Andrew Trusevich - Dallas Attorney Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Seven, twenty three, now here in Houston's borning News. Well,
the middle class, which used to be the vibe anyway
for the middle class, used to be secure. You're pretty secure.
You had a good income, You could afford to buy
decent things, keep your family fed, drive a decent car,
you know, afford your monthly house payment, send the kids
off to college. Well, that vibe is shifting, and it's

(00:22):
due to, we're told, stagnant income growth that has not
kept pace with significant increases in the cost of living,
especially for housing and education and healthcare. Joining us to
talk about Andrew Trusovich. He's a Dallas attorney specializing in
labor and employment law. I think we're seeing in a
lot of different areas right now, Andrew. I'm noticing, for example,
this is just anecdotal, but I'm noticing it a lot

(00:43):
of restaurants that I go to that used to be,
you know, pretty dog gone busy, they're not so busy anymore.
The high end restaurants are still busy, but the ones
that the middle class usually frequents not so much.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Totally agree with you, And first, thank you for having me,
and to thank you for covering this top because it
is so important what they call the hollowing out of
the middle class or the shrinkage of the middle class.
It is going to be more devastating than the dot
com bubble, than the housing bubble. And it's happening, and
we all are just watching it happen. And you are

(01:16):
absolutely correct. And when you don't have the income and
the paid disparity versus paid polarization, meaning why is the
middle class shrinking? Is it because more people are becoming
wealthy or more becoming less wealthy. Well we know the answer,
it's less wealthy. So you are absolutely right. And it's
such an important topic because it has so many consequences
mental health, suicide, family violence. So it's really devastating and

(01:43):
it needs something needs to be done about it.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
Well, you know, that's always the sixty four thousand dollars
question is and what do you do about it? Do
you just artificially raise wages because if you do that,
then you just add to the inflation, which is part
of what is driven all of this. We've gotten in
particular problem with inflation, you know, going back to going
back to COVID, things just kind of turned out a
dime during the whole COVID thing, which didn't help the

(02:07):
economy very much. And now I think you're potentially looking
at a generation of people who are not going to
be home buyers, They're going to be home runners.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
I agree. And when you say what's what's the fix
to it? The reason there was so much inflation is
during COVID, and I blamed both parties on this, throwing
free money out just from a plane and throwing free
money out saying here, go spend it, don't you don't
have to earn it. That was a big problem. But
if you look at what happened in January nineteen fourteen,

(02:37):
Tenry FOURD introduced his five dollars a day. He wasn't altruistic,
he was a capitalist like I am, but he believed
and the average wage in nineteen fourteen. In January nineteen
nineteen fourteen when he did the five dollars a day
increase was a dollar sixty seven a day, so he
more than doubled the average wage. And other CEOs were
complaining to him, people are quitting our company, want to

(03:00):
go work for Ford. Why are you doing this? And
he said, even back in nineteen fourteen, he recognized if
there's not a middle class that is the backbone of America.
If you don't have, if your employees can't buy your product.
And that's why he raised wages to five dollars a
day so his employees could buy the very product that
they made. And the answer is corporations really do need

(03:23):
to stop right now. Their money and importance goes to
shareholders dividends, and they need to pay their employees because
without the middle class, there is Medicaid, Medicare and Social
Security go away. And if I can just give a
quick example social Security tax. We all get taxed social Security,

(03:45):
but it stops that around one hundred and sixty or
one hundred and seventy six thousand plus, so let's say
one hundred and seventy seven. So most of your audience
probably is paying the max so Security tax if they
make below one hundred and seventy seven thousand. Jamie Diamond
and I don't have anything against him, but the CEO
of JP Morgan made a total compensation package of thirty

(04:07):
nine million last year. He's paid Social Security up to
one hundred and seventy six plus thousand. That is just unfair.
Everybody needs to pay. I don't care if you're Elon
Musk making billions. You need to pay Social Security tax
on every penny that comes in, and that would that
would help the middle class, and it would secure Social Security, Medicaid,

(04:28):
and Medicare. But it's it's devastating. In nineteen seventy eight,
the average CEO was making twenty times with the entry
level person where the average employee was making at the corporation.
Today they're making over four hundred times with the average
workers making. So that means there's over an eleven hundred
percent increase since nineteen seventy eight for CEOs, whereas employees

(04:53):
since nineteen seventy eight is twenty four percent. Again, I'm
a capitalist.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
Yeah, it sounds like you're proposing a the typical democrat
to tax the rich solution, though I don't know how
well that's going to go over. But I'm out of time,
Andrew for this show, but I'm gonna have to see
if I can get you on my afternoon show where
we can continue the conversation we have a little more time.
That's Andrew Trusovich. He's a Dallas attorney,