The Ledger, every show

“The doge we got sent an email to every air traffic controller in the country during an air traffic controller shortage and suggested they quit being an air traffic controller and get something, quote, more productive to do in the private sector, only later on …”

“The doge we got fired people in charge of making sure our nuclear weapons were safe and in charge of making sure that bird flu didn't spread, and then, whoops, You know, tried to hire him back in a hurry.”

“It's not terribly contested that the majority of the benefit of TCGA and OBBA went to wealthy people, and it's definitely not contested, or I'd say generally not contested, that OBBA represents one of the largest transfers of wealth from lower income people to…”

“I think identity has become too central to how my party thinks.”

“And I don't know that they can coexist for long if they're not held together by the awe of or fear of, you know, the personality of Donald Trump.”

“We got citizens who just have an accent or look brown, getting picked up, sometimes getting detained without access to a lawyer for a frighteningly long amount of time, and that's citizens, let alone other people who, you know, maybe they shouldn't be here, bu…”

“I don't know the details of the state and local proposals you just mentioned, but those sound on their face like they're further than I would go.”

“Most of the chargers would go in in 2026, 2027, but well ahead of 2030.”

“Often in terms of outright fraud, you know, they're gonna come in a number that's well below one percent”

“That has just never generated the growth that, you know, I mean, the Laffer curve has collapsed empirically, and it just doesn't work that way, right?”

“Well, look at the seventies and eighties, right? Sixties, seventies, eighties, look at GDP growth, productivity growth, and tax rates. I mean, I'm sure you're aware that those growth rates were higher, and the tax rates were higher too.”

“Now, I would argue that Trump practices a kind of identity politics too, a sort of a white identity politics that makes people feel like they're encircled by the other, that immigrants are sort of an invasion.”

“One of the biggest problems we have as a society is this level of inequality we've hit. That like, historically, there's no evidence that any republic can reach this level of equality to hold onto it and continue to be a republic.”

“I would agree that the last administration didn't do enough and didn't do enough early enough on the border.”

“I think the debate was a real turning point. Yeah, I mean, the debate was a turning point, right, where you just saw, I think everybody saw what everybody saw.”

“I mean, if she had become the nominee by prevailing over another half dozen people who wanted a shot, Presumably that kind of sharpening that, that happens would have served her well in the general.”

“You know, if and when we get another chance, a lot of the things that he has burned down just aren't coming back the way they were. Why would we put him back the way they used to be if it was full of problems anyway?”

“I think we're at the point where at least some of these technologies right now already are safer than human beings, and that's only going to increase and improve.”

“Even after they got their income, if they went through a training program and got another job in a field that was growing, but it wasn't who they thought they were, it wasn't connected to their sense of identity or belonging, then you continue to have a displa…”

“And the displacement that could come with that, I think, is enormous, and I don't think we're prepared.”

“Many of them feel their short-term business interests or personal financial interests are better served by Republicans.”

“They've gone through, like, every government website, right, and deleted anything that could accidentally be a reference to climate change.”

“Are the wealthiest people in America right now paying too much tax or too little tax? I would say the wealthiest are paying too little tax, and whether you adjust that through income tax, whether you adjust that through, you know, something like wealth tax, an…”

“Just in the four years I was secretary, We had about four billion passenger employments, so four billion times somebody got on an airplane, right? And zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of that four billion.”

“On the other hand, you know, when you talk about capital allocation, the federal government literally invented the internet, right?”

“Yeah, if you create a monopoly, I might not like it. If you hurt other people, I might not like it. If you concentrate power into your hands to an extreme extent, I might not like it because that's just not American.”

“The doge we got was one that couldn't even count, that put information, sometimes that was wrong by three orders of magnitude on its own website, then erased its own information because they didn't believe in the transparency.”

“I do think that Washington in general, my party's definitely guilty of this, is too attached to all of the, like, structures that we have right now and the existing org charts and existing habits.”

“By definition, every penny it takes to build something more than what it was actually required is wasted, and I do think there's a lot of that.”

“So we've got 435 seats in the house. Last time I checked, less than one out of 10 of them is considered to be seriously competitive. At best, like less than 40 are actually competitive, which means in nine out of 10 races, the primary is pretty much it.”

“I'll tell you, like, I'm in no hurry to be in the middle of presidential politics.”

“If an idea or a technology or an approach works in a place like South Bend, that matters. We're also small. We're small enough you can get the attention of the mayor. We're small enough we can be creative around any regulations, tear down barriers.”

“And actually, the biggest issue I've had is just Dealing with people who want to know how much tax money we've spent on it, not understanding the business model, which is that we put no city cash at all.”

“You will never hear about a state or a local government shutting down over partisan disagreement, right? We deliver water. You need water to live. And so, it's not even on the table. We are under a pressure to deliver that, I think, compels us to be more open …”

“A lot of the resistance is actually inside government.”

“We grew up around the auto industry when Studebaker was making cars, and we grew to a scale, ah, about a 130,000 at our peak. Now we're down to about a hundred, but growing again for the first time in a while.”