Talarico Calls Extreme Wealth a 'Spiritual Sickness' and Says the System Is Rigged Against Working People

Talarico opened by describing extreme wealth concentration as a moral problem. 'For one of our own residents to become the world's first trillionaire while one in five Texas children live in poverty,' he said, 'to me, that is a spiritual sickness.' He added that right now three men own more wealth than the entire middle class, and said that as someone who cares about the people in his state, that is not the future he wants.

He said the goal is a government of, by and for the people, and that the corruption in the political system has to be cleaned up first.

Asked about his birth father, Talarico said he felt a lot of anger toward him while growing up, but that as he got older he tried to understand what led him to that point. His mother believed the man may have had an undiagnosed learning disability, since he could not keep months in order. Talarico, a former teacher, noted that such disabilities can now be caught and students with special needs served, but that he apparently did not receive that help.

He said the situation can derail a person, leading to substance abuse and then to violence. 'I'm the person I am because of him and my mom,' he said, calling that a hard thing to wrestle with. He said he has tried to have more compassion as he has gotten older.

He described his adoptive father, Mark Talarico, who gave him his last name and raised him, as probably the best man he knows, someone honest who does what is right even when no one is watching.

Talarico said he has already seen how difficult the campaign is, and that the attacks reach people who never signed up for public life, including his family and his girlfriend. 'So I can't imagine doing this for longer than two terms,' he said.

Asked whether pressure and attacks are a reason not to pursue worthy work, he said he loves what he does and hopes people benefit from it, which is reason enough to continue regardless of the pressure. He also said that his skill set suits a legislative position better than the presidency.

Talarico said the anger over the economy is something he hears everywhere he goes in Texas. People are not buying nice clothes or vacations, he said, but struggling to afford groceries, gas, utilities and prescription drugs. Some work multiple jobs and still cannot make ends meet, a problem he said is especially pronounced among young people, including millennials and Gen Z.

He said young people were promised that if they worked hard, played by the rules, went to school and studied, they could live the American dream. He called that a lie, because buying a home, starting a family and retiring comfortably have become too expensive, and because the system itself has been rigged against working people.

He traced the problem back to the 1970s, pointing to what he called a blueprint for corporate interests in a 1971 memo, later associated with a lawyer who was appointed to the Supreme Court.

Talarico said trickle-down economics, in his view, is not a theory but theft. He cited figures showing that in 1970 middle-class households held 62% of all U.S. aggregate income, while upper-income households held 29%. Today, he said, those shares have flipped: upper-income households capture over 50% of total income, compared with 42% for the middle class.

He also said lower-income families rose by 5% since the 1970s, the middle-income category fell by 10%, and the upper-income class increased by 5%. The direction, he concluded, is fewer people in the middle class and more in both lower and higher income groups.

Asked how to reverse this, he said he is not proposing a radical new vision but a return to the economy of the 1950s and 1960s, when the nation grew together. He argued that a country that invests in its people grows faster than one that abandons them, and named raising the minimum wage and expanding overtime pay as specific steps.

Talarico said the country must do more to support families and children and invest in education, pointing to the GI Bill as a turning point in building the middle class. He said nothing comparable in higher education investment has happened since. He said the child tax credit cut child poverty in half a few years ago before being allowed to expire, and that it should be expanded.

He said these measures are possible if the country is willing to tax the people at the very top so they pay their fair share.

Asked whether that is difficult given lobbying against it, he said that is the point: a broken political system produces a broken economic system. He said the only way to unrig the economy is to clean up corruption so that corporate special interests and super PACs have less influence. As an example he cited an out-of-state billionaire who gave Texas's governor $12 million to pass a private school voucher program, which he said takes money from underfunded public schools in a state that ranks 43rd nationally in per-student education funding.

Asked what could have stopped extreme concentration, Talarico said the country once had a top marginal tax rate of 90%, in the 1950s. He said he does not think it needs to be that high, but that the country once had a political and economic system that more fairly distributed the fruits of labor.

When the host noted that even a 90% rate would leave Elon Musk a trillionaire, Talarico said the problem is concentrated wealth and power getting out of control. He said what upsets people about Musk's example is that Tesla succeeded because of taxpayer dollars, with investment from the federal government.

He argued that most billionaires went to publicly funded schools and drove on publicly funded highways, and said he is not saying they cannot be successful. His point is to give something back to the country that made success possible and to build a ladder for the next person. He said the government should invest in the CEO in the garage rather than the CEO on the mega-yacht, and criticized tax breaks that go to giant companies such as Walmart, which he said is effectively subsidized through Medicaid because it does not provide quality health care to its employees.

Talarico said that Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos now own more wealth than the entire middle class, and said that is crazy, adding that saying so does not make someone a socialist or communist. Asked what he would do, he said a fair tax system is a start, and noted that many of these men do not pay tax because they borrow against their equity.

He said there are many ideas for taxing not only income but also wealth, and that the country should explore every avenue to make the wealthiest pay their fair share. He said working Texans pay a larger share of their take-home pay than the wealthiest people in the state.

He attributed this to a tax system transformed by those who can pay politicians for access and control. He said the country has crony capitalism rather than capitalism, because elected officials write the tax code, education policy and health policy, and can be bought off. The passage ends with his description of how such influence produces a rigged system.

The host noted that a big headline is significant job disruption, with much of the value expected to accrue to large technology companies such as frontier AI labs and Nvidia. Talarico said that when he travels Texas he hears competing reactions: excitement about AI's benefits, such as an entrepreneur he met who talked about curing chronic diseases and perhaps cancer, and anxiety because leaders who should write the rules have their heads in the sand.

He said Congress and the federal government have been missing in action as the technology has advanced faster and in dangerous ways, pointing to a recent hacking incident. He said he would prioritize three things in an AI regulatory framework: protecting workers, protecting children from harms such as those caused by social media, and protecting democracy from deepfake political ads.

He said he increasingly cannot tell AI deepfakes from reality, and that most of the time no disclaimer is required, so there is a lot that needs to happen.

The host cited Elon Musk's claim that within a decade there will be more than a billion humanoid robots, each at least five times the output of a human. Talarico said the real issue is not whether that timeline holds, but who writes the rules. 'We cannot let AI or robotics become yet another arena where billionaires are writing the rules for the rest of us,' he said.

He compared AI to the Manhattan Project, the space race and the development of the internet, saying AI will probably be more consequential than those three. The difference, he said, is that those innovations were public-private partnerships in which the country decided the rules with private companies. AI, by contrast, is being developed by a small number of people running for-profit corporations without input from the rest of the public.

Talarico argued that the country cannot allow AI to repeat the pattern of the past 50 years, when the richest and most powerful people wrote the rules and captured the gains. Working people deserve a say and a share in the AI future, he said, whether through an AI dividend or some other policy that ensures everyone benefits from the wealth these technologies create.

His reasoning is that AI uses collective intellectual property. If companies use people's ideas and ingenuity, he said, workers deserve compensation for that use.

The host raised job disruption, noting that about 400,000 people in Texas work as professional drivers as their primary occupation, and that including gig workers on Uber and DoorDash, the number exceeds half a million. The host cited autonomous cyber cabs with no steering wheel or pedals being rolled out in Texas, and said the Uber CEO had told him those jobs are going away. The host asked how people like Talarico are thinking about disruption that could happen quickly.

Talarico said that if the country makes decisions together about the AI future, it can weather disruptions and come out stronger. He urged investing in what only human beings can do, doubling down on human creativity and ingenuity.

He proposed entrepreneurship grants funded by taxing AI companies. Some of that revenue could go toward people who have a good business idea, an invention or a piece of art but do not know wealthy investors. He said the government should invest in the little guy as it did with Tesla and the internet, which he said more than paid for themselves.

Asked whether elected officials can handle this, Talarico pointed to social media as a negative example. He said lawmakers let social media companies run wild, and it ended up preying on children and hurting everyone, so the lesson is to plan ahead for AI rather than react after the fact.

Talarico listed grievances that he said explain why many Texans voted for Trump: he had promised to lower costs, end the Forever Wars and release the Epstein files, but more than a year into the administration those promises had not been kept. He said everything is more expensive largely because of tariffs, that a new war in Iran that no one asked for costs a billion dollars a day and is driving up gas prices, that the Epstein files have still not been fully released, and that the swamp is bigger than ever.

He said people feel conned, and that his job as a candidate is to extend an open hand to disillusioned neighbors who misplaced their trust in a leader. He described the movement he is building in Texas as bigger than Donald Trump and bigger than any one party, made up of working people across the spectrum.

Asked about Trump as a person, Talarico said he does not know him personally. He named clear strengths: the president communicates in a clear, concise and powerful way, is willing to act amid gridlock, and has a sense of humor. He also named weaknesses, including putting his ego above everything else, making chaotic decisions without forethought, and a penchant for corruption and self-enrichment for himself and his family. He said that if elected he would work with Trump to deliver for constituents.

Talarico said the country should never have been in this situation. He suggested that after the Venezuela operation there was hubris and overconfidence that toppling Iran's leadership would be easy and a quick fix. He said it was not hard to predict that Iran, when cornered, would take control of the Strait of Hormuz, and that previous administrations had run war games reaching the same conclusion.

On checks and balances, he said the founders could not have envisioned political parties coordinating across branches of government. The legislative branch, which is first listed in the Constitution, has become subservient to the executive and the president's will. He said Congress needs to restore its role.

He said that if the objectives cannot be clearly articulated, it is the responsibility of the legislative branch to intervene and withhold funding for these operations. He noted that the objectives keep shifting. He added that a deal should involve free passage through the strait and address the nuclear issue, and that the earlier nuclear agreement had been on track to prevent an Iranian weapon.

The host said a proposed memorandum of understanding with Iran, offering free passage through the Strait of Hormuz with a clause on nuclear weapons, failed within a couple of days. He argued that Iran is playing to a different time frame than Trump, who is working within a four-year election cycle, and said he did not really know what he was talking about but that Iran appeared to hold the cards.

The host recalled a press conference in which Marco Rubio or Pete Hegseth said it was not even clear who is in charge in Iran, and that communication to the front lines takes a while, meaning the people negotiating might not be connected with those launching missiles and drones.

Talarico responded that the United States still has economic leverage, and that he hopes a resolution comes sooner than the end of the Trump administration. He said such a resolution will likely involve economic pressure alongside regional partnerships, since the U.S. will have to rely on regional partners to push through a final resolution.

Talarico said checks and balances are needed so the legislative branch can press the executive to clarify objectives or reach a consensus on an exit strategy. He agreed that the U.S. cannot afford to lose, since being seen as losing would embolden the Middle East, and said that Iran is an adversary and a nuclear Iran would be a disaster for the region and the world.

Asked what he would tell Trump in a phone call, he said humility and self-awareness would help avoid future mistakes. He would urge the president to call together the leadership of both parties in Congress and work with them and allies around the world toward a strategic direction. He said the administration has pushed Congress away and alienated allies, and that the country spent much political and economic capital building those alliances.

He said he would tell Trump frankly that he will not get out of this alone. It will require bipartisan collaboration at home and regional collaboration abroad.

Talarico said his faith is the soil under the work he does as a public school teacher and public official. His grandfather, a Baptist preacher, taught him that Christians are to follow the two commandments Jesus gave: to love God and love neighbor.

He described the parable of the Good Samaritan, which Jesus told when a lawyer asked him to define 'neighbor.' A man is beaten and left for dead; a priest and a religious man pass by without helping, and then a Samaritan stops, bandages his wounds, takes him to an inn and pays for his care. In Jesus's time, he said, Samaritans were not just a different religious group but the sworn enemy of the listeners, so the story would have been shocking.

He compared it to a Texas rivalry, saying it would be like telling a story about a good Aggie in the middle of the University of Texas's stadium. The point, he said, is that we are called to love not only those who look, pray or vote like us, but to actively love those most different from us, maybe those we hate the most. He said he tries to love his neighbor through public policy.

Talarico said he had always harbored a wish to one day preach and lead a church. He admired his grandfather and his pastor, Dr. Jim, who helped people make sense of their lives and ask deep questions about who they are and what the purpose of life is, in an intimate way in a small neighborhood church. He saw them comfort grieving members of the community, and said that when someone is dying, families' first call is to his pastor.

He said he always had the idea that he might go into that line of work one day. He had been in his second term in the state House when the atmosphere changed: his first term in 2019 had brought bipartisan work and a school finance package, while the 2021 session became one of the most partisan and unproductive in modern Texas history, including an abortion ban and permitless carry.

Talarico said that in seminary he learned Greek and Hebrew so that he would not rely on translations, because things get lost in translation. Studying the word faith, he realized it can be translated as belief, a commitment to a value or idea, or as trust. He said that in his first year of seminary he had a light-bulb moment: 'It feels much more like trust than it does belief.' Faith, he said, is not a commitment to an abstract concept but a visceral bodily experience of relaxing.

He used swimming as an analogy. His swim instructor at the pool in his childhood neighborhood told him, 'Don't hold on to the water. Let the water hold on to you.' He said faith works the same way: much of life is trying to control things, and faith means letting something larger hold you.

Asked his biggest challenge, Talarico said winning Texas is a challenge. The state has 18 million registered voters, 20 media markets and two time zones, and it still feels like a nation. He said reaching Texans, listening to their needs and sharing his values is a logistical, physical and spiritual challenge. He said 59,000 people have signed up to volunteer, more than a million have donated, and many more pray for him regularly.

Told that some polls show him ahead by a couple of points, Talarico said the only poll that matters is on election day, and that the campaign is treating itself as underdogs until the last vote is counted. He said Elon Musk has already committed millions of dollars to defeat him, that he has nothing against Musk, and that speaking truth to power against the world's first trillionaire makes one an underdog. He said the campaign is running as if five points behind.