James Talarico

And that should be terrifying.

We have a whole economy now built on keeping us in our rooms, on our phones for as many hours in the day as possible.

And so their competitors are church and neighborhoods and pubs.

It is the actual, messy, complicated, beautiful human relationships that we require to live.

And I think it's something we don't talk about enough.

We're seeing the effects of it every day in our own lives and the lives of people we love.

But I don't think we recognize how this is destroying us from the inside out.

I've been accused of demonizing billionaires, and I want to be really clear that that's not what I'm doing.

In fact, I am trying to humanize billionaires because I think the accumulation of more wealth than you could spend in 100 lifetimes, Elon Musk is about to become the world's first trillionaire, is not just bad for the world.

It's not just bad for our neighbors.

It's not just bad for Texans.

It's also bad for those billionaires.

And I actually think the path that I'm laying out, which is going to include higher taxes on billionaires, depending on how much money you make, it may mean you're not going to be a billionaire anymore.

But I think a more just economy where we grow together, kind of like the economy we had in the middle of the 20th century, I think is actually good for all of us.

And I'm not proposing a maximum income.

But I'm asking if you should.

No, I'm not.

But what I do think is if you have tax rates on...

the richest people in the country like we had in the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of people are no longer gonna be billionaires.

And that is just gonna be the result of a more, a fairer economy.