From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Tuesday, August 5th.

With us now, former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, among our topics, President Trump's firing of the head of the

Bureau of Labor Statistics after Friday's disappointing jobs report, Trump said it was rigged,

but cited no evidence. Sound familiar? This is widely being received as an effect of Trump's

tariffs. And also, some commentators are saying, we're now more like China.

Maybe you heard a version of this on Marketplace last night. The politics determine the official

jobs numbers rather than the other way around. So the reliability of U.S. economic data

is no longer a global bedrock, potentially. We'll sample from Trump economics advisor Kevin

Hassett's explanation on Meet the Press and get Robert Reich's reaction. But Rice also has a new

book out today, a memoir of his life and work in labor economics and how he got to where we are

economically in this country

today and how he proposes to improve things. The book is called Coming Up Short, a Memoir of

My America. Robert Rice has recently retired as professor of public policy at UC Berkeley,

still a columnist for Newsweek and The Guardian, and he's a highly subscribed newsletter writer

on Substack, in addition to the book, which again is called Coming Up Short, a Memoir of My

America. Professor Rice, always good to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNIC.

Well, thank you, Brian. Thank you for inviting me. I think you placed the start of the shrinking

of the middle class and the

path to our current inequality in the 1970s. Correct me if I'm wrong. What were the main

building blocks as you see them or maybe unbuilding blocks that created today's concentration

of wealth and working and middle class rage.

In the book, Brian, I talk about the 1971 memo from Lewis Powell, who by then was not yet a

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