AOC is Wrong: "Tax the Rich" at the Met Gala.

and last night progressive democratic
congresswoman alexandria ocasio-cortez used new york's fashion charity event the med gala to make a political statement she wore a white dress with a message emblazoned in bold gold red tax the rich you know that this dress has a message for this met gala tell me about what that is it's right there but it's really about having a real conversation about fairness and equity in our system and i think that this conversation is particularly relevant as we debate on the budget you know budget reconciliation bill for me what speaks louder is the actual governing and legislating right so the stunts like this i don't know i i don't i don't really think are really effective and come across slow cringy they're all gonna talk about this so what does that do yes if you're looking at only from like a selfish point of view he gets aoc in the press and if you're a politician that is incredibly well played okay let's keep it real but it also gets the message out and that's why i'm in favor of it so i think the message is out there though no but is it out at the met gala people let's let's start with the facts let's throw up this chart on screen here real quick okay what do you see here from 1960 to 2015 has poverty gotten worse no inequality got worse but inequality got worse only because the rich got richer not because the poor poor these issues are a emotive and people tend to look at these charts and only see what they want to see now bernie sanders is no fool he avoids using the rhetoric of saying that the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poor because i think he is aware that it is not true factually that the poor are getting poorer but most people look at a chart like this one and they just see what they want to see if you look at the bottom of the chart see the number zero zero percent there for the poor to be getting poorer their lines would have to be below zero because this is a chart showing average real household income growth the growth the percentage growth they're all growing they're all growing above zero percent 10 20 and so on the first time i presented these charts on screen i received emails written with withering contempt from left-wing people who presume themselves to be much better educated in economics than i am he said to me oh oh you poor dear your trouble is you don't understand the concept of inflation and i had to reply no no your problem is you don't understand the meaning of the word real if you look up the word real in the dictionary the technical use of the term seen at the top of this chart means adjusted for inflation and this conflict with my audience could not be more ironic because i opened the discussion by cautioning my audience that they are so emotionally committed to seeing what they want to see to justifying their beliefs by disregarding the evidence that's right in front of their face that they're going to continue to misinterpret the facts no matter how plainly i set them out and explain them and i cannot tell you how many people have looked at this chart and listened this video and refused to believe the numbers on the chart with one excuse or another but let me tell you something the problem with this chart is not inflation the problem is that it doesn't live up to your ideological expectations of what it's supposed to be this chart is showing you that the poor are getting less poor in the united states of america right but the rich are getting richer much much more rapidly look at this chart very easy to be emotive about this very easy to be irrational about it what does this actually show yes this shows that the top 1 have become spectacularly wealthy they've become much much more wealthy in this span of time and note that this chart ends in the year 2007 or 2008 for whatever reason this is not as as current not as up-to-date a chart okay but what does this show about the poor the poor are not getting poorer between 1960 and the present inequality has gotten worse in america but not poverty inequality and poverty are two very different things right now in the democratic primaries in the debates for who will be the next president of states the debates for who will be the figurehead leader of america's left-wing mainstream party lies are being told about this constantly and the problem is not just that those lies they're factually wrong the problem is that they're misleading they really lead to a false perception of what america's problems are and very false assumptions about what the solutions are and what the outcomes will be the red line on this chart is the really important line it says consumption poverty now what does that mean the word consumption has many meanings in english consumption poverty so i my university degree my first university degree is political science i learned this in the classroom from the textbook it was covered very briefly in the university education and then i learned it in the real world when i went to cambodia and did social science research there in the non-profit humanitarian sector okay the most important way to measure poverty is by people's consumption so in the united states of america you might ask questions like do you own shoes how many years have you been wearing the same pair of shoes do you eat in restaurants how many times this month have you eaten a restaurant how much money in total have you spent eating in a restaurant and then you have to calibrate the statistics you've got to reflect what is the standard of poverty in that society in the united states of america poor people can't eat in restaurants or can't eat there regularly poor people have to pack a sandwich and take it with them to save money so they don't eat lunch in a restaurant now this is almost universal in different societies you're going to be measuring different levels of poverty um in the united states it's accepted without questioning it that a person can own a car and still be considered poor they can have a person who owns a car and owns many pairs of shoes and eats in a restaurant and that they're still poor so how you calibrate it where you set the cutoff line for someone being in poverty versus not in poverty is significant but the way to measure that is by measuring consumption not not by measuring income not through relative measures of poverty if you use relative poverty the bottom twenty percent of people are then always going to be poor you get a self-fulfilling prophecy statistically when we were in cambodia i remember debating this with my boss um the measures of poverty he really favored were things like the roof of your house what is the roof what material is the roof of your house made of which is interesting measure of poverty um you know do you own a cellular phone or not things like this because his experience with cambodian society these were the first things people would spend money on as soon as they had some security as soon as that little bit of income to a little bit of income to waste they would improve the tiling on their roof that's just to do with the torrential rain that it's so loud it's so noisy the rain beating down on the other of your house so when you look at the red line on this chart what you see is a dramatic dramatic decline in poverty since the year 1960 okay and the black line there is some decline but that's been wavering along it's relatively relatively stagnant okay that sharp sharp decline on the red line you cannot cannot say honestly that the poor are getting poorer in the united states of america that is false okay the poor have become the poor have become dramatically fewer in number or you can say the poor are less and less poor however we are in a period of time in which the rich get richer now there was a quotation i copied out here so someone claimed at the latest democrat party uh primary debates that we have had 40 years of no economic growth for 90 of the people that's not that's not what this chart shows not the first person to try to debunk these myths here's a quotation from the washington post by meg kelly the nonpartisan congressional budget office reported that the bottom four quintiles so the poorer four-fifths of society saw an average income growth of 32 percent between 1979 and 2015 before transfers and taxes if you include the difference made by taxes and transfers then the middle three quintiles saw a 46 increase in income but the poorest of the poor the lowest quintile the lowest quintile saw a 79 increase in income during that span of time 1979 to 2015 so the rhetoric within the democrat party within the mainstream left and of course it's even worse on the far left amongst the extremists the rhetoric has fundamentally become detached from reality now the other canard the other excuse that's given to direct us away from these facts and to keep using this meme this false meme this misleading meme that the problem with the united states of america is that the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer it's not so it's to say oh well even if you think the poor are doing okay you know in donald trump's america and the current economy even if you think that it's not true because they're working such long hours they're working multiple jobs look at this chart what do you what do you see about that what do you see there get it's not true it is not true believe it or not the rich people the rich people are really the purple line those are the extremely wealthy we get several different levels of rich people rich people are working longer hours okay i don't find that surprising in the past rich people relied on other human beings to help them out they had servants and secretaries increasingly if you meet people who are millionaires not multi-billionaires because people have over a million dollars they do everything themselves they don't have a secretary they don't have a travel agent they use their computers and they book everything themselves they do all the work themselves i think it's really true that you know high income people whether they be medical doctors or architects or or owners of small businesses they now work very very long hours and that's what this that's what this chart shows the people who are working shorter hours are the red line so the red line here this isn't the poorest of the poor you can see if you you look at the the this is the relative poor and this is the majority of society they are not working longer hours you can see very clearly the trend and especially interestingly the the trend in in recent years so um what's the problem with this approach i'm saying this partly because i want to set up a discussion of issues in in the future video probably the next video i make um the problem is that the quality of life people have in america is absolutely awful and that problem cannot be solved by raising the wages of employees at amazon from 14 and 25 cents per hour to 15 an hour it's not going to make that kind of difference it's not going to make that dramatic difference for the people at amazon it's not going to make that dramatic difference for the people at disneyland either i followed those arguments very closely when bernie sanders presented them and even the particular case studies he presented were really misleading and dishonest i do completely sympathize with the the movement to raise minimum wage i completely sympathize with it but you know have you been to los angeles have you have you been to san francisco why are there huge numbers of homeless people on the streets it's not because of the difference between fourteen dollars an hour and fifteen dollars an hour for people who already have a steady job at amazon or disney world it's not okay obviously anyone talk to anyone who has real world experience working with the homeless in the 21st century obviously the single most outstanding issue is drug addiction including addiction to painkillers as well as you know recreational drugs illicit drugs illegal drugs okay drug addiction is an enormous vector for homelessness vagrancy and extreme poverty in the united states of america there's no denying it what is it that makes life so unpleasant for the working poor so you know now not talking about vagrants or homeless people for the working poor in the united states of america one of the single greatest issues is public transportation los angeles is hell everyone needs to own a car and working poor people they may be spending 50 of their income on their car and car related expenses you know making the down payments on their car and insurance and yet at some extent fuel gasoline is relatively cheap these days but you know the the cost imposed on them by having a car and the misery of having to drive more than an hour every day back and forth to work this is a huge cost imposed on the whole society due to having terrible infrastructure and this is true in los angeles it's true in detroit it's true in many parts of the united states life is not like that in the south of france if you ask why is the quality of life higher in the south of france it's not something simple like oh well it's the minimum wage it's not something simple like oh it's andrew yang's crazy idea of having universal basic income in the south of france they have a beach the train goes right up to the beach you can get out of the train you can pay five dollars to take the train you know it's not free but it's cheap obviously built at taxpayers expense etc and poor people and rich people alike can take their kid and get on the train and get out get out and go swimming on the beach the poor and the millionaires alike all enjoy this you know this natural splendor thanks to the government building infrastructure that enables it okay why is life better in the south of france than it is in los angeles because of the cost of education because of the cost of health care now just i'll just throw this this chart up on screen everyone knows this right this is the misery of modern life in america and this absolutely will not be broached it will not be solved it will not be improved by raising minimum wage nor through andrew yang's you know universal basic income proposal okay and this is not even talking about rent one of the most fundamental miseries in the 21st century is the cost of rent and no government wants that wants to deal with it neither left wing nor right when nobody neither democrat nor republican nobody wants to talk about how you can really help the poor by having you know housing that works for them housing that doesn't require them to drive two hours back and forth their place employment housing that doesn't cost them 50 of their income etc etc this is a huge crushing problem in the united states of america and it is in some other countries around the world high rent crisis is not universal and there are government policies to deal with it okay the most fundamentally dangerous element of the left wing blaming the problem on the rich are getting richer the poor getting poorer this false this factually false meme their statement of the problem is misleadingly simplistic and this is training public opinion to endorse and commit to solutions that are even more misleadingly simplistic indeed in my opinion dangerously so [Music] maybe we can we can practice