Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good Monday morning, everyone. As we begin this new week, let's stop for a moment to consider what a significant time last week turned out to be. The leader of Al-Qaeda was killed by a US drone strike. Right-wing talk show host, Alex Jones, who had called the Newtown, Connecticut elementary school massacre a hoax, and falsely accused the parents of one of the victims of being involved in the crime, Alex Jones is ordered by a Texas jury to pay $45 million in damages to those parents.

The January 6th Committee is now looking at text messages that Jones' lawyers turned over during the case. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, as you've heard, came in from the cold and backed the biggest climate bill in US history, which passed the Senate last night, and which will also lower prescription drug prices, extend Obamacare subsidies, and force billion-dollar companies to pay a 15% minimum tax.

By the way, that caps a series of accomplishments in Congress under President Biden recently, including the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the Burn Pits Bill to fund health care for veterans made sick by toxics and war, the bipartisan gun control compromise, and the Chips Act to help produce semiconductor chips in the United States to reduce the cost of cars and other products. Also, last week, citizens of Kansas decisively voted to preserve abortion rights. Nobody is going to forget that one anytime soon. The news organization, The City, used census numbers to calculate the child poverty declined in the Bronx by six percentage points in 2020, the last year for which numbers are available.

That was the first year of the pandemic. It was announced that the US economy created a whopping 528,000 jobs in July, sending unemployment finally down to pre-pandemic levels, and gasoline prices declined for the seventh consecutive week. Depending on what you root for, it was a pretty great week. Then again, the Indiana state legislature was undaunted by the vote in Kansas and passed a brand new ban on almost all abortions on Friday night. Most Republicans even voted for no exceptions for rape or incest, but there were enough Democratic votes to get those exceptions included.

Republican primary voters in Arizona nominated a candidate named Mark Finchem for Secretary of State, who according to The New York Times wants to ban early voting, sharply restrict mail-in ballots, and has actually co-sponsored a bill that would give the state's Republican-led legislature the authority to overturn election results. In fact, Finchem quotes Donald Trump telling him, "The Arizona Secretary of State race is the most important race in the United States." Who knows, Trump may turn out to be right about that. The fate of electoral democracy itself in 2024 may hinge on this race.

The influential Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, in Texas, which has proven repeatedly to lead on Republican priorities, welcomed as a featured speaker, Viktor Orbán, the culture warrior head of state of Hungary, a country the CPAC organizers would like us to emulate when Orbán says things like this.

Viktor Orbán: Hungarian state institutions are obliged to protect the Christian culture of Hungary. Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting that heterosexuality is what he singled out as representing Christian culture that the state should be obliged to protect. Nothing else that the Bible may have said like in Matthew 25, "The stranger is Jesus in disguise." If he was protecting that part of Christianity, he probably wouldn't have said this.

Viktor Orbán: Even though we are under pressure not only from the South but also from the eggheads of the European Union as well, yes, this is the case, my friend. They want us to give up our zero migration policy because they also know that this is the decisive and final battle of the future.

Brian Lehrer: A zero migration policy as the final battle of the future. Viktor Orbán at CPAC where he got a standing ovation. History has not ended with the leading edge of the American right pinning their identity on zero migration from the South and establishment of conservative Christianity by the government. Still, for jobs, the deficit, the climate, gasoline prices, abortion rights at the ballot box, and accountability for a conspiracy theorist who caused real harm, it was a major week last week in 2022. Now on to this week when maybe a few more things will happen.

With me now is John Cassidy, New Yorker staff writer on politics and economics, among many other things. He is author of the book, Dot.Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold about the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, and the book, How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities, which put the 2008 financial crisis in historical context. We'll talk about this bizarre, paradoxical economy we're in right now, but also other things. John's latest New Yorker article is called, The Kansas Abortion Referendum Has a Message for Democrats. John, always great to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

John Cassidy: Thanks very much for inviting me on, Brian. Happy to be here.

Brian Lehrer: All right. I'll bite on your latest. What message does the Kansas abortion referendum have for Democrats?

John Cassidy: Okay, yes, let's start in Kansas. I think the message which I took from it was that this is just, the Republicans, because of their extremism and the Supreme Court have presented the Democratic Party here with a historic opportunity to refashion Democrats as the party of individual liberty and fighting against over encroachment from the government. I've been covering American politics for 30 years now and the Republicans have all that time, that has been their basic message. It's been misleading. Probably won't go into the history of how the Republican Party says one thing and does the other, but it's been very successful.

After Kansas, I was reminded of a interview I did 20 years ago now with Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, one of the leading figures on the new right for the past few decades, and he told me at the time, that what holds together the Republican or conservative coalition rather, is this theory of getting the government off your backs. He calls it the Leave Us Alone Coalition. I think what's happened now is the Supreme Court has greatly overreached here, and even in a place like Kansas, it seemed to be reaching right into the heart of people's lives, the most personal decisions you can make about health and reproduction, et cetera.

It seems to me that this is a big opportunity for the Democrats. In Kansas, we saw that it worked. There was a big messaging campaign around that, around, the government's going too far here, and it worked. You see it in other areas too, now the Republicans, obviously, on voting rights, on the Supreme Court's move possibly against gay marriage now that they've moved against abortion. We just see this aggressive move into private lives by the government. I think that gives Democrats, as I say, a historic opportunity to push back and say, "Look, we're the party of the little guy protecting you against the government.

We're the party of individual responsibility and individual decision-making here." It helps for November, of course, but I think there's a much longer-term strategy, which can be seized here too.

Brian Lehrer: Is it a tough message for Democrats, though, to sell as their identity personal freedom? Because really, both parties want government mandates just for different things. Republicans want abortion rights, Democrats want to limit gun rights and to enforce climate protections that affect our personal choices, things like that.

John Cassidy: Of course. The Democratic Party is the party of government and the party of reform, and the party of the New Deal, and the party of the American Rescue Act, the party of the Obamacare, and now the party, which we'll be talking about, of the biggest climate legislation in history. Yes, of course, the Republicans also were pushing a very contradictory line, of course, because they were pushing themselves as the protectors of liberty. It seems to me it's not so much an effort here to redefine what the Democratic Party stands for in policy terms, but it's a real opportunity here to show how far to the right the Republicans have moved.

It's a messaging issue rather than a substantial issue, I think, here.

Brian Lehrer: Before we go onto your main specialty, which is the economy with all this crazy economic news, do you have any theory to explain Indiana in this context, just three days after the Kansas vote? It could be that Kansas has a more libertarian conservatism and places like Indiana or Texas have a more theocratic Viktor Orbán kind of conservatism if you will. Remember, Indiana had Mike Pence as governor who signed a law requiring funerals for aborted fetuses back before he was vice president, so maybe the lesson of Kansas is different state by state.

John Cassidy: I think the message is all politics is local to go back to Tip O'Neill. The way we do, there is a bit of a tendency in New York, the whole Saul Steinberg, [unintelligible 00:10:17]-

Brian Lehrer: New Yorker cartoon?

John Cassidy: -to look at everything west of Jersey is the same, but these individual states have, as you pointed out, very different histories. The evangelical movement is stronger. In some states, there are various strands of the evangelical movement. As you say, it seemed, I wouldn't call myself by any stretch an expert on Indiana history, but the evangelical [unintelligible 00:10:39] of the movement has always been very strong there. As I understand it, just reading up on the Kansas thing last week, paradoxically parts of Kansas have seen themselves as slightly less theocratic than some of the surrounding states.

Even though Kansas is not a big pro-abortion state in the sense that they've already had limitations on abortion after a certain number of weeks, et cetera, I think what hit the public there hard and went down very badly was the claim that we needed a total ban. That was what enabled the Democrats to say, "Look, this is a matter of freedom and individual choice, et cetera." Yes, they want some restrictions but the idea of a total ban was very unpopular.

Brian Lehrer: John Cassidy from The New Yorker, our guest. Let's go on to your main specialty, which is the economy. 528,000 jobs added to the economy in July, twice what economists were predicting. The June number also exceeded forecasts. The unemployment rate is back to pre-pandemic levels for the first time, hurray, but people are confused, John, because all those jobs came after six months, two-quarters of the overall economy shrinking. Maybe it's history's first full employment recession, I think I just made up that term, which, on paper, cannot happen.

Of course, we have all this inflation. In The New Yorker last month, you used the technical term that I think economists use, a crazy economy. Help us little people who aren't economists understand this. What the heck is going on?

John Cassidy: I think there's several cross currents. As you pointed out, it's very difficult to write about this stuff because I think public perceptions and economist perceptions are different. I think the basic point here is that the public's perception of a recession is just general hard times. Things aren't very good for themselves, their personal finances are under strain, et cetera. We are seeing that now because inflation is running ahead of people's incomes, inflation is running about 9%. Their job figures last week had a wages component, and they're going up about 5%.

That means for the average person, real wages are going down about 4%. Now, if you go to the supermarket, you don't need me to tell that, you know you can see bread prices going up. You go to the gas station, you see, even though it's fallen in the last month relative to a year ago, it was obviously very high. I think there's just a general funk out there among the public about what they're seeing on inflation. Then when a pollster rings them up and says, "Do you think the economy is in a recession?" they think the question is, "Is the rest of economy in bad shape?" They say, "Yes," so you get 75%, 80% of the population saying there's a recession.

In economic terms, a recession is more to do with GDP, and output, and employment. There's a common rule of thumb that two quarters in a row of negative GDP growth through the recession, the actual technical definition is broader than that. It's an extended period of decline in employment, spending, and income. We haven't seen that. Employment, as we saw, is been very strong. 528,000 in a slowing economy is a pretty remarkable figure, actually. As you said, the previous months have been revised up. We also see it on the spending side.

There's a lot of stories about some retailers struggling, and some retailers are struggling, the GAP, for example, but overall, if you just look at the national figures from the government spending, it's still holding up pretty well. We have seen a substantial slowdown in the economy this year. There's no doubt about that. We had this huge rebound last year from the reopening of the economy. There's been a slowdown, but it's not in a recession as economists would see it. I think everybody agrees with that now after the employment figures came out apart from [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Do you have an opinion about whether the Fed should raise interest rates again in response to the employment search?

John Cassidy: I think it's a reasonable policy on the part of the Fed. The Fed had basically reduced rates to 0%, remember that, during the pandemic because they were terrified of a financial crisis, and it was returned to the 1930s in terms of a great depression. They brought interest rates down to unprecedented levels, and inflation at that time was running basically 0% too. Inflation has gone from 0% to 9%. I think it's a reasonable reaction from the Fed to raise interest rates some way towards that to try and bring inflation down. The question is how far?

They've indicated from the start of the year, they're probably going to raise interest rates to 3.5%, 4% by the end of the year. I think that was probably a reasonable strategy. They're already involved in half that way, the question now is should they accelerate? Should they go further than that because inflation still seems to be more persistent than they thought? I would say, I think that's an open question. The market is already expecting interest rate rises of 1% between September and December, which will probably come. The market expects a 50 basis point increase in September, and then 225 basis point increases in subsequent meetings.

The question is, should they just stick with that strategy? Should they increase interest rates more than that because of the inflation shock or because the economy has been slowing, should they stop interest rate rises here? A lot of people, especially on the [unintelligible 00:16:06] left were saying maybe they should stop here because the economy is already slowing. I think the employment figures have knocked that story down a bit. The economy seems stronger than we thought three or four weeks ago. I think the Fed at the moment is probably content to stick with what they've indicated, 1% more increases in the next four or five months when they get back from the summer vacation.

The big question is if inflation doesn't come down a bit as they expect, will they go higher? Some people, Larry Summers and others, are talking about maybe they'll have to raise interest rates to 5% or something, and really knock the economy into deep recession. I don't think there's any justification for that strategy.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your comments, questions, editorials welcome for John Cassidy from The New Yorker, on all that accumulated news from the last week. Kansas, the Inflation Reduction Act, which we're about to talk about, the jobs numbers, the CPAC Conference, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Do you see Congress and Biden as on a roll now, despite many things they can't get done? 212-433-WNYC. Do you support or oppose the new corporate minimum tax that's in the inflation reduction bill or the carried interest loophole that they fail to close at the behest of Kyrsten Sinema or anything else relevant?

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @Brian Lehrer. We'll fold you into this conversation this morning. John, let's talk about the Inflation Reduction Act as it's called, now that it passed the Senate last night, climate investments, Medicare can negotiate prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical companies like private health insurers already could, and the VA. Obamacare subsidies will be expanded to some degree. There is some federal deficit reduction, and there's the corporate minimum tax. From what I've read, the Congressional Budget Office says the effect on inflation will be minimal, even though it's called the Inflation Reduction Act.

What's your take on the economic impact of this bill, and whether it's honestly named?

John Cassidy: I think everybody knows it was just named to satisfy Manchin. The Democrats had to bring Manchin on board somehow and his whole political MO was that the only thing he would sign onto was an Inflation Reduction Act. He'd been saying that for a year. That's the justification he's used for refusing to sign onto previous deals. I think Chuck Schumer, being an adroit politician said, "Okay, we'll call it whatever you want. Let's get down to the details of what's in it." You're right in terms of tackling inflation in the immediate future, all the studies that have been done of it show it makes very little difference.

Now, over the longer term, it could have substantial effects on prices and costs of living, especially for people who use prescription drugs. If we push ahead with the transformation to green energy, we'd be much less reliant on oil prices, et cetera, so we wouldn't be as vulnerable to the big oil price spike we've seen in the last year. Over the long term, it certainly is a counter-inflation rebuild, but over the short term, it doesn't have that much impact on it.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Judy in Port Washington wants to go back to the lesson you say Democrats should learn from the abortion referendum in Kansas, Judy, you're on WNYC. Hi there.

Judy: Hi, thank you. Yes, I think one way to reframe the two political parties, the Democratic Party sees itself as working for you and the Republican party is working for your boss.

Brian Lehrer: That's a big debate, in the parties right now, right, John? As apparently, more college-educated people vote Democratic, whereas college-educated white people, in the past, tended to vote majority Republican. Now they're tending to vote majority Democrat. More working-class income people, certainly, working-class income white people, vote Republicans, and the number of working-class Black and Latino people voting Republican is going up.

There have been some articles that say there's a resorting by class going on between the two parties. I'm sure we could get leading Democrats and Republicans up on the stage here, and they would argue till they're blue in the face, who's really the party of your boss, and who's really the party of the working person? Where are you?

John Cassidy: I agree, [unintelligible 00:20:53] the historic realignment if you just look at the voting patterns, the Democrats used to be the party of the labor unions and the working class. Now, we saw it was happening pre-Trump, but the Trump movement has accelerated that realignment substantially. The right working class who don't go to college, the white noncollege working class, which is about 45% of the electorate, or was in the last election, is very solidly Republican or very solidly Trumpian now.

You see on the other side of the divide, the college-educated classes who used to tend to vote Republican, country club Republicanism, now that's the Democratic stronghold in urban and suburban areas. We have seen that flip. It's not a 180% flip. It's still, people underestimate how many white working-class people still vote for the Democrats. It's not 100% Trumpian by any stretch. I think it's 60%/40%, but there's certainly been a classier realignment, as you said. In terms of who represents the workers, just to bring it back to this bill, for example.

We saw the remarkable and depressing spectacle of Senator Kyrsten Sinema basically holding up the entire bill just to do several favors for the private equity industry, which is the biggest awkward income distribution scheme we've ever seen. That was a Democrat protecting private equity. It's more complicated. Obviously, the Republicans all voted against the carried interest deduction, abolition, of course, as well, but the sight of a Democrat siding with private equity like that, I found pretty depressing.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to continue in a minute and take more of your phone calls for John Cassidy from The New Yorker as we talk Monday morning politics here on the Brian Lehrer Show after a pretty remarkable last week in many ways. John, I'm going to follow up when we come back, on those economic favors that Kyrsten Sinema got in there, saving the so-called carried interest loophole. Also, the thing that is in the bill is 15% minimum tax on corporations that earn a billion dollars or more. I'm going to play you a clip of Lindsey Graham, who was on CNN yesterday, saying this is actually bad for workers.

We'll hear why, we'll get your response, we'll take more calls, more tweets. Brian Lehrer with John Cassidy on WNYC.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, as we talk Monday morning politics with John Cassidy from The New Yorker. Maybe you know John's books on the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and on the financial crisis of 2008 and thereabouts, which we're really still living with in various ways despite all the other economic things that have taken place since then. We're talking about the intersection of politics and economics this morning. One of the things in the Inflation Reduction Act is a 15% minimum tax for corporations making a billion dollars a year or more.

I want to play a clip of Lindsey Graham on CNN State of the Union yesterday, arguing that this is actually not good for workers in the overall economy. Here's Lindsey Graham.

Lindsey Graham: The minimum tax at 15% destroys expensing. Now, what does that mean? If a company buys a piece of equipment, they could expense it under the 2017 tax cut in the same year they bought it. That goes away, so, CBO says it disincentivizes companies for building factories, buying equipment, which would help us get out of recession.

Brian Lehrer: Do you agree at all with Lindsey Graham?

John Cassidy: There's a technical issue on expensing investment. The final version of the bill actually limited that. Some of what Lindsey Graham is saying is not actually correct there. I think in broader terms, he's really setting up a strawman here. Corporate America got out of the Biden administration very well so far. If you think about a year ago, 18 months ago, when Biden came in, there were all the great ambitions to reverse the Trump Tax Code of 2017, which was arguably the biggest tax cut in history for corporate America. Most of that has just been left on the cutting board because of negotiations with Sinema and Manchin.

What we have, instead of the historic reversal, the 2017 Act, and the higher taxes on the rich, higher taxes on corporations to address the huge increase in inequality we've seen over the last 20 years or 30 years, we have these really pretty minor tax increases of the minimum tax stated on being conferred big corporations who report a different level of tax to the authorities that they do to their shareholders. Really, that's only a tiny element of what was in the original bill. Really, I think Lindsey Graham is just making a political message here to try and paint the Democrats, the usual Republican message as the party of high tax. This is a very modest bill on the tax side.

Brian Lehrer: You've covered tax fairness for many years, and you had written hopefully, a few weeks ago in The New Yorker, about the so-called carried interest tax loophole for hedge fund managers and private equity managers finally being closed. That's exactly what Senator Kyrsten Sinema negotiated out of the bill to get her support. The argument on that side, as I understand it, is it's good for jobs and innovation to have a low tax rate for risky investments so that capital will flow to startups and America will lead in new technologies.

That's their view for keeping that low tax rate. What's your view?

John Cassidy: There's a huge lobbying industry here, Brian, of course. The Private Equity Council has renamed itself the American Investment Council or something along those lines. They spend tens of millions of dollars a year, and this is the line they've come up with. If you actually look at the carried interest deduction, basically, people invest their money with these hedge funds are private equity companies. If they make a profit, the hedge fund or the private equity company takes 20% of that as a fee. The people who had taken the risks here are not the private equity managers or the hedge fund managers.

They're the people who invest with them. They're the risk takers, but because the hedge fund managers and the private equity managers get 20% of the income, they are then allowed to declare that as a capital gain as if they were the ones who were taking the risk. Obviously, anybody who's ever looked at this in any depth thinks it's a scam. Even Bill Ackman, the Wall Street billionaire said last week, "This is a disgrace," or two weeks ago, "We should get rid of it. Everybody in the industry knows that it doesn't help the customers and doesn't help the businesses."

It's not that big a deal in absolute terms. The money involved was I think $14 billion over 10 years, which in budget terms is not that large. I think that's an underestimate, but whatever. It's not a huge sum relative to the rest of the tax system. It's just such a glaring example of how special interests and very wealthy interests have gained the tax system for years. The fact that it survives is just the best example there is of how it doesn't really matter who the president is. We've had three presidents now trying to get rid of the carried interest deduction, Obama, Trump, and Biden, and none of them have succeeded.

Brian Lehrer: Even Trump. That's such a great clarification of the loophole too, that the hedge fund managers and the private equity managers get to take the deduction as if they were the ones taking the risk, but it's really other people's money.

John Cassidy: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: Now, listeners, we have a very interesting-looking caller who I'm going to go to next, from a place that I don't think we've ever had a caller from before. Why? For those of you who haven't been with us since the top of the hour, I played two clips of the Head of State of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas last week, where Orbán said Hungarian state institutions are obliged to protect the Christian culture of Hungary. Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

His definition of what's at the heart of Christian culture and government. Establishing Christian culture in that country, the conservatives at CPAC obviously want to do that here. They gave him a standing ovation. He also said a zero migration policy is the final battle of the future. That's where Viktor Orbán was coming from when conservatives celebrated him at CPAC in Texas last week. We are getting a call from Budapest. Tessa in Budapest, Hungary, you are on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling in. Hello from New York.

Tessa: Hi, thanks so much for having me. I listen to your show all the time, but I've never called.

Brian Lehrer: I'm so honored. Hello.

Tessa: Hi.

Brian Lehrer: What were you thinking watching your president speak in Texas?

Tessa: We hear this all the time, so it's not a very unique speech, it's in our everyday life. I just wanted to call because I feel, I don't know, disheartened or disappointed when I see that everywhere Hungary is represented through the eyes of Viktor Orbán, or as if Viktor Orbán was everything about Hungary. I just wanted to make sure that you guys know that there is another Hungary too. People who are actually resisting the authoritarian system that he's building, and people who are fighting for equality, and who are working for refugee rights, and migrant rights, and housing rights, and progressive causes, and environmental sustainability.

I feel that that part of Hungary is not really represented. I feel that it's a vicious cycle. The more Viktor Orbán is seen as Hungary itself, the less power we have, people who are fighting for actually social justice under a more and more oppressive regime. I just wanted to make sure that people know that there are other people in Hungary and not everybody in Hungary is like Viktor Orbán, and not everybody supports his views.

Brian Lehrer: I'm so glad you gave voice to that, but let me ask you a question, Tessa. I was reading up in conjunction with a speech on Orbán in Hungary, and his latest reelection this year, and I know he imposed some authoritarian limitations on the opposition parties. Then when the vote came back, it seems like he won in a landslide indicating he is and these policies are fairly popular among the people there. Would that be a misimpression?

Tessa: No, this last national election that took place in April was actually a big defeat for the opposition. That's true. I think it had a lot to do with, not a very strong opposition, not a very skilled opposition, to be very polite with them, but also it had a lot to do with the war in Ukraine and the kind of propaganda that the government was pushing, which was that if the opposition wins, then all Hungarian will be recruited and will be sent to Ukraine to fight. There is, of course, a lot of manipulation of the vote. It's true that there is a big support for Orbán's regime, although I have to point out that, for example, in Budapest where I live, the city, most of the people vote opposition.

There is a huge divide between the capital of the city and the rest of the country. I also work for a municipality, which is actually an opposition municipality. It's run by a mayor who came from a grassroots social organization who is not affiliated with any party in particular. We are trying to push a very different kind of platform that the national government does. There is, I think, a big struggle between the national government and a lot of progressive local governments.

Brian Lehrer: Tessa, thank you so much for that education that you've given our audience. Find another reason to call us sometime. Thank you very, very much for today.

Tessa: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: We have time for one more call. Yes, this is the show that takes callers from Budapest to Mineola. Sheila in Mineola, you're on WNYC with John Cassidy from The New Yorker. Hi there.

Sheila: Hi, can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you.

Sheila: Hello? Yes, you can? Okay, that's good. I'm glad you can hear me.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we got you. You want to talk about the unemployment numbers, right?

Sheila: Yes, it sounds like maybe a nitpicky kind of thing. I have a considerable background in finance, and also on social issues and stuff like that. I'm old, I've accumulated a lot of information. The idea that employment is going up, statistically speaking, and this is not personal about the guy who say this, that we see employment going up. I know a lot of people around where I am, are trying to work. They're either small business owners just scrambling and scrambling and scrambling to get supplies so they can continue their business.

The working, employed people are coming and going, including [unintelligible 00:34:21] coming and going. The part-time jobs, they get them, then they lose it, then they get another part-time job, then they lose them because of whatever the bosses decide is good for them. The people at the working level just come and go, and come and go, which can make the employment numbers, new employment--

Brian Lehrer: Look greater than they are. who we are.

Sheila: Oh, new employment, new jobs, really inflating but not really helping.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, look better than they are. We had a good report by our reporter Karen Yi on the station this morning. Some of you heard it on Morning Edition, about the situation that temp workers face where they wind up making less than the minimum wage. John, is this a bubble in temp workers, this low unemployment rate now, making it not as good as it appears?

John Cassidy: Again, I think there's some crosscurrents here. We have a long-term casualization of the labor force, which is what the caller was so vividly pointing out, in that, lots more people are on short-term contracts with very few rights and low wages, et cetera. That has been a trend going for decades and is still continuing. At the same time, because of the incredible shocks to the system over the last couple of years with the pandemic, we do have a lot more turnover in the labor market, people coming and going. Part of that is due to the opposite effect, in that, there are more jobs available than there are workers at the moment.

A lot of the turnover is people trying a job and then getting a better one down the street, or get better working conditions, et cetera. I don't want to minimize the caller's point, that even if you do get very good overall job figures, a lot of people are still stuck in positions where they are not seeing much benefit from it, either because they're on low wages or because they're on these temp jobs where they have no security.

Brian Lehrer: John Cassidy writes about politics and economics for The New Yorker. John, thanks a lot.

John Cassidy: Thank you.

 

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