Overtime - Episode #505: Katie Porter, Heidi Heitkamp, Michael Smerconish, Eric Klinenberg, Kevin Williamson

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, real time with Bill Ma.

Okay, Katie, given the pay disparity between workers and CEOs,

hi.

We don't take any breaks here.

We just...

Should we have a maximum wage?

A minimum wage?

Yeah, that's been suggested.

FDR certainly suggested it.

A maximum wage?

Yes, a limit, like, you know, 100% tax after if you make 10 million or whatever, wouldn't it?

Bill.

I'm asking somebody socialists I'm not this is somebody else's question and I think we should have a maximum wage I don't wow I think that what we should do is have empowered people in this country shareholders workers investors and we should allow our capitalist economy to actually check the wages of CEOs that will work It has worked in this country.

So should we have, as a practical matter, a maximum wage?

Are wages too high?

Should the guy at Pfizer have gotten that much more money?

Should Jamie Dimon be getting paid to say he'll think about it no but to say there's going to be some automatic maximum wage or some perfect ratio that's that's a recipe for messing with what's been worked in capitalism for all these years

but surprisingly I wouldn't

even like 10 billion a year in the 1950s the top rate was 70% would you support a top rate of 70 percent on salary

well it was

90 at one point for some reason

so that's saying

That's saying, if you make a lot of money, what is your duty to contribute to the collective good?

And it's substantial.

You should have, the more you make, the more you should pay.

We are all in this.

It's all progressive on this.

Except for Trump.

He's in it for himself.

The rest of us are in it together.

In the last 40 years, the typical CEO pay has gone up 940.

It's outrageous.

The typical worker's pay has gone up 12%.

Totally.

But here's what I want.

We totally need to change something.

But the thing that we need to change isn't some magical number, some artificial formula that we're going to set on what a CEO should be paid what we need to do is have investor protection rules have shareholders be empowered have workers being getting paid a reasonable wage compared to a CEO and this is this is the recipe it's not some magic formula that we're going to just find there's no perfectly proportional number out there.

The biggest company in the world, we don't know what that's even going to look like five years from now.

I'm curious, what do you think needs to be done to make shareholders more powerful?

Do you think they, I mean, this is not a rhetorical question.

Do you think they're in a poor position to manage their own money?

I think one of the problems is that is that the vast majority of Americans are not shareholders.

So every time Trump tweets about the stock market,

he thinks it's a joke that the stock market is falling.

And so the reality is most Americans don't have any retirement savings at all.

Most people are not invested in the stock market.

And so we don't have the average American having a say as an investor because the average American isn't an investor because they can't pay for their apartment and they can't pay for their health care and they can't pay for their child care.

So for instance, do you think they should be able to take some of the money they pay into say Social Security and put it into a private retirement fund?

No.

So

how do you want to encourage more Americans to become shareholders then?

Because I want to pay them

enough so they can make business

and then save

for their futures and for their children.

And you think they're going to go invest in the stock market and not buy bass boats.

Have you met Americans?

Yes, I have.

They're the wealthiest people in the history of the world and their saving trade is negligible.

With bass boats.

a week, fast boats are awesome.

Well, they're the

wealthiest people in the history of the world, but it's very uneven.

42% of the people make minimum wage.

These are the people I keep asking, how do you live?

They don't.

Their lives are very hard.

Right.

Look, I'd like to see a wealth tax because we've had a class war in this country for 40 years, and the overclass has won.

And it's time for the rest of the country to fight back.

And listen,

I agree with you.

I have no problem with saying we should adjust the tax system and redistribute wealth and get those who are earning the most, contributing the most, back into the system that has made them wealthy.

But that's different than saying we should have some kind of price cap on salary and manage this with a government currently headed by Donald Trump.

That's a disruption to capitalism.

The other is a normal system, a healthy system of taxation, which we need to create in this country.

And you need to start treating earned income the same as underned incomes.

So people who just sit on their ass and collect dollars, they are taxed at a lower rate than people who actually go to work every day.

And Trump said he was going to, you know, Trump was in the campaign.

He was like, oh, he was going to get on that.

Yeah, right, right.

How did that work?

No.

Eric, what do you think of Bernie Sanders' $16 trillion climate change plan, which would mobilize society at a level not seen since World War II?

I mean, it's a huge amount of money, but let's start asking seriously how we're going to pay for the mess we're inheriting if we don't do anything like a Green New Deal.

Because if we don't pay for a Green New Deal, we are toast.

We are eviscerating the conditions that make life possible.

So

it sounds outrageous, but we need an emergency plan because we are in a climate emergency.

And if you're not seeing it in Brazil this week, I don't know what evidence is going to be.

Send to my Buy the Amazon fund.

We're putting the number on the screen.

Okay, what can we expect from this weekend's G7 summit?

Great things.

Yeah, exactly.

He's going to be like, yes.

Pouting.

The president will pout.

Right.

Because people there don't like him, and he knows they don't like him.

You know what the picture will be?

And when people don't like him, he pouts.

Right.

Yeah.

You be Angela Merkel, I'll be Trump.

It's so dirty.

It's so ridiculous.

I know.

It's embarrassing.

It's not just ridiculous, and it's dangerous.

It's dangerous given everything that's going on.

He shouldn't even go.

They don't want him.

He doesn't want to be able to do it.

He took the red eye.

He left tonight.

He left like 20 minutes ago.

I thought there was a lot of people.

He took the red eye.

He wasn't even going to go.

When we came out here tonight to start your show, I was convinced that he was going to be able to do that.

It would be better.

It was a possible that he wouldn't even make the trip.

Right.

Especially because his spirit animal, Putin,

isn't there.

And that's, you know, his big issue is why isn't Putin here?

Right.

All right.

You always want to be with somebody who loves you.

Exactly.

You've got to think one reason we're getting into this crazy trade war and tariff situation of today is because he wants to go to the G7 meeting and flex his muscles a little bit.

The guy's

so insecure, his ego is so fragile, he wants something to stand up on.

Can I say that?

And that's a crazy thing that our economy is in the hands of.

I think that President Xi can out-chicken him in this game because the Chinese are not opening envelopes looking at 401ks.

Xi's job security is a lot stronger than Trump's.

And it might not be one of the 20 Democrats.

It might be the Chinese president ultimately who brings him down.

Read the art of war.

The art of war.

By the way,

he tweeted today, our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China.

What would they have said if socialist Obama had

our great American companies are ordered?

Hereby, yeah.

You gotta get the hero.

Right, like a dwarf with a scroll.

Okay, thank you very much, everybody.

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