This is a lightly edited transcript of the January edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m the host, Perry Bacon. I’m honored to be joined by one of the guests we’ve been trying to book since the moment we started doing this show in August. A great politician, a great leader. I always look forward to hearing what she has to say. Senator Warren, welcome. Thanks for joining us.
Elizabeth Warren: Thank you. It good to be with you.
Bacon: You gave a big speech yesterday about the Democratic Party, about where you want it to go, and you used two terms that I want you to define and talk about. The first was the phrase big tent. You defined big tent in a particular way. You said you want to see the party as a big tent, but you were wary of a certain kind of big tent.
So tell people who didn’t see the speech about your two views of a big tent, and what kind of big tent you want to see for the party.
Warren: So remember that the kind of underlying thread of this whole speech is about how we win and about the importance of talking about where families are economically right now, the economic pressure that families are under.
The question is: What does a big tent look like? And there are folks within the Democratic Party who think that the big tent means that we put together kind of our economic plans and proposals with a very careful eye on the billionaires and other wealthy donors.
So yeah, we talk about how it’s tough for working families, but we put up proposals that nibble around the edges, that are modest, that are simpatico to keeping the rich [rich] and everybody else struggling. In other words, replicating a rigged system.
The alternative vision of the big tent: We say, full-throated, we understand the problem. The problem is a rigged system that keeps flowing more money to the top and less money to everybody else. We have concrete plans to fix it, and here they are. And here comes the best part: We’re damn well willing to get in there and fight for them, and we’re willing to fight for them even if it offends other Democrats and Democratic donors.
Those are two very different visions of the big tent, and my view is when the choice is between billionaires and everybody else, we win when we choose everybody else.
Bacon: In other words, Elon Musk can join the big tent if he wants to pay taxes at a higher rate and not destroy the government, but the tent is not going to be open to him to do whatever he wants.
Warren: Let me say what you’re saying, only slightly differently. [The] big tent is open. We’re just not going to change our message for somebody who says, Oh, but I could open my wallet and offer you millions of dollars—nope.
Our message is the right message for us, and we are committed to get in there and fight for it.
Bacon: The other term you used was abundance. And again, you offered both a positive view of abundance and a version of abundance that we should avoid.
So talk about that term—unpack it—and explain why it can be useful, but also how it can obscure bad policies.
Warren: So abundance—what it means, or sometimes means—is just inefficiency and red tape. And boy, isn’t that stupid?
And I just want to say on this: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should be the poster child on abundance. Because we took a bunch of tangled consumer regulations spread across seven different agencies. Nobody was really effectively enforcing them. Here’s the best part: We not only smoothed it out, we made them work so that families received more than a billion dollars a year—every year—back from the CFPB… money the CFPB had collected because people had gotten cheated there. It’s the CFPB. It was abundance before abundance was hip. That’s one way to think about abundance: Get rid of kind of the tangle.
But there’s a second way, and that is to stop and think: Why does law sometimes stay so tangled up? Why isn’t it we can’t seem to do any better? And now to pay attention to giant corporations and billionaires—the moneyed interest in perpetuating the inefficiency.
Quick example on that: In most countries around the world, you can file your taxes online for free. Duh. I have fought for years to get free filing here in the United States instead. No. You got to go drop a few hundred bucks with H&R Block or some other TurboTax, one of the tax folks, in order to pay your own taxes to your own federal government, right? So I push. I push, and finally IRS—God bless them—they put together Free File and make it available. It’s limited in its first kind of options when they put it out there; it’s beloved. People say, this is fabulous, it works terrifically.
So what do the tax companies do? The minute Donald Trump gets elected to office, they swoop in and get the whole thing wiped out, zeroed out. It will not be the law.
So there’s an example of, yes, we are quite inefficient as a country in terms of how ordinary folks file their taxes. But the reason for that inefficiency is it’s corporations who figured out that those inefficiencies keep costs high for consumers and keep profits even higher for the corporations.
So my pitch here: If we want to talk about abundance and talk about where the wheels have come off and we need to make things work a little more smoothly… Sure. But come on. Let’s take a look at how corporations, billionaires have used abundance as a screen to say, oh, government is just too inefficient, you guys shouldn’t be regulating, you shouldn’t be trying to build anything. You shouldn’t be investing anything. In other words, to promote their own economic agenda behind the screen of abundance, wearing the abundance T-shirt.
Bacon: You gave us the policy ideas that I want to talk about, and that I think a lot of people agree with. A lot of them came from your campaign, which was excellent, of course. But I want to ask about two things other Democrats are doing, just to get a sense of it.
First—and I’ll ask both at the same time—what can we learn? We’re probably not going to have a national free-bus system. Or maybe we should, but we’re not going to adopt all of this wholesale. So what should we learn from the Mamdani campaign? What should we take nationally from what he ran on?
Second, the governor of California came out today and said he’s fiercely opposed to, and is going to try to kill, the proposed wealth tax there. I’d be curious what your response is to what he said.
Warren: So let’s do Mamdani first. I think what we can learn from Mamdani is that you can come basically from nowhere.
Literally. People knew who he was. And take down a political dynasty. If you listen to people about their economic lives, if you listen to them about how expensive in this case it’s to live in your city, how expensive it is to be able to raise kids, to be able to pay your rent, to be able to pay your groceries, and then come up with just a few.
Don’t do ‘em all at once, but a few concrete, measurable proposals that people can, I was thinking about trying on shoes. They can try that on in their minds and say, huh, that would be really helpful to me. Think of Zohran’s free buses universal childcare, and some access to public grocery stores in places where there aren’t any groceries.
Bacon: And the rent freeze, of course.
Warren: There you go. That’s right. Pick [a] rent freeze. You’re exactly right on the places that are eligible for that. You got four things there. They’re not complicated. Every consumer can say, I see how that would affect my life.
And that was enough. I really want to make a point here. That was not only enough to get him the win… it got thousands of people to knock on doors for him, to show up at rallies for him, to talk to their neighbors about him. In other words, it’s one thing to say you had a lot of ads.
No, he had to build that thing from scratch. He got enough people sharing the vision. And by the way, when people roll their eyes and say, oh, that’s New York City, it’s very different… Mikie Sherrill did the same thing in New Jersey.
And remember her two big things. She said, we’re going to do childcare. And on day one, she had the most radical proposal of anybody. She said, I’m going to put a price cap on day one on utilities. Nobody’s going to pay more on their utilities. She wins by 14 points. I think that’s crucial. My views on wealth tax are obviously well known since I was the one [who] started this. But the question really becomes why not?
Bacon: We have to be fair—he’s a Democrat. He’s making this sort of technocratic argument that we’ll lose more money than we’ll make, because billionaires will move. I want to make sure we note he’s a fellow Democrat, and he often says things I agree with. Is he wrong? Is he still seeing this the wrong way?
Warren: Look, I always want to make the pitch here: The best way to do a wealth tax is to do a national wealth tax. And this is one of the pitches I made when I ran for president. We should be doing this nationally so that deciding to jump across the state border doesn’t change your tax status or how much you’re going to have to pay in taxes.
In order to avoid it at a national level, you actually have to give up your U.S. citizenship. And forfeit your passport. And so I want to be fair about differences at that one can talk about where you’re trying to bring policies in.
But the part I want to underscore 10 times over is we cannot back up from proposals like the wealth tax or like universal childcare because it would mean an increase in taxes for the richest among us. Just because the donors don’t like it, right? And people will always find another way to describe it.
Nobody will ever say, Hey, look, I’m doing this because I took a lot of money from the industry and that’s what they want. Nobody ever says that, but it really is important for Democrats to say: Are we going to trim down our ambitions? Because we want to be really friendly to the people who are going to pitch nickels into our campaigns? Or do we recognize that we got to go in full force, all the way? Full-throated?
I’m not stupid. I understand that money is important, and I don’t believe in unilateral disarmament—against the Republicans. But the reality here, Perry, is that if worrying about the donors keeps us from being bold, keeps us from fighting, if that’s what happens then the money just ain’t worth it.
Bacon: You support this, to be clear, in California?
Warren: That’s right. We need to be in the fight because we need to establish that trust with working people: that we’re willing not just to do what’s easy and everybody agrees to, but to do things that are going to—there’re gonna be some rich people who aren’t going to like it—and the answer has to be that we’re still committed to do it.
We are the Democrats. We’re the party that brought America Social Security and the 40-hour workweek and overtime and unions—real power and protection for unions. We’re the party that did unemployment insurance. We’re the party that did homes for returning veterans and homes for first-time homebuyers. That did Medicare. We’re the party that did the Affordable Care Act and tried to get coverage for everybody in this country.
We need to be willing. Every one of those was, by the way, a hard fight against the Republicans. They voted no on all that stuff. We need to be the party that is willing to stand up, willing to be bold, and willing to fight for what families need to unrig this system.
Bacon: I know you’ve got to go. But you’re a senator with a plan, so I do want to ask. People across the country are asking about ICE.
Is there any—have you thought much about what we should do about ICE? People are outraged by what they’re seeing. I’m outraged by what I’m seeing. You’ve probably given this some thought. You may or may not have a full-fledged proposal, but what are your thoughts about how we can make ICE different—or whether ICE should exist in the first place?
Warren: We need to reorganize our whole approach to immigration, and yes, we need to enforce our immigration laws. Yes, we need to enforce our borders, but it needs to be done differently, and we need more restraints over people who are going into our neighborhoods.
I always think back to Donald Trump and his run-up to the 2024 election; he promised two things: that he would lower costs on day one, and he would keep us safe. He was going to make this a safer country. You remember that? Lower costs on day one. Cost of housing is up, cost of healthcare is up, cost of utilities is up. Cost of groceries is up because of his policies.
Safe. Nobody is safer. Invading our communities now, throwing people down on the sidewalk, shooting when civilians are around. He is not making America more affordable, and he’s not making America safer. And it’s up to us to put those plans out there and to show we’re willing to fight for them.
Bacon: Senator, great to see you. Thank you for joining me.
Warren: Good to see you. You take care.
