← So Money with Farnoosh Torabi
So Money with Farnoosh Torabi
1955: Senator Cory Booker on Taxes, Childcare and Big Ideas to Fix Our Economy
00:47:26
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- [00:00]
Senator Cory Booker
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Farnoosh Tarabi
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Senator Cory Booker
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Mike Schreiber
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Farnoosh Tarabi
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Senator Cory Booker
You're listening to so Money with award winning money guru Farnoosh Tarabi. Each day get a 30 minute dose of financial inspiration from world's top business minds, authors, influencers and from Farnoosh yourselves. Looking for ways to save on gas or double your double coupons. Sorry, you're in the wrong place. Seeking profound ways to live a richer, happier life. Welcome to somoney. We as a nation should take care of our most valuable natural resource which is the inherent genius of our children. In a global knowledge based economy, the more your population learns, the more it earns. And so we are way out an outlier in not providing for our children from conception to their fifth year. We think oh, yeah, public schools start up in kindergarten and that's what the taxpayers take care of. But 85, 90% of brain development happens actually between conception and the fifth year, yet we do nothing. In fact, we do. Those are the years we put the most stress and strain on families. If you're a mom, I don't have to tell you about how almost impossible it is to find high quality childcare because that actually costs more than tuition at your local college. And yet we know children that go to high quality child care perform better even in lifetime earnings than kids that don't have high quality child care. So to me, it's a matter of where are we going to invest, where we're going to get the biggest return. Childcare is one of those things. And we are an outlier. We are a nation that has the worst prenatal care of our peer nations, the worst maternal care of our nations, the worst postpartum care, the less of a child allowance for families. We don't invest in our children and we need to start doing that and finding ways to pay for it. So I'm one of those Democrats that says, yes, we need to find a way for pay for it.
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Farnoosh Tarabi
Welcome to so Money, everybody. I'm Farnoosh Tarabi. Our episode today is really special, not just because of the guest, but because of what it represents. So last year I launched a hyper local podcast in Montclair, New Jersey. It's called the Montclair Pod. And my co host, Mike Schreiber and I started it with a very simple idea. What happens when you invest in local media, when you show up consistently, talk about the issues that matter in your community, and create a space where people can have real conversations about policy and business and daily life. And what we discovered is something really remarkable, that when you build trust locally, the doors open. In the past year alone, we've had conversations with everyone from our town leaders to our governor, Governor Mikey Sherrill. And this week, that local experiment brought us face to face with one of the most influential political voices in our country, U.S. senator Cory Booker. Now, we recorded this interview in one sitting. Two podcasts for the price of one, both for the Montclair pod and so money. So you'll occasionally hear Mike jump in with some really strong questions. Now, if you know Cory Booker, you probably know the broad strokes of his history. He first rose to national prominence as the mayor of Newark, where he built a reputation for hands on leadership and ambitious policy ideas. He's now served more than a decade in the U.S. senate representing New Jersey. And he's become one of the most visible voices in the Democratic Party. He's also entering a new chapter personally. Senator Booker recently married and he and his wife are expecting their first child. Something that shaped a lot of the conversation you're about to hear, particularly when we talk about childcare, family economics and the future of American opportunity. This week, Booker unveiled a major new proposal. It's called the Keep youp Pay Act. The headline is no federal income tax on the first $75,000 of income. And he argues it could mean thousands of dollars more per year for middle class families, especially in high cost states like New Jersey. We talk about that proposal in depth, but we also go far beyond tax policy to get into the soaring cost of childcare, the racial wealth gap and economic fairness, immigration reform, and the climate of fear many immigrant families feel today. The future of independent media versus corporate media consolidation and the financial consequences of war. And of course, we ask him the question everyone always wonders about him. Does Cory Booker plan to run for president? Here's Senator Cory Booker.
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Senator Booker, welcome to so Money.
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Senator Cory Booker
I love that name. Now, how do you spell so and so money? S O, S O. Because it would be great if it was like S E, D, S O.
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Farnoosh Tarabi
So money that just my brain just split
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Senator Cory Booker
because that's what my grandfather was so determined. He was George Jefferson. Like he moved on up. He was a union worker but was an investor and started businesses. And he would tell me about SEW money. Make your money work for you. And so we've got to change the name, at least for this one episode.
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Farnoosh Tarabi
This is a big morning for you. You were in Bloomfield earlier making a big announcement about our taxes, the Keep your Pay Act. Tell us what is at the core of this problem that you're trying to solve and what is the urgency?
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Senator Cory Booker
The core of the problem is very simple. The tax system is rigged that working people pay more percentage of their money in taxes than the people at the very tipsy top. Why is all the tax avoidance up there? Why are people working harder and keeping less of their pay? And so enough of that. This is the United States of America. Let's create a fair system. Nobody pays taxes on their first $75,000. It would have a massive difference for middle class New Jersey families. New Jersey's median taxpayer would get a 85% tax cut that literally for a family with two kids making 150,000 household income, you would get upwards of $10,000 more of your money that you get to keep. It could have a transformative change for our state. And this is a podcast where I can go a little deeper.
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Farnoosh Tarabi
Yes.
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Senator Cory Booker
So 1913 we created a federal income tax, but at that point it was just for the wealthiest of the wealthy. And this idea that you would create revenue for the good of all of society. But in the century later you have a tax code where actually working people, middle class families are paying higher effective tax rates than some of the wealthiest corporations. And the wealthiest of wealthy of the 1%, will have all of these things built into the tax code that to help them avoid paying taxes. So the effective tax rate of the top 1% or fractions of 1% is actually a lot lower than the effective tax rate of somebody whose family income is 150, $200,000. So I just think we need a big idea, simple, big idea at a time when we as a nation are seeing higher and higher costs, people working harder and finding it much more difficult to make ends meet.
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Farnoosh Tarabi
Also as part of this, you're expanding, proposing to expand the child tax credit.
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Senator Cory Booker
Yes.
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Farnoosh Tarabi
I'm a mom. You're about to become a dad. This is a huge bill for so many Americans. It rivals rent and mortgage. How did we get here?
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Senator Cory Booker
I will tell you that I watched it over the 10 years I've been a senator of how people of wealth and power come down and rig the tax system to work for them and not work for the average person. But even things that I support, like I support 529. My mom started investing for her grandchild, my niece. Wonderful. But if you look at 529s, they're overwhelmingly used by the top 20% of earners. So I sat at a kitchen table today with two healthcare workers, with a salesman divorced dad trying to raise his two boys. And all of them don't have any extra money to put in a 529 account. They're barely being able to afford the medical costs. So why don't we have a tax system that works for everybody in America? If I work hard, I'm going to have a floor of earnings that I will never have to visit poverty and I can meet the basic needs of my family and this is the way to do it.
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Farnoosh Tarabi
There's a lot of debate in this country about child care funding. Whether that should be the onus should be on the individual or it should be a federal program. I know the original build back better proposal. What? 400 million per child care in early edge, it didn't make it into the inflation reduction Act. Where did that effort fail? And what are the lessons that Democrats should take from that.
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Senator Cory Booker
First of all, it's just common sense. We as a nation should take care of our most valuable natural resource, which is the inherent genius of our children. In a global knowledge based economy, the more your population learns, the more it earns. And so we are way out an outlier when in not providing for our children from conception to their fifth year, we think, oh yeah, public schools start up in kindergarten and that's what the taxpayers take care of. But 85, 90% of brain development happens actually between conception and the fifth year, yet we do nothing. In fact, those are the years we put the most stress and strain on families. If you're a mom, I don't have to tell you about how almost impossible it is to find high quality childcare because that actually costs more than tuition at your local college. And yet we know children that go to high quality child care perform better even in lifetime earnings than kids that don't have high quality child care. So to me, it's a matter of where are we going to invest, where we're going to get the biggest return. Childcare is one of those things. And we are an outlier. We are a nation that has the worst prenatal care of our peer nations, the worst maternal care of our nations, the worst postpartum care, the less of a child allowance for families. We don't invest in our children and we need to start doing that and finding ways to pay for it. So I'm one of those Democrats that says, yes, we need to find a way to pay for it. We need not be Donald Trump who did all these things, gave tax cuts to the wealthiest and then didn't pay for it and then just increased our deficit. We need to find creative ways to balance our budgets but pay for the things that keep us competitive globally. And the best way to keep competitive globally is to invest in young people. I think it is is program design. We need to get that right. And then we need to get us to call to a common cause of being the best nation in the world to raise a child.
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Mike Schreiber
What would you love to see the Democratic Party doing in terms of how it's messaging and not that this is not a big idea in terms of the standard deduction. What other big ideas are you talking? Are we talking about single payer healthcare or the expansion of Medicare to everyone? Are we talking about college that does not cost a hundredths?
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Senator Cory Booker
This might shock you between now and November. This is not the last big idea we're going to be unveiling so I'm going to try to be the change I want to see in the world. Democratic Party has failed in its communications. One of the greatest evidence points of that is Donald Trump as the president. We fail to effectively communicate. I'm done. I want to show the way now. And so this is the first one I will foreshadow you the next one as my team behind you gets really upset with me. But the next one is going to be what every American knows is that our political system is deeply corrupted by big money and politics. One of the reasons why New Jersey should know this. I was the fourth senator in American history to say, I will not take corporate PAC money anymore. Because when I got down there, I started seeing what this concentrated power of corporations that were getting wealthier and could easily put $20 million, $30 million, $50 million. I've seen industries put together $100 million PACs to affect our politics, and you don't even know it. You're watching these ads and you don't even realize some D money corporation has put that money in there. If we will never fix our democracy and make it work for working people, if we're giving big money wealth like we've never seen before, the ability to influence our politics so easily. So the next pillar we're going to talk about is corruption and how to end the corruption from senators being able to trade stocks, something I don't do, that should be outlawed all the way to. How do you get the big money out of politics? Because corporations are not people, by the way. And Citizens United was one of the worst decisions ever decided by our. Our Supreme Court that allowed this ugly amounts of money to come to our politics in the first place.
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Farnoosh Tarabi
You brought up single moms a lot in your promotion of the Keep youp Pay Act. And a lot of single moms are women of color. Pay equity, racial equity is a huge problem. I cover this a lot on SO Money. How are you thinking along how this act is going to fit into that bigger puzzle of the structural issues that we need to address to narrow. Not even close. Just narrow the racial wealth gap in this country.
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Senator Cory Booker
So, look, I want to call out bigotry, how expensive discrimination is. We've seen this simply on house assessments. They've done studies where they send assessors into a house with pictures of white families and it gets assessed at one price and then they change all the pictures to black families. And inevitably, these studies done by academic institutions show that the property value drops according to that assessor. So implicit biases have a Serious cost. I want to make sure, though, that we in our policies do not make people feel in any way that we are not trying to create a system that is about utter immediate fairness. And so when I'm, as the only senator, I think that lives in a predominantly black and brown community, when I talk about my, to my community, about what they want, show them a big idea like this, saying, yeah, we've been trying for decades to deal with the challenges of racism and bigotry. There's been a backlash against it as Donald Trump is attacking a lot of the equity programs that have helped more women get into professions. What I'm focused on right now is things that will help everybody. And often, as we know, with the child tax credit, it may have a disproportionate impact on communities of color. So this bill right now, $75,000 for everybody. If you went to a black barber shop, if you went to my church, which is majority black, and said, hey, we got a senator talking about this, everybody would say, especially in my church, hallelujah, Amen. Get that bill passed. And that's really what I'm focused on. I think, though, again, when I came down to Washington, let me use you an example of I thought was just wrong. When I look at who's managing the pensions, the pension funds, hundreds of billions of dollars, it was not women run funds. It was not nobody of color. And then I showed to the people who manage these pension funds, according to Barclays bank and others, women run funds actually get better returns. And so, so I'm not for special favors. I'm not for quotas and things like that. I'm simply saying, hey, results speak. So why are you not letting some of these women run firms up to the table? That's the kind of stuff that I'm going to fight for for my leadership position. And I'll give you the last example of why I take these things seriously. But I just want to create fairness and so that I don't care who you are. You look at that system and says, booker is supporting things like, no tax on your first $75,000 is going to help my family as much as a family there. I don't want to create an us versus them dynamic. But let me give you an example. I came down to the United States Senate, least diverse place I'd ever worked. And I know from everybody from McKinsey to Harvard Business School, diverse teams are better teams. And I've said, okay, Chuck Schumer, I want you to post, have every senator have to Just simply publish the diversity statistics of their staffs. Don't create any expectation whatever, but just create transparency and accountability. You represent a state like New Jersey, which has a wonderful diverse state. Does your office reflect that? Are you looking to find qualified people from every place? Schumer told me he got some offices that pushed back on him because they had woeful diversity on their staffs. But now what's happened is ever since, every year that they put on the study, the number of women on staffs has gone up. The first people, whatever. But that's not what's important. We're not looking for window dressing. We're looking for results. And so this is what I'm now beginning to hear is senators come to me and tell me I've gotten perspectives. I never thought I had one senator tell me I'm on your bill, Corey, about legalizing marijuana, because people on my staff told me that they were getting arrested for things that I watched my kids at Harvard and Yale do all the time. It's differing perspectives that help create better Senate offices. So again, I want to get to the basics. There's this mistake we make that black families, Latino families, Irish families, Italian families in New Jersey aren't concerned with the same stuff. They are the two things every New Jersey family is concerned with. First and foremost, is my family safe and is my family economically secure? And the things I'm fighting for are the things that are going to establish that for both of our families. I've gotten community violence intervention money back here, money for to keep our veterans safe, a lot of things. And then the economic security ideas is what I want. Economic prosperity ideas, whether from our small businesses and our entrepreneurs all the way to families and their household income.
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Farnoosh Tarabi
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- [21:05]
Senator Cory Booker
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In other news, immigration. We have to talk about that. What do you think if Congress had to pass comprehensive immigration reform? What would you like to see on that?
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Senator Cory Booker
Oh my gosh. First of all, I think both parties have been wrong in this. I think that Democrats didn't do enough to secure our border or southern border, which was a humanitarian crisis down there as much as it was a public safety crisis when you have families dying in the desert, dying trying to cross the river. So the Democratic Party has to get serious about securing borders and protecting this nation from people that are coming here to do harm. Now, like I want to be very clear that immigrants have a lower crime rate than undocumented immigrants even have a lower crime rate than average Americans. But that's still no excuse not to have orders that are secure. But then we need to expand legal immigration. We need to triple, quadruple legal immigration. When the conservative Cato Institute says that it is outrageous how long and how hard it is for legal immigrants to get status in our country that we've restricted it so much, it's like winning the lottery. When we, we know that if you bring in immigrants, they create a multiplier effect on our economies. Immigrants grow our economy. And so whether it's agricultural workers or high end scientists, it is insane that this country is not expanding pathways to legal immigration 3 or 400%. Now I will tell you, that should be it. We will fight for secure borders and we will fight for expanded pathways for immigration. Let me tell you my favorite story on this, because I graduated from Stanford University. For those of you who don't know, in New Jersey, I got into Stanford because of a 4.0, 1600, 4.0 yards per carry, 1600 receiving yards. I was a high school All American football player. The best way to get into college. And when you get into college because of sports and not necessarily because you had a perfect SAT score, you have a little bit of an imposter syndrome the entire time you're there. That lasts your whole life. So here I am in the United States Senate and I get a call, My office gets a call from the Stanford president's office saying, the president demanding to see me when he comes to Washington. And I'm all of a sudden panicked. Oh my God, did I not finish a paper? Did I not really graduate? I'm like, oh my God. And so he comes to see me angry because he says, I'm tired of seeing this. People come into Stanford University, get degrees in things that half of Congress can't spell, and then as soon as they're done, we kick them out of our country. Like, we should be stapling visas on these kids because they're getting PhDs in quantum physics, in quantum computing and robotics. Like, why is it so hard for the best minds on the planet to stay in our country and start businesses that could employ hundreds of thousands of people, if not more? Our broken immigration system is hurting everybody. It's hurting farmers, it's hurting consumers, it's hurting our job market, it's hurting our economic growth. And we need to fix that. We need to expand legal immigration and hold the line on secure borders.
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Farnoosh Tarabi
Borders people are terrified. Senator, in Montclair, we've spoken to law experts at Montclair State University. We've spoken to restaurant operators who say, hey, my workers are afraid to come into work and people are afraid to leave their homes. And not just Montclair. This is like a national problem. So how would you address your constituents in New Jersey, specifically around this fear piece?
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Senator Cory Booker
Okay, so that's a whole different topic than what I would do if I could write immigration laws. Look, look. We have a president who has unleashed hell in our communities. They are allowing secret police to jump out of unmasked marked cars, masked, and drag people out of New Jersey schools, courts, places of worship. I've stood with priests in our state. I've stood with local police officers that are saying that Donald Trump's reckless and out of control. ICE enforcement is making our communities so much less safe. That is assaulting the dignity of our communities. But even more than that, striking fear literally have had friends. One of my closest friends in Newark told me that her neighbors begged her to please walk my children to school, my American children to school, because I'm afraid to do. Businesses all over our state are telling me anywhere between 5% to 30% reductions in patronage because people are afraid to even come out and use their businesses. And then you have these private prisons like the one here in Newark where I visited. And it was appalling to me, when I speak to people there, don't even have an accent. That lived in this country for 30 years, that have families here, American family members that are now being put in a private for profit prison and then being tagged to be deported out of our country to countries they don't even know. This is such a violation of our values. And here's something that should even more outrage you. It's a violation of the federal court orders. When we had a federal judge here, Judge Farbiage, order the U.S. attorney's office to tell them document. How many times have I given a court order and you all violated the court order? They had over 50 times that they gave them a court order involving an immigrant that had a right to be here or was on a legal pathway that they unjustly deported. So this president is out of control. He's hurting our communities and fundamentally making us less safe. Why? Because now people who are victims of crime that if you happen to be an immigrant, you're afraid to even go to the police. And so that means the person that mugged them, robbed them, assaulted them, is still free in our communities because the witnesses to those crimes are afraid to come forward. It's just one way in which he's making us less safe as he thrashes and trashes our constitution and violates the decency and the dignity of our communities. And it's getting worse. In Roxbury, New Jersey, for example, a town with all Republican elected officials that came in there against the town's wishes and paid not the $60 million roughly that the warehouses were valued at, they paid twice as much as the value of that to buy warehouses to create yet another ICE detention facility in our communities, drawing down on emergency resources, their water, rising costs for local taxpayers. So this is to me what happens when you allow an authoritarian bented president to unleash hell in our communities. And we've got to stop it right now. I am telling New Jersey I'm not voting for one more dollar to fund that agency. We're technically in a government shutdown right now in a standoff. So first and foremost, your senator, I'm pledging everybody. I'm not funding an agency that is doing so much harm and so much damage. And I will vote against anything that comes before. When you have this, this reckless, out of control immigration work, that's number one. Number two is New Jersey, in a matter of months is going to have a chance to vote on this issue. Do you endorse these immigration practices or do you reject them? And if New Jersey resoundingly rejects them here in this state, we can win a House seat or two and take back the House of Representatives. And now we have the ability to further do what Congress should be doing, which is check and balance a president that's out of control. I read Federalist 47 recently just to reaffirm to myself that the Senate was designed to be a check on an abusive executive that was trying to overreach on their power. Congress has rolled over for the President of the United States and is allowing him to do whatever they want. They're complicit and complacent in this kind of outrages in our community. And it will continue as long as the Republicans are in power in the House and the Senate. So if, if people in New Jersey are tired of this, especially in those districts where you have Republican House members that are not fighting, that are voting along with all this outrage, then vote them out.
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Farnoosh Tarabi
Do you want to talk about media?
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Mike Schreiber
Oh, yeah, we should talk about media. Actually, there's been some media consolidation. I'm not sure if you've heard. Oh my gosh, yes, big media companies are getting bigger. We, on the other hand, are small independent media company. Can you talk a little bit about your position on this Paramount merger and the latest development Since I guess, Netflix came out of the deal, as well as what you think the role of independent media is, because we obviously think there's an important role for that. And it's possible for two people like us to come here and sit with a US Senator and with our phones, record all of this and get it out into the world. It tends to mean, I think, that what's possible now for independent media maybe wasn't possible 10 years ago. So talk a little bit about this consolidation of big media in the context of the ability for people like us to do what we're doing right now.
- [30:56]
Senator Cory Booker
First of all, we're in crisis in our country because local media is being devastated. When I was mayor of the city of Newark, the Star Ledger alone had five people focusing on everything that I did. There was real local accountability. I used to call them pains in the neck, but they were always watching. And you want your government always to be watched. That was just one media outlet. I also had to deal with the New York Times, New York Post, the Bergen Record, all rifling around, looking at reports, trying to figure out what was going on. And it kept me on my toes in a good way. Now there's none of that when it comes to the print newspapers we've talked about. The Star Ledger isn't even in Newark really anymore, and that's bad. And a lot of the reason why that happened was because of the monopolistic power of big tech companies. Google controls so much now of the ad spend. The sources of revenue that our newspapers had is just dried up completely, because who's going to newspapers to look for help wanted or local governments advertising in their local newspapers? That's created a very tough environment. On top of that, this corporate consolidation is giving a lot more power to a few corporations and a lot less power, frankly, even to folks like you who are creating content that people really want to see. But monetizing the content you're creating is very difficult given the power that corporations have, even over the platforms that you all post on. I'm very worried about this continued corporate concentration and what it's doing to media and what it's doing, frankly, to jobs and artists. So let's go specifically to the merger we're talking about. Remember that when Disney merged with 20th Century Fox, the number of movies that were being created that you see on the screens went down significantly. When Paramount merged with Skydance, they laid off over 1,000 people. And you might see people more. And what you're seeing for consumers, people in Montclair who are already saying I'm paying too much in property taxes. New Jersey energy costs have just gone up 20%. And now I'm going to have to pay more for my Paramount subscription or pay more to watch the shows that I like. That's the problem with corporate concentration, is that it creates higher costs, unfortunately, lots of job loss. And then on top of that, the lack of competition often means that they're not trying to compete for your eyes as much. And so they're even making less content. And so those artists have less platforms to go on. So this Paramount merger really concerns me. And it also concerns me that one family now is going to control CBS, CNN, TikTok. A lot of the things that we use, they now will be able to control and influence. And for us, as two creators, because I consider myself a creator, too. I put up things to inform my constituents and have millions of views on my platforms. But I know the way that TikTok or the way that Facebook does that algorithm is going to directly affect how I can get my content out to people and what those big platforms decide to pay the creators that often post on that platform. Platform is all about your power to negotiate. And if I say I'm going to leave Meta and I'm not going to go on your platforms anymore, then who's going to see your information if there's only one or two platforms competing for it? So it's this environment that really makes me concerned. That all said, we now spend a lot more of our time with local podcasters like you all, because the consumer now often doesn't trust media. But when folks like you, especially with your track record, the connection, the audiences may not be like when we all watched the final episode of mash, you all might not be old enough. Okay? When we all watched Roots, these are things that literally like a third of Americans watch. Nobody's aggregating those audiences anymore. Maybe the Super Bowl, American Idol. Now we have a much more fragmented market. But trust is so important and so valuable. I meet these influencers that only have 50,000 followers, yet they're able to get companies that want to place their products because they know that the persuasiveness or the intimacy of the connection is a lot deeper. What you all do to me is vital, not important. It's vital because a lot of people in Montclair know you. They say, wait a minute, you guys go to the same restaurants as me. You guys.
- [35:35]
Farnoosh Tarabi
It's becoming a problem, actually.
- [35:38]
Senator Cory Booker
But, no, but that's so valuable. So I want to see and we're thinking about creating a caucus in the center called the Creators Caucus to really try to help the smaller creators out there. Because as newspapers have crashed, as shows like Colbert Report, somebody that New Jersey loves are being forced out by, I think, some really bad decisions of these large corporations, it necessitates those vacuums being filled by people like you that have real trust and connection to their viewers, to their audience, to the community they've created.
- [36:08]
Mike Schreiber
I will say, though, like, New Jersey is getting a lot of these new movie studios.
- [36:12]
Farnoosh Tarabi
Yeah.
- [36:12]
Typically is getting a lot of that film traffic.
- [36:15]
Senator Cory Booker
Yeah. Artists are living in Montclair, which is really wonderful to see. So, look, we did a good job. And I really credit Phil Murphy for doing this. I was begging when I was mayor for us to get the tax credit back on point. I had people, studios telling me they would locate in Newark. We weren't able to get the tax credits done. I know there's a lot of debate about tax credits, but I think this was a great move for New Jersey. And we're going to see a lot of. Of economic activity radiating out because of the. That we're going to become one of the great film studio states in the nation, in the North America.
- [36:48]
Farnoosh Tarabi
I would even say thanks for indulging us.
- [36:49]
Senator Cory Booker
Yeah, no, I love that, you guys. This is a great conversation. We got to do this regularly.
- [36:53]
Mike Schreiber
Let lunch twist our arms.
- [36:57]
Farnoosh Tarabi
I'm Iranian, American. We're switching gears now. I think you may know where this is going. I think I do know the Keep your pay app.
- [37:03]
Senator Cory Booker
By the way, your name basically says Persian.
- [37:06]
Farnoosh Tarabi
There's not many people. So you are announcing the keep your pay Act. It arrives in the midst of what we're 10 days into a war with Iran. I'm more concerned for my audience. You know how this is going to impact us financially. Right. We've already seen gas prices up 14% in the first week. Makes for an even stronger case for the Keep your pay Act. But how would we actually pay for it in a moment like this? And not that this. Because this war is not going away anytime soon.
- [37:35]
Senator Cory Booker
So from Bush to Trump, when they go to war, they're charging it on a credit card to your grandchildren. Donald Trump is spending billions of dollars. At the same time, he said, I can't spend on your health care. I'm going to cut your Medicaid a trillion dollars. I can't spend on your expanding the Affordable Care act subsidy. I can't spend on your children's school lunches. I can't spend on the veterans Services for the people that fought the last war. I'm cutting all of that. But now I'm going to spend billions of dollars a day or week over in a war that I started unilaterally without congressional approval. And so I just hope all Americans can keep that in mind, because they're already talking about coming for tens of billions of dollars in what they call a supplemental. So Republicans are going to try to rush through Congress tens of billions of dollars more for Donald Trump's war effort, war of choice, and tell Americans that you're gonna pay for it at the gas pumps, you're pay for it in your energy costs, and I've now cut your health care. So in New Jersey, literally the majority of New Jerseyans are gonna see their health care go up. And hundreds of thousands of New Jerseyans, between the lack of Affordable Care act subsidies and the Medicaid cuts, hundreds of thousands of New Jerseyans are gonna lose their health care coverage, their health insurance coverage altogether. That is outrageous to me and unjust. As our country falls deeper and deeper
- [39:00]
Farnoosh Tarabi
in debt, do you see a diplomatic offering to this war?
- [39:04]
Senator Cory Booker
I think, mark my words, this war is not going to be what he wants, which is this complete surrender. I'm telling you, look at past military interventions from Libya to Iraq. They're both chaotic civil wars. There are places where power vacuums were being filled by terrorists. The record in our military involvement from Vietnam till now in terms of what we leave behind is not good. And how much of our treasure and our blood we spent in that is just not good. Donald Trump did not think this through. He has shifted around multiple times about what he's looking. One time it's, I want regime change. I want to stop their nuclear program. I want to stop their. He has not given a straight answer to the American people about what the end state is, nor can he show us a strategic plan to get there. And he has not been straight with the American people about what the provocation is. First it was that they were killing, tragically, thousands of Iranian civilians. Then it was their nuclear program that he said was obliterated. Then he said it was their ICBM programs. What was it? Then he tried to blame it on Chabad or Israel that somehow the most powerful nation in the world was dragged to war because of Israel. I am so angry at this president for what he's gotten us into. And now they're not even having hearings. Imagine Congress, who clearly in the Constitution, we have war powers. Republicans are refusing even to have open hearings so the American people can see these issues being debated and get transparency on what actually is going on. So I'm going to go back to Washington today and I'm going to be very clear. I will use every lever of power I have to stop the Senate from doing business as usual and get us focused on the fact that we are at war. You may not want to say the word war, Donald Trump, but if you ask for an unconditional surrender, that means you've declared war, you are now breaking the Constitution because only Congress has the power to declare war. And the fact that Republicans are not having, having hearings on it is complete, utter shutdown and rolling over and complicit in what the president's doing. And it's unacceptable to me, especially when who's paying the price for it? The soldiers that now are putting their lives on the line, seven of whom have died, and the American people who are paying for it at the gas pumps and paying it for their energy costs and paying it for, frankly, the fact that they're running up billions of dollars of debt that somebody's going to have to pay for. And it might be your children and grandchildren.
- [41:38]
Mike Schreiber
We live in a consumer culture in many ways, in a consumer based economy largely built on the strength of the dollar and our ability to buy inexpensive things, either because they're built somewhere overseas with cheap labor or they're picked here using cheap labor, which is why we have so many immigrants coming here to do these jobs that frankly don't pay enough for average Americans to want to do do. Can that change? I mean, it seems like that's what the American economy is built on. It seems like it's impossible to talk about immigration reform without acknowledging the fact that if you're working a minimum wage job, A, you can't afford to live B, you're not getting health insurance, you're not getting any of the things that you need necessarily to survive and thrive as a citizen of the richest country in the world.
- [42:26]
Senator Cory Booker
So let me connect the dots here real quick on what we talked about. Well, first of all, if my big idea goes through and nobody pays income tax on the first $75,000 and part of that bill is expansion of the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit. If you are a single mom making $50,000, $60,000 in New Jersey, you will get almost 10%, you'll be able to keep almost 6,000 more dollars that can help you afford childcare, help you afford rent. We have got to make work pay. That's the first big idea. The second thing, one of the other things we talked about was corporate concentration. We spend more money than any other nation on the planet earth on healthcare, and we get the worst results because we've allowed corporate concentration. How is it that a health insurance company now controls the doctors, the PBMs, and the pharmacies? They vertically integrate it and drive up the costs. We put limits on health insurance companies and what profits they can and how much money they return. So you know how they make their profits? They own the pharmacy and they say overcharge people. And really who they're overcharging is the insurance company. So we're going to shift our profits to the things that are not being curtailed enough of that. We need to break up these big corporate monopolies that are doing all kind of schemes to jack up prices on consumers and make health care too expensive. So that's another thing. And then the final thing that we have to do is you're talking about keep your pay act, which is very important, breaking up corporate monopolies, which is really important. And then do what I did when I was mayor, the last thing when I was mayor of the city of Newark, my philosophy when I first came in there, let's just attack stupid. We had detectives in our gang task force working Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. I don't know about the gangs in Montclair, but the gangs in Newark did not work 9 to 5. So the people investigating them shouldn't work 9 to 5. I had 4,000 or so employees in Newark, and we had 3,500 outstanding workman compensation claims. These things you couldn't make up. And I just wanted to attack stupid. If we attack stupid, then we're going to create a result. Two of the costs I couldn't control, though. I told you, we cut our government overall 25%. But the costs that would go up every year I was mayor were my pension costs and my health care costs. And I couldn't figure out why healthcare every year was going up so much. And I was looking for ideas. And somebody told me an idea of how to attack the stupid. And what was that idea? I went to a big casino company. We're in New Jersey, but my mom lives in Vegas, so I'd be going out to Vegas to visit my family. And this is a casino company that had thousands and thousands of employees. And he told me too, I couldn't control my health care costs. They kept going up, up. And so one day I went down to my cafeteria where we feed thousands of people. And he goes, corey, I Saw deep fryers. I saw the food we were giving our people were so ultra processed, it was insane. And so what did I do is he said, I ripped out all of these deep fryers, got rid of all the highly processed foods, and brought in the best chefs there were. At first they fought me because they wanted their Cinnabons or whatever. But when I brought these chefs in, they loved the food. And he said, then I'd have these single moms that work two shifts at the gaming table, and then they're going home and they say, can I take some food home for my kids? So I'm not stopping at that fast food restaurant. Lo and behold, he said his cost curve on his health care costs started going down because his people got healthier. So let me tell you what's stupid in the United States of America that most people don't know. 93% of our ag subsidies go to ultra processed foods. Only 7% go to the foods our doctors tell us to eat the most of. Literally, like, like, we subsidize everything at the fast food restaurant, and then we go and have to pay $15, $20 for a bucket of salad. This is insane. We have designed this system by monopolized food companies to make ultra processed, highly alluring foods and not support that. So if we just said, no more of this, we are going to put our subsidies on the food that we want people to eat, and it's going to create healthier habits. How do I know this works? It's because when I was mayor of the city of Newark, we created an entire city block that was. It was an urban farm. And then as a mayor, as a senator, I supported something called the Double Bucks program. What the heck is that? Your food stamps or your SNAP benefits? When you go to a farmer's market, they're worth double. And so I went out to this farm to do a Food Inc. It was this documentary, I remember. Yes. So they were doing Food Inc. Too. And I went out there with them to show them this great thing. And all of these Newark residents I will never forget came up to me and said I had diabetes. And then I sourced all my food from this farm because I got double bucks. And my diabetes, my doctor said is reversed, is gone. Another woman said she had gut problems that her doctor said would not be solved. She'd be on medication the rest of her life. The monthly cost of her medication was $700, and she paid 100. We picked up, as taxpayers, $600. She started sourcing all fresh vegetables from this Farm. Her doctor called it a miracle cure. It's not a miracle cure. It's having access to fresh, healthy foods. So if it works for one of the biggest casino operators in Las Vegas to lower his healthcare costs, why aren't we in America doing the same thing and making access to fresh, healthy foods low cost and affordable and letting the free market deal with the expensive foods? I'm a vegetarian. I'm a plant based guy. If you want a hamburger, I want you to eat that hamburger. I'm going to do everything I can to stop the big meat packing industries from driving up your hamburger costs. But I don't think that we should be subsidizing the cheese and the grains and the corn syrup and all the other things that goes into your ketchup. We shouldn't be subsidizing that. We should let the free market control those costs. And if there's any food that we're subsidizing as a nation, let's subsidize the fresh, healthy food. Let me say one thing more controversial, like why do we, with our snap payments, not expand the programs I've been supporting that help you get healthy food and not let people buy sugar water, Coke and Pepsi make billions of dollars every year from snap payments, from food stamps? That's outrageous. There's nothing nutritious about a Coke if you want to buy it. But why are my taxpayer dollars helping you buy Coke? And whenever you try to change this and say you can't buy Coke or Pepsi, but you can will increase the ability to buy fruits and vegetables. Their lobby comes in, big soda comes in and then they want to cry things like, oh, it's racist that you're doing this. Which by the way, it's really problematic that they even say that in the first place because the people that are worse impacted are often disadvantaged communities by diabetes and pre diabetes. Half of our country now, half of the adults in our country are either diabetic or pre diabetic because Coke and Pepsi and a lot of other companies can so easily push that stuff into our food system, not according to the free market, but because of taxpayer subsidies.
- [49:26]
Mike Schreiber
So how do you work with Robert Kennedy Jr. On that while knowing at the same time where you probably align with him on stuff like that, but at the same time he's got other positions that I'm sure you don't align.
- [49:37]
Senator Cory Booker
I have this saying about human beings is we are all mountain ranges. We all have peaks, we all have valleys. Some people have deep, cavernous Grand Canyon like valleys that I'LL do everything I can to fight this measles outbreak we're having right now falls directly at the feet of the Trump administration. And they're not science backed attacks on common sense vaccines. But I will find alliances wherever I can. Remember you all elected a senator that really believes in working across the aisle and getting stuff done. I will fight Donald Trump in every way possible. But I will tell you also with him, I passed the First Step act in his first term that liberated thousands of people from prison, hundreds in New Jersey alone from being unjustly incarcerated. I don't demonize anybody. I will work with you where you are doing what's right. I will fight you like hell when you're trying to hurt people.
- [50:28]
Farnoosh Tarabi
Final question. You know what we're gonna ask you, please. What is your role in the Democratic Party in the future and is there a presidential run in your future?
- [50:35]
Senator Cory Booker
I will tell you right now. I want to be reelected New Jersey, please, in November. I hope that New Jersey will give me another six years especially. I got the receipts. Nobody, if you're a taxpayer in New Jersey, no senator in six years has brought more money back to the state. A lot of that was obviously Covid, but a lot of that was the big infrastructure programs we did. I just came back from Bloomfield where we got them hundreds of thousands of dollars for lead paint abatement. I'm hoping that I've earned New Jersey's trust again to be reelected. But then after that, I want the Democratic Party to be redeemed because it has let a lot of folks down. I think our party needs new leadership, needs a new vision. I think America needs a new vision and that we've got to redeem the dream for working families. I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm not closing any doors, but I will be focused on big ideas like this one, like the Keep youp Pay act that are going to be the kind of ideas that can create transformative change. Not incremental change, but transformative change for working Americans.
- [51:37]
Farnoosh Tarabi
Thanks so much to Senator Cory Booker for joining us. If you'd like to discover how much your household could save with the Keep youp Pay act, there's a calculator online. We've got the link in our show notes. I'll see you back here on Friday for AskFarnouche. And I hope your day is so money.
- [52:07]
Senator Cory Booker
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Farnoosh Tarabi
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