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Pete Buttigieg: “Tax evasion by very rich people is clearly a problem in this…”

Featuring: Pete Buttigieg, Democratic | Former Secretary of Transportation, Former Mayor of South Bend | National

The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋

Published February 11, 2026 | Video Starts at 45:00

We think of as Arctic. And I just think it's a fascinating place. So. Sorry, I got very excited. That's okay. And the seed vault, where were we? Taxation. So, yeah, Tax evasion by very rich people is clearly a problem in this country. I'm not saying that would cover the entire deficit. I'm saying it would make a big difference if we collected properly. So I do have. I. (45:00–45:05)

CLAIM

Asserts that tax evasion by the wealthy is a significant issue in the U.S.

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.

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Pete Buttigieg

“Studebaker was as big of a car maker as the big three. It would have been the big four, if they hadn't gone out of business in the 60s.”
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“The gap between the average age of our elected officials and the average age of our citizens is wider in the United States than it is in a…”
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“Compared to other democracies, we have more of a winner take all system in the way that our congressional elections work.”
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“The biggest investment in passenger rail in 50 years, since Amtrak was set up in the first place.”
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“We funded [Brightline] with billions of dollars to help make it happen.”
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“I believe [Trump] when he says he wants to nationalize elections.”
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“We're always spending much more on cars and roads [compared to public transit or trains].”
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“The amount of money it takes to build a mile of railway in Spain, for example, is a fraction of what it costs here.”
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“The President is holding a $16 billion round of funding for a tunnel that is more than 100 years old in New York, New Jersey, the Hudson…”
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“They were damaged by Superstorm Sandy. That was more than a decade ago.”
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“Hundreds of thousands of people a day go through this tunnel.”
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“We got 435 seats. About 40 of them are actually competitive.”
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“The President just stopped [the New York tunnel project].”
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“He [the President] would start funding the project again if they named Dulles Airport and Penn Station after Donald Trump.”
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“There's a bridge to Canada, the Gordie Howe Bridge. The Canadians are actually paying for it.”
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“We need to be ready to have a public system where the private sector can still be there, but they have to demonstrate that they're better…”
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“We call it Medicare for all who want it versus Medicare for all whether you want it or not.”
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“Places that do that don't just take better care of people. They actually have a record of having more efficient use of dollars.”
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“If Medicare is allowed to bargain for lower drug prices, you get lower drug prices.”
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“There are so many things in this country where... at least 2/3 of the country thinks we ought to do something in a certain way.”
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“These are all things that have at least 2/3 of the country on board and they can't happen in today's Washington.”
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“We haven't done a substantive amendment to the constitution in about 50 years.”
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“One of the last big ones [constitutional amendments] was about lowering the voting age, which went from 21 to 18.”
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“We should entertain some constitutional amendments to improve the democratic nature of our country.”
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“One person, one vote, that everybody's vote ought to count the same.”
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“We actually don't have one [one person, one vote] even for picking the president.”
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“We're the only presidential democracy where you come in second place and you get to be president.”
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“Another one we could do is about gerrymandering.”
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“Right now the Supreme Court holds that basically a corporation is the same thing as a person for the purpose of intervening in politics.”
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“We could clear that up with a constitutional amendment.”
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“The number nine. Nine justices in the Supreme Court that's not in the Constitution.”
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“The number of Representatives in the House of Representatives, the number of states in the United States. Like none of those things are…”
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“We need to have more and better sources of revenue and we need to be more efficient with our spending.”
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“The average household now has paid about an extra thousand dollars last year alone and that's set to go up this year from the tariffs.”
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“China actually just had their biggest year of trade surplus ever.”
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“Journalists went back to look at some of that, the savings they claimed, and it turned out literally wrong.”
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“They said billion instead of million and just overstated their savings by a factor of a thousand.”
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“There will be a kind of a reckoning that is forced because I don't think the world is willing to lend America money indefinitely, forever…”
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“A guy like [Elon Musk] and a lot of other people like that are paying a lower percentage of their true income in taxes than a firefighter or…”
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“If you had a fairer taxation system that asked more of the wealthiest and if you did a better job of collecting what people actually owe.”
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“Taxes on the wealthy need to be higher.”
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“The debt has grown to a level that even the left cannot ignore.”
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“The average age to buy your first house was in your 20s. Now by some measures it's 40.”
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“The complete lack of paid family leave in this country. Only country to do that other than, I think, Papua New Guinea.”
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“Medicaid cuts that Trump and the Republicans push through.”
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“There's so much money on the table right now in terms of fairer taxation on the revenue side.”
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“I think we're still underreacting [to AI].”
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“I think some of those [AI] impacts are going to hit much faster than we're ready for.”
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“There is a non trivial chance that it could be a multiple of that [employment shock].”
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“We have a system of unemployment insurance that was built in a time when a huge shock to employment would be like a 2% or a 4% change.”
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“It's rare for a republic, a democratic system, to hit this level of inequality and survive.”
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“The American taxpayer literally invented the Internet and all these models trained on data that all of us put out in the world for free.”
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“State Senate Republicans voted against Donald Trump's gerrymandering plan.”
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“Trump is trying to keep the Epstein files from being released.”
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“We have 60 or 70% of people agreeing with us on most of the really big issues, taxes, abortion, even immigration.”
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“The idea of an armed attack on the United States Capitol by Trump supporters would have gotten you kind of laughed at in, I don't know…”
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“It's a weakness in our country that we're the kind of country where you can have a 20% movement, take over one of the two parties.”
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“I disagree that money on campaigns counts as the same as speech, but I believe that campaigning is speech.”
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“The political system we've inherited is not the only way for a political system to work.”
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“The actual record of term limits has been mixed.”
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“In some states that do this, what winds up happening is the politicians come and go.”
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“My successor, the current Secretary of Transportation is a former airline lobbyist.”
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“We upped the fine. We held them accountable for some of these meltdowns that happened.”
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“They still did well as businesses on my watch. They made money.”
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“When I was in the military, I learned to trust my life to people I barely knew.”
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“Part of my job is to take vehicles and people in my unit outside the wire.”
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“Trust can build, it can compound.”
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