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Share with us the overarching theme
of the book.
The overarching theme is really clear: It’s that the debates
we’re having aren’t really between left and right or even
Republicans and Democrats, they’re between people who have
gotten richer or poorer since the financial collapse in 2008.
Where do you live, for example? [Little Rock], Arkansas is
a perfect example. A lot of Arkansas is not richer than it was,
except for the northwest part of the state, which is a totally
different world. But is El Dorado richer than it was in 2008?
And yet a small number of cities are much, much richer than
they were and everyone else has less. So that’s really the
debate. You know, it’s the people who are benefiting from our
current policies versus everyone else.
How did they get richer?
It’s a complicated story, but I would just summarize it
by saying this: The economy moved from a manufacturing
economy to primarily a finance economy and a tech economy.
No one person decided this, this was the product of many
choices over many years. But the net result is an economy
where only a relatively few people reap most of the benefit and
that makes for an unstable country, and conservatives didn’t
want to admit this because it sounded like they were socialists
or something, and liberals didn’t want to admit it because
they were the ones getting rich. In 2015 for the first time in
a hundred years, the middle class became the minority in this
country. That’s a disaster. You can’t have a democracy except
in a middle-class country, period. And yet no one even noticed.
Truckload Authority will be read by
3,000 trucking executives. What’s your
message to them about the importance
of the trucking industry?
If you care about employment, it’s absolutely vital. And this
is why I’m so concerned about autonomous vehicles driving all
commercial driving. This would include ambulances, school,
buses, taxis, but also trucking. Long distance and local trucking
is the single biggest employer of high-school educated men in
America. It’s number one in all 50 states. So it’s a huge part of
the economy. Now, the way that we understand trucking is part
of the supply chain in Washington. So we think of trucking
as the way that, you know, Amazon gets its goods to market,
brings the paper towels to your house after you ordered them.
That’s true. It’s a vital link that makes commerce possible. Of
course, the way policymakers also need to think about trucking
is as one of the biggest and most important employers of men
in this country. Male-dominated occupations, working-class
occupations are in decline. I know that it’s unfashionable to
care about what men do for a living; it’s fashionable to hate
men. But 50 percent of our population is male. And if men
don’t succeed in the workplace, they don’t get married and
families fall apart. And so it is absolutely essential that our
policymakers care about what men do for work and in rural
America, male jobs have disappeared to a large extent.
Disappeared. So automation in the agricultural sector has, you
know, increased dramatically over a hundred years. And over
time it has dramatically reduced the number of jobs and those
are the remainder of the lowest jobs that primarily are taken up
by foreign labor, and manufacturing is dying. And so, really,
trucking is like an essential part of the economy outside the
cities in all 50 states. It really matters. If you replace all truck
drivers tomorrow with autonomous vehicles, you know, the
society would collapse outside the cities in a lot of places. You
put millions of men out of work and families would collapse
around them. That’s a big thing. No one seems to care, which
tells you a lot.
Do you have any political aspirations?
Well, I couldn’t get elected room mother, but thank you
for asking. Why? I’m always giving my opinion and a lot of
people disagree with me. But I’ve never said anything I didn’t
believe, but I’ve been wrong a lot. And as I told you, I’ve had
a lot of dumb opinions. I don’t know if that reflects poorly on
me or not, but everything I say, I mean with total sincerity, and
I don’t think that’s the way you get elected.
You’ve said a lot about immigration.
Where do you stand on the
immigration situation? You’ve got
Trump wanting to block them out,
you’ve the Democrats wanting to
let them in. Where do you stand on
immigration?
I’m for immigration. I think immigration is good, but
not every immigrant is the same. If you’re in charge of the
country, you’ve got a responsibility to think about the effects
of your decisions on the people who live in the country. Just
like if you’re a parent, you have responsibility to think about
your children. It’s the same dynamic. And so to act like all
immigrants are equally good is insane. We have an economy
that’s becoming increasingly sophisticated and automated and
requires increasingly higher levels of education to meaningfully
participate in. Yet the majority of our immigrants have high
school educations or less. Why are we importing people
who can’t, on average, meaningfully participate in what our
economy is becoming? It’s insane. So what you’re doing is
creating a massive and permanent underclass and that makes
the country poor and more unstable and that’s why California,
which, when I left it 35 years ago, was the richest state, now
has more poverty than any state because it has more low-skilled
immigrants than any state. Of non-citizens in California, over
70 percent are on welfare. There are millions of them, so anyone
who’s telling you that system is good for the country is either
ignorant or lying. It’s terrible. Now, it’s very good for certain
employers. It’s been great for the chicken plants because they
can pay less, but the only reason they pay less is because the
rest of us middle-class taxpayers pay the difference in housing
subsidies and food stamps and health care education. We’re
paying for big companies to pay their workers crappy wages.
Why are we doing that? So companies can get richer and leave
us with a society where people have nothing in common and
don’t speak the same language. It’s nuts. And the Democratic
Party has decided that they’re all in on this because these people
will ultimately be voters once they get amnesty and citizenship.
But the effect on the country is ruinous and that’s why Trump
got elected because he was saying that out loud. He was right.
Trump hasn’t been right about everything, but he was right
about that.
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