Top Quotes: “Persist” — Elizabeth Warren

“In 1971, the principal at Riverdale Elementary was perfectly within his legal rights to fire me for being pregnant. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had banned hiring and firing based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. But the courts were clear: it was just fine to hire and fire employees based on whether a woman was pregnant. In fact, a few years after I was pushed out the door, the law went a step further. In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that pregnancy discrimination didn’t count as sex discrimination and thus did not violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Employers knew they faced no accountability for pushing pregnant women out of schools, offices, and factories.

That is exactly what principals and managers and small business owners all around America did. And women like me mostly bowed our heads and moved on. We “left” our jobs and didn’t raise a fuss and most of the men concluded that everything was just fine.”

“A study of more than 3,500 individual insurance plans offered in 2009 found that just 13 percent included maternity care.

And not until 2015, in Young v. UPS, did the Supreme Court inch toward declaring that pregnant workers should be treated similarly to other employees who are unable to work and that employers were required to make “reasonable accommodations” for pregnant women who continued to work, just as employers did for other disabled workers. Up until then, a shift manager could tell a pregnant woman that if she couldn’t cut it anymore lifting heavy packages or standing on her feet for an entire eight-hour shift, she’d be sent home without pay — even if other workers with disabilities were accommodated.”

“In 1999, women hit their peak participation in the workforce, and then the growth stalled out. More mothers stayed home. Now, even before the pandemic, the proportion of women in the workforce has actually been shrinking.

That’s an American problem, by the way. In Canada, Europe, Japan, and dozens of other countries, the number of women working continued to rise. And America’s failure to increase women’s workforce participation has had a profound effect on our economy. Standard and Poor’s estimates that if the United States had simply kept pace with countries like Norway, our economy today would be $1.6 trillion bigger.”

“Here’s the idea. Add up the value of everything a family owns — real estate, stock, cars, cash, and so on. The first $50 million in wealth would be free and clear, but on the 50 millionth and first dollar, the wealth tax would kick in — two cents for every dollar above $50 million, and three cents for every dollar above $1 billion. This means that only folks with $50 million or more in assets would pay the tax. That’s the top one-tenth of one percent of our nation’s families — about seventy-five thousand families.

The concept of a wealth tax wasn’t complicated or difficult to understand. In fact, it’s already built into how we currently finance public education. Nearly every homeowner in America pays a property tax that’s based on the value of their home, and a big chunk of that tax is used to support local schools. Renters pay property taxes indirectly through their rent. The wealth tax is a lot like a property tax, except instead of focusing only on real estate, the wealth tax for gazillionaires would sweep in the stock portfolio, the diamonds, the expensive paintings, the yacht, and all the other fancy belongings.

Most of that stuff is pretty easy to value. In fact, most of the wealth of our richest families is held in stock, so for starters we would just need to look up the value of a family’s stock holdings. In addition, there are plenty of specialists who value jewelry, artwork, and every other kind of expensive possession. Once all of a person’s property is valued, monitoring it from year to year wouldn’t be rocket science.

My team and I consulted a bunch of tax experts and looked into how some very wealthy people would try to game the system. In Europe, early versions of the wealth tax didn’t take this into account and they created a mess — but it was a mess that wasn’t hard to fix. Once we figured it out, we stitched up the loopholes in advance. So, for example, the wealth tax would cover all property, wherever it might be held around the world. (Sorry, Mr. Rich Dude: no tax havens in the Bahamas.) We also planned to significantly step up IRS enforcement — we would hire ten times the usual number of people just to monitor the seventy-five thousand families who would be covered by the tax — and we built that cost right into the plan. Then, just to be ultra-conservative, we assumed that despite our best efforts we’d miss about 15 percent of the wealth these rich people had.”

“A two-cent wealth tax would provide enough money to improve public education for every child and every educator in America.

We could dramatically increase federal aid for public K-12 to make sure that every school gets the funding it needs and so provide every child with a good public education. We could start by quadrupling the funding for the Title I program. Title I schools serve a high proportion of children from low-income homes, children who often face a whole constellation of challenges. Additional funding would mean that these children would have more meaningful opportunities to learn-and more meaningful opportunities to succeed in life.

Two cents would let us do the same for special education. For decades, children with disabilities were often turned away from public schools. In 1975, Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to guarantee each student “a free and appropriate” education, and it promised that the federal government would pick up 40 percent of the cost of that education. In fact, the federal government has never come close to meeting that promise, and today it covers less than 15 percent of the cost. To make up the difference, local school boards find a variety of ways to cut costs — eliminating other programs, squeezing teacher salaries, deferring updates to school buildings. Fully funding IDEA at the federal level would put the money where it’s needed to defray the higher costs of educating children with disabilities. It would also guarantee that, instead of pitting one group of children against another in a fight for too few public dollars, the resources needed to provide a “free appropriate public education” to all of our children would be available.

Two cents would also let us kick in some money to improve school buildings. Right now the federal government puts no real money into helping maintain the physical buildings, playgrounds, sidewalks, and the like. Instead, that’s mostly left to local budgets — and the more stressed the local school budget, the less money there is for building repairs and maintenance. The need is real. The average public school building is forty-four years old, with the oldest schools typically located in the poorest districts. More than half the school buildings in America need significant repairs before they can be classified as “in good condition.” And the most commonly identified facilities problem at these schools? No surprise: it’s the bathrooms.

Finally, two cents would let us invest in innovation for every school. A wealth tax would generate enough money to give the equivalent of a $1 million grant to each public school in the country. Not each district or each bureaucracy, but each individual public school. Big city or rural community, old school or new school — a grant of $1 million. The teachers, parents, and administrators could put their heads together and decide what would help their school deliver a better education for their students. A new science lab? More reading specialists? More field trips? An extra month or two of classes in the summer to help make up for what was lost during the pandemic school closures? Ask a teacher what her school could do with a grant like that and watch her face light up.

Sharply increased federal funding would drive the kind of big structural change that attacks the unfairness of local funding head-on. Because schools are so dependent on local funding, children born in poorer neighborhoods have fewer educational opportunities than children whose families can afford to buy homes in wealthier neighborhoods. This means that year after year, school by school, there’s less money for speech therapists and sports, less money for smaller class sizes and teachers’ aides, less money for college counselors and reading coaches. And yeah, less money for sparkling new bathrooms.

These disparities between children whose families aren’t wealthy and those born into privilege are sharpened along racial lines. The heavy reliance on state and local funding means that our country’s nonwhite school districts get about $23 billion less every year than white school districts, even though they serve about the same number of children. Per-student funding varies, but the underlying reality is harsh, and inadequate school-district funding hits Black and Latino children the hardest. Bureau of Indian Education schools are also chronically underfunded. A tax on a small number of super-wealthy families would allow us to put an end to all this deep-seated inequality.

What would it cost to step up for all our children — to make sure that every single child gets a first-rate education? The total price tag for quadrupling funding for Title I schools, fully funding IDEA, improving school buildings, and investing in innovation grants for every school is $80 billion a year — just a fraction of the revenue from a two-cent wealth tax.”

“I met teachers who worked as waitresses and bartenders, teachers who filled. in at the 7-Eleven, teachers who did landscaping, teachers who worked in their parents’ businesses, and a teacher who worked at a meat processing plant.

Nationally, about one out of six public school teachers works a second job during the school year. But for younger teachers, those who are just getting started, the rate is much higher: one in three is working a second job.”

“Back in the 1960s, public school teachers, on average, earned nearly 15 percent more than other people with similar educations. Now, even when health and retirement benefits are folded in, these teachers are making less than others with similar educations — about 10 percent less.

That extra $80 billion in federal money for K-12 public schools would mean more money for teachers, counselors, librarians, and cafeteria workers. Quadrupling the money for Title I schools would mean that these schools could offer a premium to the teachers who want to take on the steep challenge of teaching children from poor families and children who are learning English for the first time. More money for buildings and special programs would mean more room in the local education budget to increase teachers’ pay.”

“Well, here’s a little dose of real realism:Today, the top one-tenth of one percent in America pay total taxes of about 3.2 percent of their net worth every year. Meanwhile, the 99.9 percent pay about 7.2 percent.”

“Over the course of fourteen months, our campaign put out eighty-one glorious, juicy, interesting, hard, important, imperfect plans. Plans that sparked a lot of debate and caused people to think long and hard about what’s broken in our country.”

“I wasn’t the first candidate to rely on online fundraising. At the presidential level, both Howard Dean in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008 had raised record amounts online, and during those races, MoveOn and other groups had also raised significant amounts of money in the form of small political contributions from supporters. But this was a Senate race, and these races hadn’t yet attracted that kind of strong engagement.

Even so, our team began talking seriously about whether we could support a substantial part of our operations by asking people for help online. We started out tentatively, explaining who I was and why I was running, and then asking people if they could help. Within weeks an army of small online donors rode to my rescue. People pitched in $3 and more. People held bake sales and sold handmade jewelry. Kids offered their saved-up allowances. We asked supporters to vote online in a contest that would determine the slogan for our first T-shirt, and they picked THE BEST SENATOR MONEY CAN’T BUY. I still knew very little about politics or campaigns, but before long I started to believe that I might have what it takes to run against a guy who already had nearly $10 million in the bank.

By the time the 2012 race was over, 350,000 people had contributed to my campaign, more than any Senate campaign ever.”

“Near the end of the presidential primary season, the whole money business took an unexpected turn. A stunningly generous woman put $14 million into a super PAC to pay for ads promoting my candidacy in Super Tuesday states. I had met her a few times back when I was running for the Senate, but as far as I know, she didn’t have any business interest to promote or a big chunk of family money that she wanted to protect with a tax loophole. She just wanted me to win.

By this point, every other candidate who participated in the Las Vegas debate — Joe, Bernie, Pete, and Amy — also had a super PAC or similar outside support. Only the billionaire, Mike Bloomberg, probably had more money in the back of his sock drawer than all the super PACs put together, did not have a super PAC. Iam convinced that this woman believed in what I was fighting for. And I’m sure that all the other primary candidates who benefited from super PACs supporting them felt the same. But I will keep up the fight for a world in which no one can engage in this kind of spending on behalf of anyone — including me.”

“In 2018, I started developing a plan to invest $500 billion and build about 3.2 million new housing units. The plan wasn’t about just one kind of housing. It was about rental housing and homes people could buy. It was about housing for poor people and homeless people. It was about housing for middle-class families. It was about housing for seniors and people with disabilities and people who needed group homes. It was about housing in inner cities, housing in small towns, and housing in farming communities. It was about housing on millions of acres of tribal lands. The plan was about acknowledging that housing is a basic human right and putting some serious federal muscle behind a commitment to create the housing Americans need.

My team and I decided that before we rolled out the plan, we should ask some independent economists to take the idea for a test drive. If our numbers were off or there were effects we hadn’t thought about, better to learn this in advance instead of having to backtrack and issue a giant “oops.” The econ nerds aren’t easy to impress, but after crunching the numbers they were enthusiastic. Mark Zandi, who had been John McCain’s economic adviser, told us that by approaching the housing problem from the supply side, the plan would cut rents across the board by about 10 percent. He also said that the surge of construction would produce up to 1.5 million new jobs — good, union jobs that can’t be shipped overseas.

The plan would have yet another beneficial effect. As the supply of new houses increased, the cost of buying a home would drop. More people could afford to step up from renting and buy a place to live.”

“My plan created assistance for first-time home buyers in these neighborhoods — support that would acknowledge that legacy of discrimination and help to close the Black/white wealth gap.

The plan had a number of other important features. It would offer substantial money to communities that were willing to modify their laws to increase density, modernize building codes and materials, and lower building costs. It would ban discrimination against LGBTQ people — discrimination that is currently legal. Every bell and whistle in my plan was designed to expand housing in ways that would be life-changing for millions of Americans.

But I didn’t stop there. I also proposed a simple way to pay for the plan. Borrowing from history, we would shift the estate tax thresholds back to where they’d been during the George W. Bush administration, and we’d also establish a more progressive tax rate beyond those thresholds.

That’s it; that’s all we’d need to do. According to IRS data, this would affect the tax rates of about fourteen thousand wealthy families. Requiring them to pay their estate taxes at the same thresholds that were in place in the 2000s, and instituting more progressive rates above those thresholds.”

“But we don’t have to wait for a constitutional amendment. Even in a Citizens United world, we can reduce the influence of money on our elections. We can improve laws covering contribution disclosures so that voters can see where a candidate’s money is coming from. We can insist that all campaign contributions be made public within twenty-four hours, not three months. And we can outlaw all corporate contributions to candidates for the House, the Senate, or the White House. If we established these three simple rules, all perfectly legal in a Citizens United world, we could move the needle on the influence of big-dollar spending on elections.

Step two in my effort to fight corruption was bigger — a lot bigger. During the campaign I released a comprehensive anti-corruption plan that identified hundreds of ways in which money makes its power felt in Washington. I also showed how we could change the laws to put a stop to each one of those ways. At nearly every town hall, in nearly every stump speech, in almost every interview, I talked about the corruption that threatens our democracy. Even more important, I described tough, realistic plans that would root out this corruption.

Any good anti-corruption plan should start with eliminating conflicts of interest.”

“The law should be changed and it should apply to every administration, Democratic or Republican. Tax returns for every single person who files to run for federal office — the White House, the Senate, and the House — should be automatically put online. How many years of returns? Let’s follow the example set by Barack Obama and require a minimum of eight years for anyone running for president.

It’s also time to tighten the conflict of interest rules and make them apply across the board to presidents and to their cabinet officials and agency heads. That no-conflicts rule should also applyto senators and representatives. After the primary season ended, Joe Biden and I issued a joint call for a no-conflicts rule. No member of Congress should own individual stocks, nor should they have an ownership stake in a business.

During the pandemic year of 2020, the two Republican senators from Georgia seemed to be in competition to see who could profit more from being in “public service.” Senator David Perdue made 2,596 stock trades, including 61 trades in a single company whose fortunes would be dramatically affected by congressional decisions that were being directly influenced by Senator Perdue. Senator Kelly Loeffler got private briefings on the spread of the virus, then bought stocks in companies that manufactured protective equipment and produced telework software whose value would rise in a pandemic. The Republican Justice Department investigated but declined to prosecute Senator Perdue, while the Senate ethics committee said Senator Loeffler’s actions violated no rules. How could anyone think this was okay? If these actions didn’t violate any rules, then it’s time to change the rules. And if the public officials investigating senators can’t enforce the rules, then we need to bring in some independent enforcement officials who have a real backbone instead of overcooked spaghetti.”

“While we’re at it, let’s ban those same senators and representatives from becoming lobbyists once they are no longer in office. It’s time to put a stop to the slimy business of lobbying firms vacuuming up high-ranking government officials just to get their contacts and their access to the Senate Dining Room. And the same rule should apply to cabinet officials, to the heads of agencies, and — yeah, I guess we need to say it — even to the president and the vice president.”

“There’s so much more we could do to end the corruption — or at least beat it back. We could expand the legal definition of lobbying so that none of it happens outside the public view. We could bar political contributions from lobbyists. We could ban foreign governments from using U.S. lobbyists. We could require experts who testify before Congress to reveal who paid for their research.

And while we’re at it, we could attack corruption in our courts. Let’s begin at the top: Justices of the United States Supreme Court are bound by no rules of ethics. None, zero, zip. That means they can take all-expenses-paid trips to “seminars” at lovely vacation spots or fancy hunting lodges and pal around with people who have cases that will eventually come before the Court. That’s just plain wrong, and it should be illegal.”

“If we added another feature to the plan, we could provide home-buying assistance to people living in formerly redlined neighborhoods. We could also help people who lost their homes during the economic collapse of 2008. More broadly, a significant portion of this assistance would be targeted to the Black and Latino communities, and to the people who had disproportionately borne the brunt of racial discrimination. In the end I proposed both — a big housing plan for everyone and a targeted housing plan for those who had been hit hardest by racial discrimination.

Or consider higher education. Black students borrow more money than white students to go to college and have a harder time paying it back after they graduate. And the impact of having to climb this steeper hill marks a whole life. Twenty years after graduating, the average white borrower has only 6 percent of their original loan left to pay off; the end is in sight. But the average Black student still owes 95 percent of the original loan amount.

A home, a business, saving for retirement — every major financial investment is still years into the future for nearly all Black borrowers.

What’s the best way to end this inequity? Here’s a good starting place: implement a debt forgiveness plan that considers our current state of racial inequality. By canceling $50,000 of student loan debt and limiting the benefit of debt cancellation to people earning less than $100,000, relief would be widespread. About three out of every four borrowers would see their entire debt load wiped out, and most of the remainder would see a substantial reduction. But the effect on the Black/white and Latino/white wealth gap would be stunning, reducing both by about 25 points. That shift would be historic.”

“A working mom earns only seventy-one cents for every dollar earned by a working dad.

And that’s just the start. Any woman who stayed out of the workforce for a number of years to care for her family will get hit even harder. She will likely fall short of thirty-five years of work, so when her Social Security retirement benefits are calculated, she’ll receive a zero for each year of missing income. Basic math really bites here: those zero years badly hurt her average earnings. Even if she works part-time while raising children, she gets slammed because her part-time work is likely to yield a much lower income during those years — and those lower-income years are swept into her average.

After a lifetime of lower wages and fewer working years, these caregiving women will retire with a far smaller Social Security stipend. It’s so small, in fact, that women over sixty-five are much more likely to be poor than men — regardless of their race, their education, or their marital status. They will be poor because they are women.”

“We should build a payment floor so that no ope has to live in poverty — no one. And we should create Social Security credits for years taken off work to care for families, credits that would boost a woman’s payout in the retirement years. These two changes would improve millions of lives.

And yes, of course this plan should also include caregiving fathers and sons and nephews. But let’s be clear: it’s still mostly women who leave the workforce to deal with caregiving for children or elderly relatives, and it’s still mostly women who earn less, save less, and face retirement with less money.

But let’s not stop with help for caregivers. Let’s also boost Social Security benefits across the board. A small change that resulted in a $200-a-month increase in Social Security benefits would lift an estimated five million people out of poverty.”

“During high school and my first year of college, I’d spent three summers working in a big insurance office, and multiple creepy guys patted my knees, stroked my butt, squeezed my arms, and hugged my shoulders. Oh, and let’s give a special mention to the other creepy guys who asked about my boyfriends, told dirty stories, and wanted to know what I thought about sex. But I was still young during those years, and like millions of other girls, part of my teenage education was learning to bob and weave. Besides, I felt damn lucky to have a summer job, and I knew that if I complained, I’d be gone by the end of the day.”

“Gene was a terrifying figure. He regularly asked me about my scholarship and visited my classes, and I knew he would be the principal filter for how most of the rest of the faculty saw me. His opinion would matter enormously, and I tried my hardest to do a good job. But his early comments about my teaching were brutal. I dreaded every time he showed up unannounced in my class.

One afternoon he called me into his office. As I came in, he told me to close the door. Gene already had a bottle of something — scotch? bourbon? — on his desk. He raised his glass and offered me a drink. I said no thanks. I didn’t drink hard liquor, but I worried whether turning him down would make me look like I didn’t “fit in.” Oh Lord, I thought, just get me out of here.

We talked for a bit. He sat on one side of the desk; I sat on the other. After a few minutes, he made several sexual remarks. I didn’t want to admit what was happening. I kept deflecting him, but I was quickly moving from uneasy to sweaty. I knew our conversation was going nowhere good, but I couldn’t afford to offend him.

Suddenly he got up and started to come around the desk. I jumped up from my chair, and as I moved away from him, I said in a low voice that was much steadier than I felt, “You don’t want to do this. You don’t want to do this. Please don’t do this.” For a minute or two, I felt like I’d stepped into a bad cartoon. He came around the desk. I moved to the other side. He faked one way and I faked the other. I was trying to keep the desk between us while I kept repeating, “You don’t want to do this. You don’t want to do this.’

Finally, I saw my opening and ran for the door. He made a last lunge just as I wrenched it open and escaped. I ran past the secretaries’ desks, down a flight of stairs, and into my office. I sat there by myself for a long time, trying to stop shaking and steady my breathing.

I kept thinking, My God, what just happened? And now that it had happened, what comes next? Will he come back? Will he try to grab me again? And then the magnitude of the encounter began to wash over me. Gene’s power wasn’t physical; it was far stronger. In those days, very few women were teaching in law schools anywhere, and getting this job had been hard — it was my only offer, in fact. Now that I’d bolted from his office, would he tell people that I was a terrible teacher or that I just didn’t “fit in”? Would I be forced to leave? Worst of all, if I left with a bad recommendation, I knew I would likely be shut out of teaching law forever.

I felt sick. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I dreaded going in to school. What would he do? What would he say? In fact, Gene never said anything. He saw me the next day, and it was as if nothing had ever happened.

I quietly spoke to another senior member of the faculty, John Mixon, about what Gene had done. I don’t remember much about our conversation, but years later John recalled that his advice had been, “Say nothing.” After all, I was brand-new in the business, and I couldn’t survive if I earned a reputation as a troublemaker.

But I really didn’t need any advice about how to respond. This kind of behavior was part of the air I’d breathed and the water I’d drunk since I was a little girl, and I knew what I was supposed to do: say nothing; do nothing. And for years, that’s what I did.

I didn’t report the incident to the dean. I didn’t call Human Resources. I didn’t hire a lawyer. Instead, I stayed watchful and quiet — and I kept smiling. I also did something millions of other women have done: I asked myself over and over what part I’d played in making Gene think that crossing the line would be okay. Were my cute little skirts and blouses too sexy? While trying to fit in, had I laughed too much at his dirty jokes? What had I done wrong?

Gene didn’t drop out of my life. For the rest of my time at UH, he visited my classes and gave me good teaching evaluations.

And when I was under consideration for teaching jobs at the University of Texas and the University of Pennsylvania, he gave me favorable recommendations. Years later, when Harvard made me an offer, someone on the faculty specifically mentioned that Gene had spoken very highly of me. It was an unintentional but not-so-subtle reminder that everyone knows everyone, and that good or bad recommendations trail you forever. Hearing that comment made me believe I’d been right to keep my mouth shut. Gene also kept calling me. Every month or two, my office phone would ring. I’d pick up the receiver with my usual “Elizabeth Warren.”

Speaking in his low, gravelly voice, he always started with “Hey, She-Wolf. What are you doing?”

For years, that opening line would flood me with adrenaline. My throat would tighten and I’d stop breathing. But I would never hang up. I would talk to him for a while about teaching or listen while he shared some piece of academic gossip. Years passed, and little by little my fear eased up.”

“Washington Square Park is just a block away from the site of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in March 1911, and that night I told the story of the fire. The workers in the factory were once again mostly immigrant women, including girls as young as fourteen, and they worked long hours to feed themselves and their families. Worried that the women might steal leftover scraps of material, the owners had blocked the building’s fire escapes. When a fire broke out, many of the women were trapped on the top floors of the building. In eighteen minutes, 146 people died.

Despite this devastating loss of life, the factory owners had enough influence in government to ensure that no new safety regulations were put in place. And the fire might have been forgotten, but for a young woman who ran across the park while the factory was burning and saw several of the women jump to their death, some of them holding hands and jumping together. She saw, and she committed to make change.

At a time when women didn’t even have the vote, that young woman — Frances Perkins — got a job at the capitol in Albany, then worked from inside New York’s state government to help pass new fire regulations and other worker protection laws. Later, when Franklin Roosevelt became president, Frances became his secretary of labor, the first woman ever to serve in a president’s cabinet. And from that perch, she helped push through Social Security, the prohibition on child labor, the right to join a union, unemployment insurance, and a federal minimum wage.”