It sounds, though, that youre more interested than you were even a couple of weeks or months ago when you said im considering or i wish i could think about it but i really cant. No, i wouldnt say im more interested i just think the circumstances continue to change and as things evolve, it becomes more interesting as a citizen, i become concerned. Look, where im at in my life, if i have a chance to influence policy or if i have a chance to do something good for the country, i want to try to do it. That doesnt necessarily mean i have to run for president. Theres a lot of ways to have an impact and the more in tune i many a, the more connected, the more educated i am about a variety of topics, the easier it is for me to decide. And if you ran, you would run as a democrat . No, absolutely not. As an independent potentially and id say or as a republican . Republican before democrat, most likely independent because i think a lot i think theres an incremental value for setting up an independent candidacy. Now, i understand the difficulties of that and the challenges of that from an infrastructure perspective, but the positives of doing it as a republican means you get to go head on with trump right in the primaries. Theres nothing id have more fun doing. The benefit of being an independent is you go right to the Golden Ticket time, right. And if i get enough support in the polls, then i get to participate with the debates, which is right up there with something. I think you really are considering and thinking about it. Im considering, obviously considering. But again, what caring, loving parent would put their three Young Children through the disaster i mean my now 14yearold girl, its hard enough raising a 14yearold girl its really hard raising a 14yearold girl and, you know, the thought of what shed have to face over the next couple of years on social media and from her friends and particularly in a red state, thats not, you know, a comforting thought i want to talk to you about social media in just a moment but i want to ask you about where we may or may not be in 2020 because theres an argument that ive heard many a times among most people in the Business Community that say if the stock market continues the way it does, if the economy, at least the headline numbers that we see continue the way they do and north korea doesnt do anything, that its actually a slam dunk for donald trump to win again. Everybody is a genius in a bull market, right and so for a typical president , i think youd be absolutely correct. But with a president who has absolutely no common sense, cant get out of his own way and the only real ballots hes winning is for the least popular president in modern history, the rules might be a little bit different. Do you look at todays economy and think its good . Do you think were in a bubble i think theres multiple economies in this country. If you live in a city, if you love in an area with a dense population, its not so bad. It may be a little bit more expensive to live and theres challenges associated with that. But if you live in smaller towns or you live in a smaller city, you have a completely different set of challenges. Youre not seeing 4. 1 unemployment, youre seeing your friends die of overdoses youre not looking at new Technology Creating new jobs in your community you know, youre looking at the fire and Police Department growing because of all those overdoses. And so its just there are two different worlds and you have to be able to deal with both. What does mark cuban, the investor, think of whats going on right now ride it hard. I keep a little bit as a hedge, i call it my trump hedge, because you just never know. You know, now 280 characters can change the market in a heartbeat. So ive got a hedge on but other than that, i just let it ride. And thats paubecause you th the economy actually is strong. I think theres some great companies. When you look at the stock market, the world is lifting all tides in a lot of respects youve got the fact that there are theres a Scarcity Effect over the last 20 years weve gone from 8,000 plus Public Companies to 3500. And if everybody is putting their money into indexes and mutual funds now, by definition, things have got to go up so as long as that continues, that scarcity value will keep on pushing things up, regardless of the economy. Were going to have jack dorsey here, somebody here from facebook, weve seen the stock valuations twitter has struggled but square has done quite well recently are we in a bubble in the tech world . No. Look, ive lived through bubbles and enjoyed them immensely you were a beneficiary of one. A significant one but i dont think were in a bubble because of that scarcity value. You know, its almost like bitcoin. Stocks and bitcoin have a lot in common that for stocks that dont pay a dividend, they have almost become collectibles this fund, this index has to own them if enough money comes in, they have nowhere else to put the money so the stocks are going to go up. Let me ask you about tech if you were president cuban and theres a Big Conversation right now about regulating technology. Right. The big guys in the valley. What would president cuban do . Im not a fan of heavy regulation i think, you know, in terms of the whole russian ad thing with facebook, the ftc covers that. If the ftc does their job, theres already rules and things in place for native advertising and how thats dealt with, then we dont need to create more legislation there. I think there are challenges that the growth of these companies create, but i dont ive seen Amazing Tech Companies that were dominating the world no longer dominate them. If ibm microsoft was great an then it wasnt google is still largely depend on search. That could change in a heartbeat. Well have Randall Stevenson on in just a little bit. Would you allow the at t time warner deal to happen . Yes now, let me disclose theyre based in dallas and so im on one of their tech committees, but yes. Ill give you an example of why. I got a pitch from facebook the other day for a do or dare tv show is what theyre calling it. And part of their pitch to me to do the show i, a, theyll donate 25,000 to the charity of my choice to go out and make an idiot of myself on the show. But the bigger part of it is you have access to 2 billion, 2 billion potential facebook viewers. It wasnt we have 90 million households, it wasnt there are 108 or however many households in this country. 2 billion potential viewers. The scale of entertainment leans so heavily towards facebook. Then you look at google in terms of youtube and even amazon with twitch and what theyre doing with prime at t needs if youre going to be in the entertainment business, there needs to be consolidation not so they can keep up, but so they can pretend to be within of whats going on with the top five market Cap Companies in the world plus netflix. Does the consolidation help or hurt the valuation of sports leagues like the nba, teams like yours. Irrelevant. Irrelevant because and ill tell you why. One school of thought says, well, sports rights fees must be going down because its tougher in that market but what they dont recognize is that, a, these large Entertainment Media platforms, the online, the facebooks, the googles, et cetera, are the largest market cap, huge revenue, huge profits. But none of them have been able to succeed and be truly effective in recreating audiences or directing audiences to certain programming if you want to get a significant audience, relatively speaking, to any of your original programming, the best and most Cost Effective way to do it is through live sports. And so i think the sports rights fees for our league in particular are going to skyrocket. We were talking and had Mellody Hobson on earlier and talking about diversity. She talked about taking a knee i was curious given the kaepernick situation if one of your players took a knee, what would you do well, more than ten years ago, one of my players was on a video saying the National Anthem, its not our National Anthem and ive got every amount of hate email that you can imagine calling him and me every single word in the book and what i did was i published those on a blog post things kind of changed but i supported him. I supported him. Because he is an american citizen and he has the right to communicate whats on his mind when we invaded iraq in 2002, we had players who stood up against that and said i am against the war. And i supported them this is no different but when it happens in football, its a little bit different there simply because if the new york giants and new york jets walk through here, you might be able to recognize three people from each team youre not going to know the other 50 and they dont really have large social media platforms like nba players, so their only real opportunity to take a stand is when the cameras are on. You love this country but you also had a runin with the government i mentioned it earlier. Yeah. What the lesson of that the lesson when i got charged with Insider Trading and kicked their ass . Yeah. We have some dumb ass running the fcc. Still yeah, and it was ridiculous and ill tell you why i say that if you really wanted to reduce Insider Trading, then publish bright line rules on your website and make it readily available. You can do this, you cannot do this because then theres no question but they keep it as gray as possible because they want to bring as many lawsuits and charges as possible. Its an employment act because you go the s. E. C. , the more charges before my case was even over and by the way, it went to trial in dallas. I was found not liable in three hours, one hour of which was lunch. It was ridiculous, an it took seven years. Seven years to get there and so if you wanted to solve the problem, theres a thousand better ways to do it and they make no effort to do any of them thats ridiculous. A separate question because its in the news another guy who is sometimes put in your category of sorts, carl icahn. I dont know if you saw the news, southern district, subpoenaed a former well, theyre calling him the white house advisor, carl icahn, for information about his push to change the federal biofuels program. Do you think that makes sense . I dont know. I dont know enough about it. Is that crazy to you . I dont know. I really dont know enough about it one way or the other. Thats where donald trump and i are different. All right, that is mark cuban in new york city with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the deal book conference. The headline really from that conversation is mark cuban saying that he is still considering a president ial run in 2020, though he has not made up his mind. One of the highlights in a farreaching conversation, but as i welcome you to the Halftime Report today, i call your attention to the major averages Dow Jones Industrial average down by 204 points all three of the major averages under pressure this hour on a report out of the Washington Post about the president s tax plan the senate is considering a delay in the Corporate Tax cut until 2019 stocks began falling on that news almost immediately and that is currently where they stand now, at the lows of the day. We have an allstar panel with us today led by a special guest, Mario Cabelli is with us for the hour to talk about all of this along with joe terranova, steve weiss and jon and pete najarian. As were watching whats happening in the stock market, how are you thinking about kind of where we are in the bull market cycle and the role that tax reform and policy plays in whether it keeps going or fif fizzles out . A year alow after the election you thought you would have infrastructure, a tax cut, kind of less regulation. Youve had less regulation kind of quietly so what drove the market it was the economy and earnings. And so when we look into 2018, the european economy is improving substantially. The u. S. Economy is okay the consumer has a net worth at an alltime high and housing and industrial what happens is businesses are frozen in some ways. Then we look at the multiple of earnings, which is a function of earnings and the Interest Rates and the flow of funds. So when i put it altogether, you know, a 1 correction today is not a big event. Obviously you have the stress test, the etfs and figure out what happens and that gives you some shortterm dynamics. But on the next year or two, i think we have a margin of safety if Interest Rates stay below 2. 5 but the big picture is simple. Monetary policy is being withdrawn and you need fiscal policy to keep the engines moving on a global basis. Do you need tax reform to get the bump in earnings to keep this train moving at the speed in which it appears to be . No. I think you need to make American Industries competitive. Global taxation is not appropriate. Were the only country in the world where you charge taxes no matter where you earn it you need territorial you need to cut the rate to make Small Businesses more competitive. And then youve got to get into the weeds. Well get it together. Whats the Effective Date . What are the other elements that go into it those are the important things in a tax dynamic. Pete, the Corporate Tax cut was billed and has been billed as the centerpiece of the president s plan. Yeah, no doubt about it. Clearly the Market Reaction today doesnt pour tend good things. Right. For investors if it in fact is delayed but even a messier process. Messier and delayed to 2019 delayed through into 2018 i think wed all say, you know, probably expected. 2019, i mean thats pushing it out even farther to mario point, how about the fact of why are the markets where they are because earnings have been fe gno phenomenal theyre spending more now. Folks are putting out their capital and spending it to grow. So i think there are opportunities. Now, this is like you mentioned, this is a 1 fallback. And were looking beyond today. I agree with that. We dont want to overplay it. 3 to 5 would be something im not talking about just an individual move today. The unquantifiable, if you will, aside from earnings and this Global Economic recovery that weve talked about is what level, if any, are expectations of policy like tax reform in the market at all . And we just dont know nobody knows i think its in there on small caps. You think its in there absolutely. If you pass a bill that says im locked in for ten years on 25 or 20 on taxes, then i can start functioning as a business guy. Youve got to know what were dealing with how do i make Investment Decisions . Can i write off depreciation at 100 or 25 of 50 . Whats my cash flow going to be like whats my employment levels going to be like where are my opportunities on the globe basis. There is word as well in this report by the Washington Post that companies would still be able to immediately expense or deduct their Capital Investments in 2018, so maybe that part of certainly whats been critical in terms of what the president has talked about, maybe that stays on the current time frame. And capex in the first half of the year and buybacks are down so thats important to be 2018, down relative to 2016. You want to see a reacceleration of capex in 2018 and you need that certainty now, mario is talking about the need for fiscal policy you have the handoff or the belief that the handoff was going to occur from monetary to fiscal policy. It is concerning when you hear, to petes point, 2019. Can we even get to 2019 without them losing the house . Thats the problem so now youre questioning, well, maybe that fiscal policy isnt going to be there when the monetary makes the handoff. Wasnt the centerpiece, steve, of this whole thing Corporate Taxes . Thats going to spur earnings, maybe eight to ten bucks there was a note yesterday from jpmorgan, an incredibly bullish note on what tax reform could mean for earnings and what the stock market could do as a result of that if you start having to peel some of these expectations away, what impact is it going to have on the market well, my own view is that you had to be delusional to believe that it was going to happen. It happen quickly. If you go back to reagan, you had much less acrimonious, as a matter of fact, not acrimonious at all between democrats and republicans and it took them to get three years to get a tax plan look, i thought it was best 5050 that it happens. I think its unlikely that they get in just deducting depreciation because thats going to be difficult to get in. You still only have 52 as a majority and its not a full majority, in terms of corker and in terms of others so ill focus on marios point which is i think its stifling to corporate america, because they dont know what to do can i deduct interest, can i not . Will it be grandfathered in . Will it not be grandfathered in. Thats the real issue. You have europe growing at 2. 3 . So if trump did nothing and didnt talk about taxes at all, i think the market would be higher today but im not worried about it 3 to 5 doesnt bother me either. Lets try to get more from john harwood who is down in washington, d. C. John, im wondering what you make of this and what its a result of and whether the Election Results of the other evening and some of the commentary thats been out there on the backside of that has forced the senates hand in some respects yes, i think thats one of the things thats forced their hand the other thing is that the bill appears to be on track to cost more, add more to the deficit than the senate rules permit and they have got to look at ways to reduce the cost of it. So i wouldnt be surprised if its either delayed further or if the Corporate Tax rate doesnt go to 20 at all, goes ins