Jon Stewart on Trump’s Heel Turn on Zelenskyy & Elon's Interview Challenge | Matthew Desmond

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 2 You're listening to Comedy Central.

Speaker 2 From the most trusted journalists at Comedy Central, it's America's only source for news. This is the Daily Journal with your host, John Stewart.

Speaker 2 We got a great job boy tonight. I'm very excited.

Speaker 2 As you can see,

Speaker 2 I am fully healed. Already see, this is what caused all the commotion.
They glued it back together. Where is it? They glued it back together.
Boom. That's all.
That's it.

Speaker 2 That's what nearly brought an old man down.

Speaker 2 A tiny puncture wound that all the blood in my body went. Let's go.

Speaker 2 We got a hell of a show tonight, my guest. Sociologist and author Matthew Desmond is going to be.

Speaker 2 They love him.

Speaker 2 They love him,

Speaker 2 fresh off his upset win as best supporting actor.

Speaker 2 And the crowd goes well. But first,

Speaker 2 if I can just pick up something from the last time that I was out here, I'd made a bit of a critique of Elon Musk and the Doge program. Let me reset the scene.

Speaker 2 I am not allowed to have big boy mugs anymore.

Speaker 2 There was an actual meeting of the safety department of Paramount and Viacom that was like, no more ceramic for Mr. Stewart.

Speaker 2 So they wanted to baby proof.

Speaker 2 So this is.

Speaker 2 Anyway,

Speaker 2 we had some critiques about Doge. After the show, Governor Musk tweeted, or exed, I guess, that he would like to come on here and talk to me as long as the show airs unedited.

Speaker 2 So I thought about it,

Speaker 2 and after

Speaker 2 a prayerful week with my family,

Speaker 2 well,

Speaker 2 a family.

Speaker 2 Family hall pass situation.

Speaker 2 You don't want to know.

Speaker 2 You don't want to know. And quite frankly, I don't want to know.

Speaker 2 But after thinking about

Speaker 2 his offer, I thought, you know, hey,

Speaker 2 that's actually how the in-studio interviews normally are.

Speaker 2 Is unedited, so

Speaker 2 sure.

Speaker 2 We'd be delighted.

Speaker 2 As a matter of fact,

Speaker 2 let me sweeten or unsweeten the pot. The interview can be 15 minutes, it can be an hour, it could be two hours, whatever.

Speaker 2 I'll be honest, I don't think this network makes any other programming.

Speaker 2 So we can do whatever the f ⁇ we want

Speaker 2 as long as we rap. before the new season of South Park, which comes out in like May or June of 2026.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I am game. I think it'll be a very interesting conversation.
But then I checked X

Speaker 2 again

Speaker 2 and I saw another tweet from Elon because

Speaker 2 you can't not.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he then said, after saying I'd like to come on, Jon Stewart cannot be trusted

Speaker 2 and that I am a propagandist.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 you give me too little credit

Speaker 2 and that I am not bipartisan.

Speaker 2 Again,

Speaker 2 the guy who custom-made his own dark MAGA hat

Speaker 2 that he wears to opine in the Oval Office with the president who he spent $270 million to elect.

Speaker 2 thinks I'm just too partisan.

Speaker 2 I'm really not sure what he thinks bipartisan means, but it's generally not. I support Donald Trump and also Germany's AFD party.

Speaker 2 That's not bipartisan, that's just the same shit. So I guess what I would say is this.

Speaker 2 Look, Elon, I do have some criticisms about Doge. I support in general the idea of efficiency and delivering better services to the American public in cheaper and more efficient ways.

Speaker 2 And if you want to come on and talk about it on the show,

Speaker 2 great.

Speaker 2 If you don't want to, sure.

Speaker 2 But can we just drop the pretense that you won't do it because I don't measure up to the standards of neutral discourse that you demand and display at all times? Because quite frankly,

Speaker 2 that's bullshit.

Speaker 2 You know it, I know it.

Speaker 2 Bullshit.

Speaker 2 So let's get to the big story. Americans are still trying to process the global realignment that has occurred following the disastrous Oval Office meeting between the President J.D.

Speaker 2 Vance and Vladimir Zelensky. What happened, they say? Are we still America? They say.
Whose side are we on? They say. It's complicated.

Speaker 2 The best way that I can explain what happened and show Americans how to process this new reality was with another shocking turn of events from this weekend.

Speaker 1 On Saturday night at the Elimination Chamber, the WWE shocked the world as John Cena turned heel, joined the Rock, and attacked Cody Rhodes.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 if that does not immediately explain to you our current geopolitical climate,

Speaker 2 You must have grown out of watching wrestling through the normal course of aging.

Speaker 2 I, on the other hand,

Speaker 2 understand

Speaker 2 this in my bones.

Speaker 2 This explains it, folks. All of your shock, all of your disappointment, all of your anger, it's in there.
It's in the squared circle. You see, Saturday night.
Oh, we're doing this.

Speaker 2 Saturday night.

Speaker 2 John Cena.

Speaker 2 The good guy of professional wrestling. Mr.
Hustle, the champ, the man who stood for everything.

Speaker 2 truth, justice, the guy who literally holds the record for the most Make-A-Wish Foundation meetings of all time. People would get cancer just to meet John Cena.

Speaker 2 Last weekend, Cena flipped the script and went from being a face, a good guy, to a heel.

Speaker 2 a bad guy. Now, if you don't follow professional wrestling, and I'm guessing if you watch this show, you do not

Speaker 2 but let me continue to bore you with this metaphor

Speaker 2 so here's what happened the current WWE champion is one Cody Rhodes

Speaker 2 Seven people say around

Speaker 2 Cody Rhodes is the people's champ. Unquestioned bravery.
He stands in for Zelensky in this metaphor. A couple of weeks ago, The Rock, the now evil owner of the WWE,

Speaker 2 Putin in our story,

Speaker 2 made Cody Rhodes an offer.

Speaker 2 The one thing that I want more than anything in this world

Speaker 2 is that

Speaker 2 I want your soul.

Speaker 2 Who did?

Speaker 2 He wants Zelensky's soul. Oh, but sir.

Speaker 2 But sir, I am smaller and weaker than you.

Speaker 2 It will take incredible bravery for me to protect my soul and the soul of my people.

Speaker 2 But luckily, I am not protecting my soul alone.

Speaker 2 For I have have the support of the great John Cena!

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 Cody Rhodes, Zelensky, told Vladimir Putin, rock, no soul for you, motherfer!

Speaker 2 And that's when they met in the Oval Office. America went to hug Zelensky, but when America looked up, somehow Putin had given John Cena the international sign.

Speaker 2 for its time and rather than repudiate Putin, America smelled what the rock was cooking.

Speaker 2 And through that Borshi haze, America delivered the nutshot.

Speaker 2 The nutshot to the hopes and dreams of Ukrainians everywhere.

Speaker 2 And then for no reason, America jumped on Zelensky and started punching him in the face as many times as he could.

Speaker 2 Too simplistic? No?

Speaker 2 This is it!

Speaker 2 Am I being too simplistic, assigning to the delicate art of Realpolitik a scripted outcome? Perhaps, but judge for yourself.

Speaker 2 Putin broken 25 times his own signature. 25 times he broke ceasefire.

Speaker 2 You're in no position to dictate what we're going to feel. You're not in a good position.

Speaker 2 You don't have the cards right now.

Speaker 2 You're gambling with World War III.

Speaker 2 You're gambling with World War III. Have you said thank you once this entire meeting?

Speaker 2 We gave you, through this stupid president, $350 billion.

Speaker 2 You're either going to make a deal or we're out. This is going to be great television.
I will say that.

Speaker 2 It sure wasn't.

Speaker 2 But isn't that what you want from the high-stakes diplomacy and real-life urgency that ending war demands? And you know, even reporters got some nut shots in.

Speaker 2 Why don't you wear a suit? Oh, shit.

Speaker 2 No, you didn't.

Speaker 2 Let's do the dozens. Oh, Zelensky, you're so poor and war-torn, you're down to one Brooks brother.

Speaker 2 Oh, shit.

Speaker 2 You've so war-torn, you've given up the meaningless protocols of business attire.

Speaker 2 If you think I'm pushing this metaphor, look at the stunned faces in the crowd at WWE.

Speaker 2 When John Cena turned heel,

Speaker 2 I now present you the equally stunned faces of those watching this oval office pay-per-view. Scott, I've never seen anything like that.
You've never seen anything like that.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 Just wow.

Speaker 1 That was something. Caitlin, I want to start with look at her face.
I mean,

Speaker 1 Christiane.

Speaker 2 You broke Christiana Omanpur!

Speaker 2 The woman wanders unprotected through Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Doesn't give a f ⁇ .

Speaker 2 Ten minutes of Trump diplomacy and she's like, is anyone else dizzy?

Speaker 2 My A1C is plunging.

Speaker 2 Now, of course, there is one big difference between the WWE and the world of politics. In the WWE, they seem very clear on who the good guys and who the bad guys are.

Speaker 2 Nobody walked out of the match pretending that the guy who got nutshotted was the bad guy.

Speaker 1 There was this attitude of ungratefulness, seeing his smirk, seeing him roll his eyes, seeing him refer to J.D. Vance, the vice president, as J.D.

Speaker 2 He shows up in his Equinox chic outfit to the doggone Oval office.

Speaker 1 President Zielinski was also antagonistic and frankly, he was rude.

Speaker 2 So impertinent, so disrespectful, Tone deaf, going in and fighting back, getting sassy with the president and the

Speaker 2 real scallywag.

Speaker 2 You know what I would say if I was there in the Oval Office with him? I'd say, you better watch your tone, mister.

Speaker 2 I think it was Churchill who during World War II was roundly criticized for being a bit lippy.

Speaker 2 Excuse me, mister, we'll decide where you're going to fight them, whether it's on the beaches or not or whatever.

Speaker 2 Poor guy, Zelensky, his nation was invaded. He's against all odds, held off a much bigger army for three years.

Speaker 2 And we're like, would it kill you to smile a little more?

Speaker 2 Dress a little nicer, your beautiful country, nobody would know.

Speaker 2 Show off what you got. You know what I'm talking about?

Speaker 2 Maybe some of those rare medals I've been hearing something about.

Speaker 2 But of course, if you criticize Trump's very clear hostility to Zelensky and very clear appreciation of Putin as being suspicious or a repudiation of American values as they've been outlined since World War II, Trump's people quickly set up straw men north of Richmond.

Speaker 2 If there are no negotiations, what is the alternative? Another four years of war?

Speaker 2 We're not saying there should be no negotiations. We're just surprised at the side you seem to be negotiating for.

Speaker 1 President Trump recognizes the urgent need to end this war after three long bloody years. President Zelensky has different aims in mind.

Speaker 2 Yeah, bullshit. I'm pretty sure everybody wants to.
Everybody wants to end all. Hitler wanted to end the war, just not the way it ended.

Speaker 2 You're pretending that

Speaker 2 we have no other options.

Speaker 1 Our hearts all break for the suffering and loss and death.

Speaker 2 But you know what will be even even worse? World War III.

Speaker 2 Yes, I'm sure your heart, in quotation marks, is breaking. But in your little zero-sum formulation, you are correct.

Speaker 2 Total capitulation by Ukraine, loss of all their mineral wealth, and no security guarantees is still better than World War III.

Speaker 2 For now. But you know, everything sounds better if the only other option you're presenting us is World War III.

Speaker 2 You can listen to the Amelia Perez composer freestyle another f ⁇ ing verse at the Oscars

Speaker 2 or World War III.

Speaker 2 Eventually,

Speaker 2 you will agree to hear another verse. Buy a hair.

Speaker 2 These guys are so f ⁇ ing up Trump's ass, they can't even admit that this meeting was Russia's wet dream. The world is now watching how Trump behaves and acts when he's pressed.

Speaker 2 I thought he stood up for America, that we're a good people. We want to help you, but we're going to be respected.
So I think my sky is probably more afraid of Trump than ever.

Speaker 2 Yes, people get terribly afraid when someone viciously takes their side.

Speaker 2 They must be quaking in their...

Speaker 2 What do Russians wear on their feet? I don't. Is it shoes inside inside other shoes and then they get very small

Speaker 2 until the last shoe that you take off is a tiny shoe, and you're really positive this has got to be the last shoe. And then, but no,

Speaker 2 you don't.

Speaker 2 You know what? Putin must be quaking. Let's get the this is the actual Russian state television view on Russia's fearfulness.

Speaker 2 The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations.

Speaker 2 This largely coincides with our vision.

Speaker 2 America said, do whatever you want. It has nothing to do with us.

Speaker 2 It's such a pleasure to watch.

Speaker 2 Basically, he is taking our bread and butter. We wanted wanted to saw the Western world into pieces, but he decided to saw through it himself.

Speaker 2 Not only are the Russians not fearful, they're f ⁇ ing delighted.

Speaker 2 Do you know how hard it is to delight a Russian?

Speaker 2 There's only two ways to do it. Break up the Western Democratic Order or bear on roller skates.
It's the only two ways.

Speaker 2 Or...

Speaker 2 Social media dash cam death. Three things, really.

Speaker 2 Look, none of this is to say Zelensky handled this meeting well. Everyone knows by now Trump's love language is subservience.
If he calls your wife ugly, you praise him.

Speaker 2 If he calls you widow, you run his State Department. And if you're a foreign leader who wants to be on good terms with America, you've got to butter Trump up like he's Texas toast.

Speaker 2 British PM Kier Tharmer knows how it's done. It is my pleasure to bring from His Majesty the King

Speaker 2 a letter. He sends his best wishes.

Speaker 2 It's an invitation for a second state visit. This is really special.
This has never happened before. This is unprecedented.

Speaker 2 And I think that just symbolizes the strength of the relationship between us. So this is a very special letter.

Speaker 2 That's how you do it, Zelensky.

Speaker 2 It's a legend from the king.

Speaker 2 It's got a wax seal on it. It was brought here by Harry Potter's owl.

Speaker 2 What a delight!

Speaker 2 The king is throwing you a ball. You'll be the bell of the ball.
And then I'll sweep your chimney.

Speaker 2 Zelensky shouldn't have gone in there with Russia hasn't abided by any ceasefire agreements, so we can't trust them. He should have gone in there with a dessert cart and a Kyiv hotel opportunity.

Speaker 2 So this meeting has deeply wounded America's alliance with Ukraine, as well as the rest of Europe. And the punditocracy is having a hard time figuring out the strategy.

Speaker 2 I worry that the president president is actually not interested in a deal about Ukraine,

Speaker 2 but I don't understand it. The question now, Jim, is what happens in Europe?

Speaker 1 How does this make America great again?

Speaker 2 It just does not make any sense. You poor dumb bastards.

Speaker 2 It makes perfect sense

Speaker 2 if only you watched professional wrestling.

Speaker 2 Do you get it? It was

Speaker 2 a heel turn.

Speaker 2 I'll explain it again.

Speaker 2 It was a heel turn designed to create the alliance Trump always wanted in the first place. What's to understand?

Speaker 2 Trump and the Republicans like Putin better.

Speaker 2 Just listen to Putin.

Speaker 2 The radical neoliberalism destroying traditional values,

Speaker 2 the obsessive emphasis on race,

Speaker 2 modern cancel culture, it turns into reverse discrimination, reverse racism.

Speaker 2 But they invented five or six genders, transformers, trans.

Speaker 2 You see, I do not even understand what it is.

Speaker 2 Share toilets for boys and girls.

Speaker 2 Cats marrying dogs.

Speaker 2 Will and grace reboot? I mean, come on.

Speaker 2 It sounds like Putin is primarying Marjorie Taylor Greene from the right,

Speaker 2 a woman who, by the way, gives up the whole point of this realignment.

Speaker 4 The Ukrainian government is attacking Christians. Russia is not doing that.
They're not attacking Christianity. As a matter of fact, they seem to be protecting it.

Speaker 2 By bombing other Christians.

Speaker 2 So everyone's wondering, why isn't Trump aligning himself with the West?

Speaker 2 In his mind, he is.

Speaker 2 Western civilization, not Europe. To most of us, Russia is not that

Speaker 2 because we, and historically everyone, has used the West to mean Western values.

Speaker 2 Europe represents the expansion of liberties advocated by great Enlightenment thinkers like Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau. But to MAGA, this is Europe.
It's f ⁇ ing gay.

Speaker 2 Super gay.

Speaker 2 When MAGA talks about Western civilization, they mean the Knights Templar.

Speaker 2 Still pretty f ⁇ ing gay.

Speaker 2 I got to say.

Speaker 2 But excitingly so.

Speaker 2 But that's the thing.

Speaker 2 It's not democracy versus dictatorship or capitalism versus communism anymore. It's woke versus unwoke.
And Russia is not woke. They're very...
tired. They're comatose.

Speaker 2 It wasn't decided in a particularly volatile meeting on Friday. You got to give credit where credit is due to MAGA architect Steve Bannon.
They've been working on taking out the EU for a while now.

Speaker 2 It's a global revolt. It's a zeitgeist.
We're on the right side of history. The beating heart of the globalist project is in Brussels.

Speaker 2 If I drive the stake through the vampire, the whole thing will start to dissipate. And we'll call it the movement or the cause or something like that.
And that's literally when we take over the EU.

Speaker 2 Holy shit. What a concise, centrally planned social engineering scheme.

Speaker 2 But here we are, the end result of a scripted arc that culminates in America betraying its old alliance for the lore of a strongman partnership that carves up the world's rich bounties and places classic democratic values behind transactional convenience.

Speaker 2 So say it with me, conspiracy theorists. By design, it's a new world

Speaker 2 order. So, Europe, sadly,

Speaker 2 if I may.

Speaker 2 When we come back, Matthew Desmond's here. Don't go away.

Speaker 2 Welcome back to the Daily Show. My guest tonight,

Speaker 2 he's a sociologist at Princeton University and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted. His latest book is called Poverty by America.
Please welcome to the program, Matthew Desmond, sir.

Speaker 2 Thanks for being here.

Speaker 2 Let me say this.

Speaker 2 Fabulous book. Thank you.
Filled with such interesting research and

Speaker 2 unusual and I think really interesting ideas. I mean,

Speaker 2 does America require poverty to function in the way that we do? Is it a requirement of our society?

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, I don't think so. No, no, no, I mean,

Speaker 2 does the system we run, do they require in the capitalist system, people in poverty to function at maximum profit?

Speaker 3 I think a lot of us do benefit from poverty in ways we don't realize, right? We soak the poor in the labor market, the housing market.

Speaker 3 We continue to have a government that gives the most to families that need it the least by subsidizing affluence instead of fighting poverty.

Speaker 3 We continue to live in segregated lives. A lot of us are connected to that problem, but it also means we're connected to the solution.
I don't think we have to live with all this poverty in America.

Speaker 2 This system can work. You say something in the book that blew my mind, which is there's a part in there where you talk about the tax burden.
Yeah. And if we just collected the taxes that were owed,

Speaker 2 it would account for $1. something trillion dollars.
And your calculation of how we could end poverty in this country was how much money?

Speaker 3 So if you take everyone below the poverty line and lift them above it, that's about $177 billion a year. And it's a super rough estimate, but it gives us a sense of what we're talking about.

Speaker 3 when we're talking about ending poverty, because that's so utterly attainable for us, right? That's less than 1% of our GDP. Right.
So a study came out that showed that if the top 1%

Speaker 3 of Americans just paid all the taxes they owed.

Speaker 2 Just the ones they owed.

Speaker 3 Just the ones they owed and not got taxed at a higher rate, just paid what they owed, we would net about $175 billion a year. So we could just about close the poverty gap.

Speaker 2 Just with and without levying other taxes, just collecting what we need. Right.

Speaker 3 I mean, so like...

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 yeah, right. Yeah.
Because, like, when you say that, I just go, no.

Speaker 2 Right. That cannot, that can't be.
Right.

Speaker 2 But be. Right.

Speaker 2 That's insane. And it's not, the one thing I will say, it's not like we don't spend money on alleviating poverty.
We do. The budget for America was, what, 3.7 trillion 10 years ago.

Speaker 2 Now it's like $7 trillion.

Speaker 2 We do spend the money. Are we just spending it

Speaker 2 inefficiently?

Speaker 3 So I think we have to recognize that the things that we are doing to fight poverty now really, really matter. Medicaid, food stamps, you know, housing assistance, these are life-savers, right?

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 3 these things, these programs are lifting millions of folks above the poverty line every year.

Speaker 3 We also have to recognize that we have to do more, you know, because the problem is getting a lot worse.

Speaker 3 So over the last 50 years, we've had wages stagnate for too many workers. We've had housing costs soar.

Speaker 3 We now have the lowest wages, some of the lowest wages in the industrialized world, in the richest country in the history of the world.

Speaker 2 Our poverty levels are higher than almost all other countries in the industrial world.

Speaker 3 They're not just higher, like our child poverty rate is double what it is in Canada, Germany, South Korea. You go to Europe, Europeans have this phrase like American-style deprivation.

Speaker 2 So, it's I don't even want to know what the German word for that is.

Speaker 2 But sure, it's very long and sounds like someone has bronchitis. Right.

Speaker 2 But this is the part that's shocking. We've done things.
I'm going to go back to the pandemic. There was the era,

Speaker 2 the rent assistance program

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 the child tax

Speaker 2 credits. Poverty dropped in the pandemic when people were really suffering

Speaker 2 by what percent?

Speaker 3 So the third rescue plan, the third rescue bill under Biden

Speaker 3 signed it in March, right?

Speaker 3 We dropped child poverty by 44%

Speaker 3 in six months because of that intervention.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 we naturally, at that point, had to end it very quickly. Right.
That program.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 3 Well, a lot of that because we were quiet.

Speaker 2 We were quiet.

Speaker 3 You know, we dropped evictions to the lowest they've been ever on record. We did the most for poor kids we've done since the war on poverty in the Great Society.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 3 there was not a lot of us saying, this is the new America that we want. We weren't writing our congressperson.
We weren't talking to our neighbor about it.

Speaker 2 We were quiet.

Speaker 3 And in our silence, like 5 million more kids got tossed into poverty the next year.

Speaker 2 And so I think the...

Speaker 2 Is it a question of

Speaker 2 when we think about, we always think like, well, for people below the poverty line, there's a ton of programs for them.

Speaker 2 But I'm a little bit above it, and my parents are getting older and my kids are going to school and I'm in a tight squeeze and quite frankly I don't want any resources that I might have to pay into and are there too many people even above poverty who are struggling but feel like

Speaker 2 I'm not getting any value on my return for tax dollars. Isn't there a little resource guarding and by the way, not without cause?

Speaker 3 Yeah, there's something to that.

Speaker 3 But one thing that blew me away, I think the thing that blew me away writing this book is that if you look at everything the government does for us, all those poverty programs that flow to the poorest families, like food stamps,

Speaker 3 social insurance like social security, but also tax breaks. And you got to count tax breaks.
You know, they cost the government money and they put money in my pocket.

Speaker 3 If you add all that up, you learn that the average family in the bottom 20% of the income distribution, so our poorest families, they're receiving about $26,000 a year from the government.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 So the average family in the top 20%, our richest families, they're receiving about $35,000 a year from the government.

Speaker 2 Say that again?

Speaker 3 So, this is the true nature of our welfare state. They're getting about 40%

Speaker 3 more than the poorest families.

Speaker 3 And then we have like the audacity, the shamelessness to look at a program that would like reduce child poverty or make sure all of us had access to a dentist and be like, gosh, how can we afford it?

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 2 You know? Here's where they go with that.

Speaker 2 And this is the thing that I would like you to talk about, which is what they would say is oh yeah but the top 10% 20% they pay all the taxes I don't think people understand

Speaker 2 what a regressive tax system we really have for people not just at poverty but working class middle class that comes from sales taxes and everything people pay much more percentage of their income at the lower levels even though it's not federally taxed.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 3 So, you know, a lot of folks just look at that income tax and they'll say the poor aren't paying taxes. But that's like counting calories only by counting what you had for breakfast.
Right.

Speaker 3 You know, and so if you look in the whole tax structure, you see, you know, a lot of the poor, working class, middle class folks are paying the same tax levy as rich folks.

Speaker 3 The folks that have the lowest tax burden in the country, of course, are richest families. Makes no sense.

Speaker 2 But we're not bad people. No.

Speaker 2 So what is going wrong? Is it, if you were Doge, if you were there to say,

Speaker 2 how could we do this more efficiently to get people that are struggling to alleviate that? Because in many other countries, they do do that.

Speaker 2 What would you say?

Speaker 3 So I think we got to do three things. We've got to deepen our investments in fighting poverty.
We've got to get back to those big, bold programs that we had in the Great Society.

Speaker 3 We saw what we could do in COVID.

Speaker 2 What were some of those programs that you would say?

Speaker 3 So we expanded Social Security. We created Medicaid and Medicare.
We expanded educational opportunities. These are deep investments in the poorest families in the country.

Speaker 3 So we need to get back to that. We can fund that by fair tax implementation.

Speaker 3 So the IRS chair a few years ago told Congress that we lose a trillion dollars a year, a trillion, on tax cheating and evasion.

Speaker 2 A trillion. A trillion.
Yeah, those poor people are getting away with a ton. Right.

Speaker 2 A trillion a year.

Speaker 2 And alleviating poverty would be $200 billion a year.

Speaker 2 What? Right.

Speaker 2 Is there something in the system of federalism that means those dollars to the poor?

Speaker 2 Like if Walmart has a $5 billion or $10 billion profit and yet still a lot of their workers are on public assistance or struggle who might not be below poverty line but just above it, how are we not penalizing them?

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 3 I think we need to move back. to that question, which I think gets this like second piece of the puzzle.
We need to have new ways of empowering the poor.

Speaker 3 We need to find a way to build worker power, to expand housing choice, to finally take on all the ways they're getting financially soaked by banks and payday lenders in the country.

Speaker 3 And so this is a way... Why is that so hard?

Speaker 2 Is it that poor people need better lobbyists? Is that what this is? Like, how does this get done?

Speaker 3 They need better choice, so they're not accepting the best bad option all the time. So if you think of like, how are we going to build worker power in this economy?

Speaker 3 So now you got to go to one Amazon warehouse or one Starbucks location at a time, right?

Speaker 3 Remember when we were losing our minds because one Amazon warehouse in Staten Island maybe organized a few summers ago? We were like, oh my gosh.

Speaker 3 But we have no chance of organizing all our warehouse workers or barisas like this. So we have to have different approaches.
So the new labor movement is saying, let's organize entire sectors.

Speaker 3 Let's get everyone in food of hospitality.

Speaker 3 If they take a vote, then that could trigger a process where the Secretary of Labor is like, all right, let's bring worker representatives, corporate representatives, let's hash something out that covers every single worker in that sector.

Speaker 3 So this is what policy wants call sectoral bargaining. And it's a way to organize all those kind of warehouse workers, all those barisas of UNGO.

Speaker 2 Is there something too to getting the government to value labor again in the way that they value capital? Right. Capital being taxed at

Speaker 2 gains that are much lower. There's a lot of rules that ease capital.

Speaker 2 Stock buybacks. You're only

Speaker 2 have to answer to shareholders. Is there a way to get workers in on that? Because that seems like where the accumulation of wealth seems the greatest.

Speaker 2 How do we plug labor into that stream without necessarily killing the stream, but letting it really

Speaker 2 getting them into the flow of it? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Why don't we put workers on corporate boards, for example?

Speaker 3 Easy.

Speaker 2 Easy. Why do they fight that? And would sectoral bargaining get that done?

Speaker 3 It could move us closer to something more like a capitalism we deserve, a capitalism that serves the people, not the other way around.

Speaker 3 And a lot of the times I think the ideas we have about growth are just wrong. You know, if you rewind the clock, 1960s, we had a higher corporate tax rate, about 50%.

Speaker 3 About one in three of us were belonging to a union. And we were much more productive as an economy than we are now.

Speaker 3 And we're kind of fed this like lie that like we got to slash these unions, we got to slash this corporate tax break, and we're going to get the economic growth. And we win in that bargain.

Speaker 3 And we got the inequality, but we didn't get the growth.

Speaker 2 But don't you think the financialization of our economy changed that calculus? You know, we used to think about IBM, the blue chip companies.

Speaker 2 You would invest in them and they would have steady growth and they would give you dividends and you would work for them for 40 years.

Speaker 2 You know, I was thinking, you know, if you were to reasonably watch the news networks,

Speaker 2 the little bug in the corner is the stock market.

Speaker 2 If you go to a hospital, they plug you into a machine, it gives you your pulse, your blood pressure,

Speaker 2 all that. You would be well within your rights to think, that is the measure of my health.
I'm looking at that.

Speaker 2 When you watch that, you would think, oh, that must be the measure of our economy's health.

Speaker 2 Is there a way to educate the public that that's not actually our economy? That's just a

Speaker 2 tiny fraction that goes mostly to, I don't know, the top 10% own 50% of the wealth in the stock market. What other measures would give people a better sense of how we're failing? Right.

Speaker 3 Like, could we have a ticker that's about, you know, the number of families that went to a food pantry this month to eat, right? A ticker that's like the number of families that lost our homes.

Speaker 3 Like a ticker about the number of kids that can't afford a winter coat this winter, you know? Yeah. And kind of tracking that is like the real, the cumulative, the people.

Speaker 2 How many people have parents that need elder care, but it's squeezing them because their kids are going to cut? Like, give a sense of that. By the way, I reopened that cut just by hitting like that.

Speaker 2 Oh, man. Just by doing that.
I can't even do this anymore.

Speaker 2 Are these, critique it now from the left a little bit. Yeah.
Are there things that the left advocates for or does that make this realignment harder?

Speaker 3 I just don't think think the left has fully committed to poverty abolitionism. You know?

Speaker 3 You know, we know where our local organic cucumber came from, you know? But we don't.

Speaker 2 Wait, we do?

Speaker 2 We do. Wait, is it written on there?

Speaker 2 Do I have to hold it under a blue light? How do we do it? We know. All right.

Speaker 3 We know.

Speaker 3 We don't know how much the farmhand got paid picking it. No.

Speaker 3 You know, if you go to London, you go to the independent stores, they have a sticker on the door and they say, this store pays a living wage

Speaker 3 now our stores we've got a lot of stickers

Speaker 3 but we often don't have that one you know and so I think that more of us have to just commit you're saying we've got to put up poverty has no home here signs

Speaker 3 I think that I think we I think the left needs to get more serious about economic justice

Speaker 2 and do you think so I always worry

Speaker 2 Here's what I always worry about, and I worry about this with climate. It always comes down to for some reason on the left, you people just have to be better people, and that'll put pressure on it.

Speaker 2 I feel like the whole point of joining as a society is that

Speaker 2 is that a system can alleviate that. Like, I just don't know how we get out of it without it coming from legislation.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 I mean, when you say, like, we've got to call our congressmen, I'm like, I've been in that situation where you call congressmen. It does diddly poo.
Right.

Speaker 2 Like, they're not even answering, and half the time they don't even know the ins and outs of what you're talking about.

Speaker 2 Like, the country's held together by hundreds and hundreds of legislative aides that are working tirelessly. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Isn't there,

Speaker 2 can't we

Speaker 2 present them?

Speaker 2 I would love to see you lobby. in Washington because I feel like you have interesting ideas that haven't tried.
We're not walking down the same tired path.

Speaker 2 Is that a possibility or no? Are they open to that?

Speaker 3 Of me going to Washington?

Speaker 2 Yes! But people like you. No, no,

Speaker 3 I'd have to get a time.

Speaker 3 I'd have to turn.

Speaker 2 Did they call you? Did they at least ask? Yep. Yeah.
For real? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But I think, you know, that we definitely need more political movements, we need new legislation, but we also need more skin in the game, I think, as a country.

Speaker 3 So like, let's think about segregation, right? So segregation is upheld by zoning laws. It's upheld by history.
But it's also upheld like

Speaker 3 at soccer games, you know, where your buddy turns you in and you're like, you know, you saw that building.

Speaker 3 We're not going to build that thing, right? It's upheld in little...

Speaker 2 Oh, you mean NIMBY? The sort of like, we all want economic justice. Yeah.

Speaker 2 For those of you,

Speaker 2 if you wouldn't mind.

Speaker 2 But doesn't that speak to that the systems then have to...

Speaker 2 Here's what I would say.

Speaker 2 We think of poverty as a vice.

Speaker 2 and we think of entitlements as

Speaker 2 a moral hazard for vice.

Speaker 2 Why don't we view it as investment? Why don't we view,

Speaker 2 like, what a great economic engine for this country to take areas that have suffered entrenched poverty and rejuvenate them

Speaker 2 in a different way.

Speaker 3 They're huge investments. So look at food stamps, right? Yes.
A billion dollars dedicated to food stamps gets you $1.5 billion in our GDP.

Speaker 3 If you look at what it does for kids, the long-term economic and health benefit for kids, it's a huge return on investment. It's about $1 in food stamps gets you $62 coming back to you in a society.

Speaker 3 Meanwhile, right, when we cut the corporate tax rate, the benefits that we get are a lot less. We get a lot less than we were promised often when we're doing that.

Speaker 3 So investing in American people and stabilizing communities that need it the most is the best way for for all of us.

Speaker 2 I got to tell you, that out of all that argument, that to me was the most concise and powerful because, and it's one that I really haven't heard, which is, you don't understand, like, we're not just giving people money, we're investing and getting a huge return.

Speaker 2 And all these corporate subsidies are not getting us a good return.

Speaker 3 Right, exactly.

Speaker 2 That's fabulous, right there.

Speaker 2 Is anyone watching this?

Speaker 2 I really appreciate it. This book, if you get a chance,

Speaker 2 it will blow you, it will open your eyes to a system that can often be well-meaning, but not function in the manner that it purports to be functioning.

Speaker 2 And it's really a wonderfully accessible journey through that. So I really appreciate

Speaker 2 the book. Be sure to check out Poverty by America, Matthew Desmond.
We're going to take a quick break at all.

Speaker 2 That was.

Speaker 2 that's up for tonight. Before we go, we're going to check in with your host for the rest of the week, Mr.
Michael Costa. Michelson.

Speaker 2 What do you got for us? Oh, John.

Speaker 2 For the rest of the week, John, that the Trump tariffs are about to kick in, and I'm worried about my wallet, specifically the money in my wallet, not my driver's license.

Speaker 2 That's been suspended for years.

Speaker 2 Doug, you're correct. Tariffs on Canada and Mexico are set to take effect, I think, tonight even.
Well, exactly. And so that's why I'm stocking up.

Speaker 2 I just bought 4,000 pounds of Maryland crab and 10,000 cans of Arizona iced tea. So I'm ready.

Speaker 2 Yeah, those are all American products. So shouldn't you have bought like Canadian and Mexican products?

Speaker 2 You know, this might be all that crab and iced tea talking, but I don't think I know how tariffs work. All right.
Microcast, everybody. It'll all work out.
Here it is. Your moment is at.

Speaker 2 Everyone knows the history here, the back and forth. We understand that.
We all understand that. But the question now is, can we get them to a table to negotiate? That's our goal.

Speaker 2 Don't do anything to disrupt that. And that's what Zelensky did, unfortunately, is he found every opportunity to try to Ukraine Splain on every issue.

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