May 19, 2023 • 18 mins
Republicans want you to believe that increased funding and a greater workforce for the IRS means you'll have tax collectors breaking down your door and taking your money at gunpoint. In the latest installment of Long Story Short, Al Franken takes a look at what that new IRS money is really going towards, including updated technology and more people to handle the complex high-income audits. Plus, New York Times bestselling author, Heather McGhee, discusses some of the history that created the racial wealth divide, why she decided to adapt her book "The Sum of Us" for young readers, and the story behind the book's cover art.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Comedy Central.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Yeah, well, it's tax season, or, as Donald Trump calls it,
would you get off my back already? And the Biden
administration has been making a big effort to make tax
season a bit less painful. The Inflation Reduction Act, which
the President signed lasts August, includes eighty billion dollars in
(00:23):
new funding for the IRS to hire new employees and
upgrade its technology. And it's working. The IRS is doing
much better at processing our returns and answering our questions
about how to file correctly, and that's great. Better enforcement
of tax laws means more money for all the many,
many things the government does, Social Security, Medicare, infrastructure, not
(00:48):
to mention scraping off the feces smeared on the Capitol
walls by the crowd boards. Clearly, the new funding is
long overdue. In addition to paying for immensely popular programs,
it will help reduce the depths to so everybody's got
to be happy about this. Everybody, right?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Am?
Speaker 2 (01:06):
I right?
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Democrats want to spend eighty billion dollars to hire eighty
seven thousand more armed IRS agents to terrorize Americans.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
They want to add eighty seven thousand IRIS agents that
can use deadly force to go after American families.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
I want to turn the IRS into the Gustapo. They
are arming up the IRS like they're preparing to take Fallujah.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
A little like James Bond. But instead of hunting down
evil maniacs, these agents hunt down and kill middle class
taxpayers that don't pay enough.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
What on earth are these people talking about? If you
forget to carry the one while you're calculating your return
with the IRS, actually come to your home, break down
the door, and gun down your entire family in a word, no,
in six words, of course, not, you Republican idiots. So
(02:08):
let's talk about what the IRS money is really going
for and another installment of long story short. The administration
is trying to fix a whole host of problems that
began back in twenty eleven after Republicans in Congress started
(02:31):
cutting the IRS budget. Since then, the IRS's audit rate
has dropped almost sixty percent, and the number of IRS
agents the same number we had in nineteen fifty four,
when the country's population was half the size it is today.
And pediatricians treated six children by prescribing them menthol cigarettes
(02:56):
and the combination of under staffing and stone age technology
has resulted in a very weird situation. You are more
likely to be audited in the United States if you
make twenty thousand dollars a year than if you make
five hundred thousand dollars a year.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Less money you have, the easier it is for the
IRS to come after you. This is because the IRS
doesn't have enough money to hire the highly trained investigators
needed to go head to head with the wealthy. Ultimately,
it's easier for them to audit lower income people because
it's cheap, can be done by mail, and doesn't take
a lot of time.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Can you believe that the IRS is so understaffed that
they audit poor people more than the wealthy because they
just don't have the experts to handle the most complex returns.
They're going after poor people because it's easier. It's like
a comic who only does your mama jokes. Sure it's easy,
(03:58):
but at what cost to my mama? Her life? Her
life is difficult enough, do you know? Do you know
how hard it is to find a belt the size
(04:20):
of the equator? So how much money in lost taxes
are we talking about here? According to the former head
of the IRS, it could be as much as one
trillion dollars a year. To put that in perspective, if
(04:40):
you stacked a trillion one dollar bills on top of
each other, it would it'd blow away. It'd be ridiculous
to even try that. The solution is pretty simple, and
(05:01):
it's a bargain comparatively, comparatively speaking, Just adequately fund the
IRS so it can improve its enforcement capabilities and collect
that extra trillion dollars. Now you would you would think
Republicans would love and extra trillion dollars in revenue. They're
(05:24):
the ones who are always complaining that America is spending
money that we don't have.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Politicians in Washington cannot stop spending money that we don't have.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Let's live in reality.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
We have a spending problem. We have a dramatic spending problem.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
If you had a child, you gave him a credit
card and they kept hitting the limit, you wouldn't just
keep increasing it. You'd first see what are you spending
your money on. So we're going to look at every
single dollar spent.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
We're going to audit. If you're going to have a party,
you have to pay the band.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Come on center. You don't have to have a band
at a party. Just hire your nephew's roommate to be
a DJ. Just think what we could do with an
extra trillion dollars a year. We could begin to retire
our national debt and balance our budget. Or we could
do some new things that would be worthy of a
(06:23):
great nation. We could have universal pre K or subsidized
childcare like they do everywhere. We could eliminate federal income
taxes completely for the bottom ninety percent of American household.
(06:47):
And this isn't just lefty liberal pie in this sky stuff.
With a trillion dollars we could do we could fund
an entirely new I rock war. And why are we
the only borking developed country that doesn't have universal health care?
(07:12):
And it doesn't have to be single payer. We can
have a public option, which we should have being done
in the first place, adding Labormen. The point is polling
shows that ninety three percent of Americans believe it's every
American civic duty to pay their taxes. And I think
(07:33):
you can guess who the other seven percent are. So
let's let's give the irs the resources to make sure
that everybody does what we all should do for the
right of living in this great country, a nation we
(07:54):
can make even better if we do the rational thing
and collect the taxes that people actually Oh. My guest
(08:15):
tonight is an author who's New York Times bestseller The
Some of Us has just been adapted for young readers.
Please welcome, Heather McGhee. Good to see you here. You know,
(08:48):
I've been doing podcasts, very prestigious podcast uh for uh
for about four years. Now you're my You're my favorite guests.
You've been on three times. You're my favorite guests. You
are so brilliant. Now you're an economis you and you
(09:10):
The first time we met was during the banking crisis,
and we talked a lot about that. Subprime loans, et cetera.
And housing has always been a big part in the
gap in terms of wealth between blacks and whites. Can
(09:31):
you explain where that's where that kind of started?
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Yeah? Absolutely. I mean I always say wealth is where
history shows up in your wallet. So today, the average
black college graduate has less wealth on average than the
average white high school dropout. Makes no sense.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Say that again.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Yes, So if you're the average white high school dropout,
you are wealthier than the average black college graduate. So
that's his t's be showing up in your wallet, right.
We're talking about wealth, not a paycheck. We are talking
about your home equity, your stocks, your bonds, your inheritances.
And that all dates back to that massive racial wealth
divide that we have today, dates back to when most
(10:14):
middle class Americans' wealth began, which was in the New
Deal era, coming out of the Depression. The progressive FDR
government said we want to commit to affordable housing and
mass home ownership, and they created this massive system, this
system of public subsidy, and they based it on the
never substantiated assumption that black people would be too much
(10:36):
of a credit risk. And so they commissioned maps of
the entire country's largest cities and surveyed them down to
the block level for their racial and ethnic character and said,
if there was a high Negro concentration, we're going to
circle that with a red line and say banks do
not lend here. And that really only ended in the
(10:58):
nineteen seventies, and it was quickly replaced by what people
call reverse redlining, which is when those contiguous communities of
lower wealth black communities were targeted with those high cost loans.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
But that's what we were exactly.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
And that's how we met. Eight.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Yeah, but yeah, the redlining started during the Progressive FDR
in the early thirties.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
That's right, And you know the way I see it,
And this is really the kind of core idea of
the some of Us. You know, you and I met
not just because black families were being disproportionately targeted early
in the subprime crisis, before it was a household word.
You and I met once everything had fallen apart, right,
once Lehman had gone bankrupt, once trillions of dollars in
(11:43):
household wealth and eight million dollar jobs had disappeared overnight.
And for me it was such an object lesson in
the way in which racism can ultimately have a cost
for everyone. We ignored the canaries in the coal mine,
what was going on with black and brown families early
in the crisis, and banking committee members just weren't focused
(12:03):
on it. And then obviously we know how the story ended.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Well, The Some of Us is about how race intersects
with economic inequality. And it became an instant New York
Times bestseller. And now you've done a book that's for
school children, for milliers, not for toddler, for middle school.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Yeah, school high school.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah, and how do you explain this to them? How
do because these kids are able to understand this, right,
I mean I noticed this is the book and it's
a little shorter than the other, but it seems pretty sophisticated.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Yeah, it's we really didn't dumb it down. That was
the lesson I got. We did sort of casual focus
groups of educators and middle school students, and they were like,
don't dumb it down. Actually have access to all the
same information you do, and we have the same kinds
of questions. Right, The core question at the heart of
the Some of Us is why does it seem like
we can't have nice things in America? Nice things like
(13:11):
not like flying cars, but nice things like universal healthcare
and paid family leave and childcare and a great school
in every neighborhood. And they have those questions too, And
so in the Some of Us, I use a lot
of data and a lot of history, but ultimately it's
a series of stories, like the story of the drained
public pool and that.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Now the cover of this is the boy jumping in
a pool. A white boy looks like and I think
of a black child there. Tell that story because that's
the first story you tell these kids, right.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
Yeah, it is. It's the story of what happened to
many of the country's nearly two thousand lavishly funded, grand
resort style public swimming pools that were built in that
same New Deal era of public goods, around when the
big housing subsidies were happening. And I like to get
the kids to picture what it would look like to
have a community pool that was free and could hold
(14:04):
over a thousand swimmers at a time. And most of them,
you know, they kind of gasp and they're excited about
the idea, and then I tell them that they were
usually for whites only, and they're sort of like, oh,
you know, And then I say, but then in the
Civil Rights movement, black families began to say, you know what,
it's our tax dollars that have funded those public pools
(14:25):
all along. We want our kids to swim. And the
court sided with them and progress was made. And then
many towns and cities, not just in the Jim Crow South,
decided to drain their public pools rather than integrate them.
They literally drained out the water and backed up truckloads
of dirt. And I really see in the conversations they
(14:47):
have the questions they.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Asked, and they get it so unblievable, and they did
that all over them.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
All over the country. Yeah, in Ohio and West Virginia,
all over the country. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah, so and then they planted over it.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
Yep. So just so.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Black and white people couldn't swim together.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
That's exactly right. It's this zero sum story, this old
story that says that progress for people of color has
to come at the expense of white people, that we
can't all sort of share in well being, that we're
in this competition for dominance and status. And you know what,
young people get it. It's this story that is of
course unbelievable, but they've lived in America long enough to
(15:27):
know that it's actually quite believable because they understand that
over their lifetime, public goods have really beenen atrophying, that
they don't have those big, beautiful swimming pools anymore, that
there isn't free college the way there was that was
a kind of a public pool that was funded by
the government. And they know that as the college going
(15:47):
population got more diverse for them, right, they're already in.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
A generation zero sum.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Idea is basically that wealthier whites taught poorer whites that
anything that helps African Americans hurts them.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Yeah, that's zero sum, that's right. And the some of
us is about we all do better when we all
do better, which is what Paul Wallston is to.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Say, the Late Great, the Late Great. You know, it's
the part of the book that young people really resonate
with is the hopeful part. Right. They want to hear
that we can fix this. And I truly believe that
(16:37):
everything about the world that we see now, all the dysfunction,
it's because people made decisions to make the world as
it is, and so people can make better decisions. And
the core message is that through collective action, people coming
together across lines of race, finding solidarity, recognizing that we
all do better when we all do better, and that
we all want big, beautiful public pools can really win
(17:00):
and take on powerful interests, but we can't if we're divided.
And they get that. And it's been a really fun
trip across the country, schools, libraries, middle.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
All over the country, finding communities where this is happening.
In Minnesota, yeah, we have a town Wilma, Minnesota. It's
in Kanday, Ohio County. It's the biggest turkey producing county
in Minnesota, which is the biggest turkey producing county. It's
the town I went to the graduation there. About half
(17:33):
the class German, Scandinavian, about a third of the class Hispanic.
There's a big meatpacking plant there, about fifteen percent Somali.
This was the most beautiful thing I'd ever gone to
in the time that I was in the Senate. This
town just worked together. Lewiston, Maine is doing that all
(17:55):
over the country. This works when we all when we
realize as the some of us, that's how we create wealth.
That's how we create prosperity. That's how we create a
good life for all Americans.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
That's right. You should really run for office for her.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by
searching The Daily Show wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Watch The Daily Show week nights at eleven.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Ten Central on Comedy Central and stream full episodes anytime
on Fairmouth Bluffs. This has been a Comedy Central podcast
You're listening to Comedy Central.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Yeah, well, it's tax season, or, as Donald Trump calls it,
would you get off my back already? And the Biden
administration has been making a big effort to make tax
season a bit less painful. The Inflation Reduction Act, which
the President signed lasts August, includes eighty billion dollars in
(00:23):
new funding for the IRS to hire new employees and
upgrade its technology. And it's working. The IRS is doing
much better at processing our returns and answering our questions
about how to file correctly, and that's great. Better enforcement
of tax laws means more money for all the many,
many things the government does, Social Security, Medicare, infrastructure, not
(00:48):
to mention scraping off the feces smeared on the Capitol
walls by the crowd boards. Clearly, the new funding is
long overdue. In addition to paying for immensely popular programs,
it will help reduce the depths to so everybody's got
to be happy about this. Everybody, right?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Am?
Speaker 2 (01:06):
I right?
Speaker 3 (01:07):
Democrats want to spend eighty billion dollars to hire eighty
seven thousand more armed IRS agents to terrorize Americans.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
They want to add eighty seven thousand IRIS agents that
can use deadly force to go after American families.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
I want to turn the IRS into the Gustapo. They
are arming up the IRS like they're preparing to take Fallujah.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
A little like James Bond. But instead of hunting down
evil maniacs, these agents hunt down and kill middle class
taxpayers that don't pay enough.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
What on earth are these people talking about? If you
forget to carry the one while you're calculating your return
with the IRS, actually come to your home, break down
the door, and gun down your entire family in a word, no,
in six words, of course, not, you Republican idiots. So
(02:08):
let's talk about what the IRS money is really going
for and another installment of long story short. The administration
is trying to fix a whole host of problems that
began back in twenty eleven after Republicans in Congress started
(02:31):
cutting the IRS budget. Since then, the IRS's audit rate
has dropped almost sixty percent, and the number of IRS
agents the same number we had in nineteen fifty four,
when the country's population was half the size it is today.
And pediatricians treated six children by prescribing them menthol cigarettes
(02:56):
and the combination of under staffing and stone age technology
has resulted in a very weird situation. You are more
likely to be audited in the United States if you
make twenty thousand dollars a year than if you make
five hundred thousand dollars a year.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Less money you have, the easier it is for the
IRS to come after you. This is because the IRS
doesn't have enough money to hire the highly trained investigators
needed to go head to head with the wealthy. Ultimately,
it's easier for them to audit lower income people because
it's cheap, can be done by mail, and doesn't take
a lot of time.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Can you believe that the IRS is so understaffed that
they audit poor people more than the wealthy because they
just don't have the experts to handle the most complex returns.
They're going after poor people because it's easier. It's like
a comic who only does your mama jokes. Sure it's easy,
(03:58):
but at what cost to my mama? Her life? Her
life is difficult enough, do you know? Do you know
how hard it is to find a belt the size
(04:20):
of the equator? So how much money in lost taxes
are we talking about here? According to the former head
of the IRS, it could be as much as one
trillion dollars a year. To put that in perspective, if
(04:40):
you stacked a trillion one dollar bills on top of
each other, it would it'd blow away. It'd be ridiculous
to even try that. The solution is pretty simple, and
(05:01):
it's a bargain comparatively, comparatively speaking, Just adequately fund the
IRS so it can improve its enforcement capabilities and collect
that extra trillion dollars. Now you would you would think
Republicans would love and extra trillion dollars in revenue. They're
(05:24):
the ones who are always complaining that America is spending
money that we don't have.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
Politicians in Washington cannot stop spending money that we don't have.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Let's live in reality.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
We have a spending problem. We have a dramatic spending problem.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
If you had a child, you gave him a credit
card and they kept hitting the limit, you wouldn't just
keep increasing it. You'd first see what are you spending
your money on. So we're going to look at every
single dollar spent.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
We're going to audit. If you're going to have a party,
you have to pay the band.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Come on center. You don't have to have a band
at a party. Just hire your nephew's roommate to be
a DJ. Just think what we could do with an
extra trillion dollars a year. We could begin to retire
our national debt and balance our budget. Or we could
do some new things that would be worthy of a
(06:23):
great nation. We could have universal pre K or subsidized
childcare like they do everywhere. We could eliminate federal income
taxes completely for the bottom ninety percent of American household.
(06:47):
And this isn't just lefty liberal pie in this sky stuff.
With a trillion dollars we could do we could fund
an entirely new I rock war. And why are we
the only borking developed country that doesn't have universal health care?
(07:12):
And it doesn't have to be single payer. We can
have a public option, which we should have being done
in the first place, adding Labormen. The point is polling
shows that ninety three percent of Americans believe it's every
American civic duty to pay their taxes. And I think
(07:33):
you can guess who the other seven percent are. So
let's let's give the irs the resources to make sure
that everybody does what we all should do for the
right of living in this great country, a nation we
(07:54):
can make even better if we do the rational thing
and collect the taxes that people actually Oh. My guest
(08:15):
tonight is an author who's New York Times bestseller The
Some of Us has just been adapted for young readers.
Please welcome, Heather McGhee. Good to see you here. You know,
(08:48):
I've been doing podcasts, very prestigious podcast uh for uh
for about four years. Now you're my You're my favorite guests.
You've been on three times. You're my favorite guests. You
are so brilliant. Now you're an economis you and you
(09:10):
The first time we met was during the banking crisis,
and we talked a lot about that. Subprime loans, et cetera.
And housing has always been a big part in the
gap in terms of wealth between blacks and whites. Can
(09:31):
you explain where that's where that kind of started?
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Yeah? Absolutely. I mean I always say wealth is where
history shows up in your wallet. So today, the average
black college graduate has less wealth on average than the
average white high school dropout. Makes no sense.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Say that again.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Yes, So if you're the average white high school dropout,
you are wealthier than the average black college graduate. So
that's his t's be showing up in your wallet, right.
We're talking about wealth, not a paycheck. We are talking
about your home equity, your stocks, your bonds, your inheritances.
And that all dates back to that massive racial wealth
divide that we have today, dates back to when most
(10:14):
middle class Americans' wealth began, which was in the New
Deal era, coming out of the Depression. The progressive FDR
government said we want to commit to affordable housing and
mass home ownership, and they created this massive system, this
system of public subsidy, and they based it on the
never substantiated assumption that black people would be too much
(10:36):
of a credit risk. And so they commissioned maps of
the entire country's largest cities and surveyed them down to
the block level for their racial and ethnic character and said,
if there was a high Negro concentration, we're going to
circle that with a red line and say banks do
not lend here. And that really only ended in the
(10:58):
nineteen seventies, and it was quickly replaced by what people
call reverse redlining, which is when those contiguous communities of
lower wealth black communities were targeted with those high cost loans.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
But that's what we were exactly.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
And that's how we met. Eight.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Yeah, but yeah, the redlining started during the Progressive FDR
in the early thirties.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
That's right, And you know the way I see it,
And this is really the kind of core idea of
the some of Us. You know, you and I met
not just because black families were being disproportionately targeted early
in the subprime crisis, before it was a household word.
You and I met once everything had fallen apart, right,
once Lehman had gone bankrupt, once trillions of dollars in
(11:43):
household wealth and eight million dollar jobs had disappeared overnight.
And for me it was such an object lesson in
the way in which racism can ultimately have a cost
for everyone. We ignored the canaries in the coal mine,
what was going on with black and brown families early
in the crisis, and banking committee members just weren't focused
(12:03):
on it. And then obviously we know how the story ended.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Well, The Some of Us is about how race intersects
with economic inequality. And it became an instant New York
Times bestseller. And now you've done a book that's for
school children, for milliers, not for toddler, for middle school.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Yeah, school high school.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah, and how do you explain this to them? How
do because these kids are able to understand this, right,
I mean I noticed this is the book and it's
a little shorter than the other, but it seems pretty sophisticated.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
Yeah, it's we really didn't dumb it down. That was
the lesson I got. We did sort of casual focus
groups of educators and middle school students, and they were like,
don't dumb it down. Actually have access to all the
same information you do, and we have the same kinds
of questions. Right, The core question at the heart of
the Some of Us is why does it seem like
we can't have nice things in America? Nice things like
(13:11):
not like flying cars, but nice things like universal healthcare
and paid family leave and childcare and a great school
in every neighborhood. And they have those questions too, And
so in the Some of Us, I use a lot
of data and a lot of history, but ultimately it's
a series of stories, like the story of the drained
public pool and that.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Now the cover of this is the boy jumping in
a pool. A white boy looks like and I think
of a black child there. Tell that story because that's
the first story you tell these kids, right.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
Yeah, it is. It's the story of what happened to
many of the country's nearly two thousand lavishly funded, grand
resort style public swimming pools that were built in that
same New Deal era of public goods, around when the
big housing subsidies were happening. And I like to get
the kids to picture what it would look like to
have a community pool that was free and could hold
(14:04):
over a thousand swimmers at a time. And most of them,
you know, they kind of gasp and they're excited about
the idea, and then I tell them that they were
usually for whites only, and they're sort of like, oh,
you know, And then I say, but then in the
Civil Rights movement, black families began to say, you know what,
it's our tax dollars that have funded those public pools
(14:25):
all along. We want our kids to swim. And the
court sided with them and progress was made. And then
many towns and cities, not just in the Jim Crow South,
decided to drain their public pools rather than integrate them.
They literally drained out the water and backed up truckloads
of dirt. And I really see in the conversations they
(14:47):
have the questions they.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Asked, and they get it so unblievable, and they did
that all over them.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
All over the country. Yeah, in Ohio and West Virginia,
all over the country. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah, so and then they planted over it.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
Yep. So just so.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Black and white people couldn't swim together.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
That's exactly right. It's this zero sum story, this old
story that says that progress for people of color has
to come at the expense of white people, that we
can't all sort of share in well being, that we're
in this competition for dominance and status. And you know what,
young people get it. It's this story that is of
course unbelievable, but they've lived in America long enough to
(15:27):
know that it's actually quite believable because they understand that
over their lifetime, public goods have really beenen atrophying, that
they don't have those big, beautiful swimming pools anymore, that
there isn't free college the way there was that was
a kind of a public pool that was funded by
the government. And they know that as the college going
(15:47):
population got more diverse for them, right, they're already in.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
A generation zero sum.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Idea is basically that wealthier whites taught poorer whites that
anything that helps African Americans hurts them.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Yeah, that's zero sum, that's right. And the some of
us is about we all do better when we all
do better, which is what Paul Wallston is to.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Say, the Late Great, the Late Great. You know, it's
the part of the book that young people really resonate
with is the hopeful part. Right. They want to hear
that we can fix this. And I truly believe that
(16:37):
everything about the world that we see now, all the dysfunction,
it's because people made decisions to make the world as
it is, and so people can make better decisions. And
the core message is that through collective action, people coming
together across lines of race, finding solidarity, recognizing that we
all do better when we all do better, and that
we all want big, beautiful public pools can really win
(17:00):
and take on powerful interests, but we can't if we're divided.
And they get that. And it's been a really fun
trip across the country, schools, libraries, middle.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
All over the country, finding communities where this is happening.
In Minnesota, yeah, we have a town Wilma, Minnesota. It's
in Kanday, Ohio County. It's the biggest turkey producing county
in Minnesota, which is the biggest turkey producing county. It's
the town I went to the graduation there. About half
(17:33):
the class German, Scandinavian, about a third of the class Hispanic.
There's a big meatpacking plant there, about fifteen percent Somali.
This was the most beautiful thing I'd ever gone to
in the time that I was in the Senate. This
town just worked together. Lewiston, Maine is doing that all
(17:55):
over the country. This works when we all when we
realize as the some of us, that's how we create wealth.
That's how we create prosperity. That's how we create a
good life for all Americans.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
That's right. You should really run for office for her.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by
searching The Daily Show wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Watch The Daily Show week nights at eleven.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Ten Central on Comedy Central and stream full episodes anytime
on Fairmouth Bluffs. This has been a Comedy Central podcast
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