know my name is john burbank i'm the executive director of the economic opportunity institute are one my colleagues my former colleague alex stone was here and now he's in graduate school so he's not working with us  opportunity for middle class and low income workers and people in our state that's what we focus on we focus on the problems but we also focus on the solutions and we try to figure out how we can pragmatically put forward solutions at the state level at the city level and frankly at the national level and we had quite a few successes you all know about the minimum wage initiative back in  eighty eight that was the first initiative in the country the minimum wage that was tied with an automatic cola so it kept up with inflation we did the policy for that we did the policy and actually drove the initiative to expand basic health back in two thousand and one we led the charge for family leave insurance in two thousand and seven which passed and it is wall but it's not funded right now for the state and we also developed a  wage ladder for early child education workers which is now state law so that just gives you a little rundown most recently you're probably aware that we were the sort of the catalytic organization to get the city council here in this city to pass paid sick days so we do this because we do have a dream for for our commonwealth and how we as a people together  n reach out in and enjoy that american dream as a people together not just looking at each individual but all of us together that's why it's a commonwealth so i was going to start this out by just asking about what are your expectations of life in these united states what do you think what is important that we have that we can count on so give me some ideas what's important housing education health care jobs clean water security  yeah that's a really good one saying that sort of been lost in the last two or three or four or five years ok anything else yeah  that's interesting number that the constitution originally made sure that we had slavery in this country and that slaves were counted as three fifths of a person and that has haunted us ever since that ok well this is my ideas i have we want birth a good birth a healthy birth healthy growth aspirations of hope and health right we want the challenges of work we want intellectual achievement there were not just coggs in the system but that we are able to enjoy some of the intellectual challenges and growth in understandings in questioning and philosophy and that actually is i think a big part of religious inquiry we want physical fitness we fitness fitness we want family and friends and we want comfort and opportunity enjoy and security and a good death those are the things that i think begin to make up what are important and what are achievable and actually should be objects is that we demand are part of american life and are part of the foundation of american society so what don't we have to meet these expectations so we don't have a little boy income for certainly at least about fifty percent of the population and livable i mean an income that enables you to not just live from check to check but to have some security our wages and this is a lot of this has happened particularly in the last ten years it's not just a matter of the great recession it's a matter of public policy over the last thirty years we've had depression of wages we don't have family leave every single other country has family leave when you have a baby you can take time off from work get partial compensation and care for that infant it's like we don't have that but every other country does secure pensions right we don't have those and those are actually being undermined every day the latest fiasco boeing was the best example of undermining the pensions for those workers but also undermining the economic activity of the community because those pensions are real drivers of economic activity and consumption in our communities  we don't have affordable childcare anyone who has kids here little kids could tell you that i don't know if anyone here has little kids i have big kids but not little kids but you know childcare is runs at about  seriously about eight hundred dollars a month for one child you can figure out make the calculations from that we don't have especially our state progressive and robust public revenue you see a lot of states after the great recession have made a foot and they're actually gaining a lot more public revenue we're not way why do you think we don't have much public revenue sales tax and what's missing income tax right so you know we have one of the wealthiest states in the country seattle is the tenth wealthiest at c l a has the tenth largest number of super wealthy households that is households that have thirty five million dollars more in wealth but we leave all that money on the table as a result we don't really have affordable public higher education because as state revenues have fallen state investment in public like the university of washington has fallen and what's happened to make up that gap is incredible increase in tuition and we don't have a secure retirement so security the average so security checks someone you can probably tell me this personally but the average one is about comes up to about fifteen thousand dollars a year that's it and for two thirds of the retirees they're dependent upon so security for about eighty percent of their income so that's why we don't have and i want to explain a little bit why we don't have these things but then i want to start talking about solutions and what we can do so this is one one interesting graph so this is a graph that shows the increase in productivity from nine hundred forty eight to about two thousand level now what is productivity productivity is the amount of goods and services that one worker can produce and as you invest more and more in technology you get each worker able to produce more and more and more and you can see that from after post world war two to about nineteen sixty eight or so or nine hundred seventy that hourly compensation and in fact the hour weights pretty much kept up with productivity that is the increases in the hourly compensation and the average dollars average were comparable proportional to the increases in productivity which meant that those increases in productivity were split proportionally between workers and corporations so it didn't mean that corporations didn't get any they got some too but workers got some too but look what happened after one nine hundred seventy two and particularly tax fell dramatically one of his first moves was to to break patco the professional air traffic controllers organization to send a signal to corporate america that was ok to get rid of unions when you get where you are unions and workers lose bargaining power what happens they don't get their just compensation so as productivity continues to sky or go up you have our compensation and the hourly wage is pretty much flat and this actually is a little bit deceiving hourly compensation because that includes things like health care benefits but what it doesn't show you is is that actually workers are paying you know corporations may be paying more for health care benefits  workers are paying more for health care benefits as well as as well over the last twenty years so that's what does that result in that results in this where you can see that if you this is death is ten percent or ten percent twenty percent thirty percent so the people between zero and ten percent in terms of wages you can see that their growth the blue is from one hundred ninety two thousand and twelve the orange is that orange i think that's orange but anyway what would you call it anyway it's between two thousand and eight two thousand and twelve you can see that from the bottom decibel their wages fell two percent in that time for the child their wages fell five percent for the third to sow their wages felt fell five percent for the fourth death sile now we're talking about the middle middle class their wages fell six  percent for the people in the right very middle their wages fell five percent for the people the sixtieth their wages fell two percent and then we start to get this growth one percent for the seventieth three percent for the eighty six percent for the occurring to the very top that doesn't do much good for the rest of us and but you can see what happens when that happens the average marketing com this is sort of interesting so the average marketing come for the bottom ninety percent is twenty nine thousand eight hundred forty dollars and for the top one hundred percent it's twenty three million eight hundred forty six dollars eight hundred forty six thousand so that's that's right it is hardest on them but you have this this is actually accelerated tremendously over the last thirty years yes market income is income that doesn't include transfers such as food stamps ten of payments unemployment payments these are these income from the private market or or from public employment as well there's another little picture and this is interesting because on the one hand we can see the wages for this is the typical male worker you can see his wages of wage gap between men and women and so this is not good news for either men or women in terms of their wages and in terms of family leave this just gives you an idea of what  just about two hundred miles not even two hundred fifty miles north of us in canada they have one hundred one thousand days a family of the they get fifty five percent pay that's a good good example i actually have a lot of friends in of lived in finland and finland for the first year family leave you get compensation eighty percent if you choose to care for your child and your two and your three your compensation is sixty five percent you're guaranteed that you have your job back or a well so let's go on here's of the problem now is alluding to before which is the percent of income paid in state and local taxes now so it is an interesting phrase percent of income paid in state and local taxes so in some ways we actually we do have an income tax rate it's a percentage come we pay in sales taxes not called that come tax but it's our income and you can see that the poorest twenty percent with incomes below twenty thousand they pay almost seventeen percent of their income in state and local taxes i don't need to go through this but the top to perth top one percent pay two point eight percent so when you have a tax system like paid for about eighty percent of the cost of education so that for example when i went to school at evergreen state college my tuition was about fifteen or dollars in today's dollars the state was paying eight percent to which was twenty percent now is pretty much reversed universe washington the state here has about twenty seven percent to which is about seventy three percent and that's true for the regional colleges it's not as true for the community colleges are right now the state is paying about forty when that when you have this disinvestment is who makes up the difference is the parents the students and their parents and you can see tuitions university washington rising from thirty two hundred to twelve thousand three hundred eighty three dollars over this time period similar rises in other state colleges and universities which simply means that right now the university wash into action by itself is almost a quarter of the typical household income figure that that's before taxes and you know some families have more than one child some families have two children so you can see this is really pinches typical families and one of the real problems of this is state need grants and state aid is really focused on families that are below the median income like seventy percent below the median income and as a result people who are right in the middle are completely on their own what happens student takes two didn't have to take out loans and the average loan debt in washington state now is twenty three thousand dollars when students graduate and it's getting worse and worse and you think about that i bet none of you who are over the age of thirty had student loans if you want to college of over ten thousand dollars and i bet the people here who are under age thirty i bet you do have student loans raise your hands you get student loans ok there you go because that's become you guys student loan to that's become the way that we finance higher education is student loans the banks love it  d but it is a really bastardization of public higher education all right so we can talk a lot of bombs but i like talk about what we can do for solutions and i want to go over some things and i want people to feel like this is not a problem that they're powerless to act on right we may feel like we don't have power at the federal level or even at the state level but we certainly have power at the state at the city level and we actually do have power at the state level and you can wind that up and we can have power over or in a lot of different states and find the at the federal level in fact many of the great advances of  frances perkins were not they didn't dream of these things like social security and the minimum wage just off the top of their heads these were programs that were started at the state level and then were federalized and so one of the things that we have to think about in the long run of history is how we can use our programs to build a commonwealth not just in our state but in other states as well and eventually across the whole country all right we did that actually with paid sick days we were we had a little survey organized a band of people back about four years ago talking about paid sick days we tried to get it through the legislature that didn't work too well we tried in tacoma that didn't work too well we tried in seattle and we had the right combination we had a couple of city council members who were very interested we had  some unions that were very interested in moving this forward and we built a great coalition of community organizations and unions to move forward paid sick days now this would not have  happened at the behest of the city council itself we know that right when we started talking and they said well we can't do that that's not on our agenda for this year so we said ok well it's really interesting how about if we put it on your agenda and we did  and so we really led the way in terms of an ordinance which was has then been replicated in portland and replicated again in new york city in new york city unfortunately our our level of this this labor standard kicks in when you have five f t e more than five f t e so it it doesn't include micro enterprises which we did not want to exclude but it was part of the bargaining process in new york city when they passed it included only those  firms that had more than twenty five f t e and now with de blasio gaining becoming mayor he wants to push it down to our level five f t e so we have actually created a great model for paid sick days in our state and that's you know think about that one hundred sixty thousand workers did not have access to paid sick days in the city of seattle so when their child was sick at school you'd have sometimes have children in the nurse's office pleading with the nurse not to call their mother or father because they knew that if their mother or father had to come get them out of school they might lose their job and their income a certain basic humanities or are important paid sick days and the laws been effect now over a year and a half and all the service sky is falling predictions of business are just that they're schama sawan getting elected we see that happening again by the way one of the reasons that sham was elected is that her opponent was a fellow named richard conlin who was the sole c l city council person to vote against paid sick days important powerful message and so we're looking at possibilities for for a minimum wage i'll go over that and i'm actually i'm going to go through all these things so i'm not going to sort of just read through this list here's this yellow coalition for a healthy workforce just showing that we didn't get this from having a nice policy idea but you had to build the power of citizenry to get it to get the city council to realize that they better pass this or there would be consequences to pay and indeed there were consequences to pay here's a majority support for this is the fifteen dollars minimum wage idea this is a poll that was just taken sixty eight percent support what's interesting about this is the port growers if you have a phased in minimum wage so it goes to fifteen dollars an hour in three years and this is how you can do that so right now we're at nine thirty two in two thousand and fifteen you can be to levon dollars in two thousand and six sixteen thirteen in two thousand and seventeen  fifteen that equals about eighteen percent increase for the first two years in the fifteen percent for the preview in the last year we've had percent increases of this in the middle wage in two thousand we actually had employment growth at the same time we had increases in the minimum wage and so actually i think that this is i'm hoping that this is a model that's that's taken up by if it's not taken up by the city council the mayor than what pete taken up by the people through their own initiative minimum wages we can legislate maximum compensation here's the language right here i'm not saying that this is going to happen right now but you could actually say beginning such and such a year every impartial pay to each of his or her employees a maximum compensation not to exceed two hundred fifty times a statement an hourly wage that would be not to exceed about five million dollars per year there'd be a lot of a jefferson but it be very interesting and be bout time that we actually put the  wealthy one the one percent and the corporations on the defensive rather than on the office of and this is one way of doing that so you know one of the reasons why we have this decline in organized labor is is essentially there's there's a sort of a legal i attack on workers in terms of being able to organize into unions and the federal by corporations all the time and you have their captive audience meetings all time lots of threats to workers like the right we just saw with the boeing machinist vote so how do we fight back against something like that it is really bad it's not just bad for the workers themselves it's bad for the economy it's bad for the middle class you have income and benefits that are taken away from middle class and upper middle class workers you are draining resources out of that community so how do we stop that well one thing we can do is get a little bit creative and we do have  some civil rights laws that say that it's illegal to discriminate on the basis of race sexual orientation merril status age accent or etc there's no reason why we couldn't also say that it's legal to discriminate at work on the basis of a union interest in neck tutti you could do it pretty you could insert that into the civil rights statute and then you would have a new enforcement power which would be the office of civil rights my colleague marilyn mark and we're talking at a staff meeting today she said you know it's even employers can even tell workers that they cannot share with each other how much they get in wages they can't have a discussion or their own wages so you could insert is this something that's even you know smaller which basically says it is either old illegal to discriminate against workers if they talk about their wages with one another you could do that so here's another actually garbage collectors are unionized and they're very well supported where you say teachers childcare workers childcare workers are really poorly compensated and you know we have a lot of discussion about the need for high quality childcare this is like a mantra or we have to high quality childcare center and we have to make sure our low income kids have high quality childcare but the funny thing is is that none of these people are addressing what is the central factor of high quality childcare which is the compensation of the childcare caregivers and teachers and workers that top compensation is even the bottom desk of compensation in washington state so how can you expect to have high quality childcare if you pitch or pay your teachers a lousy that there's incredible turnover there's about sixty percent a  year and so there's some real attachment issues of children with their childcare providers and childcare teachers there's no incentive for childcare teachers to get greater education at community colleges or four year colleges because they're not going to get a wage bump and so you you essentially are completely sort of building what you consider a high quality childcare system on a faulty premise that the childcare workers are education and the state would pay for those wage income it's based upon education and you would get a bump we each increase in your education and all sudden and this is actually this happened in  l an across the state in the early two thousand when it was implemented you had childcare teachers going back to community college getting their early child education certificate they're a certificate you had  you also had childcare teachers who had a lot more self esteem in their work more pride in their work what happened to child the quality of childcare all that went up to so we got this into state law so it is now the state law unfortunately it's not funded anymore it was the funding was entered in eleven in two thousand and eleven but this just gives you an idea of how it works so you can see  these percentages are these for example if you were to get early child education certificate or associate's degree then you get an immediate bump of fifty cents nothing didn't sound like that but that's a thousand dollars a year and if you're making  ten dollars to begin with ten dollars an hour that actually is is is a big it's a pretty good bump so this is another idea that could be incorporated into the early child education initiative that tim burgess is pursuing in the city of  seattle here's another idea pay it forward ok so there's an idea and originated with us with the economic opportunity institute we talked about tuition here's an idea you go to school without any upfront cost that is you don't pay for tuition or mandatory fees you contribute after graduation probably after about a two year grace period a fixed percent of income for a pre determined number of years to a higher education trust fund and that funding abel's the access under the paid for  to the next generation a cohort of students who then are wrapped in to pay it forward itself so it has no upfront costs it abolishes to ition which has to be the biggest psychological and financial barrier to higher education for middle class and long term students you then have free and open access to all qualified students increases career choice because when you graduate you don't have to worry about making enough money to pay off your student loans i have a friend who is now paying six hundred dollars a month on a income of thirty five thousand dollars so she's paying over twenty percent of her pretax income for her student loans and that's not unusual and what this student debt so this is how it would work if you went to a community college here in seattle and it was you pay one point five percent of your just a gross income for twenty five years the first year and this is based upon census data so we can actually know what the typical income is of graduates of community colleges five ten fifteen twenty twenty five years after graduation knowing that we can project that they would be paying beginning at fifteen dollars a month or and then they would finish up at fifty two dollars a month and here have a cell phone i bit your cell phone bills a lot more than fifty dollars a month ok this is also a way interesting way of of building this program over time we know that corporations like microsoft think say that we need to have a lot more stem education that's montra and actually that's just a i mean they're just pulling out pulling the wool over our eyes because they have a great business model right now they pay really low taxes they have tremendous tax loopholes they don't have to worry about the state higher education system because then if they can just recruit workers from other countries in other states so that works really well for them but let's say they're honest that we need more stem workers how do you do this well if we got microsoft to agree to a tax of twelve million dollars we could incorporate about a thousand students with that twelve million dollars at the university of washington then as if we have that twelve million dollars over time then as the students graduate and they make their contributions a debate forward then those contributions enable a gradual accretion of more and more students over time so you can see that about every ten years you're going to have close to a doubling of the number students for the same investment of twelve million dollars a year so it's a way to actually  build over time the number students who are here will have to pay it forward free access to higher education are i won't go into that for much longer what i want really want to do is my purpose about this is to have all you split up into groups and see which one  of these ideas makes sense to you and what you'd like to do about it i will talk about this though one of the things that we did in our is our part our work was to write and to push to develop a coalition for initiative ten ninety eight as anyone remember that initiative two thousand and ten it was an income tax on incomes above two hundred thousand dollars it was it didn't work out very well at the end terms of the vote talking talk about but in terms of the vote in seattle seattle supported this with a vote of sixty two percent so you think about this can we do an income tax in seattle and yes we can we can do it  as a privilege tax and you can do it on g s is it a privilege to receive more than a million dollars of income i would think that's a privilege and you could tax that privilege the the amount above the marginal amount above million dollars at five percent you could put that into middle class trust fund you could use the fund early childhood education you could be used to fund higher education and actually this is one of the reasons why it's this five percent might be we might want to think about making that two percent to make it marginally smaller so that just the transition costs of doing just what you're suggesting are real deterrent we could do that but that was one of the things about the income tax proposal in ten thousand is that we were accused that the rich people would lose would move well you know you go down in california your children move and they have a higher income tax but i guess the other point is yeah probably maybe some rich people would move but the total amount of income we get is going to be that much greater because not all the rich people move just the real bastards move so  o that's so let me ask you who who gets comcast on their cable t v yeah ok do you like paying those bills  so you know this is interesting we have a neighbor to the south of us here is called tacoma they have internet system through their public utility through tacoma city boy it's called click it you can go there and check it out but we could do the same thing here it's a it's actually makes a lot of sense public utility it is a public utility right now there's a private we could actually take over that public private and provide much better service so i want to talk about retirement a little bit this is a picture of a retirement the united states so how many people here have  have some sort of retirement savings i do all right well this is unusual because fifty four percent of people aren't don't have an important base retirement plan course i think the average age here is a little higher so some of you are more retired than others and you can see over the past forty years that the people who are on a defined benefit that number is dropped from twenty eight percent to three percent what is a defined benefit defined benefit is a retirement plan that you are vested that is you have a right to this retirement plan after you've been working in a company for about five years and you know that when you  partyer there will be a certain formula and every single month you will get a check from that company or that company's pension plan until you die now there are some problems with and that is not necessarily sometimes there's not a coal like i have defined benefit from the wash is a labor council and there's no coal attached to it so that value gets less over time but it's much better then defined contribution so define contribution is done here do you see this is going up again and this is what boeing sort of force the machine is to trade off to a defined contribution is when the corporation doesn't have any responsibility for the value of that defined contribution they may put money into the plan is going as it has done but they have no no responsibility for what happens to the value of that plan all the risk and all the recent ponse ability resides with the employee so you had people in two thousand and nine who were going to retire and all sudden they thought they had a four one k plan and it turned out it was a two a one k plan and it's a a lot of insecurity in terms of how much money you're going to have and for that matter people aren't saying enough i think the median value in a defined in a deferred contribution plan is about thirty five you know about thirty thousand dollars thirty thousand dollars when you're you know what the kids that kids you know monthly it nudie of about thirty dollars a month ok so the whole thing about this is that we need to figure out how we're going to make sure that when people retire they have some economic security and they're not worried about running out of money the lamarr going to run out of money in the current situation but just to give you an idea about defer to your god had this come up this month or probably this month is that there will be continuing to tack on the public pensions of public employees and you know people think all the public employees are really getting away with murder well that's their that's their typical monthly pension fourteen hundred dollars and a lot of these public employees don't have so security so fourteen hundred dollars that's about seventeen thousand dollars sixteen thousand dollars a year right and there's moves to try to lessen that but this is actually this is this is something that we want to keep in actually build on so be suspicious when you hear talk of sort of gold plated public pensions so they don't exist ok so and one thing to keep in mind is is people always forget about the economic impact of cutting pensions so if you look at washington state our public pensions generated about what is that two point five billion dollars and because it was spent in the community it ended up generating about three point five billion dollars in this in the in the economy in terms of economic activity and if you look at the public contributions which is about three hundred eighty eight million dollars for those benefits it had generated three point five billion the rest of this money came from investments of of the pensions so almost a ten to one benefit from public contributions in terms of increasing economic activity give you an example if you have let's say you have  one hundred dollars a week of additional money how you gonna spend it well most people will spend that within the local economy right they'll go to their grocery store though go buy a coat you know maybe they need a new they needed long underwear  january i don't know on the ground by that ok so you increase purchases and this is actually happening now with the boeing boeing did a they gave the service a bonus to to the workers they sort of bribe them they gave them a bonus if they approve the contract so you have this increased economic activity which means that if you have more people buying things are going to need to first of all hire people to  take care of the customers who are buying things and you're going to need buy you're going need to buy more goods themselves so that creates a productivity feedback or production feedback as well so it results in this sort of escalation of of economic activity it doesn't but what you said is this is all this is a little bit confusing because what we're this three point three hundred eighty eight million grew to this two point five billion over time like over probably twenty or twenty five years through the investment right of this of these pensions by the state all right so fifty percent of workers can't even save for retirement what do we do about it well there is a proposal in the in the legislature that we have helped to actually been working on now for fifteen years it's simply that you know as a small business person which actually i run a public policy but it is for like a business right and we decided we needed to get retirement plan for our workers so we had some people come in and they all came in they were dressed very nicely and they had these beautiful charts they were color charts the they had all these nice sewing that the their investments did better than the standard and poor's investments and we should go with them in the next day we had another group come in and they also were very nicely dressed they had very nice charts as well and so what would a small business person do forget it i don't i don't have the information to make that choice i have other things to do and not con around trying to figure out what is a good retirement plan the solution to this is to have the state develop a retirement plan that any employee and any employer in this state can participate in and so you'd knock down the barriers of entry you knock down the descent from asian cause you knock down the implementation costs for the employers and you enable workers to save with a product that is portable from workplace to workplace to work place so that's what this is and it's on the floor of the house right now it will i think pass it's probably not going to pass in the senate why do you think it will pass in senate get it get a little more creative than that all right the financial community the banks don't want the the current financial services industry doesn't want this it's really you think about  stupid are they in some ways because this is just pulling more money into the into the into the private financial services committee they don't want to though because they don't want to have government seen as a solution to a problem the problem is that people don't have aren't saving enough money and they're frankly not interested in banking people who are contributing twenty five dollars a week or twenty five dollars a month to their retirement savings the administrative costs are much too large but they still don't want the government to provide the solution even though probably a lot of the activity would be contracted out to the private financial services community so they're blocking this bill and they probably will succeed in blocking the bill other thing though is ok so let's say they blocked a bill what can we do what we can do a lot we can build up so security we can scrap the cap anyone know what scrap the cap is about if you go to this this website just scrap the cap you'll get a rap video with a retired machinist a retired person watching employee it's actually had a tremendous impact and this is a way of having impact on the national discussion we produce this rap video and it is result in and i think one hundred eighty thousand hits on it thus far and it is really turn the discussion so scrap the ca become a legitimate and important part of the discussion about so security because when you scrap the cap you can increase benefits you can for example switch to the consumer price index elderly which is much more representative the costs for  for living for an elderly person you can you can add in survivor benefits for students this is actually in the law up until one nine hundred eighty one so if you were a student and your mother or father  died you got benefits up until age twenty two if you're going to college that was changes to each eighteen and so you have a lot of students who have lost one or both parents who are just sort of left out to dry we could change that you could change a benefit calculator which is this is essentially just saying that is completely discriminatory towards women right now the benefits are calculated in your best thirty five years for so skew here gets though so security we probably know all this stuff so you can tell me to be quiet or not but anyway but the problem was that women's typical participation in the workforce is about thirty two years so in their calculations of benefits there are three zero you can you can get rid of that by just changing that number of years to be benefited from thirty five years to figure out the benefit from thirty five to thirty and then you can just simply increase benefits there's a lot we can do there's a lot of activity going on there's a group here that we helped organize called social security works washington you can go to their website they're leading the charge of getting our congressional delegation to signing on to a bill that will do just these things hark a family medical leave insurance how we talked about this a little bit right in and we will have a bill next year to move this forward in our state basically when you have a baby when you're caring for an ill parent when you're caring for an ill child and then you're entitled to family medical leave if you have injury off the job then you're entitled to what's called temporary disability insurance that also will be covered  you know there's nothing rocket science about this this is not like you know pushing the terms of benefits for human dignity almost every single other country in the world has these sort of benefits just not us not yet that california has this benefit right you should know that in new jersey we're chris christie is it has this benefit but so now we want to step up ahead here in our state and then i'll just throw this out public transit we want bertha and five twenty you know birth that's like two billion dollars we were a loss there right or do we want to you know we had this this great idea for a monorail there was a certain city council person named richard conlon who was one of the most people who was vehemently opposed to to the monorail and helped to kill what but do we want to monorail might be a good idea it's going to take us twenty years to build out the light rail i mean we'll have double the population by that time we need full funding for mental metro we need to make transit work for everyone we need to transfer writers union if you know about them so and just of close up here are some pathways that we like to use the city council not just in this city but coleman other cities the legislature initiatives not just for the state but for the city i suspect of the minimum wage will end up being an initiative in our city we need new revenue for  dedicated public services it's not just about taxes we need social insurance programs like social security like pay it forward and we need to focus on communications and making the connections building the public trust and you and so it is a really good time to be a citizen and help to rebuild the middle class so thanks for having you're right there is that that trend but a lot of it is coming out of this country so you know if we continue to dispose policies the take away the economic security and educational opportunity and try to privatized what are essentially public goods and services and try to come modify all of our lives  services then that is the the virus that is becoming dominant in the world and it will also chip away at social democracy in other countries so what we can do is at the local level here are ways that we're going to build social democracy we're going to build social insurance we're going to build platforms for economic security and educational opportunity which essentially are ways of changing our relationships between workers and families and corporations and as we do that then we're taking away a little bit of the drive and the momentum for privatization that goes from our country to other other countries it's a long road right but it's how we can start and you know we can build we can build seattle we can build seattle with the sense of the high road economic development where you have good wages you have free public higher education you have family even turns and paid sick days and we would show that you can build an economy that is prosperous when you have those those elements in place and in fact because you have those elements in place so it's that's our job oh no no no i'm a growth of the individual from being an infant to being a toddler to being an elementary school student to becoming an adult that's what i mean that's what i mean by growth none not talking about this and in fact i think we have to have a new sort of definition of of economic growth if you want to talk about that because every time that you say break you're like right like my dad fell over a couple nights ago and had to have stitches so that's good for the economy i mean it does make a sense but if you're if you're at home and you're a mom and you're taking care of your kids that has no impact on the economy that has no economic value so we need it doesn't redundant relate it there's not a value in our gross domestic product so we need a way of measuring our economic wife which takes into account the quality of our lives which means in some ways in the long run there can be a less consumption of things and more  consumption or interaction with services and things like that in education so if you look in europe there's much less consumption of thing per capita and there's a much higher and we're looking somewhere in the bottom or the middle just in terms of getting by well you guys do well being it has to do with being saturated in a culture of consumption well the people who have to make that shift they the reason the campaigns work is that they knew there was a problem they recognize a problem what they didn't have were the tools to address that problem and so what we gave what we created were the tools to address that problem  whether that be the paid sick days coalition or whether it be save for pay it forward in terms of actual legislation that can put in place so people if it if it's not a problem if it doesn't resonate with people if there's not an aha moment then you don't have the right you don't have the right thing but you know talking to people under the age of thirty if you talk about pay for it they get it they don't need any convincing they understand it right away and they also understand having come through the great recession that whereas they they may be weighted down under a heavy student loan they also understand that pay for offers them the ability to build a community of responsibility in which everyone is participating and where their contributions enable the next generational cohort of students the same free access to public card to cation and so if we can take programs like that which are based on concepts of social insurance we can build and weave together a net of mutual support which is very high die hard to unreliable financial community republicans some democrats have been trying to unravel so security for thirty years and they failed because so many of us are participants in social security whether we're contributors whether we're beneficiaries or whether we're going to become beneficiaries or whether our children or our parents or beneficiaries who are here get so security ok and who here knows someone who gets social security it's ok we're all in it together that's the whole point that's what democracy is ted that's exactly what you what you've just said is that how do you take it no first of all no legislature can bind a future legislature so that's how it was change you know we used to had slavery we used to have jim crow those laws changed we still have institutional segregation the supreme court has pushed us back a bunch of parents and in magnolia actually pushed us back  but my point is is that this is you don't have things that are set in steel there's nothing that says the u s congress could not diminish so security benefits tomorrow they could do that by a change of the law  and so what you're describing is is a situation like it's not a constitutional amendment right it's a law and you can change that law and the laws can and should be changed to take into account new circumstances and the new realities that previous laws and previous economic conditions may have created this is pay it forward is a great example that it's taking into account the reality that the current regime has created in terms of how you're bankrupting literally bankrupting graduates college college grads through huge student debt i think people are leaving thank you very much for having me