Howard Schultz, the executive chairman of a coffee conglomerate, never shied away from politics. Under his leadership, Starbucks launched corporate initiatives to confront race, gun violence, and joblessness.
Howard Schultz, the billionaire flirting with an independent run for president, has been a little more jittery. When asked last June while exploring a bid whether he would reverse the Trump tax cuts, he dodged.
“I don’t want to talk in the hypothetical about what I would do if I was president,” the candidate replied before offering an answer to an unasked question.
“Let me try and say this in my own way,” Schultz continued. “I think the greatest threat domestically to the country is this $21 trillion debt hanging over the cloud of America and future generations.”
[Read more: Democrats threaten Starbucks boycott until former CEO Howard Schultz abandons 2020]
This makes Schultz an outlier. Few politicians talk seriously about the debt, an issue that helped ignite the Tea Party and carry Republicans to majorities in both the House and the Senate during the Obama administration. While the mountainous national debt has provided a foundation for his presidential platform so far, Schultz has been both coy and outspoken at times.
During a November 2017 interview with the New York Times, he called the reforms, which slashed the corporate rate from 35 to 20 percent, “reckless.” “This is not tax reform,” he said at the time. “This is fool’s gold.” Congress should focus instead on creating “a level playing field and more compassionate society.”
Schultz backed that personal sentiment up with corporate policy. Starbucks received a windfall from the tax cuts, then turned around to award those dollars to its employees.
“I didn’t give the administration credit” for the employee bonuses, “I gave credit to the fact the leadership of Starbucks did the right thing,” Schultz explained. “When you’re building a great enduring company, not every business decision should be, and is, an economic one.”
That makes Schultz a good corporate citizen. Whether it makes Schultz a competitive candidate remains to be seen. He will have to address the issue as a politician, not just as a businessman.
Schultz took a second shot at the question during a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday night. Between sips of Starbucks coffee, he told Scott Pelley he would have made cuts. They would have been less steep, though, and more broadly distributed.
“I would not have given a free ride to business, from 35 percent or 37 percent to 21 percent. It would’ve been more modest,” Schultz said. “But I would’ve significantly addressed the people who need tax relief the most, which is the people I talked about earlier, who don’t have $400 in the bank.”
