Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime - Episode #505: Katie Porter, Heidi Heitkamp, Michael Smerconish, Eric Klinenberg, Kevin Williamson

Episode Date: August 24, 2019

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 8/23/19) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series, Real Time with Bill Maugh. Okay, Katie, given the pay disparity between workers and CEO... Hi, Bill. Hi. We don't take any breaks here.

We just... Should we have a maximum wage? Minimum wage? Yeah, that's been suggested. FDR certainly suggested it. A maximum wage? Yes, a limit. Like, you know, 100% tax

after, if you make 10 million or whatever, would be? Bill. What? I'm asking somebody's... This is somebody else's question, and I think we should have a maximum wage. I don't.

Wow. I think that what we should do is have empowered people in this country, shareholders, workers, investors, and we should allow our capitalist economy to actually check the wages of CEOs. That will work. It has worked in this country.

So should we have, as a practical matter, a maximum wage, our wage is too high? Should the guy at Pfizer have gotten that much more money? Should Jamie Diamond be getting paid to say he'll think about it? No. But to say there's going to be some automatic maximum wage or some perfect ratio, that's a recipe for messing with what's worked in capitalism

for all these years. Surprising? I would even like 10 billion a year. In the 1950s, the top rate was 70%. Would you support a top rate of 70% on salary? No, it was higher than that, I think. Well, it was almost 90. For some... That's a different question. I lowered it. So that's saying, if you make a lot of money. What is your duty to contribute to the collective good? And it's substantial. You should have, the more you make, the more you should pay. We are all in this together. How progressive

on the time? Except for Trump. He's in it for himself. In the last 40 years, the typical CEO pay was gone up 940%. It's outrageous. The typical workers pay has gone up 12%. Totally. We need to change something. We totally need to change something. But the thing that we need to change isn't some magical number, some artificial formula that we're going to set on what a CEO should be paid. What we need to do is have investor protection rules, have shareholders be empowered, have workers being getting paid a reasonable wage compared to a CEO. And this is the recipe. It's not some magic formula that we're going to just find. There's no perfectly proportional number out there. The biggest company in the world, we don't know what that's even going to look like five years from now.

I'm curious, what do you think needs to be done to make shareholders more powerful? Do you think I mean, this is not a rhetorical question. You think they're in a poor position to manage their money? I think one of the problems is that the vast majority of Americans are not shareholders. So every time Trump tweets about the stock market, and he thinks it's a joke that the stock market is falling. And so the reality is most Americans don't have any retirement savings at all. Most people are not invested in the stock market. And so we don't have the average American having a say as an investor because the average American isn't an investor,

because they can't pay for their apartment and they can't pay for their health care. and they can't pay for their child care. So, for instance, do you think they should be able to take some of the money they pay into, say, Social Security can put it into a private retirement fund? No, no. So how are we going to... So how do you want to encourage more Americans to become shareholders? Because I want to pay them enough so they can make things make money and then save...

For their futures and for their children. And you think they're going to go invest in the stock market and not buy bass boats? Have you met Americans? Yes, I have to. They're the wealthiest people in the history of the world and their saving trade is negligible. Fast boats are awesome. Well, they're the wealthiest people in the history of the world,

but it's very uneven. 42% of the people make minimum wage. This is the people I keep asking. How do you live? They don't. Their lives are very hard. Right. Look, I'd like to see a wealth tax

because we've had a class war in this country for 40 years and the overclass has won. And it's time for the rest of the country to fight back. And listen. I have no problem with saying we should adjust the tax system and redistribute wealth and get those who are earning the most, contributing the most, back into the system that has made them wealthy. But that's different than saying we should have some kind of price cap on salary. And manage this with the government currently headed by Donald Trump.

That's a disruption to capitalism. The other is a normal system of healthy system of taxation, which we need to create in this country. And you need to start treating earned income the same as under-earned incomes. So people who just sit on their ass and collect dollars, they are taxed at a lower rate than people actually go to work every day. And Trump said he was going to... Trump was in the campaign, he was going to get on that. Yeah, right, right. How did that work?

No. Eric, what do you think of Bernie Sanders' $16 trillion climate change plan, which would mobilize society at a level not seen since World War II? I mean, it's a huge amount of money, but let's start asking seriously how we're going to pay. for the mess we're inheriting if we don't do anything like a green new deal. Because if we don't pay for a green new deal, we are toast. We are we are, we are eviscerating the conditions that make life possible.

So it sounds outrageous, but we need an emergency plan because we are in a climate emergency. And if you're not seeing it in Brazil this week, I don't know what evidence is going to do. And to my buy the Amazon fund, we're putting the number on the screen. Okay, what can we expect From this weekend's G7 summit, great things Yeah, exactly, he's going to be like, yes Pouting, the president will pout Because people there don't like him

And he knows they don't know what the picture will be And when people don't like him, he pouts. Right, yeah You be Angela Merkel, I'll be Trump It's so German, isn't it? It's so ridiculous. I know. It's embarrassing.

It's not just ridiculous, and it's dangerous. It's dangerous, given everything that's going on. He shouldn't even go. They don't want to... He doesn't want to be there. He doesn't want to go. He took the red eye. He left tonight.

He left like 20 minutes ago. I thought there was a... He wasn't even going to go. When we came out here tonight to start your show, I was convinced it was possible that he wouldn't even make the trip. Right. Especially because his spirit animal, Putin,

isn't there. And that's... You know, his big issue is why isn't Putin here? All right. You always want to be with somebody who loves you. Exactly. You've got to think one reason we're getting into this crazy trade war and tariff situation of today is because he wants to go to the G7 meeting and flexes muscles a little bit.

The guy's so insecure, his ego is so fragile, he wants something to stand up on. Can I say that my word? And that's a crazy thing that our economy is in the hands of the thing. I think that President Xi can out-chicken him in this game, because the Chinese are not opening envelopes looking at 401ks. she's job security is a lot stronger than Trump's. And it might not be one of the 20 Democrats. It might be the Chinese president, ultimately, who brings him down.

Read the art of war. The art of war. By the way, he tweeted today, our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China. Socialism. What would they have said if socialist Obama had... Our great American companies are always,

ordered. Hereby. Hereby. It's the hereby. Hereby. Hereby, yeah. You got to get the hereby. Right, like a dwarf with a scroll. Okay. Thank you very much, everybody. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10. Or watch them anytime on HBO on demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com.