Tom Suozzi
speaker
270 appearances
18 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 25 May
Tom Suozzi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 12.
Appearances
So I think the biggest problem the Democrats face is that we've lost the working class. And that's, you know, the reason I'm a Democrat is because I believe that, you know, for America to be successful, we have to have a strong middle class in our country. And that's not going to happen on its own in our system. Government has to play a role in helping to foster the creation of a middle class.
Democrats need to start talking about, you know, Republicans try to say they're for the working class. Well, the minimum wage in America is $7.25 an hour in 20 states. Democrats are in favor of increasing the minimum wage. Republicans are not in favor of increasing the minimum wage.
Democrats are in favor of unions and promoting the PRO Act, which is a way to encourage more union membership in America. Republicans are against... the PRO Act. Democrats are in favor of giving more teeth to the National Labor Relations Board. Republicans are afraid of giving more power to the National Labor Relations Board. So first, we have to understand what happened in our country.
So in the 1980s, America was terrified that the Japanese and the German car companies were crushing America's big three automakers. And we were worried they were going to take over all manufacturing in our country. And we freaked out. And a guy named Milton Friedman, a famous economist, wrote a paper and he said, listen, Stop worrying about the employees.
Stop worrying about the communities that you operate in and focus on the shareholder. If you focus on the shareholder, we will succeed. We will beat this global threat of globalization and we will win. And we did. We focused on the shareholders to the exclusion of the employees and the communities we're in. And we made a lot of money. We were very successful. The Dow Jones has got up 2,500%.
The GDP has gone up 1,500%, but workers' wages have gone up by less than 30%. And it's best manifest in a couple movies. One is the movie Wall Street. You know the movie Wall Street with Michael Douglas?
Gordon Gekko says greed is good. And the idea is we're going to do whatever it takes to stop this fat company that's not changing with the times to be more efficient. And in the movie Pretty Woman, you remember Pretty Woman with Richard Gere?
So Richard Gere and Jason Alexander from Seinfeld, you know, was his sidekick. And they're going to buy up this old guy's company. And chop it up for parts. What's that? And chop it up for parts. And chop it up for parts and sell off the shipbuilding. Guy says, the older man says, but thousands of people will lose their jobs and this town will be decimated.
He says, yeah, but we're going to make a lot of money. And that's what happened in America is we got rid of a lot of these factory towns. People lost their union jobs. left behind a polluted property. People now, instead of, you know, making a 70 or 80 or $90,000 a year and having health insurance and a pension don't have that anymore. They're working for $10.
If you make $10 an hour and you work 40 hours a week and you work 50 weeks a year and you have two weeks vacation, you're only making $20,000 a year. If you make $15 an hour, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, that's $30,000 a year. You're not gonna be able to buy a house, educate your kids, pay for health insurance and retire one day without being scared on 20 or 30 or $40,000 a year.
It's impossible. So we got all these people in these hollowed out communities throughout the country that are pissed off because they're working hard. They're not making enough money. They don't have health insurance. They're getting bankrupt by their debt. Their churches are empty. There's no more Elks Club. Their kids are doing methamphetamine or fentanyl or dying from overdoses.
People are losing their teeth. And it's like, what happened to my town? What happened to my life? And they're pissed off and they're looking for a savior and they fell for Donald Trump's lying. Joe Biden actually did a lot of great stuff with the Infrastructure Act, with the CHIPS Act, with promoting unions to try and rebuild the middle class.
He always said, he's just, unfortunately, President Biden was not the greatest communicator in the world. He always said, we wanna build from the bottom up and from the middle out. That's what we need to do in America.
We need to rebuild the middle class and people who aspire to the middle class so that they make enough money so that they can afford to have a house, educate their kids, pay for health insurance, and retire without being scared. Until we start talking about that as our main issues to people again, we're going to keep on losing the working class.
As long as we're focused on some of the cultural issues and some of the things that like, you know, why are you so worried about... This guy who came here is undocumented and committed a crime. And I'm not making enough money to take care of my family. I don't have a health insurance or a pension anymore. What about me? What are you doing about me? So we got to get back to The basics.
One last thing. When Trump was first elected in 2016, I went to a big meeting at the DCCC. People were sitting around a table, 50 people. And one union guy says, the Democrats used to show up at church picnics and at the bars and they would talk to you. They don't do that anymore. And that's the problem.
When I first started talking about the border in my special election to take the seat that George Santos was kicked out of, and I was talking about the border, everybody's like, why are you talking about the border? That's a Republican issue. I was like, this is what everybody's talking about. We have to stop listening to the consultants and start listening to the people that we represent again.
Yeah. I mean, politics, you know, goes in waves. And, you know, right now we're on the downswing of our wave. We are in trouble. We have to get back to to talking about what people care about and talking to the people.
I think that's more of a tactical thing. You know, the media is fractured now. That's why I'm on your show.
I mean, the bottom line is the media. We have the there's five parts of the media now. Traditional media, which is your local daily newspaper and your local channels and your cable news and, you know, the New York Times and the New York Post for me and, you know, other traditional media. Weekly paper is very important. Anybody who reads a weekly paper, your local paper, they're definitely voting.
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