The Fight to Tax Billionaires, and Why NDAs Are Everywhere Now

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Will Jarvis, Infra Tracey Mumford. Today's Tuesday, October 20th. Here's what we're covering. As of today, the midterm elections are just two weeks away, and beyond the races that will determine control of Congress, the Times is looking at some of the major policy issues that voters are weighing. Leading up to election day, we'll be diving into a few key themes that are appearing on ballot measures across the country. To start, we're going to take a look at the push to tax the ultra-wealthy. We have never been so close to taxing billionaires than we are today. That's on full display in California. They snuck in a provision that allows them to turn the tax on you. There voters will decide whether to levy a one-time 5% wealth tax on the state's billionaires. There are about 250 of them. This is landing at a time when there is a lot of anxiety about economic inequality nationwide and also here in California where the AI explosion just means that some people are so incredibly well off right now, while the masses of people are just struggling for their day-to-day expenses. My colleague, Laurel Rosenhall, has been covering the fight over this measure. She says supporters of the tax say it would raise around $100 billion. Most of which would be used to offset federal cuts to Medicaid. At the same time, opponents argue that it would be a disaster for California's economy, encouraging the biggest earners to leave the state, and still others say they support taxing the rich, but not the way this measure is structured. It's uncertain if this will pass. Part of that is because of the debate over the details, but part of that is because billionaires who would have to pay the tax have absolutely bombarded the airwaves with advertising opposing the measure. There's been an enormous amount of money raised to defeat this tax proposal. Californians aren't the only ones considering new taxes on the wealthy. In Washington State, voters will decide on whether or not to keep in place a new 10% income tax on millionaires. And. Tax, billionaire, wealth. It's that simple. Several democratic candidates, including Abdul El Sayed in Michigan, have brought the question into the fight for the House and Senate, pledging to try and raise taxes on the super-rich at the national level, if elected. The efforts come as the gap between the rich and the poor has grown at an accelerating rate, and roughly the past decade, the net worth of the wealthiest Americans has more than doubled, and Americans in the top 1% now control more in assets than the GDP of the U.S. and China combined. We'll have more on other key policy issues around the country over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, in Kansas last night. President Trump kicked off a campaign blitz through deep-red states, hoping to boost enthusiasm among Republican voters, in races that increasingly seem to be toss-ups. His itinerary, Kansas, the Carolinas, Iowa, Florida, Georgia, includes states and districts Trump won by double digits. Now though, some of those have become battlegrounds, with Republicans neck and neck with their democratic opponents. Vice President JD Vance is making a similar last-minute push. He kicked off the week in North Carolina, and will end it in Nebraska, in a district T and Trump won by more than 50 points. It's a defensive strategy, as one Republican strategist said to me today. And it really shows what the White House is doing to try to prevent a blue wave. Emily Davies is a Times political correspondent. She says that right now the GOP is hoping to galvanize the mega-base and get Trump supporters to the polls, instead of trying to persuade swing state voters. Advisors to President Trump have told us that they understand that it might be counterproductive to deploy the president to states like Maine and New Hampshire, where he remains incredibly unpopular. Some of his policies are having negative effects on the economy, and the Republican candidates for Senate are trying to distance themselves from the White House. In Israel, police say they've detained at least 10 Israeli settlers, as authorities there face growing international pressure, to crack down on a surge of violence in the West Bank. The arrests came after a series of recent attacks by settlers, including one a few days ago on Palestinians who were gathered for an annual olive harvest. Well, we got there. It was even more violent than I think we expected. I mean, the first thing we did when we ran kind of up to where the confrontation was, was we saw someone being carried out by medics who'd been badly beaten, I think, and was sort of puzzled off into an ambulance. My colleague, Osam Ahmed witnessed part of the attack, where dozens of settlers dressed in black with their faces covered, descended on the people taking part in the harvest. There were fires raging across the olive harvest area where settlers had set fire to olive trees. And the settlers were throwing these giant stones and sort of using sling shots to, you know, those things are massive and heavy. Like, think, and kill you if you could hit by one. One of the people injured was an American photographer working for the Washington Post, who suffered a broken rib and shattered vertebrae, according to her family. After that attack, the settler violence continued in another town in the West Bank, with a group of men armed with clubs going after Palestinians and a European diplomatic convoy, according to witnesses. The violence was denounced by European officials. The French foreign ministry called on Israel to stop what it described as acts of terror. And the U.S. ambassador to Israel, who's long supported the settler movement, called the attack on the journalist in particular, quote, "dispicable." The assaults were the latest in a wave of sometimes deadly extremist violence that has driven out entire Palestinian communities in the West Bank in recent years. While Israeli authorities have brought charges in some of the more high-profile cases, one rights group in Israel found that the vast majority of those inquiries into settler violence do not lead to convictions, according to the group 93% of investigations they tracked over the past two decades ended with no indictment. For decades across the U.S., NDAs, or non-disclosure agreements, were mostly a thing in the business world to try and keep employees from spilling company secrets. But now, the Times has been looking at how they become a go-to-tool in the everyday lives of the wealthy. People are asking their housekeepers, private chefs, tutors, landscape designers, fitness trainers, anyone who comes onto their property to sign an NDA. A managing partner at a Connecticut law firm said over the last ten years, the number of inquiries he gets about NDAs has, quote, "easily increased a hundredfold." He said one factor driving it, which isn't that surprising, is that it's never been easier to snap a photo and post something online. The internet makes it hard to keep secrets. To account for that, the documents themselves are also getting more complicated. The founder of a staffing agency that specializes in providing nannies and other household workers said contracts that used to be a simple paragraph can now run 15 pages. Interestingly, the wealthy aren't the only ones leaning into NDAs. The Trump administration has said it wants to make current federal employees and new hires sign them to prevent leaks to news outlets. And as of a few years ago, the Supreme Court started pushing clerks and other employees to agree to NDAs too. And finally, this week, fans of The Simpsons got a big surprise. As the character Apu of "Quickie Mart Fame" made his return to the show after almost a decade away. From almost 30 years, Apu had been voiced with a thick cartoonish Indian accent by the actor Hank Azaria. That is, until 2017, when the comedian Hari Konda Bolu made the documentary "The Problem with Apu." The movie surfaced what many South Asians had long felt that Apu's character was a clumsy stereotype, and almost immediately Azaria expressed discomfort with playing the role, saying at one point that, quote, "part of me feels like I need to go to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologize." He never played the role again. Instead, the new Apu is voiced by Senil Maholtra, who's of South Asian descent. In an interview with Variety, he said that over the years he'd walked away from other offers to voice South Asian characters when he felt they were caricatures. But he said when it comes to Apu, he saw an opportunity, quote, "Could I make the character my own and reclaim him in some way?" The producers of The Simpsons have also brought on a woman of South Asian descent to play Apu's wife, Manjula, and the two of them could be in for long careers. Since earlier this year, The Simpsons hit 800 episodes. It's the longest-running sitcom in American TV history. Those are the headlines. Today, on The Daily, I think the mistake that people in my party have made is that they confuse the separation of church and state. with a separation of faith and politics. We want a politics that is spiritually rooted, rooted in something deeper than partisanship. A conversation with James Talleriko, the Texas Senate candidate who's trying to become the first Democrat to win statewide office there in decades. You can find that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Will Jarvis, we'll be back tomorrow.