Loading summary
Transcript21 lines
- [00:01]
Sponsor Voice
This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. During tax season, your personal info travels to a lot of places between payroll, your tax consultant, and the IRS. If your W2 gets exposed, that's just the ticket for identity thieves. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Don't let identity thieves take you for a ride. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply.
- [00:30]
Ben
Appearing for the first time on the Midas Touch Network, Senator Elizabeth Warren. Welcome, Senator.
- [00:37]
Elizabeth Warren
Thank you, Ben. I'm just delighted to be here with you.
- [00:40]
Ben
All right, let's get into it. So the House Republicans this week passed their budget blueprint. Tax cuts for the rich, cuts to Medicaid, $19 trillion added to the deficit, at least, I think, over 10 years. How much harm is this going to cause the American people?
- [00:57]
Elizabeth Warren
More than you can measure. Think of it this way. The bumper sticker for this budget proposal is, billionaires win, Everybody else loses. And when I say everybody else loses, I really do mean everybody. So big hunk of these cuts are for the program called Medicaid. And that's like in Massachusetts, my home state, two out of every three people in a nursing home is there funded by Medicaid. So what exactly is the Donald Trump Republican plan here that those old folks who don't have anything else, they don't have like some retirement plan or big fancy checking account to draw on? Are they just going to set them out on the corner to be picked up with the trash? Those are the kind of cuts we're talking about. Medicaid also helps fund community health centers all across this country. If you're not going to a community health center, you really ought to try one out. They do everything from little tiny babies to seniors. They do all kinds of care, preventive care, really the soup to nuts of taking care of people. And they give that high quality care at the lowest possible cost. Cuts to Medicaid means that they could lose as much as half their budget. And understand this, they even lose 2% of their budget. They work so efficiently, using every dollar to its maximum benefit, that really means they got to stop offering services. So what? They cut out care for little babies, they cut out emergency care, they cut out preventive care. None of that is good. You want to force people to go to the hospitals. You want to force people to give up the care they need in the long run, that just costs us more money and a whole lot more misery.
- [02:56]
Ben
What do you say to people though, in red states or red areas that go, but this is Senator Warren saying she's a liberal. She's saying all of these things. What's, what's your response?
- [03:08]
Elizabeth Warren
My response is I care about people and I know you do too. And what I really care about is that we don't give a bunch of tax breaks to billionaires and pay for it on the backs of hard working people. People who a lot of times are putting together two and three jobs just to be able to keep their families and themselves above water. Come on, we don't want to cut health care for those people. We don't want to cut access to nursing homes for their grandmas and grandpas. This is just basic who you think this country ought to run for. And that's true. Whether you're Democrat or Republican, an independent, a libertarian, a vegetarian. You got to care about who this country works for. And this Republican budget plan is all about billionaires win, everybody else loses. We just can't do that.
- [04:05]
Ben
Well, look, you've got all of these Republicans who are gung ho about this. They are saying this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. And they're out there, I, I think, also misrepresenting what's in the bill itself. I mean, I don't know if they're gaslighting the people or if they're just not reading it, but they're saying this is everything we promised. No tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime. It's all there. And the Democrats are opposing all of these things. Now, I've looked through the bill. I didn't see that language anywhere there. I saw the cuts to Medicaid and the Energy and Commerce Committee. I saw the cuts to farmers, I saw the cuts to infrastructure and I saw the 4.5 trillion in tax cuts. So are the Republicans just gaslighting people or what's happening?
- [04:50]
Elizabeth Warren
Look, the Republicans are following Donald Trump's lead here when he said to his donors, make him president and he would give his rich as hell donors. Those are his words, fabulous tax cuts. And that's exactly what this is about. Look, there may be a lot of ways we should be doing tax cuts for working people, for middle class families, but that doesn't mean you have to give tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires. And that's the real difference here. The people who are sucking up all those tax cuts are the people at the very top. Last week in the United States Senate, about 4 o'clock in the morning, we're running through our first version of how the budget's going to work. And the Republicans have put forward a bunch of the same stuff. So I stood up and said, is there anybody, anybody who is rich enough they shouldn't get a tax cut? And I said, how about, here's my amendment, Anybody who makes more than $10 million in a year, that's it for them, they don't get a tax cut. All the Democrats said, yes, we vote for that amendment. And the Republicans said, no, not going to do that. So then Mark Kelly stood up and he said, okay, okay. He said, not that. How about if we make it for $100 million? Anybody making more than $100 million doesn and get a tax cut. Democrats said yes. All of the Republicans, no. So then Angus King, independent from Maine, stood up. He said, okay, how about $500 million? Anybody who's making at least $500 million doesn't get a tax cut under the Republican plan. Can we agree on that? All the Democrats said yes, and the Republicans shouted no. So then Chuck Schumer stands up and says, okay, how about a billion dollars? Could we agree that if you' billion in income in a single year, no tax cut for you under the Republican plan? And every single Republican said no. And that tells you a lot. This is about tax cuts for the very, very, very richest Americans. Paid for on the backs of little kids with serious disabilities who need an aid to be able to be in public school. Paid for on the backs of people who get Meals on Wheels, paid for on the backs of your community hospital and health care system. That's just not right.
- [07:28]
Ben
You think people are already starting to feel these cuts? What Doge is doing, what Musk is doing in the red state areas, I mean, we're seeing what's going on in a lot of these town halls and ruby red areas. Do you think it's already beginning to set in? Maybe even earlier than expected.
- [07:47]
Elizabeth Warren
So, Ben, here's our big strategy. Tell everyone what's really in this bill. Because if people get it, whether they're Democrats or Republicans, whether they live in red states or blue states, whether they vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden or nobody at all, they don't want a tax package that says huge giveaways to rich people and then make everybody else in this country pay for it, that's the part we gotta fight back against. I get that there's a lot of stuff we need to go back and forth on. What's right, what's wrong. I'm all for that. But can we just agree as we start out that we're not giving tax cuts to a handful of millionaires and billionaires and giant corporations and making our little kids and old people and people who need health care be the ones who are going to pay for it?
- [08:39]
Ben
Let's talk about the CFPB that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are gutting. Although I think they're now gaslighting the courts or lying to the courts and claiming, oh, this is just part of a streamlining effort. So what happened was, right, was Elon Musk posted cfpb, RIP he posted it. Then they started gutting it, destroying it, dismantling it. Lawsuits were filed, injunctions were ordered to slow it down or to stop it. Now they're making arguments basically because I think they realize how unpopular it is to gut and destroy the CFPB which brought tens of billions of dollars back to consumers from corporations that defrauded the consumers. And so now the guy, the architect of Project 2025, I think he's submitting declarations saying, oh, you have it all. This is just part of a streamlining effort that we're doing. What do you mean we're gutting it? What do you mean? Elon Musk is posting on. We don't know what you're talking about. What's going on here, Senator.
- [09:43]
Elizabeth Warren
So let's back up just a tiny little bit and remember what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is all about. We put it in place after the big crash in 2008, when 10 million people, 10 million families lost their homes. And the idea was we had all these consumer protection laws. They were scattered among seven agencies. Those agencies didn't enforce them. It was nobody's first job. So it turned out to be nobody's job at all. We gathered those up, we put them with one agency, and then we said to that agency, enforce the law. That's your job. So over the last dozen years, what that agency has done is it's found more than $21 billion in fraud where people got cheated on various financial products. And they didn't just find the fraud, they found the fraudsters and made them give the money back to the people they cheated. More than $21 billion. It's gone to about 200 million people. This is government that really works. So Elon Musk comes in, shuts it all down, and now here comes the best part. It pays to fight back, because that's what's happened. People have taken to the street over this. People are telling their stories about how the agency Helps them. And it appears that there's some moving in reverse here. For right now, we're in the courts because what Elon Musk did is plainly illegal. But this is a place where people are starting to say, dammit, this is government that works for me and I want those cops back on the beat so I'm not getting cheated. They understand that what Elon Musk has done is kind of like draw a target on anybody who has a credit card, a mortgage, a car loan, a payday loan, a student loan, a checking account, even those online transactions, all of them. The CFPB is just the cop on the beat to say, you gotta follow the law. You can't make your profits by cheating people. Elon doesn't like that, but the American people do, and we're pushing back against him.
- [12:01]
Ben
You know, why are the Republicans just, like, babying Elon Musk and they're, like, babying Donald Trump as though the rules don't apply and we don't know what they say. You know, they just, they just say all of these things. Like when I see these town halls, when I hear over and over again from Republican people as well, is, Elon needs to testify. This is a government. There's something called oversight. You don't just get to post things on social media and then say, oops, I made a mistake there. I made you show up, you testify, you're transparent with the people. Now, I know you held a CFPB forum where you invited Elon Musk. He refused to show. I know the Democrats have tried to subpoena Elon Musk a number of times. The Republicans usually try to quash the subpoenas or even stop debate about whether a subpoena should even be sent in the first place. So Elon may be watching this. We know Trump's press team watches these things. So what would your message be to Elon Musk if he's watching this, about why he should testify before the Senate?
- [13:10]
Elizabeth Warren
Elon, stop being such a coward. You say that you are for maximum transparency, then get out of your bunker and come over here where there are people who ask serious questions, not people who just suck up to you, but people have serious questions about what you're doing because you're affecting the lives of millions of people across this country in really terrible ways. And people want to know. So why is it, for example, that you want to get rid of the one cop on the beat that protects Americans from scams? Is it because you want to launch X Money? You've made that quote quite public. And if you do that, that would be the one cop that would make sure you have to follow the law. Are you just trying to push that cop out of the way before you start? Or are you over at the CFPB rummaging through all of their data so that you can get the information the CFPB already has on the other sites that would be like your X Money, those same peer to peer platforms. Are you going to just try to get all of your competitors information so you can decide how to exploit that for your own use? Look, you want to be transparent? Then show up and answer some real questions, serious questions about the kinds of changes you're trying to make to our government and to our country.
- [14:43]
Ben
Think they're scared and you think you're scared to drop?
- [14:46]
Elizabeth Warren
I do. I think that. I think this is one of those things where they kind of build their alternative reality. And Elon spends all of his time with people who don't contradict him. The only people who contradict him are online. He's got his thumbs out and he can have a torrent of clever tweets and emojis and laugh and still just live in this completely cloistered environment where people say, yes Elon, yes Elon. Yes Elon. You know Elon, there's a whole real world out here and the real world has some serious questions about what you're up to.
- [15:29]
Ben
Well, Senator Elizabeth Warren, we'll see if he responds to that challenge and shows up. We'll see if he's scared of you or not. We'll find out. Thanks for joining us. We appreciate you joining us on the Midas Touch network.
- [15:39]
Elizabeth Warren
Thank you for having me, Ben. Let's do it again.
- [15:42]
Ben
Everybody. Hit subscribe. Let's get to 5 million subscribers. Can't get enough Midas. Check out the Midas plus subs stack for ad. Free articles, reports, podcasts, daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski and more. Sign up for free now@midasplus.com.
- [16:07]
Navy Recruitment Voice
You are no dummy, but you're kind of acting like one. You used to crush it in school, outsmarting opponents on the field. And now, well, you're still smart, but not exactly challenging yourself. You could be advancing nuclear engineering in the world's most powerful Navy. You were born for it. So make the smart choice. You can be smart or you could be nuke smart. Become a nuclear engineer@navy.com nukesmart America's Navy forged by the sea.