Jared Bernstein

You know, numerous years ago, they were talking about a jobs guarantee and have documents about how to do it.

So it's not something no one's ever thought about before.

And I'd like to dust that policy off and get people thinking about it.

Yes.

I think universal basic income pales beside a job guarantee because people don't just want income.

They want to be productive.

They want to work.

They want to contribute.

I want to tackle something else that you spent a lot of time on.

Yeah, I think all of that's correct.

I mean, I think there's another side of the issue that you have to think about if you're advising politicians or you're thinking about 26 or 28, which is that if you talk to the companies themselves, even if you're saying, hey, and you mentioned Mark Kelly before, I'm in Virginia.

At this point, 39% of the energy in Virginia that's being produced, the electricity, is being used by data centers.

So, you know, the thing is, you go to the AI companies, you go to the data centers and you tell them you're going to have to pare back.

You're going to have to have guardrails.

You're going to have to compensate the innocent bystanders who electricity bills are getting whacked by you.

And some of them are going to say to you, fine, I'll go to Saudi Arabia.

And that's the political challenge that I was dealing with in the White House.

We were thinking about these issues and these companies were threatening us with exits.

Frankly, I'll take that threat because of what you're describing is so important to put those guardrails in place.

I mean, crypto is a good analogy.