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Pete Buttigieg: “The political system we've inherited is not the only way for…”

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 1:19:39

Yeah. So some of that we may just have to deal with. But just generally, again, I keep coming back to this. The political system we've inherited is not the only way for a political system to work. It's not even the only way for an American to democratic representative republic based on our constitution to work. It doesn't have to be this way. (1:19:39–1:19:44)

CLAIM

Asserts that the current U.S. political system is not the only viable system.

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.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 02:06-02:15
“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…”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 03:37-03:46
“Compared to other democracies, we have more of a winner take all system in the way that our congressional elections work.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 04:22-04:31
“The biggest investment in passenger rail in 50 years, since Amtrak was set up in the first place.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 10:46-10:51
“We funded [Brightline] with billions of dollars to help make it happen.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 11:02-11:06
“I believe [Trump] when he says he wants to nationalize elections.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 13:26-1:16:17
“We're always spending much more on cars and roads [compared to public transit or trains].”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 15:30-15:34
“The amount of money it takes to build a mile of railway in Spain, for example, is a fraction of what it costs here.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 17:08-17:15
“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…”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 17:24-17:37
“They were damaged by Superstorm Sandy. That was more than a decade ago.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 17:37-17:41
“Hundreds of thousands of people a day go through this tunnel.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 17:40-17:44
“We got 435 seats. About 40 of them are actually competitive.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 18:52-18:58
“The President just stopped [the New York tunnel project].”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 19:51-19:53
“He [the President] would start funding the project again if they named Dulles Airport and Penn Station after Donald Trump.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 19:52-20:16
“There's a bridge to Canada, the Gordie Howe Bridge. The Canadians are actually paying for it.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 20:27-20:31
“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…”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 22:55-23:03
“We call it Medicare for all who want it versus Medicare for all whether you want it or not.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 23:03-23:08
“Places that do that don't just take better care of people. They actually have a record of having more efficient use of dollars.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 23:09-23:18
“If Medicare is allowed to bargain for lower drug prices, you get lower drug prices.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 25:39-25:44
“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.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 26:17-26:30
“These are all things that have at least 2/3 of the country on board and they can't happen in today's Washington.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 26:57-27:04
“We haven't done a substantive amendment to the constitution in about 50 years.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 30:02-30:07
“One of the last big ones [constitutional amendments] was about lowering the voting age, which went from 21 to 18.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 30:12-30:17
“We should entertain some constitutional amendments to improve the democratic nature of our country.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 30:43-30:49
“One person, one vote, that everybody's vote ought to count the same.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 31:17-31:21
“We actually don't have one [one person, one vote] even for picking the president.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 31:40-31:43
“We're the only presidential democracy where you come in second place and you get to be president.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 31:48-31:54
“Another one we could do is about gerrymandering.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 32:00-32:02
“Right now the Supreme Court holds that basically a corporation is the same thing as a person for the purpose of intervening in politics.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 32:46-32:53
“We could clear that up with a constitutional amendment.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 33:00-33:04
“The number nine. Nine justices in the Supreme Court that's not in the Constitution.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 35:20-35:24
“The number of Representatives in the House of Representatives, the number of states in the United States. Like none of those things are…”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 35:28-35:28
“We need to have more and better sources of revenue and we need to be more efficient with our spending.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 39:51-39:58
“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.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 40:42-40:50
“China actually just had their biggest year of trade surplus ever.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 41:04-41:08
“Journalists went back to look at some of that, the savings they claimed, and it turned out literally wrong.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 41:35-41:39
“They said billion instead of million and just overstated their savings by a factor of a thousand.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 41:41-41:47
“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…”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 42:16-42:26
“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…”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 43:09-43:19
“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.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 43:23-43:32
“Tax evasion by very rich people is clearly a problem in this country.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 45:00-45:05
“Taxes on the wealthy need to be higher.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 46:17-46:19
“The debt has grown to a level that even the left cannot ignore.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 50:29-50:33
“The average age to buy your first house was in your 20s. Now by some measures it's 40.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 50:42-50:48
“The complete lack of paid family leave in this country. Only country to do that other than, I think, Papua New Guinea.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 51:48-51:55
“Our income has to grow more quickly than the price of housing. Right now, the opposite's happening.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 54:04-54:09
“I think it's building more housing.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 55:54-55:57
“The best way to make Medicare cost less is to make the delivery of health care cost less.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 55:56-56:02
“Medicaid cuts that Trump and the Republicans push through.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 56:04-56:08
“There's so much money on the table right now in terms of fairer taxation on the revenue side.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 56:12-56:19
“I think we're still underreacting [to AI].”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 58:53-58:55
“I think some of those [AI] impacts are going to hit much faster than we're ready for.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 59:50-59:56
“There is a non trivial chance that it could be a multiple of that [employment shock].”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:01:29-1:01:42
“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.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:01:30-1:01:42
“It's rare for a republic, a democratic system, to hit this level of inequality and survive.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:04:25-1:04:32
“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.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:05:10-1:05:18
“State Senate Republicans voted against Donald Trump's gerrymandering plan.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:07:37-1:07:43
“Trump is trying to keep the Epstein files from being released.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:08:37-1:08:40
“We have 60 or 70% of people agreeing with us on most of the really big issues, taxes, abortion, even immigration.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:12:11-1:12:21
“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…”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:16:24-1:16:33
“MAGA, that's like 20%, 30%, depending what surveys you look at.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:17:31-1:17:36
“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.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:17:40-1:17:47
“I disagree that money on campaigns counts as the same as speech, but I believe that campaigning is speech.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:19:19-1:19:26
“The actual record of term limits has been mixed.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:20:26-1:20:29
“In some states that do this, what winds up happening is the politicians come and go.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:20:40-1:20:48
“My successor, the current Secretary of Transportation is a former airline lobbyist.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:22:08-1:22:14
“We upped the fine. We held them accountable for some of these meltdowns that happened.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:22:25-1:22:30
“They still did well as businesses on my watch. They made money.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:22:40-1:22:45
“Breakdown of trust between people and their government, between people in our institutions, between Americans and each other, is something…”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:23:46-1:23:59
“When I was in the military, I learned to trust my life to people I barely knew.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:24:27-1:24:33
“Part of my job is to take vehicles and people in my unit outside the wire.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:24:33-1:24:39
“Trust can build, it can compound.”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:25:17-1:25:20
“When you have a society with more trust, again, whether it's the government being viewed as more trustworthy or just us more ready to trust…”
The Pete Buttigieg Episode | Lemonade Stand 🍋 | Uploaded February 11, 2026 | 1:25:20-1:25:32