YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Reich

lines on the record: 52
first: 2024-09-19
most recent: 2024-09-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I could, but I'm not. I'm nauseously optimistic because I do think that things do work out, and I do think that Kamala Harris is going to be our next president, and Tim Walls, our next vice president, and I do think, hope and think that Congress will be under the power with enough power, the Democrats will have enough power to put into place much of what Kamala Harris and Tim Walls want to do. But I'm nauseously optimistic in the sense that in the pit of my stomach, when I say something like I just said, I feel that I could vomit because I just don't know the alternative is so bad. And the forces of darkness, and let me just Leave it at that. I mean, you know what I mean are so powerful that I can't guarantee what is going to happen”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being a teacher is very generative. And by generative, I mean those of us who teach trying to give of ourselves so that we can enable the next generation to be even more successful and more powerful in fashioning a world that is a better world. That's what it's all about. I don't really spend a lot of time looking at the numbers of followers and the numbers on this medium or that platform or that. The real issue is, is there a contribution significantly being made to people's understanding of what the world is right now and how they can make it better? And I don't know what the answer is. I don't know that I'm successful and I may be terribly unsuccessful.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we started doing videos. And now we have, well, Jake went on to do other things, but there are about eight or nine very, very smart young people. We talk every week or twice a week, three times a week, and we're constantly doing stuff together. And I think that I can have the most influence as a teacher. And that's what I do. That's what I love doing. I've been doing that for 45 years in classrooms and on social media. And hopefully people who have listened to this podcast will learn something.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's no secret. I mean, I work with a team of very, very talented young people who know so much about social media. My son Sam said to me about 10 years ago, Dad, do you want to influence my generation? And I said, yes. And he said, well, with all due respect, we don't read your books. It's okay. I get it. And Kara, I was a little bit mortified. I've heard. And I just, you know, finally I lick my wounds and I said, well, what should I do? He said, well, it's all about social media. And I didn't even know what social media was. But I started out with a very, very talented filmmaker, Jake Kornbluth, and we created a movie called Inequality for All. And then we did another movie, Saving Capitalism.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's step back from all this and say this are symptoms of a deep and worsening sickness in the United States. And one of the ways of dealing this, in addition to controlling the spread of firearms and keeping firearms out of the hands of the wrong people, and also having a better mental health system is to make sure that the purveyors of misinformation and particularly misinformation that's going to cause people to take radical violent action should be liable. We're even right now, you know, we're start some states are starting to hold parents of children who are violent and who have killed other children responsible. Well, why can't we hold the Elon Musk who are in charge of platforms where a lot of this junk is Being disseminated”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, but Yes, but... There is still a need for Responsibility for, and whether you call it liability, I mean, the criminal law is interesting here because I was very criticized by the right wing, obviously, for suggesting that criminal law should pertain to Musk or anybody who advocates or who helps advocate criminal activity. But I think that that's necessary. We are living in an age in which there are inevitably people who get stirred up by lies and who are, I mean, how many people does it take to create havoc? I mean, look at the data on the number of mass shootings in the United States. The fact that as we speak here, Donald Trump has twice now, apparently, assassination attempts.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the very least, they should be liable. At the very least, our laws of tort and liability and defamation should reach them. That is beginning. And I think many lawyers involved in defamation have already struck gold with regard to, well, what we saw in the wake of January 6th and Fox News and Dominion”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Henry Ford is a pretty good example. I mean, any of the people who we used to call, we as Americans used to call, at the turn of the last century robber barons, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, all of the people who were the Titans of railroads and the Titans of oil, they were innovators. A lot of people, a lot of even today, there are a lot of right-wing historians who say this was great for America. Well, maybe it was, but they also undermined democracy. They used their money for political ends. The country became more and more unequal. And as Lewis Brandeis, the great jurist, said in the 20s, we have a choice in this country. We can either have great wealth in the hands of a few. And he was thinking of the Robert Barrand, or we can have a democracy. We can't have both.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that you have to understand innovation is the lifeblood of the economy, but there are many potential innovators at any given time. One of the most common, and we saw this in the first Gilded Age, and we're seeing it now, consequences of gaining a dominant position in a market is to create what's called a moat. I mean, it's like a castle moat around you. So nobody else and no other innovators can really compete with you. Well, that anti-competitive behavior is certainly a hallmark of Elon Musk, and it needs to be attacked. You don't want that. That's not good. That actually represses innovation. It doesn't create more innovation.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, pretty simply, because a federal contract law is something that I used to deal with quite a lot, and the federal government should not, according to federal contract laws, contribute to creating an even larger monopoly when you have an industry that is monopolized like space, and you have basically one major company now that is creating a larger and larger monopoly, that's a justification for the government to say, no, we're going to give our business to somebody else, or we're going to start our own. We used to have our own space program.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Musk is unique in the sense that not only is he, as you said, the richest person in the world, I think he still is, but he is among the craziest in terms of just his support for Trump and his just bizarre behavior. Well, I think that advertisers are already seeing the light. They're leaving X because they don't want to be associated with Musk's nuttiness, his bonkers done. But I think it's also important for all of us to do what we can to even boycott the advertisers who are on X, and not give him the money in terms of Starlink.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think he said that because he thought rationally that he could do better without any limits. So what you've got to do is make the matching funds more generous. You cannot get to the point where any politician is going to do better by avoiding that matching funds threshold.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is to me the most important thing. And you don't have to even change Citizens United. You don't have to have an amendment. You can simply provide matching funds for politicians who agree to certain limits, public funds for their elections. And that for small donations, that's where to begin. You also want to restore the Voting Rights Act. And I think that those two prongs are critically important. The Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. And you start there. And you just then take advantage of every opportunity you have to actually change the laws so working people, middle class people, poor people have a better chance.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I were you. Louie, I think that you're asking the most important question to be asked these days. And I think if we look forward, hopefully when Kamala Harris is president, and hopefully she has eight years, there is an opportunity to rein in the big, big money, corporate money, the money of the wealthy. And by doing so, change, as I've said before, the structure of the economy. And you can start anywhere. I mean, school lunch is certainly an important place to begin, raising the minimum wage, paid family leave. I mean, we could come up with a very long and well-worn list of changes. But the important point is that nothing is going to change unless the financial structure of politics is changed. And so that is...”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, but also nobody wants to think of themselves as working class. I mean, everybody wants to say I'm middle class, or I aspire to middle class. But I think that Trump has an emperor's new clothes problem right now. People are beginning to see that there's nothing there. There's no there, there, as Gertrude Stein once said about Oakland, California. There's nothing. And if polls are to be believed, a lot of people, including a lot of Republicans, including a lot of official Republicans, are beginning to have the courage to call it for what it is.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the Americans who have had a bad deal for the last 40 years, we are going to give them a better deal, a good deal, a new deal.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do. There is now, particularly if, as I hope and expect, Trump is defeated, you're going to have on the right a huge fight, a civil war in the Republican Party for what the next Republican Party is. You're going to have on one hand Liz Cheney and the Bush Republicans, the establishment Republicans who want to go back to a small government and fiscal austerity and all of that, and then you're going to have what's left of the Trumpers. And they're going to say, well, we want, I don't know, we want JD Vance or we want a strongman. But I think there's an opportunity here for the Democrats, particularly to change their stripes a bit and to say, no, we, we are going back to becoming the party of the poor, the working class, the middle class.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they do, but then there are people like Sherrod Brown in Ohio who even though the Republicans are spending a fortune trying to unseat him, he's still running better when I last look. His polls are even better than Kamala Harris's in Ohio. He's doing very well on a very, much of a populist left-wing populist, class-based kind of platform. I think that works. Kara, people don't remember that in 2000 Al Gore suddenly his pole's soared when he said this is really about the people versus the powerful. And he did that for about a month. And then he stopped, I think, because the powerful sentence, wait a minute, we're not going to give you any more money if you do this. But this is what I think the Democrats ultimately have to do.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But not enough, and we waited until it was Republican Congress. I mean, people don't remember this. But Clinton gave me the green light to raise the minimum wage if I could. But by that time, it was a Republican Congress. So I went around. I was like, you know, with a hat in my hand. And I said, please, please, please. And then, of course, I showed them the polls, even the Republicans said, well, that's extraordinary. Let's not let the Democrats have this as a campaign issue in 1996. So we got it done.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Democrats used to be the party of labor unions. And if you look at the first two years of the Clinton administration, the first two years of the Obama administration, when Clinton and Obama all had a Congress that was Democrat, they didn't strengthen labor laws. They didn't make it harder to fire people who wanted to join or create unions. They didn't increase dramatically the penalties on corporations for not complying with a fair labor standards act.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bourbon swing vote. That's all he could say. Suburban swing if I had a dollar for every time Dick Marr said suburban swing. And I would say, but Dick, what about, you know, the working class? What about everybody outside the suburban swing votes, the non-college graduates? And he said, well, don't worry about them. Don't worry about them.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It hasn't happened because the Democratic Party, starting in the 1980s with Tony Coelho at the Congressional Campaign Committee, decided that it would be better and cheaper for the Democrats to drink from the same campaign fountain as the Republicans, because Tony Coelho thought, well, you know, Democrats are going to be in charge of Congress forever, as he thought they already had been. So that was the beginning of a kind of a bargain, a bargain with the devil. And I think the Democrats have had a hard time getting out of that bargain. I mean, when I was in the Clinton administration, I kept on running into Dick Morris, who at that time was a Clinton advisor, who would say, no, we've got to worry about the survival.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hope we don't have to, in order to overcome the second gilded age, I hope we don't have to suffer a great depression and a crash at a World War, two world wars, in order to...”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the first gilded age in the 1880s, 1890s, 1900. Yes, and now we're in the second gilded age. And instead of Andrew Carnegie, we now have Elon Musk.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. But just look at the amount, the few wealthy, comparatively few extraordinarily wealthy people, mostly in Silicon Valley but elsewhere, are putting into these campaigns mostly now Donald Trump, and you just have to shudder. I mean, what's the future of democracy when wealth is translated so easily into political power”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think also I'm pretty close geographically to Silicon Valley. There are people like Peter Thiel who are really much more right-wing. In fact, it's even inappropriate to call them right-wing. Peter Thiel has said... Made JD Vance who he is. He put tens of billions into JD Vance, Blake Masters, and Peter Thiel, and people like him are quite, I mean, they epitomize what I think is one of the fundamental problems with inequality in this country, which is you get this massive wealth at the top that then can translate that wealth into political power.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's a better way of putting it than I would put it. But yes, the Biden administration has started. And I think that the Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust division of the Justice Department are to be congratulated with, I mean, it's a David and Goliath situation because the Goliaths of these companies have armies of lawyers and platoons of lawyers and the Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division really have much younger, less experienced, and far fewer lawyers. But Lena Kahn and also John Cantor, they're doing a great, great job, but they need even more resources.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. The Biden administration has done a great deal on the antitrust side more than any previous administration to rein in big tech. That's where the action is, Kara, because big tech is really a set of monopolies. And the only way you deal with them is through antitrust laws. I mean, you could also change some of the other laws that allow big tech to, for example, skirt defamation. I mean, I think it's absurd, Elon Musk's execution he wants, say anything. Anybody can do whatever they want. And it's not free speech. It's really a form of assault. Yeah, I say correct.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, even in the early 90s, there was a great deal. You remember Ross Perot? There was a lot of fear of international trade. And the record proves that some of that fear was borne out, it was justifiable. NAFTA was not the biggest problem. The biggest problem was Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization. Also happened during the Clinton administration, but that really was responsible for a lot of job losses. I mean, that and technological change together spelled the abandonment of much of the Rust Belt and much of the rest of industrial America. And we had nothing in place to help people who lost their jobs and communities that were abandoned to get back on their feet. And that's the problem. In other words, it's not so much trade per se. But it was the failure of America to deal with the consequences of trade.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a deep suspicion that it was rigged before the financial crisis of 2008. But that crisis really did cause the veils to drop in front of people's eyes. Many people saw that millions of Americans lost their homes, their savings, their jobs, because of that financial crisis. The financial crisis was brought on in part because of deregulation, because of the demands that Wall Street had been making. Well, all of that together, I think, created not just cynicism, but it created on the right the Tea Party movement on the left, the Occupy movement, which had a lot of overlap. Both of them said it's all about corporate power, corporations and governments colluding against the rest of us. And I think that that is still a dominant issue.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Family to even try to form a family. I mean, here you have Vance and Trump who are kind of making fun of cat ladies who are not having children. Well, the fact is if they were really concerned about families, they would be doing far more to make it possible for people to actually have families and have children and adopt children and be families. But they're not. So Harris is on the right track, but I think she's facing huge headwinds in terms of public cynicism.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they're all sensible proposals, I think the problem is that when a politician of either party says, I have a plan, that's when people's eyes glaze over, because there's so much cynicism about politicians who say, here's my proposal, or I have a plan. Yes, of course, you've got to do something to make childcare more accessible. Of course. And it's elder care as well. You've got to help working class and middle class families with all sorts of kitchen table economic issues because everybody is stretched to the limit. If you want to help families, you've also got to recognize that among working class people, there's not even family formation very much going on. I mean, there's been a huge decline in marriage among working class people and children. I mean, why is that? Because it's just so expensive to form a”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course they're screaming. I mean, I'm not sure it's the rich who are screaming, but the lobbyists are screaming on behalf of the rich. So, yes, of course, Harris is, you know, I was a little bit disappointed, but it's nevertheless an improvement over what we have today. And given the fact that you hear so much screaming going on, it's a good indication that she is at least on the right path.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, so just for people While both by the proposals are extremely important in terms of fighting dynastic wealth. And in terms of beginning, just beginning to get the economic gains back to working people, back to the people, back to even the middle class. Right now, so much of the gain is going to the very top. Many people don't understand this, but the richest 1% of Americans now owns over half of all of the shares of stock owned by Americans. The richest 10% own 93% of all of the shares of stock owned by Americans. So the stock market, as the stock market increases in value because of everything from stock buybacks to monopolization, the people who are gaining huge amounts of wealth are the people at the top. But it's not going to where it is actually should be going, where it used to go, that is to the middle and the working class.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let me just say that there's a lot of skepticism in the electorate about any candidate who talks about taxes, but the big Cohoon, the big issue with regard to taxes is capital gains, not income. And we've got to end the stepped up basis with regard to Capital gains. Very briefly explain what I'm talking about is that when you are presumably quite wealthy and all of your assets become incredibly much worth much, much more over the course of your lifetime, if you then die, your heirs get all of those assets at the current market value. Current market value, all the capital gains are erased. Well, that stepped up basis at death rule means essentially that we are feeding a dynasty. We're creating aristocratic, dynastic wealth in this country.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ah, that is the big question. Well, there's a chicken and egg problem, obviously, because if you want to change the structure of the economy to benefit working people and poor people and stop the rigging, and it is rigged, obviously, and we can go back and talk about how it's rigged. But if you want to end the rigging, you've got to, in a way, tackle the big problem of big money in politics because it's corporate money and money from the wealthy that is electing a lot of people and whether they're Democrats or Republicans. They don't want to bite the hands that feed them. There is the source of the underlying dilemma.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely non-compete clauses would be another example. But what I want to emphasize, Kara, is that these fundamentals about the nature of property and contracts are at the core of capitalism. And they are changing.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, even more, that you're going to change even contract law so that employers cannot penalize me in the way they do. They can't put in clauses that say that if there's a dispute between me and an employer or me and a big corporation, the corporation can select the mandatory arbitration. All kinds of things”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it is an issue to the point where people intuitively understand that all of this is about power. And if you don't talk about power, who has it, who doesn't, the relationship between wealth and power and the economy and the rules of the game, then most people say, well, you're not really talking to me because I know my employer has huge amounts of power and I don't, and I am a gig worker and I don't even have, I don't even have any say over the hours I work. And don't give me this family-friendly bullshit because, you know, if you want to be friendly to my family, you're going to change the structure of the market so that I really have more control over my life.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And property and so on really depend on political forces that are constantly changing those concepts. And so without understanding the nature of politics and the changeability of the fundamentals of the market, depending on who has power and figuring power into your calculation, then you're going to be missing the boat.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it could have been a hangover, but here's where I differ from the mainstream. I think that what the mainstream fails to see is that the structure of the market is really now favoring wealthy people and people who are privileged. When I say the structure of the market, I mean the rules of the game, you know, there's a tendency among economists to think that the market is over here on one side of the great ledger and politics is over on the other side of the ledger. But actually, and I say this from a zillion years in politics and economics, it's not true. Politics affects the structure of the market. Politics affects how the market is organized. Even the most basic principles of contracts.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the sort of logic of where we are today. So what a Democrat, Kamlin Harris or anybody else coming into the presidency ultimately has to do is change the structure of the economy to the point where working people are once again earning enough.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let me go back, if I may, to what I said initially, and that is you've got a median wage that is half Americans above, half below, that is only a little bit above adjusted for inflation, what it was in the late 70s, early 1980s. And so many Americans feel that there must be some reason why they are still stuck in the mud and they're looking for reason. Now, you know, and I know a lot of it has to do with structure of the economy. And the structure could be changed, but as long as you've got big money in politics continuously altering the structure of the economy to benefit big money and jeopardize a lot of working people, then you are simply going to have a lot of angry working people. This is inevitable.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That most Americans don't want to do but have to be done somehow. So it would be a terrible thing for our economy if 11 million or 15 million people were rounded up. I mean, the humanitarian cost would be gigantic. The number of people who would be rounded up who are just of the wrong profile because they look like they are here illegally or they are from families who are Mexican or Latin American families. I mean, I don't even want to think about it. It's such a crude and it is also a hateful kind of message.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's been a lot of research on this point. And all I can do is summarize the research. And the research is that immigrants into the United States do not, whether they're here legally or here illegally, they are not depressing the wages of people who are born here. For a number of reasons. One, because they are taking jobs that most Americans who are born here simply don't want to do either because they're unsafe or they're just awful jobs. Number two, it's very important to know that most of the immigrants who are here, again, whether they are here legally or non-legally, they are paying into Social Security at Medicare if they are here illegally. They're not getting anything back from Social Security at Medicare. And number three, a lot of employers depend on them. Again, for jobs.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and here too, I mean, it's absurd that we have a tipped minimum wage that is so low. We should not have a tipped minimum wage. We should have a minimum wage, and we should increase the minimum wage for everybody, tipped workers and everybody else.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, let's take overtime. Remember, when he was president, Donald Trump's Labor Department actually took huge numbers of Americans, hundreds of thousands off overtime, reduced eligibility, actually reduced the threshold level, I mean, increased the threshold level for wages that are subject over time. So why don't you get back to basics? And this is what Kamala Harris should be doing. I'm sure she will do when, and it is when she is president, and that is at least go back to the old labor department rule.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, if they make sense, and I think they do make sense in terms of the way we did in the 19th century, early 19th century, that was protecting infant industries from foreign competition. If you want to develop, and we have to develop a semiconductor industry that is competitive, if not better than competitive internationally for national defense purposes. So obviously it makes sense to put a tariff there, but not for the purposes of getting revenue. So, I mean, look, when Mr. Smoot and Mr. Hawley, two congress people in 1930, put tariffs on everything in an effort to protect American industry, they ended up making the Great Depression far worse. We don't want to do that. And Biden certainly is not doing that.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, not the way he's going about it. He wants to use tariffs to generate a lot of revenue, supposedly, for the United States government. Well, that's absurd. I mean, tariffs are a tax. They're a regressive tax taking more out of the pocketbooks of lower-income people, working class people. And it's a sales tax. It's a terrible idea. Also, he wants to extend his 2017 big tax cut, which disproportionately helped big corporations and the wealthy. I mean, trickle-down economics, trickle-down economics has never worked. It's a cruel hoax.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do not feel that the American dream, as it was described, as it has been described, if you work hard, play by the rules, you'll do better and better, that that really never came true for them and their children are not doing better and not doing better than they are. Most of these people, again, are white. Most of them are rural Americans. Most of them don't have a college degree. But this is really where the Trump people are.”
2024-09-19 · On with Kara Swisher · Robert Reich on Trump, Harris, Musk and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT