We sit down with On Point’s “money ladies” for tips and tricks on how to manage your finances in difficult times
Guest
Rana Foroohar, CNN global economic analyst, global business columnist and associate editor at the Financial Times, author of several books, including “Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World.”
Michelle Singletary, Washington Post personal finance columnist, author of several books, including “What To Do With Your Money When Crisis Hits: A Survival Guide.”
Transcript of Full Broadcast
The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page andn listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:
Part I
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: The United States is the richest country in the world, but half of Americans can barely afford to live in it. Let me say that again. The United States has the world’s largest economy by a wide margin, a GDP of more than $32 trillion, but half of Americans do not have the re
Now, that second fact is from two recent studies from the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, which both found that almost 50% of American households simply do not earn enough money to cover the necessities of life. Of course, we’re talking housing, childcare, healthcare, even food So I ask you, how does that make sense?
Frankly, I can’t find the right historical parallel. Is it feudalism? Not quite. This is still a democracy. Is it an aristocracy? Maybe that’s closer. But I think the right one is plutocracy, or a system of government whose policies advance the interests of the ultra-wealthy, such as seen in the ancient Roman Empire, where the Roman Senate consisted of a wealthy aristocracy who appointed elected local administrators to rule in their favor
50% of American households simply do not earn enough money to cover the necessities of life
Brookings Institution
Now, American plutocracy isn’t so direct, but it’s gotten to the point where it’s pretty overt, right? A bunch of scholars have investigated this. Five years ago, Princeton University professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern University professor Benjamin Page concluded in a study that, quote, “Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests in the United States have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”
End quote. Now, I get it. I’m going a bit off the rails here, but it’s because we usually use such passive language around what is fundamentally an extreme truth. We talk about affordability and making ends meet, but when half of American families are barely getting by or, quite frankly, not even getting by, I genuinely want to hear from more forceful voices on what ought to be done about it
So enter the On Point “money ladies,” Rana Foroohar and Michelle Singletary. Rana is a CNN global economic analyst and global business columnist and associate editor at The Financial Times, author of many books, including “Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World.” Hello, Rana. It’s good to talk to you again
RANA FOROOHAR: Hey, Meghna. It’s great to be here
CHAKRABARTI: Did you like my rant?
FOROOHAR: I loved it. I loved your whole setup. Okay. I’m like, “Yes.” Yes. Yes. Check, check, check
CHAKRABARTI: Sometimes I just have to get these things out of my system. I’m so sorry, listeners. But let me also —
FOROOHAR: I’m so glad it was you, not me
CHAKRABARTI: Let me bring in Michelle Singletary
She’s the Washington Post’s nationally syndicated personal finance columnist, author of many books as well, including “What to Do With Your Money When Crisis Hits: A Survival Guide.” Michelle, welcome back. I’m so glad to talk to you again
MICHELLE SINGLETARY: Oh, I’m so glad to be back. Thank you so much, and a big amen to what you just said. If we were in church, we would all be standing up and doing the little dance
CHAKRABARTI: Tell me about it. Oh my God. Now I don’t want listeners to think that I’m, like some kind of crazy communist hiding around a corner because I actually still do believe in the free flow of capital, and I look askance at the idea of state ownership of industry, okay?
So, I just wanna put that out there, On Point listeners. But this weird… Now it’s been going on for a long time, this weird radical imbalance between how, quote-unquote, “rich” this country is versus how much tens, hundreds of millions of Americans are actually struggling to get by. I just don’t know, I don’t know
Michelle I don’t even know how to process it or think through that. Like, how do you do that?
SINGLETARY: On this show, I cry all the time, so that’s … And it’s probably gonna happen today. I don’t always process that. I have the, I don’t know, I would say privilege of working with people one-on-one
I look at their budgets. I work with couples. I work with people who make very little to people who make a very lot of money. So I get to see exactly what’s happening, people’s actual numbers, and, I tell you, it keeps me up at night. My husband is like, “You can’t internalize all this stuff,” but I do
Because I see people who have gone to college and gotten a college degree and got a master’s degree, and they are struggling. And I see people who just graduated from high school, got a decent job making what in any other country would be a great living, and they can’t make it. And it’s it’s just so disheartening that so many people can’t go to the doctor’s or can’t buy a home, or if their car breaks down, that is a major crisis. For some people, you’re like, “Oh, I can come up with $1,000 for car repair.” For them, it might mean not getting to work for a couple of days. And so, it really bothers me, and it’s why I work in my community, why I work in my church to help people try to figure out how to make this money work that they’re getting.
It greatly bothers me, the system that we set up where the rich get just richer and the poor get poorer, and the middle class are just crushed
Michelle Singletary
So it greatly bothers me, the system that we set up where the rich get just richer and the poor get poorer, and the middle class are just crushed. And the thing about that middle, they say, “I did everything you told me to do,” right? I did it all, and I still can’t make it work.”
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Rana, jump in
FOROOHAR: Yeah. I was struck by your setup about plutocracy and how the Roman Empire was set up where the plutocrats the ruling class, the policies were set up to support them. Absolutely that’s what we have in this country, and, it didn’t happen overnight
It doesn’t happen all at once. It’s not like some nefarious person, you might think Ronald Reagan was nefarious, but it’s not like some nefarious person comes in 1980 and says, “We’re gonna change the whole system and make it so the rich get richer.” But there are a series of tweaks that are based on ideas about how the economy should function, and one of the core ideas in this country has been that we should be an asset-led economy, an ownership economy. And, you’re seeing that, actually, it’s been just in the news this week with Trump coming in with these Trump accounts, the hundred thousand dollar grant from the treasury for children born between 2025 and 2028. And, hey, great. But guess what? When those kids are 18 at a 5% rate, that’s gonna be 2,400 bucks. That ain’t gonna close the wealth gap. That’s not, you know, these kind of tweaks are not, they’re admirable, but not helping fundamentally, and that’s because we need a wholesale shift in how the economy works.
We’ve got to go back to a better balance between labor and capital. I can talk more about how that could happen. One of the things I’ll just say very quickly- That I find is bubbling up now, it sounds wonky, but it’s gonna be important. You’ll hear more about it. Redistribution and pre-distribution
So, redistribution is one way to tackle all the problems we’ve just been talking about. It’s things like a wealth tax. It’s making billionaires in California pay a one-time levy on their wealth. Things that would basically say, “Okay, we now, we have enough money to fund Medicaid. We have enough money to help people with food security, et cetera.” But there’s also something called pre-distribution, which is very interesting, and that’s essentially what the Trump Account is. It doesn’t go nearly far enough. Pre-distribution is when we look at the wealth in our society in areas like, for example, the digital economy, artificial intelligence, which is by the way gonna put inequality on steroids, already is, and we say, “You know what? We can either allow 1% of the population to take all the gains,” or we can say, “This is almost like a … It’s sovereign wealth. It’s like oil. It’s like a natural resource. We’re gonna redivide that pie.” This has been done many times in many societies. It’s been done with land reform in Asia.
It’s been done with reink we’re gonna hear a lot more about both pre-distribution and redistribution, otherwise we’re headed for some even rockier times
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I wanna come back to that in a second in terms of the digital economy, but Michelle, I’d love to hear you on the Trump Accounts actually. I know you wanted to talk about that
SINGLETARY: My upcoming column was about that. It’s a big yawn for me. It just so disingenuous. Oh, the children are gonna be rich. No, rich children are gonna be rich. Or richer. And here’s the thing. Take the free money, sure
Sign your kid up. Get that $1,000. The $25, $250, sure, fine, whatever. But in terms of legacy wealth, changing people’s lives, it’s a drop in the bucket, if that. And and that’s what my column talks about the six reasons why I feel like these kinds…it’s just much to do about nothing
‘Cause here’s the thing. Families can already do what these accounts say. They can already invest for their children. You can set up a custodial account. You can put money in a 529 plan. Their tools are already there, and we know that families still don’t put their money in there, and why?
It’s not because they lazy. It’s not because they not brilliant enough or smart enough as the rich people. It’s because they don’t have the money. They don’t have it. If $5,000 a year, it sounds “oh, that’s like nothing,” but for a family, you divide that by 12, that’s $400 a month
$400 a month, that’s food on my table. $400 a month, that’s the money I need to put that tire that burst. And so if they don’t have that, that account is gonna not move the needle hardly at all. Who’s gonna take advantage of it? It’s gonna be people like me, who my husband and I have done well. We would have extra 500, and we did it
We funded 529 plans for our kids. It’s gonna be the people who already have that extra, and it’s just, “Oh, let me just use this account too.” But in terms of this whole, “gonna be rich…” And then the other thing is, you’re gonna turn this money over to an 18-year-old. My kids living in my house, who know how to handle money, are not gonna be using that money for their retirement day. They’re going to cash that money out. And so it’s just, to me it’s the kind… It’s just what Rana said. It’s rich people creating things without actually knowing how real people live their lives. If you wanna help these families, make sure they have healthcare. Why would you have cut the subsidies for the ACA market? That’s what is gonna change.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah
SINGLETARY: So to me, I… Ooh. So anyway, yeah. I just, you know. Oh
CHAKRABARTI: No, I hear you. So this gets to why I still can’t fundamentally accept or process the fact that, not just making ends meet, but, Brookings has this number that one in four American adults, 25% of American adults, are making choices about whether or not to eat on a daily basis
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: I was looking at this new series of studies from Brookings, and I quoted sort of their top-line finding at the beginning of the show that half of people living in American families just can’t afford to have a decent quality of life
Not even decent, the necessities of life. And I wanted to point out one more thing for both of you from this Brookings study, because they have an amazing map, state-by-state map. And oftentimes when we talk about affordability, the mind might automatically go to, yeah it’s expensive in San Francisco, New York, DC, Chicago
But the truth is that this affordability crisis is absolutely everywhere. So in this state-by-state map that Brookings has, basically every, almost every state in the United States, between 47%, only 47% to about 56% of American households are… or not only, but I should say between 47% to about 56% of American households can make ends meet, okay?
So they are able to afford the necessities of life. We’re not talking about splurges again. These are the healthcare, childcare, food issues. That’s such a low number. There are only a few states where it’s higher: Colorado, South Dakota, North Dakota, New Hampshire, where they’re up in the low 60%
And I just wanted to point that out. You two already know this. But just to say that I somehow feel like sometimes we talk about this in the media as almost a, just a concentrated problem when it truly is everywhere. Every location in this country. Rana, go ahead
FOROOHAR: Yeah. Yeah, no. As you’re speaking, I’m just thinking that, the median house price in America is $430,000
Which is, the, an in-state college tuition with housing is $30,000. And we could get into the fancy stuff, but just those things are out of reach for many people. This goes back to this larger question of America as an asset economy. If we go back and read our Thomas Piketty, the French economist that basically showed us several years back with his famous book that in lieu of wars or, a new deal or major government action, you will see asset wealth wildly outpace income wealth, and that has major consequences for politics and society, and that’s where we are now.
We have an asset economy that’s doing still great. We can talk about why that is and why I think it’s a head fake but it is. If you’re in the market, you’re still doing okay. The problem is that 93% of the market is owned by the top 10% of the population. So, if you get most of your money in a paycheck, you are not keeping up
The problem is that 93% of the market is owned by the top 10% of the population. So, if you get most of your money in a paycheck, you are not keeping up
Rana Foroohar
And going back to what Michelle said about the Trump accounts, this kind of grant, gift, BS, whatever you wanna call it, it basically, it just mirrors wealth inequality because what you find is even when there are, say, matches or, more of a push for people to donate or put into funds, you can only do that to the extent that you have money to do it, and you only have money to do it if you are deeply invested in the asset economy
So we’ve got to find a way to break that cycle and invest more of the country in the wealth, that you rightly pointed out, Meghna, is unprecedented in the history of this planet
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Michelle, that brings me to the question of, in a sense, this issue of rising prices would not be such an issue if people’s incomes were keeping up
And because they’re not, there is this big gap, and it’s been years now, between the rate of price increase versus the smaller rate of people’s wages increase. Because of that gap, that’s why these issues are becoming more and more acute
SINGLETARY: That’s exactly right. You get a raise, but if eggs and milk and the price of a car is increasing, you’re not getting ahead
You’re still treading water, if that. You look at the just, buying a car. Almost 20% of people who borrow for a car now are paying $1,000 a month, and they’re stretching those loans out to six and seven and eight years. So think about that. Six or seven, eight years of this very high car payment
So if it’s not 1,000, the average is, over $700 a month. And so if you’re paying for that transportation to get to your job, then that does not leave you money to put into, as Rana says, the asset economy. And so that’s why you’re left behind. And then it’s the same on buying groceries, medication. My daughter is a Type 1 diabetic, and she’s a schoolteacher and, See, I’m already gonna cry, and she talks about being able to afford her insulin and her medications on a teacher’s salary. Now, she can because her parents sent her to college with no debt, and she actually got scholarships for most of that.
So she worked. She did what she was supposed to do. But she’s making, good, decent money. But here’s my child who is, college graduate, about to go get her master’s and just — not barely, but like not a whole lot of extra — just trying to afford her medication. That’s what we’re talking about
FOROOHAR: This is about values too. My mother was a teacher as well, and she’s lucky to own a home, but she’s living very tight to the bone on a teacher’s pension. And this is about values. I’m gonna start crying. I’m not a crier, but I’m gonna start crying in a minute because we are truly at a breaking point of are we going to as a country just let people who are in basically the financial community and the very top tier of the tech community take all the wealth and leave the people that are teaching, that are caring for us in the hospital, that are doing anything else in the economy to really be disintermediated?
We are about to see what’s happened to not just factory workers, but teachers essential care workers, et cetera. We’re about to see that happen higher up the food chain because of AI. And what’s so interesting and mind-boggling to me is that although not unprecedented, because this also happened in the Roman Empire, that some of the people at the very top tier, they see the revolutionary handwriting on the wall, and they are calling for a sea change
OpenAI, for example, saying, “We need a sovereign wealth fund of tech wealth. Otherwise, nobody’s gonna have a job, and we’re gonna, we’re gonna be torn apart as a country.” It is such a profound thing, and I am amazed, frankly that it’s, with, that we’re not talking about it every single day in this way
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. You’re exactly right. When things get this far out of balance, it gives rise to very bad forms of government, of both the far right and far left variety. So, you know what I wanna do? I wanna take this back to the level of individual families, because we did get a bunch of listeners who it’s real- I love our listeners so much. They are open and brave in sharing their struggles. And it makes this real. I love that the three of us can talk about this at the theoretical level, and then also down at the dinner table level. So this is Rachel Murtagh. She’s in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and here is her question.
RACHEL MURTAGH [TAPE]: With the uncertainty right now with the economy, we’re trying to decide whether we reduce our debt payments and focus more on putting into our emergency fund, or if we still try to hammer down our debt as fast as possible. We’re right now doing a snowball debt payoff, which has been going well, but we just are a little worried that we need more in our emergency fund. We have about eight thousand in there now, which we feel great about, but just trying to see should we focus more on the emergency or do we focus more on our debt payoff?
CHAKRABARTI: Miss Michelle Singletary, that one’s for you
SINGLETARY: Yeah. Yeah. So kudos to Rachel. They’re doing a great job. 8,000 in their emergency fund that’s you know, that’s far more than the average family
So I think in her case, because they have so much in the emergency fund, I would take all the rest of the money and get rid of the debt. When you look at the average financial emergency for families, it’s anywhere from $400 to $1,000. So like your car, your tire blows out, or you’ve got some engine trouble
It’s $1,200 or $1,500. It’s always like over 1,000 when you go in. I don’t know, they have some chart that says, “Just charge them $1,000.” So they’ve got that money there for that. My concern would be, and she’s right, get rid of that debt, get rid of the debt because if there is a job loss or disruption in their income, then they don’t have to service that debt
They don’t have to worry about the debt, right? Just worry about putting food on the table and keeping the roof over their head. So if you’ve got that kind of money in an emergency fund, yeah, put everything else to the debt. And when she says snowball, that’s basically you s- you list all your debts from the smallest to the largest
You attack the smallest debt first, making extra payments on that, the minimum on the rest, and then you move, to the next, and so on. Now, some of the math people out there are like tearing their hair out like no, higher interest rate.” But you have to look at the psychology of how people work in terms of their money
And when you get those small victories, when you pay off debt, it really just energizes them, and they end up paying off the debt much sooner, so they don’t end up paying all those interests on that, those rest of the debts because they get rid of it sooner. And I’m a big advocate of it. It’s called snowball
I call it the debt dash, like a quick race to get rid of the debt. So that method, I think, works on a practical level for a lot of families. So in her case, you’ve got a great emergency fund. Stop, put all the extra money, and get rid of as much debt as you possibly can
CHAKRABARTI: I had never heard of the snowball technique
I love it. And you’re right, the psychology. The psychology is so important because like again, like we talk about vibe session, et cetera, but psychology is literally how we’re experiencing our lives. I’ve been chipping away at my student loans for a couple of decades now
And I only recently, I had about $36,000 in student loans to start off with, and I only recently saw the $10,000 mark remaining, and I honestly felt amazing. I was like “Oh, only like another decade.” Okay. Whew. But so here’s what I want, Rana, to turn back to you for a second because we’re describing the real fundamental problems that d- require some kind of paradigm shift in solutions
And you were talking about new kinds of, would you say pre-distribution and sovereign and wealth things. And you mentioned natural reWith their oil dividends
So this is something that’s not just a liberal or conservative idea. It’s pretty popular. Tell me more about where or how such a model would work in different sectors in the United States
FOROOHAR: Yeah, for sure. Just to give you a couple of historical examples, as we’ve talked about, these Trump accounts, which is really a baby bond fund, these have been tried in other countries the UK, Australia
And again, nice lunch money, but it doesn’t help to really fundamentally bridge the wealth gap for the reasons we’ve already discussed. So what does? What really changes things is when you look at, all right, what are the productive assets in our economy? And you could say if you’re in Alaska or Oklahoma, for example, it might be natural re Norway, for example, have sovereign wealth funds
It means that they take a certain amount of the wealth that is generated from reback every year, this is not just a one-time thing, every year to citizens who then can build, basically share in that wealth. Because the idea is, hey, you’re living in the state, you’re a citizen, some of this belongs to you
It can also go in-
CHAKRABARTI: Now we’re talking about the socialist states of Alaska and Oklahoma
FOROOHAR: Exactly. Really deeply blue. Not. Anyway, but interestingly, just on that note, you do see some of the the Nordic states going at it in a slightly different way. They use their sovereign wealth funds, as do, frankly, the sovereign wealth funds in the Arab world, to underpin social safety
So they, they do basic things better than we do, healthcare, education, et cetera. More money goes into it. The idea, though, is it’s a pot. We’re all citizens. One person doesn’t, if you’re Rockefeller, you don’t get to just keep everything that’s coming out of that geyser of oil that everybody gets to share
Now, take that to, where is the wealth today in our society? 85% of the wealth on the balance sheets of corporations is in digital assets, data, software, trademarks, intellectual property, ideas that you and I, this content that we are generating right now, that is where the value is. So I have thought, many or most economists, frankly, at this point think we are going to have some kind of what is called pre-distribution of those assets
Rather than waiting for, say, Jeff Bezos and a handful of other people to get everything and then wage some kind of incredibly contentious political battle to claw it back from them, let’s just say in advance, “This belongs to all of us, and let’s pre-distribute it in a variety of ways.” And you could do that through a kind of sovereign wealth fund
You could do it through the data ownership or the idea of, the way that you use AI being somehow value going back to you as opposed to the AI firms, which by the way, that’s a battle right now. Some AI firms are trying to get a stake, an equity stake in everything that is made with those algorithms, which PS, are scraping from you. So, yeah. It’s it’s complicated, but this is where we’re heading, I think
CHAKRABARTI: Michelle, I’m just curious what you think about that
SINGLETARY: Oh. As she was talking she’s so brilliant. I love Rana. I was thinking about the expression-
FOROOHARL: Love you too
SINLGETARY: I was thinking about the expression, “A rising tide lifts all boats,” and that’s really what we’re talking about, right? That it means that, that when everyone benefits, we all benefit. And honestly, just morally, we should not have a trillionaire. It’s just mind-boggling that we don’t have, we don’t distribute the wealth, that we don’t have a system where people can just live a decent life
Morally, we should not have a trillionaire. It’s just mind-boggling that we don’t distribute the wealth, that we don’t have a system where people can just live a decent life
Michelle Singletary
And when you have so much wealth concentrated by so many people, how many boats do you need? How many homes do you have? You can’t live in all of those. You have all this space, and you got families trying to live, family of five and six trying to live in two bedrooms. And I know a lot of people listening will say “I work for this money,” or, “They work for that money.” But you know what? You didn’t just work for that money. There’s no reason why a CEO should be making 100 times a person
FOROOHAR: Particularly the ones I know. Honestly, like many of us could do a better job. I’m not kidding you
SINGLETARY: Oh, I totally agree
FOROOHAR: I love it. Really, com eon
SINGLETARY: You and I, Rana, can run this country and do a much better job, and I just think about in my own personal life, because I like to not be a hypocrite, and so my husband and I have been redistributing our wealth
We have helped families go to college. We’ve helped our families with down payment on their home. You know, we’re helping our kids
FOROOHAR: Good for you, Michelle
When my teacher daughter says, “Hey, I’m gonna have a pizza party,” in a nanosecond I send her the money for that pizza party. So I think we all have to look at it that way
If we just give a little bit of what we have to people who don’t have, then we all benefit
Part III
CHAKRABARTI: And Rana, I wanted to just follow up on this idea of of pre-distribution. Because, I was trying to think of arguments against applying that model tomaybe people would think, okay for natural reate companies, but essentially from public lands, right?
FOROOHAR: Yep
CHAKRABARTI: And so there’s the idea that the public is giving companies the access to this extractive industry, and so therefore, the public should benefit from it. And that, and I think that kind of makes logical sense
So maybe some folks might say that doesn’t apply to the digital economy, but then I immediately rebutted my own rebuttal, and I was like, but the digital economy, I think you were describing what is essentially also an extractive industry
FOROOHAR: The first thing I thought, I was already gearing up my argument. I’m glad you you set me up for that, is we’re citizens. We are the public. We’re more public than the public lands. We, the public land this is our country, but this is our humanity. And, just at that level, this is really a conversation about humanity and values, and I think it’s so interesting right now that the Vatican is actually arguing for things like digital wealth sharing, faith communities are teaming up with some of the tech firms and saying, “We cannot literally mine the human being, sell it, and then have it be a zero-sum game in which we are all left impoverished with no work, no jobs, which forget about just the economic impact would be devastating, but the sense of meaning.”
Where does meaning come from? It comes from work, it comes from love, and it comes from courage. We need all three of those things right now. But these are profound questions because where we’re heading is going to be to a very Hobbesian place if we don’t have some kind of deeper sharing of the pie
Where does meaning come from? It comes from work, it comes from love, and it comes from courage. We need all three of those things right now. But these are profound questions because where we’re heading is going to be to a very Hobbesian place if we don’t have some kind of deeper sharing of the pie
Rana Foroohar
CHAKRABARTI: I love the philosophy of it. That’s actually what drives me, but the, and the more direct comparison these companies, these AI companies all the big tech companies, they are extracting a form of a natural re
FOROOHAR: Of course they are, right? Yeah. That’s the whole surveillance capitalism thing, which I’m glad you brought that up because actually people don’t connect those dots enough. We’ve been having this conversation, and you and I have had this before on the show when I wrote my second book, “Don’t Be Evil,” which was all about surveillance capitalism
That’s a term that was coined by the scholar Shoshana Zuboff in her book about this topic, that data is ideas. The thoughts in our brain, our actions on the computer right now, these are things that are being mined. They’re being surveilled. The camera that I’m looking at sees my eye movements and can take me to different ads based on that
The things that I’m typing are going into an AI model that is then being charged more for. But where do the ideas come from? They’re from my brain. They’re from my questions, my actions. And so they are being mined, and what’s really concerning to me is, just to get historical, there’s something called the Dutch disease, and it was the idea that natural re
They don’t create very many jobs. They extract a lot. They make just a few people wealthy. That’s what surveillance capitalism is. That’s what the AI economy is on steroids. We have to fix it or we will end up in, I think, a battle for the nation
SINGLETARY: Okay, so Michelle, I’m happy to, delighted to hear what you have to say about that, but I also wanted to ask you about a particular way in which this question of the digital world we’re living with is coursing directly into politics and how, the President of the United States and his family have been of personally benefiting from that
So do you want to take your pick as to what you wanna talk about
SINGLETARY: I wanna go back to the underdog ’cause isn’t this whole section about the underdog? That’s what we’re talking about. So I always root for the underdog. I’m just, you know, I’ve been an underdog. I know what it feels like
I’m an underdog. I’m a woman. I’m Black. I’ve had health issues. You name it. I’ve been a caregiver. I know all about being an underdog. And I just, again, I love listening to Rana. She’s just, I love talking to smart women, I tell you. But this whole thing about the digital companies, like somehow we’re not, part of it
We are not helping them get rich. Because every time you type in a question, you’re helping them get rich. And, you know when you sign on and they’ve got, every time I go someplace, it’s they have the cookies, right? And it says, “We’re gonna use what you do to help improve X.”
What they mean is we gonna use what you do and ask us to help us get richer. And so why should we not benefit from some of that? I’m not an economist, so I don’t know the solution in terms of the practicality of how do you extract that and redistribute it
But I do know that there are ways that we could set it up so that, families are helped, kids are helped. You know, someone asked me, I was on a program about the Dells’ contribution to the Trump accounts. And on the surface it’s look at them giving all these kids this money
But when you break it down, $250, you know what, Dell family, why don’t you adopt a whole school? A high school and say, every kid who gets into college, I’m gonna pay your whole college bill. That’s legacy changing. Because if they don’t have to pay for college, that money that they would’ve paid for college, then they can put it in the stock market
Don’t drip and drip down the wealth. Do something monumental that will help. How about adopting a whole college grad to say everybody who graduates with a degree, gets a job, I’m gonna give you money to down payment on your home. That’s gonna be changing. Your little per person thing that you thinking is so great? It’s not so great
So that’s my take on this, and here’s the other thing. Nobody is saying, “Give me it all… I want a yacht.” That’s not what people are saying. They’re saying, “Listen, do you need two yachts? Can you not buy one of those yachts, and take that money and give it to your actual employees? And how about paying all their healthcare with some of that wealth?” I’m not gonna talk about any billionaire in particular because I do wanna still keep my job for a little bit longer. But let’s just say-
FOROOHAR: I can talk about him
SINGLETARY: But I’m just saying, how about those billionaires with companies that you say, every employee who works for me for longer than two or three years, I’m gonna put your kid through college. Every employee who works for me for two or four years, I’m gonna make sure you have a pension. How about that? That is how we could extract some of that wealth, and you’re still gonna be rich
You still can have two or three yachts and have a $50 million wedding, but some family will be able to send their kid to college or have a house-
FOROOHAR: Yeah, 100%
SINGLETARY: -that just has a couple of bedrooms, right? They don’t have bedrooms that you never gonna see. They have houses where they never walk into some of those rooms
How about that? That’s what we’re talking about. We’re not saying we want all your money. We’re just saying give us just a little piece so that we c- ’cause we work for you. We work hours for you. We stay away from our families to work those long hours for you. How about sharing that with us?
FOROOHAR: I just, I completely agree with what Michelle’s saying, and I just can’t help, Meghna, but get philosophical when I think about these things because my first thought was I wanna go open ChatGPT right now and plug in how much would it actually cost the top 20 billionaires in the country to live in the way they do, and then let’s, for the rest of their lives, and then let’s look at the rest of their money and then let’s algorithmically coordinate it to all the schools and families that need help and just, boom, have AI do that problem.
Let’s do that. In fact, I may do that and write a column about it. But I then was also thinking is that a kind of a noblesse oblige model? Is that feudal? Are we going back to some kind of plutocracy where we depend or we ask for money that is, and wealth and value, productive value, that is actually ours and should be ours to own rather than theirs to give?”
And I think that is a profound question. And that’s something, by the way, the Democratic socialists are starting to ask, and some populists as well
CHAKRABARTI: So you know what’s interesting about that is, this desire for a fairer nation is actually, amongst the American people, I’d say, forget the political class, but the American people, is very bipartisan
It can’t help but to be that way because of the ubiquity of the challenges that people are suffering no matter how they vote in every election. But there’s this weird gap between the bipartisan desires of the American people to have fairer, less stressful lives versus what’s happening in the halls of power with the people who are supposed to represent us
And actually, Michelle, I wanted to turn back to you on that because there were, there’s a couple of things. I don’t know if you wanna talk about Trump and crypto, or in a more practical sense, there’s changes happening. I mentioned my student loan earlier, and I saw some weird language last time I logged in
There’s actually all sorts of stuff practically speaking that mirror this weird gap between what people actually want versus what they’re getting from their government
SINGLETARY: Whoo. Oh my goodness. We need to know how this like… I’m not a fan of crypto. I’ve never been. I think if you got in early, it’s again, rich people getting rich. Because I have a relative who opened up an account and got $80 in Bitcoin. What? What you doing with that? Come on now. And just look at the stories. We see that he created this meme, and who got rich? Most of the people who supported him, who bought it, lost money. But did they lose money?
Absolutely not, because they had transaction fees. Bitcoin’s supposed to, level things out, but there’s so many transaction fees, and it’s used for so much criminal behavior that it’s just such a… I hate it. I think that the president championing it, and he’s getting rich, and the actual average person’s, not only are they not getting rich, they are getting poorer says a lot about the administration and where they stand in terms of helping everyday people
CHAKRABARTI: I do wanna ask about, since I’ve mentioned student loans a couple of times mostly ’cause I know a lot of people, when you say those words, their ears perk up. Michelle, are there changes coming down the pike on student loans, or did I imagine that?
SINGLETARY: No, there’s definitely changes. Obviously, okay not obviously. There was the income-based payment plan under the Biden administration, the SAVE, that is going away. There were lots of court,battles, so it’s definitely going away. They’re creating a new one called WRAP. Doesn’t matter what it means, just the income-based program. I think there’s some good things about that. There’s also loan limits so you can’t borrow as much. Now, I it pains me to say this because they I just dislike the Trump administration so much because I really don’t think they help the average person. But I do like the limits that they’ve put in place, only because it will force families to have conversations that they should have had before in terms of sending their children to college on debt that they, that will take decades to pay off. My concern is that it will drive people to the private loan because they’re still not gonna have those conversations, and they’re gonna borrow money, and it’s gonna cost them more.
And so there’s nothing in the new system that sort of addresses that. So if you have a student loan or you’re taking out new student loans, you’re sending your children to college in the fall, you gotta really pay attention to the changes because you can’t borrow as much. And then, you’ve said, “Okay, go to this school,” and then you go to the loan office and financial aid office and realize, wait a minute, for parents, I can only borrow, $20,000 for this kid
Now they’re in this school. They wanna go. They’ve got the school colors. They’re packed up to go. What are we gonna do? They’re gonna turn to private loans or do some other things like pull money out of their equity for their home to send their kids. In that sense, I’m concerned about that. But I’ve always tried to maintain that please, if you’re listening and if you’re, on the edge or not even on the edge, but you’re doing kinda okay, be very careful about where you allow your children to go
Do not allow a teenager to decide where they’re going with money they don’t have. Have that conversation. Go to community college for two years. Get those basic credits out of the way, and then transfer to a four-year university. Stay at home. I know we want that traditional college experience, but if you don’t have, I just don’t want you all to debt your life, you know- with all this debt going forward because if we don’t change the system, you are gonna lose out. And so you can’t do what other people are doing, even though that’s not fair.
CHAKRABARTI: Rana, we’ve got a minute left. I’m gonna give the last word to you today
FOROOHAR: All right. I’m gonna connect a couple dots up
Michelle was talking about the Trump administration, and one of the things that I think is very important for people to think about right now, democracy is predicated not on the idea of economic equality, but it is predicated on the idea of political equality. And I think what you’ve been seeing, certainly in the last couple of decades, is money and power becoming more entrenched in this country
This administration, what it did, it just lifted the scrim on that. And it said, “You know what? It’s a free-for-all. We are here at the trough, and we’re gonna stuff ourselves. And if you’re with our gang, come on, and you can do the same.” Deep cynicism now amongst the voting public, and that is when you have to worry about democracy
The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts
This program aired on July 9, 2026. Audio will be available soon
Latest episode
