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Fox News host Tucker Carlson praised New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) after the presidential contender brought attention to job losses caused by automation.
De Blasio made an appearance on Carlson’s show on Thursday night to discuss his proposal, saying, “if a company is going to put thousands of people out of work, they should bear responsibility for making sure that those folks get a new job.”
The New York mayor had earlier unveiled his “robot tax,” an effort “to protect working people whose livelihoods are threatened by the unchecked growth of automation.”
Carlson praised de Blasio’s attention to the issue.
“My praise of you on this question is totally sincere,” the host said when kicking off the interview with de Blasio. “Very few people are taking this seriously. [2020 Democratic presidential candidate] Andrew Yang is one of them. You’re another. I can’t think of many others who are, and so God bless you.”
“So, you are basically saying that companies ought to, have to — and I’m not sure how much to this I agree with, but I think I’m phrasing this correctly,” Carlson continued. “You say companies ought to have to bear some of the cost of helping workers transition to something else when they lay them off in favor of robots?”
“That’s right. Tucker, right now, let’s just get the magnitude clear for all of your viewers: Middle-class Americans, working-class Americans, whose jobs are not going to be there if we don’t do something different, because right now, the recent estimate, estimate I saw, 36 million jobs that could be made obsolete. We’re talking as early as 2030,” de Blasio explained.
“What it’s going to lead to is a future without work. And the last thing we need — I’m a progressive, I’m a Democrat, I believe in work. And I believe work gives people a lot of value, a lot of meaning. And we need to protect work in this country,” de Blasio also said.
The Carlson appearance marks the second time de Blasio has appeared on Fox News’s prime-time shows in the past month.
On Aug. 7, the mayor joined Sean Hannity for an extensive interview that drew 3.3 million viewers.