I'm joined now by Senator Elizabeth Warren. Thank you so much for taking the time. Oh, thanks for having me.
It's always good to talk with you. So, we are right now in the midst of this negotiation for the budget bill, which has proven a little bit more difficult for Republicans than they had anticipated because you've got some Republicans who are having trouble stomaching this bill. Not because it'll kick 14 million people off of healthare, not because it takes food stamps away from Americans, but because the cuts aren't deep enough, which means we should expect to see even deeper cuts to some of these uh essential lifelines that Americans rely on.
And so where do we stand right now in terms of the bill actually being passed? I know that it's in the House. Um so this isn't exactly your jurisdiction, but eventually it's going to get to you guys in the Senate.
Oh, but we're part of this. I mean, watching it and and watching it unfold and you have it exactly right. The fight among Republicans in the House is basically, do we go with a bill that tells 14 million people they're going to lose their health care and raises the cost of groceries for tens of millions of people?
Oh, and raises the cost of utilities for people all across this country. Remember Trump's promise that he would lower costs on day one? Yeah.
This is the bill that delivers raising costs for Americans. So they're fighting over just how much cost should go up. 14 million people should lose their health care, 20 million people should lose their health care.
Uh a million babies should go hungry or five million babies should go hungry. All of it. But always keep this frame in mind.
All of it in service to we got to do more in tax giveaways for a handful of billionaires. So I I think of this right now as they're fighting over how many children should go hungry so that Mark Zuckerberg can buy another Hawaiian island, right? Can you talk about what this would actually mean in terms of taxes?
Because Republicans of course are trying to frame this as if we don't do this, this eliminates the biggest tax cut in American history. And so what does this look like in effect both with the highest earners but then middle inome earners and the lowest income earners? Okay, so the deal let's start at the high end.
At the high end, what this bill does is remember that they passed a tax bill back in 2018 but it expired and it's expiring now and it was mostly sucked up $2 trillion mostly sucked up by millionaires, billionaires and giant corporations. that is expiring. So what they want to do is they want to give those billionaires a new set of tax giveaways.
It will be the biggest gift in American history from the poorest Americans to the richest Americans. That's just the whole deal. And so at the top end, it is a it is a great deal.
It says you don't pay any taxes basically anyway, but we want to actually give you stuff. We want to give you credits for taxes you didn't pay and then the federal government will write you a check like that. That's what they're doing around things like so-called research deductions.
Okay? But the other end of it, because notice the swing, the other end of it is for Americans who actually need some help paying for their health insurance or for their medical care coverage. Right now, 14 million of them just lose it and the money goes straight to those at the top.
um Americans who count on a little assistance to be able to make it to the end of the month and pay their grocery bills goes right to the top because they want to make those cuts. And that's that's the big one at the two ends. What happens in the middle is costs go up because for example, they want to get rid of all the ways that we're trying to do clean energy now.
And that clean energy actually reduces your utility costs. Getting that solar up, getting that wind up, that stuff is cheap to operate. A lot cheaper than having to buy oil week after week after week.
So all of that goes away and that means average middle class family, your costs start to go up. And I'm not sure if it was like the the the Pen Wharton analysis or the CBO or or the the one of these one of these committees that that scored this tax bill, but it said something like $389,000 um tax reduction for the top uh top 1%. And then we have for for middle earners that we would actually see a tax increase of about $700 and for the lowest earners a tax increase of $1,000.
So, you know, the these are really I mean, you're you're borrowing from you're borrowing from the poor to be able to pay the rich in this country, which I guess lends itself to this next question, and that is that when it comes to these tax cuts, they're always structured this way. Like, we don't have tax cuts that we don't have the the elusive middle class tax cut or the or the or the working-class tax cut that's so often promised. It always ends up being a tax cut that's going to help the the wealthy.
And so, there is this sense of, okay, well, this is the best we've got. And so even with the 2017 tax cut, if there was some tangential benefit, if if the lowest earners in this country, if the working poor in this country get a few hundred and and granted it's crumbs compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars that the highest earners get, still there's this there's this sense that okay, well a few hundred is still better than than nothing, and so we'll just swallow it. And and so like we there is this sense of okay, we have to be happy with the crumbs that we've that we're being given because the alternative is no crumbs at all.
And so I'm just I'm curious if you can speak to that idea that that we've become normalized to and accustomed to this idea that yes, it's crumbs. We know it's crumbs. We know it doesn't we know it pales in comparison to what the highest earners in this country are getting, but that's how it goes.
And so it's better than nothing, right? So let me start. Let me give two answers.
First answer is this one isn't even crumbs. T taking away correct. We are actually gonna the Republicans are going to pick your pocket.
You're actually going to end up poorer with this bill. So the crumbs analogy no longer holds here. But let's do the second part and that is this ain't over.
People have power. And when we talk about the fight right now in the House, listen, part of it is the Republicans are even more extreme, saying more babies need to lose health care, more people need to go hungry. But there's a bunch of other Republicans saying, "Woo, uh, wait just a minute.
We're all going to be up for reelection in 2026. " And starting to do a little of the maybe we should have cold feet about this. So, this is the moment for people to pick up the phone, to get on email, to text their representatives in the House.
And this is true whether your reps are Democrats or Republicans. Call them, text them, email them. A and if you've already done that once, do it again.
Do it again and do it again because it is in play right now. So nobody has to accept the oh this is how it always is. The ball is in the air right and where this is going to come down is literally in the fight in Washington DC on Capitol Hill as you and I speak.
This is the moment to get involved in that fight. How does this get resolved as far as the Republicans are concerned? because already you have you have deep cuts and you've got one faction who who says, "Okay, we we can't completely explode the deficit beyond repair.
" And so and so we have to have deeper cuts here to try and offset some of these tax cuts that, god forbid, we take out. Like they they all they all agree that we need tax cuts for the ultra wealthy. And so it's a matter of passing the bill as it stands right now or trying to salvage some part of the deficit, but that means deeper cuts on the other side to offset those tax cuts, which means deeper cuts to to healthcare, deeper cuts to food stamps.
And so you have these competing factions here in the Republican party where you have the, you know, quasi deficit hawks who at least are pretending, you know, that they care about the deficit. But then then you have the but but that's going to open up the other problem which is okay now you've got to contend with the people who have to go back to their districts and say it's not just you know uh 20% of Medicaid recipients that are going to get screwed over. Now it's going to be 25%.
Now it's going to be 30%. Now it's going to be 40%. You know Brian you just keep wanting to bring reality into this conversation.
Right. Right. My my mistake.
It just shows the kind of guy you are. But that's part of the problem. They part of what's happening here is can they bend Americans perception of reality.
Right? This is what the president did. President went over there yesterday and said, "We're going to make all these cuts and don't worry about it.
We're not even going to touch healthcare. " And the answer is, right? He said he said, "We're not going to touch healthare.
You're going to have more healthare. " They asked him about uh food assistance. He goes, "You're going to have more food assistance.
" And so there's this it's it's earth too. We're living in the upside down right now where they are cutting these things, but then he's claiming that somehow not only are they not being cut, they're going to be more plentiful. Right?
So, the number one thing to do is keep talking about reality and holding them to reality. The second thing is they really want to turn away from who's going to get hurt. So, I think of this I was thinking today about you remember the Roadrunner cartoons?
Remember the bomb? Yeah. that you would buy, right, from acme.
Yep. Right. That what they want to do is they wanted to a bomb with a really long fuse and they want to say we're going to cut health care for millions of Americans and we're going to cut food help for millions of Americans, but we know that that is going to be terrible for millions of families and it's going to be terrible for the economy.
So, we're going to pass the law now, light the fuse, and it's not going to explode mostly until right after the election. Yeah. That way, we can do the deny reality.
We can all go out and all of those Republicans can campaign saying, "Nope, nobody got hurt here. Did anybody get hurt here? Nobody's been hurt.
" Uh, stop being so hysterical about this. uh and and try to bend reality. But understand about these cuts.
They're going to hit literally tens of millions of families. They're going to hit new babies, half of all new babies who are going to lose access to health care, new mamas, people with disabilities, little babies, children with disabilities, seniors who need access to their nursing homes. But here's one more part.
When you start cutting off access to medical care for those folks, what happens? Well, the first thing happens, they don't go to the doctor. And when they don't go to the doctor, they end up, some of them are going to end up sicker.
And that means they go to the hospital. Hospital treats everybody because that's what hospitals are. But now they don't get compensated for that care.
I mean, you can only you can't squeeze blood out of a turnup, right? You you the people don't have the money. So, who's going to end up paying?
Community hospitals, rural hospitals, hospitals that you may go to and you may still have health insurance. But having health insurance coverage is not going to help you if you start to have chest pains or you are in a car accident and there's no hospital nearby to take care of you. So, we have to think of every one of these cuts.
Man, it's terrible for the family, but it's terrible for our communities. It starts to break our health care delivery system overall. Billionaires, they'll do fine with their concier's medicine.
But for everybody else, the system starts to break down and hurt us all. And finally, I want to finish off with this. We have heard Trump come out and say that as it relates to healthcare that it's all good because you're going to be paying less money anyway.
Sure, you know, the the budget is going to have whatever impacts it has, but you're going to be paying 85% less on all of your drugs. And so, I'm I'm curious here your your reaction to that because it would seem to me that the only reason that we that look, he can he can write whatever edicts he wants on paper and send them out into the into the universe and that's not going to just manifest whatever he writes into reality. And if it was possible for a president to just say, you know, 85% off um pharmaceuticals, you know, sign name here, that it probably would have happened before.
And so I'm I'm curious what your thoughts are on this because really the way that I think about this is the only way to get drug prices down is to be able to negotiate to have a single payer negotiate and that is the government. And we don't do that. And in fact, Donald Trump, by virtue of being president of the United States, is entrenching a system where we don't have the government negotiating lower drug prices.
And that's why other countries do have uh lower drug prices because they allow the government to be the single entity that negotiates those prices down. But here in here in America, it's every man for himself. And so I'm just I'm curious for your reaction because you're obviously much better informed on this issue than I am.
No, no, you have it exactly exactly right. What Donald Trump claims is he's going to reduce the cost of drugs by 85%. His so-called executive order on this says, "Will you all consider lowering your prices by a lot?
" Right. It's It's the equivalent It's the equivalent of him tweeting, "Vladimir, stop. " Yeah, exactly.
It's a Vladimir stop moment. You know, we should start just calling them that. It's a Vladimir stop moment.
And here's the deal. We should change how we price drugs. We should negotiate.
I like the most favored nations approach to it. I think that could be really good. But you got to come over here to Congress.
You got to write legislation and you got to make it apply. It can't just be that the president of the United States asks for it and hopes that it will happen because that isn't going to make it happen. What's going to make it happen is we change the law.
I'm ready to do that. If there are any Republicans ready to work on that, including Donald Trump, let's do it. But in the meantime, could we not gaslight Americans into believing that somehow Donald Trump just reduced the price of drugs by 85%.
I just I want to come back to the reality based world. You know, the one you were talking about a minute ago, Brian. Yeah.
Well, you know, it's a slim pickings there. Not a lot. It's they're not not very populated these days.
Senator Warren, as always, I appreciate uh your time today and thank you for the work you're doing. You bet. And thank you.
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