AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman.

With the presidential election just eight weeks away, we’re continuing to look at the race and Tuesday night’s ABC News presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. The debate was moderated by ABC’s Linsey Davis and David Muir. This is President Trump.

DONALD TRUMP: I built one of the greatest economies in the history of the world, and I’m going to build it again. It’s going to be bigger, better and stronger. But they’re destroying our economy. They have no idea what a good economy is. Their oil policies, every single policy — and remember this: She is Biden. You know, she’s trying to get away from Biden. “I don’t know the gentleman,” she says. She is Biden. The worst inflation we’ve ever had, a horrible economy because inflation has made it so bad, and she can’t get away with that.

DAVID MUIR: Mr. President, thank you. Your time is up. Linsey?

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I want to respond to that, though. I want to just respond briefly.

Clearly, I am not Joe Biden, and I am certainly not Donald Trump. And what I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country, one who believes in what is possible, one who brings a sense of optimism about what we can do, instead of always disparaging the American people.

AMY GOODMAN: Still with us, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, Columbia University professor, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Professor Stiglitz is also currently the chief economist of the Roosevelt Institute, one of the 16 Nobel economists who have warned about Trump’s policies. We’re also joined in Part 2 of our discussion on the economy and the presidential debate by Ralph Nader, longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic and former presidential candidate. His newest book, Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country That Works for the [People]. He’s the founder of the Capitol Hill Citizen newspaper.

Thank you both for staying with us. Professor Stiglitz, if you can expand this discussion, and if you think either — first respond to what they are saying in that clip, but either Harris or Trump are presenting an economic approach that will actually help everyday Americans?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, first, one of the things that Trump is claiming is that he built the economy and that Biden destroyed the economy. Every president is confronted with events beyond their control, and they inherit an economy that — the foundations of which were left by their predecessor.

In the case of Trump, he had inherited an economy that was recovering from a very deep recession caused by mismanagement of the financial sector by Bush, who preceded him. When Trump got on, we were finally recovering from that recession. He then passed a tax bill that was supposed to get the economy roaring. What it did do is get sheer buybacks roaring. It was a tax cut for the billionaires and for the big corporations. It exacerbated one of America’s major problems: inequality. Remember when he talked about “repeal and replace,” repeal Obamacare and replace it? He failed. He failed because he had nothing to replace it with. And to his surprise, Americans liked Obamacare. It wasn’t perfect, but it was so much better than what had preceded it.

Now, when Biden took office, he was inheriting a real mess, because — not to blame Trump for the pandemic, but we can blame Trump for the way he managed the pandemic. And the result of the way he mismanaged it was more than a million Americans died. So, Biden had to build on that mess that he inherited. Because it hadn’t been well managed, there were enormous supply interruptions, the demand shifts, and that’s what gave rise to inflation. It wasn’t Biden. What Biden did is to have a number of policies address that. And if he had cooperation, more cooperation from Congress, he could have done a lot more. Like one of the problems early on was a shortage of labor. When you face a shortage of labor, what do you do? You try to get more people in the labor force. How do you do that? Well, one of the striking things about America is a weak labor force participation in the labor market. What he wanted to do was family leave, child care. Those kinds of things would have increased the supply of labor and would have moderated wage increases. That would have cut — brought inflation down. But by keeping his eye on the ball, focusing on the right diagnosis, inflation did come down dramatically.

Now, there was one more thing that made the inflation so bad — again, can’t blame Biden for that — and that was the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That led to soaring food prices and soaring oil prices and energy prices. Again, a steady hand, sanctions, a lot of expansion of energy, and the result is that the high prices of oil came down.

What is striking about Harris at this point is she’s kept her eye on the ball and what are the underlying problems. And let me just talk about a couple of those things. People are still worried about inflation. Yes, they haven’t gone back to where they were. They’re not going to go back to where they were. But the rate of inflation has come way down, to everybody’s surprise. An important part of inflation is healthcare costs. The IRA brought down those healthcare costs. We are finally being able to negotiate with the drug companies to bring those drug prices down.

She’s talked about housing. One of the problems about housing is we have to build more houses. Part of the problem of housing is we haven’t had the kind of innovation that we need. All of our innovation resources have been going to building a better advertising engine. That’s what most of the Silicon Valley is directed at, building a better advertising engine to target different people. We need more innovation in to reduce the cost of construction, and she’s proposed that.

So, I could go on. But another important problem is market power. Market power is very large, and there is a concerted program in the Biden-Harris administration to break, to limit the exercise of market power. Very, very important initiative. If we break market power, then there’s more competition, and, again, prices will moderate. So, if you look across the agenda, what I see in the Harris program is a diagnosis of the problems and concrete proposals for addressing those problems today and building foundations that will lead to a better economy going forward.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, are you as hopeful about what a Harris administration, what a Harris presidency, would do for the economy?

RALPH NADER: No, I’m not. I mean, she is diagnosing some of the problems, but she’s not diagnosing the obstacles, such as the corporate control of Congress that’s put Congress in gridlock, or worse, and blocked so many of the proposals that the people in this country want, whether it’s insurance or living wage or corporate crime enforcement budgets or auditing the military budget and cutting out the enormous waste there and redirecting it. So, that’s always the problem. You know, they say they’re going to do this and they have a plan for that, but they don’t talk about the obstacles that are involved. So, that’s what I focus on.

And it’s not just the obstacles of corporate power and corporate crime and corporate campaign money and corporate media. It’s also that the corporations are accelerating their hegemony and their corporate supremacy in every sector of our country. They’re raising our kids, you know, with the Silicon Valley Gulag five to seven hours a day, sidestepping parental authority. I mean, that’s how far they’re going, not to mention their strategic control over the tax system. So much of spending budgets are distorted. They’re blocking effective work on climate disruption, the oil and gas companies. They’re pillaging the public lands. They are damaging private pensions. They’re blocking the minimum wage.

So, you just can’t talk about “I have a plan.” You’ve got to talk about shift of power. You’ve got to talk about giving voters, small taxpayers, consumers, workers the power to organize, to speak out, to have access to the courts, to have access to their own state and federal legislators. There’s a big closure movement in Washington, in Congress and the executive agencies. They don’t even bother answering letters and petitions anymore. So, it’s a democracy crisis of the first order.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond, Professor Stiglitz?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Yeah, I agree with many things that Ralph says. I think a first order reform has to be campaign contributions. I think a first order response has to be addressing the problems of the Supreme Court, its structure. And if they can’t pass a constitutional amendment, which is admittedly really difficult, within the current Constitution, they can add judges. And I think it’s going to be absolutely necessary, if they don’t have a constitutional amendment that will limit term limits and limit the abuses of the Supreme Court, that they increase the number of judges to get the — restore the balance to make a Supreme Court reflect where the American people are.

But many of the issues that he’s talked about are things that are already being addressed within the Biden administration. And Harris, I believe, will continue that: breaking corporate power by making the markets more competitive, increasing taxes on corporations rather than lowering taxes on corporations, which Trump has proposed to do, so they won’t have as much money to advance their agenda. There’s a lot of support, both on Republicans and Democrats, for something equivalent to what Europe calls the Digital Services Act to stop the kind of abuses in the digital space that we see coming out of Facebook and Twitter and so — X, as it’s called now. So, that kind of a regulatory structure is on the cards, I think, because the abuses have been so, so great. You know, one of the things about corporate America is that it’s been so greedy that even moderate Americans have said, “You know, wait, something has to be done about this.”

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, if you can respond and also elaborate on what you said in Part 1 of our discussion about raising the issue of raising the minimum wage?

RALPH NADER: Yeah. You know, Joe, I tried to get the labor unions to make minimum wage the big issue on Labor Day. We got a lot of enthusiasm from Liz Shuler, AFL-CIO, other top labor leaders. They passed the proposal past the Democratic National Committee, who shut it down. They didn’t want a lot of events that they couldn’t control all over the country, with a compact for American labor, not just minimum wage, but worker safety and repealing Taft-Hartley, etc., all the things you know about.

So, the problem is they don’t follow through. She should have made a bigger thing on voter suppression by the Republicans and Trump, because that’s one reason why they lose these close congressional races. And if you can’t control Congress, you can’t do any of these things. Congress is the main bulwark, either to oppose or the main pathway to enact. And they’re barely holding on in Congress against the worst GOP in history. And so, you’ve got to talk about Congress constantly. That means you’ve got to talk about campaign money.

But more important, you’ve got to talk about getting nonvoters out. There are going to be about 100 million nonvoters in November. You’ve got to listen to people like Reverend William Barber, who wrote the book just now that’s been totally ignored, Joe, called White Poverty, trying to say that the overriding issue is class. It’s not just race. It’s class. And class feeds race discrimination. So, if you don’t talk about Congress when you’re talking about the future of our country, you’re not addressing the main obstruction of corporate power in our country.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Stiglitz —

RALPH NADER: They prowl the corridors of Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Professor Stiglitz?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: No, I agree with you. The politics — reforming our politics is at the center. In fact, one of the aspects I’m very concerned about is gerrymandering. And we have a Supreme Court that says, “Oh, leave it to the states to decide.” But, of course, the states are gerrymandered, so you leave it to gerrymandered states to resolve the problem of gerrymandering. It’s absurd. And it’s another example of the absurdity of our Supreme Court. That’s why we have to begin with addressing the problems of the Supreme Court, which has allowed money into politics in such a corrupting way.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask about Lina Khan — this is an issue that’s been raised before — head of the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC, and the billionaires who are pushing for Kamala Harris to replace her. Ralph Nader, if you can talk about the significance of this, what this movement is all about on both sides, what she represents?

RALPH NADER: Well, she represents the activation of the Federal Trade Commission from its years of slumber in the antitrust area, not so much consumer protection, unfortunately. But she has opened up a lot of litigation against the Silicon Valley trust, so to speak, as well as other companies that she’s going after. I think her tenure is secure if Kamala Harris becomes president. She has a very broad constituency of support. Even JD Vance has come out in the past supporting her.

AMY GOODMAN: If you can explain also, Professor Stiglitz, about the pressure from Kamala Harris supporters, like Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, to get rid of Lina Khan?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, Lina Khan has taken a very strong stance against market power, against monopolies, against abusive — abuses of market power. And it’s not a surprise, given those strong stances, that those people who have made their money out of exercising market power and abuse of market power, abusing consumers, don’t like her. So, it’s not a surprise that many of the contributors to both parties are suspect.

But economists are basically on one side of this. If we’re going to have a dynamic economy, we need competition. She is the most forceful advocate of competition. There’s been some fantastic court decisions in support of what she’s done, with Google being declared a monopoly in the search engines, cases going forward on Google’s monopoly in advertising, many other cases going on on abuses of market power by all the powerful companies.

And let me just take — differ with what Ralph said. Among the important issues of consumer protection are privacy issues. And she’s taken on those, too, those privacy issues, in a very important way. So, I think that there are both — it’s actually been amazing watching the boldness with which the FTC and the Department of Justice has attacked these issues.

And let me remind those who think of these as being very abstract issues, competition is really important for our dynamic economy, for innovation, and competition — lack of competition has resulted in more inflation, because they have the power to raise prices, which they exercised during the post-pandemic era. And the lack of competition, market power gives these corporations the ability to exploit us in a whole variety of ways that we see over and over again. You look at the abuses of the banks and credit cards, in the pharmaceutical companies, in each of the areas, like the internet, each of the areas where we feel we have no choice. Why do we have no choice? Because there’s not effective competition.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader?

RALPH NADER: But there’s another, Joe — there’s another big area that transcends the competition. It’s called massive billing fraud. And the expert at Harvard, Malcolm Sparrow, applied mathematician, who studied this, estimates conservatively that just in the healthcare industry alone, $350 billion a year, 10% of the expenditure, is drained away in billing fraud and abuse. And the FTC — and I hope to speak to some of the FTC commissioners on this; they’ve invited me — has not done anything on billing fraud.

Another way that competition is undermined is all the companies, regardless of their lack of competition, have the same fine print contracts, so they disadvantage consumers in all kinds of ways. Just think of the airlines for a more visible way. They all have the same fine-print, one-sided contract, restricting people’s right to sue. They can change the contracts at will, called unilateral modification, compulsory arbitration. All this has economic consequences, as well as legal exclusion and injustice. But, you know, just the test for the Democrats, how they’ve abandoned the minimum wage. I know that —

AMY GOODMAN: Before we get to the minimum wage, Ralph —

RALPH NADER: — you got Paul Krugman once to finally write about it.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph, before we get to the minimum wage, if you can respond?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Yeah, yeah. You’re absolutely right. And there are other provisions, like the nondisclosure agreements, which have played such an important role in a lot of other areas, like discrimination. But there’s one more I wanted to emphasize, which is, economists have finally begun to talk about monopsony power, the power in the labor market. And like monopoly power drives prices up, making workers, ordinary citizens, poorer, monopsony drives wages down.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you spell “monopsony”?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: M-O-N-O-P-S-O-N-Y. It’s the power over workers, over suppliers. So, it’s the power of large corporations to exploit small suppliers, or corporations to exploit ordinary workers. The effect of that —

RALPH NADERS: And small farmers.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: The effect of this market power over your suppliers is to drive down wages estimated by an amount of 30, 35, 40% or more. So, the point we’re making is that, finally, the Department of Justice and the FTC are going after monopsony power and some of the provisions that Ralph was talking about, putting into contracts, that increase monopsony power. One example, noncompete clauses. If you’re a hamburger flipper and, you know, you work for McDonald’s or Burger King, in that contract, it has a provision, in some places, where you cannot go to another company. And that, of course, undermines your competition in the marketplace. Weakening competition drives down wages, increases profits, increases inequality, makes for a less efficient market.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph, you were talking about the minimum wage,

RALPH NADER: Yeah. Well, just on Joe, Joe, you have to pay more attention to the very tiny enforcement budgets in the FTC and Justice Department. One major law firm has more lawyers than the lawyers working on these issues in the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, just one giant law firm. And without budgets, you can’t really spread the kind of policies that you’re favoring.

And the second thing that needs to be paid attention is delay. The way the courts are now structured, whatever Lina Khan does with the Justice Department, they can drag it out for years. And everybody knows that. They can drag it out until there’s a new administration or a new Federal Trade Commission.

So, this is why Congress has to be the focus. Congress has got to be the focus on changing the nature of the judiciary, which judges get confirmed or rejected. And Congress has got to be the focus on opposing corporate law firms that are blocking adequate enforcement budgets. It’s like having a hundred cops in New York City. You can’t believe how small these budgets are. They keep telling us — we say, “Why aren’t you going after this antitrust violation? Why aren’t you going after this monopoly? Why aren’t you going after agribusinesses crushing farmers in the marketplaces?” They’re, “We don’t have the staff. We don’t have the lawyers. We don’t have the prosecutors.” So we have to pay attention to these things.

AMY GOODMAN: Joe Stiglitz —

RALPH NADER: On the minimum wage, I know Joe is a great champion of a living wage. But, Joe, aren’t you amazed at this presidential campaign not making — the Democrats not making this front and center? It’s just a throwaway line. It’s not front and center. They don’t have workers talking about what it means to get more dollars per hour. They don’t really make an effort in Congress. She doesn’t talk about it. She never mentions it hardly, Kamala Harris.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: I agree. They should be mentioning the minimum wage. You know, research in recent years among economists has totally changed our view about what a minimum wage like $15 an hour, or even a little bit higher, would mean. It used to be said that if you raise the minimum wage, you’re going to create more unemployment. We now know that’s not true. Raising the minimum wage from the abysmal level where it’s been would actually be good for employment. It would put more money into people who would spend it, and that would increase the aggregate demand, particularly in some of the poorer communities. And so, those places in the country, like Seattle, that have already raised their minimum wages are actually doing very well.

AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to go to a piece in the Times about a week ago. “Donors to Vice President Harris’s campaign are pushing her to reconsider supporting a proposed tax on the wealthiest Americans, as some Wall Street and Silicon Valley executives try to reshape the Democratic nominee’s governing agenda.” It goes on: “Harris’s campaign … said she supported the tax increases included in … Biden’s latest White House budget proposal. One of those plans would require Americans worth at least $100 million to pay taxes on investment gains even if they have not sold the stocks, bonds or other assets that have appreciated. Under the plan, those Americans would owe a 25 percent tax on a combination of their regular income, like wages, and so-called unrealized gains. The so-called billionaire minimum income tax could create hefty tax bills for wealthy individuals who derive much of their wealth from the stocks and other assets they own.” I want to get each of your comments on this as we begin to wrap up. Ralph Nader?

RALPH NADER: Well, I’ll hand that over to Joe. My main proposal is to restore the tax rates that were operating in the prosperous 1960s on the rich and on the corporations, before we reduced them dramatically in succeeding years, shut down any kind of tax reform, fundamental bottom-up tax reform, and allowed huge deficits or declining public service budgets because the corporations and super rich were being severely undertaxed.

AMY GOODMAN: Your final comment, Joe Stiglitz?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Yeah.

RALPH NADER: Joe, you can answer that other part better than I can.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: So, we clearly went too far, because we’re in a situation today where the ultrarich are actually paying a smaller fraction of their income in taxes than those who are not so well-off. And Warren Buffett put it very forcefully when he said something is wrong where he’s paying a lower tax rate than his secretary.

The particular proposal that you put on the table is called constructive realization of capital gains, something I’ve advocated for a very long time. It has a lot of other economic advantages. These are technicalities, like, but it reduces the problem of a lockup, where you don’t want to sell an asset, because if you do, you pay a tax because of the tax is only on realization. So, it’s a reform that would actually make the economy more efficient, at the same time make it a fairer tax system. So, I’m very strongly supportive of the issue of this constructive realization. And what you do is you pay it as what the value is assessed to be, and then, at the end, when you finally sell, you can do all the kinds of reconciliation, so you’re not ever, ever really overpaying on the tax. It’s just making you pay it upfront, rather than delaying and delaying.

It has to be accompanied by another provision that is really a very bad provision. It’s called step-up in basis of taxes on capital gains. And that’s a provision when you bequest — bequeath your asset to your children or somebody else. When they inherited the capital gain — the basis of the tax is — the capital gain is at the date of inheritance. What that means, all the capital gains, from the time the asset was worth maybe nothing to the time you give it away, totally escapes taxation. And that is an essential ingredient in creating in America this inherited plutocracy, which is so much undermining the basic values of our country.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both —

RALPH NADER: Which is why I come back again and again, Amy, to Congress, Congress, Congress. The way our system is built, Congress can be the great enabler or the great obstructor. And you look at all our proposals that Joe and I just talked about, they’ve got to get through Congress, which is why we started this newspaper, Capitol Hill Citizen, which I hope you’ll write for, Joe. People can get a copy, a print copy, by going to CapitolHillCitizen.com. Five dollars donation or more, you get 40 pages back, first-class mail, right away. CapitolHillCitizen.com.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, I want to thank you for being with us, longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic, former presidential candidate, I believe four times, author of many books, including, most recently, Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country That Works for the People. Ralph is the founder of the monthly newspaper, the Capitol Hill Citizen. And Joe Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist, Columbia University professor, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Professor Stiglitz is currently the chief economist at the Roosevelt Institute. His new book is The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society. To see Part 1 of our discussion, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.