 of you here for the entire day. It's been a great day, just an amazing amount of content and some extraordinary proposals so far. This panel, panel two, is going to take a lot of the ideas that we've been talking about and talk about how do we move that into reality, into the politics and the policies and the polling of taxing the very rich. And our goal is to identify the key elements of framing and messaging for a national campaign, a successful national campaign around taxing the very rich. I am going to introduce all four of our speakers and then we will have a conversation after which we'll open it up for questions from the audience. So we have a fantastic panel for you today. Salinda Lake of Lake Research will set the stage with some of the recent polling work that she has done on public attitudes towards taxing the very rich. Salinda has worked in polling and political strategy for many years and not just asking people what they think but educating politicians and campaigns about how to communicate more effectively and strategically on issues of utmost importance. This is a fun fact. Salinda shares both of my alma maters, Smith College and the University of Michigan. So I know that she is well educated. Next, we will have Erica Payne, the founder and president of the Patriotic Millionaires, the premier class traders in the United States of America. Patriotic Millionaires, many of you know because they had an amazing conference a few months ago that set the stage for the one that we're doing today. An organization of wealthy individuals begging to be taxed more heavily. And people who focus on the key contribution that wealthy individuals can bring to this debate. Erica has done amazing work with humor and creativity to put the tax issue at the center of progressive debates and campaigns. Our third speaker is Frank Clementi, founder and director of Americans for Tax Fairness, an extraordinarily important organization. Many of the groups in this room work with Americans for Tax Fairness. It's a coalition organization that brings together all the folks who care about tax fairness. Frank has done a wonderful job leading it. I also want to take this moment of personal privilege to wish Frank a very happy birthday. Ah, yeah. He's 40. And I also wanted to wish David Stern a happy birthday. Apparently it is his 60th birthday today. And he's not afraid of the decades. So and our fourth speaker, Dorian Warren, the president of Community Change, Community Change Action is a longtime scholar, activist, advocate, and friend. He has been a wonderful friend and mentor to me. Over many, many years, we've worked together in a lot of different contexts, and we are thrilled to have him. So we have four brilliant people here. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Four brilliant people, each of them running essential organizations devoted to achieving progressive economic policies. I cannot imagine a better lineup to talk about the subject on the agenda for us today this afternoon, which is really, how do we get to that next step? How do we make it a reality? How do we bust through some of the myths and the misconceptions and the prejudices that are out there, both among the public and among politicians who sometimes have not always shown the courage that we would like to see? But without further ado, please welcome Salinda Lake. Thank you. I didn't know you were to it. That's great. We have to give you a note. Well, thank you very much. It's really great to be here, and great to be here with this lineup. And I'm actually going to show you data, all of which is publicly available, so you can get the slide, so you don't have to worry about taking notes. But I'm going to suggest to you that, number one, this doesn't take courage. I'm all for courage, and we need a lot of it, but this doesn't particularly take courage. These issues, the public, is way ahead of the elites. And we're probably in the bottom of the public opinion draft by being with Washington elites, in terms of these issues. The public was there at hello, as they said in the movie. If we look at the executive summary of what we're going to talk about, taxing the rich is overwhelmingly supported by voters. Taxing the rich is a top priority of voters. And they are beginning to see the connections, and thanks to a lot of work done by people in this room. It just feels good to tax the rich more anyway. But the public's actually there for it because of fair share and because of wanting investment. Progressives are in great shape to fight on this issue. This is the time to have this fight. And we are in better shape on taxes as progressives right now than we are on things like jobs and the economy. So this can be the opening, actually, to a broader conversation that we are desperate to have about who's benefiting in this economy and what is the progressive economic frame. And I want to thank EPI for doing such incredible work in that regard. We are also at a great moment because the Trump tax bill isn't very popular with voters. It started out quite popular. But most voters, including Republicans, don't think they benefited. It turns out you can only lie so much to people about their taxes, and then they file them. They also are pretty realistic about taxes. For example, one of the more amusing data that I find is that voters don't care that much about having Trump's taxes released because they know what he paid. Nothing. They said he wasn't an H&R block behind me. He didn't pay any taxes. He wasn't on TurboTax. So we know he didn't pay anything. We don't need to see it to know it. The best message in favor of raising taxes on the rich is that the rich should pay their fair share. And I think Frank will talk about this a lot. But it is a basic values argument followed by investing in things like health care, education, protecting social security, and Medicare. So there's something for everyone in taxing the wealthy. So let's look at this data. First of all, taxes are considered an important issue to Democrats, independents, and Republicans. Now, I'm going to present some data to you where you're going to say people are being contradictory. And I just want to set the record straight, OK? Voters are perfectly comfortable holding mutually contradictory views and usually deeply resent having it pointed out to them, OK? So I just want you to accept that premise, because we're not going to look for consistency here. But even Democrats, even progressive Democrats, think taxes are important. In terms of taxes, for a long time, taxes was a strong hope for Republicans and conservatives. People thought taxes 10, 20 point advantage. Now, actually, it's even between Democrats in Congress and Trump, and even between Republicans and Democrats within statistical margin of error. People think both are about the same. This is data that Frank was kind enough to share about what is considered rich. Now, one thing I want to warn you is that there's rich, and then there's where we want to pig-rich if the Democrats and progressives are in charge. So we did a very interesting experiment where we asked people, half the people, what's rich, and then what's rich if the Democrats are proposing a proposal. And they added 100,000 on average to their what's rich when the progressives are in charge. And when we asked them afterwards, why did you make it higher? They said, well, I don't want them to come down and get me accidentally. But in general, people think that $400,000 to $500,000 makes someone rich. They also, very interestingly, and this is brand new research that we had not done before, people are even more willing to tax net worth or total assets than they are to tax the income tax. So there's a lot of this current conversation that, again, the public's way ahead of the voters on it. And I would have had no idea that that was true. By the way, people don't hate the rich. And in fact, everybody would like to be rich. As one guy said in a focus group, I'd like to win the lottery, buy my wife a purple Cadillac, and be wealthy. But people do think the wealthy are decidedly not paying their fair share. Should the wealthy in this country pay more in taxes, 76% of all voters favor this, 54%. 91% of Democrats favor this. This is like a core democratic value. This is not a policy position to Democrats. This is a value. 74% of independents favor this, 52% strongly. Independence are actually now more populist than Democrats or Republicans. And 62% of Republicans favor this. Even though they know they're supposed to be against this, it's hard for them to bring themselves to really opposing this. So their intensity is lower, but 2 thirds of Republicans in favor of this. Democrats and independents particularly motivated by populist language. We should raise taxes on millionaires, billionaires, and wealthy corporations. Now, people are worried about the job-killing argument. There is some concern about that. But it's much less than you would think. People are actually less worried about killing jobs than having jobs move. So the number one concern is actually that individuals or corporations will move out of the state, move out of the country, or whatever. There's a part of them that thinks fine, good riddance. But there's another part that thinks, I'm not sure we want to send all that money out of the country or out of my state. People also say simultaneously, not with quite as much intensity, but that I cannot afford a tax increase no matter what it's for. People are tax sensitive. Now, why are people tax sensitive? It's not because they hate taxes. Actually, hatred for taxes is at an all-time low. Why they're tax sensitive is because wages are not keeping up with the cost of living. So that people are extremely concerned about the cost of things. The cost of health care is their number one concern, but the cost of taxes is also a concern for them. Would you, the Trump tax bill, do you approve or disapprove of the law passed by Donald Trump in Congress last year? At its height, two-thirds of voters liked this bill. That was before they knew what was in it. And Donald Trump does do a good job of marketing and selling things. Today, 36% favorite, 49% disapprove. It's very partisanly polarized, but notice that the disapproval goes up as income increases. There is really a conversation to be had in case you thought you were not making enough difference. There's a major, major conversation to be had by elites and by the wealthy about how this would be good for the economy. And by the way, the number one remembered quote about taxes from a wealthy person that people can volunteer all the time, even though they don't know exactly. They refer to them as that guy out of the Midwest, but Buffett's statement about I paid a lower tax rate than my secretary does. Everybody in America knows that statement. Everybody can volunteer it. Have you benefited from the tax bill? 25% of Americans say they paid less. They tend to be primarily Republicans. So it's very ideologically driven. It's actually more ideologically driven than income driven. 22% of Americans say they have paid more. And most people say my taxes didn't change under the Trump tax bill. People overwhelmingly believe whatever happened to them, the wealthy are the ones who really benefited from the Trump tax bill. So the middle class or the wealthy benefit. 53% say the wealthy benefited. Only 33% say the middle class benefited. Again, for Democrats, this is like a core value. This is like, are you, somebody hired a pollster to ask a really stupid question. Independence, like the nation, 64% of Republicans say the middle class benefited. A whole bunch of Republicans who don't want to admit it was really the wealthy say, well, oh, I'm not sure. Yeah, like bullshit, you're not sure. But okay. And then the last date I'll show you, bullshit plus or minus 10%. And two of the proposals out there. A proposal to increase the marginal tax rate on income over $10 million to 70%, the so-called AOC proposal. 59% of Americans favor that 41% oppose it. Again, Democrats, while in favor. Independence, while in favor. And even 45% of Republicans in favor. This is pretty interesting because this is a pretty complicated question. Remember, you're doing this poll, you're trying to fix dinner, you're trying to tell your kids to go do their math homework when you're not very good at math yourself and you just got hit with marginal tax rate, 10 million, whatever, whatever. Okay, I'm in favor of that. Pretty good numbers for a brand new proposal. And then the Warren tax plan. The Warren tax plan also very, very popular. In fact, even more popular than, and of course, their names weren't attached to them, but even more popular than the AOC proposal. Now, it may be more popular for two reasons. 2% sounds less than 70%, and 550 million sounds way high compared to 10 million. We're not exactly sure why it's more popular. The overall conclusion here is that both of these proposals are pretty popular. So the public is ready to join this bandwagon, and let's talk about how we actually get this show on the road. I have a couple of quick points that I wanna make. The first one is don't get confused when you think about this tax bill that they passed. This was nothing more, nothing less than a payoff to their donor class. There is no economic philosophy behind it whatsoever. They are deliberately trying to create a permanent underclass to minimize competition for themselves in their offspring, full stop. Point number two, the tax bill was a gift to us. In that, for the first time in forever, there is a distinct line between what they wanna do to the tax code and some nebulous something else that would likely be better. Okay, so we're gonna get to that in a minute. But they had all of the power, they passed exactly the tax code, they wanted you look at that tax code, it tells you who they are. If we can explain to the American people what's in that tax code, they will vote in other ways. Okay, that's the job in front of us. It's time to preach to the choir, okay? You hear a lot about don't preach to the choir, well let's be clear. Our choir is not currently singing from the right hymn book, they're not singing from the same hymn book, they need to get on the same hymn book. Even if the hymn book just has one tiny little short song in it, that song can be the carried interest loophole. It can be the surtax, it can be basically anything, but they need to get on the same hymn book. There are 34 Democrats right now who are not co-sponsors of the minimum wage bill. I guarantee that those same 34 Democrats are not gonna be on whatever decent piece of tax legislation people wanna put forward, okay? So the carried interest fairness act for one, I wanna know why Senator Tammy Baldwin has not yet whipped the votes on that. Donald Trump ran on it, he didn't close it, he actually made it permanent. He said those hedge fund managers are getting away with murder, well guess what, they're still getting away with murder. And I don't see the Democrats standing up, calling foul on that. So let's whip the votes on that. Let's whip the votes on the surtax, and if you're not on those bills, you're gonna get your ass primaried, because you need to get on the bus or get out of the way, okay? I want to caution us not just to think about revenue, okay, revenue is important, it pays for things, they did not have the revenue to pay for a $2 trillion tax cut. So to believe that we must always have revenue as a pay go is an absurdity, okay? Erase it from your mind. Instead of just thinking about revenue, start thinking about some basic fairness first, okay? If you're a working person and you make $101,000 working, make about $77,000 after the standard deduction, you're gonna pay about $9,000 in taxes. Ivanka Trump pushes go on her E-Trade account, makes $101,000, she pays $0 in taxes. I work my ass off 50 weeks a year, 40 hours a day, I mean, whatever it is. It feels like 40 hours a day. It does. It definitely does. You know, and I'm the idiot who ends up $8,000 poorer at the end of the year. I mean, come on. Let's have the fight about their money versus your sweat, okay? We win that any day of the week, all right? Last point, very, very important point. Do not fall for RPB, rich people bullshit, okay? Eli Brode was in the New York Times today or yesterday saying that he thinks he should pay higher taxes. Okay, let's go back to 2012 when he said exactly the same thing in California, said it publicly about a bill that Jerry Brown had put forward and then snuck a million dollars of secret money through like some Arizona, something or other to come back into California to fight the thing that he had just said that he was gonna support. Beware of rich people bullshit. Paul Tudor Jones has started an organization called Just Capital after this guy fled his house in Connecticut where he had lived forever where his business was to escape millions of dollars in taxes. When people protested at his house, he decided to start this nonsense organization that allegedly looks at which companies are just and which ones are not. I say Just Capital is just bullshit. Be very wary of this. There are 18 people who signed a great letter the other day calling for the wealth tax. I wanna see their money put forward for lobbyists. I wanna see their money put forward for campaign contributions to people who will support that. And I wanna see a public education campaign from them. Full stop. Great job. Hi folks, I'm a little bit of a veteran of the tax fight. I've only been doing it for seven years but I went through the 2012 tax fight and the 2017 tax fight. So I have a few bona fides around this stuff. Thea posed the question to us earlier when we're thinking about is it this tax or this tax or this tax? And thankfully that panel said it's all of the above and it really has to be all of the above and I'll tell you why. Our goal is it's like I believe strongly in tax fairness and the morality of that and ethics of that and all that but fundamentally this does come down to money and the need to raise a lot of money and I kind of put out there it's $10 trillion. That's that to me, what's our goal for all this? Yeah, it's to make the tax systems fair but it's also to raise $10 trillion. Why is it $10 trillion? You wanna do an infrastructure, serious infrastructure program you need $2 trillion. You wanna do a green new deal you need at least $2 trillion. You wanna do free college and college debt and affordable childcare and affordable healthcare, et cetera. You're talking another $2 or $3 trillion. We just lost $2 trillion with the Trump tax cuts. It all adds up. Yeah, maybe we don't have to pay for all of it but the demand in Congress for a lot of these folks is you gotta pay for it and so we need $10 trillion to do that and that's before we even get around in Medicare for all. Totally different ball game, totally different scale. We'll have to talk about that another day. I do wanna say how did we raise that $10 trillion? We put it Americans for Tax Fair. It's put out a report called Fair Tax is Now. It's 40 options. It adds up to $10 trillion so please go to our website, take a look at it and it provides you with all the details about all these options, all these proposals, some at a smaller scale, some at a bigger scale. Carried interest raises $14 billion. Financial transactions tax raises at least $750 billion. It gives you those sorts of things to look at. The timeframe is extremely important and I know we're all, it's like, yeah, we gotta do this tomorrow. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We are fighting, there were 7,000 corporate lobbyists who worked in 2017 on the tax bill, okay? 7,000 lobbyists out of 11,000. We know that because Ashila Krumholz's Center for Responsive Politics keeps track of all these lobbyists. So 7,000 of 11,000 lobbyists worked on that tax bill. That is what, we are fighting an entire Republican party, right? We are fighting all their think tanks and all their Fox News machine, Fox propaganda machine on down the line. So this is a marathon, it's a long range thing we're dealing with. It's a generational shift. To do what we need to do in terms of the big revenue, this is a generational shift. We had the New Deal. We had the Great Society. We had the Reagan Revolution, which has screwed us for the last 40 years, trickle down economics. This whole, that is the whole frame that we are countering now. And that's a, this requires a generational shift. Fortunately, we got the Gen Xers, I'm sorry, the millennials and the Gen Zers coming along who are gonna do that for us. And I'll talk about that a little bit later because I don't have the time to do it right now. When I say incremental, so what I believe is 2021, there will be an opportunity. The Democrats probably will say we need to raise $2 trillion, $2 trillion out of $10 trillion. I remember Hillary Clinton, she put forward a one and a half trillion dollar program when she ran for president. So the Democrats will probably come up with $2 trillion. So the question is, what are they gonna feel comfortable with to get that $2 trillion in that short term if we've got the votes to do that sort of thing? It's partly we'll be rolling back the Trump tax cuts. I do believe that the surtax will be in there. I do believe something about the estate tax will be in there. That's partly the Trump tax cuts, et cetera. We have the salt challenge, the state and local tax deduction. There's a lot of folks who wanna change what Trump did on the salt deduction, which was narrowing, reducing the salt deduction dramatically. That loses $600 billion, $700 billion if you put it back to where it was. So we have our challenges within the Democratic Caucus on how you deal with questions like that. Our two biggest challenges, one, Erica said, it is Democrats. Fundamentally, it is Democrats. Chris Van Hollen was not the center of the Democratic Caucus in the Senate, nor in the House. He's great, he's great, but he's not where most of the members are. And so we have this challenge with, Republicans have religion on taxes, Democrats half the time wanna run away from the whole tax issue. This is about structural change. This is not about tinkering. We have two candidates running for office, Sanders and Warren, who are talking about structural change. The rest of the candidates, unfortunately, are not talking about structural change. That's what this tax fight is about. Structural change versus tinkering around the edges. Campaign finance reform central. I mean, this is a class issue. The average senator, their wealth is $3.2 million. The average House member, their wealth is about a million dollars. They're protected by the tax system as it is. They hang out with the employers, the drug companies, the manufacturers, the auto guys, the auto manufacturers back in their states. So that's who they listen to. That's who they hear from most. That's who puts on fundraisers for them. So we have to take on that structural problem. The last thing, and my time is up, is the progressive resistance. We do not win this without the progressive resistance, which has been so phenomenally motivated around pushing back against Trump. But this again, I preach, our side has to have religion on this tax issue because I think it's so fundamental to changing the way things go. Our progressive allies, we are a coalition of lots of different organizations. Think tanks, unions, domestic policy groups, religious organizations, but our community, the progressive community does not own the tax issue enough. They love to ask for government to do more good investments and more good spending. They're kind of not that comfortable asking, saying, well, we need to raise the money to do that. And one simple example, actually, Craig Kaplan, I were talking a little bit while ago. It's like, if you're a donor and you get called, and that politician's asking you for money, we need to give you a script. And basically the script ought to say, well, are you in favor of the surtax and are you in favor of raising the race to here and are you in favor of the wealth tax? Whether we've got to make that a routine part of the conversation among wealthy donors, as well as among our progressive organizations that have to move this whole thing forward. Thanks a lot. Hey, everybody. So Frank mentioned religion and Erica mentioned a hymn book and Salinda mentioned bullshit. I guess I should go back to church soon. I just want to make three quick points in my five minutes around power, around race, and around strategy. And to start with power, I was taken by both Paul Krugman and Nancy McClain this morning who reminded us that most policies and specifically tax policies that come out of this town reflect the wealthy. And Nancy specifically mentioned the elephant in the room around the corporate capture of our democracy. And that made me think that there are a couple of truisms here. One is any policy is simply power frozen in time. Right? So it's reflective. Any policy is reflective of unequal power relations. And unless we start with a very clear view of power, we will not solve the problem of inequality and injustice. I just want to put that on the table. And the power question I think gets to, like we have lots of ideas and I'm about ideas, but we also have to have a strategy to win. And we have to build the power to win. And I'm gonna come back to that in a second. I think the power question goes beyond the immediate problem that Craig Kaplan raised. And that is, aside from Mitch McConnell, there's a fundamental age old problem in most democracies. Why don't the poor soak the rich? And a democracy where the rich and the very rich are a numerical minority. And poor and working class folk are the majority. Why don't we see democracies and especially American democracy voting for redistribution of wealth? That is a fundamental question we have to answer and very clearly have to answer that question. And you might ask, what's the problem? Why is that the case? And I'm reminded by sociologist Piven and Cloward who argued that sharp inequality has been constant, but rebellion has been infrequent. Why is that the case? Political theorists, Ian Shapiro argues that theorists of democracy are puzzled by this coexistence of democracy and inequality. Or we might say democracy and oligarchy. How is that the case? Political elite argues in the 19th and early 20th century resisted expanding the franchise precisely because they assumed that a majority of voters would favor taxing the rich, every distributing income and wealth downward. And if you look at our last two major expansions of the franchise in this country, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1971 26th Amendment, allowing 18 year olds to vote, they both actually resulted in not more redistribution, but less. That's a puzzle. That's a fundamental political problem and puzzle we have to answer. So, I don't think there's one answer. I think there are a couple. One is Nancy's corporate capture of our democracy. Another answer, and this is my second point, is that other elephant in the room race. To paraphrase Du Bois, the problem of the 20th century and the 21st century is the problem of the color line. And there's a, a remind of a book that just, it's 20 years old this year. Why do Americans hate welfare? Because I think black people get it. It's pretty simple. And it's been the history of this country. But to be more specific, we know from social science research that when you look at the structure of tax systems, there is a relationship to race and racial demography in states and in cities. So, in other words, the higher the percentage of people of color, the more regressive you're likely to have a tax structure. The more racially homogeneous the population, the more likely you are to have a progressive tax structure. This is not a new thing. We can go back to reconstruction and the end of reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. We can go to the end of the civil rights movement and white backlash in terms of institutional barriers to taxation. Just look at what Louisiana and Mississippi did in terms of making it so difficult to create progressive tax structures among other states in response to the black freedom movement. And it's not just about the level of racial diversity in a place. Tax systems we know are determined by levels of demographic change. Boy, does that sound familiar? So it's not a coincidence that increases in racial diversity equal lower levels of support for progressive taxation. So we have to think about the role of race in shaping not just attitudes around tax systems and taxing the wealthy, but actual voter behavior. And we have some real world experiments in states where we've lost efforts to tax the wealthy. All that to say last point on race and then I have one last thing on strategy. If we really want to win and shift the agenda, we can't ignore race. The orange man in the White House certainly doesn't. It's a central part of a strategy. It's called strategic racism. So Linda's done some work on this with a nod and others. We actually have a strategy to talk about race in a way that actually wins people over to a vision of racial and economic justice. I will just throw that teaser out there, but the point is taken, right? We can't run from it when the orange man is embracing it fully as part of his reelection strategy. Last point on strategy. Harriet Barlow told a story at dinner last night about her last conversation with David Hunter where he whispered to her, what's the strategy? And I love that story because it goes to the question of how do we build the power to win? And it has to come through organizing. Frank just mentioned the resistance. I think it's obviously through organizing there are no shortcuts to paraphrase a favorite book of mine. We have to have to have to build a multiracial movement among poor and working class folks to fight for democracy, not just for tax policy, for democracy, broadly speaking. And I think we have some lessons to learn from around the country, but ultimately it has to be a smart organizing strategy that understands the centrality of race and racism that gets millions of people, of ordinary people in the fight to challenge and transform power in America. That is the way we will win in taxing the very, very rich. Thank you. I told you that was gonna be an awesome panel, and it was and it is. So thank you to all four of the panelists. Those were wonderfully useful and thoughtful framing comments. And let's start with one question for everybody which goes to this question of power in race and winning. And I think one of the things that we've heard today is around this question that we know that taxing the rich is popular, we know that it's wise, we heard from a lot of different economists about why it's the right thing to do for a dynamic economy, and yet it doesn't happen. And so then one of the questions in terms of legislative strategy or campaigning is maybe we get jumbled up between our carts and our horses, like oh my god, we can't tax the rich until we have a more fair electoral system, until people have a stronger voice, but so how do you all see the sequencing of what we need to do? And let's talk about it in the context of the 2020 election. Like how do we come at these questions that are so important? We should be winning here in terms of we, in principle, live in a democracy. We know how popular these things are. This is not only with taxing the rich, we've seen it with a lot of other issues like the minimum wage as well. There are a lot of things that are common sense to most normal people, and yet they don't happen. So is there a way of breaking through the bullshit in order to get the power that we need to raise these issues and to make sure that we're looking at what's real, especially race in America. So anybody? Well, I guess I could start. I mean, I think that a lot of us look to what happens in Congress can have a lot to do with what happens around the country, right? Whether the media gives us focus on things, whether activists get mobilized or not, and typically, activists get mostly mobilized in opposition to something bad happening rather than affirmatively in favor of something that might be hard to do. So our first problem for the next year and a half or so is that there's not gonna be any legislation in Congress on taxes, most likely. There's a slight chance that there'll be a bill on making the Affordable Care Act more affordable through helping people with their premiums, and it could be worth three or $400 billion. And so if that happens, that's a tax fight as well as a health insurance fight. I think our hope is, or our need is, or desire is that the Democrats who are running for Congress prosecute this case very effectively. That they understand that this is a winning issue. I always say that there's nothing more emblematic, symbolic representative of the rigged system than the tax system. And if you're out there campaigning to change this economy, to change the rigged system, then you have to be talking seriously about taxes, and there's two people who are most seriously talking about taxes, it's Warren and Sanders. And so my fingers are crossed that they will prosecute that case, and that creates an environment for all of us to be moving that agenda. The third thing is that it's what Chris Van Hollen is doing, it's what Jan Shikowsky's doing when we're working closely with them. It is to develop the framework or the actual policies that should our side get in power across the board, well even if it's not across the board. Should we get in power after the election? We now have a, we've created a foundation of some core things to be pushing for. And then the Fisher-Cut-Bake question comes with the Democrats. How many 1% of the American people think the economy is rigged? I don't know what the other 29% are smoking, but it is rigged. And so how do you rig an economy? You start with the tax code. That's the storyline. If you believe the economy is rigged, you have to ask yourself how you rig it. You start with the economy. In 2017, the Republicans rewrote the entire federal tax code, blah, blah, blah. If you wanna know the story as it goes from there, you can go to pmuniversity.org. It's a candidate training website that we created for the last election. It literally lays out the entire story in easy accessible language. It was designed in order to allow a candidate to pick up those pieces and be able to share with their constituents a storyline that would make sense to them and compel them to action, okay? So number one is what's the story and that's how you get the choir singing from the same hymn book. And then there has to be some discipline for those choir members who can't seem to figure out what page we're on, okay? So we interviewed 60 candidates last time. We up through our C4, we endorsed 48 of them. They were in an average of our plus seven districts. 13 of those people won. We only backed candidates who were running against incumbents who voted for the tax bill. So these are 13 people who, according to what they told us when they wanted our endorsement were people who were gonna fight for fair taxes. A couple of those people are some of the 34 people who are not on the minimum wage bill. So their commitment to taxes has now also become suspect. And to those people I say, number one, you're not gonna get the endorsement again. Number two, let's see how hard we're gonna fight to make sure that you're not the candidate if you don't find your way towards an economic vision that actually works for working people. I just say two quick points. And I know Connie Raza and Valerie Wilson are gonna talk about this later, but I do think there is the racial justice element of this that is related to mobilizing the base in the next election. So if you think of the Trump tax cuts, for instance, and the local state tax deduction, this means many cities are gonna have to rely on fines and fees even more to raise revenue. But we know who that affects. That's related to a lot of energy right now around criminal justice reform that is getting people out in the streets and actually who are winning campaigns to fundamentally transform the criminal justice system, whether it's prosecutors or fines and fees. That is a mobilizing issue. At the same time, so I'll reference another book, my former academic self, Dying of Whiteness. So how do we talk to poor and working class white people about how they're literally voting to kill themselves, which is the argument of the book, right? So three to four weeks off the average white person's life, I think in Tennessee, because they voted not to accept Medicaid expansion because they thought it was gonna benefit black people versus Kentucky. Or, right, other ways in which poor and working class white folks think the tax system and voting to reform the tax system will not benefit them. So what are the conversations to the organizers in the room, see you in the back? What are the conversations we're also having with white folks, right, around why their fates are more linked to me than to the president? And that is the organizing challenge. It's a both and, I'm not interested in a debate about focusing on the base versus the white working class, it is both and, it is both and. And that's what the strategy has to be in terms of winning. I think one of the issues too, Dorian, and I know we've talked to Connie about this and others, is that trying to pretend race doesn't exist or racial injustice doesn't exist doesn't work, also, because then you're basically taking it off the hook and we see Donald Trump out there. As you say, I mean, I think it's a really important point that he goes directly at that issue and he's hitting that raw nerve. And so a successful candidate in 2020, whether it's for president or Congress or state legislature, needs to be able to talk about race in a way that resonates, in a way that is sincere, that doesn't pretend we don't have a problem here. Well, it doesn't even pretend we don't have a problem. I mean, this is the beauty of the race class narrative work that Demos did and CCC was part of, et cetera. So let's say we didn't care about anything, we just wanted to win. Colorblind narratives are less strong than race class narratives. Why? Because we are in a racial conversation. Trump is engaging the public in a racial conversation. There's no duck and hide here anymore. Now, many of us never wanted to duck and hide, but it doesn't matter. If all we were Washington political consultants and only cared about winning, this has higher numbers. So I would add three other things here. I think the consulting class is one of the worst enemies. If I had a nickel, honestly, for every call I'm on, no matter what the polling data says, where one of the consultants would say, we don't want to be on taxis cylinder, we don't want to be on taxis. Yeah, you got data that shows that. I mean, just curious, since I'm a pollster just wondering, well, everybody knows it, it's just dangerous terrain to be on. A couple of things I think about Erica's strategy, get to the candidates early. Because these candidates don't know they're not supposed to be for this. They'll figure it out pretty fast once their consultants get to them and the committees get to them. But right now, they don't know they're not supposed to be for this. And so being able to take a guide to them, being able to take voters that you can mobilize. The other thing is, Dorian said this is good, this is, we should do both and, which I am completely in accord with. This is actually one of the few issues that is both and. Remember I showed you that data where the independents are feisty as hell about this, because they're the least educated, they're the poorest people right now. Independents are poorer than Democrats. And if you look at white independence, they're really poorer than white Democrats. So they're feisty about it, and then the base obviously fired up about it. The last thing I would say is, I think we have to embed the tax conversation in a broader economic point of view. And that's where I think your point, Frank, about linking it to spending is really important. We shouldn't run from taxes, but the reality is, we will lose the election if we are tied on taxes and 10 points behind on the economy, which is where we are today. So we need to use taxes as actually one of our wedges into a bigger economic conversation about what this economy is gonna be like, who it's rigged for and who it's not rigged for. Yeah, just one last thing to add, too, is, as I say to Democrats, you are going to be attacked as being a taxist but liberal anyway. Really? And so the notion that you would therefore not talk about taxes is political malpractice getting to your point about the consulting class. So Trump will, he's going to make the tax, his tax cut, what is driving his economy. Now, whether the guy's smart enough to actually stay focused on his economy as a winning issue or not is another question, but that's what he will do. But if he doesn't do it, those folks down ballot are going to do that. And so we have to be very engaged in this tax conversation. Half of what we do now is prosecuting the case against the Trump tax cuts. We can't let that go. We did win the message war last in 2017. We're still winning the message war. The two things in the polling we did in 2017, the polling we did in 2018 for the election was, we won because we talk about tax fairness and we win because we say that the two trillion dollar tax cut blew up the deficit and it threatened social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those were two 70% winning issues and that's where we've got to get the people who are running for election to be focused on. That's a great last point just to emphasize this issue that they're going to call you a tax and spend anyway. One of the things is getting to scale on all of these projects, whether it is the taxes or infrastructure or early childhood, that one of the problems I think with the stimulus bill after the Great Recession was that it wasn't big enough and therefore people said it didn't work and if it had been twice as big, people don't have a good sense of scale so if you're going to tax the rich, go for it. Really tax the rich and get that 10 trillion dollars so that you can be there. If you do like, what if we raise the marginal tax rate by one half of 1%, you're going to get yelled at anyway for doing that and you're not going to have enough money and it's not going to be a game changer and we do need game changers right now. So with that, let's open it up to questions from the audience. There are some mics out there that are circulating so raise your hand if you want to ask a question. Please identify yourself and please keep your question short so we can get a bunch. Nancy McLean, so I love this panel. It's fantastic. Every single contribution has been incredible and it feels like we're really getting momentum, like we're getting there so this is great and I've been sitting through this day thinking about a phrase that military strategists sometimes use, which is to say that the enemy also has a vote in our strategy, right? And so I think you've begun to address this here in talking about what can be anticipated from the Republicans and with Dory and raising the kind of dog whistle racism that's out there from the right which would definitely come up in terms of makers and takers argument. So I think we're already moving down this road in terms of the organizing piece and the next panel will also take this up. I'd still like to hear more, but I would like to say this too, I'm realizing that this room is predominantly for folks who are like from the scholarly community, economists, political scientists, et cetera, not legal scholars and constitutional scholars and I think we have to anticipate that the right is gonna litigate hard against this and their legal challenges have been absurd. Remember what they did with the Affordable Care Act? Everybody laughed at their legal strategy except that they've gotten the judiciary and they've changed constitutional thinking so we can expect that they will say and don't laugh, this project discriminates against the rich. That will be a serious line of argument and if we're going to combat that, we need to start thinking now, who are the legal minds who have to be in place to say no, this is not that and I think it's gonna be people like Gita Siddharaman with the middle class constitution, like it's gotta be saying that this is destroying our politics and the ways that people have been talking about before and many other things, but I just wonder like are folks who are moving the conversation in the groups represented on the panel, are you also thinking about countering a litigation strategy from the right because we have to anticipate that, I think? The answer is no at this point, at least not from our coalition's point of view. I don't think any of our coalition partners, I don't know if any of them are thinking that way at this stage. Well I'm gonna recruit Lily right here in the front row to help us do our scenario planning for and anticipate what the challenges are. Lily and Ray Gadoff who's also here, another of our legal minds, but... I think there's also an interaction, I think it's a great point that you're raising and frankly, if you've noticed it's already starting in the Twitter world because when Elizabeth Warren came out with her package, they said it was unconstitutional. Now the public has no idea why it would be unconstitutional. That was a showstopper. But they did learn about the constitution in the fourth grade and are still slightly protective of it. So that was, I mean we tried that at just like last week in a focus group and people were like, wow really, why would that be? But then everything crazy is illegal. So maybe and then that means we can't do it. So it's already started, I think you raise, that it's not just a legal strategy, the legal strategy against ACA was a message strategy as well. Yeah. Here we go. Two point, next. Yeah. Look, I mean 2.5 million people are addicted to opioids for the first time in our history, life expectancy is going down for segments of the population. Last year deaths of despair, which are deaths related to suicide drugs and alcohol reached the highest point since they started recording them. Our society is falling apart, number one. Number two, thank God we have somebody who is marginally inept. At trying to do what he is attempting to do. So Donald Trump could potentially in the future look like a guy who's just not that bad. If we let this get much worse, okay? So Donald Trump overperforms in the areas of the country with the most despair. All right, stick that in your head for a second. Overperforms in the areas with the most despair. And it's time for rich people to get on the bus to fix this. There are 375,000 people in this country who make a million dollars or more a year. We have 200 members in the patriotic millionaires. Okay, that's pathetic. I talked about rich people bullshit earlier. Most people in this room work with organizations that are funded by wealthy people. I'd like to ask every single wealthy person on the board or who contributes to a political candidate on the left or who contributes to one of the organizations where they are on the tax fight and how public and how vocal they intend to be over the course of the next 18 months as we try to fight this out publicly and how vocal, if they're not willing to go on the media and Frank and I will be happy to help them get their op-ed place, get whatever, get in the fight, at least start to have the fight privately within your peer group because wealthy Americans have destroyed this country full stop. I mean, some of them are sweet though, right? I mean, it's all good too. I mean, you know what I'm saying, okay. Steve Cleese, University of Maryland. How should we deal with the charge of socialism? Oh, come on, don't even deal with it. I mean, whatever. The fact that we're even talking about it is absurd. This is an absurdity. It is like pretending that trickle down economics is actually the economic philosophy. It's like pretending they believe that if they do these things, they will have a different outcome than the definitional outcome that comes from cutting taxes on rich people and robbing a society of the resource they need. I mean, do not buy into their argument. Refuse to engage. I have a slightly different view of that. Just for this reason, so 50% of Americans have no idea what socialism is, okay. Now, 50% of people don't know what capitalism is either. Okay. In 50? I'm highly overlapping. But that doesn't mean just because you don't know what it is, you like it. I mean, you can dislike something, you have no idea what it is. Socialism was more popular than capitalism. In a year, Donald Trump changed that number. Donald Trump and Fox News. And now only 20% of the public likes socialism, even though, again, 50% of the public can't tell you what it is. So the number of people who knew what socialism was has not changed. The highest correlate of not liking socialism is watching Fox News. I agree with Erica about not worrying about the socialism argument. But I think you ought to worry a lot about the machine that generated the socialism argument that flipped the numbers on socialism. And it is trying, because they have 25 people, how would you run against all of them to characterize the whole field of socialists? And so the point of the matter is we have to compete at scale. And it's really your point. We have to get on social media. We have to find the memes. 100% of Americans know who the wealthy are. 97% of Americans know they don't pay their fair share. We don't have to deal with concepts that are obscure. So I wouldn't worry about spending all your time on socialism, but I would worry about the machine that flipped those numbers, and that we need to get to scale characterizing what we're doing. And if you put up socialism against someone who's gonna jeopardize your, a socialist versus someone who's gonna jeopardize your mom's social security, and unfund your school because they give a tax break to the wealthy who are spending half their time out of state to begin with. Okay, game on, man. We'll take that fight. Yeah, I just, my quick thing is, just turn socialism into, well, are you for social security? Are you for Medicare? Are you for the government building our highways and transit systems? And are you for public education? Just change it to that conversation. There's different ways to get it to that conversation. On what I was saying earlier about kind of the next generation, millennial and Gen Zers, they are 51% in favor of socialism. 45% in favor of capitalism. So now they're not the majority of voters yet. They're 37% of the electorate in this next election, but they don't vote in proportion. So they're lower than that. But that's where we're going. And that's why we will be able to change this system in 10 years in a serious way and raise 10 trillion dollars and get on to building what we need to build in this country. This conversation reminds me, the socialism charge reminds me of, I spent a couple of years as a union organizer. And we had two sayings. One was the boss is the best organizer. So that's the orange band. And second is inoculation. Yeah. So in conversations with workers, you have to say, this is what the boss is gonna tell you why union is a bad idea, right? That he's gonna have to lay off people or wages will go down. So you do a whole inoculation. I think we have to do that around socialism. Like this is what this dude's gonna say. This is what they're gonna say, get ready, it's coming. Or the second thing is, it's the immigrant's fault, right? When we hit a recession in the next year, two years, right? What do we think if this president uses strategic racism and immigrant bashing in good economic times, what the hell do you think he's gonna do when the economy falls? He's gonna have a lot of strategic options, right? So from a very strategic point of view, how do we inoculate people now around the socialism charge and the brown people coming across the border charge? Those are gonna be the two major plays they have. We can be smarter than them. Well, and they're gonna connect the two, right? When 50% of the people don't know what socialism is, then you can define socialism as the brown people coming across the border. So they're gonna conflate these things aggressively. I think that's a great point. We have their playbook. We do. It's not like they have a whole lot of aces in their pocket, they do not. They have a couple of things, they're gonna keep doing it. So since we know what they're gonna do, let's get out ahead of that. Let's take one last question. Mike, over there? I'd like to talk to the whole issue of inoculation. George Lakoff talks about how to frame a message, which frankly, the Republicans are great at doing. The Democrats are lousy at it. What's the frame that we're gonna use to get this message through to average American voters? So they realize they're being had by the current regime. Can I respond to that? I'd like each of you to respond to it. That's our last question. Thank you. I think that's a great question and I will let the experts on framing respond to that. I just wanna put another layer to it. And there is like the question of narrative and what are the frames and messages we put out. There's a second question of narrative infrastructure. How do people get messages in the first place and from what means? So there's Fox News, sorry I used to work at MSNBC, it doesn't compare in size, scale, viewers, right? So where are the places where people are hearing the memes and the messages? So there's social media, there's Fox News, in some communities there's barbershops and beauty salons. So we have to be smarter about the narrative infrastructure and building that out as smart as we and as much that we put into the content and the actual message and frame. How are people and from where are they getting these messages in the first place? That goes to Salinda's question about what's the machine that built that message? Frank, let's just go down the line and give each of you a last chance. You know, we're Americans for tax friends, we've actually been thinking about this quite a lot lately and Salinda's been working with us on it. I basically have said to folks we, and this is just at the brand level that we need the equivalent for the tax issue and you all heard today how complicated the tax issue is, the different moving parts of the tax issue, that what we need is a branding mechanism. We need the equivalent of a Green New Deal, a Medicare for All, a free college, free public college on the tax thing that is kind of the umbrella brand. Actually I talked to Chris Van Hollen about this too and he got it because he used to run the DSCC. He gets the boy and so we need an overarching brand. We've actually done some testing. Erica doesn't like the name we've come up with so we might do a little bit more testing, but it was Fair Share Taxes was what we came up with, hitting on the Fair Tax, the Fairness issue and then we actually tested the brand name and we tested slogans to go with it which was Fair Share Taxes to create an economy works for all of us, for everyone. And you heard Chris Van Hollen talk about economy works for all that tested better out of five other things we tested it against. So that was kind of the, so we need that and it's not policy specific, it's what can everybody from the blue dog or the new Democrat to the Bernie and Warren, what common language can we say that you understand which side you're on, right? You're on our side, not their side. And then the way, the paragraph to articulate it that we had tested was we need to reform the federal tax system to help raise trillions of dollars. So Linda said try trillions of dollars, I said trillions of dollars, she said try it without it. It tested just as well to say we need to reform the system to raise trillions of dollars in taxes by making the wealthy and big corporations pay their fair share of taxes. This will provide the revenue needed to protect social security, Medicare and Medicaid and to make new investments in healthcare, education, housing, childcare, infrastructure and environment. We're combining this fair share, make them, make corporations that pay their fair share. So Linda did our initial focus groups and polling on this in 2012, that has been our through line all the way through. We got that home in there. And but we need to get in people's minds and we need revenue for two things. One is protect those things that you love. Social security, Medicare and Medicaid, that was what we learned in the last two, 2017, 20 and to make new investments. It's always been harder to get people to pivot to the new investments because they are deficit sensitive. A lot of the folks in the middle are deficit sensitive. Thanks. We need to find it. Erica. Messaging. I think some Democrats are atrocious at messaging. Other Democrats are great at messaging. The correlation of people who think you need a political revolution, 79% Donald Trump, 81% Bernie Sanders. The language of some people works. It hits your redneck ear. The language of some people doesn't. And I would argue that most of the people who can't message something, i.e. the Clintons, don't actually believe in anything. So why don't you find a belief system first before you try to figure out how you're gonna explain it to somebody else? The last thing I would say, and it's hard to top that actually, but the last thing I would say is that the strong messages are rooted in values, which is one of the things that like I've said. As so, leave your acronyms at home. But it's interesting to me, honestly, that you have, and I'm saying this a little bit as a straw person, that you have a conference with one panel on messaging and eight hours on policy. Real people don't think it's too hard to tax the wealthy. It's not like they hide their things. Yeah, they get through loopholes and stuff. It's not like we don't know where they are. It's not like we don't know who they are. You can spot them a mile away. You know where their houses are. You know how they're spending their money. This is not a secret, really. And so real people think, why can't you just go after it and just tax? And that's why a lot of people, unfortunately, come back to a flat tax because they think, well, let's just get 10% of everything and call it a day. So I think the number one thing to remember is that the policies are honestly less important for the voters. This is not a mystery of how to do it. The framing of it, and it's really, I'm glad you asked your last question. I'm a big fan of fair share, a common ground, common fate, community at the state and local level. Investment is a very important piece to tack on to this. But again, we have the basics of the framing. What we don't have, and I'm gonna go back to Dorian and Erica, we don't have an agreement on it, so we don't repeat it. They repeat stuff no matter what, whether they believe in it or not. And number two, we don't have an infrastructure for getting around it. And not only do we need different media outlets, we need to be more aggressive on social media. Last thing I'll say to you, a third of women rely on friends and family for their information. So we got two strategies out there. We can get them different friends and families by November 2020, that's gonna be rough. I'm all for that, divorce is a national policy, maybe it would work. Or we are gonna have to get information passed on to them by friends and family. That's what the right has done. Today, this week, Donald Trump outspent all Democrats combined and has done it four months now on social media. That infrastructure question is the most important point here. Okay, please join me in thanking this amazing man. Thank you.