On with Kara Swisher - Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Kara interviews renowned economist, author, former Labor Secretary, and social media star, Robert Reich. The 78-year old professor of economics at University of California, Berkeley is as prolific as ever, pointing out the inequities in our “rigged system” and calling out the rich and powerful who want to keep it that way.  Kara and Robert discuss the presidential candidates' competing visions for the America, our rigged economic system (and how it got this way), his prescription for reigning in Elon Musk, and his incredible ability to connect with young people on social media. No one is spared from his withering critiques — including Elon Musk, Donald Trump, trickle-down economics, the Democratic party and our two-party system. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find Kara on Instagram/Threads as @karaswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you. Tells you which leads are worth knowing. And makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze breeze. So now it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is esteemed economist Robert Reich. The former Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton has accomplished so much that it's hard to list it succinctly. Reich has written 18 books. He served as a federal official in three presidential administrations and was an economic advisor to Bernie Sanders,

Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton. He ran for governor in Massachusetts. He's a professor of public policy now at the University of California at Berkeley. And he is one of the founders of Inequality Media, a digital media company that produces wildly successful content, which is always hard, but especially difficult if you're making videos about economics.

Reich has become an unlikely social media star. The 78-year-old professor dances on TikTok while explaining complicated economic issues, and millions of people watch. My son, Louis, is among them. He's been a huge fan of Reich's for years, and Robert has an incredible ability to take complex issues and simplify them so that anybody can understand them while also not dumbing them down. I've wanted to talk to him for years, and I'm excited to dive in. We're going to talk about Vice President Harris and former President Trump's competing visions for the country, the challenges of building a political movement that benefits poor people

and the middle class, Elon Musk, and social media. And our expert question for this episode comes from my son, Louis. Let's get to it. Robert, thank you so much for coming on. Cara, thank you for asking me. All right. Let's start talking about the role the economy will play in this election. Let's start with that. Americans feel pessimistic about the economy, although less so than a couple months ago.

But when you look at the actual economic indicators, the U.S. is doing terrific, especially globally. Can you talk about that disconnect from your perspective? Yes. I mean, part of it is a matter of what time period you're looking at. And if you look at the last, oh, four decades, you find that most Americans really have not done all that well compared to the gains in productivity, the gains in overall economic growth. It used to be the case, Cara, and I am old enough to remember this. In the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, really right up to almost the 1990s, as the economy grew, everybody would do better. And then everything kind of stopped. We had a U-turn. It really

stopped, starting with the Reagan administration. But that residue, I think, a lot of people are still angry and not happy, the fact that they do not feel that the American dream, as it was described, as it has been described, if you work hard, play by the rules, you'll do better and better, that that really never came true for them. And their children are not doing better and not doing better than they are. Most of these people, again, are white. Most of them are rural Americans. Most of them don't have a college degree. But this is really where the Trump

people are. Even though most of the financials in his administration coalesce to the wealthy, but eight out of 10 registered voters told the Pew Research Center the economy will be very important to their vote. Obviously, it's always at the top. Right now, the polling is mixed. Some polls show voters trust Trump on the economy because they felt they had more money in their pocket. I think that's what they often say. But the latest Financial Times Michigan Ross poll shows Harris is leading on the economy for a second month in a row. So let's talk about their policies in particular. Let's compare the two candidates' economic promises. Let's start with Trump. He says he's going to cut energy costs in half, bring down inflation dramatically, although it is declining, and lower mortgage interest rates. Is any of that realistic from your perspective? Well, not the way he's going about it. He wants to use tariffs to generate a lot of revenue, supposedly, for the United States government. Well, that's absurd. I mean, tariffs are a tax. They're a regressive tax, taking more out of the pocketbooks of lower income people, working class people. And it's a sales tax.

It's a terrible idea. Also, he wants to extend his 2017 big tax cut, which disproportionately helped big corporations and the wealthy. I mean, it's trickle down economics. Trickle down economics has never worked. It's a cruel hoax. Biden has kept many of Trump's tariffs, something Trump pointed to in his debate with Harris. Is Trump right that China has skirted rules? Obviously, there's just recent ones on Xi'an and Timu who don't pay taxes that, say, Gap does.

So talk a little bit about when tariffs make sense, if at all. Well, if they make sense, I think they do make sense in terms of the way we did in the 19th century, early 19th century, that was protecting infant industries from foreign competition. If you want to develop, and we have to develop, a semiconductor industry that is competitive, if not better than competitive internationally, for national defense purposes. is competitive, if not better than competitive internationally, for national defense purposes. So obviously, it makes sense to put a tariff there, but not for the purpose of getting revenue. So, I mean, look, when Mr. Smoot and Mr. Hawley, two congresspeople in 1930, put tariffs on everything in an effort to protect American industry, they ended up making the Great Depression far worse. We don't want to do that. And Biden certainly is not doing that. Right. So you also mentioned that he wanted to extend his 2017 tax cuts that are set to expire

next year. He also said he'd end taxes on Social Security tips in overtime. Talk about that tax plan. Well, it's nutso. I mean— Okay, nutso. Is that a technical term? You can quote me on that. Yeah, I shall. I mean, first of all, let's take overtime. Remember, when he was president, Donald Trump's Labor Department actually took huge numbers of Americans, hundreds of thousands, off overtime, reduced eligibility, actually reduced the threshold

level, I mean, increased the threshold level for wages that are subject to overtime. So why don't you get back to basics? And this is what Kamala Harris should be doing, I'm sure she will do, when, and it is when she is president, and that is at least go back to the old Labor Department rule under Obama in terms of who is eligible for overtime. Although Harris did say she'll also end taxes on tips. Yes, and here too, I mean, it's absurd that we have a tipped minimum wage that is so low. We should not have a tipped minimum wage. We should have a minimum wage, and we should increase the minimum wage for everybody,

tipped workers and everybody else. So Trump is also promising what he calls the largest deportation in the history of our country. As former labor secretary, explain what would happen to the labor market, specifically in the economy overall, if the future Trump administration detains and deports millions of immigrants. And by the way, many working class Americans think that undocumented immigrants are depressing their

wages so that mass migration benefits the managerial class, but screws them. Talk a little bit about that. Cara, there's been a lot of research on this point. And all I can do is summarize the research. And the research is that immigrants into the United States do not, whether they're here legally or here illegally, they are not depressing the wages of people who are born here for a number of reasons. One, because they are taking jobs that most Americans who are born here simply don't want to do. They're either because they're unsafe or they're just awful jobs. Number two, it's very important to note that most of the immigrants who are here, again, whether they are here legally or not legally, they are paying into Social Security and Medicare. If they are here illegally, they're not getting anything back from Social Security

and Medicare. And number three, a lot of employers depend on them, again, for jobs that most Americans don't want to do, but have to be done somehow. So it would be a terrible thing for our economy if 11 million or 15 million people were rounded up, I mean, the humanitarian cost would be gigantic. The number of people who would be rounded up who are just of the wrong profile because they look like they are here illegally or they are from families who are Mexican or Latin American families. I mean, I don't even want to think about it. It's such a crude and it is also a hateful kind of message. Why does it have resonance, though, among many workers? I've heard that from people, like, oh, they take our jobs.

I'm like, do they? Do they take our jobs? And you cannot get through to many of them because they don't feel like that. Well, let me go back, if I may, to what I said initially, and that is you've got a median wage that is half Americans above, half below, that is only a little bit above adjusted for inflation, what it was in the late 70s, early 1980s. And so many Americans feel that there must be some reason why they are still stuck in the mud. And they're looking for a reason. Now, you know and I know a lot of it has to do with the structure of the economy. And the structure could be changed. But as long as you've got big money in politics continuously altering the structure of the economy to benefit big money and jeopardize a lot of working people, then you are simply going to have a lot of angry working people. This is inevitable. This is the sort of logic of where we are today. So what a Democrat, Kamala Harris or anybody else coming into the presidency ultimately has to do is change the

structure of the economy to the point where working people are once again earning enough. Now, in 2016, 370 economists signed a letter warning Americans not to vote for Trump saying, quote, if elect, he poses a unique danger to the function of democratic and economic institutions and the prosperity of the country. Trump has definitely threatened democratic institutions, but up until the pandemic, the economy did well under Trump. You didn't sign that letter, but it reflected a mainstream economic consensus at the time. So I feel like I can ask you this. Why did so many economists get that wrong? Or was it a hangover from the previous administration as it often is?

Well, it could have been a hangover. But here's where I differ from the mainstream. is that the structure of the market is really now favoring wealthy people and people who are privileged. When I say the structure of the market, I mean the rules of the game. You know, there's a tendency among economists to think that the market is over here on one side of the great ledger, and politics is over on the other side of the ledger. But actually, and I say this from a zillion years in politics and economics, it's not true. Politics affects the structure of the market. Politics affects how the market is organized. how the market is organized,

even the most basic principles of contracts and property and so on, really depend on political forces that are constantly changing those concepts. And so without understanding the nature of politics and the changeability of the fundamentals of the market, depending on who has power, and figuring power into your calculation, then you're going to be missing the boat. But did economists do themselves a disfavor by, you know, saying this and it didn't seem that way, and voters started tuning out economists? Is that an issue? Well, I think it is an issue to the point where people intuitively understand that all of

this is about power. And if you don't talk about power, who has it, who doesn't, the relationship between wealth and power and the economy and the rules of the game, then most people say, well, you're not really talking to me because I know my employer has huge amounts of power and I don't. And I am a gig worker and I don't even have any say over the hours I work. And don't give me this family-friendly bullshit because, you know, if you want to be friendly to my family, you're going to change the structure of the market so that I really have more control over my life. Right. So lower prices, child care, et cetera, et cetera, grants, things like that. Well, even more that you're going to change even contract law so that employers cannot penalize me in the way they do. They can't put in clauses that say that if there's a dispute between me and an employer

or me and a big corporation, the corporation can select the mandatory arbitration. Right. All kinds of things. Or the thing that the FTC just tried to pass that is under siege about competition or non-competes and things like that. Absolutely.

Non-compete clauses would be another example. But what I want to emphasize, Cara, is that these fundamentals about the nature of property and contracts are at the core of capitalism. And they are changeable depending upon who has the power. Right. So in a two-party system, can either party really fight the existing power structures and still benefit from it? Ah, that is the big question.

Well, there's a chicken and egg problem, obviously, because if you want to change the structure of the economy to benefit working people and poor people and stop the rigging. And it is rigged, obviously, and we can go back and talk about how it's rigged. But if you want to end the rigging, you've got to, in a way,

tackle the big problem of big money in politics because it's corporate money and money from the wealthy that is electing a lot of people. And whether they're Democrats or Republicans, they don't want to bite the hands that feed them. There is the source of the underlying dilemma. Even though it's interesting in this election for both candidates, more for Harris right now, small donations are more significant, but they can't organize together the way corporations can or feel their power.

Let's switch to Harris for a second. She has said she'll only raise taxes on those who make over $400,000 a year. This is what Elizabeth Warren called the tax doom loop. Republicans cut taxes, Democrats raise it only on the rich. So over time, you end up bringing in less revenue. The vast majority of Americans see their taxes get cut over and over. Should Harris be raising taxes on the middle class Americans too? And when she says she'll only raise taxes on those making over $400,000 a year,

do you think the average swing voter believes her, any Democrat? They just hear raise taxes. Well, let me just say that there's a lot of skepticism in the electorate about any candidate who talks about taxes. But the big kahun, the big issue with regard to taxes is capital gains, not income. And we've got to end the stepped up basis with regard to capital gains. Very briefly explained, what I'm talking about is that when you are presumably quite wealthy and all of your assets become incredibly worth much, much more over the course of your lifetime, if you then die, your heirs get all of those assets at the current market value. Current market value. All the capital gains are erased. Well, that stepped-up basis at death rule means essentially that we are feeding a dynasty.

We're creating aristocratic dynastic wealth in this country. Well, that was the point, right? That's the point, isn't it? I mean, so just for people that don't know, Harris wants to create a minimum tax rate of 25% for the richest Americans and wants to increase the capital gains tax from 20 to 28%,

which is less than Biden's proposed increase of 39.6%. Both of them are driving rich people crazy. I'd love your take on both those proposals. Well, both of those proposals are extremely important in terms of fighting dynastic wealth. And in terms of beginning, just beginning to get the economic gains back to working people, back to the people, back to even the middle class. You know, right now, so much of the gain is going to the people, back to even the middle class. You know, right now, so much of the gain is going to the very top. Many people don't understand this, but the richest 1% of Americans now owns over half of all of the shares of stock owned by Americans. The richest

10% own 93% of all of the shares of stock owned by Americans. So the stock market, as the stock market increases in value because of everything from stock buybacks to monopolization, the people who are gaining huge amounts of wealth are the people at the top. But it's not going to where it is actually should be going, where it used to go, and that is to the middle and the working class. Well, are you disappointed that Harris's plan has smaller increasing capital gains taxes than Biden's? Because this is, I mean, rich people are screaming like stuck pigs at the 20% number. Of course they're screaming. I mean, I'm not sure it's the rich who are screaming, but the lobbyists are screaming on behalf of the rich.

I mean, I'm not sure it's the rich who are screaming, but the lobbyists are screaming on behalf of the rich. So, yes, of course, Harris is, you know, I was a little bit disappointed, but it's nevertheless, it's an improvement over what we have today. And given the fact that you hear so much screaming going on, it's a good indication that she is at least on the right path. Right. Harris has a list of proposals that are meant to help middle and working class Americans, including increasing minimum wage, which to me is the beginning of everything, increasing the child tax credit to $6,000 per child, a $25,000 down payment assistance for new homebuyers, and a little more controversial, the $50,000 tax deduction for small business startups.

Small business startups get a lot of breaks in general. That's to me the one that I have more of a problem with. But if you're a middle class voter, these seem to be very helpful proposals. But I wonder how they're received. There's a certain amount of cynicism from voters. Politicians make promises and don't deliver. And it's expensive. How is she going to pay for it?

That kind of thing is, of course, coming up. The Trump people are pushing that. So talk a little bit about these proposals she's made and your thoughts on each of them. Well, they're all sensible proposals. I think the problem is that when a politician of either party says, I have a plan, that's when people's eyes glaze over because there's so much cynicism about politicians who say, here's my proposal or I have a plan. Yes, of course, you've got to do something to make childcare more accessible, of course, and it's elder care as well. You've got to help working class and middle class families with all sorts of kitchen table economic issues,

because everybody is stretched to the limit. If you want to help families, you've also got to recognize that among working class people, there's not even family formation very much going on. I mean, there's been a huge decline in marriage among working class people. And children. And children. I mean, why is that? Because it's just so expensive to form a family, to even try to form a family. I mean, here you have Vance and Trump who are kind of making fun of cat ladies who are not having children. Well, the fact is, if they were really concerned about families, they would be doing far more to make it possible for

people to actually have families and have children and adopt children and be families. have families and have children and adopt children and be families. But they're not. So Harris is on the right track, but I think she's facing huge headwinds in terms of public cynicism. We'll be back in a minute. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore. That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists.

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Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. The Capital Ideas Podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO, Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover what differentiates their investment approach, what learnings have shifted their career trajectories, and how do they find

their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Let's take a step back then from the election and talk about how Americans think about our economy overall. Your last book is titled The System, Who Rigged It? How We Fix It. Give us the Cliff Notes version and we'll dive in the perception that the system is rigged, because I think at the heart of it, that's how people feel, Democrat or Republicans, and how it plays out in our politics. There was a deep suspicion that it was rigged before the financial crisis of 2008. But that crisis really did cause the veils to drop in front of people's eyes.

Many people saw that, you know, millions of Americans lost their homes, their savings, their jobs because of that financial crisis. The financial crisis was brought on in part because of deregulation, because of the demands that Wall Street had been making. Well, all of that together, I think, created not just cynicism, but it created on the right the Tea Party movement, on left, the Occupy movement, which had a lot of overlap. Both of them said it's all about corporate power, corporations and governments colluding against the rest of us. And I think that that is still a dominant issue. Absolutely. So Trump has successfully persuaded millions of Americans that he can take on the rigged system, even if he's part of it, and that Democrats are the elites. The terrorists were and continue to be a big part of that message, which is interesting because Republicans are traditionally seen as the free trade party.

But talk about the role free trade is in our economy, more specifically how free trade is perceived by working class voters and many voters. For example, you supported NAFTA, but NAFTA is almost treated like a dirty word these days. And Trump does a good job portraying it that way. Well, even in the early 90s, there was a great deal. You remember Ross Perot. There was a lot of fear of international trade. And the record proves that some of that fear was borne out. It was justifiable. NAFTA was not the biggest problem. The biggest problem was Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization. Also happened during the Clinton administration. But that really was responsible for a lot of job losses.

I mean, that and technological change together spelled the abandonment of much of the Rust Belt and much of the rest of industrial America. And we had nothing in place to help people who lost their jobs and communities that were abandoned to get back on their feet. And that's the problem. In other words, it's not so much trade per se, but it was the failure of America to deal with the consequences of trade. You're absolutely right in technology. Interesting about big tech, Republicans for some reason did a good job persuading many voters that Democrats are the party of big tech. And they were to a point in terms of money and affiliation. Example, a list of high-ranking Democrats who went to work for tech companies, include Jay Carney, going to Amazon, and then Airbnb, David Plouffe, who's now working for

Kamala Harris to Uber, Susan Rice to Netflix, Ron Clayton to Airbnb. Kamala Harris is from California and close to Silicon Valley, I can attest to that. But it is Republicans who now look like they're the party of big tech, which is interesting because there's no such thing as big tech, actually. There's lots of big technology companies. Do you think either party will do anything to rein in tech companies, which are the biggest and richest companies in the history of the planet, along with the richest people in the history of the planet? Yes. The Biden administration has done a great deal on the antitrust side, more than any previous administration, to rein in big tech. That's where the action is, Kara.

Because big tech is really a set of monopolies. And the only way you deal with them is through antitrust laws. through antitrust laws. I mean, you could also change some of the other laws that allow big tech to, for example, skirt defamation. I mean, I think it's absurd that, you know, Elon Musk's ex, you know, just he can do anything he wants, say anything he wants. Anybody can do whatever they want.

And it's not free speech. It's really a form of assault. Yeah, I say crime isn't free speech, but go ahead. Well, that's a better way of putting it than I would put it. But yes, the Biden administration has started. And I think that the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department are to be congratulated with, I mean, it's a David and Goliath situation, because the Goliaths of these companies have armies of lawyers and platoons of lawyers. And the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division really

have much younger, less experienced, and far fewer lawyers. But Lena Kahn and also- John Cantor. John Cantor. They're doing a great, great job. But they need even more resources. Now, to be fair, that did start under the Trump administration, that those lawsuits started in the Trump administration. A few of them did. That's right. I'm not sure Trump knew about them.

Maybe not, but it was the Obama administration who did a big bear hug of technology. Yeah. I think also, I'm pretty close geographically to Silicon Valley. There are people like Peter Thiel who are really much more right-wing. In fact, it's even inappropriate to call them right-wing. Peter Thiel has said freedom is incompatible with democracy. Peter Thiel really made J.D. Vance who he is. He put tens of millions into J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, and Peter Thiel,

and people like him are quite, I mean, they epitomize what I think is one of the fundamental problems with inequality in this country, which is you get this massive wealth at the top that then can translate that wealth into political power. That's right. And it's very cheap, actually. It's very cheap. Yeah, politicians are power. That's right. And it's very cheap, actually. It's very cheap. Yeah, politicians are cheap. That's what I'd say. Exactly.

But just look at the amount that the few wealthy, comparatively few, extraordinarily wealthy people, mostly in Silicon Valley but elsewhere, are putting into these campaigns. Mostly now Donald Trump, and you just have to shudder. I mean, what's the future of democracy when wealth is translated so easily into political power? Well, we've been here before, haven't we? In previous generations, this has been a big issue, very wealthy people influencing from the beginning. Well, the first Gilded Age in the 1880s, 1890s, 1900, yes, and then we're in the second Gilded Age. And instead of Andrew Carnegie, we now have Elon Musk.

Right. But I hope we don't have to, in order to overcome the second Gilded Age, I hope we don't have to suffer a Great Depression and a crash and a world war, two world wars, in order to- Rid ourselves of them. Rid ourselves of these robber barons. Yeah, they're also not giving libraries either. So we'll get back to that, Elon, at the end. But if we take a step back- We don't have to get back to Elon.

We will. I don't even, I don't want to go back to Elon. I understand, but I want to go back to you. say about that. That's often chalked up to racism that they, and I think Barack Obama, they cling to their guns and religion, an unfortunate way to put it. But it's more complicated, but there is no real class-based movement against entrenched power structures in the country. Bernie Sanders tried, didn't get very far. Trump seems to have hijacked that in a lot of ways, the populism. Why has that not happened from your perspective? lot of ways, the populism. Why has that not happened from your perspective? It hasn't happened because the Democratic Party, starting in the 1980s with Tony Coelho at the Congressional Campaign Committee, decided that it would be better and cheaper for the

Democrats to drink from the same campaign fountain as the Republicans because Tony Coelho thought, well, you know, Democrats are going to be in charge of Congress forever, as he thought they already had been. So that was the beginning of a kind of a bargain, a bargain with the devil. And I think the Democrats have had a hard time getting out of that bargain. I mean, when I was in the Clinton administration, I kept on running into Dick Morris, who at that time was a Clinton advisor,

who would say, no, we've got to worry about the suburban swing vote. That's all he could say. Suburban swing. If I had a dollar for every time Dick Morris said suburban swing. And I would say, but Dick, what about the working class? What about everybody outside the suburban swing votes, the non-college graduates? And he said, well, don't worry about them.

Don't worry about them. Democrats used to be the party of labor unions. And if you look at the first two years of the Clinton administration, the first two years of the Obama administration, when Clinton and Obama all had a Congress that was Democrat, they didn't strengthen labor laws. They didn't make it harder to fire people who wanted to join or create unions. They didn't increase dramatically the penalties on corporations for not complying with the Fair Labor Standards Act or the- They didn't raise the minimum wage. Yeah, and didn't raise the minimum wage. Well, we finally did under Clinton.

Right, but not enough. But not enough. And we waited until it was a Republican Congress. I mean, people don't remember this. But Clinton gave me the green light to raise the minimum wage if I could. But by that time, it was a Republican Congress. So I went around. I was like, you know, with a hat in my hand. And I said, please, please, please.

And then, of course, I showed them the polls. Even the Republicans said, well, that's extraordinary. Let's not let the Democrats have this as a campaign issue in 1996. So we got it done. So let's go back. It's still extraordinarily low. Let's go back to the how we fix it part of your book, given Democrats have already made this bargain with the devil, as you say, how do you undo that deal? Can they buy their soul back? And how does it change? Because they still love the suburban, the swing suburban voter. Well, they do. But then there are people like Sherrod Brown in Ohio, who even though the Republicans are spending a fortune trying to unseat him. He's still running better. When I last looked, his polls are even better than Kamala Harris's in Ohio.

He's doing very well on a very much of a populist, left-wing populist, class-based kind of platform. I think that works. I think that works. Carol, people don't remember that in 2000, Al Gore, suddenly his polls soared when he said, this is really about the people versus the powerful. And he did that for about a month. And then he stopped, I think, because the powerful said, wait a minute, we're not going to give you any more money if you do this. But this is what I think the Democrats ultimately have to do. There is now, particularly if, as I hope and expect, Trump is defeated, you're going to have on the right a huge fight, a civil war in the Republican Party for what the next Republican Party is.

You're going to have on one hand Liz Cheney and the Bush Republicans, the establishment Republicans who want to go back to a small government and fiscal austerity and all of that. And then you're going to have what's left of the Trumpers. And they're going to say, well, we want, I don't know, we want J.D. Vance, or we want a strongman. But I think there's an opportunity here for the Democrats, particularly, to change their stripes a bit and to say, no, we are going back to becoming the party of the poor, the working class, the middle class, of the Americans who have had a bad deal for the last 40 years. We are going to give them a better deal, a good deal, a new deal. Yeah, she's wandering over near middle class. I don't think she talks about working class or poor people very much. She wanders all around middle class because she comes from middle class. Well, but also nobody wants to think of themselves as working class.

I mean, everybody wants to say I'm middle class or I aspire to middle class. But I think that, you know, Trump has an emperor's new clothes problem right now. People are beginning to see that there's nothing there. There's no there there, as Gertrude Stein once said about Oakland, California. There's nothing. And many, if polls are to be believed, a lot of people, including a lot of Republicans, including a lot of official Republicans, are beginning to have the courage to call it for what it is. Well, not enough. Certainly not enough.

Not enough. But speaking of calling it, Lisa, this sort of leads into this question. Every episode we get a question from an expert. And for you, I chose someone I know very well and who is an enormous fan of yours, although he mispronounces your name. Let's listen. Hello, Mr. Reich. My name is Louis, and I'm Kara's son, nepotistically returning to the podcast once again, but this time with a question. Donald Trump has obviously been

the guiding force behind domestic American politics for nearly the past decade. When we get past this man, how do we get past his moment and the climate he'll leave behind? We as a nation need to get back on track, but more importantly, we need to do this together. My question to you is, can we? And what national policy do you think could assist in unifying the country? I'm going to go with school lunch to start. Thank you. Well, what an articulate young man. 22.

I know. He really is. I don't know what happened. I would be extraordinarily proud if I were you. I am. So would you answer his question? Because you've written that, quote, unquote, Trumpism will remain after Trump because it's rooted in changes to structure our economy over the last 40 years. So how can we bury Trumpism once and for all for Louie's sake?

Louie, I think that you're asking the most important question to be asked these days. And I think if we look forward, hopefully, when Kamala Harris is president, and hopefully she has eight years, When Kamala Harris is president, and hopefully she has eight years, there is an opportunity to rein in the big, big money, corporate money, and the money of the wealthy. And by doing so, change, as I've said before, the structure of the economy. And you can start anywhere. I mean, school lunch is certainly an important place to begin, raising the minimum wage, paid family leave. I mean, we could come up with a very long and well-worn list of changes. But the important point is that nothing is going to change unless the financial structure of politics is changed. And so that is, to me, the most important thing. And you don't

have to even change Citizens United. You don't have to have an amendment. You can simply provide matching funds for politicians who agree to certain limits, public funds for their elections, to certain limits, public funds for their elections, and that, you know, for small donations. That's where to begin. You also want to restore the Voting Rights Act. And I think that those two prongs are critically important, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. And you start there. And you just then take advantage of every opportunity you have to actually change the laws so working people, middle class people, poor people have a better chance. So Obama was the first presidential candidate to say he wouldn't take federal matching

funds. What do you do then? Because it's money in politics, which is an age-old problem we've always had. Well, I think he said that because he thought rationally that he could do better without any limits. So what we've got to do is make the matching funds more generous. You cannot get to the point where any politician is going to do better by avoiding that matching funds threshold. We'll be back in a minute. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees and it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot.

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Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. constantcontact.ca So let's switch topics to our mutual vet noir, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world right now, I believe. But you and Elon have a long-running feud. I've had a feud going for a while now. You've written critically about him for years,

and he's responded with infantile insults, I would say. A few weeks ago, you wrote an op-ed for The Guardian with the headline, Elon Musk is out of control. Here's how you rein him in. Walk us through the few keys. I can describe them. I think one was boycott Tesla. Others, advertisers should boycott X. Threaten with arrest if he doesn't stop disseminating lies. In the United States, another one, the Federal Trade Commission demand must take down lies that are likely to endanger individuals. So walk us through your thoughts on this, because let's exemplify him as the rich man influencing politics among many.

Well, Musk is unique in the sense that not only is he, as you said, the richest person in the world, I think he still is, but he is among the craziest in terms of his support for Trump and his just bizarre behavior. Well, I think that advertisers are already seeing the light. They're leaving X because they don't want to be associated with Musk's nuttiness, his bonkers done. But I think it's also important for all of us to do what we can to even boycott the advertisers who are on X, to not give him the money in terms of Starlink. You say the U.S. government should terminate its contracts with SpaceX, but Ukraine obviously depended on it.

Their successes showed how ossified and bureaucratic American space program had become. So how do you do that when he is so interconnected both with SpaceX and also the communications platform that spews misinformation? How do you separate those things? Well, pretty simply, because federal contract law is something that I used to deal with quite a lot. And the federal government should not, according to federal contract laws,

contribute to creating an even larger monopoly. When you have an industry that is monopolized like space and you have basically one major company now that is creating a larger and larger monopoly, that's a justification for the government to say, no, we're going to give our business to somebody else or we're going to start our own. We used to have our own space program. We're not going to give our business to somebody else or we're going to start our own, you know, we used to have our own space program. We're not going to do this anymore. And I think that'sperate as Elon Musk. Why should taxpayers subsidize that kind of CEO and that kind of behavior?

It's not reliable. I mean, reliability in a federal contractor is extremely important. And when you have a CEO who is this, you know, just unreliable, this petty and goings-off and is unpredictable, well, then that's another good reason. And taking the money to back Trump in states since he's doing get-out-the-vote, election denial, all this stuff all across the country. He's using that money for political benefit for himself, the money he gets from the government, which is interesting. for himself, the money he gets from the government, which is interesting. But how do you mix?

Here's someone, and he probably reminds one of a Henry Ford, wildly anti-Semitic, but still critically important innovator. So how do you separate, you know, the space monopoly is a function of its innovation, and no one's caught up yet. And at the same time, you have someone who's then taking that success and trying to hold himself in place. I think he'd be in a world of trouble if Kamala Harris wins, for example, and not with Trump, obviously. Well, I think that you have to understand, innovation is the lifeblood of the economy,

but there are many potential innovators at any given time. One of the most common, and we saw this in the first Gilded Age, and we're seeing it now, consequences of gaining a dominant position in a market is to create what's called a moat. I mean, it's like a castle moat around you, so nobody else and no other innovators can really compete with you. Well, that anti-competitive behavior is certainly a hallmark of Elon Musk, and it needs to be attacked. You don't want that. That's not good. That actually represses innovation. It doesn't create more innovation. Is there anyone he hearkens back to historically from your perspective? Well, Henry Ford is a pretty good example.

I mean, any of the people who we used to call, we as Americans used to call at the turn of the last century, robber barons, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, all of the people who were, you know, the titans of railroads and the titans of oil, they were innovators, Kara. They, you know, a lot of people, a lot of even today, there are a lot of right-wing historians who say this was great for America. Well, maybe it was, but they also undermined democracy.

They used their money for political ends. The country became more and more unequal. And as Louis Brandeis, the great jurist, said in the 20s, you know, we have a choice in this country. We can either have great wealth in the hands of a few, and he was thinking of the robber barons, or we can have a democracy. But we can't have both. And I think that we've got to keep that Louis Brandeis notion and choice in the forefront of our minds. So one of the last things on this is you said regulars around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn't stop disseminating lies and hate on X. And you wrote global regulators may be on their way to doing this, the arrest of Pavel Durov of Telegram. But in the United States, the Federal Trade Commission should demand, he's also said, to take down lies that are likely to endanger individuals

if he does not sue them under the Section 5 of the FTC Act. Talk about both these things, because I've been trying to push this idea that one, crime is not free speech, and secondly, individuals should be liable for this information. At the very least, they should be liable. At the very least, our laws of tort 6th and Fox News and Dominion. Although media has more regulations on it than the Internet people have. They have their Section 230. They're protected. Yes, but there is still a need for responsibility for – and whether you call it liability.

I mean, the criminal law is interesting here because I was very criticized by the right wing, obviously, for suggesting that criminal law should pertain to Moscow or anybody who advocates or who helps advocate criminal activity. But I think that that's necessary. We are living in an age in which there are inevitably people who get stirred up by lies and who are—I mean, how many people does it take to create havoc? I mean, look at the data on the number of mass shootings in the United States. You know, the fact that as we speak here, Donald Trump has twice now had what are apparently assassination attempts. apparently assassination attempts. Let's step back from all this and say these are symptoms of a deep and worsening sickness

in the United States. And one of the ways of dealing with this, in addition to controlling the spread of firearms and keeping firearms out of the hands of the wrong people and also having a better mental health system, is to make sure that the purveyors of misinformation and particularly misinformation that's going to cause people to take radical violent action should be liable. I mean, we're even right now, you know,

some states are starting to hold parents of children who are violent and who have killed other children responsible. Well, why can't we hold the Elon Musks who are in charge of platforms where a lot of this junk is being disseminated? All right. I have to end by complimenting you, speaking of which, though, on your social media savvy. You're very good online, despite the fact that there is all kinds of problems with it. You're noting correctly. You have 1.5 million followers on Twitter or X, 1.3 million on Instagram, over 800,000 on TikTok and over 400,000 on Substack. I got to say, you're like the Kim Kardashian of economists.

It's very impressive. You know, you don't normally see this from a former Secretary of Labor. I'm telling you, all my son and his friends love you. Talk to me how you've done this. Well, there's no secret. I mean, I work with a team of very, very talented young people who know so much about social media. My son, Sam, said to me about 10 years ago, Dad, do you want to influence my generation? And I said, yes. And he said, well, with all due respect, we don't read your books. It's okay.

I get it. And Kara, I was a little bit mortified. I know. I've heard it. And I just, you know, finally I licked my wounds and I said, well, what should I do? He said, well, it's all about social media. And I didn't even know what social media was. But I started out with a very, very talented filmmaker, Jake Kornbluth.

And we created a movie called Inequality for All. And then we did another movie, Saving Capitalism. And then we started doing videos. And now we have, well, Jake went on to do other things, but there are about eight or nine very, very smart young people. We talk every week or twice a week, three times a week. And we're constantly doing stuff together. And I think that I can have the most influence as a teacher. or twice a week, three times a week, and we're constantly doing stuff together.

And I think that I can have the most influence as a teacher, and that's what I do. That's what I love doing. I've been doing that for 45 years in classrooms and on social media, and hopefully people who have listened to this podcast will learn something. But, you know, being a teacher is very generative. And by generative, I mean those of us who teach try to give of ourselves so that we can enable the next generation to be even more successful and more powerful

in fashioning a world that is a better world. That's what it's all about. So I don't really spend a lot of time looking at the numbers of followers and the numbers of this medium or that platform or that. The real issue is, is there a contribution significantly being made to people's understanding of what the world is right now and how they can make it better. And I don't know what the answer is. I don't know that I'm successful and I may be terribly unsuccessful. So my last question, are you optimistic right now or pessimistic? It's a really tough world, as you said. I'm nauseously optimistic. I mean, I... Explain. Are you optimistically nauseous? I'm optimistic, but I... You could be optimistically nauseous, too. Well, I could,

but I'm not. I'm nauseously optimistic because I do think that things do work out. And I do think that Kamala Harris is going to be our next president, and Tim Walz our next vice president. And I do think, hope, and think that Congress will be under the power, with enough power, the Democrats will have enough power to put into place much of what Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to do. But I'm nauseously optimistic in the sense that in the pit of my stomach, when I say something like I just said, I feel that I could vomit because I just don't know. The alternative is so bad. And the forces of darkness, and let me just leave it at that. I mean, you know what I mean, are so powerful that I can't guarantee what is going to happen. Yeah, the empire always strikes back. Yes, and the stakes are as large, if not larger, than at any time in my life.

Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll end on that. But remember, we have Louis Swisher and others like him. That's why I'm hopeful. I am too. I think he—what a great, great question. And how articulate he is. That's how we grow him.

That's how we grow him. Anyway, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And again, I'm also a huge fan. The whole Swisher family is. Thank you, Cara. Thank you, Swishers. On with Cara Swisher is produced by

Kristen Castro-Russell, Kateri Yochum, Megan Burney, Jolie Myers, and Gabriela Biello. Special thanks to Sheena Ozaki, Kate Gallagher, Kate Furby, and Kaylin Lynch. Our engineers are Rick Kwan, Fernando Arruda, and Aaliyah Jackson. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get a child tax credit. If not, you get to work for Henry Ford, Elon Musk. I don't know

the difference. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more. Too late to reinvent yourself. The all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks is the city-sized crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. From the design and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system, you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks. Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks.

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