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Japan Ruined America: We Can Fix It! · The Overlap

0:00
My wife and I just got back from two weeks in Japan for our tenth anniversary.
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We're a two income household with no kids and we chose that partly
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so we could afford trips like this one.
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It also helped that the yen is weak right now.
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So our dollars actually went further than they'll likely ever go in the future.
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That weak yen is one of Japan's real problems,
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and I'll get to it, but it's part of why we went now instead of,
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you know, someday. So I'm not broke and I'm not rich.
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I've worked since I was sixteen for what I have,
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and we took this trip for our tenth wedding anniversary.
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So that makes two things that will only happen once in a lifetime.
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I also know one bad diagnosis could take most of everything that we've worked for,
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and that goes for almost everyone I know.
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Somewhere in Japan I noticed I'd stopped carrying that feeling around.
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Japan felt light years ahead of us,
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and the technology had very little to do with it.
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Trains ran to the minute, and if you missed one,
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another one came in four minutes.
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The streets were clean and walkable,
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and public spaces felt like they belonged to everyone.
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A hospital bill there doesn't end up in bankruptcy because everyone
1:12
is covered and what you pay out of pocket is capped.
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None of that is an accident. For decades,
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Japan put public money into rail,
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transit, and healthcare, education,
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and paid for them by keeping the people at the top paying their share.
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They invested in their people.
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We let the market decide who gets a train,
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a doctor, a decent education.
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And a livable wage. Then I flew home.
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And the first thing America handed me was Gate 52H at LAX,
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a symbolic reminder of how little we are cared about by the corporations
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who run our commercial airlines and who are starting to run our country.
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Japan has real problems of its own,
1:56
but it decided a long time ago that its people were worth investing in.
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We made the opposite decision in 1981.
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And I want to show you what it cost.
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Hey and welcome back. This is The Overlap,
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and I am Joshua. If you're new here,
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welcome. We talk about the United States of America,
2:36
labor, social issues, and systemic problems in our government.
2:40
With a side of revealing the odd stuff that we grew up inside
2:44
of without realizing how strange they actually are.
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If you've been around a bit, you know that I usually record with my intelligent,
2:51
dad-funny co-host William. I asked William to do this as a solo episode because
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I have been
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processing this since the day I arrived in Japan with a lot
3:01
of thoughts and feelings, but also so that he could have plausible deniability
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if I managed to start a movement or something.
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So, like I said, I just got back from Japan and the first thing America handed
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me was Gate 52H at LAX.
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This is a cramped basement room where you have to arrive by bus from
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a regular terminal, terminal four.
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It takes about 15 minutes to get there while your transport driver dodges planes
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landing and food trucks refilling and fuel trucks zooming about.
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But when you get off the bus, you're loudly escorted into the remote terminal.
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It's hot. There's like a grab and go counter with a $22 breakfast sandwich.
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And you have to walk across a hot tarmac to climb stairs onto a regional jet.
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It's been like that for years.
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Nobody in charge seems to think it's a problem.
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But in Japan, things just worked.
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Trains ran to the minute. If you missed it,
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there was one four minutes away.
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Public spaces felt like they belonged to everyone.
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I didn't feel the constant low grade pressure I feel here.
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The sense that everything is a is a fight over scraps and we're
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one hospital bill away from losing everything that we've scraped and saved for.
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Look, Japan has its own serious problems.
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That's not really a hedge or to sort of somehow soften the blow here.
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There are real issues in Japan.
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They have massive public debt,
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an aging crisis, declining birth rates,
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weakening yen, and ever increasing import costs,
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labor shortages, gender inequality.
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Not to mention, they're facing an increasingly assertive China,
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North Korea's nuclear program,
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and regional tensions. Japan is aggressively expanding its defense spending,
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testing the limits of its pacifist post-World War II constitution.
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And those are all very real and very present.
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But Japan still managed to prove something to me.
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A country can decide that its people are worth investing in.
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Ours decided otherwise. And I'm tired of pretending that was an accident,
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just a creeping failure that just so happened over time without us realizing it,
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like microplastics in the water.
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The turn came in 1981. And I'm not the only one that feels this way.
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Reagan cut the top income tax rate from 70% to twenty eight percent over
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his two terms, and he fired more than eleven thousand striking
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air traffic controllers, telling every employer in the country that breaking
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a union was fair game. Private sector union membership has since fallen
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to about six percent. The idea underneath all of it was simple.
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Government is the problem, and the market will take care of the rest.
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Public investment became something to cut,
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not something to build with. And it worked because it convinced
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the middle class that they were closer to rich than they were to broke.
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The post-1981 sales pitch got working people to cut off their feet
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to benefit their scalp. They voted against their own health care,
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wages, and unions to protect fortunes they didn't have and were never going to get.
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The data shows how badly we were all fooled.
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Harvard economists Alberto Alesina,
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Stefanie Stantcheva, and Edoardo Teso found in 2018 that Americans
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consistently overestimate how likely a poor kid is to climb to the top.
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The more they believe they'll get rich,
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the less they want to tax the rich because they picture themselves paying that taxes
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someday. And the real odds are brutal,
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actually. Raj Chetty's research
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found that a child born to the bottom fifth of American incomes
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has about a 7.5% chance of reaching the top fifth.
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That's the top 20%. In Charlotte and Atlanta,
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it's under 5%. The chances of winning a lottery are only barely improved
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by buying a ticket. And the American dream works about the same way.
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I am not a Democrat.
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So I'm not gonna let them off the hook here,
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right? Clinton signed NAFTA, he gutted welfare,
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he helped repeal Glass-Steagall.
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Obama bailed out the banks while millions of families lost their homes.
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Both parties have spent 40 years managing the decline Reagan started instead
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of reversing it. This is not about blue versus red.
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This is not team sports. Since 1981,
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the US
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has largely treated public infrastructure as like a secondary priority,
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allowing critical networks to just sort of erode and crumble,
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which is what happens when you have to cut the budget due to a shifting
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tax burden to the wage earners.
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Under Reagan, the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 slashed the
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top marginal income tax rate from 70% to 50%,
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followed by the Tax Reform Act of 1986,
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which reduced the top statutory rate directly down to 28%,
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with a 33% effective bubble bracket.
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As federal tax receipts contracted relative to economic growth,
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Washington systematically reallocated its discretionary capital away from public
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works. According to the Congressional Budget Office,
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CBO data.
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Overall federal investment as a percentage of GDP plummeted from over 6%
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in the late 60s down to about 2.4% by the late 2010s.
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Direct federal spending on transportation and water infrastructure stagnated
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at a sparse 0.6%, that is six-tenths of 1% of the
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GDP over recent decades, leaving American highways,
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rail systems, and water mains in a state of chronic
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deferred maintenance. Across the Pacific,
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Japan pursued a starkly divergent post-1981 trajectory.
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They chose to maintain high top tax rates on upper earners to fund
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a world-class public infrastructure state.
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In 1988, when our top rate dropped to 28%,
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Japan's was still 60%, and it stayed at 50%.
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After that, while consistently leaning on state-directed capital
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to stabilize its economy, Japan routinely directed between 4% and 6%
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of its annual GDP into public infrastructure during the 80s and the 90s,
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nearly double to triple the relative American allocation.
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While American commuters navigated potholed interstates and legacy rail networks
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starved of public tax revenue.
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Japan deployed its tax capital to construct nationwide Shinkansen bullet train
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networks and modern transit hubs.
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The two models reveal contrasting national trade-offs,
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the U.S. prioritizing top tax bracket tax relief over federal physical assets,
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and Japan using sustained public revenue to establish
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a globally competitive transport ecosystem.
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So who pulled up the ladder? I I get accused often of blaming everything
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on the boomers and everything on Gen X,
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but Boomers and Gen X came of age in the most prosperous stretch
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in American history, not by a little.
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A lot of them bought homes when one income could pay for one.
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They went to college when tuition was just a summer job away.
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And they retired on pensions that generations to come will never see.
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Not all of them. Plenty of boomers lost their homes in 2008
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or watched their pensions get cut.
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Most of Gen X got a 401k instead of a pension,
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and the 2008 crash hit them right in the middle of their careers.
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That's you. You got squeezed too.
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Look, and nothing I'm about to say is about you.
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This is about what people did once they got theirs.
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As many of them built wealth, they voted to keep it.
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Tax cuts, deregulation,
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and less public investment for whoever came next.
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I don't know if that's a is that supposed to be a whomever?
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Whatever. A Financial Times analysis of US and UK elections
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found both generations moved right as they hit middle age and Gen
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X followed the boomers almost step for step once they reached 45.
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If you got the house, the cheap tuition,
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the pension, and then voted against those same things for the people behind you,
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that's what pulling up the ladder means.
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Most people who did it never really thought of it that way.
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And I get it, like I understand when you've worked that hard for something,
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protecting it, well, that just feels like common sense.
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But the results show up in the numbers.
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That economist Raj Chetty, I was talking about,
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found that 90% of Americans born in 1940 out earned their parents.
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For those born in the 80s, it's closer to half.
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The promise that every generation does better than the last just stopped being true
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for us. Millennials and Gen Z got the bill. At 35,
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Millennials are about 15 points conservative than boomers and Gen X were
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at the same age. The least conservative 35-year-olds on record.
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Now I'm, you know, 42, but 35 is right in the middle of that millennial stretch
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there. We just never built the kind of wealth that makes protecting it feel like
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the most important thing on the ballot.
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And Gen Z women see it too. In NBC's April 2025 poll,
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53% of women
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in Gen Z call themselves Democrats.
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Gen Z men are a completely different story.
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Only 35% said the same thing.
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And their approval of Trump ran nearly double that of the young women.
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Gallup now puts the ideological gap between young men and women at five times what
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it was in 2000. Those young men aren't shifting right because they got rich,
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they're broke.
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And they're alone. Gallup found that 25% of American men between 15
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and 34 felt lonely a lot of the previous day.
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That's higher in every other developed country except Turkey.
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And no other country in the OECD has a bigger gap between how lonely
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its young men are and how everyone else feels.
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They're angry about an economy that stopped working for them and they're right to be.
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Only one side showed up and gave them an explanation.
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So here's what we're gonna do.
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And I'm asking you to do it too.
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Stop telling them what's wrong with them.
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Tell them they're right. They were promised the deal their dads got,
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and somebody took it. Then get specific about what they'd get:
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a wage that can buy a house, a union contract that means you can't be fired
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for no reason, and healthcare that doesn't depend on keeping a job that they hate.
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And go where they already are:
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the job site, the trade school,
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the gym, the union hall.
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Instead of waiting for them to come and find us.
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If you're one of those guys and you're listening to this,
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I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong to be angry.
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You should be pissed. I just want you to be angry at the people
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who actually took the money from you,
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the ones at the top who got richer the whole time that you got squeezed.
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And every time someone says tax the rich,
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somebody in the middle hears, they're coming for my stuff.
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I get it. For 40 years, every promise to tax the top
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ended with the middle holding the bill.
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I've worked since I was 16 for what I have,
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and nobody's going to take that from me.
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So let's look at who would actually pay.
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Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax started at $50 million.
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That's about 75,000 households out of 130 million households in the United States.
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We have about 340 million people.
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It makes sense, that's around 130 million households.
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That's less than a tenth of 1% of this country.
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If you check your bank balance before you buy groceries,
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that's not you. If you own your house,
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max out your 401k and drive a paid-off truck,
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still is not you. You would still pay nothing new,
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not one dime. Now look at what you're already paying.
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Your family health plan costs about $27,000 a year.
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Your share is about $7,000 of that.
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And that's before the deductible even starts.
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A new car costs you about twelve thousand nine hundred dollars a year to own.
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And in most of this country, you don't get to say no.
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The average student borrower owes almost $40,000,
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and that number has never been higher.
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Those are taxes. They're just not paid to the government.
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You pay them to insurance companies,
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you pay them to banks, to toll authorities.
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And nobody ever asks you to vote on how much they'd be taxing you.
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Japan spends about a third as much per person on healthcare as we do.
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It covers every single person.
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And they live about five years longer than we do.
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Nobody in Japan loses their house over a cancer diagnosis.
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We pay three times as much to die younger and go broke on the way out.
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And somebody is getting rich off of that difference.
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A good train doesn't take anything from the guy who drives,
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right? Toko, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka,
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and Hakone were full of people driving cars.
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They just weren't forced to. Investing in each other isn't like this zero-sum game.
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Anyone who tells you it has, like,
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has a, I guess, a really big bank account they'd rather you didn't look at.
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So, what that looks like up close,
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of course, here in Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority announced ACCESS
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Oklahoma in 2022. That's a $5 billion plan for new toll roads through Norman
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and Cleveland County. Now they put these right past people's homes
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and right up against Lake Thunderbird.
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The agenda item that set it in motion called it,
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quote, certain turnpike projects and quote,
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SP65.
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Nearly two hundred residents sued under the Open Meetings Act because nobody could
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tell from those agendas what was coming.
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Then this year, lawmakers named a planned connector after Toby Keith,
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a man who literally opposed the project and joined a lawsuit against it.
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I used to be a Toby Keith fan.
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Don't really care much for his opinions or politics,
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but he did oppose the turnpike,
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and they named it after him anyway.
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There's lots of rumors. They say his kids made the decision,
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whatever. I think there's some money that exchanged hands.
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I don't really know the details of it all.
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But that's not infrastructure for people.
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It's infrastructure done to people by an authority that answers mostly
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to bondholders, not to the people who actually live here.
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Compare what we could build. Spain and Italy.
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Keep their rail lines in public hands,
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public ownership, and let multiple companies compete to run trains on them.
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When Spain opened Madrid to Barcelona to competitors in 2021,
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the actual fares of riding those trains fell.
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And within a year, more people were riding them before the pandemic.
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Tracks owned by the people, trains run for comfort and price.
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We know how to do this.
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We choose toll roads and bonds instead,
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selling our natural resources to the highest bidders.
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Now I've heard the opposition,
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they say, America is just too big for this.
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Japan is a small country. They're wrong.
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Japan is a small nation. I I'm not gonna,
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you know, pretend that it's not.
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It's it's much smaller than the United States,
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but nobody rides a train from Maine to California,
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right? High speed rail works one section,
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one one metro at a time.
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And we have plenty that match Japan's.
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Tokyo to Osaka is about 320 miles.
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Los Angeles to San Francisco, Chicago to St.
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Louis, Dallas to Houston are all in that range or shorter.
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Boston to Washington holds about as many people as Japan's busiest rail corridor.
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Then China comes in and completely lambastes the argument because it's about
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the size of the US.
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And they have built more than 45,000 kilometers.
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That's 28,000 miles in freedom units,
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which is about 3,800 miles or so longer than the equator
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of the earth of high-speed rail in roughly 15 years.
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That means China has built more than the rest of the world combined.
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And size really has nothing to do with healthcare or schools.
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Canada and Australia are enormous and they're incredibly sparsely populated,
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and both guarantee healthcare to everyone.
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"We're too big" was never a reason.
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It was just an excuse for deciding not to.
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And underneath all of it is the fear most of us carry that one bad diagnosis
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or a few unemployed months means not affording food or care.
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That is not a personal failing,
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it's a policy outcome.
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So what we have to do is we have to fix the foundation of this first.
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We have to put the partisan fights second.
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Abortion, immigration, and the culture war matter to a lot of people,
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me included. And those arguments are not going away and they shouldn't.
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But if we don't fix the foundation,
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there won't be a country left to argue about it in.
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And I know what some of you will say trans rights matter,
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abortion rights matter, immigrant rights matter,
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and you can't ask people to wait.
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You are right that they matter.
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And I'm not asking anyone to wait.
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I'm asking you to look at what happens to those rights when a country falls apart.
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In the 1920s, Berlin had one of the most open queer communities in the world,
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including Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science,
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which performed one of the first known gender-affirming surgeries anywhere.
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But when the Weimar Republic
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collapsed, the Nazis made that institute one of their first targets.
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They raided it in May of 1933 and burned its library in the streets.
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Fixing wages, healthcare,
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And who gets a seat at the table is how we keep a country stable enough that
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nobody's rights can be voted, legislated,
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or burned away. I'm fighting for the ground every one of these fights stands on.
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I want to call this what it is.
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It's investment in our future.
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Public rail, public health care,
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and public schools are things a country owns together,
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the same way it owns its roads,
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its military.
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Calling that socialism or communism is a scare tactic.
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Selling off what we own is what should be the radical idea.
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But we've been selling it. In 2008,
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Chicago leased its parking meters to private investors for
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75 years for 1.15 billion dollars.
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The city's own inspector general found it had been undervalued by about a billion.
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And the investors earned their money back around 2020 with more than
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60 years left to still collect. In 2006,
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Indiana leased its toll road for 75 years.
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The operator went bankrupt eight years later.
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Here in Oklahoma, the Turnpike Authority runs public roads like a bonding business.
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Each deal is a piece of America handed to someone who answers
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to shareholders instead of to constituents.
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This message works across party lines.
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Bernie Sanders proved it in 2016,
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winning working class voters who went on to back Donald Trump.
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People want wages, health care,
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and a country that works, whatever team they think they're on.
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If the complaint is bipartisan,
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then why can't the solution be?
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Now look, another thing that's probably hard to picture in the same conversation
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is trains and hospitals, but AI is becoming the next piece of infrastructure that
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we all have to live with. And it's the next thing that they're selling off,
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even though we built it. Every AI model was trained on decades of our writing,
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our research, and our conversations.
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A lot of the science behind it was actually done with public money.
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The internet came out of DARPA.
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And a lot of the foundational research
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ran on NSF and university grants.
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The public supplied the raw material and paid for the groundwork.
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A handful of companies are getting insane valuations and making money
24:20
off of the bets on this right now.
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When this all started, I really hoped that AI would help to govern
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us with reason and fairness.
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But AI is really only as fair as whoever owns it.
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And right now that's companies whose job is to extract more from us.
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That's what capitalism is, whether or not you're a fan of it.
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It's the act of inserting layers of extraction between the product and the profit.
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That's the parking meter deal on a scale we've never seen.
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And they're doing it with data centers too.
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We'll see just enough of those profits to talk us into selling our land,
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our water, and their power.
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While they make billions of dollars in profit.
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But who do you think that gets extracted from?
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Us. Japan has a habit that explains a lot of what I saw.
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For about 150 years, it has studied other countries on purpose and then just copied
25:14
what worked. If you're a middle child,
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I'm sure you understand exactly what this looks like.
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In 1871, it sent a delegation of government leaders through the US.
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And Europe for almost two years just to take notes.
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Its schools were modeled on France and the US.
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Its first railways were built with British engineers.
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And its first health insurance law was modeled on Germany's.
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Japan didn't invent most of what I know we could have here if we really tried.
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It watched what worked in other places,
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picked the best of it, and then used our tax dollars or their tax dollars
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to build it.
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Now, AI is a little bit too new for that.
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Nobody has a 50 year track record to study yet.
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And right now, even Japan is mostly handing public money to companies like SoftBank.
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But a few countries are already treating AI the way Japan treated trains,
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as something the public pays for,
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so the public should own it. Switzerland's public universities released
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Apertus, which is Latin for open.
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In 2025, a fully open model built with public money that anyone can use.
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Spain, the same country that opened its high-speed rail to competition,
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released ALIA, a government-funded open model built at
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its national supercomputing center.
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The Netherlands is building GPT-NL through a public research institute trained only
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on data it has the rights to use.
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Singapore's government funds SEA-LION,
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an open model for Southeast Asian languages.
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India's national AI mission rents subsidized computing power to
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its own researchers and startups,
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so the hardware isn't only available to whoever can afford it.
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Even the U.S. started a National AI Research Resource pilot in 2024
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to give researchers public computing power.
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And Alaska already shows how shared wealth can work.
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Its oil fund sends every resident a check every year,
27:17
an AI dividend, a
27:19
public stake in the profits from our own collective work is the same idea.
27:24
None of these countries have it figured out,
27:27
but they've made the same decision Japan made about trains.
27:31
If the public pays for it, the public should own a piece of it.
27:35
We should own what we have built.
27:38
And that leads me to who gets to govern.
27:40
So I served on a local committee for about six months.
27:46
It met on Tuesdays at 1 p.m.
27:49
I didn't know that until after I joined.
27:51
So who exactly is supposed to make that with a job?
27:56
Nobody bans working people from local government.
27:59
There, you won't find it on a law anywhere.
28:01
And if they did, I'm sure it would be struck down immediately.
28:04
They just schedule it while we're at work.
28:06
And pay almost nothing to serve.
28:08
I live in Norman, Oklahoma. I I know I've never,
28:12
I don't think I've really talked about that,
28:13
but some of my listeners come from Norman.
28:16
Norman Norman City Council pays their city council members $100 per month.
28:21
My city council member spends 30 to 40 hours a week
28:27
on city business alone, which means they are currently earning somewhere between
28:31
58 cents and 77 cents per hour.
28:35
Oklahoma state legislators make about $47,500 a year.
28:40
So let's be honest, the seats go to retirees,
28:43
business owners, and people who, whose employers will just kind of cover for them.
28:47
And then everyone wonders why government doesn't understand the rest of us.
28:52
Japan ran this experiment for us,
28:54
actually. A city council member there earns about 400,000 yen a month,
28:59
which is about $2,500 or more,
29:01
depending on the exchange rate.
29:03
That's more than 20 times what Norman pays.
29:06
And really, it only works out to about $15 an hour.
29:09
But it's treated like a job because it is one.
29:12
But in Japan's small towns and villages,
29:16
they have what's called an assembly.
29:18
The assembly pay averages about half that,
29:21
right? And those assemblies look just like ours,
29:23
mostly older men with an average age in their 60s.
29:26
In 2019, eight of them couldn't find enough candidates to fill their seats.
29:32
One village looked at replacing its entire assembly because nobody could afford
29:37
to serve. Same country, same culture,
29:40
opposite results. The only thing that changed was whether the job paid enough
29:45
to live on. I would run for office if I could.
29:47
I can't afford to, and neither can most people who'd fight the hardest
29:51
for working families. That's the ladder getting pulled up again.
29:54
One meeting at a time. The fixes are cheap,
29:59
they don't really cost much.
30:00
Evening meetings, a remote option,
30:03
stipends that cover real time,
30:05
and child care during sessions.
30:08
None of it needs a constitutional amendment.
30:10
It needs a council willing to vote for it.
30:13
Or in the case of Norman, the citizens have to vote for it.
30:17
In 2022, Norman voted on raising council pay from twelve hundred dollars
30:22
a year to fifty four hundred dollars a year.
30:25
Still, that's about two dollars and sixty cents an hour.
30:28
Fifty-seven percent of Norman voters said no to a raise that would have cost
30:32
us each thirty-two cents a year.
30:35
For thirty-two cents, a teacher,
30:37
a nurse, or a guy working the line at a plant could afford to sit on city council.
30:43
But when the job pays nothing,
30:45
the only people who can take it are people who don't need the money.
30:49
Japan's villages learn the same lesson.
30:52
We keep voting to make sure people like us can't afford
30:57
to represent us. This is a warning.
30:59
I don't want a revolution. That means somebody would get hurt.
31:04
I don't want anyone hurt. But honestly,
31:07
I'm getting really afraid of what happens if nothing changes.
31:12
And the people who study this are afraid too.
31:14
Political scientist Barbara Walter,
31:17
no S, not related, in a book called How Civil Wars Start,
31:22
found that instability rises
31:25
when large groups of people feel locked out of power with no peaceful
31:29
way to change their lives. I just described that.
31:32
It's a city council seat that pays 58 cents an hour,
31:36
meeting at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday,
31:38
and a toll road hidden behind SP65.
31:42
None of that feels like the start of something dangerous.
31:45
It feels like Tuesday. That's just how it starts.
31:49
Peter Turchin spent decades studying why societies come apart.
31:54
He links unrest to two trends running at once.
31:57
Wages falling for ordinary workers and wealth piling up at the top.
32:02
In 2010, he predicted the U.S.
32:04
would hit serious turmoil in the 2020s.
32:07
We're in the middle of the 2020s now,
32:10
and I don't think anyone listening would call these calm years.
32:13
History is blunt about where that leads.
32:17
Stanford historian Walter Scheidel's
32:20
The Great Leveler, argues that across thousands of years,
32:25
big drops in inequality came almost entirely from four major shocks:
32:31
Black Swan events, mass war,
32:34
violent revolution, state collapse,
32:38
and plague. The Black Death killed a third of Europe and left survivors with higher
32:45
wages. That's the record. And it kind of sucks.
32:49
I don't want any of those. I don't want anyone hurt.
32:53
So the question is whether there's another way to move this fast.
32:58
There is evidence that there is.
33:00
Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan studied every major resistance
33:06
campaign from 1900 to 2006 and found that nonviolent movements
33:13
succeed about twice as often as violent ones.
33:16
Poland's Solidarity, the Philippines in 1986,
33:21
the Velvet Revolution.
33:23
None of them needed a guillotine.
33:25
They needed millions of people just refusing to accept the status quo.
33:30
Chenoweth found that almost no campaign in her data failed once
33:36
it drew active participation from 3.5% of the population.
33:41
Here, that's about 12 million Americans.
33:44
The 2017 Women's March drew several million in a single day.
33:50
So here's what we demand. Voting matters.
33:53
And I'll come back to that. But another state,
33:57
another slate, another docket of Democratic senators will
34:03
not fix this fast enough for people who can't afford insulin or groceries right now.
34:09
And the establishment in both parties has had 40 years to notice.
34:15
Pressure has to come from
34:17
outside the ballot box as well.
34:20
Here's what the pressure should demand:
34:22
labor that can actually stop the economy.
34:27
Rebuilt union by union.
34:30
Organizing outside of the two-party system so progressives stop being
34:36
a bloc that Democrats can take for granted.
34:39
Local government
34:42
working people can actually participate in evening meetings,
34:46
real pay, a seat for everyone,
34:49
and specific demands, public rail,
34:52
guaranteed health care, public ownership of what we built,
34:57
paid for by taxing the wealth that's piled up since 1981.
35:03
If you want to see this laid out as a full platform,
35:06
you can listen to Max's episodes of UNFTR.
35:10
He has one called The 5 Non- Negotiables,
35:13
5NN: This Is How We Win. It lays out five non-negotiables.
35:17
The first three are meant to kind of earn people's trust back.
35:21
And the last two are meant to protect our democracy and our planet.
35:25
Those are Housing First, treats shelter as a right.
35:30
You give people a stable home first,
35:32
then help with everything else because nobody gets their lives together while
35:36
sleeping in a car.
35:37
A civilian labor corps is a public jobs guarantee for work that matters
35:42
to a community, but won't turn a profit.
35:45
So the private sector never does it.
35:47
Max pitches it as sort of a way to brace for AI wiping out jobs.
35:53
And I would point it straight at 40 years of deferred maintenance,
35:58
water, rail, bridges. Medicare for All is healthcare as a human right,
36:05
one public plan.
36:06
with no premiums, no deductibles,
36:08
and no bankruptcy after a diagnosis.
36:11
Election integrity, which means getting the money out of politics.
36:14
As long as a politician's career depends on the people with the most to spend,
36:20
they will answer to them first.
36:21
Always.
36:23
Climate action is what Max calls Social Security for the planet.
36:26
A shared safety net we pay now,
36:30
so the next generation inherits something that we can live in and that they
36:34
can live in in the future. I don't line up with them on everything,
36:37
but I think they get the order right.
36:39
They start with the things that change daily life,
36:41
then protect the democracy that makes everything else possible.
36:45
Go find that episode. I'll try to link it in the show notes here.
36:48
You know, I didn't I didn't expect this episode to go in so many directions,
36:51
but I came home with a lot to say.
36:53
In Japan, I didn't keep my head on a swivel.
36:56
I relaxed, I let my guard down,
36:58
I stopped carrying around the fear that one bad diagnosis could take everything.
37:05
For two weeks, I got to see what citizenship could feel like.
37:09
In 1871, Japan sent its leaders around the world for two years to take notes
37:15
on what worked.
37:17
I went for two weeks, and this episode is my notes.
37:20
Some of what Japan does, we probably can't copy.
37:23
Our culture is different. And hey,
37:25
maybe that's another episode. But a lot of it we can.
37:29
Trains that come every four minutes,
37:30
streets you can walk, health care that doesn't end in bankruptcy,
37:35
and a government that treats its people like an investment instead
37:38
of a revenue stream. None of that is magic.
37:41
But someone somewhere chose this for us.
37:45
And for 40 years we've made the other choice.
37:47
We sold the parking meters, we hid the toll roads behind SP65.
37:52
We scheduled democracy for Tuesdays at 1 p.m.
37:55
and then voted down 32 cents to fix it.
37:58
Now we're about to hand AI built from our work and paid for with our
38:03
tax dollars to the same kind of people who bought the meters.
38:07
Gate 52H has been a hot basement for years because nobody
38:12
Who decides what it looks like ever has to sit in it.
38:16
The same goes for the people who decide what a council seat pays,
38:20
where a toll road goes, and who owns AI.
38:24
That's the whole episode in one room.
38:28
And everyone stuck in that room is on the same side,
38:31
whether they know it or not. The young guy who's broke,
38:34
angry, and listening to the only people who offered him an explanation
38:37
is not my enemy. He's on the bottom with the rest of us.
38:40
And rent.
38:41
And wages are his top issues. The people fighting for trans rights,
38:45
abortion rights, and immigrants' rights are not asking for too much.
38:49
Those rights only last in a country stable enough to keep them.
38:53
And Berlin in 1933 showed what happens when it isn't.
38:59
And nobody in the middle has to give anything up for this.
39:02
The money is at the top and it's been piling there since 1981.
39:08
And nothing has ever made it trickle down.
39:11
So here's where we are. We fix it now through investment and reform while
39:17
we still can, if we still can,
39:20
or we just keep selling it off piece by piece and find out what Walter
39:25
and Turchin already warned us about.
39:26
I know which future I want to live in.
39:28
I'm voting in the midterms like the country depends on it because it does.
39:32
But the day after the election,
39:35
that's when work starts. Every Democrat who flips a seat,
39:39
every candidate who wins owes us.
39:41
We should call their offices, pack their town halls,
39:45
and show up at every meeting they'd rather that we skipped peacefully,
39:49
relentlessly, and with the ferocity of people who know exactly what's at stake.
39:56
This ship is sinking. We've got to grab a bucket.
40:00
I'll see you at the next meeting.
40:01
Be kind to each other.
40:03
Because we need each other more than you realize.
40:06
Don't forget to check out our website at fof.foundation,
40:10
just fof.foundation.com. You can send us an email at
40:15
the overlap at fof.foundation.
40:18
Or you can hit us up on our socials,
40:20
our Bluesky, our Mastodon, or check us out on your latest podcast app.
40:25
Give us a review. Five stars if you will.
40:27
We'll see you next time. Bye.