We are thrilled to have people from all over the country here for our third conference. Dedicated to improving the lives of americans from every background and every walk of life. As you can tell from todays agenda we strive to advance progress progressive values on nearly every possible front. We have an incredible line up of speakers. Many are activists and advocates fighting to create grass roots chains that may shape the country for decades to come. Unmistakable resolve. Millions have flooded our streets, our airports and town halls in solidarity and in protest. More people are taking Political Action than at any point in my lifetime. Yet while we celebrate that Political Action. We also recognize an undeniable truth that we are gathered here today at an extraordinary moment at our nations history, a time when fore actors seek to disrupt our political system and even free elections which served as a basic foundation of our government. When the president openly interferes with an investigation to uncover his ties with these same foreign actors. When the leader of the free world fires those who hold him accountable and even provides intelligence to our adversaries. Our founders established a system of checks and balances to safeguard the integrity of our democracy. The truth is, those checks and balances are only as strong as the leaders who have the character and courage to implement them. Right now too many in one party are putting their party over our country. It turns out that the founders prediction that each generation would have to renew our democracy is true. So the extraordinary threats facing our country, foreign and domestic demand a fierce and unrelenting opposition. Citizenship confers responsibility. The responsibility to get and stay involved, to educate ourselves, to speak out and to resist when our constitution and our democratic norms are threatened. It is for problems confronting familying everywheies everywher. They are values that americans share. They are ones that pull us together rather than pull us apart. Thats because at the end of the day we all want the same basic which i thinks. To support and raise our kids and to leave our families a little further along than where we started. So today we are proud to introduce a bold new plan for creating jobs in america, one based on an idea that modernized for a 21st century world. It is one that unites working families of every color and background by advancing fairness and Economic Opportunity for all. That collision must be broad enough to welcome each and every one of our fellow americans. It needs to be based ton principals and inclusion on opportunity and justice. These are essential values which lie at the heart of the progressive movement. They are the same values that drive the work of all of the leaders gathered here today. That brings me to our opening keynote speaker, los angeles mayor. As the head of americas second largest city he spear headed efforts to expand houszing for veterans and make investments in transportation and clean energy. Please help me give a warm welcome to mayor of los angeles. [ applause ] thank you so much. Good morning everybody. Thank you for putting together this ideas conference. Thank you to the staff here at four seasons for looking after us so well. They have been calling this a big moment for the party. They are right. I believe this isnt s an even bigger moment for the American People, a bigger moment for our country. We have heard politicians talking about how we are on the cusp of a revolution. Our country imported half of its oil that we needed to meet our energy needs. Today it accounts for just about a quarter of our energy usage. We may not be using toss sill fuels at all. To date it is no longer a death sentence. We may be able to say the same thing about lung cancer or alzheimers. Its amazing. A generation ago the only place you would see Something Like this literally was in a sifi movie. This feels like a time of great anxiety and great uncertainty. Over the next 20 years Artificial Intelligence will wipe out millions of jobs. Youre wondering how you will get by let alone get ahead in this new economy. Youre wondering whether any of those leaders who keep talking about this new future actually think theres a place in that future for you. See, i hear these anxieties every day. For 16 years as a local elected official i have been knocking on my neighbors doors, holding open office hours so people from all walk of life can talk to me about anything they want. Listening is at the heart of what i do. It may surprise some people here in washington to hear that the concerns that i hear about in los angeles are similar to ones we hear throughout this country in places like lancing. 4 Million People live in my city. A few of them kardashians. Most are Small Business owners, factory workers, firefighters and nurses. We have had to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and face an uncertain future. So whats p thatting in my city is whats happening around the country. For folks at the time theres never been a more exciting time. We have a diverse and thriving class. They are having a great time doing it. Why not . You can go on your smart phone and find any kind of food that you want, have it delivered to your phone. Go ahead and get ride share and have somebody come and pick up dry cleaning with a tap of your finger. We also have a Ballooning Service class. People that are doing the dry cleaning and they are barely hanging on. The cost of college for their kids skyrocketing. Secure retirement, a hope and a dream. These folks arent just anxious and insecure. They are angry and impatient. They hear us talk but regardless of whether or not they agree with what they are saying they dont see anybody taking real action to improve their lives. So they dont trust their leaders, any of them. This sbt just ability honesty or ethics. They zroent dont think we have us. They believe some challenges are so big that only is capable of add dresi addressing them. This is a problem for our country because this distrust robs us of our ability to take the kind of big action we need to embrace the future instead of fare it, the kind of action we can only take together. Do people believe you have smart ideas to address those challenges. Third, your guts. This is the most important of the three. Even if you show you can care, even if you thought of good solutions, do people believe youll do whatever it takes to deliver the results that you promise even if it cuts against your own personal or political interests . You need all three to lead. Majors who hear from our con stit constituents, we tend to understand that. It all goes back to listening. If you really listen and mayors have to americans actually agree on a lot. They want a decent job with reliable benefits including Quality Health care. They want good schools for their kids. Republican mayors often know they can raise taxes to invest in critical things. Mayors are in the business of getting things done. We see washington moving backwards, cities are moving forward. We raised the minimum wage to 15 abhour. People already have more money in their pockets. We want 40 and 50 an hour job. It isnt just about public. It is about good paying middle class union jobs. People without College Degrees who half a century ago were working on building bombers on the assembly line, today are building rail cars on the lax sign. Creating jobs where they live. Thats just the start. We faszed the nations largest housing initiative. We have the highest Graduation Rate we have had in decades. Walk them back to school and this fall we are becoming the largest for every Public School graduate. In l. Arthealth care has meant jo jobs. 6 million added to our gdp. They are sounding the alarm about trump care and why im ready to fight like hell to make sure it never becomes the law of the land. We need to convince people that they can trust us to fight for them and to deliver for them. When we do Real Progress is possible. Let me give you an example. Anyone who has been to los angeles knows we have the worst traffic in america. Everyone who lives in los angeles knows its more than a pain. Traffic robs us of millions of hours we could be spending with our family. So we set out to fix it. We proposed the largest local Infrastructure Initiative in this nations history times two. It would produce 465,000 good paying jobs that will stay here at home. But to get the initiative we had to go to the voters and get twothirds of them to vote yes, to raise their own taxes. So for three years i criss cr s crossed of an area it is democrats and republicans. On election day measure m passed with 71 of the vote. It didnt pass because they loved Big Government and because we had the best trargting or the ads. It passed because we listened and because people trusted under the circumstances to deliver. It brings me back to the challenge that yface. I know youre mad about the. Our l vas avalues are under att. We have set up a 10 million justice fund to make sure no immigrant faces the threat of deportation without legal representation. You know what . Im a dreamer. We are going to adopt it in los angeles and i have a dozen cities ready to do it the next day. Its the right thing to do for our economy. Yes. We have got to fight and we have got to win. This white house isnt going to succeed in dragging us back into the past. I know we have the constitution and we have the American People on our side. We are going to win those fights. But every day we spend playing defense is a day we are not making progress. If we define ourselves solely by our opposition we will sell ourselves short and more importantly we will sell the American People short. My friends, our country is at a transformational moment that has brought with it challenges and opportunities unlike anything we have ever faced. The future is here. The American People are waiting for someone to step up, to lead us with confidence and courage we need. So dont seed the power you have before you, exercise it. Dont settle for being. Dont fight pessimism with more pessimism. Most importantly, dont lose fate in america. I see it every single day. So lets refuse to settle for letting the future happen. Lets resolve to make a future. Please welcome lindsay washington. Well go down to line here. Glenn hutchens is a founder of silver Lakes Partners and leading investor in technology. Austin is a former chairman of the council of economic advisers under barack obama and is currently the professor of economics at the university of chicago. And he has done a lot of important work on keeping our economy and wall street accountable. I will start off with you, senator. We are focused on ideas to address ensuring the committeco works for all americans. Love your thoughts on how we can do that better. Thank you for joining us today. When i was graduating from High School America was an amazing place for working americans. My father was a mechanic m mothers mother lived in a railroad car. Working americans were able to buy a three bedroom home, buy a car. The fact is the fundamentals of life took an enormous leap forward. In those three golden decades from 1945 to 1975 Americans Workers shared in the wealth that they were creating. But from the time i graduated from high school, 1974 through now American Workers have not been involved in decades. They have been where their share has stayed flat and their wages have stayed flat. People about think a home only by inheriting it from their parents. My father could say to me, you go through the doors and work hard you can do just about anything here in america. Unstated was the belief was just as his generation had a great leap forward forworkers so that trajectory would continue over the decades to come. The last four decades we have seen a tax system for the wealthy. We have seen a trade system that impoverishes American Workers. We have to pivot and ask how do we recreate an amazing place for working americans . Thats the question we are addressing today. We do have to address the longterm structural deficits. [ no audio ] look at the model germany has put forward. It also means Higher Education cant be for many of our children. Their dream may involve going to college. They should be able to go to college debt free. At germany it takes 5 of a medium wage to go go to colleg. In america it was 50 . We make it a horrendous experience. Par pa parents are saying we are not sure we should go to college. They are afraid and no job and nay will be tranded and crippled by that debt. We have to transform that piece in order to make the economy work as well. Would you elaborate . Sure. My basic argument there was that there was very Important Information content that came through this past election on both left and right. Im not sure thats the right demention. I think the demention might be those who are benefit by globalization versus those who are not. It was the narrowly defined devastation to communities, industries and jobs. Even though the overall economy was growing more broadly. I think the answer is not just to my argument. The argument is not just to have a series of policies. We have written about together to create the kind of fairness that we need in our economy to send a message to the people who have been devastated by the last 30 years. It is also to embrace a set of policy simultaneously. I think we need to marry a fairness agenda that you are talking about. Rather than be a false choice as between Economic Growth and economic fairness to have a grand compact between business and labor to grow our economy in a way thats kind of fair to all. I think its the right way to think about this. With ideas today on essentially guarantee, a big investment but also thinking through kind of a new vision of infrastructure. I love your thoughts on that, but also we definitely want to talk about positive ideas. I dont want to lose sight of the trump agenda. It is ability inclusive growth and how to invest in your insfrukture. Let us return to the trump tax plan and what are the ideas behind it. They asked donald trump. He said you have been criticized. You say you want to repeal and replace obamacare. What would you replace it with . He said something fabulous. That was his answer. You open yourself up. Thats possible. Up to delegation from congress. They will give you ideas and say we have been pushing this for 30 years. Why dont you make that your plan. The trump tax plan as has been outlined would be the biggest tax cut for very high income people in the history of the United States. By far more than twice as big as george w. Bushs tax cut was. If youre old enough we remember, you all said if not in this very room we all said together we cannot afford to do this. This is a terrible idea. It would be twice as big as that. It would create the biggest loophole ever in the history of u. S. Tax code by allowing anyone that has a private business to call that profit and they will have to pay only 15 marginal rate on that. Now, just to put that in perspective, if you are a regular American Worker who is currently file and say youre a single parent. Youre filing as ahead of household, if you make 38,000 a year, you will have to pay he is going to get rid of head of household. You will file as a single person. You will pay a 25 marginal rate plus another 7. 5 of payroll tax. So youll pay a 30 plus percent marginal rate while somebody who literally made 1 billion a year will be paying a 15 rate. It doesnt make any sense, and the thing that i cant understand is how do you look at the last 30 years of the history of the United States. We have seen doing productivity and profits of large corporations and what they paid people and the erosion. How do you look at the 30 years of history and say the thing we were missing is we didnt cut billionaires taxes enough and run you have the deficit enough. Thats the premise of the plan. The basic world view is that we have to have growth. We have to if we want to restore what we had in the past we must grow again and it might be a manufacturing. It might be emts. It might be services. We have to grow. There is a difference of world views. One world view says growth comes from the absence of government that if we just get rid of all of the regulations and rules of the road and cut the tax rates then growth will come. If you bloelieve that i think y have a puzzle. It is in Silicon Valley. It doesnt have low taxes. Doesnt have regulation. It is not on the island of vandawatu. There are no Capital Gains taxes, no income taxes, no Corporate Taxes at all. Some times people will come after, where is this island of vandawatu. Why isnt it there . You know why. The dynamic Innovative Companies in the United States do not primarily move to Silicon Valley or where ever they go because its cheap. They go there because they cant afford not to go there. It does require the government to invest in education, science and all of the things that we need to grow and that i think is what the fight is really about. Just briefly, one of the things we have seen over the last 30 years in addition to one vision of taxes is an erosion of the ability of all workers to demand higher wages for their human capital. So one of the challenges there has been the erosion of unions in the United States. I want today ask you to talk briefly about that and then i will turn to lindsay to talk about her experience. It is a dynamically different approach to your world. Trump may have talked it. It is an extraordinary tax give away with 24 Million People. Extraordinary onepage summary of a 6 trillion tax give away over ten years. So lets return to this question then of the power of workers. What i described before was how the loss of manufacturing undermined the leverage of workers to fight for good wages. It also undermined the organizing power to lose concentrations of factory workers. We had from the time a deliberate assault from the most powerful people in the country to dismantle unions. It was a strategy saying if we are going to rule this place we have to divide the rest of the country. We have to divide, if you will, government unions against labor nongovernment labor unions. We have to blame and split working america to pieces so we can continue to write the rules. A big piece was this assault on unions. What we saw was that workers got a full measure, a fair measure of the wealth they were creating. They are not getting that fair measure today. We have been talking about a lot of theories here. I also just wanted to really make it kind of real to people in a sense. Youre organizing. I wanted to give the sense to the audience of why youre doing that and why do you think it matters to you and your family. Thank you for having me. My name is lindsay. I am an emt. I dont do this often. We decided to organize because we had three main issues. We wanted fair pay, and working equipment. We are our patients primary providers. Without working equipment we cant give them the best care possible. As far as scheduling, we wanted to excuse me. Dont worry. Take your time. We wanted fair scheduled. We wanted to be able to go to the doctors, wanted to do panels like this without having to worry about can i take off work . Do i have enough leave to take off work . Who will cover my shift . And pay, pay be probably the most important for everyone, not just everyone, but probably everyone in this room. We wanted futures. I want to be able to go back to cool and get my paramedic certification. And without better pay i cant do that. You know, eventually i want to be able to buy a house and pay is essential to that. So we felt that if we all came together, we would have a strong voice, a stronger voice. Because one person can go to the management team, but thats one person. But when everyone comes together for the same common goal, it really gives you power and its a driving force. It opens the lines of communication with your management team. And it says to them, wow theyre organized, they really, you know we have to kind of give them what we want, because without them we cant serve our community and get paid. That was why we chose to organize. Thank you so much. Austin, please. [ applause ] it tells us about one example, but what weve seen and we demonstrate a little bit in our paper we put out today. Is that for a lot of folks, really the bottom 50 of folks over not a few years, but decades have really been unable to get higher wages for their work, as youre trying to do. How what are the trends you see thats driving that . And then ill ask one question about manufacturing and then go to the audience questions. I mean, there are numerous trends pushing that. Id say at an abstract level, the fact that the growth of productivity in the United States for 75, 100 years always went into wages. Sometime around the 1980s that breaks. If you look at the graph, it looks like productivity and growth continuing on average to go up, while wages staying flat and for different people, you know, even 50 of people, actually, going down. Some feel that the decline of unions and worker Bargaining Power is an issue. There is a globalization issue. There is i think probably the automation and technology is a more important factor, maybe than until recently weve given credit to. Because its worth remembering Something Like 80 plus of the u. S. Economy doesnt face foreign competition, its domestic services. So there are a lot of things going on but the facts are undeniable that people getting paid for their human capital, people being paid in a way sharing in the bounty that has been the increase in profits and the increase in gdp. That sometime 20, 30 years ago begins to break and by now theyve diverged significantly. Glen . To answer these questions, we need to look forward, not back. The economy that lindsay is living in is very different than the economy that your parents lived in. I would argue for another time the period of time from 1945 to 1975 was an anomaly in American History resulting from the fact that at the end of world twowar, had the only market place. It was an anomaly. Thats point one. If you look at the the other thing to remember is, if you look at the manufacturer economy, the United States has never in its history manufactured more than we do today. 2015 compare today 1980, two and a half times as much as we did 35 years before that. The second largest manufacturing country in the world. Were second only to china, china is four times as many people, you know, on a percapita basis. We manufacture far more than china does. All right . But we only employ 2 3 the number of people to do it today that we did 35 years ago. This is not about the loss of manufacturing economy, its about the fundamental change in the employment in the manufacturing economy. Whats the industry thats the highest increase during that time period . Mining. One of the reasons why the jobs arent coming back to West Virginia is because mining has become so vastly more efficient than it was 35 years ago, it takes that many, many fewer people to do it. And its also migrated from West Virginia to the powder river basin in wyoming where its more efficient and its migrated from coal to natural gas. Those are all fundamental changes that no kind of Public Policy is going to address. You layer on top of that this fundamental change in work that mayor garcetti talked about as a result of the technology revolution. We have to think different ways around the social compact we have for people who are of a working age. What jobs are going to do and what social supports we offer them so we can have fairness in our economy, independent of whether or not we have kind of manufacturing or blue collar jobs we need to create as a result of creating greater Economic Growth. I think we need to detach some of these social equity measures that we talked about, may juini wage, all the things we talked about from work because work has fundamentally changed in the economy in which we live for the future we face. I think one of the reasons why weve proposed a larger scale investment in infrastructure and more job creation is in part because we have this long term trend, and there is an important social aspect to the dignity work. We need to think about both your ideas senator, do you have any last questions before we turn to the audience . I think its important to recognize the economy is very different today, but in every community in america, when your oreo factory goes to mexico because theyre getting paid 1. 35 an hour. When your truck construction factory goes to mexico because the workers are getting a few dollars a day. Those are real losses. For those who are in the elite who say this doesnt matter, it really matters on the ground. Because it is not just a factory, its the supply chain, the pay roll and the downward pressure on everyone else. Automation. When i came to the u. S. Senate i started talking about automation. I talked to economists who said youre a ludite. I said this is different its affecting every part of the economy. I can show you dairy in oregon where the proprietor says i dont really want to give you this tour because the cows are not used to seeing a human. And its extraordinary. I mean, they dont nobody feeds them. Machines feed them. Machines sweep up the manure. The machines milk them, no human involvement. Its an extraordinary thing to see. If you can a dairy like that, what is it human hands can touch that cant be done by a machine. This is a very big and different place. Still i would rather have that truck factory here in the United States. Its a piece we still have to wrestle with and it does help drive inequality. We have a shifting measure from what was spent on labor versus capital. Now its capital and a modest amount of labor. Its going to be a big challenge. We have to think, therefore, dramatically how we restructure and how we create these minimum wage jobs. How do we create living wage jobs in this different economy. Thank you. We want to take audience questions. Identify who you are. I hope well get a mike to you. One is coming over there. Great to see you, sister. [ inaudible ] [ inaudible question ] the top of the corporations keep getting larger and larger salaries and bonuses and less and less taxes. Im concerned that the piece thats not being addressed is current tax policy where profitable businesses could pay their workers a living wage but choose instead to pay top executives for what for me is exorbitantly outrageous salaries. And that the distribution is promoted by our tax policy and that this needs to be seriously addressed if we are ever going to get to this idea that profitability depends on the workers. And the workers should share in the resource. And im curious why that hasnt come up. And two, what you think of the argument. Well, austin did talk about tax policy. There has been a big divergence, obviously, between what corporations are actually paying in taxes and a sense of how much theyre contributing to deficit reduction and other issues. But also, obviously, the issue of share of salaries and valuing shareholders over others. Do you want to talk a little bit about that . Look, the good sister has put it very well that is, we have designed not under president obama, but in the republican president s they have designed the tax code in a way that accentuated and made dramatically worse what are these underlying trends. Whatever you think, there is a technology component, there is bargaining component, we can argue about what caused it. But nobody can dispute this thing was already happening and they have transformed the tax code and theyre attempting to transform the tax code now to just pile it on. And i dont really understand i understand why large corporations, for example, would want lower taxes. Just like anybody would want lower taxes. But i dont understand the moment which is the premise of lowering the Corporate Tax is, if you could increase the profitability of companies, then they will invest more, they will hire more, they will pay more. Thats the premise. But its worth noting if you just look at the data, corporate profitability already went up, its at the record levels it has ever been as a share of gdp. Corporate profits, to income, ratio is up more than 50 . Even the biggest Corporate Tax cuts are not going fto increase profits more than that. The question of why with corporate profits are that high, if you think thats going to lead to massive employment and massive pay it would have already have done so. So i think that theres a disconnect between the philosophy that says hey, just get rid of all the taxes and we can be as successful as vanuatu, i dont think the data supports that view. If youre going to address taxes you have to recognize the concentration of power in america. When we look at our campaigns, for example, you have a vast amount of money flooding from the billionaire enterprises of america. And its equivalent of a stadium sound system that drowns out the voice of ordinary americans. And they that disproportional role has been affirmed by citizens united. If you want to understand why the very first time in our u. S. History a Supreme Court seat was stolen from one administration and delivered to the next, it has to do with concern that there would be a 54 change in a decision regarding citizens united. So as we talk policy, we also have to talk about policy and power. And we have to be willing to have a grass roots operation and embrace it and in partnership with an inside game, inside the building. If you dont have that inside, outside force by the way a huge thanks to grass roots of america. This grass roots america that torpedoed the Healthcare Plan that would have thrown 24 Million People off the healthcare roll. [ applause ] other questions . Here . Get there quickly . Craig kaplan. I agree with everybody. That having been said, to pick up on one of the points and since this is an ideas conference, if we accept the premise as has been said, slightly different from what you said, senator, that the major problem that we are dealing with over the long next 15, 20 years is a technological revolution, and questioning the premise that the change in technology will ever produce the numbers of good paying jobs that we need. If we use the traditional definition of jobs, and questioning the premise that there has to be a social value in work as we define it. Isnt the question a redefinition of work in some sense and what social contribution is . And what is compensable labor . Because if we live with the traditional notion, what do we say to all of the truckers who will now be replaced by automatic cars, the cab drivers, this is the beginning of that kind of change. We need to disconnect the economic questions from the social contributions. I will briefly just say i really hope you read our paper today on this very topic. I will just say, i will definitely let the panelists speak, that i think that we dismiss the dignity that people take in having a job at our peril and that is why we have proposed a pretty expansive jobs investment. There are questions about other issues, but i think when you look at the data of people who are currently unemployed and are already receiving ssdi, i think most folks would recognize that having so low job attainment is a problem for our society and economy. Ill let anyone on our panel respond to the broad way we define work. I dont disagree with the philosophical and the ubi and others are interested in conversations. I hope we dont write off getting regular jobs as we define them too quickly. I think the economy has proved a remarkable engine over 200 plus years at generating real jobs and the question of what people are going to do is one that we do have to sort out, but i think we want to make sure that theyre being well paid, you know, for what theyre doing. And in this report, if you read it, its the jobs guarantee is going to get a lot of headlines. But theres a lot in this report in which it goes through look, we want to invest to move up the skill base of the work force and we want to have a robust demand for there are a lot of people in the country who dont have cl j College Degree now and we need to have demand at the various levels of the skill distribution in a way that i think would be healthy and would lead to creation of a lot of jobs. Its worth remembering every month we generate Something Like 200,000 jobs. Thats a net number. Okay, we actually generate 5. 3 million jobs in the month of march and we lost 5. 1 million jobs in the month of march. There is an incredibly powerful engine of job creation, of actual what we normally think of as jobs, we just need to keep priming it and unleashing it. Were over time and theyre yelling at me. Okay, i want to emphasize quickly i agree entirely with what the senator said in terms of the importance of having those factories in the community and the jobs for the people in the community and the ripple effects, not just supply chains but also the health of the community. One of the features of being a Technology Investor is you spend your life thinking about the future rather than today. As i look at the future, we wrote about this in the ipc report which is something to go back to as well. We could well be in this period of transition from the Industrial Age to the information economy in a fundamental change in the nature of work. And a fundamental change in the nature of how people generate their incomes. In addition to work being parceled up into smaller and smaller chunks, more and more people working part time, being independent contractors in the gig economy, all those sorts of things, youve got ways in which you can generate income from your car, from your house, et cetera, that mean that the way in which government addresses the social safety net around jobs, Unemployment Insurance, workmans compensation, might not fit together well. We need to think through a safety net, for instance, going from Unemployment Insurance to wage insurance. Social safety net that fits the way people are going to work in the future and start thinking about that today while we address the moment and the jobs that need to be generated. Excellent. Thank you. Do you have the last one of those pieces is we have to have affordable Quality Healthcare agreed. Absolutely. That does not cost lets view it as a fundamental right and have it available to every single american on an equal basis. Thank you. Great. I love it when we end on topics that are so close to my heart. Thank you so much to this panel. Were going to clear the stage for our next speakers, thank you. Good job. [ applause ] please take your seats as we prepare for our next presentation. Please welcome to the stage, governor roy cooper and carmel vartin. [ applause ]