The Ezra Klein Show - A Democrat Who Is Thinking Differently

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

After the elections, I started asking congressional Democrats the same question: If the elections had gone the other way, if they had won a trifecta, what would be their first big bill? In almost every case, they said they didn’t know. That’s a problem.Democrats are in the opposition now. That means fighting the worst of what Trump is doing. But it also means providing an alternative. So one thing I’m going to do this year is talk to Democrats who are trying to find that alternative — an agenda that meets the challenges of the moment, not just one carried from the past.Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts is the first up to bat. We spoke in January, so we don’t cover the latest Trump news. The conversation is really focused on his ideas, and he has a lot of interesting ones — about the abundance agenda, the attention economy and how Democrats should talk about policy during a second Trump term. I don’t necessarily agree with every idea he offers, but he’s definitely wrestling with that question I posed to other Democrats: What is your alternative?This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:“The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism” by Ezra KleinBook Recommendations:“How Mathematics Built the Modern World” by Bo Malmberg and Hannes MalmbergRadical Markets by Eric A. Posner and E. Glen WeylWhat Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker HoweThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein show. After the election, I started asking congressional Democrats I talked to the same question, one after the other. If it had gone the other way, if they had won a trifecta, what would their first big bill have been? What was going to be their priority? In almost every case, they said they didn't know. It's a problem. Democrats are in the opposition now.

That means fighting the worst of what Trump is doing. But it also means providing an alternative, creating another center of gravity in American politics. So one thing I'm gonna do on the show this year is talk to Democrats who sound like they are trying to find their way to that alternative. Democrats who sound like they are crafting an agenda alive to this moment, not just one carried over

from the past. One Democrat I found interesting here is Jake Auchincloss, a congressman from Massachusetts. Among the Democrats talking about the abundance agenda, and my book on abundance comes out next month, so I will admit to being particularly interested here, he's been really pretty substantive. It's not that I agree with every idea he offers here, I don't, but when I hear him,

I hear someone wrestling with a question I pose to other Democrats. What is your alternative? What did people need to hear from you over these last few years that they didn't? What do they need to believe you will do if you get power? This conversation was recorded at the end of January, so you're not going to hear us discuss the latest Trump news.

But it's also not the point here. The country needs a resistance, but it also needs an alternative. As always, my email is rocl Klein show at ny times.com. Congressman Jake Alkenclaw, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on Ezra. So after the election, a lot of Democrats have responded to Donald Trump's particular form of populism by offering what you call a Diet Coke version of it. Tell me about your Diet Coke theory of the Democratic Party.

I'm concerned that bold-faced named Democrats have been leaning into populism. They have said, boy, Donald Trump has done what we dreamed of, which was building a multi-ethnic working class coalition. Biggest city in my district, Ezra Fall River, which is the exemplar of a multi-ethnic working class city, voted for a Republican in 2024 for the first time in a hundred years. And Democrats across the country

have been looking at cities like Fall River and have said, well, if they're doing populism, we got to do populism too, whether that's immigration or trans issues or the culture wars. My view on that is voters who ordered a Coca-Cola don't want to diet Coke. There's two different parties and we have to start by understanding who our voters are not and then understand who our voters could be and go and try to win them over.

If you're walking to the polls and your number one issue is guns, if you're walking to the polls and your number one issue is immigration, if you're walking to the polls and your number one issue is immigration, if you're walking to the polls and your number one issue is trans participation in sports, you're probably not going to be a Democratic voter. That's okay. There's two parties. But if you are a voter who went Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump, and you're walking to the polls and your number one issue is cost of living, boy, we'd better win you back. You say that Trump did what Democrats have long dreamed of, which is have a multiracial

working class coalition. Democrats used to have a multiracial working class coalition. They won voters making less than 50,000 by significant margins. They won non-white voters by significant margins. That was their coalition. What is your explanation of a broken? I think we were seen as taking our eye off the ball on both kitchen table and front porch issues, that the notorious ad, Kamala's for they, them, Trump's for you, was not just about the particular salience of trans issues in this election, but as a broader cultural thesis that

Democrats have taken their finger off the cultural mainstream. Between the time when Bill Clinton played saxophone on live TV and peaking I think with Obama's election in 2008, but persisting all the way through 2018, Democrats broadly were winning the culture wars, I would argue. And MAGA's big idea was maybe we can win the culture wars. And to a certain extent, they did. And I think Democrats now have to make very clear that that has been a mask for an agenda that is not actually going to help people. What you've seen in Donald Trump's first week

in office is that he's siding with cop Peters and tech oligarchs. He's not doing anything on housing, health care and taxes for the typical American family. We've got to drive that cost of living message home. Have you been surprised by the size of the post-election vibe shift? You're this very close election and then what has felt since it, like a almost seismic cultural change following. How do you understand the difference between those two things?

If you had asked me a year ago whose dance moves were going to become culturally mainstream, Kamala Harris's or Donald Trump's, I would have said Kamala Harris. She's a pretty good dancer. But no, it was NFL stars doing Trump's dance moves in the end zone. I have been surprised by that. I think it's, and you have made this point, we have to be careful about overreading the results of one election. Every single incumbent party throughout the developed world, lost vote share, center right, center left, were no different. And in fact, House Democrats

modestly outperformed, which you might expect to have been the case. So what I'm concerned about is that Democrats basically reach for economic and cultural populism in a way that is going to be uninteresting and unpersuasive to voters, as opposed to carving out in this party system that we're in our own view of things, which is that, yeah, we are a party that stands for the rule of law and that stands for a nation of immigrants and that stands for climate action and gun violence prevention. But you're going to trust us on these noble abstractions because we're also going to be able to build trust through performance at the state and local level, in particular in

these years that we're in the wilderness. And that means bigger ideas than we have right now. But the core democratic economic message is that taxes plus housing plus healthcare is less than half your wallet. That is our economic telos. And that requires treating cost disease where it afflicts sectors across the US economy, most notably housing and healthcare. What is cost disease? That's a specific term. Cost disease, I think, is the most important economic concept that policy makers are unaware of. In sectors like housing and healthcare, they are afflicted by Bommel's cost disease,

which says that because they are very labor intensive and low productivity, they are going to inflate faster than GDP. So haircuts are a good example of this. Haircuts are non-automatable, service intensive, and yet the wage for a hairstylist has to be competitive with the wage for somebody in a sector that has higher productivity gains. And so you're gonna see more and more share of wallet going towards these sectors. Imagine if you were going to build your car,

and instead of buying a car at a dealership, you stood in your driveway and you called up a general contractor, and you had them subcontract out the various parts of the car, and people came to your driveway and they called up a general contractor, and you had them subcontract out the various parts of the car, and people came to your driveway and they built the car piece by piece. Imagine how much that car would cost, a lot more than the typical car.

That's how we build houses and it doesn't actually have to be that way. In fact, it is tied to the abundance agenda that I know that you and Derek Thompson and others have been pushing to the front of the policy conversation. The abundance agenda makes the case that if you're trying to lower cost of living for the typical American family, you need to unlock supply rather than subsidize demand. You need to build more stuff. I agree with the abundance agenda and I agree with it across different sectors,

but I think it's incomplete. You can't just unlock supply if it's a supply of a sector that has low productivity gains. You first have to turn those services into products and then unlock supply. Yes, we need zoning reform to expand supply but we also need to lean into off-site construction to basically turn housing production away from stick-built where it's highly service intensive and towards modular construction where it's more factory intensive. I was reporting a couple years back on this housing, affordable housing complex in San Francisco called Tahaunin and it was the first of these NSF done as modular housing and this was a

really excellent build. And when I was talking to the people behind it and they were thinking about doing a second, at least at that time, they said, we probably won't do modular again. I said, why? Said, that's probably the political fight we can't win twice. Which is to say that it's often the same problem just in a different guise. I mean there are interest groups that have made it very hard to do modular housing. I've called this at different times things like everything bagel liberalism, but liberals have a lot of different goals piled into individual projects, right, or piled into a housing policy.

You want a lot of good union jobs, you want high environmental standards, you want affordable housing, and you sort of like keep stacking them. That ends up being a problem. It's not just that we haven't embraced the technology, but we haven't embraced it for a reason. People have interests where they don't want to see that embraced. Some times we're actively hostile to it, as is the case in the healthcare system, where if you are serious about cost disease in healthcare, it's inflating probably 2X of GDP. What you really want to promote is biotechnology and medical device technology.

Those are things that turn a service which is all the people at a hospital who perform services to care for people into a product. And yet in many ways Democrats have turned very hostile to the med tech and biotech industries. And yet, we look forward to the year 2050 when 15 million people are going to have Alzheimer's disease. It's going to require three caregivers per person around the clock. That by itself is going to be an affordability crisis. And the way to attack that issue is not through expanding the supply of caregivers. Yes, we're going to have to do some of that. The way to do it is to prevent people from getting Alzheimer's disease in

the first place. But your point about modular is well taken, which is why I think we need bigger ideas than we have right now. You've pointed out in California and I've seen myself in Massachusetts that despite the liberalizing land use restrictions, successes that we've had at the state house level, we haven't built that much housing, have we? What about a governor sanctioned charter city in these states? Massachusetts has two bases that have been demilitarized, Fort Devens and then also Union Point, tremendous amount of land there that is interstitial to local zoning regulations. Why don't we have the big idea of the governor in the state house,

either in Massachusetts or in California or another blue state, starts a new city and says, we're actually going to build 200,000 units of housing here, and we're going to ban cars and develop it where it's more organic and walkable. That's a big idea that I think could arrest some of the demographic backsliding that we're seeing in these blue states that are losing population and

can't provide housing affordability to their populations. What about education? Had not heard education as part of the discussion for the last two election cycles and yet we know that the school closures have been a catastrophe for a generation of kids. And we need to one, apologize to voters for that, and two, make a commitment that we are going to deliver excellence in education because we have seen backsliding across math, science and reading comprehension in basically every place we're measuring. It feels to me like Democrats stop talking about education because education splits their

coalition. Education was education splits their coalition. Education was controversial in their coalition when Barack Obama was pushing education reform when he had Arne Duncan as his education secretary. It was controversial under Bill Clinton. And the Democratic Party, I would say from, you know, during the resistance to Trump and then under Joe Biden, it became more coalitional, more allergic to things, at least on domestic policy, that split its coalition. It did. And the charter school debate has grown

stale. And... What do you mean by that? What I mean is that the pro-charter side is demoralized and the anti-charter side is no longer actually making that case anymore. At least in Massachusetts, we see that the conversation has moved on to other issues, legalizing teacher strikes, for example, or other things. To me, it's another invitation for

big ideas that Democrats can put forward because Republicans don't have them. I mean, Republicans are obsessed with what books are in the library. One of the things I've been tracking very closely about AI, and I tend to be a bit of an AI skeptic candidly, is that we have seen that Khan Academy and others have been able to deliver one-on-one tutoring using AI to students and are showing measurable and persistent gains in math and reading comprehension in particular. What if we made the commitment that every single kid is going to get in-depth

one-on-one tutoring, both AI but also teacher delivered? And we just flip the script entirely on what it means to have education, because we've got a factory model view of what education is, really based on the 19th century of students listen to a teacher lecture. We have technology now that can make that an entirely different paradigm. We're not talking about or delivering that. When you just said you're an AI skeptic a minute ago and then moved into a very pro-AI

case on education, I think that gets at attention in the Democratic Party, which is I would say the Democratic Party used to be the much more pro-technology party. So you go back to Bill Clinton coming out of the Atari Democrats, the DLC Democrats, who seemed to have a lot of ideas about the information age. And behind him Al Gore, who wasn't incredibly, as much as he got mocked for saying he invented the internet, Gore was one of the most prescient politicians and elected officials of that entire era, way, way, way ahead of the curve on a lot of these questions. Barack Obama running against John McCain, running against Mitt Romney, also I think

the information age candidate, the candidate with a lot more ties to Silicon Valley. And then I think starting the 2016 election, there's been a breakup between Democrats and big tech, which is fine, right? They became very disillusioned with disinformation and misinformation on Facebook, disillusioned with where a lot of the tech billionaires had moved and how they were acting. But it does seem to me that the skepticism of the companies has become a skepticism of technological solutions. And so now you see the big futurists like Andreessen and Musk have sort of lined up

on the Republican side. I'm curious how you think about this culturally, because I think before you even think about policy, policy is downstream from party culture. And I don't get the sense running through the democratic and liberal circles that I run through that people are just fundamentally comfortable with technology. I think they sort of understand it as downstream of big corporations and of tech-bro culture. I take a position sector by sector. I am very pro-biotech. I want to see us develop the larger small molecules that cure Duchenne's muscular dystrophy

or Alzheimer's disease. As we talked about with housing, I'm very pro-offsite construction and innovations in delivering housing as a commodity. I recently visited an aerospace and defense factory in Los Angeles, and what they are doing with automating the production of high mix, low volume parts for the aerospace and defense industry is super exciting. That's how we're going to be able to build the material we need to compete in the Indo-Pacific. I'm also relatively pro-blockchain because I think it can empower creators in a digital

economy. People who have a thousand true fans, whether they're musicians or visual artists, may be able to lay claim to that without being intermediated. But I have become revolted by the social media corporations and their abusive Section 230 and their attention-fracking of an entire generation of American kids. I got a four-year-old, a three-year-old,

a one-year-old at home. I know you have two little kids, too. And the way I view it, I'm in a race over the next four years before they can start scrolling on their own to force these social media corporations to uphold a duty of care to their users. Because right now, they are monetizing the attention spans of Americans, selling it off to the highest bidder, and have zero interest in fighting toxicity like, for example, deep fake pornography. That's increasingly ruining young women's lives.

That's a good setup to talk a bit about TikTok. See you were one of the co-sponsors of the House TikTok bill that passed the House overwhelmingly, that passed the Senate overwhelmingly, signed by Joe Biden, upheld nine to zero at the Supreme Court. And then a funny thing happened in that no one decided to enforce this bill that had passed through every level of U.S. government. Joe Biden decided not to enforce it.

And then Donald Trump wants to make himself the savior of TikTok. What happened here from your perspective? Ultimately, I think this thing is getting sold, but one, TikTok's lobbyists got to Donald Trump, partly out of flattery and partly because they've captured his inner circle. And two, I think Trump got concerned that he wasn't going to be able to control who the ultimate buyer was going to be, which is why you see this really half-baked concept of the U.S. government having a 50% stake in TikTok, which I don't even understand what that means. So you said you think TikTok ultimately will be sold.

One reason I asked you what you thought had happened here is that it seems to me that a lot of support in Congress has dissipated. The excitement that led to the passage of that bill has not been Congress has dissipated. The excitement that led to the passage of that bill has not been matched by first howls among Democrats when Biden delayed it and then howls among Republicans when Trump decided to try to functionally upend it. You see polling showing that moving TikTok out of Chinese hands has gone from a majority proposition to a minority one. You saw TikTok using a strategy we've seen with Uber and others, you know, putting up a little poster on its system saying, you know, the politician is going to take this away from you. Go blame them. Go talk to them if you don't want to see that happen. So tell me about the political economy of this right now, because you seem pretty confident

that this will ultimately go through. And I don't see that many champions of it. It's not that there aren't still champions on it. You're totally right that someone like Mike Walls, right? The current national security advisor to Trump and formerly a congressman a year ago, he says, Hey, if you think this pro-Hamas propaganda on TikTok is bad now, wait until China invades Taiwan. They're poisoning young minds.

Mike Walls now is singing a different tune now that Trump has changed his mind. So totally accept that premise. I don't think Congress's disposition has changed that much. What that Trump has changed his mind. So totally accept that premise. I don't think Congress's disposition has changed that much. What I think has changed is that we've just packed two years worth of political events into the last week, and there's just only a certain amount of political attention that can be paid to any specific issue.

We got to worry about inspectors general being fired. We got to worry about the impoundment clause. We got to worry about the Paris Accord. Guy's going to try to invade Panama at some point. Like we have a lot of issues. And this TikTok one is not one that I think is as dangerous to the rule of law and to the politicization of the military as other things he's trying to do. I think it's going to ultimately get sold for the very simple reason that I think Apple

and Google are going to be unwilling to embrace the legal liability that would come from hosting it on the app stores persistently. And they're going to be worried about lawsuits down the road. And that will ultimately degrade the user experience on TikTok sufficiently that a deal will make sense for both parties. It has seemed so far that the, I guess, position of ByteDance, I think many people suspect the position of the CCP is they will not sell it. It has seemed that they would prefer to cause trouble with this. One of the things that worries me about this whole situation is you imagine a world where

Trump and the Republicans save it. And this is a kind of deal. And if before the 2026 midterm election, TikTok began turning the dials such that content doesn't have to be pro Trump content, but things that are difficult for Democrats, right? Issues that are difficult for Democrats just became 35% more viral and things that are good for Republicans did the same. It would be hard to look at TikTok and know anything had happened, right? We don't have any bird's eye view or God's eye view of what is happening on that platform.

And so the ability to turn the attentional dials as a kind of in-kind contribution, given that the whole thing is a black box at its core, seems very real. I mean, in a very different way, this is true for Elon Musk's acts, it's true for all of these. Attention is a currency now. We've at least some rules and some ways of thinking about how money is moving around. We don't have anything on how attention is moving around. As you and Chris Hayes said, attention is the most valuable currency in the world now.

And it is controlled as maybe too strong of a word, but influenced very strongly by a dozen people right now. There has never been a time where more wealth and power has been concentrated in fewer hands. And I think Americans sort of assume that most of those hands are American hands because, hey, we're the home of big tech. And what TikTok makes so plain and what you just laid out is that no, the Chinese Communist Party, and let's be very clear here, the TikTok and ByteDance report to the Chinese Communist Party that they actually have levers of influence as well. Let me just underscore that, not to be too doomer about it, but Trump issued the Trump

coin. And that Trump coin is the equivalent of issuing the account number for a Swiss bank account, telling foreign adversaries they can deposit funds into that account anonymously, but then come and show him the receipts privately to prove that they have so done. It is the most brazen act of corruption of the modern presidency. And if you don't think that the Chinese and the Saudis and the Turks and the Qataris are buying some of that coin, I think people are deeply naive. I think that, let's hold here for a second.

I know we're jumping around a bit, but I think this is important. I think the emergence of crypto, which is always looking for a use case, right? It's a technology endlessly looking for a use case. As a new venue for political corruption has been really quite important. So before Trump issued the Trump coin

and Melania issued the Melania coin, you had this world Liberty coin, which Trump and his kids are a part of. And the world Liberty coin was meant more as a real coin. It was designed more in the way some of these crypto drops are designed, but it's quite punitive to users. So it didn't do that well initially. But it had terms of service in it or a structure where if it went above a certain level, it would trigger payouts to the Trump family. And this was public. And so a crypto magnet under US investigation publicly went, bragged about, right, it's

been reported in Bloomberg, right, you can go follow all of it, just pumped a bunch of money into it so it triggered a multimillion dollar payment to the Trump family. And by saying he did it publicly, of course, they knew that he did it publicly. And there was nothing illegal about it. It's an investment. But it's also very clear what was happening here. You cannot just move money into Donald Trump's pocket, but he has now created a series of vehicles where you can do something one step removed, right?

There's the Trump technology company that now has a stock price listing. You could to some degree try to invest in that. But much more directly, these coins and any further coins that Trump family puts forward has just created a way for people to back dump trucks of money into the Trump family. I mean, I remember in Trump's first term, you had this endless people staying in the Trump hotel to tell Trump they were lining his pocket a little bit. But it was only a little bit, right? A hotel room can only cost so much.

This is a whole new magnitude and a whole new innovation. It is guaranteed that foreign adversaries will be purchasing the Trump coin. And frankly, the United States would do that too. If the Venezuelan president issued some coin in his name and we thought that we could gain influence over him by purchasing that and tying up his net worth and American interest in currency, that's a good national security decision. We would do that to the Iranians and the Turks as well. You better believe they're going to do it to us too. So here's, I think, the difficult political economy Trump has created for Democrats.

Facebook, Amazon, TikTok, X, the social media companies generally are more popular than the Democrats are. So you're standing up here and saying that Democrats should take these companies on more frontally, right? They should force the TikTok sale or force it to be shuttered if they won't sell it. You're talking about getting rid of or somehow reforming section 230. So that means you're not only taking on now Donald Trump and the Republican Party, you're taking on all these technology companies which have their own levers of influence, their own constituencies.

Tell me a bit about how you see that fight and why you think that fight, even if it is a good fight to have, why you think it is winnable given what we've just seen with Tech Talk and given just how much money and power and attention is tied up in this consortium we see emerging. Matthew Feeney Because it's part of the vibe shift that you've been raising. You are right that by revealed preference, by how much time people spend scrolling, they like this stuff, right? I mean, four to six hours of online or video content on average for a person under 40. But when I stand in a living room in my district, particularly with fellow parents, and I talk

about these corporations stealing from family time to create more screen time. When I talk about the fact that since 2012 when smartphones became ubiquitous with the front-facing camera, and John Hyde has spoken about this eloquently, we have seen a spike in mental health challenges for young women and antisocial behavior for young men. Every head is nodding. People are able to hold two competing ideas in their head at the same time. One, we're not going backwards, right? We're not getting rid of the television or the radio.

We're not getting rid of the television or the radio. We're not getting rid of social media. But this Web 2.0 version of social media where these Leviathans are just attention fracking us, this is not sustainable and this isn't really what I signed up for. I feel that. I hosted an app challenge basically where young middle schoolers and high schoolers can build their own apps. What was striking to me is even in the last four years that I've been doing this, the apps that they were building were about in real life community.

The Winning App created environmental cleanups in a way for people to sign up online to go clean up locally. Gen Z gets it. They understand that this is not good for them. And their parents look at their kids and say, I don't think it's fair that they are growing up, that their adolescence is being warped by the bottom line of these companies. I can't fight Mark Zuckerberg one-on-one,

right? I have a full-time job. You haven't been doing the UFC training. I think they like the idea that Congress will pick that fight for them. Section 230 was passed in the 1990s. It immunizes the social media corporations from any liability for what they host. The social media corporations will act as though it's some kind of sacrosanct First Amendment protection. It's not.

It was drafted in the 1990s by a bunch of congressmen and senators who are good legislators, but they're not James Madison. And this law is tailored to one industry. You don't get these protections. Radio hosts don't get these protections. TV hosts don't get these protections. This was a giveaway to an industry in its infancy that it no longer needs and that it has begun to abuse.

Oftentimes, I try to thread this across a number of different sectors where I say, in 1990s, we also gave immunity to the pharmacy benefit managers from the anti-kickback statute. These are the drug pricing middlemen. In the early 2000s we gave immunity to the gun manufacturing industry from being sued for the misuse of their guns. Folks, if an industry comes to Congress and asks not to be sued for anything they're going to do going forward, the answer that Congress should give them is not, yeah, sure. The answer is,

well, what are you up to that you are so afraid of standing in front of a court of law and having the facts made plain? We gotta revoke all of these immunities and hold all corporations to simple acts of corporate responsibility. So we were talking about the supply side a few minutes ago, and I got this book on abundance coming out. One of the things that I, in some ways,

wanted to put in there, but it just felt too fuzzy, but I think you and I share a bit of an obsession on this, is that you should think about attention as a collective resource, as a public good. A crucial question in a democracy is the quality and quantity of attention the public can bring to civic and daily life. And one of the things that I see creeping around a bit of what you're saying here is the quality of American attention has been degraded. Yes. And it's a little bit tricky to talk about how would you try to increase the supply of

attention. It is a thing, I've said this a million times on the show, as a parent, the thing I worry about the most, I think I have a good idea of how to teach my children to be good people, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but I'm hoping so. I think I understand a lot of the things that parenting is supposed to carry.

I am terrified about how to teach them, how to help them have healthy attentional capacity in the world they're growing up in. And I've never really seen anybody come up with anything in public policy on this. I mean, we're beginning to have, I think, let's ban phones in schools, like God bless John Hyde on that. Yes. And many, many governors are coming around to that, Democratic and Republican.

But so then you have this piece of your theory, which I'm a little skeptical of in terms of its workability, but I'd like to hear you make the case for it, which is this tax on attention. When you describe that, what are you describing? How would you do that? We use a phrase that I think hints at what this might look like.

When you're scrolling on your phone and when you're looking at content, you are quote, paying attention, right? You pay attention. And if you're scrolling on your phone and when you're looking at content, you are quote, paying attention, right? You pay attention. And if you're paying attention, they are buying attention. In the real world, that could be subject to a sales tax, a value added tax. In the digital world, it's non-monetized and thereby is not taxable. And the degradation of attention and the greed for our attention spans that these corporations exhibit

suggests that we need to update our tax code to reflect not an industrial economy but an attention economy. And these companies will come back and say, if you try to do a value added tax, it's going to be unworkable. And here's 55 reasons why it's unworkable. And is it going to be challenging to implement that? Yeah, it's also challenging, by the way, to do capital gains taxes on private equity. Our tax code and our tax enforces update themselves. But I think the core thesis is very well grounded, that when you are paying attention and they are buying attention, that has value.

And we know it has value because they go turn around and bundle it for a price to advertisers, and we simply say, you're paying a VAT based on that. And the VAT is not going to go to the general fund. The VAT is going to go to a separate chartered entity that disperses funds for local journalism. Are you saying that every website I visit, they're going to be paying a little bit of money based on how long I spent on the site? Are you saying that we are just going to add a tax onto the money they are making from advertising,

right? That would be a way to do it. What literally? Because attention isn't what you are taxing here, the paying attention. You're taxing some kind of exchange somewhere. What is that exchange? The exchange is the not the paying of attention is some kind of exchange somewhere. What is that exchange? The exchange is the, not the paying of attention, is the buying of attention. So the advertising revenue that you're describing

ultimately gets taxed as corporate income for Facebook and the other social media corporations. They pay tax on that. What I'm talking about is the value that they accrue by your time spent on screen, which is quote unquote free, right? You're not paying and they're not paying. And yet there is an exchange there.

You are paying attention and they are calculating every single impression of that entire scroll. They then bucket up that data and they do a number of things with it. One, they sell it to advertisers. Two, they sell it to large language models and they try to figure out how we can monetize it.

And they are incredibly good at monetizing it. I'm not talking about a VAT on the back end monetization of data. I'm talking about a VAT on the front end of how much time spent on screen, taxed not to the user of the service, but taxed to the service provider. So this is a world where Netflix is then going to be disclosing a calculation to, I guess, the IRS, saying, this was a total amount of time people spent binging or watching content on Netflix,

and they pay a surcharge based on that amount of time. Netflix is not a great example because Netflix is a subscriber model, and so that is actually a monetized exchange. What I'm talking about is the social media corporations who have thrived on network effects that brought people together and then they took the free content that was created by users to attract more people. So if TikTok moved to a model where it charged me five bucks a month, they're out of this

tax system? So what's interesting about this is that some jurisdictions actually require that the social media corporations offer a subscription. So they've already had to put forward what they think the monetary value is of sort of monthly usage, which is a pretty good indication of what it might end up being. But the short answer is no, I don't think that's a get out of jail free card. And you had mentioned, is it every single website? Is it a recipe blog?

No, I don't think it is. And this kind of goes back to Section 230 also. Section 230 in the 1990s was created at a time when it was all recipe blogs and it was Web 1.0 and it was a good idea at the time. So I'm not talking about, you know, you make some blog, pay in a tip-bubba, but no. We're talking about the clear dominant websites that are monetizing people's attention spans, pay a VAT on that. And we try to support those people who are actually doing real journalism and can help reconnect our communities.

Look, I'm all for anything that will support actual local journalism. The difficulty you always have, I think, with any theory of how to do that from the government in an era as polarized as this one, when trust in the media is as polarized as it is, is how do you disperse that? How do you do it in a way where this isn't just read as a tax on things people like to fund like liberal journalists in localities? I mean, they don't even like Sesame Street, right?

It's gonna have to be bottom-up, not top-down. And what that means is you're going to have to see civil society, local and state buy-in to these organizations, philanthropic. And we're seeing green shoots of this. I'm sure you're aware of it as well. In my own district, I see in Newton and Brookline and right outside my district in New Bedford, these sort of startup nonprofit news gathering organizations that clearly have communal buy-in and yet the money is a problem. As you know better than me, the modern journalism era is a tough place to make money and tough place to make sustainable and yet it's performing what I think is a public good.

I think it has positive externalities that need to be subsidized. We've been talking here about a pretty novel approach to the tax code. We're about to get, you're about to get, a less novel one. We know there's going to be a very big budget reconciliation bill to extend and deepen Trump's tax cuts from the first term. How are you thinking about that?

They are about to take a chainsaw to healthcare funding. When you dig into the federal budget, what you very quickly see and what the Republicans are learning is that we're an insurance company with an army. This is my old line. And Donald Trump has said, not touching Medicare or social security. Well, boom, there's about half the money. The Republicans have made clear they want to spend more on the quote unquote army, right? The military.

Okay. So where exactly are these two, three trillion dollars worth of savings that you need to satisfy your fiscal hawks that you can pay for these tax cuts? And the answer is it can only come from one place. I mean, just arithmetically, which is Medicaid and SNAP and a few other- Affordable Care Act. Affordable Care Act, but functionally, what we are talking about is healthcare.

I do not know whether they are going to be able to enact the full suite of cuts to Medicaid and ACA that they are talking about. I think Speaker Johnson does not want his members going home to his constituents, to their constituents rather, and finding out just how unpopular it is to make long-term care out of reach for the average American family.

But isn't that assuming they pay for it? My default presumption is that they're not gonna pay for it. They're gonna do the tax cuts and they're gonna use some monopoly math to claim that it's paid for. I don't know whether or not their fiscal hawks are going to be satisfied by that. I genuinely don't know. I've talked to them.

And right now they have a spine. We'll see when primaries get threatened and Trump calls. And we all know how brave congressional Republicans tend to be in the long run against Donald Trump. But let's, for purpose of this conversation though, accept the premise that they do take a chainsaw to healthcare. Let's say they take 900 billion out of Medicaid, for example, over the next 10 years. And Democrats are able to draw that clear contrast and have some success in the midterms. What's our big healthcare idea going forward? Because I don't think claiming that we're going to refix the federal Medicare match for Medicaid is the big idea. And I feel like as a party, we need to move away from

equating health insurance with health care. For the last 15 years, the core thesis of the party has been everybody needs health insurance, pre-existing condition or not, and we are going to subsidize the health insurance companies to make sure that it's universal. And we've had a lot of success doing that, and it's critical that everybody does have health insurance in this country. But now the focus needs to shift towards cost. We're not going to be able to convince Americans that we're the party to trust on health care

if we don't have more big ideas on how we actually make not Medicare for all, but how about community health centers for all, where everybody can actually access a doctor and a pharmacist and a diagnostician without having to go through the maze of health insurance. One thing I have seen in a lot of your thinking on the economy and specifically a lot of your thinking about healthcare is against middlemen. In a sense that the system has become so bureaucratized and filled with people skimming off of the top that there's actually quite a lot of waste to cut.

I'm curious how that plays into this for you. Yes. As an example, of every $1 that is returned to a drugmaker for a novel therapeutic, 50 cents of that goes towards middlemen. And so that kind of rent seeking is riven through much of our healthcare system. I think the pharmacy benefit managers are particularly extreme example of inserting yourself in the middle of an opiate.

Do you want to say what they are? Pharmacy benefit managers, which are now owned by the health insurance companies, they're the ones who decide when a doctor prescribes a drug to you, what your copay is going to be, and also whether you need to try a generic first. All of these functions are useful, but they got greedy, and they've been extracting about $300 billion out of the US healthcare system on an annual basis. That is one example of it. And we have got to take out the corporate middlemen of many aspects of health care.

But I actually think it even goes deeper than that, which is to say we need to stop focusing on subsidizing health insurance and start focusing on subsidizing the delivery of health care. And they are two different things. When I visit, though, community health centers in my district, what I see is medicine as it used to be practiced, which is a team-based approach that is patient-centric, and where so much of the BS around insurance

and administration has been alighted. We need to have a caregiver first approach, not a insurance company-first approach to health care. So, I agree with a ton of this. But let me get at the really unpopular part of this conversation. So, no fan of private health insurance, and I spent the first 10, 15 years of my career covering health care as my main topic. And I remember at one point trying to work on this article asking the question of what value do private health insurers offer in the American healthcare system? Can you actually back out something we are getting for all this money?

And the piece kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more and more and more complicated. But I never could really find it. There was never a thing where I could say, well, if you didn't have the private health insurers, you would get worse outcomes, right? People are not getting worse outcomes on Medicare. There's a bunch of pieces of this. You look very perplexed by me saying this.

Because I'm actually a supporter of private health insurance. Tell me. Which is, based on what I just said, people might find surprising. I do. And yet we need catastrophic coverage for people, right? which is based on what I just said, people might find surprising. I do. And yet we need catastrophic coverage for people, right? There's two different types.

This is a simplification, but I think a helpful one. Broadly two different types of things that people kind of consume in the healthcare industry. One is things that are out of pocket affordable, and the other are things that are catastrophic. And the whole point of insurance is that you want it to cover things that are rare, unpredictable, and expensive. So if you are a expectant mother and you find out that your child has Duchenne's muscular dystrophy,

that is rare, unpredictable, and expensive, and you need insurance to be there to cover those catastrophic medical expenses so that not only are you dealing with the illness of a child, you're not also dealing with medical debt or bankruptcy. But you could have the government do that if you wanted. And yet the government's ability to discern value and price accordingly is highly suspect.

I do not think, and I would say that the evidence supports this, that a one size fits all, top down paternalistic approach to pricing things would be acceptable. So this I agree with. And this is where I was going to go with this, which is that the one thing that the health insurance industry actually does and is important is the one thing everybody hates them for. Which is to say no. You can deal with healthcare costs in a bunch of different ways.

You could try to regulate prices at the government level, which is what most other countries do. Yes, and it doesn't work very well. It doesn't, well, it works somewhat and it doesn't work somewhat. People pay with time as opposed to money though. You're always paying somehow. In some places and not in others.

Not every place is bad waiting lines. But the most complicated thing, I think, in any discussion of healthcare is that people want to say the providers are all great, right? We talk about there aren't enough primary care physicians, and we like the providers to a large extent. We like the hospitals. We like our doctors. We like surgeons. We have decided to not regulate the providers very aggressively, at least on the pricing side. Look, the reason we don't have more primary care physicians isn't some mystery. The government and the American Medical Association and the various trade groups that regulate

medical education and doctors constrained the supply of doctors. We could have more residency slots, we would just need to force them to open them up. It's not that different from housing and a bunch of other things. They make money from scarcity. Agreed. Where I would challenge, though, the status quo approach to, oh, insurance companies add value by saying no is that in most states now, the providers and the insurers

have become so concentrated that you've got, I'll give Massachusetts as an example, four to five 800-pound gorillas in the room wrestling. Two big payers and two big providers. And actually, they can't say no. They actually can't say no because if you're an insurance company, you can't take Mass General Hospital out of your network. People want to be able to go to MGH.

It's part of the reason they're living in Boston. So they have access to those medical facilities. Because neither side can actually say no to the other, you see what you would expect from a lack of competition and choice, which is inflation. What we need is much more granularity in those negotiations, such that it's not an entire provider system negotiating with an entire payer system, but rather different centers of excellence and

specialties that have to negotiate on a granular basis, with much more transparency in the pricing. Competition and choice do work, but it only works when both sides can plausibly say no to the other. And the concentration we have seen has prohibited either side from saying no. Is that just the concentration we've seen or is that also the fact that healthcare is simply a different kind of good? And it's why so many different countries have settled on some kind of price regulation. So on the way out the door, the Biden administration put out a memorandum saying, we think, although Medicaid and Medicare have thus far been banned from providing coverage for weight loss drugs, we believe that Ozempic, Wigovie, that class

of GLP-1 drugs, is treating this disease of obesity. And it actually should be covered by Medicaid and Medicare. And I think that's great because these drugs are goddamn miracles. But if they cover it, if Medicare and Medicaid, I mean, this was just rolling a grenade over the Trump administration. If they cover it, Medicare and Medicaid, at the price that is being charged for it in America, which is not the price that is being charged for it in other countries, it is going to bankrupt the system functionally overnight. The number of people who would qualify for it is I don't know how many millions, but

many millions. And we are paying 10 times for doses of this medication what other countries are. And that would be the end of any kind of budget that works in Medicare and Medicaid, which arguably we're already at for different reasons. So is that that we don't have enough granularity in negotiations or is that that we actually do need to have the government come in and be the payer who can say, now we're not gonna pay this much for it?

We absolutely need the government to come in. As you said, in healthcare, the consumption function doesn't work as in other sectors. People are gonna consume and consume and consume for very good reason because the returns keep on being there for them. And you're right that covering the GLP ones. And their lives are on the line.

Lives are on the line. Their loved ones' lives are on the line. The sort of the elasticity of demand, right, is very. My wife is a type 1 diabetic. Like, there's nothing I would not do to make sure she had insulin. And this is where the buying power of the federal government can be brought to bear. We saw this even at the state level in Louisiana, for example, where they did a subscription model

for Hep C, where the state said, as Medicaid more precisely, we have a lot of patients who would benefit from Hep C treatment. We actually think we're gonna see return to value on this. This is a good investment for us to cover these drugs, but we are gonna use our buying power to negotiate a better deal.

That is absolutely, I think, a good use of government buying power, Medicare or Medicaid, GLP-1s or Hep C or these other miracle drugs that are coming down the line. There's absolutely a role there in basically the government getting more involved in the provider side, either the providers of biotechnology, the providers of medical device technology, the providers of primary and behavioral care by funding more of the community health centers. My challenge over and over again, though though is where is the value in us continuously subsidizing the health insurance companies?

So I want to go back for a second to this point you've been making about concentration because we have seen huge increases in concentration in healthcare generally. We've seen it in a lot of places in the economy. One of the, I think, most significant, whether you think it was good or bad, ideological changes we saw in the Biden administration was a move towards much more aggressive antitrust enforcement. And that's proven to be very controversial, controversial among certainly many people who used to give Democrats money and are now lined up on the right. It created some weird bedfellows. JD Vance used to say that Lena Kahn was his favorite member

of the Biden administration, although that doesn't seem all that reflected to me in what we're seeing in the Trump administration. If somebody goes and looks you up on social media, they see a little tagline in your bio that you want an economy that works like Legos, not like monopoly. What do you mean by that?

That too much of our economy has been captured by middlemen and rent seekers, and not enough of it is empowering individuals to build things that matter together. Everybody, when they think about playing with Legos, I think has this sense of creativity and empowerment. And when you think about playing monopoly, somebody always ends up throwing the board over

because they get so frustrated that another person, out of, frankly, pure luck, ends up on Park Place, right? And is able to just extract rents every time you pass go. It happens, and this is sometimes tough politics. It happens in housing too. You see concentrated groups of NIMBYs who are rent-seeking, sometimes quite literally, but more abstractly, they are rent seeking on capturing higher property values

by preventing the building of new housing. And this speaks to a really core challenge that we have in our housing sector, which is we go out there and we say two things simultaneously. We say, boy, we need more affordable housing, housing should be cheaper. And then we say, you should build wealth by owning a home.

Well, which is it? Because the two things can't be true at the same time. You can't have housing be a commodity that declines as a share of wallet over time, and have housing be an asset which you expect to appreciate over time. Now, my answer is quite stark. Housing should be a commodity that declines in price over time.

And there's other ways to build wealth. In fact, there's myriad ways to build wealth. But one of them should not be in rent seeking off land value appreciation. Also, we need to talk about free enterprise. I'm a believer in free markets and free enterprise. I just view the fact that markets can be captured and constrained not just by government power

and red tape, which certainly they can be. And we talk about housing development, we talk about energy generation and transmission. You can talk about the production of novel therapeutics. They can also be, and we talk about housing development, we talk about energy generation and transmission, you can talk about the production of novel therapeutics. They can also be captured and constrained by corporate power. And both are true, both can warp the functioning of a market, and we should attack power wherever it's undermining that LEGO's economy, and it can be corporate or government. What is your experience in being a member of Congress, being part of the Democratic

Party, of the power of these corporations? What sort of role do they play in the political system? Did we get here because they have too much power or is there another explanation? It's not just corporations that have power. And I think this is an awkward reality that Democrats are going to have to confront as well. It's special interest groups across the board, whether they are ideologically or financially motivated.

There is, I think, a challenge in which they hold claim to debate and discourse way out of proportion to what I think the average voter is actually keyed into. So yes, that can be the pharmacy benefit managers tanking the PBM reform bill at the end of last Congress. Yes, that can be big tech preventing section 230 reform by going to leadership and claiming it's gonna destroy California's economy. But let's be blunt, it can also be some of the groups that resist immigration reform or resist on the

right gun violence reform that even actually majority of Republicans secretly want to be able to vote for. So it's not just corporate power. It is, I think, more broadly understood as ideologically animated interest groups. And they don't make their money on corporate contributions. They make their money on small dollar email list contributions. But what gives them power over your institution? This is always a bit of a mystery. I think it's clear what gives meta power. You're talking about small immigration reform groups or gun rights groups.

Many of them, I mean, some have memberships, not that many anymore. These are not mass organization groups. So why does Congress care so much what they say? At its core, primaries. There's 435 members of the House of Representatives and 400 of them are more oriented towards their primary election than their general. Only about 35 seats are competitive in a general. Between gerrymandering and the closed or semi-closed primary system, we're not giving voters actually what I would consider fully open, free and fair elections. What we need is some combination of what Alaska did,

where you have a fully open primary and every candidate is trying to campaign for the median voter, some combination of what New Jersey did, where they have a redistricting system, where both parties have to compete for an independent arbiter to decide what's fair, and it has actually worked fairly well, and some combination of what Maine is trying to do, where Maine is trying to cap contributions to independent expenditures, to super PACs at $5,000. If every state did those three things, you would totally obviate much of the power of these interest

groups because every campaign would be totally fixated on that median voter. And that median voter, from an ideological perspective couple weeks into the Trump era. What, given what you were expecting, has surprised you? Nothing. It's all exactly what you thought it would be. I didn't have the play-by-play laid out, but he campaigned on what he's doing. He said he was going to use the impoundment clause to freeze federal funds. He said he was going to save TikTok, quote unquote, save TikTok.

He said he was going to pardon the January 6th rioters. He said he was going to rip out DEI. He said he was going to take us out of Paris. In the Marine Corps, there's an expression, a commander can be forgiven for being defeated, but never for being surprised. I'm not surprised. This is what he said he was going to do. I don't disagree with that, but certainly to me, Democrats have felt surprised.

They have felt overwhelmed. And he is overwhelming the system. I mean, every day there's something that should be a two week, a three week, a three month news cycle happening. Now, maybe a lot of it doesn't end up mattering that much, right? The Birthright Citizenship move might just get thrown out in the courts.

The impoundment does not seem constitutional given what we know of how the spending power works. So is your view that we're seeing a lot of sound and fury signifying future court cases or are we seeing a more fundamental shift in how America is governed and how power is wielded? I think we're seeing a two-step process. Number one, going into the midterms, discipline. And Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, is embodying this. We are not going to play the outrage Olympics.

Americans know that this guy is morally bankrupt. They don't want him sitting at their kitchen table with their kids. They get that he's not a good dude and he's a bore. Americans understand, I think broadly speaking, that he's probably captured by a lot of different interests as we've discussed between meme coin and Christian nationalism. We are not going to chase every single ball that he throws. We're not going to play fetch. We are going to constantly and with discipline be drawn contrast between who is he helping and who is he working for and who are we helping and who are we working for.

I get it. I get the theory that you want to fight Trump on pocketbook issues. The pardons, the impoundment, where does that become a kind of willing yourself into a blindness about the system itself being so fundamentally challenged. It's not that we are, and you know, I talked about this earlier, we shouldn't give on immigration, we shouldn't give on the rule of law, we shouldn't give on climate action and gun violence prevention. I've been very clear about this. In fact, I've rejected this idea that we need to move radically to their side of the court on these issues.

It's that we can call it for what it is. This is illegal. This is a giveaway to the gun industry. Withdrawing from Paris is against our values about climate action and clean energy transition. That can start the conversation. We can call it out for what it is. But the people for whom that is resonant largely are Democrats who are voting for Democrats. we also now need to then bring this back home and draw the contrast.

It's values, it's policy prescription, and then it's a contrast with the other side. And how about the corruption? I think a lot of people don't follow the ins and outs of politics very much. We're not that aware of the Trump meme coin or they heard anything about it. They heard about it for a day and then he took office and we were on to the next thing. The Trump administration strategy, and I mean, Steve Bannon said this in the first term, is to pump so much into the system that it overloads it, that people can't focus on any one thing.

Which is why Democrats are not well served by chasing every one of those one things. But the candidates that I saw in frontline Democratic House districts that were most effective were not just talking about Trump as a cultural phenomenon and, oh, isn't he the worst? It was always crystallizing that for issues that felt like they had local impact. Here's why it matters that he's in the pocket of the health insurance lobby. Here's why it matters that he's in the pocket of the health insurance lobby. Here's why it matters that he's in the pocket of foreign adversaries and what it does for national security or what it does for cost of living.

Those candidates were the ones who were most effective. You have a line that you like to quote from Donald Trump's first vice president, which he used to say, which is, I'm a conservative, but I'm not angry about it. What's your version of that for Democrats? I'm a liberal, but I'm not cond about it. What's your version of that for Democrats? I'm a liberal, but I'm not condescending about it. And what do you mean by that? That when we either roll our eyes or we shrug our shoulders, we are stopping the conversation before it can start.

People are not going to listen to us about economic theories of cost disease and how we're gonna lower the cost of living if they don't first feel heard about shared values, meritocracy, fair play, hard work. And what they have felt like is that rather than being enlisted to a party, they are being lectured to by elites. And how do you change that? Because I think if I went Democrat by Democrat, I said, do you lecture people or do you listen

to them? They would all say, I listen to them. If I said, should Democrats talk like, as James Carville used to put it, professors in the faculty lounge or should they talk like real people? They all say, oh, they should talk like real people. I talk like a real person. So who is this? What is

the tendency in the party that you're trying to combat with that? As I'm sure you've noticed in your years of coverage, there's no CEO of the Democratic Party who says, hey everybody, we got to play and huddle up. There is no one big thing. It is an attitudinal shift that each one of us, elected and otherwise, needs to make manifest by how we go out and do it.

A couple of weeks ago, as you said, I'm a proponent of divesting TikTok. I went on a TikTok show, very popular content creator in the Boston area, and debated about why we should force TikTok divestment. They had real concerns. They're about to have a kid in the next couple of weeks, they make most of their income off this show.

Not a home field conversation, I would say. But you got to go out there and shatter echo chambers. Particularly in places where maybe the thrust of the conversation is not normally about politics, normally about sports, or it's normally about cultural current events, but you're able to insert 10 to 15 minutes about housing or health care. Gone are the days of the big broadcast networks having this linear domination of our attention economy. It is now a go-everywhere, talk-to-everyone, balkanized media landscape.

And so we're going to need individuals who can execute. And then also final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? One is an article, How Mathematics Built the Modern World on Works in Progress, one of my favorite long reads of the last several years. The second is Radical Markets by Glenn Weil and Eric Posner. And if readers like that one, they should read Glenn's next book with Audrey Tang, the Taiwanese digital minister called

Plurality about how to build social media better in the 21st century. And then the third is What Hath God Wrought, which is the Oxford history of the United States. And it discusses how Andrew Jackson built the Democratic Party in 1828 as a Christian nationalist anti-elitist party. That sounds familiar to people.

And then how the Whigs came to contest him and ultimately won in the 1840 election. And I find that template to be informative for the political era we're living in now. Congressman Jake Alkenclause, thank you very much. Thanks for having me on. This episode of The Ezra Klanjo is produced by Roland Hu. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Mixing by Isaac Jones with the theme Shapiro and Amin Sahota.

Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Elias Isquith, Christian Lin and Jack McCordick. We have original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samuelski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.