What A Day - Richie Rich and Mitchie Mitch

Episode Date: November 7, 2019

Coming off Tuesday’s elections, we look ahead at key 2020 races, including a vote on Mitch McConnell and the return of Jeff Sessions. Bill Gates pushes back against Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax. We examine why billionaires might not want to have to give their money away. And in headlines: Ayanna Pressley endorses Elizabeth Warren, T.I. needs to learn boundaries, and the trial of Roger Stone brings us back to a simpler time (the Mueller investigation).

it's thursday november 7th i'm akilah hughes i'm gideon resnick and this is what a day gideon did you see this story about uh james dean maybe being cgi'd into a few movies in the future i did and i love it yeah gives me some hope for when I'm dead. Yeah, what do you think they're going to do to your body when it's dead? You know, hopefully first bury it or send my ashes into the air, you know, the clear seacoast air of California. All right, maybe more specifically your likeness. Oh, my likeness, yeah. I hope that I'm digitally put into Fortnite,

whatever version of Fortnite is out at that point. You don't have to be dead for that. It's not real. On today's show, we talk a little bit more about Tuesday's elections and what to expect in 2020. Then math genius Bill Gates has a hard time solving for X. X being billions of dollars he would pay in wealth tax plans proposed by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. And, of course, some other headlines. Yes. So as we covered on yesterday's show, Democrats had an awesome election night on Tuesday. They had major wins in Virginia and Kentucky, where Democrat Andy Beshear apparently beat Republican Matt Bevin out for governor.

We're still saying apparently because Bevin is challenging the results. More on that in a second. Yeah, indeed. So all in all, voters came out in huge numbers for Democrats in states that have been traditionally red or red, you know, some time ago that are moving right now. Today, though, we want to talk a little bit more about the latest news out of Kentucky and look ahead to some of the upcoming Senate races that people are already starting to talk about for next year. Yeah. All right. Let's start with Kentucky. So 1.4 million people came out to vote. It's the highest voter turnout since 1995. So, you know, all you Generation Z people, highest in your lifetime. Shout out to the Zoomers. Zoomers. Democrat Andy Beshear currently leads by over 5,000 votes, but Republican Matt Bevin has called for a re-canvas of the results.

What do we think about this, Gideon? I mean, is this really going to change anything? Yeah. My initial impression of it is it's Bevin sort of trying to buy a little bit of time. The re-canvas in Kentucky, as far as I know, has never changed results. Right. No, it hasn't. Yeah.

They're effectively just recertifying, in a sense, what they already have and the total count there. And meantime, Bevin has not really presented anybody with any evidence as to why this is necessary. Yeah. He keeps talking about these irregularities. Right. Which obviously, I mean, if that's the case, why did every other Republican win? Like, read the room, dude. Exactly. You're the problem. Yes, right. By enormous margins.

I think the closest statewide race that a Republican won by, the margin was something like five points. Yeah, so come on, man. Right. Bevin lost by half a point. So in that sense, it doesn't really read to me like there's any real long tail yeah, long like tailwind on this actually happening later. But, you know, it hasn't stopped Republicans from kind of daydreaming and wish casting about other ways that they could hold on to this governor's mansion, like going through the state legislature. But we're not there just yet. Yeah. I mean, the high of the 2019 elections is behind us.

We're in the come down phase and like any horrible come down, we're starting to think about the future. 2020, it's on the horizon in Kentucky. Senator Mitch McConnell is up for reelection. His most prominent opponent right now is Democrat Amy McGrath. There's chatter that a popular Kentucky sports radio host is going to get in the race as well. What's really important for people to know about Mitch McConnell's race next year? Yeah, it's one of many that Democrats want to take on their path to a majority. It would be one of the harder ones, obviously, too. We'll talk a little bit

more about that in a second. But McConnell is somebody who has been in Congress since 1985. Yeah, so millennials most of your life. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And is a person who is often ranked as the most unpopular senator with voters in his state, and is also somebody who has sort of uniquely blocked so many initiatives that, you know, Democrats have wanted for years and years. That goes for voting rights, gerrymandering, climate protections for dreamers, gun reform, you name it. And has sort of served as the judicial liaison for President Trump throughout his term, sort of ensuring the fact that there's going to be

a legacy cemented for him with- All these judges. All of these judges, these federal judges, the Supreme Court justices they've been able to get through as well. I hate everything. Yeah. So in that sense, you know, he he is a a good politician and able to sort of do all these things. But it has come at an enormous cost for his popularity, of course. And next year, like we mentioned,

McGrath is going to be running against him. She's raised more money than McConnell. Yeah, this year. Yeah, she's had like a huge fundraising year. She's brought in more than $10.7 million since July. So, you know, those are good numbers. Yeah, I think she's mostly up against name recognition because, you know, it cannot be overstated.

No one likes Mitch McConnell. But, you know, Republicans vote. Yeah, exactly. And there's going to be probably maybe another option in this race, too. There's a whole story about Matt Jones, who is this guy who hosted Kentucky Sports Radio. Actually, on Wednesday, he and iHeartRadio that syndicates that they parted ways, parted ways in advance of him potentially actually formally joining the Senate race, but he hasn't said which way he's going to go just yet. Yeah. So would that be as a Democrat? That would be as a Democrat, yeah, in the primary.

And he's given the impression that McConnell and the Republican Party are nervous about him because they filed a complaint about the fact that he was using his radio show to like promote a prospective Senate run. So, you know, I don't know if they're actually concerned, but that could be another interesting thing to watch, too. For sure. Well, speaking of the Senate, there's a bunch of races coming up next year. Democrats think the map looks pretty good for them or at least better than 2018. What's the game plan? The game plan is for them to win all these toss upsup Senate races. Yeah, they have to.

You know, they're looking at tons of places where they want to compete, obviously against Senator Susan Collins in Maine, against Senator Cory Gardner in Colorado. And another place that's going to be really crucial is Alabama because they could sort of win all those toss-up races and then lose this seat they already have. This Democratic sort of miracle, in a sense, from 2017 when Doug Jones won against Republican Roy Moore, who, as we all know, was deeply flawed is an understatement.

But a candidate who had been accused of inappropriate conduct with underage women and who was losing the support of Republicans as well. And the important thing for the Alabama race is that on Thursday, it's been reported that, you know, former Republican Senator Jeff Sessions is going to jump in, too. And so that could. Yeah, it's coming back. Jeff is on his way back. That could really that could really complicate things here and create for an interesting dynamic also. Yeah.

Well, Democrats taking control of the Senate in 2020 is going to be a big uphill climb. If you want to help out with that, check out Crooked's fund called Get Mitch or Die Trying. Go to votesofamerica.com slash donate. During a forum with the New York Times on Wednesday, Bill Gates was asked about his feelings on presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren's proposed wealth tax. This is what he had to say. You know, I've paid over $10 billion in taxes. I paid more than anyone in taxes. But I'm glad to have paid. If I'd had to pay $20 billion, it's fine. But when you say I should pay $100 billion, okay, then I'm starting to do a little math

about what I have left over. Sorry. Well, just for the record, the man's net worth comes out to $106.8 billion. Also, he got the math of this whole equation very, very wrong. We did a quick calculation and roughly he'd pay an extra $8 billion under Warren's plan, not $100 billion. Warren herself, I think, offered to meet with him and talk about it a little bit more. But naturally, Gates' comments made a lot of people angry and was trending for most of Wednesday.

And he wouldn't notably commit to voting for Warren if she were the eventual nominee against President Trump. So the idea of the wealth tax is getting a lot of play right now. It's obviously been a major feature of the presidential primary. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both have plans to implement a tax on the ultra wealthy. Let's just run through quickly sort of the nuts and bolts of how these would work. For sure. So Elizabeth Warren, her plan puts a 2% tax on wealth over $50 million and a 6% tax on every dollar over a billion. No one, I mean, I don't know if anyone listening has that kind of money, but I'm chilling. I would not be touched. Yeah, I'm all right.

Bernie, he goes a little bit further. So he starts taxing people at $32 million, gradually increasing the tax to 8% as you get up to $10 billion. So Warren's plan would raise $2.75 trillion over 10 years. Bernie's plan would raise over $4 trillion. Joe Biden weighed in, even though he didn't really have like a formal plan out. But both candidates plan to use that money to fund things like college, health care, early childhood education, paternity and maternity leave, those sorts of things.

But just as background, America's richest 400 families pay a lower tax rate than the rest of the middle class. So it's the first time it's happened in 100 years that the tax has worked out that way. And the big reason for that is Trump's tax cut that he and Republicans passed in 2017, which obviously big cuts for people at the top and very minimal cuts for people in the middle, which is wild because they always run saying, oh, your taxes aren't going to go up. They're not going to go up. But then you just see them slashing it for, you know, 15 families at the top. Right. And then and then they you know, the things that they talk about doing after that are taking away from things like Social Security in order to make up, you know, deficits that they're running because of these other things.

Yeah. And that obviously has lent itself to a conversation that's happening right now about billionaires not existing and the notion that they shouldn't exist. Yeah, that's unethical. Right. And I think when people have that conversation and I can't speak for everybody about it, but I think that it's most of the time not singling out each individual person as evil or good, and more so the point that the possibility of that a billionaire could exist while there are people who are starving or homeless is wrong, is wrong. Yeah, right. And yeah, I mean, I think that that's a good point that the sort of Ebenezer Scrooge syndrome that our country has, where we create these very wealthy people with our labor, and then we hope that they're benevolent and generous and give something back. It's flawed and it doesn't work. It's unsustainable. Right, exactly. Like for every

Bill Gates, there's a lot of other people who just like sit on their wealth and hoard it. And so obviously, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does good work for the world. They donate more money than most charitable organizations combined. Their international giving is really important. I mean, they've pledged $2 billion to help defeat malaria, which is possible. And, you know, they're taking up that mantle. So it's not so much that, like,

the work isn't being done in those spaces, but I think that, like, to your point, when we have discussions about billionaires, like, it is unethical that that exists, and it sucks that Bill Gates has to figure out how to, give like fix the world's ills because we can't afford to because we keep giving money to them. Yeah, right. And I think that the conversation has moved on all this stuff. And there's, you know, wider support to eat the rich right now. What is the public opinion polling looks like on taxing billionaires?

Yeah, I mean, over 60% of voters, including half of Republicans, support Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax. Yeah, this is from a February poll of this year. Comments like this from billionaires and the rich only serve to make the wealth tax more popular. When Bill Gates says that he can't live on, you know, nearly $7 billion, it doesn't make me feel like any kind of way except for, yeah, I think you can. I'll do it if you don't want to. Like, I'm happy to give it a shot and see if it's possible. Right. Yeah. Listen, Mr. Gates, I will take your spot. Yeah. I mean, all these people, I don't understand what the goal is when people like him and other people like get on television and

are almost like in tears over like what warren and sanders are are talking about doing um i think that it derives from this notion that like the billionaire class for so long has felt like they can wield influence in any sphere that they want to because they've been able to yeah because they have the money yeah so it's like i think that they feel like they're wield influence in any sphere that they want to because they've been able to. Yeah, because they have the money. And so it's like, I think that they feel like they're losing their power when they do lose $100 billion, even if they're still richer than everyone else on earth. Right. And when you have this notion of people sort of turning the tables where they're saying, oh, no, I am going to use political power to make it so that you cannot do that,

and that they're not beholden to those same people in order to win elections, that's when they start to sweat a little bit. Yeah, that's right. Well, we're going to keep following the story. But Bill, if you really think you need all that money to make you happy, there's someone I'd like to introduce you to. His name is Richard Rich, and I think he could really teach you something, you know? This is a Richie Rich joke. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. Buff Monopoly man and longtime Trump associate Roger Stone's trial on lying and obstruction charges began Wednesday.

It's one of the last cases resulting from the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. In his opening statement, prosecutor Aaron Zelensky said that Stone, quote, straight up lied to Congress about his efforts to connect with WikiLeaks in 2016 to determine whether they had information that would damage Donald Trump's election opponent, Hillary Clinton. Stone is charged with seven felonies and faces up to 20 years in prison. T.I. is facing criticism for claims he made on a podcast this week that he takes his 18-year-old daughter to the gynecologist every year to make sure her hymen is intact.

Yuck. As T.I. always says, you can have whatever you like, unless you are T.I.'s daughter, and whatever you like is privacy or boundaries. The World Health Organization has vehemently denounced so-called virginity testing, calling it a, quote, violation of human rights for girls and women. Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley announced her endorsement of Elizabeth Warren for president on Wednesday, giving the Massachusetts senator one of her most high-profile endorsements to date.

Pressley broke with her fellow members of the freshman squad to make her endorsement, and I respect that. But personally, I would never break with my WOD to endorse a presidential candidate. I ride with my WOD. I die with my WOD. My WOD is my everything. For those listening, WOD is what a day. It's an acronym. We call the show WOD. Now it's time to make it Ukraine with some impeachment updates. The Washington Post has reported that Trump wanted Attorney General William Barr, a.k.a. freshly showered Steve Bannon, to do a press conference declaring that Trump broke no laws and asking the Ukrainian president to investigate Joe Biden.

These requests came sometime around September 25th, in the days after a rough transcript of the call was released. Barr said no, and according to the Washington Post sources, Donald Trump is still talking about it. The man simply cannot take an L. Come on, man. The top American diplomat in Ukraine, Bill Taylor, has identified Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani as the main imagineer behind the Ukraine quid pro quo.

Extremely dubious honor. Giuliani, who announced that he hired lawyers to defend him in the inquiry this Wednesday, is having a very rough couple of years. He's gone from America's mayor to America's sloppy Scooby-Doo villain. You hate to see it. And those are the headlines.

That's all for today. We're new, so if you like the show, make sure you subscribe, give us a rating, leave a review, add us to your Google Plus circles, and tell your friends to listen. By the way, if you're into reading and not just C-list celebrity skincare routines like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash newsletters. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick.

I'm a Mac. And I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. I'm a Mac. And I'm a PC. What a day is a product of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tun is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein, and our senior producer is Katie Long. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kshaka.