This week, Natalie Foster, co-founder of the Economic Security Project, joins Nick and Goldy to discuss her book The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy. Foster argues that as the world’s wealthiest nation, the U.S. can ensure a basic economic floor for all by guaranteeing essentials like housing, healthcare, higher education, family care, good jobs, and income, regardless of race, religion, or location. Foster explains how giving people money might just be the key to growing the economy for everyone. Their wide-ranging conversation covers topics including the wealth gap, housing affordability, baby bonds, and the political dynamics surrounding guarantee programs.
Natalie Foster is the president and co-founder of the Economic Security Project and author of the book The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy. Natalie previously founded the sharing economy community Peers, and co-founded Rebuild the Dream, and served as Digital Director for President Obama’s Organizing for America.
Twitter: @nataliefoster
Further reading:
The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy
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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.
Speaker 2:
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.
Speaker 2:
Because Wall Street didn’t build this country, 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 6:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:
We’ve been working together for about a decade, Nick, and a lot of things have changed over the previous 10 years in terms of just the openness to ideas that I don’t know would’ve been considered fringe back then that now are pretty mainstream or at least nobody thinks it’s radical to talk about. We started with the $15 minimum wage, we still don’t have it federally, but obviously in states and cities around the country, these higher minimum wages have passed and have been really successful. We saw what happened over the pandemic when we had the expanded child tax credit and now people are running on expanding the child tax credit permanently. That’s something you wouldn’t have seen a decade ago and maybe a sore subject for you because I know you’re a bit of a skeptic on this, there’s been a lot more conversation over the years about a guaranteed basic income.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, the thing about guaranteed income is that it’s very expensive and you have to tax a lot to do it. But before I unleash my inner skeptic, I think we should talk to Natalie about what she thinks because she knows far more about it than us, me in particular.
Speaker 3:
And by Natalie you mean Natalie Foster.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
Speaker 3:
Our guest today, the co-founder of the Economic Security Project and author of the book, The Guarantee: How a Bold New Social Contract Can Transform America. And I want to be clear, I brought up basic income, but all of those other things I was talking about including the minimum wage, this falls under her frame of a guarantee, which imagines a larger role for government in providing economic security in the United States and a larger expectation of what government can do for us. And I think that’s what I found fascinating about the book is not as much that any of these ideas are new, but they suggest a new way of thinking about how we manage the economy for everybody.
Natalie Foster:
My name is Natalie Foster. I am president and co-founder of Economic Security Project and a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative. And I’ve written a book called The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy.
Speaker 3:
I saw the book, I saw the book title, and my initial thought was, oh no, an entire book on guaranteed basic income. And then I read the book and it’s not. I mean it’s in there. So if you could just start off by giving us an overview of the main thesis of your book.
Natalie Foster:
I am arguing that in the richest nation on earth, in the richest moment in history, that we can guarantee an economic floor for everyone regardless of race, religion, or zip code. And I’m talking things like the guarantee of housing, of healthcare, of higher education. The guarantee of family care, so we can care for the young ones, the elders, and those with disabilities in our communities without going bankrupt. The guarantee of good work, the guarantee of income per your note, and also the guarantee of inheritance known as a baby bond. And these are seven that I am tracking to show how far the idea of a guaranteed floor has come, but they really serve as a compass arguing broadly that our economy should be about ensuring the floor so that we can usher in an era of human flourishing.
Nick Hanauer:
So Natalie, can you give a little bit more dimension to what you mean by a floor?
Natalie Foster:
The idea is that right now you could fall as far as you can go, and we see people every day in the cities we live in. I live in Oakland, Europe, and Seattle. Over the course of my children’s lifetime, we have seen the number of unhoused neighbors skyrocket because there’s no floor in America. And so what I’m arguing is there should be. That there should be a guarantee of the basic things that allow people to thrive and to really live lives of agency and the freedom and dignity that people deserve.
So when it comes to the guarantee of income, for example, which is what I’ve actually spent my last decade working on, this is the idea that every month there’s a check that comes in the door that people can count on no matter what. If they get a promotion at work, the check still comes. If they lose their job, the check still comes that that is a floor through which no one can fall. And it’s the same idea with housing and healthcare and so forth, but really that we would orient our economy toward human flourishing and not simply just making a buck.
Nick Hanauer:
But that’s not a floor, that’s an idea. Is it $10 a month? Is that the floor?
Natalie Foster:
Well, with guaranteed income, the actual amount could be, it’s a policy decision that could be whatever it needs to be. In the case of Stockton, which was the first city led demonstration of a guaranteed income, that was $500 a month for 125 families with no strings attached, and that was the demonstration of what policy would look like if we were to scale it to the national level. Other demonstrations have different amounts, and I would argue it is a floor because it’s coming no matter what, and it means that you can count on it, and that is a place you can start to stand on. And I think cash is just the beginning, not the end. I know so much of the work that this podcast has discussed and Civic Ventures has done, has been around a lot of the supply side arguments as well and making sure that we can build housing in America, that we have healthcare that works for folks.
And that is I think a really important part of the floor that should exist that doesn’t yet and is, I would argue more than an idea. And the book is arguing that too, that in fact there are models for how we would do these guarantees all across the country. In Washington state, you all have an excellent model of what a long-term care guarantee could look like with the very beginning of the new social insurance program for long-term care in the state. And I know it’s threatened on the ballot this November, but that’s just one example of the types of models that exist.
And during the pandemic when there was a political opening, we saw a lot of these things scale to the national level. So these guaranteed income demonstrations became the expanded child tax credit, which meant every parent in America received a check each month with no strings attached. And there are more examples of that from vaccines that were put in people’s arms for free and tests that were mailed out to housing that was built and entire hotels that were purchased and moved the unhoused in that we saw the beginnings of a floor in the last four years.
Speaker 3:
I’ll tell you what I found interesting about the book Natalie. I’m a policy wonk, obviously we’re policy wonks here. I was familiar with absolutely every single policy in the book. None of it was new or radical to me. I was aware of a lot of how far some of these policies have gone in the public debate and which ones have been tried. What was interesting to me was the guarantee as a framing device, as a new way of thinking about the social safety net, and in a way that it’s… I’m of the generation where the social safety net means welfare means you think about that and you think of food stamps and welfare payments and Medicaid and stuff like that, but this is a much broader way of thinking about the role of government and what we should expect from government. And I’m wondering how you came upon that word and how effective you think it’s been in getting these ideas across.
Natalie Foster:
That’s a great question. Over the course of the last decade working on policies like the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit and putting money into people’s pockets, I realized that the unifying thing is that it’s guaranteed. That guaranteed is the word within the broader suite of ways to discuss cash like a UBI or guaranteed income that was actually the radical idea. And so that became how we talked about income, and it would be in a conversation with Derek Hamilton who had written a really important update of FDR’s economic rights work, economic rights for a multiracial 21st century, where it would all click into place that it’s all needed and it’s an orientation, it’s a compass. It’s a way of understanding what government can and should be doing and what the economy should be aimed at for all of us.
Speaker 3:
Right. It struck me very similar to the way Ganesh Sitaraman’s book The Public Option hit me in that it was, oh yeah, we already do a lot of this stuff. They are public options. When we use that term, we’re not just talking about health insurance, we’re talking about all these other aspects where we have or should have them. You consider public options as a subset of the guarantee?
Natalie Foster:
I do. I consider public options as one of the ways we might get to the guarantees. So I feel in great company with the public option in Ganesh’s work, he’s been a real inspiration. Let me give a few examples. On the housing front, we are seeing government playing a role using their financing authority to build more units that are kept off the speculative market and serve as a housing guarantee. This is really happening in Montgomery County, Maryland as a first example where the housing is being built right on the transit line by the housing authority, and it’s for middle income Marylanders. Firefighters teachers, as well as low income Marylanders. And if they get a promotion at work, they aren’t kicked out. That is the case with public housing today. And instead rent is held steady and people can start to build lives on top of that stability. And that is a public option for housing. And I am excited to see more and more housing authorities start to replicate that along with other reforms needed to fix the broken housing market.
Nick Hanauer:
How is this different from traditional safety net programs? Do you find that there’s a way to distinguish these things?
Natalie Foster:
Some of these, two answers to that, yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
I mean social security is kind of a, you can call it social security guarantee, right?
Natalie Foster:
Yeah, yeah. I feel like guarantees are actually all around us, and you would know better than most guarantees exist so solidly for businesses. The guarantee of patents and the court system and shareholder liability. There’s guarantees that business in America is built on top of and are so important to how capitalism functions. And so I’m arguing we should extend the guarantees to all of us, the people that make the economy work day in and day out.
Speaker 3:
So one of the guarantees in the book that struck me the most, and it was again more in the framing than anything else because we’re familiar with baby bonds, we’ve talked with Cory Booker about that on the podcast, is the idea of a guaranteed inheritance and how it’s wealth, not income that drives outcomes in America. If you could go into that in a little detail.
Natalie Foster:
I think there’s three legs to the stool of personal finances, one being wages. So Seattle changed the world when the fight for 15 was really started in SeaTac at the Seattle Airport. The second I’d argue is income and guaranteed income and tax credits and other sorts of passive income are really important to people’s financial lives. And that’s the work we at Economic Security Project have started to reinvigorate over the last decade. But the third and probably most important is wealth, that when we talk about the racial wealth gap, we’re not talking about paychecks, though there are significantly important gaps within paychecks. We’re talking about wealth like what people own minus what they owe. And the wealth gap in America is dramatic. White families have 10 times more wealth than Black families in this country. And income and wages don’t get at the heart of that deep imbalance in this country, but something like a baby bond does.
And that’s an idea that as you pointed out, Cory Booker ran for president on in 2020 and I think really burst that idea onto the scene. He was riffing on a white paper written by Sandy Darity and Derek Hamilton just years before. And shortly after Cory Booker ran for president on it, the state of Connecticut passed baby bonds. Washington D.C has followed suit. The state of California has followed suit, and there’s kind of a race for the next state. Will it be Washington? Will it be Vermont? There’s a number of state treasurers who are really interested in this idea. And simply put, it’s that every child has a trust held in their name at birth that when they turn 18, there is a nest egg for them to take a risk, to function like risk capital and start a business or to go get a degree or to put a down payment on their first home.
The types of things that kids from, well-off families are able to do, that should be more equitably distributed and can be through a mechanism like baby bonds. So I was amazed to see how much progress that idea had made from white papers to actual policy in just a few short years and the promise it holds to start to narrow the racial wealth gap and more broadly, the wealth gap in America.
Nick Hanauer:
Natalie, what do you think are the other really big ideas, really important ideas?
Natalie Foster:
Well, we’ve talked about the ways we could guarantee care in America, and I think that is one of the ideas that we’ve seen coalesce so strongly over the last few years to understand care as infrastructure in America, not simply a personal problem to solve on your own, but instead a structural problem that can be solved structurally and care being the type of work that enables other work to happen. And frankly work that is future-proof against AI because people will always want caregivers for their loved ones. And so guaranteeing care, I think is one of the big ideas that we’re seeing playing out in this election and in past elections and that we see models of across the country. I think that’s one of the big ideas.
And I think another of the big ideas is around abolishing student debt and the idea of a guarantee of higher education. That should be something that is a right to every young person in this country. And that government has a role in playing that. Government has a role in ensuring that. And I believe that understanding the billions of dollars of student debt can be erased overnight with the stroke of a pen leaving millions of people out there with more room to breathe each month without ball and chain that people would wake up in the middle of the night worried about how am I going to pay back this massive debt that keeps growing. With that just gone, that that has changed people’s lives and has gotten us a step closer toward understanding this should be a guarantee in America.
Nick Hanauer:
Obviously COVID brought a bunch of really unprecedented economic challenges, and we saw our government respond aggressively in some cases with stimulus checks and expanded unemployment benefits and so on and so forth. Do you think that that moment played a role in shaping public perception of how these things can work?
Natalie Foster:
Absolutely. There’s an old saying that says progress is made when chance meets the prepared mind. And I think that’s what happened. There was the prepared mind that had believed another economy was possible, that this evolution of capitalism was possible and we’re starting to lay the seeds and the models. And when the pandemic hit, there was a political opening unlike any other in my lifetime, and we saw policies that moved the guarantee framework forward in a very significant way pass at the federal level. In the midst of one of the greatest health and economic crises of my lifetime, we actually saw poverty rates be the lowest they’ve ever been since we started recording poverty in American history. And that is due to what you said, the stimulus checks, the child tax credit, unemployment insurance. We invested in families.
We saw the lowest rates of uninsured Americans at any point in history because the Affordable Care Act, which was passed 14 years prior, expanded, caught people as millions of people lost their jobs. It caught people and rolled them onto Medicaid and meant we saw the lowest number of uninsured Americans in history. It would’ve been the complete opposite if those policies hadn’t been in place and if we hadn’t had the blueprint that policymakers could reach for in that time of crisis to move forward. It’s actually a Milton Friedman quote, right?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I saw you did that in the book, the Friedman quote about when a crisis comes, it’s the ideas that are lying around.
Natalie Foster:
That’s right. They get picked up and moved forward and that’s what happened. And so the task in front of us is to understand that the work is durable, the evidence is durable. We need to get the political will there to make these policies durable because as your listeners know, so many of these things have gone away. The expanded child tax credit being a key one. There was a political bet made that if we expand the child tax credit for a year, it’ll be impossible to roll back. But the truth is it wasn’t enough time and that political shenanigans did mean it got rolled back. The good news is that’s not the end of the fight. That’s still the beginning. This is the beginning of a messy new beginning in American economic policymaking, and we can do these things. We now know that, so we can do them again.
Speaker 3:
And we should also point out that all of this giving cash to people, the stimulus checks, the child tax credit, the expanded unemployment benefits, the U.S economy came through the pandemic better than anywhere else in the world. Our economy is the envy of the world right now. The fastest growth, the lowest unemployment, the lowest inflation. And so there didn’t seem to be a downside to any of this money.
Nick Hanauer:
Well far be it for me to argue against progressive policies, but there was a downside and that is we layered on trillions of dollars more debt, which eventually we will have to confront.
Speaker 3:
Maybe.
Nick Hanauer:
So it wasn’t free. If it was free, then everybody could drive a Ferrari.
Speaker 3:
Well, we should have Stephanie Kelton back on, and we can argue about this.
Nick Hanauer:
But there will be a limit, right? There is a limit.
Speaker 3:
Right?
Nick Hanauer:
Like $10,000 a year in guaranteed income for 300 million people is $3 trillion. That’s a lot of debt.
Natalie Foster:
Yeah. But the debt is a choice we’re making next year we will see the expiration of the Trump tax cuts, the TCJA, which have put corporate taxes at the lowest rate since what, 1929?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, yeah yeah. And we can raise taxes and stuff like that, but we are talking about big numbers. These are not in the margin of spending. The CTC I think cost 125 billion per year or something like that. These things are not cheap. And just for perspective, the aggregate amount of tax I think, or income of the top 1%, forget the tax is only about a couple of trillion dollars. There’s a limit how much you can tax rich people to get the money to do these things.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this, Nick, but when you invest in growing the middle class, you grow the economy faster than when you-
Nick Hanauer:
I do not deny that.
Natalie Foster:
From the middle out.
Nick Hanauer:
I do not doubt that. I do not doubt that.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I agree. I think Elon Musk has made a very strong argument for why we need to tax billionaires. He clearly has more money than he knows what to do with.
Nick Hanauer:
Absolutely. But we could confiscate all of Elon Musk’s money and that only-
Speaker 3:
And we should.
Nick Hanauer:
… and that only pays for the CTC for one year, right?
Speaker 3:
Yeah. Money well spent.
Nick Hanauer:
I do not disagree with that. You could get all of Jeff Bezos money and all of Bill Gates’s money and all of Elon Musk’s money and you pay for the CTC for a couple of three years.
Speaker 3:
My point is, Nick, is that it’s not, obviously we should raise taxes on the wealthy and on large corporations, and that will cover some of the costs, but also when it comes to debt, I’m very much in the camp that it’s not the debt, it’s the debt as a percentage of GDP. And if we can pump up growth, the debt doesn’t matter.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, that matters.
Speaker 3:
If the economy is growing faster than the debt, the debt doesn’t matter.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, that’s almost certainly true.
Natalie Foster:
That it’s investment in future generations too. I think we do so poorly at understanding our ROI on investments. We know that kids do better in school. The other thing that was interesting during the pandemic is that we saw for the first time in decades, small business creation go up. It’s been in decline for decades, which is a real concern to people who believe in the future of the American economy being ingenuity and sort of local small businesses. And that will be tomorrow’s next big business. And when people had a bit more money in their pockets, a bit more stability, they started businesses. And so I think the investment is important.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I think the return on investment thing, it’s something which I’ve been thinking a lot about because you see these budget models with their 10 year forecasts and how much it increases the deficit over that period of time. And I’ve got a 27-year-old daughter, and so I’m only 27 years into the return on investment, what I’ve spent on her. But it’s a lifetime.
Nick Hanauer:
Anything coming back yet, goalie?
Speaker 3:
Well, love and affection. Love and affection, it’s still costing me money. Which by the way, I want to say, and I think there’s a huge divide in the economy in terms of the way people live their lives and families run day to day. And that is there are the people who inherit money from their parents, and there are the people who spend money on their parents. And this is one of the reasons why guaranteed inheritance kind of leapt out at me, I don’t think those of us on the Inherit from our parents’ side, the intergenerational wealth building side, understand what it’s like to live on the other side of that divide. Because there are a lot of people out there who are caught in the spending money on their children and spending money on their parents at the same time.
Natalie Foster:
Right, the sandwich generation.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s for sure.
Speaker 3:
And it’s a very different attitude to life when you’re on our side, Nick, and certainly on your side, you can take risks that the other side can’t.
Nick Hanauer:
No, it’s true.
Speaker 3:
I don’t think we should ask the benevolent dictator question. We should just instruct listeners to read the book pretty much what your book is about, what you would do, right Natalie?
Natalie Foster:
That’s exactly right.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s true.
Natalie Foster:
It’s proof that these ideas are no longer just pie in the sky, that they are happening. And the benevolent dictator would put them into action and sequence them in a way that was responsible and thoughtful per Nick’s reminder to us, but that these are investments we can and should make in the richest nation on earth.
Speaker 3:
So you want to go and ask the final question, Nick?
Nick Hanauer:
Sure. Natalie, why do you do this work?
Natalie Foster:
I grew up the daughter of an evangelical minister in Kansas, and so spent a lot of time thinking about love. And in college, it was actually Cornell West who said something that really stuck with me that justice is what love looks like in public. And that would push me to pursue not just love but justice and has been a guiding principle for me over the last several decades.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s a lovely answer.
Speaker 3:
Yeah. And thank you for all the work you do, you’ve done and you’re doing, and for the book as well. I love new framing ideas and I need to absorb this and think about it further.
Natalie Foster:
Well, I appreciate that. And venture capitalist Roy Baha wrote a piece about the book where he called it Trampoline Capitalism. And that’s one of the framing pieces that have stuck with me as I’ve gone around the country and talked about the guarantees that it could be Trampoline Capitalism. So I’ll leave you with that one too.
Nick Hanauer:
I like it. I like it.
Speaker 3:
Well, thank you for being with us, Natalie.
Natalie Foster:
It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3:
So Nick, your mind changed at all on the idea of guarantees?
Nick Hanauer:
Two things about the idea of guarantees make me pause. The first is that I’m no orthodox thinker about human behavior. And I think that the idea that the only thing that matters to people are economic incentives is just wrong. The majority of people do the right thing because they do the right thing, not because they’re paid to do it or because the economic incentive is to do that. But I also think that while a majority of people are like that, there are a huge number of people who are not like that and who won’t respond constructively to guarantees. And I think that’s a problem for in two ways. Obviously we don’t want people who provide a lot of guarantees to stop working and to stop being constructive members of society. But the bigger problem is the political problem, which is in a world where 85% of people are doing the right thing, but 15% are not, the anger generated by that 15% who are not totally destabilizes the politics of providing those benefits.
Speaker 3:
See, I don’t think there’s empirical evidence to support your concerns. The political concerns, look, let’s be clear, the reason why we dismantled much of our social safety net from Ronald Reagan on was out of concern that Black people might be getting stuff for free. I mean, from the very beginning, the safety net was constructed, the minimum wage, the national, who qualified for labor standards, it was all constructed in a way that it benefited white people and didn’t benefit Black people, and that’s just part of the racism in our country. And I know, so politically, even now, if we could do a guaranteed basic income for white Christian men, it would be very popular amongst a big segment of society. But once you start adding in other people, and I think there’s a difference, Nick, I think when you focus on children, when you focus on children, it’s different. And I think first of all, we have the example-
Nick Hanauer:
But we weren’t talking about focusing on children. We’re talking about guaranteed basic income.
Speaker 3:
You’re not talking about doing this all at once. It’s not like suddenly we’re going to send $2,000 a month to every man, woman and child in America. You know politically, that’ll never happen that way. But when we, again, thinking more broadly, getting away from the idea, this is purely basic income because the child tax credit is a form of basic income, and I think you support an enhanced child tax credit. I want to get back to the idea. And also we saw during the pandemic that when we did these stimulus checks, and we did the expanded child tax credit and we did the expanded unemployment benefits, we didn’t see people fall out of the workforce, we saw people climb back in very quickly. Employment recovered just amazingly fast after the pandemic, and people were still getting that tax credit and they were still going out and getting back into the labor market as soon as they could. So there’s no evidence that that-
Nick Hanauer:
It’s just not true that there is no evidence that when you give people an out from having to participate constructively in society, that zero people take that out. That is not true.
Speaker 3:
It’s not, but there’s a difference between non-zero and 20%.
Nick Hanauer:
We should have a podcast devoted to figuring out what that number is, because it’s not 1%.
Speaker 3:
Look at the Nordic countries, we’ve talked about this before. They have these sorts of guarantees and they don’t have this general problem. But I want to get to the idea. I want to get back to, and this is again the baby, the idea of guaranteed inheritance, we focus so much on income, Nick, for obvious reasons, $15 minimum wage. It’s really important to raise wages and raise incomes and lower costs. But we haven’t really focused as much on wealth and how destructive the wealth gap is and how determine it is to outcomes that And I just don’t think people understand how hard it is to start out in life with nothing. And for most kids, if you’re going to college with tens of thousands of dollars of debt and it completely changes your outlook on life.
Nick Hanauer:
Of course. And look, it’s only 60 or $80 billion, it would be $40 billion, which is mice nets, to make college affordable for every kid in America. That’s it. It’s nothing. I’m 100% on board.
Speaker 3:
And we’ve talked about this-
Nick Hanauer:
And it would cost probably about the same to give every kid a pretty significant baby bond. I don’t know what, are there four million kids born in the United States a year or something like that, 10,000 per, I think that’s 40 billion. Again, in the scheme of things, mice nets, it’s just nothing relative to what we spend stuff on. But when you’re talking about programs in the trillions, that starts to be more challenging. And you and I, of course are in violent agreement on the housing thing. We could build millions of units of housing in this country for no taxpayer dollars, keep them owned by the public, and in 20 years, we’d have all the affordable housing we need in the country. This is a no-brainer. It’s just idiotic not to do.
Speaker 3:
Like home ownership where I’ve said this before, that the real benefit of home ownership is the 30-year fixed rate mortgage that you’ve locked in your rent for 30 years.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
Speaker 3:
There’s no landlord who’s going to up your rent 20% and force you to move or force you to sacrifice other things that you’re spending money on. That’s what a public option for housing does if done right, is that you know that your housing costs are going to inflate slower than inflation. That in fact, just like a mortgage, it literally in real dollars as opposed to nominal dollars gets cheaper over time. And that’s the type of guarantee that I think, yet I think everybody deserves, but also I think has huge benefits in the long run for the economy. because if you’re not spending, if that money isn’t going to rent seeking to people just owning property and extracting as much rent as possible, think of what that money could go to in terms of starting businesses, educating yourself and your children.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m with you.
Speaker 3:
Just spending it on real things.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s free. It’s free to do.
Speaker 3:
So I think, Nick, you need to get past the basic income part of it. And I’m not an Andrew Yang, like, yes, let’s give everybody free money. I questioned his take on it as well, but the idea of guarantees as a framing device to think about what people should expect from our economy, I think that’s a useful way of thinking about a lot of the things that we already do support.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Well, there you have it.
Speaker 3:
There you have it. Again, we will provide a link in the show notes to Natalie Foster’s book, The Guarantee: How Will Bold New Social Contract Can Transform America?
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 at Pitchfork Economics. Nick’s on Twitter and Facebook as well at Nick Hannower. 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.