Ethiopian DSA Colorado congressional hopeful Melat Kiros says US to blame for 9/11, single-payer healthcare ‘pays for itself,’ feds should fund national ‘social housing’

During the interview, Kiros was asked whether she believed "that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America were the inevitable consequence of American foreign policy," with the interviewer saying that she framed the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel as being "an inevitable consequence for Israel based on its action."

She said it was "inevitable in the sense that we destabilized a lot of the Middle East. That forced people to believe that another act of violence was the only response, and again, just like I said before, our responsibility is to getting rid of those conditions."

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She was asked, "What do you say to Democratic primary voters who are not socialists, who are capitalists, and are deciding who to vote for in this race?" She said that socialism is already in the US, using the examples of taxpayer-funded services such as fire departments and public schools.

"What I’m calling for is the same security that we have in those institutions to be in our healthcare, to be in our access to nutritional food, to be in making sure that we have universal child care and universal elder care," Kiros said, adding that the US is heading toward the era of AI, including AI affecting people’s jobs, saying that "we need to make sure that people’s basic needs are protected, and that’s only through programs that would be socialist."

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She also called for "housing-first measures" to be passed that would create "social housing," and for federal funding to be spent on building a high-speed rail across the country.

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She said that the thing that is most "within reach" for the Democrat party within the coming years is getting "Medicare for all," adding that "I sincerely believe that the last thing Democrats did to meaningfully help working families was Obamacare," but that was a "band-aid for a system that has now still hemorrhaging."

"Medicare for all is something that would meaningfully make real relief for working families in this country," she said, adding that she hopes if Democrats take back the trifecta, they would pass a healthcare for all package.

She also spoke on single-payer healthcare, a type of universal healthcare, saying that "single payer actually pays for itself." She added, "I think there’s a misconception that the health care is free, and that’s not what’s happening." She said that when Medicare for all is passed, "you’re just cutting out the middlemen that are frankly just making a profit off of people being sick, and when you have Medicare being the most efficient health insurance program in the country compared to all of the other private health insurance companies, this is the most common sense thing to do."

She said that "every other developed wealthy nation in the country" has done this, and said its estimated to save "thousands of dollars for taxpayers and to save $2 trillion for the government over 10 years."

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She also said that the tax code in the US needs to be updated to account for the "ultra billionaires and trillionaires" not paying "their fair share." She said that the poverty line needs to be adjusted to take into account things like housing and health insurance, not just food, adding that the federal minimum wage should actually be around $21, and that a new tax bracket should be made for the "ultra-wealthy."

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Kiros also spoke on her "struggles" as a young renter in Denver attempting to stretch her paycheck. The interviewer pushed back, saying that she’s "knowing financial struggle by choice. You were a corporate attorney who’s going to get a PhD. I have no doubt that you’re having trouble making ends meet when you step out of that world, but you kind of chose to step out of that world."

She said it was a "fair assessment," but "I did grow up with the same struggle," saying that she immigrated to the US as a baby and watched her parents work multiple jobs. Noting her prior experience at a law firm, she said "after getting fired from that law firm, it was definitely clear that no other law firm of that caliber was going to hire me either and I did make the choice to go to a PhD program to do the work that actually mattered to me."

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Kiros was fired from the law firm Sidley Austin in 2023, a little over the October 7 attack, after she published a letter on Medium criticizing her law firm’s decision to sign onto an open letter that urged deans of law schools to crack down on anti-semitism on their campuses.

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