This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
After the election, I started asking congressional Democrats I had talked to the same question: If they had won a trifecta, what would their first big bill have been? What was going to be their priority? In almost every case, they said, they didn’t know. That’s a problem.
Democrats are in the opposition now — that means fighting the worst of what Trump is doing. But it also means providing an alternative, creating another center of gravity in American politics.
So one thing I’m going to do on the show this year is talk to Democrats who sound like they are trying to find that alternative — crafting an agenda that is alive to this moment, not just one carried over from the past.
One Democrat who has interested me is Jake Auchincloss, a congressman from Massachusetts. Among the Democrats talking about the abundance agenda, he has had particularly interesting things to say.
It’s not that I agree with every idea he offers here. I don’t. But when I hear him, I hear someone wrestling with the questions I posed to other Democrats: What is your alternative? What did people need to hear from you over these last few years that they didn’t?
This conversation was recorded at the end of January. So you won’t hear the latest Trump news discussed. But that’s also not the point of this. The country needs a resistance. But it also needs an alternative.
Ezra Klein: Congressman Jake Auchincloss, welcome to the show.
Jake Auchincloss: Thanks for having me on Ezra.
After the election, a lot of Democrats have responded to Donald Trump’s particular form of populism by offering what you call a Diet Coke version of it. Tell me about your Diet Coke theory of the Democratic Party.
I’m concerned that boldface-name Democrats have been leaning into populism. They have said: Boy, Donald Trump has done what we dreamed of — which was building a multiethnic working-class coalition.
The biggest city in my district, Fall River, Mass., is the exemplar of a multiethnic working-class city and voted for a Republican in 2024 for the first time in 100 years. And Democrats across the country have been looking at cities like Fall River and have said: Well, if they’re doing populism, we’ve got to do populism, too — whether that’s immigration or trans issues or the culture wars.
And my view on that is that voters who ordered a Coca-Cola don’t want a Diet Coke. There are two different parties. We have to start by understanding who our voters are not and then understanding who our voters could be — and go and try to win them over. If you’re walking to the polls and your No. 1 issue is guns, immigration or trans participation in sports, you’re probably not going to be a Democratic voter. That’s OK. There are two parties.
But if you are a voter who went Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump, and you’re walking to the polls and your No. 1 issue is cost of living — boy, we’d better win you back.
Democrats used to have a multiracial working-class coalition. They won voters making less than $50,000 by significant margins. They won nonwhite voters by significant margins. That was their coalition. What is your explanation of what broke it?
I think we were seen as taking our eye off the ball on both kitchen-table and front-porch issues. The notorious ad “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” was not just about the particular salience of trans issues in this election but about a broader cultural thesis: that Democrats have taken their finger off the cultural mainstream.
Between the time when Bill Clinton played saxophone on live TV and peaking, I think, with Obama’s election in 2008 but persisting all the way through 2018, Democrats broadly were winning the culture wars. And MAGA’s big idea was: Maybe we can win the culture wars.
To a certain extent, they did. And I think Democrats now have to make very clear that has been a mask for an agenda that is not actually going to help people.
What you’ve seen in Donald Trump’s first week in office is that he’s siding with cop beaters and tech oligarchs. He’s not doing anything on housing, health care and taxes for the typical American family. We’ve got to drive that cost of living message home.
Have you been surprised by the size of the post-election vibe shift? You have this very close election and then what has felt since it like an almost seismic cultural change.
How do you understand the difference between those two things?
If you had asked me a year ago whose dance moves were going to become culturally mainstream, Kamala Harris’s or Donald Trump’s, I would have said Kamala Harris’s. She’s a pretty good dancer.
But no, it was National Football League stars doing Trump’s dance moves in the end zone. I have been surprised by that.
You have made this point: We have to be careful about over-reading the results of one election. Every single incumbent party throughout the developed world lost vote share. Center right, center left were no different. And in fact, House Democrats modestly outperformed, which you might expect to have been the case.
So what I’m concerned about is that Democrats basically reach for economic and cultural populism in a way that is going to be uninteresting and unpersuasive to voters — as opposed to carving out, in this party system that we’re in, our own view of things. Which is that, yes, we are a party that stands for the rule of law and that stands for a nation of immigrants and that stands for climate action and gun violence prevention. But you’re going to trust us on these noble abstractions because we’re also going to be able to perform at the state and local level, particularly in these years when we’re in the wilderness. And that means bigger ideas than we have right now.
But the core Democratic economic message is that taxes plus housing plus health care is less than half your wallet. That is our economic telos. And that requires treating cost disease where it afflicts sectors across the United States economy — most notably housing and health care.
What is “cost disease”? That’s a specific term.
Cost disease is the most important economic concept that policymakers are unaware of. Sectors like housing and health care are afflicted by Baumol’s cost disease, which says that because they are very labor-intensive and low productivity, they are going to inflate faster than gross domestic product.
Haircuts are a good example of this. Haircuts are non-automatable and service-intensive. Yet the wage for a hairstylist has to be competitive with the wage for somebody in a sector that has higher productivity gains. So you’re going to see more and more share of wallet going toward these sectors.
Imagine if you were going to build your car. And instead of buying a car at a dealership, you stood in your driveway, called up a general contractor and had them subcontract out the various parts of the car. And people came to your driveway and built the car piece by piece. Imagine how much that car would cost. A lot more than the typical car, right?
Well, that’s how we build houses. And it doesn’t actually have to be that way. And in fact, it is tied to the abundance agenda that I know that you and Derek Thompson and others have been pushing to the front of the policy conversation.
The abundance agenda makes the case that if you’re trying to lower the cost of living for the typical American family, you need to unlock supply rather than subsidize demand. You need to build more stuff.
I agree with the abundance agenda, and I agree with it across different sectors. But I think it’s incomplete.
You can’t just unlock supply if it’s a supply of a sector that has low productivity gains. You first have to turn those services into products and then unlock supply. Yes, we need zoning reform to expand supply. But we also need to lean into off-site construction to turn housing production away from stick-built, where it’s highly service-intensive, and toward modular construction, where it’s more factory-intensive.
I was reporting a couple years back on this affordable-housing complex in San Francisco called Tahanan — the first of these complexes in S.F. done as modular housing. And it was a really excellent build. It came in at about half the price per unit, about half the time to build it.
But when I was talking to the people behind it, who were thinking about doing a second, at least at that time, they said: We probably won’t do a modular build again.
I asked why, and they said: That’s probably the political fight we can’t win twice — which is to say it’s often the same problem, just in a different guise. There are interest groups that have made it very hard to do modular housing.
I’ve called this “everything-bagel liberalism.” Liberals have a lot of different goals piled into individual projects or piled into a housing policy. You want a lot of good union jobs. You want high environmental standards. You want affordable housing.
You keep stacking them. And that ends up being a problem. It’s not just that we haven’t embraced the technology, but we haven’t embraced it for a reason. People have interests where they don’t want to see technologies embraced.
Sometimes we’re actively hostile to it, as is the case in the health care system. If you are serious about cost disease and health care, what you really want to promote is biotechnology and medical device technology. Those are things that turn a service — which is all the people at a hospital who perform services to care for people — into a product. And yet, in many ways, Democrats have turned very hostile to the med-tech and biotech industries.
And yet we look forward to the year 2050, when 15 million people are going to have Alzheimer’s disease. It’s going to require three caregivers per person around the clock. That by itself is going to be an affordability crisis.
And the way to attack that issue is not through expanding the supply of caregivers — though yes, we’re going to have to do some of that. But the way to do it is to prevent people from getting Alzheimer’s disease in the first place.
Your point about modular housing is well taken, which is why I think we need bigger ideas than we have right now. You’ve pointed out in California — and I’ve seen myself in Massachusetts — that despite the liberalizing land use restrictions, successes that we’ve had at the statehouse level, we haven’t built that much housing, have we?
What about a governor-sanctioned charter city in these states? Massachusetts has two bases that have been demilitarized, Fort Devens and Union Point — a tremendous amount of land there that is interstitial to local zoning regulations.
Why don’t we have the big idea of the governor in the statehouse, either in Massachusetts or in California or another blue state, starting a new city and saying: We’re actually going to build 200,000 units of housing here. We’re going to ban cars and develop it so it’s more organic and walkable. That’s a big idea that I think could arrest some of the demographic backsliding we’re seeing in these blue states that are losing population and can’t provide housing affordability to their populations.
What about education? We have not heard education as part of the discussion for the last two election cycles. And yet we know that the school closures have been a catastrophe for a generation of kids. And we need to, one, apologize to voters for that and to make a commitment that we are going to deliver excellence in education. Because we have seen backsliding across math, science and reading comprehension in basically every place we’re measuring.
It feels to me like Democrats stopped talking about education because education splits their coalition. Education was controversial in their coalition when Barack Obama was pushing education reform, when he had Arne Duncan as his education secretary. It was controversial under Bill Clinton.
I would say that, from the first Trump presidency through the Biden presidency, the Democratic Party became more coalitional and more allergic to things that split its coalition — at least on domestic policy.
It did. And the charter school debate has grown stale —
What do you mean by that?
What I mean is that the pro-charter side is demoralized and the anticharter side is no longer actually making that case anymore. At least in Massachusetts, we see that the conversation has moved on to other issues — legalizing teacher strikes, for example, or other things.
To me, it’s another invitation for big ideas that Democrats can put forward — because Republicans don’t have them. Republicans are obsessed with what books are in the library.
One of the things I’ve been tracking very closely about artificial intelligence — and I tend to be a bit of an A.I. skeptic, candidly — is that we have seen that Khan Academy and others have been able to deliver one-on-one tutoring to students using A.I. and are showing measurable and persistent gains in math and reading comprehension, in particular. What if we made the commitment that every single kid is going to get in-depth one-on-one tutoring, both A.I. and also teacher delivered — and we just flipped the script entirely on what it means to have education?
Because we’ve got a factory-model view of what education is based on the 19th-century model of students listening to a teacher lecture. We have technology now that can make that an entirely different paradigm. We’re not talking about or delivering that.
When you said you’re an A.I. skeptic and then moved into a very pro-A.I. case on education, I think that gets at a tension in the Democratic Party.
I would say the Democratic Party used to be the more pro-technology party. You go back to Bill Clinton, coming out of the Atari Democrats, the Democratic Leadership Council Democrats, who seemed to have a lot of ideas about the information age.
Behind him was, Al Gore, who, as much as he got mocked for saying he invented the internet, was one of the most prescient politicians and elected officials of that entire era. Way ahead of the curve on a lot of these questions.
I think Barack Obama, running against John McCain and Mitt Romney, was also the information-age candidate, the candidate with a lot more ties to Silicon Valley.
And then starting in the 2016 election, there’s been a breakup between Democrats and big tech. Which is fine — Democrats became very disillusioned with disinformation and misinformation on Facebook and disillusioned with where a lot of the tech billionaires had moved and how they were acting.
But it does seem to me that the skepticism of the companies has become a skepticism of technological solutions. So now you see big futurists like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk lined up on the Republican side.
I’m curious how you think about this culturally. Because policy runs downstream of culture. And I don’t get the sense in the Democratic and liberal circles that I run through that people are fundamentally comfortable with technology. I think they understand it as downstream of big corporations and of tech-bro culture.
I take a position sector by sector. I am very pro-biotech. I want to see us develop the large or small molecules that cure Duchenne muscular dystrophy or Alzheimer’s disease. As we talked about with housing, I’m very pro-offsite construction and innovations in delivering housing as a commodity.
I recently visited an aerospace and defense factory in Los Angeles. And what they are doing with automating the production of high-mix, low-volume parts for the aerospace and defense industry is superexciting. It’s how we’re going to be able to build the material we need to compete in the Indo-Pacific.
I’m also relatively pro-blockchain because I think it can empower creators in a digital economy. People who have a thousand true fans, whether they’re musicians or visual artists, may be able to lay claim to that without being intermediated.
But I have become revolted by social media corporations and their abuse of Section 230 and their attention fracking of an entire generation of American kids. I have a 4-year-old, a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old at home. I know you have two little kids, too.
The way I view it, I’m in a race over the next four years, before they can start scrolling on their own, to force these social media corporations to uphold a duty of care to their users. Because right now, they are monetizing the attention spans of Americans, selling them off to the highest bidder and have zero interest in fighting toxicity like, for example, deepfake pornography that’s increasingly ruining young women’s lives.
You were one of the co-sponsors of the House TikTok bill that passed the House and Senate overwhelmingly, was signed by Joe Biden and upheld 9 to zero at the Supreme Court.
And then a funny thing happened: No one decided to enforce this bill. Joe Biden decided not to enforce it. And then Donald Trump wants to make himself the savior of TikTok. What happened here, from your perspective?
Ultimately, I think this thing is getting sold.
But one: TikTok’s lobbyists got to Donald Trump partly out of flattery and partly because they’ve captured his inner circle. And two: I think Trump got concerned that he wasn’t going to be able to control who the ultimate buyer was going to be. Which is why you see this really half-baked concept of the U.S. government having a 50 percent stake in TikTok — which I don’t even understand what that means.
You said you think TikTok ultimately will be sold.
One reason I asked you what you thought had happened here is that it seems a lot of support in Congress has dissipated. You also see polling showing that moving TikTok out of Chinese hands has gone from a majority proposition to a minority one.
And you saw TikTok using a strategy we’ve seen with Uber and others, putting up a little poster on its system saying: The politicians are going to take this away from you — go talk to them if you don’t want to see that happen.
So tell me about the political economy of this right now. Because you seem pretty confident that this will ultimately go through, and I don’t see that many champions of it.
It’s not that there aren’t still champions on it. You’re totally right that someone like Michael Waltz, the current national security advisor to Trump and a former congressman — a year ago, he said: Hey, if you think this pro-Hamas propaganda on TikTok is bad now, wait until China invades Taiwan. They’re poisoning young minds.
Waltz is singing a different tune now that Trump has changed his mind.
So I totally accept that premise. But I don’t think Congress’s disposition has changed that much. What I think has changed is that we’ve just packed two years’ worth of political events into the last week. And there’s only a certain amount of political attention that can be paid to any specific issue.
We’ve got to worry about inspectors general being fired. We’ve got to worry about the impoundment clause. We’ve got to worry about the Paris accord. The guy is going to try to invade Panama at some point. We have a lot of issues. And TikTok is not one that I think is as dangerous to the rule of law and to the politicization of the military as other things Trump is trying to do.
I think TikTok is going to ultimately get sold for the very simple reason that Apple and Google are going to be unwilling to embrace the legal liability that would come from hosting it on the app stores persistently. They’re going to be worried about lawsuits down the road, and that will ultimately degrade the user experience on TikTok sufficiently that a deal will make sense for both parties.
It has seemed so far that the position of ByteDance — and I think many people suspect the position of the Chinese Communist Party — is they will not sell it. It has seemed that they would prefer to cause trouble with this.
One of the things that worries me about this whole situation is you can imagine a world where Trump and the Republicans save TikTok through some kind of deal. And then before the 2026 midterm election, TikTok begins turning the dials such that content on difficult issues for Democrats is 35 percent more viral and content on issues that are good for Republicans do the same. It would be hard to look at TikTok and know anything had happened — we don’t have any bird’s-eye view of what is happening on that platform.
The ability to turn the attentional dials as an in-kind contribution, given that the whole thing is a black box at its core, seems very real. In a very different way, this is true for Elon Musk’s X. It’s true of all these platforms.
Attention is a currency now. We’ve at least some rules and some ways of thinking about how money is moving around. We don’t have anything on how attention is moving around.
As you and Chris Hayes said: Attention is the most valuable currency in the world now. And it is — “controlled” is maybe too strong of a word — but influenced very strongly by a dozen people right now.
There has never been a time where more wealth and power has been concentrated in fewer hands. And I think Americans assume that most of those hands are American hands, because, hey, we’re the home of big tech.
But what TikTok makes so plain and what you just laid out is: No. Let’s be very clear here that TikTok and ByteDance report to the C.C.P. And the C.C.P. actually has levers of influence, as well.
Let me just underscore that. Not to be too doomer about it, but Trump issued the Trump coin. And that Trump coin is the equivalent of issuing the account number for a Swiss bank account, telling foreign adversaries they can deposit funds into that account anonymously but then come and show him the receipts privately to prove that they have done so. It is the most brazen act of corruption of the modern presidency.
And if people don’t think that the Chinese and the Saudis and the Turks and the Qataris are buying some of that coin, I think they are deeply naive.
Let’s hold here for a second. I know we’re jumping around a bit, but I think this is important.
The emergence of crypto — a technology endlessly looking for a use case — as a new venue for political corruption has been really quite important.
Before Trump issued the Trump coin and Melania issued the Melania coin, you had this World Liberty coin, which Trump and his kids are part of. The World Liberty coin was meant more as a real coin. It was designed more in the way some of these crypto drops are designed. But it was quite punitive to users, so it didn’t do that well initially. It had terms of service in it or a structure where if it went above a certain level, it would trigger payouts to the Trump family. And this was public.
So a crypto magnate under U.S. investigation publicly bragged — there’s reporting in Bloomberg and elsewhere — about pumping a bunch of money into it so that it triggered a multimillion-dollar payment to the Trump family. And by saying he did it publicly — of course, they knew that he did it publicly. There was nothing illegal about it — it’s an investment. But it’s also very clear what was happening here.
You cannot just move money into Donald Trump’s pocket. But he has now created a series of vehicles where you can do something one step removed. There’s Trump Media & Technology Company, which now has a stock price listing. You could, to some degree, try to invest in that. But much more directly, these coins, and any further coins the Trump family puts forward, have created a way for people to back truckloads of money into the Trump family.
I remember in Trump’s first term, people would stay in Trump Hotels to tell Trump they were lining his pocket a little bit. But a hotel room can only cost so much. This is a whole new magnitude and a whole new innovation.
It is guaranteed that foreign adversaries will be purchasing the Trump coin. And frankly, the United States would do that, too. If the Venezuelan president issued some coin and we thought that we could gain influence over him by purchasing that and tying up his net worth in American interest and currency, that’s a good national security decision. We would do that to the Iranians and the Turks, as well. You better believe they’re going to do it to us, too.
Here’s the difficult political economy Trump has created for Democrats: Facebook, Amazon, TikTok, X — the social media companies generally are more popular than the Democrats are.
You’re saying that Democrats should take these companies on more frontally — that they should force the TikTok sale or force it to be shuttered if they won’t sell it. You’re talking about getting rid of or somehow reforming Section 230. So that means you’re not only taking on, now, Donald Trump and the Republican Party but also all these technology companies, which have their own levers of influence, their own constituencies.
Tell me about how you see that fight. Even if it is a good fight to have, why do you think it is winnable, given what we’ve just seen with TikTok and how much money and power and attention is tied up in this emerging consortium?
Because it’s part of the vibe shift that you’ve been raising. You are right that — by revealed preference, by how much time people spend scrolling — they like this stuff. Four to six hours of online or video content on average for a person under 40.
But when I stand in a living room in my district, particularly with fellow parents, and I talk about these corporations stealing from family time to create more screen time, when I talk about the fact that since 2012, when smartphones became ubiquitous with the front-facing camera — and Jonathan Haidt has spoken about this eloquently — we have seen a spike in mental health challenges for young women and antisocial behavior for young men, every head is nodding.
People are able to hold two competing ideas in their head at the same time. One: We’re not going backward. We’re not getting rid of the television or the radio. We’re not getting rid of social media. But this Web 2.0 version of social media, where these leviathans are just attention-fracking us, is not sustainable. And this isn’t really what I signed up for. I feel that.
I hosted an app challenge — basically where young middle schoolers and high schoolers can build their own apps. What was striking to me is, even in the last four years that I’ve been doing this, the apps that they were building were about in-real-life community. The winning app created a way for people to sign up online to go clean up their environment locally.
Gen Z gets it. They understand that this is not good for them. And their parents look at their kids and say: I don’t think it’s fair that they are growing up — that their adolescence is being warped by the bottom line of these companies.
I can’t fight Mark Zuckerberg one-on-one. I got a full-time job, and he’s out there —
You haven’t been doing the Ultimate Fighting Championship training.
[Laughs.] And I think they like the idea that Congress will pick that fight for them.
Section 230 was passed in the 1990s. It immunizes the social media corporations from any liability for what they host. The social media corporations will act as though it’s some kind of sacrosanct First Amendment protection. It’s not. It was drafted in the 1990s by a bunch of congressmen and senators who are good legislators, but they’re not James Madison. And this law is tailored to one industry.
You don’t get these protections. Radio hosts don’t get these protections. TV hosts don’t get these protections. This was a giveaway to an industry in its infancy that it no longer needs and that it has begun to abuse.
And oftentimes I try to thread this across a number of different sectors, where I say, in the 1990s, we also gave immunity to the pharmacy benefit managers from the anti-kickback statute. These are the drug-pricing middlemen. In the early 2000s, we gave immunity to the gun-manufacturing industry from being sued for the misuse of their guns.
Folks, if an industry comes to Congress and asks not to be sued for anything they’re going to do going forward, the answer that Congress should give them is not: Yeah, sure. The answer is: Well, what are you up to that you are so afraid of standing in front of a court of law and having the facts made plain?
We have got to revoke all of these immunities and hold all corporations accountable.
You should think about attention as a collective resource, a public good. A crucial question in a democracy is the quality and quantity of attention the public can bring to civic and daily life.
One of the things that I see in what you’re saying here is that the quality of American attention has been degraded. And it’s a little bit tricky to talk about how you would try to increase the supply of attention.
I’ve said this a million times on the show, but as a parent, I am terrified about how to help my kids have a healthy attentional capacity in the world they’re growing up in. I’ve never really seen anybody come up with anything in public policy on this. Many governors, both Democratic and Republican, are coming around to phone bans in schools — God bless Jonathan Haidt on that.
But you’ve talked about a tax on attention. I’m a little skeptical of its workability, but I’d like to hear you make the case for it. What are you describing, and how would you do that?
We use a phrase that I think hints at what this might look like. When you’re scrolling on your phone and when you’re looking at content, you are “paying” attention, right? And if you’re paying attention, they are buying attention. In the real world, that could be subject to a sales tax, a value-added tax. In the digital world, it’s nonmonetized and thereby is not taxable.
The degradation of attention and the greed for our attention spans that these corporations exhibit suggests that we need to update our tax code to reflect not an industrial economy but an attention economy. And these companies will come back and say: If you try to do a value-added tax, it’s going to be unworkable, and here are 55 reasons it’s unworkable.
Is it going to be challenging to implement that? Yes. But it’s also challenging to do capital gains taxes on private equity. Our tax code and our tax enforcements update themselves.
But I think the core thesis is very well grounded: When you are paying attention and they are buying attention, that has value. And we know it has value because they go turn around and bundle it for a price to advertisers. And we simply say: You’re paying a V.A.T. based on that. And the V.A.T. is not going to go to the general fund. The V.A.T. is going to go to a separate, chartered entity that disperses funds for local journalism.
Are you saying that for every website I visit, they’re going to be paying a little bit of money based on how long I spend on the site? Are you saying that we are just going to add a tax onto the money they are making from advertising? Because attention isn’t what you are taxing here. You’re taxing some kind of exchange. What is that exchange?
The exchange is not the paying of attention — it is the buying of attention.
The advertising revenue that you’re describing ultimately gets taxed as corporate income for Facebook and the other social media corporations. They pay tax on that.
What I’m talking about is the value that they accrue by your time spent onscreen, which is “free” — you’re not paying, and they’re not paying. And yet there is an exchange there. You are paying attention, and they are calculating every single impression of that entire scroll.
They then bucket up that data, and they do a number of things with it. One, they sell it to advertisers. Two, they sell it to large language models. And they try to figure out how to monetize it. And they are incredibly good at monetizing it.
I’m not talking about a V.A.T. on the back-end monetization of data. I’m talking about a V.A.T. on the front end of how much time is spent onscreen — taxed not to the user of the service but taxed to the service provider.
This is a world where Netflix is then going to be disclosing a calculation to, I guess, the Internal Revenue Service saying: This was the total amount of time people spent bingeing or watching content on Netflix. And then Netflix pays a surcharge based on that amount of time.
Netflix is not a great example because Netflix is a subscriber model, so that is actually a monetized exchange.
What I’m talking about is the social media corporations that have thrived on network effects that brought people together. And then they took the free content that was created by users to attract more people —
So if TikTok moved to a model where it charged me five bucks a month, they’re out of this tax system?
What’s interesting about this is that some jurisdictions actually require that the social media corporations offer a subscription. So they’ve already had to put forward what they think the monetary value is of monthly usage, which is a pretty good indication of what it might end up being.
But the short answer is: No, I don’t think that’s a get out of jail free card. And you had mentioned: Is it every single website? Is it, you know, a recipe blog?
No, I don’t think it is. This goes back to Section 230, which was created at a time when it was all recipe blogs and it was Web 1.0. It was a good idea at the time.
So I’m not talking about making some blog pay a tip — blah, blah, blah. No. We’re talking about the clear, dominant websites that are monetizing people’s attention spans pay a V.A.T. on that. And we try to support those people who are actually doing real journalism and can help reconnect our communities.
Look, I’m all for anything that will support actual local journalism. I think the difficulty you always have, with any theory of how to do that from the government in an era as polarized as this one, when trust in the media is as polarized as it is, is: How do you disperse that? How do you do it in a way where this isn’t just read as a tax on things people like to fund?
It’s going to have to be bottom up, not top down. And what that means is: You’re going to have to see civil society, philanthropy, local and state buy into these organizations.
And we’re seeing green shoots of this. I’m sure you’re aware of it, as well. I see in my own district, in Newton and Brookline, and right outside my district in New Bedford, these start-up nonprofit news-gathering organizations that clearly have communal buy-in. And yet the money is a problem.
As you know better than me, the modern journalism era is a tough place to make money and a tough place to make sustainable. And yet it’s performing a public good. It has positive externalities that need to be subsidized.
We’ve been talking here about a pretty novel approach to the tax code. But we’re about to get a less novel one. There’s going to be a very big budget reconciliation bill to extend and deepen Trump’s tax cuts from the first term. How are you thinking about that?
They are about to take a chain saw to health care funding. When you dig into the federal budget, what you very quickly see and what the Republicans are learning is that we’re an insurance company with an army.
This is my old line.
[Laughs.] And Donald Trump has said: Not touching Medicare or Social Security.
Well — boom — there’s about half the money. The Republicans have made clear they want to spend more on the military. OK, so where, exactly, are these $2-to-3-trillion worth of savings that you need to satisfy your fiscal hawks so you can pay for these tax cuts?
And the answer is it can only come from one place, just arithmetically, which is Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and a few other —
Affordable Care Act.
Affordable Care Act. But functionally what we are talking about is health care.
I do not know whether they are going to be able to enact the full suite of cuts to Medicaid and the A.C.A. that they are talking about. I think Speaker Johnson does not want his members going home to their constituents and finding out just how unpopular it is to make long-term care out of reach for the average American family.
But isn’t that assuming they pay for it?
My default presumption is that they’re not going to pay for it. They’re going to do the tax cuts, and they’re going to use some monopoly math to claim that it’s paid for. I don’t know whether or not their fiscal hawks are going to be satisfied by that. I genuinely don’t know. I’ve talked to them, and right now they have a spine. We’ll see when primaries get threatened and Trump calls. We all know how brave congressional Republicans tend to be in the long run against Donald Trump.
But for the purpose of this conversation, let’s accept the premise that they do take a chain saw to health care. Let’s say they take $900 billion out of Medicaid, for example, over the next 10 years, and Democrats are able to draw that clear contrast and have some success in the midterms. What’s our big health care idea going forward? Because I don’t think claiming that we’re going to refix the federal Medicare match for Medicaid is the big idea.
And I feel like, as a party, we need to move away from equating health insurance with health care. For the last 15 years, the core thesis of the party has been: Everybody needs health insurance. Pre-existing condition or not. And we are going to subsidize the health insurance companies to make sure that it’s universal.
We’ve had a lot of success doing that, and it’s critical that everybody does have health insurance in this country. But now the focus needs to shift toward cost.
We’re not going to be able to convince Americans that we’re the party to trust on health care if we don’t have more big ideas on how we actually make — not Medicare for all, but how about community health centers for all? Where everybody can actually access a doctor and a pharmacist and a diagnostician without having to go through the maze of health insurance.
A lot of your thinking on the economy — and specifically a lot of your thinking about health care — is against middlemen. And a sense that the system has become so bureaucratized and filled with people skimming off the top that there’s actually quite a lot of waste to cut. I’m curious how that plays into this for you.
Yes, as an example: Of every $1 that is returned to a drugmaker for a novel therapeutic, 50 cents of that goes toward middlemen. So that kind of rent-seeking is riven through much of our health care system. Pharmacy benefit managers are a particularly extreme example of inserting yourself in the middle of —
Do you want to say what they are?
Pharmacy benefit managers, which are now owned by the health insurance companies, are the ones who decide when a doctor prescribes a drug to you, what your copay is going to be and also whether you need to try a generic first. All of these functions are useful, but they got greedy, and they’ve been extracting about $300 billion out of the U.S. health care system on an annual basis. That is one example of it.
We have got to take out the corporate middlemen of many aspects of health care. But I actually think it even goes deeper than that, which is to say: We need to stop focusing on subsidizing health insurance and start focusing on subsidizing the delivery of health care. And they are two different things.
When I visit community health centers in my district, what I see is medicine as it used to be practiced, which is a team-based approach that is patient-centric and where so much of the [expletive] around insurance and administration has been elided. We need to have a caregiver-first approach, not an insurance-company-first approach to health care.
I agree with a ton of this, but let me get at the really unpopular part of this conversation.
I’m no fan of private health insurance. I spent the first 10 to 15 years of my career covering health care. And I remember at one point trying to work on this article asking the question: What value do private health insurers offer in the American health care system?
The piece kept getting bigger and more complicated. But there was never a thing where I could say: Well if you didn’t have the private health insurers, you would get worse outcomes. People are not getting worse outcomes on Medicare. There’s a bunch of pieces of this.
You look very perplexed by my saying this.
Because I’m actually a supporter of private health insurance —
Tell me.
Which, based on what I just said, people might find surprising.
I do.
We need catastrophic coverage for people.
This is a simplification, but I think a helpful one. There are broadly two different types of things that people kind of consume in the health care industry. One is things that are out-of-pocket affordable, and the other are things that are catastrophic.
The whole point of insurance is you want it to cover things that are rare, unpredictable and expensive. So if you are an expectant mother, and you find out that your child has Duchenne muscular dystrophy: that is rare, unpredictable and expensive. And you need insurance to cover those catastrophic medical expenses so that not only are you dealing with the illness of a child you’re not also dealing with medical debt or bankruptcy.
But you could have the government do that if you wanted.
And yet the government’s ability to discern value and price accordingly is highly suspect. I do not think — and I would say that the evidence supports this — that a one-size-fits-all, top-down, paternalistic approach to pricing things would be acceptable.
So this I agree with. And this is where I was going to go with this, which is that the one thing the health insurance industry actually does, and that’s important, is the one thing everybody hates them for —
Which is to say no.
Which is to say no. You can deal with health care costs in a bunch of different ways. You could try to regulate prices at the government level, which is what most other countries do.
Yes, it doesn’t work very well.
Well, it works somewhat, and it doesn’t work somewhat.
People pay with time as opposed to money, though. You’re always paying somehow.
In some places, and not in others. Not every place has bad waiting lines.
But the most complicated thing in any discussion of health care is that people want to say the providers are all great. We talk about how there aren’t enough primary care physicians. We like the hospitals. We like our doctors. We like surgeons. We have decided to not regulate the providers very aggressively, at least on the pricing side.
Look, the reason we don’t have more primary care physicians isn’t some mystery. The government and the American Medical Association and the various trade groups that regulate medical education and doctors constrained the supply of doctors. We could have more residency slots. We just need to force them to open them up.
It’s not that different from housing and a bunch of other things. They make money from scarcity.
Agreed. Where I would challenge, though, the status-quo approach to: Oh, insurance companies add value by saying no — is that in most states now the providers and the insurers have become so concentrated that you’ve got — I’ll give Massachusetts as an example — four to five 800-pound gorillas in the room wrestling. Two big payers and two big providers.
And actually, they can’t say no. Because if you’re an insurance company, you can’t take Massachusetts General Hospital out of your network. People want to be able to go to M.G.H. It’s part of the reason they’re living in Boston — so they have access to those medical facilities.
Because neither side can actually say no to the other, you see what you would expect from a lack of competition and choice: inflation. What we need is much more granularity in those negotiations such that it’s not an entire provider system negotiating with an entire payer system — but rather different centers of excellence and specialties that have to negotiate on a granular basis, with much more transparency in the pricing.
Competition and choice do work. But it only works when both sides can plausibly say no to the other, and the concentration we have seen has prohibited either side from saying no.
But is that just the concentration we’ve seen? Or is that also the fact that health care is simply a different kind of good — and it’s why so many different countries have settled on some kind of price regulation?
On the way out the door, the Biden administration put out a memorandum saying: Although Medicaid and Medicare have thus far been banned from providing coverage for weight-loss drugs, we believe that drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are treating this disease of obesity. And it actually should be covered by Medicaid and Medicare.
I think that’s great, because these drugs are [expletive] miracles. But if Medicare and Medicaid cover them at the price they’re being charged in America, which is not the price that is being charged for them in other countries, it is going to bankrupt the system functionally overnight.
The number of people who would qualify for it is — I don’t know how many millions — but many millions. And we’re paying 10 times what other countries are for doses of this medication. And that would be the end of any kind of budget that works in Medicare and Medicaid.
So is it that we don’t have granularity in negotiations? Or is it that we actually do need to have the government come in and be the payer who can say: No, we’re not going to pay this much for it?
We absolutely need the government to come in. Because, as you said, in health care, the consumption function doesn’t work as in other sectors. People are going to consume and consume for very good reason, because the returns keep on being there for them —
And their lives are on the line. Their loved ones’ lives are on the line. My wife is a Type 1 diabetic. There’s nothing I would not do to make sure she had insulin.
And this is where the buying power of the federal government can be brought to bear. We saw this even at the state level in Louisiana, for example, where they did a subscription model for hepatitis C, where Medicaid said: We have a lot of patients who would benefit from hepatitis C treatment. We actually think we’re going to see return to value on this as a good investment for us to cover these drugs. But we are going to use our buying power to negotiate a better deal.
That is absolutely, I think, a good use of government buying power. Medicare or Medicaid, GLP-1s or hepatitis C or these other miracle drugs that are coming down the line: There’s absolutely a role there in the government getting more involved in the provider side — the providers of biotechnology, the providers of medical device technology, the providers of primary and behavioral care — by funding more community health centers.
My challenge over and over again, though, is: Where is the value in us continuously subsidizing the health insurance companies?
So I want to go back to this point you’ve been making about concentration. Because we have seen huge increases in concentration in health care generally. We’ve seen it in a lot of places in the economy.
One of the most significant — whether good or bad — ideological changes we saw in the Biden administration was a move toward much more aggressive antitrust enforcement. And that’s proven to be very controversial.
Controversial among, certainly, many people who used to give Democrats money and are now lined up on the right. It also created some weird bedfellows — JD Vance used to say that Lina Khan was his favorite member of the Biden administration, although that doesn’t seem all that reflected to me in what we’re seeing now in the Trump administration.
Your bio on X says that you want “an economy that works like Legos, not Monopoly.” What do you mean by that?
That too much of our economy has been captured by middlemen and rent seekers and not enough of it is empowering individuals to build things that matter together.
Everybody, when they think about playing with Legos, has this sense of creativity and empowerment. And when you think about playing Monopoly, somebody always ends up throwing the board over it because they get so frustrated that another person — out of, frankly, pure luck — ends up on Park Place and is able to just extract rents every time you cross or you pass go.
This is sometimes tough politics. It happens in housing, too. You see concentrated groups of NIMBYs who are rent-seeking. Sometimes quite literally. But more abstractly, they are rent-seeking on capturing higher property values by preventing the building of new housing.
And this speaks to a really core challenge that we have in our housing sector, which is: We go out there, and we say two things simultaneously. We say: Boy, we need more affordable housing — housing should be cheaper. And then we say: You should build wealth by owning a home.
[Laughs.] Well, which is it? Because the two things can’t be true at the same time. You can’t have housing be a commodity that declines as a share of wallet over time and have housing be an asset that you expect to appreciate over time.
My answer is quite stark. Housing should be a commodity that declines in price over time. And there are other ways to build wealth. In fact, there are myriad ways to build wealth. But one of them should not be in rent-seeking off land value appreciation.
Also we need to talk about free enterprise. I’m a believer in free markets and free enterprise. I just view the fact that markets can be captured and constrained not just by government power and red tape. Which certainly they can be. We can talk about housing development. We can talk about energy generation and transmission. We can talk about the production of novel therapeutics. But they can also be captured and constrained by corporate power.
And both are true. Both can warp the functioning of a market. And we should attack power wherever it’s undermining that Legos economy. And it can be corporate or government.
What is your experience — being a member of Congress, being part of the Democratic Party — of the power of these corporations? What sort of role do they play in the political system? Did we get here because they have too much power? Or is there another explanation?
It’s not just corporations that have power. I think this is an awkward reality that Democrats are going to have to confront, as well. It’s special interest groups across the board, whether they are ideologically or financially motivated. There is, I think, a challenge in which they hold claim to debate and discourse way out of proportion to what I think the average voter is actually keyed into.
So yes, that can be the pharmacy benefit managers tanking the Pharmacy Benefit Manager Reform bill at the end of last Congress. Yes, that can be big tech preventing Section 230 reform by going to leadership and claiming it’s going to destroy California’s economy.
But let’s be blunt. It can also be some of the groups that resist immigration reform or resist, on the right, gun violence reform that even a majority of Republicans secretly want to be able to vote for. So it’s not just corporate power. It is, I think, more broadly understood as ideologically animated interest groups.
And they don’t make their money on corporate contributions. They make their money on small-dollar email list contributions.
But what gives them power over your institution? This is always a bit of a mystery. I think it’s clear what gives Meta power. But you’re talking about small immigration reform groups or gun rights groups. These are not mass organization groups. So why does Congress care so much what they say?
At its core: primaries.
There are 435 members of the House of Representatives, and 400 of them are more oriented toward their primary election than their general. Only about 35 seats are competitive in a general.
Between gerrymandering and the closed or semi-closed primary system, we’re not giving voters what I would consider fully open, free and fair elections.
What we need is some combination of what Alaska did with voting reform, where you have a fully open primary and every candidate is trying to campaign for the median voter. Some combination of what New Jersey did, where they have a redistricting system and both parties have to compete for an independent arbiter to decide what’s fair. And it has actually worked fairly well. And some combination of what Maine is trying to do, where Maine is trying to cap contributions to independent expenditures to super PACs at $5,000.
If every state did those three things, you would totally obviate much of the power of these interest groups. Because every campaign would be totally fixated on that median voter, and that median voter, from an ideological perspective, is between the 40-yard lines.
We’re now a couple weeks into the Trump era. Given what you were expecting, what has surprised you?
Nothing.
It’s all exactly what you thought it would be?
I didn’t have the play-by-play laid out. But he campaigned on what he’s doing. He said he was going to use the impoundment clause to freeze federal funds. He said he was going to save TikTok — “save TikTok.” He said he was going to pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. He said he was going to rip out diversity, equity and inclusion. He said he was going to take us out of Paris.
In the Marine Corps, there’s an expression: A commander can be forgiven for being defeated but never for being surprised.
I’m not surprised. This is what he said he was going to do.
I don’t disagree with that. But certainly, to me, Democrats have felt surprised. They have felt overwhelmed, and he is overwhelming the system, right. Now maybe a lot of it doesn’t end up mattering that much. The birthright citizenship move might just get thrown out in the courts. The impoundment does not seem constitutional, given what we know of how the spending power works.
So is your view that we’re seeing a lot of sound and fury signifying future court cases, or are we seeing a more fundamental shift in how America is governed and how power is wielded?
I think we’re seeing a two-step process.
No. 1, going into the midterms, discipline. Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, is embodying this. We are not going to play the outrage Olympics. Americans know that this guy is morally bankrupt. They don’t want him sitting at their kitchen table with their kids. They get that he’s not a good dude and he’s a bore. Americans understand, I think, broadly speaking, that he’s probably captured by a lot of different interests, as we’ve discussed, between memecoins and Christian nationalism.
We are not going to chase every single ball that he throws. We’re not going to play fetch. We are going to constantly, with discipline, be drawing contrasts between who he is helping and who he is working for, and who we are helping and who we are working for.
I get the theory that you want to fight Trump on pocketbook issues. The pardons, the impoundment — where does that become a kind of willing yourself into a blindness about the system itself being so fundamentally challenged?
We shouldn’t give on immigration. We shouldn’t give on the rule of law. We shouldn’t give on climate action and gun violence prevention. I’ve been very clear about this.
In fact, I’ve rejected this idea that we need to move radically to their side of the court on these issues. It’s that we can call it for what it is: This is illegal. This is a giveaway to the gun industry. Withdrawing from Paris is against our values about climate action and a clean energy transition.
That can start the conversation. But the people for whom that is resonant largely are Democrats who are voting for Democrats. We also now need to then bring this back home and draw the contrast. It’s values, it’s policy prescription, and then it’s a contrast with the other side.
And how about the corruption?
A lot of people don’t follow the ins and outs of politics very much and are not that aware of the Trump memecoin. Or to the extent they had heard anything about it, they heard about it for a day, and then he took office and we were onto the next thing.
The Trump administration’s strategy — and I mean, Steve Bannon said this in the first term — is to pump so much into the system that it overloads it. So that people can’t focus on any one thing.
Which is why Democrats are not well-served by chasing every one of those one things.
The candidates I saw in frontline Democratic House districts who were most effective were not just talking about Trump as a cultural phenomenon and saying: Oh, isn’t he the worst?
It was always crystallizing that for issues that felt like they had local impact: Here’s why it matters that he’s in the pocket of the health insurance lobby. Here’s why it matters that he’s in the pocket of foreign adversaries — and what it does for national security or what it does for cost of living. Those candidates were the ones who were most effective.
You have a line that you like to quote: “I’m a conservative, but I’m not angry about it.” What’s your version of that for Democrats?
I’m a liberal, but I’m not condescending about it.
What do you mean by that?
That when we roll our eyes or we shrug our shoulders, we are stopping the conversation before it can start. People are not going to listen to us about economic theories of cost disease and how we’re going to lower the cost of living if they don’t first feel heard about shared values — meritocracy, fair play, hard work. And what they have felt like is that rather than being enlisted to a party, they are being lectured to by elites.
How do you change that? Because if I went Democrat to Democrat and asked: Do you lecture people or do you listen to them? They would all say: I listen to them.
If I said: Should Democrats talk like — as James Carville used to put it — professors in the faculty lounge, or should they talk like real people? They all say: Oh, talk like real people. I talk like a real person.
So what is the tendency in the party that you’re trying to combat?
As I’m sure you’ve noticed in your years of coverage, there’s no chief executive of the Democratic Party who says: Hey, everybody, we got to a plan. Huddle up. [Laughs.]
There is no one big thing. It is an attitudinal shift that each one of us, elected and otherwise, needs to manifest by how we go out and do it.
As you said, I’m a proponent of divesting TikTok. A couple weeks ago, I went on a TikTok show of a very popular content creator in the Boston area and debated about why we should force TikTok’s divestment. They had real concerns. They’re about to have a kid in the next couple of weeks. They make most of their income off this show.
That was not a home-field conversation, I would say. But you’ve got to go out there and shatter echo chambers. Particularly in places where maybe the thrust of the conversation is not normally about politics. It’s normally about sports, or it’s normally about cultural current events. But you’re able to insert 10 to 15 minutes about housing or health care.
Gone are the days of the big broadcast networks having this linear domination of our attention economy. It is now a go-everywhere, talk-to-everyone Balkanized media landscape. So we’re going to need individuals who can execute.
Always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
One is an article: “How Mathematics Built the Modern World” by Bo Malmberg and Hannes Malmberg on Works in Progress. One of my favorite long reads of the last several years.
The second is “Radical Markets” by E. Glen Weyl and Eric Posner. And if readers like that one, they should read Glen’s book with Audrey Tang, the Taiwanese digital minister, called “Plurality,” about how to build social media better in the 21st century.
And then the third is “What Hath God Wrought,” by Daniel Walker Howe, which is the Oxford history of the United States. It discusses how Andrew Jackson built the Democratic Party in 1828 as a Christian nationalist anti-elitist party — if that sounds familiar to people — and then how the Whigs came to contest him and ultimately won in the 1840 election. And I find that template to be informative for the political era we’re living in now.
Congressman Jake Auchincloss, thank you very much.
Thanks for having me on.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
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