In the wake of the Democratic National Convention, Nick and Goldy take a close look at how middle-out economics has become the new center of the Democratic Party’s economic policies, championing a new era of economic thinking that puts workers, families and taking on corporate power at the center, and breaking away from decades of top-down, trickle-down approaches. With echoes of President Joe Biden’s—and now former President Bill Clinton’s—call to build the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, Vice President Harris is seizing the middle-out mantle by declaring that building the middle class will be a defining goal of her presidency because in her words, “When our middle class is strong, America is strong.” Join us as we discuss how invigorating it was to see the Democratic Party coalescing around the idea that their economic policies should benefit the vast majority of working people in order to grow the economy.
Further reading:
The New Kamala – The American Prospect
Kamala Harris and the New Democratic Economic Paradigm – The New Yorker
Say It to My Face – The American Prospect
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Nick Hanauer:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Joe Biden:
It’s time to build our economy from the bottom-up and from the middle-out, not the top-down.
Nick Hanauer:
Middle-out economics is the answer.
Joe Biden:
Because Wall Street didn’t build this country. The great middle class built this country.
Nick Hanauer:
The more the middle class thrives, the better the economy is for everyone, even rich people like me.
Speaker 3:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle-out. Welcome to the show.
Goldy:
Nick, you and I experienced the Democratic National Convention in the way that people might expect the two of us would, me watching it on TV and you actually being there, what, in a VIP box?
Nick Hanauer:
Yes. Correct. In one of the suites that they give you if you give a lot of money away.
Goldy:
So I’ve been to a convention before and I didn’t have to give a lot of money away to do it. I was there in 2008 and I actually found that the experience of being at a convention was a little disappointing, because you didn’t experience it the way most Americans did, which was watching it on TV, so it was hard for me to get a take. But I’m curious, you being there in person with all that excitement, what’s your takeaway, especially on our main issues?
Nick Hanauer:
First, let me start by giving a shout-out to our colleague, Freddy Doss, who was also there.
Goldy:
As a delegate.
Nick Hanauer:
As a delegate.
Goldy:
He had to work to get there. Unlike you, who just bought your way in.
Nick Hanauer:
To actually make a contribution, exactly. I didn’t get to see Freddy, sadly. It was mayhem there, let me just say. And it was not an easy place to move around very much. But, wow, I’m so glad I did go because what a party it was. I don’t need to remind people how dark things were for Democrats.
Goldy:
Was it five weeks?
Nick Hanauer:
For me.
Goldy:
For the world.
Nick Hanauer:
For anybody who’s paying attention to the world. Five weeks ago? Six weeks ago? I’ve lost…
Goldy:
I’ve lost track of time.
Nick Hanauer:
Was it-
Goldy:
Was that the 21st, July 21st, when Biden dropped out? And I want to be clear, we love Joe Biden.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, yeah, that was a very-
Goldy:
We think the most consequential presidency of our lifetime.
Nick Hanauer:
Absolutely. And I want to come back to that. I want to come back to Joe Biden dropping out because I have thoughts about that. But I think that, anyway, it was obviously such a sea change from where we were to today, and the convention was just extraordinary. I mean, it was just an incredibly well-orchestrated, well-organized, incredibly effective and compelling four or five days. And I want to say that it was super well-organized. Goldy, I took the bus.
Goldy:
Oh my God, I didn’t know that You knew how to take a bus.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, the buses worked great.
Goldy:
Was it an Airbus? I mean, I’m confused.
Nick Hanauer:
No, it worked super well. Getting in and out was really, really great. On the last night there was a big line at one of the entrances and we walked around to the other side and got in quite quickly.
But it was very well-organized. People were great. Everybody was happy, people were super friendly, helpful. It was an extraordinary event in so many ways. But I think that where I’d like to take this conversation is mostly to what made such a great event possible. My strong view that it was the unity of purpose around two things.
So usually, the Democratic Party is a highly fractured, contentious cantankerous…
Goldy:
Is that the old Will Rogers line, “I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”?
Nick Hanauer:
Exactly. I mean, we can’t get out of our own way generally in moving the ball forward. And we’re always trying to make the perfect the enemy of the good and we’ll fight over tiny differences, and there are two things that made this profoundly different. The first, of course, unifying issue is the need to beat Donald Trump by any means possible.
Goldy:
The obvious unifying issue that we all expect. And by any means possible, we don’t mean cheating.
Nick Hanauer:
Like the other guys.
Goldy:
Like Trump, like they say.
Nick Hanauer:
But the other thing which I think is much more significant is the vast distance the party has moved on economic issues.
Goldy:
And before we get into this in detail, Nick, we should have said this at the top, tell the audience, this is a very different podcast recording because it’s just me and you. There’s no guest.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. We’re just reflecting on what we think we saw.
Goldy:
That’s right. So no guest coming up, just Nick and I chewing the fat over the remarkable transformation of the Democratic Party. I don’t want to give it away on what issue, Nick.
Nick Hanauer:
Economics.
Goldy:
That’s right.
Nick Hanauer:
Economics. So you, I mean, I don’t know how many speakers, but even JB Pritzker didn’t make a neoliberal argument. And people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders-
Goldy:
And AOC, who gave a tremendous speech.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right, AOC, are not these fringy lefties talking about the working people. They’re the center of gravity in the party, to say nothing of Tim Walz, who could be the best spokesperson for working families the country has seen in a generation.
I mean, God bless Bernie Sanders and AOC, Tim Walz, his personal story, his track record and his ability to articulate these issues, I just think is unmatched in recent American political history. And obviously, the top of the ticket, Kamala, has come far, as has the rest of the Democratic Party on these issues. Of course, she was always more or less there, and she was Joe Biden’s vice president, who’s been the best president on these issues for a full generation. But I almost fell out of my chair when Bill Clinton said that we have to build the economy from the bottom up and the middle out. Holy crap.
Goldy:
Bill Clinton, Mr. Triangulation, the guy whose reputation is for saying what he needs to say to win elections, he’s triangulated on middle out.
Nick Hanauer:
Absolutely.
Goldy:
Whatever you want to say about Bill Clinton, he is a savvy politician. So he sees that middle out is the way you win, and that tells you that middle out, that is where the center of the party is right now.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right, that’s right.
Goldy:
And as we’ll talk about later, I want to get into this idea that the middle is the center-
Nick Hanauer:
Correct.
Goldy:
That there’s nothing lefty or radical about the middle out agenda that the Democrats are promoting. It is very fundamentally centrist.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. That’s right. And I think it was Rick Perlstein just wrote this really interesting piece, I can’t quote, but he said, finally Democrats are saying what they mean. They’re not pulling any punches. They’re not dancing around the issues. They’re not equivocating.
But the problem is, if you’re not with the middle class, you have to equivocate about everything. You’re always fucking splitting the baby. You can’t say, “We are for this and against that,” because you know in the back of your head, the majority of people are not what you’re for.
So all of a sudden, by taking a majoritarian approach to economic policy and other issues, you get to be more forthright and hardcore. And you get to draw sharper contrast, and that is how you sell stuff, that is compelling.
Goldy:
There’s this idea that political leaders lead, that our elected officials somehow lead. In fact, that’s not true, they follow. The voters have to get there first. I think they should lead.
Nick Hanauer:
I mean some people do lead…
Goldy:
Stop. [inaudible 00:09:11] Like Bernie Sanders-
Nick Hanauer:
You have to give Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren-
Goldy:
Elizabeth Warren.
Nick Hanauer:
And AOC they’re due.
Goldy:
So, there were three issues at this convention that the Democrats talked very plainly, openly, and unequivocally about as we’re saying economics, that middle-out approach that you build the economy from the bottom up in the middle out, that these sort of policies that support the vast majority of Americans that improve their lives, that’s what creates economic growth. And we’ll get into the details of the policies and what Democrats are saying about it.
Another issue finally, finally, and this has been building for a long time, is on reproductive rights. Remember, there were decades where Democrats didn’t want to say the word abortion, “Because we can kind of support Roe, but we won Roe and we don’t want to talk about it because abortions are unpopular.”
And no, no, no, “Totally reproductive rights. We want to assure that nationally, we’re going to speak very openly.” And that’s because they understand that that’s a winning issue with voters. They always believed it. The majority of Democrats were always on that issue, but they were warned not to talk about it.
And the other one is our second issue at Civic Ventures, and that is gun violence prevention, and remarkable transformation on that issue too.
Nick Hanauer:
Correct.
Goldy:
That for years, for decades, Democrats shied away from it and now they’re very open about talking about it. It’s not gun control. Nobody uses that language. Of course, that’s unpopular. It’s as we say, gun responsibility or gun violence prevention.
And America’s with us. And not only is America with us, but the majority of gun owners are with us on many of these things. They want responsible gun ownership. They don’t think that everybody should have a machine gun and a 40 round clip and so forth.
And that’s where you have somebody like Tim Walz, who was a hunter, a proud hunter, who’s out there talking about getting guns out of our schools so our kids can go to school in safety and without having to be trained for lockdowns. So those three… It’s just amazing.
Again, I was there in 2008, which was one of these really hopeful, excited unity conventions. Largely Obama was that candidate and everybody… It was a real feel good convention, but my God, is it a different Democratic Party than in 2008.
Nick Hanauer:
Totally transformed. Totally transformed, because for all the hope-y, change-y on the Obama side, they were straight up neoliberals.
Goldy:
They had a different understanding of how the economy worked. And partially, it’s a lot of, honestly, Nick, I think it’s been 10 years since we’ve been working together and all this change has happened during those 10 years. So I don’t want to take all the credit for it.
Nick Hanauer:
But a third of it.
Goldy:
But correlation, causation and all that, but I got to say, there’s more empirical evidence of my impact than there is for, let’s say, the Laffer Curve.
Nick Hanauer:
Correct.
Goldy:
But part of what’s happened is the advocacy, and we’ve been a part of that, and there’s been a lot of good effort from many different parties on that part. But part of it is just lived experience.
We saw what happened after 2008. We saw that horrible slow recovery from the Great Recession because, we didn’t do enough. And then we saw what happened when you did enough, when you did a lot during the COVID Pandemic, and that how we prevented a total collapse. And we see that the United States, which did the most in terms of stimulus, there’s report out saying that we are the only advanced country whose GDP growth, economic growth, is ahead of 2019 projections.
Goldy:
That when you look at the chart, where economies were expected to go, we’re the only ones to exceed those expectations because we did the most. Did we have a bout of inflation? Absolutely. Our inflation-
Nick Hanauer:
But not worse than any other country.
Goldy:
No. It was lower and it came down faster.
Nick Hanauer:
Faster.
Goldy:
And so on every metric, the US has done better than the rest of the developed world. And that’s because we had a very different idea of how the economy worked and we governed that way.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, absolutely.
Goldy:
And so I think people are beginning to get it that when you have a crisis like that and you give families money, that child tax credit, and we’ll get into it, because one of the big proposals in the Harris campaign that, oh my God, give people money in a time of crisis. It helps people and it helps the economy at the same time. Amazing.
Nick Hanauer:
I mean, I just think that the place on economics where Harrison and Waltz have landed is exactly right. And although Kamala herself has not yet said, “Build the economy from bottom up and middle out,” that hardly matters.
Goldy:
She’s saying-
Nick Hanauer:
She’s saying when the middle-class grows, America grows. It’s the same thing.
Goldy:
She’s just using her own wording of it to… She needs to establish her own brand.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
Goldy:
Obviously. We respect that.
Nick Hanauer:
But anyway, I mean, I just think that it’s just so invigorating to see the Democratic Party coalesce around this very simple idea. And again, it’s just so simplifying, because when you’re clearly on the side of the majority of citizens, politics gets a lot easier, and what you say gets a lot clearer and it was just fantastic.
Goldy:
I don’t know, Nick, you say that what they’re saying is clear, but I was reading the New York Times and they insist that she’s still light on economic policy.
Nick Hanauer:
God, I can’t remember who said it, but it’s like the New York Times is not going to do an analysis of Trump’s economic policies, because he either doesn’t have any or he is hiding from them. But they do want to pick every single detail of the Harris-Waltz approach apart and name the 5,000 reasons they think it won’t work.
Goldy:
They haven’t actually produced the legislation yet, I think, which, God, I mean they’re Democrats. They should have these 300-page white papers. In fact-
Nick Hanauer:
… for us to nitpick and whine about.
Goldy:
That’s right.
Nick Hanauer:
Because otherwise, what do we write about?
Goldy:
Let’s be focused. I wonder about anybody in the mainstream media listening to this, and of course you should, because we’re one of the leading economics podcasts in the country. I think more empirical evidence for that than the Laffer Curve again.
I want to point out that the Harris just, I find this critique just amazing, because the Harris policy agenda is absolutely clear. First of all, it starts on the base of we’re pretty much going to continue doing this stuff that the Biden administration-
Nick Hanauer:
The transformational stuff that we’ve just done. We did more economic policy in the last eight presidents combined. Let’s start with that.
Goldy:
The American Recovery Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips and Science Act, all those things, we’re going to continue doing those things. The industrial policy that’s in there and the…
Nick Hanauer:
And taking on corporate power.
Goldy:
That taking on corporate power.
Nick Hanauer:
Price gouging, mergers, the whole thing.
Goldy:
All the things that Biden was doing, the price gouging, that’s something the Biden administration was doing. We’re going to crack down on anti-competitive activities by corporations. We’re going to focus more on reigning in monopolies, etc. We’re going to do all of that type of stuff.
Plus we’re going to do, and this is a big focus of… People use the term care economy. I don’t think she used that term in her speech, but these are things, by the way, that Biden wanted to do, but couldn’t get past Manchin and Sinema, which is we’re going to have that. And she’s actually going a little further on it, on the child restore the child tax credit. We’re going to have affordable childcare, funding for childcare, etc.
She wants paid family leave, all these things, the care economy stuff. Again, Biden wanted it, there’s limits, couldn’t get it through Congress, and she’s going to focus on that. And on top of that, she’s focusing on housing. She’s promising 3 million additional new homes in the US to address the affordable housing crisis.
Nick Hanauer:
And by the way, Goldy, I don’t know how they get there without using our fundamental idea that we’ve shared broadly.
Goldy:
But clearly they’re focusing on affordable housing, which is something new. So right there, you’ve got a very detailed agenda, and if you want actual real legislative details, look to the stuff the Biden administration has already passed and the stuff that they’ve proposed that they didn’t pass, and then add on everything she’s saying about what she wants to do.
That’s a lot more detailed than, well, I guess there’s a detailed proposal from the Trump administration.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s Project 2025.
Goldy:
Project 2025.
Nick Hanauer:
But they don’t want to talk about it.
Goldy:
They don’t want to talk… No, he says that’s not his plan. I mean, I don’t know. Do you give him credit for having a detailed economic plan, but then accept credulously that he’s got no idea what Project 2025 is? Because other than that, all he has is no taxes on tips and huge tariffs on all imports and a big tax cut for corporations and billionaires. I mean, that’s…
Nick Hanauer:
That’s it.
Goldy:
… the Trump plan. So, it’s actually a pretty detailed proposal. The other thing is that there isn’t a coherent economic theory behind what they’re doing.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
Goldy:
And this is the thing that excites the two of us the most. And that is, we’ve talked about this before on the podcast and in our various written pieces, that the argument between middle-out and trickle-down or neoliberalism or whatever you want to… Orthodox economics is one of cause and effect, that the standard economic approach is to see the economy as money, as being the financial system, as being the economy.
And it’s all about access to capital, and what the market does. The main benefit of a market economy is that the market efficiently allocates resources to their best use through equilibrium models and the relationship between supply and demand and rational expectations and all that stuff. That’s what markets do. And so therefore, what the government wants to do is to free the market to work its magic and efficiently self-organize and allocate resources. And that’s what markets do best.
We disagree. We think that what markets do best is evolve new solutions to human problems. It’s an engine of innovation, that is what markets do best and that it’s not inherently efficient. And by the way, again, the empirical data supports us on this. Markets are not automatically inherently efficient.
And in fact, we’ve had guests argue that, Nobel Prize-winning guests argue, that markets are never efficient, certainly not in the sense that orthodox economists argue. And in fact, what that leads you to is a different purpose of the economy, which is not making things more efficient, but to improve people’s lives.
And sometimes you may even want to sacrifice efficiency for that. If you’re going to have an efficient market that’s actually shitting on 90% of the population and that’s-
Nick Hanauer:
Just to be clear-
Goldy:
… not what you want.
Nick Hanauer:
When They say efficiency, what they mean is return on capital.
Goldy:
Capital efficiency.
Nick Hanauer:
Capital efficiency. Return on capital, calling that efficient, that’s nonsense, of course.
Goldy:
And so let’s be clear, we’ve talked about this. There’s a lot of empirical evidence and lived experience over the past 50 years that we have seen all this rising inequality, just radical, rising inequality, an economy that’s worked for the top 10%, but mostly for the top 1%, but mostly for the top 0.001%.
People like you, Nick, it’s been really good for billionaires. It’s been okay for college-educated professionals. The last 10 years have been good for me. Thank you, Nick. Before that, not so much.
But it’s not been good for the vast majority of Americans, and they know that they can feel it. They’re less secure. They’re working harder than their parents did. They fear for their children’s future, all that stuff. It’s not been good. And we don’t have to have an economy like that.
And that’s one of the arguments about middle-out is that economics is a choice, and we can make different choices. And that’s why we’re free to do things like in industrial policy. We can say, “You know what? It’s in our interest both economically and for other security reasons to have a domestic chip manufacturing industry so that China can’t fucking cut us off.”
Nick Hanauer:
And all of that is the new consensus. It’s just really breathtaking.
Goldy:
And it’s not, as Trump says, Marxist, it’s not communist to have a little industrial policy. It’s not communist to have a child tax credit, which by the way, I want to get to a very remarkable difference between the two parties. And that is, you have JD Vance on one side, who’s very pro-family, he says.
JD Vance on one side, who’s very worried about white people, people not having enough children, but white people, white Christian people more than anything. And his solution, he’s on the record with this, has said, “Maybe we should penalize people who don’t have children,” like tax penalties, tax them more, penalize them for not having children.
Then you have Kamala Harris who’s proposing, what is that, a $6,000 one time when the child is born, and then $3,000 a year, these tax credits for people who have children. Functionally, they’re the same thing. Somebody wants to give you tax credits for having children. The other person wants to punish you for not having children. It really speaks to the…
Nick Hanauer:
You know what they say, Goldy? In the Republican Party, cruelty is the point.
Goldy:
That’s right. I mean, all he had to do was come out in support of tax credits and that would’ve been popular. It has the same… Carrots or sticks. We are the carrot party. They are the stick party. If you want to be beaten by sticks, vote for Trump.
Nick Hanauer:
No, it’s really true. But I want to talk for a minute about Biden, because I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching on this. Unlike most of our listeners, we, especially me, I’m an insider. I am in those rooms. I was on the calls with all the big donors freaking out about Biden, and we do have direct personal relationships in the White House and with the top, and I have a couple of thoughts.
The first is a bit of a mea culpa because for those who say that Biden was protected and enabled by a bunch of people, that is at least half true, and I have to accept some of the responsibility for that. I met with the man for 20 minutes one-on-one.
Goldy:
And you told me it went great.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, it was great. And he is 82. It went great for an 82-year-old, to be clear. It didn’t go as great as it would’ve gone if he had been 62.
Goldy:
But you and I, Nick, we’re very concerned with how the nation is governed.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. That’s right.
Goldy:
And we have no problem with that because we know how it works-
Nick Hanauer:
Correct, correct.
Goldy:
… and who actually runs the country and that he’s surrounded by great people-
Nick Hanauer:
Correct.
Goldy:
[inaudible 00:26:46]
Nick Hanauer:
It would’ve been been fine.
Goldy:
[inaudible 00:26:48] a very competent administration. In the worst case scenario, Harris becomes president anyway.
Nick Hanauer:
Exactly, exactly, exactly. All of that is true. And the thing is that we, I, we’re among a relatively small number of people in America who really understood at a detail level, the consequential nature of all of the economic initiatives of the Biden administration, recognized how profoundly important they were, how big a departure they had been from the past, how extraordinarily fortunate we were to have gotten them through.
And we’re somewhat blinded to the other reality, which is that most people don’t know about those things, and it’s not how they vote. It’s not how they process who should be president. Because at the end of the day, for most reasonable people looking at Joe Biden as an 82-year-old, would not choose him to run the most consequential enterprise on planet earth. It’s just true. Cannot not be true.
Goldy:
We’ve watched our parents grow old.
Nick Hanauer:
Exactly. Exactly.
Goldy:
We know what happens in your eighties.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
Goldy:
For most people.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. And so I, among others, and certainly a big group of insiders, we’re blind because we cared so much about the policy itself. And because we understand politics as the process of enacting policy and don’t care about the vibes. I just don’t care about… I don’t care about the sizzle, all I care about is the steak.
But the truth is that most people care a lot about the sizzle. They want to be blown away. They want somebody dynamic. They want somebody they can identify with, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don’t care at all. I don’t care. I don’t need to have a beer with you. I want somebody who’s capable and competent and gets the shit done.
But nine out of 10 people don’t think that way. And I was really blind to that. I think a lot of people were blind to that. And obviously, we learned our lesson when the transition is made.
There’s another thing that I think is really worth raising, and it’s a super interesting point to me, which is that in all of the calls I had with so many people of intelligence, substance experience, many of whom had either all their careers at stake or enormous amounts of money, not one person, not one person said, “Kamala’s got this.” Not one person said, “Trust me, this woman is fucking phenomenal.”
Goldy:
The concern was not her ability to govern. The concern was her…
Nick Hanauer:
Ability to connect with people.
Goldy:
Her capabilities as a politician.
Nick Hanauer:
As a politician.
Goldy:
As a retail politician.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. And again, not one person was in the back of the room going, “Hey, y’all, you’re wringing your hands for nothing. Kamala’s got this. She’s got it. She’s phenomenal.” So, I had one conversation that I thought was illuminating at the convention with a very senior person who I’m not going to name, because I don’t want to put him on the spot.
And he said, “Look, here’s the thing that nobody could see. He said, for the last three and a half years, Kamala Harris has been Vice President of the United States, and she has been out beyond the cameras where nobody really sees practicing her craft, grinding.” She’s been grinding for three and a half years, and when the moment came, she was ready. She was more ready than anybody on Planet Earth, and we just didn’t see it.
Anyway, so hats off to her, like holy crap. Talk about a person who has risen to the occasion, and I’m so glad my instincts were wrong.
Goldy:
Well, let’s be clear. Obviously, as a retail politician, Kamala Harris was greatly underestimated. So give her credit. Also, I think we all underestimated the competency of the Democratic Party because I’ll tell you what my concern was. I was fearful-
Nick Hanauer:
Civil war.
Goldy:
We were going to get Ezra Klein’s Thunderdome that he and so many other pundits, and quite frankly, a lot of them seemed very disappointed not to get. We should have some sort of open convention that would make 1968 look like a…
Nick Hanauer:
It would’ve been great news.
Goldy:
… child’s tea party. You’d have protests in the street and shots of the police beating down protesters and people yelling at each other on the floor.
Nick Hanauer:
As James Carville says, “America likes nothing better than a train wreck.”
Goldy:
And multiple rounds of it will take a dozen votes before they finally settled on somebody, and it would be a total fucking disaster. And we would be surrendering. Let’s be honest, this is just the way elections work.
Incumbency is a really powerful thing to have, and we would be surrendering that main advantage, which is the advantage of incumbency. And weirdly, it was, boy, man, what a smooth transition. And everybody got behind her so quickly.
Nick Hanauer:
Unbelievable.
Goldy:
And again, give Joe Biden credit for that.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, absolutely, another master stroke.
Goldy:
He carried weight with the party. They had to have pulled strings to get people to come on board that quickly. So we get this incredible smooth transition, this amazing convention. Oh my God. The fact that they pulled it off, that thing where she’s in Wisconsin.
Nick Hanauer:
Oh my God. I’ll tell you what, being there was unbelievable when she was on. Just for anybody who missed that, who didn’t see it. So during the second night of the convention-
Goldy:
The roll call.
Nick Hanauer:
During the roll call, Harris and Waltz were in another city doing a big rally.
Goldy:
The same arena where the Republicans held their convention in Milwaukee.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. And they televised them in for a few minutes to talk. It was just like-
Goldy:
And packed, by the way, they’ve packed an arena in Chicago, and then they’ve packed a second arena in Milwaukee, and then they timed this whole thing perfectly where she’s walks out at the end of the roll call and it comes up on the big screen in Chicago, and she’s addressing two arenas at once, and you may watch TV and think, “Oh, that’s easy, whatever.”
No, that whole thing was incredibly complicated. That was technically a masterful feat that they were able to pull that off. And it just speaks to the competency. One of the things, again, from the pure electoral political side, campaigns do tell you something about the competency of the candidate, because if they run a competent campaign, it’s not a perfect one-to-one, but it tends to tell you that they’re good at managing things, or they’re good at hiring people who manage things, and it bodes well for their administration.
So, I got to tell you, you’re not a, what did you say? It’s not the buzz, the…
Nick Hanauer:
The steak, the sizzle?
Goldy:
Yeah, the sizzle…
Nick Hanauer:
Steak and the sizzle?
Goldy:
Yeah, I’m speaking-
Nick Hanauer:
The vibes.
Goldy:
The vibes, the vibes.
Nick Hanauer:
The vibes.
Goldy:
You’re not a vibes person.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m not a vibes person.
Goldy:
I’m not a vibes person. My vibes tend to be pretty down. My vibes are a lot… I’m feeling a lot better. I’m feeling a lot better that I won’t have to flee the country, that our economy won’t collapse. And that what’s really important is that the progress we’ve made over the past decade, and particularly over the past three and a half years, that that progress will continue.
And because we’re really confident that these are the right policies-
Nick Hanauer:
100%.
Goldy:
And that they will pay off, but they take years to pay off and give it another four years, and more people will be feeling the payoffs of these investments.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. I mean, if Harrison and Waltz get re-elected, and by some miracle you could save the Senate and take the House, and you saw another layer of these policies enacted, of course we’d love to see the minimum wage brought up to 15 or $20 an hour.
Goldy:
And she’s come out for raising the minimum wage, has not put a number on it.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. All those things, you would see GDP increases. Again, I’ve been saying for a long time that if you let these policies be enacted relatively competently, I think America’s GDP growth rates will go back up to where they were in the 60s. I just don’t think you can make these kinds of investments in the country and not see those kinds of returns.
Goldy:
More importantly, I think you’re going to see the benefits of economic growth being more broadly shared.
Nick Hanauer:
More broadly shared, and if we can get to a point where people start to see those benefits and can connect them to the political process, then I think the democracy is back on track. Then we’re back to having disagreements about policy and not about whether we want to continue to have a democracy anymore and whether we want to elect tyrants or not. And anyway, I think it’s very, very encouraging right now, and there’s a lot to be hopeful about.
Speaker 5:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads @PitchforkEconomics. Nick’s on Twitter and Facebook as well @NickHanauer.
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