(uplifting music) (music ends) - When President Biden's asked to define America, he does it with one word, "Possibilities."

But for too many, those possibilities don't exist.

The word that defines their lives is "Unfair."

Today, we'll focus on America's tale of two economies.

As many revel in the best of times, millions more feel like they're getting, as President Biden says, "Ripped off in the worst of times."

Joining us are Anand Giridharadas, author of the bestselling book, The Persuaders at the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy.

And two veteran journalists who are collaborating on a book about race and money in America, called The Black Dollar, Louise Story, and Ebony Reed.

And later personal finance guru Susie Orman, will tell us what's ahead for the economy and your money.

But first, we want to welcome you, welcome panel.

Anand, I'm going to start with you, because even though Americans may be pushing back against inequality, polls show they really think that it's part of the system, it's part of capitalism, that it's a feature, not a bug.

They actually feel that rich people get richer because they're smarter and they work harder.

What's wrong with that picture?

- It's not true.

And I think the easiest way to maybe begin a conversation about this issue is to say, we are not in the United States, the country most of us think we are, right?

There's a values judgment that can be made about the right amount of inequality.

Different societies tolerate different amounts, but we are not even the people we think we are.

We think we are a country.

If you walk down the street here in Connecticut or in any state in this country, any community in this country, urban community, rural community, and you ask people, "What do you think actually makes the American opportunity system, American economy, American society, special in the world?"

I think a lot of people would say in the top couple things, they said, "If you work hard, you will get to a place, you know, regardless of where you're born, regardless of what your origins were, you will get to a place commensurate with your effort."

And in fact, if you look at data, of all the rich countries in the world, ours is the country where that is least true.

The American dream is alive and well, just not in America.

And I think that kind of gap between our self-image as a country, a self-image that straddles left and right and all other communities, and the reality is, for me, a starting point of this conversation.

- And that's exactly what we're doing, is starting it by sort of defining where we think we are.

And Ebony, I want to actually quote Trevor Noah, who made a farewell speech.

- Great economist.

- Great economist, absolutely.

And talked about the fact that when things start to go bad, black people know it's going to be even worse for them, basically is what he said.

The latest Yale research is that the average white family has 10 times the wealth of the average black family.

What's, how do you set up this conversation today?

- Oh, I think we have to go back and look at the beginning when this country was founded.

So when we go back and look at, you know, who had rights at the beginning of this country, a lot of those full rights were granted to property owners, who were white men.

And so that set up a gap from the very beginning between property owners, non-property owners, between men, between women, between white people and non-white people.

So as we move across the spectrum of time, we'll see, you know, ups and downs between the gaps.

But one thing that is consistent is that, a gap has been there from the very beginning.

- Louise, and we want to point out again, you are collaborating on this book, Poles showed there's very little concern for poor people.

Poor people don't get a lot of love.

Poor people don't get a lot of sympathy.

And one of the things I've heard you say is that "When New York gets a cold, Harlem gets pneumonia," which is another way, very sort of graphically of defining what we're talking about today.

What is your take on on where we are in terms of, it's historic, there's no question, but what's your take?

- Part of it is that a lot of people in society are focused on income and money that flows to you each year, rather than wealth.

And so when New York gets a cold and Harlem gets pneumonia, that was something that was said by a prominent Black American reverend in Harlem about Black Americans.

But it can also apply to poor people of any race without wealth.

If you don't have wealth and reserves and a safety net, when you get a setback, you lose a job, springing back is harder than if you have a wealth reserve.

And a lot of things, think about it, we all look at the jobs report every month and so on.

You're looking at the flow of income and money, but not that stock of wealth, that capital and that wealth is what creates these gaps.

The male female gap, the black white gap, the Latino white gap, those are gaps that we carry with us through generations.

- Anand, you, I actually saw you give an impassioned, and you were really, you were cooking on all cylinders during this speech, talking about the fact that this inequality has basically created two groups of people, extreme winners, extreme losers, and that we're living in a divided situation where you've got a republic of dreams and a republic of fears.

And part of the problem, as you see it, is that even when people are, even when rich people are giving back, even when they're doing philanthropic things and they're trying to change the world for the better, you're saying that's part of the problem.

Why is that part of the problem?

- The prompt for my previous book Winners Take All, which was about this, was I kept seeing all these announcements and kept seeing all these, you know, big, big pledges to give money away.

And Mark Zuckerberg saying, "I'm going to, you know, give 99% of my money away to solve all the world's diseases," even though his own company was a plague, but he's going to solve all the world's diseases, and so on and so forth.

And I kind of started wondering, how is it that all these people are making all these announcements, making all these pledges, giving all these money away?

And yet if you look at the numbers, year by year, the same group of people, the same actual people increase their amount of hoarding year by year, increase their share of the nation's wealth and power year by year.

So they're giving back, but they're taking more and more.

And I became curious about the relationship between the giving and the taking.

And the conclusion I came to from my reporting was that these people, that class in general, that plutocratic billionaire class uses giving back, charity, philanthropy, paying for people's surgeries, getting rid of all the diseases, performatively, supposedly, in order to deepen their hold on wealth and power even more, and giving serves as a kind of handmaiden, of taking even more.

And generosity serves as a kind of wingman of the injustice that they continue to perpetrate.

And it basically functions as a kind of drive-through reputational laundromat for them, that allows them to wipe the stink of how they made the money off them, how they busted the unions, how they did wage theft, how they preserved unlawful monopolies, and then go back over here and just make more.

And we keep falling for it, thinking that they are kind, and that some of their largess is going to fall on us.

- Wait a minute, wait a minute.

I mean, this is- - I got all the time you want.

(laughter) - I know, this is harsh though.

I mean, they are doing good things.

They are, you're almost making it sound like it's conscious that it's being done in a Machiavellian kind of way, I mean- - A lot of companies literally put their charity work under the marketing department.

It is absolutely Machiavellian and intentional to understand that when they have this kind of problem, because they have harmed society, they understand that a little bit of publicity about their giving can be incredibly helpful.

And it's about time we wisen up and understand what they already do.

- All right.

Well, Louise, you've carved out a real reputation for covering the 2008 financial crisis.

And I said harsh.

I mean, I understand that you've blocked out what happened at one company, but are you broad brushing all these people who are doing all these charitable things, and saying that basically they're doing it to hang on to the wealth and power?

I mean, do you feel that's a valid argument?

- I think many people who are giving charitable donations have good intentions behind giving that money.

And certainly it's better that they give the money than not give it at all given that they have it.

So I'm not questioning any individual's intention, but I think that the points that we're discussing here are important because they're systemic questions.

Do we as a country want so many assets tied up in the hands of so few people and then just left to their whim on if they want to give or if they want to burnish the reputations, whatever the intention is.

And if you just look at the numbers, you know, the top 1% of Americans control one third of the assets.

So whether or not they have good or bad intentions in giving the money away, the fact of the matter is these are data points.

The top 1% have a third of the assets, is that what we as a country want?

- But part of the issue also, and we are talking about systemic issues, when you talked to former ambassador Andrew Young, who was a colleague of Martin Luther King, and he talked about how they had been very conscious of the fact that economic injustice was something that had to be addressed.

But he said people don't understand capitalism.

They think that for, you know, one person that gets more, the other person necessarily gets less.

And so it's seen as a zero sum game.

Isn't that part of this issue too?

- Well, historians have also documented that Ambassador Andrew Young and Dr. King at a certain point, kind of had a divergence of thoughts around capitalism.

And if we look at some of Dr. King's last speeches, his last work, he talks about banking black, he talks about capitalism, he calls for economic boycotts.

So he is in his, you know, last works, starting to talk about economic justice and really put that at the forefront.

So I think one of the questions we have to ask ourselves as a society, are we okay with, you know, certain members of society having less than others?

Are we okay with knowing that, you know, we look at student loans, you know, black women carry a larger percentage of that debt.

When we look at who's, you know, coming out of school, are we okay with knowing that such a large percentage of black and brown communities are impacted by the criminal justice system?

You know, all of that is connected to economics.

- Here's the thing, we know what needs to be done in this country many times, we know that we've got a big problem with childcare in the workforce.

We know we've got a big problem with paid family leave, or not having paid family leave, the student debt that you mentioned.

But it's a question, Anand of, you may know what you need to do and you may have the money to do it, but you don't have the political will to do it.

You don't have people, you actually don't have that many people who think that wealth inequality is a big problem.

Maybe it's because they're aspirational and they want to be a rich person one day.

But the point is that polls also show that very often people are not that upset about wealth inequality.

How do you start to change the system in terms of wanting to make those things happen?

- I believe the place to start is PBS panel shows.

So here we are.

- Good choice!

(laughter) Thank you.

- Look, I think you're raising something valid, but I think there's two different issues.

First of all, on the, do regular people want change to begin with front, I think there's been a huge amount of shift on this in the last 10 years, less than 10 years, more than I would say, certainly in my lifetime.

I think if you think about the two Bernie campaigns, if you think about the rise of AOC as a political figure, but now the entire increasingly deep bench of the squad in Congress, if you think about young people who say they feel some allegiance to Democratic socialism in this country, there is a sea change happening.

You know, Joe Biden has multiple times proposed a tax targeting billionaires.

That was not Barack Obama's Democratic party, that was not Bill Clinton's Democratic Party there.

And Joe Biden, who I think most of us would've put to the right of those figures, because of the shifting dynamics in the party and in the country, you know, when Elizabeth Warren put out a wealth tax, 2 cents on 50 million and up, 3 cents on a billion and up, I think it had clear overwhelming support in general from Democrats, but it had a majority of Republicans favoring it, right?

And so there is a shift happening.

I would also say even if you get popular will in terrific formation, as Beyonce would say, there is a problem of the richest and most powerful people vetoing a lot of things that most people want, through their stranglehold on power, through, you know, various American institutions like the filibuster and other things.

And so we have to do both.

We have to more deeply organize greater numbers of Americans to not think falsely they're going to be, you know, the next billionaire and therefore vote to, you know, tax their future imagined selves.

But we also need to restrict money in politics and reduce the political influence of big money so that things that 60, 70, 80% Americans want can actually become the law.

- Louise, you know, conservatives, the Heritage Foundation talks about the fact that inequality is not such a terrible thing, that you need a certain amount of inequality for growth.

Of course, our numbers as Anand has pointed out, are just off the charts in this country.

We have the absolute worst numbers in this country.

But what's the other, I mean, the other point of view is that rich people give the most back to society in terms of taxes, that they actually feel like they're being sort of called out and beaten up.

I mean, you know, that mentality on Wall Street, how do you talk about the conservative point of view fitting into this picture?

- Much of the business community and much of Wall Street does think that you know, people being able to make a large amount of returns and capital is important to growth, right?

But I agree that there is a tide shift.

I mean, the success of what you're seeing with like the research by Thomas Piketty, his book Capital and so on, more people are talking about how the rate of return on capital has outpaced the rate of return on incomes, and that this is what's really contributing to this gap.

And so you've seen a shift, you know, very prominent people on Wall Street like Larry Fink, who runs BlackRock, for example, have been talking about more social issues, social investing.

And so I have seen, you know, I've been writing on Wall Street and business in some form, or editing it for 20 years.

And I have seen a shift within the business and banking community, where there are more people within that community who also think that systemically it's time to look at, you want growth, but you also want to look at distribution.

So I do think that's shifting.

- Go ahead.

- I think we have to also think about and look at government policies and how they're implemented, and sometimes if there are unintentioned, or not completely well thought out implications.

So like if we go back and we look at, you know, what happens with World War II, where the GI bill was established by the government.

People wanted, you know, they wanted these benefits which led to home ownership, people being able to go to college, and also start small businesses, right?

So that's growth, government supporting it.

That was a federal program, but it was implemented in local communities.

And at that time, in the 1940s, if there was discrimination in some parts of the country where we know it happens, involving, you know, black Americans, not all black people could take advantage of those benefits.

I come from a family where my grandfather, Robert Reed, on my father's side was a GI, and he was believed to have been a cook.

And my aunt Sandra has educated me about that in our family, and that he was able to buy his first home using the GI bill, although my family was redlined in a suburb of Louisville.

So they were only able to live in at that time a black community.

But I know from the conversations of my aunt and I have had about how being able to utilize that bill set our family down a much more middle class path than many other families, many other black families.

- But talk about redlining, you actually, I think, had an experience where you both had to sell your homes during the financial, another bonding experience obviously, during the financial crisis, you had very different experiences.

Who wants to tell what happened?

- Either way, we both had homes.

They were both difficult to sell.

It was 2008.

And because of a number of factors that are built into lives, what part of the country we were living in, what types of mortgages we had.

Ultimately, it wasn't a debt that was carried with me, but for Ebony.

- Right, and I want to be clear that I did not have a adjustable rate mortgage.

I did not have a low credit score.

But when we got to the table, because of the home values and the drop that had happened, you know, across the board on all properties, the bank said, "No, we will not do a traditional short sale with you.

We will not forgive the amount."

And it was a five figure amount.

And they said, "If you want to sell this home, you know, Ebony, you need to sign this paper, this promissory note that you will pay this money back."

- That was in in 2000, what?

2009 or something?

- That was in 2009.

- And so when's your last payment on that short sale?

On that whole deal you did?

When's the last payment?

Last year.

- It was last year, it was February.

- So this thing that I was able to walk away from- - Okay, that's the point, right.

- In 2008.

She was paying on until 2022.

- Now, let me say this, we did structure that payment in a way to try to make the payments as low as possible so I can move on with my life, but I still had this debt every month I paid, for property that I did not own.

That was money that either could have gone to student loans to pay them down faster, or gone into other investments.

- I want to get back to this philanthropy thing because if you are talking about, I think at one point you refer to people who are sort of stoking this, working within a bad system.

I think that's the way you couch it.

That even if you're doing good things within a bad system, that, I mean, you've been very strong in calling people slave masters, kindhearted slave masters- - I was quoting Oscar Wild.

- Oh, okay, well he's not here today, so.

- You tried though, right?

- Yeah.

- No, he said something very, I think challenging to a lot of us to think about, which is that, he said the worst slave owners were the ones who performed a kind of kindness within the system of slavery.

And maybe they did one little nice thing here and there, but they completely accepted slavery.

They enslaved people, they fully participated in the system of slavery, but they did these kind of little kind things within it.

And the reason he said they were the worst was because they knew, they clearly knew, and yet accepted it.

And they provided a little bit of the moral cover in their little acts of kindness that allowed it to go on.

And I quote that at the beginning of Winners Take All, because I think it is the case that a lot of these people we see doing apparent acts of good, and I agree with Louise.

I don't think every person doing a philanthropic act is doing something, there's all kinds of motivations.

There's all kinds of histories.

This is not about individual hearts and minds.

However, as a class, the plutocratic class in America increases its stranglehold over the economy, over society, over the arts, over universities, and over political influence most importantly.

Year by year, they know they're doing it.

They're doing it through acts of conscious choosing.

And then when Mark Zuckerberg turns around and says, "I'm going to spend 400 million philanthropically," securing an election.

An election that, if you think about it for two seconds, Mark Zuckerberg has helped make as insecure as it is by using his day job Facebook, to spread election disinformation through the bloodstream of this society.

The reason it is an election that needs to be secured in the first place, is he has so destabilized the brains of tens of millions of people in this country to think that elections are something you should go, you know, remedy by carrying a gun to the polls and intimidating people and so on and so forth.

This kind of thing, this kind of harming society by operational daylight and then, you know, cosplaying to fix it by philanthropic moonlight.

It's not a rare thing.

It's not a rare thing when Bill Gates maintains a monopoly that suffocates all the other people in tech that had business dreams that never got off the ground and then turns around and says, "I'm a philanthropist, you know, doing public school education.

And by the way, my ideas about Common Core and my ideas about what your kids should learn are just going to become the idea that your kids learn."

You can go down the list, I'm happy to pick any name you want, but in general, this is a group of people that has figured out that if you want to intensify your power over the society in an age of populist uprising, you can't just be a robber baron.

You need to be a robber baron handing ice cream to people.

- Go ahead.

I'm speechless, so you go ahead.

- I would be remiss if I didn't make mention to the criminal justice system and its connection to economics in our society, and particularly the impact on black and brown communities.

There have been some studies that have said that one in five people have an intersection, meaning they have been arrested, in prison, have a loved one who has, and that has huge impacts economically on families.

So if we go back a hundred years, a black man was four times as likely to be in prison or jail as a white man.

We get to the 80s and the policies that happened there in our country, and that number jumps to 11 times.

Now we've seen it come down some, but the reality is for black and Latino families who have a family member who has been imprisoned, their income over time, over the lifetime of their earnings will be hundreds of thousands of dollars less.

That I- - Just, just to bridge these two, both excellent points and to come to our theme of two Americas here, I've written extensively, the New York Times and elsewhere and edited stories about people who are, companies as well as individuals who are very wealthy, who get in trouble for things.

And often it's a very trivial punishment.

They have very high priced lawyers, they have all kinds of ways that they, that there's not that much punishment sometimes for crimes involving tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

So in the civil system, if you are a wealthy person, you're able to, and even the criminal system, you know, maybe not have as much punishment, or even have repercussions to your future earnings.

And what Ebony's talking about, if you're coming into the criminal justice system in this other America where you don't have access to a lot of resources, and this applies to people of all races, but it is definitely a problem in black and brown communities.

Then you go to jail, and while you're in jail, you're racking up debt on things, for example, like child support, which of course child support's important to families, but it's going into arrears, you're getting charged all kinds of fines and fees while you're in jail.

Now you get out, they're garnishing your wages.

How is this other America supposed to catch up, you know, to the America where you make lots of money and you don't really get in trouble if you break a law?

So that is something that is playing into these two Americas.

- All right, well we've put a lot out on the table in terms of defining what the problem is.

I want to start to talk about what the three of you who are very involved in this issue, what's the first step, Anand, to start sort of turning things the other way?

- I mean, I think the single most effective policy lever, and how a lot of this went wrong and can be set right is the word taxes, right?

That the tax system is where a society makes its most fundamental choices about the level of distribution it's willing to tolerate, and countries tax quite differently around the world and get quite starkly different results from it.

It's not a big mystery.

It's not like the weather.

It's quite clear, you tax like this, you get this outcome, you tax like that, these people can have healthcare, you tax like that, no one can have healthcare, so on and so forth.

Since the 1970s, we have made a policy choice to reduce the tax burden on, not just really top 1%, top 0.1%, 0.01%.

Really the 400 richest families now pay a lower effective tax rate than middle class Americans.

That was a choice.

It's not a thing that happened, it was a policy choice that we made, particularly practiced, pushed, by right-leaning Republican administrations, but frankly with a certain amount of kind of consent or passive assent from kind of more neoliberal tinged democratic administrations and congresses.

And that's the first and most important place to change these things.

I think we need to talk about wealth taxation.

We need to talk about, you know, policies like the one AOC raised on, you know, taxing 10 million a year of income, and more at a much higher rate going back to the kind of good enough for Eisenhower, good enough for us kind of vibe.

But I also think beyond taxation, there's issues of monopoly.

That, you know, should you be allowed to make money by essentially suffocating competition?

It's not something that is really tolerated in Europe.

We totally tolerate it here.

We don't have to.

Should you be able to do wage theft in the way that is very possible here?

Should you be able to bust unions in the way that is very possible here and hard in other places?

We have made a bunch of choices.

This is what I'd like people watching this to understand.

We have made a bunch of choices to make America a place where American dreams die more often than bloom.

And I think we can begin to reverse those choices if we are conscious of the fact that it is us who have made them the wrong way and us who can undo them.

- And how do you undo them?

- I think tax policy to start, monopoly policy, union policy, what I am saying is very basic common sense to a growing number of Americans.

If you look at who has been in Democratic party primaries in the last few cycles, who, kinds of kinds of voices that you hadn't heard before, kinds of policies you hadn't heard before, the kinds of things Joe Biden, a historic moderate centrist has been proposing.

The tide is turning in this country, and I think the billionaire class is actually much more afraid.

And some of the things you talked about, Larry Fink and others trying to get religion, you know, in the last few minutes before midnight.

It I think is driven by the fact that they recognize the winds of change are coming.

- Winds of change happen in elections and when people get out and vote.

I mean, again, people don't, it's crazy, but people don't always make the connection that you have these policies, people voted for the people making, I'm speaking... - If they could get through the line that was long And get from their job to vote.

- Right, right.

Well that's another, the voter suppression issues that have come up are just horrific in this country.

And you're absolutely right, but ultimately that's the connection people have to make on everything.

- I mean, just to jump on that, I agree, as I said, there is a changing tide, there are a changing winds, but I think that there will continue to be a lot of concern from a lot of people in the country about things that would hamper growth.

And you know, look, America, our economy, our society cares a lot about growth.

And already the growth prognosis for our country is not that great.

People think we're going to be in a lower growth next 40, 50 years, compared to China and India and other economies.

Thinking back to the GI Bill for example, and the New Deal, a lot of the gaps we see, some of them weren't bad things done to people on the lower side of the gap.

Some of them were just great benefits that not everyone got.

And you know, the wealth in America, families of all races, no one really had wealth except for the very, very few people in 1950.

I mean, this is a modern concept to have wealth.

And so, if more policy making could look at, okay, this is supposed to go to everyone, but is everyone getting it?

And if they're not getting it, automatically it has to be revised.

How do we distribute, how do we reach people?

I think that could have a big effect.

- You, again, were there covering this in 2008, the financial crisis when the middle class really was cratered in terms of home equity and savings and all kinds of issues.

And as you've mentioned, president Biden has made it a very clear priority that he wants to value work, not just wealth, and wants to really, on a big scale, try and build the middle class out.

Now how does he do that if the political will isn't necessarily there to help him do that?

- I don't know that it's not there.

I think, I would say my understanding of Joe Biden is that he's proposing those things precisely because the will has grown and he recognized that.

- They're popular programs.

- He is a, as many people call him, a fingertip politician.

I think he's defined by, you know, a lot of people, I mean, I wrote a piece about the early kind of Biden administration when he came into office, and suddenly sounded a lot more progressive than anybody who'd followed his prior career, right?

I mean, he's not a baby boomer because he is too old to be a baby boomer, right?

So he's from a different generation of the Democratic party.

And then he comes in and he's proposing I think three separate trillion dollar plus programs.

And a lot of the, you know, staff people are working for him are saying these are the bold ideas they pushed under Clinton and Obama that Clinton and Obama didn't want to do and this guy wants to do it.

Everybody was kind of surprised like, what's going on?

And I wrote this piece with the Atlantic trying to figure out what's going on, right?

This guy of all the guys, right?

And what everyone explained to me was that Clinton and Obama were each like two of the smartest Americans who've ever lived, right?

They'd read more books, each of them than any of their staffers on a subject.

Their staff brought up something, they knew more, right?

And so they had a very clear idea, both Clinton and Obama of like what they wanted to do, what policies they like, didn't like, Biden's not that model, right?

He's not an intellectual, he hasn't read more books than everybody on his staff.

He is a kind of classic machine coalition leader, right?

He is the, I think sees himself as a leader of the many factions that make up the Democratic party, the political left in general.

He sees himself as almost like the head of a coordinating committee of all these different groups, and whatever the groups want to do, Joe Biden is going to do.

- He's in.

- And there has been a tremendous amount of organizing on the issues we're all talking about and writing about, that have absolutely changed the center of gravity of what the coalition wants to do.

The coalition broadly wants to talk about wealth taxation in a way it did not want to until five minutes ago in American history.

The coalition wants to talk about race and inequality, the subject of this book, in a way that it did not want to very recently.

The coalition wants a bunch of stuff and Joe Biden, bless his heart, is willing to follow the coalition where it's going.

And it's proposed a bunch of things that I think are staggering only because the shift in public opinion is actually staggering.

- So that's what's really lifting it, go ahead.

- Joe Biden is important, but I think on the local level, we are not waiting for him to come save us.

You know, I'm on the board of the Women's Foundation United WE in Kansas City, and it's done extensive research looking at, you know, what is holding back, what are the issues with women returning to work post the pandemic, the cost of childcare, right now in the state of Kansas, it costs more for early infant care than it does to send your child to a state college.

And so one of the things that's happening at the state level is United WE is putting a lot of pressure on, collaboratively (chuckles) with the state governments in Missouri and Kansas, and they're pending proposals.

You know, governor Parsons in Missouri has got a proposal out there dealing with tax credits for childcare.

But we have to not just look at the federal level, you know, if people want change, they have to educate themselves, they have to read fact-based information, and then they have to look at what they can do in their local communities.

- And you're right, activism, and I mean people increasingly understand they have to be proactive.

This is affecting their lives.

And young people, I was actually surprised to read a story recently about how they've become the real advocates for resurrecting unions.

And they see that as a way because the grand bargain of the parents of the, if you work or if you go to college, you work hard, you have a great life.

That's not true anymore necessarily.

And so they see unionizing as a way back, and it's unbelievable.

I think it's 70% of college graduates really support unions at this point.

You have three children.

I mean, what is your plan to sort of move us ahead and get us back to a better place?

- Well, with my children, the most important thing that I try to focus on with them is that they should embrace change and be involved in leading change.

And they should live every day to make the world better.

And I see actually a lot of education that's rooted in primarily teaching traditions about why things are the way they are, and education that kind of says, here's how you navigate change.

And so you ask about my children, what I try to talk with in my family, is about how change is needed and be part of change and push for things to be equitable, inclusive, and fair in what you do each day.

So that's how I think about it for young people.

And I think it could be a long discussion we won't have now about education, but for parents to think about what their children are hearing from other students, other families, other teachers, what they're reading.

And are you essentially trying to teach people to only uphold systems that exist, or also to question things and to push for the values that you as parents believe in.

And so that's how I look at it.

- Your children are young, (laughs) Zora and Orion are very young, but do you think about this in terms of their future, and what do you think the odds, I mean there may be a sea change and things may be heading in a better direction, but by the time they're of age, what do you see at that point?

- You know, when I was writing Winners Take All, I guess that was like 2015, '16, '17, those kind of years.

I had the one child at the time and was heading towards having the second.

And one of the things I tried to do, I mean, I think for all of us who write about inequality, I mean the problem with the word and the concept is that everyone thinks they know what they think about it already.

So it's a hard topic to work on because you have to really try to reframe it for people and allow them to see it afresh.

And so I was a new parent and thinking about the topic and thinking about how to reframe it for people.

And I realized that basically like, we all love our own kids, right?

And we would all do anything for our own kids, and then there's everybody else's kids, right?

And one way to think about different societies with different attitudes to inequality and different tolerances for inequality, is where do you draw the line between your love for your own kids, and some amount of concern for everybody else's kids?

You can imagine some societies where people literally just only love their own kids, and everybody else's kids can go to hell.

And you can imagine other societies where of course you still love your kids, but you understand you're going to pay taxes, not just, you know, find illegal ways to pass your money to your children.

You're going to actually pay your taxes to take care of everybody else's kids also, right?

And I think we have gotten to a place in the United States where we have privatized everything, not just our schools, not just our military contractors.

We've privatized the idea of taking care of the next generation.

So it's become a private family obligation to give everything to your kids, because we just starve the commons, we starve the commons, we starve schools, we starve, you know, parks and playgrounds, we starve childcare resources.

And you know, I come from, my family's from India and my parents are immigrants from India.

India is a society where on that spectrum, everything is what you do for your own, you do for your own people.

And you don't worry about the commons.

And what that makes for is an incredibly impoverished society.

What that makes for is an incredibly brutal society when people only love their own, and no one loves anybody else's kids.

It's a death spiral for opportunity for everybody.

And I hope we avoid that route.

- I'm actually going to leave it right there.

This has gone very quickly.

You're talking about collective good, and that's something that we've lost, I think we all would agree, in this country.

- Common ground.

- Common ground.

You've been wonderful, thank you.

Thank you all very much, we're very grateful you were here.

And you two will come back when the book is finished.

Is that like next year maybe?

- Early next year.

- Early next year.

And you always have a book coming so we know we'll see you again, right?

- (laughs) Thank you for having me.

- Okay, thank you very much.

- [Both] Thank you.

Now for those of you who are angsting out about the uncertainty of the economy, our next guest is a personal finance force of nature.

Who's here to tell us what she sees ahead.

At age 30 she segued from making $400 a month as a waitress at the Buttercup Bakery in Berkeley, California, to launching herself on a path of money management super stardom, Susie Orman, we are so excited to have you with us today.

Thank you for joining us.

And I'm going to start with a question tagging off of the panel, which has to do with how inequality is actually impacting social security.

Could you talk, I've seen you talk about that a little bit.

Could you fill us in on that?

- Yeah, you know, I listened to that panel by the way.

I was watching them.

I thought they were absolutely fabulous, but it's also very important to bring it down to the local level of each individual.

You know, I've always said to people, you can't count on the government, nobody's going to save you.

You have to save yourself.

And the same is true when it comes to social security and the danger with social security right now isn't just about inequality.

I have to tell you, it's about artificial intelligence.

Because right now we have a very good chance that robots and GBT chat and all these things that are happening where all these corporations are investing billions of dollars into everything being automated, it's going to displace many, many workers, both blue collar, white collar, that pay into the social security system via their payroll.

And if they don't have jobs anymore, it's going to get harder and harder to fund social security.

So it is so important that for everybody that we figure out a way to really make social security solvent.

- If they lifted the cap though, Susie... - Right, they should of course tax everybody no matter what their income level.

But you want to know what's so very funny, is it's not just about those that don't have a lot of money or are making a lot of money.

I've dealt with people who make 200,000, 300,000 a year and they still have absolutely no money to their name.

And that is because they bought, the more money they make, the more money they spend, the more they want to have a fancy car, a fancy house, fancy clothes, fancy jewelry.

And when it comes down to it, they have absolutely nothing in savings to get them by.

And a lot of them will be counting on what social security, as well as obviously their 401K plans.

But those 401K plans have gone down dramatically.

So what about people who are in retirement right now who are pulling from their retirement plans that went down 30 or 40% even though they may have been invested in bonds?

So it's become very, very tricky.

- You do have, I think it's an enormous amount, 74% of people in this country live paycheck to paycheck.

67% of people in this country they couldn't come up with $400 if they had an emergency.

And that's precisely what you're talking about.

You also talk about how you see some rocky, rocky times ahead as opposed to those who are saying, maybe it's not going to be so bad, maybe we're not going to have a recession.

Where, are you at this point in terms of predicting the economy?

- Yeah, here's the thing.

Whether we technically go into recession or not, to me it doesn't matter, because the majority of the people in the United States are living a recessionary lifestyle, which means they've had to cut back on everything, $10 for a dozen eggs, filling their car with gas, even buying a car.

So everything has changed right now, we have, right as we're speaking, real estate is still sky high.

But now mortgage rates to buy real estate have gone up tremendously.

So you can't even find a house that you can afford today.

So what are people doing?

Oh, they're going to rent, they can't afford to rent.

- I mean, what are people supposed to do at this point?

- Yeah, you know, I have no magic wand.

I wish I did, right?

But the simple solution, and it's not so simple, is that you have to spend less so you can save more.

Now a lot of people say they're living paycheck to paycheck, but when you look at everything that they're buying, they still have money to go out, to do certain things, and that's why they're living paycheck to paycheck.

So we have to have a realistic view on every single person's personal economic situation.

And sometimes it's not just dictated by the fact that, oh, they're only making $45,000 a year.

Sometimes people who make less have the ability to save more because they don't buy clothes, they don't live in expensive places.

They literally have a lot more discretionary income, believe it or not, than people who are making one or $200,000 a year.

And they still are in the psychological mode that they want to impress everybody.

So, you have to get yourself out of debt.

That's the very first thing you have to do, 'cause debt is bondage, and you will never have financial freedom if you have bondage, especially at a time like this when the feds are raising interest rates and they're going to continue to raise interest rates.

- You don't have a magic wand, but you do have a very simple solution that my father, you referenced it a minute ago.

My father used to try to teach me, I'm not sure he was ever that successful, but basically, are you living as inexpensively as you can?

Because I was like looking at this article and where you're quoted even a dollar or $2, really can make a difference.

And you have to think about every single purchase in that way.

I mean that's one of the things you recommend to people.

- Here are the three rules that for over 30 years now I have taught, that I think are the key.

First you have to live below your means, but within your needs, just because you can afford something doesn't mean that you should buy it.

And this, I learned this a long time ago when it was like 1998 and my book, the Nine Steps to Financial Freedom was a serious success.

It was Random House's number one selling book in their 50 year history.

And at that, time everybody wanted Susie Orman.

So I needed a place in New York so I could go to all the shows and everything.

And so I was looking at apartments to buy, and I decided to just buy one that was $240,000 'cause I didn't feel like I needed more than that.

But at that time I could have afforded a penthouse one, two, three million dollar penthouse.

But I didn't need it.

So I started to ask myself the question, when do you buy what you need versus what you can afford?

When you can afford more than what you need?

I didn't need that multimillion dollar, you know, penthouse.

All I needed was a 900 square foot apartment in New York.

And so therefore that's when I learned to live below your means, but within your needs.

Now how do you do that?

You do that very simply by asking yourself this question.

Before you ever spend 1 cent on anything, you ask yourself the question, is this a want or is this a need?

Food at a grocery store is a need, food at a restaurant is a want.

Driving around in your car just because you want to go visit friends and everything is a want.

Getting in your car and driving to work is a need.

And last but not least, get as much pleasure out of saving as you do spending.

Are you kidding me?

Nothing will make you feel more powerful in life when you're powerful over your own money.

How you think about it, feel about it, how you spend it, how you save it, and how you invest it.

- Wow, is it too late for me?

I don't know.

I wish I'd known you a long time ago, Susie.

- I was here girlfriend.

I don't know where you were, but I've been here now for a long, long time.

- (laughs) I know, going back to the Buttercup Bakery, because I just find this story, you worked there for like most of your twenties and you were making $400 a month.

And then something happened to you.

And, and you decided you wanted to start a restaurant, I think is what happened.

I guess what I want to ask you, because you seem so confident and so sure of things, I mean, you project just this wonderful sort of confidence, self-confidence.

Is that who you were back then at the Buttercup Bakery?

- No, truthfully, you know, I grew up on the south side of Chicago.

I had a speech impediment, I couldn't pronounce my Rs, Ss, or ts.

So words such as beautiful came out as "boo-bital."

I went obviously to Horseman Grammar school, but they gave you these reading score exams, you know, back in the fifties and everything, and because I couldn't speak, I couldn't read.

And they sat you according to your reading score and I always had the lowest one.

So I was in the last row, last seat.

I knew I was stupid, I knew I would never make it.

And I adopted that mentality about myself all the way through really into my thirties, mid forties, maybe into my mid forties to tell you the truth.

So what happened though, at the Buttercup, is that, 'cause I had to work my way through college waiting on people and you know, doing all kinds of odd jobs, I now land my job, which I wanted as a waitress at the Buttercup Bakery for seven years.

And I loved that job.

I wanted to be the best waitress in the world.

I loved serving people food.

And so what I realized on my ideas, that I was giving the owners, they went from a little tiny store on the corner of College and Alcatraz in Berkeley, California to owning half the block.

Now I'm thinking to myself, "Wait a minute, on my ideas, look how much money I've made for these people."

So I asked my mom and dad for $20,000, 1980, and they said, "Susie, we don't have that kind of money to our name.

What are you talking about?"

I went to work the next morning, and that's when everybody wanted to know why I didn't look happy like I always did.

I told them the story, they gave me $50,000 to open up my own restaurant.

But I was so scared, I can't even tell you 'cause I had never seen $50,000 in my life.

And so that's where the whole saga of Susie Orman started.

'Cause I went and I put that money in a brokerage firm, where they told me to go do it.

I didn't know what a brokerage firm was.

I didn't know what a money market fund was.

I didn't even know what a stockbroker was.

Stockbroker asked me, "How would you like to make a quick hundred dollars a week?"

I said, "Yeah, that's more than I make as a waitress."

He invests the money, he loses it all in three months.

Now I don't know what to do because these people who gave me money, they didn't have a lot of money.

One gave me 2000, one gave me 3000, with a little note that said, this is to be paid back in 10 years if you can, at no interest.

But I wanted to pay 'em back.

So I decided, I know I can be a broker, they just make you broker.

And so, because I cared about those people and I knew I would never be able to pay them back, I mustered up all my courage.

I go and apply for a job.

They have to hire me because it's affirmative action.

They tell me they're going to fire me in six months, and there you go.

And then I end up suing them while I worked for them because I realized what my broker did was illegal, and so did the head of operations and he coached me on why I should do that.

I then sue them, because I sue them they can't fire me.

Two years later, I'm one of their top producing brokers.

They gave me back all the money plus 18% interest, which was the interest rates at the time, and I was able to pay everybody back.

So little by little, I got my courage.

But I wasn't taught that, it comes in time.

- Wow, on that note, we have to do part two or maybe the movie, or, I mean, it's an amazing, amazing story.

And I'm sorry, but we are out of time at this point.

I do want to wish you a happy birthday on June 5th.

Is it June 5th?

- Thank you.

Yeah, it is June 5th, 72, baby 72!

- Good, it looks terrific on you.

It looks absolutely great.

We're very, very grateful you were with us today.

Thank you so much.

- You're welcome, take care everybody.

- Okay, thank you.

I do want to thank all of our guests who have been with us today as we go into our silver lining, as we always do at the end of the show.

And today's silver lining is about the legacy of one man who rallied against how education, the great American vehicle of social mobility morphed into the debt machine, better known as the student loan crisis that holds back so many people.

Beloved Kansas City Sports writer Terez Paylor was passionate about his fiance, Ebony Reed, and the dream of one day having a scholarship carry his name.

After he died, not one but two scholarships were set up, including one at the University of Missouri Journalism School.

As Ebony says, "It's simply another chapter in the story of someone who wanted to lift others to potentially life-changing opportunity to pay it forward whenever he could."

That's our show for today.

Thanks to all of our guests again and to you for joining us.

Until we see you back here next time.

For Common Ground, I'm Jane Whitney.

Take care.

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