Timid tweaks won’t fix a broken economy. From Nick Hanauer’s blunt critique of Democratic incrementalism to a candid conversation with Representatives Ro Khanna, Delia Ramirez, and Jim Himes on how Democrats can reclaim working-class trust by embracing economic populism and fighting for real change, this episode brings you inside the 2025 Middle Out Economics conference, where the message was clear: Go big or get out of the way.
Moderator: Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect
Rep. Jim Himes, 4th congressional district, Connecticut
Rep. Ro Khanna, 17th congressional district, California
Rep. Delia Ramirez, 3rd congressional district, Illinois
Further reading:
Measuring the Income Gap from 1975 to 2023
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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.
Goldy:
The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven’t worked, but what’s the alternative?
Nick Hanauer:
Middle-out economics is the answer.
Goldy:
Because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.
Speaker 3:
That’s right. This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Goldy:
Hey, Pitchfork listeners, Goldy here. I recently came back from our nation’s capital for our second annual Middle-Out conference. This year’s was titled Looking Forward, Looking Back, Where Middle-Out Economics Goes From Here. And as it was last year, it was hosted by our friends at Democracy, A Journal of Ideas. I have to say, last year’s was a bit more fun and a bit more optimistic, what with us not having a lunatic in the White House. But despite the broadly realistic assessment of the shitshow we’re in, there was still a lot of thought-provoking commentary and even, dare I say, a little bit of optimism from our panelists and keynote speakers. All in all, the event was a great success and while I apologize in advance for the audio quality, we thought we’d share a little bit of it with you anyway. To start with, here’s a brief excerpt from Nick’s keynote address.
Nick Hanauer:
I’ve been working on the overtime threshold since 2014, and what the labor department did was small, and if I may use this phrase, chickenshit. They chose to attempt to raise the overtime threshold to include a few million workers when their option was to include 30 million workers if they had merely raised the threshold back to where it once was. And I highlight that because I think that’s the central problem. This is emblematic of the central problem of the Democratic Party is that we don’t know how to pick the important fights. If we had raised the overtime threshold to 90 or a hundred thousand dollars a year, I guarantee you everyone in America would’ve known about it. Because every business leader in America would’ve gone batshit crazy. And 30 million workers in America would’ve realized that their lives were about to be transformed in a very, very positive way.
And instead we did this small incremental thing which was merely adjusting the Obama number that got pushed down for inflation. It’s the typical technocratic risk-averse nonsense that our party has become famous for. And I think that this moment is a moment of great opportunity and great peril both. But the exciting part is that it may be possible, or likely that our party will finally begin to address the problems that our constituents face at the scale of the problem. And I have a small chart here, which I realize most of you can’t see, but it is a figure that it shows the decline in the share of income going to the bottom 90% of workers since 1975, and it has gone from about 67% to 47%. Since 1975 this amounts to about $80 trillion that has flown incrementally from the bottom nine deciles of Americans to the top one or 2%.
It is a three or three and a half trillion dollar per year problem. And by problem, I mean if you solve this problem, you merely get people back to where they were in 1975 on a relative basis. Said another way, the median full-time worker in America today earns about $55,000 a year. If they had merely maintained their same share of GDP since ’75, they’d earn about $110,000 a year. That gap between 55 and 110 is the problem. And yet no one that I know of in the Democratic Party is speaking in terms this bold. We are incrementalists. And the thing is is that there is the profound appeal to the kind of big ideas that for better or worse, Donald Trump represents. You’re right, it’s a wrecking ball, it’s a catastrophe, it’s a disaster. But in their defense, they’re at least doing some things. You can be absolutely sure that they have people’s attention, and we have often refused to address that.
Goldy:
Nick wasn’t the only familiar voice at the conference. There were a lot of past podcast guests including Representative Ro Khanna. Representative Khanna was part of a panel along with Representatives Delia Ramirez and Jim Himes titled The Road Ahead, Turning Middle-Out Economics into Good Politics. Moderated by Harold Meyerson of the American Prospect. Again, we apologize for the audio quality, but we think you’ll be interested in what they had to say.
Harold Meyerson:
I’m the moderator of this panel. I’m Harold Meyerson. I’m with the American Prospect. As regards our previous discussion about homonomics and tariffs, I will tell you that we are posting at the American Prospect website, prospect.org, no paywall, tomorrow morning, a long piece, a long and nuanced and very germane piece on why tariffs make sense under certain conditions and really don’t make sense under other conditions by Lori Wallach, who many of, along with people like Thea Lee have been sort of the experts on raising the issue of how American workers are faring in the free trade system of the past several decades. So you will find that on the Prospect webpage early tomorrow morning. I am to be joined, at least in theory by Ro Khanna, who represents the Silicon Valley district and by Delia Ramirez, who represents a west side and a west side suburb Chicago district, and by one of the three panelists who actually has worked so that his schedule has him here right now, Jim Himes of Connecticut.
When I was a young guy, there was a nickname for the Upper East Side District of Manhattan, which was called then the Silk Stocking District because so many wealthy people lived there. Jim’s district is sort of historically the district of people who have too much money to live in the Silk Stocking District. It’s the Connecticut suburb of New York. And so we will begin with Jim. I want to quote an idea at this juncture, my longtime friend, Ruy Teixeira has written by actual count something like 600 versions of the same column over the past four or five years saying that the Democrats are identified with a whole bunch of relatively unpopular cultural issues. We might add that even, oh hey Robert, good to see you. Even when those identifications are relatively spurious or magnified by right-wing media that has been disabling.
That’s on the one hand, on the other hand, the left wing of the Democratic Party, the sort of populist left wing of the Democratic Party, as personified as we’ve seen in the recent speaking tour by Bernie Sanders and AOC has been emphasizing class issues, has been emphasizing we don’t wish to be an oligarchy, has been pointing to this and the usurpations of of power, not only the constitutional usurpations of power of the Trump administration, but in general the whole usurpation of power over the last several, many decades from the American working class to global financial forces, global capital, global corporations and such. And I am finding, here, I’m such a primitive that I have a story from the New York Times that I actually cut out of the paper today, but it is, I recently stopped writing because it tickled my nose. I’m finding that there is a kind of convergence among some members. Hi. Are you Delia?
Delia Ramirez:
I’m Delia. If I wasn’t, it would be kind of weird, right?
Harold Meyerson:
Well, there was a seating chart, so I was just looking at where people were. There may be a kind of convergence between what I would call the Toshara sensibility of stop talking about this, stop talking about that. And a progressive sensibility saying, “Well look, if we’re going to get the working class back and everyone acknowledges that the Democrats need to get a chunk of the working class back, we have to start talking about the issues of greatest importance to the working class.” And so yesterday, in the House, there was a number of speakers who came together under a newly formed thing, and since I can’t find the clip because I think it’s where my mic is wired.
And I believe you, Ro, I believe you spoke, the other two guests here, the other two panelists, Ro Khanna who represents the Silicon Valley district and has been also active in a range of progressive causes and including some Bernie Sanders campaigns in the last decade and Delia Ramirez who as I said, comes from the west side of Chicago and some of the district goes a little bit beyond the city line and to the suburbs. So a definite mix of districts here. But let me talk about this new populist energy. So I want to begin with Ro since you were part of, I guess the speakers. We talked about this yesterday and then to extend the conversation.
Ro Khanna:
Well first of all, thank you for inviting me and your leadership. I’m really honored to be here with two excellent colleagues. Jim Himes was one of the smartest members of Congress, not just because he knows how to handle classified information properly.
Jim Himes:
Also because the bar is really pretty low.
Ro Khanna:
But is an extraordinary thinker. And Delia Ramirez, who after my breakfast this morning, I always thought she was a moral force and pragmatic. If there’s one person who’s going to figure out the pragmatic right approach to immigration for a party, I would look to her. I think she is extraordinary and will be an extraordinary leader, is in a leader and will continue to be an extraordinary leader.
Look guys, Chris Deluzio could be in this group. It’s a group of people across the party who simply think that we need to focus more on economic issues. We need to focus and recognize that people are upset and that they’re legitimately upset about the economic stagnancy in a lot of parts of the country. In a very short nutshell, because I saw Fareed Zakaria’s blurb on manufacturing, his sort of short thing about a week ago, and usually I agree with Fareed, but I totally disagree with him on this and I’ll tell you why this group, Economic Patriots, what it means.
Fareed was basically saying that one of America’s great advantages over Europe, over Japan and Germany was that we focused on finance and that we focused on technology. And this is the explosion of economic wealth. And of course my district proves some of that thesis. I mean, if you’re Google, you have Google India, you have Google Europe, you’re not just selling to the local community. So it’s going to be explosive growth as opposed to if you were just selling shirts. I mean you could sell technology in a global way and scale.
And so he says, “Look, Japan and Germany didn’t work and finance and technology work.” Of course the one country he doesn’t mention is China, China did both manufacturing and finance and technology. And in losing our manufacturing base, in losing factory towns, we’ve created a explosion of income inequality with no regard for what it would do to the body of politics in a governance failure of the last 50 years. And that’s what this group believes that Chris Deluzio calls it wimpy policy or something, but spineless policy. But it starts with an indictment of the status quo in a sense that we need a new governing entity.
Harold Meyerson:
Jim Himes, you come from a background actually in finance, and there is clearly this sort of neo, not populist in the sense of Trump, but populist in the sense that your colleague Ro just talked about, a sensibility in the party. How do you react to that and do you think that’s the direction in which Democrats need to go?
Jim Himes:
Yeah, yeah. No, thank you. Thanks for having me. And I need to correct something about my district, apart from the punctuality of its representatives. Yes, we have Greenwich and Derry and New Canberra. I also got Bridgeport, Connecticut, which is the biggest city in Connecticut in there is very dire poverty in Bridgeport to some extent in Norwalk to some extent. So I actually see the spectrum of economic challenge. You can imagine what the middle class goes through in a very, very high cost district. So I see this not just from the Silk Stocking point of view. So I think my answer and my response, you’re sort of asking me to channel the finance view, is that so many human mistakes are putting or where you should have and, right? I mean our capital markets in the political world, it’s valuable and popular to beat up on Wall Street.
But the truth is that our capital markets and players in the capital markets are a massive American competitive advantage both strategically and economically. That’s true of technology and everything else. So I think what we want is we want a policy that continues to have technology and finance and those things that deliver immense wealth to a small number of people, which basically that’s what’s happening. But we also need to be much more cognizant of the devastating changes that have affected the rest of the Americans, the rest of the Americans is well more than half. And that means really rethinking things like rent-seeking in finance. There’s an immense amount of rent-seeking in finance, regardless of what I just said about its importance to the country. Being thoughtful about trade deals, I’m the opposite of Chris Deluzio on this regarding that trade completely benefits my district. Chris’s was devastated by that.
So that calls for thoughtfulness there, and a recognition that politically speaking, this isn’t hard, right? I mean all over the world parties succeed when they, and if I may just sort of cartoon this a little bit, but lean left economically and are centrist/slightly right-leaning culturally and socially, right? This is how Boris Johnson with the conservative party win seats in Birmingham and Manchester, and that’s the ticket. And so politically speaking, we have got, I think to be much more thoughtful about the many, many people left line. And by the way, not only thoughtful but honest, I lost manufacturing in my own district, and there’s a lot of reasons for that. But there you look at what manufacturing means in the 21st century, it does not mean what it meant in 1930 when there would be 700 people on a factory floor, unionized, great benefits, et cetera.
You can walk through a modern manufacturing facility anywhere, frankly. But the one that really blew me away 10 years ago when I saw it was the BMW factory in Munich, right? Two floors, acres and acres and acres. Heavily unionized economy, boards of directors are required to include labor representation. I probably looked across that two-acre manufacturing floor actually much larger than that, and two or three people servicing the machines. So I think you can say manufacturing and we should, and we should push that, but we should also not be un-cognizant of the fact that that’s not enough because we’re never putting 800 people on a factory floor again. So then the question is, but what else?
Harold Meyerson:
Well, I think in many ways what else, former people who used to be on factory floors have found jobs in lower paying service sector employment. So that doesn’t eliminate the problem, it just intensifies it.
Jim Himes:
No, it makes it worse. Because the guy who used to make, in the 1950s, it would’ve been a guy, who made a good union wage with benefits, who’s now doing $9 an hour at the Walgreens. That is an enraged individual.
Harold Meyerson:
Speaking of enraged individuals Delia… Heavily working class, I would suspect, and also heavily Latino. And of course that was one of the sectors of the electorate that swung in ways that surprised, probably shouldn’t have, but surprised and dismayed a lot of Democrats. So what do you think are the kinds of things that you bring to those constituents to win them back to the democratic column? And how do you talk to them about their living in an economy such as Jim Himes just described?
Delia Ramirez:
Oh, I’m enraged. So we’ll start with that. But here’s what I’d say to you. I have a Latino majority district now, a Latino influence has now become a majority, but the reality is that my district is northwest out of the city of Chicago, and I also have the northwestern suburbs. The suburbs I have are among the wealthiest suburbs in the Chicago area. And when I won in a four-way race, I actually won by even higher margins in the suburban part, parts that have never had a Democrat up until eight years ago represent them. And so it’s an interesting diverse district. And if you ever look at the map, you also realize geographically it’s also very beautifully and ugly-looking map of what we do in Illinois with these districts. But what I would say to you is what I’ve said to people in the suburbs and what I’ve said to people in the city side of my district is I’m not going to spend 20 minutes here trying to convince you that Democrats are great and perfect and bash Republicans.
I’m going to have an honest conversation about how your life right now sucks. And it’s both Republicans and Democrats’ fault. And I think that it is really important for us to actually spend some time stepping back and realizing that if I’m knocking on doors and telling you we passed the bill six months ago that made your life great, aren’t you happy? We are actually not relevant and we’re not relatable to the reality that that person that just opened the door is about to tell me that they don’t think they’re going to be able to pay their mortgage or ever purchase a home. And so I think we need to spend some time actually listening to people, and recognizing, I think to what Jim said, that people are really pissed. They’re really mad that they’re working two full-time jobs in some cases and can’t buy a home.
They’re pissed that they were able to humbly buy a home, but their kids who are now 33 years old are saying, “Mom, I think I’m going to be living with you for a long time. Because I don’t think I’ll ever be able to purchase a home.” Melendez will tell you that over 28% of them believe that they’ll never buy a home themselves, but somehow their parents who made a third of their income did. And so I think that part of what needs to happen is have a real conversation about how government has failed people, and that we should be doing a better job, make less excuses in defending a party because the reality is that what people want to see and what you saw when people went to vote or not vote, is that they’re asking who the hell is going to roll up their sleeves and fight for me and with me?
And it’s really hard for them to feel like we’re fighting for them if we only come around and we’re knocking on doors and asking them for a vote. So they’re also asking how often are you showing up? Where are you showing up? And then actually tell me the plan and what you’re willing to do to make sure that things are changing for me. Because the other thing that I keep hearing from people, Latinos, but I also hear this from my constituents across, I’ll promise that if you vote for me this time, immigration reform, affordable housing, a lower cost to healthcare, all of these things are going to happen. But then we elect you and you have a trifecta maybe for a short period of time, but you still don’t deliver. And so part of it, to be frank with you, is gaining people’s trust and gaining people’s trust is willing to understand where they’re coming from and acknowledging their pain.
Harold Meyerson:
Well, in addition to acknowledging their pain and hearing them out and understanding their pain and understanding the sources of their pain, what then do you say you think you’re able to do? And what do you think the Democrats should be emphasizing that might finally strike those people you’re talking to as both credible and actually making their lives at least a little easier? Does that have to do with constructing more housing? Does that has to do with many of the things that were in the build back better package, which you were not enacted, affordable child care? What are the kinds of things you actually say to these people that are some of the reasons why your actions [inaudible 00:23:36].
Delia Ramirez:
Yeah. So I would say, for example, when I ran, I said to them, I told you that I go to the state legislature, I work on three issues, healthcare, education and housing because I ran a homeless shelter. And so I know what it’s like to have a veteran who’s living in the streets and needs permanent legal housing and a family who have been survivors of domestic violence. So I went to the state legislature in four years. I established a housing committee. I negotiated the largest housing bill in the midst of the pandemic that kept people in their homes. I told you that education that I believe that we should have an elected representative, our school board in Chicago. And I led the bill that passed it. And then finally I said, I’m going to work on healthcare. And I led the bill that expand the healthcare coverage regardless of people’s citizenship status.
So people, her, she said she would go do this and she worked on it and got it done. But here’s why it’s important to me. My parents are going on social security. My parents work 40 years in this country and they have no pension to live for, right? So when I’m talking to people and I’m talking about, I’m going to go fight for your social security, I’m going to fight for your social security and that social security without me sleeping on my lap, I’m going to go fight for healthcare because I actually know what it’s like to have to choose between paying your mortgage or going to the emergency room. And I think that people have to understand that you are not just giving them lip service because they’re tired of campaign promises, but that you understand it. I think for those of us that relate to it, because we’ve come from that experience, why it’s personal to us, but then the things we’re going to do to actually get it done, they’re tired of us caught talking about fellow buster.
They think it’s an excuse that we use fellow buster not to pass immigration reform. They think it’s an excuse because they see now that Trump is using every EO possible, why didn’t the previous administration use EOs and then deal with it? They’re asking if you care deeply about affordable housing, why is it that you’re okay with taking all of this money from the same corporations that are controlling the monopoly of the rent crisis? And so there’s some serious conversations that people want to have. And so for people like me, I’ll say I don’t take corporate contributions and I think we should address the issues of money and politics and it should be an issue that Democrats should take really seriously because the money in politics keeps you away from the actual work that needs to be done to reduce the cost prices.
Harold Meyerson:
Ro, do you think that Democrats have been deficient in dealing with the issue of money in politics and specifically taking corporate contributions?
Ro Khanna:
Yes. I mean, Barack Obama ran on no-packs, no lobbyists, and the DNC not taking corporate background. And he won. He won twice. And then we decided to get rid of that policy. Why would we want to move backwards for what Obama clearly showed Obama ran with a singular message. We don’t want to move back to the nominees know since Pericles, every campaign is pretty simple. It used to be great, screwed it up, we’re going to be things better. That’s the basic message. That’s how Clinton ran it, how Obama ran. Suddenly we’ve started running these institutional candidates. I mean, I don’t understand it. We do well when we run candidates of change, we do well when we criticize the status quo and we need to move forward, not backward. Biden was the first, and I have a lot of respect for, it was the first sort of throwback of institutionalism. How can it, and I won’t take many shots at the Senate minority leader, but what do you say to someone who’s been elected since 1974? That person’s going to bring change to this country?
It’s inconceivable. They laugh at us. We need new leaders, we need a new generation. We need a generation willing to throw holes and strikes and say, “We’re a party that made mistakes, and we’re our party still isn’t strong enough.” And I think Sanders on money in politics has been morally consistent and clear.
Harold Meyerson:
Well, you were a candidate who ran against for a House, he’s an incumbent Democrat even before AOC did that. Would you encourage this kind of in part generational but also political upsurge even?
Ro Khanna:
I encourage everyone to run. I think that there should be, we’re talking about primaries.
Harold Meyerson:
Yes. I joked around, there’s some article I said I tried it three times at work lunch.
Ro Khanna:
It’s hard to do, but how can you hold these seats to say no for the unity of the party? I don’t think that young people should run. And if you’re in a blue district, don’t run. It’s hypocrisy. You seats aren’t entitlements. We don’t have an aristocracy run, run. If you want to run against me, run, you want to run against Nancy, run. You want to run against, this is a democracy, and if you’re not, you’re good enough, you’ll win. And if you’re not, you’ll lose. But this idea of protecting incumbents for incumbent’s sake, this is the stuff that allows for Donald Trump to say they’re all corrupt. They’re all part of the same system.
Harold Meyerson:
Jim, sometimes the Democrats are the party of institutional defense. And right now there is an attack on government that is exceeding any of the people my age who were shouting smash the state back in 1969, the state’s getting smashed. And there’s clearly this sentiment out there that the state, the political establishment, and it’s interweaving with the corporate and financial establishment hasn’t really done anywhere near enough. So how do you find the sweet spot between acknowledging that we don’t need to defend everything that’s under attack, but we need to defend certainly everything crucial under attack?
Jim Himes:
Yeah, that’s a super interesting question. I mean, first of all, politically, as Delia pointed out, politically, particularly in a moment of anxiety and right now we’ve got economic anxiety, political anxiety, it’s politically catastrophic to defend the status quo, which we’re doing. What do you think America sees when they see Chuck Schumer shouting in front of a federal agency that they’ve never heard of that is a perfect visual of defending an intolerable status quo. So that’s the political perception of it, bad idea. Secondly, I could make a case, let’s get out of the political realm. Sometimes I do this in a union hall where somebody looks at says the Democratic Party is the party of elites. So let me tell you about my sixteen-year career here in the 16 years I was here, first of all, I almost lost the seat. I voted for the Affordable Care Act, which covers 25 million Americans now.
And by the way, if you have pre-existing condition, you can now get an health insurance. We created the CFPB, got the banks under control, we passed the Butch Lewis Pension Reform Act for the first time in American history, controlled the prices, the ten-child drugs, we expanded the child tech. I could go on 20 minutes doing this. So tell me again that we’re the part of the elites on the other side. The one thing they’ve done in that 16 years was to cut access to the top 1% of this population. So that points to the need to dig deeper and say, we can and we will, and we have made your life better. And please don’t ask me to accept the idea that after a number of us lost our seats to pass the Affordable Care Act that we can’t do it. Now, to get away with that, you need to paint a vision of what you plan to do, which we didn’t do.
One of the questions I know we were going to talk about was how should the Democrats message economically? I just think we should message economically. We haven’t tried it in a very long time. We ran the last presidential election cartoon in here, but we ran the last presidential election saying we’re going to defend democracy and women’s right to choose. Two wonderful, spectacular things that most Americans agree with. We didn’t really talk about the economy, and when we did, it was, “Well, this inflation is transitory.” I mean, just catastrophically doing it. So yeah. And by the way, last point, last point. I saw a poll, we did a democratic Policy Retreat. And I’m never going to forget this poll. What does America think of the Democrats? Yeah, they sort of trust us on healthcare, but it’s all bad news, but they sort of trust us on healthcare 55-45. They kind of trust us on taking care of retirement and everything.
And then it’s just a catastrophe, the very bottom thing that nobody trusts the party that says government can make your life better. That’s our party. We can make your, the other party says, government needs to get out of your hair. Our whole premise is that we can make your life better. And the worst polling rating, 25-75 Democrats get things done. And so boy, that shows you the problem. And there is some truth to that, apart from the symbolic aspects of standing in front of a big federal building. It takes me seven years to get a terrible little bridge built in Churchill County, right? I was celebrating the IRA. We’ve invested millions and millions and millions of dollars in electric charging in the state of Connecticut. IRA was passed four years ago. Zero charging stations built. So symbolically, it’s a terrible thing. In reality, if you can change things but you don’t, which is where we are right now, you’re in a lot of trouble.
What have been the specific hindrances to building charging stations? Well, this opens up this sort of fascinating current that is now sort of electrifying the left. It’s as refined as Derrick Hoffman as people like Jim Hines and Ro Khanna haven’t been following. My colleague from Illinois talking about abundance and realizing that we will never win in a scarcity economy, and I don’t need to tell anybody what abundance is about. But until we get into business of figuring out how in a progressive and responsible way to build a lot more energy, to build a lot more infrastructure, to deliver on the notion that we as Democrats can actually make your lives better, rather than going to a bunch of celebrations of grants that are being signed two years from now, we’re going to lose. So this whole abundance thing I think points us, and it’s controversial, right? There’s lots of controversy inside it, but the premise is so powerful, which is, if you’re going to be the party that says government can do great things for you, be that party.
Harold Meyerson:
Yeah. I wrote a piece back in 2010 prospect about the hindrances to the $787 billion stimulus that Biden had put forth to deal with the financial collapse and the ensuing recession of 2008 when it came to building things. And I quoted a previous speaker today, but not by name. His name is Jared Bernstein, working inside that administration saying there are a lot of think tanks around D.C. Well, we don’t have any think tanks that specialize in how actually things can be shovel-ready. Nothing was shovel-ready. There was just a host of obstacles. I was pointing out that Harry Hopkins had put 4% of the American population on federal jobs in 60 days in 1933. And it was unimaginable back in 2009. Not to mention 2025 was obvious. What about that? You talked about housing in your district area and some of your district deals with the city of Chicago, some of it is suburbs. I wouldn’t imagine that there’s a whole lot of new stuff going up in your district. Is there? What’s the story with actually being able to build things in and around that part of Chicago?
Ro Khanna:
Well, I represent communities that have been significantly gentrified over the last 15 to 20 years. These are communities that were primarily Latino 20 years ago and are probably at about 30% Latino. And there’s a lot of new people who moved in from different parts of the Midwest and the country. And so the conversation is constantly, how do we prevent displacement? But interestingly enough, last election for the very first time I actually heard presidential candidates talking about housing, an issue that I had been talking about for 20 years. How are we going to make housing more affordable? How are we going to stabilize rents so that people don’t feel like they’re paying three quarters of their income towards rent? And for those that want to purchase a home, that may not just be a dream of some day. And so rethinking about what that looks like in innovation,
I think has been a really critical piece for us in the city of Chicago where there’s density and there’s not a lot of empty lots left, particularly in my part of the district is asking as people are moving, how do you start looking at innovation like a land trust to be able to preserve properties that we could maintain to be affordable? How do you incentivize landlords who want to provide below market rate rent instead of these big mega developers and landlords who want to just keep raising the rent? We’re talking about communities that during the 2008 recession, buildings that sold for 80,000 are now 1.2 million. Just think about the shift in about 12, 13 years for people. A block like mine that five years ago a house was going for 250, now it’s going for 880. So there’s just a big shift.
And this is actually what I think that as we’re having the conversation here, we need to be asking ourselves, how are we able to prove that we’re going to deliver, so that people can believe that a roof over their head is a priority for us, and that we’re going to be protecting things like HUD. This resolution that you hear us so frustrated about, we know that when thinking about HUD for example, who’s the biggest developer and stabilizer on housing stock, we’re hearing that under this administration, they want to reduce the agency by less than 50% by the end of the fiscal year.
There is no world you’re creating more affordable housing, stabilizing, helping first-time home buyers get housing, which those programs, by the way, to Jim’s point, Democrats really fought for, right? So this is actually a place where we have to be asking ourselves in this precise moment, what are the ways that we show the American people that we’re fighting to protect what we’ve been able to do, while building so that when we are in the majority again, we’re able to do things that are going to stabilize the markets and stabilize housing. You can’t talk about dealing with inflation without talking about housing. We kept saying in the campaign, “But inflation’s down.” And people would say, “Yeah, but it’s not.” Because the cost of food is up and housing was still up. So I really think that we have to make housing a top priority conversation and connect it to infrastructure, to education, to healthcare and environment in order to push the vote. The other thing I want to say is immigration.
Harold Meyerson:
I was about to ask you about that.
Ro Khanna:
Democrats, I love us. We have no idea how to talk about immigration. We’re terrible at it. We actually just given to Republicans. Oh, you think immigrants are terrible? I mean not all immigrants, I don’t know. Or maybe we need to just, and then the border conversation, that’s another conversation. But here’s the thing. In this moment, you are hearing people say, my colleagues at Homeland said we don’t have a problem with immigrants. We just want the legal ones. The few legal ways we have, we just slashed them. Why not have a real conversation about creative legal pathways? You say you don’t want to see people use a person that’s going to cross on a trafficker and that they pay $20,000 to do that.
Why not instead of talking about a gold card for $5 million, which is what Trump was saying at the State of the Union, what if there was an opportunity for people to pay a fee to come with a work permit for two to five years, legally, work in work these positions where we have job opportunities, manufacturing, agriculture, and I will tell you because half my family is still undocumented, that they would prefer to pay the United States 15,000 fee figuring out how to pay for that because they do that already, risking their lives or at the border and come for two to five years and then return home to build the home or the stability they need.
So what I’m saying to you is, we should be asking ourselves, how is immigration good for the economy, and how do we use immigration to help us stabilize the economy? Because $100 billion a year, that is how much undocumented immigrants paid right now to federal taxes, that’s our work permits. So 35% goes to social security, 35 to Medicare, and another 35% goes to local municipalities. It is into our financial interest to do some kind of stability for people that have been here for a long time, establishing work permits for them. The end of this administration or our administration in the future would generate billions of dollars of revenue that would help stabilize an economy that we all want live in. And I have plan for that. I’m happy to talk to you about that as well.
Harold Meyerson:
Actually. I think the more you get that out there and have it be something that the party as a whole embraces sooner, the better. Let’s take some questions now. So let’s see some hands and let’s see some microphones. There was, yes, one over there.
Speaker 8:
Hi all. Thank you so much for your time. All of today, which not a problem. We’ve talked so much about with their tariffs with manufacturing in the US, where are these jobs going to come? What is the spectrum of automation going to do? But I’m not going to pretend like I have a question while I have three members of Congress in front of me. I would like to remind you that there is a real barrier to abundance and thriving in the US that comes from the absolute failure of public policy to recognize that some people who have jobs also have children.
And this is a failure that you can correct. You can turn this tide. It is completely under your control to have paid sick days, paid family leave, and universal childcare. And that doesn’t depend on what Germany does or what China does or what happens the next midterms. You can do that right now, and that would help a lot of workers, probably a lot more workers that would benefit from a sparsely populated manufacturing plant. So the next time we could get a trillion dollars, I would just really ask you to think about the problems that you can solve that would matter for parents.
Harold Meyerson:
Well, some of that was in the Build Back Better bill, which did not get enacted. Any thoughts about Democrats running on some of those particulars again? And let me add one thing to that. Obviously Democrats in 2026 are also going to be running against some of the unpopular cuts and other things that Trump will have made. What about in terms of what the democratic offense is, what we are offering? Would that be some of the things we just heard about? And what else? Ro, you want to…
Ro Khanna:
I think it should be a very high priority. I have a bill of childcare at $10 a day, which would be $300 a month, paying childcare workers $20 an hour. I make two points. First, there was a focus group in Western Pennsylvania during the election of Trump and Kamala, and they talked to a 35-year-old steelworker about what his top concern was. And I was shocked. He said, “Childcare costs 15 to $17,000 per family would make the biggest difference.” So it’s not just a gendered issue, it’s an issue that’s affecting many working in middle class families. Second, we had universal childcare in this country. It was during World War II. We had 3,000 war nurseries across America. And the reason we had it was simple because as you alluded to, all of the men were out in the factories. And back then it was a gender time.
And they suddenly said, “Well, who’s going to take care of the kids?” I mean, the women were in the factories Rosie the Riveter, the men were fighting the war. And they said, “Who is going to take care of the kids?” And so suddenly we came up with the money to have universal child care. And then it ended, not because of the cost, it ended because they could read the congressional record. It ended because men thought that women should go back to the kitchen. And California was the last state that pushed back and said, “No, we’re going to keep the war nurseries.” But then we lost the debate in the late-1940s. So we have a model of having universal child care where it really mattered, and we should be willing to run on that. Now, I think Elizabeth Warren has been the strongest on it, but my view on these things is 6%, 8% Build Back Better.
I think just say child care, $10 a day, then we can figure out the details. Democrats need to also realize how to get complex policy into a single sound bite. When I went to Western Pennsylvania, one of the Trump voters said, “Well, I thought really Trump was going to make sure that I don’t get taxed on overtime and taxed on tips.” And I was like, “Wow, that really broke through.” We need to be able to have a one-line cutting aspirational sense of what we want to do, and then we can have all the plans.
Harold Meyerson:
We’re running a little late. So let me pick one other question here somewhere. Okay, got one back there.
Speaker 9:
I actually have a question. I do want to say thanks to this panel. People who look down on Congress, I’ve heard this panel, all of you really impressive in every way. So my question is, there’s been some talk about the abundance of the agenda that Democrats need to adopt, and I’d just like to ask your opinions on how that will go within the party. And secondly, there does seem to be some convergence between Republicans, some Republicans and Democrats on these issues. Are there any prospects for actually getting something done?
Harold Meyerson:
Let me put a little grace note on the abundance question. It seems to me that a lot of the elements of the so-called abundance agenda are things that would be dealt with not at the federal level, but at the state and local level where reference to the non-existent charging stations suggest that Jim. Where do you think that goes? Does that become an element of democratic federal policy or what?
Jim Himes:
Yeah, again, it is hard to distill. I’m only halfway through the book. It’s hard to distill down the exact essence of abundance. But I think the idea is, the core idea is that for the party that says that government can do things, we have so surrounded those things with regulation, with civil rights of action at the local, state and federal level, right? Yes, it’s absolutely local zoning in San Francisco. It’s also NIFA at the federal level. So when it comes to housing, the changes that need to occur aren’t just about a bunch of Democrats passing laws, right? If you read the book, you discover that this massive creation of, I guess what we call generational wealth now, that assets in the hands of American families happened precisely because housing became scarce, right? Because in the post-war generation, a couple bought a house in 1948 for $20,000.
I think you had the perfect story and it went out by three orders of magnitude. That’s immense wealth. And so massive quantities of middle class or upper middle class wealth are tied up in the concept of scarcity. And I just tell that story because it’s not just about passing laws, but yes, to bring this answer to a close, housing at the end of the day is going to need to be addressed at the local level fundamentally, hopefully, with federal incentives and federal pushes, the way we got states to go to a 55 mile per hour speed limit.
In another realm and energy, this is really interesting inside our party, because you have two very valuable opposing values, environmental and local control, opposing the absolute need for tripling the size of the electrical grid in the next 15 years, or we don’t address climate change. So you’re going to see inside the party the tension between those two goals. And I hope, and this is easy to say, hard to do, but I hope the answer is that we look at environmental regulations that were created and processes that were created in the 1960s and 70s and say, “Hey, some combination of what we’ve learned and IT and data science can have a much more streamlined approval process.”
Harold Meyerson:
Delia, I know you have to go. Do you have any last-minute words to leave us with?
Delia Ramirez:
Yeah, I would just say, I think I want to just add on to what Jim just said. I do think it’s important right now. People are asking me what do I do? How do I get involved? You are my congressperson. And so I know you’re going to be okay on these things. You’re going to fight back the way that you can at the federal level. But I do think particularly for states that have super majority Democrats, we have to have some serious conversations of how these general summits are not walking back some of those policies because of what’s happening at the federal level. And I think housing is a perfect example. I think healthcare is too, frankly I know it’s not the most popular thing to talk about, but one of the things I’ve said to the state of Illinois folks is, you do need to start talking about progressive revenue. Because at some point, when you have a federal government talking about defunding you, you’re going to have to figure out how to fill those gaps and how you talk to constituents about progressive revenue in a time where they’re hurting so much.
So I just wanted to add that as a wrap up for me, but I got to get to the airport. Thank you much for having me.
Harold Meyerson:
Thank you so much. And we learned from the last panel that tariffs will not be counted upon as a source of progressive revenue. So we agree with that. Ro, you come from a place where people have noted a whole slew both of state and local regulations and people who do not want to change their zoning from single-family homes as an obstacle to the nation’s most prominent. And this is probably one of the things that prompted Ezra to write that book, most prominent housing shortage. How much of a role is there for the federal government? Is there anything about environmental impact reports, about putting a time limit on them? What do you think?
Ro Khanna:
Ezra is absolutely right, that California botched housing policy, and that we have too many restrictive zoning laws in my district and in California. But one statistic I often cite, which often surprises folks, if you look at my district, which is the richest district or median income in the country, and Silicon Valley, people would say, “Well, their houses are so expensive.” So how much of the district you think is expected, where does the district rank in terms of congressional districts, in terms of people who are rent burdened? And rent burdened is someone who is paying more than 30% of their income in rent. And it turns out that our district is 419 as one of the least ranked in our district. So people are paying more than 30% on rent, even though we have terrible housing policy. And I said, well, “What does this mean? Why is that?” Because we have high incomes.
So yes, we need to have better housing and lower child care costs and lower healthcare costs, but the single biggest thing we need in America is to raise incomes. We need to create more high paying good jobs. It is the single biggest thing that we need to do in this country, and to do it in more places than Silicon Valley. And to Ezra’s, I think book, which I like and highly recommend, I think speaks to a broader nostalgia that we’re not building things, we’re not making things we’re not building wealth. But his solution is one quiver in an arrow. Yes, we need better permitting and better execution. And yes, that Biden should have had people maybe having execution on these things. But if you talk to Intel CEO, Pat Gelsinger, and you said, “Pat, why is it that this Intel thing isn’t working in terms of Columbus, Ohio and building factories? And why were you left out?”
And I asked him this, “How much of it is permitting?” And I’m not saying that that’s not an issue, but he said that that would be in the bottom five. One, it was the lack of demand. We didn’t have companies willing to buy those chips. Second, it’s the difficulty of financing through Wall Street. Third, it was the difficulty of getting a workforce. Fourth, it was the lack of human capital with immigration. So I just think that we have to operate on this, not in a Reagan paradigm, that let’s just fix government, though it’s important, but in an FDR paradigm of what’s actually going to rebuild this country’s economic prosperity?
Harold Meyerson:
Okay, and with that FDR paradigm, we’re going to conclude this session. I want to thank the congressman. I want the congresswoman who’s rushing to catch a plane, and there’s a brief break before our 4:00 P.M. session begins.
Goldy:
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. For more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter The Pitch over on Substack. And for links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, visit our website, PitchforkEconomics.com. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.