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30 Year Republican: What the Mainstream Media Isn't Telling You · The Overlap

• 0:12
  Let me read you a paycheck. Amazon Warehouse Job,
• 0:16
  Illinois, 40 hours a week at $22 an hour.
• 0:21
  Seems like an amazing job, and it seems like the one that you might want
• 0:26
  for your kids or for your nephew who is complaining about the economy,
• 0:30
  complaining about the the person who's currently in the office of the president.
• 0:37
  But
• 0:38
  That's the real wage right now,
• 0:40
  twenty two dollars an hour. That is a job that you could actually get in Illinois.
• 0:44
  I checked the job listings. Forty hours.
• 0:47
  So
• 0:48
  that's eight hundred and eighty dollars before any money comes out of your paycheck,
• 0:52
  in a week. So eight hundred and eighty bucks for a week sounds pretty decent.
• 0:56
  Those numbers are built from the actual wage and the actual insurance costs that
• 1:02
  employers report. So you can you can check them.
• 1:05
  I'm I'm not making them up. I'm not
• 1:07
  like averaging across 10 years of of old information.
• 1:10
  This is what the number is right now.
• 1:13
  Let me break down the deductions because this is the whole conversation right here.
• 1:19
  Social Security taxes comes out of that.
• 1:22
  $54.80, that's six point two percent of the gross.
• 1:26
  Medicare comes out, that's twelve dollars and seventy six cents,
• 1:29
  that's one point four five percent.
• 1:32
  Federal income tax withholding,
• 1:34
  depending on their filing status and whether they have dependents,
• 1:37
  is roughly $100 per week. That
• 1:41
  is already $167.56 gone before they have health insurance,
• 1:47
  before they have anything else.
• 1:48
  Then the health insurance. The company typically contributes part of it,
• 1:53
  and the company calculates as part of your total compensation,
• 1:57
  but the employee share still comes from the paycheck.
• 2:01
  For basic coverage, not great coverage,
• 2:03
  just basic coverage, the American average of $1,886 as a deductible,
• 2:10
  not including the 20% coinsurance on anything that you need medical help with.
• 2:16
  That's about $60 per week out of the employees' take home.
• 2:21
  So out of $880 gross,
• 2:24
  we've taken out $227 in taxes and health insurance.
• 2:29
  That leaves about six hundred and fifty-two dollars and forty-four cents per week.
• 2:34
  That's a person working forty hours per week taking home six hundred
• 2:39
  and fifty-two dollars. We're gonna cut off the forty-four cents because let's
• 2:43
  be honest, we all learned the old way of doing math,
• 2:45
  and it's a lot easier to put numbers together when you cut out everything behind
• 2:49
  the decimal. And what can 44 cents buy you anyway?
• 2:51
  So that's $2,610 per month before rent.
• 2:58
  Before food, before a car payment,
• 3:00
  before anything. The national average rent for a one bedroom,
• 3:05
  one bathroom apartment in August 2026
• 3:09
  is about $1,663 per month,
• 3:12
  $1663. Now if you remove the ten largest US cities,
• 3:18
  which is what we've done, where rents are for similar units,
• 3:22
  one bedroom, one bath or often exceeding thirty five hundred dollars,
• 3:25
  they're what
• 3:26
  The cities that you'd think of,
• 3:27
  there are there are actually four of them in Texas,
• 3:29
  New York City, Chicago, Phoenix,
• 3:31
  Arizona, San Diego, San Francisco,
• 3:34
  the big top ten most expensive cities in the entire country.
• 3:37
  I removed that from the entire list.
• 3:39
  The average rent for a one-bedroom,
• 3:42
  one-bath apartment is $1,663.
• 3:45
  So that typically brings the average down once you remove it to $1,400 $1,500,
• 3:51
  depending on whether.
• 3:53
  A median or mean average is used.
• 3:56
  So let's say they find an apartment for 1600 bucks.
• 4:00
  That's that's the number I have in my mind,
• 4:03
  certainly when I was in college and when I was a younger person with a one-bedroom,
• 4:06
  one bathroom apartment. Sixteen hundred bucks was about the going rate for rent now.
• 4:10
  So that leaves a single person by themselves in a one-bedroom,
• 4:15
  one bath apartment.
• 4:16
  With $1,010 left for the entire month.
• 4:19
  Back in 2025, just feeding yourself costs anywhere from $245
• 4:26
  to $500 every month. And that was before the grocery index climbed another
• 4:32
  2.7% in 2026. That's the CPI.
• 4:36
  It keeps track of the most common things that we buy and gives them
• 4:40
  a general price throughout the national average.
• 4:43
  Again, they're using
• 4:44
  Swapping between mean and median,
• 4:46
  and they arrived to a 2.7% increase on CPI.
• 4:52
  But those broad averages don't tell the whole story of what happens at the register.
• 4:57
  They hide the actual math of a shopping trip.
• 5:00
  In fact, if you like coffee, just a good cup of black coffee like I do,
• 5:06
  coffee prices spiked by 33 to 35%.
• 5:09
  And if you want to have a hamburger or
• 5:14
  I don't know, a beef sausage in the morning with a little bit
• 5:18
  of oatmeal or something. Ground beef went up twenty two percent year over year.
• 5:23
  But there is good news there was one grocery staple that did drop thirty percent
• 5:30
  eggs. Everything else has been consistently higher month to month
• 5:34
  at the grocery store. That is what we're working with.
• 5:37
  Keep that number. The entire conversation is about whether that person
• 5:41
  can live on it.
• 5:43
  And what makes that possible or impossible?
• 5:45
  Now let me tell you who's talking because you should weigh it.
• 5:50
  My name is Joshua. In most of my life,
• 5:53
  I am the computer guy. I'm the one you call when your email stops working
• 5:58
  or when your iPhone starts doing something it did not used to do
• 6:02
  and you can't figure out what changed.
• 6:04
  I come over, I fix it, I don't make you feel stupid about it.
• 6:07
  I mention that because this is the same job.
• 6:12
  Somebody hands you a machine and a story about how it works,
• 6:15
  and sometimes the story's wrong and somebody has to sit down and go through
• 6:19
  it with you without being a jerk about it.
• 6:22
  Here's the other part. And it's the part that matters for weighing what
• 6:26
  I'm about to say. I was a Republican for thirty years.
• 6:30
  Not casually. I walked door to door for George W.
• 6:34
  Bush two times. Once before I was old enough to vote.
• 6:37
  I knocked on strangers' doors in the heat.
• 6:40
  Living in Louisiana and made the case.
• 6:43
  I believed it. If you and I had talked politics in two thousand four,
• 6:47
  I would have argued with you from the other direction and I would have been good
• 6:52
  at it. I left the party officially in twenty sixteen.
• 6:55
  I'm not gonna perform pride or or shame about that,
• 6:59
  it's just what happened. And I ended up well to the left of where I started,
• 7:04
  which I also am not going to hide because you would find that out in about
• 7:08
  a minute anyway, and
• 7:09
  Then nothing else I said for the rest of this episode would you actually listen to?
• 7:15
  I'm telling you all of this in the first minute instead of the last one,
• 7:19
  because the whole point here is that you should not have to take anybody's word
• 7:25
  for anything, including mine. Every number I just read and every number
• 7:30
  I am about to read is public information.
• 7:33
  I will tell you where each one comes from,
• 7:36
  and you can go and check them.
• 7:37
  If I have one wrong, I want to know.
• 7:39
  You can send me an email. It's the overlap at FOF dot foundation.
• 7:45
  No dot com at the very end. Just
• 7:48
  the overlap at FOF.foundation.
• 7:54
  I'm not here to convert you. I spent thirty years on the other side
• 7:59
  of this and nobody ever converted me by winning an argument.
• 8:02
  Not one time. I changed my mind slowly by myself over years and
• 8:09
  After the facts stop fitting the story that I had.
• 8:12
  That is the only way it has ever worked for anybody.
• 8:17
  What I can actually do is hand you the definition of a phrase as the people
• 8:22
  who hold the position actually use it,
• 8:25
  instead of the version that circulates on your favorite mainstream media channel.
• 8:30
  That's the whole job. So here is the phrase.
• 8:33
  Democratic socialism means the workers
• 8:39
  And the community have a say in who owns and who controls the things they depend
• 8:45
  on to live a power plant, a water system,
• 8:49
  a hospital, a utility, who owns it,
• 8:53
  who runs it, and whether a fund in another state gets to buy the factory
• 8:58
  in your town, strip it for parts,
• 9:01
  lay off five hundred people, and disappear.
• 9:04
  That is what the phrase means.
• 9:07
  Not that the government seizes things,
• 9:09
  not that you own nothing. A say,
• 9:13
  a vote, a seat at the table when decisions that determine your life get made.
• 9:19
  Let me be also very clear about what it does not mean,
• 9:23
  because this is where the conversation got hijacked.
• 9:27
  It does not mean communism. Communism says the state owns everything.
• 9:33
  And you cannot vote that out ever.
• 9:36
  Democratic Socialism says you vote,
• 9:39
  and if you do not like it, you vote it out.
• 9:42
  That is the entire difference.
• 9:44
  Elections. That phrase is load bearing,
• 9:48
  and it's the one that never survives the trip to television.
• 9:52
  It does not mean the government takes your house or your truck or your gun.
• 9:58
  It means the community decides who owns the water system and the power lines.
• 10:04
  Shared infrastructure, not personal property.
• 10:07
  Those are different categories,
• 10:09
  and they get deliberately blurred.
• 10:12
  It does not mean that nobody works.
• 10:14
  The one I want to spend a minute on because it's exactly backwards from the history.
• 10:20
  Eugene Debs was a railroad man.
• 10:23
  Fireman on a locomotive at nineteen.
• 10:26
  He helped build the American Railway Union.
• 10:29
  In nineteen eighteen he gave a speech in Canton,
• 10:33
  Ohio against the draft, and the federal government convicted him under
• 10:38
  the Espionage Act and sent him to the Atlanta Penitentiary.
• 10:42
  He was inmate number two hundred two five three,
• 10:45
  and in nineteen twenty, from inside that cell he ran for president
• 10:51
  of the United States of America and got nine hundred fourteen thousand votes.
• 10:56
  Think about what that number means.
• 10:57
  Almost one million Americans,
• 11:01
  most of whom would never have called themselves radicals,
• 11:04
  voted for a man in federal prison.
• 11:07
  Not because they had read theory,
• 11:09
  because they remembered the coal mines.
• 11:12
  They remembered twelve hour shifts in the mills seven days a week.
• 11:17
  They remembered men worked until they died and then replaced on Monday.
• 11:22
  The demand those people were making was
• 11:25
  Was not that nobody should work.
• 11:27
  The slogan was eight hours for work,
• 11:30
  eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.
• 11:33
  They wanted a life on the other side of the shift.
• 11:37
  And they won it in pieces over forty years.
• 11:41
  The Adamson Act in nineteen sixteen gave railroad workers
• 11:46
  the first federally mandated eight hour day.
• 11:48
  The Fair Labor Standards Act in nineteen thirty eight.
• 11:53
  Establish the forty hour work week and the minimum wage.
• 11:56
  Your weekend came from that fight.
• 12:00
  Overtime pay came from that fight.
• 12:03
  If you have ever gotten time and a half,
• 12:06
  you have collected on a debt that those people paid,
• 12:10
  sometimes with their lives. That is not nobody working,
• 12:13
  that is everybody working, and not having your entire life be your job.
• 12:19
  And here's the part I want you to sit with because it's the one that got me.
• 12:22
  There is a decade a lot of people on the right point back to as when this country
• 12:28
  worked. One income could carry a house and a family.
• 12:31
  A man could get hired at a plant at twenty and retire from it.
• 12:35
  You could buy a home on a factory wage.
• 12:38
  That was the middle of the nineteen fifties,
• 12:41
  and in nineteen fifty four.
• 12:43
  Union membership in the American workforce hit its all time peak right around
• 12:49
  a third of every worker in the United States.
• 12:52
  Those two facts are the same fact.
• 12:55
  The era people are nostalgic for is the era with the highest union density
• 13:02
  in American history, the strongest labor law,
• 13:06
  and the top tax rates of this century.
• 13:09
  That is not a coincidence but
• 13:12
  And it is not a coincidence anybody wants to explain to you,
• 13:15
  because the moment that you notice it,
• 13:17
  a lot of what is on television stops making sense.
• 13:21
  It does not mean that Venezuela or Cuba or the Soviet Union.
• 13:26
  Those were disasters, dictatorships,
• 13:30
  no real elections, and millions dead.
• 13:33
  I am not going to soften that or walk around it,
• 13:36
  and I understand completely.
• 13:38
  Why those are the places that come to mind when you hear the phrase.
• 13:41
  Those governments used the word and betrayed it by making sure no
• 13:47
  one could vote them out. That is not democratic,
• 13:50
  and that is not democratic socialism.
• 13:53
  That is the opposite of it. And the thing that makes it the opposite
• 13:57
  is the elections. I will say this very plainly because it cuts both directions.
• 14:03
  Plenty of people who use the word socialism in the
• 14:07
  In this country are insufferable.
• 14:09
  You know the type, university types,
• 14:12
  campus types who have never had a job,
• 14:15
  who use the word as a costume,
• 14:17
  and could not tell you what a shop steward does.
• 14:21
  They exist. They are annoying.
• 14:23
  They are also not who I am describing.
• 14:27
  They are not who wrote any of the history that I just gave you.
• 14:32
  But anybody who argues against socialism.
• 14:36
  Using only Venezuela without ever mentioning Denmark or Norway
• 14:41
  is picking examples that serve them.
• 14:43
  If the claim is that it does not work,
• 14:46
  then explain Denmark. Then explain Norway.
• 14:50
  Explain why those countries have higher wages,
• 14:53
  shorter work weeks, better health outcomes,
• 14:57
  longer lives, and functioning economies with shining examples
• 15:02
  of capitalism working within their system.
• 15:04
  GLP ones, simaglutide, terzepitide are a perfect example of that.
• 15:08
  An honest argument points at all of them.
• 15:12
  Now here's the part that I think actually matters,
• 15:15
  and this is not theoretical. It already exists here.
• 15:18
  You already use it, you already like it.
• 15:21
  Medicare. That's not capitalism.
• 15:25
  You do not buy Medicare on an open market.
• 15:28
  There is no Medicare store. No company competes to sell it to you.
• 15:34
  You pay over your working life.
• 15:36
  And then when you turn 65, it's there.
• 15:39
  You do not have to hope your employer still offers coverage.
• 15:43
  You do not have to fear losing it.
• 15:46
  Who pays for it? Workers through taxes.
• 15:49
  Who owns it? All of us. Who does it serve?
• 15:53
  Everyone over sixty five. That is public ownership and democratic control.
• 15:59
  The VA.
• 16:00
  Veterans Affairs funded by taxes,
• 16:03
  run by the government, serving people who served.
• 16:07
  It has real problems and gets overstretched,
• 16:11
  and in a number of measurable areas it still posts better patient outcomes than
• 16:17
  private hospitals. Who pays? Taxpayers.
• 16:21
  Who owns it? The public. The Interstate Highway System.
• 16:26
  Eisenhower, a Republican general,
• 16:28
  built it.
• 16:30
  Paid for it with gas taxes, built by public works,
• 16:33
  maintained by public agencies.
• 16:36
  Every truck carrying goods across the country runs on it.
• 16:40
  If a company owned the highways and charged by the mile,
• 16:44
  commerce would be slower and more expensive.
• 16:47
  Who owns it? The public. Who does it serve?
• 16:51
  Everyone. The fire department,
• 16:53
  funded by property taxes, staffed by public employees.
• 16:58
  It shows up whether you can afford it or not.
• 17:01
  Your house is on fire, they come.
• 17:04
  Nobody asks about your insurance.
• 17:06
  Nobody bills you for the water.
• 17:09
  That is what a public service is.
• 17:11
  A county road crew that salts the roads when there's ice or snow.
• 17:15
  Crop insurance that carries farmers through a bad year.
• 17:19
  Rural electric co ops which are owned by the members who use them.
• 17:24
  And when they run a surplus, it's
• 17:26
  It goes back to members as lower rates,
• 17:29
  instead of out to a shareholder who has never been to the county.
• 17:33
  The Tennessee Valley Authority brought power to seven states
• 17:37
  in the nineteen thirties Tennessee,
• 17:40
  Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi,
• 17:43
  North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia.
• 17:46
  Before that, fewer than one in ten rural homes had electricity.
• 17:51
  People were living like it was eighteen eighty,
• 17:54
  no power, no refrigeration, no modern tools.
• 17:58
  Your CPAP didn't work, and your
• 18:02
  Diabetes medication could not be refrigerated.
• 18:04
  Private companies had already looked at it and said no,
• 18:08
  it's not profitable. That was communities deciding some things are
• 18:14
  too important to leave to profit.
• 18:16
  So we will own it, we will run it,
• 18:19
  and we will decide together what happens to it.
• 18:22
  Every one of those falls into the same category public
• 18:26
  or community ownership democratic control.
• 18:30
  No outside fund extracting value.
• 18:33
  They have been working for fifty,
• 18:35
  seventy, ninety years. Your family depends on several of them right now.
• 18:41
  And nobody calls them socialism because nobody ever had an interest
• 18:47
  in making you afraid of the word when it's attached to something you like.
• 18:51
  So what democratic socialism asks for is not something different from Medicare.
• 18:58
  Or the fire department. It's the same thing.
• 19:00
  It's just applied more broadly.
• 19:02
  It asks who owns the hospital?
• 19:05
  Right now, a lot of them are owned by private equity,
• 19:09
  and they're buying more every single month.
• 19:12
  Let's give a specific example because this is real and recent,
• 19:17
  and I want you to look up every single part of it.
• 19:20
  Anchor Hawking Glass. Charleroi,
• 19:24
  Pennsylvania in Washington County.
• 19:27
  That plant had been running in that town for a hundred and thirty-two years.
• 19:31
  Multiple generations of the same families worked there,
• 19:34
  learned the trade from their fathers,
• 19:36
  passed it to their kids. Around three hundred people had employed jobs there.
• 19:42
  Decent wages for the area too,
• 19:44
  plenty of benefits, an employee union,
• 19:47
  stability in a town that does not have a lot of stability.
• 19:50
  In February of twenty twenty four,
• 19:53
  Center Lane Partners, a private equity firm,
• 19:56
  Acquired that business. By the end of twenty twenty four,
• 20:00
  the Charleroi plant was closing three hundred jobs.
• 20:03
  The firm that bought it was not in the business of making glass.
• 20:07
  They looked at the assets and the property and the inventory and came
• 20:12
  to the conclusion that it was worth more shut down and moved than running.
• 20:17
  The Pennsylvania Attorney General filed an antitrust complaint that October
• 20:22
  to stop it.
• 20:23
  And a federal judge ruled the closure could proceed.
• 20:26
  The people in Charleroi did not get to vote in any of that.
• 20:31
  The workers had no seat at the table.
• 20:33
  They didn't ask the community.
• 20:35
  132 years ended because a hedge fund in another state decided that
• 20:42
  was the best use of the asset.
• 20:45
  It's happening now all across the country with data centers.
• 20:48
  And if that feels like something new,
• 20:51
  like some modern private equity invention,
• 20:55
  it is not. It happened on that same river,
• 20:57
  and it's worth knowing how because it explains why nobody wanted a seat
• 21:01
  at that table in the first place.
• 21:03
  Homestead, Pennsylvania, twenty some miles up the I'm gonna mispronounce this,
• 21:10
  but Monangahila from Charleroi.
• 21:14
  July of eighteen ninety two, Carnegie Steel,
• 21:17
  the most productive steelworks in the country,
• 21:20
  and the men in it belonged to the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers,
• 21:27
  which was then the strongest union in America.
• 21:30
  Andrew Carnegie wanted the union out.
• 21:33
  He also wanted to be in Scotland while it happened,
• 21:37
  so he left it to his chairman,
• 21:39
  Henry Clay Frick, and Frick.
• 21:42
  Did it thoroughly. He built a fence around the print plant three miles long with
• 21:46
  barbed wire on top, and holes cut in it at rifle height.
• 21:51
  The men called it Fort Frick. He locked them out,
• 21:55
  cut the wage, and hired three hundred Pinkerton agents.
• 22:00
  On july sixth, he floated those Pinkertons up the river on barges in the dark,
• 22:05
  armed, to take the plant. The town was waiting.
• 22:10
  What happened next was not a labor dispute,
• 22:12
  it was a gunfight on a riverbank that went most of the day and left men dead
• 22:17
  on both sides. The Pinkertons surrendered,
• 22:20
  and the workers won. They won for six days.
• 22:24
  Then the governor sent eight thousand state militia,
• 22:28
  and that was the end of it. The plant reopened without the Union,
• 22:31
  and Union steel in that valley did not come back for forty years.
• 22:35
  Now hold the
• 22:37
  These two things next to each other Homestead in eighteen ninety
• 22:41
  two and Charleroi in twenty twenty four.
• 22:44
  Same river? Same question? Who decides what happens to the place where three hundred
• 22:51
  people work? And do the three hundred people get a say in it?
• 22:55
  In eighteen ninety two the answer arrived on a barge with rifles.
• 22:59
  In twenty twenty four it arrived as a filing.
• 23:03
  Nobody had to fire a shot in Charleroi,
• 23:05
  because nobody there had any mechanism to say no.
• 23:09
  That is the whole difference. And it's not the kind of progress it sounds like.
• 23:15
  Democratic Socialism says no. It says when you own a plant in our town
• 23:21
  and employ our people, the workers and the community get a voice in what happens
• 23:26
  to it. Now, not necessarily a veto,
• 23:30
  a voice.
• 23:31
  A union contract with real teeth,
• 23:33
  a mechanism where the people who eat the consequences have input into the decision.
• 23:40
  It says the water system cannot be a cash extraction machine for a hedge fund.
• 23:47
  It says a hospital cannot be a thing you buy,
• 23:51
  squeeze for five years, and flip.
• 23:54
  It says the power grid is a utility that has to work.
• 23:58
  Not a stock to trade. And it says a working person who works forty hours
• 24:04
  a week should be able to live.
• 24:06
  The warehouse worker we started with at two thousand six hundred ten dollars
• 24:11
  a month not survive, live, make rent,
• 24:15
  have food, a vehicle that gets them to and from their job,
• 24:20
  take a kid to the doctor without it being a financial event.
• 24:25
  That is what the argument is actually about.
• 24:27
  Now, the honest part, and I'm gonna be straight with you rather than sell
• 24:32
  you something. It costs money.
• 24:34
  Somebody has to pay for it. I'm not gonna pretend public systems are free
• 24:40
  or that they don't require taxes because they do.
• 24:43
  That is real, and anybody who tells you different is selling you something.
• 24:47
  And government does run things badly sometimes.
• 24:52
  I have sat at the DMV like everyone else.
• 24:55
  Public programs have waste in them.
• 24:57
  They have people being paid to move paper instead of solving the problem.
• 25:02
  I understand exactly why that makes you nervous because it makes me nervous too.
• 25:07
  And I'm not going to insult you by pretending that the concern is irrational.
• 25:12
  It is not. But here's my actual answer to it.
• 25:15
  The comparison being offered to you is the worst of governments.
• 25:21
  Against a gleaming vision of private business that exists in theory.
• 25:26
  In practice, private systems have enormous waste too.
• 25:30
  They also have people moving paper instead of solving problems.
• 25:34
  The difference is you do not see it.
• 25:36
  Because it's buried in premiums and executive compensation and marketing budgets,
• 25:42
  it comes out before the bill ever reaches you.
• 25:45
  But that is still your money.
• 25:48
  The question is not whether or not there will be waste,
• 25:51
  there will be. The question is whether the waste is serving you
• 25:56
  or extracting from you. So let me put real numbers on it.
• 26:00
  An ambulance ride in this country ten minutes,
• 26:04
  local transport, that runs you roughly a thousand dollars out of pocket.
• 26:10
  One thousand dollars for ten minutes in a vehicle with lights on the roof.
• 26:17
  Air transport, a medical emergency needing a helicopter.
• 26:21
  The government accountability office looked at this.
• 26:24
  You are talking tens of thousands of dollars,
• 26:27
  and a large share of those flights are out of network,
• 26:30
  which means your insurance covers part,
• 26:32
  and you get billed for the rest.
• 26:34
  People have gotten bills over twenty thousand dollars for a helicopter ride when
• 26:41
  they were unconscious and did not choose it.
• 26:44
  In Norway.
• 26:46
  That ride does not generate a bill.
• 26:48
  Neither does the ambulance. They pay for it in taxes,
• 26:51
  and yes, their taxes are higher.
• 26:54
  I'm not going to pretend that they're not,
• 26:56
  but nobody in Norway gets a twenty thousand dollars bill for
• 27:01
  a helicopter because that is not how they decided to build it.
• 27:05
  And they decided it democratically.
• 27:08
  Here is the big number. The United States spends fourteen thousand dollars.
• 27:13
  seven hundred and eighty one dollars per person per year on healthcare.
• 27:18
  That is everything. Your share,
• 27:21
  your employer's share, the government's share.
• 27:25
  Every year, whether you go to a doctor or not.
• 27:29
  Denmark spends seven thousand seventy one dollars per person.
• 27:34
  That is roughly half, not somewhat less,
• 27:38
  half.
• 27:39
  And the Danes work fewer hours,
• 27:41
  take more vacation, live longer,
• 27:44
  and have lower infant mortality.
• 27:47
  Half the money, better outcomes.
• 27:51
  That is not an opinion. That is spending data from countries doing it right now.
• 27:57
  So the question is this: Do you want the water system owned
• 28:02
  by a fund looking to maximize extraction?
• 28:06
  Over five years before selling it to another hedge fund,
• 28:09
  or owned by the community that drinks the water.
• 28:13
  That is the actual vote.
• 28:16
  I want to say one more thing and I'll get out of your way.
• 28:18
  Some profit is fine. Investment requires return.
• 28:23
  Building something requires a reason to build it.
• 28:27
  I am not confused about that, and I'm not arguing against business existing.
• 28:33
  What I am arguing again is that what happens when profit becomes
• 28:39
  the only thing we care about.
• 28:43
  When a pension gets looted by a fund manager two states away who has never
• 28:48
  met a single worker and has no reason to care whether they can put food
• 28:53
  on the table at seventy years old,
• 28:55
  when a utility is run to pull value out now instead
• 29:01
  of maintaining the lines for the next fifty years,
• 29:03
  when a hospital gets treated like a playing card or a trading card,
• 29:09
  that's not really capitalism anymore.
• 29:12
  That is extraction. And you can tell the difference because extraction never builds
• 29:18
  anything. We have done it the other way before,
• 29:21
  in living memory, in this country.
• 29:24
  The New Deal, rural electrification,
• 29:27
  the forty hour work week, the VA,
• 29:30
  Medicare, all of those things exist.
• 29:33
  They are imperfect. But they work.
• 29:36
  And they work because they were built on one idea.
• 29:40
  Some things are too important to leave it to a profit motive.
• 29:45
  So we own them together and we decide together.
• 29:49
  Now back to our person, the warehouse associate in Illinois,
• 29:53
  forty hours, two thousand six hundred and ten dollars a month.
• 29:57
  Right now between premiums, copays,
• 30:00
  deductibles, coinsurance, that household is losing several hundred dollars
• 30:05
  a month to health coverage.
• 30:07
  Before anyone actually gets sick.
• 30:09
  Under a system built the way Denmark or Norway built theirs,
• 30:13
  most of that becomes tax. At roughly half the total per person cost.
• 30:18
  What is left over is not a rounding error to somebody at that income.
• 30:22
  It's the dentist. It's a car that starts.
• 30:26
  It's winter boots that are not held together with duct tape.
• 30:30
  Will it take more taxes? Yes. The question is whether you would rather
• 30:34
  pay through taxes into a system designed to serve you or through premiums
• 30:41
  and deductibles and surprise bills from out of network anesthesiologists into
• 30:46
  a system designed to extract money from you.
• 30:50
  You're already paying for it. That's the part that gets left out.
• 30:54
  You are already paying and paying more.
• 30:58
  For less. You're gonna keep hearing this word,
• 31:01
  this phrase, democratic socialism.
• 31:04
  And it's going to get thrown at you on television and in arguments
• 31:08
  and by people running for office.
• 31:10
  But now you know what it actually means.
• 31:13
  You know how it differs from communism.
• 31:15
  And that the difference is elections.
• 31:19
  You know why Venezuela is not the comparison and why Denmark is.
• 31:25
  And you know you already use several pieces of it every week.
• 31:29
  So when somebody uses the word at you,
• 31:31
  you can tell whether they know what they're talking about.
• 31:35
  If they tell you it means the government seizes your house,
• 31:39
  they're either lying to you or they read it somewhere and never checked.
• 31:43
  If they tell you it means that nobody works,
• 31:46
  they do not know what a union is or what the labor
• 31:50
  Bur movement actually won. If they bring up Venezuela and never once mention
• 31:56
  Denmark, they're cherry picking their examples.
• 32:00
  That is what I wanted to hand you.
• 32:02
  Not a conclusion, just the actual definition of democratic socialism
• 32:07
  and the receipts, so that next time it comes up you are arguing about
• 32:12
  the real thing instead of a caricature you were sold.
• 32:16
  You can disagree with all of it.
• 32:19
  Plenty of people do, and some of them are rather good at arguing it.
• 32:23
  But now you can disagree with what it is,
• 32:26
  not something that it's not. That is worth something.
• 32:30
  Thank you.