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Former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that democracy cannot survive if there was “great wealth in the hands of few people.”

Reich said, “I think the biggest problem with having so many billionaires at the top of government is that billionaires don’t exactly know how normal people live, but secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the way people get to the top of the Trump administration is by providing a lot of money.”

He added, “The latest data I’ve seen said that Elon Musk contributed something in the order of $277 million to getting Trump elected. And he has made, since the Trump election, in terms of his actual net worth, he’s increased his net worth by $170 billion since the Trump election. Now, that’s pretty good return on investment. And the reason that is such a high return on investment and a high return for many of the other billionaires and multimillionaires in the Trump Administration is that they’re no longer, and the markets assume they’re no longer going to have to be worried about as many regulations, as many lawsuits, they’ll have a tax cuts, an extension of the Trump tax cuts, they’ll have, in other words, all the things they wanted and they bargained for when they put money into the Trump campaign. That’s the problem. And as Lewis Brandeis, the great jurist in America, said years ago at the end of the last gilded age, he was reputed for what he said: Loopk America has a choice, we can have a great wealth in the hands of few people or we could have a democracy, but we can’t have both.”

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