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Why not just remove the broadcast networks from those rules? Why are they... I'm some like they shouldn't be bound by that. Brandon Carr, who's clearly looking for his next job, which will be Dancing with the Nazis.
Hi everyone, this is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher.
And we are live from South by Southwest in Texas.
So before we before we get to it, um again I we're psyched to be here uh this live episode. We want to thank our presenting sponsor ODU. They've supported they sponsored our pivot tour last year. So they're really into us. Um we will get to everything else, but Scott, I have a surprise for you. I don't know if you know this, but I have a television show coming up on CNN.
I heard it's a horror film called Kara's Going to Live Forever.
Yes. So, I'm going to play a little clipboard cuz someone that I work with is in the show itself. Cuz largely I felt sorry because he's had so many disasters in television. I thought he should be part of a hit series.
Zero for five. Five TV series. I haven't seen any of them, have you?
Yeah. All right, let's go. This is going to be a huge hit and it's going to really chap his ass. So, go ahead.
Doesn't this land in the backyard of a Colorado household owned by a woman named Mindy?
Mork. Mork and Mindy.
It's a state-of-the-art sound therapy pod that is using sound playing in your body. So, there's a lot of science-based frequencies designed to calm your nervous system at a cellular level. We typically call it an inner and out of body experience. You know those moments where you suddenly have to ask yourself, "How did I end up here?"
This feels like the lamest crypt in the world, and I'm stuck with Kara.
Well, Emily Ratajkowski was busy.
This was one of those. I was deep inside a concrete basement in New York City about to embark on an auditory journey that is designed to help my body repair, restore, and transform itself.
We're going to take you on a beautiful sound journey.
All right. My traveling companion was my good friend and podcast partner Scott Galloway.
I just had a deep insight. Kara, this longevity trend.
Hasn't the earth suffered enough? Shouldn't we just die?
Um, anyway, it's coming uh April 11th, but the the plot spoiler there is Scott falls asleep in it and has no journey. He just snores. Um, and there is no real science to that. So, just among other things we prove, but we had a nice time.
Yeah. And that's definitely going to save CNN.
Yeah.
Oh, well, I won't be there when the Ellisons take over, so that's fine with me. Um, anyway, uh, we've got a lot to get to. Well, first of all, you having a good time here? Are you enjoying it?
I'm having a great time. I went out last night. I'm so sick of rolling up to the the parties now kind of suck cuz you meet some guy and you're like, I want to grab a drink and he's like, I'm 8 years sober and now I'm a Peloton influencer. [__] you. I want to find the guy who's in a custody battle so he can never see his kids. That dude I'll roll with. Anything? No,
You're having a nice time.
Everyone is working on their sleep. Well, good for you.
So, uh, you're leaving. You're going to the Vanity Fair Oscar party. That should be fun.
Yeah, that should be good. I'm not going. I'm staying.
I was the plus one. And the plus one RSVP'd yes. And Kara said no.
So, you'll have a good time. Try not to bother the celebrities. That's my only advice. Just be cool. Okay. Can you do that?
Thank you for that. That's hugely helpful. Thank you. Just be cool for me.
Is there anyone you want to meet? Is there like Sean? He probably won't be there. He's
I want to meet simple. I want to meet the um
I was going to say the gay hockey guys. What's it called?
Heated rivalry. I'm sorry. I'm just announcing now executive producer season 2 heated rivalry. Swedish women's team. Biggest show of next season. Biggest show of next season.
Oh god. I'm going to go for two here.
I'm I'm going to alert security at the Vanity Fair Oscar party for this. But anyway, just be cool. Say nice things. They You'll probably get recognized by some of them. It'll be nice.
I'll be at the bar. That's all.
All right. Excellent. All right. We've got a lot to get to today. We've got a lot to talk about. There's so much. It's crazy amounts of news all the time and every every moment. But, uh, first thing, surprise, surprise. Wealthy people are swaying elections with their money. Billionaires made up about 19% of all reported campaign donations of 2024 federal elections. This is a a well it's a quantum leap in numbers. Within the 19% for every dollar that went to Democrats, $5 went to Republicans. The billionaire families gave an average total of $10 million each, roughly equal to the amount a 100,000 typical donors give combined. Um Scott, before Citizens United, the share of billionaire spending was under 1%. This is 19%. That's an enormous amount of people, enormous number for a small amount of people. Let's talk a little bit about that because obviously billionaires taxes are being discussed. Um there's all there's all manner of things happening here, but their influence is absolutely clear.
Yeah. I mean, if you think about 19% from 900 people, it's um look, it's the boring stuff that kind of moves the needle that that's not that interesting to talk about. But we're gonna wash, rinse, and repeat a cycle of autocrats. Uh I actually believe there's uh if you look at history, there's as much danger of an autocrat coming from the far left as from the far right. I believe the far left is as dangerous as the far right. It's the extremes that present a threat to society. And the two things that are probably most important to avoiding a strong man or a strong woman uh from either side of the party are very boring things. But until we have them, we're going to have the weaponization of a decline in the structural and economic standing in my opinion of of middle class, especially middle class males who tend to be unfortunately more violent and upset when they don't have economic or romantic prospect. But the two major reforms that need to happen or we're going to have a cycle of strong men and strong women for the next 50 years is one, we need to dejerrymander the US because the the general election no longer matters. It's the primary. And who turns out in the primary? The crazies. So every district now is hard blue or hard left. And we keep sending um 535 very far-left or very far-right people who share no comity, no no collective values, don't want to work together, and nothing happens and they genuinely don't like each other. And the the narrative from our leadership is not how do we work together and get something done. It's that the other guys are wrong. And so it creates a level of division and stasis that's really unproductive. And then the other thing is Citizens United. We can't have a small group of people who aren't evil, but incrementally will say, "Hey, Charles Schumer," and I'll use a Democrat as an example because we always talk about Republicans. Democrats take a lot of money, too. It's Republican it's it's Republican donors typically, but also Democrats do do bask in a lot of the PAC money. And what happens is Republicans are much more overt about trying to get tax cuts for who they think are the most productive people and corporations in the world. What Democrats do is just wring their hands and kill stuff in committee and say they have concerns about things. But if you have until we have Citizens United overturned and dejerrymander, we're just going to ping from the far left to the far right for the foreseeable future.
I I do think the Republicans are sort of doing things in plain sight in a in an effective way by channeling all this money, right? And but the number from going from 1% to 19%, it's a very and you're right, it's a very small amount of people. And actually, it's a small amount of people from Silicon Valley. So, it's a very particular I mean, there's there's the Ulanes, the box people, there's a bunch of other rich people you don't know as well. And by the way, look on your bottom of your boxes. That's what you're getting from Amazon is from this very far-right family. Um, but one of the things that's the problem here is that that this stuff is done in plain sight. And what's they're not going to under overturn Citizens United from what I understand. I interviewed Larry Lessig recently who has another case that could hollow out Citizens United in terms of super PACs and dark money.
Um, but what is the solution until then? Because I don't think they're letting up. I don't I think they won't let up in this presidential election. It doesn't seem like all of a sudden Elon Musk is gonna call start calling himself they them. It's not happening for us. So what what could be done in the interim because he will continue to spend. He's sort of the the poster child for this. But then you quietly have a whole bunch of them doing the same thing.
The honest answer is I don't know. I don't know if there's a way to prohibit certain political spending across certain more targeted media. Mhm.
Um, so I have a movement called Resist and Unsubscribe and neither Alphabet nor Meta would take my dollars to drive traffic, but if you want to, you know, promote coal and get in the way of the earned child tax credit, spend away. So I also I think there might be some workarounds that people have talked about by going state by state.
But until I I think until unless it's overturned, which I agree with you, it doesn't look
this is all a word salad of saying I don't know.
Yeah. So when you think about we've talked a lot about the billionaire tax. Um, you have proposed other things like an AMT tax and there's some things in committee right now, speaking of Democrats, which seem much more effective, which is giving tax relief to people under a certain number. Um, and then at the same time making the group of people taxed larger.
Well, there's three different tax proposals. So the Democrats, to our credit, have finally wised up and realized that they need to move from their objective of redistributing virtue, telling other people they're not as worthy, constantly talking through identity politics about what's right and what's wrong with the world. And if you tell billionaires they're evil and white people they're racist, and young men that they're predators, they'll leave the party. I'm like, "Okay, this part is not for me." And if you look at those three groups, they have largely abandoned the Democratic party. So what they realize is that the key to 26 and 28 is to talk less about redistributing virtue and redistributing income. And also that the best narrative for redistributing income is tax cuts, not not handouts. Now the three there's the Khanna proposal, there's the Booker proposal, and then there's the Warren um proposal. Warren is basically class warfare. It's a 5% tax, wealth tax every year. That may not sound like a lot, but the majority of people don't have 5% liquid taxes sitting around. I can't imagine the hundreds of thousands of people who would be hired to try and diminish or decrease or lower the value assessed value of billionaires wealth. It goes after basically 900 people. Actually, that's not true. People over a billion, it's 5%. But to tell billionaires they have to come up with 5% of their wealth every year, I do think that that's the tipping point where you would lose somewhere between a quarter at least from a residency standpoint to a third of billionaires in the US. The example is the non-dom tax in the United uh in the United Kingdom. It was theoretically it made all the sense in the world. It's like you've been here for a while, you should pay UK taxes. The tax receipts this year are going to be lower because 10,000 millionaires have moved away in the last year and people have this populist [__] of let them go. Well, okay, who's going to pay for the NHS? So, the wealth tax doesn't work. The wealthy are the most mobile people in the world. They have homes all over the world. They can have really nice lives in Milan or in London. So, if you're looking to actually be effective, not, you know, not just right, the wealth tax doesn't work. Warren is more about social services and and corpor corporate taxes, expanded child tax c tax credit. The one I like the most is Booker's. His he's saying, okay, it's the first 75,000. It's taxfree. Right now, what people don't realize is that first off, the myth that wealthy don't pay their taxes. The top 1% paid 19% in 1980. Now they pay 42%. It's the 0.1% that are getting away quite frankly with murder that can use all sorts of tricks to lower their tax rate into the high teens. But the 1% the workhorses mom's a baller at a law firm. She's a partner making a million half 2 million bucks. Dad owns three chiropractic clinics. He's making 800 grand. They make 2.3 2.8 million. They probably live in a blue state in a blue city. They're paying 48 or 52% uh marginal tax rate. So the whole notion of tax the rich doesn't go very far. What I think what Booker is saying is essentially if you go the first 70 the first 29,000 pay almost no pay no federal taxes right now. He's saying be at the first 75,000. Now, the devil in the details is that even though it sounds like, oh, that benefits people who make up to 75,000 the most, it actually benefits people who make 150,000 the most because they get to apply that free 79 in the lower tax rate on a larger base. It's a good idea. It's time that we level up the middle class. So, I like that. And it's it's a little bit more elegant. Whenever you send money to Washington as opposed to lowering taxes, there's some inefficiency and friction in Washington. So, I think it's a good idea, but I think there are more elegant ways to raise tax revenue. Um, lower basically do away with or lower the estate tax, the uh the exemption on money that's inherited from 30 million to 1 million. We're creating dynastic wealth. And the key is to have taxes that are least taxing. If your kids inherit 11 million instead of 14 million, you're obviously no less happier because you're not around to see it. and the kid isn't any any less happier if he gets 11 million or she gets 11 million versus 14 million. The other thing we need is uh AMT and that is if you make over say a million bucks or you're a corporation that makes over 10 million bucks use the 4,000 pages of loopholes to skirt it down skirt it down 1202 depreciation but if you're not paying at least 40% there's an AMT. So, an alternative minimum tax and then um triple the budget of the IRS because the biggest tax cut in history that we don't talk about is that the Trump administration has essentially neutered uh the IRS. So, crime's going to go up when there's no cops on the beat. Supposedly, $750 billion a year is called the tax gap, which is uncollected taxes that are owed. So, get rid of the estate tax exemption, alternative minimum tax of 40%. support the IRS
and support the IRS as opposed to what feels a little bit like class warfare.
That's an interesting thing. I don't think it works very well because people are aspirational. That said, the the tech people especially who are the wealthiest um have not really slathered themselves in glory in terms of people we I mean they the brand has gone down. And so I think people don't when when Jeff Bezos rents Venice or uh or or Alex Karp talks about disenfranchising white Democratic women. I think that's what he was sort of saying in his statements the other day. Um it it feels like let's get them like they're they're sort of they're they're creating an anger toward them that uh that I think is unnecessary and unproductive and at the same time you sort of want to take all their you know leave them naked without clothes. Um, not well I don't want to see them naked. That's not true. Um, but it's a real it's a real conundrum and I do think one of the things that has to happen is there's got to be some neutering of Citizens United in that regard because I think it's very clear what the trends have been. On a middle metal level, the biggest tax cut would be having the stones to go after entitlements because we spent $7 trillion on $5 trillion in receipts. And every time we do that, in order to keep the government pumped up and going, and the asset prices, the assets which you and I own, keep them elevated, we issue more debt. So the biggest tax cut in history would be fiscal responsibility. And it's a tax cut on your kids in the future who are going to have absolutely no money in the government to invest in education or technology. And if you really want to get serious about quote unquote taxing future generations, some Democrat is going to have to be the adult in the room and say that if you make over a million dollars a year as a senior citizen, you're not getting social security. And we need to move back the age and we need to means test it and we need to distribute GLP1 and bring down health care costs. But if we're serious about lowering taxes on future generations, we can have populist ideas. But what we need to do, quite frankly, is just have more of a fiscal responsibility because the deficit every day is a $2 trillion tax on future generations because someone's going to have to pay the ship back.
Well, that may be true, but it's the Trump administration who's brought up the deficit more than any other of any of the
we that's been a bipartisan thing.
7 trillion George B George Washington to George Bush, 30 trillion since George Bush. But Trump's been the worst.
