San Francisco billionaire and 2020 Democratic candidate for president, Tom Steyer, spoke at an event at Manny's in the Mission District on Thursday night. The event was centered on Steyer's climate advocacy, including his new book Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We'll Win the Climate War.
Towards the end of the event, I had the opportunity to ask him if he is considering running for president in 2028. Here's his answer:
It is impossible for me to believe that somebody won't emerge who will be talking the truth, knowing the truth and pushing hard on the truth. Honestly. And I will support that person. Seriously, I want to see it. And that's what I believe. I mean, I'm saying that's what we need to do, including the part that we've just discussed. It is not niceness. It is not, you know, blather. It is a true thing about how we change our society. We have to change the society.
I also asked him what he says to those who believe that billionaires shouldn't exist. Here's his answer:
So let's talk about the billionaires, because we're obviously in a Gilded Age like the 1890s of inequality. And of course, people around this country feel left behind, dispossessed, disregarded, disrespected and they're furious. Right? Under all of this—extreme anger at a system that they think is unfair, corrupt, and that picks on them and they're super upset about it.
I don't think—look, in a capitalist system, do I believe that people should be able to fight as hard as they can to build their businesses? I actually do.
And let's talk about why this world is so unfair. The amount of money that's going to the very few people at the top is so disproportionate to any idea of fairness, but also to history. It's never happened this way before. And we live in the part of the country where this is happening.
Look, if we built the Ford Motor Company and we wanted to build a million more cars, we'd have to buy some land, build a factory, hire a thousand people and pay them. We would make a margin, but it would cost a crapload of money to do it. And so there'd be something left over. Don't feel bad for all those 1920s moguls—they're fine.
But if we're running an IT company in Northern California and we have a software solution and we need to add a million more customers? Done. No people, no factory, no land. The margins are completely different. And what that means is that the people who get the original ownership don't get diluted. They never have to raise the money to buy the land, never have to raise the money to build the factory. They never have to pay the people to work on the line. It's just profit.
And so they never get diluted, so they own a much higher percentage of the company. And the company has much higher margins. And it's a natural monopoly—IT has a natural monopoly aspect to many of the businesses. So as a result, you have huge businesses that flow a massive amount of cash and are very concentrated in ownership. Different from the old ways.
It's sort of like oil companies finding out they polluted and trying to hang on to it. Having said that, it doesn't make it right. That is the truth of how this happened. It was somewhat inadvertent. It's the nature of a different kind of business with a different kind of cash, a different kind of margin, a different kind of monopoly power—natural.
But having said that, the question is--I wasn't lying--the people who built this country, the people who made that possible. We aren't seeing that in most of the countries in this world. We're seeing this here because of the things that are here. If you look at the people, there are an awful lot of people came here to do this because here works, and the reason here works is those poor people in the mud for centuries, so when I think about it, I don't get mad at people for building businesses. I hate monopolies—I really, truly hate monopolies. I hate monopolists. And I think the real question here is, and obviously this is a big fight: What do you get to keep? I think it's true you earned that money, and it wasn't just you. And the question is, "how much of that is your's and how much of is its society"? Their argument is that "100% of it is mine". My answer is "no." "No."
There's a huge thing going on here. This is a society where we have to invest in the--look, I said we're a society of doers. That's what makes value. That's what we are. That's who we are. That means we have to invest in each other. Have we been doing that? Not nearly enough.
And I'll give you the example that I keep in my head. 1970. Ohio. Massachusetts. Same earnings per capita in the states. Same. Both pretty well-to-do states. Massachusetts decides we're going to be the education capital of the United States. We're going to have the best education system, and they pour money into it. And it's Democrats and it's Republicans. You look at the history of Massachusetts, the governorship has gone back and forth. They've never stopped emphasizing education.
Ohio is like, "You know what works? Low taxes. Let's starve the eduction system. What works is low taxes. That's what create value and prosperity." Massachusetts, 50 years later, has a 50% higher income per person than Ohio. 50%. Did it happen overnight? No. By the way, Ohio has a great educational history. There are a number of unbelievably great colleges and universities in the state of Ohio. It used to be the richest state in the United States.
So my answer to you is, look, I don't get mad at people for making money, but I want that money to be shared. And I want to invest in the people of the United States so that we can all compete as a group and be a community and do something together and succeed together.