MSNBC "The Beat with Ari Melber" - Transcript: Interview with Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Interview

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MELBER: We`re back with Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat from Massachusetts, in the center of this fight over inequality, billionaires and whether corporations pay their fair share.

Thank you for being here.

WARREN: Thank you. I`m glad to be with you.

MELBER: Is a wealth tax fair? And how would it work?

WARREN: A wealth tax is a whole lot fairer than what we have right now.

So look at it this way. The problem in America right now with billionaires is that they don`t pay taxes the way everybody else does. So, we have somebody like Jeff Bezos, who claims that, even though he sits on a bazillion dollars` worth of work, he actually only made $83,000 last year. I`m not kidding.

[18:25:05]

And so he pays less in federal income taxes than the average Boston public school teacher. That is a system that is rigged. And the American people have had it up to here with that.

So, this is our chance. Here we are. We`re putting together a package to make investments in child care, in home and community-based care, in expanded medical care, and fighting against climate change. And we have a chance to say, Jeff Bezos, you and the other 700 billionaires are actually going to have to kick in some money on this.

I think it`s the right thing to do.

MELBER: And we mentioned briefly the history which everyone lived through.

You clearly have been a leader on this. Many will remember, President Obama tapped you to try to clean up some of the problems in the economy. You are now, of course, your own leader as a senator. But, boy, you caught a lot of heat, including within the Democratic Party, at the time. Let`s take a look.

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ANDREW YANG, FORMER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: A wealth tax makes a lot of sense in principle. The problem is that it`s been tried in Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, and all those countries ended up repealing it.

FMR. REP. BETO O`ROURKE (D-TX): Sometimes, I think that Senator Warren is more focused on being punitive or pitting some part of the country against the other.

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR (D-MN): I appreciate Elizabeth`s work. But, again, the difference between a plan and a pipe dream is something that you can actually get done.

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MELBER: Is the party moving closer to you now -- to your view, I mean -- and, if so, why?

WARREN: Yes.

And I think part of the reason is that what`s happened just in the last year of the pandemic, how billionaires have gotten so much richer, not because they worked harder, not because they made these really smart investments, but because they were sitting on lots and lots of marketable securities and owned a lot of businesses.

And they got richer while everybody else struggled. And I think we realized during this pandemic this is the time. We have got to be in this to help each other out. And that includes the billionaires.

So, all of this is about, the proposal that`s on the table right now -- remember, mine was just 2 cents. Let`s just do 2 cents on everybody`s well, 3 cents if you`re over a billion. It`s a little different right now. And this one focuses on growth.

So, you and I both know that since, gosh, early in the 20th century, America has taxed when your wealth gets bigger. Now, if it gets bigger because you dug a ditch, we said, we`re going to every year make you true up, and you have to pay the taxes for whatever you earned for digging ditches.

But if you got richer by sitting on a big pile of stock certificates, you don`t actually have to true up every year. You can just wait until you decide either to sell it or until you die.

The problem with that is that, over the past three decades, is that billionaires have actually taken that difference and totally distorted what they can do with it. So, now you have somebody like Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people in the world. He buys yachts, and he buys yachts for his yachts. He shoots himself into space. He does everything.

And yet he says, my income is only this tiny little bit, because he`s figured out how not to ever have to sell anything and trigger the taxes that he is accruing.

So, what this provision says is, you know what, you got to true up every year if you earn your wages by working, and you got to true up every year if you grow your wealth by investments. Seems fair to me. And it turns out it will produce literally hundreds of billions of dollars for us to be able to invest in kids, in our climate, in America.

MELBER: Yes, it`s interesting as well, when you put it that way, Senator, because there`s always a debate about the size of taxes. And that`s pretty endless, may never end.

But what your proposal, what you have led on really reminds people is, this isn`t a debate about higher taxes, per se. It`s a debate about people who are really powerful to -- and use their power to dodge taxes. And if you own the company and run the company, or you own the voting share stock, and you say, oh, I don`t want -- I don`t want to get the ditch -- as you put it, the ditch-digging payments, I want to use the other way to duck ever paying taxes, and you can do that when you run the company.

So it`s very interesting and important that way.

While I have you, I wanted to ask you about big tech as well...

WARREN: Sure.

MELBER: ... which is something you and I have discussed before. I want to show, just for an example, Facebook, their profits there $9 billion, their tax rate, corporate, 13 percent.

[18:30:04]

That dovetails, I think, partly with what you`re discussing in the economy. But I also wanted you to give us your updated views on holding them accountable. You were on THE BEAT once talking about a plan to break up big tech. We have covered that the Biden administration`s agencies are actually going a little harder on that than before. Some of the nominees seem a little stronger, at least more skeptical.

But what`s your view of what direction we`re going and what more should Congress and the federal government do, if anything, to hold big tech accountable right now?

WARREN: Look, the only way we`re going to hold them accountable is to break them up.

And I understand there are people who say, well, maybe we could regulate them a little better, and we could put more cops on the beat.

And, look, I`m not opposed to that. It`s just not enough to get the job done. We need to break them up. And the way we break them up is, we say -- it`s kind of like with the phone company. You know how you can call me and I can call you even if we don`t use the same telephone carriers? We need to be able to do the same thing with our social media, that I can call you, and you can call me.

And once we make that work and break them apart, now you have got 10 providers for those social media services, 50 providers for those social media services, and they`re competing for our business.

And that means I can pick one who says, you know what, I`m not going to be selling your information to somebody else. And the consequence of that is to make the market work better.

The second consequence is to deprive Facebook of the kind of enormous power that it now has. Think what it means that Facebook is scooping in information from every one of our exchanges, scooping it in, and using it for its own benefit, for advertising, for selling to third parties, shoot, for playing footsie with dictators around the world.

We need to break that up. I go back to Teddy Roosevelt, who said the reason you break up these big monopolies is partly for economic reasons, create competition, but it`s partly because they pose a real political risk to the survival of a democracy.

It is time to break up Facebook.

MELBER: Really interesting, especially coming from you at this juncture.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, thanks for making time for us tonight.

WARREN: You bet. It`s always good to be with you.

MELBER: Great. Appreciate it.

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