Big Bullsh*t Bill Moves Closer to Reality

Hey, everybody.

Welcome back to the Find Out podcast.

This is Tim Fullerton.

We are down one today.

Luke had a previous engagement.

So

if you're listening to us for the F-bombs, you might have a few less to listen to this week.

So I'm sorry about that.

But we have lots of things that the four of us will talk about.

And the biggest one is the Trump tax bill that is slowly making its way through the Senate.

And in fact,

by the time you listen to this tomorrow morning, because we're doing this on Monday, the Senate may, may have passed their version.

That doesn't mean the bill is done.

And because there's a reconciliation process that needs to happen with this, but they've made the bill even worse than the Republicans had it.

I think at this point, we're looking at $900 billion of cuts to Medicaid, which translates into 16 million Americans losing their health insurance.

Likely 300 hospitals across the country will be closed and 500 nursing homes at least.

These are the estimates that have come up.

Yeah, Tim, Tim, but does it help you to know that Lisa Murkowski has exempted Alaskans from all this pain?

Yeah.

Does that help?

No,

no.

And I'm from a statement.

Do you want to move to Alaska?

No, I'm from a state that may get some car votes too, which is Maine for Susan Collins because she has an imaginary moderate reputation to uphold up there as she runs for re-election next year.

That was something earlier we were talking about hot takes, and my hot take is that Susan Collins has pulled the wool over Maynard's eyes for 30 years and pretending that she is a moderate when she absolutely isn't.

That's a cold take, Tim.

That's a cold.

Yeah, I don't think I'm, I don't think I'm, I don't think I'm at risk.

Just because it's Maine.

Yes, Maine.

Yes, Maine.

Always cold.

That was a pun.

Sorry.

I know.

I can't tell you how many times people are like, do you have electricity up there?

Like, yes, yes.

We are just like everybody else.

Anyways, so let's all.

I'm going to, for Luke's purpose, let's talk about how fucked up this bill is.

Yeah, let's hear it.

Let's hear all the bad things.

Why is any, why are we passing this bill, by the way?

That's the question I had.

It's like, I made a video this morning about like the truth is the, like, if you're just the average Republican voter, you're sort of like trading

tens of millions of people's health insurance and livelihood for a couple hundred bucks in tax savings every year.

Like, that's it.

Like, I likened it to like, you get like a free Visio flat screen pretty much for, you know, for the trouble of many millions of lives.

For those who don't know, Visio is like the cheapest, crappiest version of the TV you can buy.

Yeah, that's really what you get.

I mean, like, you get nothing.

And it's, it's remarkable to me how good Republicans are at pitching a terrible deal and making it sound awesome to people because they're like, ooh, money.

It's like, okay, but how much money?

Like, yeah, wealthy people will make a ton of money.

Like, you know, even for my family, like, this will be helpful financially.

I don't want it.

It's because it's terrible for other people.

I didn't need it.

And it's just one of those things where like, we've done this before.

We've done this stupid deal before.

We're like, hey, make wealthy people wealthier and make poor people poorer.

Let's see how it goes.

Like, we've seen how it goes.

It's terrible.

So what are we doing?

It's the same thing every, I mean, it's the same as Bush's 2001 tax cuts, his 2003 tax cuts, Trump's 2017 tax cuts.

I'm looking at the 10-year cost versus 10-year savings, you know, and almost $5 trillion is just the tax cut extensions.

And then

the 10-year savings, $1 trillion by cutting Medicaid.

And then you've got green energy and the environment, student loans, food benefits, and other health care, those, and the natural resources.

So literally every dollar is coming from something we need in the future.

You know, lo and behold, giving it to billionaires who literally don't have anything else to buy.

You know,

they don't need money.

They don't.

The people in this call and this podcast, you know, we largely don't need to be, you know, we don't need a 5%

whatever.

Sorry, I'm a shit show today.

Jesus Christ.

Got like a

coffee in the wrong pipe and everything.

We haven't been here for five minutes.

It's just the bill, but in the podcast form, it's just a dumpster fire.

That's true.

I mean, if there was any evidence that making wealthy people wealthier was going to make regular people wealthier, I'd be fine with it, but there just isn't.

And that's the struggle for me.

And the other thing that really bothers me is that within the bill, there are some provisions that are smart, but they are overshadowed by the overarching arc of the bill being horrendous.

But, like, raising the standard of deduction for elderly people, that's a good idea.

Like, there's good ideas in this thing.

They're just buried under a mountain of terrible ideas.

And that's, that's like Trump in a nutshell to me.

Occasionally, there's like, oh, that's an interesting idea.

And it's buried under like, what the fuck is that?

You know, it's just you can't focus on it.

So for me, that's very frustrating.

Like, as just an American, I want to make sure that people are doing better.

And I don't really give a shit if the idea comes to the right or the left.

I just want it to be good ideas.

And I don't think that right now we have a litany of good ideas in this bill.

It's like three good ideas and 17,000 terrible ideas.

I think where the Democrats have gone wrong is

very typical.

There is no unified messaging around this.

Everybody is calling it something different, like the big murder bill, the Republican bad bill.

Because we have not, with 10 years of Trumpism, we haven't figured out how to reduce something to a slogan and just fucking stick with it.

That's why this bill is going to pass.

Like, if we could just keep it fucking simple and not talk about every fucking piece of it, just keep it simple, this bill would not pass.

Like, that's it.

Like, what is the name?

What is the...

What is the alternative name for this bill?

Right.

Donald Trump figured out a way to get every fucking newscaster to say the words big, beautiful.

And Democrats have had no answer to that.

And I think our country is going to be fucked because Democrats don't understand communications.

That's true.

I actually think Big Murder Bill would have been a good one to use because, I mean, look, like if you're going to close 500 nursing homes, you're going to close 300 hospitals, you're going to take snap benefits away from poor, poor working class.

By the way, this isn't just these like this this this imaginary belief that snap benefits are just for lazy people who are sitting at home no that is not right at all and you're going to also then take that money that they're spending in their local communities and give it to people like jeff bezos who just spent 50 million dollar on a wedding like clearly that guy doesn't need more money and i think rich you made a good point like the the republicans started doing this in 1980s with ronald reagan where they came up with trickle-down economics which the idea which without looking at any data or any evidence, okay, it's you give more to the top, and then it will filter down to everybody else.

We have now tried this at least four times: Reagan's tax cut in the 80s, and then the three that Rich mentioned.

It never stimulated the economy for any sustained period of time.

You get a little bit of a bump at the beginning, but this one is even more regressive than I think any of the other tax bills because it is almost nobody making six figures and below is going to get very much from this at all.

And if you're on $100,000, you're not going to get anything.

And on the other end of it, you're going to lose things that you're going to have to either borrow money for or just not do.

Like this is not going to stimulate the economy in any way.

In fact, it's going to decimate some local economies.

Like if a hospital closes and then all of a sudden you don't have snap benefits and maybe you worked a job at the hospital, like the, and these are in red areas too.

This is the thing that kills me.

It's going to be in areas where people are just going to get completely screwed over.

You know, the Republicans are going to get screwed over by their constituents.

But there's the other element of it, too, just to get a little more detailed on the Medicaid side of things.

The work requirement is a very interesting thing because they pitch it as like, look, we're going to stimulate the economy and people are going to have to go to work.

And it's going.

The truth is, a ton of these people who are unemployed, the jobs don't exist where they live.

So they're going to get screwed over by a provision that they can't control.

Like what if there are not, like if you live in West Virginia, it's not swimming in job opportunities out there and you're on Medicaid and you need to get a job to get it.

Good luck.

You lose your Medicaid.

That's a terrible idea to get, and especially for parents, like the provisions the Senate put in there for single parents.

It's insane what they're doing.

It's just, that's the kind of stuff that people don't, like, because, like Chris said, the sloganing of the Republican Party makes people not know that these are parts of the bill.

And then they find out down the line and go, oh my God, if only I'd known.

Well, and I think this is This is where I want our listeners.

I want the Democratic Party to come back around to is,

yes, they are going to, they'll pass something.

They'll pass something that is called the Big Beautiful Bill by Donald Trump, and he'll call it the greatest policy that has ever been passed in a generation or in the history of America.

And he'll have banners and a party and maybe another military parade.

This is a budget reconciliation bill.

Like it's not even a policy bill because everything they put in there that is supposed to be policy gets stripped out by the Senate parliamentarian who is, I'm not even religious.

She is doing God's work.

She might actually be God.

This is a woman who's been in this position since 2012.

She's gone through the Obamacare attempts to pass and repeal.

She's gone through January 6th.

She's made it through all these different speakers.

She serves at the pleasure of the Senate majority leader.

That's it.

And I said speaker, but the Senate majority leader.

John Thune has kept her in that position because she's so goddamn good at what she does.

She is the reason that, I don't know, I look through a very long list of everything that's in and out of this bill right now and there are at least 20 to 25 sometimes multi-billion sometimes hundred billion dollar items that have been struck stricken struck from the strucken they were they were struck in from the bill um because the senate senate parliamentarian said we our rules prevent us from allowing this to be voted on with a simple majority vote.

And

I don't even want people to, I don't want Trump to know this.

Don't tell him.

Nobody tell Trump.

But Jon Thune could dismiss her at any time he wants and put in somebody that Trump would love who would just say, like, nope, there are no rules.

And yet, and yet, so like, I do want people to know the Senate is hacking this way, way, way back, partially out of rules and partially because some of the people are trying to not be terrible.

And so when he does say, hey, we passed this thing and it's the greatest ever, understand that it is maybe 15% 15%

of the malice and cruelty that they originally wanted to put into it.

It doesn't make it good, but it does make it something that is not as bad as it could have been.

And it's something that we can address when it comes around.

And we, if, if people just do the right thing and we vote Democrats into power.

A lot of this stuff, it's over 10 years or it doesn't start for two years or three years, like the green energy.

Some of those things are looking like it's maybe going to be to 27, 2027.

There are ways that we can get way back out ahead of this.

And so I don't want people to panic and freak out when they say, you know, when they see that he got his big, beautiful bill passed.

I'm going to hard disagree with that.

It's still a multi-trillion dollar bill.

It still fundamentally reshapes the, the, I mean, it, it furthers the already terrible wealth inequality that we've got in this country.

100%.

And it may, it puts the

blame on future Democrats who have to fix the bill in the first place because right now there's no evidence that this is going to

increase the number of jobs.

It's not going to help companies expand.

But raising taxes, absolutely, I guarantee you, the fucking data is going to be there saying, oh, it's going to be a catastrophe.

We're going to see the stock market slump.

We're going to see millions of job loss.

Like that is going to be the effect of fixing the bill.

So once this hole is dug, there's no fill in it.

Like it's just not realistic to say that we're going to undo the damage.

And,

you know,

like, I'm not going to do the math here and try to say what percentage of the bill is surviving,

but enough is going to go through with the tax code that it is going to strip our children's future of stability.

And

that is the point, right?

Well, and I think that

to be, you know, Chris, I agree.

I mean, the challenge here is like, even if we take the House back by 25 votes next year, and even somehow we take back the Senate, we would probably be sitting at 51.

And

there is no way that as long as Donald Trump is president, that we'll be able to reverse that.

There will be no overriding of veto.

I don't think there's been an override of veto in

Congress in decades.

Very rarely you hear about it in the state level, but never at the federal level.

Like it's really 2029 is the earliest.

And that is a, there is a lot of damage.

And I think the CBO estimates, even with the things that they stripped, is still $5 trillion deficit in this and taking money out of.

poor children's hands, literally taking food out of their hands and giving more money to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who, funny enough, hates this bill and actually launched another tirade against it yesterday because they're phasing out the, I mean, I agree with him in this particular sense, but they're phasing out of the green energy tax credits, which is insane, by the way, and giving it to oil and gas companies, which Trump literally said, I think this weekend, solar is ugly.

We're going to coal.

And it's like,

is coal?

There's no cold.

There's no cold.

The jobs aren't coming back.

No, it's like going back to Chris's point that Democrats could so easily make this a messaging win.

All they got to do is like, this will make us lose to China.

You know who's heavily investing in green energy?

Fucking China, because it's the future.

They know it's the future.

It's economically smart.

They're killing us on it now.

They're going to continue to kill us on the future when it's more necessary.

That's it.

Simple.

You want to lose to China?

Go with this shit.

You just need slogans around it.

So that's the China energy bill.

Well, Zach.

Democrats have spent more time distancing themselves from Mimdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, than they have been fighting against the tax bill this weekend, which shows you where the priorities are.

And even Senator Gillibrand made this horrible statement about Mimdani this weekend, talking about him supporting jihad or something.

And then she claimed that he misspoke.

It was like, yeah, yeah, it was, I might be getting that a little bit wrong, but she didn't walk back her statement.

I am someone who, when I was in community college 10 years ago or so, like 2015, I wrote an essay for my public speaking course.

Well, not an essay, a speech on why I wanted Senator Chillibrand to be president.

A year later, I worked in her office, and let me tell you, there is no one who can change your mind like Senator Chillibrand.

The closer you get to her, the more you realize that she shouldn't be in office.

She is the epitome of

this

protected snobbery.

Everything that was a caricature about Hillary Clinton, and I was proud to support Hillary Clinton when she, you know,

ran for president.

But every caricature, like every problematic,

like

idea about who Hillary Clinton was, that is what Senator Gillibrand like took on as her personality.

She is someone who, and as someone who, I was just an intern, right?

Like I was, I was a 30-something year old intern, so it was a little different of an experience for me than it is for the average person.

But I resent her so much from my time in that office because of the way that she treated her staff and her constituents.

The intern class that I came through, I got to watch the way that I stayed for the whole summer.

I got to see how every intern class, there's usually at least two throughout the summer, how they get treated.

These are young people.

They're typically in between their

college years.

And these are people who could be turned into alcolytes for,

if not the party, that specific politician.

Senator Gillibrand is the only senator who just didn't meet and have coffee with her interns because she just sees people as below them.

That is like the experience that came out of

working for her for a summer.

And I have seen, since I came to that recognition, I have seen it in everything that she does.

So I am not surprised to hear her being a racist or Islamophobic against a very popular politician in the state of New York.

So I just looked this up, and

this is in Rolling Stone, but New York Senator, quote unquote, misspoke when she falsely claimed that Zoran Mamdani condoned, and I quote, global jihad.

What she meant to say was

global intifada, which is the thing that they're coming.

And actually, and I believe in Arabic, that stands for revolution.

And unfortunately, it has been turned into something different in this country.

And we're not going to win that messaging war.

And I think Zoran probably should figure out a way to walk that back because that's just a loss.

I get what he's saying.

I want to go back to

the bill

just real quick

because I think it's important to just draw attention to what is happening in the Republican Party right now.

We have seen this show so many times before.

This is what they do.

They cut taxes.

They cut taxes.

They cut taxes.

They say it's going to pay for itself with growth.

It never does.

And there were actually two cuts in the 80s that Reagan oversaw.

And in both cases, whether you call it supply side or trickle down, they said the growth will pay for the, and this just doesn't happen.

The growth will pay for the tax cuts because

it'll stimulate the economy.

It never does.

Every nonpartisan, every right-wing

analysis, it all shows the same thing.

It all shows that maybe 15 to 20% absolute best case scenario of the costs of these cuts is offset by future growth, but that's an 80 to 85 percent loss.

And sometimes it's quite a bit worse than that.

And And so that is what they do.

But what the, what's different right now is that they did this in 2017 and they just got away with it.

It was like it was Trump's big giant tax cut.

It was, hey, let's do this.

Let's just add, he added 3 trillion to the deficit in his first term before COVID hit.

And

we had a $1 trillion

annual deficit before COVID hit because of his tax cuts.

Nobody fought him on that.

Now they are fighting him.

The Rand Pauls and a handful of people in the House are just saying, you're not going to be on the ballot when I'm re-elected next.

You know, when I'm, when my name is next on the ballot, 2026, 28, you're not going to be there to carry me.

I don't care if you threaten me, if you primary me.

I have to stand on the thing that I used to say that I stood on.

And so the fiscal conservatives are fighting him.

And that is why they are pulling out trillion-dollar cuts to Medicaid.

They know that is a disaster.

It is a disaster for them politically.

It's a disaster for their constituents and it's really not the best place to go find money that's the military budget if you really want to go find money that doesn't need to be spent but they're not going to do that because that would piss off republican voters so they're going after medicaid and the environment and student loans because that is the safest place for them to stick it to people to make them eat some of this cost but you're still seeing Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins and a handful of, I mean, Tom Tillis is retiring because he wants to stand with his constituents and because he doesn't want to deal with Trump fighting back, you know, and endorsing a primary challenge.

So

they are making decisions now that they didn't make in 2017 because they understand that Trump's power is on the way out.

He still has it.

He'll get something passed and it's going to be bad.

But we are seeing this infighting and the defections because Trump has just lost some of his mojo within the Republican Party.

I mean, I'm going to throw in a bit of a hot take here and we'll see.

And I hope I will obviously hope I'm right.

But I think we are seeing basically Trump at his peak power right now.

And I think, and Rich, you've actually written a lot about this.

And I think that once this bill passes, I think we're going to start seeing it slowly slip away.

I mean, Tom Tillis, who I have no love for,

I do not think has been a good senator at all, but he's basically retiring because of this bill.

I mean,

if you listen to what he was saying on the floor yesterday or Saturday or whenever it was, you know, he's like, I can't take this back to my constituents.

I mean, North Carolina is not a rich state.

It has rich areas, but like there is a lot of poverty in that state.

And he's like, he basically saying, like, I am going to go down with this, you know, I'm going to go down fighting to stop this bill

and basically hand Republicans a nightmare next year because the Democrats look like they've got an A-plus recruit.

He hasn't announced yet, but I think he's thinking about it, which is the former governor, Roy Cooper, who won twice as a Democrat and is super popular.

And I think he next year, that's going to be a really tough one.

And it's going to make Republicans spend money in a place that they normally wouldn't.

And then I also think all of the things that every one of you have said, like every Democrat in the country is going to be able to run on, you took money out of, out of poor kids, like mouth or food out of their mouths, and you shut these hospitals down, you killed these jobs.

It's going to be so easy to peg Donald Trump and the Republican Party with literally every problem this country has next year, whether that's right or wrong is different.

But like, this is politics and this is what you do.

Like, I just, I think this is, this is the beginning of a nightmare for him.

I, I want that to be true, but I don't think it is because I think in the end, a lot of the long-term effect of this won't be felt right away.

And when that's the case, essentially what happens is you have a messaging war between Republicans and Democrats, and Republicans win that messaging war 10 times out of 10.

And even if they have clearly a straight line drawn between the problem and them, they still find a way to make the line look jagged, and Democrats drew the line.

I so here's my, here's my take in general on this is that

the average person wakes up every single day in this country and it's the exact same as it was when Trump wasn't president.

It's the same as it is when Trump is president.

They don't feel the difference.

All they hear is Democrats saying shit like this, where they go, it's this big problem and it's going to be this problem and that problem and they're losing their health insurance.

The average person, that's not happening to them.

They're just not feeling it.

ICE isn't affecting their life.

These cuts won't affect their life.

They'll get a little extra money in their pocket pocket and they'll go on their merry way because they don't give a fuck about the person next door.

They care about themselves and that's it.

And the average person will not be hit by this in a substantial way.

You're saying average person.

You're saying average person.

The way I hear that, because I agree about a segment of the voting populace, is low information

swing, white swing voters.

Because that's a huge group of voters.

Oh, no, absolutely.

They decide elections.

You said average person.

I just want to make sure that.

Well, I don't think it's just why i mean like look the misinformation and the messaging war was one among hispanics as well in 2024 they shifted heavily towards donald trump because of that exact same tactic it's not just white people doing this it's but they're seeing ice you because you mentioned ice

but they don't even

But a lot of the Hispanic, like a lot of Hispanic people that I know who I talk to, they're in favor of what ICE is doing because they look at the illegal population as a drain on them individually and a, you know, a bad PR thing for them.

So it's more complex than this, but in the end, to me, it comes down to until the country is like flatlining.

I don't give the Democrats an advantage until they figure their shit out.

If Democrats were good with messaging, I'd be all about Tim's perspective, but they suck ass at it.

I agree.

Yes.

Obviously, we were talking about that before.

But I mean, if we're looking at history, there's two things running against Donald Trump's favor right now.

Midterms traditionally are favor of the opposing party.

And also, we went through this in the first term of Trump.

2017, he passed his tax cut, and then he got annihilated in 2018.

He lost places he shouldn't have lost, like all that.

And on this one in particular, I think it's a bit different.

And like, I'm not saying that this is, you're 100% wrong because I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying, but there are some immediate.

things that are that people will feel in this

snap benefits

and so like for all those people who voted in 2020 but didn't vote in 2024 i think you're going to see a spike of those people yeah and we have seen more trump regret votes videos and posts on social in this term than we did the last time.

So I'm not saying that Democrats are going to get their shit together.

I mean, some of this they're just going to trip into backwards and fall over themselves into the majority into the House.

That's my favorite way to win.

Yeah.

But, but I just think that there's too much damage in this bill for him to buck a historical trend and not lose the House next year.

That's definitely not.

I'm not saying that he will lose the House.

Like there's no question about it.

My mind, and Democrats will have to do literally nothing to have that happen because you're right.

The party that's not in power tends to do incredible.

Maybe a five-seat majority or whatever.

And Democrats also tend to turn out better in midterm elections than Republicans do in general.

So that I'm with.

Right.

But I think now's a good time for us to address a conspiracy theory that seems to be plaguing our comments.

Yes.

And that is the idea that this

bill is going to like cancel future elections.

That is not true.

There's zero truth to that.

But it is an idea that has caught on.

And the net effect of that is that people are spending their time and their energy focused on imaginary problems.

We're going to be facing more and more and more of that as time goes on, as tools like AI

become more advanced.

A friend of mine, a guy who goes by Angry Mail Vet right now, is facing down on TikTok, which is where we all met.

He's facing down an AI-based account that is using his image and his voice to convince people that that is the real authentic account.

And the AI voice, the AI image of him talking in his fucking car, like Luke's typical background, right?

It looks really fucking real.

If I didn't know this guy and that was my first impression, I see an account with 170,000 followers telling me that's the truth.

I would probably believe it and And I'd probably go and report the real account.

So that is just an example of the type of tools that are going to be used to distract us from fighting against the real problems that exist today.

And instead, to

spend our precious time, our greatest resource on things that are imaginary.

That's a really good point.

And this is why Democrats, progressives, or the left or whatever needs its own messaging apparatus, because we need to be able to combat this stuff.

I mean,

you bring up a really good point.

I mean, if you're just scrolling through TikTok, like most people on their for you page, you're not going to know like if it's like AI Chris or Real Chris, right?

Like it's a, it's, this is a real problem.

And Republicans are and folks internationally too, Russia and other places, are going to flood the zone with disinformation to get people off of the like the core points.

And the election thing is a perfect one.

The Constitution states that there needs to be elections.

You need a constitutional amendment.

There is nothing in there to cancel them.

There is some stuff at the state level, which will only affect state races that, like, if there was an emergency, the governor maybe be able to, but it wouldn't, doesn't affect Congress, House, Senate, presidential.

It has to happen every four years.

Now, you can talk about the integrity of those elections.

And I think in certain states that there, you know, there's maybe some questions about that.

But, you know,

our side has been consumed by some conspiracies.

And I will say this like Kamala One conspiracy is one of them, which is going to anger a lot of people.

There is zero evidence of that.

Congress certified the election.

There's no means to undo an election after Congress has certified it.

So like

and it won't.

And I still, because I agree, I'm getting comments from people saying like,

just wait, you know, just wait, just wait, just wait.

That's always, it's like the favorite.

It's like Trump's two weeks, you know.

Two weeks.

It's always, it's always just wait and we'll find out.

And then like, you know, then they'll throw them out.

Release the kraken.

We're going to release the kraken.

All this information.

It's like, what the fuck are you talking about?

Nothing's there.

Yeah.

I mean, I get, I get why people want it.

And I want to be clear: like, if I thought that there was fraud, even if there was no way of taking it back, I would be saying it.

I'd be screaming it at the top of my lungs.

Totally.

I've looked at it.

I've people have sent me PowerPoints from these groups that are doing these things.

I've looked at it.

First of all, it's so muddled that it's like, and it's all based on like this, the

electronic tallies being sent through Starlink, and then somebody is like

altering the totals and then blasting the back.

Like, if you knew how votes were counted in elections, you'd be like, no, like, or this thing about the Rockland County districts, not the whole Rockland County having no Kamala votes.

You know, that area, you know, why.

Like,

it happens.

So, like, these are those things that, you know, conspiracies always start with a grain of truth or something that seems reasonable, and then you pull on the thread and it falls apart.

And I, yeah.

Well, and back to this bill.

Um,

please, listeners, please like have a bullshit detector and put it to use because it's just like if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

If something sounds so scary that it would ruin the country, it probably won't.

Specifically, a budget reconciliation bill literally cannot have policy changes in it,

not to mention amendments to the Constitution, which would be required to actually change the cadence or the timing of elections.

Those are all built into the Constitution.

And so, like, are there bad people who would want to change that?

Obviously, yes, of course.

But, but when you see the Senate parliamentarian, I'm just going to pick a random one, stripping out something

gender

transition care, perfect.

Ban the use of Medicaid funds for gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors and adults.

The

Senate parliamentarian determined this provision does not comply with the chamber's rules and must be removed or modified.

So,

like, they're trying to save $2.6 billion on something Trump would love nothing more than to save 2.6 billion on.

And it's not going to happen because they're following the rules.

So like, please just bump the brakes before you panic, because it doesn't help anybody.

And like to you guys' point, it really does change the subject from the fact that millions of people, potentially, I think up to 16 million in the last estimate I saw

could lose their health insurance over the next 10 years because of the

because he's still obsessed with trying to gut Obamacare.

Like a lot of this Medicaid stuff is just, it has to do with the Medicare expansion and the, or Medicaid, sorry, Medicaid expansion and, and how people can get into it with

Obamacare.

And so like, these are real things that are happening.

So when we're talking about, you know, Rockland County, or we're talking about canceling elections, like

you look crazy like to the, to the people who, who aren't us, because I'm like, no, I get it.

He would, he would love to cancel elections.

But to moderate, low information voters are like, what the fuck is this person talking about?

Like they, you look crazy.

And then they're also not talking about the actual damage that this guy's out here doing.

I also want to just play that out for a second.

Just imagine for a second that there was that provision and they were pursuing it, right?

Which they're obviously not.

The amount of pushback from the American people on both sides of the aisle would be extreme.

Look at what happened with ICE in LA.

Trump changed course overnight.

On, yeah, he's, oh, hold on, what about farm workers?

And what about people who are like, he shifted the second there was actual public pushback, and it was pretty fucking mild by comparison to what it could have been.

There is no world that exists where, if they literally said, Hey, we're going to try to cancel elections or Democrats can't vote or whatever this stupid shit is going to be,

everybody's going to jump out and go, No, that's insane.

And they're all going to protest, and Trump will go, Fine, fine, fine.

That's how it's going to be.

So, he declares victory and he immediately pivots.

That's how he loses.

And so, like, always remember that.

He never says, I made a mistake.

He never says, All right, you're correct.

He never apologizes.

He still has yet to ask God for forgiveness.

Like, he actually said that in an interview.

I will ask for forgiveness when I need to.

And like to this date, I never have.

So he will never admit defeat.

But what he will do is say, I won and then change the subject.

That's how you know that you won and then let it happen.

Like he's like a, he's like a toddler.

Like allow him to change the subject and go find some chicken nuggets and like, you know, live to fight another day.

That's true.

I mean, like, even, even Republicans within Congress and especially senators, if they saw something in a bill like this that was like, hey, there's going to be no elections, they'd be like, yeah, we're not doing that.

Like, we act like every Republican is nuts, but like, most of them are sane enough to know that that is the death knell of their party and they're never going to pursue it.

So I just think they

secretly want to get away from Trump as fast as possible as well.

Like,

do you think Jonathan and Mike Johnson are having the best time of their life right now, navigating this shit on behalf of Trump?

Like, they're just pawns right now.

And politicians are still egocentric maniacs, man.

Like, they want to be in power.

They don't want to be doing Trump's bidding.

I do want to talk about one terrible senator in particular who I love to dunk on, and that is Josh Howley.

Josh Howley, the Republican, well, one of the two Republican senators from Missouri.

You may remember him from the fist bump photo that he gave to the January 6th insurrectionists.

Then ran away from them, by the way.

There's also a video of him sprinting away from them.

He came out.

You could tell how unpopular this bill is, is because he came out and talked all kinds of shit on it.

He said, This bill is bad for Missouri, it's going to kick all these people off healthcare.

If Republicans want to keep winning working-class voters, we're going to need to change a course.

And then

he voted for it.

It's crazy.

Like, it's just

shows you how

beholden they all are.

Trump and Josh Howey wants to be president someday, has no convictions whatsoever, doesn't even really live in Missouri,

Northern Virginia.

And

sorry, we

crash in the the background.

It's summer, so kids are home.

750 Skittles just hit the kitchen floor, if I had to guess.

So

I might have to step away.

No, it's funny you mentioned Josh Howley because I actually found his backbone.

So

it's white and it's very small and semi-rubbery.

Hang on a sec.

And very, very,

there is no tightness to that whatsoever.

He's basically, for those of you listening, he's holding up, I think, a shoestring.

I don't know what that was.

Dangling it around.

I feel like one of us should,

you know,

draw the short straw and read Holly's book on how to be a masculine man.

Because the way that that man

kisses his wife is something that everyone should see.

It is, I've never seen it.

He is a man of passion and action.

Are we getting?

I think we're getting sarcastic, Chris, here.

Have you ever seen the photo or the video?

No.

This guy is like the most uncomfortably like

weird,

just creepy, like,

oh,

oh.

Oh, geez.

That's a horrible picture.

Can we probably see that?

We got to put this up on ourselves.

There's multiples.

Isn't it weird?

It's like he's kissing a lemon.

He's like closing his mouth.

He's like closing his mouth so much as to not touch his wife yeah and she and she's like lurching in like diet can't get too close

isn't that so weird like that man is it has declared himself to be

look at that a real masculine man oh it's painful that's what a real that's how a real man kisses his wife yes well it's also like ted cruise who like when he goes to like when he was like i think it was against beto and that senate race there's all these videos of him like pushing his wife out of the way and like elbowing her in the face because he's like trying to get past her and stuff and it's and you can see the look on her face like these guys are it they these guys cosplay as masculine right this is like the whole right-wing like manosphere bullshit right they all are like and i think

it's always projection right same with republicans like it's always projection they're always talking about the trump in particular and like he like howley with whatever the hell that is and you know cruise and stuff like it it it it's just so phony but uh but it's still that's the that's the scary part i know it's like it's like a company with like the worst product you could imagine but their marketing team is amazing like that's really what the republican party i think you've just described donald trump's presidency it's yeah for sure yes it's it's it's the worst it is objectively shit if you take his name off of it and you just look at the facts anyone with half a fucking brain would look at like the MAGA campaign and they'd be like, This, this, A, makes no sense, and B, it's, it's harmful to our own brand.

But as soon as you, you know, put the fucking gold-plated bullshit on it, all of a sudden people are just attracted to it.

It's like a cyber truck.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's fucking weird.

Go ahead, Tim.

I was just going to say, it's when you look at the policy positions that he has, and if you were to just strip the names out of them and read these things to somebody and say, does this sound like a good idea to you or not?

99% of Americans would say no.

Like, okay, let's see.

Are you in favor of taking a few hundred dollars a month away from a family that makes $15,000 a year to give that money to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk?

Yes or no?

No.

No one's going to say yes to that.

Do I get $10 in the process?

No.

Right.

Well, you get, no.

Well, you miss me with that.

But if I can get $10.

That's the thing.

Unfortunately, there is just a lot of selfishness among especially Republican voters.

So like a lot of, you know, me first, as long as I get something, I don't really give a shit what happens to them.

That's an epidemic among Republican voters.

And it's like the craziest part to me is that these are like the followers of Jesus.

It's like, I don't think Jesus is all about that shit, dude.

I think he'd probably say the opposite, you know?

So what I, I, one of the like.

best things I think that has come out of uh my for you page in in tick tock are the economists the economists who like typically do 10-minute long videos.

I'm a 10-minute long video guy.

Like, that is what I produce.

That is what I like watching.

And these economists will talk about what does it mean to take away SNAP?

Why is this a bad idea, not for

the direct victims, but for the economies and the local communities?

I don't think that most people understand,

you know, because

maybe they took an economics class 20 or 30 years ago, so it isn't on the front of their mind about people who have less money spend everything that they get.

Like that, that is, and the velocity of money, it goes into somebody else's, you know, it doesn't go from

the person who gets snap benefits back to the government.

It doesn't go from the person who gets snap benefits into a fucking black hole.

It goes to the grocery store.

Right.

It goes to the grocery store.

It goes to the business owner.

And that business owner is ordering from the farm, right?

Like, or the wholesaler, right?

These,

let me, let me just name one.

Ked's K-E-D-S economist on TikTok has been doing this for Bloomberg and on her own channel.

I want to encourage anybody who uses TikTok to go look for Ked's economist because she breaks down in really effective ways how these cuts are going to hurt us all.

How, you know, my family is going to, you know, pay a few thousand dollars less in taxes every year, but the price that my family is going to pay in terms of lost productivity, you know, in my local economy is not going to be worth the money that I'm saving.

If you want to stimulate the economy, you give money to poor and working class families.

Yes.

That's it.

That's it.

Like it has been proven over and over again.

And there is not a serious economist out there that actually cares about their reputation that would say that this is a stimulative bill.

They will say that this is going to blow up the deficit and it's going to screw us down the road.

Like, we have big problems coming up.

We have to address Social Security.

We have to address Medicare.

And we are taking all this money out of the system so that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and the Walton family and like Warren Buffett, who doesn't want this tax cut,

get more.

Like, it's just, there is no defense of this bill that is, that it's like a good idea, that it's a good idea.

There's no, I think it's like,

it comes back to, you know, Chris, what you mentioned earlier about somebody's got to do the work.

Um,

I don't want to clean this up.

I don't want to be the one to say we have to raise taxes because that's what the Republican will say, but the Republicans will say, but but we do.

We do have to raise taxes on people who can afford it.

I will be the first in line if you're telling me that we're going to get green energy back and we're going to get food stamps for people I know, my friends,

in some cases, family members, people down the street, people 27 states away.

Yes.

Yes.

I can afford it and I will pay for it because what is the old quote?

You know, I like paying my taxes because with it, I buy civilization.

You literally cannot have a country if somebody's not paying for it.

The great news is, and we've, I think, beat this to death over the past many episodes and in all of our videos but the great news is that right now the top marginal tax rate is i i think i'm using the terminology correct is at 37 37.4 something like that

for the bulk of the time from the 40s to the 80s when they say america was great it was 70 to 94 percent

and i just did a video on this and about zoran's policies but not only nationwide was that fine, but even where the most millionaires are, New York City has never had less than the most millionaires in the world, including through the entire period from the Great Depression through the Reagan era.

So, no,

millionaires don't go to Europe.

They don't leave.

They stay in New York City.

They stay in New York State.

They stay in the Bay Area and they bite their tongue and they pay their taxes when they have to pay their taxes because they know it's still worth it.

That's really what it comes down to.

It's still worth it.

And this is an interesting discussion because so Zarin Memdani's proposal is to raise taxes on people making a million dollars or more in new york city and on the low end of that which is a million dollars a year right like what is that 20 times more than the average um

that person will pay roughly two thousand dollars more a year in taxes right and this is what the mass hysteria is about meanwhile that person that makes a million dollars a year is going to get more than that back in this tax this tax bill it just shows how screwed up and broken our discussion is around taxes in this country and that how they we have just Republicans have labeled them as bad.

I mean, everybody hates paying them, right?

But that period, Rich, that you're talking about, that's when we had the GI Bill when we sent thousands of people to college for free.

That was when we built the highway system in this country under a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower.

We were that in that is what the combination of those two factors and a few other things is why we became the world's superpower, because we invested in the country.

There's no no world in which investing in billionaires is going to expand this country or make it better for people.

It's just not that.

Imagine if we took that $5 trillion and actually spent it on free health, free, free health care, right?

Universal health care,

free child care for single families or parents.

There's all of this stuff that would make this country better rather than just, again, I keep saying Jeff Bezos and Elon because it's like, I just imagine them with more money.

Like it,

which they've already like 5x their income since COVID

or their net worth.

You have to look at it through like a stimulating factor from the economy, right?

So if you're giving it to billionaires, the argument from the right is that the more billionaires have, the more they can invest in putting, you know, new jobs in the economy, all that shit.

That story's sold.

Fine.

Democrats haven't sold a counter pitch, which they easily have, but they have pitched the shit wrong.

I'll use your free child care as a perfect example.

Childcare is extremely expensive.

It's like a second mortgage to a lot of of families that they can't afford that second mortgage or they barely make it work.

Imagine putting that money back in their pocket.

Imagine what that would do for the economy.

Talk about a stimulating factor, right?

Let's not pitch that it's free health care.

Let's pitch the people in the middle.

Let's do it do both.

Like we can pitch, like, look at the social benefit of all this stuff, but you can also pitch the person in the middle who wants to understand how this is beneficial beyond just free shit, because that's the downside to all this, right?

You pitch that person going, look, you give all these people that money back in their pocket.

It's going to stimulate the economy.

Same thing when you look at universal healthcare, right?

If you're able to do that, the payroll taxes that people at that companies are getting destroyed right now with the way that they have to allocate their finances to pay for people that are getting healthcare from them, the amount of a corporate tax cut that it would be to give corporations back this cash in their pocket to not have to front everybody's health insurance would be insane.

It would be the biggest corporate tax cut in American history.

Those are the ways to pitch the middle while still keeping the left satisfied.

You could win everybody and they just miss.

It drives me nuts.

I think you're 100% right.

I do not understand on the healthcare battle, for example, I do not understand why we did not argue that that was an economic fight.

Because I started as the only reason I was able to start my small business is because my wife had health insurance.

If she didn't, I wouldn't have done it.

And I hired people, right?

And it's crazy.

Also, on the child care thing, I think it's right.

There are, I saw the stat the other day, which is crazy.

There are 400,000 manufacturing jobs open right now in this country because they can't, we don't have the workers.

Now, I'm not saying that single parents, because a lot of single parents stay home because our parents stay home because it's cheaper to do that than to pay for child care.

And if that got taken away, that person could go get a job.

And then all of a sudden, everybody does better.

But instead, we, I don't know, I don't.

I don't.

I don't

know.

It's the easiest fucking pitch, and we just don't do it.

And I don't get it.

The problem is,

Chris.

One of the things that I think resonates with a lot of Americans and a lot of Republicans is, you know, my community, military and veterans, right?

If you had to guess how many,

and I'm going to do this live right now, guys,

how many military families do you think are considered food insecure in this country?

70%.

Like

a number.

40, 40%,

40,000,

100,000,

325,000 military families are considered food insecure.

Jesus.

Right.

So, so when Republicans try to push forward this idea that people using SNAP benefits aren't fucking working hard,

we're not just talking about like,

you know, people working in

jobs that are

looked at as like, you know, less than, like working at a gas station or something.

We're talking about American troops who sign on a dotted line, willing to give their life for their country.

We aren't paying them enough that A, they, they can feed their families and B, we have the Republicans trying to take away the food benefits that are filling the gap.

That is fucking insane.

And it is insane that like this factoid that I think is going to resonate with every fucking flag-waving Republican.

Like there is, you can't tell some fucking soldier, oh, you just need to work hard or get a second job.

You can't get a fucking second job when you're on active duty, it's impossible, right?

And this is, you know, if Republicans wanted American troops to

be willing to fight for their country, taking away their food security is, I don't know, probably not the best way to go about it.

Well, and Zach, you pointed this out a little while back, but you know, it sounds callous to

if you don't say it right, it can sound callous.

But like America needs natural consequences.

I'm a parent, so I go back to parenting all the time.

But

Republicans have protected

people from feeling a lot of the consequences of their cuts over the years because they have said we need a balanced budget while just signing every goddamn bill that gives us trillions and trillions of deficits.

Just a quick reminder, every dollar of our deficit, of our national debt right now, probably 85 to 90% of those dollars, were because of Republican budgets, Republican presidents who signed those bills.

We're talking the 80s was a disaster.

The George Bush era, 8 trillion for the war on terror total was a disaster.

It's just deficit spending.

They call us tax and spend liberals.

They are just spend and spend psychopaths.

And that is all they do.

And now a handful of them are forcing a little bit of that to be offset.

And that is going to deliver real pain.

And suddenly those military families who are like, yeah, fuck yeah, America, if they're food insecure or if they become more food insecure or if they lose their VA care,

we don't want this.

We don't want the political win so that people, or we don't want people to hurt so that we can score a political win.

We will have the political win when it happens because this is going to be bad for more people.

But when that time comes, we also have to be able to ask people like, hey, this is a complex argument, but we think you're capable of having a complex argument or understanding a complex argument because it's not tax and spend liberal.

It's not trickle down.

It's not one big beautiful bill.

It has to be more complex than that.

You know, Democrats are, it's not, it's not.

stability versus stability.

It's stability versus chaos.

It's clarity versus chaos.

Like we have to be able to have that clear conversation with people because you can't sum up Medicaid

in a slogan.

Like they will, they will, but we understand that's disingenuous.

It's abusive.

It's usually just completely incorrect, but they'll do that because they want that cheap win.

I'm not going to do that to my listeners who are viewers in the Democratic Party shouldn't do that to the American people because that means we got to a

place where reality TV soundbites are the only things that resonate.

And you can't govern 340 million people successfully with reality TV soundbites.

So I'm always at that point where it's like, how do

do we expect people to be more thoughtful and nuanced than they are today?

Or do we find a way to communicate our policies?

in a more simplistic fashion that's going to be somewhere in the middle.

I think it's not in the middle.

I think we just have to adopt the Republican strategy and just not adopt their shit ass policies.

Like that, like in the end, people don't give a shit.

Like we give a shit because we like this stuff and think it's interesting.

I'd say nine out of 10 Americans don't understand most of what we're talking about.

They don't understand the ins and outs because they don't have any interest in understanding it.

They want a slogan that makes them feel boring.

It is real boring for people who don't like it.

Yeah, for people who don't like it, they're just turned off or they think that they're liars or whatever the fuck.

And then they show up with whatever feels right within the last two weeks of the election.

But we are missing major opportunities by just thinking exactly like you're saying that people,

we can't stoop that low.

It's like we can and we should because we're not trying to sell them snake oil.

They are.

We're just trying to sell them a better product.

We're just bad marketers.

If we could be better marketers, they'll show up and go, holy shit, this product's been better, it's been on the shelf this whole time.

Why wasn't I buying this before?

Like, all we got to do is come up with a better marketing strategy.

I mean, that's the truth.

It's like a bridge loan, I think, is what they call it.

Like, we just got to get there, we got to get people smarter

in the interim.

We need like a reality TV show where like you get slime dumped on you if you say a Republican thing and you get like a thousand dollars in a briefcase if you say the Democratic thing.

Like, we need maybe how do we gamify this?

Maybe, well, maybe real.

I think what Zach is describing is

you know, the next mayor of New York City.

It wasn't just sloganeering.

It wasn't just talking to influencers and going on podcasts.

It was having good policy.

Yes.

Yeah.

It was meeting people where, literally, meeting people where they were.

Yes.

Being like, hey, do you think New York is too fucking expensive?

Well, how about we control the rent prices?

Like, are you having difficulty getting healthy food in your neighborhood?

All right.

Well, how about these grocery stores?

Hey, do you think that cops shouldn't be responding to, you know, a vet in crisis with their guns drawn?

And instead, maybe we should have a Department of Public Safety to have a psychiatrist or a psychologist or a social worker on call?

Yes.

Like these are all good fucking policies.

And he just was like, yeah, we're going to do this.

We're not going to pander to, you know, whatever Andrew Cuomo was doing saying like,

he's going to fucking go overseas as his first act as New York City mayor.

Like

he, he met New Yorkers where, where they were, communicated clearly to them, and people liked it.

And Democrats, instead of distancing themselves from the brown guy, which is what a lot of depth sellers,

who I ranted against earlier, instead of distancing themselves from the really fucking popular guy with popular policies, perhaps they should emulate him.

Yep, 100%.

Well,

I think, as does,

I think authenticity and strength are things that Democrats just like, you can be a moderate Democrat and do this, and you can be a progressive Democrat and do this.

Zahra M.

M.

Dani, first of all, overcame his name in New York City.

Let's be very clear.

Same as Barack Hussein Obama, right?

But

and I'm not saying that he is Barack Obama.

I'm not saying that at all, but there are some similarities here.

They stayed on message.

It is insanely expensive in New York City.

Like

no matter where you live, I don't know how a single, like a

single mother lives in this city, to be perfectly honest.

It's just unfathomable to me.

And, you know, they tried all these things on Zoran, all the, blah, blah, blah.

And he just focused on affordability, affordability, affordability.

You say freeze the rent.

People know exactly what you mean because every year people get a bill that is in is much higher than the year before, especially coming out of COVID when prices went down.

And then they tried to make up for the losses that they sustained.

And there's really very little that anybody can do about it.

So like they heard that.

They heard, you know, maybe the, maybe the, the, the government should run grocery stores to bring prices down.

They're like, okay, like, you know, I mean, I think there's some challenges with that, but like he put it out there.

But that's the problem.

But at least he's trying.

Like, what, what is the, the other option is just keep doing the same shit that you're, which is basically what the other candidates, for the most part, did.

They're like, oh, well, I'm going to, I'm going to make housing cheaper.

How?

Cops.

By building.

I'm going to put, you know, there's only 34,000 cops in New York.

We need more, you know, more than the $5 billion, $6 billion budget.

It's hollow.

No one's buying it.

We saw some of that, rightly or wrongly, in November of 2024.

And the candidates, and then you also, if you look at the numbers of who Zoran got out to vote, do you know what the biggest, the, the, the largest demographic was that voted for him or that came out at all?

18 to 24,

18 to 24.

Right.

Which is almost never, nevertheless.

The best educated and the wealthiest.

precincts voted for him over Cuomo.

It was the lower information and or like brand name people who, you know, which is normal.

We see that every, but those people will always come around once they learn a little bit more.

No, it's not true.

Yeah, but I think you're right.

Like we had like even the Senate minority leader and the House.

minority leader both sort of like are tiptoeing around their support for him.

And it's madness.

He's the Democratic nominee.

If Andrew Cuomo had won that, they'd be screaming at Zoran to endorse him immediately.

So why isn't that happening to him?

It is crazy.

It is insane.

Also, this like anti-Semitism claim against him is complete nonsense let's not forget that the guy who co-endorsed him and maybe partially healthily responsible for getting him over the finish line was is brad lander who was my former city council member and last i checked is jewish jerry nadler came out that's first the day he was he was he won also jewish endorsed him now would you ever claim that those guys would be soft on someone that is anti-semitic hell no so i don't understand why the others like it's just it's insane and i think they're scared just don't take the bait just don't take the bait it's

scared that's that's right they are scared they're scared to change they don't know what to do like it's a whole new territory for them dealing with 33 year olds with completely different perspectives than them and like you know just to speak to the anti-semites because i'm jewish like

you know anti-semitism when you see it this dude is not anti-semitic like let's just be real like it's the same thing with racism like any of the like you could look at somebody go like i know this person is not that he is not that and the fact that democrats are accusing you of anything close to that, or Republicans are doing it too, but the fact that Democrats are like chiming in on that shit, it's painful to watch.

It's one of those things where it's like, guys, we've shown you proof of an effective strategy.

And what are you doing?

You're running away from it because you don't understand it.

Maybe instead of running away, look at it for a second and try to fucking understand it.

There is a successful formula here.

And here's like, look, the guy's 33.

He's 33 with almost no fucking experience and he's literally about to run the biggest city in the country.

It's not because he's qualified, it's because he's smart and a good marketer.

That's it.

The least qualified guy on the fucking table won because he had the best PR and the best marketing.

The end, full stop.

Don't run from that shit.

Embrace it.

I don't give a shit if half of his things can't happen.

Republicans didn't worry about that when Trump ran.

He sold you a thousand false stories.

Who gives a shit?

Win, you know?

It's furious.

Well, every politician.

I would gently push back on the definition of qualified because there are a lot of experienced people who are wildly unqualified.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's just an experience.

But he's run like a department of five or some shit.

I mean, he's going to run the whole city.

Oh, his assembly office.

Yeah, that's bad.

He'll crush it.

I hope so.

Because he's smart.

I'd rather have a smart person than an experienced person.

Like I'm just saying, if I have to choose between intelligence and experience, like experience goes a long way, but only if you're intelligent and you're learning from your experience.

Otherwise, you're just learning bad habits and just getting stuck in your ways.

Depends on who it is.

But yeah.

I have a, I have a, maybe it's a hot take, but watching Zoran win, you know, we know what we know about, about Barack Obama.

I think we, I think we over-indexed on the role of identity in his campaign, like in hindsight, it was so powerful to us.

It'll be like, I voted for the first black president.

The guy voted for the guy with a weird name.

He was fundamentally opposed to identity politics, as the right calls it.

And he was absolutely, rigidly dedicated to health insurance and yes, we can and hope.

Like he did the Republican thing better than anyone in the Republican Party did at that time, which is give you, give me, give me the one, like, what are the three words you think of when you hear Barack Obama?

Yes, we can.

He did that well.

And so we voted for him for all, all the reasons we felt.

But the reason why he won absolutely massively massive landslide victories twice is because he was also saying the correct things to the middle.

And so I want to go back to that because, Chris, like you mentioned, you know, we got to pay for things and it pays it off.

The first thing the Republicans say when you say we got to invest in, you know, free food for or, you know, healthcare for everybody, free food for veterans is, well, how are you going to pay for it?

And our go-to has been to do what they do, which is us versus them.

We try to themify somebody and it's the billionaires.

And Zach, you've pointed this out.

We have to stop demonizing the billionaires.

Even if the billionaires are evil, even if Elon Musk is Elon Musk, that is still an aspirational goal for some amount of people.

They think that they're going to win something or invent something and they're going to be a millionaire and billionaire.

And a lot of people just also fundamentally disagree with the idea of like punishing success, they call it.

So my take is instead of saying we're going to do these things and they're very expensive and we're going to pay for it by making the rich pay their fair share, which is like the Elizabeth Warren thing, I think.

you flip it and you do essentially similar to what he's trying what he's done successfully with that group of people with make america great again which is that America is strong enough to do this.

We produce enough wealth to pay for the things that we need.

And if you look at GDP, if you look at per capita GDP among any nations that are even close to us in population size, we are in most cases 50 to 100% higher in wealth generated per person than any other nation.

So instead of making it about

sticking it to the rich people, sticking it to the billionaires, which feels, it's still a fundamentally negative argument.

If you say instead, hey, we generate so much wealth you included as a worker them as a ceo together we generate so much wealth we can have universal health care because look they're doing it in all these other countries and they produce half the wealth per person that we do if we made an aspirational argument out of american greatness is the reason why we can do these things for ourselves instead of saying it's we're going to make elon musk pay for it which the math actually doesn't always check out on that

I think we've actually got something.

And I think that's what Zoran does with affordability, which is he's not saying we're going to punish everybody.

He just says, it's too expensive to live here.

We're going to fix rent.

And we're going to say, you know, we're going to do it because we can.

That's interesting.

Because we should.

I like that.

He does say, though, that the rich need to pay more.

Yeah.

He does.

That's on his website.

And he did say billionaires shouldn't exist.

Well, that's so sad.

Yeah, I think your interpretation rich of

how he communicated the eat the rich philosophy is perhaps a little inaccurate.

He was very much eat the rich.

Yeah.

But I think that is a message that resonated in New York.

I don't know if I see, I don't, I didn't see, like, I never once saw that come out of his mouth.

I'm sure it did.

I'm not saying it didn't, but that was not the centerpiece of his, of his PR and his campaign and his marketing.

Like the centerpiece of his marketing was like exactly what Rich was saying, which is essentially like, we're New Yorkers, we can do this, we deserve this.

Here's the things we deserve.

The methodology to which he was getting there took a backseat in his marketing strategy, which I think is very, very smart.

Like, i'm not an each eat the rich person i think that we need to you know have a more balanced tax system and i do think it's a disastrous caviar

it's a very disastrous structure i do think that there's a you lose a lot of the middle when you start attacking success and the eat the rich doesn't really work very well but regardless i think that

whether or not momdani believes that stuff i think that what sold was what we deserve needs to be what we get and how we get there is somewhat irrelevant it's more so that we should be able to do it because we're in New York and we're great.

And I think the same thing would translate somewhat on the American stand of the full, like national stage.

Well, I think that I think that the difference is for both he and Obama was that

they were able to spin it into a hopeful message, but there was still, like, that was the lead.

But to be clear, having been, you know, the amount of, I should have kept all of the flyers and mailers I got in the last few weeks because it's probably taller than the building I live in.

But there was a fair amount of Eat the Rich and there was a fair amount.

But, but I think he, he's able to craft a story and a narrative that doesn't just doesn't just say us versus them.

It's like, we can all do this together if these guys come along with us, basically.

And I think that was powerful.

But we'll also see what happens in the general election.

Like this was the Democratic primary.

It's a very different thing.

I think he's got a bit of a challenge ahead of figuring out how to pivot a little bit to the center, just because

there are

some challenges ahead.

I don't think that they're going to be as big as some people are saying they are, but

we'll see in a general.

And then maybe this is a roadmap for Democrats next year.

I mean, I think already it looks,

if you're running in a primary, I think he's given you a roadmap for success.

That's for sure.

I don't think he should do that either.

He should just hang on the fucking messaging that wants to be.

Don't apologize.

Don't pivot.

Don't apologize.

They're making, I looked up the numbers because it just made me crazy to see people saying with Zoran's, but like, oh, the millionaires are going to leave New York or whatever.

It was like a thing that hand, you know, Eric Adams like complaining, like,

like, get over yourself.

1%

of New York City residents control 40, 44% of the city's wealth.

And so

they should be paying that same share, right?

In, in, in the income tax burden.

And, and they don't.

They pay about half of the personal income tax, which is only 22% of the city's revenue.

And so you're talking about 78% of the revenue is coming from other places.

It's coming from use fees and property taxes.

You're telling me that are they going to to move the skyscrapers from downtown Manhattan so that they can avoid property taxes are going to be there.

And so the way he's going to pay for things, you know, it'll, it'll be there and, and, and they'll get it.

And so going down that road of like, how are you going to pay for it?

And he's like showing all the nickels and dimes, I don't think it's necessary.

Just say, we're going to pay for it because we can, we can afford it.

And because you deserve it, you need food and you have to live in your city.

So like, let's start from there instead of starting starting from how do we protect the billionaires and then reverse engineer policy from that right i actually saw a republican i don't remember who it was the other day say i i bet in five years that the new york stock exchange will be moving to florida and i just like about fell out of my chair laughing i'm like you just do not understand how any of this shit works no i mean that's that's like the thing that that drives me the most insane is like that that argument that millionaires are going to leave like new york city is an n of one city there's no other city like new york city i personally don't like it but like i that's why I don't live there anymore.

But people fucking love it.

You can't move from New York to, I mean, no offense to Chicago, but Chicago and feel like, ooh, this is the same shit.

It's not.

It's completely different.

You can leave California, go to Florida.

It's a scene of hot and hot and whatever, sunny.

Who gives a shit?

There's a parallel.

There's no parallel.

So they're leaving.

I don't think people are going to fight you over this.

Good.

Good.

I'm glad.

Like, where are they going to go?

Where are they going to go where this feels like?

New York.

Nowhere.

Southern California and Florida are quite different.

But really, like, in the the end, it's about like sun and warmth, right?

I mean, like, they're completely different in terms of what they offer and

the culture, but like people in those circumstances are like, well, I live in a sunny, warm place.

I want to go another sunny, warm place.

I get what you're saying.

I get what you're saying.

I think

there is some truth to the idea that New Yorkers are flooding to Florida, but Florida is New York's graveyard and it has been for a long time.

Always has been.

Oh, yeah.

So, like, not a whole lot is different saying, like, oh, all this wealth is going to Florida.

Yeah.

People retire in Florida because the taxes are lower.

And that is, that is true for my grandparents' generation and my great-grandparents' generation.

It'll probably be like I have

friends who are who are Democratic socialists who've moved down to Florida to save money.

Like they're not moving there for Ron DeSantis.

Like they're moving there for the warmer weather to be closer to family, to have free babysitting, you know, from grandma and grandpa.

It's Christmas.

Not just for lower taxes.

Are you telling me these people don't make a million dollars a year and are upset about $2,000 more in taxes?

That's not their reason for moving.

It's also not just New York.

It's all the Northeast.

I'm from Maine and Mainers get places down there all the time.

And it's part of it's the taxes and part of it's just it's so fucking cold in Maine.

Like, you know, not as much as it used to be, but like it's still like, it's, you know, the winter is not fun for somebody, especially if you're, you know, older and, you know, all those things.

So anyways, well, I tell you what, guys, we have gone a lot longer than we said we would this time,

but I think we had some really good conversations.

And I would just, as a final note, say to anybody, if you have, if you live in a district that has a Republican member, either in the House or the Senate, it doesn't matter whether you think that all hope is lost, call them.

Tell them how mad you are about this.

And also, you know, we talk a lot about low information voters.

Talk to your friends and family.

Like, that's actually the most effective thing that you can do is get other people to do this too, or get them to understand how bad this stuff is and how we can stop it like in its tracks now.

And then if somehow it does pass, which I think everyone's right that some version of this will probably go through and it will probably be bad, gearing up to make sure that nothing else bad happens by taking back the house next year.

You know, Tim, I think I have another idea for how to get these people engaged in conversation, and that is to buy the merch from findoutpodcast.com.

So guys, the good thing about this merch is one, it helps keep us going and paying the bills.

Also, all of our stuff is made in America and where we could get it, union-made.

So it costs a few extra bucks, but you're also helping to support the U.S.

economy as well, unlike the Republicans in Congress.

And, you know, it's all going to a good cause.

Also, like, I have the hoodie.

It's great.

I have the t-shirt.

It's great.

I'm not wearing it today, but you could do that.

The other way you can help us is also subscribing as a paid member to our Substack, which is findoutpodcast.substack.com.

I think it's $6 a month, I think.

And that just helps us keep going too, because we have more plans.

Rich keeps tapping on his mic, and we are hearing all of that.

I've been doing it forever.

I don't know.

I think Riverside is saying, Your time is up, Rich, and probably our time is up as well.

So we've done our pitches.

We've talked shit on the bill.

I don't think we had as many F-bombs because we didn't have Luke, but Luke will be back on Thursday.

Do not worry about that.

Rich is trying to drop F-bombs, but he's behind a muted mic.

So little does he know that I did that to him.

No, just kidding.

But, anyways, make your calls, folks.

Talk to your friends and family.

We'll be back on Thursday.

We'll talk soon.