Halsey then opened up about growing up in a “lower class family” and now living in “the one percent,” and how that has shaped her views.
“My parents dropped out of college to have me, my father is a person of color, my mother is white, and we grew up in really, really underprivileged situations,” she explained. “My parents had access to medical assistance. I grew up in those scenarios. And now, as an adult, at 26 years old, I’m part of the one percent.”
She went on to voice support for a wealth tax and criticize those who are against the idea.
“Having that sort of shift in perspective, given the ability to kind of see things from both sides, there’s one thing that I know for a fact. It’s that for me, personally, there is no amount of money that I think is worth personally contributing to the alienation, the disenfranchisement, of millions, hundreds of millions of people across this country. Despite being in the one percent, I support the wealth tax because I believe that the people who oppose it are motivated by greed. The amount of income that I have doesn’t even make a drop in the bucket compared to these billionaires, but I wake up every single day and I never want anything, I never need anything in this small bracket of wealth that I exist in. The only reason I could imagine opposing a wealth tax that is going to make hundreds of millions of lives better and save hundreds of millions of lives because the wealth will be more evenly distributed — the only reason I can imagine opposing that is greed.”
The pair went on to discuss the “preposterous concept” of billionaires, and to think about how the landscape of wealth distribution could change under Biden’s administration.
Watch the first part of their conversation below.
