We’ve Got to Address Inequality in Our Communities

You know, there's a giant issue in this country that is like skirted, it gets addressed, but then it gets ignored. And that is, what do they do with all the communities that have been forever affected by slavery? What about all those, when people talk about reparations, it gets dismissed. Like, it's not you, I didn't do anything, it's not you. It doesn't have to do with you. You didn't do anything. You never owned a slave. I never owned a slave. We didn't have anything to do with it. But there's no denying that there's parts of this country that are forever affected by slavery and then afterwards by racist laws. Those redline laws. Oh yeah, Reconstruction and Jim Crow. All that. Yeah. Okay. Never really been addressed. Never been addressed in terms of a correction. Now, in terms of reparations, you give people money. I don't know if that works. If I thought that by me paying more in taxes and them giving reparations, we could ease the tension, racial tension in this country, I would be like, okay, that's all you have to do, but it's not all you have to do. Because you're still going to have these communities that are forever affected until something has been done to correct them. I'm not in favor of giving people who were never slaves money as reparations, but I am in favor of giving communities money and figuring out a way to rebuild them, figuring out a way to make them safer, better. High schools. Yeah, everything. School lunches. Community programs, getting people off the streets that are involved in gangs and drugs and all that stuff. I've said this a thousand times, but it bears repeating. The best way to have a great country is if we're a team or if we're a country, we're supposed to be a team, right? We're a community, a giant community of 320 million people. What's the best way to make it stronger? Well, you have less losers. That's the best way. Well, what's the likelihood of you becoming a loser if you're in an impoverished, drug-riddled, crime, just ravaged area? It's highly likely that you're not going to succeed in that area unless you are some person of unbelievable character and unbelievable will and fortitude and you're raised by people who did a phenomenal job essentially in a war zone, right? If you live in the South Side of Chicago and you look at the murder rate, the South Side of Chicago, and you compare it to the murder rate in war zones, they're pretty fucking similar, right? Essentially, these people are being asked to do their best and come out of this war zone and pull themselves out by their bootstraps, whereas other people around them are not in a war zone. If we're a community, we're supposed to look at that and go, hey, how the fuck do you stop this thing from being a war zone? How do we stop this? How do we do that with Detroit? How do we do that with Baltimore? How do we do that with all these impoverished areas? That should be addressed. Well, it has to be looked at as our problem, not their problem. We are all living with the ramifications of inequality. It's affecting us on a daily basis, whether it's crime or whether it's our gross national product would be much higher if more people were educated and more people were proud of their work. Yes. And so there has to be pride. Less losers, more pride, more identifying with progress. And I think if you live in a certain culture in this country, there isn't a pride in succeeding. Right. Because you haven't seen it. Right. More opportunity. And this includes poor white cultures. Like I have a friend who's from Kentucky and he tells me about these fucking people that live in these coal mining communities or the coal mining community, the coal's gone and the community shut down. People were hooked on pills. And he's like, you have never seen poverty like this. He's like, you've never seen it. Where like everyone in the community is on pills. Everyone is surviving on like below minimum wage and everyone's a criminal. Like it's just, everyone's poor. It's just horrific. Did you ever see the wild and wonderful whites of West Virginia? No. Holy shit. I think it's a Johnny Knoxville documentary. Did he put it together? It's amazing. It's amazing for all the wrong reasons because these are the trashiest white trash people that have ever lived and they're all on pills. They're all turning tricks and doing crazy shit and robbing people and shooting people. Everyone has a fucking story that's like, you're like Macaulay Culkin from Home Alone. Like what? Putting your hands on your ears. Like what the fuck? But those communities exist. They exist. And it's so hard to get out. It's so hard to break free. We as a community, as a giant 320 million person community should be concentrating on fixing those spots. At least as much as we're concentrating on fixing problems in other parts of the world. I understand the logic behind going to these other parts of the world that are fucked up and trying to solve these problems before they affect us, before they come back to us. That's the logic. I get it. But internally, inside of our country, we're not doing the same thing. We're allowing people to become violent criminals by never giving them a chance, by never giving them an outcome, or never giving them possibilities other than what they see around them. Not giving them any opportunities. And we treat it as if we're all supposed to be even. We're all supposed to be on this even game. No. Some people got one shitty card. And some people got like five aces. Yeah. There's this documentary they made about a public school in Chicago. I forget what Oak Park I think it was in. It was called America is Me. And it was like this 10-part series. And it showed the experiences of the white kids versus the black kids. Because it was an integrated school. But you were seeing that the black kids were lagging grade-wise, graduation rates. And they just went in depth. And you saw that a lot of the black kids were dealing with single parents. They were dealing with being fucking evicted, some of them being homeless, or just not having the resources. Like, you know, the white kids are getting SAT prep classes. And they're getting extra help because they've got a parent that's not working that can pick them up from school and drive them to a tutor. And there's just all these things that you're seeing. One side is getting fostered and the other side is struggling. And it's the same fucking school. So it's not as simple as just put good schools in the community. But there's got to be mentorship programs. And there's got to be- Community outreach programs. Community outreach. There's got to be- They got to get preschools. They got to get kids in there at a young age so the parents can work. And there's good nutrition. But they say that the studies that show preschool, the differences long-term of how people come out of there with those extra two years is astronomical. Makes sense. Makes sense. You prep them for it early. But the thing is, this is where a concept like democratic socialism actually makes sense. People think of democratic socialism or anything where you say the word socialism. They go, oh, you're going to take money and give it to lazy people. That's the worst case scenario, right? But man, if we're a community, if we are a community of human beings, we've got to help the people that aren't doing good. There's got to be a reason why they're not doing good. It's not that they're inferior. They have inferior choices. They have inferior opportunities. They have an inferior situation. And it's so hard to get the mass of people behind giving their money to some sort of a program that does take steps to fix this. You just don't hear it. Well, you know, they had the jobs for FDR and the New Deal. They were able to start. People want to work. People don't want to get a welfare check. No, they want to feel good about themselves. And you want to be busy all day. Sometimes I don't work for a month. I'm between writing jobs. Maybe I take some time off from stand up. I don't feel good about myself. Terrible. I mean, imagine that times year after year and generation after generation. And for you, it's a choice. If you wanted to, you could go on the road any time. But that's not a choice for a lot of people. For a lot of choice, they're just fucked. And you used to have... The funny thing is the factory jobs, you look back on them and you go, those are like really shitty jobs. I grew up in a factory town and it was like people were not enjoying it. People were getting fucking drunk and high and just getting through. And now we're harkening back to like that it was like some golden age of great work. No, they were union jobs, which was great, but let's shoot higher. The factory jobs aren't coming back. But the real question is like some people don't have aspirations. So if you took someone who's already gone through the school system and like, oh, we're going to get jobs for people, that's not good enough. You got to fix the people that are fucked up. You can't say like an 18 year old person is not a finished product. A 25 year old person who came from a fucked up neighborhood and got all sorts of mental problems and probably PTSD, that's not a finished product. You can't say, we got a job for you. Well, because they're fucked in the head. They've had a deal with their friend getting shot. They have to deal with their mom being on crack. Getting them a job is not enough. I don't know what the answer is. Like obviously we're just two white guys talking shit. We don't have to worry about this. This is not our concern. But if you wanted to, if you wanted to fix, if you were a person, like say if Greg Fitzsimmons became president, how do you fix that? How do you even make steps to fix that? Because I haven't heard anyone come up with a plan. Maybe there is one that I haven't heard, but a plan where it makes sense, where there's a long term proposition to try to take these communities that are just habitually engulfed in crime and violence, just consistently, like throughout the 60s and the 70s and fix it. And turn it around. Like at least try. Well, there's a gap, the gap between the rich and the poor is growing ever since the 80s. It's gotten just out of hand. The amount, the top 1% have 50% of the money or something like that. And it's just, and everything is set up structurally for that to continue to divide more and more. Right. But are they playing a game? They're playing a game called capitalism. And that game, they're dominating that game. And once they get the money, then they keep the money and they pass that money down to their kids and then they keep the money. How do you change that? I mean, we could all play that game, right? Like we could all invest in the stock market. We can all just really focus entirely on making money or should we not be able to? How do you stop the 1% like these bankers and investment people? How do you stop that? And how do you stop that in a way where it doesn't seem like you're changing the rules of the game because some people are just psycho good at it and completely dedicated to only making money? Well, you're not changing the rules because the estate tax was there from day one. The founding fathers wanted there to be a very large estate tax. They wanted to avoid what happened in Europe, which is building up of these families that are handing down wealth. And so these kids, so I think we need to go back to right now, it's like 35% or something like that on wealth over $10 million if you're a couple. They need to go back to really taking that money back because... And doing what with it though? Put it into schools to start with. I would love that if there was a real logic to how that money got spent. Yes, right. That would be the problem because if it just went to a bunch of... If it just went to a bunch of government programs that don't seem to make sense and that are poorly structured and that money gets wasted, that would make me sick. No, I think it has to be job training programs. It has to be helping small businesses grow with low cost loans. But think about these kids that are inheriting a billion dollars. What are you ever going to contribute to society as opposed to if you were set up with you went to a private high school, you went to a great university, you went to a graduate school, all of it was paid for, you had nannies, you were given tutors, you should be able to go out and make a good living now. You don't need that billion dollars. Right. And you will feel so much better if you make your own money. Yeah. There's enough money left. I'm not saying take away everybody's money when they die, but I'm saying that there's a grotesque amount of money that needs to be pulled back. That's one way of at least putting a chip away at it. That's one way, right? That money? Yeah. What's another way? Unless you want cops or police to occupy these areas. How would you ever stop, like at this point in time, how would you stop places from being crime ridden? It would have to be like a multi-step program where you would slowly but surely implement it and try to slowly but surely chip away at all these problems. Yeah. It's not something you're going to fix overnight because it didn't happen overnight. Right. Right. Now there has to be great leadership and there has to be ... Man, you got eight years. You're a president, you got four and if you're lucky you get eight. No, I mean local leadership. You need to ... City councilmen and mayors that are really looking at the community and figuring ... And each one's different. I feel like if it's that way, unless it's federally, if it's that way, you're dealing with communities that don't have as much money already. Because just by virtue of the fact that they're crime ridden and poverty stricken, these are communities that already don't have any money. Yeah. Low tax base. Let's go back to talking about FARTs. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. 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