredibly long time. And knowing what you know today, you know that Joe Biden has also helped facilitate some of the things that you’re trying to undo now.

[00:09:50.120] – J. Yarmuth

You’re right.

[00:09:51.190] – Grumbine

With this new mindset. I’m very much a left wing progressive, so just take everything I say with that understanding. It’s such a contrast to see him even remotely embrace this as one of his more famous speeches was where he talked about, we need to cut Social Security. Nothing is off the table – cut, cut, cut.

And that is a huge shift for a guy who is very much a centrist. And now maybe it’s necessity has dictated this. Maybe it’s just the fantastic messaging of Stephanie Kelton. Maybe it’s other people advising. I don’t know. But I must say, even though there hasn’t been enough spending on the people in terms of COVID relief, I feel like there hasn’t been enough push for things like Medicare For All.

I have clearly seen that we have not started freaking out about the deficit, although, we are now heading into the debt ceiling debate discussion, which is a political theater at its finest, and it has tremendously horrible effects should somebody use this as a cudgel against the poor. I’m curious: with what you know, what’s the story with the debt ceiling, given what you know now?

[00:11:07.140] – J. Yarmuth

Well, first of all, the debt ceiling is a ridiculous policy to have or law to have in place. We’re the only country in the world that has one that operates like ours does. There are a couple of other countries, not many, but not many countries have any statutory debt limit.

There are a couple of countries, I think Denmark is one, that have a debt ceiling, but it automatically rises the more they spend. So it’s in effect, not a debt ceiling. But we’re the only one who has this. And we created it in [1917] for, I guess at the time, very good reasons, because we needed to pay for World War One, and I still don’t understand it.

But back then, things were different because there was a gold standard and the sovereign currency didn’t operate the way it does today, the fiat currency. But we’ve raised it, I think, 78 times since 1960. It’s always been routine. People understand that it’s silly. And right now, all it’s being used for is partisan brinkmanship.

It doesn’t serve any purpose. If it were the least bit effective, how has the debt gone from – just since I’ve been in Congress, 15 years – from $9 trillion to $28 trillion? The debt ceiling has obviously not made a difference, and so it’s silly on its face. But now we’re faced with the reality that Republicans – and this is hard to believe – 46 Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, of course.

But 46 Republicans have signed a pledge to vote to default on the national debt. They have signed a pledge that they will not vote to increase the debt ceiling, which is the same thing as voting to default. And it’s mind boggling to me, but we have to deal with it. And we had a leadership meeting last night, in which we discussed strategy, and there is no easy answer.

Now, the Republicans want us to raise the debt ceiling by reconciliation. They want us to put it in the reconciliation bill that we’re working on now, which would require no Republican votes. We are very much opposed to that for a couple of reasons. One is it requires that you actually specify a number that you’re raising the debt limit to a certain number.

First of all, nobody knows what that number is, how long that would last us. We could raise the debt ceiling by $2 trillion, and then six months later, we’re back in the same situation where the Republicans could hold us hostage. So that’s not an ideal course of action. What we’re proposing to do is just what we did two years ago, which was to suspend the debt ceiling for a period of time, in this case, December of next year of 2022.

And that seems to be the most reasonable thing. Obviously, we can pass that in the House. It would take 60 votes in the Senate. And I think what Mitch says again, those 46 people, if they hold true to their pledge, then they’re not going to give us the 60 votes we need. I know that Chuck Schumer is trying to figure out a way to navigate this in the Senate. The current plan is to tie the debt limit increase or suspension in with the continuing resolution spending bill – which we have to pass by October 1, or we have a government shutdown – and also supplemental disaster relief.

The idea being that there are a lot of Republicans who are not going to vote against relief for their state. So for instance, Louisiana – and I saw Senator Kennedy said last night that he would probably vote for it. So the idea is to leverage those two things to get the debt ceiling raised. We’ll pass that probably with some Republican votes.

Again, whether the Senate can get 60 votes for that or not is another question, which is all of our prayers that Senator Manchin and Sinema would agree to at least change the filibuster for that purpose and use the civil majority to get it done. It’s not an easy situation to be in, but Republicans are truly playing with fire. And we saw yesterday the Dow Jones average went down 600 points, was down 900 at one point.

Part of the reason was because of fear of defaulting, which we have never done in our history. So that’s a long way of saying we don’t have a fool proof answer right now. But ultimately, this is something that has to be done. Mitch even acknowledged that.

He said, we have to raise the debt ceiling, I’m just not going to do it. Which makes a lot of sense, right?  To me that’s like a mother saying, well, I know that my baby needs to eat if it’s going to stay alive, but I’m just not going to feed it. And that’s about how much sense Mitch McConnell has made.

[00:15:41.530] – Grumbine

Well, I think the funny thing – and Aaron, I want to get your words on this – but I think the funny thing is and I’ll just say this as an MMTer, that we know that the national debt is nothing more than the sum total of every untaxed dollar in the economy. Period. That includes Treasurys, etcetera. We don’t borrow our own currency.

We create it when Article One, Section Eight of our US Constitution, laid out by your part of the government here. The House has the power of the purse. We know inherently that the debt is a joke. That’s a lie. It’s not real.

Taxes take money out of the economy, spending puts it in. And how many points on the scoreboard do we need to function at a proper rate? How do we make sure people aren’t starving? What are your thoughts on that? Aaron, I’ll give you a first crack at it, and I want to hear your dad say it.

[00:16:32.180] – A. Yarmuth

Yeah, it’s amazing. To me this won’t be a completely unique take, especially for MMT subscribers. But the analogy that I prefer is the meteor, the asteroid that’s coming to end Earth. Basically, the limits on our spending is the sum of all of the natural resources and the man hours that can be put towards solving a problem.

And in this case, it’s saving the Earth from an asteroid. So I think that the real world scenario is climate change, but we are limited by our tangible resources and then the sum amount of value of humanity to mobilize. Like that’s it.  That’s a big number, if you’re going to put a number on it. To me, it’s very simple to understand that the dynamics with how people relate to dollars spent because it’s almost like the spending in a human term.

The way we relate to spending money doesn’t relate to the way the federal government spends money. Those two things aren’t the same either. And really, one of the big seminal moments is to me, not only is the kitchen table budget different from the federal government’s budget, just like a small business or a big corporation, their budget and balance sheet isn’t in any way related to the federal government.

Banks – even the biggest banks in the world – their relationship has no similarity to the federal government. So, when you can come to those terms, it becomes very clear that even if you don’t subscribe to Modern Monetary Theory, you have to at least acknowledge that the way you think about it and talk about the federal deficit and debt is not correct, at least in the traditional cliche way that its talked about.

That to me is just the long, abstract way of answering that it’s that whatever our actual budget is, it’s pretty big. Whatever our constraint is, it’s a number that is truly impossible to fathom, and you will find no bigger Mitch antagonist than me. But my favorite thing that my dad has said in recent weeks about Mitch and the debt ceiling is that he goes around taking credit for federal government spending, bringing money back to the state of Kentucky and all of these projects.

But now he’s saying he’s unwilling to pay for it. It’s like we did all of this for our state, for the people of Kentucky, but we ain’t paying for it. We’re not actually going to deliver the money to pay for it.

[00:19:34.520] – J. Yarmuth

And I said it’s like Mitch must have gone to the Trump School of Business. Which is, never pay your bills.

[00:19:42.460] – Grumbine

It’s funny you say that because Trump in the very beginning, had an accidental broken clock syndrome thing where he got something accidentally right. He said, you know, United States government has a printing press. We can print our way out. [laughter]

Not exactly because money is debt. The dollar is a tax credit. So if you’re printing it, you’re making more debt. Anyway. I want to read this to you. I think that you’ll get a kick out of this, John. So this is Stephanie Kelton on September 17, 2017. And it’s a great tweet. It’s directed at Democrats, as she often does.

I love that she admonishes her own team because why fight the other guy when you got to get your own team on board? Right. And she says, unfortunately, the left continues to suffer from this either/or mindset: either we raise tax revenue or we cannot save the world. And she puts a quote in there from the Intercept. And I’ll just skip to her next tweet.

And she says, “100 years from now: ‘Oh, we were going to save the planet. But we couldn’t get the billionaires to pay their fair share.'” And just to be crystal clear, my point is we cannot afford to wait. And we do not need their money to deal with climate change. MMT. She says, I don’t want to wait to do what needs to be done.

This isn’t a Beltway game. Too many on the left are willing to drag their heels over pay-fors. She says, this is why I have zero patience for Robin Hood politics, the sick, the poor and the planet wait while you chase gold coins in a fiat world. Bam! That is like the home run hitter right there.

[00:21:20.110] – J. Yarmuth

Yeah, that’s very compelling. It’s frustrating because I sit in all these budget committee hearings and hear over and over and over whether it’s in the Budget Committee or us on the floor of the House, most of the Republicans, but some Democrats too, saying, we can’t do this to future generations.

We’re putting this heavy burden on them and I respond by saying, Wait a minute. We’ve been accumulating debt in this country for 230 years. Has anybody ever been asked to pay it back? Of course not. And I said. I’m sure when the national debt reached a billion dollars under Abraham Lincoln, people were saying the same thing: that all future generations are going to have this burden.

And I said, right now, future generations are going to have a burden of an uninhabitable world because of climate change. Our students are going to be studying in 100 year old schools, and we’ll have a workforce to be inadequately educated and trained for the jobs of the future. That’s the big burden we’re putting potentially on future generations if we don’t act now and do what we need to do and can do.

And certainly there are limits. The example I use is we could decide that every family in the country should get a $200,000 voucher to buy a house, and we could afford to do it. We can create the money. We can send out all the vouchers. But what would happen? It would almost be a meaningless promise, because there’s not enough housing supply.

The prices of existing houses would, well, the pun is intended, go through the roof. So yeah, there are limits, but we’re not anywhere close to reaching those limits. And even today, when we’re talking about $3.5 trillion, which I’m sorry we got roped into talking about the top line number, but even if we didn’t offset any of that – 3.5 trillion over ten years is basically between 5% and 6% above what we would already spend.

We’re going to spend 60-something trillion dollars over the next ten years. So it’s a very small addition to what we’re going to spend. And the benefits are disproportionately huge. And I think as a percentage of GDP, it’s like 1.3% over the same ten years, that’s what GDP will be, combined, over ten years. So we’re not talking about in the context all that much money.

And that’s why somebody like Jay Powell, the Fed chair, says we have the fiscal space to do what the Congress is considering. And many others have said that who are not necessarily MMT disciples, but they look at it dispassionately. You’ve got Moody’s and many other saying, yeah, we have room to do this.

So just in terms of the immediate congressional priorities, at least Democratic congressional priorities, we are far from threatening to reach any kind of ceiling on resources that we can deploy.

[00:24:46.490] – Intermission

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[00:25:12.180] – Grumbine

That’s a great point. Real resources are the limits. You remember when Paul Ryan famously went head to head with Alan Greenspan about Social Security, which is another thing that we’ve got to deal with – not really in terms of reality, but in terms of the myths that are driving us off a cliff – but they went head to head, and Paul Ryan said certainly will be better if we gave personal accounts.

That would make it more solvent. Right? And Alan Greenspan is like, you know, in a rare moment of honesty, he’s like, there’s nothing preventing us from doing whatever we want to do. The question is, can we create an economy that has the real resources available for purchase?

And that moment that was the MMT moment that Greenspan gave Dick Cheney a hat tip. He said Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. He’s right. They don’t. Well they do in terms of where they’re spent, but in a real practical term, in an accounting term, they don’t mean anything. It’s a meaningless discussion.

So I am curious as you go through this, are you seeing any other members of Congress or the Senate, for that matter, getting wised up to this? Are you starting to see a tide shift amongst them, or are you seeing pardoned resistance?

[00:26:31.020] – J. Yarmuth

Well, no, I see actually, some converts like me, and I see more than that numbers of members who are intrigued and interested and want to learn more. So I would put, for instance, Senator Brian Schatz from Hawaii. I think he’s pretty much a confirmed MMT person right now, even though he may not admit it explicitly.

Somebody like Chris van Hollen who preceded me as the top Democrat on the Budget Committee. I know that he has changed his thinking on a lot of these issues. He used to be close to a deficit hawk, and he changed his perspective on that. Clearly, we know Bernie is on board.

And in the House, we had a session in the Budget Committee for Democratic members. We had Stephanie speak to all the Democratic members who were interested, and we had good attendance for that. And there are a lot of people, again, who are, if not fully in line with MMT thinking, beginning to think differently about debts and deficits.

We had a hearing last February, February of ‘20, before everything shut down. And the name of the hearing was, “Does debt matter?” And we had four witnesses from pretty much across the spectrum. Douglas Holds Eakin, former head of CBO and a very, very conservative deficit hawk, basically said, “No, right now they don’t matter.”

I can’t remember the name specifically of the man who was there who was an avowed advocate of MMT. But again, a variety of perspectives. Jared Bernstein was on the panel, and they also know debt doesn’t matter right now. We got important things we need to do. So we’re in a period of transition in terms of congressional thinking about this.

And again, I think a lot of people are realizing the same thing that I’ve talked about, that all the things that the deficit hawks predicted would happen if you run the debt higher and higher have not happened. We’ve got historically low interest rates. We have basically no inflation. The dollar is just as strong as it was 15 – 20 years ago, hasn’t lost its value vis a vis the other currencies.

So we haven’t crowded out other spending with interest because interest rates are very low. And by the way, most of the economists are saying they don’t expect interest rates to go much higher than they are now for 20 years. So that not only is an argument for doing more now at the federal level, but it’s also an argument that higher debt does not mean spike in interest rates because it hasn’t.

[00:29:08.280] – Grumbine

It’s interesting, you say that because I just interviewed Warren Mosler, who is largely considered the father of MMT. And one of the things that we talked about was, in fact, interest rates. And the fact is interest rates are man-made, there’s nothing natural about interest rates. The Fed makes a decision and chooses the interest rate.

And that’s basic income for the rich, if you will. But that interest rate is. And interest rates in effect create inflation, they’re inflationary. So I am a staunch proponent, as most MMTers are, Randy Wray and Mosler, and I believe Kelton would fall in this mix, of ZIRP, a zero interest rate policy, a permanent ZIRP that would basically keep money at its right rate.

And the thing with interest rates is you’re defending a positive interest rate, and the Fed has to do various things in order to defend that positive interest rate, and that’s why they raise them. So get rid of that and now you don’t have to worry about that. You don’t have to sell bonds if you don’t want to.

[00:30:08.860] – J. Yarmuth

Right. Well, that’s what Japan’s done. Right?

[00:30:10.810] – Grumbine

Exactly.

[00:30:11.740] – J. Yarmuth

Japan has a zero rate policy.

[00:30:13.640] – Grumbine

It’s highly effective. Okay. So let me ask you in terms of the environment, this is one of those things where there’s a timer. Bill Mckibbin said Physics doesn’t negotiate. We’ve got some major things that are happening right in front of our eyes.

We think as MMTers, that the opportunity for a Green New Deal, which is a layer cake of a Federal Job Guarantee, Medicare For All. And a focus on decarbonization and new energy sources is vital to sustaining our life on this Earth. As you said in the very beginning, are people still thinking about this? Are they even talking about it? Because we’re expanding drilling for fossil fuels.

[00:30:57.880] – J. Yarmuth

Certainly on our side. There’s a sense of urgency that I think easily exceeds what you would find in the general public. People do get it on our side of the aisle. People on the other side of the aisle either don’t get it or refuse to admit it because either it runs afoul of their contributors or it runs afoul of what they perceive their base to be interested in.

But there is an ultimate responsibility of a member of Congress specifically – but anybody who’s involved in public policy – to be able to connect dots. And we have a lot of people who just can’t or are not willing to connect the dots. And I said this the day that Donald Trump was elected.

I said my biggest fear of Donald Trump is that he’s either unable or unwilling to consider the consequences of what he says and does. And that’s a matter of connecting the dots. And until we get more and more people who can figure out all these things are related and the threat that they all pose, then we’re not going to get the kind of dramatic action that many of us think is required to head off these very ominous trends in both climate and poverty and all sorts of things.

So again, I applaud President Biden for trying to raise the alarm, trying to propose something that’s significant and dramatic and big. Like anything else in our country, until people are feeling the pain directly, they’re not going to get out and hold politicians accountable for action or inaction.

And I think a lot of people are beginning to get the message, particularly if you live in Louisiana, if you live on the Gulf Coast, if you live in the Northwest or in California and you have all these wildfires and you have droughts. Bill Maher’s been pleading on his show to build pipelines to take water across the country.

Saying, very logically, if we can build millions of miles of pipe to carry oil, we can do it to carry water from the East to the West. And those are the things that I’m not sure what it’s going to take, but there’s very much a sense of urgency in Congress about that. I don’t know how many co-sponsors the Green New Deal has. I’m a co-sponsor. I think it’s more than 100 right now.

So there are a lot of people who understand that we need dramatic and comprehensive action to deal with all these challenges that we have. Personally from a political perspective, I’d like to see the Green New Deal actually deal in terms of trying to get legislative action, focusing on climate and the environment.

The other things such as Medicare for all and Job Guarantee and so forth, I think muddle the message a little bit, and we probably ought to deal with them individually, but I think overall, again, we need to act decisively and dramatically.

[00:34:05.080] – Grumbine

So, Aaron, let me ask you, given what your father just said, do you hear people talking about a Green New Deal, or has it fallen off the map?

[00:34:14.300] – A. Yarmuth

I would say to the Green New Deal specifically, it’s closer to falling off the map, but through that at the same time, the sense of urgency and – well, it’s a spectrum of desperation to hopelessness and probably several more emotions. I think that that’s only elevated among my generation.

I’ve got a two year old son and for the longest time, sort of like with the growing debt we’ve been warned for my entire life that this is going to be a disaster, basically threaten our children and our grandchildren. Meanwhile, only one of those two things is actually threatening our future, and you can see and feel it regularly.

I’m 37 years old, and I’ve seen stories now how my generation and younger are worried about having kids, because what are we going to be putting them through, what’s their future going to look like if they have a future? And that was certainly a consideration that my wife, Sarah, and I shared.

And in the end, it’s like obviously now I couldn’t imagine not having our son JD under any circumstances, but, the sense of fear and desperation is only growing. And that is one thing where – dad, you and I haven’t really talked about it – but I do sense that the framing of the Green New Deal was at least a little bit unclear in that there are so many other really vital important, positive issues that are being tackled that are not climate-related, that it gets a little bit muddled.

But obviously all of them are very important. But in terms of the Green New Deal itself, it has to be that box check to be a progressive. And I’m of the opinion personally that we have to do everything we can to get in front of climate change as much as we can at this point, because we’re already behind.

There is no limit, and there’s no downside to it, either. All of the solutions are what some would say would have to be pain – the spending and the work that would have to be put forth to combat climate change. All of the results are positive. Clean air.

I think that my generation and especially in particular, the one that follows, is really keenly aware that even now, that weather patterns are different than they were ten years ago, you can see it, feel it. It’s hard to ignore. And the unfortunate part is the differences politically now on it are to me, my perspective, they’re not even ideological on an issue basis or guiding principle basis.

There is strictly just one party who wants to be right instead of getting it right. They want to be right. They want to win the debate, and it’s sort of an asymmetric debate, so to speak.

[00:37:20.200] – Grumbine

Right. I want to say this and forgive me, I’m talking out of turn, but I want to frame this for my own benefit here. From a Green New Deal – I’m very close with Professor Fadhel Kaboub, and he presents this as a layer cake. And the idea behind the Green New Deal has been a framework.

And in order to get rid of some of these dirty industries, to be able to get them out of the business of destroying the planet, and into the business of restoring the planet. There’s going to be some jobs lost. There’s going to be places that don’t have work. They’ve built their entire career around dirty coal, and now they have nothing.

And so there’s this just transition to get people in dirty work into clean work. But then you have the idea of the mass mobilization required to do all the care work and other work that has been left as a result of the pursuit of capital. And so in this sense, a Federal Job Guarantee allows us to have, like, a Marshall plan to bring forth the resources to begin reshaping our communities and get everyone out of poverty.

In the midst of all the change that will occur with the key growth strategy. And then lastly, in order to have a job guarantee, you have to have health care associated with it. Otherwise, you’re just creating yet again another problem. So providing Medicare for all to those job guarantee recipients who are then in turn working as a result of dirty jobs being removed from society and moved into better forms of work.

Now we have job training as a part of that. So I think that this is a matter of hey, I see this problem, but it creates yet this problem. So by bundling this together, what I’ve done is I have mitigated the downside of each of those things. When a Republican, “it’s going to cost jobs.”

Well, you know, funny you said that. Let me show you how we’re going to address it. Yes, I could see that it’s muddy, but by removing those dirty jobs by ending those dirty industries and migrating them to sustainable ones, this is a huge job opportunity in and of itself. I just want to throw that out there and do the due diligence.

[00:39:31.440] – J. Yarmuth

No, I think you’re absolutely right. And I did say from a political perspective, that makes more sense to me because the Green New Deal is a lot for the American public to grasp. And again, if you have to explain everything the way you just did, you’ve already kind of lost…

[00:39:45.170] – Grumbine

Already lost.

[00:39:46.570] – J. Yarmuth

You’re absolutely right. And one of the things – there are far more people right now employed in the wind power industry than there are in the coal industry. I mean, it’s not even close. I saw statistics just today that there are only 13,000 people in West Virginia now employed by coal mining.

That’s 2% of their labor force. In Kentucky, it’s fewer people than that and a smaller percentage. So what people like Joe Manchin are protecting or defending, really on jobs, they are a culture, and that really doesn’t make much sense.

[00:40:22.760] – Grumbine

I agree.

[00:40:23.340] – J. Yarmuth

You can pay respect to coal country culture without trying to have policies that sustain an unsustainable industry. And that’s what right now he’s trying to do. And he’s not alone. But the people who get it best are the mine workers. The United Mine Workers has taken an incredibly progressive position on this type of thing, saying we know that the future is not in coal.

We know there aren’t going to be any coal jobs. We need the government to help us reorient all of these people who have been dependent on coal into something else, into the jobs of the future. So they’ve been the first to recognize the reality. And this is just a lot of other people aren’t listening to them because probably they’re getting contributions from energy companies.

But I’ve seen incredible projections about the potential job creation in a kind of a green infrastructure crusade in this country. And those are jobs that are accessible to the vast majority of people with very minimal training. It’s not like you have to train people to code and a lot of these things. But public education is a very, very difficult thing.

This is obviously a much broader problem, but when we have siloed our media world so that we only listen to people who agree with us, then having the kind of conversations that we need to have to get broad buy-in from the public for these initiatives is very, very difficult.

[00:41:57.160] – Grumbine

Very well stated. You said something that piqued my interest very much, and it’s kind of a way to close this out. I’d like to talk about the political hurdles that you see in front of us for doing anything. As an activist and a CEO of a nonprofit, I have the task of setting the agenda for what we do. And one of the things that I’m concerned of is that we don’t hold our elected representatives, public servants, we don’t hold them accountable for these things.

And when we do, there’s often cries of “you’re a  Republican troll.” What is the right way of regular people in the streets organizing? What would you say to a group of people that are slowly losing hope? Describe this political challenge.

[00:42:43.820] – J. Yarmuth

So what I would say to everybody is stop thinking about politics and government as a spectator sport. Your team doesn’t matter. The question of who wins doesn’t matter. It’s what happens to our society. And if you want to go through life identifying yourself as a Democrat or a Republican and that’s your primary identity, you’ve got a life that is misguided.

We put it that way. We have people in Kentucky – you either identify as a Kentucky fan or a Louisville  fan, and you either wear the blue Jersey and the red Jersey. And if you’re wearing the red Jersey and the red quarterback goes out and throws ten interceptions in a game and fumbles three times, he’s still your quarterback and you’re going to cheer for him and he doesn’t deserve it.

And that’s the way we treat politics these days. And again, until we realize that we have a society that we’re a part of and a world that we’re a part of and that we identify as a human being first and not as somebody who wins elections, we’re going to have a problem getting the kind of public policy changes that we need.

[00:43:52.860] – Grumbine

Very well stated. Aaron, let me throw it over to you here. What is your thought? As a 37 year old man with a son, what is your message to the world?

[00:44:03.580] – A. Yarmuth

Well, I think I wrote this in a column years ago before Trump. I actually firmly believe that nothing good will happen. There will be no positive change until Mitch McConnell’s gone. And I genuinely feel that way going back to his time obstructing Obama for just purely personal political purposes.

I’ll say something that would get my dad in trouble, but there are people who come and pass every day, and you can’t be sorry when that day comes for everyone. Otherwise, you live your life in sadness, and that won’t be a sad day for me politically or otherwise. So I think that as far as my generation is concerned, in addition to what my dad just said, which I fully agree with, there are two camps.

One is the “I want to prove how right I am” – and that’s the sort of social media activist. It’s people who want to prove how smart they are, that they have the answers and their answers the only way that’s going to work. That’s one problem, although it could be righteous, it is a problem.

And then the other problem is – we saw this, I think last year with racial tensions in cities is that there’s a certain segment on the other side who can just turn it off? Who can just say I can’t do anything? It doesn’t affect me, or even if my efforts are going to be unappreciated, I’m just going to not bother with it.

And, I think that that’s sort of the two problems I see with my generation and younger. But I do think that the issues that are facing us will begin to hit us increasingly more personally and drive a sense of needing to be involved increasingly because it hits us personally.

That would be the silver lining of it all, but it’s always being compelled to do the right thing. Not just because it’s interesting. There’s too much other cheap entertainment in the world.

[00:46:11.130] – J. Yarmuth

That’s the old Winston Churchill line. Americans will always do the right thing after having tried everything else. That’s where we are now.

[00:46:15.680] – Grumbine

We just can’t get out of our own way, can we?

[00:46:18.600] – J. Yarmuth

[laughs] No.

[00:46:20.760] – Grumbine

Alright. You two have been wonderful guests and I consider myself blessed. And I’m just so grateful. I want to give a shout out to our Chief Operating Officer, Julie Alberding who hooked up with you, Aaron, and your help in getting your father in here. And John, thank you so much for joining us. I find myself, even though I clearly see the hurdles I find so much hope in who you are and what your message is and the fact that you’re bold.

You’re out there, you’re not willing to hide. And I think that if more people can get on that train, I think we might have a chance. And if we don’t, to quote Chris Hedges, “I fight fascists, not because I’ll win, but because they’re fascists.” That’s what we’re doing here. We’re going to fight to the end. And I consider you guys allies. And I’m grateful to know you now and I hope we can have you back on again in the future.

[00:47:08.140] – J. Yarmuth

Sure, I’d love to do that. Thanks for having me. JD is my grandson as well as Aaron’s son, and I care about him and all the other young people out there in the world that they’re going to live in. So I think we’re on a holy mission of sorts. It’s not really particularly brave of me. It’s just I don’t know how to do anything else.

[00:47:27.850] – Grumbine

I really appreciate it. From my vantage point, it’s incredibly empowering. So with that. I’m Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese, my guests Aaron and John Yarmuth. We’re out of here.

[00:48:10.680] – Ending Credits

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.