From Safety Net to Power Base: Reclaiming Economic Power for Working People (with Jamie Keene)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

News, Business, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2026

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The social safety net wasn’t supposed to work like this. Decades of neoliberal choices from politicians in both parties reshaped it—turning what was meant to support people into a system that often leaves them stuck. This week, Jamie Keene, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and former Biden White House policy advisor, joins us to break down how we got here—and why today’s anti-poverty system can actually reinforce the very conditions it’s meant to solve. From requirements that trap workers in low-wage jobs to public programs that quietly subsidize those business models, we unpack how the system evolved—and what it would take to turn it into a system that actually gives people power. Jamie Keene is a stratification economics fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and a former White House policy advisor on equality and opportunity. She is also the author of From Safety Net to Power Base: Reimagining, Not Restoring, the US Antipoverty System. Further reading: From Safety Net to Power Base: Reimagining, Not Restoring, the US Antipoverty System Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com Facebook: Pitchfork Economics Podcast Bluesky: @pitchforkeconomics.bsky.social Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Threads: pitchforkeconomics TikTok: @pitchfork_econ YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics LinkedIn: Pitchfork Economics Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer Substack: ⁠The Pitch⁠

Transcript

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0:00.0	The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
0:10.6	The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven't worked.
0:14.8	But what's the alternative?
0:16.3	Middle-out economics is the answer.
0:18.6	Because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.
0:23.1	That's right.
0:28.7	This is pitchfork economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out.
0:36.9	Welcome to the show.
0:44.4	So Goldie.
0:46.5	So Paul.
0:48.1	I know that having been born in the...
0:54.0	19th century.
0:56.0	Yeah.
0:58.8	I was going to start this off by saying that I'm old, but you just did it for me.
1:04.4	So having been born in FDR's first term, Goldie, you might not be able to relate to this.
1:09.6	But speaking for myself, my entire life,
1:13.5	I have known America's social safety net programs as something that Republican presidents try to
1:21.9	dismantle and then Democrats come in and try to like tweak at the edges of what the what the Republicans were doing.
1:28.9	And then the next Republican comes in and they do more damage. And it's been this sort of game of
1:33.7	attrition, right? We've been losing, losing safety net by attrition my whole life.
1:37.6	It's been bipartisan, Paul. Remember, it was Bill Clinton who proudly claimed that we were
1:43.7	ending welfare as we know it.
	...

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