Pete Buttigieg
speaker
1,076 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Pete Buttigieg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
If we aren't collecting a fair level of taxes, then, of course, we're going to come up short when we're trying to fund those things.
And the biggest thing of all, numerically, that we're facing right now is this massive debt.
Now, it's not fashionable on the left to talk about deficits and the debt, partly because I think Democrats are pretty sick of that being invoked as a reason not to do things like roads and bridges and schools and hospitals that we believe in.
But it's now escalated to a level that no one can ignore it.
And it turns out some analysis has suggested or shown that if you just start the clock at the beginning of this century with the big Bush tax cuts in, I think, 2001, and then you go through the Trump tax cuts for the wealthiest, you add all that up, if it weren't for all those tax cuts, the debt would actually be going down right now.
So they can fully account for what's happened to the increase in the debt.
And we just don't have to accept that.
Got this graph here of U.S.
And what's going on with the debt is both...
evidence of it and part of the problem.
I think it's a symptom, but in some ways it's a cause.
It could be a cause of a currency crisis or force us to redo our whole tax code within the next few years.
One thing I learned about recently is a principle called Stein's Law.
It's named after a Reagan-era economist, actually the father of Ben Stein from, if you remember, Ferris Bueller.
The principle is very simple.
If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
It's one of these blindingly obvious things that we don't think about enough at a moment like this where everybody agrees the debt can't keep going up like this.
It's just almost definitionally impossible.
Pretty much everyone agrees our politics can't go on like this.
And if something can't go on forever, it won't.
Showing 521–540 of 1,076 · page 27 of 54
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